Chapter 31: The Buried City

The Cabal formation first and most frequently encountered by Guardians, the Sand Eaters represent the numerical bulk of the Cabal presence on Mars. Their equipment, tactics, and morale all show the weight of a long deployment – but they continue to pursue their objectives with dogged, weary determination. -Report to the Vanguard by Whisper-0

Reed-7 trudged forward stolidly through the sands, trying to ignore the irritation in his sensors. "Vanguard control, Fireteam Axis on site and deploying."

Aisha spoke up on comms as they marched. "At least they remembered to call this time. I still can't believe they asked Yara Croy and those goofballs before us."

Reed shrugged. "We were already on a strike, remember?"

The hunter huffed, unperturbed, and looked around at the desolate landscape. "The Cryptarchs must be really curious about this region of Mars if the Vanguard asked us to go poking around all the way out here."

"For years the Cryptarchs have been waiting to break through the Exclusion Zone and find what's left in that buried city," answered Shayura. "They say Freehold has technological wonders. We cannot let the Cabal destroy it."

The titan nodded and readied his weapon.

Elsewhere on Mars, a squad of titans readied themselves to march out into open ground from the shadow of decaying skyscraper, still standing amid the ocean of sands around it. The leader, a hulking striker titan, set his helmet down on a dune and glanced at one of his subordinates. "Tibon, tighten that strap."

"Eh?"

"The gardbrace is loose. Could slip."

"Huh."

"It's new?"

"Agema. Type 1."

"Huh. How's it hold up? I tried using Agema at the Gap, remember? It didn't – well, what's this?" The leader looked up, gauntlet shielding his eyes as a glint of light approached through the blowing sand. "A ghost!"

"Yes. Light be with you."

"Excuse me, little ghost – Tubach," he said to his second, "pass me my helmet – thank you. Little ghost, what are you doing here?"

The ghost said nothing, and Tubach shrugged. "It's just looking around."

"Where's your guardian?"

"I don't think it has one."

"Well, any servant of the Light is welcome among us. We are Holborn's Host, and I'm Holborn. The City's hand on Mars." He gave a dramatic flourish, while the ghost simply stared.

His second waved a hand. "Tubach."

"Yes, that's Tubach, my second. One of the finest titans of the City. Now see here, little ghost, on my shoulder?" He pointed helpfully. "That's the mark of Holborn's Host. Record it. The twelve-pointed star. One for each of the – oh well, off it goes! It doesn't look well."

Tubach looked out across the dunes at distant movement. "We should get going."

Tibon sighed. "A ghost without a guardian. I remember when I was risen, you know. When I woke in that wreckage, to see my ghost hovering there, its light in my eyes, like an angel. And it said—"

"This story again," interrupted Tubach.

He punched Tubach on the shoulder. "Disrespectful youngster."

Tubach turned. "Youngster? I could be older than you, Tibon!"

Tibon considered this as Tubach prodded his gardbrace. "True. The gardbrace is fine now, stop worrying at it. Will you take the Jigoku?"

Tubach shook his head. "Thought I'd take the long rifle. Bayle has the Jigoku."

"Good. That ghost, what do you think is wrong with it? It's echoing something ancient, an Old Earth language. You know what that ghost reminds me of, flitting about over there?"

The second in command shrugged. "I don't."

"The time the ghosts from Jagi's Host came back without them. Remember – they got in that fight at some point east of the Caspian? Seven ghosts, damn near silent, buzzing with some sort of corruption. Drifting back to the Tower, one by one. Scared the Speaker well enough."

"I remember. A long time ago. Jagi tells the story differently."

Tibon snorted. "Well. We all grow old, in our own way. Little ghost! Come back here!"

"It's not going to make it, wherever it's going."

"I want to talk to it. Little ghost!"

Tubach rolled his eyes and left Tibon to it and stepped over to speak quietly with Holborn. "Lyssa and Bayle are probably there already."

Holborn considered, then nodded. "Cabal move slowly. We've got time."

"Yes, but the warlocks have had a vision."

"Yes. That new one, what's her name? Ingora? They always say they have a vision when they don't want to explain how they know something."

"Ikora."

Holborn grunted. "She's always been hasty. I've faced these Cabal before, you know. I know' em like I know my own armor."

"Right. Incoming message from Lyssa. She says she's at the Dust Palace now, all quiet."

Holborn nodded. "See? All quiet." He stepped past Tibon and spoke to the twitching ghost. "Why not come with us, little ghost? We are looking for the old Warmind here, and the one who guards it."

Ash-2 hit the sand with a solid thump and refrained from commenting on the stumbles of her new companions as they transmatted down from her jumpship. It had been a long, cramped ride together in her ancient but well-kept ship.

"Alright you too, remember the plan. Stella, you do your hunter thing and take point to scout ahead, but don't go too far. I need to be able to support you if you get into trouble."

Stella stuck out her tongue, brilliant against her light-grey awoken skin, and pulled her helmet on. "Yes, mom."

Ash-2 just stared at her, and the awoken shrugged. "Too much? I'm still working on getting the mandatory hunter attitude right."

The titan sighed. "You've been spending too much time with Cayde-6. I keep telling Shaxx, he's a bad influence on you new lights."

"I think he's funny," chimed in the warlock, a bubbly human woman in basic Vanguard-issued armor. "He's very encouraging."

"He's a menace, Amelia" replied Ash-2 repressively. "Look, you two have worked hard, and you've done okay in the Crucible, which is why the Vanguard is willing to put you in the field, even with me to ride herd you on both, but out here, it's not a game. If we get into trouble, and we are looking for trouble, I'm going to need to rely on you to keep your heads together and do your jobs. Got it, ladies?"

Stella nodded. "Yeah. From the way they were talking, though, this mission is a sideshow, but one important enough to send an old stiff like you. Why didn't your fireteam come?"

Ash-2's jaw clenched for a moment. "I'm… between fireteams, at the moment. Still haven't found one that quite stuck. So, for now, I'm with the two of you, and we were designated Fireteam DX7. Don't forget it. Now pay attention, keep your eyes open, and we'll get out of this alive. And who knows, you might even learn something along the way. Now let's go."

Reed-7 took cover behind the ancient, rusted-out hulk of a golden-age vehicle that was all that remained of a suburb now buried in sand. In the distance stood Freehold, its half-buried towers still stubbornly standing in spite of the battles between Vex and Cabal that raged in its streets.

Shayura frowned thoughtfully. "With the amount of firepower the Cabal have in orbit, they could have leveled that entire city. If they haven't brought it down yet, they must have found something valuable. We should track them, see what they're after."

The exo titan nodded. "Efficient. That accomplishes both our goals, to pull the Cabal out of position and find the Golden Age data we're both after."

Aisha pulled the bolt back on her autorifle. "I've never taken down a Cabal before. First time for everything, I guess."

Fireteam Family moved quietly through the ruins of their ancient forebearers, watching from second and third story shattered windows as Vex and Cabal squads stalked and ambushed each other in the streets below. "I've got something. Inside building five." Aisha pushed the data through their network and Reed examined the information. An active Cabal signal. Good.

They moved out, approaching the building quickly, and almost ran right into a Cabal squad. The fireteam acted instantly, immediately knowing what the others would do. Reed-7 held the center, going to ground and opening up with his autorifle. Shayura moved right and slightly behind him, taking cover behind a bent support column and hurling an explosive ball of light, and Aisha leaped upwards on wings of Light, soaring to the second floor and laying down covering fire with her scout rifle.

The Cabal were just as tough as the reports said, mused Reed as he grimaced at the impact of burning microrockets. They took twice as much firepower to bring down as Fallen, and more even than the Hive.

But they weren't invincible, and they had no counter to the Light, which broke up their lines and cohesion that spelled survival, and at that short of a range, the fight was brutal and short. Aisha examined the (barely) portable Cabal display, a heavy, round holoprojector with controls sized for Cabal hands. It showed in glowing orange a projection of the neighboring skyscraper with the top floor blinking. They could see the building through a blown-out wall, impressive even compared to the other skyscrapers of the old world, still mostly intact.

"Looks like the Cabal have a recon team stationed at the top of the other skyscraper. They must have found something interesting. Check it out?"

Reed-7 nodded.

They crossed the street, dodging between Cabal patrols, and entered through a crack in the basement, creeping over sand into the hardened ceramic floors, dark without power. "What is this place?"

Shayura answered quietly, her voice intent. "It's a BrayTech building. It belonged to Clovis Bray, and was a center for scientific advancement, interplanetary defense, AI development, research on the Traveler, and more. This place could be a gold mine."

"If we can hold it."

Shayura smiled. "That's always the question, isn't it?"

They moved on out of the basement to the ground floor and into an enormous rotunda that served as a lobby. Two entire Cabal squads lay in wait, Phalanxes on the ground floor with shields raised, Legionaries on the high balcony.

For a moment the guardians and Cabal stared at each other. Then lightning crackled and Vex teleported directly between the two sides. Then everyone fired at once.

"Fire!" Ash-2, Stella, and Amelia each fired their rocket launchers, brought for just such an occasion, at the Cabal Harvester just setting down to unload a squad of Legionaries. The rockets detonated in rapid succession, but the Harvester's nigh-impervious armor survived and the transport roared out of the explosion, belching smoke and listing to the side, but still in one piece.

Not as much could be said for the Cabal Legionaries, however. Supersonic thunder cracked overhead as reinforcements, headed elsewhere, changed course and flew in. The fireteam ran to their waiting Sparrows and raced away, drawing in the Harvesters after them.

"I'm picking up some strange activity. Not Cabal."

Reed-7 grunted at Aisha's report as they climbed yet another staircase, leaving the chaos of the lobby far below. "Keep pushing."

Finally they reached another landing which boasted the same oversized windows as the lobby, giving a stunning view of the ruined city. More pressingly, another squad of Cabal had blocked the way forward with a solid line of Phalanx shields. "We don't have time for this." The titan launched himself into the sky, gathering the Light into a crackling maelstrom around him, and smashed to the ground amidst the Cabal. Two smashed into the windows, cracking the ancient safety glass, and none of them got back up again.

Reed-7 stood up to look to the next hallway when an entire flight of missiles detonated on him, killing him instantly. Shayura and Aisha split up immediately as a heavy machine gun roared the Cabal's fury back at them, with Shayura diving back out into the corridor and Aisha taking cover at the base of the stairs.

"Colossus!" shouted Shayura in warning, and Aisha winced. She'd asked around the few guardians she knew old enough to remember fighting the Cabal before the mission, and every single one of them had mentioned the Colossus. She peaked around the stairs and grimaced. If anything, they had understated things. Towering over even other Cabal, the thing was nearly twice her height, with armor as thick as she was wide, and wielding a Heavy Slug Thrower that looked like an unholy cross between a grenade launcher and a machine gun.

"Shayura?"

"Nothing coming up behind us yet. Somebody must be drawing off reinforcements!" shouted the warlock over the clangor of heavy weapons fire. "But we don't have forever!"

The edge of the staircase exploded under the Colossus' heavy fire, sending molten pieces of ceramic ripping in every direction and shredding into her armor. "Enough!" The burning Light answered her call, coalescing into the ultimate hand cannon made of raw solar energy, and she flung herself out of cover fanning, the hammer. The Cabal disintegrated under her fire, and she and the Colossus fired as one. Her single bullet cut through his helmet and killed him in a single blow. His thunderous slugs cut the hunter in half.

Shayura walked out alone into the devastation. "Alright, it's safe now."

Two ghosts peaked out from their hiding places, and with a flash of Light, Reed-7 and Aisha stood next to her once more.

"You could have waited, Aisha. I was about to fire my Nova Bomb, so there was no reason for you to die. Again."

The hunter shrugged. "He tore up my favorite armor. I was angry."

Shayura sighed.

Reed-7 marched on.

"Good thinking back there." Ash-2 nodded towards Stella, who grinned. "I thought I was in trouble when the Cabal clipped my fuel tank and blew up the sparrow."

"They never see tripmines coming."

"And Amelia, I don't know how you do it, but disintegrating people just by touching them is… impressive. You've been practicing."

The warlock smiled and nodded.

"You've done well, both of you. But here's another lesson – know when it's time to leave. We've broken contact, but a bunch of the Cabal patrols are still searching for us back there. We've accomplished our mission, and sticking around will only get us into trouble. So come on. Drinks are on me when we get back to the City. Congratulations on your first Vanguard mission."

"We've got to be close now," Shayura whispered into her comms. They'd climbed floor after floor, each filled with perplexing combinations of heavy machinery and delicate equipment in a seemingly endless array of engineering departments and laboratories. It was illuminated by flickering lights now where the Cabal had plugged their own generators into the network, reactivating parts of the place. Much of it was long-since destroyed or looted, but enough remained to paint an intriguing picture of what it must have been like here once.

The fireteam dodged another patrol, looking through the ruins for whatever it was they were after.

"We're close," whispered Aisha. "I think… there." She pointed towards a large cylindrical object festooned with power cabling and coolant hoses. It hummed quietly as steam emerged from it. "Yes, this one is still active. My ghost will analyze it."

The ghost got to work, and moments later the cylinder hissed as it opened to reveal a glowing orange core, active once again. "Huh." Aisha consulted with her ghost. "It's an AI, a submind of some sort. It connected to a Warmind on Mars. But I thought the Warmind was on Earth?"

Reed-7 considered this as the AI spoke through tinny speakers on the core in a dead language. He could not understand the words, but he knew what it meant. "Whatever it once connected to, Rasputin is controlling it now. We cannot get in, but neither can the Cabal. Hmm. Since that array got reactivated it seems he's everywhere now."

Shayura frowned. "If nobody can get in, then there isn't any point in staying here. Let's go, before more Cabal show up, and hope this was worth it."

A/N: A bit shorter this time, but we are moving steadily towards the Black Garden!

Lore Referenced:

Destiny 1 Grimoire:

Sand Eaters

Colossus

Heavy Slug Thrower

Items:

Striker's Mark