A brief note to the Fanfiction Void: Why yes, it has been eight years since I updated this story. I got married. I had a lot of kids. I got a job writing full time. And you would be quite right to ask, "What the devil is a grown man doing writing Halo fanfiction about a post-Halo 3 world that's been rendered impossible by Halo 4 et. al.?"

A fair question. Suffice it to say that I was never happy with where Halo 4 took the series; I get the instinct to take things in a more 'epic' direction, but the thing that always made Halo interesting to me was the remarkably dramatic human setting, not the imagery or even the explosions. Now, as something approximating an adult, I want to have another look at this world and see if it holds up against my adolescent fascination. I'm going to do it slowly, so don't expect updates frequently. I've got diapers to change.

But now that I'm actually getting paid to do things like this, I have a little time to dedicate to a 'side' project like this. And hey, I'm a completionist. I hope you enjoy this, and think of what could have been.

Act Three: Le Deluge
Chapter 17: Fraternité est Déterminée Par Votre Perspective
Brotherhood Is All In Your Perspective

John-117 stared at the place in the trees where Jack had disappeared. The deep silence did not unnerve him, but it troubled him. No movement in the trees... no activity on his motion tracker... nothing.

He glanced at the Sangheili warrior crouched next to him. "No heroics. We stall them as long as we can, then we fall back to the maintenance shaft."

"Hotel Juliet two-seven-niner to three-one-Actual - we have a green light, repeat, we are green."

"Solid copy, seven-niner, deploying on your mark."

"Go."

The Spartan looked to Ulee Dakol, who was again peering intently through his sights. "There are small movements in the trees," the Sangheili warrior murmured. "But they are mere stirrings. I have no -"

Suddenly, John's motion tracker became a spray of red.

"Shit."

Dozens of red dots danced and flickered across the surface, fast and unpredictable, as if dozens of wasps were on fast approach. This was the first move. Jack's men had deployed a radar jammer, stopping John and Ulee's ability to anticipate attack. It was textbook, straightforward. Jack was simply going to overwhelm them.

The Chief's tactical mind once again locked in. "Shut off your motion sensor," the Spartan ordered. "Focus on visual contact and wounding shots."

"All units, this is Hotel Juliet two-seven-Actual – HeSiTac reads only two footmobiles on the ridge. Anybody got a look at the other two?"

"India Bravo seven-niner here – two tangos ditched earlier. Big Daddy's got eyes on them."

"Copy, India Bravo. All Hotel Juliet units, mount up. We are a go on India Bravo's mark. Seven-niner, gimme your C-TEM in three..."

Just then, a high pitched wailing overloaded the outboard mics in John's helmet, and a blue-glowing sphere shot out of the trees below, scintillating above their position, then hurtling down to thump solidly in the dirt. Blue, hazy light shot from its surface; John's shields suddenly plunged to zero.

This 5.1 kilogram sphere was a C-TEM: a Contained Tactical Electromagnetic Pulse.

"EMP!" John shouted, and in that moment, fingers squeezed triggers on STI-loaded grenade salvos, ODST lieutenants began screaming orders to move, HeSiTac scopes locked onto the two thermal signatures on the ridge, and John and Ulee's entire world was swallowed in fire.

Ulee's shields were gone within seconds of the EMP's gentle landing on their position. Alien text scrambled across his HUD, warning him of the failure of the myriad systems in his combat harness, so he shut it off. At the same moment, timed-explosive stun shells began to detonate immediately above his head, impacting his sensitive aural diaphragms with head-splitting noise, disorienting him. Blinding phosphorous flashes turned his world white.

But only for a moment.

The elite's nictating membranes quickly slid closed, dimming the blinding light from the flash-bangs just as a self-biasing HUD would have. Since he could not hear, he turned his attention to his naturally heightened sense of feel and taste. Instinct took over, and Dakol began to prove why the Sangheili were some of the most feared warriors in the galaxy.

Ulee began by assessing. His only weapon was a rifle of far greater range than what would be useful in what the flavors in the air told him was about to become a close quarters combat situation. His partner, John-117, had been downed by the EMP. The Spartan's suit had lost power, leaving him blind and almost entirely physically immobile; his current sum output of assistance in the situation was the equivalent of a large brick. Ulee knew he was facing a vastly superior force, one that was likely to have no orders to show restraint with him. The elite became, at that moment, fairly certain that he was going to die.

"I declare you shamed, Ulee Dakolimee! You have deserted your brethren in combat, and so your honor is void."

Dakol had never feared the long dark at the end of life. Ever since the Battle of Xiphos, he had relished the thought, hungering for an honorable way to earn his names again through a bloody end. This was not the way he had hoped it would come, but it was all he had been given. Accepting it, Dakol chose to use what he had at hand.

The ODST on point charged up over the ridge, battle rifle at the ready. He had a third of a second to visually assess the situation before the bulk of the immobile SPARTAN-II smashed into him, haphazardly slung at him by Ulee Dakol. The trooper was knocked flat, crushed beneath the bulk of the ton-and-a-half behemoth.

The second ODST came sweeping up on the left corner of the rise, assault rifle at his shoulder. The fall of his point man proved to be the perfect momentary distraction necessary for Dakol to ram the butt of his Stanchion into the man's chin, causing him to crumple under the blow.

"Your punishment: by order of the Prophets, you are stripped of your names. Dakolimee no longer, you are no more honored with a warrior's title, and you have no part in a family."

The third and fourth ODST arrived at the same time. One squeezed off a shot from his rifle that pinged off the elite's left pauldron, dangerously close to the unarmored shoulder joint. Ulee reached out and grabbed the man's rifle barrel, jerking him toward himself as a human shield; the sudden spray of rounds from his partner riddled the man with bullets.

Ulee shoved the dying soldier toward his partner, staggering the man long enough for Ulee to pick up a battle rifle and put three rounds through the center of the soldier's visor.

At that moment, a shot rang out from the hills beyond. A single .50 caliber armor piercing sabot-jacketed round sliced through the evening air and struck Ulee Dakol in the front left lame of his breastplate.

A shout of sudden pain from the Sangheili warrior, blood spewing from the wound that had left a gaping hole in his back. John could do nothing but stare as he struggled to get to his knees, the dead weight of his MJOLNIR armor dragging him down, forcing him to watch what was about to come next.

"That's a hit, seven-three. Close it up, Hotel Juliet!"

"Moving in, seven-niner. Will advise momentarily..."

Ulee fell to his knees, one long-fingered hand closing over his wound, trying to stop the purple blood that was trickling over the cold, dark blue plates of his armor. His world slowed. For a moment, his vision narrowed, faces passed before him. His brothers-in-arms. His matron. She would have been proud of the blood he spilled in this death.

No. Not death... not yet.

More ODSTs scrambled over the ridge, rifles covering the Elite and the Chief. They swarmed forward, making a semi-circle in front of him, weapons trained on his face. He was on his knees, yet still between them and the Chief.

And yet no one moved.

Only a second had passed, yet the ODSTs seemed confused on whether to shoot him or take him prisoner, as if no specific order had been given.

This was a mistake.

Dakol took that one moment of indecision to lunge the way only an Elite can: in a long, low, rolling leap at knee height. His outstretched hands dragged down two of the Helljumpers, and as they crashed into a heap, he grabbed one of them and drew him close as he rolled onto his back, again using the soldier's body to catch the rounds that tore through the air at him.

Pain knifed through his abdomen from his earlier wound, but he ignored it, shoving the dead trooper toward one half of the semicircle and lashing out at the nearest ODST with a vicious combat kick that buckled the human's knee. The Sangheili warrior followed up with one fatal blow to the man's neck, snapping it.

As the soldier fell, Ulee whipped the man's USP .45 sidearm from its holster and turned it on one, two Helljumpers as the second unit came running up the ridge, now firing off rounds at the Elite.

Hot pain as bullets peppered his right side, spraying blood and burning his flesh. Blading his body towards his targets to limit his profile, he began to fire indiscriminately as blackness encroached upon his vision. He staggered, felt the dull click of the hammer on an empty chamber, went to one knee, looked up just in time to see a wounded trooper rush forward, pistol out, the coup de grace.

Dakol took his last second to look at John, who had barely managed to rise to one elbow, and, turning back to the ODST before him, roared a last guttural cry of defiance.

Blam.

Jack pressed his lips together in an effort to contain his fury. Holmes only looked apologetic. "It wasn't stored to the suit's drive, either. He didn't even have the interface disk," the sergeant major explained quietly, sparing a glance for their prisoner.

Behind them, SPARTAN John-117 was hanging from a suspension unit, stripped naked. Electromagnetic cuffs chained his wrists and ankles to the frame. Even without his suit, his strength was enough that simple binders and a guard detail would not be sufficient.

The sight of his one-time brother in arms in such degrading circumstances was oddly gripping. Jack had participated in more interrogations than he cared to remember. This was not a comforting realization – rather, quite the opposite: he knew what was coming – as did John – and yet more than anything in the world, he longed avoid it. Just this once, let it go, let someone else sort it out, find out what was going on, chase down the information.

"Cortana is not just a computer, Jack."

He examined John's face. The Helljumpers had violently beaten him upon capture. Upon engaging his suit lockup, they had stripped it from him – all except his torso plates – and gave him a beating so vicious that when he had finally been brought to Jack, he could barely recognize his face beneath the swelling. They remembered what he had done to the two Marines when he commandeered their VTOL, and they made certain that he remembered, too.

But the SPARTAN had not said a word to him at the initial debrief. He had not said a word when Jack had thrown him in the brig. He was not saying a word now, his face cleaned up and the swelling repaired by the medics, eyes looking through Jack with that look.

"Do you understand the word love?"

That look.

Jack knew it: that was the look he got when the subject of his interrogation simply had nothing to say. The look of a true believer.

This was not going to be pretty.

"What in the hell makes you think that you have the right to rob me of the chance that you got?"

Bauer sighed, closed his eyes for a second, and pushed away from the holopad with a quiet huff. "Well. Let's see what he has to say about it."

Holmes scowled. "He's not going to talk."

Special Agent Bauer nodded. "I know. Not without bringing in some information that could shake him." He paused, thought it through for a moment. "Obviously, he was trying to draw us away after passing the AI off to someone else. Keep VTOLs on recon. We need to deal with the brute and the Marine. Are we still tracking them?"

"Yes sir," Holmes replied. "They're still in the maintenance shafts, though, and we have no technical readouts on the layout. No telling where they're going to come out."

Jack sighed, shook his head. "Fine. Have a fireteam ready to pick them up."

"Both of them sir?" Holmes asked tentatively.

"Just the Marine. Kill the brute."

"Good news on that, by the way," Holmes interjected. "We were able to pull the data off the IFF tags they left. We have identities now."

Jack looked up. This was the first good news in... well, the first since he'd gotten here. "Who are we dealing with?"

Holmes spread a handful of flimsiplast sheets in front of his commander. "Turns out this is a real handful of fuckups, sir. Just the kind that would pull shit like this."

Quickly scanning them, Bauer paused at the one labelled ROE, EUGENE J. / SPECIALIST/CORPORAL E-4. "What about this guy?" he asked, glancing up at Holmes. "These others make sense. Any idea why a fifty-something lifer from the Corps is going rogue for a rampant AI?"

Holmes shrugged. "There's not a hell of a lot on Corporal Roe, sir. We lost a lot of service records with Reach, you know."

"Right," Bauer murmured. This was worth some study if he could discover any insight into these errant soldiers. Know thy enemy, he thought. Especially when he's one of your own.

"Anything else, sir?" Holmes asked.

Jack nodded. "I want to see the Montana's latest upper-atmosphere thermal scans. We might be able to catch a break."

Holmes grunted an affirmative, disappeared after a wordless salute.

Bauer turned. John-117 was still there, hanging from the suspension unit, still staring into nothing, unblinking, hardly breathing.

Now for the hard part.

Eugene Roe was a Delta boy. Earth-born, raised up in the fine city of Memphis, in the United North American States – well, what had been the fine city of Memphis. When Roe was growing up, it was a multi-layered picture: the wealthy and elite lived above the river in opulence, while the poor lived south of the river in what had once been the heart of the city, now reduced to slums.

Though it had been a hard-scrabble upbringing, it was not an unpleasant one. The poor river culture of the Lower City was practically Luddite thanks to its poverty. Though the days were full of hard, honest labor, the nights were warm and lazy, filled with the guttering, visceral wailing of the blues and the pleasant fish-stink of the river.

The rebellion had crushed that, obliterated it like stomping on a baby bird. It had constituted Eugene's first serious lesson in human nature: revolution never comes without human cost. The first Insurrectionist rebels who managed to smuggle themselves to Earth set up shop in cities all over the world, establishing terrorist networks and even, in lawless burgs like Memphis, operated as guerrilla shock units. In the Lower City, their first act upon arrival had been to quarter themselves in the hovels and slums of the Lower City, storing weapons in schools and barracking soldiers in free clinics. They requisitioned anything of value, and then when the Unified Earth Government troops finally showed up, the fighting that followed decimated everything young Eugene had known. His mother, father, sisters, brothers, the dockyards and side streets, the backyards and front porches, all burnt up like flash paper.

The UNSC was all that could offer him anything by way of a future, so he took. His first tour of duty saw him trained as a medic in the middle period of the wars against Rebels, battling on worlds like Eridanus II. He retired just before Harvest, went to Chicago, spent a while in private practice as a free doc in another slum. All the time he spent warfighting across the Orion Belt began to sink into his guts. It stretched him out beyond his ability to recover, left him a limp mess of a man, depressed, angry, despairing.

But then something changed. As he worked the streets of the city, doing the work of healing, a kind of benevolent nihilism began to set in. He had survived the war for some reason. He would do something yet. Something significant would come of his life - not because he was determined to make some kind of destiny for himself, but because he was convinced that the hour would come for him.

He was pretty sure this was it.

The dim-lit guts of the mountain were like a Minoan labyrinth; only thing missing was the minotaur. Well, he thought, I suppose if you slapped some horns on Big Boy, he might pass. The thought made him smile. Maximus was grunting and huffing behind him, clearly irritated that he couldn't stretch up to his full height. Medic Roe didn't have to worry about that, so he had more time to look around: in the dark latticework of metal spars and bulwarks he could see distant machines and drones, Sentinels occasionally stopping to scan them for malicious intent. A low hum resonated all around them.

They had been struggling through this jungle for close to a day by his chronometer. Mercifully, Eugene had kept his head and his rucksack when they fled the ridge, so they had rations for a few more days yet. But Roe was beginning to despair of finding the way out. He and Maximus didn't speak much - they were both laconic fellows, after all - and passed the time in an amicable silence. When they came to a fork or a turn in the tunnels, they would mostly consult with suggestive jerks of the head or simple pointing, trying to follow the strange symbols and lights on the floors and walls.

Roe felt the pull of that coming hour. Meeting and working with the Master Chief in the last week had awoken something in him that had laid dormant. He had seen much carnage and human suffering; it made him compassionate toward the weak and strengthened his sense of justice. Whatever part of that had fallen asleep during this nightmare war with the Covenant, the Chief and his AI had snapped it to. Eugene Roe was not going to let the Master Chief down.

He could read the tea leaves; whatever happened on that ridge, it wasn't going to go well. Ulee and the Spartan would likely be captured. If they were going to make it out of ONI's clutches, Roe would have to play a part. He wasn't sure yet what that was; a man as unassuming as he did not have outsized beliefs in his abilities. But as he glanced back to check on his struggling brute squadmate, the thought occurred to him that if he was right, he would need nothing more than what he already had.