King's Gate
Aashir shifted in place on the hot bed of stone. "Any change, Aveline?"
"None," came the quiet reply. "Just soldiers stomping up and down the dunes, like they own the place."
Aashir shifted again, beginning to believe dropping down to his stomach had been a bad call. The sun seared the desert angrily and unlike the others, he didn't have much in the way of shade, using a higher perch to keep out of sight. He thanked the Traveler for his lack of sweat glands. Even with shade, Aveline and her brother must've been miserable.
The three of them had been out in the Valley of the Kings for a week now. Ikora had them tracking Cabal movements, a job usually reserved for Cayde's scouts but something about the pattern of it seemed to bother her. A week staring down the scope of a sniper told Aashir why.
He must have passed by it a dozen different times in the span of years and still, it remained a distraction. One that has still managed to stop the Warlock in his tracks on his trips through here. And how could it not? The Valley Vex gate towered over every other structure within the vicinity, the exceptions being Cerberus Vae and the mountains themselves. Aashir was positioned near a small Cabal base, directly facing the King's Gate and even from his distance, it was daunting. Josef was stationed closer, hidden within the dunes next to the construct while Aveline remained further back, in a position that put her directly across from the Cabal landship and kept the Vex structure within the corner of her eye.
Ikora's interest was in the Cabal. Multiple reports over the past few months have shown the Cabal attempting to take the gate. Every single incursion is met with violent resistance from the Vex patrolling in front. Each attempt has failed, with the Cabal pulling back in order to preserve their numbers for another. The Vex that were destroyed were always replaced, by the usual Martian subtype, the Virgo Prohibition. Nothing out of the ordinary. But the Cabal seemed to know something and whatever it was, they wanted the gate for it.
"Movement." Aveline's voice was hushed and from her, that instilled a sense of urgency better than anything else. "They're getting agitated."
Aashir pushed his discomfort to the back of his mind. "Directly from Cerberus Vae?"
"Yeah and lots of them. Moving quick. They'll be in view soon."
Soon was sooner than expected. The Cabal sent a large contingent. Nothing like the numbers they'd usually see on strikes but much larger than their previous attempts. Three Colossi, two Psions in Interceptors and a number of Legionnaires and Phalanxes. For the first time in days, this could go very differently.
"Josef?"
"Still here, boss," he replied, sounding every bit as miserable as Aashir had expected him to.
"Have you got the group in sight?"
"The ground is shaking with each step. I've got them well in sight."
"What do you make of their numbers? Their chances?"
No response.
"Josef?"
More silence. Then a quiet rush of air. "Sorry. Was almost spotted," the Titan breathed. "And as for their chances, I'd be very surprised if they didn't take it this time."
"You think so?"
"The Cabal are bringing in three Colossi. They'd only need one to take down the Hydra and once they do, the battle's pretty much over."
"Should we interfere?" Aveline then asked, "I doubt we'd need to. Even if the Cabal took the gate, what are the odds they'd know what to do with it?"
It was her Ghost who answered. "Pretty high. They wouldn't be fighting so hard for it, don't you think?"
"That's…a good point, Esila."
"What's the play, Aashir? We movin' in?"
Josef sounded so hopeful, Aashir almost didn't deny him. "We hold," he said, "Observe the battle and be prepared to pick off any survivors." He wouldn't agree that the gate in Vex hands would be a better option than the Cabal but as long as the Vex have held it, nothing worth worrying about has occurred. The status quo didn't benefit them but at the moment, it wasn't hurting either.
Besides, Ikora only wanted intel and they were still suffering from the last time they had failed to obey orders. It's a wonder she didn't have the three of them disavowed as her Hidden. There wasn't even a precedent for doing so, no one Ikora trusted so well betrayed her. Not Chalco, not Aunor and certainly not them, or so she believed. So they all believed until the Vault.
Now Aashir did as told and made sure to treat this whole business with the Heralds as what it was; a job. A matter of life or extinction but a job nonetheless. Keeping the others at a distance has become easier ever since Pride had revealed himself. Easier, at least, to keep Aro at a distance. It kept Aashir professional when working with him and being professional kept him cordial, even if admittedly, a bit cold at times. He wasn't sure if he felt bad about it yet.
This fight certainly did go differently. Not another routine skirmish, no, this one dragged itself out. As Josef predicted, as soon as the Hydra was down, the battle began to shift in the Cabal's favor. High powered slugs ripped through beaten bronze and Vex units were dropping like flies. The others seemed to be enjoying the spectacle, commenting on tactics and maneuvers, enjoying any break they could get from the monotony. Aashir declined to join in but he sympathized. He was becoming restless too.
But every battle had an end and this one's own was rapidly approaching. Josef had been right, the Cabal had taken this fight almost effortlessly. The last remnants of the Vex forces included two Goblins and a headless Hobgoblin, the Minotaurs and Hydra long since destroyed, while the only losses suffered by the Cabal being a few Legionnaires and a single Interceptor. Aashir still felt it best to take out whoever was left. He and Aveline could remain where they were, pick off the Legionnaires and the remaining Interceptor riding Psion. The Colossi and the Phalanxes, with their defenses, would prove more difficult at longer range. It seemed Josef would get the fight he was hoping for.
Aashir opened his mouth. His Ghost spoke first. "Guardians, I'm detecting a massive spike of energy within the area. And I mean, massive."
"Feeling it too," Hernan agreed.
"So it's not just me," Esila said.
"Source, Fel. Give us a source." Aashir put the sniper to his eye, trained it on one of the Colossi, the one nearest the King's Gate.
"There's a bit buzzing all over but it all seems to be converging onto the King's Gate. It's…"
Aashir slowly pulled away from the sniper scope. "Turning on." His gaze dropped to the stone underneath his feet. The pebbles were jumping. More fell from the stone over his head and joined them. The ground was trembling.
The spiked metal arches of the King's Gate began to glow, strongly enough that even with the sun still so high up, his attention was still torn away from the ground. Arcs of white radiolarian lightning jumped back and forth across the metal frame and within the center, the very air began to violently twist and fold in on itself. Dozens of times, Aashir had been here and not once had ever seen or even detected activity from the gate. The sight of it was so mesmerizing, he could almost ignore the quakes beneath his feet growing in intensity.
"Aashir? Aashir, what's the plan?" Adrenaline could be heard in Josef's whispering, in the slight tremble of his tone. Pure but contained. Like a powder keg, waiting for him to light the fuse. The result would be just as explosive.
"Hold," He ordered again, "We need to hold. We need to see what they're-"
The air beneath the gate exploded in a cloud of static. Bodies began to materialize and marching out in droves came the strangest Vex Aashir had ever seen. Old things, with the same basic structures and frames but covered in an ever-present layer of green, with strands of what appeared to be plant life hanging off of their limbs. Within seconds, they matched the Cabal's remaining force. A few more passed and they outnumbered their assailants, three to one.
The battle started up again in earnest. The quaking underneath their feet hadn't stopped but instead, became due to the explosions rather than the gate itself. The gate's energy levels had yet to drop. Aashir was the farthest away and even he could feel the static in the air. For a second, he thought back to the Moon. How Gluttony's loss of control and subsequent transformation could be felt by every single Guardian on the Lunar surface. He could almost hear Ikora's voice in his ear, demanding an explanation.
"This is strange," Josef mumbled, probably more to himself than anything.
Aashir responded anyway. "What is it, Josef?" He asked, bringing his sniper back up.
"These new Vex," he indicated, "They aren't really fighting as a unit. Not like they usually do."
He could see it. They fought differently than any of the other subtypes they encountered, moved differently. These Vex weren't being cohesive or methodical. They were rampaging, tripping over each other in order to practically throw themselves at their foes.
And the kills. The kills were far from clean. The remaining Interceptor piloting Psion found itself grabbed head first out of its vehicle by a Minotaur and thrown down before being beaten into the sand. The shield wall of the Phalanxes was broken through like a flimsy dam and all the Cabal behind it found themselves swept up in the rushing wave. Aashir even found himself grimacing as he watched several Goblins swarm a single Colossus, actually ripping their way through its armor and exposing leathery skin to the dry Martian air. The Colossus, trying and failing to shoot them down, outright dropped its weapon and used its bare hands to throw the Vex off, even as waves of them kept coming. Its struggling continued until one Goblin that had latched onto its back made its way up the Cabal's head. The suffocating Colossus dropped to its knees, stubby fingers grabbing desperately at its throat as more and more Vex continued to pile on, obscuring the corpse from Aashir's sight.
"One Colossus left," Josef said, "Won't be long now."
The Colossus in question was the one Aashir had taken note of closest to the King's Gate. How it had managed to survive so long at the source of the tide was beyond them. But it was holding out, even after the rest of its group lay dead on the ground, soon to be buried by the sand-shifting wind. The barrel of its gun glowed red hot as it kept spinning and firing, erratically so but with this many targets and your own death drawing closer and closer, how much could accuracy matter?
"Energy readings are spiking again, Aashir."
Fel warned him but Aashir could already feel the trembling. "Guys, the gate's opening again."
Josef scoffed. "For what? The Vex have won. This Colossus is on his last leg, he's just trying to go out in a blaze of glory."
"We watch and we find out what."
"Energy's at its max again, Guardians!"
Aashir kept his sniper trained on the battlefield, preparing himself to take quick notes of numbers, enemy types and any other kind of info within the half minute this last leg of the battle was going to go on.
The roiling energy at the center of the King's Gate expanded outward, forcefully enough that the Colossus turned its attention and its gun away from the Vex to face it down, its heavy slug thrower spinning up in anticipation.
A Vex unit did come out, just not in its entirety. The only part of the machine that materialized within the King's Gate was a single massive arm.
Again, Aashir's gun slowly lowered from his sight in stunned silence. With the ringing in his head, he could barely hear Josef curse or the silent Aveline let out a shuddering breath.
The limb hung in the over the Colossus' head, obscuring the soldier entirely with its shadow. The seconds it remained there passed like hours. But eventually, the arm began to fall. Even without staring down the sights his gun, Aashir could pinpoint the exact moment the Colossus had given up on getting out alive.
Leave it to the Vex to make him feel sympathy for the Cabal.
Aashir was nearly thrown off his perch when the arm landed. A massive geyser of sand blasted into the air, obscuring everything beneath the gate from view. Even when the rumbling settled, his vision did not. Neither did his voice. "Damn it. I've lost visual entirely but…" He brought the sniper back up. He could just barely make out shadows and red lights. "I think they're retreating."
Simple observation was no longer enough. The Cabal just woke something up and they need to know what it was. "We need a specimen to examine, before they leave," Aashir said, "Aveline, if you have a target on any Goblin or Hobgoblin, I need you to take the-"
The sharp crack of a high-power rifle firing echoed over the Valley of the Kings. Then Aveline's telltale exhale. "Target down."
Aashir hopped off his Sparrow and ran the rest of the way while Fel sent it back to his ship. He slowed significantly when he came across his first Cabal corpse. Then another and another. It was easier to think less of the Cabal's loss when one was so far away from them. The last group had been bigger than the rest but the preceding ones had never been by any means small. Stepping over their corpses, he could see that now.
Aveline had gotten to her downed target first. A Hobgoblin, covered in a layer of moss that made it look as if the machine had spent its entire existence within some sort of jungle. The only place Aashir could name with so much green would be Venus and until the destruction of the Nexus Mind at their hands, they'd been actively working to change that. Esila was hovering over the frame, a cone of light emanating from her eye while her Guardian crouched beside her, keeping protectively close.
Josef ran up to them last. "Aveline..."
"Scan's rounding up," she responded. A few more seconds passed before she rose to her full height. "Done. Sending to your Ghosts now."
Aashir took a moment to go over what Esila had found with Fel within his head. "The Sol Divisive," he murmured out loud.
"Doesn't sound familiar. Another Martian subtype?" Aveline asked.
Josef was shaking his head before she could finish. "No, no. Mars has only ever had the Virgos."
"And what's stranger," Hernan spoke up, "Is that the Virgo Prohibition have always stuck to the Meridian Bay. They've had sightings in other regions, especially the Basin down south but not much else. And a lot of this unit's directives come from coordinates that are...unchartable."
"You mean they're not on Mars?" Aashir asked.
"They're not even in this solar system. Or the next one over."
Aashir turned his gaze from the Ghost back to the Vex. "It seems our friend here got its directives from something called a Gate Lord," the Ghost said, "The orders translate directly to 'Sinus Meridiani Gate under siege. All hostiles are to be eliminated."
Aveline turned. "Sinus Meridiani?"
"Meridian Bay in old Latin or Italian, I can't remember." There was an uncomfortable question to be asked as to why the Vex were using Earthen languages but this wasn't the place for it. An issue for the Gensym Scribes, he supposed.
A quiet, gurgling growl had all three of them reaching for weapons. They relaxed once they'd located the source. Aashir stepped over the Vex unit and approached the gate, stopping before the Cabal Colossus that had been crushed under the Gate Lord's hand. By some miracle, the soldier was still breathing, its respirators humming weakly underneath the helmet. The eyes were open and it was watching the Guardians as much as they were watching him, its long, thick fingers twitching uselessly in the direction of its dropped weapon.
An idea began to brew in Aashir's mind. "The Cabal wouldn't be so interested in this gate if they didn't know something," he said. He took his eyes off the dying Colossus to look back at the base and then the landship farther off. "I say we go back to their base. Find this 'something'. Right now, it's our best chance at an explanation for what we just saw."
"Base is probably packed," Josef pointed out, shrugging in fake nonchalance. "Probably on high alert too."
"I'll hack into their systems while you and Aveline give them something to think...Josef!" He called at the Titan's retreating back, watching him sprint across the dunes.
"He's been wanting to do that since we got here." Aveline took her eyes from her brother to the still breathing Colossus. "I'll join him. Start something up so you can sneak in. You'll take care of this?"
"Hmm. Go ahead." Aashir kept his eyes locked with the Cabal's while Aveline's running footsteps faded into the distance. Then he lifted his boot to the sealed edge of the Colossus' helmet, where it joined the rest of its armor, and struck down.
"I'm in. Easier than expected," Fel said.
"Watch for security, Fel. The Cabal are good at putting it where we least expect it." An explosion rocked the ground beneath their feet. Aashir put his body between the outside world and his Ghost and twisted around just in time to catch a cackling Josef riding past on a struggling, thrashing Cabal. As soon as they were out of sight, Aashir heard the crack and watched an empty Cabal helmet go flying past along with the strangled cry of a suffocating Legionnaire. They were overdoing it.
Fel didn't seem to mind the commotion. "Gotten past all that. Unfortunately, they don't have much. Barely anything on the gate and nothing concrete. Nothing at all on the Sol Divisive either."
"Not even previous contact?"
"Not even that. This was their first. And nothing matching the coordinates the Hobgoblin was holding."
The familiar sound of three Golden shots being fired off silenced three individual Cabal shrieks. Aveline landed right at the entrance to the computer terminal Aashir and Fel were trying to search through and walked in. "How's the search going?"
"Poorly," Aashir responded, watching a lightning-covered Josef whizz past behind her and then feeling the very ground shake. "Nothing solid. Nothing we can really use-"
"Aashir." Aashir was already feeling his Ghost's sense of urgency in his head. "I've hit something."
Aashir stepped closer. "Hit? Something? What's something." He started typing.
"A very solid wall of security. Much stronger than anything else I've encountered in their systems."
The terminal was suddenly rocked by an impact. Josef had been thrown into the wall and slid down, getting to his feet and shaking off the blow as if he didn't just leave a dent in solid metal. "Big things tend to hide behind big doors," was all he said before charging back into the fray.
Aveline turned back to Aashir. "Any ideas?"
"Just one. Fel, tag the data," he ordered, "Make it untraceable but in a way that we can find later if we need to." He moved away from the computer and let the Ghost work. Aashir sighed and leaned against the wall, feeling the long held off exhaustion finally start creeping into his joints. "Today's been nothing but strange," he muttered, "I really hoped we could go a little while longer without strange."
"Not that it makes much of a difference but at least this is Vex strange and not Herald strange," Aveline pointed out, "It's still pretty normal work. For us, at least."
The terminal rocked again, this time hard enough to nearly knock Aveline off balance. Instead of finding her brother, she looked up to find herself face to face with a Cabal Phalanx, who had shaken off its impact induced daze first and was already reeling back from a vicious strike with its shield when its helmet suddenly blasted off.
Aveline blinked and turned to come face to face with Aashir and smoking hand cannon. "I don't share your optimism," he grumbled, holstering the weapon. "But it's too early to speculate. Fel, are we clear?"
The Ghost pulled away from the computer. "We're good to go. Anyone of us can find it later if necessary."
"Then prepare for transmat. Josef?" Aashir called over comms. "Josef, we're leaving."
A loud, obnoxious groan came over as a response, punctuated by another earth-shaking slam and the ear-splitting crack of thunder.
Aveline snorted. "Give him a few minutes," she then suggested, "He knows the way home."
"Fine. Josef, wrap up here. We'll meet you in orbit."
Josef fell and landed from directly above with another dead Legionnaire beneath him to break the fall. He gave them two enthusiastic thumbs up, then grabbed the Cabal corpse by its armor and launched the dead thing back at its own comrades before hurling himself back into the crowd right behind it.