Arise in Valour
"Come on! Get some sugar! I know what you fascists like!"
Johnson could barely hear his own voice over the blare of gunfire. Around him was battle—and it was a real damn battle alright. Pushing through adjacent hangars, they had finally run into staunch Imperial resistance, and the rooms were big enough for hundreds of combatants. Marines, ODSTs, Rocket Hogs, Scorpions and more, manoeuvring around pits, ramps, catwalks, and crashed fighter-launching-thingummies. Across the other end of the bays, the stormtroopers were playing the exact same game. Outside, TIEs occasionally flew past, dogfighting with Longswords and Broadswords.
Johnson dropped behind some crates to reload, putting one hand to his comm. "Hey, Cortana, these idiots are fascists, right?"
"Yes, very evil—I'm busy, Johnson!"
"Hehehe! I knew it." Johnson moved over to the flank of the nearest Scorpion, laying down cover fire with his BR, before slamming his fist into the tank. "Perez! Kill that chicken-looking thing, your 10:30!"
The Scorpion's main gun twisted until it was focused on the walking mech on the other side of the battlefield. It blasted once, and the walker staggered, twisting to fire shrieking twinned plasma bolts that scored along the Scorpion's side. Then the Scorpion fired again, and the walker's head exploded, it's legs crashing to the floor.
"Ha haaa! That's what I'm talking about Perez!" Johnson thumped the flank of the Scorpion again, looking for new targets. "Alright, now—oh, hell no! Bail, bail!"
The problem with things outside the hangar's shielded entry was that they were in a vacuum, which meant silent. Which meant Johnson hadn't heard when the humongous gun-equipped head of a machine loomed in from the edge of the shield, turning to look Right At Them.
Johnson grabbed the gunner and hauled him up out of the seat, jumping away. Perez was not so lucky. The giant mech fired, and plasma bolts bigger than he was flew down to slam into the Scorpion, blowing it to kingdom come.
"Weird Scarab! I repeat, weird Scarab!" he yelled into comms, running back to cover as the machine began blasting indiscriminately into the UNSC lines.
"Here, sarge!" A marine with a sniper rifle waved to Johnson from behind some pallets, and Johnson dived in next to him as the area behind him just sort of exploded.
"Dubbo! Do we know what the hell that thing is?" Johnson asked, pressing his back to the pallets.
"Cortana's intel says it's called an AT-AT, sir!"
"And is there any detail on how we kill attatts, marine?"
"Actually, sarge, I'm pretty sure you're meant to call it an aytee-aytee—"
"I don't care what it's called!" Johnson peeked out past the pallets, then ducked back. "That visor at the front of its head! Is that a weak spot?"
"Let's find out!" Dubbo stood, braced his sniper rifle on the pallets, and fired four shots in quick succession. Something else exploded (not the AT-AT), and he knelt back down. "No good! The visor looks like glass, and I saw there were people in there, but I didn't do much more than scratch it!"
Damn it. Even as they talked, rockets and gauss rounds and more were flying up from the marines towards the AT-AT, all to little effect. The ODSTs with their vacuum-rated armour could maybe attempt boarding, but that would take too long. Breaking into the cockpit and killing the pilots was about the only thing they had to take it down, but nothing soldiers could carry had higher penetration than the SRS-99C.
…Well. Almost nothing.
Johnson sprinted back to their command station—or rather it's remnants, as a blast from the AT-AT blew it to smithereens. He hopped over the wreckage into the ammo and equipment reserves that a Warthog had dropped in. Spent a painful few seconds rummaging through crates, while behind him their only other Scorpion went down. Then,
"There you are, baby! Come to daddy!" He hefted what he was looking for. And then threw the other thing he was looking for over his shoulder. And then started running on the opposite direction.
Damn, and they say the field isn't like boot camp. 'OH, I DON'T KNOW WHAT I'VE BEEN TOLD—'
Ahead of him, a marine riding a Mongoose got clipped in the head by a stray blaster bolt, yelping and going down. Johnson jumped onto the Mongoose as it passed him, gunning it and trying desperately to keep control of it with just one hand. He swerved through the battlefield, dodging around his own men and splattering one unprepared stormtrooper as he went.
"Alright, big fella, come on…" he grunted, shouldering his weapon, and aiming it up at the AT-AT. Pulled the trigger.
The Anti-Vehicle Model 6 Grindell/Galilean Nonlinear Rifle—or, more colloquially, Spartan Laser—began charging.
Johnson really, really hoped that the bastards on the inside could see the laser pointer shining through their window. If not, that was fine; it was about to get a lot brighter.
The BOOM of the laser made Johnson's teeth vibrate, and immediately put a target on his back by drawing a big red line between him and the AT-AT. He was still moving, though, racking the weapon on the Mongoose and beelining for a ramp at the edge of the hangar. He'd made a hole, alright, followed by the hilarious sight of air flooding out into the vacuum. This left the occupants scrambling desperately to not just die, unable to do anything against his next trick.
Pushing the Mongoose to its top speed, Johnson launched it up off the end of the ramp, rising temporarily weightless out of the seat, arcing across the view of the stars like that one old movie he'd watched with the alien and the bike.
The next step definitely hadn't happened in that movie. Johnson unslung the belt full of grenades he'd picked up, pulled the pin on one, and tossed the whole thing out into the void.
He was a goddamn lady-killing superhero, and he didn't miss. The belt of explosives clipped the foot-wide hole in the window and flopped through. The explosion that followed was silent, but it was beautiful.
…And then Johnson had to land, and that was a whole 'nother thing.
"Whoa—ooooOOOAAAAAAH—"
John-117 stared down the sights of his BR at the hostile. It wasn't quite as tall as him, but it was close, shrouded in a black cape that whipped about in the whistling updraft from the abyss below them. Its helmet was angular, with a grilled triangular mouthpiece, and on its chest was a panel with a number of glowing buttons and switches. It's energy sword was red-white and thrumming—a singular straight blade held loosely in its grip.
The was some kind of presence about it—John wasn't the type to panic in the face of a new foe, but the atmosphere in the room felt heavier, the pressure greater, the air colder. The Covenant hadn't scared John, and the Imperials hadn't scared John, but the Flood had—and this thing did too.
"He was in their database," Cortana said in his ear. "Darth Vader. Apparently he's the Emperor's right hand—some kind of religious zealot, and enforcer."
"Human?" John asked.
"Classified behind security I can't yet break, but probably."
"Good." Humans could die.
There were twenty metres along the catwalk to Vader, and Will's body. A platform with consoles sticking off, halfway there. The target point (and the nuke, loose on the floor) ten metres behind Vader.
John flicked the BR to full-auto and opened fire.
Vader moved his blade to intercept before John had even pulled the trigger. The first few bullets slammed into the plasma blade and splattered into liquid metal, some spits of it landing on the black armour. The rate of fire was too fast and too wild for Vader to properly catch, and a moment later he whipped the blade away and raised his other hand. One bullet glanced off his pauldron—
—and the rest froze in the air, floating and spinning in space.
"Possible EM manipulation!" Cortana warned—
John's mag clicked empty as he ran forwards. He tossed it out, and then jerked to one side as Vader flicked the fingers on his empty hand, and the bullets all whizzed back across the catwalk. John skidded behind the consoles on the halfway platform, reloading the BR as the rounds scattered around him.
He popped back up over the cover to return fire again—
And grunted, as something clamped about his throat and lifted him upwards.
It wasn't electromagnets. Chief knew enough physics to know that didn't make sense, for whatever the hell had him, but it was more than that—this wasn't just force. It somehow felt like Vader was bringing his own willpower to bear, and trying to crush John into a pulp with it. He was over a thousand pounds in his armour, and Vader's outstretched hand yanked that up into the air like it was nothing, leaving him dangling a metre up over the platform. His shields crackled and sparked, draining as they tried to hold up against the pressure.
He grabbed the E-11 from his back and fired three times with his offhand, on a wordless intuition to test if Vader could focus on two forces at once, or if he could even catch plasma. It was inconclusive. Vader's blade whipped almost lazily through the air and deflected the plasma bolts directly back at John, the first two shattering the remnants of his energy shield and the last scorching into the armour of his breastplate. And then the force intensified, yanking John's arms apart and arching his back. Without the shields, the grip tightened about his throat, cutting off his air.
"Sensors can't pick up how he's doing it!" Cortana called in his head, over his rapidly raising heartbeat. "I've signalled for backup, but I can't stop him—fight it, Chief!"
He was fighting it. It felt like his armour had locked around him, but that wasn't the case—his arms were working, his suit was still ready to augment his strength. What he was under was a force—and if Vader was trying to press his will upon John, well, John had a good deal of willpower of his own. He strained, grunting, against the pressure upon his arms, ignoring how his head started to throb from lack of air. And slowly, muscles burning, he started to drag his limbs forwards.
Darth Vader's helmet tilted slightly.
If anything, the force intensified again—but John had started moving and he wasn't stopping now. He pulled his arms inwards, centimetre by centimetre, twisting his shaking wrists until they were just about on-target—
And fired both the BR and the E-11 at once.
Vader swept his arms across himself and John went flying backwards, the pressure on his throat releasing. The plasma, Vader deflected back at him, catching his thigh as he fell, while the bullets clattered across Vader's upper arm and shifted him slightly, putting a score on the armour.
John slammed into the catwalk and kept rolling, his legs swinging out. He dropped the E-11 and used that hand to grab the edge of the platform as his whole body dropped off, dangling over the abyss. Cortana upped the oxygen concentration in his helmet and he gasped.
"Incoming!"
Cortana didn't need to tell him—turning to look back at the threat, he saw that Vader had—thrown his energy sword?
John yanked himself half-up onto the catwalk with his free hand and rolled back on, the red blade skidding just past his foot. He got up to one knee, flicked a grenade off his belt, and threw it. Vader, predictably, caught it with magic, making it float harmlessly just in front of him, as far below the sword began to spin its way back up and towards him like some sort of boomerang.
Vader's mechanical, rhythmical breathing (that hadn't so much as sped up in the whole fight) suddenly cut out for a jolting intake—
As John trained the BR on the grenade and fired a burst.
The explosion echoed throughout the space, concussive force rolling over John even at his distance, a distance he was rapidly trying to close, holstering the BR and sprinting up into the blast. He saw the glow of the blade first, already moving to intercept him, and as he ducked it and the smoke cleared he saw Vader stood there, armour scuffed up and cloak aflame but otherwise undamaged.
John punched him twice in the solar plexus, and there was the distorted grunt indicating Vader had actually felt it. He tried to hit Vader in the face, but that swing got caught in a black-gloved fist, and then the sword was swinging in again—Vader was faster than he looked, and strong, and he kept reacting before John even moved, before John even thought. But John was a Spartan, and he could feel that the physical advantage was his. He caught the blade on his forearm, shedding almost all of his shields in a moment, and twisted his other arm free to deliver a rocketing uppercut that snapped Vader's head back and crumpled in the bottom of his mouth-grill.
John felt the explosion of fury from his enemy. And then felt it physically, as a force took him about the midriff, lifted him up over Vader's head, and then slammed him down into the catwalk behind.
He grunted at the impact, but rolled fast, turning to spray the BR at Vader's helmet from point blank, for about half a second before Vader whirled round and sliced the weapon in two.
"Chief!" Cortana flashed an alert and waypoint on his HUD. He lunged forwards, whipping one arm back over his own head, using the other to catch the sword's backswing at the forearm as he slammed the first arm into Vader's chest—
Vader swept out his offhand, casually, as though dismissing a junior officer. Another blast of force ripped out of him, drawing groans from the catwalk underneath them and causing its lights to flicker. John was hurled backwards, skidding away along the catwalk. Will's corpse, close by, was picked up and sent tumbling into the abyss.
The nuke—despite John's desperate midair attempt to catch it—was flicked away, dropping out and down into the darkness.
Not good.
John landed on his back, his helmet slamming into metal. He groaned, and tried to stand, his eyes snapping up at the sound of a vicious, horrible rending noise.
As Vader raised a clutched hand, the console platform—all three square metres of it—was wrenched up from its connection to the catwalk, floating in the air over Vader's shoulder.
And then he thrust his hand forwards and hurled the thing.
There was no time to dodge. John raised his arms and braced, and the platform's base slammed into his open hands. It was like a Warthog being dropped on his head. He groaned, legs buckling, dropping to one knee. But—even increasingly exhausted—he was a Spartan, and once the impulse of the initial throw had been dissipated, it was just carrying something heavy. John could do heavy. He'd once flipped over a Scorpion tank that had landed upside down.
He heaved the platform upwards, rising, pulling up his knelt leg to stand fully on both feet. He looked up, angling away the platform enough for him to stare at Vader's helmet. Vader continued to be utterly impassive, staring at John like he was an Unggoy that had barely managed to escape an exploding Ghost: impressive, in some small way, worth noting in the split second before you kill it.
Vader pulled his blade arm back, the way he last had when he'd thrown it, and John had no way to dodge—
Cortana flexed her virtual shoulders.
"Hey there, Darth," she said over his suit's internal comms. "That's a nice life support system you got there. Be a shame if someone broke it."
She (and presumably John) had noticed that Vader reacted to things before they happened. But he'd still chosen to catch the grenade with his telekinesis, hadn't panicked until a second later, meaning whatever he was doing had limits. So when John had pulled her chip out and, with that last hit, pushed her into the access port she'd spotted on Vader's chest?
She'd pre-committed to not actually attacking for several seconds, so that by the time he realised what she was doing, it was too late. Now, as Vader wound up to strike, she triggered three dozen programs she'd set up to activate all at once.
His oxygen supply was cut off and carbon dioxide was pumped into his lungs. His chemical supports began injecting him with all the wrong fluids in lethal quantities. His power generator exploded. His electronics sparked and overheated. His HUD scrambled and blinded him with bright, chaotic lights. Any prosthetic that was capable of causing pain did so; the rest went inoperative, twisting at odd angles to strain his biological parts. His voice box played the 'olly olly oxenfree' jingle.
His lightsaber dropped from nerveless fingers and clattered to a stop on the catwalk.
Most people in Vader's physical condition (and goodness, what a condition, yikes) would have died on the spot. Clearly he was a special case. Cortana gave him thirty seconds at most.
Vader roared in pain, muscles spasming, electricity flickering along the exterior of his suit. A nudge to his mechanical legs dropped him to his knees, but not to the floor—Cortana needed a big target. Sure enough, through his optics, she saw Chief hefting up the monitor platform as he stood fully, then tipped forward a step.
Then another step.
Then another.
The clanking of footsteps rapidly out-registered the fluttering of Vader's heart as Chief broke out into a run, powering forwards with at least three tons of metal and a sharp edge atop him, and Cortana only hoped he wasn't going to smash her chip into the bargain as he planted his feet in front of Vader's struggling form and
RAMMED the platform into the upper part of his torso.
It might have been funny if the situation wasn't so dire and John's body wasn't in active rebellion. Vader's body just went down in an instant, slamming back into the floor and skidding along it over a metre. John wanted to stagger back, but didn't dare. Instead he pressed his shoulder to the back of the platform and heaved forwards, tipping the entire thing over until it crunched down bottom-up onto Vader's head, and a good deal of the rest of the catwalk.
Then John staggered back, slowly regaining his breath and his shields. No elite would have survived that, and not many Wraiths would have either. He almost called out to Cortana, then realised she wasn't there.
"Chief to key players, threat neutralised. Status?" he asked his comms.
"This is Johnson, still on my way!" over the sound of an engine.
"Linda here, these bastards will not leave me alone!"
"Fred, coming in to relieve Linda now!"
John exhaled, and moved forwards to Vader's exposed legs and abdomen. He reached out to pick Cortana's chip out of the ruined console—
And froze. Not of his own will. It was like a vice clamped, not around his throat, but his whole body, locking him in place. He grunted, and then started to float slowly upwards—and so did the platform, and so did Vader's lightsaber. A moment later, so did Vader.
The implacable, fear-raising mechanical breathing had stopped when Vader's systems had shut down. Now he rose, half with the wrenching motions of what little flesh was left to him dragging non-compliant metal into motion, half with the weightless abruptness of a puppet pulling itself up by its strings. The grating on his helmet crumpled under nothing and then tore away, along with half of his already-ruined mask. Revealed was a mess off grey, scarred skin, a furious, sickly yellow eye, and a mouth that finally opened to take a rasping breath. He looked and sounded like he was in agony—which made sense, given the massive indent in his torso that must have been crushing what was left of his heart and lungs.
His right arm moved to his chest, plucked Cortana's chip from the console, and dropped it onto the catwalk. Twisted, and the separated platform was tossed away and clattered down into the abyss. Then moved to catch and ignite his sword as it floated into his hand. The limb didn't move like it was generating any real force of its own. More like some dead thing being wafted about in rote motions, by a force far greater than the broken man's own body.
John tried to reach for the magnum at his hip, but was slammed down into the catwalk like gravity had just tripled. He could endure that, tried to stand—and it tripled again, forcing him to one knee with a grunt. Vader staggered forwards, raised his left arm, and punched John across the helmet like a hit from a gravity hammer, dropping him flat onto his back. Then stomped on his breastplate. John's HUD glitched and frazzled, and darkness encroached on his vision. He wanted to call to Blue Team, but he could barely breathe—it felt like a maelstrom of dark energy was swirling all around him, roaring in his ears, yanking the breath from his lungs. All he could do was stare upwards, as Vader raised his blade into the air, preparing to stab downwards—
"Hey! Bowling pin!"
Vader and John both twisted to look.
Gunnery Sergeant Avery Johnson stood at the end of the catwalk, Spartan Laser braced on his shoulder and already charging. "Nice sword you got there! But mine's bigger."
The beam fired. Vader surged away, but didn't have the speed anymore, and it tore through his left arm and a decent chunk of his torso, spinning him about. The force on John relented, and he got half to his feet, charging for Vader—then the force came back, slamming him down again. He heard Johnson yelp, and then saw him flying through the air only to be impaled through the chest on Vader's outstretched blade. Fully run through, Johnson only grunted, before reaching to his hip, pulling a grenade, and slamming it down into the energy sword.
The second grenade in as many minutes went off in Vader's face. Johnson went flying backwards and landed in a heap on the platform, Vader staggered away with a roar, the lightsaber flew out of his grip—
And John caught it, lunging to his feet to grip the hilt with two hands and swing it with all his strength.
Red light scored diagonally across Vader's chest, biting deep through his armour. He collapsed to his knees, taking a last, shuddering breath—
And then John drew his magnum and emptied the magazine into Vader's exposed face.
When that was done, all that was left was a red smear around the scorched remnants of a black suit, and none of it was moving.
John dropped both weapons and staggered back towards Johnson, crouching next to him.
It didn't look good. There was a visible hole through Johnson's chest, the edges cauterised black, and his face was a mess of scar tissue. He looked up at John, blearily, and coughed. "You get him…?"
"We got him." John made to loop an arm around Johnson's back. "I'm getting you out of here."
"No…no you're not." Johnson wheezed. "You got bigger things to carry."
He reached up with a shaking hand, and snapped the chain of his dog tags. Extended it outwards. John clasped the hand.
Johnson grunted, and met his eyes. "Send me out…with a bang."
John didn't look away, until Johnson's eyes rolled back, and his head touched to the catwalk.
"Chief!" Boots on the catwalk. John turned to see Fred and Linda running up to him, both their armours damaged but intact. "Are you alright?"
John stood, grunting. His suit had delivered a few micro-injections of bio-foam, his HUD was still glitching, and a good number of his muscles were torn.
"I'm fine. Threat neutralised. Sergeant Johnson is KIA. Will is…MIA." He walked closer, and picked up Cortana's chip that was (luckily, very luckily) still on the catwalk. Plugged it into the back of his helmet. "We lost Will's nuke. Cortana?"
"Good work back there," she said, privately, her voice more tender than she usually allowed on a mission. "I was really worried for a second. And…sorry."
He wasn't going to reply, and she knew it, so she switched to group comms. "Without all four we won't be able to blow the whole station. I'd need to plug back in to see their progress on fixing the superlaser, but we have twenty minutes before the Death Star has line of sight on Earth."
"Can we reposition the remaining nukes?" Fred asked.
"This thing is too damn massive," Cortana said. "Anything less than a perfect storm to trigger a chain reaction in its systems won't be enough."
John looked up. "You mentioned there was a thermal exhaust port we could hit."
"Yes, but I said our munitions wouldn't cut it. You'd want a fighter or bomber ship to make the run, and none of ours would do."
"I know," John said. "Are there any Imperial fighters still docked?"
One second's pause.
A waypoint tried to appear on John's busted HUD. "Three levels up, there should be a suitable ship. Chief—"
"Alert the In Amber Clad," John said. "They need to get off this station."
He leaned down and picked up the hilt of Vader's sword. Took one last look at Avery Johnson. Started running.
And that, folks and gentlefolks, is that.
I'm sure the fight is going to be conclusive. These things always are. I hope, at the very least, I was able to make it narratively satisfying and mostly believable.
The Force probably works on Chief. Cortana can probably hack Vader's suit. Things like that all depend on how you rule your inter-fandom interactions. But I think this is the kind of way the fight would probably go down. Sure, a maximally efficient Vader would probably have done better, but that man canonically does not give a damn about most things.
And hey, if you think it should be different, you can write your own! That's not a dismissal; that's an invitation. This is fanfiction. Let's all tell our own stories.
Next chapter: Monday
Where we get ready to put an end to this.
RIP, Johnson. You were very fun to write.
