Katya Volkovskaya

August 30th, 2552

08:00

UNSC ARMY HQ

Aszod

The Fall of Reach

[}-{]

Katya had a gun pressed against the soldiers back as she sweat profusely from her brow. She had no intention of killing her but all the young woman didn't know that. All she could see was the legendary fangs of the Wolf as she growled orders into her ear. The woman did her best, unsure as to why a war hero might press a .45 into her back and threaten her but she had a ticket home and she wasn't about to die for some Spook.

"The last transport out." She said, tapping a manifest laid out in pieces on the desk.

"William Wallace. That's your ride?" Jack asked, watching her intently after glancing at the manifest.

She nodded, "the last ride out of town. Beggars can't be choosers, right?"

Jack nodded, "truth. Show us the way."

The man entered the coordinates into Katya's compadre and stepped over to the console. She switched it on and Katya watched the ancient radio buzz into life.

Katya stepped up to it and began to transmit a message to Preston.

Maddie Harper

August 30th, 2552

08:15

The Boneyards

Aszod

The Fall of Reach

[}-{]

The three of them had left the camp immediately. In the sky, plasma burned. Katya had got in touch with them not longer than fifteen minutes ago.

"head west, towards dock b. Find the William Wallace. Wait by the coffee chain outside the ammunition pens."

Preston was repeating the mantra like a hopeful prayer. The end was in sight and soon they would be off this cursed planet. His sister, Maddie, limped behind him with Mikaela in her arm. They tracked through the scorched and blasted roads lined with troops and refugees. Most had a bandage of some kind wrapped tightly around an arm or cheek. Those with missing appendages lay on makeshift stretchers by the roadside.

Eventually they came upon a checkpoint where the guards were on high alert. Preston approached the guards, former members of the NAPD, and asked them what the trouble was.

"Covenant drop pods hit in force. We have teams out there mopping them up to reestablish control but we can't advise anyone to pass until we have put the fuckers down." the taller person said, gripping their rifle with a white knuckled stance.

"strength?" Maddie asked, steadying herself.

"They're down to about a single squad but it's been tough. These aren't normal covenant."

"spec ops?"

"Kig-Yar mostly. Got some strange markings on their armour. ONI say its a group under the command of the Brute chieftain himself."

"You're in contact with ONI?" Mikaela asked, trying to sound hopeful.

"Briefly. UNSC Winter put an a.p.b. out on this unit as soon as they appeared."

"That's weird. Not the way ONI usually works." Preston said suspiciously.

"hoo-Ah to that." they said, sucking air through their teeth. "You guys already knew that I'm guessing."

Preston was about to protest but Maddie stepped forward, field by the painkillers in her bloodstream. "We were separated from our unit back in New Alexandria. Winter has been trying to get us back to command for nearly a week, now."

"can't advise that but you're more than welcome to try."

"Got any wheels?" Preston asked.

The trooper gestured to the roadside, where a series of warthogs sat waiting to be used.

"Nice." Mikaela grinned. "Shotgun!"

"thanks, Trooper." She said offering out her hand. The trooper moved to take it tentatively, perturbed by the sight of Maddie's half mangled face.

Or…

The Hog whirled into life, its engine bubbling as Maddie grabbed the collar of the man. With a firm yank, she tore the fabric away. Revealing a black vacuum suit beneath.

They locked eyes.

"shit!" Preston cried.

Maddie brought her knee up to the person's crotch, slamming it with a force that made them cry out in pain. She drew her pistol.

"we're made!"

Maddie fired twice, slotting the headhunters in three short quips before turning on her heels and jogging as fast as she could hobble towards the vehicle.

Shots erupted behind them as Marines began to fire wildly at anything that might pose a threat.

Preston gunned the throttle as Maddie threw herself into the back and hid behind the chain gun as bullets ricocheted off the walls of the 4x4.

"What the fuck!?" Mikaela asked ducking as they rounded a corner and took off down the dirt path towards the sounds of fighting.

"Headhunters. Katya was right, ONI are coming for us."

"Maddie, I can't kill a person."

"I'm not going to ask you to, Mikaela, let me bear that cross."

The Hog gurgled as it dropped a gear to climb an incline grunting and whining up the hill as the supercharger roared.

"Won't that make your job harder?"

"It will. Your soul is a precious thing, Mikaela." Maddie said, steadying herself as she gripped the gun by its handles. The metal was cool under her bare hands.

"I don't want to be a burden." Mikaela said, almost too softly to be heard over the engine.

"You're not a burden, Mikaela. Remember Declan. Remember the respect you had for him for making that choice. Do not let yourself join the cycle of abuse that ONI has built and maintained. Years ago, Drake groomed me for this. He eroded away all the pieces of me that saw life as precious." She did, urgently squeezing Mikaela's shoulder. "Any deal you make with the devil is paid upon the soul. Whether you believe in a soul or not, you will feel it."

Mikaela touched Maddie's hand and nodded, she could see what it meant to Maddie as she bore pleadingly into the eyes of the woman who had given everything to get her off the planet.

Maddie saw her own eyes reflected back at her and Mikaela realised that Maddie was not just pleading with her but also with herself: saying what she wished someone had said to her when she really needed to hear it. She could only hope that she had chosen differently because Maddie had been born inside the system, with a family steeped in military tradition and a reverence for the institutions that had kept humanity in the war.

Mikaela nodded, "no compromises."

Aurellian 'Ollie' Van Graff

August 30th, 2552

09:00

Above the Boneyards

Aszod

The Fall of Reach

[}-{]

Ollie watched Valette listening to the audio as it filtered in from their ground teams. Maddie had caught wind of the headhunters presence but she had been force to kill two operatives that were not supposed to have been killed. At least, that was how Drake had envisioned things playing out.

Instead, confusion had swept through the operation as men were gunned down in cold blood. There was no video but they had been mic'd up, Drake was sweating as the realisation of his failure began to set in along the frown lines of his face.

"For all your talk of Madeleine being too sentimental," Ollie said, sneering, "y'all just can't seem to kill Captain Harper. You, Drake, damn near left the girl dead. You landed the blow and let fate decide what happened next. Now you got two men dead for your mistakes."

Nico, who visually wanted to chew Ollie's ear off, actually agreed with him for a change. "He's not wrong, Cap. You had her where you wanted her and you didn't finish the job."

"She looked dead." He said, not engaging with their insults.

"And you didn't bother to check?" Ollie asked, curiously.

Drake rounded on Ollie, grabbing him by the collar and throwing him back against the bulkhead.

"Don't take this shit out on me, Drake. There are two men dead because of you."

"We will finish the job. We know where she is, we know where she is going, and we know that Mikaela and Preston are with her. How they found out about us is irrelevant. We bring one of them in alive and we secure ARC DREAM for ourselves."

"bullshit." Ollie said, barely controlling himself. "Parangosky ordered me to escort her around Reach, that data has nothing to do with ARC DREAM. The truth is that even if you had access to it you wouldn't know what to do with it. You're actually trying to eliminate a rival and yet, when it came down to it, you couldn't finish the job."

Nico looked at Drake. Valette looked at me, and Drake, the man of a thousand masks, shook his head and struggled to speak.

"Madeleine… is my responsibility. All of it. Years ago on Skopje, there was a vault. A vault I sent her into. I ordered her into that vault, to touch a foreign alien artifact and study the results so that Parangosky And I could figure out whether the information there was worth extracting. She and the others had already worked out that ONI knew more about the vault than I had let on but we needed a guinea pig and I only had one to spare. I told her only she could do it because she had the correct genetic imprint… I created this problem and then she went missing; and I realised I felt responsible. I started to care. She was eager, young and pliable. She was clever, curious, she rarely complained, and above all else, she wanted to better herself. She was me without my baggage." Drake let his confession hang in the air for a moment, surveying each person in the room as they watched him intently. "So no, I'm not sentimental but I do feel responsible. Maddie is on a course that will fracture humanity at the exact moment it must stand united; she is hoarding treasures that we will need in the months to come. I thought I had killed her at ONI HQ but I underestimated her once again. We will give her one last choice, she can turn over Mikaela or come herself but either way, before we leave this planet, one of those women will die."

Ollie watched him, really, watched him. Something about the man wasn't right, as thought it was difficult to say. He'd seen half truths told before but Ollie couldn't figure out what wasn't true as he studied the lines of the agent's face.

He searched for the tell that no one had ever worked out, Ollie searched his eyes, his mouth, and the muscles as they lay like concrete upon his bones. He wanted to kick and yell and demand the truth but Ollie was facing a seasoned liar, an expert of the craft. For a man who had grown up in a commune, reading a person was not a skill he had needed to practice.

So he relented, sighing, "what a waste."

"Why do you care, Van Graff?" Drake asked, "All you have ever wanted was to fly."

"I worked with the headhunters, Drake. That soured my apathy, didn't much like it but… well, some sights'll churn any stomach."

"Is there no way to bring ARC DREAM to our side?" Valette asked, hopefully. "don't you owe it to her to give her a choice?"

"I gave her a choice. She chose this."

Nico, who usually said little without baring his teeth, shrugged, "look, I don't like the way things played out but in her heart she is a traitor. She doesn't believe in ONI and the brass don't believe she ever will. The Office must always win and Harper has the resources to split what remains of the UEG in half. She has resources, she has a ship that could destroy our fleets, and a reason to hate us. She's too dangerous to be left alone."

"She's what he made her" Ollie said, jerking his thumb towards Drake. "You gave her all that to play with and now you want to take it away."

"We didn't give it to her to keep. We loaned it to her to run." Drake replied, "our game. Our rules."

"So we just kill 'er?"

"Aye, we do just that." Drake said, "She won't give us a choice."

Maddie Harper

August 30th, 2552

09:30

The Boneyards

Aszod

The Fall of Reach

[}-{]

"Help me down." Maddie said, crouching near the top of the container.

Preston stood below her and held his arms out, ready to catch her. Mikaela winced at the body of the Kig-Yar in front of them. Emblazoned on its chest was a strange marking, one that Maddie hadn't seen before.

Maddie dropped like a feather into her brother's arms, the dusty ground barely disturbed as they gathered around the corpse.

"Each patch is a kind of seal or promise," she said, turning her face to Mikaela. "It's a sacred commitment to a mission. I've seen it on Zealots before."

"How many Zealots have you come across, exactly?"

"I lost count."

"Cool" Mikaela grinned, reverently.

"Not cool, those bastards are dangerous," she motioned to her eye and arm. "The best of them took my eye and my arm."

"Shit, really?"

"Yeah, same one, actually."

"Damn, bet you're looking forward go that rematch."

"There's not going to be one. He died as I burned a whole fleet above Ballast."

"Woah. That's hard-core."

"It was," Maddie said, "but I wouldn't have done it without the help of a brute. A brute that bore a sigil much like that."

Preston blinked, "you had help from a brute?"

"I did. When we found Tuk, he revealed his true nature to us, they were both present on Meridian and set out to find me. Erun, the Zealot, couldn't bare to see our inheritance turned on his own kind so he tried to kill me."

"And that's when he took your eye and your arm?" She asked, trying to fill in the gaps.

"No," Maddie shook her head. "Erun took my eye when I was 16, on Skopje. He and Ketarus were about to kill Preston."

Preston smiled, sadly. "Her and the Elite dueled on a battlefield he lost part of his jaw, she lost an eye."

"Which is what sold me on ONI. They made me feel invincible, even as I spent months recovering from the trauma of torture and even as they shoved a replacement eye into my skull. They told me he didn't matter, even though all I had wanted to do was save the people of Meridian from a coming invasion, save my brother from a zealot-"

"And Maggie, from dying." Preston said, finally understanding Maddie, perhaps for the first time in his life.

"Take a bored and privileged child and give her purpose, and you have just as eager a recruit as a child uplifted from disadvantage." Mikaela added, "Okay, Maddie, I get it."

"I don't say it to absolve myself of responsibility, I say it because they will manipulate you without a second thought, and you need to know what they are capable of."

"Are they capable of recruiting Kig-Yar?" Preston asked, nudging the corpse with his foot.

"No." Maddie said, "this is a third party."

"Here for us?" Mikaela asked with a raised brow.

"Can't say. If things in Orbit aren't going well, and resistance has collapsed then most of the UNSCs remaining strength will be here." Maddie looked about, spotting a small group of buildings near the edge of a great cliff. Their Plight had taken up from the basalt basin filled with ship corpses to the facility itself, perched neatly on the rock overlooking the valley.

"Think we can rest there?" Preston asked, spying the same outcrop of buildings.

Maddie nodded. "Good cover for a fire, I'm hungry."

As they trudged over towards the building, Preston scanned their surroundings for anything that might be watching them.

"Maddie?" Mikaela asked, as they reached the doors. Maddie held a hand up for her to wait whilst Preston went inside and the two women waited for the all clear.

When it was safe, Maddie cocked her head. "What is it?"

"You say a lot about ONI taking advantage of you but not about what it was they used against you. What were you so passionate about that you were blinded to all of that?"

"Well… a lot. I learned so much, about our ancestors, and about the covenant. I learned that they are curious yet hamstrung by their faith. They have all been fed a lie that humans are impure and a vile admonishment against heresy. We needed to be purged for our heresy." she laughed, "the sick truth being that their gods chose us. We are being wiped out by the prophets because they found out that we were their successors. Worse than that, even. They found out that they had absolved themselves of the right to stand alongside us millenia ago when they betrayed humanity to the Forerunners."

"It's an amazing story" Mikaela agreed.

"You know its not just a story. I only knew part of it when I was sixteen but I was learning things that would put most people behind bars."

"In a way it did."

Maddie laughed, "Yeah, I suppose it did."

"Do you regret it?" Preston asked, handing out self-heating rationpacks. "Not the ONI stuff, just the things you've learned."

Maddie tore hers open with one hand and her teeth, yelping as the steam heat from the bag wrapped her face.

"I think I know the answer." Mikaela said, grinning, "knowledge is like a drug for us. To deny Maddie the knowledge of ARC DREAM would be like taking air from the atmosphere."

"I think I was destined to find some forbidden knowledge. I never did take no for an answer."

"Even if it's destined to kill you someday?"

"I'd die for a light in the darkness, Preston. Wouldn't you?"

He needn't answer. As the smell of old rations passed between their noses, and the sounds of battle grew closer in the background of their ears: Maddie could see that her companions understood how this had come to pass. Once again, she found her friends and family to be an omnipresent sanctuary, hidden in a storm.