The Viper

August 30th, 2552

17:30

Above the Planet Reach

The Fall of Reach

[}-{]

The battle had moved beyond the smelting plant and along the road to a rally point set by NAVSPECWAR. Rally point omega was a final stand, a section of the Winter Contingency found at the end of the document that the viper had read only two months ago and found sickening. All SPARTANs still alive on reach were to deploy to the location and hold it for as long as possible.

It was a sickening thought to her at the time but now, charging across the wasted lanscape, drugged up on battle stims and numb from pain, the Viper found the idea almost romantic. That she would take her revenge so close to that place seemed fitting.

The company of headhunters had thinned to a platoon but survivors left over from the battle of Aszod had joined Drake and Nico, spilling into the factory district and fighting tooth, nail, and joint for each spec of burning dust. There was nowhere for them to go, and the Viper picked her targets carefully as she killed what remained of ONIs forces. Rafe had realised she wouldn't kill the rank and file and was using her as bait to expose them and kill them as they tried to kill her.

The Viper was fighting with reckless abandon, matched only by the ferocity with which she took her revenge on the ONI soldiers in her way. An insatiable bloodlust had descended upon her and she suited the smashed up, half cracked visor that bared her teeth to the enemy. It spurred them on in rage as they beheld a human turned on their own.

Eventually, they came to the outer refinery and the Viper found herself lost amongst the vats of pooling oil, searching for Nico and Drake as they drew her in.

"Drake!" She screamed, "I know you're here, Drake." There was a clanging and a door clicked shut behind her. "You too, Nico. I can smell your bloodsoaked hands from here."

Behind her, a SPARTAN emerged, clad in black and donning a Mark V[B] helmet. "Captain? What happened to you?" B312 asked.

"ONI."She said, igniting her shield.

"I'm not going to fight you, Captain."

"Liar. No ONI puppet would spare me for what I've done."

"What have you done?" He asked, his voice strangely empathetic as he approached her.

"I betrayed humanity and struck a deal with a brute chieftain. The lives of my brother and friend for the heads of two operatives were my condition."

"That doesn't sound like a betrayal. That sounds like love."

The Viper blinked. "Love? What would you know about that? Don't try to manipulate me, Bee. We both know SPARTANs don't get to love."

"We love. It may not be romantic love but we love. You taught me that, Captain."

A piece of the Viper seemed to crack and Maddie broke through, the wildness in her eyes subsided as she relaxed and the sounds of battle faded in her ears.

"I did?"

"Captain Harper did." he said, holstering his Assault Rifle on his back. "She said to embrace Noble team like my family."

"And did you?" She asked, pausing.

Bee nodded, solemnly, "I did."

"If you could have made a bargain that would have saved their lives, would you have done it?"

Bee stared at her for a protracted moment. A plasma grenade could be heard going off in the background.

"I wasn't forced to choose between duty and love."

"Love is the death of duty." Maddie said, finding herself again.

"That's what they said during my training camp. Funny that they didn't lie about that."

"I saved my brother and I saved Mikaela from dying. I don't regret that."

"And taking revenge?"

"I wanted it. Want it, still." She shook her head. "It's not fair, Bee. I did everything they asked and it ends like this. We all die here on this blasted rock."

"Thanks to you, your friends live on."

"I just… did not think it would end like this." She said, turning off her shield.

"How we die is our choice, Captain. I learned that by following your orders. I will die for Noble team and their mission, I will die to give you a chance."

"A chance?"

"Just a chance."

"There's no escaping this planet, Bee. The only way I leave is death or… as Tartarus' prisoner."

"Rally point omega." Bee said, speaking as though a bulb ignited in his head.

"What about it?" Maddie asked, "it's a nothing place filled with dead SPARTANs."

"It was where I was going when I caught up with you."

"Do you have extraction?"

"No."

"A place to hide?"

"No."

"Any means of communication"

"There's no one left to hear it."

She remembered then, the words of Mikaela: 'So where you see a shit pint, I see a kind gesture.'

"And persistence in the face of annihilation…"

"What?" Bee asked, confused.

Maddie swallowed, realising that she was facing the end, now. "Okay. Yeah. Let's do it. Fuck it."

"We choose where we die, Captain. It would be my honour to buy you a few more minutes."

"Betrayed by the nation we loved. Condemned to die on a planet we were never born on. Lied to by our masters…" Maddie grinned.

"Taught to kill and take life" Bee continued.

"Turned into heroes"

"at the cost of our innocence"

"Our souls the price, our bodies the payment"

"Stretched to our breaking point."

"Bending."

"Never breaking."

"Until we revolt against the world itself." Bee said, not realising his words echoed Mikaela's.

Maddie grinned, the meds began to wear off as the pain lashed at her body. She stood taller, ignited the shield on her arm, "get behind me, SPARTAN."

"Yes, Ma'am."

She approached him and turned her back to his chest, the war-god stood above her broken body like an apparition of death. Together, they set off, the oil behind them catching fire as a grenade erupted behind them.

"You're going with her?" Came a voice in the darkness, flames spread across the oily surface of the refinery.

It was Nico, he stalked forward. "She took my fucking eye."

"An Elite took mine." Maddie spat at his feet as he approached, the flickering lights of the fire lashed across his face like her axe had barely an hour before. Maddie smiled at the sight, delighting in his misery.

His eye socket was cracked, scarred from a slice across it. Flesh hung limp and wet from his cheek and brow. The eye, what was left of it, rolled about in its hole.

"You fucking bitch." He seethed, "you vicious, disloyal…"

"We're going to Rally Point Omega. There's nothing you can do to stop us." Bee said flatly.

"This is the ending we choose." Maddie added, her body flagging as the drugs entered their least effective stage. It wouldn't be long now until they were completely gone from her system.

"...Belloc! We need to get to the roof, Winter will meet us there-" Drake said, slowing to a halt as he watched Nico threaten Maddie and Bee.

"Lass…" he said, coming to a stop. "I really wish you hadn't done that."

Maddie stayed firm, she was done with revenge. She'd saved her friends and family. It didn't matter if Drake escaped.

"You just… you just couldn't fall in line. Nico did it. Nico gave ONI everything. Now, the World Forge data is ours and you have nothing. You've lost. You're not a hero, you are not going to get that recognition you wanted from ONI. You… you betrayed everything you stood for." he said it, resignation emanated from the face beneath his helmet. Maddie wondered what that looked like on Drake's face but she couldn't picture it. His mask could slip beneath his helmet but his voice had lost the iron-clad security it once had. It led Maddie to the inexorable conclusion that the war had finally gotten to him.

Or maybe… she had.

"I stayed true to myself, Drake. To the end."

Tartarus smashed through a set of doors at the end of the hall with Rafe and Clover in tow. He charged at Drake who returned fire and retreated with Nico, who snarled up towards the rafters and the gangways that overlooked the pots of oil.

Flames spilled from a pot as the covenant flooded the room, Bee whispered that it was time to go and Maddie turned, leading him out of the facility the way she came and fighting like a symbiotic pair of dancers. Maddie was the shield and Bee was the sword. Plasma and high explosives echoed and danced, foxtrotting about the pair of them in a cacophony of beautiful destruction.

Maddie was at her human peak, her body exhausted, her mind pulled from the brink. With one arm, one eye, and one heart, she killed and hacked and protected Bee as she always had. At once she was the best and worst of humankind, tenacious, unyielding, and a defender of her kind; yet she was also a killer: cleaving and brutal. Without mercy she severed the gas mask of a grunt as she slammed the shield against it.

It squealed but Maddie was gone, dancing with Bee towards the far end of the Nomolos Refinery where the covenant had not set troops down yet.

The dust beneath their feet was crispy, the air was hot, and the sky was brown as the magnetosphere choked under the shards of hot plasma that was being injected into the surface.

They ran for nearly twenty minutes until Maddie's feet could bear it no longer. She collapsed to her knees and her chest heaved.

As she knelt there, her civilian clothes covered in the hot and radioactive dust of the refinery floor, Maddie watched a familiar ship swoop into view and land on the refinery roof.

They were too far away to see if anyone got onboard but Maddie wasn't naive, she knew that her enemies had escaped.

"We need to get to the rally point," Bee said, peacefully.

"Our terms?" She asked, looking up at him.

"Our terms." He replied, with an outstretched hand.