[}{]
Maddie
August 27th, 2552
09:00
The Convoy
Aszod
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Maddie had woken that morning with a sense of dread. At around five in the morning, she'd woken to the sounds of a howling wolf-pack. The coyote-like creatures stalked the land in the waning hours of the day, it was unusual to be up that early: they should have been going to bed.
The sky was already light, though much of that was the after effects of New Alexandria continuing to burn. Maddie had seen that sky before, as well. She'd seen it on Ballast, shed seen it on Meridian, she'd seen it on Skopje, and now she had seen it here, on Reach, as well.
It was a sobering and wretched feeling but one that couldn't quite pin Maddie down as she felt her brief respite coming to an end. With restlessness coming for her, she'd gone for a walk. She took a racing-green hat from Olu's bag and perched it on her head, hiding her mess of hair inside the cap. Strands hung awkwardly from her face but she looked unfamiliar when she checked her reflection in the windscreen of a warthog before she set off.
Now, she was looking out over the Boneyard. Her legs dangled off the cliff face, she looked out over the the wildcards before her. There were the carcasses of old ships strewn about. The exoskeletal husks of ancient junkers lay before her. From up here, Maddie could see the signs of warfare but it didn't carry the same dread that it once had. Between each old ruin, lights flashed and danced; Maddie knew what truly happened with each burst and waltz of the light.
She played Mikaela's music as she watched the scene, a song with sweeping tones and whimsical voices. A song about the afterglow of sex. Her time with Olu was already over, perhaps at another time, she might have fallen for him but in truth, she had realised that there was a lot that she wanted to do.
It wasn't just that ARC DREAM was a necessity, she wanted to see where that mystery took her. Since she'd found Tukmen'tukhan, she'd spent much of her time not doing the very thing that drove her to join ONI. Somehow, ONI had managed to keep her at arms length from the actual research and exploration of ancient humanity.
As she sat, looking out over the valley, she saw an ending. It was bittersweet, and leaving this place would be hard. Maddie wouldn't have expect it to be easy, it never was; now she had felt her perspective change. Things would still get worse before they got better but if Maddie could keep going, humanity would have a second chance.
As if commanded by God and fate, a ship appeared in the sky. Maddie watched it fly by, a silver streak across the burning skies of Reach. Like a titanium moth to flame, the ship ducked out of the cloud layer and swooped low. Maddie had seen that kind of grace before.
Instantly her body reacted, jumping to her feet as it swooped and perched itself in the centre of the camp. Maddie jogged over, hanging back as civilians and troopers approached the ONI marked ship.
Maddie leaned against the side of a warthog, waiting for the crowd to disperse the Winter paused on the ground before hissing.
The ramp lowered slightly and Maddie straightened. Three figures were waiting there, standing in the light of the ships loading bay. Her stomach tightened.
Ollie was there, his head darting around like a pigeon, searching for something to eat.
Or warn.
He's looking for me.
Immediately, her sight snapped towards the other figures.
Drake. Nico.
Maddie turned, inwardly thanking Olu for the hat as she walked away through the crowd, tucking the jacket sleeve into her pocket so that it wouldn't blow in the breeze. Each step felt laborious.
Maddie returned to the rock she was sitting on earlier, looking down at the cliff face below her. It must have been a hundred metres high at least, the rocks jagged out like the serrated points of a knife.
She looked at herself, hoping her canvas shoes would hold together as she descended the rocks.
Maddie decided it didn't matter.
There will be worse days to come.
[}{]
Captain Aurellian "Ollie" Van Graff
August 27th, 2552
09:10
The Convoy
Aszod
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Ollie watched as Nico sleuthed through the crowd. That rabid dog was good for little but hunting was one of them. Drake spoke with the troopers as he informed them of a traitor hiding in their ranks.
Accusations immediately turned to the woman who unlocked their bunker in New Alexandria. Drake and Nico shared a glance. It didn't take a lot of thought to work out who she was, especially when they said that she arrived dressed in ONI fatigues and was missing one arm.
"Alright, thank you for the information, Trooper. You mentioned she was with one of the other refugees?" Drake asked, "which one?"
The trooper looked around and spotted a man standing near the flap of his tent. He looked half-asleep. His dusty linen shirt flicked in the wind as he watched Ollie, Drake,and Nico speaking with the guards. When the trooper pointed him out, he went into his tent and fetched his jacket and glasses.
Nico began to disperse the crowd, stating that they were not here to rescue them and that the efforts at Aszod would be more than enough to meet their needs. Drake stood with Ollie, his visor polarised menacingly, as the man approached.
He was shorter than Nico, and had a certain softness about him. His face was washed with the warmth of a pastoral mentor, laugh lines were eking along the lines of his eyes. His round glasses and beard sat looking erudite on his face, and paired nicely with the dulcet tones of his voice.
"State your name, Civilian." Drake said.
"Olu. Sir."
Ollie suspected that this man wasn't used to giving respect like that. He wasn't rude, but he spoke awkwardly. Ollie had seen his professors at Luna act like that in the past, he figured Olu was something similar.
"Follow us, please." Drake said, gesturing towards the bridge of the Winter.
Nico began to search the camp, asking around for the mysterious stranger that they had all seen hanging about with Olu. Ollie watched him in the crowd for a moment and then turned, he closed the Winter's ramp behind them.
"...did she approach you?" Drake was asking. He was stood over Olu, who sat in a chair looking nervously between them.
"I'm not sure, it wasn't something I expected to need to remember. The conversation was fun, though. We shared water and a cigarette."
"Does she smoke?" Drake asked, turning to Ollie.
"Not that I know of." Ollie lied. He'd seen her strike one up outside of the tavern in the Old Town.
"What did you speak about?"
"The people we loved."
"She didn't say anything else?"
"She said a lot. Nothing you would be interested in."
"I'm interested in everything."
"You sure?"
Ollie thought he saw a hint of a smirk on Olu's lips.
"Her name was Maddie. She arrived out of nowhere with the ability to circumvent the security protocols on a glassing bunker door. Medics had to fix her up, lots of blood lost from a wound to the shoulder. Wasn't a blade like those… Elites. It was like she'd been gouged half open."
"She look like this?" Drake knew it was Maddie but he confirmed it with a picture all the same. It was stamped from 2551, she still had both arms in the picture. Ollie looked at it, a class photo from Luna academy. The legendary class of '51. The other students had been cropped out of the photo but one of them would have been Katya. Maddie had a wicked smirk in the photo, she projected nothing but confidence and steely excitement.
"Yeah, that's her."
"What did she say to you?"
"Nothing specific. She said she had lost her last partner at Ballast. Ship Captain."
"She give you a name?"
"I don't remember. She didn't really need to say much… I don't know if you've met her but she wears the answers to most of a person's questions on her face.
"Dispense with the verification checks, Drake. You know its her."
"You didn't see how I left her."
"She's a survivor."
"That much is true, watched that girl walk away from worse."
Olu straightened, "you know her? Is she dangerous?"
Drake nodded. "She's just about the most dangerous woman I've ever met."
"And the Captain here knows old Ironsides herself." Ollie said, patting Drake on the shoulder.
Olu went pale. "You mean?"
"I do." Drake grinned, "that woman you fraternised with"
"Boned." Offered Ollie, with a shrug.
Olu swallowed nervously. "What did she do? Am I in trouble?"
"When did you last see her?" Ollie asked, knowing that the question was coming.
"This morning, when we woke up."
"You shared a tent." Drake asked, folding His arms.
Olu nodded.
Ollie smiled, he would enjoy telling Agent Belloc that later.
"She went for a walk."
"Did she take her things?"
"She didn't have anything, except her clothes, a music player and an axe."
"An axe?" Ollie asked, smirking.
"Well, it was more of a hatchett really. She said she was going to give it back to its owner."
"Aw shit, you hear that Drake, she's going to return your gift."
Drake stood up straighter and grunted, a sign of his advancing age.
"Wait, you did that to her?" Olu was skittish, his eyes moved quickly and he gripped his trousers tightly as her squirmed under Drake's gaze.
"Aye, I did. Unless you want me to make you look like a sieve, you'll keep this to yourself. All of it." He stepped forward and offered the man a hand, "what's your profession, lad?"
"Teacher, sir."
"Go back to teaching, forget all of this." Drake pushed him towards the door.
Olu stepped out of the Winter and into the breeze. He looked both ways before crossing the camp, acting as nonchalantly as a man could. Ollie watched as Drake sent a message to Belloc, then he looked at Vallette who sat watching the pair of them idly. She was running her thumb over the base of her hand near the wrist where a red patch of heat seemed to begin to form.
"Will you let him go?" she asked, "he seemed nice."
"I did, didn't I?"
Valette nodded.
"Whether the covenant does, that's another matter." he grinned with a sadism that made Ollie feel sick. "Hard to remember ONI when the bullets start flying."
"You're sick" Ollie said, flatly. Valette folded her arms in agreement.
The Agent just shrugged, "we're all sick, Van Graff. Don't think that you're any different."
[}{]
Maddie
August 27th, 2552
12:12
The Boneyard (Outskirts)
Aszod
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At some point, she had slipped. Scaling a near vertical hundred metre cliff was difficult at the best of times but with a crippling shoulder injury and missing an arm meant that Maddie was not in the best position to be attempting something like that. She had known it was a long shot, so she picked out a slim gouge in the cliff. She could see it begin to level out towards the base of the rockface. Once, it had likely been a waterfall, but now it sat barren upon the wall of stone. She'd fallen before she had reached it but only just. Her knee had snagged on a razor that jagged outwards like caltrops and Maddie had raked herself against as she slipped towards the smoother part of her descent. Smoother being key, her elbows and ankles and face were grazed as the friction rubbed her raw. She crumpled in a soft dusty ditch and took a moment to breathe.
It wasn't until the UNSC Winter took flight and blasted off in the direction of the Breaking Yards that Maddie dared to raise her head. She needed to assess her surroundings and take inventory but on the latter, there wasn't much point. Her canteen was gone, her hatchett was gone, her magnum was gone, even the music player that Mikaela left her. She thumbed about in her pocket, only producing half a pack of cigarettes, and her flick-lighter. Just a girl and her ever-present specter, together again at the end of a world.
As for working out where she was, Maddie could at least find solace in knowing where she was. Here, on the edge of the Boneyards, Maddie was close enough to work out what was going on. Prior to the declaration of Winter Contingency, Maddie had been given access to the defense and evacuation plans. Given that Beta-7's first, and now only, job was to recover assets from Reach to build ARC DREAM, Maddie had needed to know where to send those assets in the event of a covenant invasion. That meant that she knew a few things without even poking her head from her ditch.
Firstly, covenant air support would be light. The covenant were being kept at bay by a series of goundbased MAC cannons, each of which could carve a covenant cruiser in half given a good enough shot. Secondly, she knew exactly when she would run into civilians and the UNSC foward line. Again, she groaned in her ditch, pulling a cigarette from her pouch and lighting it. She'd seen trenches on Skopje and Ballast, that kind of warfare made her skin crawl. Worse still, she would need to make her way towards the line from the front. She breathed in and sat up, glancing over the giant space ahead of her. It would be a day's walk without being attacked to get to the centre of the facility, where Katya and the others would be waiting. With the covenant attacking, that could stretch into a five day slog. Maddie looked out at the scene ahead of her. Much of the area was awash with relics of Earth's colonial past. The war had torched all but the luckiest ships in the UNSC, and those that had survived 25 years of all-out warfare had done so because they were never designed to fight in the first place. Those that had become unusable had been laid to rest here. Some had been here twice, their hulls picked from the ground and pushed into space back in the 20s before returning late into the 40s when the UNSC couldn't justify their upkeep.
Each wreck was pocked and speared by rock formations. The Aszod basin had once been the site of volcanic activity, where lava flows carved flat rivers into the top of the continental shelf. Now, only the corpse of the UNSC Navy spewed forth across the dusty plains; careening through the central arterial point was the spine of a relatively new Frigate. It was mangled beyond the point of recognition for the most part. Only the upper boom of the MAC cannons remained mostly unscathed, wedged neatly in the middle of a small canyon. She climbed from the ditch and stood tall as the wind picked up, blowing across the duty plains of Aszod. The was warmth in the air, the smell of plasma and copper was familiar to Maddie now. With those smells as her companion, she descended the steps of stone towards the base of the Boneyard, spotting the telltale signs of combat and war in the distance as they slowly and surely fell behind the rising walls of Titanium alloy carcasses and rocky spears.
Her arm still ached but the stitch job was holding for now, she probably shouldn't have exercised it so aggressively during the night but she couldn't help that. What had happened with Olu was a beautiful, necessary thing. She'd been up for a few hours now and still felt the warm glow numbing her muscles. Truly, nothing was a greater painkiller. Maddie tried to smile at the memory and stretch but she yelped as pain shot through her arm. There was nothing else to do but to begin her long march into the Boneyard and the cavalcade of corpses that held court there.
She passed by fallen Kings of the sky, noting the names as she went. Starsight, CMS Dragoon, and the UNSC Serenity. The Serenity had only its rusted inner hull left to show of its superstructure and it wasn't clear whether the chunk of torn metal with Serenity written on it was actually part of the rusted hull piece it had been discarded next to. Maddie didn't wait to investigate, though she desperately wanted to; instead she walked along its length, touching it as she stepped, one foot in front of the other.
She'd known that Drake would show up at some point. She knew that he would come for her. The moment she saw him in the feeds, there was no chance he wouldn't come for her. Now he was hunting her. She was a rebel and a traitor, a girl in the middle of the war. No government represented her, neither side would show them mercy. ARC DREAM had become do or die and it had already been too late by the time that decision had been made.
If only. She thought: if only I had seen the truth quicker.
And yet, she had seen the truth. It had been staring her in the face for years. From Drake on Skopje to Serin and Parangosky at Luna, from Meridian to Ballast, and finally to Reach, her path had not been her own but it had perhaps been her choice to follow it. Back then, she had wanted the adventure, she had been bored of her life on Skopje. How could she have known things would turn into this?
She continued onwards, skirting an old covenant camp, now blasted into debris, along its outer edge. She headed for the canyon she had seen, noting the boom arm in the distance as it grew and swelled at her approach. Maddie had been unfair to herself for a long time. When a child says their life is boring, it doesn't mean that they should have to watch their father slip into a depression that ends his life, or see their sister experimented on and killed. She shouldn't have had to kill her friend on Ballast, or go on the run from her own government. How much would have been different if she had walked away when she had the chance?
She wished Maggie was still alive, she'd always wanted to help her. She'd asked Maddie to stop smoking, and she'd not really managed it. Resigned to that failure, she lit a cigarette and breathed it down, eagerly. She'd promised on Skopje that she wouldn't smoke another but the rush numbed her to that betrayal. Drake had told her to do what she had needed to do to get through that experience; it was perhaps the best advice he had given her. On that advice she justified everything. She was beginning to see it for what it was, though: it was the mantra of the addict. Drake had been an alcoholic, Maddie had smoked, and both had replaced it with adrenaline and a lifestyle that was unsustainable for anyone. Maddie felt lower and more vulnerable than ever before, a feeling she thought that ONI was supposed to protect her from. It was just another realisation that she came to, just another lie.
She'd wished for a respite but she soon came upon the old unsc front lines. Some of the bodies were still freshly dead as the Covenant had washed through here only days ago. The fighting here had been brutal, as the covenant were forced to flow between the old wrecks into UNSC killzones only for none of it to matter because of their numbers. They were a horde, truly; Maddie had seen this all before and put her cigarette out on a brute corpse before turning back towards something that did interest her: a mongoose.
She'd arrived at the base of the old wreck's MAC arms not twenty minutes later. The battlefield was empty, as the noose around the UNSC tightened, few and fewer covenant arms were needed to stamp out UNSC resistance. Maddie wondered what she'd done to end up here but scolded herself because the answer was obvious.
She trusted the wrong person.
Sighing, she pulled up and hopped off the quad to heal her wounded shoulder. Driving one handed was tiring but when the suspension was cracked and the jolting was tearing at your sutures, the feeling was unbearable. A ration bar was all she could find, tucked into the pocket of an army trooper with a melted thigh and a pained look on his face. She took a seat on a box of discarded ammunition and sighed, listening to the wind howl and the faraway sounds of battle.
"Maddie?" a familiar voice asked, as she sat, taking a moment to eat under the old frigate.
Maddie turned, in surprise. It was all she could do, she didn't have a weapon.
"Preston?" she exclaimed, dropping her food into the dirt.
"Thought I would find you here, told the others over and over that you're too sentimental not to wind up here."
"Here?" Maddie blinked.
Preston simply pointed upwards and Maddie tracked his fingers with her eyes.
Printed on the old MAC cannon was the word Cavalier.