Concurrence Chapter 8-7

3203 words. This marks the end of the final chapter before we move on to the epilogue and the true ending. 

“Your brothers sought the same thing,” the Brute replied. “I sucked the marrow from every one of their bones, you will be no different.”

He levelled his fuel rod gun, Seela charging towards him at the same time. The Captain Major fired off a single bolt, but it went wide, Seela circling the ball of plasma and lunging for the Brute, her sword aimed for his chest.

The Brute clocked her over the head with the fuel rod, Seela stumbling back, planting her hooves in the dirt to steady herself. Her shields had weathered the blow, framing her body in white light as she dropped into a crouch, swiping her sword from right to left. Her opponent stepped out of the arc, quickly realising she was keeping close enough to render his fuel rod ineffective. He dropped the massive weapon, reaching over his shoulder and gripping the haft of his gravity hammer, brandishing it at her in a challenge.

They began to circle one another, the number of portable barriers nearby creating a small ring for the two to square off amidst the firefight, the sightlines too broken up for the Major to help her.

The Brute swapped his hammer from a one-handed grip to two, keeping Seela guessing as he darted in for a swing, the generator on the head making the air around it quiver as the gravity pulsers idled.

She parried the strike with her sword, the weapons interlocking, a bright flash of sparks accompanying the collision. Seela pulled away, the Brute swiping at her legs as she backed up, kicking up a curtain of soil as the hammer grazed the ground, the sheer mass behind the hammer nothing short of titanic.

Seela squared off with him, her opponent constantly angling the hammer in different directions, striking out again, this time with the haft. She knocked the attack aside, but the Brute followed up with another swing, bringing the hammer in for an overhead strike, like a lumberjack about to sever a log of wood.

She stepped to the side, the ground shaking as the hammer dug a pit into the dirt, the Brute heaving it out of the crater, but not before Seela darted in, swiping at his ribs. Her sword clashed against his shields, bouncing off them as though they were magnetically opposed, the Brute snarling in his native language. It was a battle of attrition, to see who could get through the other’s shields first to draw blood.

Pressing the attack, Seela threw herself into the Brute, hammer meeting sword as the two aliens parried one another. Seela was more agile, but the Brute had the strength and mass that even a glancing strike from his hammer could be fatal, the design of their weapons reflective of the user’s fighting style.

The Brute held his hammer horizontally, pushing the long bar into Seela’s chest, knocking her off balance. Taking advantage of the breathing room, he raised the hammer like it was a baseball bat, giving it a monumental swing.

Seela blocked it, another shower of sparks raining onto her hooves as the weapons clashed, stopping the hammer inches from her face. The Brute exposed his tusks in a grin as he activated the gravity generator, a sonic blast sending Seela reeling. She tumbled to the ground, her knees slipping in the dirt as she was sent a good five meters back. A blast that close would have crushed a human’s skull, but Seela wasn’t out of it yet, clutching her head with a trembling hand.

“How pitiful, that the last of the Sangheili is female, and a Heretic,” the Captain Major chuckled, stalking towards Seela as she struggled to her knees. “Your ancestors must be so disappointed. Perhaps you can gleam back some dignity, and accept your fate.”

He beckoned to Seela, heaving his hammer over his shoulder as he laughed, Seela shooting him a disdainful look. Her mandibles flexed in a silent rage, but she held herself back as she wiped at the blood leaking from her temple. The Seela in the past might have taken the bait, but she wasn’t about to throw herself into death for the sake of honour, the Major could tell by the look on her face that she was done with that flawed outlook.

She glanced to the corpse of a nearby Brute, Seela sliding over the dirt and reaching for it, plucking a plasma grenade from its belt. Still crouching, she tossed it, sticking the Captain Major on the thigh, the Brute snarling in surprise by the swift throw.

Blue flames engulfed her opponent, but rather than end him right there, his shields protected him from the blast, the shimmering barrier collapsing as the sudden influx of collecting energy melted away his defences.

Her powerful legs flexing like springs, Seela launched towards the Brute, bringing the two points of her sword down on the disoriented alien. The Captain Major blocked with his hammer, planting the haft into her stomach with enough force to impale her, had her shields not been there to deflect the blow.

They were trading jabs, the Major unsure of who was getting the upper hand as they danced round each other, Seela putting her agility on display as she swapped from dodging to blocking, some of the swipes of the hammer coming dangerously close to severing her head from her shoulders.

He held his breath as Seela’s shields also failed, the barrier breaking with a snap of parting energy. Rather than fall back, she pressed in close, throwing all her weight into a cleave. Her opponent raised the hammer like a giant quarterstaff, angling the haft so that his arms were higher than hers were. Seela dragged her sword down the hammer’s length, a piece of decorative cloth tied to the shaft burning to cinders, the sword moving down until it connected with one of the Brutes hands. With his shield broken, the alien roared in pain as most of his hand fell to the ground, the flesh trailing wisps of smoke as the severed digits cooked.

The stubborn alien refused to give up, holding the hammer with its intact hand and sweeping it from side to side. Seela didn’t block, dodging out of the way instead, letting the Brute’s own momentum create an opening for her.

She swiped across his chest, leaving glowing hot lines in the Captain Major’s chest piece, a sliver of burning fur visible between the grooves as the Brute stumbled, the stump of his ruined hand clutching at his wound. Seela planted a hoof in his sternum, the Brute falling back into one of the portable barriers behind him, his hands slipping against the curved light as his rump met the dirt.

Laying there, he tried to swing his hammer at the approaching Elite, but she knocked it aside, twisting the sword round so that she was pointing it like it was a giant hand saw, driving it into the Brute’s stomach. The armour melted into liquid as the heated blades slipped through the armour, the Brute lurching as she embedded the sword in his torso.

“Tell your ancestors a female Heretic sent you to them,” Seela growled, leaning close so that her and the Brute’s snout practically touched. “See how disappointed they are.”

She flexed her wrist, the sword twisting inside the Brute’s gullet, the Captain Major twitching one last time before going still. She slid the blade out, the Brute’s blood boiling on the hardened light and leaving it pristine.

“My kin are avenged,” she declared, meeting the Major’s eyes over the battlefield. He sighed in relief, lowering her carbine as the last of the Covenant were mopped up. They’d thinned out the rest of the aliens while she’d had her duel, the silence that followed grating, after so much continuous gunfire. There had to be at least fifty aliens littering the beach, with at least four entire packs worth of dead Brutes laced through the corpses.

“I can see the boat!” one of the Marines shouted, the Major turning his eyes to the ocean. Maybe a hundred meters out was another patrol boat, rising and falling as it barrelled through the waves, identical to the one still burning away on the shore.

“Uh, guys?” Joker called out, pointing at the sky. “Did everyone forget about the Phantom or something?”

The Captain Major’s personal Phantom rose over the canyons, its pilots not averse to what they were doing. In some last-ditch effort, it banked towards the beach, its weapons turning not on the exposed humans below, but the newly arriving boat.

“Open up!” Rebar shouted, slotting a fresh clip into his sniper and firing from the hip. Joker and Holiday joined him, as did the Marines, battle rifles and magnums barking as they threw everything they had at the dropship. The rounds bounced off its armoured hull, making little pinging sounds as they ricocheted. They all knew the craft was too heavily armoured to be in danger of small-arms fire, but the humans tried anyway, they didn’t have the manpower to hold out against much more if this boat was destroyed too.

The Vulkan on the newly arrived boat opened up on the dropship, but they didn’t have enough time to chew through the pilot canopy before the Phantom would be on them. The Major felt a pit form in his stomach, his head darting around in search of something, anything they could use to stop the ship.

“Leave this to me!” Seela shouted, the humans looking over to see she was clutching the Captain Major’s fuel rod gun in her hands. She hoisted it over her shoulder, peered through the lenses that served as its targeting package, and pulled the trigger.

A brilliant bolt of green energy arched through the air like a blazing meteor, Seela leading her shot to compensate for the travel time. The Major felt the backwash of the Phantom’s engines as it flew over the beach, praying the bolt wouldn’t miss.

It did not. The bolt slipped through the ventral doors, the mounted guns on the sides having long been sniped clean by Rebar, impacting the ceiling on the inside. Some critical system erupted, a chunk of the purple alloy above the pilot’s canopy blowing apart from within, the front engines losing power.

The craft tipped until its nose was facing the water, momentum still carrying it horizontally as it began to arc towards the ocean. The boat swerved out of the way, a giant wave engulfing the Marine standing on the prow as the dropship collided with the water. As the spray settled, they saw the tail-end of the craft jutting out of the water, almost like a capsizing ship, the purple dropship slowly disappearing beneath the bobbing water after a few moments.

The Marines hollered and whooped, directing their praises towards Seela. Her brow jumped in surprise, but she quickly masked her astonishment with a satisfied grin, nodding stoically as she tossed the fuel rod to the ground.

“Everyone alright? Sound off,” the Major ordered. There was a chorus of replies saying they were okay, all the specialists reporting they were fine. The same could not be same for the Marines, three of them reporting wounds, two of them lying in the shallows, dead.

As the Marines began to haul the injured and the dead towards the approaching boat, the Major stooped to retrieve his shotgun, wading into the surf as their rescue pulled up to the shallows, water sloughing off its grey hull. One of the men aboard lowered a ladder, and the specialists helped the injured up first.

“Let’s go, let’s go!” the Marines who’d dropped the ladder said, the Major vaulting over the railing, his soaked boots leaving puddles on the metal deck. Last to come up was Seela, the alien so tall the waterline barely reached her knees, while everyone else was soaked from the torso down. The Major offered her a hand, Seela chuckling as he struggled to lift her weighty frame onto the boat, Joker lending a helping hand when the Major couldn’t lift her up on his own.

“Hell of a shot you made on that Phantom,” Joker said, giving Seela a playful shove on the arm. “just wait until the Corps hears about your kill count.”

“Indeed,” Seela replied. “Tell all of what you saw this day, so that my deeds may be… ubiquitous among humanity. I said it!” she added, a hand on her chest as she blinked her eyes. “Major! I said the word!”

He chuckled at her, Joker and the rest of the team giving them odd looks as they shared their little in joke.

“That’s everyone,” the Major said, thumping his fist on the driver cabin. The boat lurched into motion, peeling away from the shore in reverse, listing into a spin until the nose pointed out to sea. The engines rumbled to life, the patrol boat picking up speed as the shore slowly began to receed into the distance.

The Marines collapsed onto the deck, exhausted, the Major all too eager to find his head a pillow. He told the Marines he’d let their superiors know of their hard work, before moving towards the back of the boat, passing the driver’s cabin where Joker was poking his head out of the window.

“Coming in, Sir?”

“Just a sec,” the Major replied, the boat jumping beneath him as the vessel speared through the rough waters. He put a hand on the railing as he reached the stern, looking out at the shrinking New Mombasa. The skyscrapers were framed by the glassing cruisers, the beams of light too bright to look at even at this distance.

“The day is ours,” Seela said, moving to stand by his side, the two looking out over the water. The only other thing filling the sky aside from the Covenant fleet was the tether, or the bottom half of it at least. He could just see the fallen rings dotting the landscape towards the right, sticking out of the ground like massive armbands.

“Doesn’t really feel like a victory,” he replied.

“Do not go all gloomy on me just yet,” she replied sternly, looking down at him. “Your mission was a success, and we escaped. Even took out the commander of the Brute forces, that’s a tremendous victory from my point of view.”

“You’re right,” he said, taking her hand in his and giving it a squeeze. “Forgot one thing, though,” he added, Seela blinking at him. “I found an asset, someone I think is a little more important than the data.”

“Oh yes?” she cooed. “And what do you plan to do with this, ‘asset’?”

“I’ll keep her around, make sure everyone treats her right,” he said, glancing back at the Marines. “Not that I think that’d be a problem, everyone’s seen how much Covenant she killed on that beach, word’ll spread fast.”

“And what of your organisation?” she asked. “This ‘ONI’? Your superiors will want to extract information from me.”

“Technically you’re in my custody,” he replied. “Means I’m responsible for you, and I’ll have to stay by your side for the foreseeable future.”

“See? Told you it was a victory.”

He laughed at that, the two going silent as the city shrank in size until the Major could cover it with a hand. They stayed like that for a while longer, the boat accelerating deeper into the sea, bouncing off the waves like a skipping stone until New Mombasa was just a bump on the horizon.

The Major

ONI Orbital Facility

30 Days After Rupture

The Major was drawn out of his conversation with Holiday as the door swung open, a figure dressed in specialist gear walking into the bay. She had long, blonde hair tied up in a pony tail, the insignia on her armband identifying her as a Captain.

“Major?” she asked, and he waved her over to a part of the room where they couldn’t be overheard. “So, you’re the bunch who were sent to succeed where my team failed. Thought Lord Hood had a little more faith in me.”

“The Admiralty couldn’t afford to wait,” he replied.

“Can’t afford to waste time and resources and dual-ops either,” she said, her irritation not going unnoticed. “That data you recovered? Well, we managed to secure a much more…. advanced version of it.”

“The AI core,” the Major said. “Heard they had a Huragok floating around here somewhere. Still not entirely sure how that thing managed to, what, absorb the AI into itself?”

“Something like that,” she answered, turning towards the milling team members nearby. “Still, can’t say your mission was a complete misuse of ONI resources. Reports say you secured another asset, where is it?”

“She’s over there,” he said, leading her to the far side of the bay. Seela was sitting on top of a supply crate, Joker standing nearby, her energy sword in his hands, swinging it like it was an oversized cricket bat that weighed too much. Seela had been – after a bit of convincing – relieved of her carbine, but she’d insisted that she keep her prized weapon, the Major’s clearance allowing her to keep a hold on her trophy.

“We’ve never been able to capture an Elite before,” the Captain mused. “If it was there on the ground when the invasion began, it’ll know everything about the Covenant’s ground logistics.”

“Wasn’t captured,” he corrected. “She came here of her own free will.”

“And we all appreciate that,” she continued. “As long as it continues to be cooperative when we start the interrogations. The Huragok knows a lot, but seeing how the Covenant operates from the front lines could give us a valuable insight on their tactics.”

“I know Lord Hood thinks you’re the expert on aliens all of a sudden,” the Major said. “But you don’t see me butt in on your ops. She’s our asset, Captain Dare.”

In the Navy chain of command, he outranked Dare, and he knew it was the only way to keep her from intruding on his section. She had somewhat of a reputation among ONI for stepping on other people’s toes.

“Yes, Major,” she replied. “I understand.”

“You’re free to stick around if you want,” he continued. “And I agree, she’ll know how the Covenant works better then even our best spies. We’ll take any edge we can get right now.”

They approached Joker and Seela, the latter chuckling as the former accidently nicked his finger on the superheated blades. They stopped to greet the two officers.

“Good news, Seela,” the Major began. “Admiralty just cleared you for asylum following a few… creative interpretations of the rights commission. All we need to do is a bit of debriefing.”

“Then we take the fight to the Covenant?” she asked.

“It’s eager, if anything,” Dare muttered.

“Who is this?” Seela asked, narrowing her eyes at the Captain.

“This is Captain Dare, she’ll be taking part of the interrogation. Purely in a supervisory role, of course,” he added, giving Dare a pointed look.

“Of course,” Dare echoed.

“Well then, if you would leave us to it, Joker, we’ll get started. Question one…”