Concurrence Chapter 4-6

2703 words. Begins at the astericks. Astrix? Asterisk? I feel like I've never typed that word before.

Her eyes met his brown ones. “You jested before that I always thought the Covenant was in the wrong. I do not regret my service to the cause, but in that moment, when I saw that child, it was a very… stark reminder that the Covenant is not all it is made out to be back on the homeworld.”****

“So that’s it?” he asked. “Almost shooting a kid was what gave you a wakeup call?”

“Yes!” she growled, sounding very angry, but not at the Major. “Ever since my first deployment, I’ve known war is not so glorious as the Prophets would have us believe, yet it took me almost shooting an infant, to open my eyes that our purpose is without glory. It’s despicable,” she sulked. “that moment shall hang over my head until the day I die.”

“… What happened to the kid?” the Major asked.

“I do not know. My squad was tasked with eliminating all Humans, but we only managed to catch two of them. I never saw the mother or child after. Maybe it was all in vain, and they ran into more Covenant after we gave up.”

“It’s not impossible that they were exfilled,” the Major noted, Seela looking up at him. “This was before the carrier jumped, right? The Corps had plenty of squads in the city before the rupture, those civvies were probably running to one of the evac points the Marines set up.”

“You’re trying to cheer me up,” Seela muttered, shaking her head. “Save your breath, for every Human squad there were two Covenant ones, the odds were against them. If I had only done more to assure their escape…”

“Even if they didn’t make it,” the Major continued. “You can stop it from happening again. Tell me what the Covenant is doing here, what they’re after, their plans. That kind of intel could save hundreds of lives.”

“What would I know?” she replied, shrugging her armoured shoulders. She suspected he was manipulating her guilt to pry for information. She should lie, and pray that she had learned from her limited interactions with the Zealot. “I couldn’t even be trusted enough to lead a fellow kinsman. They only saw me as a potential mate, not an equal,” she spat, digging her claws into the face of the counter, leaving scratch marks on the granite. “No, the price of my redemption shall cost much more than a simple exchange of information, one I will be glad to pay.”

“For what it’s worth,” he began. “you did something no Elite has ever done before, it was very… noble. Course, you could just be making this all up,” he added with a shrug. “but I don’t see why you’d be lying now of all times.”

She felt a little better at his choice of words. Noble. The Zealot had seen her failure to kill as Heresy, but this Human acknowledged her actions as worthy, the right decision. Perhaps Heretics weren’t so corrupt as she’d thought.

“Thank you,” she said, feeling slightly better, despite telling the Human to save his breath a moment ago.

“Yeah… no problem,” the Major answered, Seela smirking at his body language. He appeared out of his element, uncertain, like he wasn’t used to giving or receiving praise. “You done with that?” he asked, pointing at the tub, which she had scooped clean of its contents.

“Is there no more?” she asked, her mood drooping when he shook his head.

“Fresh out. About time we got moving anyway, the mission won’t wait.”

-xXx-

She still kept a wary distance behind the Major as they walked through the city, but not so much as she had before, their conversation over their meal and his revealing to be a Human putting some of her reservations aside.

The only halts in their journey were to give those imposing blockades time to open, and to find more of those kiosk devices for the Major to plot their way forward, the Human apparently relying on memory when it came to following their route, mumbling the words left and right in specific sequences.

She kept alert for any sign of the Covenant, but splitting her attention between listening in on the BattleNet and scoping down the streets was hard enough without the endless rain dripping onto her face and soaking her mandibles. What she wouldn’t give for one of those enclosed helmets the Rangers sported right about now.

“Can you not simply download a copy of that map?” Seela asked after they stopped at yet another kiosk. Her bodysuit was soaking, the material rubbing her hide raw thanks to all this walking and waiting.

“Do you see a port on this thing?” he replied as he tapped at the screen. “Usually I’d let Holiday do all the tech work. Unless you happen to see her, this is what we’ve got to work with.”

“At least write the directions down,” she mumbled. “I do not like staying out in the open for so long.”

“Because of the rain?”

“Because Kig-Yar snipers could make quick work of us… And that, too,” she added, her demeanour flipping as he called her out.

“Not a fan?” he asked, turning his visor up at her once they got moving again. “Gets your hair wet, does it?” he joked.

“If you have not noticed, I do not have an enclosed helmet or mouth like you do, Human. I feel like I’ve drunk a barrel’s worth of water ever since leaving that apartment.”

“The one con of being a split-lip,” he chuckled. He said the word like it was a slur, and she took offence, despite not being wholly aware of what it meant. “Doesn’t it rain on Sangheilios?” he asked, pausing to vault over a car.

“Yes, but never for nearly as long as this storm has,” she answered, following after him. “On my homeworld rain comes in short, violent bursts, but our dwellings are built in the shelter of the canyons, which keep us safe from the more harrowing storms. The longest storm I’ve ever seen lasted maybe twenty of your minutes, and that is on the lengthy side for my people.”

“Must be jarring,” he said. “Here on Earth it rains pretty much all the time, sometimes for whole days depending on what season it is. Damn.”

“What?” she asked, her grip on her carbine tightening.

“Nothing, just… realised we’re literally talking about the weather, of all things,” he chuckled.

“Not exactly a topic I ever thought I would discuss with an Imp,” she admitted. “What of your home?” she added after they turned down the next intersection. “You said you weren’t born in this city.”

He glanced up at her silently, perhaps contemplating on whether he should answer her question or not. “Yeah, born on one of the other continents. It’s a little bit like your planet, mostly canyons and dry as hell, sometimes it goes for months without raining there, then other times it storms for two or three days in a row. Fucky weather, but its got its charm. Been deployed on the front for so long I almost forgot what this planet looked like.

“And you left to join your military, why exactly?”

“I didn’t, I was conscripted,” he answered, both his answers confusing her. “Means I was forced to join the Corps. We lost so many worlds to the Covenant that we started to have more guns than troops, and each town and city had to provide a certain quota of men and women for the war effort. Earth hadn’t needed to conscript in over five hundred years, but we had no choice, you aliens were right on our doorstep.”

“And what is the process of becoming an Imp?” she asked.

“You do well during basic training, someone’s bound to notice,” he said. “What about you?” he asked, turning the topic back on her before she could pry further.

“Me?”

“Why’d you join up with the Covenant? Surely there’s other ways of earning glory besides genocide.”

“The homeworld had nothing to offer me,” she said, ignoring his comment. “In my youth, my eldest brother would often come home and tell us stories of the glories of war, and I was enraptured by his tales of the strange, colourful worlds he spoke of. Exploring and fighting went hand in hand with the Covenant, even though many sought to discourage me from joining, not just because I was female, although that was the most common argument I heard, even to this day it is a point of ridicule.”

“It bothered your kind that much?” he asked. “We Humans have women in the army. Have to, considering millions of us have been wiped out in this war.”

“Even on the front lines?”

“Yeah, not as many as there are men, but they’re there. My squadmate Holiday, she’s a woman. Half of her is machine, but still.”

“In the Covenant, it is the collective opinion of all that the war is no place for females,” she explained. “Sometimes, it was harder for me to decide who thought of me as the enemy, the Heretics, or the other warriors.”

“Sounds rough. Why’d you stick around?” he asked.

“To prove that even the daughter of Rekan’Kahomai can carry the family name just as well as his sons could. The alternative was to be married off to raise young, but that would mean abandoning my family honorific, and that does not interest me.”

“You deploy with your brothers? Speak with them a lot?”

“No, they are all dead.”

“Oh.”

He didn’t add anything, and she respected that. Too many family friends had tried to console her, but their constant apologies had been tiring.

“Death is the penultimate display of one’s deeds,” she continued. “One can slay a hundred worthy foes and earn herself much renown, but if she were to be killed by one hundred foes, that shows she has earned a rightful legacy as a great warrior.”

“That what you were doing back in Kikowani? Where I met you?”

“In a manner of speaking,” she admitted, not wishing to tell him much more than she already had.

“Don’t go dying on a hill just yet, Seela,” he said, his armour shining as he passed underneath the glow of an advertisement board.

“Taking an interest in my safety, are you?” she smirked. “I thought I was a Covvie?”

“Yeah, but you’re my in to the BattleNet, won’t get far if I run into a patrol without my eight-foot rat, will I?”

“That’s appropriate coming from you, a Major who scurries in the shadows,” she shot back. She took his silence as a small victory, but her smirk was short-lived as she glanced up at the cloudy sky, her eyes narrowing as something caught her attention.

“Do you hear that?” she asked, angling her head back the way they’d come. “Phantom.”

“Get inside,” he insisted, Seela ducking after him as he dashed into the closest building. Just as they had in the commercial district, they waited in the cover of darkness, guns aimed out of the doorway as a Covenant dropship banked over the buildings, gently coming to a stop in full view, its searchlights painting the buildings in white dots of light.

“They search for us again,” Seela muttered, the Major leaning out to get a better view. She shot out her hand and pushed him back, taking cover herself as a circle of light splashed against their hiding place. “Do not peak, fool! They know we are in the area.”

“They’re probably just looking for survivors,” he said.

“No, this is the same dropship as the one before. There are markings just above the nose of the ship.”

When she saw the aura of the light displace, she allowed him to look. There was a marking painted in blue colouring just above the pilot’s canopy, to the Human it would have looked much like the letter V, with dots surrounding the point. The symbol would have meant nothing to him, but Seela knew the rune belonged to the Jiralhanae alphabet.

“It’s like a decal,” the Major said after examining the rune. “Our pilots do that too, they personalise their birds with pictures of animals or sayings, but usually its skimpy ladies.”

“Skimpy ladies?” Seela asked, bewildered. “Why would you have that on an aircraft?”

“What, Elites don’t have vinyl alien girls on their wings?”

“A-Absolutely not!” she said. “That is hardly appropriate to put on a machine of war.”

“Don’t be so prude,” he said. “the female body is a work of art in of itself.”

Before she could reply, the Phantom searchlights illuminated their street again, the proximity of the light making them go silent with tension. They waited for the ship to move on, but after five minutes, all it did was bank over to the next street, it was lingering.

“I don’t like this,” the Major mumbled. “He’s not moving off.”

“Perhaps we should destroy it,” she suggested. “That way, it cannot pursue us.”

“Oh yeah?” he asked, Seela knowing he was scowling at her behind his visor. “Go do that then. You want to lead, or should I?”

“What is your idea then? Let me guess… slip past?”

“We can’t stay here,” he said, checking his long weapon to make sure it was primed.

“Splendid observation, Major,” Seela said, rolling her eyes.

“Just shut it and follow me, try and keep your lanky ass down.”

“What did you call me?” she hissed, but the Major was already moving, running in a crouch as he followed the sidewalk towards the right, putting a building between him and the Phantom.

Seela weaved between the vehicles at his flank, her excitement growing each time their sightline with the Phantom was unobstructed. For countless times she had aerial support as backup, and to be on the receiving end of the attention of its guns would be an exhilarating experience, a new challenge for her to overcome.

After a few minutes creeping along, the Phantom descended to the street ahead of them, she and the Major taking cover behind a wall. The bay doors slid open to reveal the brightly lit interior, the space cramped with troops, Kig-Yar and Unggoy leaping from the ship and landing on the pavement with a series of thunks, Jiralhanae following up as the smaller species cleared the area. There were maybe twelve aliens in all, splitting up into groups of three and four as they fanned out in different directions.

As the Phantom doors began to recede, Seela noticed not all of its occupants had disembarked. The glint of golden armour caught her eye, a Jiralhanae clad in the colourful armour standing just outside the cockpit bay, a gauntleted hand clutching at the handholds on the ceiling. She flexed her mandibles in a supressed snarl, it was him, the Captain Major!

“It’s just Major,” her companion whispered, and Seela blinked down at him, realising she’d said that thought out loud.

“No you fool,” she whispered back. “You see the Brute in gold? He was the one who coordinated the betrayal from the ground! Now we mustdestroy the Phantom!”

“Here we go,” the Major sighed. “Killing one golden asshole isn’t going to bring your dead buddies back.”

“No, but he must face justice for his actions.”

“Alright, let me just call in heavy weapon support,” the Major said, lifting his finger to the chin of his helmet. “Oh wait, I forgot, we’re just two soldiers against a dozen, completely stranded behind enemy lines. Unless you got a fuel rod stashed away somewhere, we’re not going up against air support.”

She remembered when they had encountered the Wraith, how his initial caution had ultimately been the correct approach. She doubted she’d be even able to kill a single squad before that Phantom strafed them with plasma fire, and she wouldn’t let that damnable Brute have the satisfaction of watching her die.

“Then lead on, Major,” she said. “You are the sneaky one.”

She followed him as he dashed from sidewalk to sidewalk – keeping the potholes in mind this time around of course – sticking to the shadows wherever they could as the Phantom rose above the city after depositing its troops, beginning a lazy circle over the area. Its bay doors were still open to allow the Unggoy-manned plasma turrets to add even more aerial cover, one on each side. Seela lived for combat, but she’d be a fool to let herself be killed so swiftly by four plasma cannons.