Chapter Text
“Perditus” - Adjective
- degenerate, morally depraved, wild, abandoned
- desperate/hopeless
- reckless
It took us 3 days to be cleared for deployment to the front lines. 9 days to make landfall and link up with the ODST forces that were sent in around the same time as us. 25 days to march to the nearest major settlement. 73 days to cover the evacuation. On day 103 we’re ordered to move on. On day 134 we lose contact with the rest of the UNSC. 136 days in, we watch fragments of the vessel we deployed from, falling from the sky. 168 days in, we lose Nox. Then Charlie, on day 179. Laurence died on day 196, and then I was all on my own, with one order left to fulfill. Fight.
It takes me exactly 207 days to complete my mission on the planet of Esther IV.
There isn’t a single sign of living Covenant soldiers left to be found. There hasn’t been for the past week. On each and every patrol, I search for footprints, check to see if any of the corpses or rubble has been disturbed, and lie in wait for hostiles of any kind. None appear, so I am left to assume the only likely cause; there truly is nothing left for the Covenant here. They had carried on.
Now it was my turn.
After Spartan A245 died, I was alone. I can’t even say that I have the enemy to keep me company, now that they’re gone too. My world is one of loneliness, days brightened only by the occasional update that my HUD picks up from an automated weather station some few miles in whichever direction. It creates a little happy sounding ping in my ears whenever it goes off. I don’t entirely know if that’s part of the factory settings, or if I’ve accidentally enabled it somehow. Either way, I don’t deign to mess with my settings lest I lose my only form of company.
At no point did I think I would ever end up missing having someone else’s voice in my ear, and yet here we were.
Back in training on Onyx, at Camp Currahee, barely a word ever slipped out of my mouth, and only when it was necessary. By necessary, I mean when my face was being mushed into the dirt by an instructor, and then when I had to describe what had happened to the medical staff afterwards. Each and every time the answer was the exact same. ‘Training accident’. Those were the words we were expected to say; given to us like a script. With that in mind, I suppose it could be claimed that I had never said a single word of my own past the first night that I had arrived there. When I had jumped out of a moving aircraft however many feet up in the air, and thrown my old life away in favor of the one that I currently lived in now.
All alone in a dirty valley, moving west by southwest, because that was the direction that I had seen Covenant fighters flying in, just over eleven days ago. I don’t really have any reason to believe that there will be anything waiting for me this way, but it’s better to have some kind of reason behind your actions instead of just aimlessly wandering.
Marching isn’t difficult when you’re a Spartan. In fact, I would have to have been jogging for a few hours straight before I even actually began to feel any form of strain. My augmented legs carry me far and fast at what I would consider to be little more than a basic walking pace, but what a common man would regard as exceptional speed. I leave landmarks and millions of years worth of natural rock formations behind me in lazy minutes, focused on not thinking, just for a little while.
Unfortunately, I suffered from a particularly irritating affliction, where not thinking about the present just caused me to stress over my past.
Unlike some of the others, I remember my training years well. Perfectly, actually. The doctors called my condition hyperthymesia. From the day I first tasted ice cream to the day I first tasted Sangheili blood, my memories were crystal clear. That included nearly every waning second of pain, soreness, and torment that I lived through to get this far. Every beating that I received from the trainers and my fellow cadets. Every time I was left shivering and crying in the freezing rain overnight during field exercises. When I went in for my augmentations and when I came out of them - an entirely new human being. Amusingly, still shorter than most of my peers.
I forgave and accepted all of it. Because it gave me the chance to be here, now. Killing the invaders who had taken everything from me. But the longer that I spent here, all on my own, the more I began to wonder if it had really been worth it.
This planet was hell. Esther was hell. The Covenant had made it that way. But we humans weren’t proving ourselves to be all that much better when it came down to it. Nobody could say that the twisted doctor who came up with the idea to send children to war was a righteous individual. Nobody could defend the generals and admirals who went along with it. The taxpayers who funded it. I understood why the UNSC was so scared of the Insurrection before the Covenant came along and started killing everyone. They were terrified because someone out there in the universe had finally started asking questions. Someone had stood up to them and won.
But my understanding of the situation, and my empathy towards those who suffered because of it, wasn’t something to be confused with any desire for personal revenge. I hadn’t been manipulated like the other children. Like Charlie, Nox, or Laurence. When the man from the Office of Naval Intelligence had come to recruit me, I had never been under any illusion that I would win back my life, or get to be on the right side of history. I had come here to kill the enemy. Even though it was a one way trip.
Back to the present, Rue. Spartan A113.
Tremors shake me out of my thoughts. The ground is shaking. Tectonic activity has gone way up since the glassing began, but it’s hardly enough to make me budge. The only acknowledgement I give to mother nature is a slight decrease in the pace at which I’m moving through the valley. I’m not an immovable object; but I’m very good at pretending to be one.
As for the orbital bombardment itself; I’ve only seen it in the distance so far. Faint glowing and the occasional bright flash, secondary and tertiary sunrises in the middle of the night. As powerful as the energy beams aboard Covenant warships are, planets are, as it turns out, especially large, and it takes a significant amount of time for a fleet the size of the one here to properly cleanse the entire surface. In fact, most of the time, they cheat. Once the ice caps and a few geographical points of interest are melted, the rest of the planet is effectively screwed.
It’s apocalyptic. But not as terrifying as what a true glassing indicates in terms of enemy fleet size.
I quietly remind myself to be thankful I didn’t end up in the navy, and then I start to pick up speed once again as I feel the tremors beneath me starting to subside. A few paranoid thoughts pass through my mind; has a planet ever exploded during glassing? But worrying about something like that was fruitless, and the idea was scrubbed from my brain just as quickly as it had grown there.
If the planet cracks, that’ll be the least of my worries!
As my stroll through the grass brings me up the side of a hill, I get a wonderful chance to look at Esther’s sun. A red dwarf star, which is quite a sight- but has me a little upset. They were supposed to be smaller and cooler than the usual sun, but I was still sweating my ass off inside my SPI equipment. The rising temperature was probably another byproduct of the glassing - I had never really read up on the specifics. Too depressing.
‘Hey, Rue, if you’re so hot, just take off your full body armor!’ Absolutely not. Overheating was a much less likely problem than getting shot in the face was. If there were still enemies out here on the surface, then my photoreactive camouflage, as flawed as it was (damn you SPI Mark I), was the only thing keeping me out of danger.
Energy shields would’ve been very welcome at a time like this.
Another view that my new vantage point has provided me with is what must have once been a refugee camp, nestled comfortably around the base of a suspiciously rounded off mountain. Even from this extreme distance, I can tell there’s likely not much to be awaiting me there in the way of life. Old fires barely continue to smolder and there isn’t any artificial light to be seen. My HUD tells me that it doesn’t detect any signs indicative of human population. I hadn’t needed an advanced tactical computer in my armor for that analysis.
This must have been where the Seraphs had been heading, when I saw them. True to what I had expected, this had certainly been one of the last evacuation centers on the surface, not that long ago. Until the Covenant had found it, of course.
Briefly, part of me wonders if I’m the only human left alive on Esther. But what did it matter? I sincerely doubted that anyone was keeping score.
Well.. 1-Rue. 0-Everyone else.
It takes me about ten seconds of fighting with my HUD’s complex internal systems, controlled in part by neural link and in part by an uncomfortable combination of eye movements, to set a waypoint on the distant encampment. Whether or not there are any survivors, there might be supplies - an even rarer commodity these days. More than that, there might have been some kind of communications tower. That would have been the real treasure. It wouldn’t have been too far fetched to call me suicidal, but I was okay with making death wait a little bit longer if I managed to locate a functional spacecraft, or a comms array with which I could ping one. But those were just the naive hopes of a child worming through the cracks in my damaged psyche.
I had nothing better to do!
Just as I began to stroll further ahead, an increasingly familiar ringtone sounded in my ears. Weather update! Weather update! My eyes turned to the left side of my field of vision, almost in excitement. Lord, I was immature. But considering it was my only form of entertainment as of late, I could forgive myself.
The text was just a little too big to fit in its allotted space on the HUD, so it had to scroll a little bit in order for me to read all of it [Weather Advisory: Clear skies. Meteor showers in the area. Not expected to cause damage to any settlements. Come out with your family and enjoy the show!]
If only the poor Dumb AI that managed that broadcast system could comprehend what was actually going on out here in the big wide world. Still, a meteor shower was more interesting than light rain, followed by light rain, with an occasional sandstorm thrown in. Maybe I’d get to make a wish? No. Those were shooting stars. Damn.
I spent three seconds enjoying the little tone that played at the end of the meteorological update, and then pressed onwards. I also tried to ignore the fact that I was starting to get the weather forecast jingle stuck in my head.