Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There wasn’t much that separated unattached Ghosts from one another.

Most of the personalities that the truly unique Ghosts had managed to accrue over their time came from their interaction with their Guardians, something that, as sparks of the Traveler’s Light only just dreamed into being separate entities from their nominal parent, they hadn’t had the chance to experience.

As such, the decision of any Ghost to journey to any one location in the solar system was, absent external interference, more or less up to random chance.

Even if something else was capable of interfering, which would necessitate either some form of paracausal awareness or time travel in order to know to intervene in the first place, the very nature of the Ghosts as sparks of Light, which defied causality in its own right, had a tendency to resist paradoxes, especially when they would have, absent such interference, connected to a Guardian that would have become skilled at wielding the Light. Their existence tended to place a thumb on the metaphorical scales, seemingly random events in actuality dragging the Ghost in question to a time and place where they could find their partner and raise their bones from the embrace of the earth.

One could, if they were of a more poetic or romantic bent, even call it destiny.

None of this, of course, was common knowledge amongst Guardians who hadn’t made a study of the exact relationships that the Light had with causality, let alone a Ghost who hadn’t had more than five minutes of interacting with other beings since coming into existence. As such, the Ghost in question took the fact that they ended up in the grandiose ruins of Russia’s Cosmodrome when they did to be a product of their wanderings, and not the Light within them gravitating towards their partner, the one that would shape them as much as be shaped in return.

Neither, it must be said, did the Ghost know about the shroud of secrecy that prevented the more advanced paracausal forces, such as the Heart of the Garden, from reaching across time and preventing them from finding their partner, but then again, the Celestial Forge had always had its own means of ensuring its existence despite the first death of its host.

No, when this particular Ghost came across the bones of the woman who had, before her untimely death, carried the greatest potential of all of humanity within her, just barely peeking out of the soil of the irradiated crater that she had been killed in during the Collapse, they thought that they were just lucky, chancing upon a Guardian that was so compatible with the Light, and not playing its part in reawakening humanity’s greatest mind at the behest of a force as far beyond the Traveler’s comprehension as the Traveler was an ant’s.

Perfectly unaware of the weight of the events that were about to unfold, and wary of the threat of the Fallen that roved the Cosmodrome, the Ghost whirred in closer to what had, once, been a human, and let some of the Light they carried within themselves bridge the gap between them and this particular potential Lightbearer.

The bones soaked in the Light like a sponge dropped in the ocean, and the Ghost cautiously forged the foundation for the link between themselves and, once that was done, opened the floodgates, letting the Light crystallize into the shape of a human again until-

The fabric of the world shuddered as the newest Guardian took their second first breath. Not enough for most beings to notice it, even amongst those most closely bound to the world or those most distantly situated and best suited to see motions of the whole.

Not everyone was unaware of this, mind- on a ridge, drawn in by the eddies of time itself, there stood a steel-shod soul who could sense as this Guardian awoke, and more distantly, vaster existences than her became aware that, for better or worse, the world had just changed itself forevermore, but not one of them could perceive it as it truly was- as a cosmic hammer rang out against a starry anvil once again.

“Eyes up, Guardian,” I heard, and… was that me? Guardian felt… right, somehow, but I could tell that there was more that I should be able to remember-

As if triggered by my efforts to attempt to remember, memories flashed through my head, too many for any normal human brain to carry within them- but I wasn’t an ordinary human, now, was I? I was the Master Builder, a Forerunner in human flesh, and my combat skin was more than up to the task of holding my memories of constructing, designing, destroying, and reconstructing the technology of my species.

But no, that wasn’t right- I knew these memories weren’t mine, as much as the thought processes matched up with what I thought I’d do- even ignoring how these memories and skills were almost entirely devoted to creating things, it felt almost like watching them through a pane of frosted glass, distant and not completely faithful to what was actually happening for all it conveyed the general outline of things.

Dimly, I felt the loss of that other me’s ancilla- she would have helped me manage this conundrum much better than what subroutines remained in the combat skin I’d been stuffed into, but I supposed there was nothing to it- I just had to handle things on my own, at least until I could find the time to put a new one together from scratch.

Underneath the memories of the Master Builder, though, there were… fragments of others. Here, there was an instant of pain, world-consuming for all its brevity, and there, the memory of a triumph at a drafting table, and I was aware, somehow, that these were mine. I knew there were supposed to be more memories, but apparently something had happened to me and I couldn’t remember just about anything.

“It worked. You're alive!” I looked up and there was something floating there, like eight tetrahedrons stuck together surrounding a central sphere with an eyelike screen on the front, that had apparently spoken to me.

It looked somewhat like a monitor, if the monitor had been built by a human military operation from before they were de-evolved to be as modular as possible.

“You don't know how long I've been looking for you. I'm a Ghost. Actually, now I'm your Ghost. And you... well, you've been dead a long time. So you're going to see a lot of things you won't understand.” It looked me up and down, taking in the combat skin and managing to somehow convey its bemused state through nothing more than the moving of its tetrahedrons. “And things that I won’t understand, apparently. That’s some impressive armor.”

“Thanks, I think,” I said hoarsely. “Sorry, I have no idea where it came from.” After a sluggish moment, my armor moistened my throat, far slower than it would have with an ancilla to run its systems, but well enough to work for now, in…

I took in my surroundings, spinning around to take in as much of the environment as I could and gaping the blasted wasteland full of rusted-out shells that had been cars years ago, overgrown with weeds and covered with rubble, and frowned, before nearly facepalming for forgetting the spectroscopic sensors that would have allowed me to take it all in at once. “Not to be rude, but, uh, where are we?”

“The ruins of the Cosmodrome, in Old Russia.” The Ghost cast around, almost warily. “We’re not exactly safe here, in Fallen territory. We need to find a ship so we can get to the City, and-”

There was a crack, like someone had smashed down a door, and my combat skin’s energy shielding flared to incandescent visibility as a projectile the size of my clenched fist spent its momentum on the defensive arrays. My helmet materialized in the space between two heartbeats, and the sluggish algorithms backtraced the projectile to a hulking, four-armed figure perched atop a ridge, flanked by smaller figures bearing circular panes of light on their arms. In the four-armed figure’s arms was a rifle that looked to be almost as long as one of the smaller figures was tall, which, from the calculations crawling around the edges of the HUD, were about of a height with a relatively standard-pattern post-devolution human.

I launched a hardlight mortar round from the armor, then winced at the abrupt flashing of the warning indicators that, after a moment, swam into focus enough to tell me that I needed to be careful using the built-in energy weapons while the shield’s capacitors were recharging.

“We really need to get out of line of sight,” said the Ghost, spinning about as if to see where I could find cover. “That kind of high-powered railgun slug will go right through a Guardian and then detonate to try and catch the Ghost in the backblast, and I’m not sure how much we can rely on your armor against something like that.”

I could feel that the Forerunner that the memories had come from would have rankled at anyone questioning their designs, but to be entirely honest, I wasn’t sure I wanted to rely solely on the shields either, especially with how precarious my power situation was at the moment.

“Yeah, okay, lead the way,” I said, watching with one eye as the mortar landed squarely on top of one of the circular panes of energy that had been raised to block it, detonating with a flash and killing the unfortunate creature it landed on and the handful closest to it but only managing to throw the rest around.

“Right, towards the Wall,” said the Ghost, and a white square inside a gray one flickered into being on my HUD. The screens inside my armor whirled around to show what it was denoting, and I was thankful to see the maintenance corridor was relatively close to me, right smack dab in the middle of a patchwork expanse of slowly yellowing probably-ceramic panels.

I waited a handful of seconds for my shield array to fully recharge, then fired off another mortar round before launching myself off the ground hard, flight systems kicking in half a second after I started feeling the stomach-swooping sensation of freefall. As blue-white etheric impellers propelled me away, the Ghost dematerialized in a shower of bluish-white sparks and, abruptly, my combat skin started responding more as it should, if it had a properly installed ancilla.

“Whoa,” said the Ghost, “this armor is… really something else!”

“Well, it’s no war sphinx, but it’ll do,” I said, tracking the mortar round as it plunged towards the rapidly retreating creatures. “Those are… Fallen, right?”

“Indeed they are,” the Ghost replied. “The House of Devils is, from what I will be hearing, one of the biggest threats that the City has to reckon with, and even if we’re lucky enough to be able to avoid them now, we’ll probably have to fight our way through at least some of them in order to find a way out of here.”

“That figures,” I said, flipping the thrusters around so I could avoid plowing through too much of the grating that was apparently the floor inside the Wall. Then, a specific wording choice that the Ghost made registered to me. “Wait, will be hearing?”

“Yeah, time doesn’t… it isn’t linear like a lot of non-Guardians think of it, especially once you get the Light involved. Things like, uh, hearing intel reports before you’re told them, or flashes of a potential death.” Now that the Ghost mentioned it, the world felt… different than it had, in a way that shouldn’t have really made sense with so many missing memories but did, despite what all logic would suggest. It was like I could almost peel reality back for a moment, and expose the void into which the universe erupted in fire and lightning.

“That sounds…” My audio receptors, with an ancilla of a sort running the sorting algorithms, picked up a skittering sound. “That sounds like a conundrum for later.”

A thought brought up the weapons systems built into this combat skin, and I cursed, low and guttural, in a language that I somehow knew was called Russian. “No beam weapons, limited projectile options, and barely enough matter tolerances for a blade, with most of the power generation geared for hardlight explosives… it’s like whoever put this tin can together didn’t even think about fighting in enclosed spaces!”

I had some tools on hand, secured within the suit and ready to release, but there was only so much I could do without somewhere to set down and overhaul the thing, and I was a little too far behind enemy lines to feel safe doing that.

I could feel… something, shifting, a sensation not unlike raising a hammer to strike down on an anvil, but it subsided quickly, leaving only gooseflesh and chills in its wake.

“Whoa,” said the Ghost. “Did you feel that?”

“I did,” I said, frowning. “That’s… it doesn’t feel like the Light does, I don’t think. The light is more an… underlayer to the world, and this is… internal. Do you have any useful hunches?” I tried to reach for that underlayer, to see if it would reveal anything to me, but it remained frustratingly out of reach.

The Ghost was silent for a long moment. “It doesn’t feel dangerous,” they said, finally. “Beyond that, I have no idea. Something about it muddies the future too much for me to really try and learn about it.”

“Well then,” I said, extruding a footlong blade along the back of my right hand, extending about six inches past my knuckles. “Hopefully that doesn’t come back to bite us in the ass.”

With that, we delved into the depths under the Wall.

Chapter Text

I was more than a little grateful for the sensor suite built into my combat skin as we crept through a particularly dank corner of a cavernous room. Sonic mapping and infrared analysis showed a rather large population of Fallen throughout the area, and as much faith as I was willing to put in my combat skin and its shields, even if only a handful of them had the kind of rifle that had almost punched my ticket out in the open, I didn’t think we’d be able to make it, raw firepower be damned.

“Ah, perfect,” said the Ghost, marking a splotch down the side corridor I was hoping to travel down. After a moment, that splotch sharpened and zoomed in to reveal a rifle, leaned up against a crate and covered in dust but still in somewhat decent shape. “A firearm.”

I was a little bit warier, but after a moment of more intense scanning, I took the weapon from where it had rested for who knew how long, leaving a clean spot against the crate in its wake.

“Hopefully this thing still works,” I said, dropping to one knee and starting to pull the unfamiliar weapon apart.

“Is this really the time for that?” the Ghost asked, sounding more than a little exasperated.

“I’d rather do it now so I know if the gun’s gonna crap out on me and prepare accordingly than for it to just happen without warning,” I said, my programmable screwdriver automatically reconfiguring itself to the screws that this weapon used in time for me to pull apart the internals. “Chamber looks tolerable, could use a good clean but not something that could cause problems, barrel is…” I took one look at the readouts and winced. “Damn, it’s like the thing wasn’t rifled at all with how much shit got crusted on.”

“Can you really do anything about that now?” asked the Ghost, as much out of curiosity as out of concern for time.

“Thankfully, yes,” I said, extruding the magnetic chisel from its slot in my armor’s thigh and taking it to the layers of mud, dust, and gods knew what had been all but slathered all over the inside of the rifle. “Not as much as if this were a really good Forerunner rifle, but if it were a Forerunner rifle I wouldn’t have to deal with this, just flush out energy channels and then we’re ready to roll.”

“I… see,” said the Ghost, sounding like it didn’t quite know what I was talking about but that it was going to keep figuratively nodding along anyways.

I gave the inside of the barrel one last scan, making sure I hadn’t missed anything, before returning the magnetic chisel to its place and reassembling the rifle. This took less time, what with having already pulled it apart and learning what went where, but I made sure to spool up an explosive charge and set it for proximity launch just in case something found me while I was still working on it.

Thankfully, my precaution came to nothing, and as I continued along the corridor, I now had a gun to sight down, which despite lacking the raw stopping power that most Forerunner options would provide still made me feel better, like a particularly boxy security blanket.

I managed to make it down two more corridors and most of a third without encountering any kind of opposition, finally coming across two smaller creatures with the energy shields I’d seen outside, although thankfully this time their barriers were out of position to stop my shots.

Before I raised my rifle from where it was pointed directly towards the ground, I took a moment to scrutinize the two of them. They had two arms ending in three-fingered hands, one bearing a gauntlet that was projecting the energy field, and below those, protruding from the back, were stumps that had presumably at one point been other limbs. From the one that wasn’t facing completely away from me, I could see two eyes set closely together, not quite covered by the brownish-gold helmet it wore, and underneath its eyes a set of chitinous mandibles clacked together almost agitatedly.

The other one froze, and I heard an intake of breath, before both wheeled around, presenting their shields as they scrabbled for pistols at their sides. They both let out an almost wheezy shriek as their guns swept up, both of them spitting bolts of crackling energy at me.

With that de facto declaration of war, I swept my own rifle up, firing off short bursts to pass through the small cutouts in their shields that they were firing through- but no, the rounds impacted the shields, because the sights on this thing hadn’t been calibrated in who knew how long and I hadn’t thought to set them.

“Ignore the sights, just get me a reticule off of how the bullets flew,” I said, impellers flashing on as I propelled myself down a side corridor to dodge the blasts they’d loosed at me.

“Done,” said the Ghost after a moment, and I spun ninety degrees vertically to peek back around the corner down at ground level, rifle first, and squeezed the trigger. Thankfully, the Ghost had managed to get the reticule damn near perfect, and the loss of their firearms had them both reeling back enough that I could take the half-second it cost to blow them both to bits with a launched grenade.

Again, that sensation of raising a hammer struck me, and I just about managed to remember to pull up a monitor of my brain activity as it passed.

It wasn’t exactly a smoking bullet, but there was enough noise in the cerebrum and cerebellum to be worth analyzing, and a brief moment’s focus from both myself and the Ghost revealed what looked to be proprioceptive input from a secondary input source, albeit not one that we could trace.

“That’s… peculiar,” the Ghost said, eventually.

“Yeah, but unsolvable questions later, we need to figure out some better solution than just lurk in the Wall until we fuck up and get got by something out there.” I knelt down by the remains of the Fallen, examining their weapons and equipment. As it turned out, both of the gauntlet-mounted shield generators had been overloaded by the explosive, but that meant they only needed a power cycle to get them up and running, so I maneuvered one of them off of the thoroughly perforated corpse that it was attached to, and I took the less battered pistol for later analysis. Otherwise, there was only a glimmer of light around them, which seemed to vanish as I passed through it.

“Ah, good,” said the Ghost. “We’ve got Glimmer, so we can afford to manufacture at least a little ammunition for that thing.”

“If you say so,” I said, standing back up with the shield gauntlet secured around my own arm.

The next corridor had a small handful of the shield-bearing Fallen, plus one taller, with four arms, although not quite as tall as the one that had taken the shot at me, and mercifully with a smaller gun.

I raised both my shield and my rifle, then, after a moment, lowered the gun and magnetized it to my leg as the first energy blasts splashed off of the shield. “You know what, I’m curious.”

Then, I ripped back the fabric of reality.

For a moment, there was just me, in an endless, crushing, freezing, hungry blackness that seemed to be trying to pull me apart.

Then, the Ghost materialized, looking more surprised than anything else. “Wow,” they said, digital eye blinking as they spun in place. “We should probably get back before we run into something bigger.”

“I…” It was like my thoughts were running through molasses. “What?”

“Okay, Guardian, I need you to focus,” said the Ghost, sounding a little worried. “You described the Light as an underlayer to reality, right? You need to reach out and touch that underlayer before something finds us.”

There was a stirring in the void around us, almost like the wake of something incredibly large swimming by, and it took a moment for my sluggish brain to register the disturbance. Then, thankfully, the adrenaline surge hit, and I managed to find that distant sensation of the Light woven just underneath the surface of reality. As I became conscious of it, I could feel my thoughts speeding back up, and after a moment, I reached out to touch the Ghost.

“One moment,” I said, feeling almost like I was clinging to the bottom of the Light in order to not fall off, and I felt the wake again, larger- no, not larger, but closer.

I attempted to flip us around the Light, and for a heart-stoppingly long moment it felt like nothing had happened. Then, there was a screech as something with entirely too many eyes, teeth, eyes made of teeth, and teeth made of eyes shied away from the Light, and in a blinding flash I was back in my combat skin, standing in a corridor that looked like first a bomb and then a tornado had struck it.

“Wow,” I said, deactivating the heavily stressed shield gauntlet and watching the temperature gauges built into the combat skin with a wince. Too much more juice could have overcome even its impressive insulation. “Remind me to be more careful the next time I try to reach out to the Void.”

“In the future,” said the Ghost, with wry amusement in their tone, “might I suggest the metaphorical pinhole, instead of just ripping the entire carpet up to see what it looks like?”

“Yeah, that sounds about right.” There weren’t big enough pieces left of the Fallen to get a good count, let alone identify the numbers and types, so I didn’t even bother trying to scavenge, just hopping over the mess with a brief burst of power from my etheric impellers and continuing on my way, this time with a good deal more caution.

I had the good fortune to catch the next squad of fallen with their shields down, and I sprayed the rest of the magazine at them, just barely managing to drop the last of the shieldbearers before the bolt locked open on an empty chamber.

Reloading the magazine awkwardly, thanks to the bulk of the blue-white plasma of the shield gauntlet, I slung the rifle onto my back, magnetizing it again, and drew the pistol I’d taken from the shieldbearer.

I could feel the power cell within it, a humming bubble of energy underneath the base physicality of the thing, and though it had once been far stronger, it would likely serve for more than long enough for me to find or build a better weapon.

Of course, around the next corner was a wide-open space relatively full of Fallen, a contingent of which had managed to form a phalanx around a taller member garbed in a flamelike energy shield.

“Fuck,” I said, and as I dropped the pistol to my magnetized thigh, I poked as small a hole in the fabric of the world as I could, letting the hunger of the void leach into the area just above my hand for the barest instant before hurling it like a bowling ball at the phalanx.

It managed to slip into a gap between two of the shields before detonating, turning the very air corrosive, and the phalanx collapsed under its own weight before it could do more than spray a scant handful of energy blasts at me.

The phantom hammer rose once again, then slammed down, and in the scattering of the sparks it threw off as it met impossible metal on an unknowable anvil, I could see the outline of a secret of the universe.

Not all of it, no, but the shape that I came away with, the idea of an object less as a collection of crude matter given purpose than as a product of human imagination, a plan for what to do on a lazy summer day before school started again, clad in the material of the world and simplified in terms of means of production beyond what most learned men and women could bring themselves to believe.

There was something familiar about it that pulled at memories lost to the void of whoever I had been, before now, an association with a reddish triangle and a green, blocky shape, but ultimately, that was all that came of it.

Of course, the idea of being able to apply much more basic tools and materials to the construction of much more advanced technology, in a situation without any of the supply lines that my memories of the Forerunner Ecumene told me that I should be able to rely on, and still coming out ahead on time, was still a great advantage here, and I took in the burned-out husks and scattered half-empty supply crates with fresh eyes.

“I get the feeling,” said the Ghost, “that you’ve got something crazy in mind.”

“Of course I do,” I said, feeling the fabric of the world underneath my metaphorical fingers, all but begging for me to take hold of it and create. “This wouldn’t be any fun if I didn’t.”

Chapter Text

Even with the incredible versatility of Glimmer as a crafting material, there was only so much I could do with such a paltry amount, and though I could work around many structural elements by ripping apart abandoned items and the equipment that the dead Fallen had been using, it was still, by and large, low-quality material that I couldn’t rely on for more delicate applications, where it wasn’t rusted away to nothing.

Still, I didn’t have to rely on the ancient, almost entirely worthless rifle for all my ranged attack needs, having managed to assemble some of the favored weapons of Warrior-Servant solo operatives, so that was a win in my book. On top of that, I’d managed to tweak what I remembered of a Monitor’s chassis enough to offer my Ghost companion some degree of protection, albeit not up to the standards that Faber and everyone else with real material budgets could build with access to proper alloys. Still, it was better than nothing, and I didn’t hear any complaints.

On top of that, I had a few surprises, if I really needed them, as well as being able to rewire some of my combat skin’s systems to be more energy-efficient, given that I didn’t know how long it would be before I could get my reactor refueled and I lacked the Glimmer to build a proper vacuum energy shunt.

“I don’t know about you,” said the Ghost, rotating its new, sleeker chassis in midair to get a feel for the motor systems, “but I’m feeling much better about this now.”

“Yeah…” I frowned. There was something in the air, now, not something that I could see or register on my sensors, but there was a hint of something acrid in the atmosphere, even through my newly retuned shields. “I dunno, I’ve got a bad feeling about this.”

Still, I proceeded out of the big room with a much more powerful weapon in hand, proceeding down a ventilation shaft and out through a maintenance room on the other side.

Opening the door out of the maintenance room revealed the other side of the Wall, which was mercifully much less open, cutting down the worry that I’d have to deal with a sniper from who knew how far away. Less fortunately, the area was patrolled by small groups of roving Fallen, visible despite the rusted-out hulks and crumbling edifices that were scattered around the overgrown courtyard that the maintenance room opened onto.

That, at least, I could handle, tuning the laser rifle in my hands to its gamma ray setting just in case and allowing the etheric impellers to raise my feet off the ground.

Some careful timing got me to the roof of a building in roughly the middle of the grassy courtyard unseen, which in turn got me some further bad news: there was a big vehicle in the courtyard, looking like someone had decided to cross a spider with a tank, and each of its six segmented legs had at least two panes of blue-purple energy radiating from it.

In somewhat less bad news, the main body of the tank looked a little scuffed up, and most of the Fallen foot soldiers on that side of the building were clustered around the burning wreck of a spaceship, about the size of a smaller War Sphinx if I were any judge. The sensation of wrongness was stronger there, almost steaming from a gash in the ship’s superstructure, but there was another source, past the other side of the courtyard, and something told me that I’d have to contend with it if I wanted to get out of here without some pretty severe problems.

That, however, was a concern for later. Right now, I had a tank to demolish.

All told, my plan for dealing with the tank was about as simple as I could make it.

While rationing power, I could store maybe three mortar rounds without having to compromise my shields or mobility options in favor of devoting energy to maintaining the structural integrity of the hardlight shells. Given that they were relying on the plasma-based defensive gauntlets, or something very much like them, for ground-level defense, their armor probably wasn’t anywhere near up to Forerunner standards, but just to be safe, I was willing to commit two rounds to trying to cripple the tank, one to hit the turret on top and one to see about hitting the reactor they had in that thing, based on the amount of radiation it was leaking and from where. The third would be for insurance, or just in case someone or something that I couldn’t handle with my beam weapon found me.

The phantom hammer drew itself back, then slammed down again.

This time, the weave of the world contorted itself around me. Not by much, no, but by enough that I could feel probability skew just that little bit towards me. Nothing major, no, but enough that I’d be more likely to find useful materials in the course of battle, or in a scrapyard or something of the like.

This time, though, in a flash of sparks, a slip of paper materialized in my hand. I spared it a glance, reading something about a smoothie coupon, then stowed it inside my armor for perusal when I wasn’t about to go into combat.

I launched the two mortar rounds within seconds of each other, trails of silvery-white light leading back to my position, and I raised my beam rifle to point at the nearest collection of Fallen. The beam dropped two of the shield-bearers almost instantly, being caught out of position, although it took a moment longer to drill through the shroud of fiery energy surrounding the larger one in the center of the cluster.

Still, drill through it did, and I swept the beam around to clear the rest of the squad of Fallen after the tallest one dropped like so much leaf litter.

The tank had almost managed to raise its main barrel to me by the time the mortar shells made it down. The first one dropped just slightly off angle, impacting on the rounded corner of the turret instead of dead center, but the detonation still managed to punch a hole through the armor and into the chamber. As it started shifting its legs to turn the turret the rest of the way manually, the second round slammed home, not quite managing to hit the reactor but still managing to do more than its fair share of damage, if the way that the back legs collapsed was any indication.

“They’re calling for reinforcements,” said the Ghost, highlighting a screen on my HUD that displayed the intensity of local radio traffic and was working at decrypting the streams.

“Let’s try and make this quick, then,” I replied, fabricating another pair of mortar rounds for Fallen squads who’d had the good luck to find a position with cover.

The rest of the scavengers were easy prey for my graser, although even while half-destroyed and lamed, the tank caused more than a few problems, all but spewing boxy drones that were individually not much of a challenge but, in the aggregate, could swarm up and really cause problems if I wasn’t careful.

In a lull between waves of the drones, I tried reaching for the void again, this time far more carefully, and was rewarded with a sphere of not-quite-light hovering about six inches above my palm, pulsating and almost seeming to draw in my attention before I shook myself and had my combat skin re-up my adrenaline.

For a moment, when I threw it at the tank (still trying to drag itself to where it could actually draw a bead on me with its main cannons, mind), it seemed to almost absorb into the metal and do nothing.

Then, within the space of a heartbeat, it crumpled in on itself in a flash of what my sensors told me was ultraviolet light, and the air itself seemed drawn into the void for a moment before re-expanding out with a bang that scattered the rest of the drones from where they were hiding behind the tank as it collapsed like a dog too tired to turn around in its bed. The tank’s reactor went dead after a moment, and without that offering scanning protection, I picked the remaining drones off in short order.

My radar and lidar arrays were starting to pick up on the incoming dropships, presumably to reinforce the Fallen contingent, so I only paused long enough to pick up a drone chassis before jetting off further into the spine-chilling sensation of wrongness.

I encountered another patrol of Fallen as I approached the next section of the Wall, but this time I didn’t even slow down, leaving a hastily-manufactured pulse grenade behind as I literally plowed through them, the tallest- the Captain, as the Ghost’s labeling system on my HUD said- splitting in half as I swept an extruded blade through him on my way through the squad, barely slowed by his energy shield, let alone by frail mortal chitin and flesh.

By the time the grenade detonated, I was safely within the next section of the Wall, just barely slowing down enough for the sonar systems in my armor to map out the complex and provide me the raw data to plot out a flight path, and I emerged from the other side perhaps slightly covered in cobwebs but otherwise unmolested.

Here, I slowed, allowing the processors in my combat skin and the Ghost time to parse through the sensor data that I was gathering as I rose into the sky, still within arm’s reach of the Wall just in case.

“I think,” said the Ghost, after a moment of thought, “there’s a Guardian who passed through this way. Best guess, they managed to bail out of that ship before it went down and were trying to find one in the Cosmodrome…” There was a moment as the Ghost pulled up and dismissed numerous screens, almost faster than I could track. “Yeah, sensor traces show that there’s probably an old Arcadia-class down there, although whether a normal Ghost could get it back up and running is anybody’s guess.”

“Hopefully we’ll be able to do something about it,” I said, tensing as the phantom hammer drew back before relaxing as nothing else happened. “Can you pick up a trail for that Guardian, one that we can follow?”

“Eh… one moment.” For a moment, I could feel as the miasma that was filling the area was blown back by a fresh breeze, before it closed back in. “Aha! Here we go,” said the Ghost, and after a moment, a set of concentric square markers were placed on my map of the area, seemingly meandering around the rusted-out planes and up a series of switchbacks to a compound that seemed to contain extensive subterranean sections.

I took a moment to look over the path that the Ghost thought the other Guardian had taken. “Looks like they really kicked over the anthill.”

Indeed, there were a fair few dead Fallen along the trail, as well as the wreckage of a number of their drones and something… bigger, that seemed to have had some sort of spherical outer shell. These dead were being picked over by living Fallen, the Captains keeping wary eyes up just in case something like me came along to ruin their days while the shieldbearers stripped the bodies and collected as much scrap as they could.

“Ooh,” said the Ghost, and their tone felt almost like they were wincing. “The House of Devils won’t take kindly to that. They’re already a lot closer to Servitor worship than a lot of other Fallen Houses, and that one Guardian killed a Servitor is… That's gonna cause a lifelong grudge if I’ve ever seen one.”

“Let’s see if we can’t get to them before the Fallen, or… whatever shot down that ship does,” I said, securing my rifle to my back before pulling out what I’d turned the pistol into.

It was still roughly the same size, and built on the same basic revolver-like model, but instead of the standard energy weapon aperture on the end of the barrel, there was a dish that seemed to be right out of a Saturday morning cartoon, not that I could remember one to actually compare it to.

This weapon wouldn’t do a whole lot for me out here, but I was operating under the assumption that I’d need to go subterranean, and I’d rather have something less unwieldy than a rifle in the presumably tight confines of the facility.

With that, I pushed the throttle to full and shot away from the Wall like a bat out of hell.

Chapter Text

Thankfully, I managed to make it across the gap between the Wall and the facility without being shot down, although it was closer than I would have preferred with how two of the Captains had the same kind of massive rifle that I’d been shot with just after the Ghost had found me. I heard the report of the oversized weapon a moment after I’d broken line of sight, which was followed quickly by the sound of the projectile punching into the solid concrete of the building I found myself in and then the warhead’s detonation.

I could hear the whole edifice shudder with the force of that explosion, although thankfully there was only one- if they’d fired again, I suspected the building would have come down, and I wasn’t actually sure if I could devote enough energy to shields quickly enough to survive that.

The room I’d found myself in was, fortunately, empty, which I very much appreciated since it would have been embarrassing to make it past the Captains just to get my ticket punched by some scavenger in the right place at the right time. Still, I brought up the raygun-looking sidearm I’d made, combat skin automatically compensating for the lack of light this deep into the building with LIDAR and sonar and half a dozen other sensors, as I swept the room.

“Step one, complete,” said the Ghost, seeming almost incongruously cheerful, but I couldn’t argue with the sentiment. “Let’s see about the rest.”

“You said it, not me,” I replied, walking through to the next dusty, probably mildewing room and then, after a moment to check sight lines and angles, down the cracked and pitted concrete staircase descending from it.

With every step deeper into the complex, the more the choking miasma seemed to settle, to the point where, eventually, it appeared to be almost physical, a devouring mist wafting out of the edges of hallways and around blind corners that threatened to conceal any number of monsters straight out of horror movies within its depths, arbitrary limitations such as space and physics be damned.

“This… isn’t Fallen territory anymore,” said the Ghost, sounding almost afraid. “Here, look at this.”

On my HUD, an image of something that looked like someone had poured concrete around a patch of barnacles, if the barnacles had been taken off the cover of a horror novel set at sea, glowed. “That looks… disgusting.”

“You can say that again, but no, that wasn’t really the point. This is a Hive structure, something that they use to alter local atmospheres to be more compatible with their biology. Generally ends up becoming vestigial once they stop expanding their fortifications, but with it pumping out gases like this…” I got the distinct impression that if the Ghost had a nose, they’d be wrinkling it in disgust. “Not great news.”

“When you say not great news, do you mean, like, I found an early termite infestation, or, say, we’re activating the Halo Array, may the Domain have mercy on our souls?” I asked, just barely checking the impulse to activate the shield gauntlet.

“Hopefully closer to termites, especially since they’re at least nominally in House of Devils territory and they’d probably clear them out if they knew this was happening, but there’s really no way to be sure.”

“Great,” I grumbled. “Any more pertinent suggestions?”

“If the thralls are glowing blue,” they said, pulling up a picture of a hunched, bulbous-headed creature and then another, this one seeming to almost be hugging itself and glowing with inner light, like a deep-sea fish waiting for something to nibble on its lure before exploding into motion, “don’t let them get close. They explode, and it’s not pretty.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said, as I felt the phantom hammer rise once more, and then slam down.

I felt… something, inside my head, not quite a headache, but close, for a moment before it faded. For another moment, it felt like nothing had happened, but as I looked down at the gun whirring softly in my hands, parts of it that I just hadn’t had the time to look at in any detail started to make sense to me.

At the same time, my combat skin jolted, and on my HUD a gear icon flashed once and opened into a list, headed by the words “Dimensional Storage Pocket” and listing a not insignificant number of items, the very first of which being the words “Laser Cannon” preceded by a stylized graphic of a flame. I selected the cannon with a finger twitch, and in a flash of Cherenkov radiation, the armor grew heavier, and protruding from over my right shoulder was a barrel almost longer than I was tall.

“You know, I think I can work with this,” I said, dismissing the weapon with a quiet pop.

“Good,” said the Ghost, sounding more than mildly worried, “because I’m picking up a lot of Hive-typical chatter, as well as faint signs of Light from inside. I think the Hive got their claws on whoever that Guardian whose ship is outside, and they’re doing… something to them in here.”

“That doesn’t sound good,” I said, dialing up the yield on the energy pistol I was holding. “Any idea what it is they could be doing?”

“...not really? They’ve got something… weird down there, and it’s almost seeming like it wants to suck in the Light, so that might be related to it, but that’s just taking a stab in the dark, really.” The Ghost gave the impression of a sigh. “What I wouldn’t give for a holocaust cloak…”

The line sounded familiar, even beyond how the Ghost said it with the air of a favored movie quote, but like so many other things in this frustrating second life of mine, I just couldn’t place it.

“That and five bucks’ll get me coffee in the morning,” I said, some part of me absolutely certain of the price despite the fact that I’d been dead for who-knows-how-many years’ worth of inflation driving the price up even farther. “Any other recommendations before we wade in?”

“Uh… stay mobile? That’ll help a lot with the Knights and their swords, and the Thralls shouldn’t be able to swarm you as well if you keep moving. On top of that, the Ogres have trouble keeping beads on targets if they move unpredictably” As the Ghost spoke, images of the three Hive forms appeared on my HUD. The Knights were hulking creatures, chitinous armor arranged in such a way to suggest protruding tendons underneath heavier plates to accompany the not-quite death’s head rictus on their faces, while the Thralls were much smaller, the combination of the multiple holes going completely through their torso and their bulbous head giving an almost skeletal impression that seemed at odds with the Arc energy crackling along their claws. The Ogres dwarfed the Knights, seeming at first to be overgrown Thralls if not for the far superior armor coverage and the pulsating, almost brainlike mass that its twisted jaws hung from like a bony remora.

I took a moment to slightly reconfigure one of my arm-mounted grenade launchers, altering the casing to be both more efficient to produce and to cause it to splinter more effectively to handle swarms of Thralls, before I nodded, replacing the energy pistol on my leg in favor of a submachine gun that had been included in the cache of reverse-engineered technology. “Zombie apocalypse rules, got it.”

I darted into the next room with a grenade already primed to launch into a cluster of Thralls halfway across, and the handful of triangular Acolytes, as my HUD labeled them, that were keeping the Thralls at a figurative arm’s length vanished in a chattering burst of fire from the submachine gun.

From deeper within the bunker, I heard a deep, almost bone-rattling screech. “I think they know we’re here,” said the Ghost, sounding a little bit worried.

“That’s not gonna save them,” I said, feeding a solid stick of Glimmer into the submachine to restore its internal ammunition reservoir. “Push comes to shove, I draw them out and glass the place and see what I can’t find deeper in.”

“If you’re sure,” said the Ghost, managing admirably to convey their skepticism.

“Sure enough,” I said, racking back the slide on the boxy weapon. “Now then, eyes up, and let’s see what we can’t do about the little infestation we have on our hands once they get a bit bigger.”

Maeve was more than a little concerned with the fact that she’d been taken alive by the Hive.

Over all the years she’d been in the figurative saddle, she’d never heard of the Hive so much as attempting to take a Guardian alive, with the notable exception of Eris Morn’s stories of the fireteam that Toland had talked into trying to kill Crota in his own throne room, and the fact that she could still feel her Ghost outside the cage the Hive had custom-grown for her was, if anything, more concerning.

Cas and Shaw were still out there, presumably, but neither of them were good enough to fight through who knew how many rooms jam-packed full of Hive bodies to get to her (Dark Below, she didn’t think she was good enough for that), and with how the big Wizard had blasted her ship out of the sky on her approach at just the moment she was changing the shield frequencies over, when it would be easiest to shoot down, she wasn’t sure either of them were good enough to sneak or otherwise contrive a way to get to her, not with what that said about this little operation.

Once again, she reached for the Light, feeling it fill her with the almost burning radiance that she was just shy of being able to spill over to the real world and forge into a hammer to smash her way out of the cage and, if she was lucky, the Wizard.

She waited for just a moment longer, letting the raw Solar energy burn inside her body to get her heart pumping and warm up her tendons, and, once she was sure she had enough juice for a solid recreation of Sol’s hammer, then-

Felt as the Light splashed off of something between her and the world, returning to wait within her body, seething under the wet blanket of Hive magic.

Maeve didn’t trust herself to turn the Solar energy into Arc or Void without her Ghost on hand to help mediate the process, not that she thought that would work any better than trying to call up Sol’s Hammer had.

Experimentally, she closed her fists around two bars of her cage and pulled, just hard enough to get them to bend a little without really trying to tear them out of the ground, before giving it up as a bad idea. Even with the terrifying might of the Sunbreaker burning within her, she wasn’t sure she’d be able to get out of the cage without the power of the hammer.

Absently, she remembered how Cas had described Radiance, the few times he’d let go of his Nova Bombs in exchange for Solar Light, as burning himself up for raw power and trusting in the Light to make him a wick instead of the whole candle, before her mind fixated on the idea.

Maybe if she could throw around enough Sunstrikes fueled by Radiance, she’d be able to make it out? It was worth a try, since her other option was just sitting around and waiting for rescue just in case Cas and Shaw could arrive before the Wizard tried to eat her, or whatever it was that the Hive wanted from her.

She called up the raw power of a thousand suns again, holding on far longer than she’d ever dared to before, and felt the Light starting to burn at her from within, as constrained by her own will and Hive magic as it was.

Just as she thought she might burn alive from the inside, another Guardian who delved too deep, the Hive magic faltered, and given half a chance, the Light scorched through the flickering barrier like tissue paper on a bonfire, and Maeve’s fist clenched around the haft of the Hammer of Sol, the weapon’s comforting warmth infusing her as she brought it crashing through the Hive prison, scattering chitinous bars like so many ninepins.

It was only once the bars shattered that she registered the sounds of a firefight outside, the detonations of Hive Boomers, the roars of Knights and the Ogre that had caught her for the Wizard, the shrieks of dying Thralls, and, above all else, the sound of energy weapons discharging.

For a moment, she thought she heard one of the Fallen Walkers’ main cannons going off, but that couldn’t be, there was no way they’d pushed this far into the Hive’s territory so quickly and even if they had they didn’t have a way to get something that big down to the level they were on.

Either way, there was someone out there taking the fight to the Hive, and hopefully one way or another she’d be able to find her Ghost, so she firmed her grasp on her hammer and leapt through the narrow tunnel that led into the cavern she’d been held in.

She landed in the massive storage room that the cavern had been tunneled out of hammer-first, scattering a not inconsiderable horde of Thralls in a spray of cinders as she whipped the weapon back up to crush the Knight who the Thralls were milling next to, then cast about for her next target.

She froze for the barest of instants as she saw the figure floating near the roof of the cavern- no, not floating, but flying, clad in sleek silver armor with veins of Arc blue, Solar orange, and the Void’s not-purple spiderwebbing around its surface, a shield gauntlet presumably looted from the Fallen on one arm (and taking far more punishment than they’d ever imagined possible) and the other hand occupied with what could be mistaken for a book, if not for the barrel and chattering bursts of leaden death it spewed every now and again.

“Guardian,” she heard from the internal comms of her helmet, and the voice was a smooth, feminine one, with an accent that tickled at what memories she had of Before but couldn’t quite place. “I’m marking your Ghost’s location on your HUD now. Go find them so we can get the hell out of this shithole before they get enough reinforcements in here to stop us.”

“Is your ship nearby?” Maeve asked, throat sore but workable from… had she been screaming when she was trying to invoke Radiance? No, a question for another time.

“There’s an old Arcadia-class jumpship in a hangar a floor or two down,” said another voice, and she could tell somehow that this was the other Guardian’s Ghost, “that between the two of us we should be able to get working before the Hive really starts to get pissed.” Two markers superimposed themselves onto the screen inside her helmet, one on an out-of-the-way table in a corner of the room next to one of the corridors that had been built when the facility had originally been commissioned and the other on a staircase almost directly next to the hallway to the room she’d been imprisoned in.

“Understood,” Maeve said, and in a flare of Solar light she shoved off the ground, scattering another rush of Thralls in her wake as she bounded across the room to find Sarissa.

Fortunately, she just managed to make it over to the table as her grasp on the Sunbreakers’ might started to slip, and she let it go in a burst of searing heat that burnt the trio of Acolytes menacing Sarissa inside her miniature cage to ashes.

“It’s good to see you,” her Ghost said, and thankfully Maeve’s weapons were right there on the table next to her. A handful of rounds from Fabian Strategy had enough of the bars shattered that Sarissa could squeeze out, and she tapped against Maeve’s helmet once before dematerializing into her Light signature.

“Glad to see you’re okay,” Maeve said, turning back to the battle and holding down the trigger, walking the tracers fired by the auto-rifle across groups of Thralls while the other Guardian hurled explosives to strike down Knights and the occasional Wizards as they floated in from another room.

“Alright,” came the Guardian’s voice, “now that we’ve got everyone, it’s time to blow this pop stand. Get to the staircase and start clearing rooms, I’ll make sure you have a clean path and see about buying some time before the big Wizard decides to come back with friends.

One part of Maeve wanted to object, to insist she be the one in the thick of combat like a Titan should and the other Guardian be the one to clear the way to the ship so they can fix it up sooner. The more rational part of Maeve, though, took in the way that the other Guardian was throwing around grenades like they were going out of style and admitted that was probably better than what she could do even if she was able to muster enough Light up to resummon Sol’s Hammer so soon after using it already.

“Got it,” Maeve said, stowing Fabian Strategy in favor of The Comedian and making her first jump on the path towards the staircase.