by Various
Dahlia recognized the weapon. A particle beam rifle, generally used by Covenant snipers. She’d seen the bodies left on streets after that loud snap-whine of energy fried them.
“There are more than six,” Dahlia pointed at the ridge. “I see two or three more sand plumes.”
“I concur that we are well outnumbered.” Jat reached to his belt and handed her the energy pistol he had taken from one of her captors. “We are making our last stand. It is the only option we have left.”
One of the death squad’s Spectres jumped the ridge and slid down toward the bottom of the gulley.
“I can’t,” Dahlia whispered. “I can’t do this. What about my parents? What about your people? You were going to warn them.”
“You can run,” Jat said casually, as if it wouldn’t bother him. “You saved my life, and you have paid your debt. But I tell you: they will hunt us down. They cannot have any witnesses left alive. Together, our weapons united, we can fight with honor.”
“Die, you mean,” Dahlia said.
Jat ignored the Spectre crabbing its way toward them on the floor of the canyon. He aimed farther away, calmly tracking something with the massive rifle. Energy lanced out through the air. A Spectre spun out of control as a driver slumped forward and died. There was bellowing from the Sangheili suddenly trapped in the back as it flew over the edge and exploded against rocks.
“When I waited for you in the corridor, when those guards marched you out, I had time to observe you. I do not know much about humans, but I think you were ready to attempt an escape. You were not going to let them kill you easily, am I correct?”
“Yes. I was going to run,” Dahlia said, as Jat fired up at the ridge, killing more Sangheili scurrying along it to get a position on them. What about the Spectre right down here with us? she wondered in a panic.
“We are not animals to the slaughter—you and I,” Jat rumbled. “We are warriors, survivors. We make a stand. Our memories—we will make our lineages proud, human. We will make this sand drink our enemy’s blood.”
Plasma fire hit Jat’s broken Spectre, shaking it. The two of them dropped behind it for cover. Dahlia looked down at the bulky alien pistol. She could feel her pulse racing and the world narrowing around her. The droning sound of the approaching Spectre filled her world.
“Focus,” Jat said to her, large pale alien eyes regarding her as he realized something was wrong with her. “There are worse ways to die than on your own terms. Breathe in every extra moment you are given to be free. Think that earlier this day you were certainly dead, and now you are not.”
He broke out of his crouch and yanked the rifle up to fire at the approaching Spectre.
Dahlia glanced around the front of the craft in time to see the death squad Sangheili diving clear of their vehicle. The air filled with more plasma bolts as Sangheili on the ridge opened fire, no longer worried about hitting their own.
“Look up!” Dahlia shouted at Jat.
Two more Sangheili were scooting along above them up on the ridge, trying to move down so that the Spectre could no longer shield them.
Jat swung the rifle up and fired. No aiming, but he got the result he wanted. The would-be attackers ducked back from the edge of the rock.
Plasma fire from the Sangheili who’d dived clear of their exploding Spectre splashed the nearby rock now that Jat was distracted.
Dahlia took a deep breath, then leaned around and fired the pistol. The plasma struck far to the right of the aliens ducking from rock to rock toward them.
She corrected and peppered the nearby rocks with fire, keeping them behind cover.
“They’re getting closer,” Dahlia said, voice breaking slightly.
“As they will,” Jat grumbled. “Ready yourself.”
He fired again at the lip of the rock, then twisted to sit the rifle on the Spectre’s chassis. Sighted. A Sangheili head popped up and Jat fired.
The dead alien body slumped forward over the rock.
One of them roared with rage to see yet another of their own die. Jat ducked back as a barrage of fire struck his vehicle. Dahlia clutched her knees, shivering.
So much. Too much.
With yet another bellow, three of the Sangheili charged. Dahlia could hear their footsteps pounding the ground as they advanced.
“Now!” Jat shouted.
Dahlia forced herself to lean around and fire blindly, finding the target only after she’d started pulling the trigger. She hit one of them in the leg and it tumbled forward, losing its footing. Jat swung, aimed, but the two other Sangheili jumped over the Spectre.
Struggling to spin as quickly, Dahlia tried to engage, but they darted forward just as Jat leaped at them with a war cry. His energy sword was out in an instant, his rifle left behind.
The other two Sangheili had their swords out in kind.
A three-sided duel began, swords hissing and crackling as they struck one another with remarkable speed.
Dahlia scrabbled up, looking for the third Sangheili she’d wounded. Something struck her on the shoulder. She spun, her breath knocked out of her, and landed against the Spectre. The impact caused her to hit her head and bounce off, the world fracturing into a series of images.
She saw the wounded Sangheili limping around the Spectre and raising its carbine to aim at the dueling Sangheili, their swords whirling around each other as Jat fought for his life. The two Sangheili still up above on the ridge leaped into the air, barreling down toward them.
“Jat . . .” She tried to warn him, but what could he do?
Her pistol had been thrown clear. Dahlia tried to crawl for it, but the wounded Sangheili already figured that out. Towering above her, it thudded over and kicked the weapon away.
Dahlia slumped to the ground and looked up.
Her left shoulder was on fire. The shot had come from the nearby Sangheili and burned through her. Pure adrenaline had stopped her from initially feeling it, but now the pain made her vision dance.
This was it.
Dahlia struggled to stand, but her attacker kicked her back down and unsheathed its own energy sword. It seemed to be relishing the moment of conquest. Taking its time to look at her, mandibles opening in a roar as the sword lifted.
She’d feared this moment her entire life. Woke to nightmares of the aliens and their inhuman eyes and backward-jointed legs kicking in a door to kill her just like this.
“Do it,” Dahlia whispered. “You’ve been the boogeyman in my life for long enough. I’m ready. I’m not scared of you!”
Behind it, Dahlia saw Jat finally fall, the hilt of his sword clattering to the ground. Four Sangheili surrounded him, triumphant.
Jat looked over. “We made them bleed,” he said to her, spreading his arms. “So then, they bleed!”
The entire canyon erupted in gunfire.
Human gunfire, Dahlia fuzzily thought.
Dozens of bullets ripped through the Sangheili standing over her in a split second, destroying the once-massive creature and filling the air with a mist of blood. The gunfire shifted across the desert floor and stitched through the other Sangheili trying to run for cover, chewing them apart.
Jat twisted up and stopped moving.
The gunfire ceased, and over it, Dahlia could hear the whine of turbines. She saw the hunched-forward shape of a Pelican transport dropping slowly down into the gulley.
Beige-uniformed soldiers jumped clear of its ramp, battle rifles up to their shoulders as they fanned out to examine the Spectres and alien bodies.
Dahlia somehow managed to stand up, her unharmed arm in the air.
Paul and Greta ducked as they ran around the Pelican’s wings, the engines kicking up their cloaks.
“You,” Dahlia said, mouth dry. She ran toward them, wincing with the pain that flared through her shoulder at each step. “How?”
“We may be traders, but we also feed information back to the Carrow militia,” Greta said. “Keep an eye on the ground for them. Once we got back to the d
epot, we called for help. Met them out in the desert for a pickup. When we saw all the smoke here, we came to have a look.”
Dahlia could have hugged them.
“Live one!” shouted a militia man.
Dahlia spun around as fast as her damaged shoulder would let her. “It’s Jat! Don’t—”
A single shot cracked through the air and Jat slumped forward to the ground.
Dahlia screamed and ran forward. She grabbed the Sangheili’s head with her good arm, cradling it. “Jat.”
But he only stared off into emptiness.
“He . . . he saved me. He wasn’t one of them!” Dahlia raged at the soldiers standing around her now. “You killed him!”
The strangers in their beige uniforms said nothing, their sand-bitten faces empty at the sight of what had once been their enemy dead on the sand.
“He was my friend,” Dahlia said.
“The Sangheili aren’t our friends,” one of them finally said, grabbing her elbow. “You’d know that if you lived in the Outer Colonies before coming here. You’d have seen what they did. They think this is their world. They’ll find out who it really belongs to soon enough.”
They dragged her off to the Pelican, where Paul and Greta tried to talk to her.
But Dahlia didn’t have any more words left.
Dahlia’s father woke first, responding to the heavy antivirals and fluids the militia medic had hooked both her parents up to. He blinked at his daughter, who was sitting down in full desert gear at the foot of their bed, a new militia rifle on her lap. Her shoulder was bandaged, and the skin on her face chapped from the desert sun.
“Dahlia?”
She stood up with a smile, a tiny bit of relief coursing through her to hear him say her name. She crossed over to his side of the bed and gave his forehead a kiss. “Dad.”
He hugged her. Then looked at the long dagger on her hip and back to the rifle. “What’s all this? You carry weapons now?”
“I do,” Dahlia replied. “I have to. Mom hasn’t woken yet. You’re too weak to travel. You need to rest and recover. So I’m ready for anything that comes here to Sandholm.”
Her father appeared heartbroken. “And do you think you can hold off the Sangheili by yourself?”
“No. I have no doubts I’d die quickly,” Dahlia flatly said. Her dad flinched at her honesty. “But they say there’s an envoy being sent from the Unified Earth Government. Maybe it won’t come to that.”
They could both tell she didn’t believe that.
Dahlia wiped her mother’s forehead, then stood up and looked out of their window. Out toward Signal Hill, the rocks, and the desert beyond. “But a friend of mine taught me that I should die on my own terms, not someone else’s. So if they come for us, Dad . . . I will make them bleed and pay a price.”
Everything had changed. Everything will collapse into blood and fire once again, she thought.
But the difference this time was that there would be no more cowering in the corner for her. Dahlia wasn’t scared anymore.
ANAROSA
* * *
* * *
KEVIN GRACE
This story takes place in March 2556, three years after the end of the Covenant War (Halo 3 era) and one year after FAR STORM, a joint military operation between humans and their former Sangheili enemies in order to secure the remote and mysterious Forerunner installation known as the Ark (Halo: Hunters in the Dark).
Who is she?”
Agent Prauss wove through the cars on the highway, eyes darting from vehicle to vehicle around him. Years of driving an unmarked vehicle meant he was well used to the Doppler sounds of angry horns at nearly double the legal speed limit. He still enjoyed that a bit. More than a bit, really. Leo could tell.
The small silver hologram of a man in a neat-fitting suit appeared on the car’s dashboard and nodded sympathetically to the particularly shocked owner of one of those horns.
“Is this really the right time for the breakdown? You seem to be busy.”
Prauss’s eyes never left the road, and yet they rolled. “Leo . . .”
“Very well.”
Leo inclined his head to the windscreen readout behind him and the car’s control cluster was replaced with the picture of a young woman. Short brown hair. Smiling brown eyes.
“Anarosa Carmelo. Age twenty-six. Ninety-ninth percentile at Hyugens Preparatory Academy and First Mars Technical. Goodpasture Foundation scholarships for master’s degrees in biology and astronavigation. Medical records clean. No criminal history. Extensive community service. Good kid. Great, even.”
Prauss nodded. “They all are. Work?”
“Snapped up by Oros Trading after graduation, self-selected into their test-pilot program with extra research on colonization protocols.”
Prauss glanced to Leo briefly, curious.
“Colonization? Oros makes slipspace engines, so test pilot I get. What does Oros have to do with colonization?”
“Company records show that it was a new program she created to train test pilots for encounters with unexplored or abandoned systems. Makes sense. There are a lot of systems out there coming back on the market now that the war’s over.”
“Over. Yeah.” Prauss sliced into the exit lane. “We’re close. How did she die?”
Anarosa’s image disappeared from the car’s HUD, returning the standard array of indicators and Office of Naval Intelligence datastreams.
“Acute hypothermia. Details are still coming in, but she entered the cockpit of a training shuttle forty minutes ago to perform a preflight checklist. Seven minutes later, sensor logs show a misfiring of the craft’s fire-suppression system. I don’t think it was her fault, but . . . full Aerosol D immersion with no suit. Life signs ended fifteen seconds later.”
“Damn,” said Prauss, wincing. “Still, this is good.”
“Good? You may want to rephrase that in our upcoming conversation.”
The car finished its short course of residential street turns and stopped in front of a simple white house. Curbside holo fed the address and name to the HUD: 7735 Killingham. Michael Carmelo.
“Yes, yes,” admitted Prauss, composing himself in the rearview mirror, “but you know what I mean. Anarosa was special. She had a very special mind. And we are here to convince her brother that he should give that mind to us. Her death is a damn shame, but the way she died means the tissue will be preserved longer than we usually have for emergency calls.”
Leo had to agree with that. Prauss was right. Mercenary, but right.
“And why is this an emergency run, anyway?” Prauss continued. “She must have been flagged as a candidate years back. We should be at the hospital making pickup by now, not here and about to ask this question. We shouldn’t have to do it like this.”
“She was flagged,” Leo nodded, matching Prauss’s gaze now at the white house. “But she delayed her decision. Twice.”
“Really?”
“Sat down with recruiters both times, asked quite a few questions, and both times said she needed to think about it.”
“Interesting. Not many delay twice.” Prauss checked his watch and frowned. “But we don’t have long. Does he know?”
Leo nodded. “He picked up the call from Oros HR twelve minutes ago and hung up three minutes ago. No other calls initiated since then.”
“And he’s the only living family, right?”
Leo nodded again. “Mother and father died of natural causes three and seven years ago, respectively. Anarosa was unmarried. No children. Just the one sibling.”
Prauss sighed and opened his door. “Damn shame. Let’s go.”
At the door, Agent Prauss knocked and apologized and introduced himself and Leo to the bewildered Michael Carmelo. Prauss could tell from Michael’s body language that asking to come inside wasn’t an option, which meant he had to do this on the porch. Prauss hated doing it on the porch. But he was well prepared, practiced from years of conversations just like this one, explaining gently tha
t Anarosa’s natural talents had singled her out as a candidate for a very special program within the Office of Naval Intelligence. This program, he explained, upon the death of someone as special as Anarosa, would use that person’s exceptional brain to create a very special computer program called a “smart” artificial intelligence like his colleague Leo, here. Smart AIs like Leo, Prauss went on, are vital to the successful operation of many of the United Nations Space Command’s most critical operations and are unmatched in their creative, computational, and strategic abilities. In a way, Prauss delicately suggested, Anarosa would have one last chance to create something wonderful from this tragic day . . . and all Michael had to do was consent, and arrangements would be made and her body returned with minimal signs of the procedure within twenty-four hours.
Leo, projecting now from a small disc held by Prauss, remained silent, other than saying a few brief words conveying his regrets for the loss of Anarosa. He listened to Prauss’s practiced speech while monitoring various subroutines furthering the rest of the assignment.
Background check on Michael Carmelo (clean).
Conversations with medical regarding risks of freezing damage to Anarosa’s brain (minimal).
Initiation of the pickup crew in case permission was secured (on the road/ETA to Oros in seven minutes/holding for pickup confirmation).
Confirmation of the body’s destination if permission was not secured (Wesley General Hospital).
An order for flowers paid for and sent to this address regardless of outcome (priental lilies/white vase/condolence note from both Prauss and myself).
After nodding once to acknowledge that he was indeed Michael Carmelo, Amarosa’s brother listened silently to everything Agent Prauss had to say. When Prauss stopped talking, Michael made no acknowledgment of the unbelievable offer just extended. He stood still for a moment, his gaze locked on the floor, and then broke his silence by simply stating:
“Go to hell.”