Halo: Indelible Past/Chapter Eighteen

"Oh, God. What happened hear?"

Simon swept the bombed-out plaza with his assault rifle and shook his head. "The same thing that happened everywhere else. Someone blew the shit out of it."

He stepped through the charred wreckage of a side-street bazaar. Everywhere he looked, corpses lined the streets, all of them Sangheili and most of them females and children. A part of him wondered if it was bad that he didn't really feel all that torn up about the carnage; he registered the massacre on a tactical level, just another sign that he didn't have to worry about causing a panic amongst the civilians because there were no civilians left to panic.

Maybe if it had been the Visag keep, with all the warriors and students and servants he had gotten to know over the course of his year-long stay there, Simon would have taken it all harder. But Mamore had taught him to stroll through the torn bodies of humans without pausing to be sick, and at the end of the day most Sangheili were as inhuman to him now as they'd been back during the Great War.

The remnants of a vender's stall collapsed as he and Zoey passed by. She squeaked and brandished the pistol he'd given her as if to ward off invisible attackers. Simon glanced down at the wares the vender had been selling: some kind of meat, from the looks of things.

"Diana," he said into their private com channel. "Anything on the 'net?"

"Yeah, we've gotten ourselves into a full-scale ground war from the looks of things," she reported. "Half the reports are screaming about the UNSC, the other half are ragging on the local government for not doing enough to stop it. Either way, we're looking at over five thousand meatbags dead in this city alone."

She paused before adding, "You know, business as usual."

"Out on the frontier, maybe." Simon stepped gingerly over the huddled corpse of a small Sangheili child. "But not on Sanghelios. This isn't just one clan getting pissed at another clan over farming rights."