User:RelentlessRecusant/Halo: Vector/Chapter Two

 VECTOR ii   By RelentlessRecusant 

One year before the present day

MARCH 2570 UNSC MERIDIAN RAYS SLIPSPACE, EN ROUTE TO MONMOUTH SYSTEM

“New Monmouth.”

It was free association—immediately, relevant phrases were collected and brought to Delta-Three’s mind. People’s Liberator Army. Terrorists. Insurrectionists.

At the fore of the table, Commander Hayes (O-5, UNSCSOCOM Counterterrorism Activity Warfare Section), dispensed the grainy black-and-white thermal photographs from the beige folder, disseminated them across the poorly-lit aluminum table. With a nonchalant glance, Delta-Three flicked his eyes over the photographs.

Low resolution. Infrared spectrum. The likely snoopscoot for obtaining the flyby pictures was the covert SEAGULL THREE orbital reconnaissance satellite, the five-hundred-billion-credit RECONSAT exclusively fielded by the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence and unveiled to the intelligence community two years ago. Three also acutely noted the intra-departmental tracking digits listed on the bottom frame of the photograph, and the light impressions on the photograph where a photoanalyst, a civilian contractor, had written in comments before erasing them.

Three looked at the front of the table, where Hayes, his short-cropped blonde hair pale against the low ambient light, was impatiently gesticulating at the photographs. “The ‘People’s Liberator Army’ have set up another front on New Monmouth, and are raising support with the local peoples. We’ve been authorized to sanction a hinge point individual—”

At this point, Hayes brandished another photograph, this one of higher resolution and the product of a long-lens field camera, onto the table—“Aaron Shaver. We execute at 1930 hours tomorrow.”

Delta-Three eased back in his chair, his relaxed demeanor sharply juxtaposing his heavily-set and morose face, his muscular frame, and the almost sinister calm with which a sidearm rested upon his right hip.

He flicked his wintery eyes to the left, sighting Delta-One, whose own expression was similarly enthused, his body, uniformed in the bland dress blacks of UNSC Special Operations Command, sprawled disinterestedly over the restrictive confines of his discomforting chair.

Delta-Two’s expression was inscrutable, as implacable as ever. He sat hunched in his own chair, his eyes sweeping over the aggregated mass of chiaroscuro photographs over the table without interest nor disinterest, his mouth and pale cheeks entombed by the perpetual black balaclava that he favored during combat or non-combat operations. Delta-Four impatiently reclined in a dingy corner of the room in a load-bearing tactical vest, his unhelmeted hair a disorganized fray in the humidity, his gloved fingers playing across the length of his shoulder-slung machine gun.

And in the corner was someone else—

Delta-Three sharply canted his eyes towards the unfamiliar sight, his attention drifting from Hayes’s practiced monologue to this anomaly. She was disarmingly young, and as he focused his gaze upon her, he more fully realized her figure—she had striking viridian eyes, with luscious black hair that fell to her shoulders. Her figure was slender and sinewy, her frame suggesting regular exercise. Yet, upon closer examination, of her electric eyes and her strong jaw, there was something about her that struck him as horridly wrong. As if there had been some fundamental, inviolable rule of the universe that was being violated by her very existence.

She turned her own eyes to meet his own stare, and her arrestive eyes caught him in his vision. She must have realized that Delta-Three was staring, and she stared back vacantly at him, as if he was some subhuman creature beneath her contempt.

He wilted, his eyes forced to deflect and turn from her penetrating stare, and an odd fear-sense was buzzing within him, and a tempo of urgency drummed into his pulse, and even at the back of his head, he could feel her skewing stare lance through his bone and marrow—

One leaned forward, and Three sensed that his commander had already caught the presence of the unfamiliar individual in the confines of the UNSCSOCOM briefing room. The team leader rapped his fingers against the burnished tabletop, drawing Hayes’s attention, and then turned to indicate the stranger. He required no words as he leveled a questioning finger at the newcomer.

In his peripheral vision, he sensed that Delta-Four was upright now, and he cradled his submachine gun protectively in his hands, his fingers no longer drumming a staccato beat along the weapon’s surface. Even Delta-Two now had an attentive look to his eyes, a careful one.

So it wasn’t him. The other Deltas had felt her electric presence as well.

An awkward silence fell over the room as One and Two wordlessly looked at each other, the two senior soldiers communicating in a brew of telepathy and mutual experience as One continued to point at the woman.

Delta-One blankly stared at Hayes. “Well?” he demanded, disregarding his subordinate rank.

There was now a rank fear in the conference room—Delta-Three’s predator sense could detect it, emanating from Hayes. The seasoned special-operations commander now exuded a primal fright, an acute discomfort—

Three subtly reached for the grip of his handgun. The three other Delta soldiers in the room were upright, fully awake and alert, and Delta-Three knew their expressions well—that sense of inexorable urgency the rising thunder in his heart, the adrenaline— Four’s expression was rapt, focused on the submachine gun that he cradled in his gloved hands. One’s expression was stony, and his arctic eyes smoldered with danger. Three’s fingers lightly rested on and wrapped around his personal weapon, and from the subtle movement’s of Two’s hands, he could sense Delta-Two doing the same.

Delta-Three didn’t even understand the genesis of his phobia. However, there was an inexorable biological imperative within him that screamed from within him. Kill her. KILL HER. Three knew fully well and trusted his impulses and instincts as much as any recon photograph during an operation—and now as his subconscious flooded his body with fear and danger, he treated that as information. Two and Three made eye contact, and there was a deadly calm in Two’s irises, the steady focus of a sniper.

The tension in the room was palpable.

And at the center of it was a single young woman at ill ease, surrounded by five operators of the UNSC Special Operations Command.

Three didn’t care about the apparent tactical disparity. Some primal fear was seizing him, some terror of his woman. He had to kill her.

Hayes coughed, and that singular action was a testament to the man’s fear-ridden psyche—Hayes was a full Commander of the UNSC Special Operations Command, and was a known protégé of certain highly-placed senior officers, well-vetted, and invariably well-connected to the Office of Naval Intelligence. His appointment to the station of senior commander over Delta Team, one of SOCOM’s elite tactical field units, attested to his distinguished past and his promising future.

Hayes held a strict, military air that radiated with the firmness and decisiveness of command, and he maintained a presence that was reminiscent of flag officers, not middle-tier officers. That he was coughing was the sign of something abysmally wrong.

When he spoke again, his voice was raspy. “This is…” He coughed lightly, licked his lips. “This is our attaché to the UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence. She is to be extended every courtesy, and will serve as an ONI field observer for the Monmouth operation.”

One and Two exchanged glances again, and Delta-Three caught his superiors’ shaded eyes and their immediate sense of taut intensity. Delta-One raised disrespectfully, brazenly staring at the quiet woman, “With respect, ma’am, may we have your identification and allegiance?”

Hayes coughed again and raised his hands hastily. “It is the request of the Director of Naval Intelligence that her identity and her presence aboard the Meridian Rays remain confidential.”

Delta Team was no novel foreigner to the realm of ONI’s lucid games and strategizing—Delta Team had become well-known in the UNSC brass and even the civilian government as a scalpel; an exacting, precise weapon that struck on command, excising unpleasant political situations, defusing complex bureaucratic situations that would have required months to resolve, and for other social unniceties to be unleashed. Delta Team was the “clean” solution for civilian politicians and for UNSC senior officers. Their role as covert executors had made them well subject to ONI’s control and scrutiny, as well as from their parent organization, the Special Operations Command.

But this “attaché” from Naval Intelligence—she was a girl, and younger than anyone aboard this vessel—Delta-Three had been disconnected from common society too long to accurately evaluate her age, but she at least younger than twenty, and the youth of her face made her junior even to the youngest recruits at the Marine camps. What attaché with ONI was old enough to be in high school?

Yet, despite her youth, he was struck by the halting intensity of her stare, the primal hunger playing through her lovely green eyes. He felt the fear-sense within him swell.

Delta-Four’s voice was sharp. “A ‘field observer’, sir?”

Despite Delta Team’s exceptional field capabilities, civilians—hostages, bystanders—always proved to be the defusing element in any special operations. To have to take a highly-placed civilian ONI observer under their protection under an unpleasant assassination and counterinsurgency operation would not only be operationally compromising, but also fatal to Delta Team’s reputation if the “observer” was wounded or worse, killed. Civilians weren’t warriors. They weren’t meant to be in hot zones. This woman was the farthest from a soldier.

If anything, she should be in a classroom or the high school soccer team.

Commander Hayes at this point had recovered some of his prior dignity and authority. “That’s right, Four. She will be coordinating the second combat element.”

It was on that single moment, that Three knew there was something pervasively insidious. He cleared his throat, and asked pointedly, “Second combat element?”

Hayes’s eyes flashed with anger, and his voice became soft. “Delta will be coordinating with a new special-operator detachment of UNSCSOCOM, hereby code-named ‘Echo’. They will be actively assisting your special mission on New Monmouth.”

“I’ve never heard of any field unit named Echo”, said Delta-Two, his voice careful.

“The operation is their live-fire inauguration exercise”, steadily answered Hayes.

That was enough to bring Delta-Four to a pinnacle of incredulity. Delta Team was experienced in jointly working with other elite commando units—NAVSPECWAR, Marine Force Reconnaissance, the ODSTs—but that this was a newly-commissioned unit, to be approved based on their performance on their first live-fire field operation, one that involved Delta—

Delta-Four snapped, “Commander, ‘live-fire inauguration exercise’?”

The rest of the Deltas could only opaquely stare at Hayes, who stood with a malevolent calm at the fore of the room. Something about this operation stank with darkness. An ONI “field observer”. A previously known special operations group. Now, Delta was being paired with this observer and this “Echo” detachment on a counterinsurgency operation with an untested UNSCSOCOM unit—

Three closely examined Hayes’s face—the officer barely maintained his face in a semblance of dignity, and though his cheeks blushed fiercely with fury, there was a wavering, uncertainty in Hayes’s eyes; Delta-Three calmly noted the detail, mentally recorded it. Something was amiss here, and it would be resolved promptly.

“That is correct, soldier.”

The warmth of the room immediately died, as if someone had pulled the plug. The voice was hyperborean, chilled, inhumane, as if forged from metal and ice, lacking of all warmth. Faces canted sharply to the doorway, where there was a familiar figure—

The Deltas rose and saluted in unison. A man clad in the formal black dress uniform of the Office of Naval Intelligence, his allegiance confirmed by the affiliation pin upon his lapel, and his authority validated by the two unmistakable brazen stars affixed upon his breast.

It was Rear Admiral Gibson, Chief of Section Three of the Office of Naval Intelligence.

Delta-Three felt his gut drain of warmth, and ice pierced his abdomen as a sickening feeling came over him.

Gibson ignored their salutes. His eyes, cold with anger, flashed back and forth, from the suddenly-erect commandoes, to Hayes, and to the young woman who still reclined in her chair, not caught up in the sudden flurry of salutes that had swept the room. Delta-Three distantly noted that such activity, paying such blatant disrespect to a flag officer, was a final act before one’s career and reputation was torpedoed.

And it was even more remarkable when Gibson mildly looked away from the woman without outward concern at her behavior.

Gibson fixed Hayes within his scathing glare. “Commander, is your team ready?”

Hayes was ramrod-straight. He answered stiffly, “Aye, Admiral.”

Gibson stared again at the woman, then strode out of the room wordlessly, leaving a forest of unanswered salutes in his wake. When he left, all the questions and defiance had been drained from the Deltas.

Hayes said finally, “We organize at 0230 hours tomorrow morning in the forward operations hangar. Get bunked and kitted.”

Seventeen years before the present day

FEBRUARY 2554 OFFICE OF THE COLONY ADMINISTRATOR NAZARETH COLONY BERYL, CARINAE-2179 SYSTEM

The night was beautiful. Administrator Aygen could only stand outside on the balcony in prostrative awe at the astral field of brilliant pinpoint lights that burned in the sky against a blanket of velvet black. Here on Beryl, the stars were so intense, so foreign from the stars in Earth’s sky. He gazed upwards in vacant wonder, wondering if Sol, Earth’s star, was one of those flaring dots of light in abeyance over Beryl’s lovely surface.

As the frosty cold bit at his flesh, Aygen’s eyes distantly observed the palette of the stars. Earth … thousands of light-years away. So far. So distant. His fingers reached towards the stars, willing himself to grasp his homeworld, to feel its familiar soil, be bathed in its comforting light.

Beryl was the most distant UNSC colony world established to date. Its funding was not primarily from the UNSC Colonization Authority, the typical funding agency for UNSC colonies. No, Beryl was a rare jewel, an exception in politics. Most of its funding and protective oversight was from Acumen Science Laboratories, the sprawling multiplanetary biomedical and paramilitary firm.

Acumen’s motives were simple—it had wanted a yonder archipelago to stash its research laboratories, partitioned away from its competitors by sheer space (tens of thousands of light-years) and nestled in an awkwardly-accessible nebula, NGC 3976.

Aygen’s motives were even more rudimentary. He wanted peace. Solace. Quiet. The War had scarcely ended a year ago, but he never forgot. He saw burning children, vaporizing pregnant mothers etched into his memory, impossible to dislodge. All the light. The fire. Mankind would never forget the War.

And now, Aygen had found his peace and quiet—a lovely floral world, months of travel even in the fastest Slipspace-enabled message skiff away from the most proximal UNSC outpost. So resplendent. The sublime world, underneath a cloak of night.

Aygen and his ten thousand colonists had landed nine months ago in a UNSC colony ship, the Cyclopean. They’d established their modest homestead at the footrest of a ridge of pristine, snow-powdered mountains, sheltered by the mountain line from transient weather hazards, marveling at the lissome reflection of the yonder star’s cyan light against the frigid snow and the glacial streams that stately worked from the mountainous summits.

His homestead, named Nazareth, had flourished, although it was still becoming self-sufficient with the Cyclopean’s continued efforts. In light of Nazareth’s initial successes, Acumen had authorized that five other homesteads be constructed on the far side of the planet. Planetary mapping teams were due next month to charter and detail the whole of the planet.

A polite rap on the door behind him broke him from his reverie.

“Come in.”

The figure that emerged from the door that ragged, his dignified graying hair an unruly mass, and his manner was tired, deprived of energy and life. There was a quiet about him—Dr. Gagne, his face perpetually somber, his eyes quiet.

Gagne too had come to Beryl for quiet, for an escape into solace. He had been a botanist on Harvest at the War’s genesis, studying how Harvest’s flora flourished underneath the world’s brilliant sun and stark humidity, modeling agricultural worlds and how they sustained their commercial agriculture. When the Covenant had burned the planet, Gagne was one of the few thousand that had managed to escape. Gagne’s wife and family had been killed.

The doctor had been continually on the run, jumping from refugee ship to freighter, escaping the path and swath of destruction carved by the invading Covenant as they tunneled through UNSC space. Gagne had no home after Harvest. After his family had been burned by Covenant plasma.

Gagne had finally found refuge on Beryl, this yonder world, an island of quiet. Aygen was in some sense glad for the aging, regretful botanist. That he had finally found his place of quiet to reflect on the War, on Harvest. He was also fortunate for Gagne’s help—the botanist, knowing Aygen’s love for the forest, when he’d sent remote probes into the nearby Nazareth foliage to search for novel plantlife, had rigged them with live camera feeds so Aygen could observe the lush wild greens as the probes wandered through the deciduous growths.

Aygen was surprised at Gagne’s unannounced appearance at his office, though—it was two-thirty in the morning, and the three behemoth crescents of Beryl’s three moons were already tracing their stately trajectories in the nighttime dark. But it was good—the night, so still. He’d never seen Gagne more at peace. The night was good.

He looked at the botanist, still standing on the doorstep. “Doctor. Please do come in.” He gestured to the office, to the balcony.

Gagne had a quiet smile on his lips, marred with a sad moue as he approached, the brilliance of the proliferous stars illuminating his dark eyes. In the center of a minor nebula, Beryl had infinitely more neighboring stars than Earth. He looked at Aygen. “Administrator, we have a solar flare. It’s breaking up communication with the Cyclopean and the five homesteads on the far side. The communications are down too—no more footage from my plant seekers.”

Aygen faintly smiled against the backdrop of the black dawn. “That’s fine, Doctor. I wasn’t observing the video feeds anyways—” He gestured wantonly towards his desk. “Paperwork has me up. Writing to Acumen to fund the mapping exploration next month for the southern continent.”

“Acumen doesn’t care about nature”, Gagne said quietly. “It’s interested in either finding novel pharmacologicals from Beryl’s plant life, or else setting up research stations somewhere on the planet.”

The administrator shrugged, willing away the thought of Acumen’s ulterior motives, which blemished his vision of Beryl’s crisp beauty. “They funded us, Gagne. I’m glad enough for that.” He nodded upwards towards the stars. “Without them, we could never have had a view like this.”

Aygen instantly regretted those words as Gagne’s eyes became silent. Around one of those stars was the blackened orb of Harvest.

Gagne’s lips curved into a desolate, sad smile. “It’s a beautiful night, Administrator. You should enjoy it.”

The botanist turned away from the balcony when there was an electronic whir, and to Aygen’s astute perception, the stars were blotting out—there was movement of black against black, camouflaged—

And before them, as if some nightmarish specter, rose a bird of prey, a mechanical predator, its wings and body the black of night, but its nose shone with the sinister crimson of arterial blood. Two pulses lanced out, and the world brightened, flickered, and dissolved as the two solitary figures crumpled against the hardwood floor.

Across the breadth of Nazareth, the night lit up with the syncopation of weapons fire.

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RESIDENTIAL MODULE TWELVE NAZARETH COLONY

“Objective Red secured.”

“Objective Green neutralized.”

The military man in black raised the microphone to his pale lips. “Copy. Regroup at sector six.” In the background was the decadent hum of curt, military affirmatives and reports.

He turned with predatory calm on his heel to stare at her, his face inhumane, ghoulish from the black and green paint scattered across it. His dark figure was lit from the brilliant starlight from the ruined door beyond.

Someone clenched her tightly. It was a familiar grip, strong and firm, but one that tremored with fear. “If you dare to touch my daughter, asshole—”

A singular report sounded, and there was a violent peal of light and pyrotechnics. She flinched away, and her world tremored.

When she realized she was alive, she was spattered with blood. A limp figure was sprawled at her feet.

There was a flurry of motion, of moving limbs and feet—she tried to scream from breathless lungs. A second peal of applause of light, and before her younger brother could even get within range of the black-clad murderer, he was dead.

She screamed, and it was a wheezy, protracted, mangled cry of fear imbued with anger.

“Suppression phase executed. Begin recovery.”

A distant voice reciprocated, “Local resistance neutralized.”

She clenched herself desperately, her nightgown, stained with crimson. The blood of her father. The blood of her brother. She looked up, tremoring in undisguised fury, but fear shimmering in her eyes. At his heavy-set, calloused hands and her scantily-clad figure—

More of the killers filed into the room with military precision, weapons at ill ease. The first one glanced at the newcomers, and gestured to her. “Take her in.”

They closed in with gloved hands, and she tried to scream as darkness smothered her, and then existence was suffocated, and then closed to black.

It was a quiet night.

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When she absently awoke, it was warm. There were many others. She hadn’t seen so many others.

Then, she fell asleep again, content.

7 -  7  -  7

As they dragged her unrelenting, twisting, struggling figure away, he tossed a glance at the black-uniformed men. “That’s the last of them. How many?”

One of the soldiers handed him a number. It was reasonable.

The man tapped his helmet communicator. “Recovery phase executed. Let’s wrap it up now.”

He watched as they were warded into the gaping maws of the carriers, and then the nighttime sky lit with new miniature suns as the vessels broke away, reaching escape velocity. He turned his eyes to the broad streets outside, where against the fast-setting concrete walls, men and children were being lined. Upon an unspoken command, soldiers waded in with rifle-mounted bayonets. There were fast, adrenaline-filled motions, and bodies collapsed, some trembling in death throes.

Other corpses were wantonly distributed across the townstead, their bodies eviscerated by weapons fire.

He waved at his soldiers, and they fell in behind him, leaving behind shattered human bodies them.

When the sun rose again over Nazareth, it shone brilliant red with the blood that had been spilled over the land that night.

One year before the present day

MARCH 2570 UNSC MERIDIAN RAYS SLIPSPACE, EN ROUTE TO MONMOUTH SYSTEM

Eleven fifteen hours. Three hours, fifteen minutes until they assembled in the forward hangar to prepare to render the operation. Yet, for the four Delta field operators aboard the Meridian Rays, sleep was elusive, slipping beyond their tenuous, frustrated grasps.

Delta-Four was on the fritz, repeatedly disassembling and reassembling his M7 submachine gun, cleaning the diopter sights, screwing and unscrewing the attachable suppressor. It was a senseless exercise. Disassembling and field-stripping guns was an activity that existed only in fiction. Playing with a gun’s integrity greatly increased the chance of a misfire.

Yet, Delta-Four’s new personal demons seemed to possess the rest.

Delta-One was beset himself as well, and instead of urging the unit to take rest in his typical leader-type personality, was on the twenty-sixth repetition of reviewing the Delta / Echo strike plan. Delta-Two was sleeplessly hunched on his bunk, his vacant eyes absently staring.

He couldn’t rid his mind of her face—those eyes, so verdant and beautiful, but so penetrating, that stare, so intrusive—the face with the delicate features and strong jaw, so haunted, so distant—He couldn’t rid his mind of her face. At times, he could see her, see her eyes as if she was standing before him. He could feel the heat of her stare, that lancing gaze…

And “Echo”. Delta-Three had pulled out all the stops, searched every classified UNSC Office of Naval Intelligence and UNSC Special Operations Command mainframe. Not a trace on any special warfare group by that name. For that matter, there wasn’t any UNSC, paramilitary, mercenary, or rebel group that had that name. Delta-Two even had root access to the NAVSPECWAR and the Marine Force Recon databases, and yet, there was a new UNSCSOCOM special warfare team being commissioned tomorrow, and no one had heard a word.

Every aspect about this operation was horribly wrong. Commander Hayes’s behavior had been pathological, so far removed from his quiet calm, the assurance of an officer well-set for a flag command and an independent command in the short future. That woman with the knowing eyes, the “ONI attaché”. This “Echo”. A “live-fire inauguration exercise”. The fact that Admiral Gibson, the Chief of Section Three, the Director of Special Intelligence, was onboard this very carrier.

And when Delta-Three had been in the presence of that woman, he had felt like he was in the presence of a higher being.

The coincidences were horribly wrong, leading to a dark nexus that he didn’t want to think—

Delta-One snapped, “Get some sleep.”