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Part 1: The Fallen
Posted By: Bionic Pants<ZombieNinja901@gmail.com>
Date: 28 June 2006, 11:52 pm
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It was a beautiful, sunny day in Sydney, Australia. The island continent had been Earth's military base of operations since the creation of the United Nations Space Command in 2164 in response to the savage Koslovic and Frieden movements. In a war memorial park in the downtown area were stone walls engraved with thousands of names. They displayed the men lost in every war from the Rainforest Wars to the Jovian Moons Campaign, even the wars of generations ago. One particular part of the wall read "HUMAN-COVENANT WAR" boldly at the top of the slab, "2525-2552" was engraved just below that. The following list seemed massive compared to those of other wars.
In the afternoon sun, an old man dressed in civilian clothing entered the park. His once stark-black hair was now a dull gray, his prominent mustache old and frayed. His face was wrinkled and bags rested delicately beneath his eye sockets, and his dark skin had lost its reflective sheen. He was an old man, exhausted of combat and politics. He only wanted to rest now. He strolled through the park, taking time to stop shortly at each wall and scroll through the lists. He lingered at the one he was most interested in, and the same one that he had came to the park to see. The man dug in his pocket briefly and procured a cigar. He lit it with an old, scratched lighter and breathed the smoke in deeply. It curled around his mustache invitingly, yet deceptively at the same time. He coughed hoarsely. He was dying.
Presently a young man in formal lieutenant garb approached the old man. He was a business acquaintance, from a time the man wished to forget. His dark brown hair was shaved to military regulations, and his face was without a single hair. He stepped up next to the man and similarly looked to the wall. "I thought you wanted to quit? You said yourself it was a filthy habit," he said without looking over.
"That just wouldn't be like me," the old man replied with a mischievous smirk.
He began scanning the many names, finding ones that he recognized. One line read, "Private Jenkins, Anthony, KIA". He shook his head and puffed on his cigar. He also found "Private Desola, Carlos, KIA" and "Sergeant Stacker, Pete, KIA." Finally he looked at "Captain Keyes, Jacob, KIA" and sighed.
"I lost a lot of good men and women," he said wistfully.
"We all lost a lot of good people," the lieutenant replied, obviously referring to the military's loss. The old man snorted.
He continued sifting through the names when he came to his own engraved into the wall. After his name were engraved the letters "MIA". He looked over at the officer. "I thought you said they were going to have this fixed?" he said. "And that was nineteen years ago!"
"It's more complicated than you would imagine. First someone would need to fill in the engravings. When that was done, you would have an empty space. If it's left blank, it looks sloppy. If it's filled in with another name, it's a lie."
"Oh, for God's sake," the man muttered. He withdrew a pen from one of his pants pockets and wrote a letter "W" above the "M". The officer smiled.
The man checked further down the list and found another discrepancy. "Master Chief John-117 of Epsilon Eridanus system, MIA" was engraved under a section of the wall labeled "SPARTANS". He looked again at the lieutenant. "This was supposed to be fixed, too," he complained.
"I've gone over this with you before," responded the officer, somewhat annoyed. He kept his eyes on the wall. "There is no evidence of his survival. For all anyone knows, he died up there. But we can't be sure. That's the only reason he's listed as missing on this wall."
"He was on that Seraph. I took one and he took the other, and we got off that city before it went," the man insisted.
The officer sighed. "Even if that were true," he continued, "shouldn't someone have found the body by now? We searched the surrounding area and all the wreckage extensively and no remains were ever found—"
The old man interrupted him. "He aint a body and he aint remains. He's a person," he said disgustedly.
"Ok, we never found him in any of the wreckage or in space. No craft was ever found on the moon or the Earth's surface. It's been twenty years. If he were alive, shouldn't we have found him by now?"
The old man did not respond. Instead he took a long drag of his cigar and blew it out slowly. He gestured to the section where "SPARTANS" was engraved. "Damn fine men and women, those ones," he said reminiscently.
The lieutenant glanced at the lists below. "That reminds me of why I came for you in the first place," he began. "My superiors at ONI are looking into a new project. They want to know if you'd be interested."
"You know I'm retired," the man replied shortly.
The officer continued, seemingly unaware of his objection. "We're toying with the notion of a Spartan III project."
The cigar nearly escaped the grasp of the man's lips when he choked on the lieutenant's words. A pair of raspy coughs sent puffs of smoke into his eyes, stinging them a bit. "What for?" he demanded once his fit had passed and the cigar was firmly in place once more. "The Flood are all dead. The Halos are gone. The Covenant's been overthrown. The ones that are left have made peace with us," he argued.
"Law enforcement, mainly. If they were that efficient against the aliens, imagine their ability to keep humans in line! Crime problems will be nonexistent!"
The man sneered angrily. "You suits don't get it." He blew a stream of smoke out his nostrils. "You just don't get it."
"Get what?" he said, almost uninterested.
The man plucked the cigar from his mouth and stared into the names engraved on the wall. "Son, I was trained to kill. I learned how to pull a trigger and break a bone, and when I was good and ready, for that matter." He licked his lips. "But they, they grew up killing. They learned to play catch with hand grenades, hopscotch with obstacle courses, snowball fights with training weapons. They had no childhood. Even what they'd already learned was wiped clean when you stole them."
The lieutenant gazed ahead. He opened his mouth to say something.
"And that wasn't enough," he continued. "You bastards had to play God. You had to change them, make them better. You stole their humanity from them. You made them machines. You told them what to kill and how to kill it, and they did it without a second thought. You made them take what they knew about war and throw out the rest. You killed them." He was silent for a moment. "I didn't realize that until after the war." His lips clamped shut on the cigar and he puffed anxiously.
The officer did not say anything. He suddenly averted his eyes from the list of Spartans and looked down at his polished boots.
"You said you wonder why no one has found the Master Chief?" asked the old man. The lieutenant looked at him inquisitively. "Maybe," he continued, his eyes locked on a single name etched into the wall, "it's because some people don't wanna be found." With that, he took a last drag of his cigar, dropped it to the ground, crushed it under his foot, and delivered to the wall the crispest salute he could muster in his old age. He turned and strolled onto the avenue, his eyes faraway with memories of people he once knew.
The lieutenant stood shortly with his face to the ground before looking up at the wall again. He scanned it briefly, but looked away again when he saw the word "SPARTANS" engraved as though it were on someone's heart. He turned and left the fallen to rest.
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