Seashells

The beach. Stray visited it only twice. Strange, then, that he remembered the beach at all. He didn’t even remember the planet’s name. It was just one more garden world littering the frontier, the kind with a few scattered settlements but nothing in the way of local law enforcement. The perfect place for a smuggling ship like the Chancer V to nestle down and disappear for a few days.
“Come on,” Gavin Dunn said. He practically dragged Zoey off the ship. “I have something I want to show you two.”
He did that thing where he pretended they were a family instead of a criminal gang. It rubbed Stray the wrong way, especially when Gavin lumped him in with Zoey. He hadn’t endured all those years on Onyx, the augmentations, Mamore, countless battles with the Covenant and UNSC and anyone else with a gun on the frontier just to be treated like a kid alongside the runty redhead with a bad attitude. That happened a lot these days. So Stray strapped on his armor and loaded up an assault bag full of weapons just to remind Gavin what the score was and kept saving his life on a daily basis.
The armor and weapons were a mistake. They’d set down in a dry forest on a hot day. Gavin led them on a five klick march down a nondescript path. Zoey complained every step of the way. The internal cooling system inside Stray’s battered SPI picked that day to malfunction. Ten minutes into the hike and he was practically swimming in his armor. He gritted his teeth and kept his mouth shut while Zoey whined about her aching feet.
The complaining didn’t last long. When they finally cleared the forest and arrived atop a long stretch of sandy dunes, Zoey gaped speechlessly at the beach spread out before her. Rocks and shells littered the sands while a vast, rolling ocean extended out to the horizon.
Gavin beamed. “I’ll bet you’ve never seen something like this before.”
“Only on Waypoint,” Zoey muttered. There hadn’t been much in the way of standing water on Venezia’s farmlands. She glanced at her dirty boots, suddenly embarrassed by all her complaints.
Gavin unzipped his backpack. He’d packed what passed for swimwear on a run-down freighter: three sets of tattered jumpsuits. “No sense standing around. It’s time you got to feel a real wave.”
Zoey wasted no time stripping off her grimy coveralls and throwing on the smallest jumpsuit. She and Gavin were soon racing across the beach, leaving Stray to unload his cumbersome armory on the wind-swept dunes. Unlike Zoey he knew exactly what a beach was. Onyx had plenty of beaches, most of them artificial. ONI terraformed entire regions to simulate the diverse battlefields they’d throw their Spartans into. Stray remembered long nights spent shivering alongside Cassandra and the rest of Team Jian as they were forced to stand in the surf up to their necks while coarse salt water scraped their skin raw. He looked out at the beach and saw exactly where the drill instructors would place gun positions to strafe platoons of gasping ten-year-olds staggering ashore on an amphibious assault test.
He watched Zoey kicking up waves in the surf, more delighted than she’d been in months. Her happiness sent an ugly wave of envy coursing through Stray’s chest. Even after all she’d been through, she could still enjoy the galaxy’s mysteries with a sense of wonder. All he ever saw were new battlefields bristling with threats and cruel memories.
“C’mon, Stray!” Zoey floated waist-deep in the water. “Get down here!”
Gavin laughed and vanished beneath the waves. It only occurred to Stray later that it was the happiest the captain had been in months. He’d waited for just the right moment to spring this wondrous scene on them both. When Stray finally stripped off his armor and waded into the surf, Gavin sprang up and splashed water into his face.
Zoey practically floated back to the ship. She’d collected a pack full of the strange shells scattered across the beach. “I heard you can hear music in these,” she announced with a girlish enthusiasm Stray never expected from her. “See?” She pressed one shell to her ear and offered another to Stray.
He gingerly held the shell up and for a moment he actually believed he heard strains of watery music amidst a distant ocean’s rolling waves.
Gavin watched it all with a weary smile. “This is a beautiful galaxy. We’re going to come back here a lot. I promise.”
But they never did come back—at least, Gavin and Zoey didn’t. A year later Stray stood on that very beach while Covenant warriors—his warriors—dug in along the sandy dunes. The battlecruiser Soul Ascension loomed over the ocean, blotting out the sun and casting its grim shadow across the beach. There were Forerunner relics buried on the sea floor. Jul ‘Mdama had dispatched the Kru’desh Legion and its newly instated human commander to retrieve them.
“The mining drills will start up along the coast here and here…” Tuka ‘Refum droned on about drill placements while Ro’nin and a gang of Kig-Yar barked orders to Unggoy labor crews. The Kru’desh would spend the next week tearing the once-pristine beachhead apart. The coastline’s destruction bought them a cargo bay’s worth of discarded Forerunner metals.
This pleased the Didact’s Hand. His Prometheans needed the scrap to repair their battle-worn chassis.
Stray stepped away from the command team. He plucked a shell from the beach with his left hand—now an unfeeling prosthetic—and absently pressed it to his ear. Even with the ocean just meters away, he heard nothing. Whatever music he might have once imagined was long gone. He looked into the surging waves and tried to remember Zoey and Gavin splashing in the surf. He saw only a team of Sangheili planting a set of blasting charges.
“Commander?” Tuka called. “Is something wrong?”
“No.” Stray’s hand became a fist. He let the crushed shell fall to the beach. He had a week’s worth of mining operations to plan, seismic readings to report, and a new batch of condemned warriors to break in. This was no time to lose himself in pointless reminiscing. “Nothing’s wrong.”
He lied better every day. Sometimes he even fooled himself. Overhead the Soul Ascension’s ventral beam warmed a blast that would leave the land burned and the ocean boiling.
Category:The Weekly