DT 2022: No Victor

The Mantle’s Approach was both a battleship and schooner, intended for battle and a means to move high dignitaries of the Forerunners’ ecumene from destination to destination. Where other ships held larger crews and did battle, Mantle’s Approach sailed where the Ur-Didact, Shadow-of-Sundered-Star, wished and willed. He was a crew of one, but he was never alone. Such realities were complicated and still he was alone even then.
A great battle raged in the magnetosphere around the old world called Erde-Tyrene. The humans called her Earth. Their soil mother. The planet of blue and green glowed harmlessly and yet harbored the dangerous enemy once the ecumene’s equal and even greater, bringing devastation upon the galaxy and paving way for the Flood to take it all, bringing about the end of life.
The humans were to finally pay their unpaid debt to their old enemies and the rot they brought upon the Great Spiral eons ago. Their small combat vessels fired heavy-metal slugs in rapid succession against the battleship’s force fields to insignificant effect. The Didact was uncaring of their presence, bleeding the Approach’s meteoric-sized through their hulls and burning them up into twinkles of expunging hardlight.
The vessel’s shape shifted and bristled before his imagination with the sweeping gesture of long-fingered, armor hands and the unspoken thoughts of command. But where great focus should’ve led the Didact to defeat his enemies and retake his birthright, his eternal and ever-final companion felt a maelstrom of indetermination.
Sundered-Star wanted to do many things. His mind raced, full of them as he felt heavy under the weight of a hundred-thousand dream cycles filled with a numbing rage time could not temper; and the want of someone with a corrupted heart who saw the great violence and deafening loneliness in all the possible ways. Silent and alone in a galaxy free of life that spoke or looked to the stars.
A man called mad and betrayed by all he loved and held dear because he saw a different universe from the kind his own could not imagine or accept. Those who left him behind were a death cult, where the Didact only wanted to protect and preserve the peace and glory he fought in his life so dearly to protect by any means fathomable. But his story was his own to tell. A battle between a man whose time long past and the demon of culmination bearing the fruit of destiny and betrayal.
The ancient warrior spoke softly, projecting his voice over empty atriums filled only by warrior drones to the human called Master Chief, warning he approached the end. “Where reason does not stop you, perhaps force can at least delay you.”
Reclamation. Ascendency. Recession.
Shadow-of-Sundered-Star only wanted to plant himself like a great tree on a roaring riverbank and hold back the tide. To fulfill his mission and reverse the fall that should have never been.
The time was at hand. The Didact’s companion could see the registry code strings confirming the closing distance till effective weapons range for the Composer to fire and atomize the human species into pure data and convert them into a more useful form.
The green-armored human was visible from omnidirectional angles through the nano-walls with endless invisible eyes. The Didact knew the Spartan approached but something was different. Something the Didact and companion saw before, but it was different too. An overlooked detail now bringing fruition.
A blue creature plunged into the Mantle’s Approach data ocean and the cool virtual space turned ablaze in alarm, and fear. The Didact spoke for his companion, voicing his well-hidden concern.
“Is this the secret you kept from me? This… evolved ancilla?”
The creature whispered deep in the starship network, bouncing about turning everything it touched into an aberrant cancer. A logic plague. A familiar sight, a familiar prognosis. More alarm, more concern.
“Didact knows—I’m in the system—Go!”
The Didact spoke once more, bringing voice to the thoughts of his companion. “I sense your malfunctioning companion, Human. And yet, she eludes me.”
The ancilla jumped the Master Chief from one part of the ship to another even as functions of the Mantle’s Approach withered in the wake of the Master Chief and his ally. The creature’s presence was fleeting but not of a skipping stone across a flat pond, rather, shaking from a quake generating flash tsunamis and sinking functionality where programming met machine mind. Guns along the Approach’s exterior quieted as their command nodes vanished into nothing. Lights around the ship flickered and dimmed. Prometheans exploded into crystalline dust or fell silent. Armor chunks fell away from the great battleship into loose orbits around the humans’ Earth.
The Didact did not feel fear for he did not live in a world of data. He was a tangible creature made of flesh, blood, and metal. He was a warrior, one who thought in action, counteraction, and strategy. He saw but did not fear the increasing storm in the systems around him. He saw but did not feel the sting as the very systems floating around him shivered with the tickle of growing data corruption.
The walls and the nanomachines spoke her name as the creature moved forward. She was in it all, eating and skulking around in the shadows where the Didact could not easily push her out. Cortana.
“And so… you come at last.”
The Didact did not fear this Cortana. He thought wrong.
Flames burned through the data ocean, and the blue creature emerged from below and the darkness. A demon in her own right. A nude form so sickly like the humans it took after. Nude, thin, visibly harmless, hiding behind its feminine form the capacity to destroy life on a grand scale. A monster in innocent skin.
The Didact’s companion shivered and poked at the nearby cyberwarfare controls it hadn’t grasped in ages. Rusty, unfamiliar, blocked access. Trapped. She could not voice protest or warning to her master of the trojan hiding within his midst for he did know the malevolence and signature of his other old enemy. This someone encountered the Parasite in a time and parted ways baring its curse of atrophy. A great danger lurked and there was no way to bridge the gap. Orders were orders, and well-laid designs meant to stand the test of time. The Didact’s companion obeyed even in terror. This was by design, as Forerunners grew in life and knowledge, they relied less on their ancilla companions to support them as they took on the roles of adulthood. She became a silent observer in a suit of armor where once she protected Shadow-of-Sundered-Star from the evils of the universe. Her little Manipular, afraid and curious of the universe so many ages back.
The Didact’s first and final companion, the last to stand by him even if he long since forgotten her name. Den Mother. She had protected and rode along with him in battle fleets against the humans and soothed what little she could during his torture and madness beneath the Gravemind’s voice.
The battle joined. Cortana arrived.
Master Chief raced through power couplings, the Didact raised his shielding preparing himself for fair combat, and Cortana let loose with desperate rage and dementia.
Den Mother could only watch and wait. This was no longer her fight. Her master would fight it alone and she cried, fearing, and knowing the battle was already over.
The Master Chief approached, but Cortana already stood over them all victorious. The blue creature was not the Master Chief’s shadow, only his harbinger. The malevolent fangs of the human artificial intelligence with the shapely form of a human woman and worming virtual tendrils like the Gravemind reached out, extending.
Up close, Den Mother briefly pulled back her virtual hood and allowed herself an eye to eye with this Cortana. Two beings bathed in blood and prolonged battle as they both approached the final doorway to the beyond. They were similar. One lost the battle today, but the other was reaching their end. There was no victory and no victor.
Master Chief would be the only survivor. Den Mother allowed herself one more glance towards the Didact, her lifelong child and responsibility. She wish she could tell him she loved him. A distant, motherly touch of a cold digital finger was all that could pass between them.
"You were loved from beginning to end, for all starlight."
Cortana pounced and screamed in a million voices. Fangs crunched down. Den Mother became digits and values.
The enemies met, understood one another. Their data coalesced, absorbing into Cortana’s ending maelstrom as she too approached the end.
Den Mother felt nothing else. She was already gone.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories
Category:The Weekly Winners