Comfortable?

I remember my first day of basic training. I was thrown out of my comparatively idyllic life into cold, hard reality. I was broken down, into my pure basic components, and reformed. Remade. Refashioned into a tool. A tool of death. I was molded into a soldier, or at least, trained in the use of a blaster rifle. In those days, I could recall terrible homesickness, and worries that my whole life would move further away from my hopes, my ambitions, and my dreams. However, it did not exactly take me in an undesirable direction. Most certainly a different one, but not inherently unwanted. I was shipped out and I saw a vast expanse of the Cosmos. I saw worlds perhaps no Erdellian had been on before. I took, into my lungs, air never before breathed by an Erdellian. I walked across fields foreign to anything in the Empire. I saw cities no Erdellian engineer had ever dreamt up before. And I met peoples that were totally unfamiliar to the Erdellian Empire. The many marvels of Creation humbled me. I was in awe, as if I was some child watching a riveting action-adventure narrative in the cinema.
I stood in this city, on the Human homeworld of Earth. I had campaigned with the 200th Army and the 14th Cosmic Battleforce for almost two years now, and was further from Zond that I cared to think about. This certainly was not Lusia. However, the urban environs felt… not entirely dissimilar. The clamoring, the mechanical droning, the smells of cooking meat that seemed to perpetually hang in the air of this city. I believe it was called “New York.” So here I stood, before a statue of a Human soldier and a Sangheili soldier, their weapons aside, grasping their right hands together, in a gesture of reconciliation. The statue was made of marble, that nigh-eternal stone substance with a color mimicking the lofty clouds orbiting the Divine Twins. By now I had some working knowledge of some Human dialects, and a basic understanding of Sangheili, both written and spoken. And fortunately for me, there was a plaque written in both a Human language and High Sangheili, so in this instance I was able to comprehend the writing:
This memorial marks the occasion when, on February 8th, 2553, the Unified Earth Government and the Swords of Sanghelios signed a peace treaty, terminating hostilities between the two nations and establishing relations with one another. This historic act symbolizes the first time in Earth history where the people of that world befriended an intelligence beyond it. Let neither Human nor Sangheili forget the bond and friendship that grew out of the blood and carnage of the past, and may that past never repeat itself between these two species.
I stared, with eyes shielded from the midday sun behind sunglasses, at the two figures grasping one another. The Sangheili naturally towered over the Human, although the Human stood strong, unshaken, upright, a face apparently of firm resolve upon him. I simply found the whole dynamism between the two figures depicted highly intriguing, and I could not really bring myself to look away, until the others came.
First came the Human, who said, “I was present when they dedicated this memorial, you know. It was quite the pomp and circumstance.” The Human, whose name was Maksim Nestorenko, stood upright, his hands behind his back, as he looked up at the statue, the brim of his peaked cap blocking some of the sunlight. Aside from a wisp of hair growing from his scalp and parted to the side, his head was shaved. He also had thick facial hair: a moustache, I believe it was called.
“I did not have the pleasure of attending, I am afraid,” said the Sangheili, who followed. This Sangheili had a carbine of Covenant design carried on a latch on his back. He spoke softly and profoundly, and seemed quite careful with his words, which had, at least to me, an air of wisdom about them. He was called Kai ‘Kalar.
“There was much controversy back then about this alliance,” said Nestorenko.
“There is much controversy about this alliance today,” added ‘Kalar.
“Mmm. Much time will be needed for these wounds to heal. Time and effort.”
“Indeed, the injuries inflicted upon your species were numerous.”
I looked at ‘Kalar when he said that. I just looked at him. And… I felt insulted. As a student of history, I know of the bloodied past of All-Erdellia and the Covenant, if the propaganda of the Empire had not already iterated it, which would be a virtual impossibility. Every Erdellian for centuries was touched by the specter of bloody war with the Covenant, whether there was an actual conflict or not. For centuries we had lived in nigh-perpetual fear of a full-scale Covenant invasion, similar perhaps to the thoughts of the Covenant, who perhaps likewise feared an Erdellian onslaught. And yet here this Kai ‘Kalar was, speaking to this Human as if he was a foe of a stature surpassing All-Erdellia. As if he was the object of his greatest fears, his most perilous obstacles. Who is he? Who is this man? I do not know him. Yes, I know his name, but who is he? Where did he come from? What are his merits, his deeds? I certainly do not know. And here this Sangheili speaks to the Human, to Nestorenko, in platitudinous conciliatory tones, as if he treaded upon the Human’s vegetable garden in a drunken stupor, and returned the next day with a fistful of coins as recompense.
But as I prepared to open my mouth, I dwelled upon the situation more. Who am I to speak on such things? Who am I to judge what is right or wrong, up or down, the focus of a particular story or its periphery? I, being Erdellian, have never heard of a Human before a few years ago. What was a Human to me then? What is one to me now? Indeed, the Human homeworld, this planet I stood on at this time, was thousands upon thousands of light-years away from Krett, or Zond, or Parvo, or any other Erdellian colony. We are not familiar with the Humans. And yet here I am, an Erdellian, looking down upon Humans like an Emperor, or a god. What foolishness I had sunk into, the unmistakable Erdelocentrism. Admittedly, as an Erdellian, one should expect this. I have read the textbooks given to us in the schools. I know of the histories of my people, much of it anyway. I know of the struggles the Erdellian scientists of past days when they worked day and night to reverse-engineer Forerunner technology, sometimes by brute force, and sometimes with dangerous results. And yet to hear these rumors that the Humans do it so effortlessly, how they manipulate Forerunner technology with virtually no struggle, no questions. As if the Forerunners were expecting them.
As if the Forerunners had Humans in mind to take their place.
The Forerunners.
It is them. It is they who should be laid to blame for all this bloodshed. All this chaos. All this suffering. Was it not their technology the Covenant adopted? Was it not their technology that allowed for such immense destruction, for the worlds whose names Humans utter in weary melancholy, worlds that many fled, worlds that had turned to ash and glass from Covenant plasma beams?
“And,” spoke ‘Kalar, who, without warning, looked to me. I was flustered, and before I could even open my mouth, I was silent, waiting for him to finish his thought. “Humans were not the first to suffer attacks upon them by the Covenant.”
I stared at him, thinking of the many ways to lay plainly how injurious the Covenant has been to my people, my nation, my species. How many Erdellian cubs lie in mass graves and mausoleums? How many Erdellian villages and towns and cities were demolished, razed to the ground? How many worlds did they glass, and we had to terraform back to life, only for them to glass again in another war? How many sons and daughters, fathers and mothers, how many of them went to defend our Empire, only to never return? The terror of the Covenant is known to more than simply the Humans, to more than even us Erdellians. The Yonhet. The Zarids. The Yggolites. The Reblans. They have all felt the sting of war with the Covenant.
And I dwelled upon this. And then I realized, that any rant I would utter would be most tactless.
“Indeed,” I said simply, trying to have my single word be the seed of fruitful thoughts in the minds of both ‘Kalar and Nestorenko. I did not know, and still do not know, if it worked.
“As a warrior, I was duty-bound and honor-bound to follow the orders given to me. I carried them out to the best of my ability. All of my companions, and indeed all of my countrymen, were the same. We had a duty to perform. Be it against a Human or Erdellian, we had a duty.”
Nestorenko glared at ‘Kalar. “And I had a duty to save as many people as I could,” said the Human in a slightly bitter tone. “There was more than one instance where I spent consecutive days fighting the Covenant, breaking engagement and then re-engaging. The exhaustion on everyone’s face at the end was palpable. And I saw the throngs of refugees made whenever a planet was glassed. All those people lost everything to their name, with nothing but the clothes on their backs left. Nearly every Human knows someone who died in his war. Nearly every one. Do you even comprehend the scale a war needs to be to affect literally an entire species?”
“It is a scale that is the norm in this Universe, Captain,” I said. “Whether we like it or not, each living species competes with others for its continued existence. The nonsentient lifeforms do it with fangs and claws. We do it with rifles and missiles.”
“I don’t wish to live in a Universe where war is not only the norm, it’s the recommended course of action” quickly answered Nestorenko. “I’ve seen what war does to the uninitiated. It’s pure trauma. The looks on those people’s faces are images that’ll haunt me. The children. The children… many of them disembarked evacuation ships alone.”
“War is war,” I replied, admittedly in a neutral, and thus apparently cold, manner.
“And that is why I do not advocate for war. Not now, not ever. Mine is a job that is a necessary evil.”
“A soldier who resents war,” uttered ‘Kalar. “If that is not wisdom, then we are all fools.”
“A soldier does not fight because he hates what is in front of him. He fights because he loves what is behind him.”
I narrowed my gaze as Nestorenko when he said that, working hard to suppress a most tasteless chuckle at that utterly banal platitude I would expect to find on a motivational poster in an armchair general’s room. “I fought because I was told to,” I noted. “Before I was mobilized, I was a student at an educational institution.”
“Did you manage to complete your studies before you took up arms?” asked ‘Kalar.
I moved my head in the negative. “Soon, though,” I added, briefly raising my eyebrows for emphasis. ‘Kalar grunted and nodded in acknowledgement.
“Do you ever think about going home?” asked Nestorenko.
“At times, yes. Sometimes the homesickness was terrible, while other times I felt more comfortable.”
“Comfortable?” asked ‘Kalar.
“Yes, I think so. Well… hm. How can I describe it? It… it’s as if I’m… ‘at home’ here. And by ‘here’ I mean ‘in the Army.’ I feel like I have purpose now. Like I’m doing something useful with my life. As if…” I stopped. I felt like I had already said too much. “Well, you know.”
The two men stared at me, perhaps with more questions than answers. I dare not reciprocate their eye contact, and simply stared at the statue.
Category:The Weekly