Coming Apart

“Did you hear the news?”
Redmond Venter stood in a cramped command center overlooking the Second Vanguard’s latest staging area on Talitsa. His soldiers hurried to load supplies onto a squadron of waiting Pelicans beneath a cold, grey sky.. A bitter wind blew through Irbit’s tall buildings. Venter pulled his coat tighter around him.
“Sir? Did you hear the announcement?” Lieutenant Mohsin Shah stood just a few paces away. The young officer’s dark eyes bored into his commander. The rebels in the command center made a poor effort to hide their interest in Venter’s response.
Gunfire drifted through the open window. Too close and organized to be a firefight. Another execution, then. Talitsa was crawling with UNSC holdouts and Syndicate agents too stupid to realize the Second Vanguard wasn’t playing by their rules anymore. A few dozen were rounded up and shot every day.
“I heard.” It did Venter no good to pretend otherwise. The news from Meridian was all over the airwaves.
“And do you think it’s true?” another rebel asked. “Or just some ONI trick?”
“It’s true. Or at least they think it’s true. ONI wouldn’t fake something like this.”
Several officers whooped. Even more offered grim smiles. Mohsin—always more perceptive than his peers—watched his commander intently. More gunshots from below. A Pelican lifted off vanished into Irbit’s urban jungle. Venter gritted his teeth. A sharp pang of guilt drove through his gut like a knife.
“The Master Chief is dead!” someone exulted from the far end of the room. “Someone finally put ONI’s attack dog down!” Several more cheers from the assembled rebels.
“Quiet!” Venter snapped. The noise died at once. He looked away from the officers and back out the window. He didn’t want to see the embarrassed shame on his soldiers. Too much of that already ate his own soul.
“Quiet,” he repeated. “The Master Chief is dead. That doesn’t help our efforts to liberate this planet by a single inch. Don’t waste your energy on pointless trivia. I trained you all better than that.”
“But sir,” one officer protested. “That bastard killed—”
“Hundreds of our brothers and sisters. Maybe thousands. And during the war he saved tens of millions. More than any of us ever managed to save. He was the enemy. But he was human. It’s a dangerous galaxy out there for humans. It just got even more dangerous. The Master Chief was more interested in killing Covenant than he was in killing us.”
Disappointed silence hung over the command center. Venter didn’t blame them. They needed something to celebrate. He’d robbed them of the perfect opportunity. But he wouldn’t have them celebrating the death of a war hero. Plenty of UNSC “heroes” deserved to die. The Master Chief wasn’t one of them. A man like that—a true Spartan—deserved to be pitied and mourned.
A true hero. A man who ought to represent everything right and good about humanity. Even now Venter remembered standing in awe of the news reports during the war. He’d shrugged off the cold cynicism of ONI black ops and bought into the myth—the hope—that a man like the Master Chief would turn the war around. That the world could be a brighter place after all.
That foolish hope felt so distant now. The young man who let the metal-plated heroes steal his breath was long dead. Now the hero who brought such hope was gone as well. Consumed by a galaxy that had no time for hope or heroes. A galaxy determined to be nothing more than a cold, cruel void where the strong crushed the weak underfoot.
Another round of gunfire. Another firing squad. Redmond Venter despised this miserable galaxy and the things it made him do.
“The Master Chief is dead,” he said, loud enough for everyone in the room to hear. “He was a hero. He was a good man. A decent man. And the United Nations warped him just like they warp all good and decent men. They used him and now they’ll throw him aside and replace him. Everything is replaceable to them. Everything is a commodity. They’ll say their words and pretend to care. And in a year they’ll forget about him. But we won’t. We’ll remember who he was and what they did to him. And we’ll give him justice.”
Venter swept from the room. He couldn’t face his officers anymore. He didn’t know if a single one believed him. They probably couldn’t even understand him. He hardly even understood himself at all these days. The Master Chief was dead. Another part of his past slipped away into the void.
Outside, the firing squad released its next volley.
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