Stories from the Sigmaverse/Understanding

{|style="width:100%; color:#FFF;"
|valign="top" style="padding:5px;"|
As far as chases went, this had been a fairly spectacular one. 
Alex-A121 descended the grassy hill at a casual pace, tossing aside the spent tubes of his Jackhammer missile launcher. Ahead of him, at the end of a long, freshly-dug furrow of earth, sat the burning wreckage of a civilian shuttlecraft. It had been a hard landing, but the pilot was still alive. He had to be. 
It didn't take long for the Spartan to reach the downed craft. Its rear thrusters had been completely blown out, and as Alex approached its side door slowly clanked open. A figure fell forward onto the dirt, and the Spartan unclasped his rifle from the magnetic seals on his armour and brought it to bear. 
Before him lay a man in the distinctive black techsuit of a Spartan supersoldier, its entire left side shredded and torn. Alex took a step forward and the man looked up, revealing a bloodied face and a pair of wide, fearful eyes. 
"Kill me," he whispered, shuffling onto his knees. "Just do it."
Alex thumbed the safety off his rifle, but kept his finger off the trigger. He stared at the wounded man, who looked back at his own reflection in the armoured Spartan's red visor. The air stank of smoke.
"What are you waiting for?" the injured man rasped, keeping one hand clamped to his side. "Get it-"
"Five weeks." Alex spoke softly, but it was enough to make the man below him wince. "You run for five weeks and expect things to end quickly, Nik? You know me better than that."
Nikita Varro had been a dead man for over a month. All that remained were a few necessary formalities to seal the deal. Beneath his helmet, Alex's face was a mask of eerie calm, his hands steady and his breath even. A single movement would end things here, but this wasn't an experience worth wasting. 
Nik sighed, and shook his head. "You taking me in?"
"No."
"Then what more is there to discuss?" His voice rose. "Everyone else is dead, so why won't you pull the damn trigger?!"
"Simple." Alex lowered his weapon by a fraction. "All this is new to me, Nik. I wanted to see how this plays out."
"What?" Nik's mouth fell open in disbelief. "What the hell are you talking about?!"
"Never dealt with a real traitor before," said Alex. "So I want to do this right, for Alan and Roman and Beth and all the rest. For Blackwatch."
A trained killer since before his tenth year, Alex-A121 had never aspired to be a leader. In the SPARTAN-III Program he'd honed his skills as a tracker and a killer, but had left the decision-making to others. The war hadn't changed that outlook much, even as his company and his comrades fell around him. Even so, when the Office of Naval Intelligence chose him to lead Blackwatch, a rapid-response unit assigned to defend scientific expeditions in deep space, he'd jumped at the chance. Though his fellows - men and women of a younger Spartan generation - had taken time to adjust to taking orders from a man who knew nothing but war, they'd gotten along fine. Orders were carried out, victories were celebrated, and losses mourned. Life was simple, and good. 
Until last month.
"Alex." Nikita slowly began to rise, only to halt as the Spartan's rifle barrel followed his movement. "I said I was sorry. If I'd known how things went down, I'd have never..."
He trailed off, unable to finish his sentence. Alex's expression curled into a contemptuous sneer, and for a moment he considered ending it right there. Not yet.
Some of the blame was his. Alex, while a superb soldier by any standards, had also been easy to fool. Years of being bound to his peers in tight-knit teams had birthed a sense of innate kinship between him and his fellow Spartans, and not once had he even considered the possibility of treachery by one of his own. Especially when such treachery was brought about by the allure of money, of all things.
When their temporary headquarters was raided by several platoons of corporate mercenaries, paid by some unscrupulous company to steal Forerunner artefacts from ONI itself, Alex's thoughts had been of survival. He'd fought as he always had, only to find the rest of Blackwatch - his team - murdered. They'd died too quickly and too easily for Spartans. Nothing could have taken them by surprise. Nothing except betrayal by a man they considered their brother.
So he'd fought back. With the near-infinite resources of Naval Intelligence at his back, Alex had dismantled and destroyed the entire enemy operation by himself, and pursued the man responsible to this backwater to end things. Nothing in the past few days mattered as much as these next few moments, and he knew it. 
"Three years ago you said it was an honour to work with me." Alex broke another uncomfortably long silence. "You saved my life and I saved yours. Explain."
Knelt in the dirt before Alex, his red-streaked face lit up by the burning fuselage beside him, Nikita looked manic as his eyes lit up with realisation. His killer didn't understand why he'd betrayed him. He couldn't. It was a strange naivete that only someone as broken as a SPARTAN-III could possess, but there it was. 
"I had an offer made to me." Nikita stared unblinkingly into Alex's visor, pleading wordlessly. "We were talking millions, here. I was proud to be a Spartan - hell, I still am - but who would've noticed if that cargo had gone missing all the way out here? Even you-"
A burst of gunfire rang out in the clearing. Nikita's body toppled sideways into the dirt, blood pouring from the fresh hole through one eye socket. 
Alex blinked, and stared at the body for some time. Despite everything, the anger hadn't come to him. He'd felt it before, as he'd slaughtered countless Covenant across multiple worlds, and as he'd snuffed out rebels and terrorists on almost as many. But not now.
Betrayal was new. Killing a Spartan was new. Alex had pulled the trigger more out of disgust for what Nikita had become than anything, and he wasn't entirely sure why. Stowing his weapon away, the Spartan turned his back on the corpse and slowly walked away. Others would pick up the pieces, and he'd move on.
Category:Sigmaverse Stories
Category:Sigmaverse PW