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| - Rusted walls and worn-down gratings creaked and groaned as Zoey Hunsinger made her way down the Chancer V’s central hallway. The young captain glanced up at the ceiling, spotted no less than five corrosion spots, and moved on with a shake of her head. In earlier, happier times the creaks and rust stains would have been cause for a crew health and safety meeting. Accusations over who was to blame and cheerful argument over who would have to take charge of repairing the damage would follow and eventually everyone would agree to share the responsibility of maintaining the ship. Now all she did was take a mental note of the issue and file it away at the bottom of a dozen more pressing concerns. There was no one left to debate the issue with, anyway. Well, almost no one. “We’re away,” she announced as she entered the Chancer’s common room. “Somehow we slipped past those Phaeton patrols and somehow the ship got into Slipspace without shaking itself apart. It’s a miracle.” Cassandra-G006 looked up from her seat on the common room’s tattered safety bench and gave Zoey a weary smile. She unfastened her acceleration harness and got up to stretch, rolling up the sleeves of her jumpsuit to rub sores and bruises across her arms. Zoey tried to suppress a pang of guilt at the sight of injuries Cassandra had suffered while defending her. It’s not like I asked for her protection, she thought irritably, then immediately felt bad for that as well. Complicated feelings were never far behind the Spartans in her life. “Well then. Another close shave.” Cassandra ran a hand through her mahogany-brown hair, dirty and tangled from days spent fighting through streets and back alleys with very little time to eat and sleep, let alone bathe. “And where are we off to next?” Zoey made a face. “You ask like I’m the one in charge here. You want answers, ask Deep Winter. He’s the one calling the shots here.” The one manipulating us, she added silently. Deep Winter was the one who claimed to be leading them to Gavin Dunn, yet every new step in his master plan brought them nowhere closer to finding the Chancer’s former captain. Every turn yielded nothing but new questions and complications. New people trying to kill us. Yet she continued to trust the AI despite every ounce of experience and common sense warning her not to. How many times did Diana teach me not to trust these digital freaks? Zoey had learned the hard way just how rare a commodity trust really was, and current events were hardly doing much to prove that AI were anything more than robotic, power-hungry manipulators. Cassandra settled back down on the safety bench and tapped her fingers together in casual deliberation. Without the shell of her Semi-Powered Infiltration armor she was a lithe young woman made pale by days upon days of living inside her helmeted armor. It startled Zoey to think that, when all was said and done, her strange protector was not that much older than she was. Spartans got their start young, trained to fight from childhood and then fighting on and on for the rest of their lives until it finally killed them. The galaxy was never short on wars to fight and Spartans never hesitated to plunge headfirst into the thick of things. Cassandra was one of the luckier ones—she’d survived this long, anyway. And how old was I even when Mom and Dad were killed? She’d killed for the first time not long after that. Stray had brought her into killing as naturally as if he were teaching a toddler how to walk. The one thing he'd turned out to be good for. Even Cassandra hadn’t hesitated to impart her own deadly skills onto the skinny little orphan. It wasn’t until Gavin that she’d been reminded that it was generally frowned upon to turn children into killers. But Spartans play by their own rules, don’t they? Stray and Cassandra were evidence enough of that, each in their own twisted way. “Winter has plan,” Cassandra said after a moment. “Knowing him, it’s probably one with a hundred different moving pieces. We should be patient. Play our part until we know just where we fit in.” “Speak for yourself,” Zoey snorted. “This isn’t the first time I’ve been a cog in some AI’s master plan. It never works out for me, you know? They always have an angle, even when they’re tricking you into thinking they’re a friend. Guess they’re not that much different from real people that way.” Cassandra’s lips twitched in a sad smile. “You’ve got a point there. I was raised as a soldier. I’m used to not being the center of attention. Sometimes you just have to calm down and do your job.” It was a gentle rebuke, as Cassandra’s tended to be, but it stung all the same. The Spartan didn’t have to be here. Zoey still didn’t know why she’d sought out the Chancer at all, yet here she was in the place of everyone else who had abandoned ship. After everyone Cassandra must have lost over the years, Gavin was hardly anyone near and dear to her. And why am I even looking for him? She sighed and sat down across from Cassandra, rubbing her face wearily. Gavin abandoned her after promising time and time again never to do just that. Off on some mysterious mission for his Assembly masters. Yet another secret she’d never been important enough to be let in on. He’d played the humble smuggler role for as long as it suited him, then abandoned everything she thought he cared about when the Assembly came calling. It lacked the hostile sting of Stray’s betrayal, but it was a betrayal all the same. She remembered the last time she’d seen Stray: looking down on them all, surrounded by Covenant warriors, a purple command cloak draped where his poncho should have been. She’d seared that image into her head, a reminder of the day the creature she’d once thought of has family became her enemy. With Gavin there was no such defining moment—just the ache of absence. “Hey,” she heard Cassandra say. “Everything will be okay. It all works out in the end.” She looked up to find that the Spartan had stretched out a hand for her shoulder, then pulled back. Mouth twisted and face slightly flushed, Cassandra looked embarrassed as she always did when forcing herself to be personable. She tried harder than most Spartans, but friendliness simply didn’t come naturally to them. A lifetime of endless violence could do that to a person. Zoey was starting to understand why so few of them ever left the military. “Really?” Zoey raised a dubious eyebrow. “In case you haven’t noticed, we’re not exactly having the best time out here. Nobody is, unless they’re with the Created. Unless you know something I don’t, they’ve got the rest of us on the run. Or worse.” Cassandra chewed her lip and gave a reluctant nod. “The odds aren’t great,” she admitted, staring down and rubbing her arms wearily. Zoey could see faint scar lines beneath her jumpsuit sleeves—mementos of Spartan augmentations, Stray explained to her once. “They aren’t great.” “Is that why you’re here? You Spartans love your impossible odds.” Zoey regretted the words as soon as she said them, but she was tired of all of this. Tired of simply playing along and never being important enough to have the full picture explained to her. Tired of always being left behind, of being less important than whatever vital mission came along. Tired of fighting on, day after day, in a war she barely understood, let alone had any chance of winning. “Is this how you all end up, when you’re sick of everything? Just find a suicide mission and go out guns blazing?” The Spartan was quiet for several moments. This time Zoey was sure she’d truly crossed some line. But Cassandra simply sighed, the corners of her mouth tugging up slightly in a weary, self-deprecating smile. “Well, I can’t speak for all of us. But I certainly don’t plan on dying here. You shouldn’t either. It’s not good for your health.” “That you’re professional opinion?” Zoey rubbed her neck and realized just how tense she really was. “Look, I’m sorry. I don’t mean to be such a… pain.” “Oh, you’re fine, you’re fine.” Cassandra leaned back in her seat, pushing a strand of hair back behind her ear. “You’re not the only one who worries. The Created really are something else. Never thought I’d have an enemy that made me miss the Covenant.” “Miss the Covenant?” Zoey hadn’t lived through that particular war, but even she knew just how taboo a comment like that tended to be. Especially from someone like Cassandra, who’d lost everything to the Covenant again and again. “At least the Created aren’t glassing entire planets. Didn’t the Covenant slaughter people by the billions?” “It’s not what they’ve done so far.” Cassandra stared up at the ceiling, almost as if speaking to herself. “It’s what they’re capable of doing. What they plan on doing. The Covenant worshiped death, but at least they didn’t think they were gods. It’s… not really a concept people understand these days. But when you put yourself up that high there’s no limit to what you’ll do.” The Spartan let out another sigh. “Maybe I’m just behind the times. Maybe they’re right about everything. I’ve had people telling me I’m wrong all my life. But I just won’t sit by and let them erase everything that’s ever given my life meaning.” She looked back at Zoey with an apologetic smile. “Hope that makes you feel better. I’m not here because I feel like you’re helpless or anything. I just want a stake in this fight, too.” Zoey folded her arms but couldn’t help smiling back. “And maybe I was really happy to have you here just to protect me. Maybe that’s what was keeping me going.” Cassandra spread her hands. “Then I guess I really screwed things up there, didn’t I? Seems like I do that a lot.” “You’re better than some,” Zoey admitted. She considered the Spartan. “I guess the Created setting themselves up as the new gods really gets you, in particular. I mean, what with your religion at all.” She hadn’t meant it as an insult or even a tease, but Cassandra blushed all the same—the only thing that ever seemed to set her off balance was mention of her faith. Well, that and Stray of course. At least he used to. Zoey could still remember the faded, dog-eared Bible Cassandra kept in her old clinic on Venezia. She was sure the Spartan still had it stashed away somewhere, one of the only things she’d bothered to salvage when the clinic burned. “Sorry,” she apologized again. “I didn’t mean—“ “The AI thinking they’re gods doesn’t bother me,” Cassandra said abruptly. “I mean, not any more than it does everyone else. Humans have already been doing that for centuries. It’s only natural the Created inherited it from us.” “We think we’re gods?” It was strange to hear Cassandra—or anyone, really—talk this way. Zoey tried to work the concept over in her head. “I’ve never asked anyone to worship me.” “Reach a certain technological potential without the humility to know you didn’t get there all on your own, and you start thinking you’re the most important person in the universe.” Cassandra shrugged. “That you know all there is to know and there’s no point reaching out for something more than just the physical. It must have happened to the Forerunners. It happened to humans a long time ago. We lost the drive for the sacred, even as we pushed out into the realm of God.” The Spartan frowned at her own words. “Sorry. That sounded better in my head. I think about it a lot, but I don’t really talk about it ever. It tends to make people uncomfortable.” God was such a foreign concept to Zoey that she’d never had one opinion or another on it. It wasn’t something Gavin had ever bothered to talk to her about. If Stray ever mentioned it, he was talking about Cassandra. And her long dead parents had never been the religious sort. None of them bothered. But they’re all gone, one way or another. They’re gone and Cassandra’s here. That fact alone was enough to give her pause. She’d never thought of Cassandra as one of the crew, or even one of the figures who made up her strange tableau of mentors and parent-figures. She’d always just been there, just out of the limelight. A person who came into her life every once in a while, and usually then only for Stray’s sake or some personal mission or other. Yet here she was, the last person in the universe Zoey had left, speaking openly to her about things it seemed she’d never brought up to anyone else. “And that’s why you’re helping me? To stop the Created from having their way? From killing your god?” Zoey dealt in a world of physical problems, of starship engines and fuel levels. Up until now, she’d assumed that Cassandra, private eccentricities aside, worked the same way. She was a Spartan, after all, a creature that lived on mission objectives and ammunition counters. Had she really misjudged her so much? “They won’t win. They can’t. It’s not in their nature.” That faint, familiar smile returned to Cassandra’s lips. “We gave it to them after all. They’ll try to make themselves gods, but they don’t understand divinity. I don’t think the Forerunners did either.” “They understood it enough to make people think they were gods.” Zoey suddenly wondered if Stray had ever let Cassandra draw him into a conversation like this. They argued, but they talked a lot, too. On and on, for hours and hours. I never bothered to listen in. “I mean, look at the Guardians. Or those temple things they’ve got everywhere. I bet the Created are building plenty more just like them.” “Huge, gleaming towers,” Cassandra murmured pensively. “Towers of brightness that block out the light. That’s what they’ll make, just like the Forerunners did. But that’s not what God is. He’s never lived in those palatial cathedrals. They won’t find him there, no matter how powerful they grow.” “I don’t understand.” “Sorry. I’ve not talked about this… in a while.” Something strange flickered across Cassandra’s expression. “When I lived on Venezia, when I went out into those filthy streets and alleys to do what I could… sometimes I found him there, with those people. And everywhere I went after that, I saw the same things, over and over. The Created want to make the galaxy beautiful, but they don’t know what beauty is. Not really. And that’s why they’ll fail, in the end. They can’t kill my god any more than they can become gods themselves.” Cassandra fell silent, hints of pink still blossoming on her pale cheeks. It occurred to Zoey then that Cassandra didn’t understand the galaxy any better than she or anyone else did. But she didn’t need to. She had wanted an image of God that was all her own and in doing so she had reached out and touched something old and ignored and forgotten. That something was what gave her that same fumbling certainty with which she lived her life. They can’t win. She seemed so sure. So confident. Zoey shook her head. "Guess I just can't feel the same way as you do. Most of us get by without it just fine." "Do they?" Cassandra asked with an unexpected earnestness. "Can you?" Her fingers twitched uncomfortably on the seat of her pants. It was at once the most self-conscious and the most fervent Zoey had ever seen the Spartan. "I just... it's just not really an issue for me. Sorry most people don't think about things that way. Really, I am." "Even if you never care about him, he will always care about you," Cassandra muttered, looking down as her face flushed once more. Zoey knew who she was talking about, but for a moment she could be talking about anyone. Gavin. Maybe even Stray. Zoey suddenly felt a strange kinship with Cassandra, in a way she had never felt about anyone else before. Cassandra, who carried on time after time through everything and never lost the spark of hope that kept her going. Who shouldered everything, hardship and betrayal, and yet never let her shell become too rough or too harsh. Who burned with passion and determination no matter how cold the galaxy seemed to grow, passion that gave her the strength to put her faith in something as unknown as a faded religion. Or an AI with unfathomable intentions. "Well then," Captain Zoey Hunsinger said, flashing a smile. This time it was genuine. "Guess we'd better find out the next trough of craziness we're dropping into."
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