The Refinery
Cosmodrome, Old
Russia, Earth
With a sudden rush, I was back. Instinctively, I crouched to get my bearings. Resurrections are always like this. You tend to come back without the memories of
the last few moments before your ‘death’, so it makes for a few anxious moments
as you try to figure out what’s going on.
The chatter of Garm’s auto rifle told me that we were still in the thick
of things. My ghost was there, floating
in my face, hurling admonishments.
“This time please
try to keep your head down!” the tiny machine snapped.
I pushed him away with my left hand and checked the pulse
rifle’s magazine. Full. As I stood, I became aware of the guttural
and unmistakable sound of Fallen speech.
Dregs. Very close. Like, shotgun close. Fallen are generally humanoid in appearance,
but with four eyes and four arms. They
wear masks that supply the Ether they need to breathe. The motion tracker in the upper left of my helmet’s
HUD showed them just on the other side of the broken wall that currently sheltered
me from the firefight raging nearby. I
couldn’t help smiling as I quickly swapped the rifle for the shotgun. As their name implies, Dregs are the lowest
of the Fallen society. Dregs are forced
to have their lower set of arms removed and the stumps fitted with docking caps
until they prove themselves worthy.
These Dregs wouldn’t be earning those arms. Or anything else. I crept forward a few meters and crouched
again. Wait for it. Wait.
The three Dregs scurried around the corner, looking back
in the direction they’d come and they nearly ran into me. The first one spotted me and began to screech
before my first slug caused his entire head to disappear. I quickly racked another shell into the
chamber, swung the barrel slightly to the left and took the head off the second
Dreg. There’s something deep inside me
that loves the way their heads always seem to... vaporize.
Like smoke wafting out of the empty neck hole. I’ve never asked about the physiology that
makes it so. I don’t really care. And I know I probably shouldn’t find it
funny. But I do. The third Dreg had closed the distance
between us and was right up in my face.
It earned him a ferocious punch.
When Titans punch things, they often just disintegrate. Just like this fellow did, floating away in a
purple mist.
The firing had stopped now, so I paused to replace the
three shells I’d fired. My helmet comm
crackled slightly. “Adam? Are you okay?”
“Yep,” I replied. He
couldn’t see it, but I smiled at my ghost.
“Nothing my little buddy here couldn’t fix.”
Scout rifle at the ready, Kat stepped cautiously around
the same corner from which the Dregs had emerged only moments before. She still had difficulty with the idea that
Guardians could be revived after death.
It wasn’t often that one of us went down, but when it happened she was
always concerned.
Despite the fact that her helmet concealed her face, her
body language clearly conveyed her relief when she saw me standing upright and
breathing. It’s better that she wears
the helmet, because her light blue skin is simply mesmerizing to look at. Kat is Awoken, a species that evolved from
Humans who fled Earth after the Collapse.
Most of them have blue or purple skin that shimmers with some kind of
energy. They tend to be quite...
appealing to look at. Not that I’m
interested in that. You know. She’s my teammate, after all.
“What hit me?” I asked as I stowed the shotgun and went
back to the pulse rifle.
“Would you feel better if I said it was a servitor?” she
asked. The tilting of her head told me
that she was teasing.
“But it wasn’t,” I muttered. “Was it?”
“Nope. It was a
Dreg.”
Thankfully, my own helmet hid the look on my face, not to
mention the reddening that I knew accompanied the feeling of shame at having
been killed by a creature that was aptly named for the lowest of the low. Not that death was a good thing by the hand
of any other enemy, but you know... It
was a Dreg. Damn it.
I prodded one of the headless corpses with a foot. “Red and gold armor,” I observed, changing
the subject. “Definitely the House of
Devils.”
She clapped a hand on my heavy shoulder plate. “C’mon Titan, let’s get this done and get out
of here.”
I followed Kat about fifty meters to where Garm-12 was crouched,
peering into a large hole blown into the side of a building. Kat, Garm and I are one of many Fireteams
that operate under the guidance of the Future War Cult. We’d been on a routine patrol of the area,
when we received new orders dispatching us to investigate reports of activity
in the Cosmodrome’s Refinery. This
Cosmodrome and others like it, once served as launching points for Humanity’s
effort to colonize the galaxy. Now, it
was little more than a ghost town, littered with broken technology.
“Our quarry lurks within,” Garm stated, without looking
away from the building’s ragged new entrance.
Under his helmet, I knew that his glowing yellow eyes would be flicking
back and forth; scanning... probing... analyzing.
Garm-12 is an Exo, a race of artificial beings created
late in Humanity’s Golden Age. They’re
living machines with thoughts, feelings and personalities. Many believed that the War Cult was
originally responsible for their creation, but I’m not sure anyone can really
substantiate that. It does seem likely,
though, given that nearly every Exo I’ve known has been somehow aligned with
the War Cult. Lakshmi-2, the public face
of the War Cult, is an Exo. Fully
armored, you’d never know that a Guardian was an Exo, until he or she removed
the helmet. Their faces are angular and
robotic in appearance, with plasteel alloy skin and glowing mechanical eyes. If I’m being honest, it’s a little creepy
until you get used to it.
Garm stood. His
long blue robes fell into place and he shouldered his auto rifle. He turned to face me and appeared to be
assessing the fact that I was once again intact. “You should really learn to duck.”
Again, the helmet hid my red face. “That’s what my little pal keeps telling me,”
I mumbled, inclining my head toward the ghost hovering over my left shoulder.
“For what little good it does,” my ghost rebuked. I batted it away again. It’s a common exchange. The ghost scolds me for doing something
stupid and then I swat it away like an annoying insect.
“Shall we?” Garm asked.
He started into the building without waiting for a reply from either of
us.
***
We’ve been a Fireteam for a few months now. Before coming together, all three of us had
bounced around a bit, partnering with a number of different Guardians. This is pretty normal. In fact, some Guardians never find a ‘fit’
and continue to change companions throughout their careers. We’ve never discussed it, but I think that all
of us are pretty happy with the current arrangement.
Katrin, who we commonly address as Kat, is a Hunter. Gliding undetected through any environment,
she’s the very definition of stealth. Like
most Hunters, Kat wears light armor and a hooded cloak. Proficient with just about any weapon she
touches, Kat is especially lethal with blades and sniper rifles. It’s pretty rare that an enemy gets so much
as a glimpse of Kat before eliminates it.
Garm-12 is our Warlock.
I generally don’t even ask for any sort of explanation for the arcane
and unnatural things he’s capable of.
I’m just glad he’s on my side.
I’m a Titan.
Basically, that means I’m the guy that smashes things. Pure brute force. Compared to Garm and Kat, I don’t see myself
as particularly special. Don’t get me
wrong, I’m a Guardian, and my combat skills are well above the minimum
standards required by the Vanguard. I’m
good. But I think the other two are
simply amazing at a level that I’m not.
My teammates seem to appreciate my company, though, so I do my best to
earn my place on the team every day.
***
Garm stopped and spoke though the helmet commlink that
connected us.
“We are very close,” he said, in the flat monotone that
he normally used. “It would be best if
we exercised maximum stealth from this point.”
In other words, it was time for Kat to take the lead and
do her invisibility thing. Garm and I
would follow at a bit of a distance.
Close enough to help her if things went bad, but not close enough to
give her away. We simply didn’t possess
the same level of ‘sneaky’.
Without a word, Kat slipped forward and dematerialized
within a few steps.
We continued on in silence. Soon, we reached the main portion of the
Devil’s former lair. The piles of bones
were still there, but the Devils were not.
We detected no activity, though it was clear that there had been Fallen
here recently. The dozen Dregs we’d
killed outside had been wearing the Devils’ signature red and gold, but they
were certainly not the significant presence we’d been asked to look for. We hadn’t encountered anything more than the
Dregs. No Vandals or Captains. You remember how I mentioned that Dregs have
to prove themselves worthy before they are allowed to grow their lower arms
back? Well, once that happens, they are called
Vandals and they’re allowed to wear capes bearing the colors of their
House. A Vandal will often lead a small
group of Dregs. A particularly skilled
and experienced Vandal will eventually become a Captain. Captains command several Vandals and their
subordinate Dregs. Vandals tend to be a
bit bigger than Dregs and Captains are even bigger than Vandals. This has something to do with a special Ether
draught that the leaders consume. The
more they take in, the bigger and stronger they grow. This is how some of the top level Fallen
leaders manage to be more than two or three times as large as a Dreg. The hierarchy continues after that, with each
House having a couple of Barons that oversee a group of Captains. Each House has a single Kell that acts as the
operational leader, issuing orders to the Barons. Here’s where it gets kind of weird. The Fallen worship these floating purple
machine spheres called servitors. You’ll
sometimes find them on the battlefield, funneling additional Ether to the
Fallen troops. Each House has a Prime
Servitor. On top of that, they have a
single Archon. The Archon is similar to
the Kell in size and appearance, but that it serves a much different
function. The Archon communes directly
with the Prime Servitor and then communicates the wishes of the machine-god to
the Kell. Thanks to the efforts of my
fellow Guardians, none of the known Fallen Houses have their entire leadership
structure intact.
Nearly a year ago, I’d been part of another Fireteam that
had breached the Devil’s lair and destroyed their Prime Servitor. As we reached the place where Sepiks Prime
had met his end, we stopped for a few moments to rest, rehydrate and, most
importantly, listen to our surroundings.
This practice had served us pretty well in the past. As we resumed our search I caught myself
grinning again. Sepiks Prime had been a
very memorable fight. After that, the
Devils had been mostly scattered and leaderless. Constant patrols of the area had picked off
the occasional straggler or two, but there had been no sightings in quite some
time, so it was generally believed that the surviving Devils had either been
absorbed into the House of Kings or perhaps found their way to the House of
Exile on Earth’s Moon. Despite this,
none of us were really surprised to hear that the Devils might be on the rise
again. They were vermin, and vermin
always seem to find a way to survive.
***
We took another two hours to complete our sweep of the
area and had no further enemy contact. We
found a defensible position and took a few minutes to rest. Kat quickly prepared a Field Activity and
Intelligence Report. As soon as she
finished, her ghost transmitted it both the Guardian Vanguard and the Future
War Cult back to the Tower. Though our
missions were usually issued by the War Cult, the Vanguard was responsible for
monitoring and directing the activities of all
Guardians in the field, regardless of their faction affiliation. The Vanguard could elect to overrule our
instructions or even co-opt our team for their own missions, if need be. Thus, both organizations had to be
notified. A few minutes later, we
received a short response acknowledging our information and instructing us to
return to base.
