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Changes
Posted By: Mark Boone<markboonejesusfreak@yahoo.com>
Date: 11 February 2003, 3:30 am
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Earlier in the war, before the epic destruction above, on, and of Halo, the Covenant came to a small Human farming settlement on a mining planet. On their way from one smoking Human city to another Human city, the Covenant Grunts, Jackals, and Elites came. They came to the tiny village, a tiny green spot among miles and miles of twisted hills between deep ravines made by the eroding of sand, out of which grew and lived naught but small, scraggly trees with long roots, reaching through the air sometimes across a ravine to another hill where they hoped to find water. By day the sun beat without pity on the parched dust, and at night the stars shone overhead.
There were new stars this night. They were Covenant cruisers and destroyers, cutting down, one after another, the Human ships with their heroic-or was it suicidal?-crews. The new stars were the explosions: plasma, and fire.
The Covenant came in the night, destroying the homes of the villagers, slaughtering the women and children with their screams of terror and the men with their screams of defiance and valiant, yet hopeless-pathetic-, defense. One Human escaped. He was an old boy, some would have said a young man, and he fled the battle into the ravines, while the hills echoed with the dying screams of his family and the plasma lightning flashes danced in the night. The Covenant did not follow him. Till morning he wandered the ravines aimlessly knowing only one thing: they were all dead; all he had ever known, his entire life, was dead.
When dawn came, hope came with it. For all hope was gone now, and the only thing left was war, blood red war. With the blood red dawn came duty and a will to fight. He could hear the Covenant legions tramping through the ravines and up the hills...calling out in their strange languages to each other...somewhere...on the left. The boy rushed to find them.
The boy clambered up one of the higher hills and saw them: hundreds of them were visible. There were probably thousands. The turtle-like ones were crawling on their stubby little hands and feet up and down the hills; the lizard things with their shields walked more nimbly; the tall blue ones that looked the most like men except for the hideous heads seemed to walk effortlessly over the hills. Their lines stretched far back into the north.
Now the boy proved the meaning of insanity: the use of reason and only reason, the possession of an incomparable intellect and the possession of nothing else: no heart, no soul, no love, and no life. Only the mind. He was in touch with reality, this young madman-supremely in touch with reality, this madman-and only in touch with that small part of reality that he could see. There was only war: blood red war.
And strategy. The sun was just peeking over the hills behind the boy. There was no hope for reinforcements, and since his life now consisted only of war, death would be the fitting conclusion to it if only he was not the only one dead. If only he could take some enemies with him. The front lines of the Covenant were approaching the highest hill in the system of ravines, a few hundred yards to the south, a hill the boy had known well in another world, another life. It was also the steepest hill, the one most likely to crumble with new erosion. One large tree root-several inches thick-protruded from a point dead in the lateral center of the upper reaches of the hill. The front lines of the Covenant would soon be passing underneath that hill: probably ten minutes. They could not see the boy clearly, if at all, because of the morning sun.
He had always been good at climbing, able to shinny up a tree in seconds or flit up, down, around the ravines with incomparable ease. Now he raced down the side of his hill-about 65 degrees-and across one valley and up the next hill. And down the next hill and eastwards along the valley and up the next hill-the biggest, steepest hill-from the narrow ridge that was the only accessible way to the top. Then he crouched, knowing that the rising sun was directly behind him in relation to the evil eyes of the enemy. He waited.
The Covenant in the lead began to walk in the valley underneath the hill. It was time. He sprinted. Speed was what counted. His feet hit the root running, and he moved like a bullet across the root, suspended a hundred yards above the enemy, his speed maintaining his balance. About halfway across to the next hill, the root began to quiver violently. The Covenant had noticed him by now, and some of the Grunts gave out little yelps of warning. At three-quarters the root was no longer possible to navigate. In fact, it was sinking behind him; the plan was working. Red and green streaks flew through the air around him, needles and plasma bolts. There was only about ten feet left. He jumped, but the root failed to provide any sort of solid ground to push off of. He grasped wildly at it as it sank to a lower and lower angle, and he grabbed it as it was almost completely vertical, and with one hand he held the root while his body slammed into the hard dirt of the side of next hill. He bounced backwards by inertia, being sure to do two things: to keep holding onto the root, and to turn around and look.
Just in time. About a quarter of the entire mass of the largest hill for miles cascaded down onto the Covenant, crushing and burying anywhere from twenty to fifty of them. The cloud of dust hid him from the eyes of the rest. The root, pulled by his own body weight, had brought down the mountain on his enemies.
The Covenant army moved on, but left a small contingent behind to destroy the obnoxious Human. There was one Elite commanding them, and twenty Grunts and about ten Jackals. But the Human warrior was hard to kill. They hunted him through the ravines for sixty-five hours, and he continued to dodge them. They would see him running by moonlight or starlight, like a shadow. A shadow that killed. By the twenty-fifth hour the warrior had found one of their plasma pistols, and the numbers of the Covenant party began to dwindle: three Grunts and two Jackals were shot dead, one by one, by a phantom enemy that never stopped, never needed new strength or seemed to sleep as normal Humans did.
The warrior lived on, in a state of complete madness, having full possession of a superb intellect and using it to do only one thing: to kill anything that moved, the only conscious thought in his mind. In his subconscious, beneath the reach of his mental observance, his intellect worked flawlessly, telling him when to run and when to shoot and when it was best to lie still. He hid in shadows and out of sight and struck from shadows or in broad daylight if it suited him: when the terrain was fit for quick and deadly movement that was impossible for even the darting eyes of the Covenant to track with enough efficiency to fire and kill. Time and again he marked where the Covenant would make their base of operations, and time and again plot a way to attack it: sometimes with plasma, sometimes with rocks or avalanches, and sometimes with his own body. Somehow he survived.
By the sixty-sixth hour, suddenly he realized that something had changed. Human voices had begun to echo back and forth through the valleys. His subconscious, where his mind still worked flawlessly, suddenly rose to the conscious level. He thought and recognized it as thought, and he realized that he knew their voices. They were from another world, one he had once been part of: the Human world. He remembered it, but like a dream. This war amongst the sandy hills and valleys was much more real than that dream. But the dream was real, and getting realer by the second. Something was going to alter the entire word of war that was his only knowledge.
He realized they were talking about him. About the Covenant and the signs of someone who was capable of killing them. The voices were getting closer. He leaned on the sandy wall of the valley, and waited for them.
Soon they came into view, nine of them, green and shiny in their suits, like the spectral half-human monsters of Human nightmares. But their voices were entirely Human. Some bit of sanity took hold in the young man's brain, and he felt once again something other than the blood-red war.
"There he is!"..."Is it just you here?"..."Who are you?" they said to him. To each other they whispered, "That one should have been a Spartan."
The young man, his eyes vacant and staring but kindled with flame, spoke to them and said slowly, "Everything's changed. Now that I see you again, I can feel myself again...I've never felt so tired." He faltered, then stammered and said, "I thought I would have lived like a normal person, but now that everything's changed..."
One of the newcomers took off his helmet and the young man saw his face: a powerful face. "Who are you?" the young man asked.
"John...my name is John. We've come to destroy the Covenant. Can you tell us where they are? We'll also help you and bring you somewhere safe."
The young man replied, "I will show you." But they tried to stop him; they told him it was over, they would take care of the Covenant now; he needed to rest. "No," he said; "I will finish what I've started."
The young man looked into the eyes of the soldier, and each beheld that the other was a warrior, and for a flicker of a moment they understood each other. "Lead the way," said John. And the greatest battle of the young man's life began: finishing what he had started.
He walked, and every step was agony. But he held his head up high and kept going. One more step was all that duty required of him. It was all a man could do. The next step was all that a warrior could do.
He led the way to his last valley of this twisted dead land of sandy ravines and hills, the valley where the Covenant were waiting for him: they knew he would come again to fight them soon. The young man reached the crest of the hill, John by his side, and he stopped. John took two more steps forward. The other soldiers knelt down on either side and raised their assault rifles. John threw a grenade. It exploded in the midst of them, sending two Jackals and a Grunt flying and wounding the Elite. The soldiers opened fire, and the Covenant attacked. Firing plasma rifles and pistols and needlers, they ran up the slope the hill. Forty yards. Thirty yards. Twenty yards. The wave broke upon the shining bullets from the assault rifles like water on stone. All the Covenant Jackals and Grunts lay dead. The Elite sank to ground, letting out a long, guttural scream-his dying breath.
The soldiers and the young man ascended a hill to await the coming Pelican dropship. Minutes before the dropship arrived, the first star of evening appeared in the sky. The young man, the warrior, became a boy again. Where a horde of powerful enemies could not stop him, a single star brought him to his knees in intense pain. He cried bitterly until the dropship came. He wept for life lost and for the death of innocence. For the death of his heart he sobbed. Everything had changed. A new life had begun. Now there was only war: blood red war. But a single star shone overhead, and that unutterable beauty pierced him to his very soul.
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