"I've loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."
-Galileo Galilei

Starry Night, Fateful Day

by

Electromotive Force

The night was calm. The air was cool. A gentle breeze sifted throughout the lush valley floor, the tall grass swaying softly around John and Kelly.

They lied in a flattened patch of earth fashioned from their own hands. It was another mission in the wild, a training exercise devised by none other than Chief Petty Officer Mendez. One of many trials designed to test their will to survive, adapt and win.

The other Spartan candidates were scattered throughout the Big Horn Valley, perhaps milling about and simply stargazing like these two were. As preparations for the next day's mission were completed early, they took full advantage of the down time. Absorbing the nature around them had always been the favored pastime whenever away from the concrete jungle of the Reach Military Complex, where the light pollution was too much. The children were becoming increasingly self-reliant as the training progressed. The wilderness now took the place of the compound as their mainstay. This was certainly a welcomed escape from the barracks—running, yelling, following orders that mostly made no sense.

Here, things were simple. Looking to the stars tended to help them put things into perspective. They were all so young when they were swiftly cast out from their childhood shield, assuming warriors' burdens. They were growing up so fast. It seemed the only reference was an occasional night's sky. It was an all-consuming blanket of wonder, enveloping them, conversing with them, alive with the tranquility of lights pulsing like fireflies. And though the omniscient magnificence above easily dwarfed John and Kelley, it did not intimidate them in the least. Both children felt as though they could lay here for hours just soaking it all in, the lights and shadows of the beyond.

Dozens of Reach's artificial satellites criss-crossed the sky along their lofty orbits, mere pinpricks of reflection coasting along at what would seem a leisurely pace from their perspective. It then seemed to John that his presence at these training grounds was merely the stepping stone to something far greater. Doctor Halsey expressed such when she told the children they would become the protectors of humanity. Far away, an exo-atmospheric vehicle had launched. John tracked its trajectory, watched it ascend lazily at a mild arc making for escape velocity. From here, from this vantage, it was so small superimposed onto the backdrop of the starry night, its engine wake consumed by the vast openness.

"You ever wonder what's up there?" John asked, looking over to Kelly.

She seemed quite content where she was, lying on her back, her arms folded behind her head. That was until John posed the question. She glanced sidelong and met his gaze, perhaps a slight amount of concern over her night-cloaked visage.

"Like what?" she asked.

John looked back to the vessel—so high up now—about to break the bonds of Reach's gravity. To where it was headed, he could only guess. And the stars glimmered in the night from so far away. It took at least hundreds of thousands of years for most of that light to reach here, to this very moment.

"…Maybe someone out there is wondering what it's like here."

"I guess." she replied.

The notion had never crossed Kelly's mind. All she needed to concern herself with was right here at planet Reach. Everyone had priorities after all, despite the infrequent indulgences such as moments like these. Way up there, everything seemed so far off and unattainable. Why John wondered about such trivial things was none of her concern, but he had always struck her as being on a different page, otherworldly himself. He was vastly different from most. Faster, stronger and braver, but mostly self-centered. He always won at everything, or at least he always had to. The other children resented him for it—her too, sometimes. Especially when John was on her squad for Ring the Bell, the day he lost the game for them and sent them home hungry and defeated. He didn't exactly start off his new life as a team player.

But he was beginning to grow on her. He had definitely changed over the course of their training. He had learned to accept others and work as a unit, and for the moment she was rather surprised at his wonder of the cosmos. Now that they were alone and at peace with their surroundings, Kelly witnessed a side of John never before seen—by anyone—she assumed.

She looked back to him, deciding to be a good friend and humor his conjecture. "Do you think we'll ever meet them?" she smiled.

John stared fearlessly upward. "I hope so, don't you?"

He waited for an answer...

But when John glanced her direction, she was no longer there. Instead of sweet Kelly resting by his side, there was only the helmet of his Mark VI armor calling him back to a bitter reality.

Decades had passed since that innocent, wholesome night with her.

The conflicts to befall the human race during his time as a Spartan supersoldier were of the most harrowing ever recorded. Over the many years since, he had become less and less John and more so the Master Chief. The countless battles he fought over the past years blurred together—on more planets than he could begin to remember. Battles with Insurrectionists and all species of the Covenant, every enemy known to the UNSC…and one other that even the Master Chief had considered to be truly insuperable: the supervirulent, parasitic species known to all as the Flood.

After mankind's twenty-seven year struggle, the War had reached critical mass and converged at the place where life began—Earth.

The Master Chief surely realized this as he himself woke up nearly face-down, staring blankly ahead at desert sands. The first thing he noticed was the high-pitched piercing of the scream that had so mercilessly ended his dream, crescendoing louder and louder. But as soon as he caught sight of a helmet resting in a sandy divot nearby, he knew this was no longer an imaginary occurrence.

The last waking moments suddenly came back into cognizance like a flood of urgency, and he began to remember what happened. He pieced the last moments together and instantly realized that the loudening screech wasn't a scream at all—it was an incoming mortar, now impacting the ground just a few meters away.

Any closer and he would've been dead.

He looked up: condensation trails criss-crossed the entire sky, the remnants of aerial dogfights reigning over the landscape. Without warning, a pair of Covenant Banshees roared overhead and more wavy contrails formed off their canards, following their vector into the sun. The Master Chief held up a gauntleted hand to contrast them against the searing light. They weren't yet strafing him as he confirmed the Doppler effects from their engines fading away into near-silence, and John felt as if he could linger here for hours just like that starry night so long ago. As he slowly came back to consciousness, a tide of stimuli invaded his senses all at once.

Radio chatter drove him to full alertness just as Kelly's fading voice came back and played tug-of-war with his attention, Do you think we'll ever meet them?

Her question had been answered some years ago.

John was fully awake now. He knew he had to get up. He had to move.

John looked down and reached for his helmet, the helmet that had saved his head so many times before. Resting tranquilly before him, the visor gleaming golden in the mid day sun, it never looked any better. He deftly snagged it with one hand and brought it to bear in front of his face for a damage assessment. He inspected the seals in a fraction of a second, and to his great content they were totally intact and immaculate as the day he first donned it. He slipped it on and darkness consumed his vision. The visor instantly unpolarized as he fastened it, the internal air supply repressurizing with a braying hiss. He was at least fully armored now. He could regain his bearings and begin to carry on with the mission, a mission only a Spartan could accomplish.

But before he mustered the will to stand, Kelly came back. Time to go.

He shook his head.

Though he loved listening to her gentle voice from a time nearly forgotten, it drowned out his resolve every time he heard it, taking him back into a place that would get him killed. He found himself once again staring down into the sandy plain, in a half-crouch now, wondering why this memory echoed. He must've been hit harder than he thought.

He wanted to take just a few more seconds to clear his head, but he had to go.

And if the bliss of her memory couldn't have undermined his safety any greater, another familiar voice echoed inside. Chief, leave me!

Cortana. Whether it was real or not, she obviously cared of his safety more than her own, begging him to turn away and forget her. But he couldn't—not now, not ever. A natural impulse made him look to the horizon from where so much toil had pervaded. He gazed into the distance, searching as if Cortana would appear like some desert mirage superimposed onto the hell-filled battlefield with a set of familiar eyes to connect with that familiar, comforting voice. But she wasn't there. He had to go. So many things would be left undone if he didn't get up right now.

Just then, a smattering of plasma crashed into the dirt around him, closer now, dull thumps audible.

And contrasting against the sounds of enemy fire all around him were more voices over the UNSC Battle-net.

"Is anybody out there?"

The UNSC Defense Forces were on the backpedal, and the only Spartan on the battlefield was down. Once more, John heard something else familiar, this one not a memory or hallucination.

"Chief?"

It was Avery Johnson.

Finally, at least there was something in John's favor now. He could recover while the battle-hardened Sergeant Major mustered up what troops were still alive and coordinate an effective counter-assault against the invading Covenant. John would've answered, but he was only just beginning to snap out of his haze and concern himself with his own survival. He looked around and found an MA5C nestled in the dirt. John was almost ready, but before he armed himself a command broadcasted throughout the entire carrier frequency superseded any intentions the Chief or Johnson may've had.

"Marines, fall back now!"

As John scooped up the rifle, he wondered why a commanding officer would pull back his forces during the middle of perhaps the most important fight of all time. Then, it made sense to him as he rose to his feet. He reached over his shoulder and placed the assault rifle within close proximity to the MJOLNIR armor's magnetized backplate, which instantly pulled the weapon from his grasp and firmly anchored it there. He flexed his stiff hands to get the sensation going again. He was now back in full force, ready more than ever to complete his mission.

He looked up into the sky as Johnson came again over the radio.

"Any sign of the Chief?" he said, desperation in his voice.

The same CO that issued the retreat hurriedly replied, his tone equally somber as Avery's.

"Negative, Sarge...I think we lost him."

John could understand their despair. A volley of energy mortars raced high into the sky, arcing gracefully in his direction. They held a subtle beauty as he traced their lazy trajectory to the apex of their journey. They shone brighter than anything else in the sky during their ascent above the giant vortex cloud in the distance, much like the vessel had that starry night so long ago. But it was a mistake to marvel them. Once they landed, they would vaporize everything in their way. The mere sight of such a barrage had driven away the steadiest of warriors, but John had an ace up his sleeve: it was attached to his armor's hip mount, the newly-fielded Bubble Shield.

The Marine on the other end of the radio had announced the Master Chief was dead, that his luck had run out. John said only to himself…

"Not yet."

With a pistol in one hand, he reached down with the other, unfastened the Bubble Shield and pressed the activation switch. The device's chassis took on a faint glow as its internal capacitor whined to life. Within a few hundred milliseconds, it reached full charge.

The only things certain were the approaching mortars. The enemy had the Spartan and nearly all other UNSC personnel dialed in. The Master Chief wound up and spiked the Bubble Shield into the dirt in front of him just as a near-supersonic sphere of white-hot plasma raced directly closer. Before the approaching heatwave could melt away his armor, a solid wall of amber enveloped him. He bent lower.

And then the mortar hit.

The toppled vehicle lying next to him a moment ago got blasted away in an expansion wave of superheated debris. Sand turned to glass, and the ground blackened farther out. Temperature and pressure outside the shield was enough to kill any living being, yet the wall held long enough to do its job—to protect the man inside.

As the sand whisked away and the heat dissipated, the Master Chief looked up again. The translucent, hexagonal tiles of the barrier began to disband. The shield was spent.

John moved.

He darted through the jagged remains of the spherical projection and straight into oncoming fire. He knew it was now or never.

He sprinted harder than any other time before in his war-filled life, the combination of his iron-dense skeletomuscular power and MJOLNIR armor propelling him to a blistering speed. Not missing a single stride, he fluidly reached down to secure his sidearm against the thigh plate, instantly retrieving the assault rifle from over the shoulder, eyes fixed to the cliff ahead.

Another explosion caught his side, but the heavy momentum he possessed made it merely an afterthought at his current velocity. His adrenaline was on overdrive at the sight of a Brute pack waiting down below. The Chieftain of this horde saw him coming, its massive Gravity Hammer wound fully back in anticipation for the killer blow. But the Chief saw right through it, practically into the future. So many others had often commented on his luck and how it was responsible for his triumph. He was certain it hadn't run out yet.

As John, the Master Chief Petty Officer Spartan 117 came rushing up to meet the edge of the cliff, he pushed off and leapt straight into the fray—just like he always did.