As We Fall - Drabble
There was a certain appeal to being a shadow.
The UNSC Unsmiling Tsarevna cut unseen through the standard shipping lanes, the prowler's on board systems keeping it cloaked and hidden from prying eyes as it was piloted by the skillful hands of his assistant, Kerubim. For his part, the Vice Admiral had to admit that it seemed as if there was little Kerubim couldn't do without excelling, and he allowed himself a momentary sense of pride at the thought. He'd hand-selected Kerubim, placed him high in his division and trained him personally - it was always pleasant to see hard work pay off.
Of course the Admiral had been displeased, when she received word that he was leaving Headquarters with no more explanation than there being a matter that required his personal attention. No destination, no set objectives - she may have been in charge, but for as long as the option remained on the table for him, he didn't intend to bow to her every demand to know where he and his people were and what they were doing with every deployment. It was counter intuitive to the purpose of his division - black ops and wetworks required a certain amount of deniability, and the more people who knew the comings and goings of he and his, the greater the risk of discovery.
The fact that he knew damn well Osman wanted him eliminated didn't hurt either.
He took a sip of his coffee, absently reaching down to pat the soft fur of the little dog that slept in her plush bed near his chair, as he gazed out at a passing civilian cargo ship that would never know just how close an ONI vessel had skimmed by it.
Five years, since the world had changed and not for the better. Five years since he'd been forced to break his routine of three months in, one month out of cryostasis, and it was starting to wear on him. Once upon a time, he'd thought that the day he was forced to abandon that rigid routine would be a happy one, that to be able to engage the world as himself and not be concerned with preserving his division or his own waning health and youth would be a happy one indeed. Now he wasn't so sure, because though his body was still young, his mind was heavy and weighted with concerns, and his spirits low and tired. Rejuvenation treatments, anti-agapic drugs, and cryostatis did wonders for preserving the body, but the mind was another matter entirely.
For the first time in his life, Seraph genuinely felt old.
It was a daunting, and somewhat terrifying, prospect - aging. When he'd taken over the division from his predecessor, the previous Seraph had instructed him quite clearly on the importance of their job. Protecting the UNSC and ONI from all threats, internal and external, that required a subtle knife and a silent kill was no small feat, and a calling that kept their division almost constantly on the move. Section Zero was a necessary evil, and their division the most necessary of the myriad of devils that dwellt within it's shadows. 'Stay on top of your game as long as possible,' his Seraph had said, looking into his eyes with his own so deep and vibrantly blue that it was like staring into the skies of Earth. 'Keep your wits about you, stay vicious, and most of all stay ten steps ahead of everyone else because they all want your blood, they all want your people, and they all want your power.'
'Thank you,' he'd said, as he flicked the safety off his weapon. 'Thank you for your service, and all that you've taught me. '
Two pulls of the trigger and a career that had spanned more than seventy years was ended in the blink of an eye, and thus began his own. Back then, the only threat the UNSC and UEG had faced were the rising tides of human rebellion and Insurrection, the threat of civil war had kept his people busy in the field. Too busy to notice the change of command, and by the time any of them did, they'd grown to trust him as much as they had their previous commander. Those outside the division bit their tongues and carried on - Covert Operations Division ran things their own way, with less oversight than most of Section-Zero's divisions, and no one wanted to step up to the plate least they start a trend of others delving deep into their closets as well. The only one who'd been rankled by the change of power had been an Army man, attached to ONI through his deep connections in the Special Weapons Division of Section-3, for whom the transition of power ensured that he no longer had direct access to the division's assassins via ties to Seraph's predecessor that even he wasn't clear on to date.
He could still hear the two shots, the thud of his predecessor's body onto the ground - could still smell the spent gunpowder and the blood - when he closed his eyes some nights.
He'd been thirty, when he started the treatments. Theoretical drugs and rejuvenation procedures that would never see the light of day, cooked up by the less ethical sub-divisions of ONI's Medical R&D teams. Some were worthless, some were painful, but others worked wonders, and between them and the advancements made in cryogenic stasis and flash cloning, he'd remained a physically fit man in his twenties for the past thirty someodd years. Living his life in snippets and snapshots had taken time to get used to, as had reviewing the mapped memories of his myriad flashclones that entered the world over and over again for him, only to be retrieved and eliminated well before their expiration date to ensure that no one was any wiser.
Kerubim had been his greatest asset throughout it all - in fact, he couldn't quite remember how he'd managed before the operative had entered his employ. Entered his employ - Seraph's lips quirked in a vicious half-smile as he took another sip of his coffee. There was a joke in and of itself - it wasn't as though he'd presented Kerubim with much of a choice. Join and receive an identity, a placement, a paycheck and a full pardon in exchange for continuing your work with a tracer in your neural lace... or die here and now, a skilled assassin ending their life as nothing more than the anonymous victim of a senseless crime. Kerubim may have been a number of things - assassin, murderer, conman, sociopath - but stupid wasn't one of them, and he'd quickly found the job to his liking. Enough that he'd become Seraph's best operative, his personal assistant, and the closest thing he had to a confidant.
Much like he himself had been to his predecessor.
Seraph sighed softly, setting his cup aside as he rose to stand before the viewports, hands clasped behind his back as he gazed out at ships and stars.
Everything in ONI had been rock solid, until the Covenant appeared, their goal the destruction of mankind and their driving motivation a frantic sort of religious fanaticism. That was when the embers that had lain, sullenly smoldering for years, between he and Ackerson had been fanned into a flame. Halsey, Halsey, if he could never hear that woman's name again in his life it would be too soon. With her Spartan-IIs and their MJOLNIR, the countless near-breaches of security and secrecy regarding the dirty little past of her subjects, the constant eliminations and lies and sowing of rumors that had to be done had placed his division in Ackerson's war path - their protection of the UNSC putting them in the position of protecting the woman Ackerson despised above all. And when the III Program had been proposed and Parangosky regulated Ackerson to another position, ever higher within Special Weapons Division, he and Seraph had all but began open warfare against one another. Two of the most powerful men in ONI at each other's throats, too stubborn and too cautious to eliminate the other outright.
Everything in ONI had been predictable and orderly, until the last year of the war. That last year of the war, and especially when Reach fell, everything changed. He and Ackerson, both sensing a sort of end-game scenario for themselves, had begun the steps necessary to end their long running rivalry against each other once and for all, ensuring that Parangosky would only retain one of them in strict confidence from then on, and thus ensuring one or the other of them became the future of ONI once the old battleaxe stepped down - she was, after all, aging and rather gracelessly at that. Seraph had swayed two of the more trusted operatives in Ackerson's employ, set the stage and moved all the pieces into place, set and ready to strike during the formalities of an awards ceremony when all eyes would be on the event and none on Ackerson...
And then the Covenant had found Sol, and with it Earth.
And somewhere along the line, everything had gone to shit. The operative he trusted with the plan had pulled the trigger on his own, early and under the worst possible circumstances - during the Battle of Mare Erythraeum, leaving Ackerson for dead. And he was marked KIA. Then again, so were a lot of people - Seraph himself had been marked it a fair share of times when he'd emerged from impossible odds the victor, or at least limped away the survivor. With Ackerson eliminated, had the war continued Seraph figured he would have become the only plausible successor to Parangosky's intelligence empire, but when it ended abruptly and efforts were refocused on rebuilding, on reunifying and reclaiming what was lost, Serin Osman had swooped in out of nowhere and blindsided him entirely. He hadn't known the woman existed, much less that Parangosky had been grooming her for a replacement. His only protest had been met with vague insinuations that were shrouded in code, all referring to the events on Mars and what a problem that would pose, if other division heads in Section-Zero were to find that Seraph's ambition had clouded his judgment and potentially threatened the greater good.
Now though, now everything made sense.
Soldiers were won't to say that everyone in the UNSC was a potential pawn for ONI, another piece on their grand chess board of schemes and coups and conspiracies. Hell, he'd said it himself to protesting, indignant young men and women more times than he cared to remember. And somewhere along the line, he'd forgotten that he too was just another piece on the board, a Bishop perhaps, but certainly no higher. The Queen was still the most maneuverable piece on the board, and it was by a Queen that both he and Ackerson had been brought to their knees. The more he considered it, the more it became painfully clear that the operative who'd arranged for Ackerson's presumed demise on Mars hadn't been acting under Seraph's directives after all. Someone else's hand was pulling the strings, and all these years later, Seraph was almost certain he'd put two and two together and reached four at last.
It all came down to Parangosky and Osman. There were no other options.
Osman coming out of nowhere was all too perfect, as was the position his attempted coup with Ackerson had placed him in. It guaranteed his support behind Osman, bound him to her out of a constant threat of the revelation of the result of his actions. If it became common knowledge in Section Zero, Seraph knew all too well that he'd be lucky to make it half-way to his Prowler before someone took him out. He was living on borrowed time, courtesy of the new head of ONI, and he certainly didn't appreciate it.
And that was why, in the end, he'd left planet as soon as he'd received the message. Hoping, no, praying for more away from the prying eyes of Osman and her network of lackeys and supporters. Praying for the chance to speak with the man himself, to finally explain what had happened between them, and align himself with the one man who'd been his equal in ambition, cunning, and influence before they were both rendered useless, eliminated, or worse.
"Oh, how the mighty have fallen," He murmured.