Archive:Graeme Devine's Blog/Spirit of Fire/Relic
FLIGHT OVER TIGARD
Harvest was once a colony world...
RELIC
I insisted that I go down and see for myself. The captain was pretty insistent that this wasn’t a good idea, but I think he realizes that I need this and that he needs someone else other than UNSC to talk about this insanity.
We flew in low over what remains of Tigard. It was raining dark mud like rain and lightning filled the clouds but never really formed any streaks or strikes. Fires still littered the ground, breaking through from under the surface to flare up. I thought it would be quiet but it wasn’t. It was as if a thousand windows were being broken, the wind formed shrill almost animal like sounds, and the rolling thunder shook me. No one down there could have survived. There was no safe LZ in Tigard so only visual passes like this one have been made.
The only activity I saw was further to the north, a UNSC command base, obviously dropped in from orbit, was beginning to unfold. I had seen these dropped constructs before on the news feed but never seen one unfold in front of me. The scale seemed somehow off to me as I watched it power up and the polycrete walls popped into place.
We landed next to the artifact the aliens had been digging up and I walked up to the thing that probably caused the death of my wife and kids. The thing that caused the deaths of millions of people here on harvest. The thing the UNSC was now so damn interested in too. I hit it with all my strength, fell over, got up and hit it again. By the time they restrained me I had broken several bones in my fist, but at least that thing had some blood spilled on it. Human blood.
I was pulled away and back into the pelican. Forge sat next to me obviously intending to make sure I didn’t get back out. He only said one thing to me. “I’d have done the same. Doesn’t bring them back though.”