Seventeen: Centurion

'You know what? I'm not even surprised Caesar gets shanked.'

John and Nep'Thalia both looked up from their paperwork, raising a collective eyebrow and exchanging looks. The Spartan blinked at his second in command, who was biting her lips to hide a small smile. [Care to explain how you came to that conclusion, Ferial?]

'This useless paperclip's been kidnapped by pirates, right? He just told his kidnappers that he thought six hundred kilos of silver wasn't a high enough randsom! He wants them to raise it to fifteen hundred!'

The Spartan buried his face in his hands. [Did you just call Julius Caesar a useless paperclip?]

'YES!'

[Hello, Caesar, this is John. One of my subordinates just insulted you in a manner which doesn't make sense now but is still highly offensive. Would you like to crucify her now or later?]

Ferial let fly a flurry of expletives that were highly inappropriate for small children. [Ferial,] John said, [There's a reason we switched to observation only at the dawn of the Roman Empire.]

'Yeah, because Caesar's a bag of dicks.'

He snorted into his hands. [No, its because we can't take the same risks as we did with the Grecian states. A lot more is known about the Roman Empire than the Greek, and Leonidas was hardly one to take advantage of our presence. Caesar is not.]

'So, in other words, a bag of dicks.'

[Ferial…]

'It's the truth, and you know it!'

[Okay, yes, Caesar has an ego. And according to legend, he's going to have all of those pirates killed and take back all that silver.]

'…Oh.'

[Yes. Oh.] John put his hands down and signed off on some Lifeworkers' request to collect some gene samples from the Roman people. They wanted to see if humans were genetically predisposed to certain positions in human society, as well as track the genetic evolution of the human race.

'…he's still an asshole.'

[That doesn't make him not Julius Motherfucking Caesar.]

'Ugh.'

[Big men, big egos.] John threw out a request for a permanent game server once he saw the cost, much to the disappointment of his crew. [No different from the Galactic Council.]

'You don't have a big ego, sir.'

[Spartans were trained out of it.]

'Ah. Well, this still proves that evolution is a fraud and nothing ever changes.'

'Amen.'

The Commander ignored the subsequent discussion in favor of wading through still more paperwork. Another request for research, this one into neural physics in hopes of replicating the Domain, the massive Precursor data archive that had been destroyed with the firing of the Halo Array. [Put in a request for a grant with the Council,] he said, signing his name, [There's no way in hell we're going to be able to do it all ourselves. And put out a broadcast, see if anyone else wants to participate. How's your run going, Sérë?]

'Rather well.' The Builder was off trading with other worlds, and delivering shipments that they had picked up on the way. 'It's very quiet right now- things seem to have settled down from all the rebellions that were going on. But it looks like the hard-liners in the ecumene are planning to stir things up again. They're trying to put a tax on trade and deliveries through their space, and ban interspecies marriage.'

[Their territory is right at the heart of all allied systems – that's kind of like if someone decided to put a tax on wireless Internet access.]

'I WILL KILL SOMEONE.'

John stared wide-eyed at the Captain-Commander seated across from him. Her poker face was impeccable. A number of his other Infected were having similar reactions and staging revolts at the mere thought of a wi-fi tax, but her reaction was the most unexpected and out of character. She stared back impassively.

[Explanation please?]

'I enjoy reading some of the historical and scientific journal publications that they release online, and most all written material now is published via our version of the Internet.'

John waited. Nep'Thalia's cheeks turned pinkish.

'And I enjoy reading some fanfiction,' she said in a small voice.

The Spartan pretended he knew what that word meant and wouldn't need to ask someone later. Going by the way the twins were cheering and Dacien was giving her "I trusted you" looks, he was probably better off not knowing.

'The absolute harten's been rescued,' Ferial reported, interrupting anything John might have said on the fanfiction front.

[Remind me what that is again?]

'Harten are the worms in halgengei.'

[Okay, you can definitely not call him that. At least not to his face.]

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The Chief was almost falling asleep at his post. He had wrapped up all of his paperwork and trade negotiations in time to watch Caesar "get shanked," as Ferial put it. Now he was a Roman soldier in Jerusalem, waiting for the events of the Christian gospels to begin – or not begin, whatever the case was. The Infected had their various belief systems – the Forerunners and the Tower, the Gultanr and their belief that the stars were the fiery souls of their ancestors, and so on – but he had never really subscribed to any particular religious doctrine. None of the Spartans had; it had never been a part of their training, and so it had never concerned them.

But, to many, the Christian Bible was an important milestone in history, and so here they were to document it. That didn't mean they enjoyed all the waiting. For a group of people whose entire objective was to wait, they were very impatient.

John sighed, shifted from one foot to the other, trying to wake himself up. He wasn't normally this unprofessional, but even Spartans had their limits. He had been called upon to mediate a dispute because he was notorious for cutting through crap, but it had taken - literally – five times as long as it was supposed to. He was so sick of bureaucracy that he wanted to make the entire Ecumene Council eat a gun or make himself disappear into the emptiness of space. The moment he expressed the thought, over half the Infected volunteered to go with him.

[See, now they're the real reason why the Graveminds wanted to destroy Forerunner society,] the Spartan grumbled, [them and all the other dicks.]

'Agreed.'

John shifted back to his other foot and let his eyes drift closed, feeling out his environment. The ebb and flow of ordinary humans had become soothing to him after so long away from his own species – he was able to sense them better than any other. Then his eyes shot open again, all sleepiness vanishing with the suddenness of a lightning strike.

There was something nearby, an alien being similar to humanity and yet unlike anything they had ever detected. It was strange and vast and beyond comprehension, and so as one they retreated, slammed up the strongest mental shields they were capable of making, and everyone able to do so assumed the fetal position in a corner.

stare into the abyss long enough and it stares back

Even the Commander's instinctive split personality was freaking out and trying to transform their body into some kind of defensive fortress. He snarled at it that if it was who he thought it was, even a doomsday bunker wouldn't save them. It settled at that, but still mentally turned itself into a ball of barbed spikes.

It was getting closer. Despite knowing that it wouldn't do them a damned spit of good, John shifted his grip on his spear, hoping that if he was attacked it would buy him enough time to body-hop-

A boy.

A small Jewish boy, dark hair, dark skin, dark eyes, human and yet not, mortal and yet not. A child, but already so much more.

"Commander," he said, in perfect Forerunner Digon, "Infected."

"Son of God," they answered.

"Thank you for serving," he said, and then entered the temple as if what had happened was not of world-shattering importance. They blinked.

'Are we dead?' Kenera asked.

[I… I don't think so.]

'Why didn't we get smooshed like a bug?' her twin demanded.

[I don't know – I don't claim to fathom the mind of God. Let's get out of here. I hear the Soraceon System is lovely this time of year.]

-------------------------------------------

"You met Jesus Christ, and you ran away."

"Yes. It was a perfectly logical reaction at the time. – Stop looking at us like that."

"Do you know how many religious institutions would kill for an opportunity like that?"

"All of them, I'd imagine."

"Yes, exactly."