Parhelia: Side Jobs

This page is going to be a collection of drabbles and short stories that I write about the characters found in Not All Who Wander. Some of these will be more-or-less scenes taken from future chapters that I have yet to write (Dividual episodes) while others will be independent or show an alternate view of events (Individual) and some may be purely non-canon (Omake).

I'll do my best to keep Dividual episodes spoiler-free. For example, How The Upper Third Lives contains a scene that won't happen until chapter thirteen or so, but won't be a surprise to anyone who has read to the current chapter (Chapter eleven) of NAWW. The story cuts out right before Quatch turns off the shower, which is when the really interesting confrontation happens.

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How The Upper Third Lives (Dividual Episode)
"So this is how the aristocrats have it," Quatch thought.

This freighter, the Parhelia, was said to be the racing yacht of a long-dead merchant prince, and it showed. The ship and all of its parts were the best that money could buy, if far more tasteful and refined than a Kig-Yar like Quatch would have commissioned. What this mostly worked out to was plenty of wood paneling and indirect lighting, but true quality showed through in places.

The engines, for example, were still cutting edge, and Quatch despaired of affording replacement parts for them. The display screens in the cockpit were so full in resolution that they looked crisp and smooth, even to a Kig-Yar's eyes. But true quality was found here, in the captain's quarters.

At the press of a button, a blue barrier field erupted from the floor, forming a teardrop-shaped enclosure with enough internal volume for a crouching Mgalekgolo. Standing inside the field, where the base of the teardrop met the bulkhead, Quatch had a moment to be alarmed.

That alarm only got worse when louvers on the bulkhead popped open. There came a chuff of decades-stagnant air, and in the void behind the louvers, Quatch saw a soft blue glow and a hum like a great engine roaring to life. Now on the verge of panic, Quatch lunged for the controls.

Then the deluge struck.

It wasn't a steady stream of water. It was a downpour, borne on a gale of hot humid air. Quatch wouldn't be any less soaked if he was the bowsprit of an old maritime schooner tossed about by a tropical storm. With his hands up to shield his eyes, Quatch spied the controls through one clenched eyelid. The holographic panel was red, and options rimmed the central controls like petals around a flower.

Every shower that Quatch had known used tricks of hydraulics to make a little water ration seem like a lot. They forced water into narrow jets that struck so hard, nobody would notice that the water was lukewarm. This was because Quatch was a working man, and always had been. His father had owned tenement blocks, but he didn't have real wealth, nothing to protect him and his family when the political machine of Erstral City sucked his business dry and threw them out on the streets. Quatch had only known the weak, underpowered shower head, and it got worse when he became a spacer. Half of the work had to be done with a damp cloth.

He had never dreamed of a shower that could replicate a tropical monsoon, let alone envied the rich for having them. But now he owned one, and the freighter-cum-yacht that came with it.

Quatch still didn't envy the rich.

He remembered how his fellow Kig-Yar of the working class lived on favors. One Kig-Yar would ask to borrow another's water ration so she could double up on a shower, with the promise that the favor would be repaid later. So it went for food and smokes and rides. It was the worst for the very poor, who seemed to live in an endless pool of credit, charity, and resentment.

It was probably true for the very rich as well, or so Quatch decided from an early age. When one was so rich that money didn't matter at all, all that did matter was favors and boons and networks of obligations. And the very rich, unlike the very poor, kept track of what they owed and were owed.

Perhaps that's what attracted Quatch to the life of a merchant. In between the extremes of the rich and the poor was a life where everything had a price, but that price was openly displayed and could be negotiated down in a pinch.

Except Quatch didn't live in that world anymore. Perhaps in granting him the Parhelia in exchange for a small favor, Kuotasim 'Umtalla had elevated Quatch to the level where obligations mattered more than cash flow. It was terrifying to think about, but Quatch wanted this ship, and he didn't know how else to pay for the engines.

So he relaxed, and he let the water wash over him like sea spray.

Author's Note:
''I wrote this in a single night for Weekly 208 on Halo Fanon. Later, I saw Distant Tide's correction that "Shower Thoughts" didn't necessarily mean thoughts in the shower, but the wandering thoughts and surprising insights you usually see on r/showerthoughts. I still think this drabble fit the criteria, though I might write another that fits better.''

And yes, that second drabble will be set in a shower.

If Mothers Should Bury Their Sons
0128 Hours, March 27, 2553 (Military Calendar)

Delta Station, William E. Adams Spaceport

Medium Orbit over Ballast

A light and a soft buzz awoke Captain Stanislav K. Simonov. In a daze, he rolled over and retrieved the chatter from his nightstand. The light was like daggers to his eyes, so he simply flipped the phone open and muttered "Da?"

"Captain," the man at the other end said. "There is situation."

Stanislav didn't place the voice at first. He was so tired, he wasn't even sure what year it was. He felt unmoored, drifting through memories of a dozen apartments he'd lived in since his homeworld fell.

"Yes, what is it?"

"Something you need to deal with directly. The aliens are making trouble for us."

An identity drifted through Stanislav's mental fog. Lieutenant Georgy Sobyanin. Newly promoted after the battle of Earth. Another name came to Simonov. Ballast. He was sleeping over Ballast.

"Go on."

"We've arrested band of aliens. They were vandalizing sports bar on Beta Station, but their captain is here, arguing for their release."

Georgy had been promoted to lieutenant to replace a much more capable officer, at the same time that the airlift company had been grounded for lack of aircraft. They were MPs and shuttle pilots for now. But if Georgy didn't grow a sense of initiative soon, Stanislav planned to demote the kid before Army Aviation gave them their aircraft back, and the kid could do real damage.

"Tell him to fuck off until morning," Stanislav muttered, before he cut the connection and dropped the chatter on the table. Before he could roll over, the chatter rang again.

"Tell him to fuck off!"

"Captain, he won't. He says that he must depart soon. He is in service of Fleetmaster 'Avros, and he is transporting fuel and munitions."

"Fine. I'll be down shortly."

Stanislav cut the connection, and he was tempted to go back to sleep. Instead, he gently extricated his arm from under his wife and rolled out of bed. As he did so, he realized that her pillow was soaked through with tears.

Again.

She must have cried herself to sleep, or she had a dream about little Timofey. Almost instantly, Stanislav's drowsiness was gone. He was wide awake now, and cold hard fury was starting to settle in the back of his mind.

His trousers were thrown over the back of a chair. As quietly as he could, he pulled them on and silently cursed all of the forces in the universe that had carried him and Mina to this very apartment, starting with the aliens who had started and prosecuted the war. He cursed the split-lip Elites who claimed to be Humanity's friends now and the hairy apes who didn't know that the war was over. Then he worked his way down the caste system, realizing halfway through that he'd forgotten the Prophets and their religious mandate.

Thousands of cities had been burned by those aliens. Dozens of worlds had been glassed, including Stanislav's homeworld. All because those aliens had been too blind to question their holy orders. And now Stanislav had his own orders, to make peace with the mass-murdering animals and work with them. The very thought made his blood boil.

As he was buttoning on his shirt, Stanislav moved on down to the generals and the politicians who had thrown away the colony's future. Preparing to fight the Covenant when they should have evacuated the colony! They sold his countrymen on false promises and wishful thinking, and what had it done for them?

His boots were under the chair. Stanislav sat down and laced them up, and as he did so, his anger crested and broke. He was still furious, but some of that fury was reflected back onto him, because he had made that same choice to stay and fight. He remembered the justifications, the comparisons to Arcadia and the strategic projections that showed that the Covenant had far overstretched their supply lines. One good hard blow to the jaw, a single colony that held out instead of falling, and the whole offense in Sector Two would collapse. Stanislav had his doubts back then, but he wanted to believe. So did his countrymen.

But it had all been a dream. And his countrymen had all paid the price for holding on to a fantasy. The colony was lost, and with it tens of millions of proud men and women. The future that they had been building could have been built anywhere else, but it would never come about without the people to construct it.

There was a hole in his heart where his colony had once been, but at least Stanislav still had Mina. Most of her. Just as she still had most of him.

He grabbed his belt and holster from the nightstand and walked around the bed to give his wife a kiss on the forehead. In the dim light, he saw that her face was red and puffy from weeping. She was a plain-looking woman, very self-conscious about her appearance. He would have to be back before breakfast.

He stepped out of the bedroom and closed the door. The floor lighting in the short hallways made it easier to get his belt through the loops on his trousers. But this particular apartment was a family unit, and there was a spare bedroom for children. Mina had talked about turning it into an office, but she had yet to do anything with it. For good reason. In this world, under slightly different circumstances, there would be a little boy named Timofey sleeping in there. He'd be six years old right now, in his first year of school, maybe learning how to fly shuttles with his papa.

But Timofey wasn't there. Little Timofey never had been. And at this hour, when he was half-asleep, the regret of that loss rocked Stanislav like turbulence off a mountain wake.

Not everyone had stayed to fight. The colonial government had been insane, but not malicious. The children had been evacuated ahead of the Covenant advance, and many mothers had gone with them. But in the week when the government formally scrapped the plan for a general evacuation, when Stanislav was trying to determine what this meant for his airlift squadron, Mina came to him. She'd missed her period, and a little test kit proved that she was pregnant.

Stanislav tried to arrange a seat on an outbound shuttle for Mina, get her and the child to the safety of the Inner Colonies, but she refused. She didn't want to leave him behind, and she didn't want the child to come between them. After a month of arguing, he finally conceded.

She'd gone in for an operation. 'Letting the air in' was the phrase. Whatever it was called, the child, whose name would have been Timofey, never had been.

And it was all for nothing. Stanislav lived. So did Mina. They'd lost their colony, but worse than that, they'd each lost a piece of themselves that Stanislav wasn't sure that they'd ever get back.

Had Mina miscarried, she would be followed always by the question of whether it was her fault, but she would have the comfort of knowing that it probably wasn't. Instead, she knew that she had killed her firstborn son. And Stanislav had to face the knowledge that he had agreed to it.

The weight of that regret was too much for Stanislav's shoulders to bear, so it became rage. Rage towards the Covenant in general and particularly towards those bastard aliens waiting for him at the depot, who were calling him away from his wife when she needed him the most.

Stanislav opened his holster and withdrew the Gaubika. It was his colony's homegrown pistol design, but it was chambered in 12,7x40mm, and it would split an alien's head just as good as the M6. He checked the chamber, holstered it, and grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter.

His cousin had once gotten away with throwing a bunch of Insurrectionists out the airlock. It was a tempting thought.

Author's Note:

''This was written for Weekly 211 over on Halofanon. The objective was to write a character having second thoughts about something that seemed like a good idea at the time. Stanislav and Mina date back to an RP run on the Halo Archive forums in 2016, maybe 2017. Back then, a minor note on Stanislav's character sheet indicated that he and Mina had medically sterilized themselves until the war ended. This detail was in flux after the RP ended and I got the idea to, somehow, incorporate Stanislav into Not All Who Wander. In 2019 or 2020, I hit upon the final idea for the confrontation between Stanislav and Quatch, and almost simultaneously hit upon an idea that would make Stanislav predisposed to... well, can't give too much away, can I? Suffice it to say that I can't tell where I came up with the idea for Mina's abortion and the regret that followed, but it was so heart-rending that it immediately came to mind when Actene posted the theme for Weekly 211.''