She felt the heaviness of the firearm strapped around her back and laying in her hands. It was a delicate vehicle of destruction, a means of death, and so she held it gingery, lightly folding the stock under her arm, hand on the grip and finger coiled around the trigger. It was cold and curved, the steel cooling to the touch and with a sharp edge at its end. She put her head to the sniper's shaft; her neck rested across its barrel and her eye placed over the sight. Within her reticle was a band of Fallen. She had been tracking them across the craggy and precarious cliff faces of the Ishtar Sink, wading through waist-high foliage and following the marauding band of scavengers for days. Slinked across her back was a small flask full of clean water, a rare commodity on Venus. A large duffel bag slung across her back contained weeks of rations and food airsealed, meant to last years. Over the last three days she had gotten very little in the ways of sleep, only stopping to catch a few precious minutes of sleep when the band had stopped for a resupply of Ether. Among them was Dregs, hunched over with thick coats of bristling fur and four beady, dead eyes, mandibles opening to chatter with his comrades. Always at the lead was their Machine leader, a Servitor by the name of Kerelis-7, who enveloped them in glowing pink auras and shielded them from any harm. And now she stared at them as they passed through the open pasture that used to be the courtyard of the Ishtar Academy, not with her eyes but down the sight of her rifle. She sprawled out on a rock far at the end of the expansive valley overgrown with plantlife and tall blades of grass dripping with dew from the night before. They were a high-value band, specifically the Servitor, because they carried with them contraband stolen from a City raid that was quite important to the scouts planted on the humid jungle planet. They planned to use the bomb in order to destroy a valuable base that served as a beachhead of the Vanguard, which would send the comms into a state of disarray and destroy the communication from Venus to The Tower. It was a job that a Guardian could do in seconds, so naturally, they had deployed the Militia to do the job themselves. She was one of them, Iliyus, a sniper deployed to do the job that the best of The Last City and The Traveler could do with the snap of a finger. And after days of stalking, she now had the perfect opportunity to take her shot. "Maurice, I think we've got a clear shot. Who do you want to take? Over and out." She whispered to her superior, Maurice, over the comms channel they had put on the walkies. The two had been communicating through a series of flashing lights ever since they split apart at touchdown. She was new to the profession, a fresh recruit to the Militia, and therefore she wasn't trusted with comms technology. Instead, she and her senior partner were given the crude technology of the walkie-talkie never deployed since The Collapse. Not that members of the Militia were ever really trusted with anything of value, anyway. [i]Here you loud and clear, greenhorn. Getting my sights trained. I'll take the Dreg to the left, you try the one to the far right. When the Servitor tries to make out with the goods, pop him in the eye. You're a crackshot, right? Over and out[/i], the two-way radio crackled, tucked into her coat pocket. She always kept her feed going in case of emergency. She sat there, sprawled out on a boulder leaning precariously from the side of a steep and thin ridge. It was made of petrified land driven upwards from the crater left behind by a meteor, a particularly nasty indenture in the ground. She laid out on it, her tattered cloths swaddled around her spreading over the surface of the perch, stock propped up on a few dead twigs bundled and reinforced into a tripod. It was defunct, but it functioned well. Her breath quickened as she set her sight on one of the Dregs, kneeled in prayer to the Servitor, who pumped out streams of luminescant ether which floated through the air into the Fallen. It's face was mostly flat with a globe containing its head protruding from its neck. They were ugly creatures, far removed from the normality of the human form. But she still hesitated to pull the trigger. She had never shot a gun before at a live target. It was different in Basic, where she blasted dummies with fifty caliber lead. [i]They're getting suspicious, newbie. I'd take the shot. They're awfully close to refilling on Ether.[/i] Her finger quivered over the trigger, trembling, waiting for a propagating factor to take the life of this Fallen, that began to stand from his knee and chatter something to his friends. [i]Take the damn shot![/i] She stood there as still as a pile of bricks, following the Fallen's head in the reticle of her rifle, but her hands were frozen. Her head felt clammy and she only now noticed the cold sweat coming from her brow, no doubt partly from the heat of Venus, but also her body's refusal to fire. The gang of Fallen continued to chatter amongst themselves before their heads swiveled, looking at the perch where she was poised. [i]Goddamnit greenhorn! You're gonna get us ki--[/i] The shot ripped out of the chamber of the rifle. [b]Chapter One:[/b] https://www.bungie.net/en/Forum/Post/230829689/0/0