Chapter 1: Delta Spartan

Novmeber 27, 2552. Odyssey-10. Operation: TELEPYLOS.

Things had gone horribly wrong.

Delta Company's mission should have been relatively straightforward. The mining platform Odyssey-10, in an asteroid field near the remains of Sigma Octanus IV, had been commandeered by the Covenant. They were using it as a weapons manufacturing base. The UNSC's newfound allies, the Elites, had provided the intelligence to the UNSC, who planned a surprise attack using cloaked Sangheilli starships for Delta's insertion. With three hundred Spartan-IIIs, this should have been a relatively easy success. But it turned out that one little detail had been overlooked.

It just so happened that the Covenant could detect the cloaked ships.

They waited to open fire until the ships had entered the asteroid field, and then proceeded to pound away with their plasma. Out of the thirty ships Delta was using, probably seventeen or eighteen were destroyed in the first few minutes - sixty percent casualties with the mission barely underway. The rest, unable to abort the mission, pushed on and docked at Odyssey-10. There, they fought their way through hordes of Covenant to find the reactors powering the platform. Delta's objective: blow up the reactors to destroy the station.

There were now twelve Spartans left. Twelve of three hundred. The majority had fallen through the sheer amount of plasma grenades lobbed at them, the Brute gangs that overwhelmed lone Spartans, the weapons that took out their armor's shields and rendered them defenseless. Many Spartans, out of ammunition and hope, simply charged the enemy ranks, trying to kill as many as possible with their bare hands before they succumbed to the inevitable.

But they had reached the reactor room. The problem was that none of the survivors had explosives enough to take out even one of the four reactors. Between them, they only had three grenades left.

Chris-D154 lobbed a grenade over the makeshift barrier of empty ammunition crates blocking the reactor room from the Covenant. Four of the approaching Brutes tried to dive for cover, but too late; the blast threw them into the walls, and they fell lifeless. "How many grenades do we have left?" he yelled.

"Two!" said Mika-D033, dropping her empty SMG in frustration. "And we're all running low on ammunition. We've picked up some needlers and plasma pistols, but we can't keep this up for much longer." She grabbed a plasma pistol from a dead Grunt on the ground and resumed shooting. Besides Mika and Chris, there were six other Spartans on the improvised front line.

A hail of Brute spiker rounds found their mark past the barricade. Pat-D269 screamed as the rounds entered his shoulder and chest, some finding gaps in the armor, some just piercing through it. Before he could do anything other than yell, another round of glowing spikes struck his helmet faceplate head on. He collapsed to the ground. No one bothered to check his vitals. Eleven.

"You guys might want to hurry it up in there," Chris said into the radio in his helmet.

In the reactor room, two Spartans stood guard at the door while two other Spartans worked frantically at the main control board.

"I'm trying!" said one of them, Tara-D112, who was frantically pushing buttons on the board. "I need to overload the reactors. Give Lukas and I a few more minutes."

Lukas-D232 looked up from the computer where he was entering commands. "I don't think we'll last that long…"

March 30, 2553. UNSC Chariot of Fire.

Awake.

I felt the vibrations of the ship first. That and the chill of the cryo tube that had kept me in stasis for who knew how long. I knew I was on the UNSC frigate Chariot of Fire, but that was all I could remember for now. Besides the dreams.

I could still remember the Odyssey-10 incident with stunning clarity. I didn't know how long I had been in stasis, but the extended sleep period must have triggered near-perfect recall. As a Spartan, my memory was nearly perfect anyway. But I would rather forget Operation: TELEPYLOS completely.

Now I opened my eyes. The cryo room was dimly lit by the electronic readouts on the walls and computers, as well as the glowing tubes themselves. The only other person in the room, a technician, pressed a few buttons on a console. The bonds securing me inside the tube retracted, and I took a few shaky steps before standing firm and upright.

The technician gave me a once-over. "How are you feeling?" he asked

"I'm fine," I replied, right before bending over and throwing up.

The technician grinned. "Glad to see it. That's the chemicals leaving your system. Now you're fine. The captain wants to see you ASAP. You'll probably want to grab some food first. And your bodysuit and armor are over there on that rack."

"Thanks. And, um, what's the date?"

"March 30, 2553. About 1630 Earth time. You've been in stasis for about four months."

Four months. Four months since Delta Company had perished. Stop thinking about it.

I found the rack by the wall. My black bodysuit was there – it had been washed for me – and I quickly put it on. I studied the pieces of my armor, lying haphazardly on the rack. They had also been washed, but several of the pieces were scarred with black burns from Odyssey-10 - I barely made it out of there alive. If not for the Chariot of Fire, I would be dead. Like everyone else. I sighed and started attaching the armor plates to the suit. Once finished, I looked down at myself. The dark green armor had served me well - it wasn't as powerful as the Spartan-II variant, but it had kept me alive. Even though it had failed for two hundred and ninety-nine other Spartans. Stop it.

What next? Food. I was kind of hungry, but I would rather wait to eat until I knew what was going on. I had no idea where the Chariot of Fire was, or where it was going, or how the war was going. I needed answers.

I quickly walked through the corridors of the frigate until I reached the bridge. I entered and snapped to attention. "Second Class Petty Officer Lukas-D232, reporting for duty, sir."

The captain turned from his position next to one of the twenty or so computers being manned by the crew. He was an older man, one of the career military types with graying hair and a firm face. "At ease," he began. "Glad to see you back in action, Petty Officer. I'm Captain Vincent Clark."

"Sir, what is the present course of the war?" I asked, still rigid.

The captain chuckled. "First off, don't be so formal. It's a little unnerving. As for the war, well, it's over."

Over. The war was over. Just like that. "Did we win, sir?"

"Of course. It was mainly thanks to one of your people, a Spartan. John-117, if I remember correctly."

The name didn't sound familiar to me. "He must have been a Spartan-II. They're different from Spartan-IIIs like me. Spartan-IIs are bred to fight and survive differently."

"Then what are you bred for?"

"Completing the mission, sir. Survival is secondary. That's why we get the rice paper." I tapped one of my chest plates with my knuckles.

Clark chuckled again. "Well, it looks like it saved your life from your last mission. How is your wound healing up?"

What wound? I didn't remember being badly wounded - just some scrapes and bruises. Then I felt a dull throb in my left shin. I looked down to see an inch-wide circular hole in the armor on the back of my leg. That was weird – I had literally no idea how it got there. "I feel it, but I don't remember being wounded. What happened?"

"When we picked you up, you had a spiker round in your left leg. The wound has had plenty of time to heal, so you should be fine."

I was still struggling to process the fact that the war was over. After almost thirty years of hard fighting by humanity, I was out for four months, and the rest of humanity decided to go ahead and win. "Now that the war is over, are we going home?"

"We are, Spartan, but not to rest." It was the first time that Clark had directly called me by my "genre" of soldier. "Now that the Covenant has been fragmented, we have to deal with the insurrectionists. They've come back out of the shadows more dangerous than before. Somehow they got hold of a ton of military surplus weapons and vehicles. It also appears that they scavenged whatever they could from Covenant invasion sites - New Mombasa, Kiev, and others. Right now, they're just isolated to Earth, but if we're not careful, this could erupt into another round of the Interplanetary Wars."

"So what is our objective? Specifically, I mean."

Clark turned to the keyboard next to him and tapped in a few commands. A holographic map of a landmass appeared in the air. I recognized it as the Mediterranean Sea, surrounded by Europe to the north and Africa to the South. As I watched, the map zoomed in to one peninsula in particular.

Clark cleared his throat. "This is where much of the rebellion is centered. In-"

"Greece," I finished. "That was where I was born, sir."

Greece. It would be like going home again. I didn't remember much about home - I knew that I had lived in the city of Kalamata, in the southern region. I vaguely recalled two loving parents, parents I had last seen when I was six years old, when I was "recruited" by ONI. But that was all I knew of Greece.

"That's good," said Clark, pulling my mind back to the present. "I don't have any specific mission details. What I do know is that we'll be sending you down in a Pelican to this point in the South, near Sparta. You'll meet some Marines there, and they will escort you by Warthog to the UNSC command post in the area. It's too dangerous to fly cross-country - the insurrectionists got their hands on enough Archyr missiles to bring down a whole fleet of Pelicans."

"Why not just fly straight to the command post from orbit in the frigate?"

"Orders," replied Clark. "Right now, Greece is a no-fly zone except for authorized personnel. It's essentially guerilla warfare right now - we don't know much about the enemy strength except that ONI Greece and the major military bases were knocked out." Clark rubbed his hand through his hair. "I really don't know what the UNSC is trying to do about this. The problem here is that this is a popular movement - the majority of Greece, at least the majority that's speaking up, is supporting the insurrection. If the USNC goes in and crushes it, then we get the appearance of being a dictatorship and ignoring the rights of the people. New insurrections would spring up everywhere. That's why we're not bringing in the heavy guns, although to tell you the truth, this course of action isn't much better. The UNSC is losing support, and I don't completely understand why."

I couldn't understand it either. The UNSC had just saved humanity from extinction and conquest - this was the thanks they got? Some gratitude. "When do I leave, sir?"

"We arrive at Earth tomorrow morning, probably around 1030. You'll leave as soon as you're ready. You're dismissed."

I saluted and left the bridge. It was kind of saddening, really. Even though the war was over, the UNSC and I still had to fight. I had thought that if the war ended and I was still alive, I would be able to just leave the military. I could try to have a normal life. It didn't look like that would happen now. Life went on, and I would have to either do or die.

I would settle for not dying.

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