They're glassing the planet.
The thought sifted through Carolina's half-conscious mind, dredged up memories of intelligence reports, of the precise engineering specifications of Covenant orbital plasma cannons, of the endless circular arguments in the Assembly records about the numbers of minutes and hours and days the Covies would need to extinguish a colony of this size as opposed to a colony of that size. They'd picked the word 'glassed' precisely because it was evocative, descriptive, horrifying, because it would make the war more real, because it would galvanize humanity into action.
The building around her shuddered, and Carolina, raising her head, managed to splay the fingers of her left hand against the rubble, feeling the vibrations through the shredded kevlar glove. 'Glassed,' just now, felt abstract and strange and distant, a backdrop to the pounding lethargy of her heartbeat in her temples.
The small, wet cough that echoed over an open comm channel was more immediate.
Her helmet was wedged bruisingly tight against the skin on the side of her face, her HUD blinking kaleidoscopic warnings. She couldn't move her head. Reaching up, she felt along the ragged edge of the chunk of metal that was weighing her down. Weighing her head down. It was wedged against the side of her helmet, pressing her head into the floor, and she was sickeningly aware that if the point of impact had been a few inches lower, it would have struck right through the weaker bodysuit at her neck.
Another cough over the radio. Carolina had two agents under her command on this rock. Both of them had been on the roof of the building with her when it had collapsed.
She licked her lips, tasted blood. She'd bitten her tongue. "Report," she said. Her voice came out shaky.
The breathing—gasping—over the open channel faltered. "Boss?"
Wash. That was Wash. His tracker was a nearby blip on her HUD, his biocomms offline. She responded to the dazed tone in his voice by relaxing her own. "It's okay, Wash, I hear you. The building came down. I'm pinned. Are you—" Stupid question. "How badly are you hurt?"
A long beat of silence, punctuated by his uneven, wheezing breaths. She tried again. "Wash?"
No reply. Hell.
"Agent Mississippi, do you copy? Please respond and set your tracker. I do not have your twenty." Nothing. There was no sign of Missy on her HUD at all.
Carolina exhaled slowly. Okay. Priorities, moving from the general to the specific: survive. Get her team off this planet in one piece. Find a comm tower to contact the Mother of Invention. Get this damned building off her head.
She twisted, trying to get a grip on the metal wedged into her helmet. It made an alarming groan as she struggled, and she paused, waiting for the dust and dirt to settle around her. Her flickering sensors were telling her that the metal siding pinning her to the floor by her helmet was also propping up one wall of the building. Structurally unstable, the readout said, with a certain smug understatement.
She was pinned down, but she wasn't panicking. There was absolutely no reason to panic, and there was certainly no reason why she should keep thinking about the time when, as a child, she'd accidentally locked herself in a particularly dark and gloomy cupboard for three hours before anyone had thought to look for her.
She tried shuffling her feet—both legs were working, at least—to get them under her, to give herself some leverage. It was an awkward and painful attempt, and her neck protested the contortions. Something caught her attention, just at the edge of hearing beyond the scuffling of her feet in the dirt, and she froze, listening. It took her a moment to realize there was no longer any breathing coming over the open frequency.
"Wash," she said, and then, sharper, "Agent Washington."
A harsh intake of breath, like he'd been startled, and then a rough cough. "'m still here," he slurred.
"Good," she said, and twisted again. Maybe if she could wedge the toes of her boots under that support strut... "Report, soldier."
"Mm?"
"Report."
"I... there's a lot of blood." A pause. "Didn't have my helmet on."
He sounded more lucid now, at least. "Wash, I need you to listen to me. Are you listening?"
"Yeah. I, uh." He hesitated, like he was trying to come up with something to add to his report. "It's cold."
"I know. Right now I need you to look around. Missy was standing next to you when the building went down. Do you see her?"
Another pause. "It's dark. Can't see much." He coughed, and now she could hear a high whine in the sound. "I'm gonna try to move around a bit. Think my armor's snagged on something."
"Be careful." She clenched fingers around the metal siding, tried to push up, like a deadlift with one hand wedged behind her back. Yeah. That wasn't working.
She heard Wash shifting, and then his breathing caught. When he spoke again, his voice was high and shaky with panic. "Fuck. Wasn't just my armor. I'm... I'm losing a lot of blood."
Carolina let her eyes slam closed for a moment, breathing hard, focusing on the unforgiving pressure of her helmet against the side of her head. "Can you get to your biofoam?"
"No," he said. "I mean, yes. But my hands aren't working so good. I can't get it open. Medical suite in the armor's offline." He was shivering; she could hear his breath hitching. Then he exhaled, and the sound was like he was building himself from the ground up, solid, determined. "Boss, I think I'm done, here. You need to get off this rock."
Carolina opened her eyes. "Great. Now I have to cook York dinner."
A pause.
A small, confused sound. "Um."
"See," Carolina said, and tightened her grip on the metal, "when you signed on, he bet me dinner that, if the situation arose, the new guy would put on a brave face and be a self-sacrificial hero." Her knee was wedged beneath her gut; her neck ached and popped at the strange angle. "I figured you for someone with a secret streak of self-preservation. But here you are. Here we are."
"I'm... sorry?"
"You'd better be. I'm a lousy cook."
"No, I." He paused, regrouped. "That seems like a very specific thing to bet on."
"Have you met York?" She twisted, testing her grip on the hunk of metal. "Wash, I'm gonna have to kill my comm for a few seconds. Keep breathing."
"Boss," he said. She'd heard a lot of last words, still had most of them rattling around her head on bad nights. Wash's voice had the same shaky cadence, the same desperate determination to push past pain and shock. "It's been an honor—"
"I don't think you understand what a bad cook I am," she said, firmly. "Keep breathing." She routed power from her transmitter before he could protest, then skimmed through her HUD until she found the sequence of commands that would deactivate the newly-installed camouflage unit and cannibalize its emergency power supply. The speed unit would have to stay online. After a moment's hesitation, she killed her armor's medical suite, too.
She shifted her grip, testing, and tensed her leg underneath her, wrenching her ankle to press her toes into the ground. Ramping up the speed unit shorted out her HUD for a split-second, and when the display came back it was blurring and wavering in her vision. The ground shook beneath her—Covies coming by for another pass?—and that was all the signal she needed.
People thought the speed unit slowed things down, gave her more time to think and plan and ensure that each step, each strike, was perfectly choreographed. In reality, the effect was a little different: it sped up her body so it could finally keep pace with her racing thoughts. This time, though, she fought through the rush to plan, carefully and deliberately, the next few seconds that would either free her, kill her, or leave her trapped under the rubble listening to Wash bleed out.
Okay.
She used the excess power to ramp up the force mods in her armor—a weaker model than the units powering Agent Maine, but still necessary to compensate for the added momentum her speed unit imparted—and slammed her hands upward against the metal siding that was pinning her down. It crumpled at the impact, but lofted a few inches with a protesting groan before it began to fall again. No time to pull her head back. The speed unit was spun up to full capacity, and she pressed her toe into the ground, using the leverage to slam her entire body forward.
The metal came crashing back down, but she wasn't there anymore. She'd even overshot, colliding with a wall hard enough to knock the breath from her lungs.
The building creaked and settled as she gasped into her helmet. One arm was out of its socket, and as the speed unit spun down, she reactivated the medical suite and let it pump her full of painkillers. It was considerably more than the dose she typically used to combat the crash after the speed unit-induced high, and her head spun for a second before her metabolism caught up. Her face felt hot, and she resisted the urge to yank off her helmet.
Her comm flickered to life a moment later. "Wash?" She sounded shaky, even to her own ears. He groaned, and she had to hold her own breath to make out the shallow rattle of his breathing. She pushed herself one-handed to her feet, keeping the injured arm clenched at her side. "Look, you gotta stay awake. I'm on my way."
She passed Missy's body on her way to him.
Agent Mississippi's armor had been split open by a plasma blast. It was curiously clean, neat, instantly cauterized. She just... ended, a little bit above the waist. Carolina didn't have time to do more than pull off her helmet, fumble for her tags, but she ran a gloved hand along the sharp cheekbones, the thin lips, tangled them back for a moment in the wiry hair. No last words here; none that she could remember, anyway. She'd check her helmet's recording later. "Sorry," she said, helplessly inadequate, and thumbed the staring eyes closed.
Wash was a few meters away; Carolina had to activate her helmet's flashlight to pick him out from the clutter of rubble. He was sitting slumped against a wall, his legs straight out in front of him, his hands resting limp and palm-up at his sides. He wasn't wearing a helmet. There was a shocking amount of blood in his hair, streaming along the side of his head to runnel down his armored chest. With a sickening lurch, she realized that the small patch of glinting shine at the center of the wound was his exposed skull.
"Wash," she said, crouching beside him. She dragged the glove off her good hand with her teeth, then pressed her bare fingers to his cheek. He was still warm, breathing shallowly through his mouth. "Hey, Wash, are you really gonna let me lose a bet to York?"
His eyelids flickered. He seemed to be having trouble focusing on her; he had the glassy look of deep shock setting in. "Boss?"
"Yeah," she said. "I'm getting you out. Is-" She'd been reaching down to grab his medkit, and froze when her hand encountered something sticky and warm. She tilted her light down. Froze again. There was a long, thin braid of steel rebar punched through his side. Blood was pooling beneath him.
She acted quickly, quietly. Stanched the sluggishly bleeding head wound with a smear of biofoam. The rebar impaling him was still firmly embedded in the concrete behind it, and she knew she'd need to remove it to apply the biofoam. "This is gonna suck," she said, drawing in a breath through her gritted teeth. Wash gave one ragged scream when she tightened her grip on him and pulled him free of the rebar. By the time she'd pressed the injector into the wound and depressed the plunger, by the time the foam had billowed out, sealing veins and capillaries and immobilizing organs, he was unconscious, his eyes half-lidded and staring. But he was still breathing.
She rocked back on her heels for a moment, staring down at the blood coating the front of her armor. Missy was the sixth Freelancer dead under her command. Wash could still be number seven. She swallowed a surge of anger directed at the incomplete intel, at the Covie bastards. At Wash, slumped against her, who looked way too fucking young right now. She thought of Missy's dogtags, safe in a compartment in her armor.
Six dead, but the rest had all made it home.
The building rumbled. No time. She hooked her good arm around Wash, dragging him with her to her feet. He mumbled a protest, which she took to be a good sign, but after a few staggering steps his full weight was heavy enough to draw aches and pains from her body, even beyond the pleasant buzz of the painkillers. "You're heavier than you look," she muttered, and was pleasantly surprised when he gave a little snort in response. "Hey, there. Still breathing, huh?"
"Unfortunately," he wheezed. "Nothing beats biofoam for making you wish you were dead."
She grimaced agreement. "Hang on, we've gotta get up these steps. Just one more. There. Not your first rodeo, huh. You make a habit of getting poked full of holes?" Past lives were off-limits, of course, but she had a pretty good idea about where exactly PFL had dragged Wash's ass out of the fire.
He snorted again, then tensed against her when one of his dragging feet caught a piece of rubble. "Fuck," he breathed. "Yeah. Some. Guess you could call it a hobby."
The rubble shook beneath them again, and she instinctively reached out her bad arm to brace herself. The pain blitzed out the vague numbness from the painkillers, sent her stumbling with Wash into the wall. He yelped, and she tightened her grip on him. "Sorry. You good?"
He clung to her, gasping, his face covered in a sheen of sweat despite the cold. "Yeah," he said, finally. "Yeah, I'm good."
"Good." They picked up the pace again, Carolina's HUD blinking out the nearest route to the transmitter. Assuming it was still intact. Probably best to keep assuming that.
Wash had gone quiet again, and Carolina racked her brain for something to ask him. She'd been on the receiving end of a half-conscious stumbling rescue through a field of rubble once, and while she remembered basically none of the nightmarish experience, Connie assured her that she'd been an excellent conversationalist. But then, she and Connie had been working together for months at that point. This was only Wash's second mission on Alpha team, and he'd been quiet, meticulous. Kept to himself.
The thing about the old joke, the one that said you shouldn't treat rookies like they were people, was that it wasn't really a joke.
"So," Carolina said, the desperate cheeriness in her voice echoing weirdly in her helmet. "What's your thing, Agent Washington?"
Wash mumbled something, his head lolling to one side, and she shrugged a little, jolting him awake. His fingers tightened on her shoulder, then relaxed. "Uh," he said. "My thing?"
"You know. The character-defining inexplicably ridiculous trait you use so you make an impression, so people don't forget who you are. South dyes her hair and collects tattoos. York's got the damn guitar. Wyoming has his awful jokes."
"I... don't think I have one of those," Wash said, weakly.
A distant rumble brought up a simultaneous alert in her HUD. It wasn't unexpected, but she ran the numbers just in case. Covie ships inbound to start glassing in earnest. Her HUD recognized the pattern a moment before she did. Current projection: the plasma fire would start at their location in under five minutes. Five minutes was well before they'd make it to the transmitter. Well before the Mother of Invention would be able to scramble a rescue.
The bite of frustration, quickly suppressed. Four minutes and fifty seconds. A lot could happen in four minutes and fifty seconds.
"You should get a thing," she said. Her shoulder was throbbing again in time with her hammering heartbeat. She wondered whether it might be worth just dumping the last of her suit's painkillers into her bloodstream all at once. Four minutes. "You're gonna be around a while. Take up skateboarding or something."
Wash snorted. "You're saying I'm just cannon fodder otherwise."
A glint of sunlight from the ragged ceiling, incongruously bright in the gloom. "I'm saying it pays to have friends."
A crackle of static over her radio. Carolina's knees were already starting to give out by the time the pilot's voice registered. Three minutes and forty seconds. "You fucks had better be ready for evac, this is not where I want to be right now!"
"Nice of you to join us."
"There are fifteen shitting ships up here with much bigger guns than me. I'd stow the attitude."
"You just wanted to be where the party was, didn't you? Transmitting coordinates."
Wash was staring at her, trying visibly to focus. "What's going on?"
Right. No helmet, no comms. Carolina straightened, shifting her weight, already searching out a new exit. "Rescue's here." Three minutes. She bared her teeth in a grin. "No problem."
Wash faded in and out on the final, nightmarish leg of their journey, as they rocketed through an ionized atmosphere, as they passed impossibly close to Covenant ships too focused on their slow plasma burn to pay them much mind. Under the brighter running lights of the Pelican, he looked more than half-dead, grey-faced and still bleeding from the edges of wounds gruesomely stuffed with pink-tinged biofoam. Carolina forewent her usual seat in the copilot's chair to sit beside him in the hold, her good shoulder braced up against him to keep him from jolting too hard against his restraints each time the dropship hit a patch of turbulence.
They were finally clearing atmo when she felt him move against her, shifting like he was trying to get comfortable, his face screwed into a grimace. "Hey," she said. "Welcome to Freelancer Airlines. I always complain, but they never hand out peanuts."
He coughed a laugh. "You seem chipper."
She decided not to mention the buzz induced by the heightened dose of painkillers she'd indulged in once they were beyond range of the Covenant weapons. Instead, she nudged him gently with her shoulder. "I figure you owe me one for saving your ass, and hey, maybe that means you forget to mention the whole noble self-sacrifice thing you tried to pull back there. Maybe that means I win my bet with York."
He managed a passable eye-roll, although the motion made his head loll and bump gently against her armored shoulder. "Can do, boss." A beat, then: "Skateboarding, huh?"
"Just... try not to fade into the background, if you can avoid it. Helps motivate people to pull off crazy-ass stunts against orders to save your life."
She'd raised her voice at the end of the sentence, and Pilot 479er leaned over from her seat to flip her the bird. "Never. Again. You're really fucking lucky you're cute, you know that?"
"Unwavering loyalty is such an inspiring thing to witness," Carolina said, resting a hand over her heart with a dramatic sigh. It was worth the glower she got in return. Maybe not worth the spike of pain in her shoulder.
Wash shifted again, and when she looked back at him she was startled at the sharpness of his gaze. "That's your thing, isn't it? You'd tear yourself to pieces to protect your team. Even the boring rookie. I saw how close those Covie bastards got. No way we would've made it out of there."
"We had a few minutes. A lot can happen in a few minutes. And besides, even if I'd dumped you back there, I couldn't have made it out alone in that time anyway."
"Yeah," he said. His voice was fading, but his brow was still furrowed with concentration. "You wouldn't have left me, though. Even if there'd been time for you to get out. You would've stayed. You would've done it for any of us."
Carolina felt the weight of Missy's dogtags, nestled safe in her armor. Like a stone at her chest. "Maybe."
He tilted his head back, eyes flickering closed. "Definitely," he said. "I'd bet on it."
He was quiet for the rest of the journey, and Carolina, drifting on a chemically induced high, dreamt about the burning planet they'd left behind.
Glassed. Evocative, descriptive. A word to make it more real, more immediate.
She dragged off her helmet, traced gloved fingers over the dent, then pressed the palm of her hand against her forehead, breathing slowly through her mouth. The air tasted fresh, recycled, but not enough to conceal the cloying scent of blood.
"Hey," Four-Seven called from the cockpit. "You get that loudmouthed lockpick to cook you dinner yet?"
Carolina grinned, dragged the hand back through her hair. "It's gonna be fancy, and it's gonna take hours."
Some things, after all, were more immediate, more real, more important than others.