A/N: If you are new, look up Orca in the halo mass effect crossover area for the full story, it will soon be in the halo section only, however.
The ass end of nowhere
March 20
2553
1255 Hours
"This is stupid. Seriously, doc, you've got us out here in the ass end of nowhere for three days now, think you can get us back somewhere we can at least shoot our problems?"
This is the first time Fal speaks with the doc since she set foot on the ship and in light of the current staring contest over the kitchen table, I kinda wish she'd kept quiet.
To my left, Trevor munches on his burger with enthusiasm, oblivious to the sudden rise of tension while, to the right, Iona gives Fal a stare of death.
The doctor puts down her meal and takes a second to prepare her answer, "I am working with very little resources, trying to convert a human Shaw-Fujikawa translight engine into something resembling the Covenant model, if I make even the slightest mistake, this ship will end up sucked trough a black hole into a hundred meter long Spaghetti. I could botch my job, but I doubt you'd like the result."
Fal nods once and return to her plate, "Alright, take your time then."
G317 is a lot like an animal, when you think about it; aggressive, unsubtle, predatory and quick to hit the berserk button, but she is completely oblivious to feelings such as remorse, shame or resentment, as aggressive as her question was, the doc supplied a satisfying explanation so Fal won't push it, unlike many other peoples who would try to justify their anger or incitate the doc to work faster.
Abe, in front of me, begins swapping extremely complex scientific talk out of which I can only salvage a word out of ten, prompting me to start a discussion of my own with Iona.
"Once that's contract's done," She looks up, just knowing I'm speaking to her, "I'd like to go to Emerald Cove…"
A slight smile tugs at the corner of her lips. We trained in underwater operation there. Curtis sabotaged my and Abby's tank and, in return, we stole all of his gear while he was sleeping on one of the island, leaving him stranded, half naked and without supplies other that his desalinization kit.
The next of the week we spent on an island that had previously been occupied, cooking clams and tropical fishes and learning how to surf.
We're halfway trough the re-enactment when Bob bursts out laughing. I know exactly why.
"Then, Zombie boy sees somethin' triangular stickin' from the water and he starts yellin' 'Shark!' like it woulda made it go away!" Fal and Trev join him in laughing, finding it just as funny as they did back then. "And Chris swims and swims so fuckin' fast he got halfway across the island and even then, it's the palm three that stopped him!"
"So what was it really?" The doc asks, interrupting her conversation with Abby.
Iona just grins evilly while answering, "Chief Mendez, our chief instructor, turns out, the Spartan IIs had ended up on that island too. When he found our instructor, he deduced where we had gone."
"Curtis had sunburns all over…" Abby recalls with a sadistic grin, "I almost felt bad for the man." She then plant her eyes in mine, "But that's not why you want to go there, is it?"
God damnit Abe!
"No," I confess, "it ain't," I managed to piece some memories together while we were there, little details, but it brought me to a simple conclusion, "Emerald's where I'm born."
There's a few seconds of silence around the table, then Trevor speaks, nodding slowly, "Makes sense; all there is there are clams and starfishes."
Abe is the first to get it, "Because of his regenerative abilities and…"
"No, because he's dumb as a rock and totally spineless!" Bob quips, earning a streak of ketchup across the face.
I duck under the mustard counter attack and roll away before…
*Splat!*
Should have known better that to start a food war with the team's sniper…
Iona looks up at the yellow streak running across her face and growl dangerously.
I wipe the mustard in my eyes and signal Bob to go right while I take left. At the table, Iona's already organized the troops and they're getting up.
"Excuse us, doctor," She politely tells Farkas, who's watching with interest, "We must go educate our little brothers.
Bob and I begin running right after that, Fal and Abby going after me while I guess Big guy and Boss are going after the sniper.
My shoulder hit the wall quite painfully, but I recover fast enough to duck under Fal's outstretched hands.
I speed past the infirmary and Hydroponic area, practically feeling Fal's breath on the back of my neck along the way. She's faster than me, but not by much and the corridor is not long enough for her to reach her peak speed.
No clue how that happens, but I find myself diving headlong down the hatch to the cargo bay, landing with a roll under Fal's angry bitching about my lack of fear of injury.
Her exact words are "Fucking Zombie boy!"
I recover from the roll twenty centimeters form the railing. A bit more and I was barreling down eight meters…
I don't stop; I jump, spinning sideway in midair and landing on the bay floor with another roll.
There are plenty of crates here to hide behind, but that would be too obvious. Instead, I climb the chain leading to the crane and hide in the dark folds between the ceiling's support struts.
When Fal arrives, soon followed by Abby, they only see Iona and Trev, coming from the opposite door.
"You lost yours?" Iona calls, smiling, and Fal only nods, squinting to pierce the darkness bellow.
Iona and Abby look up, but I'm hidden by the large support strut and too far to the back of the cargo area for them to have a good angle at me. Of course, I need to duck my head behind cover when they look too closely, but I manage to stay hidden by squeezing myself between the two support struts, holding in place trough pressure and friction.
"Sneaky bastards," Trevor growls, "Probably hiding right next to us, laughing their asses off."
"Yeah," Fal scoffs, "You take your eyes off them just one second and poof! They're gone!"
Iona shakes her head and that, "Okay, guys, you win, you can come out!"
I trust Boss enough to know this isn't a trap, so I let go and use the thick chain to rappel my way down, sticking my tongue out at Fal and Abe on the way down.
"You guys are getting rusty," I call upon hitting the floor, stretching my arms and legs a little, "Maybe we should hide your stuff, make you train your seeking skills…"
"Screw you, Zombie boy." Is the general answer.
Bob appears next to me out of the darkness and I instinctively step away from the possible threat.
"You ain't much better, bro…" He laughs with a wink.
After that, Iona decides we should reconvert a part of the hold into a gymnasium and set up war games like Mendez used to put us trough, so we don't become soft.
0
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0
Spartan-class Freighter Thermopylae
?
?
I wake up to the sound of alarms, my cabin plunged in darkness.
Not much to see anyway; there's the bed, opposite to the ladder, the shower and toilet to the left and the dresser to the right. Plus, as a Spartan, I can see pretty well in the dark, enough to orient myself, anyway.
I decide to suit up before I leave the room and take five minutes or so to put my armor on in the dark. Guess I'll have to work on that, it took me half as long the first time, but I had a giant flower roaming around looking for me back then.
As I climb up from my room, Trevor is descending from his, just over me.
I let Big guy go first and jump after him.
He's wearing his armor as well, the scratched brown plating glistening in my suit's low-light vision enhancement.
"What's up?" I ask the heavy gunner, who just shrugs his large shoulder pads, "Alright," I continue, "Go get some guns and meet me in the cockpit."
Trev nods once and we part ways. I meet Fal just as she climbs out of her room and tell her to wake the others.
I soon pass the empty common area and…
"Chris," Iona's voice in my comm. almost gives me a heart attack, "meet me in the cargo bay ASAP."
I flash my acknowledgment light green and turn around.
0
0
0
Five minutes earlier.
Abby loved this ship, she loved ships in general, but this one was her favorite ever; whereas most military vessels were designed with functionality and cheapness in mind, this freighter was made for practicality and comfort and although outdated, basic human comfort hadn't changed much in…. Well, ever.
So, unlike the military ships, outfitted with rigid command layout and little customizability, the cockpit was made to accommodate a single pilot. Every tactile screen could switch its function with another one if the pilot preferred and the joystick could easily be exchanged for simpler or more complex models, so long as they were compatible.
Abejundio spent more time in the cockpit than in her cabin now, customizing, installing videogames, fine tuning the commands. Iona had made it clear that the room was all hers, since beyond G051, no one in the squad had enough piloting skill to be sent there for anything other than temporary replacement and maintenance.
So when the radar blip appeared, it did so square in her face and she took exactly three seconds to recognize the Unggoy ship.
She immediately sounded the alarm and contacted the doc in engineering.
"We have problems, senorita, you have three minutes to get that drive working."
"The Grunts?" Came the tired answer.
"Yeah."
There was some resignation in the Doc's voice. She knew they Pylae was not equipped with weapons and that its stealth systems would not keep it safe for long. The only solution in that case would be to make a jump with the half assedly re-assembled drive, solution that had a fifty-fifty chance of ending in a spaghetti scenario.
Two minutes to jury rig a drive to the ship was a tight schedule, but she had worked tighter during the war and always came out no worse for wear and having learned a new shortcut.
0
0
0
Abby is the last one in the cargo bay, but she's all geared up and ready for drop.
We have yet to be briefed, but Iona, Kat and Abby seem to have spotted something very bad that requires everyone combat ready in the bay.
Whatever that thing is, it will take a lot of firepower to bring down; Fal is loading her auto-shotgun magazines with self-propelled Armor-Piercing slugs, Bob received one of Abby's beam rifles, Iona is loading her MA5C with FAR 5H0T Fuel Air Rounds, same as Trevor and I, while Abby is hauling around so many covenant guns that she looks like a Christmas three.
No sign of Doctor Farkas, however, but that's not very surprising, I guess, she's no soldier after all, she'll probably stay on the ship.
I'd love to be packing a M395, or a BR-55, these pack real punch, but I'll have to make due with special ammo and hope whatever Iona is pitting us against will fall from it.
I jump off the Salamander's hood and walk up to Abe as she steps off the elevator platform.
"SITREP?" Pretty much covers what I want to know.
Her dome helmet snaps up slightly and she stops walking. I can see her turn to Iona, a few meters behind me.
I see Boss nod in my rear view cam and Abby switches to squad wide comm:
"We were followed by the grunts and had to jury rig the FTL drive back in place and make a random jump…" Makes sense so far, Fal and Trevor stop their weapon maintenance to listen in, "But we ended up way off course, star charts are as lost as seagull on tequila, we are not receiving any kind of UNSC transmissions and are now orbiting an unidentified celestial body…" So far, it still makes sense, but why the guns? "…inhabited by humans speaking an unknown dialect and apparently fighting off an alien invasion."
She resumes walking toward Iona and the loading ramp. I follow.
"Covenant?" I sure hope so, this war ended way too soon.
"No, pero…" She thinks about it for a while and I'm not sure wether she said but or dog.
Iona finishes loading her last clip and stuff the thing in a thermo-resistant hardcase. "The bastards looked close to Brutes on the infrareds, but there's more of them down there than we ever thought were in the entire Covenant." I already use hardcases on my suit instead of soft pouches, so my clips are safe where they already are.
"That explains the FARs, but why do we care?" Bob might be a happy go lucky assassin, he really lacks in altruism, although I can't argue with him, it's not our problem, we're retired.
Fal jumps off the hood as well, her anger showing clearly through her body language.
"We care because we're SPARTANS," she spits, taking a few threatening steps toward Bob, "we kill aliens and save humans, that's what we were made for!"
Trev steps between the two, his massive stature keeping them from even seeing each other. "I'll tell you why we care; not because we were made that way, not because we took an oath when we were six, but because we're still Orca team, the best group of warriors in the galaxy, we can help these people, we can let these new bastards know humanity doesn't take shit from anyone and we can get very rich doing so."
As good an argument as any.