Chapter 1: Introduction

On the side of a mountain in the middle of nowhere on the planet Kholo, a fifteen year old boy sat on a stump. His name was Diesel. He had black hair that hung down to his lean shoulders, and had hard hazel eyes that, if he were to give a serious frown, could pierce another person's soul. His features where thin and sharp but not because of malnutrition. He was well fed. He had black scruff that was coming into his features, that matched the color of his hair, growing on his jaw line and upper lip, which indicated his youthful self was soon to flower into manhood. His pants were fashioned of a black bear's skin, with moccasins to match. He wore no shirt but had dog-tags dangling from his neck as he chewed a sprig of grass that was hanging out of his mouth. His upper body was lithe and lean but very strong, reminding one of a tightly braided raw-hide whip. He was surprisingly strong for his size as he only massed at about 150 pounds but could lift up to 200 pounds to his chest only using his arms. His fingers were also very strong and relatively thick for his figure. They displayed a few scars from past mistakes, accumulated, mostly, from work. All in all, he was a very healthy, well built young man.

He sat there silently working with his eyes fixated on his task, giving his personage the appearance of an intensely focused tiger, steadily scraping his knife back and forth on the underside of an elk's skin.

He had spent the past hour tirelessly scraping the flesh off the hide of that newly killed elk, and was hardly half-way done. This was the fifth elk hide he had to tan that spring, and chances were: this was far from the last one. While elk were not indigenous to Kholo, they still thrived in the local ecosystem.

Earlier that morning, Diesel had used an MA5B to shoot the elk that happened to be grazing only about two hundred meters outside his cabin. The MA5B wasn't standard, though. He had modified the rifle himself by taking all of the electronic components out to turn the gun into an analog firearm. This made it impossible to be digitally traced and much easier to maintain and a bit more reliable. He and his brother had done the same to all of their weapons, actually.

Earlier that morning, Diesel's older brother,Boomer, had departed to go to the nearest town. It had been two years since either of them had last ventured into any civilized settlement, and only for the purpose of purchasing new clothes, ammunition for their bows and guns, and the like. It was only a five hour round trip on horseback, so Boomer was expected to return in the early afternoon.

They didn't have much money, only whatever a couple of mountain men could sell, like wild berries to the relatively nearby farmers, or tanned pelts to those who might have been into that kind of fashion, or, perhaps most profitable, selling whiskey because most people would buy it.

Kholo was mostly a rural farming planet with only a few major cities world wide, and so the local government hardly had the care to trace the distribution of liquor (of all things), particularly in rural areas. Plus the Covenant pulled most of the attention from such issues. This gave Boomer and Diesel an ability for easy cash with little chance of any law-dogs being a problem.

Over the years of living in the mountains, the two brothers became well versed in crafting their own primitive weapons, traps, clothes from animal skins, and foraging for food, but they always kept some contemporary technology at their disposal just in case anything happened.

Diesel sniffed the air and smelled what he had expected at any minute. The liquor mash he had made from wild fruit a couple weeks ago was now finishing its fourth distilling procedure. What was four-times distilled whiskery for, one might ask? It wasn't for drinking. The intense alcohol that was being brewed was intended to be used as a solvent to clean things, like dirty guns.

Diesel had other batches of "gun solvent" already made, but constant consumption demanded constant production.

There was one time that the whiskey supply had ran out, and the guns needed to be cleaned, so Boomer had the brilliant idea of using his own pee as a solvent. In theory the uric acid would act as alcohol normally would in gun-solvent. It did work, and the guns were clean, but peeing down the barrel of a gun was far from preferable. It also smelled bad for a few days.

Diesel set the animal skin onto the pole he used to help work hides, and went to attend to the nearly completed liquor batch. It wasn't a very impressive pole. It was merely a thin log that Boomer had cut, scraped, and placed into a hole in the ground to keep it upright, but it did its job.

It was less than a minute later that the distilling process was complete. Diesel put out the fire that was under the pot, which was filled with mash, proceded to place the clear lightning into bottles, and put it away in the cellar, which was located in an underground basement under the cabin.

He went right back to work on tanning the hide. He continued this for ten minutes when he heard the sound of hoofsteps in the distance on the forest floor. Diesel knew that Boomer was approaching with the supplies he had left to get.

Diesel looked up from his work to see his brother just coming into view as he rode his bay colored stallion up the side of the mountain with a full pack of supplies fastened securely to the back of his horse.

Boomer was a giant of a man who stood seven-foot-two and almost weighed four hundred pounds. He was twenty-three years old now, with dark blond hair that, like his brother, hung down to his shoulders. His curly dark blond beard covered his whole face in a single, bushy growth of course scruff. His eyes were blue and serious but held an air of calm self-confidence, and fatherly comfort and wisdom. Unlike his brother, his features were broad and thick. His bulky hands were like steel vices, his jaw even more so. His muscular arms were the size of most men's legs and his chest resembled that of his own horse.

Boomer reached the cabin, dismounted, and began unpacking. All the while, Diesel continued to scrape the hide.

Diesel was almost done. Twenty more minutes and the hide would be thoroughly scraped and be ready for the brain solution he had mixed earlier.

Diesel halted his work and averted his eyes from what he was doing to his brother when he heard Boomer ask, "Where's the elk meat?"

Diesel knew that Boomer was referring to the elk he had shot earlier that day. In response, Diesel simply pointed his knife at the smoking-shed that was built out of logs. Boomer glanced over the shed and noticed that there was no smoke emanating from it, which indicated that Diesel hadn't started smoking the meat for some reason.

Boomer returned his attention to the teenager sitting on the stump, and asked, "The meat ain't done bleeding?"

Diesel simply shook his head in response.

Diesel was always a quiet person. Even as a baby he never cried much and was a man of few words, but often, when he did speak, he usually had something meaningful to say and spoke concisely; saying much in only a few words, mostly only to his close family, like his parents or his brothers.

When it came to people outside of his immediate family he always preferred to stay away from the attention and simply observe the other people interact with each other and about what was being said. He was always a good listener.

Despite his strong and silent nature, he never refused to ask his family for any help that he needed. He was diligent and would persist on any given task with rarely ever giving a complaint. He was rather smart too. He had a gift for learning languages, both verbal and gestural. This gave him the ability not only become fluent in Russian and Mandarin by the time he was ten, but also aided his natural "way with animals", prey and predator alike. Since then, he had mastered Hungarian and was semi-fluent in Spanish, and was advancing fast.

He enjoyed learning languages not because he wanted to communicate with other people ,necessarily, but to understand what others where communicating, especially if it involved information that concerned him. Although almost everyone knew English, there were still a large portion of humanity that primarily spoke different tongues. For instance, most people from New Harmony spoke Slavic languages and much of Reach's population spoke Hungarian.

One time, when he was about his business in town, buying some cheep pots to make a whiskey still, he overheard a couple of adolescents, who were sitting on a nearby bench, speaking in Russian; commenting on his unusual appearance of animal skin clothing, and their own suspicions that he might be hiding from the local authorities. This prompted him to finish his affairs quickly and get out of town, just in case there might be trouble involving him. It was a good thing too, because when he exited the town he observed the two previous people through his pair of binoculars, talking to a couple of local police. Diesel figured the situation most likely concerned himself.

His ability to understand the other predominant inter-planetary languages undoubtedly gave him an edge in situations in which people might have tried to exclude information from him that could give him an advantage for any reason.

The best part was that no one, other than his family, knew of his polyglot capabilities. The ignorance of others concerning any of his abilities was one of his more powerful tools to use against other people.

Boomer was just as calm and level headed as his little brother but was much more personable. He was the one that always did the talking, and was the one who taught Diesel all there was to know about conducting business in town. While he didn't have Diesel's prodigious ability to learn languages, he learned a little bit from his brother and ,occasionally, the two would practice by having conversations in whatever language Boomer wanted to practice.

Boomer always seemed to have the wisdom to make the right choices regardless of the problem or situation. He was always calm and never seemed to loose his temper, and no matter what, he always looked after his brother and put whatever family he had left as the first and foremost priority.

They trusted each other wholeheartedly. They stuck together no matter what, and never let anyone or anything come between them. Regardless of the circumstances, they looked out for each other and watched each other's backs. They were brothers.

Boomer finished unpacking his horse, Tucker, and proceeded to put him back in his pasture. The two brothers had constructed a fence out of logs over a couple of summers that held seven hectares. To keep their two horses separate, they put a cross-fence through it to roughly split the pasture into two equal halves. They kept the horses separate because the other was a mare.

The two brothers thought that one day they would like to raise a foal to be used primarily as a pack-horse, but at the current time they wouldn't be able to take proper care of three horses so they kept the two horses separated. After all, it was spring and that was the time that the mare, Korona, would start to get…fidgety.

Diesel had finally finished scraping the pelt clean of any flesh and brought it inside to begin the next step. As he continued working, Boomer attended to the elk carcass inside the smoke-shed. It had just bled out so it was ready for smoking. He picked up the blood-bucket and set it outside the shed. He then placed a sufficient amount of freshly cut green wood and placed it into the smoking-oven, which would vent into the shed, drying the meat and flavoring it with its smoky goodness.

Boomer waited until he could see smoke seeping out of shed before he was satisfied. He poured the bucket of blood onto the ground and washed it out in the stream that ran behind the cabin. He went inside to find that Diesel was nearly complete with his work for the day. After he was done spreading the brain material all over on both sides of the pelt, it would be placed in a cool damp area to absorb the oils of the brain for a day or so.

Neither brother had much work to do that day. It was now 15:00 and everything that was planned for that day was complete. After all, it was a Saturday. With that in mind, Diesel broke out a bottle of homemade 60 proof whiskey and tossed it to his brother. They both drank and just enjoyed the fact that they had the rest of the day off; to spend the rest of it just having a good time. They were both wise in their consumption, however, and never drank more than they could handle.

Diesel's mind wandered to past memories of his family. He was very little at the time, but he remembered that before the aliens had attacked and destroyed his home world, Eridanus II, his family helped fight the UEG's attempt to subjugate all of the colonies under a single government, even when it came to shedding blood. Many people called people like his family by many names: rebels, terrorists, insurgents, selfish anarchists, and the like. Diesel never denied that many of the insurrectionists were lawless rebels, who did terrible things in retaliation to many people who weren't even combatants. Some went even so far as to incarcerate whole neighborhoods under suspicion that they supported the UEG. Just like Diesel's family, they wanted their own freedom too, but went about securing it the wrong way.

But, the Boon family was different. They had a very clear set of moral standards that they, as a family, held with ardent conviction. They made it a point to only respond with lethal force when people, even the government, imminentley threatened to take their property or their lives. That was what distinguished the Boons from many of the other insurrectionists: they never harmed anyone that wasn't an immediate threat. They did everything in their own power to remain morally blameless.

But then, the aliens attacked, which caused the focus of the fighting to be directed toward the Covenant rather than other humans. Diesel was only six when it happened, but he vividly remembered how the Covenant's ships surrounded the planet and sent in ground troops and started attacking, just as they had done to many human colonies before. He remembered how his parents instructed Boomer and Diesel, the two youngest, to escape to the nearest ship for civilian evacuation. The two oldest brothers, along with their father, Axel, were to rescue their mother, Josephine, from the city. It just so happened that she had ventured into town to buy some parts for a truck when the planet was attacked.

While Boomer and Diesel borded a ship without much of a hitch, the rest of the Boon family had managed to board a ship as well. Both the ships managed to exit the planet's atmosphere, and all seemed okay. But then, a plasma beam from one on the Covenant Supercarriers had been fired into the ship that held most of the Boon family. Diesel and Boomer stood in silence as they watch everything transpire through a window. Boomer was only fourteen at the time.

They escaped to Kholo where they had lived in the secluded mountains ever since.

Diesel lifted his gaze to his brother. Boomer understood that his little brother was about to say something.

"You think they'll find us here?" Diesel asked.

Boomer knew exactly what Diesel was talking about so he responded, "I don't know, man. They have destroyed every human colony they've come across, and the UNSC hasn't been successful in pushing them back. But who knows? They might not locate this planet. I suppose all we can do is wait and keep our fingers crossed."

Diesel nodded in understanding.

The time was approaching 19:00 and the two had their work cut out for them, come tomorrow. With that, they each crawled into their own hammocks and prepared to get up early in the morning, 04:00 to be precise.

"Good night, bro," Boomer said.

"Night," Diesel responded.

They both shut their eyes and fell into a deep sleep, leaving the house still and quiet, with only the sound of the little midnight critters from outside to break the silence.