Torn Fragments: The End of the Human-Covenant War
Disclaimer: I do not own bungie or xbox or the halo franchise or any other affiliated company for that matter.
Chapter 1: The Final Four
Captain Amphase drifted along through the bridge of his ship observing the viewscreens of his crew. "Status report," he barked suddenly. His navigation engineer replied, "sir, there are seven covenant capital ships surrounding us; two to our starboard, two to our port, one behind us, and two directly ahead." The man in charge of making their craft invisible turned towards the captain, "we are successfully holding at 89 percent ghost sir. We should be able to keep up this level of stealth for another 14 hours." "Dammit!" the captain said as he pounded an empty terminal sending himself a few feet backwards in the process from the low gravity. "Why wont these covie bastards leave now. They already won the battle. What's the point of having seven capital ships stationed out in the middle of nowhere?"
Outside the invisible ship, the hulking wreckage of a UNSC ship floated past and was deflected by one of the covenant capital ship's shields.
The navigation engineer turned towards the captain and said, "sir this isnt the middle of nowhere, this is a critical slipspace exit area usually from around the Earth area."
Then it suddenly dawned on the captain, "wait that must mean that the invasion of Earth must have started and they are guarding any exit areas for surviving ships. God I really hate these sons of bitches. They gotta kill you while you run. I really wish we could have won this war."
The navigation engineer said, "sir, we still can win this war. If Earth holds up against the invasion..."
"Come to your senses! The Covenant have a force almost five times the force that is defending Earth. If they manage to land any ground troops on the Earth surface then it will already be more than the already overwhelmed Marine forces can handle. Face it, the human race is doomed to be extinct by the end of the year."
"If only we had a Spartan..."
"Not even 100 Spartans could save the human race. There is just too many covie bastards left. All they need is to conquer one more planet and then its over."
"Sir there are still other colonies on other planets."
"You dont understand, the Earth is the symbol of the human race. You take that away and we will have nothing left to fight for. You gotta figure that pretty much everyone will give up after that. Believe me i would like to have hope for the future of the human race like you do but my life experiences all tell me that this is the end of the line for all of us."
"So is that it sir? Are we just giving up? Are we just going to sit here until the covies find us and blow us all to dust? Or are we going to try to make a difference?"
"I would like to share your enthusiasm, but we are just one ghost ship and we are stuck in the center of seven covie ships with our energy about to run out. As captain of this ship i see that there really nothing that we can do. And even if we manage to get out of here without being killed, then what do we do? The ship that we were supposed to be bringing the secret shipment to got destroyed minutes before we got here. We have no orders. The final UNSC headquarters that is still standing is on the planet that is currently under conquest. So since you believe that your captain is not doing the job that he should be, you tell me what we should do."
"Why dont we check what the shipment was? It doesnt really matter if the secret gets out now."
"Ah what the hell why not. We have nothing else to do for the next 14 hours besides carry on this useless argument." The captain then turned towards the ghost engineer who had been silent all throughout this conversation and said "let me know the second anything changes." The ghost engineer gave a slight nod and turned back towards his station. The captain had always cut this guy a lot of slack because of the huge burden he carried. It was the sole responsibility of the ghost engineer to avoid detection at all costs. Detection could mean the end of the entire crew's lives. So ghost engineers held the lives of the entire crew in their hands.
Down below the bridge was the storage area of the ship. The ship was rather large for a ghost as it had at one point been a cargo ship that had been partially destroyed and then rebuilt with stealth technology. The captain approached the vault which held the top secret cargo they had been initially ordered to deliver. He inputed the 16 digit password and the door panel chimed with a green light. The door slid away and the captain and navigation enginner entered the unusually cold vault. Vaults were uncommon in almost all kinds of ships in that time and this one was even more unique. It had been installed directly into the ship with the delivery already inside. What now greeted the two crew members were four large cryo tanks, one of which was significantly larger than the rest.
"We were ordered to deliver four cryotanks? Man this just gets stranger by the second," the captain said as he approached one.
The navigation enginner approached the largest of the cryo tanks and peered inside the small window. The engineer fell to his knees and let out a gasp. "Oh my God, its a Spartan."