Chapter One
Spartan-B124, aboard UNSC Corvette Falcon, Slipstream space – unknown coordinates near Beta Gabriel System. 1500 Hours, February 10, 2553 (Military Calendar)
The only signal that the ship had transitioned back to normal space was a tug of deceleration, Scott's room lacking windows, but even then it was a gentle tug that spoke volumes of the advancements humanity had made when it came to slipspace drives even in the few short months following the conclusion of the Human-Covenant War, blending a mixture of human and alien technology into a device that allowed faster than light travel.
Before, the jolt that came about was more pronounced and required the crew to hold on or strap in. Now, they just had to brace slightly as they went about their business onboard the ship, which is exactly what the Spartan did.
He tensed his legs slightly once he felt a slight change in the corvette's background noise but otherwise, his attention never wavered from his task of prepping his gear ahead of a combat drop via HEV to a long abandoned Outer Colony. It was a routine task for him, the past seven years consisting of countless times he and his team had gotten ready from a drop from orbit, and his hands danced around the plethora of equipment located on a table in his quarters, checking and rechecking for damage or fouling.
'Time to target three hours, four minutes, Commander,' a disembodied voice said from a wall mounted speaker, the captain of Falcon and her crew.
'Acknowledged,' Scott said without looking up. 'Anything anomalous?'
'Negative. No weird COM signals so far, but there could be ships operating under EMCON.'
'Acknowledged,' Scott said again.
The intercom clicked off as the captain of the ship, who was equal in rank to the Spartan, returned to his duties. He knew what he needed to do, having done it over the course of a career longer than Scott's by a good three years, and didn't need a passenger telling him what to do, even if said passenger held tactical command of the mission and its assets.
Scott, like Falcon's CO, knew what he needed to do and piloting a corvette wasn't one of his responsibilities. He had zero experiencing helming a ship larger than a Pelican dropship, so any input he had to offer might be detrimental. Better to let those who knew their jobs get on with it, just like they'd let him get on with his tasks.
He ejected the magazine from his assault rifle and pulled back the bolt, working it several times to ensure it was properly oiled and not snagging on anything, and ran the electronic systems through a full check. Everything pulsed back at him with a cool blue to signal it was working correctly, and the Spartan slipped the magazine back home.
He did the same with his pistol, and everything else, two more times to be certain they wouldn't fail on him at just the wrong moment, stowing them all into the various pouches and clips that adorned his armour and the rucksack that came with it, adjusting it all to make sure nothing rattled when he moved.
By the time he was done, their target was coming within range for HEV deployment and the lone Spartan made his way to the observation deck where Lieutenant Commander Matthew Esteban was waiting. The bridge was too cramped to accommodate a fully armoured Spartan and even on the more spacious observation deck, Scott seemed to take up half the room himself as he and Esteban peered through the toughened glass at their target below, the glassed Outer Colony of Kohl that appeared to be a great ball of ice, a permanent state of winter imposed upon it by the actions of the Covenant back in 2532.
The surface, what wasn't covered from view by thick grey clouds, was a dirty white, the sea still choked with ash even after twenty years to recover. Readouts appeared on Scott's HUD as Tara, the dumb AI that resided in his armour, interfaced with the corvette's systems and relayed her findings. They said the surface temperature was, on average, ten degrees below freezing with strong winds making it feel even colder.
'Hard to believe anything's alive down there,' Esteban said. 'We're here in the planet's summer months. I can't imagine what the place is like in winter.'
'Somebody's down there,' Scott said. 'Or, they were. It's just a matter of finding them.'
Spartan-B124, interior of Bravo-6, city of Sydney. 0845 Hours, January 02, 2553 (Military Calendar) Four weeks ago.
'Commander, welcome back,' the ONI agent said, an unassuming man who gave his name simply as Smith, dressed in a black service tunic with the all seeing eye of ONI sewn onto the shoulder in subdued colours. 'For a while, we thought we'd lost another member of Grey Team.'
He was sat behind a plain desk devoid of any personal touches, containing just a computer and an equally plain mug of coffee that had long ago grown cold, fixing the Spartan before him with a warm smile, or as warm a one that an ONI agent could muster. They lived and breathed secrets, after all, becoming more familiar with phrases like eyes only and beyond top secret than please and thank you.
Scott didn't return the smile, staring fixedly at the ONI agent. Unlike Smith, he was dressed in his armour, a battered and scuffed set of MJOLNIR Mark V coloured a matte steel grey, the only uniform aspect about it. His helmet came from the K line of armour pieces, boasting a command network module on the right of the helmet and additional plating on the brow to allow him to better intercept enemy transmissions and survive blows to the head that might come from above, the visor a deep black that offered no glimpse at the face behind it.
His shoulder pauldrons were the exact opposite of one another, the right hand one nothing more than a hardened plate wrapped around his upper shoulder that allowed extra protection during close quarters combat while offering some freedom of movement when firing a rifle. The left shoulder's design went the other way, a circular piece of metal boasting great defensive capabilities against incoming fire when shooting from a prone position.
For storage, his armour sported three pouches directly on the chest, each big enough to hold an extra magazine or equipment like lock picks and data pads, and a much larger soft case on his left leg that held anything else that didn't have a home, including a pack of cards housed in a battered tobacco tin that had survived countless battles, and other than a UGPS on his left forearm the only other adjustment Scott had made to his suit were knee guards from the FJ/Para line, offering maximum protection at minimum weight.
All in all, the Spartan and his armour weighed more than half a ton, closing off some avenues of approach or escape, but offered enhanced speed, reflexes and strength, and a recharging energy shield as compensation, resulting in a very hard to kill soldier who, when paired with an AI, could receive and act upon fresh intelligence in the field at a moment's notice, a deadly combination.
The suit, and the Spartan wearing it, had just returned from a parallel world where humanity had never spread to the stars, bombing themselves into near extinction long before that could happen in a nuclear war of global proportions, leaving behind a radioactive hellhole raiders and mutants and scavengers constantly fought over with only a few bastions of humanity trying to make the world a better place.
He and a few companies of Marines, plus four platoons of ODSTs, had gotten engaged in two different wars on both sides of what was once America, fending off mercenaries in and around the former Washington, DC, before shifting regions and enemies to help defend the State of Nevada from two whole armies, one modelling itself after the pre-War US Army and the other taking inspiration from Ancient Rome.
The fight had not been without casualties, most of them coming about when a Covenant assault carrier appeared high above the Earth and shot down their frigate, prompting the remaining crew to launch a desperate boarding action to give themselves a means of escaping the wastelands.
And they had, returning just a few days ago to find their Earth, only after it had been assaulted and partially glassed by a Covenant fleet of gigantic proportions and some sort of parasitic infestation that had gripped the eastern coast of Africa. More staggering was the fact the Elites of all things had broken away from the Covenant after some falling out with their bosses, allying with the UNSC to send them and their new enforcers the Brutes into Hell.
It had come as a shock to Scott and he couldn't quite wrap his head around the idea, everything he had known in his life up until that point placing emphasis on the fact that aliens were bad, and should be killed at every opportunity. Now they were allies? Madness.
'Sir, what's the status of SPARTAN-B101?' he asked, keenly aware that the last he had seen of Emily was of her inert form being loaded onto a Pelican for transport to the UNSC Hopeful, a little over four months ago following the Battle of Leon.
'She's fine, Commander,' Smith said. 'There's no need to worry. B101 made a full recovery and returned to active duty just in time to help with the Battle of Earth.'
'Where is she?'
'On deployment, long range, so we can't easily recall her, but rest assured. We will get you two back together before too long.'
The Spartan let out a breath he didn't know he'd been holding, relieved to know Emily was still alive but worried slightly that she was out by herself. Seven years of fighting alongside one another fostered deep bonds between people, and the Spartan-III program placed great emphasis on its candidates utilising teamwork to achieve objectives.
As was so often drummed into their heads by Lieutenant Ambrose, fireteam is family. To hear his teammate was working elsewhere without him caused a pang of concern to resonate throughout Scott. He could sense apprehension from Tara via his neural lace, the AI having grown accustomed to Emily in the short time Grey Team had worked with the intelligence construct.
'Request permission to join her, sir,' Scott said, but Smith shook his head.
'Permission denied, I'm afraid,' he said. 'As much as I'd want two Spartans working together on the same mission, there are other matters to attend to.'
He snapped his fingers and a holographic map of a star system snapped into view between him and Scott, slowly rotating along an unseen axis to show a dirty yellow star at the centre and five celestial bodies, two rocky planets and a gas giant with two moons, revolving around it on circular orbits. At the bottom of the image were the coordinates of the system, and below these was the official designation.
'Beta Gabriel,' Smith began. 'Almost a hundred light years from Earth and home to a single Outer Colony, Kohl, which was founded in 2480.'
He snapped his fingers again and the map zoomed in on Kohl, one of the moons orbiting the gas giant, and Scott saw most of the surface was ocean with a single landmass, a mountainous continent that took up a quarter of the planet's surface. Clustered close to the southernmost part of the continent was a sprawling city with an orbital elevator sitting a few kilometres even further south to put it on the equator. As the image zoomed in even more, the Spartan saw numerous docks and ports filled with ships and barges lining most of the coast.
'By the time the Covies came knocking in 2532, it was a chief exporter of fish with a population of fifty-thousand, helping feed four other systems which was vital after we lost Harvest, so a spirited defence was made which, ultimately, failed and we retreated from the system.
'As is SOP in such instances, we deployed a long range beacon to keep an ear out for any anomalous transmissions, human or otherwise, so we could act accordingly based on what we heard.'
Smith leaned back in his chair and steeped his fingers, looking over at Scott and, to a lesser extent, Tara, pausing for a moment before saying, 'For the longest of times, we heard nothing from the Beta Gabriel system. Then, around a year ago, the beacon began detecting something. At first we believed this was just garbled interstellar noise that a twenty year old platform had picked up and paid it no heed, but when the noise came back and with near perfect regularity we started paying more attention.'
'An automated message,' Scott said, rather than guessed.
'Yeah,' Smith said with a nod. 'Encrypted too, so it's not a distress call from any survivors on the planet. Or, if it is, they only want certain people to come get them.'
'Human or Covenant?'
'No idea,' Smith said, offering an apologetic shrug. 'It's being broadcasted on all known frequencies, human and Covenant, so we don't know at this point if it's humans using Covenant equipment or vice versa. All we know is that it's the same signal, day in and day out, getting broadcasted from a glassed colony. Make of that what you will.'
Nothing good was Scott's first thought. The only signal he might expect to come from a colony the UNSC had retreated from was a distress signal, on known human frequencies, without encryption, calling for any and all listeners to come save them. Encrypted signals on all frequencies hinted at ulterior motives and hostile factions, likely the Insurrection, alerting their comrades in arms to some new discovery that might tip the odds back in the favour somehow.
'So why are you sending me?' Scott asked.
'To investigate, of course,' Smith said. 'We've been sitting on this for over a year, flagging it as low priority given the Covenant were giving us something more important to focus on, but now they're fractured we've got an opportunity to check it out. If there's a threat on Kohl, we need it dealing with sooner rather than later.'
'No, I mean why are you sending me specifically,' Scott said. 'Deploying a single Spartan on a simple recon job seems like a massive waste of resources given the greater, more apparent threats out there. Wouldn't ODSTs be able to get the job done just as easily?'
'Maybe,' Smith said. 'Definitely, actually, but I've only got access to a handful of them, a battalion or so, and about a dozen other problems I need to look at that, like you said, are more apparent and of greater concern. The difference between them and Kohl, though, is that we know more about those problems.
'Enough, actually, to know just how many Helljumpers are needed to sort it out. That's not the case with Kohl. I could send a platoon of them there when I actually needed to send a company, or the whole battalion, because there's a sizeable Covenant garrison still on the ground looking to reunite with their buddies and resume their genocidal campaign, or an Insurrectionist cell that's hidden themselves amongst the ruins and is looking to establish a second Venezia.
'I'd rather send a Spartan into an unknown situation like that because they stand a greater chance at making it through alive, and at softening up the opposition whilst waiting for mainline forces to arrive. You guys have a reputation for making the impossible happen, which might just be what I need.'
Smith spread his hands wide and added, 'It's not ideal. I'll freely admit that now. Were we not just starting to pick ourselves up and had we not just deployed a division of Marines, ODSTs and Spartan-IVs off to some far flung system to battle Innies and griffins, I'd have sent more than a corvette and a sole Spartan to investigate this signal, but you're all I've got.'
The Spartan cocked his head to the side as he processed what Smith had said, agreeing with most of it despite not liking the news he was getting deployed solo again, before fixating on one thing.
'Griffins?'
Spartan-B124, interior of Glukhovsky Memorial Elevator. 1930 Hours, February 10, 2553 (Military Calendar)
Stepping foot into the orbital elevator was like stepping foot into some macabre tomb, everywhere he looked containing abandoned suitcases and bags that were covered with dust and frost from when the inhabitants of Kohl had made their desperate escape from the Covenant, and Scott crouched down besides one such holdall, plucking a small doll from within that looked even smaller in his gauntleted hand.
'Do you think she knows she left it behind?' Tara said in the Spartan's ear.
'I don't know,' Scott said as he discarded the item and stood, panning his gaze across the atrium and cutting through the darkness with twin beams of intense white light.
The power had long since failed in the elevator, meaning the lights had stopped working and their emergency battery backups were completely exhausted. The illumination being provided by Scott was likely the first such artificial source to beat back the darkness in years, even if it didn't paint a pretty picture.
He had seen similar scenes before on a dozen different planets, often with the people still around to accidentally drop their bags and holdalls and dolls, and he couldn't decide if the deafening silence of Glukhovsky Memorial Elevator was better or worse than the deafening cries of colonists as they hoped for a spot on the next available transport. Each was horrific in its own way but Scott settled on preferring the noise rather than the silence.
At least the cries meant there were still people he could save. A dread silence meant he was too late.
He shook the thought from his head and hefted his rifle, snapping its underslung torch on as well to provide extra illumination, pushing through the detritus and flotsam that was a panicked evacuation's sad reminder to the elevator's main centre of operations where, if the archived schematics were to be believed, would be a working terminal of some description. Falcon had triangulated the automated signal's source to the elevator's long range communication arrays, which meant there had to be some record of where it came from.
Scans had shown the elevator's temperature to be close to -50 Celsius, far below what anyone could expect to brave without adequate protection, to say nothing of making the ascent from the planet to the top of the elevator. All four cars would still be docked with the station, left there after the last evacuees were away and with nobody to send them back down again, and even if someone managed to divert enough power into the station to send them hurtling downwards it was likely the docking mechanisms had seized shut, or become frozen into place once the temperature dropped.
That meant someone on the planet had established a link between themselves and the communication arrays and left an electronic trail that Tara, and in turn Scott, could follow all the way home.
It wasn't long before the Spartan found himself in the nerve centre of the elevator, a cramped space filled with terminals and data banks and windows that offered majestic views of the planet below, a once picturesque panoramic of deep greens and blues that had been replaced with a single, solid expanse of grey that was polluted snow, a lasting reminder of the Covenant's glassing creating a nuclear winter.
'We've gone from one extreme to another,' Tara said. 'First the scorching deserts of DC and the Mojave, now the frozen wastelands of Kohl.'
'Don't say I never take you places,' Scott murmured as he centred himself on the largest terminal, sweeping away two decades worth of dust and frost from the keyboard and tapping the space bar.
He reasoned there had to be some trickle of power running through the elevator's veins if it was sending messages, either too little to activate the lights or diverted solely to the communications array, but some of it had to pass through the operations centre. It was the figurative brain of the tether and through which all commands and requests went, meaning that if communications were up then so was this.
It was and Scott eventually found himself looking at the logon screen, ejecting Tara's chip from his helmet and plugging her into the system to work her magic. She appeared above a nearby holotank, avatar blurry and distorted from the frost that covered it, smoothing her hands over the lab coat and jeans that made up her appearance as powerful decryption schemes went to work on the antiquated computers currently hosting her.
'Three seconds,' Scott said once the logon screen vanished, replaced by a more cluttered desktop. 'You're not struggling, are you?'
'Hardly,' Tara shot back. 'It's the hardware, not the software. This is the first time in two decades that this stuff has spooled up to full speed, and the cold isn't helping.'
'Is it going to be a problem?'
'No.'
The screen began flashing as numerous alerts popped into existence, each bemoaning some overdue report or missed maintenance schedule or equipment failure, nothing majorly critical that would cause problems in the near future and Scott paid them no heed, Tara closing them all soon after as she sifted through the logs and found the one they were interested in.
'Okay, it looks like the communication system was last accessed one year, four months and twenty-three days ago,' Tara began. 'Content was an encoded file with no specific destination in mind. I'm guessing the sender didn't know where his friends are anymore.'
'No,' Scott said. 'Signal source?'
'Local,' Tara said. 'Obviously. Just give me a second to- Oh.'
'Oh, what?'
'The source of the signal came from a terminal in the base station. All external connections were severed during the Covenant's assault. Whoever sent the signal had to physically visit the station to do so. The actual source could be anywhere.'
'Of course,' Scott said, turning his gaze downwards to look at Kohl through the glass floor, a small spec of grey at the very bottom of the tether surrounded by clouds and covered with snow. 'Hail Falcon and let them know we're ready for pickup, and have them train their sensors down at the city. Look for anomalous heat sources or energy readings, anything that might signal the presence of survivors.'
'Working,' Tara said. 'And if they can't find anything?'
The Spartan shrugged.
'We find them the old fashioned way.'