I force myself to watch in the mirror, as I suffer through every crippling hangover. The nice thing about raging alcoholism is that your diet usually consists exclusively of fluids, so it's easy to wash down a sink with a running tap. Plus there's the fresh, cool water piped straight from the valley walls of this frozen hellhole.

Gotta stay hydrated, right?

I'll spew my guts, choking and whimpering between particularly violent bouts, and every few minutes look opposite-me in the eye and groan "augh . . . never again."

Now, I like to think I'm referring to the drinking, because usually I go right back to emptying the deepest, darkest corners of my insides.

Typically, this lasts at least a day, and I mean all 93 fucking hours of it.

Then there's recovery, where I've wedged myself as deep as possible into the loveseat I have instead of a bed. (Oh god . . . I burned that thing years ago, I promise. Now, as a rule, I black out on the floor. A mop and bucket works so much easier on alien tiling than it does on a tempurpedic.)

And through all the pain, and sweats, and panicked staggers to the bathroom, I keep telling myself "never again. Never fucking again."

I know I'm an idiot every time I reach for that first bottle. I'm mentally screaming "NO! YOU FOOL!" and considering running down to Rosie's workshop to run both my hands through his cold-saw.

But I'm weak. Got no moral constitution, I can readily admit to that.

And . . . a bottle's usually the closest thing at hand after my intestines stop aching and I've managed to unlock my spine from the fetal position.

There's a lot of them scattered around the base, and most of them always seem to be full.

I don't remember being stationed here with this much booze, and considering it's been what? Six years since we've had any contact with the galaxy beyond this godforsaken alien frost-giant? You'd think, given the amount I consumed alone after we realized the human race had been wiped out, we'd have run out a few weeks later.

Yeah, you heard me right.

Humanity's gone. We lost the war, very badly, and the aliens wiped us out.

So now we're stranded here. Forever.

Get the whole raging alcoholism thing now? Trust me when I say, I'm not the only one down here who does.

Like I said, the radio went dark about six years ago. There were no more commands, no more reports to file, no more instructions for excavating the alien installation buried in this valley.

At first, when we lost the sat-comm uplink, we figured it must be some technical problem up in space. They'd send a repair ship, and that would at least reestablish contact with us.

But then the supply ships stopped making their drops.

We figured maybe there was a snafu. No more communications means no more supply orders, after all, so they must have thought we were conserving, or something.

According to the dusty protocol booklet our comm officer Erin managed to find, the UNSC would mount a search-and-rescue operation if they didn't hear from us in three weeks. So we went about our daily lives counting down the hours until the next drop ship touched down.

A slip space jump is easy to spot, anywhere above the planet. We were confident, so Rosie manned the scopes for a while. Three weeks became three months, and by that point Rosie had company at the radar console. We were practically living in that room by then.

But we never picked up any slip space contacts.

There were no more ships. Those alien bastards must have tracked down every last one.

Aah . . . I don't want to talk about it.

Permanent exile, especially when you're trapped in a glacial valley, has a way of driving you crazy. And we've all lost it, that much is clear.

Remember, I'm not the only one with a problem.

It's funny, I never thought losing my mind would be so . . . literal. I didn't know amnesia was one of the primary side-effects. Actually, besides the major substance abuse running rampant in the base, it might be the only side-effect most of us are experiencing.

Bear in mind, the key word here is "most", but don't worry. I'm not the one who's gone off the deep end.

Yet.

I've watched my memories run away from me for years now. Usually it's the little stuff, unimportant things like where I was born, who my parents were, where I grew up, why in god's name I ever sign up for the military.

Of course, that doesn't mean I don't know why I'm here. The Mission is the one thing I'm still clear on. As is the rest of us . . . well, you know. Most of us.

Ah yes. The Mission.

It wasn't the brightest the UNSC ever came up with. In fact, whenever I think about, it seems downright retarded.

What were those idiots hoping to accomplish, sending the most unqualified soldiers in the galaxy to investigate the site of a top-secret alien installation the government had uncovered? (I may have some memory loss, but I can remember enough about Basic to know that yeah, we were all a bunch of fuck-ups before going crazy.)

We have all the original mission statements and orders. It's what helps us remember.

Apparently, the government was doing some sort of geo-survey on the planet when they stumbled across a shaft of ice leading into a continental glacier. That's how they found the original site. Now, the discovery of alien structures like this wasn't new, and by now archeologists had examined enough of them they were pretty sure of themselves:

Where there's one base, there's two. Usually facing each other, some distance apart. So they started digging.

It took them a while to realize their mistake. They had used the base's center entrance to plot a line out towards where they thought they'd find the second. There were two side openings, and a solid back wall. Turns out the aliens had just decided to wall that back entrance off. (Who knows how extraterrestrial remodeling works?) As it turns out, it was one of the side entrances that led to the other base.

After that embarrassment, they dug back to it and managed to excavate it as well. To cut the labor costs, they left a huge chunk of the glacier blocking most of the center of what would have been a giant caldera.

I guess they called the place "Sidewinder" to remind those archeologists of their screw-up.

The 405th Squad, my team, got posted to provide security for the sites when more important discoveries were made during the war.

In the meantime, we were told to excavate the structures, catalog any and all technology we encountered, and work on identifying all the ancient runes and hieroglyphs the aliens liked to carve into the walls.

Of course, none of us had any clue about the Forerunners until after we were given our briefings. And we sure as hell didn't know the first things about any alien technology, languages, or even how to excavate the damn things. We signed up to be soldiers. Really crappy soldiers, but soldiers nonetheless.

Our mission was given a code name. REVENANT.

Sometimes . . . there's something about that name that seems familiar.