"You actually said that and walked out without dismissal?" Rachel asked, her mouth half full of synthesized beef sandwich. The only thing on the sandwich that was probably naturally produced back on Earth was the mustard, maybe. "I mean, we're not exactly welcome here as it is," she said after swallowing, brushing back from her eyes the loose strands of dark brown hair that had managed to escape imprisonment from the ponytail that cascaded down her back. Matching brown eyes looked up from her meal at the lieutenant captain, mild disbelief scrawled across her strikingly plain features. A look that would have likely been read as contempt by anybody who didn't know her rested on the thin pink lips that could display any emotion from surprise to annoyance. Jason had no chance to answer her question.
"The captain is just keeping up our rep," Joshua smartly stated, patting Jason heartily on the back in approval with a stupid grin on his face. He took another large bite of the biscuit in his other hand and smiled while shaking his head in amusement. Six foot four, 255 pounds and raised in the streets of Angola, Joshua was the team's heavy weapons specialist. He carried enough ammo for his light machine gun to provide covering fire for a solid twenty straight minutes. Jason knew the man could launch a volley of four spankr rockets faster than any other marine could reload after firing two. His optimistic attitude and helpful demeanor put him in favor of the rest of the team, but Jason could sense something deeper in the man that hid behind the friendly façade.
"Just because we have gotten authority to respect us through our not respecting them doesn't mean we should flaunt it," Carlyle said, stirring the remnants of his macaroni and cheese on the stainless steel dining tray.
The four Firefly team members were gathered in the relatively empty mess hall. Steel tables and benches were situated in military rows throughout the low-ceilinged, sterilely lit enclosure, each one securely bolted down to the metal flooring in case the Artemis ever decided that evasive maneuvers were necessary. Not that the occupants of the warship would be free of any changes in inertia due to sudden barrel rolls or Dolskvi maneuvers, but at least they wouldn't have to worry about being smashed into the wall by shifting furniture. Death by a mess room lunch table was not the way Jason planned on going.
"We could have at least started off our first assignment on the right foot, just to show there are no hard feelings," Carlyle said, finishing his meal and sipping a cup of perfectly black coffee.
"But there are," Rachel stated coldly, putting down her sandwich. "We're not going to pretend that Nathaniel Hawkins is not the asshole's brother." Terry Hawkins, the commanding officer whose questionable orders had caused the circumstances decisive in the founding of the Fireflys, was commonly referred to as "the asshole" in casual conversation. Far from an eloquent designation, nobody ever said that UNSC Special Forces soldiers possessed a candid finesse over the English language.
"So what's our next move then, Chief?" Joshua asked Jason, breaking the brief silence before anything else could be said in reference to the bitterness all at the table felt.
"We're going to play the next mission straight, given there is one," the esteemed leader spoke, standing up and grabbing his tray. "And Certa," he said as he turned around and stepped over the bench.
"Sir," Joshua Certa answered.
"Make sure that you get those rocket launchers back to deck five before 1600 hours."
"Sir!"
…………………
Just over four years ago, during a suicide mission masterminded by the great Fleet General Terry Hawkins, Jason and his team was shipped out to the Covenant controlled planet Canastas in an attempt to divert their attention long enough to allow a Hawkins led fleet to strike at an important Covenant supply convoy passing through the sector. Of course, when Jason had been briefed on the mission along with the seven other Special Forces squads, none of them had been told the nature of their mission. Everyone agreed that what the general had asked of them was impossible – capture and hold one of the Covenant's secondary launch bases – but they had followed the orders anyway.
General Hawkins had received commendations from district command for the success of his raid. The mission log barely mentioned the 72 lives that had been sacrificed in order for the plan work.
Through either skill, luck or miracle, twelve members from the seven squads had survived the enemy ground forces and escaped to UNSC controlled space after commandeering a Covenant Skip Ship. Admiral Schenmet, Jason's former CO and officer training mentor, had welcomed the broken remnants of Hawkins' suicide mission and allowed them to reform into one unit that would operate under his command. Hawkins had never even made a query about how the twelve soldiers had managed to survive their damnation.
Schenmet had been generous in allocating resources to the group, though it could have been partially due to the fact that Darius Clayborne, the son of Walker Clayborne, a prominent politician back on the Earthen Front, was one of the twelve survivors. Darius was also the reason the survivors had coined their call tag, the Fireflys. Back on Canastas, after enduring a near 75 casualty rate, the Special Forces squads had managed to regroup and organize a sweep of the murky jungle planet to search for other survivors.
Jason and Darius had been the last two soldiers that were found alive. By then, a total of 15 soldiers had already been reunited, though five eventually gave their lives while fighting through the Covenant hangar to the Skip Ship. The only reason that Darius and Jason had been found in the misty jungle hell was due to the charged Covenant plasma pistol Darius had been wielding. Even though they were from different squads, the two soldiers had improvised a strategy that had kept them alive for seven long hours.
The duo had moved quickly through the dark jungle terrain tag teaming the Covenant scout forces, Darius stripping Elite shields and Jason tagging them with his M6D pistol, the barking noise of its muzzle aiding the searching human troops to pin point their location. After escaping the hellish jungle, Kelly Mortell, one of the survivors from Spider Force, told them that they had reminded her of fireflies swooping through the summer night air in Iowa back on Earth. It was agreed upon by the remaining twelve elite commandos that they would from that point on be known as the Fireflys.
