Winterbirth
A Halo Reach Fan Fiction by Marianne Bennet
A/N: Nothing much to say this time around. Thank you to my reviewers and to my beta-reader EternalEntity. Enjoy!
Four: Down the Rabbit Hole
July 24th, 2552
Much of the fog that filled the air around the relay outpost was revealed to be smoke as the Falcon descended back into the valley. Some of it managed to get through the ventilators of Six's helmet and she unwittingly breathed in the bitter vapor as Carter said into his comm.: "Noble Two, sit-rep. How are we doing over there?"
"We're at the relay outpost, commander."
"Beautiful scenery," Emile's voice came over the speaker in Six's helmet in tones of sarcasm. "And the wildlife is something else. Wish you were here, commander."
"Door's locked," Kat continued."Mechanism's been flash-fused."
"Well, you can beat it, right?"
"I've dialed up my torch and cut a way through but it's going to take some time."
"Alright, we're heading to your location. Won't be too long now."
"What's our objective, sir?"
"Clear the field," Carter said in response to Jorge's query. "Get inside; get word to Holland as quickly as possible. Round up survivors, get them out of there. You know the drill." The courtyard of the outpost came into view through the fog. "Drop us off there," he told the pilot.
The man winced. "LZ's a little hot, sir."
"We know. Put her down, pilot." He glanced up and at Six. "I hope you've had your fill of sitting around, Six, because break time's over."
She rolled her eyes, waves of contention rolling off of her. "Understood, sir," she replied through clenched teeth.
"Emile, I want you to fall back and stick on Kat. Make sure nobody gets near her."
"Sure thing, commander. See you soon."
"Jorge, cover us. Six and I will clear a path to the door."
"Will do," he replied as the Falcon dropped down into the heat of the battle in the courtyard. "Let's go make a ruckus."
Six leapt forward past Carter and immediately zeroed in on where Kat was crouched by the panel to the right of the huge door. Emile was down beside her and had cleared the area between the Covenant forces and their position as per Carter's instruction but there was a large arc of enemies still left to breach.
She moved fluidly through the area, pausing only to snap an unlucky Jackal's neck between her arm and torso. She let it drop dead to the ground and dispatched its blue shielded counterpart with an equally graceful thrust of her knife. She jerked her wrist back, retrieving the blade and thinking idly that if Halsey called her a "killing machine" those years back, she might as well live up to the title.
Jamming the knife back into her belt, she snatched up a Magnum from a corpse's hand and quickly smacked a Grunt with the butt of the gun, then used her elbow to shove the hapless victim to the ground and killed it with a single shot.
Beside her, Carter kicked another Grunt to the left and opened fire on the remainder of its companions. None of the enemies within the courtyard's perimeter seemed particularly deadly to Six and she supposed that it was their sheer number that had made it difficult for Kat to accomplish her task. Now between the four of them, Emile, Carter, Jorge, and Six made short work of the aggressors. But Six was only beginning to think that they were seeing the end of it when the twin Spirits descended on the team.
"How are we doing, Kat?" Carter called over to her as he crouched behind a low lying wall beside Jorge, waiting for the heavy fire to cease. Six was stooped over across the way, listening to the Covenant forces unload; wishing for what must have been the tenth time that day that she had a sniper rifle in her hands instead of the shorter ranged DMR.
There was the sound of Kat gritting her teeth together. The sparks of the torch were reflected on her visor. "It's taking a little longer than I had hoped, commander. I'm just about half way through the door."
Beside Six, Emile crept around to the side of the forklift her shoulders were braced against. He fired his shotgun once, then cursed as blast of white-grey energy tore past him, caving into the wall. "Can't shoot a damn thing with that thing out there!" he grumbled. "You got contact, Jorge?"
"They've gotta move eventually," said Six rationally. "Their troops are moving in and they wouldn't risk getting them shot down by friendly fire."
With a nod, Carter agreed. "Wait it out, team. Keep them off our backs until Kat can get through."
"Jackals coming in round the back!" Jorge bellowed, turning his gun on the new enemies.
"They've sent out a couple Elites too," observed Emile, "Behind the Grunts." The skull on his EVO helmet seemed to wink at Six as he tore around the corner of the forklift and along the edge of the courtyard. Moments later, he sent an update along: "Took down the shields on the orange one. You prime for a headshot, commander?"
"Draw 'em out, Four," Carter replied and lifted the scope of his gun up to eye level.
That was when the suicidal Grunts come rushing in.
Plasma residue glowed blue at their fingertips as one grenade after another was thrown forward into the fray. Most bounced harmlessly off of the wreckage and makeshift barricades but at least one soared over Six's head, ricocheting off of the building's exterior and causing her to dive across the doorway to crouch beside Carter. She meant to hit the ground a few feet behind him but miscalculated the distance and the force of the consequential explosion behind her. She dove hands first into a roll behind her commander but accidentally caught his ankle with her elbow and caused his headshot to misfire and hit the Elite's shoulder.
"Damn it, Six," Carter growled as Jorge said, "It wasn't her fault. There was an explosion, commander. She had to get away from it."
"Guys?" Emile interrupted. "If you haven't noticed, there's an Elite over here and more drop ships coming in."
"Fall back, Emile. Kat?"
"Almost…. There. Got it."
"Alright, we're in," said Carter as the door slid open. "Fall back. Everybody. That's an order."
That last directive was given for the benefit of Six, whom, in the interests of redemption, was doing everything in her power to eliminate that last Elite. Only when the enemy fell did she turn back and start running even as the door began to close.
She sprinted past Jorge who was firing a few last shots of his own and tore through the door to join Carter and Kat. Jorge backed up, the shrinking doorway barely wide enough to accommodate his large frame and Emile remained outside for a dangerously long period of time. It was only when the door way nearly shut tight that Carter reached through and pulled his younger comrade into the complex.
The Covenant was shut out but that meant that Six was closed in with her new team whom, with perhaps the exception of Jorge, couldn't be too happy with her. She wondered which the better option was. Then the darkness of the room seemed to close in on her and she immediately decided that, given her choice, she'd have taken the former.
Six was shaken out of her thoughts by the sound of Emile rapping his armored knuckles against the door they'd just come through. "That'll hold them for a while," he observed with satisfaction. "Then the fun starts."
"It's dark enough for there to be plenty of 'fun' in here already, waiting for us," replied Jorge, adjusting his grip on his machine gun. "Keep your eyes open."
"Then I say we find the control room and Kat can make this place a little less dark," said Carter. "We need that relay back online. Emile, stick to this location. Any 'fun' comes along, it's all yours. Six, take flank. Kat, Jorge, let's move."
Resisting the urge to sigh in exasperation –she knew well enough that recent events had caused her a huge setback in her commander's respect for her –she followed them into the room. It was still dark but seemed peaceful, peaceful in the way that a cemetery was serene. There were enough bodies in the next room to fill a graveyard anyway –and a couple of live ones too.
A dead man was slumped over a dark console. Kat pushed the corpse aside as she moved to work on the controls. "Six," she said over her shoulder, "take a look at that body. See if there's some kind of reset code lying around."
As she turned the body over, running her gloved hand along the inside of the dead man's jacket, Carter knelt down beside a badly wounded but alive UNSC trooper. She looked up when she heard her commander speak quietly to the injured man but was careful to never focus on the trooper's face; somehow, she already knew what his fate would be and did not need the picture of him stamped into her memory.
"What happened to the rest of your unit?" said Carter a little more loudly but still in that same quiet, calm, and authoritative manner. "Do you know?" He handed the man a canteen from his belt.
"Never saw nothing," rasped the trooper between shallow gulps of water and equally shallow breaths. "We got split. I ended up here and they… It sounded bad, you know, over the comm. I don't think they made it. Covenant bastards took nearly everyone… Jake and Harrison and Kara… ah shit, they got Kara."
"It's alright, corporal. No one was expecting this. Now you stay put–"
"Not much else I can do," the soldier grinned weakly.
"–And we'll find you a combat surgeon. We'll have you up and at them again in no time."
The wounded man closed his eyes again and Carter got back to his feet. Six quickly looked back down at her task. "Kat?" he asked.
The other female Spartan made a little huff of vexation. "Well, it's plasma damage but what else would we have expected?"
In another corner of the room, Jorge sifted through rubble. "Can we fix it?" asked Carter as Six rolled the body she was inspecting over. Something fell out of the dead man's sleeve. She snatched it up, running her hand over the grooves and ridges of what she could only determine to be some kind of data module.
"If you mean 'me' when you say 'we,'" Kat was saying but Six interrupted her with her discovery.
"Found something," she said to Carter, unable to keep subtle notes of triumph from her tone. She was about to get up and join them at the control panel when Kat snatched the module from her hand.
"I'll be taking that, Six," she said, pinching the module between her robotic arm's fingers to inspect it. "Not your domain."
"Says you," Six muttered but her comment went unnoticed in the din as Jorge announced, "I've got another live one over here."
All three Spartans turned to look at the staircase as Jorge pulled a struggling girl out from behind the rubble. "Come on," murmured Jorge. "Come on out. I'm not going to hurt you. None of us are."
He turned, revealing a slim, dark haired girl in practical gray clothing trying her best to remain behind the rubble. She did not seem to believe him or was perhaps too frightened to even register what Jorge was saying because she continued to shout and pound her free fist down against the plating of his armor. Six averted her eyes. It might have been comical, watching this skinny little thing fight against a Spartan's strength and sheer mass, might have been funny had Six not been that girl; what felt like not so long ago.
"Jorge…" said Carter, a note of warning creeping into his tone.
Jorge gently placed his weapon upon the floor, propping the gun up against a mound of debris. "It's alright," he said, either to his commander or to the girl; Six didn't know. "I've got her. I've got you. Keep still and I promise I'll release you."
The girl went limp in his arms and he set her lightly down upon the rubble beside the staircase. "Are you alright?"
She shook her head feverishly, blubbering something in that same language of the farmers that Six hadn't bothered to learn. Frantically, she kept jerking her hand over Jorge's shoulder and for a moment Six thought that the girl was gesturing at her but the wounded soldier cried out in alarm.
Carter and Six's heads whipped around to watch as two Elites -that's what it looked like to Six; in the heat of the moment, she couldn't be sure of their number -swarmed the control room from three different entrances, snarling and brandishing high tech Covenant weapons. One occupied Kat and Carter's attention, nearly taking Kat's remaining arm if not for Carter shoving her out of the way, and the other advanced on the Jorge, its energy sword sweeping in a wide glowing arc over the big man's head as the he pushed the civilian girl down.
"What's your status, over?" said Emile's voice over the comm.
"We've been engaged!" spoke Carter in response. "Six, take the heat off Five."
An impulse –more reckless than brave –struck Six as the lingering closed in on Jorge, its ostensible target the girl. She snatched up her assault rifle from where it lay beside the dead man's corpse and charged the Elite, shooting all the while and watching its shields flicker to dead, only to have her gun knocked out of her hands and her body pushed down against the floor with the alien on top of her.
She didn't expect help from anybody as her attacker pulled back its energy sword for a fatal blow; she was accustomed to not relying on anybody but herself in these situations so she pulled back her own weapon –her fist –and socked the Elite in the jaw. Rewarded by the sound of a crack, she drew her free fist back again, winding up for another punch as the alien shoved its face into her visor, an intimidation tactic that Six would never admit out loud worked. Still, she screwed up her fist even tighter but then the alien's weight was lifted from her and tossed aside.
Carter –her implied liberator –kicked her assault rifle across the floor to her and she snapped it up in her grip. Never again, she told herself and lifted the gun, targeting the door that the Elites were in the process of retreating through, holding the wounded trooper up as a human shield. Carter froze; his gun was pointed at the door as well but the Elites disappeared down the corridor.
Screams –a man's very human screams –rose up and Six, losing herself again, snapped, "Why didn't you give the order to fire?"
"There was a civilian in the way, Six," was Carter's firm answer. "We don't fire on civilians."
Emile came running in. "Did those bastards get by me?"
"The man was dead anyway." She shook her head and sighed.
The screaming subsided. Kat stepped forward. "Well, he's dead now," she said emotionlessly.
"Permission to pursue?" asked Emile, wielding his shotgun.
"Negative. Four, guard the entrance. Two, get the girl. Five, Six, clear the hole."
Jorge grabbed his gun and followed Six to the door. She went through, casting a last glance back at the rest of her team before Jorge slammed the door shut, plunging them into blackness.
…
The Elite Specialist had cracked her helmet's visor and Six found herself holding her head at a funny angle as she attempted to manipulate a current and reset the junction to get it back online. "Fixing this is going to be a pain," she said over her shoulder to Jorge as her fingers manipulated the wiring.
"You talking about the junction?"
"No," she slammed the panel shut. "That's done. I'm talking about my helmet."
"We got spare visors," replied Jorge helpfully. "If you need help putting it together, Kat's good at that sort of thing."
"Spares sound good. For the record, I make a point on fixing my armor myself. Makes sure that I can put back together again myself, should the need arise."
"That's… self-reliant."
"My middle name."
Jorge cleared his throat. "Did you say the junction's up?"
"Up and running," she confirmed as she got back to her feet. "You can radio Carter and let him know. But I'm sure that Kat's figured it out by now."
"You don't want to do it yourself?"
She winced. "I'm not about to deal with Carter right now."
"Oh?" Jorge smirked to himself as he pulled off his helmet and motioned for her to follow him back to the control room. "You got a problem with our commander, Spartan?"
Grinding her teeth together as they walked, she answered, "I think he's got a problem with me."
"What makes you think that?"
"Oh, don't pretend that you haven't noticed the constant contention going on here."
"Can't pretend to save my life. You want to take that helmet off?"
"Why would I do that?"
"The crack's doing wonders for your coordination." Jorge suddenly grinned. "Plus I'm curious."
She looked at him with suspicion. "Are you trying to flirt with me?"
"Relax, Six. No intentions of that sort here. I bet I'm near twice your age anyway."
"I'm not that young," she replied stoutly.
"Oh? How old are you, grandmother?"
"Surely that was in my file."
"Surely you don't think I actually read that ONI crap." They'd reached a bridge and Six knew they were close to halfway back. "I like people to make their own first impressions. But, believe me; I heard plenty about you over the mess table, what with Kat and Carter."
"Well, what with them?" He shrugged and adjusted his grip on his gun. "They argued over you, as they did over near every candidate, save the ones they immediately rejected."
"What was there to argue about?"
"Oh, same old, same old. Basically, it came down to the fact that Kat wasn't nearly as keen on you as Carter was." He stopped abruptly. "Don't tell either of them I said that. I'd like to live to a ripe old age."
"What was that language you used with the farmers and the girl?"
"Hungarian. There are lots of them around here that speak the language."
"'Around here' meaning Reach?"
"Sure. What about you? Harmony?"
"French," she paused, realizing what she was giving away. "Some Flemish. We're nearly there. You grew up on Reach?"
"Sure I did."
"How was it?"
"Worse places to grow up in the galaxy. Here we are." The door was still latched shut. He set to work on the deadbolt and then paused. Jorge turned back to Six. "Look," he said, not unkindly, "the thing with you and Carter… well you're both good soldiers. You just need to act like it."
Kat was still hard at work at the controls as Six and Jorge entered. Carter glanced up from where he'd been lurking over Kat's shoulder, nodding in greeting at their approach. To Kat, he asked, "How long?"
Irritably, she answered, "I don't know how many times you've asked me that. I don't know how many times everybody's asked me that. Question of my life."
"What's the answer?"
"Be more specific, commander. If you're asking how long until the entire's station's online, two weeks. This," she waved a hand at the entire console, "is plasma damage."
"Two minutes would be too long," replied Carter, rubbing his forehead wearily. Jorge shrugged at Six, then crossed the room toward Emile and the civilian girl. Six lingered. "We need to make contact with Holland now."
Kat shot him a patronizing look. "Which is why I'm slicing through to the main overland bundle to get you a direct uplink to the colonel," she explained patiently. "You're in my light, commander."
Wisely, Carter backed off. He glanced to Six. "Tough first mission," he said in a tone that belied his efforts at being reasonable. "Glad you pulled through."
Six opened her mouth to begin a retort but Jorge glanced over his shoulder. His hazel eyes seemed to meet hers through the cracked visor so instead she took a deep breath and replied, "I aim to please. Sorry about… back there."
"We look out for each other," he said evenly. "You did good work. Drive better than I do. That crack looks bad."
"Jorge tells me you've got spares."
"Not necessarily on hand. We'll get you something when… when we get picked up out of here."
"And when will that be, commander?" asked Emile with a contentious shrug from where he leaned against the wall opposite Six and Carter.
"We'll find out when Kat gets that uplink."
"I'm working on it, alright? This is plasma."
With a sigh, Carter turned back to Six. With a crooked smile, he said, "Get that all of the time. Something else, Six?"
Suddenly nervous, she shifted her weight. "I'm sorry about… I openly doubted your orders back there. It wasn't my place, sir."
"We're all under stress here, lieutenant. I don't typically give my soldiers long lectures in the middle of a hot zone."
She nodded, unsure of where to go from there and turned to lean against the wall and observe Jorge with Emile.
He was talking to the civilian girl in calm, reassuring tones, asking her simple questions and receiving simple answers in return. Six watched for a while, pensive. Emile shrugged at her. "Big man forgets what he is sometimes."
"She just lost her father," Jorge growled in an undertone to Emile, getting up and crossed the room toward Carter, and Six's heartbeat seemed to stop and then rebound at a pace twice as fast as before at this knowledge. To Carter he said, "She needs a full psychiatric workup."
"She's not the only one."
"Lock it down, both of you," said Carter but he looked to Emile in particular. "You're soldiers. Act like it. Get her on her feet." In a quieter voice, he added, "Body stays here."
Jorge looked doubtful so Six stepped forward. "Let me talk to her, commander," she said. Carter shrugged; he didn't seem to care either way. To Jorge, she asked, "What's her name?"
"Sara."
"Pretty name."
"That's what I said."
They smiled at each other even though Six knew Jorge couldn't see her sad grin and then she took Jorge's place opposite the civilian girl. "Hey," she said softly. "Jorge tells me your name's Sara."
"Yes," she didn't look up as she responded.
"You understand English?"
"Enough."
"Alright. I'm Six."
"That isn't a name." Sara's gray eyes flashed.
For a moment, she was taken aback. "You're right. My name's Jen. But don't tell the others; they'll make fun of me." She cracked a smile; remembered too late that Sara couldn't see it. "Jorge says that's your father."
"Yes."
"I'm sorry for your loss."
"What do you know of it?" Again, a blaze sparked in those gray eyes.
"More than I'd like to admit." She was conscious of all eyes in the room save Kat's on her. Clearing her throat, she continued, "We need to get you out of here, Sara. I know it's hard but your father would want you to be safe and so do we. Let's get you on your feet."
She rose, held out a hand, and Sara took it. The girl got to her feet and Six lightly touched her shoulder before looking at Jorge, Carter, and Emile. "You're right, Emile," she said coolly. "She's not the only one." And then she pushed past Carter and into the open space behind them.
Kat broke the silence with a pleased sigh of triumph. "Commander, signal's there. It's patchy, but it's there."
Carter looked away from Six's back and replied, "I'll take it."
As he crossed the room, Kat responded in a gently teasing voice, "Best not touch anything. You wouldn't want to ground the place like you did before."
He smiled at her and then Holland's voice came over the speaker: "I'm barely getting you. What's your situation, over?"
"Colonel, it's Noble One." Six turned to watch as his face seemed to age five years with his next few words. "There are no rebels. The Covenant is on Reach. Acknowledge?"
"Come again, Noble One. Did you say 'Covenant'?"
"Affirmative. It's the Winter Contingency."
There was a long silence and Six wondered if the connection had been grounded after all. She looked to Kat but the Spartan made no movement to repair the uplink. Then: "Then God help us all."
She leaned back against the wall again. Idly, she wondered if in fifty years the big question of the century she'd be hearing would be, "Where were you when the Covenant was contacted on Reach?"
Or whether they would even live that long.