Petty Officer 1st Class /:ERROR:NAME REDACTED:\\, UNSC Recluse, In orbit of Eirene, Mali system, 2554
They were all dead. She couldn't help them. At least most of them had been dead by the time the room's atmosphere had been ripped out of their lungs and sucked out of the ragged gash in the window in front of her. In a way they had been lucky. A plasma bolt to the head hurt a hell of a lot less than exposure to hard vacuum. She knew, because her and every single Spartan of Gama company had been repeatedly exposed to vacuum as part of their training. The problem with most peoples' reactions is that instinctively humans tend to inhale and hold their breath when in a situation where it is important, diving into water, when shocked etc. This isn't helpful in vacuum. Because the vast pressure differential between the inside of your lungs and the outside world means that that breath full of oxygen is coming out of you, one way or another. The "another" part of it was significantly more damaging. So proper procedure it to exhale hard. You have to do the very thing that your instincts are screaming at you not to do.
However, for most of the dozen or so ensigns drifting around the compartment, the strafing runs from the Seraph fighter had killed them before the atmosphere systems had failed and released the precious air from the multiple holes in the polymer window.
Fortunately for her, her training would not be necessary in this particular situation. Her armour's readouts showed she still had 58 minutes of breathable air available. Good. Good. She was struggling not to panic in these circumstances, and looked around the room for a full 30 seconds before trying to move out of the cargo bay.
The room around her was small, and dark. The only light came from her bright halogen lamps on her helmet and from the stars slowly rotating through the shattered view screen on one wall as the ship tumbled, powerless through the space between Eirene and its moon Tero. The planet below had been glassed back in 2529, only 5 years into the galaxy-wide Human-Covenant war, its surface reduced to a dull grey glass-like substance by the incredible heat of Covenant plasma weaponry and energy projectors. 20 million people had lived on Eirene before the war, now around 12 thousand miners were camped down on the hellish surface, chipping away at the glass and trying to re-colonise. It was thanks to them that the Relic had been uncovered in a previously undiscovered Forerunner outpost hidden under a granite sheet that had been reduced to vitreous solids and unsealed by the Liang-Dortmund corporation as part of their mining efforts.
She patted her thigh to check that the small microfiber bag containing the Artefact was still attached to her armour. The Artefact itself was about 6 inches long, made of a weirdly light-absorbing matte-grey metal hewn into an almost perfect cylinder, with glyphs etched in light onto one end. For all she and anyone at ONI knew, this Artefact, pulled from the core console at the centre of the outpost, could be a valuable Forerunner asset with clues as to other installations, or it could be a paperweight. She didn't care. Her job was to get it back to Earth ASAP. And things had been going swimmingly until the local Covenant drongos had picked up chatter of their retrieval, probably from the scavenging community of Kig-yar camped down on the planet's surface, scrounging for titanium.
And so they had come. The DAV-class stealth corvette had chased them down as they had approached the slip-space exit beacon and attacked, raking the small corvette from bow to stern with lasers and gutting their engines with plasma torpedo, leaving them drifting. They had sent out a distress call, but the nearest UNSC force that could help was on the planet's surface with no way to get to her. Brilliant.
Her musings were cut short by flickering blue light on the walls around her. She glanced to her right and saw that the door from the cargo bay into the engineering deck, which had automatically sealed when atmospheric integrity was lost in this sector, was now being cut through. A bright blue bead of light traced around the periphery, too intensely bright to look at directly, even with her polarised filters activated, which left a glowing red trail as the plasma cutter melted through the triple-thickness titanium door. They would be through and into the room within 20 seconds. They wouldn't make it.
She confirmed the detonation code with a blink of her eyes and her HUD flashed a warning as the signal was sent. A short three second countdown timer started, during which she double-checked that her M20 sub machine gun was ready to go. Satisfied, she tensed her legs and got ready to push off along the wall with the door in it.
Ahead of her, a bloom of pure white seared her retinas as the make-shift breaching charge detonated, blowing the weakened door into the next room and hopefully crushing any Covenant on the other side. The explosion was fleeting in the vacuum, and there was no sound as she pushed off from the wall with her legs and sailed towards the ragged hole, effortlessly recalling the countless hours of zero-gravity training as she steadied herself with one outstretched hand grabbing hold of the utility rail next to the portal, the other hand squeezing the trigger on her weapon as a squat pug-faced alien peeked through the doorway.
The grunt twitched and tumbled backwards as the armour-piercing rounds tore through the atmospheric armour suit and punctured the pyramidal methane tank on its back. Its fellows panicked and fired blindly through the doorway, green bolts of plasma pouring through bay. She was already clear of the fire having pulled herself away from the edge and into cover. A few select bursts of automatic fire later and the enemy search team was floating down the corridor in a glistening combination of bright blue blood and wispy methane vapour.
Her motion tracker clear, she pulled herself through the door and into the corridor towards the engineering section, activating her helmet-mounted flashlights to light the way. Not even the emergency lighting was active, which did not bode well for her half-thought-out plan for getting the hell out of this FUBAR situation. First on her list was getting some semblance of power back online. This was vitally important for the second part of her plan, which was vitally important to the third. If she failed at any of them, she was most likely dead. The Covenant would keep throwing bodies at her until she ran out of ammo, or they would back off and wait for her to run out of oxygen. Not great options.
"Alright, let's see what I can do" She mumbled to herself as she floated through the plasma-cut hole in the opposite end of the corridor and into the pitch-black engineering bay. The place was a haunting diorama, the three engineers who had been working in the cramped room were suspended in the air, globules of blood trailing behind them as they spun through the not-air. Tools and datapads hung in the space around them, their screens still glowing with light and casting faint macabre shadows on the floor and walls as they spun. The other door out of the central compartment had been cut through by the aliens, evidenced by the still-glowing rough 1-metre-wide hole in its titanium surface. She didn't have much time. Reinforcements would probably already be on their way to avenge the dead Unggoy, and now she had lost the element of surprise.
She inspected the panels on the wall, noting that what little emergency power was left kept the screens dimly lit. She typed in commands into the reactor control system, assessing the damage done to both the primary fusion drive and the backup fission unit. She swore under her breath, the primary drive was toast. The containment shield around the core had done its job and prevented complete meltdown, but there was no way to re-connect the ships grid with the core, save by a UNSC Engineering station. The backup power plant was damaged as well, having taken some sort of damage in the battle, but was still producing some power. There was nothing she could do about the lack of air, the ship had been too extensively holed to support an atmosphere. The routing system must be shot as well, because what little power was being produced was being used by completely the wrong systems. For instance, the coffee machine and vending units in the mess hall didn't need power when the artificial gravity was dead. That wasn't all, completely redundant systems were being flooded with power while basic life support and door control were offline. Whatever dumb AI was in charge of this had lost their mind.
She rapidly keyed in commands, cutting off all power to extraneous systems and funnelling everything she could into door power and artificial gravity. It wasn't easy, it took multiple inputs of her level-1 clearance code for the terminal to accept her inputs. As her body was slowly pulled towards the floor of the compartment, she synchronised the command and control systems of the corvette to her HUD. She was going to need the edge.
The next group of Grunts fared as well as the first. Their wild bursts of plasma hastily fired needles barely slowed down in her mad dash towards the ship's weapons bay. Time was of the essence.
That was when the Elite ruined her day.
The alien had to have been using the infamous active camouflage ability to mask his silhouette, blending in with the dull grey bulkhead of the corridor leading up to weapons. By the time she'd recognised the tell-tale shimmering, the Sangheili had already brought his rifle up to bear, aiming the long-barrelled weapon straight at her.
Her leg was ripped from under her as the beam round struck her in the knee, flaring her shields and breaking them, tearing through her armour's ceramic layers before dissipating mid-way through the gel layer. Of course, she had no idea as to the specifics. She just knew that it hurt.
Mid way through her impromptu roll she had been thrown into, she turned off the artificial gravity. This abrupt change caused the pair to float into the air, her still headed towards him thanks to her momentum, and had the intended effect of throwing off the elite's follow-up shot, which instead burned through the ceiling of the hall as he flailed his arms trying to right himself.
She too advantage of his momentary loss of control by reaching out an arm to stabilise her chaotic rotation and opening fire with her SMG in the other hand. The automatic spray was almost entirely silent, she could still hear a muted roar interspersed with metallic clunks and clicks as the vibrations travelled up her suit and into the air inside her helmet. The force from the assault slowed her speed as she fired, allowing her more time on target as the rounds pummelled the alien's energy shielding and depleted it, puncturing the sleek vacuum suit and tearing into flesh. He twitched and thrashed like a fly caught in a web as armour-piercing bullets ripped through him, sending spurts of deep rich blue blood drifting through the hall as he became motionless, slowly drifting down the hall thanks to the momentum imparted from the M20's 60-round magazine.
As the gravity pulled her down to earth she gasped as white hot searing agony pulsed from her injured limb. She collapsed to the floor as her left leg buckled, the SMG clattered out of her hand and across the floor as she breathed heavily, wincing. For now the pain was muted, but as soon as her adrenaline wore off she knew that she'd need meds. By the time it got to that however, hopefully she would be far from this wreck
As far as her suit diagnostics could tell her, the beam rifle energy had not actually broken through all layers of her suit, and had superheated the gel layer causing third degree burns around her left knee. This meant she was still barely vacuum-proof. At least for now. But she couldn't take any more hits. How had she not seen the camouflaged alien lying in wait for her? She cursed herself out while struggling to her feet, testing her range of motion and supressing the fresh throbbing pain.
She hobbled into the weapons room, stumbling over to a terminal and accessing it, trying to activate security cameras across the ship to get a better picture of the force she was facing. Judging from the number of enemies she'd encountered so far, she could reasonably conclude that whatever boarding craft was latched on to the corvette, it would be a larger type. In her head she ran through the known classes of covenant boarding craft, narrowing it down to two options, then selecting the bigger of the two to estimate the worst scenario as to enemy numbers. She was in trouble.
The camera displays burst into life on-screen, showing multiple squads of Sangheili-led infantry in the mess hall and lifeboat bays, mostly Unggoy but a few Kig-Yar scatter amongst them. She was shocked. Most of the Kig-yar had broken away from whatever pre-Schism faction they were associated. The bird-like alien species were legendary for their pirate origins amongst the covenant's many species, and they tended to be less fanatical believers in the Great Journey than the other races. Their presence could mean that the post-war covenant remnant were less fractured than the Office of Naval Intelligence believed them to be.
Tearing her eyes away from the screen, she limped over to the wall behind her, which was indented with 5 square lockers each with a number pad lock and display screen on them. Inside each of these lockers was a HAVOC nuclear warhead. The lockers themselves were made of a top-secret titanium-A alloy which was nigh unbreakable. This ship could fall from orbit, which it would very likely do soon, burn up in the atmosphere and these lockers would be sitting in the centre of the crater unharmed. She didn't need all five.
As a Spartan, her authorisation code granted her access immediately, and the door swung open to reveal a black round ball with a control panel, no bigger than a basketball. She affixed it to the magnetic holster in the small of her back and returned to the camera feed, analysing what route she would have to take to get to the escape pods. Unfortunately for her the only real route was straight through the mess hall where a large number of aliens had congregated, all listening to a white-armoured Sangheili. There were easily 50 of them. She didn't fancy those odds, even if she wasn't injured. She couldn't take them all. It was suicide.
2 minutes later she strode out of the room and retrieved her discarded SMG, heading in the complete opposite direction of the mess hall. Each door she passed through she locked, hoping to slow the enemy advance through the ship after her. It might not be enough, but she was counting on the enemy taking the time to break through the now 4 double-thickness doors in between them and her. She was also counting on them not knowing UNSC ship design.
She came to a cross roads and stopped, looking around for her goal; there, a small grated panel in the wall down low. She smiled and crouched down, ripping the grate from the wall with ease and inspecting it. These tunnels were used by automated janitorial units and doubled up as air-flow control tunnels. They ran throughout the ship, snaking between compartments. They were her ticket past the insurmountable enemy presence. They were also her worst nightmare.
Her heart rose into her throat as she confronted the hole. Memories of a dark, dank storm drain flashed across her vision. Crawling for miles, no-one else. All alone. She was alone now. By the time that the UNSC Search and Rescue teams had found her four days after the glassing of New Tasmania, she had grown to fear confined spaces. Her breath became ragged and panicked as those events came flooding back; a dreadful wailing siren, a mob of panicked people crushing the breath from within her, a white hot flash. She closed her eyes, willing the memories away and slowing her breathing, steeling herself for what must be done.
She stowed her weapon on her thigh holster, got down on all fours and crawled into the tunnel, fighting the almost irresistible urge to run and hide, every fibre of her being screaming at her to stop. She took a deep breath and moved further in, crawling through the cramped shaft. The edges of her armour scraped against the walls, and a fresh horrible possibility crawled its way into the forefront of her already cramped mind; what if she got stuck?
She forced her panic down as she carried on, thinking of her training to occupy herself. She had crawled through plenty of tighter spaces, under barbed wire and through thick rain, snow and hail. She had not let her memories stop her before, they would not defeat her now. As she wiggled and crawled, she focussed on her good memories, Commander Ambrose's speech at graduation came to mind. The one in which he'd finally called them Spartans.
Something toucher her leg. She whipped around so fast that she hit the faceplate of her helmet on the wall next to her, down at her ankle, a fat orange worm-like creature wriggled and coiled around her. Lekgolo worms. Hunters. She swore again and smacked her foot violently against the wall, crushing the worm with a horrible squelching feeling reverberating up her leg.
More of them. Her motion tracker lit up as hundreds of Lekgolo swarmed in on her, moving up the tunnel behind her and from in front of her. The worms were a hive-mind, and when a colony of them grouped up into one mass, the resulting bipedal Hunter was a truly powerful foe, extremely strong, armoured by the covenant in starship-grade battle armour and armed with a fuel rod cannon, they were extremely dangerous.
She pushed onwards, dragging herself free of the writhing mass of orange only for it to slither back around her ankle, encircling it like a wrought iron cuff. Lashing out bought a temporary reprieve, coupled with the satisfying squelching of half a dozen worms against the walls of the passage. However, the freedom was short-lived as she felt another iron fist grab her ankle, weighing her down, constricting, setting off klaxons and alerts inside her helmet as the gel layer of her suit stiffened up in protest.
Panicked breaths wracked her chest, fear rising into her throat as a horrifying realisation dawned on her; she couldn't move. The hydraulics and servos in the suit's joints whined and grinded, but her legs were resolutely cemented in the ball of worms. The bright halogen headlamps illuminated a nightmarish scene behind her as hundreds of lekgolo came together to form thick bands of interlocked units which anchored her in place, wrapped tightly around both ankles and slowly pulling her backwards, creeping up her legs. She could feel them wriggling and vibrating from within her armour, which increasingly warned her of immense pressure and imminent failure of her ceramic armour plates. She knew that the software tended on the cautious side when it came to armour integrity, but the mere fact that it had decided to alert her was more than enough cause to worry.
There was no way out. She fruitlessly clawed at the metal around her, desperately trying to free herself from the colony. Her fingers dug into the smooth surfaces around her, creating impromptu handholds which she clung onto, the alloy shuddering and deforming as the incredible forces at work bent it like rubber. She couldn't breathe. Her heart pounded in her chest, deafening her in the silent vacuum.
The world closed in. Walls compressing her, vision going dark. With her last sense, she shakily activated a subroutine in her armour. The HUD flagged a message "Confirm?" in bright red letters. She confirmed.
In a flash of dazzling yellow-tinged white, her suit dumped insane amounts of power into her shields, burning out the capacitor banks and attunement arrays and sending power surging through the otherwise invisible barrier. She shut her eyes and felt the fusion cell in the small of her back overheat and restart, her gel layers and undersuit barely able to counteract the heat. Her HUD flickered and died, the servos in her limbs slowed to a halt, leaving her frozen prone. As much as the overload had messed with her, it had decimated her adversary. When the fusion cell came back online and she was able to crane her neck around to see what had become of the seething colony, she was indescribably relieved and elated to see no sign of a cohesive worm form left. Just a whole lot of orange paste on every surface for about 3 metres of the shaft.
She crawled resolutely on, shielding fried and fusion cell running on borrowed time, through the belly of the corvette and finally emerged into the escape pod sector; a narrow hallway at the centre of the ship with four airlocks leading off of it, two on either side of the corridor. On the other end of each airlock were docked Class 1 Gnat lifepods, the smaller, less armoured variant of the Class 3 Bumblebee craft. They were her only chance out of this, and in more than one way. She ducked into one of the cramped pods, slipping into the pilots seat and checking that her emergency power re-routing had given them enough juice to initiate launch. The pods had their own independent power supplies, but it was far less damaging to launch a pod while the ship could initiate the procedure.
Her motion tracker alerted her to another contact moving in on her location. She abandoned her position and slealthily paced out into the corridor, SMG raised and primed with a grand total of 17 rounds left. The contact was dead ahead, through a set of doors back towards the bridge. A plan quickly formulated in her head as she dived into the opposite pod to the one she had just exited, waiting for the lone enemy to fall into her trap.
30 seconds later, she sprang into action as the silver-armoured elite stalked past her, she drew her knife across the back of the Sangheili's ankle, burying her blade up to the hilt in the corresponding thigh. The Alien arched his back in pain and rage and batted her away with one hand, crumpling her chest plate and sending her tumbling backward into the pod. As the warrior inspected his wounds and prowled towards her, she reached out and tapped a button on the Havoc warhead stashed underneath the pilot's seat before whipping herself upright and closing with the wounded alien.
She ducked under a clumsy swing with the dazzling energy sword and kicked the elite in the back, sending him down onto the floor that seconds before had been her resting place. Before the towering Elite could regain his footing, she dashed out of the pod and slammed the airlock's locking panel, causing a blast-proof door to slide forcefully into lace over the door. She primed the launch sequence and synchronised it to her HUD, moving quickly into the opposite pod and strapping into the pilot's seat, initiating her own launch sequence. Out of the window she could see the slowly spinning view; the planet below them then the blackness of space and then the menacing silhouette of a covenant corvette holding distance 20 kilometres away. She had to time this perfectly. Any deciation from the optimal release time would send her spinning off into space where the corvette could easily destroy her pod with point defense laser weaponry, or send the more deadly payload down towards the planet alongside her own trajectory. And she had to launch within the next 3 minutes before the four warheads she had left on a timer earlier in the weapons bay detonated, complying with the UNSC's Cole protocol and evaporating the entire ship.
It was during the next minute as she ran through circular motion equations in her head and calculated the optimal dispersion delay that she thanked her lucky stars that Maths and Physics had been her preferred subjects during Training. There was a fair amount of guesswork in her calculations, but with reasonable confidence she keyed the launch procedure for the Elite's pod. She felt the sudden jolt in the structure around her as the Gnat was violently propelled from the docking port by a more-than-necessary acceleration from the crafts rocket propulsion system. No need to give the covenant any more time to realise what was happening and destroy it. Then, precisely 23.8 seconds later, she launched her own pod, her body pressed against the seat as the acceleration pushed her Gnat away from the ship and back down towards the planet below and away from the impending nuclear detonations. She had timed it so that the bulk of the Recluse shielded her from the covenant corvette's field of fire, and it was with no small amount of satisfaction that she craned her head arund the headrest to see twin nuclear fireballs blooming in the vacuum, one much smaller and further away, dwarfed by the closer ball of flame.
As the destruction fell behind her and the pod began to brush the upper atmosphere, she smiled for the first time in a while and closed her eyes, letting the lifepod's automated navigation system take over. She was overdue a rest.
13 hours later, when the UNSC Expeditionary Force Warthog roared to a halt outside the crater in the glass left by the lifeboat's rough landing in the middle of the New Brighton Glasslands, 2000 miles away from the nearest inhabited sector, the perplexed Marines found not a half dozen bruised and battered Navy crewmen, but a single Spartan in charred and dented Mjolnir armour, sitting on a rock nearby and tapping her foot impatiently. Without a word she hoisted herself into the passenger's seat of the LRV, gave her rank and ID code:
"Petty Officer 1st class Rachel-Gamma-Zero-Two-Three."
And then slumped in her seat and slept for the whole 12-hour journey back to civilisation.