25m From Objective Alpha
Delta 132 IVa (Temperate Zone)
04:47 Local Time (08:47 Zulu)
January 10th, 2552 (Military Calendar)

Murphy tapped his foot in impatience as he waited for Timmons to complete her cracking procedures on the massive doors. It had taken nearly six minutes to break free enough reinforcements to make Gunny Wilson happy about their chances should a serious force be waiting for the Marines to open the doors. That was okay, though; Timmons had been hard at work finding the correct command pathways to convince the doors' computerized lock that she was an authorized user for just as long.

She'd arrived with her ruck stuffed full of little electronic widgets, most of which were arcane even to Murphy--who'd had the basic cracking procedures course recently. It seemed that the longer this war went on, the better the UNSC got a breaking into Covenant data systems, the more complex the gadgetry needed to be. AI and electronic encryption were the only two areas of technology where it seemed that the UNSC had a slight edge over their opponents, and it was a constant race to ensure that it remained that way--humanity couldn't afford to fall behind in yet another area if it was to survive.

Specialist Timmons had her little phone-pad-looking device magnetically attached to the doors; she was constantly punching in alphanumeric code on it while consulting a small datapad with the other hand. Thirty seconds crept past, their silent movement only marked by a cough here or the scuffle of feet there. Finally, one hundred and two seconds after the last trooper had been placed in a position to fire into the archway, she looked up at Murphy and nodded her readiness.

Murphy nodded back as he glanced around at the extra ten troopers assigned to his "fireteam". It was really closer to a little more than a squad, now; but the Gunny had decided to keep him as "Johnny-on-the-Spot" for the time being, with all of the casualties that the company had taken. They were down to less than four E-5s and above in the entire company; most squad-level positions were being held by corporals and lance corporals. There was even one squad that was currently being led by a PFC! The unit was down to about sixty effectives, though; most "squads" were really understrength fireteams of six men or less.

All that meant was that Murphy was the one left holding the bag when it all came undone. Timmons turned back to her keypad, leaned to the left of the door to provide a clear line of fire, and hit four quick keystrokes. The doors whipped apart with pneumatic swiftness, and blazing plasma fire came pouring out. Green, blue, and purple bolts seared the atmosphere, their ionized gasses stripping electrons from the surrounding air as they streaked towards the Marines' positions in unaimed suppressive fire. The ODSTs returned fire, their tracers appearing as lazy bolts of fire reaching back into the darkened doorway. A trio of SPNKrs flashed out, their detonations sounding like one combined rumble, and the suppressive fire from the other side of the arch slackened in intensity for a moment.

A roaring could be heard, as if a herd of male gorillas had gotten loose in the base somehow. These "gorillas", however, were infinitely more lethal than a pack of silverbacks. Not one, not two, not even four, but six squidheads--most in blue armor, with a lone exception in violet--came bursting through the doorway, their shields flashing blue with multiple impacts. Their plasma rifles flashed the same tone as the devices superheated the atmosphere in between their two capacitors and sent it burning downfield towards their Marine targets.

As the three ODSTs with rocket launchers brought them to bear, a trio of Elites tossed plasma grenades. Two missed, forcing their targets to dive aside and abandon the launchers; one, though, stuck to its target.

Lance Corporal Weinbender, someone that Murphy had known and worked closely with for better than a year of waketime, had less than three seconds to do something about it. He knew that the grenade wasn't going to come off, so he did the only thing he could: he rushed the bastard that had killed him. He was less than a pace and a half to the creature, turning to bring another one of the blue-armored behemoths into his sights, when three things happened simultaneously. First, he pulled the trigger on his surface-to-surface missile launcher. Second, the Elite next to him brought its heavy plasma rifle down on his helmet with a loud crunch of vertebrae crumbling. Finally, the grenade detonated in a blue-white flash. It vaporized the top half of the Marine and threw the squidhead back in a purple spray. Less than a heartbeat later, the 102mm rocket impacted another one of the damned things and turned it into a fine violet mist.

The Marines, well-trained from dozens of drops similar to this, began to concentrate their fire on the power-armored figures in their midst. It was all that they could do, though, to bring the creatures down. Their energy shielding, their speed, and their sheer toughness meant that a single Elite, let alone four of them, was a difficult prospect. They could, and did, die though. They might do it fighting to the last, but they could be killed. It just took a lot of bullets to get the job done.

When the smoke cleared, and all six of the creatures had been reduced to so much offal, there were exactly four troopers left standing--out of nineteen. If Bravo was going to continue taking casualties like this, there was no way it was going to complete its mission. Murphy walked over to where the single purple-armored squidhead was slowly bleeding out onto the freezing floor of the complex and looked it in the eye. He raised his M6 and fired once, putting the creature out of its misery. His grief had been firewalled away from the rest of him and all he could think was, Gonna need reinforcements. Lots of reinforcements.

He sighed, looked at his three remaining troopers--Timmons, Chu, and Richards--and keyed his COM, "Gunny, we've taken the entrance. I'm down to four effectives, though. I need a corpsman and about twelve or thirteen bags. Things got...bad...there. It looks like the Covvies shot their wad, but I don't want to find out the hard way."

"Roger. Help's on the way, Murphy."

Right. Help. More people for me to get killed, he thought. Then he banished such thoughts from his mind with a sharp headshake; there'd be even fewer of Bravo's troopers going home if he didn't...