UNSC Infinity in orbit over Requiem
February 19, 2558
The final group of prometheans stood defiant as Eon closed in on them at the edge of the hangar. A trio of crawlers popped with a few rifle shots and the two knight commanders accompanying them folded their bodies inward to fade in a blue light.
"Watch your six," Lusana kept his weapon forward, leading the group as the active camouflage came online.
Keeping an eye on his motion tracker, everyone except Pine crept forward around the giant mammoth platform in hopes of finding and flushing it out.
"I got a visual on one of them," Fowler reported, "Over at its port side. Careful Bailey it looks like it's waiting for you."
"Roger that," She shuffled her weapons around, taking out her sidearm, "Ready,"
"Go!"
Bailey shot out of cover, heading into open space and drilling the entire clip of her magnum into the knight commander. The shots splattered against its shielding and it hissed, bringing up its incineration cannon.
"Gotcha!" Lusana had used the distraction to climb on the mammoth's top cabin with an M41 rocket launcher in hand. He took a moment to target the mechanical beast and fired, sending an explosive warhead right down.
It sensed the incoming attack, but still had no time to react when his aim hit its mark and caused the knight to explode in its fiery orange dust.
The second knight commander had sensed its partners death and suddenly appeared over the other side of the mammoth. It targeted Lusana and fired.
"Shit!" Eon Lead jumped from his position on top over the edge, falling down and summersaulting in mid-air before engaging his armor thrusters to cushion his descent.
"Suppressing fire!" Everyone could hear Fowler's SAW chattering somewhere else. Burst fire from Austal's battle rifle went in conjunction. They heard another incineration cannon shot before Marcus screamed at Fowler to move. They all breathed relief when they heard the machine gun again.
Just a few moments later, Lusana, Bailey and Pine came around the mammoth to see Fowler and Austal standing alert with weapons raised and shields overloaded. Sparks danced across their armor for a moment before they glowed bright yellow to begin recharging.
"All clear?"
"Affirmative," Fowler ejected an empty clip from his SAW and slapped it on his back, "All hostiles cleared."
"Commander Palmer, this is Spartan Lusana. Our sector of Infinity is secured."
"Good work Eon," Palmer sounded distracted over the comms, "Other fireteams are reporting similarly too. It seems that the Covenant and Promethean attack is weakening. I'm designating several of us to finish off the stragglers."
"Roger that."
"Return to S-Deck for debriefing Eon, I'd like to have a word with each of you."
Commander Palmer, minus her helmet paced impatiently at the operations table when the doors to S-Deck opened, allowing Eon to stride in. Their helmets were off and in their hands and weapons minus sidearms, were handed off to the master armorer before heading up. Each one looked weary and tired from battling Covenant and Prometheans for the last six hours.
"Commander," Lusana began and all five Spartans saluted, their fatigue vanished in an instant at that point.
"Eon," She returned the gesture, "Nice work as usual. We have the rest of the boarding parties cornered and we should finish them off within the hour. Ops are going to resume planetside once Captain Lasky gives the green light."
"Good to hear. We'll volunteer for cleanup duty after we get some chow,"
"Smart thinking but that's not why I called you here." She headed over to the holotank, to bring up an image of a three sectioned building that was built alongside a riverbank, "We had to pull security teams from several of our research installations to aid in repelling the hostiles. I checked in with each of the facilities and they've all responded that all personnel were accounted for."
"So which one didn't respond," Fowler knew where this was going.
"Carnegie Base," Palmer answered, "They were the third base I hailed and have done so every half hour, but still have not received anything. Camera uplinks are down, so I'm assuming that it went under attack while we were boarded."
"Covies could have used the attack on Infinity as a distraction," Pine pointed out, "But Carnegie hardly had any of its Marines sent out, yet we're assuming it's an attack."
"You saying that they attacked Carnegie for a reason?" Eon noticed that Palmer immediately sounded irritated when Ross had mentioned his theory.
"Maybe. There were a lot of defenseless bases that are in their radar yet they still chose this one."
"Either way," The Commander put her hands on her hips, "My top fireteams are planetside finishing off the missions they were originally assigned before the attack. Tyrant has authorized the mission before you are to be reassigned."
"Understood."
"Good," Once again she seemed distracted…almost infuriated at something. "Go get something to eat and report to your designated assignment hangar in an hour."
After grabbing a meal in the mess hall, Eon allowed their techs to briefly make some repairs before arming themselves again and heading down to the surface. There was debris of Covenant ships and aircraft all around. Beside humanity's largest ship were several of its frigate escorts as they controlled other pelicans combing the wreckage for salvage. Broadsword fighters flitted around, patrolling for any survivors.
It was a half hour flight when the pilot informed them they would be touching down just a mile north of Carnegie to avoid catching the eye of the air defenses.
"Thanks for the ride," Lusana called out as the team bounded off and split-second secured the LZ.
"No problem," The pilot drawled as she powered down the engines, "We'll remain on station here and fly on over once you've given an all clear."
"Copy that."
As the white buildings came in sight over the hilly horizon, Lusana marked a point up top with a few to its entrance. Pine flashed his light and broke off from the group, setting up his nest.
"We're going to enter through the rear entrances and restore power to the security feed."
With their backs pressed against the face of the building, Lusana stacked up by the door and twisted the handle, yanking it open.
Fowler went in first, followed by Austal as they cleared the room. The other two Spartans walked in with weapons raised, despite their motion trackers remaining empty of hostiles.
"Room's clear," Eon Three called out with Four echoing.
"Let's move to central control."
The sealed walkway over to the main building was a massive tube window and wide enough for three people to walk abreast. Down below was the small barracks that the security team was stationed at, including a motor pool. Just out of curiosity, Bailey scanned the two warthogs at the motor pool. Both engines were cold.
Since their arrival, there were no outgoing distress calls or no formal hailing of their arrival.
And no sign of any human. It was like they were erased from existence without a trace of their whereabouts.
"Spartan Lusana to Carnegie Base," Eon Lead repeated, "Does anyone copy?"
Silence.
"Too bad they forgot to leave a notice that they went away for lunch," Fowler quipped over the comms, "The auxillary power station is online. Air defenses are rebooting now."
True to his word, there were several blocklike missile batteries stationed around the facility that popped up out from their mounts and began rotating around, scanning for threats.
"At least we got that up," Pine said, "It's still reading an all clear here and I've accessed the schematics for Carnegie. I've got three unidentified contacts in the northwest corner of the base. They seem to know you are there and are headed in your direction." He stared at the blips, "I think they are going to try and get the drop on you. Approaching at your nine, towards the west."
"We'll be ready."
Austal automatically moved in front and Fowler stood in the center, with his machine gun ready.
Both Spartans suddenly cursed, seeing the anomaly at the same time and diving out of the way as a steady stream of plasma fire erupted from the end of the corridor.
"Cover fire!" Lusana shouted as he and Bailey sent down short bursts.
The three elites' shields shimmered as the bullets uselessly struck them and they remained defiant, unwilling to cover. They let out irritated growls and fired back erratically. Still, the strength of them surprised Eon.
"These guys have overpowered shields," Fowler grumbled, letting off another round and in disbelief as it shrugged it right off.
The lead one moved in front of the second that had a ranger harness and gestured to the other one.
At once, they began to quickly fall back, shooting stray shots at the Spartans.
"Permission to pursue?" Austal asked.
"Let's go," Lusana gestured to Fowler, "Bailey, stay here and pull whatever you can on the databanks. I want to know why the Covenant were here."
"I'm on it,"
Tony led the other two Spartans through where the elites had retreated off to, but his mind was swimming with questions, the bottom of which was why they were here. Even bigger of a mystery was why were they retreating so quickly? Sangheili were creatures of honor and turning tail from an adversary was considered rather shameful.
Unless they were planning a trap.
"Watch your six," He automatically warned them, "We don't know why they ran off so fast."
"Never seen split-lips do that before," Fowler remarked, "And the fact that they were wearing similar armor to the ones we encountered on the cruiser. Definitely not a coincidence, they're spec-ops."
"And they take a fuckload of bullets to even drop their shields," Austal added. They came to another intersection and an exit that was still opened, facing the main facility's entrance. It was recently used.
"Hear that?" Fowler cocked his head inside his helmet, "I hear a phantom."
Their augmented ears quickly picked it up too, the low droning sound of the dropship's engines was faint, but there was no mistaking it.
"Must be their ride. Move!"
The three Spartans sprinted right out to see the large purple phantom rise out from the edge of the cliff. Its doors were open and the ranger that they encountered earlier was manning a plasma turret by the hatch.
Their shields flared as he peppered them from his mount and just about any returning fire from any of them was basically obsolete. It lingered around for just a moment before the fins on its stern rotated and it sped off into the distance.
Behind them, their trackers picked up two friendly tags as Bailey and Pine sprinted to the edge to regroup.
"What was that all about?" She breathlessly asked.
"I don't know," Lusana replied, sounding distant and still looking in the direction their quarry had escaped. He shook his head, "Let's just call in our backup."
An hour later, Carnegie Base was once again bustling with personnel as both scientists and marines moved crates of new supplies. Technicians were thoroughly checking most of the networks, fairly pleased that there was no malware to be found installed on their systems.
Eon stood in the facility's main hall where it was the center of the activity. Tyrant was on the holotank in full armor and a datapad in hand.
"And you're saying that the elites were just falling back when they encountered you?"
"That's an affirmative sir," Lusana scratched his head, "Fowler, Austal and I moved to pursue and they had stowed a phantom out of sight, which they used as their escape vessel."
"Are you sure it was a retreat?"
"Could've been, they did act like they were on orders to abandon the station as soon as we showed up, but at the same time, they had advanced shielding and heavy armor."
"They were overloaded after an entire clip from my SAW, but we failed to kill one since they were in such a hurry with their tails between their legs." Fowler added.
"I've received all of your recorded feeds and am sending it to ONI for analysis. This could take some time, so I'm pulling you out. Once the Cartographers from the Initiative have created sufficient data, you're going to be the first to engage these new foes in War Games."
So it's been a while, but here's another chapter, even though I haven't seem to have gotten any additional reviews. Anyway the biographies of Eon are now going to be on the Halo Fanon wiki where I've already started work. I don't have much done yet, but I promise more will be added including the events of this story, Venomous Honor and Crossfire as well as early backstory to further flesh out our favorite Spartan Fireteam.
Thanks for reading and reviewing, you give my writing purpose.