Chapter Fourteen: Leaving Home

February 23, 2525 (Military Calendar) \
Harvest, Epsilon Indi System

My wounds itched.

Biofoam worked wonders, but it itched, and slowly going crazy trying to ignore that itch almost made surviving my wounds not worth it.

Our commandeered JOTUN heavy combine sped north along the Gladsheim Highway, carrying me and my fellow exhausted survivors of 2nd Platoon back to Utgard.

We were getting close, because I could see the tops of Utgard's tallest skyscrapers poking their heads over the horizon.

Glittering in the sky were the seven majestic strands of the Tiara Orbital Elevator, catching the late afternoon sunlight. Anchored in Utgard, the seven parallel elevator strands stretched all the way into the sky, further and further away, until they grew too distant to see. The Tiara Space Station could not be seen by the naked eye during daylight hours, and even at nighttime it was difficult to glimpse without a telescope.

Bulky cargo containers ascended the seven elevator strands in pairs, each container carrying up to two thousand people. Before my very eyes, the evacuation of Harvest was transforming my people into interplanetary refugees, and I wondered for a moment if I was dreaming. Surely this was a dream?

Dempsey dreamed loudly next to me, and my admiration of his ability to sleep on the hard metal floor did not extend to his snoring. How could he tune out the rumbling engine and ignore the wind? And how could he possibly nap while knowing that we were about to make history as the first planet abandoned by the United Earth Government? Somehow I doubted we would be the last. Nothing felt certain anymore, except my lurking nausea's promise to make enjoying my next meal as difficult as humanly possible.

The sun was out in full force, which normally I hated, but today I could only think about how it was the last time I might ever feel this sun's warmth. Would any other sun feel the same?

I stared forlornly at the passing landscape. Gently rolling golden hills of wheat stretched into the distance as far as the eye could see, dappled with homesteads, silos, windmills, water towers, patches of trees denoting the boundaries between farms, solar panel arrays, and wind turbines. The countryside was a beautiful place. Harvest was a beautiful planet, and even as I had the thought I cringed, because I was referring to Harvest in the past tense.

"Rise and shine!" hollered John Carrol, rousing everyone who'd been asleep, except for our wounded, including Nolan Byrne, who remained sedated and immobilized on stretchers. "Thirty minutes to Utgard!"

"Asshole," muttered Dempsey, rubbing the bleariness from his eyes. "I was enjoying my dream."

"It won't be your last sex dream, Demp," I assured him. "You should be thanking Carrol for stopping you before it fully evolved into a wet dream."

"Idiot, it wasn't a sex dream, it was a flying dream, which is a hundred times better, because unlike you, I know sex is in my future, but flying? When will be my next chance to fly?" Dempsey gave me a moment to reply, and when I did not comply within that moment, concluded with another quiet, "Idiot."

"Fuckface," I shot back.

"You can't use that language until you're old enough to have pubes," Dempsey retorted.

"Have some originality," I rebuked him. "You made that joke already when we first met, it was just as stupid then as it is now, and if you're running out of ways to insult me-"

"The Tiara!" Stisen screamed suddenly from Alpha Squad's end of the JOTUN space, pointing up at the sky. "The number seven strand, it's about to—oh, FUCK!"

A horrible groan thundered across the sky, followed by the scream of tearing metal. In petrified silence, we all helplessly watched the Tiara's seventh elevator strand fall from the sky. In the moments before the doomed elevator strand broke up into smaller segments, I managed to count at least six pairs of attached cargo transports, and there may have been more. Even through the chassis of the fast-moving JOTUN, we could all feel the ground trembling as segments of the wrecked orbital elevator began to make landfall.

All I could do was cross my fingers and hope none of those pieces would hit our JOTUN.

One segment slammed into the Plains of Ida, less than fifty kilometers away, sending into the sky an almighty explosion of dust, smoke, and fire.

For the remainder of our drive to Utgard, no one said a word. Watching twenty thousand people die in an instant had a numbing effect. Some of us probably had family on that strand, but not me of course. I was luckier than most.

By the time we rolled into downtown Utgard, the sun was setting on Harvest's capital for perhaps the last time, and we were the only ones left to see it. No cars roamed the streets, no pedestrians cluttered the sidewalks. The massive crowd of refugees in the Utgard Mall was gone, whisked away up the orbital elevator strands. Even the holographic billboards had disappeared. In the handful of times I've visited Utgard City, I've often tried, and failed, to imagine what the city would look like without 26th Century lights, and now here it was. An unplugged city. Quiet. Desolate. No sound but the wind.

Within seventy-two hours of Governor Thune's planetary evacuation order, Harvest had become a museum exhibit.

Our JOTUN transported us straight through the Utgard Mall to the Orbital Elevator complex, coming to a stop outside the loading center for the third elevator strand.

"2nd Platoon, on your feet!" Carrol exclaimed, much to the chagrin of Stisen, who would have preferred to be the one giving platoon-wide orders. "Stisen, take Alpha and secure the boarding platform. Everyone else, grab a stretcher."

While Alpha Squad disembarked and hurried into the loading center, Dempsey and I grabbed hold of Nolan Byrne's stretcher. "You okay to carry him?" asked Dempsey. "You've got chunks of a wall in your gut."

"I'm fine." I ignored my protesting wounds as we lifted Byrne from the metal floor. They were small wounds. It was fine. We gently stepped down from the JOTUN onto the asphalt, careful not to jostle the staff sergeant while carrying him across the parking lot. "How many times have you vowed to kill him?" I asked Dempsey as we entered the loading center and hurried down the corridor towards the boarding platform.

"Byrne?" asked Dempsey. "Frankly, I lost count."

"Did you ever imagine you'd be carrying him to safety?"

"Doesn't sound like something I'd do," Dempsey remarked. "I'm still not convinced this isn't all a dream."

"My dream?" I asked, wincing as my wounds began to throb. "Or yours?"

"Alley, shut the fuck up."

We emerged onto the boarding platform, where an open cargo container waited to receive us. Stisen stood next to the cargo transport's airlock, waving us in. "Inside!" he shouted, as if we might have chosen to stay behind were it not for his helpful and insightful suggestion. "Get inside!"

Byrne's eyelids fluttered as we carried him into the cargo container. "Is he supposed to be waking up?" I asked.

"Probably not," Dempsey replied. "Sucks to be him."

Staff Sergeant Byrne's eyes cracked open. He tried to speak as we brought him over to the mountain of ration crates piled in the middle of the cargo space, but his dislocated jaw made English impossible. All we could hear was, "Mmrhrmrgh."

"I said, it sucks to be you, sir," Dempsey repeated himself directly to Byrne as we set him down.

"Aw, shit," I groaned, reaching under my shirt to clutch my bandaged abdomen. The bandages felt wet, and sure enough, when I withdrew my hand, I got a nice look at my own blood. Just in case I'd forgotten what it looked like. Wasn't that nice?

"Idiot." Dempsey grabbed me as I was collapsing, throwing one of my arms around his shoulders and helping me over to the nearest bulkhead. "Someone else could've carried the stretcher. You should have been on a stretcher. Why didn't you say anything?"

"I'd have been sedated," I said. "We're abandoning home, Demp. I wanted to leave on my own two legs. Awake."

"You could've done that without carrying a stretcher." Dempsey helped me sit down and applied pressure to my bandages in an attempt to slow the bleeding. "Fucking idiot."

By now, the rest of our wounded had been brought into the cargo container by Bravo and Charlie Squads, allowing Stisen to order Alpha Squad aboard. When the last of his troopers was squared away, Stisen entered the cargo transport and sealed the airlock doors, leaving us in pitch darkness, but only for a moment. The cargo container's internal systems came online, and the bulkheads' opaque portholes depolarized, becoming transparent and allowing sunlight to pour inside. Tube lights built into the ceiling flickered to life as well, which would come in handy when we entered the darkness of outer space, far removed from the sun.

The floor rattled underneath our asses and feet for a few moments as we were drawn along the loading rail to the base of the elevator strand. Then our cargo container's docking clamps engaged, securing us to the elevator strand for our ascent.

I took a deep breath, and I barely had time to glance through the nearest porthole before the elevator strand whisked us away into the sky, sending my stomach plummeting to the base of my spine. Within moments, I saw the urban sprawl of Utgard laid out beneath me in its entirety. Seconds later, I could see all of the surrounding countryside, including the Baldr Mountains in the distant north, and then eventually I was able to perceive the curvature of the world.

For a moment I forgot we were abandoning our home, likely never to return, and I was a little kid again, gazing up at the night sky, wondering how I could possibly get close enough to collect the stars. I'd always wanted to keep a handful of stars in my pocket, so I could have friends on cloudy nights too.

The Plains of Ida grew smaller and smaller, until I could see the entire Edda Supercontinent. The Munin Sea sparkled in the south of Edda, glinting in the light of the setting sun. I tried to spot Gladsheim, but it was obscured by a dense veil of ash, smoke, and dust.

Gradually the bright azure sky outside deepened to a dark navy blue, which in turn gave way to the silent starry depths of outer space. I was still getting used to our rapid ascent when our container suddenly began to decelerate, signalling our proximity to Tiara Station, where we would be making a brief stop to pick up 1st Platoon. After a full minute of slowing down, we lurched finally to a stop, and I could hear mechanical whirring as our airlock was secured to an umbilical connecting us to Tiara Station.

When the indicator lights turned green, Stisen initiated an override and unsealed both sets of airlock doors at once. The doors opened with a hiss, revealing Andersen and the rest of 1st Platoon's bloodied and battered Bravo Squad waiting in the loading umbilical beyond, laden with eight severely wounded militia members on stretchers. "Inside, Bravo!" Anderson shouted, helping to pick up one of the stretchers and leading the way into the cargo container. "Wounded first!"

Carrol and several others from 2nd Platoon hurried over to help, relieving their traumatized 1st Platoon counterparts of stretcher duty and allowing them to rest.

Andersen shook the hand of Carrol and Stisen as the last members of his squad came aboard. "Thank you for not forgetting to stop."

"This ride is AI-controlled," Stisen replied. "We couldn't abandon you even if we wanted."

"And we are glad you made it," added Carrol.

Weapons fire could be heard close by, but we could not see what was happening beyond the far end of the umbilical. A steady trickle of wounded from 1st Platoon's Alpha and Charlie Squads began to make their way down the narrow connective tube, hurrying into the cargo container. Most of them had been lightly wounded in some way, and many had to support each other. Once the lightly wounded were safely aboard, the rest of Alpha and Charlie Squads finally showed up, and it was clear they were holding back a ferocious assault by our alien foes.

Doc Healy arrived, carrying an unconscious Dass, and he was immediately helped by Stisen into the cargo container, bringing the incapacitated leader of 1st Platoon's Alpha Squad over to the rations, where the other severely wounded had been secured. Dass's back was riddled with plasma burns. If he lived, the next year of his life was going to be hell.

Last to show up were the sharpshooters. Critchley provided covering fire, doing his best to keep the umbilical clear while Jenkins and Staff Sergeant Johnson, supporting a profusely bleeding Forsell, slowly made their way towards us. Critchley was a good shot, but he could not keep an entire assault at bay. Dozens of winged insectoid buggers and stubby little gas-breathing aliens swarmed into the umbilical in hot pursuit, quickly overwhelming Critchley's covering fire.

"Seal it!" Johnson ordered as he and Jenkins heaved Forsell into our cargo container's airlock. "Seal it! Get us the hell out of here!"

The airlock's outer doors hissed shut, and within seconds we were moving again. As we finished our journey up the final stretch of the orbital elevator strand, I could feel our cargo container rapidly accelerating to a speed much faster than any we'd experienced thus far on our ascent. When our docking clamps disengaged, there came a heavy clunk which reverberated throughout the entire cargo container, followed by the smoothest gliding I've ever felt as we were flung free from the orbital elevator, sailing through frictionless space towards our assigned faster-than-light propulsion pod.

Assuming our trajectory was calculated correctly. If not, then we would drift through the Epsilon Indi System without a slipspace drive for months until we froze or starved. Now was certainly the time for a Glass Half Full outlook on life.

Through the porthole, I could now see all of Harvest. Everything I've ever known, loved, dreamed, and cried about could now fit underneath the palm of my hand as I pressed it to the porthole glass.

I've never felt so small.

After several minutes of drifting, we felt another bump and heard the docking clamps re-engaging, securing us to our propulsion pod and completing our cargo container's evolution into a freighter. A faint, omnipresent rushing sound enveloped our container as the propulsion pod's faster-than-light drive fired up, launching us into slipspace. I only assumed we successfully made the jump after the rushing sound subsided and we were still alive.

"Did we make it?" Dempsey was the first to speak, tentative at first, but with growing confidence. "We made it!"

"Fuck," Billings murmured. "Fuck me..."

There was no celebration. What was there to celebrate? We'd just lost our home.

Healy tended first to Dass and Forsell, who were the most severely wounded. After cleaning their wounds, Healy foamed them up and applied fresh field dressings, wiping away the excess blood. Next, Healy attended to Byrne, spending several minutes tenderly massaging the Staff Sergeant's temporomandibular joints, loosening the seized-up muscles before resetting the Staff Sergeant's dislocated jaw.

Byrne worked his jaw around a bit, flexing it gently, muttering some very colorful profanity under his breath.

"Charming," Healy remarked as he set the Staff Sergeant's arm in a splint and cleaned the lacerations on his shoulder and clavicle. Then he came over to me. "Didn't your parents ever tell you not to eat polycrete, Garris?" he asked, surveying my abdominal wounds. "You have half a wall in there."

"I grew up without parents," I replied, leading to a slightly awkward silence. I wasn't in a humorous mood right now.

Healy used a flash-sterilized needle-nose forceps to carefully remove the polycrete fragments from my gut, and each time the forceps brushed against my insides, I clenched my teeth and focused on remaining calm. Fortunately, Healy worked quickly, so I didn't suffer long. When he removed the last of the polycrete, he filled my wounds with some fresh biofoam.

I squirmed as the cool polymer expanded throughout my insides, filling up the curious spaces within my body I'd never known I had until now. Fresh biofoam, before it settled and congealed, felt like one's insides were being infested with fire ants.

Healy noticed my discomfort. "Stings like hell, sure," he said while changing my bandages, "but it's saved more lives than either of us could ever count. Including yours."

"Thanks, Doc. I feel sunny inside. I feel like frolicking."

Within the next hour or so, most of us had fallen back asleep. Snores and heavy breathing filled our container. We were done. None of us had gotten much rest since the disaster at the Botanical Gardens. Soon, I would sleep alongside my friends, but not yet. I was still a little restless.

I sat in front of the porthole, staring out into the black nothingness. Slipspace had no visible light, so there was literally nothing out there, nothing beyond our little quantum bubble, for my eyes to translate into visual information. But that was okay. I didn't need to look at anything, I just needed to let myself zone out and decompress.

"It gets easier."

I looked up from my reverie.

Byrne was now wide awake, sitting up in his cot nearby, observing me.

"Sir?"

"What you've been through," clarified Byrne. "It will never go away. You can learn to live with it, but you cannot ignore it. Anyone can go to war, Garris, but not everyone can make it back."

"We did, sir."

"Surviving isn't the same as coming back," said Byrne. "And this wasn't a war. This was a scuffle. The war is coming."

"Why are you telling me this?" I asked.

"You're awake and everyone else is asleep," Byrne replied. "We are the only people in the UNSC who have experience dealing with these aliens. FLEETCOM will take Harvest back, and when they do, the Marine Corps will need you."

I pictured it in my mind: Private Garris of the UNSC Marines. Somehow I doubted my battle armor in real life would be nearly as spiffy as what I was now imagining. The real armor probably wouldn't catch the light so well. "Do I have to go through Basic again?"

"Yes," Byrne replied. "No way around that. Marine recruits train at Camp Needle Point, on Reach. It won't be easy."

"I survived you, didn't I?"

END OF ACT I