Chapter Twenty-Five: A Little Overreaction
November 30, 2536 (Military Calendar) \
Verus III, Alpha Tauris System
I should have known this whole thing wouldn't be a smooth in-and-out rescue. That wouldn't have involved getting charbroiled in a shower of plasma, so deep down I always knew things would get complicated.
The complications started when the ODSTs we were supposed to rescue needed me—a sharpshooter—to finish their mission by assassinating a Covenant Prophet. Okay; still not quite yet fubar. Getting there, but not quite.
It got fubar the moment I blew a hole in the Prophet's head. The Covies had quickly determined which direction my shot had come from and had promptly started raking this whole damn ridge with plasma artillery. They hadn't spotted me or the squad of ODSTs which I had temporarily seemed to have joined, but it was only a matter of time.
"You guys have any vehicles?" I shouted as we finished tumbling, sliding, and jumping our way down to the bottom of the ridge which we had been holed up on.
"No!" the ODST Master Sergeant shouted back. "We were dropped in like you! It's all on foot from here; I hope your pelicans are sticking around!"
"They will be!" I answered confidently. "We never leave a marine behind!"
"Pyro; prime that SPNKr!" the Master Sergeant ordered as we heard the whine of banshee fliers coming in hot. "Hold your fire until they have us sighted!"
"Got it!" the black ODST—who went by the callsign 'Pyro'—hollered, shrugging his hefty rocket launcher off of his back.
The valley, which had been dark and somewhat tranquil when I had crossed through it the first time, was now a nexus of chaos and pandemonium. There wasn't much wildlife left, but the few animals who had remained were getting the hell out of there now. Trees were burning all over the place, filling the air with the acrid smell of burnt leaves. The fires cast the valley in a hellish red glow…not quite enough to illuminate the place, but bright enough to render the use of infrared night vision unnecessary.
The banshees spotted us just as we were crossing the stream. The Covie fliers passed by low overhead, but didn't fire.
"Did they miss us?" Pyro asked hesitantly, shouldering his SPNKr.
I knew better. "Nope," I shook my head. "That was just the visual run, to give them a feel for our strength, armament, as well as the direction we're heading. We're dead in their sights, now."
"Wrong," Pyro declared, glancing into the sighting scope of the SPNKr. "They're dead in my sights."
The banshees banked back towards us in a tight one-eighty, their forward nose-mounted plasma cannons blazing to life. Plasma bolts peppered into the ground and water. The stream hissed and steamed as the plasma flash-vaporized the water it came into contact with.
"Fan out! Fan out!" the Master Sergeant screamed. The banshees were no doubt going to fire their fuel-rod projectiles down on us—being bunched up would have been an extremely bad idea.
Sure enough, as the banshees reached the bottom of their strafing dive, they unleashed crackling green hell down on us. The only one of us who hadn't scattered before the barrage was Pyro, who stood his ground defiantly, feet spread wide.
Pyro fired his SPNKr, sending two rockets blazing up into the sky. One of the rockets slammed into one of the banshees, consuming it in the resulting explosion, but the other rocket only grazed one of the thruster engines of another Covie flier. Even so, the destabilization caused by losing one of its two propulsion thrusters forced the flier to break off.
"Anyone hurt?" the Master Sergeant called out.
"Gotta lil' singe in my hindparts from that last 'un," Cajun—the loudmouthed ODST with the Louisiana drawl—reported. "Nuthin' major."
We kept on pounding our way through the woods after we crossed the stream. The Covenant plasma bombardment was shifting to keep up with us. The hellstorm of plasma wasn't hitting the ridge, anymore; it was now carpeting every inch of the valley it could find. We had to get out of here, fast.
"Watch those banshees! They're going to make another pass," the Master Sergeant yelled to us. "Virgin! Get over to Pyro and help him with the SPNKr!"
"Yessir!" one of the ODSTs replied, making his way over to the rocket launcher-toting Helljumper, who was struggling to reload it while running.
I jumped over a tree root that rose up from the ground in front of me, narrowly avoiding getting tripped up. The leaves and branches rattled and shook as the banshees swept low for another pass, their nose cannons blazing.
One of the plasma shots nicked me in the side of my back. I stumbled, spinning forward from the force of the hit. It felt like someone had hit me with a sledgehammer; white-hot pain spread throughout my back as my mind registered that I had just been hit by plasma.
My armor must have held, though. If it hadn't held, I would be on the ground screaming right now, or worse: on the ground not screaming. I swore at the top of my lungs, venting the initial reaction to getting hit, then regained my footing and shoved the pain into a dark, dusty corner of my mind.
"Who was that? Who got hit?" the Master Sergeant bellowed.
"I'm fine, damn it all!" I snapped, pushing myself to the very limits of my running speed. "Keep going!"
"Well, as long as you don't-"
The Master Sergeant was suddenly outlined in a blinding green explosion. The earth heaved as the banshees unleashed their fuel rod bombs down on us. The rest of what he was saying to me was lost as one of the projectiles slammed down somewhere close to him.
I could see Pyro firing his SPNKr out of the corner of my eye, taking down another of the Covie fliers.
I shook my head, blinking out the white spots and stars sparkling in and out of my vision. That explosion had half-blinded me, but the moment had passed. I swore again as I saw the motionless form of the Master Sergeant lying on the ground, parts of his armor still smoking.
I hurried towards the downed Helljumper, but Celt got there first. The Irish ODST rolled the Master Sergeant onto his back. "Apache!" he was screaming. "Apache! Get your arse over here, now!"
"Out of my way, coming through!" I was shoved to the side by the ODST squad's medic, who crouched beside the wounded Master Sergeant and immediately tended to the bleeding leg, dousing with coagulant-powder a bleeding leg wound too small to warrant using an entire can of biofoam.
"What in the devil is the hold-up back there?" Cajun exclaimed, his accent thickening almost to the point of not being able to understand him. "Them banshees ain't gonna wait fer-"
"The Sarge is down!" Celt snapped. "We're all very feckin' sorry for the inconvenience!"
"He's fine," Apache murmured, taking his hands off of the Master Sergeant's vitals. "Took a little hit to the leg, and the concussive forces of that blast pretty much overloaded his sensory…you know what, forget the explanation. He's fine, just unconscious. Someone give me a hand, here…"
"I got him," I stepped forward, helping Apache hoist the unconscious Master Sergeant to his feet. I knew Celt wouldn't be able to easily carry him because of his hand wound. He probably could have managed, but I didn't have a hand wound, so that made the choice rather easy. I slung my BR55 over my shoulder, where it hung next to the SRS99B, which I had strapped diagonally across my back. It wasn't comfortable, but it still worked.
I threw the Master Sergeant over my shoulder, holding him like a sack of potatoes. I got my balance, compensating for the sudden shift in weight, and set off again. The whole thing had taken less than thirty seconds, though it seemed a lot longer when I looked back on it.
"You got him?" Celt called to me. The Irish Helljumper was running alongside me, glancing hesitantly at the Master Sergeant.
"Here's hoping!" was all I said in reply. I winced a little bit every time the sniper rifle or the Master Sergeant's head brushed against the spot where I had been hit by the plasma shot from one of the Covie fliers. Sure, my armor had held, but the sheer heat of the plasma must have cooked the skin that had been under the armor.
"I'm almost out o' rockets!" Pyro was saying as he and the other ODST with him finished reloading the SPNKr. "I just loaded my last two!"
"Spirits!" Virgin, the ODST assisting Pyro, suddenly pointed. Sure enough, we could see no less than four of the U-shaped Covie dropships descending over the valley, hovering down low towards the treeline. Though we could see them once they got down low enough, we all knew they were dropping ground forces.
"Hope they didn't drop any ghosts…" Celt murmured.
The first ridge which I had climbed over with Colonel Ndebele and the other marines from the 9th Force Recon was getting nearer. We needed to hoof it up and over that ridge to make it to our exfil point.
I nearly stumbled on another root, but again I managed to keep my footing. This was doubly fortunate, as I was now carrying a wounded trooper on my shoulder. That kinds of upped the stakes a tad.
"Watch yer asses!" Cajun exclaimed suddenly. "Them Covie fuckers've gone an' dropped ghosts down behind us!"
"You just had to open that mouth of yours," Apache, who had been within earshot of Celt's last statement, muttered to the Irish Helljumper.
"Make those last two rockets count, Pyro!" Celt shouted, ignoring Apache's jab.
The banshees seemed content to pepper us from a distance, no longer coming in for low, sweeping dives like before. They knew that every time they did that, we killed one or two of them. I guess they didn't know that we were nearly out of rockets, and just as well.
Another plasma bolt impacted not too far ahead of us, melting the dirt and underbrush into a red-hot crater. If one of those suckers hit me, there wouldn't be anything left. Maybe a finger or a helmet, but beyond that…
Just when things couldn't get any worse, those four dropships then started firing on us. They had already unloaded all of their ground complements and were now homing in on us from the air.
"Jesus H!" I swore, ducking instinctively as a rain of plasma disintegrated the tree to my left. "Sure, so maybe I killed their Prophet butt-buddy, but don't you think they're overreacting just a tinybit?"
"You know how bad Elites are? You know, their whole 'I'd rather die before lettin' me honor get tarnished' deal?" Celt asked me.
"Yeah, no shit!"
"Well take that and multiply it by ten or fifteen, and you'll get an idea of how the Honor Guard Elites feel!" Celt explained. "There was a fuckload of Honor Guard Elites down in that digsite, and you just 'tarnished their honor' by killing the one they swore to protect! They're sorta pissed off, right now!"
As we made our way up the slope of the ridge, I actually found myself missing the trenches. Life in the trenches had been simple—when the Covies threw something at you, you either ducked or repelled it. Here, though…here, you were actively seeking trouble…although something about that appealed to me as well.
"Sergeant!" Celt bellowed. "Ghost on your six!"
I twisted my head around to look behind me. Big mistake. Just like Celt had said, one of the Covie ground assault vehicles was coming up fast on my tail. Normally I would simply dive out of the way, but I was carrying Master Sergeant on my shoulder, so rolling wasn't a good idea.
"Thanks for the update!" I rolled my eyes. "What the fuck am I supposed to do? I'm kind of carrying someone right now!"
Celt muttered something under his breath, fumbling with his belt. I cocked a curious eyebrow at what he pulled from his side—one of the small, C-shaped plasma pistols that grunts and jackals usually carried. "You owe me for this," the Irish Helljumper grunted.
Celt depressed the trigger on the Covie weapon. The two nodes at the ends of the barrels started to hum and glow. A sizzling orb of crackling green plasma energy hummed into existence in between the two prongs at the ends of the 'C' as the plasma pistol overcharged.
Celt released the ball of energy, which leaped from the plasma pistol with a loud hiss. The plasma overcharge struck the oncoming ghost right in its frontal armor. The purple alloy bubbled and dented where the charge hit, but the damage was superficial. What caused the actual damage was the overcharge shorting out the ghost's power.
Faint blue tongues of electricity crackled all over the chassis of the ghost, almost like blowing a fuse. The ghost's thrusters and anti-grav nodes went dark when the ghost was going at upwards of eighty miles per hour, causing the Covie assault vehicle to slam into the earth in a blue fireball. Even if the vehicle itself had survived, there was no way in hell the driver could have.
"For last-resort situations," Celt explained his possession of a Covie plasma pistol, tucking the weapon back into its holster. "Kept it quiet from the brass. Best not to use it again for a few hours to give the batteries a chance to recharge."
"More of 'em, comin' up hot!" Cajun warned us.
I heard an explosion—probably Pyro finishing off a ghost with one of his remaining rockets. I also heard a noise that none of us wanted to hear: Wort! Wort! Wort!
We were barely halfway up the ridge, and now we had Elites right behind us. They could easily outrun Humans in normal conditions—outrunning a group of wearied, scarred ODSTs who were weighed down by a wounded trooper while going uphill would be a cakewalk for them.
I swore again, the certainty that we weren't going to make it sinking in. "Form up!" I finally roared, finding my inner Sergeant. "Prime your frags and take cover behind the trees!"
"May I ask why the fuck you want us to stop?" Pyro grunted as he fired off his other tube.
"If we keep running, they'll catch up and slaughter us!" I retorted. "Might as well fill a few of 'em full of holes, beat 'em back a bit, and try again! Otherwise, we're all toast!"
I think that in the frenzied heat of the moment, none of the Helljumpers really remembered that I was a regular infantry grunt. In that moment, I was simply a Sergeant.
I laid the Master Sergeant down behind a tree and pulled out one of my frags, popping out the pin and hurling it towards the charging Elites. My grenade wasn't the only one out there; several of the ODSTs had also tossed their frags into the fray.
My frag took out the shields of two of the leading Elites. I quickly shrugged off my BR55 and shouldered it, loosing off a burst towards one of the unshielded Elites. The shields of the other Elites started to shimmer and pulse as the ODSTs' gunfire started laying into them.
I dropped one of the unshielded Elites with that first round, which tore into its throat. I aimed over to the right and nearly dropped a second, but it ducked at the last moment, causing my burst to ping right off the top of its helmet.
By then, another Elite had managed to get up close and personal. It wore red armor, identifying it as an Elite Major—the Elite equivalent of a Lieutenant, I think. Its mandibles spread out in a growling snarl as it lunged.
It swept its energy sword towards my neck, intending to bring my miserable existence to an end by separating my head from the rest of me. I ducked, actually able to feel the heat of the plasma blade as it seared through the air where my neck had been a moment ago.
The Elite warbled in irritation and brought its blade slashing down. My heart was in overdrive and my circulatory system had pretty much become a water park of adrenaline. My reflexes were at the highest they would ever be. The moment I ducked, I was ready for the Elite's inevitable secondary strike. As the blade came searing down, I threw myself to the side, rolling over and back up onto my feet.
The Elite Major stabbed its blade forward in a thrust aimed at my gut. As I stepped back, I ended up tripping on another one of those goddamned tree roots. The Elite's thrust once again only stabbed thin air.
The red-armored Elite's warbles of irritation now turned to growls of frustration and anger. It stepped forward and brought its energy sword down towards my head once more. I think I must have let out a high-pitched little-girl shriek—something I would never admit to doing—as I rolled out of the way.
The energy blade sizzled down into the earth right in front of my eyes, just missing my head. The Elite struck down with its fist immediately after the blow, faster than I could react, hitting me right in the gut and knocking the wind out of me. It thrust its blade down again, its twin points making a beeline for my forehead.
I swept my BR55 up and intercepted the Elite's sword arm, holding it at bay with all of my strength. For a brief moment, both of us were locked in position—the Elite holding its sword to my forehead, me looking wide-eyed straight at the plasma blade…
Much as I tried to resist, the Elite was stronger than me by far. One of the twin tips was starting to brush against my forehead; I could feel a spot of pure white-hot pain just above my left eyebrow. This had to end, now.
During the struggle, I had managed to curl one of my legs in close. Now, as the Elite's energy sword started to hit home, I lashed out, kicking the Elite right between its legs.
Elites have no genitalia between their legs like we do, I don't think…but a kick is a kick. It hurt.
The red-armored Elite Major grunted in pain as my kick connected. It stumbled, losing its purchase. Unfortunately, my kick—while it had prevented me from getting slowly skewered—made the Elite accidentally swipe its energy sword downwards as it staggered back.
I screamed as I felt the plasma blade draw a searing line down the left side of my face. Looking back on it, there really aren't words to describe how that sort of pain felt. I knew a few marines who had survived wounds from Elite energy swords—all of them would say the same thing; unimaginable pain, almost like a burn, but intensified into a single spot. I could only imagine how it would feel to actually get stabbed.
The blade didn't hit my eye, thank God, because I could still somewhat see through it, though it was blurred by tears. There was no blood—the sheer heat of the plasma blade instantly cauterized any wound it inflicted—but I could feel the wound; a thin, smooth line of fire extending down to my chin. I was incredibly lucky that the angle of the Elite's sudden loss of balance hadn't sent the blade into my face, through my jaw, or into my chest.
Clutching my face with one hand, I caught sight of the Elite recovering from my kick, raising its blade for another go. It plunged its energy sword down, but I rolled back the other way, just missing it once more. The hissing sound of the plasma burning through the dirt was enough to shock me into leaping back up to my feet just as the Elite cleaved its blade over to the side.
In the scrabble, I had lost my BR55 and the sniper rifle. I now faced the Elite Major with nothing except my sidearm—which was down in its holster—and my combat knife.
This little melee was going no place fast, so it was time to stir the pot a little. The throbbing agony in my face temporarily forgotten, I ran forward into the Elite just as it was pulling its sword from the ground. It turned to face me with another warble of surprise just as I crashed into its midsection in a football-style tackle. I really wish someone had got that moment on helmet cam, but…well, memory would just have to do.
The Elite fell onto its back with me on top of it. It was too stunned to move for the briefest of moments, but I took advantage of that to the extreme. I used all my strength to pin the Elite's arm down, unholstering my M6D magnum as I did so. I whipped my sidearm around and tried to empty the clip into the Elite's arm.
The shields failed with a hiss and my rounds started to slam into the Elite's armor. The Covie howled in pain, dropping its energy sword. The weapon hit the ground, winking out as its failsafe destroyed the hilt.
I didn't get the chance to fire the entire clip. The Elite gave another furious growl and worked its leg up in between me and its stomach. It then kicked…and it kicked hard. Payback really is a bitch. I flew back at least fifteen feet, slamming into a tree and sliding down into the dirt.
I groaned, trying to roll back onto my stomach and get back to my feet, but the Elite was already on me. It struck me again with one of its feet. I felt several of my ribs crack from the blow. The force of the kick knocked me back down onto my back. The Elite planted a foot on my chest, pinning me down as it pulled out its secondary weapon—a standard, straight-up Covie plasma rifle. As it aimed the weapon right at my face, the only thing I noticed was that this red-armored Elite was missing at least half of its lower-left mandible. It must have been busy these past few years.
But I wasn't quite finished, yet. I still had one weapon left.
As the Elite Major curled a finger around the plasma rifle's trigger, I flicked out my combat knife and jammed it straight into the Elite's leg, plunging it right through two of its armor plates.
The Elite grunted again with pain, its aim faltering. I pushed its foot off and rolled away. I didn't get back up, though…my entire body was just a reservoir of pain, right now. Going hand-to-hand with Elites tends to make people feel that way. This was the first time I had ever been this up close and personal to an Elite…and I have to say, the experience wasn't a pleasant one. Not something I'd ever want to repeat.
The Elite reached down and gingerly pulled my knife out of its leg. It examined the blade for a second before casting it away. It brought its plasma rifle back up and aimed it right at me…but it didn't fire. It just looked at me, pointing its weapon right at me.
I turned to look at it. "Well, what the fuck are you waiting for, you split-chin piece of shit?" I rasped. "Do it already!" Even as I howled at the Covie, I saw something curious in the red-armored Elite's stance and eyes. I knew next to nothing about their race…but if it were a Human I was examining, I would have said he was looking at me with a hint of respect.
People would always call me crazy when I told them about this afterwards, but I could have sworn that that Elite had actually seemed momentarily conflicted about putting me down. Not that it mattered, in the end. Even if it did have some measure of respect for me putting up a good fight, I was still a Human and therefore vermin in its eyes.
Its trigger finger tightened, but before it could fire the sky exploded.
Well, to be technical, one of the dropships exploded. One of the U-shaped spirit dropships was suddenly consumed by greedy orange and blue flames, illuminating the night. The BOOM of the explosion echoed off the faces of the nearby cliffs and ridges.
I heard a loud hissing noise right before a second dropship exploded, and I knew what was going on.
When I turned my gaze back to the ground, the red-armored Elite Major was nowhere to be seen. I didn't see its corpse anywhere, either, so it wasn't dead, wherever it had gone. I shrugged inwardly…I was alive. That was all that mattered to me for now.
The next series of explosions were the ghosts blowing up. The Covie assault vehicles had been slowly advancing behind that first wave of Elite ground troops, which I could also see falling back under a hail of gunfire too powerful to be coming from the ODSTs., their shields shimmering in the night.
I turned my gaze to further up the hill, where my suspicions were confirmed. The four pelican dropships—which had taken down the Covenant spirits with their missiles—crested the ridge and pursued the remaining two Covie dropships back the way they had come.
Down on the ground, I could see roundabouts forty or so marines slowly advancing, firing away at the retreating Covies as they came. The Colonel and Lieutenant McCandlish had come back.
I knew we weren't out of the water, yet. I knew that the Elites would never simply cut their losses and retreat—that wasn't their way. They had just been the first wave, and they would definitely be back with reinforcements. We had to get the hell out of here before said reinforcements arrived.
"Sergeant Garris?" It was McCandlish, whose voice I easily recognized. "Sergeant, are you alright?"
"Do I fucking look alright?" I snapped at him. Now that the adrenaline of my fight was wearing off, I was beginning to feel how much pain I was really in. My face really started to burn, now.
"Bloody hell; what happened to your face?" the Lieutenant asked me as he helped me to my feet.
"Got into a little brawl with an Elite…" I coughed. "Those fucking-" I broke off to cough, suddenly. I felt something wet come from my mouth as I coughed, but I didn't need to look at it to know what it was. I kept on talking once I stopped coughing. "Those fucking split-chin sons of bitches really know how to hurt…"
I left out the part about the Elite hesitating to fire when it had me dead in its sights. There would be time to trade stories when we weren't in imminent danger of dying. I quickly recovered my dropped weapons and started moving off with the rest of the marines.
One of the more burly marines from my outfit picked up the Master Sergeant, who was still lying unconscious in the spot where I had left him.
We didn't take any fatalities, surprisingly. I have no idea what was going on for everyone else during the firefight—all of my attention had been focused on that Elite Major—but the others had taken a beating, too. Pyro was unconscious, having been struck in the head by another attacking Elite, which Cajun had apparently finished off before it finished Pyro off. Apache, the medic, had taken a plasma charge to the arm, Celt had taken two plasma charges to his leg and waist, and Virgin—the squad technician—had been too close to a plasma grenade detonation and sported some pretty nasty burns.
Only Cajun seemed to have come through unscathed.
The pelicans—whether or not they had taken down those Covie dropships, I don't know—were waiting for us back at our old LZ, where I had first landed. Though it had been only two or so hours since then, it felt like days.
"Good to have you back, Sergeant," the Colonel clapped me on the shoulder as I limped aboard one of the pelicans. "We'll get you fixed up when we get to Wiltshire. Did you complete the objective?"
"Uh-huh," I grunted as I sat down. The side of my back burned where I had been hit by a charge from one of the Covie fliers, my chest and torso throbbed from the beating I had taken at the hands of that Elite…and my face felt like someone had drawn a red-hot poker down across my left cheek.
A corpsman who had accompanied us gave me my morphine syrette, which numbed and dulled the pain, but it didn't make it go away. I just sat there…listening to the hum of the pelican's engine as we lifted off and started making our way back north.
Far off in the west, I could see the first rays of light peeking over the horizon as sunrise arrived.
I rested my head back and closed my eyes. What a day…