"Never stand when you can sit, never sit when you can lie down, never stay awake when you can sleep."
-unofficial US Army motto and Excerpt from Murphy's Laws of Combat Operations
Location, insurrectionist controlled planet taurus IV, 20:15 hours standard military time, January 6th, 2558
When they arrived at the landing pad it was already getting dark. Alison began to swiftly walk back to the hotel, but Brandon didn't follow her pace. He was walking so slow it looked to Alison that he was almost standing still as he stared absentmindedly at the sky.
She looked at him with a puzzled expression.
"What's the rush?" He asked from well behind her.
"I don't know, it's kind of late, shouldn't we be heading back?"
Brandon looked at the sky again, "no way, it's way to nice of a night for that."
He sat down on a park bench and gestured for Alison to sit next to him. She nodded and took a seat, following Brandon's gaze as he looked to the sky. she cracked a smile for a brief second, not long enough for brandon to notice. It was nice sitting next to brandon. He always seemed to be kind and have a smile for her, and now was no exception.
"So what are we doing exactly?" She asked as he continued to gaze off into the distance.
"Just enjoying the view. You had a great time doing that yesterday, right?"
Brandon evidently couldn't tell she was enjoying this, and she decided to have a bit of fun with him.
She shrugged indifferently and pretended to not even notice the stars, "what view am I supposed to be looking at?"
"The stars! Aren't they beautiful?"
"I see stars from ships all the time, what's different about these?" She said flatly.
She smiled slightly to herself as he struggled to come up with a reason, and eventually found the words to describe what he meant.
"Stars just look different from a planet's surface than they do in space. The way they cast a dim light on the ground and how they seem to hang suspended above you like an incredible chandelier, not like in space where they don't shine quite so brightly and only look vaguely suspended in a void. I think it's beautiful."
She was surprised at his response. He had clearly given this a lot of thought.
She rolled her eyes, "that's very poetic Brandon."
"Maybe it is, and maybe I'm biased too. I guess I've always been fascinated with the stars."
She laughed, "Really? I was told you could go blind staring at lights all your life."
She held up three fingers in the path of his vision, "how many fingers am I holding up?"
"Is that a joke I just heard out of you?" He said in surprise.
She smiled, "I guess it was."
Alison noticed his reaction upon seeing her smile. He seemed almost satisfied with it, as though that was what he had really wanted out of her the whole time. The look he gave her was sweet and kind, and she could have dismissed that as him still trying to be nice to her after bowing up on her back at the cemetery, but this was something else entirely. His features seemed to soften, making him look a lot less battle weary than he normally did. He smiled brightly at her. She couldn't say she had ever seen this kind of gaze directed towards her, but her smile only grew wider because of it, something Brandon was clearly very happy about.
When he realized Alison had noticed him looking at her he snapped back to looking at the stars, and tried to play it off as though nothing had happened, but Alison had seen the look he had given her. Now she just had to figure out what it meant.
"You've got to admit this is nice though," he said, trying to direct the conversation back towards the stars, "It's just like being a kid again. Didn't you ever look at the stars when you were a kid and wonder what was up there, and dream about going there?"
A dark shadow came over her eyes as she thought back to what it had been like to be a kid.
"Let's just say I knew I was going to see those stars in person someday, wether I liked it or not."
"Oh, sorry," said Brandon, his affectionate smile disappearing from his face.
"Don't be, it's not your fault," she said flatly.
Brandon's short sentence carried more meaning than he would ever know. Her childhood hadn't been a happy time. She had had no time to enjoy the stars as other children had. She had been trained as a child soldier, abused, experiment on, and had her life made a living hell. It wasn't Brandon's fault though, and she quickly tried to think of something to say to let him know her sadness wasn't on him.
"You're right though Brandon," she conceded with a sigh, "These stars are beautiful, I just wish I had time for beautiful things."
Brandon looked at her with sad eyes but said nothing. She found it interesting that the lieutenant would care about her having time to enjoy things like stars.
Alison leaned back and looked up at the stars once again. She'd served under officers before that liked to remind her to remember what she was fighting for, what life would be like when the war ended. She always wondered what they had been asking her to remember, as she had never had a chance to experience whatever it was the UNSC had been fighting for. Now the war was over, supposedly, so was this what they had been fighting for? The ability to sit peacefully under the stars and smile for no reason at all? She drew in another deep breath of the planet's clean air and felt the warm night wind brush against her face. If this really was it, then with the way she felt right now, maybe it had all been worth it.
She felt a slight twinge of guilt for feeling that way, considering all the people who had died to defend her few moments of peace, and she was sure that guilt would continue to nag at her all her life, but she didn't care anymore. A few moments of peace was something she had desperately needed after leading a life where death could happen at any moment and the crushing weight of never being good enough to save every last person was enough to make you want to curl up and weep.
Although the she loved the escape from that life, if she was being honest, brandon was the real reason she was enjoying this moment. He didn't talk to her like people always seemed to talk to her, like she was an alien, or a lab experiment. Every non Spartan she had ever served with had always referred to her as Spartan, and nothing else. Not her name, not even her rank, and they always seemed content to question her about things like how she got into the program, what was her training like, what battles had she fought in, and a whole host of other things she didn't want to talk about. The Lieutenant was different. He cared about her, not about her military career, and recognized that she wasn't just a sheet of data with armor and a weapon, she was a human being. His questions still brought painful memories, but they were different, almost like he had lived a life similar to her's, and understood what upset her. It was the reason she liked his dopey smile so much and managed to return one of her own, something she hadn't felt compelled to do in a long time.
"Come on, let's head back," said Brandon, much to her disappointment.
Alison nodded and took one last look at the stars before following him back to the hotel. Brandon took note of the action and smiled.
"If I didn't know any better I'd say you enjoyed that."
She nodded, "I guess I just never took the time to look at the stars that way before."
He shrugged, "Most people don't anymore. Sometimes I think it's the war that took away people's curiosity with space. Nobody really wants to know what's out there anymore, most people think whatever it is is probably worse than what we already found. I guess I respect that, but I figure anything that can go wrong for me already has, so whatever's out there can't be any worse, and I intend not to miss out on whatever it is."
Alison smiled, "Here's to not missing what's right in front of us."
He smiled back at her, "Amen."
Location: modified unsc pelican dropship bogof, in orbit around forerunner installation X50, 07:00 hours standard military time, January 7th, 2558
"There is no way in hell this is gonna work," commented Mal as he sat down in the back of the pelican next to Vaz.
The previous day they had been extracted from X50 by Devereaux and brought aboard the Murphy's law just to be informed that while they had been on the planet, admiral Osman had been talking with the ship's huragok and had come up with an even more crazy plan to get Intel out of the URF than posing as deserters. The plan was to follow a URF supply condor into slipspace and dock with it, capturing the crew to interrogate for Intel. She had convinced Adj to instal a cutter into the floor of the pelican that allowed it to cut open and dock with other ships while in slipspace to facilitate the plan.
It all seemed pretty air tight taken at face value, but Mal had never been one to take any plan without at least a little Skepticism. After all, anything that could go wrong, tended to, and by this point he had pretty throughly convinced himself this was the worst idea ever, of all time.
"Suck it up butter cup, you can't chicken out now," yelled Dev as she taxied the pelican out of the hangar and cloaked.
She held her position for a moment and waited for one of the URF's condor's to enter her field of vision. After only a few moments of waiting, one zoomed past and initiated a small slipspace rupture.
Right on time, thought Dev as she gunned the engine to make it through the slipspace rupture without being detected. It was critical that she be in the same section of slipspace as the condor or it would be nearly impossible to navigate the pelican to connect with the condor, and if she missed the small window she had, she wouldn't get another one. The pelican shuddered and its engines wined as it entered the rupture inches behind the condor. Several warning lights went of in the Pelican's cabin, but Devereaux ignored them and opened a com channel to Mal and Vaz.
"You two still with me?"
After a long pause she heard a groan from Mal, "How come every time I fly with you I end up sick."
Dev laughed, "Maybe you should follow the Lieutenant back to the Army, ODSTs are supposed to have sea legs."
That shut him right up.
Dev maneuvered the pelican through the blue void of slipspace and aligned it as best she could with the dorsal side of the enemy condor. The cutter clamped on to the top of the other ship, and sparks began to fly from the circular opening in the Pelican's floor as it sheered a whole through the condor's dorsal section.
Mal and Vaz crouched on opposite sides of the opening, both clutching flash-bang grenades and shotguns loaded with electrified stun rounds.
The rounds contained insulated plastic shells with a capacitor in the center. They attached to their targets with a fast acting adhesive, specifically designed to stick to clothing or flesh, and delivered a 100,000 volt shock to the target, spread out over as much muscle as possible by two additional barbed prongs that fired out of the round shortly after impact. The rounds cost about 100 credits a piece, but they always ensured the target was captured alive.
When the hole was finished being cut, the remaining material of the condor's dorsal section clattered to the deck bellow.
Bullets whizzed through the new opening and ricocheted around the interior of the pelican as the condor's crew attempted to stop the boarding action. Mal and Vaz quickly armed and threw their flash-bangs into the other ship, causing two people to let out screams and fall to the floor.
"Go, go, go," said Vaz, and the two of them dropped into the other craft.
They hit the deck with a loud clang, and Mal spotted the crewman who had let out the scream. It was the pilot. He had been knocked off his feet by the concussive force of the grenade and was slumped against the front bulkhead of the condor.
He reached to pull his pistol but Mal beat him to the draw, putting a round dead center in his chest and shocking him to the point of unconsciousness.
Mal and Vaz scanned the cabin to look for the other crew member of the pelican, and found him slumped over on the floor, appearing to have been knocked out by the force of the fall he had taken. He wore the patch of a UNSC Airforce load master with UNSC colored over in permanent marker, and a name tape that read Collins.
Mal put a shock round into him just to be sure before placing both him and the pilot into restraints and hefting them into Bogof. Once they had secured both the prisoners into their seats Devereaux sealed the cabin and jettisoned the other craft.
"Strap in. I've never done this before," said Devereaux ominously.
"Oh shit, what now?" moaned Vaz.
Dev laughed evilly, "oh yeah, this is the part of the plan I didn't tell you guys about. Because we didn't initiate this slipspace jump we don't know where it was supposed to end, so we have to fall out of slipspace blind. I won't know where we're ending up so if we accidentally come out in the middle of a planet or a star it's not technically my fault."
Both of them were silent for a moment.
"Why do crazy mother fuckers like you always end up in the ODSTs?" Grumbled Mal.
"Remind me to teach you when to stop talking," added Vaz.
The both of them quickly strapped in, and Devereaux powered down the ship's slipspace drive, causing them to abruptly fall back into normal space. The ship shuddered intensely and the deceleration caused Mal and Vaz to lurch wildly in their harnesses.
When the ship finally came to rest Devereaux checked the ship's navigational computer and found they had barely traveled five astronomical units from X50 despite the lengthy amount of time they had been in slipspace.
Slipspace was funny like that. Sometimes it took you a million years to go nowhere and sometimes you we're halfway across the galaxy in the blink of an eye. Devereaux just counted herself lucky she hadn't ended up in the middle of a star.
She left the cockpit to check on Mal and Vaz, and found them with their helmets off, leaning forward in their seats's restraint webbing. Both of them looked like they were going to be sick.
"Solid execute boys, you deserve an ice cream. What do you say we head back Murphy's law and see what these boys know about ONI's favorite unidentified piece of technology?" She asked rhetorically.
"As long as it gets me out of this pelican, I'm ok with it," said Vaz.
Dev sighed loudly, "you two are so ungrateful."