I: Sideways
"Objective: Collateral Damage"
Year: 2517
Planet: [REDACTED]
A borderless morning of gold seeped into the thick atmosphere of the world, the selfsame color echoed in both the cloudragged sky and fiery stretch of grain that billowed in the early winds. The purple of the heavens deepened as one looked to the west, the direct line to the stars broken by the rapidly evaporating cirrus that swirled at the furthest stretches of atmosphere.
The willowy grain stalks appeared almost liquid as they flowed with the slightest breath. From certain angles, grain was all the eye could see, appearing as a sea unto itself as it grasped at the horizon, shredding at its edges with its extended spikelets. There were no mountains in the distance to offer any break against the otherwise perfect curvature of the world, as lonely as it was. On this part of the continent, on such a sparse part of the galaxy, any deviation from the stout flatness of the agricultural plain was miles away. Hundreds of miles. Here, in its geographical perfection, was an iconic example of the nondescript of which any other world in the galaxy would have difficulty in replicating.
There was an almost imperceptible shiver from the field as the breaking dawn ushered in the first sign of warmth. A low glimmer of heat muddled the wheat stalks. The warming was beginning, though it would be hours before the whitehot sun would put the field to the truest test of the day.
With the first few rays, the horizon became broken as several dark figures suddenly rose from the fields, standing with the grain now brushing up to their waists. It was almost as if they had clawed themselves up from below the very earth, even though they had been lying in wait this whole time, reacting to an unseen cue.
En masse, the figures, eight in all, began marching in the same direction like dark revenants drawn forth by some notion of the damned. They were armored from head to toe, the familiar trappings of the ODST uniform all making each member appear as if they had been cloned from one another. Their vacuum-rated titanium armor rattled only slightly as they walked, the brushing of the grain stalks sifting out the sounds of their natural movements. Their helmets reflected a blue-gray imitation of a frozen ocean, speared only by the light of the sun as it carved its way through the clouds.
None of their hands were weaponless. Between all of the members, they carried a variety of submachine guns, assault rifles, shotguns, and even a sniper rifle. All equipped with silencers. They handled their weapons with the cold professionalism only garnered through the familiarity of their craft. There was not a single greenhorn amongst the group.
The only other object that now dared to blot itself out upon the featureless plain was the lonely two-story house at the top of what technically constituted a rise, even if the elevation was only a meter higher than the surrounding area. It was made out of the usual prefab materials for quick-start farms, mounted upon a cheap concrete foundation. A stout water tank suspended on supports stood twenty meters away from the homestead. A garage next to the home with an open door revealed the metallic glimmers of a vehicle inside.
The troopers were all heading in the direction of the homestead, proceeding slowly, carefully, that they would approach the building with a methodical logic. Such discipline had served all of them well thus far.
As they grew closer and closer, having now intruded from the grain waves into forests of corn, the ODSTs began lowering themselves back down again, letting the tall and drying stalks mask their approach. Their path brought them to a dirt road that led straight to the house—the two squads stayed in the fields, flanking the pitiful avenue as they brought their weapons up to bear.
"Apache Actual, Saber 2-1," the internal comms of the troopers resounded. The serial number of the squad's commander blipped up in the corner of their helmets, along with a wavelength icon to indicate that they were transmitting. The noise was confined to their helmets—anyone not on the same frequency would not be able to hear them, even if they were standing inches away. "Have concluded approach into grid zone Romeo Delta 61-21-94. Proceeding with immediate incursion. How copy? Over."
"Saber 2-1, Apache Actual," came the rapid response. "Solid copy. Have detected no presence of additional enemy foot-mobiles within a twenty-klick radius. Be advised, continue to watch for Insurrectionist ordinance or masked thermal markers. We'll call out targets as you go. Over."
"Roger that, Apache Actual. We have markers on the occupants of the building already—count: three at this time. They have already been outside the household to perform their delegated tasks. No Insurrectionist profile confirmed. Over."
The squad leader made the universal hand motion to stop in a full crouch when they were only meters from the front gate. The ODSTs complied, the sights of their weapons never straying far from the house.
"Saber 2-1," their superiors in the orbiting frigate miles over head said, "provide full profile on marked individuals for record sweep. Over."
"Apache Actual, have confirmed presence of the following: one count male—bearded, late thirties. Two count female—one early thirties, other below ten. Over."
There was a momentary pause as the information was run through whatever data filters were onboard the ship. "Profiles confirmed, Saber 2-1. Target of interest is the male. Known alias: Shervan. Additional contacts match family members of Shervan. Free fire zone of Romeo Delta 61-21-94 authorized. Your order is to eliminate Shervin by any means necessary. If any residents of the household attempt to interfere, you are cleared to engage. How copy? Over."
If there was any indication of hesitation with the receipt of these orders, it was not apparent in the voice of either speaker.
"Solid copy, Apache Actual. Saber 2-1 out."
A good soldier follows orders.
The hand signal to rise back up was given and the troopers continued to make their way to the front gate, roughly three dozen meters from the front door of the house. However, once they were about to intrude upon the interior premises, the squad leader went back down to the ground.
"Contact. Twelve o'clock. Eyes up."
The rest of the squad complied, all weapons raised.
A young girl, no older than eight, had just come from the open garage door. They had olive skin, shiny black hair, and was dressed in the usual colonist garb of well-worn and stained clothing. They were lugging a bucket that was full of some kind of liquid, judging by the sloshing noises—the squad waited until the girl had pushed open the front door and made it into the house. The soldiers did not even breathe a sigh of relief—they were so well hidden in the corn that no one could possibly notice them unless they wanted to be seen.
"Thermals are showing contacts on both the first and second floors," the squad leader said after letting half a minute go by. "Five and Six, take the garage, sweep for masked entryways. Everyone else, to the front door with me."
Silently, they clambered over the low fence and zig-zagged a stealthy trail through the evenly parked farm equipment and the maze of chicken wire that had been erected to cage a variety of feathered animals. Mud had caked and solidified upon the front and sides of the tractors and vans—signs of their intense usage.
"Innies," one of the troopers rasped over the comm. "Thought we had cleared them all out of this sector."
"Innies are like cockroaches. Turn on the lights and they scatter," another trooper responded to his cohort. "They still have sympathizers on this world. And if there are sympathizers, there are underground cells. Shervan just got sloppy, it seems."
"Think he was the one was behind that mall attack on Vespa II?"
"No, but he probably knew. So, what difference does that make?"
"Maintain radio silence," the squad leader reprimanded in the form of a sharp whisper. They were now approaching the porch of the house. "Eight, Seven, maintain the perimeter. Two, Three, and Four, infiltration duty. Form up."
The windows to the building were drawn, but some of the troopers pointed their guns in the directions of the glassed openings anyway. They then treaded from the dusty ground onto the wooden porch—the beams here were reinforced, so there were hardly any creaks as the weight of the armored men came onto it.
The four ODSTs that were on incursion duty hugged the side of the house, right next to the door, in single-file. They kept their weapons close. From inside, the soft sounds of people ambling about the interior could be heard.
The squad leader made a gesture. "Corporal. Begin breaching procedures."
"Sir." The indicated trooper moved up from the rear of the line, a small packet of plastic explosive withdrawn from one of his thigh pouches. Expertly, he applied the explosive atop the electronic lock to the homestead and stuck a remote detonator no bigger than a tack head into it. Wires trailed from the main globule of C4 into smaller satellites of explosive putty, which ran further up and down the door.
The trooper returned to the line. "Ready," he reported.
"On my mark," the squad leader said. Diodes in his glove flashed red—all he had to do was give the correct haptic gesture and the proper electronic signal would be sent through the air.
He took a glance back at the men lined up behind him. Their armored faces bore no expressions, but their body language was tense, poised, ready. They all gripped their weapons with two hands, readying for what was to come, not even the filtered sounds of their breath able to be heard in the dead quiet.
The squad leader looked back to the door. His pulse was slow and calm, the actions of the next few seconds already played out in his mind.
"Execute," he whispered, and he clenched his glove.
There was a brilliant flash followed by a sharp thunderclap. In a spray of sparks, the homestead door was completely blown off its hinges and propelled into the dirt almost ten meters away. The shockwave from the detonation rippled through the house, the force jolting the ground underfoot for less than half a second.
The ODST squad was already in motion from the moment the breaching charges detonated. They pushed through the opening of the house, the edges of the door pouring smoke. They passed through the threshold like they were entering some ancient portal that led to a hellscape beyond their imagining, but all that was to greet them was the state of a simple farmhouse. The furnishings were threadbare and coated with a layer of dust. Dishes were piled in the sink in the kitchen at the far end. The gas lamps mounted to the ceiling were strobing angrily, appearing almost hallucinogenic.
"Living room, clear," one of the troopers reported as he surveyed the area to their right, which contained a torn couch and a media projector with a cracked lens.
"Hallway, clear," another one said after scanning the passage that led to the garage.
Thick footfalls from the kitchen drew the attention of the squad. Heavy boots on flimsy wood. Noises that sounded like they were retreating, but the squad quickly zeroed in on the fact that the source was now ascending. A staircase.
"Priority contact retreating to second floor," the squad leader radioed, undoubtedly recognizing the source of the disturbance. He made the hand gesture for the three men to form up behind him. "Eight, Seven, watch the upper windows. Five, Six, status of the garage?"
"Garage clear, fireteam leader," the icon for trooper Six winked in the corner of their HUDs.
"Copy that. Proceeding to staircase."
The men slowly tromped forward, their hands never leaving the grips of their weapons. Their VISR software was able to project reticules within the visor of their helmets, allowing them to aim their weapons perfectly without having to peer down the sights all the time. Their silenced barrels seemed to betray a cruel judgment for which they were acting as its harbingers, black and elongated, with an endless maw awaiting to dispense destruction in plumes of metal and flame. The rebreathers in their helmets were now hissing in time with their breaths, the smoke particulates being redirected effortlessly so that they would not inhale the toxic vapors.
As they entered the kitchen, the squad leader trained his barrel to the right. The man behind him trained his to the left. In that moment, there was a blood-curdling scream and a diminutive figure suddenly burst from around the leftmost corner, a flash of steel tightly clasped in a hand.
The closest ODST to the blur instinctively brought his weapon up to block the slashing knife—the blade scraped along the submachine gun with a ragged ribbon of sparks. He was about to bring his gun to bear when he realized that his opponent was not as tall as he was expecting. More surprisingly, they were even younger than he ever could have fathomed.
And they realized that they had seen her already today.
The girl barely made it over any of the ODSTs' waists, but there was a feral ferocity that exploded in her eyes that belied her age. Her dark hair became a whirlwind as she sprang back and forth, slashing without abandon toward the soldiers that had infiltrated her home. The first trooper she attacked was still trying to get his bearings—she whipped her appropriated kitchen knife at him several times with an unbelievable strength. The knife merely scraped across the ODST's titanium armor, only gouging the paint. This series of unsuccessful attacks only seemed to enrage the girl further, and now she was howling like a banshee as she tried to stab at the unarmored portions of the soldiers.
The closest ODST aimed his weapon, having disengaged long enough to get a proper bearing. The girl rushed him next, a war cry let loose from her throat. She shunted her arm forward, but the trooper dipped his rifle down, deflecting the blow and loosing the knife from the girl's hand. The blade clattered upon the wooden floor and shone wickedly up at the combatants.
The girl looked from her fallen weapon and back up to the four troopers. Unwilling to be deterred, she planted her feet and unleashed another savage roar, appearing as a rabid chimera instead of a child.
Not at all impressed, an ODST, the one the girl first attacked, stepped forward and, with the butt of his weapon, slammed it into the side of the girl's head. There was a meaty thwack. The girl gave a grunt, line of blood hurtling through the air from a cut on her head, and toppled through an open doorway, which led to a darkened staircase trailing down to the basement. The girl did not cry out as she rolled down every step, which sounded like it was shaking the house's very foundations as her tiny body slammed down the entire length of the stairwell. In seconds, she was swallowed up by the darkness far below.
The ODST stepped at the top of the staircase and let loose a five-round burst with his submachine gun. Though the weapon was silenced, the concussions from the gunshots sounded like whipcracks. The bullets zoomed off into the deep black, the flashes from the muzzle barely lighting up the unfinished structure several meters below. Brass belled as the spent casings littered the ground at the trooper's feet.
"Christ, this is a madhouse," the trooper panted as he lowered his weapon a hair. "Permission to pursue?"
"Negative," the squad leader shook his head. "She's not the priority target. Ensure the combatant is neutralized and then form back up."
The ODST nodded in the wake of his orders. There was no time for further questions, anyway.
"Yes, sir."
The trooper then unbuckled a grenade from his belt. He pulled the pin and gently rolled it down the steps. The whole squad could hear the sharp clack as the grenade bounced from step to step.
"Fire in the hole," the trooper said after he moved out of the grenade's line of sight back in the kitchen.
There was a thick whumping noise and the entire house seemed to ripple. None of the ODSTs so much as jumped. Dust and thin smoke billowed back up from down below. The trooper, ever the professional, simply returned to the basement door and closed it. For good measure, he also brought over one of the kitchen chairs and moved it underneath the door handle, jamming it from the inside. With his deeds done, he returned to the squad and lined back up, ready to proceed.
"Proceeding to second floor," the squad leader said. "Perimeter check?"
"All clear so far," the icon for Seven winked. "No visual on retreating hostiles."
"Stay frosty," was now his command to the men inside the house. "They've got nowhere to go except through us."
From here, the squad now had a direct line to the staircase that led to the uppermost floor. They had just made it to the lower landing when a roar, not unlike an explosion, caromed from the second story. The squad leader jerked back and a foot-wide hole appeared in the floor where he had been standing. Another report shortly followed and the adjacent window on the bottom floor burst into a hail of crystalline shards.
The squad leader seemed more annoyed than out of breath as he readjusted himself. "Watch your motion trackers. Unless you're keen to get a gut full of buckshot."
The troopers waited for a moment, noting that the upper floor stomped and creaked—their quarry was moving about the place, evidentially, trying to find a good spot to hunker down.
"Advancing," the squad leader murmured tonelessly.
The four-man squad began ascending the staircase, taking care to tread as softly as they could upon the wooden steps, even though their boots caused a fair number of settling pops to reverberate through the house anyway. All of their weapons were trained upon the definite edge that was the corner of the hall, expecting anything to come bursting out from around there at any time. But they made it to the top without being shot at again, and after another short pause, they all rounded the corner to further intrude into the hallway.
Dust-streaked pictures hung at odd angles upon the walls. Pictures of what were presumably the residents, along with the occasional landscape. The ODSTs paid them no mind as they slowly plodded their way down the corridor, the light here growing dimmer.
There was a voice that was warping through the door at the farthest end of the hall. That was where the troopers were heading, though they did take care to perform systematic checks of the rooms they did pass, knocking them off the list, one after the other.
"…knew it was only going to be a matter of time," the automatic transcripts in the helmets of the troopers read out—the patriarch's rantings. "UNSC bastards wouldn't discriminate, they told me. Thought I should come with them. Well, they led me to this. And you want me to lead you to them. No. You hurt my family. There is no walking away from this."
The ODSTs were now lined up on either side of the door, flanking it. Standing silent and statuesque, just listening. Neither of them had the inclination to respond to the accusations being thrown forward. The darkly armored soldiers reflected silent manifestations, the closed entrance warped within the ice-grids that were their visors.
The man behind the door was still talking away. There was a hollow metallic sound that was being fumbled around there, too. The shotgun being reloaded, the ODSTs all recognized.
"I did nothing, you hear?! Nothing! Would you turn away your own brother if he begged you for shelter? You think that makes me an Insurrectionist?! Everyone's going to know what the UNSC did today. Everyone. You kill me, and you will cause something even greater to rise up. I'm warning you!"
The situation was so tense at the moment that, at any other time, the troopers might have laughed or, at the bare minimum, cracked a smile. They had heard it all before. Every excuse under the sun. But they had long ago numbed themselves to the nearly innumerable permutations of justifications that people could come up with in order to buy themselves a few more seconds of freedom. It was almost humorous for the troopers, realizing that their quarry might not have realized that harboring Insurrectionist fugitives typically carried the same stiff penalties that actual Insurrectionists would receive. After enduring the bloody campaigns in the Epsilon Eridanus system, and having to witness the aftermath of the nuclear detonation of the Haven arcology on Mamore, any sympathy the UNSC might have had for the Innies had all gone completely out the window at this point.
This was no longer a war that could be construed as brother against brother anymore. This time, it was the long arm of civilization come to quash the foolhardy breakaways that would rather live in a degenerated state.
Now, as they stood before the door where this suspected Insurrectionist was taking his presumed-to-be-final breaths, the ODSTs gripped their weapons, brimming with a savage fire inside them all.
The hallway had fallen silent. Nothing but the sounds of the house settling.
The squad leader tilted his head in the direction of one of his subordinates. It was time to end this. "Breacher."
A trooper walked forward, reaching for a breaching device in the pouch at his waist. But before he had even taken three steps, a massive hole more than a foot wide suddenly blew out into the hallway, spraying woodchips, and ushering in a thick shaft of sunlight. The explosive roar of the shotgun blasted through the house, thin contrails of cordite grasping their way out of the newly fashioned exit.
Immediately, all of the troopers jumped out of the way—the buckshot had miraculously passed between the squad. With their silenced submachine guns in hand, they all began shooting through the already perforated door, the sounds of their bullets becoming jackhammers in the thin space. They shot deliberately, methodically. Single trigger pulls. The flashes from their muzzles warped animatedly in their visors.
"Cease fire," the squad leader said with a firm wave of the hand. The shell casings continued to clatter and warble as they settled on the ground, while the smoking weapons bled faint waves of blistering heat.
The ODSTs continued to aim at the door, the sustained silence almost manifesting its own mass.
Two seconds later, there was a scream. A woman's.
"Go, go," the squad leader said. The closest ODST reared a boot and, with a well-placed kick, burst through the tattered entryway in a storm of splinters, closely followed by his cohorts in a tight single-file line.
Without knowing it, they had all encroached into a hive of pure damnation. The man was lying upon his back, next to a bed, his hands tightly clasped to his throat. Blood was bubbling through his fingers in a steady rhythm, his frantic eyes rolling upwards to reveal the already broken capillaries. He was gagging, ejecting a mucus so dark it appeared almost black. A significant mirror of blood had already spread beneath his back.
But he had not been the source of the noise the ODSTs had heard earlier. A woman, presumably the man's wife, was sitting upon her knees, wailing hysterically and without definition. She had been shot in the leg, but she did not seem to notice the wound, instead pouring all of her anguish into her raw and throaty howls as she cradled a lifeless body in her arms. A body half her size.
The boy was probably no more than five years old. He was staring up at the ceiling, nestled in his mother's lap, with eyes that could have been made from glass. A perfectly symmetrical red hole had been marked upon his forehead. He looked almost peaceful, perhaps his final wonder of what was upsetting his mother so much, though everyone in the room knew the end had been swift and painless.
The ODSTs took all of a few seconds to absorb this sight. The squad leader pointed to the man, who was in the process of bleeding out. "Execute."
Two troopers roughly marched by the woman and plugged four bullets into the dying man's chest, execution-style. The man jerked twice and then fell still.
Now the woman was shrieking louder, though with her wounded leg and the fact that she was pinned by the body of her dead child, all she could do was scream.
The troopers looked to the woman, then turned to the squad leader, waiting for orders.
They only got a mirrored shake of the head. "No witnesses. Her, too."
The woman's scream broke off with a throaty sob. The tears on her face seemed to dry instantly. Perhaps the horror of the moment had vanished like the dew in the light of the approaching dawn. Or maybe she found some serenity in the thought that her nightmare had a definite end, one that was mere seconds away.
Despite this, she still retained that human characteristic of continuing to fight until the end, even at the edge of desperation. With an adrenalized burst, the woman rose to her feet, fingers outstretched like claws, mouth open in a frantic wail. She hurled herself against the nearest trooper, fighting with them for their weapon. The ODST grunted, trying to regain control, but the woman had been seized with a strength that had temporarily gone beyond her, some faint understanding locked behind her eyes, demanding the fate that she had perhaps always been destined for.
And it would soon be granted.
The squad leader would take no chances. As soon as he saw the woman engage with one of his men, he had already began withdrawing his nickel-plated sidearm from his holster. He levelled his pistol, his arm extended. The woman never noticed the trooper coming up to her side, not even when the barrel of the pistol was pressed into the side of her head, and not when it fired and she fell to the ground, her thoughts uncoupling from her shattered skull as what remained of her frosted the broken remains of the window far beyond. And when the entirety of the room shrank into a rectangle of light in her blood-swollen eyes, becoming smaller and smaller than a pinprick, an atom, did she finally realize she had been unburdened at last.
A crimson mist still clung to the air, mingling with the dust and smoke. The ODSTs now stood alone in the overturned room, which was already beginning to stink with death.
They all regrouped outside, next to the porch, into the already broken dawn.
"Do a mag check," the squad leader told his encircled troops. "LZ to the dropship's three miles away. We need to be in the nearest treeline by the time the homestead is noticed."
"Sir," trooper Three spoke up, "what about the girl? She may still be alive."
The other ODSTs, the ones not having been inside the house, listened intently.
"Make sure she isn't," the squad leader just said.
Five minutes later, four of the ODSTs encircled the house, stationed at the four quadrants like points on a compass. When a radioed order hit their receivers, they all moved in one fluid motion.
From their belts, the ODSTs each took out an incendiary grenade and removed the fuse with a well-practiced flick of the thumb. Then, four grenades sailed through the air and burst their way through the open windows of the farmhouse—moments later, the thermite in the grenades instantly converted to molten iron at 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit. In less than a minute, flames were already springing through the shattered openings of the home, savage orange tinged with a white like pure phosphorous.
The ODSTs had made it half a mile from the house by the time it was fully engulfed. It burned in the distance, creating a pillar of smoke, a flame made dual with the overhead sun like they were locked upon some nameless competition. Scattered sparks shed downwind, igniting the dried crops that crackled and burst, eager to receive the cleansing the flames promised.
Very soon, the fields were devoid of the intruders, as if the deadly soldiers had only been figments of the land's imagination. The unbroken horizon of grain continued to stretch on beyond sight in one direction, the permanence of the terrain proving to endure all that had come and all that would ever be.
The house remained alight, an unrecognizable forge becoming skeletal in the roasting day. As the smoke climbed higher and higher, the sun became a burnt disc, sheathed by blackened veins so thick that even it seemed that it had been scorched from the horrors that had defined the shattering of the twilight.
Later that day…
The homestead had become nothing more than a pile of smoldering supports, surrounded by a field of which half was still charred and smoking. The Pelican that was touching down within the inside fence seemed almost impassive to the destruction that had taken place here. Cool blue jets from its wing-mounted engines flared downward, throwing up waves of dust and ash in continuous streams. It then settled upon the ground with a heavy thud, the ramp at the rear of the craft swiftly opening to eject its passengers.
Three armored soldiers with assault rifles marched out, the ONI icon barely embossed upon their chestplates. A light-skinned man with a regulation haircut—shaved—followed them out. He bore no rank, just the shield insignia of an eagle cupping a five-pointed-stair upon his shoulders. The man walked past the ONI troopers, surveying the carnage.
He stood with his hands folded behind his back, the smell of a woodfire practically embedded into his nose. He looked upon what had been a standing structure just earlier this day, now reduced to a pile of rubble and glowing embers. Dusk was now falling, with the three moons of the world looking cold and pale in the darkening sky.
The man turned to the ONI troopers. "Fan out. Search the area."
He then took a few steps back towards the Pelican as the troopers gradually spread apart as they headed towards the burned-out husk of the house. He angled his wrist and adjusted his TACPAD, keying into the provided SATCOM channel for his use. From above, there was a small frigate recording every word he said—he would need a detailed record if he was going to report back to his superiors with this kind of news.
"Demetrius," he spoke.
The frigate's AI was in his ear immediately. "At your service, lieutenant."
"Log the results of site Alpha Two India. It may appear we have lost the candidate."
"Ah, an unfortunate circumstance." The AI actually sounded sincere. "Doctor Halsey will be beside herself with this loss."
The lieutenant looked back to the house. He could only see two of the troopers now, one of which was clambering in and around the fallen and cracked beams, which had been burned so bad they were as fragile as glass.
"Did we have any drones in the area with timelapse footage?"
"Negative. Coverage of the area remains intermittent. Last usable footage was taken thirty-three point four hours ago."
A pity. If there had been any overhead drones, they might have been able to shed some light on why their target homestead was now a pile of smoking rubble.
"Run a datamine program," he said after a thought came to him. "Search for historical data of any UNSC geopositoning tags in this sector in the last three solar days."
"One moment. Scanning," the AI said.
Turned out the lieutenant did not need to wait very long. Demetrius came back to his earpiece in seconds.
"Match confirmed. Geotags place eight UNSC-affiliated position tags in this sector at eleven point three hours ago. Additional tags for armor components and ident-matching weaponry were also detected during this same timeframe."
The lieutenant's boots now crunched in the blackened grass. He bent down and picked some of the withered stalks. They turned to obsidian dust in his hands.
"Damn," he said.
It was not the first incident he had heard of where the UNSC had unknowingly entered into a competition with itself. ONI, being the UNSC's intelligence bureau, typically won most of the bouts, intentional or not. They had the natural urge to be selective with the sort of information they chose to dispense to the other service branches, for what good was intelligence if it could be disseminated to everyone? They had the tendency to butt heads with the Armed Forces most of the time—the rivalry between the branches was well known. ONI felt that the Armed Forces were a cadre of ill-disciplined short-timers. The Armed Forces saw ONI as a legion of spooks and kingdom builders who made every excuse to bend protocol as they saw fit.
But this, the lieutenant figured as he watched the last pathetic trickles of smoke wisp and sputter in the air in unstable spirals, just seemed to be a settling of the accounts that had always been tipped in ONI's favor. He wanted to be furious with the Armed Forces, to be able to get onto a wide comm channel and verbally ream the incompetent commander who had taken credit for the debacle he was now a witness to. But, in the cold logic of his brain, he knew that was never going to take place. The Armed Forces would never have suspected that ONI held an interest in this place at all, and if ONI had told them before, what good would that have done? That would only have drawn forward suspicion into ONI's activities, at the worst time when all of the facets of ONI's tradecraft needed to be running at 110% in order to pull off their most insidious deception: to kickstart the most important black box project of the modern age. The risks had been deemed acceptable; the selective blindness considered a necessity.
Perhaps the unfortunate truth was that there had always been a certain inevitability to these risks, with the heavy price only beginning to reveal itself today.
Just then, his comm blinked on his TACPAD. The lieutenant looked up. One of his men was waving to him over by the wreckage of the house.
"What is it?"
"Motion tracker. Receiving a steady ping."
The lieutenant rushed over, where another of the ONI troopers was digging out debris with his hands, pushing aside roasted boards and curled pieces of metal beams that had softened from the flames. A few blackened trinkets were carelessly tossed aside, the last reminders of the people who had once lived here.
The trooper that was digging gave a grunt, and a long section of what used to be wood flooring was lifted aside. What had been underneath, nestled in a shallow ditch in the ground, looked like a bundle wrapped in tin foil. And it was faintly stirring.
With a ragged pant, the trooper straightened. "She used a fireproof blanket to stay alive."
"Check the subject," the lieutenant pointed, his heart in his throat. Perhaps disaster would not completely befall this day. Maybe not at all.
Gently, the trooper knelt down and began to pry away the tightly wrapped ceramic fiber blanket. Now, the squad could hear soft whimpers emanate from the thing that had been so swaddled within it. In short order, a small face was revealed, along with a swath of reddened skin like an intense rash had sprung up, as deep as a port wine stain. Blisters freckled the brow of the girl, white and trembling. How she was not screaming in agony had to be a testament to her strength, the lieutenant reasoned. No wonder Halsey had selected her.
"She has second-degree burns on her hands, legs, and face," the trooper said, accepting a med pack that a fellow ONI agent handed him. "Some deep extension into the dermis, but nothing permanent. She'll survive."
The lieutenant was seasoned enough to not let his relief show. All he managed was a solemn nod.
"Patch her up and get her onto the ship."
It was almost dark by the time the squad headed back to the Pelican. One of the ONI troopers was gently carrying the girl, who was in a hazy state of lucidity after receiving a strong drug cocktail for the pain. Half her face was bandaged, but with the state-of-the-art medical technology on board the frigate that they would soon be docking with, the girl might not even walk away with a scar before they even arrived at Reach.
The squad ascended the small ramp and entered the Pelican. The girl was slowly set down lengthwise upon one of the benches. Two ONI troopers proceeded to secure her in place for the voyage ahead.
On the opposite bench, the lieutenant approached another object, the same size as the girl they had just retrieved, that was covered by a slick medical sheet. A monitoring device that hung from a fashioned coat hanger above it silently beeped electrical activity—electrode wiring spiraled downward from the small gadget, slipping underneath the sheet and out of sight. Without fanfare, he reached out and lifted the covering off the object partway to reveal a sleeping girl, one that was the exact same size, exact same age, and identical shape of the girl that the squad had just brought on board the ship.
One of the troopers came up behind the lieutenant, looking at the girl donned in the white sterile gown, their new passenger in a deep sleep at his back. "What are we going to do with it?"
The lieutenant slowly glanced to his subordinate, like the answer was obvious and he was an idiot for asking such a question.
"There were no survivors here, right?" he spoke lowly, keeping his voice level to morph the question into a statement. He then lifted his chin towards the opening in the Pelican, nodding back out to the still-smoldering house. "Liquidate it."
A less disciplined soldier would have blanched at the order. And perhaps the notion to do just that radiated within the ONI trooper. But it was for an undetectable moment, as the trooper just gave a nod of his helmeted head, before he bent down to lift up the unconscious girl who carried a name that was never hers and would soon carry no name after this night.
The lieutenant watched two of his troopers go back to the house, one of which was carrying the girl, the other who was holding a small bottle of kerosene. He stepped outside, back into the parched grass, and listened to the increasing whine of the Pelican's engines behind him while he waited. He stood in the midst of the approaching night, the wind cool on his face, and a grave taste infiltrating his tongue. He watched as a fresh glow in the middle of the house far away began to warm, the fire looking like a distant coal amidst the shattered remnants of this civilized puncture within the field. From such a ways away, he could imagine the flames sawing amidst a kerosene shower, the embers deepening and sparking amidst a terrible roasting and crackling. He could almost imagine the object at the core of the fire, crisping and curling, the sight of which would have made men with the toughest constitutions feel sick with the purest horror they could ever feel.
But when the flames would eventually die down, the fuel expended, the flesh and muscle having burned away to reveal the blackened bones surrounded by the grave of the husked-out house, the lie that remained would be so perfect that to imagine any other narrative would be an exercise in uselessness.
In some respects, the ignorance of the truth would be a mercy for the ones that would find this place and the four bodies dispersed throughout the rubble. For it would be hard to believe that the lie was far less terrible, when compared to the truth.
A/N: For the longest time, I've always wanted to do a Halo story. I kept on putting it off for a couple of reasons, mostly because I had other projects that I also wanted to work on first... and also because I never had an idea until now. In some cases, this is an experiment for me, because it's been quite a while since I've written a story for a franchise other than Mass Effect (for the people popping in from over there, it's good to see you again).
To give you guys a sense as to what I intend for Rabbit Zero-Eight-Seven to be, I suppose the best way of putting it is that I envision as a character piece - a vehicle for the character of Kelly (my favorite Spartan aside from the obvious choice). It's going to be a story that adds some new dimensionality to her character that the books and games have not had the opportunity to do before. That doesn't mean I'm going to be making Kelly OOC in this story - on the contrary, I plan on sticking very closely to the template that the early Halo novels had outlined, it's just that I'm providing myself a little wiggle room to make Kelly more approachable as an MC. And, for those expecting a shipping fic, sorry to say that you're out of luck. Rabbit Zero-Eight-Seven is going to be taking a very serious tone throughout its entirety - besides, if you're looking for something like that, you're more than likely already spoiled for choice on this website. Of course, this opening chapter should have been an indication of that, but one never knows...
Updates to this story will come when they're ready. I can't promise a regular schedule but I can say that I have not abandoned a story thus far. It won't be long as my last few stories, so I'm hopeful that this gets finished in a reasonable time frame. Hopefully, you guys get some entertainment out of it.
And like in all my stories, I like to provide a playlist at the end of each chapter. Music is pretty much my main vehicle for stirring my imagination and I like to match pieces of music to enhance the mood of certain scenes. The pairing of text and music pretty much acts as the best version of the story as I intended it to be.
Playlist:
ODSTs Approach / Breach
"Eye for an Eye"
Mac Quayle
The Last of Us: Part II (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
ONI / Clone Burn
"A Fatal Tragedy"
James Horner
Southpaw (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)