Halo: Cloak and Daggers

By: Natination

Will walked into his office and was allowed himself to be surprised for a few seconds to see a military official sitting at his guest chair across his desk. The official wore the typically marine fatigues of war and was designated a captain.

"Will Turner?" The man said standing up when he noticed Will standing in the doorway. "I'm from Tetra IV, and sent by the brass in this system to resume operations."

"Sir, to be frankly, we have 30 men dead of unknown causes. We have limited intelligence on what attacked them. We have 6 survivors; 4 are gibberish, 1 is in a deep sleep because of exhaustion and only one man who can only tell us what happened by drawing on piece of paper."

"I don't care as long as it isn't covenant." The officer replied sternly.

"It might be a hybrid of some covenant race we haven't met before for all we know!" Will replied.

"Yeah well you have 12 hours to find out what happened to these men before we resume operations on this planet." He said.

"Yes sir." Will gut told him not argue with him anymore, he had been given a time limit and the officer outranked him. He had his orders and the only thing he could say was yes sir. The officer decided it was time for him to leave and started out.

"I didn't catch your name sir." Will said turning towards the back of the officer. The rank of captain was clear on his uniform. He must have gotten promoted somehow. Someone who didn't know any better had anyway.

"Captain Ackerson." He replied. "You have 11 hours and 55 minutes now. Better start working."

"Yes sir." Will said though his gritted teeth; he restrained himself from lunging at Ackerson for doing such a stupid thing with that platoon of men. His gut said that Ackerson had something to do with these men. Ackerson, that would explain a lot about how there was no dog tags on these men.

Will released the breath he was holding and breathed deeply for 10 seconds to release all the stress he had contained within himself in the past 5 minutes. Maybe his subject would have any idea of what happened. He walked down the hallway past a guard post on his way to the visitor quarters. There were 4 guards there with battle rifles and one didn't quite point his battle rifle at him till they identified him. The station was a rough sandbag bunker with bits of concrete to reinforce against grenades. If the Covenant did visit though, it wouldn't last long. Will continued down the hallway past it as his thoughts wandered onto different subjects.

Will got to his subject after a series of turns and twists past numerous barrack's and guard posts. The outpost wasn't as large as the one on Reach. It was nearly 2 miles under the surface and there were three elevators to the surface with 3 vents as escape routes if power was lost. The vents though were a grueling two miles of climbing up ladders. The main evaluator was able to raise three platoons of troops and 6 warthogs or scorpion tanks up to the surface with ease. They had about 120 marines stationed here with 12 warthogs and 4 MBTs. There was also about a dozen or so scientist and a small collection of ONI agents.

Coming back to realty he glanced into the one-way window to see his subject. He noticed that the subject hadn't shaved in a long time and had brown hair. They had tried to look up his DNA but nothing showed up, the files were removed. Damn Ackerson, always screwed up his projects, that's why the Spartans took first place in ONI eyes. Ackerson projects seemed to succeed but also failed at the same time because he failed to factor in things. That is why he always got men killed.

He had a long grey streak of metal located on his elbow somewhat like a metal plate most likely when he broke his arm the docs had implanted it. Grabbing a coat that concealed a voice recorder, Will nodded the guard at the door and he opened.

The man inside looked up then went back to drawing. He had seemed to have done about 3 pictures that had some good detail in terrain. Will pulled out a data pad and brought up a map of where ONI had located the survivors, near the ruins of an old outpost.

"Do you know this place?" Will said pointing at the old base. The man looked at it then nodded. He glanced down to see what he was doing erased a line and redrew it. Will looked at the guy, he probably never get this guy to talk. He activated a voice recorder on his coat pocket just in time when the man looked at him dead in the eyes. Fear and yet confidence in what he was doing was in those eyes. Will felt flickers of fear run down his back and shivered, there was something strange about this man that he couldn't figure out.

"We landed in pelicans about 2 kilos north of the old outpost. Ackerson had told us that an unknown group of residents had taken up inside it. We were to explore the ruins and find out what they were. To see if it was Covenant or some other creature that had managed to survive the fight when we took the planet back. If proved hostile we were to take them out, recover the bodies and bring them back. If otherwise, to escort them back." The man said. "We thought this was a milk run, go in and out, less then a 4 hour op."

"Talk about a milk run gone Fubar." Will said. "Noticed anything different at the beginning?"

"No, we landed fine." The man said. "The weather was fucked up though. Rain so hard that it looked like it was raining upside down."

"Yeah I heard about that, that's pretty interesting." Will said. "I remembered the day it did that here. We had to suspend getting more supplies because the warthogs and their trailers couldn't get though the roads. Tell me more."