The Right Place and Time
"We don't know what they're capable of. Stick with the by-the-book drills and we'll never find out, either. But put them in an impossible situation, and maybe they'll surprise us."
"Short definition of a Spartan."
—Lt. Kurt Ambrose and SCPO Franklin Mendez
Word Count: 4538
[LOCAL TIME\DATE UNAVAILABLE] 2153 HOURS, JUNE 23, 2554, (MILITARY CALENDAR)\ [ERROR: LOCATION UNKNOWN]\ SPARTAN-B292 Mission Clock +14:53:42
The earth baked beneath the might of the midday sun; no relief came from the sickly green sky save the occasional grit-filled breeze. Of course, not much stirred upon the ruined ground to complain. . .
Well, not much other than Lucy and himself. The two sat in meager shade at the northern base of a small hill; a road, the asphalt cracked and crumbling, curved around it on its own north-south run. A car, heavily rusted but not enough to disguise the bullet holes perforating the driver's side, sat on the hill's western face.
With no solid leads on where to go after several hours of wandering, they opted to halt and make a more thorough effort at finding an active frequency without draining more of their SPI armors' batteries than absolutely necessary. The suits were meant for extended operations, but that usually meant months at the most, not years. . . and on a world with no discernible UNSC presence, being found in years was optimistic.
He cast a glance at Lucy. She balled both hands into fists with her thumbs pointing away from each other, brought them together, then back apart, palms up. Anything?
He shook his head. Most frequencies were silent. Static garbled one beyond identifying, while another was a looping beacon with no discernible purpose. They'd covered enough ground for their armors' to attempt to triangulate the sources of both, and if they found nothing better, they'd investigate the nearer one.
A dozen more frequencies were broadcasting "Enclave Radio" from mobile transmitters. What they'd heard from it was long on platitudes and propaganda, short on facts, and even shorter on context for those facts. Several of President John Henry Eden's speeches did, however, have similarities to how the Office of Naval Intelligence talked about political dissidents. They weren't inclined to try to seek out the Enclave just yet.
He almost suggested that they resume walking when he heard the faint hum of a jet engine. Lucy heard it too, and was already fading from view as the optical camouflage came back online. She ducked behind a rock outcropping as he bolted to the ancient car. Tom searched the sky for the aircraft, only to find—
Nothing? He frowned, the Visual Intelligence System, Reconnaissance (VISR) wasn't picking out anything either. Stealth aircraft seemed even more dubious, so he switched to watching the ground for a hovercraft.
There! A drone advanced along the road from the south—a spherical central body, olive drab paint faded and flaking, with a trio of bulbous sensors on articulating stalks sat atop a rocket-based propulsion system while three segmented limbs were attached where chassis and thrusters met. He doubted "flying octopus" was the image the designers had meant to evoke, but it was the first that came to him.
He blinked his acknowledgement lights, two red & one amber—unknown detected south—and received two red, one green from Lucy; another contact from the north. He turned to identify it, and blinked in bewilderment.
Scuttling not quite towards them was a blue-gray scorpion the size of a small car. The main body didn't come up to his waist, but the poison gland with its half-meter-long barb towered over him and the pincers were broader than he was at the shoulders. If either of them were afraid of bugs, he would've had to entertain the possibility that they'd died and gone to Hell.
The creature halted, having finally noticed the robot, and shuffled to face it head on. Tom looked back to the machine, which had likewise stopped to assess the wildlife.
"Is that someone who needs me to kick their ass?" it barked in a passable impersonation of a drill instructor.
Maybe it was intelligent, perhaps just territorial, but the scorpion responded with a low, warbling hiss and charged.
"You just made my day," the machine shouted as it's arms rotated around the central chassis to switch a basic pincer manipulator for one with the end glowing an actinic green. "Opening fire!"
The projectile it fired wasn't as fast or focused as he was used to seeing, but when it struck the scorpion's carapace, it burned through it and into the flesh beneath like any other plasma weapon.
The scorpion shrieked in pain and staggered momentarily before surging on with a speed borne of desperation. It took three more hits as it closed, two legs gone and it's right claw burned to a useless stump. It tried to grab the machine with its other claw, but its opponent maneuvered clear, arms rotating again. The scorpion lashed out wildly with its stinger and managed to barely drive the robot back as the next weapon settled into place.
This one was a flamethrower. "Is that the best you can do?" the robot mocked as flames engulfed the creature.
The scorpion shrieked again, now in primal terror, and frantically backpedaled before scrambling away in a blind panic.
The robot tracked it as the plasma gun was brought around again. "Running will only make the pain last longer!" it called out as it continued firing.
A ball of plasma burned through the tail halfway up and the creature faltered. It managed several unsteady steps before it took two more shots and collapsed in a feebly twitching heap. The robot put two more blasts into it and it stilled.
The robot hovered over to inspect its kill—"That's how we do things in the U.S. Army!" it declared. "Hoo-ah!" Or gloat, I guess.
"Move it out people. I want this place searched top to bottom." it said as it floated off, arms rotating to bring the manipulator front and center again. It didn't hold to a straight line—instead it arced out in an outward spiral search pattern.
I guess it's time for a calculated risk, Tom thought as he watched. He flashed Lucy a pair of amber lights—wait—and left cover uncloaked, carbine mag-locked at his hip. He interrupted the search when the robot was positioned where Lucy would have a clear line of fire on it.
"Step forward and identify yourself!" it barked.
"Sierra-B292, of the UNSCDF," he supplied. They didn't exactly have a cover identity to feed it.
"You had better remove yourself from this area before I am forced to declare you an enemy of the U.S. of A!" it said with no indication that it had heard him or cared if it did.
"Understood." he said as he turned away. It had been worth a shot.
"Looks like this is my lucky day!" it said.
Lucy's green light started flickering.
Tom dropped to the ground as a staccato bark split the air. From the corner of his eye, he caught a flash of glowing green sailing off into the distance. He drew the carbine as he rolled into a proper firing position.
The machine pinwheeled through the air, sparks leaking from new gashes in the main body. Tom snapped off a two-round burst before it could recover, destroying one of the sensors in the process. The central chassis deformed some more, but the robot stayed in the air.
Lucy put a burst directly into the thruster assembly. With a bout of flame and a scream of tortured metal, the apparatus exploded and the machine crashed limply to the ground.
Tom stood and cautiously approached the wreck, MA5K at the ready. Between his own augmented vision and his MK. III SPI's VISR, he could just barely observe his longtime partner making for the giant scorpion's severed stinger. It might be worth some supplies when they found whatever passed for civilization here—wherever here was. Otherwise, they both knew several quick-and-dirty anti-venom recipes if they had to risk it.
Kneeling down to inspect the machine's weapons, he idly wondered if its owners would react poorly to its destruction. Assuming they still existed and it wasn't just an automated system rotely executing its last orders or the onboard AI deteriorating under Rampancy or something like it.
The flamethrower's small fuel tank detached easily enough and Tom stood again, slipping it into one of the armor's pouches. He ignored the energy weapon and the main body. Curious as they both were about the compact plasma gun, he wasn't confident enough in his mechanical skills to attempt disassembling it without it having even odds of exploding in his hands. Plasma weapons were still essentially black box tech to the best minds in the UNSC and the robot probably used a microfusion reactor, which the two of them had never worked on. The ones in Pelicans and Scorpions, yes, but those were far larger and well known for being less temperamental.
He turned to Lucy—now identifiable by the large venom sac seemingly floating amidst a distortion in the air—and noted the tilt of her head. Most people, in his experience, were terrible at consciously interpreting all but the most obvious body language, and many of those who could would have had difficulty with someone who was nearly invisible, but they had known one another for most of their lives and she had been unable to speak for the majority of that time. Every movement she made was deliberate, adding a depth and context to every exchange in Sign or Beta Company's own private code that only he was privy to; he tried to return the favor, but she was better by far. He cast his gaze to the northwest, following her own, and increased the magnification on his HUD.
Thin, gray tendrils snaking into the sky. Smoke. Fire. Possibly people, and not far off—five kilometers, max.
He didn't say anything, didn't need to. Twenty seconds later, they had gathered the rest of their supplies and set off.
[LOCAL TIME\DATE UNAVAILABLE] 2227 HOURS, JUNE 23, 2554, (MILITARY CALENDAR)\ [ERROR: LOCATION UNKNOWN]\ SPARTAN-B091 Mission Clock +15:27:45
They reached the source of the smoke after half an hour. At a dead run it would have taken less than ten minutes, but they deactivated their camo systems to conserve power and covered the ground with due diligence.
Before nuclear Armageddon made a visit, the collection of identical, single story houses had probably been a suburb inhabited by workers who commuted to the ruined city in the southeast. Now, most of the buildings were gone, the only reminders of their existence the concrete foundations and the occasional blackened frame. Many of the survivors had been boarded up—whoever lived here having decided that exposure to the elements was safer—and then cannibalized to erect a ramshackle wall around and in between the houses at the subdivision's heart.
In Lucy's professional opinion—formed before they had gotten close enough to see the bullet holes—and in reality, said wall offered concealment at best, not cover. The patchwork affair of plywood, rusting sheet metal, and floorboards lashed together with a mixture of barbed wire and power lines stood taller than Tom and, from inspection of the irregular—too few and too random to be murder holes—gaps in the construction, had no means of allowing normally sized humans to easily fire down on attackers.
Unless the inhabitants were the size of Brutes, they had made a cage for themselves, not a fortress.
They had yet to observe any sentries either, as they crept around the unattached homes after stashing their heavy weapons and the duffel bag in the shadows of what passed for a back porch. Lucy knew she wasn't the best at judging how civilians would allocate limited personnel, but if any group she had fought alongside, or against, couldn't post a lookout, then they were either all dead or in the midst of a complete organizational collapse. And there were people here: her VISR's thermals had tagged a column of warmer air rising from the middle of the settlement—too small to be what she had seen earlier, that had to have been the scorched house up ahead that was still much hotter than its surroundings—while she could faintly hear what she thought sounded like digging.
That assessment was formed, considered, and filed to the back of her mind in the time it took to dash across the ground that separated one townhouse from its neighbor. She reached cover and halted as the armor's camo system deactivated, years of experience allowing her to shift the abrupt stop into a smooth pivot facing the settlement. She kneeled, MA5K in hand, but safetied and pointed at the ground, and upped the HUD's magnification. Jagged chunks of metal and sharpened wooden posts faced the world at large before a sandbag wall, the attempt at an Abatis undermined by the burnt, propped up hulk of a car towering over it and blocking any possible line of fire. The windows of the house it ran up to had been boarded over. Finally, some respectable defenses, though overdone compared to the rest. Must have run out of materials after the main gate.
She flashed Tom three green lights and pointed to the sandbag line, then drew her arm back and clenched her fist. He raised his free hand in acknowledgement, engaged his cloak, and moved out. While she waited, Lucy withdrew her fiber optic probe from the hardcase over her heart and readied it.
Ten seconds later he reappeared, pressed up against the front of the house on the other side of the road, and waved her over. She vanished into thin air and darted past him before halting, crouched, at the apex of the sandbags. We, a small, detached voice in the back of her mind mused, had a vastly different version of leapfrogging from what regular children grew up with. She ignored it.
Noting the pile of dry-rotted tires immediately in front of her, that the sandbags across from her could actually be used as a firing position, and the posts to a rope bridge between the two, she ran the line over her cover. A screen opened in the upper left corner of her HUD, black and empty for a heartbeat before images began to come through. Tom would see the same.
A rope bridge, as expected, and the water it crossed—too murky for her to tell how deep, but a major hassle to cross under fire if there was more debris in it than the half-submerged car. On the other side of the bridge sat another Abatis-and-sandbag emplacement, though neither extended far enough to prevent an attacker from taking cover against the concrete walls of the adjacent house's back porch.
And a person, the first they'd seen since the teleporter, sitting miserably behind those sandbags. Some model of SWAT helmet protected the tanned, haggard face of a man who couldn't have been much older than Tom or herself. A thick black jacket—workable, but not ideal attire for the region's climate—with extra padding strapped over his shoulders, and a battered rifle held like a lifeline rounded out what she could see of him. A sentry then; was his limited line of sight a sign that most threats came from the north, that the locals couldn't risk a more elevated position, or both?
Lucy saw little in the courtyard, save that the two buildings she had an angle on from her position had had their porches reinforced with scrap to become better fallback positions.
Lucy flashed the green status light three times as she reappeared and holstered her carbine. Noting the single green blink of Tom's status light and his approach on her motion tracker, she whistled the six note, six beat tune Kurt had taught them all. Redundant to her companion and functionally meaningless to outsiders, it nonetheless served to get the sentry's attention. Through the probe she saw him bolt up—jacket's missing its left sleeve, she observed absently—and shoulder his rifle properly, though shakily. Whether from nervousness, burnout, or lack of confidence she couldn't be sure.
"H-hey! Who are you?" he demanded, voice cracking and rifle jerking about, less a deliberate search pattern than the spastic twitching of prey looking for a predator. "Show yourself!"
"Relax, I'm not here to cause trouble," Tom replied. He placed his carbine on his back rather than his hip or over his shoulder to appear less threatening—well, as "less threatening" as a two-meter-tall, post-human-cyborg death commando in heavy armor could be—and taken on the calm, authoritative tone Kurt often used on the Gammas, and Beta Company before them, when someone was about to have a panic attack in training.
". . . Right. What do you want?" the guard asked and lowered his gun, facade of bravado vanishing. She could hear it in his voice that he didn't trust them, but that was just good sense and she would have been more concerned if he did.
"Supplies. Information. We're new to the area; want some firsthand knowledge, before we find out the hard way."
"There's nothing here," the stranger said forlornly, melodramatically, more to himself than Tom, "but the stench of death, and the threat of attack looming over every sunset. You're better off scavenging the dead out in the wastes or continuing on to Megaton." He pointed behind himself, more south than east.
He's trying to warn us away, but what he's obtained is our undivided attention, Lucy thought.
Strictly speaking, they shouldn't involve themselves in the problems of a dying subsistence community and should instead try to either return to the UNSC—not possible now, if ever—or find a wider-reaching authority to ally with. Of course, with no map of the area and only the vaguest of knowledge about local factions and hazards courtesy of the pretentious Enclave Radio, the latter path was a shot in the dark. Pragmatically, helping these people would hopefully make them more pliable to sharing that, and other, information with the two of them. Personally, if they didn't use their skills and augmentations to try and keep others from suffering as they had, then what would have been the point of all the trauma they'd endured and awful things they'd done?
And if the locals decided they'd rather pay the two of them with a knife in the back. . . they'd be dealt with summarily.
Tom folded his arms behind his back and she knew he was watching the man intently. "What kind of threats?" And like that it was gone, back to the aloof, professional bearing that characterized most interaction between SPARTANs and those they did not know.
He swallowed, and was silent for a moment. "There was a Super Mutant attack last night—they killed some of our friends and carried off some more—and where there's one big ugly, there are ten more just waiting to grab you by the throat. They always come from the north; Hatchet thought they were set up in the old police station." He paused. "Then the slavers will come and pick over your carcass and drag any survivors to Paradise Falls—it's to the north or northwest, we think, and near enough for them to risk the Muties. The best we've ever been able to hope for is that they attack at the same time and kill each other."
Lucy idly looked up at the sun blazing away in the sky. It seemed to be between 1500 and 1600 hours in the planet's estimated twenty-four hour day. If she or Tom had orchestrated a night raid, they would've aimed for between 0100 and 0300 hours when everyone would have been at their lowest ebb. A possible fifteen-hour lead was bad news for a purely on foot pursuit, especially if the withdrawing force wasn't being hindered by its prisoners.
Beneath her helmet, Lucy frowned at the new name; she had never heard of anything, Covenant or otherwise, referred to as "Super Mutants." Never seen a car-sized scorpion before, either, but it happened. Right, she thought, new world, new enemies, hopefully the same rules. They had a place to start looking, at least.
Slavers were both more and potentially less straightforward. More, because slavers were considered hostis humani generis; UEG laws and UNSC regulations (an irony that wasn't lost on them) called for an arrest and trial, but due to the War, the latter considered in-the-field summary executions perfectly acceptable. Less, because a large-scale hostage situation was part and parcel. They'd probably need support if they tried to tackle something like that.
"Alright," Tom said coolly, "we'll help however we can. Who's in charge here?"
He blinked. ". . . We?"
Lucy stood and waved.
He paled, briefly, before shaking his head and recovering. "Flash walks around town with his gun, trying to watch out for Mutants. He should watch the horizon more, then he'd see them. Red, the doctor, was the one to really go to. Too bad the Mutants took her in the last attack. Another victim to add to their list." He sighed. "Come in. Just . . . don't cause any trouble, okay?"
Tom nodded. "Thanks. We'll leave you to your duties . . ." he trailed off, expectant.
"Huh? Oh . . . uh, Dusty. My name is Dusty." he sputtered, but didn't ask for theirs—probably wasn't expecting to see them again. The boards creaked ominously under their weight as they crossed the bridge, but held. She gave him a slight nod on passing.
The reduced distance did a little to improve appearances—the buildings to her left had been similarly reinforced like their opposites—and the scrape-fwump of shovels was clos—ah.
Bodies, three, shrouded in blankets so covered in dirt and dried bloodstains it was impossible to tell where their wounds began or ended. Three more still living toiled at shallow graves—and for a moment, she was back in Onyx mourning the ones who hadn't made it that far. One, a black woman with her hair tied back in a messy bun and wearing an outfit similar to Dusty's. The second, a man slightly darker skinned than Tom, clad in rags, and short hair damp and clinging to his forehead with sweat. The last, a dirty blond boy in a grungy, oft-patched shirt and coveralls with a lovingly polished revolver at his hip. None looked as old as Dusty.
"We're going to try to rescue your friends," Tom announced without preamble. "What do you know about the Super Mutants?"
All three came to a dead stop at that particular bombshell and looked up at the two of them. Such a novel experience, Lucy thought, if only it were under better circumstances. The older-looking of the men watched them with naked suspicion, while the woman looked on the verge of tears—whether of joy at their timely arrival or from having to bury her friends, Lucy didn't try to guess. The blond just appeared dumbstruck.
The blond—Flash, she assumed, as he was the only one with a gun—recovered and looked them over incredulously for a few seconds before speaking. "What . . . you've never seen a Super Mutant before? They're big—"
"Bigger than you." Rags cut in dourly, pointing at her partner.
"—and ugly and scary as hell!" Flash continued, as though never interrupted. "They came and rounded up a bunch of us and carried them off! God, they must be doing awful things to them."
"Do you mean it? Can you do it? Are you sure you can find them? And rescue them?" Leathers blurted out, then frowned. "We don't have much to offer as payment . . ."
"Once someone tells us what we're getting into, we'll do all that we can," Tom replied.
Rags snorted. "You've decided to rescue our friends? Unlikely. You two probably just figured out a way to take advantage of the situation." The man fumed. "Well, if you feel like dying, go right on ahead. If they're not in the ruined church at Hallowed Moors, or the trainyard, the next place would be that police station up near Germantown. No one here knows where they go after that."
Tom nodded. "Where, exactly, are these places?"
Rags looked at them in surprise, as though just realizing they were serious, before Leathers interjected. "Nearby! You can see both from the top of the hill . . . if you have binoculars. The trainyard first, to the northeast, then the church is northwest. The police station's farther away and hidden by the ruins, though. About . . . ten miles? I think."
"Hatchet," Rags picked back up, "could have told you more, but . . ." he cast a weary glance at the covered bodies, "everyone's luck runs out sooner or later. Won't be long before we all end up like Timebomb: dying on a table in Red's clinic." He jerked his head towards the house on the settlement's far side.
Flash made a valiant effort at putting on a brave face and a show against the somber air. "I'd go rescue them myself, but then who'd defend Big Town? I patrol every day now. And I got a little present for those Muties when they come back. You know what it is?" He brandished the revolver for all to see. "This kick-ass gun, that's what! Yeah baby!"
"Terrifying," Tom drawled, not bothering to sound the slightest bit impressed, but drawing a perhaps intended chuckle from Leathers. "Now, tell us about the Super Mutants themselves—how they fight, how best to kill them."
Lucy could see something like hope in their eyes now. Maybe it was having the two of them walk in and offer to enact a daring rescue or revenge fantasy. Maybe it was just being given something to think about other than burying their friends.
"Bring lots of guns and shoot the hell out of those Muties!" Flash sounded genuinely happy now. "I'll hold down the fort here!" She wouldn't hold him to that.
"They use whatever they can find as weapons," Leathers continued more helpfully, a haunted look in her eyes, "but they seem to like big things. Axes. Sledgehammers. Any rifle they can work the trigger for. One last night had a flamethrower." She gazed in the direction of the smoldering house. "Grenades when they can find them. And they have these . . . things . . . that follow them around that'll trap you with their tongues if you're close enough and spit at you if you're not. It burns." She shuddered.
"They're a solid wall of muscle when they hit the bridge," Dusty called back to them. "No scouts or rearguard that I've ever seen, just the overeager and the stragglers. No maneuvers or tactics, just an unstoppable wave."
"As for killing them?" Rags took over, placing an arm around his fellow and holding her close. "We've never had much luck. Dusty's rifle only seems to make them madder and Flash'd piss himself—"
"Hey!"
"—and faint if he had to stand and fight. The caravan guards—when the caravans would risk coming out here, anyway—always said they ate a lot of 5.56 ammo though."
Lucy mentally catalogued all that they said. The two of them would examine "Timebomb" before they left. Their medical supplies, like all the others, were finite, but they might be able to at least ease his pain.
"Right," Tom declared, "we'll be heading out once we've retrieved our supplies and checked your wounded. If you have anything else to add, don't hesitate."
As Tom turned away and began walking to the clinic, Lucy parted with him and headed back to the bridge. It seemed they would need their big guns after all.
