Featherkisser
5
All Talner could think about was the smell of crisping pork chops. The scent was familiar to him, even though he hadn't actually had pork for over fifteen years. He remembered that his aunt and uncle used to cook pork chops, on their ranch in the middle of the Roemio State wilderness, on his homeworld of Sasewaschke.
Talner had had their pork chops once, when he and a few friends had stopped by after an evening of drinking. Those pork chops, and his aunt's stern, passive-aggressive delivery of remarks on how he was wasting his life away, sobered him up real good.
It was weird that it took an airplane crash to remind him of that very elusive strip of memory. But, as he had learned long ago when he was still in the corps: combat was a hellish thing. It rarely made sense.
His eyes snapped open to reveal the desert sky above, tinged darkly through the blue visor of his ODST helmet. Talner coughed and tasted blood between his teeth. Dust was swirling everywhere and the sun was flickering.
He had first thought something was wrong with one of his eyelids, but after a few more blinks he came to realize that the sun was flickering because something was constantly passing through its beams. It was the Rotary Lifter's sole remaining propeller blades. They were still turning, like a creaking, vertically facing windmill. Four black swords eeking out right over his head, whispering and cindering.
If I'm here, then why the hell does it smell like aunt Khar's pork chops?
-A normal man would've asked that question.
But Talner knew better. It all made sense.
He sat up painfully, his spine screaming and his legs numb. He gripped his suit's collar and wheezed in an attempt to calm himself down. Just ahead of his boots, he stared blankly at the scorched and mangled corpse of one of his fellow contractors. He vaguely knew the identities of most of the people in Kuhaga's band alongside him, but in the moment, either due to adrenaline, sheer confusion from all that had happened or pure ignorance, Talner was drawing a blank on this poor slob's name.
Not that anyone would ever be able to identify him again. The man's face was a sloping, black plain of crumpled, rubbery flesh with the forehead of his skull starting to emerge like a white bilge of charcoal from his wrecked brow. He was missing a leg and the other one had been bent so far back that he was sitting on his own kneecap.
Talner coughed again and looked around the crash site. He had been tossed a few feet outside the bay, and discovered that the Rotary Lifter had actually remained in relatively good condition, for how much its catastrophic death warranted.
It was lying angled on its belly, dark soot leaking from its ruined ribs and ripped-off wing-stub. The cockpit was shattered and he could see spatters of dark blood inside the glass decorating the entirety of its bubble-like interior.
They had landed in the middle of a dune valley, and Talner recognized it as the one he and Kel had crossed to reach the point where Shackie had picked them up from in their little nature-walk.
As he made to stand up, he felt his chest scrunch into his own ribs as a cold feeling of dread stabbed into his heart.
Where was Kel?
Talner jumped to his feet and then immediately tripped and fell flat on his face. Grunting, the ex-ODST glared down at his ankles, and sighed so loudly that it caused the vox-grille on his helmet to wheeze.
Kel was there in one piece, draped over his ankles, unmoving. The T'vaoan looked quite peaceful, even though there was still a possibility that she was dead. Her harness wasn't rising and falling with its usual motions of breathing. The crackle of fires and the howl of the wind echoed silently, even as the latter tickled the edges of her flattened feather plumages.
Talner mumbled incoherently. He flopped over to her and propped the saurian up, manhandling her very light body to drape her in his arms and lap. Kel limply flowed past his forearms and her beak tilted back. He grabbed her scalp and supported her, staring at her closed eyes.
Feeling his teeth clench painfully, Talner opened his mouth but couldn't find any words. His quivering hand reached up and placed itself over her forehead. He was completely silent in the minutes following.
"-Hey,"
Talner gazed over his shoulder as he cradled his friend. He saw Shackie tumbling over some sand piles that had gathered around the chin of his craft's shattered cockpit. His bearded face was speckled with blood, and he was waving around a sidearm as he slipped over his own heels.
"Taln'? That you?" The pilot called, even though he was only eight or so feet away.
"Yeah." Talner croaked and turned back to Kel, playing with some of her feathers in his fingers.
Shackie muttered something and Talner could hear his boots crunching through the stone and sand until the pilot was standing right over and behind him. Shackie collapsed to a kneel beside him and stared at the Kig-yar in his arms.
"So, uhhh…" He toyed with the bolt on his Magnum, his eyes scanning the sky. "-how was my flying?"
Talner's jaw quivered and he bunched a fist. He was just about to whirl around and deck Shackie when Kel suddenly wheezed, and her entire body tensed.
"Kel." He gasped, gripping both sides of her ridged beak.
Kel Yn Gor's fiery eyes shot open, wide, inquisitive, terrified. Her mouth gaped in a series of panicked pants, her chest now bobbing rapidly underneath her harness. Talner flexed his thumbs down her cheek-ridges to calm her down.
"You're okay." He repeated to her several times, fawning over her like an overwhelmed parent, adjusting her feathers, wiping soot and sand stains from her beak. A single drop of moisture fled down the Kig-yar's cheek, and Talner blinked as he witnessed some semblance of her crying for the first time since he had met her. He wiped that away too and sat her up until she was on her haunches. "Kel Yn Gor, c'mon, you're okay. You're good."
Kel grabbed his arms and squeezed until the padding squeaked under her fingers. Her breathing slowed and soon the two of them were staring at each other through the swirling dust.
"Hey, darlin'." Talner smirked silently.
"…I have decided that I hate flying." Kel croaked, and her feathers bristled. She swatted his hand when he made to adjust them.
"You birds can sure take a hit when you need to." Shackie chimed in over Talner's shoulder. Kel chattered at him angrily and hissed like a displeased lizard, making the pilot flinch and scramble back towards his ruined plane.
Panting, now with hate, Kel stood up and swept her snout around the crash site. She covered the distance to the bay with two bounding steps, and Talner grunted as his sniper rifle landed in his arms, and Kel returned checking the blamite count on the spine of her Needle rifle.
"Are you injured?" She muttered, staring at him.
"Bruised to hell." He shrugged, standing up and facing her. "I've had worse. I should be askin' you. Anything hurting?"
"Same as you." Kel avoided eye contact and stared at the sand.
"That's alright." Shackie chuckled, holding up his forearm. "Nobody ask me how I'm doing this fine morning." There was a strip of hull-plating the size of a water-bottle sticking from his flesh. It punched through the underside of his wrist and stabbed out the other side. It leaked blood that dripped from its lower, ragged half, in loosely patterned drops.
"Shit." Talner yanked a biofoam canister off his belt and knelt down to work on Shackie's limb. "Kel, gimme' a survey of the crash site, and tell me what you see. Sight the enemy."
Kel made a considering hum and shifted on her talons, her snout pointing up at the sky just ahead.
"Of course." She said. "Survey is complete."
"What?"
"Enemy sighted." She gestured with the barrel of her rifle. Talner finished packing the foam around the wound, and followed her gaze.
There was an eel-shaped mass rapidly approaching from over a few dune rises. The tell-tale howl of the Dromon's repulsors sang across the desert.
Talner grit his teeth and shoved Shackie to his feet, turning on Kel.
"Ya' think we're close enough for the boomer?" He asked.
The air thundered in a hollow, distant clap. The Dromon was just about to present its belly and chin right over their heads, when a flickering band of what resembled lightning shot out from the rear of their position.
The Gauss-shell slammed into the Dromon's nose, singeing and puncturing the reflective synthetic metal enwrapping its elegant snout. The ship's thrusters blared and it jolted backwards on its own fuselage mounting, soot and steam trailing from the damage wrought on its face.
"Yeah! Get 'em, Huan!" It was the nuts man, standing on a scorched ridge off to the Lifter's flank. He pumped a fist in the air, his other hand clenched around the collar of a wounded Kig-yar from the Lifter's bay. The alien held onto his human savior's flank for dear life and merely coughed with an expression of depression laced over his beak.
"Out of all people to survive a wreck, why did that have to?" Kel pursed her mandible.
"We'll have to leg it back to the dig." Talner watched as the Dromon backed away from the crash site, its plasma turret struggling to get a bead on them over some dune ridges that divided it from the wreckage of the Lifter. "Use the Tower's boomer as cover. We should be able to make it."
"Are you out of your mind?" Shackie wiped his nose, again, sounding astoundingly unaffected by the situation going on around him, even with a foamed piece of scrap impaling his arm. "The Gauss will need to chew on that thing to take it out. It could easily just fly over here and spray us and retreat, just to get the kills in, once we're out in the open."
Another clap of miniature thunder, and the Dromon sank lower when a second shell smacked into its chin. There was a flash of blue light and licking flames. The entire group flinched when the wreckage of the ship's mangled plasma cannons slapped into the sand up ahead, still smoking.
"What a stroke of luck." Shackie said.
"Eat it, you vagina faces." Nut-man whooped. "So," He and the wounded Kig-yar hobbled down a slope towards them. "what's the plan?"
"We run like hell." Talner jabbed a thumb. "C'mon, I'll stay back and cover you."
"We will stay back and cover them." Kel corrected, bounding off to the crash site's flank before Talner could voice an objection. No sooner had that been said did the Dromon give off a new kind of sound.
Disarmed, the dropship lowered its stance whilst a third shell missed its sloping roof by just a few feet, and vanished off into the horizon. Twin rib-lodged mouths opened with wheezing hisses of hydraulic clamps and gravity nullifiers, spilling blue light from the vessel's interior.
Immensely tall, dark shapes fell heavily from the left side first, a total of three, and then two more from the opposite flank. Talner didn't need a close up view to know what they were.
"Sangheili infantry." Kel voxed through his helm link. "They are advancing towards the crash site."
"Count?" Talner watched as the sole three surviving crew hobbled around the Lifter behind him.
"Eight."
He growled under his breath and ran for the blast zone's crater ridge to take cover.
Over the howl of the wind, a distant, deep-throated command sounded faintly among the dunes. It was all that was said amongst the mostly silent warriors of R'ha. The first five were moving with startling foot-speed towards clusters of rocks and dune-ridges for cover at the edges of the crash site. Three more eight-foot-tall aliens garbed in crimson and yellow plate armor landed from the Dromon's interior and began to fan out behind their comrades. Talner picked out one armed with a Plasma Rifle before the alien ducked swiftly behind a large rock.
There was a chipping noise in the air, and a pink bolt lashed over the sand. One of the R'ha warriors dropped with a blamite crystal sticking from his forehead, his huge, muscle-wreathed body landing with a rough thud in the sand.
Amazingly, the Sangheili twitched and actually started to get back up. Kel shot him again, this time, a shard passed right between both sets of his mandibles in the open-faced helmet. It hit the inside of his throat and burst a second later, spraying the ground behind his head with rich, purple blood.
Talner ducked as a bushel of plasma fire raked the ridge he was on, kicking up dust and sending pebbles everywhere. He checked the scope on his gun and popped up past the ridge, shoulder-level. He fired once and the round rook off a Sangheili's forearm. He could hear the warrior screaming over the wind as more plasma fire pinned him.
Phsskkk~! –a plasma bolt ripped off his left pauldron with a plastic-like, burn-sound of tearing. Talner grimaced as his skin was cooked underneath his flack jacket. It had been a solid, lucky hit. Today was evidently proving more and more to not be his day.
It was Primian all over again. At least back then he'd been standard equipped with the new marks of powered infantry armor that were capable of dealing with shots like that.
These Sangheili were home-brewed colonial soldiers, so they didn't have the benefits old-era Covenant infantry did. But he had to remember that he and Kel were handicapped too. Limited ammo and hand-me-down armor wouldn't suffice in a protracted firefight.
"Relocate." Talner grunted into his link, ignoring the pain, and sliding down the slope. Overhead, the Dromon dropship inched a little closer as it followed the advance of its infantry. The ship jowled as it turned on its flank, presenting one of the opened troop bays in the direction of its enemies.
A Sangheili wielding an antique Type-42 Plasma Cannon swiveled the gun to face down at the crash site, its size comically small in comparison to his larger, hunched-over gait. The alien's mandibles wriggled as he held down the trigger and sprayed the dune ridge with a piss-stream of blue plasma.
Talner just ducked behind the Lifter's cockpit as a blast of fire shattered the craft's glass right over his head. Metal screeched and dented. Shards of tiny glass rained about his lap, not from the cockpit but from bolts hitting the sand around his position and superheating it.
Kel bounded and jumped over the Lifter's tailfin. The two of them glanced across at each other and then rose as one with their rifles ready.
Talner's crosshair lined up with his quarry, and he fired. The Dromon's gunman kicked back, his claws reaching up to hold his head. Talner's bullet had eaten a fist-sized trench through the Sangheili's forehead that exited out the back of his neck. He died with magenta gore erupting from his face, his corpse tossing back into the troop compartment.
Kel's needle inflicted a loss too. Talner jumped in startlement when a Sangheili's body flopped uselessly on the dune that they had just vacated.
Before they could move, plasma fire raked the Lifter from several directions. Talner cursed and balled himself behind the cockpit as bolts hit the area around him like hail. He glanced up and saw a Sangheilian infantryman standing on the flank of another hill to his left. Talner fired from his lap and the alien rolled to take cover.
"We've been flanked." Kel croaked nearby. "Fall back!"
"I'm tryin-" Talner's speech left his throat when something hit him in the side of the head. By pure reaction, he ripped off his helmet and threw it out into the open space just past the Lifter. The plasma grenade stuck to it detonated a second later, blinding both sides of the fight temporarily in a brilliant corona of bright light.
He glanced over the wreckage at the hill ahead. It was the Sangheili whose arm he had shot off. The bastard was tough, evidently. His mandibles splayed in a bellowing cry, completely uncaring about the gore leaking from his stump as he ripped a Plasma Rifle from his belt and peppered Talner's hiding place.
"Tower to Talner, get your ass back here!" Susanne cried in his comms bead. "Huan can't get a bead on the dropship, it's too low, and it's gun is gone, run for it!"
Talner considered screaming at her to remind her about their alien infantry problem. But the backdrop of plasma rifles barking and the distant cries of very angry Sangheili were probably enough to inform Susanne, seeing as he never had closed the vox-link after she spoke.
"Go, I will keep you covered." Kel cried.
Talner sprinted across the open sand, pink needles flying right over his head as Kel pinned the blood-enraged warriors eagerly gunning for them, hoping to exact revenge on those who were now not only trespassers, but murderers of their kin.
{👾}