*****LANGUAGE WARNING, IF CUSSING OFFENDS YOU DO NOT CONTINUE READING*****
ONE; EYE OF THE STORM.
Mid-2560. Zeta Sector. Storm-Covenant controlled space. Alone, but not alone.
Any and all of those were words and phrases Spartan Vance would use to describe his situation. He did not, however, agree with Spartan Cross's assessment: "We're screwed."
So, despite the fact that Ellen Cross was leader and Haydn Vance was second-in-command, he took charge. "Shut your mouth, Cross. We got this. So they got a couple Wraiths, no worries. Nothing we can't handle."
"Yeah, except that's more than a couple, and we got no heavies," Cross retorted angrily. "Remember your place, Vance! You don't get to say whether we're screwed or not!"
"Before you give in completely and raise the white flag, Lead, hear him out," the heavy weapons expert, Spartan Owen Potter, interjected. "Sounds like Vance has a plan."
"Damn right I got a plan," Vance said, depolarizing his faceplate so the fireteam could see his feral grin. "It's kinda crazy, but they won't be expecting it…"
"No."
"Not even gonna hear me out?"
Cross sighed heavily. "Fine. Sixty seconds. If you haven't sold it to me by the time my counter hits zero, I'll have Gates run you through with that energy sword he picked up."
"What makes you think Gates will take your side?" Spartan Tony Gates asked cheerfully. "Last I checked, I like Vance better than you."
"Fifty seconds, Vance!"
Grinning even wider, Haydn took out his combat knife and started scratching a rough diagram in the dirt. "We have cover here, here, and here. This building-" he stabbed a shape "-is covered on all sides by heavy infantry and Shade turrets. That leaves there, and there. The Wraiths are patrolling this area, and with no heavy weapons, we have to get close – except we can't get close. Right?"
"Right." Cross glared at him. "And that's why we're screwed."
"But," Vance said, eyes sparkling, "what if we can? Gates speaks fluent Sangheili, and he has that sword…"
"I see what you're getting at. You're fucking insane."
"Well, I was, but I ditched her for stupid, and now I'm fucking serious." Vance paused while Potter, Gates and Holden let out choked snorts of laughter and Cross and Ware glared daggers at him, then, laughing himself, he stabbed another patch of dirt with his knife. "Gates can get us to about there, unless they got smarter in the past ten minutes, and then we have to scatter and move fast. One Wraith each, no backup because once those Wraiths are gone we gotta get the fuck outta Dodge. Ain't got the numbers to take on that much infantry. Or the firepower."
"That's never going to work," Cross said.
"Au contraire, sweetheart," Spartan Dale Holden said with a predatory smile. "It's just crazy enough to work."
Haydn didn't much like the other members of his fireteam – he argued with them on a regular basis, and unlike them, actually meant the insults he threw around over meals and during ops – but all the same, he did need them. Twelve highly capable, hyper-lethal Spartans, himself included, had a chance at getting out of this alive and successful. Spartan Vance on his own would have lasted about five seconds.
"We should listen to Vance," Spartan Taryn Ware cut in. "Unless anyone has a better idea?"
"Here's one," Cross said, only half joking. "We set the charges, use him as bait, and get the fuck out of here while he goes out in a blaze of glory, saving the lives of eleven other Spartans and, therefore, indirectly, millions of civilians."
"Nah," Potter said. "That'll never work. He'd last what, five seconds, before the Wraiths got him. We'd have another maybe three seconds before they found us and rewarded us with the same fate. Gonna send the rookie into certain death you gotta make sure you get out of it alive."
"I'm not the rookie anymore, Potter," Vance reminded the big heavies expert. "That's Moreau."
"Uh-huh," Spartan Ashton Moreau grunted, with a sharp nod to punctuate his 'statement'.
"Yer too loud, Moreau" Holden said, grinning. "Might deafen us if yer not careful."
"Yeah, shut up a second, we might forget you're here," Ware piped up.
"All right, Fireteam Grimm, listen up! Spartan Vance is in charge from now until the operation is complete!" Cross barked, finally giving in.
"Formation! Gates, on point." Vance fell into position just behind Gates. "Cloaking! All members, hold your fire until my word. Are there any questions?"
"No, sir!"
"Good! Move… HUP!"
Gates moved casually, trying to look as much like an Elite as possible and hoping, as he did so, that none of the others slipped up and gave the game away. It was really only Moreau he wasn't sure of, but anyone could make a mistake. They might have been Spartans, but they were still human. Mistakes were a very human tendency.
"Greetings, sword-brother," he said, in fluent Sangheili, to a nearby Swordsmaster Elite. "May the blood of your enemies run in rivers from these cliffs!"
"And the heads of yours roll to fill the valleys of this land!" the Elite responded, completing the grisly greeting.
This was why nobody else could be point-man and play the highest-ranking Elite. The only member of Fireteam Grimm who could speak Sangheili well enough was Tony Gates.
Nearly there, Vance thought, eyes locked onto the waypoint he had placed in his HUD. Just another fifty metres… carefully now, Tony, carefully. It didn't seem like much, not to a Spartan, but fifty metres could mean the difference between success and total failure. If this plan blew up, the deaths of an entire fireteam would be on Haydn Vance's head. He had a strong feeling he could get out alive if things went bad, but he couldn't get the team out.
With each passing second the distance decreased, but Vance's nerves were on edge and getting more and more strained with every step he took.
Suddenly, just short of the marker, an Elite roared something from the other side of the battlefield.
"They're onto us!" Gates bellowed.
"Scatter! Hit those Wraiths!" Vance barked, bolting for his allocated target as he gave the order. He pulled a frag grenade from his belt and primed it, holding down the spoon with so much force Cross gently reminded him to relax.
Plasma splashed across his shields; he dodged far more than he didn't, but it still drained their power very quickly. The 'shields low' alarm started going off in his HUD, and then another bolt of plasma splashed across his field of vision and the 'shields down' alarm screeched in his ear. He swung up onto the Wraith and punched through a panel, then let go of the grenade, wrenched his hand free, and leapt off.
Moving at a dead sprint, Vance just ran, placing a waypoint a good distance away for a rendezvous point. Whoever survived would meet him there in short order. Whoever died would not. From there they could make their way to the pickup zone, and once aboard the Pelican and at minimum safe distance, he would trigger the explosives. Six SHIVA nukes would make very short work of the Storm Covenant base and probably most of the continent upon which it was situated.
Cross, Holden, Ware and Moreau came up level with him, all blowing hard, and fell into step. Vance nodded to each in turn, but otherwise paid them no mind. It was each Spartan for him- or herself, and screw teamwork. That could wait until they got to the rally point.
-FIFTEEN MINUTES LATER-
Haydn Vance leaned back against a tree, arms crossed, helmet off, surveying the Spartans who he had so far managed to gather. Spartan Ellen Cross, the leader of Fireteam Grimm, stood very close to him, well inside what would have been his personal space had he actually had any, and anger rolled off her in waves. Potter, Ware, Gates and Moreau were playing poker on a tree stump, and Holden was watching from a vantage point above, chuckling to himself. Vance assumed it was because he could see everyone's cards. Spartan Melinda Harper was sitting cross-legged just inside the Pelican.
They were only waiting on two more. Two had been confirmed dead – Spartan Karen Daly and Spartan Mack Davis – and eight were present.
"Where are they?" Cross demanded of Vance. "Where are they?"
"If I knew, you would know," Vance replied calmly. "Look. Archer and Gomez are going to turn up within the next five minutes if they're going to turn up at all. If they can't have gotten here in twenty minutes, they can't have gotten away from those damned terrorist Storm-Covies. Fair's fair, I made no guarantees we would all make it out alive."
"Eight of us is a darn sight more than were going to survive," Harper said philosophically. "I mean Vance's plan was mental, sure, but sitting there and waiting for them to kill us wasn't going to achieve anything."
"WHAT THE FUCK MAN!" Potter suddenly bellowed. "How do you always get four of a kind? DAMN IT! You're a fucking cheat, Tony Gates!"
"Nope. Dead set, swear a fucking oath on my dear mamma's grave, I never cheated at anything." Gates was telling the truth, of course, but he still danced backwards out of Potter's reach. "You're just pissed 'cause you lost your month's supply of caramel fudge again. 'Cause you suck at reading people, and you suck at controlling your face."
"To be fair, Aaron, I'd have beat you if Tony hadn't," Ware said soothingly. "And Ashton would have beat you if I wouldn't have beat him."
"How come it's always Tony who wins? And always four of a kind? And always aces?"
"I'm not a cheat!" Gates said again. "It's your fucking deck!"
"Stow it," Cross growled. Everyone fell silent instantly; there was something in her tone that even Vance wouldn't argue with. "There – hear them?"
Vance nodded. Two sets of feet. MJOLNIR-booted feet. He was about to say they would call in at any moment when Gomez's voice came over the comms.
"This is Spartan Javier Gomez. Friendlies approaching. I'm with Spartan Marie Archer."
"Solid copy, Gomez. Come on home," Cross told them. She relaxed, her fury abating so much that Vance couldn't stop himself glancing at her to make sure she hadn't fallen asleep. Soon the two Spartans came into view. Vance quietly moved their names to the 'accounted-for' list, and then greeted them with a smile in the same moment the other seven Spartans gathered already ran two fingers across their faceplates in the traditional 'Spartan smile'.
He offered Gomez a fist-bump, which the Hispanic fellow met first by reciprocating and then by casually bumping shoulders with him. Vance nodded in satisfaction, and, everyone accounted for one way or another, the surviving ten members of Fireteam Grimm piled into the Pelican – except Harper, who was already onboard.
"Take us home," Cross told the pilot. "Notify us the moment we reach minimum safe distance and I'll have Vance activate the bombs."
Vance grinned, still sans-helmet. "Calling a SHIVA a bomb is like calling the Infinity a yacht."
"You can say that again," Spartan Greg Holden said with a short laugh. "Hey, Potter."
"Yeah, what?"
"Next time you cheat… make sure you shuffle and deal to your advantage."
"Fuck you."
"No thanks."
Vance smiled to himself and shook his head. As much as these guys argued, as much as they complained about each other, it was all in good fun. They never actually meant what they said. Until they were speaking to Vance, but that was ok. He preferred things that way. Always a little on the outer.
Spartan Haydn Vance might have been where he belonged, but he liked to not belong, just a little bit. It meant he could maintain a little distance from his comrades and not be completely shattered whenever they lost someone. Daly and Davis were dead this time. Last time it was a sniper, Spartan Brandon Stuart, and the time before that it was someone Vance had gotten along with quite famously – Spartan Martha Slover, who had been his closest friend from his cadetship right through ODST training, through Spartan training, and right up until her death.
He kept his distance on purpose now. Martha still haunted him, two years later. Vance still strongly disliked her replacement, and wasn't sorry that Karen Daly was now dead. He wasn't a big fan of Moreau – Stuart's replacement – to begin with, but didn't mind the quiet half-French, half-English all-rounder so much now.
"Hey, Vance," Gomez said, shoving Ware out of the way to sit next to him. "You ok?"
"Yeah." Vance forced himself to smile at Javier. "Just thinking how I could have planned that better."
"Liar."
"Piss off." For once, Haydn didn't actually mean what he said. With a stab of panic he realized what that meant. He was starting to feel close to Javier Gomez. He was starting up the very thing he was trying to avoid. A friendship. He wasn't sure he could survive having another friend ripped away from him, so it was safer just to avoid getting close to people.
"Hayd. It's Martha, isn't it?"
"Maybe," he admitted.
"You know, none of us blame you. For that, or for Daly and fucking Mack Davis."
"I know."
"Do you?"
"Yeah, Jav, I know. It doesn't matter. If I hadn't let her go…" Vance couldn't stop the brief flash of memory. Martha, falling, falling… falling forever, so long that nobody heard her hit the bottom of the shaft. No scream or anything, just a whispered goodbye that carried all the weight of her sacrifice and cut through Vance's heart like a knife, emphasizing everything he could have, should have, done…
"Oh for fuck's sake, Haydn Vance! 'If only' never brought anybody anything but pain."
Gomez had a point, but Vance needed someone to blame, and the only person he could possibly blame was himself. He just shook his head and put his helmet back on, signaling an end to the conversation. He had no idea whether or not Gomez tried to push the point, because he deliberately blocked out every other Spartan onboard.
AN: So this is locked down in stone and you guys know to correct me if I screw it up, team rankings go as follows, and they are a twelve-man fireteam:
LEADER; Spartan Ellen Cross, F
2IC; Spartan Haydn Vance, M
THIRD; Spartan Aaron Potter, M
FOURTH; Spartan Taryn Ware, F [tuh-RIN]
FIFTH; Spartan Tony Gates, M
SIXTH; Spartan Karen Daly, F [dec]
SEVENTH; Spartan Javier Gomez, M [hah-VEE-air, or hahv {Jav} for short]
EIGHTH; Spartan Marie Archer, F
NINTH; Spartan Greg Holden, M
TENTH; Spartan Ashton Moreau, M
ELEVENTH; Spartan Mack Davis, M [dec]
TWELFTH; Spartan Melinda Harper, F
Pull me up on that if I make a mistake, okay? I'm dreadful like that... I mean look at AoD and how much I kept stuffing up team order in THAT to begin with! With half as many Spartans to keep track of. The dead ones will be replaced soon. They do have an unusual, somewhat unprofessional team dynamic, and argue a lot... Vance is the source of most of that, discord follows him wherever he goes! Even if he is not actively causing trouble, it always seems to follow him around. His luck is dreadful.
Next chapter, we can look forward to some John/Halsey conversation, which should hopefully entertain you guys. And Hayd isn't doing well, the sook.
Halo isn't mine, canon characters such as Halsey and John-117 aren't mine, all OCs and this storyline are.