Special agent Sandra Vikker looked at Major Gregory Dahl with barely concealed surprise. The man had taken some serious hits back there, his dress uniform melded to his skin in three places under the armour's chest piece and an open wound in his thigh, cut so cleanly it hardly bled, showed the pulsating artery inside.
Dahl applied biofoam to his thigh right through the uniform, wrapped it in duct tape to save sterile bandages for those who'd really need them and took a long swig from some mechanic's forgotten beer can.
They were in fort Aleksandre's underground service pit, where vehicles were re-armed and refit just like in Nascar races. The pit itself was, in fact, a thirty square meters elevator which lowered into a much wider warehouse area, through which one could see three more elevators also busy refitting Army vehicles for patrols and CASEVACS. The warehouse itself was abuzz with engineering teams trying to salvage vehicles that were too far gone for a quick refit.
Dahl's Rangers were not scheduled to head back out any time soon. A lot of them had lost fingers, eyes and whole limbs, not to mention slightly less than half of them were clinically dead.
People often mistook casualties for KIAs, but a flatline did not signify a soldier's end, not with a UNSC Army base fully equipped with state of the ark medical facilities. Only about a third of the Rangers were really out of the game for good, and the ones still able to walk and shoot were patching themselves up with field dressings, tourniquets and biofoam, which made no sense, seeing as they were about to receive proper treatment…
"Major!" Called Vikker, hopping on the elevator just as the Major got off the empty ammo crate he'd selected as his throne.
Dahl took another swill of beer, then put the can down, looking in the distance, at a Mechanized Infantry squad getting geared up in another pit. He only looked at Sandra once she was right in his face.
"Agent Vikker." The moustached officer nodded once, in respect, then began the tedious process of putting his burnt armour plates back over his equally seared dress uniform.
Sandra said nothing for a moment, taking a second look at Hammer 1-1. Bloodied and tired, each member of the squad was now busy replenishing their ammo carriers, swapping damaged gear and testing each other's condition. "You're not heading back out there, are you?" This seemed insane, they had barely made it the first time, going back now would be suicide!
Dahl briefly looked over his shoulder, at the beaten up Covenant vehicles his team had rode in on. "Not on those things, we aren't…" Looking around the hangar, he spotted an alarmingly low amount of functional vehicles. Twisted and burnt Gremlins, Wolverines and Warthogs filled every available workspace, all of which he could see from his elevated position, but the yellow-striped areas where reborn war machines were stored until they were needed, spreading seventy meters around every elevator, shone brightly in the crude white lights of the hangar, not a single vehicle breaking the grey and black pattern.
Dahl took another look at his team. They were good, loyal and intelligent, not a single of his SigSpec Ranger had flunked high school, most were college graduates, actually. You don't make it into the 75th Regiment's signal corps just by being buff and shooting straight…
All of this meant sweet fuck-all without mechanized support.
"The Navy has enacted Cole Protocol," Vikker explained, "the Marines have bugged out already, we're cutting our losses now…"
Dahl shook his head and chuckled, before sipping on the beer again, looking around the elevator for the Chief Engineer or anyone else who could give out some lawful orders. "How many civvies are left?"
New Kheops was a major colony in term of population and nothing else. One of many gateways between Inner and Outer colonies, it saw more than a few desperate souls seeking to evade the Covenant fleet, they piled in ghettos, tore at each other's throats for scraps of food and off-world shuttle tickets. It had once been an important military outpost, during the Insurrection, and a large army contingent remained on world from those days, but everything and everyone else on this world was at best a resource drain and at worst an outright liability.
They'd evacuated the industrial and residential quarters of every city, but whoever happened to live in the slums was on their own.
"All valuable individuals were evacuated…" Dahl spun on the spot swiftly and Vikkers barely dodged the empty beer. She was about to give him a piece of her mind, but the Major beat her to it.
"Did you evacuate Salim, the twelve years old who sells me cheap DVDs to feed his two sisters?" He waved somewhere to the east, presumably to where Salim had his stall, and Sandra took a step back. "Or Josef and his family, four adults, twelve kids, all unrelated except for the fact they all lost their homes on the same planet at the same time? Is Mohammed, the Muslim delinquent who looks after Rosaline, an elderly jewish lady, are they safely tucked into one of these luxury liners I saw leaving this morning?"
Everyone on the elevator had gone silent. Vikkers was armed, yet she felt terrified of the Major as he blurted out abridged biographies. "Are they safe?" Asked Dahl, nearly foaming at the mouth, but not quite yet, "Or did you evacuate just whoever was lucky enough to be born on the right side of the electric fence?" He stopped talking and looked at her, his nostrils flaring and face red, waiting for an answer.
Sandra kept quiet. Everyone kept quiet.
Finally, she said, almost timidly, "Eight hundred million..."
At the start of the Human Covenant war, humanity had counted around forty billion individual. Eight hundred million civilians equalled almost four Outer Colonies, or one large Inner Colony.
Dahl took it in stride remarkably well, breathing in deep before stepping back a bit, "Does that seem like acceptable losses to you?"
Sandra's answer was as automated as it was hollow, "Highcom has estimated that the costs in military assets, should we try to save more colonists, would only endanger a much greater number lives."
"I missed the part where they say anything about not having room for…" He spotted someone in the hangar and suddenly went back to business, "Hey, Sergeant! Get on that horn!" He yelled to a man in a yellow jumpsuit. A moment later, the two were speaking over the pit's phone.
The pit's elevators rarely lowered all the way down for re-arm operations, to save time.
"Listen, pal, I need something with armor and at least one functional gun, think you could scrounge up something for me?"
The Sergeant seemed puzzled, though Vikker could not hear his reply, she could see the small yellow silhouette look up in confusion.
"Hey, most of the kids can't even walk straight anymore, I'm sure they won't bitch about it." He looked away for a moment, to Lieutenant West, "If I tell you HRUNTING Mark Four, rings a bell?"
West stopped nursing his scratched bicep and thought about it for a moment, "Cyclops unit, about five years old… They gave them a try on the battlefield as weapon platform, but walkers tend to stand out too much, and they're a bitch to drive, so the concept was scratched. Why?"
The elevator shook as it began lowering itself. "The Sergeant's going to show you how to drive one, get six volunteers too fucked up to fight, but stable, and get used to the suit, we leave in twenty mikes."