Chapter XVII: Merry Easter
April 29, 2537 (UNSC Calendar)/ Two years later
UNSC Inconvenience, Middle of Nowhere, Carentan System
"Are you wearing any socks?" he asked me.
"Yes," I answered, then: "What the hell kind of question is that?"
"Well, in your diary, you didn't mention getting issued socks on your ODST training camp."
"What the hell man?" I replied angrily. "Besides, it's not a diary, it's a journal, you creep," I told him. "Wanting to know if my feet are covered or not you foot fetishist."
Pavel was now embarrased with himself, I knew that because he didn't say anything else.
"Woah, woah, careful now," he told me.
"I know what I am doing," I told him.
I was placing a bunch of C12 explosives on a Shiva warhead. We were doing a space walk, with only our ODST suits, a couple of oxygen tanks, and our jetpacks giving us protection. Pavel had a sniper rifle while I only got to carry my pistol.
The Shiva warhead I was working on was the size of a small trailer. It was one of those with higher payloads. We should've been using a lesser HAVOK warhead, but their design didn't allow for them to be blown up they way we intended to. With the ship's electronics out, we had now way of activating it remotely. Our three longswords wouldn't be flying anytime soon, so this was all we had, detonation with explosives.
"I think they spotted us," Pavel warned me as he aimed his rifle at some point where a bulge in the Covenant cruiser blocked my view.
"Almost done," I said.
I cursed as the body of a dead elite ranger slammed into the bomb. Pavel held his breath before I angrily kicked it away.
"Shit," he muttered. He almost pissed his pants. Pavel wasn't a big fan of zero-gee or explosives. Particularly such a dangerous combination as the one he was experiencing right now.
"If you don't like the bodies then don't kill them," I told him.
"You killed that one," he replied.
"Damn right I did, you were to scared to shoot that big gun of yours."
"Oh piss off," he said before scoping the area where he suspected there were more enemies.
"Aaand… done," I said.
I connected a couple of wires, set the timer for ten minutes, and pushed the bomb towards the enemy ship. It would stick there since it had been attatched to a magnetic platform. I let my own momentum carry me to the ship, not wanting to give away my position by using my booster rockets.
Plasma fire flew past me and Pavel, hitting the plating of the Inconvenience, barely even scorching it.
Oh how well the name fits the ship, I thought as Pavel fired his sniper rifle at an elite ranger, tearing its suit. It seemed like the EMP had taken their shields as well. It only made sense, since the cruiser's shields were down too. I activated my thrusters, gaining a sudden burst in speed. I arrived at the ship in seconds, Pavel close on my wake. I stood up on the port armor of the Inconvenience she was slightly damaged from point defense fire, but she would hold.
The pit stop was supposed to have been a quick one. We jump to Carentan, stop at the resupplying station, grab a couple million rounds of ammunition and some food supplies for our ship, live like kings for a couple of weeks.
The captain had agreed to the mission mostly out of hatred to the UNSC command, he saw it as a way to get back at them without really going against the greater good of humanity. I was inclined to agree with him. This operation was of the books and highly illegal. We weren't supposed to pick anything at the station. Since it was unmanned, like all resupply stations, it was easy, we would only have to load things manually instead of letting the robots do all the work.
The fact that Carentan had no colonies in the whole system only helped make our goal easier. I remember high-fiving Pavel as I found myself a crate of Sweet William cigars and he grinned while holding a larger box with experimental grenades. The mission did proceed easily. We jumped into the station without reporting. Loaded goods into our pelicans, and went back to the ship. Pavel and I were one of the lucky few sent to pillage the station. We had been allowed to keep whatever we could carry. I just took the cigars and a crate of fine coffee. I didn't need coffee, but whenevere I fought with regulars, they offered me their souls for a single small-sized jar.
Pavel himself decided to take the grenades in addition to some biofoam cans. They were always useful on the battlefield and could be sold for high prices to almost anyone. A personal biofoam was bound to save your skin more than once. Probably.
I myself didn't need to buy one from Pavel. I had gotten a Tactical Trauma Kit on the armory. It had been one of the only two to arrive in the ship. Agreed, it had cost me half my savings to the smug armorer, but it had been worth it. That little box had some sort of biofoam on steroids, it would cure almost everything in seconds. Granted, it stung even worse than regular biofoam, but still. In fact, it was strapped to my left thigh right now.
Well, as I was saying, our stop was supposed to be a quick one. Easy in, easy out. That's what our captain had told us. We believed him, there was no reason not to at the time. Our slightly inconvenient event happened halfway back to the ship. Our pelican had made its last trip before picking us up. I was smelling my Sweet Williams on board of Mary's Little Lamb, I had just offered a free one to the pilot of the ship. She was a cool chick, not as cool as Layla, but funny to be around.
The two Covenant CCS-class battlecruisers had appeared less than one hundred kilometers away from the Inconvenience. What are the odds right?
They must've been more surprised than we were, because our ship fired two MAC rounds at the lead cruiser before it was able to lift its shields. A barrage of Archer missiles knocked it out before it could respond. God bless AIs and their reaction times.
The other cruiser, however, had more time and was able to put up its shields and face us directly for an attack. My pelican had barely arrived in its bay before the ship started moving with a foolish boost towards the enemy cruiser. We were able to dodge two incoming plasma torpedoes but another one did an air burst on our side, damaging us. We fired half our Archer reserves before shooting our MAC. Half the missiles and the round hit our opponent head on. They barely lowered their shields.
Our AI must've been a genius, because she slowed us down with our front boosters before it played the only ace we had under our sleeve.
She detonated an experimental EMP that we had on board. It had been given to us by ONI, not stolen. It fried everything withing a twenty-click range. That's why we had been doing a full burn at the covvie ship. Our frigate scraped the top of the cruiser before coming to a relative halt, staying about a hundred meters away from the inutilized enemy ship. Bad news was that our ship was inutlized as well. We had only managed to fend of boarding parties because our point-defence cannons worked without electricity. We had to manually fire them, but they did the job.
It wasn't long before the covvies learned better and stopped sending soldiers to their deaths.
That's about the time me and Pavel had been sent on our little mission. Operation Merry Christmas, it had been called. It wasn't even Christmas yet. Operation Happy Easter would've been more suitable.
So here I was, on one side of the ship, towing the ship with the help of two dozen more marines in EVA gear and jetpacks. It was a very weird image. Twenty-something little ants dragging a squirrel is the closest I can put this to smaller terms.
We were actually making pretty good progress on the ship, moving it at a hundred miles per hour. The fact that there was no friction in space was helping us make progress a lot faster.
The silence was broken by a laugh, it came from one of the marines towing the ship (comms were still working). "What's so funny?" he was asked by at least ten other soldiers.
"The situation, this is so absurd," he replied.
There were mutters of agreement from the rest of the towing soldiers, they were quieted by the Inconvenience making use of its last working booster. We slammed against the hull of the ship quite hard, but no one was really harmed. A second later the black space flashed the purest white for an instant. I heard nothing at all, I only felt the shockwave push the ship faster. We had been far enough away from the blast.
"Thank God," I said to myself. My helmet speakers only gave out white noise. They had been knocked out by the EMP from the nuke. I simply pushed myself from the hull until my cable was taut. I started towing the ship back towards the resupply station, It would probably take a couple of hours, and we would likely need radiation treatment when we got on the ship, but this would be a hell of a story to tell to my kids. Provided the radiation didn't render me sterile.
We entered the ship and were greeted like heroes, well, Pavel and I were. The other ones didn't have such luck. We received pats on the back and were offered cold beers. The captain was even clapping at us. Turned out he had been the one to think of the crazy stunt with the EMP, not our AI. He deserved at least as much clapping as I was getting. Gramps was there, next to the captain, with a smile on his face, clapping as well. For all the world he looked like a proud grandfather. Except for his ever-present armor.
"Nice job Sergeant Castillo, you as well Corporal Klaus," said the captain as he shook our hands. Truth be told, anyone could've done what we did. Not anyone would've volunteered for it though. Now that I think of it, few people on the ship could've shaped the C12 for it to detonate the nuke.
I smiled at the captain and turned to Zavala. "Do you sleep with that sir?" I asked jokingly.
"Only on weeknights," he replied.
I laughed at the joke and enjoyed the applause for a while. I spotted Layla through the crowd and she hugged me. As usual, the crowd met our display of affection with catcalls, wolf-whistles and raunchy comments. We were both used to it, we had kind of become the "official ship couple" as Pavel liked to call us, but no matter how used to being teased you are, you still feel uncomfortable when 300 people are doing it at the same time. When the captain and the colonel joined the crowd I almost lost it. Layla's face was a deep shade of red and mine probably wasn't far behind. We managed to push our way through the crowd and make our way someplace else while repairs of the ship started. We had to wait for all circuits to restart and replace the fried ones, so it would be a few days before we were able to set off without the slipspace engine transporting us to some crazy alternate universe.
Out of the glimpse of my eye I saw Pavel with his arm around Vicky, she was the closest thing this ship had to a brothel.
"So, what does it feel like to be a hero?" Layla asked playfully as her arms hugged my waist.
"It's getting old," I said while giving her butt a squeeze with one hand and opening the door to my room with the other.
"You're terrible," she said as she pushed me to my bed.
I smiled.