Chapter XIX: Threes and Alphas
June 3, 2537 (UNSC Calendar)/
New Istanbul, New Constantinople, Draco Prima System
"Come on!" I yelled while throwing my halmet to the floor. I stumbled a little from the damage to my body, but managed to stay upright. I banged my Damascus Steel knife to my chest, as if taunting the brute to attack me. My other two knifes were stuck in the brute's ankle and shoulder respectively, the monster had countered by throwing me of its back and breaking a rib. Or three.
The brute roared in anger as I took a fighting stance. It went completely berserk, throwing it's brute shot to the side and charging towards me like an enraged gorilla. I didn't flinch, I just yelled at it to make it angrier. Just when it was about two meters away from me it flew sideways.
"Nice job buddy," I told Titan-4, who was sporting a smoking shotgun in his hands.
"You weren't that bad either, sir," he said.
"Don't call me sir," I told him. "Sergeant's fine."
I walked through the rubble while picking up my pistol. On my way to the brute I shot it twice in each kneecap. One shotgun blast to the side of a brute is lethal, but not that much. It was bound to be still alive, even if it was missing all the skin on that side of its body.
I flipped the brute around with effort and jumped back as it roared at me.
"You human mongrel will burn!" it grumbled, blood in its lungs.
"They can speak English?" I said, startled.
"They can speak?" asked Titan-4, equally surprised.
As the brute captain went on with a sermon about the might of the prophets and some crazy shit about a journey into the divine beyond I kneeled next to it and slid my knife into its eye socket.
It let out a howl way to high-pitched for a monster that size before it went still. I grabbed the large knife embedded in its shoulder and repeated the process on the other eye, kicking the monstrous piece of steel deep into the monster's brain. I had seen brutes take rounds to the skull and still be able to tear a man in half. I wasn't about to let that happen to me.
"All clear?" I spoke into my comm.
"All clear," said Pavel's voice inside my helmet.
"You should've fired into its face," I told Titan-4 as I pulled my knives from the brute's body and wiped them on its fur. The man just shrugged. I confirmed my knives were in working order and put them in their respective sheaths.
"Did you see where my gun was knocked to?" I asked my squadmate. He pointed to a pile of debris, there it was, relatively undamaged, only sporting a few scratches.
We had ambushed a small brute pack with booby traps and the element of surprise. We managed to kill the minors and a major before the captain went apeshit and tore Titan-3's arm from its socket before he could be taken out with a rocket. Pavel and Titan-5 were forced to take cover and I managed to improvise a beautiful plan, with the help of Number Four here.
We had been dropped to a position in downtown New Istanbul. We hadn't been spotted and managed to take out some jackal snipers that had set up shop in the buildings in front of us. The brute pack we had just neutralized was probably sent here to investigate until they had met our hastily planned ambush.
"So, whose kill was it?" asked Pavel as he hopped from a collapsed second story, Titan-5 in his wake.
"It was a coolaborative effort," I told him. He shrugged and smiled. Right now he was leading the kill count by two. Only majors or higher-ranking covvies counted. He was fifty-two to my fifty. I am pretty sure that I had killed more Covenant leadership over the course of my short career, but it was really difficult to compete with a man carrying a weapon that can fire for three consecutive minutes.
Titan-3 was still alive, we had bandaged his stumpy arm as best as we could and gave him a heavy dose of morphine. He was probably going to die, so we left him there and called for a medvac that probably wouldn't come anytime soon. We took most of his ammunition and his SPANKr and left him with one mag for his pistol and one for his MA5. He was in to much pain and under to much opiates to care. We placed the assault rifle near his hand, the remaining one, and left him there.
We sprinted out of the battle area and away from enemy soldiers that were probably going to investigate soon. I knew that our small squad couldn't halt an enemy advance by ourselves, even if we had an impenetrable wall and were safe from enemy fire, which we were not, we would quickly run out of ammunition. Our only solution was sabotage. We had requested explosives to the Inconvenience and they had dropped us a Fury "nuclear grenade." We would infiltrate the Covenant lines before detonating the small nuke near an important looking structure.
A SOEIV landed in a small park right in front of us.
"Cover us," I told Pavel and Five, they had the LMG and the sniper rifle of the squad respectively. Four sprinted next to me while aiming at our surroundings, making sure a lone jackal wouldn't end our trip. I reached the SOEIV and knelt next to the door. Four aimed his MA5B at the space around us, his shotgun now slung over his back. I found the latch of the pod after burning my hands, even through my gloves. I had forgotten that the pod had just burned through atmosphere. Nah, I didn't forget, I was just in a hurry. I pulled the latch and the door hissed as it started to fall. I let the piece of metal fall on my shoulders and gently lowered it to the ground. Had my armor nor been so thick, I would've been missing part of my skin right now. I looked into the pod to find a couple of ammunition crates for Pavel and loaded magazines for Five's sniper rifle. There were also clips for my rifle and MA5 ammunition. I handed all those to Four and he made the run back home.
In the middle of all that ammunition, right where an ODST should've been, there was not one, but two Fury tactical nukes.
I giggled in giddy anticipation. I placed the two football-sized devices of doom on my rucksack and made my way back to the building where the rest of my squad already was. I found them reloading their weapons; Pavel was switching the half-empty ammo crates in his rucksack for full ones, not a single one of them had bothered to cover me as I made my way back.
I slapped Pavel in the back of the head.
"Way to cover me, buddy," I told him. Four and Five looked at each other. "You too bastards, don't act all innocent."
They all shrugged and went back to business. "I am surrounded by incompetence," I said and joined them.
We had managed to avoid all Covenant patrols so far. We only had to keep some jackal sentinels and a few lone grunts. Those were quickly dispatched with either my silenced pistol or a nice second mouth in their necks. We were making good progress, taking alleys and side streets. A couple of times we were forced to use rooftops to move without being spotted.
Right now we were in a large sewer tunnel waiting out a Wraith that was patrolling the street above us. We had been avoiding covvies for hours now, managing to advance only a few hundred meters into their perimeter. Luckily, we only had about two hundred meters before we arrived at our target, a large structure where their command was located and surrouned by a large number of inactive Wraiths and Specters.
"So, how are we going to leave this place after we plant the bomb, sarge?" asked Five through the comm channel.
"Well, I hadn't thought of that, I assume we will throw the bombs with a two minute timer before running our asses off."
"Oh," was the only reply I got.
We hadn't received a word from command since they confirmed the delivery of our nukes. We hadn't been able to contact them so far either, so a Falcon gunship was out of the equation.
"Ok, I think it's safe now," Five said while looking over at the entrance we had entered through. Just as he began to climb the ladder Four called out.
"Shhh," he whispered.
"What is it," I asked through the comm channel.
"I think I heard something," he replied.
We had all heard, so we were now at the ready. Five had hopped off the ladder and was looking around.
"Brute stalkers?" I asked.
"Nah, they would've showed up on our radar."
There were nodds of agreement all around. I took a couple of careful steps to my right before I raised my rifle slowly, there was nothing in sight. Just as I was about to tell my squad to climb back up I saw something that startled me. It was a bootprint in the dried shit of the sewer. There was no running water, but it still had nasty stuff stuck to the floor and walls. I looked over the area, finding another boot print right next to the first one. I raised my eyes and for the briefest moment, I saw the air flickering.
"Fuck!" I said as I raised my rifle, ready to fire. Within an instant, my squad was next to me. In that same instant, an olive suit of armor materialized in front of me, an MA5K aimed at me. Four other similar suits materialized around the same area and all of a sudden I found myself in a nine-way Mexican Standoff. The armored soldiers were aiming their rifles at my squad, with two barrels aimed at my head. My squad was responding in kind, with Four pulling out his pistol to even out the equation.
One of the armored soldiers turned its head to the one I was aiming at, it nodded. They all lowered the weapons and we carefully did the same. Five got a little twitchy in the process and raised his sniper rifle again, so we all found ourselves aiming at each other again.
"Don't shoot, we're allies," a voice came from the yellow glass helmet in front of me.
"Prove it," I said to it, not lowering my gun.
"Fine, I'm going to take off my helmet now," it told me.
"Don't try anything funny," I said as he lowered his rifle and reached for his helmet. He took it off with a hiss of air and I was startled as to what I was seeing. It was a kid, a regular human kid. He looked out of place with his military buzzcut and his bulky armor.
I lowered my gun, conscious that I wasn't about to shoot a kid. This guy was around sixteen years old, he couldn't have been much older than that.
"What the hell are you?" I asked. I meant to ask something along the lines of what unit he was in, but those were the words that came out of my mouth.
"We're SPARTAN-IIIs" called out a youthfull voice.
I turned to face the other armored soldier, this one sounded even younger than the one in front of me looked.
The sixteen year-old kid without helmet shot a glare that could rival Layla's to the soldier that had talked.
SPARTAN-IIIs? That means that that this is the second class of SPARTANs, I told myself. Major Cavallaro had confirmed that the SPARTAN project was real. Officially, it wasn't but everyone in the UNSCDF had heard at least one story about the supersoldiers that fought through hordes of Covenant soldiers with impunity. Oh how I hated them. I joined the ODST to become the best of the very best, and ONI decides to pull out a bunch of supersoldiers out of its sleeves? I found that quite hurtful to say the least. And now this kid was telling me that theywere another class of SPARTANs, I no longer belonged to the second most elite class of warriors in the universe, I was now bumped down another spot to third place, surrounded by Elites and perhaps Brutes. No, just Elites.
The helmetless kid sighed. "I am Carter A259, Team Swarm," he hesitated before stopping and deciding he shouldn't say anything else.
"This is my squad," he said as he started introducing them to me.
"The one with the big one is Mick A001," he said as he pointed towards the other soldier that had spoken.
"That one over there is Sasha A167."
"Yo," said Sasha.
"And those last two are Rose A111 and Elizabeth A089," he said as he pointed at the remaining two armored figures.
"Call me Liz," said one of the female SPARTANs in a cheery voice. I swear, she could've been around thirteen by the sound of her voice.
"Should you really be telling me this?" I asked once I had gotten past the shock of the encounter.
"Nah, but who cares right?" he told me with a smile on his face. His face got serious all of a sudden before he asked: "So, I assume you're the guys from Alpha 2nd?"
"Yes we are," replied Pavel, who wasn't good at staying quiet.
"Well, our company was sent here to provide support to you regulars," started the kid. He had the balls to call me a regular, it was all I could do to keep my face from showing the anger I was feeling. My visor helped too.
"Our team was separated from the rest of our company to meet up with you and provide support on your mission. We lost contact from command shortly after we were dispatched, it was only by chance that we managed to…" he chose his next word carefully "…meet."
"Ok," I said.
"That's it."
"That's it?" I asked, dumbfounded. Not even we dropped to combat with that much lack of intel. The SPARTAN nodded at me before putting his helmet back one.
"So, what's the plan?" he asked me.
"Well, we were going to sneak in as close to that Covenant structure as we could before placing the two Furys on a two minute timer and bailing," I told him.
He nodded thoughtfully.
"Sounds like a plan, we'll take one of the nukes and place it farther back in the enemy lines," he told me even as he reached into my rucksack. The balls of this kid.
"We'll contact you when we have placed our bomb and will come here to help cover your escape," he said as he placed the bomb on his back, where it attatched magnetically.
"You're kidding me right, we're not going to wait for you to cross a mile and a half of enemy-held land to the next Covenant spire," I told him.
"I never joke when it comes to combat," he told me, with steel in his youthful voice, "besides, it is us who will have to wait on you."
Having said that, he disappeared in front of me, the rest of his squad vanishing with him.