Chapter XXXIX: Juno
January 28, 2541 (UNSC Calendar)/one month later
Juno,Olympus System
"Frank! Frankie, Frank! Frankie wake up man! Frank, Frankie, Francisco! Wake up goddamit! Francisco Castillo! WAKE THE FUCK UP!"
You can tell that I didn't wake up feeling exactly happy.
"I am awake! Fuck," I mumbled.
"Pavel what the fuck?" Marina yelled as she pulled up the covers.
"I finally scored with her!" Pavel said. I instantly sat up, pulling the covers and eliciting a yelp from Marina, who was forced to pull them back up to cover herself.
"Good for you buddy!" I said happily. "It's long since been coming,"
Despite the fact that he had rudely woken me up, scared me half to death, and seen my girlfriend half naked (girlfriend is being used loosely here), I was glad for the big guy.
"No, it's not good?"
(Flat out)"What?"
"Why not?" I asked. "You couldn't… you know… make your soldier stand at attention?"
"What? No!" he said outraged.
"Then what?" Marina asked. "You… um, didn't measure up to expectations?"
"Or perhaps time flew by," I suggested.
"You know what?" he said. "Fuck you guys, both of you," as he said that he stomped away from the room. Had the door been hinged, he certainly would've slammed it against the door.
"Wow," Marina said. "It must've been really bad."
"Tell me about it," I said while scratching my head.
I left the tent that had been set up in the Junian desert. I had to cover my eyes to avoid the momentary glare from the sun shining on my eyes. Marina had left a few minutes after Pavel, sneaking out through the back door. She didn't want anyone to stop her and report the illegal relationship between her and me. Not that it was entirely illegal, we were from different branches, I think.
"Morning Staff Sergeant!" called out some marines that were doing a morning run across camp. I nodded at the men before I walked outside.
Ok, you probably need a little bit of context here, so let me explain the situation. The Olympus system was a small system that somehow managed to have eight different colonies. Two planets we inhabited, Mars and Apollo. Those two planets had a significant number of moons each, they both had three terraformed moons. There had been some Covenant scout ships detected a few weeks earlier, they had done quick recon of the system before leaving. Presumably a larger covvie force would return to finish the job, so a rather large fleet had been sent here to defend the system. Most civilians had relocated from their respective moons or planets to Triton, one of Mars's moons. From there they were already being shipped up in escape craft, they'd be able to escape the system in moments notice.
The entire UNSC forces had been divided into two, the largest section was sent to Triton to protect the civilians in case the covvies showed up, while the smaller one was deployed in Juno to serve as a stalling force in case the Covenant attacked earlier.
I was part of that smaller force.
"Staff Sergeant."
"Lieutenant, good morning," I said as I saluted Yevgeny Nezarian, the leader of the Army Rangers contingent attached to our ship.
"It's almost noon Staff Sergeant," he informed me.
I glanced at the sky to confirm that. "That late already? Why wasn't I woken up or something?" I wondered out loud.
"Oh, the marine sent to do so decided to avoid you the embarrassment and skipped waking you up."
"Oh," I said as I tried not to blush.
"Don't worry, we all need some semblance of being normal every now and then eh?"
"Yes sir," I said.
The man saluted me once more before he left. I was standing alone in the middle of the improvised camp that had served as my home for the past two days. The entire ground forces available to the UNSC Inconvenience were also here, tasked with defending a relatively significant plateau. Strategically significant that is. We were basically camping in an area that was higher in the desert, even though the desert kept changing.
I went through a couple of Armadillo IFVs before stopping in command. Command happened to be a larger tent that was actually made of plastic and not simply a pile of cloth. I talked to Captain Sharma, who said my services weren't required.
"What am I to do ma'am?" I asked.
"Right now, nothing."
I sighed deeply in disappointment, I was really beginning to get bored. I decided to take a walk around our makeshift camp, passing near tanks, Armadillos, Falcons, Rattlesnakes, and Pelicans. If you had looked at our camp from space, it would've looked like there were a lot of people in here, not just a small battalion. Eventually I tired of walking around in the scorching sun of Juno and decided to return to my tent. On the way there I found Pavel.
"Hey man, you want to tell me what was so bad about spending the night with Delacroix?"
"You mean Chloe?" he asked. "Well, no, I won't tell you."
"Come on man, you know we were kidding," I said, referring to the earlier incident.
"You were still an ass about it," he said.
"What are you? A nineteen year-old girl?" I asked surprised. "Just tell me what was wrong," I said.
He took a deep breath before he went ahead. "Ok, at first everything went like normal, we were having a little fun and getting touchy feely, as she says, so she proposed we went to a pelican…"
"Nothing wrong with that…" I muttered, my previous evening had gone much like that.
"Shut up, once we got there…"
Pavel didn't get to finish his story, since in that precise moment, two loud blasts from a bullhorn put the entire camp on high alert. We headed towards our tent to armor up while the rest of the camp went to the armory. I stripped down to my underwear so that I could put on my undersuit before putting on my armor. Why? You might ask. Well, before the climate control of my suit functions more effectively like that. Within a minute I felt like I was taking a lovely stroll down some park in a relatively cool morning. Weather-wise, of course, I actually felt like I was ready to kick some serious Covenant ass.
After we were both looking like grim reapers in armor (Pavel now referred to himself as Grim in account to the scythe he had drawn on his helmet, formerly a reference to Cronos or Kronus), we headed out towards command. Unsurprisingly, we were stopped by one Lieutenant Krikor Darbinian, but we pushed our way through the man and faced Captain Sharma again.
"Ma'am," I said.
"Ah, Staff Sergeant, Sergeant," she said, nodding at each of us in turn. "Looks like the Covenant have finally decided to jump into the system," she explained.
I refrained myself from saying "about time", instead, I simply nodded.
"The Covenant force consists of four ships," she explained.
That was good, our fleet was composed of about twenty something ships, including three Marathon-class cruisers in addition to several destroyers in addition to our frigate.
"I presume that means that we won't be forced to fight," I half-stated, slightly disappointed.
"On the contrary Staff Sergeant…" Sharma said with an uneasiness in her voice.
"Oh, crap."
"Yes, one of those ship happens to be a supercarrier."
"Godammit, fuck!" Pavel exclaimed. Sharma simply cleared her throat. "Sorry ma'am," he said.
"Never mind, we are moving to a better position, this is just a glorified hill, a giant piece of sand," she said. It was true, our camp had set up in a giant dune. It provided a higher vantage point, but was still a dune.
"We're moving here," she said as she pointed in a map, an actual paper map, can you believe it? "This place is the closest in miles that actually has rocks as surface instead of sand."
I peeked at the map and saw it already had some lines and circles scribbled on the hills. The highest one was circled with blue and arrows pointed at it. Looked like that would be our new base.
"What are we to do?" I asked.
"Borrow two mongooses from a pelican, then head out that way. You'll do as scouts, radio us back if you find anything interesting."
"Ma'am," we said simultaneously before we left.
Pavel and I headed towards the section of the camp where all the pelicans had landed. I headed specifically for Mary's Little Lamb. Not for the obvious reasons, but because I knew that there were two vehicles of the type that I needed inside of it.
"Hey Frank!" said Sheppard. "What are you doing here?"
"I need to borrow your mongooses," I said.
"Sure, take care of them," he said.
"Don't worry, we'll return them intact," Pavel said.
"Like I care, I don't get to use them," returned Sheppard.
By that time we had already hopped on the two ATVs and driven them of the craft's bay. I told my HUD to point the quickest route to the hills in Sharma's map and headed out. My HUD put various waypoint markers that we had to go towards instead of a line or something. They weren't positioned in a straight line, we would have to climb through huge dunes for that to work, but instead had to take long detours around the place.
"So, Pavel, you ready to tell me what went wrong yesterday?" I asked, suddenly remembering our interrupted conversation.
"Oh yeah, I was saying, that we were inside this empty pelican, she's taking my clothes of and all of a sudden…"
"Staff Sergeant, do you copy?" our radio interrupted us.
"Yes ma'am, I copy."
"How's your progress?" Sharma asked us.
"We're fifteen minutes out," I said.
"Wow, you move slowly," she replied.
"Well, maybe you should've sent a falcon," I suggested.
"Probably, but Hernandez wasn't willing to risk one, even now they are moving at slow place and a meter above ground level. Supposedly they can't be identified from orbit that way."
"Ok…?"
"Yes, that's what I though too Sergeant, talk to me as soon as you reach the hill," she ordered and left the conversation.
"It's Staff Sergeant," I muttered.
"Well, as I was saying…" Pavel started.
This time we were interrupted yet again, only that it wasn't by our own, instead, a nice little banshee popped into view from right above a dune. It immediately spotted us and started positioning itself for a strafing run.
"They're here already?" Pavel asked. I looked at him and shrugged in response.
"What now?" he asked calmly.
"Normally, I'd say we hide," I suggested.
"Great, you start digging while I distract it," he said.
"Ok, go," I said.
"What? Really?" he asked surprised.
"No idiot, I'll draw its fire, you just use your M247," I told him.
"That's more like it," he said as he started breaking apart from me.
The banshee finally decided to attack and started spraying my mongoose with plasma, I managed to avoid being hit and passed right underneath the banshee, I turned around and shot it a couple of times as it turned around for a second strafing run. This time it got peppered by fire from Pavel, unfortunately, a couple of shots made contact with my mongoose, melting away some of the metallic pieces of the vehicle.
I floored the accelerator and started heading sideways so that the banshee had to turn to shoot me. The craft was flying a meter above the ground, it was at time like this that I wished I had plasma grenades, but a regular M9 would have to do for now.
"Pavel?" I asked.
"On it," he replied.
I turned around after a few seconds to see my friend toss a grenade into the path of the speeding banshee. It detonated just as the flier passed over it, blowing out the rear half of the craft and sending it crashing into the ground. It hadn't been flying high, so it simply skidded through the sand until it stopped.
"Nice one," I said, complimenting my friend.
"I aim to please," he said.
We headed towards the wrecked banshee with our weapons aimed at the wreckage. The banshee tilted to the side a little bit and we found ourselves facing a brute pilot missing two of its legs. It was obviously in pain, but it still managed to snarl at us and try to grab our legs with its hands. We didn't go closer, it was still a brute, which meant it was still dangerous.
"So it's brutes then," I stated.
"Looks like it," Pavel agreed.
"Ok, let's go," I said.
We hopped on our mongooses and left the dying, bleeding brute to its fate in the vast desert.
We finally reached the hill ten minutes later. We stopped to take a good look at it before contacting Captain Sharma. The hill in question was a regular-looking hill. It was roughly round in shape, with slopes that weren't steep at all. It got better higher up in the hill, as near its top it had a cliff of sorts protecting the summit. Around it there were two smaller hills. All were made of the same dark brown rock.
"Captain," I asked.
"Yes," she answered, the sound of vehicles was evident on the other side of the channel.
"We're here, found a lone banshee patrol on the way her. Brutes."
"Yes, it seems like the carrier has already landed. Two of the enemy ships were destroyed at the cost of seven of our own. A third CCS-class cruiser was damaged and rendered inoperable, but the supercarrier managed to save most of its crew and equipment. The ship landed some eighty kilometers away from the hill."
"Too close," I said.
"Unfortunately, yes," but the Navy is already launching an operation to disable its engines, we currently lack the firepower to actually destroy the craft. We'd probably run out of nukes if we tried to take it out. Those things were as deadly as… well, as deadly as supercarriers. There's nothing that compares to it on any side of the war. The craft is actually almost thirty fucking kilometers long, equipped with standard covvie plasma weaponry and shields. Up to eleven, of course. I couldn't see it from here, the curve of the small moon prevented me from doing just that, but it would only need to pivot on its edges three times to arrive here. It was large as fuck.
Hours later the hill was bustling with activity. The tanks had been dug into trenches to serve as stationary artillery to defend our base. The summit of the hill was covered with AA machine guns and missile pods, all of the Armadillos had been placed inside a recently-created cave, around that cave camouflage netting had been set up to house all the equipment that the IFVs needed to run. The Falcons had been landed on the top of the hill, which was flat enough to serve as a decent landing pad for the airships. The Rattlesnakes were simply placed near the slopes of the hill and the pelicans had been landed on the side facing away from the direction of the enemy. Regular troops had set up their tents in the slopes of the hill, while officers and command was on the better-protected summit.
"Johnson's regiment and the sixtieth will move in to cut off any dropped troops here and here," Major Hernandez was telling Sharma. "Then they will take out…" he looked at Pavel and me.
"Oh, don't worry, I called them in," Sharma said.
The Major ignored us and resumed his jargon, my mate and I headed towards a corner of the tent to talk to Nezarian.
"What do you know?" I asked.
"Seems like the Navy strike succeeded, they managed to eliminate the ship's capacity to actually move," he said.
"Already?" Pavel asked, surprised. "That was quick."
"Yes, unfortunately a dozen boats were sunk," he stated. "They used nukes to take out its shields, looked like about five of them from what I've heard, then a few MAC shots to the ship's rear took out its engines. They might've managed to wreck one of the ship's plasma projectors, but I don't have confirmation on that."
"Shit," I said. "A dozen ships?"
He nodded. "The Inconvenience didn't take part in the attack, too small."
"I see, so now what?" I asked.
"Well, we take out all of the covvie troops from the ship, no other way around it, the few nukes that we have will be used to stage attacks on the ship, so I doubt that we'll simply get nuclear rain to fall on this desert."
"You're telling me we're about to start a campaign for this little piece of sand?" Pavel asked.
"Seems like that's the case."
Hello, just apologizing for this short chapter. Hope you enjoy.