Chapter LVII: A Pleasant Stroll

February 20, 2542 (UNSC Calendar)/

Grid Y21, Peninsula Laccia, Aztlan, Eta Cassopie System

"That's not a lot of information," Pavel noted.

"Hey, no worse than the usual," I optimistically said.

"Actually, I do believe it is worse."
He was right. It was worse. We often got sent in dangerous missions with 50% survivability rate and where it was likely that we would die. We often had to complete them through several and various different types of wounds involving plasma or needles. You know, the usual in our business. Not trying to brag or anything.

"Fifteen seconds!" someone yelled through our radios.

You see, pilots are big fans of yelling, they yell at you to move it so that they can bail out of there, they yell at you to hurry up and get to the LZ, they yell at you to tell you that you're arriving to the DZ, and they yell at you whenever they see a multiple of five in their countdown clock to arrive someplace important. Every pilot I know likes yelling, even Marina, she's a screamer. Ka-pow. I am the most awesomest person in existence.

"Five seconds!"

We were on board a falcon, which was rather unusual since they were mostly used by Army and not Marines. Sure, there was the occasional gunship here and there, but Marines tended to stick to Pelicans and Hornets, even though I am not entirely sure why the higher-ups chose to keep Hornets and use them as transportation methods for infantry. Those things didn't even have straps. They also happened to offer no protection for any passengers. Not that I am in a position to complain about it, those thins have saved my life a couple of times.

"Now! Now! Now!" the pilot yelled.

We hopped off the falcon gunship and reached the floor before the pilot was even done screaming into his mouthpiece. Pavel did a flashy combat roll and then aimed at his previously designated sector. I rolled my eyes while I aimed my rifle in the general direction of my line of fire. Not that I was expecting any trouble, if there were any enemies nearby they would've shot at us a lot earlier, covvies weren't particularly famous for their fire discipline.

We started moving away from the hovering VTOL and made our way into the dense jungle all around us. We had a tough mission ahead of us. We were behind enemy lines, the only stuff that we had to survive could fit in a backpack that was about a cubic foot. That made for about two weeks worth of food plus two days of pre-packed water. We would have to get most of our liquids from the jungle around us if we needed to. I really hoped that we could get this thing done within a day and a half tops, but the way things tend to go it would probably be closer to a week or so of roaming the jungle while avoiding patrols and looking for an enemy hierarch.

Yep.

"Which way?" Pavel asked.

"Ahead bro," I said. "No other way to go."
"Well, actually we could go 360 different ways, but yeah, I get your point."
By that time we were about two hundred meters from where we were originally dropped. Any contact that we had with the UNSC was now lost. Sure, we could contact the UNSC in a second with the satellite comlink that we had been issued for this mission, but it was supposed to be for emergencies only or for a nuclear strike. Even then it was dangerous to use because our signal would be easily traceable and we would receive a nice squad of banshees for our efforts.

"So," Pavel started saying through our helmets' radio (that one was undetectable), "If you had three superpowers, what would they be?"

"Hmm, good question," I said. "So many to choose from, besides, the combination would have to be ideal."
"Exactly."
I thought about it for a some time while I made my way through the undergrowth and navigated around tree trunks as thick as an elephant troop transport. More than once I had shivered at the sight of a beetle the size of a watermelon. It really wasn't nice being in this jungle. I kept expecting a velociraptor to pop up somewhere and ambush me. They say that those things could open doors. Can you imagine? All we needed was intelligent lizards against us as well. Or maybe we would've fought our common enemy, who knows?

"We've been walking for hours," Pavel complained. "Can't we stop now?"

I knew he was kidding, he knew that we had to keep going for a few more hours or until we found an enemy patrol or encampment.

"No Pavel," I said in a fatherly tone. "We need to keep walking."
"But Fra-ank," he said in a childish voice.

I chuckled and stepped over a huge root. My VISR was set to detect enemy heat signatures and silhouettes, but so far nothing of interest had been spotted by the helmet's electronics. I had seen more than a few organisms that would fuel enough nightmares for a couple of years. Oh, and I had stepped on shit puddles the size of a car. Apparently they belonged to a herd of whatnots.

"How do you even know which animal pooped this shit?" I asked Pavel after I finished wiping my boot on some weeds.

"I read about it," he said. "Wanted to get as much info on this rock as possible."
"You don't read," I reminded him.

"Well, truth be told, I got lost in one of those online encyclopedias," he explained with a shrug.

"You mean Wikipedia?" I suggested.

"Yeah, might've been that one," he said.

"Had to be that one. No other online encyclopedias have existed for about five hundred years Pavel."
"You're mean," he said.

"Well, I'm mad that you might be taking me down from my throne."
"What throne?"
"The knows-an-absurdly-amount-of-utterly-pointless-and-useless-data," I snapped.

"I don't know if you just insulted yourself or me."
I didn't know either so I just shrugged theatrically and moved on ahead. The map of the area had the rough positions of large enemy troop concentrations and some arrows and dotted lines that delimitated their areas of operation and all that. For a simple infantry grunt like me (albeit an extremely good-looking and talented one), it all came down to one thing: avoid the red zones as much as possible. That golden rule was then bound to change to: get inside the large red zone as deep as possible without being stopped. And then get the hell out.

Yeah, it's as fucking difficult as it sounds.

"So, any new conversation topics?" Pavel asked.

"Not really, action movies don't really focus on the boring days before the big moment," I said.

"Yeah, and we're not even on that many long-term missions."
"Besides," I added, "last time we were on one, you wouldn't stop talking about Chloe."

"Hey, don't even get me started on that 'hypothetical' Marina vs. Layla discussion. You were mentally cheating on your girlfriend."
"I was not. Besides, it is allowed."
"By who?"

"It's general knowledge Pavel, read a book."

"That hurts Frank," he said. "Really does."

We must've looked pretty weird. Two tall, strong, armored special operations operators having a discussion about who was stupider through our radios. With all the body motions to accompany our very fine points and no sound to know what we were talking about, an outside observer would've taken us for two escaped mental patients. We kept on having a very intellectual and mature conversation about why my conversations were more entertaining than his or the other way around. It was a debate that was solved through clever use of words and fine points. It eventually ended like this.

"Well your mom thinks brutes are geniuses," Pavel snapped.

"I don't even know how to respond to that," I responded after a moment of confusion. The comment had come out of the blue.

"Damn right you don't, this makes thirteen to nine."
"You're counting? Wait, never mind, you don't get a win if I don't know what the hell you're talking about."
"Well somebody's a sore looser," he said in a baby voice.

"Well somebody is a sore winner," I mimicked.

Pavel then babbled something that was meant to sound like the way I spoke.

"Yes Pavel, we all know that doing two brain extenuating activities such as walking and talking at the same time can severely impair your ability to do one of them. I'm just glad you didn't trip this time."
Pavel opened his mouth to say something clever but then closed it and kept quiet. Well, at least I like to imagine that he opened his mouth, because, unlike me, his visor was completely polarized.

"Twelve to ten," I said. "And I did it with intelligent comments and big words."
"Screw you."

"Halt," I said.

"Halt? Really?"

"Yes, are you deaf or something?"

By that time both Pavel and I were crouching in combat stances with him aiming to the left of the area ahead of us and me aiming to the right. I had just heard a twig or something snap for like the fourth time in an hour. I was pretty sure that it was nothing, but protocol dictated that we should make sure it wasn't a cute squirrel first. I was about to move ahead to check on the source of the noise when I heard a couple of dull thuds and a squeal.

"Oh shit."
"Climb a tree?" Pavel suggested.

"Not like there's anywhere else to hide."
Truth be told, we were in a dense jungle with plenty of places to hide, but climbing a tree just seemed fitting to the moment. After all, that's what they have done in the movies ever since film was invented, maybe even before that in novels and plays and whatnot. I gave Pavel a boost and he pulled himself on top of a branch. I used my super-enhanced muscles to jump and reach for Pavel's hand. Hey, I was good and all, but I wasn't that superhuman. He pulled me up and we climbed a couple more branches just in case.

"Ok, here's good," I said as I sat back on a comfy shooting position and Pavel changed his magazine to shredder rounds instead.

I switched the display in my helmet from regular to thermal. I was almost blinded by the amount of red. It was scary, trees were supposed to show up as blue or light yellow, but here they were more like orange. Testament to the heat going on outside of my bulky-yet-climate-controlled-armor. My helmet's optics immediately picked up something different from the surrounding area. It was ten bulky shapes moving through the jungle. I could tell they were not human but couldn't make out the species as the edges of their heat signatures blended with the background, but they distinctly moved like covvies.

"See em?"
"Yep," he replied.

"What do you want to do?" I asked.

"You're the boss," Pavel said with a shrug.

I glanced at the map of the area and figured that this group must be a patrol from one of the smaller Covenant camps. We could follow it and do some sabotage or we could simply avoid the patrol and mark this area on our map as one frequented by enemies. We were close to one of the smallest red areas, so I decided that it was worth a shot at least placing some C7 on a couple of plasma coils and have it detonate a few hours later.

"We follow them," I said.

"Afraid you'd say that."
We waited for the patrol to pass right under our feet and saw that it was an elite clad in blue armor and eight grunts. There was a jackal scout walking ahead of the main group, but their strength was eyesight, not smell. It didn't even glance in our direction. When the rest of the group passed right next to our tree I tensed up. A grunt lagged behind the group and took a sniff, it looked around and I took careful aim at its head. The grunt got close to the tree and for a moment I was scared it would see us. Then it turned around and squatted. I almost laughed when I realized it was taking a shit. Pavel even elbowed me in the ribs.

I relaxed a little and watched the grunt go. It looked like it hadn't gone in a while because it was pouring out what looked like its own weight in processed food. That went on for about ten seconds until there was a nice pile of oddly colored shit next to the tree. The grunt turned and looked like it was sniffing the air once more. Once it was satisfied, it prepared to turn around. Then it saw us.

"Shit," I muttered.

The grunt barely had time to squeal before I put one between its eyes, blowing out the rear of its skull in a disturbingly beautiful spray of alien blood. Pavel opened up on the aliens farther up ahead with his machine gun. He would've used his shotgun, but had decided against bringing it for this mission. Three grunts fell under Pavel's barrage before I switched to thermal again and aimed for the elite. I managed to take it out with three bursts to the chest and one to the neck. It was still twitching by the time Pavel hit the last grunt in the belly and killed it.

"Oh shit," I said, my first words since I had fired the first shot, just ten seconds ago.

"Better get moving."
True that.

I jumped off the tree and was careful not to land in the pile of oddly colored shit on my way down. Pavel, apparently, didn't have the same reservations about the issue and landed with a sickly squick on the pile of goo.

"Oh shit."
Oh shit indeed.

"Ok, let's get moving before someone decides that they miss a patrol," I suggested.

"Yeah, wait a moment."

Pavel jogged about thirty meters away from me and made sure all the corpses were in fact corpses. It took a long look at the still-twitching elite and gave it a nice, bloody, loud, curb-stomp.

"I just love doing that," he said sheepishly once he came back.

"Hey, take it easy," I said. "Love doing that myself."
Yeah, I'm a psychopath. Nothing you can do about it.

Ok, so we now found ourselves in a difficult situation right? The entire enemy forces (which was like a lot) would soon be combing this entire area for us, angry and looking for vengeance. We would have to hide a lot more than we usually did, which right now wasn't really that much, and we would probably get in a couple of other firefights. Well, we could make the most of it and move towards the bulk of the enemy forces instead of away from them, they wouldn't really expect that. I don't think that anyone would.

"And with a good reason!" Pavel said after I explained him my plan. "No one is stupid enough to run at an overwhelming enemy force."
This debate ranged on for a while, in reality, we were heading towards the bulk of the Covenant ground forces on this side of the planet, the large red area in our map. Pavel was to busy complaining and being a whinny little girl about it to notice, so I purposely kept the discussion going while we walked. If this went on for another hour or so we might just be close enough to the red zone for me to convince Pavel to go there and kick some serious religious ass.

Ha, see how it rhymed?

"Frank, I know that you think highly of your skills and everything, but you are simply not good enough."

I decided whether to say 'Challenge accepted!' or whether I should call him out on insulting me.

"Do you want me to prove you wrong?" I asked with an annoyed tone.

"Ok, maybe that was a poor choice of wording for my argument," Pavel admitted.

"Yeah, it was."
"Well, Frank, they will be looking for us back there and they will be more alert in front, that means that it will be…" he stopped mid-sentence.

I could just tell that Pavel had popped the map and cross-referenced our current position with the one we had been in fifteen minutes ago. We were a good distance away from where we started and obviously closer to our goal of reaching the prophet. My friend stuttered for a few seconds before he could think of something coherent to say to me for tricking him into following me towards the place he wanted to get away from.

"You fucking asshole."
Yeah, it wasn't that wonderfully worded, but it got his feelings across very clearly, which was all he needed to do. I laughed behind me depolarized faceplate for Pavel to see and get him angrier, it would get me a couple dozen extra meters before he finally realized what he was doing and stopped and stomped on the floor like the little girl that was deep, deep inside him.

"You bastard."

"Come on, we're not even that far!" I said.

"Just because you tricked me," he reminded me.

"Still counts."
"Damn you."

We were still walking. I reached a dense bunch of leaves and weed and pulled out my knife to cut through it. Pavel would follow me out of pride or something, he wouldn't enjoy being called out of being afraid of the creepy jungle trail. Besides, he pretty much had to since I was his superior officer. If only I had realized that at the time it would saved me a long and pointless discussion that would've ended in me getting what I wanted. On retrospect, that makes me look like the idiot of the story and not Pavel.

"Whoa," I said as I almost fell down a cliff.

"What?"
It was hard to describe you see. In front of me was an average sized valley, this side was blocked off by massive cliffs about a kilometer high and the left and right sides (in front of me) were instead regular mountains while the land in front of me gently sloped upwards. There were absolutely no trees on the valley. No flora and no fauna, just a barren muddy wasteland. Well, there was no fauna unless you count alien species as animals.

Hovering above the valley was a single CCS-class battlecruiser and a smaller corvette a lot closer to the ground. Normally, this would've been a great find, with the UNSC not knowing where in the hell these two ships were thanks to the elaborate Covenant cloaking technology, and normally, we would've called in an artillery strike on the area. An artillery strike with small nuclear warheads that were commonly used in ship-to-ship combat. Or perhaps we could settle for a Shiva or a Havok. Well, the point was that we would've called in a rain of fire and radiation on this covvie's asses.

"What were Wilkins' exact words?" I asked.

"Something along the lines of: We can't use one because of the cloaking and interference."
"No, after that, on the falcon," I corrected him.

"Oh, yeah," Pavel said.

While on our way here a particular situation had changed for the glorious UNSC Navy. Apparently they had managed to nuke two cruisers out of the sky. Space. It took them about a million nukes and a more than a handful of MAC shots in addition to the ships that they certainly lost. Now they had one or two more cruisers to deal with along with the four frigates that they didn't manage to take out. It seemed like they were all focusing on the last cruiser (or two, I loose count) in orbit. The frigates could be dealt with later.

"Fucking Navy just told us to fucking screw ourselves with the nuke, so no calling in a nuclear strike even if you find their fucking army hiding in the rain. And I am quoting that fucking admiral here!" the professional Wilkins had yelled through the radio. Not so professional now.

"So, what do you want to do?" I asked with a grin on my face.

"Frank, you'd have to be very, very stupid to go in there. It's two of us against thousands of them, no backup, no aircraft, no nothing. Can't we call in an Army or Marines nuke?" he asked.

"Only way to deliver those is through airstrikes…"
"They'll be shot down," Pavel noted.

"Or missiles…"

"They'll be shot down," he admitted.

"Or by convoy."
"Which would be turned into molten slag of metal."
"So, what option does that leave?" I asked. "None, so that means no nuke for us."
"Frank…"
"We're already here, we might as well earn our paycheck."
I honestly don't know why I was so insistent about this mission in particular. I generally ran away from incredibly overwhelming odds when I had the chance and means to do so. Something inside of me wanted to accomplish this mission and blow those two prophets' brains off their skulls and into the faces of their surprised bodyguards with my battle rifle. For some reason I wanted to take focus all my anger against the Covenant on those two individuals, like it was somehow their fault in particular.

"You'd have to be incredibly stupid to go in there," Pavel said, but I knew I had him convinced already.

"No," I corrected him, "not stupid. Just crazy enough."