Chapter LXIV: Blown Away Redux
March 13, 2542 (UNSC Calendar)/
Aztlan, Eta Cassopie System
"Back to basics."
"Run!" Two yelled.. Those were her last words before she was pierced by a needle rifle. Actually, those were her last words overall.
"Anne!" the lieutenant cried out.
"Keep running!" I yelled at her. Four tripped on a thick root, luckily enough, the fall caused him to avoid three different blasts from various types of Covenant weaponry. As he fell down his rucksack opened up and a small ten by ten inch plastic briefcase slid out. It looked like one of those consoles where you directed airstrikes from. In the twenty-second century. It must've been the package, so I grabbed it and helped Four up as the trees all around splintered from plasma fire.
I stepped over a large tree that only seconds ago had been standing upright. The air all around me was now sizzling hot from all the plasma shots, the temperature display in my HUD had gone up some two and a half degrees Celsius in the last minute and a half from the enemy fire alone. The exploding needler shards weren't exactly helping my situation either, with flora raining on me from every imaginable direction.
I started sprinting faster and faster, disregarding all the instructions I'd been told about keeping myself "normal." Pavel, almost superhuman in his own right was the only one who managed to stay close behind me. Everyone else turned into green dots that were further and further away from the middle of my motion censor, while the covvies behind them were a huge red wall that closed in with every passing moment.
You could say I was in a very uncomfortable situation, and truth be told, I actually was in a less than desirable place. That's an understatement. It wasn't really that bad though, just keep running in front of that Irish rookie and I'd be fine in the time it took me to run three kilometers. Who am I kidding? this sucked. One step in the wrong direction, on inch to the left or right and my head might just serve to stop an incoming proyectile.
Things started going really haywire when everyone left except for Pavel and me dropped out of my motion sensor. I didn't actually know if they died, I just turned of their vitals off and tried to ignore their grunts and sounds of surprise as I cut off the radio chanel. It all happened very fast. I turned my head just in time to see the Irish kid stop and turn to fire a long burst from his assault rifle in the distance, I wasn't able to see anyone else. The Irish kid sprayed, hitting absolutely nothing. He was cut down within seconds, he actually managed to get killed by a sword-wielding elite. Probably not the most glamorous or heroic way to go, but still a pretty painless one.
Idiot, I thought.
"You got that right," my comm crackled. The statement was accompanied by a chuckle. apparently I had been thinking out loud. Again.
Pavel and I were the only remaining members of Titan Squad. In fact, we were the only remaining members of both Titan and Anvil squads it seemed.
I didn't bother answering him. I kept running as fast as I could while tossing my flashbang supply at carefully timed intervals. By this time I had mastered the art of firing while on the run. It was a skill that came really useful, especially if you can actually hit something that you can't really see. From the sound of it, I might have nailed a grunt or a jackal.
Two minutes later of frantic runnning and dodging I finally emerged from the dense tropical jungle of Aztlan. In front of me was a two-hundred-meter stretch of land that was devoid of anything other than dirt, craters and corpses, obviously not your everyday clearing. Just over the two-hundred-meter mark there was probably the most imposing looking trench to have ever been built in the world. In this world at least.
I stopped for a fraction of a second to make sure that my friend was still with me. A black blur against the bright greens, purples and yellows of the rainforest confirmed that and I resumed my dead man's sprint. I hadn't gone more than one step when the whole air in front of me exploded.
Technically speaking it was only the oxigen in the air that exploded, but when a large area in front of you actually blows up, you can't really spare the time to worry about the technicalities. I threw myself to the floor and happened to land in a very muddy crater that was halfway filled with water, the other half was filled with blood. Since the blood was red, it made it human blood, but I chose not to think about its origin at the moment. Hell, it still creeps me out when I think about that redder-than-normal water.
I stayed in that crater for about fifteen seconds before I realized that the air I was breathing tasted somewhat stale and a bit boring for the colorful atmosphere of Aztlan. Only then did I realize that the explosion had burnt all the breathable air that was remotely near me, so I would be breathing that boring air for at least fifteen more minutes. I was lucky that I was an ODST, my helmet had a small supply of oxigen in case of emergencies.
I finally dared to raise my head above the rim of my comfy-yet-creepy crater. The first thing I saw was that the tranchline in front of me had been reduced to molten glass. The barricades and fortifications were now smoldering heaps of molten metal and smoking corpses. I turned around and noticed that the jungle a couple of meters behind me was greatly reduced in density. Covies don't usually miss when they perform danger-close bombardments from orbit in support of their ground troops, but this time they managed to both eliminate the army chasing me and the army waiting for me without actualy managing to land a single first-degree burn on me. So much for precision. I'd probably get some nasty blisters in the back of my neck, but I was feeling very triumphant right now.
I stood up and managed to lift my rifle up to my shoulder while I looked around.
"Always a showoff aren't you?" said Pavel Klaus, my only and oldest friend. It looked like he would still hold that honorable position for a little longer, even if a little longer meant forty-five more seconds. We still weren't dead and it wasn't in my schedule to change that.
I can't believe I just wrote that, corny action movie line.
I looked behind me and broke off my pose to shoot a stumbling elite that was missing it's right arm up to its shoulder. It went down with a single round. Someone must've messed with the covvies targeting quite a bit for them to miss by that much. I thanked the AI that hacked into the enemy system or the UNSC ship that fired on the bombarding Covenant ship at the exact moment. Hey, the blast might've not killed us anyways, but it sure as hell wouldn't have killed the army on our ass.
"You wish you could look as good as I do right now Pavel," I said.
He chuckled and gestured at his semi-wrecked armor.
"You got that right," he retorted. With a heavy dose of sarcasm in his voice. Once you are in the face of death for the thousandth time, you start taking a less philosophical look at it and try to make the best of what little time you have left. If that meant laughing like a deranged man to make myself feel better, then I was ok with it.
I chuckled and simply started trotting towards the wreckage of my front line. I stepped carefully on the patches of molten glass that didn't shine bright red, those were as hot as lava and wouldn't stick to my boot and then slowly roast my foot. I crossed the fifty-meter-thick strip of molten glass while treading carefully and then another hundred meters before stopping on a tree stump that was actually quite comfortable for a tree that had just been blown to splinters. I crossed my leg over my knee and pulled out my combat knife. I scraped off the already-cooling glass of my boots and waited for Pavel to do the same. We kept walking without a sound for a while longer in silence.
"How much longer?" my impatient partner asked.
"Check your goddamend HUD!"
"Well, since I asked you it probably means that I'm too goddamned lazy to do so myself."
I didn't bother answering, instead I simply took of my helmet (which is against regulations, especially in a combat zone) and kept walking.
"Oh no. How will I check my HUD map now?" I said in a completely emotionless voice.
Pavel just cursed and in a matter of few seconds shouted out the answer to his own question.
"Half a click."
I nodded and put my helmet back on. I managed to smile at the thought of a nice and safe pelican evac to the UNSC Inconvenience followed by a quick series of computer generated random slipspace jumps. We'd be in another allegedly safe colony within two weeks.
Unfortunately it was never that simple, and this time was not going to be the exception. I heard the familiar grunting noises of elites and the high pitched squeals of grunts up ahead, they were within thirty feet. For the first time in the past month I actually thanked whichever god was up there for making this jungle so goodamned dense. If we couldn't see them through all the plants, odds were that they couldn't see us wither.
Pavel and I both dropped to a cave-like depression that was formed by a thick tree root above and a rocky back. Then we waited. Those thirty seconds were probably the longest thirty seconds of the past two and a half months of my life.
Shortly after I heard the heavy thumps that only an elite could make. They were almost elegant yet somehow managed to sound rough and dangerous. Elites were a warrior race through and through. The thumping stopped and I almost squealed as the two red-clad legs of an elite major suddenly appeared right in front of me. The legs stood still for a few seconds and I could almost picture the elite turning its head and sniffing the air, sensing that something was wrong. I then saw around six grunts and two jackals appear in front of the elite.
I glanced at Pavel. He nodded at me and I moved my rifle as noislessly as I could. I brought it up and changed the BR55's setting from three-round-burst to full auto. Thankfully, it didn't click as loudly as it could've. Keeping your gun clean actually does help in more ways than one when you think about it.
I pushed my back to the floor and launched a two-legged kick at the knee-joint of the elite. My armored boots contacted nicely and I managed to keep them going forward instead of slipping to the sides of the elite's leg. I don't know if the joint actually broke, but the kick brought the small giant to the floor. I left my small cave with a jump and brought my boot down on the chest of the elite, the metal made an ugly crunching sound as it pushed the energy shields down against the combat harnes of the alien. I then emptied half my magazine into the face of the ugly alien while keeping it down with one leg. Meanwhile Pavel made himself useful and strafed the lesser squadmates of the elite with his M247L. He managed to knock down one grunt and both jackals. I put three rounds in the now unshielded elite's face and then turned to check the area behind our backs, our last-resort fall-back point was supposed to be that way. Not that there were many options left, we just had to run away from the covvies if we wanted to survive at all.
Pavel killed the remaining grunts with well placed bursts and then we resumed our march. By this time we were both exhausted. We had ran, climbed, stumbled, and crawled more distance than anyone should in their whole lives in the past day alone. This time our movement was different, our rifles were up and ready to fire, as were we. We crossed some sort of hedge that was acting as a wall between a couple of trees and found ourselves in front of at least fifty covenant soldiers. Hunters included.
Pavel and I jumped backwards at the same time just before plasma fire flew above our heads. We scrambled as fast as possible towards a thick tree as soon as we landed on the ground, plasma bolts were hitting the dirt all over the place, leaving it scorched and bright red for a few instants.
"Eliza?" I shouted into my com. "This is Frank, do you copy? We need some help ASAP!" There was no answer, only static. "Dammit!" I screamed into my helmet. I took a couple of deep breaths before I calmed myself down and then glanced at Pavel.
"You do realize we're as good as dead?" I asked.
He simply nodded as he heaved his LMG. We stayed there for a few moments as the tree we were in started to disintegrate and atomize with the intense heat of the plasma. It was probably on fire already, but I barely noticed any of it. I was a dead man. I had suspected it for the last hours, but it was only now hitting me that I was going to die.
"Not just yet Frankie," he said. I knew waht he meant.
"Count your rounds?" I suggested, remembering the time when that phrase saved my life.
"Count your rounds," my squadmate acknowladged grimly.
We jumped from cover, our guns blazing to meet death in the face like the heroes in the action flicks did. Unfortunately (or fortunately, now that I think about it), we didn't get that honor. Suddenly, the ground in front of us and under the covies balooned upwards and cracked. Through those cracks came flames. It was a beautiful spectacle and it seemed to happen in slow motion, with the blast throwing the covvies into the air or simply engulfing them completely. Only moments later I felt the shockwave slam me into the same tree we had been using as cover. It wasn't like in those action movies I mentioned earlier, where people fly into objects thirty feet away and turn out to be fine. It was more like a shove. A shove that managed to collapse one of my lungs and turn one of my kidneys into mush. Some shove indeed. SGMs tend to have that effect, especially when they detonate less than a hundred meters in front of you.
To this day I am not sure who authorized the use of space-to-ground missiles. Those things are large enough to destroy scarabs and cloaking spires in one shot and this one was used on a comparatively small group of infantry. If I knew who authorized the launch I would've given him or her a big wet kiss on the lips followed by a knee to the balls. Unless it was a shee, in which case I'd simply give her a kiss, or not, Marina's the jealous type. Whoever let Eliza launch that missile saved my life and Pavel's.
My vision started going dark at the edges right as I spotted a pelican in the distance. As it got closer I thought to myself that it would all be just fine and that I could just let myself fall unconscious and I'd wake up a week or two later in an comfortable hospital bed with a cloned kidney and a reinflated lung, ready to jump into the fight again after receiving the obligatory medals, commendations, and the like.
Unfortunately, reality didn't quite meet up to my expectations, the pain kept me alive. I watched as ten regulars dismounted from the red-painted pelican and bayoneted the survivng Covenant soldiers with mechanical precision. The two hunters were treated as materiel and were instead blown up with three grenades each, just to be sure that the missile blast killed them. Finally two marines, one of which was a very pretty corpsman with blonde hair carried me onto a stretcher.
Funny, here I am, on the verge of death, saved in part by my amazing girlfriend and I can't help thinking how pretty this woman looks.
The corpsman ignored the smile I gave her as she took of my helmet. It probably wasn't much of a smile either, since I was coughing up blood and there was even more blood streaming down from my head, courtesy of a rock that landed on my head in account to that blast I just mentioned. The ground started moving all aorund me as the stretcher was lifted and suddenly I wasn't able to tell where up was. I tried not to move lest I fallo f the stretcher and make my injuries worse.
Pavel was limping and being helped by two other marines. He did his best to try to push them away without discouraging them from helping him too much. That way he looked like a badass and still got two marines to help him walk the five meters to the pelican blod tray. I let my head fall back and had a breathing masked attached to my face. The space around me turned a lot darker andi t wasn't just because I was now inside the pelican. I looked at the boring metal ceiling of the pelican and could feel the craft flying away before everyone around me turned into vague silhouettes. The last thing I remember was having a big-ass needle being stuck in my chest before I finally managed to slip into unconsciousness.
Man, getting blown up sucks.
Due to a couple of petitions I didn't definitely kill off all of the other ODST's. They might just return later on. Also, I appreciate your reviews and will do my best to meet your expectations. I hope you enjoyed this chapter.
-casquis