Chapter XCIII: Spire II
June 26, 2543 (UNSC Calendar)/
Constante, Ninive, Zeta Argenteus System
Lieutenant Yevgeny Nezarian
"Sounds good to me," I told Frank. "I'll contact you before we jump."
"We'll provide the distraction, I assume?"
"Correct."
"Roger, Reaper out."
I cut the channel and turned to face my platoon. It was five men short, all of them had been killed in the past few days as a direct result of this battle. The rest of them were holding up pretty well, but you never know when one can decide that he or she has been through too much and eat a bullet. Of the surviving members only one person was injured. I am ashamed to say that that person was me.
I don't know if it had been bad luck on my side or good luck on the jackal's side, but the carbine round had grazed my arm. It wasn't a particularly bad wound, but it stung like hell and annoyed me every time I moved my arm in certain directions. The anti-radiation medicaments that I had taken also made me feel queasy. Leave it to the Covenant to invent a weapon that fires radioactive ammunition, costing us even more money that would be better spent elsewhere.
"Valeri, how are we on ammunition and supplies?" I asked my second-in command. I used the universally understood English instead of the Russian that I usually used with my best friend. Despite being an inconvenience of sorts for me it made it seem that I cared whether my men understood me or not.
"We're probably at fifty percent on both," the sergent replied. "But if we're jumping that shouldn't be much of a worry, should it?"
I smiled at my friend. "It always pays off to be cautious, doesn't it? I believe it was you who once told me that."
"Somehow it never stuck," Valeri muttered, obviously not amused at having had his own words used against him. "I can come up with at least ten different examples of you failing to be cautious in the last three days."
"Please, go ahead."
"Well, maybe not ten," he admitted.
"Worry not, we'll be out of this goddamned tower and towards safety and hot showers in some twenty minutes."
"I hope so, lieutenant, I hope so."
It always annoyed me when Valeri called me that. I was his friend, he could've called me anything and I wouldn't have minded, but the man insisted on following protocol when we were deployed or in front of other members of the platoon. It annoyed me further that he only seemed to follow that particular piece of protocol when addressing me. You can pick your friends, but you can't go around fixing every little thing that you don't like in them.
I sat down on one of the couches. The top floor restaurant had been a five star place for the rich and famous just a few weeks ago, now it was simply a room full of soldiers and overturned tables. Half the alcohol was still here, I had allowed my men to pick whichever bottles they wanted to, but I had made it extremely clear that anyone who had so much as a sip of alcohol would be harshly punished. I myself had picked the oldest bottle of scotch that I could find. The oldest reserves tend to be more expensive, and in turn, better tasting. Perhaps I could ask Castillo over for a drink to celebrate leaving this place alive.
Perhaps I could ask over his new female subordinate instead…
"Don't wonder off lieutenant, we might face trouble any moment now," Valeri warned.
I sighed, I knew that the man was right. I don't consider myself a pessimist, but enough time fighting a war will turn any person from a wide-eyed idealist into the worst of cynics. Even Castillo, who was cheery and jolly most of the time was an incredibly cynical person. Sure, he tried to hide it and denied it vehemently when I suggested the possibility, but I knew the truth and I think that deep down so did he.
Talk about not taking the mask off.
I stood up from the couch that I had just sat down in. It was one of the only intact pieces of furniture that had been placed in the restaurant's bar section. It was insanely comfortable by any standards and it pained my ass to stand up from it.
My rangers weren't doing anything productive. The few that I had sent to stand guard were doing their job, but the rest of them were either playing cards or trying to catch a quick nap. I don't blame them, but we were in a combat zone, they didn't have the luxury to play backjack.
"All right, listen up!" I yelled in my usual serious business tone. The manner of my voice gathered everyone's attention and elicited a few groans of complaint. You'd think that I would normally speak like that, but I constantly reminded myself to go back to my command voice when talking to my men in combat situations. "Reaper Squad, who some of you are familiar with," I started. I name dropped Frank's squad to gather the men's attention. The Helljumpers were all but legends in the Inconvenience, and they were similarly famous for their exploits in certain circles in the UNSCDF.
"…will soon be joining us. Rather we'll be joining them. There is a large building with a wide roof, a warehouse by the looks of it a hundred or so meters away from our position."
I didn't know the exact position, my rangefinder had been damaged and the support drones had been shot down so I had been forced to judge the distance by eyesight. The rain hadn't really helped.
"Castillo and Reaper will be taking over the warehouse and we'll be doing a short jump to their direction. From there we'll head back towards our line."
The men all nodded and stood up even before I issued any orders.
"I want all of you to get your jetpacks and triple check them. The same goes for anything that goes strapped to your bodies. As soon as we get word from Reaper we jump en masse. The quicker we get of this wretched rock, the better. Understood?"
I would've liked a more uniform reply, but every man and woman acknowledged my orders with different words. Call me eccentric, but I am the kind of officer that wants all of his subordinates to reply unanimously and with the same phrase.
"Valeri, send a couple of men three floors down and tell them to establish strongpoints in case we get attacked. Volunteer someone to go to the lobby and close and booby-trap the doors if you will, but tell him to make it obvious to UNSC forces. We wouldn't want friendly fire would we?"
"Hell no," my XO replied. "Not since Dawson's." He shuddered before giving me an almost-mocking salute and departing to fulfill my orders. I tapped a ranger on the shoulder, one of the newer replacements and ordered him to follow me to the rooftop.
It was still pouring once we left, only it wasn't pouring as much as it had been before. From the landing pad on top of the spire we could see for miles uninterrupted. What we saw wasn't a pretty sight. Half the city was on fire and the other half had been bombed to oblivion. The worst part was that you didn't have to look very hard to spot the bluish and purple lights of Covenant vehicles. We were effectively surrounded, same as several other human units in the area.
"There, that's the place," I told the young ranger.
"I see it el-tee. Looks more like a hundred and fifty meters to me," he mentioned.
"Maybe you're right," I shrugged. "But it's close enough to us that it doesn't matter."
"If you say so," he replied.
"What do you suggest we do after we land?"
"I'm no tactical genius, but wouldn't we have a higher chance of success if we completely disregarded the Helljumpers and used the last of our jetpack fuel to hop back to the line?"
I shook my head. "Even if leaving Reaper behind was an option we wouldn't be able to do it. Twenty odd bright orange flashes in the night sky are gonna gather a lot of attention, we're gonna have a lot of covvies on our tail."
"Makes sense," the ranger muttered to himself. "In that case I say we better sprint as fast as we can."
"My thoughts exactly," I smiled. "Now let's get away from this ghastly rain."
"Sir."
Back in the restaurant the rangers were putting aside their jetpacks in easy-to-reach places and gathering up all of their ammunition. They were putting back on their ballistic armor and strapping grenades to their webbing. One by one they started looking more intimidating, just like a UNSC Army Ranger should look. I grabbed my rifle. It was yet another MA37, not as fancy as the new MA5s, but it was just as reliable and looked a whole lot better. Still, I would've changed it for one of those fancy sixty-magazine assault rifles in a heartbeat. I honestly don't know how they crammed that many rounds into the magazine, but it paid off to have double the usual amount of ammunition on one magazine. At least that's what Sutton had told me.
I quickly checked my weapon for any foreign objects in its chamber and pulled back the slide repeatedly to get rid of anything that might've gotten stuck in there. As soon as that was done I made sure to slap the magazine back in and make sure that a round was chambered and the safety was off. I slung my rifle over my lower back, allowing me to have some space to put on my jetpack in a hurry if I needed to. I reached for my helmet and put it on. I immediately took it off as my scar started itching. I scratched furiously at my cheek to get rid of the itch and eventually succeeded.
It would take waterboarding to wring it out of me, but I was terribly ashamed of the scar, not of the reason that I got it, an energy sword scar is as heroic as anything, but instead I was ashamed of how it looked. Call me vain if you want to, but everyone wants to look good, everyone wants to be that handsome man, and now I was that one guy with an ugly scar turning his face into something different. Sure, the fairer sex still liked me well enough, but I couldn't help feeling that it was because of what they thought I was and not because of what I was.
I used to be able to meet a girl and get her to jump in bed with me in less than five hours. Now I barely had to do any talking other than tell a slightly exaggerated story of how I got that ugly mark on my face before they started giving me bedroom eyes.
Look at me, I am actually complaining about getting laid easier than before because of a relatively small scar. Frank would beat the living shit out of me if he found out.
"Lieutenant."
I turned around. Valeri was standing in front of me.
"Yes?" I asked almost irritably. I didn't like it when someone interrupted my train of thought.
"We've got one man going to the lobby and the rest of us are setting emplacements on the stairs."
"Good, why don't you grab a couple of men and build a barricade that aims directly at the elevator."
"Sir."
I suddenly realized that I was fortifying this place further even though we were already preparing to leave. Why I had decided to do that, I don't know, but years of fighting in the war had given me a supernatural sixth sense. They had honed my instincts, if you will. If my sixth sense was urging me to do this for some reason then we were-
"Nezarian," I heard in my earpiece, it was Frank. "We're here."
"Roger that," I replied, "we're good to go, we'll probably take the jump in a few minutes," I added. "Any idea where we should go after this?"
"Probably barrel straight towards our line. It's about one kilometer away in a straight line, isn't it?"
"Last I heard," I admitted uncomfortably..
"We'll be waiting."
"Fine, try not to-" I stopped mid-sentence when I heard a noise. It was a common noise, the noise that someone made when they bumped into furniture. The kind of noise that had no place in a platoon of well-trained rangers in a supposedly cleared building.
"What?" Frank asked, obviously worried.
"Zhang, Palomer, check that out," I ordered the two nearest rangers. "Frank, we might be running into some-"
I was forced to stop mid-sentence once more as I heard a burst of gunfire coming from the elevator. According to the display on top of the doors the elevator was on the lobby, but gunfire is loud, and it would easily carry over through the elevator shaft. The man that Valeri had sent to the lobby was good as dead. Judging from the lack of explosion, he hadn't managed to place the explosive on the doors.
"дерьмо," I cursed. "Stairwell teams, what's your status?"
"Nothing here so far, sir," one corporal replied. His voice was calm, but it was weakly disguised, I could practically smell the man's fear over the radio. No doubt he could smell my own fear as well.
"Be ready," I warned. "Valeri, keep that gun trained on the door, nothing passes from that elevator. Zhang, Palomer, go downstairs and help out the other teams. Nothing gets through. Understood?"
"Yessir," they saluted.
That left four of us in the restaurant.
"Contact, contact!" I heard through my radio. "Open fire!"
Before the sentence was finished I heard bursts of plasma and gunfire echoing through the walls. The enclosed space allowed noise to travel well, even if it was through closed doors.
"Too many of them!" the voice in the radio said. "Toss a grenade and fall back to the second position!"
"Hold the doors!" I ordered. Two elites materialized out of nowhere and sprayed my position with plasma fire, forcing me to duck. "Shit, shit. Right, right. Two on the right."
There were now several soldiers yelling incoherently into the platoon's channel, but I tried focusing on the first voice as much as I could. My helmet couldn't isolate one signal, so I was forced to listen intently as I aimed at the door that led to the emergency stairs.
"Shit," I said again. "We're not gonna be able to jump Frank."
"How many?" he asked me.
"Too many, we're not gonna make it." The sounds from the stairs weren't a good sign.
"Grenade out!" I heard through the radio.
There was a detonation.
"Behind the pillar! They are carrying swords, I repeat swords, MacMillan's down, MacMillan's down!"
The gunfire intensified briefly as the rangers down below struggled to push back the attacking aliens.
"Eat this motherfucker!"
After that I was unable to find the voice through the cacophony of screaming. Perhaps my concentration broke and I lost track of the ranger, but I knew better than that.
As far as it goes for last words, those are good, honest ones.
"Stair teams, give me a sitrep," I ordered. "Enemy numbers?"
"Too damn many," someone replied. "There are elites all over the place, can't miss 'em, but it's just too many of them!"
"Hold out against them and fall back slowly, we'll jump anyways."
"Yessir. We'll hold."
I nodded at the man, even though he couldn't see me. Immediately after that I heard a burst of gunfire behind me. I turned just in time to see Valeri's machine gun team gun down two elites that had decided to take the elevator. The two aliens managed a step or two outside the elevator before their shields succumbed to the sustained gunfire. A second later they both met their end as FMJ rounds went through their bodies with little to no effort. Before the elevator doors closed again I was able to see blood splatter on the walls. Red blood splatter.
"Fuck!" I cursed. "Stairs?"
"Falling back slowly," a different voice replied. "There's no end to them!"
"Feel free to fall back faster!" I ordered. I didn't want any more of my men dying on me.
"Yes, Lieutenant."
The gunfire started getting even louder as my rangers started going up the stairs and retreating. Zheng was the first to come through. He was bleeding from a wound that his helmet covered and looked paler than a ghost. He looked at me with a haunted look before doing his best to regain his composure. I asked him if he was fine, after which he nodded and managed to pull off a decent attempt at looking healthy.
"Grab as many jetpacks as you can and take them to the roof," I ordered. "If worse comes to worse we can jump and put on our jetpacks as we fall."
"Ok," Zheng replied. He slung his jetpack over his shoulders and grabbed two more. Those he took out to the landing pad. Another couple of soldiers emerged from the stairs, both were bleeding heavily and looked to be wounded. Whoever was leading the defense down there had had the decency and smarts to send the wounded up first.
"Jetpacks, roof, now."
They nodded and did the exact same thing that Zheng had done.
"Valeri,"I called out. "Aim at the stairs, I don't think they would be stupid enough to try the elevator again."
"You never know with these guys," he replied. He was correct to some degree, but he still complied with my order.
Another ranger stumbled out of the door, prompting me to lunge forward to catch her before she met the floor face-first. My efforts were in vain, because as soon as I turned her around I could see that she was dead. Plasma shot to the chest had burned through her armor, her clothes, her skin, and her ribcage. There was still some steam leaving her body, it made for a grisly sight, especially when her face was undamaged. She had been beautiful, and now she was dead.
I didn't even treat her body with respect, instead tossing it out of the way so that the rest of my still-living rangers could retreat without impediment. Soon after I had defiled her body five men burst through the doors, they were scared and most of them were wounded. They nodded at me before taking defensive positions behind me. Two more men came through the stairs, dragging behind a ranger with his belly slashed open and his intestines hanging out. The worst part is that he was still alive, crying in pain at the horrible injury.
One of the uninjured rangers kicked closed the door. He shook his head at me, letting me know that they were the last survivors. "We did the best we could lieutenant," he told me sadly. "We did our best."
"You did well," I said as a grabbed the biggest piece of furniture that I could find and pushed it in front of the door. I heard an elite banging at the other side and emptied half my magazine into the door. The rounds easily penetrated the overturned sofa and the thin door, hitting the elite and forcing it to cease its attack.
I withdrew a couple of steps before firing another burst through the door for good measure. Over half my platoon was either dead or dying and the rest of us didn't have good odds on making it out. If we tried jumping we would be shot out of the sky. We had to buy enough time for at least some of us to make it out alive.
Just as I was about to give the order they broke through. Not one or two, but a dozen elites came crashing into the room, firing indiscriminately at anything and everything in front of them. A couple of my soldiers were hit, but the rest had enough presence of mind to duck behind cover and return fire blindly. The elites barely seemed fazed by the bullets pinging off their shields. Sure, a few of them fell to the floor, but the rest just kept on coming.
"Shoot the ones in the front," Valeri ordered loudly. "Stop the advance!"
How someone could think about stopping an advance that was at most a few yards from our own positions. Even if we managed to stop their advance the bodies would fall on top of us and we would still be uncomfortably close to the ones behind. Not to mention the lack of full magazines in our rifles.
In one word, we were fucked.
I raised my rifle again and emptied the magazine in an elite's chest. The shields held. I jumped backwards as an energy sword cleaved my barricade in two. I was already reloading by the time Valeri emptied his own weapon in the elite, depleting its shields and allowing me enough time to finish it off with a burst to the neck and face. From my new, exposed position, I managed to force a pair of elites to drop to the floor for cover and spare one of my soldiers from a horrible death.
Then he got shot in the neck. The plasma burned through his skin like paper and destroyed everything in between his throat and his spine. Death was instantaneous even if it wasn't pretty, he wouldn't have felt anything other than the realization that he had just died. Before his body hit the ground the elite that had shot him was hit from multiple directions. Its energy shields flickered and died from the combination of sustained gunfire and then three different bursts from three different weapons hit the alien in the chest.
That death wouldn't have been instantaneous, the elite would survive for a few seconds, perhaps even a full minute, while its organs slowly stopped functioning. He would be in intense pain for most of the ordeal. It would be a messy death, just like the one that he had caused, but it would be long and painful. The knowledge did not give me any comfort. My man was dead, there was nothing that I could do to change that.
"Fuck!" someone cried as he was hit.
"Flashbang out!"
What?
My instinct was just fast enough. I made out the shape of the flying cylinder out of the corner of my eye and turned away from it. My helmet had noise dampeners, but I wasn't able to reach up and turn them to maximum before the grenade detonated. My world went slightly brighter even through my closed pupils and the helmet's goggles. They weren't photo-reactive like those that the ODST helmet had. I couldn't help but feel offended at that little detail even as my eyes tried to get used to the sudden changes in lighting. I mean, we are the elite in the Army, a couple extra hundred credits wouldn't really send the UNSC bankrupt, would it?
I turned back to face the elites, the flashbang had blinded them worse than it had me, but I was still seeing twice as many elites as I was supposed to.
No, wait, I was seeing just fine.
My ears were another matter. The loud bang caused my eardrums to vibrate a lot stronger and faster than usual. As you know, eardrums help you stay on your feet, they function as a balance mechanism if you will. The loud noise managed to shake them up enough that I had to catch myself before I tumbled sideways. I allowed myself a second to get used to the spinning floor before opening fire on the elites again. The flashbang took them by surprise and many of them had dropped their weapons to cover their eyes.
We killed three aliens before the rest went into rage mode and started firing back. We were now being pushed back at a fast pace, not because we wanted to get to the rooftop, but because the elites were simply overwhelming us.
"Up the stairs! Now!" I ordered. "Valeri, hold out with me!"
I didn't see my friend nod, but I assume that he did that, because a second later we were on each side of the door leading to the landing pad, firing full-auto at the elites and forcing them to keep their heads down. Two men got shot while making a run for it to the stairs, in addition to the ones killed up here and the stairs, that made for a grand total of twenty-five casualties in the last three days, the overwhelming majority in the last three minutes.
"Go!" Valeri cried.
I finished emptying my rifle's magazine and ran up the stairs. Valeri tossed three grenades before running after me, the good sergeant. The subsequent explosions left my ears ringing despite the distance between the grenades and my already damaged eardrums. I climbed all the way to the roof behind three of my surviving rangers and in front of Valeri. As I left the stairs and arrived at the roof of the spire I felt the rain hitting the lower part of my face.
"Grab the jetpacks," I ordered.
The three men in front of me made a run for it but were stopped abruptly by plasma fire. I turned around and sprayed three elites, pushing them back to the stairs with Valeri's help. We moved backwards towards the rest of our soldiers and kept the elite's in check. All five of us were about to jump when the aliens left cover guns blazing. We dropped to the floor or dodged, saving ourselves from being hit.
Suddenly, one of the elites collapsed for seemingly no reason, it took me a moment to make out the shape of a Helljumper firing from behind the corner that led to the stairs. One of the two remaining elites turned and fired at Frank, for it was him who had saved my ass, forcing him back to cover. The Helljumper hid behind a wall that was glowing red in some parts from the heat of the plasma. We now had something that was very close to a chance of winning.
The joy didn't last long, though.
A small blue orb landed not a yard away from me.
"Grenade!"
I jumped away as fast as I could. Years of honing my reflexes and the sheer panic that that word could induce in a man saved me. The explosion only managed to lightly burn my face. Valeri, a soldier with just as much experience as I had, managed to jump out of the way. The kid that I had taken up here and asked about his opinion on the situation rolled away from the explosive just in time as well. The other two guys weren't as lucky. The blue explosion engulfed them almost completely. By the time the flash disappeared all that was left of them were a few fingers and parts of their weapons. The rest was just an unrecognizable mess that could've easily passed as ground meat.
I fired my rifle at the two remaining elites, they were already closing in on us, their plasma rifles discarded instead for the energy swords that their race favored. One of the two shook slightly before two bullets erupted out of its chest. I made out a black shape moving out of the corner of my eye and registered additional gunfire. My brain blocked out all those things and only let me hear one noise.
The sound of my rifle clicking empty.
I looked up just in time to see an elite preparing to impale me with his weapon. I drew my pistol so fast that Jesse James and Billy the Kid would've been proud of me and emptied it on the elite's chest. The distraction, for it was nothing more than that to the elite, gave me a moment. Actually, it gave Valeri just enough time to pull me out of the elite's reach. The angry alien didn't react prettily.
It brought its sword down in a wide arc. The slash hit my best friend in the shoulder. As the energy blade cut through the flesh and bone my mind went back to all the times that Valeri Ivanov had saved my ass. From the moment I joined his platoon all the way to these past few days. The memories flashed in front of me like something out of a bad movie.
My friend cried out in pain. The scream of agony was one of the worst things that I had heard in my entire life. It wasn't just because it was a blood-curdling scream, it wasn't because the man had just had his arm cut off at the shoulder, it was because he was my best friend, and had lost his limb while saving my life.
The elite turned towards me, and next thing I know…
It's gone.
Just like that. Abracadabra. Gone.
My eyes didn't register what happened, but my brain knew that magic wasn't real, or that at least it wouldn't work like that. I looked to my left just in time to see Frank's boots disappear from over the edge of the roof.
"Shit," the kid said.
I don't know if he was referring to the man falling over the ledge, to his direct superior lying on the ground without an arm, or perhaps just to the situation in general.
I felt myself being pushed sideways towards the edge of the roof.
"What the-?"
"Get him," another Helljumper told me. By the sound of his voice and judging from his accent he was Konstantinov. I had never liked that guy. Something was off about him. This seemed to confirm it.
One of my feet suddenly found nothing to stand on and I was on the edge of falling. I looked at the Helljumper in shock, not knowing why he was killing me as well. I tried to hold on to his arms, pull myself up, but instead I only found wet metal. I gripped the metal as hard as I could and then I was also falling down.
It took me longer than I care to admit to realize it, but I saw that the piece of metal in my hands was nothing other than a jetpack. I strapped it on while falling, a technique that I had been taught in my first days in officer school. As soon as I knew that the straps were roughly secured I moved my body into dive position and crashed into Frank's body a lot faster than any of us would've liked it.
Believe it or not, the man had his rifle in one hand and his sidearm in the other. He had been firing at the falling elite all the way down, not giving up until the last possible second. When I tackled him I could feel the air driven from both our lungs. Frank instantly realized what was happening and hugged me as if I was the last woman he would ever see.
I activated my jetpack and suddenly we were flying to the ground a lot faster than before. I adjusted the direction just in time to avoid hitting the ground head on, instead we hit an ornamental palm tree in the spire's courtyard, the impact separated Frank and me. My jetpack's thrusters made me do a cartwheel. In that fraction of a second I saw the Helljumper crash into a car's windshield and then the ground came up rushing to meet me.
So, this chapter ended with pretty much the same sentence than the last one, albeit in a happier note. If you can call an entire platoon of elite Army Rangers being wiped out a happy note, but you grasp my meaning.
Well, I hope you enjoyed reading this chapter, I personally think that it made for a nice perspective change. If you think that Nezarian though about Frank a little bit too much I just want to tell you that I did that semi-purposely to give a different perspective on the main character that isn't tainted by Frankie's delusions of grandeur. Another thing regarding the different POV, I tried to write this chapter differently than most chapters because Nezarian is a different person and would obviously use a different writing style, think differently, be different, etcetera.
Thanks to Sniper Fodder for proof-reading this chapter. Do you think I ought to put that at the top of the post-chapter author's comment? Cause I was thinking about it.
Anyways, let me know what you think.
You see this button right here?
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