So, I've been sitting here recording this, talking a lot about myself, and my friend here has been needling me to just be truthful regarding the nature of my relationship with Spartan-087. He's not going to stop, so I might as well rip the band-aid off now.

I love her, okay?

I've loved her ever since we were nine years old.

I ever tell you about Emerald Cove?

It's this inner colony world famous for its tropical beaches and natural beauty. Picturesque scenery with white sand, crystal-clear blue water, swaying palm trees, vibrant wildlife. It was pretty enough to make you think the pictures of it were computer-generated. Back before the war it was a hugely popular world for rich types to vacation too. Probably still is, if the Covenant haven't turned it into a ball of molten glass.

When we were twelve years old, Chief Mendez took us there. We weren't going for a vacation mind you. We never got anything of the sort. Instead, we were going there for underwater training and SCUBA certification.

The CPO's exercises always came with a twist though. On our final certification dive, he made sure that half of our seventy-five air tanks were sabotaged and became non-functional after we hit a certain depth in the dive, mine included. Only, Mendez was in the water on the dive with us, and we knew he wasn't going to sabotage his own air tank, not when he was supposed to evaluating our response in an extreme scenario.

So, we responded by taking his.

I remember Jai, Cal, Serin, Maria, Fred, and Soren dogpiling on the CPO underwater while Jorge and I pulled him out of his SCUBA apparatus. The other sixty-seven Spartans did the same to the other drill instructors. It was pretty funny, watching them all have to make an emergency ascent to the surface.

After that, we took their air tanks and swam off. Technically we were AWOL for a week. Sam called it a team-bonding exercise. We surfaced on some small private island. Right on the shore was this big beach house. Three stories high, it had a deck, a pool in the back, a big kitchen, and even an elevator. It wasn't Lord of the Flies.

Whoever owned the island wasn't home that week, so we decided to 'commandeer' their property for military usage. We made sure the house was fine when we left.

That was the best week of my life.

The kitchen and pantry were empty, so we went free diving and scooped clams right up off the sea floor, or speared fish and snared crabs and small mammals, and then we baked them over a fire we built right there on the beach. Someone found surf boards in the house's basement and we took them and taught ourselves how to surf on beautiful waves that foamed white when they broke on the shore.

We'd gather around the fire outside when the sun went down and Sam would tell jokes and we'd stare up at the stars and make up our own constellations and stories for them.

On the last day, Kelly and I and a few others climbed up to the roof of the house to watch the sun as it set. It painted the sky a vivid yellow and orange as it went down, and as it disappeared over the horizon the creeping night sky seemed a mysterious purple with the shining stars twinkling.

Eventually the others climbed down and it was just Kelly and I.

For a kid whose life had been filled with decidedly unchildlike things, like jumping out of planes, learning how to use or disarm explosives, and learning how to kill, let me tell you- I'd never felt more nervous than right there.

I saw a moment and I took it and kissed her. She didn't immediately slap the teeth out of my mouth or break my arm, which I took as a good sign. Her pale-blue eyes went wide for a second and then she kissed me back.

The thing is, we were told that 'fraternization' between soldiers was strictly prohibited. Some of the other Spartans took that to heart and some of us didn't. Later that year there was an incident.

We weren't the only ones who were fraternizing either. I'm sure Jorge and Cassandra were sneaking around together when they thought nobody was looking. Otto-031 and Margaret-053 were getting close too.

They were the ones who got caught.

They got ratted out to Chief Mendez by their own teammate, Victor-101. The CPO had Otto and Margaret thrown in the brig for a week. It was after that they decided to separate the boys from the girls and put us in different barracks. Dr. Halsey also decided to give the boys and the girls the talk separately.

I'll spare you the details and just say it was uncomfortable.

The thing was that when Otto and Margaret got out of the brig, some of the other Spartans decided to take matters into their own hands. Red Team- Jerome-092, Douglas-042, Alice-130, Leon-011, Robert-025, and August-099 -decided to jump Otto and Margaret and beat them so bad that Margaret lost her left eye. They said it was for 'engaging in non-Spartan behavior.'

Mendez had Red Team thrown in the brig for two weeks after that, but the message went across to all of us.

So, Kelly and I kept it private. A touch here, a long gaze there, a kiss when we could manage it and were sure that nobody else was around.

I'm sure some of the others knew something was going on. John didn't. Fred knew something was off but wasn't sure what. I'm sure Linda figured it out eventually but didn't say anything, for our sake. I'd be genuinely surprised if Dr. Halsey didn't know. That woman seemed to know everything.

It was hard being separated, but we had our duty and the mission came first. Kelly was always a part of Blue Team and I got shuffled around between squads as necessary. After Sam died, I was afraid we'd get sent on different ops and one of us wouldn't come back. That one of us would see the other in a casualty report somewhere and that would be it. I heard nary a whisper for months while she was deployed for operation: SILENT STORM.

I thought that one day, when the war was won, that I would take her back to Emerald Cove. We would stand on the beach together and watch the sunset again.

I…

I…

Alright that's enough. I've spilled enough of my proverbial guts.

It was foolish for me to think like that. That some day we'd get to walk off the battlefield and into a normal life. I wouldn't know what to do with a normal life if it slapped me across the face. It just doesn't compute for me.

I've seen what ONI's psych-evals said about the Spartan II's.

'Fundamentally incapable of adapting to or integrating with civilian life.'

I'd say they judged that right. I usually solve my problems with a bullet to the problem's head and I'm sure Kelly and the others would share the sentiment.

I'd be a soldier for as long as I still had her and the other Spartans with me, and if I was the last one left then I would die avenging them. I didn't want to think like that though, but I needed to know she was still alive. I needed to know.

You'd be amazed the things you can learn about people if you stop talking and just listen to them. You know those self-help books? The ones that say the key to making friends is to just shut up and listen to people, and nod your head along with whatever they say? Turns out they're right on the money.

Or at least that's what I thought after travelling for two days with Klara. I think she got sick of the silence after a while, so she would just start talking, and every so often she would look back at me, and I'd nod up and down like a bobblehead because it was all I could do.

I'd noticed her shooting sideways glances at me since we'd met. At first, they seemed like they were done out of fear, making sure that I wasn't drawing my weapon while her back was turned.

Then when she started talking, the glances were to make sure that I was paying attention and not just tuning her out. If she was a UNSC marine and I could still talk, I would have told her to cut the chatter. That she needed to keep her wits about her and eliminate distractions.

But then she woke up in a cold sweat on the second night and I saw her eyes darting around until they settled on me, and then her glances all throughout the third day were like she was making sure that I was still there and that I was real, and not a mirage.

As the sun was going down on the third day, we hit a gap in the forest. A divide had been cut through the wilderness for train tracks to be laid down.

"These go to a train yard near the mountain," Klara tells me. "They were used for shipping away ores that were mined out before the cherti arrived."

I was presented with a conundrum.

The metal tracks looked old and worn and grown over, to the point that no cargo-runner should have been able to use them, but the suit was telling me that she's telling the truth.

Either she was wrong but she didn't know she was wrong, or the suit was wrong.

Neither possibility was good. I'd staked my hope and trust that she was telling me the truth and that we'd spent the last three days walking towards a militia base where I would be able to find organized resistance to the Covenant invasion.

Three days that I couldn't waste, because every passing hour would be giving more time to the Covenant for them to dig in and consolidate their grip on the planet, which would just make it harder for the UNSC relief force to do their job when they showed up. Together, eight Spartans couldn't liberate a whole planet, but with a bit of intel we could identify potential landing zones, disrupt Covenant supplies, or eliminate high-value-targets to disorient the enemy and buy more time.

If I was being led around by the nose to nowhere, then that meant all that time had been wasted.

The voice, what I had taken to calling the half soft alto, half deep mechanical buzz in my skull that gave sound to the suit apparently sensed my doubt because it decided to reiterate its command.

"Follow Klara."

I almost wanted to taunt it like a teasing child. Yeah, and what if I don't?

"Directive: Follow Klara."

I know what you're thinking.

Why didn't I disobey?

What was stopping me?

I didn't have to waste time tagging along with a wayward scout when I could have made the distance in a day if I wasn't bound to the pace of an unaugmented woman. She'd been a real trooper yeah, and If I'd just abandoned her to go own by myself than the odds of her survival would have plummeted but there was the big picture to think about.

It's just…

I don't…

I don't know.

Maybe I'd seen enough war orphans, refugee kids crying out for their dead parents that knowing that Klara was trying to get back to her little girl got a little under my skin.

Was it any different than what I was doing? Trying to find my family?

I guess, maybe I felt a kindred.

I was standing there like a statue, having my silent argument with the voice, while Klara started following the old train tracks. She got about thirty feet away when she noticed I wasn't following. She stopped and turned a glance back to me.

"Ulysses, are you coming?"

I sighed internally and nodded my head.

We followed the tracks to the train yard. At some point we came out of the woods and the trees gave away to a vast expanse of tall grass. I guess Klara could see well enough in the dark by the light of the moon and the stars now that they weren't being obscured by tree cover. They shined down with pale light.

I took over navigating for us. The grass was high enough to reach my shoulders and taller than her head.

When we reached the trainyard I saw it was a weathered wreck, just like the settlement I'd found. Train cars filled with mining materials and earth that needed to be carted away had just been left out to rust for what must have been years. There was a security booth out front at the entrance that held a yellowed skeleton slumped over a desk, but Klara walked right past it, paying it no mind.

It became apparent to me that she must have been there before through the ease with which she navigated the ruin.

She pointed me to the engine shed. It was a three-story building with a large hole in the roof. Any widows the building had once had were either shattered or cracked, or impermeable from abuse done to them by the elements. A fire escape ran up the side of the structure to the roof.

"We should camp there tonight," she said. "Sometimes others stash things there. Water, food, bandages. We'll be at the base tomorrow."

I was fine but I could tell she was worn out after three days of traveling on foot.

I slipped her rucksack off my shoulder and she pitched camp on the ground floor of the engine shed, in a large open room. The hole in the ceiling was visible above. It loomed wide, and the light of the moon shown through. The moon's shape was full.

The hole had been there in the ceiling for years I'd surmised. Maybe even decades.

What I couldn't let go was how familiar the damage was. The metal around the edges was warped and twisted, like it had been exposed to extreme heat so great that a patch in the ceiling had melted away. It couldn't have been the result of exposure and lack of maintenance.

It reminded of the damage I'd seen done by Covenant plasma mortars; the kind carried by wraith tanks.

I looked down on the ground and saw that it was coated thick with pollen and that our boots had left tracks in it where we had stepped.

I knelt down and dragged my finger through the muck like a stylus. Klara stopped what she was doing and looked at me as I stood back up.

I didn't wait for her approval as she read what I had written.

'I'm going to have a look around.'

I exited the engine shed and walked back to the security booth at the front of the trainyard. It was a cube shaped building, a few meters across in each direction. There was a door on the side that was rusted shut, but the glass window that the operator would have seen out of was long since shattered, and I slipped in through it. Grass was growing in through the floor and the whole building seemed like it would collapse soon.

I examined the yellowed skeleton.

Any clothing it might have had had long since rotted away. It was in three sections. The ribs, arms, and skull were laid across a ruined operator's console, while the lower spine, pelvis, and thigh bones were resting on a decrepit chair while the lower leg and foot bones were scattered across the floor. The three sections had just fallen away from each other through gravity as time and decomposition set in.

I took the scene in. It was a man, judging by the size of his pelvis. He'd died sitting, and then slumped forward over the console.

I took the man's skull and examined it. I felt a little uneasy, disrespecting the dead like that, but that didn't matter much when everything I was seeing was making me feel uneasy.

Despite natural weathering of the bone, the front of the skull was undamaged except for the left ocular cavity. The back was a different story. A large hole was present, burned clean through, leaving the skull uncracked or shattered.

It was apparent that the man had died from a gunshot to the head. Exit wounds are always bigger, so the shot must have gone straight through the left eye and out the back of the skull. The edges of both the entry and exit holes were blackened from the heat of the projectile.

I placed the skull back and turned on my heel, looking out through the space where the front window had once been. The shot would have come from someone approaching the trainyard from the direction of the forest that Klara and I had come out of.

I could picture the scene in my mind. The man at his desk doing his job when a round went through the glass and then his head, before he slumped forward dead without the time to even process what had happened.

I turned back around and ran my eyes across the wall behind the skeleton. If the shot had gone clean through the man's head, then the round must have impacted somewhere behind him.

I had a hunch.

I judged the man to have been anywhere between five and a half to six feet tall, so the angle of the shot would have had to have been low since the man was sitting.

I got down on my left knee and looked at the wall closely.

Matching up with the angle of the shot was a divot in the wall about half an inch in diameter. It was blued too, which contrasted with the rest of the surface.

I don't suppose you have a Geiger counter, do you? I silently thought.

The suit responded by pulling up a radiation sensor on my HUD, and it jumped at the sight of the mark on the wall to about ten times the normal background radiation and confirmed my hunch.

The weapon that had killed the man had been a Covenant carbine firing a standard 6x80mm caseless radioactive projectile.

I processed that thought.

Humanity had been fighting the Covenant for eight years ever since the first contact at Harvest in 2524. As far as I knew, the Covenant hadn't set foot on Kursk until two and a half weeks prior. There was no way the man went from death to a completely desiccated skeleton in just two and half weeks.

Looking at the state of the trainyard, his skeleton would have had to have been there for years. His bones were weathered, but still partly protected from the elements by the damaged security booth. I knew it would take about thirty years of open exposure to the elements in a reasonable environment for nature to turn a skeleton into dust.

Was it possible that Covenant weapons had found their way into human forces in the last few years since the first contact?

Possibly, but unlikely. Some of the first ops I'd ever been deployed on were to recover items of Covenant technology for reverse engineering and study. Pieces here and there were bound to wind up in the hands of other groups besides the UNSC, but on a backwater like Kursk?

It wasn't adding up.

I left the security booth and walked through the trainyard; my eyes peeled.

I found more blued divots in the walls of buildings. Just like the one in the security booth, the suit's Geiger counter jumped whenever I focused it over them.

There was more; bullet holes caused by human ballistic weapons and the metal sides of the buildings had pockmarks across them like someone had pressed their finger against softened wax. Plasma scoring.

I felt one of my boots land on something solid that gave a noise of protest under my weight. I bent over to the ground and picked it up. Despite its weathered state, it was an object I instantly recognized. One I had seen regularly since I was six.

A UNSC marine combat helmet. The UNSCMC logo was painted on in faded white on the side.

It was one of the models with a full face mask. The helmets visor would have been wide enough only to show a marine's eyes, but the visor was shattered. Instead, the empty eye sockets of a derelict skull stared back at me. I looked for the rest of the marine's remains but found none. The head and helmet had been separated and the body must have come to rest somewhere else.

I looked for a serial number on the helmet's side only to find that it had been worn away.

I felt dread growing like a pit in my stomach.

I could have sworn I felt my heart rate going up.

There was still room for reasonable doubt though. Maybe the helmet had been stolen, or sold through a black-market arms dealer to the colonists. But if it had, why not paint over the UNSCMC logo?

There was still a way to be sure. I pulled the skull from the helmet.

I held it for a moment, staring into the empty eye sockets.

Alas, poor Yorick, I thought.

I turned the skull around and found my proof. Surgically added to the base of the skull was the standard issue neural lace that all UNSC personnel had installed upon entering active service.

I sucked in a deep breath and held it for a moment, before resting the skull on the dirt.

I quickly walked back to the engine shed and found Klara in the process of laying out her sleeping bag. She fixed me a look with her blue eyes. She could tell something was wrong. Her eyes drifted to the helmet still held in my hand.

I knelt and wrote on the pollen covered ground with my finger.

'We need to talk.'

The irony of the sentence was not lost on me. I wouldn't be doing any talking at all.

"What's wrong?" she asked worriedly as she stopped what she was doing and stood up straight.

This wasn't the first time she'd been in the trainyard. She had to know something. UNSC marines had died fighting for it. Not army, marines, which meant they had come from off world since they would have been deployed by a navy ship.

'What happened here?' I wrote silently.

Her face twisted in confusion at the question. "What do you mean? I don't understand."

The suit assured me that she was telling the truth, so I decided to reiterate the question.

I shook my head and gently tossed the helmet at her feet. It rolled over and she saw the UNSCMC logo painted on it. 'HERE. At the train yard. There was a firefight. Covenant weapons. Dead marines.'

She read my question and then looked at me like I had grown a second head. The suit registered that her blood pressure was rising.

"What happened?" she said quietly before her voice rose. What she said next sounded like she was in disbelief. Like my question was absurd.

"Ty s uma soshel? What do you think happened? The aliens happened! Last time they came to this planet!"

My blood went cold.

Last time? I thought silently.

Before I could scrawl out my next question, the voice sounded in my head and interrupted the moment.

"Threat detected."

For a moment I thought it was referring to Klara, but I didn't see how she could be a threat. Her rifle was laid down on the ground close by against a steel beam that supported the roof of the engine shed, but she hadn't even so much as made a twitch or a glance towards it that indicated she would try to grab it, and there was nothing a hundred-pound woman who didn't even reach my shoulder could do to hurt me with just her hands.

Suddenly, I heard gunshots ring out in the night. Bursts of gunfire going off like a chain of firecrackers. It sounded distant, but I didn't know where it was coming from or where the shots were being aimed at.

I sprang forward, grabbed Klara by the wrist and pulled her to the floor, shielding her small frame beneath my massive one as the suit's surface shifted into its armored state. She let out a gasp of surprise as I lunged at her. Any protest though was silent as she heard the shots ring out too.

I waited a few seconds, and when no bullets came whizzing by overhead, I moved off from on top of her.

I looked up out of one of the shattered windows, before glancing at the map in the corner of my HUD. The suit had marked out more than two dozen contacts, approaching from the woods towards the trainyard through the tall grass, at a different approach angle than the one Klara and I had come from. Seven of the markers were huddled together, moving as a group. The rest were more spaced out and further behind, but closing fast.

Before I could do the math in my head, the suit supplied the calculation for me. Twenty-one contacts closing on the group of seven at a speed of roughly thirty-five miles an hour.

I needed eyes on.

I quickly scrawled the word 'danger' onto the ground before rushing towards the engine shed's fire escape stairwell. Klara scooped up her rifle from where it lay and followed behind me. As I was going up the stairs one of the markers in the group of seven vanished from my HUD.

I exited the fire escape onto the roof where I would have a vantage point to see out over the field of grass. My visor amped up its magnification and I could see that in the grass a few hundred meters away was a group of men, now reduced to six, firing blindly into the grass around them. They carried surplus rifles like Klara's.

Further back I saw the contacts the suit had labelled as threats. Or rather I saw the markers the suit had painted them with. They moved obscured in the grass, the only true evidence for their existence was that the grass parted below where the markers were as they moved. The way the tall glass parted around them reminded me of the way a shark's fin parts the water as the creature swims through it just below the surface.

And they were moving fast. That narrowed the list of possible enemies quickly. They moved too fast for grunts or brutes, and the latter were so big and bulky that would have easily been visible above the grass. Elites with jump packs could move that quickly, but then they would be leaping clearly into view.

No, these were Kig-Yar, and not just the common shield-bearers.

T'vaoans. Skirmishers.

A flash of blue light pierced through the grass and felled another one of the men, and the rest panicked and each ran off into separate directions. The unseen attackers split off into groups of three or four and gave chase.

I grimaced.

Loss of unit cohesion dramatically increases the chance of death on the battlefield.

The tactically smart thing to do would have been to abandon the men to their deaths. I know that sounds horrible, but think about it objectively for a moment. The skirmishers didn't seem to know about Klara or I yet. They'd merely stumbled upon us out of chance.

Even if they did know that we were in the trainyard, the roof of the engine shed presented an advantageous position. It was high ground that gave us clear firing lines, and the only obvious way up to the roof would be up the fire escape stairs which would funnel any advancing attackers into a tight space. A kill-box.

Going out onto level-ground to face an enemy with superior numbers with no solid cover would be stupid.

But I couldn't just leave people to die, not when I could do something about it.

I could use the element of surprise to my advantage.

I turned and looked at Klara, for a second trying to think of a way to tell her to cover me from the rooftop before I remembered that without a set of night vision optics, she'd essentially be firing blind, and could accidentally hit me or one of the men just as easily as she could hit the enemy.

Her eyes were turned towards the occasional muzzle flashes of light in the grass, so I waved my hand to get her attention. I pointed to her and then straight down.

Stay here, I thought.

I hoped she understood, right before I turned and leaped over the side of the roof to the ground below.