I remember the last thought that went through my head was 'I'm going to die'.
Let me back up. My name is Ulysses, Spartan-086. UNSC military I.D. number 22193-55673-086. My friends call me Ody. I'm recording this account of my experiences during and after operation: SIBERIAN WINTER with the help of [REDACTED], in the hope that it makes its way to the right people.
The things I've seen and learned have to make it back to Earth.
I'm sure that if it does, somebody is gonna go digging through my personnel file to try and ascertain the validity of my identity and corroborate the details of this report. I imagine my file has gathered quite a bit of dust by now, if it hasn't been completely covered in black ink, so I'll spare them the trouble.
The psych evaluations and personal facts about me won't match up. They won't because that's not who I am anymore. I'm sure all the ONI spooks will point at the discrepancies to try and discredit me. The lingual analysis alone I'm sure will set off red flags.
No Spartan I've known, and believe me I've known a few, was ever particularly loquacious.
The two's, my class, we got the best education money could buy. They may not have been as important as the lessons on wilderness survival or how to treat a gunshot wound in the field, but Dr. Halsey didn't skimp out on grammar, vocabulary, and linguistics either.
It's just that us Spartan II's are usually a pretty reserved bunch. We like to keep to ourselves, and really, can you blame us?
Then there's the Spartan-III's, a bunch of war orphans whose language lessons got cut in favor of even more combat training and a faster production time, and the Spartan-IV's who aren't much different from your typical jarhead.
You gotta understand. It's this thing I'm inside of. It's changed me. It wasn't like this in the beginning when we first met, but we've been together awhile now and we've only grown more inseparable.
Me and my armored casket. I'm inside it, but it's also inside me. It's in my blood, my bones, my brain. My every conscious and unconscious thought is laid bare before it. We're about as close as two separate entities can possibly get.
We exist together now, two corpses in one grave. Heh.
The year was 2532. The Human-Covenant war had been raging for the last seven years. ONI's section three had us, the spartans, bouncing from warzone to warzone trying to slow down or stop Covenant assaults wherever they popped up like it was a game of whack-a-mole. We were the UNSC's single most effective ground combat asset. Still are, I imagine. Of the limited number of spartan II's produced, we had only suffered two combat casualties in the eight years we had been active.
The problem was the navy. It didn't matter if we killed covies until the ground flowed with a river of their blood, if the navy couldn't hold it together against the Covenant fleet in space, then the destruction of whatever backwater outer colony we had been sent to defend was pretty much guaranteed. I'd lose track of time, it's hard to keep it all straight when you go straight from a cryo pod to a battlefield, and then back to the pod to get to the next one.
Sometimes we'd get woken up after detransitioning out of slipspace only to get told that the situation is already fubar and that we were going straight back into cryo because some HIGHCOM desk jockey already considered the planet we had arrived at to be a lost cause and that we were pulling out.
This wasn't one of those times. The planet was called Kursk. An outer colony that had been settled by a bunch of Russian descendants sometime in the mid 2430's. It hosted an Earth-like biosphere with gravity within 9.6m/s^2. Pretty ideal for human life. What wasn't ideal were the three Covenant CCS assault cruisers that had laid siege to it. But they weren't what we were going after. There was a fourth CCS orbiting the planet's moon, separate from the rest of the fleet. That was our target.
I remember the cryo pod hissing open as I defrosted and the first thing I did was double over and cough up the bronchial surfactant all over the deck of the cryo bay. I wasn't the only one either. Most of the rest of the crew of the UNSC prowler Night Fox were doing the same.
If you've never had to experience the after effects of cryo freeze before, lucky you. The bronchial surfactant is this thing you inhale before going under that protects the tissues in your lungs from damage while you're frozen. Standard procedure is that when coming out of cryo your supposed cough it up out of your lungs and then swallow it because it's packed full of nutrients that got lost in cryo and enzymes that help you shake off the lingering effects of the deep freeze.
The problem was that no matter what the R&D teams did to it, it always wound up tasting like mucus.
Mine was supposed to taste like raspberries. Maybe a raspberry that had been left to mold and ferment.
So, there I am on the deck of the cryo bay, coughing this stuff up, completely naked because wearing anything in the cryo tubes had a tendency to cause freezer burn, surrounded by seven other spartans all in the same position. We shrugged it off. It's not like we hadn't seen each other naked before. We were out of the pods, and the light on the wall was green which meant someone had a mission for us.