Recorded July 27, 2552 (Military Calendar)
Bethlehem TW-2 Platform, Reyes McLees Shipyards
Intermediate Martian Orbit, Sol System
Alright, Rufino, it's John. If you're listening to this, you've finally defrosted. You are confused, wondering where you are, maybe even pissed at me if you've put two and two together. But believe me, you will want to listen to the whole message before you open that cryotube. And I'm sorry if I ramble here and there. I've never been good at saying goodbye.
You're a good man. You're talented, skilled. You can weld, you can swing a wrench, you can debug a console and kitbash a life support system back together. That is one heck of a skillset to have. You remind me of myself when I was your age, probably because I taught you everything I know.
Well, everything I know how to do. Not quite everything I know. But that skillset is wasted in the shipyards.
Don't get me wrong. Knocking frigates and cruisers together is a good mission for a worthy cause, but it wears on the soul. It's the same thing year after year, and it fries my fuses to know that we can't build those ships faster than the Covenant can burn them out of the sky.
It's all you've ever known, man, so you have no idea how monotonous it is. Me? I'm Johnny Z, the old man of the crew. I was a terraformer. I remember what it was like to bring planets to life.
I've seen glorious sunsets. I've seen sunrises over alien deserts, and I've seen fogbanks roll over strange oceans. I've built things. Homes, laboratories, power plants, space stations. I never knew, from one month to the next, if I'd be scooting around in vacuum or working with my boots on terra firma.
It was a good life. A real good life, and I miss it. If a man doesn't yearn for that kind of freedom, he simply doesn't know it exists.
Then the Covenant glassed Harvest. After a few years of fighting those bastards, we realized that it was an all-hands-on-deck, in-for-the-long-haul kinda conflict. All of those terraforming projects dried up. We couldn't get supplies. Everything was being diverted toward the war effort.
I helped end the last of the great projects. I rode shotgun on twenty colony ships as they gathered at Hardscrabble and sailed on down the Aquilla Trunk to Sol. That was… thirty? Thirty one? Whichever year DEATHRAY released their final album. I bought it right before we cast off, and listened to it the whole way there.
Sorry. Memories, you know? I'm just rambling.
We flew the ships to Mars to be refitted, turned into logistics ships or something, but that didn't happen. All the drydocks were full. So we parked the colony ships in Saturn's orbit, put them in deep storage, and then I caught a shuttle back to Mars. The shipyards were hiring, friend.
I think I told you what the past two decades were like. I got older. Every month, I'd hear that a colony I knew got glassed, and that same day I'd go build a cruiser to go kick the Covenant in the teeth. Moved out to Reach to put some distance between me, the ex-wife, and her lawyer. Moved back to Earth to escape ex-wife mark two. Pissed off some Sinoviet execs and got assigned to your crew. Stuck around because the lunch break poker games were fun.
And the Covenant, they just kept coming. This war wasn't shaking out the way we needed it to.
I remember the week that Ritchie didn't show up for work because his brother's ship went down with all hands. I remember you finally lost your cool. Swore out HIGHCOMM, swore that the Navy was incompetent. You said that the Navy was just feeding ships into the meatgrinder, and when it was all over, the brass and the politicians and the execs were just going to pile into an arkship and leave us to fend for ourselves.
You hit that note several times over there years, and I never said a few things. I taught you everything I know how to do, but not everything I knew. See, I know you can't run a long-distance colonization op with just one ship. You need a fleet, and you need a bigger fleet if you can't go back for supplies. And I know exactly where that fleet is sitting.
The third thing I knew is a single word: OUROBOROS
I got headhunted a few years back by a woman who told me that word, and also what to do the next time I heard it. Where to go, who to talk to. Then she swore me to secrecy, backed by the full faith and credit of the Office of Naval Intelligence.
See, we are blessed with a leadership that knows they can't go it alone. They need an army of workers, men and women with many skills, who know how to be supremely adaptable. Prime, Grade-A colonist material.
As I walked out of that dame's office, I realized that the program doesn't need me. I'm the best there ever was, but I'm old. Over the hill. My best days are behind me. Worse, these aches and chills and the headaches… I think you're right. It's probably Boren's Syndrome. I never went to the doctor because I know the Program keeps tabs on the volunteers, and if BS came up in my medical record, my slot would go to someone else.
I'd rather you have it.
Something's going down. We all know it. We saw all those supplies suddenly get diverted to Earth's defense network, and those two destroyers that were sent directly to Reach? Not even a shakedown cruise around Saturn. We all knew something was about to happen.
The call went out last night. I had forty eight hours to grab my stuff and report to the assembly point. Fortunately, I've been making certain preparations. I may be the one reporting for duty, but you're the one going into the cryotube. Sorry for leading you behind the bar for a smoke and sucker-punching you. The knock-out pills weren't doing the job fast enough, and I was on a tight schedule.
I don't know how long you'll be on ice. I don't know how far OUROBOROS is running from Sol. With luck, you'll wake up outside the Orion Arm. Whatever you do, avoid any biometric scans until it's too late for them to do anything about you. Your new name is John Zimmerman. Wear that name with pride.
Do me a favor. Live life to the fullest. Build that new world. Find a good woman. Whatever you do, be supremely adaptable.
And in a hundred years, send the great-grandkids back to kick the Covenant's ass.