We hit the showers first thing out of cryo. I'd have preferred to stretch first, but coming out of cryo always gives me this gross sticky feeling that I hate. That, and I think doing yoga stretches naked would get pretty awkward.
The thing is the Night Fox was tiny. As a razor-class prowler, it was only five hundred and twenty five feet from bow to stern, and typically carried a crew of twenty-two personnel, with room for a complement of forty troops. On a ship like that privacy was a luxury reserved only for the captain and his first officer, so pretty much everything was coed. The eight of us, Malcolm-059, Anton-044, Grace-093, John-117, Kelly-087, Fred-104, Linda-058, and myself were in and out of the showers in three minutes.
We were pulling on our BDU's when Fred finally broke the silence. "So where do you think we're going this time?" We didn't have any money to place bets, but we'd been betting all the same after our last few deployments.
"My bet is an iceball," Kelly replied.
"I'll second that," I added.
Kelly was probably the one person I was closest too. Wasn't hard to see why when we had bunked next to each other for the first six years of our training. I was sierra-086, she was sierra-087.
She was the fastest spartan and had the build to match. She was lean for a spartan, with powerful legs, and angular features. She had cold, pale blue eyes and dark hair that was shorn close to her scalp. I remembered she had had freckles when we first met but they had vanished as she got older. She had always been pale but now that all of our time was either spent on a space ship or in full armor, her skin had taken on an almost snow-like color. The sound of her voice carried an accent that suggested she was descended from Britons.
I thought she was beautiful. Not that I ever would have told her that.
"Just for once I wish we could get deployed somewhere tropical," Malcom said as he stretched languidly. "I swear ever since the augmentations, cold temperatures just make my bones ache."
The augmentations.
It had been eight years since we had endured the final phase of our Spartan II training, the physiological augmentations. The procedures had left a number of the seventy five trainees dead or permanently disabled, but for those of us who had been successful we had gained enhanced musculature, stronger bones, and faster reaction times. The augmentations had been necessary in order for us to safely operate our MJOLNIR armor, a powered exoskeleton that increased our combat effectiveness tenfold.
Still, sometimes I thought about them.
The people who hadn't made it. Carris-137 and Yasmine-116 both died in surgery. Fhajad-084 was left with a form Parkinson's disease which caused him uncontrollable muscle spasms. Soren-066, the physically strongest spartan, was left with a gnarled gimp leg and his fingers twisted into unnatural shapes. Oscar-129 had been considered a success. His body reacted well to the augmentations but mentally he couldn't handle what had been done to him and he ate the end of a gun because of it.
There were more still. They were my family.
Some part of me knew that wasn't really true. They weren't my real family. I had had an older brother and sister who took care of me when my mother wasn't around. I never knew my father, but now I could barely remember any of them. I knew I had been wronged. Like all the Spartan II's, I'd been abducted from my home at the age of six and taken to the UNSC military stronghold world of Reach because I was genetically gifted.
You will become the best we can make of you. That's what Dr. Halsey said the day we were inducted. She was right.
Anton was about to add his own bet to the pool when a voice over the ship's intercom interrupted him.
"This is Captain Shelby to Spartan Blue and Green teams. You are needed in the CIC for mission briefing immediately. On the double Spartans, Shelby out."
As soon as the intercom went silent, John was on his feet. He had been promoted to the rank of master chief petty officer years earlier by Colonel Marmon Crowther during operation: SILENT STORM, and ever since he had served as the ranking field commander of all the Spartans in addition to his command of Blue team.
"You heard the captain. Snap to, Spartans," he said.
As we headed out, Anton asked "So what do you think will go wrong with this mission?" It may have sounded pessimistic, but as the phrase goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy.
Trust me, never have truer words been spoken.
Captain Nigel Shelby was a thin man with tired eyes, graying hair, and the long strange gait of someone who spent too much time in artificial gravity. I thought he looked like an old man who wanted to yell at kids to get off his lawn but was either too tired or too apathetic to bother.
But appearances can be deceiving, and you didn't get to be the captain of one of ONI's coveted stealth prowler vessels without having done something exceptional to get yourself noticed. We'd been stationed aboard the Night Fox for the last few months and Shelby had gotten us out of some sticky situations.
So, there we stood assembled in the Night Fox CIC as the man gave us the details on our op. On the CIC's primary display had been pulled up the model of a planet with a single moon, also visible was a quartet of Covenant CCS class assault cruisers.
"Alright spartans," the captain began, "This is the outer colony world of Kursk."
He said it as he gestured to the model of the planet. It wasn't quite an iceball. There were visible oceans and green continents, but a majority of the planet's surface was a snowy white. Probably a seasonal winter cycle, I thought.
Kelly exchanged a look with Malcolm conveying the unspoken message of 'I was right'.
"Two weeks ago," the captain continued, "they sent out a distress call after a Covenant fleet exited slipspace and executed a surprise attack, destroyed Kursk's planetary defense fleet, and began a ground assault campaign on the planet's northern hemisphere."
Surprise Attack.
The thought made me feel a little tinge of frustration. In the pre-war decades when the most the UNSC had to worry about was insurrectionists with outdated equipment, it was easy to catch early warnings of approaching ships because whenever a vessel exited slipspace it would emit a burst of Cherenkov radiation, something which could be easily detected on long range stellar scanners if one knew what to look for.
Although Covenant ships did the same, the problem was that Covenant vessels were far more accurate when exiting slipspace. Human ships could sometimes exit slipspace anywhere within a target deviation of a few million kilometers, whereas the Covenant were able to execute precision jumps, even inter-system ones, which often allowed them to bypass early warning systems simply by being more accurate with where they exited slipspace, not to mention their ships were a magnitude faster than anything humanity could field.
Captain Shelby continued with the briefing. "However, before it was destroyed, Kursk's planetary defense fleet managed to partially disable one of the four cruisers. That one is our target." Shelby hit a key and the display changed to focus on Kursk's moon, showing a flight trajectory of one of the cruisers splitting off from the rest of the fleet.
Linda, usually the quietest of Blue team, floated a question. "Captain, you said the ship was disabled, but it was still capable of splitting off from the fleet?"
"Yes, 058. ONI believes that the cruiser's shields are inoperable and that it has split off from the fleet to make repairs, but that it also has a secondary objective. The cruiser is looking for something on the moon while the rest of the fleet sets to the ground assault of the planet."
"So, it's a zero-g insertion," John stated bluntly. "Board the ship, secure the ship's data centers, find out what they're looking for, plant explosives, and then exfil."
"Correct, 117," The captain replied. "You'll be deploying from the Night Fox on an intercept course with EVA thruster packs, and then you'll effect entry through one of the cruiser's airlocks. The Night Fox will be on standby for extraction."
An outsider wouldn't have noticed a thing, but the Spartans all felt the change in the room. A slight discomfort.
See, it wasn't that we hadn't done ops like these before. We had probably done more than thirty zero-g insertions. Some against insurrectionist controlled orbital stations, some against Covenant ships. That didn't mean they didn't come without risk. Putting people in space was always dangerous. The environment would always be hostile to human life.
At least on the ground most of the time the worst thing you had to worry about was just being shot at.
Remember when I mentioned that the Spartan II program had only suffered two combat casualties in the eight years we had been active?
Well, both of those happened in EVA ops like this. In 2531, the year prior, the original leader of Green team, Spartan Kurt-051 had been lost in space after his thruster pack had been damaged, sending him on an out of control thrust vector into space, and was presumed dead. Likely after his suit ran out of air and he asphyxiated.
I say presumed because his body was never recovered.
Before that, in 2525, Samuel-034 was killed during a boarding action of a Covenant vessel. It was our first deployment outfitted in our new MJOLNIR armor. The entire company of Spartan-II's had attempted the boarding action over the planet Chi Ceti IV, but only John, Kelly, and Samuel made it inside.
During a firefight aboard the ship, Sam suffered a catastrophic suit breach after being hit by a Covenant plasma weapon and because of it was unable to exit the vessel back into the vacuum, and instead stayed behind to defend a nuclear warhead that Blue team planted aboard the ship, and died when the device detonated, destroying the ship and Sam along with it.
It was the first time humanity had ever been able to destroy a Covenant vessel. It was a victory. But for us it just proved that we weren't invincible. In our new MJOLNIR armor, we had felt unstoppable. Sam's death was a grim reminder that we were still just children. Barely fifteen years old, but we had been charged with the defense of humanity from a seemingly unstoppable foe.
I…
…
…I remember finding Kelly after the mission was over, secluded by herself. John mourned for Sam silently. The three of them had been inseparable. But, Kelly.
When I pulled that helmet off her, it was the only time I'd ever seen tears in her eyes.
I turned my attention back to Captain Shelby. "We have the element of surprise here, Spartans. We're on approach now. Get suited up. Deployment is in two hours, and good luck."
