I don't think it would be an understatement to say that interacting with normal humans isn't exactly my strong suit. With my whole life spent in the Spartan II program, I could break the kinds of people in my life that I usually interacted with down into four groups.
My fellow Spartans, people I trusted with my life and would always have my back. Superior officers, who were to be obeyed unless their orders directly countermanded my mission. Fellow soldiers, who while not able to perform on the same level as my fellow Spartans and I, could still be counted on for their support. And the last group, enemies, which were to be given no quarter.
Which is why when faced with a civilian, I'm a bit out of my element.
I watched as this woman, maybe not even a few years older than me, cower. Her eyes shot about wildly, looking at me. Going from my helmeted face to my boots, to the dead alien corpses littering the ground behind me outside the barn, to the door I had torn away, to the rifle I had wrenched from her hands, and then back to me.
I looked at the gun I'd taken from her. Not a Misriah Armories model, instead it looked like a surplus rifle from the last century. A polymer body construction, slim profile, and a curved banana-style magazine protruding from a magazine well in front of the grip and trigger. A contrast to the bullpup rifles typically carried by UNSC infantry men. It didn't have an electronic display either and weighed just a little under eight pounds. Half the magazine was empty from the spray of bullets the woman had fired at me.
The weapon's silhouette reminded me of the ancient Russian-made Kalashnikov rifles which had been popular until the early twenty-second century. On a colony world filled with Russian descendants, I guess it was par for the course. Some things are traditional.
The woman's wide blue eyes flickered back and forth from me to the rifle. She was hyperventilating, short and sharp breaths going in and out. I bet if I could see the hair on her arms, it would be standing up straight.
According to the rules of engagement, she was disarmed and no longer a threat, even if she had shot at me already. ROE's only applied to humans, which was fine by me. I didn't have a problem killing aliens, but I'd been originally trained to fight human insurrectionists.
The innies.
Colonials who wanted out from under the authority of the United Earth Government and had resorted to violence to try and gain their independence.
That's the joke, right?
We call them innies when what they really want most is to get out.
Point is, I'd killed people before, but I'd never liked having to do it.
Shooting at covies is one thing. It was always different when shooting at people who look like you. Chief Mendez never taught us to hate our enemy other than the standard 'if you don't kill the enemy, they'll kill you and your squad', but spend enough time around soldiers and you'll start to pick up on the fact that they aren't what you'd call the most tolerant people. Ride along with a combat unit and you can hear all sorts of creative slurs for the people we shoot at.
That's by design.
It's a defense mechanism. If you can come up with a way of dehumanizing someone, it lessens the guilt of having to kill other human beings who might have perfectly reasonable grievances.
It's funny, isn't it? How even when humanity is facing extinction at the hands of genocidal aliens, we still can't just get along and stop shooting at each other. Good job, humanity.
Anyway, I needed answers and she was the only person I'd found so far, and she had attacked me out of fear and a need for self-defense, not malice.
I'd seen enough soldiers lose their nerve on the battlefield to know what she was thinking. It would be important to make myself seem as unthreatening as possible.
I released the magazine from the well and tossed it aside, then pulled back on the charging handle to eject the round from the chamber. It flew out with a satisfying noise as the bolt slammed open. I gave the weapon one last look and then set it down on the dirty barn floor and gently kicked it away, a cloud of arid light brown dust going with it.
I turned open my hands and showed them to the woman, my palms facing towards her. Her eyes switched back and forth and between them and saw that they were empty.
I finished the gesture by lowering myself onto my left knee. I was still looking down at her, but at least now it wouldn't seem like my giant frame was towering over her.
I guess the message got across to her, because her breathing steadied, and she stopped looking at my hands and looked me in the eye. Or the two glowing blue dots on my faceplate that stood in as a facsimile of eyes for my armored visage.
"Vy chelovek?" She spoke at last.
Russian, of course.
I knew a little, amongst other languages, but the suit translated for me.
Her voice was accented, trembling a little, and in the alto range.
She spoke the same question again, this time in English.
"Are you human?"
I was used to the question. The Spartan II program was highly classified. Some information about us had leaked out since we went into service in 2525, but it was entirely normal for people to see us in our MJOLNIR armor and mistake us for some type of battlefield robot.
My new appearance may have seemed even stranger to the eye but was still humaniform.
I made a show of nodding my head slowly up and down.
She drew in a heavy deep breath and let it out in relief. "Slava bogu. Are there more? Are there more of you coming? Are they already here?" she said hurriedly.
And there we hit the wall I had feared. With my inability to speak, communicating would be slow.
I needed more information. She had said 'more of you'. What could I tell her? Telling her there was a UNSC fleet coming would have been a violation of security protocol.
She kept going. "Your name, what is your name?"
That was technically classified too, but I didn't have a problem sharing that. Sharing my name was the start of building trust, and that was what I needed.
I took the dog tags whose chain I had wrapped around my wrist, palmed them, and stretched out my hand towards her, while pointing to myself with my other hand.
"Vot i vse, Ulysses? That's your name? Ulysses? You're a soldier?" she said, reading it off the tags.
I nodded again, slowly, and gestured towards her. She seemed calm now and gave a short nod as she understood.
"Klara. My name is Klara." She pulled strands of blonde hair which had slipped out of her messy ponytail away from her face. "You understand me. Why can't you speak?" she asked.
I wasn't quite sure how to properly mime the act which would explain that I had probably lost my voice as a result of damage caused by explosive decompression. Instead, I settled for making a finger gun gesture towards my throat, and then swiping my fingers across it.
"You were injured?" she asked quietly.
I nod again. She seemed to have herself under control now and made to stand up. I followed suit as she looks me up and down, the top of her head barely reaching up to my solar plexus. She made a small move like she wanted to touch me but stopped herself and put her arms back down to her sides.
"Bozhe moy, like a big golem."
I suppose I did look the part. The suit's dark gray artificial muscles looked like they could have been sculpted from clay.
I knew she wasn't a soldier, but maybe she was planetary militia, a forward scout perhaps. Someone who would be sent out to survey the terrain for an incoming force if there were no satellites over head to map the ground from orbit.
"There are others, the polkovnik will want to see you. I can take you to them." She said.
'Colonel' the suit tells me, translating the word. So, she is militia, and reports to someone. It would be a start of me being able to contact the other Spartans.
"Er, do you mind?" She said as she dusted herself off, grabbing a discarded rucksack from the ground and shouldering it, before making a gesture to me, glancing at the rifle I had taken from her. I was standing between her and it, discarded on the floor behind me. "Sorry about… you know. I thought that those cherti were going to get me and that you were one of them."
I'd be lying if I said I was comfortable with the idea of giving the rifle back to her. Looking at my torso, the burst of 7.62mm rounds she had fired at me hadn't even left a scratch on the suit, but still.
I conceded though.
I turned on my heel and plucked the rifle from the ground. I quick tap from my palm shook some of the light brown dust off and I held it out for her to take.
She grasped the weapon with both hands and inspected it, before pulling another curved magazine from the inside of her jacket and brought it home into the magazine well. She pulled the charging handle back to chamber a round, and then slid it halfway back again to make sure it had chambered successfully. Someone had at least taught her the basics of how to handle the gun. She flicked the safety on and kept the barrel pointed to the ground.
The thing is, I did trust not her not to shoot me in the back.
You know why?
The entire time she'd been talking to me, the suit had been running scans over her and putting readouts on my HUD. I don't know how it gathers all this data, but it says it's analyzing her heart rate and stress markers and ultrasonic harmonic frequencies in her voice and pupil dilation and temperature, and a bunch of other things and it tells me that she's telling the truth.
And the suit hasn't been wrong so far, so if it's inclined to trust her, then I'm willing to as well.
I step out of her way and let her take the lead. I see her eye the Covenant corpses on the ground with a look of hatred as she exits the barn.
I pluck a discarded needler from the ground as she looks back at me and says, "You killed them all yourself?"
She doesn't wait for me to nod in reply. It was more a rhetorical statement made out of a sense of awe rather than an actual question. I could only imagine what Klara had already lost to the Covenant invasion. In the last seven years I had already seen too many parents grieving for children they had lost, and too many war orphans left alone in the world after their parents insisted that their children be saved when there was limited room on evacuation ships.
I'd seen men and women fall in battle around me. Each one of those people had a family or someone they were leaving behind. Somebody who would mourn them.
Even with every impossible victory the Spartans pulled from the jaws of defeat, humanity was still losing the war. I'd seen ONI's projections on the probability of actually winning. It seemed like for every victory humanity won, we still suffered three defeats.
I remember wondering just how long we could keep that going.
I see Klara point to a mountain off in the distance. "Our base is a three days' hike from here to the East," she says to me. "We'd better start walking."
The suit sees the mountain she's pointing at and does the math, calculating distance. Seventy-six miles.
A fit hiker can walk about twenty-five miles in a day, and I'm thinking our speed will be even slower than that going through wooded and rough terrain, not to mention if we get spotted by a Covenant air patrol. Somebody will probably put an alert out when they realize the group of covies I killed to save Klara aren't reporting in, which would complicate things.
Alone, I could probably make the distance in less than a day, but then I would be leaving her on her own.
"Follow Klara," the suit orders me.
So, we start walking, going back through the tree line and into the forest.
I let her take the lead as guide because she's familiar with the woods, but it makes me feel restless. My two-meter stride covers the ground quicker enough to the point that I have to make sure to slow myself so that I don't accidentally run her down.
Every so often I turn around and look to make sure we aren't being followed. She fills a canteen from streams running through the woods. The first time she offers me a drink of water from it, I realize that I hadn't eaten, drank, or slept since I had deployed from the Night Fox.
I didn't feel the urge to either. Hunger and exhaustion could be suppressed. Soldiers were issued with combat stims which augmented GABA and adrenaline in the brain, designed to keep them combat-capable for extended periods but it always made them feel like crap for a few days after. Those things take a toll on the body, and it catches up with you eventually.
Something that can't be suppressed though is the need for water. Military regulations say a soldier may need anywhere between ten to twelve liters of water per day, depending on climate, levels of exertion, and combat conditions. Given my size and weight, I probably needed a bit more than that.
My MJOLNIR armor had an internal recycling plant to purify my sweat and urine and feed it back to me as drinkable water, but as far as could tell, my mystery suit didn't. I should have been dehydrated after going so long without a drink, and yet I felt nary an urge for even a drop of water.
That should have worried me, but it didn't.
I think you can guess why at this point.
The sun starts going down eventually and I look at Klara and can tell she wants to stop to sleep. Her steps are sluggish, and her eyelids are drooping, but she hasn't complained at all. She's driven. The suit tells me that the days on Kursk last twenty-five hours and sixteen minutes, as opposed to an Earth-standard twenty-four-hour day. She would have trouble seeing in the dark with no night vision aid, and a flashlight or a torch could give away our position.
Eventually we come to a rocky nook and stop.
"Here," she says, "I need to rest."
And I let her. She pulls an insulated outdoor sleeping bag from her rucksack and lays it out on a patch of flat ground, angled to make sure that all her blood doesn't go to her head while sleeping, but not before pulling out an MRE as well.
She eats it cold, not bothering with the self-heating element. I know why. It's the same reason her sleeping bag is lined with a thermo-reflective layer and that we don't light a campfire. It's so we don't get spotted by anyone flying overhead with an imaging system.
When she's done, she wraps up the MRE's packaging and stuffs it back into her bag, rather than leave it behind it. Someone could find it and use it as a lead to tail us.
She takes a moment to pull a little metal bobble on a thin chain around her neck out from under her clothes. The bobble is the size of the tip of her thumb. Not dog tags, I realize, a locket. The locket flicks open and inside there's a picture of a young man with close cropped dark hair, and a little girl with blonde hair and blue eyes just like Klara. Her husband and daughter, I'm guessing.
She says what sounds like a prayer in Russian, asking God to keep them safe.
Then she clicks the locket shut, stuffs herself into her sleeping bag, and drifts off to sleep, but not before laying her rifle close by.
She goes up in my estimation. She may not have been a soldier, but someone had clearly taught her a bit about escape and evasion. Maybe one of her parents, I think. It wasn't uncommon for retired UNSC servicemen to move out to the frontier after they got out of the military.
I almost want to pick her up and just keep walking while carrying her. She couldn't have weighed more than a hundred pounds, but I don't think that would have gone over very well. Instead, I just keep watch throughout the night.
I don't feel the urge to sleep.
I can't in fact.
Not anymore, anyway.
I'm always aware now.
Every sound in the forest snaps my head around, looking for unseen enemies, but the suit never pings anything with a white triangle, or puts a new marker on my map, or sounds a threat alert. For the uninitiated, those of you whose military experience starts and ends with what you see in action films and play in your simulation games, the truth is that ninety percent of being a soldier isn't fighting.
It's waiting. Just sitting there, waiting.
Like slowly watching the pressure in a vessel rise and rise and rise, until finally there's a quick and sudden explosion, and then everything is still again.
That's what being a soldier is like.
Kelly once told me that was the best thing about the cryo freeze. Cutting out the waiting. Getting rid of the time where doubt would build in your mind and you started second guessing all your decisions. If you thought too much about all the things you could have done, it would drive you mad. You know I was only twenty-two years old, right? That because of all the time I spent in cryo freeze, I was probably biologically closer to eighteen or nineteen?
I'd already seen enough in life where I didn't want to sleep anymore.
I almost miss it now. Now that I can't anymore.
I spent the night watching the sky, my needler always close at hand.
I watched the steady rise and fall of Klara's breathing.
I watched the stars twinkle.
If this report makes it to Earth, let me tell you, it's different.
Seeing the night sky with no light pollution, seeing light from stars that travelled for untold millions of years. Knowing there are places out there I'll never get to see. Humanity hasn't even made it out of the Orion arm of the galaxy. You ever wonder what else is out there?
I see purple streaks in the sky.
Flight trails. Two sets.
I immediately recognize them as a belonging to a banshee air patrol.
And I think to myself maybe it would have been better if humanity had never left Earth at all.
I tense, but see they're not flying towards us, and not adjusting course.
The suit threw a chronometer up on my HUD that tells me it's been six hours and I decide it's time to keep moving. The sun wasn't up yet, but I gently shook Klara awake anyway. She comes to sharply, reaching for her rifle, her eyes scanning around. "What is it?" She asked worriedly. "Are the cherti close?"
Devils.
She calls them devils.
I shake my head from side to side, telling her no. I point to myself, then to her, then I walk my right index and middle fingers across my left palm, and she understands.
We need to keep moving.
She climbs out of the sleeping bag and picks up her rifle. I roll the bag up and stuff it into her rucksack before slinging the rucksack around my own shoulder. She looks at me strangely but doesn't protest. I didn't have a problem carrying it. Less weight to tire her out meant we would move all the faster, and we still had a lot of ground to cover. I was correct in my assumption that we wouldn't make perfect time while having to push through dense forest growth.
Every moment I spent separated from Kelly, John, Malcolm, and everyone else, the probability of something horrible happening increased.
I just hoped I wouldn't be too late.
