Stolt - Grunt Ranger
The Covenant chose a really bad day for this operation.
I mean... I know they don't really care about our opinions, I know they discriminate against us and think we are a bunch of losers, but ordering a major attack on the anniversary of the day they glassed our homeworld? That was pretty much the last straw. The old leadership would have understood that maybe they should have waited another day, waited till a day that didn't have so much resonance to us.
We are not a particularly brave people but we have limits. Asking us to glass a world on the day our own homeworld was glassed, the very day our people considers to be our racial day of mourning? That was our limit. Messages, coded ones, were passed around as somebody had connections with the enemy. Talks were had and an agreement was reached.
We were the majority of the fleet even if most of us were conscripts. We were the janitorial staff, the cooks, every rear-echelon jobs outside of Engineering. Three weeks away from the attack the Covenant blew up a peaceful protest on the bug homeworld. Children died and then Engineering contacted us and said they were in. The two of us worked together, setting things up until we slipped just outside the human death zone. Then we shut off all the power, to every ship on the fleet. Doors were locked and bolted and we hoped and prayed that things would work out.
The sizzling of holes in our bulkhead was a good sign the Huey forces looked at us.
"You're the guys?"
I held up my symbol and they kicked over a box. We took the weapons eagerly and rushed forward. It was strange fighting by Huey's side, they didn't tire like we did and they lasted longer. That was good because, even with their help, it was one hell of a slog. The officers did their damnedest to fight back, to try to stop us, but we had the guns and the element of surprise and help. Lost a few friends that day, but when it was over the fleet was ours.
I remember us cheering. I remember particularly hated officers being sent into space, watching them scream for mercy that never came. For the first time my people had a fleet to fight back with, a real fleet. It was then that we turned over some pretty major intelligence to Huey on a holy relic, a Halo.
The officers had some kind of plan and if our revolution had any chance of success we absolutely needed to stop it. I remember talking to some human named john about it, he looked at me.
"I never thought I would see the day I would fight alongside a Grunt."
"How about a friend?"
I held out my hand and he laughed.
"Yeah, that I could see."
We shook hands. I thought about giving a speech, about new eras, about change, but this wasn't the time. It was time for action.