April 4th, 2532
UNSC colony Vodin
Furthest extent of settled territory…
A morass of local and Earth-sourced plants rustled loudly in the untamed fields nearby, heralding the chill night breeze washed over Gaetano Iannelli's face. The seven year-old huddled closer to the adults standing on either side of him in response.
In the skies above, death flashed among the stars.
It came in flares of violet and ruby, or lingering flashes of orange and yellow like fireworks. He wasn't sure when the deceptively entertaining display had started, only that he'd been roused when someone else saw it and led gently outside to bear witness to Vodin's impending annihilation.
Gaetano knew a seven year-old like him shouldn't have been thinking in those terms, but it was really unavoidable. Both his parents had been gone for almost three years to serve the Navy. As for who was taking care of them in their place…
"I think they pull this one off," Uncle Arrigo told everyone in earshot, rubbing Gaetano's shoulder reassuringly. Gaetano looked up and saw the young man's amber eyes gleaming intensely in the night despite the patchwork of scars covering his face.
A loud sigh filled the air on Gaetano's right. He watched Aunt Lika lean into view with a dismal light in her copper eyes."
"Honey, you weren't there at Asmara," the young woman explained. "You don't know how this works-" she swept her hand across the sky and towards the horizon, where an ochre gleam centered around the city of Vonomir (or rather, what used to be the city of Vonomir) was just visible.
"The Navy had two months to turn the tables on them. If they couldn't do it before…" Aunt Lika let the implication hang, tracing the outline of a scar that extended from her forehead to her left cheek and down to her chin-the work of a wrist-mounted energy blade wielded by one of the "Elite" aliens that had invaded a colony called Caspia. It was an unnerving reminder of her time in the UNSC Army, one she still hadn't told Gaetano the full story of.
Both Aunt Lika and Uncle Arrigo had served, apparently meeting each other at some Veterans club on the colony. The difference was that Arrigo always shared stories of hunting the Freedom League on Jericho VII, while Lika had promised to tell him about fighting the aliens when he was older.
After the past two months, Gaetano understood why.
True, the pair had staked their claim far from civilization, which was part of why his parents had sent him to live with them in the first place. But this isolation had given them no relief on January 20th, when news of Covenant ships advancing on Vodin had been announced on the planetary Waypoint network. There had been no visible reaction from his hosts, only a newfound coldness in the air that had overpowered a balmy afternoon.
Uncle Arrigo offered no retort to Aunt Lika this time. The former marine simply grasped Gaetano's hand tightly and resumed watching the mesmerizing light show playing out above them.
They had no way of knowing exactly what was going on up there. The couple had avoided the news like the plague, and civilian sources wouldn't explain exactly what forces were involved anyway-"opsec", Uncle Arrigo had explained faux-melodramatically. Still, the signs were there, the battle playing out over their heads being the most obvious example. All the big cities like Lucania and Karawankgrad lay on the other side of the planet. When Vonomir, which didn't even have a space elevator, had been replaced by that surging orange glow on the horizon, the fate of those cities wasn't hard to guess.
"Two and a half months," Lika murmured to herself unprompted. "Not bad. I hope they bled every step of the way up there."
Gaetano ignored this sudden outburst of spite, knowing that it wasn't anything abnormal for Aunt Lika.
Uncle Arrigo didn't reply, simply putting one arm around his wife's waist and pulling the trio closer together.
Sensing her Nephew's discomfort, the woman ruffled Gaetano's hair and looked down at him with a whimsical expression.
"Just relax, dear. Soon it'll all be over."
The words set the gears of Gaetano's mind turning belatedly, and he fixed his Aunt with an incredulous expression.
"Is this really it?" His voice grew urgent for the first time in the past two months.
Aunt Lika nodded solemnly, but tightened her grip nonetheless. "When you see the light, just hold onto me. Don't run, don't cry, don't shout. Be brave, for your parents."
The mention of his parents made Gaetano shiver in the night air, but Aunt Lika only pulled him in more tightly.
"You won't feel a thing except for the warmth from our bodies. That's all you'll feel forever."
A purple sun lit up the night sky, burning for a few seconds before fading away. Now it was Aunt Lika's turn to shudder.
"They'll never split us apart, understand? They want us scared and tired and alone, but we'll always have each other forever because we're family. We won't give them what they want and we'll be together forever and they'll be mad because we're not afraid of them. And one day you'll feel your parents joining with us and we can all embrace that warmth forever…"
Something else blew up, catching Aunt Lika's eye. Gaetano followed her gaze towards a veritable fireworks show of violet and orange lights. Whatever was going on up there must've been reaching its finale.
Gaetano ignored the halfhearted sputtering of Aunt Lika and the increasingly chilly night air around him, instead concentrating on the wild display above him. He saw flashes of pin-sized light split the night sky, followed by pink sparks at the far end of each bright line. More sparks filled the other end of the sky, large clusters that split apart of their own accord.
More new stars filled the night, pink and purple, then a few orange lights in rapid succession, then another indigo smear billowing across the sky until it caught fire in the atmosphere, then back to orange again.
The battle passed out of view moments later just as another ship began shedding purple flames in the atmosphere, leaving a trail of smaller bits and pieces flashing in the night.
But Aunt Lika and Uncle Arrigo remained unmoved by the scene, continuing to hold Gaetano tightly in anticipation of the blinding fate that would come down upon them.
So they waited.
And waited
And waited some more, as a newborn meteor shower filled the sky, brilliant lights colored white, yellow, and pink zipping over their heads.
Gaetano was starting to feel the adults shivering against him, so he took the opportunity to speak up at last.
"Was that it?"
—-
46 years later…
Chief Petty Officer Gaetano Iannelli finished his story shortly thereafter, settling into the familiar couch that dominated the living room of his Uncle's house. The room was in a near-identical state to what it looked like that night in 2532, excluding a few rearranged pieces of furniture and new plants. On either side of him, distant lights from other houses shone through the bulletproof glass windows that took up most of the walls, hinting at other changes that had occurred beyond his reach. This part of the colony wasn't so isolated anymore.
Having finished telling his story, Gaetano waited for a reaction from the four-person audience that had joined him in the living room. Half of them already knew the details, having been there themselves. Uncle Arrigo and Aunt Lika, looking much older but no less dull in their near-matching copper eyes, were more interested in what the other half of the audience had to say.
These two were the youngest people in the room, on the outside at least. Tomaso and Cristina Ianelli looked upon their son with a mix of concern, relief, and amazement in their eyes. Gaetano could understand why his parents seemed so befuddled by the story, after all, they were the lucky ones.
Tomaso and Cristina had been assigned to the UNSC Spirit of Fire, a former colony ship rebuilt to do everything from transport troops to fight enemy ships head-on with a triple MAC battery. From what they'd dared mention in emails, the ship had been sent to Harvest as part of the last push to evict the Covenant from the planet only to get caught up in some sticky situations far outside its league and left shorn of its slipspace drive in unknown space, forcing the crew to take refuge in cryosleep. This dire state of affairs had persisted until 2577 when the lost ship received help from an ironic source: a fleet led by one Arkad Nar Kulul, a Sangheilli Admiral in league with a post-Covenant coalition that was allied with humanity. Gaetano was still processing that the true leader of that faction was indirectly responsible for rescuing his parents, but that was in the past. So were his parents, whose exact resemblance to his faint memories from 2530 held an almost dreamlike quality. The only difference was the newer dress uniform design they wore, matching Gaetano's own. He, on the other hand, must've looked like a completely different person now that he was on the wrong side of 50, and despite gallivanting across space in and out of cryo for 30 years he was still starting to show it.
His father broke the silence first.
"I'd say it doesn't make sense, but then again the Navy told people that our ship was lost with all hands, so in a way I'm not surprised."
His mother shook her head in shame. "They wrote off all those ships, an entire planet…it's just not right."
Vodin's survival was nothing short of a miracle. Barely a year after Gaetano's parents had vanished with the Spirit of Fire, the Covenant had attacked, slowly but surely pushing back the UNSC defenders on land and in orbit until almost every major city on the planet was lost. Still, the Navy had continued to fight until April 4th, when the last remnants of both fleets had seemingly destroyed each other.
But that "seemingly" was doing more work than it should've. Not a single human escape pod had graced Vodin's surface during the campaign. The confused survivors, civilian and military, could do nothing but work together to survive.
What nobody knew was that Vodin was left cut off from the rest of human space, stranded in the wake of a large Covenant offensive. By the time the Navy made contact with the planet again, it wasn't late 2532 but late 2542.
Despite this isolation, the survivors hadn't forgotten the sacrifice of their unknown defenders. Many, including Gaetano, happily accepted the opportunity to be evacuated to safe territory so they could join the Navy in their honor, perhaps even uncovering the truth about the battle along the way.
As it turned out, the latter hope would prove fruitless. Navy records about Vodin were nothing less than a black hole. Only a few warships, mainly those tasked with protecting evacuation convoys, had made it out of the system, and barely any of those had survived the war. Besides, Gaetano had been too busy trying to survive the Inner Colonies sieges to go scouring old records. After over 30 years of nearly getting killed by the Covenant, the Servants of the Abiding Truth with their Forerunner toys, and everything in between, it seemed to him that the full story of Vodin would be just another of many mysteries that had piled up during the collapse of the Outer Colonies in the 2530s.
But that didn't mean they had to forget. Since 2533, the colonists had marked April 4th as a day of mourning in memory of everyone who had died during the siege, including their mysterious saviors.
Gaetano could see Aunt Lika listening to her sister in-law with a skeptical look in her eyes. Having served in the UNSC Army, Gaetano knew what she would've wanted to say. Whether it was Galodew, Caspia, Karaba, or Asmara, the story always had the same ending: the Navy would cut its losses and run, leaving a few million people at the mercy of the Covenant. What about Green Hills, Second Base, Hairu, Redstow VI, Etalan IV, and all the other undefended colonies attacked at the very start of the war, she might've asked. The Navy's qualms about leaving planets to die were few, she would've declared. But then, Vodin hadn't ended that way, had it? Instead, she just turned away and gulped down her drink.
The discussion quickly shifted to more mundane topics, like the demeanor of the neighbors. It was almost too quick for Gaetano's taste, and initiated by his parents. They seemed interested in changing the subject, as if they had something uncomfortable on their minds about the attack, but what? As the night wore in, he decided not to press the issue until tomorrow. Their own odyssey held many unpleasant secrets that couldn't be rushed.
After getting more drunk than he'd intended, Gaetano finally decided to turn in for the night, finally returning to the same bedroom he'd first slept in almost 50 years ago. Passing by dimly-lit UNSC Marine posters and dust-covered models, he slid into bed and soon fell fast asleep.
May 11th, 2546
UNSC Colony Camber, moon orbiting gas giant Eryri.
Farwatch system
Turn, reverse, turn, reverse. That was all GM Iannelli could feel the Destroyer Edgar Sykes doing for the past 30 minutes, and every time it did he had to grab hold of his assigned console for fear of the ship's artificial gravity giving way beneath a plasma wallopping.
Something had gone horribly wrong. Camber was supposed to be ready for anything, even more so than in 2542 when the Covenant first raided the system. So why was the Edgar Sykes twisting about so wildly in space? Why hadn't Captain Konou given proper sitrep?
Machinery rattled to life around him, the Archer missile pods he'd been assigned to watch over chattering eagerly at the prospect of unleashing their deadly payload for the first time. Iannelli waited for the familiar gong-like reverberation of the ship's two MAC guns to fill the corridor around him.
Then the Halberd-class destroyer turned once again, this time with the suddenness of emergency thrusters being engaged. Already clinging for dear life to the handrails framing his console, Gaetano still lurched hard to the right and readed himself to swing nonchalantly back into position.
He never got a chance. The Edgar Sykes jerked forwards again, slower but far more roughly this time. Iannelli could almost hear the destroyer screaming in protest, a metallic wailing that reverberated all around him before sputtering out into a veritable storm of tinny coughing and choking from throughout the maimed ship's hull.
Somewhere along the line, Iannelli had lost his grip both figuratively and literally, and he found himself slumped against the door at the far end of the corridor, the cacophony still ringing in his ears.
At least the artificial gravity hadn't failed, he noted.
The ship was moving, limping straight ahead away from whatever had struck it. He could feel the fusion drives surging from where he lay, a precariously uneven throbbing as the ship struggled to accelerate.
Slowly, the ringing in his ears gave way, replaced by a strange voice echoing his latent thoughts.
"-get up."
It wasn't his thoughts, he realized, it was the ship's PA system.
"-weapons aren't responding from here! Iannelli, you need to launch the Archers on your end! I've got your biosigns pulled up right here, don't sleep on me sailor-"
Captain Konou's voice cut through the haze in his mind. The crewman got to his feet just as the ship was struck again, knocking him to his hands and knees amidst another round of metallic screaming. More shaking followed, the contortions of the ship's tortured hull flowing up through his hands. He crawled forward, unsure of how stable the destroyer was.
"Iannelli, launch the missiles!"
The console wasn't even 3 meters away. He didn't know how much time he had. What was going on?
A calm sensation fell over him just then, and the floor suddenly ceased its rumblings. Something unseen lifted him gently to his feet.
The calm faded, but the presence remained, drifting away from him until he was suddenly shoved forward without warning, stumbling the last few steps towards the local control console until he had to grab a handrail to steady himself.
The option to fire filled the whole screen with an urgent red.
He reached out his left finger to tap it.
Everything went white.
—
"Edgar Sykes…"
Gaetano grabbed a handful of his bedsheets before he remembered where he really was. Indistinct voices babbled just out of reach, the last vestiges of his dream. Or so he thought, until the voices only grew louder and more familiar until they reached where his bedroom door lay hidden beneath near pitch-black darkness.
The door swung open to reveal the shocked visages of his parents above the light of two datapads.
"Gaetano," his mother stammered, "the colony-there's something in orbit-it's an emergency!"
"Mother, what's wrong?"
The pair seemed to remember how old their son really was and took a steadying breath in unison, a moment of calm that was ruined when Uncle Arrigo stumbled into view behind the pair and worked the bolt on an MA5 to get their attention. The noise visibly startled the pair.
"I can already see them outside," the scarred man hissed, offering an ancient 9mm pistol to both of Gaetano's parents. What exactly the former marine expected small arms to accomplish against a threat that was apparently up in space, Gaetano didn't know, but he was already sliding out of bed to get dressed.
Alerted to the movement, his Uncle put the gun away and started explaining what was going on.
"A bunch of ships jumped into orbit and started attacking anything bigger than a satellite. Our friends are doing their jobs, but there's still a few coming our way."
Gaetano nodded, pulling on a spare service uniform and checking the old digital clock on his desk to confirm what his growing headache was telling him. It wasn't even midnight on April 4th, meaning barely three hours had passed since he'd fallen asleep.
The annoyance passed quickly. He'd been on the receiving end of surprise attacks with less sleep before.
After getting dressed, he finished off a spare bottle of water to soothe his headache and exited the bedroom, his parents having already left to get a glimpse of the attackers. Uncle Arrigo had helpfully left a few guns propped up against the wall for him to choose from. He swiped a familiar M6D pistol, just for old time's sake, and headed to the living room.
"There they are. Looks like a half dozen."
His Uncle was already pointing out the unknown foes to Aunt Lika and his parents when he arrived, holding an MA5 bereft of the usual bulky integrated display at his side. The others seemed to err more on the side of common sense and weren't carrying guns.
Gaetano stopped at the far end of the group and examined the familiar night sky. Sure enough, there weren't just a half-dozen fast-moving lights, but at least twice that number. The Sapphire beacons traversed the sky in no particular formation, fanning out above the planet.
"Who are these freaks? Abiding Truth?" He asked.
"They haven't read us the riot act yet, so I don't think so." Arrigo replied.
Watching the blue lights continue to dart around between stars, Gaetano almost felt like his headache was spreading. Each one pulsed with a harsh glimmer that made his eyes burn in its own unique, special way. Soon enough he admitted to himself that this was no normal uneven migraine. There was something very wrong about the ships up there, something quite unlike any Covenant ship.
The comparison made him think back to that ominous night 46 years ago. He remembered the cold wind that seemed to rise with each light that winked out of existence, the echo of another fallen combatant in the climactic struggle for his home.
The usual superstitious nonsense asserted that somewhere out there, the defenders of Vodin remained waiting for the day when the colony was under threat once again. Gaetano remembered the time on his clock: 10:52 PM.
For the first time, he thought back to the memory of that confusing day over Camber that had visited him in his dreams. The whole battle had been a blur in his mind for 30 years on, a defeat he never cared to revisit even with Covenant archives available to explain how everything had fallen apart. Until tonight, when that sudden rush of unnatural serenity and drive to action became clear once again.
Between growing up with unexplained stories from his Aunt and Uncle and serving in the Navy himself, Gaetano had always been unable to deny the existence of ghosts.
Was something really out there? There was still an hour left before April 4th passed them by to find out.
—
/watch?v=8KTbvIVIyBM
Darkness receded before a new presence, rousing her after an eternity of isolation.
The light illuminated the full breadth of her scattered self and bathed her in warm understanding.
The pain was immense, dissolving the broken mess her spirit had become.
She embraced it, accepting the first true sensation she had felt in this crushing void.
Her essence was reformed, reassembled by the immense power of the light.
She heard voices calling out from it now, felt the fear and desperate hope falling over her.
They were under attack again, and they needed someone to save them.
Not just anyone, she realized. They knew of her somehow.
Why didn't they call her by name? She had a name, of course, yet didn't hear it.
More importantly, why did they want her in the first place? Who had she saved?
Since when was she a hero?
The answers lay on the other side of the light, she knew. She reached out towards the voice, an unfamiliar sensation that drove her doubts away.
Besides, she shouldn't have been asking them in the first place.
It wasn't a question of heroics, it was a question of service.
And she had been constructed with one answer in mind.
—
/watch?v=kdWDg6TVWSg
Her first thought was to take a deep breath, and she was rewarded with a big gulp of nothing in the vacuum of space. Next she thought about how what should've been a horrifying experience elicited more whimsy than anything. From there she became amazed at the thought that she could think in the first place, and was about to get lost in the mire of thinking about thinking before a little voice from her crew told her to concentrate.
Wait, crew-? She started, before the voice cleared its throat and gestured somewhere out of sight.
The whole situation was absurd, she reflected. Instead of reflecting on her apparent immunity to the effects of the vacuum, she was more off-put by voices in her head, of all things-
Now several voices rose in annoyance and repeated the same gesture, accompanied by a rush of sensor data that seemed to come from her own mind rather than any equipment she wore. Deciding to take it all in stride, she subconsciously activated the thrusters mounted on the portside of her bulky armor and spun gently towards the direction of her various sensor readings.
What she saw nearly left her drifting paralyzed through space.
Whatever had brought her to the planet that lay below had deposited her on the nighttime half, the sun hidden well behind the far side. Even so, her eyes could discern countless landmarks on its darkened surface, and cross-referencing with the databanks that resided in her mind led to only one conclusion.
"Vodin," she whispered, her voice hissing to life on her comm despite being muted in the vacuum. Visions of silver and violet hulls skirting the edge of the planet's atmosphere flashed in her eyes. She knew this colony well, too well.
Then she noticed the lights dotting the colony's surface-not the lingering aftermath of a Covenant glassing, but the gentle sparkling of cities. A quick review of her records confirmed that the large continent below her remained almost completely unexplored. Or so it had been when the planet became her final resting place, that is.
Before she could wonder how much time had passed between then and this strange revival to her new state, she sensed an urgent warning from her communications officer. Hoping to get some kind of answer, she activated her comms and was immediately drenched in messages from all frequencies. Countless shocking details passed through her mind without a chance to reflect on them-2578? Cities that didn't exist on her records?-but all the transmissions shared one point in common:
Vodin was under attack.
She thought back to the immediate moments preceding her apparent reincarnation, but the feeling of complete sensory deprivation was already dissipating from her mind. All she could remember clearly was the sudden intrusion of something from the outside, and a rising call for help, just like the distress signals filling her head now.
There was no time to postulate the connection. Instead she sifted through the signals to settle on the most prominent, looking towards the source to see a sprawling space station connected to a hollow metal cord dotted with red navigation lights. A young man's shrill voice now rang out clearly in her ears, the speaker clearly unversed in proper comms protocols.
"Hello? Is anyone out there? This is Tannerovo space tether, we're reading multiple things coming our way. Someone stop them before they chop us down!"
Tannerovo city didn't exist in her records for the colony, and all the Space elevators had been felled by the Covenant. Ignoring the brief mental dissonance, she pinged the station and spoke hesitantly into her helmet's built-in mic.
"Tannerovo, this is UNSC Kayenta. I'll do what I can to protect you, but can you tell me how many contacts you're picking up?" Her voice didn't sound as confident as she wanted to project, partly because she herself was unsure of what she was.
The young comm operator yelped in shock at the words.
"UNSC? Who…What're you doing-?"
She glared down at the unhelpful space station and spoke again, more sternly this time.
"UNSC Kayenta, DDL-391. Now tell me what you're detecting out there. Are they Covenant? Innies?"
If 46 years had really passed since her untimely end, she doubted anyone would know of her. Still, saying her name aloud was enough to soothe the growing concern in her mind. She still wasn't sure what she was, but she knew who she was, and she knew her duty.
Meanwhile, the man on the other end of the transmission seemed to know less and less about the meaning of basic words. His loud breath rasped over the microphone for crucial seconds before he responded.
"Covenant?" he muttered, incredulous as ever. "What's an innie-wait! Ma'am, the freaks are changing course, they're coming right for you-"
The signal vanished in a rhythmic, static-infused sputtering that almost resembled a laugh. Instantly, Kayenta felt as if she was being watched from several places at once, and her sensors finally snapped to life in concert with the feeling. A redout on her HUD displayed multiple new contacts swerving erratically off to her left. There was no unified formation or pace, but all of them were lurching closer by the second. Whether the unknowns had deliberately reduced their ECM or her own systems were still warming up in this new state, she didn't care.
All that mattered to her was that she was outnumbered 8 to 1.
Sensor data was no help, sending back a mess of readings about the approaching unknowns that put them at anywhere from between 150 to 350 meters. There was little relieving about these measurements. The smallest Covenant warships she recalled were 300 meters long, and those slippery little rascals could easily outfight frigates twice their size.
Glancing to the left, Kayenta spotted a trio of the unknowns in the form of 3 cyan lights skating just above Vodin's atmosphere. Now that she was looking at them directly, the feeling of being watched only grew even more intense, as if there were 3 cyclopean entities bounding through space and not 3 ships. Watching the lights with her augmented vision, she began to discern the silhouettes they were attached to: jagged, skeletal frames that stood out in contrast to the clouds and city lights of the planet below.
Already these contacts were proving to be a complete mystery, what little she could discern of their designs quite unlike any Covenant ships she recalled. From what she could see, they even stood in defiance of basic shipbuilding conventions.
But a closer examination wouldn't become possible for several more minutes, and she didn't think these gut-churning newcomers would allow her to watch them in peace.
Shifting gently with her thrusters until she could take the whole wiley group of 8 in, Kayenta humbly requested her "crew" provide a status report on her weapons systems, whatever they were. If she truly was what she'd recited to the man in the space station, then she wouldn't have to worry about letting him and the others trapped up there down.
As it turned out, the truth was always a glance to her right away, in the form of a large MAC battery housing shaped like her old pointed prow that swung down over her right shoulder. The rest of her grey Marine armor was covered with Archer missile pods and 4 M870 Rampart autocannons. Her armor even had a replication of her old hull's "fins" on the miniature fusion drives connected to each of her boots.
The time to reflect on the absurdity of her loadout, just like the rest of her existence, had long since passed. Now there was only the strange enemy charging through space, and the colony that was under threat.
And the only one standing between the two of them was her, though she didn't feel worthy at all.
Kayenta watched as the 8 glowing hostiles began to pair up as they advanced towards her.
"Let's get to work."
A/N: It took a little longer than I expected, but now I'm BACK! Back in the New York Groove!
Remember how it took 6 chapters for the first shipgirl to show up in my last story? Not anymore!
This short story is going to be centered on one of the events kicking off at the same time as the "main" storyline shown in part one. I have a few other small-scale tales planned out after this, possibly alternating between the installments of the primary arc. You can expect it to end somewhere before 50,000 words.
In case you just ran into this one first, I have to emphasize: READ DEATH DIMENSION! It will explain much of the "rules" of the setting. This is an AU after all (sorry not sorry 343. you tried).
Enjoy this first chapter and happy thanksgiving!