[}{]
Captain Alex Harper
August 28th, 2552
22:00
UNSC Aegis Fate
En Route to the Boneyards
[}{]
"UNICOM has denied the request, sir. I don't know what to tell you." the officer said, exhausted.
Aegis Fate had completed its third evac run from the boneyards and his crew was shattered. Something, however, was amiss. Evacuation run number four had been denied. The docking bay they had been using, Dock D, had been denied to them by local ground support. Alex had then tried to get permission for Dock C and that had been accepted until their request was overruled to allow an ice hauler named the William Wallace to land instead.
"Who authorised that hauler to land?" he asked, frantically.
It took a moment for the intel officer to check through the records. "NAVCOM, Sir."
The Wallace made sense, it was massive, well armoured, and ships of its class could use its axial thrusters to dodge incoming covenant barrages but Dock A was still free, and several thousand civilians, warthogs, and tanks could be loaded aboard the Aegis Fate within hours of landing.
"What did they say when they denied the request?"
"Not much, Sir. They said the decision wasn't theirs to make, that the decision came down from the top, the Wallace will do the runs instead."
"ONI then." Alex sighed, "Parangosky's office?"
"I can find out for you, Sir. It will take some time, though."
"Get to it."
The question was what to do now. Ordinarily, they were to return to their primary directive or return to the fleet but no call had been made. Alex didn't want to isolate himself but he wasn't going to leave everyone stuck on the surface if he didn't have to. He had the helmsman position the Aegis on the route between the Boneyard and the lifeships, pointed at the fleet.
If the order to move to Rally Point Zulu was declared they would be positioned well to move there and, if the covenant came for the evac ships or the life ships, the Aegis could buy them some time. It took nearly two hours to get into position, the sector had gone eerily quiet since the evacuations had begun.
A sense of unease had taken the crew hostage as they waited, lurking in the skylanes. Occasionally, a battered transport would limp by. Most of them had made too many runs back and forth and taken too much damage. Few crews would leave the system, the people who manned them rarely did. They were a breed apart. Their sombre and unyielding march towards the salvation of those planetside made Alex feel guilty.
He made a point to remind his crew that if they could carry on, then so could the crew of the UNSC Aegis Fate.
He sat in the commander's chair, watching the stream of transports go by. Then, his intel officer shuffled over to him, snapped a salute and asked for permission to speak. With permission granted, he spoke clearly, meeting Alex's eye the whole time.
"Sir, the order came from Halsey's office, though Parangosky signed off on it, as well."
"Get the evidence to my desk, ensign. Good work." Alex said before saluting back and dismissing him.
It was convenient that Halsey had penned RED FLAG for the 30th, Parangosky was a master at taking what existed and using it to her own ends. As he reviewed the data, he saw nothing to suggest that the Aegis Fate had been frozen out deliberately. Parangosky had simply killed two birds with a single stone. Alex sighed as he looked at the empty dock on the SAT feed. Pillar of Autumn. A halcyon-class cruiser and one of the few they had left. It had been scheduled to make a pitstop there on the 30th for a reason unbeknownst to anyone his crewman had spoken with.
He wished Mei wasn't on her break, he could do with her support. She had a subtle confidence that Alex found reassuring, it had developed over the last few months as Mei reconciled her past obsession with upward progression with her newfound desire to survive the war.
He admired her ambition, he could see it in her eyes when he caught her looking at the Captain's chair but Mei had learned much quicker than most, that her ambition would mean little if there was nothing left to be in charge of. Perhaps it was the lack of hope for a future that made her decision easier, or maybe it was about Alex himself?
The answer was likely neither. Mei was too noble and too independent to have her goals marred by a man or by circumstance.
With Command in tatters, the respect she once held, that Alex had also held, for his superiors had waned. Reach had and continued to be a disaster. Winter Contingency was a dire protocol and whomever came up with it needed to go through a military tribunal. Regardless as to whether ONI needed to burn through its intel, denying it to the covenant, their desire to do so had come at the cost of an effective response.
As a result, half the strength left in the UNSC was drip fed into the system without a cohesive plan in place. The navy had paid the price for that failure.
Perhaps he would yet join his countless brothers and sisters in arms and he welcomed the thought of a long rest as he sat brooding in his captain's chair. He looked to his office, as he always did when his thoughts turned dour, and remembered the little communicator stashed away under his desk.
People still needed him.
As he watched the sun's rays slip away from the far horizon, darkness falling on the surface of Reach below him, Alex found his resolve. For Mei and Maddie, he would see this war to its conclusion, whatever the cost.
[}{]
Maddie Harper
August 29th, 2552
09:00
The Boneyards
Aszod
[}{]
The Warthog thundered along the arid track, kicking dust upon its wake. Clouds gathered above as the engine called out to them, their silver gaze clamouring for a view.
Round ragged rock and through aluminium valleys of dead giants, the remainder of Maddie's life clung to the chassis of the jeep as it barrelled through the boneyards.
There was a great and noble sense of urgency, then. Two patrols had been encountered already as the lines contracted around the evacuation site. Two patrols had been wiped from the surface of Reach.
Like all things that she and her companions did, it wouldn't be enough. As she sat in the front of the warthog, she watched Jack as he drove the vehicle expertly through the carcasses of the Boneyard and up into the hills around the Breaking Yards that sat in the centre of the sea of navy corpses.
"What a sight." Jack said, looking out over the stewing mass of cloud cover, HE rounds, and plasma discharge that lit up the sky.
It was a brightening sky. A sky that clawed through that swirling terror that impressed itself in front of it. Cloud. Detonation. Plasma.
"After all this time, you still think it's beautiful?"
"No, I don't." He said, "but I do think it's still worthy of note."
"It's the same kind of sky as Skopje." Maddie replied, tentatively rolling her arm as the pain from her wound bit at her limb.
"What do you mean?"
"I don't know… it just…" Maddie spent a moment searching for the words, and Jack allowed her to. The noise of the engine, and the chatting between the others in the back kept the silence from becoming oppressive.
"It's an omen." She said at last.
"Of what exactly?"
"Well, Skopje was the beginnings of ARC DREAM, and the prelude to the siege of Meridian. Erun and Ketarus would find out they were lied to, and I would find Maggie again."
"You're being silly, kid."
"You think?"
He nodded, "Skopje felt like that because you were trying to escape and because you had something to look towards. You wanted to take on the galaxy. Reach is different. This is the end of the world."
"Now you're being silly."
"Reach was over half of what remained. Two thirds of the remaining Naval assets are burning or waiting to be burned in Orbit. This campaign will cost us every ship, Trooper, SPARTAN and commander by the time it's over. The whole UEG can collapse for all I care. So long as Earth survives and ARC DREAM with it, we can build it all again.n. Empires have risen and fallen for thousands of years, its a natural cycle of renewal. The UEG was the UN, the UN was the League of Nations, the Romans believed their empires would never die and yet-"
"They did."
"Exactly. We live in a time of endings, we just need to see things through."
"No matter the cost?" Maddie asked, unsure it was worth the price they were paying.
"No matter the cost."
As if to make a point, the rear of the covenant forces began to sleuth into view. "Keep that in mind for the next few minutes, Jack. It's about to get rough."
They barrelled into them, cleaving through a squad of grunts resting on the ground. It was a strange start to the dance; the covenant didn't react to them at first. It was almost as though they couldn't quite believe that they had elected to ram their car through the spearhead dof the covenant assault. Jack veered left and right, the hog ducked each attempted blow from bright plasma bolts aimed at them with aplomb. The road split ahead, yellow tree trunks long felled as the desert raided the continent, beckoned.
"Right!" Maddie said, directing Jack along the path.
Her old friend, trusting in her decisions, turned and hit the hand brake, kicking the back of the vehicle out as they drifted, casting aspursions of dirt at the bewildered Jackals patrolling the trail.
"Does this lead to the front?"
"It leads into the hills. More hills means more cover."
Katya and Preston's AR's bellowed behind them as they clipped and picked at the troops who had been alert enough to track and shoot them.
Maddie watched as Jack dropped a gear, gaining traction; he powered them up the hill as the beastly vehicle grunted at the challenging elevation. She drew her pistol as she sighted a Grunt, reaching for its grenades.
She loosed a shot, feeling the click of the trigger and the bellow of the barrel. The grunt fell, slumping over its comrade to its side. The shriek, as they careened past, was distorted like a viscous seraph as they pressed onwards.
Slowly, the hills grew thick with corpses, plasma flew and occasionally a bullet ricocheted from the prow of the hog. It was covered in viscera now, having picked up smears of grunt and brute as they plowed relentlessly through the mire of covenant forces towards the outermost boudaries of the UNSC line.
"Just another gauntlet, Jack. Send it." Maddie said the words and tensed, her arm screamed at her for even drawing the pistol. Each buck of its mechanical hip was another shockwave she would pay for later.
Then, at the edge of the covenant advance, a small group of Covenant hid behind a large jutting rock, watching the warthog as Wolf burst out of the covenant line and headed straight towards their allies beyond no man's land.
One of them, a jackal with a shield, spotted Maddie before she could see him. Too late, and too injured, she was unable to get a shot off at the exposed hand of the creature. It fired, a burst of pink shards streaked towards her, tracking the movement of the hog as they flew.
One lodged in the side panel. Then another, and another, and the next in the seat behind her. The last one moved in slow motion. They were nearly past them.
They moved less like a whirlwind and more like a breeze as Maddie watched it.
The shard struck the frame of the windscreen in front of her.
Maddie sighed, they passed the UNSC troops, who opened fire.
Then the shards exploded.
[}{]
Captain Aurellian 'Ollie' Van Graff
August 29th, 2552
15:00
In Orbit above The Boneyard
Aszod
[}{]
"There's now't in the Boneyards, too." Drake said, pouring over the imaging data.
"Definitely signs of life in and around the Cavalier" Belloc replied, pointing to two rails arriving and leaving the site. "They got transport."
"How did you know they would be there?" Ollie asked, earnestly. It earned him a worried look from Valette, who continued to keep silent. She had still not said much since the operatives arrived but she had become more worried. Something that had spread to Ollie himself as he watched the pair work.
"Sentimentality is a disease for the weak." Nico Belloc said, bluntly.
"Years ago, the UNSC Cavalier extracted Maddie and I from Skopje. It was where she was deposed after her first unofficial mission with ONI. Her sister was taken there after she was injured by a needle round to the gut. Maddie said goodbye to her in the medbay of that ship."
"Damn."
"Yeah" Drake said, bitterly. "That's where it all started, I suppose."
"So we follow the tracks?" Valette asked the obvious, offering the bare minimum. Ollie wondered if she had ever forgiven ONI for their doomed mission to save Grey Team. That being said, it didn't take much to hate Belloc or agent Drake. They were callous monsters.
Drake nodded, "Follow those and we find our missing people. We can take them in."
"You want to recover them?" Nico nearly choked.
"They're both assets. I only want the pair of them dead if it's strictly necessary. I will give them the choice to come quietly because Parangosky is watching us, Nico. She doesn't like waste."
"More than happy to create it though" Ollie said, earning him a nasty glare from Drake and Belloc. "All I'm saying is that a bit more honesty might not have pissed the woman off. Either of them for that matter."
"We have our duty." Drake said, holding his gaze with steely, unfeeling eyes. "We know what we are supposed to know."
Ollie didn't fight the point but god he wanted to. Valette shuffled over to his side as the pair of them tracked the vehicle tracks across the Boneyard, she seemed to shudder as they picked and planned at the maps.
A tone sounded from the communications station and she looked to Ollie for permission to investigate. He nodded and she wandered off, playing the message as Belloc and Drake chartered the route before finally settling on a location where they believed Maddie and Katya would get slowed down.
"It's there, definitely. We can spring the trap and divide them once they're across the canyon." Belloc said, tapping a small bridge in the hills.
Drake scratched his chin, "Good work, lad."
Nico seemed to bristle at the praise and it took a lot of effort for Ollie to just roll his eyes. He got away with the gesture, watching Valette's brow thicken with worry as he hid his ignominy behind a sideways glance.
Valette couldn't hide what she'd heard as she returned to the table, stony faced and glancing at Ollie. They'd discussed their plan but it wasn't perfect, a lot can go wrong, which is especially true of those considering committing murder.
"What is it?" Ollie asked.
With trepidation, she reached out and handed a data pad to Drake. "Your request to deploy kill squads has been granted by Parangosky, Sir."
Ollie almost choked. "No. Not on my ship."
"Ah, just like old times, Captain." Belloc said, sliding a grin across his face in the dull light of the cabin.
The engines hummed in the silence between sentences.
"They will not board my ship." Ollie repeated.
"Now, now, Ollie. We've worked well together." Drake said, coolly. "No need to let sentimentality get in the way of things."
"I won't have no war criminals, besides those present, aboard my ship."
Valette looked happier about that but she couldn't show it too much beyond a slight tug on his sleeve. Ollie didn't need her to beg him, he hated everything about the men and women that worked with Nico.
"Well, it won't matter because Captain's in ONI outrank-"
"Naval Captain's, yes. Except Parangosky made me a Captain herself, so I'm ONI, not Navy."
Drake glared back at him as silence fell inside the Winter.
"By all means, use the troops, just know that unless you're extracting those women alive then those headhunters ain't setting foot on my boat." Ollie added it, knowing not to overplay his hand. He'd obey Alex's advice as though it were an order, doing what he could within the boundaries set by ONI; and he would do it even if it cost him his life.
"Luckily, we don't need to move them, they can get there themselves." Nico pointed to a command centre near the canyon. "they're already in the Boneyard."
Drake leaned forward like pooling oil. "In that case," he smiled, "we can plan a better trap."
Valette looked to him helplessly and he responded in kind, she knew he didn't have a choice but to obey.
For now, they played the game.
[}{]
Maddie Harper
August 29th, 2552
17:00
The Boneyard
Aszod
[}{]
"It was going to be a fucking bridge" Maddie heaved as her friends pulled her from the Warthog.
"Relax, kid. You're going to be fine." Jack replied, tending to her.
"I can barely fucking see." She wailed, growling in pain and anger.
"It has messed up your eye, something fierce."
"You're a strong woman, Madeleine." Katya said, touching her hand. It was the most affection she had ever shown Maddie.
"Is she going to be okay?" Mikaela asked. From what little Maddie could see of her face, she didn't think she was.
Maddie could see her civilian clothed and canvas shoes stained with bright red blood. She felt them stick to her like plastic sticking to skin in the heat.
Her brain swam with strange sights and sounds as a medic rushed to her side and threw her arm over the gurney that had been trundled alongside her.
"We're crossing the bridge now." Jack said, touching her softly on the shoulder that wasn't injured.
"Not our first time, eh Jack?"
Mikaela was still there. "What is she talking about?"
"The day we met."
"Is she lucid?"
"Barely." Katya replied, "Madeleine, you're going to be fine but we're going to have to put you on a round of stims that will knock you out."
Maddie slipped in and out of consciousness. Rounds of conversation slipped in and out of her head as she felt the sounds of music play in the background.
"Mikaela, I'm sorry… your player…"
Then later, as guitar strings danced in her head: "You need to push through, kid. For Nicola."
Maddie gasped. "Nicola…"
Jack's hand never left her own as Preston held her by the head. Time seemed to flutter.
"We can't move her." her brother was saying it firmly, he would fight the point.
"I know, Preston, that's why Jack and I will go. You and Mikaela only need to keep her hidden from ONI."
"For how long?"
"Until the drugs remove the last of her implants."
Maddie slipped again under the waves of drug induced euphoria.
"We'll be back, kid, I swear."
"Jack keeps his promises." Katya was being sweet. Maddie wondered if that was a bad sign.
Jack, who couldn't bare to see her in the state she was in, began to speak as tears welled in the corners of his eyes. "In case something happens.. I want you to know that I stopped being a soldier the day you signed me up to ARC DREAM. I never wanted to be a soldier again, I could feel myself slipping away like your friend Nico… like Drake. You saved me from that life. You can save yourself, too. No matter what happens."
"You're a fighter, sister. I want you to know that. We will make them pay for this. We will find the world forge." Katya added, squeezing her hand.
Maddie smiled, feeling the peace of kind words wash over her and let the drugs take her and heal her in a restless sleep.
'We're in the Endgame now.'
So, we are finally at the part of the story I always wanted to tell. A step-by-step account of the Fall of Reach from the view of my characters.
I have done my best, using the Wiki and my embarassing level of knowlodge for the series, crafted the account so that it fits with the Fall of Reach and Halo: Reach stories. Twists and turns abound!
Something I struggled with with this story, and that became very apparent in the first few chapters, was that I didn't have a timeline properly mapped out or a way to move the characters where I needed them to be. Splitting the perspectives between Ollie, Alex, and Maddie was a good idea but it made things difficult interms of rooting the story with Maddie.
There was a lot of reasons for the hiatus but the main one in terms of writing it was plotting. It took me a while to know where the story was going to end up!
So, please enjoy the finale, I am really pleased with how this story is going, despite its troubles!
More excerpts from the star wars fic is coming, some good feedback for it already, which is good. Leave a review, you know I love to hear from you all.
TheCalrog