My team was in the middle of a mission when the order to abandon the Creek came. We were pinned down behind a scant few rocks, the laser fire unrelenting as it turned the night into a crimson dawn. Eagle One, Super Earth commend her, refused to pull out. Even after we stopped painting targets for her, she came back run after run, trusting our old targets were still viable through the thick jungle canopy.
"Get out of here Eagle One, we're already dead." Our team leader, R1, radioed up.
"Negative R1, I still have heat to drop."
"Sir," I said to him, "I know how to get her out of here." I pulled my last stratagem out and keyed it to the half tonne explosive and it painted the four of us in a bloody light. R1 nodded at me and I held it above my head.
"Target confirmed, payload away." Eagle One said. I saw the bird briefly through the canopy, close enough to see the look of horror on her face.
"Promise you'll take back the Creek." R1 said to Eagle One, cutting off the connection before we heard a reply. The munitions knocked the stratagem out of my hand as it came flying overhead. She never missed. By some miracle the bomb landed on the other side of a depression, the flames roiled above our heads as we tried to meld with the oil stained dirt.
"J2, K4, we need to move, now." Came R1s burnt voice. I raised my head and saw that F3 was on his feet, body hugged by oil fueled flames, his Heavy Machine gun continuously coughing. We didn't have any stims left. Under the cover of smoke and our brother's life, we doglegged out. The Sword of Science would be leaving orbit any second now.
We didn't stop until we were a klick removed from that death trap. "What do we do now, Sir?" K4 asked.
R1 pulled up his map, "Do? Our job. We still have a nuke to launch, rookie."
I crept up to the power generator painstakingly slow. I was solo on this objective. R1 and K4 were locating the launch codes, but the codes would be useless without the power to the silo. I was used to solo operations, I was a Ghost after all. Of course, no one on my team knew this, R1 just didn't want to leave the rookie on his own. This was K4's first campaign, a replacement of a replacement of a replacement. All lost on the Creek. R1 trusted I would get the power started no matter what, but he also expected that I wouldn't be able to regroup at the silo. I don't blame him. Operating solo in this situation, facing this level of resistance, it should be a death sentence. Good thing I died a long time ago. Ghostdivers were a rare breed of Helldiver, specializing in infiltration, sabotage, and survival. I left my scorcher behind, hidden in the hollow of a tree. The lights on it too visible and the weapon too complicated to drag through this much mud. My trusty senator was still at my hip, simple, reliable, and lethal. When I activated the terminal, I was in the middle of four chainsaw devastators with a rocket devastator overlooking the facility. They all had their backs to me. Enslaved to their programming, they were incapable of thinking that an enemy could be right in the middle of them. And if all goes well, they will never find out.
Crawling to the generator was the most nerve recking part. A flame hulk stood on just the other side. One burst and I'd burn brighter than a Roman Candle. Just like F3. I pulled down the lever and the generator roared to life. The hulk turned around but I was already gone, detouring to my scorcher before making my way North towards the missile silo.
After circumventing a dozen patrols, I came across the silo. K4 had a trail of devastators behind him. He was attempting to lead them away from the control terminal. A crackling came over my short range radio. "J2, get K4 out of here, I have the terminal." There were rivers of oil running down the hill stemming from the ocean of it at R1's feet. Hulks were bearing down on him, and he wasn't giving a single inch. I gave him a crisp salute and shouldered my scorcher. I laid waste to the train of devastators, tossing my last few fragmentation grenades.
"K4, break south-west, regroup at the super-sample site from earlier. DO NOT fire your weapon. Repeat, DO NOT engage with the enemy." K4 sent a brief burst of static in acknowledgement. With the space needed to disengage, he disappeared into the jungle. The attention of the bots were now on me. They were closing in, but I couldn't just leave R1 after showing up late to the party. I ignored the immediate threat and pulled my senator. Three shots and I dropped three hulks that were falling on R1's position.
"That's enough J2," he said while turning to the terminal. "Thanks for the window, but I'm not getting out of this one. I know what you are, that kid needs you. I'm listing us all as KIA. R1 out." It took everything I had not to charge forward. To fight by his side to the bitter end, I was sick of tired of watching friends die. Of being the only one to survive, but I had my orders. Without a second glance I left him there. To die. Alone.
"Give 'em hell, sir."
I stumbled onto K4 half way to the distinctive rock feature, he was going back towards the silo. "What the hell K4, I told you to wait for me at the rock." I hissed at him.
"I, I didn't know if you were gonna make it." He stammered out. "I didn't want to be alone." My gaze softened. I knew the feeling. This was only his first dive after all. "What do we do know?" The mushroom cloud from the atomic loomed over the horizon, proof of our mission's success.
"Now? Now we need to get away from here." I said, formulating a plan. He needs to feel purpose before the despair seeps in. "Theres a functional broadcast tower 2 klicks west of here. If we can get to it I can boost the signal and bounce it across relay towers to cover the whole planet."
"Are we calling for evac?" K4 asked with a look of hope in his eyes. I didn't want to snuff it out but I couldn't lie to him either.
"Negative, all ships have left orbit. No one is up there to hear us, and the bots will have shrouded the planet by now. No signal will reach our forces and even if it did, it would just make it harder for them."
"What do you mean?" K4 was worried now.
"They can't come back, its against protocol. We'll be stuck here until they launch a campaign to take back the planet." I responded. "They don't need to hear the echoes of dead men."
"What's the point then? Why bother with the broadcast tower. He said, voice clear with dejection.
"Because rookie, we have protocol to follow too."
The hump to the broadcast station was uneventful. We came into contact with several patrols. I tried to teach K4 how to move to avoid detection, but he was still green. Luckily, I was able to shoot the bastard trying to call for reinforcements. We avoided the second and third patrols. K4 was a fast learner. There were no signs of bots in the proximity of the broadcast station.
"Hold up," I said to K4. "There's something we need to do first. Take off your helmet." K4 complied, well past questioning my orders. I pulled my combat knife from my boot and moved to stand behind K4. "Sit down, this is gonna hurt." I stabbed my knife into the base of his skull and dug his neural implant out. To his credit, the kid just grunted. I watched as his tag on my HUD went from K4 to K0.
"What the fuck was that for?" He demanded as I handed him some gauze. I dug my own out before responding.
"Just taking out our personal identifiers and trackers. Don't worry, the neural interface is still in there. We'll get knew ones when we get back."
"I meant why, jackass."
"I'll explain once I get the message out."
It took roughly thirty minutes to jack into the signal tower and reroute most of the station's power to the antenna. We'd only get out one message before the circuits fry.
"All good on my end." K0 called out. "Broadcast when ready."
I took a deep breath. "Attention all Helldivers marooned on Malevelon Creek. This is Super Private J0. I am enacting the Black Horizon Protocol. Make them pay." The radio went dead as the tower was overloaded. Small fires broke out.
"Time to leave, the ships will be on us soon."
The enemy ships searched in a grid pattern for us for hours. We crawled through the jungle for 6 hours, only making it about 2 kilometers before the ships gave up and we found refuge in a crack in a cliff-face.
"Do you want to tell me what's going on now? Since when have you been a Super Private? What's Black Horizon?" K0 asked as soon as we had settled in.
"Have you ever heard of the Ghostdivers?" I asked.
"That myth? They're Helldivers who have died and come back to life, to continuing fighting for Super Earth even in death."
"They're not a myth. It's an unofficial unit within the Helldivers corps. They specialize in sabotage and survival." I replied. "The first Ghostdiver appeared in the first galactic war. She was left marooned on a planet that fell to the terminids. She was trapped there for 17 months before we were able to retake the planet. She hadn't given up the fight the entire time, destroying nests, poisoning their food, and scavenging ammunition and supplies from the long dead. When she was recovered, her neural implant was damaged and she took the identity of a dead comrade. The brass kept it under wraps, and she was integrated back into the normal forces."
"If that's the case, how do you know all this?"
"Well, that's because I've had this exact conversation with someone else. See, it happened again. She was stranded alone on a fallen planet for a second time. This time she had met up with another Helldiver and taught him how to survive. They parted ways and taught more survivors. When the planet was retaken, all the surviving Helldivers had broken implants, and all took up identities of fallen brothers and sisters. This is what sparked the rumors. Some of the identities they took were confirmed KIAs. They had seemingly come back from the dead."
"She had also taken a new identity, a second one. Every time a Ghostdiver comes back from the dead, it is as a new persona."
"Are you a Ghostdiver?" K0 asked.
"I am, and you are too now. There are a few requirements to join our ranks. The first one is that you must be dead. Abandoned by Super Earth with no hope of rescue. The second is that a Ghost must take you under their wing. Our tactics don't work in a group. Ghosts operate solo, with one exception. We work in pairs when training a new recruit."
K0 mulled over the information for a while. "How many times have you 'died'?"
"This will be my twelfth time. Its an unspoken rule that when you come back to life, you take the lowest rank you can. When you become a ghost again, you take the highest rank you achieved during one of your lives. I've achieved Super Private twice. I was hoping to go for the hat trick, but I guess this one was cut short."
"How come you guys integrate back into the Helldivers? Why not use you as a special unit?"
"They do, sometimes. There's a high ranking officer who is a Ghostdiver. One of the top brass. They will sometimes pull a Ghostdiver for a high risk, high reward mission. Suicide runs beyond the norm. I only know this because I've gone on a few. We go back to conventional squads for situations like this."
"Why?"
"We never know when we're gonna lose a planet. So we dive with normal teams in hope that we can save a few, teach them not only how to survive, but how to thrive. Protocol Black Horizon is a command to Ghostdivers to meet up with survivors, recruit them, and to soften up the planet for when Super Earth retakes it."
"It also serves as a call to arms, so that Helldivers know they are not alone. That there is a purpose for them being here. That there is a reason to keep fighting, a plan to rally behind."