by Matt Forbeck
TWO
* * *
Hostage situations are never any fun.
As a Spartan, I’m trained to shoot enemies, not negotiate with them. The only language I’m fully fluent in is ordnance.
But I’d dealt with such troubles before. The last time was a year earlier, back in 2554, on my home planet of Draco III.
Yeah, that Draco III.
I wasn’t a Spartan back then, obviously. But by the same token, I’d never say I was “just” an ODST, since that’s something I’d aimed for my entire life up to that point.
Even though I grew up on Draco III, I hadn’t been back there to visit my hometown of Karnak for years. The day I turned eighteen—August 25, 2528—I walked into the local UNSC recruiting office, stood there in line with everyone else who shared my birthday, and signed away my life to the Marines.
Before the Covenant had showed up in the human part of the galaxy three years prior to that birthday, the UNSC had spent most of its time putting down rebellions across colonial space, and I honestly hadn’t thought much about joining the military. My mother had been a marine herself, but she gave it up to raise me and my kid sister, Lucy. And Dad had never wanted to be anything more than a dockworker and family man.
I never cared too much for school, and I spent my summers apprenticing with my uncle Lou as a fisherman on the Gold Sea. Fish farms took care of filling most of Draco III’s seafood demand, but Uncle Lou went after bigger game, the kind of tenacious critters that had been native to the planet before humanity terraformed it. These creatures survived by living far beneath the waves, but when they crept back up toward the surface, Lou and his compatriots went after them hard.
I still remember skimming along the ocean’s surface on an industrial fishing ship, stalking a rare island-sized naeori. (That’s the egghead name. Growing up, I always called them octowhales.)
You can’t just blast the hell out of something like that. Regular munitions don’t do more than simply annoy it—or worse, drive it back down into the deep. Bombs might work, but only by blasting the beast into parts small enough to be useless to anyone. So we had to herd the damn things into shocknets instead.
The nets used enough juice that they had to be attached to their own reactor, so you couldn’t just drop them from above onto one of the creatures. You did that in waters too deep, and the octowhale would sink to the bottom before you could stop it. Then you were down not just the net and your chance at the cash that kind of rare sea creature catch can bring, but a whole reactor as well, and those things are pricey for someone on a sailor’s salary.
On Draco III, fishing for big game like that was the closest thing we had to living like a cowboy back in Earth’s Old West, centuries ago. And as much as the sea life stank and the salt stung, I loved the hell out of it. Out on those waves, far from the rest of even what Draco III called civilization, I felt free, like nothing could touch me. This was a life worth living for the rest of my days.
But in 2526, after I heard about humanity’s violent first contact with the Covenant on the planet Harvest, I tossed those dreams aside. There was no other sane choice in my mind. I was underage at the time, but the first moment I could, I joined the Marines so I could help save my world, and the rest of humanity on top of it.
Of course, that didn’t work out as well as I’d hoped.
I was in cryosleep between Mars and Hardscrabble in 2545, when the Covenant finally got around to invading Draco III. I was an old soldier by that point, about seventeen years on, and even though the UNSC tried to keep the news from the front lines just rosy for the folks at home, I knew the war wasn’t going well for us. But I kept following orders and fighting my hardest, trusting in my superiors and doing my best to keep my nose clean between battles.
I’d been back to Draco III a few times on shore leave since I left, but extended stints in cryosleep meant the years zipped by my family far faster than they did for me. My parents got grayer every time I saw them, leaping closer toward retirement but still together and happy. Right up until my dad died in a traffic accident.
The last I saw of my sister, she was married with two kids, my nieces Cyan and Cho. I never had the opportunity to meet my nephew, Xu.
And then the Covenant came and killed them all.
I got the news as soon as I woke up on arrival at Hardscrabble. By then, every last human on Draco III had been murdered.
It felt like watching a history lesson about your own life, filling in a bit of backstory that had happened while you were sleeping the weeks away. Surreal, shocking, and saddening all at once.
I don’t know exactly what happened to my family, but I can only hope they went fast, in the initial assault. That’s what happened to the lucky ones, before things turned absolutely terrifying planetside.
Once the Covenant beat Draco III’s defenses into dust, they sent Grunts and Jackals down to the surface for some R&R. In this case, that stood for Round-up and Rub-out. I heard they hunted down the human survivors for sport and then cackled themselves silly as they ate them and gnawed on their raw, bloody bones.
I was encouraged to not watch the videos. “You don’t need that kind of shit floating around in your head,” my old sergeant told me.
But I couldn’t stop myself. I had to see what had happened, what the Covenant had done. I became obsessed with watching every last second that I could find. And when I was done, I went back and sat through it all again.
I wanted to know who we were fighting and what horrors they could do. I wanted to burn those atrocities into my brain until they filled my dreams. I wanted to make sure I’d never forget what we were up against and why we had to give everything to the fight.
Everything the bastards hadn’t already taken from us.
The UNSC sent Spartans to Draco III to fight the Covenant, but they arrived way too late to do any of the people there any good. They couldn’t save anyone—only avenge them.
Everyone else might have cheered at the images of humanity’s superheroes diving in and kicking some Covenant ass, but all I could think about was how useless it was to pin our hopes on a few handfuls of super-soldiers who couldn’t possibly be everywhere we needed them to be.
After all, how much good had they done for my mom? Or Lucy and her kids?
It was then that I put in for an immediate transfer to the ODSTs. That’s where I figured I could get things done fastest and do the most good.
Someone in High Command must have been taking pity on the soldiers who hailed from Draco III. I got my new orders just a few weeks later, which, when it comes to the UNSC, seems like lightspeed.
And I made the best I could out of that opportunity. I fought those Covenant bastards like hell and gave them everything I had.
THREE
* * *
After the Covenant War ended late in 2552, a few groups of displaced humans decided to try to resettle Draco III. Miraculously, because the Covenant had saved the planet as a hunting ground for its worst scum to enjoy, most of the place hadn’t been glassed. That didn’t mean the cities were open for business and ready for people to occupy, but it’s a lot easier to clean up a place than to have to rebuild it from scratch.
Me though? I hadn’t gone back. I’d already taken out as much grief on the Covenant as I cared to, and there obviously wasn’t any home left for me to return to. It would have been as useful as visiting a gravesite.
Plus, I still had other battles left to fight.
The Unified Earth Government also had more items on its agenda than trying to dictate who settled where. No matter how the United Rebel Front or any of the other splinter groups liked to paint it, the UEG mostly left them alone—as long as they behaved. It wasn’t until the Front did something stupid like trying to violently secede an entire planet from the UEG that they demanded the UNSC’s attention—and sure as hell got it.
The stupidity filt
ered over to Draco III not too long after the resettlement began. The rebel leaders on my homeworld decided that they needed to act fast to declare the planet independent, before too many reasonable settlers arrived. That, of course, didn’t sit well with the decent people who had already set up shop there, or with the Office of Naval Intelligence, which focused on Draco III’s strategic importance as the UEG moved to reclaim many of the lost colonies that lay beyond it.
“That’s why you’re the right man for the job,” Veronica had told me. “You’re one of the few Draco natives left—and the only one in the ODSTs.”
“Why don’t you just let the Spartans handle it?” I asked. “You’ve got a whole new bunch of them who I’m sure are looking for things to blow holes into.”
“ONI prefers not to use blunt instruments where a scalpel would be better,” she said, though we both knew it had more to do with cost than efficiency.
“Come on. You can’t reason with the Front,” I said. “They’re not interested in anything but their own way.”
“We’re just hoping you and the rest of Alpha-Nine can keep a cap on the collateral damage.”
I smiled at that. “You know, you look a lot like Veronica Dare, but you must be a shapeshifting spy. The real Veronica knows better than to claim my ODST fireteam would cause less damage on an op than any other choice.”
She patted me on the cheek. “Look. The sight of Spartans puts the rebels into a frenzy. They think of them as the symbol of all that’s wrong with the UEG. They call them fascist super-soldiers and claim they’ll eventually take over humanity in a military coup that will spell the end for regular folks everywhere.”
“And are they wrong about that?”
“Well, soldier, I’m afraid that’s classified.”
“And far above my pay grade either way.”
“By your own choice.” I could hear the accusation in her voice.
“Ah. I didn’t think you went for overengineered post-humans like that.”
“They came to you with the offer, Eddie.”
“Wait. I never told you that.”
“It’s my business to know things.”
“Well, then you should know why I turned them down.”
“Because you’re a stubborn ass.”
“But I’m your stubborn ass.”
“For now, anyway.”
But I found that being stubborn wasn’t enough. Not on that day, at least.
I should have just given in to Veronica. She always got her way when it came to me, and her request that I lead my team back to Draco III didn’t prove any exception.
It wasn’t just my natural orneriness that kept me from wanting to be a good little soldier when it came to that particular job though. Well, that was some of it, sure, but the fact was I just didn’t want to return to the scene of one of the Covenant’s worst crimes. I’ve seen all sorts of horrible things in my career—things that would make you want to weep tears of blood—but Draco III was personal. I didn’t want to spend every second on that familiar old ball of dirt seething with righteous fury.
Since the end of the war, I’d had this satisfying sense of accomplishment, that when it came to stopping the Covenant invasion at least, we’d done what we set out to do. It felt healthy, and I wanted that to be enough for me. I worried that going back to Draco III would reopen the wounds I’d worked so hard to heal.
But I’d never let fear stop me before. I wouldn’t be much of a soldier if I did.
You follow your orders. You do your job. Every damn time.
So I went back to Draco III in 2554, and I took the rest of Alpha-Nine with me.
FOUR
* * *
Despite ONI’s preferences, my team gave up on the subtle approach soon after we hit Draco III. The rebels who had taken over the capitol building in the heart of New Albany didn’t respond well to much other than bullets. ONI wanted us to take down their leadership, but the determined little bastards had—probably not coincidentally—barricaded themselves inside the best-built structure on the planet.
Nothing short of a nuke from the air would be able to dislodge them from the capitol building, and I was fresh out of that kind of ordnance. Besides which, we had orders to leave the area as intact as possible. If we’d gone in and brought the building down on top of the rebel leaders’ heads, that would have only given the rest of the Front a crater to rally around where the heart of the city had stood. The last thing ONI needed was to give the Front’s propaganda machine a new recruiting tool: See how the UEG treats you when you object to their iron-fisted rule?
So instead, we got dropped inside the Front’s perimeter and stormed the capitol on foot. Back then, there were five of us in Alpha-Nine: me, Dutch, Romeo, Mickey, and the Rookie.
We fought well and made good headway toward the rebel leader, a woman who called herself Captain Ingridson.
And then they cornered us hard.
We got all the way to the floor of Draco III’s old legislature, which the rebels had commandeered as their headquarters. Using explosives, we punched through into the room where Draco’s laws had been formed, debated, and passed, only to find the place empty.
It was a trap. As soon as we got inside, they closed off the way behind us.
I spotted a way out through an emergency door, and I sent the Rookie to go for it while the rest of us covered him. Damn kid did a great job, dodging from cover to cover, and he made it to the exit in no time.
His job from there was to circle around behind the rebels who were keeping the rest of us trapped in the room. With luck, he’d catch them by surprise and take them out before they knew he was coming. At the very least, he’d distract them enough to give the rest of Alpha-Nine a chance to blast back past them and out into the open again.
The next time we saw the Rookie, though, he was a bloody mess. He’d been shot in the shoulder and beaten bloody, and he’d lost his helmet somewhere along the way. A couple of soldiers dragged him up onto the balcony at the front of the legislative chambers—the one from which the Draco III president used to address the planet—and presented him to us. We dove straight for cover and tried to figure out our next move.
Well, I tried, anyway. The others were never that great at coming up with plans on the fly. But that’s why I outranked them.
I was still strategizing when Captain Ingridson herself appeared next to the Rookie and pressed a pistol barrel flat against his temple. I signaled the others to press back and hide.
“Stand down, imperialists!” she shouted. The Rookie tried to angle his head out of the way, but the rebels holding his arms had him in a vicious grip. “Give yourselves up now, or your comrade dies!”
The rebels had us goddamn good, and they knew it. After an assassination attempt in the days before the Covenant War, the presidential balcony had been protected from just about any kind of attack. There was no way anything we had with us could penetrate the transparent energy shielding around it—not without killing the Rookie as well.
“Just say the word, Gunny.” Romeo hefted a string of grenades in his hand. “I can take them all out.”
“Not with those, you can’t,” said Dutch.
“I don’t have to hit them,” said Romeo. “Just get close enough to blow the moorings out from under that balcony.”
“And you kill the Rookie, too,” Mickey said.
“He knew what he was signing up for,” Romeo said. “We all did, right?”
I couldn’t argue with Romeo’s stunted logic. Trading the Rookie for Captain Ingridson would put an end to the rebellion on Draco III—but only for a few days, at best, until someone new occupied the power vacuum.
I just couldn’t bring myself to let the kid get killed like that. Not without trying to save him. We’d been through too damn much together for me to cut him loose. That’s when a sharp voice sliced into my comm system
and presented a new option I didn’t really want. “Gunnery Sergeant Buck? This is Spartan Sarah Palmer. I understand you’re having some problems. We’re here to help.”
FIVE
* * *
I recognized Palmer’s voice at once. They tell you that the UNSC is huge, and they’re not joking. Still, when you’re talking about elite soldiers like those in the ODST, that’s a much smaller number. We don’t all know each other, but most of the time there’s only a degree or two of separation between us at most.
With me and Sarah Palmer, that degree was zero.
Back in 2546, Palmer and her own ODST group, Gamma-Six, wound up getting sent into Belisk, a town built around a number of large-scale manufacturing plants belonging to Lethbridge Industrial on the colony planet Sargasso. The Covenant had assaulted the planet, and we were giving it to them good in the sky. But nevertheless, the bugs had sent a ground force down to destroy Belisk and cripple its production facilities.
I didn’t know it at the time, but Lethbridge was chest-deep in manufacturing all sorts of military-grade gear and munitions for the UNSC in general, and ONI in particular. ONI had invested a mountain of money in Belisk for all that gear, and it was up to Gamma-Six to protect that investment in the most aggressive way.
Little did Sarah Palmer know, though, that ONI didn’t like to take chances when it came to such large investments. They gathered up my Alpha-Nine team and ordered us in at the same time, but with a different mission. While Gamma-Six was supposed to protect the facility, it was our job to grab all of Lethbridge’s latest research data before it could fall into Covenant hands.
The Cole Protocol dictated that any kind of data that might lead the Covenant toward Earth had to be wiped out if there was any chance it could fall into enemy hands, but that emergency order didn’t strictly apply to other bits of data that were marginally less vital. ONI hated to let hard-earned research and development go to waste if they could help it, so we were sent in to secure the data and guarantee its safe passage to Concord, the colony where Lethbridge Industrial was originally based.
