by Matt Forbeck
Meaning “whenever I get around to it.”
As much as I respected Musa and knew he was right about keeping us out of the way, it grated on me to have to be put in a cooler like that. Mickey lay on his bed in shock, staring at the ceiling, not doing or saying anything, while Romeo paced back and forth in what little room we had.
I couldn’t take the silence. “Do you have any idea who might have done this?” I asked Mickey.
He didn’t say anything.
“Mickey?”
Nothing.
“Spartan Crespo!”
“I don’t know,” he said in a not terribly convincing way. “But I think it might have been Schein.”
Romeo scoffed. “That idiot? Do you know how much money I’ve taken off him since we got here? Can’t bluff for shit.”
“He’s a lot more serious about his politics than his cards,” Mickey said.
“What are you getting at?” I asked.
Mickey gave me a pained frown. “It’s not the things he said to me so much as how he said them. Nothing seditious, but with what happened to my parents, I’m a little, you know—”
“Sensitive?” I said.
“Yeah.”
“Maybe that’s just the way he talks,” Romeo said. “I mean, he is an idiot.”
Mickey sucked at his teeth. “And he saw me looking at my medallion once. Commented on it.”
“Ah,” I said. “You should say something to Jun or Commander Musa about it.”
“You think?”
I tried to raise Jun on the comm system, but he didn’t answer me. That’s when we heard the first shots fired.
Jun’s order to stay put lost a lot of its weight. Mickey and Romeo glanced at me for my lead, and I gave the door a sharp nod.
We charged down the brightly lit hall that ran through the barracks part of the space station, ducking past the other Spartans sticking their heads out through their doors to see what was going on. I doubt if most of them were still confined to quarters as well. After a long day’s training, they were taking a well-earned break that had just been ruined.
Some of them shouted at us to ask what was going on. Others leaped into action right behind us, racing toward the direction from which the shots had come.
The rec room sat at the end of the hall, but we never got that far. Before we reached it, Captain O’Day came heading our way at top speed.
“Get back!” she shouted at us. “Now!”
I hesitated for an instant in confusion. My training told me to obey a superior officer’s orders, but my first instinct was to ignore her and keep heading for the danger instead.
That’s when the hallway behind O’Day exploded. A fireball chased down the hall after her and flung her toward us.
Gravity cut out at the same time as the explosion, and that threw me off. I wanted to try to catch O’Day, but I found I couldn’t brace myself properly for it. And then the shock wave from the blast sent me, Mickey, and Romeo flying backward, spinning into the other Spartans charging up behind us.
It was all I could do to cover my head and hope for luck to shine on me one more time. The force of the explosion battered all of us, sending us skittering off the walls, floor, and ceiling, not to mention each other. We wound up in a heap of tangled and bruised limbs at the far end of the hallway.
The fireball petered out before it reached most of us, but the edge of it caught the captain, setting her legs on fire. With my ears ringing from the blast, I shoved myself toward her and patted her down with my bare hands until the flames went out. She’d been knocked senseless and didn’t bat an eye through the whole thing.
Alarms blared throughout the station. I shoved myself out of the pile of people and tried to get a better look at Captain O’Day.
Mickey grabbed my shoulder. “We need to get her out of here!” he said.
I was reluctant to move her much for fear that she’d been severely injured, but we couldn’t leave her floating there scorched like that either. I scooped her up as gently as I could, relying on my zero-G training to keep me from banging her around too much.
“Clear a way for me,” I said.
That’s when the massive viewport in the rec room gave way. It seemed like a miracle that it hadn’t happened at the same time as the blast, but the SPARTAN program likes to build things to last. In this case, they lasted about thirty seconds more than I would have guessed.
The viewport looked out from the rec room into the airless space through which the space station swung on its orbit around its dark dwarf planet. When it gave way, the room decompressed violently. Anyone and anything in the room at the time got sucked straight out into the raw vacuum, which tugged at every exposed part of the station.
The air in the hallway became a howling wind, pulling us toward the rec room as if a giant were sucking us through a straw. I tried to maintain my hold on Captain O’Day, but she got snagged on something and was wrenched out of my grasp.
Struggling to hold on to her cost me my best chance at finding a grip that could stop me from heading toward the rec room. I glanced off three different doorways, getting pulled closer to the end of the hall, beyond which lay certain death.
Just in time, the emergency shutter slammed closed, sealing us off from the damaged room. That didn’t stop my momentum, though, and I smacked into it hard. If I hadn’t been a Spartan, the impact might have splattered me as if I’d leaped off a skyscraper. It still hurt like hell, but my reinforced bones kept me from becoming a pancake.
And then Captain O’Day—who must have torn free from whatever she’d been caught on—landed on me. I saw her coming at me, and I did my best to cushion her. Because she’d passed out, though, she had no means of helping herself. Little did I realize that she landed at a terrible angle, and died instantly.
The rest of the Spartans in the hallway had managed to find themselves a handhold, so no one else landed on me. Their belongings hailed down upon me, though, battering me like a storm of rocks. I tried to shield O’Day with my body as best I could, huddling over her and turning my back to the incoming objects to let them bounce off me.
I didn’t know I was already too late to do her any good.
When I turned back around, I spotted Romeo and Mickey hauling themselves toward me, hand over hand. At some point, the lights in the hallway had all gone red. Commander Musa’s voice sounded over the public comm system: “We have experienced a catastrophic breach! All personnel are to remain in their quarters!”
“That’s where we screwed it up,” Romeo said. “Shoulda followed orders.”
“We weren’t the only ones,” Mickey said, pointing toward the other trainees pulling themselves back into their quarters. “Not by far.”
“None of them wound up with every loose thing in the hall slamming down on them though,” I said as I examined O’Day’s body and finally saw she was already gone. “Dammit.”
I scooped her up with one arm and glared at Romeo and Mickey, daring them to tell me to leave her behind. I tried to head back to our quarters, only to find we’d been sealed off from them too, so we holed up inside an empty room instead.
The gravity came back an hour later. Commander Musa warned us before he had it activated, which gave us a chance to slip into our borrowed room’s bunks and avoid a repeat of the incident in the hallway. Soon afterward, he appeared on the viewscreen built into the back of our room’s door, looking like someone had shot him in the gut.
“You are to return to your proper quarters, Spartans.”
“Sir,” I said. “Captain O’Day—”
“We’re aware of her status, Buck.” He lowered his eyes for a moment. “Leave her in one of the bunks there. A crew will come by to take care of her remains shortly. We still have a lot of work to do for the living before we can take care of our dead.”
“Can I ask what happe
ned, sir?”
Romeo and Mickey had been swapping speculations about the explosion the entire time, right up until I told them to shut their yaps for a bit. The ridiculous notion of a Covenant fighter entering slipspace right outside the rec room finally broke it for me.
Musa sighed and gestured to shut off the viewscreen. Just as he did, Mickey piped up. “Sir! I’d like to know if I’m still a suspect.”
The screen went dark. I gave Mickey a sympathetic clap on the shoulder as he and Romeo left the room. Before I followed them, I stopped for a moment to pay my respects to Captain O’Day. She’d pushed me as hard as any drill sergeant, and I’d never had a chance to thank her for that.
When we got back to our regular quarters, no one felt much like talking. Mickey shoved his footlocker back under his bunk, and we threw ourselves down on our mattresses to be alone with our thoughts. Or as alone as you can get in a UNSC barracks, at least.
The viewscreen on the inside of our quarters’ door lit up a moment later. “I’m sorry, Spartan Crespo,” Musa said. “It’s been a terrible day, but you, of all people, deserve to know.”
He took a moment to compose himself. “Checking the records, we discovered that another Spartan had slipped into your quarters this morning before the training exercise began. When Jun, O’Day, and I went to confront him, we found him waiting for us in the rec room. He threatened to blow up the entire station unless we gave in to his demands.”
“How did he manage that?” Mickey asked. “I mean, he couldn’t have brought a bomb aboard with him in his luggage.”
“He had extensive training in demolitions, and he had access to our onboard armory. He had a bandolier of grenades slung across his chest, plus another in his hand. He told us that when his grenade went off, it would trigger a series of explosions that would blow the station to pieces.”
“Obviously that didn’t work,” I said.
Musa shook his head. “I managed to shut off the artificial gravity throughout the station the instant before he blew himself up. As I’d hoped, that wreaked havoc with the switches he’d installed in the other explosives around the station.”
“That’s why you took so long to bring the gravity back up,” Romeo said.
“Our technical teams worked as fast as they could. We’ve ejected all stray explosives into space rather than attempting to disarm them on a functioning station.”
“At least we only lost Captain O’Day,” I said as I thought of her scorched body.
Musa frowned. “We very nearly lost Jun as well. He launched himself at our terrorist at the same moment I turned off the gravity. He managed to bat the grenade out of the man’s hand. That was the explosion that killed Captain O’Day.”
“And what happened to Jun?” I asked. The man had always seemed untouchable.
“The explosion—along with the lack of gravitation reinforcement—compromised the viewport in the rec room. While he was struggling with the terrorist, they smacked into it, and it gave way. I managed to find a handhold and pull myself to safety, but Jun and our traitor were pulled out into space. Jun is currently in our infirmary, recovering from his exposure to raw vacuum.”
“How the hell did even he manage that?” Romeo said.
“He wasn’t a Spartan-II, obviously, but Threes were built to last,” Musa said, not without some small pride in the older Spartan generations.
“But even people like that are only good for a few minutes at best,” I said. “How’d we get him back into the station so quick? Wouldn’t the decompression have shot him out into space?”
Musa nodded. “Once Jun was clear of the station and the air escaping from it, he planted his feet on the traitor’s chest and kicked off as hard as he could. That propelled him back toward the station, and we were able to recover him in time. He’ll be on the mend for a while, but he should do so completely.”
“And the traitor?” said Mickey, his voice small.
“Jun’s kick sent him farther away from the station. He died before we could recover him.”
“No,” Mickey said. “I meant, who was he?”
Musa grimaced. “I want you all to understand that this entire incident is to be kept under the strictest confidence, only to be revealed to others under my direct orders, no matter their clearance.”
“Is that necessary?” I said, sensing Mickey and Romeo’s discomfort.
“The rebooted SPARTAN program is at a delicate stage. News of a security lapse like this getting out could compromise our independence, which is exactly what this little bastard would have wanted. For that reason alone, I’m not willing to let that happen.”
I looked to the others, and they both nodded at me. “Understood, sir.”
He drew a breath to steel himself. “The traitor was Spartan Rudolf Schein.”
“I knew it!” Romeo exclaimed, hitting his fist into an open palm.
“You didn’t know nothing,” Mickey said. The strain from that horrible day had put dark circles under his eyes. He looked like he wanted nothing more than to press the reset button and start over again.
“Course I did,” said Romeo. “I never did trust that guy.”
“That’s why you stopped him from doing all that?” I said. “Cause if you did know something about Schein and didn’t try to stop him, you were derelict in your duty, and Captain O’Day died because of it.”
I liked Romeo some of the time, but he had a horrible habit of talking through the seat of his pants. Most times I ignored it, but if I hadn’t called him on it right then and there, I was afraid that Mickey might have tried to silence him permanently.
Romeo flushed at my words, but he didn’t snap back at me. He knew I was right, and for once in his ridiculously fortunate life, he shut his damn mouth.
“It was Spartan Schein,” Commander Musa said. “His mother had been killed by UNSC troops the year before the Covenant War began.”
“Because Mama Schein was part of some kind of colonial rebellion?” I asked.
Musa shook his head. “Not officially. She was caught in the crossfire when the UNSC quashed a rebellion on Persia IX. The young Schein didn’t seem to bear a grudge about it. He joined the UNSC when he was old enough. He became a decorated veteran of many battles, and he came to us with his superiors’ highest recommendations.”
“So what the hell happened?” I asked.
“He was loyal when it came to killing the Covenant,” Musa said. “He turned against us, though, when it came to fighting his own kind.”
“We still have plenty of Covenant to mix it up with,” Mickey said. “Couldn’t we have just sent him to fight them instead?”
“We’re soldiers,” Musa said. “We fight the threats to the UEG, no matter what form they take. We don’t shirk our duty just because those threats share DNA close to our own. From what he said in his final rant, Schein had been planning to mass murder this entire class of Spartan-IVs and anyone else he could take with him. He regarded the Spartans as an ONI tool that would be used to cleanse the colonies of troublemakers by any means necessary.”
“I guess he didn’t get the memo that we’re a separate branch now,” I said. “Or maybe he just didn’t care.”
“What about Wakahisa?” Mickey said. “Why kill him?”
“He’d been trying to recruit Spartan Wakahisa to his cause,” said Musa. “When Wakahisa said he’d report him instead, Schein killed him.”
Mickey let loose a string of curses that would have made my uncle Lou blush. No one saw fit to disagree with him. “And then he tried to frame me for it.”
Romeo nodded in a rare show of sympathy. “And he did such a feeble job of it. Must have just been trying to buy himself a little time. I mean, I could think of lots of better ways to frame you for something.”
I shot him a dirty look. “You two have maybe been working together for too long.”
&
nbsp; “Losing soldiers to the Front is an increasing problem for the UNSC,” Musa said. “We put every candidate through a rigorous screening process to try to ensure that we only recruit the best and most loyal soldiers into the SPARTAN program.”
“Maybe if you didn’t send us out to shoot other people,” Romeo said. “That might be a big start.”
If my glare had been fitted with an assault rifle, Romeo would have been KIA on the spot.
“What?” he said at the chilly response Mickey and I gave him. “We were all thinking it.”
“You need to stow that talk,” I said to him.
“Hey, I don’t know about you, but I signed on to fight the Covenant,” Romeo said.
Musa cleared his throat, and Romeo finally seemed to realize he’d been mouthing off in front of someone other than his buddies.
“The SPARTAN-II program began before anyone in this part of the galaxy had ever heard of the Covenant,” Musa said in the kind of clipped tone that brooked no arguments. “We were created to help squash the Insurrection, and the Front carries on those terrorists’ work. These so-called rebels don’t want peace with the rest of humanity. They’re demanding war. The appearance of the Covenant didn’t end that. It only interrupted it.”
“All I’m saying is that this shouldn’t surprise anyone,” Romeo said with a soft voice and a reluctant shrug. “Not one damn bit.”
Mickey nodded along with Romeo.
Musa gave them both a weary sigh and then spoke in clear, hard terms. “What’s left of the Covenant is still a major threat, and it will be for years. Perhaps forever. Like most of us serving, I prefer to focus on such threats. That said, we Spartans do our duty either way. Understood?”
I understood one thing for sure: Our continued careers depended on answering that question properly. I wondered what they would do with a decommissioned Spartan. Would they strip the implants out of us or just deactivate as many of them as they could? Either way, how would that leave you in the end?
I also wondered if any of us would be the first to find out.
“Yes, sir,” I said.
