by Various
When it finished, Marquez read, “I hear you, Meridian Station. All will be dealt with in time.”
“That’s it?” demanded Doc Cale. “When? How?” She grabbed the notebook from Marquez and stared at it dumbly. As if in response, the light on the transmitter darkened.
Evelyn looked at Doc Cale and then back to Marquez. The technician lowered himself to his cot, exhausted.
“I guess that’s that, then,” said Evelyn, suddenly very weary. “Now we wait.”
The doctor said nothing. Marquez closed his eyes and let out a very long breath. Evelyn sat and watched the transmitter.
The survivors of Meridian waited as the galaxy reshaped around them.
BREAKING STRAIN
* * *
* * *
JAMES SWALLOW
This story takes place in 2553, during the harrowing final days and aftermath of the Covenant War (Halo 3 era).
The gray morning invaded Darren Leone’s life with callous disdain for his lack of sleep, and it did so in the form of First Lieutenant Maher, who stood knocking on the frame of his hatch until the captain rose from his rack.
“Sir.” Maher insisted on giving Leone a crisp salute, which matched the crisp uniform and crisp haircut that the junior officer displayed every damn day. They’d been grounded on Losing Hand for almost a solar year, low on everything one could consider a luxury, and yet Maher always looked like he’d just stepped off the parade ground of an Officer Candidate School. Leone resolved to find out if the younger man had some secret stock of hair-care products and good soap he was hoarding from the rest of the stranded crew.
“What’s the problem this time?” Leone wearily asked. Because there was always a problem. Each new dawn brought another for the pile, and somewhere along the line, Leone had been caught in the inertia of solving them. At first, it had been out of a sense of responsibility—maybe guilt, if he was being honest—and a dedication to the protect and defend ideals of the UNSC. But now he was doing it because it had to be done, and if not by him, then who? He idly wondered if the day he slept in would be the day that Losing Hand’s fragile state of grace unraveled.
“The fight last night,” Maher went on, as Leone pulled on his uniform. “There have been some consequences. Criminal damage. Nobody saw it until first light.”
The lieutenant handed Leone a datapad as they walked out into the corridor. It was an image capture of the ship’s bow, just below the plate showing the reg-code and name. Beneath the words UNSC Dark Was the Night someone had spray-painted a bunch of choice swearwords in the NuNordic dialect that was the local lingo. Leone had picked up enough to know that there weren’t enough dogs on the colony for his crew to perform the acts it suggested.
“I have a work detail out there scrubbing it off,” Maher concluded. “I don’t recognize the handwriting.”
“I do.” Leone grimaced, tamping down a flare of anger at the disrespect the graffiti showed his vessel. Dark Was the Night was only a military cargo tender, it was true, but it had been . . . dammit, it was still a fighting ship.
Civilians, he thought, rubbing the growth of graying beard on his chin. They just don’t get how important this old hulk is to us. “Leave it with me—I’ll deal with it.” Leone tapped the corner of the image, where part of an autocannon turret was visible. “That’s the number two cupola, right? Put some power back to it, just for a few days.”
Maher eyed him. “Sir . . . respectfully, what use will that be?”
Both men knew that all Dark Was the Night’s point-defense weapons were incapable of firing, rendered useless by the damage that had ultimately stranded them on Losing Hand. But while the targeting and firing mechanisms were dead, the autotrackers in the turrets still worked. “Keep it online, just for show. Someone comes around again with a paint can and raging about something, the guns’ll follow them. Most folks can’t look down the barrel of a fifty-mil cannon without flinching. They’re not going to know it won’t turn them into wet shreds.”
“Aye, sir.” Maher obviously didn’t like the idea, but he followed orders. That was why Leone had made him his exec, after the attack had gutted the rest of the ship’s command crew.
Captain Leone gave the sketch of a salute to a couple of duty techs as they passed, getting the same in return. Since the downing of the vessel and his ascension to captaincy, he’d slackened off the rules about discipline, but on some level Leone still felt like an imposter in his position of command.
He glanced out of a viewport and into the constant, sleeting rain, glimpsing the blurry shapes of the landing field’s hangar, the township, and the derelict refinery beyond. There was too much mist to see the coastline from here, but he could smell it. The salty, metallic brine of Losing Hand’s seas permeated everything, even the deep sections of the transport.
Not a day went by that Leone didn’t think about the night of the crash landing; the chaos of fighting the helm all the way down from low orbit as the ship was captured by the ocean planet’s gravity well. Those desperate moments as he struggled to bring them down in one piece on the landing strip instead of planting the ship in the middle of the colony. It had been a damn good touchdown, if you stepped back to think about it, and he’d done it without AI assistance. A few degrees either way, and Dark Was the Night would have ended up in the sea or flattened against the mountains. Instead it was here, never to take sky again, casting a slab-sided shadow over the same fishermen who had daubed their hate for the UNSC across the hull.
If Leone closed his eyes, he could still see the moment when they had lost Rosarita. The transport’s artificial intelligence had disintegrated in the chaos of the Covenant attack that had nearly ended them. The enemy bombardment ripped through the vessel’s systems like a flash-fire and left them to perish just after they entered slipspace. Without the AI to help maintain it, Dark Was the Night began a death spiral of critical malfunctions that meant the crew’s only hope was to make an emergency planetfall. Crashing out on the perimeter of the Outer Colonies, where chances came thin on the ground—they had found no other choice.
But their arrival on Losing Hand could not have been more catastrophic for the outpost of people living there when the ship demolished the colony’s vital wind farms as it hard-landed.
“Anything else?” Leone stopped in the main bay and helped himself to a heavy-weather parka hanging on a bulkhead.
“Solar flares are kicking off again.” Maher paused. “The usual issues with the power core.” He indicated the heavy cables snaking out of the open loading hatch and away across the landing field. “Too high a load for too small a reactor.”
Leone accepted that with a nod. “Tell Chong I’ll have a word with the locals. Again. For what good it’ll do.” Dark Was the Night’s long-suffering senior engineer had his work cut out for him keeping the ship operable as well as providing energy to the township, as he wasn’t shy about reminding the captain at every opportunity.
Maher had more to say, but he fell silent as a figure in a ragged rain slicker marched into the compartment, pushed forward by an armed soldier. Platinum blond hair spilled untidily out from under the slicker’s hood, and presently a woman’s face turned up to look at Leone, ready defiance in her gaze. She sported a nasty shiner around her right eye and a split lip.
“Here’s Ms. Larsson,” the soldier said tightly, and by the fresh bruises on his cheek, Leone guessed he’d been on the wrong end of the wiry young woman’s fists. “We let her sleep it off in the brig.”
“You can’t hold me here,” she told Leone.
“She was drunk and disorderly,” offered Maher.
“I guessed that.” Leone beckoned her toward a parked Warthog. “But that’s like every night in this town, right?”
That earned him a sharp smirk. “Yeah. Not much else to do,” she said.
“Let’s go see your big brother, then,” said the captain, climbing into the vehicle. “I’m sure he’s worried sick.”
A shadow passed over the wo
man’s face as Larsson’s escort followed her into the cab. “Not likely.”
They drove in silence through the rain, the fat windblown drops spattering the Warthog’s windshield and crew compartment as Leone aimed it toward the town. The road was washed out, so he followed the yellow cables from the ship, bouncing over potholes and skidding through deep puddles of dirty water.
He shot the Larsson woman a glance. “So you want to tell me why you picked a fight with my men?”
She gave a theatrical sigh. “Look out the window, soldier-boy. It’s easy to get bored in this place.”
“That all it was?” He watched her for a reaction. “Because I hear things. Like maybe that your brother and his friends are starting to resent the UNSC presence here.”
“Starting to?” She gave a bitter laugh. “Everyone on Losing Hand came here to get away from people like you! How do you think we feel having a military starship dumped on us from out of nowhere?”
The sergeant sitting in the back—his name was Robertson—spoke up. “We didn’t ask to land here,” he told her. “We had no choice.”
“No one likes being beholden to the UNSC.” She folded her arms across her chest. “If we still had our windmills—”
“You’d have heat and light, yes,” said Leone, finishing her sentence. “And if my ship had its systems up and running, we’d have our drives and our long-range comm and we wouldn’t need to trade wattage for food with you. But you don’t, and we don’t, and that’s how it is.”
“When are you going to go?” She snarled the words, suddenly fierce. “How long do we have to wait until your people come to get you?”
The question wrong-footed Leone, and his mouth went dry. “I . . . I really don’t know.”
Dark Was the Night had passed its time-overdue limit months ago, crossing the point where command would log the ship as missing in action and, according to standard procedure, send another vessel to investigate its disappearance. But no one had come, and the single drone satellite they had been able to put up in orbit hadn’t detected anything in nearby space in all that time. The last communication they received from command had been before they were attacked, a terse and grim message informing them that Reach had fallen.
“Maybe nobody is looking.” The words slipped out of him before he could stop them.
“What?”
“We don’t know how bad it got. . . . We don’t know how far it’s gone. The war could be over by now. Earth could be a cinder. . . .” He felt sick inside at the thought of it.
She was silent for a while before forming a reply. “If you think that’s true . . . then us fishers and you soldiers are going to be stuck here together for a long time.”
Leone brought the Warthog to a halt outside the town hall, where a small cluster of grim-faced men was waiting. “So maybe we better stop all the pointless fistfights with each other.”
She shook her head as she climbed out, and there was a note of regret in her tone. “You’ve been here long enough, Leone. You should know by now. We don’t play well with others.”
He followed her out of the vehicle, not willing to let it end there, and found himself surrounded by a half dozen of the locals. All of them glared back at him, and unconsciously, the captain’s hand slipped toward the M6 pistol holstered at his hip. Robertson dropped down next to him, his assault rifle already in his hands. Leone gave the soldier a slow shake of the head.
The Larsson woman was intercepted by her brother, who leaned close and said something Leone couldn’t pick out—but whatever it was, she reacted badly to it and stalked away to the hall. Above her on the clock tower, a weathered comm dish creaked and groaned as the wind tugged at it.
The elder Larsson then turned to face him. “Captain. You haven’t had enough of playing sheriff yet?” Broad-shouldered with a wolfish face, he tapped himself on the chest. “Why don’t you find yourself a hat and a tin badge, like they have in those old Earther vids?” He nodded at the pistol. “You already have the six-gun.”
“I’m just interested in seeing things remain stable, that’s all.”
“You and your boys are peacekeepers, then? And here I was thinking you were the jackboot of the UEG, come to lay upon our necks.” He snorted. “Politely, of course.”
Leone folded his arms. “As much as I’d love to share the same old load of scintillating political discourse with you, I’ve got other things to do.”
“So why the hell are you here?” demanded one of the other fishers.
“To give you back the kid sister. To ask everyone to watch it with the power drain, for all our sakes. . . .” He let his tone harden. “And to tell you that the next person who paints crap on the side of my ship won’t get to brag about it.” Leone eyed the man. “You read me?”
Larsson’s expression shifted, and belatedly Leone realized he’d given him exactly what he wanted. “You’re making threats now? What’s next? Another blackout to keep us in line?”
“That wasn’t deliberate,” insisted Robertson. A few weeks ago there had been a system overload that Chong and his team had struggled to repair, but of course no one in town seemed to believe that. Days later, the regular food-trade load of salted fish had arrived with over half of it contaminated by fuel oil. An accident, so the locals had said.
“No one put you in charge.” The captain found himself wishing he had brought more men, as Larsson advanced on them and pointed at the UNSC crest on Leone’s uniform. “You act like that eagle makes you lord of all you survey!”
Leone felt Robertson tense at the other man’s words and interposed himself between them, keeping his hands at his sides. “We’re not here because we want to take over your fish farm. We’re trying to make amends. We need each other to survive, and until something changes, that’s the way it’s got to be. I’m willing to work with that. How about you, Larsson? How about you quit bitching and rabble-rousing and we can all concentrate on staying alive?”
Larsson smiled, and it was ugly on him. “You’d like that, wouldn’t you? Make it easy?” He spread his hands. “But you’re right, something does have to change. Maybe it’s you.” His voice turned low and menacing. “Maybe it’s us who should take charge of that ship and the power core, by force if we have to. This is our planet, after all.”
“Try it!” snarled Robertson. “The Spartan wouldn’t let you get ten meters!”
“Sergeant,” snapped Leone, “shut it!”
But just the mention of the name had been enough to swing the mood of the moment away from threats to something more like fear.
The captain was one of the few people on Losing Hand who knew his actual name: Kevin-A282, a Spartan-III who had been unlucky enough to be on board Dark Was the Night when it all went wrong. The ship had been part of a chain of vessels taking him back to Earth, for reasons that had not been made clear. But Leone had seen the horrific damage wrought upon the Spartan’s battle armor and the web of fresh scars on his impassive face, and had known instinctively that the supersoldier had survived something terrible.
He remembered the thought that had crossed his mind on first seeing the Spartan. More damage there. Inside, where it doesn’t show.
Leone would have been dead if not for Kevin-A282. In the wake of the Covenant attack, the Spartan had saved his life when an airlock blew open, dragging him to safety through a screaming, freezing hurricane of decompression. He still had the frostbite scars on his fingers.
Then, a month after planetfall, the Spartan set off on an overcast night down the coast and didn’t come back. He didn’t answer any communications, and men sent to find him came back with nothing. But he was still out there, keeping watch. People had seen him standing sentinel on the headlands. Leone had no way to compel the Spartan to return.
The locals didn’t know that though. Just like they didn’t know the autocannons were offline, because the reality was that there were a lot more people living in the township than there were crew and guns to fight them with, if push came to sh
ove.
A state of grace, thought Leone. All it would take was somebody on one side losing their temper or making a bad choice in the heat of the moment, and the simmering resentment between the locals and the UNSC crew would erupt into open violence.
He studied the fishermen, knowing all of them carried wicked utility blades in their coats as a matter of course, and that they knew how to use them. How many more had stub pistols from the township’s armory, or worse?
How long until someone winds up dead?
Leone locked eyes with Larsson, and for a long moment he thought the other man might be about to answer that question—but in the next second, the tension shattered as the hall door crashed open and his sister came sprinting down to them. “Ryan!” she shouted. “We’ve got a problem!”
Larsson growled at her to switch to NuNordic, but Leone’s attention was drawn away by the crackle of his radio. “Ship to CO,” said Maher’s voice.
He tapped the comm bead in his ear. “Captain here. Go ahead, Lieutenant.”
“Sir, the orbital drone has picked up something coming in from the edge of the system. A transmission on the E-Band frequency. Looks like it could be emanating from a moving source.”
“A ship?” Leone’s blood ran cold, and the reaction surprised him. He should have been elated at the possibility of outside contact; but instead, some odd premonition made it feel like a threat. “Are we sure about this? The solar flares—”
“It’s confirmed,” Maher broke in. “Radiation from the sun has dropped in the last ten hours—that’s how we were able to pick it up. Must have been out there for a good few days before the drone’s sensors spotted it, sir.”
Across the way, Larsson and his sister were speaking in hushed, urgent tones, and Leone knew she had to be telling her brother the same thing. In the weeks after the landing, one of the things Leone had agreed to in order to build bridges with the locals was allowing them independent access to the orbital drone. If Waypoint or the UNSC’s comm relays ever started talking to the Losing Hand colony again, they deserved to know about it.
