Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe

by Various

  DIRT

  * * *

  Tobias S. Buckell

  The figure in the charcoal-black body armor picked his way over the top of a shattered, stubby wing, then walked past the ruined mangle of a Pelican dropship. A large BR55 battle rifle rested at the ready, cradled between his forearms.

  He paused by the tip of the Pelican, which had plowed into the ground on its side, and looked through the shattered windows of the cockpit.

  “Over here, Marine.”

  The oval black helmet swung around to look at a clump of tall orange grass behind a thick piece of granite, the morning sun glinting off the upside-down T-shaped visor.

  BR55 aimed forward; the Orbital Drop Shock Trooper moved toward the sound of the voice and pushed aside the tall fronds of grass.

  The 70-millimeter chain gun from the tip of the Pelican dropship had broken loose and sheared the tip of granite clean off, then cratered into the dirt a few hundred feet away.

  Lying between it and the rock was a man in battle dress uniform: simple camouflage with a few chest and hip pockets. Fairly standard.

  He’d obviously been thrown clear of the cockpit on impact and bounced along the dirt. Both legs looked broken, and at least one arm. Blood seeped through the BDU’s legs, torso, and arms.

  The man’s face was cut up. Enough to be unrecognizable.

  He had an M6 Magnum sidearm pointed at the ODST, which he let drop to the dirt next to him in exhaustion.

  Somehow the soldier had crawled out of his body armor, which lay all around him. A closer look revealed why: charred and melted, the ODST body armor would have burned his skin.

  “Good to see you.” The man’s voice held the strange calm of someone who knew they were beyond help, so terribly injured they were past the pain. “I wasn’t sure if the call got through.”

  The ODST crouched beside him and opened a medical pack. Biofoam, to stop the worst of the bleeding, and polypsuedomorphine to ease the man’s pain. He worked as best he could, though his hands shook a bit. This wasn’t training; this was a real, dying man, and the ODST was no medic. He looked around. “My SOEIV landed nearby, and I was ordered over to see if I could help with a downed Pelican. But sir, you need more help than I can give you. We need to get you out of here. There are Covenant forces moving in on our position. We don’t have much time.”

  “We have time, Private.” The injured Marine grabbed the helmet of the crouched soldier in a sudden movement, yanking the man down close to him.

  “I’ve been doing this so long, rook, that somewhere along the line I forgot what it was all about,” the Marine on the ground hissed into the reflective visor. “But what I want you to remember about me is that it has been a long journey between where I started and where I’m sitting now. I would apologize for the things I’ve done, but sorry’s passed me by, rook. You don’t see the things I’ve seen and come out sorry. But sometimes, if you’re not a complete monster, you come out realizing what’s important.”

  The ODST pushed back carefully, trying to make sure not to further hurt the man on the ground. “Sir?”

  He coughed, blood staining his lips and chin. “All this crap started back in the Colonial Military.”

  The ODST turned and looked back the way he’d come, helmet twisting, and murmured a situation report and request for backup as he reported his find.

  “Of course,” the injured man continued, “I can see by your insignia you’re a private, just out of training, probably your first jump down to dirtside. You might not even remember the CMA . . . but back before there was the UNSC, there was the CMA . . .”

  “Sir . . .”

  “Shut up and listen, rookie! There’s something important I have to tell you.” The man’s face relaxed. He was slipping back into a world of thoughts and memories. “About friends. Betrayal. Loss. If you keep your head up and do what I tell you, you might even live long enough to tell someone what happened here . . .”

  I SIGNED up for the Colonial Military the hour I turned eighteen. January 3, 2524. Smartest thing I’d done up to that point. Flipped off my father, who’d stood by a giant JOTUN trundling across a flat, golden plain of wheat, and then I rode a flatbed full of corn all the way into town. Sure, the JOTUNs did the real manual labor: plowing, planting, monitoring, harvesting. But we still ended up among the crops now and again, despite the automated work the giant, one hundred-foot lawn mower-like machines did.

  “It’s just dirt,” I’d told a friend about my decision to leave. “And I’m sick and tired of grubbing about in it. I can’t believe my parents left a real world to travel all the way out here to dig dirt.”

  The farming life was not my destiny. I’d known that since the day I first looked up at the stars while riding on the back of one of the giant, automated JOTUNs, a long piece of straw dangling out the side of my mouth.

  No. I was going to see worlds. Pack a gun. The next time I came back home to Harvest, I wanted to watch the girls bat their eyes at a man in uniform. Not a farm boy with dirt under his nails. I wanted to be a hard-as-nails, tough-ass Marine.

  I walked around Utgard for the last time, strolling along the banks of the Mimir River. I lit up a Sweet William cigar by the floodlit, well-landscaped grounds of the Colonial Parliament’s long walls. I blew what cash I had on me on drink after drink at bars scattered all up and down the Mimir until I could barely walk.

  Then at sunrise, without a wink of sleep, I walked into a small recruiting ofice where a vaguely bored-looking desk sergeant looked me over and handed me some paperwork. After I painfully worked my way through it, he stood up and shook my hand. “Welcome to the Colonial Military, son,” he said.

  By that evening I was still not a tough-ass Marine, but a tired, hungover recruit without any hair, dressed in an ill-fitting uniform, throwing up my guts in a dirt field while a drill sergeant yelled at me. I was now Private First Class Gage Yevgenny.

  I want to say I learned how to kill a man with my pinky, or how to use a sniper rifle to kill a fly on a log of shit from a thousand yards, but all I really learned was that I didn’t like scrabbling around in the mud with live rounds going off over my head.

  But I made it through anyway.

  Unlike the UNSC, the CMA boot camp lasted just a couple weeks. Enough to teach you how to use your weapon, salute, march, and drive a Warthog before they booted you right on out of there.

  It wasn’t that much more advanced than spending a week shooting gophers in the fields, or so I thought at the time.

  Unlike some of my fellow recruits, I at least knew how to point and shoot. As a result, I was promoted to lance corporal and got to tell a few other soldiers what to do.

  That I liked.

  But it still didn’t prepare me for the things I was about to see.

  I MET Felicia Sanderson and Eric Santiago at the Utgard spaceport. Felicia grew up right here in Utgard, on Harvest; Eric had come in from Madrigal. With our duffels at our feet, we waited as patiently as we could in line with civilian passengers. We’d developed some grudging respect for one another during boot camp, enough that they felt comfortable airing complaints about Colonial Military life around me.

  “I still can’t believe we’re forced to fly civilian to Eridanus,” Felicia groused.

  “We could go AWOL,” Eric said.

  I shook my head. “Where? The liner doesn’t stop anywhere remotely interesting between here and the Eridanus System.”

  “I’m just saying, it’s odd.” Eric picked his duffel up as the line moved.

  “How could command let the UNSC grab all our ships?” Felicia had been complaining about this latest development for a solid week. Harvest was a newer colony, and most of the settlers had come from other Outer Colonies. Felicia and her family didn’t hold a lot of love for the UNSC, or the Earth-controlled Colonial Administration. Her family hadn’t set foot on Earth in generations.

  It was, I had to admit, an indignity. Without our own ships, the Colonial Military was shuttling fighti
ng men where it needed them by buying them coach-class tickets.

  The three of us had been deployed to Eridanus, where the action was. Our angry words for the UNSC were partly attempts to hide our nervousness. Talking big to keep our minds off the big issue.

  Operation TREBUCHET had been the UNSC’s answer to Insurrectionists, and we’d just been folded into the far-ranging series of operations aimed to “pacify” the Outer Colonies.

  I was just excited to be leaving Harvest for the first time, no matter how, or to where.

  As we lifted off, I could see one of the seven space elevators that Harvest used to move its goods off the planet’s surface. Just like me, each piece of cargo would be flying through slipspace to other planets, like seeds being dispersed from a pod.

  It was the last time I saw Harvest with my own eyes.

  I often regretted leaving my father the way I did. We never had another chance to see each other, and now that I look back on it, I know he was just a hardworking man who’d lost his wife and did his best to raise one hell of an angry kid. I doubt I could have done better.

  I often wonder what the expression had been on his face when I left that day. Sadness? Relief? Or just weariness?

  What would we have said, or done, had we known what would happen to Harvest?

  “YOU WANTED action . . .” Felicia slapped my back. We were in an old Pelican dropship, shuddering its way down to Teribus Island on Eridanus II, and I was throwing up because of the turbulence.

  Older CMA Marines just stared blankly at us. They looked bored, and Eric, sitting next to me, knew why. “No action, Felicia. You can thank the sympathizers. Someone, probably in this unit, has already called ahead. There won’t be anything on the ground by the time we arrive.” He said this loud enough for everyone to hear. No big secret, and none of the other soldiers bothered to contradict him.

  Harvest was relatively removed from the heat of the battle over the Outer Colonies’ destinies. Eridanus was at the heart of it.

  Every day, more and more Insurrectionists set off bombs in major cities, targeting UNSC troops, ships, and Colonial Administration buildings.

  The UNSC, in response, was cracking down harder with each passing month, seeking to instill order. And even though the Colonial Military had been increasingly sidelined to smaller and smaller operations since the discovery of elements inside our organization sympathetic to the cause, our brass never stopped pointing out that Robert Watts, the leader of the Insurrectionists in Eridanus and the mastermind behind most of the activity in the Outer Colonies, was actually a former UNSC colonel.

  That was always a quick way to a bar fight with UNSC Marines.

  It rankled me that the UNSC viewed the Colonial Military as suspect, but they were right to do so.

  “So this is all a waste?” I asked.

  Eric nodded. “So it goes.”

  “Not exactly helping the UNSC break their assumptions about us, are we?”

  “Screw the UNSC.” Eric leaned back against his restraints. “They gutted us. They sidelined us. They give us crap; barely functioning equipment. Then they want to whine about our lack of effectiveness? At least give me a uniform that’s not threadbare and then we’ll talk.”

  A few grunts from nearby indicated that Eric’s point of view was commonly held.

  “Then what are we doing here?” I asked.

  Felicia, sitting across from me, grinned. “You want to go back to the golden grains of Harvest, Gage?”

  “Hell no.” I grinned.

  The thing about soldiers: We were usually there for the guy next to us. The Felicias, the Erics; boot camp, barracks; the tiny little world that was the unit and only the unit, particularly now that we were away from past friends or any family connections.

  Everyone in that Pelican was family, no matter what disagreements we had. We still had to back each other up come crunch time. And we had each other’s backs when we piled out of that Pelican, weapons hot.

  Felicia took point, her preference, while Eric and I had her covered. The other Marines spread out around the Pelican.

  The island was deserted, but whoever had been here hadn’t been gone that long. The remains of a campfire still smoldered. Sand-colored camouflage tents whipped about from the Pelican’s exhaust. There were dummy targets set up around the scraggly bush on the edge of the Insurrectionist camp.

  “I am saddened to report,” Felicia said, “that we have just missed yet another Insurrectionist camp.” There was some bitterness in her voice. Like me, she was frustrated by what she’d seen of the CMA sympathies so far. No matter how much we were Outer Colonists, we’d still been given a job and sworn an oath to be soldiers. We wanted to do our job.

  An hour later, someone from the Office of Naval Intelligence arrived in a gleaming, brand-new green Pelican. It touched down in a flurry of sand. The ONI agent quickly walked about the camp remains with a disgusted look, then left.

  We had a barbecue on the edge of the water that night. The sunset wavered, and the stars started to wink into place.

  “They won’t be able to hold this together,” Felicia said, throwing chicken bones out into the water.

  “Who won’t?” I asked.

  “The UNSC. The Inner Colonies.” Felicia pointed up at the stars over the bonfire and the dripping explosions of fat from chicken still hanging from the improvised spits. “If we spread out through all those stars, what could hold us all together? At some point, distance will have its effect, and so will time, and someone will have to break away and do something different. No matter how much force they apply, they can’t stop this. Even people from within their ranks are deserting for the Outer Colonies. It’s like Rome. They kept taking these barbarians and teaching them how to fight, and then they’d end up leaving and fighting the very generals who’d taught them. We’re those barbarians!”

  A small coal exploded in the fire, scattering tiny, incandescent particles into the dark, where they winked out and vanished.

  Eric threw a chicken bone at Felicia. “You think too much, you damn Innie.”

  Felicia laughed. “Innie? Not me, sir, I’m no Insurrectionist. I just follow orders and go where they tell me. If I weren’t here I’d be sitting in jail back in Utgard because of this girl I met in a bar one night . . .”

  “. . . I mean, how was I supposed to know she was the governor’s daughter,” Eric and I chorused, finishing Felicia’s anecdote before she could even launch into it. She’d told it to us often enough.

  She blushed and laughed, demanding we hand over the six-pack of beer before it got warm from sitting outside the cooler and too close to the fire.

  The next day we were assigned to riot patrol in Elysium City: howling citizens throwing rocks and pavers at the Colonial Administration’s offices, shaking signs about freedom and independence while we kept our shoulders up against the riot shields and kept them back.

  “They’re really pissed off,” Felicia grunted, arms locked in mine as we shoved back against the crowd. A red-haired woman in a cocktail dress shouted obscenities at us and tried to leap over the cordon, but Eric stepped forward and shoved her back, hard enough that she fell under the mob, fortunately rescued by a pair of her friends.

  It was something the police should have been doing, so it was quite clear that the UNSC didn’t want to have anything to do with us and had sent us out to do scut work. Certainly they wouldn’t be including us in any raids or counterinsurgency operations in the future.

  None of the old hands in our barracks particularly minded.

  Meanwhile, the demonstrations grew angrier and more dangerous with each passing day.

  AFTER TWO months of riot patrol and guarding bases, or anything else the UNSC determined was simple enough for us to handle, we were growing bored and looking for diversions. We were far enough out of Elysium City that to hop a ride into where the parties were meant we had to get ahold of passes, or know someone with access to a Warthog.

  So the three of us had made fas
t friends with Allison Stark, one of the last of the Pelican pilots that the UNSC had yet to steal away from us. She not only had access to transportation, but a pet NCO who’d sign off on any leave request.

  Usually we didn’t fraternize with the flyboys (or in this case, flygirl), but Allison could get you into the city, outdrink you, and get you back as long as you picked up the tab.

  But tonight the four of us found the Warthog pool empty.

  “The officers cleared us out,” Felicia said.

  Eric kicked a large rock. “Or they’re escorting supplies.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Doesn’t matter. How do you think Innies get UNSC explosives or weapons? Spare parts?”

  I hadn’t thought much about that. “Black market?”

  “Black market still has to get that stuff from somewhere,” Eric said thoughtfully.

  “Don’t care what’s going on,” I said, “we’re still standing here with no transport.”

  Allison folded her arms. “I have a solution, if the guys here have the balls . . .”

  “And what is that?” I rose to the challenge right away, even as Felicia laughed at my predictable response.

  That was a Hornet. A small, one-person cockpit with a pair of engines perched high overhead and behind it, and a chain gun on the nose. It looked, appropriately enough, like a gray metal insect.

  “You want us to ride the skids?” Eric asked, stepping up onto the flanged wings under the cockpit that the Hornet sat on.

  There was barely room for one person to ride the sides, it seemed to me.

  “Hey, UNSC Marines ride the skids all the time,” Allison said as she opened the cockpit and clambered in. “Combat insertion. Training. You name it.”

  That sealed it.

  But who was going to pair up on a skid?

  Eric, Felicia, and I squared off with a fast round of paper-rock-scissors, which Felicia and I lost.

  Eric walked to the other side of the Hornet. “See you on the other side!”