by Matt Forbeck
It wasn’t like the Covenant could outfit the Elites in UNSC gear. Our helmets wouldn’t fit around their ugly heads, for one. But on the other hand, ONI didn’t want the Covenant to know anything more about our cutting-edge equipment and research than they could figure out by prying it off a fallen trooper who’d been doing his best to kill them.
“I don’t like this at all,” I told our ONI liaison, none other than Captain Veronica Dare herself.
I’d met Veronica for the first time a year earlier than that, when I was on shore leave back in 2545. Looking back, it’s hard to believe we’ve known each other that long, but spending months traveling through the stars in cryosleep really makes those years fly by.
The Covenant had destroyed Draco III earlier that year, and my CO at the time had ordered me to take some shore leave I didn’t really want to have. She’d tossed a few phrases at me like “taking too many risks,” “jeopardizing others,” and “mental health break,” which I did my best to ignore. It wasn’t until she threatened to send me for a psychiatric evaluation that I finally gave in.
We met in a swim-up bar in a zero-G resort in Castellaneta, a tourist station set in geosynchronous orbit on the sunny side of Saturn’s outermost ring. Most people just came there to float around and enjoy the overpriced drinks, but I got this huge kick out of the weightlessness. I’ve gone without gravity lots of times, of course, but it’s different when you’re on duty.
I remember the first time I saw Veronica. She was standing alone in the middle of the club in a long silver skirt, glittering like diamonds in the morning sun. I knew right then she was exactly what I needed to get my mind off Draco III.
I’d like to tell you that we spent weeks getting to know each other. That we took it slow and let our relationship build. But that would be bullshit.
We were soldiers taking some well-earned time off in the middle of a war over the fate of our entire people. We didn’t fall into each other’s arms. We jumped.
It didn’t end with that one night though. We spent an entire week together and made the most of every damn moment.
I’d never met anyone like her. Smart, confident, beautiful, and ready to take me on every level. Oh, she had my number—hell, I gave it to her—and I worked as hard as I could to find hers.
I just didn’t have any idea what she was hiding behind it. It wasn’t until our week careened to an end that I figured it out.
Okay, I didn’t actually figure it out. She had to paint it on the wall for me.
We were lying in bed, entangled in each other’s arms. I had to catch the next transport out of the resort, and I knew she wasn’t long for there either.
“Does this have to end?” I asked.
I felt her tense up against me, and I knew the answer before she could open her lips. I hoped, though, that it might just be her reflexes betraying her. The smart thing would have been for me to let it go right there—to let her go—but I couldn’t bring myself to do it.
“I don’t mean to push you—” I started.
“Yes, you do.” She gazed up into my eyes, her head nestled on my shoulder, and I couldn’t find a way to argue with her about it. “And I want you to. I just don’t know if I can let you.”
That broke the spell for me, and I cocked my head down at her. “Is there someone else?”
Her chuckle told me that wasn’t the problem.
“Because if there is,” I said, “I can take care of that for you. I am a trained professional, after all.”
“And a crack shot from a thousand meters.” Her tender mouth formed a gentle smile.
It wasn’t what she said so much as how she said it. I am a crack shot, and I made top marks in sniper school to prove it. She wasn’t just taking my word for my skills and making a joke about it. She said it like she knew my exact score.
I narrowed my eyes at her, and her smile vanished. She pushed herself out of the bed and started to get dressed.
“Hey, what the hell?” I asked in as mannered a way as I could manage.
She didn’t look at me.
“Veronica—what’s going on here?” I got up and started slipping into my clothes, too.
“I can’t tell you,” she said.
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“Just what I said. I haven’t lied to you. Not once.”
“But you haven’t told me the whole truth, have you?” I sized her up in a way I hadn’t bothered to before—not as a potential date but as a threat. “What aren’t you telling me?”
“Don’t ask me that.” She pleaded at me with her bright blue eyes. Don’t ruin what we just had, they said. Just let us treasure this precious moment for everything it was, and nothing more.
But I couldn’t help it. “Who are you . . . ? Really?”
She finished dressing and started for the door. I knew six ways to stop her, but they all leaped into my head out of my military training. None of them would work here, not the way I wanted them to, and I felt as helpless as if I’d been shot through the heart.
“Is Veronica even your real name?”
She stopped at the door and glared back at me, her eyes bluer than ever and glittering with fought-back tears.
“Stupidly enough, yes,” she said. “And I shouldn’t have shared.”
That’s when I figured it out. My eyes must’ve grown as large as spotlights. “Ah hell. You’re a goddamn spook!”
She frowned. “I work for ONI, and I shouldn’t have even told you that. We’re on the same side.”
“Are you here on a job? Whoa”—I stabbed a finger into my chest—“am I your job?”
The dead-eyed look she speared me with told me I’d nailed it. “My job has nothing to do with this.”
“How the hell am I supposed to believe that?” I clapped my forehead in disbelief. “You just admitted to being a professional liar.”
“I haven’t lied to you.”
“Yet.”
She pushed past me and put her hand on the door, but she stopped there and stared back at me. Her eyes burned with regret. “It didn’t have to end like this.”
Maybe I wasn’t being fair to her. Maybe I was being a massive jackass. Or maybe I was right.
I’ll note that those three things aren’t mutually exclusive.
At that moment, though, I didn’t damn well care. I only knew I didn’t want her to walk out that door.
“Look.” I held an open hand out to her. “I’m sorry. We were having such a good time, and I never wanted it to end. And you—”
She arched a thin eyebrow at me, daring me to say something wrong.
I took a deep breath and said the most honest thing I could. “You took me by surprise.”
“Funny,” she said, her words as cold as space. “You didn’t surprise me at all.”
SIX
* * *
I didn’t know if I’d ever see Veronica again after that week.
I managed to track her down through UNSC channels, but she ignored me every time I tried to initiate contact. She didn’t say one word to me for almost a year.
If she hadn’t been the ONI agent in charge of the operations on Sargasso in 2546, we might have managed to miss each other forever. Even so, when she came to deliver my team’s briefing personally, she acted like she barely knew me. When I told her I didn’t like Alpha-Nine’s assignment to rescue Lethbridge tech from Sargasso, she discarded my opinion out of hand.
“You’re not required to like it,” Veronica said. She was so cool and professional about it, I wondered for a second if I’d once had such a great time with her twin sister instead. “You just need to follow your orders and get the job done.”
“But I don’t get it.” I nodded at Samrat, the ODST I’d served with longest at that point, and he shrugged in agreement. He didn’t understand the assignment either, but he wasn
’t about to argue with an ONI officer about it.
Me, I wanted to survive it if I could. Even at that point in my career, I’d already been sent on enough suicide missions. As a matter of fact, I was working with an entirely different fireteam back then, not one of whom is still breathing today.
That’s the nature of war, I’m afraid. It’s rare for a team to be able to remain whole for long. Back then, Alpha-Nine consisted of me, Samrat, Svensdottir, and Gomez.
You might notice I’m the only one still on that list.
They were good soldiers, one and all, and each of them deserved to live toward a long and peaceful retirement. The best I can say for them is that they died well.
I can only hope to manage the same when my time comes.
At that moment, though, I had to deal with taking orders from someone who didn’t seem to like me much at all.
Veronica gave me the kind of exasperated sigh I’d only heard from people who had real issues with me, and then she slowly repeated herself.
“You need to find a way into the Lethbridge facility. Make your way to the main lab.” She paused to make sure I was still following her. I gestured for her to go on. “And then confiscate the central data chip all the engineers who worked there kept loaded with the results of their years of irreplaceable research. What’s so hard to understand about that?”
“The part where we have to find our way into the facility,” I said.
“Right,” Gomez said. “Why don’t we just drop down on top of it?”
“Discretion is vital here.” Veronica set her jaw and sized us up. She didn’t trust any one of us—least of all, me—not yet. In that sense, at least, she was ONI all the way. But she decided she had to let one last bit of information drop. “The UNSC isn’t aware of your mission.”
I shot the rest of the troops an I-told-you-so look. Svensdottir threw up her hands in disgust. “But there’s another ODST team going in ahead of us. Gamma-Six doesn’t know either?”
“If the UNSC knew about your target, they’d engage in standard operating procedure.”
I narrowed my eyes at her. “And you don’t want that because . . . ?”
Veronica looked like she might spit blood. “They’d encircle the lab and dig in. You might as well paint a bull’s-eye on the place and let the Covenant know where to hit us hardest.”
Samrat groaned in realization. “So Gamma-Six is there to distract the Covenant from the real target.”
I liked it now even less. “And you expect them to die doing that.”
“Battle analysis from our AI shows that this is the only real chance we have to recover that data and those prototypes and keep them out of Covenant hands. Without the other team’s mission, your chance of success drops precipitously.”
“All right,” I said with an exaggerated shrug. “We’ll do it your way.”
“You don’t have any other choice.”
“Of course not,” I said in a low voice as I brushed past her, leading the Alpha-Nine team toward the transport that Veronica already had waiting for us. “But that doesn’t mean you have to be rude about it.”
She didn’t buy my hurt-feelings act for even as long as it took us to gather our gear and get on the transport. She caught up with us just as I ushered the last of my teammates onto the dropship and grabbed me by the elbow. “This is more important than you could know.”
“You mean, than I’m allowed to know.” I glanced down at my arm, and she released it. “Oh, so we’re actually talking now . . . ? Look, I’m well aware of how ONI plays soldiers like pieces on a game board. Just don’t expect me to like it.”
“I value the lives of every one of your soldiers just as much as you do.”
“Uh-huh. I seriously doubt that.”
“I know you don’t trust ONI. I get it. I wouldn’t respect you if you did.”
“Respect? I’m an old-fashioned kind of guy, and I think you’re moving just a little too fast.”
She bit back a response that might have blown my head off. “Buck. We run the numbers. We slice the scenarios every way we can. We do the goddamn math. We don’t risk anyone on our side unless we know the data’s on our side, too.”
The transport’s engines fired up then, and I leaned down close to speak into her ear. “That’s the difference between us,” I said. “I only care about the people on my side.”
I left her standing there on the transport pad, and right then I figured I’d never see her again. Either I’d get myself killed on her high-risk mission, or she’d find someone easier to work with the next time around. I couldn’t let that or the look in those bright blue eyes of hers bother me then though. If I wanted me and the rest of Alpha-Nine to survive, I had to focus instead on the craptastic mission she’d handed us.
The transport dropped us off five klicks outside of Belisk. After enough whining about sore legs from Gomez, I had Svensdottir hotwire an abandoned civilian truck with the Lethbridge Industrial logo emblazoned on the side. The rest of us piled in the truck’s cargo bay and tried not to get knocked around too much as she gunned her way through town.
“Slow down!” I shouted over the comm. “The whole point here is to not get noticed!”
“I’m the only truck on the inbound highway,” she said. “What the hell do you expect me to do?”
“We’re on a stealth mission,” I said. “Drive stealthily!”
To her credit, Svensdottir only snickered at that for a couple seconds before she pretended to try to humor me. She wove her way through Belisk’s abandoned, shell-shattered streets until we reached Lethbridge’s main facility, screeching to a halt fast enough to make me feel like I might catapult through the truck’s front wall.
“Shit,” she said. “Incoming!”
Gomez, Samrat, and I were already heading for the rear cargo doors when Svensdottir stomped on the accelerator again. The doors splayed open before us, and our momentum sent us sailing out the back to land sprawling on the street beyond.
I turned around just in time to see the missile Svensdottir had been trying to avoid smacking into the back of the truck and detonating in a gigantic ball of fire. Svensdottir spilled out of the driver’s side door, howling the entire way. But thankfully it was more of a war whoop than a cry of pain. She was okay for the moment.
I rolled to my feet, unlimbering my battle rifle. “Target’s at three o’clock high,” I said. “Sam! Scoot right and concentrate fire on him! Gogo! You put Daughter’s fire out! Haul her behind the truck until we send this bastard to hell!”
To their eternal credit, my team did exactly as ordered. We pay a lot of lip service to that in the Marines—especially with the ODSTs—but you don’t realize how much of a difference that makes until someone screws it up. Alpha-Nine was a well-oiled machine.
Of course, war blasts even the best machines to pieces.
As Sam moved to the right and forced our attackers to keep their heads down—at least for as long as it took them to reload their fuel-rod gun—I went to the left to split any incoming fire. As I did, I plucked a grenade from my belt and thumbed it active. The Covenant bastards were chattering at us from a balcony overlooking the entrance to the Lethbridge headquarters, so I overarmed the charge at them in a high arc.
The grenade went off an instant after it landed, blasting out all the windows from the balcony and sending a pair of Grunts sailing over the railing, too. Somewhere up there, an Elite bellowed in pain and then collapsed with a heavy thud.
As far as I’m concerned, that’s one of the sweetest sounds in the galaxy.
“So much for the stealthy approach!” Sam said while my ears were still ringing.
“I never cared for that ONI bullshit, anyway.” I signaled for Sam to cover me as I charged up the open steps and then kicked the spiderwebbed safety glass out of one of the doors. No one challenged me.
I scan
ned the foyer. “Clear! Gogo, report!”
“Daughter’s good as gold, Gunny,” he said. I glanced back to see him hustling Svensdottir to join up with me while Sam covered our backs.
“Feel like I got scorched that color,” Svensdottir said as she shoved aside the pain. She huffed hard but didn’t limp a lick.
Despite our noisy entrance, we only found token resistance once we pushed into the complex. Much as I hated to admit it, ONI’s plan worked like a bullet through butter. Just no stopping it.
I wasn’t one to question our blessings, so we pushed toward the lab hard and fast. I knew it wouldn’t take much for the Covenant commanders in the area to turn their attention toward us, but by the time that happened, I planned to have Alpha-Nine long gone. Also, some small part of me hoped that we could be done with it all fast enough to make a difference for the troopers in Gamma-Six. Once we wrapped up our job, Command could order them out.
“Gogo, you’re on the point. Daughter, cover my left. Sam, you watch our six.” I didn’t really need to say the words. That was our standard formation, and we’d used it dozens of times in situations just like this.
The ritual of it, though, felt right. I’m not superstitious, but I take comfort on the battlefield in following the patterns I’ve drilled into my team’s heads. It makes you feel like you have some kind of control in even the least controlled places, and when you have bullets flying all around you, that helps stave off any panic.
We moved through the halls as fast as we could, clearing side rooms with a glance, just to make sure no bugs would slide up behind us. We kept quiet, whispering into our comms rather than shouting.
We took the stairs up to the fourth floor rather than risk the elevator. Nothing like an arrival bell to let anyone in the area know you’re there and when they can start shooting you, after all. When we got there, Gogo breached the door, and Daughter and I covered him, me going high while she went low.