New Blood

by Matt Forbeck

  I understood how the others Jun recruited had all said yes. It was the opportunity of a lifetime, and it held the potential for being able to do a whole lot more good for humanity. But it struck me as a bargain with the devil. You could have everything you wanted. It would only cost you your soul.

  I’d seen too many members of Alpha-Nine give everything they had—up to and including their lives. I had fought alongside Dutch, Mickey, and Romeo for so long at this point, leaving them behind would have made me feel like a traitor. If anything ever happened to any of them in the field from that time forward, I knew I’d blame myself forever for not being there to save them.

  Maybe because of that, we stopped adding people to Alpha-Nine when the war ended. The Rookie turned out to be our final recruit. He filled up the open spot created after Gramps died in August of 2552, during the battle for Reach.

  Baruti Komen—or Gramps, as we called him—had been the sole survivor of his previous unit, and High Command had matched him with Alpha-Nine to fill yet another hole in our ranks that had opened up in early ’52. Gramps had joined the UNSC the moment the Covenant invaded human space, which meant he’d served even longer than me. I outranked him, but he always claimed that was only because he’d spent so much more time in cryosleep, heading off to more important skirmishes.

  “That’s the secret to my success,” I said. “I don’t sleep so much on the job.”

  He laughed pretty hard at that.

  Gramps wasn’t with us all that long. He took a burst of plasma in the chest during the fall of Reach. Blew out his heart. We’ve got a lot of amazing medical technology these days, but nothing that can help with a wound like that.

  We hadn’t been doing anything particularly special or desperate at the time—just trying to hold a piece of ground on one patch of dirt on Reach for some reason only High Command understood and wasn’t particularly eager to share with us. Some days, you’re the feint, and other days you’re the actual attack. You just don’t always get told which kind of day it might be.

  I don’t know if Gramps died for some noble cause or to pave the way for someone else’s noble cause, but either way, we couldn’t save him.

  After Reach fell to the Covenant, we hauled ass back home to help out with the Battle for Earth. And on the way, High Command saddled us with the Rookie. Maybe it’s not fair that we never called him anything else, but that’s what he was to us: a brand-spanking-new trooper who’d been transferred to our squad at the last possible second.

  Never mind that he was a seasoned veteran who had five years on Mickey. He was the last new person our fireteam ever saw. Maybe if someone else had joined up, we’d have gotten around to giving the Rookie a better name. But that never happened.

  When we got to Earth, the Covenant had already set up shop over Kenya. But instead of just glassing the homefront—as we’d feared for decades that they might do the instant they found our ancestral homeworld—they’d gone hunting for something in New Mombasa. The High Command decided to take advantage of that odd lull in the impending armageddon by hitting the bastards as hard as we could.

  Alpha-Nine—along with the rest of us Helljumpers present on the UNSC Say My Name—had orders to drop straight on top of the Covenant assault carrier Solemn Penance, which sat hovering right over the city. Our job was to board the damn thing, fight our way through to the bridge, and yank it out of the hands of a Covenant leader known as the Prophet of Regret.

  We hoped to help him live up to his name, maybe even nab the bastard to broker a peace deal—if such a thing was possible.

  But Veronica intercepted us before we could climb into our coffins. I cringed when she walked in. Whatever she wanted, I figured it couldn’t be good.

  After all, it had to be important enough that she’d track me down personally in the middle of the Battle for Earth. On top of that, remember that I hadn’t seen her for a whole six years after that mission on Sargasso, and we’d finished that on pretty lousy terms.

  Sure, it would all work out soon afterward, but I had no hopes for that in the moment. When she grabbed me, I just knew her timing was lousy.

  Under Veronica’s orders—or maybe from someone else a level way above my pay grade—Alpha-Nine got seconded to ONI for another mission under her command. She refused to tell us anything about this new job—only that we were to follow her orders to the letter. My relationships didn’t normally deteriorate in that direction, but I’d done enough work with ONI over the years. I knew how to dance to that beat.

  She didn’t do much to alter our original plan until after we’d launched from our dropship. At that point, she gave us new coordinates to head for, steering us away from Solemn Penance and putting us straight into the streets of New Mombasa instead.

  I actually considered ignoring her and leading Alpha-Nine to crash land into the Covenant flagship per our original orders. But I was a good soldier that day, and it ended up saving our lives.

  Right after we switched our target, Solemn Penance triggered a jump into slipspace while it was still in the Earth’s atmosphere. This is what we call a Very Bad Thing.

  The shock wave from that insane activation blew out an electromagnetic pulse bigger than a conventional nuke’s. It fried the electronics of just about everything around it—and that included every one of the midair drop pods carrying a Helljumper.

  Alpha-Nine was the only team to survive, and that was a damn narrow thing at best. If we hadn’t veered off under Veronica’s orders, we’d have hurtled to our deaths in those blacked-out coffins along with everyone else. That’s the one thing every ODST with any bit of sanity left in them wakes up screaming in fear of at one point or another, and it kills me to think about how many good soldiers met their ends that way on that day.

  As it was, each one of us had a hard landing. The shock wave not only blacked out our systems but knocked Alpha-Nine all over the place. Instead of hitting our target like a sniper’s bullet, we wound up landing more like bits of buckshot.

  Mickey and the Rookie actually smacked into each other on the way down. I figured both of them for dead, but they turned out to be tougher than I could have hoped.

  I landed upside down, which made getting out of my pod trickier than ever. I managed to get Veronica on the comm in her drop pod, but I couldn’t raise anyone else. That worried me, but I consoled myself with the fact that I at least still had her on the line.

  ONI must make their coffins out of tougher stuff, but Veronica had gotten stuck inside hers and couldn’t get the door open. That meant I had to come to her, someplace in Tayari Plaza.

  The mean and shattered streets of New Mombasa were swarming with Covenant forces, though, and it took me too damn long to cut my way through them. At the time, I thought it strange that I didn’t see any Elites swarming over the place. There had been plenty on Reach, after all.

  Turns out the Covenant was having internal problems at the time. The Brutes and the Elites didn’t care much for each other to begin with, and as it happened, they were about to thrash out their differences for good. They later called it the Great Schism, although at the time it just seemed like the Giant Fustercluck.

  Apparently the Prophet of Regret had jumped the gun and taken his fleet to attack Earth before the Prophet of Truth was ready to roll. (Please don’t ask me how many prophets the Covenant had. Even one of them was too damn many for me.)

  Right after Regret jumped out of Earth’s atmosphere, Truth gave the orders to get to it. He had a planet or two’s worth of Brutes loyal to him embedded in Regret’s fleet. They slaughtered any Elites that had been left behind and then set in to treating any humans they found the same way. I hear most of the Covenant—particularly the Elites—weren’t privy to this sudden change of plans until weeks later, but by then, it was too late for them to do anything about it.

  Et tu, Brute, anyone?

  While I was happy to not have to face
off against any Elites—they earned every letter of that nickname—I wasn’t sure I would have traded them for ten times as many Brutes on the ground.

  But they never ask me for my opinion about these things, you know.

  It was late in the day when I crashed into New Mombasa, and it was getting dark fast. The local cops had done their best to protect the citizens from the invasion, but what police department is prepped to repel a full-scale alien assault?

  Alone as I was, and not knowing if any of my teammates were alive, I tried to keep to the shadows when and where I could. Much as I enjoyed killing the bugs that had finally dared to invade Earth, that wasn’t my mission.

  The frustrating part was that Veronica hadn’t yet briefed me on what the hell Alpha-Nine’s mission actually was, and I had to rescue her before I could figure that out.

  The Covenant forces flooding the city made that a challenge. Although I didn’t know it at the time, they had a mission of their own beyond just killing every human they could see, which they could have done from orbit. They were hunting for something they’d detected underneath the city, and they wanted it badly.

  Despite their huge numbers, that forced the Covenant to spread themselves thin, which gave me a fighting chance. I avoided them as best I could, but sometimes they just popped up in places I had to go through. When that happened, I disposed of them as fast as I could and then moved on before anyone could come looking to see what all the excitement was about.

  I’d almost made it to Veronica’s location when she reported enemy forces moving in on her position. I made a mad dash to get there in time to save her, but a stubborn pair of Hunters spoiled my plans.

  Have you ever seen one of those beasts? Believe it or not, they’re not actually single creatures at all. They’re colonies of space worms banded together in the shape of giants. Angry, slimy giants with nearly impenetrable armor and massive guns.

  Better yet, they twin up, which means they always come in pairs.

  If you ever have the misfortune to meet a pair of these monsters on a darkened street in New Mombasa while a battle for the future of your species rages around you, run the hell away. If that’s not an option for you—and it sure wasn’t for me—run circles around the lumbering bastards and shoot them in the back.

  I don’t normally advocate for cheap shots like that, but hey, it’s war. And, two, they carry these enormous shields on their forearms that repel bullets like they were spitwads. Shoot them anywhere but there.

  But the back is easiest.

  By the time I took care of those giant freaks, I’d already lost contact with Veronica. I finally reached her pod in a panic and tore the door off it, thinking I’d find her either grateful or dead.

  To my utter shock, her coffin stood empty.

  I was so distracted by this discovery that I didn’t see an Engineer coming around the back of the pod at me, carrying Veronica’s helmet. I’d never seen one of the floaters up close before, and I’m only a little ashamed to admit that I panicked.

  I stumbled over backward trying to get away from it. I thought it was going to try to beat me to death with Veronica’s headgear, just to put a nail in my absolute failure to rescue her.

  That’s when Romeo put a high-caliber bullet through that gasbag, firing from the top of a building across the plaza. The thing didn’t just deflate; it exploded hard enough to embed Veronica’s helmet in a nearby wall. I didn’t see where it went, but the Rookie pried it out of there later while he was hunting for the rest of us.

  Grateful as I was for the save, I had some mixed feelings about that.

  Romeo and I rendezvoused as soon as we could. I wasn’t positive Veronica was dead—along with maybe Mickey, Dutch, or the Rookie—but I had no idea where she might be and no way to find her. Since she hadn’t disclosed anything about the mission, I couldn’t follow up on that piece of business either.

  With the city overrun by heavily armed Covenant forces, one thing seemed clear. It was time for Romeo and me to get the hell out of town before it became a sheet of glass.

  We didn’t know it at the time, but every member of Alpha-Nine had survived, too. Dutch landed in the Uplift Nature Reserve and had to commandeer a Warthog and use it to shoot his way onto the island proper. He wound up stumbling over Mickey, who’d commandeered a Scorpion tank himself and was using it to blast his way across the city.

  I never accused my teammates of being subtle.

  While Romeo and I were still looking for them, Dutch and Mickey got drafted into helping ONI defend Alpha Site, their headquarters in New Mombasa, until they could get charges in place to destroy it. ONI was afraid the Covenant would be able to use the collected intelligence gathered inside the building against humanity, but the officers and analysts there didn’t seem to know a damn thing about high explosives.

  Dutch and Mickey were only too happy to help them out. I never knew those guys to give up the chance to make things go boom in the service of the UNSC—especially if some of those things were useful to the Covenant.

  The Alpha Site was this massive black cube of a building, walled and moated off on the southernmost edge of New Mombasa, and the only way to get to it on foot was over a bridge that connected the joint to the rest of the island. Dutch and Mickey blew the bridge, which slowed down the Covenant advance on their location, but that was all. It didn’t stop the Covenant soldiers from piling into their Phantoms and dropping in from above.

  That at least meant that the Covenant had to stuff its assault teams into convenient, ship-sized packages, which made for great target practice, but those Phantoms are damn sturdy. The guns ONI had on hand couldn’t do much to bring them down. Instead, Dutch and Mickey led the troops there in a retreating action, doing their best to slow the assault long enough for the local cops to set charges inside the building. The plan was to bring the whole site down and seal off the top-secret stuff buried deep below it.

  Once those were in place, Dutch and Mickey wound up falling all the way back to Alpha Site’s rooftop and then hopping on the last Pelican out of there, abandoning the entire place to the enemy—but not for long. When they got clear, Mickey triggered the charges lining the building’s interior and blasted the whole thing to hell.

  After that, Dutch and Mickey finally got close enough that our comms started working again. I can’t tell you how thrilled I was to hear their voices. Romeo had spent most of the day trying to convince me to give up hope on them, and rubbing his face in all of his dire predictions made their survival that much sweeter.

  It also meant there was hope that Veronica might be alive, too.

  After the mission on Sargasso, I’d buried any feelings I had for her as deep as I could go. Seeing her again had dredged a lot of them up, but in an angry, frustrated way. The thought that she might still be breathing filled me with such hope—I realized that I hadn’t done nearly as good a job of getting over her as I’d thought.

  Romeo and I had headed over to the New Mombasa Police Department’s headquarters to do what we could to lend a hand—and maybe find a way out of town. I ordered Dutch and Mickey to rendezvous with us there, and Romeo and I double-timed it up to the roof to meet them.

  The city’s police had given up on trying to fight the Covenant. They didn’t have the numbers or the guns. Instead, they were doing everything they could to evacuate the city as fast as possible.

  I have to give them credit for how well they dealt with the panic. Lots of police officers, when faced with the invasion of their planet, run home to take care of their families first. But these people considered the rest of their city to be their family, and they did their absolute best to help them.

  It wasn’t enough, of course, but what could be? We’d all assumed the Covenant would just start glassing Earth as soon as they arrived.

  Despite the efforts, though, lots of people did horrible things to each other as they tried to fl
ee the city. Fights broke out. Innocents got trampled . . . children, even.

  By the time we got there, most of the screaming and terror was already over. Alpha-Nine had only the growing horror of relative silence punctuated by the sounds of plasma fire, burning buildings, and orders being barked out by Brute commanders.

  In less than a day, the city had gone from being one of the most vibrant places on Earth to an alien-riddled ghost town. I figured it was time for us to be leaving, too.

  When I saw Dutch and Mickey’s Pelican heading in to land on the NMPD’s rooftop helipad, I thought, That’s just what we were going to do. Romeo and I would join the other guys, and we’d beat a trail out of there, leaving nothing but our dust behind.

  But just when they were touching down and we were about to have ourselves a family reunion, a pair of Banshees swooped in and knocked the Pelican clear off the landing pad. It went scudding sideways through the sky and landed in a fiery wreck on another rooftop across the way.

  Those two Banshees turned out to be the sharp end of an assault against the few cops that remained alive. Seems the Covenant had pegged us as one of the last bastions of humanity in the city, and they meant to put a bloody end to that.

  As plasma fire rained down on us, I grabbed Romeo, and we raced over to see what we could do for our downed friends. Unfortunately, they’d crashed on a completely separate building. There just wasn’t any easy way to get to where we needed to be.

  In the end, Romeo and I had to tiptoe across a bundle of girders dangling from a crane to reach the rooftop where the Pelican had come to rest. The pilot was dead, and the bird was a total loss anyway, but some NMPD cops had rallied around Dutch and Mickey to give them fireteam support until we arrived.

  By the time Romeo and I got there, it seemed like every flying alien within a hundred klicks had been drawn to the Pelican’s wreckage like moths to a bonfire. If they were looking for light, well, we made it bright enough to burn them all out of the sky.