by Matt Forbeck
Dutch’s shot didn’t catch the other two rebel soldiers hard enough to knock them flat. He immediately took out the one on the right with a second shot. The one on the left threw himself to his knees and tossed his hands into the air.
“Don’t shoot!” he shouted, his voice cracking in desperation and fear. “Please! I give up!”
Mickey pointed his rifle at the man’s head. Even from down on the main floor, I could see his barrel shaking. For a second, I thought he was going to kill an unarmed foe. Much as I wanted justice for the Rookie, if such a thing was possible to find, we’d gotten it the moment Dutch killed Captain Ingridson—an eye for an eye. She was an active, armed threat—one who’d just murdered an unarmed ODST in cold blood—and no one would have found fault with Dutch’s actions.
Shooting a man trying to surrender, though, was something entirely different.
“Mickey!” I shouted into the comm. “Stand down! Right goddamn now!”
The urgency and authority in my voice brought him up short. He took a step back, still trembling, and Dutch stepped between him and the kneeling rebel.
“Check your corners!” I said.
Romeo and I scanned the edges of the legislative chamber while Mickey, still shaken, looked out into the hallway outside of the balcony. Dutch kept his shotgun on the terrified rebel.
“Down on your face!” he barked at the man. “Now!”
The rebel complied. Everything grew quiet for a moment, and I could hear gunshots somewhere else inside the building, getting closer.
“Palmer?” I said. “We got a man down! How’s it going out there?”
“Hold tight,” she said. “We’re coming in.”
“What’s your ETA?”
The doors at the back of the chamber blew open in a cloud of dust and debris. In walked an entire fireteam of Spartans dressed in red and silver armor.
The one in the lead stripped off her helmet and shook free her hair. I recognized Palmer in an instant. She gave me a grim smile filled with satisfaction rather than happiness.
“How’s about now?”
TWELVE
* * *
We buried the Rookie at sea the following week. The UNSC is great at a lot of things, but they don’t usually handle the repatriation of remains back to the deceased’s home planet. For one, it’s too busy sending living troops into war zones to spare the resources to ship the dead ones in the opposite direction. And two, it’s not always easy to find enough remains to send home. No disrespect intended, but it’s foolish and bittersweet to risk living soldiers to gather their fallen comrades.
Romeo, Dutch, and Mickey were there for the ceremony, of course; all of us in our dress blues at just after the crack of dawn. An honor guard loaded the Rookie’s black coffin into an old Albatross dropship and draped both UEG and ODST flags over his remains with all the respect the man deserved. Then the three of us climbed into the bird, sat in the seats closest to the Rookie, and settled in for the ride.
We didn’t say much to each other. It was a warm, beautiful day, and we left the dropship’s side doors open. The honor guard had secured the flags to the coffin so they wouldn’t go sailing away. We’d been on countless missions with the Rookie just like that, staring out the panoramic doors as the thrumming winds battered us.
We took off from the main port in New Albany and flew low out over the city. I’d gotten a high-altitude view of it as we’d come in for the assault on the captured capitol building, but it had looked a lot like an aerial photograph. Even from there, the vastness of the damage the Covenant had inflicted on the city had been easy to see, but it had been like looking at a distant mountain range.
Now, scudding barely over the rooftops, the destruction seemed far more personal. You could pick out the individual streets that had been destroyed, houses that had been bombed out, even places where the corpses had been burned.
It was a relief when we reached the shore. The ocean’s waves hadn’t changed one bit. This part, at least, still felt like home.
The pilot kept going straight out to sea until we couldn’t see land on any side. We could have been on any of a number of watery planets, maybe even back on Earth.
I knew Draco’s oceans too well to fool myself that way though. The color of the water, the way the sun glinted off the waves, the scent of the breeze.
It felt right.
I stood up to show that we’d gotten to the burial spot, and the pilot hauled the dropship’s engines back until we came to a gentle stop, hovering over some random point.
We gathered around the Rookie’s coffin and stared down at it.
“Why we got to do this?” Romeo said.
I backhanded him across the shoulder. “Show some respect.”
“He don’t mean nothing by it, Gunny,” Dutch said. “It’s just—you ever have a show like this for anyone else?”
I realized what they meant then. I’d lost a lot of friends in the war, including every member of Alpha-Nine since I’d taken command, with the exception of the three guys standing there with me. We’d never had a funeral for any of them.
“Well, we haven’t lost anyone since the war ended,” I said. “This is one of the perks of peace.”
“Peace.” Romeo snorted. “I liked it better when they called it what it was.”
Mickey just stared at the coffin the entire time. The rest of us joined him.
“You were a good soldier, Rookie,” I said to the capsule of black plastic underneath the flags. “I was proud to serve with you. I’m glad you got to see the end of the war, which started before you were born. I just wish you’d gotten to go back home, too.” I looked around at the others. “Anyone else want to say something?”
None of them moved forward. They all looked like I felt: stricken, frustrated, and maybe a little bit angry, too.
Seeing neither Mickey nor Dutch was ready to move, Romeo shrugged and then nodded down at the body. “It only takes one mistake, kid. You went a long time before you made it.”
With that ice broken, Dutch knelt down and put his hand on the burial capsule. He held his tongue for a long moment before he spoke in a low voice. “Lord, I don’t know if I can do this anymore.”
“Just tell him good-bye,” Romeo said. “No need to get all weepy about it.”
“He’s not talking about the funeral,” I said.
Dutch bowed his head. “Yeah. I’m done. I’m putting in for a transfer as soon as we’re finished here.”
“I thought we went over this.” Romeo looked like Dutch had just hamstrung him from behind. “What the hell else you going to do with yourself? The only thing you know how to do is soldiering.”
“I used to drive road-trains,” Dutch said. “Maybe I can go back to that.”
“So you’re going to go back to hauling groceries?”
Dutch shrugged. “I don’t know. Either way, it’s time for a change. My wife mustered out last year. She’s been waiting for me to join her.”
“Yeah, well, Gretchen was ODST, too. She knows why we have to do what we do. She knows how important it is.”
Dutch looked his old pal in the eye. “I don’t disagree with that. But the war’s over. I’ve pulled my weight. I’ve worked my share. Screw it. It’s time for someone else to step up.”
Romeo looked shellshocked. I didn’t know if he was going to shove Dutch out of the transport with the Rookie or sit down and cry. Instead, he put out his hand to his friend, who took it, and he hauled him up into a bear hug. “You make sure she takes good care of you,” he said.
“What about you?” Dutch said with real concern as they broke their embrace.
Romeo laughed it off and pounded a thick finger into his own chest. “Whatever. Never worry about the man on this end of my gun.”
As they chuckled, I relaxed just a bit and turned toward Mickey. He hadn’t said a wor
d the entire time. “Hey. How about you?”
Mickey shook his head. “I’m staying.” His voice was as raw as if he’d been shouting over a gunfight since the moment he woke up.
“I meant, anything you want to say for the Rookie.”
He clammed up tighter than ever.
“Okay, suit yourself.”
Dutch put a hand on Mickey’s shoulder. “You can’t blame yourself for this.”
“Sure he can,” said Romeo. I shot the man a look that could have peeled the laminate off his armor, but he kept on going. “If he hadn’t hesitated when he came through that door, we’d all be blasting out of here on our way to our next mission instead of saying our adioses.”
Dutch winced. “That ain’t fair. I was right there—”
The next thing I know, Romeo was on the floor of the transport with blood streaming out of his nose, and I was hauling Mickey off him and pinning him against the far bulkhead. “Enough! Stand down!”
Mickey shoved back against me, and I lost it. “I said stand down, goddammit, or I’ll toss you right out of this craft!”
“And we ain’t going to have one of these little parties for you!” Romeo said. Dutch was trying to settle him down and had already ripped open a pack of gauze to help staunch his pal’s bleeding nose.
The fight went out of Mickey right after that. I put him on one side of the craft and Romeo on the other. Dutch came over and lent me a hand, and we gave the Rookie’s capsule the little shove it needed to topple out of the transport and disappear into the waves below.
We didn’t say much on the way back.
It bothered me a bit that no one else had been at the funeral besides us three. The Rookie had been born on Luna, in Crisium City, Naniwa. Most if not all of his relatives had died during the Covenant’s assault on the home system back in 2552. Some of the bugs had decided to scour the Moon while they were on their way to Earth, if only to make sure that we couldn’t launch any kind of sneak attack from our bases there. A bunch of the home colonies got hit pretty hard when the Covies came through—Luna and Mars in particular—but all of them fared better than Earth.
He hadn’t wanted to talk too much about it. When I asked him, he just gritted his teeth and said, “There’s nothing left there for me now.”
Like many marines, he’d dedicated his life to the UNSC. He no longer had any family outside.
I might have ignored that and tried to hunt down someone on Luna who knew him, but I didn’t much see the point. No one was going to come all the way out here to Draco III to say their farewells.
I might have invited local friends and family of my own to the Rookie’s funeral, to fill out the ranks a bit if nothing else, but I didn’t have any left either. Most of the people who’d been someplace else when the planet got glassed were UNSC, too, and few of us liked going back to see what had happened to our homeworld.
Mind you, the new colonists had done a remarkable job with the place since the war had ended, but they hadn’t rebuilt much outside of New Albany. Some folks who liked the isolation had set up camp in the more remote spots of the planet, starting over from scratch. Others had reclaimed long-abandoned places, hoping no heirs ever showed up to reclaim them.
Feeling low about the Rookie when we got back to New Albany, I hopped the next civilian flight out to Karnak to go on a tour of the places I knew as a kid. I hadn’t been back in more than twenty-five years, but the memories of it flooded over at me.
Sure, technically I was forty-four at the time, but I’d spent more of those years off-world in cryosleep than I cared to add up. In terms of mileage, though, I’d rolled up more of that than anyone I’d known before I signed up to fight the Covenant.
When I got to the tiny airport in Karnak, I rented myself a car and went for a drive. As I walked across the open parking lot to the rental, I stopped for a moment to soak it all in.
Standing there in Draco III’s light in civvies brought those early years right back to me. I could close my eyes and imagine that nothing had changed, that I could drive to my old neighborhood, slide down my old street, turn into my driveway, and have my mom there ready to welcome me home.
The sun on my face felt the exact same way it had all those years ago. One thing they don’t tell you about when you sign up for the UNSC is that every sun is unique. Sure, the ones we can tolerate under an open atmosphere share a lot of the same characteristics, but they differ, too, mostly in small ways.
Their intensity. Their warmth. Their hue.
Every sun has its own kind of burn, and I knew Draco’s better than any. The sensation of its radiation dancing on my skin made me smile.
But the planet’s smell? That was something else entirely.
The Covenant had trashed Draco III about nine years ago. The planet had bounced back some from that. No matter what humanity does, nature marches on, as my dad used to say. Fair enough, but nature also takes its time, and nine years isn’t enough to recover from a Covenant glassing.
The brittle black shit on the outskirts of the huge swathes of destruction the Covenant leaves behind isn’t actually glass, of course. It’s what you get when you melt everything in the area into a chemical soup and let it cool and harden on its own—more like obsidian from a volcano than anything else.
Most colonies aren’t built on volcanically active planets. We prefer easier targets for terraforming, meaning you don’t wind up with things like obsidian just lying around.
Not until the Covenant comes your way.
I tried to make it into my old neighborhood. Glass blocked the way in. The entire area had been flattened into a black, hardened sea dozens of klicks wide. And this was just the edge of the destruction, far from ground zero.
Glass doesn’t form smoothly underfoot. It’s not like you could strap on some skates and set up an old Earth hockey game on it. Not everything melts well, even under the Covenant’s relentless plasma bombardment, so you get things sticking up out of the glass here and there. Mostly they’re internal scaffolding for high-rise buildings, but you can find other things, especially at the edges of a blast.
It takes longer than you’d think for the glass to cool entirely as well. I could actually see white-capped waves in the spot where I guessed my old house would have been. I like to think of that as some last act of courage. Pointless, sure, but defiant to the end.
I decided to wind my way around toward where Uncle Lou used to moor his boat. The boat was gone, but by some fluke, this part of my old stomping grounds hadn’t been glassed. Someone had gone to the trouble to clean up the docks, but the surrounding area hadn’t seen the same kind of love.
Leeward’s was still open.
It’s an old dive bar that Uncle Lou used to take me to after a long day on the sea. I was too young to drink, but we ate there regularly. Uncle Lou and my dad threw me a hell of a going away party there the night before I had to report to the UNSC. I was still ruined when I staggered into the recruiter’s office.
Leeward’s served an amazing chowder filled with all sorts of seafood that I never wanted anyone to name for fear of wrecking it for me. It came out of this huge pot that probably hadn’t been cleaned since the founding of the colony. Every time it ran low, they just tossed more water and fleshy sea creature bits into it, along with a little spice, and kept it going.
Damn, it was good. Made my mouth water just thinking about it.
The front of the place still bore bullet holes and plasma scars. It kind of added to its charm. At least they’d cleaned up the blood.
The inside looked like someone had gutted it from stem to stern and then gotten bored with the refurb and just started tossing tables and stools into it until it felt more like a bar. The place stood empty except for a couple of retired fishers who were old enough to prefer talking about the sea to actually being on it. I didn’t recognize the bartender, but that wasn’t any surprise
either.
After a bit of chitchat, I started in on a bottle of some local-made baijiu. I didn’t have any plans to stop.
I’d worked through about half of it by the time Jun found me there. He didn’t say a word. Just sat down next to me until I noticed him.
I signaled the bartender for another glass and poured Jun a tall one. He gave it a dubious sniff and wrinkled his nose at it, but I had to give him credit for not letting his eyes water at the smell.
He raised his glass to me, and I clinked mine against his.
“To the Rookie,” I said.
He said nothing in return.
After he finished his drink, I poured him another. He tried to wave me off, but I ignored the gesture.
“Don’t worry about your manners,” I said. “This isn’t a polite place.”
“I’m happy to toast your fallen friend,” Jun said. “But that’s not why I’m here.”
I grunted at that. “You going to take the Rookie’s place in Alpha-Nine?”
He smiled. “I’m a long way past active duty, I’m afraid.”
“Must be nice.”
“It has its ups and downs.”
I sighed, put down my drink, and looked him in the eye. “So let’s cut to the good part. My answer’s the same as before.”
“But you haven’t heard my offer.”
I raised my eyebrows. “Oh, there’s an offer this time? All I remember is you hunting around for my sense of patriotism.”
“And I found it, right there underneath your loyalty to your troopers, which trumped it.”
“And I still have troopers.” Maybe not as many as I’d had that morning, which he probably already knew. But that was beside the point.
“For now.”
I squinted hard at him. “Explain that.”
Active combat or not, Jun was still a Spartan-III. He towered over me, even sitting down. I had no doubt he would wipe the bar with me in a fistfight, wring me out, and then ask the bartender if he could go ahead and clean up the floor as well. Still, I had to grip the bar’s brass railing white-knuckle tight to keep myself from taking a half-drunken swing at him.