by Matt Forbeck
“Yes, sir,” said Mickey.
Romeo chewed on his lower lip and drew out the drama for as long as he could. In the end, his answer was the same as ours. “Yes, sir.”
SIXTEEN
* * *
So that’s how we wound up on Talitsa the following year. By that point, Mickey, Romeo, and I had been full-on operational Spartans for nearly eighteen months. We’d shaken the bugs out of our systems and become a well-oiled, three-soldier fighting machine.
Up until then, Commander Musa had been as good as his word about what kinds of opponents we’d face. We’d been shipped off to distant corners of the galaxy to fight fractured Covenant forces and beat back any kind of opposition as they attempted to reorganize. You’d be surprised how much damage three Spartans can do, especially when you’re not having to worry about a Covenant destroyer coming in overhead and glassing the ground you’re standing on. The Covenant always had better spacecraft during the war, but we could hold our own against them on the ground. With their alliance shattered, the remaining leaders either in hiding or on the run, and their fleets broken up, let’s just say those were a good few years for the UNSC.
The postwar Covenant mostly broke up into its individual species, each of which had to try to forge a new leadership for themselves for the first time in centuries. The Elites started a civil war with each other that had more factions than I care to count. Some of them even allied with us, including one headed by the Arbiter, who’d helped the Master Chief himself put an end to the Covenant War. Most of the rest of them were too busy fighting him and each other to bother with us, but we found—and took care of—some notable exceptions.
The Jackals broke up into sects that squabbled with each other like starving dogs fighting over a fresh kill. The Brutes? Without the Covenant imposing any kind of structure on them, they mostly fell to chewing each other to pieces again. All we had to do was bust out the popcorn and watch. Sometimes they’d fall in with an Elite faction trying to resuscitate the Covenant under new leadership, but they rarely had the ability to put aside their differences and execute such a plan on their own.
The Grunts mostly wandered around in lost packs, looking for an alpha to lead them. If they weren’t such dangerous little buggers who bore so little attachment to their lives, it almost would have been funny.
Some of the Hunters took up with the Arbiter and his Elites. Others stayed loyal to the Sangheili they’d known before. For us, that meant we sometimes had them on our side, but more often we did not.
The Drones mostly dug in and disappeared. We tried to adopt a “don’t poke the nest” policy with them when we could. It didn’t always work, but we had plenty of battles to fight already without having to go looking for trouble.
As you might imagine, ONI spent a lot of time and effort trying to track down more of the Huragok. The Covenant may have killed the vast majority of them before we could get our hands on them, or maybe they just fled when the time was right. That said, I’ve been told that the UNSC managed to rescue a few. I’ve never seen one working in the SPARTAN program, but I wouldn’t be surprised to hear they have a few of them helping out somewhere higher in the chain of command.
The new Spartan branch played a huge role keeping the Covenant safely away from human civilization. Working in coordination with the UNSC, we even wound up saving a few aliens sometimes, too. Commander Musa called that a great way to make friends and cement alliances.
Back before I met Vergil, I don’t know how excited I would have been about doing something like that. Working with that Huragok, though—and being trapped in that orbital station with him for those few weeks back in 2552—taught me well that not all aliens have it in for humanity. Some of them, like Vergil and the rest of the Huragok, weren’t even working with the Covenant of their own free will.
The Arbiter—the Sangheili who wound up in charge of the Elites after the war ended—seems like a good sort, too. I’ll admit to having some grudging respect for him and his kind, even the ones that I still end up fighting. They have their own sense of honor, which is a lot more than I can say for the Brutes or Jackals.
Still, it was a lot simpler when any alien that came up into my field of vision was a viable target. Fortunately, Commander Musa doesn’t send us out to save those buggers dedicated to killing us. If our actions somehow indirectly wind up keeping a few hostile aliens alive a little bit longer, we can only call that “collateral rescue,” as opposed to damage.
Hey, it happens.
Despite Musa stating in no uncertain terms that the Spartans were now a separate branch of the UNSC, we still wound up working with ONI on a regular basis. Spartans may be great at lots of things, but we’re a bit too big to make for good spies.
Mjolnir armor isn’t built for skulking. Unless you get one of the models with the active camouflage upgrade. But even then, you can’t exactly tiptoe around in a suit like that.
Because of my working relationship with ONI—and my personal one with Veronica—Alpha-Nine went on several covert missions that made good use of our skill set. In effect, ONI served as our spotters, and we lined up and took the shots.
I was always wary on ONI missions—especially if Veronica wasn’t involved. They liked to dole out information to the Spartans on a need-to-know basis, but that often translated into Spartans getting in deeper-than-predicted trouble because we never had the full picture of what was actually going on.
Sometimes it was far worse than that. ONI isn’t known for valuing its assets as much as the assets value themselves. From ONI’s point of view, sacrificing a few people to save hundreds or even thousands makes solid mathematical sense. If you’re one of those to be sacrificed, however, you might want a heads-up about the magnitude of what you’ve been asked to do.
Blindness takes all the fun out of being a hero.
I trust Veronica to give me a nudge and a wink so I can at least turn in the direction of incoming fire and meet my fate head-on.
So when she told me that Vergil had gotten in trouble while working on Talitsa in 2555, I knew two things.
First, she was right. Alpha-Nine—or what was left of it, at least—stood the best chance of anyone to recover our Huragok friend and his human handler safe and sound.
Second, we couldn’t let the rebels keep hold of him. As long as they had control of Vergil, he’d work away at making their lives easier. That was something the UNSC could not tolerate. If we couldn’t recover Vergil, we’d have to kill him.
That only made me that much more determined to bring Quick to Adjust home with us. Back in New Mombasa, we’d gone through far too much to save the big, floating gasbag from the Covenant to ever let him die, much less shoot him ourselves.
That just wasn’t going to happen. Or so we hoped.
As I mentioned at the start of all this, the long hike out to the rebels’ camp didn’t do much to put me, Romeo, and Mickey into a good mood. Even with our enhanced muscles, moving around in Mjolnir armor gets tiring after a while. The suits assist us with their own powered hydraulics, but they’re meant more for charging into battle than sightseeing.
It spoils you fast.
Still, Alpha-Nine had slogged through worse, swimming through the snake-infested rivers of Charion VI, sledding across the burning sands of New Caracas, and burrowing through the eternal snowdrifts of Gaenir Beta.
You wouldn’t think a hike across a rock-dotted desert like that would set us off against each other. But lately, it got to be that I couldn’t stand being around the other two if we weren’t on the job. We were all professionals and completed the missions, but once we got home we all went our separate ways.
Romeo spent most of his free time living up to his nickname. The man had been a womanizer before, but becoming a Spartan only made it worse. There were enough ladies out there who wanted to give a surgically enhanced soldier a try to keep him busy every night of the week.
T
rouble was that wherever he did this—which was pretty much anywhere we had some time to spare—it pissed off those local guys who thought of the area women as theirs. A lot. And most of them didn’t bother to distinguish between Romeo and any other Spartan. As they came to hate him, they learned to do the same with us all.
It got so bad that Commander Musa had to take him aside and dress him down, threatening to confine him to UNSC bases at best. That didn’t stop Romeo much, although it slowed him down a hair. After that, at least he was a bit more discreet.
Mickey sometimes played Romeo’s wingman, but he couldn’t live up to Dutch’s work in that role. When it got to be too much, he hunted down old friends, either from the ODST days or even back home on Luna before that. After all the showboating Romeo did, I was happy to see him trying to keep a low profile while roaming off base.
Me, I generally tracked down Veronica, if she could be found. She always helped keep everything in perspective.
Just as often as not, though, she disappeared for weeks or longer on one ONI op or another. That only served to remind me what a rotten married couple we’d be for each other—at least until we decided to one day hang it all up and retire to a long-forgotten beach somewhere.
When I couldn’t find her, I generally kept close to the bases and hung out with the Spartan leadership. There aren’t any ranks in the Spartans, as Commander Musa likes to remind me about once a week. Still, some of us are more equal than others. I might not have been a gunnery sergeant anymore, for instance, but I’d been leading Mickey and Romeo too long for them to not jump to action when I started barking orders.
So I kept at it. Everyone’s got their role, after all, and I knew mine cold.
Every now and then, I’d catch up with Dutch and Gretchen. Leaving combat duty had treated him well. I don’t think I’d ever seen him smile so much when he was part of Alpha-Nine.
“How’s Romes?” he’d ask me every time though. Seems the two of them didn’t chat much anymore.
Back in the day, they’d been joined at their holsters. You never saw one of them without the other. They knew each other’s moves so well, they worked together like longtime dance partners.
I think Romeo took it personally when Dutch left. Maybe they had some kind of in-together-out-together pact that was violated. Either way, Dutch had clearly made the right call. All you had to do was watch him put his arm around Gretchen, and you just knew.
And I thought about the Rookie a lot.
I’d lost a number of soldiers under my command over the years. It’s part of the job, the nature of war, etc. But it wasn’t the Rookie himself so much as the way he went out. All the rest of my siblings in arms were KIA at the hands, guns, grenades, blades, needles, blasts, or claws of the Covenant. I’d never had another human kill one of us before on my watch.
I didn’t always feel too human, but I couldn’t blame that on the SPARTAN program. That started soon after I joined the UNSC. Combat can do that to you.
Understand that when I felt that gun tap me in the back of my helmet that day on Talitsa, I knew I’d come to a crossroads for that issue. I just didn’t know which way I’d wind up going.
And on that note, you should know that we’re sort of back to where we started with my story. Here’s what happened next.
SEVENTEEN
* * *
When I heard Romeo and Mickey warning me not to move as I lay on the top of that ridge overlooking the Front base, I thought they might be playing some kind of joke on me, but it didn’t make much sense.
I’d drilled barrel and trigger discipline into their heads for years, and I’d made sure to revisit it when we became Spartans. We’d seen too many people get hurt or killed by goofing around with guns, and none of us tolerated those sloppy kinds of accidents.
It sure felt like a gun barrel on my helmet, but I held out hope that it was something else, like one of my teammates just trying to get my attention. Mjolnir armor is tough enough that a finger on a gauntlet could smack you like a steel rod.
When I tried to get up and got a second knock in the head, I knew something was definitely up.
Both Mickey and Romeo had warned me to stay down, and while I can be a little contrary by nature, I’d already lived a lot longer by trusting and listening to my teammates. I didn’t see a good reason to doubt their word here.
“Okay. This is an awful bad time for a joke,” I said, still holding out hope for the least painful explanation.
And then the rebels stood up to surround us. They didn’t charge up at us out of the camp, or drop down out of the sky, or appear out of thin air like camouflaged Elites.
Goddammit, they’d been waiting for us.
Lying in wait for as long as it had taken us to hike up to that spot and start spying on them ourselves.
They had not only been told we were coming, but we were led right to where they could get the drop on us.
You might wonder how that could happen if I was in the lead. When you work with teammates for long enough, you develop an unspoken language, a means of communicating by the way your bodies move. All it takes is for one of you to start pushing or lagging in one direction or another to guide the rest of the crew.
Most of the time, it’s on instinct, honed over the years, and it keeps getting you out of tough spots in one piece. You don’t question it—or your teammates’ instincts either.
But it’s not so hard for someone on the team to pull the others where you want them to go if you have a destination in mind.
In fact, it’s practically invisible. Unless you’re actively working against it, you just go with it.
The funny part was that, at first, I couldn’t tell who the problem was. Who’d betrayed me? Was it Romeo, Mickey, or—worst of all—both?
“Gunny?” Romeo said. “I don’t think anyone’s laughing.”
Then I figured it out.
Romeo had said, Hold it right there, Gunny. Don’t make one damn move.
Mickey had said, Better listen to him, Buck. Don’t move a muscle.
None of us ever called each other by our real names unless we had something serious to discuss—and I mean life-and-death or court-martial-at-least serious. Especially when we didn’t have any officers around.
They were both warning me to stay down, but one of them was also warning me about the other.
I twisted my head around slowly to see Romeo had his weapon at the ready. But it was pointed at the rebels rather than me.
Much as Romeo grated on me, he hadn’t betrayed me.
That meant it was Mickey.
“Dammit, Spartan Crespo,” I said. “You picked one hell of a time to mix up the good guys and bad guys.”
Mickey didn’t say a word. He just ground the barrel of his gun into the back of my helmet. I could hear the sand under its tip scratching my armor’s paint.
That armor was fantastic, but the colors on it never held up. It always came back from every mission scratched, scraped, and dinged to hell. And that was the way we liked it. The UNSC may have given Commander Musa carte blanche to rebuild the SPARTAN program, but he’d been wise enough to put those efforts into things like training and performance rather than worrying about cosmetics.
Besides the paint and the laminated layers of deflectives, my armor also came fitted with personal shields, a force field that enveloped me and protected me from incoming munitions. It would take a lot more than a single round from Mickey’s gun to kill me.
The trouble was that taking that round would rob my shields of a lot of their power. Even if I’d been able to turn around and start fighting back at Mickey without him getting another shot off first, he’d be able to take down my shields before I could do the same to him. And then my armor, as good as it was, wouldn’t keep me alive for much longer.
Sure, Romeo might have been able to help me out. Together, we should have
been able to take Mickey down in no time flat. But Mickey wasn’t alone.
We had something like forty rebels surrounding us, maybe more. I couldn’t tell for sure at the time, with my face half planted in the dirt. They carried an assortment of mix-and-match rifles and wore the kind of battle armor that I’d first been issued when I started with the ODSTs, although they’d painted it a rusty camouflage pattern to help them blend in with the local terrain.
Few of their weapons or suits of armor matched up well. The Front didn’t have the robust supply chain of the UNSC, and I suspected they’d mostly stolen their gear from wherever they could find it. Some of them had probably even walked off with it when they’d gone AWOL from the UNSC.
“Good work, Michael,” one of the rebels said in a gravelly voice as he lifted the faceplate on his armor. “We’ll take it from here.” He stood up right in front of me and stalked straight toward us.
I’d seen his type before. He had a graying, well-trimmed mustache and the kind of eyes that came across as painfully sincere no matter what he was jawing about. His armor didn’t fit him well, and he swung his gun around on his hip like it was a baby. I figured he shot off his mouth more often than his weapon. He clearly hadn’t served in the UNSC, and probably saw that as a badge of honor.
“If you’re going to kill me, just do it now and get it over with,” I said. “You’ll save me the agony of having to listen to your revolutionary bullshit.”
The rebel leader chuckled. No one else moved a centimeter. “Now, you don’t think you’re getting off that easy, do you?” he said. “A live Spartan’s a valuable thing.”
“You already got Mickey in the bag for you,” I said. “Don’t see why you need any of the less helpful variety.”
“That’s not how this is going to go,” Mickey said. “Try keeping your mouth shut for once, and we’ll all get out of this alive.”
“Right,” I said, half turning around on my belly. “I can tell how concerned you are about my health by the way you stuck your gun against my head.”