by Matt Forbeck
About half the rebels in the circle took a step forward and leaned toward me with their weapons. The rest of them kept their guns trained on Romeo, who presented the bigger threat, since he wasn’t flat on the ground. I banked on the ones keeping their weapons trained on me not wanting to shoot me and their new pal Mickey over a few words, but I knew there was only so much play in the rope they’d caught me with.
Mickey stuck his knee in my back and forced me flat on my chest again.
“Actually, your chances of living to a ripe, old age just skyrocketed,” the rebel leader said. “As did those of everyone who meets you.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “I just met you, and I’d say your odds just went through the floor.”
The man leaned forward and got on one knee right there in front of me. “I’ve had a lifetime of jingoistic idiots like you pushing me and my people around. You cost me my son. You’re goddamn lucky I didn’t have you killed on sight.”
“If you can’t find your balls, maybe you could borrow Mickey’s.”
That actually got a chuckle out of a few of the other rebels, and their leader’s cheeks flushed red. Then he bent over and spit onto my faceplate.
“Don’t push him, Dr. Schein,” Mickey said to the rebel leader. “Buck may be on the wrong side of this war, but he helped win the last one.”
“Schein . . . ?” Romeo’s voice went up an octave in surprise. “Oh, you gotta be kidding me.”
I was just as shocked. Our rebel captor had the same last name as the Spartan recruit who tried to frame Mickey for murder? It’s too big a galaxy for something like that to be a coincidence.
“I met him at Rudolf’s funeral,” Mickey said.
“Seriously, Mickey? You went to that asshole’s funeral?” I shook my head.
“That asshole even had a funeral?” said Romeo.
Dr. Schein kicked me in the face for that one. Didn’t hurt me at all, though I couldn’t help hoping he broke a toe trying.
“Funerals,” the doctor’s voice cracked, “are how civilized people say good-bye to the people they care about. The people they respect. The people they love. Decent. People.”
“Your decent son killed a Spartan who hadn’t done a damn thing except sign up at the same time as him,” I said. “Not to mention killing a fantastic UNSC captain while trying to take himself out and all of us with him.”
The doctor hefted his rifle at me. The thing looked like an antique compared to the gear we were toting around, but it had a barrel I could have jammed my thumb into. The bullet that fit a bore that wide would put one hell of a dent in my shields at this range.
“You’re a very persuasive man.” Dr. Schein’s voice wavered. “I think you’ve convinced me that you’re not worth the trouble of keeping alive.”
Mickey spun his rifle about and slammed the butt of it into the back of my head. That cracked the glass in my faceplate, and even with my helmet on, I saw stars. “Shut up, Buck!” he said. “Or someone’s going to grant you that death wish of yours.”
Romeo started forward then, but he only got a step before Mickey flipped his rifle back over and stuck it in Romeo’s face. Every one of the rebels swung their rifles in his direction simultaneously. If I hadn’t had Mickey kneeling on my back right then, I might have been able to take advantage of that.
“Back up, Romes,” Mickey said. “We’d like you both alive.”
“Right,” Dr. Schein said in my direction. “But since we have two of you, we could consider the other one a spare.”
They weren’t fooling me. If they had Mickey on their side, both Romeo and I were spares. The mileage they’d get out of two Spartans captives was nothing compared to what a Spartan converted to their cause would mean. While ONI might try to squelch the news, Spartans got killed all the time.
They never switched sides.
I only hoped that if I had to die that day, I’d be able to take Mickey with me. At least I’d rob them of that.
I wanted to spin around and rip his head from his shoulders right then and there. I was so furious I could hardly see straight.
“One little talk with this jackass, and suddenly you’ve switched sides? What about everything we’ve done together, Mickey? How many times have I saved your life?”
“How many times have you put it in danger? How many times did you haul us all into a firefight we should have avoided? I didn’t get the Rookie killed, Buck. Goddammit, that was you!”
“Is that what this is all about? Some sick and twisted version of survivor’s guilt stuck in your head because you couldn’t pull the trigger when you needed to? You want to ask these guys to give me a minute, I can put an end to that trouble for you!”
“Hell, I’d be happy to hold him down for you, Gunny,” Romeo said.
Mickey ignored him and kept his rage focused on me. “So I could be just another notch in your service record? How many troopers died under your command, Buck? Do you even remember all of their names? Serving with you, getting killed is just a matter of time!”
“I did all right by you. Better than you did by the Rookie!”
“We should never have been fighting other humans! Don’t you get that?”
I spun around underneath him, and he leaped away before I could grab him. The rebels shoved the barrels of their rifles at me, but I kept screaming at Mickey instead. “Do you mean exactly like you’re doing right now?”
Mickey leveled his gun at my chest. “You, Spartan Edward Buck, are under arrest by the United Rebel Front. I hereby declare you our prisoner of war.”
I glared at him so hard I wondered if I might melt my armor’s faceplate.
“What?” Romeo said. “Don’t I get any of that formal combatant love?”
I didn’t say a word. I just held my hands over my head while the rebels stripped me of my weaponry. They did the same to Romeo, who whined out loud about every piece they took from him.
“What about their armor?” one of the rebels said.
“It’s a couple hundred kilos, and it requires robotic machinery to get in and out of it,” Dr. Schein said. “I think we’ll let them carry it back to the base for us.”
It was only about a klick to the Front base, but it felt like the longest walk of my life. The bowl of the steep-sloped valley had a bit more vegetation scattered about it than the rocky desert we’d marched through to get here, but that only meant a few scrub brushes here and there and a hardy tree or two that was just too scrawny and stubborn to die. Boulders of all sizes lay tumbled between us and the hangar in which I could still see Vergil’s blue glow, including a few rock formations I could have hidden a Warthog behind.
I was glad that Vergil was safe, but I hadn’t seen Sadie yet. I wondered what they might have done to her. Hopefully her rapport with the Huragok meant that Sadie was too valuable to the rebels for them to have gotten rid of her.
Either way, if I wanted to make sure Vergil and hopefully Sadie didn’t get hurt, I didn’t have many options. Sure, I could let Mickey and the rebels do whatever they wanted to me, but I absolutely hated that idea. I refused to let those jackasses get away with this, and I’ll admit, a large part of me burned to beat the crap out of Crespo.
My only other choice was to try something before we reached the hangar. Once we got there, the chances of the Engineer—or Sadie, if she was there, too—taking a stray round went up exponentially. I just had to find the right moment to make my move before it became too late.
Dr. Schein led the way down the slope, weaving his way through the boulders. Romeo and I walked side by side while the rest of the rebels formed a wide semicircle behind us, all with their weaponry at the ready and leveled at us. I wondered if the good doctor would be caught in friendly fire if Romeo and I made a break toward the man.
Mickey walked right behind Romeo and me, covering us both with his assault rifle. Alone, eve
n unarmed, Romeo and I might have been able to take him—at least before he killed us both—but not with forty armed rebels giving him a hand.
I craned my neck around to look back at him through my cracked faceplate. “I can’t believe you, Mickey, you stinking bastard. You just betrayed everything you’ve been fighting for your entire adult life. Worse than that, you betrayed Romeo and me!”
“And over the Rookie, too?” Romeo snorted. “Took you a long time to find the guts to turn on us, didn’t it?”
“I wanted to resign after that,” Mickey told us. “I even put in my paperwork. Then Jun contacted me to recruit me to become a Spartan.”
I sneered at him. “And you saw your chance to become the greatest traitor the UNSC has ever known?”
“I thought you were one of the good guys,” Romeo said with a sad shake of his head.
“I was.” Mickey hesitated. “I still am.”
“When the Covenant War ended, the UNSC didn’t fold up shop and send its heroes home,” Dr. Schein said. “Like any other war powers throughout history, once they’d dominated the realm they’d fought so hard over, they weren’t about to give it up. They took those brave men and women who’d battled so well against humanity’s common foe, and they turned them against their fellow humans, who only wanted to be left to themselves.”
Romeo started to laugh.
“What’s so funny?” Mickey said.
“So much!” Romeo said. “Well, two things, really. And I can’t decide which is better!”
He giggled himself silly then, and I couldn’t help but join in. We kept walking through it all, waiting for him to catch his breath.
“Maybe you can help me out here, Gunny,” Romeo said. “What’s funnier? All this bullshit the man here’s spouting? Or the fact that Mickey bought it?”
Mickey didn’t see any humor in that. “Shut the hell up.”
“Oh, wait!” Romeo said, almost crying with laughter. “Maybe it’s the fact that Mickey’s going to go down in the books as an even bigger traitor than his parents! I mean, after trying to live that down his whole life? And there he goes to follow in their footsteps?”
Mickey stepped forward and smashed his rifle into Romeo’s back. The man went tumbling down the slope toward the camp, head over heels. He crushed a scrub brush as he rolled over it, and he glanced off the side of a boulder, too, but it looked like his shields held, keeping him safe the entire way.
Other than shouting “Whoa!” as he went over, he laughed the whole way down.
For someone of Dr. Schein’s education, he displayed a stunning command of profanity as he sent the rest of his soldiers down the hill after Romeo, who kept rolling away.
I turned around and found myself staring down the barrel of Mickey’s weapon.
“So tell me, Spartan Crespo,” I said as the others chased down Romeo. “Sorry, I mean Traitor Crespo. What so disgusted you about your job and your friends that you decided to turn against them?”
“You already know. You’ve seen the same things as me. You’ve been sent to kill the same people.” I could almost hear him grind his teeth. “You know.”
“I know how fast those people you’re talking about turned against us as soon as the war was over. I don’t think our guns had even cooled off after saving their asses from the Covenant.”
“And did we ever question our orders to stop shooting aliens and start murdering our own kind?”
I couldn’t help but bark a short, bitter laugh. “Any time we weren’t actually under fire, you and the rest of Alpha-Nine questioned your orders constantly. You really think I was just some ONI drone relaying instructions to you guys?”
“I signed up to fight the Covenant.”
“You signed up. Period. And you could have mustered out at any damn point. You joined the Spartans instead.”
“I thought they’d send us out to kill more Covenant.”
“We kill bad guys, aliens or not.”
“Bad guys?”
Schein turned away from watching the others chase after Romeo. “You’re wasting your breath, Michael. From what you’ve told me about his relationship with Captain Dare, Mr. Buck is too much an ONI man to ever change.”
That accusation annoyed me, but it wasn’t surprising.
Mickey scoffed at me. “You know, during your Spartan transformation, you spent so much time with Veronica, Romeo and I hardly even saw you. That’s when I met Rudolf. That’s when he opened my eyes to both the UNSC and you.”
That stopped me in my tracks. Mickey hauled up fast and jabbed his rifle at me. “Are you telling me you knew about Schein’s bullshit even back then?”
“How do you think he got into my footlocker?” Mickey said. “He used to drop dissolving pamphlets about the Front in there for me to read. Hell, I gave him the code.”
“You gotta be goddamn kidding. And then he betrayed you by trying to frame you for Wakahisa’s murder? I stood up for you about that!”
“He just needed to buy some time to put the rest of his plan in place,” Dr. Schein said. “Sadly, it wasn’t enough.”
“I don’t know what kind of crap this guy’s been filling your skull with over the past few months, Mickey, but do me one favor based on the years we’ve worked together—the countless times we’ve had each other’s backs? Don’t fling that same shit at me.”
Mickey started in on the excuses straightaway. “There comes a time when a man has to—”
Having a gun pointed at my head by someone I’d trusted with my life more times than I could count was one thing. Listening to him spout that kind of revolutionary bullshit at me really pissed me off. “Don’t you ‘In the course of human events’ me, Spartan!” I snarled. “This isn’t ancient history, and you aren’t on the side of angels!”
Mickey grunted at that. “Fine,” he said. “Don’t listen. Keep your ears closed. Just be a good little soldier and do what you’re told.”
“Maybe you should have stuck to that plan yourself. I guess I should have seen this coming. Forgive me for thinking you might not wind up like your parents.”
“Hey.” Mickey’s voice went cold.
“How old were you when they died, again? And which government building on Luna were they trying to blow up for the insurrectionists?”
“That’s got nothing to do with this. I was too young to even remember much about them. I faithfully served the UNSC for my entire life—”
“Until now. But you had to enlist, didn’t you? Mandatory for all foster care kids.”
“I put in my two years, and then I re-upped. ODST was my home!”
He started to say something else, but I put up a hand to interrupt him.
“Hey, I know. It’s a whole new kind of war these days.” I stepped closer to him. “But you had the chance to muster out, and you became a Spartan instead. And then you sold us out. Just like those parents of yours who you say you never knew.”
“I’m not like them!” he shouted at me in a thick, hoarse voice.
“I guess you’re right.” I sneered at him. “They might have been traitors—just like you—but at least they weren’t wearing a uniform when they did it.”
I tapped Mickey right in the chest as I said that, and that pushed him straight over the edge. He hauled back on his rifle to take a full swing at me.
If I hadn’t gotten him so upset, he probably would have realized what a stupid move that was. When he opened his stance for his swing, I came at him and knocked his weapon away with my left arm. As it arced off into the distance, I punched at him with my right and clocked him in the jaw.
“Michael!” Dr. Schein shouted. “No!”
Mickey was too angry to listen. He dove at me, howling like an animal.
Uphill as he was, this made it easy for him to knock me down the slope, and I wasn’t about to fight him on that. Instead, I w
rapped my arms around his waist and brought him with me.
We didn’t tumble as far down as Romeo, which was perfect. We had just enough distance from Schein that he wouldn’t want to shoot for fear of hitting us both, but we stopped well shy of the rebels who were still chasing Romeo down.
Away from any other threats, Mickey and I laid into each other with everything we had. With our enhanced Spartan forms, we landed punches on each other that would have shattered regular soldiers’ bones—and we survived them.
Downslope, Romeo saw that I had gotten loose, and he took that as his cue to stop tumbling and start tussling. He rolled to his knees, facing upslope, and ground to a halt, ready to face the forty armed fools coming after him—just like he’d always planned it that way.
He scooped up a fist-sized rock and whipped it at the nearest rebel. It caught the man in his armor’s faceplate and shattered it. He flopped over like a rag doll, and his rifle skittered down the slope ahead of him.
Romeo hurled another couple rocks at the rest of the rebels. He caught one in the leg, shattering her knee, and he knocked the gun out of another one’s hands.
The rebels realized that the man they’d been chasing had only been toying with them until now, and they scrambled for cover. If they’d had some discipline—and a decent commander leading them—they might have opened up concentrated fire on Romeo instead and overwhelmed him with their sheer numbers.
Then they might have had a chance.
Romeo leaped forward and snatched up the fallen rifle next to him. He quickly checked its action, saw it was good, and then started picking off the rebels one by one.
Meanwhile, Mickey was doing his level best to beat the tar out of me.
I don’t know if I’ve ever heard of two fully armored Spartans going at each other with everything they had. Sometimes we’d spar with each other for training purposes, but that was in a dojo or a ring and dressed in shorts and shirts.
We held back during sparring—just a little, at least. As well-trained and hyper-boosted combat machines, we knew all too well how easy it was for us to kill someone, and we didn’t want any accidents during training. We always had a medic on hand, just in case.