Chapter Text
Grace woke with a stumble, as the world rocked around her.
The walls shuddered, the ground shook. There was a stink in the air, and the taste of something in her mouth – gunpowder?
A set of red emergency lights snapped on, making everything look blood-coated, but revealing a number of stirring bodies around her, and a familiar bench of seats.
Pelican. She was in a Pelican. She twisted, and sure enough, there was another bench behind her.
The tray bucked, and they were all launched a meter into the air. For a few milliseconds, her stomach tensed – and then Grace moved.
Grace reached out for an emergency grip, her arm lashing out like lightning, and reeled herself in. A normal person should have flopped back down to the deck, the laws of momentum and her own body weight conspiring to rip the bar out of her grip. But Grace hadn’t been a normal person for most of her life, and she held on to that grip like a monkey in the jungle.
The Pelican rocked again, a moment later, but there was nobody left to launch into the air. Every one of the awakening people on the floor had moved with the first turbulent jostle and grabbed onto something solid. Two other people had grabbed emergency grips, four had grabbed onto the bench itself, and five had thrown themselves into the Pelican’s seats and were already strapping in.
The familiar stink clicked in her mind, as she looked across the bay at Naomi’s exposed face, which wore a confusion expression, staring right back at Grace. It was the smell of the cryo drugs, the anti-coagulants and the like, mixing with the smell of unwashed skin from wearing their armor too long. It was a smell that Grace had lived with from dozens of crash-freezes and un-freezes, racing across the Colonies with her brothers and sisters.
She looked around, and saw familiar faces. Kelly was looking around, same as her. Linda, too. There was even a face she swore she knew, but it couldn’t be. Jerome had been gone for years, decades. So had Alice, but there she was, the same quirked eyebrow fading into stunned surprise.
Faces and smells meant no armor. But if they weren’t wearing armor, why did they still smell like they’d just come out of the field?
Grace’s mind leapt to priorities, as it had been trained to do – check teammates, check supplies, check the mission.
She saw familiar faces, so she was with family. She had no armor, and there were no weapons in sight, but there had to be something in the storage lockers of the Pelican. The mission…
…what had she been doing before this? She couldn’t remember.
The cockpit hatch slammed open, and an unfamiliar voice cried out from it, loud and scared.
“Does anybody know how to fly this thing?!”
Grace let go of the emergency grip instantly, landing bare feet onto the cool metal of the deck. The Pelican was still bucking, but she was fully awake and aware now, and she’d ridden similar dropships through worse turbulence.
She was the closest to the cockpit, and she was capable. There was no need to give or ask for orders – a clear objective, with clear purpose. Naomi fell in behind her as she moved swiftly towards the controls.
There was a man standing in the open hatch, his features shadowed by a bright light behind him. He was shorter than her, and stepped back as soon as she approached, flattening himself against the cockpit’s bulkhead to stay out of her way. He moved hurriedly, but it was still slow to her eyes. No uniform. He probably wasn’t military.
The light source wasn’t the cockpit controls, but the front viewscreen instead. The sky was burning past the armored canopy with the streaks of re-entry.
Grace was falling from orbit with twelve Spartans and a civilian, in a non-functional Pelican.
It still wasn’t as bad as her last drop. Last time, the cockpit was entirely gone, and she’d had to jump and pray. This time, there was a chance they could fully recover. Even the civvie might come out of this alive.
The burning sky in front of the cockpit was a good thing, Grace reminded herself as she strapped herself into the pilot’s seat, checking the controls for any kind of residual power. It meant that they were falling nose first. Pelicans were supposed to make re-entry nose down, for maximum heat dispersion and control. Like a diving bird. Without that, it would tumble and break apart under the stress, instead of smoothly dissipating the wind resistance along the armored nose and streamlined shape.
Of course, Pelicans also were supposed to have power when they did so. The controls were all fly-by-light, and there were no manual backups. The cost of efficiency, durability, and weight-saving. Understandable, even – who would want to ride something that could break orbit, yet was still controlled by levers or wires?
Still, emergency power was better than no power, and the bird didn’t feel like it had taken any major damage. It could be possible to coax some life back into the engines.
“Console’s dead,” Naomi reported from the co-pilot’s seat behind her. “No response on my controls.”
“Everybody get strapped in back there!” Grace called back to the main compartment, tugging at the controls but getting nothing.
There was a clatter of noise, possibly some loose object being knocked around. They’d better grab onto that before it hit somebody.
Grace tugged at the controls a second time, but they were still stiff and unresponsive. None of the buttons were lit up and no displays were active, not even emergency indicators. She tried hitting the ramjets, both with reaction mass and without, but nothing happened.
It was like the Pelican was completely offline.
She paused, and pressed the start button.
A couple lights flicked on, and then the console came to life, blaring out warnings about heat, stability, engine offline, and more. Grace started flipping switches and toggles immediately, racing through an abbreviated start-up sequence.
The yoke loosened up, and she immediately adjusted course slightly downwards, to even out the jostling that they’d been suffering. The Pelican adjusted smoothly, ailerons deploying as the engines came rumbling to life.
“The tank is nearly empty,” Naomi told her. “Engines look to be in good shape, but a lot of damage across the aft.”
“Worry about that later,” Grace told her, slowly adjusting the yoke as the burning flames of re-entry died out and they punched into the atmosphere. “Let’s land this bird first.”
The intercom buzzed, and Grace tapped it.
“Status report,” came John’s voice.
“All green,” Grace said. “Good to hear you, Blue Lead.”
“Grace?” John asked, his voice tense, loaded with some emotion.
“Aye,” Grace confirmed. “Approaching the ground now. Anybody know what planet this is?”
“You wouldn’t know it,” another voice said over the intercom – the stranger who’d stood in the cockpit door. “And if you did, you wouldn’t believe me.”
“Set down somewhere quiet and remote,” John ordered.
“Aye aye, Chief,” Grace replied, scanning over the horizon as they descended lower and lower.
The planet below was green and lush, and she could see a couple mountains rising up as they descended swiftly. They were coming in on a wide, large land, with ridgelines separating out several chunks.
She could see the beginnings of a sandy desert to their west, a forested plateau dead ahead north with grassy plains further beyond, dense jungle to the east, snow-capped mountains to the far north-west, and what looked like an active volcano to the north-east, peaking between the clouds.
There was some kind of settlement much further to the north, but it wasn’t large, it was at least a hundred kilometers away, and there was some kind of dense haze in front of it, so Grace couldn’t make out many details.
“Let’s go for the plateau,” Naomi suggested, as the terrain features slowly grew in size. “I’m seeing ample tree cover in there and some clearings we could land in.”
“A plateau?” the intercom buzzed again with the stranger’s voice. “Aim for the forest in there. Stay away from the ruins and the plains around them. It’s not safe.”
Grace glanced over her shoulder at Naomi, who shrugged. It seemed like the stranger knew the terrain – the ruins were just popping into view now, growing in size from just a couple dots to larger blobs of dark rock. There were two sets of ruins – one was clearly long abandoned, with barely anything save for low walls left, but the other still appeared to have a roof of some kind, so it must have been abandoned far more recently.
“Those ruins are close to the forest,” Grace noted. “Is there a safer LZ?”
“There’s not many safe places on this world,” the stranger replied. “I don’t want to test if the guardians can shoot us down.”
“Guardians?” Naomi asked.
“Land in the forest,” John said, speaking over her. “Keep low. Let’s not take any risks just yet.”
Grace guided the Pelican into a wide turn, aiming to soar west around the plateau’s mountainous peaks, which had a light dusting of snow on them. She would have gone straight over, but that would bring them far too close to the ruins. Nape of the earth it was.
But even around the edges of the plateau, there were ruins of a different type. Not structures, but walls along the edges of the plateau, atop the natural stone. They were old, grimy, and crumbling in parts. They looked like parts from a medieval castle, with sharp lines and vaulted arches supporting the battlements, but it was clear that most of them were retaining walls, holding up the dirt behind them.
“John, you’ll want to see this,” Naomi said, as they circled around the edge of the plateau, dipping beneath the walls and hugging the cliffside.
Below them, a winding path of arid scrubland rose higher and higher into the dull orange highlands and canyons.
A hand closed on Grace’s shoulder, alerting her of John’s presence.
“Hm,” John grunted, as the Pelican banked, coming within a few dozen meters of the cliffside. “Doesn’t look Forerunner.”
“Forerunner?” Grace asked, the word unfamiliar.
John sucked in a breath with a hiss of air, and his hand tightened around her shoulder.
“Not enough shiny metal,” Naomi said, in a tone of agreement.
“What’s Forerunner?” Grace repeated.
The arid scrubland below them came to a series of wooden bridges, stretching from one large rock column to another. She would call them islands, but they were more like pillars, rising high into the air.
“Just fly, Grace,” John said. “After we land.”
“Contact, on the middle column,” Naomi reported, leaning over the side of her console to get a better view. “Big contact.”
Grace looked down, and blinked. The contact was an enormous blue creature, stretched out on the ground. It was vaguely humanoid, and as she watched, one enormous arm reached up and idly scratched its belly.
“Is that a Gúta?” Grace asked, thinking of the hulking creatures native to Reach.
“No claws or tusks, and it’s a lot bigger,” Naomi said. “Maybe twice, three times the size.”
“Hinox,” came the voice of the stranger, behind them. “It’s called a Hinox.”
John’s hand left her shoulder, and Grace felt the temptation to turn to look, but kept focused on flying. They were low and slow, and her attention needed to stay on piloting.
“You know these things?” John asked.
“I do,” the stranger confirmed. “This is the first time I’ve… really seen one, but I know about them.”
“How?”
“It’s a long story,” the stranger said. “I’ll tell you after we land. It’s gonna be confusing and hard enough to explain, let’s not do it in the air.”
John said nothing more, and Grace nudged the Pelican’s nose up, pushing the ramjets enough to lift them just over the perimeter walls. It felt odd to apply that word – they were at least a couple hundred meters in the air, and no medieval walls had even been that high, but Grace couldn’t think of a better description for the chiseled stonework.
This close, they could see the individual stone blocks that made up the enormous battlements, some still holding together and some collapsing. They were a light gray-white, perhaps marble. Or perhaps they were just sun-bleached.
“Large clearing, one o’clock,” Naomi spotted.
They moved in slowly, coming in above the treetops. Grace carefully kept them high enough to avoid knocking anything over. A lot of leaves were getting blown away, but they were all going backwards, far from the intakes.
The clearing was fairly large, easily a couple hundred meters long, and oddly lower than the surrounding forest. Maybe it had been a small lake that drained away. There were a couple rock outcroppings throughout it, but they were scattered enough that it was still an excellent landing zone.
“Coming in for a landing,” Grace said, drifting the Pelican gently towards the middle of the clearing well back from the largest rock formation, which lay at nearly the exact center.
“Wait!” the stranger exclaimed suddenly, his voice panicked. “Don’t land! Get up! Get us out of here! It’s not safe!”
Grace pulled back on the yoke, arresting their descent and holding position several meters above the ground. The Pelican hung there, relatively stationary, and the ramjet exhausts roared as she put it into hover mode.
“Calm down,” John said behind her, his voice firm. “There’s nothing here. It’s fine.”
“Scans are clear,” Naomi added. “Nothing beyond some scattered wildlife and very small metal deposits in the treeline. Nothing in the clearing.”
“It’s the rocks!” the stranger insisted, still rattled. “Look! Those rocks! It’s a monster!”
A monster? It’s just some rocks, Grace thought to herself, staring at the rock outcropping in front of them.
But then the ground trembled, shaking the trees around the clearing as if there was an earthquake, and with a slow, ponderous movement, the rock formation shifted.
For a moment, Grace thought it was crumbling to pieces, maybe on a hidden fault that their jetwash had put too much force on. Then more rock appeared from below the ground, sending up showers of dirt as it shoved its way through the topsoil and grass.
It wasn’t crumbling. It was rearing back. Standing up.
A huge bipedal creature stood where the rock formation had been – no, it was the rock formation. It had an enormous block for a torso, with short stubby legs, and rounded boulders for fists. It must have been laying half-buried in the clearing, and had to dig itself up.
The creature twisted slowly from side to side, as if looking for something despite having nothing resembling eyes, a face, or even a head.
“Get up!” the stranger demanded, his hand smacking Grace on the back. “Up! It can throw boulders!”
Grace hauled back on the yoke, and the Pelican shot upwards, ascending ten meters in a half-second, and kept rising.
The stone creature froze, and then turned to face them. If it made any noise, it was lost beneath the roar of the Pelican’s engines, but it leaned back all the same, keeping its broad rock torso pointed towards them, as if tracking them by sound alone.
With an uncanny quickness, it hurled one bulky limb towards them, like it was pitching a baseball, starting behind its back and whipping over its shoulder with a straight arm. As its fist came hurtling forward, there was a crack, and the fist detached. With how stumpy and short the creature’s proportions were, it almost looked like a Grunt throwing a grenade.
The projectile was enormous, easily dozens of tons of solid stone – and it was moving very fast for all that weight. Crude it might be, but it would send them down very quickly if it so much as clipped them.
“Higher!” the stranger cried out.
Grace ignored him, and turned the yoke instead. The creature had aimed slightly higher than them, leading its shot to where they would have been, had she kept the same course as the stranger insisted.
Instead, she banked to the right, and the boulder missed wide, flying dozens of meters above and to the side of where they were.
“Get us out of here!” John barked.
“It’s slow and dumb,” the stranger added, “Break line of sight, and it might forget we’re here!”
Grace punched the reverse, and flipped the ramjets back-to-front. The Pelican lurched, the acceleration pushing them forward, out of their seats, instead of back into them – but the dropship slid backwards as smoothly as if it was on ice, moving them quickly away from the huge clearing and the stone monster.
She kept her eyes on the gyro and the other instruments, riding the line between speed and stability, keeping their nose down to minimize their profile. From the co-pilot's seat above and behind her, Naomi kept an eye on the creature, which quickly vanished behind the treeline as they retreated.
No further boulders came flying after them, but it was a tense few seconds.
“What was that thing?” Naomi asked, a tense note in her voice.
“Talus,” the stranger said, his voice shaking. “Stone Talus, specifically.”
“There are other kinds of that thing?” Naomi asked, sounding disturbed.
“Ice and lava, yeah,” the stranger said, still shocked, answering almost automatically.
Naomi let out a low whistle.
The Pelican kept sliding backwards on its thrusters, treetops flashing by underneath the cockpit. After another kilometer of distance, Grace deemed it enough, and relaxed on the controls, slowly them again to a stop, hovering in place well above the forest canopy.
“Are we going to face another of those things, if we go for another clearing?” John asked the stranger.
Grace finally turned around to take a look at them, now that they were relatively safe.
John largely looked the same, save for a couple new scars, but his face was oddly more round than normal, and he’d lost the crow’s feet he used to have around his eyes. He looked younger – much younger.
The stranger had short brown hair and wore loose civilian clothes, jacket and pants. His face was vaguely similar to many from Reach – perhaps he was from there as well? He was far more open and easier to read – panic fading, but still lingering. Unsurprising, given that few civilians ever had to go through an orbital drop.
“We shouldn’t,” the stranger said, having calmed down. “There was only one Talus on the plateau, if I remember right.”
“You’re sure?” John asked, looking firmly at the stranger. It was understandable to Grace; the stranger had forgotten about the first one.
“I’m sure,” the stranger said back, matching John’s look despite standing nearly a head shorter.
“Take us down,” John told Grace, jerking his chin lightly in her direction.
The trees rustled and shifted like they were in a storm as the jetwash blew them around, but this new clearing had no exposed rock formations, so Grace thought it was probably safe enough to land, as the stranger said.
The Pelican was ten meters over the ground and Grace was just starting to deploy the landing struts when a thunderous bang rang out, and the dropship lurched hard to the right side.
“Hang on!” Grace yelled back to the bay, wrestling with her controls to keep the Pelican in the air.
“Front right engine’s out!” Naomi barked out.
They were pitching forward and to the right, and Grace had to haul hard on every aileron, flap, and manual control to slow their landing. Naomi was already reducing thrust on the port-side thrusters so that they didn’t flip all the way over, but they were going down, and fast.
“Brace for impact!” she shouted.
There was a yelp behind her, but she had no time to look back before the ground rose up to greet them.
Just before they hit, Grace slammed the emergency cut-off – killing the thrusters before they sucked in foreign objects and broke in the crash.
The Pelican bucked like a horse, and Grace was thrown nearly out of her seat. Her head whiplashed, but she caught herself before she slammed face-first into the dashboard.
A haze of dust and dirt had filled the cockpit, coming from hidden corners and compartments that must have breached. Grace suppressed the urge to cough as she sat back up.
“Status!” John called out, his voice echoing.
“A few bumps, but I’m good,” Naomi said. “Grace?”
“All good,” she replied.
She paused in her seat, and started flicking through the shut-down procedure carefully, given the damage this bird had already taken. The engines were already off, but the electronics followed.
As the Pelican shut down, she spotted a discolored splash of blood, right along the control dashboard. It looked fresh, but it hadn’t come from her, and nobody else had been close to her. Where had it come from?
“Bay’s good, Chief!” came someone else’s response behind her.
Grace unstrapped herself from the seat, rolling her shoulder and stretching a little as she stood up.
Now that the adrenaline was starting to fade, she felt odd, like she was feeling phantom pains… but there was no pain. What was the opposite of phantom pain? Her stomach, for instance, felt amazing, and she wasn’t sure why.
But introspection could wait until they’d double-checked the safety of this LZ. She reached under the dashboard for the usual emergency pistol, but found nothing. She fumbled around, in case it was clamped in an unusual spot, but there was nothing – no clamps, no pistols.
“Pop the hatch,” John ordered. “I’ve got one wounded here.”
It was the civilian, Grace saw as she turned to look. John carefully picked up him, keeping the man’s head and neck still as he carried him out of the cockpit.
She paused, and looked back at the splash of blood on the dashboard. Yet it couldn’t have been him – he’d been standing well back in the hallway, behind John, and Grace could see that he wasn’t bleeding at all.
“Naomi, any weapons?” she asked, turning to face her sister.
“Nothing,” Naomi said, stepping down from the co-pilot’s roost. “We’ll make do.”
John ducked under the cockpit’s door to the bay, and Grace followed him. Someone had opened the back hatch, and the scent of oak trees wafted into her noise, accompanied by wildflowers and a dozen other rustic smells.
It was like they’d stepped into an idyllic painting, like the ones you’d see at Camp Hathcock, of paradise worlds like Arcadia and Jericho VII – before the War, anyway. The trees had thick trunks, and their vibrant green leaves rustled in the breeze. She could see little signs of wild animals; a stockpile of acorns and nuts, scratch marks from some antlered creature, the disturbed dirt of something digging around for roots.
Everyone else had left the Pelican. She saw Linda’s red hair contrasting against the long green grass, the sniper standing vigilant with her eyes sweeping the treeline. She saw Kelly hopping up and down lightly, stretching out like she did before a good run. Fred, already gathering wood for fire or improvised weapons.
There were two more figures that she didn’t recognize in the clearing – a man and a woman, both standing off the side, somewhat awkwardly looking at the others. They’d gravitated towards each other like teammates did in an unknown situation, and they stood as tall as Spartans, but they were strangers. She’d certainly never seen them before.
And beyond them, she saw impossibilities.
Jerome and Alice, both of whom had been missing for over twenty years. There was no sign of Douglas, the other member of their team, but just having those two back felt like missing pieces of her heart coming home.
No one had their armor, and Grace could see the slight twitchiness that they all felt at its absence. Instead, they were clad in bland jumpsuits of grey, brown, or dark blue. They bore no insignias, but they had their names stenciled at the chest, not just their numbers. She looked down, and saw her own: Grace-093.
But then she looked to Daisy, sitting on the tailgate of the Pelican, her back pressed against the side with one leg dangling over, one hand holding her keepsake, and she almost couldn’t take it.
Cal, standing in the clearing, looking up at the sky with her stupidly long hair trailing around her, slowly clenching and un-clenching her hands.
She didn’t know if this was kindness or cruelty, but she didn’t like it. She’d already mourned. The book was closed. Re-opening it felt wrong.
John stepped out of the Pelican, carrying the unconscious stranger, but he gazed around at their family with an odd expression. Naomi kept in step with Grace, and laid a hand gently on her shoulder, almost fondly.
The stranger was laid down on the grass gently, and Alice knelt down to perform a medical check on him.
“This can’t be happening,” Daisy muttered, staring down at her hand, and the little bear keychain she was holding. “No fucking way.”
John reached over and quietly laid a hand on her shoulder. Daisy looked up, and she almost looked like she was going to cry.
“Did I at least get a burial?” Daisy asked, looking up at him.
John hesitated, and Daisy’s tears broke loose. She closed her eyes and slumped down. Small drops landed on the dry, dusty tray of the Pelican, shimmering in the clearing’s light as they fell.
Then John leaned in, and wrapped his arms around Daisy. He moved slowly, though whether out of caution, or just out of lack of familiarity with the action, Grace couldn’t tell. She didn’t know how long it had been since any of them had simply held one another.
“Was any of this… ever worth it?” Daisy demanded, harshly, but unable to hide her sobs.
“We won,” John said to her, his forehead pressed against hers. “In the end, we won.”
Daisy stared up at John, and then grabbed him tight, her arms lashing out like whips and pulling John closer. She still cried, but there was something… lighter in it. A smile, peaking through the sadness. Relief at a burden finally laid down.
We won? Grace thought to herself.
She didn’t remember it. It was a haze towards the end – she could remember gathering on Reach, remember weeks of fighting as the Covenant glassed the planet… it had all seemed so hopeless.
“I saw it,” Kelly said, stepping towards them, looking at Grace. She had probably spotted her expression. “I saw the final days. We won, and it was… over. Over as best as we could tell.”
“No way,” the unknown woman said, a trace of an unfamiliar accent in her voice. “We lost Reach. How could we still win?”
“It’s a long story,” John replied, as Daisy released him. He turned to the unknown woman with a slight frown. “Identify yourself.”
The woman’s eyes flicked to John’s chest, where his name was written. She stared for a moment, then snapped to attention and saluted. Her right arm was a hardened prosthetic, which looked slightly too large for her frame. It must have been scaled for when she was wearing MJOLNIR.
“Lieutenant Commander Catherine, Spartan B-320,” the woman recited, eyes fixed ahead. “XO to Noble Team, SPECWAR Group Three.”
“Spartan-III’s,” Kelly said, with a nod of… familiarity? “I’ll fill you in later, Blue Lead.”
John lifted his chin, meeting Catherine’s gaze. He held it for a moment, then returned the salute. The Spartan woman, Catherine B-320, relaxed immediately.
“Lieutenant Commander…” Fred repeated, a playfulness in his voice, as he returned with another bundle of wood. “Now I feel like an underachiever.”
“I’m still a specialist,” Catherine said. “The rank is largely ornamental.”
“Mendez did say he’d be training the next class,” John said, his voice a little distant.
Grace remembered it too – it was the last time they’d ever seen Chief Petty Officer Mendez, at the start of the war. Twenty-seven years and a lot of dead worlds since then, but she’d never seen any hint of another class, either Spartan-II’s or Spartan-III’s.
“We’re glad to have you, Lieutenant Commander,” John said, nodding to her. “Do you want to shake out the chain of command?”
Catherine shook her head.
“The Army is not like the Navy,” she said. “They were less willing to listen to Petty Officers. Noble Team had higher ranks than we needed, to make joint operations easier. I’ll follow your lead, Master Chief.”
“Glad to have you aboard,” John said, before hesitating. “…Catherine.”
Kelly frowned. Linda shifted her footing, and Fred stopped sorting through the woodpile.
“Just Kat, sir,” the Spartan-III said, noticing the unease.
“Too close to Halsey for them,” the other unknown said, from where he was standing with his arms crossed.
“Six!” Kat snapped.
“Not hard to tell, Kat,” the male Spartan-III said. “Jorge was the same.”
“Jorge was on your team?” John asked, as the wind ruffled through the small clearing.
“He was,” Kat said. “Heavy weapons.”
“Always did love the big guns,” Kelly murmured.
John said nothing, but nodded slowly.
“Civvie’s OK,” Alice said, cutting through the mood as she stood up from the unconscious man. “Still non-responsive, but his pupils aren’t dilated, respiration is regular, no bleeding, and I can’t feel any swelling in the skull. He’s as good as I can make him, unless any of you have a medkit stashed somewhere?”
“Nothing on the Pelican,” Grace said, shaking her head. “Not even a last-ditch gun.”
None of them seemed to miss the oddity of that. UNSC Pilots were a superstitious lot, even if they weren’t supposed to see much direct combat. For a Pelican to not have a couple extra medkits and a holdout pistol stashed somewhere was unusual in the extreme.
The whole situation stank even without that.
Who had shoved them all into a Pelican?
Where had they found Jerome and Alice?
…and then there was Daisy, dead for fifteen years. Cal, dead for eight.
“Three teams,” John said, his voice loud and clear, getting everyone’s attention instantly. “Green team is Grace, Cal, Kat, and Six. You’re on salvage, medical, and defense.”
“Wilco, Chief,” Grace said, nodding to him.
“Red team is Jerome, Alice, Daisy, Naomi,” he continued, turning to their two long-missing siblings, and laying a hand on Daisy’s shoulder. “Set up a perimeter. Avoid any contact if possible, but look for locals.”
“Aye, Chief,” Jerome nodded. “Good to be back.”
“Blue team is Kelly, Linda, Fred, and me,” John said, picking up one of Fred’s gathered sticks and loosely testing it. It was long enough to be a decent spear, at least. “We’ll make for a hill I spotted, about a klick or two away for recon. Get the lay of the land.”
They nodded, even Daisy, and started moving. Blue Team took first priority on the few decent-sized branches that Frederic had gathered. They were still pathetic weapons, even snapped into rudimentary spears, but they were better than nothing.
Jerome gathered Red Team around him with a couple quick hand-signs, and held out an arm towards Daisy as she approached.
“You were dead before me,” she heard Daisy say, as she clasped arms with Jerome.
“Not quite, but close enough,” Jerome replied, as Red Team walked off.
“Kat, Six, what are your specializations?” Grace asked, as her team gathered around her.
“Computers,” Kat replied, with a slight grin. “There’s no system I can’t crack. ONI doesn’t like me much.”
“You take the console,” Grace ordered. “Pull the black box, see what you can dig up. Might give us a clue as to how we got here.”
“Aye,” Kat said, nodding.
“Six?” Grace asked, turning to the quiet Spartan.
“Pilot,” the man said.
Grace suppressed a wince; her own specialization was demolitions. Even though she was a rated pilot, as all Spartan-II’s were, maybe if Six had been in the cockpit, they wouldn’t have crashed, and the civvie might not have been wounded.
“Do a quick forensic on the Pelican,” she told Six. “Front right thruster failure caused the crash. Take a peek and see if it’s repairable, or a lost cause. After that, join me on salvage in the bay.”
The man nodded, and Grace couldn’t help but notice the scar lines across his head and neck. Short but deep, not the long trailing lines of a surface scrape. Judging by the angles, they should have been fatal.
She turned to her last squadmate, and wondered if perhaps they had been fatal.
Cal had always been the quiet type. Strong but silent, it was easy to mistake her aloofness for reluctance. But Grace had known Cal since she was a child, same as all the Spartan-II’s. Cal wasn’t cold. She was too kind, too loving. She couldn’t hold a grudge to save her life.
She’d died on a mission back in ’44, an assassination with only an ODST squad for backup. The mission was a success, but her sister never came home.
Grace could still remember the recorded debriefing of one of the survivors, afterwards. A big man, trying his best not to cry… and when they’d heard, the Spartans had all done the same. Her death had been a blow almost as hard as Sam’s, long after many of them had thought the war had hardened them.
“Medical and security,” she told Cal, laying a hand on her shoulder.
Cal smiled, her light-blonde hair almost glowing in the idyllic clearing’s sunlight, and reached two fingers up to slowly trace an upside-down arc across her jawline, imitating the smile above it.
Grace returned the smile, and turned away to re-enter the Pelican’s troop bay.
The bay was slanted ever so slightly from the low-speed crash, and she stepped carefully into the hazy gloom. The emergency lights were off now, but the sun peaked through the open hatch to illuminate dusty spores dancing through the air. It was much less musty and smelly than before, but the additional light showed spots of damage that Grace hadn’t been able to see earlier.
Wherever this Pelican had come from originally, it had clearly been through Hell on the way.
The back of the passenger bay was splashed with plasma scoring. The deck had bits of dark-brown mud and reddish clay, and burn marks on the lip of the ramp. There were even bullet holes along the walls, on both sides – two people had been shooting at each other while inside the Pelican.
But they’d just gone through re-entry in this dropship, so that couldn’t be right. Surely some of this damage should have created a puncture in the air-tight seal, or weakened the armor enough for re-entry to rip the bird to shreds.
Grace tried not to look around and imagine what had caused each bit of damage while she was busy rummaging through the storage lockers, but it was hard.
The plasma scoring was understandable: evacuating under Covenant fire. The mud, similarly, was just from multiple deployments without time to hose the bay out. The scorch-marks across the lip of the ramp were from a flamethrower, possibly accidental when someone was spraying out the back. Residual heat from the often inaccurate cone of fire.
But it was the bullet holes that really bothered her. It couldn’t have been some Innie shooting at a UNSC dropship from the outside, not from that angle. Both shooters had to be inside the Pelican… which meant they’d peacefully climbed aboard, but then once inside, dumped at least thirty or forty rounds towards the other guy, at roughly the same time.
It seemed wrong to Grace, somehow – that in the middle of a war of extinction against aliens, two humans had trusted each other enough to get in the same Pelican, but then tried to kill each other shortly afterwards.
Why? What reason could they have had?
The Pelican’s storage compartments yielded no answers. It seemed that every one of them had been emptied – the bottom drawers for emergency supplies and the top lockers for passenger storage, they were all empty. Some were even shiny and clean, as if they’d come right out of the factory, brand new, completely unlike the rest of the battered, abused dropship around them.
Audible grumbles echoed down from the cockpit, which threw Grace off a little more. Were the Spartan-III’s less disciplined? Perhaps it was just the unusual circumstances.
Someone knocked on the Pelican’s back hatch with a closed fist, making a dull ‘thump.’ Grace looked, and it was the male Spartan-III – the one that Kat had called ‘Six’.
“Thruster’s out for now, but it might be repairable,” Six reported, folding his arms. “Some of the cabling overloaded and fried itself, but I can pull some redundant ones from elsewhere. Exterior casing was weak, so it blew outwards.”
“Loud bang for some fried cables,” Grace said, frowning. “Shouldn’t its own redundancies have handled the load?”
Six shrugged.
“It’s weird,” he said, slowly. “Thought it was the ramjet sucking up some FOD, but when I got a look, the thruster was pristine. Shiny, even. Factory-fresh. Who replaces a half-ton thruster, but misses a couple kilos of cheap cables?”
“Come here,” Grace said, reaching to open one of the storage lockers that had been suspiciously clean. “Same thing.”
Six looked at the immaculate metal, then glanced down at the scuffed, bloodied, muddied, and plasma-scored interior of the rest of the Pelican.
“Makes no sense,” he said. “Replacing a turbine would be one thing, but lockers? Is that even possible? I thought those were structural to the bay.”
Grace shrugged, then turned as the cockpit hatch opened with a thump.
Kat might be a stranger, but she and Six were Spartans, and they resembled it. Six had scars that could only have come from plasma blades. Kat’s hair was trimmed short, and she had her own string of scars around her face, likely from shrapnel. Right now, her high-boned cheeks were skewed in a twisted frown.
“Black box fried?” Grace asked, already anticipating more bad news.
“No,” Kat said, shaking her head. “But it’s pretty wild. Not sure I believe it.”
“Black boxes don’t lie,” Six said.
“We can ask the Master Chief for confirmation,” Kat said. “Flight recorder say this Pelican carried him on several missions recently.”
“What about damage to the dropship?” Grace asked. “We’ve got some… inconsistencies about the front right thruster.”
“Can’t help there,” Kat said, with her lilting accent. “According to the box, this Pelican should be a goner. Severe damage. All four thrusters were burning out from plasma hits, but it doesn’t record any repairs, or even the crash that should have happened after the thrusters were shot.”
“Could it be a replacement?” Grace theorized. “Flight recorders do get swapped sometimes. Maybe they had to re-purpose a used one that survived one crash, and forgot to wipe it beforehand, or only did a partial wipe.”
“Tail number matches the logs,” Kat said, meeting Grace’s gaze with a puzzled expression. “It also has all outgoing and incoming audio. The callsign and ident-codes all match … and the last thing on the log is the pilot’s mayday. Pelican Echo-419 went down with all hands on September 22nd, 2552, just before it could make a pickup for the Master Chief. He would have seen it crashing.”
“So how is it intact?” Six murmured softly. “And how did it get here?”
“If I had to guess, the same way we did,” Grace said. It was only logical.
“Which would be?” Kat asked, with a sardonic, impatient tone of voice.
“I don’t know,” Grace said, as she walked to the Pelican’s open hatch, and looked at the remaining unsolved mystery – the unconscious civilian man on the grass. “But I think he does.