Spartan One 016

After returning to the Mad Cap and spending ten minutes in an experimental, expensive piece of equipment known as a Total Relaxation Inducer, or sleep machine for short, Orion-while not at his peak-was good enough to go. Such expensive equipment wasn't aboard every UNSC vessel, and had actually been specially installed for him and his Spartans. 

On his list of things to do, calling in that favor for a few drinks was a nice idea, but he had something much more important to do. 

Emerging from other sleep pods, the rest of the Spartans had smiles on their faces, and relief in their postures. Another successful mission with zero casualties. For a moment, everyone liked to believe that their ‘invincibility’ would continue forward. 

“Still armored, eh, LT? Not trying to get out of treating us to a round, eh?” Johnson asked in a good mood. 

“I'm going down to search for survivors. Anyone who wants to volunteer is welcome to join me.” Orion replied. 

“Hgg, we're not being volun-told, are we?” Johnson groaned. 

Orion simply shook his head. 

“Good! Then you've got me. One sec, and I'll have my armor on.” Johnson remarked, quick to jump into his suit. 

Some of the other Spartans gave Johnson an ugly look, but with him acting as the first volunteer, none of the others wanted to look bad in front of their peers, and began to change too. 

Before long, they were on the flight deck, boarding a Pelican, and descending to Troy once more. The Spartans looked travel worn, their gear still had blood stains on it, and scorch marks. However, Orion insisted on a fast travel plan, as anyone caught under rubble had little time left to live. There were also singular Warrior Bugs here and there that required elimination. The longer the delay, the more lives that would be lost. 

Once they landed, Orion took in the ruins of Habitation Block Eighteen. The fighting in this sector had stopped four hours ago, and ever so slowly, civilians were returning to the city to reclaim their lives. 

Commandeering an engine, they had used a combination of motion scanners, infrared technology, and his own latent esp to start looking for survivors. 

Private Johnson climbed down from the excavator's cab, helmet locked to his utility belt, and cigar in mouth. 

“Lieutenant, thermal says there's nothing. The ground-penetrating radar’s reading the whole pile as solid, it's just a mass of twisted rebar.” Johnson said. 

Orion stared at the collapsed building.

Fifteen stories had once stood here. Now, 13 floors lay crushed atop one another like pancakes. Water spilled from ruptured pipes, and electrical cables snapped and sparked in the rubble.

“Shall we move on to the next site?” The Sergeant quietly asked. 

“Not yet.” Orion said with a frown. 

He dropped to one knee, pressed a hand against the concrete, and closed his eyes in concentration. Behind him, his Spartans went silent, even Johnson held his tongue.

Orion slowed his breathing. He pushed away the echoing memory of the battle-the stampede of Warrior Bugs, the shriek of high yield explosions, the hammering recoil of his rifle-and focused on the present. 

His head began to ache, but Orion refused to give up searching. He was more than a glorified artillery battery, damnit. After a minute of parsing through the dense psychic death energy, he found it. A spark in the dark, a living mind. It was weak, and afraid…but alive. 

Orion crawled across the broken slab, searching with his fingertips. The spark faded whenever he moved left and brightened when he shifted right. “Right below us is the target, perhaps 12 ft.” 

Johnson looked at the mound, then at the unstable wall leaning above it. “I think we might collapse what remains of the structure if we dig here, sir.”

“Then don't use the excavator. We're Spartans, be resourceful.” Orion gruffly replied, and began to use his enhanced strength to pry away at the rubble. 

Following his lead, the squad worked both quickly and carefully. Orion tore loose chunks of ferrocrete while the Sergeant cut through rebar. Johnson took the heaviest debris, bracing entire sections on his shoulders until hydraulic supports could be driven into place. Every movement was measured, as one careless shift could crush the civilian waiting below. 

After a half hour of hard work, Orion’s fingers were beginning to ache something fierce, but they were almost there, he could feel it! During the excursion, the rubble shifted twice, showering them with dust, and another time, the leaning wall groaned so loudly that it threatened to fall down on top of them. 

Yet after digging up many corpses, and broken bodies, they were unwilling to give up.

Eventually, they had reached their target. Popping opening a small cavity, stale air sighed from the opening. Orion shone a light inside, revealing a crushed living room reduced to a triangular pocket between two slabs. A couch had been flattened, and family photographs lay beneath layers of gray dust. A child’s stuffed animal rested near the entrance, one buttoned eye reflecting the light.

At the rear of the cavity, something moved. Orion began to wriggle inside like a worm. 

“UNSC! Can you hear me?” He called out. 

A faint whimper answered him, sounding like it came from a child. He crawled forward on his stomach, pushing broken glass away with one gauntlet. The space narrowed around him, and his armor scraped concrete, the sound was especially grating within the confined darkness of the collapsed hab-unit. 

Eventually, he spotted the target. It was a little girl no older than six. Covered in dust, she was curled up under the remains of a man who resembled her, likely her father. 

The man had placed himself over her when the building came down, his arms locked around her and his back turned toward the falling ceiling. A broken support beam had struck him across the shoulders, and his body had absorbed the impact, leaving a pocket beneath his chest where his daughter had survived.

Orion couldn't help but swallow hard at the sight. He had seen some truly hair raising, gruesome deaths this last month. Shit no ordinary man should have to live through. In all that madness, he had soldiered on, because it was ‘us vs them’ man against alien, extinction vs survival. It was natural to mask any fear or sorrow with hatred. But here, now, in front of a child was when he truly felt the weight of this war. 

Tears wetted his eyes, and his breathing became heavy. For a second, armored man, and little girl stared at one another, their accumulated sorrow somehow magnifying. It took Orion a second to compose himself when he realized that his heightened emotions were slightly unstable, that the girl in front of him was affecting his psyche. 

‘She's a psychic.’ He thought, the realization coming to him belatedly. 

“Hey, my name is Orion.” He said, trying to appear friendly so he could coax her out. 

The girl stared at his blood-streaked armor.

“Are you a Spartan?” She whispered.

“Yes.”

“Daddy said Spartans would come.”

“We're here now…will you come with me?” Orion asked, holding his hand out. 

“He won’t wake up, will he?” The little girl's innocent quietly voice asked. 

Orion looked at the man’s dust-covered face. His eyes were closed, but it appeared he knew what he was doing with his final act, and Orion felt respect for his sacrifice. 

“No.” Orion said softly. “He won’t.”

The girl’s lip trembled, and Orion reached forward, but she clung to her father’s coat.

“I can’t leave him.”

“You’re not leaving him.” Orion held her gaze. “You’re living for him. What he did here, you must always be proud of. He is a hero, one bigger than any Spartan.” Orion said sincerely, pulsing his emotions towards this surprisingly strong psychic little girl. 

She began to cry then, silently at first, her small shoulders shaking beneath the shelter of the dead. But she was a sensible thing. The girl slowly released her grip, and looked up at Orion, searching for someone to comfort her. 

Orion carefully lifted the man’s arm, then drew her into the shelter of his own armored body. She wrapped both arms around his neck, and he held her tightly, turning his back toward the unstable ceiling just as her father had.

“I have her.” He called out to his squad. 

Just then, a shriek tore through the rubble, and the wall beside Orion exploded inward.

A Warrior Bug jump scared him, lunging from a buried service corridor, one forelimb missing and half its carapace burned away. Its remaining scythe punched through the opening, snapping shut inches from Orion’s head.

He twisted, and with no gun in hand, spewed forth a burst of [Warp], consuming it whole. 

The Warrior Bug collapsed against the opening, legs spasming, black jaws clacking even as yellow blood poured across the debris, and it eventually collapsed inward into a pile of flesh. 

Orion felt the little girl trembling against him.

“It’s dead, I promise.”

He then backed out through the narrow passage, passing her carefully into the Sergeant's waiting arms. Medics rushed forward, wrapping the child in a thermal blanket, but she refused to release Orion’s hand until they placed her aboard the evacuation transport.

Before the doors closed, she looked past him toward the ruins.

“My daddy-”

“We’ll bring him out.” Orion promised. “He won’t stay buried here.”

“I want to be a Spartan like you, Orion. Can you teach me to shoot that stuff from my hands?” The girl innocently asked. 

Orion furrowed his brow, thinking the Spartan II Program could use such a talent, but also felt guilty recommending her to Halsey…however, no one would hate the xenos more than a kid like her. 

“...sure kid, by the way, what's your name?” 

Just as she was being taken away for treatment and out of ear shot, her voice whispered in his mind. 

Nova Terra. 

…after learning that he was apparently in another universe destroying crossover, Orion desperately needed a drink. Participating in several more rescue options, night had descended on New Troy City. 

The bar he found himself in had lost half its roof during the invasion, but the taps still worked, and that was enough for the Spartans.

They occupied a battered corner booth beneath a flickering neon sign, their armor stacked nearby in a disorderly wall of dented plates and mud-caked boots. After fourteen hours of lifting ferrocrete, crawling through ruptured utility tunnels, and carrying civilians out of buildings that groaned like dying animals, none of them possessed the energy to clean that shit off. As no one was there to stop them…the booze was free! At least, that was their justification as soldiers who just saved the planet. 

Johnson raised his glass for a toast. “To gravity, the most persistent enemy we faced today.”

“Hear, hear.” Someone muttered.

Orion took a slow drink, and lightly chuckled, recalling when Johnson had fallen through a staircase. Face covered in dust, and cigar crushed beneath him, the Private had silently stewed in place whilst the whole squad laughed at his expense. 

Laughter rolled around the table now, and Orion clapped at his friend's humility, finding it great he could joke about himself. Glancing about as Johnson continued to make jokes, it was times like this that he really loved these guys. There was nothing like saying stupid shit about your brothers in arms after a fierce fight. 

Johnson leaned across the table and pointed at him. “Lieutenant, you’re brooding.”

Orion straightened his posture deliberately, adopting an exaggeratedly cheerful grin.

The table went silent, and the other members of the squad recoiled as if they had been shocked. 

“That’s worse.” One Spartan said.

“Much worse.” Another agreed.

“Sir, respectfully, never do that again.” Johnson said, saluting in the process. 

Orion held the expression for another unbearable second before breaking into a laugh. Soon the others joined him, and all was water under the bridge. 

Someone produced a deck of cards, and people started to wager their pay like money didn't matter. 

They were loud, foolish, and extremely obnoxious. Arguing over who had killed the largest Warrior Bug, who had carried the most civilians, and whether Johnson’s singing constituted a violation of military law, the Spartans made all sorts of lewd jokes, even the one or two women in the unit got involved. For a little while, they were not augmented super soldiers or survivors of the nightmare known as Klendauthu. 

They were simply young people in a bar celebrating life. 

As the night dragged on, Orion looked around the table at their bruised faces and tired eyes. Tomorrow, they would return to the ruins, and yet again find more corpses than the living. It would be harrowing, traumatizing, and PTSD inducing, waking some of them up in a cold sweat decades later. 

…But tonight, his boys had earned the right to laugh.

Johnson raised his glass one last time.

“To everyone we pulled out.”

Orion lifted his own.

“And everyone we’re pulling out tomorrow.”

The glasses met above the table with a quiet clink.

This was what he lived for. This was the Humanity he fought for in his heart. Not some distant politician calculating reelection, or corpo maximizing profits. But for his brothers & sisters in arms, for the people suffering under the claw of the alien. This was what made life worth living.