Summary:
Reach. Once a thriving human colony, this place was my home. Now, it’s a warzone. Conflict has returned to Reach, the now-dead world where life is hanging by a thread. I am Matthew, SPARTAN B-026 of Foxtrot company, Yellow Team. I wield my SRS990D4 Sniper Rifle, and a standard MA5K assault rifle. The Covenant want this place; and we’re here to stop them.
Prologue coming soon! And yes, the prologue will be first person as well.
January 3rd, 2556
ONI prototype stealth carrier
0900 hours
The Underground Railroad’s hangar bay was littered with supply crates. The cramped space somehow could fit three modified Pelican shuttles. They were small enough to fit the space, with enough room to carry even the largest fire team the ONI stealth carrier could offer. Troopers sat around, some tired from returning from a stressful mission, others recruits pumped with adrenaline. The gray Titanium-A walls were crowded with doors leading around the small, cramped prototype ship. 800 people lived upon the carrier; larger than any ONI-commissioned ship ever constructed. It weighed 8,000 invisible tons, and it’s design somehow fit three plasma cannons, a MAC gun, a slipspace drive, stealth generators, and a shield amplifier. Two decks fit in the bay, with innumerable HEV pods stuffed along the bottom.
I sat down on a supply crate beside my team, and looked at Staff Captain James Fork as he gave us a briefing.
“Spartans, this camp provides the Covenant tank shops with power. Take down that generator, and assist Orange Team with cleanup of all Covenant troops. Be advised; this will be a close quarters fight, so take shotguns and short-range weapons. Recon also provided us with info that two Wraiths are on guard duty. We will upload schematics of the base, patrol paths and sniper positions. Good luck.”
The gel layer of the SSPIS armor stuck to the crate, but finally, I tore free.
I got up and walked over to the armor station, my squad behind me. Weapon racks lay beside two double doors, marked Authorized Personnel Only. I walked into the doors, through a DNA check and multiple medical tests, got some vaccines plugged into me, and walked through another door. A white room with a scanner scanned my face and I stood perfectly still. An SSPIS (semi-shielded power infiltration suit) chest plate lowered over the black gel layer I wore. I put my arms out, and armor plates sealed onto my shoulders. Thick leg armor latched on, and my helmet lowered over my head. Multiple displays flicked on and off in my vision, and a glowing bar began spinning around and around me. A shock travelled through my body, and a blue shield indicator filled with light turquoise. I walked out of the armory room, and grabbed a shotgun and my Assault rifle from a rack. One by one, my team and Orange team stepped through the two doors, returning with nothing but green armor all over them.
The MA5K Assault Rifle was designed for close to mid-range combat. It was perfect for the job. The M90 CAWS Shotgun had a maximum effective range of thirty feet, much improved from the five feet from 4 years ago. It was effective against packs of Grunts and Jackals, less for Brutes, but it still did the job. I hefted the rifle, and walked over to the Pelican.
The Pelican was modified so it could fit in the tight spaces of the Underground Railroad, meaning less armor, less fuel, and less space. Equipment was stored in packs above our heads; belts carried anything like med kits and grenades to ammo and knives. The leather padded shock seat was anything but comfortable, with the straps digging into my exposed shoulder gel. I looked around at my team. They were all grim-faced; prepared to lose the people next to them, or themselves. Final inspections were made, and we took off into space.
Ashley was our explosives specialist. She was born on Reach, like most of us, and had a dark face and dark personality. She had witnessed her family slaughtered, and now was payback time. Her green eyes could be seen, just as her visor polarized and she was nothing but machine.
I, Matthew Vudka, was born on Earth. My dad moved to Reach, and we (my brothers) went with him. However, Reach was destroyed, and we SPARTANS were trained on Onyx. One of my brothers was also a SPARTAN, down on Onyx with Team Katana of Gamma Company. But, we lost contact with Onyx in 2553. Three years had passed, and no word came from the outpost.
James was the Engineer of Yellow team. He always had a bright smile and some jokes to share. Brown hair and brown eyes signified his birth in the fish farms of the Taran Peninsula on Reach. Luckily, he had left his home planet and joined the Marines, got picked for the SPARTAN Program, and here he was, the squad leader.
Joshua was a trooper, along with all the other guys in the squad. He had blonde hair, and blue eyes, born in Germany on Earth. He was picked a SPARTAN, and here he was.
Damien was another assault trooper. He was a nut for Covenant tech; took all the equipment he could carry back with him. Intelligence loved him.
Maria had olive skin, black hair, and worked wonders with computers. She was the last specialized troop here, and was born near the Philippines on Earth.
Alvin was a trooper with red hair and green eyes. He didn’t know where he was born; ONI found him, and he was a SPARTAN candidate instantly. He knew Grunt talk-what they said, but the Humans couldn’t hear. That gave him a helpful ability to kill all but one of them, and interrogate it.
A shudder shivered through the ship, and I found my self falling through the sky, with bits of flesh and metal tearing at supersonic speeds through the stratosphere.
January 3rd, 2556
Remaining jungles of Reach
1800 hours
Matt found himself face-first in a mud puddle. He wiped away the grime and took a look around. He saw a shield of black. Well, great, he thought, my helmet is useless. How wonderful.
He tossed it away, and found no resistance from his shields, anywhere. Then he noticed his shield generator had broken off. Just perfect. One of the Pelican’s thrusters had landed near him; along with the bodies of Joshua and two ODST’s that were almost unrecognizable. There must’ve been AA Wraiths coming from the tank shop, because nothing else could’ve torn up a Pelican like that. Thick foliage and blooming life cluttered most of the space around him. He still managed, however, to find his rifle that had detached from it’s magnetic seal on his waist. He tore his shotgun off his back, and collected med packs, ammo, and food from the fallen troops. He also noticed that Joshua’s shield generator still worked. Grabbing it, he hooked a ton of wires and batteries together, and finally, he was up and running. He slogged through a pond, and shoved his way past some trees. Joshua’s repurposed helmet told him he was going north, away from the coastal view he had seen on his way in. He popped a stim pack, and set off in search of his team.
*********************************
Alvin questioned whether the voices around him were of a Grunt search party, or his team, attempting to wake him. He opened his eyes, and hoped the green shapes of Damien and Maria weren’t aliens.
“Al! Wake up! Al!” Damien shouted at the other boy, lying on the ground.
“Ugh....what happened?”
“A cannon blasted us out of the sky,” Maria piped in.
Alvin got up, and grabbed a rifle. A quick look around showed the SPARTANs had set up shop. The moons of Reach circled above the island. Wait, what? Reach had no moons! Alvin shoved his friends down to the ground, and they hid behind a rock.
“What is it?” Damien asked. He quivered in fear.
“Spirit dropship,” Alvin whispered. “Use private COM only.”
Out of the ship’s troop bays dropped a patrol of Brutes. One of them barked, and the other, apparently lesser-ranked troops, ran off in groups of two. The Spirit also dropped a tank.
“There,” Maria pointed. “we can take that tank.”
The Anti-armor tank was an oval egg, with two fuel rod cannons mounted on the back of the egg. Two quarter-sphere pads jutted from the side. On them were a few rifle-wielding Brutes, nearly indiscernible in the thick swamp. The tank itself was a dark green, to match the jungle world. Alvin raised his rifle, and tore through the heads of two Brutes. The Grunts screamed and panicked, and another few bursts from the silenced MA5K stopped the yelling. The four other Brutes tried to find the SPARTAN troopers, but Damien had blasted them with his shotgun before they could fire a shot. The last two found the rock and opened fire. Alvin dove out of the way and slammed his rifle butt into through a whole tree and smashed it up the back of one of the alien’s skulls.
The move did almost nothing more than piss the thing off, and the teen shoved a grenade into the hand of the huge beast. He dove as it detonated, showering him and his squad with melted flesh and armor. The last one, angered at the loss of his pack mate, charged. He took Maria head-on, breaking a few ribs. The explosion of the shields, however, tossed the thing onto its back. Damien curb stomped his face into the ground with a burst of blood and brains. The tank had no attack but to run, and Maria, even with three broken ribs, hopped on and smashed the head of the driver. Lifting the body out, she hopped in.
“Come on...” she coughed, “in...”
“Here!” Damien tossed a can of biofoam into the control pit of the vehicle, and clambered onto the side. An armored blast shield rose over the troop compartments, and Maria thumbed the starting switch. The tank in question sped off through the swampy forest.
***************************
Ashley opened her eyes, and noticed that half her body was trapped beneath a Pelican thruster. With super human strength, she threw it past her and off of James. It took a kick to wake the boy up, and he rose grumpily.
“Give me a break....” He said as Ash collected equipment. A few MA5K rifles lay strewn about, and she threw them along with med kits and ammo over her back. She selected a fallen SPNKR Rocket Launcher, and a shotgun from the small armory assembled. James chose a FIXR welder, and a few wrenches. His pack was merely a few feet away, stuffed with engineering equipment and his SMG.
As they trudged off through the jungle, something caught Ashley’s exposed eye. With her visor partially cracked, her vision was a bit blurry. But the unmistakeable crunch of AA fire proved to her thoughts what she thought she saw; a Scarab.
A steady thump, thump, thump, pounded the ground beneath the soldiers’ feet.
“How do we stop that thing?” James questioned.
“I don’t know!” Ashley shouted back over the pounding of the cannons. She kept on, cutting through the jungle with her combat knife. She punched down a thick tree, called a diem tree, and subsequently crushed a Grunt. The Brute leader of the patrol pointed them out, and the search party opened fire with an array of plasma pistols and rifles. James cut down a few of the scaly, gray skinned grunt aliens, and Ash pumped a few shotgun rounds into the Brute before it fell with a thump. The last troops yelled and roared, scattering. A few shells and some M9 fire silenced the stupid extraterrestrials.
They sprung through the swamps, and tore into the clearing beside the Scarab. They found another three Spartans, from Orange Team, struggling to fight the hordes of enemy contacts literally churning out from the massive machine. Unsurprisingly, the power generator that the SPARTAN Black Ops team was supposed to destroy.
Ash took the modded Rocket Launcher, and fired a volley of four rockets at the generator. Plasma erupted from a fusion core that was the power node, and the thing exploded in a shower of gases and dangerous flammable particles. Bits of metallic alloy jammed the Scarab’s main gun, and when it tried to fire, it overloaded and blew out its power core. It slowly tumbled to the ground, smashing a platoon of infantry.
Two more cores remained, and Ash proceeded to blow them into oblivion.
Tank > Banshee