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Price of Glory by loserman
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Price of Glory Pt. 1
Date: 20 June 2003, 5:18 AM
Chamber of the Divine Council
Covenant Homeworld, location unknown
25 September 2552
The Prophet slumped in his grav chair, blindsided by his aide's grim news. He felt his energy drain out of him, as if it were running down his legs and dripping onto the floor. The report had to be wrong...the situation had been stabilizing...coherent speech proved to be a major effort: "Halo...destroyed? How...how can that be? Are you certain?"
His aide, a smaller-than-average Elite by the name of Borsa Gunomee, cleared his throat. "Yes, your Excellency...I've seen footage. There is no doubt."
The Prophet's shock gradually turned into a cold, burning rage. "How?"
Gunomee cleared his throat again. "One of the human cyborgs, your Highness. The power plant on the wrecked human ship survived the crash...the cyborg fought his way back onto the ship and somehow sabotaged the reactor to go critical. The resulting catastrophic explosion sundered the ring, causing a loss of structural integrity. Unable to withstand the rotational stress, Halo fragmented. Casualties are...severe."
"How severe?"
Gunomee's voice dropped to a whisper. "At least 10,000 troops were still on the ring at the time of the explosion."
"TEN THOUSAND TROOPS!?!?" The Prophet's mouth flopped open. He fluctuated between shock and outrage, shock and outrage..."What of the Templar Gaurd?"
"Half of it is gone."
The Prophet roared as if he had been wounded. For a creature of his seeming frailty, it was surprisingly loud and ferocious...Gunomee shivered. Long, tense moments passed as the Prophet stared at the ground, thinking, enraged...
He slowly raised his head. "This atrocity shall not pass."
"No, your Holiness, it shall not."
"The humans will pay."
"They will pay most dearly."
The Prophet once again sunk deep into thought. He then spoke slowly, in a calm, measured tone: "Operation Divine Wrath is to be put into effect immediately."
Gunomee blanched. This was the order he had dreaded. "Your Holiness...I tremble in fear to contradict you....but many of the units earmarked for Operation Divine Wrath were lost on Halo."
The Prophets eyes glowed a blazing scarlet. "I do not care! Whatever is left will begin the offensive immediately! IMMEDIATELY!"
Gunomee nodded. "Yes...Yes, your Holiness. At once." Gunomee dashed from the room at a full sprint. His subsequent actions set into motion dozens of warships and thousands of the Covenant's best troops.
Marantha Mountains, Grid 73x29
Human Outer Colony Rashear IV
6 October 2552
Staff Sergeant Jacob Carlyle peered through his standard issue binoculars, observing the flat plateau he and his fire team had been guarding for the past five hours. Still all quiet...
"Hey, Sarge, why do we always get stuck watching the back door?"
"Because we're dependable, Lyle."
"Aw...sucks being dependable, man." Private Lyle Lanski, the team's primary griper, wrenched off another piece of beef jerky from his ever-present stick and chewed thoughtfully. "Why the hell are we even up here, anyway?"
"Because Major Keeler says they'll be landing right there on that plateau, so we have to guard it...whether or not you want to," Carlyle responded. Lanski muttered obscenities under his breath.
The storm had broken only a few days ago. The leadership said that in terms of scope, it was the largest Covenant offensive ever. Simultaneous invasions of Rashear IV, Quingliu, St. Vith, Wotan, and several other outer colonies...the Covies were pissed off, no doubts about that. Sergeant Carlyle and his Fire Team Papa were paired with a tank platoon from the 3rd Armored and dropped deep in the red-tinged Marantha Mountains, with orders to cover a plateau ringed by steep cliffs. Carlyle and his comrades were entrenched up there in one of those cliffs, twiddling their thumbs and listening to other units mix it up over the radio.
"Hey, Kiowa, you asleep over there?"
Specialist Frederick "Kiowa" Ironhorse, the team sniper, looked up over the butt of his S2 AM sniper rifle and grinned. "Almost." Kiowa had a reputation as the best gun around, which Carlyle wholeheartedly believed. He'd seen the guy make shots that even a Spartan would find challenging. Most of the guys jokingly attributed Kiowa's skills to some sort of Native American "magic". He always kept two eagle feathers tied to the S2's butt, and put two flecks of anti-glare under each eye. With that big rifle and "warpaint", he looked like Custer's worst nightmare come to life.
"Sergeant! HQ says we got three Covie dropships inbound, ETA two minutes! They just popped up, sir!"
That was Clay, the radioman. Good kid, always stuck by your side in a firefight. "Alright, boys, company's coming, let's give 'em a warm welcome! You got us covered, Lieutenant?"
The commander of the tank platoon radioed back, "Roger. Hold fire until we open up. We'll wait till they commit to a landing, understood?"
"Understood. Papa Leader out." Carlyle checked his weapons one last time: clicked off the safety on the MA5B assault rifle, aligned the scope on the M6D sidearm, touched each one of his four frag grenades.
"Sir?" McCall, the Heavy Weapons Specialist.
"Yeah?"
"Requesting permission to give our new friends a rocket in the teeth."
"Negative, let the tanks handle the heavy work...we might need those rockets later."
"Yes sir."
Now they could all hear a low, droning hum - the dropships were close. Abruptly they soared up over the cliffs and halted over the plateau. Covenant dropships were ass-ugly monstrosities, looking for all the world like stubby, metallic-purple tuning forks flying through the air.
One of them opened its troop doors and slowly descended. A thunderclap sounded as one of the Scorpions opened fire with its 90 mm cannon. The round struck in one of the open troop compartments, shattering the thinly plated inner bulkhead and cracking the anti-gravity drive. The shimmering blue field between the tines flickered, then vanished completely. The dropship corkscrewed into the ground, rolling over and breaking in half. A glut of cobalt plasma flame consumed the downed ship and all of its occupants. Too bad, so sad, Carlyle thought.
One of the craft grounded hard and dropped its doors. Another Scorpion fired, wiping out half of the Covenant in the left-side compartment. The third and final Scorpion eliminated the rest in a flash of orange and red.
"Let 'em have it!" Carlyle bellowed. His marines opened up, dropping several Grunts and a Jackal in a withering hail of depleted-uranium bullets. Carlyle took aim with his sidearm and dropped three Grunts with seven shots. They all went down hard, methane spraying from their support suits. A Jackal ran on a slant towards him, wildly firing with its plasma pistol. Several shots hit near the Sergeant, boiling the red rocks into glowing orange slag. He took careful aim...BLAT! The round tore into the Jackal's ankle, and it fell flat on its face. Several other marines shot at it and the thing simply disintegrated in a purple haze. BAROOM! BAROOM! Carlyle shuddered and covered his head. God, he forgot the tanks were so close. Those last two shots annihilated the rest of the Covenant forces on the plateau. The remaining two dropships climbed up and away, one of them taking a severe list and trailing thick black smoke. It probably wouldn't make it back into orbit; chalk it up as half a kill for the tankers.
"Sir! Sir!" Clay's voice had a trace of panic in it. "Fire Team Tango got hit hard! Six dropships came down right on top of them, their tanks are gone, they're about to be overrun!"
Carlyle didn't hesitate. "Lieutenant, Fire Team Tango is 1.2 klicks north of here! If you hurry you can help them! We can handle things here!"
The Lieutenant didn't skip a beat either. "Alright. We're on our way. Good luck." The Scorpions' powerful engines sputtered and roared, and the massive 66-ton backed out of their revetments and clawed their way north. Carlyle watched as their treads threw up geysers of vermilion dirt. They ducked into a narrow ravine and were gone. Fire Team Papa was alone.
"Thanks, Sergeant, you just gave away like half our firepower."
"Lanski, shut the hell up."
Silence abounded as the marines reloaded their weapons and waited. Would the Covenant come again? How many would there be? When would they come?
"Um, sir? HQ says we've got three more incoming bogies! ETA one minute!" Now Clay was definitely panicked. "They must have found a dead zone in our sensors, sir!"
"Yeah," Carlyle muttered. Damn Covies were getting smarter by the day...
Three more tuning forks soared up over the cliffs and hovered, then started a slow descent. "Armor's gone, people! Kiowa! McCall! This one's all you!"
Both specialists nodded and went to work...
Price of Glory Pt. 2
Date: 24 June 2003, 6:13 AM
...Frederick "Ironhorse" Kiowa was always the topic of barracks banter. Guys joked about "feeling the Great Spirit within" and "becoming one with the rifle". Kiowa laughed along good-naturedly, but deep down inside he believed in all those things. And that's why he was so damned good.
One of the dropships dropped its doors and descended. McCall wouldn't waste a rocket on an exposed troop compartment; the seats were too far apart. So Kiowa had his choice of targets...
Four Grunts were on the left side, not worth it. Next to them was an Elite with blue armor - a rookie/apprentice. A good alien to kill. But seated next to him was an even better target - a scarlet-armored Elite veteran, probably the commander of this file. A worthy target indeed. Kiowa fired. The 14.5 mm APFSDS was a damn big bullet, and it punched through the Elite's shield and into its left shoulder in a puff of purple mist. The thing wrenched violently in its harness, grasping for the quick-release handle. Kiowa's second shot skewered its neck and left it convulsing in the seat, dead. Two rounds left. The third shot hit the blue Elite, dropping its shield. The fourth and final bullet of the magazine ripped into the alien's abdomen and scrambled vital organs. Scratch two. Kiowa hastily ejected the magazine and jammed a fresh one in as his comrades brought down the grunts in a tempest of assault rifle and pistol bullets.
As Kiowa dealt with the first ship to touch down, Specialist Ian McCall focused on the second Covie stupid enough to land right in front of Fire Team Papa. He let them bail out of their compartments - yeah, you stupid sons-a-bitches, bunch up real tight now, real tight...
He loosed an M19 SSM at the center of the pack. It struck dead-center, blowing a passel of Grunts to pieces. Body parts and pieces of their support suits went everywhere, raining down on Fire Team Papa's position. Two Elites had been near the rocket's impact point; they both lost their shields and staggered. McCall made ready to shoot again - two Elites were worth a rocket - but Kiowa pounced first. With two quick shots, both of the massive alien warriors were on the ground twitching. McCall was pissed. He would have had them.
"Hey, you Indian bastard, you stole my kill!" he called as he slammed another rocket tube into the launcher.
"I prefer BLAM! 'Native American'!" Kiowa shouted back as he dropped yet another hostile.
By now, the third dropship had grounded behind its two compatriots and dropped all of its troops - the two vessels between it and the humans provided excellent cover. A horde of various Covenant soldiers rushed Fire Team Papa's defensive line, desperate to get in those trenches and disrupt the human defense.
Sergeant Carlyle had only used his pistol so far, and he had done well. Now a scarlet Elite with a full shield charged right at him, spraying disconcertingly accurate bolts of blue plasma. A bead of it struck right next to the Sergeant, instantly flash-burning his face. He opened up with the M6D, connecting with one, two three, four shots - CLICK.
He struggled to get a new clip in before the Elite got to him...he screamed as a azure bolt struck him dead center in the chest, melting the armor and knocking him back. Oh God, its got me.....!
A plume of super-heated air speared the Elite through its torso and threw it flat on its back. Kiowa had struck again. Wincing, Carlyle looked back at his ace sniper. Even in that hellish storm of plasma beads and white-hot tracers, their eyes locked. Carlyle mouthed, "Thanks." Kiowa smiled and nodded, then started tracking another target.
The Covenant were within forty meters now. Their dropships started to lift off. A blue Elite, the only one left, desperately tried to orchestrate a coordinated attack as it wove and strafed for its life. But the less agile Grunts and Jackals couldn't dodge as much fire, and fell in droves. Carlyle switched to his assault rifle and fired in short, controlled bursts. His first two bursts chewed through a Grunt's support suit, sending spurts of methane in all directions as the diminutive alien spun to the ground. Another two bursts maimed a Jackal's arm. It staggered and lowered its arm-shield, exposing its head and upper chest. Carlyle took aim and blew the front of the thing's damn ugly face off. The corpse fell like a sack of bricks. Carlyle was ecstatic. We got 'em, flat on their back we got 'em!
The three Covenant dropships abruptly opened up with their rear-mounted plasma turrets. They had waited until they had a perfect defilade on the Marines' trenches, and now they quickly turned the tables on the unfortunate humans. Incandescent blue streaks tore through the Marines' ranks, severely wounding several in the first few seconds of the barrage. Sergeant Carlyle was hit in the right arm; he cried out and rolled away from his position. "McCall! McCall! Handle those things!"
McCall had started to take aim as soon as the first bolts struck. The dropships were rising slowly; he needed just a tiny lead...WHOOOSH! The 102 mm shaped-charge rocket squarely hit the plasma turret, rending it into unrecognizable scrap. The twin tubes of the launcher rotated, and within two seconds another rocket was ready to launch. McCall coolly swiveled twenty degrees and shot at a second dropship. This shot didn't hit the turret dead-on, but it hit close enough to shred the housing and sever the power supply. He started to reload the launcher, but the dropships apparently had enough. They swiftly climbed up and away, leaving their troops stranded on the ground. The surviving Covenant didn't seem to care; they plunged headlong into the trenches and fought Fire Team Papa at point-blank range.
Carlyle tackled a Jackal and wrestled it to the ground. Holding it pinned with an arm to its neck, he yanked his combat knife out of its sheath and buried it in the thing's neck. Purple blood spurted in irregular bursts. The Sergeant twisted the blade until it grated against something hard and the bird-like alien went slack. He stood up and looked for another bad guy to kill.
Kiowa laid his sniper rifle aside and drew his M6D. A gang of Grunts lurched out of the chaos, shooting green plasma and glowing purple needles at any movement they saw. By this point, most of their comrades were dead anyway. Kiowa dispatched the first with two neat shots to the head. The Grunt didn't have time to yell. Three more slugs brought down a second alien, and another four rounds for the third. Kiowa yanked the pin from a frag grenade and lobbed it underhand at the remaining two Grunts. One of them saw the smoke trail and actually caught the damn grenade. Realizing its mistake too late, it tried to throw it back - BOOM! When the smoke cleared, Kiowa could only see a patch of charred dirt and a splatter of blue-green blood.
The surviving Elite was despondent. It had seen the rest of its file mowed down like grass, and now escape was impossible. Bellowing its desire to transcend the physical, the armored alien launched itself at McCall, just standing up from behind a rock. The plasma rifle came up...too late. McCall deftly unslung his M90 combat shotgun and discharged it into the Elite's abdomen. Shield circuitry overloaded, giving the Covenant warrior a painful shock. It doubled over, and McCall swiftly delivered a coup de grace right to the thing's shark-like face. The roar of combat abruptly stopped.
Now the screams and moans started. Sergeant Carlyle wanted to gather up his killed and wounded and get the hell out of Dodge. But most of the casualties had medics attending to them, and he didn't want to get in the way. He stood there lamely for a few seconds, dumbly watching his men start to clean up. The Sergeant motioned Kiowa over. The sniper was as close to a second-in-command as anybody in Fire Team Papa would ever get. Carlyle spoke in a hushed whisper. "Who's hit?"
Kiowa pointed left. Carlyle saw a pile of gore, lots of blood spattered around it. "That's DeParma. Displaced at the wrong time...plasma turret picked him right off." Carlyle winced.
Kiowa jerked his head in the direction of a prone form with several men around it. "Tarkow got a chest full of needles. He's still got a pulse, but he's expectant. I'd give him five minutes, eight tops." He gestured towards another cluster of Marines. "Utroska and Simmons were elbow to elbow in the trench. Plasma grenade landed right near 'em. Utroska's dead, Simmons has third-degree burns on all exposed skin. He's probable."
Carlyle cursed bitterly. Utroska and Simmons had been the closest guys on the team; they were best friends before conscription. He'd told them just that morning not to stay so close to each other...
"All right. Hey, look, Fred..."
Kiowa looked up, surprised. People rarely referred to him by one of his given names.
"...Nice job today. You saved my ass, man."
Kiowa smiled and waved it off.
"You get yourself squared away and ready for dustoff...it'll be here soon. Clay!"
The fresh-faced radioman bounced up in a heartbeat. The kid's earnest obedience and tirelessness never ceased to amaze the Sergeant. "Call for a dropship and get us the hell out of here."
"Yes sir!" Clay barked. The Sergeant walked away. "Valkyrie Nine, Valkyrie Nine, this is Papa Five, we need immediate extraction from Grid 73 by 29, sending coordinates now..."
Several pistol shots echoed from the plateau. Lanski and McCall were going through the downed Covenant, putting a bullet in the head of any that lived. The Covenant's medical technology was incredible, and any survivors would probably make it back into service some day. That was unacceptable.
Carlyle examined his wounds...not serious. Charred armor, probably second degree burns on his chest and arm. Not too bad...but...God...two already dead, another two soon to join them...he felt his facial muscles harden and twitch, eyes starting to burn...he put his fist in his mouth just as the roar of their dropship's engines echoed up from the south.
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