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Struggle to survive: Prologue
Posted By: Sh4rk<Jackal117@gmail.com>
Date: 26 April 2005, 4:44 PM


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Prologue

Location: Classified
Date: Classified
Time 11:49


Tom was hiding. In fact he was cowering inside a dark cupboard. Tom didn't like the dark, but he'd rather be scared than dead. Outside his hiding place he could hear the covenant moving around searching for survivors. Tom prayed to any and every god he could think of. Zeus, Jupiter, Christ they all were entreated to save him. He lay there listening. Every now and then there would be a burst of plasma fire then a scream and he knew another comrade was dead. He was ashamed, he was a marine for fucks sake, and he should be out there fighting the enemy. But he couldn't, he wouldn't. He loved life too much to risk death. He was a coward. He lay there for what seemed like hours, until there was no noise that he could hear. The covenant must have left he thought, but he was still not prepared to leave his hiding place. He must of dozed off because the next thing he knew, the door was open and light was streaming in. he blinked once saw a hulking figure in front of him, made a grab for his pistol and died.
Arona 'Ulleame smiled as he wiped the human's blood off his blue armor. His hundredth kill. He chuckled as he removed his helmet. Some of the human's brain had become lodged in its eye slit. Arona didn't mind though. One hundred kills. At last he was a veteran. As soon as he got off this rock he would go and see his commander. He would be stripped of his blue armor. Then after a night spent in prayer he would don his new scarlet armor. He smiled as he replaced his helmet making sure that the armor over his mandibles was locked in place. He smiled again thinking of his new armor waiting on board the flag ship. He stepped out of the main complex and strode over towards the command area. He was still smiling when the sniper round hit. Before his body had even hit the floor the elites in the command centre had hit the ground and crawled behind cover, searching desperately to try and find the human who had such a good shot at their HQ. They stayed behind cover for the next twenty minutes while teams of jackals scoured the nearby area in a desperate attempt to find the enemy. Eventually the jackal commander radioed in to say that they hadn't found the sniper, but that they had found an empty casing on top of a nearby building, suggesting that the sniper had moved on. The elites got cautiously up and when none of their number were killed, relaxed and went back to work
In a nearby tree Sergeant Davis readied his sniper rifle. He'd killed his fair share today, but there were just too many of the bastards, command needed to do something drastic soon if they were to stop the covenant. He stared down his sniper scope at the enemy HQ searching for the gold elite that he knew had to be in charge. He couldn't see him and was just looking again for a high ranked officer when he saw and elite looking straight at him. Through his scope he could see every detail, the places where the red coloring had been scraped off its armor, the grenades on its belt, and the pistol in its holster. He could also see the look of surprise on its face and he knew that it had seen him. The elite dived for cover and roared to his comrades. Davis swore. He fired a shot and was rewarded with a roar of pain as the elite he'd wounded pulled his blue armored leg back behind the box it was sheltering behind. He spied a red armored shoulder sticking out from behind a crate and fired again, this time however the aliens shield deflected the round. The problem with elites was they had shields. The blue bastards where the lowest rank and so their shields were pretty weak, a sniper round could plow straight through them. The red armored elites were harder. Their shields could handle a sniper round before they went down. Then there were the gold SOB's those guys were tough, it took two or three shots to take their shields down. Finally there were the silver or black spec ops elites. Those mothers were hard. He'd seen them take a clip and a half of sniper rounds before they finally went down. He shivered and looked around hoping that he wouldn't be facing them today. He jumped down from his tree looked around and once he was sure the area was clear took a claymore anti personal mine from his back pack. He set it up about ten feet from the tree facing it. Then he linked it up to a pressure sensor which he placed at the foot of the tree. Finally he covered both with leaves and twigs before running as fast as he could towards a copse of trees about three hundred yards away. He settled down in the long grass at the trees feet to watch the show. Sure enough about five minutes later a team of jackals approached his former hiding place. He watched them shuffle around it base looking for him, until eventually one of them made the fatal mistake of stepping on the concealed pressure sensor. He smiled and lifted his rifle, sighted and fired all in one swift movement. The blue elite he'd wounded earlier flew back in a spray of blue black blood and lay twitching on the ground his head now sporting a hole in between his eyes. He smiled again. Then he saw it, a flash of gold amongst the red at the command centre. He didn't fire knowing that with only three rounds left in the clip his chances of neutralizing the enemy leader were slim. Quickly he reloaded and sighted, he took a deep breath, let it half out, and then when his sight was steady he fire off four shots in quick succession, the first hit the gold elites shields, the second missed but the third and fourth were head shots. The first dropping the aliens shield and the second dropping him. Davis got up slung his rifle and with out even bothering to reload ran. He knew he'd kicked up a hornets nest and had no intention of being stung.
High in the atmosphere Admiral Harper sat in his flagship, the Victory. He studied the sensor pattern in front of him, trying to think of anything more he could do, he had a means of victory, but at a cost, so he desperately tried to come up with another solution. Beckoning an aide he asked him, "what about the ODST's?"
"Too few of them" he replied.
Admiral Harper was silent for a few minutes. He sighed then turned to his aide and nodded. It was done. There was nothing more he could do. Many decks below a technician programmed some co-ordinates into a computer. When he hit the execute button, a single Jackhammer SOb (Sub Orbital or Son of a Bitch as the techies liked to call it) missile fired from its launch tube. It lived up to its nick name, forty four feet long and a dark silver in color it swelled outwards just before the tip so that it could carry its deadly payload. Its eight control fins gave it superb maneuverability and it carried a number of machines designed to hide it from radar by ionizing the air around it. It was, put bluntly lethal. It sped down through the atmosphere until it was only two hundred feet off the ground then sped at mach 12 round the planet to the opposite side before blasting back into the upper atmosphere and detonating. The tactical nova warhead on it, a smaller version of the usual nova weapon, exploded and totally destroyed the covenant flag ship in orbit above the planet. It also sterilized the planets surface with in fifty mile radius condemning all the covenant and humans within that area to an immediate death.
Admiral Harper sat back in his command chair and closed his eyes. It was done. The covenant invasion was halted. The marines under his command could deal with the stragglers left on the planet surface with out much difficulty.
That was when the main Covenant fleet dropped out of slipspace plasma weapons glowing and spoiling for a fight.





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