Operation: DRAGOON

Chapter Two

Spartan-A196, surface of unnamed planet, near unidentified energy source. 1229 Hours, December 03, 2552 (Military Calendar)

Lisa kept her eye glued to the scope, slowly sweeping it over the town before her.

It didn’t look like anything Insurrectionists would create. All the houses were wooden with thatched roofs, clustered in a loose formation around a three-tiered building that was sat next to a small river. She saw it cut off a few houses from the majority, winding its way into a nearby forest where it was lost from sight.

There was a farmhouse on top of the hill directly opposite her, standing proud above bare trees arranged into precise rows, with what looked to be an apple on top of a weather vane sitting on the highest point. Lisa could just about make out the dial spinning lazily around.

Was this worth breaking radio silence over? She had discovered a potential Insurrectionist stronghold that housed some kind of powerful and unknown energy source, of which there were at least two others, and had evidence that the place was inhabited.

However, to break radio silence Lisa would have to exit the dead zone surround the town and risk alerting anyone in the area that had a radio direction finder up and running, an old and vague means of navigating but, if tuned to COM frequencies, could reveal the Spartan’s basic direction and range to the operator. There wasn’t any concrete evidence of this anywhere but it never hurt to consider it a possibility.

Stealth was her weapon and defence against any enemies the planet might have and Colbert would likely just order Lisa to observe the town and avoid further radio contact unless the situation demanded it. Maintaining that weapon would serve her better in the potential long run.

Lisa nodded once and kept sweeping the town, shifting her thoughts to when sunrise would be for this town.

Should she find a suitable place to set up camp and rest until daybreak or wait it out where she was, ready in case anything happened that needed her attention?

She didn’t feel tired or hungry, her weapons hadn’t been fired so it was unlikely they’d need cleaning or maintaining, and it would take her at most ten minutes to set up a suitable encampment in the nearby forest.

She’d stay put for the moment.

Lisa shifted into a more comfortable and stable firing position, rifle tucked firmly against her shoulder, and settled ahead of a potentially long wait.

Spartan-A196, surface of unnamed planet, near unidentified energy source. 1652 Hours, December 03, 2552 (Military Calendar)

Dawn came slowly, starting out as a faint glow on the planet’s west that quickly developed into a brilliant golden ball which crept up from behind the hills and mountains, bathing the town in a soft light and giving Lisa a proper look at it.

Her eyes had virtual night vision following a series of augmentations her body had been put through, enabling Lisa to see in the darkest of places with little to no external light sources. Coupled with image enhancements built into her armour, Lisa was able to see the town in the pitch black as if it were day.

But seeing it with proper illumination was so much better. It gave the lone Spartan a more realistic idea of what lay before her.

With the first rays of the sun’s light came the first signs of life from the town.

Peering through her scope, Lisa watched as several doors and windows were opened, fully expecting to see humans wearing mismatched pieces of armour or faded fatigues step out to go about their business.

She did not expect to see brightly coloured four legged creatures emerge from the buildings, some of whom took flight and sped off to fields or the clouds above.

Lisa tracked one such creature, brow furrowing in confusion as it seemed to push a cloud away towards the forest. How could they possibly manipulate something that was essentially condensed water vapour which parted before even the most softest of substances?

Yet as she watched, more of the four legged creatures took flight and began moving the clouds to a set location, actually herding them into place.

The Spartan watched them for a further five minutes then switched back to the town below, pushing the magnification of her scope as far as it would go.

Upon closer inspection, Lisa saw that the creatures were almost identical in appearance to horses, but smaller and with a wider variety of coat colours, some of which she was sure didn’t occur in humanity’s horses.

She watched a vibrant pink horse with a mane and tail that looked like someone had taken a pump and inflated it step out of a house which looked like a cross between a cake and a gingerbread house, complete with three lit candles on top, then go into a series of jerky body movements including vibrating on the spot and flopping ears.

Baffled, Lisa continued to watch as the horse then waved in her general direction and went off somewhere, out of sight.

Shaking her head, the Spartan turned her scope over the rest of the town right as something sped over her, something fast enough to throw up dust and leave behind a faint sonic boom. Lisa moved her scope to track the high speed object, only to see it was another of the flying horses, this one a light blue with a rainbow coloured mane.

Stranger still, it seemed to leave behind a contrail that was the exact same as its mane and tail.

Lisa watched as it headed straight for the clouds being positioned above a barren patch of earth and helped organise them.

A few minutes later, Lisa heard a whirring noise similar to a Falcon, a tilt wing aircraft that used rotors to fly. She titled her head in the noise’s direction and just stared, stumped, as a tortoise flew past, a helicopter blade affixed to its shell and a pair of goggles over its eyes, heading straight for the town.

Whatever this place was, and why the Insurrectionists had coordinates leading here, was a mystery that kept getting more and more strange the longer Lisa spent there.

She tracked the tortoise until it became too small to see then re-evaluated her situation.

Visible contact had been made with an alien species, albeit a race that looked remarkably similar to one humanity already knew about, that was intelligent enough to know about agriculture and engineering if the farms and flying tortoises were anything to go by. But at the same time, this planet, or at least the system, was known to the Insurrection. There was a small chance that the natives were in alliance with them and opposed to the UNSC, which meant that Lisa or anyone onboard the Shadow Boxer would be met with hostility.

She mulled the idea of breaking radio silence for a few minutes.

The discovery of a new alien race was more important than staying hidden.

Lisa crawled backwards, away from the town and out of the bushes, then ducked into the forest to her left and began walking out of the energy source’s reach to a place where she could try and contact the Boxer.

Spartan-A196, surface of unnamed planet, near unidentified energy source. 1701 Hours, December 03, 2552 (Military Calendar)

‘You discovered a whole new race?’ Colbert said over the radio as Lisa crouched in a depression from where she could watch the road for more of the horses and not be seen.

‘Yes, ma’am,’ Lisa said. ‘Though I’m not sure horses qualify as ‘new’.’

‘Horses?’

‘Yes, ma’am. They share the same physical anatomy as horses but smaller and with a wider pallet of colours to choose from,’ Lisa said, recalling the pink horse and the blue blur. ‘Shall I maintain an observation point and watch or initiate a first contact scenario?’

‘That depends on your assessment of the situation,’ Colbert said. ‘Do you feel that there’s an Insurrection presence within the town?’

‘No, ma’am. I haven’t seen any evidence that they are here,’ she said. ‘All I’ve seen are the horses. And a flying tortoise.’

There was silence from Colbert’s end for several seconds and Lisa could image the commander displaying the same expression of disbelief that she’d had upon seeing the tortoise fly past.

‘Okay,’ Colbert finally said. ‘Here are your orders, Spartan. You are t- -ainta- -tion.’  Static began overlapping Colbert and the radio began whining, trying to scrub the transmission. ‘-thing is in- -ering with yo-. Try to-‘

Whatever command Colbert was about to give was cut off, the line finally becoming overloaded with static, prompting Lisa to sweep her battle rifle in a full circle, looking for anything out of the ordinary.

Her COM had been jammed by something, something powerful, and she fully expected to see Insurrectionist forces closing in on her from all sides.

Only she didn’t see anything.

Her motion tracker was clear, there were no anomalous thermal readings and there was no movement other than the swaying of branches in a stiff breeze.

That left one other possible explanation: the energy source had been moved closer to her position. It was the only thing that so far had been fouling her gear.

If it was the energy source, why was it suddenly mobile? And for what purpose?

Lisa couldn’t come up with any decent ideas. She had no idea what this energy source looked like or even what it was used for. She’d have to get eyes on it to make more concrete guesses.

She checked the area for movement but saw none, setting out back to the town and its unusual power signature.

Spartan-A196, surface of unnamed planet, near unidentified energy source. 1715 Hours, December 03, 2552 (Military Calendar)

Lisa stopped in a break in the trees, battle rifle up and pointed in the direction of the town. She hadn’t reached the brow of the hill where her observation point had been. A small nagging voice in the back of mind had told her to stop where she was, a voice Lisa had been taught to listen to by her instructor all those years ago during training and so far, it hadn’t let her down.

She dropped to a crouch and rested her rifle on a particularly thick branch for better stability, activating the auto-zoom and focusing on where the path came over the hill.

She flicked her eye to her motion tracker, hoping to use it as an early warning in case something came for her, but frowned when it displayed a mass of red and yellow dots, swarming all over the place. Evidently, the interference was affecting that as well.

But why? Lisa had been inside the dead zone before and her motion tracker was clear. Unless the closer to the energy source, the worse it got to the point that her more basic sensors would ultimately fail as well.

The Spartan shut it down. The tracker was all but useless.

Instead, she paid more attention to her aural systems, boosting them to the point that every noise of the forest filled her ears. She got used to them, memorising what belonged and what didn’t, then mentally filtered it all out, listening out for a sound that wasn’t part of the forest.

She heard one a scant minute later, hooves coming down on packed dirt, too many to be just one of the horses.

Voices followed them within seconds and Lisa tensed, awaiting her first up close look at the aliens/horses. She couldn’t make out any identifiable words, just melodic gibberish. It was almost childlike and it was getting louder.

The Spartan dialled back her aural sensors until they were back to their normal setting and the forest fell back to an almost imperceptible hum, replaced with approaching hooves and unintelligible voices.

Her finger rested on the trigger as the same blue blur she had seen not twenty minutes ago came flying over the hill, stopping to hover as five more horses appeared, including the pink horse that had waved in Lisa’s direction.

Now that they were closer and not moving, Lisa saw the blue horse had a pair of wings that held it aloft. The pink horse had no wings.

Two others in the crowd had wings, a horse with a light yellow coat and a soft pink mane, and another whose coat was purple and had a mane of deep blue interspersed with streaks of vibrant pink but rather than just having wings, this one had a horn on its head too.

There was only one other horse that possessed a horn, a brilliant white one with a much darker purple. The last two, the pink one and an orange horse wearing a cowboy hat over a blonde mane tied into a ponytail, had neither horns nor wings.

Lisa could classify the winged horses as Pegasi and the white one with a horn as a unicorn, but didn’t quite know what to label the purple one that had both. A winged unicorn? A Pegacorn? A Unicus?

None of them seemed to fit so Lisa shoved the thought to the back of her mind, focusing on the six horses as they went off the path and headed to her old hiding spot in the bushes, led by the pink one.

Did it know Lisa had been there? It had, after all, waved at her earlier.

As they walked, Lisa noticed that the blue Pegasus stayed aloft, circling the group, as the pink horse skipped rather than walk normally as the other four did, bouncing around the bush when it reached the foliage, proudly proclaiming something Lisa couldn’t understand.

The five horses took it in turns to examine the bush, sometimes poking at something, possibly a bent or flattened blade of grass, all the while talking to each other. Occasionally, they would scan the forest and twice their gazes swept across Lisa but made no reaction. They hadn’t spotted the Spartan.

She took her finger off the trigger. Colbert hadn’t been able to give her full instructions and this was a first contact scenario. UNSC guidelines called for her to make cautious attempts at communication with any sentient life she came across.

So far, Lisa hadn’t seen anything that would give her the impression that these horses, these aliens, would react negatively upon seeing her.

She clamped her battle rifle to her back and backtracked to a wider break in the trees, emerging from the dark undergrowth and into the bright light and open fields, hands spread wide to show they were empty.

Lisa took a deep breath and began walking over to the group. Diplomacy was not her strength and up until now, her past dealings with aliens had resolved around fighting. This was going to be a whole new experience for her.

The Spartan managed to get within fifty metres of the horses when the yellow Pegasus saw her and let out a shrill shriek of fear.

Almost instantly, the others turned to face Lisa and froze, eyes widening in fear and surprise.

Lisa came to a halt as well, trying to gauge their reactions.

‘I come in peace?’