In the year 2531, 6 years into the Human-Covenant War, the United Nations Space Command’s Office of Naval Intelligence covertly initiated the Spartan-III Program with the express purpose of creating super soldiers similar to the legendary Spartan II Project but in far greater numbers and at highly reduced cost. Hundreds of war orphans between ages five and ten were invited into the program with the promise of achieving revenge against the alien collective known as the Covenant that murdered their families. Three companies were trained in succession between the years 2531 and 2552. Of the three, two companies were sent on suicide missions that though successful, resulted in the deaths of almost all Spartan III personnel. The third, known as Gamma Company and comprised of 330 Spartans finished their training just as the war was coming to a close and never took part in their designated operation. To this day only a few select personnel within the UNSC are privy to the existence and operations of this ‘lost company’.
SPARTAN TEAM WAR HAMMER
OPPERATION TRESSPASS
UNCHARTED PLANET, INSIDE FORMER COVENANT SPACE
SITE LOCATION ALPHA
MAY 7 2556
Chief Warrant Officer Malachai-G102 or simply Mal as he preferred made his way down the craggy volcanic hillside toward the Forerunner installation nestled inside a crater that until recently had been the interior of an active volcano. The Spartan stopped for a moment and lowered his scanner over his visor just to make sure there weren’t any ‘guests’ visiting. Even a month after the eruption, ash was still heavy in the air and a person could barely see a hundred feet in any direction if they didn’t have specialized equipment. Mal spotted the facility’s entrance poking out of the crater’s wall around a kilometer away as well as his squad leader, Commander Ulrich-G071, standing guard near their retrofitted ONI Pelican with his SAW resting on his shoulder. “Boss is outside?” The Spartan scout said to himself in the quiet confines of his helmet. “Guess things are getting a little cramped in there.” His team had been on this molten rock for five days now (three more than they should have) investigating the installation so UNSC scientists could go in and not accidentally hit a blow up the universe button Forerunners were so fond of installing in their works.
This was one of their usual ops, other times they would be investigating abandoned Covenant outposts and on occasion War Hammer would get a combat mission against Covenant remnants. Sabotaging arms factories, disabling warships and other such complex facilities. But today their orders were to inspect this forerunner hole in the ground, determine scientific value of the installation and evict any hostile alien squatters if necessary.
It was a pretty thankless job being a covert team of Spartans, especially Spartan III’s but the way Mal saw it, they were the ones doing the important work unlike the IV’s. Those showboats could polish their glossy colorful armor on Infinity and hog all the glory they wanted; they were just pale knockoffs in Mal’s eyes. They were augmented and had MJOLNIR armor, but they weren’t Spartans, they were just soldiers playing Spartan. Their squads hadn’t been together since they were children, haven’t been conducting training exercises and studying military tactics for most of their lives. They didn’t have that intuitive bond between each other that a team of Spartans needed to function flawlessly. So they could strut all they wanted like the cocks they were while the real Spartans of Gamma Company did the heavy lifting throughout the rest of the galaxy.
Since the end of the war, good old ONI took Gamma’s Spartan III’s and retooled them into proper special forces squads as Commander Kurt had envisioned them to be. The Spartans got to ditch their inferior SPI armor for complete access to all variants of the GEN 2 MJOLNIR Armor Systems and armor equipment. It felt like graduation all over again when Mal suited up in his Scout/Scanner armor for the first time. Since then his squad had made more practical upgrades to their armor to improve survivability and equipment load civilian manufacturers forgot to put as a higher priority over aesthetics. Now most of Gamma’s teams were working for the Office of Naval Intelligence under the Army’s Special Warfare Group Three doing all matter of black operations that were otherwise unknown of to the rest of the UNSC. Some were running counter terrorism ops on the few outer colonies that survived the war, others were still fighting against Covenant remnants and making sure the alien collective never posed a threat to humanity again. Such high risk operations were their lives. Mal thought ahead to where he’d be 20 years from now. Himself and most of his teammates were only in their late teens now and had already participated in dozens of missions over the past four years. Maybe in twenty years, they’d be as revered as their second generation predecessors were now, he hoped.
Mal waved at Ulrich as he approached, volcanic rock crunching beneath his boots with a metric ton of armor and Spartan pushing into the ground. “You were gone for over a day.” Mal’s CO said sternly. His khaki and white Warrior variant helmet probably mimicked the humorless expression beneath it.
“Come on boss, you know how I love hiking with extreme prejudice.” Mal replied in his slightly drawling accent. now standing in front of Ulrich beneath the pelican’s overhanging tail. “And for the record, I was right.”
“What’d you find?” Ulrich asked motioning his head to the dull grey thermal resistant bag on Mal’s back and holding out an offering hand to take Mal’s DMR.
Mal accepted the offer and gave Ulrich his rifle while he set the bag down and went through its contents. “Apes,” Mal said as he exhumed the bloodstained golden helmet of a Brute Captain-Major with a large caliber bullet hole through the left temple, delivered from Mal’s collapsible SRS99-S5 AM Sniper Rifle he kept on shoulder mounted brackets above his jetpack. “Found eight of ’em twenty or so clicks northwest of here with a…cargo transport I think.” Mal said assumingly. “Ship wasn’t armed anyway and I made sure it won’t be of use to anyone else.” Ulrich didn’t reply, he just stood motionless, likely contemplating enemy presence and what measures they should take now.
“So, looks like ONI weren’t the only ones to pick up that signal this place sent out when eruption uncovered it ay boss.”
“How heavily armed were the Brutes?” the Commander asked.
“Spikers, grenade launchers, near a dozen ‘stickies’ between them, I pocketed those. This guy had a grav-hammer but it was all out of juice, had been for some time too by the look of it.” Mal motioned the helmet again before dropping it back into the bag and sealing it up. “Nothing sophisticated like plasma weapons though.”
“Well then it looks like the prophets’ big dumb gorillas have been hung out to dry.” A new voice chimed in. Mal didn’t even need to look to know it was, his younger brother Jer. Warrant Officer Jeremiah G103, Mal’s only living relative and the team’s demolitions expert/resident smartass. As he strode up to them in his dirty orange and brown HAZOP variant armor with two long bandoleers of explosive charges and 40mm grenades hanging down his torso. “Sure will make killin’ ‘em a helluva lot easier without their high-tech crap.”
Ulrich turned to Jer. “Or it will just make them more desperate.” he voiced and held Mal’s rifle out to him while continuing to glare at Jer. Mal was quick to take back his rifle, Ulrich’s annoyance with Jer obvious. Mal loved his brother but god he could talk your damn ear off sometimes. “Come on Mal, let’s get inside, your filters are probably clogged with ash.” Ulrich started toward the installation’s entrance and his teammates fell in behind him. Five days of sitting inside a dull and lifeless forerunner facility while the team’s two tech experts were busy trying to figure out what was what. Not exactly thrilling work for a recon sniper like Mal but this was better than doing anti-insurrectionist ops against their fellow man and all in all today had worked out pretty well the rifleman thought, bag of bloodstained souvenirs swaying back and forth on his back as he walked.
The three of Fireteam War Hammer’s Spartans worked their way through the installation’s small maze of corridors to what they had presumed to be the control room of this place. It reminded Mal of a gothic cathedral if cathedrals were made out of shiny metal and hard light, that is.
“I jus’ can’t believe you went hiking without me Mal.” His younger brother complained.
“You’re too loud Jer.” Mal replied.
Jer gave an annoyed huff back at him before rebutting. “Hey I’m jus’ as soft-footed as you are brother…and don’t you give some smartass remark ‘bout me talkin’ too much.”
“Don’t need to Jer, you already made my point for me.”
“Ah, screw off.” Jer said jokingly, finally giving up.
With that out of the way, Mal spoke up to Ulrich while looking around the sloped ceiling of the cathedral. “Hey boss, where’s our little black cat? I brought back a treat for her.”
Ulrich thumbed up. “In the rafters, as usual.”
“Yeah, that’s what I thought. Still damn scary that I can’t ever spot her.” Mal switched to the squad comm channel. “Hey Mia, you up?”
A black shape peaked out from behind one of the supporting trusses above. “Yeah?” Mia replied. Warrant Officer Mia G099 was the team’s infiltration expert and for some reason she always liked being up high. Mal or the other members of the squad never asked, they respected her too much and figured whatever it was, she had a good reason for it. Besides, a pair of eyes up high came in handy.
“Brought you a present courtesy of the local trouble.” The black shape disappeared for a moment before he saw her again, now swiftly and flawlessly moving down the large support column with the deadly grace of a panther or leopard. The effect was all the more amplified by her blacked-out Recon variant armor. Mal fetched the object out of the soft case on his left thigh as she now approached and held it out to her. “Brute hand-to-hand weapon.” Mal said as she examined it. It was a sort of knife, the blade curved from the handle over the knuckles and ended at eight inches with a deadly point. The bladed weapon looked a bit too big for the 17-year-old Spartan of 5’ 10” but one short demonstration of Mia getting the feel of the weapon, twirling and carving through the air showed that size was of no issue to her.
“Not bad.” She said, latching it on to her left thigh’s magnetic holster.
Mal tipped his head in a short nod. “Glad you like it.”
“Come on,” Ulrich spoke up before moving on. “Let’s check on Alexei, he said he was getting close.”
The rest of War Hammer fell in behind. “Well it’s about damn time, sittin’ on my hands for near a week ain’t my idea of a shindig. Hey boss, if it turns out our two geniuses don’t actually have it figured out, can I blow this place so we can all go home?” Jer asked.
“I’ll take that into consideration Hammer Three.” Ulrich said.
They ascended a ramp up to the main control center at the end of the cathedral where dwelled the source of their frustrations. The area was dominated by a fifty-meter-wide hole in the floor with two concentric rings floating at the perimeter. Ahead of the team stood their number five, Alexei at a podium near the hole’s edge surrounded partially by a hard light interface.
Lieutenant Commander Alexei B200 was the team’s odd duck. He was one of the rare III’s from Beta Company. Commander Kurt had him pulled from the rest of his company for having the highest recorded IQ of any Spartan on record and presented him to ONI who then took to him like a bear to honey. ONI trained Alexei thoroughly, turning him into the ultimate combat engineer, able to counter and subvert covenant hardware and software, something which could potentially turn the tide of battle. They taught him all humanity knew about covenant and forerunner tech and Alexei absorbed the information like a sponge, exceeding all expectations. It was not hard to believe that Alexei not only tested his Engineer variant armor, but helped design it too. Alexei was also the reason War Hammer were often requested for these types of missions.
Originally, the team had a different number five, Daniel G287. That was back during training on Onyx with the rest of the Company. The team knew they were in the top 5 ranked Spartan teams in the company and confidant they would participate in the top honors competition but that dream was cut short when Daniel died during an airborne training exercise due to jetpack malfunction. ‘One in a million’, Commander Kurt had said, ‘an unpredictable accident’. The team felt crushed, not only loosing their place in the competition to Team Gladius but also a cherished teammate.
Luckily though, Commander Kurt had special plans for them. They and two other teams were pulled from the Company to become Special Operations units even before the rest of their fellow Spartan III’s got retooled post war. ONI assigned Alexei who had completed his advanced training to fill War Hammer’s empty slot and the five of them had been working together ever since.
Mal stood at the edge looking around the hole. “This is the thing that’s been holding us up for the past three days?” Mal asked.
“Yes.” Their teammate replied simply. Alexei’s cut-and-dry speech was full of subtleties if you listened for them. For his reply just now for example he put a slight inclination on the Y telling Mal he was a little more than slightly frustrated.
“Where’s Bob?” Mal asked.
“Sent him down to re-root power to whatever this device is and the central terminal it’s plugged into. Normal connections were disabled.” Alexei replied.
Bob or Unexpected Bobbing was an Engineer or Huragok in the Sangheili language, a biological supercomputer created by the forerunners hundreds of thousands of years ago to be the perfect mechanic. And as it turns out, the perfect mechanic is a purple squid looking creature with a long wormy neck and a large sack of gas bladders for a body. They had been the slave backbone of the Covenant for centuries and were a major factor in its downfall when the Engineers up and left during the former empire’s collapse. The UNSC managed to recruit a number of these former slaves during and after the war along with several forerunner originals discovered later. Their naming came from an individual aspect regarding how they floated in the air. Jer was the one who started calling Unexpected Bobbing Bob and the name just stuck. ONI had assigned Bob for the duration of this mission, being that War Hammer was to go deep inside former Covenant space to investigate this installation. This was much to Alexei’s dislike, feeling more than capable after all these years of doing work like this without outside assistance but ONI wanted this op done quick.
With an audible whir and sets of blue lights coming to life around the machine, it seemed Bob had done his job. New screens opened up on the hard-light display Alexei was viewing and he quickly dove into the new information. “The device is working now Bob, get back up here on the double.” Ulrich ordered into the comm.
“Hey Alexei, are you sure that this thing isn’t some kind of, I don’t know, prototype Halo?” Mal asked.
Without even slowing down his pace, Alexei replied. “We’ve been to both installations three and five Mal, I’d know by now if this was a Halo. More likely another model of a teleportation device given the warehouse of Sentinels you and Mia found down the hole.”
“Portal to where?” Jer asked, joining his elder brother near the hole’s edge.
“I’m about to fi-…what?” Alexei said unexpectedly to everyone’s surprise.
“What is it?” Ulrich was quick to ask, moving up beside Alexei who was still trying to work the red flashing interface.
“Locked up when I tried to access deeper files on this thing.” Alexei replied to Ulrich with bewilderment barely detectable in his voice. “It would take me an hour to explain why that shouldn’t happen.”
“Bob, triple time it, we got a problem up here.” Ulrich spoke again into the squad comm. No sooner had he said that, the strange looking biological machine floated out of the deep hole.
“I am here Ulrich Gamma Zero-Seven-One.” Came the artificial voice from the Spartans’ translator software. In reality, Engineer spoke with a combination of whale-like vocalizations and sign language using their tentacles, so a translator was needed on both ends for any sort of interaction to happen.
Ulrich stepped to the side of the podium to address the creature. “Hammer Five was examining the information on this device when the system locked up on him. We need you to fix it.”
Bob gave a deep nod of his head to Ulrich. “I will do as requested, Ulrich Gamma Zero-Seven-One. Alexei Beta Two-Zero-Zero may I have access to the interface?” Alexei reluctantly stepped away from the podium for the Engineer.
Bob raised his tentacles to the controls and the Spartans observed how they split into innumerable cilia. Bob glided them over the controls, in seconds unlocking the system and then took a step further by replacing Alexei in exploring the information on the interface, only at ten times the speed.
“Stop, we only needed you to unlock the system, I can handle the rest.” Alexei spoke up but it appeared Bob didn’t care or was too engrossed in the data. The entire cathedral was suddenly alive with cold cyan light. The device began emitting a high pitched whir and the lower ring began to spin rapidly. “Commander!” Alexei alerted to Ulrich.
“Bob stop!” Ulrich yelled seconds before the lower ring around the hole began glowing and a bright flash followed that, temporarily blinding the Spartans along with the Engineer. Just long enough for their guard to be impaired so they couldn’t react when they were all suddenly and violently sucked through the portal before they even realized what had happened.
\\O///
A memory crept into Ulrich’s mind of his training back on Onyx, particularly the first time he was put through an exercise where a team was flash-banged and then immediately put through a live fire exercise. Ulrich recalled those first few disembodied seconds, where you can’t see, hear of feel anything and your sense of balance is almost completely lost. What he was feeling right now was so similar, he expected for a fraction of a second that Senior Chief Petty Officer Mendez would start screaming at him to get up on his feet and into the fight. That memory of that grizzled old man who smelled faintly of Sweet Williams Cigars screaming at him was all it took to kick Ulrich back into gear. His heart raced as adrenaline flooded his body. He felt himself move his limbs and was struck by a sensation of floating. Not good. At least he could feel the death-grip his right hand had on the pistol grip of his SAW, so at least he still had that. Ulrich blinked his eyes continuously to clear them and after what seemed an eternity but was more realistically only a second or two. His eyes finally began to clear and he could see a blurry shade of purple fill his vision. He didn’t allow his mind the luxury of pausing at the strange sight and instead craned his head around to get a better look at his surroundings. To his left the purple faded to black but Ulrich now detected light coming from his right. He quickly turned his head right only to almost be blinded once more if it was not for his visor’s auto polarization. The sun…a sun, the portal had spat them out over a damn planet! And then Ulrich realized…he was falling.
Suddenly all his senses cleared with his realization of what was happening. “Spartans, Spartans say status! We are in freefall!” Ulrich shouted into the squad comm. The Spartan leader magnetically latched his SAW between the boosters on his back and flipped his body over to get an assessment on his altitude. His Heads-Up-Display’s altimeter came to life on the right side of the display as he got a look at the ground rushing up to meet him, 9800 meters and falling.
“Boss!” Mal shouted through the channel. “I got a visual on you; I’m a thirty meters to your eight o’clock.” Ulrich quickly spotted him thanks to his HUD’s IFF waypoint tracking. Ulrich spotted Alexei’s tag and followed the arrow on his HUD. He was 68 meters to his front and was nearly 20 meters lower in altitude.
“Alexei! Hammer Two, do you read!”
“I read you Lieutenant, status is green.” Came Alexei’s calm reply to Ulrich’s relief, though he detected an aggressive undertone. Most likely for the Engineer who had gotten them into this mess in the first place. Ulrich would have a few choice words himself for Bob when they’d find the little gasbag.
“Boss,” Mal spoke up again. “I’ve got our black cat and Jer on my scanner but their way far off, plus one-eight-zero meters and drifting.” Mal notified before turning his attention back to his younger brother. “Hey Jer, you up?”
“What…whoa, shit! Jesus, Moses and Mohammed what the fuck’s goin’ on?! How’d we get up here?” Ulrich heard his demolitions expert panic. “Oh the little fart-bag royally screwed us, didn’t he?”
“Confirmed Hammer Three.” Ulrich replied before turning his attention to the final member of his team. “Mia, what’s your status?”
“Green, sir.” Came her reply.
“Glad to hear, now listen up Spartans, we’ve done high altitude jumps before; we trigger our thruster packs just before we hit the ground. Once we’re down, regroup on…”
“Boss! Fast-moving contact, nine o’clock high!” Mal alerted but it was already too late. Some kind of shockwave hit with an unbelievable chromatic explosion like nothing Ulrich had ever seen or heard of.
\\O///
Far below in a city built on the side of a mountain, the mood was very different.
“An impressive display,” Talos the Griffin King remarked to the pony Diarch beside him. Even upon seeing the fabled sonic rainboom, his well-worn and scarred face remained as stoic as ever.
“I guarantee your majesty, it’s a sight that doesn’t lose its appeal no matter how many times you see it.” Princess Celestia replied with a pleasant smile as she stared into the distance at the dispersing waves of light.
King Talos turned his head toward the alicorn to address a different matter. “I apologize for arriving as late as we are princess, our journey was unexpectedly delayed by a storm while we were passing through the mountains.”
“Perfectly understandable King Talos. Now if you are ready, I’d be delighted to show you to the castle.
Through This Window
