• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

So I soldiered on, battle after battle.

I almost saw my end in a hastily dug out trench on Skopje, an Inner Colony world. Unlike most of the wilder Outer Colonies, this world had highly built up urban areas, roads, and railways. It was an entire civilization sprawled across its island continents.

From the trench, if I turned to look behind me, I could see a skyline glinting and blazing in the sun over a red marbled museum. But back in front: mud.

We were sent in to protect the headquarters of a shipbuilding corporation during the evacuation of their shipyards. The machines, tools, and personnel that could be saved would be relocated to Reach, to continue building parts for the war effort.

Our headquarters were the halls of a nearby city museum, the grounds of which served as our landing zone and held all the quickly placed antiaircraft batteries.

“This is the fallback point, there is nowhere else to go,” we were told. “So you hold the perimeter at all costs.”

Covenant air support dared not attack us directly, not for several blocks. So they threw Grunts at us. Thousands of them in brutal house-to-house warfare, their numbers overwhelming our loose perimeter. We fell back and regrouped, drawing them in until we were foxholed on the edges of the vast museum gardens. We let the Grunts charge us across the muddy field.

They’d pushed us back, but we still simply thought of them as cannon fodder, waiting until they got close enough to hit their methane tanks and watch them explode. Now that we had our open ground and dug in positions, we slaughtered them.

But they kept coming. And after waves of screaming Grunts came the races higher up in the Covenant food chain: Jackal snipers, Brutes rushing the line, and then finally Elites, flashing their energy swords as they got in close enough to the melee.

The trenches got cut off, communication lost, and I found myself crouched in between two walls of mud with another ODST, waiting for the Covenant to leap in with us.

This would be it. We’d go down fighting in the mud, I thought.

But instead, in an explosion of mud, a two-ton powered suit of gray-green armor landed between us. “Follow me!” the powerful baritone voice behind the gold visor ordered.

Then it leaped over the edge into the fray, plasma discharges slapping the powered armor.

We followed.

The armored human was like a tank, clearing the way for us. It shrugged off Grunts like they were annoying mosquitoes, tackled Brutes face on, and was an equal match for any Elite.

We were led to a giant castle, like something out of a picture book, with large antiaircraft guns mounted along the walls and AIE-486H heavy machine guns on the parapets pointed down.

Inside we were left by the giant armored man.

“What the hell was that?” I asked the Marine in the courtyard.

“Special ONI project. They call them Spartans. Engineered to be the best, armored with the best. Haven’t you heard the ONI announcements? They’ll be ending the war with these sons of bitches running through the Covenant soon enough!”

The ODSTs weren’t the cutting edge hard-asses anymore.

I’d just seen the future of warfare. I wasn’t in it.

I didn’t have time to dwell on this, because suddenly an all-too-familiar voice said, “Gage? Gage Yevgenny? Is that really you?”

And I turned to see Felicia standing with a BR55 slung under one arm and a canteen in the other.

“Felicia?” There were wrinkles in her tanned, leathery face. But all these years would do that. We’d just been kids the last time we saw each other, really.

She ran over and hugged me, a strong clench, and then she shoved me back. “I can’t frigging believe you’re alive!”

I was just as stunned. “What are you doing here?”

“Holed up, same as you. The castle was my call. Some CEO had it made using actual quarried rock from outside the city. Covenant low-level energy weapons don’t vaporize the rock; they just melt it a bit more, making it even stronger. We’re waiting for some Pelicans to get us the hell out now that they took the museum off your grubby hands.”

She had a jagged scar across her