Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [53]
We compared notes and found that we’d been in a couple of the same theaters together, separated only by thirty or so miles.
“I can get you aboard my detail, if you want,” she said. “And I promise I won’t flake out on you again.”
“Crap, Felicia, that was a long, long time ago. A lot’s happened since then.”
“I know. You actually saved my life, you know.”
“How’s that?”
“I would have gone back. I would have been sitting on Harvest in my lame-ass Colonial uniform when those goddamn aliens dropped the hammer the second time around.”
I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t want to think about Harvest.
“There were some survivors from the first attack,” Felicia said. “Did you ever look to see . . .”
“My father wasn’t on the rolls, no.”
Felicia nodded. “Mine, either.” Then she leaned in. “Look, I’ll get you a transfer to the Chares, the cruiser I’m aboard. And once up there, there’s someone you need to meet.”
I was intrigued. I hadn’t felt this energized in years, so busy with keeping my head down and focusing on one task at a time. And now here was Felicia, with her energy and friendship.
You know, to tell you the truth, I was scared. Did I dare reach out to her again?
Or would she be dead soon enough, ripping another part of me away with her?
Because how much of that can a person ever truly handle?
I wasn’t sure.
“If we get back to orbit,” Felicia said, “I have a surprise for you.”
An explosion shattered molten rock up in the air, which drizzled back down and reformed. Eventually this castle was going to look like a version of itself that had been placed inside an oven, and half metal.
“If we get back up!” she said, slapping my shoulder. “Get more ammo and get up on the walls. Pelicans should be down here soon.”
Off in the distance a sharklike Covenant Cruiser began to descend from the clouds. From its belly, fierce energy descended upon the land, glassing it into oblivion.
So we hightailed it out of there.
I’d stopped expecting to live, right before I saw her again. After that, I suddenly felt real again. A human being again, with a past, and a life.
ABOARD THE Chares the wounded and battered Marines and ODSTs tended their injuries as we retreated into slipspace. I couldn’t put a figure to the numbers who would have died down there on that planet, but given the cities I saw in the distance, I’d imagine millions.
Despite the glum atmosphere, Felicia hunted me down with an air of excitement.
“Come on,” she said. She led me down through several bays until we came to a smaller bay crammed with Pelicans.
We rounded a corner, and sitting on a chair with a small cooler was Eric.
Freaking Eric was alive.
He stood up and grabbed my hand. “Gage . . .”
“When?” I could barely find the words. “How?”
Felicia looked over at us. “Bastard woke up after five years in a coma and joined the Navy. Became a right flyboy.” She grabbed a beer and studied it. “Rank has its privileges, and Eric has his ways.”
It was almost too much.
I wanted to know everything that had happened. Twenty-two years, more or less.
Twenty-two years, and we were strangers to each other.
And yet we fell right back into the same friendships, like chatting in the back of the empty Pelican, our voices echoing in the chamber of the launch bay.
Felicia was a colonel, Eric flying his way in and out of hell. And I was not much more than a grunt that had been more of a zombie for the last couple decades than anything else.
I may have lost the Outer Colonies, but I suddenly had my friends again.
WHEN THEY told me about the plan, I remember that we were crowded in the back of Eric’s Pelican getting drunk after a particularly messy ground operation. As Eric summed it up: people had died, Covenant had been killed, and we’d once again had to fall back.
“But at least it’s happening less frequently,” I said. “With the Cole Protocol they’re only finding our worlds when they stumble over them.”
Maybe this would give humanity