November 27th, 2525
UNSC Commonwealth (Paris-class Heavy Frigate)
Entering orbit around Chi Ceti IV
1750 hours
(David Pov)
"S-003 reporting," I marched through the automatic doors leading to the bridge and stopped at attention, giving a salute to the captain of the ship.
"At ease," hearing Captain Wallace's acknowledgement, I shifted my stance.
"All Spartans are in the hangar and are ready for deployment to the Damascus Testing Facility on the surface of Chi Ceti IV," I delivered a status report to both the Captain and Catherine as she stood beside him, listening intently.
"Good work, Chief Petty Officer," the man in front of me said with a gruff voice. I nodded, but couldn't help but notice the slight unease in his body language. The way his eyes narrowed every time we spoke, or his posture, which was a bit more defensive than the one he had with other soldiers.
'He's not the only one,' I glance out of the corner of my eye, catching a glimpse of other crewmen on the bridge giving me uncomfortable looks.
He looked to Catherine, "We'll be at the drop off point within an hour. I suggest you head to the hangar and load up with the rest of your Spartans," he said with clear displeasure.
"If I didn't know any better, Captain, then I would think that you are trying to kick me out," she retorted with an equally icy tone, "Need I remind you that you are me and my project's escort and hence not in charge of the mission,"
"I understand that, doctor," he said with a glare, "But in order for my ship to escort you safely. I would prefer if civilian personnel stayed out of my bridge."
Throughout the argument, I stood at ease simply observing. The doctor almost always butted heads with any form of military leadership. Whenever it came to anything even remotely related to the Spartan program, it had to be done her way without exception.
But I paused that line of thought. In the distance, I spotted a glimmer of light through the front viewport. In the instant, it seemed that only I had noticed it, mostly due to my enhanced eyesight. It was too bright to be a star, and its shape didn't fit in with the background. Then, just as it appeared, the flash dissipated back into the dark canopy of space.
"Captain, I-I got a contact, just slipped in," my eyes darted over to a crewman as he nervously called out information.
'I got a bad feeling,' my chest was tight, because I doubted whatever just slip-spaced in was friendly, and I was hoping that, at the very least, our enemy would be human, just this time.
The captain gave the doctor a look to table their argument before turning back to face the front viewport, "Give me eyes on, and a position vector," he ordered as his eyes carefully watched a screen as it pulled up an image of the enemy ship.
My eyes narrowed into points as I saw a purple blob of a ship that was certainly not of any human origin appear on a screen. The Spartans as a whole had been briefed about the little information we had gathered surrounding our new enemy. The fact that they were aliens of several unique species and the fact that they boasted technology vastly superior to our own.
Weapons that could melt through a man in a matter of moments. Ships that held the power to win a 3-1 battle while being a fraction of the other human ships' size. All of my classmates, my fellow Spartans, understood the gravity of the situation. We had received a formal declaration of war, a vow that these inhuman creatures would exterminate all of humanity out of existence. All for their so-called gods, under their name: The Covenant.
And we only had one response.
As I was analyzing the ship, another crew member spoke up after gathering the other piece of information, "The enemy ship is 80 million kilometers and closing, sir!"
Everyone, except for me and the doctor, let out a sigh of relief. "Very well, maintain course," he said strictly, but there was a hint of newly added ease in his voice.
"Captain, I suggest the crew go to their battle stations," Catherine approached Captain Wallace with a serious expression.
"Doctor, at their distance and velocity, we will easily be able to stay far enough away from them to avoid being fired upon."
Catherine sighed before her face grew grim, "Captain, this detail is still classified, but there has been evidence that this enemy, the Covenant, is capable of making in-system slip space jumps."
For the first time since I arrived at the bridge, my expression changed as my eyes widened at the information, 'In an in-system jump? That's… impossible or at least it should be,' Slip space as a whole was a messy subject. It hadn't progressed as a technology very far from its introduction back in 2291 with the Shaw-Fujikawa slip space engine.
But the reason why an in-system jump was so insane was due to the inaccuracy of slip space drives, or rather, our slip space drives. Never mind the fact that humanity was incapable of opening slip space portals anywhere near a gravity well. To do even a relatively small jump, thousands of complex calculations were required, and even then, the imprecision of it all forced ships to slip into the edge of a system and use their sub-light engines to reach orbit, which could take days.
And the Captain knew this as well, as his eyes widened with shock before he tried to dismiss the doctor's rumors, "That's impossible, that technology is decades, if not a century away-"
"For us it is," the doctor cut him off, giving him a look.
The Captain sighed, shaking his head, "All hands report to battle stations. Bring all weapons systems online, push the reactor to 90%," he barked, giving Catherine a look that said 'I hope you are right about this'.
"That ship just disappeared-" Just as the crewman finished speaking, a blue light in the shape of a disc glowed above the viewport. I reacted first, my head snapping to look up at it, and I saw the underbelly of the ship as it glided over.
The ship was smaller than the frigate I stood on by a good margin. The hull was rounded, making arcs and curves instead of the boxy, sharp corners and efficient designs of UNSC ships. Lights of various systems glowed faintly in the ship's shadow, some in colors of purple while others were green. 3 almost rudder-like spines sprouted from the bottom of what I assumed to be the head of the ship, as, instead of having any different parts with different heights, the ship was remarkably flat. And finally, every inch of it seemed to be plated with some type of purple metal alloy.
The Captain was awed for a moment by the sheer precedence of what just happened, like the rest of the crew, before he snapped out of it, "Prime Archer Missile pods! Launch when ready!" Quickly, the men and women began to work.
An alarm sounded as a screen from a camera pointed at our rear covered the screen in high priority. The ship had completely eclipsed us and had managed to do a U-turn before we could turn to face it. New purple lights crackled to life as they departed from the top of the purple hull. They came toward us with incredible speed, faster than any rocket I'd seen fired, while also leaving some type of trail behind them just as regular rocket launchers did in atmosphere.
"Brace for impact!" a Lieutenant called out. I hurriedly grabbed onto the metal railing with one hand while quickly gripping tightly onto the doctor's white lab coat just in time.
*BOOOOOM*
The ship rocked and rattled as the sound of whatever those weapons were crashed into the titanium hull. I managed to stay upright and caught the doctor when her legs went out from under her due to the cataclysmic vibrations. The Captain was propped up on the railing but nearly fell as well; some of the crew fell out of their chairs and scrambled to get back to their stations.
I set the doctor down on her feet, and she faced me with a soft expression, "Thank you," she said with gratitude, to which I nodded.
Our attention was then grabbed as a crewman called out, "Archer missile impact in 2 secs!" We turned to watch a camera following the yellow lights as they approached the purple monster rapidly.
Unconsciously, I held my breath just as they hit, and to my dismay, the explosives hit and were swallowed by a golden hexagonal net made of pure energy. The only thing that came to mind when seeing that was a science fiction concept that now seemed to be reality-
My eyes wide, I blurted, "That's-"
"Energy shielding," Catherine finished my sentence with an almost horror-stricken look.
"Damn it," the Captain swore before turning to one of the controllers, "Turn us around and arm the MAC."
The frigate began to vibrate underneath our feet as the MAC began to charge. The MAC, or the Magnetic Accelerator Cannon, was an advanced mass driver weapon that was typically the super weapon of a given UNSC ship. Through the use of electromagnetism produced by vast amounts of electrical current running through coils of wire, the gun shot tungsten slug projectiles at a percentage of the speed of light. Force equals mass times acceleration, so one could guess at the damage something traveling at 10% the speed of light could cause.
The only problem was that the projectile was unguided, so the ship had to be in line with its target before firing.
Golden light began to erupt from the front of the ship, shining into the viewport before finally:
*VVVVTTTTTT-BING*
In a flash, the tungsten projectile left the barrel and smashed itself onto the golden energy shield. The enemy ship released another volley of torpedo-like projectiles as their purple glimmers reflected from a distance. At the same time, the MAC reloaded and charged another shot, firing a similar vector as the first one.
*VVVVTTTTTT-BING*
Another high-pitched whine followed by a big boom sounded throughout the ship's bulkheads. A second flash, and the next round was away just as the torpedoes slammed into the Commonwealth. But this time the results were different.
"Captain! We got a clean hit! That last MAC round penetrated straight through the gut of the ship," a female Naval officer said excitedly.
"Good! Fire again!" he ordered, his eyes not moving from the distant Covenant ship.
"Negative, that last volley destroyed the MAC," another voice said, informing the entire command of the grave reality.
"Its shield has to be weakened. Prepare a Shiva," he said before sighing, "And get Long Swords in the dark."
I knew that look.
The Captain had just made a choice he would struggle to live with, and I had an idea what his plan was. I bit the inside of my lip, 'He's sacrificing those pilots,' tactically it was the obvious thing to do, but morally? Maybe you could argue for the greater good, the lives of a few for the many, but that just didn't sit right with me.
{A/N: The irony is not lost on me. In fact, I laughed a bit while writing that last part.}
Two fixed-wing space fighters flew out from the Frigate heading straight for the Covenant ship. The Covenant ship seemed to open up with white energy weapons, which I assumed were also plasma-based like the hand-held weaponry that had been reported. The Frigate banked hard away from the fight.
But before the Long swords could even reach the enemy, another projectile, the Shiva nuclear warhead, chased behind like a harbinger of death. It reached the Covenant ship, and all at once, the darkness of space was illuminated by a blinding light, causing everyone, including myself, to look away from the viewport.
The electromagnetic pulse produced by the 10+ Megaton thermonuclear device passed over us, and the ship that had been temporarily powered down came back online.
"Sitrep!" The Captain called out anxiously.
"Both long swords vaporized…. And….. son of a- the damn ship is still alive," a crewman called out with a weighty awe in his voice.
"It's retreating, though, sir! It seems it's pulling back for repairs!" another voice said, bringing the first piece of good news I had heard today.
The Captain, who'd been holding his breath, sighed with relief before turning to face both me and Catherine, "My mission is to escort you to the surface. Report to your drop ships and we'll hit the Damascus facility with a drive by," he sighed before determination flashed in his eyes, "If the ship comes back… we'll lead them away,"
"Understood," I reluctantly nodded and, with Catherine behind me, headed for the hangar.
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Mjolnir is next chapter and so hear's a question, what do you think Alpha team's armor will be? Daisy and Cal's are no brainers obviously but what about Sheila and David's? I will say that David's is considered to be the commander's armor.
Anyway see you in the next one bye.