Chapter 1

The Rookie – five minutes before drop, aboard the UNSC heavy cruiser Say My Name in high orbit above New Mombasa.

The Rookie was jolted awake as his comrade gave him a less than gentle tap with the butt of his sniper rifle. His nap interrupted, he opened his eyes to see his fellow ODST peering down at him with a wry smile on his face. It was Romeo, the blue coloration on his BDU’s chest piece giving him away.

“Wake up, buttercup,” he said as the Rookie reached up to adjust his helmet. Dutch appeared to his right, shoving his rowdy comrade out of the way, Romeo stumbling off in the direction of his drop pod. Dutch’s battle dress was adorned with a skull and crossbones that had been etched into his orange chest piece, and a skull motif that decorated his helmet. Many of the more experienced ODSTs sported such decorations, they were a tough bunch, and they had seen a lot of action during the war against the Covenant. UNSC dress standards had gone out of the window lately, there were more important things to worry about.

“Relax, Rookie,” he began. “He don’t mean nothin’ by it. Besides,” he continued as he appraised the submachine gun that he was holding in his hand. It was an M7S, the suppressed variety, the flashlight that was mounted on its barrel already lit. He thrust the weapon into the Rookie’s hands as the glass on his helmet’s visor went opaque. “Now’s one of those times when it pays to be the strong, silent type...”

The Rookie stowed the weapon beside him in his drop pod, slotting it into place next to his seat with a mechanical click. The last thing that you wanted when you were hurtling towards the ground in a metal coffin was your gear bouncing around and hitting you in the face.

Was it already time to drop? He hadn’t been paying much attention to the briefing, he had learned to take every opportunity for sleep that presented itself. You never knew when you might be forced to spend seventy-two hours wide-awake behind enemy lines. He knew their mission, however.

The Covvies had invaded Earth. Fuck knows how they had located it, the Cole Protocol had seen the ODSTs running from ship to ship, scrubbing navigation data to protect that secret for years now. Either way, they were here, and they had made landfall in New Mombasa, a Kenyan port city. There was a big-ass Covenant assault carrier hovering right next to the city’s orbital elevator, and intel reported that it was the Prophet of Regret’s personal ship. If they could board the carrier and kill a Covenant Prophet, that would certainly give the ugly split-jaws something to regret. Better yet, capture the bastard and use him as a bargaining chip to broker an end to the war. The Prophets were holy figures in Covenant society. They were like an Admiral, a President, and a Pope all rolled into one. Who knew what he was doing on Earth, but the UNSC wasn’t about to look a gift horse in the mouth.

He leaned back in his padded crash seat and strapped in, the windowed door of his drop pod closing to seal him inside with a loud clunk. The SOEIVs, colloquially known as eggs, were single-person vehicles that could rapidly deploy a soldier and his equipment to the surface of a planet from orbit. They were angular, teardrop-shaped pods, about five meters tall and weighing half a ton. The ‘rapid’ part came from the fact that the pods would drop feet-first at terminal velocity, literally falling into battle. They had limited maneuvering capabilities that would allow the occupant to make small corrections, but they were pretty much fire-and-forget. If command sent you down into a blanket of anti-aircraft fire, then there wasn’t much that you could do about it besides grit your teeth and try not to piss yourself.

As he secured the straps, the thirty-second countdown began, the comms equipment that was built into the pod coming to life as it slowly rotated to face space. Two monitors to either side of the narrow window flickered on, showing the helmeted faces of two of his superiors, along with readouts displaying navigational and tactical data.

“Latest intel reports that Covenant troops are massing beneath the carrier,” he heard over the radio. Dare was speaking, the Naval Intelligence operative who had been assigned to their unit. He could see her name stenciled across the brow of her Recon helmet.

“They’re pulling back?” Buck asked, his commanding officer’s helmeted head appearing on the leftmost monitor. “Why?”

“We’re not gonna find out way up here,” Dare replied tersely.

“Troopers!” Buck continued, the Rookie’s heart beginning to race as the countdown neared its end. “We are green and very, very mean!”

The pods that were nestled along the ship’s underside began to drop, streaking towards the clouds below, trailing plumes of smoke as their main engines fired. The Rookie’s stomach lurched as his own pod detached from the heavy cruiser, a brief moment of weightlessness making him feel like he was floating before the engine kicked in and sent him hurtling towards the ground. He gripped the twin control sticks for all the good that it would do, his knuckles white.

Chapter 2 »