Chapter 2

Alba – fifteen minutes before the slip-space rupture, aboard the Covenant assault carrier Solemn Penance.

Alba fiddled with her power armor, the skin-tight, rubbery underclothes that she wore beneath it doing little to prevent the chafing. It was made with males in mind, and it was uncomfortably tight around her chest. There were few females serving in Jiralhanae packs, only the strongest and most resilient managed to rise through the ranks, and she was one of those few.

Against the odds, and in spite of her chauvinistic superiors, she had risen to the rank of Captain in the Covenant military. Her status afforded her command over her own pack, although it was comprised entirely of aliens, rather than Jiralhanae of lesser merit. As she made her way across the assault carrier’s cavernous hangar bay, a gaggle of yapping Kig-yar and waddling Unggoy trailed behind her.

The Kig-yar were avian creatures, pirates and scavengers, for the most part. They stood a little over six-feet tall, their long, scaly snouts full of razor-sharp teeth. They had large eyes, and a crest of quills on their heads, their fingers and toes tipped with wicked claws. They walked on a pair of digitigrade legs, bobbing their heads with every step, examining their surroundings with a jerking motion that Alba always found off-putting. They were wielding point-defense gauntlets and needle rifles, clad in form-fitting jumpsuits that provided little protection for their slim frames.

The Unggoy were the runts of the Covenant litter, little more than cannon fodder, less than half her size at four feet. They were methane-breathers, carrying tanks of the foul-smelling gas on their backs, which were connected to their helmets via snaking tubes. They were arthropods, resembling large crustaceans, encased in a tough exoskeleton. The diminutive creatures struggled to keep up with their longer-legged comrades, clasping plasma pistols in their hands with their stubby fingers. They made poor warriors, but as someone who knew what it felt like to suffer the disdain of her superiors, Alba did not mistreat them as many of her peers did.

“Make your way to the troop carriers, runts!” she heard one of the more senior Jiralhanae yell over the noise of the bay. He growled at a passing Unggoy, raising his imposing gravity hammer as if threatening to crush the creature, the little alien hurrying along to join the rest of its group. He was a Captain Major, his golden power armor catching the light, his shaggy fur a mature shade of silver. Alba preferred to keep hers shaved, the armor was uncomfortable enough without it snagging on her hair, and it wasn’t as if the males would afford her any more or less respect because of it.

There were packs of Jiralhanae wearing their brightly colored armor loading into the transports, the ornate designs of their helmets displaying their respective ranks. Alba was just one of many Captains leading her pack to their assigned dropships today, the High Prophet of Regret had ordered them to occupy the Human city below. They were searching for something here, something important. They hadn’t told her what, she didn’t need to know, her only orders were to suppress any resistance that she met down on the surface.

She missed Doisac sometimes, things had seemed so much simpler on the homeworld. Out here, everything was shades of grey, war was not as black and white as the preachers had led her to believe. She’d had faith in the Covenant, at least for a time. They had offered her something that her own people had been reluctant to give her, status, respect. Although there was a great deal of animosity between the Jiralhanea and the Sangheili, the reptilian warriors that made up the bulk of the Covenant’s elite troops, they had always afforded her a modicum of dignity that had earned them her respect in return. Many of the Elites, as they were known, had already deployed to the ground. She couldn’t see any among the troops in the bay.

She mounted one of the dropships, its curved, purple chassis shining under the bright hangar lights. Her pack hopped in behind her, gripping handholds on the walls and ceiling as their pilot prepared for takeoff, the deck humming beneath her feet as the engines spooled. She selected a carbine from the weapon rack beside her, checking its payload of radioactive ammunition, glimpsing the city beyond the hangar bay as the ventral doors of the dropship began to close. The skyline was jagged, the native buildings blocky and strange. Fires were already raging, black smoke rising into the air in thick plumes. At least it wasn’t cold here, that was usually her first complaint.

The Phantom rose from the deck, flying out over the city, the alien landscape now obscured from view behind the ventral doors. Almost immediately, the dropship began to shake as it sustained anti-aircraft fire from the city below, human shells exploding beneath it and hammering it with shrapnel. They were primitive weapons, they didn’t pose much of a threat. The Unggoy whimpered all the same, huddling together, the Kig-yar jeering at them and snapping their jaws.

There was a dull ‘thunk’ sound as the gunner returned fire with the nose cannon, spraying a stream of plasma at the enemies below. Alba gripped one of the handholds in the ceiling as the craft dodged and weaved, avoiding the worst of the flak, one of the Unggoy bumping into the far bulkhead as the Phantom came to an abrupt stop. The ventral doors began to open, the wind rushing in. Alba was blasted in the face by a stream of hot air, the smell of baking asphalt, and the scent of acrid smoke stinging her nose.

She gripped her carbine and stepped towards the edge of the troop bay, looking down at the street below. There were odd, colorful vehicles that looked like beetles scattered about, their metal carapaces shining in the harsh sunlight. They didn’t look like military vehicles, they had no obvious armaments, no armored plating. Their occupants were long gone, many of them leaving doors ajar and engines idling, as though they had left in a hurry. Besides that, the city seemed deserted, there wasn’t a soul in sight. There hadn’t been any fighting in this area, there were no signs of combat, no bullet holes or plasma burns, no charred corpses. Alien trees in planters blew gently in the breeze, angular structures made from metal and glass rising to either side of the pathway below like the walls of an artificial canyon.

Her pack crowded behind her as she prepared to jump. It was a long drop, twenty feet at least, but the gravity on this planet was half that of her own. She steeled herself, then leapt from the Phantom, landing on one of the colorful vehicles and denting the metal roof like it was made from tin. She stepped down onto the path below, the black surface pleasantly warm beneath her feet. It was patterned with regular, white markings, glowing lighting strips barely visible in the sunlight. She shouldered her carbine and covered her pack as they dropped down behind her, the Kig-yar scrambling up onto higher ground, and the Unggoy spreading out to form a defensive perimeter as they had been trained to do. There was a rush of air as the Phantom above them moved away, soaring off over the tops of the spire-like buildings and vanishing from view.