Halo Daybreak Drabbles

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
So, these are going to be oneshots and drabbles set in the Daybreak AU. I don't really know where I'm going with this, except that I think it'll be a fun exercise.

Daybreak is a Semi-Alternate Universe take on Halo, where we reset the clock to Halo 3 and imagine how the universe might have played out differently. What if there were no Forerunner? What if the Covenant Empire took decades to collapse, and intrepid negotiators were just as important as square-jawed Marines in keeping Humanity alive in the chaos of the Great Schism? What might have happened with Buck and Alpha Nine if there was no Spartan IV program?

I'll be stealing prompts from Halo Fanon's Weekly writing contest. Some characters and locations may persist from one drabble to another, and others will be stand-alone.
 
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Solace In Addis Ababa

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
1850 Hours, December 2, 2552 (Military Calendar)
Filwoha Grand Hotel, Ethiopian Protectorate
Earth


These days, jobs rarely came with perks. You had to take them whenever the opportunity presented itself.

Take, for example, the sheer amount of Covenant hardware and scrap left in Africa. The UNSC wanted all of it. The Separatists, who were apparently going to honor the terms of their truce, also wanted the salvage. The salvage had to be collected and warehoused in central locations like Ethiopia or Egypt while it was haggled over, and the negotiators needed roofs over their heads.

This led to the last hotel standing in Addis Ababa to be commandeered by the UNSC, a three-hundred-year-old neo-classical building that was dwarfed by the smoking ruins of high-rise offices. Negotiators couldn't meet with the aliens alone, so two squads of Marines had been dispatched to show the flag and keep the peace.

The Marines had promptly learned that the hotel still had water in its reservoir, and power from a backup generator. Seeing the looks on his jarheads' faces, Sergeant Torres remarked that he didn't need twenty two Marines to secure a building. If someone needed to slip away and freshen up, he wouldn't notice.

And now, Corporal Tara Kennedy thought as she eagerly dropped her trousers, it was her turn.

Her first shower in nearly four weeks felt like shucking off this mortal coil and ascending into heaven. Hot water washed through her too-short hair, ran in rivers down her back, trickled down her arms and dripped off her fingers. The shower was still warm from the last few jarheads, so the humid air fogged into steam almost immediately. Tara cranked up the heat and the warmth of the water worked its way through her skin. Every cut, every ache and stiff muscle just melted away.

Tara had been counting down the minutes until she had to hop out and make way for the next guy, but the warmth made her mind wander.

It was weird. After ten years of training to fight the Covenant, making them pay bitter blood for every meter of ground they took, it was downright surreal to see them sitting across the table from each other, pointing to spots on a map and bargaining through a translator.

The same went for the mingled vehicles. Mules and Clydesdale trucks shared the road with Shadows as Albatrosses and Spirit dropships circled round in the sky.

The alliance was going to take a lot to get used to.

Tara cracked open one of those tiny complementary bottles of shampoo open, emptied it into her palms, and worked it into her hair. She'd nicked the shampoo out of a supply cabinet, just in case her squadmates used up all the supplies in this room. She'd also filled her bag with a little bit of everything that cabinet had to offer.

The funniest thing she'd seen that day was when a pedantic lieutenant tried to correct an Elite's terminology. Struggling to breach the language barrier, he explained that the eighteen-wheelers were Mules, not Pelicans, because a pelican is a bird and a mule is a pack animal. As if a chuckhead knew what a pelican or a pack animal was! The thought still made her grin.

After the conditioner, Tara soaped up her arms and worked her way down... and then she stopped.

On her homeworld, Arcadia, there had been a beast called a hippogriff, because the more accurate name of grizzlypotamus hadn't caught on. Arcadia was glassed five years ago, but the hippogriff lived on in some zoos, and there was a wild herd in Australia.

But there was no vehicle in the UNSC inventory called a Hippogriff. Warthogs, Albatrosses, Scorpions, Darters, but no Hippogriffs or Ceithresciathans. All from Earth.

Was that intentional? The UNSC maintained that Earth was the cradle of civilization, and the primary aim of the war was to protect her. Did that mission really trickle down into something as mundane as the names that the procurement system chose for the UNSC's vehicles?

Her train of thought was derailed by furious pounding on the bathroom door. With a yelp, Tara stumbled out of the shower and ripped a towel off the rack.

============
Prompt: I'm not going to put you through writing your characters in showers. That is, if you don't want to. This week's prompt is about what curious thoughts do your characters get up to when their brains are left wandering through boredom and the routine. What keeps them up at night and what weird things about the world stick out to them? Where do they do this odd thinking, in what scenario?
 

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
When it's time to throw down against the Covenant's heavyweights, that's when you want a Spartan by your side. You can be a hardass ODST with ten jumps under his belt and two squads of veteran troopers under your command, every last one of them loaded for bear and high as a kite on synthetic adrenaline and desperate to prove something. When a Brute warlord strolls into the room flanked by Hunters and a pack of shielded body guards, that's when you thank the gods that you brought a Spartan with you.

The last thing you want to hear from that Spartan is "Hold on, I have just the gun for this!" And you definitely don't want to see her turn tail and charge back down the hallway, toward the armored forklift that the platoon turned into a rolling armory.

That leaves you high and dry, trading fire with a dozen pissed-off Brutes. There's vehicles and wrecked aircraft that your squads can use for cover, but it all melts under the wrath of the Hunters. So you all stay mobile and trade grenades with the Brutes, but the Chieftain activated some kind of super-shield that's shrugging off grenade blasts and hits from Jobani's SRS-99, and he's charging in with a big fuckoff gravity hammer, and you're in the back wondering how to turn this fuck-fuck circus around.

Then there's a thump, loudest thump you've ever heard, a wall of noise that you can feel in the roots of your teeth, and an explosion of fire and Brute bits on the far side of the hangar. And there's the Spartan, furiously reloading... something.

"Is that a... grenade launcher?" you hear Jobani ask over the ringing in your ears.

"Sure is," the Spartan replies. "I got tired of those forty-mike-mike doorknockers and had this made custom."

She fires again, and another wall of sound and fire slams into you. Suddenly, you know what that gun is. You'd recognize that muzzle flash anywhere. Sure. In her hands, with the trigger and stock and all the other modifications she's made to it, it's a grenade launcher.

But it rolled off the assembly line as an 82mm infantry mortar.
 

f1onagher

Well-known member
Is it alright if I link the spacebattles snippet threat here Quirel?

EDIT: Alright, for those that may be curious we do have an older snippet thread on SB started by yours truly. It hasn't seen much action since I'm lazier than even I thought, but feel free to read and write there. I'll look into crossposting here at a later date.
 
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Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
To clarify, the only reason that this hasn't been posted to the snippet thread is because my 2FA app deleted itself, and I lost the password. So, until I get around to contacting the SB administration and getting this straightened out, I won't be able to post there.
 
If Mothers Should Bury Their Sons

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
0128 Hours, March 27, 2553 (Military Calendar)
Delta Station, William E. Adams Spaceport
Medium Orbit over Ballast

A light and a soft buzz awoke Captain Stanislav K. Simonov. In a daze, he rolled over and retrieved the chatter from his nightstand. The light was like daggers to his eyes, so he simply flipped the phone open and muttered "Da?"

"Captain,"
the man at the other end said. "There is situation."

Stanislav didn't place the voice at first. He was so tired, he wasn't even sure what year it was. He felt unmoored, drifting through memories of a dozen apartments he'd lived in since his homeworld fell.

"Yes, what is it?"

"Something you need to deal with directly. The aliens are making trouble for us."


An identity drifted through Stanislav's mental fog. Lieutenant Georgy Sobyanin. Newly promoted after the battle of Earth. Another name came to Simonov. Ballast. He was sleeping over Ballast.

"Go on."

"We've arrested band of aliens. They were vandalizing sports bar on Beta Station, but their captain is here, arguing for their release."


Georgy had been promoted to lieutenant to replace a much more capable officer, at the same time that the airlift company had been grounded for lack of aircraft. They were MPs and shuttle pilots for now. But if Georgy didn't grow a sense of initiative soon, Stanislav planned to demote the kid before Army Aviation gave them their aircraft back, and the kid could do real damage.

"Tell him to fuck off until morning," Stanislav muttered, before he cut the connection and dropped the chatter on the table. Before he could roll over, the chatter rang again.

"Tell him to fuck off!"

"Captain, he won't. He says that he must depart soon. He is in service of Fleetmaster 'Avros, and he is transporting fuel and munitions."

"Fine. I'll be down shortly."


Stanislav cut the connection, and he was tempted to go back to sleep. Instead, he gently extricated his arm from under his wife and rolled out of bed. As he did so, he realized that her pillow was soaked through with tears.

Again.

She must have cried herself to sleep, or she had a dream about little Timofey. Almost instantly, Stanislav's drowsiness was gone. He was wide awake now, and cold hard fury was starting to settle in the back of his mind.

His trousers were thrown over the back of a chair. As quietly as he could, he pulled them on and silently cursed all of the forces in the universe that had carried him and Mina to this very apartment, starting with the aliens who had started and prosecuted the war. He cursed the split-lip Elites who claimed to be Humanity's friends now and the hairy apes who didn't know that the war was over. Then he worked his way down the caste system, realizing halfway through that he'd forgotten the Prophets and their religious mandate.

Thousands of cities had been burned by those aliens. Dozens of worlds had been glassed, including Stanislav's homeworld. All because those aliens had been too blind to question their holy orders. And now Stanislav had his own orders, to make peace with the mass-murdering animals and work with them. The very thought made his blood boil.

As he was buttoning on his shirt, Stanislav moved on down to the generals and the politicians who had thrown away the colony's future. Preparing to fight the Covenant when they should have evacuated the colony! They sold his countrymen on false promises and wishful thinking, and what had it done for them?

His boots were under the chair. Stanislav sat down and laced them up, and as he did so, his anger crested and broke. He was still furious, but some of that fury was reflected back onto him, because he had made that same choice to stay and fight. He remembered the justifications, the comparisons to Arcadia and the strategic projections that showed that the Covenant had far overstretched their supply lines. One good hard blow to the jaw, a single colony that held out instead of falling, and the whole offense in Sector Two would collapse. Stanislav had his doubts back then, but he wanted to believe. So did his countrymen.

But it had all been a dream. And his countrymen had all paid the price for holding on to a fantasy. The colony was lost, and with it tens of millions of proud men and women. The future that they had been building could have been built anywhere else, but it would never come about without the people to construct it.

There was a hole in his heart where his colony had once been, but at least Stanislav still had Mina. Most of her. Just as she still had most of him.

He grabbed his belt and holster from the nightstand and walked around the bed to give his wife a kiss on the forehead. In the dim light, he saw that her face was red and puffy from weeping. She was a plain-looking woman, very self-conscious about her appearance. He would have to be back before breakfast.

He stepped out of the bedroom and closed the door. The floor lighting in the short hallways made it easier to get his belt through the loops on his trousers. But this particular apartment was a family unit, and there was a spare bedroom for children. Mina had talked about turning it into an office, but she had yet to do anything with it. For good reason. In this world, under slightly different circumstances, there would be a little boy named Timofey sleeping in there. He'd be six years old right now, in his first year of school, maybe learning how to fly shuttles with his papa.

But Timofey wasn't there. Little Timofey never had been. And at this hour, when he was half-asleep, the regret of that loss rocked Stanislav like turbulence off a mountain wake.

Not everyone had stayed to fight. The colonial government had been insane, but not malicious. The children had been evacuated ahead of the Covenant advance, and many mothers had gone with them. But in the week when the government formally scrapped the plan for a general evacuation, when Stanislav was trying to determine what this meant for his airlift squadron, Mina came to him. She'd missed her period, and a little test kit proved that she was pregnant.

Stanislav tried to arrange a seat on an outbound shuttle for Mina, get her and the child to the safety of the Inner Colonies, but she refused. She didn't want to leave him behind, and she didn't want the child to come between them. After a month of arguing, he finally conceded.

She'd gone in for an operation. 'Letting the air in' was the phrase. Whatever it was called, the child, whose name would have been Timofey, never had been.

And it was all for nothing. Stanislav lived. So did Mina. They'd lost their colony, but worse than that, they'd each lost a piece of themselves that Stanislav wasn't sure that they'd ever get back.

Had Mina miscarried, she would be followed always by the question of whether it was her fault, but she would have the comfort of knowing that it probably wasn't. Instead, she knew that she had killed her firstborn son. And Stanislav had to face the knowledge that he had agreed to it.

The weight of that regret was too much for Stanislav's shoulders to bear, so it became rage. Rage towards the Covenant in general and particularly towards those bastard aliens waiting for him at the depot, who were calling him away from his wife when she needed him the most.

Stanislav opened his holster and withdrew the Gaubika. It was his colony's homegrown pistol design, but it was chambered in 12,7x40mm, and it would split an alien's head just as good as the M6. He checked the chamber, holstered it, and grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter.

His cousin had once gotten away with throwing a bunch of Insurrectionists out the airlock. It was a tempting thought.

=================
Prompt: It's a truism that fiction writing involves a lot more writing about mistakes and failures than about success. Characters need to make mistakes in order to grow and invite the audience to sympathize with them. For this week, write about a character dealing with the fallout of a mistake or error in judgement. The topic can be as serious, mundane, or even comedic as you wish. Just make it clear to the reader what this mistake was and what consequences for the character or those around them are ensuing. 500-800 words, as usual, though don't be too worried about busting the word limit.

A/N: So much for that word limit.
Don't be surprised if something similar to this scene pops up in a future chapter of NAWW...
 
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Snake Eyes (HaloWeen 2021)

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
'It must be winter' Danny thought as he fumbled with the fuel meter. Winter when the cold wind flowed over the airport like a swift river. There were no barriers to hide behind, so the airmen froze if they ventured outside the heated hangars. Froze until their hands were numb and thoughts flowed like maple syrup. This old aviation gas meter with its digital display and mechanical linkages always acted up, and Danny's hands were too stiff, so he just hammered the side of the meter to knock the ice off.

The digital display blinked back at him. 0131... 0130... 0129...

Danny folded his hands in his armpits to warm them up, shivered from head to toe and cursed the company-issued coveralls that never kept him warm. With bleary eyes, he stared at the digital counter. He couldn't make out what it said. Either his eyes were fuzzy, or the display was frosted with ice. The fuel meter was blaring an alarm that grated his half-awake mind, and he very much wanted to shut it off.

0105...0104...0103

A stray thought wandered through Danny's mind, and he realized that he could feel his palms against his bare flesh. He glanced down and saw that he was not, in fact, wearing coveralls. Save for a medical bracelet strapped around his left arm, he was as naked as the day he was born.

0056... 0055... 0054...

He screamed and whirled around, staring all about him. A spike of fear drove into his mind at the same time he realized where he must be. This is all a dream. A nightmare. How many times had he dreamed about that damned fuel meter, only to wake all the up and find himself hammering on his alarm clock? It was a dream. A dream!

But this wasn't his bedroom.

0039... 0038... 0037

Sure, the room was about the same size as his bedroom, but that's where the resemblance ended. The walls and the floor were white sterile plastic, and freezing fog rolled out of vents in the ceiling. There was one door with a frosted window, not quite big enough to drive a car through. It looked like... like an operating room, or the paint room in his uncle's auto shop, or...

A walk-in freezer. He was standing in a walk-in freezer.

Now fully awake, Danny glanced back to the so-called fuel meter. It was a terminal of some kind, fogged over from his breath, and only the timer was big and bright enough to shine through. With blunt fingers, he scraped at the glass.

H+43760.19
Cryogas Exhausted
Cryosleep operation interrupted, emergency wake procedure in progress...
0022... 0021... 0020...

Thinking back, his last day at the airport was a hot one. Middle of summer, yes, but the bombing and the strafing runs and the burning dropships hadn't helped none. But Danny had survived long enough to be herded onto a shuttle and carried to high orbit, leaving the Covenant to ravage Chi Ceti V. He'd been near tears of joy as the crew herded him and twenty others into a cryochamber and put them to sleep. He had beaten the odds and now he was home free, so long as his luck didn't roll snake eyes.

Danny knelt down and pulled the medical bracelet off his bicep. It came free with a bit of blood, exposing two large needles that had pumped hibernation nutrients into his veins at the start of the journey. But the cryofluid was exhausted? How long had he been under? And where was everybody else?

0003... 0002... 0001... 0000

With a chuff of warm air, the door parted. Shivering, Danny stepped out of the cryochamber. The compartment was dark, lined on each side with cryochambers. He wanted to call out to the crew, but something felt wrong. It was dimmer and grubbier in here than he remembered, and if the crew wasn't there to greet him now... well, maybe calling out was a bad idea.

Danny peered into one cryochamber after another. All were occupied. He could see the dim outline of people through some windows, while others seemed to hold... Danny wasn't sure. Looked like boxes. Why would boxes be stored in cryo instead of evacuees?
He pinched himself. The feeling was numb, but it was there. He wasn't dreaming.

With a clank and a hiss, the door on the cryochamber opposite of him parted, allowing another man to stumble into the open. He spat a mouthful of nutrient onto the deck and stepped out of the doorway to make way for at least a dozen other men. The first man, a portly, middle-aged guy who looked vaguely familiar to Danny, looked around in the gloom. Danny had to wave to catch his attention.

"Keep it down, would you kindly?" Danny whispered.

"Why?'" the man asked. "Where are we?"

"Still on the Eva Mae, I think," Danny replied. "Is anyone missing?"

The man looked at the crowd of shivering evacuees. "Maybe some. You?"

"Yeah. Everyone else in my fucking chamber."

A pin drop could have been heard in the compartment, almost. The men were still shivering and chattering their teeth, but they were still and silent like a deer that just heard a twig snap in the forest. So silent that Danny could hear the other cryochambers cycling into wake mode, one after another. And there was something else. Something heavy, shuffling, coming this way.

The men scattered. Most ran back into the cryochamber, but the smart ones ducked into the spaces between the cryochambers or behind an equipment closet. Danny tried to take cover between a pair of cryochambers as well, but the space was full of stowed equipment... including a fire extinguisher. The fire extinguisher had a thick layer of dust on it. That was a bad sign, same as the burned-out light panels that made the room so gloomy. Sealed compartments didn't collect dust, and lights didn't burn out from disuse.

Danny pulled the extinguisher off the bracket, strode down the line of cryochambers, and took up position by the door. He could hear something walking in the next chamber over, If it was a pirate, he was a big man. If he wasn't a man... Danny tightened his grip on the extinguisher. If it wasn't a man, it didn't bear thinking about.

drag-thump-drag-thump-drag-thump

That first man out of the other cryochamber took up position by Danny and said something, but Danny wasn't paying attention. He was focused like a laser on those footsteps, listening to them draw nearer, calculating the exact moment to strike.

drag-thump. drag-thump. drag-thump.

Whatever it was, it was bigger and moving slower than Danny thought. If it was as heavy as it sounded, it was taller than Danny, and he wasn't a short man. He adjusted his aim accordingly.

Drag-thump. Drag-thump. Drag-thump.

With a yell, Danny stepped out of cover, fire extinguisher swinging... and he hesitated. It wasn't one person, but two, and the skinny one in the white bloodstained coat was hauling the other in a fireman's carry. For a fatal moment, his brain trying to piece together what his eyes were seeing, Danny thought that the one in the coat was a doctor.

But the gaunt, beaked thing that was the 'doctor' was staring back at him with large, glittering yellow orbs. Snake eyes.

Danny screamed again and swung. The alien shrieked and ducked, so the fire extinguisher collided with the naked person that the alien was carrying. Danny swung again and again, but the alien practically threw the person at him and scampered down the other compartment, screaming with terror.

"Shit! Is she alright?" the other man asked. Danny glanced down, and saw that the victim was a middle-aged woman. His airport training took over. He knelt down and checked her vitals. If she had a pulse, he could barely feel it, but the only wound on her was the reddening bruise on her shoulder. If that blow had connected with her head, Danny would probably have killed her.

"That was a Covenant alien," Danny snarled.

"Yeah, a Jackal," the other man said. "What are they doing, interrogating us one by one?"

"I don't-"

With a hiss, the Jackal rushed out of the shadows. Danny swept up the fire extinguisher and lunged for the alien, and they collided in a tangle of limbs. He'd been in fights before, back behind Smithy's Hangout, but nothing prepared him for the frantic energy of the Jackal. It raked him with claws as it rolled off of him, scrambled to its feet, and took off at a dead run.

"Stop him!" Danny screamed as he rolled to his feet and gave chase. "Someone stop that fucking buzzard!"

Only one man had the guts or the opportunity to try. He leaped out of the shadows between the cryo chambers and tackled the Jackal to the ground. They wrestled for a moment, and then the Jackal broke free, leaving the man with a face cut to ribbons. Danny was already on his feet and racing after the alien, but it hit a button on its way out of the compartment and the door closed behind it.

"Shit," Danny breathed.

"Covenant!" someone else said. "How did they find us?"

"We're done for!" someone else shouted. "What does it matter? We're all going to die!"

"Not yet we're not!" roared that first man. He held the woman up in his arms, as if to show the other evacuees what was at stake. "All of you, man the fuck up and find a weapon. If we're going to die, we're give them a black eye for their trouble. That kid over there has the right idea, and if the rest of you have even half of his gumption, we're going to get out of here alive! You with the beard, get the rest of these cryochambers open! We need reinforcements!"

That nagging feeling hit Danny again. He knew the other man, but his mind was locked up from terror and adrenaline. He pinched himself again, and his fingers came away slick with blood. Definitely not a dream. That Jackal slashed him good across the chest.

The men were pulling hoses and breaking sections of conduit, making a hell of a lot of noise, working themselves up for a fight. Danny crept forward and put his ear to the door. He thought he could hear something on the other side. Squawking, the clicking of claws on the deck. There was someone on the other side of the door, but did it bring friends?

Danny retreated and ducked to the side of the doorway. It wasn't the most original plan, but he was flat out of options. The men were taking up positions, and more evacuees were stumbling out of cryo chambers. If there was enough of them, and if they were all brave or stupid or panicked enough, maybe they could rush-

The door opened. The gunshots started a heartbeat later. Yellow-hot spikes hissed through the air and cut men down. Dying men's screams were cut with the shrieks of the Jackals. When the evacuees were driven back from the doorway, a pair of Jackals advanced with wicked hooked knives, the kind you'd skin an alligator with. They wore white smocks, but neither was bloodstained, so Danny guessed that the son of a bitch he'd tackled earlier was the unseen one with the gun.

A gun. He just had a fire extinguisher. How was he supposed to-

Inspiration struck at the same time the third Jackal quit firing. Danny flipped the extinguisher, reversing his grip and bringing it up.

The Jackal darted around the door, and this time it made sure to check its corners. Those snake eyes glinted madly as it snarled and took aim.

Danny squeezed the trigger. So did the Jackal. Metal spikes hissed past his ear. A stream of chemical fire retardant hit the Jackal square in the face. It flinched, and its aim was thrown off for a crucial second.

Danny covered the ground between them in three steps and swung the fire extinguisher around, and slammed it into the alien's beak with a loud, wet crack. He carried forward on pure momentum and slammed the Jackal against the wall. He felt ribs crack, fortunately not his own.

The Jackal fought back, weakly. Mostly it just sunk a talon into his arm and dragged him to the ground. Danny rolled away, felt his elbow collide with the gun, and lashed out. He needed to get away, he needed to get the gun away-

Footsteps thundered all around him. The men had overpowered the other two Jackals, and now they were getting out of here. Danny rolled out of the way, surged to his feet, and stumbled after them.

Outside the door, there used to be a changing room, full of lockers with the last set of clothes that the men had worn. But now... Danny felt a sick sense of familiarity as he looked around. It was a kitchen. Designed by aliens, to be sure, but it was a kitchen all the same, with ranges and ovens and stainless steel countertops and a pot of stew bubbling in the corner. The men were tearing the room apart, looking in every drawer for something they could use as a weapon.

And through the next door, where there was supposed to be a shuttle bay, Danny saw a bunch of Jackals seated at a bar. Some were gawking in horror, while others went for their weapons.

Danny didn't bother pinching himself this time. He grabbed a cleaver out of a knife block and charged.
-----------------------------------------------------

"That was a hell of a tackle back there, son," the old man from the other cryochamber said as he taped a towel over the laceration's on Danny's shoulder. "Did you ever try out for the highschool team?"

Danny wanted to laugh as he finally made the connection, but it hurt too much. Coach Lamont, the man who ran the highschool gravball program since there was a program to run. "Naw, but my nephew was gonna this year."

"Ah. Missed opportunity then." Lamont stood and surveyed the damage in the alien diner. "Good work."

'Good work' Those words felt hollow after the fight in the diner. Some of the Jackals had guns and the presence of mind to draw them. Half the men who stormed out of the cryochambers were dead, and many more were like Danny. Too injured to fight. If the Jackals hadn't panicked and run... Well, they had. And now there was an alarm blaring somewhere. The aliens would probably be back with reinforcements.

Danny looked away from the kitchen. He was sitting at a booth with an exterior window, and through that, he could see where the Eva Mae had come to rest. Like the kitchen, it was alien yet familiar. Held together with energy tethers and scaffolds of exotic alloys instead of good old Titanium A, but an asteroid habitat nonetheless. One habitat linked to another, teaming with aliens, and the Eva Mae at the heart of it all.

"Coach? We're not going to make it, are we?"

"I've seen better odds," Lamont conceded. "But we've given them a black eye, and I think we can do worse than that. Now you're going to sit tight right here and watch the other wounded. The rest of us are going to go on a run."

Danny nodded dully. Sitting here would probably be the easiest thing he'd ever done.

"And one more thing," the gravball coach said as he plunked a plasma pistol on the table. "I want you to do me a small favor..."

"Don't let yourself get taken alive."

-----------------------------------------------------
It's the Mole/Soupman here again, to ask you to write some spookiness once again. I'm sure you all know by now that I have a soft spot for fear of the reality-defying, the unexplainable and anomalous, but if that's growing a little stale then I'd pitch this week's prompt as being Nightmares. Whether it's a horrifying dream or finding oneself in a very real situation that recalls one, the scariest things can be those our brains come up with for ourselves.

I'm going to be generous and give a completely flexible word count for this one, as #219 had, but also note that the end of the month will be a hard cut-off for thematic reasons and also so I don't get Silver'd.
If anything, I expect to be the reason why nobody on Halo Fanon dares to say "No word limit" in a weekly prompt.
 
Cold As Ice

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
1242 Hours, 7th November 2552 (Military Calendar)
Sol System, Jupiter Orbit, Equatorial region of Europa’s surface


If Seaman Alan Wallace had his druthers, he would have stayed in the lifepod. At least he would have died warm. But Petty Officer McConnell had other plans, and the crusty old sailor was such a hardass that Wallace had long since given up telling him no. Ten seconds after the lifepod hit the ice, McConnell was on his feet, screaming for everyone to grab everything and get out.

Wallace donned his helmet, locked the collar, scooped up the bugout bag from the seat in front of him, and bolted. Twelve Navy sailors, formerly of the UNSC Icy Yew, spilled out the airlock. McConnell sealed the door behind them, in the hope that they could return when the skies were clear.

Right now, the skies weren’t clear. The horizon divided the universe, with the rust-red ice of Europa below, reflecting the light of Jupiter above. The patch of sky around Jupiter was glittering with the lights of weapons fire and burning hulls. The sky was full of streaks too, as the remains of the Icy Yew and fuel scows like her rained down upon Europa.

And in the midst of it all was the telltale blue streaks of Covenant strike craft.

Alan sprinted as best as he could in the low gravity, and out of the corner, he saw his fellow sailors doing the same. The radio was alive, and full of confused chatter, but McConnell was shouting for silence, and if only he had more time, maybe he would get it.

But the Banshees were already flying low. There was a green flash, then two, then blue light strobed across the expanse of ice. Wallace hit the deck, and the ground around him erupted.

He was too terrified to move. The radio channel was dead, save for the hiss of Jupiter’s static. He didn’t dare get up, and he didn’t dare look around. He could still feel the telltale drumbeat of plasma weapons tearing into Europan ice.

He felt the cold too, an oppressive force reaching up through the ice. The trouble with vacuum was that vacuum is an insulator, and spacesuits like the one Wallace wore were designed to shed heat as efficiently as possible, lest the wearer cook himself in his own body heat. It could adjust for temperature ranges, but the ice of Europa was far, far colder than anything the suit’s designers had in mind. It was drawing the heat out of him, wicking it up like a rag soaking oil off the deck.

But Wallace didn’t dare move. Not as the cold flowed up from his chest and his thighs and his arms, through his lungs and into his head.

An eternity later, or maybe just twenty minutes, he felt footsteps approach. He had visions of an Elite, sent down to bayonet the wounded. That terrified him, but at this point a hot plasma blade through the heart would be a relief.

It wasn’t an Elite. It was McConnell.

The old sailor flipped Wallace over and inspected him. Wallace himself was shocked to see the state that McConnell was in. Plasma burns splotched all over his suit’s torso and arms, and the breastplate that contained the radio and other electronics was blackened, sparking, shedding steam. Wallace was amazed when he saw rust-red flakes falling from the breastplate, and realized that the steam was from boiling blood. The suit was breached. It was a wonder that the tyrant of the Icy Yew’s engine room was still alive.

McConnell leaned in, touching his helmet to Wallace’s. “Loafer wasser. Seward!”

Wallace didn’t understand any of that.

“Loafer wasser. Loafera geezer. Say! Ward! Gudluck kid!”

The petty officer pushed off and waved goodbye as he backed away. Then he turned around and pulled a pistol from his belt. There was a flash of red and a gout of steam from his helmet. Then the old sailor slowly collapsed to the ground.

The Banshees had been thorough. Wallace was the only survivor. He retrieved what remained of the other’s bugout bags and tucked it under each arm. That gave him power for thirty eight hours, at most, and a couple of squeeze-bottles of rations. Enough to keep him alive until help arrived, if he could find someplace to hole up and stay warm. He also took McConnell’s pistol and holster and clipped them to his thigh.

Then he ran. The battle was still glittering overhead, and he was terrified that the Banshees might see his high-visibility suit on the ice, but he was so, so cold, and he hoped that running might warm him up. Soon, he was bounding in great bunny-hops, trying to reduce his contact with the ice as much as possible. It didn’t work well. His feet were like two lumps of lead, and the rest of his body wasn’t much better, but maybe it was warming up a little.

Gudluk kid. McConnell had obviously said “Good luck, kid!” The rest of it was an enigma. Wallace turned the words ‘Say ward’ and ‘Seward’ over in his head until he realized that McConnell had told him to ‘stay warm’.

That was a lot of help. Seaman Wallace’s first instinct was to stay warm, but it was impossible out here. The warmest that ice could be in hard vacuum was in the ballpark of negative seventy degrees Celsius, or it subliminated into steam and bled away. And the surface of Europa was so much colder than that.

Wallace tried his radio again. He thought he heard something new, but whether it was traffic in orbit or Europan natives searching for survivors, he didn’t know. He needed help. He needed shelter. He needed something warm, but nothing stayed warm for long on the ice.

Case in point, bits and pieces of starship fell from the sky, buried themselves in the ice, and threw up geysers of steam. But that never lasted for long. They grew cold quickly, and…

Geyser. That word flowed through Wallace’s head like the last drop of syrup out of a bottle. He stopped and turned in place, shivering from head to toe, barely aware of the fact that he couldn’t feel his feet anymore. After… after he didn’t know how long, the word “Geyser” made contact with something McConnell said. Loafera geezer.

Loafer a geyser. Maybe “look for a geyser”?

Wallace’s eyes settled on a hump in the horizon, topped by a faint shimmer, like a heat wave. Or a very thin jet of steam. A geyser, known as a cryo… cryo… cryo-something.

So if “Loafera geezer” was “Look for a geyser”, what was the other thing that McConnell had told him? “Loafer wasser?” Look for… look for water?

It occurred to Wallace that liquid water had the same minimum temperature everywhere in the universe. Water only ever froze at zero degrees Celcius. Which was a hell of a lot warmer than Europan ice.

The geyser was two, maybe three kilometers to the north. Wallace didn’t know if he could make it, but he thought of the liquid water and imagined it to be like a hot spring, and he wanted nothing more in the universe than to be there. His legs practically started sprinting on their own.

-------------------------------------------------

Week 232: In The Cold
Judge: Distant Tide
It might rain, it might freeze where I'm at this weekend. So we're keeping things as simple as possible. The cold is a biting, long foe to life itself. A fight to stay warm, an invisible force that tests our limits at their least and worst. Tell a story involving your characters and their experience in the cold. It can be a wide range of interpretations, just involving the concept of the cold. Cryogenic cold. Blizzard cold. Hard vacuum cold. Death cold.

Do what you want and will. I'll play loose with the word count this week too.
 

Laskar

Would you kindly?
Founder
0128 Hours, March 27, 2553 (Military Calendar)
Delta Station, William E. Adams Spaceport
Medium Orbit over Ballast

A light and a soft buzz awoke Captain Stanislav K. Simonov. In a daze, he rolled over and retrieved the chatter from his nightstand. The light was like daggers to his eyes, so he simply flipped the phone open and muttered "Da?"

"Captain,"
the man at the other end said. "There is situation."

Stanislav didn't place the voice at first. He was so tired, he wasn't even sure what year it was. He felt unmoored, drifting through memories of a dozen apartments he'd lived in since his homeworld fell.

"Yes, what is it?"

"Something you need to deal with directly. The aliens are making trouble for us."


An identity drifted through Stanislav's mental fog. Lieutenant Georgy Sobyanin. Newly promoted after the battle of Earth. Another name came to Simonov. Ballast. He was sleeping over Ballast.

"Go on."

"We've arrested band of aliens. They were vandalizing sports bar on Beta Station, but their captain is here, arguing for their release."


Georgy had been promoted to lieutenant to replace a much more capable officer, at the same time that the airlift company had been grounded for lack of aircraft. They were MPs and shuttle pilots for now. But if Georgy didn't grow a sense of initiative soon, Stanislav planned to demote the kid before Army Aviation gave them their aircraft back, and the kid could do real damage.

"Tell him to fuck off until morning," Stanislav muttered, before he cut the connection and dropped the chatter on the table. Before he could roll over, the chatter rang again.

"Tell him to fuck off!"

"Captain, he won't. He says that he must depart soon. He is in service of Fleetmaster 'Avros, and he is transporting fuel and munitions."

"Fine. I'll be down shortly."


Stanislav cut the connection, and he was tempted to go back to sleep. Instead, he gently extricated his arm from under his wife and rolled out of bed. As he did so, he realized that her pillow was soaked through with tears.

Again.

She must have cried herself to sleep, or she had a dream about little Timofey. Almost instantly, Stanislav's drowsiness was gone. He was wide awake now, and cold hard fury was starting to settle in the back of his mind.

His trousers were thrown over the back of a chair. As quietly as he could, he pulled them on and silently cursed all of the forces in the universe that had carried him and Mina to this very apartment, starting with the aliens who had started and prosecuted the war. He cursed the split-lip Elites who claimed to be Humanity's friends now and the hairy apes who didn't know that the war was over. Then he worked his way down the caste system, realizing halfway through that he'd forgotten the Prophets and their religious mandate.

Thousands of cities had been burned by those aliens. Dozens of worlds had been glassed, including Stanislav's homeworld. All because those aliens had been too blind to question their holy orders. And now Stanislav had his own orders, to make peace with the mass-murdering animals and work with them. The very thought made his blood boil.

As he was buttoning on his shirt, Stanislav moved on down to the generals and the politicians who had thrown away the colony's future. Preparing to fight the Covenant when they should have evacuated the colony! They sold his countrymen on false promises and wishful thinking, and what had it done for them?

His boots were under the chair. Stanislav sat down and laced them up, and as he did so, his anger crested and broke. He was still furious, but some of that fury was reflected back onto him, because he had made that same choice to stay and fight. He remembered the justifications, the comparisons to Arcadia and the strategic projections that showed that the Covenant had far overstretched their supply lines. One good hard blow to the jaw, a single colony that held out instead of falling, and the whole offense in Sector Two would collapse. Stanislav had his doubts back then, but he wanted to believe. So did his countrymen.

But it had all been a dream. And his countrymen had all paid the price for holding on to a fantasy. The colony was lost, and with it tens of millions of proud men and women. The future that they had been building could have been built anywhere else, but it would never come about without the people to construct it.

There was a hole in his heart where his colony had once been, but at least Stanislav still had Mina. Most of her. Just as she still had most of him.

He grabbed his belt and holster from the nightstand and walked around the bed to give his wife a kiss on the forehead. In the dim light, he saw that her face was red and puffy from weeping. She was a plain-looking woman, very self-conscious about her appearance. He would have to be back before breakfast.

He stepped out of the bedroom and closed the door. The floor lighting in the short hallways made it easier to get his belt through the loops on his trousers. But this particular apartment was a family unit, and there was a spare bedroom for children. Mina had talked about turning it into an office, but she had yet to do anything with it. For good reason. In this world, under slightly different circumstances, there would be a little boy named Timofey sleeping in there. He'd be six years old right now, in his first year of school, maybe learning how to fly shuttles with his papa.

But Timofey wasn't there. Little Timofey never had been. And at this hour, when he was half-asleep, the regret of that loss rocked Stanislav like turbulence off a mountain wake.

Not everyone had stayed to fight. The colonial government had been insane, but not malicious. The children had been evacuated ahead of the Covenant advance, and many mothers had gone with them. But in the week when the government formally scrapped the plan for a general evacuation, when Stanislav was trying to determine what this meant for his airlift squadron, Mina came to him. She'd missed her period, and a little test kit proved that she was pregnant.

Stanislav tried to arrange a seat on an outbound shuttle for Mina, get her and the child to the safety of the Inner Colonies, but she refused. She didn't want to leave him behind, and she didn't want the child to come between them. After a month of arguing, he finally conceded.

She'd gone in for an operation. 'Letting the air in' was the phrase. Whatever it was called, the child, whose name would have been Timofey, never had been.

And it was all for nothing. Stanislav lived. So did Mina. They'd lost their colony, but worse than that, they'd each lost a piece of themselves that Stanislav wasn't sure that they'd ever get back.

Had Mina miscarried, she would be followed always by the question of whether it was her fault, but she would have the comfort of knowing that it probably wasn't. Instead, she knew that she had killed her firstborn son. And Stanislav had to face the knowledge that he had agreed to it.

The weight of that regret was too much for Stanislav's shoulders to bear, so it became rage. Rage towards the Covenant in general and particularly towards those bastard aliens waiting for him at the depot, who were calling him away from his wife when she needed him the most.

Stanislav opened his holster and withdrew the Gaubika. It was his colony's homegrown pistol design, but it was chambered in 12,7x40mm, and it would split an alien's head just as good as the M6. He checked the chamber, holstered it, and grabbed his keys off the kitchen counter.

His cousin had once gotten away with throwing a bunch of Insurrectionists out the airlock. It was a tempting thought.

=================
Prompt: It's a truism that fiction writing involves a lot more writing about mistakes and failures than about success. Characters need to make mistakes in order to grow and invite the audience to sympathize with them. For this week, write about a character dealing with the fallout of a mistake or error in judgement. The topic can be as serious, mundane, or even comedic as you wish. Just make it clear to the reader what this mistake was and what consequences for the character or those around them are ensuing. 500-800 words, as usual, though don't be too worried about busting the word limit.

A/N: So much for that word limit.
Don't be surprised if something similar to this scene pops up in a future chapter of NAWW...
Oh, yeah, I forgot.
In spite of some stiff competition, "If Mothers Should Bury Their Sons" won the yearly prize for short fiction on Halofanon. I'm very proud of this short, and can't wait to use the characters in other stories.
 

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