Chapter Three:
There’ll be Another Time…
—--------------------—
They were still there. Worshiping her fucking plane. The sun was just starting to peek over the horizon, and the guy who climbed up onto the Pelican and then ate shit looked like he was giving a bloody sermon to a prostrating crowd.
You know what? If the Covies hadn't shown up yet, they probably weren't coming, period. So it was probably safe for her to just live in the crash site while waiting for rescue. Unfortunately, it seemed that a group just a fanatical but somehow even more weird than literal aliens had found her instead…
She'd better get down there before Frye ends up being worshiped as their fallen God or something. Though, that would be something he'd find hilarious.
Rawley stuck the empty rifle shell into her pocket and clambered to her feet, already dreading her hike back.
—--------------------—
Forty five minutes later, Carol trudged out of the forest, magnum in hand and SRS clipped to her back. At first, she was planning for a peaceful meeting, and had been mentally reviewing what she remembered from the UNSC first contact procedure as she walked.
Key word: at first.
But after marching through that fucking forest again, Carol was feeling slightly on edge. So by the time she got back to the beach, she was feeling less than hospitable.
All of that went out the window when she saw that the group was gone.
Frye.
Carol's heart fell through her feet and she took off towards the Pelican, boots pounding the sand almost as fast as her heart raced in her chest. She skidded to a stop at the foot of the small hill of sand created by the crash and climbed up onto the nose of the Pelican. Rawley then scrambled up the remaining glass pane and into the cockpit. While it was still shadowy and indistinct in the morning light, she could just about make out Frye’s body still slumped over in his chair.
Letting out an explosive sigh, Carol collapsed back onto the dashboard- staring sightlessly at her copilot. His armor hid the damage remarkably well, but she could still see the signs. His breastplate was slagged, and the plasma had fused his crash webbing to his body. But other than that he seemed ok. She’d have to cut him out of there, but the body was better preserved than most.
Usually you have to hose pilots out of their chair after a direct hit like that. Maybe these fancy new BDU’s were good for something after all. Or maybe that Banshee was just running low on juice…
…..
…She’s going to bury him…
What was the total crew of The Autumn again? Somewhere around twelve hundred. Probably more from all the strays they had picked up from Reach.
Out of those, how many had made it off the Ring?
During the fighting, how many men did Foehammer hot drop into combat? And out of those, how many was she able to pick up when the dust settled? How many brave men and women had to be left where they fell, rotting in the sun on some giant fucking alien hula hoop?
How many did Carol personally deliver to Death itself? Fuck… she always tried to make it a point to remember them, to remember the ones she had to leave behind.
But in the chaos of the battle, captain Carol Rawley lost count…
If no one else made it… Then twelve hundred people are just going to have to share Frye’s grave.
Standing, Rawley made her way back to the cargo bay. This time, she didn't avert her gaze from her friend. She held her head high as the door ground open once more.
She was going to need a shovel… and a blow torch.
—--------------------—
There was something therapeutic about digging. Even making something as morbid as a grave still had a certain kind of zen to it. Nothing but the endless shink tshks of an E-tool moving dirt, and her thoughts as company. The ground was pretty hard to move, as it was full of roots and rocks. But her trusty MK Eighty-Eight utility knife made short of the former, and good old fashioned elbow grease dealt with the latter.
It was mid afternoon by the time she finished the regulation grave, exactly six feet deep, seven feet long. The perfect size for one soldier. A little small for the thousand more she hoped to lay to rest here.
Tossing the shovel from the hole and clambering out after it, Carol made her way back to the Pelican. She grabbed one of the body bags from a compartment in the cargo bay, before carefully laying it out on the ground of the cockpit.
She was right, the buckles and emergency release on Frye's crash webbing had fused together and would have to be cut off. His armor was mostly melted to his body, so he'd have to be buried in it.
Carol sawed through the harness as close to his body as she could with her utility knife. When he was freed, Rawley grabbed him under the armpits and tried to gently lift him down. Rigor mortis had set in though, so she had to be a little more forceful than she would have liked. That, and he weighed a fucking ton in his flight suit. Eventually though she was able to get him down and onto the open body bag.
Before she zipped him up, she gave him a pat down for personal effects. His TACPAD was coming with her, per the Cole protocol, as was his Chatter that he kept on him for some reason. Probably for his classical music files. He always was obsessed with turn of the millennium rock. He had a few pistol mags as well as the gun itself which she set aside. His wallet probably got left on The Autumn, because it wasn't in his pocket. She took both sets of his dog tags, one for herself, and the other she had a plan for.
Last but not least, his helmet. With all the care she could muster, Rawley unlatched and lifted it off.
He… he was in bad shape, the armor had hid how bad the damage really was, but… he was barely even recognizable.
Carol wanted to say something, anything to her copilot- to her friend, to beg for forgiveness or blame him or… or something.
Finding herself only able to stare at his ruined face, Foehammer instead just zipped him up without a word.
—--------------------—
Rawley sat with her helmet off and knees to her chest at the base of a tree. The sun was dipping toward the horizon, washing the world in a warm orange glow. The water sparkled brilliantly in the setting light. The Pelican looked more like it was clad in amber rather than Olive Drab titanium.
Not a bad place for a grave, huh Frye?
Looking to the left, the upturned dirt was an obvious sign of someone's final resting place. But not as obvious as the memorial she made.
Pounded deep into the earth at the head of the grave was a monolithic double cross of green metal.
She had cut the landing legs off the Pelican and welded them together. On the body of the monument, 'MARINES' was still proudly stenciled onto the side. The horizontal bars of the cross, however, had something special carved into them with a plasma torch.
The author's tale has been misappropriated; report any instances of this story on Amazon.
To the unwavering crew of The Pillar of Autumn:
Do not count days, do not count miles, and do not count friends lost.
Count only the amount of Covenant you have killed.
Ad Arcendam Hostium
Underneath the first bar, a second, slightly smaller one sat.
Lieutenant Drake Frye
43897-37486-DF
UNSC Navy
Echo 419
Welded to the marker was Frye's helmet, crossed by two combat knives. His dog tags hung beneath it, blowing gently in the warm sea breeze.
Not a bad spot at all…
Rawley turned back to the sun set before pulling out the crown jewel of Echo Four-Nineteen's secret stash. An actual, honest to God bottle of Harvest Whiskey. Crafted by the goddess of booze herself, Sif.
Cullen had won it in a card game of all things, and the crew of Echo Four-Nineteen had agreed to crack it open when they had won the war. Or when they lost, whatever came first.
Hopefully Cullen will understand her jumping the gun a bit.
Rawley placed three cheap glass shot glasses onto the ground in front of her, Before breaking the bottle's fancy wax seal.
She poured out the drinks, distantly aware that these three shots of booze was probably worth more than what she makes in three years.
Taking her glass in her hand, she paused to think of something to cheer to. To life? Hah! To victory? Maybe, or perhaps just giving the Covies the mother of black eyes. Just plain old celebrating breaking shit works too.
Oh, wait…
A vicious grin spread over her face. She held her glass high, the amber liquid inside glowing gold in the sunset.
"To the Chief, may he be kicking ass and taking names, where ever the fuck he is."
She clinked her glass together with the others before throwing it back.
It was delicious.
Carol then upended the other two shots onto the grave, before settling back on her hands, eyes on the horizon.
After a second's thought, Rawley pulled out Frye's Chatter from her pocket. Finding the shuffle button, she connected it to the speaker on her helmet and hit play. Immediately, an electric guitar accompanied by drums filled the clearing.
Witchy Woman, a song more than five hundred years old.
Carol listened, spellbound, before abruptly bursting into laughter. Shit, maybe Frye had the right of it, this stuff is way better than the modern shit shoveled out by dumb bots. Especially nowadays, who the hell has time to make original music when humanity is being pushed to the brink of extinction?
Hm, maybe it was time to dig into that MRE she nabbed. In all the excitement she had forgotten to eat. She pulled out the green-gray brick and tore it open.
Huh, Beef stroganoff… her favorite.
She spent the rest of the evening there, picking away at her dinner listening to music written half a millennium ago. Basking in the fading rays of sunshine.
—--------------------—
Nothing- not a fucking peep on the Navy open channel, or any of the civie ones either.
After concluding that the Covenant weren't about to come rolling up to play Tossers with her, Rawley had set her TACPAD to start scanning the radio for chatter. Even in the ass end of nowhere, she should still be getting echoes, or at least phantom signals.
But there was nothing.
That set her on edge, even more so than those freaks ghosting around the island. The Pelican's motion tracker picked them up half a click away last night, making their way to the crash site again. But when she went out to confront them, they took off at the sight of her.
Carol was now sitting in the much more organized cargo bay of her Pelican. She had been doing some housekeeping over the last three days, taking inventory and putting away everything that had gotten knocked around. She had even found the time to put a tarp over the hole in the windshield.
The amount of supplies she had on hand was, frankly, ridiculous. Multiple crates of ammo, meds, and food. Several rifles and shotguns, a few pistols, one of which was a bloody M Six C/SOCOM, her SRS, and the SPNKr she found that had slipped under one of the seats. There were some weirder items as well, like the pack of M Eleven combat knives, or the full suit of M Fifty-Two B body armor that someone loaded up for some reason.
Thanks to the charity of the boys from Alpha Base, she could have kept a full squad in fighting shape for months with the gear she had.
Or the Chief for like ten minutes.
But that list didn't take into account the real prizes she found, however.
Some mad man had snuck in three little items that broke at least four laws and was in direct violation of the Cole protocol.
But thanks to that lunatic, Carol Rawley has now found herself in possession of a Plasma Rifle, the hilt of an energy sword, and the coup de grace, a God damn Active Camouflage unit.
They had been shoved haphazardly into a rucksack with a sticky note on the side that simply read 'Jenkin's shit, do not touch'
Sorry Jenkins, but your shit has been officially touched. Carol thought, as she repeatedly turned the sword on and off. Watching enraptured as the super heated plasma burst into being before vanishing instantly with a click of a button. .
Experimentally, Carol brought the energy sword to the magnetic holster on her left leg, and to her pleasant surprise it stuck fast. Holding up the purple half crescent shaped camo unit, she noticed frayed wires hanging out the bottom of it. The unit must have been ripped straight out of some Spec-Ops Elite’s armor. All three items were probably pried from the cold dead hands of that group of split chins that attacked Alpha; The ones that tried being cute with that little Trojan Horse stunt.
There wasn’t much she could do with the Camo module right now, and she’d rather have a slug thrower than a plasma bolter. So she took the glowing blue rifle and Armor Ability unit and stuck them in the EMP hardened storage compartment; One meant for comms equipment, Just in case the weapons were tagged and trackable.
The sword though… Well, Mama liked the electric glowing sword, so it was coming with her come hell or high water. But what to name it? All the best weapons should have names.
Excalibur was too cliché… Harpe maybe? Those overgrown lizards are ugly enough to pass as a Gorgon… Foesword could work, would be kinda funny, Foehammer’s Foesword? Comedy gold right there.
Oh.. OH!
Foehammer stood and ignited the sword, silently observing the gently shifting blue and purple hues of the curved, two pronged blade.
“In honor of the Twenty-Third Naval Air Squadron, I’m going to name you… Deliverer”
—--------------------—
“Fuck!” Foehammer screamed while cradling her throbbing hand, wanting so desperately to chuck her omni tool into the ocean. But she only had the one, so she settled instead on nearly busting her God damn hand on the Pelican's armored hull.
She was currently elbow deep in the Pseudooil-y guts of one of the aft engine pods, trying to get a feel for how boned she was. The other aft pod was beyond FUBAR, apparently the fire suppression systems didn’t quite work as advertised, because all that thick-ass smoke from earlier was coming from the hydrogen condenser as it burned; While the thing continued to gather more fuel.
That's what you get when your shits’ made by the lowest bidder.
So now the whole pod is basically cored, with only burnt scrap metal left inside the armored shell. Losing one pod on a Pelican isn’t usually that big a deal, sure it makes landing a bitch, but that's what crash webbing is for.
Unfortunately, Carol just discovered that the other fuel condenser had also been damaged. This one seemed to have been struck by a fuel rod shot that went internal. Most of the components were protected by the armor, but it was still inoperable until she could get spare parts. Spare parts she didn’t have, and without being able to cannibalize the other pod, Foehammer was officially SOL. No transport, no contact with the UNSC, and she was all alone on an island filled with reclusive, Pelican worshiping natives.
All she had was a couple of years worth of food and medical supplies; A full fire team's worth of weapons, and enough ammo to conquer a small planet.
Oh… when she put it that way…
Carol looked up from the hydrogen condenser and towards the mountains looming in the distance.
Maybe it was time to do some recon, get the lay of the land and all that.