Chapter Four:
This Town Isn’t Big Enough
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A little adventure sounded a lot more fun in her head, but trudging for miles along an empty beach wearing a full combat load had effectively vitiated her adventurous spirit.
She had taken the off-white colored shoulder, forearm, and shin guards from that spare M-Five armor to give herself a bit more protection, but had kept her flight suits's chestplate and helmet just because it was what she was used to. In her hands was the infamous MA-FIVE B, a weapon so synonymous with Death that Innies' were heard to surrender at the mere sight of the gun. The Covenant were slightly less impressed by the firearm, but it remained the gold standard regardless.
If for no reason other than its fearsome thundering roar when fired.
Sitting proudly on her hip was the newly dubbed Deliverer along with her M-SIX as backup. She wasn't planning on being gone long. Her aim was to scale the mountain and have a quick look around. She wasn't aiming for the peak because fuck that, no- the was a path she spotted that circled the mountain about half way up.
To that end, Rawley had broken out one of the Pelican's Jump Packs. Sure, all her training with the thing was dedicated purely to using it in microgravity, but if those crayon sucking Jarhead's can use them in combat, then she can climb a bloody hill with one.
After nearly an hour of walking, the silence was starting to grate on her. So in the ultimate 'Eff You' to Op-sec and radio silence, Carol started playing more of Frye's music through the external speakers on her armor. The chatter declared the song as Nintey-Nine Red Balloons.
Heh, you'd never get away with writing a song like this nowadays. An anti war song? Must be an alien apologist, or even worse, a damn Innie.
She openly laughed at the line 'somethings here from somewhere else', it's like this song was written for her.
The ground started rising steady in a sharp incline as she got closer to the base of the mountains. Strangely, the critters that were making all the noise were dead silent now. Maybe the music spooked them or something.
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Rawley got as far as she could without using the Jump Pack climbing up the mountain. Vaulting what she could and scaling up the rocky craigs where she couldn't. But to go further she'd have to cross a sizable chasm, with nothing in between it but a long drop with a short stop at the bottom.
Carol was, by nature of her career, not exactly afraid of heights- but she was used to experiencing those heights at the helm of a well armored and state of the art gunship. Attempting to fly without several inches of titanium alloy between you and danger was a whole other animal. Nothing for it now, to get back down she'd probably need the Pack anyways. Best to learn it now, rather than trying to learn while falling.
Standing as far back from the edge as she could, Rawley slowly throttled up the Jump Pack via her neural link.
The thrusters popped out of the armored shell on gyrating arms before igniting, the small hydrogen engines throwing out twin jets of bright yellow flames with a low growl.
At thirty percent throttle Carol started to lift off the ground. Jumping straight up and throttling to fifty percent gave her several feet of vertical lift. She practiced jumping and landing a few times to get a feel for the drop, before stopping to let the hydrogen condenser do its thing.
Nothing quite like a trial by fire to learn a new skill. Rawley took a runner's stance before full tilt sprinting to the edge. Just before she ran out of room and Wile E Coyote'd herself, the jet pack roars to life, thrusters opening up to half thrust and tilting down.
The jet pack does exactly what it says it does on the tin, it lifts her up.
And up.
And up.
She probably should have done some more practice, or actually trained a bit on the beach before throwing herself whole hog into this stupid ass stunt.
Rawley can only be glad no one is around to see The Foehammer screaming in fear as she barrels towards her death, God knows Frye would never let her live this down.
She resigned herself to being a bloody streak on the side of some random cliff, hopeful that someday she might become a famous landmark like some turn of the millennium body on Mount Everest.
Once you reach Foehammer’s Grease Stain, turn left for the Idiot Falls scenic view!
Thankfully for her life and more importantly her pride, the Jump Pack's limited fuel reserves ran out and she dropped like a stone. Instead of flying full force into the wall, she fell out of the sky and was sent tumbling ass over-tea-kettle across the rocky plateau when the main thrusters cut out.
Carol rolled to a dusty stop, rifle and jump pack digging painfully into her back. While her flight suit and cannibalized armor took the brunt of the fall, she could swear she saw a few cartoony Pelicans circling around her head for a second.
As Rawley layed there contemplating every decision she had ever made, she noticed that the sun was barely a quarter of the way through the sky.
It was still early in the morning yet she felt fucking exhausted.
“Damn it."
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It was just… Just around this bend. Damn was she sick of this adventure already, her injuries were flaring up bad; No amount of pain suppressing cybernetics could fully hide the minute agony she was in, even with the micro dose of morphine her armor gave her this morning.
But she was here now, might as well finish what she started. From her height, she could see all the way to the tip of the cape she landed on, and some of the adjacent one. It was just forests and beaches, with no hints as to where those cultists came from.
When she rounded the bend… Well, Rawley had seen a lot of destruction during her long career. From witnessing battles spanning entire planets to the brilliant orange-white glow of a world being glassed; All the way to the more recent visage of the fortress world Reach burning while surrounded by the melted husks of the UNSC fleet.
Foehammer knew death, and while the destruction in front of her wasn't quite on the scale of the Battle for Onyx, there was still something… personable about it.
To start, the mountains she had climbed weren't part of a chain, it was actually the edge of a gigantic valley- easily stretching several kilometers across, almost like the galaxy's largest caldera. Nestled in the dead center was a sprawling, yet decrepit city. The ruins however, were like nothing Rawley had ever heard of before.
It was as though every ancient human race had all come together to build a city, but at the same time they refused to blend or share techniques. One building for instance looked like it was pulled straight out of Rome and plopped here, desiccated marble columns still standing proud, while its neighbors had been taken from the Ottoman empire and feudal Japan.
Stranger than their architecture however, was their size. Even from this distance, she could tell they were massive. Comparing them to the nearby trees, each building was several stories tall at their smallest; While not exactly impressive when compared to say- New Alexandria, the juxtaposition between the primitive architecture and their gargantuan size was jarring to say the least.
Some artist's abandoned project maybe? She had heard of mega structure sized passion projects like that from before the war, but those were glassed out of style pretty quick.
The most bizarre thing, however, was as soon as she reached the edge of the cliff- the Geiger counter in her TACPAD started ticking away.
It was completely digital, programmed to ignore anything below background radiation, which means…
Carol had crash landed on an island with nothing on it but a heavily irradiated ruin made to look like the ultimate mixing pot of classical cultures… What the hell kind of planet did she end up on?
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The plan was always to just take a quick Look-see and then head back, but after seeing those ruins… she had to go take a closer look. So after scanning the city for signs of life with the zoom function of her helmet and finding none, Carol began her descent.
The gentle decline into the valley proper made the journey trivial, she barely needed to use the Jump Pack.
The closer she got to the surrounding forest at the base of the mountains, the faster her Geiger counter ticked. Moving past the point of 'slight contamination' and approaching 'acute poisoning in hours'
Her armor would shield her from radiation poisoning, and the material was designed to allow contaminants to just slide off. Even the packaging of the MREs she brought could resist contamination up to a point. All very important innovations when your and your enemies rely so heavily on nuclear and radioactive weapons.
It would only protect her to a certain point, but the TACPAD will let her know long before she reaches that level.
Rawley adjusted her grip on her rifle as she passed beneath the forest canopy, the woods as silent as a grave and just as unnerving. The shadows here seemed… longer, darker.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Unnatural.
She could spy the tell-tale signs of long term radiation exposure in the trees, the slight mutations in the shape of the leaves and plant life pointing to decades of exposure at least.
The grating squeaks and squeals of the unknown creatures had been absent so far, but Carol had learned they were most active during the morning and evening anyway.
Rawley padded through the forest for about an hour, head kept on a constant swivel and gun at a low ready. When she reached the outskirts of the city… Overgrown was an extremely apt description for the ruins, both in size, and with plant life. Something she had failed to appreciate at distance was that the buildings weren't built big, they were built blown up, like a normal house just sized up by a hundred. The doors were almost as large as the Autumn's Shortsword hangers, and the windows large enough to drive a Scorpion through comfortably.
Without maintenance, the forest had crept up on the edges of the city, slowly consuming the outlying structures as nature reclaimed its territory. Vines and shrubbery climbed the walls and broke through the cobblestone streets, further dating these ruins to at least half a century for it to become so decrepit.
The only noise to be heard was the echoing tap of Rawley’s armored boots on the stone street and the ticking of her Geiger counter as she walked straight up the middle of the street.
Her positioning would make her an easy mark for any snipers watching but… Something about the buildings and their shadowy, cavernous interiors raised her hackles like nothing else.
For some reason, her VISR system was having trouble illuminating the insides of the buildings.
And that scared the shit out of her.
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As she approached a four way intersection, slight movement in the corner of her eye caught her attention in the completely dead city.
Foehammers rifle snapped up as she pivoted on her heels to the left. There, clinging to the side of a cracked marble wall- was a gigantic snail…
Just a snail… Rawley cracked a grin and allowed herself a slight chuckle at her own expense as she lowered the gun.
This place must really be getting to her if even an oversized slug can get her so jumpy. To be fair to herself, the thing was huge, at least five feet tall at the shell. Oh! It's looking at her now, it's two stalk eyes swiveled in her direction, probably checking to make sure she doesn't have a giant salt shaker or somethi- ITS FUCKING SPRINTING!
Her rifle snapped up again as Rawley wheeled back, the second the circular crosshair landed on the slimy fuck barreling towards her far faster than it had any right to Carol unleashed hell. The furious roar of a MA Five exploded out across the silent city, titanium jacketed rounds shredding the ill fated Mega Mollusk like an energy sword through particularly warm butter.
Rawley filled the fuckin' thing with half a mag just to be safe before laying off the trigger. Sweeping the rifle back across the street, she waited to see if the rifle's echoing report had attracted something else in this God forsaken place. But after a few minutes of silence, Rawley slowly allowed her muscles to untense as she lowered the gun.
She stared at the puddlized Super Snail for a second before letting out a drawn out sigh.
Fuck this planet.
She was just about to move on when her HUD glitched out. Like a hologram when you pass your hand through it, the VISR system started 'stuttering' for lack of a better word. Her health monitor and motion sensor started flickering in and out while drifting slightly.
Carol had to fight the urge to rip off her helmet, the glitch was distracting, bordering on blinding; But it still wasn't as bad as acute radiation poisoning. For over a minute she stood stock still as her HUD sorted itself out, eyes darting about looking for the inevitable ambush.
When it stabilized, there was a new element to her HUD.
Something had added a Waypoint.
The standard orange triangle was hovering over a location about two clicks away. It was pointing to a monolithic ancient Greek styled structure near the center of the city, one so big she could still see it over the roofs of the already super-sized structures.
Damn, she was already making her way towards the 'copy and pasted' Temple of Artemis as it had just screamed important, but now that something was telling her to go there…
Screw it, maybe she can finally get some answers from whatever or whoever is up there.
Oh it's definitely gonna be some Forerunner shenanigans, she could already tell.
Decision made, Rawley squared her shoulders and swapped in a fresh mag for her gun. Time to go meet the Wizard of Oz.
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As she approached the city center, Carol noticed a change in the nature of the destruction around her. The ravages of time and the elements were still present, but more prevalent was the destruction caused by more active means.
Buildings here had been knocked down as opposed to just fallen down. Scorch marks, burns, and melted bits of masonry were everywhere, and there appeared to be massive claw marks carved into the stone of the damn street.
Carol found the likely perpetrator of the marks just around the corner.
Half buried in a collapsed building, was a skeleton of a creature that would make Gútas look cute and cuddly by comparison. Easily the size of two M-Three Elephants back to front, the thing was big enough to bite a Scarab in half and still be hungry for more. A good portion of it was hidden by the debris, but from what Rawley could see of the skull… It kind of reminded her of a dinosaur.
Or a goddamn dragon.
Rawley admired the awe inspiring sight of the slain beast for a while. As well as taking several photos and making sure her helmet cam had good angles, because no one would ever believe her otherwise, before adjusting the grip on her rifle and moving on.
That body ended up being just one of many she found the closer she got to the temple, every step causing her Geiger counter to tick ever faster as she ghosted through the remains of the ancient battle.
Carol had to pick her way around two colossal skeletons in the middle of the street, permanently entwined together at the final moments of their battle.
The size of the buildings were starting to make sense if these 'dragons' were their occupants…
She would have loved to know what they were fighting for, what drove these giants to conflict? And who won? Where are they now? Will they be friendly? Were they responsible for the radiation? Or was that the result of some natural phenomenon?
God… A whole race of sapient beings this size…
If the Covenant had these guys under their control- if they loaded them up with their arms and armor…
Humanity would never have won a single ground war.
But if… if Humanity could get these guys onto our side, if Rawley could lead the UNSC here…
She was shaken out of her thoughts as she stepped out onto what must have been the city center. Bones of all different shapes and sizes lay scattered about the cobblestone plaza, bleached white in the sun. Across the way from her, she could spot the edge of a massive blackened crater, just about the right size of a low yield SHIVA class missile.
Guess that rules out the radiation being natural, which begs the question- are these 'people' secretly an atomic era civilization who just chose to live in marble homes? Or was there some fuckery afoot? She couldn't get closer to ground zero without risking her shielding failing, so getting a better look was out of the question.
Thankfully her destination was on this side of the plaza, a crushed fountain marked the base of a winding dirt path leading up to the temple.
Great! more climbing! Rawley's favorite.
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Carol couldn’t help constantly looking over her shoulder as she climbed the stone path towards the waypoint. She felt unbelievably exposed out here, even more so than when she willingly walked down the middle of the street. Now she felt like she was being watched.
She stepped off the path in front of the fifteen story tall temple with her rifle at the ready. Like the others, something about the interior of the building was resisting her VISR. She flicked on the underbarrel flashlight of the gun, but it was as though the shadows simply absorbed the light. Rawley couldn't help the full body shiver that crept up her spine at the sight of the beam of light being swallowed by the dark.
Alright, your move Rawley thought as she stepped on the spot indicated by waypoint, though her aim never strayed far from the entrance to the temple. After a moment, her HUD began to spasm like before, but this time it only took a few seconds for it to stabilize. A new waypoint had been added, this time it was guiding her to a small, human sized dirt path leading off into an orchard of what might have once been apple trees.
Following the path, she was led to an overgrown clearing lined with a few stone benches. On the other side, a tall spire of rough stone stood. The waypoint was hovering right in front of the pillar.
Caroll skirted the edge of the hollow, every step placed with care and motion sensor set to its full hundred meter range, resolution be damned.
But there was nothing moving even or making a sound; Hell, the wind wasn't blowing here.
When she finally stood in front of the stone spire, her HUD malfunctioned once more. Instead of a new waypoint however, her mission objectives had been updated with a new entry.
>>Who Are You?
…
Rawley swept the edge of the clearing with her eyes once one more time before turning her attention to the pillar. There was nothing indicating that it was anything more than some rocks piled up high; No scratch marks leading to a hidden door, no secret emblems or drawing. Nothing… Guess she's going to introduce herself to a pile of rocks.
"Captain Carol Rawley, UNSC Navy, Twenty-Third Naval Air Squadron, Service Number: Two-Six-Six-Five-Seven Six-Five-Six-Nine-Three CR."
On an afterthought, Carol added "Commander of Echo Four-Nineteen."
The speakers in her helmet had added a slight electric whine to her voice, but one could still hear the pride and conviction she introduced herself with.
The mission objectives tab on the upper left corner of her HUD fragmented, randomly changing characters and symbols before reconvening back into the same message.
>>Who Are You?
What else was there to tell? Did it want to know her bloody favorite color? Because if you must know it's the dark lavender color of an Elite's blood. She already told the stupid pile of rocks everything Carol cared about.
Well, not everything… Might as well try.
In defiance of the fear this whole situation inspired inside her, A small grin tugged at Rawley’s lips as she propped her rifle up onto her shoulder, and with her free hand slammed a fist onto the heart of her breastplate.
"Foehammer"
Immediately after the words left her lips, Carol found herself facing away from the spire. She didn't even realize she had turned around until she noticed the trees and grass. Her rifle was still in her hand, but in her other arm was something new. Cradled protectively in her gloved hand was a fiery orange rock of all things; Polished to an immaculate shine and criss crossed by jagged, thin red lines.
While beautiful, Carol couldn't help but feel… protective of the strange stone. She turned around but couldn't see anything different about the stone spire. Nothing to hint at where the fuck the rock came from. She looked towards the sky to find the sun dipped far lower than it had been two seconds ago.
She… she could figure this shit out later, but there was no way in hell that she was staying in this city overnight.
Before she could take another step, her mission objectives updated once more.
>>Good luck, Rider