Our troops are scattered all around this valley. Regroup, reorganize, and prepare for war.
Aaliyah and Rhodes
“We’re coming in hot, I can barely control it!” yelled the pilot of the Bumblebee Lifeboat. Aaliyah hated atmospheric re-entry of any kind, and coming in through a Bumblebee Escape Pod was perhaps her least favourite way to get back on solid ground; except, perhaps, through Orbital Drop Pods. She had never been forced to experience one, but she couldn’t even fathom how anybody would be voluntarily dropped from space onto the ground in a tiny metal pod that was prone to any number of malfunctions. Aaliyah had tried to keep her mind off the atmospheric reentry, standing in the middle of the Bumblebee’s “hallway”, flanked on both sides by Marines and crewmen that had been lucky enough to get off-ship in time. It had gotten her through most of the rumbling and the flames of atmospheric resistance that licked the Bumblebee’s exterior, visible by looking through the pilot’s cockpit, but as the pilot of Echo Foxtrot Lima 07 exclaimed perhaps to her, perhaps to the Marines, and perhaps to himself in a fit of frustration, for the first time in a long time the Spartan III was truly scared. Her heart was in her throat, and her stomach was churning. She’d be throwing up if she had eaten anything in the past couple of days. Behind her stood Rhodes B-091, another Spartan III from her company that had been ‘lucky’ enough to get off-ship. She craned her head to look at the Spartan sniper, who had been out of his element when he was forced to fight the Covenant boarders on the Pillar of Autumn. He was calm, cool, and collected, as always. Or at least he gave off that affect. It was impossible to tell how a Spartan was really feeling while their armour was on. The two of them had been excluded from sitting down due to the bulkiness of their armour being too large for the crash seats. At least it meant that we got two more soldiers off the Autumn, thought Aaliyah, trying to find the silver lining of the situation that she had been stuck in.
As the life pod rocketed toward the surface of the weird ring that they had accidentally stumbled upon, she couldn’t help but take a glimpse outside of the pilot’s reinforced glass canopy to see the ground rapidly approaching the pod. Or more correctly, the pod rapidly approaching the ground. Oddly enough, beautiful, green ground. Aaliyah’s mind liked to wander when under immense stress, something that she had always hated. As the ground got closer and closer, Aaliyah closed her eyes, and only barely heard the pilot advise her and Rhodes to hang on to something. A second later, she was jolted forward, the force of physics flinging her and her five hundred kilogram suit of armour forward, disregarding the fact that she had solidly gripped the handrail on the side of the Bumblebee. She collided with the pilot’s chair, breaking it from its mount and propelling the chair and the pilot in it forward. She heard was an extremely loud snap in front of her as Rhodes collided with her, his shoulder into her back, bringing down her MJOLNIR armour’s shields.
As the pod finally rumbled to a halt, Aaliyah didn’t move for about half a minute. Her eyes were still shut tight, partially from the pain, and partially from the harsh landing and the ordeal of getting off the ship. As her armour’s shields recharged, she was infinitely grateful for the armour’s protective qualities; Aaliyah considered the fact that she’d be little more than a ragdoll if she hadn’t been wearing it. Rhodes had already gotten off of B-312, and seemed to be shaken, but overall physically fine. Aaliyah stood up, rolling her shoulders back in order to crack her sore back in a futile attempt to mitigate the pain before the Spartan surveyed the situation. The Bumblebee’s rear doors had already been opened, and most of the marines were exasperatedly making their way towards the exit. The two exceptions were a single marine close to the pilot’s seat which had been detached, who was slumped over in his seat, and the second was the pilot himself. Aaliyah quickly crouched in front of the Marine and felt for his pulse, first on his neck and then on his wrist. When she found nothing she stood up, glanced at the pilot’s chair, which had undoubtedly crushed the pilot into the reinforced cockpit when they had landed, shook her head and left the pod.
Most of the equipment that had been stored on the pod including weapons, ammunition, and medical supplies had been brought out by the surviving marines, who were shortly followed by the two Spartans. As Aaliyah stepped out of the craft, she got, for the first time, a good look at the ring that they had landed on. Her immediate surroundings resembled the Earthly grassland biome; there they had landed on firm, green “grass”, or whatever it technically was, since there was no way there was Earthly grass on the Ring. There were trees with thick trunks and needles that resembled those of the Earthly pine tree. Somewhat miraculously, the craft had landed in a “bowl”, a geographical formation with rocky cliffs, easily fifty feet up, surrounded the circular clearing on all sides except one, which led to a drop that must have been hundreds of feet down. They had landed on the far Eastern side of the clearing, in a lightly forested area, many of the trees had been pushed aside or simply smashed into splinters by the incoming pod. Aaliyah quickly theorized that one of those collisions had led to the initial jolt that she received before the actual crash landing. To the west of the survivor’s position was a large complex of buildings that protruded into the air, clearly not Covenant in origin. Every fifteen seconds or so they shot out a bundle of what appeared to be neon-blue plasma into the air.
Turning her head to the massive drop, which was due south, Aaliyah could see a massive body of water, with a number of equally rocky outcroppings protruding out of the water every three or four hundred meters, some of them large enough to share the same structure that was to the West of them. Looking back North, she could then tell that their little piece of land was not isolated like the rest of the islands; a small, narrow path in the cliff wall led to freedom. The Spartan was awestruck at the scale of the entire thing. There were obviously other inhabitable worlds aside from Earth, but the ring was equally obviously artificial. She wondered that, if the Covenant didn’t make it, who did? Were they trespassing? She pushed the useless contemplation aside for the time being, and instead went to work doing a quick mental inventory. Her right hand went immediately to the thigh of the same side, and she was reassured by the presence of her well-worn M6D pistol. She drew it, feeling the familiar heavy weight of the gun in her hands. Cocking the slide without looking at the gun, she looked at the motley crue of servicemen that had assembled around her. There were nine of them in total, including Rhodes and Aaliyah. Of those nine, two were Spartans and four were UNSC Marines. The other three were navy crewmen: two men and a woman who served upon the Autumn, who were more adept at crewing a ship than fighting the Covenant with actual weapons. Aaliyah decided to take charge of the situation; she might not have been the highest ranked member of the forces present, but she, along with Rhodes, were simply two of the most capable. “Roll call.” She said in her stern, authoritative voice. “Name then rank; you three start first.” She then said, nodding towards the three naval crewmen. The first to speak up was a man wearing a navy blue jumpsuit, whose square jaw was extraordinarily chiseled and had no facial hair at all. He had a nose that had been obviously broken multiple times, the deformed mass of cartilage dominating the relatively large face. He was clearly aging, signs of grey stubble were beginning to show on his clean-shaven head. Despite his probable age, he was still powerfully built. “James Dawson, Lieutenant.” Beside him, the second male crewman stepped forward. Unlike Dawson, he wore a bright orange jumpsuit, which contrasted sharply with his ebony skin, completely shaved head, and well-kempt, short moustache. He spoke in a firm, confident voice, but was not as well-built as Dawson. “Akin Askari, Ensign.” The third and final naval crewman was a woman, who was physically imposing for her gender, almost as well-built as the muscular Dawson, but much shorter. She had high, well-defined cheekbones and china-white skin. “Julia Wolfe, Ensign.”
The marines followed suit: It turned out that they were more or less completely disorganized, only two of the marines had been assigned to the same fireteam on the Autumn, and the rest were either split up from their group or sole survivors. After everyone introduced themselves, Aaliyah introduced herself simply as “Spartan B-312; Lieutenant. I fought on Reach, like many of you. I don’t know where we are, or what the surviving chain of command is. But right now what we have to do is regroup and prepare to meet up with the other survivors.” Aaliyah said, nodding to the smoke streaks that wafted into the sky relatively nearby, indicating other crashed pods from the Human warship. “Haul what you can up to that structure over there,” she said, indicating with her left hand the alien complex. “It offers high ground and fortification, just in case.” The Spartan said, inferring potential conflict with the Covenant. As the UNSC troops began to organize what they could from the pod, Rhodes followed them before he was stopped by a firm hand on his shoulder by Aaliyah. “Don’t worry about the equipment. Get up to that structure, I need you on the lookout. Let me know over the radio if you see or hear anything we wouldn’t normally want to.” Re-holstering her M6D, she picked up what she could carry, slinging an MA5B behind her back, and picking up a second MA5B in one hand and a number of ammunition boxes and medical equipment on the other; most of the other servicemen had done something similar.
Joshua and Deshi
Of the two Spartans, Joshua was the first to wake. The last thing that he remembered was the intense rumbling of atmospheric entry, the pilot screaming something about losing the parachute and coming in too fast, and finally the impact that slung the warrior forward, causing him and the other Spartan III Deshi to black out. Picking himself up from the ground of the pod, it was clear that the Bumblebee hadn’t landed as intended. Weapons, supplies, and ammunition were strewn about the cramped pod, much of which had landed on the now-limp bodies of the other eight passengers in the lifeboat. It was clear that no one else survived the crash, and a few of the marines had even been thrown clear of their crash seats, some colliding with other bodies, and others being flung out into the open hatch, leaving a trail of four bodies strewn throughout the blackened ditch made when the pod touched down. Realistically, had Joshua or Deshi known anything about the physics and limitations of the Bumblebee lifepod, their excess weight of a thousand kilograms had put too much stress on the vehicle’s weight limit, which caused a fatal error during the “slow-down phase”, the parachute snapping clear off, causing the pod to come in too fast, killing most of the occupants not protected by some of the most advanced technology Humans possessed.
Outside, the pod had crash landed on the top of an elongated hill that on left side of the pod’s exit merged with a sheer cliff face, perhaps thirty or so feet up. On the right side, however, the hill led to a complex similar to the one encountered by Aaliyah’s group via a gentle decline, surrounded on the lefthand side by thick tree cover, though the righthand side was bare. Past that, there was a river that seemed to be relatively shallow but wide, and past that, the terrain seemed to drop off into a steep valley, as if it was a tunnel that led somewhere. As Joshua was examining the terrain that the pod had landed upon, he could hear Deshi groan in pain behind him as the Spartan woke up. As relieved as he may have been to realize he wasn’t the last one alive, the familiar moan of Covenant repulsor technology warned him of the incoming surprise; a single Covenant Spirit Dropship thundered over the pod before touching down in the clearing to the right of the structure, letting loose its cargo: two standard Covenant Lances supported by a single Lance of Jackals; in total, two minor Elites, a major Elite, eight minor Grunts, three major Grunts, and a total of seven Jackals, two of which were majors. Whatever the pair of survivors were going to do, they would have to do it quickly.
Abraham, Valentine, Vince, Van der Hale
There was silence for a moment after the touchdown of the Bumblebee Echo Foxtrot 002. As the dust settled, an authoritative and stern female voice reverberated throughout the pod; “Is everybody okay? Sound off.” One voice after another spoke, and once everyone was done, it was clear that all ten inhabitants of the pod, Spartan included, were at least alive. As Sergeant Major Micaela Tomasi, the woman who had demanded rollcall, undid her crash harness and shakily walked towards the pilot’s chair; she had noticed that the pilot hadn’t responded during the rollcall. She peered over the chair, resting her still-shaking hands on the headrest. The pilot had shed his helmet to the side, and had put both his hands tightly on his right thigh; his leg below the knee was bent backwards in an utterly unnatural fashion. “Oh, fuck.” The airman had whispered below his breath, before repeating it slightly louder. Tomasi attempted to take charge of the situation, “Alright, marines, clear out, set up a perimeter. Spartan, I need you up here to haul this airman outside.” As they brought the pilot from the crashed lifeboat to the ring, Tomasi led the way as Joshua carried the wounded airman, picking up her MA5B Assault Rifle on the way out.
The marines had already made a perimeter outside of the crashed Bumblebee, but it pleased Tomasi, a career servicewoman, to see that the terrain that surrounded them was fairly defensible. They had crashed, somewhat luckily, along the shore of a shallow river, that was extraordinarily wide. While there was about fifteen feet worth of shoreline on either side, but past that on either side were relatively high rocky outcroppings, being able to easily hide the group of marines. However, in the direction that the pod’s exit was facing, the outcroppings eventually smoothed out into shorelines that had green grass-like plants meet with the blue-grey water. To the left there were a few sparsely distributed trees that appeared to be similar to the Earthly pine tree, but much taller and with thicker trunks and branches. Past those was a rather steep depression that looked unnatural in its formation, leading to something that was obscured by how steep the decline was. To the right, a branch of the river ran past a small collection of silver buildings, clearly non-Covenant in design and protected by tube-like walls on three sides. As the riverbed continued, it eventually dropped off a massive cliff face, as if the rim of a bowl. In the direction the Bumblebee’s cockpit was facing, the river continued flowing towards it for some time, the rocky outcroppings growing greater and greater in height, before a large rocky landslide had evidently occurred, leaving only a small gap for the water to flow from its mysterious original source. Above the landslide was a large cliff, similar to the one that was to their far right.Tomasi, surveying the entire thing, wanted to get to a safe place before considering further action. “We need to grab what we can and get out of here, the Covenant will start looking for us soon enough. If we get towards those trees, we’ll be able to get some shelter from prying eyes in the sky,” She said, referring to Covenant Banshees and Spirits. “Plus, it’ll give us time to figure out what the hell we’re doing here and what the next steps are.” She nodded, before turing her gaze towards Miriam van der Hale.
She didn’t know the ONI Spook’s name, and she didn’t want to. ONI had never done her any favours, and she was well aware that van der Hale outranked her. But the Spook was out of her element, Tomasi presumed, and wasn’t overly prepared for a combat situation. “And you,” She said, nodding towards van der Hale. “You stick close with me. Won’t want you wandering off where you’ll get yourself killed.”
