The Will To Live✔️

Epilogue

"You know, as far as plans go, that last one was a real shitshow," Greg said, staring across the desk at Gibson. The man seemed to have traded his snowy mountain view for one of deep space, the windows behind him showing the distant pinpoints of lights against an obsidian curtain.

"Sorry about that," Gibson replied, finally looking up from his datapad and setting it aside. "We were under a hell of a time crunch, working with limited resources, and against a huge group of alien monstrosities that were actively, continually trying to kill us all. To be honest, I'm amazed it worked at all. But you and your team really did come through."

Greg sighed. "Yeah, we did. It cost a lot though."

"Doesn't it always?" Gibson said, his mood darkening.

"Not always, but too often." Greg rubbed his temples for a moment. "What's the count?"

"About fifty two percent," Gibson said.

Greg sighed heavily. Jesus. There had been three million people on Wintermute when the outbreak occurred. It had been two weeks since they'd killed the Proto-Gravemind and begun, in earnest, the evacuation of the planet. It was a daunting prospect even without the four-day window, but their operation had saved probably a million lives. It had been a near thing. The Elite fleet had arrived ahead of UNSC forces and had been all set to glass the whole planet with barely an hour's warning, but those in charge had finally managed to convince them that the Proto-Gravemind was, indeed, dead. After that, the rest of the UNSC task force assigned to help deal with this arrived and so began the somehow slow but rushed process of evacuating a whole planet.

It was difficult as hell. Mostly those four days involved getting people actually physically off the planet in literally anything that could sustain human life in orbit around it, taking care of anyone who was injured, and ensuring that no Flood got off the planet as well. Using the search parameters that had been put together to find the Proto-Gravemind, many ships were upgraded with the software and used to scan for Flood.

That was the most tedious part. The Elites wouldn't let anyone leave the system, under any circumstances, until they were one hundred percent certain that there were no Flood aboard the ship, and the UNSC was with them on this one.

Once the four day window had closed, down to the second, the Elites began the process of glassing the entire planet.

That was a miserable sight to watch.

The next ten days were spent dealing with the refugees. Mostly just keeping them alive while they were slowly filtered out of the system to wherever they could be taken in, even temporarily. The UNSC was bringing in whatever resources they could, but there was still a war on. Sort of. Greg and Task Force Reaper, minus Izzy, much to her chagrin, had spent those four days frantically evacuating people as quickly as possible. Thankfully, there hadn't been all that much offense from the Flood. They seemed to be incoherent and out of it, not nearly as intelligent as they had been becoming near the end there, so they didn't put up much of a fight unless they happened to be hanging around the evac zones. Greg had been on one of the absolute last flights out, getting a scant few civilians who had almost been left behind after their ship had gone down thanks to mechanical problems.

"We're still in the process of getting it all figured out, but we at least know that no one survived on that planet. Everyone who's alive is in orbit, which at least makes it easier to keep tally," Gibson said. "And some people are dying, succumbing to their wounds, but that's slowing down. Ultimately, it looks like we saved about one point six million, give or take a hundred thousand. Which is not an insignificant number."

"No, but neither is one point four million," Greg grunted.

"We did the best we could, Walker. Honestly, it's miracle we did this well."