Halo: Guerrillas In The Mist (No longer being updated)

Chapter 11: To Hell And Back

Sunday, November 28th

23:46

Corporal Parker sat in the dark, dank building. He needed this rest before heading out. His black battle dress uniform sank into the inky black of the shadows as he kept himself awake. He played little games in his head, counted up to high numbers and thought about his past, all in an effort to keep alert and ready. He remembered back to his first live-fire exercise in Hungary, the barking orders of his sergeant major as he squirmed through mud and razor wire. The early morning runs and the late night firefights left him exhausted and filled with pain but he knew it was all worth it. Those experiences moulded him into the man he was today. Every shout and every strenuous exercise had hardened him into a battle ready soldier.

Then he was hit by a pang of anguish. He remembered his first combat drop, the one that really changed him as a person. Before he joined the ONI hands, he was a regular ODST. Dropping feet first into hell with his buddies was all he wanted to do, charge alongside a mass of his fellow soldiers and into the smoke and fire of battle. Excited, he sat aboard his home frigate, the UNSC Armstrong, waiting for his commanding officer to tell him where he was going to be dropping. A huge thump resounded throughout the ship and the whole room rocked. As they, went back to the normal chatter, the call came down the line, not from his commanding officer but from the ship's commander himself. Their face's suddenly turned from anxious, excited looks to stern and serious faces, hard as stone. Arcadia.

They had heard only a few hours ago about the invasion of Arcadia. SPARTAN red team, alongside Sergeant Forge, were already on the surface and they were evacuating the civilians as fast as they could. Parker wondered why the call had come from the commander of the ship, and he soon found out. The ship was venting atmosphere and the ODST captain happened to be in one of the area's most badly hit. That, along with the need to evacuate civilians fast, was one of the reasons they had to get to the pods so urgently.

Already dressed for battle, the three six-man squads sprinted through the corridors, sliding around corners as plasma swayed the ship. Grabbing their SMGs and magnums from the weapons rack, they had jumped into their pods and dropped, all within five minutes of their orders. As the metal coffin hurtled through the atmosphere, he saw the ships taking civilians away from the carnage and destruction. The pods hit the ground near to the evac sites and Parker disembarked. Grunts were nearing the landing pads the evacuation transports were waiting on and Parker and the men in his squad opened fire. A scythe of SMG rounds cut through the grunts and their methane masks, letting out their screams of pain.

Parker had no time to adjust to this new environment. Though he's never been in a real battle before, he had no way to ease into it out here. It was kill or be killed when fighting the Covenant. He stood guard on the landing ramp of one transport, sighting out targets for snipers on rooftops all around Arcadia's capital. As he watched Phantoms and Spirits drop their troops from the sky, he saw a Covenant destroyer creep into the view in the skyline. It was all over so fast. Within an instant, a orange hued beam smashed down into the surface of the planet and through two separate evacuation ships. They span out of control and into the raging sea waters. They had no time to react, and nor did they have anything to react with. Everyone knew that once a glassing started, it wasn't going to stop without some serious firepower.

As the beam neared closer to the evacuation site, Pelicans swooped in to save the day. All the ODST's were bundled aboard along with the remaining civilians and they sped away from the burning, orange city. It looked like hell, a raging inferno dancing around the tall spires of the city's skyscrapers. The horrible image was accompanied by the screams of civilians below, floundering in the ocean, desperately trying to stay afloat. All the ODST's in Parker's Pelican screamed at the pilot to drop down and pick up whoever they could from the torrent of salty water.

They found a pair of children, three women and a sharply dressed business man clinging to a hulk of twisted steel. All were pulled aboard but the ODSTs knew they could do no more without letting everyone else aboard the Pelican die. Silent, a sombre, depressing mood permeated the atmosphere of both the Pelican and the frigate that picked them up and that same mood now filled Parker once again. It knocked him off his high from passing training and gave him a nasty case of post traumatic stress disorder. The nightmares haunted him, screaming images of civilians drifting on the waves with a scorched city in the background. He only stopped having those dreams last year and the last thing he wanted was to get them back now.

He shook the thoughts from his head and tried to focus on the task at hand."Midnight," he muttered to himself. That was when he planned to go for Monteyez's pod. Already he knew that Monteyez wasn't in his pod so there was no need to get there too urgently. Any clues that were there earlier would still be there later that night. The cover of darkness would hide his jet black armour from the prying eyes of Covenant Phantoms.

Monteyez came first, then Knight Squad would have to be rescued. Their beacon was nearby to his friend's abandoned pod so he hoped he could take out two birds with one stone. Then it was on to the Covenant strongpoint in the city to go fishing for religious leaders. All the excitement was yet to come. For now, he just played the waiting game.