DT 2022: Pebbles of Mamore

A short story connecting Yvan-A113 by and Rat Pack by to my own work with their permission.
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It was always strange returning to Mamore. A planet ruined by war and human suffering – Mamore witnessed multiple rebel uprisings and multiple military interventions. It was a seeming endless cycle.
Cities atomized by nuclear dirty bombs. Indiscriminate missile attacks on population centers. Razing the surface: forest, farmland, and wildlands alike. All turned to desert and ash. A once green ball forged by over four terraforming generations, splattered by orange and brown, the colors of decay and the smears of warfare.
And all against the backdrop of a genocidal alien war against humanity. The alien Covenant didn’t come to Mamore, the suffering here was only by human hands and sins. Among UNSC military forces, most looked at an assignment to Mamore as punishment. Nowhere else did the UNSC and their CMA precursors see such staggering numbers of desertions and disappearances from their ranks.
It was like the entire planet suffered with a disease of madness. Missions to force the Insurrectionists back into submission seemed utterly hopeless. Where fighting the Covenant made every human life lost a tragedy, here human life counted only for another dead body count, and sometimes not even that.
Training instructors from the Spartan-III program described Mamore as “Colonel Ackerson’s graduation crucible” among themselves as the late director of the supersoldier program had a reputation for soulless war-grinding. He sent the Spartan-III companies into Mamore. All of them returned. Few ever came out with casualties because unlike the Army and the Marines, Spartans got the job done or died trying.
But not once did they see Mamore’s curse of desertion rear its ugly head. Not until the third company, Gamma. Not until Simon-G294.
This was his world, even after he left Mamore far behind him in his wake of interstellar violence and cowardice. That’s how the Spartans remembered their traitor. They all dreamed of putting him in a shallow, unmarked grave themselves. Two shots to the skull, maybe cut his head off for good measure.
Yvan-A113 was Simon’s senior in the Spartan-III program by almost a decade, hailing from Alpha Company. An elite Headhunter with a similar sense of disgust sent to investigate the traitor’s past for a Naval Intelligence civilian consultant, Doctor Reyna Zhou-Romero. A psychologist. Yvan wasn’t sure what he expected to find on Mamorian soil a few years later but the Office of Naval Intelligence expected results, so he would provide as usual.
Welcome to Mamore.
An ONI Owl stealth dropship set Yvan down on the outskirts of a village called Concorde at daybreak when the sky took on a hazy yellow glow. Yvan didn’t spend as much time as other Spartan-IIIs below Mamore’s sky but he could still remember his time on tour and imagined the rugged and lifeless dirt pounded by hundreds of boots from Spartan-III shock troops as they rushed into haphazard defenses of rebel strongholds.
A platoon of Spartan-IIIs could route an entire dug-in tank column, not to mention a full Spartan company washing across sandbag walls like a tidal wave and wiping out even the greatest of defenses. Spartans were unstoppable no matter the scorching sunlight, moonless nights, or the unrelenting dust storms that the Mamore campaigns were known for. In fact, the weather and terrain conditions made counterinsurgency difficult for regular forces where Spartans saw a minor inconvenience and sometimes even as an advantage over their local adversaries.
Back then, the Spartan-III forces had the support of precision air strikes and heavy artillery for cover. Mamore was easy but even with the countless bloodshed, their pacification operations didn’t seem to stop the UNSC from having to return. No matter what the government did, they couldn’t suppress the rebel fighting spirit.
Maybe G294 saw something in them that his fellow Spartans and UNSC could not. He spent months among their kind, missing and thought dead, emerging later as the attack dog for a local spec-ops turncoat named Redmond Venter. Whatever made him turn made him a despicable traitorous creature but still human, still capable of rationalization and thought.
Something changed Simon here among the endless desert of rock and rust. Yvan was changed too after all. Where Simon did not suffer the mass suicide operations that destroyed Alpha Company in Operations PROMETHEUS and TORPEDO, he and his comrades saw their own hardships. Yvan missed PROMETHEUS as a Spartan Headhunter, trained specially as a