Wish You Were Here!

Even from the side of an AV-14 Hornet, it was easy to appreciate Zanzibar Island's natural beauty. Its beaches were bone white, its palm trees as tall and curved as any vid trying to sell people on a tropical retreat promised. A delipidated stone arch, worn and sanded by the elements and time, connected with a wall of a similar material that rimmed the island. The structure appeared older than the abandoned wind station beyond-- and far, far older than the massive alien anti-aircraft cannon that sat atop the landmass.
A shimmering doppelganger of the Orbital Shock Drop Trooper seemed to surf upon the surface of the surrounding waters. Here, the ocean shone like a brilliant emerald when the local star caught it just right. 
Not just any star, Scott had to remind himself. The Sun. Sol. His family had spread out among humanity's various outer colonies generations ago in search of a new life. To him, "Earth" had only ever been a word. And not one always spoken of with reverence. For a lot of people back on Cygnus II, the United Earth Government was an unwelcomed intrusion upon their lives, albeit a rarely present one.
Scott wondered for a moment what his family would think if they knew he and his team were now fighting to defend the Earth they wanted so desperately to have escape the influence of.
"Hang on, trooper! Things are about to get hairy!" The Hornet pilot's voice blared inside Scott's helmet, barely audible over the roar of the VTOL's engines. The craft swayed to dodge a sizzling stream of plasma fire. Scott lost his footing, and nearly tumbled into the ocean, but his harness tethered him to the VTOL's side even as the water rushed by his face inches below. The craft pulled back up, allowing the trooper to steady himself once more.
"Anyone wanna remind me why we're flying into the giant alien cannon?!" He heard Lance Corporal Davien Calson, Fireteam Wolf's marksman, shout over comms. When he looked over at the nearest other Hornet, he saw the trooper bracing himself with one arm, and cradling his battle rifle like it was a newborn baby with the other.
"The facility's too hot for a direct drop, and the beach is too skinny to aim for without losing half the company! You'd know all this if you paid attention, Lance Corporal!" Scott bellowed back. It was hard to hear himself with the VTOL's engine roaring in his ear.
"That doesn't explain why my ass is strapped to a Hornet of all things!"
"T-38s can't aim this low, and the AV-14 is the fastest craft we had." Came Petty Officer Allison Lloyd's voice, sounding pretty calm and collected for somebody whose VTOL almost got vaporized by plasma fire as she spoke.
"The big gun can't, but there's a lot of smaller guns too! This is nuts!" Corporal Jerome Brandt said. The man was as big and as strong as an ox, but if you only ever heard him over radio, you'd have thought he was half the size, and fresh out of boot camp. 
"Yeah, well, we got guns too, trooper!" The second Hornet pilot, a woman, responded. She was carrying Brandt and Calson on her bird-- which meant her Hornet was listing to the side ever so slightly thanks to the drastic weight difference between Wolf's largest and smallest members.
But that didn't stop her from aiming a volley of air-to-surface missiles towards the beach head, blowing a hole in the Covenant's hastily erected defenses. A Shade turret blossomed into a bright blue ball of fire, its squat Grunt operator tried to dive out of the way, but got caught on the seat and fell flat on its snubbed face. Its friends left it for dead, running as fast as their little legs could carry them, but not far enough. The fire ball consumed them, and a dozen other aliens. 
At the sight of freshly charred aliens, Calson whooped and hollered.
"Welcome to Earth, douchebags!"
The male Hornet pilot that carried Scott and Lloyd on his wing followed suit, blasting more Covenants to gory bits with missiles and cannon fire. It didn't last long, however, as several globs of bright blue sailed through the air, and stuck to the Hornet's cockpit despite the pilot's last second evasive maneuvers. 
"Shit!" The male pilot screamed. 
"Stickies." Came Lloyd's stoic assessment of the situation.
"This is our stop!" Scott drew his knife, and slashed the tether. Once free, he didn't so much as leap from the Hornet as allow gravity to take over, tuck into a ball, and tumble over the edge. At their speed, the pair of troopers skipped across the water like a stone once, twice-- three times before the ocean swallowed them. Were it not for their heavy armor, they would have been pulverized from the force of hitting the water at such a high speed. Instead, Scott only felt moderately tenderized.
Seafoam bubbled over his visor as the ocean sloshed around him and brought him to a halt. He saw a flash of blue, and a dull pair of thumps as the stickies went off, and vaporized the Hornet.
When he moved, everything hurt. He was fighting with all he had to take a breath. The first skip had sucked the air out of his lungs like somebody had taken a sledgehammer to them. The second, like a smaller hammer to his shoulder. But a hammer, all the same. And when the waters finally swallowed him, for some reason, there was a wave of nostalgia as well. Images of a being a kid and falling into a river back on Cygnus II flashed in his mind. He never much liked the water after that.
Scott didn't spend much time musing on the irony of a future "Marine" hating water. Instead, his hand moved to a red handle near his shoulder. The harness he wore didn't just keep him strapped to the Hornet's side, it could also serve as a heavy duty flotation device in an emergency. Just one yank, and the harness would rapidly inflate, and draw him towards the surface, armor or no.
But he didn't pull it, even as he continued to sink. Not just yet.
"Lloyd?" Scott called out within his airtight helmet after he managed to suck in a lungful of air. Nothing but silence answered him. Of course, radio waves didn't travel this deep underwater, so there was no way Lloyd, nor anyone else, could have heard him. Or vice versa.
His head swiveled around to try and catch a glimpse of his team mate. This would be a lot harder with no NAV marker to lead the way. Whenever he squinted at a dark speck in the crystal clear saltwater, his helmet magnified the image. First couple times, it was just a piece of debris from the Hornet or something inconsequential like that-- but eventually, he spotted the familiar silhouette of an ODST in full gear.
But something wasn't right. Her emergency harness was deployed, but it wasn't inflated to full size. One of the bladders had evidently burst, leaving the trooper to list to the side. She wasn't sinking as quickly as her Staff Sergeant, but she was sinking all the same. What's more-- Lloyd didn't seem to so much as twitch, her limbs hanging limp. Just drifting, in the sparkling emerald film.
"Shit."
The impact must have knocked her unconsciousness, and she probably yanked the handle either mid-tumble, or the handle got caught on something somehow and got yanked on accident. In either case, she was out like a light. Scott didn't want to believe it was anything worse. She'd need a medic. Problem was-- she was the medic.
His eyes darted to the rangefinder. Forty nine meters. Almost a whole Olympic sized swimming pool's worth. If they had already reached a bottom, it wouldn't have been that hard to just hop along in his gear, grab the trooper, and yank his own handle. Their suits should have had fifteen minutes worth of air, after all. But Scott couldn't see the bottom, and he wasn't about to gamble away their valuable time on the chance that it was close enough for his purposes.
Nor did he want to find out how many atmospheres' worth of pressure an ODST's space suit could take before imploding.
In truth, his suit was made up of a variety of layers, and only the underlying black body suit and the helmet were truly necessary to maintain the vacuum seal. The rest was all Kevlar, plates of ceramic-titanium, auxiliary electronics, and a pair of standard issued boots. 
Plenty of weight he didn't need.
His fingers worked fast as he did his best to ignore the pain, and shamble over towards Lloyd's position, unfastening belts and unclasping hatches. The oversized shin guards and thick arm bracers were the first to go. He shed everything but his helmet, tactical vest, emergency harness, and the MA5B still somehow slung to his back, along with three extra magazines. 
With every gram of weight discarded, he picked up speed, and it was easier to resist the pull that was trying to claim the both of them.
A shadow passed over the both of them, and for a moment, a primal fear of a certain aquatic predator seized his heart. But it wasn't a shark, it was an Orca. Not the black and white behemoths he used to learn about back in class on Cygnus II, but swift UNSC attack craft that were essentially speedboats with an M41 Light Anti-Aircraft Gun in the back. Another shadow passed, and another.
The rest of the attack force. Wolf and the other dozen of Hornet-strapped ODSTs were meant to be the tip of the spear, and pave the way for their fellow Helljumpers to take the alien AA gun out. For a moment, Scott wondered just how different his day would have gone if his team were up in one of those boats instead.
He heard dull distant rattling, followed by a thump, and the low sloshing sound of something large falling into the water nearby. Charred debris peppered the area, with larger chunks sinking into the blackness below dangerous close to where Lloyd listed helplessly. He recognized the smooth, curved fragments as belonging to a Covenant Banshee. 
Even if he got Lloyd and himself out of here, were they just gonna float up into a warzone? Was there even really a choice? Unless they sprouted gills, they had to come up sooner or later.
"Lloyd! This ain't the time for a nap, trooper! Answer me!" After wading through the debris field and getting within arm's reach, Scott tried to call out to her again, this time over his helmet's voice emitter instead of comms. All he heard was the device's muffled, dying warble before it fizzled out entirely. This stuff wasn't designed to work in salt water.
He checked Lloyd over quick for any sign of a suit breach. When he was satisfied there were none, Scott turned Lloyd around in the water, and slipped an arm under her pit and around her waist, grasping her belt. Then he yanked the red handle. Somehow, it hadn't occurred to Scott that his own harness might have been damaged on impact as well until he fingers grasped the handle. But relief washed over him when it inflated like it was supposed to, surrounding the ODST's neck in a pair of cushiony, buoyant pillows.
The two of them were rising now. Perhaps not as quick as Scott would have liked, but at least they weren't sinking. As they approached the surface, the light of the Sun burned brighter and brighter, piercing the green veil and dazzling Scott's vision. They were going to make it.
With twelve minutes of oxygen left to spare, and not a second less.
"You're okay, kid." Scott whispered in his helmet. "I got you. You're okay-- Ow! What the hell?"
The words: WARNING! SUIT BREACH! scrolled across his vision.
Shit.
Something was tugging against his shin, hard, ripping into the polymer of his black body suit. It was impossible to look down with the inflated bladders keeping his neck from bending too far in any direction, but there was something heavy snagged on his leg. They were sinking again, despite the efforts of his harness. The Sun's rays were retreating again.
Scott tried to shake whatever it was loose, but it was no good. His oxygen supply was depleting fast, the seconds ticking away twice as fast as it should have.
And they were so damn close, too.
"You're okay, Lloyd. You're gonna be okay." He shrugged off the harness, pulled it over his head, and wrapped the straps around Lloyd's hands tight. When he let go, she practically rocketed up into the light, while he kept on sinking, further and further, into the inky blackness.
He tried his best to fight the pull, to try and unsnag whatever it was that was caught on his leg. Turned out, it was a piece of a Banshee wing. It took him a couple of minutes to unhook himself on the jagged alien metal, and shove the wing aside. He winced, as he felt saltwater rush into an open cut. It didn't feel like the wing dug into his skin too hard, but that obviously wasn't the problem here.
He looked to the readout of his air supply. It ticked down to five minutes, the numbers burning a deep crimson into his vision. Still ticking down at an absurd rate. He'd figure it was more like two minutes, at best.
As an ODST, you knew any day could be the day you got your hole punched. Scott accepted that, or at least, he always thought he did. But he had always pictured something a bit more... glorious? No, that wasn't quite the right word. Noble? Heroic? Something that involved going down swinging, a real a blaze of glory. A proper ending to a story worth telling.
Summoning what little strength he had left, Scott fought with all he had to rise, ignoring how every muscle burned and ached. He hadn't lose that much distance, he tried to tell himself. The surface wasn't that far. Just keep swimming, whatever you do, just keep swimming. Up, up, towards the Sun. Forget the assault rifle slung to your back, forget the helmet, forget everything else. Just swim.
The edges of his vision blackened. His strength was leaving him. His lungs were burning. The last thing Scott remembered was reaching towards the Sun, closing his eyes, and the feeling of something grasping his hand.
Scott did not think he would wake again. But he did. First, he dreamed. He dreamed that he was back in the water. Not the ocean near Zanzibar Island, no, but back in that river on Cygnus II. The current that dragged him along felt so overpowering to his young self. Yet now, for some reason, he felt like he could fight it now. That he could plant his feet, and move against the river, and simply walk back to shore. But eventually, he couldn't stop himself any longer, and he opened his little mouth for a gulp of air, and instead, the salty taste of sea water rushed in. 
The Staff Sergeant's eyes shot open, the brightness above nearly blinded him, but he didn't care. Rolling over, he began retching sea water onto the sand. Salt scrapped against his throat with every heave, and stuck to the lining in his throat. He groaned, much in the same way he did when his parents first pulled him out of that river.
"Told you. Your chest compressions were off." He heard that familiar stoic tone. He looked over his shoulder, and saw Lloyd, Calson, and Brandt kneeling next to where he laid on the sand. Lloyd and Calson seemed no worse for wear, but Brandt was strangely enough down to his skivvies alone. And soaked to the bone. The Sun's rays refracting off his bald head and into Scott's eyes like a burning spotlight.
"Wh-" He tried to start, but had to stop to gag again. "What happened?"
Calson threw up his hands.
"You guys went and missed the whole fight! That's what happened!" He jabbed an accusatory finger towards the half-naked Brandt. "This streaking prick decided to jump in after you when your bird went down. Almost got himself killed by our own Orcas too."
Scott turned his focus to Brandt.
"Wh-When I saw Lloyd pop back up, but not you--" The giant mountain of a man rose to his full height and stood as straight as an arrow, not so much as looking at the Staff Sergeant as the patch of sand in front of his own feet. "Well, I figured you'd be..."
"You shouldn't have done that, Corporal." He managed, between labored breaths. "No matter who falls, you keep moving forward."
"You're one to talk, Staff Sergeant." Lloyd said. Even past the tinted visor, he saw her brow furrow, before she craned up neck to look up at Brandt. "Thank you. Both of you."
The big guy looked up from his feet, and nodded. Scott was honestly surprised that Brandt had not only managed to carry him back to shore, but assumingly the still unconscious Lloyd as well. Then again, at this point, he should have known better than to question the man's physicality.
"Yeah, this is nice and all, but I hope you all realize that Vrzak ain't gonna be in the same touchy-feely mood here." Calson interjected, arms crossed. Major Vrzak was the CO of Alpha Company, Wolf's parent unit. Over the years, Vrzak had done little to keep his distaste for the troopers of Wolf a secret. Honestly, there was a part of Scott that wondered if the decision to make Wolf part of the tip of the spear today was an endorsement of their abilities-- or an attempt by the Major to get rid of a few pain in the ass troopers.
No, he shouldn't think that way.
"He's gonna be pissed about today."
"You let me worry about the Major." Scott said. He tried to rise to his feet, but he was just so tired. So instead, he sat up, and leaned up against the old stone wall of Zanzibar Island. 
When it came time to leave, Wolf hitched a ride on another team's Orca. After years on starships, VTOLs, and Warthogs, it was funny how a motorboat felt like a novelty to Scott. He turned, and caught a glimpse of the giant AA gun, silhouetted against the sunset. Or at least, its burnt out husk. 
Way Scott heard it, the ODSTs faced largely minimal resistance after stormed the beach. The enemy forces were largely Grunts, Jackals, and only a couple of Elites. For as powerful as that T-38 AA gun was, it sure didn't seem like they put a ton of effort into defending it once the ODSTs broke through the initial line of shades and plasma turrets.
Scott didn't like that one bit. Was this all a ploy to get the UNSC to direct its resources in the wrong location? Or had they already accomplished whatever it was they had wanted to do when they set that AA gun in place? Either way, it didn't sound good.
He did know one thing for certain. As long as he lived, he was never spending another day the beach.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories