DT 2022: December Dawn

For . Johan Helnwein muses the "what" he keeps fighting for on a December morning.
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It was a futility of spacetime. Out in the faraway stars, Earth was in December but anywhere else it could be any other climate, or local condition. And at some point, the old traditions had to admit Santa wasn’t building a Slipspace-capable sled and delivering gifts to good boys and girls from his Arctic North Pole across the expanse of human colonies in a single lightyear evening.
Or maybe he did and was holding out on the UNSC Navy his deep-Christmas technologies, preventing humanity from getting ahead of the Covenant in faster-than-light travel because it was a “state” secret. But Christmas and the mysteries of Slipspace were the last thing on Johan Helnwein’s mind as he took half-buried sniper rifle magazines and ejecting their rounds one-by-one onto some blades of grass he knitted together into a kind of bowl. Once free from their container, he used his rubbery combat gloves to wipe them clean of dirt and debris.
His eyes, behind an information-laden digital visor, stuck to the encampment beneath him. Alien troops slumbered in brutalist scrap metal shells and tents beneath the artificial darkness of the ringworld – they knew not the threat waiting at the edge of their security-razed tree line and a little way up a cliffside.
Johan glanced at the set-aside bullets and frowned at his handiwork, though in disinterested satisfaction. He made a habit of sticking waypoint-marked weapon caches at the edges of the Banished army installations. If they found them, the guards would have a fright knowing a Spartan was still out there still hunting. And if not, he had a ready setup to wreak havoc when he was ready to teach them a bloody lesson.
This cache here he setup two weeks ago, a SRS99 sniper rifle and 5 magazines of ammunition. 20 rounds. Enough to waste half the Brutes and Jackals, and the rest he probably could turn to mush with his other gear or his bare fists.
It was months now since Banished task force ambushed the UNSC Infinity above Zeta Halo. Weeks since the forces of the Mortal Reverie fell like the ancient Siege of the Alamo. The UNSC’s command-and-control on the ring was all but gone, but the fight continued because that was all UNSC survivors could do.
Let it be known – the indomitable human spirit was one that bled and bloodied back until the very end. Johan could fail again and again, and give up from time to time. But it was a long time since he felt a sense of doom. He watched oceans boil and atmospheres burn from gas to plasma. He saw it all over the last two decades, the cruelty of a dark forest universe – where rarely can species find friends from endless foes.
The Covenant empire. The mysterious leftover machines of the Forerunners. And now the Banished vandals.
They all still bled, sometimes red and sometimes other colors. But they still bled. Not once in all his fighting did, he feel like accepting defeat, meeting an end. He was still alive, and if alive there was always something more he could do.
And more worth fighting for.
Faces flashed by Johan’s imagination faster than his Heads-Up Display, recollecting all his family and friends back home. His wife. But a particular face layered over the rest, Flynn. His son. Lightyears away somewhere trapped in a power-stripped Germany after Cortana’s Created shutdown the power grid. German winters were always tough, but after generations soften and comforted by post-scarcity power needs; the freezes since the power went out were likely so otherworldly and different.
Johan grit at the image of his son shivering in the darkness or blue, holding hands close towards a makeshift fire in an unforgiving cold. The Spartan gripped his gloves tight and pushed a magazine into his sniper rifle. Cortana was gone now, and the Created with her. But the galaxy would not move on without them, having thrown so much chaos into galactic civilizations.
Johan wracked back the slide on the rifle and chambered a round. Tonight, whether Christmas Day or Yule, or Advent. The Banished stood in his way of getting home to his family, his son. Every body he dropped was a body and a time fewer between the long fight and returning to them.
If Saint Nicholas was to again give gifts to good boys and girls this season, he hoped the human spirit knew he would be borrowing the devilish Krampus this time. He would bring the gift of Death upon the evil-doers in his way.
The next artificial light cycle of the Halo ringworld crept around once more, bringing a new December dawn. The explosive crackle of his sniper rifle exploding a alien skull was the first crack of the new dawn.
The battle began anew with the day.
Category:Short stories