Eaglestrike: An Eagle Called Nicole

Eaglestrike: An Eagle Called Nicole is set in the microverse established for multiplayer and is a standalone project written for Weekly 254: Eaglestrike.
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EAGLESTRIKE : AN EAGLE CALLED NICOLE
Miss Nicoline Folasade was once a cadet, and a civilian before that. She might have returned to civilian life had the Final War not change everything, brought by the Covenant mystics with their smoke, fire, and gas.
Many orders of men and women at first carried on in the inner population centers as if there was no war at all. That the monsters didn’t threaten the gates. Nicoline, like so many, turned a blind eye as colonies and settlements fell because it was so far away. But the war creeped in eventually. Like a shadow beneath the night: invisible and plentiful. The public could not ignore the Covenant forever, and soon everyone joined in the conflict. The genocide of humankind unified the species like never before, forging a UNSC. Their Unified Nations Security Confederation. A united front, but it was never enough.
Pluto. Neptune. The Covenant scorched the orbital ports and pressed in on the human territories with a vicious and always mysterious rage. Nicoline spent her recent life witnessing the conflict as humanity’s dire enemy inched forward and forward, knowing that with every home they sacked – her own life’s clock ticked towards midnight and death.
She became a Capital Military Authority cadet during the Europa defenses, a long quagmire reportedly between frigid ice fields and low gravity. Despite the inhospitable grounds beneath a beautiful Jovian sky, Europa was the first point where humanity showed true resolve against the waves of dark monsters. It was a line where frontier became home for many, unwelcoming of humans or not. The army cut defenses into the snow miles deep, dotted with sealed bunkers and pillboxes beneath frost and bodies lost to frostbite. Many lost their lives not to enemy blades or launchers but simply an uncaring mother Nature.
Nicoline thought like many when three of her former fellow cadets returned to Earth home that they died bravely amongst fire and fury. Their bodies told a different story, pale-gray and off-green so mummied that not even embalmment could save their pretty faces. George. Si-Yun. Petrie.
She cried for the first time then, not over their deaths but of wasted life and youth. Friends dead and lost not to the Covenant, but a simple and bitter cold.
Rumors spread after the first few old friends returned home as popsicles. That anyone else who died on the front joined the mortar becoming packing for the trenches. The bodies did stop returning home. Nicoline never confirmed if the rumors and horror stories were true. At some point it stopped mattering. When the Covenant did surge across Europa battlefronts, Nicoline feared them from the anticipation alone. And part of her wished she could join others at the Front even though it was not yet her turn. At least the killing anticipation would leave her alone in a quick death from cold or blast.
The Covenant’s arcane powers reportedly poisoned the surfaces and played magic on physics and the minds of better men. The eternal cold turned hot and cold again. Blades pointed at foes pointed inward at friends. The UNSC aero forces painted indiscriminate streaks of chemical dumps on allies and enemies alike to stem the enemy tides and yet to no avail. Beasts of snow rose from the ice, impossible feats of dark transfiguration – it shouldn’t be possible but that’s what radioed into Nicoline’s home every night, hooked up to the COSMOCOM as her family and friends gathered around in silence to the sounds of broadcasters beneath gunfire and screams of war. It was a terrifying visage, imagination playing the powers of wicked upon innocent and distant minds so far from the actual horrors of war. But the listeners couldn’t turn it off, they couldn’t close their ears or their hearts. They tuned in every night religiously, like a civilization cult obsessed with entropy and listening as their children flash froze in blizzard and vacuum. The Covenant rolled over Europa, and Titan, and all of Jupiter.
Kig-Yar privateers from beneath another sun coasted from aster island to aster island in the Belt, picking away at bypassed hovels where the Covenant war machine could care less to finish them off. Only the return of stranded Army tunnel rats delivered late tales of slaughter and eatery by the jackal pirates.
When the Covenant took the deserts of Mars, the rugged former frontiersmen-turned-merchants-of-war stood against them bravely. But not even they could succeed where even united resolves like Europa floundered. The once-thought eternally dry riverbeds of Mare Erythraeum flooded with plague waters and drowned out entire super-townships. Nicoline didn’t join the military then. Men were the first to go to the front, women could volunteer as the war continued to go badly – but it wasn’t their fight. The home front still needed saving by someone and women rose to the occasion under the watchful visage of Rosey, the workers’ iron goddess.
Some women chose the battlefield. More chose nursing, food cultivation, factory work, civil services, and other professions altogether. But Nicoline spent too many years feeling the war herself. Not the fires or the magic, but the costs of it coming home and occupying her living room with noise and with the silence of sleepless nights staring at the spinning ceiling fan wondering when the roof will rip off and a Covenant grave-maker would come down upon her and rip her from the universe.
The anticipation ate at her. The lost youth and dullness returned as rage. She chose to find something where when the time was right, she too would lift the rifle and give her life for the cause. But she waited still, preparing. Readying for when her clock struck near midnight because what mattered most now, her own life, as her father fell at Mars and her mother faded from grief. She had to keep going as long as she could, not because she had a goal in mind but that this was her life and purpose. She expected to burn quickly, but at least she wanted to go out brightly.
Nicoline became a pilot, flying Wunder-birds from the factory to the Front. A dangerous task but still over friendly ground and safe skies fulfilling a good deed and purpose. She knew the frontline was an ever-creeping stroke in the sand. The Covenant kept coming, closer and closer to home. At a point, the cockpit of an aero plane was more home than under the bedsheets and spinning blades of her fan. Flight gave her control. The night took it away from her, leaving her only with the fear and anticipation in waiting.
Eventually, Nicoline got her wish.
The skies and spaces stopped being safe. The ground beneath her peppered with ghoulish beasts headed into Earth cities as blowing war sirens spoke the language of fear. So many nights listening to the COSMOCOM could never prepare her for the sights. Legions of rainbow-and-dark armors alike colored with fairytale pastels made a mockery of what children considered horror. The Covenant understood fear well. Do not unnerve with the expected but rather the unexpected. Fear takes heart when not even the light is safe. The darkness of unknown spaces was one evil, but a predictable one. Monsters of light confused and twisted the soul and the Covenant readily marched their brilliance over human corpses offering toothy smiles sweetly at their fresh kills.
Nicoline tried to fly ahead of the swarms to dodge their skyward flak-fire but she wasn’t careful or fast enough. She fell from the sky and no Cloudjumper harness could save her now. At least her Wunder-bird didn’t shatter her body to pieces, only trapping her in a cockpit-turned-ready-coffin.
The woman screamed in her own defense, trapped behind iron bars and unable to escape but she fought on. Her confetti-maker rifle seemed to deafen beneath her own rage-laced battle cry, the force holding together year after year in this pointless Final War. Her moment had come and she would take every single shining ghoul with her.
To the Covenant, she was a wasteful little target trapped in a parodic display of human suffering. Nicoline figured quickly as she gunned down one or two packs of Covenant marchers that she was no longer a priority. The rest started to pass her by and some more bored monsters took pot shots at her ruined flyer from a distance. Never with killing shots. They could never give her that mercy. Their colorful shells passed through the recent husks of human homes, eventually their passing amusement died down. They left their fallen near her, a reminder of their ilk’s own failures and a reminder to her that she run out of bullets.
Nicoline screamed until she couldn’t anymore, her raspy voice sapped finally of its rage after two days of adrenaline and pure survival. But her cockpit was a cage. Trapped and alone, hungry and no help coming. She would starve as her penance to whatever damned gods the Covenant cult worshiped. As cloudy days turned into silent nights, Nicoline imagined herself back in her quiet bedroom beneath a simple spinning fan. Her rage gone, she realized she missed her simple and innocent past. She dared to wish again to go back to that. Anything but this waiting again, knowing finally that this was the end.
It was the end. Or it could have been.
Midnight passed and the next day came. A wind-swept camouflage pattern over a dark-armored suit with a golden thin visor trekked close under a smoke-choked sky teasing with gaps of sunlight. The human in an inhuman place introduced himself as he neared the bars with some subtle excitement, as if Nicoline was the first human he had seen in some time. It was probably true, this far behind enemy lines. After three days alone, Nicoline thought she hallucinated him until his gloved hand wrapped and shook her own caked in soot and charcoal.
“Trooper Zachary of the Red One, fair maiden.”
“Nicoline,” she greeted through parched lips. The man was quick to draw a canister from his dog harness. Bringing the liquid-filled container to her lips, she was surprised and suddenly jubilant to taste such a lively sweet flavor in this dead place. Weak lilac tea, old but familiar and a firm reminder of home. “Thank you.”
“Of course, ma’am. Where are you from?” Zachary asked as he cut the bars off her forged, death cell.
Nicoline looked around herself at the bombed-out city. “Here. This was home.”
Zachary gave a slow, empathetic shake of his head. It took him a moment to speak but his simple words brought Nicoline no calm or peace. “Mine too.”
They sat by the fallen Wunder-bird in silence, sharing a small snack as they regathered their strength.
Nicoline decided Zachary had a young voice despite only partially taking off his Eaglestrike helmet. The few details he offered over crackers about his activities before finding her spoke of a long journey of trying to return home. As the enemy frontline pressed into human territory, the further he trailed after it never finding safe harbor. Now his birthplace joined the bitterly-spoken “behind enemy lines” as Zachary called the ‘where’ that they were.
“Were you in the Cadets?” Nicoline offered a rare question even with her slowly-recovering voice.
“Yes,” Zachary confirmed as he inspected Nicoline’s rifle. “I joined the regular forces after Europa. I couldn’t wait around any longer, so I went to Mars.”
“Three years or so… Ahead of me then.”
Zachary’s visor looked over Nicoline and then at the fallen and decaying carapaces of Covenant ghouls in the mud around them. “You’ve been through a lot too I see. This work of your making?”
Nicoline gestured with a careless head nod to the spent magazines in her abandoned cockpit as her evidence and confirmation.
“You fought well for a former cadet, even more so as an irregular. Few humans could even manage this.”
Nicoline shrugged at Zachary’s praise. Survival felt good once she had time to appreciate her returned freedom, but war was never a happy affair.
“If we make it back to safe harbor, would you keep fighting?”
What a weird question. Nicoline had no immediate answer. She thought back to her bedroom and spinning fan. A simpler time. She could go back there now, and crawl back into her destroyed bed. If she fell asleep, would home go back to before the Final War began? Would this endless nightmare end? Would she have her family and friends once again?
The answer was no. Nicoline knew that. But her future was gone now, her past with it. To the caring world of humanity, she was dead. All that made her Nicoline was behind enemy lines, lost to humankind or knowledge. It was just her and a lone special forces trooper in a dead city.
“Maybe,” Nicoline decided firmly.
Zachary nodded and sealed his suit again. He offered her one last declaration as he gestured an open hand to pull her up.
“If we make it back to civilization, I’ll make you an Eagle. I promise you that.”
Nicoline took his hand, and silently accepted his promise.
Six months later under the glare of a frontline strobe light, a Eaglestrike suit of armor carried a wounded young man over its shoulders through bombed-out no man’s land. Despite his open and bleeding wounds dripping with every shaky footfall, the hoisted young man waved a emblazoned flag of the First Infantry Division calling in silence their message: Friendly.
A female voice roared from the enclosed helmet and narrow yellow visor. “Eagle! Eagle!”
The guardsmen behind the sandbags lowered the light beam and their confetti-makers and caught the two war-survivors as they cleared the top of the trench, falling in with little grace or style.
The young man wheezed out for the both, “Eagles returning home. Zachariah Weaver. Nicoline Folasade. We’re back. We’re back.”
Nicoline pulled the Eaglestrike helmet from her shaggy mane of hair and gently set it in Zachary’s lap as she helped him sit upright in the dirt. Medics began to tend to them both, attempting to break them apart but Nicoline held firm at the special force trooper’s side.
She spoke softly with her returned, angelic voice bringing sweet relief to a suddenly tear-stricken Zachary. Nicoline kissed his forehead and gently spoke, “You kept your promise. You can rest now.”
When the medics finally confirmed the two survivors in acceptable health despite their injuries, they rested against one another near the warmth of a frontline bonfire. Finally, safe in the light. After so many nights in the darkness, they made it home.
Category:The Weekly
Category:Short stories
Category:Fractures
Category:The Weekly Winners