Dust and Echoes: Back in Black

== Chapter 1 - Distress Signal==
1624 hours, October 28th, 2554 (military calendar)
3.4 kilometers from Mimir City Limits, Paris IV, Paris System
It was hard not to imagine what the colony of Paris IV must have looked like back in its day. It was hard not to see where the rolling green hills would have gone, where the blue foamy waves crashed against the rocky shores. Where millions once called home- until the invaders came, and scorched the earth. For no better reason than because they could.
Staff Sergeant Scott Edwards wasn't quite sure what he was expecting to find on a long dead world. Perhaps more than just the charred remains of Kepler Base, its walls scarred by plasma fire and the raging storm of sand and glass. The partially buried M12 Warthog carcasses and melted concrete barriers, all evidence of a battle long since fought- and lost.
"This doesn't look too good, Sarge." He heard Calson say over the roaring winds as the rest of Wolf Team stepped out of their own Warthog. Wolf-Four had always made it a point to refer to his leader as just about anything but his name or proper rank, but after so long, Scott had since given up any effort to correct him. The layer of jagged glass that was Paris IV's surface crunched underneath their boots with every step, but at least with the storm raging, there was no need to worry about making any excess noise.
"It did take us a while to get here." The largest of them all and Wolf's third, Jerome Brandt, shifted uncomfortably in place, cradling his rifle in his oversized arms. Scott had no doubt that the man could have bulldozed through just about anything due to his sheer size, yet he carried himself with a sort of meekness ill fitting for someone of his stature. Like an elephant, terrified of the little mouse at his feet. "But how do we know that the enemy isn't still here?"
"We don't." Scott understood his concern well enough. The storm had reduced their visibility to practically nothing. Truthfully, if it wasn't for his helmet display working to compensate for the environment, he couldn't see anything more than two feet in front of himself. Still, it was hardly perfect. Scott and his team saw the world as an assortment of fuzzy silhouettes, only able to discern detail when they neared the object in question.
Effectively blind, out in the open, and hanging around a battle site that wasn't even cold yet? Yeah, he couldn't blame Brandt for being anxious one bit. How many of those fuzzy lumps out far off in the waste were actually snipers waiting for the perfect opportunity to pick them all off? Perhaps it was best to not stick around long enough to find out.
"If it wasn't for this storm…" Brandt said, his head on a swivel.
"I don't think twelve hours would have made a difference." Wolf's second and Hospital Corpsman, Allison Lloyd, was the last to disembark from the team's Warthog. Since the weather proved too hectic to land a dropship on site, Wolf Team had instead been dropped off a few hundred kilometers south, in an armored M12 designed to traverse the glasslands without it or its occupants being torn to shreds on the way there. That, of course, was more than twelve hours ago. "Chances are, anyone who made that distress call is long gone. It was a week old by the time we heard it." She said, as bluntly as ever.
"You're not much for bedside manner, are you, Doc?" Calson said.
"I didn't mean they're dead. Just not here."
"Then where?"
For once, Scott found himself echoing Calson's sentiment, but all Lloyd could offer was an armored shrug. If Kepler's security force had truly made their last stand here, then where were the bodies? He supposed it was possible that the sand had buried most of them, but every single one? Without a trace? That seemed a bit much.
"We still have to check inside." Scott said after a moment. After a quick grumble from Calson, the rest of Wolf fell in with their leader.
Kepler itself was simply a single rounded structure, sat atop a lonely hill in an expansive, featureless waste. Prefabricated and modular in its design, like so many other "temporary" structures out in the frontier. Meant to accommodate additional blocks if the population here became too large for the original building. Which, of course, would never happen now.
There was something poetic about a lone puzzle piece, Scott mused as he ran a hand over the dull-gray walls, its clinical, neutral tone not too unlike that of the armored ODSTs themselves. He could not see before but now that he was so close, Scott was able to fully perceive the sorry state of Kepler Base. Where the structure bore the plasma burns, the polycrete had melted and solidified, leaving it blackened and warped. Pits and gashes dotted the structure as well, but whether it was from the fight itself somehow, or the years of being eroded away by the perpetual storms of Paris IV, he could not say. The front gate had been crumpled inward, as if the thick titanium slabs had been nothing more than cardboard. There was no evidence of plasma fire nor explosive residue, which meant that whatever had split the gate open had done so with brute force alone.
"What the hell could've done that?" It was Calson who spoke, but three pairs of eyes fell on Scott, expectedly.
"That's what we're going to find out." Scott took a moment to steel himself, before crossing into the unknown, his rifle at the ready. The rest of Wolf followed suit.
For better or worse, the first floor of Kepler was only more of the same. Evidence of a struggle came not only in the form of the familiar scorch marks, but also spent round casings and toppled workstations. Now that they were sheltered from the storm, visibility returned. But when they flicked their flashlights on, Scott found himself wishing he was still blinded.
There was blood- far too much blood. Reddish-brown streaks coated the gray walls like paint on a canvas, in horrible, violent strokes. From the floor to the ceiling. Scott felt his stomach churn. He heard one of his team mates behind him mutter "Holy shit…". Who exactly it was, he could not say, for the words sounded a thousand miles away. Accompanying each dried pool and streak of blood was a crumbling hole or crater. It was as if a wrecking ball had been set loose inside the station. It was nothing short of a miracle that the building itself was still standing. If you could call any of this a miracle.
Just like before, there were no bodies, human or otherwise. A part of Scott had been hopeful that this meant there were no fatalities at all among the men and women of Kepler, but that naïve delusion had been cruelly shattered the moment he set foot inside of the facility. He wondered if he were to inspect the blood streaks, would he find his missing researchers, pulverized into a red meaty paste?
It should have been obvious, after all. There was no way someone could hold out for a week here. Not after such a brutal attack. The very idea that they could was only ever wishful thinking. Thinking that experience taught him time and time again was always wrong.
But what about the bodies? The question was a thorn in his mind, gnawing away at his thoughts with every passing second. However, he did his best to stuff it away, and focus on the task at hand.
"I think I'm gonna hurl…" Calson said- and judging from the groan that followed, Scott believed it.
"Remember our objective." Scott said, as much to his team as to himself. That's right. There was no time to lament or reflect on the horrors here. Not when there was a job to do. "Search for survivors, if there are any. Keep an eye out for anything that could tell us more about what happened. But, ultimately, we're here to extract what data we can, and-"
"And failing that, blow this place to Kingdom Come." Lloyd finished for him. Not exactly what he was going to say, but close enough.
"Is it ever any different when it comes to ONI?" Calson added, having stuffed the urge to vomit back down. Brandt said nothing, but judging from the rustling of armored plates Scott heard from behind himself, the mountain of a man was even more anxious than before. At this point, he could only hope his team would keep it together. If the ones who tore the staff of Kepler to ribbons were to return now, the last thing he needed was for Wolf to crumble.
"The sooner we get this done, the sooner we can leave." A hand gesture from Scott coaxed Wolf onward to the next floor.
Thankfully, the second floor was not nearly as horrifying as the first. The signs of conflict were still there, but it was relatively intact. Scott wondered if this was because whatever monstrosity had been responsible for the carnage below couldn't have fit in the stairwell or the elevator, or perhaps its rampage was intentionally constrained to the lower level.
From all the plasma burns, anyone would have assumed this to be the work of an ex-Covenant splinter group, but that didn't do much to narrow down the list of suspects. Hell, if it wasn't for the inhuman amount of carnage below, he might not have even ruled out incredibly well-equipped insurgents or pirates. It wouldn't be the first time alien weaponry found its way into unsavory hands.
From there, Kepler branched off into a series of hallways on either side. Calson and Brandt took the right wing, while Scott and Lloyd searched the left. If he wasn't so desperate to be done with the mission as quickly as possible, perhaps he would not have split Wolf the way he did.
Kepler Base itself had told him everything it could, Scott decided after scouring half a dozen rooms left him with little to go off on. When it came to answering "Who or what did this?", his best bet would be the security footage from the day of the attack, but watching the carnage unfold wasn't something Wolf's lead was looking forward to. Of course, that was assuming the footage still existed at all.
"Found something!" Lloyd called out. A gloved hand shot out from behind a door frame, attempting to grab Scott's attention. He found Lloyd hunched over in the middle of what seemed to be someone's personal quarters. The plaque on the wall read "CONNIE JENSEN".
The bedding from the bunk had been violently torn apart, leaving the mattress leaning against the far wall, and the covers shredded like bits of confetti. On the other wall, he saw a desk, complete with personal effects. Knick-knacks and souvenirs from off-world were piled into the far corners. But what caught the Trooper's eye was a single holo-still, in which a mother and father held their little girl between the two of them, juxtaposed against an unfamiliar city skyline. The girl's curly black hair was tied up in pigtails, and her beaming smile showed off the gap between her two front teeth. She must not have been older than six or seven when this was taken. Whether Connie Jensen was the mother, or the daughter in the holo-still, Scott could not possibly know the answer. Regardless, he imagined that there would be no shortage of grieving family members after today.
"Down here!"
The snapping of Lloyd's fingers forced Scott to turn his attention to whatever it was she was trying to show him. She was crouched over a laptop- or at least, what remained of one. Shards of glass and loose keyboard keys littered the floor around the two troopers, with the computer itself boasting exposed components within its sufficiently bashed in casing. With that sort of damage, the thing was little more than scrap.
"What am I looking at?"
"Well, this and pretty much every other computer here is shot to hell."
Scott frowned. "Then we'll have to-"
"But-!" Lloyd raised a finger, as if for dramatic effect, before producing a data chip, no thicker than a playing card, and as large as her thumb. "This survived. My helmet can't read what's on it, but it works."
"Encrypted?"
"Yup." She held the chip out for him to take. "So I assume it's something important."
Scott, on the other hand, was dubious. "Could just be a personal photo album."
"Or- exactly what we're looking for." He couldn't see her face beyond the featureless silver visor, but he heard the condescension in her tone.
But before they could prove whether Lloyd was right or wrong, the world went sideways, and Scott was hurled into the far wall by… by what, exactly? Despite his helmet, he had been struck hard enough to crack the visor, and blur his vision. His ears rang, and no matter how hard he tried, he could not take a breath, or move the right hand that clutched the data chip. Even tearing at his throat with all his might did nothing, instead his fingers merely clawed at whatever it was that held him in such a vice grip. If he still had the ability to breathe, he might have cried out when his trapped wrist made a sickening pop.
Out of the corner of his eye, a smudge of black leapt into action- Lloyd, Scott quickly realized. She had sprung to her feet, her rifle firing at the open air in front of the suspended Scott. But instead of passing through, the lead found its mark, slamming into an invisible object. A gold shimmering outline betrayed the identity of their attacker: a vicious Brute. It snarled at the tiny human with its rows of razor sharp teeth as its camouflage failed, winking in and out of existence. The beast was nearly twice Scott's height and easily three times as broad. Tufts of fur stained red peaked from the gaps of its jagged armor where Lloyd's rounds had found their mark. She had wounded it- but nowhere near enough to stop it.
It howled again in rage, releasing its iron grip on Scott's throat and wrist, allowing him to drop to the floor with a hard thud. But before he could suck any air back into his empty lungs, the Brute leapt at Lloyd with its claws outstretched, intent on ripping her to shreds. Lloyd ducked beneath the swipe, which left a horrifyingly long and deep gash into the wall. If something like that had even grazed her, she would have been minced meat. But it wasn't as if Lloyd was the only trooper in the room.
Still slumped against the wall, Scott fumbled for his sidearm. The moment his finger popped the thumb strap off the holster, a lance of pain drove itself into his arm. C'mon, damn it! There was no way he'd be able to fire the pistol with his right hand, and there was no time to try and rip it out of the holster with his left. So instead he had to raise his thigh, and jostle the pistol free. After a couple of shakes, it fell and clattered upon the floor.
By then, the Brute had shifted to chase after Lloyd, roaring with rage and its arm cocked back for another huge swing. Scott grasped the pistol with his left, and thumbed the safety off. Lloyd went to duck under the Brute's arm like she had done before- but fell backwards when her foot slipped on a piece of the shattered laptop.
BAM!
A clap of thunder accompanied Scott's pull of the trigger, but instead of having its head blown clean off, the Brute's body was enveloped in a shimmering gold. Its shields had come back, and absorbed all the force from the bullet. The Brute didn't feel a thing, nor did it stop its swing.
"Lloyd!" Was what Scott tried to call out, but the name died in his throat when the Brute suddenly crumpled to the side. Another smudge of black, this one far larger than Lloyd or Scott, had just rammed into the Brute like a freight train.
The Brute's claws missed Lloyd's head by a hair as it was tackled and pinned onto the far wall by the human trooper. Although, at that moment, who would ever believe that Jerome Brandt with his monstrous strength was human? Certainly not the Brute, who's terrible rage was quickly replaced by pure confusion.
Yeah, I know exactly how you feel.
"Now!" Brandt bellowed, every muscle fiber in his huge body straining with effort. But once the Brute got over the initial shock of being pushed by a mere human, his rage returned even greater than before. It shoved Brandt to the floor hard and roared- before its head burst and painted the wall behind it a dark red.
"Jesus, man." Scott looked over towards the open doorway to find Calson standing there, the barrel of his rifle smoking. "Let a guy know what you're gonna do before you go all linebacker on us."
It was only when the Brute's corpse hit the floor did Scott realize what Calson had done. There would have been no way to break the shield and pierce the skull in a single shot. But the shields didn't cover the inside of the Brute's mouth, did it? That meant that Calson had blasted the beast right through the roof of its mouth while it was roaring, which gave the bullet a clear path to the brain. Scott would praise him for such a shot.
"This is hardly the time for napping, don'tcha think, Sarge?"
Scott would, if the shot had been made by anyone else.
==Chapter 2 - Ghosts of Kepler==
“Brutes.” Calson sighed.  “It just had to be Brutes.”
Even through his helmet’s air filtration system, the stench of the dead alien was almost thick enough to make him gag. Lloyd pumped a couple more suppressed rounds into the monster’s corpse for good measure, and turned to tend to her Staff Sergeant. But Scott waved her off. He didn’t need anyone to tell him his shooting hand was busted– the agonizing pain that shot through his arm whenever he tried to flex his fingers was all the diagnosis he needed.
An hour in, and already down a man…
In the corner of his eye, he spotted the data chip amidst the clutter on the floor, and slotted it into the free data port in his helmet. Lloyd’s words about this chip being exactly what they came here for rang in his mind. Was it just a coincidence that the Brute chose to attack the moment they found this chip?
Either way, it was clear that the mission’s secondary and tertiary objectives of securing any data and potential human survivors were no longer a factor. If an invisible Brute had been stalking these halls for god-knows how long, then it was very unlikely that there was anyone left alive at Kepler Base at all. As for data– ONI would have to be satisfied with the chip they had recovered. Whatever it was.
“Zephyr, this is Wolf-One. Come in. We have a situation. Over.”
Nothing but static answered him. He tried again, and again, but still nothing.
“Any luck?” Asked Brandt. Even with several kilos of armor, Scott could see the large man’s chest heaving as he tried to catch his breath.
“No. And that’s the fifth time I tried to make contact. We may be on our own here, people.” 
“Figures,” Calson snorted. “The spooks are never around when you actually need them.”
“You don’t think they…?” Brandt didn’t finish the thought, but everyone knew the man’s habit of focusing too hard on the worst case scenario enough to guess the rest.
“A Prowler crew knows how to stay undetected.” Lloyd assuaged his concerns. “And sometimes that means going radio silent.”
Scott nodded approvingly.
“It may be just interference from the storm. Whatever the case, I’d say we bug out.” Scott jabbed his good thumb towards the armored demolition pack on his back. “I got enough C-12 to blow the place sky high, and it doesn’t matter where we toss it. It’s about time we say goodbye to Kepler.”
“Best news I heard all day, Sarge.” Calson said. Scott expected Brandt to express a similar relief, but the mountain of a man still looked antsy. No doubt still hung up on whatever was keeping their ride from answering.
There were about a dozen potential explanations for the ship’s silence– and none of them were good news for Wolf. The least bad, and the one Scott was hoping for, was that the heavy glass storm Paris IV was currently experiencing was blocking all forms of long range communications. Not only because that meant that the good men and women aboard the UNSC Zephyr were still alive and well, but because the Brute would have likely faced the same difficulties, if it truly had called for backup before dying.
Thump, thump, thump.
Unless, of course, its backup was already inside the facility.
“Move!” Scott bellowed, but Wolf was already charging ahead. Rather than hold position at the end of the corridor and let any reinforcements  pick them apart, they would rush into the wider atrium, where they would have a clear shot on anything trying to reach them from the ground floor. Normally, Scott would have taken point, but with a bum hand, it was better to leave it up to Brandt and his assault rifle. 
“Thought you cleared the ground floor, Lance Corporal!” Frustration crept into Scott’s tone as the team took up positions near the only stairwell. 
“We did, Sarge!” 
“With thermal?” Lloyd asked, in a way that made it clear that she already knew the answer. All Calson could offer was a groan, and Brandt a meek apology. Covenant active camo rendered the user invisible to the naked eye– but it gave off a ton of heat. Had Calson and Brandt swept the lower level with thermal optics, it would have lit up any hostiles using the alien stealth tech like a Christmas tree.
So that’s how the first Brute got the drop on me and Lloyd.
They should have known better. But there was no use laying into them right before a fight.
Echoing footfalls and the clanking of armor plates smacking into each other sounded closer and closer. They certainly weren’t trying to remain undetected any longer, but that just made Scott question why they had allowed Calson and Brandt to intercept their comrade in the first place. Was he missing something here?
“Let’s not make the same mistake again. Switch to thermal optics, people.” The glow inside Scott’s visor shifted from a dull green to a vibrant arrangement of blues and purples.
Still, no sign of the reinforcements. Yet. How many were there? It had been hard to tell when they first heard movement, and since then, it had quieted down. Given how Brutes usually worked in packs, it may have been a safe bet to assume that the reinforcements were yet more rhino-bear monstrosities. 	But he couldn’t be sure, exactly. Those footsteps didn’t sound heavy enough to belong to a half-ton Brute. Elites? Probably not– those two races hated each other even more than they had hated humans, so the chances of them working together were slim.
Slim– but not impossible.
“Steady, people.” Scott whispered over TEAMCOM. “Let them come to us.”
The filtered air in his helmet tasted stale. The winds outside still roared, but it was muffled and distant. The crinkle of somebody’s glove squeezing the forend of their rifle may have been barely audible, but in the tense silence that always preceded a firefight, it was deafening. Scott’s eyes flickered to the corner of his HUD, where the number of remaining rounds in his sidearm was displayed. Seven. He hoped that meant his luck hadn’t run dry just yet.
Thump, thump, thump. 
They were close now– whoever “they” were. Right underneath Wolf, if Scott had to guess, about to head up the stairs– and walk into a wall of lead. A shadow detached itself from the wall. Scott's finger wrapped around the trigger.
"Hold your fire!"
Confusion spread amongst the troopers like wildfire. Scott heard the command in his helmet-- but it was his voice that spoke the words. Helmets tilted in the Staff Sergeant's direction, but before Scott could tell them that wasn't him, the unknown contact stepped into view.
What turned the shadowy corner was no Brute at all, but perhaps just as unsettling. As his helmet reverted from thermal to night vision, threads of green spun and sewn themselves into the blank, indifferent visage of a human hazmat helmet. Even in the low-light, it was impossible not to notice the high-visibility yellow of the loose and baggy safety suit and armored plating-- or the assault rifle they carried in their gloved hands.
The person in the hazmat suit came to an abrupt stop before they ran into the troopers head on. Their rifle wasn't raised and ready. Wolf, however, had not made that mistake. 
"Woah, easy, easy!" A young man's voice blared from the helmet's external speakers. "You're here to rescue us, aren't you?"
"Us?" Brandt repeated.
"That all depends," Scott said, his finger still hovering on the trigger. Never hurt to be too careful. "You Kepler? Where are the rest of you? What in God's name happened here?"
"You got it all backwards, Nathan."
A second hazmat suit emerged from the same shadowy corner as the first. Thinner and shorter than the kid, but with a whole lot more confidence despite their only weapon, a snob-nosed revolver, holstered at their hip. A woman, most like. She placed a hand on the other's shoulder, the one apparently named "Nathan".
"They're the ones who need saving now."
Category:Stories