Halo: New Blood

We’d been sent to that damn dustball by Veronica—excuse me, Office of Naval Intelligence Captain Dare—who thought we might have some kind of rapport with the alien. I suppose I saw her point. After all, Alpha-Nine had been the team that’d hauled his floating carcass out of New Mombasa, ba

glory-hungry bullet-catchers.

So while the war might have been over, the battles went on, just over different issues.

I kinda miss the old days. At least then, you knew who to shoot and who might be drawing a bead on you. But as Commander Musa likes to say, you don’t always get to fight your favorite foes.

He also likes to say that, as Spartans, we no longer have formal ranks like they do in the rest of the military, which we’re supposed to take as meaning we’re all equals within the Spartan branch of the UNSC. Course, some of us are far more equal than others, and he’s the main point of evidence for that. So I don’t take his words as gospel.

Some of them even allied with us, including one headed by the Arbiter, who’d helped the Master Chief himself put an end to the Covenant War.

Jun reached into the breast pocket of his jacket then and pulled out a sealed plastic bag about the size of a fist. A broken chain and a circular medallion sat inside of it, and they were smeared with blood.
Even painted red as it was, I recognized the medallion instantly. It had been molded to resemble the surface of the Moon.
It belonged to Mickey.
“We found this clutched in Wakahisa’s hand,” Jun said. He kept any hint of accusation out of his tone, but we all knew what it meant.
Mickey’s eyes grew wide as the barrel of a grenade launcher. “That’s mine,” he said in a hollow voice. He glanced at me for support. “The Rookie and I bought them after the end of the war. Something to remember our common home. He lost most of his family there during the Battle for Earth.”

“Wow. ONI knows about us—and they’re treating me like they were your dad.”
“My dad’s dead.”
“Dammit, you know what I mean.”

“Dammit, Gunny!” Captain O’Day shouted in my face. “Spartans don’t cry!”
“I ain’t crying, Captain,” I said as I winced again in agony. “I just got some nanotech in my eye.”
There was more than a bit of truth in what she said. I’ll admit that I had something salty flowing out of my eyes, but it had more to do with the fact that I couldn’t stop the pain. The medical alterations had sent my hormones into a crazed spiral. I hadn’t felt this raw and vulnerable since I’d hit puberty

“You were a good soldier, Rookie,” I said to the capsule of black plastic underneath the flags. “I was proud to serve with you. I’m glad you got to see the end of the war, which started before you were born. I just wish you’d gotten to go back home, too.”

She pulled the trigger on the Rookie, and his brains blew out of the back of his skull in a fine red mist that scattered all over the legislature’s floor. Then he crumpled backward, tumbling over the balcony’s railing. His body slammed right on the podium from which Draco III’s legislators gave speeches to the rest of the world. It splintered under his weight.

rescuing them.”
“That’s not the point,” I said. Much as we’d been through, Romeo knew he grated on my nerves sometimes, and I’d started to think he liked it. “We got our orders, we got our fancy implants and armor, and so we get the job done.”
“Aye-freaking-aye,” Romeo said in as positive a tone as he could muster.
With that settled, or so I thought, we double-timed it up the sunny side of the mountain. None of us said another word. We’d worked together for too long to bother with small talk in the field.
That sort of thing had killed more soldiers than I care to think about. You started talking about your home life, such as it was, and you took your mind off the task at hand. The next thing you knew, enemy fire you never saw coming blew straight through your head.
We hadn’t survived this many operations by letting ourselves get distracted. Besides which, we didn’t always have that much to say to each other those days.
By the time we reached the ridge, the massive sun had fallen low, painting the sky in reds as dark as blood. The light amplifiers in my helmet automatically compensated for the encroaching dusk.
I gave the signal, a