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The Titan Eleven by Lysander
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The Titan Eleven: Prolouge
Date: 15 August 2006, 4:44 am
Titan Eleven: Prolouge
"Dropship, I need a ride out of this Hell hole, now."
Marine Lieutenant Dimitri Priest sprayed the area in front of him with automatic weapons fire, killing two of the advancing rebels and causing the rest to duck back behind cover. One of them spun around from behind a door frame and put a semi-automatic round through one of Dimitri's squad mate's head. The private fell over, eyes staring up at the sky.
The rebel turned his sights on Dimitri, who rolled, narrowly missing the shot. He brought his weapon up and riddled the enemy with automatic fire. The rebel fell back, knees giving way, and collapsed onto himself. Dimitri rolled a grenade into the doorway, turned, and ran through the rest of the office, squad behind him.
A second later, the grenade detonated, killing all the following rebels.
The lieutenant turned, pounding down the hallway. A rebel burst from a doorway, rifle pointed from the waist. Dimitri put a trio of rounds through his head and kept going.
"Sir!" Sergeant Forester barked from behind. "More enemies, coming this way."
Dimitri's motion tracker flashed red all around, flashed, blurred. It appeared that there were rebels all around. The hallways of the office building wound and cavorted this way and that. Lieutenant Priest reached the end of the hall and kicked the door open. He swept left and right. No enemies.
As soon as his men were through the door, Dimitri slammed it, and pushed a desk in front of it. He radioed in again.
"Dropship, where the hell are you?"
There was the chatter of automatic weapons on the other end. Then the pilot's voice came in. "Inbound now sir. Location?"
Dimitri looked out of the enormous window of the office. "I'd say the seventh floor of the building. You'll know which one is ours. We're the one with the fireworks display," he said and cut off the mic. He turned to Sergeant Forester again.
"Sergeant, get that damned bomb armed. We're getting the hell out of here."
The sergeant cracked open the large satchel he was carrying, and placed it on the desk blocking the door. He unzipped the satchel, revealing the two megaton bomb that would level this office building once detonated. Not to mention kill all the rebels that swarmed over the building like bees in a hive.
There was pounding coming from the other side of the door. Splinters began to break off as the rebels tried to hammer their way into the compound.
There was a roar outside the building. Dimitri turned to see their
DT-5713 "Falcon" dropship hovering outside the window, hatch open and waiting for them.
Dimitri sprayed the window with bullets, and kicked it into a million fragments. He leapt the five feet onto the waiting dropship. The rest of his squad jumped aboard. Sergeant Forester finished arming the bomb, turned, sprinted, and leapt aboard the dropship.
Dimitri flung open the door between the passenger area and the cockpit. "Get us out of here. Now!" he bellowed. The lieutenant grabbed a hand rail as the Falcon accelerated sharply. He turned to see a blossom of fire explode from the side of the building, the thermite bomb melting through the metal braces. Then the building collapsed upon itself like a deck of cards.
There were artillery and anti-air fire exploding all around. Below the flying dropship, brave Marines stood guard in the city streets, pouring fire into the mob of advancing rebels. For every Marine that was killed, ten rebels were killed in exchange. But it was still not enough. The marines were crushed by a living tide of bullets and flesh, the barbaric rebels unrelentingly pursuing the retreating marines.
Dimitri pounded on the cockpit door again. "Where to next?"
"The skipper needs you to hold a strategic street downtown." The pilot replied.
"Rebel resistance?"
"Heavy. You'll be making a quick combat drop into the heart of them. After that, it's up to you to hold that position for the next sixty minutes."
"And then?"
"Reinforcements are inbound from the south. They'll be there in an hour to help you."
"Just fucking great…" Dimitri muttered under his breath.
"What's that?" the pilot called back. "You're not scared, are you? Not the great Lieutenant Priest of the 19th Airborne Infantry, Scourge of Nova Roma."
"Shut your mouth and fly this thing, pilot. That's an order." Dimitri didn't want to think about Nova Roma at this point and time. Another five minutes of flying passed in silence. Dimitri's squad mates restocked their supplies from the Pelican's small armory. The Lieutenant checked his own MA19C assault rifle. He ejected the nearly spent clip, and inserted a new clip that went in with a satisfying click.
"Okay, we're here," the pilot called. At that moment, a violent explosion rocked the Falcon to the right.
"We're hit!" the pilot screamed. "Right wing is hit. If you're gonna go, go now," he ordered. "I can't keep this thing flying much longer."
Dimitri attached his repel line to the Falcon, clipped himself on, and jumped. Like a spider on a thread of silk, he slid down to the street. When he hit the ground, he cut the rope with his combat knife. The rest of his squad landed beside him. A NAV marker appeared on his heads-up display, and Dimitri guided the rest of his squad to the area.
The Lieutenant looked over his shoulder at the Falcon dropship. It's right wing was on fire, and the dropship drifted dangerously to the left, right towards a towering office building. Dimitri radioed in.
"November-11, come in November-11. Pull up, pull up now!" he shouted into the microphone. There was a lot of static on the other end, and then the pilots voice came in clear as a bell.
"Can't hold her steady more. I'm going down!" and then the Falcon collided with the side of the office building and erupted into flames. A split second later the fuel tanks erupted and a blistering explosion emanated from the wreckage.
Lieutenant Priest turned back to his post. The rebels would be coming this way any second, and he intended to greet them properly. Hastily constructed concrete barriers had been put in place not too long ago. Their drop-zone had been the main intersection of the two main roads in the city. Two massive six lane streets met where Dimitri and his squad now stood. There was a two story fountain in the middle of the intersection. There were some Marine regulars scattered about, and even more dead Marines on the ground. The gutted remains of two Rex class tanks indicated the fate of the last squad that had been chosen to hold this ground.
Dimitri stood behind a large concrete barrier, smoking a cigarette. His eyes, one grey and the other a reddish-brown, another souvenir of Nova Roma, stared off into the distance. Even though they were far off, he could still see the advancing rebels, pouring like a wave of living flesh down the highway. They stretched all the way across the six lane road, a hundred across and probably three times that deep. He readied his MA19C assault rifle and let loose with bursts into the oncoming crowd. He knew that even if every shot hit and killed, there would still be plenty left to finish him off.
They started to grow closer, and his unmodified squad mates finally noticed them. They took up positions at firing blocks and began hosing indiscriminately into the enemy. "Spray and pray" it was called. It was a prodigal waste of ammo, in the Lieutenants opinion. Even though scores of bodies were felled, they kept on coming. Few of them had guns, most came with swords, knives, and clubs. Still others were completely unarmed, and came screaming towards their deaths like wild Neolithic savages.
They were less than a hundred meters away now, and Dimitri could hear and smell them as they coursed down the street like an out of control river overrunning its banks. The smell was carried forward by the wind, and it repulsed Dimitri. They smelled of sweat and blood and death. But most of all they smelled of blind, uncontrolled malice. Like lemmings they ran forward to their deaths, unthinking, uncaring, unswerving in their single-minded mob mentality goal of utterly erasing the Marines from the face of Gilead VII.
"Men!" Dimitri barked. "If we're going to die on this God forsaken rock, then let us die gloriously!" he shouted. Never mind the fact that if they died here nobody would ever remember them or their glorious last stand. He leaped over the barricade, the bullets zinging all around him, but not one hitting him. Like a weathered tree before the storm, he stood against the oncoming tide of enemies.. "For blood and glory!" he shouted one, the heat of battle settling over his eyes again. "Charge!" he bellowed, and turned. He didn't know how long it would be before he saw his squad again. Ten minutes, half an hour, an hour. Time lost meaning in the heat of battle.
Lieutenant Dimitri Priest charged headlong into the oncoming rebels, pouring lead into the enemies that dropped dead before his feet as if seeing God. Like a great shield and a great spear clashing, the two forces met, neither breaking. The two hundred some Marines of the 19th Airborne that had been at the intersection (some modified, most not), clashed with the at least thousand strong enemy.
In the heat of battle, time lost all meaning. Seconds ticked by into minutes. The seconds seemed to last days at a time, and the minutes ticked into what seemed like years. All is lost and forgotten in battle, like a swirling sea it eddies and rises, tearing the soldiers in it apart.
When the hour passed and the reinforcements broke through, they delivered a swift, murderous blow to the flank of the enemy, driving them away. It took several hours to clear the clotted streets of bodies. But when they were moving one, it coughed up a crimson streamlet of blood, and opened its eyes, one grey, one a certain reddish-brown, back at the world. For why wouldn't he? He was Lieutenant Dimitri Priest, leader of the 19th Airborne Infantry, Scourge of Nova Roma, and a survivor of the Titan experiment. At his word, a thousand men marched and a fleet of ships could be moved. He was Dimitri, 7th of the Titan Eleven.
A/N: This is the first chapter of a story set some one hundred years after the events of Halo, and tells the tale of a UNSC where the Covenant has long since vanished and rebellion threatens to tear the UNSC apart. It's a universe where modified soldiers aren't elite, but the majority. Some of them more modified than others. One of these extra-endowed soldiers is, of course, Dimitri, a graduate of the ill-fated Titan Mk. V project, of which out of one hundred and fifty candidates, eleven survived.
The Titan Eleven: Chapter 1
Date: 24 August 2006, 4:49 am
The Titan Eleven: Chapter 1
There was the smell of gunpowder and iron in the room. Though the room had been rebuilt from the ground up after the Covenant invasion, it still smelled of blood and fire and dust and the ages of time. It hadn't been used since the Covenant Wars, and had so been unused for over a hundred years. But, the rebellion led by Xavier Brands had changed all that. And now Dr. Gabrielle Smith stood in the once abandoned research lab on Reach.
The rebuilding of the facility after it had been destroyed had taken some time, but it was the only place in the UNSC that was without a doubt completely safe from rebel attack. The funding for the project was astronomical. The largest funding for human modification since the Spartan II projects in the 2500's. And, it was only fitting that Gabrielle Smith was in charge of the facility. After all, it had been her ancestor, Dr. Catherine Halsey, which had last stood here.
The dim amber overhead lights flickered on over the gathered audience before Smith. One hundred and fifty men and women were gathered before her. Most were just Marine regulars that had shown all the required markers required for the project. However, there were several officers in the room as well, including five ensigns, four lieutenants, a commander, and a captain.
Smith approached the large oak podium in the center of the room. The hundred and fifty pairs of eyes stared at her. She looked back at them. She spied one of the ensigns, and his eyes seemed to glare right into her heart. An icy pair of grey eyes that stared right through Smith, like a piece of paper being held up to a light.
She cleared her throat. "Hello. I am Dr. Gabrielle Smith, director of the Titan Mark IV Project. This project is designed to modify the human body to the point of near superhuman status. The current Zeus Mk. III series of biomodified enhancement currently employed by fifty-seven percent of the United Nations Space Command Marine Corps is ineffective.
"However," she continued. "You all have the proper requirements to become the next generation of modified humans. Codenamed "TITAN", this project is designed to modify you in ways never before imagined. If you accept, you will be transformed into the pinnacle of human engineering. This is the pilot run of this new system of biomodifcation, and, if successful, will replace the Zeus modification system as the current standard amongst Marines. You will run faster, jump higher, lift more, do more, be more than you ever could've been on your own.
"However, this project is not without its risks. And there is no guarantee that you will survive the transformation. That is why we are asking for volunteers. If you wish to join, please, at this time, stand up."
In unison, the entire assembly of soldiers before her stood up.
'Thank you," Smith said, her voice choking a little bit. Not in admiration of the bravery of these soldiers. But in regret, as she knew that she was now condemning most of them to their deaths. "The new Titan system incorporates the standard Zeus series of modifications, and then some. Muscle growth accelerants will allow you to lift up to three times your normal weight. They, along with the adrenaline amplifiers we will implant, will also allow you to run at bursts of up to sixty-five kilometers an hour. Brain implants will give you improved reaction times, down to the nano-second. Also, certain enhancements will also be made to your eyes, giving you better sight range and near perfect low light visibility.
"Amongst other things, the Titan series is developing a breakthrough technology. We will give you, in a series of surgeries, a new system of organs. These organs will allow you to mend wounds more quickly, and will also pump synthetic cells into your blood that will allow you to clot wounds almost instantly. They will also increase your recovery from lactic acid, make your lungs and heart more powerful, and in conjunction with other implants, accelerate muscle and bone growth. These organs will also allow you to break down food more quickly, giving you quick bursts of energy.
"Are there any questions?" she finished.
The man with the icy grey eyes raised his hands. She nodded towards him.
He fixed her with his eyes, and interwove his fingers together. "When do we start?" he asked. His voice was rough, but gentle like at the same time. Like an orator who had been giving orders on a battlefield for far too long.
"Right away," Smith replied. She locked stares with the grey eyed gentleman. "You will be introduced to your new quarters shortly. Welcome to the Titan Project, ladies and gentlemen," she said and turned on her heel, walking off stage. She added to herself in a whisper, "I hope you won't regret it."
And now, some five years later, only eleven of those original one hundred and fifty marines still lived. The other unfortunate one hundred thirty nine individuals had not been so lucky. Their bodies had violently rejected their implants. Instead of making them near invincible, the implants designed to enhance their bloodstreams instead turned their blood into a sort of acidic ichor that burned their hosts from the inside out.
The military had dubbed it "Acceptable losses", and the eleven survivors of the 'successful' Titan project were soon to become legends. The Captain that had been among the group had catapulted to an Admiral in little under two years, his innumerable victories in both ground and naval engagements were often pivotal points in the war.
As it had turned out, all of the Titan Eleven were the eleven officers that had attended that day. The commander was now a Lt. Colonel in command of a small fleet in the Thracian Gulf. The ensigns were now all at least lieutenants. Two of the lieutenants were now Captains. One was a Major, and the other went from Lieutenant JG to a full lieutenant.
The Titan Eleven were often light years apart. On only one occasion had two of them fought in the same engagement. And in that one, one had been commanding a ship while the other one had led the ground forces.
It was unknown how or why the survivors of the Titan IV project were so successful. In five years the squads or ships they commanded or were attached to racked up more kills than any other in the engagements they were in. In the battle of Odin II, a Titan Eleven soldier and the regiment she commanded killed four thousand rebel soldiers in the two months they were stationed on the planet.
In the battle of Deus I, a company of one hundred men led by Lt. Colonel Roland Dean was charged with holding a base against a rampaging rebel mob. For six days the held out against the rebels. UNSC strategic reports said that if they stayed there any longer, they'd be over run. Rather than scorn retreat, Colonel Dean held out another day. At the end of the seventh day, the rebels were all but defeated in that theatre of operations, and the company still held the ground.
The Titan IV project was never again attempted. The UNSC did not want to risk losing anymore men in a project with only a 1/15 success rate. However, through the five years since the project, more and more questions have sprung up about the Titan Eleven and their actions. And the UNSC has given fewer and fewer answers. Especially in the case of the Massacre at Nova Roma.
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