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Reflections: Day One
Date: 14 January 2008, 5:12 pm
The crowd was stampeding like a spooked herd of wildebeest. Savannah struggled to keep a clear head amidst the noise of human panic rising to the shriek of the alien fliers passing overhead. Someone knocked her to the ground and pain flashed across her face. She had to get out of the crowd or she would be trampled.
Through the passing people, she could catch glimpses of an alleyway off to the side of the main thoroughfare. Flowing with the crowd, she struggled to move toward the space. Just as she was a few feet away from safety, Savannah felt a wave of heat at her back, then the thunderclap of an explosion.
The crowd surged away from the smoking crater, screaming.
Fleeing men and women shoved her roughly aside, propelling her further and further from the alley. For an instant, fear took hold of her and she became part of the crowd, pushing, biting, scratching, all to get away from the aliens. She could find shelter somewhere else. She had to keep moving.
Blue fire cut through the crowd in front of her with a demonic hiss. The man who had been running in front of her just a heartbeat ago lay in a melted heap on the ground. Savannah tripped over his body, and fell, but from this new perspective she spotted a shattered concrete pipe lying in a ditch off to the side. She sprinted for it, not caring if she stepped on outstretched bloody fingers. A desperate moan rose from the bodies of those not yet dead as the iridescent fliers rounded for another pass. Twin blasts rocked the pipe as Savannah curled up in a ball inside it. The smell of smoldering flesh stung her eyes.
But she had survived. Only 12 years old, and she had survived. All she had to do was keep surviving.
* * *
The lion cub mewled helplessly beside the bodies of her parents. Savannah turned to her father. "Why won't you help it, Daddy?" she asked. Her father looked at her and smiled sadly, ruffling her hair. "There's nothing we can do for her," he said, "not without interfering."
It seemed like everything was conspiring against this tiny lion, even her father. "That's not fair."
Her father picked her up and sat her on his lap. She took comfort in his voice, the smell he always carried of long grass baking in the hot African sun. "Savannah, you're getting to be a big girl now, and this is one of those choices we have to make," he explained, "You see, if we began to take care of that lion, she'd become dependent on us. Before long, she wouldn't be a lion anymore. She'd just be a housecat. Is that really being fair to her? If we gave her everything she needed, we would wind up taking away her lion-ness.
"Don't you think that's unfair? Taking away her lion-ness?" Her father never raised his voice, never used any tone of voice besides his typical laid-back drawl, but Savannah knew she was being chastised. "Besides, that's just not what we do. We're trying to get this place back to its natural state, not change it even more."
"So she'll just have to survive on her own?" she asked, perhaps beginning to understand.
Her father's tone was earnest.
"Don't we all?"
* * *
Consciousness returned to her like a tidal wave – unexpected and all at once. Savannah hadn't even remembered falling asleep inside the pipe. She shook the last of the dreams from her head, shoving aside the memories of her past, and tried her best to think things out like her father always had said to do.
She was alone. Her parents were probably dead, along with everyone else she had ever met. She would have to find food, water, and somewhere to sleep. She would also have to deal with the invading aliens. She could try to get out of New Mombasa, but doing so might just get her noticed. Perhaps it might be better to lay low until they lost interest and moved on.
She'd lived within easy distance of the city all her life and knew the city well, so she could think of plenty of ways to meet her basic needs. The aliens, however, she would need to be smart about. She knew nothing about them except that they were set on killing every human being they could find. She had only one advantage over them: they weren't looking for her, yet. She'd have to learn as much about them as she could before they started looking for her, so she could outsmart them when the time came. She'd spent all her life watching and studying animals. How different were the aliens, really?
She sat up as best she could in the small pipe, ignoring the pitted concrete scraping against her scalp. A breeze began to stir outside, just a small one, but the tight confines of the pipe channeled it into a storm. Stale wind whipped Savannah's face, bringing the scent of the burned bodies just out of view, and howling like the alien fliers. Her heart began to beat faster as she remembered, almost relived, the horror she'd experienced.
She felt like crying, but the tears never came.
Reflections: Day Two
Date: 20 February 2008, 3:11 am
DAY 2
The sign proclaimed its welcome in big, bright letters, but the way it dangled limply from its laser-scorched billboard proved it was lying. Savannah had never felt less welcome anywhere in her life as she cautiously stepped into the store. She'd been here a hundred times, but that had been when the place was lit and filled with people. It was cold without the warmth generated by dozens of human bodies.
She strained her eyes, trying to divine the contents of the shadows. No movement, no slight hiss of the breath masks worn by the smallest aliens, caught her senses. Still, she crept in as softly as she could and hid underneath the cashier's station for a few seconds. She reached up and felt around for the clipboard she knew would be there, detailing the store's layout and inventory. She would need to think carefully about what she needed most; otherwise, she might grab too much to carry easily.
The board was bigger than she had anticipated, and covered her legs completely when she set it down on her lap. Quickly she scanned its contents, noting the location of all the ways in and out and all the dead ends. More importantly, she had access to all the cameras. She could set the security system to think the store closed, but she would need the manager's passcode. She didn't have time to spend rummaging through the offices looking for a ten-digit number somewhere.
Finding a way she could carry the board comfortably under one arm without impairing her movement, she set off.
* * *
DATE: 3/26/2577
FROM: UNSC MIL AI TNG2814-74
TO:
SUBJECT: SPARTAN – S41
Subject has shown a significant resistance to the standard mnemonic therapy. The original memories are reasserting themselves such that intensifying the MT could result in a total loss of ability to recognize reality.
I need more time.
>84F2E00206DFDCA7008C030780066>SYSTEM ERROR 9320
>The M7 submachine gun is gas-operated and magazine-fed. It fires 5mm x 23 caseless ammunition.
The suppressor fit snugly onto Savannah's SMG, and she gave it an experimental tap to ensure it was in place. Holding her weapon at the ready, she stepped cautiously to the edge of the Pelican's bay, and jumped. She fell 25 meters to the tundra below….
* * *
Click, click. Savannah gently tossed the multi-tool back to its kindred. The locks that snapped its heads in place were too loud to be useful when trying to avoid notice.
Click, click. The multi-tool, however, lay limply in its box.
The forgotten clipboard fell from her shaking hands and clattered to the floor at her feet. Only the sharp crack of metal on metal fully shook Savannah from her reverie, and she pressed herself into the gap between the upper shelves. The boxes beneath her feet shook slightly.
A diminutive alien rounded the corner, one of the gas-breathing ones, its clawed feet clicking on the floor. Savannah had to suppress a laugh – the alien was no bigger than she was, and wandered about like a lost child. Nonetheless, she held her breath as it approached. It paused below her, and interestedly grabbed for a box of screws.
Her footing gone, Savannah tumbled from her perch. She crouched on the floor, face to face with the alien for an instant. It screamed, shoved her aside, and ran babbling away.
She took two quick steps forward, yanked the plasma pistol from the Unggoy's satchel, and fired twice, dead center mass.
The laser gun joined the clipboard on the floor. Trembling hands covered her burning eyes to block out the scene before her, but somehow it seems to seep through her face into her brain. Her first shot had scorched a hole in the back of the alien's air tank. Her second shot had ignited the escaping gas, setting the helpless creature ablaze.
It wasn't that she'd never seen death before. Watching a lion feast on a young gazelle, though, was not the same as watching a creature burnt to death by her own hand. But why had she pulled the trigger? She'd never fired a gun in her life, never even be around one, yet it all felt perfectly natural. Even automatic.
Something did feel wrong though. She had fired the gun, she knew she had, but she could not remember the actual sensation of doing so….
* * *
The metropolis of Vladivostok towered in the distance, but Savannah was focused on the newer settlement only half a kilometer away. The brief hadn't been exhaustive – all she knew was that the semi-permanent refugee camp was the largest of its kind on Earth and the now the ad hoc headquarters of the True Colonial Militia. The TCM had been the controlling force behind a series of increasingly large-scale terrorist attacks, and now could be organizing a standing army for the purpose of taking on the UNSC.
So, obviously, they needed to be taken out.
A series of eight slight indentations in the ground were the only clues that the rest of Blue Team had taken up positions around a rock outcropping, their light-bending MJOLNIR-R armor making them little more than whispers in the wind. Behind the rock, Mick hefted the long laser designator that was both the key to the operation and their greatest liability.
The beam projected by the sniper-rifle-sized device could be easily detected by a number of security measures which the militiamen might have. Plus, its large size would be visible with a simple pair of optical binoculars, even if its wielder was not.
In a single motion, Mick dropped out from behind the rock and lay prone to support and stabilize the designator. Savannah triggered the zoom on her faceplate to scan for threats, while Naoko, Whitney and Eric readied scoped M6 pistols.
The radio crackled to life on the narrow-beam channel: Mick confirming the target with the UNSC Within the Hollow Crown orbiting overhead. The Crown carried a high-intensity, low-blast radius tactical nuclear missile keyed to the laser. The blast would, in theory, knock out the Militia leadership with minimal civilian casualties.
Savannah could see the tiny laser dot on the squat, two-level compound at the settlement's center, but even as Mick signaled Blue Team to fall back to the extraction a flash of sudden movement in the distance caught Savannah's eye.
A pair of MAKO attack drones rose from concealed pads on the edge of the camp, jerry-rigged LAU-65D/SGM-151 missile pods hanging precariously from their undercarriages. They hovered for a moment, searching, and then rocketed toward Blue Team.
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