Men of War: Final Edition

Book One: The Lost Spartan

"Wake me when you need me."

The latch of the cryo-tube locked into place and sealed shut with a hiss. Within the self-contained system of the stasis pod, he laid back before her, slowly becoming motionless. There was little else she could say, yet her holographic projection betrayed a longing to speak- say anything once before he was gone. She held back a reach, instead watching the casing frost over and the man behind the visor become inactive.

The being of light, the holographic entity sighed. She turned away, trying to not focus too much of her loss onto his departure to incapacity. This was all a fragment of what she was, a cast image of her choosing. This was Cortana, a highly advanced super AI with above human capacity for thought and multitasking and learning. Her displayed form was that of a slender woman, currently only a foot in total height, comprised of blue light and purple after-notes. An untrained eye would miss the streams of coding flowing through her form like veins of a human body. These symbols, both the small and the large, betrayed her non-human appearance, but her face was noticeably human in looks and her hair formed short.

This being of light stared for a moment more, surveying the man in armor within the stasis. As far as she knew, that was the only alive, sentient creature that was within communications range. Her image faltered, and her intelligence surged through the ship, seeking its senses: cameras and microphones, radar and long-range communications. Within a second, she had found all systems were inactive, save for the stasis pod which her companion lay dormant and the internal emergency power. Within the circuitry of crystal linings, she huffed and re-directed latent energy from the off-line gravity emitters and focused them into what she could. The wrecked ship at least would finally see what was around it.

The ship she, and her now frozen companion, drifted in space within was the once complete UNSC Forward Unto Dawn, a beautiful Charon-class light frigate ship. It had served Cortana, her companion, and its crew to not just win a war, but save the galaxy from total annihilation. Now it was but a halved wreckage, adrift in a celestial sea of starlight and vacuum. Its other half was nowhere to be seen.

Back online came external cameras. A majority of the long-distance arrays were destroyed or compromised by damage to the point of requiring physical repairs: something she was unable to accomplish. Still, with a blink of many dozens of cameras, Cortana finally spied around.

Well, look at that, she thought to herself as the visuals reported what they saw, what do we have here?

Several hundred thousand kilometers from her was something blocking out a considerable area of starlight. A quick scan and judgement of size later, and Cortana thought to herself, so there's a planet nearby. That could complicate things, she concluded. A spectroscopic scan determined that it was surprisingly viable for sustaining life. And you have some moons too, she added after the scan designated two moving celestial bodies within orbit.

Wait, she thought as something else caught the scans, that was composite material that came up. Pollutants and alloy? She switched her methods of short-range signals. What few ship-board antennae that she got moving with diverted power were suddenly awash with frequencies. If she had a mouth at the moment she might have gasped.

Multiple satellites in lower and higher orbit? She had no one to turn to for the stunning revelation as the cameras sophisticated lenses finally pierced the veil that was the atmosphere of the planet. Dozens and dozens of city-like layouts scattered over the surface of the planet. Signs of advanced life. And to her astonishment, the signals being bounced around by these satellites were… very human like in coding and design.

Not one UNSC signal to be found though, she thought to herself, and she started to scan the signals being bounced around by the satellites. They were crude by her standards, sub-standard to what she was used to, for sure. They aren't even coded! Do these things have any security? She thought in such bewilderment that it almost shocked her that her voice didn't just materialize out of the speakers. This must be an outlier colony, she realized, and scanned its surface once more. This… isn't anything on star maps as I know it though.

The ship's compromised bulkhead groaned. With a diagnostic and then flight path analysis, Cortana concluded very quickly a problem.

Not one minute after vanishing from a holographic pad did her blue-light form appear, and she looked up to the figure in stasis. She pursed her lips and shook her head as her mental command began the thawing process.

Slowly the hatch of the stasis pod unlocked and slowly lifted away, assisted by two hydraulic arms. The armor beneath it was still. Only for a moment, however: the helmet with the soft orange visor shook lightly, looking side to side.

"Sleep well?" she asked.

The imposing figure looked to her. Over seven feet tall, the being stirred within its armor. An underlying mesh of dark material was protected by heavy pieces of light forest green painted metal. It was a suit that at a distance looked fairly light and maneuverable, but up close looked more suited as armor for a vehicle strapped onto a human's form. The person pushed themselves up and out of the pod as the door swung clear, and the person looked around. This was the soldier known as Master Chief.

"How long was I out?" the figure asked, a lower toned and grizzly voice that felt somehow unshakable.

"One minute fifteen seconds as I finish the sentence," Cortana announced, following a sigh. The vizor turned and focused on her. No face, no look was visible from her point, but she knew exactly what he meant. "No nap today," she apologized.

"What happened?" he asked, lifted up into the air by a lack of gravity.

The AI lifted her arms up as he ascended into the air. "Careful chief," she warned him, "even if it was just a moment, stasis can take a bit to shake off."

"I'm fine," he told her. Catching himself on the ceiling, and pushing himself to the floor, he finally kneeled and looked up to her.

"We're not going to be adrift for too long," she mentioned.

"Boarded?"

"Not exactly."

The figured nodded. "Can you restore gravity?"

"I can, but it'll take time and energy cells aren't something we should expect to get back up online. Unless you need something, I'd advise we conserve what we have."

"Okay," the man nodded, and looked around. She could almost see the internal heads-up display beginning to fire up, announcing to the chief the surroundings. "what is operational?"

"From a very basic diagnostic, more than I would have expected," she admitted, "We have navigational thrusters, main weapons, life systems, short-range comms, stasis pods, grav generators, internal control systems, and enough juice to give the engines maybe an hour push. I wouldn't advise it though, because then we're really dead in the water."

The man before her, a spartan known as John 117, stood up slowly and surely, and with a look down suddenly had the boots stick the metal floor with a softened clang. Magnetized to the floor, he stood up fully, and extended an arm to her. She smiled.

"You shouldn't have," she teased with a grin. Her form faded as he waved his hand over the holograph station. Suddenly she was in his armor, and did a very thorough, very quick diagnostic of his armor and vitals. He was in good health, as good as one could be in his situation.

Once she was aboard his armor neural pathways, he turned, and marched to a station where he had mounted a weapon- the robust MA5C rifle. Cortana watched him reload it quickly, gathering a collection of several magazines from a nearby locker. With a swing over his head, the Master Chief seated the weapon into place on a magnetic lock over his back shoulder. The he marched away, magnetized to the hallway.

"Fill me in," his voice asked her.

"Gladly," she said into his ear, "we've been pulled into the gravity of a planetoid. Earth-like. Inhabited, and by the looks of things, an outlying colony," she summarized, "But get this- not on my records."

He nodded as he walked down the hallway to a control station. The screen activated with a touch from his armored glove. It registered the hull and weapons. Cortana said, "I'd leave those off for now. I'm not done yet," she said.

"We're crashing, right?" he asked.

"Looks like it," her voice told him, "not without burning what we have to escape the well and then we're probably both dead in space anyway." The helmet nodded. "And we have a hell of a landing zone."

"Show me."

Holographically projected before him using the stations systems, a mock planet was created. The image swelled in size until the wreckage of the Forward Unto Dawn was visible. "Without interference," Cortana explained, "we'll land like so," a dotted and chaotic spiral was drawn out, spinning towards the planet's surface, "which looks like so much fun."

"You said we had engines?" he asked.

"Up to an hour of main thrust."

"No slip-space?" he asked.

"Don't make me laugh," she told him in a flat tone, "we'd be lucky to get a hiccup out of this, let alone a full jump."

He shook his head and stared at the planet. His head tilted to the side. "What if we try to land it?" he asked.

"We don't have any of the bow," Cortana explained, "controlling this in atmospheric entry will be near impossible without the compensational thrustors."

"Unless-" he said, and pointed to the ships rear.

"-we navigate the ship to intentionally fall backwards, and use main-engine thrust to reduce the velocity mid-atmosphere!" she finished for him.

The spartan shrugged, "not my plan, but I like yours more." He said, and turned away, walking down the hallway to a labeled armory.

"I'll begin by spinning us around. If I can direct the path enough to get a side landing rather than a direct one. In the meantime… wait a second," her tone nagged at him, "what was your plan?" she asked, a smug smile heard through her words.

"You don't want to know," he declared.

She continued after studying him. "Vectoring in the crash destination to be as soft as possible, we'll land outside a large city border by several kilometers. My estimation is the ship will remain… mostly intact," she said after a pause, "with the input path, with a forty percent chance of disintegration."

The spartan added, "If the dawn begins to disintegrate, we can jump. I've fallen from higher places."

"So reckless," her voice scolded him.

"What kind of colony are we landing by?" he asked. There was a noticeable pause as the AI collected her data. Long enough for the spartan to walk down the next hallway towards the doors to the armory. "Cortana?" he asked as he grasped the nearby manual override lever.

"I don't want to be an alarmist," she told him as he cranked it down easily and opened the door with one hand, "but… industrial and looks pretty torn up. Not flying any UNSC identifiers either."

"Insurrectionists?" he asked.

"Would be weird considering the war with the Covenant," she muttered, "but they could be. I do have other theories, though," she added, her volume diminishing as she thought.

Walking inside the armory, the spartan found a large metal bin, and with one hand holding it by, he marched to lockers and wall mounts. Carefully grasping weapons and ammo, he compiled a vast collection of weaponry that could easily weigh several full human adults. With a dangerous situation looming on the horizon, there was no assurance what he could need. He found a lid to the mobile weapon locker and locked it tight.

"You're a collector now?" she asked after he lifted the large bin of weapons and made for the exit.

Looking back, he asked her, "I'm going to lock down the door. I don't want anyone else getting these without our permission, or any UNSC personnel. Can you make that happen?"

"Easily done," she nodded, and a light flashed over the door as the Chief closed it shut, "it should only open if I'm around now. The encryption code should be complicated enough to keep out any civilians or insurrectionists. But what about you?" she asked as he turned back to the hallway, marching away with his bin of weaponry. "Why lock the armory when you've taken half of it away already?"

"I plan on entering that city," he explained, "I want drop pods at the ready for us."

"Oh! Smart idea," she noted, "I can encrypt and lock those too."

"You're two steps ahead of me," he told her with a small chuckle. The ship shuddered. Metal groaned and the chief paused. "Cortana?" he asked.

"Just the aft navi-thrusters pushing us around. From the gash through the ship we won't be able to see much anymore, but at least we will have more control going in than before."

He continued down the hallway without a word. If Cortana said it was okay, she knew that he never worried.

Crossing down a series of hallways, down a ladder into the HEV deployment zone, he started laying out the weapons into the pods. Each had a holsters and rests for the guns and ammo, and he laid them in firmly. He was not interested in them landing and breaking on impact.

"I can set their drop zones to specific areas of interest," Cortana added, "maybe in high-risk areas? I can't claim I'm going to get them on the bulls-eye; I don't have a good reading on the weather patterns of the area."

"Do it."

She chuckled, "Done."

Emptying all the weapons into twelve pods, the chief walked over to the control override, and began to operate the touch-interface screen.

"Once you drop them chief, they're out of my hands," Cortana reminded him, "I can't put in a new coordinate and flight path once they're out."

He nodded. "Just tell me when to fire," he said.

She paused, and finally said, "go ahead."

With a touch of a red button and pull of a lever, each of the twelve self-contained units of exo-atmospheric insertion vehicles slammed their doors shut, and were propelled down through the floor, out of site and off-ship. The chief stood up, and walked past them empty spots.

"Now we just sit and wait for the fun," Cortana told him as he marched out of the drop pod facility. "We should be entering the atmosphere in only a few minutes.

"We should get to a safe area," he said.

"Couldn't agree more- "

The ship lurched. Metal screeched and the chief felt himself whip to the side as the entire vessel jolted to the side.

Before he could ask, the AI called out, "we must have hit something! Get me to the control pad, now!"

Clanging of his boots would have echoed through the hallways if the atmosphere had been re-pressurized. He rushed, panting heavily as he charged back into the control panel, he had let her used prior. With a wave of his hand, he watched as she pulled up an information hologram, along with several camera views.

"That's not good," she stated.

The ship was spinning. Something large had collided on its spin, and the planet would rotate around the views of the camera slowly, but at a rate that both the chief and Cortana knew to be too dangerous.

"It was a large satellite," she hissed as she appeared next to the information, "look," she pointed to a camera, where a sparking, steam-leaking mess of artifice crumbled past them. Some sort of red energy crackled and leaked from a lens-like focusing node of some sort. "It completely destabilized the entry path!"

"What do we need to do?" he asked.

"Chief, the amount of energy needed to steer us back could spin us even further out of path. I'll try to settle the ship back to a more conventional crash-course, but the ship is probably going up in flames. Easily from a forty to eighty percent chance of complete hull failure and total disintegration," she announced, "I'm sorry. I just don't have the time to set this in a secure manner. I'll try setting the thrusters to minimize the trajectory loss."

"That's okay," he said, and offered his hand out.

Her holographic eyes looked to him, and then his hand. "Wait…" she said.

"We need to leave, don't we?" he reminded her.

"There aren't any remaining escape pods, and without those-"

"Cortana," his voice called, "trust me."

Biting her lip, she looked back to the panel. She waved her small, blue hand by it, and the information faded from view. She gave the room a final look, studying its utilitarian design quickly before reaching back to his own, and with a stream of broken lights, she entered his suits neural network again.

"Now let's get out of here," he declared, and turned away from the panel as the lights faded around him. His armor's lights flared on, illuminating the otherwise dark hallways. He rushed once more, his steps launching forward through long hallways at break-neck speeds. Finally, he turned a corner and paused. The end of one was a broken section that would have led into the bow. Now all he saw was space, and pieces of the Dawn were being cast away, large plates of titanium flung off from weakened fastenings.

They both saw the edge of the planet. It was so very large now, taking up the entire view once the ship lurched around enough. The spartan shook his shoulders around, stretching them.

"Chief, tell me you have a plan," Cortana asked.

"Remember the one I had from before?" he asked.

"You told me I didn't want to know," she stated.

Inside the helmet he grimaced. "Yup." He stepped forward, and started to run. He ran faster as his heads-up display showed a potential path to take from Cortana. "Wish me luck," he asked as he neared the edge into space.

He had moments before he leapt.

"Good luck," she said with gritted teeth.

Pushing off the doomed ship with a mighty jump, he launched himself into space, following the drop-pods and a cloud of debris.

Stuffy air and the smell of tobacco perfumed the darkened space in a distant corner of Sera. This room was dimly lit with the humming glow of dozens of electronic screens, thick bulky monitors with varying sizes. What they displayed was a mess of information, graphic relays, pure numeric data, and camera feeds that seemed to originate from space, perhaps in orbit.

Piercing the ambient buzz of electrical humming was a snore. A woman laid her face on a section of the large curved desk that overlooked these panels. Her back lifted up slightly as she snorted, a tuft of her brown, wavy hair fallen from a tight knot in her face. She was otherwise asleep, dressed in a crisp grey and blue uniform with a riveted gear like symbol on her shoulder. Red lining ran down the edges of the long coat.

From behind her, a door slid up with a sharp hiss. Another similarly dressed person, a man with dreadlocks and warm tone and darker skin stepped inside. He held a pair of mugs in his hands, each with the same logo- of a gear, or a cog. He wore large, circular glasses which caught much of the glare of the screens. As he stepped inside the room the door behind him slid shut. Marching up to a chair next to the sleeping woman, he lowered the mug of steaming something and placed it just by the woman's form. No sooner had it landed than she stirred, her dark blue eyes flicking open.

"Morning," he said, pulling out a chair from under the large table to sit. She groaned and immediately swigged the drink before her. "It's hot," he warned her.

"Noted," the woman hissed, leaning up against the back of the chair. If the hand not currently cradling a mug was a smoldering cigarette at the end of its short life. She flicked it onto a small, heavily piled ashtray. Rubbing her eyes, she let out a prolonged yawn.

"Eventful night?" he asked her as he pulled out a heavy, metallic, mechanical keyboard and started typing. The screen before him flashed on, and with a quick input of some password, a series of registered and ever changing coordinates appeared.

"The usual," she snorted, and leaned up, "nothing in the skies to report on. Who'd expect that?" she asked sardonically.

He cast her a quick look with a cocked eyebrow. "They have us down here for a reason," he reminded. She snorted. Rolling his eyes, he looked back to the screen, "looks like the comms for HOD three-four-seven is down."

"That's new," the woman said with a curious look to his screen, "it was up just," she checked her watch, "ten minutes ago."

"Yeah," he said in a drawn-out breath. He typed rapidly, and she slid her chair closer behind him, studying him over his shoulders, "funny. It's not just ignoring our commands. Localized chatter between it and other HODs are down. Can you- "

"I'll do a quick satellite echo," she nodded, and pushed herself to a different screen, and began to type on her own similar keyboard. Within moments, a larger screen above both of them flashed on, and a huge sphere labeled 'Sera' appeared. Hundreds of tiny-line connected dots appeared, moving around the planet in orbit. From the sky blue lights they all flashed a bright green, until one did not, which flashed red. She gasped, and typed something else, causing a nearby screen to flash with a large, singular, red word: [Destroyed]. "No way," she groaned.

"We have a broken dawn?" he asked her, looking over to the screen, "man, if Prescott hears about this-"

She snarled, and turned to a different screen, "It still could be communications being down."

"It might as well be dead then," the other said, leaning back into his chair with a heavy sigh," even after the bomb, we're still putting most of our resources into the locus war." He shook his head, "we're not getting funded for a maintenance rocket. Even for a Hammer of Dawn." Next to him, rapid clicking was still cutting into the air, and he turned. "What are you checking?" he asked.

"I'm re-directing three-four-five to get a glimpse at it," she told him, and hit enter.

On the screen was the stars and space before it. They both blinked, and looked closer.

"Put it on the big screen," the glasses wearing man told her. She obliged him, and the same screen appeared on the largest screen, towering above them, in crystal-clear quality. "What the hell?" he almost whispered.

"By orbital schedule we should be able to see it," she said, leaning back in, she rapidly typed. "Let's try from the outside looking in. One-one-three," she said, and leaned back as she hit enter.

Then they saw the planet, and they both gasped. There was a stream of debris and sparking metal as their precious satellite was seen falling from orbit. It was, however, not alone. A massive object, clearly constructed and made from composite alloys and fabricated electronic devices, was descending into orbit, fast. It was… the size of a naval vessel, but oddly shaped, and it seemed to be drifting. With a loud clatter, the woman dropped her mug, spilling its contents across the floor.

"Holy fucking shit," the woman swore as she and her comrade became covered in goosebumps. "Is that a spaceship!?" she snapped at him.

He shook himself from the shock, or at least the stunned pause. He rushed forward the to the panel, and started rapidly typing. "Get it recorded! Save all visual record of this, NOW!" he yelled. She rushed forward to her keyboard and started transferring all visual recording of the object to local storage. He looked to her, "when you can, get someone."

"Who? Hoffman?" she snapped.

"Unless you want to go directly to the Chairman?" he laughed, "I'm sure he'd love to be reminded of Project Blacklight right after our hollow victory," he stood up fully and looked to her, "tell Hoffman we finally have something. And he'll want to act. Estimated to land in the woods off Jacinto west edge." She nodded, and with the clang of her boots the woman sprinted to the door and left in a hurry. He looked to the screen, his eyes glued to the falling vessel. "Whoever you are, welcome to Sera."

Those who remember, try to bring yourself back to an older time, when you were younger. Remember back to the days of the Xbox 360. Remember the first time you played Halo CE, Halo 2, and beat halo 3 on the HARDEST setting, that elation of the full Legendary ending. Remember the first time you defeated RAAM on the Lightmass Bomb operation. Remember that feeling of wanting more. Forget what has happened past halo 3. Forget what happened past gears of war one. We're going into new territory.

I can't promise to give you the story you want, or even the story better than what the series have done so far. I do promise that I'll try. If you're back from my previous two tries at this story, well, I guess you know how much of a flaky bastard I am. Sorry. Excuses aren't what you want, but I've got a basket of them. Either way, I'm here to give you this.

This is called Men of War: Final because, well, this is it. If I do not finish this version of the story, it just isn't getting done. So… I hope to get through this.

I hope this gets to you, my friends, in this very troubling time. Maybe this lightens your day. I hope it does.

Oh, and for those readers who remember the days I used to just DIE randomly at the end of each chapter, don't worry. That's coming back. Just, uh, maybe another chapter.

Much love,

-EZB.