User:RelentlessRecusant/Halo: Dawn at Gethsemane

Halo: Dawn at Gethsemane is a short story written by RelentlessRecusant set in the Azure Dawn series that chronicles the Battle of Cambridge and introduces several main characters to future novels, such as Kawika Son and Chandler Danial.

It details the assignment of Flurry Troop, an elite NAVSPECWAR Six special warfare detachment, to Cambridge to secure the battlespace, activating thermonuclear fail-safes in academic research laboratories there at Harvard and MIT under Directive 0-2 to ensure that ONI technologies don't fall into enemy hands, and to recover and rescue Marine long-range patrols in the area that had come under heavy attack from Covenant forces. Flurry, under the command of Commander Kawika Son, is inhibited from prosecuting its objectives after heavy Covenant activity and technical malfunctions begin to hamper the UNSCSOCOM mission, and NAVSPECWAR teams are being overrun by Covenant forces. Ranger 38/6 C, a wounded and heavily-damaged Ranger company, volunteers to deploy to Cambridge, to continue the prosecution of the mission and to recover the lost NAVSPECWAR and Marine forces. Subsequently, the Ranger mission is successively jeopardized, and after Directive 0-2 is executed, NAVSPECWAR pre-emptively orders a UNSC retreat from the area, to evacuate the wounded, to extract the overrun UNSCSOCOM operators, and to cover the exfiltration of a civilian refugee company.

The story concludes with the sacrifice of 38/6 C, which refuses to partake in the UNSC extraction, instead launching a disorganized and final assault on superior and entrenched Covenant forces, but covering the NAVSPECWAR retreat. NAVSPECWAR snipers Kawika Son and Katrina Woodbury voluntarily similarly break off from the retreat, staying behind to ensure the safe retreat of their comrades. Son and Woodbury would both be awarded the Medal of Honor for conspicuous gallantry; for disobeying orders and walking to a certain death by staying behind in Cambridge. Woodbury would be captured by Covenant forces and would mutilated and decapitated. 38/6 C would be devastated, completely slaughtered. However, Son, though severely wounded, would elude capture long enough to be rescued by forces of Sangheili Special Forces that launched a second rescue mission to look for the UNSC special forces that had been left behind.

It concludes with the safe recovery of Chandler Danial, the survivors of Flurry Troop, and the rescue of the civilian convoy, even under overwhelming Covenant pressure.