Halo: Capti/Prologue

Biggs watched the elevator doors closed in front of him, and let out a breath as it began moving upwards. Whenever he walked through the corridors of the Gulag, the mercenaries aboard made absolutely no attempt at hiding their disdain for his presence. If he walked past one of them, he was either greeted with a glare, an aside push, or an open gesture with whatever firearm they happened to be carrying. They didn’t seem to care that they were antagonizing a 7 foot tall, heavily armored, genetically modified super soldier. They just hated the fact that a Spartan was on their ship. Well, not just one Spartan, Biggs thought as the elevator came to a stop.

43 IVs, four IIIs, and a II. That was what he had been put in command of. He sighed as he walked out of the elevator and into a corridor leading to the bridge. Not for the first time, Biggs wondered what he was doing there. He had commanded Spartan deployments before, but they had always been stationary deployments, with limited combat and a relatively cohesive structure. This deployment felt like it had been scraped together as an afterthought, with multiple Spartans Fireteams being pulled from across human space and grouped together under the codename “Guillotine Platoon”.

Still, he could understand the choices. ONI needed to keep this invasion covert, so they didn’t exactly have a wide range of options when it came to the Spartans they could re-task without raising any eyebrows. The Spartans, in turn, needed the mercenaries to get inside Chemuros, and once everything started kicking off they’d have a whole UNSC Battle Group backing them up anyways. He could live with the disjointed nature of his forces, as well as the fact that they’d been stuck in cramped freighter-turned-prison ship-turned-mercenary transport for the past three days.

What he couldn’t stomach was the final set of orders he had been given at the initial briefing, before ONI agents had shoved him and his new platoon aboard the Gulag. "Under no circumstances," said the agent who had briefed them, claiming he was relaying orders directly from Serin Osman. "... are you to question or interfere with Team Specter's operations within the installation. Are we understood?”

Specter. Biggs clenched his fist at the thought of them. Goddamn SADs. He’d always disliked them. They did fuck-all to contribute to the war effort, and instead ran around doing chores for ONI like a bunch of trained lapdogs. That reputation held fast here too. As soon as the Gulag was to enter the Shield World, the II, the IIIs, and four of the IV’s, all operating under the alias of “Team Specter”, would take a Pelican and fly off to God-knows-where to do God-knows-what inside Chemuros. Meanwhile, the rest of the Spartans would be neck deep in Covies, cutting a swath through their army and taking out the leadership. They could definitely use all the help they could get.

Still, it meant that the number of Spartans that he was actually “commanding” was down to 39, and if Biggs couldn’t exactly be grateful for that, he could at least be slightly relieved.

His train of thought was interrupted as he arrived at the end of the corridor. Before the door to the bridge stood an armed guard, his finger hovering near the trigger of his M90 and a wary look on his face. Biggs traced his sight line, and realized that the man was staring at his hand, still clenched into a fist. Awkwardly, Biggs un-balled his hand and made a passive gesture. The guard stood for a moment, his face unchanging, before letting out a dismissive grunt and pressing the screen on the wall beside him. Biggs shambled past him and walked onto the bridge.

The situation wasn’t much different there. Crewmembers manning consoles stared him down as he walked past them, making no effort to hide their sidearms. He ignored them, as he always had, and walked over to the center console. There, a woman, tall, lean, fit, and clad in a stolen officer’s uniform, was standing over the COMM station, a stern expression on her face as she awaited a signal from the Shield World’s occupants. The Spartan took up place beside her, staring out of the window that spanned the length of the bridge.

“Biggs,” she regarded him coldly, not taking her eyes off of the console in front of her.

“Crannory,” he responded with equal dismissiveness.

Esther Crannory apparently had something of a history ONI, and from what Biggs could gather, it wasn’t pleasant. All he knew for sure was that the large scar that ran down the left side of her face, several burn marks on her chin, and the ship and crew she currently commanded had been the result of that incident, and a deep-seated hatred of ONI had formed in the mercenaries of the Gulag ever since. Biggs couldn’t really blame her, as ONI wasn’t exactly a pleasure to work with. However, the animosity still made interactions with her range from highly uncomfortable to downright hostile, and they had done their best to avoid each other as much as possible.

But now, with the artificial planet in their full view, they needed to communicate for the sake of the plan. The Spartan decided to break the awkward silence plaguing the room.

“So, what exactly are we waiting for?”

Crannory looked up at him, a not-so-subtle hint of exasperation in her eyes. Subtlety was something that seemed to be lacking aboard the Gulag.

“They’ll send out some drones, and radio us through them,” she replied, looking back down at the console. “Once they give us the all clear, we’ll head through the portal. You’d better hope your Battle-Group has a good eye on us.”

“They do,” said Biggs, although he wasn’t so sure himself. “They’ll punch through about 20 minutes after we enter.”

Crannory gave a noncommittal grunt and focused focused her attention purely on the screen at her fingertips. They stood like that for a few minutes, him staring at the seemingly innocuous planet in front of them, and her fiddling away at the screen, when an alien voice rang out through the COMM.

For a second, Biggs thought it might be the Covenant inside the Shield Word contacting them, but then he recognized the voice. Yuro’ Hantan. Of course. Biggs had almost forgotten about the two former Covenant ships escorting them: the Relinquishing Glutton, a CRS-class cruiser crewed by a disgraced Sanghelli General and the remnants of his division, and the Forsaken By Fools, an SDV-Class corvette, belonging to a mixed group of Jackals and Brutes. The Gulag mercenaries did some favors for them for them in the past, and it had apparently been enough for both groups to pledge their allegiance to Crannory.

Now with the addition of the Spartans, Biggs thought to himself, they certainly made for an odd group.

The Elite finished speaking, and Crannory began shouting orders to the rest of the bridge, sending crewmen scrambling into their seats and onto their keypads. She turned to Biggs.

“The drones are incoming. Tell your Spartans to shut up and keep their heads down.” She walked over to the Captain’s chair, located on an elevated section of the bridge’s center, and took a seat. She looked back at the Spartan, her eyes widening. “That means you too! Get away from the window, you idiot!”

Biggs sighed and walked over to her, ducking down behind the series of consoles in front of the chair. He sent the heads down order to his Spartans, and then they all waited. For two minutes straight, no one on the bridge said a word, silence overwhelming them and making the air palpable with anxiety. Then, a small speck appeared in the viewscreen, getting larger as it came closer. It stopped less than 20 meters away from the bridge, where Biggs could see it as clear as day.

“A Sparrowhawk?”

He’d known that the HRC were well equipped, but he hadn’t expected this. Sparrowhawks, outdated as they were, were hard to come by, even for members of the UNSC. And this one had been heavily refitted, to the point where it was now capable of travel through both normal space and slipspace, seeing as it had come out of the portal. Several rows of missiles were affixed to its side, enough to blow the front section of the ship to bits.

“Where the hell did they get a Sparrowhawk?” Biggs asked again.

“From us,” the Captain answered immediately.

The Spartan turned and opened his mouth to protest, but then shut it. There was no point. The entire reason ONI had chosen to pay off the Gulag crew was because they had been the ones supplying Chemuros’ occupiers for quite some time. They were the only ones who the HRC or the Covies wouldn’t blow to shreds for coming near them. He couldn’t chastise them for doing what had got them hired in the first place.

By then, the Sparrowhawk had moved away from the bridge and begun inspecting the ship. After 10 minutes, it returned to the front of the bridge, resuming its earlier position. A slightly garbled male voice came through the COMM. “You and your escort are free to proceed, Gulag. Welcome back.” The Sparrowhawk turned and sped back towards the portal. Biggs rose from his position, watching it as it left. He steadied itself on the console as he prepared for the ship to lurch forward, but it never came. He turned to look at Crannory again. Instead of her usual stern expression, her mouth was twisted into what Biggs guessed was her version of a worried expression. “Well?”, he said motioning at the dwarf planet.

“Something isn’t right,” she responded, her eyes remaining dead-set ahead. “There are usually two of them.”

Biggs groaned. He didn’t even care that there were now apparently two stolen Sparrowhawks. He just wanted to get this over with.

“You said yourself that they got into a feud with the NCA. Maybe they took it out?”

“They searched us too shortly,” she replied, her face unchanging. “It usually takes twice that time.”

Biggs had had enough of this. He wasn’t about to delay the mission and risk millions of innocent lives so some mercenary captain could grasp at straws.

“Look, this is the only chance we’re gonna have for months, and I’m not going to risk that. You want your guys to get paid? Then get us inside.”

Crannory looked up at him. Her face was still stern as always, but Biggs could see her fingers curling on her keypad. She was pissed.

Wordlessly, she motioned to the rest of the bridge crew, who Biggs realized had been watching their exchange. They all returned their focus to the ship, and after a few moments, the ship lurched forward. Biggs watched as the planet slowly grew larger through the viewscreen. Although it was entirely uninteresting from a distance, as the ship moved closer, he realized that the surface was unnaturally smooth. Once they were close enough, Biggs could see a spot of blue in the mass of gray, sunk into the surface. "You'd best tell your Spartans to ready up," Crannory said. Biggs nodded. The portal was fully visible now, a swirling mass of blue built into a machine within the rocks.

"Biggs," she addressed him again.

"Hm?""If any of my men die, it's on you."

There were a lot of things he could have said in response to that. He could have pointed out the hypocrisy of blaming her job offerer when she was the one taking the money. He could have told ther to focus her anger on the ones who would actually be killing he men. Hell, he could have told her that it wouldn't come to that, since his men would be the ones in the most danger, while she and her mercenaries sat back and ran the occasional supply run.But he didn't say any of those things. Instead, he just said, "That's fine by me."

Out of the corner of his eye, Biggs saw her fingers curl again.