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the fall of firebase bravo - part one
Posted By: Rachel Docherty<bubbleraye@hotmail.com>
Date: 2 November 2007, 8:00 pm
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Private David Barrett was dimly aware of a harsh screeching sound, plucking at his eardrums. His head was fuzzy and he couldn't feel his legs. With a great deal of effort, he opened his eyes, and realised with a stab of fear that he was lying on his stomach on the ground, and the weight on his back was the corpse of his superior officer. Panicking, Barrett tried to roll over, but the stiffness of his joints and the deadweight of the Lieutenant made this difficult. It took Barrett a good while to claw his way out from underneath the body, and he forced down the bile that rose in his throat as he pushed the corpse away. As he stood up, he realised that the death of his team mate wasn't his only problem.
He blinked in disbelief at the carnage that surrounded him, as far as the eye could see. Where their base had been, before the surprise Covenant attack, there were piles of corpses, the bodies of the men and women who had fought of the waves of enemies attacking Fire Base Bravo.
Barrett limped forward, taking a sharp breath, his leg was stinging painfully. Looking down, he noticed a large burn-mark surrounding a substantial rip in his fatigues just above his right knee. The skin was blackened and cracked, and as he moved his leg, the skin split, oozing scarlet blood. Barrett swore, and shouldered the discarded 99C-S2 AM sniper rifle that lay by the badly burned body of a marine.
Barrett grimaced, stumbling towards body after body, hoping to find someone, anyone left alive. The thought that he was alone in this field of the dead was choking him as he absent-mindedly policed for sniper rounds.
It wasn't just the base that had taken damage. The hillside around the base had been hit by the Covenant plasma blasts, and the grass and stubbly trees had burned away, leaving the ground glimmering like the surface of a mirror. Now Barrett really knew why they called it 'glassing a planet.'
After a half an hour of searching, Barrett had found no other survivors. He slumped to the ground, the rifle sliding from his shoulder and landing on the hardened mud with a loud clap. He tried to remember what had happened before he got knocked out, but that screeching noise still rang, albeit distantly, in his ears. He gazed up into the sky, shielding his eyes to try and locate the source of the noise.
Three Covenant Banshees were circling the forest in the distance. Suddenly the heat of the fight came back to Barrett and he could hear the yelling of the marines in his ears. The Covenant had come in huge numbers, wave after wave of Grunts squealing and firing those needles, they stuck deep into the bodies of whoever they hit, and exploded, ripping the person's innards apart. But it hadn't just been Grunts. The UNSC troops could deal with Grunts, sometimes they even fought them off completely, but there were Jackals too, and a type of alien that Barrett had never seen before, nobody had. Hulking, huge bipeds, when they had come lumbering over the cliff towards the base even the Sergeant had turned pale. The bigger ones had huge plasma cannons, which almost seemed to be a part of them. They blew through the marines, raining bolts of green plasma down on the base, destroying the UNSC defence.
Barrett had been holding back the waves of grunts with a small group of marines, who were the best snipers they could get hold of. The ammo had been running low and Barrett was down to his last three rounds when the low wall in front of them had been hit by a streaking plasma blast from a circling Banshee. The marine in front of him had been propelled backwards, dead on impact, and the force of his body hitting Barrett must have knocked him unconscious.
Barrett knew that the only reason he lived was because he had been hidden. Hidden under the body of a fellow soldier. He hung his head and contemplated the best course of action. When the marines had been dropped in, the Covenant had launched a ground attack on Cote d'Azur, a major population centre on the planet. Barrett knew that if he had any chance of surviving, he had to find his way to Fire Base Alpha and join up with the second platoon of marines. Shaking his head, he tried not to think about what he would do if he reached the base and there was no base.
Barrett decided that the only way to get to Firebase Alpha would be to cut through the dense jungle. He knew that it would probably be crawling with Covenant troops, particularly at night fall, but he could only hope that the fact that he was alone would mean he passed through unnoticed. Barrett counted the rounds he had policed, he had five magazines. He would have to be very careful not to miss. Wincing, he rose from his dusty seat on the dirt and headed out towards the jungle edge, where the greenery starkly contrasted the burned up brown earth of the base.
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