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Halo: Ghost (Forerunner)
Posted By: Stephen Parke<titans30_7@yahoo.com>
Date: 20 December 2012, 4:01 am


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1It is 2552. The UNSC has been fighting the Covenant for many years. There have been specially picked enlisted members in the military... And I am one of them. I was born in 1992. And I have been in the Airforce since 2010. Yeah, it seems impossible. But you'd be suprised what chrio sleep can do for a person. I have been in crio for 537 years, when they put me in there was only seven of us. But in the few hours since they have woken me. Their has been over 50 other men that have walked through these halls with the same mark on their left arm. It is close to a marines symbol yet instead of Earth, it has the Milky Way. People know about the Spartans but they don't know about us, we are Ghost. All of us, not just one or a squad or platoon. We are all Ghost. We are sent in when it seems impossible and they are desperate enough to win a valuable strategic point. We are so top secret that we are even considered targets towards those not part of Ghost on our side. The sad part? We can't shoot back. We aim for the Covenant or our target and that's it. Also challenging when we aren't supposed to kill the Covenant unless Command says so. We don't even get the right to get credit for what we do! Yeah the first ring was all that Spartan called Master Chiefs doing. But the second one? It was Ghost. Master Chief had screwed up our tweaking with the ring so that it targets the other rings and instead, it shut down on us. A glitch in the system after that caused o We are Ghost and we are the last hope for Earth. We have no rank and we have no number. All we have is our individual mark behind our neck. We don't get breaks and we don't get honorably discharged. We live and we die here. The only other way to get out is to go rogue or the UNSC descides to shut us down... Or at least we hope so...

2It's been about 3 months since they have woken us and 2 since the unnecessary destruction of the second ring, and I'm about to head on my first run with my group. My name is Stephen... at least that's what I remember it as. I'm with 4 others; Charlie, Sarah, Mickey, and the one we call Scrap. Since he doesn't remember his name. 3Our group was supposed to target a Forerunner ship and bring it back to the UNSC by any means necessary. I was a sniper in the Airforce and now as a Ghost I am once again. Sarah was the rocket whore, Charlie and Scrap in the front, and Mickey the engineer, and though we didn't have a leader we had chosen Sarah to give the go ahead before we put it into action. We had just landed on one of the broken rings where the suspected ship was going to be at; which was timed to impact a planet in 74 hours. It was a dark burning jungle, you could see the Sentinels, Flood, and a few Covenant running and fighting for the last few days or hours of survival they had left. This time we got lucky, free fire on anyone and anything we see. We started out smoothly enough, being able to avoid a few of the patrols that had come by. "I've got a shot." I say to my unit while aiming at a Brute feasting on the entrails of a Grunt. Sarah gives the go, a green light shining bright at the bottom right of my visor; and just like that the way was clear. We moved in slowly across the sundered opening, nothing but the ashes falling down to give us cover. We had made it to the entrance of the suspected surviving ship, we waited for Mickey to open the door.

3Suddenly, out of the ashes, 4 Sentinels appear, lens' glowing red, ready to fire. "Give me cover!!!" yells Mickey, as he tries to unlock the door. We begin firing our weapons and as Mickey still struggles with the door, Scrap flanks to the right to buy him more time. Unfortunetly, none of the sentinels pay attention and they start firing their beams towards Mickey. Sarah yells, "This is taking to long." she tells Mickey to move as she finds a plasma grenade on the ground and tosses it towards one of the sentinels. It hits it's target and destroys it, also temporarily shutting down the other three. Sarah turns rocket launcher loaded the other way and hits the door with two blasts. Immediately after she fires, we run in through the smoke. Once in, Sarah plants the C4 and we run for cover. And then our only known exit was sealed. We turn, Sarah taking lead, with her assault rifle gun. Mickey and Charlie with there battle rifles, Scrap with an SMG, and me; shotgun at the ready. We turn on our night vision on our helmets as we move through the dark corridors. "Signs of fights here Sarah, seems like their may be some Flood around here." Charlie says shakily. With a smug tone, Scrap says, "Wow, someone in Ghost is actually afraid of some Flood! Wait until we get ba-.""Quiet!" Sarah commands as she spots a group of Flood huddled together in a corner. We put on our silencers slowly and wait for the green light from Sarah. In an instant, they all drop. We move slowly forward, guns primed and aimed at the backs of our targets. Trying to be careful our steps in the puddle of blood from Covenant, Flood, and Human alike, is muffled only by the grunts and moans made by the gruesome Flood. In a flash the little attack is over and successful, leaving none of them alive. As we move further in we see nothing but dead bodies of every race, some already complete skeletons if they were lucky enough to die still attached to there full body. We reach the main console of the Forerunner base and attempt to start up the power. Unfortunately we had no success. The main power source was damaged by the explosion to start up so we needed to find an alernative. Heading towards another exit, a drop ship is called in to deliver some fuel cells and cable. With 60 hours left, and many sparks and shocks later, Mickey is able to power up the system long enough to decrypt and download the map of the place. "If I'm reading this correctly... we are about 20 miles away from where the ship should be. And we have 45 hours left." Mickey says, aggravated at the Forerunner language. Sarah gives the signal and they start moving through the corridors, making so many turns that Scrap got dizzy at one point and threw up in his helm. "We've reached the door, get ready guys, remember, they are all hostiles, leave nothing alive." Sarah whispers as she loads up two shots into her rocket launcher. The green light is lit and we storm into the hangar, we spot a few Jackals but they were all to weak to fight back. After a few flashes from our guns and explosions from our grenades, we reach the ship. "It looks like they were eaten alive mostly, Jesus, they were even eating the Flood! They're practically infected themselves!" Charlie screams as he looks at the face of one of the now dead Jackals lying in front of them. Sarah smacks Charlie behind the head and tells him to get ahold of himself. He shakes his head with a now bad headache to refocus his vision. We see a huge door, towering over us nearly 20 feet tall. Mickey heads over to the panel for the ship and starts punching in a bunch of keys. "That should do it." Mickey says confidently. Nearly 10 minutes pass when Scrap starts complaining about how hot it's getting. Suddenly the door starts glowing a bright blue, then gold streaks outline the full spectrum of the door. It slowly opens up and when the bottom section of the door got low enough, Sarah rushed up against it and jumped over the bottom part, leaving the rest of us to sit their and wait for it to come down.

4"I wonder where the hell she went!" Charlie says as the door opens completely with no sign of Sarah on the other side. They turn off their night vision and move into the now lit ship; closing the door behind them. They walk through the hall and end up at an intersection, "Alright let's split up in groups of two, report anything and everything you see." Mickey says calmly. Me and Charlie take the left corridor, while Mickey and Scrap took the right. An hour had passed when Mickey radios in, "We found the bridge,the doors are open for you guys, it'll lead you straight to us." Me and Charlie go through a few doors, getting annoyed because of the fact that in order for us to know which one was open, we had to stand in front of it. We had finally reached Mickey and Scrap to see that Mickey was typing away at the Forerunner computer at the center of the bridge, trying to see if he could find Sarah; while Scrap sat on the side eating up his rations. Charlie and I drop our packs near the console Mickey was using and lean our rifles against the wall a few feet away. Taking off our helmets, you could actually see that even though we looked all the same, we were really different people, not clones. Charlie takes off his helm revealing a scar that ran from just under his right eye, just past his ear. (He got it from a training exercise that got out of hand, he just doesn't tell people that.) Hour's pass and Mickey finally slaps his swollen hands on the console, "Dammit! Where the fuck is she!" he yells, his voice echoing throughout the room. Scrap looks at the time on his "military assigned" Fossil watch to see that we were still 10 hours away from collision, only to say, "Guy's I say we just get this thing off the ground, we don't have that much time left." I back his statement up with, "Yeah, she's on board anyways, we can still leave and look for her later." Mickey slaps in the launch procedure and the ship starts shaking. We here the thrusters ignite and the ship starts on its way.

Mickey drops on his ass and let's out a big sigh, face covered in sweat. Charlie, Scrap, and I play cards for a while then lay down for some rest. I wake up to see Charlie and Scrap still dead asleep, Mickey typing on the console once again. I say with irritation, "Jesus man, give it a rest, we completed the mission." He replies, "Yeah, but I'm the only one who knows how to pilot this damn thing, so you fuckers are useless now that were in space."

"Yeah, so true, aren't we lucky to have you, your such a God damn ble-"

A shot is fired suddenly. Mickey and I turn to see Sarah gun pointed at Scrap. Charlie jumps up, shocked at what he had just heard. Sarah turns the gun to Charlie as he stands against a wall, arms raised. Before Mickey and I could do anything to stop her she let's off another shot, dropping Charlie where he stood. I run for my shotgun and Mickey runs for his rifle, we grab them and without a second thought open fire on our once, "squad leader". Within a blink of an eye it was over, she was dead. We walk towards her body when we see that her blood was a strange color... green. We take a closer look to see that some of her flesh was covered in Flood boils and her skin had already been turning a leathery green. "We have a problem, we can't deliver this ship." Mickey says.

"Why not?" I ask arrogantly.

"Because, we can't bring a Flood infested ship to Earth! We'd cause the end of the human race. We're gonna have to crash this thing somewhere else."

"Fuck! How will we get out then? What do we tell command?"

"First off, we don't get off, their isn't a pod on this thing. Second, we just tell them the situation, they'll understand."

After a few minutes of silence I finally agree. Mickey sets up communications and we get in contact with command and tell them the situation. Without any remorse for us, they agree. Mickey turns the ship towards the planet the broken ring was supposed to hit and aims it straight for it. Mickey and I walk towards the ships window and see the planet we're heading for.

"You know what? I wonder what happened to my family. Last thing I remember, my daughter, Anna, she was just heading into middle school." Mickey says, eyes tearing.

"What? You had a family and you joined Ghost? Why?" I replied with a confused look.

"Because they said my family would be taken care of completely. I had a son as well, Jeffrey, he had gotten married to some Japanese woman. But hey, it's his choice I guess."

"Yeah... hard to believe they've been long dead huh?"

That's when Mickey starts breaking down. He says, "I never got to see her grow up! I didn't get to see what my son became! And now they're dead and I didn't even bury them!" I try and comfort him with a pat on the back, not knowing what to do but to say, "Well... if they were able to know what you were doing for them, they would've been proud." With that, flames appear around the ship. Just seconds after the flames appear, the ship starts to shake. We get back to our feet and watch as the ground grew ever closer. I turn to shake his hand and he returns the hand shake. The top part of the Forerunner ship hit the edge of a canyon, we fly towards the ceiling and stay their, bruised. The ship flips upwards and lands on it's three legs, causing Mickey and I to fall to the floor, making us bleed this time. I look to him as I spit out the blood in my mouth, "So what do we do if we live?"

He turns onto his back in pain and replies, "We aren't, if this wasn't going to kill us, the piece of the ring will."





End





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