Apollo, Spartan One-Two-Zero scanned the landscape. The desert flowed like waves frozen in time. Sand-filled winds obscured the footsteps of what could have been thousands of travelers in the Ashantis desert.
For three years, seven months, and eighteen days, he had been stuck on this garbage heap of a planet, filling out what ONI claimed to be 'routine patrols'. He knew when ONI didn't like people, and this time, they had decided to take their anger out on one of their own. It was banishment, to put it lightly. The more he patrolled, the more he surmised that it was more an intimidation job than a protection job. After all this time, he had yet to encounter a single Insurrectionist - or anything remotely hostile, for that matter.
His biggest enemy, he realized, was the planet itself. The near hundred-degree weather was nearly impossible for any human to survive in without some kind of external body temperature regulation. He was grateful for the armor he was allowed to wear. ONI knew they couldn't detach him from his other half: his armor. Dunes climbed to mile heights, waiting to fall at any moment, suffocating any living thing caught in it.
His squad mates were out fighting, while he walked from point A to point B, with nothing to fight against. What a waste of a Spartan.
"Lost in thought again, eh spartan?" Thalia's icon popped into his HUD, a smiley face constructed out of ASCII characters. The AI, much like the muse she was named after, loved to crack jokes and lighten the mood.
Why she chose Apollo, he had no idea. It was made very clear that Apollo hated her. "Anyway, I was going to remind you that you are about two hours away from your destination. You are roughly eighty-eight point eight percent done with your journey! That's three eights in a row!"
"Great. Two hours until I walk in the other direction."
"Hey, that's not true!” Her icon flicked to a sad face, then back to normal. ”Usually, when you arrive at the colony, you have about a week before you are assigned another patrol."
"Fantastic," he breathed out.
His boots sunk into the sand up to his shins as he crested one of the larger dunes. Beyond it, he saw the UNSC colony, a supposed risk, as the ONI's files put it, of separating from the UNSC, and claiming independence. Tents dotted the flatter part of the landscape, while the more rugged parts were occupied by iridium extractors. These extractors reminded Apollo of those old oil rigs that they used on Earth, but way bigger, and a lot noisier. The noise they made could be heard from where he was, which was a couple of hundred feet away from the extractors, at least. The sound was like a repetitive thump that repeated for infinity. He sometimes wondered why the inhabitants didn’t wear hearing protection anytime they went out of their tents. He tuned down the volume of the lower frequencies that cycled in through his helmet and continued onward.
In a combined motion of walking and sliding, he moved down the steep end of the rise. Once he reached the bottom, he took a few quick steps forward to ensure that he wasn’t caught in the rest of the falling sand.
It didn’t take long to get to the colony after scaling the dunes. Apollo easily hopped the fence that marked the border of the colony. He reached behind his back and felt at the safety of his rifle. He clicked it on and did the same for his sidearm. There were always mixed reactions to his arrival in these colonies. It was best to take some precautions.
The colony was a simple one: tents for housing, extractors for fuel, and Cacaru trees for food and drink. Only an open-air seating area that was often empty, and the break room tent situated closer to the extractors served as the only spot for recreation. This colony served primarily as a research station for this section of the planet, although some families had stayed here - why you would ever want to live on a desert planet, Apollo had no idea. The colony observed seismic data, down to the millimeter, and within a fifteen-kilometer radius. Only a few people were out, either carrying data chips, seismometers, or jugs of water, all to deal with maintaining the equipment. Large fans surrounded the tents, spraying a refreshing mist throughout the whole colony. It was practically the only thing stopping them from heat exhaustion.
He pushed aside the tent flap to the break room, ducking inside. As he entered, the noise and talk in the room hushed very quickly, and heads turned. Some were surprised, and some fearful, though few, he noted as those that had seen him before, were completely uninterested. A guard put a hand on his holstered pistol.
He must be new. He laughed to himself a bit. With a screwdriver from his belt pocket, he began the disassembly of his pistol. He cleaned out the sand that was caught inside and applied more oil that so easily dried out in this heat.
Thalia’s icon winked back into existence. “A little earlier than usual, but your assignment just got through! It says… oh!” Her icon changed to a face with a raised eyebrow. “It’s not a patrol this time.”
“What is it?” He responded, still busy with his regimen. His ears picked up on the hushed conversation of two scientists, only a couple of meters’ distance away.
“Hold on, hold on. Lemme read it.” There was a half-second pause as she processed the document. “Oh, wait, never mind! It is a patrol! The message says that there's been mentions of insurrection here at Camp Neal.”
"That'll have to wait." The scientists were speaking their Scottish, so he hadn’t a clue what they were saying. Lucky for him, Thalia was his resident translator. "What are they saying?"
"Hmm... Something about an abnormality… The dialect is difficult to understand." She continued to listen in to the scientists' conversation. "They mentioned coordinates and something about a cavern. They both seem pretty confused about it."
It's been so long since Apollo had been through some real action. "Sounds good. Mark it."
“Mark it? But you have a patrol to get to!”
“I said it can wait, Thalia. Now, mark it.”
A nav icon winked into his HUD.
Being a captain was no simple task. Piloting a kilometer-long brick was a feat in two dimensions, let alone maneuvering in three. Micro-managing all the functions of this ship was a chore in itself; making sure each system is perfectly balanced for optimal performance both in battle and during transit. Millions of would-be pilots undergo rigorous, unrelenting training to pilot even the smallest of spacecraft.
It was the perfect promotion for a Spartan.
Leslie sat slack in the captain’s chair, tapping a finger to the loose rhythm of the engine's hum. Click, click, click, click…
Aside from the slow breaths of the few commanding officers on deck, it was all she could hear. To her, the silence was a calming noise, but to others, an anxious pause. She understood why; they were ready for action. A good sentiment to have, in moderation.
She clenched her teeth at the thought of her squad mates. The three of them were all reckless adrenaline junkies who would claw their way into every fight they could get into. They’d go out and get the honors of the killing, while she did what they came there for. She was beyond certain that they would have gotten themselves killed, yet there they were, thousands of miles away from each other, and without so much as a scar to show for their hubris. And now, Leslie was the one with the prosthetic.
She shook away the thought, letting a sigh escape her teeth. If time was going to pass, she wouldn’t spend it thinking about a few reckless Spartans. It wouldn’t get her leg back, anyway.
“Captain.” A bit-crunched voice called, drawing her out of her muse.
“Yes, Thalia. Go ahead.” She checked her posture and moved her gaze to the center screen. Thalia’s hologram faded into existence; a late 1990’s era desktop computer, with that familiar ASCII face on its screen pulled into a stern look. “My subroutine reports that Apollo is going off course again.”
Her posture sagged. “Same as usual. Record a GPS track, let me know if we lose signal.”
“Confirmed. Reporting track, five-minute frequency. Uploading live data to your screen now.”