The Pelican's engines roared, and it rose up from the clearing with a backwash from the thrusters. The ferns and trees waved madly, and loose dirt billowed up from the ground.
Linda waited with her head ducked and her face shielded, until the noise and motion had died down, before she moved.
She knelt down in the clearing, pulled off her backpack, and methodically unpacked it out onto the dirt. It was important to take stock, the voice of a trainer whispered in the back of her head. She laid out each and every tool on the ground with care, one by one, until they were all present and visible.
Her knife was laid out first. There were no predators in this jungle, nothing that hunted men, just smaller perils like venomous snakes or spiders or fish, all of which could be avoided or handled. Still, a knife was an important tool. Perhaps the most important tool. If she lost everything else, but kept this knife, she could still complete the mission. Both the blade and the ferro rod stashed in the hilt were priceless.
Next came the water purifier. The rivers in the area probably weren't safe to drink from, and even if she could improvise a rainwater catcher, she'd be moving too much to use it for anything more than overnight stops. That was if it rained, of course. Relying on the weather to favor you was a common blunder in military history, and one that no Spartan would make.
The GPS transponder followed, nestled in its case. It was an emergency backup, little more than a locator ping for the exercise's proctors, and a button for Linda to signal for pickup, if she got in too much trouble.
A waterproof tarp came next, to serve as her bivouac. It wasn't cold at the moment – far from it, in fact, as Linda wiped the humidity from her forehead – but the nights might be different. If it rained, then it would keep her pack dry and her core temperature from plummeting. Plus, wet socks, ew.
Three MREs and a compact mess kit were also included, but Linda was planning to keep those in reserve in case of emergency. She could forage, and maybe hunt or fish, depending on what she came across on her hike. Ideally, she'd make it to the rendezvous point with all three packets still sealed.
Her canteen was hefty, containing a liter of water. It was solid, durable. Nothing fancy. Same with the small packet of toilet paper and the collapsible spade. You could keep from pooping when you were out in the woods, even for a couple days, but the trainers were nice, so they gave the Spartans the option.
A small bundle of paracord was also included. It wasn't long, maybe ten meters, but it would still serve a good purpose for a lot of things. Maybe fishing line, if she could find or make a hook. At the very least, she could hang up her supplies off the ground, where animals couldn't get to them.
The medikit was light for this journey, but still important. It was missing many of the supplies that Linda was used to, but she'd been told in advance that they were going to be weaned off their old habits. It had only a single tape wrap, so if she rolled both ankles, she'd have to either tough it out, or call for evac. There was no blister ointment, no painkillers, only two bandages.
Worryingly, the only thing it had in excess was antivenom. There were a dozen small containers, with a pack of sealed, sterile needles, one for each. She read the labels. Snake, spider, frog, centipede… different species, different types. Most of them, she knew from her SERE training, would shy away from humans. She just needed to be observant, and not surprise them. That wasn't an issue for Linda. She was very observant.
Of course, she also had her backpack, a lightweight design that should hold up decently well. There was also her clothes – a lightweight set of mottled green jungle fatigues, without the armor plating of a proper BDU, but still up to the same quality standard as the rest of the UNSC issue gear.
Last, and most important, was the map and the compass. It was old tech, but GPS navigation on a datapad would have ruined the entire point of the three-day land-nav and survival exercise.
When she was younger, back when she was six or even nine, the Chief would have tested her and her family by giving them less information than they needed. Small, mostly missing maps. It trained them to constantly look for more information, to hunt for the tools they needed to win.
Now that she was older, she'd been given a waterproof, folded up map of the entire zone. The logic had flipped. Adults had more responsibilities, more problems, and information overload was a decent simulation for that. She would have to first determine her location before she could use the map to locate the rendezvous point. Filtering out the less important info, and only using what mattered for the mission, the way that any good adult did.
Today was her birthday, Linda reflected. She was eleven years old, now.
Normally, a birthday would involve a small cake dessert for a Spartan at the mess hall, just enough for them to enjoy on their own, while other Spartans would get the regular dessert. No sharing slices of cake, because with seventy-five kids, that would have been cake nearly every other night at the busy times of the year, and once a week in the quiet times, which the Doctor had told them was far too much cake for children.
It bred bad habits, the Doctor said, to constantly get rewards when you hadn't earned it.
But tonight, there would be no cake. Sergeant Doolan, the chaperoning trainer in the Pelican, had apologized to her for it after the other Spartans had been dropped off at their landing zones. There'd be a birthday cake for her when she got back at the end of the exercise, he said, but the program took priority.
Linda had nodded, because she understood. When they graduated, when they were proper soldiers, they wouldn't get special favors from the UNSC, so it was good and right that they got used to that now, and didn't get spoiled.
She took another minute to pick up each item from the ground, carefully inspect it, and pack it away.
The first thing she needed to do was figure out where she was. Navigation. Everything else she could figure out as she made her way to the rendezvous, but she had to be moving in the right direction first. The hatch had been sealed on the Pelican ride over, so she needed to climb the nearest hill and start looking for landmarks.
Of course, the jungle's canopy got in the way of that. Lucky for her, Linda could see a small hill just barely from the edge of the clearing. At least, she thought it was a hill, judging by the much taller trees towering over the rest.
Bushes, ferns, all sorts of undergrowth were in the way. There was no trail, no easy path, not after a minute of inspection. Maybe the Doctor had been right when she said, a couple years back, that the Spartans might be getting a little too acclimatized to the Highland Mountains.
There was no other option. Linda nodded to herself, picked up her knife, and headed into the jungle.
Her journey to the hilltop went fine. Mostly.
She didn't waste energy chopping away at random branches or vines, like movie characters did. She needed that energy for the next couple days. Instead, Linda carefully stepped around the bushes, her legs shifting and her feet tap-dancing across clear spots of the jungle floor. It was a lot of hip movement, but at least it wasn't muddy, or stinky.
It took Linda about twenty minutes to reach the top of the small hill, and once up there, she realized that she'd made a small mistake. She'd been hoping that there might have been another clearing on the hill, somewhere that she could stand and look out over the terrain, but every inch was crammed full of greenery.
Linda bit her lip, and looked up at the tallest tree. She knew how to climb trees, of course. What kid didn't? Especially with how Gunny Wentworth had kept changing up the playground day after day, making them steadily harder over the years.
She removed her backpack, and hung it on a low-hanging branch. Insects might crawl into it otherwise, if it was sitting on the dirt. She stuck the foldable map and compass in her pocket, and started climbing.
Even with the exertion of pulling herself up the tree's branches, it was cooler up here. The tangled, twisted mess of the jungle's canopy was trapping heat, or blocking the wind, or something like that. As Linda went higher, she realized that she'd been sweating. That wasn't good. Sweat was wasted water, and she hadn't even noticed.
Linda settled into a crook in the tree, where two branches split off. She secured herself as best she could, sitting her butt against the trunk and wrapping one leg around each branch, like she was riding a horse. Only then did she risk pulling out the map and the compass, and she went slow. Dropping them would be the worst possible thing here – there was no guarantee she'd be able to find them again in the dense jungle foliage.
Treelines. Ridges. What might have been a stream, underneath the canopy. Then combine it with whatever direction she was looking, and repeat.
Slowly, surely, Linda started mentally crossing off sections of the map, until there was only one map square remaining.
The good news was that she could see a taller vantage point to the east of where she was currently sitting. A low mountain, much, much higher up than the tree she was nestled in. If her map was right, it was on the way to the rendezvous point.
That was a good next step. She'd check her location again from up there, and if she was right, she'd have made progress. There should be a river to the north that would serve as a tell-tale sign. If she was wrong, she'd still have a much better ability to figure out where she was.
She tucked away the map and the compass, sealed that pocket, and slowly started descending the tree.
It was time to get a move on.
Linda knew that she had her strengths and weaknesses. She was the best shot in the entire program; better than anyone else, civilian, cadet, or trainer. But she could also hyper-fixate. She'd get too focused on her immediate job, and miss the other, important stuff. It was the reason why she rarely was assigned any leadership roles.
Once she hit the ground, Linda peeled off her fatigue jacket, and hooked it onto the back of her backpack by the shoulder straps. With just her all-weather undershirt, she'd be much cooler, and lose less water from sweat.
In this situation, that weakness of hyper-fixation would manifest itself through perfectionism, she reminded herself as she picked up her backpack, and started moving through the jungle. This was a land-nav exercise first and foremost, and a survival exercise second. The faster she arrived at the rendezvous, the better. She couldn't waste time by trying to pinpoint her exact position on the map, or by sticking around a river too long to catch fish. Even taking the time to make a safe firepit might be a bad decision.
That was the real challenge for her. It was something that Chief Mendez had quietly pointed out to her. She needed to strike a balance between theoretical perfection and practical effectiveness. If it was ugly, but it got the job done, then it was better than a perfect solution that she'd failed to achieve.
It took an hour for Linda to summit the eastern mountain. She consulted her map again. With a higher altitude, she could see the winding river far to the north.
A smile split Linda's face. She'd been right, and now she know both where she was, and where she needed to go.
Sixty kilometers. That's how far the rendezvous was. That meant that she'd have to do twenty kilometers a day. If she hiked twelve hours a day, and did just two kilometers an hour – which was pathetically slow – then she'd be done by noon of day three.
"Easy trip," she whispered to herself, still smiling.
It was the middle of the morning, on the second day, when Linda spotted it.
The jungle up ahead was opening up around a river, one that she would follow for a few kilometers. After that, she'd turn off it, and settle in for the night at the top of a line of hills looking out over the last valley before the rendezvous point. If the day went well, she could even finish up tonight, before darkness fell.
She was looking forward to it. If she saw some fish, she could quickly catch a meal for herself with the spear that she'd whittled from a relatively straight fallen branch the day before. At the very least, she'd be out from all the trees for a little while. She'd have the open air around her, a good breeze, and the sky above her. No more vines brushing her shoulders, branches making her hunch over and squeeze herself smaller.
But after one step into the open, she stiffened.
There was something out there. Linda didn't know what, but it wasn't right.
Slowly, taking care to not make any sudden, jerking motions, she stepped backwards, slipping behind one of the nearby trees. She faced forward the whole time, keeping her eyes peeled as she looked for whatever had just set off a screaming alarm bell in her hindbrain.
There was nothing plainly visible to her. The river was there, the far bank filled with trees and bushes and vines, the same as this bank. There was no sign of animals, or human presence, or… anything.
Hyper-fixation, she told herself. Get it together, Linda.
Trust your instincts, the voice of the Chief whispered back to her. Trust your training. Those two things are one and the same. They are your compass.
It was only after Linda was several meters back that she slowly lowered herself down, and started crawling to the side. She hid underneath a huge front of a leafy fern, using it to camouflage herself.
She waited, searching the area with two kinds of visual scanning. The first was intense inspections of anything that looked suspicious. The second was broad, non-specific stationary gazes, so that her peripheral vision could catch flickers of motion.
A minute passed. Then two. Linda counted out the seconds in her head.
Everyone in the Program thought that Linda was likely to become a sniper. They were probably right, but not because of her eyesight alone, or her marksmanship scores. Sniping was a game of patience and focus, not pure accuracy. Most targets were not stupid enough to prance around in front of your scope. Even with a routine, even with a good vantage point. You had to wait until the target was exposed.
In other words, to be a good sniper, you had to hyper-fixate. It was a place where Linda's weakness became a strength.
It took another five minutes, and then Linda saw it.
Across the riverbank, further up a hill, one of the trees had just shifted suddenly. A branch had been moved with force. Two hundred, maybe three hundred meters.
Her eyes narrowed. She hadn't made a mistake. She had seen something.
The wait continued, and perhaps ten, twenty seconds after that, she got another glimpse. It was hard to make out, not because of any deficiency in her vision or her focus, but because the object was camouflaged.
It was the outline that gave it away. A smooth, rounded object not unlike a large river rock, with a small protrusion on the front… but painted in a mottled green color. The same color as her own UNSC-issue fatigues. It was a patrol cap.
There was a man out there, in the same camouflaged clothing as her. He was set up perfectly on the opposite side of the river, in a good position, with a view of where she'd have to expose herself.
He was hunting her.
This isn't the Chief, Linda thought to herself with a frown. Not his style. Not direct enough. This is the Doctor.
That was a problem. The Doctor's problems were much more difficult than the Chief's.
Chief Mendez was a clever thinker with decades of experience in the military life. He'd seen nearly every way that an operation could go wrong, and he trained her family for those situations. But he liked conventional problems. A team of chasers with dogs would have been Mendez's choice for a SERE-slash-nav exercise. Something to simulate being shot down behind enemy lines, and having to escape them.
But this was an ambush, not a tracker. This hunter must have known Linda's path even before she did. His position was too perfect for this to be random chance. He must have been briefed ahead of time.
She was screwed. It was a perfect setup for a sniper duel, except for the fact she didn't have a gun.
Linda had two options. Try to ford the river under gunfire – which was suicidal, literally, since at her bodyweight, even TTR rounds would knock her unconscious for twenty, maybe thirty seconds, more than long enough to drown. Otherwise, she could backtrack, try to find an alternate route, and pray that she'd manage to both evade her hunter, and that there wasn't another one waiting for her.
Neither option was good. Which meant it was time to make a third option.
She couldn't risk the odds that there was only one hunter. That would have been far too easy a solution for one of the Doctor's problems.
There might be a dozen of these guys stationed around the jungle, at exposed crossings like this, just in case she'd taken a non-optimal route. A defensive line of watchmen. It seemed likely. The Doctor did not reward mistakes.
Which meant the hunter had to be eliminated.
She had to punch through the defensive line, which meant taking this guy out.
It would be hard. This was a relatively narrow, but very calm part of the river. Everywhere else was either far wider, making it easier for the hunter to spot her and take her out, or narrow but far more treacherous and full of dangerous rapids that could kill her far less cleanly.
Natural danger it is, Linda thought to herself with a grimace.
The rapids were far enough downriver to be hidden from her hunter. The odds of her surviving the rapids weren't great, but she wouldn't know for sure until she saw them. On the other hand, the odds of her surviving a river crossing under a sniper's sight was zero.
It took about twenty minutes for Linda to make her way to the river's bend, and the stretch of rapids that she'd seen marked on the map.
The map was accurate: the river was thinner here, that was true, but it wasn't kidding when it also said it was impassible. The ground angled down to the south, and the water dropped a meter abruptly as the bank gave way. The gentle flow became a frothing, spraying, churning torrent. Large stones dotted the span, some right in the middle of the violent flux, and some further down, where the rapids must have been in years past, before the waterfall moved back.
She looked at the crossing from the safety of the treeline. The rocks were her best bet. They weren't too flat, but they were dry, and they were spaced just far enough apart that she could jump from one to the other in a row.
The Pillars of Loki, she thought to herself, smiling slightly. Just like home.
Linda knew she had to stay focused, but the smile wouldn't go away.
Gunny Wentworth and his men always tried their best to keep the Playground fresh and varied, but it was inevitable that there'd be repetition. The Pillars of Loki were one of the more visually distinctive patterns. A forest of five meter tall poles, jammed into the pool at random intervals. Sometimes they were slicked with grease, sometimes they were booby-trapped, and sometimes there were trainers waiting to punish you for going too slow or too fast.
She just had to get from one jump to another. Exactly like back home on the Pillars. It was about ten meters of exposure in total. Three meters of 'open space' to the riverbank, then five meters for the river's width, and then two more to the cover on the other side. Easy. She tightened up the straps on her backpack, tensed, and then launched herself forward.
Linda's feet were steady as she hit the riverbank at a fast jog. Not a run, that would unbalance her, but a trot, like a horse at half-speed. Keeping your center of gravity stable was the most important part of the trick. The bank was sloped down, and the first rock was sloped up, away from her, so her foot slapped into that easily enough… but the next jump was harder, at that angle.
She was far enough down-river that the sniper shouldn't be able to see her. Her chest still itched with suppressed tension regardless.
Five seconds. Ten. Fifteen. The whole time, her heart was pounding. This was an easy obstacle, something that any of the Spartans could crossed, and she was glad to see her training was paying off even for the weird stuff like this… but the real test would come after she crossed.
Twenty seconds, and Linda was across the river, without a single drop of water on her. She darted into the trees, moving quickly and avoiding as many bushes as possible, minimizing her noise.
Now it was her turn to hunt.
The entire first day, Linda had grown accustomed to the jungle around her. The sounds, the smells, even the touches from flies or spider-webs or little vines. It was such a vast change from the Highland Mountains, the forests and the high desert. Different even from the lakes that they were taken to in the summers, where they swam and dove and exercised in more unusual ways.
The jungle was alien, now. Nothing appeared to have changed, but there was something in the air. A thicker humidity, maybe from the river, but… not quite. It was a pressure that loomed just below the canopy. Even though she knew that her target was still at least five minutes away from her, it felt like he could be behind the slightest obscurement.
Everywhere was a potential hiding place. Anywhere was a trap, a target, an enemy. She could be in the sights of a dozen, a hundred gunmen, and she'd never know until they opened fire.
It was terrifying and exhilarating all at the same time. Linda wasn't sure if she wanted to never experience it again, or live with this fire in her veins for the rest of her life.
Slowly, slowly she crept closer. She couldn't risk dropping her backpack and potentially losing it later. She tucked all the loose flaps and strings and lines inside pockets and zippers, or tie them together, so that none of them would make a single sound. She had to keep her chest upright, to prevent the insides clinking or clanging against each other, even wrapped up in the tarp like she'd been taught to do.
Five minutes of hiking stretched out, into ten, into fifteen.
Linda was walking more slowly, to stay stealthy, but now she was starting to get worried. Had the sniper repositioned? Had she gone too far? She was working off her memory of where he'd been posted up, but she had been on the other side of the river, and the landmarks of a jungle were hard to distinguish from the rest of it.
When she found him, it was almost a surprise. She had made her way uphill, to try to approach the sniper from above, and it looked like she'd done it too well.
All of the sudden, he practically popped into her sight, as she hit the perfect angle without even knowing.
Linda looked downhill, and saw the man laying belly-down in what looked like a hollow where a tree had been ripped out of its roots by a storm.
His face was pressed up against the scope of an MA5K Carbine, and he was aiming out over the river. The lightweight weapon wouldn't have been Linda's first choice, but in terrain like this, the lighter, cut-down version of the MA5 was probably a much easier burden to carry than a proper DMR or an Oracle.
More importantly, the sniper hadn't moved since Linda had seen him. Snipers could be very patient, but this time, it had been a mistake on his part. He didn't know that she was above him.
She approached carefully, looking at every single step before she made it. What foliage she'd touch, where it was connected. Every patch of loose soil, and where it might slip or slide and give out beneath her weight.
It felt like wandering through the stun-mine course – the tripwires interweaving like a knitting project gone wrong, the contact detonators disguised as clumps of dirt or grass. There was no risk of that here, no way that her hunter could possibly have been authorized to plant explosives… but it still felt just as tense.
Linda's hand strayed to the knife by her side. They hadn't given her a firearm for this 'land-navigation' exercise. That made sense, it would have given away the twist from the beginning. She still had her options, with the knife.
She'd need to play it very carefully, to not hurt the man. Rule number one of fighting with knives: you're going to get cut. If he was a trainer, then she didn't want to stab him.
Unless that rifle was loaded for real, and this wasn't part of the exercise. In that case… well, she'd probably be talking to Doctor Meyer more often.
Closer. Closer she moved. So close that she was only a meter from the man, so close she could read the writing on the paper pad set just off to the side of his rifle. He'd written down the distances, what looked like a timestamp, and some other code words.
Linda breathed very lightly, very slowly, just enough to keep her lungs half-full and not give herself away with nervous panting.
She drew her knife, pulling it from its fabric sheath without so much as a whisper.
The sniper shifted. Linda froze.
He was pulling back from the rifle, his head away from the scope. He was checking something – not the paper pad, but something else. Something electronic.
There was a datapad sitting there. Linda could just make it out from her position, half-crouched, less than a meter away now. It was currently displaying a map grid. The same map grid as her foldout hardcopy, showing the jungle.
But this map was different, she spotted with her keen eyes. There were dots on it. A red dot, right at the center of the screen, and a blue dot, almost perfectly overlapping it. The datapad was blinking, showing the red dot on top, then the blue dot, then repeating again.
The sniper stiffened. His entire body tightened, as if he was bracing for a blow.
The GPS tracker, Linda realized, the thoughts racing through her brain like a ship through the Slipstream, faster than she ever could have said the words aloud. He can track me by the GPS tracker in my backpack.
He knows I'm here.
Linda leapt forward, abandoning stealth entirely. The sniper rolled over on his belly, his hands already gripping the MA5K, raising it up, up-
She landed on the sniper harshly. Her knee slammed into his stomach, drawing a muted grunt from the man. Her right hand punched into his hand with the pommel of the survival knife, smashing it against the MA5K. The integrated ferro-rod was jostled out by the impact, and it flew out, off to the side.
The sniper yelped in pain, and his fingers spasmed. A single shot fired, roaring so loud in Linda's ears that she flinched. It was like a lightning strike after the near silence of her stealthy approach.
The shot went off to the side, up, away, into the forest canopy. She wasn't hit.
Linda's left hand seized the man's already damaged right, and squeezed. She was weak. She was eleven years old. There was no way she could beat him in a contest of strength. She had to be strategic. She had to be fast. She had to hit where he was already wounded.
The sniper winced as she pressed down in the same spot she'd struck him. He looked like he was about to power through the pain, but it was too late for him.
The knife flashed, and the sniper locked up like a statue. His eyes were wide beneath the patrol cap, staring down at the dark, dulled metal of the knife resting a few millimeters above his throat.
"Surrender," Linda said.
She meant to sound strong, to sound tough, but the sudden sprint of exertion had rattled her, and the gun had fired right next to her face. Her ears were ringing. Her voice was little more than a hushed whisper. She grimaced.
Had he even heard her? Should she repeat herself? Or would that be a sign of weakness?
The sniper said nothing, not with the knife so close to his jugular, but he released the carbine. His hands opened and his fingers splayed wide with as little movement as possible. The MA5K dropped, tumbling down into the dirt next to him.
That was good enough for a surrender, Linda supposed, but she didn't have restraints, or the ability to shoot him with his own weapon – not without removing the blade from its position and giving him a chance to fight back.
If he had been one of her trainers, one of the Spartan-II program, then she could have trusted him, even if he hadn't heard her demand.
He wasn't. Linda didn't recognize his face.
She knew every one of the trainers, including Gunny Wentworth's non-combat crew, and Staff Sergeant Swanson's cooks; not that it was hard, since there was only about a hundred of them in total.
A verbal demand it was, then.
"You're dead," Linda said, making a conscious effort to raise her voice a little louder. It still came out too soft, too quiet to her ears. "Agreed?"
She pulled the knife back, just enough so that he could speak without touching the edge.
"Agreed!" the sniper hissed, his eyes wide as he glanced between the blade and Linda's face. "Agreed! Jesus Christ!"
Linda hesitated. Was the man's word good enough? If he was a well-trained, disciplined, upstanding member of the UNSC, then of course. But how could she tell if that was the case? Unworthy people would just lie.
Her eyes flickered to the MA5K laying on the ground, off to the side. If he was a legitimate trainer, then it would be loaded with TTR rounds. The training munitions would only knock him out for a few seconds, ten at the most given his bodyweight, but that would be enough. Worst case, she could just keep shooting him.
And if the man wasn't a legitimate trainer, and those were live rounds… then if he tried something, and she shot him, then it was just karma. If you were gonna kill someone, then it was only fair that they got to retaliate.
"Do you have restraints?" she asked after a moment. "Handcuffs?"
"Yes," the man said quickly. "In my bag."
"I'm going to get up," Linda said slowly. "Go get them, and put them on."
She rose up slowly, shifting her weight so that the knife was still over his throat, just in case he decided to kick her off the moment that she was off-balance. Only when she was fully prepared did she pull back, leaping to the side.
The man didn't attack her. In fact, he recoiled away from her and her sudden movement, throwing himself to the side with his hands raised. As he did, some small object fell out of his ear. An earbud, perhaps.
The MA5K was in her arms, and swiftly raised up to her shoulders, ready to fire. It was much smaller than it used to be, as she was much taller than she used to be, but that was fine. It meant she'd be able to handle the recoil better.
Linda's heart felt a little empty, as she watched the man's reaction. He stared at her, seemingly surprised that she had gone for the gun. It felt… pathetic.
He should have predicted that she would go for the weapon, since it was the only smart play from her perspective. As soon as she'd released the man from the ground, he had a massive advantage in weight and training against her. Evening that playing ground was logical.
Yet he hadn't seen it coming. Maybe he was poorly trained. Or he was still feeling the surprise from her sudden assassination gambit on him. Or maybe he was just unnerved, scared, suffering an emotional reaction.
No, she decided. That last one didn't fit. Who would be scared of an eleven-year-old girl? He must just be poorly trained.
Linda kept the gun leveled on the man as he slowly walked to his stashed pack, and pulled out a pair of restraint-cuffs. The man was moving with an almost absurd caution, perhaps out of fear that if he moved too fast, she'd mistake it as a hostile move and shoot him. Ridiculous. She had far more control than that.
Her opinion of the man was lowering by the moment.
Only after he'd tightened the restraints did Linda relax. She kept the MA5K pointed at him with one hand, and with the other, pressed the magazine release and caught it as it fell. She glanced down. The bullets weren't brass and lead, but plastic polymer and red paint, with a small microchip warhead at the top.
A TTR bullet. He was a trainer – just not from the program. Some outsider, brought in as a surprise.
She reloaded the weapon, and racked the charging handle just to be sure. A bullet ejected from the chamber, which made sense, as it had clearly been loaded earlier. That meant she was now down to twenty-eight rounds in the carbine. That was more than enough.
"Name, rank, branch," Linda asked, lowering the carbine from her shoulders to a loose carry around her chest, though she kept it aimed at the man.
"Sergeant Coburn, UNSC Army Rangers," the man replied, his voice going from weak to strong as he spoke. "And that's all you're getting out of me."
"Fine," she replied. "I don't need anything more."
A thought struck Linda, and she paused, frowning.
"Well," she continued. "Maybe just one thing."
She pulled the trigger, squeezing it smoothly instead of pulling. The MA5K barked, spitting out a TTR round that detonated barely two meters after exiting the barrel.
The man's chest grew a solid red splotch about the size of a mini-pancake, too vivid and neon-bright to be real blood, and he dropped to the ground, instantly unconscious.
Linda jumped into action. She scooped up the GPS-enabled datapad and threw it into her backpack, pulling out her own GPS tracker as she did. Then she hurried over to the sniper's backpack, and grabbed it, hoisting it up on one shoulder. It was heavy, heavier than her own, but that meant it probably had much better gear. She didn't need to carry it all the way, just far enough away that she could search through it without having to deal with the prisoner.
It only took a moment, but then she hesitated, and glanced back at the man.
This wasn't the first outsider to the Spartan-II program that she'd beaten. She'd done pretty well in the joint exercise with the ODSTs a couple years back, and with the other Navy special forces the year after that.
But it was the first that she'd handled completely on her own, as an underdog dealing with a better positioned, equipped, and aware opponent.
Maybe it wasn't a 'real' first kill… but it sure felt like one.
She stepped over to the Army Ranger, knowing she might only have a few moments before he woke up from the TTR round's very temporary knock out.
First, she took the man's patrol cap. She'd been given a wider brimmed boonie hat that was well suited for keeping her protected from the equatorial sun, but she didn't like how floppy it was. The patrol cap's bill was curved, and it would fit right over a rifle's sights, narrowing her field of vision to help her focus downrange. There was even a dulled, blacked out insignia for the UNSC Army Rangers on the forehead, as a reminder of who she'd got it from.
Second, with quick fingers, she reached down to the man's neck, and pulled off his dog-tags. Then she scooped up the earbud that had fallen out of the man's ear, and dropped it in a pocket.
Finally, she looked down at her hand, where she held GPS tracker that had been included 'for her safety'. It had allowed the sniper to track her. That couldn't happen again. She squeezed the small button on it three quick times, activating the emergency extraction request, and then dropped it on his chest.
"Trade you," she said to the unconscious man, before raising the MA5K and shooting him a second time. It might not be needed, but it wouldn't hurt to make sure he'd stay down long enough for her to get away.
Then she melted away into the jungle, moving quickly yet quietly up the hill. From there, she'd at least have the high ground in case the Ranger decided to come after her.
Of course, chasing her when she had his gun wouldn't have been a smart decision for the handcuffed man, but like Doctor Meyer said, assuming that people would always make smart decisions was one of the classic blunders of everyday psychology.
Five minutes later, she stopped at the top of the hill. It was quiet enough, and she'd be able to see and hear the Pelican approaching. Linda set down both backpacks, and started tearing through the contents of the Ranger's.
Much of it was useless to Linda. Unnecessary luxuries. A sleeping bag. A set of chemical emergency flares. Extra rations.
There were some diamonds in the rough. More ammunition for the MA5K was a natural inclusion. Two more magazines, and nothing more. Presumably, the UNSC believed that if you needed more than ninety bullets to take down an eleven-year-old, you shouldn't be in the Army Rangers. That was probably way too lenient of the UNSC, Linda thought, but then, she'd only met the one Ranger. Maybe the rest were better?
That was followed by a multi-tool and a much thicker first aid kit. That was nice. Much more useful for survival than just her knife.
More jewels followed. A combination rangefinder and monocular, still in its padded box. Linda pulled it out with careful fingers. Had the Army Ranger been so arrogant as to think he didn't need it? Had he used it to determine the range to the river, and then put it away out of concern for its durability? Either way, tools were to be used, especially in wartime. Even in training, it was far better to use the right tool and risk destroying it, than to risk failure of the mission.
But best of all was an encrypted two-way radio. It was active, but the volume was set so low that it would be impossible to hear.
More incompetence? Linda wondered to herself. Then a thought struck her, and she reached through the pack for anything else. Sure enough, she found a small case for earbuds. One of them was missing – already in her pocket.
Standard-issue UNSC earbuds. To prevent giving away a soldier's position, they only activated when they were being worn, and only loud enough for the soldier to hear, and nobody else. If they were in someone's pocket, they wouldn't make any noise.
Linda's chest hitched. She'd made a mistake. Two mistakes. Possibly three, even.
It was only natural for the trainers to have radios for communication. Regardless if they bagged a Spartan or not, they would need to call for extraction at some point. She'd even seen the earbud fly out of the man's head, and hadn't thought any more of it.
She frantically dug through the pack for the GPS-capable datapad that the Army Ranger had been using to track her. She ripped it out, uncaring of how the rest of the backpack spilled all over the ground in a disorganized mess.
The GPS map was beeping rapidly. The blue dot that should indicate Linda, but now actually meant the Ranger, was flashing repeatedly.
Mistake number one: forgetting that the enemy has communications.
Mistake number two: forgetting that she'd intentionally set off the equivalent of a signal flare.
Linda inserted the earbud slowly, and prayed that she hadn't made the third, fatal mistake: assuming that the enemy wouldn't use either of those two things.
The earbud was silent. She checked the radio. It was on, and the status lights were green.
She waited. The GPS map by her side was flashing with words – text scrolling across the screen. It was a backup protocol, in case a UNSC soldier was temporarily deafened, while the datapad was linked to the radio. Three lines, all in caps, as big and bold as brass.
EXTRACTION FOR TARGET EN ROUTE.
RETURN TO TARGET AND ENSURE HANDOFF.
CONTACT FIELDEX HQ ASAP TO CONFIRM.
Shit.
Linda licked her lips. Her heart fluttered. At least this showed that whoever was running this exercise – the Army, or the Spartan II trainers – wanted to make sure that nobody died.
Not that it would have been any help if Sergeant Coburn had shot her while she was crossing the river. She'd have drowned before he could get to her.
There was a roar over her ears. Linda jerked, dropping the datapad. She plucked up the MA5K from where she'd left resting against a tree. A huge metal object zoomed over her head, the backwash of the engines louder than a bomb.
It was a Pelican. The dropship was flying faster and lower than she'd ever seen one move before.
The normally sedate landing pace, meant to ensure a minimum of accidents, was nowhere to be found. This bird was flying nape-of-the-earth, and descending for a landing like it was taking hostile fire.
The dropship was heading straight down the hill. Down to where she'd left Sergeant Coburn tied up.
The earbud blurted to life. A man's voice. Angry.
"Coburn, I swear to God," the voice growled. "If you abandoned your target to go double-dip on somebody else's, I will hang you from the back of the blood tray the whole ride back, you hear me?"
Double-dipping?
Linda glanced down at the GPS map. She knew how to use it, of course. UNSC standard electronics had been covered when they were just seven years old. She toggled the zoom function, and the map expanded, blew out enormously, covering hundreds on hundreds of square kilometers.
There were other blue dots on the map. Other red dots. Some of them were even close to Linda. They fanned out in a circular pattern, away from the rendezvous point. It looked like they'd dropped maybe nine Spartans at the edges of circle.
But there weren't nine blue dots. She was extrapolating. There was only seven, but the holes in the pattern were obvious.
The Pelican slowed. It was dropping now, and Linda could see the rear hatch lowering just before it disappeared underneath the canopy.
Double-dipping, Linda thought to herself, as an idea slowly started forming in her mind.
She looked down at the map with all the little red dots, neatly mapped out for her. Many of them were far away, but a couple of them were close… and judging by the relative distances, they weren't going to reach their Spartan targets any time soon.
More than enough time to even the score.
Her throat was rather dry, she realized. She slowly, calmly reached for her water bottle, and took a few sips. Just something to smooth the edges, prevent the growl.
"…the hell is this?" the voice whispered, the UNSC comm gear relaying his horrified tone perfectly over the link.
"This is Spartan-058," Linda stated, looking down the hill. "Sergeant Coburn is out."
"Say again," the voice barked. The man's voice was firm.
"Coburn is out of the exercise," Linda repeated, before continuing. "Thanks for the idea."
The radio blurted out more words, more demands, but Linda wasn't listening. She spoke over him without caring.
"Do me a favor," she said into the radio. "Don't spoil my fun."
Corporal Navarro was not bored.
Nope.
He was one of the best damn operators in the UNSC. Hand-selected by the Chief. He had spent years honing his skills even sharper. He could stay glued to a spotter's scope for days without a flinch.
Being assigned to gate duty at the rendezvous point was, therefore, not a problem. The rendezvous 'point' itself was little more than a small waystation for Pelicans, with some huts of emergency supplies.
Thus far, it hadn't been used much. Yesterday, on the second day of the exercise, about twenty of the Spartans had come trickling in. All of them had survived their assigned hunters by dint of moving quickly. Most of them hadn't even seen the Army Rangers at all.
Navarro didn't expect to see any more Spartans today. It was a bit sad, but it was also a very necessary part of their training. A course correction to their growing arrogance.
After that joint training op with the ODSTs, two years ago, the Spartans had slowly gotten a little… cocky.
Oh, they didn't walk or talk or act any different. But every trainer could see it. The sink-or-swim exercise had turned into a confidence booster, and it had worked too well.
Some of the trainers could even argue that this was an overdue step in the training. Nobody did. The Doctor was always around the corner. Her opinion on the training schedule's pace was well known, especially after all the pruning she'd done to the staff over the years.
It was a matter of initiative in combat, really. The Spartans had exploited their control of initiative when they'd sprung that shock assault on the ODST's. The helljumpers had never expected it. They were facing kids. What group of kids could crawl through an enormous grass field without giving themselves away?
But traps work on everyone, and so too did they work on Spartans. They weren't told that this would be a test of their escape and evasion training, just their survival and land-nav.
The two things were similar, sure. But land-nav didn't assume that you were being hunted.
Navarro glanced down at his datapad, mounted on the new side-bracer that the Doctor's Project GUNGNIR was experimenting with. There was a list there, a long list of Cadet numbers. A green dot meant a success. A yellow dot meant they were still in-progress. A red dot meant they'd been eliminated.
The exercise should be over by now, because there were no more yellow dots. Just the twenty successes, and the fifty-five failures.
Yet Corporal Navarro had still been told to stand watch at the gate.
Professionalism, he figured. Before the program, he'd have put money on one of the other trainers messing with him, getting him assigned to a boring duty as a lesson to keep his head on a swivel more. But that wouldn't happen these days.
These days, all of the Spartan trainers were more… refined. They'd had a lot of their rough edges polished smooth by Mendez, the Doctor, and the kids themselves. They trusted each other to actually go into cities, and talk with normal people, without fear of triggering an attack. In the old days, they'd all go hole up in some backwater place for a month or two with some friends until the combat twitchiness had left them.
He hoped it was a good sign for the project as a whole. Navarro was no scientist, but he figured that it was much better for the Spartans to learn from well-adjusted elites than fidgety, hypersensitive soldiers. There was no danger of the trainers pushing the kids too hard, too fast, and getting either the kid – or themselves – killed in some panicked accident.
But it wasn't perfect.
Carris, a sweet little girl, had almost killed Sergeant Pattinson a year ago. Grappling training gone wrong. The trainer was trying to pin her, and she reversed the pin so effectively that it used all his bodyweight and momentum against him. Textbook. A near perfect maneuver.
Except they'd been near the edge of the large set of wrestling mats. Pattinson had been thrown off the mats entirely, and over to the hard-packed dirt. He'd almost landed on his neck. That much mass, moving that fast, landing on that spot. He would have been dead instantly. Navarro could still see it. He'd been on supervision duties that day. Too close to miss the oncoming tragedy, too far away to stop it.
It was only thanks to Doctor Halsey that Pattinson was still alive. She'd been walking around the edge of the wrestling mats, just close enough to see it. She'd grabbed the man out of the air like she was catching a fish at Pike's Place. Dragged her down to the ground too, knocked their heads together, but they'd both landed far more gently.
One of the bushes rustled in front of Corporal Navarro, knocking him out of his recollections.
He didn't move. Didn't jerk in place, or gasp, or do any of those little tell-tale signs to make it clear that he'd spotted anyone. Instead, he relaxed. He was already holding his MA5K, fully loaded and ready to go. It would only take a second to twitch the carbine's muzzle up and sweep the forward arc with TTR fire.
Not that his job was to shoot the Spartans. This was the rendezvous point. But you couldn't be too careful, especially since there shouldn't be any more Spartans remaining right now.
There was another shift in the bushes. Then a voice called out.
"Star!" a boy's voice announced, loud and clear.
"Texas," Navarro replied. It was the proper call and response for a Spartan arriving on the third day of the exercise.
"I'm coming out," the boy said.
Out of the bushes walked one of the more troublesome, and also more interesting Spartans. John-117, one of the squad leaders.
Well, if anyone survived this late, of course it'd be him, Navarro thought to himself.
John wasn't the strongest, or the fastest, or the smartest of the Spartans, but he was pretty well rounded. Aside from excelling in leadership, there was one part of the boy that damn near every trainer knew about – his luck. That boy was luckier than a leprechaun at the end of the rainbow frolicking in a field of seven-leaf clovers.
"Corporal Navarro," John said, nodding to him as he stopped only a few feet from the jungle's cover. "Is the exercise over?"
Navarro frowned. Then he glanced down the datapad mounted to his forearm. Just as he'd seen before, there was no yellow dots left at this point. John-117 was officially recorded as eliminated, with a bright red dot by his name.
Something prickled the back of Navarro's neck. Some instinct. Some hair-raising feeling from the days of saber-tooth lions and woolly mammoths.
He looked out, over John's head, for whatever Spartan was keeping watch on him, but of course, he couldn't see them.
"The exercise is over," Navarro replied. "You are clear to enter, and your mission is done."
John smiled faintly at him. Then he turned his head back over to the jungle, and let out a high, sharp set of whistles.
Oly Oly Oxen Free. The Spartan's little all-clear signal. That meant Navarro was right. There was another Spartan out there, keeping watch on him, just in case.
The bushes rustled, and not one, not two, but three more Spartans emerged from the bushes. Each of them was carrying a loaded MA5K, though they kept them slung low at their hips, barrels carefully not pointed at Corporal Navarro.
The Marine felt a chuckle work its way up his throat.
"You find some friends on the way, John?" he asked casually.
"No," John replied, shaking his head as the Spartan fire-team moved up with the easy synchronicity of long experience. "I got lucky, Corporal. Linda found me. Otherwise, I'd be dead."
The chuckle grew louder, and Navarro was forced to let it out. He snickered for a few moments. As the four Spartans came to a loose stop in front of him, he held out his forearm-mounted datapad for them to inspect.
"According to this, you are dead," he informed the eleven-year-old boy. "Would you care to explain yourself?"
"Cadet Linda-058 took out her pursuer and went on a rescue op," John told him, stiffening up to a pseudo-attention.
Navarro looked at Linda. Unlike the others, she was wearing a patrol cap, rather than a boonie. Navarro felt his eyebrows raise as he spotted the dark, IR-dulled battlefield insignia of the UNSC Army Rangers on the hat.
"Corporal," Linda said, acknowledging him as she reached one hand into a pocket. "What would you like me to do with these?"
Metal beads jingled. Clutched in Linda's fist were a set of dog-tags. Four in total.
His eyebrows rose even higher. The best shot in the Spartan program hadn't just been defending her comrades – she'd been taking trophies.
Maybe she'd taken the easy route and shot some of the Rangers. But not the first one. Just to get a rifle in the first place, she would have had to ghost one of them. Assassination tactics. Get all up in his face and take down a man at least twice her age and vastly more experienced than her.
"An excellent question, Cadet," Navarro said, smiling down at her. "Why don't you keep them for now? I'll see about asking Chief Mendez for his opinion, once we're at our destination."
Like hell am I doing that, he thought to himself, eyes glued to the shiny dog-tags, swaying in the light breeze. Trophies aren't a concern for the chain of command. As far as I care, those are her dog-tags now. Maybe that'll teach those Ranger-boys to be a little less arrogant.
"Great," Linda replied, smiling at him. "Now, where's my birthday cake?"