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DIRT

TOBIAS S BUCKELL

THE FIGUREin the charcoal-black body ar, then walked past the ruined e BR55 battle rifle rested at the ready, cradled between his forearms

He paused by the tip of the Pelican, which had plowed into the ground on its side, and looked through the shattered s of the cockpit

―Over here, Marine"

The oval black helrass behind a thick piece of granite, theoff the upside-down T-shaped visor

BR55 aimed forward; the Orbital Drop Shock Trooper moved toward the sound of the voice and

pushed aside the tall fronds of grass

The 70-un from the tip of the Pelican dropship had broken loose and sheared the tip of granite clean off, then cratered into the dirt a few hundred feet away

Lying between it and the rock was a e with a few chest and hip pockets Fairly standard

He‘d obviously been thrown clear of the cockpit on is looked broken, and at least one ars, torso, and arnizable

He had an M6 Magnum sidearm pointed at the ODST, which he let drop to the dirt next to him in exhaustion

Somehow the soldier had crawled out of his body armor, which lay all around him A closer look revealed why: charred and melted, the ODST body armor would have burned his skin

―Good to see you" The e calm of someone who knew they were

beyond help, so terribly injured they were past the pain ―I wasn‘t sure if the call got through"

The ODST crouched beside him and opened a , and polypsuedomorphine to ease the h his hands shook a bit This wasn‘t training; this was a real, dying man, and the ODST was no medic He looked around ―My SOEIV landed nearby, and I was ordered over to see if I could help with a downed Pelican But sir, you need et you out of here

There are Covenant forcesin on our position We don‘t have rabbed the hel the , rook, that soot what it was all about,"

the Marine on the ground hissed into the reflective visor ―But what I want you to re journey bethere I started and where I‘s I‘ve done, but sorry‘s passed s I‘ve seen and come out sorry But someti what‘s i to round

―Sir?"

He coughed, blood staining his lips and chin ―All this crap started back in the Colonial Military"

The ODST turned and looked back the way he‘d co, and murmured a situation report and request for backup as he reported his find

―Of course," the injured nia you‘re a private, just out of training, probably your first juht not even remember the CMAbut back before there was the UNSC, there was the CMA"

―Sir"

―Shut up and listen, rookie! There‘s so important I have to tell you" The hts and memories ―About friends Betrayal

Loss If you keep your head up and do what I tell you, you h to tell someone what happened here"

I SIGNEDup for the Colonial Military the hour I turned eighteen January 3, 2524 S I‘d done up to that point Flipped offacross a flat, golden plain of wheat, and then I rode a flatbed full of corn all the way into town Sure, the JOTUNs did the realBut we still ended up aiant, one hundred-foot lawn

mower-like machines did

―It‘s just dirt," I‘d told a friend aboutabout in it I can‘t believe my parents left a real world to travel all the way out here to dig dirt"

The far life was not my destiny I‘d known that since the day I first looked up at the stars while riding on the back of one of the giant, auto out the side of un The next tiirls bat their eyes at a man in uniform Not a farm boy with dirt under his nails I wanted to be a hard-as-nails tough-ass Marine

I walked around Utgard for the last ti the banks of the Miar by the floodlit, well-landscaped grounds of the Colonial Parlia walls I blehat cash I had on me on drink after drink at bars scattered all up and down the Mimir until I could barely walk

Then at sunrise, without a wink of sleep, I walked into a seant looked me over and handed h it, he stood up and shook my hand ―Welco I was still not a tough-ass Marine, but a tired, hungover recruit without any hair, dressed in an ill-fitting uniforeant yelled at enny

I want to say I learned how to kill a man withof shit from a thousand yards, but all I really learned was that I didn‘t like scrabbling around in theoff over h anyway

Unlike the UNSC, the CMA boot cah to teach you how to use your weapon, salute, ht on out of there

It wasn‘t that ophers in the fields, or so I thought at the time

Unlike some of my fellow recruits, I at least kne to point and shoot As a result, I was proot to tell a few other soldiers what to do

That I liked

But it still didn‘t prepare s I was about to see

I METFelicia Sanderson and Eric Santiago at the Utgard spaceport Felicia grew up right here in Utgard, on Harvest; Eric had coal With our duffels at our feet, aited as patiently as we could in line with civilian passengers We‘d developed soh that they felt co complaints about Colonial Military life around me

―I still can‘t believe we‘re forced to fly civilian to Eridanus," Felicia groused

―We could go AWOL," Eric said

I shook my head ―Where? The liner doesn‘t stop anywhere re between here and the Eridanus Syste, it‘s odd" Eric picked his duffel up as the line rab all our ships?" Felicia had been co about this latest development for a solid week Harvest was a newer colony, and most of the settlers had come from other Outer Colonies Felicia and her family didn‘t hold a lot of love for the UNSC, or the Earth-controlled Colonial Adenerations

It was, I had to adnity Without our own ships, the Colonial Military was shuttling fightingthem coach-class tickets

The three of us had been deployed to Eridanus, where the action was Our angry words for the UNSC were partly atte to keep ourissue

Operation TREBUCHET had been the UNSC‘s answer to Insurrectionists, and we‘d just been

folded into the far-ranging series of operations aimed to ―pacify" the Outer Colonies

I was just excited to be leaving Harvest for the first time, no matter how, or to where

As we lifted off, I could see one of the seven space elevators that Harvest used to oods off the planet‘s surface Just like h slip-space to other planets, like seeds being dispersed from a pod

It was the last ti my father the way I did We never had another chance to see each other, and now that I look back on it, I knoas just a hardworking man who‘d lost his wife and did his best to raise one hell of an angry kid I doubt I could have done better