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Minutemen: Cronin Protocol Chap. 1
Posted By: Azrael<tondorf@bc.edu>
Date: 19 April 2005, 9:52 AM
Read/Post Comments
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Minutemen: Cronin Protocol Chapter 1
ONI Signals Intelligence Center
United North American Protectorate
Midway through Covenant Invasion of Earth
Late night/Early morning
In a small workstation, a big discovery was about to be made. The Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI) had a signals intelligence center in every major region of every continent; their purpose was to intercept any Covenant message over the extensive BattleNet and send it to High Command, deep in the bowels of Sydney. Most of the signals centers were busy all through the day, but in the Northeast region of the United North American Protectorate, the facility had been, for lack of a better word, bored. The Battle of New York and the fall of Pittsburgh had been the biggest news in recent months, but those days had passed. Save a few small reconnaissance missions and subsequent rescue operations, the signals center was increasingly finding itself on the sidelines of the war. That fact was becoming more and more apparent to one particular analyst as night proceeded into morning.
From his workstation, Ensign Keith Keaveny was hardly listening to his headphones. The models were antiques and comically bulky; the silver bulbs protruded from his ears like giant gleaming earmuffs. In fact, it had taken several hours to sync up the relics to ONI's intelligence net, but he had done it. In his opinion, Keith always said, he missed nothing with the headphones. Neural laces be damned.
The mid-level analyst was hunched over his workstation, his face bathed in a variety of colors. The harsh reds, blues, greens, and purples emanated from his holo-panels and the huge viewing screen that took up the entire wall of the half moon-shaped operations floor. Keith squinted for a second as he tried to focus his thoughts. The early hour and the perpetual darkness of the operations floor created both a sense of intense immediacy and creeping drowsiness. At the moment, Keaveny was succumbing to the latter. The Ensign slapped his cheeks for a second and went back to working on yet another intelligence report.
Scans over the past few weeks have revealed increased chatter in the Northeast...
Keith leaned back in his chair and heard several vertebrae crack. What was the point? He asked himself. He stared at the holo-panels in front of him, then checked lines of text that would soon be gathering electronic dust in the inboxes of Command. He shook his head, mired in his own redundancy. He got back to the report.
the increase may be indicative of increased Covenant presence in cities, but recent detections of IR feedback in the evacuated city of Boston point to different type of technology. It seems to be completely unlike Covenant tech seen thus far; more like experimental UNSC stealth technology. After conducting research into UNSC operations in the area, no such troop presence is accounted for.
Whether it was remaining Covenant forces or mop-ups from the UNSC, the Ensign couldn't be sure which was the cause. It mattered little. The cities that could not be saved were left, the ones that served a purpose were, in a clinical ONI term, "Cleaned."
It was midway through his shift, and Keaveny was drifting off to sleep, the neutral drone of static making his eyelids heavy. This was yet another day in a long war, and to the young ensign the days were starting to blend together. At the same moment that he was convincing his body to get up and talk to one of the prettier female recruits, a sudden urgent chirping sounded in his headphones. A red light began blinking in the Ensign's peripheral vision, and he stared at it quizzically. How did I get a priority alert? He wondered. Who fell asleep at the switch upstairs? Must be nothing. Keith was about to turn the alert off when he remembered protocol. "No matter what," he mentally quoted his training officer, "a priority alert must be answered." Even if that priority alert was being handled by a mid-level analyst.
The Ensign turned to a holo-panel and his fingers drifted over several keys, transferring the communication to his headset. The broadcast nearly made him fall out of his chair. His dreary eyelids snapped up, and he felt the hair rise on the back of his neck. His pages of notes and cup of Zanzibar-blend coffee became casualties of his flailing around looking for paper. The transmission was crystal clear. This was too good to be true. How did they miss THIS? This was an emergency UNSC broadcast!
"Contact! Contact! Five Covenant Banshees on my six! Sensors also detect two Wraith tanks with infantry support closing on your position! New contact! I've got a squad of Ghosts coming from the South of you! Fire team, what have you stumbled on to?"
Keaveny clutched the headphones to his ears, his fingers turning white as he rewound the transmission, taking in the entire dialouge. His fingers now danced across several holo-panels simultaneously, and on a large map of the United North American Protectorate, a green dot glowed bright and true. A date and time popped up in red, semitransparent digits on his workstation. The Ensign did a double-take with surprise. This is nearly a day old! He yelled in his mind. Oh man, someone up high really dropped the ball on this one. Keith scribbled some notes, then stood ramrod straight as his chair slid backwards, colliding with the desk behind his.
"Get me Commander Young, on the double!" The excited Ensign said into his desk's communicator, making the observation of his career, "He may want to come and listen to this..."
Evacuated City of Boston
Morning
The loud beeping brought Captain Jack O'Shea into a world of pain. As the commander of the Minutemen, Boston's militia resistance against the Covenant, he had to wake up at the earliest of hours to get a head start on each busy day. But this morning was different. This morning, the usually dutiful and responsible leader prayed for another two hours of sleep. The prayers were unanswered. O'Shea went to stretch but was greeted by a wave of pain and tension throughout his entire body. Jack accounted for each ache and pain like a timeline of the day before, one of the longest and hardest days in the history of the Minutemen. Even the Captain's eyes ached as he willed his eyelids to separate.
His feet ached. Jack winced as they hit the floor, thinking of the miles of sewer he had trudged in the dark while trying to escape the Covenant. He then thought upon the medics that had carried the stretcher with a badly wounded Marine, and suddenly his feet did not hurt that much anymore.
His legs ached. Upon closer inspection, the forty-year-old man could see numerous bruises and lacerations from debris, near misses by plasma weaponry, and concussions from explosions and other engagements. He thought of all the times he had to dodge out of the way as several waves of Covenant reinforcements assaulted their position during what the Minutemen were now calling "The Battle of Commonwealth Avenue."
His torso and his ribcage hurt badly. O'Shea hadn't told anyone, but he had gotten a bruised rib from being hit by debris. He was lucky as he thought about it, the debris had come from a high-rise apartment building that had been turned into a parking lot in the space of fifteen minutes. Many of his troops had been crushed from huge pieces of structure falling from the sky, so Jack looked upon one bruised rib as a trivial matter. That didn't make breathing any more comfortable, though. Jack lifted up his faded gray t-shirt, crumpling the bold black block letters UNSC. He revealed a large dark bruise along his right side, running perpendicular to his strong stomach muscles. The Captain prodded the bruise with two fingers, wincing at the sharp electricity of pain that rippled out of the bruise. He resolved to drop by the medical tent later.
Jack stretched his arms above his head pulling on his right wrist and bringing it across his body. O'Shea realized he had spent nearly all of yesterday holding his urban camouflaged battle rifle in a ready position, and the strain had finally taken its toll. Jack wondered if he could even heft a cup of coffee.
Or more importantly, water and pain killers, he thought as he rubbed his hands just above his temples. Images of last night's party flashed through his head with each throbbing pain. The shot glass memorials, Parsons and McManus promotions, the friendly faces, the warm feelings of home, the pain and sadness of loss, and Laura. O'Shea turned around as his wife groaned, obviously irked about the early hour, as always.
"What time is it?" She asked, her dirty blonde hair splayed out on her pillow, dressed in one of the Captain's beat-up, old Marine t-shirts and cotton shorts. Jack allowed himself a brief smile as images of the events after the party flashed briefly through his mind. He added that to reasons he was tired.
"You don't want to know," O'Shea said, moving his hands from his temples to his cheeks, scraping them across stubble that had not yet been shaved off. His hair was messed up as well, and Jack ran a hand through the brown and gray mess, smoothing it somewhat. The fog in the old Minuteman's head was beginning to clear, but the hangover would probably remain until noon.
"Today, el Capitan, I'm giving you a day's leave." Jack laughed appreciatively at his wife's pet name. He heard the soft sound of sheets moving behind him as Laura moved across the deep, warm, and comfortable bed. She draped her arms over his shoulders and kissed him on the cheek. "That's an order," she said into her husband's ear as she proceeded to massage his aching shoulders.
"Tomorrow I'm relieving myself of my command," O'Shea said as he accepted the massage gratefully. The aches and tension began to melt away under his wife's skilled fingers. Jack's eyes opened in surprise as he felt his body being pulled back to bed. He had forgotten Laura was in very good shape and, if driven, could probably kick his ass.
"No!" She said playfully, pinning Jack down easily. "I am your wife, Jack!"
"My love.
"Your devotion!"
"All true."
"Thus I outrank you, sir."
Jack put up a show of resistance. "And if I disobey my orders?"
"You get court-martialed...and your sentence is tickling!" Laura's knowledge of the Captain's weaknesses, combined with her leverage over the body of her husband, gave her an immediate tactical advantage as Jack found himself sinking helplessly into the deep mattress. O'Shea squirmed and gave his wife ample resistance, but he savored the levity of the moment, until his wife's searching fingers found his bruised rib. His face contorted in a flash of pain. Laura immediately sobered.
"What?" She asked, and lifted up Jack's shirt. A hand went to her mouth instantly, and she got off her husband. "You're hurt!" She said, sitting by O'Shea's side as he rose up into a leisurely sitting position, keeping his weight on his elbows.
"Bruised rib. No big deal. I had worse in high school."
"No big deal? Jack, how close were you?"
"To what?"
"To dying!"
Jack frowned and shook his head. This exchange was inevitable every time he came home, but it still stung him. He put his life on the line every time he ventured out of the camp, and he had not gone without injury over the last two years. He had received worse injuries than this, of course, but every time Jack appeared vulnerable to harm, his wife would worry and try to get him to retire. And that, the Captain thought to himself, is not going to happen.
"It's just a bruise. Honey, I'm fine. Trust me here."
"You're just going to go out there again, go play 'hero'...one of these days, you're not coming back, and where will I be?"
"Laura, you're my world, but these people need me to keep the Covenant at bay. Otherwise, we won't have a city or friends to protect. I don't go out there to be a hero, I go out there to make sure people survive. Not just you and me, but all the other refugees who won't leave this city."
Mrs. O'Shea got off the bed and walked to the dresser, leaning heavily on her elbows, staring straight ahead but keeping her husband's reflection in front of her gaze. "Jack, I know why you go out there, I know why you fight. God knows, I love Ron and Timmy like they were our own kids...but Jack," she turned and looked into her husband's eyes, "I don't care about them. I only care about you. You're all I have left in this world."
She came to him then, and Jack held her tightly like he always did when the hostilities ceased. She was crying softly, her face buried in his chest, and he knew this was her way to grieve for those who had been lost before. This was part of how she mourned. Everyone had their way. "You have to come back to me," she said, her voice muffled in the cotton shirt.
"I will always come back to you," he said into her hair, staring straight ahead, eyes heavy with guilt.
Forty-five minutes later, the Captain left his train to leave for work. High above his head the daylight simulating lamps had yet to activate, keeping the South Station base and refugee camp in a peaceful gray darkness. The entire camp was a converted subway station, the largest in Boston, with towering vaulted ceilings and an incredibly large amount of floor space. Two main tracks ran parallel to each other and bisected the main terminal; on each track double decker commuter and luxury trains sat, converted into civilian and military offices as well as officer's quarters.
On either side of the trains the refugee tents were pitched, creating spacious pedestrian streets. The South Station camp was a city in and of itself; some creative refugees and Minutemen had even taken the liberty to name streets within the camp. O'Shea allowed himself a brief smile of pride and satisfaction as he approached the communications car. Helping humanity survive, he thought to himself.
Jack slid the door open and walked into the converted train. After walking past rows upon rows of surveillance and communications eqiupment, the Captain came upon a small stairway leading up to the second floor and ascended into the Minutemen war room. In contrast to the relatively crowded ground floor, the war room was nearly bare. The long rectangular shape held only a dozen or so chairs, four hanging pictures of the South Station camp and Minutemen in action, and one large oval table that also served as the holographic projector for briefings.
At the moment, a nearly transparent wire skeleton of the city of Boston hovered six inches off the table. Jack looked through the map of the city and saw a trail of steam wafting out of a large, white ceramic mug. Next to the mug was a large sandwich, half eaten, and behind it all was Master Gunnery Sergeant Gus Reynolds, reclining in a leather office chair, shuffling through documents. The second-in-command had his shiny black boots up on the table's edge, but his laid-back posture was not relfected in his dress. Jack was hard pressed to make out a single wrinke or stain anywhere on his friend's uniform.
"I'm just going to say it, Gus, because I know you won't;" O'Shea said as he let his eyes adjust to the dark for a second, "it's way too fuckin' early." Trying to get a rise out of his old war buddy had always been a game of his, and for the Captain, there was no time like the present. Jack playfully threw a bagel that he had stolen from his kitchen at his second-in-command; the ring shaped snack passed through the city like a rock through a thin waterfall. To the Captain's amazement, Reynolds caught the bagel without looking up, took a large bite, and threw it back. "Long night at the bar last night, sir," the Master Guns said. "You know what they say: awake 'til you're sober-"
"-never hungover." The two finished the saying. O'Shea broke off a piece of his breakfast and switched off the hologram. The green wire mesh of the city fell away like grains of green sand, vanishing completely from view. Jack then turned the lights up, illuminating his comrade's stern features. The African-american officer slapped his paperwork on the table and took a long swig of his coffee.
"What do we have on the docket today?" Jack asked, settling into his seat. It would be a full hour until the other Minutemen officers arrived, but the two veterans liked to have the time to catch up. Rank, protocol, and formality did not exist for this hour. O'Shea put his feet up on the table as well, his black boots reflecting the overhead lighting.
"Civilian or military?" Gus asked, gesturing to two piles of paper. Even though the post of Captain was a military designation, Jack O'Shea was the chief civilian administrator in the city of Boston as well. While there were elected members of the city who coordinated various functions for the community, most of the major decisions fell on the Captain's shoulders, including food distribution, waste management, and...
"...winter preparations," Gus Reynolds said, pushing a small booklet O'Shea's way. The leader of the Minutemen sighed and flipped through pages as his old friend continued talking.
"Temperatures are dropping faster this year, weather algorithms we've run indicate this is going to be a bitch of a winter."
"That will work well against Covenant," Jack muttered absent-mindedly.
"It'll work even better against humans without heat energy," Reynold replied, getting his superior's attention.
"Ok," Jack said, thumbing through the research and options, "Look into shutting down the heaters in some of the weapons storage closets until we get our first frost; and drop the temp in the main terminal by a couple degrees. Everyone will complain, but just tell 'em to dress warmer. Other than that, conserve wherever we can. Let's not get caught with our pants down."
"Check," Gus said, making a note. After fifteen minutes of back-and-forth on various civilian issues, Reynolds pushed the other pile of pages at Jack.
"I thought we fought a battle yesterday," Jack complained as he took the stack of papers, rolling his eyes, "aren't they all dead yet?"
Reynolds chuckled, a deep bass that rumbled from out of his barrel chest. "Bastards are like rabbits, Jack."
"Seriously..." O'Shea shook his head, rifling through paper after paper. After going through nearly half the stack, the Minuteman Captain stopped and scrutinized a page. He held it closer to his face as if the paper would reveal its secrets if Jack looked hard enough. He passed it back across the table.
"You see that?" Jack asked, his head slightly cocked in confusion. "IR pickup last night outside city limits. Minimal, but still..."
"UNSC surveillance droid?" Gus guessed, running his finger down the page as he read.
"IR would have been a heckuva lot higher," Jack said as he called up the Boston city map. He punched in a few commands and the map rotated to give them a bird's-eye view of the city. A red dot glowed outside the border of the city. "Can't be Covenant, they don't have technology like that, at least, not that I've seen or heard of."
Gus Reynolds frowned and pointed at the position of the dot. "Right by an outlet of the Charles River, too," he noted as the map zoomed in, "that's a defenseless entry point into the city. We haven't had the time to put cameras by there."
The Captain grumbled to himself. "Our own damn fault. Stay vigilant with the cameras we do have, tell the surveillance guys to keep their eyes peeled. If there's anything new, I want to know about it right away." Jack rubbed his eyes vigorously and stared into the map again. "Until then, not much we can do about it."
A chirp sounded, and the hologram of Boston fell away, replaced with big blue letters that read, "Incoming transmission." A robotic female voice announced the same.
"Receive," O'Shea commanded, and there was a short tone.
"Morning, guys," a disembodied voice said over the war room's speakers. The two Minutemen raised their mugs in an unseen toast and sipped on their drinks.
"Morning, Mike," Jack said. "How's everything at BC? Keeping busy?"
Colonel Mike Fox laughed over the COM. "Everything at Boston College is boring. Covies don't take any interest in this fucking place anymore. I think we've read all the books left in the library."
"We should all be so lucky, my friend." The Captain replied. "What can we do for you?"
"Food's getting a little stale over here," Fox said, his voice barely echoing in the sparse war room, "and getting a bit low. Are we due for some groceries, or should we just start going on diets?"
The two veterans laughed appreciatively. Gus leaned against the table and spoke into the air, unsure of the microphone's location. "We'll arrange a pickup tomorrow on the Charles. Same deal: floating trash heap with an attached submerged ration package. Should float to the pickup zone at sixteen-hundred. But remember, Mikey, you've got ample space to grow some of your own. Everyone does their part, now."
"I got you, Gus. I think you'll be very pleased with this year's potato crop."
"Couldn't be worse than last year's," O'Shea jabbed, and the three shared a quick laugh in the empty room.
"Sixteen-hundred tomorrow. We'll be there." The camp commander confirmed, and for a few seconds, the only sound was that of shuffling papers.
"Now what's this I hear about you promoting Parons?" The voice asked. O'Shea and Reynolds shared a glance and laughed appreciatively. The Captain waved his hand and severed the transmission.
Jack stared across the table in mock disapproval as his second-in-command wiped a mirthful tear from his eye. "But seriously, Jack," Gus said, taking his feet off the table and swiveling the chair to face his CO, "that IR pickup by the river troubles me. We haven't had anything like that since last year when the Covies got that armor reinforcement. I don't want to have bad intel on their troop strength. We underestimated them back at Comm Ave. I don't want to have to face that again."
The Captain considered it for a second. "All right, Gus," he said as he tossed his half eaten bagel between his hands and stared up into the ceiling. "First tactical orders of the day: get Parsons and McManus on recon. Send 'em to a safe sector, but keep them by the river. While they're at it, have them update some of the surveillance cameras with the new translation software we got from the Marines. I want to hear what the Covies think of the past battle."
Reynolds finished scribbling on a pad, stabbing a period at the end for emphasis. "Done and done, sir." He answered. "They'll be out of the house in two hours."
Two dozen meters above ground, Boston was a ghost town inhabited by aliens and decaying remains of bodies and buildings alike. The overcast morning only made the husks of structures appear even more gray, their imposing shadows falling over destroyed cars, twisted streetlights, buckled pavement, and corpses. The scene at the Charles River was quite the opposite, however.
The wide waterway weaved through the center of the city; the environment along the riverbank was almost tranquil, even if the balconies of past apartment buildings were nothing but crumbling slabs of concrete and the sides of the structures looked as if a gigantic fist had punched through their sides. The river still ran full and strong along its grassy banks, and a patrol of Grunts that loitered along the Charles was taking it all in.
The scene played itself out through the Oracle scope of a S2AM sniper rifle half a kilometer away. Dark brown eyes watched behind a full faceshield as calculations and tactical data streamed across a heads-up display. The sniper observed the six aliens without compassion or remorse. He had signed up to kill Covenant, to preserve humanity, to make a difference, and now he was getting his first big shot.
"Six fatboys." The sharpshooter said evenly.
"No other species?" His partner asked in a grave and weathered voice.
"Negative. I have a good line on them. Give me the word and they ain't goin' home."
"Hold fire. We're avoiding detection, and when that patrol doesn't check in, someone will notice." A short crack and fizzle of electricity sounded behind the sniper, and the man turned his head from his prone position to face his commanding officer. While the sniper considered himself in the peak of physical shape, and every test he had taken agreed with him, his commanding officer was head and shoulders above him.
The trooper, dressed completely in black battle armor and urban camouflage, moved with incredible speed as he dismantled a security camera hidden in the shadows of the roof they had occupied. The commanding officer reached into one of the tactical pouches around his belt and withdrew a set of pliers, driving them into the thick black cable that supported the surviellance device.
White and blue sparks flew from the forced entry, but the material of the special operations uniform negated the electricity that would have fried an unprotected human. In an extraordinary show of strength, the soldier tore the cable from a hole in the roof and dislodged the camera, allowing himself to get a better look at it. The black-clad trooper held the armored camera in his hands as electricity still sparked from the end of its' severed cable. In a blur, the pliers were back in the pouch that rested right above the commando's thigh-holstered M6C sidearm.
"Another camera?" The sniper asked.
The soldier regarded it with concern for a second, even though it was impossible to discern any expression through his faceshield. "The third one so far. Not Covenant tech."
"Civilian model?"
"If it is, why's it still active?" The trooper handed the camera over to the sniper and pointed at the gray markings underneath it. "And why's it labeled 'UNSC'?"
The black-clad sniper swore under his breath. "If there's one thing worse than no intel-"
"It's bad intel."
"Fuckin' spooks." The sniper said, tossing the camera down leisurely.
"Move out," the trooper ordered, "this facility ain't comin' to us."
The two Orbital Drop Shock Troopers extracted quickly from the roof, throwing long black ropes from the edge as they rappelled down the face of the damaged building.
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