Gray Team, chapter 1 Options

[Agent Griff]

I've studied all my options regarding a Halo story, and this seems the most unexplored and the most mysterious of all Halo stories. Even Eric Nylund, author of several Halo novels said that he considered the story of Gray Team a subject for a possible novel. Where I'm gonna be 1 step ahead of them and I'll try to express what I think happened to Gray Team. Most of this story will be fictional but I will add some things which are canon in the mix. I hope you enjoy this story.

~~~

The year was 2525. The UNSC frigate Commonwealth was in orbit over the planet Chi Ceti IV, in the fringes of UNSC space, more than 77 Light Years from Earth. The Commonwealth had just dropped all of the Spartan IIs which had survived the byo-augmentation process to test their new armour. This armour, dubbed the Mjolnir Mk IV by its creators, was a new type of special combat suit which was designed from the ground up especially for the Spartans, and especially for fighting the Covenant.

The MJOLNIR Mark IV was a radical redesign of the suit taking advantage of many technological leaps. This advanced battle suit was the first to fully integrate with the soldier's body. The suit plugged directly into the soldier's nervous system through a standard issue Neural Interface. The suit's many functions (communications, hydro-static gel levels, environmental systems, etc.) responded to commands issued by the soldier's thoughts.

This was also the first design to successfully utilize the reactive metal liquid crystal as a means of enhancing locomotion. It flawlessly enhanced the speed and power of the wearer, a sharp contrast to previous versions which required powered motors to allow the soldiers mobility. Because of this advancement, the design more closely resembled an actual suit of armor, as opposed to a powered exoskeleton. On one level the soldier moved the suit and in return the suit moved the soldier. This allowed for an incredibly compact design when compared to the previous incarnations.

The success of this version was also dependent upon the parallel development of the Spartan-II program, which produced soldiers with the physical prowess required to drive the system. Previous attempts to wear the prototype suit by unaugmented soldiers resulted in their deaths or severe injury due to the extreme reactivity of the system.

As soon as the Spartans equiped their new suits, they found it to perfectly suit them and their needs on the battlefield. The Spartans could now be assigned into military units and be sent to battle the Covenant. Before they would be officially sent into battle however, the Spartans were forced to undergo a baptism by fire when a Covenant frigate entered the system and engaged the Commonwealth. As soon as they could load up on weapons and ammo, all of the Spartans were ferried via Pelican dropships to the Commonwealth. It was going to need all the help it could get.

As soon as the Spartans boarded the ship they received tactical information regarding the situation of the battle, information on their enemies and their role in the battle which was going from bad to worse for the UNSC. There was only one option left for captain Wallace, commander of the Commonwealth: send the Spartans to board the enemy ship. Without a flinch, the Spartans did what they were told.

After being taken by a Pelican dropship to the very hull of the Covenant starship, the Spartans infiltrated the ship through a hole in the hull made by the Commonwealth's MAC gun. The MAC gun was an advanced weapon used by the UNSC, on par with Covenant Plasma torpedos. They were in short suply however when the war started and few ships had fully functional MAC guns. When they were fully functional however, they were a weapon to be feared by the Covenant. A well placed MAC gun shot could disable a Covenant ship by destroying its engines, or destroy it completely by destroying its fuel cells. Before the hull could be destroyed however, there was always the issue of Covenant shielding. All Covenant ships had shields, and the most resilient of shields could even resist a SHIVA Nuclear Missile. In this situation however, the shields of the Covenant ship were down, and both ships were exchanging body-blows between eachother. The Spartans would turn this situation however.

Only three Spartans, John-117, Kelly-087 and Sam-034 succesfully landed on the ship and entered through it's hole. They reached the ship's reactor, tossed their warheads inside, and escaped. Unfortunately, Sam got hit by plasma from a Jackal that breached his armor making it impossible for him to follow his friends out from the ship since he would die from decompression. He was forced to stay behind . He held off the Covenant while John and Kelly escaped. The warheads went off, and the Covenant ship was destroyed, taking Sam with it.

This battle was a victory for the UNSC, yet the Spartans had paid a price in this victory. One of their finest was killed by the Covenant on his first mission. He was the first of the Spartans to be deemed "Missing in Action" by the UNSC. It was part of a startegy to keep morale up by maintaining the myth that Spartans couldn't be killed. The reality however, was painfully different from what UNSC publicity made it appear to be.

After the battle, the testing facility on the planet's surface was abandoned in fear of a Covenant counter-attack. This attack featured only one ship, yet Covenant fleets often employed great numbers of ships, upwards of 30 capital ships with many more support ships.

The Spartan super-soldiers were divided into platoons, called teams, which were colour-coded. The team of Spartan John-117 was Blue Team. Out of all the Spartan teams, one stood out. Gray Team. Sent into a mysterious mission to a place held secret by the UNSC, being named only "too far away to be recalled", they were one of the last remaining Spartans by the end of the year 2552, when Earth was invaded. Many kept seeing them as possible reinforcements to join the battle to come. Yet many also questioned wheter they actually existed and if they weren't dead.

The task of Gray Team, when they set out from the UNSC HQ on Reach in 2551, was to try to focus Covenant ships and troops into a far away section of Human space, while keeping attention away from Reach and, ultimately, Earth. Hoping for a diversion, Gray Team was sent along with a task-force of 7 UNSC ships to the furthest reaches of UNSC space, even further than Chi Ceti IV. The planet which was their destination, Caleston, was a rocky planet, made up of several continents with wide surfaces of undrinkable liquid between them. This, coupled with the great heat of Caleston caused by the nearby star Fury 821, made the planet lightly inhabited. It wasn't one of the greatest places to set up but it was better than other planets nearby.

The task-force, dubbed task-force Atlas after the flagship of the battlegroup the carrier UNSC Atlas, stood in orbit over the planet as Pelican and Albatross dropships ferried troops and engineers over to the surface of the planet. The whole taskforce was commanded by captain Alexander Quinn, a promising UNSC naval commander who had seen action before in the battles of Paris IV and Jericho VII. This was first mission in command of an entire task-force and he was visibly nervous.

As he stood on the bridge of his flagship, the leader of Gray Team came up to him to talk about what his Spartans would have to do in this mission. Since he was thinking heavily, he barely noticed Spartan Randall-079 coming up behind him, even if Randall was in his Mjolnir Mk V armour specially given to him and his squad-mates for this asignment.

"Sir?" Randall quietly asked from behind captain Quinn.

"What...who...oh, Spartan-079. I wanted to speak to you. Good thing you received my message quickly." Quinn said in a slightly nervous voice. It was the second time he talked with a Spartan, and he knew about their famed skills in battle.

"You can call me Randall sir, I much prefer it when people call me by my name. Regarding a message, you never sent me one sir." Randall after a slight pause in which he tried to remember any message sent to him. Captain Quinn had only thought of a message, but since he was so stressed he didn't actually send one.

"Well, it's good you came anyway. I've been receiving preliminary reports from the planet's surface. It seems it's uninhabited. A barren wasteland...thankfully." Captain Quinn said, gathering his thoughts and trying to calm down. He felt a constant beat in his heart, a constant fear which always gnawed at him from the inside, too faint to really affect someone but too powerfull to dissapear. Quinn was feeling it fully.

"I have gathered my men sir, we are all suited-up and ready to go. What are our orders sir?" Randall asked. He was not impacient yet he did not appreciate staying away from the subject.

"Very well then...Randall. Go to the hangar bays and board Pelican dropship Alpha Kilo 17. It will take you to the surface of the planet, where it is no longer my jurisdiction to give you orders. General Blake will handle everything from there. I wish you luck on the surface Randall." Quinn said in a calm and collected voice. To an outside observer, only slight flickers of his voice would show how stressed he really was. Those that knew him closely however, could clearly see that he had changed since his promotion to captain. From the confident and outgoing commander he used to be, he was now a hollow shell of his former self, always seeming to fear something which was neither close but neither far.

"Yes sir. Good luck to you as well, I hope this all goes well for you." Randall said as he politely saluted his commanding officer. Randall wished the captain luck with a slightly ironic tone. He smiled slightly as the captain's face went pale. Randall always liked making these slight jokes on his colleagues. Little gags to personally amuse himself and ease off the stress of constantly being ready for battle.

As he left the bridge, he left the captain alone, staring blankly at the large viewport which showed the planet above which his ships orbited. His task-force was well-equiped as far as UNSC standards went. The oldest ship he had was his own flagship, the Atlas, which had served in the war since its very start, in 2525. The other 6 ships, the heavy Marathon-class cruiser Acheron, the 2 frigates Ebon Falcon and Surprise and the 3 destroyers Avenger, Achilles and Galahad were all relatively new ships, all equiped with modernized MAC guns, Archer misiles and Shiva Nuclear misiles.

The long trials and tribulations of Gray Team had just begun...
~~~
I hope you liked this first part of "Gray Team". Feedback and criticism is greatly appreciated.

This post has been edited by Agent Griff: May 11 2007, 07:12 PM