July 7, 2534 (UNSC Calendar)/
New Paris, Mars, Sol System
It was cold. Very cold.
Apparently this region of New Paris had had some sort of crappy guy overseeing the terraforming, so the weather was colder than it should've been.
I was back in the base that I had first landed on when I came to mars. I was standing at attention my new dress uniform. Like the rest of the stuff us ODST's (I was so excited at being able to call myself that) had. Everything was black.
We weren't armed, we were simply standing at ease while the Colonel that was the leader of the 19th Batallion awareded us with this and that crap. It was surprisingly similar to a school graduation. Scratch that, it wasn't.
There were approximately three hundred men standing in the large courtyard. That is without counting the Colonel, his aides, and our trainers.
We had managed to finish our training more or less without physical harm to our bodies. Our minds were another story, but let's not get into that.
I was standing at ease now. The Colonel had inspected every last one of the platoons before us and handing each soldier individually his lapel pins. I knew that not many of us would use them unless on funeral detail, and at that time I felt like I was invincible, like my friends were invincible. We could take on the whole Covenant ground forces for all I cared.
Well, we stood there until the Colonel passed by, at his prescense we immediately snapped to attention. He walked in front of us, nodding at each one of us as he passed each one of us. He looked as bored as I felt excited. He then handed each of us a pin shaped like an SOEIV drop pod. We saluted the Colonel and then went back to standing at ease as he moved onto the next platoon.
By the end of the day, there were seven new platoons adding to the numbers of the 19th Batallion. Ours was the largest, with 32 members.
"Fall OUT!" we were ordered.
We did so and boarded our designated pelican. There we were adressed by Gabuka, who seemed to be the leader of all other trainers.
"I have no idea how you piss-ass excuse for men managed to complete the training program, you should not be marines, you should not be ODSTs, and you certainly shouldn't have the right to have balls!"
Love you to sarge.
"However, I trained you, and the level of your skill will be directly linked to mine as a trainer. So you will do your goddamned best!"
"YES STAFF SERGEANT."
"That's how I like it."
A few seconds later we landed. Distances become really shot when you're doing Mach 5.
We dismounted the pelican and walked to our respective barracks. There were only five men in mine. It was me, Ramsey, Jonah, Dutch, and the man whose name I kept forgetting, turns out it was Chow.
Us five were the only remnants of the original number of Barracks Two. We were damn proud of that.
"Time for your graduation present!" yelled a familiar voice. I turned around to see that it was the same fat man that thad given us haircuts when we first got here and every couple of months ever since. This time, however, he was not carrying his shaving machine thingy, he was handling a needle with a pistol grip.
We were getting our tatoos.
"Why don't you just use a mold?" asked Dutch.
"Are you a man or not?"
"Fine, jeez, I was just asking," came the answer.
I was first in line, so I sat in the chair after taking off my suit jacket and shirt.
"No running away this time," mumured the fat man. He still remembered me.
It was about fifteen minutes before he was done. This guy was fast, although dozens of years doing this same thing would probably hone his skills. I stood up and cleaned up the blood from my new tatoo. It was up on my right shoulder. I couldn't see it that well, so I went to the bathroom mirror.
I looked at it carefully. In black ink it showed the silhouette of an SOEIV with a flaming skull in its middle. Said skull was missing its lower jaw and had a mean look to it. Underneath the skull was a ribbon with the letters ODST inscribed into it.
I stared at it for a while until I wasn't able to resist temptation. I flexed my arm.
"Now what girl would be able to resist you right now?" I asked myself.
"Anyone who knew how screwed up you are up there," said Jonah, standing a the door of the bathrooms.
I laughed.
"You be jealous man, you wish you were as good looking as I am," I said while chuckling.
"Yeah, that way I'd stop being harassed by attractive women every place I went to," was his retort.
"Keep telling yourself that bud," I said, still smiling.
Jonah simply shook his head and left for his new tat. I looked at myself detainedly. My body was probably looking the best it had ever looked, although it certainly didn't feel like it. The last year had been quite exhausting. I sighed, this time with relief at training being over, although somewhere in my mind I knew it was bound to get worse. It was no secret now that the war that we were fighting wasn't one we had a chance of winning right away. We needed luck, or a whole lot of firepower. Lately, both those things seemed to be running out for humanity.
I was actually surprised that we weren't only getting our tatoos for presents (well, technically speaking tatoos don't really make much of a gift, unless you are into needles and stuff), our next "gifts" were much more better than our precious ones. Next up in our series of graduation presents was protection. Well, actually it was our armor, but I felt like doing a double entendre.
They came up in plain-looking suitcases. Each one of us was handed our individual suitcase by Skinny and Bulldog themselves. I opened mine. Cleanly laid out was the ODST Battle Armor. It looked shiny, clean, new, the mean-looking helmet design, the large shoulder guards and equally oversized chest piece. We even got spare boots and a new armored rucksack. Truth be told it looked lame, no scratches or anything to brag about. Granted, we were as green as that armor, metaphorically, but my point still holds.
It even had my blood type and some additional medical information on the left pauldron.
It had my last name written in white ink on that same shoulder guard as well. The armor also sported the UNSC insignia on the left side of chest protector and the letters UNSC on the underside of the central part of the chest protector.
"Just because I am feeling nice to you, I will paint paint your armor for you today. I don't usually do this, but you are one of the goddamned finest group of recruits I have ever seen. No matter what the sergeant says."
I was surprised, it was the first time in months that someone had offered me a favor other than passing me Jonah's datapad.
Regulations only allowed for the afromentioned chest protector, parts of the shoulder guards, and the stripe running down the middle of the helmet to be pained. I chose a dark crimson red for this and the hairdresser/tatoo artist complied. A few minutes later the armor was painted. The large man finished by spray painting back on the UNSC insignia and acronym into their former positions. He did the same for the rest of my fellow squad members. They each chose their own colors.
The man stood up and we thanked him. He grumbled something and left, dragging his chair and equipment behind him.
I went to bed that night with the heavy smell of paint lingering in the air.
"Only one last thing before we ship out people," called out Ramsey.
I nodded, wondering what the med check would be like.
Next morning my questions were answered. It was quite nice, at least for me. There was this nice nurse injecting me to guard my immune system against any known otherworldy diseases. Quite literally, since I was going to be deployed to other planets. We were also being injected with several performance enhancing drugs, they would make our muscles denser, our bones stronger, and our reflexes faster. Not by that much really, any further augmentations would've proved fatal to our bodies. My designated nurse was quite good looking compared to the other nurses, in fact, she was quite good looking compared to a lot of people. She was blonde and very… vuluptuous. Yes, I am talking about her large breasts.
"Any side effects to this?" I asked right after she was done injecting some thick black fluid into both my arms and legs.
"Erectile disfunction," she answered, totally deadpan.
"But doesn't this make my muscles bigger and stronger?" I questioned her, doing my best interpretation of an innocent voice.
She paused for a moment to think of a clever comeback to my own clever comeback. "Nope, I've got nothing," she said as she brandished an unaturally large needle, "you're actually the first one to not freak out over that."
I smiled at myself.
"Now if you just stay still," she asked while she drove that needle deep into my body.
After she had given me the last injection she patted my behind. I would've been flattered had the last injection not consisted of a massive needle being stuck deep into my rear. The patting she gave me didn't really help ease out the pain.
"You can look but not touch," I said while I limped away.
She smiled. "Remember to eat healthily for the next couple of weeks, that way the enhancements should work better," she warned as I left.
Yeah right, like I'll have the chance to eat healthily in cryo.
I met with Ramsey limping in a similar way. He took a single glance at the nurse that had done my medical stuff and his facial expression went from in pain to annoyed.
"How come you get the vuluptuous one?" he asked.
"Who the hell says vuluptuous?" I shot back. I know I'm a hypocrite, but most of you are too, so you really are in no place to judge.
Ramsey realized my point was a valid one, at least that's what he thought, before he rephrased his sentence.
"How come you get the really attractive one?"
"She petitioned to service me," I said, this time phrasing my sentence carefully.
Ramsey rolled his eyes.
"See what I did there?" I asked him.
"Don't. Don't explain the joke," he said, "please."
I simply laughed again and watched Dutch, Chow, and Jonah walk out from another room, their hands covering their butts.
"I think I'd rather run the ditch in thirty than go through that again," said Dutch.
"I'd go in my room again," I said simply.
Ramsey slapped me in the back of the head.
We were interrupted by the sound of someone clearing their throat. We looked up to see the captain. That man was everywhere. He was carying a small box and Gabuka was flanking him.
"You five are the last men that are missing this," he said as he opened the box. Inside that box there were dogtags. They weren't really used to identify bodies anymore, but they still were a symbol that was used to represent soldiers.
I took mine, looked at the numbers in it and clutched them in my hand. Us five snapped at attention as soon as von Klaus was finished.
We must've looked pathetic in our hospital gowns, but every one of us was more proud of ourselves than we had ever been.
For the first time since arriving at Mars, I felt like a real soldier.