You Know the Music
My name’s Cordelia Redd, and I’m a telepath.
Don’t believe me? I can tell you what every single member of the 103rd ODST battalion is thinking at this exact moment, as they climb into their private metal coffins that will, in the near future, be flung towards a planet that’s currently on fire.
They are thinking l, “Why, for the love of God, am I doing this?”
From personal experience, I can attest that nobody has ever sat inside an ODST drop pod thirty seconds away from launch and thought anything else. This is the seventh time I’ve thought it, then seventh time I’ve had those wonderfully conflicting thoughts: “Oh my God, I’m going to die” and “it is physically impossible for me to die here.” Never in those words, of course, they’re far too blatant to sustain the self-delusion of invulnerability every ODST needs to arm themselves with, but we think it all the same.
ODSTs have always had higher fatality rates than the rank and file, and it ain’t because of the pods combusting in mid-air. It happens, don’t get me wrong, my last LT found that out the hot and unbelievably painful way, but even though it’s a universally agreed-upon opinion that the brass have their heads so far up their own -Yoinks!- they can see their own tonsils (that telepathy back again) they do make sure we get top-notch equipment.
Oh, my LT? Nathan Barrister. Strict, one of those Sandhurst types who’d come from a well-off Earth background. You know those “inspirational speeches” you get at the start of the third act in any corny war movie? What they never show you is that if you try that in real life everybody will think you’re a massive knob. He couldn’t go five seconds without mentioning Earth and how great she was. Yes, always “she”; he told Palamino he was “insulting a thousand years of humanity’s legacy” (which isn’t even a coherent sentence) when he used “it”. When Barrister crapped, he’d claim he squeezed it out specifically for the good of Earth and her colonies. Yes, I supposed that “Why the hell am I doing this” question isn’t always rhetorical. Barrister closed his eyes and thought of that lovely blue marble. Even when the structural integrity of his pod failed and the meat on his bones cooked while he was still alive, he was probably still thinking of it.
Myself? Never set foot on the inner colonies before the war started. Homegrown farm girl, that’s me. No, I’m not doing this for Earth. If Barrister had known how many times I’d scrawled “UEG OUT!” on a back ally with a spray can, he’d have probably broken my damn neck.
Still though, bad way to go. I try not to think about it. God, I never thought men like Barrister got scared.
The pods shift. A countdown begins. It’s all out of my hands now, at least until I hit the ground in ten or so minutes. As I said, the drop? It’s really not that dangerous.
No, the problem we have is that once we’ve dropped behind enemy lines, we have enough food and water to last us two days with generous rationing. We’re given forty eight hours to complete our objective and then punch a hole through a mile or two of Covenant before we drop dead of dehydration. They won’t put this on the propaganda posters, but every ODST is issued a cyanide pill. If you get hit and start slowing the squad down…
Theo Palamino, owner of a ridiculous name and two middle fingers aimed permanently at any authority figure he could find. “Why the hell am I doing this” wasn’t rhetorically for him either. “Because they’ve started shooting deserters,” he’d tell anyone who’d listen. Nobody was actually sure if they did- Barrister was adamant they didn’t- but Theo made it clear that he didn’t want to be there. “Three drops, and I’m out,” he told us, just before his third drop. “I get through this, and the next time you’ll see me I’ll have a margarita in one hand and a well-endowed prostitute in the other.”
…he might as well have painted a sodding target on his head in terms of tempting fate. Of course he took a needle to the calf- made a few jokes about it “missing the important equipment”, and none of us made the predictable “well, it’s not exactly a big target” joke because we’d all quietly realized he wasn’t going to make it. Sergeant Oakbrook took command- she didn’t really have any idea what she was doing, but neither did the rest of us- and after a while the Medic Ash took her aside and said they had to meet up with the thirty third before nightfall and that Palamino probably wasn’t going to make anyway.
Palamino never swore in the end. He cursed us all as cowards, spat at us, even made a grab at Oakbrook. Why had I expected him to gently take it? There was no dignity as we left him there, raving and sitting in his own piss. But I don’t think there would have been any dignity in it if he had sat down and took it.
At first, I was like Palamino. I did it because I had to. But I’ve done my three drops…and here I am.
The Pods launch. I feel my stomach jolt. All systems are green. There is a jolt of excitement- where did that come from? Then of fear, and after a minute or two it slips back to a lovely mix of terror and boredom.
The ODST suicide rate is marginally higher than the rest of the corps, although not by much. They came up with a term forit, “Existential Threat Syndrome”. The Covenant are incomprehensible, and it breaks us. It breaks us to know we are a blue dot against the cosmos, and it breaks us to know some nasty space -Yoinks!- are wiping us out for the hell of it. Billions upon billions have died for absolutely nothing.
That was how Oakbrook went out. Little Holly Oakbrook, five foot nothing and with a face of permanent unease like she’d just followed through. Took her cyanide capsule while showering. They spaced her body within the hour.
A few days later, I found myself in my own shower (Oh yeah, we get private showers most of the time. Suck on it, rank and file.), my own capsule clamped between my teeth.
I couldn’t do it. I wanted to, God I wanted to, but I found it…physically impossible. I just kept wondering, what if I bite and then I change my mind? What if I spend my last seconds of life choking on my own vomit while I try clawing open my own stomach to take it back?
Maybe that’s why I’m still doing this. It will be quick, I suppose. One day a plasma bolt will catch me in the face and that’ll be the end of everything.
I miss them. Of course I miss them. I can’t bear looking at the others, the others who I’m dropping with, because it only takes a second for plasma to boil a man to ash, a needle to reduce a person to meat.
Sometimes I curl up into a ball at night, tell myself stories of them returning to me. Palamino recovered, made his way back to safety. Barrister’s pod survived, he’s in an infirmary light-years away. Oakbrook? I never saw her body, she faked her death to escape service and one day she’ll come back for all of us and we can fly away from this war.
I flick my view screen inside my pod to the other ODSTs in my unit. I am glad for the helmets; it makes them metal, pawns on a board, not men and women just as whole and human as Barrister and Palamio and my dear, dear Oakbrook.
My pod hits the ground with a jolt, and the hatch bursts out with a satisfying burst of pneumatics.
I make myself a silent promise. It’s not much, but it’s the best I can offer myself:
If I make it out of here, this final fight, I’ll go home, or whatever home is left for me.
God, now if THAT’S not tempting fate, I don’t know what is.
