Spartans Never Die

Holy Relics

New York Airspace

Jorge, having taken off Ardent Prayer in the YSS-1000 Sabre starfighter Noble Six had landed in, executed three strafing runs, hoping to further weaken the supercarrier's defenses before it deployed its fighters. Three times he passed along the remains of the supercarrier's hull, and three times he tore into its defenses with missiles and expertly placed machine-gun barrages, destroying a significant fraction of the point-defense weapons. He, like all UNSC Spartans, had developed an intuition for quickly getting accustomed to unfamiliar vehicles, and as the Sabre was a UNSC vehicle he had little trouble adjusting to it.

Putting some distance between himself and the carrier, he began to try to understand where he was, allowing the implausibility and practical problems of his current situation to begin to sink in. "Based on the buildings and technological level from up here, this appears to be 20th or 21st century New York City.... The Twin Towers of the World Trade Center aren't in the skyline, so it must be early 21st or thereabouts," Jorge reasoned as he peered out of the Sabre's cockpit.

While training to fight the interplanetary Insurrectionists of the 26th century, Jorge, along with the other Spartans, had been educated on the various facets of such movements. One of the topics of their study included the major terrorist acts of recorded history, including the jihadist attacks of the early 21th century and the destruction of the Statue of Liberty and UN headquarters in New York by the fascist Frieden movement in the mid-22nd. Jorge himself had an affinity for history as it was one of the things that helped him ground his values and remember the value of human life. The other Spartans, of course, did not lack a concern for humanity, as they spent their entire lives fighting to protect it, but Jorge's interests had helped him learn to be more comfortable outside of a military environment than many of the other Spartans.

"Alright, let's see if I can make contact with... oh hell, I bet FleetCom doesn't even exist here. I'll have to contact whoever's in a position to stop whatever's left in that supercarrier. A shipboard AI would be nice but I suppose I'll have to make-" Jorge muttered before he stopped himself; a screen on his left had come to life, displaying the text: "UNSC AI 464400 SBR-B029 activated. What services would you like rendered?"

Smiling under his helmet, Jorge was relieved he had a little bit of luck left. "I guess only Six would have noticed the AI; he must've never felt to need to use it." the Spartan thought to himself; he then ordered SBR, "Scan this planet's communications for any military or other tactical chatter and patch me into it. I need to give the forces here a fair warning about who's just landed in New York," Jorge replied.

After 5 full seconds of analyzing the internet and local communication signals, SBR displayed: "Opening communications with Mr. Tony Stark, A.K.A Iron Man. Monitoring communications of SHIELD helicarrier..."

Jorge furrowed his brow in skepticism. The names "Tony Stark" and "Iron Man" didn't ring a bell, and he'd never heard of an organization called "SHIELD" before in his studies of this era. He could barely believe that this day could get any more bizarre....

As if on cue, an energy beam began firing from one of the city's skyscrapers, and another portal opened above New York.

New York Airspace

"Right. Army." Tony Stark nervously muttered as the Tesseract reactivated, opening another portal above Stark Tower. Blasting upward to meet the new, swarming invaders, Iron Man fired his repulsors and let loose a missile volley at the first wave, blasting over a dozen of their gilded vehicles out of the sky when he heard an unfamiliar voice that sounded vaguely Hungarian patch into his suit's audio, "Mr. Stark, please respond."

Blasting another Chitauri vehicle with his repulsors and carefully weaving through their speeding formations, Iron Man casually responded, "Ok. Now please tell me who you are and how you got a connection to this highly secure channel."