"Well, I'll be damned," the Pelican pilot's voice crackled over the troop bay's intercom. "Is this a peacekeeping mission or a goddamn occupation?" "From what I heard back up on the Dauntless, the guy who's in charge of this whole deal's a real hardass," his co-pilot replied. "Apparently, he's some desk jockey who thinks the UNSC hasn't been taking this frontier shit seriously all this time." "But still," the pilot said as they banked and began to pass over New Madrigal's eponymous city. "Just look at the damn place. If I didn't know better, I'd say there was a real war going on down there."