Spirit of Fire
Prologue
Something was not right, Serina thought as she surveyed the ship's deck. It's been two years, six months, four hours, eight minutes and five seconds since they have escaped the Forerunner's Shield world. Ever since then the crew of the ship has been in deep cryo sleep. The Spirit of Fire's FTL reactor was sacrificed in the shield world in order to detonate the planet and deny the price for the covenant; the price that would have wiped out humanity in a blink of an eye. Therefore now they can't travel through the slipspace and enter the UNSC space territory, which means they have to take the long route home. As Serina went through the Crew's vitals as routine, she remembered all the brave souls who gave their lives in order to the save the humanity especially Sgt. Forge. As she thought about him she saw his empty cryo bed through the ship's surveillance cam at the cryo room. The only thing that bothered Serina was that these brave deeds of her crew might never be known to the humanity. "Sad" she muttered.
Serina, the ship's AI, has been the sole caretaker of the ship ever since its handful of crew retired to the cryo sleep. Everything was quite until she saw some disturbance on the lower decks. She heard banging noises as if something was hitting against the metal walls and occasionally some screams. "That can't right," Serina thought to herself. All the crews were accounted for in the cryo, no one was wake and walking around. She used all her tricks to pinpoint the source of trouble, but for some reasons the lower decks, especially the engineer rooms, are not well covered by the cam surveillance. She was so tempted to wake up the Red team, the three Spartan IIs; Alice 130, Jerome 092 and Douglas 042, from their sleep and ask them to investigate the source of trouble. However that would be unwise to do without the Captain Cutter's orders. "I guess it's time to wake up Captain," Serina thought and activated the wake up cycle of Captain James Gregory Cutter's Cryo bed. Because she has a very bad feeling about this and her gut feelings were always right.
Captain Cutter was dreaming, a terrible dream. He was in a forsaken land and was surrounded by deformed figures. He saw one of those deformed figures charging at him. He raised his pistol to take out the charging figure but he was holding a live, beating, bloody heart instead of his magnum. He threw the heart down in fear and looked up. The deformed figure was standing above him with a crooked smile on its face. It was the flood, Cutter thought to himself. But before he could react, an energy sword ripped the deformed flood into two. And Cutter's savior was Forge standing tall and proud with his Covenant energy sword on his hands. Before Cutter could thank Forge, a massive tentacle grabbed Forge's leg and started to drag him off. Cutter ran after him but then before he could reach out to Forge, the land beneath him gave away and Cutter was falling into oblivion. Cutter screamed but no sound came out of his mouth. In distance he heard a faint female voice reaching out to him saying "Captain. Wake up. Something has happened."
And Cutter thought to himself, 'This isn't over.'