5: Hammer of Thor Chronicles: The Augment

by La Aardvark

Somewhere in the deep of space, there is a world, and its sun. On a periodic cycle of three days, this duo will disappear, though to where no one knows, and then return. Going there is quite possibly the biggest mistake ever made...

1. The Greatest Epic Oops

1: Greatest Epic Oops

ANUNA-01

I have walked in fire.

Faced hordes of unfaltering foes.

In times of crises, it was I who held the sword.

I stayed my hand when it was right to do so, even at cost to my own honor…

And I, and my people, are alive today to bear witness to that fact.

Circling the planetoid – for it might well not even be a real world, given – I took in the serene view with a clenching sense of foreboding in my gut. There are many ways to say the same sentiment, many ways of expressing one's apprehension about a certain artifact of circumstance. But, to me, there was also a defunct presence of curiosity. Morbid, perhaps, but while my inner voice insisted I would die down there, my outer voice wanted to see what it was that would kill me so absolutely.

Maybe I am getting old… maybe I have reached that stage where, in the final throes of youth, I am grasping at the trailing threads of adventure that had plagued my younger years. Maybe I was merely bored with having sat idle aboard a star cruiser for the past six months. I hadn't even earned the pity of a harmless duel with a comrade in that time.

Yes… that was it. And now, facing some form of mockery, it was without question that I had no defense of wisdom. I was going to march right forward into this mess, whatever mess it might become, and I would do so with enthusiasm. Only after would it occur to me to berate myself the foolishness of such a venture, only after when it was by far too late to really matter.

Save for the berating, of course.

One mustn't be neglectful of one's self-derogatory functions, after all. Forerunners know I have had my share of kick-self-in-tender-place moments. Quite a few, if memory serves, had consolidated around the events in which that seemingly luckless Human was present. What was his name, again…? Oh, he may never have told me. I have a vague recollection of a few random tidbits, and perhaps this is me admitting that I have been hit in the head one too many times – or perhaps a few times too hard? – and now like a senile Elder cannot recall regardless of the age of the memory.

I should hope that is not the case.

Still, there remained the edge of tension, that glorious supposition that one gets when one just knows, above all shadow of doubt, that one is about to be commanded to embark upon yet another fulfilling mission where lives could be lost… in ways fit for the recounting, so that one's Kaidon might retell it to the eager young trainees long, long after one has already suffered the fate. Perhaps I am being morbid. Perhaps this is just me being bored, as the Humans put it, 'out of my skull'. Surely death counts as a viable exit from one's head, does it not?

Back to topic.

To my right was a hardened veteran I had worked with over the past couple of seasons… he was a chunky fellow, broad of frame and thick of muscle. He wasn't any stronger than I, particularly, but then, while wiry by comparison, I was almost a half a head taller. So it might well be he had all the same mass as I, but folded down over a shorter frame. It might explain why he looked so very thick. His name was Rano Ka'alimee.

Interestingly enough, he had not discarded the military honorific denoting him as a warrior, after the Schism. I had… most of us had. Some, like Rano, had not. I feared the topic too tender to broach to ask him why, but there remained no question about his loyalties; he was pure and simple Sangheili. Slightly behind him and even more to my right, reclined another companion of length; Iganiu 'Chaseun. Now, Iganiu – or Igan to those who he felt deserved the honor – was a peculiar fellow beyond the tongue-tangling pronounciation of his odd name.

Not that it was unusual for my kind overall – like any race, we were not all one solid culture. While all pretty much wholly indoctrinated into the religion of the Prophets and their mantra, we retained a casual socio-economic separation from one another. A good for instance was our internal caste system, but this ran a little deeper. Igan was from, shall we say, the 'far side of the world', than I and those like me.

Rano, for example.

Igan was no less the warrior, and while I admit I had never seen him fight to the bloody end with a blade, I have spoken to those who have. They all tell me never to ask for a display.

Maybe I'll learn to listen one of these days… in the mean time, I had witnessed Igan pick heads off of shoulders around the curve of the planet. I had also seen him peer out of cover, duck back before losing his own noggin, aim his remarkable rifle at the cover he stood behind, and shoot blind.

He still took that head.

So, while not terribly prone to close quarters, and by word, best that none should beg it of him, Igan was quite possibly the most valued member of any given strike team. Certainly, my own (perhaps overzealously) worthy bloodline had not earned me that title in ours. Do not doubt I had served my own; indeed, I had even spared Igan himself the need to bring up his blade. We all had, in our own way, saved one another's skins at one time or other. It was just the way of the team, the way of war, and the nature of going into battle with backup. Still, even without the Covenant deciding how and when and where we went, I was still seemingly permanently separated from my brother. I had not seen him – again – for more than a year.

That part had started to annoy me, as while I felt confident he was still quite alive and perhaps even doing well, I still wanted to have better contact than a badly lagging comn connection. So for the moment, it was just myself and my two friends, Confidence and Supposition.

Now, don't get me wrong, Rano and Igan were pretty good. For friends, they made the cut. For teammates, I'd take two of each. But as far as being all I had in the galaxy for longer than is fair to a body's sanity? No… I'd rather be alone. And I do not mean the ribbing.

That part actually made it more bearable.

"If you stare any more at that world 'Vadum, perhaps it will disappear again." Rano's gruff voice interrupted my thoughts. "We will all be doubtless happier if it does."

.

FLINT-093

Settling the bird aground behind the frontlines was relatively simple. But while there was no real reason to need to be armored, expressly, I still wished I'd had the brains to put my Mjolnir Mark VII on this morning, instead of waiting until after we'd made landfall. I wasn't going to get attacked, not physically… but there was this nifty little feature the armor had that I really wished I could be using about now.

Tori would not leave it alone. Something had ticked her off – and I'm not entirely sure if it wasn't me – and she'd been fussing and sniping at me ever since breakfast. Getting away from her was out of the question, as was any reasonable attempt at diplomacy. She wanted to fight, and she wanted to scream at me, and I guess there was just nothing I could do about that.

Barging into the cockpit again after having left it to get dressed in her Mark IIX, I knew before her mouth opened that she'd only used the moment away to think up something new, and compose her next scathing line.

As if on queue, out it came; "You have a stack of problems as tall as you are! That cat is easier to talk to than you, most days. Do you have any idea how much effort it takes not to bite your head off sometimes??"

I sighed. Man I wished I had my suit on… helmet and all… I could shut her out and she'd never notice until much later. "Yesterday you told me you appreciated that I was honest with you." I told her, flatly. "Today you want me to lie to you?"

"You could at least act like it bothers you, Flint." Tori snapped, dropping hard into the copilot's seat. I didn't even bother to complain about the treatment she'd given the furnishings… inanimate objects got a lot of abuse when she lost her temper, and I was not about to give her more reason to get a lot more personal with that attitude. I was also not going to add another list to the gripes she had against me.

"But it doesn't." I could have done it in my sleep, but I traced the movements of my fingers on the control board with my gaze and paid a little extra attention to the readings on the screen just to justify not having to look at her. She'd likely only be glaring anyway.

"But it does! Four days ago you kicked me off the bed because it woke you up!" She argued. "I didn't want to be a soldier, Flint, this is your fault!"

Finally, I looked at her. "Tori."

Yup – there was a signature peeved-at-Flint look on her face. I'd gotten to see it a few times before now. "Don't you Tori me, Flint." She shot back, through her teeth. Jabbing a finger at me, she added, "I told you I'm no good at that shit and you made me do it anyway, and then you had the balls to complain when I didn't do it perfectly!"

I let one eyebrow quirk up. It was probably the first time either had gone anywhere besides down in a little more than three hours, now. "What shit would this be?"

She huffed; "Well if you've forgotten then I'm not about to remind you, or you'll just fuss at me again, and I really don't want to hear it! I've had enough of your bullshit."

"What the hell is that supposed to mean?" I protested, now more confused than miffed. The sloop wound down on its own, and I knew I needed to be heading for the arms locker, but if I moved an inch I had a feeling Tori'd just pounce on me… and without my own armor, I'd be easy meat for her. "If you're going to rattle on about grievances you don't even want to make known, then just shut the hell up. I'm not going to have an argument about nothing with you."

"Don't tell me to shut up!" She shrieked. "I'm sick to death of bouncing from one shooting match to another, never doing anything else, and you don't even have the decency to delay our arrival so we don't have to spend every waking moment up to our necks in bloodthirsty animals!"

I admit I did flinch when she jerked upright, but that was all I did.

"I am not a soldier, I'm a scientist, and throwing myself at ugly aliens who all want to kill me is not my idea of doing something constructive with my time!"

I crossed my arms. "Okay, so what would you rather? You're a Spartan, Tori, welcome to the real world. What few places remain unaccosted do so because people like you and I – and those Marines you were screaming about this morning, too, by the way – go out there and be up to their necks in ugly aliens who all want to kill us. I'm not the xenophobic genocidal maniacs who shoot at you, nor am I the genocidal parasite who wants to eat you. Why are you taking this out on me?"

"Because you like it." She snarled. "You go out there again and again and sometimes it's all I can do to make you come back in. It's almost as if you prefer being shot at!"

I sighed. "I don't like it, per se. But it is what I do. It's what I'm told to do. You'd have a better understanding of that if you hadn't spent so much time locked in that asteroid."

Oops…

She hit me, hard, and I came out of the pilot's chair onto the floor for my trouble. Landing there actually stung more than her swipe had, remarkably, so I picked myself back up and socked her square in the mouth with a fist. It was the only thing not covered in armor, and thus the only thing I wasn't liable to break my knuckles hitting. But, she needed a good knocking, because obviously nothing else was going to get some sense into her.

She staggered back, but her armor had her balanced and braced, so she didn't fall over like I had. I took the opportunity to turn towards the door, hoping I could make it through and out before she came back.

Blessedly, all she did was scream at me… first wordlessly, and then in English. "You piece of Spartan shit!"

Okay, I will say I do take exception to being called a freak… it's one of the few ways to really ruffle my feathers. I turned right around where I'd stopped in the hall, and gave her back her glare from earlier. I wasn't sure what I wanted to say, though, but I knew I needed to hit back with something, or she'd think I was open for another one-liner.

She, sadly, got there first. Scowling past her newly busted lip – hmm, that'd make her hate me for a few more days than usual – Tori shoved hard into the doorway after me. "I am not a tool, and I refuse to be used and thrown away! You want to run into the breach and die, be my guest! But I'm not going to follow you there!"

"Would you like me to string you up for insubordination?" I knew it sounded weak, but it was all I could come up with at the moment.

She shot it dead. "You're Section Three, Flint, I'm Section Zero. You don't have authority over me."

"I do now." I informed her, flatly. "When they issued you that armor you've got on and put you on this sloop, that put you back in the chain of command."

I saw her shoulders pull up, but while that usually meant she was about to sling a punch at me, this time that was as far as it got, and her arms remained at her sides. Interesting. "Prison doesn't force you to do things you're no good at."

Wait, wait… huh? Did she actually just tell me she wanted to go?? Maybe I was barking up the wrong tree, then… "I'm not the one to blame, Tori. If you have an issue with your situation, take it to ONI. They're the ones who made you what you are." For a moment I considered telling her what she was – a "piece of Spartan shit" – but for some reason I left it at that.

Seeming to have at long last run out of steam – whew! – she jabbed a finger at my face and said, "Not talking to you anymore." She then shoved past me, and stalked off down the hallway.

I'd have let her pass, even let her get away with pushing, but she'd aimed for my left, and I had to wonder if it wasn't deliberate. I leaned on the wall for a moment, contemplating crushing that deltoid in my other hand. The grimace was sudden, involuntary, and felt like it wanted to become permanent.

I hated being a gimp… but there was nothing I could do about the shoulder, and I knew she knew what she'd done to me just then. The really sad part was that the only viable solution to the icy knives irritation of the injury sent my way was to have her pull the joint up and back, and press a thumb under that shoulder blade. For some reason – must have been a nerve cluster thing – that actually made it quit hurting.

There was no way in hell she'd do that now. Especially not since she'd been the one to deliberately try and cripple me by twisting it to make it hurt. One thing I had learned –blessedly not the hard way, the first time – was that above all else, Tori had a massive vengeance complex. Now how was I supposed to get into my armor? Grumbling through my grimace, I straightened, and turned to follow her.

It wasn't always this bad. In all honesty, it had gotten this way just inside the last three weeks… gradually, she'd begun to grow frustrated with some things – mostly random things I'd forgotten to be bothered by years ago – and finally her first outburst boiled over sometime at the end of the week before this one.

Maybe it was something she'd ate… it was hard to tell if I was grumpy because she was taking most of it out on me, or if I was just grumpy for the same reasons she was. But, like her, I had no one to take it out on besides the only other occupant of the sloop… and when we hit dirt, those unfortunate New Covenant that we'd been sent to kill. The slew of complaints that she'd scream about varied… the addition of not outlining what they were was a new one, though. I honestly didn't remember what that anonymous gripe was about.

Doubtless we'd get out there on the surface of this world – an outer colony that had missed being glassed when the old Covenant came for Earth – and she'd rack up a few dozen more things to fuss over before it was overwith. There were times when I wished she'd get socked in the head by a Brute. It would earn me some silence, at least, if it didn't somehow rewire her soggy brains and make her think straight again.

Pulling the Mark VII out of the containment unit one-handed was alright – trying to don the stuff that way was a nightmare. Sitting down to get the legs on, I was ripe for invasion when the cat darted into the room after me and bounced like a wound spring right up and onto my lap… which at the time was a narrow little wedge of space between my tucked knees and forward-leaning torso.

Somehow, the cat fit right up in there, causing me to reflexively sit straight. "Do you mind?" I demanded, cross. Lifting the tabby off my legs, I set her aside, and bent back over. "I'm busy."

Meow.

Given the sudden nature of the foul mood infecting the sloop, I hoped it wore off as quickly as it had set in, because I had already lost my patience for it. Mentally I promised myself that if Tori sniped at me one more time I'd push her ass out the airlock and fly off without her. I worked well enough alone, after all… and whenever I didn't, the Elites usually sensed it and came and got me.

Meow.

It was a crazy system, but it worked for me… having Tori around certainly wasn't. Not really. At first she'd been a little rusty with things like the guns, but it seemed almost as soon as she'd gotten back into the swing of it, she'd gotten a temper I'd never seen on her before, and now we fought with each other almost as much as with the enemy.

Meow.

Sitting up, I looked over at the cat. I'd somehow managed to always forget to ask Tori what the runt's name was, so she was just "the cat" to me. This after six months outside that lab I'd sniped at her about earlier. Being a brown tabby made her current environment ideal for hiding in, and there were days when I never saw her at all. But then, the sloop had not been designed with cats in mind, so there were places innumerable for a creature her size to sneak into and sleep. Dropping a hand over her head so it obscured her vision and flattened her ears, I curled my fingers around her little skull and pulled upwards. She adopted a forced smile as all the skin on her face followed my retreat. Repeating the motion a few times, I let her flop over onto her side and purr there as much as she liked. She just adored that treatment, for some reason, and it would make her purr loud as a buzz saw every time.

Now was no exception.

The cat sated, I returned to my unnecessarily arduous task of pulling into the Mjolnir. It would have been a faster, more efficient process if Tori hadn't torqued my shoulder, but though impeded, I was not deterred. I'd get into it… just… slowly.

.

TORI-138

There's a good reason for this.

There's a reason, logical and well defined, for everything.

I was mad as hell, and I was going to break his bastard neck. Unfortunately, even I had forgotten why by the time I'd made it to the airlock, so I felt quite empty and a little foolish as I stomped angrily down the footramp to the gravelly soil at the bottom. Oh, I was still quite mad at him, and I knew that somewhere in my absentminded brain there was a good reason why – I was not terribly prone to senseless tantrums, was I? – but I'd gotten so busy being mad that I'd let go of all the logic behind the sentiment.

I just wanted to kill him, and be done with it, so I wouldn't have to be mad anymore. There was the theory that maybe if I left things be – forgave him, even – he'd only turn right around and go be irritating again, and then I'd remember everything I'd just forgotten, and it would once again be the 'last straw'… on and on and on. Honestly, I was almost ready to believe all I needed was some chocolate and everything would be better again… after a couple solid weeks of nearly nonstop fighting with the guy – and boy was he better at it than I was! – I was almost ready to think it wasn't really him doing it to me at all.

I just needed some chocolate…

Okay, okay… I'm a lousy Spartan II. That's no excuse for lousy relations, however. My main issues were not on the battlefield, nor were they in tactics or logistics. No, no… leave it to me to have problems being a people person, after pretending for all I was worth for thirty years to be a civilian! Wow, was I an asshole.

Out ahead, I saw the first Marine – he had a lot of funny looking stripes on his shoulders, so he had to be the ranker in charge – appear out of the broken woodwork, and turned his direction. In the ten or so strides it took me to make the gap, my thoughts continued. I began to reiterate the argument of the morning through in my head, running over parts of it again and again just to make sure I had psycho-analyzed every little aspect of it.

Surely it wasn't me. Surely, surely.

Right as I got to the Marine and stopped walking, sparing a moment to take him in – raggedy little officer, he was! – I went over the last bit before I'd stuck my finger in his face and stalked off.

Like a two year old.

The Marine saluted me, erroneously thinking me of some considerable rank. My armor was markless, as far as he could tell, though it was still unquestionably Mjolnir of some breed. "Captain Hicks, sir, glad to see you."

I pondered the real meaning of Flint's threat to have me 'strung up'… and if he would really be that kind to allow someone else to do it to me… when I had a mental hiccup. I stared at the Marine for a full minute before I realized he'd not just called me Captain Hicks, but rather introduced himself.

"Hello?"

I shook my head, feeling very out of sorts. I'd always let Flint take care of interactions like these in the past, preferring to be the mysterious 'strong, silent type' in the back who never said anything. Right now I was really feeling it, too. "Sorry… was listening to the comn. Come again?"

It was a lie, yes, but the look it earned me! It was absolutely priceless! He gave me something of a cross between astonishment and horror. "You can hear that? I guess that means I don't need to fill you in on much, then, do I, sir?"

In a hopeless scramble to save my ass, I was about to laugh when instead I suppressed it under a stern-sounding harrumph. Or I hoped it was stern-sounding. I was so not good at this! "Wrong channel, Captain. I'm not listening local. Fill me in anyway."

He quirked a brow. "Oh… well… Brutes came down through the throughway two days back, wiped out our forward base. But they didn't get everybody all at once, and you could hear the screaming a mile away. We tried to hammer them back, but it was as if they came pre-fortified. We lost nearly every tank we had in that sting, and we didn't even break their forward lines."

Most of that went over my head.

It wasn't even particularly dense military jargon.

I sighed.

"Yeah, it's bad. Which is why we were hoping you'd get here quick." Hicks said, misinterpreting my sigh.

Maybe I was good enough to bluff and blunder my way through this, but I was by no means being brought 'up to speed' by this exchange. Indeed, I'd likely need to go and see the mess he was trying to tell me about in order to get anything remotely like real intel on it. Maybe I ought to have paid better attention to the exchanges Flint always had in my stead, so I'd have a better understanding now he wasn't here.

And that's about when I realized he wasn't here. I backed up a step, turned bodily halfway around, and turned my head the rest of the way, for a moment puzzled what could be the hold up. Flint could be stiff sometimes, but he'd never been slow. Not even when a Brute had picked him up by his left arm and slung him into a crashed Phantom. Flint was many things – irritating among them – but never once since knowing him had he ever been slow.

At anything.

"Sir?" Hicks asked, puzzled.

"Wondering where my backup is." I answered, the words out just barely before I recalled a likely reason. And then I kicked myself mentally so hard I almost did it physically. At the time I might have gloated a little, but now… now I'd cooled my irrationally hot head somewhat… I really ought not play off his weaknesses like I do. Poor guy probably hadn't seen it coming, either. Or, if he had, he'd thought that even pissed off at him he might could trust me not to wring him in half.

Boy had he been wrong. Considering the fact that he hadn't come out of the sloop yet, he might not come out at all. Or, if he did, he'd be dead to rights once we actually hit the battlegrounds. Or, worse yet, he'd never forgive me the slight and make sure I felt it once we hit the battlegrounds.

I was… am… a lousy Spartan II.

.

ANUNA-01

"Investigate the surface," they said. "Attempt to determine why it moves the way it does," they said. "Return any relevant data you procure from the planet to your ship and send it to Command as soon as you have it compiled," they said.

Might as well have asked me to explain to them why Humans do not have ditigrade legs. Gah. Of all the missions, despite the feeling in my guts, this one had to have screamed the loudest of math and boredom. Major math, quantum being the one-plus-one end of that spectrum, for perspective. I was not particularly fond of that level of math… Humans called those people 'scientists'… and even then, one had to be a special kind of scientist to really go that deep.

Personally, I would have by far rathered being sent to certain doom through a raging furball in the atmosphere to the surface of an embattled world where Brutes awaited to shoot down my dropcraft and if I survived the crash, to shoot me down, too.

There is more than one way to die, I knew, and I was not appreciating the fact that I had been stabbed by the least honorable of the two methods. I would have dozed on the trip down, but I was already fairly well rested, and the maintenance-begging buzz undercutting the usually soothing hum of the Phantom I was in kept me from even wanting to close my eyes.

Finally, when we were almost there, I heard Rano complain about it.

"I do not know what that noise is, but it hurts my head!"

"Here, here." I muttered, under my breath. If I had wanted to heartily agree with him, though, 'here' would not have been the word of choice. At the moment, I was content to remain viewed as silent.

Still, Igan heard me. Igan is hard to whisper past, even if one is several meters away and there is ordinance detonating all around him. Igan will hear you… no matter who you speak to, what you say, or what ambient noise there is to contend with. He cast me one of those looks that is mainly unreadable but just slightly sympathetic… and gave a half-hearted, "Wort."

You know you are already dead of boredom when you split up laughing at something like that. But all three of us cut up, guffawing and hooting for almost a minute before it tapered off and the somber depression of prior descended again, leaving us without so much as a grin to our names.

Sad… so sad. I sure hoped this world killed me. It would be a great reprieve! Not that I expressly wanted to die, really, nor that I was being dishonorably punished for any particular crime. I was just that bored. Give me a Brute to fight, any day, under any conditions! I would relish it.

But this slow death… there is no justification for it.

.

FLINT-093

I had my MA series on the right, just in case, but I'd left everything else where it usually went. The ammo packs were spread out, the grenades were spread out, even the incendiaries were tucked where their holding hooks were supposed to go. I liked incendiaries; who wouldn't? By the time I'd made the outside of the Whispers of Fate, Tori was already talking to the Marine sent back to get us. I'd had a look at the terrain and what occupied it on the way down, so I already knew most of the updated situation, the layout and where we'd be going first.

But I kept my external comn feed off even as I made for their joint locations. For some reason, having my shoulder cranked for me and then having to figure out how to get into my Mjolnir anyway – and now it was throbbing – had put me into one of those almost quintessential Spartan moods. There was enemy, I was gonna kill it. And the Marine spotted me coming and he backpedaled right out of my way without me even having to ask. Tori wasn't as quick, so she got shouldered aside. I kept going.

The icon for comn chatter in my HUD blinked at me, but I gave it only as much attention as it deserved; note its presence, then look past it at more important things. Ahead, through the ruins of a building I couldn't see all the way through from the sloop's perspective, was a steep gradient hill with a line of ragged shelled-out buildings on the top. Between them and me was a roadbed, graded flat against the hillside and making the cut to the top a difficult one at best.

I was not in the mood to be impeded by steep grades or cut roadbeds.

I stepped out of the first building onto the road, marched myself across it to the other side and – remarkably I'd aimed myself squarely at a maintenance and access tunnel – right into the side of the hill. The metal grill gate had been long since blasted to twisted shrapnel, probably more likely by the human side than the enemy. There was sunlight on the other side, but I could already see the cross-way junction in the middle. Perhaps it was underground access to the building directly above it.

Reaching that, I kept straight. The tunnel itself was dark, the overhead lights present but either off or broken. I didn't need their help, but I offered a few half-seconds of thought to the function and use of artificial lighting. Once I made the other end of the short tunnel, I found myself facing a massive, smoking crater. The hill had been cut out again, and that half of the building's shells were gone completely. If the material had not been blown to the next county, then it was likely vaporized and nobody would ever find it again.

That was okay with me.

I circled the near edge of the crater to avoid needing to descend to the very bottom and then climb back out the other slope, and stepped up over what I guessed had once been a traffic impediment. The concrete sphere was bigger around than I was tall, its exterior raggedy and pocked by glassy little needle-holes and torn at by what was quite obviously grenade shrapnel.

It had been embedded in the ground when whatever artillery had struck, so it made a dandy little step that got me up and out of the crater proper and back onto street-level… which was higher than the road I'd just crossed. The byway ahead cut between an arch suspended between the two buildings on that edge of the crater, but the arch was holding itself up now and both buildings were reduced to freestanding rubble. Anything flammable was long since gone, so that left twisted metal, shattered rock and crumbling crete for as far as the eye could see. Aside from the smoke curling off the hot soil in the crater, though, I had not seen any fires.

That changed when I stepped under the arch, and out into the field beyond it. It had not been intended as a field; rather, this was a dense stretch of city proper. However, it had been rigorously shelled, then whatever was left standing had fallen over or been pushed over by what looked like tanks. Tanks, and tank fire. Mortar sign was everywhere, pocking even the insides of the larger craters. That made me think the place had been strafed from orbit before the troops had dropped in, but aside from the cuts, gulleys and humps of broken rubble, there was no cover.

There were splashes of what looked like blood – and a couple of colors of it – but no bodies. Not even NC bodies. I kept walking. It took about ten minutes, but I finally reached the far side of the field of rubble back to the next shelled building, and past that I saw my second Marine for the day. That he was dead made little difference to me. The long, steel-colored rods sticking out of his chest that had been machined down to vampire stakes was what got my attention.

Brutes are not necessarily good shots with that particular weapon, and if this man had been close enough to earn that many spikes – there were six of them – without being simply stabbed by the blades on the fore of the barrel, then things had to have been pretty harrowing, to say the least. Harrowing for the Marines… harrowing for the Brutes.

Already I knew the fighting here was brutal. And I'd only seen one body.

Deeper through the remains of more structures I began to see more signs of habitation, some of it dead, some of it not. I found a medic right as he finally gave up trying to resuscitate a comrade, and he watched me go by. I saw him grab his radio without wiping his bloody hand off first, and I saw his mouth move, but while I knew he was probably calling me ahead to the fore teams, I didn't bother to turn the comn on to hear what he said.

Reaching sight of the first Marine with his gun in hand and shouldered – it was pointed down, but it was still butted to his shoulder – I finally sent my hand over my own shoulder and brought the MA6C down into my other hand. When the grip hit my palm, my fingers closed around it reflexively, but I had to hold the whole weight of the gun with my right for a moment longer as my entire left arm twinged painfully in response to the impact.

Damn… I was getting old.

Finally, when I could see more than one live, armed Marine at once, I flicked the externals on, and the sound of gunfire a few blocks up came through. Closer, I heard someone screaming in agony, someone else trying to scream over the top of them, and closer still… I heard feet.

Whatta watta watta watta.

I stopped walking, and stood still for a moment. It had been so long since I'd heard that sound… it registered in memory as familiar, but I couldn't place what it belonged to other than feet. Human feet, yes, but… standard issue combat boots just don't go watta watta. Not on dry, pebbly concrete surfaces, at least.

Finally, one of the Marines near an alleyway entrance jerked as if stung, spun his rifle out of the alley and punched himself in the face with a salute. "Colonel, sir!"

Colonel? I admit, I was puzzled.

What came out of the alley answered all the questions at once, so I started walking again.

The dirty golden visor turned instantly to take me in as I approached, the high domed shape embedded into a cranial ring of dented, dun-green armor that I knew instinctively was not Mjolnir. He drew his shoulders back, the armor over his forearms making it look like his fingers came right out of his ulna rather than owning any wrist at all… one glance at the pocked, worn stenciling over his upper arms told me who I was looking at.

I half wondered at the coincidence.

I knew this one. I stopped again, this time about six paces away. He saluted me, and visibly let out a breath. I saluted back. "You got short." I said.

He laughed.

"Need a hand?"

"If it's yours, yes, sir." He was, admittedly, a smaller, more compact, next-gen little guy, but he was no less the Spartan that I was. In fact, being a next-gen type, he could probably outstrip me nowadays. Me being… old… gimpy… whatnot. I wasn't going to tell him that, though. He was Spartan-249… we'd met back when I still ran with the 51st, so he probably thought it something of a surprise to see me, specifically, given that all Spartans can tell when an MIA is sincere or not.

That I'd never been MIA was beside the point… even ONI couldn't cover up that broadcast fast enough to justify saying I was merely "missing". And here I was… and I knew that that prolonged pause meant he really was staring at me.

I crossed my arms under my rifle, tipping my head at him. "Got something else to say, Andy?"

He shook his SPI-clad head. "No, sir. Just… you look good, sir. Glad to have you with us."

"That's nice." I decided, trying to figure out how Command had failed to mention his presence here. Where was his team? SPI troopers never ran by themselves. "Where's the team?"

I saw his shoulders drop about a centimeter. Oh, bad news. Not what I needed. "Dead, sir. They shot us down… we fell out of slipspace here, so…" he waved a hand at the rubble behind me. "This is sort of our fault."

I shook my head. "New Covenant is nobody's fault, son."

"Aw, Chief." Andy complained. "Please don't call me that."

I laughed, and in passing him, patted him on the shoulder. "Come on, kid, let's have a look at your little mess."

"Yes, sir." He turned on a heel, and followed me.

"Command didn't tell me you were here." I mentioned, making my way up the surprisingly intact alleyway. Urban warfare really wasn't my forte, but I'd take shelled buildings over trees any day. It was better than worse. "Intel on the ground was spotty, so they told me to reach the forward Marine base and contact their commander."

"Intel on the ground is always spotty where the Covenant are concerned, sir." Andy informed me, tacitly. "Every time we send something out, they set up a shielding hood and then we have to go and knock it out. Bit of a merry-go-round down here, sir."

"Understood… what's the fighting look like?"

"The Marines are getting butchered, sir. Brutes don't have much of a foothold but they've flattened much of the terrain and what they do manage to grab they hold for all their worth." Out of the corner of my eye, I saw him shrug. "I've been helping out as much as I could, sir, but… it's just not enough."

"Which is what I'm for." I finished for him, coming up to the top of a rubble bluff and pausing at its peak to take in what it had to show. From there I could see past the next row of buildings and down the hill, where there was a bit less cratering and a bit more tank-fire markings, and interspersed in the woodwork were the creatures in question. The rattle of gunfire reached me even with the interference from the buildings.

"Sir, if you don't mind my asking… did you come alone?" Andy ventured.

"Nope." I answered. Right as I did so, a little green dot appeared in my motion tracker, on approaching vectors. I saw Andrew turn around halfway, and look behind us. That dot was Tori, playing catch-up, this time more literally than usual. She was almost always in the back, following me around, picking up the slack I left, rather than out front plowing out her own trench like a normal Spartan II would have.

I had my standing doubts she was really there to back me up this time, though. If she shot at me, however… she would not be the one to make it back to the sloop. I might be a rotting old gimp, but I was by far better at this than she was and we both knew it.

I'd have to explain it to Andy if it got to that, though. Poor kid.

"Who's this?" I heard her say, when she finally stopped walking.

"Ma'am." Was all Andy said. He hadn't said anything more – and he wouldn't – until he understood more about what he was seeing. Her Mark IIX Mjolnir was markless… for a reason. Unlike all the other Spartan IIs to make it to the service end of the war, she did not have a rank. That would come with time. Even little Andy – okay, so the guy was like thirty five or so – was in a position above her. He just didn't know it yet.

I felt a set of knuckles knock softly into my back. "Hey, you ever going to turn your damn comn back on or what?"

I could almost feel the weird look Andy was giving her. I smiled. Doing my best to sound unamused – rather, gruff – I answered with, "Nope."

I heard her huff at me, and then the telling smack of a rifle grip striking an armored palm. "Well I need something to shoot at or I'm going to pick a fight I'll regret."

At that point, my frown was genuine. Hmm. Perhaps my doubts of earlier had not been unfounded? I looked at the Spartan III at my elbow. "Lead the way."

"Yes, sir." He, like all III's, had never learned how to walk. The man sprinted every damn where. Now was no exception – and away he went, down the bluff towards the fighting. Just for the chance to stretch my legs, I sprinted down after him, but I had to keep holding myself in or I'd wind up passing him by. Who was the true faster of us three was still in question, but in something as simple as a sprint, my legs being longer than his simply put me a little ahead of him. If he could pump his faster than I could at a full-out run, though… that would wait to be discovered until later.

If the circumstances commanded it. If it didn't, I doubted he'd do anything but sprint. Behind me, I could hear Tori toodling along after us, keeping up, but probably thinking we were both quite nuts.

I can't honestly say she was wrong.

.

TORI-138

The new guy was wearing something that looked like an early-model Mjolnir outfit with his visor all the way up to his hairline. The overall body design made him look shorter than he was – only about three quarters of a head less than myself – and chunky as all shit. That there was armor over his wrists that made it look like his fingers came out of the ends of his arms, rather than from a hand, helped this look none at all.

But in a way… it almost made him cute.

Okay, so that's not often associated with armor-plated killing professionals, but hey. He had a quick sprint, and I'm not sure how he did it but he had a ruler-straight beeline to the bottom of the hill whereas both Flint and myself were zig-zagging over the rubble. Little zig-zags, but they were there.

On that same note, the little guy made Flint look very overpowered, and much more dangerous. Reaching engagement range, I saw the new guy raise his aim and open up, distracting several of those large, hairy… uh… wait, wait… okay, yeah. Flint calls them Brutes. Sorry, had to remember technical stuff for a moment.

Really… ask me for a chemical formula any day, and I can recite more than a hundred of them off the top of my head. But battlefield lingo? Army slang? Bleh! Not my thing. Although, in their defense, I took one look at the I-infested real name for the creatures and decided that "brute" was a hell of a lot simpler to say and remember.

Back to topic; Flint hit behind him, swung left wide and hammered down the first target without pausing his own sprinting momentum. I'd never known him to sprint before… he'd run, he'd toodle, he'd even crawled over a mile to infiltrate somewhere that I wound up doing most of the shooting at, but he'd never actually sprinted until now. Didn't really know he could, given that he obviously preferred not to. Learn something new every day!

I was strung out from our formation in the back – following by intent, not necessity – and I decided to swing right, since our little brother was taking up the central focus and Flint had gone left.

I made a mental note to ask him why he seemed to gravitate in that direction all the time… and while I was at it, to ask why he sometimes looked like he'd get confused which hand he wanted to use for something. He could be strange, some days.

Cutting to the right, I wound up behind another shell of a building that looked like part of a manufacturing plant, and there was no immediate enemy presence in the area. Instinct made up for a lot of my lack, so I followed it down the wall to the next available alleyway and cut down that direction, leading with the barrel of my own MA6C. Flint's gun looked like it got used. I took very good care of mine – mainly for terror of breaking it when I'd need it most – so mine always looked good as new.

Darting headlong into the striped shadows laying all down the alleyway, I broke out from the brickwork back into an open area that had an overturned forklift in the middle of it. Processing yard. Been in one that was functional, once… passing through it.

On the left, since I'd gone so very far to the right to cut around, was where the majority of the fighting was happening, but I could see the new guy plainly and I could hear Flint. One thing about him – he's not subtle. Not unless he really wants to be. And then… well, I'd yet to witness that side of him so I can't say.

I'd turned my barrel to catch the unshaven savages in a crossfire when plasma slapped against the back of my turning shoulder, and I spun back around to see where that'd come from.

There was this hairy sausage pointed at me… I don't know why, or where it came from, but I have never liked being pointed at. I blew the hand off the end of the Brute's arm before ruining his face for him, knocking him on his ass before the little things… um… Grunts, they're called… at his heels could respond.

But boy, when they did, did they! I tucked into a turning roll, came out of it in the middle of the fray, and lurched sideways into a full-on run. Now, I love my armor to death. Flint has told me I'm the only active duty Spartan II without a single scar on my hide… I'd like to keep it that way.

So far, in Flint's case, the only place he doesn't have a mark is on his face. I'm told a bunch of my creed have a habit of knocking their teeth into shit and getting badges for their trouble. I hope I never do that, either. But when I came back up to my feet, I was dizzied, and I stumbled backwards a whole step.

In the same instant something as big around as my head and as bright as the sun zipped past where I'd just wavered away from.

I shrieked in alarm and surprise, but the shoulder-cannon round (Sorry, I can't remember what Flint told me those were called. They weren't on the last op) was past me and the following rounds were slow enough that I could see them ahead of time now I was paying attention to that. The shooter was one of the little ones… the Grunts… and all his friends were peppering me with their C-shaped plasma guns, trying to make me dance.

I was not in the mood to dance. Flint was mad at me, I was mad at Flint, and here I was in the middle of the biggest anger management session in all of Creation and I wasn't exploiting it properly. Must fix that.

I rolled my MA6C around (am very familiar with that tidbit, by the way, it's stenciled into the gun and I field strip it all the time) and unloaded the first three-round spray into the air in front of them. Flint had taught me that – when overwhelmed by Brutes, duck for cover. When overwhelmed by Jackals, duck for cover. When overwhelmed by Grunts? Spray a few random rounds at them and if one of them panics, then all of them will and you're more or less in the clear until someone gets them turned around and straightened back out.

It only worked partly – having that Brute I'd knocked down so close to them evidently either gave them the courage to stand up to me or they were scared enough of him being angry at them that they got the courage from somewhere else. But, it did distract them from the constant fire and gave me time to aim.

On the fly – when not unbalanced – I'm pretty good at the MA doing headshots. And while only a few Brutes do not have shielding units, none of the Grunts do. Couple rounds through the skull, dead alien. In the span of about four heartbeats I had laid all of them out, even ducking the cannon-wielder's fire. The thing hit the dust still glowing like a fiend, so I surmised it still had live rounds in it.

Best to use those up, Flint had said, than let them lie. The enemy is annoying, but they are not stupid, and will come back behind you and pick it up again to use on you later. So I began to stride forward in a mincing, sideways zig-zagging manner almost as soon as I'd dropped the cannon-wielder. I dropped another Grunt that tried to jump for the big gun, then pitched that magazine, snatched out and slammed in a new one, jacked the action bar and focused on that Brute.

Or what remained of him. I pegged four three round bursts to pop his recovered shielding, then a final one through his own skull to end his rein over my problems. That done, I took a kneeling step to claim the glowing gun, standing back up again as I continued forward.

Immediately, there were no more. Just the twenty or so Grunts and the one Brute. So I turned around, trusting the little blue donut in the bottom of my HUD to tell me when it was smart to turn back again.

I was downrange of enemy territory, after all, and staring a shitload more enemy in the ass. I tossed my MA over my shoulder, hung on for an extra second to be sure it caught in the catching hooks, then shouldered my new toy, and bled rounds into the rear of the assaulting enemy troops.

Phou, phou, phou, phou, BOOM, phou, BOOM, phou, BOOM, BOOM, BOOM!

So on and so forth. The lightplay was pretty spectacular, as was the blood spray and the anatomical separation at the cellular level. Bits of it I actually saw shredding in-flight, bits of it I never saw but was sure had vaporized outright. Having a superheated gas detonate under you… or on you… would do that. The intensity of the impact of the pressurized ordinance was even enough to break the shielding of all of the present Brutes, but I did cringe when I heard a human voice holler in protest.

Hopefully that cry wasn't my fault.

The toy was empty, though, so I dropped it, reclaiming my MA and proceeding to mop up the ones still un-charred enough to wriggle after the last detonation.

Gunfire crackled in my direction from the other side too, and now the crowd was thinned I could see Flint mowing them down from his side, and off his flank was the little guy, covering for one Marine who was dragging out another. White-hot steel spikes whistled past my head from one protesting Brute, accepting round after round into the chest without much more response than being hammered backwards.

Pigs, I'm told, have this thing called a shield. It's made out of gristle and callous. You can put rounds into that shield all day and all it will do is give the pig expensive acne and a real whoop-ass case of pissed-off-ness. If my friend the Brute had a chest shield, then I was not going to waste ammo by punting him breathless until my magazine was empty. Raising my aim, I took a chance and riddled his face with my next burst right as his long, dog-like mouth opened to roar something likely obscene at me.

He dropped like a rock, and the next (I didn't know until later, I swear!) two rounds of that final three round burst (I'd used two) went past his snout through open air.

The last one down, I saw Flint standing there with his MA pointed at the ground. I knew he was watching me, probably gauging how well I was doing, as usual… but he jerked back with sudden imposition as his shielding flared up visibly.

That's when my comn line finally clicked green; "TORI!!"

"Sorry!" I called back… but he'd stuck the rifle into his shoulder already, and I ducked fast under some reply rounds with my hands on my head. My rifle went up there, too, but I doubt it helped me much. "I said I was sorry!!" I shrieked, ducking to the side and hoping there was cover there.

That was, blessedly, all the ammo he granted me, so it ultimately didn't matter. Even if he'd hit me, the rounds would not have reached my armor, either. Maybe that was the point. Maybe he was just really that mad at me.

Maybe he was reconsidering the whole court-martial thing and had decided to do me himself… while I'd been shot at before, I'd always imagined I was on the winning end of each battle we engaged in because Flint was just that good at this game. Having to go toe-to-toe with the guy in a gunfight was frightening, even just on principle. In practice? Might as well eat my own sidearm and save myself the trouble.

"That's the last of them here." That was from the new guy… I recognized his voice, because it was a soft tenor, but I still hadn't gotten what his name was. Or hell, a rank would do for me. Something to call the guy besides hey you there. "Fifteenth is calling for backup over on the south ridge. They've brought up a couple of tanks."

"Which way's south?" I heard Flint ask. Looking that way, I could see him looking around at the ruins of the city, but even I couldn't tell where a 'ridge' was, so… yeah, which way was south? Forgive me for not having a compass in my head. Or one on the HUD, for that matter. On an asteroid, there are no polar regions, so south is a nonexistent metaphor used to mean 'down', or 'bad'.

South is not a direction, to me.

The little guy stuck a stumpy looking arm out and pointed, catching Flint's attention with the gesture. "Going up that way, sir?"

"Yes." Very blunt, to the point. So very like him. I wondered what it was that made fielded Spartans be of so few words. I won't claim I'm terribly talkative, but I can't recall the last time I answered a question with a single word, with no intent to add anything more until further prompted.

Flint started walking. I let my shoulders drop, the MA in my hand long enough that it almost touched the ground beside my boot. Damn, I hated this. Go here, shoot at that, make sure it's not wiggling anymore, give it some more ammunition if it is. Move on, repeat.

But I followed the guys anyway, well aware that that was why I was here. And if I didn't follow Flint, he would probably abandon my ass somewhere. It was as effective a kill shot as putting a magnum to my forehead. I needed him, and okay, I admit, there were a few times when we got along really well…

But damn, I hated this job.

.

ANUNA-01

It was beautiful. The fallow forest had gone for so long untouched that there existed a kind of symmetry between the underbrush and the towering stands of trees. I mean… nary a trunk less around than twice my height! I could not hope to encompass a trunk in my arms, and on the bigger ones, perhaps not even a quarter of a trunk.

Rano was still looking up, grinning, muttering to himself as he took it all in. Deep, dark, rich green, vibrant foliage with a hinting of some bioluminescent accents here and there. I could not tell if it was fungal moss or some kind of fern, but I would have to go and look eventually, just because it was so very fascinating. I had never been in a forest like this one before. The trees on the Halo arrays were old, but this place looked to predate everything else.

I do not know how to properly express the wonder… or the sense of scale and depth… trying to take it all in, I felt like an insect before gods, those mighty trees seeming to look down at me and struggle to see something so small as I. Looking up in reply, my balance wavered, and I had to look down again or risk falling over backwards into a plant that might or might not be tolerant of that. If I happened to stick myself into a fern that happened to be a nettle first thing, I knew the trip would be spent grouching.

And while beforehand, I was considering just ignoring everything and being very narrow-minded for a while – mainly out of spite for having given me such a terrible mission – I found as I took in the surface of this strange, exotic world, that there would never be such a thing. I would be rambling on like a lovesick romantic for years about this place, I felt sure. There was just no other way to say it… it was beautiful.

Recapturing my breath, I began to wade through the nodding ferns going in a more or less random direction. Due to the thick forest cover, there was no real way to scan anything ahead of time. So my guess was as good as anyone else's, and any old direction would do for the moment. One thing just about all breeds of plant have in common – they shield against scanning instruments like nobody's business. Get a stand of trees in place, and not even infrared will be able to tell you are there.

Igan pushed off after me first, casting a word at Rano to distract him from the siren's call and remind him why we were here. The sky, where I could spot it through the canopy, was a lovely shade of variegated lilac-on-periwinkle, making it a mockery of all other world's sunsets. If there was nothing unlovely about this world, it would be a marvel indeed.

Not even any indigenous predators to spoil our day! How strange, actually. On that note, I finally looked down, and saw the soil through the patchy leaf litter. Where were all the leaves? Should not such a forest as this have a leaf bed so thick the dirt itself might never see the light of day again? Indeed, I almost wondered if I had not been struck out upon a trail made by feet that left no tracks. The soil was fairly loose, suggesting it was blown or stirred by wind, rain and roots, and occasionally ruffled by the low-hanging leaves of the ferns I was walking through.

But while my tracks compressed in almost perfect renderings of the bottoms of my combat shoes – I could even tell where the sole had been worn smooth and where it had not – and was a good inch deep… there was nothing else imprinted into the dark brown earth.

That, I admit, was cause for alarm. My head snapped up, and I took a brand new look at the surrounding stand of towering giants. Nothing moved but the wind, a very gentle suggestion of a zephyr, broken as it was by all the treetrunks in the way. A good, strong wind current could not get going down here, understandably, not unless it was a gale force and it rode on the head of a storm large enough perhaps to topple one or two of these monsters.

Ahead, as I rounded the fifth tree, I finally spotted such a victim. But the nature of its demise drew me up, even stalling out Rano and Igan before either could run into me.

That tree was – I will measure for you – fifteen meters thick in diameter, and had broken off like a twig. It had struck several of its fellows on its way down, wrenching branches bigger than I was from their places and casting them to the ground. The silence of the scene before me screamed in protest of the context, certainly, but it was undisturbed. Like a photograph of a battlefield in action. People dying, people not dead but a half-inch from their doom, people casting death to others, all frozen. Still. Silent. Nothing moving.

It was a break from the beauty, surely. Like stepping from a wondrous dream straight into a nightmare. It wasn't just that the tree was down. In fact, the towering spires of sharp, shattered wood standing free of the tree that had grown them, still attached to the trunk, some bent over in massive clumps of curled fibers, looked normal enough for a fallen tree that had not died and started to rot before it fell.

That aspect looked normal. I was okay with that.

But the near side of the trunk… some thirty meters from the base… it had been burned. Not just casually struck by lightning, not at all. Not like that. I mean explosions of massive amounts of ordinance, high-reaching flames with a chemical root, I mean warfare at the modern level type burned. There was wood missing. Enough for me to crawl into the hollow and not fall back out if the trunk were to stand back erect.

That was what was frightening to see.

And while there was nothing to claim as much, I was ready to suspect and then believe that that impact was what had knocked this Kaidon from his place, and laid him down forever. It looked like the tree had started to buckle in that spot, somewhat, but hadn't finished breaking there by the time it was done landing on its side. That tree's demise had lent a long, carved-out, raggedy hole for the sun to come through. It left the entire scene lit bright as day and obvious to all who looked that way.

The gloom around us only shadowed all the more in contrast.

"What did that?" I heard Igan whisper.

"I do not think we want to find out." I answered, bearing little more volume than he. When I lifted my Carbine from my back, both of my companions armed themselves similarly. We had just walked through Paradise to find evidence that Evil was here on Holiday.

.

FLINT-093

'The ridge' was just that. All the streets were steep as hell and anything cylindrical or spherical or even pretending to be as much would go rolling hell for leather down to the bottom. The bottom, as it were, was a long way from the top.

My first kill on the ridge was a Brute too busy pegging the Marine line to notice me. I got up behind the oversized bugger and reached over his shoulder to stick my armored hand over his snout. With my other elbow embedded in the back of his neck, I pulled on that snout, partly upwards as I brought it around. Unprepared for my attack, the motion snapped his neck.

He dropped, limply, to the littered street, and began to roll over himself going downhill until he got lengthwise to the grade and stopped. There was a sign over my head that said WATER DRIVE, but I suspected that it being on a pole that was sticking out of a brick wall meant that it was misplaced. The fact that the 'sticking out of' was literal, and not figurative for meaning that it was on a brace bolted to the bricks, also meant as much.

The new Water Drive was moved, quite possibly several blocks, from the original. This, considering that the next several blocks of city had been flattened. My guess was the signpost had gone sailing like a spear until it met the brick wall. Stepping over the dead Brute, I reached up and tugged on the butt of my MA.

Argh, that was getting annoying. I sent my other arm snaking up behind my own head, and fought with the gun being just out of reach for a second before I finally got it in hand and pulled it loose from my back. My left shoulder was feeling better, now, and like usual when that was the case, I had forgotten that that arm was good for shit. I'd slung the MA over my left when I'd gone after the Brute, without even realizing I'd have hell to get it back over and into my hands again because of its placement.

I saw Andy shoot me a look. He waved something.

I chinned the comn, answering with a click.

When a spike grenade whistled over his ducked head and embedded in the wall behind him, he evidently figured it was okay if the enemy heard him ask me his question; I got to hear him grunt as he jerked the ordinance free of the wall, then huff as he flung it back. That spike detonated in mid-air over the heads of some Grunts, missing the original thrower by almost ten feet. Oh well, short fuse. Not Andy's fault. "Something wrong with your armor, sir?"

I blew the Brute in question on his ass with six rounds to the throat, his shields fizzling on the edge of breaking open when he went down. The punishing impact of MA6C rounds was significantly more than MA5B, after all… and they'd dance and swagger for MA5B's. "No." I answered, feeling a little unwilling to explain that I was more or less a gimpy old cripple and I really didn't need to be out here.

How could I say that to him, though? I was his backup! Maybe I should call Command and tell them to stuff it up their ass… they let Maria retire, and she still had both arms! Still, right now was not a good time to be filing resignation papers.

Not that I really knew where to find that sort of thing. I'd have to ask.

"If you say so, sir." Andy was a sharp kid… he was not convinced. But, if he was going to go along thinking I had buggy armor, I'd let him. Really, the armor was still relatively new. It only had five or six dents in it. So far. But I was not about to give him a rundown of my current medical situation, nor was I really feeling that sour enough to call them out and leave because of them.

The shoulder was a liability, yes, and it was weak as hell. But it didn't hurt right now, so I was perfectly willing to just plug on. Get the job done, maybe go and pick another fight. That was, provided, if I didn't get it cranked for me again.

Which reminded me why I was mad at Tori.

And about then was when the first tank round sailed over my head, screaming like a thing possessed and glowing like a mini sun. External temperature meters swung hard for the hot end, but inwardly my skin didn't even prickle. I ducked anyway. Don't need to lose an ablative coating for no damn good reason, after all. I ignored the smashing impact, the screams of the Marines who'd been unlucky enough to survive within its blast radius, and the crackling warning of a building's remains threatening to come down.

I slung a hand signal at Andy hastily and charged down the hill at that tank. There were a small number of us who had been good with tanks. Good at destroying them, I mean. I could drive and shoot one, sure, but making them erupt spectacularly was a specialty. One I almost never got to employ when on the job. The NC just didn't have the kind of resources the old order had had, and it left them unable to field much of their existing equipment. This, I imagine, was only compounded by the fact that every time the Brutes behaved like idiots an attacked another ship – be it ours or one of the Elite's – with just one of their own cruisers, it would get obliterated.

So they were also running shy on space-worthy troop carriers, as well. Reaching the bottom of the hill far and away ahead of Andy, I used my elevation coming down off the hillside to augment my jump, landing me right on top of the operator's door. In a hatch just behind it, the secondary gunner was sitting, the plasma equivalent of a fifty mounted to shoot at infantry. The gunner squawked at me when I dented in the driver's hatch, an odd sound to come out of a Brute, surely.

Bracing one foot in the dent I'd made, I grabbed the gun and twisted it into that elbow, reaching past it for the gunner trying to fight me for possession of it. Grabbing a hold of his snout, I yanked him forward, bashing his face off the backside of the gun. The force of that single impact had enough power to fully alter the gunner's worldly perception, as he reeled back from me in a dizzy stupor. I could see him flailing uselessly in a rabid attempt to regain his wits before I killed him, but his reaction was too slow.

Getting my magnum off my thigh, I stuck it through his shielding and blew his brains out from within his yawning mouth. That was about when the tank I was on spun around, and the only thing that kept me on top of it was the fact that my other arm was still wrapped around the turret. Wooh! Good thing I'd shot the gunner lefthanded… or that mighta hurt.

Restoring the sidearm to its place, I turned over, letting go of the turret and slamming my good fist into the driver's hatch. When the hinges broke, the latch was a worthless impediment and I tore it off the tank as a whole. From within, the driver snarled at me, trying to get a gun up at me from within those cramped quarters.

Should have just jumped out instead. I dropped a fist-sized block of plastic into his lap, let go, and jumped to the side. I wasn't clear, precisely, but I hit the switch anyway just in case he'd toss it back out on me. He didn't… the Wraith erupted like a volcano, tossing me back up the hill I'd come down.

I hit on my back, and slid about a foot again back down before I caught the pavement and started to get back up. Andy appeared over me and grabbed my bad arm, attempting to help me up. I yanked it from him before he could pull on it, alarmed that my good spree would end so soon… and because of something other than the enemy, to boot.

He took it wrong, though, and backed up. "There's another two, sir." He said, sounding like I'd hurt his feelings.

I cast him a look as I picked the MA off the ground and slapped it once. "Where?" I didn't mean to put him off, but what could I do? He was a good soldier – he'd get over it. Besides which, he'd known I wasn't terribly cozy to be around beforehand. I just had a sense of humor.

Which might be why Tori was in such a tizzy at me, come to think of it.

.

TORI-138

Plenty was an understatement. But the tank fire was starting to annoy the crap out of me when I saw Flint go running fast as he could down that first street to rip the guts out of one of the tanks. Yay, score one, UNSC. I hauled a Marine out from under some bricks and dirt and stood him up – he wasn't hurt, just disoriented. He'd be okay. There had been several others who would not be okay, not with that last round the now-dead tank had fired.

The aliens occupying the street were too numerous to call it a win and move on, though, so I tried to keep my tally running. I was tall enough that the Marines running in front of me didn't get their heads shot off, so I let them sort themselves while I covered for them.

What was going through my head sounded more or less like this; That one looks like it needs a new paint job, BANG, but then, so does Flint most days, BANG, sure hope he gets it in gear and gets back up here, BANG, before things get ugly cos I don't know how to do this, BANG, by myself. Speaking of ugly, BANG BANG BANG, that one needs some serious makeup to fix his ugly. BANG, and speaking of makeup, BANG, I need to find what happened to my, BANG, chapstick before my lips split open like, BANG, Flint punched me in the mouth or something. BANG, that'd make him laugh at me, for sure, BANG, little twit BANG BANG BANG, Yeah, take that, you ugly hairball!! This is me being mad! BANG BANG BANG, And that, too! Heh. BANG, look at 'em run. BANG Damn, I missed!

Then my guts twisted.

I need chocolate.

Yes, I was being a whiny little bitch, but I'd gotten addicted to the stuff, and since falling in with Flint, I hadn't even had any coffee to take the edge off. Not that there was no coffee on the sloop – but more because on the days when it occurred to me that coffee would help take that edge off, I didn't ever have time to go and get into it.

Flint didn't drink coffee… for some reason… so he never had a cup I could readily swipe or be reminded by. Which didn't really help. One thing the sloop did not have, was chocolate. And I was just about ready to gnaw on the first brown thing I saw, I was so deprived.

Maybe it was stupid of me to get addicted to something like chocolate… I'm not sure if it was the caffeine it contained or something else, but I could sit and eat the stuff all damn day and be happy as a jay bird. Coffee was… not really my thing, which is why I never 'got around to it' like I had. My clip ran dry so I popped the little lever thing to make it fall out of the gun, and reached behind myself for the next when something overhead went crunch. My hand hesitated, and a Grunt got to live because of it, and I looked up.

"Look out!" Barely had the last phonetic sound of that last word gotten out of the Marine's mouth before the first brick hit me in the visor, and a moment later I was buried under half a building.

"God, damn this!" I shrieked, now truly annoyed. Gah. Anger management my ass, this was not helping my mood at all. I'd guessed the tank round had shaken the building next to us, but I hadn't realized it was going to topple… let alone do so on me. Well, now there really was nothing I could do, now my precious MA was gonna have a bunch of rock scars etched into it.

Gonna have to reapply the damn bluing when I get back to the sloop. Sigh.

I pushed, and pushed, and tugged, and struggled, and pushed. Finally, I worked most of my body free, and to the tune of bent structural steel and crete and glass grinding against my armor, I finally got loose of enough of it to kick out what was now a wall and what had used to be a ceiling, and step back out onto the street.

Slamming that next magazine home, I rained all hell down on those cheering assholes on the next block. They stopped cheering quick like and ran for it. Most did not make cover. About half a dozen Brutes came out from hiding finally, and their Jackal counterparts began that chicken-dance bounding run to follow them out. Most of those idiots did not bring their oval shields with them.

I briefly considered doing like Flint had taught me was smart and dropping the Jackals first, but I was mad and I had a point to make. So first I flung every grenade I had on me at the Brutes, lining them up all the way across the street. They dove out of the way, and one flat out ran the other way, but I got to light them up anyway. When it was all done with, I'd gotten a single piece of shrapnel from my own grenade embedded in my chest armor, and I'd broken my own shielding by standing too close, but of the ones I'd hit, I'd flattened them permanently. Two remained who could get back up, and only one of them was still wearing an operable shielding unit.

The Jackals had hung back for that display, and now got their eyes pecked out by my MA6C. The slicing spikes whistling past me were an annoying noise, but since not a single one hit me… ever… that was all they were. The Brute reloaded, and missed at me some more.

I finished off the last Jackal, checked to see I had six rounds left, and aimed at the natural marksman who didn't seem to get a clue. I mean… I dance when pummeled to death, too, you know. I also light up bright as day when my shields are active and get bothered. Just like everyone else. He really ought to have noticed by now that he was missing me.

Idiot.

My rounds hit his shield, bouncing off, one and all. Briefly I considered running down there and picking a really personal fight with the guy, but Flint had been particularly adamant about that part.

Don't.

Annoyed that he couldn't hit me at that range, annoyed that I had murdered all his friends and all his accomplices and most of his cannon fodder too, and quite possibly also annoyed that I'd even survived having a building dropped on me… he must have been annoyed at something that badly, because he totally flipped out, and lost it. He stuck his knuckles on the road bed and charged at me like a mountain ape from Earth.

Roared a little like one, too. Casually, I dropped out the empty magazine and slapped home a new one. Casually, I pulled the action bar back, and let it go at the back so it slammed loudly to the front, first round in the chamber.

The Brute reached up and out, showing me all his crooked, some of them pointy, teeth. I braced sideways, cocked my hips forward and slung my free hand down behind me. Reversing, I completed the arc across under his chin and to his other shoulder, the sound of a metallic screech following the entire motion.

The Brute slammed into my extended arm, gushed hot blood all over me, and slumped away, gurgling weakly. I stayed like that for a moment, feeling affronted that he'd bled on my armor… then sighed, and relaxed the stance. Oh, I had bigger problems than the corrosive properties of blood on the mostly ceramic surface of my outfit. I'd sent my combat knife through the armor on this dude's throat.

That was weapon's-grade steel, versus Covenant armor. Think I was annoyed at the bloody mess? Only a little, now I realized what kind of terrible mess I'd have when I went to straighten out that knife later on.

Yeah. Exactly. I sighed.

MA in one hand, my combat knife in the other, I looked behind me to see where all my Marine buddies had gone. Obviously, Flint darting off to the left with his new friend the mini-Spartan guy meant that I wasn't going to get him back up here any time soon.

So it was me and the Marines for a while. I saw them, nearly all of them, standing up at the top of the ridge looking down at me like I'd displayed just how it was done and they were all awed at the show. I turned and started walking towards them, watching as my shielding picked up and began to charge. Little bar across the top, I'd called it. That bar had become my most precious indicator, as when it was out, I started to feel impact again. Like anyone worth their salt in nerve endings, I did not appreciate feeling combat impact.

Reaching the front line around the edge of the building's rubble, I stepped over their Kelly-wall barricade and looked around. Counting faces, I came up with roughly thirty. The ones in back kept moving so it was hard to tell past the twenty-one mark. That was all but seven of the original number, if in fact thirty was correct.

"That was amazing!" One of the closer dudes exclaimed, finally, breaking the pall.

I shrugged. "Got a towel?"

That set them to laughing. "No, ma'am, but I can find something."

"Slimy and annoying, huh, ma'am?" Another put in. That one was a woman. I turned, a little surprised. She'd never spoken up before, and when I finally spotted her I realized why I'd missed her being a girl.

She had a square jaw and blunt features. In full battle rattle it hid her gender perfectly. But she grinned like a girl, and she was grinning, so it gave her away. "Very…"

"Here, towel." The guy coming back announced, tossing a wadded scrap at me. I caught it with the hand holding the knife, and after deducing that it really was not mostly dirt, I handed off my MA to the girl-Marine. Her eyes popped out and her mouth fell open as the mega-sized rifle landed in her hands. Maybe it was the size of the thing… or maybe it was just the fact that a Spartan had handed her something.

Marines are funny creatures that way. Toss a dude an unprimed grenade cos he needs one, he'll brag to the whole goddamned world that a Spartan gave him something. Hell, if you toss 'em a rock, they'll tell the same story.

I got most of the blood off of my front – doubtless it was all down my back, too, but oh well – and tossed the filthy, half-shredded rag back to the ground. He'd probably gotten it out of the rubble of what had once been a hotel, after all. That there was anything like it left in this place was a minor miracle. Having wiped off the knife, I slid it back into the sheath I'd hitched under the power housing on my back, and clipped it in place. Then I lifted my MA back from the Marine's hands, raising her gaze back to meet mine.

"Where's the rest of them?" I asked, figuring if they were gonna think of me as Athena – goddess of war – then I might as well play the goddamned role. Be a battlefield badass. I could… but not as efficiently or as jubilantly as Flint.

Flint… damn, if I never saw him again, I would not be surprised. He lived off this shit, and he'd chase the last living NC to the end of the world if he had to, to make sure he got to kill all of them. And I often wondered if it was the fact that they were NC… or if he was just that into the killing theory… or if it was something else.

And I have to admit, I really was starting to suspect that it was the something else option, more and more. Because he'd go after a Flood infestation the same way.

"Up this way, ma'am." Someone from the back of the group said, waving at me so I'd see which direction 'this way' was. "They took it two days ago and we haven't been able to punch through this deep until now."

"Fair enough." Inwardly, I sighed. I could be all they thought I was, so long as I didn't open my mouth. Trying to talk the talk with Flint was hard… he still gave me strange looks from time to time. So trying to be all by myself doing this I felt like a fraud. Like I'd missed the first fifteen years of my life due to the fact that I forgot how to use it all in the following thirty.

Flint, meanwhile, had been learning to perfect all the art of war in those same thirty. Perhaps this was the fulfillment of a destiny, for me, perhaps it was what I'd been meant for, but boy was I really out of my league here. To be fully honest, there had been days on the asteroid when I'd wished I was Flint… where my problems could be solved by shooting them in the head, and I'd never have to deal with the same problems twice.

Where my peace of mind and security was as simple as walking away from the front lines for a spell, and when I was ready, I could walk back to them. But, on the other hand… I was all grown up and had been taught to be someone else.

Someone grumpy as hell at her soldier-boy companion for being what he was, and suffering from chocolate withdrawal like nobody's business.

As the Marines ahead of me began to turn and go in the indicated direction, most of them checking guns and pockets for ammunition levels, I turned back to look down at the girl-Marine and asked a very girl-centric question.

"Got any chocolate on you?"

She laughed, but dug into a breast pocket. "Yeah… yeah, I do."