I
SLIPSPACE
UNSC PROWLER, LOST BOY
0630 HOURS, 10 JUN 2551
DESTINATION: HD 40307
The cryotube's glass door opened with a hydraulic hiss, and Jaiden-112 emerged, wet and cold, but unscathed from her stay in the cramped space. She coughed, expelling the viscous Bronchial Surfactant from her throat, and swallowed, smacking her lips in disgust at the slime sliding down her into stomach. Gross, after thirteen years, you think I'd have gotten over the taste.
The intercom next to the holopad blinked green. Jaiden pressed the flashing button and swiped her black body suit from the adjacent table. I guess we're back to business as usual.
"Morning Cupcake," Ravello's greeting, smooth as silk, came with his usual panache.
Too bad he looks worse than he sounds. She smoothed her short russet red hair and yawned, inhaling sterile air. After a week in the cryotube, she dare not squander another five minutes.
"Rise and shine! Exiting Slipspace in three hours. Did you sleep well?"
"If by 'sleep', you mean, 'week of total sedation'."
"Good. I added five-hydroxytryptophan to your sedative to prevent—"
"Whoa there, buddy," she cut in, slicing the air with both hands. "You added what, and why? Try again. English. Standard, please. I'm psychic, not a scientist."
"Five-hydroxytryptophan is a naturally occurring amino acid broken down into serotonin by the human body. It is widely used as an antidepressant, appetite suppressant and sleep aid. By the by, the proper term is 'Psion', not 'Psychic'."
She yanked the suit up over her body, zipped up and stormed out, following the painted signs on the floor to the bridge. Ravello looked up from the navigation console as she hovered over him with her arms crossed.
"Happy pills?" she asked, gritting her teeth. "He gave me happy pills?"
He drew back, and for a second, she thought he looked truly stunned, that is, until he simply answered, "No pill, an injection preventative for your nightmares. Mendez said not to inform you knowing you would object. Sorry, Cupcake. Mission directive."
"Makes me wonder what other little details the Chief left out," she muttered, and sat in the command chair, trying not to notice Ravello's deteriorating appearance.
The synthetic skin of the android's craggy face and his ragged attire was reminiscent of a character she had seen in film vids selling whiskey in old western traveling medicine shows. Despite their experience together, she did not trust the obsolete sensors of his construct. Next time, I'm retiring that piece of junk for a holo A.I.
"Incoming message from Onyx," Ravello stated.
"Put it on-screen," she responded flatly.
"Are you all right?" he asked.
"I've been better."
"Operation: TORPEDO was a success," he reminded her. She could hear beeps from the touch screen as he input commands to open a secure COMM channel. "Soldiers sacrificed themselves to push back the Covenant and save countless lives."
"Yeah, well, ONI's success doesn't change the fact my teammates are dead," she countered, standing as the blue screen dissolved in front of her. "Call me when you can make me a better offer— Chief Mendez." She straightened, giving a halfhearted salute as his face filled the screen, the camera lens magnifying the deep lines on his forehead.
The senior CPO nodded curtly. "Commander, I trust you slept well?."
"Inadvisable question, Sir," Ravello cautioned.
"Excuse me, Spartan. I did it for your own good."
"Sir," Jaiden maintained an indifferent tone. "My sleeping habits have never left you questioning my ability. Why the sudden change?"
"This is your first solo, and I needed you in top shape. If you have no further objections..."
"Go ahead."
"One of our Prowlers stationed above the mining colony of Coral intercepted a high-frequency transmission coming from one of the moons orbiting the system's outer planet. You are aware of the underground installation the miners dug up several years ago?"
"If memory serves, they excavated thirty meters of atomically symmetrical crystal."
Mendez nodded. "Yes, there has been no Covenant activity in this system. ONI doesn't think the signal was meant for Coral. I'm sending you to find the source. Bring back anything you can for analysis, and if you gain any extrasensory information, report directly to me. It ain't ours, and I don't care whether or not it belongs to those alien scumbags; standard protocol is in effect for the duration. No messages on unsecure channels, and if the situation goes to hell, you know the rules. Understood?"
She mustered the deference to give him a rigid salute. "Crystal clear, Sir."
He relaxed, softening the lines on his face. "Good, I'm counting on your return."
II
0930 HOURS
HD 40307
"Entering system fringe," Ravello announced.
An orange dwarf appeared, half off-screen to the left. Jaiden could see Coral and Veros, two of the star's three giant terrestrial planets in the system. Tyr, further along in orbit, hid outside their immediate view.
"Long range?" she asked.
After several seconds, Ravello replied, "Odd, I'm not picking up anything on our scanners."
"What do you know about this place?"
"HD 40307 is a K-type main sequence star harboring three planets, commonly referred to as 'Super Earths'. Coral is the only inhabited planet and has no natural satellites. Two moons orbit Tyr, and Thanatos, our objective, orbits Veros."
"Super Earths, huh," she wondered aloud. "Some reference, for a place I've never been." She pursed her lips and turned to face him. "Lock in our course and bring us into low orbit around that moon. Get a digital topography using thermal and short-range scanners, and I'll decide the best place for a drop."
"You don't expect to drop blind and just march across the globe… wait, where are you going?" he called as she jogged down the hall to the armory.
Jaiden heard his footfalls as she opened the tube containing her armor. "Shouldn't you be flying the ship?" she asked when he stopped a few steps behind her.
"I'll have you know, I have extensive multitasking capabilities."
Briefly glancing back, she rolled her eyes. "I guess I have to take that at face value."
He quirked an eyebrow, but she ignored him, removing the armored plating, one piece at a time and clamping them onto her body. Her steel-gray gauntlets, greaves, shin guards and pauldrons fit comfortably, but the thoracic cage felt bulkier than to which she was accustomed.
"All that weight training isn't paying off right now," she grunted, tugging at the chest plate after checking her connecting joints. "What'd they load this thing down with, anyway?"
"You're wearing a prototype MJOLNIR Mark-V variant comprised of a multilayer photo-reactive alloy capable of withstanding moderate radiation and electromagnetic disruption. The battle suit also has an electrostatic gel layer to cushion falls, and an antimicrobial air-filtration system able to sustain extended periods in zero gravity."
Holding her helmet close to her stomach, she eyed him suspiciously. "I thought only Spartan-IIs could wear the gel layer."
"The Mark-V contains a super-thin layer that will enable you to move freely. If you impact from a high point, your suit will go into partial lockdown, hardening the gel layer. Should you fall unprotected from, say, the atmosphere of the moon, the landing would damage your suit, rendering the plating inoperative. This is the only armor you'll be getting for a while. I would suggest a test drive but, I already know your response."
"Are you kidding?" She grinned, locking the helmet into place, and flexed her gauntleted fingers. "This is the test drive."
III
NATURAL SATELLITE THANATOS
1052 HOURS
The sound of roaring air and rending metal filled Jaiden's ears as the long-range stealth orbital insertion pod penetrated the moon's atmosphere and friction-generated heat peeled away strips of the pod's outer hull. Black spots danced in her eyes as the vehicle tore through the surface in a spray of snow and ice, the impact knocking the wind out of her. A loud, repetitive tone from her helmet synchronized with a flashing red warning light. Energy shielding, she thought, involuntarily sucking in air, forcing her lungs to inflate. Within seconds, the blaring stopped, her shield meter refilled and she pried free of the vehicle, kicking at a scrap of the hull. It's about time ONI did something right.
First checking holsters for her combat talon and hand grenades, she noted a seventeen-meter range on her radar and started walking, surveying the snow-dusted tundra beneath a nitrogen-rich atmosphere that gave the moon a ghostly pallor. Stars dotted the holes in a clouded sky, and Veros provided the only light across the white landscape scarred by the smoldering wreckage of the mangled drop pod.
Ravello's voice crackled over SATCOM. "According to topography, you are approximately two clicks west of a natural depression worth investigating; I'll send you a waypoint."
A white navigational arrow appeared on her radar, and she broke into a jog across the wintry desert.
Two minutes later, she gazed across an ice-encrusted crater blanketed with new snow and the shadows of cirrus clouds, and folded her arms. "This is a natural formation?"
"Not bad," he commented. "I clocked your armored speed at seventy-one kilometers per hour, and perhaps not. Scans show a nearly circular formation with edges suggesting frost build-up. Gradual sloping indicates a fabricated structure, maybe a satellite dish."
Jaiden knelt and brushed away some loose snow, watching flakes scatter, when she spotted a metallic object glinting at the bottom of the crater. "That's a pretty big satellite," she murmured, staring at the shiny anomaly.
"Thermal imaging complete, scans show a heat source emitting from the center beneath what appears to be a panel at an estimated depth of one-hundred meters."
"Now we're talking," Jaiden said, clasping her hands together, and took a step forward, peering into the depression. "I hope you've checked on the heavy lift gear recently, because I'm going in."
IV
Climbing feet first, belly to the slope, Jaiden descended the depression and crouched at the bottom to run a hand over a silvery tip sticking a few centimeters out of the ice. No human colony needed such a huge land-based satellite, and the Covenant could not avoid detection long enough to install it. Why would they would they even waste time spying on humans when they can just glass entire planets? Maybe, it's Forerunner. The Forerunners, ancient beings that had vanished around fifty-thousand years ago, left behind only relics of a civilization whose technological advances surpassed the scant archaeological finds of what might have once been a utopian empire spanning the galaxy.
The buzz of SATCOM interrupted her thoughts.
"The ice is too thick," she announced before Ravello could speak. "We'll need to melt through it."
"At the risk of damaging the structure, the Pulse Laser should do the trick," he answered.
"You know rule number one: shoot now, ask questions later."
"For you, it's really more of a motto."
"And, I'm still alive, aren't I?"
"Assuming you will put yourself at ample distance from the blast radius…"
"You know me," she responded, already on the move.
"Locking in coordinates, shields dropping, firing in three, two…"
She heard the atmosphere crackle high above, and a bolt of cyan energy pierced the clouds, melting thick layers of ice and funneling a cloud of steam into the thin air. The haze cleared, revealing a deep hole beneath the metal feed horn of a parabolic antenna, its inverted support arms extending far into the ice. Jaiden looked straight down, allowing her HUD to calculate a distance of one hundred meters.
"Well, I can't reach the supports from here, but a grenade might break up this mess," she ventured.
"The antipersonnel concussion grenade would be a suitable choice for sheer explosive power. I recommend a strategic throw, but I recall your idea of strategy…"
"I'll see where it lands," she said, tossing the explosive from hand to hand.
"For one of exemplary foresight, you certainly leave a lot to chance."
With less enthusiasm, she replied, "Sometimes, not knowing is better."
Guilty of the occasional blind toss, Jaiden knew when accuracy mattered. She calculated the necessary three seconds after pressing the button for the grenade to strike the opposite wall and detonate before losing momentum and falling, and made an underhand toss. The grenade followed intended trajectory, exploding on contact, and as the smoke billowed upward, layers of ice began to crumble, stealing her footing. She thrust out her hands, digging for purchase as her legs struck the wall, and clung tightly. Her vision tunneled between the contours of her pauldrons, and she inhaled, focusing attention on the white wall in front of her. Considering the odds of surviving a fall, she tried to kick the front cleat of her boot into the ice.
"There is a narrow landing thirty-point-two meters beneath you."
There goes that idea. "If you haven't noticed, I'm dead weight here."
"I say, you're a half ton of dead weight."
"Oh?" Jaiden snorted in derision. "What's your bright idea?"
"Scanning… there is a ledge about three meters below to your left. You might be able to shimmy over and climb down, provided the ice does not break when you land."
"Thanks for the encouragement," she retorted, her body swaying as she tried to reach down and grab her left heel. Pulling up with her right hand, she shifted her other leg to counterbalance and managed to raise her knee to waist level, disengage the first cleat and stab the wall. "I've got it!"
"Have you given any thought to your exit route?"
"Easy enough… same way I got in, unless you feel like dropping in with that gear."
"I do not 'feel' like anything," he reminded her. "Seventy meters remaining; updating your waypoint."
Thirteen years training commanded disregard of the burning sensation in her muscles. You know what they said in boot camp: pain is an affirmation of life. At last, Jaiden hopped away from the wall and reattached her cleats. The white arrow spun like a compass on her motion tracker, leading her directly to a panel at the center of the dish.
"Thermal is picking up an unidentifiable object, possibly crystalline in design," Ravello reported.
Kneeling before the panel, she pulled out her knife and ran it along the panel's edge, seeking a structural weakness. Her blade slipped into a thin crevice toward the right side, and she wedged it in a little further, bending the corner just enough for her to grip the cover with her fingers and pry it back.
"Just a little more," she said, grimacing as the panel groaned under the strain and gave way, spilling white light into the hole. Jaiden shielded her eyes even as her visor polarized against the brightness. When the light dispersed, she saw inside a large, glowing crystal filled with ionized gas suspended by what appeared to be two magnetic dowels. "You getting all of this?" she asked Ravello, glancing at her HUD. "There're no radiation emissions, no interference… nothing but your thermal sig. I've never seen anything like it."
"Are you able to extract it?"
"I don't know, let me try." As though compelled beyond her control, she reached for the artifact and stopped. This is weird. I feel like Pandora with her box. When she let her hand hover above the crystal, it began to pulsate with a cerulean glow, burning a negative image into her retinas, brighter and brighter, until she all but resisted the urge to look away and a tingling sensation spread from her fingertips throughout her entire body. "S-something's happening… my armor," she stammered, though in fleeting hindsight, she knew her MJOLNIR was not malfunctioning, and her fingers connected with the crystal, as if drawn by the same force holding the ionized gas suspended within.
Jaiden shut her eyes and saw blackness.
Black, likened to space. Stars clustered in the darkness, swirled around the forms of seven colossal rings. From the center ring, a cyan glow emanated outward, followed by the second ring, and the third, fourth, fifth, until all seven set alight and tipped inward, releasing blinding explosions of hot blue. She found herself again in the starry void, drifting toward a blue-green gas giant surrounded by a ring of rock. Space contorted, collapsing inward into swirls of colorful nebulae, and Jaiden began to fall. Stars and clouds rushed past, and a peculiar world formed from the vortex of color, its atmosphere becoming a blur of motion as she sailed, helpless to stop, into shapeless masses of blue, green and brown shapes transforming into ocean, grass and dirt, right before she hit the—
Ground. A shattering sound exploded in her ears, and the hairs on her skin stood on end as her body stiffened and slackened on impact. Her shield meter screamed a warning, and pain erupted in her back and limbs. For seconds, she lay, dazed, blinking up at the sky until her shields recharged. Struggling to her feet, she noticed the white light had vanished.
"Are you all right?" Ravello asked, sounding distant.
"Ugh, yeah, I'm fine," Jaiden mumbled, rubbing her arms to try and get rid of the lingering prickly feeling. She clicked on her headlamp and peered down into the opening, illuminating a pile of powdery, translucent shards that were all that remained of the artifact. "Uh, you'd better set up a rendezvous and get there A-SAP. Oh man, the chief's going to want to find out about this."
V
COVENANT-UNSC FRINGE
PROWLER, LOST BOY
0206 HOURS, 11 JUN 2551
EMPYREAN SYSTEM
At the command console, Ravello performed routine system scans, diagnostics and registry repairs, and created backup data in case of electrical failure. He checked the status of the ship's artificial atmosphere, fuel and power reserves and stealth-ablative coating, and finally pressed his hand against a panel containing five sensor nodes to measure the structural integrity of his synthetic skin. The material, made from rubber coated with conductivity-enhancing ionic liquid, could stretch well beyond its original size, but required frequent replacement. Thus, when the computer blipped the response, 'Replacement Mandatory', he logged a note to inform ONI upon their return, but the high cost of warfare training and equipment prevented the company from spending precious funds on a 'cosmetic procedure'. Seldom inactive except for periodic maintenance, his processor, upon completion of priority tasks, searched for menial duties. He calculated ETA: Onyx, Zeta Doradus at three-hundred and twenty hours, according to their current course along a randomized vector through the outskirts of Covenant territory to the nearest slipstream entry which, by their fuel conservation, put them a week behind schedule.
A solitary life sign registered on deck two inside a private office across the corridor from the research laboratory. Ravello inserted a reminder into his internal log to check on the life sign, programmed applications to run in the mainframe background with minimal memory usage and transferred temporary processes to the surveillance module. Without changing camera angle, he ascertained the Spartan resting her head on the desk, at best appeared asleep. He had associated the term 'troubled' with the psychological makeup of child refugees he encountered on Onyx, but the rise and fall of the young adult's chest alluded to nothing as to her condition. He decided to leave her be to whatever she did or did not dream.
VI
"The universe remembers everything."
"Everything, Mama?"
Mama's silken hair swept Jaiden's face as she leaned in to give her daughter a kiss. "Everything, Jaiden; the past, present, future, is all at your fingertips. You only have to reach out and open your mind."
Small fingers tugged at a chestnut lock. "Love you, Mama."
"I love you too. I'll be back soon, I promise."
Jaiden's blanket began to undulate as if stirred by a sudden wind, and her mother crumbled like autumn leaves and drifted through her doorway. She threw off the coverlet and bolted into the dimly lit corridor. Turning, she saw a light at the end, and pressed her hands against the wall.
"Mama, where are you?" she called, leaning around the corner. "Daddy?"
There, at the front door, stood her balding father conversing in hushed tones with a person.
"Go back to bed, Jaiden."
"Daddy, where's Mama?" she asked, stamping her foot.
Looking over his shoulder, her father started to reply, but at what sounded like many rows of jagged teeth clicking together, he turned toward the door again.
"Daddy, monster!" she screamed when the creature, no longer a person, withdrew a glowing purple object.
Towering over him, the no-longer-a-person fired bursts of molten violet at her father's face. He clutched his face, shrieking in agony as his skin melted through his fingers. Soon oblivious to the pain, he crumpled to the floor.
"Daddy… No, Daddy!"
The monster narrowed shark-like eyes and pointed his gun at her. Jaiden took off running to her bedroom, away from the sound of clopping hooves, but when she reached the hallway, she could not find her door. Sidling along, she groped the plaster in vain as the footsteps got louder. Suddenly, claws scratched the nape of her neck. She squealed and darted toward a faraway light at the opposite end that cast shadows of twisted, gnarly appendages along the walls. The corridor expanded, elongating the faster she ran, and the light seemed to yet grow further away, and still, the monster came thudding after, drawing closer, until its hot breath made her skin crawl and she let out a bloodcurdling scream.
Jaiden jerked awake, her fingers involuntarily splaying across the keypad as she sat straight up and blinked furiously in the light of the computer. She wiped away beads of sweat clinging to her temples and refocused on the text near the bottom of the screen. What am I supposed to tell Mendez? I had a premonition about some sort of weapon of galactic destruction? That I destroyed the artifact? If it was Forerunner tech, who knows what could have transmitted through that satellite. She shook her head. I'll wait. No one else should get wind of this before he does. After typing the rest of her report, she pushed away from the desk and stood, staring at her screen for several seconds before hitting 'Send'. Straightening her mussed white tank and navy-issue fatigues, she disengaged the door lock and stepped out of the office into the hall. This could be bigger than we thought, but, how long do we have?
VII
FLEET OF PARTICULAR JUSTICE
STEALTH VESSEL, PIOUS FERVOR
The desert planet, Chariot, eclipsed Ziek's view of the red Empyrean sun, creating a partial corona which diffused the more distant light of surrounding stars. An easy target, Ziek mused, narrowing his alizarin eyes, almost risible. The Supreme Commander is a fool if he thinks any mere human is capable of standing against me. If they are hiding on this world, I will hunt them down and flay them one by one.
"Ship Master?" Lost in thought, Ziek failed to hear the summons of his commander, who again spoke, this time gaining his attention. "Ship Master, the Luminary."
Silent, Ziek gave no sign he understood other than a slight shift of his head and a reproachful brow as he turned to look in the direction of the Major's attention. The officer's clawed fingers scraped the Luminary's metallic façade, tracing two glowing layered circles dividing a perfect annulus quadrisected by four radial lines. Two shorter radii extended from the largest inner circle, and a small circle, adjoined to the left side of the outer ring, stuck out from the rest of the glyph. And, to think I believed the High Prophets sought to make a mockery of me bestowing upon me a useless relic. It seems this Luminary proved viable after all.
"Location?" he asked.
The Major's fingers flew across his keypad as he brought up the information on the viewer. A tiny white box outlined a vacant section of space near Empyrean's outermost planet.
"Impossible," Ziek spat. "I see nothing."
The Major ran the intelligence again and shook his head, briefly letting his jaws hang in disbelief. "The computer's coordinates are accurate, Ship Master."
Ziek returned his attention to the viewer, doubt creeping into his mind, as to a puzzle piece set into the wrong picture, which at first glance, appeared dissonantly static. Then, he spotted a vague shimmer above the outlined location moving almost impalpably across the screen.
"Magnify," Ziek ordered, watching the boxed area expand until he saw a sleek, black object in silhouette against the stars. "It appears we have uninvited guests."
"A human vessel, Ship Master; shall we give them a proper Sangheili welcome?"
Ziek turned to his commander, eyes agleam as he strode toward the central console. "Inform the Supreme Commander and hail the enemy ship… Neté," he demanded, leaning in as he activated the COMM to contact his minor officer in engineering, "Prepare a boarding party."
12