Halo: Isolation
Chapter Three
Another wave of nausea rolls over Marc as he is pulled into and out of slipspace in the span of a few milliseconds. He barely manages to twist in the air before he gracelessly slams into a field of pack ice. Pain jabs through his back,and he manages to choke down both a yelp and a mouthful of bile.
Marc pushes himself to his feet, smacking the side of his helmet to clear his head. He finally manages to shake free the disorientation and looks around. He is standing on a flat, blue-white landscape of ice. In the sky, there is a distant, dim orange orb. The system's larger star. Little eddies of frost and wind swirl and roll all around him. Even with the armor's insulating layers, a gnawing cold prods at his skin and threatens to sink deeper.
Two things become instantly apparent to the Spartan. The first is the absence of John and the Forerunner. He checks his comms. "Bedragare to Sierra A Two Two Two. Acknowledge?" His comms are silent. "John, come in. Heritage? Anyone, respond."
While still experimenting with the comms, Marc starts walking toward the second item of interest: a giant gray spire jutting from the glacier. It stretches several kilometers into the atmosphere, and depending on the glacier, could be much taller, buried under the ice. With no other apparent landmark and a growing chill, it's the most logical place to go.
Twenty minutes later, he finally catches a signal. "Bedragare to John. Come in John." A faint voice responds. "This is John. Marc, can you hear me?" Marc sighs, and the knot in his stomach finally loosens. "Finally. Yes, I can hear you, barely. What's your situation?"
"Still shaking off the teleportation sickness. I'm somewhere with a lot of ice, and not much else." Marc glances around. "Sounds familiar. Where's Heritage?" "I managed to contact him a few minutes ago. He said he dropped us off near our first objectives, but the Cryptum's range was limited. He placed us as close to them as he could, but we'll have to find our way from there."
Marc sighs again, and this time annoyance colors his tone. "A boatload of help he is." As he says this, he finally reaches the base of the spire. "Just as well, I think I found what I'm looking for." "Good. I'll...keep this chann..." Marc taps his radio. "Repeat that last thing, my radio's bugging out." "Marc? I can't...peat what you said." Marc mutters a curse. "Something's blocking our comms. Radio silence until one of us figures out what it is." John's response is a mess of static. Marc sighs a third time and looks to the spire.
The spire seems smooth and featureless, but as Bedragare closes the final meters to it, irregularities become apparent. There are dark lines which extend up the length of the spire and out of sight. They occasionally veer off at odd angles, intersect, and in some cases, stop abruptly. He reaches the base. "Right. How to open you?" He starts walking around the base, looking for any clue or sign of entry.
Ten minutes and three laps around the base later, and nothing becomes apparent. Marc is growing irritated, mostly from cold and a growing sense that his time is being wasted. He starts to consider a less subtle approach when his motion tracker blips. He turns in the direction of the blip. Out on the ice, toward where he first appeared, there are numerous flashes of light. Faint roars accompany them. Knights. He unconsciously reaches for his back, and the scattershot clipped there.
His hand grasps at nothing.
Marc snatches at air again, then realizes his mistake. The scattershot must have been knocked off his back in the landing. He makes a quiet promise to find his old drill sergeant and let him kick his ass. He turns back to the spire. He figures he has less than two minutes before the Knights find him. As if to illustrate the point, the blips all start moving toward him. The roars grow louder, and Crawler screeches accompany him. Marc knows the Crawlers are likely charging ahead of the Knights, like hounds before the hunters. He continues his search, forcing down a growing anxiety. Finally he yells. "Open, Goddamn it!" Marc pulls back and punches the gray metal with his left fist.
The noise reverberates like a gong, but doesn't fade. Rather, it grows louder and louder. The ice around the spire splits, and so do the black lines crisscrossing the structure's surface. White light breaks through, and the great sections of metal in between the lines float outward, widening and opening. Marc sighs explosively. "Cutting it pretty damn close." He slips in through one of the splits, not bothering to wait. And just in time: a bolt of hardlight scorches the metal beside him. The ancillas become visible against the frozen glare, hauling toward the spire and firing madly.
Marc squeezes into the center of the spire. He is standing on a transparent hexagonal platform. It floats above a dark shaft that stretches out of view below him. A panel of yellow hardlight floats to his left. He quickly moves toward it and starts jabbing his fingers at the glyphs scrolling across the surface. More hardlight sears past him and against his shields. A scream brings his attention back to the Prometheans. The Crawlers are scratching their way through the openings. And the openings are still growing wider, allowing the Crawlers further maneuverability. "Damn." He renews his pace.
One of the hyena like constructs finally squeezes through and lunges at him. He whirls, backhanding it across its insectoid face. This veers it to the side, and it tumbles past him. Its metal claws rake against the lip of the platform, throwing sparks. It is a useless gesture, and the Crawler tumbles off the platform and into the void below. "Screw this," he mutters. Once again, his fist goes through the terminal in a shower of sparks. The walls halt a moment, then start to close again. The Crawlers scream as they are crushed. The platform jerks, then descends rapidly.
Marc has a moment of vertigo, and rests against the terminal. The chute narrows a bit, closing the gap between the platform and the walls speeding past. He closes his eyes a moment. Because of this, he doesn't see the red blip on his radar, or the blue flash as something appears behind him. He doesn't hear the Knight rush him.
But he is Marc Bedragare. A long time veteran of nearly a hundred campaigns. A hardened ODST, then a black ops SPARTAN-IV. He didn't survive what he did for as long as he did without nurturing and honing an amazing and uncanny survival instinct. Because of this, he knows instantly of the danger, and is ready for it.
He drops to a knee at the last moment. The air sings as a hardlight blade scorches its way through where his neck was less than a second earlier. Without turning, he hears the metal sound of the Knight's foot as it steps to rebalance itself, and he gauges the Knight' s position. Using the terminal as a brace, he mule kicks as hard as he can. He hits the Knight in its knee, hobbling it and forcing it to drop to its hurt knee. Marc turns, balling his fist and aiming just right. He viciously uppercuts the Knight in its chin. The blow lifts the construct off its feet and tosses it to the far side of the platform.
Marc rises to his feet as the Knight does the same. He flicks his wrist, and his knife pops out of the bracer and into his hand. The Knight roars and waves its sword at him in a challenge. He returns the gesture, flicking the matte black blade. "Come and get me."
In a dull, gray haze, Marc sees a white light hovering over him. It speaks in a tinny, deep and somewhat sad voice.
"Reclaimer... what has been done to you?"
Marc comes to in complete darkness. Every part of him hurts, and he tastes blood on his lips. Blue sparks catch his attention. He activates his VISR. Little tan lines outline everything and make it clearer.
He is at the bottom of the shaft. The lift lies in shattered panes all around him. Twisted metal laces through it and smoke hangs in the air. The end of the ride was not gentle, it seems. The lift must have lost power and plummeted right after...
Marc tries to remember exactly what happened. The Knight ambushed him. It happened very quickly, he remembers. The Knight rushed him in a zigzag motion. He slammed against the wall, throwing sparks as his shield ground against the speeding wall. He leaned to the right. The sword slashed past the left of his head. A scorching red line traced up into the dark. He hooked the Knight's sword arm. It roared, he headbutted it. His knife hand was caught. The Knight tried to crush him against the wall. He let the knife go. His free hand caught it. An orange skull filled his vision. He buried the knife in between the eye sockets.
He vaguely remembers what happened next. Marc pushed the burning machine away, letting the knife go. He shakily stepped over the flickering data purge. He took another step. He managed a third, and... his skull exploded. He fell over, twitching, writhing and choking as an invisible vise took hold and squeezed. He felt a sudden sensation of weightlessness, and blacked out.
Marc's VISR highlights something buried in the debris. He starts digging it out while trying to figure out what exactly happened to him. He had had a seizure, obviously. But he had never had one before. And while he had read up on them - there was always the danger of seizures in the first three weeks after augmentations - he was certain no augment seizures hurt that bad. It was worse than anything he had felt before. The augmentations, falling from low orbit, anything. It was sudden, unexpected, inexplicable and worst of all: crippling. Marc had no way of treating it, and no way of knowing if it would happen again.
All the more reason to get this done fast, he thinks as he finally frees the object: the Knight's lightrifle. It is scratched and dented, but serviceable. He clips it to his back. The elevator door is cracked open slightly. The blast had damaged it, bent it slightly inward. Thank God for GEN2. He approaches it and kicks it the rest of the way open. Beyond it is a short hallway ending in a bend. He follows it, and finds another tunnel with another bend. And another. And another.
Eventually, the labyrinthine tunnel ends quite suddenly. It dumps him out into a very, very large room. The ceiling extends over seven hundred meters above. Marc wonders how much of the elevator ride was controlled and how much was falling. He runs through several equations - thickness of the Halo, speed of the elevator, how far above the surface he was when the elevator started moving - and decides that around two thirds of his descent was gravity-based. Thank God for GEN2.
The far wall lies over a kilometer away. And on either side of him, the room extends forever, even curving upwards slightly. He'd be willing to bet that the room extends the entire length of the Halo.
Halfway up the room, suspended in the middle and likewise extending forever, is a narrow beam of yellow-green light. At regular intervals, the beam threads through the center of great circles of hardlight and floating metal.
On the whole, the spectacle is impressive, intimidating and entirely impossible to make sense of. Marc has no clue where to go, what to expect and which buttons to press. Flustered, he opens his comms.
He gets a ping almost immediately. "...Twenty two to Bedragare. Marc, come in." Marc presses his chin to the mic. "Marc, here. Go ahead, John." The normally stoic Spartan's voice betrays relief. "Finally. Your vitals went nuts about an hour ago, then nothing. Been trying to raise you ever since." Marc pauses, then continues. "I had a date with gravity, but I'm alright. Give me a sitrep." John doesn't need to know about Marc's episode, or his current predicament. He has enough to worry about.
"Heritage has finished his objective, and is heading to the second. I'm just about to hit mine. What about you?" Marc glances back up at the trickle of energy, and the slight curvature of the insanely large room. "Almost done. Keep me posted."
"Will do." The comms pop as John closes the channel momentarily. Marc picks a direction and starts walking. The going is slow, as the floor is a maze of ramps, platforms, buildings, chutes and even the occasional man cannon. Marc makes a mental note to talk to the Forge team back on the Orion and model a war games map after it all.
Two things happen then, quite suddenly. The first is that a waypoint appears on his HUD without warning, pointing to one of the hardlight circles the beam is flowing through. The second thing is a Phaeton that moves out from behind a tower and opens fire at him.
Agility and the fortune of seeing the Phaeton first saves his life. He leaps and clambers over a short wall near him. The cover is short lived, as the VTOL appears above him in a flash. Marc wastes no time standing on ceremony, and runs like the devil himself was after him. He leaps, rolls, slides, dives, jets, climbs, sprints and generally does everything in his power to get the hell away from the gunship. It's an impressive display of coordination especially with a hail of directed energy and missiles raining down around him.
But the Phaeton stubbornly refuses to let him go. It blinks into existence above, beside and in front if him, takes pot shots at him and repeats endlessly. The battered Spartan is soon exhausted and making mistakes. His chances of survival dwindle lower and lower.
Less than three minutes later, Marc is sprinting across a catwalk suspended over a shallow but wide trench. The Phaeton dogs him still, and Marc has no cover. It's endgame, one way or another. When the VTOL blinks and appears in front and to the side of him, an idea grips Marc. A brilliant idea. A really stupid idea. And at this point, the only thing that can save him.
He leaps, as hard and as fast and as high as he can, straight at the Phaeton. The ship fires its missile pods, and the orange projectiles streak past him, annihilating the bridge. Marc slams into the nose, scrambling like mad for a handhold. He finds one just before he slides over. The Phaeton spins wildly, trying to shake off the Spartan. He is grasping the ship with one hand, a white knuckled death grip. The Phaeton halts suddenly, trying to use inertia to dislodge him.
Instead, Marc swings around and latches firmly to the side of the cockpit. He pries it open, looking directly into the orange glowing eyes of the pilot. The Promethean soldier spits curses at him and swipes at him. "Get out."
The soldier plummets into the gorge. Marc settles in, trying to remember the one simulation he ran two years ago. The Phaeton shakily starts heading to the waypoint.
A Knight patrols the lip of the platform, three hundred and fifty meters above the floor. One of the scout ships sent out earlier is returning. But something is amiss. The ship lists on its port side, and is coming in fast. Too fast. And it is aiming for the Knight.
The construct screams once before the VTOL slams into it at ninety MPH. It screeches and tumbles across the platform and throws the pilot clear. Marc tumbles alongside it a ways, yelling. He comes to a stop eventually, his shields crackling. The Phaeton doesn't, and tumbles of the far side of the platform.
Something skitters to a stop near Marc. He pushes himself to his feet and limps over to it. It's an armor ability. Marc wonders at the convenience. He picks it up, brushes it a bit and clips it to his back. His suit instantly interfaces with it, and a relevant icon appears on his HUD. A hardlight shield. He smiles appreciatively.
A roar brings his attention to the rest of the scene. A cadre of Prometheans, drawn by the clamor, now rushes onto the platform at him. But this time, there are no ambushes. No lack of situational awareness. Marc is ready, eager, and more than slightly annoyed. He draws his lightrifle and charges.
A Knight falls over, vaporizing, as Marc steps over it. There are no more enemies in sight. Marc looks back at the trail of destruction he blazed. Bent metal, scorches, orange ichor and more litter the whole length of the battlefield. He ejects the spent energy cartridge, inserts a fresh one and approaches the terminal. This one isn't the complex blue orbs Marc has been encountering. Just a big, simple, yellow-glowing button. He presses it, glad for the reprieve.
The energy beam flickers, dims a moment, then explodes with activity, blinding the Spartan. He blinks away spots in his vision and looks again. The trickle has become a bright river of yellow and green that fills the entirety of the band. He opens the comms. "I got the grid online. Copy?"
"Copy," John replies. "I got the centripetal generators working again. You're sure the grid works?" Marc glances back at the console. He realizes that there's just the button. No way to enter coordinates, monitor traffic, nothing. "One way to find out. Have Scotty beam us to our next objectives." There's a pause. "Scotty?" Marc sighs. "Heritage. Have the Forerunner teleport us."
John takes a moment to reply yet again. His tone is hesitant when he does. "Funny thing: Heritage has gone dark."
"'Dark'? Dark how? Dark where?" Marc's headache returns, for entirely different reasons. "'Dark' as in he hasn't checked in the last three times I hailed him. As for where... I'm not sure. Probably near his first objective." Marc grunts. His headache isn't helping him think. "I'll find out a way to get to him. I suggest you find your way to to your next objective. Hopefully, the old bastard nodded off or-"
Marc's train of thought is derailed when a host of blue dots blink into existence behind him. White flashes tease the edge of his vision. He wheels around, rifle at the ready. And all he sees are Sentinels. Dozens. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. A swarm of triangular drones all stare at him, their weapon-crested undercarriages trained on him. Marc stands utterly still. They can see him, they are locked. He'd be turned into a wisp of vapor before he pulled the trigger. With nowhere to run and no way to fight, Bedragare stands completely still for want of anything to do.
But the Sentinels hold their fire. A white orb weaves its way through the throng. Marc lowers his weapon as he realizes what is happening. The white ball exits the mass of drones and settles before Marc Bedragare. The glow lessens, and the Monitor reveals itself. It speaks with the same deep, tinny voice Marc heard in the dark.
"Greetings, Reclaimer. I am the Monitor of Installation 02. I am 007 Iniquitous Dominion. We have much to discuss."
(Written by Marc Bedragare. Edited and proofread by John-A222)
