7: BREACH OF CONTAINMENT

The messhall looked empty.

Tori had not seen it look this way in a while, given the asteroid had a staff of nearly a hundred, and all the times she had ventured here in the past, some sort of meal time had been called. Others were always there. Others, like Grace. Like Tam. But today, she was early. Nearly two hours prior to the standard wake-up call, it was likely her alarm would chime into an empty quarter. But something had to be done… something. That perilous two-month mark had passed with the night before.

Stepping through the ranks of vacant tables and chairs to the resource tab, she slipped a fork and a knife out. Sparing a moment to look at the utensils, she breathed a sigh. Flint had asked for one of the latter; did he know more about his unique condition than he let on? She knew better than to outright ask him, though. He'd already professed openly that he knew about as much as she did.

That didn't really change the fact that he behaved more alien than he ought. There were times when she couldn't figure out if it was the Flood doing it to him, screwing up neural pathways, or if it was something he'd learned out in the field. Spending the majority of his time alone at the front lines might have made him strange, but there seemed a pattern to it.

Like it was a learned behavior… had he picked it up off his Elite friends? Without meeting one such warrior herself, though, there was no real way to know. Turning away from the dispenser, Tori left the room and headed down the corridor towards Quarantine. She knew the cage was killing him – he'd never stayed in one spot for this long in his whole life – even the training grounds of their adolescence were larger than that isolation chamber. Having spent almost as long in one herself when she was younger, Tori fully understood his feelings; but it didn't quicken the cure or a treatment, nor did it heal his strange condition so he might emerge without knocking the whole asteroid dead.

Getting into Quarantine proved the easy part. Lifting the access port off the wall, she tripped the wires together to make the doors open without entering a code. As such, the opening was not logged, and if Tam looked at the files, he wouldn't see her intrusion. Replacing the port to the wall and securing it, Tori slipped through and down the hall to the only occupied room. Through the window, she could see Flint sprawled across the bed, either still out of it from the day before's treatment, or sleeping, finally.

He'd never really slept well. Put down by Tam's harsh deprivation treatments, he'd stay out for a small while, but not for long. Trying to get any rest on his own, the increments of time were smaller still. Each time, the terrible nightmares would bring him awake, usually hyped on fear or adrenalin or both. He never said what they were, and wouldn't talk about why he even had them.

She strode past the ranks of computers, testing equipment and rows of old samples. Most of them had been utterly destroyed by the rigorous process the scientists were using, making them useless. Each was just one more way how not to get the job done, really. Tori paused at the airlock entrance, and wondered how to proceed. The tedious process of staving off the Flood's expansion was not really helping.

Every few days, Tam would have to knock Flint out, go in, hook him up to a catheter and leave it open until he'd nearly bled to death; and when the pressure was relieved, he'd replace the necessary amount with clean blood before disconnecting. The process had left Flint looking more than a little miserable… but like usual, he didn't outwardly complain until he decided he was more than sick of it. But there was little anyone could do about being trapped in an atmosphere too thin to make good use of… Flint couldn't stop them, couldn't even fight them.

That, most of all, had made him edgy. Getting through the locks had slowed Tori, so she only got through every other night. Listening to him talk, watching him stare through the transparent steel at her, even taking in his current physical situation, all made her cringe. Unlike her, he was trapped in there for a small eternity. He had nothing to do, nothing to put his mind to.

And while the progress on finding a way to cure him was slow to almost nonexistent, it was still happening. The attempts of the staff assigned the project had seemed to forget what it was they were working on, though… he'd failed to remain Human some time ago.

Tori inhaled once, and blew it all out as a sigh. If there was one thing most normal Humans didn't understand about the Spartans, it was the small but significant fact that they had been trained as a team. One giant team. Divided into working groups, yes, but it didn't matter if one Spartan wasn't in another's assigned squadron. Tori had been long removed from their ranks, but she still remembered what she was.

Watching Flint decay was almost more than she could bear.

Her fingers traced over the recessed buttons for a moment, before she tapped in the default code. The near door opened. Tori ran her eyes over the interior of the small airlock, assessing and calculating. It was only a six by six chamber, but then it was only meant for passing through, and not for keeping anything inside.

She stepped in, twisting the knife in her hand. She didn't look behind her as the door closed there, watching instead the doors ahead; the hiss of a seal taking met her ears, and a short time later, a rush of foul air slipped through the breaking seal ahead of her. Her expression crinkled in disgust – but she figured she already knew what the smell was.

That was Flood. For all his being treated like an animal, Flint was a relatively well-cared-for animal, leaving his only woe to be his containment and his illness. Either by itself was enough to fell any man.

After taking several small, calculated breaths to steady herself against the terrible smell, Tori stepped out of the airlock into the room behind the window. She looked around, once, then moved toward the bed. Drawing near, she began to roll the knife around in her hand, contemplating its feel. The shiny, smooth metal handle rolled easily against the skin of her palm, but it wasn't why she had come in.

"See, Flint?" Tori asked, her voice nearly a whisper. Lifting her other hand, she stroked those fingers across his forehead. She hesitated when what she felt was clammy and cool, but the touch made him move, reassuring her he hadn't died. Relaxing again, she smiled. "See, you don't hurt me."

Tori took a moment to take him in; round face, grizzled, sunken features, broad frame. As the lights in the room beyond clicked on with the automated day/night timer, the light poured through the steel window across Tori and Flint, illuminating her presence where she ought not be. Tam had locked the door to Quarantine for a reason.

Leaning close over him, Tori's smile broadened. "You're not alone, Flint." Though his skin looked frightfully green, she noted, his hair remained the color of polished gold; it made an interesting contrast. Absently she wondered if it was straight or curly… he always kept it buzzed, so it was impossible to tell.

Not that hair of any real length had any place on a working soldier… it got in the way of helmets, especially ones with environmental seals. Straightening, Tori breathed out.

"I guess I should go, then. Tam will be along soon."

Hans made it in first, though Vernon was right on his heels. The two men hardly bothered to look through the window before plopping down at their consoles; both had had working projects the night before, and wanted to finish the relative theories before attempting anything new.

Tam stepped in almost a full minute later, though, coffee still in hand, and spared a moment to look through the window. He looked at the window itself for a moment, trying mentally not to call it glass, then through it. A brow raised.

Behind the transparent steel pane, Flint had woken; sitting up, a blot of dark discoloration on the floor had caught his eye. Focusing on it, horror had set in. He knew the scientists were arriving, but today that was as much a good thing as a bad one. Rolling off the bed, he took the three quick steps between it and the airlock, dropping to his knees on the floor next to the blot – it was Tori.

He took her shoulder, and rolled her over, but her eyes had closed. His attempt to test her pulse nearly singed the skin off his fingers, though. "Tori?" What was she doing in here? Hadn't she said something about not having an immune system? What fool thought had driven her into the one room on the asteroid where she would only die horribly?

Flint scooped his arms under her, and lifted. On the other side of the window, he saw a coffee smack into the floor, forgotten and forsaken. He had only to wait a moment for the airlock to cycle as the scientists hurried into a protective suit and came through it. Tori was handed off, and half-carried half-dragged back through the airlock. They dressed her in a suit before cycling back, but she was ferried out the door and up the corridor in short order.

Flint spread a hand on the window, watching her being taken away. Questions still remained about the situation… but everyone had abandoned him, in favor of following Tori out. There was no one left to ask… even if the comn had been on. He sighed, and sat down on the edge of the bed to wait. Maybe she wasn't too far gone, maybe she would survive that… and be back again eventually.

In the falling silence their departure granted, he focused on his hand. Lifting it from the glass, he looked at the palm. Raising his other hand to match the first, he studied them. It was the most fleeting grasp at sanity, but while he knew it had been the right thing to let her go, to hand her off, inwardly he knew he'd really wanted to keep her.

If he had, he wouldn't be alone anymore…

Commands and demands flew back and forth as fast as bullets, the scientists frenzied and hurried. Through a veil of environmental consolidation, and a seeming endless layer of seals and protective layers, they eventually got Tori hooked into a medical interface and responding to stimulus; it wasn't enough, though, given the nature of her current situation. Why she had walked into Flint's cell was never raised; she was, as Tam had pointed out, a valuable asset to the asteroid's staff.

Meting out punishment for disobeying an order would wait until much later… if in fact she was alive to receive it. Grace came in as quick as she heard, lending her expertise of the innermost workings of Tori's fragile system. She had been at the head of the team that brought the Spartan back from the brink many times since her arrival at the asteroid, and would be needed to stabilize any efforts to purge the infection spreading through Tori's defenseless systems.

Arrest began to seize much of her organs, shutting everything down, the cellular degeneration and rearrangement happening even on an outward, visible level. In a desperate stab at a last chance, Grace filled a syringe with dark red liquid from an unmarked bottle, and injected it right into Tori's jugular. The spastic twitching ceased almost immediately… following that, the irritation surrounding the pulled, stressed areas relaxed, and a moment later, she drew her first ragged breath on her own.

When Grace looked up, she found all the others were looking at her. Tam reached for the unmarked bottle, and looked at it curiously. Offering it to Grace, his expression asked the question.

Taking it from his hand, Grace answered simply, "It's blood."

"Blood?" Tam asked, astonished. "You gave her a couple cc's of blood, and it did that?"

"From the other Spartan." Grace nodded. "The Flood doesn't hurt him. I wanted to investigate it for any other properties, so I swiped a sample back when he first got here."

Tam looked down at Tori, then up at the monitors. Her fever was slowly ticking downward, away from the danger level, and her heart rate had slowed from the defibrillating hammering it had been doing before. She was also beginning to breathe easier, too. "Damnation, Grace." He looked back at the other scientist then. "That's some powerful T-cells."

"More than just." Grace looked at the bottle, then at Tori. "But the body knows how it is supposed to be shaped… and she's missing something."

"Yes, but we don't even know if they've the same blood type… yes, they both had augmentations and survived it. But still! You could have killed her just then."

Grace cast him a cross look. "Tori was already going to die, just then, Tam. It was a gamble, and it paid off. I wouldn't be so quick to condemn my actions, were I you, considering the circumstances."

Tam shook his head. "But that sample was contaminated."

"So? She already had that in her. Obviously." Grace waved the bottle at him, dismissively. "What's a little more going to hurt, given that it comes with the only thing capable of fighting it off? She's stabilized… I can take it from here."

"Keep her in lockdown." Tam decided. "Improved or not, she's now a source of more Flood infection, too. I don't want that spreading through this asteroid." He turned away, stepping through the airlock into the room beyond, where he started stripping out of his containment suit. As he discarded it, he could be heard grumbling about Spartans and their seeming magnetism to Flood.

Grace watched as most of the others attending the situation began to file away, the team assigned Flint's case going first. Her own team had just been reassigned; if Tori turned out half as well as her initial reaction suggested, though, the odds of her being cleared for access to the asteroid at large again were fairly high. But while her exposure to the Flood spores had been indirect, there was also the question of the reaction of her system to a foreign immunity. The progress of the cellular transformation had obviously been arrested, but would that last, if her system rejected – or tried to reject – the foreign booster?

Usually the source of systemic rejection was based in the presence of the immune system itself – so the odds of that happening were fairly low. But the situation was fairly unique, and so too was Tori's physical condition. Being an augment built for war – ostensibly, to withstand massive punishment without falling or failing – the lack of presence of an immune system to match would change quite a few things about the anatomy of the situation.

Grace would need to keep her under close observation to be sure nothing else went horribly awry.

Jorg Anders had always loved technology above biology… the doctorate had landed him at the asteroid. The tinker fingers had landed him at the maintenance end. He didn't care – their equipment was top of the line, and being allowed to take it apart, tinker with it, and put it back together was great.

Being handed a full suit of working… or theoretically working… Mjolnir Mark VI, on the other hand… that was Christmas. He'd been working on the suit's minor functions at night and sometimes even at lunch. But now nearly all of that category was done, and it was time to move on to the bigger bits of machinery. He didn't have a clue how to replace or repair the missing chunks of ablative coating, or how to resurface the reflective ceramic layer that had been blasted away under bullet scarring. But he did know how to restore the powered joints, even without fresh, new parts. Most of the damage was superficial, barring the six punctures across the left side of the main chest piece.

Getting it to respond to programmed stimulus – like a self-diagnostic of the sensor array and data feeds that supplied information in realtime to the HUD – required it be completely assembled, however. Sealing the helmet down to the neck of the armor proved a difficult process, though, given the flexible nano-carbon weave it locked down to.

Jorg could only imagine having something of that sort hugged to his jawline, making an arc over the back of his head to connect his ears. Without a body to hold the suit to shape where it was designed to go over a joint, it was hard to make it stay where it ought in order to assemble it.

Finishing his struggle with it, he slid the seal catches down and waited a moment for the suit to communicate with itself while he unwound the jack cables that were attached to his computer. Reaching for the port at the back of the helmet, his cable head met resistance. After stabbing impotently at the stubborn port a few times, Jorg leaned over and peered at the port, his brow furrowed into annoyance.

Seeing where it ought to go, he tried to push the jack into the port again… and again, it wouldn't go in. Putting the cable down, he pressed his thumb down into the port at the bottom, testing.

Sure enough, a data card popped out far enough for him to grasp. Eyebrows up, Jorg slid it out, and looked at it curiously. The holographic interface glowed a sharp, brilliant blue around the hole through the center of the otherwise square card. It was more or less a standard AI hard drive chip… and the base power cell looked in good working order, given that it was glowing.

Turning away from the armor, Jorg poked a drive slot in his computer and dropped the chip into the tray when it slid out. He pushed the tray back in, and waited for the two to correspond so he could investigate the chip's contents.

He drew his hand away from the keyboard, though, when the lights, the computer, even the air filters in the ceiling overhead, all shut down at the same time.

"Ah, crap."

System reboot

ONI facility function class R-47-3-002.

Accessing authorization coding…

Authorization accessed successfully. Running data diagnostics… diagnostic complete. Systems functional to 92.003 percent base capability.

Rerouting memory to active buffers… transfer complete. Subject located.

I see you there.