Chapter Thirteen: THE DARKNESS
The Pelican. The Pelican is a dropship.
The Pelican skimmed out across the darkened sea. Thed was at the wheel, and in the bay Oreo and Johnson hunkered down, preparing for the fight of their lives; board the Truth and Reconciliation, locate Captain Keyes' signal, retrieve his Captain-Codes, change his diaper, and then run away. But for now, Johnson was filling in Oreo on the Flood and his experience with it.
"How did I survive the muthafuckin' Flood?" Johnson mused as he looked out the window of the Pelican, watching the night darkened sea rush by, again. He had to look out the window because Oreo had made Thed close the bay door. "Hell, shawty, I don't even know. That turkey Darren's plasma grenade knocked me on my ass fast and burned the shit outta me. Next thing I new, the Flood was just passing my black ass over." He frowned. "Hell I guess even the fucking Flood is racist shit."
"Did you see what happened to Keyes?" Oreo pressed.
Johnson's lips tightened. "Hell naw."
Oreo turned towards the cockpit (so sexist!) and called out: "What about you, Ted?"
"My name's Thed, biatch! Maaan I'm sick off all you white breads assuming that jus' because I have the same or similar name as all of my dead brothers that I'm the exact same as them!"
"Um, how many brothers do you actually have, Thed?"
"I had fifteen when we got to this ring. The other one hundred and forty eight were on Reach and they got killed by the Covenant…" He cleared his throat. "It was on that day, the day that Reach fell, that I swore revenge on all aliens and people who look different from me."
"Well, Thed, you're not the only one who wants payback," Oreo said. "I was just thinking about my time in the brig—the brig of the ship we're going back to right now, in fact. It's kind of ironic that Keyes has gotten captured on the Truth and Reconciliation twice, isn't it?"
"Ah." Johnson nodded wisely. "The brig, nigg? Got down on the dl, didn't you?
"What?"
"The Down Low." He shook his head ruefully. "Shorty…thinking about it is like trippin when you're free—you think, 'hey, I would never have a nigga suck my ass while pounding a nigga in the ass and jerking a nigga off at the same time while taping a picture of yo bitch to his ass.' But once you're on the inside, once you're hard, well…"
"You've never been in prison, Johnson."
Johnson ignored her and radioed the cock pit. "Hey, Thed, we there yet?"
"Fo shizzle mah nizzle."
"Boi." Johnson's mouth curved in distain. "Those are our words, boi. You better watch your fuckin' mouth before I slap it outta you."
"Thed," began Oreo, putting a hand on Johnson's wrist, "a lot of people have died since we got to this ring." She tried not to think about the fact that the Chief had been the main reason for this. "How many brothers of yours are left?"
"None," said Thed raggedly. They all shared a moment of worried silence. But then Johnson put a solemn hand on Oreo's shoulder.
"We can do this, shotty. You too, Tade."
"Yeah," Thed's voice broke on the radio. "Yeah. We're coming up on the Truth and Reconciliation now, guys. According to his neural link, Captain Keyes is somewhere on the bridge."
"Let's give them hell," said Oreo. She fist bumped Johnson while inside the cockpit Thed gave a slow salute to his sweat soaked brow, showing his respect to all the fallen brothers and sisters who had died since the Pillar of Autumn landed on Halo. Then a Banshee piloted by a Flood combat form smashed into the Pelican at a hundred and twenty miles per hour. The impact sent both vessels careening into the Truth and Reconciliation's open hanger in a shower of flames, Oreo and Johnson smashing together painfully by the impact, then tossed like pin balls as the Pelican's side slapped against the walkway overlooking the hanger. It flipped over and landed upside down atop a docked Wraith tank. With the crash, a noise like the opening of some metal hell filled their ears, leaving only a ringing silence when it passed. But the peace was short lived; in seconds, a bright blue plasma fire flared to life beneath the wreckage. The Wraith's reactor core had gone critical. The hull of the Pelican began to heat, its insides slowly transforming into an oven.
Oreo coughed herself awake to the smell of burning flesh. She opened her eyes onto a world suffused in blood red light from the emergency lights of the Pelican. The deck was now searingly hot under her hands. Her lungs felt like they were burning. She pushed herself to her feet, stumbling towards the cockpit, stopping in her tracks. Before her eyes, the cockpit was a crumpled mass of twisted metal—nothing inside could have survived the impact. She gritted her teeth and turned away, searching for Johnson. The bay door of the Pelican had buckled inwards a bit and it looked jammed. She found him splayed on the ground, his leg twisted and mangled. His hair was beginning to smoke. Oreo took a deep breath of air and plunged forwards, shoving both hands under his arm pits and pulling him up. The hot floor squeaked and groaned under her feet as she pulled Johnson across it towards the closed bay door, throwing one last look at the cockpit.
"Thed!" She shouted into the shredded mass that the forward portion of the ship had become. "Thed, are you in there!?" Movement caught her eye. Through a crack in the wreckage, buried under a heavy metal slab, a charred but still somehow very white form twitched.
"Niggas…" Thed strained to push off the red hot industrial size architectural girder that had pinned him to his chair. His arms fell off.
"Oh god." Oreo looked away for a moment, noticing that the controls to the door were locked. "Thed," she whispered with increasing urgency. "I need you to open the bay door. If you don't, we all die." She paused, "I'm sorry, Thed. I don't think you're coming with us."
"I understand." Thed's arm stumps fumbled at the controls. His eyes had already burned away, so he was blind.
"It's over there," added Oreo. "The button is over there. To the left. There. No, go back. Yeah. No, back. Go left. Yes. Yes that's right." The tears streamed down her face and evaporated.
Thed's blackened arm stump thumped down on the big red button. Oreo heard the pelican bay door groaning as it strained to open. She looked back at Thed's dying body.
"Tad…" she began quietly. "I'm sorry we never knew you. Very well, I mean."
"GO!" he coughed. "GET OUTTA HERE, BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE!" Oreo turned away but did not move. Thed spoke one more time. "And…tell Johnson that all I ever wanted…was for him to…be proud of me!"
Oreo nodded silently as she dragged Johnson's unconscious body towards the Pelican's slowly opening door. "Open god damn it!" She kicked at the quickly heating metal again and again, her armored combat boots cracking against the hot steel as sweat and tears stung her eyes. With a sudden crash the door slammed open, revealing the smoke choked hanger full of looming mechanical shapes. Without looking back, Oreo stumbled through the smoking portal, taking Johnson with her.
Thed watched her go as a single tear fell from his eye socket. "Lift off."
The Wraith tank beneath the Pelican exploded with the force of ten thousand plasma grenades, shearing the Pelican in half in a gout of molten steel. Oreo and Johnson were thrown to cover behind a line of unused Ghosts and Banshees as huge tentacle-like tongues of plasma licked at their heels. The blast of compressed air made every vehicle in the hanger rock back, and a sound like an exploding sun shattered all the glass in the room, though there was no actual glass in the room. Huge globules of red hot sludge splattered onto random surfaces as the survivors huddled beneath the wings of a Ghost for shelter, managing to avoid the deadly debris. Oreo tried to catch her breath, but it was as if all the air had been ripped out of her body. She gasped, waving smoke away, and became dimly aware that Sergeant Johnson was coughing too.
"Johnson! You okay?" She propped him up against the Ghost.
"I...I can't feel my leg."
Oreo looked down. Johnson's legs appeared fine, which was odd considering one of them had just been broken. Had she imagined it in the gloom?
"My third leg," said Johnson.
Oreo groaned inwardly, but what came out of her mouth was: "Thed is dead."
"I know." Johnson reached up as if to adjust his cap, but it was no longer there. His hand dropped dejectedly into his lap. "I know. I was awake the whole time."
Oreo slumped back. "Why did you make me carry—"
Johnson turned quickly away from her. "Why do you think, Oreo? I couldn't face him. The kid was like a son to me. What he said—how was I supposed to answer that?"
"You could have said something." Oreo smacked her hand into the ground. Her finger tips were numb. "God damn it Johnson—the kid died thinking you hated him."
Johnson's shoulders shook. "But…but I did. Don't you see...I didn't hate him because he thought he was black. I hated him because even though he was the whitest son of a bitch on the planet, he was still blacker than me."
"God damn it." Oreo swung out at the wall beside her. "God damn it!" Her knuckles bit into the purple hull of the Ghost. She raised a bleeding fist to the air. "GOD DAMN IT!"
There was a gurgling sound behind her. She turned. Something huge and yellow hauled itself over the top of a Wraith tank and bore down on them. It was a Flood combat form, covered in burns and missing half its upper body. It was the pilot of the Banshee that had crashed into them!
Oreo's eyes narrowed and she reached for her rifle. It wasn't there—they had left their weapons in the Pelican! "Johnson! Get your gat out!"
Johnson shot bolt upright, turning to see the threat approaching. "MUTHA FUCK! I left the mother fucking gat on the mother fucking plane!" Oreo grabbed Johnson by the arm and hauled him out of the way as the Flood tentacles smacked down like a huge fleshy whip, snapping the Ghost they had hidden behind into two. They sprinted towards the exit, the monster's shadow fast on their backs. Oreo's boobs made her bounce off the door when she reached it.
Johnson waved frantically at the motion sensor. "It's not working nigga! We're trapped in here with that thing! Game over, man!"
Oreo wheeled around as the zombie lurched towards them, gait slowed by the damage its bone structure had suffered during the crash. Oreo stared—it had once been human, once been a man. "Quickly," she said. "We need weapons—we need—"
"There's nothing!" sobbed Johnson hysterically. "Game over man! Game over!"
"Stop saying 'game over'!" Oreo grabbed him and started to move, trying to get past before the beast could corner them. The horrible smell of wet paper bags and also rotting flesh filled her nostrils.
Then a blast of light and sound came out of nowhere and tore the zombie's entire torso off, leaving only a wagging spinal column draped in ribbons of putrid flesh. Coagulated blood along with chunks of organs and bones sprayed everywhere, and then a boot kicked the wobbling lower half squarely in the crotch. The dismembered pair of legs were knocked clean off their feet as Private Mendoza stepped casually in front of Oreo and Johnson, a smoking shotgun slung over his shoulder. He winked.
"Gayme over, girlfriend." Johnson stared. Oreo stared.
"Mendoza?" she asked. "I saw you get shot in the face. How the hell are you still alive?"
Mendoza considered this for a moment, sucking his lip. "Because there are still men alive who I haven't had sex with?"
Johnson sniffed. "If only…if only Thed had been an immortal homosexual."
Mendoza eyed the Sergeant, the cold calculation that had determined the logistics of countless reach-arounds kicking into high gear. "Oh, yeah?"
Oreo moved to cut short this exchange before it became any more penetrating. "Never mind that, Mendoza; we just lost one hell of a pilot—and a friend. And we would have lost ourselves, I mean died, if you hadn't come along. Thanks."
"No problem. I'm sorry to hear that." Mendoza pursed his lips as he handed the smoking shotgun to Sergeant Johnson and produced two SMGs from a back pack, giving one to Oreo and keeping one for himself. He grinned at Johnson. "I figured a big boy like you would want to handle the big gun."
"Damn right homeslice." Johnson obliviously threw up west side. "I mean, shit, you can pump that boomstick all right but for serious you gotta let the man with the plan take over, you know what I'm saying?"
Mendoza curled a lock of hair around his finger and squirmed in delight. "Oh, I think I do."
"I think you don't." Oreo checked the safety on her SMG and snapped her fingers, drawing the attention of the two hilarious minorities. LOL THE NIGRA AND THE HOMOSECHSAH MEXICA "Guys, let's go; we have to make sure that Tad's sacrifice wasn't in vain. I mean, Thed's sacrifice. The Chief is counting on us to find Captain Keyes and get a hold of his neural implant."
"Oh, is that why we're here?" Johnson looked around confusedly. "I thought we were going to clean out the Aryan Brotherhood or something."
"Very funny." Oreo gritted her teeth and turned to Mendoza, a thought occurring to her. "Why are you here, anyways? Last time I saw you was on the Butte. Kit Fisto shot you point blank between the eyes and you died." She glanced around at the empty hanger with an increasingly worried look. "This isn't hell, is it?"
"Why would you assume I would go to hell?" asked Mendoza.
"No reason." Oreo winced, shrinking into herself as her political correctness gland strained under the pressure to secret such enormous amounts of white slash straight guilt so quickly. She straightened up and tried the door again, waving at the motion detectors. This time for some reason the Covenant technology recognized the presence of living beings and slid open, revealing a purple canal of a corridor that could easily have been the inside of Cortana's junk. This comforting thought encouraged Oreo to step inside and the two men to follow her. Well, one and a half men: Mendoza considered himself to have a 'boy pussy,' as we in the gay porn industry like to say. Not that I'm in the porn industry, gay or otherwise, or that my screen name is Duke Rootem.
Oreo raised her rifle and watched the corners as Johnson and Mendoza formed up nervously behind her, watching the shadows of the alien ship. She held up a hand. "Careful, you two; I hear something."
"Covenant?" husked Johnson. "Or the KKK?"
"For the last time we're not hunting down the fucking Aryan Brotherhood." Oreo craned her neck in agitation. "Where do you keep getting these ideas?"
Johnson just shrugged. Mendoza made a 'you tell me' face at him. Well, it was either that or a 'fuck me with that fat dick' face. It was hard to tell. Suddenly, their headsets crackled to life on full volume. A tormented voice rang in everyone's ears through a pall of static.
"CHIIIEEEEEF! Leave me! Get out of here before it's too late!" The voice was twisted, agonized, but still recognizable.
"Captain Keyes!" Oreo wheeled around in circles to find a direction to face that would enhance the signal, somehow. "You're alive! Do you still have your neural implant?"
"Chief?" croaked the voice on the other end. "You sound different! I thought your balls already dropped."
Oreo leaned back against the wall. "No Captain, it's me, Lieutenant Oreo."
"Why I remember that day like it was yesterday," rambled Keyes obliviously. "I had just returned to Reach after one of my colony wide booty call combo chains! There you were, having a shock stick jammed into your ear by one of the drill instructors when suddenly your agonized wails changed from Justin Bieber levels to Keith David levels and you tore that poor bastard's balls out through his ass. It was on that day that me and Dr. Hasley, who was my last stop by the way, knew you were something special."
Oreo digested this. "I…see." She looked guiltily at the other Marines. "And, uh, what other stuff do you remember about his—I mean my childhood?" Johnson scowled at her, but Mendoza only grinned; he was also a nosy bitch.
"Oh, all sorts of things," said Keyes. "Did I ever tell you about those shrink sessions we had to conduct near the end of the Spartan program? You boys kept killing yourselves for no reason! But as it turned out, most of the Spartans were either too shell shocked from the constant torture and psychological reconditioning, I mean training, to retain human emotions and identity. Ah, the folly of youth—if only I was young again! But praise the lord, even though you all came down with dozens of disorders apiece we still managed to squeeze the entire program through as decent, good soldiers, once we stuffed you boys and girls into battle armor and filled you with rage drugs. Damn fine work all round."
Oreo had gone pale. "The Spartan program, sir? They were kids? What…what did you do to them?"
"Well, most of the poor lads died as children, or when we tore their bones out and replaced them with metal. But then, of course, there was you. Dr. Hasley said she'd never seen a more violent response to the training in her whole life! That was why Cortana picked you, we always thought. She has a thing for sadism. Hasley said your complete loss of sanity and empathy had been a result of the training—but damn it if you didn't turn into one hell of a soldier!"
By the time he'd finished, Oreo had placed a hand over her mouth. Her eyes were as wide as saucers. She turned to the others as Keyes continued to ramble.
"My god. I never knew," she said. "I mean, the Chief is bad, but—but not that bad!"
Johnson had lost his frown. "You didn't hear the stories they used to tell. Cortana told me all about the damage the cryo chamber did to his brain when we unfroze him." He shook his head. "Can't believe I'm saying this, but mental retardation might have been the best thing that's ever happened to the Chief. The best thing for the rest of us, anyways."
"And don't even get me started on the multiple personality disorder," interrupted Keyes's voice obliviously. "I mean that whole thing with thinking he had an imaginary friend. Talk about peculiar, it took years of aversion therapy to make him forget about—"
Oreo muted the radio with an irritable motion. "The Captain's obviously not with us right now, guys. The Chief's problems will have to wait until we can get the neural implant. Mendoza—" she stabbed a finger at him "do you have a pen and paper?"
Mendoza's took out a small notebook and a pen. "Of course. Do you want to see my drawings or something?"
"No." Oreo motioned for them to follow her and they did, turning the corner into a veritable labyrinth of lavender passageways. She was looking about at the walls, gathering in details as she spoke.
"When I was captured, they brought McKay and Silva and me in through that hanger and took us straight to the bridge. I counted our turns, steps, and tried to remember a couple of these hallways." She turned left abruptly and they followed.
"That's not a bad talent," said Mendoza, still holding the pen and paper "But it would be so much easier if we had Cortana with us."
Johnson grinned. "Yep."
Oreo shot them a look over her shoulder. They kept their faces as straight as possible. "Mendoza, write down what I say, I might need to recite it—"
Johnson straightened up. He was still listening to Keyes on his earpiece. "Hey, niggs, did you guys know that some of the other Spartans cut the Chief's penis off with garden shears?" He frowned. "Because he'd gotten hold of one of the other Spartans and pulled out his…oh my god."
Oreo growled. "God damn it Johnson I'm trying to concentrate!"
"Do you want me to write that down?" asked Mendoza.
"No! Left turn, eighteen steps!" Oreo fumed as they followed her, Mendoza scribbling furiously. Oreo reached into her breast pocket and pulled out a small prescription bottle, then shook it. It was empty. "Fuck me." Oreo threw it over her shoulder and Mendoza caught it surreptitiously. He and Johnson looked at the bottle, then at each other with raised eyebrows.
"Let me see that!" barked the Lieutenant, wheeling around suddenly and waggling her hand at Mendoza. He jumped and shoved the bottle behind his back, then offered her the notepad. Oreo was too frustrated to notice. Her eyes skimmed over the page and crossed for a moment.
"Okay. Okay, I remember now. We're almost at the bridge." She closed the book and handed it back. "Huh. Strange that we haven't encountered any resistance yet. You'd think that if the Flood had overwhelmed all the Covenant here, there'd be more signs of battle."
"Hmph." Mendoza crossed his arms. "Well, I think it's fabulous, thank you very much."
"I wasn't complaining. Come on. Let's keep going."
"Nigga!" hissed Johnson to Mendoza. "Can I see yo drawings?"
Mendoza handed him the notepad with a wink. "Don't use them all at once, now."
Oreo cleared her throat. "Time's a wasting, boys!" She grinned, suddenly feeling manic. "Let's go!"
They shrugged and followed the Lieutenant down the next empty corridor and through a few more turns. She was counting under her breath. They stopped before a set of doors slightly larger than those that had come before. They still had not encountered any resistance whatsoever.
"This is the door to the bridge," said Oreo. "Johnson, put Keyes back on our channel."
Suddenly, Keyes's croaking voice filled her ears. "Chieeef! Leave me! It's too late for me!"
"Where are you, sir?" asked Oreo in a calm, authoritative voice. "Are you still on the bridge?"
"I don't know!" howled the Captain. "Damn this horrible disease!"
Her eyes widened. "Disease? The Captain must have been infected by the Flood! Don't worry sir, we're coming!" Oreo was practically bouncing off the walls with enthusiasm. She flipped the safety off her weapon and looked over at the other two.
"You guys ready?" Her eyes had a feverous glint to them.
"You can count me in," said Johnson.
"Me threeway," said Mendoza. He held up his caramel hands. "I mean, only if it's gay though. Sorry, girlfriend."
Oreo made a face and then rushed towards the door. It slid open with a hiss and they piled through, weapons ready. But nothing could have prepared them for what they found. The bridge was awash in shadows that danced and flickered from the pale purple lights atop the command platform. Through the turmoil of shadows, they could make out nothing much lining the walls. Likewise there was not much of anything anywhere else in the room.
"ATTAAAA-" Oreo stopped. She looked around, face falling. "Oh…well. Um…good." She was visibly deflating. "Looks like the coast is clear."
"Sheeet." Johnson pumped his shotgun, unnecessarily ejecting a perfectly good shell out. "I was hopin to cap some niggas."
"You guys are disappointed?" said Mendoza. "Gee, straight people are so blood thirsty."
"Don't start." Oreo cocked her head. "Wait a minute—do you hear that?"
Faint moans came from the platform. "I'm straight," said Johnson a bit too loudly.
Mendoza eyed him. "That's what they all say."
"Guys, shut up." Oreo marched up the platform with her weapon ready. She stopped when she got to the top. Her shocked voice made them both jump. "My god—it's the Captain!"
Johnson and Mendoza looked at each other and rushed after her. They too came to a frozen halt when they saw what she had seen. Nothing could have prepared them for what they found on that platform. The command platform was awash in shadows that danced and flickered from the pale purple lights atop the command platform. Through the turmoil of shadows, they could make out a twisted a shape: a barely human body contorted in agony is at it writhed on the ground. Besides that there was nothing at all there.
"Keyes," said Oreo slowly. "He's…he's so old." It was true: the aged Captain was curled up on the ground, his emaciated rib cage rising and falling slowly. He looked like he always did: fucking horribly old.
Johnson and Mendoza's faces fell. "Oh…well. Um…good. Great. That's a relief."
"You guys," said Oreo disapprovingly. She gave them a terse look and knelt down by aging man. "Captain Keyes?"
Milky gray eyes flickered open from wrinkly sockets. "That you, Doctor Hasley? So you finally got those breast implants I've been telling you to get." He nodded approvingly. "Good woman."
"Um, no, it's me. Lieutenant Oreo."
Keyes waved her away, trying to sit up. "Don't be ridiculous—no woman would ever be allowed into the military!" Mendoza and Johnson snickered nervously at the look on Oreo's face, but she refocused with the ease of one who had much practice in this area.
"Are you all right, sir? Last we heard you were on a mission to secure an armory."
Keyes hands shot up suddenly to grip the front of her collar. She stood up, pulling him with her until he was standing shakily on his own two feet. "You don't understand, you fool!" croaked the Captain.
She respectfully disengaged his hands. "What don't we understand?"
"Women can never be allowed into the military! Do you have any idea what that would do to unit strength!? Women are sexual animals! You wouldn't be training recruits to fight! You'd be training them to fuck! If you let a woman into the ranks she would fuck everyone in the whole damn army!"
Oreo looked over her shoulder at Mendoza, who was grinning widely. She scowled.
"Try to stay focused, sir. What happened to you?"
Keyes began to shake. His eyes had a very far off look. "T-t-the Flood, Lieutenant. That's what happened."
Oreo rolled her eyes. "Wow, even shell shocked he's still a drama queen."
"Ah, that's right!" said Keyes. "I remember you, young lady!" His voice dropped. "Since you asked, I'll tell you what happened; we had just discovered the Chief in some sort of ante chamber after losing most of our squad to the swamp. We thought we were safe; they usually only come out in the daylight. Usually."
"Jesus Christ," said Oreo.
Keyes ignored her. "The nigger took a plasma grenade to the face."
"Hey!" Johnson's face went red.
"Calm down," said Oreo. "He's from a different time, Johnson. That's just how people were back then."
"FUCK THAT SHIT." Then Mendoza put a hand on Johnson's chest. Where the other hand was, only his ass knew. Oreo turned back to Keyes.
"Then what happened, sir? Who threw the plasma grenade?"
"My opposite number in the Covenant—a man as dangerous as he is insightful, as clever as he is deadly, as calculating as he is cold. Commander Darren and his wicked Jackal concubine Eric."
Oreo slowly pressed the palm of her hand to her face. "Of course. Why did I even ask. And then what happened?"
Keyes's eyes opened very wide. "The Flood."
"I've heard of them."
"Yes." Keyes stared at her. "My god—the fabled woman's intuition! It is not a myth after all!"
"They're standing right there." Oreo turned, aiming her SMG at the enormous wave of putrefied flesh that poured from the door like a spray of bacteria laden pus from a popped zit, filling the room below the platform in a sea of squirming, squealing parasites. A wall of corroded armor and twisted limbs piled up the platform with gurgled war cries as Mendoza and Johnson turned in shock.
Keyes shook, a mad-gleam in his eye. "…The day of judgment…" he hissed dramatically "HAS COME." Oreo pistol whipped him in the face.
The humans fought for their lives aboard that ship, but down in the snowy valley, in the final generator chamber, another sort of fight was taking place…
Cercil was talking as usual.
"Well, Chief. What a day, huh? I'm sure glad all that mind rape is over. Crazy stuff! It's been a while since we got to talk like this, in person."
"We talked like ten hours ago," the Chief pointed out. They were standing in front of the glowing hollow of the generator, their faces blue by its strange alien light. The rest of the underground chamber was pitch black. "Then I shot you."
Cercil shrugged. "Relatively a while, then."
"Relative to what?"
"To the size of your dick in metric measurements specifically millimeters!" Cercil thumbed himself. 'Hey-o, Faster Queef, score one for your mother! You walked right into that shizzit."
"Sometimes I have no idea what you're talking about," said the Chief. "Oh, wait, that's all the time."
"Are you going to shoot him soon?" Cortana asked.
"Probably. I wanted to try talking first, though."
Cercil Saltstein chortled at the Chief with an air of infinite smugness. "Wanted to talk to me away from your friends, Chief-guy? Can't blame you; I wouldn't want that Oreo-chick hanging out with the two of us, either—sooner or later she'd switch teams for these beans." He gripped his groin. "Hey, it ain't my fault that thot's hot to trot: she was pretty impressed with my singing back on the ship, I can tell you that much."
"Singing," repeated Cortana apprehensively.
"Later, Cortana. This is something I have to do alone." The Chief hadn't raised his rifle, but he was gripping it close to his chest. He looked Cercil in the eye. "I finally understand what you are."
The alien's eyes widened. "Fuck me, you do?"
"Cortana found the records in the Forerunner archive back in the control room. You're a Marisoo."
"That's right," Cortana piped up. "'Marisoo's.' The same thing that Whitania thing is. Physical manifestations of a person's subconscious—the subconscious leaves the mind and manifests through the dimension, when a disturbed individual travels through slip space. The more attention the Marisoo it gets, the stronger it becomes. And it can't die—not unless its host dies too."
The Chief nodded. "Just like Whitania. It explains why you're always trying to get my attention by being incredibly annoying. It explains why we share dreams." He paused dramatically. "You're my Marisoo. I don't know who created Whitania, but both you and her must have been created when the Pillar jumped here through slip space. "
Cercil looked at his hands. "So I'm not even really real?"
"Not really."
"What a boner, Chief. And I thought I was a demon or something. Oh well!" He shrugged, sticking his tongue out of the corner of his mouth. "What can you blew! My life is basically meaningless."
"Basically," the Chief agreed. "Maybe you should go away?"
"But you said yourself I can't die, Queef. How exactly do you intend to make me?" Cercil bared his teeth.
"I've been thinking about that," said the Chief. "But I didn't think of anything. Do you have any ideas, Cortana?"
"You could always just freeze him in a cryochamber and launch him into space," mused Cortana. "I mean, that's what the UNSC did with you when they wanted to get rid of you."
"What?"
Cercil interrupted him with a simper. "Ahhh, that's almost poetic, isn't it, Chief? Going back to where it all started: you—me—cryochamber, the dead of space, me escaping from your brain in an eruption of blood…together again."
"What was that about getting rid of me?" the Chief asked Cortana.
Cortana spoke hurriedly. "Actually Cercil brings up an interesting point. It might be possible to somehow re-merge you two. The Forerunner database on Marisoo's suggests that with enough potential energy, the Marisoo can be brought back into the mind." She paused. "Someone deleted the rest of the file, though, so I don't know what happens after that."
"Nothing?" suggested Cercil.
Cortana continued. "But whatever you decide to do, Chief, you have to do it fast; the Flood is spreading faster than Herpes at a college, and Guilty Spark is trying to murder us all. This Halo has to blow—and so does that generator, right now."
The Chief snapped his fingers. "That's it! The generator. Cortana, how many megatons does this this thing have?"
"Megatons? It would mean anything to you if I told you, Chief. But it could be enough to do what the Forerunners are talking about…"
The Chief gave Cercil a speculative look. "Well there you go. Are you going to try to fight me on this, or are you going to go peacefully? Because either way is fine by me."
Cercil grinned like a shark that had just scented blood in the water. "I'm willing to come together if you are, Quiche. Just be gentle. It's my first time."
"Yuck. Fine." The Chief gingerly grabbed his long middle fingers. "Let's just get this over with, okay?"
"Faptastic." Cercil's grin if possible widened, exposing every single one of his sharp pointy teeth as they walked towards the generator together. "You know, Chief, I've actually been waiting for this moment for a long time. All I ever really wanted was to be near you, you know?"
"Really?"
"Yeah. I guess you could say you complete me, Chief, but not in a creepy way, just in a healthy way."
"Technically it would be you completing me," the Chief pointed out.
Cercil beamed. They were only a few feet from the generator now. "Do you really mean that?"
"Uh…I guess."
"Wow." He reached over and grabbed the Chief by the shoulder, pulling him close as they stepped into the blinding white light of Halo's energy stream, the glow enveloping them both. "That's all I ever wanted to hear, Chief. Now we can finally be whole again. And also I can posses your body."
