A flurry of glowing purple needles flew over Kelly. They hit the air trooper, half of them burying into the chinks in the armor, the rest pinged off harmlessly. The needles exploded in electric fury. The trooper was barely affected inside its armor, there had barely been any damage to it. But its warning system flashed, the needles that had hit had given such a shock that the systems had been overloaded.
The Trooper, in a last ditch kamikaze attack, turned head over heal and spun wildly at Kelly. Smoke trailed behind it as the suit overloaded itself to become a large-scale bomb. Kelly dodged the attack, the edges of the wave of the explosion not even catching her heels. She turned her head around just in time to see another wave of electrified needles catch the other air trooper and destroy it.
Then the soldier whirled; bringing her shotgun's barrel to face a Pirate looming behind her. She brought the muzzle up to the middle of its head, shoved the barrel forward and fired. A torrent of exploding frags hit it, nearly immediately after coming out of the mouth. The Pirate staggered back from the blow and Kelly ducked to her right, bringing the gun close to her as she rolled to avoid incoming fire.
The Spartans busied themselves with the remaining pirate and elite. Both went down quickly. The Pirate's frontal armor had been weakened severely by Kelly's attack. Kelly switched weapons, not wanting to take the time to reload her weapon. She brought the assault rifle up and fired regular rounds into the Pirate.
Both enemies collapsed to the ground. The Spartan group gathered together.
"Where did that flying alien come from?"
"I don't know. They might have a base nearby. It will be best if we stay as stealthy as we can from now on." John signaled the Spartans to switch off their speakers. They did so.
"Let's move." He said and waved the group onwards.
The Spartans stuck close together as they moved onwards. The Chief told Kelly to scout out ahead of them. She continuously darted ahead of the group by several meters, and darted back, visually signaling that the path was clear. Progress was slow and arduous as they carefully made their way forward, wary of the flying pirates.
Soon they stumbled upon a nest of alien activity. Kelly told the group to wait up as they came closer to a turn in the rock wall. When she reported back seconds later she gave some news that the Chief was barely able to believe.
"When I got close to the turn, sir, my long range radar picked up a lot of enemies."
"Alright. Everyone stay back here and hidden until I say otherwise." The Spartans disappeared into the trees, vanishing like ghosts. Then they disappeared from his motion detector, as they remained motionless.
He walked over to where Kelly had been and crouched on the ground. John took an optical cable out and gingerly fed it around the corner. He plugged the wire's feed into his HUD. There were many enemies around the bend, the only way they could continue forward. John wanted to minimize contact with the aliens as much as possible.
He twisted the cable, and got a view of something. The Pirates had a large pod hovering above the ground, it was roughly twice his height and two and half times again his breadth. The pod was being moved by a latticework of crossing gravitational beams that the Covenant controlled. His bones reverberated as the pod was dropped gingerly to the ground. Whatever was in the pod must have been extraordinarily heavy.
The Covenant took the device that had been rolling along the sides of the pod carrying it and walked off to do some other business. The Pirates stayed however. There was a giant tank near the pod's landing location, and there were lengthy and thick serpentine cables near them. The Pirates hooked the cables to various valves at the bottom of the pod. The cables stiffened and turned a shade of blue.
John swiveled the probe about, rotating it to look at other things. Then he noticed the large area that was bustling with alien activity. There were a lot more of the large pods hooked to cables attached to the humming tanks, four at most. John could only guess what was going on inside the tanks and the pods. He focused the probe on one of the pods that gleamed sunlight similar to glass.
The probe zoomed into 2x magnification and he tried to make out the shape of the shadowy figure in the pod. Its arms were crossed in front of it, hands pointing up. The figure floated carelessly in the liquid of the tanks, eyes closed in a deep sleep. It had a shape similar to that of a pirate, but it was more ruggedly built, had larger muscles, and different armor. It was also massive, nearly taking up all of the room inside the cryostatis pod.
John tried to compose himself as fear raced across his brain. The strange armored creatures that were more massive then himself that he had met on Sigmus Octanus IV were not that huge. The blue armored, orange skinned Covenant had nearly killed one of his squad members. They had only defeated it by knocking the floor out under them. This thing was probably seven times it mass and more then quadruple it's size.
'Relax,' He told himself, 'That thing's frozen.' He carefully pulled the probe back, able to tell that his heart was still beating nervously. He couldn't hold back the thought of what would happen if one of those things woke up. He detached the probe and stored it. Still crouched, the Chief backed away from the cliff and sprinted back cautiously through the forest to his team. He managed to control his apprehension by the time he got back. So long as they were asleep, those monstrosities would be no threat.
"Sir, what's going on around there?"
John walked past Kelly, "We're pulling out; this area is too hot."
The Spartans followed the Master Chief as he walked out of the area. He knew that his Spartans could take on all the normal enemies with the element of surprise, but he did not want to risk waking the beasts to get more information. He was definitely going to ask Samus about the giants when he spoke to her again.
Slowly, they made their way back, a lot slower and more carefully then when they had come forward. When they had come back to the area where they had originally fought the pirates the area was hot again. The Master Chief peered at the group of Grunts and Jackals that were looking around the area, there was also one of the Elites.
He made a couple of hand signs to three of the Spartans; they disappeared into the trees. They would be back up incase there were more of the enemies in hiding, such as those Air Troopers. They would not attack unless the Chief told them to or surprises popped up. He told the other Spartans to disperse among the foliage and appear at his signal. With the Pirates now in the situation, it wasn't too prudent to take some care in their movements.
John picked up a nearby rock and dropped it onto the ground. The sound didn't bother the aliens, none of them even noticed. However, the Spartans in hiding recognized the signal. A second after the sound, the armored soldiers went to action, still hidden. Two of them picked out the grunts with single shots from their pistols. The Jackals whirled around, putting up their shields. The Spartans behind them head shot two of the Kig-yar.
Several of the Jackals turned around to face the direction of the new onslaught. The elites hollered at them. The Spartan's translation software gave them the rough gist of the orders. They knew that as the Jackals moved, they were forming a tight circle to block incoming fire. The Elites waved plasma rifles and needlers around the area, looking for the assailants.
A grenade flew from a crag in the rocks and then there was movement from all the hiding places. It landed among the Jackals: bounded off the ground an inch, landed, rattled, and blew. The frag grenade's explosive range instantly killed the Jackals as they began to roll to avoid its engulfing flare.
The elites growled at the attack, firing at the source of the grenade. Chief gave Kelly a signal, and she sprinted into action. John and the other two Spartans opened fire on the elite closest to the Spartan. It's shields flared, flickered, and died under their cover fire. Then they switch to the other elite, suppressing the counter strike it was sure to give.
Kelly moved with celerity, jumping out behind the elite, catching it off guard. With as much strength and speed as she could muster, she slammed the butt of her assault rifle into the Sangheili's head. Then she tumbled to the side, avoiding a frontal assault from the second elite that still managed one last attack before it, too, died.
John heard the whine of Pirate Air Troopers as they came towards them. John waved the group forward. The Air Troopers would take another minute to get there. By that time, the Spartans would be gone. As the seconds trickled by, the whine became louder.
Until it was directly overhead. Samus had been curled up in Morph Ball for nearly a minute by now. She felt her limbs spasm for want of movement. The Chozo warrior controlled her breathing, making sure to keep it deep and slow. She opened her blue eyes to scan at the projected screen that had made its way between her face and her thighs. It emulated her HUD. She watched the radar movement in the lower right corner of the green screen.
Very slowly the overhead orange dots moved away from her position. Samus allowed herself a slow breath of relief. She kept the lighting on the side panels off as she allowed the micro-cameras all over the surface of the Morph Ball to guide her, the views smoothly transitioning from one camera to the next as the ball rotated forward. Soon she was over the ridge of the hill. Samus paused only a moment to make sure that nothing had spotted her, certainly none of the aliens made a scene about it.
Samus gyrated over towards the rocks halfway down the hill, turned back to normal and crawled all halfway back up from her current position. Then she risked opening a squad-wide channel.
"Okay, guys. I think I heard enough down there."
"You understood what they were saying?"
"Certainly, the Pirates at least." That was a lie and Samus knew it. However she did not want to go into little details like why she understood the Covenant without ever having heard their dialect before.
She continued, "Anyways, as much as I'd love to go down there and kill all the pirate scum... that would totally blow our cover and the fact that we're not dead. That's not an image I want to break just yet."
Then a comm. line broke over their channel, "This is Red Team." Fred's voice broke over the line, "Charlie Team just sent us an S.O.S...apparently they were found out by the Covenant, and they're having a hard time. There was a loud earthquake sound just before the transmission cut off. Requesting orders?"
Samus grumbled to herself, 'Although it seems it's been broken for me.' Instead of voicing that thought she spoke over the line while waving the team away from the ridge and back towards the ship. "Chief, you there?"
There was a moment's pause before he responded, "Yes."
"I don't trust marines with loud thudding noises...do you?"
"No."
"Okay, let's go see what's going on down there."
"Red Team, we'll meet you half a kilometer south of the original S.O.S. signal."
"Yes, sir."