Chapter Twenty-Five: One Final Final Effort [Part Two]
0930 Hours, December 20, 2552 (Military Calendar) \
Installation 00_The 'Ark', Near September Beach
Crashed Loyalist CCS-Class Battlecruiser
Spartan-III Alex-G004
I felt the pain even before I came to. I heard Sam and Tyrone's voice swimming into my dark mental room, calling me to come out and wake up…shaking me…Leave me alone...
More shouting and urgent shaking; they just wouldn't let me rest…Fine…I cracked open my eyelids, only to see blurry streaks of color and movement. My eyes had teared up, obscuring everything I saw. My body was nothing but a human-shaped vessel of pain; when the warthog had swerved and hit the side of the ship, the passenger seat had borne the brunt of the impact, as had I, its occupant.
I could barely feel my legs, my already injured left arm was throbbing up a storm along with my right one, and my torso…I don't even have to explain it.
I reached up to my face to wipe the tears from my eyes, but my hands were stopped by the smooth surface of my ODST helmet's reflective blue faceplate, reminding me that I was wearing a helmet. I blinked hard several times to clear away the excessive tears, allowing me to see again. I lifted my head with a groan and took in my surrounding. The tank form which had taken us down was lying dead several meters away, around a dozen shotgun shells from Tyrone's M90 lodged in its head. Our faithful Gauss warthog which had brought us this far was now nothing more than a twisted lump of burning metal crushed up against the armor of the cruiser. I had obviously been thrown from my seat during the impact; had this not been so then I wouldn't have woken up at all. My teammates must have also dragged me some distance away from the wreckage, because I was lying on the wrong side of the warthog, in front of the open docking port.
Sam was kneeling over me, examining my newly acquired injuries. Her voice was grim and sympathetic when she spoke. "He took most of the impact, Ty. No spinal damage from what I can tell, we have that much to be thankful for. He's got a big concussion from the trauma of the impact…for his chest it's not a question of how many ribs are cracked, it's a question of how many, if any, aren't cracked. His left arm is shattered and there are at least two compound fractures on his right arm…" she prodded my legs, prompting a violent spasm of pain from both of the lower limbs which I couldn't completely repress, "And his legs are basically maracas."
"Can we move him?" Tyrone asked.
"Do we have a choice?" Sam countered. No one could argue with that. Sam bent over and picked up my prized sniper rifle, slinging it over her back before turning back to me.
Hearing the howls of the rapidly approaching swarm of Flood which we had blown past, Ty shook his head. "No, we don't. Alex, we're gonna pick you up and move you, now. It's gonna hurt like Hell and nearly every other method of pain you can think of combined, but it's the only way."
"Gee, don't you just have the bedside manner of a teddy-bear," I grumbled bitterly as my two teammates grasped me under both of my arms and stood me up. They threw my arms around their necks and supported me like a hospital patient. They tried to be gentle, but time was not on our side, so gentleness didn't really exist. My body was screaming at me the entire time, each sudden jerk or movement bring a fresh wave of pain to different parts of me.
"Man, you have to be the unluckiest lucky sonofabitch I've ever met…" Tyrone grunted as he and Sam made their way through the hangar bay. All around us were groups of infection forms which Sam and Tyrone took out when they got too close. All around us were smoldering wrecks of phantoms and seraph fighters which had been destroyed in the impact, but as we slowly fought our way through to the center of the hangar, we found a relatively intact phantom dropship. The bluish purple Covenant craft had lots of burns, dents, and scoring all over its hull, but compared to most of the other vehicles in this dump, it was a first-class ticket home. I got a glimpse of the name of the dropship, the Journey to Salvation. I smirked at how appropriate the ship's name was; it was about to take us on exactly what it was named for, though it would be more of a freakin' odyssey than a journey with all the crap we had gone through since leaving the Citadel.
"Sam, get in there and get it started; we can't haul Alex inside through the side openings unless we really have to. We'll come in through the grav lift in the ship's belly," Tyrone said once we reached our phantom.
"Uh…okay…" Sam replied, gingerly removing my arm from around her neck, leaving me leaning fully on Tyrone for support. She leaped up and grabbed hold of the edge of the side deployment opening in the phantom dropship, pulling herself up and slipping inside the Covenant craft.
The gurgling howls and roars of the Flood echoed off the walls as the swarm entered the Hangar, hot on our heels. A minute passed, then another. The swarm was now close enough to fire at Tyrone and me, but I was unable to walk on my own, let alone fire a weapon. My head began to buzz and my ears started to ring slightly, but I shook my head to stay awake. Sam had said that I had a severe concussion from the crash; falling asleep could prove to be fatal. I still felt the adrenaline in my system, and that helped a lot, but it was still difficult to remain focused.
Tyrone unslung his M90 and brandished it with his free arm, daring the combat forms to come closer. Whenever a Flood form came within a five-foot radius of us, he blew the infection form lodged in its chest into next year, causing the rest of the body to collapse, useless until another infection form took the previous one's place. When he was out of ammo, he gave me the shotgun to reload and opened up with his magnum sidearm until I finished reloading. This cycle repeated until both Ty's shotgun and magnum finally ran dry, now about as useful as feathers. As the semi-circle of combat forms started to close in on us, sensing that we were out of juice, I heard a hum behind us as the phantom dropship powered up and rose about thirty feet into the air as its thrusters activated. Its main plasma turret emerged from its underside and opened fire on the swarm of combat forms, dissolving the ones nearest to us, effectively saving our skins. It wouldn't be able to kill all of them, but it would be enough to buy us enough time to board the ship.
The Journey to Salvation moved directly above us and descended to twenty feet. As I glanced up at the belly of the phantom, the large round black hole in the center which the Covenant troops would use for deployment and boarding lit up with a brilliant indigo beam of light which reached all the way down to us. It was the phantom's gravity beam, which is how troops would quickly board the phantom in battle, and it proved to be the best way of getting me aboard in my severely wounded state. Hauling me up and through one of the side openings probably could have killed me or caused spinal damage.
As the indigo light washed over us, I felt a feeling of weightlessness as Tyrone and I rose up through the air along the gravity lift, up through the large hole in the phantom's underside, and into the ship's main hold, which was comparable to the hold of a pelican. It was a big enough room to fit several vehicles or over twenty troops. The internal structure had the same basic shape of the outside of the phantom, but there was a doorway in the back which led to a small engine room and another portal in the front which led to the cockpit. I could see Sam sitting at the controls. The sides of the hold were dominated by two large openings which troops would use to jump out of and onto the ground in combat. Those openings could be closed when in zero-atmosphere environments.
Several combat forms had managed to make it into the gravity beam as well and were rising up towards the hold after us. The first combat form actually made it inside, but Tyrone took it down with his bare hands when it reached us. The brilliant indigo light of the gravity lift faded as Sam deactivated it, sending the rest of the combat forms splattering to the floor of the hangar bay. Tyrone rolled the remains of the combat form he had just killed out one of the openings in the sides of the hold and got rid of it, sending it crashing down on top of its howling comrades. The swarm had congregated below us, leaping on top of each other and into thin air in a vain effort to reach us. Sam had ceased firing the plasma turret now that we were safely aboard and focused on getting us out of here.
As the phantom's thrusters engaged, we began to steadily move forward and up. Because of the slight tilt of the cruiser, its other side was angled up towards the sky, prompting Sam to keep moving us up to avoid getting too close to the floor of the hangar bay. We avoided the Flood on the floor until we reached the open deployment port. Sam was forced to descend close to the ground to fit through, and a handful of lucky combat forms and a tank form managed to leap on top of the dropship during that time. We moved forward, clearing the crashed cruiser and soaring out into the open air.
Tyrone gently sat me down on one of the seats next to the starboard deployment opening in the hold. "I'll be right back…" he grumbled, cracking his knuckles and neck. He walked over to the opening and jumped up to the ceiling, grabbing hold of the top edge of the deployment side opening and hauling himself up on top of our phantom. I heard several labored grunts and a good amount of crushing blows, then silence. As I watched, a cascade of seven dead combat forms and the tank form fell off the top of our ship and past the deployment opening down to the ground below, all of them pummeled to death by my team leader. Tyrone climbed back down the side of the phantom and swung back inside the hold. He exhaled as if he had just finished a work-out.
Now that we were in the open, Sam hit the phantom's main engines and we really started to move. The ground dropped away pretty fast as we climbed through the air, which got colder as we got higher.
"Better close the hatches…" Sam murmured, searching around the controls for the appropriate one. She finally found it and hit it. A whirring noise was heard as armor plating slid into place, sealing the deployment hole in the floor of the hold and both of the side openings. We were now completely airtight. A different whirring sound, this one much softer and not nearly as noticeable, signaled the activation of the air recycler, designed so that the ship's crew wouldn't suffocate after long periods of time.
I tried to get up to move into the cockpit, but the strain on my mangled limbs and torso was too much. Tyrone picked me up again and moved me to the cockpit himself. He examined the co-pilot's seat briefly before finding a way to force it to recline all the way back so that it was more of a flat surface. He lay me down on top of the flat seat and secured me with the safety belt so that I wouldn't move as much. For the next few minutes, he sat by me and kept me awake; with my concussion unconsciousness wasn't an option until I saw a medic. The blood loss was starting to get to me as well; I was starting to cough it up now, which really didn't seem like a good sign. Coughing up blood meant internal bleeding. For one of the first times since the destruction of my homeworld when I was little and before I was recruited into the Spartan-III project, I was truly afraid that I was going to die.
I still had a good view though the cockpit window which was basically the windshield of the phantom, the large window that the pilots utilized to see where they were going. As we kept up our ascent, the clouds fell away and the blue sky gradually gave way to darker and darker blue, and then finally the pure, starless, black of deep space. I could see two of the Ark's arms far off in the distance as well as the rapidly combusting Halo ring far above us. We turned towards one of the outreaching spokes of the Ark, the one which we had emerged over with the Separatist fleet twelve hours ago. The slipspace portal leading back to Earth was hovering well above that arm, right where we had emerged from. Twelve hours...it felt like days, not hours since we had come here…
I watched Sam pilot the phantom, hitting the engine as hard as she could, sending us on our way towards safety. "Now when did you learn how to drive a phantom?" I asked her wryly.
"Oh, about five minutes ago," Sam chuckled. She seemed relaxed, now. I guess it made sense; at this point there was nothing more we could do to help or hurt our fate. Either the phantom was fast enough to reach the Portal before the Halo fired, or it wasn't. There was nothing we could do to change anything at this point.
We couldn't hear the sounds of the firing Halo anymore, on account of the fact that sound can't travel through space, but we could tell that it was getting pretty violent. The explosions were really shaking the Halo, sending out bits of debris into space and the Ark's atmosphere.
"It's shaking itself apart…" Tyrone murmured.
A sort of energy was beginning to gather at the two edges of the Halo ring, an orange aura, like flames. Whatever it was, it definitely had something to do with the Halo ring lighting. We were out of time.
"Come on…" Sam hissed, eyeing the Halo nervously, but also gazing at the Portal we were heading towards with a ferocious tunnel vision. It drew nearer and nearer until it suddenly stopped. Our phantom shook slightly, and I heard a powering-down noise in the engine room in the back.
"Jesus H. Christ, don't you dare tell me the engines broke down!" Tyrone growled with frustration.
Sam hesitated, searching for an appropriate synonym to describe the situation. "Uh…the engines just cut out. Not the same thing, different words…" she sprang up out of her seat and strode out of the cockpit, heading into the engine room at the back of the ship. I heard several expletives coming from that room before Sam showed her face again. "It must have been damaged when the Loyalist cruiser crashed; there's scoring and broken systems all over the place. We were extremely lucky to get off the ground, let alone this far…"
Tyrone let out another frustrated growl and punched the wall, putting a sizeable dent in the armor plating. "Now we're all the unluckiest lucky sonsofbitches I've ever known…Can we fix it?"
Sam shook her head, "No the damage is too extensive. All we have are the maneuvering thrusters. It's not much, but it's something."
"It's not enough," I sighed, calculating the distance between us and the Portal, and the Halo's firing, "We'll barely make it a quarter of the way on just thrusters at the rate that Halo's firing."
As we continued to debate ways on how to improve this impossible situation, the phantom's battle network system, the Covenant equivalent to our COM, squawked to life. It must have been set on a universal setting, because the transmissions we were hearing were from UNSC COM units.
"Sam, get back here!" Tyrone exclaimed, hearing the transmissions too, "Isolate that signal."
Sam sat back down in the pilot's seat and manipulated the battle network's controls until we could clearly hear the voices conversing over the COM. My heart leapt as I realized the gravity of this discovery; UNSC transmissions this far up in space meant only one important thing; a ship. More specifically, a ship with functioning engines.
"How do you use this thing?" Ty asked Sam, gesturing to the battle network system. Sam pressed several more controls and nodded to our team leader, prompting him to speak. "Any UNSC forces in the area, this is Team Rapier! Our engines are shot to hell and we are in need of immediate assistance! Any UNSC forces in the area, please respond, over!"
There was a few seconds of silence before an older voice addressed us. "This is Commander Brown of the Lady Fortune; we're coming up on your tail. We're opening our port-side lateral airlock, you have permission to dock."
"You're a godsend, Commander," Tyrone responded, killing the channel.
Another few seconds passed before the light coming into our phantom's cockpit was obscured by a large moving shadow. I struggled to sit up a tiny fraction, ignoring my ribcage's protests, until I was able to see the mighty silhouette of a marathon class cruiser coming up on our right side. It must have been a late arrival, as it hadn't gone through the Portal with the Separatist Fleet. The only two marathon-class cruisers present had been the Breath of Winter and the Burning Ember, this particular cruiser must have slipped through the Portal sometime after my team had gone to ground to storm September Beach.
"A Commander in charge of a marathon-class cruiser?" Sam observed after the channel closed, "Either we're running out of Captains or that guy's freakishly good."
As we slid into the Lady Fortune's docking port, the last sight of Halo I saw was the energy at the rim of the ring, which was gathered in the center of the ring, reaching a critical mass and exploding, ballooning outwards away from the installation in a huge, crackling purple wave. I instinctively knew that we did not want to be here when that wave hit.
Sam maneuvered the Journey to Salvation into the Lady Fortune's hangar bay and set the phantom down gently between a group of pelicans and scorpions. I could feel the marathon-class cruiser's hull shake as she fired up her engines once more, gunning for the Portal. I heard the familiar rushing noise of a slipspace transfer, then nothing.
I knew we had reached the Portal. Against all odds, we had reached it. I could scarcely believe it. My teammates and I had unbreakable willpower when it came to our determination to escape back to Earth, but deep down none of us had actually expected to make it. I felt the adrenaline rush coursing through my body fade away, now unneeded. There were no more Flood to fight through, no more wounds to shrug off. My eyelids felt like lead weights which even augmented muscles couldn't hold up, and they shut. I heard exclamations from my teammates, but I ignored them. It was time to rest.
We had made it. We were safe.