The Phantom smashed into the ground. Not with enough force to knock any of the three occupants within unconscious, but enough to rend the air from their lungs. Jason gasped, groping for his weapons. There was very little time. A large hole had been torn in the bottom of the dropship, which was now lying on its side.
Sunlight, mottled with whorls of dust, spilled in. The sounds of combat could be heard, getting closer. Jason only managed to find his pistol before heading towards the hole. Enzo and Faraday were recovering deeper within. He had to buy them time. Thoughts of the escaping Prophet were shoved aside for the moment.
A Combat Form wielding a shotgun stepped into the hole, making awful growling noises. It raised the shotgun. Jason emptied the pistol magazine into the thing's chest, punching an ugly, bloody hole clean through it. The Combat Form fell aside. Jason holstered the pistol without reloading and snatched up the shotgun.
He quickly checked it. Found it full. It would do.
"Let's get a move on!" he roared as a second and third Combat Form appeared in the hole. He blasted away the first, cocked the shotgun and repeated the process.
"Coming!" Faraday groaned. The ODST was suddenly beside him, sniper rifle in hand.
"That's not going to be any good," Jason said, remembering the combat report he'd read on the Flood. "Sniper rounds travel too fast to do any real damage to them, or some such shit. Here." He handed Faraday a discarded battle rifle.
"This thing is perfect. Aim for the chest." Faraday nodded.
Enzo appeared with a Carbine. "Shall we go?"
Jason didn't bother with a response, instead opting to let his actions speak. He blasted away a fourth Combat Form as he made for the hole, then pushed out into the brilliant sunlight. Blood drenched sands, littered with corpses from both sides, stretched away from them. Up ahead, he could see the silver structure, glittering brilliantly in the alien light. Immediately, Jason knew that they hadn't a hope in hell of going after the Prophet.
The Covenant were dying. The Flood were sticking to the truth in their name: they were coming in waves. There were dozens of them.
"Make for the central structure!" Jason roared, and began running. The others hastened to follow. They opened fire as rarely as possible, trying to let the Flood finish off what Covenant there were left and give them every precious second.
While they ran, Jason wasted no time. If there was a moment where he needed backup, it was now. He sent the call up to the Darkwind, with a rough description of the situation that instructed Echo Team to make for the central structure as quickly as they could and be wary of Flood. They were almost there as he sent out the data packet.
It would be less than two minutes now. They reached the nearest ramp, curving around and leading up the structure. Jason got there first, blasting off an infected Elite on the way up. The rest of the way was clear. The trio pounded up the ramp, desperate for survival. Jason was the first one up, spotting a collection of Brutes, the sole survivors of the Covenant occupation, duking it out with an overwhelming force of Flood.
Jason focused on the Flood for the moment, letting the Brutes get picked off one by one. He heard Enzo make a noise of dark glee and caught a peripheral of the Elite rushing over to a corpse and picking something up.
It was an energy sword.
Jason suddenly felt a lot better. Behind him, he could hear Faraday picking off targets with his battle rifle, covering their rear. He and Enzo moved forward, intent on cleaning up the resistance that remained atop the structure.
Jason emptied the shotgun too quickly for his liking, abandoning it for the moment and grabbing his pistol. It was running low on ammo, too. He reloaded and kept going, backing Enzo up. The Elite was a thing of fury. The Brutes had been finished off and now the Flood were making headway towards the last three survivors.
Enzo moved with a disturbingly fluid grace that would have been envied by Samurais of old. He slashed and sheered straight through the nearest Combat Form, neatly severing the upper torso from the rest of the body. Another Flood took a swipe at him. Enzo neatly dodged and brought the energy blade around in another tight, clean arc. The Flood's arm fell away. In another swipe it, too, fell away from Enzo in two pieces.
He kept at it. Jason emptied his pistol and began looking around frantically for another suitable weapon. Behind him, he could hear those reassuring three-round bursts. He didn't know how long it would keep up for. Overhead, off his peripheral, something bright caught his attention. He glanced skywards.
Eight brilliant pinpoints of light, drop pods burning through the atmosphere, could be seen. Jason was certain that he'd never been so happy to see those ODST pods. They were closing in fast. Jason located a Carbine, presumably Enzo's, abandoned in his glee of discovering the sword, and snatched it up.
He spotted another clutch of Combat Forms, having come up along the secondary ramp, and opened fire. He blew their chests out, sending the quartet of them tumbling backwards. Enzo never seemed to tire, a constantly dancing figure among many, untouched and seemingly untouchable. But Jason knew they couldn't keep this up forever.
More and more Flood were coming to the top of the structure. An explosion ruptured behind him. Jason spun, spotting Faraday priming another grenade and hurling it into a fresh batch of Combat Forms making their way up the ramp. The second frag grenade exploded in a fiery display of metal fragments, flame, smoke and Flood bits.
All at once, the eight pods slammed into the earth. The Flood, preparing to overrun Jason's position, seemed to notice this new threat. The dozen or so Flood atop the structure remained, but no more came atop. Not so far away, Jason could hear the sound of pod doors popping sharply opening, followed swiftly by the bark of rifles.
He smiled grimly. They might just make it out of this. He, Enzo and Faraday quickly finished off the remainder of the Flood assailing them. They then snatched up whatever long range weapons they could and any ammo they could find. Jason found another battle rifle, his preferred weapon, and passed the Carbine off to Enzo.
The three hurried to the edge of the Forerunner building and provided cover fire for the ODST squad battling their way towards the structure. It was chaos down there. Jason felt guilty, just for a moment, for calling them in. It was immediately erased however, when he saw the maddened glee with which the squad was cutting through the Flood. They were eager for battle, he surmised, and must have hated being kept aboard the Darkwind.
Minutes passed by, measured in bullets and corpses. Jason emptied his battle rifle, twice having to scavenge for more ammo among the ravaged corpses. Echo Squad was making short work of the ravenous horde of Flood, smartly blasting holes in every chest and carefully popping Carrier Forms at a distance.
Grenades erupted, spewing limbs and blood and chunks of flesh in every direction. Coagulated blood flew upon the air, adding to the mess. The alien sun shined down on it all with cold indifference. By the time Jason returned from his third scavenge, finding only two magazines this time, he found that the ODSTs were marching up the ramps.
After that, it was only another five minutes of heavy gunfire before the remainder of the armada of Flood were finished off. Jason had to give it to them, they were a formidable foe: fighting to literally the last 'man'.
He was grimly satisfied to see that not one of the ODSTs had fallen in combat. Although a few already looked a little worse for the wear. Their slick black armor was splashed with blood and stained with the dregs of warfare.
"Well...that was worth the wait," Bolt said when the silence had settled down around them.
Jason chuckled. "I hope so, we've got a Prophet to catch," he replied, already eying a collection of Banshees, seemingly untouched by the conflict.
Bolt followed his gaze and nodded tightly. "Let's get a move on, Helljumpers!"
They were in the air, a collection of purple dots against a desolate, desert landscape. There had been just enough Banshees for all eleven of them. They were pushing the Covenant vehicles as hard as they could. The Prophet had a hell of a lead of them, but Jason was at least glad to see that the meter counter accompanying the nav marker was slowly counting down. Slowly, but surely, they were gaining on the evil bastard.
He wouldn't get away. Jason wouldn't let him.
Time continued to pass. Jason tried to kill it faster with conversation.
"Bolt, what's been happening?" The Sergeant's voice was heavy over the radio.
"Lots...The Master Chief hit the Ark like a bat outta hell and has been tearing up Covenant ass for a while. The Brutes have been engaging the Elite and human fleets in space over the Ark. We've been outnumbered, but we're doing good. The Chief managed to locate the Cartographer, which provided a map of the Ark and lit up all the important bits. From what I heard, he took the Elites and Johnson and cracked through a big barrier surrounding the Control Room. They went after Truth and finally put a stop to that bastard.
"Then the Flood showed up."
"So...the Covenant's done for?" Jason asked.
"Seems that way."
"I wonder why they haven't told us...do we even need to kill this Prophet now?"
"We are not abandoning our mission." Enzo's voice was set and grave. Jason felt his emotions grow colder.
"No, we're not," he agreed.
"Glad to hear it. I've been cooped up on that ship for too long, waiting to get some payback," Bolt said.
They flew on.
As the marker dipped down below a hundred meters, a cluster of purple things appeared on the horizon. Further beyond them, Jason could see enormous, darkly colored things marring the seemingly eternal miles of desert landscape.
He realized, as they drew closer, that they were ships. Cruisers from both sides of the conflict. There must have been a dozen of them, broken up and scattered over a several mile length across the desert.
"My god," he whispered.
"Remnants of the conflict overhead," Bolt said.
"A metal graveyard, then," Enzo added quietly.
The cluster of purple dots coalesced into something more substantial: a Phantom dropship being escorted by nearly a dozen and a half Banshees. Jason grew grim, preparing for one hell of a battle. In the distance, near the edge of the graveyard, he could see a Covenant cruiser hovering. It must be the Prophet's escape plan.
Jason had no intention of letting him get there.
"Engage targets."
His small fleet of Banshees hurried forward. As they did, a dozen of the enemy Banshees broke away from the cluster, making their way back towards them. So that was their game. Jason growled, gripping the controls firmly, preparing himself for the worst. Seconds passed in tense, dread-laden apprehension.
The pair of small fleets slammed into one another with flares of plasma.
Jason opened fire, opting to send a fuel rod round arcing out into the nearest Banshees. He watched it hit dead on and rupture something vitally important in the enemy Banshee as it began sagging towards the ground, eventually becoming one more pile of useless, sparking wreckage among the ruins of the graveyard.
As far as he was concerned, a good start. Then the other Banshees returned fire. Jason yanked his controls up and away, then savagely came back down, opening fire on one of the enemy ships. Around him there was chaos, two dozen Banshees going at it in the air like a swarm of angry, warring bees. Plasma boiled everywhere, cutting lances through the air, sometimes striking purple metal hulls, mostly not.
The dogfight raged on. Jason weaved around, trying to get the upper hand over whatever Brute had chosen to take him down. He whipped the Banshee around sharply, narrowly avoiding a fuel rod round and viciously brought it back around to face his attacker. His muscles felt tense and ache from the maneuvers. He lined up his shot and let loose with his own fuel rod round. The enemy Banshee tried to dodge, but not fast enough.
The round hit its wing at a glancing blow, knocking it wildly off course. Jason finished it off with a concentrated burst from his plasma cannons and watched the thing blossom into an eruption of blue-white plasma. As they finished cleaning up the remnants of the attack force, he called for a report. North was the only one who didn't report in, and Bolt gravely informed Jason that the Corporal had gone down somewhere in the fighting. Jason felt emotions tugging at him, but knew there was no time. They had a job to do.
"Let's move!" he roared as the last Banshee went down.
The Phantom and remaining Banshees were halfway across the graveyard. Jason's own fleet hurried after them. They closed the distance quickly. Below them, chaos was boiling. There seemed to have been survivors from the various crashes. Lots of them. The Covenant, Elite and human survivors were all engaged in a vicious battle. To make matters worse, lots of Flood were pouring into the spaceship graveyard.
Jason returned his attention to the Phantom and the Banshees. As they came within range, he instructed Echo Team to focus on the Banshees while he, Enzo and Faraday would close in on the Phantom and bring it down.
The plan went into action. Jason, Enzo and Faraday moved in fast and vicious. They took out the Phantom's plasma cannons first before focusing on its engines. While they were flying around, hitting it again and again with plasma fire and fuel rod rounds, Jason heard Williams scream over the radio about the same time as he spotted one of the friendly Banshees explode in a brilliant blue-white ball of ruptured plasma.
Another one down, he thought grimly. He returned his attention to the task at hand. They had to do this. He fired off another round, and was rewarded with a violent explosion. Instead of the Phantom completely blowing up, however, it merely began to lose altitude.
"Shit!" Jason roared. It would crash. He watched the Phantom disappear among the ruins, hitting dirt with a satisfying crunch. He and the others prepared to pound the ship with more gunfire. Jason checked in on the others and found that they had finished mopping up the last of the resistance. Bolt's voice suddenly erupted onto the radio.
"We've got problems!"
Jason began to ask what, but then saw it. An army of Sentinels, hovering machines native to the Forerunner installations, began to descend from every which way on the graveyard. There were dozens of them, hundreds maybe. A collection of them focused golden beams of energy directly on Faraday's Banshee. It exploded almost immediately.
"Oh shit! Down, everyone land! Now!"
He hurried towards the crash site of the Phantom. Enzo followed. He dodged the narrow golden beams of light as much as he could, but felt the Banshee shuddered each time one came in contact with the hull. Warning lights began flaring, and a small alarm started sounding. Jason barely made it to the ground before the thing lost power completely.
He quickly hopped out of the now dead Banshee and looked around. He was amidst a collection of hulls and equipment, scattered remains of a once epic battle. Overhead, the Sentinels amassed, opening fire on friend and foe alike. Jason spotted Enzo. Together, the two of them hurried towards the remains of the downed Phantom.
Jason could already tell the Prophet had escaped it and was moving away. The nav marker was growing farther away. He called for the ODSTs to get to his position, making his way around the Phantom, trying to get a visual on the Prophet. He failed, and the nav marker was growing further away, over thirty meters, by the time the surviving ODSTs had gathered. They looked haggard and harried, but still strong.
"Dixon and Cruz are dead," Bolt reported grimly. Jason offered no more than a nod.
"Come on, he's close by. We need to get to him and finish this," he growled. Bolt nodded back, intent on not letting his men's death be in vain.
Together, the survivors plunged into the graveyard.
The way was tough and wrought with danger. Around every corner seemed to be something new. Jason knew they had to be careful, in case there were any human or Elite survivors around, but with all the corpses mounting up and the fleet of death dealing machines overhead, he held out little hope for himself, let alone anyone else.
They followed a trail of death. It seemed more than the Prophet had survived. There was no doubt a small collection of highly trained Brute bodyguards trying desperately to keep him safe. Jason planned on making them fail at their job. He'd managed to get a battle rifle and a shotgun, opting for the shotgun at the moment.
The collection of five black-clad ODSTs and one Elite rushed on recklessly. They hurried in between huge pieces of debris, large, blackened parts of enormous hulls or ruined vehicles. The bodies were everywhere. Jason fired the last shell in his shotgun into the torso of a Combat Form, just around another corner, and blew the thing's chest out.
He quickly reloaded, feeding shells into the weapon. They were closing in. There was somewhere between ten to fifteen meters of distance between them and the Prophet. It was a constantly shifting number. They could hear the sounds of conflict up ahead and, somewhere in that chaos, a Prophet's voice. Jason lead them onwards.
He heard growling overhead about the same time he heard Falcheck let out a sharp bark of pain. He spun and spotted a Combat Form standing over him, having landed on him from above. Enzo put it down with a sideways swipe of his plasma sword. Everyone covered Bolt while he checked the ODST's vitals.
He looked up, shook his head. "Broken neck."
Jason growled and they pressed on.
No time. They had no time. Overhead, the Sentinels rained down death from above. They seemed to be content with massacring the Flood for the moment, keeping away from the humans. Jason was glad enough to let them keep to it. He hurried on, desperation in his pounding footsteps. The others struggled to keep up.
Jason ran on recklessly. He wanted off this Ark. He wanted to go home. He wanted Veronica. He wanted food and a shower and to sleep for a few days. Some part of him knew he'd live to regret this want, that the killing fields would always call to him. But another part, a louder part, didn't care. More than anything, he wanted relaxation.
All at once, the debris seemed to fall away, leading to a large, open area littered with smaller bits of hull, providing cover. The Prophet. Jason saw him, all at once, halfway across the clearing with a clutch of Brutes.
Jason got the whole thing started with his last plasma grenade. He hurled it, attempting to stick that hovering chair the Prophets were so fond of, and instead managed to get the back of a rear guard Brute instead. In a surprising show of loyalty and intellect, the Brute threw himself away from the others. The explosion consumed him.
The Prophet hurried on, two of the Brutes going off with him, with the others broke away to cover his escape. Jason had no intention of letting him get away. Everyone broke to cover and the next several minutes were wasted playing a game of what Jason liked to call pop-n-shoot. He popped up over the cover and fired, then slid back down.
Plasma and bullets were flung every which way. The Brutes began to go down, one by one. Jason sighted as many of the bastards as he could. There were only half a dozen of them, but they were tough. He put a three-round burst through one of their skulls, sending the big, ugly ape crashing to the earth. He heard a sharp shout of pain.
He spared a glance to his side, spotting Collins.
The man was on his back, writhing around, a line of Spiker rounds stitching a bloody column up his torso. Abruptly, he grunted, once, and stopped moving all at once. The PFC was dead and gone. Jason refocused himself, sharpening back up quickly. Down to just two of them now, besides him and Enzo. The last Brute fell. Jason took off running, not even bothering to pause and see if the others were following.
He heard running footsteps behind him as he raced across the clearing and plunged into another narrow alcove of debris. The Prophet hadn't gotten too far. Beyond the graveyard, closer than ever, the Covenant cruiser loomed. Jason thought he could hear a Phantom nearby. He rushed on, pressing himself harder than ever.
He and the others broke into another clearing, smaller than before. The Prophet was continuing his escape. Jason raised his battle rifle, fired, took one of the Brutes down with a well-placed trio of shots to the back of its skull. The final Brute turned. It was holding a gravity hammer. It issued a roar, a bellow of fury, and charged at them.
Jason narrowly avoided the bulky tip of the hammer as it was swung at him. He dove out of the way, and there was a loud crash of gravity, followed by the sound of a solid crunch. The power of the attack forced him to roll a few more feet. He scrambled to his feet, just in time to see the Brute, taking several shots directly to the chest, bring the hammer down on Bolt. Weldon's body, unmoving, was in the distance.
Bolt went down, his skull crushed instantly. Enzo appeared at the Brute's side, slashed once, expertly with his sword, and beheaded the Brute. Its head fell away. The body stumbled, nerves twitching, blood fountaining from the stump of a neck. The body collapsed. Jason and Enzo glanced at each other, briefly, then bolted.
The Prophet was almost gone.
Rushing through one more tunnel of debris, they burst out the other side into a third and final clearing. A Phantom hovered over it, grav lift in place. The Prophet was heading for it. Jason didn't give him the chance. He rushed forward and leaped into the air, tackling the Prophet right off of his hovering chair. They both went to the ground in a tangle of thrashing limbs. Jason went for his combat knife, ready to finish the job, but he suddenly felt a sharp, hot pain in his stomach, and his hands suddenly refused to work.
He gasped, and fell back. The Prophet was laboring to get to his feet, holding a plasma based energy knife. He had a look of grim satisfaction on his face.
"Not so brave are you now, Imp?" A look of surprise abruptly shot onto the Prophet's face as the twin tips of Enzo's blade burst through his chest in a thick spray of blood. The Prophet glanced down and coughed, once, then collapsed to the ground.
"Jason!" Enzo cried, dropping to his friend's prone form. Jason was clutching desperately at his gut. He was bleeding, tremendously. Enzo abandoned the flickering plasma blade, which was nearly out of power, and grabbed Jason.
"Don't worry! I'll get you out of here," he growled, making for the grav lift. "We'll make it, Jason!"