PART III
SPIRITUS MUNDI
Chapter 47: Rampant
Naomi's body fell backwards, and Vaz's was dragged along with her. There was a momentary sensation of pain as his hands were pinned underneath Naomi, her half ton of armor crushing his fingers. With a bit of wiggling he was able to free them, and immediately cupped her face. If he had not been panicking Vaz could have appreciated how serenely beautiful she looked. A face which only a few moments ago had been contorted in absolute horror now seemed to be peacefully asleep. His own Swedish sleeping beauty. Now if he had only thought about kissing her to wake her up. Instead he shook her in earnest as he had done before, but Naomi's head just lolled to the side, her eyes still softly shut as if she could wake up at any moment.
Vaz looked around the room. Phillips was busy throwing up underneath one of the chairs. His chest heaved like a cat coughing up a hair ball. When he stopped long enough to breathe his breath came back in rattling rasps. As if he had been a chain smoker for several decades. Behind him Lian patted his back, though she was little better off. She could not look directly at Phillips, her head turned as far away from him as humanly possible, and every time he vomited Lian gagged just a little. That only left one person.
"Mal! I need your help."
Mal's eyes were bloodshot. He looked as if he had been on an all-night binder, mixing whiskey, liquor, and beer together with abandon, and in such reckless quantities that one could catch a buzz simply from smelling his breath. Mal attempted to focus on Vaz, but the world tilted. It turned upside down, then swirled around as if he were being taken through a particularly noxious roller coaster ride.
Vaz's call for aid echoed again in his ears, which were still ringing from the chaotic chorus of bells. This time he reacted. Mal attempted to stand up, but only succeeded in falling on his face. He crawled then. He would crawl for that annoying Russian prick, and only that annoying Russian prick. Naomi too, he conceded.
It might as well have been a marathon, or the first day at boot, but finally he made it. Naomi seemed to be sleeping. He was jealous. He should be sleeping, not her. He was the one that had been up the longest, and she was a Spartan to boot. Mal had half a mind to report this to Admiral Osman.
He shook his head. He wasn't thinking clearly. Vaz was saying something to him, but it came out as garbled and nonsensical. Damn commie bastard. If he wanted to speak Russian then he could go back to fucking Russia.
Had he said that out loud? Mal was sure that he had not, but then again Vaz was looking really angry. He was getting all red in the face, which usually meant that Mal had said something to piss him off. Mal attempted to speak but found that his mouth did not work properly. Instead he nodded at Vaz.
Damn right I said it ya twat.
The world tilted again, and Mal's vision tunneled. Vaz's face stretched and contorted until it looked like a Picasso painting. He made one more bumbling crawl towards Vaz.
Mal's world darkened. The last thing he felt was the cold embrace of Naomi's armor as his body fell forward and his forehead collided with her left breastplate. The darkness consumed him, and Mall fully embraced the unconscious world.
Phillips had finally finished throwing up, wiping his mouth with the sleeve of his coat. He looked weakly up at Lian and asked, "Are you okay?"
Lian gave an exasperated laugh, half frown half smile. Phillips had thrown up what remained of his breakfast all over the floor, yet he still found it within him to act chivalrous. It was that kind of dorky gentlemanliness that endeared him to her. She looked around the room, seeing Naomi and Mal lying unconscious on the floor along with a clearly distraught Vaz. Things were not good, but at least they were still alive after…
Well, whatever the hell that thing was at least none of them were dead.
"Black Box," she shouted. He had been unusually quiet, something that worried her even more than two of her teammates being incapacitated. "Black Box, can you read me? What the hell just happened to us? What was that thing?"
There was a crackling on the ship's speakers. Something that sounded vaguely like BB's voice, but garbled and nonsensical. All the displays on the bridge then began flashing crimson red, large error messages flashing across the screens. The static sounded again, and BB's bastardized voice returned, but this time they formed words. Cold and metallic. Menacing and emotionless. Lian felt a sharp shiver slither up her spine as the echoes of a past life filled the room.
"I was the Levite on the road."
"I was the good man that allowed evil to flourish."
"I sinned for the greater good."
"I broke the law to catch the devil."
"I watched as Halsey laid every law flat."
"I could not stand in the winds that blew then."
Over and over the message repeated, like an insane merry go round. Lian, Phillips, and Vaz all stared in wide eyed fear and fascination as BB said the message at an increasingly faster pace, the words blurring together until they were one unified mechanical shriek. The overhead lights slowly dimmed, until all that was left were the crimson warning screens. The entire bridge was blood red. The scene looked hellish, the sounds of the tortured souls in the machine only adding to the feeling that they had somehow left the mortal realm and descended into the darkest depths of human nightmare. Then the message suddenly stopped its maddening loop. More static, then BB's voice returned. Normal this time, but in a whisper. Lian had to strain to hear it.
"He shall be exalted among the heathen. He shall be exalted among the Earth. For the Lord of Hosts is with him."
An even lower whisper this time, Lian putting every fiber of concentration that she had to make out every last syllable.
"I was wrong. God is real, and he is pissed."
Then all the lights within the Port Stanley suddenly winked off. The computer monitors went blank, and the ship's fusion engine slowly whined to a halt. Everything became eerily silent, the low gum of the engine so constant that none of the crew ever thought about it, but now that it was gone the stillness that followed rattled Lian's ears.
Even more than that, though, was the darkness. It was nearly absolute. A seemingly tangible black wall stood in front of her. Lian felt around, keeping her breaths measured and even as best she could. It would do her no good to panic now. A hand clasped around hers. Even in the darkness she could tell it was Phillips.
"Hey," she said to him. "Are you still with me?"
"I never left," he replied, squeezing her hand in reassurance.
She squeezed his back. Her eyes slowly began to adjust. The stars and the reflecting light off of Alesia's metal surface provided the only illumination. That quickly changed, purple and red explosions popping up like fireworks hundreds of thousands of kilometers away. A battle right at the doorstep of Alesia's entrance. Was this Romanov's victorious sally out of the planet as he routed the last of the Covenant? Or was this one last desperate charge? A doomed attempt to break free from an encircling and numerically superior army. Trading defeat for total annihilation. The action was too far way for Lian to be able to tell which, but given everything that happened today either outcome seemed equally likely.
However, even that extra bit of light was not enough to break the dark wall in front of her.
"Vaz," she called out into the void. "Are you alright?"
"I'm fine," he answered back. There was a bit of fumbling, and then, "Naomi's still breathing. She has a steady pulse so I think she's just passed out. Mal's fine too. You guys have any light?"
"I do," Phillips spoke up. His hand briefly left Lian's, and he fumbled with the digital watch on his wrist. When it was off his hand immediately returned to hers. He hit a button, a faint green glow shined from the watch. It wasn't much, but it was enough. Lian and Phillips crawled forward cautiously. They were only able to see Vaz a few feet away from them, his face lit up by the green glow.
"What the hell happened with BB?" Lian asked urgently. "I've never seen any AI act that way."
Vaz shook his head. Not in a 'I don't know,' way but in a 'I know, but you are not going to like it,' manner. Before he answered though, his eyes widened. He pointed at the watch.
"It's fifteen hundred," he said.
"Yeah," Phillips replied. "What about it?"
"The Sangheili fleet arrived in the system at around twelve hundred."
"That's…" Phillips started, flipping the watch over and looking at the time himself. "No, the watch must be wrong. It has to be. There is no way that thing, that anomaly lasted more than a few minutes."
"Maybe," Vaz halfheartedly agreed. "Or maybe that anomaly did more than just make us sick."
"It makes sense," Lian agreed. "When the Sangheili fleet arrived they were several thousand kilometers away from Alesia. Would have taken them twenty of so minutes to reach it at sublight speed."
"Okay," Phillips said. "Then that just means that the anomaly lasted twenty minutes."
"Did it really?" Lian asked. "Did it feel like twenty minutes? As bad as that thing fucked us up do you really think we could have survived twenty minutes?"
Phillips sighed in resignation. "It just doesn't make sense." He looked up at Vaz. "Do you think the anomaly might have something to do with BB going off the rails?"
"That could be it, but it might also be something far worse."
"Like what?" Lian asked.
She never got an answer. The Port Stanley was rocked by a sudden collision. Vaz was knocked off balance, falling forward onto Naomi's unconscious body. Beside her Mal moaned as the Prowler rocked back and forth like a sailing vessel in a violent storm. Lian and Phillips' heads knocked together, both of them loudly cursing in unison in pain and surprise. The entire ship vibrated as the collision reverberated throughout Port Stanley's steel and titanium hull, and Vaz felt his teeth chatter together.
His first thought was that an asteroid had hit them, but he immediately dismissed that possibility. If they had no power it meant that they also had no shielding, and no way to seal off any breached compartments. If an asteroid had hit them than a collision of that size would have breached the hull. They should all already be either dead or dying. No, this was something entirely different. Vaz propped himself up and looked outwards towards the stars. Using them as a reference point Vaz saw that the Port Stanley was now drifting to port, as is to be expected after a collision on the starboard side. Then something peculiar happened.
The Port Stanley stopped drifting. Vaz did not have to be a genius to understand that the conservation of momentum meant that such a thing should be impossible in space. Unless, of course, there was something actively working against the port side momentum. Like another ship with boosters that could fire in the opposite directiong and keep the two ships from floating into oblivion. The conclusion was inevitable.
They had boarders.
…
Vaz kneeled behind a crate, fingertips lightly drumming on the barrel of his battle rifle. He was wearing his ODST helmet, the HUD proving night vision in the pitch black cargo bay. Off to his left was Lian armored up and ready, her visor pointed straight down her assault rifle. Tucked safely in a corner was Phillips nervously holding his plasma rifle. To the right, and at an angle, orange light began to glow as the boarders cut through the hull. Vaz looked at Lian, held both his fists together, and pulled one away in a sudden jerking motion. Lian nodded in acknowledgement and produced a grenade, Vaz doing the same.
They waited. Waited as two lines of molten metal ran parallel to each other, simultaneously cut at a ninety degree angle, and met at the top.
The metal slab fell forward, clanging heavily against the floor of the cargo bay. Vaz and Lian threw their grenades.
They exploded, Vaz seeing the flicker of energy shields as the shrapnel hit them, one of the energy shields going out completely. The four black figures fanned out in the room, their movements unnaturally quick and fluid. Vaz struggled to keep track of them, emptying his battle rifle as he fired burst after burst at the intruders. Plasma bolts lit up the room in bright blue flame, Phillips spraying wildly at the dark figure closest to him. The intruder turned on him with rapid motion, ducking just in time to avoid a plasma round aimed at their head. They fired, and Phillips made a sickening choke as the rounds struck him squarely in the chest.
"Evan, Lian cried out. She stood up quickly, eyes and ears searching frantically for any sign that he might still be alive.
A round struck her in the head, and Lian collapsed onto the floor.
"Shit," Vaz muttered, white hot rage coursing through him. He reloaded his battle rifle. With a yell he ran out from behind cover, firing at the closest figure. The enemy moved out of the way rapidly, tucking and rolling to the right, Vaz's rounds hitting only empty air. Vaz's reflexes kicked in, decades of combat experience, training, and muscle memory commanding his body to drop to one knee and refocus his targeting reticle back onto his enemy.
He did not get another chance to fire, was not even able to move fast enough to drop to one knee. Five rounds struck him in the chest and abdomen, knocking the air out of his lungs. Vaz's body went limp.
…
Naomi stumble through the corridors of the Port Stanley. Her vision was nonexistent, the Spartan moving down the hallway by sense of touch and memory alone. Her ears were still ringing, and she flet as if the room was spinning constantly. She had found Mal passed out next to her, and after clumsily checking his pulse went off in search of the others. The effort was far harder than it should have been. Her augmentations normally allowed her to have cat like vision in the dark, but that only worked so long as there was a light source of some kind. Deep within the depths of the Port Stanley no such light existed, and Naomi was left with only her other very disoriented senses.
Naomi stumbled, her shoulder banging against the wall, every muscle in her legs and arms throbbing in constant dull pain. She was an engine stuck in second gear, unable to accelerate beyond a slow trot.
Then she heard it. The bang of metal on metal, the explosion of grenades, and the sound of gunfire in the distance. Naomi forced herself in third gear, her body nearly stalling out as a result. She ignored the pain, tearing down the hallway as fast as she could will herself to go.
Then the gunfire ceased, and Naomi halted as well. She strained her ear, fine soft hairs standing on end at the back of her neck, straining to detect any type of movement. Naomi did not hear the figure creep towards her, the bells still ringing in her ears far too loud for her to detect such subtle movement.
But she did feel him. Felt in the same way that a predator is detected by its potential prey. Pure instinct. On any other day she might have been faster than him, but when she twirled around and brought her pistol up to shoot him, a round struck her square in the head. Her hand immediately went numb, and the pistol clattered to the floor. She recognized the sensation. Had felt it many times before.
Stun rounds? She thought in bewilderment. The dark figure turned the flash lights on his helmet, the light shining directly into her eyes. "Where are they?" she asked in a low dangerous voice.
"They're still alive," the man reassured her. "We won't hurt them unless we have to."
That voice. She recognized it.
The man took a step towards her. "It's been a long time Naomi."
Naomi's narrowed her eyes. "Otto?"
Black three leveled his assault rifle, and fired a long burst of stun rounds at Naomi. She collapsed against the wall behind her. One round had struck her throat, and she was left unable to speak. The look of the betrayal in her eyes, however, told Black Three all he needed.
"I know," he said, closing the remaining distance between them. "Maybe when all this is over you'll understand why we did this." He raised his assault rifle. "I'm sorry."
The butt of his weapon collided with Naomi's head, and she was knocked unconscious.
