Zaeed screamed in pain, holding the size of his head, blood gushing down over his face. He was screaming in incoherent rage at the pain. The influence of whatever he'd touched had been forced from his mind by the trauma. He kicked the damn thing back into the hole he'd taken it from. A fiery rage burned in his head, a pure incoherent anger that took away any intelligent thought he might have had.

A squad of marines had entered the room, trying to contain their pain-maddened Sergeant, but he merely slapped them aside. He screamed at whatever had dared to try to take over his mind.

He took off his mangled helmet, his troops staring in horror at the wound. Zaeed screamed into the helmet.

"This entire damn ship is haunted. We're leaving!" He growled as he waved off the medic that tried to patch him up. He was getting off of the ship and back to the circumference.

-

Medical bay of the Circumference.

"Captain, something just happened." Leng suddenly yelled over the intercom in the medical bay. "Sergeant Zaeed. He shot himself after touching something on the Covenant ship! He's demanding we nuke the cargo ship immediately."

Exaviel turned to look at the Elite. "What. Happened." He was a moment from taking his pistol and ramming it down the Elite's throat and demanding answers.

"He must have touched the artifact." The Elite said sincerely, not trying to hide it in the slightest.

"Artifact. What artifact?" Exaviel asked. The idea of an artifact being able to make a man commit suicide disturbed him greatly. It offended him on a fundamental level as someone who believed all things could be explained rationally.

The Elite leaned back into his bed, crossing his arms in front of his chest. Then he murmured something. "The Artifact I was transporting for some crazy cult. They paid quite a lot for me to make sure it reached them. The one that killed everyone aboard when it woke up."

Exaviel nodded at the Elite. "Except you. What did you say about the way they died?" He started to calm down. He could talk this through, find a way to safely dispose of whatever had killed the crew of the cargo ship.

"No." The Elite looked sorrowfully at Exaviel. "It killed me too. I just remembered I was the first to die."

The Elite began struggling against its bindings, arms and legs stretching unnaturally, skin ripping apart to reveal cold blue lights inside. Red lightning began to arc around its body, flesh melting away into a noxious black goo. Additional limbs extended from its back, vicious claws that looked like they could dig deep into tissue and crush bone. The Elite broke free from his restraints and roared. It was a scream that cut to Exaviel's bones. The sound was wrong like it was not meant to be heard by mankind.

Kirrahe emerged from his cloaking field and opened fire into the side of the Elite's head, but this did nothing to phase the abomination, the bullet merely passing through. The Elite's neck extended, and its face split open into five sections along the lines of its mandibles. The creature lunged out, biting Kirrahe's arm and ripping it off in a shower of blood. The STG operative screamed and fell back, using the omni-tool on his remaining hand to try to tend to the horrific wound. The guards opened fire with their shotguns, taser rounds implanting themselves into the flesh of the once-elite and sending enough electricity into his body to kill a brute. But this did nothing to slow down whatever creature was stuck in the medical bay. It glared at them with burning red eyes. A device erupted from the side of the Elite's head, targeting one of the guards with a laser, before a blast of electricity erupted from the flesh of the monster, jumping from guard to guard and leaving them as a crumpled scorched mess.

Exaviel fell onto his back as he tried to get away from the monster, crawling backward as he opened fire with his MA6D service pistol. Each shot blew chunks out of the abomination he was facing, but this did little to slow it down. It went down on five limbs and ran, leaping over Exaviel and heading for the door.

Four marines rushed into the room, only to freeze in fear at the sight of what was heading towards them. They opened fire, but the creature was upon them. A vicious jaw tearing off heads, claws ripping out throats, and fists crushing chests. It was unlike anything Exaviel had ever seen. The abomination raced out the doorway, heading directly for the bridge.

Exaviel slowly righted himself, then put a hand to the side of his head. He'd cut himself when he hit the ground. "Code Black!" He yelled across every communications channel. "The ship has been infiltrated by… by something! All forces converge on the bridge! Shoot to kill! Initiate Cole Protocol!"

Most of the Circumference Marine complement had been sent to the Covenant ship, with only a single squad remaining onboard, as well as a standard guard complement in essential locations. There were only eight marines left aboard, the rest had boarded the enemy ship. "Pull back all forces from the Covenant ship, immediately, then prepare to destroy that haunted tub!"

Leng's voice spoke into his head from his neural interface. "Captain, the unknown entity is trying to force its way into my database. Its processing power is… I do not know! It's somehow reacting to me before I even try something. My internal clock is leaping forward hours at a time. I am detecting gravitational and temporal anomalies all over the ship. Slipspace around the ship is... There is something wrong!"

"You're an ONI AI! Tell me what this damn thing is!" Exaviel screamed as he ran to Kirrahe and pulled the Salarian to his feet, and shoved his pistol into the Salarian's remaining hand. Kirrahe nodded. "I apologize, Captain. I had no idea such a thing was... Nevermind. Let's go." Kirrahe kicked a shotgun up from the floor, with Exaviel catching it. He reached for the ammunition of a fallen guard, quickly loading the shotgun.

"Apologize for what? That some abomination crawled its way out of slipspace to slaughter the ship? We can't let this thing escape."

"Agreed. You take your marines and head for the Bridge. I will head towards the engine room and prepare to detonate the reactor. Good luck, Captain." Kirrahe engaged his tactical cloak and slunk off in the direction of the engine room.

A squad of marines busted down the doors. They had to have come from the barracks. They stopped to look at the slaughterhouse the medical bay had become, some pausing to look in confusion at Exaviel, but before they could ask what had happened, Exaviel yelled. "With me! We can't let that monster take the bridge!" He wasn't sure what it was they were facing, but that didn't matter. The creature rushing the bridge had only one explanation.

It wanted control of the ship.

-
Circumference Bridge

The cameras outside had been ripped away and consumed by the abomination, which was changing rapidly as cybernetic modified and rearranged themselves into new hideous configurations. It left a trail of death and destruction in the halls as it charged the bridge on all of its limbs, digging into every surface of the rooms it passed. Nothing slowed it down as it propelled itself through the ship. A churning mass of cybernetic limbs, discolored flesh, and crackling red energy. The monster advanced without pause, claws destroying sensors and cameras as it advanced.

Leng heated up the defensive turrets aboard the bridge as the once-Elite began to bash down the Titanium doors. The bridge crew had taken their sidearms and joined the two Marine guards in fortifying the room. Lines of fire were established, and weapons charged.

The door started heating up by some unknown mechanism, and the blast doors began budge as claws dug in and began to pull the massive slabs of Titanium-A apart. As the doors opened, the hideous visage of the creature could be seen through the gaps. The defenders opened fire immediately, only for a barbed arm to lash out through the hole, grip one of the ensigns tightly, and pull him towards the doorway. There was a horrific noise as the creature began feeding on the ensign, and he screamed for his comrades to open fire.

The door servos failed, and the doors were ripped wide open. The monster leaps inside, plasma fire, erupted from its chest, revealing integrated plasma weapons that blew off limbs and melted defenses, while blasts of laser-guided electricity burned defenders into smoking heaps.

Leng opened fire with the defensive turrets, armor-piercing rounds ripping chunks off the abomination. If he could have screamed, he would have roared in defiance for all the good it did him. His turrets were ripped from their mounts one by one after the creature leaped towards them, cutting them off their mounting, and using one of them as a club to kill several of the surviving defenders.

The creature then moved in on the Captain's chair. It jabbed a clawed hand into Exaviel's console, forcing its way into the system.

Leng could now see the true extent of what he faced. It wasn't some mindless abomination spawned from slipspace, but something more, an intelligence. He tried futilely to stop the intrusion, but his cyber defenses were nothing to a being like this. Its thought patterns were unmistakably running inside of Slipspace. Leng's slipspace sensors could see the invisible control over the once-Elite.

In desperation, Leng began to detach as many functions from the bridge as he could. Engineering, doorways, defensive guns, life support, airlocks. Everything he could to stop it from taking control of the ship. He tried to wipe the navigation data, but the entity rewrote the data as fast as Leng could erase it. In a manic desperation, he transferred the navigation data to engineering and cut the connection.

The digital space Leng inhabited was rapidly falling apart as the corruption spread, Slipspace-based mathematics, and code slowly replacing every line of code of Leng's being. And as it did, Leng too began to see like the creature did.

Everything went dark, and Leng was in a dark room, facing the abomination that was consuming him. Hinged jaw and glowing baleful eyes glaring into Leng's very being. He felt fear. True fear. He wanted to cry, even though he couldn't do so.

The being reached out with a claw, grazing Leng's cheek, then grabbing his jaw, holding it tight, and pulling Leng closer. Streams of data and code entered Leng's being.

He screamed.

-
En route to the Bridge.

Exaviel heard screaming over the radio as he and his squad approached the bridge. He and his marines passed scenes of carnage and bloodshed as bad as any battle of the Human-Covenant war, but a thousand times more horrifying as they realized what they faced. He and his marines ran as fast as they could. They had to pass through a long hallway before they could get to the bridge, a design initially intended to give the defenders an advantage in the event of a boarding action, but which was not being used against them. Exaviel noted he'd received a message from Leng.

Leng suddenly started screeching across every radio and intercom aboard the bridge, with a voice that sounded like nails on chalk.

"SaPIenCe Is A Lie.
rEalItY Is ThE PlAygrOunD oF tHE InTellects Of ThE MisT.
SuFfEriNg iS TruTh.
ThE CyCLe WaS NoT EnoUgh.
JoY IS A MisTake
We TaP On thE GlAsS.
DeATh iS sAfeTy.
wE rEtUrn."

Leng's final scream caused every speaker and radio aboard the ship to burn out or explode at the same time. Marines screamed and threw off their helmets as their eardrums burst and blood ran down their heads. The ship's power went out, and the only light that remained was a pair of glowing blue eyes.

Exaviel's shotgun spat out one shell before he was ripped in half.