The elevator descended for a concerning amount of time.

Greg was finding it a bit harder to maintain his focus simply due to the amount of pressure that was now riding on him. He was used to high stakes and short fuses, but this was ridiculous. To his knowledge, he'd never had the fate of an entire world resting on his shoulders. All the more reason to stay sharp, but all the more reason why it was getting more difficult. Greg wasn't delusional. He knew that he had strength and will, more than even the average Marine, but he also knew that he had hard limits.

Even the strongest metal would shatter under enough pressure or the right circumstances.

He took a moment to check over his weapons. The only sound was the soft hum of the lift descending. Greg tried not to think of the immense weight of the icy water pushing in on all sides around them. A few things made him pretty nervous, and being underwater was on that list. There was something about knowing that there was tremendous, unseen force surrounding you and it was trying to kill you.

Or, if not trying, then at least you would die as a natural consequence of it getting its way.

Water wanted in, and if given the tiniest opportunity, it would burst inside and it wouldn't stop until it had killed you or you had forced it to cease.

Space was the same, though it was the opposite.

Air and warmth wanted out.

Greg didn't do too well in space, at first at least, but he'd eventually learned to tolerate it. But it wasn't like he operated in an aquatic environment all that often.

The elevator began to slow as he finished checking over his gear. It seemed to be in working order. After some consideration, he selected the shotgun. The hull could probably stand up to a direct shotgun blast if it came to that.

Probably.

He hoped he wouldn't have to find out.

The elevator settled into the bottom of the shaft and then all became still and silent.

"Get ready," Greg murmured as everyone quickly positioned themselves around the door, ready to blast away at anything that might be waiting for them.

The doors slid open.

Again, an anticlimax. Greg relaxed ever so slightly as a bloody, flickering security checkpoint was revealed to him. Slowly, shotgun at the ready, he walked out of the elevator with Izzy. She covered left while he covered right. Nothing but more dented, bloody metal and bodies and spent shell casings. A computer console bled sparks in random bursts. A pipe leaked steadily overhead. Somewhere, too close for comfort, something growled.

Greg spied two ways out of the room, both of them ripped open by force.

"Coretti, Rydell, cover the right door, Ellis, Laney, the other one," Greg said.

They all snapped off quick replies and headed off to provide cover. "Izzy, Turner, see if you can find a working terminal."

They both nodded and got to it. While they worked, Greg moved around the security checkpoint, making double sure they were secure. As far as he could tell, this was their only way into, and thus consequently out of, the facility. There was nothing hiding in the shadows or among the debris scattered across the room. He glanced out the only window, which was sprayed with blood but otherwise intact, and saw a floodlight on out there. He saw nothing but dark water, though after a moment a fish swam into the light, then darted away.

"Got something," Turner said.

He and Izzy joined her in a little booth tucked away in a corner of the room. She made way for Izzy, who booted up the console and began navigating it.

"I think I can work with this, gimme a moment," she murmured.

Greg left her to it, looking back out the window. He wondered about the facility, about how it had come to be. It had been over a week since the outbreak began...right? Somewhere between one and two weeks, he still wasn't entirely clear on the timeline. Hell, at this point he didn't even know how long he had been on Wintermute. But he knew that a group of highly-trained, well-funded people could create miracles and move mountains if they were properly motivated to. He'd seen it happen before. So it wasn't impossible that they'd just seen an opportunity and jumped on it. Whoever they were. Gibson had sure hopped on it quickly enough.

But maybe someone with more pull and power had been of a similar mind as Gibson. Probably this place was known to some high ranking members of the military. Maybe they thought it would be a secure or at least isolated enough place to do research.

"Got a map," Izzy said, breaking his thoughts.

Greg moved back over and looked at the screen. He saw a rough topographical overlay of the facility and quickly oriented himself. The place was basically a giant square, and they were in the bottom left corner. To their right was the dorms wing that ultimately terminated into a large storage warehouse. Up from their current position was security, the medical ward, and ultimately the control room at the end. Between the control room at the top left corner and the utilities section, which made up the top right corner, were the labs where they kept and experimented on the specimens. Ideally, all they'd have to do was walk up to the control room.

Ideally.

Greg downloaded the map to his suit, then uploaded it to the team's wireless cloud and pushed it through to everyone's database.

"All right, map incoming. It looks relatively simple, all we have to do is-"

He fell silent as they heard distant gunfire: the rattling of a battle rifle. He hurried over to the place it was coming from: the right, the way to dorms and storage. He joined Rydell and Coretti at that door, staring down a long length of bloodied metal corridor. He couldn't tell for sure, but he thought the gunfire might be coming from the far end, near or in the warehouse.

"Flood, maybe?" Coretti murmured.

"What, shooting each other?" Rydell replied.

"Maybe."

"No, it's too controlled. They fire really sporadically," Greg murmured. He activated his radio. "This is Sergeant Walker of Task Force Reaper to anyone, respond. Over." He waited. The gunfire didn't let up. He cursed. "Either they're too busy or they've got a busted radio. Rydell, with me. Everyone else, get to the control room and get that data. I'll go grab whoever it is and meet you there," he said. "Izzy's in charge."

"Let's move," Izzy said.

Everyone gathered around her and they hustled out of the room.

Greg looked at Corporal Rydell, who looked back at him with resolute lethargy. "Let's get this done," he said, and they set off.

Their pace was brisk, as whoever it was was still firing away, but they had to keep an eye out to both sides as there were a lot of doors surrounding them and any of them could hold Flood. Even as he thought it, Greg heard a growl come from the third open door they'd passed on his side. He skidded to a halt, turned, and raised the shotgun. A Combat Form, a woman wearing the tattered remains of a white labcoat over the bulging malformation her body had become thanks to an Infection Form, began coming for him from out of a wrecked dorm room. He squeezed the trigger. The shotgun bucked in his grasp as the shell blew out the Combat Form's chest, sending it flying backwards into the dorm room and crashing into something.

That seemed to awaken everything else around them.

"Dammit, keep moving! Run and gun!" Greg snapped as he pumped the shotgun.

Rydell joined him as they started rushing down the corridor. Combat Forms came at them out of doorways. Each man fired as quickly and accurately as they could, Greg his shotgun, Rydell his battle rifle. Another Flood lurched out of another doorway ahead of him, growling menacingly as it reached for him with a wavering collection of bunched tentacles, dripping some awful green substance, and he blew its 'arm' completely off, splattering the wall beside it with gore. Working the shotgun with his armored fists, he blasted a second time, blowing a hole through its chest. He repeated the action as another staggered out behind the first.

Then he was past the door, given only a brief glimpse into a blood-soaked mess hall.

He could hear more behind them, but time was of the essence. They'd deal with that when they could. For now, they had to get to whoever was fighting for their life. Greg emptied the shotgun by the time they'd made it halfway down the corridor and was forced to switch hastily to his battle rifle as there was no time to reload. He began pumping out three-round bursts, managing to nail Combat Forms more often than not as they surged out into the hallway, looking for fresh meat to slaughter. Rydell was keeping up, he was glad to see.

By the time they reached the end of the corridor and came to the threshold, he'd emptied his battle rifle and was grabbing for a reload.

"Friendlies, coming in!" he shouted. "Rydell, cover rear!" he snapped.

"On it!" Rydell replied as he dug in his heels, ground to a halt, and spun around. Greg heard him resume opening up after a hasty reload, and then he was too busy for anything else as more Flood came at him from the warehouse side.

He caught a quick glance of crates of many different sizes, stacks of them scattered here and there across a large room, and a lone figure standing atop a pyramid of them near the center of the room. In the wan light from the overhead fixtures that still functioned, he saw that it was a Marine in white camo, desperately fighting for his life.

Greg walked into that room feeling at least decently confident that he could handle whatever the situation was.

That changed when he actually saw what was attacking the lone Marine.

"What the hell…" he whispered.

It was something new.

For a few seconds, he simply wasn't sure what the hell he was looking at. There were about a dozen of them in room, mixed in with a few Combat Forms. They were short, whatever they were, maybe two and a half or three feet tall. They looked like...for the life of him, they looked like a thick, fleshy leaf supported by two stubby legs. For just a second he wondered if they were Grunts that had been transformed into Flood. Did they have Grunts down here? As far as he knew, there were no Covenant on Wintermute.

But then two of them turned around and he knew immediately that they were not Grunts.

The front half of the fleshy leaf body was studded with white spikes. As he watched, they each fired off one of the spikes towards him. One missed and the other pinged off his armor, sending him stumbling back.

"We got new ones!" he shouted as he opened fire. "They shoot stuff!"

"Great!" Rydell roared behind him.

Greg put a pair of bursts into one of them and shredded the creature, managing to hit its central mass, and it seemed to die, toppling over into a pool of greenish gore. As he attempted to repeat the process with the second one, he managed to land a few shots, but this one abruptly curled its top half down on itself. He kept firing but suddenly the bullets seemed to be doing very little damage, as though the back half of it was heavily armored.

"Son of a bitch," he growled, switching to his shotgun, shoving a few shells in, taking a few steps forward, and then blasting twice into it.

That did it.

Or at least it seemed to. He blew two chunks out of its back and it uncurled and tried to run. He put the last shell into it and blew it in half.

What the hell were these things!?

As Greg rapidly fed more shells into the shotgun, he suddenly remembered the way that one of those stealthy little bastards had been...changing, somehow. Was this what it had been trying to change into it? These Flood really were monsters designed to murder. Why were they so powerful? So adaptive? So vicious?

Where had they come from?

Greg finished reloading and resumed blasting. He emptied the shotgun twice more helping the lone survivor put down the new Flood types that littered the warehouse floor and the handful of Combat Forms lumbering around, then switched back to his battle rifle and helped Rydell put down the Flood that had yet to be killed behind them. Finally, after several wild, gut-wrenching moments, the gunfire fell silent.

"You okay up there?" Greg asked as he reloaded yet again.

"Fine," came the reply. "I'm, uh...I'll be down in a minute."

Greg looked up. The man slowly sat down on the topmost crate of the pyramid, slowly reloading his battle rifle. "Who are you?"

"Lance Corporal Baranov," the man replied. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly as he finished reloading. "I assume you're another team that Gibson sent?"

"Yes. You're from the first?" Greg replied.

"Yeah."

"Anyone else make it?"

"No."

"You positive about that?"

He sighed. "Yeah. I saw them all die."

"I'm sorry." Greg activated his radio. "Izzy, how we looking?"

He heard a shotgun blast and a few battle rifle rattles as she responded with a disgusted sigh. "We got to the control room. Place is locked down, goddamnit. I'm trying to figure out-shit, hold on." He heard a much closer shotgun blast, then two more. Something shrieked. "Sorry, I'm back. Flood are here in force. Two problems. First is that the door itself is without power, and the manual release has malfunctioned. The nearest terminal is showing it as locked down. So first we need to power it up, and then we need to find the security keycard to get past it."

Greg sighed. "How do we deal with power?"

"Over in the utilities corner. It's not too difficult, just a reroute that has to be made."

"Keycard?"

"Look around, I guess. We'll have to get lucky, there."

"All right. I found the lone survivor of the previous squad. He's alive and kicking. And, wait one." He looked up. "Baranov, you a tech by chance?"

"Yeah. Combat technician," he replied.

"Well all right, then. He's a tech. You all look for the keycard. We'll make the repair and look for the keycard on our end, then meet you at the control room."

"Understood."

"You up to date on the situation at large?" Greg asked as Baranov started coming down from the top of the crate pyramid.

"Not really," he replied. "Gibson wasn't entirely coherent when he sent us out here. All I know is that we came here to snag some research data on these bastards." He kicked the nearest Flood corpse as he came down to the floor.

"Oh...I've got bad news then. We've got less than a day before this world gets glassed straight to hell," Greg said as the three of them made their way across the warehouse and towards the door that would take them to the next corridor.

"Damn," was all Baranov said in response to that.

"Yeah. I guess I just want to let you know what the stakes are."

"I understand."

Greg nodded and took point as they made their way into the next lengthy corridor that connected this corner of the underwater facility to the utilities one about a hundred meters away. The way seemed to be clear enough, and it would make sense that their battle would have drawn in all the nearest Flood. They talked quietly while they walked.

"What happened?" Greg asked.

Baranov sighed. "Divide and conquer, basically. There were eight of us. Our Sergeant split us. My team was to go to the utilities section to provide any kind of technical support if necessary. They were hiding. We didn't encounter anything until we got to the utilities section. Then they came out of everywhere. We fought, we fought really hard, but ultimately they took my team down one by one. I managed to make it to the corridor that connects the initial checkpoint to the control section, tried to get to the other half of my team. There was just two left alive, my Sergeant and Private Benson. Benson was wounded bad. We made it back to the lift but lost Benson. The Flood just kept coming and coming and the lift took too long to get down. We were forced to retreat. I made it back to this very corridor and ended up hiding in there," he pointed.

Greg glanced in the open door as they passed it, seeing a simple utility closet.

"Lost my Sergeant back at the warehouse to one of those weird types. One of the spines they shoot caught him right in the skull. Killed him. I hid with Benson for awhile, but he'd lost too much blood. He died. I decided to try and make it back to the lift when they rushed me again and then you came and saved my ass."

"Sorry we couldn't have been here sooner," Greg said. "And about your team."

"Yeah," Baranov murmured.

They didn't say anything else. There was nothing else to say.

They got to the utilities sector without running into anything more than a few Infection Forms waddling around. They popped easily, though each time he killed one Greg expected a fresh assault to trigger. But the Flood in this area seemed to have been temporarily exhausted. The utilities wing was jam-packed with tech, gear, equipment, consoles, and workstations, all of it acting as the guts and nervous system of the station. Heart and brain and lungs all in one. It had held up surprisingly well, and after clearing it out, Greg suddenly wondered if the Flood actually understood that if they destroyed this room, they'd likely destroy themselves.

How smart were they, exactly?

Yet more questions for later, he supposed.

"Okay, I'm dialing you into our squad frequency," Greg said. "Sergeant Serrano will walk you through what needs to be done."

"Understood," Baranov replied.

While he worked out the problem on this end, Greg worked the other one. Although as he searched for the keycard, he had little faith that he'd find it. The base as a whole was such an irreconcilable mess that he was pretty sure they were going to have to find some kind of workaround. But maybe not. Maybe they'd get lucky.

He hadn't gotten lucky or found anything beyond some shells and magazines by the time Baranov announced that he'd completed the reroute and Izzy confirmed that it had worked and the door to the control room had power.

"Any luck with the keycard?" Greg asked.

"Nothing yet," Izzy replied.

"All right. We're on our way back."

"You gonna cut through the labs? The door on that side is locked down too, or it should be, but the keycard might be in there…"

Greg considered it, looking at the door that led from the utilities corner room to the string of rooms that connected it to the control room. The laboratories.

"I think we'll avoid it if we can," he replied. "We'll loop back around."

"We'll be here."

"Let's head out," Greg said.

By the time he got over to the control room, Greg felt like they were being given a lot of good luck, and that they were closer than ever to hitting a skid of bad luck.

Not only did they manage to get there without running into any real trouble, but Izzy had managed to track down the security keycard among the dead, and his entire team, plus Baranov, were all still alive and kicking as they unlocked the command center.

Something bad was waiting in the near future, he could just feel it.

The door opened onto a room of sparks and blood and bodies. A handful of Infection and Combat Forms hung around, and they were put down quickly and efficiently.

"All right, Izzy, Turner, find the data. Everyone else, secure the room," Greg called out as soon as the immediate threat had passed.

The team leaped to work. He joined them in securing the room, but it was a tenuous task at best. Although the door leading to the labs was closed and locked, there were a lot of burst open ventilation grates. They apparently made great entry points for the Flood. The seconds ticked by in miserable, bloody wretchedness as they all prayed and hoped against hope that nothing would go wrong. Greg looked out one of the windows, seeing more dark water and the occasional fish drifting by. The local fish seemed to be long, narrow, bony, and with lots of teeth. Well, it fit at least. Everything about Wintermute seemed miserable.

"Okay, I've got good news and annoying news," Izzy announced suddenly.

Greg turned away from the window and strode over to join her at the workstation she was investigating. "Give it to me."

"I've found the data we're looking for. That's the good news. The annoying news is that the transfer is going to take about four minutes. I've already started, but I have to stay here, in this room, to complete it," Izzy said.

"All right. Maybe our luck will hold and-" The door to the lab suddenly rattled in its frame as something slammed against it from the other side. "Oh come on!"

"Get ready!" Izzy called. "Protect this workstation!"

"Ellis, Laney, with me! Rydell, cover the exit! Coretti, Baranov, Turner, help Izzy protect that workstation!"

Greg took point on the door that was currently being pounded down. They all got into position behind other workstations that would afford them protection and waited anxiously as dents appeared in the door. Greg eyed the broken vent grates nervously. Nothing coming through them yet, but he could easily envision Infection Forms spilling out of them. He selected his battle rifle and kept it trained on the door.

"Izzy, how long?!" he called.

"Just under three minutes!" she snapped.

"Shit!"

"You're telling me!"

A blunt, pointed protrusion suddenly split the metal of the door, bursting through. As it began to pull back, it became stuck. Greg heard a roar and it started to yank back more violently. A Tank, he knew, was on the other side of that protrusion.

And it was getting more and more pissed off with every second it was stuck.

"Get ready to unload on this thing," he snapped.

Finally, the Tank ripped the door from its frame, tossed it aside, and began trying to shove itself in through the opening.

"Kill it! Now!" Greg yelled.

Immediately, over half a dozen streams of gunfire converged on the creature. The Tank roared and shook and flailed. Greg felt his heart skip a beat in hope as he saw that it had tried to force itself through and then tried to pull back so hard that it had gotten itself stuck. He unloaded the battle rifle into it, desperate to kill it while it was still stuck. By the time the first round of gunfire had expended itself, the thing was still moving, if sluggishly. Cursing, Greg quickly swapped to his shotgun and resumed blasting away at it.

Partway into the second volley of gunfire, it finally died.

"Cease fire!" he called when he realized that it was no longer moving, just being moved by the impact of the bullets.

It stopped moving as the gunfire fell silent, and then began moving again almost immediately. He took aim, preparing to blast it away once more, unsure if it was truly dead or not, but then he realized what was happening.

There were more Flood behind it, and they were trying to get in.

"Okay, Rydell, keep that back route clear! Let me know if anything shows up! Izzy, how long?" he asked as he frantically shoved more shells in, then, once he'd finished, switched back to his battle rifle and reloaded it.

"Two minutes," she replied.

"Let me know the second it's done," he said.

"Confirmed."

"Everyone, watch those vents!"

Barely twenty seconds passed after he'd said it before he began to hear that distinctly strange, terrifying noise the Infection Forms made. That odd sound that was almost akin to speaking, albeit in some alien, unknown, unknowable language. And then they were coming through the vents, dozens of them drifting in, like someone had opened the floodgates. Immediately, everyone opened fire. Greg popped half a dozen of the things mid-fall as his first volley of bullets hit one of them and it caused a cascading chain reaction of small, fleshy explosions. But there were already more coming through to replace those who had died.

He kept firing, shooting the ones that made it to the floor and then trying to stem the tide coming in through the nearest broken vent.

Emptying the weapon of bullets, he popped most of them as they poured through, and as he reloaded, found himself wishing for an assault rifle for the first time in awhile. Yet more still were coming, and the Tank corpse was being literally shredded, tough as it was, as the Flood behind it fought to get it out of the way. As Greg took aim at the vent shaft once again, something new abruptly popped through it.

One of the stalkers.

The giant-bug creature fell through and disappeared behind a broken workstation before he could get a bead on it. Cursing, he prepared to kill it as it came out from behind the equipment, if it was going to. It seemed strange to him that one of them would be involved in an attack. He briefly turned his attention back up to the vent, but that seemed to be the last thing coming through it, apparently. Around him, the others were continuing to fire.

"One minute!" Izzy called.

God, just sixty more seconds before they could begin retreating from this nightmare situation. But each one felt like it took three or four times the appropriate interval of time to pass. He caught movement coming out from behind the workstation and prepared to eliminate the stalker. But Greg froze when he saw one of the new ones, what he felt like calling a spine-thrower for lack of a better term, come scuttling out from behind the sparking equipment.

In his mind's eye, he suddenly had a flashback to that one stalker he and Izzy had come across when it was transforming into something else.

So they could transform!

Why in the hell did it have that ability!?

"Dammit!" Greg snapped and opened fire, putting three rapid bursts of gunfire into the creature and killing it before it had a chance to start causing real trouble. Yet another thing to deal with later, provided there even was a later.

He emptied his battle rifle once more helping stem the time from another broken vent grate. Ejecting the spent mag and slapping a fresh one in, he repeated the process, and then did so again, putting down probably close to fifty of the damned Infection Forms. How many were there!? He glanced at the Tank Form's corpse.

It had partially dislodged from the doorway and he could see Combat Forms reaching through.

"Done!" Izzy shouted suddenly.

"Go! Go! Izzy, Laney, help me cover the rear!" Greg snapped.

Everyone began scrambling out of the room as Rydell told them the back path was still clear. They opened fire on the Flood trying to crank open the gap they'd managed to open so far with the Tank, pouring a magazine apiece into the Combat Forms back in the lab section, then beat a hasty retreat as they reloaded.

For the next several seconds, Greg knew only running, stumbling, and navigating a broad, bloody corridor littered with corpses. When they reached the halfway mark, he glanced back over his shoulder and felt the breath leave his lungs in terror. The back of the corridor was alive and writhing with a living wave of Flood, a tsunami of Combat Forms and Infection Forms and spine-throwers. He shouted for them to hurry and kept running, putting all of his focus on getting the hell out of there. They reached the end of the corridor and raced back into the elevator room. Rydell and Coretti were waiting for them and immediately began providing cover.

"Go! Go!" Greg shouted as he saw that they'd managed to get the elevator open already.

They piled in and the last thing he saw behind the closing doors was the living tide of Flood pouring into the security checkpoint.

And then they were shooting up, towards the surface.