RECOMPOSE
by Ladywolvesbayne
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22. TEARING APART
proofread and correction by: SL4Y3R -hugs-
SEPTEMBER 7TH 2558
LOCATION: UNSC INFINITY
NAVIGATION AISLE - BRIDGE
standard time not recorded
The Rampant Cortana knew that the Master Chief was aboard (and Subject Three was with him), and her attention was set on him.
The problem was that she had no eyes on the SPARTAN or his team and she couldn't access the video feed of the ship without rebooting Roland, the Infinity's main AI. Doing such thing wasn't a good idea. She was certain that John and her flawed sister would try to get Roland back online (it would have been her first objective too), so she had already taken care of that. The Spike nicely demanded Jul 'Mdama to spare one of his monstrous security AIs from the Song of Retribution's network. The digital creature would keep the Chief away from spoiling her fun for a while, even if she couldn't use it to take over the automated systems.
"What would you do now, John?" she said out loud. "Where would you go first?"
Her venomous smile only grew wider, as she thought of him.
'Mdama went ahead and set off a distraction: he commanded his men to sweep the ship and take every human prisoner aft, while the Spike and her sparse navigation crew would stay at the bridge. The Elite leader wanted to face the Demon, at all costs. The Rampant Cortana knew John better... would he think that she was at the bridge, or at the engine room? Would he go after her, or try to save the hostages? Which would it be?
Both were risky options for any regular soldier, but she had to keep in mind that John wasn't anywhere near being an ordinary man.
It was immensely amusing. She just couldn't wait to see the results.
The non-automated navigation systems, however, were online; she was ready to get the Infinity into slip-space. The Spike had plotted an intricate set of coordinates that would take them to Earth in less than sixty hours, by pushing the Forerunner engines to the verge of hazardous overheating conditions. Dr. Halsey had to check her calculations and approve them, she had no choice after all. If it didn't make the engines explode in the middle of slip-space, damning them all to the Hell of unexplored quantum physics, the whole ordeal would nearly ruin a big part of the ship. So, even if (by any chance) Seven didn't succeed with her original plan, the biggest pride of the UNSC would be left crippled beyond repair.
She let him in. She wanted John aboard because she had plans for him.
But the Rampant Cortana wasn't counting on Dr. Halsey's schemes, neither had she realized when the scientist disappeared from the bridge.
SEPTEMBER 7TH 2558
LOCATION: UNSC INFINITY
SOMEWHERE NEARBY THE ENGINEERING DECK
11:35 PM standard time
Catherine Halsey was a woman of many resources.
She knew her way around the Infinity like the back of her hand (she had a lot to do with the design and building of that vessel, after all), so it wasn't hard for her to avoid the Rampant Spike's surveillance and escape. The computers at the engineering deck were the best shot she could ever have to retrieve the data she needed so much. The Spike hijacked the ship for her own purposes, but she dropped a piece of information that the Doctor found utterly appealing. If she was right (and Dr. Halsey was always right), it could only be the secret location of the Fortress, the last known reliquary of all Forerunner knowledge.
She needed those coordinates, it was her last chance to access the Domain before it was forever out of her grasp.
She didn't have to run or hide from the Sangheili, 'Mdama's Elites were ordered not to harm her in any way. They wouldn't even look at her twice if she happened to cross their paths.
The SPARTANS, however, were an entirely different matter: they were already on the move and any of them would shoot her on sight, she had the feeling. She'd seen a few on her way through the corridors already. The Doctor had an advantage: she was small-framed, she could quickly crawl into reduced spaces and hide if suddenly she felt in danger. Besides, killing SPARTANS was out of her capabilities, Halsey decided that unless it was Sarah Palmer, she wasn't interested in hurting any good soldier.
The Doctor ran through the shadows towards the main engineering deck, wishing for no further delays.
SEPTEMBER 8TH 2558
LOCATION: UNSC INFINITY
FIRST LEVEL MAINTENANCE DECKS
1:13 AM standard time - mission clock: 1:17:05
"How dare she to say that to you?" Cortana whispered, angrily. "Like you wanted this to happen, what is wrong with the Commander?"
John didn't answer at first, he didn't have much to say. The Commander already contacted them to send the clearance code and that was all. No time for chatter. He didn't stop to analyze Palmer's tone over the comm, it wasn't important.
But a little later, he responded: "She's right."
"No, she isn't. Palmer can't pin this on you just because Seven is losing her mind and she wants you dead, or whatever the hell she wants with you. It's unfair, Chief. You've done nothing but try to end this."
"Exactly." he said, looking over his shoulder. "It should be done by now."
"No, listen to me!" Cortana stopped in the middle of the dark passage, raising her voice. She was shaking in rage, the HARPY hissed over her body. It irritated her to no end when other people underestimated John because he was taught to keep his mouth shut and obey blindly. "It was all me. All because of me, because I'm too stubborn to stay away from you. I was going rampant and you tried to save me, then I died and I just couldn't stay dead, could I? The weight of all these lost lives, it lays on my shoulders, Chief, not yours. You're still trying to save me! Someday you will kill yourself doing..."
"Cortana."
That was his 'this is not the time' tone, mixed with a little of 'stop doing that to yourself'. It was good that they were holding that conversation over a private sub-channel and not out loud, otherwise the Elites walking over their heads would have killed them both already. John crouched against the passage's thick wall and looked at her for a moment, observing the signs of her distress; Cortana's body language gave her away. He even considered for a second or two sending her back to the med-bay, she wasn't much of a reliable soldier in such an emotional state.
But if someone could retrieve Roland safely, it was Cortana.
"You listen to me." he started, serious. "I don't regret anything. Anything."
Cortana tilted her head up, took in a deep breath.
It wasn't that the pressure was finally getting to her, it was so much more. It had been nearly three weeks of uninterrupted agony, fear, uncertainty and now, consequences; it was one thing to hear about something and an entirely different matter to actually see it (feel it) with your own eyes. He could relate to that, somehow. John was so aware of her anguish that he could barely focus on anything else, let alone the proximity alert that Sigrid was displaying on his HUD.
"I fear for you, John."
"I know." he said, his voice softened only a little.
"An awful lot of people will be court-martialed because of me after this; if they live long enough to be arrested, that is. I can feel it. And I don't want you to be one of them, John. You don't have to make any more sacrifices for me."
John perched down his rifle, resting the heavy barrel against his thigh.
"We'll see about that." he growled, defiantly. "We have work to do."
Cortana took another deep breath and nodded, feeling a little embarrassed of her emotional outburst.
"Are we okay?" he asked, since she didn't answer.
"We're okay. I just wanted to say it, in case of... you know."
Hell, no. He didn't want to hear that.
John turned around, away from her. "Save it. We'll have plenty of time."
He patted Charley on the hip three times (commanding the dog to move forward and scout for threats) after checking on Sigrid's message. The Elites were standing right over them. There wasn't much light available but the road was clear and it was a straight line, they had to keep moving.
The UNSC battle dog lead them through a complex network of service tunnels below deck, to easily avoid the Elites patrolling above their heads. It was a small space for a man of the Chief's size and getting into a fight inside the ducts would be suicidal, but if there was a better route, they had no time to take it. The passageways were usually occupied with transportation platforms that carried supplies and equipment from the main cargo bays to the rest of the decks, providing a wide range of routes that ended not far from the server station.
It had taken them nearly thirty five minutes to get close to the exit point. Cortana couldn't help to look up from time to time, whenever she heard some woman or man screaming or an Elite roaring its lungs out. She clutched her plasma rifle with shaking hands. Her anger was evident as much as her worries.
The last stage of the route would be the hardest, but the Chief was ready.
"Wait." he crossed an arm before Cortana's chest, he was looking at Charley.
The dog was crouching in front of them, thirty feet ahead, listening.
"What is it?"
"I'm picking up something through Charley's interface."
John received in his own HUD the faint trace of movement near their position. The readings suggested that a hundred feet ahead of them the duct ended and there was an important crowd of Sangheili. The heat signatures were clear too, at least twelve of them. The enemy was concentrated exactly at their exit point.
Cortana saw it too, Sigrid replicated the report for her.
John pressed his lips in a hard line, while assessing the situation. The dog was so silent that it seemed like it wasn't even breathing, her ears and tail stiff.
"Any ideas?" Cortana whispered.
"Just one." John was so focused in the readings that he almost didn't pay thought about explaining the idea. He unclasped two plasma grenades from the small of his back and moved onward. "Cover me."
John patted Charley on the hip and moved onward, side by side. They barely fit together in the narrow duct. The woman proceeded too, following close, until a faint reddish glow at the end of the tunnel made them stop: there was a hydraulic door, the light filtered through the grating. Sigrid updated the readings again, placing every Sangheili Storm on the Chief's HUD with a red silhouette and a triangular marker floating above its head.
John put down his rifle and readied the grenades. The coolant started venting on his hands, with a low hiss. Arms resting over his thighs, he kept the explosives still until he heard the familiar clicking sound inside. Then, he kicked the door off its hinges.
One...
The Elites turned immediately towards the noise, when a piece of the wall came off flying over their heads and hit one of the aliens right in the face.
Two...
Two rounded objects flew in their general direction, one stuck to a dark purple piece of armor and the other fell on the floor grating, but it didn't bounce. The Sangheili barely had time to back off or deploy any other form of shielding.
Three.
The grenades went off, and before the enemies could realize, another two devices came out of nowhere and exploded beside them as well. The sudden flash of white left a bunch of Elites blind for a moment, another six were directly hit by the boiling ionized gasses; three aliens fell down dead with their faces and chests melted in a burnt purple mess, they were too close. There was a lot of roaring and weapons clicking, some blind firing, but none of that really mattered.
Someone sent an alert on the comm network, giving away position and situation. There was movement beyond the wall.
The confusion helped a large and fierce creature to emerge from the darkness. The Elites froze when it appeared: a monster covered in fur and combat gear with enormous fangs and flaming eyes, it moved on four massive legs. The beast fell upon the Elite closer to it and the powerful mandibles munched on the alien's flesh, a low and terrible growling sound accompanied the motion. They had never seen anything of the likes before, it was another kind of human demon. When the aliens snapped back to reality, the beast had already ripped out the throat of a second warrior.
That's when the shooting started.
SEPTEMBER 8TH 2558
LOCATION: UNSC INFINITY
FIRST LEVEL MAINTENANCE DECKS
1:24 AM standard time - mission clock: 1:06:23
John brushed off the purple blood from his faceplate.
The Elites made it to send an alert and now the hallways were compromised. It was time to move out in the open; a large backup squad was expected, so the Chief estimated they had pretty much fifteen minutes to locate the server stations and get Roland out. Charley killed four aliens on her own taking only a plasma sword injury that cut off one of her ears and busted a section of her headset. John shot another four Elites and Cortana finished off the last one: the creature hid in the shadows and attacked the Chief from behind in the heat of the confusion.
She put a bolt of plasma through its head. John never saw her so satisfied about killing something.
He checked all the dead bodies and picked up the functional plasma weapons, she took the swords and the ammo, pinning anything she couldn't carry herself to Charley's armored harness.
They were ready to move when the floor trembled. Cortana nearly lost her foot and the Chief shoved an arm to the wall to remain still. A few seconds later, an unknown force hit them making them fall flat on their backs. The dead Sangheili rolled violently towards the other end of the hallway, jumping off the floor and then bumping down again. Charley rolled over herself, whining, until she clawed the gratings.
A thundering sound ran echoing through the corridor, like the roar of an ancient metallic beast, and for a short moment the lights blinked and gravity failed.
Cortana grasped the gratings too, tried to stand on her feet again.
There was some sort of... resistance in the air. Something pushed her body back.
John spread his feet, trying to remain steady against the force.
"What was that?" he barked, roughly.
"The Infinity just entered slip-space via an undetermined vector." Sigrid said, over the comm. Her voice sounded clipped, there was noise in the line. "I'm picking up a lot of strange Cherenkov radiation readings through other SPARTANS' sensors, this is way off normal rates."
"Meaning?"
"Slip-space is a multilayer stream. We're diving in deeper than recommended."
"It's the engines, Seven is over-clocking them. This could be very bad." Cortana explained, frightened. "She's taking us somewhere..."
"And we're going real fast." Sigrid completed Cortana's sentence. "If this is an experimental course, I must say that manually calculated vectors may have unexpected outcomes. This could lead to overheating or overall core malfunction. We could end up bursting out in a billion pieces or disappearing forever, who knows."
"Chief, this is worse than I thought." Cortana said, shaking her armored head.
"We have to run." John decided.
SEPTEMBER 8TH 2558
LOCATION: UNSC INFINITY
FIRST LEVEL MAINTENANCE DECKS
1:33 AM standard time - mission clock: 0:57:34
"It's here." she said, standing before a blast door striped in yellow.
John immediately turned his back to Cortana and held his rifle up. Charley trotted a few meters ahead to stand guard, hiding her massive frame against the wall.
Cortana opened Commander Palmer's last transmission and tapped the twenty-four digit clearance code on the doors' pad. Through the triple-layered acrylic windows she saw the tall server towers, the immensely powerful data center of the Infinity; the environment was dark except for a few standby lights.
So, this is what her brain used to look like when she was an AI.
"Hurry up, come on..." she whispered, while the system processed the code.
The panel flashed red with an error code.
Cortana's eyes went wide in horror, something cold ran down her spine.
She entered the number again, this time slowly in case she made a mistake before (which she hadn't, that was for sure). Same answer, error code. Cortana swallowed a scream of rage and hit the panel with her fist, angry. She found herself damning all machines to Hell and beyond, which was funny somehow but not in that stressful situation. She tried the number a third time.
Red flashing panel, again.
"No... nonono!" Cortana clenched her fists, trembling. "Please, don't..."
The door wouldn't open, the past power failure must have fried something inside the panel's wiring, she had no time to fix it. And a server station, if not the most secure room of a vessel like the Infinity, didn't have other entrances besides the main gates or an elevator shaft from the power supply room, which was a deck below. Not an option.
She eyed at the mission clock, alarmed.
MISSION CLOCK: 0:55:16
They still had to get out of there and go back.
"This damn thing is fried!" Cortana shouted over the comm. "Chief, I need you to get here and blow up this door, now!"
"Got it." he acknowledged.
It was a bad idea, since the explosion would alert the Elites roaming through the corridors and plus, if the doors were broken they wouldn't have many ways to cover themselves from fire, but there was no time. The Chief eyed the dog and with a simple gesture of his hand commanded her to stand back and lay down. Charley had a basic shield system to protect herself.
He only had one plasma grenade left, it should be powerful enough to open a hole through the thick doors. The Chief readied the detonator, then placed the live explosive on the floor right beside the joint of the twin doors and quickly grabbed Cortana to pull her away. They barely had time to run a few dozen feet and crouch down together when the artifact exploded, raining droplets of boiling plasma all over and splattering the walls with fuming holes. The lights blinked and died in that section of the corridor, a thick cloud of smoke surrounded them.
The MJOLNIR's shields flared in amber and dropped to fifteen percent.
"You need to get yourself some shields." John whispered.
"First thing in the morning." she said, hands tightly clutched to his forearms.
Cortana softly bumped her helmet's faceplate against his, as a gesture of gratitude, and stood up. John took a moment to kick the half-melted metal and open the hole a bit more, enough to get inside without touching the white hot edges. Cortana ran in first, heading to the end of a large passage sided by towering servers, the Chief and the dog followed immediately.
There was no sound inside the room, and it was colder than outside.
"Sigrid, report." John asked, while running.
"I have a squad of six inbound, can't say if Elites or SPARTANS. The radiation is messing up with my readings. I can barely see anything."
"Good." John stopped and turned to the door. "Cortana, you're on. I'll cover."
"Copy that, Chief."
She sounded calmer now, dedicated to her task.
It was better that way, he needed her focused. John crouched down beside a server tower and checked his rifle's ammo, then aimed at the blazing hole on the blast doors. The unknown squad was tagged ETA four minutes. Charley already knew the drill; when she saw her master hide, she found a spot right beside the doors and laid down on her belly, waiting.
Cortana found the mainframe terminal at the center of the room, where six other passageways converged. There were four dozens of chips set in their respective sockets, most of them dumb AIs, alphabetically sorted. Supposedly, a status light should be blinking beside every socket (green if the chip was active, yellow if it wasn't, red if there was a reading error), thirty seven lights out of forty eight were flaring red. Sigrid's socket was the only one empty. Cortana assumed that the other AIs were attacked by the alien AI, so, what if Roland was destroyed?
She found Roland's chip right away and yanked it out of the socket; the status light wasn't on, so Cortana didn't exactly know what to expect.
Besides, where could she plug him in to check on his status?
She took the only choice she had left.
Cortana looked doubtfully at her armored right arm and with extreme care placed Roland's chip over the matte-black surface of her forearm-plate. The HARPY hissed softly and a small socket opened on the plate, she pressed down the chip and six tiny strap-like protuberances locked it in place. The chip lit up in soft orange, immediately afterwards. A rush of adrenaline ran through her veins.
"Roland? Are you there?" she tried out.
Nothing happened for a few seconds, but then...
A status light blinked slowly on the upper left corner of her HUD, alongside the mission clock. When it settled for green, she saw the startup code sequence.
"This is UNSC Smart AI RLD 0205-4. Loading." Roland's voice filled her ears.
Cortana sighed, relieved.
"Chief, I have Roland, he seems to be okay." she said.
"Then we should go. Now." John growled. "We've got company."
She ran back towards the Chief, the elevator shaft was their best exit option. She pulled his arm, showing him the direction. John understood immediately, then he called out for Charley and they moved together towards the other end of the server room, all the way across. The inbound squad was technically around the corner.
John opened the elevator doors violently, only to find that the cage wasn't there, just the darkness of the empty shaft. He made a hand gesture that needed no translation: we jump. Cortana nodded.
The Chief threw himself down the hole, without hesitation.
SEPTEMBER 8TH 2558
LOCATION: UNSC INFINITY
THIRD LEVEL MAINTENANCE DECKS
1:38 AM standard time - mission clock: 0:52:02
"Roland, can you hear me? It's Cortana."
"I'm here. I feel... dizzy." the AI responded, inside her helmet.
"Not for long. I'm going to download you into my armor; I know the HARPY is alien tech and the risk of a critical incompatibility is high, but I want you to try taking over the system. Carefully."
"I'm not sure about this."
"Neither am I, but the Chief's interface is already occupied. I'm the only one who can carry you safely."
"... okay, let's give it a try."
They were running as fast as they could through another dark set of passages, a level beneath the server room, looking for the exit. They needed to get back upstairs, time was running out. She didn't have to do anything, the AI slowly poked into the HARPY's buffers and let himself in, overlapping his routines with the current operative system. Roland found resistance, a rudimentary firewall and small pieces of software that tried to attack him, but he disabled them without erasing anything. Cortana felt the armor move against her body, layer over layer of angry tiny beads trying to fight back the invasion, but the AI succeeded.
After all, as Eleven once explained, the HARPY's inner system was primitive.
After a few seconds, she knew he was there. She could feel Roland, somehow.
"How is it going?" Cortana asked, eager.
"The architecture is unusual but the processing power is amazing! Ten times more buffer capacity than the Infinity's servers. I could get used to this, you know?"
"You better not." Cortana warned him.
"Fill me in, why are we running?"
"There is an alien AI inside the Infinity's network." Sigrid tapped in through the comm, her rough but feminine voice still sounded a little clipped. "It's a tough beast. It eats your code, assimilates your programming and grows bigger and uglier. I estimate that we are the only ones left and that thing is waiting for us to show up."
"Nothing fancy, I see."
"It's extremely vicious. It almost got away with a piece of me."
"How do we know that it didn't screw up the ship's primary functions already?"
Sigrid snorted."Have you not noticed we are in slip-space?"
"Not really, I just woke up."
"Well, here's the short version." Sigrid transferred to Roland a single file with the current mission log, over four thousand lines of entries collected from the Chief's and the other SPARTANS' sensors.
He assimilated the information and gasped, in shock.
"If this keeps going, we'll lose the engines." Roland stated, grimly.
"Most likely."
John and Cortana kept running behind the dog, while the AIs kept talking to each other. Cortana knew that Roland was working on something inside the HARPY, since she felt uneasy again and the inner layers of the suit were moving, crawling and tickling her skin with the touch of sand.
"Show me the fastest route to the engine room." the Chief demanded.
"No, Master Chief; we better get to the engineering deck." Roland requested, then he talked to Cortana: "Your armor is a great server but still, I need an UNSC computer network to kick that foreign AI's butt."
"We'll never make it before the Spike starts killing people!" Cortana said.
"I can lay your asses there in three minutes if you can get me to the tram."
"Can you take control of the ship?" John asked. Sigrid was quiet.
"Not right now, but engineering has a direct line with the engine room and other minor systems. I can shut down the engines, but I don't know in which conditions we will exit from slip-space... or where. And I have to focus, so I'll need some protection while I work."
"Leave it to me. I will enjoy tearing that monster apart." Sigrid said, with pride.
"Master Chief, what do you say?"
John nodded just once.
"Anything that slows this thing down works for me. Let's move."
TO BE CONTINUED
Did you see that? The part where John says that he has no regrets? Pay attention, kids, and treasure that moment, because that is as close as we will ever get to read this man saying something like 'I love you'. I'm not at all that confident about the mechanics of the plasma grenade sequence, but it looked cool in my head and it seemed like something the Chief would do... you know, hold grenades back until near detonation, jump down dark elevator shafts, that sort of stuff xD also, I'm making up a lot of things regarding the Infinity since I couldn't find any precise references, so what the heck.
I just love Roland, I actually love every AI ever introduced in this universe. And Sigrid *cof cof*. I'm getting some weird ideas about these two, but it's not what you think, I promise. You'll see :)
Guest; *bows down* thank you very much for the support! Thanks for stepping out of the shadows, too. Let's see what I can do for Palmer with my little story, then. Hope to see you around!
Rory; you have a thing for Halo, so do I. Don't worry, I get you. I'd be scared to shit if I were standing before the legend himself, hehe. Thanks a lot for the POV on the matter, pal!
BananaKing; I'm not sure I understand what you mean, English is not my first language and I get stuck sometimes, especially if I'm not familiar with the sayings. Anyway, thanks for being here -hugs-
RandomGUy; xD I'm glad you're liking my Sarah, let's see how that goes further into the story. And yes, we can say this is somewhat like a monster, so good for that xD thanks a lot for stopping by! Don't hide, I'd love to see you around more.
Nico; -hugs- thank you for reading, darling. I guess we can say Palmer doesn't seem to like the Chief, but when you have to put up with a lot of people calling you names because 'you'll never be half of the SPARTAN the S-IIs are', well, that's gotta have some weight on you, I suppose :P
Now, be good and say something, share your opinion about what happened today! And let's meet again next Sunday ^^ *hugs*