Hi there, again! My sincere thanks to all my Motivational Marines who keep leaving their support in the comments :) you guys rock! WARNING: here we have some character death and depictions of gory violence. Be careful!
RECOMPOSE
by Ladywolvesbayne
38. UNMOVABLE OBJECT
[ERROR] DATE UNREADABLE
[ERROR] LOCATION UNREADABLE
[ERROR] standard time unreadable
Eleven was suddenly feeling a painful itch on the back of his head, near the place in which a regular SPARTAN soldier should have their neural ports. Since he couldn't scratch it, his armor did it for him: the dark sand-like material that made his HARPY rolled all over the affected zone brushing his skin like sandpaper, the discomfort was eventually relieved. The prickling sensation didn't completely vanish, but it extended down his back and towards his palms as well. It was a palpable discomfort. An urge of some sort. It didn't have anything to do with this newfound information about how much John's teammates seemed to reject the existence of the Cortana fragments, but the turbulent emotions the news elicited in him made him keep quiet.
"Alright, I broke in." Sigrid's voice invaded their ears. "Just a minute, now."
Despite being silent too, the Master Chief was experiencing something along the same lines as Eleven did. Phantom feelings. Cravings of blood. Urgency to move. An indescribable anxiety. He sensed the pull of the ever stronger gravity well on his every bone. There was a low ringing disturbing his sense of hearing, and this insane notion that he was getting late for something.
But most of all, he felt Cortana's presence.
He couldn't explain why, or how or where it came from, but he was sure that what he was acknowledging was her proximity. She was somewhere in here, not far. She was within his reach now. The agony of not knowing was finally fading away, making room in his thoughts for a greater truth. Only a few more steps -a few more fights, a few more dead- were standing between them and salvation.
Eleven and the Master Chief stared at each other, for a few seconds.
John wasn't counting on easy. He straightened his pose again, reassuring the grip on his rifle with both hands.
Visibly unnerved, the rest of the team just observed as Sigrid used the head of the Sphynx drone as a terminal to hack their access into the Bridge. The drone's head was attached to her left arm with a bunch of black hoses and wires, her hand morphed into something like twisted roots and tangled itself around the device to hold it as an extra limb. A thicker string of wire was attached to John's armor too, suspiciously resembling an IV drip, but this one birthed from Sigrid's simulated thighplate.
Kelly grabbed this cable and looked at John, he looked back at her.
"What is this for?" she said, in a private comm with him.
"It's complicated." The Master Chief sighed, but tried his best to explain what he understood of it: "Sigrid uses my DNA to hack the systems. The mainframe is locked under a certain strain of genetic code… which apparently I have."
"She's… drawing blood from you?"
"In a way. I'm fine."
"You have the key to open this, you, out of all of Humanity?" she was resilient.
John's faceplate turned the other way, Kelly couldn't really read what was going on with him. His body language didn't say much, except that he was perhaps too willing to comply with all of this craziness.
"A lot has happened in the past six years." he said, after a moment. "I've been in contact with the remains of ancient civilizations. They did things to me. I can't explain, but it has been useful."
Kelly kept quiet for a short moment, thinking about it.
"Useful to whom, I wonder." she said at last, and closed the channel.
The Master Chief did not reply, but her words lingered in his conscience.
Perhaps he had been a tool, all along.
"I've got something." Sigrid announced, through TEAMCOM. "It's a map of the Bridge. You're not going to believe your eyes."
She sent the schematics to their HUDs. The architecture of the shape was loosely familiar with that of Installation 00: there was something like a hub, a node of sorts, and six pathways that converged onto it. By the added descriptions Sigrid was pulling up, it also reminded John of the control room of the Halo rings he had been into: hardlight bridges, a powerful computer station at the center of it.
"Is this where you're taking us?" asked Fred, wary.
"We might exit at some point nearby, Lieutenant." the AI answered, reflexively.
"We might." he huffed, uncomfortable.
"It's okay, Fred." John said, his tone was somewhat soothing. "We're heading the right way. We're close."
Nobody really wanted to question their leader's word, but…
Something with Sigrid's fumbling must've gone right, because after a brief time the gravity lift under their boots glowed in response and the Spartans found themselves weightless and rising lightning-fast across that radiant tube. Such kinds of lifts usually weren't an unpleasant experience to navigate, but they were moving way too fast into unknown territory, with no perspective of what would come after.
John took the lead, moving forward to be the first into the unknown light.
When Kelly was about to open her comms to say something, a sizzle of electricity passed through her body and her skin's galvanic response to it made her gasp, the need to hold onto something overcame her. But there was nothing to hold on to except for her shotgun, and she didn't have enough time to formulate her question.
An intermittent line flared across their faceplates, Sigrid's warning:
BRACE FOR IMPACT
[ERROR] DATE UNREADABLE
[ERROR] LOCATION UNREADABLE
[ERROR] standard time unreadable
"SPARTANS, GET TIGHT!" yelled Commander Palmer, through the radio.
She ducked to avoid the sweep of a dark blade that would've cut her head off. A lot of stressed groaning and agitated breaths filled the channel she was listening to, her men and women were in distress and holding, some registered as wounded but none of them was dead yet.
"We gotta keep moving, ma'am!" Roland told her, urgently.
"I'm trying, goddammit!" she snarled back.
Roland grabbed her arm and pulled her away from the invasive wave of creatures that lashed out at them, hissing like angry vipers. The enemies kept coming and coming, climbing out of the pit onto the bridge, lurching towards them with their hands turned into swords. One shot of anti-HARPY ammunition was enough to make them crumble into piles of dark sand, but it scurried back into the pit and out of it again after a while. Sarah couldn't believe her eyes, although she'd seen this before: when the AI Sigrid was captured wearing an artificial body. She had wrecked several vehicles fighting with Subject Eleven in order to keep the Master Chief safe from harm, Roland had also been involved. The memories poured in, needlessly.
All of them had been arrested after the fight was over. Sigrid had been thrown into a Faraday cage to be contained. The AI had adopted a shape like that of these creatures: a human female, big and tall, muscular, nude. Spartan, one could say. Warrior-like. Her body was made of something like glossy black plastic, it shimmered under the lights. These creatures were the same, except they didn't wore long dreadlocks carved on their heads and backs, but something like a bob cut to their chins… it had movement, like real hair. And they were petite, curvy. Sexy, even.
Softer. Faster. Deadlier.
Artificial bodies made of HARPY mass. They looked like Cortana.
Oh, she had known something like this was going to happen, eventually. She did warn Tom about it, but did he listen? Of course not. He was too eager to support his hero, the Master Chief, in whichever crazy scheme the latter one was up to. She leveled her gun again and squeezed the trigger, dropping several more of these drones.
A waste of ammo, this wasn't stopping them from climbing out of the pit again.
"Roland, how the fuck do we get out of here?" Sarah hissed, angry.
"I'm working on it!" the AI replied. He stepped before the Commander, sweeping a wide arc with a blade that sprouted from his right arm. He cut several enemy bodies in half, making them crackle and crumble in very small pieces. The creatures seemed to acknowledge the danger he posed now and retreated to the edge of his reach, assessing the circumstances. "But we can't stay either, they won't stop coming!"
"So this is not the Bridge after all." Palmer growled.
Empty magazine. She dropped it and shoved in a fresh one, quickly.
"The entrance has to be somewhere around here, this is just an optical illusion… this runway is not endless as it seems. I can't grasp any broadcasts or data signatures to piggyback or hack into." Roland sounded a bit disappointed, perhaps scared. It didn't make Sarah feel better. "I will figure it out."
The shockwave of a detonation pushed against the Commander's back, an intense rain of white-hot pebbles hit the plates of her armor next. Scorching pieces of something like melting plastic dropped all over the hardlight runway, smoking, hitting the HARPY drones. The creatures screamed in a high pitch and squirmed at the kiss of liquid fire on their naked bodies…
"Plasma grenades work!" said Spartan Thorne, on the radio.
That gave Roland an idea: "OVER HERE! Let's use them to clear the way!"
Both fireteams gathered into a tight formation and paced backwards to meet with their leader and the AI, under the predatory watch of the entities, eerily still after Throne threw the grenade at them. The hole in their lines left by the explosion had been filled with new units already, like nothing ever happened. They kept crawling up from the pit, there were already thousands of them standing close to one another as far as the sight could reach. The swarm of drones moved forward as the Spartans retreated, following them like sharks after the scent of blood.
Thorne grabbed another grenade and held it high over his head, showing it off.
"Yeah, that's it. Keep away. I've got more where this one came from." he hissed.
"You know…" whispered Spartan Madsen, his voice sounded tense. "If I wasn't shitting myself right now, I'd be so happy to see this many naked women."
"They do look a little bit familiar, don't they?" mentioned a member of Bravo.
In that moment of tense, fake peace, the Spartans managed to catch their breaths and recover some sense of orientation. In a compact group, they moved away from one mass of hostiles forcing the other one to retreat, pushing across the bridge and keeping a respectable distance between them. Every Spartan had an explosive in hand, making a statement with it. But it was just a matter of minutes until the drone entities understood that the plasma grenades were finite and they would run out eventually; same thing with the anti-HARPY bullets.
Roland himself was running out of time, growing uneasy.
He kept sending pings in every direction, trying to catch a signal. His feet weren't sensing anything from the hardlight bridge either. It was like being trapped inside of the Faraday cage all over again and it was driving every one of his subroutines on a loop.
The just had to keep moving.
"HEY, HEY! STAND BACK!" yelled someone, through the radio.
Some heads turned to see, Spartan Hoya was the one who threw the second grenade. It fell at the feet of the first line of drones and after a quick beeping it exploded opening another huge hole on their mass of bodies, blowing up charred pieces of heads, legs, torsos, white-hot and melting hands and feet in every possible direction. Another heavy rain of debris and super-heated gases hit the fellow creatures and they answered with deafening screams, twisting and curling like in fear or pain.
"HOYA!" screamed the Commander, angrily. "What the fuck are you doing? DO NOT PROVOKE THEM!"
"They were trying to sneak up on me, ma'am!"
"WATCH OUT!"
A ragged yell filled TEAMCOM and the line buzzed with voice activity again, as there were gasps and growls, labored breathings. Palmer looked back, leaving her flank unattended, to see what had happened. Someone had fallen -she couldn't see who and her MJOLNIR's systems didn't work for shit, still- and the Spartan was being trampled by these mannequin-like monsters. Her eyes filled with horror when she found that the creatures from the rear were charging at them, their faces lit with a radiant shade of light blue. She whirled around fast as lightning and just in time to kick away a blade that was aimed straight for her gut, then she drove a massive punch to the face of her attacker; its head shattered like a porcelain vase full of dark dirt and the body dropped, although it still moved. The Commander didn't have a fraction of a second to consider what she'd seen, another three blades were coming in her direction to impale her.
She used her pistol on them, blowing their heads off with the special ammunition.
"ROLAND!" Palmer yelled, because she still hoped he'd have a magical solution.
"I guess they don't care about the grenades anymore!" the AI gasped.
More explosives detonated, both at the front and at the rear. More scorching hot debris bathed them as they battled against the never-ending wave of enemies. At this rate, they would be overpowered in no time.
"WE SHOULD MAKE A RUN FOR IT!" Spartan Suzuka roared in the line.
"A RUN TO WHERE?" someone replied.
Palmer was about to say something to keep them all focused, but something very strong grabbed her ankle. She'd been standing too close from the edge of the runway. It was inevitable: the drone tugged, she lost her footing and fell towards the pit, hitting her side on the bridge and screaming. The Commander managed to fish her combat knife off her thigh and get a weak hold of the hardlight construct, preventing her from falling all the way into the pool of darkness below. She exhaled all the air from her lungs in another scream: that fucker was twisting her ankle, boot and everything. Another set of claws grabbed her a little further up her leg, and another and another.
Those monsters wanted to drag her down with them, whatever the cost.
The hands of Roland grabbed the handles of her armor and pulled her up, fast and hard. Palmer screamed again, it felt like her foot was going to come off her leg. Trying to suppress the pain, she clasped her free hand on Roland's simulated armor handles and kicked with her free leg, hitting heads and hands and bodies alike.
Above on the runway it was a full-on battle: every Spartan to fend for themselves.
"COMMANDER, I'M GOING TO PULL! PLEASE RESIST!" Roland yelled.
"DO IT!"
She tried, oh God she tried to resist but the pain was too much. They were digging their razor-sharp claws through her exo-suit and into the muscle of her leg, shredding the nerves and arteries. A deep fear invaded her gut, the fear of failing and getting all of her Spartans killed. They were wasting time, she should tell Roland to let her go…
And she was about to…
"ROLAND, WATCH OUT!"
It seemed like he'd sensed them, anyway, because a second before Palmer warned him. He turned his gray-orange helmet head back in a full-180-degree angle and two more arms sprouted from under the main ones, to divert the attack of the drone that tried to sneak up on him. The AI managed to fight one, but he couldn't defend himself from the other two: four thin blades went straight into his simulated torso, sliding as easy as a knife through butter, buried to the hilt and beyond.
The Commander choked on a gasp, horrified.
The creatures pushed harder, trying to make him fall. They wanted him.
They wanted all, they had titanium all over their bodies. This thing, the HARPY mass, it multiplied by eating titanium and other specific metals, if she had understood correctly what Cortana explained about the process that had given Roland a body. The Spartans weren't just intruders and enemies. Images of the endless wreckage of ships outside the Fortress came to her mind, it made sense considering how many of these monsters kept coming towards them. God only knew how many more there were.
'We're so fucked.' she thought, numb, ignoring the pain on her ankle.
Roland was… well, he looked fine despite being impaled by two sets of plasma-edged swords. The scorched exit 'wounds' kept nibbling at his own HARPY mass, but he wasn't even complaining. The AI strained to keep Palmer off the pit and at the same time, his extra pair of hands had captured in a vicious grip the necks of his attackers. He looked furious, the materials that made up his artificial body were shifting and rippling. Flashes of orange crackled all over him, electricity surging off.
A third drone tried to add more swords into him, but…
"Fuck no, you won't." Roland's electric voice growled.
Then something happened, Palmer couldn't understand what:
A huge pulse of some sort blew off from Roland, a shockwave. Like the sweep of a sensor, a wave of energy exploded from him and rolled across the bridge hitting every drone on sight. He hadn't detonated another grenade and it certainly wasn't an EMP, but whatever he did froze the incoming enemies in place.
Silence fell immediately. The creatures were shivering.
Roland's hands disintegrated on the necks of the drones he was holding at bay and the arches of orange electricity ran through his arms towards them, to which they wailed and writhed but they couldn't get off the AI's grasp. He was the one pushing back, now, both carrying the drones with him and pulling Palmer out of the pit, now that she'd been released. A second, earth-shattering pulse rolled across; this time it was strong enough to make the hardlight runway flicker a little and the thousands of creatures twitched and answered with a collective high-pitched-scream, holding their heads.
Palmer was absorbed in the sight of this disturbing show of strength.
At last, the drones seemed to shut down and the lights on their faces died.
All of them. Thousands upon thousands, left and right across the bridge, were still and silent, like authentic mannequins. Even the dark pools that stirred below in the pits had turned quiet, crystalized into a smooth, polished surface like a never-ending slate.
TEAMCOM was also so quiet that Palmer feared her Spartans were actually dead. When she focused hard enough, she heard faint breaths.
Thorne was the first one to move, pushing several drones off him so he could get up. He'd been assaulted and pinned with his back towards the bridge, as he shot and kicked and punched to get free. Both fireteams had been just shy of being completely toppled by these monsters and killed, and miraculously nobody was dead yet.
"Good Lord, that was very close." someone sighed on the line, with relief.
The AI delivered the Commander into the arms of Spartans Suzuka and Grant, Madsen was already pulling a medical kit to give her a hand with her ankle. But human nature was strong: their fear lingered, so for a time nobody peeled their eyes off Roland as he pulled himself together. Veiled guns were also aimed in his general direction, it's worth noticing.
Roland absorbed the extra pair of arms and completed whatever process he'd been working on. Not a word came from his line, for a while.
Palmer, however, acknowledged the elephant in the room:
"Roland, are you there?" she began, confused.
The AI turned around to look at her, he seemed…
"I'm fine, ma'am. Just a bit of a power surge."
"Is that what happened?" Sarah inquired, trying to pick her words carefully. "You just short-circuited them?"
"I tried this with Sigrid, once." Roland said, rearranging his mass together in a Spartan-shaped body of a slightly different design. Slim, fast, designed to execute close quarters combat. His materials moved slow, dizzy. The orange stripes flowed across his arms and legs, shifting places. "I tried to infiltrate her, to shut her down. It didn't work with her because she's powerful, as I am now. But these… these vessels -because that's basically what they are- are way less than Dumb AIs, they're barely subroutines. They have a main directive and a set of behavioral patterns, that's about it. It's not even well protected, I could easily override their programming and re-write it."
He lifted a hand, with a lazy gesture.
One by one, the faces of these frozen drones lit up again and slowly, they began to move. To stir. To recover from their unnatural poses and stand in straight lines far and wide across both ends of the bridge. The light shining off their faces came from their eyes, now blazing orange and warm as the sun.
"They're mine now." the AI confirmed, with a sharp nod.
Palmer was stunned. Not even a fly flew on the main TEAMCOM channel, either.
"Looks like we got ourselves an army." she exhaled, impressed.
[ERROR] DATE UNREADABLE
[ERROR] LOCATION UNREADABLE
[ERROR] standard time unreadable
She managed to slip from their grasp when they weren't looking.
As fast as her wounded legs allowed, Two held her broken arm close to her chest and ran away through the forest of glowing glass columns, leaving behind the violent sounds of a bloody fight. Too fast for her to realize, the fleet exited slipspace in the near vicinity of the final destination and they had been attacked, all of their ships destroyed and consumed, the living beings inside ported into this place. She knew where this place was, and she was afraid of it. She wasn't supposed to return, ever. Two wished she had a second pair of hands to cover her ears with, so she wouldn't hear the sounds of death behind her. The saurian roars of the Elites under Jul M'dama's command as they were being ripped apart, bolts of plasma, weapons firing, glass shattering. Angry voices. Detonations. It was loud and it hurt her brain.
She had to run. She had to find John.
She had things to tell him, things he needed to know.
He would protect her, too. She'd never seen a truth with more clarity.
Poor things. They had entered her territory, and now Seven was shredding them to pieces. Catherine, the real Catherine, had been wrong all along: there was nothing to see here, this was Seven's domain and here she was absolute ruler.
This was the Edge of the Universe.
This was where they all Ended, and she Began.
But they insisted, the damned fools.
The aliens wanted something that nobody could possess, and they would pay for it with their lives; that was another truth she could see with amazing clarity. Gasping for air to soothe her sore throat, Two zigzagged between the columns as she made her way towards the thin wedge of light in the distance. The vast open space before and around her roared, shifted, trembled. She tripped, fell on her shoulder and hurt her broken arm. But she didn't scream. Eyes filled with tears of pain, Two got back up on her feet and tried to run again, limping this time.
The end of the Fortress wasn't far; the light was growing wider. She had a chance.
Her legs hurt, her ankle was now bruised. Her arm throbbed.
Pain was such a horrible feeling. If only there was a way to disconnect it, to stop her brain from perceiving it…
The Fortress began to crumble around her, before her, the columns of glass were breaking apart and sharp crystals were falling everywhere. Two tried to avoid it, but she couldn't defend herself against the thin shards that flew towards her and pierced her skin, shredding her already damp and dirty clothes, bleeding her from a thousand small cuts. It was late. She did the math in her head, fast as lightning.
Tears fell down her cheeks.
But she kept running. The thunderous roar of destruction followed her.
A huge block of crystal crashed down on her path, forcing her to dodge and cover her face with her free arm. Sharp pain, again: another shard had penetrated her, this time on her gut. And this time, she did scream to ease the suffering.
She dropped on her side, hurting her broken arm once more.
She was in so much pain that her muscles had become numb, by now.
Forcing her shaking fingers to work, Two grabbed the piece of glass buried on her body and plucked it out, quickly. She forced herself to get up and move, although her limbs didn't want to respond. Her feet obeyed slowly, but only because fear was a much more powerful emotion than pain. She was so close. Once she went around and cleared the cracked chunk of glass, her path was straight towards the light.
Gasping louder and louder, feeling the warmth of her blood down on her gut and legs, Two arrived to salvation and pushed through the energy doorway into the Bridge. It took her sore eyes a moment to adjust to the blinding radiance on the other side, but at last she found herself on the hardlight runway.
The door closed behind her when the last of the Fortress collapsed, out of reach.
Catherine was gone now, out of her reach too.
Two's shoulders shook violently and she sobbed, overwhelmed by sadness.
She was so scared, so alone. She wished he was with her, that he could protect her and keep his promises…
The blood loss made her feel dizzy. The woman fell to her knees and plummeted forward, but she reacted quick enough to prevent further damage to her head by planting a hand on the runway. Leaving bloody stamps and trails of red behind, she dragged her weight across the bridge, keeping a watchful eye on the curious pools of dark liquid below. That…
That wasn't there the last time she'd been in this place.
She had to remain alert, but she was so tired.
Relying on the last remnants of her strength, Two stood up on trembling legs and walked slowly across the runway, there was a certain distance to cover before she could step into the Inner Chamber and be safe. If her math was correct –and it always was-, at an X point in space she would find the entrance to the Singularity.
From then on, everything would be easier.
She was bleeding out, unfortunately. The trail of red behind her was getting more and more substantial. Her sight was a little blurred, her ears were ringing. The intense pain of her every wound pulsated against the sheer force of her will to go on, draining her. Her attention was shattered, too. Part of her awareness watched her laborious step, her erratic breathing, the floor under her feet that seemed to flicker; the other part tried to keep the surroundings under surveillance. Her senses were fleshed out, like exposed nerves on a wound.
Still, she didn't notice when the darkness below the bridge stirred.
A thousand hands crawled out of the black mass, slowly, behind her, rising up and grabbing the edges of the hardlight runway. She didn't see them climb with their twisted limbs, clinging to one another as they poured onto her level, creeping and sneaking and touching the blood smudges. The strange beings moved slowly, sometimes staggering and sometimes lurching about, but they seemed to gain more confidence as time went by. They were learning to stand on two feet, to use their hands.
The hairs on the back of Two's neck prickled up.
She felt the electricity in the air, a soft hiss filtered through the ringing in her ears and she noticed the shadows moving along with hers. A moan of fear got caught inside her throat. Electricity crackled and all of a sudden, a flash of cyan thunderbolt disturbed the blissful underwater-like light of the facility…
"Oh, look what the lizards dragged in!" said a familiar, terrifying voice.
Two stopped dead on her tracks and turned, her eyes flooded with terror.
The picture before her resembled a nightmare, there were dark bodies everywhere and stretching as far as she could see -easily, thousands of them-, they moved away clearing a passage for Subject Seven to approach. Purple alien blood dripped from the edges of her twin swords, boiling and smoking to the touch of dozens of blue electricity arches running all over her. An array of sharp spikes had grown over her shoulders and back, pieces of saurian flesh and purple gore dropped and pooled on the surface of the hardlight bridge, around her feet.
Seven moved like a victorious queen. She walked towards her deranged sister, the sheer arrogance of her step only outmatched by the imposing presence of her modified HARPY armor. The dark beings from below came closer, twitching, hissing. With the corner of her eye, Subject Two saw a thousand more emerge from the depths and climb onto the bridge, behind her. She was surrounded.
They were human in form and wore nothing over their exquisite female shapes, their skins were black and polished like plastic mannequins. There were no eyes on their faces, they had no voice but that soft sound, the movement of millions of tiny neural-reactive particles sizzling with electricity. They were not made of liquid, as per her first observation, but out of HARPY mass.
Two moaned something unintelligible, desperate. She had to move. Escape.
But where? She wouldn't be fast enough.
Her time was up. Math never lied…
So, if she ever had a soul, it had abandoned her body by now.
Seven seemed to arrive to the same conclusion as her damaged sister did, because she laughed erratically behind her blue faceplate, her shoulders shook with an obscene violence. Her head twitched and so did the heads of the army of figures standing behind her, the jerky movement rippled across the thousands of HARPY drones like a wave, in a mathematical progression that Two could read immediately. It didn't take her too long to understand that Seven had made herself infinite somehow, and by contamination, she had populated the empty clusters of these vessels.
She had given them life by giving away a small part of her former digital self.
Of her rampant digital self, more precisely.
It was a logical conclusion, because deep down, if she hadn't been damaged, part of her would've done the same. The drones were extensions of Seven's body: the long, all-reaching arm of her divine and murderous Justice. Her unmovable army.
"… John." Two gasped, she wanted her last thoughts to be of him.
"Yes, you will see John again." Seven reassured her, confident. "You will see him very soon, through my eyes. When I rip his heart out."
Before Two could react, the scorching hot invasion of a blade exploded inside her chest: the sharp tip of the plasma-edged weapon burst out before her eyes, boiling and smoking. The wound was immediately cauterized and it didn't bleed, but her heart had already stopped beating, charred out of life.
A choked groan escaped her dangling mouth and she quickly became limp on the drone's hold, impaled at the end of its weaponized arm.
"Well, that was that." Seven sighed, not even a sliver of remorse permeated into her voice. She just propped her arms akimbo and watched how the body of Subject Two fell to the ground and began to disintegrate in luminous particles, like fireflies. "Alright, we have places to go and people to kill. They're getting closer to the Bridge and I don't want to be late for the party."
The black woman-like drones cleared a way again as a pair of them came forward, dragging someone by the armpits. The real, aged and bitter Doctor Catherine Halsey, with her hair tousled and her clothes tainted in several shades of blood, struggled to find freedom against the impassive strength of her captors. They came to a halt, brusquely. She did her best to pull herself together and stand up, but the creatures kept her face down, almost lying on her belly.
When she saw the last stages of Two's body disintegrating, she choked on a yelp.
"You monster!" Halsey accused. "She was harmless! How dare you?"
The Rampant Spike sighed.
"Catherine, please." she said, exasperated. Although her face was hidden behind the blue faceplate, the pose suggested that she was rolling her eyes. "We've talked about this already, do I have to explain myself again?"
The brokenhearted Halsey hissed between clenched teeth: "You're broken; don't you see? There's no way to repair your rampancy, you're too far gone! Not even if you gather all the fragments again!"
"I know." Seven chirped, insanely cheerful. "That's why I spared you."
"I cannot fix you! And even if I could, I'd never do it!"
Seven's stance abandoned all sense of nonchalance then, to be substituted with a menacing aura that slipped fear into the good Doctor's old bones.
"You can't." she agreed. "But your brain…"
It took Cartherine Halsey a brief moment catch the meaning of Seven's words…
"… no." she gasped, shocked. "No, you wouldn't dare."
Seven leaned forward, to stand face to face with her former maker. The drones propped the woman up to ease the transition. The Rampant Spike's helmet disintegrated in millions of small grains of black sand, uncovering her face so her burning blue eyes could look at the scientist up front:
"Now, now, Catherine. Don't act so surprised. You made me after a flash-clone of your own brain after all." she commented, as-a-matter-of-factly. "Maybe I am defective because you made me out of a fake brain. But what if we had the real thing, huh?"
The elder woman shivered, terrified. "You… you lunatic bitch."
This was the moment when Catherine Halsey, renowned UNSC scientist and sole mother of the SPARTAN program, felt that she'd made a horrible mistake, the biggest of her career. A mistake that had an exact date: August 29th, 2552. That was the day she should've abided to fireteam Noble's suggestion and abandoned SWORD Base with them, leaving everything behind. She could've started over somewhere else. As long as she lived, her research would've found a chance to thrive.
She should've left the place to be glassed, and her first stable Cortana model to be buried under it.
[ERROR] DATE UNREADABLE
[ERROR] LOCATION UNREADABLE
[ERROR] standard time unreadable
Thirteen felt it.
Something hit the borders of her awareness, disturbing it like a stone breaks the surface of a quiet lake. It vibrated like a pulse. Raw knowledge, a huge download of it. It was the universal language itself: almighty Mathematics. She couldn't see it, but the long strands of her hair connected to the Primordial Pool lit up with pulses of light, all the way from the waters towards her scalp. A sharp pain hit her gut, she cupped her belly with both hands and fell to her knees to withstand it better. The information was filtering in. Her mind was racing, and upon closing her eyes to still herself, she could see a million fluctuations of gravity, time, speed, entry vectors, distances, acceleration, complex formulas. In the blink of an eye, all the required information flooded her brain and she knew exactly how much longer she would have to wait.
In response, the ancient beings of the Singularity stirred and twisted, angrily.
Her completion was near. It would be a deathmatch, for sure.
But it wasn't really decided between whom, yet.
TO BE CONTINUED
We're pulling some Evangelion-levels kind of weirdness here, right? Good. I like Evangelion. Good show. Confusing as fuck. There's at least three more chapters to go through before we can see the light of day again and find some solace. Now, is it just me or John is acting weird again? *evil smirk* Perhaps he senses Thirteen's presence and his instinct is looking for her, or maybe there's something else at play. He's a Reclaimer after all.
Don't forget to throw your thoughts in the box below, it helps with the stress when you tell me what you think. See you in 15 days!