XV: Gray
"And Behold a Lonely Road…"
Sonatine
Stratosphere – 20 miles above surface
ALTITUDE DESCENDING
The cockpit was disintegrating.
Kelly clung for dear life upon the yoke of the Pelican as it lunged and twisted in her hands. The ship, with one engine having turned into a ball of fire once it had hit the oxygen-rich atmosphere, had taken a massive turn for the worse ever since starting its doomed voyage from Arbogast. She used two hands to cling to the controls—she was barely able to stabilize it, yet her efforts mattered little to turn the tide against a falling multi-ton metal object.
The Pelican buffeted as it hit pockets of turbulence and denser atmosphere as it dove to the ground in a fiery streak. Creaks and groans hurtled throughout the interior of the cabin, almost as if the ship were alive and were in extreme pain. Many things were rattling like bonespasms. The airframe popped as it warmed after being frozen from the dull void of space, the sound like gunshots.
Melting metal and bits of ruined engine spat out from the blazing comet that was the remains of the engine—the one that Logan had blown out with his rocket launcher. Smoke poured from the white-hot nuclei of the mechanism, emitting behind the craft in a permanent black contrail. The Pelican was on its last legs, falling to pieces as it split apart the sky.
Nearly all of the controls in front of the struggling Spartan were consumed by blaring red lights. Multiple alarms screeched and overlapped. Kelly ignored them all, for they all told her the same thing:
This ship was well and properly fu—
A jolt of turbulence kicked up into Kelly's seat and would have lifted her bodily into the air had she not been wearing her seatbelt. Regardless, she bit her tongue quite badly as her jaw slammed upwards from the force. She spat blood. Some of it dribbled down her chin.
Desperate, now that the atmosphere was getting thicker and thicker, she tried to extend the flaps. They were barely responding. Ailerons were a no-go as well. The amount of thrust pressure that was in the engines was at around 35%, and that was after she had partitioned the power from the good engines to the bad ones to even out the load.
And none of it was working.
An altitude warning began declaring its own notification in a maddingly sotto voice: "Altitude… altitude… altitude." Kelly looked past the canopy—a screen of clouds dusted everything in sight, reducing visibility to zero. Instrumentation, however, showed that she was passing over an unpopulated and mountainous stretch of land, judging by how closely the topographic lines were bunched up along what appeared to be a range. Quickly, she zoomed the view out and committed the map to memory as best she could, knowing that the electrical system on this thing had only moments to spare.
Just then, the clouds broke, and the Pelican hurtled through the bottommost layer. Kelly could now see the dark gray underbellies of the cloud shelving above her, pregnant with water vapor.
Rocky slopes and switchbacks razed the ground that now stretched before her, like massive claws had taken insolence to this particular stretch of land and had proceeded to tear it apart, creating the ragged and young mountain ranges. Thin gray rivers ribboned their way through the steep valleys. Snow glazed the landscape, drifting upon the great stone mammoths that furrowed up from the earth. A cold and barren wasteland.
Kelly was just getting enough responsiveness in the controls now. The atmosphere had thickened just enough. She yanked the yoke to the left. The Pelican sluggishly scraped past a particularly tall mountain by a mile. The smell of metal and burning fuel punctured her nostrils. Her eyes felt red and raw.
The bitter shoulders of rock soon gave way to snow-draped taigas underneath her plummeting chariot. Kelly helplessly watched as the horizon rose further and further in her view. There was no way to stop what was coming. She looked to her right through the windshield and saw the rolling and vibrant hills of white and green come up to meet her, ready to embrace her stricken craft like an old friend.
Her angle was too steep. She wasn't going to make it.
The altimeter continued braying. A sharp whistle resounded from the engine. The crackling and roaring of burning Pelican continually boomed in her ears.
Everything was shaking. It felt like Kelly's eyes were being bounced around in her skull. The Pelican was on its last legs.
In front of her, there was nothing but dense forest. Trees and snow as far as the eye could see. She had seconds left.
…three… two… one…
Right as the first of the treetops began to brush the belly of the Pelican, Kelly used the last of the auxiliary generator's charge to burn through the safeguards and to overpressurize the wing hydraulic systems. At the same time, the maneuvering jets on the underside of the wings all fired in tandem. Instantaneously, the flaps burst open and locked into place. A lurching force nearly crushed Kelly's organs against her ribcage as she was thrust forward against her restraints. The forest swung up, out of view, traded for the shapeless sky.
A stall warning now went off. Kelly's vision started to gray. She could still feel the plummeting feeling in her gut as the great metal beast she was inhabiting continued its descent to the cold world below.
There was a moment of absolute serenity.
Then a tremendous impact banged, shaking everything, and something exploded next to Kelly's head. She momentarily felt warmth as the helmet over her head was ripped away, though she did not realize this at the time. The back of her head rebounded against her seat. Glass and feather-like particles of cold—snow?—brushed her face. Sparks blazed from shattered control panels and flickers of electricity marked a composition of terror in its spasmodic strobes.
The world tilted. She yelled.
Then things went dark.
The thud of her heartbeat was just about as loud as the cheering of the cadets—her friends—around the room. She tried very hard not to wince. For almost a week, she had to endure the brutal assault on her ears, caused by the tiniest of sounds. Even brushing a hand along a felt pad sounded like she was listening to an avalanche. To be in close proximity to a crowd of similarly aged men and women—no, still children… but only just—made it feel like she was about to pass out.
Since waking from the painful procedures that Dr. Halsey had imposed on all of them, the Spartans, Kelly had tried to adjust as best as she could. Every once in a while, she would wobble in place, as her balance was shot from the severe hormonal surge that was one of the side effects of the operations. She still would have trouble standing, especially in the morning. The first few days, she had fallen down a lot. Crutches had been provided for her use, but she had refused. Her eyes still bled on occasion—it had been feared that she would lose one of them, yet she had recovered all the same, to the relief of her teammates.
Sometimes, her sight would abruptly lose focus, time would slow to a crawl, and all she could hear would be her heartbeat. She quickly learned to take some comfort, even when she was lost in that fog. That heartbeat meant that she was still alive. The operations had made her slow, hampered from her injuries… but she would be fast again. More than she ever had been before. Dr. Halsey had promised.
Another breath, and she was back to normal. Even her ears had stopped ringing.
Kelly looked around the room. They—the Spartans, at least the ones who had survived the augmentations—had all been packed into the gymnasium of the UNSC Año Nuevo and had clustered around the boxing ring on the side furthest from the exit, which was usually reserved for ODSTs trying to blow off some steam in between missions. Two of the Spartans were already in the ring, utilizing a mixture of fighting techniques, as they sought to go for a grapple, and ultimately a tap-out. The sound of their blows and grunts were lost among the din that the rest of the Spartans made. They were cheering as they watched the combatants, enthralled by the show.
Two handlers stood just behind the ropes, watching the fight. They occasionally called out to the fighters, acting like referees. Telling them to press forward if there was an opening. To defend if they had no other options. They were covered in thick body armor. The fighters, aside from form fitting pants and gloves, were unadorned.
Surrounded by the ropes, John and Sam seemed to glide across the ground as they both jabbed punches and levelled kicks. They flipped, spun, and made several graceful dodges, their evasions looking more like a dance than actual combat. They moved fast… faster than anyone in the room could have believed. They were only around fourteen years old, but their bodies were rippling with muscle. Olympian in stature, they had managed to shake off the worst of the side effects from the augmentation procedure before anyone else.
The two of them were grinning as they fought, though. Neither of them thought of this as a no-holds-barred contest. Not completely. Even though the blows were real, the two friends were still having fun.
Sam's smirk widened and he faked a punch to the right, only to abruptly swivel in the opposite direction so that he could deliver a perfect wheel kick to John's face. There was a crack and the audience groaned.
But John managed to scramble across the ground without going down and quickly got back up. Some people starting clapping—Kelly was one of them. John didn't seem to notice. Blood was bubbling at the corner of his mouth, yet the smile remained. In fact, he seemed almost delighted at the hit.
The two men, the two soldiers, went at it yet again, to the rancor of their onlookers. It then occurred to Kelly that this was the happiest that she had seen everyone since they had disembarked from the Endurance, the frigate upon which they had been… improved. The immediate nights after the procedure had been filled with the wails of men and women in pain. Herself, she had not gotten any sleep in the first and miserable forty-eight hours after she had been woken from sedation. But now, as she looked about the room, all of those ailments appeared to have fled everyone. They were just enjoying what was a casual night for them—to be watching a series of fights and then participating in one of their own.
Her eyes flicked across the crowd and she caught the face of Chief Petty Officer Franklin Mendez at the back, their trainer. The impeccably bearded man was donned in a navy-blue set of armor, and fiddling with an unlit cigar while he watched the fighting, remaining quiet, his dark eyes ever studious.
There was little cause to let her guard down. Kelly had spent several years with the man to know that Mendez did not let the Spartans have "fun" unless there was something to be gained. A lesson to be learned. So, what was the angle? Kelly swept her gaze across her friends again, noting their happiness. She then looked back up at John and Sam, who were not holding back as they fought for supremacy within that ring.
After a few minutes, it seemed like she understood. Kelly hid a nod. It had been a whole week since the Spartans had actually trained. Trained like soldiers would and not just physical therapy. The medics had run a gamut of tests on each and every one of them to ascertain the new abilities their bodies could perform, but they had never before been able to freely show what they could do until now. Never been able to let loose. Mendez must have thought by pitting friendly fights against one another would get them all back into the swing of practice once again. Plus, fighting against an opponent gave them all a peer to aspire to dominate. For who else could stand up to them? They were strong enough to bend metal bars and break bones without a second thought. To have anyone else whose speed and strength had not been enhanced in the ring with them would be like trying to fight a child.
She looked at Mendez again. For a moment, she wanted to know what he truly thought about all of this. If everything they had gotten to reach this point had been worth it. The sacrifice of her friends. The nebulousness of their objectives.
They had survived, but was that winning?
The crowd gasped. Kelly swung her head back. She had missed the action—Sam had gotten John in a grapple and both of them were on their back. Sweat and blood dotted the floor of the ring and Kelly could hear the deep bellows of the fighters' grunts as their arms, corded with muscle, tensed and squeezed. They were in that position for two long minutes, after which John gently tapped his fingers upon Sam's wrist, who immediately released him.
The crowd applauded and Sam helped the coughing John to his feet. None of the handlers announced the winner. The fighters simply stepped back down into the crowd, both congratulating the other. There was no bitterness between the two friends.
Kelly caught the eye of Linda, who was standing a couple of feet to her right. The quiet, red-haired woman just gave Kelly a wink, who chuckled in response.
It would be interesting to fight Linda, she thought. The two of them were usually evenly matched whenever they sparred together. Kelly was fast and tended to end her matches quickly through quick and decisive strikes, but Linda was pragmatic. The sniper tended to endure until Kelly burnt her energy out, upon which she would strike with no mercy. Kelly was interested to see how much her speed would give her an advantage this time against the silent sniper. If nothing else, such a fight would simply serve to sate her curiosity.
Destiny, it seemed, had other plans.
"087!" Mendez barked, his eyes never leaving the ring. "119! You're up!"
Her legs moved her forward without thinking. She pushed through the rest of the trainees, parting them with her hands as gently as if she were commanding a soft wave. She lifted herself up at the ring level and ducked underneath the robes. She shrugged off the jacket she was wearing—she had a tank top on underneath. Blowing air from her mouth, she rotated her head, hearing the crackle emit from the vertebrae at the base of her neck.
Then, she slowly turned as she watched her opponent rise to meet her.
For a moment, Kelly was startled. The woman across from her looked starkly different from when she had seen her last, which had been when they had been placed side-by-side during the augmentation process. She still remembered the woman's screams and cries as medics crowded around her bed. Kelly had thought this person had been dying—the augmentations had taken to her even worse than the rest of the cadets here.
But now, Phaedra stood before her, amongst their brethren, having survived all that had been thrown at her. She had passed the test simply by standing here today.
Or… had she? Kelly instantly spotted that something was amiss with Phaedra. For one, the olive-skinned woman had taken on an incredibly sickly pallor to the point where it was starkly obvious. She was pale and sweating—her hair matted to her brow and her damp clothes clung to her body. The sounds of her gasps and pants were like blades sawing through wood. She was swaying, her balance out of sorts, as if she was drunk. Tiny tremors and twitches momentarily gripped Phaedra's face—little grimaces and winces—almost like she was trying to hide being in pain. She was favoring one foot, it turned out, as Kelly could see that Phaedra was unwilling to place her weight on her left heel.
Kelly almost didn't put her fists up. She took a few glances at the handlers that flanked the ring, expecting them to call out. Phaedra could not fight! She was in no state to do such a thing! How was it that no one was calling this off? One did not need a medical degree to see that Phaedra was currently suffering from ailments caused by the surgery.
"Ready yourselves!" she heard Mendez call out behind her. Without hesitation, her arms rose. Phaedra did the same thing moments later.
This was wrong. Phaedra needed to bow out. Now. She was in too much pain, she had failed their latest test. How could she be expected to fight like this?
Kelly's eyes were widening more and more, confused as she looked upon the savagely determined scowl Phaedra wore. The other woman had hunkered down, a feral look in her eyes, as she sucked in breath after breath, sweat dripping down her face to the floor below.
"Phaedra," Kelly said, audible only to the two of them. "Don't."
She did not know what else to say. How else could she get through to the woman?
Phaedra slowly shook her head, the effort from just that motion seeming like it had claimed half her strength. "You're not going to stop me."
Kelly was about to protest again when Mendez shouted, "Fight!"
Although she would never have consciously done so, Kelly found herself moving forward to meet Phaedra's own charge. The two warriors met head-to-head, grim concentration etched on both of their features.
Phaedra attacked first—Kelly could see the other woman begin to make a cross punch straight towards her face. Sweat hurtled from the ends of the other woman's hair, her mouth tightly contorted as she tried to push past the pain.
With a breath, Kelly dodged the blow. She had recognized the beginnings of the Muay Thai technique Phaedra had chosen. They had practiced the style together for years, after all. It was a versatile method of fighting, but the style tended to falter when it came up against an opponent that was decidedly faster.
Kelly lunged left then juked right. She swung a double-handed blow at Phaedra's abdomen, which was barely blocked in time, though Phaedra made a grunting noise from the impact.
But Kelly had been expecting this, for she had already launched into the next stage of her attack by spinning around and bringing her right knee up. Phaedra lowered her stance, looking for the kick. However, this was a classic Taekwondo ploy—Kelly dropped her right knee and used the impact to spring herself up. She then extended her left leg, instead of her right, in a ferocious kick that connected with Phaedra's chin and sent a tendril of blood fountaining in the air.
The audience oohed, but Kelly did not hear it. She dropped back to earth, as delicate as a feather, while Phaedra flopped heavily on her back.
Kelly could have ended it right there, but she did not step forward. She couldn't. If she pinned Phaedra now, then that would not extinguish the suicidal drive this woman had within her. Phaedra would not stop if someone held her back—she needed to come to this decision on her own.
"Stay down," Kelly said, splaying out a hand, feeling the impacts she had wrought upon her friend.
Phaedra spat a globule of blood-tinged phlegm. She snarled at Kelly, baring red-stained teeth, looking animalistic. Her hair was becoming unleashed from her ponytail and her chest was noticeably heaving.
Her hands curved like claws, Phaedra slowly got to her feet. "I'm not… going anywhere."
Having gained a second wind, Phaedra suddenly lunged towards Kelly, trying to grab her so that she could execute a Sambo throw. Kelly danced out of reach, jabbing a couple of punches to give the two of them some space.
"Stop it, Phaedra," Kelly pleaded. "You don't have any other options."
"Don't… tell me… what to do…"
Phaedra's face turned devilish, and she charged at Kelly like a mad bull. The two of them briefly became tangled in a web of elbow and knee strikes—the close-range blows hammered each soldier's body, none of the punches having been pulled. The sound of the ferocity of the warriors was enough to quiet the crowd and to make them grow closer to the ring, rapt in awe.
More blood and sweat hurtled through the air. Phaedra landed a series of Sanda strikes on Kelly's ribs, which made her double over in pain. Using that opening, Phaedra then landed an open-palm strike at Kelly's nose. There was a crack and Kelly felt her nose break, followed by a warm gushing sensation as she felt her mouth and chin become covered in her own blood.
Kelly momentarily felt a burst of fury. Up until now, she had been playing easy with Phaedra. Apparently, her friend had to learn this lesson the hard way.
Abruptly, Kelly grabbed for Phaedra's arm and wrenched it back so that it was close to breaking. Phaedra screamed as the greenstick fractures began to accumulate in her wrists. Kelly then sank her knee into Phaedra's gut, and she folded in half. A punch to her face and Phaedra's jaw dislocated. While her opponent was stunned, Kelly gripped her around the waist and flipped her head over heels and brought her back down to the ground upon her back, which drove the wind from Phaedra's lungs.
Her nose burned. Kelly wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. It came away dark red.
At her feet, Phaedra spluttered and coughed, but was still attempting to get up. She slowly rolled over and got on her knees, forehead pressed to the ground as if in prayer. She left a red streak behind when she lifted her head up.
Helpless, Kelly looked to the handlers for assistance. She implored them with her eyes, begging for an explanation, for some semblance of mercy.
Expressionless, they would provide no deliverance. "What are you waiting for, 087?" one of them asked as they pointed to the struggling Phaedra. "The enemy is still active. You need to destroy them."
The enemy. Kelly was unsure of herself as she watched Phaedra rise to her feet. This was no longer a casual fight. This was something colder. More calculated. One that would only end once one of them had been taken out of commission.
But why? Why would they let this fight go on, unless…
…unless they knew that Phaedra was not up to par.
That had to be it, Kelly realized. Even disregarding her injuries garnered during this fight, Phaedra had been noticeably unwell beforehand. Surely Mendez would have noticed—he saw everything, after all. Her symptoms were obvious, but they had not manifested as a significant detriment to her person. She had not suffered the severe side effects that had killed or maimed so many of their friends, but had simply gotten unlucky by being just unfit enough to no longer function at her full capability.
Full capability. One would never become a Spartan if they could prove anything less. The program needed to sort the wheat from the chaff. Nothing but absolute perfection would be accepted.
And Phaedra did not fit into that category.
Now, she would be taken out of the program once and for all. And Kelly understood that she had been the instrument selected for the job.
"Don't make me do this!" Kelly panted to the scowling Phaedra, who was furiously brushing her unkempt hair out of her eyes. "You need to stop. Right now."
"Push forward, 087!" another one of the handlers yelled.
Phaedra spat again and then affixed a long look around the room. Perhaps searching for some measure of salvation, or just trying to get one last snapshot of this scene before it all changed. She stared back at the person who used to be her friend. "I don't have anywhere else to go, Kelly. You couldn't even imagine…"
But Phaedra didn't seem interested in trying to explain herself to anyone, especially Kelly. With a growl, she sprang forward again, all technique nearly abandoned now in favor of wild blows.
Kelly backpedaled, on the defensive, barely offering any riposte to Phaedra's uncoordinated strikes. With her speed, none of Phaedra's punches could connect. The woman—no, still just a girl—was expending energy at an accelerated rate, becoming less and less human with every passing second.
After ducking a strong haymaker, Kelly jabbed Phaedra in the face, but pulled the punch. A warning. Phaedra's eyebrow split open and soon her left eye, half of which was already bright red from a burst blood vessel, started to drown in red. But that just made Phaedra even angrier. She roared and swung at Kelly with a vengeance, lunging with each step, teeth gnashing in a rabid fashion. She just kept swinging and swinging, desperate to cause pain. Any pain.
"Attack the enemy, 087!" the handlers chanted one after the other. "Destroy them! Do it!"
Only then did something flip within Kelly. Even after all she had conveyed to the woman, Phaedra would not give up. Not by her own accord. She could never be convinced.
And that fact drew forth an innate fury within Kelly. Phaedra would never be able to match the rest of the Spartans because of her disabilities. She would be slower and weaker—a liability. Not just to herself, but to her team. The other Spartans would have to worry about her, to the detriment of their objectives and their team cohesion.
She would never get better.
She would never be a Spartan.
The fact that she was still trying to pretend to be one, to prove absolutely nothing except to justify some self-imposed accolade, was just an appallingly selfish act that Kelly, for the first time today, was hit by a dose of uncontrollable rage.
Phaedra needed to accept reality. Kelly was ready to teach her now.
As the taller woman was marching forward, intent on doing her harm, Kelly did something that managed to cool the snarl upon her face.
She attacked.
Kelly drove a fist towards Phaedra's solar plexus first, which was blocked just in time. That gave Kelly enough momentum to spin around and to drive her elbow back into Phaedra's jaw, which reinserted the dislocated bone into place with a sickening pop. The pain was enough to make even Phaedra's eyes water.
But Kelly was not going to let up. Not this time. She pressed forward in her cold anger, the momentum firmly hers. She unleashed punches, specifically targeting Phaedra's ribs, liver, face, throat, eyes, and even groin. One of the tenets of Krav Maga, a combat style Kelly was fond of, was to concentrate on the body's vulnerable points and to relentlessly repeat those attacks in order to dispatch an opponent in a quick, if not violent, manner. Most of those blows Phaedra was able to block. The ones that made it through her screen rippled the woman's body, causing untold amounts of damage as Kelly's enhanced bone and muscle amplified her strength to a punishing degree.
Phaedra screamed as one punch cracked two of her ribs. She tried to stagger away, but Kelly did not let her give in that easily. She was sinking into her muscle memory, every action mapped clearly out in her head, as if the script for this fight had been dictated to her from the start.
Lashing out a foot, Kelly's kick connected with Phaedra's knee and there was a crunching noise as the kneecap disintegrated. Phaedra toppled to the ground, an astonished look on her face.
The enemy was still active—Kelly's head rang with the words. Wearing a similar expression, as if she was not in complete control of her actions, she dropped to the floor as well to grapple with Phaedra.
First, Kelly grabbed at Phaedra's arm and struck up at her elbow with a palm strike. Phaedra's arm bent in the wrong direction as it shattered. Many in the audience gasped, unused to seeing this sort of violence play out between two of their own. Mendez, to his part, still made no motion to stop the fight. From his position, he could see everything as he wanted it to be.
Yet, despite half her limbs being crippled, Phaedra kept stirring, desperate to get back up.
"Kelly—" she tried to say as she looked up at her own enemy.
This time, Kelly was silent.
The enemy was still active.
Not for long.
Kelly hit Phaedra in the head. Closed fist. Knuckles so taut they were stark white. Phaedra's skull rebounded across the ground. Blood bubbled past her teeth and she spat, some of which splattered onto her face.
But Kelly hit Phaedra again.
And again.
And again.
Over and over and over. To the point where her own hand soon became as bloody as Phaedra's face. While her left hand grabbed a hold of Phaedra's tank top, and if she still felt movement travel through the fabric from the twitching of her body, Kelly would hit her. Her punches quickly made wet noises as they connected. She swore she heard something snap in Phaedra's head at one point. She dimly had the realization that Phaedra's skull suddenly seemed to change in shape before a strong arm snaked around her neck and bodily yanked her off her victim.
"Stand down, 087," Mendez's voice suddenly came to her ear, a simple and gentle statement. Not a shout.
Immediately, she ceased all resistance and Mendez lowered her to the floor, where she sat in a daze. She blinked, almost as if she had woken up from a deep slumber.
A pool of blood was spreading to her feet from the crumpled body that lay just feet away. Suddenly conscious of herself, she scooted away so that her shoes would not get soaked.
One of the Marines wrapped her in a towel. Mendez was saying something to her, but she was not listening. She was just staring at the limp and lifeless body of Phaedra, her face unrecognizable beneath the collage of blood and gore that now marred her. Shocked into silence, Kelly watched as medics put Phaedra onto a gurney and carted her away—the rest of the Spartans rapidly made a path so that they could get through with the patient.
But Kelly's eyes were still locked on that pool of blood. She could not take her eyes off the mirrored red lake. For it burned at the deepest and darkest parts of her soul, a vivid stain that she would never hope to erase.
Sonatine
Red… red… white.
A swift blast of wintery air flooded her lungs like water greedily rushing over the top of a dam. Arctic cold dug into her throat, the sensation akin to needles puncturing every square millimeter of flesh.
The shock to her system caused Kelly to sit up from her seat, though the belts that dug into her shoulders greatly impeded that motion. Her helmet was gone, somehow. The crash had been so dramatic that it had dislodged the covering from her very head.
Immediately, several shards of agony bombarded her from all sides. It was like there were several people waiting until she had risen from unconsciousness so that they could all stick her with knives in unison. Automatically, she hit the seatbelt release and was freed from the restraints so that she could clasp a hand over her ribs, the effort producing a soft and tender hiss from her.
After the pain subsided and her vision unblurred, Kelly finally looked at her surroundings. A cut of white appeared past the broken glass of the Pelican's canopy, punctuated by the dark green spears of evergreen trees. Snow dusted the Spartan's face, sticking to her skin and drenching her with cold. She tried to look behind the seat, but the effort produced a fresh slew of pain that made her wince. Slowly. She was going to need to take this slowly.
Doing just that, she hesitantly and awkwardly swung her legs out from the seat of the Pelican and started to file out of the ship, which she assumed had landed somewhere on Sonatine's surface. The floor was at an angle—clearly she had not stuck the landing as well as she had hoped.
The discomfort at her side worried her. Ribs were broken, definitely. A fresh slew of dizziness and nausea was now battering at her skull. Internal bleeding, too. She did not even want to think of what kind of damage she would have accumulated had her skeleton not been reinforced.
Kelly limped out of the cockpit, but not after noting that the instrumentation was smashed beyond repair. Not that she held a hope of fixing this bird in its condition anyway. It was going to take more than a wrench and a hammer to get this crate airworthy. She would need a miracle, to start with. Seeing as she was fresh out of those, she had no choice but to find another way off-planet.
Her hand dropped to her waist, feeling for her sidearm. It was gone. Launched out the canopy during the crash, perhaps. A rather rude word exploded into Kelly's mind, but she did not give it voice.
The door to the next section was half open, stuck. Kelly used her good arm to wrench it all the way open, though this produced a sensation not unlike a spear running her through at her abdomen. She dropped to a knee, lips drizzling spit and blood, and she swore. She had suffered more serious wounds before—her entire ribcage had sustained multiple compound fractures during a mishap with a gravity lift, not to mention she had suffered through a collapsed lung and several ligament tears all at once while fighting on Reach—but there was just this tiredness overwhelming her now that she was finding hard to overcome. She had never before encountered anything like this. Cursing some more under her breath, she straightened back up and continued to the back of the Pelican.
The cargo bay was in even worse condition. The rear ramp had been completely ripped out during the hard landing, exposing a deep cut of upturned earth and a dusting of snow outside. Crates and other cases had been jolted around from the impact, their contents having spilled out upon the Pelican's blood tray and into the forest beyond. The contours of the bay itself were bent out of proportion and several of the light fixtures had blown out—some of them were still sparking and flickering.
Kelly's foot skirted into a slight layer of brown powder. The drugs, she realized. The bricks that had been loaded into this Pelican had broken open and had been completely deposited upon the ground. It was like somebody had completely sandblasted the leftmost wall of the bay's interior with the stuff. Kelly kept her breathing low and steady. She didn't want to risk inhaling too much of the compound.
She tried to put all of that out of mind as best as she could. Instead, she turned towards the wall that separated the cockpit from the cargo bay. There was usually a med kit bolted onto the side, if this Pelican had not been plundered for its materials while it was on Arbogast. But there it was, and Kelly wrenched it from its moorings and went back into the cockpit, where there was a still intact seat for her to sit on.
The Spartan opened up the kit after setting it upon her lap. Fortunately, it seemed that the contents were unused. She spotted a couple of rolls of gauze, pills for pain and infection, a HyFin chest seal, nitrile trauma gloves, shears, two tourniquets, trauma dressing, a scissor leash, surgical tape, triage cards, a nasopharyngeal airway, a needle decompression kit, a saline lock kit, and even an IV constricting band, among other items.
But what she was really looking for had been fitted into one of the side pouches on the kit: a tall cylinder with an unfolding needle about as thick as a ballpoint pen. A canister of bio-foam.
Quickly, she unzipped her bodysuit and shivered as her bare skin was exposed to the freezing air. She shimmied the covering down to her waist—she was wearing nothing underneath it. Ordinarily, she would have done all this fully clothed if she had her armor on, which would have been able to triage her wounds without effort. Unfortunately, the lack of said armor meant that she was going to have to go about this next bit in a more medieval fashion.
Kelly looked down. Her left side was black and blue. A swollen fistula that continued to weep a dark serum. She wondered if that had been garnered when she was shot or if it was from the crash. Multiple punctures broke the skin there. There was no debris in the wound, thankfully. That would have been annoying to try to clear out.
She ripped open one of the swabs and cleaned the outside of the wounds with alcohol, disinfecting it. After that, she tore open packs of gauze and dressing and laid them over the holes in her side, but did not tie the wound off just yet.
Grabbing the bio-foam canister, Kelly unfolded the massive needle, checked the pressure of the container to ensure there was still some foam inside, and quickly jabbed the needle just underneath her ribcage, right where the source of her pain was emanating from. There was no time to discern the needle's intrusion—she tightened her grip on the canister's trigger and soon a sensation like a million fire ants nipping at her insides burgeoned to the forefront of her consciousness.
"Shit," Kelly said aloud. She was reminded of how much she hated this sensation.
Thankfully, the pain of the bio-foam soon subsided as the narcotic properties began to take hold. Already her side was starting to feel number. The bio-foam would clot against where she was internally bleeding and would prevent further blood loss. The worst was over, at least. She would not succumb to a hemorrhage today.
She wrapped bandages around her waist and zipped up her bodysuit. She then rolled up her pant leg, the one where the ricocheting bullet had nicked her upon her calf. She swapped out the nozzle of the bio-foam canister and applied it to the wound as a topical salve. Another bandage was slapped upon her leg and, for good measure, she stripped a syringe out from its packaging and inserted the needle into a vial of tetracycline. The syringe was then inserted into her left quadriceps—she depressed the plunger.
A few of the pills from the med kit were counted out in a hand. Kelly swallowed all of them without water. That would stave off the worst of the pain and the infection that would inevitably result had it not gone untreated, but it would not keep her alive. The rest was up to her.
Kelly then spent a few more minutes picking shards of broken canopy glass from her face after she used a mirror from the med kit to give herself a once-over. She was intrigued that she had not noticed the pain at all—probably because the combined adrenaline and more serious injuries had taken precedent. If the pilot's helmet had remained upon her head, this would never have happened, she noted dourly. She cleaned the wounds and used more bio-foam to close off the deeper cuts.
With that done and all of her injuries addressed, Kelly had to confront the obvious next step: leaving the ship. This was not something that she had to approach lightly, but the way she saw it, she had no other choice. Logan would undoubtedly try to track the ship and would find the crash site if this Pelican had a monitoring device on it—which she had to assume it did. She still lacked the tactical advantage in a theorized head-to-head fight, which meant a swift departure of the operating theater was in order.
She went back to the cargo bay to see if there were any more supplies she could use. She found the battle rifle that she had brought on board, but the barrel had bent sometime during the crash. It would scarcely be of better use as a club. It was left behind.
Kelly scoured the ship for any other weapon that she could get her hands on, but she could not find so much as a combat knife around here, let alone a spare pistol. Worse yet, there was not any clothing suited for cold weather excursions within the wreckage. That was going to be a problem, considering the environment outside, but not one that she would be able to solve right away.
A small pack was located and though it had a water bottle attached, it was empty of any provisions. It did have a flashlight, though, which Kelly was eager to take. Kelly slid the med kit into the open pack and zipped it up before throwing the straps around her shoulders.
She gave the Pelican another once-over before she determined that she could not salvage anything else of use. Right, there was nothing else for it. It was time to go.
She wished she had some demo charges, though. It would have been nice if she had a way to destroy the leftover drugs instead of leaving them behind for someone to find.
It turned out Kelly's concerns over leaving the Pelican's fuselage behind, along with its payload, were unfounded. Unbeknownst to her, the ship had been leaking fuel into the electrical systems, and the damaged wiring had been sparking upon several areas where the bundling had frayed. The Pelican had been strenuously overengineered to prevent these sorts of occurrences, but even the most exhaustive tests could not replicate the sheer stresses that a major crash could introduce as corrosive factors.
The Pelican exploded when Kelly had mounted a hill a half mile out from the crash site. The Spartan had whirled back at the sound, thinking she was being attacked. Where the ship had been sitting, a giant black mushroom cloud, encasing a core of fire, was now rolling upwards into the sky. Small shockwaves of punctured snow rippled from the epicenter of the explosion—descending pieces of the ship that had finished their heavenly arcs.
Kelly just stood on the snow-sodden hill, the gray sky lapping in inverted waves above her, obscuring the flat disk of the moon Arbogast somewhere overhead. She inhaled the fresh breath of morning while a few flakes twirled around her head. She watched the Pelican smolder and burn at the bottom of the hill, through the trees. The ship had now bulged outward and was missing a significant chunk at the back—at least, that was what she could see through the obscurities the smoke presented.
Well, at least that takes care of the drugs.
The tower of smoke now climbed more than a mile. If anyone was making low passes of the area, they would be blind if they missed this. She had to move.
The other side of the hill sloped down, back into the forest. The trees were spread apart enough with little bramble and thicket. At least traversal would not be too difficult. Kelly headed into the woods after re-shouldering the pack.
The day immediately grew darker as soon as she stepped into the shadow of the canopy. The snow layer was less thick, and the cutting wind had died down dramatically. Now that she was getting deeper and deeper into the forest, Kelly could take in how ancient this place was. Smooth boulders as tall as houses created a maze of the woods. Webbed roots provided tricky obstacles for her to avoid. Past the gaps in the trees, she could spy the razor-edges of the jagged mountain ranges to the relative north. Best she avoid that direction, then. She did not want to be travelling uphill if she could help it.
The Spartan walked for about a half an hour in her current bearing before she stopped. She listened to the silence of the forest, the eerie quiet and how nothing seemed to rustle.
All of this reminded Kelly of the exercise Mendez had given the Spartans after they had been training for two years, when he had taken all of the recruits and had deposited them in the woods on Reach, hundreds of miles from civilization. The expectation was that all of the Spartans would use their skills to locate each other and make it to the exfiltration point to hitch a ride home, all the while they had to make their way through untamed forests and mountains.
In the end, they had succeeded handedly in the task. Everyone had made it onto the ship and no one had been left behind. Kelly remembered that day quite fondly—she had gotten to land a few good hits on some of the DIs that had been sent to slow her down.
This day was not quite like that one. For one, she was all by herself on this mission—she could not hope to rely on Furan this time. Two, she had no idea what or where the endpoint of her mission was. Three, she was even less equipped than she had been while in the woods on Reach. At least Mendez had the good sense to provide her with a coat back then. The odds were certainly stacked against her right now.
Kelly assessed her options. One of the recommended strategies to wilderness survival was to stay out in open areas as much as possible. The crash site had bordered a slightly open field, but Kelly knew that being exposed like that would make her an easy target in case a patrol sent by Logan came calling. In the forest, she had air cover, and the boulders provided a few safe spots to hide from thermal tracking.
The next strategy she knew of was to keep herself heading downhill at all times to save on energy. If she found a stream, she should follow it as well. Civilizations typically based themselves by water sources, though Kelly recalled that Sonatine was not a heavily colonized world. For all she knew, she was a thousand miles from the nearest settlement, but that fact had little bearing on her current situation. At this point, all she could rely upon was a little bit of hope that she could stumble upon a road, or at least something manmade.
She just needed to find a way to get off Sonatine by any means necessary. Finding a trail or any evidence of civilization was her primary objective, then.
"I'm going to need that hope soon, I guess," she grumbled aloud.
Suppressing a shiver, she plodded on.
The sun was shielded behind an array of low-hanging clouds but every once in a while it broke through the barrier. Kelly took note of its position in the sky and calibrated her internal compass. She had also memorized the partial topographical map that she had glimpsed on the Pelican and she knew that if she kept heading in a southeasterly direction, the terrain would be more forgiving. And towns preferred to be established on forgiving terrain.
She kept walking. The forest rose and broke from time to time as Kelly's path brought her up against rocky promontories. She followed the direction of the shale shelves until she was back into the woods and boulders, within the maze of rock and moss once more.
Snow that had been perched upon the boughs of the conifers was tipped into Kelly's empty water bottle. Given some time, it would be melted for her to drink. It would not be clean, but it would suffice. Ice had frozen upon the branches and caught the light in such a way that they looked like glistening spears of sun.
On occasion, she would stop and crouch to listen for signs of wildlife. She was not hungry, but she would have to eat something eventually. She had been collecting a few broken branches for traps—she could use those plus some of the items in her med kit as rope. But she had not yet come across any signs of life, not even any tracks.
Even though she had been leaving her footprints in the snow, Kelly was careful to clamber over obstacles in a way that would throw any potential pursuers off her trail. She had not yet heard any scouting craft overhead, but that was not proof that Logan had landed far away and had picked up the path she had left behind.
Somewhere above, an owl hooted. It fluttered against the shape of the congested leaves, irritated by the Spartan's presence, looking for another tree to branch upon. Kelly wondered if it was native to this planet or had been accidentally introduced by a careless colonist.
"That's 'Chief Owl', to you," she murmured to herself.
The day grew brighter, and the sun continued to slash itself more and more through the thick reefs of gray clouds. The snow glistened and glimmered gold. A few snowdrifts from the trees silently tumbled to the ground with faint whumpfing noises.
By midday, Kelly perched herself upon a rock that lay bare and exposed to the elements in a tiny clearing. She quickly changed her bandages, which had turned dark red and brown, taking care to put the used ones back into her pack. By her count, she still had several hours before nightfall and a disturbingly raw cold would settle in. She started to think about shelter and where to make camp for the night.
Once she had finished attending to herself, she exited out of the forest by way of a steep gravel slope where snow lay furled in deep pockets. Another spread of trees lay some five hundred feet below. Kelly scrambled her hands and feet among the sharp and naked rocks, taking care not to slip and fall lest she would suffer a long tumble to the bottom. As she climbed down, she had a view of the steel peaks in the distance as they bled glaciers of dirty white. Runs of ice turned into silver rivers permanently frozen onto rock slopes. An anvilhead to the north spouted wires of lightning, the thunder too far away for the sound to travel.
Kelly made it to the bottom of the slope and trekked back into the woods again. Her hands and feet were numb with cold—she could feel her toes burning. Frostbite. Her bodysuit was not staving off the elements.
She moved through the woods, her legs acting almost senselessly. The Spartan was shivering and was blowing air into her cupped hands to keep warm. She kept to her original heading, using the sun to track her position. Occasionally, she could see black and blue mountains to the west at her back where they footed from the roots of the valley. A tremendous cape of rock was at her right—she rounded the base and kept hiking until she finally heard something other than the screech of the wind.
A faint gurgle. Liquid. A stream!
That was cause enough for her to alter her course. A fresh swell of energy started to life in her gut and she followed the sound until the smell of wet stone reached her. She reached a pebbled wash and was able to spot a metallic ribbon cutting between two snow-covered banks. Finally, some semblance of hope.
Kelly waded into the ankle-deep snow and cleared out a path so that she could drink from the stream. The water was alpine and cleaner than the snow. She could clearly see the individual rocks and sparkling grains of sand at the bottom of the creek. The water tasted fresh, though slightly acidic, as she scooped handfuls into her mouth.
Past the sound of water dripping from her fingers, Kelly was in the middle of dabbing the sweat from her forehead when she could discern a slight difference in pressure. Almost as if a presence had intruded into her sphere that had not been there before.
Slowly, she brought her hand down and looked up across from her. She crouched there next to the bubbling river, only her eyes moving as she absorbed each and every groan from a tree, crack of a branch, and whistle of the wind.
Something then passed atop a triangular ridge through a cut in the trees. A shadow upon a shadow. Logan's mercs? No, this was too large for a human. She almost thought that it was a Brute, until the figure slowly crept out into full view.
Quadrupedal. Thick black and spikey fur. Hollow yellow eyes. A thin maw filled with rows of curled teeth. Steam rose from its mouth like smoke as it panted, and its padded feet made no noise as they sank into the snow.
The creature reminded Kelly of a wolf, though this one looked far more wild and altogether sinister. It must have been tracking her scent or she had stumbled upon its territory on accident.
Kelly suppressed a groan, but she could not help but offer one quip to the animal: "Come on, I don't have time for you, too."
Understandably, the creature did not comprehend English, so it gave absolutely no reaction to the Spartan's statement.
It seemed that this creature—whatever it was called—had decided that Kelly was either a threat or food and should be dealt with accordingly. It was widening its stance, classic preparation for a pounce. Even if she were at her full strength, Kelly would not want to tangle with such an animal anyway, especially hand-to-hand. She lacked a thick hide and claws that would normally provide protection from the snarling mouths of the fauna. One lucky strike and she would be disemboweled in an instant. Either that, or her throat would be torn out quickly in the fight and she would be left to bleed out in the snow.
For the umpteenth time today, she wished she had a rifle.
While the angered creature continued to size Kelly up, a small glinting at the bottom of the stream caught Kelly's eye. It was a stone flecked with pyrite, having been worn down by the rushing of water over the eons.
She had an idea. Kelly reached into the stream—slowly, so as to not alert the creature any more—and plucked the rock free from the riverbed. It fit her hand perfectly and felt reassuringly solid.
The Spartan gradually rose, her eyes never leaving the animal as it stomped and snorted. Low rushes of pulmonary breathing seethed from its nostrils. Kelly turned the stone over and over in her hand, looking about the land, making sure that this was the only solitary animal before her, in case this would all go to hell in a handbasket in the next minute.
Kelly bent her arm and cocked it back. She smirked at the creature. "Smile for me."
Somehow, amazingly, the creature roared in response—a deep, guttural sound that tapered off with a flapping screech.
With all her might, Kelly hurled the stone.
The missile spun like a top as it was flung through the air. It made a slight whistling noise as it sailed on course to its target.
The creature must have seen the blow incoming, but had no idea how to process such an attack. The stone hit it squarely between the eyes with a loud thunk. Blood immediately splashed around the rock as it impacted and bounced off. Dark red liquid matted against the animal's thick coat and dripped to the snow, turning it a bright and simmering shade. Its skull was so thick that the blow had no chance of killing it, but the pain was so immense that the creature sank to the ground in surprise, no longer roaring, but producing a string of weak whimpers as it suffered through the worst headache of its life.
Kelly had obtained another stone by this point and was already ready to send it on its way to join its predecessor.
It turned out that was unnecessary, because after five minutes of lying down in its paralysis, the animal staggered back to its feet, its muzzle continuing to drip blood, and staggered in the direction that it had come from, the fight having all but fled from it. It spared the Spartan a look of confusion and astonishment as it departed. Newfound respect had been won today—a lesson had been learned.
Kelly waited until she was sure that the creature would not be returning. Slowly, she unleashed a breath. Blood continued to thud in her temples. She certainly did not feel cold anymore.
She looked in the direction the creature had fled and shook her head. The second stone made a plunking noise as she tossed it back into the river. "Not your lucky day, I'm afraid. I'm just not easy prey."
In the midafternoon, after she had followed the creek for the rest of the day, Kelly had started the process of setting up camp within earshot of the water. A fire was quickly started, small enough that the smoke trail would be too thin to attract any attention. The flames faded and freshened, scattering loose sparks. The Spartan's eyes were like coals as she sat at the fire's perimeter, her feet angled towards the heat to thaw them out.
She flexed her toes. They responded, but she could not feel them moving. Not good. The damage could be reversed, given medical attention, which was something she was unlikely to find out here.
The blanket of evergreen needles rustled as Kelly adjusted her position upon it. It was no five-star-hotel bed, nor was it a barracks cot, but it would more than do. Besides, it was better that sleeping on the forest floor—sleeping without anything laying between a person and the ground was a surefire way to succumb to exposure. This would help keep her warm. That, plus the small shelter she had erected for herself against the trunk of a nearby tree, which had several limber logs lashed together with IV tubing to create a sort of triangular canopy, curtained with more evergreen branches.
Occasionally, she ventured out beyond the glow of the undulating scurf, that ragged forge, to check the traps that she had set. It took her half an hour to check them all, but they had managed to snag nothing. Probably not surprising—she had noted that she was not near any game trail, nor did she have the proper bait to entice any creature, edible or otherwise, to venture in her direction.
Seems she was going without food tonight. Her stomach was already giving her grief.
Sleep refused to claim her. There was a pain in her side again as she sat there next to the fire. Her meds were starting to wear off. She did not re-up, as she only had a limited supply. There was no other alternative but to sit there and take the pain.
Snow matted against Kelly's hair as a breeze furrowed by. Her eyes drooped and dimmed, though she would instantly become alert at the faintest sound of a branch snapping in the distance. The creature again? Or was it Logan? There was no way for her to tell, not in this darkness. She could only see about a dozen feet away from the fire—she would be able to see more, if it were not for the light ruining her natural night-vision.
Thick clouds like smoke wafted from her mouth. She rubbed her aching hands together. She looked up a couple of times and found that there were no stars to view through the trees. Her jaw was chattering, as if in seizure. The Spartan then held her feet in her hands, desperate to warm what the fire could not. Each individual toe felt like a dead boulder.
By what approximated for midnight, Kelly began to hallucinate. From her injuries or lack of sleep, she could not diagnose. But as she sat at the fire like a chained phantom, almost as if she were in servitude to the shapeless mass of light before her, wraiths that inhabited only the lenses of her eyes began to take form past the flickering sheets of flame. Devils and monsters. But human. So very human.
Smokeshapes in the form of unclothed and ancient warriors sat opposite the flame, their eyes smoldering like pools of burning arsenic. Roughened markings the color of caked ash adorned their bare chests. Their faces gave no hint of judgment or respite. They all had slit lips with insignias of jade slipped into the crevasses of flesh. In their hands, they clutched knives of obsidian that glistened with a wetness not of this world. Incredibly, Kelly could smell rain, even though she knew it was impossible.
With each passing of the fans of flame, the alien shapes across the campfire vanished and appeared and vanished again as if they were the result of some maniacal zoetrope. They made no effort to harm Kelly, nor did they speak. They simply sat and watched, imbuing some vague yet implicit understanding that reached beyond mere consciousness and into the primordial intuition that harbored an atomical—no, infinitesimal—weight, yet still had the power to shape a thought.
Her eyes half-open, it was a struggle for the Spartan to shake her head.
"Stop," she whispered. "Stop looking at me."
Her demons continued to taunt her in their silent overture, utterly impenetrable to what constituted, for a Spartan, an impassioned plea.
Kelly rose before the sun did, as the sky was just beginning to turn the color of a deep ocean. She had gotten an abysmal night's sleep—her ribs had woken her several times and she had to force herself to withstand the pain as long as she could.
The fire had long gone out—a pyramid of fine ash remained in place of the branches that had formed the fuel. The air was crisp and raw, and Kelly's bones felt like they had formed a layer of ice around them.
But she was still alive.
There was no food to eat, so Kelly quickly spent a few minutes changing out her bandages again. She took an opiate to drive the pain off for the day. There was little time to waste, so she scattered snow across the campfire and trudged back into the thick winterfall, making her way back over to the creek.
The creek tumbled over stones loosely assembled to ward off its passage, and it ribboned down the valley floor. Eventually, it turned into a river wider than a Warthog, its velocity somewhat tempered by its newfound width. The path of the water made an arc through the forest, a long and mirrored boulevard that swept its power out beyond all sight, beyond all caring of the insignificant life forms that just so happened to chance across it. For the makings of a world give no thought to the synapses of neurons, yet those worlds would be themselves blissfully ignorant about the power of imagination those synapses could conjure.
Kelly followed the river for several miles, keeping to the treeline while having the water within eyesight. The gradient was more level here—she was probably now into the foothills of the mountain range; the worst having passed. The trees were as thick as ever, but still easily navigable.
Her leg was starting to aggrieve her by mid-morning, though, and she soon developed a slight limp while the fresh and blue sky raged its deep color high above. There was nothing she could do, so she tried to ignore it as best she could.
Just before noon, she came across a curious sight. The trees ahead had cleared, but maybe only for thirty or so meters before the forest sprang back up on the other side, as dense as ever. It wasn't until Kelly had gotten closer did she realize that the clearing was shaped like a line—an entire channel of nothing but grass had somehow scraped its way across the thicket, carving a groved path that had pulverized the brake that had dared stand in its way.
Of course, Kelly knew that paths like this—so straight and so evenly wide for a distance—were impossible to naturally occur. She walked out into the middle of the path and looked in the two directions it offered—one presented a clear route back towards the blue and paper slopes of the mountains that she had just finished descending, the other made a beeline further down the foothills in the direction that the river had been heading.
The assemblage of steel lattice beams at the side of the avenue provided Kelly the answer. They were several meters long, of varying sizes, stacked upon one another rather evenly, that formed a massive rectangular block a good hundred meters in length that ran along the treeline. The grass around the beams was flattened, as if a vehicle had been continuously running in this area.
Kelly recognized the beams as the disassembled pieces of an electric pylon, the presence of which meant that she had just stumbled upon a utility corridor.
A light feeling intruded into her chest. People had been here. Colonists. And if they left these infrastructure materials behind to build later, then that meant that this place was traversed more often than most.
Kelly headed in the direction opposite the mountain. She assumed that, if there were colonists in close proximity, they would have intelligently placed their dwellings further downhill, where the river was wider. Plus, the colonists would not have come from the mountains to lay out their equipment for later use. There was little doubt she was going the right way.
Again, she retreated into the forest and walked parallel to the utility corridor, which acted as a bright zone of white and green that seemed to emanate past the shadow of the canopy. She absconded amongst the darkness of the forestry, an animal in her own right. The path in her view was like a scar mapped upon a mare plain of otherwise flawless skin—impossible for her to lose her way.
Her leg and her side were now producing a thin burn, like liquid fire was seeping into her joints. It soon hurt to even breathe. She dragged herself through the snowclumped waste, the ground underfoot springy and rocky. The light of the day began to pale and thin dustings of snow escaped from their branched perches.
The Spartan's eyes were rimmed raw and started to glaze after she had been hiking for what seemed like years. She was tired, hungry, and the amassed collection of her injuries on top of her internal ailments was taking its toll. She was nowhere near a hundred percent. She would be loath to say that she was even above fifty percent. The sweat at the back of her neck seemed to simmer and sizzle against her coldfried skin, the very beating of her heart feeling like it was pumping magma into her limbs.
Stay alive, she had to tell herself. Stay alive. You still have work to do.
She had a mission: to kill Phaedra.
She had a desire: to save her brother.
She had a duty: to stay alive to face the battle that would come next.
Some people fought for only one cause. She had the choice of three.
That was when she knew she would live to see the next day.
After the trail had angled for the hundredth time, Kelly soon became aware of a great wall of light just in front of her, off from the utility corridor. She headed in that direction and pushed aside frozen leaves and thickets until she was suddenly up against a barbed wire fence. The fence did not seem to be electrified; she ducked underneath it.
She was now standing at the edge of a field of smooth and perfect snow that sloped down gently to where a singular one-story homestead punctuated the clearing, along with what appeared to be a garage/barn combination next to it. A lone furrowed track razed up and to the right, offering the only passage out of the flat and snowy expanse. Smoke wisped in a thin stylus from the chimney of the home and the windows inside exuded a calming copper light. Someone was home.
Kelly no longer gave a damn if someone had her underneath a gunsight. Clumsily, she tromped out into the field, leaving a gorge of footprints behind. She made it to the footpath that led to the front door and firmly rapped upon its face with a shaking fist and repeated the action thrice more. There was nary a sound that she could hear past the threshold except for the occasional creak of the floorboard. For a moment, she thought she should find cover, but decided against it.
Then, the door swung open. A cut of firelight washed the hunched-over, panting, and dismal-looking Spartan as she had to hold onto the doorframe to steady herself. Kelly's head rose, and in her eyes pooled a crystal blue invocation.
"Please," she gasped to the dark figure across from her, who was obscured from the light, "I need help."
A/N: Maybe I should have titled this chapter "No Country for Old Spartans," because that was the tone I was intending to mimic here. I don't think I could have ever forgiven myself for the poor wordplay, though.
Playlist:
Misshapen Skull / Doomed Fight (The Last Moment of a Friendship)
"You Are Not Alone"
Jed Kurzel
Assassin's Creed (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Medkit
"Lung Draining"
Hans Zimmer, Jasha Klebe, Mel Wesson, and Martin Tillman
Rush (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack - Complete Score)
The World of Sonatine
"First Steps"
Clinton Shorter
The Expanse: Season 4 (Original Amazon Series Soundtrack)
Firelight Demons
"Small Beginnings"
Marc Streitenfeld
Prometheus (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Utility Corridor / Homestead
"Through the Trees"
Joel Corelitz
Halo: Infinite (Original Video Game Soundtrack)