The Chief's vision slowly returned to him, the picture slowly becoming sharper as his eyes tried to focus properly. He blinked for a few seconds, his eyes felt heavy and tired for some reason, and he slowly tried to pull himself up. He gripped a nearby console as he realised he was still on his Longsword fighter, although for some reason the craft was now entirely stationery. He stretched his various limbs, surprised how they too seemed to be almost numb. Every part of his body felt tired and dull, as if he had just been to sleep after a very exhaustive battle. Whilst waiting for the blood to flow back to his arms and legs, he took a brief look around the cockpit. For some strange reason the protective metal visors had come down over the viewscreen windows. All the controls and systems had been powered down and the Chief had to activate his inbuilt flashlight to see what had happened.
His Assault Rifle was lying on the floor next to where he had fallen, and so was the Sniper Rifle too, lying flung across the bottom of the doorway where it had come to a rest. The Chief picked up the smaller weapon and bought it up to a firing position. He scanned the cockpit in detail, checking every square inch of the room to see if anything was out of the ordinary. Apart from the visors being shut, however, there was nothing noteworthy to see. An attempt to opened the visor failed, the armour being too tough to move with the power down.
Then he heard a noise coming from behind him, like a distant footstep. The Chief turned quickly, bearing the Rifle down on where the sound came from. But nothing was there. The Chief trained his eyes and ears, trying to either hear the sound again or see the reflections coming off an active camouflage suit. His internal motion sensor picked up nothing.
Cortana…use your scanner and see if you can pick up anything. But there was no reply. The Chief felt the area at the base of his MJOLNIR suit's neck, but her chip was gone. Shit he thought, and bought the hand back under the barrel of the rifle. He walked slowly forward, heading to the rear of the ship. He tread softly, occasionally spinning round to try and see if anything had crawled up behind him. As he turned round near the rear of the fighter he saw that the hatchway was lowered, and was now resting on a blue coloured metal deck about a metre below the Longsword. The fighter was inside the Covenant ship!
This put the Chief in a serious dilemma. The Covenant now, it seemed, had Cortana, and he had to go and rescue her before they could decode her memory files and retrieve the information held there, including the location of Earth. But he knew the moment he stepped off the Longsword the Covenant were going to wipe him out before he had fired off a clip.
He crouched next to the hatchway, his eyes peering down the barrel at the blue deck below him. He breathed slowly as his mind ran over the thousands of tactics he had been taught by both his drill sergeants and his battlefield experience. Perhaps he could duck underneath the boarding ramp as soon as he got off, but he guessed that the Elites would have had every angle covered. He could try throwing a few grenades down, but he didn't know whereabouts they were. He scanned the ground for shadows but couldn't make any out. And then something else occurred to him.
Why hadn't they killed him when they took Cortana? Or at least throw him in the brig? Was he in a prison cell now? Where they watching what he were doing? Was he actually awake? Was this a dream? He tapped the side of his helmet and felt the vibrations clear enough, so he was awake. He detached the clip and checked its contents. The bullets were the same, proper H-E rounds filled the entire magazine. He reattached it and aimed the rifle at the gaping hatchway. The situation was beginning to plague his thoughts, and thousands of random, almost entirely improbable possibilities began to play out in his mind. Was this a Covenant ship? Sure it looked like one, but that didn't mean anything. It could a race similar to the Covenant perhaps. Or was a test of him? Or were they even bothered about him? It takes a lot of effort to purge an AI out of a neural implant, so why do nothing with him? Why leave him armed? How much of a threat did they even consider him?
Suddenly a sound reverberated out of the hatchway. All of those strange thought processors were abandoned and replaced again with a purely tactical mindset. The sound seemed to echo around the room outside, and it was followed by an almost inaudible hiss, like a very quiet reprimand for the person or thing making that footstep. He took in a deep breath, concentrating on his sight and hearing, picking up any clues as to what was going on outside. The extent of the echoing suggested that it was a very big room outside, possibly a hangar if they were storing the Longsword in it. There were at least two contacts too, possibly three, most likely a hell of a lot more. He decided to do a little probing.
He fired a round off through the door and hit the deck below, sending up a small fountain of sparks. His ears picked up a couple of small steps and a few extremely faint grunts.
Now that sounded like the Covenant, but it wasn't how the Covenant usually reacted. He would now be expecting at least half a dozen various Covenant troops coming to check out who had fired. But then this wasn't usual position for him to be in. He felt like he was being toyed with, and he hated it. He half-wished Cortana were with him now. If only to stop the various factions in his head acting in unison to drive him slowly but completely insane. He sighed, and wondered what they waiting for.
"Chief!" He looked up, Cortana's voice? "Chief, you there?" She yelled again, her echoing voice coming from far outside the hatchway.
"Where are you Cortana?" The Chief called, still with his gun trained at the hatchway.
"I'm outside, please come outside Chief." Her voice sounded surprisingly cold and quiet this time.
"Cortana? Who is outside this fighter Cortana?
"No-one Chief. Please come out, I'm scared." She didn't sound it. The Chief guessed it was some kind of trick, poorly done too by Covenant standards.
"Cortana, I know someone is out there. I don't even know if this voice I'm hearing is actually you."
"John, the people here…they're friends." She said softly, draining all the emotion out of her speech.
"They're Covenant Cortana. Covenant." He growled.
"Chief, John, you have to believe me, they are not going to hurt you. They're not the Covenant!"
"Who are they then?" He asked, trying to sound as dispassionate as he could.
"You will have to see for yourself!" Her voiced raised slightly, as if she was slightly encouraged. The Chief sighed quietly.
"Cortana?"
"Yes?"
"I've got no chance if I don't co operate have I?"
"John, there is far more at stake here. Humanity relies on you coming outside right now!" She yelled again.
"What are you talking about?"
"John, you have got to come out, please."
"Cortana, who is there?"
"Chief, come outside." For some strange reason he crept forward. Everything in his rational mind told him this was a trap, and yet. There was something strange going on here, and he was going to find out. He moved slowly down the ramp, and bit-by-bit the hangar came into view.
It seemed to be a Covenant designed interior all right. Vast, violet coloured, curved walls rose to a high ceiling far above him, pale blue lighting shining out of small grooves located on almost every part of the room's surfaces. Two Covenant landing craft lay parked at the end of the room, hovering under their glowing suspension rails. At the far side of the room opposite the Chief was a typical hexagonal Covenant door, and next to it was a holographic display panel. And there was Cortana, standing rather formally with her arms by her side in the holopanel's display emitters. She looked at the Chief with an emotionless expression and didn't make a sound.
The Chief slowly walked forward with a combat stance. He moved his gun from side to side whilst continuously looking down the barrel, ready to engage anything remotely threatening. But he couldn't see anything apart from the Landing Craft floating harmlessly under its rack. He made his way cautiously toward Cortana's console. And then he stopped.
A figure decloaked right in front of him, causing the Chief to stop and then take a leap back, bringing his gun up to train on this new arrival. The figure's active camouflage shield finally disappeared. It was an Elite. A big, fat, red Elite. And then right before his eyes two more Elites, this time in blue body armour, appeared on the red's flanks. Shit. He looked at the central Elite; it stood tall and menacing, as Elites tended to in times of victory. But it didn't say anything as it raised its rifle. The Chief didn't wait. He quickly rolled to the side and fired his Rifle into the red Elite. He fired off the entire magazine into him but every single bullet just pinged and ricocheted off the Elite's shield. Shit crossed his mind for the umpteenth time and started to reload his clip, but the first plasma shot tore the rifle from his hands. He nearly fell over from the blast and turned to run.
But two more blue Elites decloaked right in front of him as he ran back to the Longsword, and the nearer one smacked him hard with the butt of his Plasma Rifle. The Chief fell to the floor, heavily winded and nearly concussed. Through the corner of his eyes he saw two more blue Elites decloaked either side of him. All eight blue Elites walked up and aimed their rifles at him. The Chief sighed and looked up at their glaring faces. Cortana was going to die for being a traitor if he ever survived this.
Then something even stranger happened, so the Chief thought.
"Back off the human!" Came a loud gruff voice from behind the group of blue Elites, and they obeyed instantly. Their circle took a step back, allowing a gap to appear. The red Elite walked proudly up next to the Chief, still lying on his back and wishing many bad things to happen to Cortana, and looked down at him. He then growled again at the blue Elites standing around him, and they removed themselves much further away, till the red Elite gave a quieter grunt of approval. It looked down again at the Chief. The Elite gave him a studious look, as if it was puzzled by something, then it knelt down and offered the Chief a hand up.
The Chief decided to just go along, too many strange things had happened for him to actually understand what was going on. He took the Elites hand and found himself almost flying up into the ceiling as the Covenant effortlessly pulled him up to a standing position. The Chief soon found his feet, and was even more surprised when the Elite sank to his knees and picked up the Chief's Assault Rifle. He took a clip from an unseen pouch in his armour and reloaded the human weapon. He thrust the now full rifle back into the Chief's hands. The Chief just stared back at the Elite, and he swore he saw Covenant give him a sort of smile.
"A warrior should never be without his weapon, human." The red Elite growled at him, putting a well-armoured hand on the Chief's shoulder. "I am Commander Briyanku of the Rvarn'ii, and if you call me or any of my men a Covenant again, I'll tear your head off your shoulders."