Chapter XIX: At the Edge
"The More You Know…"
In Transit
The stars had disappeared long ago, replaced by the electric sheen of slipspace that sent kaleidoscopic reflections of light hurtling around the cockpit. Kelly observed the phenomenon for a time, standing at ease, hands behind her back, watching as the infinitesimal lines of energy and starmatter scurried by like they were struggling to get out of the way of the racing prowler.
It was rare that she had moments like this to take in the strangeness of how spacetime warped around an object she knew to be intrinsically solid. But in slipspace, even that was not entirely true. Matter did not behave normally in this superluminal universe—it stretched, becoming perceivable in more than three dimensions. The human mind, even one like hers, simply lacked the capacity to see the quantum realm that made the supposed physics phantasms possible in the first place. The most that she could envision, on a physical level, was a simple point of matter travelling down a wormhole that folded the galaxy so that she could get from point A to B in an amount of time that even mathematics struggled to quantify.
She stood in the same position, still in her appropriated armor, allowing all thoughts to trickle out. Here, she was at home with the universe, a patient mote headed straight to its destiny.
Eventually, Kelly touched a control and the cockpit windshield darkened until the light no longer played havoc with the shadows.
The navcomputer was estimating that the trip to Phaedra's hideout, which did not match any known systems, would take three months, thereabouts. Clearly Phaedra had intended for no one to accidentally stumble upon her, considering the sheer distance in which she had placed herself from any major colony.
Kelly wondered if Phaedra had packed up shop and left since their first verbal contact on Arbogast. She hoped that Phaedra was at a location that made relocation difficult if not outright impossible. If not, then she was on a long, long trip to pick everything back up at square one once she arrived.
The prowler had a cryo tube that Kelly could use to make the time pass by quicker. She was not thrilled with the prospect, as being in cryo was an unpleasant experience that no one could say was at all enjoyable, but it was a necessity in this case. The ship did not have enough rations to sustain her for such a span of time, plus she would get bored within in a week if she tried to rough it the whole way, despite her best efforts. Even Spartans could suffer from the delirious twilight of a ruined sleep cycle as time grew more and more slower with each passing day, on account of there being no change to her environment while the ship was travelling. Cryo was simply the best option at her disposal, though she was going to have to endure the uncomfortable itching of freezer burn afterward—Spartans typically went under while still in full armor, which made them susceptible to the angry rashes stemming from the reactions that covered skin had with the effects of cryo.
She slipped her helmet from her head and rubbed at her short hair with a gloved hand. Sighing, Kelly breathed in the darkness, tasting the staleness that even the air recyclers could not scrub out. She found the pilot's chair and sat in it. With that same hand, she rubbed her palm across the golden visor of the Mark V helmet, giving it her first real consideration since she had left Arbogast.
The armor had never belonged to her, of course, but it felt like she had been reunited with an old friend, regardless. The Mark V had been the first update to the successful fourth-gen MJOLNIR and were the first to be provided with shield generators, which had been reverse-engineered from captured Jackal hand-shields. The Spartans owed much of their success on the field to the Mark V, for it had given them the first real boost in combat that enabled them to confidently go toe-to-toe with an Elite zealot, not to mention giving them the ability to take a few plasma hits without injury.
Kelly had done a quick diagnostic of the armor's components earlier. The shield generator in the model she wore was first gen, many versions removed from the GEN2 platform. Unlike the newer models, the shields in this one had a catastrophically slow recharge time—she was going to need to rethink her tactics if another firefight awaited her. Maybe tamper the brashness down a tad. She would need to wait in cover for far longer until her shields recharged to full, at the very least. That would not sit well with her natural impatience.
Adding to her downgrade woes, the Mark V did not come fitted with the standardized ports for any additional gear that she could attach to gain any tactical edge. She was running on proprietary hardware, a closed system.
The Spartan then leaned forward and placed her helmet atop one of the computer banks. She then snaked a cable out from behind the units and plugged it into the port at the back of the helmet. There was a beep and then the prowler began downloading several years' worth of soft-patches into the helmet at once. At least she could be up to spec on something once this was all over.
As her helmet was being updated, Kelly's eyes flicked over to one of the console screens, which had just produced a pop-up window—white text on a black background. The deepsystem virus scanner had just announced that it had finished its file investigation. No hits that would otherwise trip the sensors.
Kelly folded her fingers together and leaned forward, appraising the screen with apprehension. When Armitage had mentioned that he had left files behind on board, she had no reason to believe that the AI's intentions had been anything but genuine. Those "files" could have been malicious pieces of software that were meant to play havoc with the Nighthawk's systems, or worse. Kelly was not all that keen at making such risks at this stage of the voyage, so she had subjected the entire database of the ships to every single kind of virus scan that the OS had at its disposal. She had even initiated the scans more than once, even when no alerts had been raised the first time.
And now, as she looked at the simple folder that hung upon the screen, Kelly could scarcely find a reason to drag it over to the recycle bin so that Armitage's info would be deleted forever. She lifted a hand though, preparing it wipe the contents of the folder.
But then she stopped, fingers just inches from the glass.
Her brow creased. She made a soft noise.
"Very well," she said as she repositioned her hand and double-tapped upon the folder and opened the first file, after another moment's hesitation.
A new rectangular window popped up on the next screen and Kelly's heart raced a beat, thinking that she had just made a terrible mistake. But she was soon allayed when a series of images—a video file—began playing within the window. She relaxed.
The video was a shaky snippet of bodycam footage. Kelly could see a brightly lit ward, something that looked like a high-tech research facility. A hospital of some kind, much like the facility where she had received her Spartan enhancements.
The camera moved through glass-walled corridors. Flashes of the camera-wielder appeared in the panes of glass—a medical technician dressed from head to toe in pale green sterile lab garb. The view sloppily panned across a wide corridor flanked with thick, white doors. The sight reminded Kelly of a kennel.
The Spartan adjusted herself in her chair, intrigued as to where this was going.
As the images of the facility flashed and spun, a robotic voice was narrating the video through an encoded transcript.
"Report to Vice Admiral Parangosky on Project: ASTER anomaly. Classified to Section Three parameters. Location: UNSC Reach Complex. Date: May 1, 2525. Debrief: urgent update regarding ORION trainee suffering from side effects as a result of Project: ASTER."
There was a cut and the camera was now moving into an operating room of sorts. More doctors and technicians, along with enameled medical robots, all surrounded a singular supine figure that was laying upon a reclinable hospital bed. The figure was a child. So tiny compared to the adults. The camera briefly dipped down, long enough for Kelly to see blood trickling into the floor drains that stemmed from the patient. Then, as the camera rose, the patient was finally in full view.
Kelly did not even have to wait their features came into view to know that she was looking at Phaedra.
Despite herself, her breath momentarily paused.
On the screen, the girl had her eyes closed, with most of her face being covered by a breathing mask that steadily hissed a stream of air. One side of her scalp had been shaved and Kelly could see that part of her skull had been removed, exposing a red, fleshy expanse of what was the girl's nervous system. Medical instruments flashed and hovered above the girl and there was the whirring of a saw in the background. Out of focus behind the subject, a variety of monitors glimmered holographic-green biosigns.
"An incident at the complex between Trainees-087 and -119 resulted in severe traumatic injuries for -119, which were exacerbated by previously undetected side effects from the use of level-3 experimental compounds. During the operation to repair the visible trauma, the medical team determined that the muscular enhancement injections had severely increased the cardiac volume of Trainee-119. A list of NMDA receptor antagonists has been provided—the subject will require a program from this drug class in order to reduce the volume of blood flow. Should the subject fail to be put on such a regimen, cardiac arrest would have been inevitable in a matter of weeks."
The camera panned down and Kelly was now looking at Phaedra's cut-open chest. Her ribs were pale and glistened. Robotic arms were delicately scurrying around in the open cavity as they surrounded the throbbing heart. Blood so dark it was black stained the scalpels and needles, splattering the edges of the sterile robe that draped about her body.
Kelly's mouth parted a hair. So that's what had been ailing Phaedra when they had fought. Her heart had been beating so fast she had nearly had a heart attack. Perhaps she would have, had Kelly not pummeled her to a pulp beforehand.
And the mention of NMDA receptor antagonists… that had been the exact same drug class as the one that had been created on Arbogast. The drug that was the answer to her condition that had been ailing her ever since the augmentations.
Had Phaedra been mass-producing her own cure? Why?
Now the camera was back on Phaedra's head, where a membranous barrier was slowly being peeled back from the girl's head where it had been cut, exposing the brain, the scene macabre and sinister as the raw tissue saw light for the very first time. A spit of that same dark fluid splashed from the open cut in the skull and a medic pressed a cloth to the side of the patient's head.
"Personnel observed tenderness and palpable deformities upon left side of the head. MRI scans revealed that severe brain tissue swelling had resulted from shards of skull impacting the frontal lobe. A thirty-six-hour procedure enabled the patient to be stabilized, but the permanent brain damage could not be reversed."
The next breath in Kelly's throat held there until it hurt. She still remembered the sensation of Phaedra's head giving way to her fist, that terrible ripple of flesh and that final choked cry before the trainers could finally pull Kelly away.
I did that.
Another angle on Phaedra. The menagerie of doctors had thinned, the surgery apparently complete. This time, she was draped with a sheet up to her neck, her chest apparently closed up. An angry crisscross of scars had been arrayed on her head, the bruising in her eyes still dark and apparent.
"The patient was monitored in case of secondary injury from biochemical cascades. Pressure in the skull was regulated until the swelling had receded. Further diagnosis anticipates that severe behavioral issues will emerge as a consequence of the injury. Additional damage to parietal lobes will also result in reduced tactile sensation. A high possibility of amnesia or issues with memory retention have been estimated to develop as a result of the primary injury."
Behavioral issues. Kelly unfolded her hands and placed them upon her knees, tightening her grip. All this time and the explanation was that simple? That Phaedra had become a psychopathic killer because of the injuries that she had been dealt during their fight?
Shamefully, she closed her eyes and dipped her head down. But just for a moment.
The screen had now devolved into rapid oscillations of images. Images of Phaedra—full color photos, X-rays, MRIs, every possible wavelength. One static picture in the corner continually displayed the woman's scowling face, but she looked older in that picture. Older than Kelly had remembered. There was a severe look upon her, any traces of the wide-eyed child long vanished. Like she was struggling to keep all that anger from bursting out from the attempt at a calm façade she was so desperately putting up.
"Dr. Halsey has ceded responsibility of Trainee-119 as a result of the incident at the complex. The subject's injuries would not make her suited for working within a team due to the aforementioned behavioral developments negatively imparted in addition to the long rehabilitation period that will be required in order to offset the damage. ONI will retain custody of -119 and will oversee their recovery—per Section Three subregulation A1-09, all ORION washouts will be reassigned to operator roles as befits their reduced physical abilities. Should Trainee-119 survive the recovery process and exhibit optimistic results in the physical therapy, their file will auto-route through the appropriate Section Three channels to reinstate them as a field operator. They will be closely monitored to ensure that they have the capacity to demonstrate complete compliance towards ONI and the hierarchical structure that has resulted in this second chance."
The file unceremoniously closed itself not long after the last syllable had finished resounding.
Kelly shook her head in reflex. Closely monitored. That clearly did not work, did it? Unless Phaedra had been deliberately let off the leash (for what purpose, Kelly could not fathom), it stood to reason that ONI had lost control of their investment. They had claimed ownership of Phaedra like she was nothing but an object. An object with extensive copyrights. Picked her up as the scraps left over from the SPARTAN program and trained to act as ONI's own private henchman until they could no longer control her.
Guess they had reaped what they had sewn.
Thoughtfully, Kelly tapped her fingers together. She then reached to activate the second file, which was nothing but text, instead of a video, this time.
Her eyes scanned the text.
COMMUNIQUE: IDENT FACTOR 1-0-0-5
AI IDENT: JLM 3259-8 "HALL OF THE MOUNTAIN KING"
BURST TO: ARM 4822-0
HOUSING: UNSC NIGHTHAWK [PRO-88317]
CLASSIFIED – Q AUTHORIZATION
ENCODE:
INCURSION 1 FAILURE. SIERRA-087 NOW ASSIGNED AS INCURSION 2. 087 MUST NOT DISCOVER PRIOR INCURSION. COMMUNICATION HAS BEEN RECEIVED FROM TARGET OF INTEREST. TARGET HAS BEEN DETERMINED TO HAVE LOST CONTROL. MONITOR 087 AND ENSURE DESTRUCTION OF TARGET.
087 ASSIGNED DUE TO PRIOR HISTORY WITH TARGET.
SECONDARY OBJECTIVE: OPPORTUNITY PRESENT TO RECTIFY BEHAVIORAL ANOMALIES IN 087 – BRING TO PARITY WITH REST OF BLUE TEAM. 087 PREDICTED TO DISPLAY FEELINGS OF RESPONSIBILITY FOR MISSION AND TARGET. ENSURE 087 REMAINS FOCUSED.
SHOULD 087 BREAK FREE OF PSYCHOLOGICAL LIMITS, YOU ARE AUTHORIZED TO TERMINATE THE MISSION BY ANY MEANS NECESSARY. SHOULD 087 RESIST, YOU ARE AUTHORIZED TO HAVE HER DESTROYED.
DO NOT DISSEMINATE. DO NOT REPLY TO THIS MESSAGE. GALACTIC SECURITY IS PRIORITY.
Kelly read the message in its totality two more times before closing the file. There was one more item in the folder to open, but she spent a little bit pondering over what she had just read before going into that last file.
Her eyes looked off into the darkflooded distance. Incursions. She could only infer, but it seemed like she had not been the first course of action against Phaedra that ONI had taken. Whom had they sent in the first team? Marines? Another Spartan? Had Incursion 1's failure resulted in the escalation of action by Phaedra and the rest of the Phoenix Unit? It would not be the first time that a miscalculation in military intelligence had led to an outcome far worse than expected.
It seemed that Armitage had been telling the truth. ONI had recognized Kelly's role in shaping the soldier that Phaedra had turned into and had sent her out on this mission because of it.
But what was more concerning had been the paragraphs devoted to her "behavioral anomalies." Not Phaedra's. Hers. That had been the thing that had given her the most pause. What anomalies? Was ONI trying to make her second-guess herself? For what end? Were they playing their little games, trying to subtly manipulate psychological shifts on accordance of nothing but smoke and rumors?
She gave a grunt. Enough. She could mull over the hierarchical structure of the missions within missions that had been levelled upon her. In the end, they were all meaningless to her.
The third file began to automatically play after a quick pause. A wavelength bar popped up. Audio only.
"NavSpec Omega Victor," a man's voice, sotto, spoke. "Burst comms to Dr. Catherine Halsey, Reach. Retrieval of -119 complete. Subject is suffering from second-degree burns on body. Have initiated healing regimen in her cryo pod to ensure that she will be at full health by the time we return to the facility."
Kelly tapped her chin. A report of how Phaedra was "recruited" into the SPARTAN program, it seemed. Kelly could not recall how she had been made a part of the whole thing, for it had been so long. She had never once attempted to dig up such circumstances on herself or any one of her fellow Spartans before. To do so seemed like a flagrant violation of their trust.
Yet, she could not stop listening now.
"Reckon you'd want to know of the complications. Marines got to the family first. Apparently, they found out the father had ties to the Insurrection. They murdered the family and torched the house. Subject was found buried in the rubble. The clone was disposed in a manner to make it look like it had burned up with the house. This may have lingering effects on her psychological development when she comes to. She may come to hate the UNSC for what they did, when the trauma settles. This may become a powder keg, if you want my honest opinion. The -119 situation will not suffice due to its deviation from control. You have final approval to go forward, but you should be aware of the potential consequences."
That was it for the audio file. Kelly's eyes swerved over to the window and she tapped her fingers together in thought.
Armitage was more right than he had let on. ONI indeed knew everything. About Kelly and Phaedra. And about Phaedra's botched recruitment. To see their family murdered in front of them… no wonder Phaedra had cracked. She may not have ever had loyalty to the UNSC at all. She had to have been plotting some sort of escape, a kind of revenge, just to get back at them for killing the only people who had truly loved her.
It got Kelly thinking. What had stopped her own "recruitment" from meeting a similar fate? Had things turned out differently, perhaps her brother would have died earlier, instead of on that cold and lonely moon.
The final file was queued up and began playing after a last, lingering touch upon the screen.
On the screen, a dark video rimmed with static centered on what appeared to be a still grayscale image, though it was too dark to make out any detail. The camera was fixed in place in contrast to the first video and did not shift like a handheld perspective would. The poor lighting remained within the video and Kelly had to lean forward to make out the faintest shards of light that cut bare, white lines across the multi-gray canvas.
It was only after one of the shadows on the screen moved did Kelly realize the video had been centered on a person this whole time. An armored warrior—MJOLNIR—in a sitting position. Facing away from the camera at a right angle. The figure slowly shifted, allowing the gentle play of light against shadow to highlight the barest contours without ever revealing the full scope of their enormity.
The same robotic voice from the first file narrated the opening: "Transmission 1, received 19:00 hours. Date—" there was a harsh beeping noise as that portion of the voiceover had been excised, "—Sector Tango, Alpha, Omega."
The soldier in the footage then slowly turned their head. A dull simmer from their visor, a miniscule spark of aureate, flashed once before dying in the blackness. They were still not facing into the camera, but their body language indicated that they were all too aware of its presence.
Then, the soldier finally spoke.
"I used to think that… there was some kind of… willful blindness that you were able to exert. You people. For how could there be any other reason? You destroy the lives of strangers without giving them any second thoughts. Subject ones so young to lifetimes of pain and suffering. And you claim to have someone else's best interests at heart. The so-called 'greater good.' It goes beyond hypocrisy, to say the least. Maybe you just enjoy the lies. Hiding behind a veil to disguise your own actions—I would at least understand if you did it just for the sheer amusement it all brought you. It would be… easier to sympathize, that way."
Kelly was rapt with attention on the screen. The voice was deep and scratchy after coming through both the lossy video file and the helmet's vocabulator, but after Arbogast, there was no way she would ever forget that voice.
"If only you knew… how much I hate you," the soldier on the screen sighed, momentarily hanging their head. "Hate all of you. If you had even figured out that I had never stopped hating you, would you have let me live?"
A low and industrial groan rippled from the video and the figure slowly straightened back up. They slowly gestured to the camera with a firm hand.
"You tried to rectify your mistake too late. You'll be receiving this, along with the footage featuring the men you used to try to silence me. I'm told their expirations were… lengthy. In the end, they could not even reach me here, beyond your watchful eye."
The soldier in the footage tapped their fingers upon their kneecaps just once before they finally looked straight towards the camera for the first time. Bars of illumination slid upon the front of the Security helmet and the bulky frame of Phaedra could be clearly glimpsed for several long seconds. Tall and powerful, a rippling giant even underneath all that armor.
"You know what it is that I want. I want her let off the leash. I want her to know what she has helped create. She'd better be the next person you send after me, otherwise I will pull the trigger to the gun that has been aimed at your head this whole time. I do not need to remind you of the consequences. But should you waver, I will be quite happy to provide you with all the proof you need. Just watch. You'll fall in line. Eventually."
The video then paused on the eternal glare lidded within Phaedra's curved visor. It had reached the end of its playback. It seemed like the demonic creature in that file was staring straight at Kelly, every word laced with venom and positioned like daggers toward the true audience all along.
And Kelly just looked back at the screen. At her friend. At her enemy.
"You wanted this all along," Kelly whispered to the frozen image. "You're going to get more than what you asked for."
She spent several minutes in that chair, sizing up the image that had long burned itself in her mind. The masked visage of Phaedra. But after a while, it became apparent that she needed to do something else other than consider old and current foes. She stood once more and headed over to the bench, closer to the hologram pedestal, where her disassembled weapons sat. She pulled up a chair and switched on the light that was positioned above, allowing her to wallow in a cone of illumination.
She placed her hands upon the table, observing the metallic innards of the guns before her, along with her cleaning supplies. Kelly just kept herself in that position, not moving any further, just staring at the table, as though as she had suddenly found all this to be distant and insubstantial. It was not out of forgetfulness of what to do next—she had cleaned weapons more times than people heaved themselves into cars—but that she was just unable to concentrate on even the simplest steps, steps that had been engrained in her mind since she was a young child.
And despite all that, she could not muster the will to even pick up a simple cloth to dab at any singular piece of a gun laid out before her.
Awareness fell away from her in sheets. As though as her own mind slowly slipped from her grip, growing fuzzy as though she had been drugged.
The thought caused Kelly to sit up in concern. Was she still experiencing some of the side effects of being dosed? Inwardly, she cursed her own stupidity. She had gone this long and had not once given a thought of trying to counter-medicate herself? Muttering under her breath, she got up from the chair and headed to the tiny medbay one level down, where she prepared a quick cocktail that would alleviate the worst of her reaction. After all this time, the severity of the effects had long passed, but she was not going to take any chances, especially with a compound that was not even fully understood to government chemists.
Returning back to the table, Kelly found that her concentration to the task at hand had not even bothered returning. It was as if she was unable to process what she was doing. What she was about to do. She had months ahead of her. Months. This spell could not last. Not until Phaedra was dead.
Seeing as her weapons were not going to get cleaned anytime soon, and that she had quite a while to attend to that particular task, Kelly stood and returned to where her original position was: in front of the cockpit. She did not brighten the glass, instead choosing to peer through the visor-like material, so dark it was nearly opaque.
She continued to stand there, looking at the stars that were not stars and the spaces between them that were anything but. It all led to this final place. The last haven of the fugitive Spartan. She was going to make it. After she arrived, the rest was all up to her.
One part of Kelly recognized that she needed to treat this as any rote assignment. To put aside her prejudices and to carry out the task to the letter as according with doctrine that befitted a Spartan. To treat Phaedra, when she did find her, as any common criminal, and to dispense judgment on that criminal with cold proficiency.
The other part was saying to hell with all that. The price she had paid had been too heavy. That there needed to be recompense beyond an unglamorous kill. She needed Phaedra to understand what she had gone through to get to this very point. Kelly would not have wanted to make this personal, but Phaedra had only ever made this personal.
It was because of their voices. She could still hear their voices.
"…right about one thing," Furan's voice snaked into her ears, as though the Sangheili was standing right behind her, "rightful vengeance is always considered the justified path."
Kelly inhaled and closed her eyes, afraid that if she were to open them, she would see Furan laying before her, a katana impaled through her heart as she bled to death upon the snow.
Then the musical lilt of a child's laughter soon infiltrated. Kelly grunted and clasped her ears and staggered away from the window, keeping her head down so that she would not have to look upon Soraya's pale face as she hung from those terrible rafters, the bodies of her parents similarly displayed on either side of the girl.
Phaedra did this. All along, this had been Phaedra's doing.
"…I want you to know that I never forgot about you. I just want to know that you remember. If you still do, then maybe everything would have been all worth it."
Brandon. Damn it. His pulverized body could not leave her mind. His feeble croaks and his wet gasps as his punctured lungs struggled to draw breath. The steady drip-drip as blood leaked from his wounds, pooling upon the floor. His final smile upon seeing his sister—her—alive and in front of him, perhaps granting him permission to rest at last, knowing that she was still all right.
By touch, Kelly groped her way out of the cockpit and into the bathroom. She furiously clasped her hands on either side of the sink and cracked open her eyes a splinter, looking upon the damp basin.
The lights here were white and fierce. She had to squint in order to perceive her own shivering mask in the mirror, which was dappled with sweat, strands of her hair threatening to fall out of place. She sucked in tight breaths through clenched teeth, a sharp and grinding pain infecting her gut.
She didn't know if she could do this. That it had been a bad idea to have done this alone. She wondered why ONI had insisted on her being the one to do it. Just her. Not Linda, or Fred, any of the other members of the Spartans that marched within the Infinity, or any of the latter in combination with her.
There was that part of her again. The one that always explored the dread potential. That she, at no point in time, never truly knew what Phaedra had in store for her. This was a person who had cultivated decades of resentment against her. Kelly knew that hate—she had dispersed it upon the Covenant many times before. But never before had she been the target of such unfiltered scorn. Had all of this really been set in motion from that one terrible sparring session all those years ago? Or was that resentment always there, just under the surface?
Kelly thought about it some more as she continued to observe herself in the mirror. There was nothing else in her mind that ended up clicking, for there was no other answer. This had been her fault. She had created Phaedra, or had least played a part in her development, never mind that she had been goaded to do so. The Spartans—all of them—had been taken from their families, but Kelly took Phaedra away from her new one when she had brutally beat her senseless and bloody, which had been the lynchpin in expelling her from the program.
She had taken away the one chance for Phaedra to be a part of a family, one that would go through hell for each other, that knew each one as though they knew themselves, and would prove to be there to back each other up without a moment's hesitation.
She had been Phaedra's ruination for the second time in her life.
It was only then that Kelly knew there would be no other option. Neither could live while the other drew breath. There would be no quarter. No more hesitation.
She would kill Phaedra or die in the attempt.
But was that truly her will? Or ONI's?
Or did she no longer have a say in such things anymore?
Beryl eyes the color of cosmic lakes gleamed back through the mirror. Kelly could see the muscles in her jaw clenching as she took all her fears and ground them up into mincemeat. They would not inhibit her anymore—they would be fuel. She knew what must be done.
Barely shivering, Kelly took a firm step away from the sink and groped for the light switch. She doused the bathroom in darkness as she finally stepped out, only peeling her eyes away from the mirror at the very last second.
Cargo Bay
The swordsmen moved in, their serrated blades whipsawing the air as their wielders lunged and snarled. The cargo bay of the prowler exploded in a firestorm of crackling energy, a blinding razor whirlwind of savagery and pure, unfiltered instinct.
Kelly, back in full armor, was in the center of the melee.
The holograms that surrounded her took many forms, a quirk of the combat program that was designed to push a Spartan's reflexes to the limit. They adopted guises of ancient samurai warriors, Sangheili knights, highly skilled UNSC assassins, among others.
The Spartan's feet seemed to glide across the floor, as though Kelly was dancing. She never stuttered, always in motion, deep in the complex choreography as she bobbed and weaved, never allowing the holographic blades to touch her.
She had initiated this routine as a way for her mind to be distracted from her upcoming objective. She needed the practice, not just to train her body. A fight was not dictated by the sort of weapons one chose to utilize—it involved precision, focus. Focus of the mind and one's trust in their own abilities. She needed to conquer fear and that only came through the repetitiveness of her training.
Kelly waded into the morass of disparate duelists, almost as if she was trying to get hit. She held no weapon of her own against the various combat staffs and blades her opponents were wielding. The holograms could do no damage—her shields would take dips should they come into contact with one of the projected weapons and her suit would record the impacts, but she would be physically unharmed. She did not let the surety of her safety risk dulling her mind. She treated this as yet another skirmish, one where life and death was once again on the line.
The holograms were not completely independent and had been programmed with team-centric tactics. That meant they could all attack at once instead of just lining up, one at a time, like they were queuing for destruction.
Therefore, there was barely a moment where Kelly could pause and rest. Exactly as intended. She ducked a blow that had been aimed for her neck, sidestepped a vertical chop, spun while backpedaling to avoid a raking cut that had intended to split her open from collar to hip, her breathing slow and effortless, delicate in her throat like the first chill of a winter morning.
She skirted within arm's reach of one of the holograms—close enough that her opponent had to disengage in order to take a well-aimed swing in her direction. She was also close enough that she could have clobbered the head off the hologram if she had been so inclined, but chose not to. She wanted to see where this led.
For a human, this sort of unfair duel would have been over before it had truly started. Kelly had set the holograms to their maximum strike limit—eight strikes per second—but they were not enough to compete with Spartan reflexes whipping faster than the eye could see.
There was no need for caution with the holograms—they carried no sense of self-preservation. They pressed the attack, striking from beyond Kelly's reach. But her defensive velocities were just too much—she could not be touched. She was beyond thought now. Everything was a simple matter of neurons firing in response to preordained patterns programmed in her cortex. Clarity of mind and her physical prowess performed the fighting for her.
A trio of holograms all swung their blades at her. She ducked them all in one smooth motion. The swords swept by over her helmet as if she had just performed the limbo.
She used the momentum of her evasion to transition into a sideways roll. At the same time, she swept her leg and "caught" one of the holograms around the shins, bringing it down to the ground. Kelly quickly stood and rapidly brought her boot down upon the hologram's head. It dissolved in a sea of scintillating digital noise.
Her arm flicked out and caught the chest of another hologram that had been winding up for another strike. That sort of blow would have caved in a man's ribcage instantly and would have pushed his lungs out the other side of the body. The combat program was not configured to show such gruesome sights and merely registered such a hit as a "kill." That one also deactivated as well.
Just a few more to go.
The herd of holograms had been thinned to the point where Kelly could now have a spare second to devise her strategy instead of being on the reactionary side of things. It was like a chess match, always thinking several moves ahead.
She suspected a presence at her back and she sprung upwards and backflipped over an onrushing barbarian who had been intent on spearing her with his long lance. She landed catfooted on the deck and cut her way through the mob of holograms in front of her with her bare hands, as easily as if she was parting a field of canegrass.
There were just two left. And the combat program was smart enough to allow their attacks to become more desperate to make up for the sudden lack of support.
A spearman charged towards Kelly, his long weapon aimed directly for her heart. Like a matador whipping away the cape, the Spartan gracefully spun away at the last second, but reached out and grasped a hand around the spear.
The program registered the "theft" and allowed Kelly to yank it free from the hologram. She was now whipping up the electric-blue pole. It felt like she was not holding anything, but the weapon still adhered to the basic laws of physics. It was a disconcerting sensation, but Kelly was able to swallow it down for these next few seconds.
The weaponless lancer skidded to a halt, as if it was considering taking Kelly on with just its fists. Kelly gave it no time to enact the next part of its program, because she levelled a cybernetically-enhanced kick that brought her boot heel directly into the avatar's "chin", snapping its head back violently. A blow like that would have sheared a spinal column in an instant, but the hologram somersaulted in the air before dissolving with a crackling burst.
The last hologram resorted to spinning its twin curved swords in a showman-like maneuver, perhaps as a way to intimidate the Spartan. It did not work, for Kelly just took a step forward and ran the hologram through with a precise thrust from her spear, seeing as she had the longer weapon. Strangely, the hologram exhibited an expression of shock. The moment of verisimilitude did not last, for it too vaporized into nothingness in the next second, leaving Kelly alone in the cargo bay.
The next few moments were filled with absolute stillness as Kelly just stood, surrounded by the rearranged crates that had been cleared to give her this makeshift arena in the first place. She was not even breathing hard after her exertions.
Kelly then lifted her arm and looked at the TACPAD on her wrist. A text box was asking her if she would like to proceed with running through the combat program for a seventh time, but she closed the program instead. She then accessed the controls to the prowler and began prepping one of the cryo pods. She would take care of a few housekeeping items in the interim between now and when she would step inside the pod.
There had been one inventory item of particular that Kelly had known about since departing from the Infinity. All this time, she had been reluctant to even consider using it. Up until now. The stakes had just gotten too dire for her to be too comfortable.
Heading into the weapons battery, she passed the controls for the autocannons until she came to what looked like a stainless-steel locker on the far wall. An assortment of tubes ran from the back of the locker and were bolted along the wall, drawing a separate feed of power and coolant. Upon the front doors to the closet was a biometric keypad and several warnings had been plastered there as well, including the triple-bladed icon that indicated the presence of radioactive materials.
Kelly typed in the code to the locker, knowing it from memory, and also inputted her ident code. With a hiss, the locker doors parted and Kelly threw them open so that she could peer as to what was inside.
There were two of them—oblong objects that were a vague shape similar to an overinflated football, with "MFDD" stenciled on one side and two red LED screens facing outward. They were on an extendable tray, which Kelly pulled out. Swirls of freezing carbon dioxide gas unfurled from inside the closet, waterfalling to the ground and lapping at the Spartan's boots.
Tactical nuclear weapons had become more commonplace as battlefield weapons during the Covenant war, and the Fury Medium Fusion Destructive Device had seen usage several times as an effective means of taking care of large assault forces or by using them to destroy ships from the inside. The Fury had a one-megaton yield, with a comparatively clean blast that produced little in the way of fallout. It had a conflagration zone of eight kilometers from the epicenter, with the heat flash capable of vaporizing most objects within a two-kilometer radius. The Fury was portable, able to be strapped to the rear cargo hook on MJOLNIR, which made it a popular target for black-market weapons dealers, provided they also had the codes to activate such a device.
There was a console nearby that allowed access to the nuclear detonation codes for both of the Fury nuclear weapons. Kelly accessed the console using her credentials and downloaded the encoded activation sequences to her TACPAD.
Now possessing the proper codes, Kelly was able to come back to the two Fury nukes so that she could activate them both. Using both screens on the two nukes, Kelly slaved their controls to her armor's OS and began setting up the remote detonation procedure.
As a precaution, Kelly made sure the nukes went back into standby—even though she was proceeding with an abundant amount of caution, dealing with nukes always gave her a little extra consternation. One wrong move and everything would be blown to kingdom come, which was typically the desired result when tinkering around with a nuke in the first place, though not the one she intended to have occur right at this moment.
Using her HUD, Kelly accessed the firing controls for one of the nukes. She scrolled through the esoteric menus before she found what she was looking for and indicated the desired configuration.
The nuke she had been tinkering with gave a muffed thump, like there was a creature inside struggling to get out.
Kelly ignored it. She procured a marker and wrote "2" upon the side of the nuke. She wrote "1" on the opposite one, the one she had not been fiddling with. No sense in getting the two of them mixed up.
With that completed, Kelly pushed the tray back into the frigid locker and sealed it shut once more.
There was another console in the weapons battery, closer to the entrance. Kelly activated it with a firm touch of a finger to the screen. The following words blipped up in short order: ARGUS drone VirtuPilot Suite 3.001.254.
Looking upon her options, Kelly smiled.
Weeks later
The sound of the alarm felt like someone was stabbing Kelly's ears with sharpened forks. Awareness soon hit her, the effect akin to running into a brick wall. Her eyes cracked open and everything soon slid into focus, and the Spartan continued to awaken inside her cryo pod.
The cryofrost around the inner chamber had already melted, as the thawing process had started about fifteen minutes ago. Kelly lifted her head, the effort feeling like a ton of weight was situated around her neck. The HUD to her helmet had begun engaging—it had been switched off while she was out. Immediately, on instinct, she reached up and grasped the manual handle to the pod and gave it a twist. There was a hissing sound of equalizing atmosphere and the casket soon slid open to allow the iridescent green warrior to step out.
Smoothly, Kelly extricated herself from the freezing coffin. Her skin underneath her suit was fiery and irritated—clear sign of freezer burn. She had experienced this situation enough times to ignore it. The remedy for this was in a med pack on the wall—she just needed to administer an oral anesthetic and that would lessen the pain, for the most part.
Speaking of which…
Kelly lifted her helmet up so that her mouth and nose were uncovered. She spat, and a thick stream of fluid was flung from her mouth. The bronchial surfactant had protected her lungs while she had been frozen, but it would serve to suffocate her now that she was thawed out.
Once she was breathing normally, she applied her helmet back for a tight seal. One of the monitors near her pod was indicating that she had arrived in the system where Phaedra was. It did not seem to match any known starcharts or maintain any reference to current territories.
Kelly tapped on the controls to the Nighthawk's sensors, looking to discover more about her location. What she found was certainly intriguing.
Wherever Phaedra had chosen to hide, it was on something artificial. The approximate location of her transmission had honed in on a particular body that did not match any known orbital patterns, nor were the contours of said body at all natural.
And even more curious; the system they were in was home to a magnetar.
The false color feeds were registering the magnetar as a bright ball of sapphire blue, searing so brightly that it was causing interference in nearly every wavelength. It was surrounded by a brimming yellow sea of gas, which appeared almost as a belt of fire, remaining impossibly alight within this raw and dead section of space.
Kelly was transfixed—she had travelled across the galaxy more than the most season veterans in the UNSC could hope to claim, yet this was the very first time she had ever laid eyes on a magnetar. Magnetars were very uncommon phenomena in the galaxy. They were neutron stars that possessed magnetic fields of extreme strength. That field decay fueled the emission of radioactive particles on a massive scale, the vast majority being either X-ray or gamma. It was the perfect camouflage—no sensor would be able to pick anything up through the sea of radioactive noise.
So close. She was this close. Practically able to reach out and touch her.
The thought should have made Kelly giddy with anticipation, but she swallowed the sensation down.
Kelly spent the next thirty minutes running through a last regiment of no-thought drills and reflex routines. She made sure to top up on dermacortic steroids for the freezer burn and popped a couple of stims to stave off any cryo aftereffects. The human body, even for a Spartan, was not meant to be placed in cold storage. One did not age while in cryo and even though the process was considered relatively safe, it was still quite dangerous as ice crystals had the tendency to form in one's cells if they had not been administered the correct drug cocktail ahead of time. And the waking period right afterward felt like Kelly had just bounced back from a stint of unconsciousness that approximated the sensation of getting hammered on whiskey before embarking in a barfight. Or so she had been told; Kelly had never even gotten close to being drunk before, so she just had to take the metaphor at its word.
Once she was done with that, she headed into the cargo bay, where her armory awaited.
She had taken the liberty of doing all of her prep-work before she had gone into cryo. From the weapons locker, she selected a M45D shotgun, two automatic pistols, along with several grenades.
With everything selected, she moved into the weapons battery once more and punched in the code to the nuke locker. She grabbed both nukes and brought them into the cargo bay. The one marked "2", she slotted upon her lower back. She left the one marked "1" sitting upon a wheeled cart.
Grabbing the cart, Kelly dragged it behind her as she headed into the airlock section of the cargo bay. Using her TACPAD, she signaled for the heavy door behind her to slam shut. The automatic regulators immediately began equalizing the interior pressure of the airlock with the exterior atmosphere to prevent Kelly from being explosively blown out of the prowler once the outer door cracked open.
Had she been accompanied, this would have been the moment where a voice not of her own conscience would have asked if she was sure about what she was going to do next.
Too bad that things had not turned out that way.
Kelly raised her arm and tapped the button to open the outer door.
The last thing she heard was a whisper of air—then silence.
Bright blue light fell upon Kelly's visor as the door cranked down until it was flush with the floor. Her visor automatically polarized to protect her eyes from the glare.
The magnetar was beautiful. Even with everything being darkened, Kelly could see the ionizing wisps of the gamma bursts swerve around the rapidly rotating star, shaped like wings on a butterfly. Her HUD was picking up repeated intervals of burst noise—radio signals constantly being jettisoned in structured clusters of raw energy. The magnetar seemed to pulse and simmer, like its perfectly spherical construct was nothing but a shell keeping the beast within locked up.
Kelly looked down from where the magnetar was hanging in its position in space. Stars dulled the black fabric, the light of the star outshining them by several orders of magnitude.
Using the zoom function on her HUD, she found what she was looking for.
A collection of irregularly shaped objects. Not forged by gravity or the fickle fate of the cosmos. They were shapes made of metal. Broken shapes. Whole shapes.
Starships.
A graveyard.
Stretching out before Kelly, as she stood upon the lip of the cargo bay, one footstep away from nothingness, she looked upon a grim expanse of ship hulks. They were numerous, at least fifty or so. All shapes and sizes. Slipspace-worthy, too—Kelly recognized some of their profiles. UNSC battleships. Pleasure cruisers. Even a few Pelicans were interspersed in the field here and there.
The debris hung in place like they were the markers of a long-forgotten battlefield. A sea of remnant iron. The visible light of the magnetar slashes hues of thick black and blinding blue upon the reflective surfaces, making the wrecks appear as motes of glass-like sand upon a long and endless beach.
"Hmm," Kelly murmured.
She appraised some of the hulks with her visor. The strange thing was that they ships did not look like the victims of a battle. There were no obvious breaches that had been caused by plasma or pyrotechnics. No scorch marks of any sort. Weirdly, she did notice that a little more than half of the ships were floating around in pieces, but the parts looked like they had been dissected with a precise saw, almost as if a giant scalpel had swiftly nicked parts off the long-dead ruins instead of a cascading missile strike.
So, these ships had not been destroyed outright. They had been brought here and summarily dismantled for parts.
Not a graveyard, then. A junkyard.
For what purpose, that was still indecipherable, but she could see, in the middle of the field of metal, a long object, another ship, clearly the biggest thing out in this lonely place. It looked like a conglomerated assortment of various ship parts, which perhaps explained why several of the hulks out here had been cannibalized so heavily. The parts had all been collected and fused together, making a construction that looked about two kilometers long, almost cannon shaped. It reminded Kelly of a massive railgun, like the Super-MAC cannons that had orbited both Reach and Earth. A scaffold of aluminum encased the rearward half of the ship—weapon?—like a Faraday cage. Lights of fusion torches sparked along the exterior—were there people out there?
And there, through the maze of girders and suspended beams, the telltale glow of a drydock. There was atmosphere in that station. A place for her to enter.
Kelly reached out and touched the side of the wall for a second. Steps away was infinitude. In front of her eyes, destiny.
The Spartan, armed to the teeth, gazed out at that enormous island, the vast of night shredded by the light of the neutron star, which rippled its radioactive rays and subsumed the whole of what she could see to its deadly shockwaves.
If she had her radio sensors engaged, her ears would have been filled with the roar of the star.
The same sound that her own mind raged, knowing that Phaedra was right… there.
She breathed.
"Rightful path, indeed."
Kelly lifted a foot and into nothingness she stepped.
A/N: You ever wonder how much those writers on the Halo TV show got paid? To think that they actually get a paycheck at all for their sheer incompetence...
Playlist:
Logs Pt. I
"Should You Choose to Accept..."
Lorne Balfe
Mission Impossible: Fallout (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Logs Pt. II
"The Manifesto"
Lorne Balfe
Mission Impossible: Fallout (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Holograms
"Terrible Resolve"
Sarah Schachner
Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Looking Out From the Edge
"Main Theme"
Craig Armstrong
In Time (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
