XX: Enfant Terrible
"Hurry Up and Wait"
Deep in the darkness of space, the soles of her boots no longer pressed against the aluminum ramp of the prowler, Kelly gracefully dove through the nothingness, arms at her sides, head continually oriented towards the cobbled-together construction several dozens of kilometers away that approximated an orbital defense platform. Her flight was stable—puffs of gas from her suit's thruster pack gave her ample velocity and control. The nuke situated at her back was held securely in place, its weight tangible even to the Spartan.
The magnetar brimmed like a fiery ingot, just behind the station. Thick wisps of dark energy rippled around the sun, almost as if it was destabilizing before her eyes. Blue and white illuminations reflected off the drifting husks of the dead ships that seemed to be in orbit around the station, a makeshift asteroid belt that shimmered and refracted the deadly light.
Kelly's flight continued until the radiation-spewing star was just behind the massive station, shrouding the blocky structure in a dark outline. Kelly's visor adjusted to the dimness—she could now see the exposed decks from the incomplete fabrication as well as the skeletal design of the ribbed girders that exuded outward from the hull.
Kelly analyzed the station as she flew closer, flipping through multiple wavelengths in her visor to get a better sense of its design. Phaedra had been able to disguise the construction of something this enormous because of its proximity to the magnetar's interference, but how had she been able to actually build this thing? Surely, she had not managed to also disguise the fact that she had an entire contract crew working on this thing, or had she? With every person that had knowledge of such a black box project, the more risk there would be of revelation. Unless she found a way to trick a crew large enough to build such a station, Phaedra would not left so many variables up to chance.
It was only when Kelly zoomed in that she got a better understanding. The gleam of fusion torches upon the hull had not been from mere construction workers. Not human workers, in fact.
They were machines; self-replicators that were about the size of a Warthog each, with a lattice of tethers and a singular cyclops optic in their center. A programmable army of workers, one that never tired or required any sustenance. They were assembling this great ship together having been directed to do so. They could do the work of ten humans each; they could lift loads that even a human in power armor could not attempt, fusion-weld more than three times as many seams at once, and perform all of those tasks and more in record time. It only made Kelly wondered if there were any living personnel in that thing at all, besides her target.
An alarm shrilly rang in Kelly's helmet. She looked towards the top of the hull of the station and saw several dozen red diamond icons appear near it, along with a distance counter in meters.
And they were all closing, judging by how the distance counters were all rapidly scuttling down to 0.
Kelly knew that she had just been locked on. The station apparently had auto-turrets and had just sent out a volley of fast-movers—missiles—to take her out. She switched to infrared and was able to spot the scatter of thrusterglow out near the curve of the magnetar.
Only natural to be scared, she figured. There was enough firepower out there to blow her to atoms, to disperse her body into a smear of dust across the emptiness of space. Yet, she stomped that notion down, refusing to give in.
Fear can be a weapon. Use it.
Fortunately, she had prepared for such an eventuality. Quickly, Kelly brought her arms up and she typed in a command on her TACPAD.
Several kilometers behind her, the Nighthawk became a flurry of activity as, from both its launch tubes, a swarm of metallic gnats hurtled forth and wormed their way in irregular paths through deep space. In the distance, they appeared as silver glints, nearly seventy in total, but they quickly overtook Kelly, enabling her to view what they were all the more clearly even without her zoom function.
Kelly watched as the drones—mini-Clarions—gathered around her like they were a school of guppies. Pulsing for a beat, they then spread outward like a cloud of metallic chaff, providing a smokescreen of interference as the Spartan continued to head on course for the station.
The mini-Clarions were small, about the size of an atmospheric camdrone. They emitted little heat and could enter stealth mode by flying cleanly, under certain circumstances. But if they had been programmed to fly with their heat diffusion set to the lowest limit—flying dirty—then each one was its own flare. A new target for the oncoming missiles to seek and destroy.
And Kelly had seen fit to remove those diffusion limits before she had gone into cryo.
On her HUD, she could see the icons for the multitude of missiles immediately break off, hopelessly locked onto the wrong targets, leaving her in the clear. She watched as white pulses from the detonating projectiles impacted with the target drones. Flak burst on all sides, threatening to shatter her. Each flash was like a lightning strike, eerily quiet. If she had been in atmo, the concussive shockwaves from the close explosions would have damaged her organs.
The Spartan continued to spiral into the void as the platform launched more missiles, but there were too many drones spoiling their lock. Chain explosions rippled around her as she soared, turning permanent night into temporary day. She was aware of her calm breath echoing in her helmet—the rippling blasts reflected her own eyes back upon the interior of the visor.
Eyes of a warrior. Blind to all but the objective. Nothing would rattle her now.
One missile passed by a little too close to comfort and detonated, sending her careening into a floating bulkhead. Her back impacted against the hard surface and outlined her body in a tremendous indentation. Dust hurtled away from the bulkhead in a sharp shockwave. Kelly grunted and shook her head, dazed but still alive. She pushed off from the surface and altered her course, using the spacebound debris as additional cover for the missiles.
She tracked another launch as it streaked by, but it had not been aimed anywhere close to the drone swarm. Instead, it hurtled on course for the one ship that had been parked at the very edge of the combat zone, as if someone went out of their way to manually target such a thing.
The Nighthawk was there one moment… and gone in the next.
From this distance, it looked like a gentle puff of light, a momentary spark. But that soft light was merely the display of catastrophic pyrotechnics that had ripped the prowler apart and had detonated its fuel cells in the blink of an eye. Flames billowed and raged for a microsecond before they ran out of oxygen and died. The scattered pieces of the Nighthawk were flung in every direction, most of them still glowing at the tattered and wrenched edges where the blast had ripped them apart.
Kelly momentarily regretted the loss of the prowler. It had been a dutiful ship that had provided her nary an issue on this mission. The sort of workhorse that she would have considered as a sanctum, of sorts.
In the back of her mind, she knew that this was always supposed to be a one-way trip. And with her ride destroyed, she had no way back home that she knew of.
She finally looked away after another inordinate pause. No sense in mourning the lives of the inanimate. The prowler was a tool that had done its job and had done it well. But she would not let its destruction be a source of distraction.
Kelly steered herself towards a floating Pelican and clung to the top of its hull. It still looked intact, as did many other drifting ships in this mess, but there was no way to guarantee any of them to be functional. She did not want to waste time in making any checks, so she had to abandon the shuttle and continue on her path.
Most of the missiles by this point had disappeared, already having exploded against the multitude of drones that had been tauntingly mobbing the area. There were still quite a few drones left flying around, Kelly noted. Many were now scrambling towards the opposite end of the station, drawing the fire away from the Spartan's position. Either she had forced Phaedra to use up all of her armaments or the auto-turret emplacements had been programmed to cease firing so that there would be no more wasteful expenditure of ammunition.
Clear to proceed to the superstructure, Kelly bounced from halved hull to halved hull before launching herself on a direct course to the station's closest bulkhead. She tucked herself into a ball at the last second and her body caved the station's surface a couple of feet, like a meteor had suddenly struck.
Kelly grunted and stretched her limbs—no damage. Only her shields had registered the impact, which were already charging back up.
She engaged the magnets in just her gauntlets and began to clamber over to the closest airlock. From this angle, she could no longer see the magnetar—the scything rays that coursed over the lip of the station indicated just how bright the star was on the other side.
As she grappled her way along the hull, Kelly felt a series of thin vibrations jitter across her fingertips. She looked up.
One of the self-replicators had undoubtedly detected her impact and had come over to investigate. Its eight long limbs had snagged onto clawholds and it lifted its central body up, its lone optic eerily staring right at Kelly. It slowly snaked one of its arms out to reach the Spartan.
Kelly was not in the mood to be poked and prodded by a machine. The fact that these things had not attacked her outright meant that they were construction units only, which gave her some comfort. But when the arm of the self-replicator was finally within reach, Kelly shunted her arm forward, grabbed the tentacle-like limb, and gave it a firm whipcrack that had the effect of both dislocating the limb and launching its owner into space, ripping it clean from its moorings along the hull.
The self-replicator flailed for a moment before it was able to reorient itself in the zero-g. Thrusters along its profile were able to bring it under control so that it could float back to the station, but Kelly was already on her way by that point, not keen on facing off against the machine for any longer.
She maneuvered around a sprig of antennae, pulled herself up and over a lip of thick plating, and finally made it to an airlock door. Strange—Kelly just realized that she had been scrambling across a portion of station that had been cut from a Valiant-class cruiser. No wonder she had known where the airlock would be. If the exterior was made up of jumbled ship parts, what was the interior going to look like?
She would find that out in a moment, for she was now in front of the door. Using the manual handles bolted onto the side, Kelly was able to wrench the airlock open so that she could step inside. As soon as she slammed the door back closed, dousing her in complete darkness for a sheer moment, she was rewarded with a hiss of atmosphere as the seals held.
Then the lights burst on.
The station had gravity. That was good, at least. Kelly always felt more comfortable with two boots on the ground.
She slowly ventured through the station, her shotgun boring down through the corridors as she moved. The life support fans roared in the background, masking her footsteps. The temperature gauge in the corner of her HUD showed that the station was being held at around thirty-eight degrees Fahrenheit. She noted condensation momentarily mist the walls as she passed them, giving them a bright sheen. So, there was atmosphere in here, which meant that someone was living on this thing.
The interior of the craft slowly descended into a dim haze as she moved deeper and deeper into the facility, where there were little in the way of light fixtures. The layout became drenched in darkness, the shadows oily. Kelly tapped on her helmet lights and twin beams cut through the darkness ahead of her.
The corridors were a mess. Cabling and tools lay upon the ground. Dust coated nearly every surface and floated among the halls. Kelly had to watch her step lest she nudge a wayward wrench and create a hollow ringing noise.
It took the Spartan a bit to get her bearings. There was no rhyme or reason to the formation of this place. As she suspected, the superstructure was indeed a marriage of several different ship parts. She recognized the layout of one of these corridors—it belonged to a Hillsborough-class heavy destroyer. And, when she arrived at an A-frame transit tube, that looked like it had been ripped out of a Diligence-class. It was like someone had desired to enact a greatest hits tribute of all of the different parts of widely-used UNSC ships by combining them all into one chassis, though with not the same level of care that the original designers had demonstrated. Kelly suspected that if she were to see a blueprint of this place, the final diagram would look like an absolute disaster of hallways, empty spaces, and technical offshoots.
Kelly had to step over places where the hallways did not quite fit together, where some of the decks had been attached with several inches in height difference. It was like the entire station was a slowly deteriorating puzzle.
A clicking noise—metal on metal—made Kelly swing to the left as she came to a shadowed intersection. She raised her shotgun, the circular reticle in her HUD firmly centered down the hall.
Two seconds later, a blinking red light wafted from the darkness. The clicking grew louder.
Then Kelly slowly lowered her weapon as one of the construction drones—a smaller version—quickly scurried past the Spartan, its eight legs a silver blur as it moved across the ground. A camera mounted upon what was its "head" momentarily looked at Kelly before it reset back to its central path. It moved around Kelly, treating her as an obstacle.
She watched the self-replicator drone as it headed down the opposite hallway and rounded a corner, leaving her alone again. The fact that Kelly had only seen machines since arriving in-system gave further credence to her hypothesis that there was only one other organic on this ship. There were no guards to be found, but Kelly did not dare to relax for a second as she kept on moving deeper and deeper into the station. She made sure to flip on her infrared and sonic scanners from time to time, just to check if there was anyone hiding in the shadows, but as before, she was just as alone as ever.
At least there was no one opening fire on her just yet. It would be a shame if she had to kill more humans today. More than one human, anyway.
The superstructure seemed to get more claustrophobic as Kelly travelled. The walls of the corridors appeared like they were closing in on her and the flickering from a bad light emplacement threw eerie shadows around the bends. Above her, coolant pipes hissed and groaned, and bundles of electrical cabling gave a low hum, acting as the soundtrack to this lonely and desolate place.
Kelly's grip on her shotgun grew tighter and tighter. She leaned around corners and aimed down stairwells, barely having the foggiest idea where she was headed, for there was no map to guide her to any point of interest.
She stepped over a puddle of frozen coolant that had leaked from a burst pipe. Next to her, a frayed series of wires sprayed sparks. Jets of superheated steam fizzled below the grating, making her look menacing as she marched through the humid cloud. She wiped the condensation from her visor as she made it across an antechamber and into a segmented partition that led to the next section.
Where are you? Where. Are. You?
At another junction, she stopped. A mote of light—to the left. She turned in its direction, studying it.
A lit chamber. No more than fifty meters away. It flickered upon her visor, like a campfire in the middle of a long night. It could not have been more obvious than if a neon sign had been blazing an arrow in that direction.
With trepidation, she headed in the direction of the chamber. As she got closer, she could see that a ribbed and thin umbilical section about three meters long separated the hall from the other room. Kelly would have to hunker down to get through it.
It was only when she reached the umbilical did she stop. Her HUD was blinking a warning and she looked up.
Bolted upon the ceiling, right next to the doorway, was a round plate a few feet in diameter. Kelly immediately recognized the grav plate—Insurrectionists had successfully used one on Blue Team years ago to envelop them in an artificial 10 g zone, which caused their armor's automatic gel cushions to overpressurize until they were knocked unconscious, rendering them captive for a short while. All subsequent MJOLNIR armor had received firmware patches to prevent such an occurrence from happening again, but Kelly had been on the alert for those kinds of booby traps ever since on their missions, despite the supposed update.
"Cute," Kelly snarled. She lifted her shotgun, silence be damned, and let loose a long, chugging burst.
The grav plate exploded and clear zenostium plasma dribbled to the floor after sludging from the cracks in the dish.
Past the menagerie of sparks and molten detritus that dripped to the floor, a shadow flickered at the other end of the umbilical. Kelly looked through the cascading mess and blinked, but there was no time to get a glimpse of the thing that had briefly shrouded the hallway. Kelly raised her shotgun again, preparing to let off another spike of flame, but there was only silence greeting her.
Slowly, she got down in a crouch, trying to reduce her profile as much as possible. Calmly, she inserted another shell into the tube, ensuring that if she was going to start firing, she would do so with her weapon at full ammo.
Then she heard it: a stiff and plodding set of footsteps. Echoing and wet through the umbilical. Thump… thump… thump. A languid pace. But heavy. Very heavy.
The shadow moved in front of the opening again, blocking the light, but soon slid out of the way. Kelly could see, from how the illumination played through the dim area, that there was a reflective surface in the middle of the hall that separated her from the shadow: a pane of bulletproof glass. She quickly glanced to the left and realized there was an offshoot corridor there that led elsewhere through the station.
Something was amiss here, though, and she was keen to find out what.
In the other chamber, the dark shape moved past the opening again before proceeding on. Just stalking back and forth, back and forth, like a predator playing with its food.
From the little glimpses that Kelly was able to make out, they were giant. Even for a Spartan. Kelly could discern no clear details—not with the light at the shadow's back. She could just see that this person was massive and imposing, also draped in MJOLNIR armor like any other Spartan. They held no weapon in their hands, which were clenched into tightly balled fists.
Dim light fell upon both of them, the color of a sun on a cloudchoked day. A faint glint of auric twinkled from the corner of the shadow's helmet. Kelly's breath turned cold, as did her extremities, as the details finally fell into place to confirm what she had intrinsically known all this time.
The shadow gave a huffing breath before it edged out of sight in the other chamber again. Almost as if it had been studying Kelly like she was an animal on exhibit.
Then, the shadow spoke, though Kelly could not see where the voice was coming from.
"I was wondering if you would fall for that." A low voice, throbbing with some held-back emotion. Age had deepened the voice, but it was still immediately recognizable to the lone audience member.
Kelly slowly stood back into a half-crouch. She nudged the broken pieces of the grav plate out of the way with a foot.
"Wondering if I would fall for such a thing again?" she hissed.
"I was intrigued. Felt it would be worth a shot. The reports of your exploits have been… illuminating."
"You've been reading up on me?" Kelly ground her back teeth together.
"When I could," the voice replied, now sounding pleasant, as if she was discussing the weather. "I had access to your files during my training. At no point were they even kept from me."
Kelly leaned, trying to get a better angle of the speaker through the blocked umbilical. She kept her shotgun pointed at the aperture at the other end, scanning for a hint of movement.
There was a deep laugh from the other chamber. "Might as well shoot. See what happens. The glass is about an inch thick—will stop your buckshot like it is nothing but grains of sand."
How the hell did she know what Kelly had been trying to do? Kelly looked up and spotted the reason how: cameras. Tiny camera emplacements had been bolted onto the ceiling. The other Spartan must be simultaneously looking at her on the feed while she talked from cover.
She brought her weapon down. Tried to figure out what to say next, but words would not come. She had not prepared a speech or anything when she had gotten to this moment, but at the same time, she just wished that she had the ability to say something more declarative.
Half of Kelly's body became doused in shadow as Phaedra stood in the doorway. The massive Spartan had to hunker down somewhat to clearly see Kelly, which made her look all the more terrifying.
"Hmm," Phaedra mused as she studied Kelly's armor. At how the insect-green hues had become dulled in the poor light. "Now that's a throwback."
"It was simply available," Kelly said, mouth dry as she looked at someone who she had once called a friend. "Made that way from circumstances you orchestrated."
"Really. And what circumstances might those be?"
"Meaningless ones. At least right now, to the both of us. I've come here to see that your service to the UNSC is terminated. We don't need to recount the how and why. Not after things have gotten so… out of hand."
"Please," Phaedra rumbled in exasperation. She put a hand upon the wall as she leaned closer to the glass in the umbilical corridor. "It's bad enough to have to endure a lifetime of sanitized rhetoric. Coming from you, though… I thought I would have been better prepared. But let's call this what this really is, shall we? You've come here to kill me. No—you were sent here. By your handlers. Your superiors. And you have come a long way indeed… Kelly-087." She spat every syllable of her name as if she was unable to digest speaking the entire word.
Kelly kept herself standing straight, her own expression controlled behind the helmet. "One could say that about you. About having come a long way."
Phaedra pushed away from the wall and turned to the side. She folded her hands behind her back as she rippled in a new, searing breath.
"I never had any other option."
Kelly waited. Unsure if Phaedra wished to take the lead to do… something. She glanced at the floor for a moment, then lifted her head back up.
"I know," she said.
She heard Phaedra give a huff. "You know." Not a question.
"Yes. I do."
Phaedra's head slowly bobbed up and down, but very softly and minutely. Davening consideration. She gave a subtle twitch, as if she was trying to reconcile something within herself.
Then, she looked at Kelly. The lobed curvature of the Security visor seemed impenetrable and alien to Kelly. It gave the Spartan a chill, knowing that there was something senseless behind that eternal gaze.
After a moment, Phaedra gave a grunt. "Well. Something they did right, at least."
With that, the titanic supersoldier slowly stalked off to the left, out of sight once again, leaving Kelly with just a vague view of the antechamber beyond.
Kelly took a shuddery breath, but her attention was diverted elsewhere when lights suddenly flickered on to the left. The hallway that she had noticed earlier, this one unobstructed, had been revealed through the adumbrations. An invitation to follow.
Keeping her eye out for more traps, Kelly slowly proceeded down the lit pathway.
The hallway spat Kelly out into a darkly shrouded room that was so badly lit it seemed like gossamer sheets of steel had draped over the expanse. The chamber was tall and narrow, cylindrical in shape. Another barrier of bulletproof glass bisected the room, preventing Kelly from going any further. There was another door to her left as she entered, but the locks on the threshold were dark. She surmised that Phaedra wanted her to be here, in this very room, anyway.
Kelly walked into the middle of her partitioned chamber, her footsteps echoing wetly. Strangely, she did not feel as doubtful as she expected—if Phaedra had wanted to kill her outright, she would have done it by now.
She engaged her VISR system to peer through the murk. She saw not much in the way of accoutrements—merely a simple table and a chair. Rather annoyingly, the bulletproof glass obscured her view beyond the barrier. It must have been enriched with a wavelength-resistant material to prevent anything other than visible light from penetrating.
The shadows refused to be banished, and Kelly made a slow turn in place, looking to see if anything was due to jump out at her. In the metallic guts of this station, the inorganic contours merely exacerbated the eeriness of her solitude.
Then Phaedra's voice seemed to burst around her: "My scanners have identified that, besides the shotgun, you are currently carrying two automatic pistols, three grenades, and two combat knives—one at your waist holster and another at your shin. Put them in the chamber you just came in from, Kelly. We would both be disappointed if you were to refuse."
Kelly frowned. It seemed like she had just wandered into a very obvious trap. She wondered if this was part of some elaborate scheme on Phaedra's part to humiliate her. Her eyes quickly scanned the room, or what little of it she could see. Was there a way for Phaedra to easily vent the room of all its contents? Did she have more grav plates hidden that would crush her into a puddle of gore in an instant? The fact that the demand was made in the first place was quite worrying.
In the end, Kelly had to assume that her existence was underneath the blade of a knife at this point. She had to assuage herself that there was no other way she could have gotten close to her target without embarking down this maze that had been laid out for her. She could have just bombed the hell out of this station from a distance, but she had chosen to come here, to confirm the kill and put all those phantoms to rest. Her mistake, so now she had to pay for it.
She headed over to the hallway airlock, noting that the passage further down had sealed itself. No escape, it seemed. Kelly tossed her weapons inside, one after the other, which made limp clanging noises as they clattered to the floor.
The weight upon her back continued to make its presence known. The nuke. She reached over to grab it.
"Not the nuke, Kelly," Phaedra interjected from somewhere in the darkness. "You'll want that for later."
The warrior's expression darkened as she continued to stare into the emptiness of the hallway. What the hell did Phaedra mean by that? What was she really up to? In the end, Kelly would not object, seeing as she needed the nuke to accomplish her own mission and all, but the fact that Phaedra also made a deliberate reference toward it for unknown purpose was enough to make her think twice.
After she stepped away from where she had deposited her weapons, the door slammed shut, cutting her off from them. Nothing but her bare fists, now. And her armor, so it was not like she had been stripped naked, at least.
She still felt rather bare, though.
Making her way to the glass until her visor was almost touching, Kelly made sure to keep a reserve on her breathing. She tried peering through the barricade once more, to no avail.
"What now, Phaedra?" she asked the void.
In the next heartbeat, the lights to the chamber snapped on and Kelly's visor polarized.
In the middle of her own section of the room, Phaedra was seated in a chair that had been bolted to the floor for reinforcement. Kelly could now finally get a good look at the other Spartan. Her MJOLNIR armor was a dusty carbon gray GEN2 platform and was scuffed in many places, like Phaedra had been dragged across a bed of scree at some point. Multiple scorch marks had carbonized swipe lines across her chestplate. This warrior had seen many battles, from the looks of it.
Phaedra's Security helmet looked even more insect-like now that she was in full view. The helmet had a CBRN breather system attached, allowing the operator to maneuver within hazard zones. Phaedra's gauntlets were varying shades of silver, with threaded fibers of red running the length of her fingers, making them appear like cybernetic implants.
The collar of Phaedra's suit was lined with additional tubing that ran underneath her armor, held in place with slate clamps that glimmered like stars whenever the Spartan moved into the light at the right angle. Kelly could hear the other's breath positively pumping, almost as if she was hooked up to a powerful respirator that had to be performing all her breathing on her behalf.
Raising her hands off her knees, like she was about to impart a scholarly diatribe, Phaedra set them back down with a metallic clink. A sign of indifference.
Then, she stood.
Kelly had to tilt her head upward to get the full picture. Phaedra was indeed enormous, about a head taller than she was. Nearly seven-and-a-half feet tall and over a ton of armored human, the Spartan cut an astounding profile.
The Spartan enhancements had clearly done a number on Phaedra, it seemed. Kelly recalled that Phaedra had not been particularly bulky as a child. Either this was another rampant side effect or that Phaedra had always been genetically inclined towards a greater muscular and bone density. Still, she had not been expecting such a large size differential. This was going to badly skew things against her, considering what was coming.
Lifting a hand, Phaedra pointed to the table on Kelly's side of the chamber. "Take a look at what you see, there. I've left something that you might find interesting."
Kelly doubted that very much, but she had little choice in the matter except to humor the woman. As suggested, she turned and walked over to the table, which only had one article lying upon it, which she had not been able to see previously due to the lights having been shut off and her concentration being directed elsewhere at the time.
"Pick it up," Phaedra said to her back. "Read what's on it."
Somewhat resenting being told what to do when she was going to do it anyway, Kelly reached out and delicately clasped a thin metal chain between two fingers. What was on the chain dangled and jingled as she lifted it up.
"Dog tags," Kelly announced, Phaedra still facing her back. "From the Infinity."
The metal plates were embossed with the UNSC eagle on one side, and an encoded codex of personnel information on the other. All dog tags had a neural link installed and regularly transmitted a low-frequency signal that any HUD software could pick up. Right when Kelly had touched the dog tags, a blip of text appeared at the bottom of her visor: Ibrahim Taha, 90503-72140-IF, UNSC Infinity.
Kelly turned the tags over in her hand. One of the plates had been encrusted with something on the corner. It looked like dried blood. There was hardly any need to guess who it belonged to.
Phaedra had been watching like a hawk, observing Kelly's every move. "ONI did not tell you, I presume, that they tried to send another team after me before they enlisted this task to you, yes? So arrogant of them, but very on brand for them. They did not get very far before Logan intercepted them and availed himself to their suffering. He sent a few mementos, the tags you're holding being one of them."
Gripping the tags in a fist, Kelly turned towards Phaedra. "Guess it's only serendipitous that I, in turn, avenged their deaths when I killed Logan. And Rina. Your list of allies has dwindled since I was brought on board." She looked back towards the table and opened her fist, staring at the tags again.
Phaedra waved a hand, as though she could not be bothered, but Kelly did not see this action. "Expendable assets. The Phoenix Unit had outlived its usefulness to me, anyway. Had I been concerned for their well-being, I would have ordered them to form back up, fight as a unit. But I wanted to see what you would do—how far you would be willing to go to get to me. I figured, a SPARTAN-II like us would be more than a match for any crony that ONI could throw at us. And, what do you know, I was right."
The words that Phaedra was saying seemed almost incomprehensible to Kelly, like she was speaking another language. The level of callousness for her team members—Kelly could not hope to conjure a serious thought like that towards Blue Team. If Phaedra was so unconcerned at sacrificing her own allies—Spartans, even—as part of some childish game, then what else was she capable of?
"So it seems. But you're also right as to what you said earlier," Kelly said as she set the tags back down. Scraping a foot across the ground, she turned back towards Phaedra, her own visor displaying an expressionless visage. "ONI did not deign to tell me everything."
"I wish I could say I was surprised," Phaedra dipped her head.
"I did find out eventually," Kelly qualified. "But not from ONI's volition. They would have preferred to have kept it in-house, if they could help it."
"The point still stands. ONI had assumed that they could have taken care of their little 'problem' quietly. Keep it within the family, so to speak. When that failed, they had no choice but to turn to the recourse that I had suggested to them in the first place. But the fact that they never bothered to tell you about their first attempt on my life beggars the question: what else haven't they told you?"
Phaedra was right to mistrust, Kelly knew. This was someone who had been continually abused by the system from a young age, passed around from division to division and treated like an object, more so than the other Spartans. Someone who had, despite the best efforts of those involved, lived a wholly unfair life. No wonder Phaedra wanted to burn everything down.
"I know why I'm here, at least," Kelly spoke. "Not for ONI's own reasons. But yours, Phaedra."
"Oh?" the other Spartan hissed, tilting their head in mockery. A viper, coiled to strike. "Do tell."
"It all comes back to that day. Our fight together. The spark that lit the powder keg. You had been reacting badly to the augmentations, showing side effects. They had not gone unnoticed, so ONI felt that using me to weed you out was the 'sympathetic' option. And I obeyed their commands. Obeyed until you were nothing but a pile of bloodied meat on the floor. For a moment, I truly did want to carry out what they were ordering me to do: 'Destroy the enemy.' I did not stop to think what the consequences would be for you, though, and I will be regretful for that for as long as I live. I will not relay an excuse to justify my actions. I had a choice and I made it. Right or wrong, the choice was made. In return, I got to continue forward with my training while you had to be dragged out. Permanently damaged."
She walked closer to the glass, where Phaedra was standing. The monstrous Spartan kept staring at her with a cold lividity, reverting to the machine-like demeanor that Spartans typically reserved when in the presence of others who were not their teammates. Who were not Spartans.
"I'm the one responsible for your removal from the Spartans," Kelly said with steel in her voice. "I took that opportunity away from you. Took you away from your team—your family—for the second time—"
"Family?" Phaedra severely whispered, the sound like wind scything through a rocky glade. She began trembling out of sheer indignance, making it look like she was being electrocuted, and she haltingly turned her head to look at Kelly. "What makes you think I ever thought of you as family? A team? What a disgusting concept."
Kelly did not know what to say. This reaction from Phaedra was unexpected. Was Phaedra saying this to get a rise out of Kelly? Was she truly making an effort to deny the past?
"What I'm trying to say," Kelly said evenly, "is that I do know what you have gone through. I know that you survived your family—your real one—being murdered, and you had to live with that all your life. To that end, I do understand—"
"Wrong!" Phaedra suddenly bellowed. She raised a shaking finger. "Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong!"
On her last exclamation, Phaedra lashed out and struck the bulletproof glass with a massive fist. There was an explosive blast, like a gunshot, but the glass held. However, a network of cracks had manifested from the impact about two feet in length, causing Phaedra's body to appear fractured from Kelly's angle.
Kelly had scurried a foot back upon seeing Phaedra strike out, maneuvering into a reactionary position, but willed herself to remain still when the other Spartan seemed to immediately calm down, the episode having concluded for now.
Phaedra spent several moments catching her breath, her exhalations sounding ragged and watery, before lifting her hand again. "You do not understand and perhaps you never will, Kelly. I'm not looking for your pity because you cannot provide it. You can only extend comfort through words, which cannot convey that comprehension. For you did not have to spend years upon years of restless nights, hearing the screams of your family before armed soldiers shot them all dead. I heard the wailing of my mother, Kelly, right after they shot my brother and father. Do you even know what such a thing sounds like? It's not just a cry. It is so much more. It is a deep sound, guttural, that comes from a cavernous part of a person, the purest version of expression. It is the sound of someone who has become broken in that moment, undone. And when she finally stopped screaming after there was the noise of a pistol going off, I knew that her brief suffering had finally ended, though it must have seemed like an eternity to her. An eternity in which she had to look upon the dead eyes of her husband and son, their blood coating her body."
Phaedra took a quick breath and rolled her neck, ironing out the kinks that had gathered there.
She continued after a soft cough. "That is a noise that I hear every night. It is a memory that endured, even after all of the indoctrination the UNSC imposed upon us. You say that you understand, yet you don't have anything anchoring you to your past life. I read your file, remember? ONI picked you up while your family was away from your home. Quick and easy, just as intended. Apparently, you gave the handlers a hell of a chase, but no one was killed in the process. You at least had the comforting knowledge that everyone you knew was alive and well back on your world. Yet it had all gone wrong for me before I was ever one of theirs. Or rather, before they thought I was one of theirs."
For a moment, Kelly almost spoke about Brandon in an attempt to knock Phaedra down a peg. In some small way, she did in fact understand, though not to the extent that Phaedra had gone through. She held back at the last second, because Kelly was still unsure if her fateful meeting with her brother had been the product of chance or had been engineered by the rogue agent in front of her.
But Phaedra had taken a step back from the glass, shaking her head. "You shouldn't have tried to be my friend, Kelly. I never wanted your friendship in the first place. I never wanted to work with any of the other trainees. They were just like the rest of them, complicit with their acceptance. They obeyed despite not having a reason to. I, on the other hand, had a goal. One that superseded what Halsey and her handlers had in mind. A goal to become their agent they envisioned, only to use their knowledge against them in the end. It would have been spectacular to have it unfold… until you took that chance away from me."
Kelly did not rise to ask the question that Phaedra had obviously baited her with. She now understood that Phaedra had just implicitly admitted that the target of her wrath was never truly Kelly to begin with.
Her target was the UNSC. The whole system.
And Kelly realized that all of these recent events had been designed to bring her to this one spot because she was the only person in the galaxy who could ever hope to understand Phaedra's reasoning.
"You wanted to tear it down from the inside out," Kelly said. "The Spartans. ONI. Everything."
Phaedra spread her arms. "That is the only way that empires can fall, after all. And who would've even thought to mistrust that a double-agent could be a Spartan? Or at least, that would have been the plan, had the augmentations not left me… changed. And had you not so dutifully revealed that fact."
Annoyance spiked within Kelly. "I've accepted my portion of the blame, but don't assume that I'm at fault for highlighting your side effects that ONI already knew about, Phaedra." The tall Spartan did not immediately retort and Kelly realized that she had divulged something that Phaedra had not known. "Yeah, they knew the augmentations weren't taking. They just wanted to see how willing you would be to push past them or if you could overcome that handicap at all. I don't mind being the target of your wrath, but I'd rather it be for a more truthful reason."
"The semantics don't matter. There is only one truth." Phaedra lurched back to the glass—her and Kelly's visors were nearly touching the cracked barrier, each one malevolently staring at the other. "And that truth is that whether you were a willing participant or not, you were the instrument that caused my removal from the Spartan program. Had I continued my training with you and everyone else, I would have been above suspicion. I would have been able to have cultivated my plan all the quicker and with more resources at my disposal. I would have gotten my revenge for my family by now, instead of having to operate in the shadows for far too long."
"The more you try to explain yourself," Kelly snidely interjected, "the better I'm feeling about beating you unconscious that day."
That stung. Phaedra could not hide her reaction—she jerked as if someone had dared slap her in the face. She had to take several deep and hoarse breaths to prevent herself from losing all control.
The Spartan's body jittered as she gave an animalistic growl. She did not rise to the taunt to give Kelly any satisfaction and instead elected to continue with her explanation.
"When ONI picked up my broken body, the body that you had left behind, I became under their constant supervision. There was little in the way of independent thought in my subsequent training from that point on. Every action I made was closely scrutinized. My identity was being robbed even more—for a time I started to believe that I would never get a chance to strike back."
All the while Phaedra had been speaking, her voice had been taking on a raspier timbre until it sounded like she was making an effort to spit the words out. Kelly just stood there, taking the vitriol, allowing her cool head to prevail whereas others would have been unnerved from this manic woman.
"And yet," Kelly snorted, "I have yet to see that chance take form."
"Ah, but it has taken form, Kelly. You're standing in it."
Kelly made a slow circuit of the room with her head. No, she realized. Phaedra was not referring to the room. She was referring to the station.
It was not just any ordinary hull, then? Some part of the station's design had a strategic importance to Phaedra. It had been shaped like a miniaturized orbital platform, but what good would that do in the hands of one Spartan? Even if she had her hands on a full-size Super MAC, it would not necessarily mean that Phaedra had gained a tactical advantage. Such platforms were slow and were hard to defend. Even the orbital platforms around Earth required fleets of warships to guard them.
Phaedra noted Kelly's confusion and nodded. "There is still more I need to tell you. But we can get to that in due time." A new ringing sound had started to trill on Phaedra's side of the room. She glanced down as a red light upon her armor began to blink. She considered Kelly almost sheepishly. "You'll just have to excuse me for a moment. This won't take long."
The deeply disturbed soldier turned away and reached for something upon her belt. Kelly saw Phaedra take out what looked like an aerosol canister with a thick tube attached to it. The tube was then attached to the underside of the chin on Phaedra's helmet after the Spartan had pushed aside a covering to reveal an induction port.
Phaedra's thumb flipped up the cover to the canister that protected the release button and depressed it. The canister made a vibrant hissing noise that sounded like electrical static. Kelly watched as Phaedra's hands began shaking in a crazed dance after she had inhaled several bursts of what was inside the container. She twitched and hunched over, as if she were fighting against her muscle spasms, her fingers hooking into rigor mortis claws while the rest of her body threatened to lock into a rigid and petrified state.
As she watched, Kelly was uncomfortably reminded of those moments when she had fought Phaedra on that fateful day. The girl had been coughing and spluttering back then, so stricken with these ailments that she had struggled to get back to her feet whenever she had been knocked off of them. She recalled at how Phaedra had been clutching her chest, her balance noticeably shot from the swaying of her body. A pale creature, one continually lanced by pain.
The same creature now stood before her, that pain never having left.
After half a minute, the thrashings subsided and Phaedra's breath cleared. She straightened back up and unhooked the tubing from the induction port and placed the aerosol canister back at the spot upon her utility belt.
"There," Phaedra murmured, voice still raspy. "That's dealt with for now."
Kelly could not mask her scoff as a feeling of recognition passed over her. "SN 92305," she muttered. "And you're sole intended consumer of that new synthetic drug. I had a feeling I could trace that pandemic back to you."
"Interesting. So, you also found that out on your own. How resourceful. You know that I was the one who synthesized the drug in the first place? ONI gave me plenty of training, enough to make me an expert in the hard sciences. One of my first projects was to try and develop a compound that would counteract the worst effects of the augmentations while not negating the ones that mattered."
To hear it being admitted in such a blasé fashion almost made Kelly steaming mad. "So it nullifies the effects of your overclocked circulatory system. How did that come to start a galaxy-wide pandemic?"
Phaedra shrugged like the answer was obvious. "The addictive properties of the drug were known, but my metabolism was able to ward off those particular effects. And as ONI gradually gave me more autonomy, I realized that the drug could be used as a way to gain capital for whatever plan I had in mind. Black-markets have existed in warzones since time immemorial. It did not take long to discover a few of those seedy contacts and to entrust them to distribute the product in exchange for monetary gain. And the rapid ramp-up in demand meant that I needed an industrialized processing plant to compensate. The funds I had already received from my initial transactions paid for such a facility along with the necessary bribes to the local colony government to keep their mouths shut about its existence. Not too bad, all in all."
Now it was Kelly who was considering punching the glass in anger. "You traitor. You didn't care who you hurt as long as you came out on top at the end."
"You're right. I didn't care. Why should I have cared? Any member of the UNSC that I managed to addict to this drug was an incremental step forward in my plan. I got paid, they got sick and started to die. What reason would I possibly have to be empathetic at all? This was always the plan, Kelly. To hurt the UNSC however possible. Turns out my start was rather unorthodox."
Kelly shook her head, like she was deaf to all of this.
"You should have been put down a long time ago."
"If only. It would have saved the both of us a lot of trouble now, wouldn't it?"
A vast array of imagined ways she could execute this woman all flashed through Kelly's head quicker than she could comprehend them, like each sudden, unwanted exercise of her imagination was so terrible it could not maintain its form for longer than a frame.
"Put us in a room with no barriers," Kelly gestured. "We can see just how much trouble we can cause."
Phaedra waggled a finger like she was scolding a misbehaving pet.
"Not so fast. You don't seem to respect exactly what you have become embroiled in, not even after all this. And that's not your fault—I've given you no indication on what to expect. I aim to correct that. Right now. If you'll just follow, you can have the answers."
From a hidden command in her armor, the second door in Kelly's chamber slid open behind her, unveiling a darkened passageway. At the same time, another door on the same side of the room opened on Phaedra's end.
Knowing that Kelly would be understandably hesitant at relocating to a new area, Phaedra disengaged first with a callous turn, having to duck her head as she left the cylindrical antechamber.
Kelly waited a beat. Then she screwed up her courage and followed, just as intended.
The hallway led the both of them to a lift that ran horizontally across the length of the station. They had gone down parallel hallways to reach it, much like how prison passageways had been arranged as one-way tubes for inmates to travel. The lift was also bisected, this time by an energy barrier that looked like it had been ripped out of a Covenant ship, giving half of the box to each occupant. Phaedra certainly had been indiscriminate when performing her cannibalization of the vessels at her disposal.
The lift started to move as soon as both Spartans had stepped inside. Phaedra had positioned herself by the glass window on the opposite end. Kelly did the same.
As the lift traveled, Kelly watched in interest as she was treated to an unobstructed view of the station's internal structure. There were layers and layers of levels sandwiched together that ran from one side of the superstructure to the other. The size of a small city, the station contained an imbroglio of passageways and what looked like service corridors. Kelly could actually spot one such garage below her that housed a couple of Warthogs designed for maintenance—several raised roadways tangled and wove through the various decks like metallic spaghetti. The decks were swarming with the self-replicating bots and every square meter of the station's inner workings seemed to be covered by autocannon emplacements. Hoverdrones hefted heavy girders, blinking red warning lights as they whirred to and fro within the makeshift atmosphere of the station. Many parts of the structure were unfinished and encased in construction-yellow scaffolding. Steam from ventilating piping surged white columns that turned into frozen particulates as gas was ejected out into space.
The light of the magnetar managed to seep through the spaces between the girders and the beams, yet some indefinable gloom remained. The starlight seemed to deepen the adumbrations that lurked in the corners of the floating labyrinth, despite the natural brightness.
Kelly tried to commit the layout of the exposed corridors, chambers, connecting walkways, and elevated roadways to memory, but it was too complex of a puzzle for her to work out, especially since the lift was continually shifting her view as it traveled along the magrails.
"Impressive," Phaedra said, the barrier making her voice sound distorted. "Isn't it?"
Kelly did not turn to look at her. "This is where you give me your explanation. It is substantial, but meaningless. Is this supposed to unnerve me?"
"We'll see. What does this place look like to you?"
Folding her hands behind her back, Kelly returned to her first impression. "An orbital defense platform. A Super MAC."
"Very good," Phaedra said. "Though undoubtedly this will lead to follow-up questions."
Indeed it did, because just having Phaedra's confirmation did not clear things up for Kelly at all. A Super MAC was meant to defend an orbital body—a planet or any large body that could hold the orbital platform in a geosynchronous orbit. It was a defensive platform, not at all meant for offense. Kelly could not think of anything else in the area that this Super MAC was meant to defend, unless she had somehow missed out on detecting anything else in the system due to the magnetar's interference.
"It's obvious I'm missing a piece of the puzzle," Kelly growled as she stepped up to the barrier to face Phaedra, ignoring the manufacturing of the superstructure just out the window. "I have the basics: you've managed to program construction bots to lift enough parts from various ships that you've managed to collect in this system so that you can build a rudimentary Super MAC for your own purposes."
She began to point out a few areas as they passed them by. "The reclamation process has been pretty substantial, from the looks of it. You're using the power plant from a Halcyon-class, if I'm not mistaken. Armor was lifted straight from an outdated Insurrectionist battleship, judging from the insignia still painted on the side, there. You've even added some Covenant tech to bolster the life support systems, seeing as you've incorporated plasma cabling into the design of the station. The only question remaining is… why? Is this all related to your plan to get even with the system that created you?"
The stare that Phaedra was now levelling at Kelly seemed like it could have frozen the heart of the magnetar. After a moment, she gestured out the window to a particular exposed section that the lift was heading towards.
"Tell me what you see out there."
Kelly did so and peered through the empty space between the lift and one of the storage hangars just beyond. She was not sure what to look for until she spotted a perimeter of blinking red lights surrounding a stack of gargantuan machine parts, all of which looked like ensnared metal lollipops that had been placed upon their sides. Yellow and black paint ribbed the sides of the objects and burning blue lights adorned every corner of their appearance.
Shaw-Fujikawa engines. At least thirty of them. Stacked on top of each other three high like ISO containers. Kelly had never seen so many of them in one place. These engines were not something that was typically stockpiled—they were produced on a per-ship basis, made to order. No one, not even the UNSC, even thought of keeping safety stock of these things on hand.
A multitude of questions all blitzed through Kelly's head at once. She remembered, during her initial briefing, that all of the attacks that Phaedra's unit had committed on the colonies had also seen a rise in the theft of Shaw-Fujikawa engines. Was this where they had all ended up? Why was Phaedra keeping them here to begin with?
Then… a thought came to her.
Arbogast. The radio dish structure that had been vaporized by an unmistakable Shaw-Fujikawa drive detonation.
Was Phaedra planning on using the drives as bombs?
"It's an arsenal," Kelly stated, realizing as a pool of dread gathered in her gut. "You're going to use them to commit acts of terrorism."
"In a more tangential manner," Phaedra corrected. "Originally, the plan was that I would use them to carry out bombing of certain targets, but I figured out a more elegant use for them."
Kelly looked at the pile of drives and back to Phaedra, shaking her head.
"Just arrive at the point."
Phaedra shrugged. "As you wish. You remember the Long Night of Solace, don't you?"
Kelly did. The Long Night of Solace was a supercarrier that had carried out the initial invasion of Reach. It had been destroyed from Spartans planting a Shaw-Fujikawa device inside that was rigged to blow. The explosion had cut the supercarrier in half and had vented nearly the entire crew out into space. It had been a tremendous victory for the defending UNSC, but Covenant reinforcements had arrived in the system practically seconds after the ship had been destroyed, making the entire assault nearly worthless, in the end.
"You're trying to replicate that event, just towards the UNSC this time?" Kelly asked. She made a point of making a grand sweep of her hand, referencing the superstructure. "And this somehow fits into that plan?"
"Not quite. But it's important for you to know. The Long Night of Solace became the most well-known usage of a slipspace drive improvised as a weapon of mass destruction. The Insurrection had attempted to use such devices before in similar manners, to little success. But what was witnessed on Reach… that was the kind of test run that indicated the potential for what those drives could do. Under the correct circumstances, that is."
Kelly gave a grunt. "'Under the correct circumstances?'"
Outside the window, the lift had moved on from the storage hangar and was now heading through a corridor of mechanical decks and industrial piping.
Phaedra was nodding. "It proved that a Shaw-Fujikawa drive could be ruptured by having its superconducting magnets align out of phase at a specified point in time, instead of manually adjusting the drive's components so that it could detonate under duress, which had initially eliminated the preciseness of such a detonation. It had me thinking: if you were to detonate a Shaw-Fujikawa drive at the right place, at the right time, and be in control of both aspects, one could do more than simply blow up a ship. See where this is headed?"
"No," Kelly replied honestly.
"Then let me put it another way. What if there was a way to control a Shaw-Fujikawa detonation even more than it has been historically observed?"
"I thought you just said that we already have a way to control them."
"Not until now," Phaedra levelled a hand. "In the past, Shaw-Fujikawa detonations were typically the result of negligence. That they were caused by poor calibration that usually ended with facilities or people being warped into a slipspace void where no one could ever find them again. It was like a black hole had phased into existence, its destination leading to nowhere our minds could fathom. But what if we happened to know all the variables in the equation? What if we knew where that black hole—the slipspace rift, if you will—would terminate?"
Kelly started to pace the interior of her partitioned lift section. "Very much like how all capital ships move between two points in space via that slipspace rift today. Particle accelerators create ruptures using microscopic black holes, allowing whatever ship to pass through into eleven-dimensional space. The key differential here is that the ships are performing quadrillions of calculations with each jump to keep the rift open. Without those calculations, the ship would never reach its destination."
"Textbook answer. So, let me ask you something. What if such a drive detonated, but it already was transmitting the eleven-dimensional coordinates required to make a precision jump?"
The question caught Kelly off guard. She was good at physics questions—though she had not been the best in her class at them—but there was the nagging feeling like there was a hidden dimension to what Phaedra was asking her. She knew the answer, but wondered if there was a lateral line of thinking that she was not considering.
Carefully, she said, "The object would therefore be transported to the coordinates in question. The drive controls the opening of the rift and the manipulation of the quantum field. A detonation does not necessarily mean the destruction of the drive. It will simply teleport it, and anything in proximity to—"
"—to wherever the coordinates are indicating," Phaedra finished. "Here's another question. If you have a Shaw-Fujikawa engine and you fire a bullet, aiming not right at it but next to it, and the drive detonates right as the bullet passes by, what happens to the bullet?"
"The bullet will get transported to…" Kelly stopped as all the pieces finally fell into place. Swallowing, she looked at Phaedra with an entirely different light, unable to see her as she had done previously. In the span of nanoseconds, the Spartan had transformed from simply insane into a complete psychopath. "…to wherever the rift ends, its velocity unchanged."
Phaedra seemed to ripple with pride.
"One last question. Scale up the bullet. What happens?"
Kelly did not want to speak, but she did anyway.
"With the right calculations, an ample supple of Shaw-Fujikawa engines, and a weapon that can fire projectiles capable of destroying capital ships, you could—in theory—be in possession of a gun that can destroy any target across the galaxy from a single point."
An ugly chuckle rasped from Phaedra's vocabulator as she looked upon her handiwork as the lift continued to take them on a tour of the expanse of the station. "Well… no longer theory now, is it?"
The magnitude of what Phaedra had created seemed almost too much to bear for Kelly. Researchers had been trying time and again to figure out safer ways of conduction slipspace travel, not realizing that the inherent dangers that Shaw-Fujikawa drives presented acted as a loophole for enabling point-to-point galactic travel.
A loophole that Phaedra had managed to crack and exploit.
She had managed to create a Super MAC platform courtesy of her robotic workforce—the design comparisons had not been a fluke. Where the comparisons ended, though, was the effective range that this platform had in comparison to any other Super MAC or any other weapon devised, whether that be human, Covenant, Forerunner, or none of the above.
Phaedra explained to Kelly how it worked. Her Super MAC essentially fired twice per target, as was its design. Once to launch a primed Shaw-Fujikawa engine into space. The second to launch the ferric-tungsten round that she had devised by melting down normal MAC rounds from the ships she had scrounged up to create an enlarged round. The Shaw-Fujikawa engine would have a slower velocity than the MAC round and would be timed to fire the moment the round was in optimum range of the detonation. In that instant, both objects would disappear from realspace in that sector and would reappear at another location once they had completed their slipspace transit. However, the MAC round would continue to travel as normal, at its original speed, as if its point of origin had been in that particular sector all this time.
With such a weapon, Phaedra could target any object in the galaxy whenever she pleased. She could zero in on a city on even the most heavily fortified of worlds and wipe it off the map with a simple press of the button.
Phaedra had managed to devise the galaxy's most powerful sniper rifle, able to place the smallest of objects underneath its all-gazing scope.
And both of them needed to be obliterated from existence.
Shadows flitted across the interior of the lift as the tram momentarily tunneled through a space of skeletal rafters and hazard lights.
Kelly could only stare at the woman on the other side of the barrier. "I'm not going to talk you down from this. No point, is there? Not after you're so far gone."
"I would expect nothing less," Phaedra retorted. "After all, ONI sent you, didn't they? You don't send a Spartan to negotiate. You send them to destroy, as they were clearly hoping you'd do when you reached me."
The gray-armored Spartan looked down at her scratched wrist, almost as if she was checking the time. She made a few adjustments on her TACPAD, gauntleted fingers tapping delicately upon the glass surface.
"And right on time, I see," she said.
"Right on time for what?" Kelly asked.
Phaedra again spread her hands. "We can discuss plans and strategies and tactics all we wish—thinking of the 'what can be' portion of our story. But, for most people, tactile proof is something that cannot be discounted, at least not in the way that words can be."
"If you even think that I'm just going to sit by and let you fire this damn thing—"
"Ah, but you don't have to," Phaedra cut Kelly off. "Because I already fired it. Two hours ago."
Kelly went still. Something cold opened up within her chest. Her voice sounded distant when she finally murmured out, "What?"
"Oh, the platform fired another round before I got here," Phaedra spoke casually, like she was conversing with an old acquaintance at a bar. "Arbogast was the test run, you see, and that cost me two of my stockpiled drives to ensure that the wavespace array was well and irreparably destroyed. This time, I decided to do a field test on something a bit more public. With ammunition that I can afford to lose."
Gazing blankly out into the conglomerated morass of steel beams, arc welding geysers, and flashing halogen lights, Kelly noticed that the shimmer of the magnetar was drowning out the light of the constellations above.
"What have you done?"
"See for yourself," Phaedra said as she tapped another command upon her TACPAD.
On the window, blocking Kelly's view of the superstructure, a video screen popped up, hanging upon the transparent surface. She could see a fleet of ships orbiting a brightly lit world, the glimmer of air traffic gridded and looking like glowing arteries as they swarmed within the planet's orbit, which she now recognized as Earth. Huge UNSC ships seemed to hang in place, one of them being the Infinity, their engines blazing cataclysmic blue. Orbital platforms hovered in the background, surrounded by light carriers. From the timestamp in the corner of the screen, she deduced that she was looking at camera footage on one of a ship's emplacements.
Kelly was about to ask if Phaedra had targeted the Infinity or any of the emplacements on Earth, when Phaedra helpfully zoomed the view in on the screen, centering the lens upon one of the light frigates, one of the Infinity's escort ships. FOF tags popped up on the screen, indicating that this ship was the UNSC Béjaïa.
"The time delay makes aiming rather difficult," Phaedra said, "but it's not a problem when the target keeps to the orbit they have set."
Placing a fist to the barrier, Kelly looked away from the screen. "Phaedra, you need to stop this right now."
"Not really an option. The round has been fired. It's already in motion until it reaches its destination."
She curled her hand into a fist and rippled a punch upon the barrier, to no effect. "So you're just going to make a show of force to the UNSC? A shot across the bow, is that it?"
An antenna array momentarily parted the light of the magnetar as the lift lined it up perfectly against the cosmic phenomenon, throwing Phaedra's body into faint slits of shadow.
"I would not be so wasteful, but I guess this could certainly count. Do you know of the Béjaïa, Kelly? New ship, top of the line. Crewed by one Captain Tiana Clemenceau. You'd find this interesting: a while back—this would be thirty years ago—Clemenceau, an ensign at the time, was loaned out to ONI to help devise some of the propaganda for internal distribution to alleviate any 'moral concerns' over the prospect of kidnapping children for their new super-soldier program. At the urging of her superiors, she created some of the case tasks and prepared the ONI crews on how to handle potential leaks of the program, should they arise."
The Security helmet glanced over and all light trapped within the visor seemed to twist until it had grown jet black, with only one single golden spark allowed to gleam.
"For her efforts," Phaedra continued, "ONI granted Clemenceau with high honors and enough recommendations for the UNSC to fast-track her on her route to becoming a captain. Her work enabled and emboldened ONI to kidnap more and more children to the program, potentially repeating the circumstances that gave rise to me. But they didn't see it like that. Instead, they gave her the honor of the posting as head of the Infinity's defensive guard fleet."
On the screen, Kelly could only watch as a twinkle of azure and ice-white blipped into being just above the curvature of the planet, like the afterwave of a meteor entering the atmosphere. It could have been any other ship entering Earth-space, come back home after spending an eternity amongst the stars.
But two seconds after seeing the blue/white flash, the Béjaïa, hovering stately on course alongside the Infinity, suddenly became split in two as something bored straight through the front of the frigate and exited through the top of the superstructure, like it had been shot with a slug at an upward angle. Metal burned and gas crystallized, trailing spirals of both smoke and frozen particulates. The lights on the frigate darkened immediately, the power plant having been destroyed from that salvo. Lengths of hull peeled away like paper only to vanish in a magnificent fireball caused by the remaining fuel igniting.
The shell of the Béjaïa exploded, the one shot from the Super MAC having cored it out nearly from stem to stern. Once the light finally faded, the remains of the frigate were nothing left but millions of dispersed pieces of glowing shrapnel.
Watching the display, Phaedra clucked her tongue in approval.
"A fleet which will need a new head, as it turns out."
Kelly could take no more of this. She reached behind her, gripped the head of the nuke that was hooked at the small of her back, and lifted it out with a hand. She slapped the controls on it once and the diodes upon the device lit up like a Christmas tree.
"Shut it down," Kelly ordered Phaedra, her appearance through the barrier glimmering with rage. "Right now!" She had never before shouted at someone like this. The forte exclamation ripped through her throat as easy as breathing.
Phaedra appraised the nuke for a bit before finally shifting her gaze over to where she approximated Kelly's eyes were through the visor.
"Not the best choice of words," Phaedra said and made a small gesture with a hand.
The lights upon the nuke winked off.
Kelly stared at the device. Instinctively, she shook it as if it was suffering from a simple malfunction. How…?
The gray-armored Spartan lifted her hand—Kelly could see holograms encrust the gauntlet like a shield.
"Insurance policy," Phaedra sneered. "The quantum computers in a Shaw-Fujikawa drive can do a whole lot more than plot eleven-dimensional coordinates. Compared to performing a seamless slipspace transition, a nuclear activation code is hardly on the same level."
The nuke in Kelly's hands was about as useful as a paperweight in its current state. She tried the wake command again, but the display was still unresponsive. Somehow, in the time that they had been talking, Phaedra had not only cracked the nuke's firewalls but had gained root access to the whole device.
Kelly gave a growl. "You—" she stared to say, but Phaedra was already talking.
"You and I are on the same ground now. Don't worry, the nuke's not dead. You still can have a contingency in place, but that's not the focus anymore. Now, this next bit is interesting, because I'm going to give you the opportunity to turn the nuke back on. Play your cards right, you get the nuke and you get to be the savior of humanity for a day. You'll have your fifteen minutes of fame."
Something was not sitting right with Kelly. "And what do I have to do to get it back?" she asked.
Air snorted from Phaedra's vocabulator.
"That's the tricky part. There's only one way to stop the coming slaughter—the Super MAC's been recalibrating since its last salvo and will be ready to fire again shortly—and you know that only one of us will be walking out of here alive. So, let's not put the inevitable off any longer, shall we? It'll be just the two of us—you and me. No guns. No explosives. Just us and our armor. The doors will open, we'll head into the next room, and we'll settle this score once and for all. Fighting as equals once again, after all these years. Win, and you will get control of your nuke back."
The Spartan stood tall and menacing, arms spread wide. "But… if you lose, I'll be starting the bombardment after what's left of your corpse is flayed and strung up in pieces around this station. Clock's ticking, Spartan. What do you say?"
A tangle of cross-braces and girders now encased the lift as it quietly whirred into the exit station, the end of the line. The magnetar's light shimmered upon the bare rail in the back, the occupants safe from its eternal gaze. A twin set of skyways connected the interior of the box to the rest of the superstructure.
Despite the suit, Kelly felt ice cold. The being across from her was an even greater void of raw and hyperborean frostiness. She wondered if there had ever been a moment where she had not underestimated this woman since the beginning.
No matter, she had to tell herself. That was then. This was now. The time to ask for forgiveness was over. The sins of the past would have to be forgotten. The way things would be and would ever be had now reached their final crescendo. Perhaps this had been their destinies all along. And now, neither one could live while the other was alive.
The doors to the lift slid open, allowing them passage back inside, but neither one moved. They continued to stare through the barrier at each other, ignoring the howling metal sound of atmosphere rushing through the empty station.
Behind her visor, Kelly bared her teeth.
"I'll fucking kill you."
A/N: Yes, I know that there haven't been any f-bombs in a Halo game to date. I'm going by MPAA rules here - you are allowed one usage in a PG-13 film, pending the context in which it is dropped. Consider this my one usage.
Playlist:
Spacewalk
"Trapped"
Jed Kurzel
A Writer's Odyssey (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Interior Steps / Phaedra Shadow
"Helheim"
Andy LaPlegua
Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Spartan to Spartan
"Wallace"
Benjamin Wallfisch and Hans Zimmer
Blade Runner 2049 (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Superstructure / Shaw-Fujikawa / Plan Revelation
"Exit the Pod"
Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer
The Matrix Resurrections (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)