VII: A Reasonable and Profound Argument
"You Have Arrived at Your Destination"
Wichita
It was still morning by the time Kelly and Furan had arrived at the turnoff marked on the map. They sat on their Mongooses, parked in the shade of a lone tree on the road, the motors steadily running. The ATVs were completely caked with dirt and mud from wallowing over the bad roads in the day it took for them to get here, but the vehicles were built to take plenty more knocks before giving out.
Kelly reached over and switched her Mongoose off. The engine died with a low whine. Furan repeated the same motion to her own ATV moments later. They then swung their legs from the opposite ends of their vehicles and pushed them into the safety of a nearby hedgerow, which had grown so far out of its original design, having not been trimmed in perhaps decades, that its heavy branches were almost spilling into the road.
They now stood at the T-junction, where the main road continued on and a more disused dirt track speared off into the distance towards the west. The two riders were now facing this less-used trail, which was overgrown with wilted weeds and amber tufts of trailgrass.
The terrain here had not changed much from where they had landed—nothing but unkempt fields as far as the eye could see. Neither of them said it aloud, but they had found it rather fortunate that this current theater had found them in a climate that was quite conducive to life. Temperate zones were few and far between in terms of places that Kelly had operated in. It beat having to hoof it across roasted cinderlands dotted by blasted rocks, where scoria crumbled from cracks in ancient black stone cliffs, in addition to having to avoid deadly wildlife while out and about. And that was on the mild side in terms of the various locales that had hosted the Spartan at one point or another.
After spending a moment to do one final mag check of her weapons—12.7x40mm rounds for her pistol, 5x23mm caseless for her SMG, 8-gauge rounds for Oathsworn—Kelly pronounced herself ready to head on, down the road that bore witness to few creatures in its lifetime, and had been rendered unpopulated by some foreign act until this very moment.
Before they set out, Furan wheeled her head to look at Kelly. "At least one of your Spartans is waiting for us down that road. Perhaps we still hold the element of surprise."
"They aren't my Spartans," Kelly sternly emphasized, for what felt like the umpteenth time. "But I know. And we're ready to face them."
Furan took a determinative step forward towards the Spartan, completely unafraid. "I won't press my case more than I already have—"
"You can stop right there, then," Kelly sarcastically rasped, which earned her quite the malevolent glare from the Elite.
"—but consider how good your odds will be if you truly plan to take on at least three well-armed combatants essentially by yourself. Or," Furan emphasized, "I invite you to try stomaching the idea of enlisting nearby support, should the tide turn against you."
Kelly gave a noticeable dip of her helmet towards the plasma pistol that hung at Furan's belt, as if to say "You already have a weapon," but the obviously engineered disadvantages of bringing along such a weapon that was under-powered and had a halved battery capacity was an exercise in lunacy to even try to debate. It had been deemed a necessity at the time to equip the Elite with such paltry weaponry for her own safety, but it was clear the situation and the environment was going to introduce quite a few additional unknown variables that could bring even more harm.
Kelly momentarily pursed her lips, thinking for a moment. She appraised Furan's studious expression, at how the Elite was in total mastery of every muscle in their body—even the slight tics she gave with her mandibles were calculated moves.
With a thin sigh, she reached behind her and took out her M7 submachine gun. She extended the stock and twirled the weapon once with her finger before she then gripped the barrel and offered it to Furan.
"Preferable?" Kelly simply asked.
Furan's eyes arced to the ground so fast it could have been a trick of the light before they returned to Kelly's visor. A conciliatory gesture of thanks.
"To a point," the Elite admitted, but her tone very much exuded her gratefulness, despite the laconic wordage. The weapon was awkwardly small in Furan's hands, but she was just going to have to find a way to make it work.
They set out, veering from the road and following it parallel. They cut through a barbed-wire fence and headed deep into the wilted fields of wheat and corn, which swallowed both soldiers up from head to toe as though they had been nothing but phantoms haunting this forsaken world.
A topographic map in the corner of Kelly's HUD was used to continuously mark their location. The maize fields cut down visibility to almost nothing, to the point where even though they were no less than fifteen feet from the road, they were unable to see past the conglomeration of internoded stems, tassels, and margined leaves. The vegetation crunched as they tramped through it, nearly shoulder to shoulder. This was not turning out to be quite the stealthy journey that Kelly had been hoping for, but it was better being in cover than trapezing aimlessly out on the track wide open and practically inviting someone to take potshots at her.
She needn't have worried about the noise, for the wind suddenly picked up, rustling the thickened stalks and creating a rattling not unlike the knell of common serpentine predators. The sun had nearly reached its aphelion, yet the horizons carried a faint still grayness to them, like flesh drained of blood.
They moved on, and the corn gave way to wheat which barely rose to their hips. Kelly and Furan shrewdly treaded through the farmland, keeping the road at a distance, the low slopes of the hills the only agonized variance upon the acreage that the land allowed. The two checked their motion trackers constantly, and occasionally squatted within the dried tillage, waiting to see if a shot would draw out. Yet nothing emitted except for the occasional cry of an airborne raptor-like being. It truly felt like it was just only the two of them on this planet.
It was like this for two miles. A walk in the park, as far as Kelly was concerned. She'd probably never face an easier hike like this ever again.
Before they mounted the next rise, Kelly signaled for her and Furan to take another moment to orient themselves. On her TACPAD, she pulled up the map. On it, they could see where the road that they had been following terminated on the other hill over.
"Less than a mile to go," Kelly said. "Remember, ONI wants them all terminated. We're not taking prisoners today."
Furan deftly clacked the safety to her submachine gun off. "Oh, that won't be a problem for me."
They rose like demonic sapients and advanced with interest over the crest of the rounded hill, the long brushes of wheat covering their tracks behind them. They could now see where their destinies both lay, for the moment. The sunblanched waste revealed an open country, just as widespread as the one behind them. The next hill, within walking distance, marked the terminus of the road that they had used as their guide. It led to another large field of more corn, which stretched from the road, across the slopes, and curved over the ridge of the land.
A path from the ringed cul-de-sac trailed up to a square plot, suspiciously bereft of the limber and dried vegetation that surrounded it. It was a bare rectangle adrift in the scuttling sea of cloying corn. A tall water tower still stood two dozen meters away from the clearing, though its stilts had long been consumed by the field that was home to its anchorage.
Kelly focused her binocular function on this area—she could see the remnants of wood and plastic among a foundation of stone. A building had stood here, some time ago. Perhaps not a building, judging by the size of the plot, but a simple house. Either it had failed to withstand the elements or it had been torn down deliberately—the cause of which mattered little to the Spartan.
"No sign of activity," Kelly said as they approached. "No functional vehicles, no movement. Doesn't mean they're not out there, though."
Furan gave a grunt of acknowledgement. At least, that was how Kelly interpreted the sound.
They descended into the paltry excuse for a valley before rising back up again, approaching the hollowed-out husk of what used to be a standing structure. A homestead, if the location could point to any indication of its purpose.
Another fence barred the way to the center of the farm, but Kelly simply pushed down the rusted metal barbs with an armored glove. They were close to the front gate and now out in the open, but they hugged the boundary of the corn field as they slowly crept forward, their weapons raised and ready.
Burned out pieces of farm equipment now lay interspaced on the flattened area. The grass here, unmanaged after so long, was in the process of trying to reclaim the material—many of the tires on their burst wheels had long strings of crabgrass intertangled and wedged around them, almost like the earth was trying to pull them under.
Kelly wiped a finger upon the side of a ravaged van that had all of its paneling and glass removed. A line of china blue now lay uncovered beneath a layer of soot, which now marred the Spartan's finger. The vehicle had been set on fire at some point. Looters, perhaps? Any evidence that had been left behind would be long gone, considering how old the damage to the equipment was.
She knelt down behind a listing tractor, Furan just behind her. The water tower was to the west in front of them, a four-story high structure that was comprised of a barrel supported on a ringed platform. The homestead was directly to their left, the remains of the presidio crumbling away beneath the ageless sky.
Kelly shallowed her breathing, listening to the world again, but there was nothing to indicate that she was within any distance of anyone else, nor had she found anything that would have otherwise revealed that this area had been visited recently. There were no footprints, no UNSC material, nothing that could help her hunt for Phaedra here. She resisted the urge to curse out loud.
"Your Phantom's calculations didn't account for any margin of error, did they?" she asked aloud.
"You know as well as I do the celestial mechanics have been accurate," Furan snorted. "There was a high determination of variance in the model—our placement at this spot cannot be summed up as coincidence."
Slowly, Kelly stood, peeking her head out around the corroding frame of the tractor. "It was rhetorical."
Suddenly, a pulsing blue shockwave hummed to life in her motion tracker. It was a calming visual, like a pebble being dipped into a hidden pond. Kelly brought up her shotgun—the pulse had come from the direction of the wreckage of the house.
"Contact," she said. "Stay frosty."
She walked towards the ruin, the half-ton of armor and soldier utterly silent. Kelly skirted around the boundary of what must have been a garage—boards and bits of foundation created a mountain over the scorched hulk of an unidentifiable vehicle inside. She then moved towards what looked like had once been the entrance. There was a singular concrete step that only gave way to a mass of burned and decaying wood. Kelly was worried about setting foot upon it—more than likely it would give way in its damaged state. And if there was a basement, which there more than likely was, she would be sent plummeting into the depths, which would not be a very dignified start to this whole thing.
Her motion tracker detected another ping. Whatever the source was, it was inches in front of her. Kelly gave pause, standing before the remains of the porch. Only now did she realize that had messed up. She had been too hasty to investigate the digital disturbance without formulating a proper plan. What if she was walking into a trap? What if someone was zeroing in on her right now? If she had the rest of Blue Team, she would have been able to properly decide upon a strategy that guaranteed everyone's safety. Unfortunately, she only had an Elite to count on here. Hardly a good comparison.
"Spartan!" said Elite urged. Furan now stood up from behind the tractor. "What did you find?"
She held up a hand. "Wait one."
With tender caution, Kelly knelt down to where the first of the cracked wood boards touched the concrete step. Some of them looked arranged, like they were placed in sequence instead of haphazardly deposited. Kelly checked to see if there were any tripwires before she reached out and flipped the first two boards over.
She stared down at what was beneath them.
A bright red device, about the width of her helmet, lay placidly in the dirt. It was oblong, shaped like an oversized earpiece. A black triangle had been painted on one end, and white electrical symbols marked the side.
A distress beacon, Kelly knew, a sinking feeling rippling in her gut. Something was definitely off, here.
The Spartan also checked to see if the beacon had been tampered with before she lifted it up from its vault so that Furan could see what it was. The Elite tilted her head as she caught a glimpse of the device, not recognizing it. Kelly rotated the device in a hand, noting that a green diode upon it was winking steadily. Then, she noticed that something had been wrapped around it. A metallic chain of some kind. And something was attached at the end.
Carefully, Kelly unwrapped the chain from where it had been snaking around the distress beacon. She dangled the object with a finger. A set of dog tags limply jerked in the stale wind, hovering just in front of Kelly's visor.
"Spartan?" she heard Furan breathe.
"Quiet." She made a rotating motion with her wrist and caught the dog tags as they whipped up and over, smacking firmly against her palm.
Then, she looked at what was printed on it.
PHAEDRA
S-119
"Shit," she murmured.
In the next moment, a red ping brimmed to life at the corner of her motion tracker. In front of her.
Kelly whirled, her boots digging into the dirt and dead grass. Time seemed to diminish to a steady crawl. She could see Furan's mandibles part quizzically—the Elite spoke, but the words didn't register. Her breath filled her lungs so fast that they ached. She almost skidded on the loose ground, her eyes hopelessly fixated upon that small burning point in the little circle of her tracker.
In less than a second, but what seemed like an eternity, she had made it to the tractor. She bent her legs and sprang forward, catching the still-standing Furan about the waist, bringing the two of them down. The Elite was starting to curse the Spartan out loud for this indecency, but a fierce snap split the air, the ripples red-hot from something passing by at killing speed. Where Furan's head had just been, a thin trail of smoke was already unraveling. The shattered remains of the tractor's side mirror sprinkled down upon the prone human and Elite, dousing them with mirrored glass and cheap plastic.
"What is—" Furan was about to say, but Kelly was already sitting up, her back practically melded to the side of the tracker. The golden visor of her Hermes helmet seemed to sear an angry red outline from the sun beating down on it. She lifted her shotgun, every muscle in her body taut like pianowire.
"Sniper," Kelly said. "Get ready, this is it."
The fire was coming from the other side of the tractor, within the field of corn. There was nothing on the motion tracker anymore. The crackle from the sniper round still echoed in the air.
Furan was edging around the opposite side of the vehicle, working up the courage to stick her neck out.
"They have to be hunkered down. We need to flank—"
Kelly grabbed Furan's collar and yanked the alien bodily back. Half a second later, the left taillight of the tractor exploded in a morass of red plastic shards, some of them nearly going into Furan's face. The two fell back, both breathing heavily.
"You're not going to sneak up on a Spartan," Kelly chastised, poking at Furan's arm with an angry finger. "We're zeroed in. The two of us aren't getting out of this the easy way."
There was another roar from a high-powered rifle in the distance, and the windows to the tractor's cabin either disintegrated or were shot white, so full of microcracks that they appeared as frosted ice. Furan covered her face as more glass rained down upon her.
"That shot came from low," the alien mused—her submachine gun out by now. Furan instinctively looked towards the water tower, the obvious vantage point, and found it empty. "We're without long-range weaponry. We need to take the fight to the sniper."
"Good strategy," Kelly sarcastically rasped. "But I thinking that getting out from behind this tractor should be our first objective."
Furan was about to respond to the remark, but before she could say anything, the radios squawked. A pirate feed had infiltrated their comms.
"Ah, there we are." A woman's voice. Light and husky, almost a feline purr. "I almost thought you wouldn't go for it. The beacon. Too overt, I thought. Not subtle. But, orders are orders. You had to see the tags, otherwise you wouldn't have understood. Has it sunken in yet, 087?"
Getting into a crouch, Furan compulsively checked her weapon to see if it had a full clip. "Is it her? The leader?"
"No," Kelly said. "It's not her. It's Rina. Phoenix's sniper."
She tried to edge out around the front of the tractor, but there was another shot and the radiator of the vehicle exploded in a punctured haze of ruined metal and sour coolant. Some of the shards spun so close to Kelly that her shields momentarily flared. The day began to seep with the rich tang of gunpowder. The smell of cordite was noticeable, even through the filters in Kelly's helmet.
"You're disappointing me, 087," Rina admonished over the comm. "You and your pet freak. Hiding behind cover all day will not help you. Sooner or later, you'll need to move. And I know how good you are at that."
Furan unleashed a short breath. For the first time, the Elite appeared afraid.
"Can she even hear us?"
Kelly shook her head. "It's a one-way channel. She can talk, but she can't listen." She waited for a moment to see if Rina would fire any more shots. "We need to gauge her strength. We don't know if she's alone or with company. Follow my lead."
"What are you planning to do?" Furan asked.
"Just probing," Kelly said as she hefted the shotgun in her hands.
Crouch-walking back up to the front of the tractor, which was now missing its grill, Kelly counted to a random number in her head before she leaned out of cover and opened fire with her shotgun. The 8-gauge buckshot mowed down sheets of corn in fettering waves of gold and brown. Kelly methodically racked the slide, not at all hurried. As she was firing, she was waiting. Waiting for the glimmer of motion in her tracker. Waiting for the muzzleflash deep in that field.
A round suddenly crackled from deep within the recesses of the corn forest and Kelly grunted as it struck her shoulder. Her shields immediately glowed like a miniature sun before dropping completely. An alarm in her helmet rang shrilly—the bar at the top of her HUD was flashing red. Immediately, she dropped behind the tractor again just as a second bullet spat by, glass crackling under her boots. Upon the opposite side, she could see (and hear) Furan opening up her submachine gun in short bursts towards the spot where it looked like Rina had been firing from. The weapon jerked unsteadily in the Elite's hands, the recoil constantly spoiling her aim as it forced the gun to jitter upward continuously. Furan got back into cover just in time before Rina's next few bullets passed dangerously close to the Elite—if Furan had stayed in her spot any longer, the top of her head would be nothing but a purple smear upon the parched dirt.
Kelly timed the break in the firing. That had been more than four rounds in close succession. Rina had to be using a modified sniper rifle, then. An extended clip, that was obvious. She wondered how many improvements had been made to the rogue Spartan's weapon. She was going to have to keep these alterations in mind.
She wished Linda were here. Sniping was her specialty, not Kelly's. What she would have given to have Linda as a partner on this mission…
The radio crackled again. Rina sounded amused on the other end.
"A good show—though your coordination could use some work. But I'm not about to make things easy for you. Let's switch it up, shall we?"
On Kelly's motion tracker, where there had been one solitary red ping before, a dozen new contacts blipped to life, each one moving in their own aimless track.
Furan cursed next to Kelly. "Radar's malfunctioning. She's deployed a jammer."
"I know. We need to find it, take it out." She loaded more shells into her shotgun. The Spartan made a quick gesture with her hand. "I'm armored, you're not. I'll make a break for the fields, draw Rina's fire. She'll focus on me first—I need you to give me some cover while I get close."
An empty mag clattered to the ground as Furan hit the release to her submachine gun. The Elite quickly smacked in a fresh clip and racked the slide. "You'll have your chance, Spartan. Good hunting."
Time to be the rabbit again, Kelly thought as she steeled herself. This was not going to be like old times—she didn't have the luxury of having a sturdy fallback option. She just needed to get the hell out of this position so that she would no longer be pinned down.
Nothing frustrated her more when up against dwindling options.
Furan leaned out and clumsily fired a ragged burst towards the field again. Rina's rifle answered with a sharp report. At that moment, Kelly took off from behind the tractor, her gait cheetah-like. She had popped from zero to nearly thirty miles an hour in the span of just a few seconds. She pulverized giant tracks in the ground as she hurtled across it, her breathing strong and pulsing, like a machine.
Kelly's ears rang as a shot from Rina's sniper rifle passed millimeters from her head. Damn, too close. She passed by a sunken sedan—another shot hit the roof of the car and sparked off of it, taking out what little glass it had left in its windows.
She made it to the corn and skidded, almost going prone. The vegetation here would protect her from Rina getting a bead on her on both the visual and thermal bands. She could still hear Furan occasionally popping off with her weapon, but Rina was not shooting back. Kelly clambered sideways, trying to scuttle to a low place in the field, but everything was flat here. The topography would not be lending assistance to this fight.
Rina was somewhere out in this field, just ahead of her now. Kelly tightly held her weapon close as she trudged through the stalks, a seven-foot-tall armored giant jailed in by the rattling of cornspires.
A bullet, viper-quick, lashed through the maize and hit Kelly in the side, knocking her on her back. How could she see me?! Another shot burrowed into the ground just next to her knee, causing the dirt to jump before her.
"Tag," Rina hissed. "You're it."
Kelly rolled to safety, her shields howling a warning again. The bullet had not penetrated, but her body was aching where it had struck. Deep bruising, most likely. She was going to be discolored for a week.
That is, if she survived today.
Kelly drew back deeper into the corn, her heart pounding. She couldn't hear Furan firing anymore. Was the Elite still alive? Had Rina gotten to her?
Enough was enough. She needed to kill this traitor now.
She mapped out the area in her head. She was about a hundred meters from the farmhouse, or what was left of it, and somewhere, perhaps no more than forty meters ahead of her, Rina had dug herself into an entrenched position. She needed to get around the sniper and flush her out of cover.
It seemed that Rina had the ability to read Kelly's mind, for her voice was soon back on the comm.
"I don't think so, 087. You're nothing if not predictable. Try this out for size."
In the next moment, Kelly heard a series of dull pops, the noise like someone coughing into a barrel. She then noted the smell of gasoline, vibrant and caustic, before it seemed like the entire field of corn became ablaze in an instant. Walls of fire crackled and sprang up over ten feet high, the raw and slender fingers of the inferno raking at the sky, turning the hue from blue to a pale pink.
Rina had pre-mined the field with incendiary devices.
Her MJOLNIR's temperature sensors immediately cawed a new alert. A rolling blast of yellow flame billowed towards Kelly—she fell upon her back and the blast yawed right over her, a backwash of smoke and red haze engulfing her immediately afterward. She got back to her feet, the grass under her boots smoldering and lit like tiny matchsticks. A filter of smoke and ash darkened the air around her, but it seemed like every border of her vision was consumed by a raging torrent of flame. The dried stalks of corn snapped as fire bit into them, causing them to twist and wither as a result of the punishing heat. Momentarily disoriented, she turned in place, but only saw the same hellscape before her. On her motion tracker, the dozens of red angry dots seemed to vibrate in their perverse joy.
Cinders were falling around her—alight bits of vegetation making cursory spirals toward the ground. Heat rose and fell in blistering waves around the Spartan, scorching the panels of her armor. Smoke was shrouding the sun overhead to the point where it had almost become dusk. The only hellglow that dared emit in this maze of infernal power was the tiny lights on Kelly's suit and of the brimming magma-star of her own burning wrath deep behind the smokeglass of her helmet.
"Predictable, am I?" she growled.
The field was still burning, but Kelly no longer let the fire alarm her. It was just another form of cover—a thermal mask and a hindrance against motion tracking. She plowed through the burning stalks, flames streaming around and off her like a vibrant cloak. Smoke twirled in cyclones in her wake and heat turned her outline into a watery reflection.
Dangerous though it was, Kelly showed no signs of discomfort.
She broke south, now ramping up into a powerful sprint. Another bullet smashed through the tapestries of fire, throwing out scarves of sparks and glowing particles, and disappeared into the flames in front of Kelly. Rina just was not stopping.
You've accounted for a lot, Rina. But did you remember this?
Hardcharging through the vast and innumerable blazing curtains, a gargoyle drenched in the land of smoke and flame, a demon of the battlefield, Kelly smashed a path through the violent landscape as sniper bullets seared by her head, the metal blazing just as hot as the fields around her.
She skidded to a stop directly underneath the water tower. The tower was a structure standing on three stilts, and was rusting in several spots. Kelly looked above her and found the topmost joint that was in the direst state. Luckily, the joint was facing the direction she had just headed from. She raised her shotgun, aimed, and unleashed a singular blast of buckshot that spat into the air with the force of a volcano.
The 8-gauge shot smashed into the joint and severed it in a spray of corroded metal and sparks. The tower, one of its legs having been chewed away by time and red-hot metal, began to bend dangerously towards the inferno, before it all broke loose. The barrel atop the structure tilted, arced, and raced to the bottom and erupted in a blast of decrepit wood. In the blink of an eye, hundreds of gallons of blackened and filmy water burst from the felled tower, spreading out into a grimy deluge that stank something awful. The fire shied away and hissed as the water overwhelmed it, throwing out clouds of gray steam to add to the pungent black smoke.
But, in mere moments, a fan of extinguished farmland had now spread out before Kelly. The ground underfoot was sodden, the mud thick and a deep rich brown. Flames still rose into the air in the distance, but they would not be able to touch this area anymore.
And, as the lapping waves diminished and faltered, Kelly stepped around the wreckage of the water tower. Her attention was now drawn to something lying in the mud, the water rushing around it and forming a solemn "V" of turbulence, like it was a singular stone amidst a sudden rapid. It was a metallic object, vaguely spherical, and glowing a terrible coral color. Mud and rainbow-hued water clung to its surface like there was an adhesive applied to it, and Kelly marveled at the fortuitousness of the situation to have this stroke of luck be upon her.
There was no question about it. It was Rina's radar jammer.
"My turn."
Kelly was not at all about to let the rogue soldier continue to have an advantage on the battlefield. She quickly aimed her shotgun, fired, and the jammer flew apart in a thousand pieces of jagged metal.
The bevy of contacts on Kelly's motion tracker immediately dipped to one.
And that one was, if she was not mistaken, just a few meters in front of her.
The ground erupted in a cauldron of soil and flaming vegetation. The hatch to the trapdoor swung open in a complete hemisphere and something leaped out from the darkness of the underground tunnels and into the light, a towering and limber creature decked in jet-black armor, parts of their armor trailing fire from being doused in the fuel that had generated this hellish landscape.
Kelly could only absorb so many details in such a short amount of time: AKIS helmet, shielded visor made out of a metal plate, with a P237-THEIATEK optical suite adorning the left eye, which glowed yellow-orange like a shedding sun, much like the trails of fire that continued to warp atop the Spartan's helmet like a savage crown. A fang-like structure had been scratched around the visor, mimicking the mandibles of an Elite. A supplementary bandolier of sniper rounds ringed her left arm, while a JFO plate adorned her right. Gray outlines of Elite and Brute skulls had been applied to the rounded portions of her shoulder armor and to the Multi-Threat chestplate she wore. Kill marks in the shape of human skulls dotted the plate on both sides of her sternum, much like the marks that flying aces provided their crafts with.
Rina lifted a heavily modified SRS99 sniper rifle, one that had its stock swapped for one of reinforced polymer and had a bedding block made of cast aluminum. It had a custom single-stage trigger and a high-end 25x power scope capable of sighting at different wavelengths. At this close range, Kelly wondered if her shields were going be enough.
She struggled to get her shotgun up in time, but Rina had already sighted in.
"Here I am!" the rogue Spartan roared, right as she pulled the trigger.
The first bullet caught Kelly center-of-mass, and her own shot went wide, the buckshot missing Rina clearly. She had taken some direct hits before, but this felt different. Her legs felt as if they wanted to give out from underneath her. She had trouble breathing. Her ribs were bruised, maybe broken.
She fell upon her back, her shields having dwindled down to nothing once again. She wanted to just lie there, but a voice in her head was screaming for her to move. Obediently, she acted upon the unseen command and rolled, just as Rina fired again from point-blank range. The next shot sparked off Kelly's thigh armor, but she felt some of the bullet fragments puncture her bodysuit. Blood began to marble down her leg, the pain already starting to sizzle.
Rina callously patted out the fires that had wrapped around her arm, almost as if such an event were a regular occurrence. She didn't get too close to Kelly, who was still clinging onto her shotgun. Instead, the terrifying and limber Spartan slowly sighted down their sniper rifle, bringing the taller warrior's head into view.
"Nothing if not predictable," she hissed, her tone a hive of fury.
Kelly never looked away, waiting for the bloom at the end of the heavybarreled weapon.
In that moment, Rina's shields became awash in furrows of static electricity as they seared and sputtered all along her left side. With a roar, she turned, and watched as the nearby row of scorched corn was stomped aside as Furan sprang forth, submachine gun in one hand, and plasma pistol in the other. The Elite was sure-footed, eyes narrowed in grim taskwork, while she alternated her fire with the submachine gun in short bursts while she used her plasma pistol to fill in the pauses she made while trying to adjust to the recoil of the human weapon.
Rina raised her rifle to fire upon the Elite, who had dived back into the field for cover upon seeing the Spartan whirl to face her, but quickly swung back as she saw that Kelly had used the distraction to sit up and recover in that one fateful moment. Kelly's hand went to her belt and unhooked a metallic disc—one of the armor restraint systems. She bent her elbow and hurled the device before Rina even had a chance to sight down, and the discus spun through the air like a slung frisbee.
It didn't hit Rina's chest. It latched onto her right arm instead with a clicking sound. Rina's armor was partitioned to defend against electrical attacks, but the armor restraint system could still wreak havoc with the MJOLNIR's systems, which is exactly what happened in the immediate aftermath.
Rina's right arm brimmed with blue electricity, becoming rigid. Like it had turned to lead, Rina could only stare as her arm swung downward, as if she had lost the strength to hold it up anymore. At the same time, her finger spasmed tightly against the trigger and was held in place there—the ground between Kelly and Rina exploded as a HVAP round buried itself there in a wave of displaced dirt and smoke. The air was split apart from the blistering report—the shockwave of the rifle firing was so powerful that it could have given someone a concussion.
Kelly had leaped back to her feet by that point, shotgun extended. Rina was trying to jiggle her own weapon free from her paralyzed hand at the same time. Kelly shot Rina three times so fast it sounded like one continuous roar. Rina jerked back each time as she was hit with the buckshot, her overcharged shields warbling, barely holding together. The weapon firmly bucked into Kelly shoulder, the high-powered bursts easily holding up against her armor. Oathsworn streamed pale fire, a kick to its bite savage like she had never felt in another weapon before. She was able to ignore the smarting in her leg, even as her blood created a seeping maze down her thigh. There was only the mission to concentrate on. Everything else was a distraction.
Kelly adjusted her aim downward. 8-gauge shot smashed into Rina's knee and she fell. The sniper's shields wavered and finally broke with a snap. There was the familiar tang of ozone. Kelly was about to finish this, but quickly noted that the breach to her shotgun was still wide open. She had just expended her last shell.
Her enemy noticed this as well and uttered a cruel laugh, despite her position. Rina's hand now reached for the pistol at her side, having deemed the retrieval of her rifle to be a lost cause, which was still clenched in the frozen claw that had become her right hand.
Kelly's hands opened and Oathsworn plummeted to the ground. In a smooth motion, her right arm swept downward and found the grip of her own pistol. In a practiced maneuver, her hand slid into the shape of the melded handgrip and her finger found the trigger, and she lifted the weapon out from its holster. As she raised her pistol, her left hand came up to cover her right, steadying her aim, and made the gun seem small in the massive hands of its owner.
Both Spartans raised their weapons.
This time, Kelly was faster.
Her pistol shot raced across the plain, the noise caroming off into the endless horizon, and Rina's fingers sprang open, dropping her weapon, as a burst of crimson spurted from her neck. The gun had just finished bucking in Kelly's hands, a thin trail of smoke wisping from the barrel. Rina gasped as she clasped a hand to her neck, blood spurting past her armored fingers, a dark fountain amidst the bright day.
Kelly breathed again.
She stepped forward, continuing to hold her pistol in a two-handed grip. Rina continued to sit where she had sunken upon the ground, the spurts from her neck steadily losing their distance as she sat in a pool of her own blood. The left side of her body was wet and glistening, and she was painfully rasping as the minutes of her life rapidly ticked down.
Rina saw Kelly approaching and weakly took her hand away from her wound—which spouted more furiously without anything to stem the flow—and held out her arm, fingers splayed in the universal stop motion, as though as she could somehow hold back such a universal force with nothing but a hand.
"Wait—" she began to say.
Kelly shot Rina twice in the head. Both pistol rounds punctured the metal plate of the AKIS visor—the second shot actually went straight through the protruding optical suite, blowing it out in a burst of golden glass. There was a thumping sound and the back of the helmet burst open, allowing a fist-sized expulsion of gore to exit in a thick clump. Rina's body swayed, as if balanced by a single string, and then fell face-first into the mud, the spurting of blood immediately ceasing to a tender trickle, no longer propelled by the fateful functions of the heart.
The echoes of the two rounds continued to linger in the air, smoke still lazily rising in thick columns from the field as the fires raged elsewhere. Kelly continued to stand over the body, hands remaining tightly clenched upon her pistol, positioned in readiness over the traitor she had just felled, as though she bore her transition from judge to executioner quite handedly.
To Rina's body, Kelly said, "At least I shoot before I talk."
Long minutes seemed to pass, with Kelly standing perfectly still over the empty shell that used to be Rina-P101. Kelly continued to aim her pistol at the dead woman's head, just making sure in case there was the rare off-chance that she would suddenly become re-animated and would attack once again. Not like that there was a chance of such a thing happening, but after such horrors like the Flood had been made known, it behooved one to account for all possibilities, no matter how outlandish they seemed.
Furan was running over to her, the Elite breathless with glee. She was trembling as she came up to Kelly's side, looking down at the felled soldier.
"This is her," Furan said. "This is the one who shot me."
The cauterized lined of knobbed flesh on Furan's neck seemed to be enunciated—Kelly could not help but glance at it.
"You're sure?"
Furan knelt next to the body. "I am not mistaken. I was fortunate enough to bear witness to those that hastened my downfall. Only fitting that I am there to witness theirs."
Kelly also dropped to a knee, but was not looking at Rina anymore. She was solely concentrating on Furan. The Elite didn't seem to notice the newfound attention until several seconds had elapsed. She looked over, eyes blinking in confusion.
"That was a foolish thing you did," Kelly said. "Taking on a Spartan with the minimal weaponry and armor you had." There was a tender pause, then she added, "Thank you."
The apology and the recipient of the apology seemed unsure of themselves in that moment. Almost as if they had no idea how to process such a thing.
"The same could be said for you," Furan gave a knowing nod after several seconds had elapsed. "Attacking an enemy armed with a long-range weapon while you only had armaments for short to medium range."
"The terrain helped in my favor."
"So it seemed." Furan then looked down and gave a slight start. "You're wounded."
Kelly tracked Furan's gaze and spied what had caught the Elite's attention. She had completely forgotten about being nicked by Rina's rifle. Blood was dripping to the ground in a thin drizzle—her leg was practically soaked from all the bleeding. The pain had receded to a dull simmer at this point—she could have honestly forgotten about the whole thing. After all, she had been through worse.
"Yes, evidentially," Kelly said as mildly as one would intone when discussing the weather. She reached to her belt and withdrew a biofoam canister. It did not feel like an artery had been nicked, but the bleeding needed to be stopped in order for there to be one less thing for her to worry about. She unfolded the canister's nozzle and inserted it into her wounds. The coagulant made a hissing noise as it entered the channel in Kelly's leg and expanded. Biofoam was uncomfortable to withstand—she gave a shiver. It felt like a thousand insects were gnawing on her muscle, but only for a few seconds. The pain subsided into a serene relief, a rather narcotic sensation.
There was still plenty of biofoam left. Kelly folded the nozzle back up and reattached the canister to her belt. She would have to spend an hour or two on the Nighthawk digging out any of the bullet fragments from her body, but at least this way she could continue to stay out in the operating theater without further concern for her health.
She returned her attention to Rina's body. Kelly reached over and thumbed the activation switch to the armor restraint disc that still clung to the traitor's arm. The disc released with a magnetic hum and Rina's fingers slackened upon her sniper rifle.
Kelly lifted the rifle up and examined it. It was an exquisite piece, capable of firing faster than the standard sniper rifle while being able to fire heavier rounds. She slotted it into a spare weapons rail along her back.
"Shame to let it go to waste," she said to Furan, who simply shrugged, having no interest in utilizing human-made weapons any more than she needed to.
But Kelly was not done with Rina. Not yet. She opened the access panel on Rina's arm, revealing a tiny ten-digit pad. From memory, she keyed in a failsafe code—even though MJOLNIR armor could be reprogrammed, it was still a tall order trying to tamper with hardcode commands embedded directly into the software. As expected, the armor accepted the code and began a thirty-second countdown. Upon its conclusion, the fusion reactor in Rina's armor would overload with the force of a pocket-nuke. It was not out of spite that Kelly did this, but it was better to be safe than sorry when leaving personnel lying around with proprietary technology.
"What did you just do?" Furan asked with worry, noting the numbers counting down on the small display.
Kelly shrugged. "Might've armed the power cells in the armor to overload. Blast has got a ten-meter radius, though. We should probably move."
The two scampered away from the area, back towards the homestead, with room to spare. The power pack detonated in a blinding flash that shook the earth and rattled their teeth, resulting in a small mushroom cloud that gently rolled up to the sky.
"Even in death, nothing about Spartans is subtle," Furan observed as she wheeled around to look at the rising cloud of smoke.
"Hammer and scalpel all at once," Kelly said. "Think of us as a regular Swiss army knife."
"A what-kind-of-knife?"
"Forget it." She then referenced a new set of datapoints on her map and indicated a location to the southeast. "Managed to grab some nav data when connecting to Rina's armor. Seems she parked her ship in a nearby forest. Worth a look. It might contain another record of Phoenix's transit."
"Agreed," Furan said. "Perhaps there I'll be able to find my armor, as well."
It was a mile hike to the spot that Kelly had indicated. They transgressed through lowcut fields of wiregrass and bloodweed. The gently oscillating horizon shimmered where the sun touched it, except the areas in the distance where rain clouds hung, dispensing their payload like a long tongue of soot to obscure all from view.
They crossed into the woods, now surrounded in the forest of the ancients. The dim outline of a Pelican was soon observable through the thin shroud of thorny vines. Its rear hatch was open, as if it were expecting visitors. More than likely Rina had expected to have completed her objective and would have been back onboard the vessel without her would-be victims even knowing this ship was here. Life had a funny way of not going according to plan sometimes.
As they stepped inside, the two of them noted that the interior was quite sparse. Half of the bay seats had been ripped out to make room for dark forest green crates of some kind. Kelly cracked the first one open—it was filled to the brim of boxes of ammunition. But of course.
"Ship drive's up front," Kelly said as she flipped open a few more boxes as she idly made her way towards the cabin door. Behind her, Furan was doing the same thing on the opposite side of the ship. "We'll rip it out after taking inventory. Armitage will examine it, see what is—"
She cut herself off as she opened the final crate. The lingering click of heavy plastic from the top swinging back onto the crate's side rattled hollowly within the Pelican. Kelly just looked inside for a period of several seconds, the immediate objective forgotten.
Furan turned around, midway through opening the closest crate on her end. "Find anything?"
Kelly slowly reached inside the container. "Yes," she rasped. "Yes, I did."
She brought her hand back out. Gripped tightly in her gauntlet was a curved shoulder pauldron, so exquisitely designed that it would have been at home among glass sculptures in an art museum. It was polished to a high sheen and glowed with electric blue crystals inlaid into the armor, the hue sapphire-deep.
Kelly had seen such pieces of armor before, though they were uncommon sights on the battlefield. Most Elites she had killed tended to wear common armor configurations in shades of blue or red. Sometimes, she would even come across a black-suited Elite—a Special Ops warrior. But this piece of armor was not any of those colors. It was a sharp silver color, so spackled clean that it almost resembled a mirror.
Furan stared at the piece of armor that Kelly gripped in a hand, her composure stiffening. She did not try to claim the armor as hers, but neither did she deny it. She just stood within the bay of the Pelican… and stared.
Kelly tightened a breath and tried not to let the motion of her empty hand shift to her holster so obviously.
"I believe," she said, "further explanations are in order… Shipmaster."
A/N: I figure that a lot of people have their own interpretations of how a Spartan v. Spartan fight would play out, given the right circumstances. How it's going to work in Rabbit Zero-Eight-Seven, as you just read, is that each separate fight is all going to have their own distinct feel to them. I'm not going to throw the kitchen sink at the audience every time Kelly comes across another Spartan, because that would just be exhausting to read. At the same time, I don't want it to seem like the fights are just like just a bunch of drunk ex-football players clumsily trying to hit each other while dressed in mo-cap suits (*crickets*). To keep things fresh, I'll be throwing new wrinkles into the story, changing up the fighting styles here and there, all so that Rabbit Zero-Eight-Seven remains an intriguing read from start to finish.
So, what does that all mean, really? It means that I still have plenty curveballs up my sleeve. Don't get too complacent, now.
Playlist:
Homestead Approach / The Beacon
"The Med Bay"
Jed Kurzel
Alien: Covenant (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Meet P101 / Fields Ablaze (Rina's Theme)
"They're Still Out There"
Mac Quayle
The Last of Us: Part II (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Water Tower / Draw Down
"The Darklands"
Daniel Pemberton
King Arthur: Legend of the Sword (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
