IX: Dispatched
"Excuse Me, You Dropped This"


Odarferr was a bleak, desolate place. The kind of world dreamt about in nightmares. Utterly bereft of greenery or major aquatic body, the backdrop of the planet was awash in hues of gray and brown. Paper mountains in the distance the color of soot lay shrouded below a veil of alien clouds, not even allowing the palest streak of sunlight to puncture through. The ground was a thick and chalky clay broken up by shale boulders that lay shattered and broken as if they had fallen from a great height. The endless peaks and valleys loped on upon this vast hinterland, barely providing the faint inhabitants a glimpse at the curvature of this world, for it was a formless ball that had yet to be sanded away with the erosion of time, its very appearance a deterrent to those who gazed upon it.

The only reason that Odarferr was even breathable was because the UNSC had run a terraforming operation here at the onset of its colonization age. The pursuit of resources was the obvious goal, something that Odarferr was not lacking in. For fifty years, five different atmospheric processing plants had worked tirelessly to purify the atmosphere to the point where one could step outside without a helmet and not gag from the sulfur fumes. It had been a sizeable investment in both materials, time, and money, which indicated that the UNSC was quite serious about recouping its investment in the planet.

Unfortunately, that investment would never be completely paid.

The realities of terraforming in such a wild galaxy were always stacked against the investors. Ninety percent of endowments usually had amounted to nothing—it was the other ten percent that had made absolute killings, whether from the fact that the worlds they colonized were absurdly abundant in resources to the point where someone could trip over mineral deposits without ever intending to look for one, or they were able to leverage leases of prime real estate that they had acquired to other willing companies, that enabled this constant cycle of hopeful prospectors looking to strike it rich. The reasons that colonies or planetary leases failed were too numerous to count: the environment was more inhospitable than expected, the funds for the company had been expended before they could gain critical mass with their investment, an unknown virus or bacteria had wiped out the colonist populace, or bureaucratic red tape for one reason or another managed to grind all operations to a halt.

Odarferr's colonist operations had actually not succumbed to any of those reasons. In the end, it was just bad luck that had befallen the planet and the legion of hopefuls that had bound themselves to it.

With an environment as contaminated as Odarferr's was, it took two more terraforming plants than normal in order to reach the optimum rate of planetary cooling. Five billion extra credits had added to the initial expenditures purely from that particular necessity. Not an easy thing to pay off quickly. And it certainly wouldn't be quick—planetary terraforming was considered a thirty to forty-year affair. Odarferr's had been going on for fifty and the work still had not been completed. Investors came and went as the money dried up time after time and corporate confidence in the world grew lower and lower.

Bad timing, of all things, finally spelled the end in Odarferr's total investment. While vast sums of money had been burnt trying to get this world up off the ground, other worlds, ones that were more habitable like Draco III and Biko, had yielded faster success rates in their terraforming operations, not to mention that the planets themselves were naturally more conducive to life, contained more resources, and were thus more appealing to colonists. Add in the fact that new worlds that were already fertile, like Eridanus II and Reach, were being discovered seemingly on a monthly basis and also drew heads away from the open colonist pool, it was no wonder that prospectors and wildcat rig operators found themselves lured away to calmer pastures. Within weeks, interest in Odarferr shriveled.

The UNSC and the world's latest owner, a conglomerate based in Singapore, would not give up from this massive cash sink that they had on the books, though. Odarferr was still rich in natural resources, though not as wealthy as many of the other planets discovered around the other colonies. Terraforming was still proceeding, albeit at a very slow and protracted pace.

This meant, when the Covenant eventually arrived to Odarferr, with the Banished following dutifully after the former's collapse, the UNSC had been wary of withdrawing from any location in which it had any vested commercial interest. Perhaps prophetically, the Covenant had sensed the planet's relative unimportance and had sent what amounted to a token invasion force to pacify the human resistance. The UNSC, having given up dozens of worlds at this point, had been desperate for any sort of victory, so they had taken steps to implement a permanent garrison on Odarferr, as sort of a demonstration that human persistence could lead to triumph on the battlefield. The thinking was that such a win would result in an easy spin for the media to dole out to the masses, which would boost recruiting, which would encourage consumer spending, the whole nine yards. The Covenant took beatings throughout the Odarferr campaign, as did the UNSC, but both sides took care to keep their forces replenished, neither side willing to lose ground on this particular conflict, though neither of them fully committed to a full force that could either maintain a permanent advantage upon the field. It was a war as significant as a speck of sand in the cosmic sense, but to those on that world, their sense of the grander scale would be lost as the days blurred ever on as they fought for their lives.

The Odarferr Skirmish had started in 2534. It was still continuing to this day.


Odarferr
Camp Parham

Kelly and Furan walked down the ramp of the idling Nighthawk, which rose and sealed shut behind them as soon as they were clear. The two of them strode across the landing pad, a weapon each in hand. Kelly was gripping Oathsworn in a tight gauntlet, while Furan had been appropriated a pair of heavy pistols. Kelly had figured that the Elite could be trusted enough to handle a little extra firepower, though she would never admit out loud that she knew that having a helping hand could not hurt her chances of survival out here.

In Kelly's left hand, a small chip rested atop her palm, which made her look like she was panhandling. The chip had an empty hole in the middle, the inside of which was surrounded by a small band of crystal lighting, which were currently emitting Armitage's avatar less than half a foot high. It made Kelly look even more gigantic than she was as she effectively carted the AI around, as if she were the titular kaiju in the innumerable film franchises that promoted collateral damage first and character development second.

Armitage had his hands folded behind his back as he surveyed the scene before them. Camp Parham was a borderline dump, a far cry from the well-coordinated and comparatively pristine base they had seen on Vona. A thin drizzle hazed the air and made the rest of the parked ships on the landing pad shimmer and glisten. Wooden boards and ripped-out starship floor grating had been arranged as pathways atop rivers of mud, the raised platforms so dirt-streaked that the color had overwhelmed and caked in layers atop them. The mud was the consistency of paste, having been routinely drenched by the foul-smelling rain.

Filth-splattered Warthogs rested at uneven angles at the motor pool to their right. A Scorpion without treads sat gathering rust. Several different ships of various makes and models were aimlessly dispersed upon the landing pad, their engines cold and quiet.

Harsh whistling noises followed by dull but forceful thumps caught the attention of the trio over to their left. Through the blackened mists, they could see blobs of arcing plasma weave in and out through the clouds overhead like knitting needles. The projectiles seemed to freeze in the air before they plummeted back down, superheating the air around them in conical displays before they smashed into the ground, which sent out shockwaves of molten rock and arcing electricity.

Wraith rounds, Kelly noted. Staring at the battlefield before her, she could see at least five more arcs of the superheated liquid rise up almost in unison like flares. The rounds all fell short of the entrenched perimeters that the UNSC had put up, but the array of thundering noises from their subsequent detonations were enough to shake the ground.

The main front was a network of trenches, each one bolstered by walls of rotting wood to keep the valleys of mud from collapsing in on the men hunkered within them. Soldiers in various stages of undress fired machineguns into the waterlogged night, their tracer rounds sparking off into nothingness. Others fired motors, not even bothering to cover their ears as their monitored tubes burped split-second flames and watched as the high-ex and white phosphorous rounds met the ground in scintillating bursts of brilliant heat, hitting absolutely nothing. It was a kind of tit-for-tat play with the Banished, it seemed.

Neither side looked like it was dealing much in casualties at this very moment, but Kelly knew that damage had already been dealt to these soldiers. Most could not cope in being in such close proximity to combat for so long. These men and women weren't Spartans, they had breaking points. More achievable breaking points, at least. She wondered how long they had been here. If this unit had not been rotated out in a while, there was a good chance that the majority of the company had already developed symptoms of PTSD.

Kelly and Furan were still standing underneath the slight awning the Nighthawk provided, allowing for a little protection against the rain. A stiff breeze blew moisture into Kelly's helmet, which beaded there and eventually dribbled down her reflective front.

"They've been here a while." Furan had come to the same observation about the soldiers.

"Yes," Armitage agreed, still standing upon Kelly's palm. "And no doubt suffering the psychological consequences from their residency here."

Kelly adjusted her grip upon Oathsworn in her right hand. "That just means that the situation hangs on a knife's edge."

Furan lifted an arm, gesturing towards the maze of trenches towards the front.

"Your plan is to go into that?"

"Not much choice," Kelly said. "There's a good chance a commanding officer will be there, or someone that knows where they are. Everyone's FOFs are all turned off—I can't hone in where the command post is." She looked toward the Elite. "Speaking of which, you still have yours?"

With a jangling of metal, Furan hooked a thumb around the chain upon which the FOF card dangled. Colonel Scheben's gift was still being put to good use.

Kelly nodded, having received her answer. "You'll need it here. I can attest to that."

Crossing his arms, Armitage looked up at the Spartan that held him. "Searching for evidence of Phoenix's whereabouts is going to be tricky. Do you even have the slightest inkling of what you're looking for?"

"Anything from incontrovertible proof to whispered rumors," the Spartan said.

"And if we find neither?"

The Spartan just levelled a long look at Armitage. It was clear that she did not even want to broach that possibility right now.

Armitage gave a sigh in a manner that Kelly found disconcerting. It was just so strange seeing an AI exhibit such tics that held no use for them other than to drive reactions from their human creators. It all felt manufactured to a degree that Kelly could not place.

"Right," the AI rubbed his hands as he turned around, facing forward. "Clearly I'm among company in this band of pessimists."

"Don't make me regret bringing you along," Kelly snapped. "I'm going to slot you in, now."

"Yes, you've dawdled long enough on that, anyway. Hurry up, time's a-wasting."

Armitage's avatar then drew up to the width of a pencil before disappearing in a burst of sapphire light. Kelly now appeared to be holding just a chip in her hand. She then took the chip and placed it between her thumb and index finger. Catching Furan's eye, she gave a brief shake of her head.

"I can't believe I agreed to this," Kelly groused.

She then reached over and found the slot at the back of her helmet. Firmly, she pushed the chip in.

John had once told her that the sensation of an AI interfacing with neural implants felt like someone was pouring cold mercury into your head. Kelly did not find that to be true at all. Armitage's intrusion felt like someone was crudely sticking a metal spike past the soft matter of her inner ear to reach her brain. Her balance twisted and she nearly stumbled. Her vision fogged, which she had to blink away. The Spartan coughed.

"You haven't done this much, I take it?" Armitage's clipped voice seemed to say inside her mind.

She gave a grunt and muted her external speakers. It was just the two of them for the moment.

"First time," she said.

"Oh? Lucky me."

Kelly ignored the quip as she switched her external speakers back on. "Let's go," she said to Furan, and gripped her shotgun in two hands. Her hand unconsciously dropped to brush the PXX machinepistol that she had holstered at her waist.

The two proceeded to descend the small hill where the Nighthawk was parked and headed towards the sound of shelling. Bombarding plasma and metal erupting became more and more perceptible to the ear as they started their journey down into the trenches, almost as if they were dutybound specters en route to the underworld.

The lip of surface now rose several feet above their head. Flares sparked golden orange light amidst the smoke and fog above them. There was now a deadly glow in the corner of the sky, some kind of uncontrolled fire sparking fury in the distance. Occasionally, dirt and mud would filter over the side, as if the walls were minutes from giving way. More wood and metal reinforced the ground and sides, and several of the fortifications had been bolstered with sandbags. Sporadic gunfire sparked off into the night—machineguns and sniper bullets blitzing off into the vast plain of nothingness before them. It was hard to tell what the soldiers here were shooting at, but Kelly seriously doubted that anything was actually being hit.

Kelly and Furan gently pushed their way through the soldiers. The Spartan was actually surprised to see that none of them were at all balking at the Elite in their midst, but these men and women all looked like they had been through hell. Their unwashed faces were all exhausted, and some were already exhibiting thousand-yard-stares. They were sleeping in cots dug into the walls barely large enough to hold a man. Filth covered all of their belongings—no doubt infestation was plentiful. Some of them were hunched over portions of food, which from a distance appeared as a brown sludge. Perhaps they were just too tired to care about Furan, who was quite obviously not posing as a threat by being in Kelly's shadow.

The constant siege had done a number on the available equipment as well. The closer they got to the front, Kelly could see parts of Hornets sticking out of the mud off in the distance. Wrecked vehicles edged over the trenches and down into the no-mans-land, fluid still dripping from their engines and collecting in putrid pools down in the manmade gorges.

There were more hissing noises. Kelly looked up and beheld three different parachute flares that reflected in her visor, white and incandescent in the night sky. Her rain-speckled armor glistened as if had just been polished, the blue of her plating appearing washed out and pale.

The two moved along, lit by the battle among them. Mortar rounds screamed over their heads the whole while. Kelly pushed aside a tangle of barbed wire fence that had dropped into the trenches. It was phantasmagoric, almost hallucinatory. The pyrotechnics were relentless, ever chugging along in the background, the ground never ceasing its stuttering and rumbling.

Kelly hooked a right down a trench that ran parallel to the front. She stopped a soldier whose uniform was out of sorts. "Where's the CO?" she asked him gently.

The man wobbled on his feet as if he was drunk. It did not seem to register that he was talking to a Spartan several heads taller than he was—he couldn't even keep his own head up. Kelly noted that the man's hands were shaking and that his lips were faintly moving.

Damn it, Kelly thought. PTSD. This man needed to be taken to a hospital immediately. But she knew she did not have time for that, nor did she know where the nearest field hospital was. And on a place like this, the only good facility for treating someone in this kind of state was offworld, on the next UNSC frigate that would come into orbit overhead.

"He's gone, Petty Officer," Armitage said. "He's not going to respond to you. Nothing you can do for him."

"Shut up," Kelly snapped.

She carefully sat the man down on a nearby crate, out of danger from being barreled over by his mates, before she moved on again.

The Spartan asked a few more soldiers on the location of their commanding officers, but they all gave her nothing but silence. Most of them were shellshocked, their faces pale and their muscles taut by some unknown fear. Others were simply listless—they sagged on the mud-splattered floor, mired in a fueled stupor. Kelly knelt down to examine a few of them and gently moved their heads around. Their eyes refused to focus onto her. Drool leaked from the corners of their mouths. They mumbled incoherently. Around here, the trenches were filled with bodies just lying prone in the same state, a complete fugue in which their bodies had all seemed to cease working entirely, though their more coherent comrades simply stepped over them like this was business as usual, as though this was nothing to despair at.

Kelly approached one of the prone bodies and rolled them over—their head had been in a puddle of filthy water and she was worried he was drowning. His labored breaths blistered past his dripping head as the Spartan pulled him free of the muck. She helped sit him up and shined a light into his pupils from her helmet—they refused to contract.

"Pharmacologic effect," Furan said behind her, observing the same.

"Yeah," Kelly breathed, still staring intently into the dazed soldier's face. "Hallucinogenic of some kind. Dissociative state, catalepsy. Whatever it is, it's powerful." She then surveyed down the trench, noting the dozens of bodies slumped in their boneless poises. "Habit-forming, from the looks of it."

"They cannot help us, Spartan. Just as you can't help him."

Kelly refused to take her eyes off the man in front of her, but knew the Elite was right. She stood up after putting the soldier in a corner somewhere that he would not be trampled just like she had done for the man before this one. They continued on in their seemingly fruitless search for a CO, passing by gun emplacement after gun emplacement, where fifty-caliber machineguns roared in calamitic unison.

She muted her external speakers again. "Does the UNSC know this is happening?" she asked into the safety of her helmet.

"If they did," Armitage spoke, "do you think they would have let this continue?"

"It wouldn't be the first time soldiers would be sacrificed in a pointless conflict," she murmured.

As they walked, they started to come across a crowd of men and women that were more lucid. Kelly's boots knocked around a few empty bottles. It seemed like the soldiers here had found the liquor stash.

One such soldier leered at Furan as they passed. He was holding a submachine gun in one hand and a beer in the other.

"Goddamn hinge-head," he spoke loud enough over the never-ending bombardment. His words had a noticeable slur to them. "You bastards couldn't just stop screwing with us for one night, could you? You think you're so high and mighty—"

Kelly shot a quick look over at Furan and shook her head. Furan gave a nod of acknowledgement, which relieved Kelly greatly. The last thing they needed was this particular powder keg erupting all around them. She worried about the Elite being pushed around or harassed beyond reason, but even Furan seemed to think that one drunken soldier was hardly worth caring about. She could deal with this… so far.

The soldier in question was starting to realize that his ravings were not producing the reactions he was intending, so he started to raise his submachine gun, but Kelly quickly reached out and grabbed the barrel before he could even lift it halfway. With little effort, the Spartan jerked the weapon out of the man's hands and casually tossed it up over the ridge, out into no-mans-land.

The drunken soldier's eyes hopelessly tracked his wayward weapon before it disappeared over the rim.

"You bitch!" he bemoaned, but there was just as much surprise in his utterance as there was anger.

With surprising quickness, he took the only object he had left in his hands—his beer can—and hurled it at the Spartan. It harmlessly bounced against Kelly's chestpiece and clattered to the ground.

"Nice," Kelly rasped. She then reached out and gave the man's forehead a gentle shove. His balance ruined, the soldier's arms pinwheeled before he fell flat on his ass, brown water spraying out when he hit the ground.

They left the drunk struggling to get back to his feet. They continued to move past gun positions where the entrenched weapons proceeded to shoot at nothing but shadows upon the barren wasteland. Portable radios around were blaring some sort of hard-hitting music, acting as a soundtrack to the perturbed night. Kelly recognized the genre as 'flip,' a sort of descendent from rock music from the twentieth century. She decided that she did not care for it much.

Another soldier, one of the gunners, staggered out from his pillbox and back into the chaos of the trenches, a lit stub clenched between two fingers. He noticed the Spartan, decked in her pale blue armor, and a wide smile spread across his face.

"What have we here? Aren't you a sight for sore eyes, ma'am! I tell you, tall chicks—mm! Can't resist them. How long have you been planetside, baby? You're not going to find anyone else on this sorry shithole who's better than me in the sack. You game, honey? You game?"

Kelly did her best to ignore the man, but the gunner was walking backwards in his lanky gait, that Cheshire-cat grin refusing to leave his face.

"Silent type, huh? That's cool. I respect that. I really do. It's just… you're all proportioned in the right ways, girl. Gawd damn, I bet you're hot under that thing. You know what? Screw it, I'm going all in on you. Honest to jeezus, I'd break every chair in the world just to have you sit on my—"

Truthfully, the second the man had opened his mouth, Kelly had been barely listening to him, so his desperate ramblings had fallen on completely deaf ears. The gunner was short of selling all that he owned to have the Spartan even take a cursory glance in his direction. However, because had been walking backwards the whole time, he was therefore surprised when all of a sudden, he tripped on one of his mates that was sprawled out across the floor of the trench. He fell hard and his head bounced off the ground. The lit joint in his hands flew out from open fingers and sizzled as it was extinguished into a nearby puddle. Kelly stepped over the groaning gunner, having never broken stride.

"That's the thing!" the gunner managed to blurt out just as Kelly's boots stomped on either side of his head, continuing to lie where he had fallen. "I just want to be loved, baby!"

The aggravating music was getting louder the further they got. Fights between the soldiers were now commonplace. Machinegun fire was general. Heaps of equipment were now on fire, the massive black smoke clouds extending towards infinitude towards the starless sky.

Out in no-mans-land, Kelly could spy one such Marine march out into the jagged expanse, completely naked. He held a ripped-out helmet radio in his hands and he was shouting something into it as he walked further and further towards the enemy.

Another magnesium flare went off in the distance. Kelly knocked upon the ceiling beam of the nearest pillbox, gaining the attention of the machinegun's gunner and spotter, and pointed out to where the naked man was screaming as he stood out in the quagmire. "What's he doing out there?"

The two soldiers took a glance out of the pillbox slit and shrugged like this was a regular occurrence for them. "Danger close, man. Airstrikes."

Kelly took stock of the battlefield, at the smoke-choked plain. "How can he see where he's aiming the strike? He knows the grid zone coordinates off the top of his head?"

The spotter gave a hazed laugh.

"He ain't aiming at the enemy, man."

Now the naked soldier was raising his arms high above his head. There was a rumbling noise that sounded metallic, not quite like thunder but close enough. In the next few moments, the entire landscape before them erupted in a sea of fiery napalm and the entire front was galvanized of anything that was alive. A brilliant tremor shook the front, and the Marines all erupted into cheers.

The soldier who had called in the strike had been jumping up and down the whole time the bombardment had been going off. The strike had missed him (barely), but he didn't seem to care as he was also now whooping and hollering upon the sight of the inferno, his body a black outline against it. Heat waves blistered in the chilled night, and for a moment even the faint volcanos of erupting plasma in the distance seemed like quaint disturbances.

The spotter laughed again. "Crazy son of a bitch." He settled back against the wall of the pillbox, the napalm bombardment only warranting half a minute of entertainment.


"I don't know what it is you want, okay?! I'm waiting for my relief, can't you see? I can't answer your questions!"

They found the CO, or the closest thing to them, cowering in a bunker that had been dug out rather unintelligently close to the front line. Kelly suspected that either someone on that drug compound she had witnessed earlier had the bright idea to build the command post right next to where their subordinates were firing, or that the battle had gotten so out of control that it had come up to where the bunker had been built a while back.

The CO—a captain wearing no identification tags—was shivering in a chair in the post's conference area. Consoles with no techs in front of them displayed random variables and maps of the battlefield. A long briefing table in the center of the room was a large metal plinth, a digital touchscreen acting as the countertop, which was covered with several layers of dust and scattered datapads with darkened screens. The command staff was nowhere to be found, to Kelly's surprise. It was just them and the captain, who was in an inconsolable fit of some sorts at the moment.

Kelly stepped forward. For a second it looked like she was about to backhand the captain (a good hit to the head would shut him up), but reconsidered that notion and simply gripped the front of his stained uniform and hauled him to his feet.

"With respect, sir," her voice dripping with malice on the last word, "you may have information that I need to know. One or more Spartans were planetside within the past week. I need your override to access the IFF port logs so that I can ascertain their origin."

The captain looked lost and confused. He was not doped up like the others, judging by his nervous body movement, but he was so on edge from being under siege for so long that he was probably hours away from having a complete breakdown.

"The… t-the IFF port logs? What could you p-possibly want with those?"

"She just told you, human," Furan could not help from growling behind Kelly's shoulder.

"He pays attention well," Armitage commented in agreement.

Kelly tilted her head, trying to get the man to look only at her and to ignore the Elite behind them. "Captain, I need you to focus. I have Iota-level clearance from ONI to ensure that my mission gets accomplished without anything delaying it. Now, I'm asking you to provide me with your override so that I can check the ship nav logs you have here. My purpose for doing so is clandestine, but I can tell you that it is all for a matter of institutional security."

The captain's eyes dashed back and forth, comprehension slowly landing upon him.

"I… I can't…"

"If you refuse, I am obliged to tell you that I can legally commandeer your command on this planet."

"N-No…" the man pointed with a shaking hand towards the unibody console at the far end, which featured a single curved screen coupled with a quad matrix of smaller screens flanking it. "I mean… I actually can't. My staff… they executed General Order 098912X-7, Article 4, months ago. The viral data scavengers were activated. The log databases were purged and have not been writing any new data since."

Kelly's fist opened and the captain collapsed back down in his chair. She turned away from the man in a huff, too frustrated to actually continue the conversation right now.

Furan looked from the captain and to Kelly's back, once again in over her head. "What did he mean by that, Spartan?"

"They wiped the databases of all sensitive information," Kelly grimaced. "Including the flight logs." Menacingly, she turned back around to talk to the captain. "How did that happen?" she snapped.

The man adjusted himself in his seat, raised a shaking hand to his forehead, and finally mustered a limp shrug. "One of… one of my aides took something… ingested a substance that… well, that he probably shouldn't have taken—"

"From what we saw outside, it seems he was not the only one," Furan snidely interrupted. Kelly silently shushed her with a hand.

"—and in the middle of his… stupor, he came to the conclusion that our position was on the verge of being overrun. He panicked, and initiated the override before anyone could stop him."

"And where were you to stop his override?" Kelly asked. "That kind of an order should have required your authentication level to enact. How come one person was able to initiate the General Order?"

The captain's mouth was parted halfway, as though as he was only now coming to terms with how badly things had been screwed up in his little corner of the universe.

"I was… asleep. In my cot." He tried to disarm the tension with a crooked smile, but that did little to soften the blow. "And… our techs had cannibalized all of our software—they had started doing so years ago. They were tired of getting mired down in red tape, so they set up backdoors to get around passwords and approvals. They were getting the job done and they seemed to know what they were doing, so I never reported them."

"Don't worry, I'll be filing those reports on his behalf," Armitage flittered in Kelly's ears cheerily. "Throwing people under the bus is quite a lot of fun, don't you think?"

Kelly continued ignoring Armitage as she spoke to the captain. Her polarized visor seemed to churn as a continuously morphing outline, refusing all definition.

"No backups of the data? Is it too much to ask if there were any hard copies on hand?"

The captain seemed ready to immediately respond with an answer, but again halted before he could get the first syllable out, his eyes tracking upward in thought as if some long-stored bit of knowledge had just struck him like a lightning bolt.

"The auxiliary storage site," he straightened in his chair. "Over on the eastern front. There's a radio tower there that writes all data to a limited-space drive, about two weeks' worth of logs."

"Show me."

She pulled up a map of the area on her wrist-mounted computer and held it out for the captain to see. With a few moves of the cursor, a new NavPoint had been outlined twelve miles from their current position, due slightly southeast.

Kelly and Furan then headed for the door, but before they exited from the room, Kelly turned back around to address the captain.

"I know that you haven't been commanded to give up your position on this planet," she told him, "but from the little that I've seen today, you need to get help for your men. Many of them are sick and are in need of psychiatric and medical attention. They are malnourished, suffering from a lack of sleep, and are addicted to drugs. If you have no objections, I can authorize an immediate evacuation of the UNSC forces here. You won't be disobeying orders. The blowback from the brass will come back to me, not you. The situation here is causing more problems for the soldiers than it's worth and they should be given the chance to get out before more irreparable damage can take hold."

As she spoke, she watched the captain's face become rigid and solidified into a stern visage. When she had finished laying out her proposal, several seconds elapsed before the man broke out into nearly hysterical peals. He was clutching his belly from laughing so hard that Kelly and Furan shared a worried look, wondering if they had just seen the captain's mind implode in front of them.

"Oh, that's… that's inspired, Petty Officer," the captain said as he wiped tears from his face. "Leave Odarferr. Yes, that's… that's a good thing. Only one problem with that, though."

Kelly frowned. "And that is?"

The captain spread his hands wide, a crazed grin forming. "How exactly are we supposed to leave this place? No ships are in orbit now. Not much chance of a pickup for at least several weeks."

Nonplussed, Kelly glanced in the direction of the landing pad. "There are several spaceworthy ships up there that I saw. Several of them have slipspace capabilities, and you could make a few trips—"

The captain cut her off with a curt shake of his head. "Not going to work. Those ships can't leave the system."

"I don't understand."

"For starters, they don't have Shaw-Fujikawa drives."

Kelly resisted the urge to groan out loud. She almost betrayed a major tic with her body language, for hearing this news was almost enough for her to make a full-bore gesture of anger.

Still, she allowed herself to remain resolute. For now.

"None of them have drives?"

Sheepish, the captain tried shrugging again. "Not a one."

"That doesn't seem possible. How could you have five Shaw-Fujikawa drives break all at once? Were you not allocated enough OEM parts to fix them here?"

"No, no, no, no, you don't get it," the man frantically waved his hands. "The ships don't have the drives. As in, at all. They're empty. We don't have parts. We don't have the whole shebang."

This was just confusing Kelly more and more. She stepped back into the room, avoiding a shimmering trail of dust from the ceiling. A tender but deadlier quiet seemed to infect her and she seemed to occupy the room with a simmering presence.

"What happened to the drives, captain?"

The man now bore the expression like he had stared death in the face and had only come out the other side half the person he had been. "I was told… they had been sold."

"They had been sold," Kelly repeated tonelessly. "Sold… for what?"

The captain's next laugh was humorless, as though he was imagining his own public hanging. "Contraband, I gathered."

Kelly took another step. "And who were the drives sold to?"

This time, the captain never took his eyes off of the armored warrior.

"Again… I was told… that the drives had been sold to a Spartan."


Kelly and Furan headed back through the tunnels of the command post to the exit, forcing the barebones staff to press themselves flat against the wall as they passed each one in turn. Strings of lights sloppily linked bulbed lamps together upon the walls, the effect looking particularly ramshackle.

There were many questions racing through Kelly's mind. For starters, she still had no idea what had drawn Phaedra and the rest of Phoenix to Odarferr. The captain's revelation that the Shaw-Fujikawa drives had been pawned particularly disturbed her. Shaw-Fujikawa drives were not just any piece of equipment one could buy at a hardware store—they were sophisticated pieces of machinery that, under dire circumstances, could catastrophically overload if misused properly. Put simply, a malfunctioning drive could bite off a chunk of a Covenant dreadnought if it detonated. Had Phoenix explicitly come for those? And furthermore, how did Phoenix pay for them? What did they have that the Marines on this planet needed?

No… what did they want?

The captain's mirthless face floated into the dreamsphere of her mind. "Contraband, I gathered," his tired voice echoed.

Kelly stopped in the middle of the sloping hallway and raised a hand that went to Furan's sternum, an indication to halt. She then turned towards the Elite. "The ship parts the captain mentioned," she stated aloud. "They were bartered with illegal goods. Most likely the drugs that have been dispersed around the front."

"That would seem to track," Furan agreed.

"If Phoenix was the courier, then maybe those goods can help us narrow down our search. A scrap of evidence or something, I don't know. But it's worth a look. We need to find out where they're keeping that contraband."

They were soon back out into the madness of the ever-present battle up top. Kelly was placing herself in a more observant stance, her helmet sweeping back and forth as she studied the movements of the languid troops around her. Chattering all around them were tracers from .50 caliber bullets, and the cometary trails from surface-to-air missiles as they flew overhead towards their conflagrated fates. She disregarded these as nothing but distractions. White noise to be filtered out in accordance with her directives.

A dead white light from the multitude of flares that had dropped upon the valley and the surrounding hills temporarily caused the immediate surroundings to be immersed in a field of high-intensity but low contrast detail. Kelly came to a crossroads near the closest trench to no-mans-land—she noticed that there appeared to be far more Marines that were sober that were venturing to the left than there were who came in from that particular direction. It stood to reason that the leftmost path was where the troopers here were going to get their fix. And where there were drugs, no doubt the bulk of the contraband would also be in close proximity.

Rudely breaking her way through the crowd like a tiger amidst a sea of grass, Kelly headed in the direction the sober Marines were traveling, Furan in her immediate wake. Very soon, they came to another bunker, this one smaller than the command post, with a side entrance that was flanked by two rather steadfast-looking Marines. The rest of the soldiers were trailing around the corner—their ostensible dealing location, perhaps, while this particular entrance was left in the shadows and relatively devoid of any activity.

"Follow my lead," Kelly spoke to Furan.

"Yes," the Elite said dutifully.

They walked up to the two Marines; Kelly was holding her shotgun at waist height as she approached. The soldiers saw her coming and stiffened, partially blocking the doorway.

An orange-and-gray mortar burst columned into a fiery ball overhead, mimicking a sun upon Kelly's visor. She nudged her weapon in the direction of the door. "Move aside," she told the troopers. "I am exercising Iota-level clearance for access to this base's facilities, this bunker certainly qualifying."

The Marines, to their credit, did not so much as give an inch. "Apologies, Petty Officer," one said, his HUD bringing up her rank, "but we are under orders to not let anyone who isn't an armormaster into the munitions depot. All UNSC-clearances are to be recertified at the adjacent post to gain entry."

That was a baldfaced lie and Kelly knew it before the soldier could complete his sentence. The staff here had clearly come up with a half-baked story to ward off any prying eyes, but apparently they had forgotten that no munitions depot on a front line would ever be guarded so tightly. There was just no reason for the security, unless there was something inside that warranted hiding.

Kelly's visor affixed the soldier who had spoken with its unblinking gaze. "I'm afraid you've piqued my interest, now. Not only do I have the clearance to step inside that room, I would like to see what 'armaments' you have that requires such… careful handling."

The Marine smiled sympathetically, but his right hand began to drift down to his holster, where his pistol had been placed.

"With all due respect, ma'am, we can't let you do that. Now, we're going to have to ask you to leave before—"

As soon as Kelly saw the pistol leave the holster, she lashed out. The butt of her shotgun swung out, cobra-quick, and connected with the Marine's jaw, spinning him around one-hundred-and-eighty degrees. Blood and spit hurled out in a wild arc, whipped clear from the sheer force of the blow. He was unconscious before he even hit the ground. She had actually pulled her punch, in order to prevent from killing the man, but the blow had been hard enough to knock him unconscious in no time flat.

Half a second later, Furan sprung into action against the second Marine who was now starting to draw on Kelly too. The Elite's knee went up and drove the man's breath from his lungs as it sank deep into his stomach, cracking a couple of ribs in the process. Furan then turned the soldier around and launched him into the closed door, banging his helmeted head hard enough to make a dent in the rusted steel. He too collapsed to join his comrade.

Kelly quickly scanned the area. Cannonade and machineguns had completely overwhelmed the sounds of the scuffle—no one was running over to investigate.

"Could have been worse," Furan murmured as she straightened, not even winded from the effort.

"Could have been better," Kelly said.

The door to the 'munitions depot' was barred by a thick chain and a sturdy lock. Kelly just reached out and yanked on the chain until it shattered. She then pushed open the door and grabbed both bodies and dragged them inside. She found two pairs of handcuffs on the soldiers and proceeded to detain them against the supporting columns that held up the ceiling. The two men would be out for a while and were more than likely sporting concussions. They would live, though they would be a little humbled after today.

They were now free to examine the contents of the room. At first glance, the interior looked to be rather unassuming. It was set up as a basic storeroom, with wooden shelves stacked in rows that ringed around the rather small area. There was nothing sitting out that indicated that anything untoward was going on here, but Kelly knew that appearances could be deceptive.

"See if you can spot anything suspicious," Kelly told Furan. They then split up to tackle the opposite ends of the storeroom first.

Kelly rifled through the first couple of shelves that she came to. Nothing overtly questionable was here, just a few gourmet boxed and canned goods, most likely stored away for the officers. But these weren't the usual MREs, either. They were labelled with the logo for a boutique eatery, which comprised foodstuffs like flash-preserved foie gras, truffle deviled eggs, steak tartare, duck breast with cherry mostarda, along with several bottles of wine.

Just the mere possession of these items was enough to prove that misappropriation with the supply funds was occurring here, but Kelly was not looking to nail personnel with hoarding three-star meals for themselves. This was all immaterial. She needed more. She needed to connect Phoenix's presence here to their ultimate goal, whatever it happened to be.

And, a minute or so later, she had her proof.

Positioned in the dim central aisle in the corner of the shelf forest, it was in the form of a cloth-draped pylon that came up to Kelly's waist, shaped vaguely like some religious obelisk of yore. The tarp that covered whatever was underneath was dust-streaked and uneven, indicating that it had been withdrawn and replaced repeatedly. The Spartan spent not an additional second considering this misshapen object before reaching out and yanking the covering off.

Two military-grade crates had been stacked upon the other, the topmost one black and half the size of a fusion coil, while the bottommost one was forest green, the size of two footlockers melded together. There was no stenciling adorning either of the crates. She waved for Furan to come over and once the Elite was at her side did she open the smaller of the two crates.

Inside were clear plastic baggies completely stuffed with pills of three colors—red, white, and blue ampules that shone in the dim light. The pills had no markings on them. Kelly took one of the bags out and closed the case. She set the liberated bag atop the case and opened it up, withdrawing a singular pill. Carefully, she used her fingers to pry the capsule apart. A chalky white substance spilled from within, dusting the top of the container that had ferried it.

"The culprits in question," Kelly observed.

"Are you able to tell what type it is?"

"Not at first glance. We'll need a lab to effectively hone in on its chemical structure. Fortunately, the Nighthawk has one."

Kelly took a sampling of ten pills and placed them into a pouch in her armor. She then closed the baggie back up and replaced it in the container she had taken it from, but not after dusting off the compound that she had intentionally spilled upon the top.

Furan watched Kelly's movements. "You're not going to destroy them?" she asked, referring to the drugs.

The Spartan shook her head once. "No," she said definitively. "That will only create more problems than it will solve. The soldiers who are addicted could very well face withdrawal symptoms and some may even die from them if not properly treated. The facilities here are in no shape to treat so many soldiers coming down from the drug's pharmacological effects, so we have no choice to maintain the status quo."

She knew the words sounded hollow even as they were leaving her throat, but it was the truth. By herself, she could not help these men and women. It would be one thing to strap an incendiary grenade to the drug case, watch it detonate, and go "mission accomplished," but that was the naïve take of an idealist on how widespread issues could be tackled when the root cause was more sinisterly foundational.

The Elite seemed a bit skeptical of Kelly's decision, but she decided that the issue was not worth the argument.

Kelly patted the area where she had stashed the pills upon her thigh. "I am curious to see what the source of this epidemic is, though." She forced herself to come back to the present. "Later. We still need to go to that area the captain mentioned."

But there was still one more container to open. The fact that it had been lumped in with the drugs was a sign that the contents were either related, or that they had been part of the same shipment. It was all too suspect for Kelly to ignore.

She set the first crate of drugs aside and knelt down. With a click of the twin latches, the larger container's lip popped forward and then lifted open.

Kelly remained still as she looked down to see what was inside. In all honesty, what was there was not at all what she had been expecting to see.

A collection of emerald green ceramic plates had been carefully organized and positioned in such a way that they resembled a human anatomical structure, albeit condensed together to fit the confines of the crate that it had been placed in. The plates had a dull sheen to them and were fitted over a suit of armored alloy. A darkened power pack upon the torso piece jutted out—a shield generator. And capped atop all of that was a helmet with a golden visor, twin airducts at the jaw, and two triangular brims that extended over the visor like a cap that had been partially sawn in two.

"Not the sort of contraband one usually finds," Kelly noted almost sardonically as she lifted up the helmet and dusted the visor off with a hand.

She recognized the variant of the MJOLNIR armor right away. It was Mark V armor—the first of the MJOLNIR to incorporate energy shields into its systems. This particular example was on the GEN1 equipment system, however there was no way to tell what BIOS the suit was running unless she turned it on. She would need the Nighthawk to give the suit some juice, for the suit was most likely dead, hence its undignified storage location here.

There was an odd sort of sentimentality that befell Kelly as she turned the helmet around in her hands, looking for any identification towards its previous owners, as if there had been a ledger left behind to indicate such a thing. The style of the armor was almost exactly like the first MJOLNIR exoskeleton that she had ever utilized. Just looking at the helmet brought back memories of nervousness and exhilaration—those fateful seconds just after powerup where she was testing out the armor, hoping that her reinforced bones would be enough to take the massive stress that the polymerized lithium niobocene layer placed upon them when enhancing her reaction times. She remembered being so tense that she could pluck a muscle strand and have it twang like a guitar string, only to fall into relief and wonderment when the suit had proved to be a flawless marriage of its own cybernetic capabilities with her already dominant reflexes and training. If she had felt powerful back then, the suit only made her feel invincible.

"More collateral that had been exchanged?" Furan asked, referring to the armor.

Kelly placed the helmet back, her fingers lingering atop the covering for half a second longer than she had initially intended. She then noticed something shining in the corner of the crate and bent back down to pick it up.

It was a piece of nanolaminate armor, colored a deep silver, that looked half of a mandible guard. A piece that matched the half-formed ensemble that had been brought on board the Nighthawk, for instance. Seems Phoenix had thrown in a little trinket to sweeten the deal.

"That, and more," Kelly said as she handed the mandible guard for Furan to examine.

The Elite positioned the armor between a thumb and forefinger, examining it curtly in the yellow-orange glare of the sodium lighting. She brought the piece up to her own mandibles—it was a perfect fit.

"Indeed," Furan hissed.


The two of them made a quick stop back at the Nighthawk before heading out to the western front. Kelly had refused to leave the MJOLNIR armor behind and had loaded it onto a smart cart, which trailed behind the Spartan like a dutiful hound, the individual motors in its wheels happily whirring away as it jiggled atop the uneven ground as they made distance from the storeroom.

The ramp to the prowler had opened just long enough for the cart to wheel itself on board before it shut and locked itself again. Kelly and Furan stood watch the whole time, ensuring that, for whatever reason, no crazed member of the platoon here would make a sudden break for the ship in an attempt to leave this madhouse. Kelly would have sympathized with the effort, considering all that was going on around here, but she was in no mood to deal with any more unstable troopers in an enclosed environment. That was just a recipe for disaster, right there.

They then headed over to the motor pool to find a vehicle that was still functional (or if its parts also hadn't been pawned off, yet). Luck was on their side—they found an intact Razorback, which was essentially a stripped-down Warthog meant to ferry supplies. Kelly took the driver's seat. Furan claimed the one beside her.

The drive proceeded in relative silence. All around them, though, things were going to hell in a handbasket. The road they were on had been well-traveled, but the Razorback was still bouncing along as if its shock absorbers had rusted themselves stiff—Kelly had to yank the wheel several times to avoid crashing headlong into a blownaway stump.

They were now traveling through the remains of a forest—the trees were blackened and smoldering skeletons underneath a sky of burnt amber. The raw ground cracked as the wide tires ran over it. Styluses of smoke came ramrod straight into the air from the trees that were still burning. Ball lightning seemed to blister off in the distance at first glance, but Kelly would soon realize that she was looking at the terrible detonations of artillery shells.

Coral stalks of fulgurite rose in their tormented stalks all around them, the soil having been fused into these strange shapes by the heat of explosions and plasma. The wasteland rose and fell in its cratered pan, the road now getting thinner and the night getting thicker. They could see other fires burning in the valley, ragged dots canvassing the mountains to the south.

Kelly kept on checking the position of the marker she had denoted on her HUD. In the span of one of those moments when she looked up to check her compass, she nearly ran the Razorback into the side of a tank.

"Spartan!" Furan yelped as she gripped the dashboard for dear life.

Kelly snapped to just in time and hit the brakes at the same time she angled the wheels to the right. The Razorback skidded to a stop, inches from the dark and lumbering Scorpion that rolled through a scorched thrush of bushes and thorns, which emitted a great crackling noise as the treads flattened the foliage. The main barrel atop the turret belched concussive fire and smoke, the vibrations so intense the occupants of the truck could feel them pulverize through the fluid of their bodies.

"Think we made it," Kelly said dryly to break the spell. Furan just shot her a look.

They followed the Scorpion at a safe distance, now noticing that they were in the middle of an armor column of at least four other tanks around them in close proximity. All of the Scorpions were firing at something off in the distance, the 90mm rounds threatening to knock the tanks back a foot with each firing of the main barrel. The Marines placed within the machinegun turrets upon the tanks were all too happy to fill the empty space with redhot shards of lead shaped to the size of 7.62mm bullets.

When it looked like they were reaching another network of trenches to the right, Kelly pulled over and parked the Razorback under a tarp next to a prefab supply station. The fleet of Scorpions rumbled their way by behind them, the darkness shrouding their giant black outlines so that only glimpses through the dead forest could be discerned, but their growling engines and gnawing treads could still be heard through the nebulous veil.

The riders dismounted, found their armaments again, and headed off in the direction of the NavPoint.

They had not proceeded perhaps two minutes into the division camp before they realized that things here had gotten out of hand quite badly, even worse than they had seen at the first camp.

The soldiers here were in an even more dire state than the Spartan could have initially believed. The men and women here were exhibiting the same symptoms of PTSD and addiction, but there was quite a lot of evidence that they had been mired in this state for far longer than their comrades in the other valley. Fires from oil barrels illuminated the slicked torsos of the humans that wandered around in a daze, their eyes lobed red coals in the thrumming night. The corrugated bones of their ribs all seemed to stick out in manic proportions, almost as if they were walking skeletons. They seemed half-awake, trapped in some zombified state.

Kelly and Furan continued their descent into the division, a land worthy of Sodom and Gomorrah. Several times, they noticed soldiers walking around with necklaces draped with Grunt fingers or Elite mandibles. Some had even taken to adorning Jackal ears upon their armor. They chewed on the fleshy objects, as though to keep their jaws working. A cluster of troopers sat around a fire, passing around a Grunt mask they had fashioned into substance filtration device, a silken vapor rising from the interior of the covering. Kelly watched as the soldiers would place the mask around their mouth, inhale its contents with a bubbling noise from the carburetor, throw their head back as smoke dribbled from their mouths, and would finally pass the mask over to the fellow next to him in an endless cycle.

Movement through the crowds to the left caught Kelly's attention. A cursory glanced revealed a soldier in a stained shirt match their pace, a throng of bodies separating him from the Spartan and Elite. A flash of orange light caught the metallic glint of a knife trapped within the paw of the man and Kelly could see wild eyes stare hollowly towards them, but noted that the soldier's stare was particularly focused on the Elite behind her.

Great, this was not what she had been hoping for. Furan's presence was causing a stir among the natives. Kelly lifted her shotgun up slightly, trying not to give away that she had noticed that they were being stalked, but meant for the gesture to act as a warning, nonetheless. It signaled that she was on alert and would react at the kind of speed that would be too fast for any ordinary human to counter.

It seemed to have worked, for Kelly noticed in her peripheral vision that the man stopped, scowled, and slunk off into the shadows past a row of tents. Kelly did not lower her guard. There could very well be more soldiers like that one around who held some sort of grievance against aliens and wished to execute on it.

They continued on, their attention upon a razor's edge of reactivity. Their large forms cut a path through the stumbling crowds, as though as they were heralds come in from afar, bringing news of utmost import to the lands they chanced upon.

Another grouping of soldiers, seated upon a tarped mortar launcher as big as a house, passed around holos containing black-market videos. Even at this distance, Kelly could see that the holos were displaying sexually explicit content of private encounters that did not seem like they were consensual. The men were laughing as they watched, completely distant from the hideous subject matter they were witnesses to, and made several disparaging comments about the women in those films at the mercy of their abusers. Some even were joking about their own sexual prowess in comparison to the men who were either the enactor or the subject of the abuses—from the amount of material present, no gender was off-limits to this sort of horror. Even more disturbing was the smaller sub-cult of people on the other side of the launcher, who were looking at exclusively snuff-holos. Thankfully, Kelly couldn't see what was on those films, but the bevy of terrible noises, like the cracking of bone, the whistling gasps of exposed tracheas, the crunching of cartilage, and the wet and thick splattering of fluids and fleshy objects upon floors, was enough to give Kelly the sort of idea what sort of images were being absorbed and altogether celebrated.

"Madness," Armitage whispered in her ear. The Spartan did not disagree.

As they passed by a few dug-out entrances to more bunkers underneath hastily mounded hills, Kelly could get quick flashes of what was inside them, thanks to the brutal yellow lighting seeping out from within. After passing one of the bunkers, Kelly almost stopped in place as she glimpsed something that made her blood ran cold. She kept on going, for if she were to draw attention from her own scrutiny, it would only invite an adverse reaction from the soldiers.

Strobing shadows guttered unsteadily, as though they were made of grease, and played with the light as though the fiery illumination was a phenomenon to be casually dispensed with. Seated upon a chair, its body a black silhouette, a naked Elite hung his head as its bound hands furiously shook behind it. Surrounded by three men in various stages of undress, they surrounded their captive. Steam rose from the four bodies, mingling with the cold night air. One of the soldiers upended a bucket of freezing water upon the Elite's head, creating a pale purple serum that splashed around the alien's feet. Another human held a pair of industrial pliers in one hand, and jumper cables in the next.

That was all that Kelly was able to see—it had come in a series of quick cuts, almost as if she had been witnessing the scene through spliced frames. Furan had also noticed and let out an unconscious rasp of horror upon witnessing the atrocities within. Kelly had to grab a hold of the Elite's arm to prevent her from barging in there.

"Release me!" the Elite hissed into Kelly's visor, soft enough to only be confined to the two of them, but loud enough to emphasize the venom in her voice.

"If you kill any human here, we'll have to fight our way through the whole camp!" Kelly reminded her. "What is going to be your plan after you have freed these half-dead prisoners?! Everyone is going to be looking to kill you on sight, and the Elites you have just sprung free will be dead anyway."

Furan almost tore herself from Kelly's grip, but the Spartan managed to hold on just in time.

"And what if our places had been traded?" Furan spat. "What if my people were torturing yours? Would you still remain steadfast amidst such atrocities?"

"Yes," Kelly offered immediately. The answer seemed relatively obvious. Spartans (at least SPARTAN-IIs) did not crack under torture. They were trained to withstand any and all types of pain that would be subjected to their person. They implicitly understood that their rescue would be secondary in the eyes of the mission. At no point would they ever dare to hope that liberation would come for them, and they never once felt that they should ever surpass the main objective in terms of importance. That was what made a Spartan different from the rest. They were aware of their expendable nature in the grand scheme of things. They could remove the personal attachments to their comrades, their friends, and still remain in the service of the mission.

But Furan did not seem like she bought that explanation. Hot air from her nostrils curled in the nightchill and she eventually wrenched her hand from Kelly's grip.

"They really did make the perfect soldier, didn't they?" she hissed as she passed Kelly by, managing to keep her head facing forward, never looking back.


The radio tower was in sight now, a giant ugly scaffolding that acted as a dark spine against the vast night. It was about a mile from the camp, perched atop a lone hill filled with dead trees. The path to get there was devoid of activity—a wide track marked by tire treads looped around the hill. Kelly and Furan followed this path to get to the tower.

A dismal shack stood at the base of the tower, barely large enough to comfortably fit two people. Its corrugated metal roof had been punched with holes, as had its walls.

There were no items of note to be found inside the shack. Just an access panel that had been bolted onto the side of the tower. More than likely this little hut had just been erected as a makeshift awning for this particular panel. So far, this auxiliary storage site was not all that inspired as a locale.

Kelly stomped inside, stowed her shotgun upon her back, and reached out a hand to grasp the latch of the panel before pausing. A lot of things were contingent on there being something they could use here. If things here did not pan out, then she would have to get creative in order to figure out what the next lead was going to look like.

She was a Spartan, so creativity was a given in her line of work, but damn it, sometimes she just wished that things could go smoothly for once.

She opened the panel and looked inside for a brief moment before letting out a groan. The electronics inside had been fried. Black residue coated the inside of the panel door. The electronics and hard drive crystals had either been burnt or shattered. She ran a finger down the residue and found that it had been carbonized onto the surface. Plasma effect—from the Banished? Or had Phoenix repurposed a malfunctioning plasma device to throw others off their trail? Regardless of the answer, there was no question that the data here was unusable. As she feared, this was a dead end.

With an uncharacteristic growl, Kelly ripped off the panel to the drives and hurled it against the wall. It shot straight through the weakened barrier with a clamorous noise, allowing a dismal shaft of yellow light from the lamps down in the camp to stream in.

Kelly fumed in this stupid shack. She should have known better. It was too much to hope.

She was about to pulverize the blasted panel with an armored fist, to just crumple this abstract remnant of her continuously being behind the curve on this mission, when all of a sudden Furan's voice echoed from outside, jerking her from her reverie.

"Spartan?"

The Elite sounded worried. Kelly whirled back around and stepped back out into the open, the shack out of mind again.

Furan was facing down the path they had just taken to get up the hill. Blocking the way now were five disheveled Marines, each one not in regulation uniform. Three of them were sporting beards. Kelly could see that every man was armed—a couple were touting pistols, one had an assault rifle, and the rest were carrying blunt force objects like wrenches and crowbars.

Kelly stepped alongside Furan. For the longest time, no one on either side spoke. Kelly actually recognized the man in the lead as the one who had been stalking Furan earlier at the camp. No doubt he had roused some of his fellows who shared the same indignance towards aliens, and had followed them up to the radio tower where there were no other witnesses apart from themselves.

Kelly waved a hand for the soldiers to clear out. "Disperse," she called out, her voice booming from the external speakers. She sounded like a malevolent demon—her already husky voice had dropped several pitches lower. "Disperse or stand down, Marines. You will comply or face the consequences of your actions."

The Marine in front spat on the ground. He then lifted an arm, pointing a knife towards Furan, but his eyes remained ever-fixed on Kelly.

"Shut up and put your weapon down, bitch," he seethed through clenched teeth. "You brought a hinge-head here. You must be stupid or something. We ain't in the mood for a con-fricking-fabulation with their kind. Our rights have been infracted upon. That can't go unpunished."

The man was high. His pupils were bloated and his center of gravity was askew. Come to think of it, all five of the men were inebriated in some fashion. For it would take a great deal of courage to threaten both a Spartan and an Elite for someone in a more sober mindset. Kelly's eyes scanned the group carefully, cursing herself for not having gotten her shotgun out beforehand. Her empty hands curled into fists, which seemed to give the men confidence at the sight of her so unarmed.

"Don't do anything you'll regret," Armitage warned her.

I'm not the one you need to worry about, Kelly thought to herself. She then lifted her chin. "I see," she said to the group across from her. "And what infraction has the Elite even committed?"

A cruel smile spread across the Marine's face. "Simple. It's living."

Kelly saw Furan shuffle nervously next to her. The Elite was not liking where this was going. The Spartan was of a like mind, but she was determined to defuse this however possible.

"The Elite is under my protection. I won't let you lay claim to her."

"No one can lay claim to me!" Furan furiously whispered to Kelly, out of earshot of the crazed men.

"I am… trying… to save… your life," Kelly hissed back, equally as fierce.

This did not seem to set well with the ragged council. They grew visibly more frustrated and they started to bandy their weapons around with more carefree motions.

"You seen where you are?" the leader said, his speech slurred and his syntax failing. He spread his arms theatrically, as though as he were the subject of a grand opera. "You seen who you're with? It's war, honey. Just war. They booted us onto this dirtball to bag aliens and, by god, that's what we're doing. If a hinge-head walks free on this planet, it does so without our consent. Last chance. Give the thing over. What is she even to you? She ain't your kind. She ain't human."

"She's not coming with you just to be slaughtered."

"What do you take us for?" the man said in mock confusion. "We ain't uncivilized, sweetheart. We ain't going to kill the thing straight-out. We're just… going to have a little fun with her. Show her… what being a human is really about. It's just fun… and if it dies from even that… what's the loss?"

Get out. Get out.

Whatever it was the man meant, it did not sit well with Kelly. At all. She made a motion with her head for Furan to start stepping backwards, to disengage right now. They would take the long way back to their ship. Kelly waited a beat before she slowly slid her left foot backwards, her body already beginning to turn around.

"Go home," she told the group, seconds away from putting them in her rearview.

But the eerie silence would not last. A shirtless soldier stepped from the group and bent down to pick something up from the ground.

"There ain't no home except here!" he cried, and his arm arced powerfully in a wild throw.

The rock whistled sharply as it spun through the air, a missile in flight. The man's inebriation had betrayed his accuracy, or he was simply a lucky shot. The next second seemed to stand in silence, the fires off in the distance freezing in their conflagrating perches, the arc of plasma mortars up high becoming cometary. The projectile sailed on course—right into the back of Furan's head.

Yet, at the last second, an armored hand caught it before it could impact. A loud clap arced through the hill.

In a panic, Furan turned around, her eyes focused on the rock that was clenched in the grip of the Spartan warrior inches from her face. Kelly had just reached out and had snatched the rock out of midair like it had been slowly lobbed to her.

"Oh shit," one of the men said.

The soldier in MJOLNIR armor stood impeccably still, her arm still outstretched and holding the rock in the position from which she had intercepted it. Her golden visor was smoldering in the direction of the men that had just dared to interject their opinion upon her. Just something about all that misplaced rage that had been spiraling up from this accursed world had all encapsulated itself into this one rock, this one lone act, that everything else seemed to fall into place in moments. At last, Kelly finally understood these men.

It was because of that understanding did she let her subconscious take over.

"Don't—" Armitage tried to say, but it was too late.

Without another moment's hesitation, she whipped her arm forward and slung the rock back in the direction it came.

There was a meaty cracking noise as the rock, thrown with all of the strength the cybernetic soldier could muster, hit squarely upon the head of the man who had first thrown it. Blood immediately splashed in a violent corona and the soldier crumpled, his legs folding underneath him as he lost all tensile strength in his limbs. His face gurgled crimson from a spurting head wound and he started spasming and frothing at the mouth. His hands curled helplessly into weak paws and his legs shuffled the dirt as he lay there staring up at the clouded brown sky.

His comrades did not come to his aid for at least several seconds, as they had been so astonished at the display of power from the Spartan that they had not realized that one of them had been hit. They all seemed to come to their senses at the same time and clustered around the fallen soldier, crying out "Mark! Mark!", which must have been the man's name.

He had a name, Kelly thought, still locked into the position in which she had thrown the rock. Her pulse thudded agonizingly in her temple and a nameless quiver seemed desperate to infect her fingers.

"What have you done?" the AI whispered.

The man's head was now being cradled in the lap of one of his fellows. They were slapping his face, trying to wake him up from his convulsions, but that did nothing other than smear blood all over their hands and chests. Others were trying to hold his limbs still, but that also had no effect. And, half a minute later, the frothing and choking and spluttering noises ceased, and eyes with broken capillaries remained permanently affixed to the horizon overhead.

The man had died with his body wired taut, a painful grimace seared upon his face.

The rest of the soldiers looked upon the shell of a man who had just been there a second ago. They got to their feet in their own separate dazes, comprehension only starting to dawn on them.

Then, they turned to face Kelly.

They no longer appeared like men to the Spartan. They had become twisted, devilish, a soft blue fire brimming deep within the corneal passages of their eyes. Their grotesque faces seemed twisted out of proportion, for they had just documented the instant which they had willingly left all humanity behind. Stained with the blood of their friend, the men jerked electrically, realization coming to them that they were still carrying weapons and that their wild aims could be given some votive actuality.

Starting to snarl barbarously, the men crept forward, twitching as if a live current was running through all of them.

Furan wheeled her head towards Kelly. Wondering what to do. "Spartan?"

The men adjusted the grips on their rifles and pistols. They kept them pointed at the ground. They panted into the humid air, their breath being expelled as vibrant mists of smoke.

"Spartan?"

The heads of the men lolled, each one of them trapped in a fever dream. They heaved and sighed, heaved and sighed, until the sounds coming through their throat become hoarse, ruined. As if they had sawed open their own gullet so that their wheezing could rake through the fluted slashes like some ancient wind instrument.

Furan grabbed the shoulder of the armored woman.

"Kelly!"

With a sucking noise, the air lost all sound. The men twitched their weapons up—

Kelly was faster.

She brought up the machinepistol she had holstered at her waist. The weapon was in a two-handed grip before the men across from her could get theirs up.

Twice she pulled the trigger. Twin automatic bursts spat from the barrel and ripped the night apart. There were six linked pulses of light and then the darkness rushed back in. She did not pull the trigger a third time.

Where there had been four men previously standing before her, there now laid four bodies. Pneumatic sighs from final breaths escaping from punctured lungs slithered free from the ossein cavities that trapped them. Their weapons rolled from open hands, splattered with blood. The wet and stark ground laid claim to the life that had been spilled there, and the executioner could only stand there, the barrel of her machinepistol tenderly smoking.

There was only the crunch of leaves and branches as the Spartan approached the bodies—Furan anxiously awaited where she had originally been standing. Kelly examined each of the men in turn. One was still alive—a bullet had torn through his trachea and he was bleeding to death on the ground. Kelly flipped the firing rate of her weapon to semiauto and put a bullet through the dying man's head. He finally stilled to join the empty arms of his friends around him, perhaps never having fully comprehended just what exactly had befallen him or if he had ever considered that he had deserved a fate in this manner.

They were alone again, Kelly and Furan. Alone atop this hill in the middle of the worst hell in the galaxy. They could only look at each other, each gaze speaking volumes. Furan's confused and tense face. Kelly's solemn tilt of her helmeted head. They silently affirmed their understanding, bemoaned their bad fortune, and found the reason of the heated moment in the span of only seconds.

They were soldiers. It was their duty to ascertain a threat, no matter what shape or form, and take decisive action to eliminate the threat. But these had been men. Marines in the UNSC. Drunks and disgruntled of a manner, but still human. For some reason, Kelly could not get their faces out of her head when the bullets had shattered their faces, sending gore and teeth flying in a split-second spray. Her throat ached and she felt numb, like she had been dipped in Novocain.

She didn't need Armitage to chastise her for this. Already she was suffering the consequences.

Continuing to say nothing, the two formed up and headed back down the way they came after Kelly had holstered her machinepistol and swapped for her shotgun. They would not speak another word until they had reached the Nighthawk, each one utterly lost in the violent storms of their own thoughts as they journeyed back through this scorched land where lightning had blown apart the ground and worldquakes had made ruins of the traprock mazes, and all who would behold such alien and sparse sights would be etched with the same scars that had been inflicted upon the world itself.


A/N: Inspiration for this chapter came from Michael Herr's articles about the Vietnam War, some of which described just scenes of absolute anarchy that are just too surreal to even imagine.

Playlist:

Camp Parham
"The War Is Not Yet Over"
Steven Price
Fury (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Western Front
"Bene Gesserit"
Hans Zimmer
Dune (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Standoff
"Watertank"
Junkie XL and Christian Vorlander
Divergent (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)