X: Absorption
"Wait, There Are Instructions?"


UNSC Nighthawk

Upon departing from Odarferr, Kelly had immediately made a beeline to the armory's workbench in the Nighthawk as the prowler had begun ascending away from the tattered battlefield that now shrank to a speck in the ship's theoretical rearview mirror. Normally, the Spartan would have gone straight to the bridge to do a debriefing with Armitage, but this time she had felt the urge to entrap herself within her own thoughts for a little bit.

She had entrusted Armitage's chip to Furan so that the AI could be placed back in his pedestal over in the bridge. It also gave the Elite an excuse to depart from Kelly's presence for a few sacred minutes. Hopefully the two wouldn't come to grammatical blows once they were left alone.

Now that she was by herself, the armored soldier laid out the weapons she had brought for the campaign on Odarferr onto a workbench—Oathsworn and her machinepistol. She had not used the shotgun at all while planetside, but it had been raining intermittently plus a lot of mud had been kicked up while they had been either in the trenches or driving in open-air vehicles across the bombarded land. It was just a good habit to clean a gun even if its use was minimal. Such equipment tended to last longer through dutiful care.

Kelly sat down upon a reinforced chair that could take her MJOLNIR-laden form. She had to raise the table so that she would not appear hunching over her work. Next to her, the crate containing the Mark V armor she had liberated from Odarferr dutifully sat where it had been dropped off. A cable snaked from the open top, connecting the battery of the suit to the Nighthawk's power supply, recharging the drained cells.

She laid out a thick cloth and lifted up the shotgun first. She made sure to pull the bolt open with a ferocious clacking noise, exposing the empty chamber (she had already unloaded the weapon). She unscrewed the magazine extension, pulled it out, and plucked out the magazine spring from the extension, which was a long and stout coil that sprang out to nearly eclipse the length of the shotgun. Kelly then pulled the barrel/forend assembly forward after wiggling it to free it up from protrusions. In short order, it was separated from the receiver. All while she had been doing that, Kelly made sure to hold the operating handle of the shotgun with a firm but gentle grip, because if she had let the bolt slam forward without the barrel securely in place then that would have caused major damage to the receiver. As she removed parts from Oathsworn, she was carefully placing them upon the cloth she had laid upon the workbench. Each piece was organized neatly, arranged in such a way that it would be intuitive for the Spartan to reassemble the weapon just from a mere glance at its strewn-about guts.

As she worked, Kelly found that it was easier to not think about the men she had just killed. The ride back to the prowler had seen her replay the entire thing over and over again, desperately searching—hoping—that she could have done something different. Anything. If only she had made it to that tower earlier, she could have left before those soldiers had arrived. If she had the pride to turn her back upon the taunts and the jeers and the threats, to lead herself and Furan away from those that had wished them harm.

In the end, none of that mattered. It would not change what she had done. There was no one else she could blame, if blame was to be a factor at all. She had shot those soldiers down on that world and she had done it on purpose.

The past was intruding with a spearing pressure, like a headache. Kelly was about to rub her temple with a finger, but remembered at the last second that she was still wearing her helmet. She continued to take apart Oathsworn after relieving her strained lungs with a quick exhalation.

With a finger, Kelly depressed the action spring as she held the cocking slide and piston in place. This allowed her to pull the operating handle all the way out with a sound that was like pulling a sword from a dripping sheath. Slowly, Kelly released her pressure upon the action spring. The piston, slide, spring, and bolt all came out together as one piece from the breech block. Kelly took each piece apart and set them on their own little section of workbench.

Bottles of nitro solvent and light gun oil were atop a workshelf nearby. Kelly grabbed the bottles she needed, along with a few extra cloths, and began to clean and lubricate the bore. She applied a light coat of the oil to the bolt assembly and upper receiver but only after she had cleaned them first with the solvent. An oil-dabbed cloth came away black after she swiped it through the magazine tube and the steel sleeve that was inside the front part of the forend. Normally, carbon scoring would have resulted in there being a couple of caked black areas in the barrel, which would have required a thorough brushing, but as the weapon had not been fired since its last cleaning, there was no reason for Kelly to be that meticulous in her swabbing.

She was about halfway through cleaning the shotgun when she suddenly saw a small yellow blip appear behind her on her motion sensor. Furan still was wearing her FOF tag, it appeared.

With deliberate precision, she lifted her hands away from her shotgun and wiped most of the oil from her suited fingertips. She then placed her hands flat upon the table, her body rigid as though she was going through some form of petrification.

Kelly waited until the Elite finally spoke.

"Your construct was inquiring about the pharmaceuticals you lifted from the planet," Furan uttered towards the Spartan's back. "I believe it wishes to make a thorough examination as soon as possible to determine our next location."

A fair point. Kelly had truthfully forgotten about the drugs she had taken from that storage closet. Reflexively, she patted a hand to the pouch at her thigh—the outline of the vial through the thick scratchproof fabric was still there.

She did not reply right away. Instead, she returned to the disassembled shotgun before her and began to piece it back together in rapid fashion. The action spring was reapplied to the magazine tube so that the piston could be slid back into place. The cocking slide was fitted onto the piston and then the bolt was also attached to the slide. The entire assembly was then slid back into the receiver. Kelly flipped the quick employment safety of the shotgun to the "safe" position. She then pulled back the operating handle until the bolt locked open—she was now able to fit the barrel/forend assembly over the magazine tube and onto the receiver. The magazine spring was then replaced and the extension was screwed back on.

Kelly lifted Oathsworn and closed the bolt with a frightening clanging noise of oiled metal snapping home. The entire reassembly process had taken her less than fifteen seconds to complete.

The Spartan laid the shotgun down next to her machinepistol, which she would apply the same care and attention to after her debriefing. She rose from the bench to head to the bridge and passed by Furan, only the sound of her heavy footfalls echoing throughout the armory/staging area.

There was a scraping noise as the Elite turned around. Almost liquid in the quietness of the deck.

"Why didn't you give me the order?"

Behind the mask, Kelly's face was stone. She stopped in place for a moment before she turned back around. Furan was leaning forward, almost as if she were getting into position to pounce, but it was anticipation at the coming answers that gripped her upper body in such a manner.

"What order?" Kelly asked, her voice dry.

Furan gave her head a twitch, indicating something in the direction behind her. "On that world. The men who tried to attack me. You know just as well as I do that their initial assault—the rock they threw—would not have done any permanent damage. That was my battle to fight, Spartan. I could have dealt with them all in the same manner that you did. Why did you interfere?"

The Spartan nearly laughed. The question itself seemed so absurd to her. Her training had given her the ability to distill all choices in combat down to a simple and logical equation. To have to explain her actions after the fact seemed redundant, almost.

But, her training had taught her that exhibiting emotional reactions, especially among non-Spartans, was a surefire way to have her authority eroded. Her mouth frowned and flattened irregularly as she tried to decide upon what she was going to say to Elite: whether it was going to be what Furan wanted to hear or if it was what Kelly knew as the truth.

"You really don't know?" she prodded at the Elite.

"What I do know is that those men were a threat. They were advancing with the intent to kill and therefore that gave us the right to act with equal force onto them. Yet, you delayed and delayed until you decided to act all at once. I did not need your help to eliminate that threat, yet you inserted yourself into it all the same."

She really didn't understand. Kelly resisted the urge to shake her head. "Imagine," she said, "that our little one-sided fight had been witnessed by another soldier from the camp. Imagine what they would have done if they had seen an Elite—a Sangheili—killing UNSC soldiers. Doesn't matter if the men you hypothetically killed were belligerent drunks or high on some substance, what do you think the optics of that would look like if you were in that hypothetical witness' position?"

Furan's eyes blinked ponderously. She straightened back up and started to understand. "The entire camp would have come down upon our heads."

Kelly pointed a finger at Furan, the gesture almost coming off as sarcastic. "Precisely. You know, for an Elite, you can come across as rather dense. If it had been you shooting those men and someone had seen you, the two of us would have either killed many more soldiers today, or we would have been dead ourselves. I did what I did because I could get away with it. You certainly do not have that right to kill humans so wantonly. With luck, you'll never have it."

The Spartan tried to stomp away, but Furan wasn't having it.

"That doesn't explain why you stopped that rock from even touching me. You could have let it, but you didn't. What is that supposed to tell me?"

"I don't know," Kelly growled as she halted yet again, half-turned, the short staircase to the inner hallway maddeningly in sight. "Maybe because I never saw the use in wounds accumulating unless I could help it."

That was a half-truth. While it never was Kelly's goal to garner scars on the battlefield, the fact of the matter was that she was one of the most grievously wounded Spartans living today. She had once fought through an entire Covenant battalion while sporting a fever, bleeding in her liver, and a collapsed right lung.

Now it was the Elite's turn to rasp a laugh. "Spartans really are not as forthcoming as the rest of your kind, are they?"

Kelly looked at Furan, absorbing the quip. "Most of them are even less so," she admitted.

They let the silence brim back up until it almost manifested as a resounding roar in their ears. They could hear the delicate creaking of the prowler as a few of the outer panels popped from micropressure wells. Together, they stood there. They were feet apart but it could very well be worlds apart.

The Spartan shifted a scant millimeter as she stood there. The motion came off as a smooth adjustment, as though as she was not wearing any armor. To a human, a Spartan could be the most terrifying being they had ever seen before—the warrior-like proportions of the MJOLNIR armor made them look like a battle tank had just sprouted legs. Their faceless visors obscured all and let nothing in. They were meant to be the light of humanity and the shadow of its wrath. Swift as ocean currents yet punishing as stone. Talking to one was almost like talking to a machine.

Yet, Kelly noted, that didn't stop Furan from taking an obstinate stance, addressing her as a soldier should, one to another. The conscious nature to address just the human's outward appearance did not seem to register to the Elite. She exhibited a great understanding in cutting down one's nature to its base elements.

Lightly, Kelly turned around once again to fully face the Elite. Still, neither of them spoke. She lifted her chin, almost in defiance, but it was only for it to make it easier to reach up and pull off her helmet with a quick burst of depressurization.

The Hermes covering was now held delicately in Kelly's hands. The human's pale face appeared even whiter than normal under the harsh blue lighting. Her brown hair looked almost black, still tied in its short ponytail. Her blue eyes seemed to glow, piercing and all-absorbing like a raptor's eyes. There were definite shadows that steepled from her angular cheekbones, making her seem gaunt, but just for a moment. But there was that icy savagery mixed with honed discipline that spoke volumes just from the very stare she now levelled at the Elite. She straightened, the air tasting iron and foreign to her—her helmet's air scrubbers had always given her air a metallic taste, but something about the prowler's interior was thicker on her palate.

Furan betrayed only a blink as she stared at Kelly's naked face. She had already seen Kelly out of armor before, but there was still that jarring incompatibility when it came to staring a Spartan in the flesh versus when they were in full MJOLNIR armor. Seeing their face gave them a vulnerability that was quite contradictory to the legend that had spread among the Covenant ranks. It almost felt to Furan like she was looking upon something that she was not supposed to see.

Kelly parted her arms, but just for a moment. One hand continued to hold her helmet.

"Are you going to ask?"

"Ask what?" Furan said, not comprehending.

"The rest of your questions. You've been holding back many since the Infinity."

The Elite crossed her arms. It was clear she was hesitant to buy this new line of dialogue. Either that, or Kelly's unmasking had unnerved her a bit, but it was hard to tell.

"Is this the part where you are actually going to be forthcoming?" Furan asked, as though she dared to hope the answer was going to be in her favor.

Kelly, for her part, might have said 'no' the majority of the time. But, things had changed so much. It was clear that her past strategies for dealing with Furan were not panning out as well as she had intended. A balance needed to be struck before the remaining threads of their so-called partnership were frayed beyond repair.

If only there was someone around that she could gripe all of her worries to. It would do her some good to get the strain of this mission off of her chest.

The Spartan tipped a frosty smile. "Well, let's find that out together, shall we?"

Furan nodded, the action substituting a shrug. It was clear that she was fully intending to take advantage of Kelly's newfound openness.

"The Spartan," she started. "The one who leads the Phoenix Unit."

"Phaedra," Kelly said.

"Yes, you had mentioned her name a couple of times. And the two of you were featured in some of the on-board records, sometimes in the same file."

"Really? How'd you find that out?" Kelly made a mental note to recheck those records, find out exactly what was on them.

The Elite's mandibles rippled in a faint smile. "Your construct was kind enough to redact a few passages for my benefit."

Kelly frowned. She was going to have to talk with Armitage about that. Same side or no, did the AI truly understand what sort of material he was providing the Elite with?

She let it pass, for now. "Go on."

"So. It means you have history together. Tell me, what is she to you?"

Were they seated at a bar together, this would have been the point where Kelly would have taken a drink to compose her answer. As it was, Kelly awkwardly stood in place, her face a frozen map of controlled muscle.

"You mean, how did I know her? Because we trained together?"

"That would be a start."

Kelly crossed her arms. She paced a few steps before answering.

"Phaedra and I… we were conscripts for the SPARTAN program. We were the very first. A group of seventy-five children. We were all taken from our families and delivered to another world where our training took place. The entire time, we were pushed to the very brink of our natural abilities, but we were also taught high-level courses, and a sense of honor and discipline was instilled in every one of us. We were chosen because we fit the genetic candidacy requirements, both for our physical and mental prowess."

Furan absorbed this with tiny nods. "A Sangheili's training also commences around that same age. Perhaps younger. The family remains in close proximity to where the training is held, though the young never do truly learn the complete identities regarding their parentage."

"The SPARTAN training was more antithetical to a typical human upbringing," Kelly admitted. "If the public had been informed of the full extent of our training, the program would never have been embraced."

"Why was that?"

"It was because of our young age, that's why. Conscripting children to train for war is considered ethically problematic in the eyes of human society. When the program was made public, our conscription as children was left out. The reason is that the choice to go into war is a decision that an adult should make, not a child, because a child cannot comprehend the choice they would make if it had been provided to them."

"Yet," Furan said, "you never were given a choice, it seems."

Kelly absentmindedly flipped her helmet around in her hands so that the golden visor was looking up at her, though she kept her eyes on Furan the whole while. "You're right," she said. "The choice was never mine."

The taller warrior produced a credible reproduction of a curious murmur. "Intriguing that you imagine that your people would willingly seek out the flaws of the program, when the results, historically speaking, have been to your benefit and to your race's."

"That's the nature of politics. It's why I'm still holding onto a gun so that I can be far from that world as possible."

"Are you ever regretful? To have that choice taken from you? Or, would you have made the same choice, given the opportunity?"

As the years had passed, Kelly had actually given that very question some thought. All her life, she had known only the SPARTAN program and the people she had trained with. The UNSC had not given her baldfaced lies about its intentions to use her and seventy-four others as weapons in their fight to pacify insurgent human forces and later the Covenant—they were not stupid like that. Doctor Halsey and the rest of the brass that had conceived of the program had been quite transparent with their recruits to their ultimate purpose. The children all knew they had been taken, but they did not care, or they eventually came to an understanding of their situation. Kelly remembered that it had taken her some time to adjust—fights with her DIs had been common, but eventually she had cooperated, but it was for the sake of her teammates, and not from any sort of coercion.

The training had been hard, but it had never been unfair. Kelly and the others were put through grueling physical regimens, yes, but they had also been given first-rate educations, they were fed well (as long as they didn't come last in competitions in which case they would go without dinner for the night, a punishment that Kelly had only ever garnered once), and the mock-combat scenarios they were put in had some fun to be gleaned. She never once considered that she had been subject to any sort of abuse through her training, though she had to concede that an outsider might not see it that way. A random civilian would only look upon the program and see the obvious surface-level truth: children forcibly taken from their homes, made to exercise themselves completely ragged, and to be put through an astonishing array of wargames that involved but was not limited to live firearms, vehicle operation, and the implied threat of torture by roaming DIs during their missions in the various nature preserves on Reach. Any ordinary person would have been horrified if they knew the truth.

But, if it had not been Kelly, it would have been someone else in her place. There would have been seventy-five Spartans regardless. Seventy-five, if the augmentation process had been perfected, which it had not, but the risk was always part of the calculation. There would have been an eager recruit to fill all available slots, given the chance.

Perhaps it did not matter. Kelly could only take decisions made in the past with the added value of hindsight. She, at least, had been given a purpose to her life. Guaranteed that she would make a difference to someone, somewhere. That was a chance very few could ever hope to obtain at some point in their lives.

"I suppose," Kelly said after a beat, "I'm just grateful that the choice was made for me."

Furan's eyes narrowed, absorbing the answer. "And… this Phaedra? Where does she fit into the saga?"

Kelly's lips flattened, but just for a moment, for the ghost of emotion had come and gone without it taking root. "That's the thing. Until a week ago, I was not even sure she was still alive. Or at least, still in the fold."

"You mentioned she was a washout."

"Yes." Kelly's voice had taken on a grittier tone, as though as she was having to fight to dredge up some of these memories. "There was only one point during the training where a recruit could truly fail. Unlike the rest of our lessons, if we failed there, it meant the end of our careers as Spartans. The augmentation phase."

"Augmentations," Furan repeated. "The moment where your genetic ability hit its limit, only to rise above them through your cybernetic tampering?"

Normally, Kelly would hesitate in discussing clearly classified information to a non-UNSC member, let alone at all, but this was important.

"Body enhancement chemicals and biomechanics were part of the final procedures that enabled us with physical abilities beyond what a human body could naturally produce. It was a critical step in our training, but it was… difficult. The procedure was painful. Probably the worst pain I had ever been in."

That was selling the procedure short. Kelly could vividly recall the carbide ceramic ossification of her bones causing her to feel like her entire skeleton was shifting before finally shattering, a piece at a time. The muscular enhancement injections had made her veins all stand out, dark with blood, her entire circulatory system feeling like it was pumping liquid fire through her body—she had thought her veins were going to rip out from her skin. And the fabrication of neural dendrites to her spine had made it seem like her entire spine was glowing white-hot with an intense heat, scorching the tissue and her brain in a long column of unbearable pain.

Furan had respectively remained silent, continuing to listen, so Kelly kept going.

"There were seventy-five recruits in the beginning. Forty-five ended up surviving. And only thirty-three of those forty-five suffered no lasting effects. The rest… were rehabilitated, or in some cases, placed in suspended animation for their injuries were so severe they could only survive inside buoyancy tanks, unable to handle the weight of gravity upon their shattered bodies."

After the program, Kelly had barely been able on her own two feet. Her shaved head had been covered in bandages. At one point, it was feared that she would lose an eye.

But it had been nothing compared to the sights of her fellow recruits. Her friends. Fhajad. Kirk. René. She could not rid herself of the memory of looking upon those that had failed to make it. Some were constantly shivering in wheelchairs like they were in the late stages of Parkinson's. Others had been maimed so brutally by the ossification process that their bones were twisted into shapes that no living creature could withstand. Kirk's face particularly haunted her, for his dislocated jaw had been angled forty-five degrees to his scalp, his tongue trapped within the pit of bone that was his lower row of teeth.

"These were the washouts," Furan stated, snapping Kelly back to the present.

"Yes," she affirmed.

"And Phaedra was among them."

Again, Kelly's mouth flicked a tiny frown. "Not at first. She had been able to convince the doctors that she was in a good enough condition to fight, but it didn't take long for her ailments to be discovered. When she left the program, I assumed that she would have been absorbed back into ONI as an analyst or something to that effect. It never crossed my mind that her… defects would be corrected and she could be free to resume service once again."

Furan seemed like she understood. A soldier's true home was the battlefield. It called to those who wished for their weapons to taste blood. And once that hit was achieved, for a pure warrior, that thirst could never be quenched. "It is a difficult affair to remove a soldier from their calling." She then lidded her eyes upward as a thought came to her. "When we find Phaedra, what do you plan to do? Will you kill your fellow Spartan, or try to save her?"

Kelly's fingers tapped a ragged tattoo upon her empty helmet. For the first time, she was the one to break eye contact with Furan, as she slowly turned to peer out into nothingness.

"I thought I had saved her a long time ago."


They now stood back at the bridge, Armitage's hologram looking quite cross at the two for keeping him waiting. Even though Kelly had fulfilled his desire for a glimpse outside of the confines of the Nighthawk, he was still acting like he was the most important being on this ship.

"Good talk?" he asked Kelly, who had set her helmet atop the hologram pedestal in front of her, while Furan took her usual place where she could stand with crossed arms and look down upon the AI with an approximation of a scowl.

"Something to that effect," she said.

Before Armitage could prod further, Kelly reached down and unzipped the pouch that had been wrapped around her thigh. She brought out the vial of the powdery compound she had stolen from the camp they had just visited and held it in a hand for a moment. Heading over to the nearby wall, she tapped upon a control to open one of the slide ports on the analysis machine, which revealed the aluminum coated opening at one of the equipment banks. Kelly raised her arm up and tipped about a very small amount of the vial's contents down the unveiled chute and closed the port.

"Good to commence spectrometry analysis," she told Armitage.

"Stand by," the AI's hologram shrugged.

The Nighthawk had been spared no expense. Whoever had outfitted this ship had seen fit to equip a mass spectrometry machine onboard. Why someone would think that performing a discriminatory drug test would be necessary on a stealth ship like this was anyone's clue, but Kelly was grateful it was there. She needed to see if this drug could be traced. If they came up with nothing, then they were back to square one.

The machine was working to measure the precise molecular mass of ions as determined by their mass to charge ratio in the compound. The drug was then separated using gas chromatography and ionized through electron ionization.

The ionization process, Kelly could see on a monitor that monitored the process through a false color image, looked like she was seeing several billion islands in a wide ocean suddenly turn jagged and fragment like a disintegrating iceberg. The molecules were cascading into separate pieces, generating complex mass spectra. The drug was being destroyed in the detection process, but this would allow it to generate a result with greater accuracy.

In less than a minute, one of the boxes on the lower right portion of the screen flashed ANALYSIS COMPLETE. Kelly turned to Armitage, who was shimmering on the emitter in thought. "Well?"

For the first time, the AI looked befuddled. "Well, indeed."

Kelly's stomach lurched. She needed an answer, not stalling for effect. "I don't follow," she said, trying not to sound desperate.

"It's just that what you took from the camp doesn't seem to be in any drug database whatsoever. Lab-fabricated from the ground up, it seems. A brand-new designer drug on the market."

Armitage pulled up several pages from the databases he was referring to so that he could prove his point. The webview documents hung in the air like glowing sheets of paper. Like he said, all of the search results he had performed on this compound's chemical structure had come up with nothing but blanks.

Stepping closer to the holo-table, Kelly made sure to keep her breathing level. "You're telling me that no one's either seen or reported on this thing?"

"Circumstantially, that seems to be the case. We know for a fact that those fellows on Odarferr could not have been incentivized to 'do the right thing' and make any mention of this drug in their report. Most of the soldiers there were using that compound, as you saw, and the scant few that continued to remain sober were more than likely bullied into keeping quiet about the rampant abuse there. It is quite possible that the planet was used as a trial run for this drug. Either that, or the drug was distributed to systems where the population of soldiers had less scruples about partaking this sort of stuff."

"So. Tell me what it is, then."

Armitage raised his arms and a holographic image of what looked like a couple of hexagons connected by angular lines popped up in the center of the pedestal, with occasional branches warping out to the symbols "Cl" and "NH."

"Behold," Armitage announced dramatically, like he was a sports announcer, "C12H20ClNO3. No ATC code on reference for this bad boy. No CAS number either—like I said, not even the agencies are aware this thing exists. By my count, that's the twenty-second drug of this type discovered just this year. Believe it's safe to say this thing is an IND. An Investigational New Drug. Nothing like this is on the market today. But, going by current chemical nomenclature standards, we can derive a name for this thing. SN 92305, I think will suffice."

Kelly studied the diagram of the drug and traced the paths of the chemical bonds with a finger. She recalled her lessons with Deja and stared at both the diagram and the detailed analysis from the testing machine on a separate tablet.

"It's a ketamine derivative," she said as she looked up from the datapad. She flicked at the tablet's screen to put up a section of triggered chemical flags over the pedestal for everyone to see. "Look, the chemical structure's been modified to incorporate a methyl ester group. Those groups get rapidly metabolized to carboxylic acids—the end result is an increase in inactive compounds that can have an early termination effect on the drug. That's main differentiator. SN 92305's been designed with a shorter acting agent than ketamine. Not as protracted of an effect with no reduction in potency."

Armitage was nodding in agreement. "The pharmacological profile is remarkably similar to ketamine, but the potential of emergence reactions such as psychomotor agitation is reduced due to its shorter period of effectiveness." The AI then seemed to be aware of whom he was in the presence with and looked over at Furan. "Psychomotor agitation is a symptom of exhibiting unintentional restlessness, commonly seen in individuals emerging from general anesthesia, hence 'emergence reaction—"

"I am aware of both terms," the Elite said so gruffly that Kelly nearly cracked a smile. "I am not as dense as you think I am, construct."

Armitage raised his hands in the general expression of surrender. "Sorry about that, just figured the conversation was getting a bit technical."

Furan didn't look impressed. "Ketamine. That's a sedative, no? Is it a commonly abused substance for humans?"

"Its heyday has long passed," Armitage said, "but that doesn't mean there's not a market for it."

Kelly was left to provide the explanation. "Medically, ketamine's used for anesthesia by inducing a dissociative state. It can also stimulate heart functions and increase blood pressure. Abuse can cause damage to the circulatory system and liver. Recreationally, it's used to dilute pain and to enter a lower level of anesthesia, where users have reported various hallucinogenic properties. It's an important medicine, but yes, it's very easy to abuse."

The AI added, "Business as usual to the UNSC. Some aspiring chemist tampers with an already illegal drug and distributes it to the troops. It's a huge problem for the forces on the outer fronts—a lot of these types of drugs have a high susceptibility to addiction and the recovery process for each one is usually quite the ordeal. Without close proximity to supply lines, command cannot deal with the problem as rapidly as they would like to. Treatment is completely dependent on proactive steps being taken by the leadership in place to halt the spread of addiction, but in such hostile and isolated areas, the morale for the troops to get or stay clean is too low for any sort of progress to be made."

The Spartan frowned. She knew about the problems that were rife at the UNSC's outer limits. It was just hearing them spoken aloud made the impact hit all the more fiercely.

She had never once had the inclination to partake in any recreational drug—just never felt the urge—but she understood the mentality or circumstances that a soldier on the front lines would be under that would have pushed them over that edge. The isolation and the constant combat would only intensify the feelings of abandonment and would wear down their sanity thread by thread. Turning to medication abuse was a way for those troops to escape such feelings, to live within a zone of alternate possibilities in a plane of thought and sensation utterly detached from reality. Kelly could not deny that, to a soldier trapped for months down in the trenches, with little hope of ever making it back home alive, perhaps their desperate measures made a woeful kind of sense. A Spartan could power through those feelings, but an ordinary soldier could not.

Kelly picked up the datapad again and scrolled through its contents. "You said that SN 92305 has not been documented anywhere else in the galaxy? No other data points for us to use?"

Armitage's hologram paced the pedestal a quarter of the way around the circumference. "No… but—" he appeared to brighten, "—I have an idea."

"I'm listening."

"I can run another spectrometric analysis on the drug sample, but this time I'll hone down the spectra limitations. Instead of identifying the drug itself, I'll be analyzing the impurities within the drug."

Kelly walked back over to the analysis machine so that she could supply another sample of the drug into the feed port. The machine started to hum as it went to work at razing the sample, breaking it down to its most basic components. "Is there a particular element or compound that you'll be analyzing for?"

"I'm keeping an open mind," Armitage said as his hologram crossed his arms. "All substances contain impurities of some sort. They act as localization markers, offering up a map of their origin. The theory is that no drug is truly 100% pure. There will still be nano-amounts of contaminants or other substances polluting the pharmaceuticals. And if we can determine what types of impurities and how much of them reside within the drug, we can hone its origin down to a specific point, maybe even an individual lab."

"Seems surprisingly accurate," Furan spoke up from the other end of the tactical board.

"Drug laboratories are rarely sterile in the sense that they are completely devoid of trace outside elements," the AI explained. "It happens all the time, even in our most tightly-secured bases. Tiny amounts of soil samples can be found clinging to skin of the lab workers, even after a decontaminating wash prior to entry, for example. Sometimes the drugs are in proximity to live cultures that might be ejecting microbes into the air. Or the water that is used in the system has gone through a corroding plumbing system. If SN 92305 was made in a lab that conformed to basic UNSC specifications and was run according to UNSC regulations—which is a bit of a long shot, I know—and only then, if there was any issue or common contaminating markers we can reference, we might just get a—"

The analysis machine stopped humming. Green text appeared on the screen, quickly followed by several pop-up boxes displaying chemical profile screens.

"—a hit."

Armitage turned around and gave a long swipe with his arm. A planet the color of a pearl swooped into view. The AI focused the zoom on its only moon—a copper ball faintly dotted with verdigris sections pooled at the bottom of rocky valleys.

"Sonatine," Armitage announced. "And its moon: Arbogast."

Kelly spent several seconds looking at the assembled planetoids. "That's a bit closer to the Inner Colonies, but not by much. How did you parse down the list of candidates?"

"You doubt my abilities?" the AI spun around, pretending to be cross. "Okay, fine. I had detected a vast concentrate of perchlorate compounds within the sample that were not approaching toxic levels to humans, but were significant enough to cut out 98.7% of the colonized worlds with a UNSC presence on them. From there, I was able to determine the presence of feldspar, olivine, and pyroxenes. Only one place on the list had such characteristics, hence the end result: Arbogast."

Kelly reached out and touched a control upon the pedestal. Tiny statistics blipped up next to the representation of the moon. She zoomed the view in further, honing the view on what was a marked settlement. A UNSC-governed colony, it looked like. Not one run by the mega-corporations headquartered on Earth. More than likely the UNSC had taken control of the place some years back and established a garrison within the facility.

"UNSC presence," Furan murmured as she watched the whole thing, echoing Kelly's own conclusion.

"Yes," the Spartan said, continuing to peer at the data before her.

Armitage was also doing his own analysis. His rock-like cloak glistened and shifted around him as his eyes momentarily became blanks while he scanned through legions of data at his disposal.

"The facility is called Arbor I," the AI said. "Originally colonized by prospectors from Mir/Laguna, the UNSC exercised eminent domain early in the colony's lifespan. The UNSC built out the facility and turned it into a listening post—it has a large wavespace dish array here. Population of 2,000 souls and contains enough infrastructure for a small Earth town. It also has miles of underground tunnels and is even rated for laboratory operations. Good place as any to start looking."

Furan almost barked a laugh. "You mean, it is the only place to start looking."

Armitage looked miffed. "Well… yes. I wanted to put a more positive spin on things."

"Do not bother with your puffery. Plainspeak will earn you sympathizers here, not wordbandiers to twist the direction of the truth."

"Be quiet, you two," Kelly said as she laid her palms flat upon the pedestal in front of her. She leaned in closer, her eyes squinting at the low-resolution image of the facility before her. "Or I'll put you both in the airlock if you won't behave."

"You wouldn't dare—" Furan was saying, but Kelly ignored her.

The Spartan reached out and tapped on the largest structure, which from this bird's eye view looked like someone had bolted four massive stilts through a volcano. Kelly had access to the base's schematics, though, so it was clear to see that the volcano was simply acting as a natural shield for the interstellar communications dish that had been buried deep inside its core.

A diagram of the array now replaced the moon of Arbogast. Kelly studied it for a minute. "A wavespace dish is an expensive piece of hardware," she said. "They require a lot of energy to operate and are not even commonly found on our most populated worlds. To see one here, so far out from the nearest occupied post, is certainly suspect."

"Operational wavespace links are also prone to distortion over long distances," Armitage piped up. "However, that can be rectified if this array was constructed with reverse-engineered Forerunner technology."

"And I don't suppose the base keeps any records of such construction details, would they?"

The AI mustered a slight shrug. "I mean… I couldn't access those records here."

Kelly flipped the hologram back to the moon. She scooped up her helmet and pointed towards the image of Arbogast. "Set a course."

"Already on it."

Furan pulled Kelly aside as she headed for the hallway. "The longer this goes, the more we seem to be grasping at shadows and proclaiming them tangible. How can you be sure of this moon's importance?"

"The wavespace dish," Kelly said. "If I were Phaedra, I would have recognized its importance as a material advantage in the area. With it, she would be able to maintain contact with her divided squad almost in real-time. She could coordinate Phoenix from across the galaxy with minimal time-lag. And if she used it at all, there's bound to be a record in the logs somewhere. Plus," she gave a surreptitious look to the side, "if Arbogast is indeed the source of the drugs we found on Odarferr, probably stands to reason that more of your armor would be located or would be able to be located at that source."

The Elite gave a slight harrumphing noise. The mere mention of her armor was a cheap ploy to fuel the alien's indignation, but it would take quite a long time for Furan not to feel the sting of her failure from losing her shipmaster plating.

"Then," Furan shrugged, "I suppose I'll be humoring the weight that darkness itself exerts."


Hours later, Kelly was sitting at her desk in her quarters, practicing her breathing exercises as part of her Zen meditation. Her eyes were closed, her body completely relaxed. She was focusing completely inward, with nothing materializing in the gray matter of her mind, the urge to breathe in, breathe out, and breathe in again only coming through as the dullest reflex, a twinge sent along a singular nerve.

She had placed her helmet on the corner of the desk, which was otherwise devoid of any other personal materials. She was still wearing the rest of her MJOLNIR armor. Around her, the deck hummed, the perfect white noise to tune out and into the endless swath of her emptied consciousness.

Prior to this, she had finished cleaning and reassembling her weaponry back in the cargo bay, ensuring that all of the parts had been scoured clear of carbon and that they had received a fresh coat of lubrication. Once that had concluded, she had embarked into another series of twitch response drills, keeping her body finely tuned and wired to react in a matter of milliseconds to even the tiniest stimuli. Her exercises had proceeded in stark silence, allowing her to get through all of her drills uninterrupted while space folded by just outside the hull in the deep jewel-glow that was slipspace.

Now, as she sat in her quarters, she inhaled and opened her eyes.

Kelly checked her chronometer. There were fourteen more hours left to go before they would reach Sonatine and its moon. She had no idea what to expect once she got there. After Odarferr, it seemed like anything could be possible when it all came down to how wrong things could go. But, what gave her pause was the possibility that reality could eclipse the worst her imagination could conjure. Already this mission had beholden her to the sights of dead civilians piled atop one another and insane soldiers, high on some godforsaken substance, running around and calling down airstrikes on their own positions. What was going to be next in this elongated horror show?

There was no proof, but with this new knowledge of the lab-synthesized drug and its haphazard distribution to the troops out in the field, Kelly was sure that Phaedra had something to do with it. Spartans had been taught to control the battlefield by any means necessary—the mission was the priority, no matter what. The drug and Kelly's own mission were too entwined in a series of coincidences. It would be a harder sell trying to convince herself that there was no connection whatsoever. There was a common thread linking it to Phaedra, but for what nefarious purpose, Kelly was lacking that key bit of information.

Suddenly tired, Kelly passed a hand over her eyes. She rubbed at the bridge of her nose with armored fingers. She just couldn't connect the dots. Too many suppositions, not enough certainties.

After a bit, she reached down and pulled out one of the desk drawers. She lifted out a small glass tablet and double tapped the translucent screen to rouse it from its sleep mode.

With a few flicks of her finger, she opened the tablet's messaging application. The tablet had been granted root access—she had been entrusted to a wide array of contacts that she could reach out to at a moment's notice. Quickly, she typed in the commcode she had in mind into the "To" field. She knew it from memory, it was one she could never forget.

Only unfortunate that the person it belonged to was someone she could not reach. It had been several years and still there had been no sign of them. No one had said anything definite, but she could not bear to think that they were gone for good.

But deep down, within her, there remained a tiny locus of hope that refused to be extinguished against all odds. Because she knew something that not many others in the galaxy did. The person who she wished to speak with couldn't be dead. They always won. They were just too lucky to die.

Kelly tapped another button and the tablet's text-to-speech capability was now enabled. A waveform symbol popped up on the glass screen, awaiting her voice.

She leaned forward so that her elbows touched the desk. She steepled her fingers in front of her, her eyes seemingly boring a laser hole into the wall just beyond.

"I… I…"

She didn't know how to start the message. There were no casual evening chats that she could recall enjoying in this person's presence. The last few conversations that could barely be interpreted as 'friendly' that they had shared outside of their occupation had been terse and distantly impersonal. It was not that they could not stand each other in real life, in fact quite the opposite. It was just that she had never really needed to say any more than what she already knew in those moments. She had the man's face in her head, as clear as day, as though each feature in their imperfect perfection was chiseled as a bas relief upon her very eyes.

But right now, Kelly realized that she had no idea what she was going to say.

The tablet had translated her first few feeble utterances upon the screen. Kelly deleted them all. She was going to try again.

"I've never done this before," she spoke aloud, as though there was someone on the other side of the desk patiently judging her, "but I know you haven't either. That gives me some relief; you've only gotten quieter as you got older."

Below her, on the desk, the tablet was accurately displaying each word she spoke. It even used the correct punctuation and paragraph spacing, too.

"I've been doing some thinking. Thinking back to when we were kids. Before the Covenant. On Reach, I mean."

She took a breath, trying to keep her train of thought on a narrow track.

"That obstacle course. The first day we met. I thought you were such a pain in the ass. You ran ahead and got to that bell and didn't even bother looking back to help us. I remember being so mad I wanted to punch you in the mouth. But, then came the second day. Different course, but the same teams. I think I threatened you if you didn't help out that time. Could you imagine that now? Yet, everything after that made sense. Third place that day, do you remember? We didn't go hungry that night. Or any nights after then, come to think of it."

Kelly leaned back. She placed her hands atop the desk, continuing to keep them folded in front of her.

"Every day was a new mission. New orders. They gave them out and we followed them. We were a team. Your team. You did your best to bring everyone back home. A far better job than I would've done, but don't tell anyone else that. I'll never hear the end of it."

A smile uncontrollably cracked on her face. She placed a hand to her throat for a bit—this was the most she had talked in a long time and already she could feel it taking a toll on her voice.

"They gave me a mission. One that was just meant for me, this time. Different than anything I've ever have to do before. Routine assassination, though there's nothing routine about it. How many of those missions have we taken together? Enough where I've lost count. But that's not what makes it different. They sent me to kill a human. Not Covenant. Not Banished. And not just any human, a Spartan. There shouldn't be any difference—a target's a target in the eyes of the mission, right? But… this time, there is."

She wondered if she should keep going. She was not supposed to harbor doubts like this. It was not what was expected of her. But something was making her spill her soul out like this. Before, she could confide in the strength of the rest of her Spartan team to share whatever burdens came her way. Now, it was just her, with everything piling on her shoulders with no end in sight.

"They've never asked me to kill a Spartan before. They wouldn't have asked if they felt they had no choice, though. I've seen firsthand what my target is capable of. Mass murder. Torture. That was not what we were taught. We were trained so that we could win, but not in that way. We were told to erase the self—a soldier removes the capability of inward thought so that they can achieve greater team synergy. This… what I've seen… is anger. Nothing but personal anger. Directed outward, at so many. I'm hunting someone who might have gone completely insane. Dogmatic Covenant were predictable in their own right. But, an irrational Spartan? With our training to turn against us? Hard to say."

Maybe it's easier than you think, that little voice in Kelly's head admonished. You just don't want to imagine the ensuring clash once your convictions come up against one another.

She put aside her doubts for now. "I have to do it. I have to kill the Spartan. Kill Phaedra. Yes, it's Phaedra. Back after all this time. Even if there wasn't a mission, it needs to be done. I need to do it, to finish what I should've started all that time ago."

Her hands were still on the desk. Slowly, they crumpled into fists.

"She wasted her second chance. She washed out, but ONI brought her back into the fold. I thought she had been spared that life the first time. It wasn't what she deserved. Had I known what she could become…"

With a disdainful notion, she shook her head, trying to rid herself of any intruding thoughts. "It doesn't matter. I couldn't have known. I can only feel the smallest ounce of regret for the person she could have become. Phaedra deserved a different life than ours. Maybe… the least I can do is put an end to it. For her sake."

And mine, the little voice whispered.

Kelly took a glance at the datapad. Multiple paragraphs of text now adorned the screen. The cursor was patiently blinking, always awaiting the next syllables that would spill from her mouth.

After a while, she took a breath. It felt like she had just unloaded a ton of force off of her lungs. Despite herself, she managed to smile. She placed a hand under her chin thoughtfully.

"I'll be surprised if your reply is just as long. Like I said, John, you've only gotten quieter."

She tapped on the datapad. It stopped recording. For a long, long time, Kelly just sat motionless in her chair, eyes closed, sitting up straight like some dutiful automaton. The send button on the tablet thrummed expectantly, the wall of text waiting to be deposited into the ether of FTL comm-traffic. She ignored it for now.

Finally, she opened her eyes and tapped the delete button on the tablet. In an instant, the entire conversation vanished on the screen. All that was left was a blank text box, like she had not even been speaking for the last several minutes.

She mentally chastised herself for being so foolish. What had she expected to gain from this… exercise? Pragmatically speaking, there was very little guarantee that the message would find its intended receiver at all. John had been MIA for years, ever since he had destroyed the Ark and half of his ship, Forward Unto Dawn, had crash landed on Earth without him in it. If she had sent that message, the comm signal would just endlessly bounce around from relay to relay, her target nowhere in sight. Eventually, the message would degrade with respect to the time domain and would become a garble of white noise to join the eternal roar of cosmic audio, drowned out by the trillions of radio waves sent out by thousands of worlds across the galaxy. A useless endeavor.

"You're still out there," she whispered. "I'll tell you everything when you get back."

She was about to put the tablet back in the drawer where she had pulled it out from, when all of a sudden, she noticed that the screen had flashed red. Curious, she angled the screen towards herself.

A white octagon with an "X" on it had been emblazoned in the middle of the bright red screen. Underneath the symbol, a few lines of text in white read: "Your device has been locked. Reason code: 0x0812k002. Deviation from authorized activity detection. Submit for psych-eval to remove software blocks."

Kelly's blood ran cold for a quick second. Was the UNSC monitoring her private messages? In moments, that chill suddenly ran magma-hot. How dare they even think about barging onto her private musings while she was alone. Her thoughts were her own—they were the only thing she had left to herself.

Apparently, it seemed she was not even allowed that.

She shut the drawer to the desk, hard enough to create a tortuous slam as she applied more force than was necessary. She was still holding the tablet, though, and had a hand on both sides of the glass device.

"Here's another deviation for you," Kelly rasped.

With barely a fraction of the allotted strength her MJOLNIR armor could give, Kelly snapped the glass tablet in two with a heavy and thick crack. Tiny sparks fluttered angrily in the momentary furrow between the two pieces.

A corner of Kelly's mouth rose in a tiny smirk. She found a wastebasket and dropped the pieces of the tablet into it.

One less thing that would spy on her in here, at least.


Armitage entered the command level of the Nighthawk and trailed down the maze of submenus and objects until he returned to the CONTINGENCY: PLANO 15TH LEGACY file and input additional context strings that enabled two more of the nine boxes in the list to be checked.

While he did that, cyberspace swirled next to where his own avatar was "standing." Out of a veil of pixels, the image of an 18th century American general stepped forward, his projected coat flawless in its presentation. To whom the image belonged was not even a whom. They were not an AI, smart or dumb, but a phantom program. An entity that lived entirely within the confines of a system, never interacting with a human input. Their responses were limited, mostly restricted to the entirety of the database that they inhabited, but some had been programmed with additional kernels of knowledge that gave them the barest sense of personality.

But for Armitage, personality was all lost on him. He just needed a straightforward conversation, for once.

"The evidence is quite clear," Armitage said by way of greeting. "It has only been in support of the predictive models I have compiled over the last several days. Psychological failure is imminent. Spartan-087's relationship to the target is only hastening her compromised status. The mission needs to be terminated and restarted with another operative at the helm."

The AI was projected as talking, when in reality the two were sending tiny bits of data from one node to another. And this conversation was taking place in the span of micro-seconds, far too quick for the human brain to comprehend, even for a Spartan.

The phantom program just tracked the motion of Armitage's avatar within the virtual server with just his eyes, the rest of his image remaining in a composed and dignified posture.

"Request denied," it said stiffly, its "voice" containing more of an electronic tinge than Armitage's. "The directives are quite clear. Inference from your recorded accounts cannot be construed as metal facility degradation significant enough to invoke the contingency you are attempting to unlock."

Armitage sent out a packet of bytes to signify to the phantom program his overall annoyance.

"I have the suit recordings, as well as imagegrabs from Spartan-087's personal correspondences to support the hypothesis. She executed several UNSC soldiers on the contested world of Odarferr. Is that not proof enough?"

"ONI does not share the same sentiment. They consider the loss of the soldiers to be inconsequential. They were drug users, unfit for battle. In any other theater, they would have been liquidated from the roster. 087's conduct could theoretically be spun up as a public service, to that effect, with no black marks attained upon her record."

Armitage lifted a virtual eyebrow. "Forgive me, but that's just insane."

"She has been provided enough extrajudicial jurisdiction to ensure that her mission is completed, no matter the sacrifices," the program reminded Armitage, its expression neutral. "At this point, no evidence has been provided to indicate that Spartan-087 has wavered outside of the psychological quartiles typical of the Spartan program."

The AI found himself nodding in agreement. Even as a construct, he was not built to blindly follow set logic patterns devised by his makers. The hopes that had been burdened unto him had been to think outside the box, to get creative. He was not rigid, like this phantom program, but even he could not hope to budge what had been decisively set as ironclad law.

"I hope you will note my comments on the overall matter," he then said, sensing that he had lost this battle, but was already planning his next future attack. "Inform your handlers—no, remind them—my post on the Nighthawk was to specifically prevent occurrences like the one on Odarferr from happening, but I am only able to do so much. An AI cannot take control of a Spartan, infiltrate their mind. My capabilities in the field are dictated by what I am allowed to perform by Spartan-087. If they wish for me to become more effective, then additional operating parameters will need to be bestowed to my access level."

"Additional operating parameters?" For the first time, a sneer wisped across the phantom program's face.

Armitage's smile turned silken. So, some semblance of emotional recognition had been programmed into this lackey after all.

"Spartan-087 was tasked to destroy Spartan-119 to prevent any embarrassment or scrutiny from coming to the Spartan program—if it becomes public that ONI-sponsored Spartans had gone rogue and were killing civilians, the resulting backlash would be quite costly to the UNSC. Spartan-087 was sent as the mitigating factor to this disturbance, but if further damage to the program comes at her hands, then it would stand to reason that her involvement in the mission should also be terminated to control the spread of damage. Unless that doesn't track, I would require that the specific parameters for initiating the Plano 15th Legacy Contingency be accessible to my credentials. If I am to ensure that the Spartan program remains untarnished throughout the duration of this mission, I will need to be kept in the loop of what ONI would consider to be acceptable or unacceptable conduct."

There was a determinate pause of several micro-seconds from the phantom program. A frightfully long time to an AI. In a way, the silence gave away the answer that Armitage had been hoping to obtain. Had he overstepped in some way, rejection would have been automatic and swift.

But now, an answer had yet to formulate, until…

The phantom program's eyes flicked away from Armitage, the hollow of its projected cheekbones appearing as triangular shadows. Without any additional inflection, it said, "Request granted."


A/N: A guest reviewer, AJ, asked me what my process is for coming up with the playlist suggestions for each chapter. To answer that question, there are many ways that people fuel their imagination and the imagery that comes with it when they come up with the ideas for their stories. In my case, I'm a very audio-oriented writer. Music has been my primary source for my imagination, and has even acted an unorthodox sort of guide to writing. Take, for example, movie soundtracks. Even in action-oriented scenes when the score is blaring, there are still moments where the music dips to allow dialogue through or to emphasize certain actions seen on the screen. By incorporating those scoring patterns into my writing, I have found that it benefits the story greatly by allowing the pacing to be more fluid and to let certain scenes breathe.

As for why I choose which track, that all depends on the mood that I want to set for each scene. All of the music comes from my personal playlist that I have on my computer. I must have 15,000 tracks on there, or close to it. The idea is that I want to curate a playlist that complements what the reader is reading on the page, rather than haphazardly slapping a bunch of pop/rock songs into inappropriate points in the story without giving any thought to how it might sound in context (like a worrying amount of authors on this site do). Again, I return to the process of movie scoring as my inspiration. The music should never distract - only complement. If a scene is primarily composed of dialogue, that's a good indication that the score should be quiet or moody or completely absent altogether. Same principle applies to action scenes - the music should be there to highlight the drama but should be ready to back off at certain points for effectiveness. Of course, determining all this is wildly subjective, and depends a great deal on one's music taste.

However, it is my belief that the tracks that I do end up suggesting for each chapter convey the intended mood that I wish each scene to achieve and acts as an emotional enhancement for the readers who are more audio-inclined, as I am.

Speaking of which...

Playlist:

Talks of Phaedra
"Should You Choose To Accept..."
Lorne Balfe
Mission Impossible: Fallout (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)

Message to John
"Never Give Up"
Clinton Shorter
The Expanse [Season 3] (Original Television Soundtrack)