XII: Disobedience Manifest
"This Seems Familiar"
Starburst patterns continuously played across the lens of her eyes, refusing to grant them focus, keeping her in this world of bleary comprehension, pressing down the rawness of her sensations to distill them to the basest feelings. A universe of pain. Endless. Chewing at her.
All she knew was agony.
Life had deteriorated into an endless slideshow of solid white medical lighting, the smell of antiseptic and blood, the feeling of cold metal upon flesh—her flesh—that felt that it had spontaneously combusted into flames of the purest crimson, and the continuously shattering array of the ceiling behind a tangle of slender robotic instruments that made it seem like her own eyeballs were fragmenting into irreparable pieces with blindness only moments away. There was hardly a concept of her own "self" anymore. The suffering had long frayed any lingering strings to her consciousness.
A diagnostic machine nearby—though it sounded like it was miles away—thrummed a quiet beat. Lasers continually scanned her body, displaying her vitals on monitors dimly reflected in the recesses of her vision.
Muscles seized. Her eyes bled. Even the bones in her toes ached—she could count them all from where it hurt the most, she noted. It felt like she was inhaling bits of glass. Her stomach seemed to be constantly on the verge of upending, but the dry heaves never came. Right now, she was dimly aware of what it felt like to die.
In this place, right now, all she could do was endure.
Things kept on blurring in and out of focus past the aqua-green facemask that had been fastened around her head. Even though the transparent covering was designed to protect her eyes, the light that blistered through was like looking into the sun. A plastic mouthpiece had been inserted past her lips to prevent her from biting her own tongue off. Hoses in her nostrils pumped a steady but low stream of air, the effect feeling as if her sinuses were being frozen.
She heard voices from time to time, out in the ether of her own misery, but they were too muffled for any words to be discerned. The thought came to mind that she was hallucinating the sounds.
Every now and then, a blinding wave of pain would smash into her brain, just behind her skull at the forehead. The organ felt as if it was swelling, about to burst from the pit of bone that had acted as its prison. Sometimes, her body would involuntarily writhe or spasm after needles had been injected into her limbs, where serums had been inserted into her blood that gave her the sensation that her muscles were twisting and reorganizing themselves under her skin, like they were parasitic worms and she was just the infected host doomed to witness the moment when her entire body would burst and collapse.
The pain was excruciating and it never let up. Only more pain was added on as time went on while she laid endlessly on this hospital bed, just compounding and compounding and compounding. The loneliness also bore a weight, for the mask that was placed upon her felt so isolating, it was as if it was just her in this little void, even though she knew that her fellow trainees—her friends—were just feet away from her in a massive room of combined suffering, all going through the exact same pain that now crippled her.
Everything was blurring together. Sleep refused to claim her. She was too weak to even lift an arm. Her bare stomach trembled with every breath she took. But at no point did she ever cry out. She did not scream. This had to be one of the chief's tests, she had decided. If she screamed, it was a sign that she was letting the pain win. That could not happen.
Lying on that unforgiving bed, Kelly remained locked in her unbreakable war, doing her damnedest to push past the sensation of the chemicals slithering through her body, no matter how many times the inclination to give up touched her mind. She was a Spartan. Spartans never lost.
She was going to win.
Sometimes her assuredness left her. There were times when the lights gradually grew dark and she started to fade away. But the lights were remaining at the same brightness—it was her that was fading away. Those were the moments when she had to snap herself awake, even though she had no idea how long she had been here. Hours? Days? Weeks? She honestly could have believed that had been lying here for a month. In this room, there was no day/night cycle, so she had to rely on her internal clock for awareness, though she was acutely aware of how screwed up her senses were.
Something changed and her sensation reached a peak. She inhaled loudly, but it was only a reflex action. It was as if she could feel the tiniest strand of muscle fibers in her heart, rippling to the powerful pulsations that wracked her. She could feel the subtle twitching of the cilia in her lungs and how they bristled with each breath of fresh air that bustled them this way and that. Another inhalation and the scent of metal and her own sweat grew stronger, as though they had suddenly developed a taste, for which she could also detect her own coppery blood in the droplets of the mist that she expelled from her mouth.
Tendons tightened in her wrists. She clenched her hands into fists and felt strained popping noises resound through her body. A terrifying strength flooded her, an assuredness that she had never before felt. It was raw, untamed. It burned fire into her, stoking the life of her spirit.
You're going to win, she told herself. You… are going… to win.
Time continued to distort. The seconds turned into days. The weeks turned into minutes. None of it made sense. She watched life pass by her eyes as though she was a distant observer, an impartial wraith sent from the heavens to watch as preordained events would play to their script, never to deviate, even though nothing would actually pass before her eyes that had a determinate shape.
Yet, despite the imposed veil of detachment, she continued to hold true the belief of her victory. That there was something that awaited her at the end, something more than the nothingness of death. Perhaps this had been the one moment her life had led up to, as short as it had been at her fourteen years of age, but there was an assured feeling that refused to leave. That this would be the crux of who she was to become as a person. As a soldier.
As a Spartan.
She had told John and Sam that she was going to see them on the other side. She intended to keep that promise. More than that, she was going to be there to meet them when they arrived. She had always been the fastest, after all.
"I'm…" she whispered through cracked lips, the sound hollow and dry, so quiet that no one could possibly hear her save for the tiny microphones embedded in the medical machinery nearby, "going… to… win."
She took another breath and there was a howl.
It had not come from her.
That had been another conscript. Someone in the bed next to her.
Kelly tried to turn her head, but her spine felt like it was made of glass and several electric bolts of pain rippled all the way down to her tailbone. Her taloned hands ripped the bedding beneath her to shreds, but she did not notice.
In the next moment, she realized that the person screaming out was a friend.
Her heart skipped a beat in that one strand of time, the only instant in which a nameless dread filled her mind, the first for today.
She tried to call out, but she had used up what precious breath she had been afforded. All she could muster was a hoarse wheeze.
The person on the bed next to her was sobbing so loud it hurt Kelly's eardrums. The wails kept going on and on and on, bloodcurdling and shrill. It embodied the sheer hurt that was befalling the own Spartan, but to hear it be provided a voice was far more torturous than what she had ever been able to imagine.
An alarm was cawing from one of the machines that monitored the other trainee. A clarion call to action. Kelly recognized it as the sound of a patient that was coding.
As slowly as she dared, she twisted her head so that she could see who it was that was crying out in agony. She tried to reach out, a futile gesture, but even then, she could not lift a finger. She was just too weak.
"Phaedra…" she could barely hiss as her eyes struggled to comprehend the shapes of silhouettes beyond into a truth she would never learn.
Medics in light green sterile gowns had clustered over the patient in the next bed. A girl. The same age as Kelly. The patient was jerking, screaming so hard that spittle was flying from her mouth, the sound carrying over the shrill alarms of the machines. Blood poured from past her lips and there were claw marks on her arms as she unconsciously scratched at herself, along with anything within reach. There were several clattering noises as the medics tried to restrain her—Kelly could see one of them get thrown to the ground. That couldn't have been Phaedra's doing. Had they simply tripped?
Her own thoughts were jumbled, played out of order. Kelly blinked several times, but the resolution of the scene would not sharpen. Her eyes, still weeping blood, refused to grant her clarity.
"…tamper... injection proced—…" Kelly could dimly make out from afar, as if she was swimming underwater. Multiple voices overlapped one another, but she could discern between each one, even if she couldn't completely understand what was being said.
"No… —ood… abnormal cardiac vol—…"
"Affirm—… hypervolemia is detected… —eed with immediate dialysis. High-volume."
"Where's that metolazone? We're almo—… at 3% increased volume."
"Meto—… no good. Use diltiazem as supplement. Countering blood pressure."
"Begin stabilizing treatments to reduce the long-term effects. Can't afford any additional damage. Subject is nearly…"
There was a tickling pull at the back of Kelly's mind and her eyes rolled up into her head. A final breath of exhaustion was the last thing she heard before the black call of unconsciousness came up to meet her. Her friend's bed vanished from view and soon everything else did after that.
Finally, after an eternity, Kelly felt nothing at all.
Arbogast
Tramway – En route to wavespace array
The maglev tram bustled through the underground line whisper-quiet and smooth enough to fool most people into thinking that it was not moving at all. However, one of the nearly imperceptible bumps during the voyage was enough to jostle Kelly awake.
The Spartan gave a start as she straightened upon the bench in an instant, punctuated by a quick burst of breath through her nose. She had been slightly slouched over when she had been sleeping, her arms crossed, while the tram had been moving. She did not uncross her arms, taking a moment to wonder how long it had been since she had last slept and then chastising herself for slipping away during a mission, even if it was while she was in transit. Nodding off like this was sloppy.
Kelly looked over her shoulder, her visor's HUD continuing to record and scan data while she looked around. The lieutenant was also dozing next to her on the same bench. His head was drooped downward while he had slid partially in his seat. Perhaps he hadn't noticed that she had fallen asleep.
Fortunately, the two of them were the only ones on this tram, so their little siesta had not been witnessed by anyone at all. Kelly took another moment to take in the interior of her surroundings. Off-white hardshell seats, thinly plushed. Stainless steel handrails. Expensive monitors embedded on the sides of the tram and near the ceiling that endlessly wafted advertisements and propaganda jingles. Logos were part of the cavalcade on the screens as they blistered past, one after the other.
She stood, her MJOLNIR armor eerily silent. The motion had been enough to rouse the lieutenant from sleep as well, who rubbed his eyes with a yawn. "Lost track of time," he said.
"You weren't the only one," Kelly said as she approached one of the windows and appraised her phantom-like reflection. There was only black past the ghostly outline, apart from the occasional light fixture that warped past as a brief white blur. Fitting, considering she might have well been chasing a ghost this whole time. "It's been forty-five minutes since we left. At our current rate of speed, we should have ten more minutes."
"Not bad." The lieutenant got to his feet and stretched his arms.
Kelly swept her gaze up the empty maglev carriage. "This would've been filled with the array workers on a regular day, I assume? All of them took this line?"
The lieutenant nodded. "Most of them would. There's actually a small settlement a dozen kilometers away from the array facility. Some of the workers lived there. Cheaper housing, that sort of thing. Now, it's under heavy lockdown. No radiation has been detected in the area, but we didn't want to take chances."
Something else to worry about, Kelly sourly thought. The worst-case scenario she could comprehend at this time was that the array's reactors would explode for whatever reason, even though there was nothing to suspect that such a thing might remotely happen. Still, if it did, Arbor I would likely be safe from the blast radius. This settlement however, not so much. She was going to have to keep that in mind.
There was an awkward pause of about sixty seconds before the lieutenant cleared his throat.
"So… what are you hoping to find in the array?"
Kelly turned to face the man. "I'm a bit too cynical to hope."
The lieutenant pulled an exasperated face for the briefest of moments. "Fine, then what are you expecting to find?"
The Spartan flashed a slight grin at the jab, though she looked back out the window to stare at the veil of the blackened tunnel. She waited a thoughtful beat. "Nothing, to tell you the truth."
"Sounds a bit pessimistic."
"Call it realistic. Comes with experience."
The lieutenant watched Kelly. He shifted his weight from one foot to the next until he realized that he was the only one keeping the conversation alive.
"Experience," he repeated. His eyes shifted up to Kelly's visor. "Well, considering the obvious, it'll be hard to find anyone in this military that could ever hope of surpassing you in experience. You're Generation Two, aren't you?"
Kelly nodded.
A bare smile flitted upon the lieutenant's face. "I had a feeling. I've seen you guys on the newsfeeds. The CAA Factbook added new Spartan profiles pretty regularly since 2547. As you can imagine, I had a lot of time to read through the back-catalogue."
"Did you, now?" Kelly asked in a monotone.
The lieutenant took that as a sign to keep going (Kelly winced). "A lot of them were mostly puff pieces on the Gen-IVs. Going over their service records and what not. Like they were celebrities being interviewed." A note of disgust crept into his voice, but it soon vanished. "There was never much on the -IIIs, if I recall, and even less than that on the -IIs. Though, they did have a detailed article one month, on the Master Chief."
The man had been looking away at that time and had missed the slight twitch from the Spartan next to him at the mere mention of John's rank. Blissfully unaware, he continued.
"It was a very well written story about his origins. It featured a lot of quotes from people who knew him personally. Inspiring stuff—a colony kid whose parents get killed during a Covenant raid is a very touching story. Pulls at the heartstrings. Said tragedy is the inciting factor for him to march to the nearest UNSC outpost a hundred miles away so that he can sign up to kill the aliens who murdered his family. A tale worthy for the man who holds the moniker." His mouth rose in a half-smile and he craned his neck up at Kelly. "But it's not a true story, right?"
Kelly didn't respond. Despite that, she still levelled the lieutenant with a distinctive dip of her helmet before she turned her body at an angle, not quite directed at anything.
When the Spartan program had gone public in the forties, Kelly had not been consulted about this new development. Hell, every single Spartan had been kept in the dark on it. But it was not like it was directly pertinent to their operational readiness. After all, a Spartan never had to worry about how their image was marketed before.
However, everyone involved in the program, not just the Spartans, eventually came to the conclusion that it was very much a way for the UNSC to cover its own ass by creating an aura of integrity and human exceptionalism around a program that had played very loosely with morality and ethics. Truthfully, Kelly did not care how much information about her had been made public knowledge—though from what the lieutenant had just described, a lot of effort was being put into distorting what she had been before she became a Spartan even though she never gave a thought to that life anymore. Her history did not make her unique amongst her family, the other Spartans, for each one shared the same origin. A product of genetics and chemistry, grown and trained on the now-glassed stronghold of Reach. Regardless if the public outreach effort had been a success or a failure, she had not seen any tangible benefit from the decision that the brass had made, nor had it manifested into anything that approximated a distraction onto her own duties.
Until now, it seemed.
The lieutenant shrugged, knowing that he had confirmed his own suspicions. "You know the problem with that story? It made it seem like anyone could've been the Master Chief. Pick a planet out in this galaxy and you'll find a hundred kids with tragic backstories like his. Out here, everyone's lost someone." He gave a little shake of his head. "Someone like the Chief… there had to have been something else. Maybe it was a twist of fate, who knows? Just a lucky flip of the coin. But no one else could've been molded into what made the Chief the Chief. And if I was wrong, you would've corrected me by now."
Kelly slowly crossed her arms, not knowing what to say. The lieutenant was more insightful than she had initially given him credit for. Surprising, coming from someone who had been stationed at such a remote outpost. Usually the brighter officers had postings in the inner colonies or on battleships of significant size, not out in the middle of nowhere for their career to stagnate and waste away.
"You are right about one thing," she said carefully.
The lieutenant raised an eyebrow. "Oh?"
"The Master Chief. No one else could've become what he is." The noncom before her had used the past tense when referring to John—she made certain to emphasize the correct tense with an elongation of the critical syllable.
A slight pull of deceleration warped at her standing angle. The maglev was beginning to slow. Kelly checked the chronometer in the corner of her HUD. Two minutes until they arrived at their destination.
She walked over to the doors in preparation for disembarkation. The lieutenant joined her, but he had to grab at one of the nearby metal poles to steady himself while the Spartan remained standing unassisted.
"You know him well, don't you?" he asked her.
Kelly ignored him.
This didn't put the lieutenant off. "Probably even know his name. And he probably knows yours, too. Spartan-087. That's a number, not a name. Still, the biggest mystery in the UNSC and you're in on it. It's just—"
"Is there going to be a question…" Kelly slowly turned her head, the great golden dome of her helmet appearing phosphorous and shimmering as the industrial light fixtures outside swept across its polished face like a scanning laser as the train passed them by, "…coming from all this, lieutenant?"
The man realized that he had irritated her, if the tone of her voice was any indication. Meekly, he closed his mouth and shook his head.
"Nothing right now, Spartan."
With that, Kelly faced forward again, suppressing the urge to give a grunt of derision.
So many questions from this man! It was almost like being submitted to an interrogation. Or a network interview, at worst. At least when Furan had plied her with inquires, they had remained focused upon a singular topic instead of this of type of stream-of-consciousness rambling. The Elite would have read the room a long time ago and had shut herself up to Kelly's immense relief. This was going to be a long mission.
The maglev had now approached a terminal. She could see a dusty platform slowly drift by through the doors. The deceleration grew more and more pronounced yet her stance hardly changed as she stood in front of the doors, waiting for them to slide open.
Still, before she departed from the train, she almost shared a private chuckle to herself when she realized what she had just thought.
She couldn't believe that she was now ardent for the Elite's presence.
Exiting the emptied terminal through its only hallway gave way to a fork in the passage. The leftmost path had been walled off and coated with warning signs and yellow-and-black striped caution tape. The lieutenant mentioned to Kelly that the blocked path led to another terminal on the other side of the sealed tramway line. Due to the threat of radiation, the tram line had been terminated here to prevent anyone from entering the array in this direction.
The rightmost path continued out down a skeletal passageway before a small ramp ushered them up into the garage. Kelly took a moment to look around upon entering. The garage was bigger than the map had made it seem, yet it was barely large enough to hold more than four Falcon craft. There was a distinct lack of equipment here, for a garage, as there were only a few tool chests interspersed around the room. Empty racks lined the walls. The ground was dusty, streaked with old oil stains.
Three M12 Warthogs were lined up with the airlock exits. Their twelve-liter engines whirred and whined like angry beasts. White mists of evaporating hydrogen poured from the ill-fitting injection ports where nozzles dispersing the liquid fuel had been haphazardly inserted.
Kelly was pleased to see that these Warthogs had been fitted with Vulcan chainguns. At 500 rounds-per-minute, a weapon like that could chew through the armor of a Hunter pair and could still keep on firing long after they were dead until the barrels warped from the heat. There was a reason this two-century design had been renewed for use time and again by the UNSC, with very little variation in its design. It was the ubiquitous vehicle of the Marine corps—rugged, hardy, and ready to take on any terrain. Kelly couldn't imagine what other vehicle could be up for such a job.
The lieutenant had to get changed into a vacuum-sealed suit, to protect from the elements and the thin atmosphere just outside. There were a few empty environmental suits near the airlock door. He headed over there while the Spartan took some of her weapons from her back rack and strapped them onto the side mounts of the closest Warthog. She zip-tied them into place with a few quick yanks.
There were no engineers in the garage. Somewhat unusual, but Kelly figured this place was just understaffed, if not completely devoid of them. She checked the airless tires, the suspension, the power plant, everything on this thing that had even a remote chance of breaking.
Kelly looked over as she heard the lieutenant approach. He was busy zipping up the final layer of his environmental specsuit. It looked like a bulkier version of the bodysuit that Kelly wore underneath her MJOLNIR armor, though this one was padded, had armor plating on it, and was colored a rusty red.
The lieutenant checked his pistol, confirmed that there was brass in the chamber, and let the slide click back before he holstered the gun. He came up to Kelly just as she was finishing up her pre-drive checks.
"It's a pretty straight shot to the facility," he told her. "There's a marked path, lit by beacons. Can't get lost."
Kelly straightened up from her crouch. "I'm guessing this is where you reveal another complication?"
The lieutenant's expression clouded with concern. "To guard the contaminated facility, ONI contracted out the job to a licensed provider."
"You mean a PMC," Kelly said. Private Military Companies were a nuisance in civilized space. They were glorified mercenaries with pension plans, beholden to a steady paycheck instead of a sense of duty to a government or even to their own race. Kelly had heard of some PMCs even licensing their services to alien races. Her brow furrowed darkly at the thought.
"ONI issued out a contract and Southgate Service Group took it," the lieutenant nodded. "Underbid pretty heavily for the job, from what I was told. Don't know how much news you watch, but SSG got into hot water a few years back. Some of their contractors posted a video to social media of them shooting civilians as they were being evicted in a company mining town to the tune of a hit single. Caused a stir over at HQ in Sydney. There were many formal inquires, but no one was charged."
Kelly figured that was the case. She was well aware of the political aspect that surrounded PMCs, with many attempting to justify them as a cost-saving measure for the less important ground operations in contested zones. Many favors were no doubt traded between both sides, most of them financial, which incurred the companies with a fair amount of political clout, rendering them and their operators effectively immune from judicial punishment, especially since the Code of Military Justice had since been amended that it did not apply to outside contractors—an effect of the massive lobbying effort the PMCs had spearheaded.
The Spartan clambered into the driver's seat and flipped the hybrid drive on. She had to wipe away the dust from the center console so that she could see the screen. The lieutenant clambered into the passenger's seat next to her, an assault rifle tucked between his legs.
"This PMC, Southgate," Kelly said as she checked the dashboard—engine temp and fuel readouts looked within limits. "What are their sanctioned ROE?"
The lieutenant slid a helmet over his head and there was the brief sucking noise of equalizing atmosphere. "Minimal. Warning shots, if we're lucky. More than likely they'll shoot to kill right away."
"Great," Kelly grumbled sarcastically. "Don't suppose they're going to make exceptions for us?"
"Personally, I doubt it."
Kelly slid the Warthog into drive but kept her foot on the brake. She looked at the lieutenant. "This is your chance to get out. I can't promise that I can keep you alive out there, but I have no choice. I'm getting to that array, even if I have to carve a path through those contractors to do it."
To his credit, the lieutenant actually appeared to consider Kelly's words. He clasped his head together and his helmet tilted upward as he appraised the ceiling in thought. But, as he sat next to the Spartan, his courage was always going to be ironclad.
"I won't say you didn't offer," he simply responded as he settled into his seat.
Kelly's hands squeezed the steering wheel. Very well, then. Once more unto the breach it was.
She tapped the throttle and the Warthog lurched forward towards the airlock door, which opened automatically to let the vehicle through. The 4x4 then rolled into the next chamber, which was sized to fit massive trucks inside it, and waited until the door dropped shut behind them. In the next few moments, a series of dark orange strobing lights blistered to life all around the Warthog within the airlock. Kelly imagined this was what being in a microwave looked like.
After a bit, the light show ceased and several klaxons began resounding. There was a series of hisses and a burst of pressurized gas seared through the overhead piping. The door in front of them then slowly pulled upward, exposing the barren mare of the parched moon.
Slowly, Kelly pressed the gas pedal down, and in the next moment, they were out upon the surface of Arbogast.
There was very little sound as the vehicle bounced over the surface of the moon. Alien dust kicked behind the wake of the Warthog, throwing up a brown filter over the copper sky. If she looked up, she could see the host planet, Sonatine, loom enormously upon the heavens. A great marble rivuleted with a thousand colors, a titanic orb that imposed a massive gravity upon all that bore witness to its magnificence, as though it acted as a constant reminder to the denizens of its moon that its position in the cosmos was superior and that a wonderous natural order had decreed such a standing long before the paramecium in this system was little more than a thought.
Like the lieutenant said, there was a tireworn trail that immediately banked right to avoid the massive planum that was in their way. Metallic poles a meter-and-a-half high, capped with a light shaped like half of an ampule, dotted the way in kilometer intervals. The markers for the road. Kelly made sure that she had one of those markers in sight at all times as she drove down the trail.
The two sat in the Warthog in silence as Kelly drove. For once, there was little to hassle them along. No one was taking potshots at them yet, nor were they on a real timer of any sort. They could just settle and concentrate on the drive.
The road took them across planitiae made up of fine and powdery dust that billowed from the massive tires as they drove over it. They passed by chaos terrains of shattered moonscape boulders. They even skirted around the border of a claustrophobic chasm network and mounted a few tholi ridges. A field of sloping undae rippled across the surface, the Warthog handling the uneven terrain without a complaint. In the distance, the dorsum of a nearby continental range could be discerned, appearing as crumpled black paper underneath a sky of brass and violent dark blue.
Half an hour passed, and Kelly rounded a bend. They skirted a small bridge that passed over a sharply recessed rima, but now the mighty volcano, their destination, had now swept into frame. A tall rise with its point cut off—had it been capped, it would have appeared like a terrifying blade ready to pierce the heart of Sonatine.
"Orbis Terrarum," the lieutenant spoke next to Kelly, his first words since they had set off.
"What's that?"
"The name of the mountain. It's Latin. It means 'Worldspear.' The array is in its heart."
"Fitting name," Kelly said.
The lieutenant fidgeted in his seat. Despite the exoticness of the terrain passing by, it had not captured his interest one iota. He seemed to be more concentrated toward the sky, and of the infinite possibilities that stretched on beyond his sight, while he remained trapped down in this thin bowl of an atmosphere.
"For once," he murmured, "I'm not interested in leaving this place."
His words had been so quiet that Kelly had almost missed them. She flicked the wipers on once to rid the windshield of the dust that had started to obscure the glass. Off in the distance, a purple dust storm broiled and grew—a series of twisters peeled off from the mounting anvilhead, but the atmosphere was so thin that the Spartan knew they had no power to knock over even an unarmored person. A red-violet hue warped the horizon, an electrical charge feeling like it was building up out here.
She flicked a glance towards her passenger. "How long has it been since your last mission?"
The lieutenant gave a harsh laugh. "Haven't really kept track. I couldn't tell you, even if I tried."
The Warthog rumbled as the landscaped flattened. The dust storm was beginning to filter over their vision. Silt made tiny pinging noises as it was hurled against their armor.
After a beat, Kelly stirred in her seat and, without bothering to think of the consequences for once, asked, "What did you do to get posted out here?"
The man turned in his seat. He seemed interested now that there was the actual hint of a conversation.
"What do you mean?"
Kelly spared a quick but determinate look at him. "Respectfully, Arbogast is not the sort of place to make a career. It's where they end."
"Hell, Spartan," the lieutenant chuckled, "tell me something I don't know."
"Not much of an answer."
"Well, if I had one, I'd give it to you. I know what you're thinking. That the only reason why I could possibly have been directed to Arbogast as part of its garrison is because I managed to garner some egregious black mark on my record. That I… I don't know… accidentally bombed a school or something. Or ran over a Vice Admiral's dog with a Mongoose. Or that I just did something incredibly banal that managed to piss off the wrong person. Wrong place, wrong time, that sort of thing."
"Well, did you?" Kelly asked as she turned the wheel to avoid a pothole in the road.
The lieutenant mustered another laugh as he reached forward to grab the overhead handhold to steady himself. "Would you believe me if said that nothing I ever did warranted this posting? At least, I never quite figured it out."
Before them, Orbis Terrarum loomed. The height was immense, awe-inspiring even to the Spartan. It would not have dwarfed Reach's tallest mountain, but it certainly gave it a run for its money. On the GPS, the Warthog continued to follow along the marked path dutifully.
"There's always a reason," Kelly said.
"Not in this case," the lieutenant lightly jabbed a finger. "Sometimes, the deck is just stacked against you. One day, you're in line at the recruitment office on Imber, requesting a posting to Reach. The next, you're sitting in a waiting room, long after everyone else in the office has left, while a random background check against you is supposedly being performed. Then, you get accepted, but you always feel like an eye is on you at all times, that someone thinks that I'm a ticking time bomb that could go off at any moment. And after Basic, everyone graduates and gets their orders on the newest warships in the fleet… except me. I got a handshake and a one-way ticket to Charon as my first posting. The first of many similar postings."
The man let go of the handhold and drummed his fingers against the dash while he pondered.
"I never knew what I did," he said. "Only that there must have been something out my control that was responsible for my appalling luck. Never could guess which side of the coin was up, you know?"
Kelly took a moment to compose her thoughts. She wondered how she would have reacted, were she in the lieutenant's position. It must have been soul-crushing to have expressed a desire to sign up to fight the Covenant, only to be consistently denied a meaningful path forward at every turn. In some respects, Kelly was one of the luckiest soldiers in the entire UNSC—the best possible outcome had been foisted upon her, and she willingly gave the position her all in spite of there never being an actual choice she had to make. This man, he had made the conscious decision to fight instead of being chosen to carry such a banner, but things had panned out so much more differently than he could have imagined, that his unintentional evasion of combat had rendered him to be catastrophically afflicted with the worst coincidental timing she had ever seen in a person before.
If their positions had been reversed somehow, would either of them have faced the same fates? Would their statistical luck have held?
"You did whatever you could to get into the fight, I assume?" she asked.
The Warthog went over a bump and the lieutenant made a flippant gesture. "Wrote to everyone I could think of, short of any deities, requesting for a transfer. The response was always the same, or the lack thereof, I should say."
"Hm," the Spartan grunted.
They were about to mount another rise, so she set the vehicle's worm gear into the lower range. They went over it, and now a wide-open field of parched ground stretched out before them. A ridged entrance to a valley lay crumpled on the other side, about ten miles away.
Kelly was about to let the conversation go, but for reasons she could not explain (or perhaps she could but just was unable to reconcile it), she wanted to know more. That the story of this one soldier could have possibly been steered in the right direction for him to have fulfilled his purpose in some form. It was all any warrior deserved, after all. Wasting one's years within remote outposts was a travesty, especially if this man's record was as spotless as he claimed.
"If you have been failed like this," she asked, "why not leave? What's stopping you from mustering out? Someone of your rank, you can probably get out whenever you want."
The lieutenant placed a hand to the chin of his helmet. He shook his head. "I have my own reasons for staying. Mostly because I don't have anywhere else to go."
"No one's waiting for you? Family or something?"
Just asking about a family felt like Kelly had just uttered something in a foreign tongue. The Spartans were her family, but they were the family she had chosen, not the family she had been given. She didn't even have dreams about her mother anymore. Those had stopped during boot camp. She couldn't even remember the woman's face, no matter how hard she tried.
The lieutenant stretched his legs and sighed. "No one's waiting. Not for me to become a civilian, at least. Everyone out there that I know, they've all passed." He scanned the starry air, almost losing himself to the dreams of the infinite beyond before he came back down to earth. "Nah, I'm riding this one out until the UNSC has had their fill of me, Spartan. I vowed that I was going to win at least one battle against them, so if I withstand whatever arbitrary limit they have in place for me, I'll age out with a pension and the self-satisfaction of having endured this path they chartered. They'll get to take care of my post-soldier career, while I'll just have to settle with the fact that I won't have any stories to tell."
Kelly gripped the steering wheel. The dust storm was seeping in more heavily now, trickling around the tires like they were wading through a brownish stream.
Another twister touched by a hundred meters away, but Kelly did not alter her course. She simply drove through the dust devil. The world turned golden and copper, but it only lasted for a moment before they burst through the other side with a whisper of pelting sand. The speed of the vehicle had only dropped two miles an hour from that brief excursion—a simple irritation.
She looked over at the man. He was staring back at her. Finally, the Spartan gave a singular but pronounced nod toward him. She meant the gesture wholeheartedly. It took a strong will to remain steadfast in the face of unfortunate odds. Bravado revealed itself in many different forms—the lieutenant was just coping the best he could. The least that Kelly could do was to give respect in the face of that.
Lightning crackled around the storm clouds building at the end of the valley. The Warthog remained on approach to the mountain lair.
They did not speak for many minutes after that.
The radio crackled. Kelly looked down to the unit and twisted a knob, trying to clear up the interference.
"Unidentified vehicle," a voice from the unit rasped. "Adjust your heading to oh-seven-four. If you proceed on your current course, you will be destroyed."
The Warthog was racing along an open plain, through a low field where soft chains of craters had been diveted in the ground. They had outrun the dust storm for a bit at this point, but it was starting to intrude once more, the wind having chartered a new course for it that took it back over their position.
Kelly activated her visor's macrobinoculars. Past the windshield, she could see a distant column of several vehicles near the foot of the mountain range that they were currently heading toward. With the naked eye at this distance, they only appeared as black dots, but as Kelly zoomed in, she could view several Warthogs and Mongooses taking a up a border formation across the horizon about ten kilometers away.
"Southgate," Kelly said. She reached down to the semi-automatic gear selector and locked it into high. "They're in our way."
This again. It just doesn't end.
"They're maintaining a perimeter at the entrance to the array," the lieutenant said. "They're not going to let us in."
"We'll give them a chance," Kelly said. She reached down to the radio and flicked the switch. "Array column, this is Sierra-087. Transmitting Iota-level clearance. Requesting permission to pass through the line. Over."
She hoped that the privateers would see sense. No, it was something deeper than that. She needed for them to see sense.
However, reality never failed in disappointing her.
"Unidentified vehicle," the radio crackled, "your credentials are not recognized. Cease your approach. Power your car down and await arrival of interrogation units. Refusal to deviate will be met with lethal force. How copy?"
Kelly flicked the wipers on again. The trucks in the distance were beginning to move, judging by the thick clouds their tires were kicking up. More lighting crackled in the atmosphere and a violet-red haze bloomed near the horizon to their right.
"They're not going for it," she growled. "We're going to have to do this the old-fashioned way. Get ready."
The Southgate Warthogs were beginning to close in to the point where Kelly did not need to use her macrobinoculars anymore. They were certainly assuming a hostile formation—the Spartan could see that the turret positions were manned and that every single gun was aiming right at their vehicle. Arbogast dust was periodically obscuring her vision—she had to compensate with her VISR package that illuminated non-organic material in gold-colored outlines.
The lieutenant was now gripping the dashboard with fear. "You kill any one of those contractors and ONI won't even lift a finger to protect you," he warned her.
"I don't care," she responded. "They're not giving me a choice. Hang on."
Several things occurred all at once. A fusillade of pelleted debris kicked up by the storm furrowed astonishingly against the side of the Warthog, creating a noise like a sandblaster had suddenly been turned against the vehicle at point-blank range. At the same time, the privateer line blossomed in a singular line of blistering orange and red. A barrage of crackling noises resounded like fireworks. Tracer rounds sparked past the sides of the Warthog and the lieutenant cursed as one of the nearby rounds created such a snapping noise that his eardrums rippled.
The machinegun fire distorted the air and felt like it was jostling the organs of the passengers with each near miss. Fortunately, MJOLNIR armor negated that impact upon Kelly. Yellow bolts seemed to be skipping along the ground, producing the earthshattering rumble of rimfire with each near miss.
Immediately, Kelly yanked the wheel to the left, erupting a thick stream of Arbogast dust from the ferocity of the maneuver. Two seconds later, the air atomized and pulsated as a heavy round from a HWS Scorpion surged past, which would have hit their Warthog had they stayed on course.
Kelly's hand moved quickly over the center console. On the TACMAP, she quickly zoomed out, switched the view to topographic mode, and punched in a series of breadcrumb points that quickly reorganized themselves into a new route. She looked past the lieutenant—the PMC vehicle column was closing fast. It would be only a minute until they would be on top of one another.
She flipped the Warthog's cruise control function and gave the lieutenant's shoulder a tap. "Take the wheel," she said, already in the process of standing up in her seat. The Warthog continued to travel straight, toward an irregular escarpment that rose from the ground, a gigantic mesa with ancient crumbling cliffs. There was a dark cleft that was directly in front of them, a fissure in the ground deformation that had formed from the distortion of magma chambers cooling and growing dormant. The map showed that there was a route through the labyrinth, which was the heading they were about to take.
The lieutenant did a double-take. "W-wait a minute! I didn't—"
"Now!" Kelly hollered as she began to clamber over to the gun at the back. This was not the time to argue over tactics. Things needed to be done right as she said them.
Fortunately, the terrain here was smooth enough that the half-ton Spartan could maneuver over to the Warthog's machinegun without being jostled off. She rotated the barrel in the direction of the PMC vehicles and began priming the beltfed weapon.
At the same time, the lieutenant had unsteadily gotten himself into the seat that Kelly had just vacated. After getting the seat into position, he reached over and switched the cruise control off. He then floored the accelerator while taking cursory glances at the TACMAP embedded in the center console, making sure he was heading in the right direction.
"Into the canyons," Kelly directed anyway. "Do not slow down."
"Got it! I got it!"
Barrel flashes from their pursuers kept erupting in steady streams. The ground plumed where the heavy rounds struck, narrowly missing the rear end of Kelly's Warthog. They bounded over a short hill, but that was the only obstacle to the canyon's entrance. Kelly kept the barrel of her own machinegun rotating, but did not fire. Not until she could see the headlights of the PMC vehicles rise over the lip of the dune.
And in the next second, a Mongoose off in the distance leaped over the tholus, sand trailing from its four spinning tires as lightning blossomed in the air above it.
Kelly held down the double triggers and gave the weapon a short sweep of only ten degrees. Tiny yellow tracer dots were all that she could see of the fusillade she had unleashed. But immediately afterward, the Mongoose teetered and then veered off to the side, beginning to slow. The person who had been riding atop it seemed to sway before they pitched off the side of the vehicle. But only part of the body had fallen off. The mercenary's legs remained straddling the seat. The Spartan's burst had cut the contractor completely in half.
Unlike the men on Odarferr, that she had directly looked into their eyes as she had shot them, Kelly felt nothing about the person she had just killed. Then again, she did not have any time to afford being regretful—the contractor's cohorts were just on their tail, no doubt incensed at seeing one of their own fall to the Spartan's bullets.
However, it was going to be difficult for the PMC to effectively cut their quarry off, because Kelly's Warthog had just entered the canyon pass. The volcanic stone walls rose up half a kilometer on all sides, causing the sound of the roaring engines to echo in a relentless choir. The path was marked by strings of LED lighting—this had been a maintenance road at one point, which explained the minimal infrastructure.
The lieutenant was biting back curses as he swung the wheel, trying desperately to avoid smashing the Warthog into the side of the canyon. It certainly was not easy—a Warthog was a difficult vehicle to control even under the best of circumstances. Its dual-axis steering made cornering a dismal affair, despite the airless tires being incredibly grippy.
Above them, the dust storm was picking up amidst the clouded sky. Tiny mistrals of brown sand furrowed down through the fractured terrain, glittering particles of quartzdust sparkling amidst the stars that managed to pierce the thin cloud layer above.
Kelly kept her machinegun trained on their six at all times. They were going fast enough in this maze that she never got a visual on the pursuing vehicles, though at times she could see the yellow glow from their headlights reflect off the walls as they approached, until they inevitably disappeared as they went around another turn only to start the same process all over again.
In the corner of Kelly's HUD, a small wavelength icon popped up. Someone was calling her. The connection was force-accepted on the other end and the last voice she needed to hear piped into her ears.
"Spartan-087," Armitage said, "I'm getting reports that you are participating in a live-fire—"
"Not now, Armitage!" Kelly barked. She manually cut the connection. The relief was short-lived, because the AI tried calling again.
"I need to inform you that your actions are not—"
"I said, not now!" the Spartan yelled. She then blocked Armitage's radio code to prevent him from distracting her any further. Damn that AI. This was the worst timing for him to go into a lecture. She knew what she was doing and did not care what it looked like to anyone else.
The lieutenant risked a look behind him once the winding path straightened for a few precious moments. "Everything good back there?"
"Fine!" Kelly growled. "Just keep driving."
The lights ricocheting off the walls behind them were growing brighter. Whatever vehicles Southgate had been loaned, they were faster than this Warthog. Kelly still could not see them but knew that they were going to be losing the PMC. Not in a contest of speed, at least. The tracks they were making on the ground were fresh enough that they might as well have been lighting up flares the entire time they were within this congregation of endless canyons. Not only that, but the rattle of chaingun fire was now apparent—the contractors were apparently getting so annoyed and trigger happy that they were spraying the canyon walls with their weapons despite not seeing the Spartan's vehicle. This emitted a rush of sparks as bullets ricocheted off, as the mercenaries were anticipating being able to open fire more indiscriminately whenever they were going to see their prey come within range.
They needed to change things up. The PMC had them outnumbered and outgunned. It was time to take a different tactical route.
Kelly consulted the map. They were moments away from coming out the other side of the labyrinthus. All that was left was a little sojourn through another dune field to reach the array's access hatch, but that was not going to be of much good if they still had a platoon's worth of privateers chasing after them.
The Warthog swerved around a hairpin turn, nearly losing the back end in the process, but got itself under control before the rear tires could let go. The canyon break could now be observed—dust was pelting in from the breach in the rock face and making pinging noises off the reinforced windshield. Seconds later, they were home free.
Kelly looked to the front and spied a dormant cargo rig parked upon the left side of the entrance to the canyon when they had raced out from the confined chasm with a jubilant roar from the engine. The rig looked abandoned and it appeared to be configured to transport large loads across tough terrain if airlifting was not an option. Plus, it had been initially hidden to her when they had been trying to race out of the canyon. Anyone still in the crevasse would not be able to see it.
All of this had taken her less than two seconds to process. She slapped the support bars of the Warthog to gain the lieutenant's attention. "Wait! Park the Warthog next to the right wall and have it face the rig."
The little jerk the lieutenant gave was enough of a tell to indicate that he was uncomfortable with this order. Regardless, he complied by turning the wheel, and the Warthog embarked into a precise one-eighty-degree turn.
"Whatever you're going to do," he said, "it needs to be done fast."
Kelly planted a foot upon the lip of the rear bed as the Warthog began to slow. "Fast is what I'm good at."
She jumped out before the vehicle had stopped completely. Her boots sank into the soft sand, but it hardly inhibited her movements. The Warthog was now hugging the exterior wall of the mesa, effectively invisible to their pursuers who were still in the maze—the exit right in front of them. Kelly launched herself toward the front of the Warthog, grabbed one of the two tow hooks, and sprinted across the road to reach the rig on the other side. She skidded to a stop as she reached the massive truck, going so fast that she nearly collided with it, and locked the hook around the rig's frontal tow point. Simultaneously tapping at a control on her wrist, the Warthog's winch rapidly engaged and pulled the wire taut with a twang. A fine metal line had now been pulled completely rigid nearly across the cliffside entrance to the canyon maze. Kelly was already running back by now and had leapt aboard the Warthog, back in the gunner's position. All told, the entire maneuver had taken eight seconds to accomplish.
The lieutenant was staring up at her in awe. "Holy shit," was all he could say, impressed at the sheer speed of the Spartan. Kelly had looked inhuman, torn from the pages of comic books when she had been moving at such high velocities, going so fast that she could have turned the sandy ground into molten glass wherever her armored feet had landed.
"Eyes front," Kelly just said, the praise deflecting off of her. "Company's arriving. Keep that handbrake on, no matter what."
The rattle of approaching engines warping through the canyon breach was growing louder and louder. Kelly trained the machine gun several feet in front of the entrance. She counted down the seconds until she estimated they would come into visual contact.
In the next moment, everything went spectacularly according to plan, and then some.
Another Mongoose, driven by a contractor hellbent on chasing the Spartan, was the first to race from the canyons. He was driving with the vehicle at the redline, his head sweeping in all directions as he attempted to locate the Warthog that he had been tasked to destroy, realizing that it was no longer in front of him. Perhaps he spotted a whisker of movement traveling towards his face as he sped forward, appearing as a trick of the light, maybe, before he was suddenly killed.
Faster than the eye could blink, the rider's head flew off from his shoulders a second later, his neck cleanly cut, and the headless corpse kept on riding the Mongoose for a bit until the listless body flopped over and rolled several times in the dirt. The decapitated head, still in its helmet, bounced a few meters past the twanging wire that had liberated it from the rest of the body.
"Goddamn," the lieutenant murmured. The Warthog had not even budged when the attached cable had sliced the merc's head off.
"Scratch one," Kelly said, her fingers hovering over the triggers of the machinegun.
But the wire was still intact and the next vehicle was also approaching.
The Southgate Warthog that followed the unlucky Mongoose rider had been travelling too close to see exactly what had happened, which meant they had also never bothered to adjust their speed until it was too late. The wire had been placed at the perfect height that it caught the base of the Warthog's windshield. Like a precise chainsaw, the cable shattered the glass as they slammed together, lopped off the head of the driver, sheared through the support braces, and sliced through the ankles of the gunner before any one of them could get a word out. Glass and metal exploded violently, the trimmed Warthog petered to a stop, and the footless gunner was thrown to the ground before his head bounced against a rock and shattered his helmet. Blood burst from the cracked covering and darkened the sand. The body twitched twice before it fell still.
That last impact had dislodged the cable from where it had been secured against the rig, and it whipped back with such force, straight across the road, towards Kelly's Warthog, that the metal hook slammed against the bottom corner of the windshield and created a giant crack in the transparent covering. The lieutenant flinched from the impact and swore under his breath, most likely having thought that the hook was coming back to whip him in the face.
"Oscar Mike, lieutenant," Kelly ordered. "Head out!"
The lieutenant disengaged the brake and slammed on the accelerator. The Warthog's wheels helplessly spun for a moment before they caught and they were off once again.
The Southgate vehicles were now close enough to be in effective range, but Kelly had already opened fire as soon as she saw the first pair of headlights maneuver through the debris of the two destroyed ATVs. The machinegun rattled her limbs, but she saw the closest enemy Warthog flail underneath the heavy fire she was putting down. She saw the windshield of the one she was shooting frost white, then briefly splatter red, and the gunner just behind it fly apart as bullets riddled him from head to toe. Her next burst took out the engine block and ignited the fuel. There was a flash and the vehicle exploded in a deadly burst of molten metal.
She laid down a few more bursts of covering fire to ward off any more enemies. "How far to the access hatch?" she called out.
"Imminent," the lieutenant said back through gritted teeth. His hands were probably knuckle-white underneath his gloves as he gripped the steering wheel. "Should we go past it, try to lose these guys first?"
"No. Stay on course. We might have a chance now."
The suspension rumbled as the Warthog passed over a low plain of polygonal tessera, before it met another loping escarpment. The vehicle came over the rise and pelted down the rather steep backslope, which was a sliding curvature of sand that led down to a hardpacked bottom next to an encrusted magma tube. They were now in a half-formed caldera, with nothing but a crescent ridge surrounding them and the floor of the crater, which is where their destination lay.
Kelly could see a bunker door had been erected upon the side of the massive tube, a hemisphere shape that reminded her of a missile silo. The entrance was a smooth concrete slab, just as the lieutenant had said, but a metal grappling point had been bolted onto the front.
She pointed for the lieutenant to park the Warthog in front of the sealed entrance. Kelly jumped out again. The bellow of the pursuing motors could be heard, but they were still past the rim of the crater. Kelly spent a precious second trying to gauge the distance, figured she had enough time, and hurried to the front of the vehicle. She unslung the hook once again and rushed over to the grapple point. Quickly, she looped the steel cable over the metal bracers and locked the hook into place.
The Spartan ran back to where the lieutenant was still sitting in the Warthog. "Full reverse. Short bursts of acceleration. We don't need to blow it open. Just wide enough to fit us will do."
The man was already shifting the truck into gear as he pressed the winch control buttons—there was a twanging noise as the cable was put under tension. "Not enough time! We're a bit exposed here, in case you hadn't noticed!"
Kelly disregarded the man's indignance. This might have been the first time he had been shot at before. Everyone reacted to being under fire a little differently, but they eventually got used to the sensation.
"I'll take care of our guests," she reassured him. "Just get the door open."
She hustled around to the back right corner of the Warthog. From the exterior weapon hook on the quarterpanel, Kelly lifted up Rina's sniper rifle that she had brought along from the Nighthawk. Long-range weapons were not exactly her thing, but she had been curious to see how this weapon held up in a firefight, compared to the stock rifles the UNSC typically issued.
Her trained ears picked up that there were at least four more vehicles that were heading their way. It would be seconds before they would mount the ridge and come travelling down the long volcanic slope.
She stepped away from the Warthog, which was now spinning its wheels frantically while the cable trembled and strained as it was being yanked hard by the truck. Dirt and sand bubbled around the whirling wheels like liquid.
The Spartan dropped to a knee, brought the sniper rifle up, and trained the muzzle upon the lip of the caldera.
The sun above her was slicing through the ribboned atmosphere, despite the dust storm razing all around them. A raw blue light, distorted by the filtered haze. Lightning continued to spiderweb the sky and the air in Kelly's filters reeked of ozone.
She waited, finger brushing the trigger, keeping her breathing under control, until she saw the first glint of a black helmet rise up from the sandy ridge.
The sniper rifle's first bullet caromed off the pan and hit directly upon the rider's vehicle—another Mongoose—right into the engine block. The bullet kept going and went all the way through the rider, blowing a hole the size of a dinner plate where his torso used to be. The dead mercenary was yanked right off his ATV, like someone had just given an invisible chain around his body a harsh tug.
The Spartan allowed a moment to appreciate the power of this custom weapon. She wondered what Linda would think of this rifle. The balance between the recoil and the precise destruction were unlike anything she had seen in such a rifle before.
While that was going on, the lieutenant was struggling to keep his Warthog from sliding back in forth, almost as if the vehicle was desperate to dug the concreted door wide open. Kelly kept sidestepping so that the Warthog did not block her line of sight to the ridge, because more were coming their way.
The near horizon was quickly populated with the raw gray shapes of the Southgate vehicles. A Warthog jumped the gap, landed heavily on its four wheels, and raced towards them, the motor loping.
Kelly snapped the sights of her rifle to the front of the Warthog, zoomed in close enough to see the creases in the gloves of the merc that was holding onto the wheel, and let off another shot. The truck's front right wheel flew off—the axle having been blown to bits—and the front of the truck collapsed and dug into the soft sand. That caused it to decelerate to zero in nearly two seconds, which had the effect of causing the back of the Warthog to flip into the air, hurling the driver and passengers from their seats. The driver actually crashed through the windshield and landed on the ground only for the airborne Warthog to crush him as it landed right upon him. The truck flipped once… twice… three times, before the abused engine finally exploded and the skeletal chassis was engulfed in flame for a brief moment before the thin atmosphere snuffed out the pyrotechnics.
Kelly heard the lieutenant whoop in her radio, but she wasn't listening. A whisper overhead indicated that someone was taking potshots at her.
A mercenary in an open-cockpit Jackrabbit, which was a scout vehicle with two wheels in the front and one in the back, zoomed past the smoldering wreckage of the Warthog and fired a submachine gun at her with one hand. The bullets smacked all around Kelly, who was still perched in her kneeling position, not having moved a muscle.
The first shot that she sent in the Jackrabbit's direction blew its rear tire to smithereens. The next one pierced the cockpit as it was driving past. Kelly saw a burst of blood and brains spurt from the interior, but didn't see the remains of the body. The Jackrabbit slowly petered to a stop.
The bolt to the sniper rifle locked open. Empty. There was only one Southgate vehicle left—one final Warthog. Kelly reached down to grab a fresh magazine, but raised her head to see that the mercenary had aimed his vehicle right for her. He was going to run her over.
There was no time to reload. Kelly dropped the rifle and rolled out of the way. The ground rumbled as the truck bore down on her, the scratched fender appearing almost as a rampaging animal in bloodlust. She could see the curvature of the tires, the serial numbers stamped upon the side of the rubber as they passed her by. She heard a crunching noise as the Warthog ran over the sniper rifle, bending the barrel.
The Spartan exited her roll, not bothering to bemoan the loss of the weapon, her pistol now in hand as she straightened back into a crouch. The nickel-plated barrel glinted with malevolence as she lined the dot sight up with the gunner in the back of the departing vehicle, who was struggling to turn around the machinegun on a gummed-up swivel axis.
She took a breath and fired. The gunner dropped from the rear of the Warthog.
Kelly dipped her aim down and to the right a hair. She pulled the trigger again. The passenger's head dipped forward and blood smeared upon the windshield's interior.
With a sharp move, she pivoted her aim to the left, perfectly parallel. Her final shot caught the driver in the corner of his helmet, which ricocheted around the interior of the covering, and killed him immediately. The Warthog kept going until it hit the remains of the Jackrabbit in front of it and its engine spluttered and died.
Kelly kept the pistol aimed at the motionless Warthog, dust continuing to scythe around her. Finally, after a minute had passed of nothing but stillness except the wind and the temperamental warming of sunlight as it broke in and out of the clouds above her, the Spartan stood. She surveyed the scene as she calmly ejected the magazine of her pistol and methodically slotted in a new one. It was all quiet in the caldera. The rampaging of engines had ceased.
All except for the one the lieutenant was driving. The truck was violently jerking back and forth as it yanked against the concrete block that barred the way to the array. As Kelly stepped over to him, the man leaned out from the Warthog, knowingly wide-eyed behind his helmet.
"My god," he murmured, noting the carnage all around him and the bodies that lined the crater. "And you weren't even on the machine gun."
Kelly walked up and placed a hand on the Warthog's A-pillar. "I bought us some time. They'll send over another patrol when this one doesn't radio in. We might not even have half an hour before the rest of the Southgate mercenaries come down on us." She turned toward the door. "Where are we with getting in?"
"I think I got it!" the lieutenant bobbed his head and pointed. "It's a small crack, but it might be big enough!"
The Spartan gave the Warthog a pat. It sounded like she had just punched a steel drum. "Good work."
Before her, towering overhead, the mountain awaited. She walked around the rear of the Warthog to avoid stepping over the cable, which was now limp on the ground, but did not want to risk stepping over a line that could potentially grow taut in any given moment, and headed over to the concrete block. She unhooked the tow cable, just in case, and investigated the lieutenant's handiwork.
Just like he said, the block had been moved about a foot, exposing a delve of blackness that was cold and blue within. It was not enough to allow Kelly to squeeze through, but it was enough of an opening that she could wedge her armored body in and push off from the other side.
She dug her heel against the wall of the lava tube, placed her hands upon the massive block, and with the ease of someone encased in MJOLNIR armor, pushed as hard as she could. Her exertions created a massive grinding noise as the block scraped along the ground, exposing more and more of the access shaft that had been hidden just behind it.
Within moments, the Spartan had made an opening wide enough for her to enter through. She peered into the fissure that she had just created and flicked her helmet lights on. A large steel door rimmed by a threshold painted yellow and black was now visible. The first portal unto the ancient darkness. Kelly heard the lieutenant approach behind her and she reached behind for her shotgun.
The man gave a whistle. He had undoubtedly witnessed her feat of strength. "Nothing you can't do, eh?"
"You'd be surprised," Kelly just said. She slotted in an extra shell into her shotgun. She then turned to the lieutenant. "Weapons out at all times. And keep an eye on the radiation level. We don't know what we're going to find down there."
She had meant it when she had said it earlier, but now Kelly did hope that there was something to find. Something that would give the events of this day some worth. Because what would separate her from Phaedra if her violence all panned out to be senseless? Her brain seemed to static darkly at the thought.
"Roger that," the lieutenant said as he brought his assault rifle out. "Don't have to tell me twice."
Grimly, the two soldiers gripped their weapons as they spared one final look behind them before they slipped through the opening, shielding themselves from the savage light of the slashed sun only to be met by the unknown umbrae that lingered within this dark and abandoned cape, the fortress of stone and metal impassively awaiting their arrival within.
A/N: I'm hoping to get another chapter out at my usual pace before I go on vacation in a little more than two weeks. I'll be taking a well-deserved break for about a week-and-a-half, so I won't have any time to devote to writing all throughout then. As long as the next chapter doesn't turn into a massive tome (from my outline, I don't think it should, but I've been wrong before), I'll be able to churn it out before I'm out of commission. But if you don't hear from me for a longer period than normal, now you'll know why.
Playlist:
Delirium (Becoming a Spartan)
"The Road"
Jed Kurzel
A Writer's Odyssey (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
The Warthog / The Drive Begins
"OKB Zero"
Ludvig Forssell
Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Arbogast Chase I (Perimeter / Canyon)
"Going Dark"
Sarah Schachner
Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
Arbogast Chase II (Wirecutter / Crater)
"Grains of Sand"
Hans Zimmer
Dune [The Dune Sketchbook] (Music from the Soundtrack)
