XIII: Elemental
"Preceded Reputation"
Arbogast
Array Access
The shaft was situated at a twenty-degree angle downward, about five meters in diameter. A concrete sarcophagus. The walls were unpainted and roughened, the color of basalt gray, with loops of yellow wired lighting flickering on upon something chancing by in close proximity, creating a sequential illumination phenomenon that rippled down the cylindrical passage.
A sloping industrial catwalk, ridged with metal steps, marked the way down the shaft all the way to the bottom, which was invisible from the height the two soldiers were currently at. It was a singular line of stairs, a metal spike deep in the stone heart of the facility, towards whatever awaited them in the central chamber below.
Kelly's helmet lights barely afforded her any additional illumination more than a few yards ahead of her. She was relying on her VISR system to pick up the slack, but even with it on, there was little detail to behold. She was holding onto her shotgun, slowly treading down the steps which popped as soon as the full weight of her armored form settled upon them. The adjusting metal sounds reverberated and warped until they sounded less like steel and more like liquid. The noise was unavoidable—this area of the facility had been in such disuse that it was a wonder that the catwalk had not deteriorated a long while back.
Behind her, the lieutenant was closely treading behind the Spartan as they went down the steps, his own footfalls comparatively silent. He was keeping an eye on their six, turning around every once in a while to ensure that they were not being followed by any more of the mercenaries up top. It had looked like they had gotten all of their pursuers up there, but they both knew it was not in their best interests to make any assumptions. Though if Kelly had left any of the privateers alive from their firefight up on the surface, they had perhaps developed a sense of self-preservation and had decided to leave the two well enough alone. The carnage that the Spartan had left in her wake had been enough of a testament to not provoke her further.
For fifteen minutes, they slowly descended, deeper and deeper into where the wavespace array was located. The temperature was dropping substantially as they traversed down the staircase, though the Spartan and the lieutenant's suits were staving off the chill thanks to their environmental regulators. Kelly did notice that, the further they went, the greater the presence of ice on the walls became, which shimmered like glassy patches as the light fell upon them.
At no point did Kelly relax as she kept her shotgun aimed down the shaft, ready to unleash a load of 8-gauge buckshot to anyone that chanced upon them here. If the lieutenant was correct, then this facility should be deserted, but Kelly could not drop her suspicions about this place. A nuclear disaster was a convenient cover. Perhaps too convenient.
She had been harboring doubts ever since Governor Ishir had mentioned the situation to her. Although a catastrophic reactor failure was an event that was surely plausible, the fact that members of Phoenix Unit had traversed to this planet in the last several months was too much of a coincidence for her to ignore. Phaedra would have likely understood the value of having a wavespace array available for her use, which would have provided her the ability to give directives to the rest of the members of her squad in real-time, allowing them to spread out and to carry out her bidding to the far reaches of the galaxy by using Arbogast as a waystation. Deliberately causing a nuclear disaster would have provided the Phoenix Unit with the opportunity to have this facility all to themselves, given the right circumstances.
That is, Kelly figured, if this nuclear disaster was in fact real and not fabricated.
The proof of that, she suspected, was located somewhere in this facility. Individuals like the governor could be fooled by manufactured evidence. But not her. Not a Spartan.
Fifteen minutes later, the catwalk levelled off and the two soldiers were now walking upon a flat grating. Ringed metal supports circumferenced the dark stone chamber. The information in the corner of Kelly's HUD indicated that they had just descended roughly a thousand feet below the surface. They had not encountered any diversions or splitting branches in the path ahead, so there was nothing to suggest that they were going in the wrong direction. Furthermore, there was now a bundle of piping overhead that suggested the presence of additional infrastructure in their direction. They pressed on.
The bowels of the facility were ice-cold at this point, and a hissing noise could now be discerned at this depth. Bright warning signs, many of them displaying the universal symbol for radiation, had been emblazoned upon the sides of the shaft, the neon colors doing their job at catching the eye. Kelly kept glancing at her suit's radiation readings from the built-in Geiger counter. The levels down here were nearly nonexistent, but occasionally there would be the smallest spike that would produce a chirp from the counter. The dosage was negligible at this point and easily ignored—a routine chest X-ray would contain more radiation than what they were currently experiencing.
Another massive steel door soon blocked their path, sized to the diameter of the chamber, much like the door to a safe. There was no access pad or handle to open it that Kelly saw. No obvious extrusions that would indicate this door was meant to be opened from the outside. She tried wirelessly accessing the door, but it did not have a functioning receiver to detect her signal.
Kelly lowered her weapon as she approached the door. She ran a hand along its face, as if it would betray a weakness of some kind. She rapped her knuckles lightly upon the face, which produced a dry clunking noise.
She stepped back from the door and appraised it from top to bottom. "Override code's not going to work. And we're not going to have time to cart in enough explosives to blow this open."
The lieutenant did not seem despondent. "I figured this would be the case," he said, but he moved to Kelly's right and indicated for her to follow. "There's another way in, though."
There was a shadowed passageway that had blended in with the wall. Even Kelly would not have noticed it was there if it had not been pointed out to her. Not right away, at least.
The space was tight and hard to maneuver in full armor. The Geiger counter gave a few more clicks before quieting. After a few right angles and a jaunt down a tiny staircase, the two had now come to a small maintenance room. At the far end was a massive pipe with a wheeled hatch angled in their direction. Another cluster of warning labels had been slapped onto the side of the pipe. More radiation signs.
"What's this?" Kelly pointed to the pipe.
"Secondary cooling feed," the lieutenant explained. "There are three loops to the reactor cycle and two heat exchanges per reactor. The cooling water regulates the temperature of the third loop. There are still two reactors running to provide power to facility, so the line isn't going to be stagnant. The current's weaker at this point in the cycle, so you should be able to move about without being swept away easily."
Kelly tried to think through this tactically but realized in seconds what the lieutenant was talking about.
"You want me to submerge myself in the cooling water to a nuclear reactor?"
"Way I see it," the lieutenant said, "we don't have a choice. The main door's inaccessible and that was the only route inside I could think of that was not blocked. But the cooling pipe has multiple access points—you could get around the door and open it from the other side when you reach the next hatch."
He then turned the wheel to the hatch and, with a pneumatic hiss, exposed a pod-shaped airlock that looked barely large enough to fit Kelly into. Right away, Kelly's Geiger counter began chattering angrily. Something in that pipe, just past the next hatch was disturbing it. She glanced at her readout—50 roentgen.
"The water's irradiated," she said. "That doesn't seem right. The cooling water system is independent of the reactor. They should be radiologically isolated."
She switched the wavelength on her HUD to detect neutron patterns. Sure enough, the hatch beyond was visibly "warmer" than its immediate surroundings.
Kelly looked at the lieutenant. "To your knowledge, when the reactor melted down, did anyone report any signs of structural damage?"
The man thought for a moment. "I don't believe they did, no."
"Hmm," Kelly considered the pipe. "The locked door. The contaminated cooling water. They all sound like manufactured barricades to dissuade anyone from entering this facility. My armor will handle the radiation in the water, but yours won't last the swim. Almost as if this threshold was set to limit anyone who isn't a Spartan from entering."
"You think the meltdown was deliberate?"
"At this point," Kelly sighed, "I'm looking out for any proof that can convince me otherwise." She stepped toward the pipe. "How far to the nearest hatch?"
The lieutenant consulted the TACMAP. He had downloaded a blueprint of the facility onto it. "Fifty-two meters. The current's running against you, but there are handholds on the interior of the pipe, if I'm reading this correctly. Still, might take a while until you'll be able to exit." He pointed to the next section. "After that, you'll need to maneuver through the heat bleedoff diffusor that is positioned over the heat exchanger. That's another ten meters. But once you're past those, you should be able to return to the door to open it from the inside."
"I'll manage," Kelly said. She slotted her shotgun onto her back. She lifted a leg and stepped into the pipe but froze when she was halfway in the airlock to address the lieutenant. "Wait by the door. I won't be long."
Kelly saw the man shift his weight from foot to foot. A telltale sign that he was nervous. He seemed to consider her words for a few seconds before he gave a shaky laugh.
"Just trying to figure out what I'll do if you don't make it," he explained.
Kelly dipped her head. Shadows danced in her visor.
"That's not going to happen," she simply said.
With that, she stepped into the airlock and reached up and shut the hatch.
The Spartan was now submerged in complete darkness, or she would have been if her helmet lights had been extinguished. She had to hunker down in order to fit within the airlock properly. There was barely enough room in here to spread her elbows out, never mind her arms. Fortunately, Kelly did not plan on staying here for long.
There was another circular wheel at the bottom of the airlock, between Kelly's feet. Before she turned it, she set the alert threshold on her Geiger counter to a higher number—it was going to be ringing constantly down there at its current setting and she would only need the warning if she were to come across a pocket of untraversable radiation.
With that settled, and after a final check over all her attached equipment had been performed to ensure that everything was properly secured, she reached down and turned the wheel. It creaked open, revealing a ladder and a massive gurgling noise. Water. Rushing by at hundreds of gallons a minute. All her helmet lamps could reveal below her was a shimmering surface that appeared almost solid, like it was ice. There was nothing in the stream to break up the flow and to create reefs of white foam.
Kelly instinctively took a breath so that she could hold it. She then exhaled. Without hesitating a second longer, she took a step into nothingness.
The water hitting her armor barely registered. There was just one continuous impact that started at her feet before it enveloped her head. It reminded Kelly of a concussive blast from a grenade if she was standing far away from it. Bubbles rose in an angry froth around her armored form. Her helmet lights cut twin beams through the murky liquid, but only for a few feet, and the diodes upon the joints of her frame revealed a skeletal rigging of the massive warrior that had now inhabited this dark portion of the moon.
Slowly, she took a step forward. There was resistance pressing at the front of her body—the current. Kelly could not feel the coldness of the water outside, but simply trying to move when there was an opposing force working against her felt strange. She had run ops in every type of environ imaginable—low-gravity, high-gravity, zero-g—but underwater was the one that she had the least experience with. An ocean never felt natural to her, but the stars had. Everything felt constrained down here. Restricted. That feeling had never sat right with her.
She splayed her arms out, sluggish in the deep. Another thing she disliked about water—she could not be fast here. Nearly blind, she groped along the sides of the wall, her fingers sliding across the smooth surface of the pipe. She tried to dig her boots in, but the floor was made of the same surface and they kept losing purchase.
In desperation, Kelly lifted off, her feet no longer touching the ground. She did the breaststroke in three powerful bursts, surging through the pipe, seeing the rush of particulates graze past her visor, until her helmet caught sight of a runged protuberance to her immediate left. She grabbed for it.
Her hand clenched around the rung and she was anchored into place. Kelly slowly let out a breath, letting her body be carried in a parallel position from the flow of the current. She lifted her head. If she looked down the pipe, she could see the next handhold within arm's reach. A sideways ladder bolted into the pipe. She had a path.
The Spartan pulled herself along the handholds, her movements machine-like and deliberate from being immersed in the fluid. Branches of bubbles flowed from the vents in her helmet as she breathed. She timed her actions down to the half-second as she kept going further and further down the pipe, an old mental trick that taught her to break down menial actions to keep her mind continuously working.
With nothing but dark water ahead of her, her imagination helped to fill in the gaps. As she watched her hands extend, grip the metal rings, hold her there for a moment while her elbows bent to pull her body through the liquid, and repeat, she could not help but think back to the contractors she had just killed. She wondered why she was feeling nothing for those men. Was the violence senseless, in that regard? Had she been putting the mission so far ahead over everything else that the lives of other humans weighed less and less as time ran out? Or was it because they were not even UNSC, that they held no connection to her as a soldier? They were just obstacles, in a way. Things to push aside.
The current was getting stronger as she moved forward. Not enough to dislodge her from her grip, but Kelly still made sure to tighten the hold she had upon the rungs. She did not want to lose any sort of progress if she could help it.
She wondered how the lieutenant was faring back up top. More than likely he was bored out of his mind, waiting for her to return. At least, that possibility was on the more optimistic side of things. Worst case, there were more contractors that had followed them down into the industrial access and the lieutenant was now in a fight for his life all by his lonesome, trapped between an impenetrable door and a horde of angry privateers.
There was something about the man that just didn't settle for Kelly. It was not a sense that he had been lying to her—she had a feeling that he had been entirely truthful when regaling his sorry tale to her—but that there was just one small bit of context she was lacking. The only issue was that she did not know what questions she should be asking.
"Damn," she said out loud, frowning.
She continued pulling herself up the pipe, shaping her hands into blades as she shunted them forward to reach the rungs. By her count, she had twenty meters still left to traverse.
Kelly wondered if this was all a game to Phaedra. That she had devised all of this so that anyone trying to find her would be forced to follow in her footsteps. Kelly had long surmised that this course had been chartered for her—only her—a long while back. The thought saddened her. A long time ago, she had known the woman quite well. Maybe now it was time to accept that she either did not know what she could become, or that she never really knew her at all.
I know you hate me, the words in Kelly's head rang, an unspoken confession. What I've done to you, I'll never ask for forgiveness. I don't deserve it. But I won't become you. You're trying to show me that even someone like me can be brought to your level. Or maybe, you were never meant to reach mine.
A dark green outline then began to appear out of the gloom, becoming brighter and brighter. Kelly's heart began beating a little faster. It was the ladder up to the hatch. She had made it. The Spartan positioned herself underneath the opening and checked her Geiger counter one last time. It was still reading the same dosage level and had not registered any major blips. Seems like she would make it out of here relatively unscathed.
The Spartan lifted herself up, dripping with fluid. Her helmet vents hissed as they switched environs, sounding like the intake to a large-bore engine. She reached up, twisted the wheel to the hatch, and pulled herself up into the airlock.
After the pressure to the two sectors of the facility equalized, Kelly was allowed to extricate herself. She stepped onto another grated catwalk, and returned her shotgun to her hands again after she did a check to make sure that the strong current had not knocked off any of her weapons. Satisfied, she recalibrated her motion tracker and continued down the hallway. She proceeded on her current heading, taking cursory glances at her TACMAP along the way. Her motion trackers were silent, indicating that she was the only organism within range in this place. As much as the thought brought some comfort to Kelly, she could not allow herself to fully relax.
Machines break, eyes don't, Chief Mendez had been fond of saying, after all.
The catwalk now extended over a cavernous pit that could have easily fit a UNSC destroyer. Dim lights created a simmering arbor across the way, like the massive room was haloed by a ring of white. From here, Kelly could not see the bottom. She gave a quick scan to the environment, found that there was nothing in it of any material substance, and kept on going.
The catwalk soon speared into a textureless wall and Kelly now ended up within a concrete hallway. Pipes and wiring clustered upon the right side of the corridor, making maneuvering quite tight. The hallway was at least a quarter of a mile long—woeful conditions for a shotgun. She swapped to her pistol. The handgun might have seemed like a tradeoff, but with its integrated scope package, Kelly could wield the thing like a precision rifle. She treaded forward, her boots leaving wet marks in her wake. Her armor was still glistening from the cooling water beading off of it.
She traveled the length of the hallway and took a left, headed up a staircase for ten seconds, and found herself in front of a large maintenance door. Based on the triangular warning signs that had been applied to its face, and from what the lieutenant had told her, this was the room to the heat bleedoff diffusor to the reactor. Luckily, there was a thick lever to the right of the door that initiated the opening sequence. Kelly grasped it and yanked it down.
There was a heavy thunking noise and the door cracked open. Hydraulics slowly parted the opening wider.
"You have got to be kidding me," Kelly groaned upon seeing what was beyond.
The catwalks had returned, only now they were positioned upon something that was far more tangible than the previous chambers. A titian glow blasted from the chamber, along with a wave of heat (that her armor's temperature sensors registered in a massive spike), that caused her light blue armor to appear that it was glowing stark white. Sparks and streams of superheated air blistered around the edges of the opening, almost like they were scratching at anything within reach.
Stretching before her, the walkway bisected the next room, which was arrayed with titanium nozzles the size of Pelicans, twenty in total, blasting cones of vibrant flame of nearly every color down onto a pool of metastable protowater down below, which simmered and broiled but strangely did not emit any steam, though the light the pool emitted was almost blinding to behold. Six massive fans churned the air, causing the entirety of the room to appear distorted as a wavy filter of haze billowed about.
Kelly gulped her grimace down and started to quickly walk across the bridge. This environment was not conducive to her health, perhaps even less than the cooling pipe.
Immediately, as she headed into the diffusor, her armor began to shimmer and steam. The water that had previously collected upon it all evaporated in a matter of seconds. She was creating a cloud, her outline becoming ghostly, as the outside temperature of her MJOLNIR armor skyrocketed. She gave a brief glance downward as she was midway across the catwalk—the pool of modified water below glowed yellow-white, as bright as molten metal.
The nearest bleedoff nozzle belched a thick infernus, colored copper and blue. The flames nearly washed over Kelly and her shields began to register failures in their power level. Static crackled along her body and she hurried to the other side. The door registered her approach and cracked open for her. Kelly sidled her way through, continuing to radiate a wavering film of heat from her scorched armor. The air seemed to shimmer and become obscured around her—Kelly waited for her armor to cool.
"Right," she said after she did a systems check to make sure the heat had not damaged anything. "Let's not do that again."
This part of the facility featured additional branching paths, but Kelly had a good thing for directions and knew where she needed to go. Having memorized the map, she took the proper number of turns until she passed through an unmanned security checkpoint. The hemisphere-shaped door that had previously barred her way was now standing before her. She was now looking at the opposite side.
Kelly tried pinging the lieutenant to let him know that she had made it, but her signal was not registering any IFFs. She concluded that there was simply too much interference down here, what with being surrounded by solid rock and metal and all.
She searched the door for another access panel to open it and came up empty. The Spartan then turned to the security station, which was little more than a booth big enough to house two guards where they could look at a wall of security cam footage. No doubt an override to the door would be found in there.
She approached the station, but the door was locked. Guess that figured. However, Kelly was not about to let this kind of flimsy door bar her way—she smashed it in with a well-placed kick. The door was knocked off its moorings and flew into the opposite wall and obliterated one of the security screens. Glass scattered across the ground.
Kelly walked in, found a big red button on the control desk that was clearly marked as the override. She depressed it with a palm. Over by the hemisphere door, yellow safety lights began rotating while klaxons blared a warning.
Kelly walked out from the booth and approached the door as it began to lift up. From the other side, the lieutenant ducked underneath the still-opening door and straightened to face the Spartan. From his body language, Kelly could tell he was glad to see her. His gaze flickered somewhat as he observed the new streaks of carbon scoring that now marked her armor—concern for her wellbeing, perhaps?
Before he could say anything, Kelly jerked a thumb back in the direction she had just come from.
"Well? Shall we continue?"
The main avenue gave them a straight shot to the core of the facility, if the TACMAP was accurate. They moved through the deserted area, rolling their footsteps to minimize the noise of their approach. Their weapons were held at the ready, their motion trackers continuously within their peripheral vision.
The hallway was now comprised of smooth tile instead of concrete. It sloped downward at a slight angle for about half a kilometer. A set of planters with fake vegetation split the path down the middle. Kelly took one side of the hall while the lieutenant took the other side. Still, they did not encounter anyone on their travels, nor did they come across any areas that were heavily irradiated. Yet more evidence to the suspect nature of this supposedly disastrous phenomenon.
They came to another door. The portal parted without requiring either of them to find a roundabout way to get past it, thankfully. A large bridge was now suspended before them, branching across the massive and bottomless pit Kelly had observed earlier, only this time the shadows on the other side had seemed to dissolve to reveal the hints of a gargantuan metal structure, which Kelly could now see was a large dish half a mile long in diameter. She looked up and realized that the dish was acting as a convex dome to the enlarged chamber they were in right now—the wavespace transmitter, hidden from sight above them, speared upwards through the opening in the volcano, and reached the geosynchronous satellites overhead to receive the inbound data.
Behind Kelly, the lieutenant gave a whistle.
"Never ceases to amaze," he said.
The Spartan wondered how the man would take seeing Onyx for the first time. It was easy to forget that most people had not seen the sort of things that her or any of the Spartans had. Ancient alien technology never failed to strike awe and wonder into those looking upon it for their first time, however the dish served as a fair reminder of human ingenuity, if not for its sheer size alone.
The bridge was sturdy, a little less than a quarter mile long. It had handrails to prevent people from accidentally walking off the side, but the drop beyond was likely to be fatal at any rate. Kelly looked over the edge—she still could not see the bottom.
Some of the structural supports, bolted onto the dish at various angles, were as tall as redwood trees and as big around as the tallest specimens. Walking underneath the dish, a faint ring of light rimming around its edge, one did get the uncanny feeling of being underneath the expansive canopy of a giant tree. As they went along the bridge, their footfalls evaporated into nothingness, the giant chasm between the dish core and the facility behind them swallowing up the noise into its encompassing void.
They approached the door at the other end. The entrance to the core. Now that they were closer, Kelly could see a maze of stairwells and catwalks encrust the outer edge of the dish structure. Even though they were approaching the lit threshold, it still felt to the Spartan like she was moving further and further into darkness.
Kelly checked her Geiger counter once more. Background radiation levels were slightly elevated, but nothing that would remotely cause concern.
She reached out a hand to touch the door controls, but stopped as soon as she saw a flurry of red dots crowd her motion sensor. She froze.
"Contact," she said over their COM. "Six targets. UNSC beacons."
Not contractors, she meant, unless someone had stolen a few extra IFF tags from Arbor I. Marines, maybe. Were they here to secure the area? Or was their presence here unsactioned?
The lieutenant glanced at the digital readout on his rifle, ensuring that the number "60" was still emblazoned there in its blue block font. "Is the plan to go in blasting?"
Kelly paused a beat. The people inside the dish core were not third-party mercenaries. They were fellow soldiers, just like her. There was no excuse to shoot them all in cold blood without an explanation. She was a Spartan, but she was not a monster.
"Negative," she shook her head. "We don't fire unless they fire. Copy?"
"Copy," the lieutenant said, but it was obvious from the tone of his voice that he was unsure about this.
Kelly hugged the door. She slid back the slide of her shotgun halfway, confirming that a shell was loaded. A reassuring act. Her audio receivers were picking up muffled bits of conversation past the door, but nothing clear could be discerned. They sounded human. Good. The last thing Kelly needed was to have the Covenant involved in all of this somehow, but it was a paltry attempt at deriving some much-needed relief out of this situation.
She waited for a few additional moments and then held up three fingers to the lieutenant. She set her hand down, waited until she had counted down to zero in her head, and then hit the controls.
The doors slid open and Kelly and the lieutenant swept inside, moving as smooth as anodized blades. The room beyond was multilevel, consisting of raised ringed platforms that were positioned at low angles traveling upward towards a center platform to their right. Four support pillars stabbed through the room, along with a central column rimmed with piping and wires directly in the middle of the room that towered from the tallest point. Control panels of dusty glass that were draped all over the walls glimmered hieroglyphics and jeweled icons.
And, like Kelly's motion trackers had indicated, it was already occupied.
Six armored ONI agents turned to face them.
From the moment they stepped in, Kelly could see that something was off. The agents had all frozen, like they had been caught in the act, stealing from the cookie jar. In their hands, they held bundles of wiring and canisters that Kelly could easily identify as explosives. There was no doubt in her mind that they were here to destroy this place. Many questions came to mind, but the one that was the most pertinent was the desire to know if these men were in fact loyal to ONI or Phaedra. To say this complicated matters a bit was perhaps a mild reading of the situation.
Then, the agents went for their weapons.
Kelly held up a hand to the lieutenant, a reminder for him to not be the one who would fire first. The ONI troopers bore down on them with silenced submachine guns, yelling several different directives at them, many of them variations on "Stand down!", "Identify yourself!", or "Freeze!"
"Spartan?" the lieutenant asked over the COM, his voice noticeably shaking. He moved the weapon of his barrel back and forth in alarm.
"Do not listen to them," Kelly growled before she activated her external speakers. The agents were still yelling at her and she tilted her head in mock confusion. "One at a time, guys," she said, her voice booming. She pointed her shotgun at the closest agent. "You. What are you doing here?"
"You don't ask questions!" the agent spat. He groped for the holo-sights on his submachine gun and flipped them up. "Drop your weapons and submit yourself for confinement. Now!"
Are these guys kidding?
"Not happening," Kelly said evenly, finding the agent's threat to lack teeth. She clenched her gun, knowing that she could unleash a cone of buckshot and turn this place into a slaughterhouse at a moment's notice.
In her peripheral vision, she could see the other agents move to flank her. She turned her head, openly displaying that she knew of the threat that the squad presented. Behind the visor, she frowned. Everything was beginning to destabilize and she did not know how she could put it all back together.
She tried another angle. "I've come for the core data," she nodded in the direction of the main console next to the central pillar in the room. "I have no quarrel with you. You're free to do as you wish with this place, but only after I'm done with it."
Despite the massive barrel of Oathsworn staring at his face, the first agent chuckled.
"You won't be getting anything. In a few moments, this base will be nothing but slag. Nothing personal, Spartan. But orders are orders."
"Yes," Kelly said slowly. She gripped her hands tighter upon her shotgun. "And my orders supersede yours. Stand down, or—"
"Oy!" one of the agents to Kelly's right shouted. Kelly could not catch the whole outburst because half of it was suddenly drowned a loud series of noises.
There was a scything chatter of silenced weaponfire. Sharp and quiet, almost as if someone was gently running a drill bit along an irregular metal surface. Bullets seared by Kelly's head, but they were never directed at her. She knew that when she heard the lieutenant cry out in pain.
There was something in the sound that produced a reaction in Kelly that she never before felt. It was like a filter of red passed over her vision, reminiscent of an intense hint of adrenaline, dulling all but the most animal of her senses and her inhibitions.
In that instant, it became her fate to manifest her desires into reality.
Automatically, as soon as the first decibel hit registered, her finger clenched down on the trigger of her shotgun. The agent in front of her was there one moment… and then he wasn't. His upper torso had been turned to meat, splattered all over the floor in a violent eruption.
The liquefied insides had not even finished hitting the floor when Kelly abruptly rotated to the right. She aimed up on the riser half a meter above her. The agent who had fired, smoke gently curling from the silencer, turned to now address Kelly. The Spartan could see the lieutenant on the floor at her feet, clutching his chest and groaning.
The second agent made a valiant attempt to aim at Kelly, but he was too slow for the Spartan. Kelly's next shot punched through the thin guardrail sheet that blocked most of the agent's body from view, and hit him in the chest. He went down, his finger spasming on the trigger. Bullets sprayed the ceiling and dust and debris filtered down, but Kelly was already moving onto the next target.
She was now walking through the room with her shotgun levelled at her waist. Four pings remained on her motion tracker—the agents were not doing a good job at keeping still.
One of the armored ONI troopers rose out of cover behind a row of consoles. He managed to get off a few rounds, some of which fizzled harmlessly against Kelly's shields, before the Spartan shot him in the face.
Kelly pumped her shotgun and an expended shell sailed out, the unbrassed end crumpled and ragged like a dog had been chewing on it.
A grenade clattered across the ground, having bounced down a small flight of steps, and nudged against her armored foot. She kicked it away, back to the sender. The agent who had thrown it staggered away as the grenade detonated, but was still on his feet even as a hail of smoke and scorched pieces of metal grating rained down on him. He stumbled in place, having been deafened from the explosion, leaving him out in the open. An easy target. Kelly aimed her weapon and shot the man in the side. He flew across the room, his abdomen unraveling.
One more agent leaned out from behind a monitor-overlaid pillar and sprayed Kelly nearly point-blank in the back with a long submachine gun burst. Kelly's shields dropped to nearly half and she whirled. Her answering shot only found metal and stone as the agent ducked back into cover.
She pumped the shotgun again, though she knew that the weapon had no ammo. The Spartan did not reload—rather, she stowed her weapon and walked toward the pillar where the agent was sheltering in place. A militant pace, determined in her objective. She moved forward at a forward angle, her head affixed in place as she became the wolf, no longer set on inhabiting the persona of the rabbit.
The agent leaned out to shoot at Kelly some more only to find the Spartan right there in front of him.
Kelly's next moves were savage and swift. With her left hand, she pushed aside the agent's submachine gun, leaving an opening so that she could punch him in the throat with her right hand. Hard. She could feel the man's windpipe break. Cartilage snapped like dry twigs. The man tried to cough but ejected an unearthly and wet croak, like he was in the process of expelling his insides through his mouth. His eyes behind his armored helmet widened in pain and blood splattered the interior of his visor.
The Spartan was not finished. Elegantly, never moving a millimeter more than necessary, Kelly plucked the submachine gun from the agent's hand, who was still alive albeit suffocating to death, and quickly tossed it to her right hand. That allowed her left hand the freedom to be sunk into the man's side in another massive blow, cracking through armor, and the right side of his ribcage collapsed with a crunching noise. His lungs now perforated by dozens of bone splinters, the man began to sag forward, but not until Kelly pumped a tri-burst from the reclaimed submachine gun directly into his sternum. The agent fell at her feet with a wet smack.
All told, the entire sequence had taken less than four seconds to complete.
She took a breath and details in the background began to fall back into place. Everything seemed to sharpen in clarity.
Kelly turned and saw the final agent five meters away from her, levelling a SAW at her head. Too far for her to spring forward without him opening up on her—the SAW could chew through her shields in the blink of an eye if his aim was true. They looked at each other, comprehending the moment, understanding what needed to be done.
Then gunfire exploded and both agent and Kelly jumped. But the agent continued jerking in place and Kelly saw blood and bits of armor and fabric leap from his back. The agent fell dead upon the floor, and the lieutenant groaned as he sat up from where he had been laying, his assault rifle expelling a gentle curl of smoke as he continued to hold it in a fierce two-handed grip.
Kelly hurried over to help the man up after stepping over the last agent's body. The lieutenant slowly managed to get himself into a sitting position, propped up against a pedestal for the dish's hydraulic controls.
Dropping to a knee next to him, the Spartan examined the man for injuries. "Where were you shot?" she asked. She looked over the man, but she couldn't access his TEAMBIO signals because his armor was not compatible with her software.
"Chest," the man coughed. His fingers indicated a spot upon his armor—two stiff indentations had depressed into the chestplate, but had not penetrated. There would be a monster of a bruise underneath, but Kelly would not even have to break out the biofoam for this.
She gave the man's shoulder a light tap. "You'll live."
Kelly helped the man to his feet.
A plastic cap tumbled to the ground as the lieutenant knocked back a thimble of pregabalin for the pain. Even then, he was still wheezing and making contorted faces as his body adjusted to the shock of being shot. He was shaking, but it was from the adrenaline of the moment. It would pass within a few minutes, Kelly knew. She could speak from experience. Getting shot was old hat for her. In her case, it could even be seen as a mild annoyance. It came with the job.
Together, they surveyed the room. It looked like the aftermath of when the metaphorical wolf had gotten into the henhouse. Kelly uncomfortably treaded the obliterated remains of the agents she had killed, making a conscious effort to avoid stepping in blood. Human blood, not alien. Past the filters in her helmet, the air was thick with the scent of cordite and iron oxide. A low thumping noise from the generators beneath them pulsed about the room.
Kelly found the most intact body and knelt down, turning it over. She tried not to look at the head of the corpse, which was missing a face from getting a full load of buckshot applied at the speed of sound.
"Now, what were you doing?" she said in the comfort of her helmet as she patted the body down. "What were you really looking for?"
All she came up were a few extra submachine gun magazines along with some wiped datatablets. She tried tapping one of the tablets—it refused to wake. Dead man's switch of some kind, triggered to a biometric monitor. Killing the person that it had been assigned to had activated a total memory purge. Even Armitage would be unable to recover the data. She left the datatablets with the corpse.
She stood back up, darkly replaying the events in her head. What the hell was ONI doing here? They had been the ones to give her this assignment in the first place—had they sent out another team to duplicate her efforts and they had simply gotten crossed in the middle? Or, how could she really be sure that these men had been ONI at all? They had uniforms, yes, but those could be faked. They could very well have been sent here by Phaedra to cover her tracks.
The lieutenant limped over to her. He had pried his helmet and chestplate off and was taking deep, gulping breaths. Sweat matted his hair to his head and he looked like he had aged several years.
"Holding up?" Kelly turned her head.
"You know the feeling after a night of tequila and barfights, Spartan?" the man shrugged, finding the humor in himself to manage a half-grin.
"No."
"Well, this is about on par." He pulled a grimace as he looked down at the closest body. "Sorry it had to end up like this."
Kelly shook her head as she began to head for the main console, which was near the central pillar up a shallow staircase that barely rose up a few feet. "They made their choice. I reacted. There wasn't any other way."
The lieutenant shuffled across the floor. "You know you were in the right, don't you?" He gave a limp laugh. "It was cut and dried. Clear as could be. And you… well, who else could have your kind of authority? I mean… you're a goddamned Spartan. The best of any of us, and the fastest person I've ever seen in my life. They wanted to—"
Kelly turned back to face him. Her height, with the addition of being a couple of steps above the man made her seem like a malevolent god. Industrial lighting frantically tried to scramble around the back of her helmet and, in that moment, she projected a synthetic atmosphere that threatened to tear the last of her humanity away.
"I wouldn't be so optimistic about who I am," she told the lieutenant, her voice soft but edged like steel. She began to head back to the console after a thudding beat, turning her back to him. "Spartans have disappointed others in the past. If you really knew me, you'd retract that statement."
She left it at that for now. She was not going to completely destroy the man's image of Spartans that had been built up in his mind through years of consuming propaganda, but at the same time she was not going to stand for being worshipped. She was just a soldier come to do a job. That was it. To have her image be inflated beyond all reason, even if was all the result of some little psy-ops experiment, that all needed to take place out of Kelly's presence.
The lieutenant's next words completely upended everything, though.
"On that, I beg to differ, Kelly."
The Spartan froze in place, the grating creaking heavily underfoot. Her lungs turned to iron and icy cold splinters seemed to pour into her throat. Her hands went limp at her sides as she, for the first time, did not know where to go from here.
"I never gave you my name," was all she said, the words sounding pathetic even as she was speaking them.
"If it can be believed, I never needed to ask."
Kelly slowly turned around. The brutalness had fled somewhat from her posture. Now, doubt and suspicion rushed in to replace it. The lieutenant was looking up at her at the bottom of the steps, a bit of that youthful resolve taking the edge off his wearied face. He was still wearing that half-smile up at her, but it was not a sinister smile. It was one of hesitation and of a deep, nameless emotion.
She tilted her head. "Are you ONI, too? Were you briefed on me when I arrived on Arbogast? Is that the explanation? That's how you know?" Were you lying to me as well? was the implication that she very nearly shouted.
The smile on the lieutenant's face wavered. Kelly realized that some genuine feeling had been the cause of this revelation in the man.
"I think you know the answer to that question," he just said, and Kelly believed him.
But the Spartan refused to relax. Her body tightened and she drew herself closer. She slowly descended the steps. "Who are you? Tell me."
The lieutenant looked away and took a shuddering breath. Kelly could see tears start to form in his eyes. Something was wrong here. Very, very wrong. But she could not take her eyes off the man. She needed to see. She needed to know.
There was an unzipping of velcro and the lieutenant reached into a pocket at his hip so swiftly that Kelly almost instinctively went for her pistol. The feeling faded as soon as it had arrived, however, when the man held up a small glass terminal that fit into his palm. The screen warmed to his touch. He held the terminal up for Kelly to see. Without looking, his thumb found the photo drive and activated a slideshow.
Helpless, the Spartan looked.
A set of images scrolled past the screen. A man and a woman alone… no, two kids were with them. Brother and sister. A family.
A sunlit farm. Timelapse of the moon and stars moving across the sky.
The young boy was drawing something. The girl was running and cheering. The two of them gripped a tire swing as it whirled in its restrained orbit, both laughing until it hurt.
Then there was a wooden bench. A tablecloth set upon it. Cheap, disposable silverware. But bright colors. A picnic… or a party.
Kelly looked from the terminal and back to the man, not understanding. "Your family," she said. "They had all passed, you had mentioned."
The man's hand that held the terminal trembled hideously in place. His eyes turned foggy and his breathing became even more labored. "Yes," he hissed out. He wiped his eyes, though they still remained rimmed red. "At least… I thought I did. You know, up until nine years ago, I was convinced that I was the unluckiest son of a bitch in the Marines. Someone like me, without a black mark on his record, shipped to only the most godforsaken places the galaxy had to offer. Not a posting of any substance. Didn't seem fair, right? And then, by sheer fortuitousness one day, I realized why that had happened to me. In an instant, everything made sense. Remember what happened nine years ago, Kelly?"
She was not sure how to answer that. She was doing the same thing nine years ago that she was doing right now. Hundreds of campaigns had been won and lost in that timeframe—she had been boots down, in the trenches, carving a path through the Covenant one world at a time. Somehow, the Spartan knew the lieutenant was not referring to any of that.
She shook her head.
"The PASSERI Act," he said. "That was the codename for Section Two's announcement of the SPARTAN program to the public. I was in a bar on some no-name world when it hit the newsfeeds. They spared no expense. Camera angles of you guys just… just being you. Spartans. Slow-motion shots of you marching. Helmet-cam footage of you mowing down Covenant. There wasn't a single noncom or grunt in that bar that was not whisper-quiet as they watched you guys in action. It was exactly the reaction ONI wanted, I'm willing to bet, because they sold the program to us as the final echelon of the best of the best the UNSC had to offer. Giants in those magnificent green suits. Of course, none of you talked for the cameras. Anything personal about you guys was simply up to the audience to speculate."
He dropped his arm and it looked like he was about to let his handheld terminal slip through shaking fingers.
"Though," he continued, "they did make one mistake in all of those propaganda feeds. A crew had been filming you guys run through an obstacle course at a Marine base on Reach. To show you guys off, I'd wager. The network was interviewing a lieutenant, or someone assigned to the program, it doesn't matter. The camera was in his direction, with the obstacle course behind him. In the middle of the interview, the lieutenant, perhaps from a cue or something, turned around and pointed to one Spartan who had just started the obstacle course—who was just this magnificent green blur, for they were running so fast. I'll never forget what that man said next: 'You see that? That right there is the fastest woman in the galaxy.'"
Kelly was frozen as the man lifted the terminal again. A few touches on the screen and the photo reel was back. The lieutenant flicked between two of the pictures rapidly. The scene of the party. The little girl running.
"I never thought we would meet again."
Some part of the Spartan wished to interject. To steer the direction of this insinuation away from the one destination she knew was unavoidably the final endpoint. But she said nothing, even as the lieutenant began to climb the steps towards her.
"My sister liked to run, too," he said, his voice weary. "But on her seventh birthday, that spark had all but vanished. Just like that," he snapped his fingers. "It was like one day she was herself… and the next she became a completely different person. For no reason. She died from an illness less than a year later. I started believing that she had died earlier, on her birthday, when she lost her passion for the things I knew made her the joyful sister that she had been to me. She would have never stopped running."
He slipped the terminal back into his pocket. "I just needed that one look on that screen to know who that Spartan on the obstacle course was. It was like I could recognize them, even after all those years. I memorized the Spartan's service number. Told myself never to forget it. 'Fastest woman in the galaxy.' Before today, you have no idea how much I would've given to see you in action. In more ways than you could realize."
At this point, the lieutenant was now one step below Kelly. He now fully smiled up at her, though it was a melancholy smile.
"ONI was the one who moved me around, you see. Who else could it have been? Because even though the odds were near-improbable, they would be afraid of the slimmest chance of long-separated siblings running into each other, somehow, on the worlds most likely to have a Spartan presence. Spook paranoia works like that, you know?"
Kelly turned her head by a few bare degrees. Looking away. Something was unlocking with her, an incontrovertible truth. She could not escape it.
Below her, the lieutenant widened his stance, planting his feet. Not giving in.
"I don't know if they did anything to you or not, but I want you to know that I never forgot about you. I'm not mad that I got to grow up without a sister. Not after this. I can't be mad, because you're still alive out there, keeping us safe. I just want to know that you remember. If you still do… then maybe everything would have been all worth it."
The terminal had been put away, but Kelly could not take the images out of her head. They replayed over and over, in fast motion, though she could remember each picture in blinding crystal clarity. Interspersed were her own memories of her own origin—boot camp on Reach, being encased in MJOLNIR for the first time, ramming her fist down an Elite's throat and ripping flesh out from within. The girl she had been. The soldier she was now. One and the same.
She looked back at the lieutenant's expectant face. Her hands were also trembling, noticeable even in this dim light.
"Of course I remember," she uttered, the effort to voice the words feeling like her strength had been cleaved in half. "I still remember. Even you, Brandon."
The lieutenant—Brandon—closed his eyes and took a breath. Savoring the moment where, for once, everything in his life had panned out exactly how he had hoped.
"Kelly Shaddock," he murmured. His eyes lidded open. "Look at you. You never did stop running, did you?"
Behind her visor, Kelly smiled. "Not for a second."
Brandon's smile turned into a string of hysterical laughs. His eyes appraised the ceiling thankfully and his lips fumbled at words that his brain could not even formulate. He finally caught his breath and shook his head in amazement.
"I…" he stammered, "I… still can't believe this is happening. If you only knew how happy—" His smile faltered and a hand came to his chest, massaging around his sternum, where he had been hit. He gave a slight wince. "Ow, this actually does frickin' hurt. Hold on."
His knees buckled and Kelly's first instinct was to spring forward and catch him, but that turned out to be premature because Brandon held up a hand, indicating that he was all right. He limped over to where a nearby swivel chair had been stationed at a console. He rotated the seat and slowly lowered himself down upon it.
Kelly walked down to his level and stood before her brother, her thoughts a whirlwind of astonishment.
Brandon, meanwhile, took deep breaths as he visibly struggled with his injury. He finally addressed Kelly with a sheepish look and he waved a hand.
"I've had so many questions for you," he said. He shook his head, still smiling ruefully. "But, for the life of me, I can't remember what any of them are."
Kelly felt her face flush hot, then cold. She reached out and touched Brandon's shoulder for a few seconds. Her fingertips torturously slipped off the armored pauldron.
"We have time."
As Kelly's hand dropped away from him, Brandon twitched his own hand in its direction, like he was about to grasp it, but he stayed the action, still hesitant.
"Maybe, but we'll have more time later. We didn't make it into this room so that I could just spring this whole thing on you. You've got a mission. Might as well see that through first."
"This is also important," she said, and she meant it.
Brandon laughed. "Important. Might be the most flattering thing I've heard in years. But… more important than your mission?" His questioning stare blazed through Kelly's polarized visor, drawing forth the answer when she could not say it. He nodded understandingly. "It's okay, Kelly. Do your work first. Then, we'll talk. Presumably when I'm in an actual shape to hold a conversation."
To drive that point home, he was suddenly wracked by a string of wet coughs. Saliva splattered the ground in front of him. The man then leaned back, eyes tightly screwed shut in pain from his cracked ribs. Sweat stood on his forehead.
Kelly stayed, but just for a few more moments. She knew that Brandon was going to need a medic. His injuries were not life-threatening, but she was not keen on taking the chance of his wounds deteriorating. She just didn't know if he had suffered any internal injuries or not. All the more reason not to linger any longer than they had to.
"I won't be long," she told him as she turned to head back up the steps.
"I'll be here," he said.
The Spartan walked forward, toward the central pillar in the middle of the room, where a fiery cross of ragged screens blazed metrics and data. All for her perusal.
But as she approached, the specifics of her mission kept getting overlaid with her own wonderous thoughts.
My brother is alive. I have a brother.
The center dais of the array core reminded Kelly of the command platform on a Covenant warship. From here, she could ascertain the geometry of the room – the core was square-shaped, and each level ringed around the platform in the middle in a low pyramid.
The control console was positioned in a recession inside the central support pillar. Kelly used Brandon's login to grant her access. She was greeted by a UNSC logo along with the logo of the third-party provider who had designed the software. Then, the introduction screens winked away, replaced by a tableau of simple icons and datacharts. Kelly bit her lip. These systems were designed so obtusely. Attempting to navigate the database was akin to learning a new language.
Regardless, Kelly was able to brute-force her way through the strata of submenus and found the query table she was looking for. The wavespace call logs. Kelly used a wildcard query to ping the server. She was answered by a rotating icon for a few seconds before the entire screen came up blank. No results. Nada.
This was not at all surprising, but still Kelly nearly grunted in frustration. Using the wavespace array was particularly taxing from an energy standpoint—hence the reactors in close proximity—not to mention that bandwidth across the relay system was quite limited, which in summation would lead to a grand total of very few calls being placed compared to the other superluminal communications protocols the UNSC still relied on. But for there to be exactly zero calls recorded at this station, considering it was functional at one point, not to mention an enormous investment to begin with, just raised Kelly's suspicions. Why bother building this place if it was not going to be used?
It was obvious that Phaedra, or one of her Phoenix Unit lackeys, had wiped the records after each call. A prudent course of action, but they had forgotten that sometimes the complete lack of evidence was, in fact, evidence itself.
Kelly was not ready to give in to despair just yet. She still had one more card yet to play.
Now that she had an idea how the database was indexed, she was able to navigate through the software until she accessed the very page she needed: the dish positioning logs. She input the same wildcard navigator again.
This time, the page filled with rows and rows of useable data. Filters for plane coverage, angular domain, spatial frequency domain, azimuth, and elevation were just a fraction of the parameters available for her to search with.
The Spartan smiled. Phoenix had been sloppy. They may have erased their comm data, but they did not erase the multitude of times they had repositioned the array transmitter and the geosynchronous satellites above so that they could communicate. With this vast array of data for her to pore over, combing through it would take weeks, though. Fortunately, she knew how to parse all of this down.
Kelly's hands blurred over the keyboard as she typed in a command. The data analysis was relatively simple. All she needed to do was filter the data based on the destinations the array had transmitted to—the coordinates were still within the databanks. She hit a key and the datasheet all scrunched down to only a few rows. Kelly scanned the number of times each location had been hailed, which was displayed as a singular metric next to the location's numerical coordinates: seven calls… two calls… nine calls… forty-one calls.
Forty-one.
She rechecked the data. No other location in the data showed that any of the other places had been called more than twelve times. Someone had called a singular location forty-one times and Kelly did not recognize the galactic position of the coordinates.
Phaedra and Phoenix. The king in the high castle ordering his troops in the valley below.
Kelly committed the number to memory: 8. She punched it in the TACMAP at her wrist when she zoomed the view as far as she could. As she suspected, the coordinates ended at a blank location somewhere in the Outer Territories. Kelly zoomed her map in—there was nothing at that location except for a magnetar possessing a terrifyingly impressive magnetic field. A neutron star like that could interfere heavily with ordinary comms and would shield even the most ungainly ship from detection. In fact, the only method that could reliably communicate within range of a magnetar was a wavespace array.
"Got you," she said to the tiny dot.
This was it. This was where Phaedra was hiding.
She did not celebrate just yet—this was not the time for it. She still had a mission to complete. Still, it was a sobering thought, knowing where the endpoint for this convoluted manhunt would take her. Perhaps in a week, it would all be over and she could return to regular duty instead of acting as a wetwork operator.
Kelly turned to leave, but stopped. She looked back to the screen and studied the data for the final call. It had been made to the same position—the magnetar system. The last person who had come here had talked to Phaedra. The satellites were probably still in the same position, ready to transmit directly to her.
She lifted a hand, hesitated. Wondered what she was about to do. Asked herself if she was ridding herself of some unknown advantage by doing this. But, in the end, she ultimately decided that logic could not sway her. She needed to do what she was about to do. She needed to hear that woman's voice, even if it was from afar.
Kelly tapped a singular key on the keyboard. The word TRANSMIT? blipped up onto the screen. She hit the "Y" button.
Below her, the still-functioning reactors groaned a song of metal as they began to churn power into the array. On the screen, a cutesy graphic was showing Kelly that an attempt at a point-to-point connection was being made. There was a ferrous creaking sound as the array transmitter made micro-adjustments to the satellites orbiting the moon. Kelly waited for a few minutes, seemingly watching the screen for an endless amount of time, before a green checkmark popped up, indicating an engaged connection.
A popup box appeared, titled by the numerical coordinates Kelly had indicated. The connection had not been simply initiated, she realized. It had been accepted.
Someone was listening to her right now.
Kelly waited. The person on the other end waited. There was just the hiss of static being shared between the two of them.
Sucking in a breath, Kelly realized that she was expected to speak first. She moved closer to the console and her hand depressed the button to transmit.
"This is SPARTAN-087," she began, "Petty Officer of the UNSC. I am transmitting from the array on Arbogast. The contents of my message are meant for SPARTAN-119. If you are there, SPARTAN-119, respond to this hail."
Kelly lifted her hand off the button. The white noise continued. She eyed the still wavelength for a minute before she began transmitting again.
"SPARTAN-119, respond. This is SPARTAN-087 here to direct you to acknowledge this transmission and to stand down to await further orders. Do you copy?"
Again, there was no answer.
"If you're listening," she tried again, "then you should know that the UNSC has placed a termination order on you. They have determined you to be a severe danger to the government and to all of the military operators working today. I am the first one they sent out to retrieve you, but you know that I won't be the last. More will come after me if I fail. If I could find you, then so can the others. I don't care if you don't talk. If I have to get you in person, so be it. But I will come for you, no matter how long it takes."
The room continued to remain in an effervescent silence, except for the steady stream of feedback that exuded from the speakers. The connection remained open—maddingly so, as if the person on the other end was refusing to let go.
A shiver took hold of Kelly, as she now was getting the sensation that she was being monitored. She briefly scanned the room for cameras—were any of them transmitting her image offworld? She tightened her jaw. "All these years, Phaedra. It was easy for me to imagine that you were dead. When I last saw you, you were… I just didn't think about any of the consequences. I don't know that, if you were in my place, you would've done the same thing." Kelly raised her chin and leaned closer in to where the embedded microphone was. "Talk to me. Like we used to back on Reach. Remember when we used to run the obstacle courses together? When I said that I would wait on the course for you, that night, you were worried that you would slow me down? I remember saying that I was going to speed you up instead. The plan worked, didn't it? You never went without dinner for the rest of our time there. And we… well, you know how we turned out."
On the screen, the answering waveform diagram still remained as flat as a steppe. There were a few microtraces of feedback, but that was just from the distortion in the near-realtime message caused by light delay.
After counting to ten, her pulse thundering in her temples, Kelly flicked her eyes back to the screen as if she could imagine a person on the other end. "I don't know what drove you to do the things you've done, Phaedra. It wasn't what the UNSC saw in you. It wasn't what I saw in you. You're a Spartan, Phaedra, not… whatever you've become. If I was the catalyst for all of this then—" Kelly was about to say two words, but they lodged like iron bars in her throat, "—then I need you to know that I never meant to cause you any pain."
That was it for her. There was nothing else that she could say. Kelly backed away from the console, her gut heavy with unease. A new and unfamiliar sensation of anxiety rippled over her, her skin pinpricking like spikes were shooting out from her body.
She turned away, and was nearly back out into the array core when there was a voice from the speakers. Heavy and simmering with a foul rage. Quiet as metal drawing from a sheath, yet gritted as if the words were said behind clenched teeth.
"You're a liar, Kelly."
The Spartan whirled to look upon the ridged peaks and valleys of the wavelength on the screen, her entire body now wired red-hot with adrenaline. There was a lump in her throat and a high-pitched ringing noise infiltrated her ears. The console had gone silent, however. The connection had been broken from the other end.
There had been no mistaking it. That had been her voice.
She backed away, out into the room, never taking her eyes off the console. Something just did not sit right with her. She could not shake this feeling of dread, a feeling that had not imparted onto her since she was a child.
Get out of here, the voice in her head rang. Just leave. Right now.
"Right…" she agreed with no one in particular as she shuffled out of the central chamber. "Right…"
Brandon was still sitting in his chair in the core, waiting for Kelly to return. As soon as he heard the characteristic stomping of boots on a metal floor, like a titan flattening farmland below its massive feet, he perked up.
Gliding down two steps, the Spartan's stride was fast. "Get up," she told Brandon. "We need to go. How well are you holding up?"
Pulling a tight face, Brandon slowly got to his feet. He was careful to keep movement in his arms to a minimum. "Not great, but I'll—"
His face paled as he stared not at Kelly, not directly, but something on her. She realized it too late that his eyes were focused upon something flitting across her armor.
She dipped her head down. A tiny red pinprick had focused at her sternum.
No…
"Shit," Brandon whispered before his voice started to rise in volume. "Shit. Kelly, move!"
She didn't know where to run to. Just that she had to. Without thinking, she picked a direction—to her immediate right—and dove. Ultimately, it didn't matter, because mid-dive, Kelly's HUD picked up dozens of tiny EMP grenade contacts, which had been inactive this whole time, suddenly flare to life. Below the floor. Below her.
They all detonated before she hit the floor.
A blinding white flash, followed by static, seared across Kelly's visor so bright that her helmet polarized by 80%. She heard someone cry out in the background. Brandon. She finally hit the floor so hard that she made an impressive dent in the grating. Tiny blue electric bolts zapped across her frame and her MJOLNIR armor jittered in its spastic throes, threatening to contort her joints out of their sockets. The surging electrical current flared white arcs from her armor, draping the Spartan in the damaging surges.
The electricity that coursed through her body, through her armor and bodysuit, was so intense that Kelly almost threw up. It felt like her intestines were being scorched inside her body. Her jaw was chattering so hard she worried that she was going to bite her tongue off. She tried to stand, but her body was not responding to her brain's signals. Her HUD flickered and darkened, the software going haywire. There was a constant ringing from her suit's alarm—her shields had dropped and were not recharging.
She made another attempt to stand, her fingers scraping across the ground in desperation. Her knees locked in place and the weight of her armor seemed to bear down upon her, like it had suddenly been subject to an intense gravitational exertion and was in the process of crushing her body within. Kelly roared and reached out. She gripped the edge of one of the control panels. Slowly, she began to lift herself up.
There was a chugging sound. Like a shotgun's pump, but deeper.
Kelly turned her head towards the noise.
There was a blast and a puff of steelgray smoke from across the room. Kelly could not move out of the way of the impact. Something large hit her unshielded chestplate, perfectly upon her heart, but did not penetrate. The force of the impact merely rocked her back a few inches, but the damage it inflicted was far worse than she had initially thought.
A metal discus, about as big as her hand, had affixed itself to her angular coating and seared a sinister red upon its face. Kelly tried to reach up to rip it off but now found that, while her movements had been sluggish just a few moments before from the EMP grenades, her body now refused to budge a millimeter, almost as if she had been calcified in concrete. She could not even move her head or tremble a finger.
Someone had shot her with an armor restraint, she realized. A searing orange filter the color of ozone continually seeped across the surface of her armor. Kelly had no hope of even budging, not with every single one of her armor's systems short-circuiting.
She continued to struggle even though she failed to gain any results. The taste of real fear threatened to impart itself upon her.
As she squirmed within her immovable armor, across the way the light bent and fractalized into a distinct humanoid shape, before it finally unraveled to reveal a Spartan slowly walking towards her. This new Spartan held a customized launcher, about a foot longer and twice as thick as Kelly's shotgun—they set it upon a nearby desk. The War Master helmet they wore tilted down at Kelly, studying her. With its angular brow, it made the wearer seem like it had a perpetual snarl ossified in place.
This must be Logan, Kelly figured. The close-quarters expert and right-hand man of Phaedra.
At the entrance to the room, Kelly heard the doors slide open. A series of marching sounds clanged about the place and several mercenaries and soldiers in UNSC garb streamed in.
Logan paid them no mind, even as they formed up behind him. The soldiers all stiffened to attention in the Spartan's presence. Judging from their uniforms, they had all come from Arbor I. Kelly wondered how Phaedra had managed to pay them all off. Had it been so easy for them to abandon their loyalties all for credits?
There was a clicking sound and Logan slowly withdrew his pistol. "A pleasure to finally meet you, 087," he said.
"Can't say the same," Kelly replied in between concerted efforts to budge free of the impulses the restraint device was projecting, though it still was all for naught.
But Logan seemed to have already moved on past the initial pleasantries. Two Marines were coming up the steps, dragging Brandon by the arms. They deposited the man at Logan's feet. He was groaning and coughing. Blood was trickling from his ears, but he was alive.
One of the soldiers gestured to the prone Brandon. "Aiding and abetting, sir," he spoke to Logan.
The SPARTAN-III looked down upon Brandon for a moment, but then turned away as if the man was nothing but an insect to him. As if anyone other than a Spartan did not deserve his complete and full attention. "How unfortunate."
With his other hand, Logan reached up and unsnapped one of the many ammo pouches strapped to his chestplate. His deft fingers peeled away the thick fabric and, from inside, he withdrew a small silver cube, barely larger than a die. The Spartan depressed one of the faces on the cube and the little device then began to glow a wispy blue. Like the restraint launcher, he gently placed it upon one of the control desks. Exhibiting an unusual amount of control, Logan made sure that the sides of the cube were positioned parallel to the edge of the desk, emphasizing that this action had been made with the most extreme of deliberation and care.
"Timer's set for twenty minutes," he told the assembled troops. "Objective is to reach minimum safe distance in fifteen. Launch is imminent. Commence evac procedures now—this location is burnt."
The rogue Spartan then began to walk toward Kelly, though he stopped when he was standing before Brandon again, who was still lying on the floor in pain. He gave the lieutenant one more look, perhaps wondering if they had anything in common, before the moment faded. Losing himself to calculated cold-bloodedness, Logan lifted up his foot, almost as if he was about to step over Brandon, but adjusted his aim at the last second so that he set his boot down upon the unarmored man's right shin.
There was a terrible and thick snap, like a massive branch being felled from the trunk of a tree. Brandon's lower leg bent at an angle. He screamed and clung to his maimed leg. Blood welled from the wound and soaked through his pants.
Kelly almost roared as she surged within her armor, desperate to claw herself out of it and attack Logan with her bare hands, if need be, but she could not move an inch. "Do not touch him!"
Logan's head turned to affix itself directly into the stare he estimated was emanating from Kelly's visor. He walked around Brandon and knelt in front of the paralytic Spartan. At this distance, he could discern the grunting noises she was making as her reinforced muscles struggled to overcome the locked armor so that she could rip his head off right then and there.
He reached out and patted the side of Kelly's helmet. The gesture was sickeningly affectionate and the gentleness in the action was twisted. Kelly's stomach churned.
"Don't worry, 087," he whispered. A glow past the matte pattern of his marbled visor seemed to simmer. A secret grin. "He'll live. As will you. Unfortunately, you have not been completely briefed on the present situation. The commander has determined that you should be brought in."
Kelly imagined that her stare was like a focused beam, capable of boring a hole straight through Logan's forehead. "Only to eliminate me later."
"That all depends on you, Spartan. This far out, we truly are the masters of our own fates. No one else can claim such a thing, not even the UNSC. It's been decided that you should be informed of that fact. If you reject the truth," Logan gave a shrug, "then there's nothing that anyone can do for you. It's all in your hands now, 087. I'm just the one to deliver you the bill."
A/N: Glad I was able to get this chapter out before I went out on vacation. Bad news on that means that I won't be able to write for two weeks while I'm out and about. And not before time, too. I could use a bit of a mental breather. Now I just need to hope that I don't get run over by a bus while on my travels so that I can get back to it when I return. Knock on wood.
Playlist:
A Long Swim
"A Writer's Odyssey"
Jed Kurzel
A Writer's Odyssey (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Approaching the Core / Core Skirmish
"It's In My Mind"
Johnny Klimek and Tom Tykwer
The Matrix Resurrections (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
The Answer / EMP
"Hold Your Breath"
Clint Mansell
Mute (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
