XIV: Thorns and Splinters
"This Again?"
Arbogast
Hannover Mountain Base
Images and light swam by in a ceaseless flood that lacked both clarity and clear borders where colors ended and began. It was almost as if she was swimming underwater and that bright halogens beneath the surface were being continually distorted from the arrays of currents and the filtration of bubbles.
Yet, that scenario was not at all plausible, Kelly knew. Particularly because she was not swimming. Or moving whatsoever, at least not of her own accord. Her body remained immobile, the restraining device upon her chest still fastened where it had impacted her.
However, the sequence of bars of light scraping from the top of her vision all the way down to the bottom continued in their purposeful march. She was moving, as it turned out. She just wasn't the one doing any of the movement. It took her some time to realize that she was being gurneyed down a hallway—the bars of light were ceiling fixtures that caused her visor to polarize slightly every time she passed underneath one.
The rattling of chains had come to the forefront of her audio receptors. Kelly could not move her head, but she could strain her eyes to see just what was in her peripheral vision. There was a thick pressure that had looped around her wrists and ankles. She had the distant sensation that her body was swaying ever so slightly. Kelly then came to imagine that she was not being wheeled down a hall on a mere gurney—rather, she was dangling from a reinforced steel cradle with all four limbs anchored to separate bolt points, much like how an engine would be transported around a motor pool… or a carcass being presented through camp on the way to a crackling bonfire.
Had Kelly possessed a tiny additional bit of vanity than she already had, she would have found the comparison of her current situation to be rather insulting.
As the cradle ferrying her went deeper and deeper into this new compound, Kelly desperately tried to collect her thoughts, but they came sluggishly and without order. She must have been drugged at some point, she figured. Gassed, was the possibility. She recalled that Logan had encased her helmet filters about an hour prior with some kind of tubing so that he could pump a compound directly into her system so that she would be more pliant during her transportation. Judging from the way the lights surging by overhead refused to adhere to their boundaries, the gas had to be some sort of nitrous oxide analogue. High dosage, considering her metabolism and what it would take to properly drug a person of her stature. If her estimates were correct, the entirety of the effects of the gas would dissipate after two hours. Maybe less, considering the time that had already passed.
The self-diagnosis was good. It was helping keep her mind sharp. Already, she could begin to see a bit more clearly, but there was still a distinct throbbing sensation just underneath her skull. It felt like needles were being bored through her sclera, reaching through the soft organs to reach her brain stem. Not at all pleasant.
Afterimage flashes continued to burn themselves into her retinas in the brief intervals of darkness when light was not being shined into her eyes. Starbursts given shape, imprinting into her consciousness.
Kelly squinted, trying to peer through the kaleidoscopic filter.
Pouring rain… a warrior festooned with warpaint… water hissing off the edges of knives as they sliced through the air…
The Spartan groaned. She blinked multiple times, trying to make the images go away.
Hot blood squeezed between fingers… rainwater mingled with sweat upon a finely chiseled face… firelight slashed by the monsoon as it rippled off her bare shoulders… every corded muscle wound tight…
The carriage holding her trussed up body hit a pothole and Kelly was jostled in place. She gave an irritated grunt.
The hallucinations had briefly fled from that interruption, but soon came rushing back like a lapping wave to seep into her eyeballs.
Her mouth open in a fearsome shout… structures of stone on fire in the distance even as the waterlogged night dragged on… standing amidst ruins while lightning crowned a halo of thorns atop her head… waving a stained spear whilst the screams of the dying overwhelmed even the thunder…
The entire cavalcade of dissociative imagery exploded in her eyeballs for so many seconds that they felt like they dragged on for hours, until all of a sudden, they had stopped all at once. The voyage of ceiling lighting had paused, keeping the same level of illumination blazing down through her polarized visor. From the minute motions her body was rocking in, Kelly determined that she had come to her final destination. Clarity had returned to her vision and the lethargic drawl of the nitrous oxide had all but vanished from her system, it seemed. Quietly, she hung in place, wondering what was to come next.
As her consciousness came back from her momentarily scrambled reveries, her thoughts turned to her brother. Was Brandon suffering the same indignity as she was? Was he all right? Was he at least alive?
There was a cranking sound and Kelly felt herself being pulled into an upright position. She was soon able to see two UNSC troopers winching her body into place by her wrists, where multiple chains looped around them, connected by a bevy of industrial locks. A reinforced winch had been fastened to the steel girders in the ceiling; the contraption was able to hang the two-ton warrior a few inches above the ground.
Kelly took hold of her surroundings. Threadbare room, furnished in cheap sheet metal. A couple of foldable tables lined the wall to her left. The floor below her was stained with brown rings.
All in all, she had no idea where she was. This could have been a room on a completely different planet, for all she knew. Though she suspected she was still on Arbogast, there was nothing within sight to give her any proof to that hypothesis.
The door on the far side opened and two more troopers came in, lugging a long crate between them. They set the crate on the ground and flipped the latches. Kelly could see a variety of power tools nestled in a sea of foam stalagmites inside.
One of the troopers strode up to Kelly, close enough that if she didn't have the armor restraint active, she could have easily reached out and ripped his head clean off his shoulders. Knowing that he was not in any danger, the trooper went right up to that armor restraint and rotated a dial upon it like he was trying to open up a safe. In the next few seconds, a winking amber alert pinged in the corner of Kelly's HUD. They're bypassing the suit locks, she thought to her alarm. To drive that point home, Kelly felt a slight rumble along the bottom of her jaw as the clamps securing her helmet to her collar disengaged. The restraint had intruded directly into the MJOLNIR's subsystems through the hardcoded icegates, giving Logan's cronies root access.
Rough hands from behind Kelly then took hold of her helmet and yanked it off. The Spartan gave a somewhat impotent growl as her bare face suddenly became exposed to the musty and humid air that smelled of oxidizing metal and dripping rock. A strand of hair became dislodged from her usually correlated ponytail that now irritably hung over her forehead. She puffed a breath to get it back into place, with no results.
To their credit, her captors were behaving like this was just a day at the office for them. They moved quickly, professionally, as they now worked to setup a piece of equipment from the crate that looked like a cylindrical pole about two feet in length and five inches in diameter that had to be assembled in sections. Kelly, for her part, did not swear at them, or hurl bravado-laden threats, as there was no point. Boasting while being a captive certainly sounded good in theory, but rarely in history was it a tactic that worked at all.
The pole-looking device was now held aloft by one of the rogue UNSC troopers. Kelly could make out an insignia adorning their forearm: a trident spearing through the eye socket of a bull skull. His armored helmet shielded all expressions, though Kelly could still pick out the tinges of nervousness emanating from his body language. First time interrogating a Spartan, then?
Her own expression could have been carved from marble, despite the unknown danger ahead. Did Logan plan to torture her? What exactly would he expect to divulge from her, anyway? Maybe he just didn't care and would be going forward with this song and dance purely for his own amusement, if Logan truly suffered from psychopathic tendencies, that is.
Kelly forced herself to put that potential future aside, for the moment. To dwell on the "what could be" was poison to the mind. She started sinking into her no-thought practices. Everything flows out. Feeling is but a distraction.
The soldier that held the pole turned to one of his cohorts. "Battery pack," he requested and held out a hand. Once the black cylindrical component was then placed in his palm, he attached it to one of the ends of the pole with a series of clicks. A green bar upon the pack slowly filled and flashed once.
Kneeling back down to the crate, the trooper then lifted up a long and slender rod like a thin arrow of aluminum, except instead of an arrowhead, the pole terminated at just a sharp point. Using a plastic feeder, he slotted the rod into the other end of the pole, where the conical point protruded sinisterly. The pole had now become a spear. The trooper then grabbed a muzzle-like stand that fastened over the end where the aluminum tip was pointing, extending the length of the pole by half a foot.
With the device now completed, the trooper stood back to his feet and slowly approached the dangling Spartan. Kelly eyed the cylindrical pole. If it was going to be used to torture her, it certainly did not look like anything she had ever seen about or read of before. She blinked towards the reflective helmet with suspicion. If they expected to hear her beg, they would be disappointed.
But, perhaps fortunately, the UNSC troopers did not taunt her or ask for any futile pleas. Instead, the pole was lifted up and fastened at Kelly's right shoulder so that the aluminum tip was pointed directly at the armor covering the joint. She could see the soldier tapping at some buttons upon the side, where a digital readout glimmered block numbers.
Curiosity nearly made her ask what the hell these guys were doing. Her training kept her mouth clamped shut. In the end, it didn't matter, because these guys weren't about to keep her waiting.
"Clear", the trooper that continued to hold the pole stated, almost in a bored fashion, before he clicked a button upon the device.
There was an imperceptible buzz of a current and a pressurized blast of air that sounded like a gunshot. Kelly could see, through the chassis-like muzzle of the pole, the aluminum spear suddenly jut out, travelling at a blistering speed, so that it impacted squarely upon the MJOLNIR armor that covered her joint at the shoulder.
There was a howling pop, a noise amplified like a massive glass jar had suddenly developed a deep and irreparable crack.
Kelly half-expected the accelerated spear to crumple and disintegrate uselessly upon her armor. She was therefore surprised when she saw that the spear had not in fact been destroyed and instead had sunken into the armor. Not only that, but the armor had completely shattered around the impact site—fissures and faults had splintered from the epicenter faster than the eye could blink. Not at all surprised with the results, the trooper clicked another button and the intact rod retreated back into the pole.
The Spartan was astonished as she watched the ruined remains of the shoulder armor drop away, leaving her body unharmed beneath an unpunctured bodysuit. The bits of jagged metal clamored noisily as they fell to the floor below Kelly's dangling feet. She felt strangely incomplete as she looked at her practically bare shoulder, not to mention confused. MJOLNIR armor was made out of a titanium alloy, nearly impervious to all projectile-based weaponry. How had this rod destroyed it so easily?
A resonance hammer, Kelly remembered. That had to be what this device was. Mining companies used them for getting through ferrite deposits on asteroids in order to reach the precious resources that they were blocking. The diamond-tipped rods could be tuned to the natural frequencies of the minerals in order for them to shatter when struck. Kelly had never known that the technology had been miniaturized and certainly would not have expected it to be used for cracking a Spartan out of their MJOLNIR armor, until today.
Phaedra, no doubt, had figured out the composition frequency of the armor and had freely distributed that information to Logan. She had an army of efficient traitors and mercs on her side, Kelly had to admit. Damn her.
The next hour was spent carefully trying to extract Kelly from her armor without bringing damage unto her and keeping her as restrained as possible throughout the procedure. The resonance hammer was used three more times—upon her other shoulder, and at two places upon her thigh armor. Those spots were not chosen at random, Kelly knew. They were the physical locking points for MJOLNIR that linked her limbs with her torso. Not even an armor restraint could bypass those locks so easily—Logan apparently figured that the simplest option was to simply cut Kelly out from the armor that housed her instead of trying to brute force through the rest of the icegates that made up her armor's software.
Eventually, a pile of jagged and shapeless MJOLNIR remains had collected upon the ground. A full-body table harness had been wheeled in to restrain Kelly's limbs as she was freed more and more from her armor. One of the troopers then returned to the armor restraint upon her chest and made another adjustment on the dial. Immediately, the electrical signals surged through Kelly's bodysuit and triggered the beta locks—the remaining pieces of MJOLNIR armor snapped open, like a cocoon splitting apart to reveal the metamorphized creature within. There were several sonorous clangs as the heavy coverings slammed to the ground—chest first, followed by arms, and then legs—leaving just Kelly in her bodysuit, continuing to dangle from the titanium chains by her wrists.
After ensuring that the Spartan had been subdued to a degree worthy of them being able to relax in their presence, the UNSC soldiers stepped aside, their hands gripping their weapons. Kelly, her arms and feet coiled in so much chain that they could anchor a ship to the seabed, simply hung where she was, her stony brow beaded with sweat, but not letting the pain show an iota, not even as her wrists began to bleed from the metal chains cutting into her skin, her arms turning hot and wet as the blood dripped down and fell from her elbows.
Kelly inhaled as best she could. In this position, her lungs were starting to burn. She tested the chains, ignoring the fresh slew of pain, and found that even her reinforced body had no hope of breaking free. If the chains had been made of steel, she would have made short work of them.
She glanced down at the ruined pieces of her Hermes armor that littered the ground below her. She did not bemoan the loss of her equipment—it was meant to be replaced after all—but it was evident that someone felt that she was too much of a threat with it on. Never mind the fact that a simple neural collar could have been attached to her AI port to permanently make her immobile within her MJOLNIR armor, this had all been performed to intentionally act as a humiliation.
All that she could do now was wait for the next stage in her captivity to commence.
Fortunately, she didn't have to wait long. The lone door directly across from her opened and Logan strode in, still decked out in full armor and weaponry. The sounds of his slow footsteps were immediately swallowed by the stale air of what constituted Kelly's cell. His War Master helmet, its visor fashioned in a permanent glare, gave Kelly some approximation of where she should be looking.
The only noises now were the soft dripping of Kelly's blood falling to the floor. Logan just stood a few feet away, hands at his sides, remaining utterly silent. Kelly maintained the same resolute front, keeping everything neutral. She did not grunt or talk. She just looked upon him with a slightly expectant gleam in her eyes, a subtle sign that she was not going to beg for mercy anytime soon. She would let Logan set the terms of her imprisonment and she would match it, beat for beat.
They remained in this silent battle of stares for half a minute, until Kelly realized that a more diminutive figure was poking his head out from behind the other Spartan. Nervously shuffling out into view, Governor Ishir seemed gleeful as he took in the sight of the bound Kelly—her own image was reflected in the man's antique bifocals.
Kelly instinctively narrowed her eyes at the man. His traitorous turn was expected, but a part of her was astounded by the sheer brazenness of it.
The governor, fueled by a temporary burst of courage, shuffled over to one of the tables where the soldiers had previously laid out their equipment to tear Kelly out of her armor. His hands scanned across the table before he found an iron bar. He gave it a few practice swings. Armed with the bar, Ishir walked up to where Kelly was being held, his hands shaking with excitement. He flirted with hesitation for a few moments, uncertain if the Spartan had the capability to unexpectedly break free and rip him apart limb from limb. After he waited a few seconds to confirm that Kelly was indeed neutralized, he took a step forward and swung the bar like a baseball bat, directly plowing it into Kelly's stomach with a meaty smack, causing the woman's body to ripple from the impact.
The Spartan made a little noise as the bar slammed against her abdomen, but she did not so much as wince. Inwardly, she was rather amused at this turn of events, not to mention the comparatively weak attempt at torture that Ishir had just demonstrated. She had been hit harder by Grunts.
Watching this play out, Logan's head tilted apprehensively. He finally reached out and grabbed at the iron bar, wrenching it from Ishir's grip, when the man was gearing up for another swing.
"What," Logan said with a tone that conveyed extreme disappointment, like a parent scolding their child, "exactly do you think you're doing?"
Ishir took several quick glances back in Kelly's direction, like his motives should have been obvious. "What… does it look like? I'm starting the interrogation?"
The rasp that emitted from Logan's vocabulator managed to encapsulate exactly what he thought about the governor. "You can't interrogate a Spartan." He tossed the iron bar to the floor as he moved closer to Kelly.
Behind him, Ishir spread his arms quizzically.
"Then why'd you bring her here if you're not going to pump her for information? She's a prisoner, isn't she? I mean, what else would you call all this, seeing as you have her trussed up and all? That not worth something to you?"
"It would have worth if it were anyone else," Logan folded his arms behind his back as he began to walk a circuit around Kelly, who kept her eyes aimed straight ahead all the while. "But Spartans, we're a different breed. We're trained to resist all methods of interrogation and torture. It's been instilled in us that dying would be the preferable option rather than give up information that would compromise fellow human lives, even more so if the lives in question are other Spartans. 087 will never talk, not even to provide us with false information. I'm just telling you this now to save on any embarrassment on your end, because you will not succeed if you try to torture her." He slowly looked Kelly up and down before returning his attention to Ishir. "So… yes, she may be a prisoner, but her stay here has been determined to be a necessity by people far more important than you. The interest is in her presence here, not what she may or may not know. The privilege to decide such a thing is not reserved for us."
Logan's orbit had finally taken him back to Kelly's front. With the chains holding Kelly off the ground, their stares were at the same height. The armored Spartan made a show of deliberately angling his helmet in the direction of Kelly's bloodsoaked arms, appraising the injuries she had sustained, before he maneuvered his head back level.
"I've been very curious as to what our first meeting would be like, 087." He spoke with a breathy voice, one that his vocabulator gave a bass amplification to his words, making them seem both ethereal and monstrous.
"As have I," Kelly said with no additional inflection intruding into her own voice. "Though I have to say that the circumstances of our introduction have been… disappointing."
The rogue Spartan allowed a few laughs. He turned toward Ishir while jerking a thumb in Kelly's direction. "You see, governor? This is what you'd be up against. Either rote verbiage or dry humor. Perhaps both. Had I not interfered, your interrogation would have amounted to nothing but a miserable failure."
Logan did not plan to disengage from Kelly's conversation for long, as he swung back to face her.
"You'll have to forgive him," he gestured to Ishir. "Such small-mindedness tends to frustrate others who unfortunately happen to veer into their orbits. He's never had the luxury of seeing what you and I have seen. We both know that there are more ways to torture a person than violence upon one's body."
Kelly allowed a fraction of a smile, despite her precarious position. "Are you sure we've seen the same things?"
"Haven't we? We're practically cut from the same cloth. Created to fulfill the same purpose. It would make sense that we've been exposed to the same horrors. To the same lies."
Kelly narrowed her eyes. "Going for the sympathetic route, then? I'd rather spring for straight torture."
"Rest assured, I'm not trying to convert you," Logan shook his head in derision, sounding amused. "We both know you're too far gone for that. You're incapable of breaking the indoctrination that has been set upon you. Even now, you're fulfilling the mission that was given to you. We have no use for such an… acolyte such as yourself. My probing is merely meant to satiate a baser need, one whose fulfillment does not require your conscious input. All it requires is for you to listen."
Kelly was trying to comprehend what Logan was saying. He was not making complete sense to her. The rogue Spartan sensed her incomprehension and took a step back.
"Did you ever wonder why you were chosen to carry out this mission? And did you ever wonder why it was that you were chosen to carry it out alone? No doubt ONI tried to fill in the blanks as best they could, or at least provide some redirection in their answers. but they never truly explained themselves to you, did they? They kept some of those blanks open, no doubt. Tradecraft as usual for ONI, tricky of them. Always hiding missions within missions. Concealed objectives, unknown to their pawns."
What could Kelly truly say to that? Even if she knew the full picture, there was the implicit understanding that had already been established that she would remain silent. Regardless, Logan seemed to sense that any answer from her was unreachable in this very moment and gave a shrug.
"We've all been used by the UNSC. The difference is that they think you have some value to them, 087. They didn't see it that way for me, once. If they had, they wouldn't have been content to deploy me and the rest of my brethren to a world where the enemy outnumbered us fifty-to-one. They wouldn't have sat high in orbit and watched as an onrushing battalion of Elites cut my fellow soldiers down upon an open stretch of beach with no tactical cover. But when the objective was completed, despite the odds and heavy losses, they would at least have sent down an evacuation shuttle to exfiltrate the survivors instead of abandoning us on a hostile planet with no escape. As the surviving Spartans were hunted down by the remaining Elites and Brutes, we became fewer and fewer until I was the only one left standing. Had ONI not arrived to contain the situation, I would not be standing before you today." Logan waited for the words to sink in, a faint tremble rippling through his person. "After that day, I never forgot what it was like to be treated as something disposable. It's a fate that would've been in store for you at some point, 087. Now, answer me honestly, if you had been in my position, would you have the luxury of ever trusting another order?"
If Logan was honestly expecting Kelly to deliver a straight answer to his face, then he showed no sign of disappointment when all that she provided him was a flat look. She was behaving exactly as predicted: no tells, no indications of discomfort. There was no evidence that Kelly was cracking whatsoever.
Kelly resisted the urge to smirk, to somehow deliver a sign of glibness to demonstrate exactly how she felt at this moment. But that would just be an answer in of itself to Logan. During an interrogation, it was up to the interrogee to maintain control over their responses and their body language. Even the slightest twitch could be interpreted as a reaction to a meted query. In this room, everything she did was subject to agonizing scrutiny, as though as she were under a microscope.
The truth was that she did indeed sympathize with Logan's predicament. She had seen soldiers with PTSD before—it was rare for such trauma imprint upon a Spartan and Logan's was the worst case she had seen thus far. Clearly, his mission had left more of an impact than he was letting on. If she tried to place herself in his shoes, she might have been able to approximate the feelings of abandonment he had gone through when his mission had been botched. If Blue Team had left her behind for no good reason, then perhaps that would have been enough to forge a path similar to Logan's.
She would never admit that, though. Kelly remained maddingly silent, which was an answer enough for her interrogator.
Logan had turned away from Kelly and had walked back to one of the tables. He was fiddling around with the assembled components there. "Our host," he referred to Ishir, "had thought you had come here to destroy the pharmaceutical labs that had been set up on this moon."
"What are you doing?!" the governor hissed, his arms raised to his head as if he was about to tear his own hair out. "She never had confirmation that the labs were even here!"
The little man was ignored. "I knew that you had not arrived here for a simple demo op," Logan said. "That would've been a waste of your talents. No, the real target was always going to be the wavespace array. Which, judging from the fact that we had caught you in the middle of the act, you had used to contact the commander. Clever of you. A shame that we had to do away with the site in the end, but it was a chance for us to finally have an actual target as a testing ground. So, it seems we both got something out of today."
Now it was Kelly's turn to scrutinize Logan, who was now coming back to her, a datapad held in a hand. Logan was being obtuse again. He had said "testing ground"—what did he mean by that? Did it relate to his statement back in the array when he had mentioned something about "evac procedures"? She remembered that he had gone so far as to set a timer before they left. Had he destroyed the array?
She decided now was the time to speak up.
"You rigged the array to blow?"
Logan tapped at the datapad with a few decisive strokes before he angled it in Kelly's direction. "Not exactly. See for yourself."
Common sense rang within Kelly's head that anything Logan had to show her would be obfuscated through a lens that was less conducive towards displaying the actual truth. But something indicated that the rogue Spartan was being entirely open with her. She slowly blinked in trepidation before she flicked her eyes over to the screen.
For a second, she was not sure exactly what she was looking at. It seemed like Logan had accidentally queued up archive footage of old explosive tests that had taken place on uncharted worlds—right now, the screen was showing a massive crater that broiled a chimney of smoke and dust, one that plumed up for miles into the thin atmosphere and dispersed to be spread across to the far reaches of the moon, which eventually clicked with her that she was looking at a feed of Arbogast.
But, as she continued to look, Kelly realized that there was something odd about this crater. It was massive, if she was looking at the scale correctly, not to mention that the center was practically hot with Cherenkov radiation. Ten miles in diameter, from the looks of it, but the edges of the crater did not have the typical ridging that came with a cosmological object impacting into the surface. One of the sides was irregularly sloped, a triangular stone portion that towered nearly a thousand feet tall, that unnaturally stood at an angle towards the crater. Almost like it had been part of a mountain and the rest of the mountain had just been scooped away… along with a long stretch of foothills that had been nestled next to the mountain.
It hit her in the next second. She was looking at what used to be the remains of the wavespace array.
Her pulse began thudding in her temples. Phaedra had nuked the site? But that didn't make sense. The surrounding area from the epicenter did not have any signs of damage that typically accompanied such a devastating blast. Rather, it all looked as it had been completely untouched.
All the pieces slowly came together. She suddenly remembered that she had seen and heard about detonations like this before. Incidents that had happened on Cygnus and Reach were eerily similar to this one. There could be no other option—the presence of Cherenkov radiation was the final nail in the coffin for her realization to finally kick in.
This had been the result of a detonating Shaw-Fujikawa drive.
What she was looking at was the aftermath of the drive's explosion, or rather the event that had, for all intents and purposes, teleported the mountain and the array into slipspace, effectively destroying the entire facility.
Along with the nearby settlement that had been situated at the base of the mountain—the one that Brandon had pointed out to her as they had approached the site.
Thousands of lives, all gone in an instant. Ripped apart in the churning void that was slipstream space.
A throbbing sensation bulged in Kelly's throat as she stewed in the unfairness of it all. She had seen soldiers die in combat before, but dead civilians were another matter. They did not deserve to be exposed to the life of a soldier. They were the ones that she truly needed to protect, for Kelly had been fighting for them all her life—Earth and all her colonies. And she had failed these men, women, and children. She knew that Phaedra's cruelty had a long reach. She just could never comprehend that obliterating an entire city, not just a ramshackle colony town, had been within that reach. Her miscalculation had damned all those people to a sudden death. Darkness constricted her throat. A snarl threatened to burgeon forth.
More and more questions began to surface. How had Logan smuggled a Shaw-Fujikawa drive onto Arbogast? Had this been from one of the drives he or someone else on his team had stolen from the colonies they had raided? Why was he so casual about murdering his fellow humans? She suspected that these were answers that she was not going to receive any time soon.
Slowly, she looked back at Logan, an icy fire brimming behind her eyes. "You didn't need to kill all those people," she spoke quietly, each word laced with iron and venom.
Logan lowered his arm with the tablet, deactivating the screen. "Collateral damage."
"It wasn't necessary."
"On the contrary. They were all unwittingly part of the final stages of the commander's plan. While their participation was not necessary, their fates have acted as useful data. We are now ready to proceed with preparations for the next phase with this successful trial."
Kelly could only scoff. Her arms had gone numb by now, but she didn't care. A black haze was wrapping around the edges of her sight, keeping Logan firmly centered within her view. Every single hardwired instinct in her body was aching for the chance to brutally dismember this Spartan. Not just for what he did, but what he represented. What he would eagerly do all over again.
Logan tossed the datapad onto an empty table and gestured for the guards to file out of the room. Once they did so, he also turned to leave after shooing Ishir out.
"Try to be appreciative of your situation. If it were up to me, you would be dead already, 087. The commander… sees things differently. She wants a witness, one who would understand her motivations," Logan said as he too began to depart. "Do not forget that it was from her mercy that your condition has not deteriorated. All that can certainly change."
Mercy had limits, Kelly knew. She envisioned spitting in Logan's helmet to show him exactly what she thought of Phaedra's mercy, but of course that would never do.
Before Logan departed from the room, she could not resist having one more word through her strained and raw throat.
"When I get out of here, I'm going to kill you. You know that, right?"
Logan was midway through the threshold and stopped in place for a moment. He tilted his head, as if he were about to turn around, but did not make such an action. Instead, he gave a raspy chuckle before he finally stepped into the dark hallway beyond.
"If, 087," his voice tauntingly reverberated. "If."
Ishir was waiting for Logan just outside Kelly's cell. He quickly fell into lock-step alongside the Spartan, after a pair of guards had been assigned to the entrance of Kelly's prison, as they moved through the rocky tunnel. Steel beams bolstered the sides and ceiling of the corridor, and a rubber mat had been laid upon the ground like a blackened carpet. Ishir had to uncomfortably angle his body as he walked—Logan's massive frame nearly took up the entire width of the hall.
"I'm going to let her hang there for a couple of hours," the governor said as he tried to make his awkward walk look as dignified as possible. "After which, I'll send in a specialist to perform some enhanced interrogation techniques on her. You know, to at least make an attempt to see what she knows."
"I already told you," Logan said, never breaking stride. "You'd just be wasting your time."
"I heard you. I just want to see for myself what her limits are."
Logan then abruptly stopped—Ishir nearly banged his head upon the Spartan's curved shoulder plate for the deceleration had been so severe. The armored soldier then turned, grasped a fistful of the governor's shirt, and pressed him up against the wall. Ishir let out an involuntary whimper and tried not to look at the War Master visor's perpetual scowl as it grew closer to his face.
"By that, you mean that you have no objective to your torture other than careless amusement," the Spartan growled. "How disappointing for you to admit."
The governor tried—and failed—to look brave. A tentative grin cracked upon his face, so delicate that it could have been made of glass.
"I merely wanted to impart a… a r-restitution to compensate for humiliating me at my own—"
This did not convince Logan a whit. "Right," he said tonelessly, which almost bordered on intense sarcasm. "I know that you are eager to attend to your own agenda, but let me enlighten you to mine, so that there's no risk of overlap."
He released his hold on Ishir's shirt, but kept a finger firmly on the man's sternum, holding him in place.
"You can go ahead and proceed with your fool's errand, but—" the finger applied pressure on the governor's chest to the point where Ishir started to cough, "—you will not leave any permanent damage on her. Before you can think of bargaining with me on that, know that this was not my call to make. If I come back and see that something irreparable has been done to the Spartan while in custody, I'll impart the same damage onto you. And maybe… I'll go a bit further with you, just because you inconvenienced me. Nod if you understand."
Ishir frantically bobbed his head in between wheezes. Logan kept his finger depressed a little while longer upon the governor's chest, letting the point sink in. When he took his arm away, Ishir clutched at his chest and let off a string of coughs so rough that he nearly sunk to his knees.
The Spartan had already taken off down the hall, leaving the man behind. Such a fragile thing.
Despite the warning, there was a part of him that hoped that the governor would disobey him. While torturing a Spartan was an exercise in insanity, Ishir, on the other hand, would more than likely prove to be quite rewarding of a subject. Sadly, Logan knew the governor was afflicted by cowardice more than stupidity. Any hopes of insubordination and the appropriate punishment to be meted out would be a scenario that would probably never occur.
A shame, though. Logan knew he would enjoy turning the tables on the man, if that possibility ever occurred.
It had been a whole hour and Kelly was already bored. She was angry, obviously, but boredom was winning the battle at the forefront of her consciousness right now. It was not like she could doze off, what with the chains continuing to cut into her wrists, keeping her blood freshly flowing down her arms as she hung in place. Not exactly the most comfortable of positions to grab a few winks.
She decided to study the interior of her cell to keep her mind occupied. Though, it was not like there was much around her to concentrate on. There was no bed, no toilet, no mirror, no sink. Nothing except the couple of foldable tables that had been placed next to the door. There was only a single LED bulb above her that shone down upon her. Grated mesh slats upon the wall hissed a continuous stream of stale ventilation.
Every once in a while, she tried flexing her arms to see if she could create any play in the chains that bound her. No such luck. They just grated further into her tissue and resulted in nothing more than a fresh slew of blood to trickle down her skin. She passed on any future escape attempts, not because of the pain, but because of the perceived futility.
On the whole, Kelly was not truly worried about herself. What she felt the most guilt about was getting her brother involved in this mess, albeit unintentionally. Brandon. She wondered where he was. Had he been transported to this very facility as well? Did Logan plan to have him tortured in lieu of her in an effort to get her to talk? The more she languished in this room, the less time that Brandon had. For once, Phaedra's destruction was no longer paramount in her mind. She needed to free her brother first and foremost—then she would kill Logan swiftly after.
Relax, she had to tell herself. Empty your mind. All thoughts can be displaced. Remember your training.
She had not gone a few minutes into her Zen training before the door was rudely shunted aside, breaking her from her reverie.
"Guten Tag, Spartan," a tall man in a black security outfit said as he walked inside. He was bald and impressively mustachioed—a thick caterpillar that draped over his mouth and went down to his jawline. He carried a black leather bag that was crinkled from use. He set the bag on the nearest table. "I take it you are my specimen for today?"
Kelly reverted to her usual silent treatment. She was now more confused than anything. This man looked more like a circus strongman. She flicked her eyes around for any hidden cameras, uncertain if she was being messed with.
The man gave a theatrical shrug at her silence. He unfolded the bag and Kelly could glimpse silver instruments folded within some of the interior pockets. "I am Herr Thun. Security detail for Governor Ishir. Do you know why I am here, Spartan?"
She did, but she did not need to state it out loud. Ishir seemed to be deadest on torturing her, so having someone swing by to do just that was entirely expected.
Thun carried on, unperturbed by Kelly's refusal to answer. His hands delicately flicked over the metal instruments in his bag before he plucked a slender scalpel from its leather moorings. Light flicked over the razor-sharp blade. "This is to be an advanced interrogation. I assume you understand how this will go, ja? I will ask questions. You will provide answers. Should I be met with silence or falsehoods, the interrogation escalates. Verstehen Sie?"
The options were to agree, to be difficult and play dumb, or to keep being silent. Kelly chose the latter.
"No matter," Thun said. He then withdrew a personal device from his breast pocket and clicked a button on it. New age music began to play, light and airy. To this soundtrack, he sashayed his way over to Kelly in such a campy manner that Kelly nearly gaped at the sight. "I was informed you would be a challenge. I suppose we will start with something basic, then. Easy questions. They will only get more difficult as we go on, so it is advisable to be cooperative early."
Kelly wished Thun the best of luck, then.
Thun smirked as he twirled the scalpel between his fingers in a manner that was distinctively flashy. Not at all disciplined, to the Spartan's consternation. "Before we begin," he said, "I must reveal that being an interrogator was never my only job. In fact, I was an actor before I came to Arbogast. Some could say that this job chose me because I have a rather overactive imagination. Make of that what you will."
Great, Kelly thought. An actor moonlighting as a torturer. This was just getting better and better. Between this and the terrible music, a headache was building beneath her forehead again. Might as well put a bullet in my head now rather than endure any more of this crap.
"So," Thun continued, "question one: what was your primary target on Arbogast? Bonus points if you tell me the individuals who tasked you with such an assignment."
That question, Kelly felt, did not even warrant the standard response of a rote recital of her name and serial number. It took everything she had not to roll her eyes.
The interrogator shrugged again. "If you insist," he said. He moved closer to Kelly and reached out so that he could feel for the bottom of her ribcage underneath her bodysuit. His hand drifted to the side, to her upper abdomen and prodded her there. He made several tisking noises as he worked. "I was instructed to not do anything too permanent, but I think a few redundant organ removals can be counted as such, don't you think? Still, would it have been too much for the ingrates to have removed this damn bodysuit before I got here? I'm going to have to cut it away before I can—"
The door to the outside then opened unexpectedly, startling Thun. He turned around to see what the interruption warranted. However, no one else came through—just a blank corridor stretched out beyond the threshold.
"Was ist los?" Thun called out, a note of peevishness intruding. No one else answered him back, not even the guards that had been stationed to flank the entrance to Kelly's cell. Kelly even tried to crane her head around Thun's massive frame to see beyond him, but there was quite literally nothing to see.
Thun kept on staring at the opening until the door automatically closed again. He gave a snort of derision as he turned back to Kelly. "Everything is breaking in this shithole," he groused, his hands returning to press at Kelly's ribcage, the scalpel growing nearer and nearer to her body. But the interrogator continued to talk to himself, clearly in love with his own voice. "Few months back, the waste management system went kaput. They told us the malfunction would last a couple hours but it extended into a full week. Be thankful that you weren't here when that happened. You had people stealing coolers from the kitchen and finding a quiet corner to do their business in because all of the pipes were backed up. Never in my life had I thought about quitting until that—"
If Thun had thought that Kelly was paying attention to his rambling, he was sorely mistaken. But while the Spartan was able to tune him out for a few moments, her concentration was suddenly drawn to something else—a disturbance in the air, it seemed. She squinted to get a better look. Thun did not notice.
Just behind the interrogator, the walls had changed somehow. They now seemed to shift and distort. Almost like they were melting, for their contours had turned glassy and flowing.
Then… the phenomenon shifted. Moving. The reflection from the lone bulb now warped upon the massive shape of the distortion as it now crept toward the two humans. Kelly sucked in a breath of realization.
"—I know, it's not going to be all that comfortable," Thun said, misunderstanding the noise that Kelly had made. "Then again, what did you expect? If you want to talk about discomfort, you should have seen my first audition at the SLO River Theatre back in the 40s. The director told me he hadn't seen a performance that bad since Lizzy Barkova was drunk during the Q-Cup Finals—"
The rippling of the air positioned itself directly behind Thun and Kelly heard a buzz of electricity and the stink of ozone sweep forward.
In the next moment, twin crescent beams suddenly burst straight through Thun's chest, hissing and crackling as blood boiled and flesh cooked against the superheated energy shapes.
There was a light ringing sound as Thun dropped the scalpel. His eyes widened and he looked down to see the tips of the energy sword that was now protruding from his chest. Wisps of smoke from cooking flesh and tissue seared forth. In a daze, he raised his right hand and tried to pat the blades that had impaled them, perhaps to see if they were in fact real. That was a mistake—as his fingers passed across the sword, they dropped away from his hand and bounced at his feet, four severed digits that were blackened at their little stumps.
"Ah," Thun said with mild affect, as though this was nothing but an inconvenience to him. "Gott im Himmel."
There was a wrenching noise as the sword then swept to the side, opening up a tremendous gash in Thun's body that ripped him open all the way to the sternum. A tremendous gush of blood burst forth, as did the tender push of soft organs as they tried to expel themselves from the opening. Thun grunted, and his hands automatically dropped to the wound, as if he was trying to keep his bodily fluids in. It was no use—his eyes rolled to the back of his head and he quickly collapsed to the ground, stone-dead in moments.
At the same time, the distortion in the air pulsated, fractalized, and solidified with a crackling of electricity. Now, an angular creature stood in the room with Kelly as the active camouflage dropped away, draped in a magnificent silver armor, polished to a high sheen.
The Elite lifted their energy sword in what looked like a salute to Kelly. Then, the blade extinguished, allowing Kelly to get a good look at the alien's face.
For the first time since being thrown into this room, she smiled.
Furan nudged the still-leaking body of Thun away with a foot and stepped towards the bound Spartan. "Is it normal for your torturers to be so… talkative?" she asked by way of greeting. The Elite looked powerful and intimidating now that she was returned to her armor. A sheer frame of illumination seemed to melt across her polished form, rippling light upon the walls as they reflected off the shiny surface.
As best as she could, in her hanging position, Kelly gave a shrug. "He said he used to be an actor at one point."
"Is that akin to a court jester or something similar?"
"In his case, more than likely," Kelly said. She then eyed the chains anchoring her to the ceiling. "A little assistance?"
The energy blade reignited and Furan held it up just a few inches from Kelly's hands. "Hold on. Get ready."
With a singular swipe, the curves of plasma chewed through the titanium bonds in an instant. The glowing ends separated with a hissing snap and Kelly lightly landed on her feet as she was finally allowed to drop to the ground. Furan then carefully used her sword to cut through the chains binding her wrists and feet together, and soon a coil of sheared chains looped around the Spartan's feet, the severed pieces smoking as the heat from the sword melted the ends.
Kelly gave a nod of thanks to the Elite. She then walked over to where Thun had left his medical bag on the table. She rummaged around and found a bottle of salve, which she applied to the cuts on her wrists.
"How'd you manage to get here without being detected?" she asked as she rubbed the salve in.
Wordlessly, Furan hooked a thumb around the chain that looped over her neck, foisting up the ident tag that dangled there. "I kept close to patrols while camouflaged, to group my friendly contact with theirs so that there was a digital overlap on their sensors."
"Smart. What tipped you off that I was here? I never sent out an SOS alert."
"I was monitoring the base's radio channels the whole time. When I heard requests for the security forces to begin mobilizing, I figured that you could use some backup. I was on my way to you when I intercepted a message indicating that the personnel here were making their way back to base with detainees in tow. Detainees. Reason enough for me to investigate. I simply pinged your armor's IFF codes and it led me straight to you."
Kelly made a quick gesture to the scattering of what remained of her Hermes armor that had been strewn across the floor, sans her helmet, which one of the guards had taken. "A day longer and you would have had a harder time trying to track me."
Furan bent down and picked up one of the cracked joint parts. "Is any part of the armor still functional? Could you be returned to it?"
"No. They disconnected the power plant and removed several of the fuses. I couldn't even soft-boot it if I tried. And that's if it was still intact."
"A shame. That'll make things difficult for you."
Thanks for stating the obvious, Kelly nearly said out loud.
But Furan was right. Without MJOLNIR, she no longer had any sort of protection from small-arms fire. One lucky headshot would end her career faster than she could blink. Her body suit might be able to stop a round or two—maybe—but that would not hold up very well when facing guards with automatic weapons.
In a way, she was almost remorseful that her armor had met such an undignified end. It would have been a worthy culmination of its service if it had been damaged beyond repair from battle. To be subject to such dissection and casual disposal reeled within her like a flaming punch had been delivered to her gut.
Enough. She couldn't dwell on the poor condition of her tools any longer. She still needed to escape this place and she was going to have to do it without armor.
Kelly continued to filter through Thun's bag and swiped several scalpels for herself. She threaded them through sewn-on loops at her arms and her thighs upon her bodysuit. Knives to a gunfight. This was going to go quite well.
"What can you tell me about this location?" Kelly asked as she checked herself over.
The silver-laden alien rippled a shrug. "It appears to have been a reconverted cargo dock that has now been appropriated by the Arbogast security forces. It's not a long drive from the main facility. Size is not entirely substantial, but it does feature several sublevels and four main docks."
"Get a sense of the size of the contingent based here?"
"I can only estimate."
"Please do."
Furan looked up to the ceiling in thought. Trying to find out how to break this. "All I can say with confidence is that every hallway and room that I traversed upon was occupied by armed human warriors."
It seemed that Kelly didn't have enough scalpels to take out every single soldier in this base. Not that she wanted to kill them—most of them were just following orders. They were still loyal to the UNSC. She couldn't just slaughter everyone she came across.
"Obviously, my capabilities have been starkly reduced with the loss of my armor," Kelly turned toward Furan. "That will pose a problem for us. Quite significantly, considering the circumstances."
"How so?"
"Because one of the other Spartans is here. Logan."
Furan's nostrils flared and she straightened, growing a few inches taller. She agonizingly looked toward the door, as if the aforementioned soldier would come bursting through it at any second. "Is he? Interesting."
The thought of being in such close proximity to another one of the trio that had so grievously wronged her was having an electrifying effect on the Elite. She was shifting her weight from foot to foot, spoiling for a fight.
Kelly spotted the change in the Elite's demeanor and curtly shook her head. "I'm not going to be much help to you if we come face to face with him. This is his territory—he has the advantage."
"Let him come," Furan hissed, her attention upon Kelly wavering. "For this, the risk of death is negligible compared to the opportunity we have been afforded."
Kelly stepped between Furan and the door. "It isn't smart for us to blindly charge into battle when we lack the tactical advantage. Now that Logan has unveiled his presence here, he won't be content to let us go when we make our escape. But we need time to regroup and resupply ourselves before we can destroy him. And regardless," she added, "there's one objective that takes precedence in this facility."
"And that is?"
The Spartan almost said my brother, but that would open up a whole host of questions that she was neither prepared nor compelled to explain to the Elite. "Logan took captives in this place," she said instead. "Soldiers loyal to our cause. We spring them, it will increase our numbers, not to mention our combat effectiveness, and will make escaping easier for us."
Those were a bunch of white lies, but Furan did not need to be completely informed of everything.
"Once we leave," Kelly continued, "we'll make our way to the Nighthawk, find the nearest allied supply depot, and return with the proper armaments to take out—"
"I did forget to mention one thing," Furan interrupted apologetically. "When I left your ship to release you from this place, my path crossed with several squads of Arbogast security heading towards the dock. I fear they may have seized the ship, along with all of the materials within."
Kelly frowned. That was going to put a large dent in her plan. The Nighthawk's armory had the type of weaponry that was even capable of making a dent in Logan's armor. Not to mention that the spare Mark IV MJOLNIR armor she had picked up was there as well—she had planned to use it as her replacement, if she had the time to suit up. Without the ship, she was going to have to start her whole plan practically from scratch.
Today was not giving her many breaks, that was to be sure.
"Very well," Kelly said, trying not to let her frustration show. "Then we adapt. You said this facility had a few docks, correct? Did you see any light craft? Pelicans, or anything of the like?"
The Elite nodded. "Indeed, I did."
"Then that's our objective. First, we spring the prisoners. Then we commandeer one of the Pelicans and make our way back to the Nighthawk. If Logan's forces haven't disabled Armitage, perhaps we might be able to get him to remote-pilot the ship so that we can meet in orbit."
Furan nodded in agreement. At least they had something in the works. Kelly's connection to the ship had been severed when Logan had destroyed her armor, so she needed to bounce her signal off of Furan's transponder. When the connection was green, she spoke rapidly to the AI.
"Sierra-087 to Armitage. Provide sitrep on current status. Over."
There was an inordinate pause that turned into a long silence of hissing static. Something twisted in Kelly's gut. She checked the connection again—it was signaling that she was linked to the Nighthawk. Had the security forces ripped Armitage out from the ship? Otherwise, why would he not answer?
She tried again: "Sierra-087 to all Nighthawk channels. We will be oscar mike momentarily. Acknowledge transmission and begin takeoff procedures. How copy?"
Still silence. This was not right.
Kelly was about to try again when, deep in the recesses of her audio feed, she could hear a tiny click as the impetus of the radio switched over. She held her breath. Armitage?
Five more seconds passed. Then ten.
Then, words in her ears.
"I regret that it has come to this, Spartan-087."
Kelly's blood pressure spiked in her ears. There was a deep churning noise that accompanied the hissing of the radio. Her tendons seemed to be made of razor wire and a cold presence started to manifest at the stem of her brain.
"Armitage?" she breathed. "Repeat your last."
The AI then made a noise that eerily sounded like a sigh. "You shouldn't have ventured beyond Arbor I, Spartan. An error in hindsight, but an error nonetheless. I cannot afford any more damage to the SPARTAN program to be incurred. I am sorry, but I will do what I must. Activating Plano 15th Legacy Contingency."
"Armitage? Armitage!"
There was a click in her ears. The connection had been cut.
In the next moment, the lights went out. The entire room was doused in darkness.
The obscurity did not last for long. Deep crimson lights embedded underneath the grating in the floor quickly ignited, dousing the cell in a hue not unlike blood. Kelly's face was bathed in the light, though no heat emanated upon her face. Furan slowly rotated, both the slick umbrae and coral illuminations practically dripping across her polished armor. Sparks radiated in her steel eyes and the Elite bent her knees in preparation.
In the distance, upon the opposite side of the door, an alarm was sounding. A call to arms. It was ringing shrilly, accompanied by the blasting of lightening-white strobes that blitzed around every corner of the facility like the place was subject to one continuous rave.
"Damn it," Kelly spat, unused to this hollow sensation in her chest. "Things just got more difficult for us."
"And it was already stacked in our foes' favor to begin with," Furan commented dryly. "I take it this behavior from your construct was not anticipated?"
The Elite was speaking in a rather annoying I-told-you-so tone that Kelly had to admit was earned at this moment. No one was more blindsided from this betrayal than she was. Armitage had been keeping secrets, it seemed, to the extent that he seemed willing to scrub this whole mission as disastrously as he could in order to ensure the integrity of said secrets.
How could this have happened? Kelly asked herself over and over again. Had Armitage somehow been reprogrammed? Adjusting the alignment of an AI was a plausible scenario, yes, but that would require many thousands of man-hours to hack into the matrix of an AI in order to gain access to its root code. Man-hours that she knew that Logan could not have conjured up in the time since they had all set foot on Arbogast. So, tampering was out of the question. Rampancy? Armitage was only in his third year of service—surely he couldn't have achieved that destructive state in his lifecycle yet? No, the only answer she could think of was that the AI had turned on his own initiative, whether by necessity or if he had the required behavior already programmed into him.
The how and why were irrelevant at this point, Kelly decided. All that mattered was getting Brandon and then getting the hell out of here.
"Armitage is compromised," she announced to Furan hollowly. "For all we know, he's called down the entire base upon our heads. We should probably move."
As if there could be another course of action that the Elite could hope to suggest. Furan reached behind her and procured a plasma pistol. The same one, Kelly noted with irony, that she had first given the alien.
"A warrior could use a weapon," Furan said. She offered the gun to Kelly.
The Spartan almost did not take it. Just the sight of the ugly and foreign curves of the device was enough to make her lip curl in disgust. An underpowered and altogether useless thing.
But… it was a weapon.
She reached out and took it. The readout showed that it had about half a charge left. "Next UNSC weapon I see, I'm ditching this," she warned the Elite.
"So quick to abandon a lifeline," Furan mocked, but didn't press the issue further.
They left the cell, with Furan taking the lead. Just outside, they passed by the bodies of the two guards that had been stationed at the entrance. Kelly quickly knelt down to check their pulse, but realized that would just be a futile endeavor once she spotted the scorched gashes in their necks. The Elite had slit their throats in what looked like one fell swing. Impressive, but Kelly still could not help but wonder if these soldiers had not been swayed by Phaedra and had simply been trying to do their jobs. She had to put those questions behind her—they would just be a distraction.
The Spartan reached down to take one of the fallen guards' assault rifles, but when she grabbed the grip of the closest weapon, she noted that it felt oddly light. Soon she realized why—when she lifted up the rifle, she discovered that she was only holding half a gun. Furan had chopped the assault rifles in half with her sword on her way over.
Damn. She was stuck with this stupid plasma pistol for a little while longer.
They continued on. The corridors of this facility were a maze, but strangely empty. The walls and ceiling were made out of dusty and angular rock, held back by a network of supporting steel beams. Thick rubber mats that were poorly aligned to one another functioned as the "carpet" to this place. Kelly kept looking for thermal cameras. If she had her helmet on, her HUD would have picked them up. But, even with her enhanced eyesight, she could not spot any monitoring devices. It would be foolish to assume that they were not being watched, though. Any base worth its salt would be wired to the seams.
Faint stenciling in light white paint offered some directions at a nearby junction. One line that pointed in the direction they had just come from read Storage. Another line read Docks. Underneath that same arrow read Detention.
Kelly pointed in the direction of the detention wing. Furan nodded, understanding.
Carefully, they proceeded until they came to another intersection. As they approached, Kelly's ears picked up noises from around one of the corners. Footsteps. A patrol. She gave Furan's arm a slight tap to alert her. The Elite turned around.
"Don't kill if you can help it," the Spartan whispered. There had to be a sizeable contingent on this moon that was still loyal to the UNSC. Cutting a bloody path through the division that barred their way was a rapid escalation of tactics that could severely backfire further down the line.
The Elite grunted, not all too pleased with the directive, but offered no objections.
They hugged the wall, listening as the footsteps grew closer. Furan held the deactivated blade of her sword against her chest, her eyes pale slits. Kelly's lither form crouched slightly behind the alien, leaning over to the side a bit. Just waiting. The faint edge of conversation began to increase in volume from the soldiers talking amongst themselves. Whether or not they were ready for what was coming to them was immaterial. Fate had already arranged the way that things must be into the way they are.
Before the troopers could round the bend, Furan beat them to the punch. There was a sizzle of energy and a tannic smell filled Kelly's nostrils. The Elite leaped out, her sword ignited, and jumped towards the Marines—of which there were two.
"Hey! We got—!" one of the soldiers tried to yell into his comm, but he did not get very far.
Furan swiped and her sword cut cleanly across the closest Marine's wrist, severing it with a hiss-snap, and separating the man from his weapon. Flesh cooked and bubbled, but before the Marine could scream in pain, the Elite's free arm reached over, grasped the man's head as if she were cradling him, and propelled him straight into the wall. He crashed forehead-first into the metal scaffolding—his helmet took the brunt of the blow—but he was still knocked cold. He dropped at Furan's feet.
That just left the other trooper. Kelly had jumped out from around the corner at this time. She sprinted towards the Marine and quickly aimed her pistol down, firing a single burst of sickly green plasma as she went. The bulbous beam splashed against the Marine's thigh, scorching his armor and burning the fabric. If the pistol had been at full power, it would have seared through half the man's leg. Still, it was enough for the Marine to drop to a knee, at just the right height for Kelly to bring her own knee up and solidly connect it with the man's head. The Marine flew back in a graceful arc, arms splayed out like he had just embarked into a curvaceous dive, but landed rather unceremoniously in a heap several feet away. She examined her target with a practiced eye: concussion, third degree burns. A painful recovery was in his future but nothing permanent had been made to his body.
It was just the two of them in the corridor again. They were not even breathing hard.
However, the klaxons began resounding louder and louder. It seems their little scuffle had not gone unnoticed by the staff.
"We're going to be overrun very soon," Kelly warned. "We need to free the prisoners and get out now."
Before they did that, Kelly made good on her promise of discarding the plasma pistol at the earliest opportunity. She then knelt down to the unconscious soldiers and took one of their pistols for herself. She pulled the slide back half an inch—brass shone within the barrel. Letting go, the slide clicked back into place with a satisfying snap of cold nickel.
A battle rifle was lying on the ground next to her. A severed hand still clung to the grip. Kelly gently pried away the fingers, which had already started to go into rigor mortis, and tossed the clammy appendage to the side, admitting to herself that Furan's methods, which a bit extreme, still fell within the guidance she had given. Couldn't exactly fault the Elite for following orders, could she?
At the end of the hall, back the way they had come, Kelly's head snapped up as a vibrant war of shadows played across the walls. Obscured by the darkness and dim amber lighting, rustling black shapes were spilling in her direction. Marines, and lots of them. Coming at them from more than one direction—Kelly could perceive the same disturbances in the lighting at the corridor to her immediate right.
There was no time to think. She snapped her rifle up and angled her right eye behind the scope. As soon as she found an armored midsection for her reticle to fall upon, she pulled the trigger.
A trio of powerful blasts rippled from the barrel of the battle rifle. A triple impact rattled Kelly's shoulder, but she held the weapon in place with ease.
Deep down the hall, she could see sparks blaze off the chestpiece of the lead Marine as one or more of the bullets ricocheted off. He went down with a wheeze. Still alive. Good. She had hit the thickest part of his armor, where the bullets had the least likely chance of penetrating.
But her introductory fire had practically sent up a flag for the rest of the Marines to go all open season upon her and Furan. Immediately, white-hot flashes lit up the thin hallways, creating bonechattering sequences of lighting and furious zones of pressure that rattled the roots of their teeth. Bullets smashed against the walls, dislodging sheets of dust and furious flechettes of rock.
Kelly fired from the hip, trying to keep her aim low. Starburst patterns emanated from the barrel of her rifle, creating explosions that reflected in her eyes. She skirted behind a nearby stack of crates—a bullet whizzed by where her head had just been. Another burrowed into the wood of the crate in front of her, spraying her face with woodchips. Quite the wakeup call.
Adrenaline gripped her neck, flushed her cheeks. Her breathing came through thin and ice-cold, like she was submerged in a wintery lake. A numbness gripped her limbs while simultaneously she was aware of how every fiber in her body was positioned, almost as if she was looking upon herself from afar, like a detached spirit.
It then occurred to her just how much danger she was in, and not because of the strength of the company she was fighting against. MJOLNIR had made her complacent. Too comfortable. If she had been armored, she would have simply stood in place and had taken the hits without bothering to dodge the bullets. More likely that she would have simply charged in to commence a close-quarters brawl. Being so unarmored was… almost exhilarating in how she had to consider new tactics to her survival.
And terrifying. But not a paralytic terror. A deeply rooted concern that had laid dormant for far too long, merely poking its head up now that its hollow had been unearthed.
Furan was firing a plasma rifle—sapphire beams blazed down the corridor and splashed against the walls. The Elite was deliberately making her aim sloppy so that their pursuers would try to take cover. Her deactivated sword dangled from its holster at her hip.
Kelly leaned out from around the stack of crates and pulled the trigger several times in quick succession. Bullets punctuated the air in stiff explosions. She aimed for legs, shins, anything that would incapacitate. Even through the din, she could hear rough shouts as her shots found home, but the air was full of muzzle flashes outrunning thick shadows that she was having trouble seeing what she hit.
A flashbang bounced along the ground and rolled to a stop next to Kelly's knee. She frantically grabbed for it and hurled it back. There was a pop and a flare of magnesium white seared the intersection that obliterated the sight of all who looked upon it.
The chaff from the flashbang left Kelly's ears ringing. Scowling, she shook her head and blinked several times to avoid the myopic haze that threatened to descend upon her.
"Move," she knocked a fist against Furan's armored shoulder. "While we're covered."
Leaving their temporarily-blinded assailants behind, the two hurried down the hall once more. Kelly had swapped for her pistol—she could run faster with a sidearm, not to mention shoot faster.
Muffled shouts began to warp behind them—the Marines had recovered and were pursuing. Kelly led the way as the ground soon began to tilt upward, turning into a ramp. In short order, the grit and dankness of the rocky corridors had been replaced by a pentagonal metal hall that continued to slope higher and higher. They followed the signage, crossing through passageway after passageway, until they came to a great two-story hall, which was also abandoned. Kelly could see at least five separate paths branching off, not including the one they had exited from: three on the bottom level, and two on the upper level where a trapezoidal staircase rose to their right.
A signpost erected in the vein of a classic Earth city contained different metal arrows that pointed in the direction of each passage. Next to it was a small fountain that was arranged like a set of discombobulated cubist metal shapes where the water not only spouted but swirled and flowed across the gleaming curves. Kelly glanced up and found the arrow for the detention bay. She clambered up the staircase and crossed the hall to what looked like a small checkpoint that marked the entrance to the hall.
She was about to enter when she heard a bang and her calf twitched as bullet fragments punctured her bodysuit after the round had skipped off the ground in front of her. Kelly turned, blood flicking the floor from her wound, more annoyed than anything, and just managed to spot a trio of Marine marksman stream across a walkway several meters above her before two bullets skipped off her reinforced ribs.
It felt like a Brute had levelled a sledgehammer into her—the impacts were white-hot punches that expelled her breath from her lungs. Her windpipe closed on itself. Just trying to breathe felt like she was sucking fire.
Stunned, her wounded leg buckled and she went down, but not before Furan caught her. One-handed, the Elite fired her plasma rifle up at the offending soldiers. The Marines threw themselves prone and the bolts blistered over their heads. "Don't let this stop you now, Spartan!" the Elite angrily hissed into Kelly's ear as she dragged her into the passageway. The security checkpoint beeped angrily as it undoubtedly detected a host of unwelcome materials between the two of them.
The firing picked up after a few more seconds, but Furan had gotten Kelly into cover well before then. The Elite set the Spartan down upon a nearby bench and looked at the wounds on the human's side. They were oozing blood, but nothing seemed particularly grievous.
Kelly seemed to come to the same conclusion. She grunted through clenched teeth as she clasped a hand to the afflicted area—it came away stained with red. "Almost forgot what getting shot with actual bullets felt like."
Furan took a cursory glance towards the main hall, where the crackle of occasional gunfire could be heard. "Loath as I am to say it, time is of the essence. Do you think you'll reach mobile-readiness soon?"
But the Spartan was already getting to her feet. She was a little shaky, but the tremors quickly subsided with some effort. Kelly was breathing harder than normal and tiny pearls of sweat had formed upon her brow. She gave a nod. "Don't worry about me. I'll let you know if the situation changes for the worst."
Taking point, the Elite started to head into the hall that led to the detention wing, Kelly just a meter behind. Kelly was concentrating on their rear, keeping her battle rifle raised in preparation for the thunder of approaching Marines that were most definitely shooting to kill. At some point, she was going to have to return that fury in kind, if the violence was only going to escalate more and more.
The wounded woman was thinking so much of the plausible next scenarios that she was therefore surprised when, with a heavy thunk, a pressure door slammed shut into the corridor, separating Furan and Kelly in an instant. The Spartan jumped back—the closing doors had nearly cut her in half.
"Shit," Kelly spat, her pulse starting to break from the bonds of her control. She looked for an override panel, found none. The door had no windows and was soundproofed, so Kelly switched on her radio and found the closest channel. "Furan? You all right?"
"In one piece," the wearied voice of the Elite sighed. "I wondered if something like this was going to happen. Got too complacent. My mistake."
The Spartan had the urge to punch the door in frustration, but it was a fleeting wisp of emotion that barely lasted a full heartbeat. Plus, splitting apart her knuckles did not seem like a good idea at this time. "We can fight over who will magnanimously take the blame later. Are you able to open the door from your end?"
There was a brief pause on the other end.
"There are no controls on this side. If you're asking, then I suppose you don't have an obvious way to open it, either?"
Kelly slowly got into a crouch, keeping the barrel of her rifle pointed out to the open end where the corridor terminated. "Logan's paying closer attention to us than I thought." A thought came to her. "Will your sword be able to cut through?"
"One moment," Furan replied. Kelly then swore she could hear a faint hissing noise past the door, but she was uncertain if that was from a curvature of plasma fizzling and sawing away upon a melting door, or if that was just the constant hum of the air recyclers. The Elite was back after about a minute. "It will take too long to cut through before we are both overrun. The material in the door is just too pure."
"Are you trapped?"
A beat, but at least the Elite did not seem despondent. "Doesn't seem like it. The markings on the wall show a route back to the main city, but no way to your position. I've triggered my armor's soft-jammers to prevent any more traps from being sprung, but no telling how long that will hold."
Kelly's plan was just going up in flames before her eyes. With her and Furan having no way to reunite anytime soon, their combat strength had just been halved. Add to the fact that she had just been shot and was dehydrated meant that she was not even close to one hundred percent.
The detention wing was now blocked to her. No way was that even a route that she could confidentially plan to take. A fiery burst of anger strove to leap out of her chest—she had been this close and it had all been cut away from her when she was not looking. The Spartan cursed herself for being so foolish.
She juggled all the variables in her mind. Wanting to see if she knew which one would come to the forefront, but the weight of her next choice had already been decided, it seemed. Tactics and logic would never lose, even against her purest emotions. No matter how much it caused something inside her to wrench horribly, tearing at her guts and bringing a tremble through her like she had been electrocuted, Kelly knew for a fact what her only option was.
Everything feeling sorrowfully heavy, Kelly's world reeled. "Furan…" she said, her voice thick, "…we need to abort."
The Spartan loathed saying those words. Spartans never retreated. Never gave up ground. Very rarely, at least. This was different—the odds were stacked against her to such a degree that trying to justify her rescue operation seemed less and less realistic with each passing second. There was no way for her to deny the obvious; she was poorly armored, ill-equipped, already wounded, and there was a very patient enemy stalking her somewhere in this facility.
Brandon, she thought, as though her words could transcend space and time. Hold on and stay alive. I will return for you.
Kelly could hear the mandibles of the Elite click together in thought on the other line. "Are you indeed sure? You think there'll be enough time for you to retrieve the lieutenant once you retreat and regroup?"
She had underestimated Furan yet again. The alien had not missed a trick.
"As sure as I'll ever be. I promised myself that I'll come back to get him out of here. I intend to keep it." She leaned against the door and lowered her voice. "I'm sorry I didn't explain myself to you earlier."
"Even I have succumbed to the sentiment of bonds forged in battle, Spartan. Your attachment is understandable."
Kelly wryly chuckled. Sometimes the Elite could be worldly and altogether insular at the same time, with aggravating results. "It's not just that. He's kin."
"Truly? Then your objective has an even greater warrant."
"No one knows that more than me." Kelly did a quick mag check and stepped away from the door. She glanced at the wounds at her side, which were still dripping fresh blood. A pool of dark crimson had engulfed her left heel—she left blotchy footprints in her wake. "In case we don't run into each other beforehand, plan to rendezvous on Sonatine," she said, referring to Arbogast's host planet, the most obvious cosmological formation in the sky. "Use your beacon sparingly, they may use it to track us. Once on the surface, send a pulse to my frequency. We'll find each other."
Through the radio, she could hear the soft buzz of Furan's ignited plasma sword as the Elite readied for close-quarters war.
"Very well. Meet you planetside, Spartan."
"Good hunting, Shipmaster."
Determinedly, Kelly headed back to the corridor exit, towards the great hall once more. She did not really have any other option—Logan (and perhaps Armitage) had seen to it that she would be herded throughout this facility like cattle, but she was still capable of throwing wrenches into their plans. She studied the layout of the hall via her mental map—directly across, a distance of perhaps fifty meters or so, was an adjacent hall that also led to the docks. Seemed a good route as any.
The most immediate problem for her were probably going to be the sharpshooters on the upper railing. If they were smart, they would have held their position instead of trying to follow her, knowing that she would be forced to turn back into their gunsights, where they could easily open up on her from afar. Sure, she could spring out first and would more than likely shoot them all if she had enough time—just a few seconds, not that much—but she was still wary at killing soldiers. She would not do it unless there was no other choice.
She quickly stowed her rifle and switched to her pistol. Again, she checked her wounds. Finally, the bleeding seemed to be slowing, if not outright halted. The pain had diminished to a dull simmer, something that she could easily push past.
Well, she was just going to have to do just that, wasn't she?
"Nothing ventured," Kelly commented lowly in mock amusement. She bent her knees, preparing for the off. Her breath whistled through her clenched teeth and her skin seemed wintery cold. Everything began to grow gray, as if placed under a dilution.
Without wasting another second, Kelly sprang out from the hallway, back into the open of the metallic concourse. As expected, the catwalks on the opposite side were still occupied—she lifted her arm and pulled the trigger of her pistol as fast as she could will her finger to move. The sidearm jerked comfortably in her grip. Her shots were wide and half-aimed, but they had the effect of spoiling the aim of the snipers.
Slugs bounced and pinged off the deck in wild sparks as shots from up top hurled all around the Spartan. They were having trouble maintaining their aim while under fire.
Kelly had no thoughts about staying and picking off her pursuers. Instead, she kept running, almost as if she was intent on outrunning the bullets sent in her direction. In moments, she had traversed the entire width of the room and had made it into the next hall without picking up any more scars. She never slowed, however, and kept on running like her life depended on it. Which it very much did.
She hurried underneath more blaring klaxons that wailed and receded and wailed in a sinister demonstration of the Doppler effect. Her wounds had faded into the steady throb of adrenaline, which was what she had hoped would happen. The natural anesthetic would stave off the discomfort for a bit, allowing her to operate as if she were at one hundred percent.
The Spartan skidded around a corner, continuing to follow the signage for the closest hangar, and came face to face with a Marine who was holding, of all things, a Spartan Laser.
"She's here—!"
Kelly lashed out with a quick jab and clobbered the Marine in the jaw. She could hear bones breaking. The man folded down to the ground after getting knocked back an impressive length. The laser fell to the floor and Kelly stomped on it with a foot, crushing the housing for the electronics. The smell of fried silicon wafted up. A weapon like that could cause too much collateral damage—she was certain she wouldn't need it, but she also needed to make sure that no one could use such a thing against her.
She continued on.
A narrow staircase soon came up to her left—an offshoot of the main corridor. Directly in front of her: more armored soldiers. They noticed her and began firing. Immediately, she bounded down the staircase so furiously that her side began throbbing again. She winced and her fingers came to her bodysuit. They were wet with her blood again. Damn.
She was running out of time. Logan was sending everyone he had after her. If she was going to get out of here, she needed to make every second count.
A bulb shattered overhead at the same time a ferocious crack burst behind her. Dropping to a knee, glass raining upon her head, Kelly whirled and let off two rounds that impacted directly into the chest armor of a pursuing Marine. He fell with a groan, the spasmodic lighting draping him in slashes of tortured illumination.
Kelly was back up to her feet before the man could even start to roll around in pain. However, another door opened and two more Marines stepped out, submachine guns already aimed at the Spartan.
Without thinking, Kelly reached for the scalpels she had liberated from Thun's bag and hurled one at the closest soldier. The blade whirled through the air until it hit the back of the man's hand and punctured all the way through his palm with a quick and bloody splash. The Marine shouted and his fingers opened of his own accord, dropping his rifle.
Kelly was still holding her pistol—she sprang forward and struck the first Marine on the forehead with the butt of her weapon. The man's eyes rolled up into the back of his head as he lapsed into unconsciousness and began to crumple like a puppet with his strings cut. She then kicked his chest so hard that she propelled him into his cohort, causing both of them to stumble and fall in a tangled heap. That would keep them occupied for a few seconds. The Spartan turned and ran.
She rounded another corner and quickly passed through a doorway that could function as an airtight portal. Good thing this one had not closed yet. After making it to the other side (while being slightly paranoid that the door could come smashing down on her at any second) Kelly found and opened the panel that hid the controls and hit the master override. The portal then creaked closed with a heavy thud that rippled the ground underfoot. Kelly then ripped out the wiring to the panel after setting the door in its locked position. Let's see them try to burn their way through that.
Whatever lay ahead, she was now committed.
Thankfully, good fortune had finally decided to smile upon her today. After ducking through a few cramped access tunnels, one of the passages finally opened up into what was unmistakably a hangar. A singular Pelican occupied the bay, painted in rough hues of cardinal and obsidian. Beyond it was a rectangular barrier that hummed with light, separating the atmosphere of the facility from Arbogast's comparatively poor one.
Kelly headed toward the Pelican. If it was spaceworthy, it would suffice for her needs. Right now, she was not feeling all that picky. She just hoped that it was fueled.
She was midway between the door and the Pelican when Kelly saw two soldiers come down the ramp of the craft. They were guiding a hovering auto-pallet that was stacked with a tower of shrinkwrapped multicolored bricks. The bricks had white stenciled numbers and codes on them, along with the stylized logo of a spider upon them. From this distance, Kelly knew what a drug transfer was when she saw them.
The Marines—drug smugglers—wheeled about as they saw the tall and bleeding woman in their midst. Comically, they froze in place as if they were trying to formulate a good explanation for all of this. But eventually, it soon dawned upon all of them that an explanation would not defuse the situation at all. The soldiers released their hold on the auto-pallet and went for their weapons.
There was no cover between her and the soldiers. She had to do something. Now. Kelly raised her pistol, her eyes never leaving the soldiers in front of her.
Her first bullet tore into the collarbone of the closest Marine, ripping apart the muscle. He collapsed, his right arm useless.
Kelly then deftly rotated, found she didn't have the same shot on the second man, and aimed down. The other Marine's kneecap exploded outward, violently spewing out a fragmented swath of bloodstained bone. His leg folded into an awkward position and he too joined his partner upon the ground.
The Marines were yelling and cursing at her, but they could do nothing but that as they were in so much pain that they could not even hope to lift a gun. Kelly hurried over and was about to step inside the Pelican, but not before she plucked up a grenade, went to the auto-pallet and engaged the drive function, pulled the pin to the grenade and wedged it between the pallet and the bricks before it took off. The auto-pallet lurched off with an eager burst of acceleration and made it a good dozen meters before the grenade finally went off, vaporizing the mechanized vehicle, along with its drug payload, in a fiery concussive burst. As the smoke cleared, only a mangled hulk of flaming metal remained of the auto-pallet, and a few spot fires blipped and smoked upon the marred floor of the hangar.
It's a start, Kelly thought to herself with a nod.
Then again, when she finally got back to getting on board the Pelican, she was temporarily disheartened to see that the rest of the ship had at least six more full size pallets loaded on board. All laden with the same type of drug that she had just destroyed. There was not enough time to blow them all up. She was just going to have to take care of that when it best suited her.
She clambered her way over the pallets, hit the door to the ramp which slowly encased her in a vast pit of darkness, and muscled open the door to the cockpit. She got into the pilot's seat and started the ignition sequence. A constellation of instrumentation glimmered to life in front of her. She glanced past the canopy—no one had entered the hangar to try to stop her yet. She was still within her window of departure.
A spare pilot's helmet had been left behind hanging on the headrest, coincidentally almost shaped like her Hermes helmet. Behind the polarized visor was the Integrated Helmet and Display Sight System that further linked the ship and pilot together. She slipped the helmet on—the active-matrix crystal booted to life and the direct retinal projection flickered on, showcasing a bevy of flight information hovering in her field of vision. The display system was also connected to the Pelican's exterior cameras, allowing her to view multiple angles of the craft with the flick of a finger.
As the engines spooled up, Kelly once again thought about Brandon. What was going to happen to him after she had gone? He did not know anything that could jeopardize her mission. But Ishir or Logan would not care. They would hurt him to get to her. She just knew it.
It seemed like the next course of action would be to find a way to hurt them all first.
The whine from the engines was now approaching a roar. Cool fire began to blister from the thrusters at the wings.
Kelly decided to try Furan one last time, just in case. "Furan, this is Spartan-087. If you can hear this transmission, acknowledge. Over."
There was no immediate response. Kelly hoped that the Elite was simply busy in securing passage off this moon. She really did not want to have to come back to rescue two people.
The Spartan glanced down to see if the preflight check on the oxygen test had completed or not. When she looked back up, she could see that, on the upper level directly across from the Pelican, Logan was now standing there, holding a SAW one-handed. The weapon looked heavily customized, with a linked belt that doubled the already large capacity of the light machinegun. Her hands automatically gripped the armrests of the seat—a SAW fired 7.62mm FMJ rounds which could easily cut through the skin of the Pelican like it was made out of paper.
She stared at Logan through the canopy. Logan just stared back.
After another second, the rogue Spartan shouldered his SAW and, with vibrant blades of crossed flame, opened fire on the Pelican. He did not so much as even request for her to surrender. Heat bled from the barrel as half of his armor seemed like it was lit by torrid light within an infernus.
Kelly managed not to flinch as bullets smacked against the canopy, producing a sheet of hellish sparks, but did not penetrate. This Pelican had been upgraded with reinforced armor, it seemed, but how long could it hold up against such fire?
Behind the railing on the upper level, Logan slowly stalked to the side, firing his gas-powered weapon in medium bursts, eight to ten rounds at a time. The Pelican's armor puckered—but held.
It soon dawned on Logan that he should diversify his targets of interest and he quickly switched his aim from the canopy of the Pelican to its engines. The machinegun rattled heavy chainfire again. More sparks blistered near the wings. Logan tilted his helmet back towards Kelly as he continued to fire upon the thrusters. Come out to play, if you dare, the stare seemed to say.
"The hell with you," Kelly growled, right as one of the lights on the instrument panel flicked from red to green. She doubled-blinked upon an icon in her IHADSS and a targeting reticule popped into view.
Upon the chin of the Pelican, the anti-personnel M370 autocannon slid out into view. The tri-barrel was already spooling up and the hydraulics swung the 70mm cannon in accordance with where Kelly's head was looking at: Logan.
Kelly wasted no time in hitting the button to fire right as Logan seemed to inherently sense that the tides had shifted against him. With a fearsome chugging noise like a thousand jackhammers all going off at once, the autocannon opened up and sent a horde of depleted uranium slugs in Logan's direction. The armored ex-Spartan stopped firing and ran for the nearest doorway as the autocannon ripped up the walkway at his heels. Grating and bits of handrail spouted into the air and the wall became heavily indented upon the far side.
Choke on it, Kelly smirked.
Logan put on a burst of speed and bent his legs before he erupted in a fierce jump, sending him sailing through one of the bulletproof windows of a nearby armory, which dislodged the entire pane as a half-ton of MJOLNIR armor crashed against it. The autocannon rounds sprayed after him, but hit only empty air through the now-vacated threshold.
She no longer had a shot on Logan anymore, but that hardly mattered. The preflight calibrations had completed and the Pelican was operating on full power. Kelly settled into the pilot's seat and yanked the controls towards her. Immediately, the craft responded, and a powerful gripping force settled upon Kelly's shoulders as the craft began to bank up and to the left. The tail thrusters ignited with a twist of a dial and the lumbering ship began to rotate towards the direction of the energy field, toward freedom.
The Spartan let her hand slip down towards the throttle and she was about to push the gripped joystick forward when she picked up movement in the corner of one of her IHADSS feeds. Logan had stepped back out from the remains of the window he had defenestrated, but instead of clutching his SAW, he now held an even larger weapon. It looked like two large tubes mated together within a rotating barrel.
No, Kelly thought.
In the next instant, she started throttling up as fast as she dared so that she would clear the hangar just in time before she smashed the ship into the wall, but it was still too late.
Logan fired the rocket launcher and a column of smoke erupted from the massive barrel. The cometary tail of the rocket blazed forth and the projectile tilted and veered as it honed in on the heat source of the Pelican's right engine—
There was a catastrophic roar and the Pelican was rocked by a massive explosion that careened into Kelly's eardrums so loud she almost went deaf. The yoke yanked in her hands, but she managed to hold onto it, despite what had just happened. She looked back to the cabin to see if it was on fire—no smoke, so it probably wasn't—and back out the canopy. Incredibly, the Pelican was still airborne. The ribbed walls of the hangar slotted by until they suddenly vanished, replaced by the gentle embrace of the dusty Arbogast sky. A dim glow of stars and planets in their waspy arbor above shone, their glow nearly consumed by the white/green planet of Sonatine that now loomed large in Kelly's view.
Kelly's instrument panel was a scene of chaos. At least half of the readouts were blinking bright red. Multiple master alarms were shrilly ringing. There was a noticeable dead zone in Kelly's controls—she used her IHADSS to pinpoint the damage.
The two hybrid drives on the right side of the ship had suffered a direct hit. One of the engines had been completely destroyed, ripped away from the force of the blast. The other engine had not been completely knocked out, but was only at 15% power and stuck there. It was a miracle that the cabin had not been breached—but Kelly was too focused on stemming the damage to praise any sort of good luck.
The Pelican limped higher and higher into the atmosphere, trailing pungent black smoke in its wake. No other anti-air fire rose up to touch the ship.
The automated radio function began to call out a mayday—Kelly hit the button to silence it. Brow damp, hands clenched so hard on the yoke that her knuckles cracked, veils of fire and ice stewing in the glass reach of her eyes, Kelly guided the stricken Pelican away from the moon, to where the marbled and unfurling landscape of the cold and new world before her grew in size until it completely engulfed the canopy view.
A tender string of light connected the moon and its planet. That string then turned into arrow of flame then began to pierce Sonatine's atmosphere. Within that arrow, aloft on her scorching chariot, the Spartan fought her failing ship, mouth open in a silent yowl of unfocused rage.
Ripples of gravity and pressure battered the ship. Stars were replaced with clouds. White—all white filled the canopy. The control stick violently shook in its socket. The master alarms kept ringing and ringing and ringing—
A/N: You know, I had expected this chapter to be a short one, judging from the fact that it seemed pretty straightforward in my outline. Something light to ease me back into my routine after coming back from vacation. Imagine my surprise when this turned out to be the longest chapter of this fic yet, proving once again that I am atrocious at estimating the length of these things. Whoops.
Playlist:
Strung Up
"Trapped"
Sarah Schachner
Prey (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Death of an Actor
"She's Rigged"
Harry Gregson-Williams
Metal Gear Solid V: Ground Zeros (Original Video Game Soundtrack)
The Escape Begins (Kelly's Theme Reprise)
"Run for the Stronghold"
James Horner
Thunderheart (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
Final Push / Pelican vs. Spartan
"FAST CARS"
Ludwig Goransson
Tenet (Original Motion Picture Soundtrack)
