Chapter Eighteen

Now that my mind was out of the system and I could listen, I heard something clanging in the areas behind the doorways. Metal on metal, heavy and loud and unforgiving. My heart sped up.

Even as I kept Oisin somewhat calm, I partially entered the systems again. Trying to find out what could be in those doorways.

They began hissing open, all fourteen of them.

John backed up and lifted his rifle up to his shoulder. "What just happened?"

In my shock I'd completely stopped helping Oisin, and his tension was mounting with my own. It clouded everything and something was wrong here and...

"I-I don't know." My voice was just stronger than a whimper. "I don't think it's-"

A hoard of aggressor Sentinels rushed out of each doorway. They were all, some six of them, charging up their devastating beam attacks.

"Contact!" Fred cried, opening fire on a damaged-looking Sentinel.

All hell broke loose. Particle beams and gunfire and terror ricocheted throughout the room; I was amazed I was at all lucid in the cacophony.

A trio of Sentinels unleashed their burning attacks on Ellen. My hand shot out and created a half-dome to protect her from the attack.

Her terror sped up my own heart; she'd nearly been killed. And the laser beams on my shield hurt.

So I pushed the shield up, loosening it into a pulse, and knocked the trio of Sentinels back into the wall. Two of them were crushed.

An aggressor shot down a beam so intense that it cut into the metal floor and made the air around it wiggly with heat lines. And it had been this close to Kelly; if she hadn't rolled to the side she would have been sliced in half.

Seeing her in such peril made a nasty pull in my chest. I felt it again when Fred avoided an aggressor's physical attack by a mere second.

A pulse rippled from my body, but it wasn't a physical pulse.

It was my mind, and an order to shut down. And suddenly every single electronic device in the room was dead.

The remaining Sentinels began crashing into the floor, each with an earth-shaking boom. Some of them cracked against the hard, and now scarred, metal.

"Are there any more Sentinels?" Kelly asked cooly, as if she hadn't almost been halved mere seconds before.

I took a breath. "I-I don't know."

In truth, I was barely holding on to my self control. Oisin was quietly panicking by the door, and Ellen was still in shock from the nearly-fatal attack. Saoirse was terrified, even as she hid it to try and help Oisin.

All of those emotions were feeding into my own fear. My breath was quick and shallow, my eyes wide.

John offered his relative calmness. I accepted, bathing in the steadiness of his emotions. Using them to block out everyone else's'.

I took another deep breath, feeling my lungs fill with cool, stale air.

"I can find out if there are more Sentinels," I said in a calmer tone. "A-and now that I know they're there, I can avoid the tripwire that...activated them."

That helped soothe the rest of Blue Team. Tension notably fell off of Linda's shoulders when I said I knew how to avoid any more Sentinels that may be lying in wait.

So I walked back up to the console and placed both hands on it. I closed my eyes and entered the system.

I checked out the structure's defensive systems. Other than some standard surveillance stuff, the Sentinels were the only things I could feel that the base had in the way of protection.

And every single Sentinel was showing as offline, if only temporarily for some of them. Those would be the ones put to sleep by my shutdown order.

I opened my eyes again and turned to face the others. "We're good. That's-that's all of them."

"Good." Ellen stepped down from the second tier on my right. "Can you get my equipment back up?"

Saoirse perked up from beside a hyperventilating Oisin. "And our comms. He's a program on his that helps him calm down when he's panicking."

"Right." I walked over to Oisin and Saoirse first. Oisin's panic made my own chest tighten up, and for a moment it felt as if my heart had stopped working.

He was having a panic attack.

"Where's his comm?" I asked in a weak voice.

Saoirse reached into a pocket on Oisin's cargo pants and handed me the round comm. It was a holoprojector model, like I used to have.

I struggled to tune out Oisin's dread, even with John helping me through the bond. It was so intense and all-encompassing.

So I shoved my mind into Oisin's comm. I didn't snoop, but I did put more of my mind inside of it than was necessary. Anything to escape that fear.

I'd had panic attacks before, but not in a long while. I didn't like the idea of feeling one again. But if I got Oisin's comm back up he could get help.

So I sent out a brief reactivation command throughout the device. It lit up around my mind.

I pulled back into my body, my heart stuttering when it once again felt Oisin's terror, and nodded to Saoirse. "I-I can get your comm back up now. His should- it should be working."

"Thanks." She set Oisin's comm in his trembling hand and handed me hers.

I once again dove into the comm. Delayed as much as I could. Took my sweet time getting everything back online.

When I did, and returned to my body, Oisin was marginally calmer. He was consciously focusing on his breathing under the calm instructions of a dumb AI, who was in a blue hologram on his comm.

I handed Saoirse her comm and wordlessly walked over to Ellen. She was so much more at ease than Saoirse and Oisin.

She'd mostly calmed down from her near death experience; all that was left was an aftershock of adrenaline than I didn't particularly mind. It sharpened my senses and made me a bit jumpy.

"Sorry for shutting everything down," I said as she handed me her datapad.

She waved a hand. "It's fine. As long as I didn't lose any data."

"I- there shouldn't be any data missing. It was just a shutdown." I looked down at the datapad in my hands.

There wasn't any data missing, and more data streamed in as I reactivated both the datapad and the little floating camera. It bobbed back up and glanced around before Ellen took control and guided it towards a Sentinel's carcass.

"And our visors," Linda said.

"O-oh, yeah."

I sent needles of my mind into each of the SPARTANs' helmets and set everything back up. Their holographic visors flickered to life in front of their eyes.

It would have been easier to send out a universal wakeup command to everything nearby, but that would wake some of the Sentinels back up. We didn't have time to fight them or to reprogram them.

So I decided to find out everything about this structure as quickly as possible. That way we could assess for specific threats, warn ONI of the Sentinels, and get to work on another structure.

Ellen was still moving the camera around the room. Oisin was standing up now, clutching his holocomm in his hands and watching the AI. Saoirse was beside Linda and both of them were eyeing a crumpled Sentinel with distrust.

Fred and Kelly had taken up post beside the door, facing the row of doorways with their guns at the ready. They trusted me but they wanted to be ready, just in case something else happened. The Sentinels had caught all of us off guard.

John was right behind me.

"What was this structure built for?" he asked. "The resistance wasn't as strong as it is other Installations."

I nodded in agreement. "I can find out."

His eyes cast around the room, from the doorways to the dead Sentinels.

"And I'll avoid tripwires this time," I said.

He nodded, his eyes still on the Sentinels. Some of them had moss or dust on them, and almost all of them sported old scars. John wondered what they had been through, and why the ruins hadn't patched them up.

I placed my hands on top of the console in the center of the room and closed my eyes. My mind sank into the system again but this time I treaded lightly and felt ahead of my every move for traps.

There was nothing, of course. With the Sentinels gone the ruin's active defense system was gone. There was no security in place after them.

I skimmed through the data from the system, absorbing information as quickly as I could. John was eavesdropping, in a way, picking up the data with me but more aware of our surroundings than I was.

I just wanted to know why this place had such a pitiful security system. Had it been disabled? Ruined? Was it never there to begin with?

Every search for a deactivated defense system came up empty. It was like there was nothing here.

Strange.

I turned my focus on the data logs and found a lot of activity approximately 800 years before Halo was fired.

After this place was built, it had been packed full of technology as a sort of storage location. Cutting edge tech - and cutting edge for Forerunners meant reality bending for humanity - had filled every room of this building and made it a treasure trove.

But several thousand years later - 800 years before Halo - most of it had been excavated.

I checked the inventory for terminals. That was a constant secondary objective for Ellen and me. If we found a single intact terminal, or even one that mostly worked, ONI would immediately pull us from this assignment and put us to work making it possible for humans to enter the Domain.

I knew they wanted to hoard the terminals for themselves and make recon safer for their agents. And I understood why they wanted to do that, I did. The ability to gather information remotely would save lives.

But I needed the Domain open to all of humanity, to the entire galaxy. Unggoy and Sangheili and Humans, and even Kig-Yar, deserved entrance, and their presence would strengthen the Domain. They would heal it.

We could hammer out the details with ONI later. They were letting Ellen and I work on the terminals for now, and that was enough.

There were four terminals in the inventory, but a more thorough examination showed that they had been taken when the structure was emptied before Halo. It didn't say why they had been taken or where they were, so I had no leads.

There were terminals somewhere on this planet, I knew. But nobody had any idea where they were.

I pulled out of the system. "There's nothing here."

"Nothing?" Ellen asked.

I shook my head.

"Well, what was it for?"

"It was a storage building." I glanced around but my eyes were dull. "It used to have a lot of technology in it but it's all been removed."

She pursed her lips.

I stayed still while she moved the hovercam around. Without terminals this place seemed useless, and I didn't really want to stay.

John propped his rifle on his shoulder and wrapped his left arm around my shoulders. The comfort was appreciated, and I leaned into him with sudden fatigue.

oOOOo

The Pelican felt empty with only the six of us in the bay. Ellen was sitting as close to the cockpit as she could get so that she could talk to another researcher without much background noise. She was coordinating with a few other teams from Infinity as we all worked to understand the ruins all over the planet.

Linda was cleaning Nornfang with comfortable ease, even as the Pelican jostled around us in Arcadia's atmosphere. We had roughly an hour before we would land in Avaris, on the continent of Lemuria.

Avaris was the smallest region on the continent, but scans hinted that Forerunner artifacts and ruins covered as much as 60% of the surface. We were hoping we would stumble upon something useful, most of all a terminal.

But we wouldn't be moving out until tomorrow. And when we did set out our orders were 'explore as many ruins as you can' so we needed to be prepared to move and move quickly.

We were all enjoying the downtime, though. Kelly was meditating and Fred was talking to someone on a UNSC-issued commpad. I wasn't trying to eavesdrop but whoever he was talking to, he was so invested in the conversation that his demeanor had changed into something eager and positive.

John didn't need my empathy to realize that Fred was romantically interested in his mysterious contact.

But John was busy too. He was reading a briefing packet on Avaris, and the Air Force base we would be staying at. And he seemed...apprehensive about something.

He wouldn't tell me what.

At the start of the trip I was too tired to prod, since it had been six in the morning. After I woke up from a brief nap I bugged him again, until I realized how much he didn't want me to know what he was worried about.

I trusted him, so I let it go. He would tell me when it was important.

But I could feel that he was having trouble focusing on the datapad in his hands. He reached towards me, hunting for some focus he could borrow. I smiled a bit and leaned against his arm, offering up my contentment.

It wasn't the focus he was looking for but he accepted it, and some of his tension eased.

I turned my head in and kissed his shoulder. He let go of the datapad with his left hand and wrapped it around mine, running his thumb over the back of my hand and my wrist.

"Where are we hitting first?" Fred asked, apparently done talking to his mysterious contact.

John checked the datapad. "Ruins twenty clicks north of Tralee. On the edge of a farm; the property owner is cooperating."

"So we won't make a mess, then," Kelly said. "If we can help it."

John nodded. "Transport leaves at oh-six-thirty."

I withheld a groan; I'd have to wake up early again. John smirked.

I reminded him that an early wakeup meant we couldn't stay up late. He let me know that he would survive. I stuck my tongue out at him and burrowed into his side.

He wrapped his arm around me. His tank top was smooth against my cheek.

"Avaris is near the pole," Ellen said from the front of the blood tray. "Be prepared for cold and snow."

There was a chorus of affirmations from Blue Team. I just nodded.

"There's a rebel group causing trouble a few towns away from Tralee," Fred said.

The attention of everyone in the Pelican was suddenly on him, and sharp.

"How do you know that?" Linda asked.

John scanned the datapad and said, "The briefing packet doesn't mention rebels."

"I've got a contact within ONI." Fred's voice was nonchalant but his stomach was light when he thought about his contact.

I shared my observations silently with John and we both guessed that this contact was the person he'd been talking to a few minutes ago. The one he was in to.

Ellen slid her datapad into her pack. "Good to know. If we're in that area we'll keep an eye out."

Kelly nodded, then closed her eyes and resumed meditation.

As much as I dreaded the thought of waking up early I was chomping at the bit to get out and explore the ruins. The Domain swelled around me and I felt that it was pushing me to find a terminal quickly.

All I could think of was the halls of the Domain, so empty and silent, full of people. Families could talk to their deceased loved ones, or find missing individuals, or get closure they would otherwise need to die to get. The Domain would be strong, and alive.

But we needed to find a terminal for that to happen.

John could sense my eagerness, and he shared the sentiment. He was just better at keeping a level head. I'd been sharing a lot of his self control through the bond but even then, we were both straining to keep calm.

We needed to find a terminal soon.

oOOOOo

Author's Note: Sorry it's a bit short :( This week has been a little crazy lol

I love you guys!