5: Hammer of Thor Chronicles: The Augment

by La Aardvark

Somewhere in the deep of space, there is a world, and its sun. On a periodic cycle of three days, this duo will disappear, though to where no one knows, and then return. Going there is quite possibly the biggest mistake ever made...

2. Secrets Within Secrets

2: Secrets Within Secrets

ANUNA-01

Logic demanded we turn tail and run for it. Intelligence demanded we turn tail and run for it. Sanity demanded… well…

But curiosity overrode them all, somehow, and for the first time in my life I think I finally understood what was going on before it happened. I knew we were risking everything to find the origins of that tree's condition, but nobody balked when I stepped forward instead of back. And nobody protested, either.

So forward we went, turning and following the length of the tree to its foot, since there was no way shy of jump packs or grapple lines to get over it. There, we began to see more of the same, deeper into the forest. Massive trees were felled seemingly at random, most of them lying flat but one or two forming steep ramps into the stout branches of a neighbor. We could not even discern what the purpose of their demise had been… shots had been fired at all directions imaginable, it seemed, even after we had calculated the twisting drop most of the victims had employed upon being shot. When a tree is felled – by any means at all, really – and hits fellow trees, what happens is their outermost branches touch each other, and bend. If the tree is big enough to press them out of the way, then the thicker, inner branchings touch, and knuckle together. Sometimes they bind up and hang that way, like the lean-tos we saw.

But most of the time, the bendy branches will want to unbend. Since the stronger branches tend to push harder than the weaker ones, and these are never in uniform placement, the falling tree will roll. One must calculate the strength and springiness of both the falling and the catching tree, of course. The falling tree's branches will want to unbend, too, and will push back on the pushing branches of the catching tree.

So instead of knocking into one another like pins and all breaking at the base to land flat, trees shrug one another off with the flexible armor layer known as their branches. If a defending tree has strong, extra springy branches on the left, and weaker ones on the right, then an attacking tree will get shrugged to the right as the weaker branches on the defending tree are overpowered by the pushing of those on its left. So the falling tree will roll, twisting over to put the impact site of the missile on the bottom when it finally hits the ground.

We saw several that had actually been struck in several places, and some that had buckled and were laying back upon themselves, and a few more who were topless, towering trunks, their bases too strong or too springy to snap off. It made the forest a very interesting place to try to navigate… that someone had used the place as a target practice range was unsettling, considering what the untouched part we'd landed in looked like, but more, what they had been shooting at the trees to make them buckle over like they had was also unsettling.

I would doubtless vaporize if what had hit those trees came down and hit me.

And Rano and Igan would, too, for that matter. Great swaths of underbrush were simply gone in some places, a light dusting of soft ash settled aground where the foliage had been. Walking through this oversized, haphazard destruction zone – many dozens more trees survived untouched than had been dropped brutally – gave me the chills down to my bones. But what could I really do about any of it?

Finally, a very broad, seemingly older cleared area that had some sign of new growth poking out of the edges of it, came up. Stepping out from the edge of it towards the middle where it had been blasted clean, I stopped after three strides. The radius had to be something in the neighborhood of fifty meters, but it was a rough oval. If there had once been a tree in the middle, there was not one now. What had my attention the most, though, was the moss-covered shapes standing out of the forest floor… they were oddly symmetrical, and had flat angles.

That is not to say there were no gently curving angles, but overall it screamed of sentient stone masonry to me. Like something that had been built. Flowers with stems and delicate stalks littered the place, and there was what looked like some kind of Human clover in bloom – it was the same color of yellow that G'wi's human had called, 'bright, shoot-me yellow', I noted – along the center.

Otherwise, it looked like nobody had been there, and nothing had moved, in centuries. Or at least for as long as it took moss to grow over everything. It was a little pretty, in its own way. But in the same token as before, also equally as alarming. Cautiously, I stepped out towards an arch that looked like it might have once been a doorway to a structure. It was the biggest freestanding lump of all the stemmy green moss shapes, so I figured it might give me some clue as to what we were really looking at here.

We were here, after all, to find out why the planet and its sun – and those two were all that made up this odd little solar system – would shift in and out of existence on a systemic period cycle of three standard days.

If there were ruins… then beneath them, perhaps, was the technology responsible. I paused when I heard a hard metallic sound at my hooves, and looked down. Lifting my forward hoof, I looked at the track I'd left in the dirt.

Sunlight lanced down from behind my head, and struck the disturbed place.

It glittered.

.

FLINT-093

I mopped up the stragglers – which included a pair of those wormy things we all know and love called Hunters – while Andy picked off the ones up top to herd them in a specific direction. Pushing the last of the enemy – of the ones we could find, anyway – up the bluff to the top of the ridge in-city towards Tori had been an interesting endeavor. It still was being interesting, too, since most NC members are not taught to run when the going gets hazardous.

Herding them, to say the least, was hard to do. Once we got the Grunts moving, though, it was more or less easy enough to make them go where we wanted… even with as many Brutes remained, they were not going to stay behind while the bulk of their forward forces turned past them and fled. Turning their assault face towards the Marines and Tori had been Andy's idea. I admit that giving the Marines the chance to utilize their existing cover and emplacements to the maximum was in a way not that stupid… but Andy had told me that those men often got hammered flat when an army of NC forces came running up the hills towards them.

Dodging through buildings or not, this ground force was being hard on them. I had my doubts… maybe he was just trying to keep us from getting too far from the others, as at the moment, we were some half-mile from where I'd last left Tori.

Maybe that was what had made Andy suggest the idea. SPI troopers hate being alone. Unlike Spartan II's, they cannot readily go solo. Even with me there to augment his position, it hadn't eased those lack-of-a-team jitters, apparently, and he was itching to reconnoiter. Oh, well. In any case, I still got to shoot at them, still got to kill several, and still had to chase them down. I was just going in a new direction, is all… one the NC wasn't particularly fond of going in.

Rather than pressing back their line to their point of origin, I was cutting them off from said point and driving them like cattle to the slaughter right into Marine central, where they had no hope of reinforcement if things went in the Marine's favor this time.

I was trying to take out as many of the Brutes and Jackals as I could, though, just to maximize the Grunt's momentum and relax some of the press they'd have when we did finally reach that line again. A wall of endless Grunts coming at you is somewhat unsettling… but replace them all with Brutes – or hell, replace half of them with Brutes – and any Marine you can name is gonna run like hell the other way and try to find somewhere else to be for a while.

An all-Brute charge is nothing pretty. An all-Grunt charge, on the other hand… well, they're roughly Human-sized and don't carry shielding. That makes them more or less Human, when it comes to taking them out. I'll leave manner and combat experience off the table in this calculation, since most combat effectives don't usually panic in the middle of a battle and Grunts will actually do that.

Brutes, on the other hand, are about a third again as tall as a Human and built proportionately like a Human on steroids. Add in their love affair with the Carbine – more on the nature of that weapon later – and the fact that they all carry shield engines, and suddenly each Brute is the combat equivalent of a LAV. Only, twice as mobile if a little slower.

Lesson in battlefield ethic over; the long and the short of it was, Brutes were a bad thing for Marine health, and I was more or less the only cure for what ailed them. Tori would have been, but she was badly out of her element and only just starting to break back into the fold. No offense to Andy intended, but a single S-III just isn't the same as an S-II.

Which was why they never operate solo.

Which was why I was being cautious with my harassment… I had to keep an eye on my little friend, and pry him out if he got himself wedged somewhere. Coming through the next intersection to make the next block up, I looked for the millionth time at the motion tracker, and for the first time that day, didn't see his little white dot.

Hmm…

"Chief!"

Aw, shit. Got himself wedged, time to go get him out. "On my way." I replied, turning up Avenue E to follow the sudden Nav Point my HUD had discovered. That was the nifty thing about Andy… he was a pretty decent hack, and he knew all his suit's systems inside and out… and if he needed something specific he knew how to ask for it. Case in point, advertising his position to my sensor systems despite being outside of sensor range.

I moved it into a swift trot as I listened to him breathe on the comn bud, the manner of each exhalation telling me what he was doing. When he sucked in a fast breath I figured he'd probably tucked a roll… until I heard him choke it back out with a spoken, "Huff!"

I moved into a run. That sound meant he'd been fisted in the guts, or had been thrown against something. If a Brute was that close, I didn't have time to hesitate, or my little S-III would die in pieces. Call me sentimental, but I rather liked Andy. Of all the S-III's, Andy had been the only one who'd bothered to talk to me. He was a squinty-eyed little honey-colored guy with a look that claimed he knew what you were thinking even when he really didn't know, but he was polite and soft-spoken and he also didn't seem to mind that I outranked his Commander at the time we talked… he'd been the only kid I'd ever shared a story or two with. The one he picked to tell me in return had been hilarious. I'd savor that… he was a good kid, and I liked him.

Coming around the bend into Loxodonta Drive I finally spotted him, right as he stood against a signpost and folded the thing over. The Brute that had tossed him into it was bigger than I was! Yikes, get caught by the biggest damn ape he could find, why don't he! I barreled in before the ape could follow Andy down and grab him again, so he was home free for a second. The Brute and I went down as one – the thing about Mjolnir being an accelerator suit was never an understatement, after all, and when something that weighs some half-ton gets going real fast, it's gonna leave some bruises, if it doesn't outright break every bone in the body it hits.

Well, when I grappled the monster, we went down. The Brute made the same noise Andy had a moment ago, all the air blasted out of him on impact. Bracing a knee in his gut, I raised my torso and brought a fist down across his face hoping to break it off, but if nothing else at least disorient him.

He kicked me off as if I'd had no effect. I tumbled over my own head, but I came down on my knees almost perfectly balanced, somehow, so I was able to reverse my momentum almost as soon as I hit that point in my roll. Back on my feet, I saw the Brute finish getting up, too, and I knew without needing told that this was going to be a fistfight.

I was not up for a fistfight.

I couldn't handle a fistfight!

Behind the Brute, I saw Andy finally pick himself up, but he only got as far as his knees and a hand, his other hovering just shy of his domed visor as if something was wrong with his face. Being fully clad in SPI armor, though, those motions meant something else entirely. I stiffened, alarm dumping adrenalin into my system.

"Andy?"

The Brute swung a hairy fist at my head, leading the swing with the point of a crooked, jagged-edged knife that more resembled a small machete. Rage swept in to replace my apprehension. Somewhere in the deepest part of my soul, I knew I didn't have time to dance with this idiot if I intended Andy to live. The comn was silent… he'd either chinned it off, or it was drowned in the blood he was coughing up. Being beaten until your insides break apart is a terrible way to die.

I did not want Andy to die.

My head dipped under the reaching blade, and my left came up to follow the overshot arm. I felt my fingers sink through the Brute's skin and into the slimy tissues beneath it, blood squirting out over the back of that arm from the crushing grip. My right came up and smashed his wrist, shattering most of his fingers. I yanked him bodily by that arm to unbalance him completely, and rolled my other hand upwards as the machete fell out of his ruined hand.

Catching it, I brought it up and under his arm, slamming it home through his own chest armor. Force of introduction blunted the tip on his shields, but they broke away with just a moment's hesitation, and I felt the blade stab through the metal plating on his chest and bite flesh beneath it. The Brute's eyes bugged out as his lips curled back, but I wasn't done.

Jerking the ragged blade out of him, I slammed it home again in a new place, hammering again and again until he finally quit fighting me and just stood there, too in shock to know he was already dead. Throwing his arm out wide, I finally let go of it, and when he twisted after his retreating shoulder, I seated the butt of that machete in my other hand and slammed it up into the underside of his jaw so hard it lifted him to his toes.

I saw the ruined point burst out the top of his skull before he fell over, but as soon as he was down, I was past him. I curled my arms under Andy's stooped form, jerked him from the sidewalk and rolled him over my good shoulder.

Then I ran.

I did not want Andy to die.

.

TORI-138

First came to us the mother of all Grunt armies. I'd never seen so many in one spot at once in my life! I'm sure some of the others with me had, possibly more than a few, but they were all running flat-out and they covered the road for what had to be a hundred miles back into the distance. They poured out of the side streets and crushed in closer, most of them screaming "we're all gonna dieeee!" and similar.

Well, most of them did die, and most of those did so by grenade. Really, who could resist? Talk about using it up till it screamed for mercy… not a single tiny microscopic ounce of those grenades went to waste, as they shredded Grunts without mercy. What the grenades missed the Marines and I made up for in rifle fire, making the end of their road into a bloody suicide.

I don't know why they just kept on coming…

Until I saw what was following them. Over a hundred Brutes, headed by oh about a dozen shield-bearing Jackals. Most of that group was screaming obscenities at the Grunts all while chasing them down, trying to make them stop and be good little NC members again. I'd run if that was coming after me, too! Still, over a hundred Brutes all at stinking once… well, long story short they were coming after me. And my combat knife was already ruined to all shit. I began to bleed rounds over the heads of the Grunts rather than into them, desperate not to allow that wall of Grunts to thin before we were ready for those Brutes to get through. The charge might not have been in their battle-plans, but I wasn't going to hand the battle to them for it if I could help it.

Most of the Marines at my flanks followed my aim – the Grunts became more of a buffer keeping the Brutes from ever reaching us, and if we could keep them crushed together for a little longer, we could take out those Brutes before they got to us and made a difference. Spike grenades sailed in at us, making me think we'd need to give them the street… and then one of them shot me in the elbow… not sure why… and my aim went high. Three rounds smashed into a high-sailing spike grenade and then they all went off, string-detonated by my shot. I shrieked in surprise as I ducked my head, some of that death-rain hitting our line even as the majority of it came down on the nearest line of Grunts.

I had no idea that shooting a grenade in-flight would do that… come to think of it, I don't think that that works with Human grenades at all. Must be a spike thing, because I've actually shot plasmas before and they don't go off for bullets either.

Most of the Marines made it through the hail alright, but one unfortunate soul took a single shard of shrapnel in a bad place and was dead before he hit the ground. Oops. I wasn't sure who that was but I was annoyed anyway, and I focused on a single Brute for long enough to break his shields… and then a Beret boomed behind me and that guy was down for the count. A couple of Marines focused on a single Brute, broke his shielding, and he too dropped over backwards to the Beret's kiss. So… if that was how it was going to go, I was game for that.

I saw a Brute dancing for impact and I sent him mine, too. There were still billions of Grunts fixing to overwhelm our forward line and more than seventy Brutes when our front ranks met, but they were thinning fast and we'd lost… um… one.

Almost as one, and without anybody coordinating this, we all backed away from our blockade and let the Grunts crawl over it. Some forty or so Marines were still shooting Grunts dead but all the rest of us – I'd counted, and down the one we'd lost I had some two hundred and fifteen Marines and one, count him, one ODST. I have no idea how in the world I wound up with one shock trooper, but oh well. He was cute and he was cool as a cucumber under fire and he was a damn good shot.

That was him on the Beret, by the way. QED, damn good shot. He was getting those Brutes at dangerously close ranges for a Beret but oh well. They weren't getting any closer very fast, still pausing to kick Grunts in the ass and fuss at them, and the Grunts in turn were doing more milling than charging… and no shooting.

Why wouldn't they shoot? Even if I'd been chased into a rat's nest I'd still have been shooting in hopes of surviving my flight. Wasn't that the logical, instinctual reaction to such a situation? I was almost sympathetic to the Grunts, though, caught between such a pinching press of hostile forces. I saw a Brute lash out with the blades on his spike gun and orange blood lanced up in a rising arc from his point of impact. Ouch. I know Flint can be a hardass some days, but at least he doesn't take after me with a knife! If he had, though… if he'd left me alive after the fact then he'd learn not to do it twice. That was if I felt sympathetic enough to let him survive the affront. Lousy Spartan II I may be, but I am a little self-righteous and I do not appreciate being bullied around just because I'm outranked on all sides.

Maybe that was why he never told me what my stripes ought to look like. I didn't know, so I never painted anything on my armor. It sure kept me in charge over these Marines… honestly, I was finding I liked it. I was good at it, and I was quick to compensate and relay updates. They listened… all of them called me ma'am. None of them questioned my authority despite my markless sleeves. I'd have to ask Flint about it later.

If I survived this engagement. Finally, when the Grunts in back got wise to what the fate of their forward brethren was, and came around the bodies with their guns up and intent to carve a pathway through us with them, I relayed the next update.

"Split off, Alpha team take right, Beta cut left, Charlie and Delta lead them back, split off at the next block and come about to get us from behind! Move!" A grammatically incorrect sentence, perhaps… but that's how it came out of me. All in one breath. And we dispersed like water dividing an army of ants, leaving the Grunts a clear path through uncontested (for the moment) streets.

Boy, have you ever seen a Grunt really run?

I darted to the right, since I was already on that side of the street, and went under some hanging traffic lights with Alpha team. We reached our secondary set of barricades, jumped them and ducked under cover. If a Grunt looked our way, they'd see a line of Kelly walls, and nothing more. It'd be a little like we'd simply run halfway down the street and disappeared into the air.

It didn't matter… we'd need their nonchalance towards our noncombative positions to disarm the Brutes behind them. The plan, I guess if there really was one, was to get the Brutes into a pinch. I hoped to get them from the sides and behind, so they'd spend time we'd use to be firing to turn themselves around. One guy can do it on a heel and be turned in a breath. Seventy guys all charging headlong take a moment to all get turned about, and sometimes the guys out front never realize their followers have stopped following.

I was counting on that.

Sure enough, when we failed to fire at the Grunts' flanks, the Brutes failed to fire down on us, likely thinking we'd gone on farther than we really had. Never mind the Kelly walls' presence, or the fact that theirs might imply ours. I don't know if I was lucky or if the Brutes are really that stupid… (again, need to ask Flint) when the majority of the sound of running feet had gone past the second corner, I stood up, raised my rifle and fired the first round.

To my left and right, the Marines all opened up with me. Technically we were shooting at Beta team, and they at us, but that was not really the plan and both sides were hopping the Kelly walls again and moving back up to the intersection we'd abandoned a few minutes before. The pause for breath we'd had had allowed most of the men to get their second wind, too, and for it, most of them came back as if fresh and eager.

That part I liked.

Now, the ODST had hid out on an office roof, so he hadn't moved. But I imagine his aim was mighty awkward since now he was aiming straight (more or less) down from the edge of the roof he'd picked. Trying to move would cost him time and likely make him miss the fight – it takes a certain amount of time to descend forty flights of stairs and run across the street to ascend another forty, after all.

In as much time, myself and the Marines might well rob him of further participation in the battle. Brutes went down in the scissoring pinch as Alpha, backed by Delta, and Beta, backed by Charlie, ran up behind their flanks and pressed in. The density of the rifle fire was enough to snap shields, shatter bones, and pulverize meat, even if most of us really were trying to aim. It didn't matter who I shot at, there were some five other guys also shooting at that same target, and likely an interchanging five.

The Brutes tried at first to turn around and face us, to shoot back, but there simply was no room, no time, and no opportunity. We'd cut them down to damn near ten before they figured that out, and the last four made it to cover.

My MA and I were pretty hot by then. Environmental suit or not… I was sweating buckets, working my ass off like this. The bite of chocolate (quick energy, really) I'd gotten earlier was gone, doubtless, and I knew by the time I got back to the sloop I'd be ravenous as a dog. Running, trotting, sprinting… some minor tucking and rolling, a lot of ducking… and oh yeah, shooting a gun is not as simple as point and shoot. There's kickback, which takes strength and energy to fight back against, withstand, and even adjust for. Then there's the during-shot-fired vibrations sent through the skeletal frame.

Let me add here that vibration is a therapy used on atrophied muscles to rebuild and stimulate them! So being shaken to death is justifiably as tiring as doing real manual labor. Parts of me ached – especially the shoulder attached to my dominant hand, since that's where I butted the gun to. (that'd be my right) And when I held still, I'd shake like a spastic due to the massive over-stimulation each muscle cluster had endured. Really, really working out will make you shaky, trust me. I'd learned that the hard way.

Gods only know how Flint could find the stability to hold a fork after a hard workout. I never could… usually had to eat with my fingers. That or wait a couple of hours. If I took the time to have a hot shower after stripping out of the Mjolnir, I'd be relaxed enough to not be shaking anymore, and I could use a fork. Flint, though… he wasn't particularly bad about it but he usually hated having to shower. Claimed the water made his big scar burn like all hell.

Don't know about that one… don't have any scars to get wet and test that theory on. But while that shoulder would burn, the rest of him'd get itchy, and he'd never really go for longer than three days before he'd finally relent and suffer through it. He was strange in some strange ways… much of it, I suspected, was built around things like that, though.

With the majority of the Brutes out of the way – and boy what a heap of smelly bodies we'd made in the middle of Main Street! – I felt better about going after those Grunts. They looked significantly less in number now, because I'd gotten a sense of scale with the Brutes coming through. Now, don't take me for a genius – I'm absolutely horrid at estimates. Distance, numbers… sorry. I'd guess at it but I'd almost never be right, or even close. Still, I was now convinced that the word 'billions' nolonger applied.

I took a moment to assess my troops, and dismissed two. One to get looked at, another to pick up our second loss for the day, and drag him back to the base. So I was technically down two, but actually down three. For now. My wounded dude might be back, soon. Marines are like that. Slap a bandaid on it, doc, and be hasty! I've got aliens to kill.

Even if the bandaided place is a missing limb.

I was just about to lead the way after those escaping Grunts when an icon I didn't recognize flashed in my HUD, stopping me.

"Ma'am?" A Marine asked, noting the suddenness of my stop.

"Uh…" was all I had to offer. The icon did not look like a good sign… but what on earth was it, really? I couldn't even tell what the icon really was. Most of them are little shapes that represent longer sentences, but this one was blinking like a fiend and I couldn't tell what in hell it even looked like. It was bright, and blood-red, and frantic. That's all I know.

After it had been on for a couple of heartbeats – the mission clock in my HUD ticked off the last of the previous minute and began to count up the next one – I heard my comn click on. First I heard a ragged sounding breath. Then I heard Flint's voice.

"Get to the sloop, right now."

"What? What happened?" I asked, alarmed and unsure what to do with myself all at once. I looked around at the men for a moment, confused, before remembering which way was which and taking off running back the way I'd come from, heading for the Whispers. "I'm on my way…"

Flint didn't answer… but the longer he left the comn online, the more I became convinced that it wasn't him in trouble. He sounded a little like he was under a load, but he was breathing deep and even, and he wasn't doing it through his teeth. No pain, no internal agitation. Was he carrying somebody?

Was he carrying the little mini-Spartan guy?

I am possibly not the fastest girl in the UNSC, and perhaps there's a Spartan II out there who was faster on her… or his… feet than me. But I've proven to myself once already that I am faster, at least, than Flint. Maybe it's because I'm a girl, and my power is in my legs. Maybe it's because I've got legs up to my neck. Maybe it's because I'm lighter on my feet and have a lighter body frame than he does. I don't know, but I do know I'm faster than him when we both flat-dead run for it.

I didn't get lost, remarkably enough, and I sailed cleanly from one side to the other of that first crater we'd crossed. I hit the entrance to the maintenance tunnel leading to the first cut roadbed (that really ought to have been a telling of things to come, considering the monstrous stone hills and bluffs this city was built on top of) and flew out across that, too. I think I left a footprint in the center stripe, because I felt something cave just a little under that heel right there.

I got out of the buildings and into the trees and then across the grassy area to the sloop to find it already open, the ramp's foot sitting on the ground. I put on the brakes when I hit the bottom step, using the last of my momentum to fly up the first six steps. I wrapped both hands around the outer hull at the top, though, hauling myself to a dead stop as I lurched through the hatch to the interior of the sloop.

"Flint?" I called, wondering what the emergency was.

"Medical." I heard, over the comn.

"What's going on?" I asked, shouldering down the corridor in that direction. I had a feeling… most women are good at 'feelings' like that… so I started stripping my armor off. I just knew I'd need to be out of it by the time I made Medical.

Sure enough, I got through the door into the miniature medical bay, and the instant I saw what Flint had dragged in, I knew I'd been right.

He raised his steel gray eyes at me and said, simply, "Prep for surgery."

.

ANUNA-01

We had walked around for several hours, but there was no entrance that we could discern there. Going off through the trees to the west, Rano had found another site some half-klick in that direction, so I set off to follow his trail. Doing so I realized how obvious he had been… and I knew just by knowing who he was that this trail was an affront to the fact that he had made it.

The soil, the forest… it was all just that untouched. Igan moved in from wherever he'd wandered off to, also, and I could hear the other two teams dropped off on this mission beginning to decide to meet up with us. They too had found what we had; damaged forestry, and a few scattered elements suggesting structures had been erected, fallen, and been grown over. One had even gone so far as to report that they had found a surface layer of metal much like I had.

The whole thing was worrisome, and we had all admitted as much to one another. Of aggressors, we had all seen nothing. No one had seen any wild life, either… nothing larger than a slow-flying moth-thing spotted nearly twenty klicks from my current position. I had not even seen myopic redbugs in the moss!

A stranger forest there never was… how did the plants get pollinated, given that the wind was cut off by the forest being so dense, so tall, and there were no bugs to flit from blossom to blossom? Such an ecosystem cannot persist for long, one would imagine. I certainly found it odd… and I am no botanist.

Even as warriors, we learn about chemistry, biology, and quite a bit of that biology is entomology. Bugs, as it were, get into sleeping sacks, down into loose armor, into eyes on hot, muggy battlefields, and there is a species on every world that has a fascination with flying up the nasal passageways when one least expects invasion. So with bugs I am familiar. And while I had no problem with being left alone by them… not seeing them anywhere was unsettling.

It was like approaching a San Shyuum and not seeing any sign of a hovering throne. Seeing the honorless maniacs floating above me had always been annoying yes, but… the lack just felt wrong. Yes, I would kill them… but I would prefer if I did not feel alarmed first by the sudden, drastic change in their presentation. It would stay my blade, for fear of what it meant. For fear that it meant something particularly bad. In much the same way I had never, ever seen a Prophet, even a minor one, without his hovering throne, I had also never, ever seen a world without bugs on it.

Not once.

The lack of larger life I could handle. Larger life knew when to get out. Reptiles, amphibians, mammals… all have that kind of brain power. But bugs? Not hardly… a bug will stay right where it wants to, even if the location is under heavy plasma barrage at the time. Likely, said bug won't even bother to try to run. It will just stay hung under its leaf or what all else bugs will perch upon, and sit and watch as the fire rains down.

Reaching Rano's position, I arrived to find Igan already there, and coming out of the forest on the far end of the much, much larger clearing was the first of the other two teams. I had considered coming in looking confused and hoping for an enlightening report, but Rano and Igan both already looked confused, and so too did the newly arriving secondary team.

Scratch that.

Clearing my expression, I stepped up to Igan and Rano, and breathed out. "I am learning nothing." I admitted.

"Nor am I." Rano piped in, sounding disgruntled. "There are no doors, no entryways, no sign of technology of any kind here."

"Other than in passing." Igan supplied, gesturing at a faceted, moss-draped shape off to the side. "One would suppose there once was cutting technology here at some point, but it is not here any longer."

"Random emplacements of shaped stones do not make planets and their suns shift through the fabric of reality." I grumbled, looking past Igan as the other three got close enough to hear us talking. Back at the same point they had appeared through the trees, I saw the third team appear, and begin to approach.

"Perhaps it is not a technological marvel at all." Igan offered. "Perhaps it is merely a natural anomaly in the vacuum of space up in orbit?"

"We scanned for anomalies." Rano reminded him. "Point of origin for all of it was here, on this world."

"But there is nothing here." Igan argued. "At least, nothing in this infernal forest."

"Infernal." I sighed. "Half-cooked, for certain."

The new arrivals all harrumphed in agreement with my last statement. I turned and shifted past Igan, mainly to do a little meaningless wandering, and paused when I saw what looked like a small, loose stone. I kicked it, for little more reason than to watch it bounce and roll away. It tumbled oddly, for a round stone, and when it knocked against the foot of a freestanding pillar that was only waist-height, I heard something under my hooves shift.

I twisted at the waist, to look back at my fellow warriors. "Did anyone else feel that?"

I got a line of blank looks.

"That shifting…" I tried to explain, but then it really happened, and we all did an involuntary jig right where we stood. At the far end of the clearing, a tree crunched at the base, and wood screamed in agony as it tore apart and the monolith came toppling down.

"Away!" One of my fellow teamleaders cried, sending us all charging headlong in the opposite direction. We did not get far… barely had we made that edge of the clearing than trapdoors slid out in the ground, ditching moss and dirt onto the tops of a dozen little floating machines that wore them like green hats. I had seen Forerunner Sentinels before.

Three booms hovering around a central eye. These were not Sentinels… and their design did not look like Forerunner technology, either. Forerunner is easy to discern from say, Human, or old order Covenant. Or even our own, or that of the new order Covenant.

This was none of the above. It was different. There were two booms on the bottom, but when they flexed, they unfolded, transforming into arms. There was a bowl-shaped cap over the top where they wore their moss hats, but when they began to move in other directions than up, the moss hats slipped free readily and revealed them in entirety.

There was no obvious eye. Not even one that doubled as a laser-head. Rather, an iris of shiny golden metal would slip open over the end of each arm, and a lance of heat would shoot from it, and then the iris would slip closed again. If the machines fired by blind sensory equipment, I was unsure.

But the very first shot had punched a fist-sized hole through the commanding team-lead's head, and dropped him like a rock. The rest of us opened fire, but while we brought down three, more than could be counted had come out. Our quick dispersal into the trees saved us at first, but soon enough I could hear the shooting of old Covenant weaponry thin out, and the sound of collapsing body-sized forms happening more and more.

Behind my charging steps, I could still hear Igan and Rano, but which was which I could not spare the time to tell. "Where are the Phantoms?" The near one asked, breathlessly.

By the sound of his voice, I knew that he was Rano. "Just run, brothers! Perhaps we can outdistance them!" I advised. Even if we just got them strung out far enough to keep from being overwhelmed, that would do, too. We had weapons… but we did not have armor sufficient to protect us enough to take a stand-up war with them. Case in point, my fellow team-lead whose shield and helmet had been destroyed in the exact same instantaneous shot.

"Faster!" I heard Igan cry. "There are many of them following us! They are gaining!"

Barely a heartbeat later, "Igan!" from Rano.

I twisted around as I heard his plasma rifles firing, and the crackling destruction of a pair of the assaulting drones. Falling farther and farther behind us, I could see Igan's collapsed form, and I knew he was dead. Adding my own fire to the fray, I realized that I had not been misinterpreting my situation when counter-fire lanced the brush around us both. Those beams really were quiet as death. No sizzling crackle like the laser beams from Forerunner Sentinels.

About when Rano jumped clear of a shot meant to end him and had to scramble back to his feet, I heard a maintenance-begging whine. I dove after Rano, desperate to get him back on his hooves and in motion. If any of the others remained at all, I would be surprised. There were eleven of the blasted machines after just us two!

Right as my hand closed around Rano's arm, the machine over us burst open spectacularly to what looked like Human rifle fire. Twisting around to see where it had come from, my momentary joy dissolved into utter despair. It was another machine… a bigger, jets-mounted machine, almost big enough across to hold me up should I stand upon its armor plated back. The bigger, chunkier machine took a while to kill all eleven of our heat-beam shooting antagonists, but I noticed a detail before I'd gotten Rano up and us both running away again.

The bigger machine was disk-shaped, with a fat center and sharp edges. There were glorified rotary cannons on the right and left, but while one of them spun angrily, spilling white-hot rounds at the enemy, the other was twisted to a strange angle and would twitch back and forth in its wheel while buzzing impotently.

This was not a new war.

I was behind Rano, now, both of us pelting along as fast as our legs would possibly carry us, when a new clearing opened up suddenly around us from through a tall, bushy fern. At first I stumbled for the suddenness of our lack of cover – those trees were all that the heat beams didn't just go all the way through, I'd seen – but all the stumble did was spare me Rano's grisly fate.

He got ten meters out ahead of me for my stumbling, and for it, when a third kind of hovering mechanized drone rose up out of the stonework ahead of us, their six-point attack blew him and only him into shredded mulch. He did not scream, but I did hear him inhale before he blew apart, so I knew he saw it coming. More honorable, I suppose, than being ambushed, and requiring one's ancestors to inform one's disembodied spirit that yes, you really are dead now.

I backpedaled back into the trees.

By darting between as many of them as I could, I managed to stay just a step ahead of the pursuing drones, but each time I led one kind into a crowd of another, I would be ignored for long enough for one side or the other to obliterate all of the offending models.

No two models looked alike, although all had a set of similar features. All floated or flew, somehow. All had guns. All were aggressive, and all wanted me dead. They were apparently in contest over which of them got to kill me, however, and I was able to use that to my advantage many times over. Ducking through the forest like a lost prey animal, even going so far as to drop and roll beneath a fallen trunk to keep going, was not sufficient to keep the machines far enough behind me.

It did not take a genius to figure out where the machines were coming from, though. It was the clearings… the stonework, somehow. I had set off some kind of perimeter guard alarm, and brought out the killing machines, and their activation had likely set off more alarms from other clearings, and then everyone was soon out to play.

I ducked through another fern, and as soon as it was behind me, it erupted into shreds. The detonation picked me up and threw me, flipping me end for end once before dropping me onto my knees out ahead. My shields were gone, but they would recover and I was unhurt, if savagely out of breath. Desperate, I lurched back to my hooves and pelted on, aware that the more of these robots I got active, the less likely I would be a primary target, and the more likely I would be able to get back to the Phantom with enough time to make it aboard and then away.

So when I spied another clear area out to the side of where I was running, I turned and made for it for all I was worth.

That one must have been a special form of bad, because the machines following me all put on their best efforts to herd me away, to make me go some other direction, and to stop me outright before reaching it. I looped around five times just to defy them, and then I got my wish.

My hooves touched hot moss, throwing it up behind me and baring sharply gleaming metal and glass and what looked like crystalline substance as a loud whang followed each step I took.

The machines drew up shy of going out over the surface, but they continued to position and fire, making my running flight a dancing, jagged one. Finally reaching the first of many dozens of rock ruins, I dove behind one and curled up, gasping hard. I was let to stay there for several seconds, until I was ready to believe I had finally found a safe haven and could call for pickup, when I felt the ground there stir, too.

"Oh, Forerunners spare my soul…" I begged, breathless, as the surface I was on actually moved. My fingers clutched at the shape I was hiding behind, but it was polished slick under the mossy growth, and I could find no hold. I had no defense when the metal and glass pulled back and the crystal suddenly vanished… maybe it wasn't a crystalline substance at all, but was rather an energy field of some kind.

I screamed more out of principle than fright on my way down, but while much of the noise was wrought of frustration at being hunted from all angles, I will freely admit that there was some fear included in my cry… after all, who likes to fall, especially any great distance, when what one felt before the plummet was a suggestion of hot from below?

Would that not suggest I was going to plummet into a molten substance, metal or rock perhaps? Was that not worth a terrified scream? I made a tremendous splash when I struck, yes. But the liquid was warm, merely, and did not seem to be of any particularly harming quality.

Getting my head above it, I clawed the somewhat slimy stuff from my face and gasped for air. I looked up then, and alarm re-wrote into my manner as the doors over my head began to slide together again. There were five of them, independent of one another, and the energy field besides. I had not really the strength to swim, though, besides that I am not built for the exercise. Feeling the very odd sensation of a soft fabric slipping sideways over my arms, I paused in my kicking to raise them out of the liquid, and look at them.

What I saw scared me even more. My armor was melting right off my arms, the metal, the ceramic, the ablative coating, even the coloring and the skinsuit beneath it, all drooled off like waxy soup until I had been literally rinsed clean.

I would have paddled for shore as fast as I could have, had there been a shore to paddle to. There was none. But a curious thing indeed became known as the last of my armor… heh, the entire outfit… came free of me and finished dissolving at the bottom of the pool I was in.

I felt no burn, no pain, no itching, consuming ache as an acid or caustic material might cause me. No… I felt merely wet, like I had dropped into water. I was quite nude, however, and certainly weaponless. I found it very, very odd, so much so that I forgot for a moment how much my body hurt from the overexertion of a moment ago.

I was reminded, though, soon enough, as nothing else new happened immediately to distract me. I tried to give my paddling some direction, tried to find some kind of edge, wall, shore, something, to go to and get out of the liquid. I did not even quite so much mind now that I was nolonger being shot at that I was naked. I just could not swim anymore, and I needed to be on solid ground to keep from drowning in my exhaustion.

The liquid had no currents tugging at it, and all the waves and ripples were made exclusively by myself. But I still found no edge of the pool I was in to cling to, nothing at all to suggest I was going to enjoy very much at all of a lucky streak… in as much of a bizarre lucky streak as it was.

Rano, Rano, Rano… he had saved me, whether he knew it or not. If he had not died when he had, then it would have been me, and his demise allowed me to know that our direction needed to change. That, in turn, had led me to here… and I remained alive, and at last away from those machines that had come out and murdered my brothers. I pined for company of some kind for a moment, wishing I was not all that had lived. Finally, my strength gave out, and I could not fight anymore. My body sank, cutting off access to air as I went down. At first I held it, just for a chance to relax and rest, but then I could not hold my breath for as long as some others, and I soon needed to fight again, lest I drown and die despite being saved from the machines.

I got so close, I felt my fingers stroke open air through the surface, but I just did not have enough strength to get all the way up, and the pain dragged my kicking to a still. Sorrow filled my mind as the terror of reaching for death with a clear and open path to survival right in front of me took hold. It was not an honorable end, drowning… but I just could not kick, could not flail, could not catch enough surface area to push myself far enough up, to get another breath.

My held air came out in a choke, and I almost breathed in some of the liquid, but I again held it for a moment more. I shook my head, as if that would have really helped, but I was still going down… down… down some more.

I let my arms trail over my head, awareness fading even as I tried anew to fight one final time for a breath, just a single breath, of that precious air. Spots swam in my eyes, thought blanked out repeatedly, and all I cared about was one more breath… My throat opened, and I inhaled a lungful of the liquid.

Internally, the reaction to the flooding was to gag, choke, and heave all at once. My entire chest constricted as my stomach muscles cinched tight to repel the invasion of unacceptable substance into my lungs. I was vaguely aware that I was falling faster, but as I choked the breath of liquid back out again, I knew I was fading out, and soon I would die. The burning, choking agony ripping my chest to shreds from the inside was not due to the chemical nature of what I had inhaled. It was the oxygen starvation eating at my cellular structure, the cells starving and dying inside me.

I was starving and dying, too.

My hooves struck something hard, and my legs buckled beneath me, until I had piled in the bottom of a narrow tube. In a terrible rush, all the liquid was sucked out through holes beneath me, until I was slick and soaking but otherwise out in clear air again. I gurgled for a second, before my throat opened, and I got a tiny gasp in.

I was effectively blind by that point, but the tiny gasp was enough to resuscitate me… and I suddenly heaved all over again, the vomit and exhalation of liquid from my lungs happening simultaneously. I had not been, prior to that, aware that both "throat-holes" could be open at the same time. Learn something new every day, the Humans say.

Guess they are right about that part.

My next breath was a little deeper, several gagging gasps, and then I coughed hard and began to choke up all the little moist swatches I had left behind in my initial up-heave. The air was sharp, tangy, and frigidly dry. It hurt… but then, the rest of me did, too. Finally, the liquid was out, and the coughing was reduced to dry chokes, and I could readily breathe again. I let myself sag against the scooped interior of the tube I was in and just inhale loudly, content to be alive and not much more than just.

I guess I ought to have guessed that I was not out of the… water… as the saying goes… yet. Rather, while all sign of the liquid was more or less gone now, I was very suddenly nolonger alone in my little prison. It was roughly twice as big around as I was, giving me plenty of space to be piled in a heap in the bottom of it, but while it was twice again as tall as I, it was still quite a small prison indeed.

Snakes coiled over my legs, reached across my belly, slithered over my arms. None seemed to try to catch me, restrict me, or bite at me, so I just lifted them off and threw them aside as they got to places I disapproved of. That qualifying area was pretty much the majority of me, to be honest.

Touch more than my face or my hands, and I will take exception… I am particular that way.

Finally, the snakes got themselves sorted, each one seeming to adhere to a point of origin at the base of the tube. Several of them got behind me and pushed, causing me to lurch forward, but there was another one back there that I did not know about until it bit me.

Right at the base of my skull.

The command fired in my brain to make my arms rise and reach for the offending thing, as nervous reaction made my back arch. That command got as far as raise the arms, then it cut off and my body felt suddenly spongy as I flailed weakly for a few seconds. More and more of the snakes began to bite into my flesh, many of them striking nervous points, quite a few of those happening along the length of my spine.

I felt my brain go cold, as the nerves in the skin and muscle just under said bit of skin told me just how many needles were going up through my skull from that first snake. Pain lanced up from every nerve ending I owned as they went through the bone and up where they had no business being, but I could not fight… my body was not responding to my own command anymore.

They say there are no nerves in the brain.

They are wrong.

My just-barely recovered vision faded out again, and I fell into the long dark once more.

.

FLINT-093

Surgery took her all of an hour. Poor kid had torn quite a bit of himself up playing patty-cake with that Brute, but he was tough as nails and pulled through anyway. There was a reason I'd called Tori in for this, though… on the one hand, I have fat fingers. On the other… I've never really done restorative surgery, and while I can probably do it on principle, I've never actually done it in practice and I was not going to risk Andy's life on principle.

Tori has these narrow little pencil-thin things she uses as fingers, very fine-boned, and she's good with them. Can manipulate tiny things easily. I fumble tiny things. Anything smaller than a .223 round and I'm probably just going to push it around on the surface it's on unless I can get some needle-nosed pliers or something.

Being a scientist, one cannot be squeamish. There simply is no real allowance for it. But I wasn't the kind to much appreciate eviscerating someone if the idea was to put them back together. I have no real problem blasting people to shreds… been doing it long enough. But carving into someone that I know is still alive, and toodling around inside their innards… and then stitching them up again? Especially when I know who it is I'm doing that to?

Sorry… squeamish.

Funny how that kind of distinction will make all the difference in the world. Failing utterly to look at his face while I helped out helped me some. But not all the way. My insides had twisted into a merry little knot by the time we were done, and I was infinitely glad Tori had done all the real intensive bits of the work. I don't think I really could have, to be perfectly honest.

She got it done, made it clean, and stitched it all back closed again, and when she was done I was relieved. Whew… glad that's overwith. I was sick and nauseated and weak in the middle all at once. I needed to get out of Medical before I did something biological about my condition, too… Tori might misinterpret it somehow.

Through an act of God, I managed to make it through cleanup and then get out of the room and up the hall before I just couldn't take it anymore. I paused where I was and leaned heavily on the wall, feeling shaky. Tori would be a moment more in coming out of Medical, blessedly, so I had a moment to shake myself down and get over it without her there to watch.

I didn't dare close my eyes, afraid I'd just see that horrible image of Andy's innards again, stenciled in on the undersides of my eyelids. It took me all of two minutes to find my feet again, though, so I walked on down to my quarters.

Okay, correction. Yes, there are two of them. But, for reasons only she would understand, most nights only one of them gets used. This doesn't mean much other than I get two girls laying on me at night, except under fairly rare conditions when the cat has to be somewhere else for a spell. That particular instance has not occurred in a while, though.

Speaking of the cat… she was there when I walked in. I needed the kind of comfort that cat provides, so I scooped her up and sat down in the warm spot she'd made on the bed, settling her drowsy self in my lap. First she sank her claws into my thigh and stretched, and when I plucked her paws off my leg, she yawned at me. Flashing tiny little fangs, she then perked her ears up and looked up at me.

Meow?

I ran one hand down her back, using the other to rub the prickles out of my skin. "Yeah, I'm back." I told her, half-grinning at her antics. Funny how being slugged by a Brute only puts me down for a moment, but getting tiny cat's claws sunk into my leg will get a pained grimace every time. Perspective, I suppose… or maybe it's the nerves involved? Brutes don't often aim for my legs.

The cat always does.

Unless she's after my ears. I sat there running my fingers through the cat's fur – she's a tiny little thing even for a normal house cat, so there's not a whole lot of her to pet on – for a while, until I felt reasonably assured that I'd seen the last of the gore for the day. Seeing enemy explode is one thing. Even Innies. But watching your allies come apart is a whole other boat, and there are mental processes attached to that that don't come with watching enemies die.

I'm pretty sure there's a medical name for that perception in the psychological world, but I don't know what it is. Finally, the cat a boneless pool of purring fuzz in my lap, I felt reasonably mentally stabilized enough to go back into Medical and get my armor. It needed cleaning, after the stabbing spree I'd handed that last Brute, and there was probably a lot of other junk stuck into it, too. Lifting the cat up off my legs, I set her aside, but I hadn't even gotten to the door before she'd zipped past me and was out and down the corridor.

She's fast as a speeding bullet, some days, and others she just doesn't move. And on some surfaces, her paws don't find proper purchase and she'll slide… and when that happens it's usually pretty hilarious watching her go. I have no honest idea where she goes at those speeds, or why she even bothers to go at all, but go she does and quickly. Perhaps she just enjoys the exercise.

Or there might be a sound or two the sloop makes that is beyond human hearing ranges that really get to her after a while. There were no maintenance warning lights on the control board at the bridge, and I couldn't hear anything questionable from anywhere aboard, so if that was the case, then she'd eventually have to get used to it. I was not going to take the ship apart just to look for a reason to justify Tori's cat being a crazy little kook.

Finding some way to get some decent sleep in some other position than face-down, however… I'd likely have to shoot the runt. If I let her in the room, she'd harass the daylights out of me until I rolled over, and if I didn't let her in, she'd claw at the door to the room all night long, yowling at the top of her tiny little lungs.

Needless to say… there was no rest for anyone when I shut her out. Tori thinks it's cute. Tori usually thinks the cat's antics are cute, though, and there were some of them I actually disapproved of.

Still, she had her uses, and being a distraction from staring at Andy's insides for an hour was a good example of one of them. Her purring also had that special vibratory tone that, if I threw her over my left shoulder and carried her around like that for a while, would help loosen up the soreness in the scar tissues. If she hadn't been one of those purr-on-demand cats, though, that wouldn't have really worked.

I tried not to look in Andy's direction as I entered Medical, going instead over to the table where I'd stacked my Mjolnir prior to the surgery and gathered it up in my arms. Somehow I managed to make all of it bundle in such a way as to not need to make two trips to get all of it, and I carried it up to the quarters again without incident. The original armor lockers had been in a separate room, but the quarter was empty and huge, and after our first mission together on the sloop, both Tori and I had decided that it was a terrible inconvenience to have to go into three different rooms just to get fully outfitted.

So we'd redone up a weapons' locker, consolidating everything but the armor in there, and the armor lockers got moved up into the quarter we used.

I can honestly say I've never been inside the other one… I have considered it, though. Just because I never go in there, Tori isn't likely to look for me there, and it would make a dandy place to hide from her one of these days.

Because honestly… it's hide from her or kill her. And I have a distinct feeling that killing her really won't be as much of a solution as I think it is. I've spent whole nights slumped in the pilot's chair on the bridge with the door sealed just to get some peace and quiet, but as much as I hate hearing her bitch at me, I've begun to think I can handle the agonizing sensory clarity less.

Tori is a little like the cat, in that sense. She's a point of focus, something that grounds me where reality ought to stay. All the training, all the combat experience had gotten drilled into me so deeply, that I simply cannot ignore a presence in my vicinity. And I'd discovered that if my security isn't absolute, and I have something I can focus on, then I can usually fight off the clarity and win. I won't call Tori a threat, so much, but she sure likes to pick fights. The aggression is annoying, but it's better than the alternative…

It's when I'm by myself, nothing to do… and it's haunting as hell. There are things in that void that I hope I never see manifested.

Back in the quarter, I got sat down again, and this time without the cat, I began to work over my armor. As I finished with each piece – and well knowing I might just wind up putting it back on and going back out again – I put it into the case inside my locker. So long as Tori didn't get after me again, I could get it out and on me again quickly enough.

My Mjolnir was a second skin to me, after all… and I am still not over that addiction.

When all that remained was the helmet, I put everything else away and just sat there holding it, staring at myself in the visor and pondering the colors reflected on it. My skin looked very metallic and golden, and my eyes looked damn near black. But the black t-shirt I had on looked a funny color of puke brown.

Ugh! I did not need that kind of reminder right now…

I looked up when I heard the door auto-open, some four or so hours after having first left Medical. The cat could make it open, and I actually expected it to be her… but instead of the cat's whiskered face, I saw Tori's boots walk in.

"Hey." She greeted, making the distance and turning to sit down next to me. I half wondered what she was up to now… one thing a scientist almost never said, it was 'hey'. And even if there were exceptions to that rule, Tori did not say 'hey'.

That was my word. I didn't look up at her, still holding the helmet of my Mjolnir in my hands. I returned my gaze to it instead, staring at the convex reflection of my face in the visor again.

"I looked up your file." She finally admitted, beginning to get to the point.

"Uh huh." I mumbled.

"Again." She admitted, confessing to what I'd already guessed – if there had been anybody on that asteroid where I'd found her who hadn't looked up my file, I would have been surprised. "I know why I didn't remember you, now."

That raised my head, and my eyebrows, too. I looked at her.

"You're not really zero-nine-three." She told me, matter-of-factly.

I shook my head in agreement; "No."

"You were zero five seven." Tori went on. "Your file is a nightmarish mess, really… but after looking up all the odds and ends it started to make some sense." I went back to looking at the visor.

"Intel on the mission against the Unyielding Hierophant leaked. ONI knew I was still dark, so they rewrote my files to cover for the fact that lives were lost." I explained, almost absently. "They effectively erased Grace from existence… but Spartans never die. They wanted someone to show the public, to prove that we were all still alive."

Tori hmmed. "Is nothing about you solid, though?" She ventured, suggesting there was more to this than my seemingly odd Spartan numeral. I let the helmet roll in my grasp, until it was topside-down and I was looking down into the interior where my head went.

"Anything in particular you wanted to address?" I asked, figuring if she wasn't going to get to the point, then I'd have to make her.

"Like how your number isn't zero-nine-three, like how your name isn't Flint…."

My head jerked up, and I shot her a confused look. "What? Yes, it is." I protested. Where had that come from?

Tori shook her head, sure of herself. "No, it isn't. Medical records on induction date to the ORION Project have you down as something else." And then she made a pointed elaboration; "Your real name is Frank."

My eyebrows met. "No, Tori… my name is Flint. I've always been Flint."

"That's not what your records show," she countered.

"There's a reason for that." I answered.

She cocked a brow.

"Frank is my brother's name."

She raised both; "Your brother? You told them your name was your brother's name? Why?"

"I didn't tell them, I merely allowed them to believe that." I explained, still feeling a little defensive. Friends, family… parents especially… it was all a gray blur in the backmost, darkest corner of my living memory. But Frank… Frank I'd never forget. "They were strange people who looked like government officials. They came to our school, and asked for my brother. They asked me if I was Frank. I didn't trust them. I knew he hadn't done anything wrong, and I didn't want him to get into trouble for nothing. So I told them yes."

Tori shook her head, confused. "Why on Earth would you do that? Why protect him?"

"He was my brother, Tori." I told her. "As an orphaned only child, I wouldn't expect you to understand. But people do that sort of thing. My brother, I trusted. The people ONI sent to get him, I did not."

"You realize ONI chose us for good reason… you could have gotten yourself killed by not being the one they really wanted." Tori argued.

"I didn't know that at the time." I told her. "And now that I do… I still don't regret my answer. It's best they didn't put him through this."

She gave me a strange look, still puzzling me over. "How did they get you mixed up? I'm sure that ONI was pretty thorough about that sort of thing…"

I looked back down at the helmet in my hands, starting to recall the day… it was some month and a half before my seventh birthday. "Because we are identical twins, Tori."

.

TORI-138

I'd left Medical and gone up to the bridge, mostly to secure a patch-link to Command for some data. I didn't want to mess up and be administering something to the mini-Spartan that he might be allergic to.

There are not two Flints in medical history, after all…

That was where I found out he was Andrew-249, an S-III, and he really wasn't wearing Mjolnir at all. It's SPI armor, or Semi-Powered Infiltration armor. And it's dandy as hell for stealth and recon but a bit of tissue in a stand-up fight. I also found records placing him on a special reconnaissance mission linked to a dreadnaught that housed an augment-company called the 51st Aeronautic.

Flint had mentioned that company.

So now I knew why they knew each other, and when it had happened. Right before, it seemed, Flint's big shoulder injury. And the utter destruction of the dreadnaught and subsequent deaths of all of the 51st Aeronautic.

As it turns out, that was not to be the only shocker for the day. For cross-referencing on that juicy tidbit I'd found while perusing Andrew's medical records, I called up Flint's. Immune to this, immune to that, yadda, yadda. But then I was looking a little deeper than I had back at the laboratory, and when I ran across some included data that contradicted the file…

Why would he be put down under 093, and yet, earlier records attached from a couple of early missions call him by 059? Curious, I dug in, my casual desire to know what not to give Andrew now leading me to wonder some serious things about Flint.

Going back to the start of the records in the file, I found something even more odd. That man has more secrets than ONI, I suppose, and the tight-lipped manner I'd discovered about him was not particularly uncharacteristic.

I closed the files, having gotten what I really needed already, and decided to go and talk to… I don't even know what to call him anymore. I guess Chief is all that remained solid in that mess of a file he's got. So I was going to go and talk to Chief.

And when I found him, he was sitting on the bunk in the bedroom, helmet in his hands, staring at himself in the mirrored visor and looking like he wondered what to do with himself now. I was a little surprised he hadn't just put it all back on, gone back out and done some more hunting, but since he was still there I wasn't going to complain.

When he looked up, he only looked as far up as my boots, but the look on his face bordered on the inquisitively disgusted. Maybe he'd had a thought that reminded him of something nasty right before I'd walked in. But I wasn't going to ask… I had other questions and I thought they were more important.

"Hey." I said. As I sat down next to him, he looked back at the helmet. "I looked up your file." I told him, wondering what was on his mind. He's quiet by nature, but he usually has something to add when prompted.

"Uh huh." Was all I got.

"Again." I corrected myself; yes, I'd seen the thing before, but I'd only given it a cursory inspection then. Now I had some questions that I hadn't realized needed asking back then. "I know why I didn't remember you, now." How could I not? He'd been a confused jumble, and anyone would have been uncertain.

That raised his head finally, and his eyebrows lifted slightly as he looked at me.

"You're not really zero-nine-three." I informed him, bluntly.

He shook his head, in agreement; "No."

"You were zero-five-seven." I wanted to let him know I had at least some of his secrets in hand, and by that tactic I wanted him to tell me what was going on. Why it got like that. "Your file is a nightmarish mess, really… but after looking up all the odds and ends it started to make some sense."

He looked back down at the helmet again. "Intel on the mission against the Unyielding Hierophant leaked. ONI knew I was still dark, so they rewrote my files to cover for the fact that lives were lost." He said. Honestly, he sounded more uninterested in the fact that I'd found out some very interesting tidbits about him. "They effectively erased Grace from existence… but Spartans never die. They wanted someone to show the public, to prove that we were all still alive."

I hmmed. "Is nothing about you solid, though?" If he thought a cursory explanation would placate me, he was wrong. I needed more than that.

I watched as the helmet slid in a roll under his fingers, tipping up so the heavy end – the top – was pointed down and he was looking at the dark, padded inside where his head goes.

"Anything in particular you wanted to address?" He asked.

Yes, point in fact… "Like how your number isn't zero-nine-three, like how your name isn't Flint…." I could have gone on, but I'd lent some minor emphasis on the your name isn't Flint because that part had me rumpled.

His head jerked up, and he gave me a startled, alarmed expression. "What? Yes, it is." That was a protest – like he'd never, ever been confronted about that part before. Ha, got him. I was going to squeeze it out if I had to do it literally.

I was certain, and I shook my head, correcting him. "No, it isn't. Medical records on induction date to the ORION Project have you down as something else." To let him know I was not bluffing, I handed him the evidence; "Your real name is Frank."

He frowned at me… but it was not his usual frown. "No, Tori… my name is Flint. I've always been Flint."

"That's not what your records show," I protested.

The frown changed hue again. "There's a reason for that."

I was, I admit, somewhat surprised that there might be something in that all-inclusive mess that was not, after all, included. Had Flint's secretive nature gone so far as to even keep intel away from ONI, even as a child?

"Frank is my brother's name."

My eyebrows reached for my hairline as surprise knifed me in the guts; "Your brother? You told them your name was your brother's name? Why?" He really wasn't faking it – he was bona-fide nuts.

"I didn't tell them, I merely allowed them to believe that." He told me, for all the world sounding about as sincere as a body could be. "They were strange people who looked like government officials. They came to our school, and asked for my brother. They asked me if I was Frank. I didn't trust them. I knew he hadn't done anything wrong, and I didn't want him to get into trouble for nothing. So I told them yes."

I could only shake my head, thrown for a brand new loop. Yes… he'd been born this way. "Why on Earth would you do that? Why protect him?"

"He was my brother, Tori." Simple explanation, meant nothing to me. "As an orphaned only child, I wouldn't expect you to understand. But people do that sort of thing. My brother, I trusted. The people ONI sent to get him, I did not."

Ouch. Yes, I'd told him that… the folks got glassed, I got shipped out. Few weeks of picking fights in the orphanage later, ONI shows up and carts me off to go be a Spartan. But I'd never realized that my condition among our number had not been the norm. ONI advertised that I was what they used… and here he had siblings… living family. "You realize ONI chose us for good reason… you could have gotten yourself killed by not being the one they really wanted." Maybe there was just something about him… er… Frank… that ONI couldn't bear to pass up?

"I didn't know that at the time." He admitted. "And now that I do… I still don't regret my answer. It's best they didn't put him through this."

I made a quick mental checklist of what 'this' was, in that sentence. Maybe he was right… or maybe he was wrong, and Frank would have borne the terrible brunt a little better than Flint had done? Still, even for brothers, kids just don't get mixed up that easily. The spooks sent to get us had pictures, among other information. "How did they get you mixed up? I'm sure that ONI was pretty thorough about that sort of thing…"

Next shocker; "Because we are identical twins, Tori."

My whole brain went epically BLAW! What do you say to something like that? My dear sweet had a clone puttering around out there somewhere, wearing his face, probably sounded just like him! And here I'd been ready to believe that there were not two Flints running around in the galaxy…

Turns out I was wrong about that.

"Frank." I muttered, trying to picture Flint standing next to himself and calling himself Frank. He'd always been Flint to me, so it was hard to do. Wait… no, the other guy would be shorter. Little narrower, just a tad. Not as strong, fast, or well-trained. That's if he was military at all, now days. And he wouldn't be able to pass as Flint for long, given that he's not an augment from the ORION Project, and Flint's suit would shred him.

Then the next part hit me. I scrunched my face up, and looked over at Flint again. "Your names both start with an F."

Cat-like smirk.

"I thought that people naming twins like that was just a rumor." I protested, feeling hollow. I really didn't know this guy… not at all. Not like I thought. He was his own little enigma, and he had secrets within secrets, and he'd even kept some of them from ONI.

For how many years? All of them… more than anyone had ever known. Briefly I wondered if anyone had given the real Frank some hell for being really Frank after ONI tried to recruit him and got Flint, claiming to be Frank, and… gah! I turned my poor head in so many mind-numbing, rapid-spinning directions that I soon couldn't keep them straight anymore.

Flint pretends to be Frank. Later, more likely it's CPO Mendez, asks him what his name is and he admits the truth. File update. Flint is now Flint again. Frank, meanwhile, has been successfully saved from ONI's clawed hands.

What about Frank seemed superior to Flint that ONI chose him, of the pair, and not Flint? I admit, there are a buttload of things about Flint I'd never thought ONI would have wanted to show up in a Spartan. Sarcasm, for one. Pessimism, for another. Was Frank the "good twin", and Flint the "evil twin"? He'd made a pretty good little soldier, I suppose, but if ONI had wanted Frank instead, then the odds of them being happy with second-best were small.

And then I wondered if anyone higher up had noticed when little zero-five-seven suddenly changed identities on them, mid-training. Maybe they thought nothing of it, if in fact anyone noticed at all that Frank was suddenly missing and there was this extraneous kid named Flint thrown in there somehow.

Later in life, they did it to him themselves, changing him from zero-five-seven to zero-nine-three. Identity change seemed the story of his life, really. And the secrets got deeper, and deeper… more profound, more dangerous.

There are a billion things about twins that people will tell you that would be very bad to have one in, one out, of the ORION Project.

Like how they share nerve endings.

Like how they feel each other's emotions.

Like how they know without proof if their counterpart is dead or alive.

I pitied poor Frank. I had, like everyone else in the UNSC, watched Flint die on public broadcast. Frank, meanwhile, had likely felt him die, on public broadcast.

"Flint…"

"Yeah?" If he knew I'd just gone on a mental merry-go-round, he didn't show it.

"What happened to the real Frank?"

I got a shrug.

"How can you not know? If you're twins…"

"In learning how to shut out me, Tori… the last time I felt anything from his end was several decades ago. I wouldn't even know if he's still alive."

Ouch.

I really, really pitied poor Frank.