3: Mission Prerogative

ANUNA-02

Command sequences rolled through my forebrains, but most of them made little sense and were gone from memory almost as quickly as they came into it. I could not control my own body, could not command my own motions, could not fight.

I begged for death and heard laughter.

Sight filtered in almost as if I were suddenly a machine, a mockery of flesh and droid, and focus shifted inward, outward, settled somewhere in the middle and hesitated there as the fuzz slowly eased back. Brightness soon replaced the dim lighting seen through mostly-closed eyelids, and for a moment I wondered if I had not been downloaded into a new body.

A new, alien body… but when the nervous system checked in, as it is apt to do in situations of wakening, I felt familiar to myself. Confusion replaced my begging, and I was mentally silent for several heartbeats.

I heard the overlapping pulse of a pair, one primary, one smaller secondary. I was… normal? And yet the nagging ache of overwear on my knees was absent, the permanent headache I had gotten used to was gone, and the searing burn in my ribs from the punishing gauntlet I had raced through was missing, too. What had happened to me?

I tried to raise my right arm, testing, and I saw it come up. The longer I stayed as I now found myself, the less detachment I felt… and I turned the familiar Sangheilian hand around under my gaze to see the knuckles on the back, and the soft rise of the large veins just under the skin there.

Then I felt my mandibles move, as if in protest of being neglected, without permission or command. Focusing for a moment on them, I nipped them against one another, testing… tasting… and while my mouth felt just a little dry, and it tasted a little odd, everything seemed in order. Moving on, I pulled on the appropriate muscles to curl myself forward, and in doing so I let my head hang down to see the rest of me. I was, unsurprisingly, still nude as a newborn.

But my skin… it was… darker. Smoother. It looked fake, almost, it was so very without blemish or mark. The… mother had claimed they were freckles shot at my head that had missed and pimpled over my chest… were gone. The terrible battle-scars were all missing. Even the most important mark I had ever gotten, the jagged line I was most proud to wear.

I remembered his name, now.

That mark had been a gift, the gift of life, of a clash of cultures that had permitted me to see this day. That scar, that missing badge of the unquestionable honor of one 'Zelisee Zero-Nine-Three… that was the holes that had been punched into me that he had deemed non-fatal. And by his insistence, I was denied an honor-killing, and permitted instead to heal as I might, and recover to fight another day.

I felt affronted that it was missing.

But when I tore off the slanted plate I had found myself half-leaned, half-lying on and stomped to my hooves, I opened my mouth wide to discover I could not roar in furious protest.

Instead, now upright, what came out was this; "Yes… this body will do nicely."

It was then I understood that I was not the one in control.

I was merely an observer.

.

FLINT-093

I don't know how long it took us. Couple of days or so. Tori's piss-ant mood had only half-lifted, but even she couldn't stay furious all of the time. Her face would start to hurt from being frozen in an angry expression after a while, and then she'd have to justify being in some other mood for a spell.

That was my guess anyway.

Andy seemed to be doing well, but he took the meds like a death sentence and usually looked dead whenever I came through… Tori liked to keep him under, because like me he was infinitely fidgety and couldn't justify holding still for long at all. The one time he'd gotten away from us and tried to get up anyway, he'd only succeeded in making the floor. And I'd been in earshot when he complained about impact.

So I didn't protest Tori keeping him under sedatives whenever we couldn't be there to watch him. I wanted to – on principle. But honestly, it was sedate the kid or strap his ass down, and I did not want to strap him to the gurney. He'd likely just decide we weren't friends anymore and twist the gurney into scrap metal for us. Waking up the first time, he'd been groggy, confused, and wanted to know where in hell he was.

The inside of my sloop was nothing like the inside of a standard UNSC spacecraft, after all, and we refer to Medical as a "mini-medbay" for a reason. It's very small, compared to a medbay designed to service the crew of a cruiser or bigger.

But he was doing pretty well by the time Command radioed in and told us we were needed somewhere else. Mission priority was urgent, but then they all were, or I'd never get handed the task. Mission classification was different, though – someone had shot down an Elite cruiser, and there was nothing in the area to check out what it had been. Ugh, recon. It's never just recon. So since the closest allied craft was us… that meant we'd fly in first and blow the horn if we found something other than a lucky comet.

My guts told me it was not a comet.

I hated to ditch Andy and run, but I couldn't take the kid with me. S-III or not, Command would see him as 'baggage' that I did not need, and so I had to find somewhere else to put him up until he could get back on his feet. Explaining that to Andy took a few tries… something nearly all Spartans share is the magnetic attraction to combat… and this mission absolutely screamed combat.

We go, they say, to suicide missions like moths to flame. And we'd popped in the fire at about the same going rate, too. I admit I jump for combat ops too, but not so much for suicide missions. Maybe I'm different. I don't mind. I usually go wherever I'm sent, but I have never volunteered for anything in particular.

I heard a goodly number of the guys who went down on Reach had begged for mission clearance. Andy was no real exception, even pounded to pudding and only half-alive. He still wanted to get up, get a gun and get after it. Still wanted to fight. Felt like a limpet lying there waiting for something to happen.

He's a good kid.

I left him (and yes, his armor, too. I'm not that demented) in the care of the rear Marine base, and left them strict instruction not to let him wander until he was healed enough to walk without wobbling. Don't get me wrong, Andy takes orders. But he hates getting commanded to 'do nothing'. Which was more or less what I told him to do.

Hey, I had spent some eight months in rehab once… he'd live.

Hmm… that was my being shot to shit from behind by a SPNKr rocket fired by a Flood form on Delta Halo. Ah, memories. I hadn't seen the Elites in a while, so I suppose it was high time I went back their direction.

Maybe I'd see someone I knew, and we'd talk. On that topic, and yes it's related, I noticed Tori was up to some questionable activity before we got packed in and left the ground. I have no idea what it was she brought aboard, but I'm content to let it rest in that I'm more or less convinced that whatever it was, it's not alive, and it's also not heavy. The Whispers always lets me know whenever I pull out from a resource cache.

Fuel was more or less optimal… and okay, I felt bad about abandoning the Marines here, but we'd broken the line for them and according to the intel I got out of Tori (eked out around two more arguments) their morale was pretty good. They could handle it, I suppose, even if we had to leave prematurely.

The cat joined me on the bridge for takeoff, but like most creatures with eyes she does like to look out the windows from time to time, and takeoff from a planet heading into space is never a dull picture. It's just repetitive as hell and eventually you stop caring. When we broke atmosphere and all there was to see was a velvet black with white salt spilled over it, she turned and jumped down out of the copilot's chair, to dash headlong for the door.

Still do not know why she randomly goes fast like that.

I punched in the coordinates and got us into slipspace, and since we would spend a couple of days just cruising through slipspace, I got up and left with the controls on autopilot. Now, this does not mean I had Thor plugged in. While I still had the AI, I hadn't poked his chip into a jack port since taking him out of the helmet I'd handed over after getting my new one. He was old, too old, and likely rampant as hell. That I had failed utterly to turn him over (despite the fact of him being in my possession at all was the fault of a mission to retrieve him for Command) was more or less moot at this point.

Thor had been a prickly bastard back then… he was not likely to be any healthier now, even restricted to dormancy in the bottom of my sock drawer.

The only thing keeping me from tossing him into the recycler unit was the fact that even rampant AI's have their uses… and while at the moment I couldn't think of a good example, I knew that eventually I'd need him for something. Plug him into a gun and run like all hell while he harasses the enemy? I don't know.

I'd find out when I got to that point. In the meantime, he was gonna stay in that sock drawer.

I'd reached the juncture in the corridor outside the bridge that led to the opposite ends of the sloop before I saw Tori coming up after me, and for a moment I watched her come, contemplating what my reaction was going to be. At first, she didn't look all that peeved. Okay, so I could probably go do something useful with myself and not be in too much trouble.

But when I turned the other way and started to walk in that direction, I heard her make one of those under-the-breath grrr noises, and I knew before I'd taken the second step that I'd messed up somehow.

I walked a little faster.

.

TORI-138

Well damn him if he was going to be like that, anyway! I stopped bothering to approach when he turned away, and crossed my arms as I watched him go on down the corridor and around the second bend. Here I had been all prepared to go have a nice little chat with the guy – okay, so our track record for converse was not that appealing – and he goes and does that!

He saw me coming. I know he saw me coming. And then he turned his back and just went the other direction, as if I hadn't ever been there. So I let him go, figuring he was probably having an attitude problem about now anyway if he was behaving like that and it was subsequently for the best that I let him have the time to chill out before going after him again.

I must confess, he's stranger and stranger to me every passing day. There are times when he is so very charming, and then there are times when he's so callous I want to bust a cap in his head and call it a day.

Okay, so the charming parts had gotten past my defenses… I hadn't known I was supposed to be cold when he was warm, since he tended to be cold when it was me being warm. Can I be blamed for being naïve? He was a completely different creature than I. Been shooting aliens since he was a kid, and meanwhile I'd been slowly growing a fondness for agoraphobia. That mess still got to me some times, but it was not as bad if I was dirtside.

Trying to follow him out onto the hull was nightmarish. Invariably I'd panic and do something completely idiotic and then he'd have to go back inside, adjust the sloop's course to catch my wayward ass, and then come back out with a grapple line just to bring me back inside.

Dirtside there were at least things like trees, rocks, and buildings to buffer the outness. Upness I'd just had to learn to deal with… and I was coming along. Not perfect, but I was coming along. Being entirely sealed inside Mjolnir helped a lot with that. It was close, and hugged me, and I felt safe since my scientific mind knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it was the best armor Mankind had to offer. My emotional mind took comfort in that cold truth, and could usually handle looking at open sky through the visor if in fact the visor stayed between me and said open sky.

At the moment, though, my feelings were hurt, and I was going to go and have myself a dandy good pout before I saw Flint again. At first I wasn't sure what to do to facilitate that… after all, if I went and gobbled down my meager chocolate stash now, what would I do the next time I hit an emotional low and started craving it again?

Likely, as like now, I'd just take it out on Flint and we'd do this merry-go-round all over again. Man, I hate this. Why couldn't he be the understanding type, and curb off a goodly corner of all our friction? Or maybe that was the point.

Maybe I should go get into my armor, and tell him to get into his, and then I'd drag him down to that weapons locker we'd stripped clean and I'd just let it out. I could pound on him and he could pound on me until we both had said our pieces and counted to ten. And maybe then, maybe then, we could finally talk like civilized beings again.

The thought reminded me that that very action was what had happened just prior to us getting this sloop. I have no idea if it helped disarm him to her christening or not, though. Still, I couldn't have an epiphany and let him think he'd gotten clean away with misbehaving, so I needed to keep pouting until at least after he'd refused to fight me.

If he did that, though… I was liable to jump on his ass without the armor and I'd ruin every fingernail I owned making him recognize just what a bad idea saying no had been. Savoring the thought of him having to pry me off of him, I began to walk the halls again, reaching the first corner before wondering where he'd gotten off to.

While not large hardly for a spacecraft at all, the sloop was a little like a very large, two-story house. Waaaaaay too much space for only two people. It could crew at something like fifteen or so, but we'd never shared it with anyone. And the other end of the comn line that gave us our orders never asked us to, either. So it made the sloop a fairly empty ship to be in, with just myself, himself, and the cat. And there were days when I never saw the cat at all.

Oh, she'd always turn up… good little kitties always do. She liked kibble almost as much as the next cat, after all, and she didn't go for long without coming back for another bite of it. Speaking of which… having 'cat food' on the list of resources we'd reload on at certain resource stops usually raised eyebrows.

As much as he'd grumble about her, I knew Flint was warming up to the girl, and eventually, maybe, he'd quit grumbling. I'd seen him pick her up, pet on her, and set her down, I'd seen him sit there with his chin in one hand and her head in the other, and seem to think while pulling the skin off her little face.

For some reason, she just adores that treatment. It would be so like Grace to have a cat that absolutely loves having her face pulled off, but still. The cat was a source of comic relief most days. She'd get up on Flint's head at night and knead his ears if he wasn't face down, and if he stayed in bed too long, or happened to roll over after she'd gotten up and left, she'd hop back up on him and hook her paws on his bottom lip and pull.

He usually got up after that.

But then, there were the days when I feared for her little life, the nights when all her loving affection just wasn't enough, and he'd fling her across the room – and for that matter, me, too – just jumping awake. Then he'd stand there and stare at us both like he had no idea who either of us were, before turning away and – most times – leaving the quarter to go be somewhere else for a while.

The latest round of shooting at shit and being around other people had mitigated that, but now we were back alone again I expected it to happen again very soon. Especially since he was being evasive even when I was not being confrontational with him. Getting out of him what it was that haunted him so badly was impossible. Trying to conclude it for myself was also impossible.

The man simply did not tell stories. If he'd ever written an AAR in his life, I would not have been able to believe my eyes. And on that note, they were all classified if in fact any existed so I couldn't find them to tell. Oh, he'd tell me about so-and-so on random occasions, but he'd never elaborate on how he'd met so-and-so, or why so-and-so had earned an honorable mention.

I only knew what had made most of his scars because he'd tell me that much. Not how, not why, not when. Just what. Big one? Longsword strut. Huh? How in the world do you get a strut through your shoulder?? No answer. The long, straight one on the left of his belly? Backside of an energy sword. Back side of an energy sword? What? That makes no sense. I mean, sure, it can happen. But what'd he do, elbow himself in the guts while holding an active one? No answer.

That's the long and the short of Flint. Not terribly talkative, but he'll speak when prompted. I sighed. I wanted him to be more personable, and I needed him to be less cold… but what's a girl to do? I was effectively pretending to be just like him!

.

ANUNA-02

It was learning from me. Learned how to blink, learned that blinking was necessary to the use and possession of eyes. Gelatinous ones, anyway. Learned the art of balance on ditigrade legs, learned how the function and use of four-digit hands worked. Learned how to move, fluid and graceful, with all the power a fully functioning mostly organic body had to offer.

I was walked over to a line of monitors with some interesting information on them, and I found out some goodly details about my new self. While none of the text was legible to me, I understood the pictographic parts fine. There was a medically spread diagram of me… the real me… and then another, a counterpart, of the body I was now looking out from.

The differences of the pictures were not that vast, but I had an eye for detail and I understood what the subtleties meant. My new host was an augment, cloned from upgraded DNA stolen from my original person. I now had metal bones, with all the perks and none of the weaknesses of a real, calcite skeleton. My muscles were denser, more compact, and strengthened with what, at a guess, might be carbon fibers. All of this was blended in ways only the word organic can explain; it had holes, fibrous lines, pores, and even cellular structuring, and all of it was bonded much in the same way a normal, organic being would be. Only the basic material one found after cutting through the skin for a look was different.

While justifiably horrified, I knew I was in significantly less danger in my new body than I was in the one I had been born into. That was not necessarily a good thing, considering all the ways I was subject to control in this one, but I was willing to look at it from a logical standpoint at first, if just to keep from losing my mind. Every fiber of my being was strange and new… and stronger and better.

I hated it. I wanted my weak, frail, broken old body back.

I do not know how to fully explain all the nuances of my situation, standing there learning about my new self. There are subroutines of thought, of knowing, of self-oriented understanding, that a being that started out organic has. And all of them, the sense of self, the sense of being, of knowing, of understanding how and why and perhaps a little of who and what… those were stripped away like so much tissue, and cast aside. I was left feeling cold, and empty, and purposeless. Dead.

There are no gods in the Machine. There is no yearning for enlightenment, for spiritual learning, understanding, or ascension. There is only logical processes, the here, the now, and a little bit of planning for a physical later.

That is never good enough for living creatures. Humans call it a sense of fulfillment. Happiness, perhaps, is another good word. Contentment… knowing in your soul that who and what you are is good enough, if for a breath of a moment, and you can revel in that. I was not. I could not. And I did not.

But I had been stripped from that, from my natural world, and thrust, cold, empty, naked, into the Machine.

It laughed when I begged for death.

At the time I had thought it honorless, pitiless, without mercy for a soul such as mine so stripped from what was good and right, and perhaps even proper as far as chemical, cellular evolution is concerned. Yes, I was born a machine in a way. There are people who consider the 'mechanics' of biology. However, my machine was by far a superior specimen than the one I stood currently wearing. The organic brain, for instance, while quite fragile to disease and decay and even damage, is vastly larger, can hold more, can operate faster, than any artificial computational unit ever built.

By even the Forerunners.

Case in point… the Monitor we found at the Halo installation that the Human Demon destroyed was rampant. Sangheilian Elders do not ever get that way.

Now I understood – as only an organic being might – that while yes, I had been hurt, emotionally wounded, to hear that cold, heartless laughter when I begged on my psychological knees, I had misunderstood its true merit.

The Machine did not understand why I wanted to end myself, why I wanted to die, and cease to be. Why was missing. Logically, without a reason, an action is beyond ridiculous. A machine will not engage in randomness. A machine will not consider, or even begin to know how to consider, action without reason. I had mine, yes. My culture, the very culture that had been defied and spat upon when 'Zelisee chose to spare me, demanded it. But honor is an organic excuse for behavior patterns.

Robots can have patterns, even behavior patterns. But, organic life must have justification for those behavior patterns, not merely reasons for them.

In the beginning I imagine that our honor code was a much more logical process. Those who could not perform up to a certain standard would be culled by the local wildlife. So, in the spirit of keeping as many of ourselves alive as possible, we had developed a counter-intuitive behavior pattern, a culture, of learned behaviors, that later became moot when most of us were dying by entirely unrelated means. Like gunshot wounds. It was still considered very, very culturally honorable to behave in those same traditional ways. Wounded members of a tribe would slow healthy members down… consume without reciprocation. It was best for the health of all to put them out of their misery and leave the body behind. Leave it on the battlefield, undisturbed. So that healthy, unwounded warriors would not be lost meaninglessly trying to recover useless dead meat. Logical, yes, but only after one unburied that logical root out from under the cultural tree that had grown out of it.

The Machine did not understand that culture. It could not, subsequently, dig through the cultural lid that I stood upon to reach the logic to make sense out of me. It was amused that I would be so… organic… and be such a fool. I was useful, I was healthy, and I was, as far as a fragile organic being could be, strong. No disease or overt amount of crippling damage wracked my mind or body. I was fit, and could go on. Could be used, like a subroutine in a larger program, for useful things.

Like teaching this monstrosity how to walk, blink, breathe, and flex, in an artificial Sangheilian body. But it was the absolute shallowness of this Machine's existence that horrified and repulsed me… and made me hate it so much. Were I any other form of sentient creature at all, I would have felt the same. Nobody likes to be used… especially when instinct (also a non-machine thing) is screaming that there is nothing logically useful about the end results.

My new body was very obviously a weapon.

.

FLINT-093

It was instinct that told me I'd been snuck up on. It was logic that told me I was probably too late to bother with jumping around like a spooked chicken, considering who all was available to sneak up on me.

She's a klutz and a hopeless case and she's a lousy Spartan-II but… she's still a Spartan-II. So the odds of my noticing her sneaking up on me, while I am more or less suitably distracted, before she has noticed she's done it to me, are beyond small.

I didn't bother to look up.

Promptly, the cat jumped up from behind me and landed in my lap with as much zeal and gusto as she could – and banged her little head off the edge of the table in front of me, doing it. "Hey!" I protested, startled by the suddenness of her intrusion. Okay, so that disarmed me.

I was fooled, for just a moment, into thinking I had misinterpreted my instinct, and that the body who'd snuck up on me was the cat.

"Hey, Flint."

I flinched, startled again. Damn I was getting too old for this shit… one hand on the cat, I finally raised my head, and looked up at Tori. She wasn't moving… yes, I'd been right the first time. By being stood there and not moving when my gaze found her, I knew I had correctly ascertained that I had been snuck up on. If she had wanted to, she could have pounced… or fired a bullet… or any number of things. And I would not have been paying enough attention to counterstrike, defend, or even get the hell out of her way.

So I was dead to rights.

But there was that hey again. Did that mean she'd dug up something else about me and wanted me to confess something random? I quirked an eyebrow, justifiably confused.

She frowned at me.

What did I do? I hadn't even spoken yet and I had already earned a frown! This is why, (G'wi was the one who asked) I deliberately ask Command for solo ops. They're peaceful when they're not in the action I'm sent to take care of. They're quiet, and most of all, they're non-confrontational.

All of which Tori most assuredly wasn't.

Tired of having to put up with it all, I frowned back. Go away and leave me alone, gah.

She brought her arms up, and crossed them. Then she said something else. "Get your armor."

Mind-blank. "What?"

Her jaw set, and through her teeth, she said, "You have five minutes. After that, I'm just going to pound the crap out of you without it."

I put my other hand on the cat, feeling an odd sense of protectiveness over what could easily and quickly become some collateral damage between us. Kitty was off-limits to Tori's tantrums. Kitty at least knew how to purr from time to time!

Her lips pursed, then relaxed. Then she inhaled deeply and let it out slow. Waiting, waiting… probably hoping I'd stay where I was, so she could have the satisfaction of hitting something other than cold metal. I had… two minutes left (yes, I'm very good at calculating times, even without a watch) when she uncrossed her arms.

I lifted the cat to my chest, and stood up, holding her there. "Tori." I decided, well aware she had been about to jump the gun and go at me early. "You are out of your mind."

Her eyebrows rose all the way up, but it was an accusatory stare, not an incredulous expression. "Oh, I am out of my mind? Look who's talking!" She pointed at… hmm… the cat.

"Just because you're an augment does not mean I can't break you in half." I informed her, bluntly. "And if you give me reason to, I will."

Her face bunched down into a pinched frown again, teetering on an outright scowl. "You can't break me in half, Flint."

I briefly wondered why she was so very certain of that…

"You only have one arm."

Oh, no, she did not – ! The cat squeaked when I turned quick out from in front of that slung fist, avoiding having my bum shoulder socked right out of joint. Ooh, she loved that weak spot. It wasn't for free, though, and just as soon as I found somewhere to put the cat, I'd show her a thing or two about jabbing where she ought not be jabbing. Yes, I was a gimp. And yes, I was fully aware of the fact. But the arm was still attached to me… furthermore, it still worked, it was just weak as hell and sometimes it ached like a fiend.

The majority of the shoulder blade attached to the joint being missing might have something to do with that… and the arm being my dominant side only made me seem all the worse off. I was uncoordinated, though, not useless.

Tori followed her initial attack with more of the same, and at first I just stepped and turned and ducked out of the way, making her overextend a few times but always miss. I could tell it was working her up to some major frustration… was it frustration at being unable to get the frustration out? Haha, what an irony.

Finally, unable to think of a good out, I stepped inside her range to the side of her last extension, lifted the tabby off my chest and held her out right into Tori's face. She shrieked in surprise and lurched backwards, having no intention of getting a face full of catsclaws (because kitty was being particularly annoyed with her current treatment) by holding still for that.

With her effectively backed off, I stooped and let the cat go, pausing to watch her run lickety-split away through the door and off down the hall to be somewhere where there were no pesky Humans around. So much for being in my lap.

Oh, but Tori was still there, and she still looked mad. I looked at her again, and sighed. "Tori, this is really getting rather old."

She turned purple.

Why on Earth was Tori turning purple? If she had something to say… I mean, she'd never failed to cut loose with scathing commentary in the past. What was the deal now? She looked like she was about to explode.

Any minute now.

I was very tempted to look at my watch.

.

TORI-138

I had had sex with that! I was in love with that! I couldn't believe what I was seeing… or hearing. Was he really several different people in that head of his?? I'd calmed myself down (okay, so not all the way down) before I'd found him, but all I wanted was to see if he'd talk to me… and he gives me this look that says, "oh, fuck off."

That hurt.

More still, him throwing the cat in my face hurt. Using an unjudging ally as a weapon against me! And then he just casually sets her on the floor, and he's still not even rumpled that I'd been trying really hard to pick a fight. Honest! Really hard. Not even rumpled! I would claim that I wanted to kill him, to go get a magnum and blow his brains on the deck, but that wasn't the truth.

What I really wanted to do was run somewhere and hide, and cry.

He couldn't even feel anger. He was that cold. Honestly, what could be more heartbreaking? I don't know really how it happened, and I'm pretty sure it was a gradual sneak-up-on-you thing, but I do know that I'm to the point where I'd admit it. I loved him.

For some reason.

I don't know.

But that I couldn't even make him fight with me anymore was beyond hurtful. A billion words jumbled up in my throat, clogging the passage, so none got out. Even if I had opened my mouth, I knew nothing coherent would come out. It'd just be all noise. I didn't need noise. I needed to get it out with words, real words, so that once I'd made a sentence or two I could lash them together and beat the living daylights out of him with them.

He wouldn't even allow me to hit him. Flint doesn't run from things… he'll evade, avoid, whatever. But he doesn't actually run from them. So staying within striking distance yet dodging perpetually out of the way of each swipe was exactly within character for him.

Throwing the cat in my face?

I still have no idea where that came in. I guess if his aim was to make me back off, and quit swiping at him, then it worked. Genius. But.

My face flushed hot, and I knew I was going to burst. I really was going to kill him, and then I'd beat his carcass with my fists until I broke every finger in both hands, if something didn't change. I couldn't handle being alone in the presence of a machine. I just can't do it. Flint was warm to the touch, but emotionally dead. Good man, yes. Good company, no. He was just another element of my mechanized surroundings.

All I had left in the world was that cat.

.

ANUNA-02

The view was of interest. I had means, I suppose, and some minor influence. My captor allowed me to poke my new fingers through a few things I found in the new place I had been taken to, but while I had done the walking at first, my captor had made sure I went in the direction it wanted me to.

One can only counter-balance so far before one falls over.

So we walked. The corridors were perfectly circular, long running tubes that latched onto one another like biting serpents. Aligned down the middles of the tops and bottoms were flat plates of interlocking floor panels… and I learned that the top ones were floors too when I got to use them. Taking a half-sprung leap at the curved wall, my captor had turned a partial somersault in mid-air, but just when I thought it a fool to end its leap with our body upside down, I was subject to the surprise of landing on the ceiling, feeling no more and no less right side up or upside down than before.

My hooves found their places on the ceiling as easily as they had on the floor. The counter-gravity technologies this place had to offer were impressive, and I walked along just to savor the thought that I was upside down and walking along on the ceiling. I felt it a pity that there existed no fellow occupants to watch pass me by or wave to who might look upside down to me.

My captor seemed to consider this reaction with some speculation; I was, evidently, a peculiar creature to it. I could live with that. If the thing never figured me out completely, the merrier I would be. We went for a stroll that felt almost casual, directionless, and looked at the blank-sided corridors for a while. I will admit that while only in partial acceptance of my current situation, my mind had begun to wander after the fifth or sixth corridor we passed. It was fascinating on some levels… but seeing the same thing over and over again, no matter how strange and new at first it might be, always gets old.

Finally, our casual stroll took me through a large circular door that irised open like a steel sphincter, and on the other side, something other than more corridor finally greeted my bored mind. Stretching away from me was a large chamber, the overhead panels set into a decaying ceiling. Some of the panels had fallen, and one or two hung by only a few of the original set of bonding points. I could see dirt, and quite a bit of penetrating root clusters. I do not know if I was taken up a gradual incline to reach that point, but I do know there were no roots prying the roof off of anywhere else I had been thus far.

Not since leaving the pool of oddly selective acid.

It was I who inclined us forward then, spying a few filthy shapes hiding in the receding gloom of the massive, poorly-lit chamber, but my captor allowed me the control to move us towards them. Approaching them, I saw they were larger than I had perceived them at a distance to be; and once I was standing underneath the wing of one that I had supposed myself taller than at first, I fully understood what I was looking at.

They were roughly C-shaped, with one broad, blunted end and one narrow, blade-like pointed end, the breadth and length of the C combining the two ends with all smooth, linear lines. They sat flat to the floor, but I got the feeling that they did not fly like that.

They flew upright, fat end up. My captor showed me how to key entrance, how to mount, how to activate, and then how to fly one. Several tons of dirt cascaded down along with a shattering tree when the bay doors slid back on groaning gear wheels, but though my little C-ship had been buried in the cascade, it tipped back and sliced through the new heap without so much as breaking a rusted port.

I was a little surprised at the craft… we went through the atmosphere with ease, shooting over the tops of the trees' massive countenances inside a whisper's time.

Still… my captor's luck was much like my own.

As we took the plasma to the hooked wing, as we spiraled out of control back through the trees, even as the New Covenant Seraphs zipped past overhead, I sat in the back of my new body's mind and laughed as my captor struggled to comprehend what had just happened. When it queried me for information on the events, I just laughed a little harder.

Oh, how I did laugh.

.

FLINT-093

The guns were stripped, cleaned, oiled down and put away in their places. The armor was clean, ablative putty poked into the bullet scarring, and put away in their lockers. There was no reason to play with fate by trying to steer manually through slipspace, and there was already cat food in the little bowl on the floor.

There was quite literally nothing for me to do. I could have sat down, spilled the bowl, and proceeded to sort all the different shapes and colors of cat kibble, but that was just a little too off the deep end, even for me. I wasn't that bored yet. And besides which… the cat wouldn't have given a shit.

One might say that that was about when I found out just what it was Tori had snuck aboard prior to our last launch. I tipped the box up to examine all the corners (I had the time, and I was not in any hurry to get done with not being bored anymore, after all), and had myself a look at the locking mechanism before popping it open and lifting the lid.

That smell came up and smacked me right in the face like a double Brute fist.

Whoa.

I offered the random looking contents a puzzled look. Whatever it was, it was vaguely familiar, smelled definitely sweet and came in a lot of small plastic packets. Lifting one out, I examined it closer in hopes of finding out what it was. I found myself reading storage instructions and content ingredients before I finally found the actual label, but by then I already knew what I was looking at.

Tori had a chocolate stash.

I closed the box with a crooked grin on my face, but I left it to her… yes, she was strange, but everyone is entitled to at least one personification of their environment. Mine was yet to be determined, really… I couldn't even hang on to a particular set of armor for long. I guess I was happy so long as I had one, regardless of how old or new it was, or how long I'd had it. If it worked, or if it didn't, I didn't care. Tori certainly wasn't going to be like that. But I knew some basic chemistry (useful for identifying expedient ordinance) and I had a suspicion that she'd gotten a stash of chocolate for more reasons than one.

It was a lot like coffee, or cigarettes.

Hmm. Maybe that's why she was being caustic. Perhaps not. If the cure was that simple, then she'd have lightened up by now.

I left the box behind (yes, I did forget to lock it again. Oops.), and decided to go and see what said other person had done with herself. She was hard to read, but not impossible. I knew she'd gotten something up her craw and was likely out somewhere pouting, though over what I'd never figure. That the sloop was fairly small made my trek a short one… especially given what I knew about her.

I found her in Medical.

When I stepped through the door, she was curled up sitting on one of the gurneys, her feet crossed and her arms wrapped around her knees in a hug. She had her chin tucked into them, and was looking down at a syringe lying at the foot of the gurney in front of her.

I had a feeling I knew what this was… stepping far enough away from the door for it to auto-close, I folded my arms across my chest, and waited. I knew she knew I was standing there… the hiss of a door opening on this sloop was gunshot loud, considering the ambient noise level it usually harbored. Our almost perfect silence made the Whispers seem an empty sloop indeed.

I waited, and waited… I was almost convinced she had nothing to say (a first), when she finally spoke. It had taken her ten minutes. And five seconds.

"Go away, Flint."

I quirked a brow. "To where?"

She sighed. "Never mind."

Okay, here's what I got out of that; Tori was still mad at me, but somehow had drained of the energy or gumption (or both) to bother being proactive about it. And she knew she couldn't command me to do anything – even on principle, ranks aside – so she'd given up on the idea of talking.

That was a little unlike Tori. So too was, I figure, sitting there staring at her booster shot rather than administering it and moving on. If she refused it, she'd probably get something off the cat… or more likely, shrivel up from her minor Flood contamination. But either way, she'd still die. And disease is never like a bullet to the head. It's slow, and it's not pretty. Tori was dancing with the devil, putting off that shot. Maybe there was some psychology behind that. I'm not sure.

Might be the fact that she gets the damn things from me.

Damnation, this was getting more and more complicated the more I gave it thought.

I took a breath. "Going to take that?"

She lifted her chin off her knees, and tasted her lips. It looked like her initial answer had gotten sidelined when she'd changed her mind about it, but no new replacement made it up to the forebrain fast enough to keep her from a pause. But even still, I found her answer of considerable quality; she shook her head.

"Why?" Logical following query, right?

"You have to ask?"

Um… huh? Okay, now I'm stumped. "Well… yes."

And then she shot me a nice, toasty, rot-in-hell glare. Well, at least I was getting some good old normal Tori out of her, sans this new, strange, morose version of her. It was unfamiliar, and I didn't like the version any better than the original. So… might as well shoot for familiarity, since there's nothing else holding one's value over the other.

"Pistol'd be faster."

She rolled her eyes, and looked away, dropping her chin back onto her knees. "Go away, Flint."

What, a guy can't offer helpful advice? I know she'd somehow gotten to this point without venturing towards the apprehension or the stress levels to call it post-traumatic. This had nothing to do with war, or even what she'd seen during the few fights I'd gotten her into. (total of fifteen, thus far)

She was somehow talented enough to come up with issues from somewhere else, somewhere that I had yet to venture. Or, conversely, if I had, they hadn't led me to similar ends. So I admit I was still a little on the uncertain side. She looked… shall we say… sad?

"Going away requires some footwork, you know." She told me, evidently tired of my just standing there. "Start walking."

Okay, so I can be something of a pain myself some days. I walked – but I went forward. And why not? She raised her head again when I got at arm's distance, and I saw her mouth open again when I reached out and swiped her booster shot off the gurney. I popped the protective plastic cap off the needle and nailed her in the arm – er… through the sleeve, yes… and yes, I know that that's not precisely wise – before she had the first sound out.

Her face scrunched up, and then "Ow!" fell out of her open mouth.

I let her rub her arm as I poked the needle back into the plastic cap, pretending for the most part to be ignoring her. I turned away, aware she hadn't moved much more than her other arm yet, and paced to the dispenser unit in the wall. I'd gotten the syringe flipped through the hole and about three quarters of the way turned back around when I first saw her fist … but there wasn't enough cognizant time left to process it, and then send down the neural commands to my muscle structures to make me duck.

So that's why I got hit.

My head knocked off the wall behind me, but I didn't even have the time to recoil (physics there) before she came back and did it again. I got my spinning brains working again after that one, though, and got an arm up under her third strike, swiping it to the side.

So she hit me with her other fist.

Damnation! I had no idea she was ambidextrous! The feel of an awkward non-dominant sided punch is always different from a dominant-sided punch. And while I know I had her right in mine, her left had come up quick as a viper and got me square with all the dexterity, all the aim, and all the power of her right. She got me twice from that angle, too, before I got tired of it and stuck my elbow between us and knocked her in the chin with it. I don't like to hit things squarely (no, not even soft fleshy faces) with my left anymore, because there's too much recoil sent through the shoulder.

But the elbow strike would put all the processing power straight through my forearm and into my chest, where I could handle it. And where I wasn't gimpy. Her head rocked back, but I knew she'd already had her jaw set or she'd never have slung the first fist. Little something about Tori I'd learned a while back. For some reason she always sets her jaw (and sometimes will outright clench it) before she slings a punch. So when I saw her lips curl back into a signature grimace, I knew that her earlier challenge was now in play.

She wanted to fight me.

Had I a third hand, I would have stuck it to my face and groaned into it.

Using my grasp of her imprisoned right, I slung her out and then tugged her backwards in again to spin her out. She stepped right into the toss, though, and ducked her head down to slip under my elbow with her own arm over her head. Dance move. To counter, I brought that arm down and cinched it down tight, squashing her against my side so she couldn't hit me anymore.

When her balance shifted, I dropped my other arm and caught her traveling knee shy of its target. Using that, I slung her back out away with her right arm and lifted her bodily off the floor from wrist and knee. It was awkward for both parties, but it was more so for her. She'd be unbalanced, off the floor and more than likely going to wind up lying on it if she ever got loose.

But I didn't have enough strength in my left to hold her that way, even if she'd never squirmed once, so I ended the lift in a casual toss. If I actually threw her in here… that might cause some interesting damage, and for god's sakes, this was Medical. I didn't need my patch station getting trashed. She didn't even squeal when she flipped over and smacked face-down into the floor. She just stuck her elbows out, rolled onto a knee and jerked back towards me with her rising step.

When she got close enough, I brought my right arm back, but I saw she was watching that, so I snuck in a surprise pop with my left. Now, that being my dominant side made it a considerable pop indeed, regardless of the state of repair of the arm in question. I knew how to use it, under any and all conditions. That's the perks of having a dominant side.

Tori counter-balanced without backing up, accepting the full brunt of the hit in order to send in a reply. I dodged another aimed at my face, but then she grabbed a fistful of the t-shirt I had on and yanked me forward. She wasn't braced well enough to do much with that, but 'not much' and 'nothing at all' are two very different demons. She dug that ambidextrous left into my bad shoulder like it was her dominant right, either aiming to decapitate the limb completely or reopen the old hole.

I turned just out of physical principle – even a block of steel would have spun if glanced across the side that hard! – but before I let the well-anticipated feeling that hit would grant me in, I brought up my right behind her head and caught her across the neck. Holding her firmly like that, I finished my swipe by bringing her forward the rest of the way, and smacked my forehead off of hers.

Funny that… I hadn't done a head-bang since the last time I'd fought Innies. I'd been a kid then. And I do not remember head-bangs sounding like a pair of unripe watermelons connecting at bullet velocity. Crack! Mine hurt. They usually do… but she reeled back in a dizzy stagger with a wet smear across her hairline that was slowly crawling down towards her nose.

Oh, so Tori has fair skin, then, over all that attitude? Could have fooled me! I set my teeth and tried not to give her the satisfaction of seeing me grimace, but I reached up and poked myself in the forehead just to see if I'd done myself the same way I'd done her. I hadn't… I hadn't even gotten any of her blood on me. Hmm! That'd be a first. I sent the probing hand across my front and hugged my other elbow to my side, unwilling to so much as nod my head while the ordinance was going off inside that shoulder.

To say it hurt would have been the understatement of the year. To say I was annoyed that Tori was the reason I'd earned that agony would pull a close second. She was UNSC, she was ONI, she was Human, and she was supposed to be an ally. And that's never getting to the part where her odd behavior towards me from early on gets mentioned.

She quit staggering back after the fifth step, but it was enough distance for comfort. I was just glad nothing around us had gotten mixed up in the fight, and I hoped that didn't change. She had both hands on her head, hiding most of her face, but I knew she was holding her forehead and not her face. If I'd hit her lower down with that strike, I'd have broken something. Her nose, a cheekbone. A tooth. Something. But foreheads are notoriously harder than anything in the face. She'd live.

She stood there like that for almost a full minute, likely trying to weather down the headache, before finally giving an audible sniff and raising her head. Her hands came down, the blood from the split in her scalp all over one of them. That traveling droplet had, I noted, reached her nose and turned down the side of the bridge to follow it to her upper lip.

For just an instant I felt sorry I'd done it, but the instant passed, and I felt justified. She'd picked the fight, she'd not wanted to quit, and hey… what's a little head wound in exchange for what she did to my shoulder? On the flip side… it did make her quit.

"Have something you wanted to say, Tori?" I asked. Remarkably enough, I was able to speak without the brain-shriveling agony getting any airtime. I spent the following moment just marveling at that little tidbit.

But then the look she gave me sidelined that thought train.

.

TORI-138

I never found the collarbone.

It was just plain gone. He'd always hated it when I messed with that shoulder, so it was something I hadn't realized. No wonder it fell out of whack so easily. Even the bones weren't really attached anymore. I knew I'd buried my fist into that scar as deep as I could make it go, and I had felt it cave like a stomach, not like a shoulder. Soft. Pliable. Very empty on the inside.

Having him take that iron ball he calls his head and smack me with it did cure me of my initial ideas of pounding on him until I didn't feel angry anymore, but it did not cure me of feeling raw and abused. On the other hand, I couldn't really blame the guy for wanting to get me off of him after that last hit I'd landed.

When I finally got my face out of my hands, though, and I looked up at him, what I saw almost convinced me he'd turned into a machine. His expression was only a little miffed… not pained, not agitated, nothing like that. Just a little miffed.

And while he was holding the elbow of his bad arm…

"Have something you wanted to say, Tori?" He sounded like a goddamn robot. He didn't even sound hurt! For a moment he looked like he might be about to go off on some random subroutine and do some calculations or something else robotic like that, but when I gave him my answer – the best twisted expression I could muster – it evidently canceled those travel plans.

He looked at me like he wasn't sure what I was anymore.

No. No, I did not have something I wanted to say. I might once have, but the absolutely artificial look in those steel gray eyes… were they steel, really steel? … that made me shake my head, and turn away. I could wash my head in the sink in the head. I didn't need to doctor it here. Most of the blood on my face already felt crusty and dry, so the odds of it bleeding any more after now were fairly small.

Despite how headwounds – regardless how little or how big – just bleed and bleed and bleed. I kept him in my peripheral as I walked towards the door, but he never moved. He just watched me go. I went through and out, and once I heard the door hiss shut, I lit out into a run.

Pistol'd be faster. No shit, smartass. Thing was… I hadn't decided which of us to use it on yet. Me? Or him? Or, conversely, him and then me? But then who would take care of the cat? She didn't deserve our problems. And leaving her alone in slipspace on a sloop with a pair of dead bodies and no way to get at the cat food… that just wasn't humane. But there was no way in hell I was going to shoot the cat.

No way in hell.

I made the head and elbowed the door open, unwilling to wait for it to slip away into the wall on its own. Once in, I went to the nearest sink, and turned on the hot side. I let it run full blast for a while, not even touching it, just letting the steam soak through my skin and trying not to think about what had just happened.

I was going to kill him. I really was. I just hadn't come to terms with the thought yet… the action was already taking place. Raising my head, I looked at the foggy reflection of the woman in the steamed-up mirror, and inhaled.

"You are in a shitload of trouble." I told her. Lifting a hand from the edge of the sink, I wiped it across the mirror to clear it. Through the smear, I could see the tiny little split in my skin, and spent a moment marveling at the massive amounts of blood that had gushed out of it. "Wow, seems like overkill."

I got a hand towel and washed my face off, leaving the area around the split alone just so the newly formed scabs wouldn't get washed off and then start bleeding again. I could cover the split with a single fingertip, but I was not interested in walking around for an hour with a finger on my forehead. Especially considering how tender the area was. If I had not already been a nice deep sienna in skintone, I knew I would have had a lovely little bruise. If I didn't get a goose egg, I'd be surprised.

Leaving the head, I walked until I found myself on the bridge.

I stood in the doorway and looked around until I felt certain I'd come here for a reason. When the cat walked up behind me and raised her tail before walking up against my leg, I made a decision. Bending, I scooped her up, and after stepping inside, I turned and made sure the door was locked behind me. I put the cat in the copilot's seat before sitting down, taking a moment to go over the control board with my eyes and re-run over everything Flint had taught me about its use and function.

Finding the control I wanted, I turned the seat to face it fully, and called the console out of standby. There was an area monitor, but I ignored it for a moment as I punched in the all-too-familiar command sequence. Reading computer coding for thirty years will make it into something of a second language, after all, and part of the sciences happening in the asteroid laboratory had been based around programs and their use and function.

I was no hack… but I could create simple programs and even alter subroutines to do what I wanted. I could even read off existing coding and know what I was looking at. If it was digital, it had coding.

I wrote in a small one, and plugged it into the main feed before opening the area monitor and looking to see where Flint was. I found him easily, but that made me pause. He hadn't left Medical, it seemed, and after I'd left he'd had himself a seat on one of the gurneys. He was still sitting there. Still had his bum arm cradled.

But now he was wearing that pained grimace I'd failed to find on his face before. My fingers paused over the control board, my eyes studying that picture. Was it some part of Spartan history that I'd missed, locked away in that lab? Few words, no emotions.

Was it all a mask?

That led me back around into another spiraling, angry internal rant, and before I knew I was angry again my hand had begun to tap in the sequences in. If he couldn't trust me enough to let me know he wasn't a robot, then he just might really need to be slapped around a little bit. Once it was in, I sat there and watched the video feed. I wondered how long it would take him to notice, given that he wasn't moving and he wasn't trying to leave. I had sealed the door with a false override telling the onboard emergency systems that the hull over Medical had been breached. That door would never open. Not until someone hauled us into drydock and 'sealed the breach' so it would 'hold pressure' again. Or, alternatively, someone convinced the computer that such a thing had happened.

It took about a minute.

First he raised his head, a puzzled look on his face, and he looked around. I tucked my chin into a hand and propped that elbow on the lip of the control board, where it wasn't going to interfere with any of the depressable keys. Flint looked bewildered at first; as if he wasn't sure why the air was getting thin. When he finally bothered to get to his feet, though, it had been almost three minutes. He walked calmly to the door, and discovered that it didn't open automatically anymore. I saw him spread a hand on it, as if pondering that.

He left the door for a moment, turning away to look over the expanse of Medical once before turning back again, and promptly popping the control panel off the wall with his bare fingers.

I wondered what he thought he was going to be doing, but then I saw him reach through the access hole and yank out the entire fistful of wires, contacts, and chipboards. Reverting to a default maintenance mode, the door unsealed and slid open. I saw him take a step back from the newly opened passageway, as if there had been a sudden sucking of air from the hall, and it made him hesitate for a moment before he stepped through.

I sighed.

There went that theory. I began to absently punch in the codes to undo what I'd done, more to make the access vents in Medical quit trying to suck the air out of the whole ship, while the ones outside Medical were all pumping it in again. We'd have some interesting pressure lows floating around if I didn't, and the humidity would get really funky.

If Flint didn't fix what he'd done to the door later, I knew I would; and not because I had any overt duty to clean up after him, but more because that sort of thing was a dandy way to pass the time when one is trapped aboard a sloop with no one but oneself for company. Flint surely didn't qualify, not if he was going to pretend to be a machine until he died.

I almost felt sorry for him in that respect. It was almost a default mode for the guy… and if it was in fact a default mode, then perhaps I had signed myself up for a hell of a lot more trouble than it was worth when I'd decided to move in with him. I guess I didn't necessarily have to pursue anything personal. Technically, I knew all about the fraternization between officers thing. That wasn't what had me miffed. It was that he treated it like something that didn't exist until I dragged the cat outside and made damn sure he didn't get any sleep.

It usually took some doing.

The problem began at the point where I had already made that leap. Sure, he was coasting along like nothing had changed. And I'm sure he wouldn't even miss me if I dropped dead on one of our extraneous combat runs. Take note, ship report home, continue on. That'd be Flint. So going back to being 'just friends' was going to be a little less of a hardass haul than for most. That did not mean it wasn't still going to be one.

I didn't necessarily have to pursue anything personal. But that was the catch. I already had, and now I was heartbroken about it. I needed a different avenue of understanding, obviously… I could, if I peeked in secret, see the pain. But I had never once found any malicious intent.

Maybe that was why my heart got so attached.

Damn thing needs a reboot.