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...

4. Surviving Death

4: Surviving Death

ANUNA-02

I was dizzied, and I could feel the pain acutely. It brought home just how close to it all I really was… constrained observer or not, I was still very much a part of this body, and instinct insisted I take care of it the same way I had cared for my old body. I jerked control from the frantic Machine and leapt away from the cockpit almost too late, and I felt the heat and shrapnel lance across our back.

The Machine was spinning madly, trying to figure out how I had known that was going to happen. I refused to comment, focused instead on what should have been a moment of hyper-sensitivity and awareness. But I remained normal, nominal… sluggish almost.

Where were my adrenal glands?

I heard my Machine counterpart hiccup. Those things have a use??

Duh!

Annoyed, I kicked out the hatch and jumped through, right into open freefall. I let the first branch zip past without even trying to catch it, aware that the speed of a falling object of my weight and mass under the current environment and gravity (air density matters!!) would be sufficient to get me clear of the ship if it decided to pop… but that I would never be able to climb down fast enough to make similar distance in similar time.

I wrestled with the Machine over that for a while before I ultimately lost, and we caught the next branch down (too close) and jerked a shoulder out of joint for our trouble. The cry of pain was not mine, though I undoubtedly shared the sentiment. Our grip failed us, and we fell anew, this time heading down falling with a slight backwards flip. If we struck a branch badly at a bad time, our back would snap apart and then we'd be a useless, lame, and likely paralyzed jellybag.

And I knew from experience that that was not an ideal condition for an environment like this one. There were a dozen different varieties of Sentinel out there, and while they all wanted to kill each other, they also would team up briefly to eliminate intruders.

And unless I had the great fortune to come in contact with my creator's brand and model first, we both would be in a massive amount of trouble for a very short and irrelevant time. And then it would be overwith. I saw our other arm come up, and we twisted bodily to the left, right in time to smash off the next branch. CRUNCH, and that dislocated shoulder went right back in.

Huh… interesting way to utilize falling against a branch. If our bones had not been made out of metal, though, that impact still would have done more damage than aid, and the point made would have been laughably moot. The Machine howled anew, but we had been slowed by that impact, and when the next branch came up, we struck it squarely and chest-first. I clawed for control, wanting desperately to shove off and be gone from the tree, but the Machine did not allow it.

Instead, we bore the brunt of our ship erupting, and taking out the entire top of the tree we had crashed it into. As we tumbled through the air anew, I mentally crossed my arms and grumped into the Machine's ear with a dozen different ways to reiterate 'I told you so'.

I got only cold silence.

When the next to last branch went by, we reached out and clawed at it, but while we caught some traction and tore claw material away for thirty meters down the trunk, we did not catch enough to stop entirely. I was satisfied with that, though, and when we hit the ground the Machine let me have our legs so we wouldn't break them. It did not know how to balance a long drop, after all, even if we wore a body capable of surviving one.

There is beauty, art and chaos in a living being that permits it to adapt through motion to its environment. And motion, conversely, that interacts with those living beings that makes them who and what they are.

I balanced us, flexing correctly to the right amount of tension and resistance, and instead of breaking our legs or landing in a splash on our back, we dropped right to our hooves neatly and then sat promptly on the ground before rolling once over our own heads.

I was killing momentum doing that. The gathering crouch was a way to alter direction for the tuck, and the roll was to extinguish the final breath of rushing impact. I brought us back up to our hooves again, balanced and still with plenty of breath to spare… I do not know what the Machine thought of that, because as soon as we were upright again, I was again stripped of motor function and pushed to the back of our forebrain to watch as I was walked away from the crumbling, collapsing tree.

Poor tree.

.

FLINT-093

I brought us out of slipspace to a grand view of the stars, all dimmed somewhat by the closer presence of a red giant some fifty thousand AU's away. I was not supposed to be no fifty thousand AU's off course.

I looked carefully at the control board, then, wondering what I'd done wrong. Slipspace hasn't been this badly miscalculated before in a long time. And surely my luck wasn't so rotten that I'd wind up with the first modern-design sloop with the Shaw-Fujikawa engine that did not work.

But the numbers I'd run were correct… I'd come out almost to an inch right where I was supposed to come out. Right where I'd been told to go. Right where that damn ONI spook had told me to go.

God dammit.

I was spooling up the sublight engines and getting ready to pop on over to that red giant (for it surely must be my target, seeing as how it's the closest thing, right?) when I saw the slipspace flower bloom right in front of me.

I took one look at it and guessed I had enough clearance to not get swallowed or damaged, but it was still very close. Thirty thousand kilometers. Maybe a little closer. Touching the fire, really, and pretending not to get burned. I let my fingers sit still over the half-finished command sequence for a moment as I watched that display, wondering what exactly was fixing to dump out over on top of my ass.

The slipspace flower was only getting bigger… and bigger… and surely there existed no ship, no vessel, that could possibly require a slipspace window that big. My eyes were all the way open, and if I was breathing anymore I wasn't aware.

I very suddenly did not want to be anywhere near a ship that big… just when I thought the entire universe might get swallowed in this monster before the damn vessel decided to come through, it snapped upwards, yanked back and was gone. The residual sparkle of closure as the rift in realtime healed over was hidden around the horizon line of…

A planet???!!! Better!! Sharp light lanced down through the forward viewports and lit me up like a plasma grenade, the sun all bright and hot and very much present in a place where the space had been empty just a moment before.

I don't know if I squeaked or not. If I didn't… well… let's just say that I did.

Watching that shit happen on top of me was scary as hell. I thought for sure I was about to get swatted right out of the sky, but then the big ball of dirt and water and air swung idly away, continuing an uninterrupted orbit off through space. A slight tremble of tension releasing ran through me, and I let out a shaky breath. I suddenly didn't like this mission a whole lot more than I hadn't in the past.

Hanging in orbit in the upper atmosphere were the remains of the Elites' cruiser, and coming around the bend of the southern hemisphere was what looked like the nose. Shaking off the suddenness of my introduction to the area, I began recomposing my reply to that ONI spook… I suddenly really liked him, a whole lot. He'd not put me where that slipspace window had been. That was some thirty thousand kilometers' calculations that a lot of people get wrong. It's not normally enough to bother most slipspace travelers, but in my case it would have been the end of me, my sloop, and all trace that it or I had ever existed.

That's the thing about slipspace. Once it has you, it has you, and if you don't have a pair of scissors capable of going through the fabric of the universe, then it will always have you. Still, while I had a very bad, crawling feeling about getting anywhere near that planet-with-a-slipspace-engine, I still had to at least fly in close enough to check it out.

So, with a bit of reluctance and a fading adrenal buzz, I brought us in.

We cruised smoothly through the once-disturbed space, giving me some appreciation for whatever evil had installed a slipspace drive into a planet and it's sun. The transition had been flawless, without any of the junk one might suppose would have been sucked through a transitory hole that big. Or, maybe, the fact that it had only just opened enough to permit the planet and it's sun left little to no room for such flotsam? I don't know, and I honestly don't think I want to find out.

Still, the environmental repercussions after an action like that have got to be massive… and I found out first hand. The first hint was ignorable, and sadly I did just that. Sensors picked up some minor turbulence. Turbulence in vacuum is nigh nonexistent, because the eddies usually only go in one direction if there ever are any. Ships passing through or over them feel a soft tug in whatever direction, but most of the time their initial vectors are too strong to be affected beyond having noticed.

The Whispers noticed… and after it told me about it and I'd noted as much, ready to dismiss it as a normal vacuum eddy (those tend to pop out around recent slipspace ruptures, but they disappear after about an hour) when it happened again.

And that's when the scary part happened – no eddy, no matter how big or how powerful, has the magnetic or geothermic capacity to shake the gravity generators. Nor, if I recall correctly, can they cause a flash-heat spike on the inside of any given ship. Well, first I was rattled in my seat, and then the air around me got really hot.

I was about to suck in a breath and (more than likely) go what the hell, when my console went completely dark. My what the hell turned into something tenfold as profound. I jerked out of the pilot's seat and discovered quickly thereafter that the power to the whole ship was gone. The door didn't open… and I knew that yanking the control circuitry wouldn't make much difference to a dead system. So I pried it open with my hands, shouldering the opening wide enough to pass through.

I hadn't made any kind of note of where Tori had been – or the cat, for that matter – prior to the power failure, but that it was ship-wide meant very bad things. I'd run down the length of the uninterrupted corridor to the next door I wanted through before it all came back online suddenly, but I went through anyway.

I wanted my armor like nobody's business right now.

On my way through, I hit the intercom on the control panel next to the door, and waited for the telling soft click to tell me it was on. It took three times as long as it should to happen, but I guessed it was probably sluggish due to the sudden power loss. Even under ideal conditions, a running system hates to crash right in the middle of a task. Every computer known to man hates that. And most will complain to the user once it's been restored, too.

I'd gotten the locker open and the Mjolnir pulled out before the click came through, but I almost didn't hear it. What I did hear, though, was Tori.

"What the hell is going on??" She'd likely had the time to figure out something was wrong, wherever the hell she'd gone off and hidden, and maybe even enough time to figure out the intercom system was also down.

"Get up here and get into your armor, Tori." I answered, tugging myself into the first bits of my own. "Hurry."

"Right… on my way." She could be annoying, I'd found, but she was not above doing what was logical under bad conditions. Perhaps not all of her training as a Spartan II had been lost.

I was fully clad and on my way out when I saw her down the hall, but I was only able to continue to see her there because I had my helmet on when the power died yet again. That time, I heard the enginery wind down. A moment later, I also heard Tori shoulder into the wall with an audible thump.

"Flint!" She called. "I can't see!"

I turned away and headed for the bridge again. Unless active systems had recalibrated enough to revive the door command, my path – and hers, too, since I'd been standing in the doorway of the quarter when it all died – should still be open. "Just keep going forward until you find the doorway. It's still open."

I made it to the first juncture where I needed to make a left when gravity changed… and with the power off, that was going to be a weaker counter-force than usual aboard our sloop. I went pinwheeling backwards down the wrong hall when I suddenly found myself on a very steep grade, but I heard Tori shriek before she was out of earshot.

Must have found the door and been slung inside.

I hit the wall on my back, but it felt like the floor. Getting myself rolled around so I could get 'up', I found myself feeling gravity slowly shifting to the ceiling. Hmm… either we were rolling over inside the planetary gravity well – and going to burn up in atmo, if that was the case – or something about the slipspace eddies was a bit more frightening than I'd thought. I stood and waited, aware there was really nothing I could do, until the ceiling was the steeply graded floor.

Then, as it slowly leveled off, I began to climb it, and when it was a shallower rise, I stood into a run. I managed to make it back to the bridge before we'd rolled to the opposite wall, but I found myself upside down to all the controls. First I looked up at them, then down at the forward viewports that were supposed to be above me.

I saw stars.

Huh?

The lights flickered once, the engines howled a single, dying note, and I had enough time to crouch down and tuck my arms over my neck before it all came back online for a third time, slamming me hard into the real floor. It hurt, but not as much as it would have had I been out of the Mjolnir. I think I left a dent, though, because getting up again I could hear something metallic crinkling in my wake.

I went first to the main control console, and began punching in data. If I was going to have to fight for control, and if I was going to have to fly blind half the time – blind and powerless, no less – then I needed to be on the ball. For the very first time since being commissioned to the sloop, I threw the harness over my head and strapped in, more to keep from being tossed out of my seat when next the gravity engines failed us.

What happened next should have made me green as an emerald for the rest of my natural life; fully clad and fast as a bullet, Tori appeared in my peripheral, dumping into the copilot's seat and strapping in quick. How she had managed to get dressed during the roll and drop, and then traveled up to the bridge, I will never know. But I was, I admit, jealous of her for the ability.

Still, her timing was good enough to pass, and I was glad she was there. "What's going on?" She asked, reaching for the console and pulling her chair inward towards them on the running track. Close enough to reach them, she locked it down so it wouldn't slide back again. "Why does the power keep dying?"

"I couldn't give you a scientific explanation, Tori, but I have a hunch." I answered, feeling justifiably annoyed. I hadn't been tossed around by a non-combatant in a long time. Flight control finally came to me right as we rolled back around so the planet was above us, and I got a good view of the lashing storm we were about to nosedive into right before we actually nosedived into it.

"We're there?" Tori asked. "Already? That was fast… so what's your hunch?" She turned her golden visor at me, but I ignored the look.

"Just shut up and see if you can't get me the manual auxiliaries."

"Uh… okay." Even Tori can understand when not to waste time arguing, I guess. It is one of her few redeeming qualities. But unfortunately, she loves to multitask, and as she ran her hands over the copilot's control board, she asked again. "What's causing the power outages, Flint? And if it died so completely, why didn't it stay dead?"

"See that?" I spared a half-heartbeat to point a finger at the planet right before the upper atmosphere came up and swallowed us. The event happened with a tremendous, thunderous bang and shook the ship some more.

"Yeah."

"That's why."

"The planet's doing this?" Tori asked, right as I finally got what I'd asked her for. I turned the counterspin against our lolling roll, and got an equalized descent going. It was enough to let me breathe again, but not enough to save us if we ever hit dirt.

"It dropped out of slipspace." I answered, trying to get some of the automatic functions to actually do something. The controls claimed they worked… but I wasn't seeing any evidence through the forward viewports, so I was unconvinced.

"That's… isn't that impossible?" She sounded as if she'd been about to simply state the impossibility of such an event when she'd changed it to a question instead. I smirked.

"Obviously." Did I really need to finish that sentence? "Where's the cat?"

"I don't know." Tori answered. "Didn't see her."

I hoped she'd been tucked into one of those impossibly small spaces… it would have kept her from getting hurt when we did our shipwide antics. But I hadn't seen her either, so it was as much a guess as anyone could offer.

"Are we going to crash?" Tori asked. For some reason she sounded as if it had been a casual question. Like she didn't care one way or the other, but it'd be nice to know.

I looked at her. "Probably." Why did I find that amusing?

She looked back. "Okay."

I looked back at what I was doing, feeling puzzled. First she tries to rip me apart, and now this? Maybe her stint with the booster shot really hadn't been a joke. But then, why'd she bother getting into her armor, like I'd told her to? I understood that some things were reflex and couldn't be explained or helped much. But if she was really as calm and collected as she sounded, that shouldn't have come into play.

Reflex is a lot like habits. You do them under stress. Not just because. Just because allows too much room for cognizant thought processes, and those tend to interrupt things like reflex and habitual motion.

Tori was, I realized, and likely always would be, a mystery to me.

I looked at the controls again. "Do… we have shields?"

Tori looked at her end of them. "Hard to say. Some of the monitors are spinning madly. I'd guess yes, or it'd never go over that end, but don't put much faith in them. They could be weak, or flickering as bad as the internal lights were a moment ago."

Right on cue, the lights went out, and the controls went dark. Rain lashed against the forward viewports, the action sudden and startling.

"Yeah… we had shields." I decided.

"How's our vector?" Tori asked, calmly.

"It used to be fifteen by three by eight, versus twelve by ten by thirty. What it is now is anyone's guess." I answered, almost as coolly. If she was being infectious, then it wasn't so bad. But at least she wasn't being panicky and infectious. "Tori?"

"Uh huh?" Now she sounded distracted. When I looked over, she was looking out the windows at the lancing rain.

"You high on too much chocolate or something?"

Her head whipped around and she looked at me, at first silent. Then she shook her head and laughed. "Oh, you found that, did you?"

I found myself on the verge of a responding grin and wiped it off. Looking back at my controls, I wondered what she'd really gotten into… because unlike me, Tori was as susceptible to chemical alteration as the next guy. I had a feeling it wasn't the candy at all.

The rain abruptly quit, and the water on the hull whisked away, some of it flying off and some of it drying in place, giving me a good feel for just how fast we were still going. Fast enough to shatter ourselves on a good, solid rock face if we found one before the power came back on.

Tori crossed her arms. "Shouldn't we be on fire, or something?"

"Maybe." I shrugged. "We did just shoot the heart out of a rainstorm."

She shook her head. "Water is no cure for friction."

"That's true." I looked back down from the windows at the control board, and almost before I could take in the dark screens and the unlit keys, it flashed alight, the sound of our engines returning to life a stark and sudden sound. "Here we are." I tapped in some of the boot sequences just to see if the restarts were complete. If it was partial again, we'd fall in a sideways direction (due to speed) for a little longer.

And the longer we fell unpowered, the more of a parabolic arc we'd have, and the less option or time for correction we'd have. I for one did not want to borrow a magnum for personal use, even if Tori was hinting at apathy.

She remained motionless for a while longer, before reaching forward again and tapping on some of the displays, one of which was still spinning madly. "Looks like we've got a reboot error here." She said, calmly. "Should get that looked at… later."

I blinked in surprise when we sheared the top out of what had to be a tree of some kind, the screeching sound almost loud enough to penetrate the hull. Leaves splashed across the viewport for a moment before flying away, even as I directed us upward again to keep from plowing a furrow in that forest… if in fact it was a forest and not a freestanding tree on a plain. If it was a forest we weren't as low as I thought, but if it was a lone tree then the odds of the wind letting it get very tall at all were slim, and we were seconds from plowing that furrow.

"Hey." Tori commented. "You hit a tree."

"No, we crashed into the tree. I wasn't flying." I protested, getting the air brakes to respond finally and bringing us around in a swinging arc. In doing that I began to see little dots no bigger than man-sized appearing on the scanners. All of them – electromagnetic, systemic, heat, and motion. Looking up, I could see nothing of the sort gathering out of the trees ahead of us, but now we were going slower I could actually tell they were trees, rather than greenish blurs.

"Hey." Tori said again. There was that hey… twice. She pointed at the viewport. "What's that?"

"Whatever it is, it's showing a silhouette on the scanners." I answered, still unable to tell what 'that' was supposed to be.

"It is?" She looked down. "Oh, yeah. It is."

"Tori… where were you when the power first failed?" If she was going to psyche out on me, I needed to know before it happened. And if she had somehow found some way to dope out on something in Medical, I also needed to know. Doing that would make her a bigger liability than merely being normal old Tori.

She proved evasive, though. "Why do you want to know?"

I sighed. "Never mind." We were slow enough, now, and hopefully going to retain power, that I could land us. And just ahead, on the side of what looked like a capped mountain (it had friends) was a shelf in the rock that looked good enough to park two or three Whispers on. Good as any, really… unless it was broken, fragile, or otherwise unsuitable.

I did a quick scan, and found it suitable enough.

Good… time to get outside and find out why we couldn't keep power. And if I had to tie Tori to the landing struts, I would… though between her augmentations (and the recent workouts) and her Mjolnir suit, I'd likely need to use some landing cable to do it with any effectiveness.

Oh well.

.

TORI-138

He seemed to be in a better mood for some reason.

It was nice, I admit. But it was also weird on him, after spending so very long being so very hard to live with. The commentary kept me distracted from what promised to be certain doom, too. Asked about the cat. Don't know anything about the cat, she's being evasive again.

Asked about the chocolate. Okay, that one was funny.

I was doing my very best not to panic and become unreasonable, as it would look fairly awkward if we actually did survive landing. And landing looked to be unquestionable; the planetary gravity well had sucked us in, and without power we'd been helpless to resist. So down we went.

And remarkably, we were able to keep power on the last leg of our descent, so Flint got us landed neatly on the shoulder of a mountain that looked like it was a rough diamond. Most of the mountains behind it all looked the same, though, so it might just be junk rock with little glass or crystal protrusions on the surface.

It was pretty, though. I liked it.

I was looking down at my displays, almost expecting them to go dark again, but they didn't… at least, not before I looked up again, when Flint got my attention by throwing his seat harness back over his head and standing up. He turned and headed for the door, looking like he expected to do something once he got through it.

Curious, I unbuckled, slid the chair back and got up to go after him. Part of me wanted to go and look for the cat… but part of me insisted she'd be alright and I could leave her be. So on after Flint I went, pondering random things and wondering what we were going to do since being at a distance cooped in our sloop didn't seem to be acceptable to the planet we were here to investigate. I followed him down through the same passage we'd used to get to the bridge a while ago, and then on past the quarter and then through and into the arms locker. I hesitated to see what Flint thought we'd need, then pulled my scored and re-blued MA off the latching rack. He cast me a look when I did that, but I half wondered what it really meant… was he taking note of his environment, because I'd made a noise?

Or was he contemplating the wisdom of allowing me to have the MA? Call me weird… but I had a feeling it was the latter. There is only so much a tinted visor can conceal, after all. I tried to ignore the feeling – and the look – as I moved up to the ammunition cabinet and loaded the gun, then an ammunition belt and put it on.

I hesitated on the decision of what to take as a sidearm, though – the SPNKr? We only had one of those, but every time we went out I wanted so badly to take it along, just to see what the rockets looked like in flight… and what they did to a particularly annoying target. I'd never seen Flint use it… maybe it was an emergency backup weapon for the just-in-case moments. With a sigh, I picked up the standard usual, a magnum, and then got some clips for that, too. No sense only taking thirty rounds for the rifle and twelve for the pistol. If we needed them, we'd more than likely need several thousand rounds for each.

By the time I was done hemming and hawing and hesitating over what I really wanted to take versus what I knew was practical to take, Flint was done and out the door again. He's quick, efficient, and to the point. Actually fussed at me once for being less than the same.

Still, he was in a good mood and I wasn't about to complain about that. I also wanted to squeeze every last drop of it out of him until there was no more, too. The longer he spent being not mad at me, the longer I felt I could hang on to my sanity.

I trotted to make up lost time, and got caught up with Flint right as the main loading ramp hit the rock and quit moving. Outside looked huge. Flint started down the ramp without hesitation, looking around at all there was to see. Me?

Um.

No.

I was not going out there… it was faaaaar too open. It looked scary as hell just being so open. Never mind if I took a brisk walk down the mountain I'd be back in close quarters again. The forest didn't quite try to eat the mountains, but those trees looked massive and they were also pretty close. My hand swiped at the wall twice before I finally made contact, and once I did, I held on for dear life.

It was so open…

Finally, some six strides from the bottom of the ramp, Flint turned around and looked back at me. "What?"

I just shook my head.

I saw his shoulders drop. He'd sighed at me. Probably rolled his eyes a little, too. When he started walking back towards me, I knew full well what he was going to do, and I let go of the wall just to start backing up.

"No… no…. no…" My protests sounded weak even to me, but I didn't have enough time to get away before he'd gotten the gap closed again and had me by an elbow.

"Come on, already." He grumbled, turning back around and hauling me outside. I tugged back on him all the way down the ramp, unable for the most part to hear much beyond my own heart slamming in my ears. At the bottom, though, I could see more than just ahead. There was out left, and out right, and a little bit of behind me, as well, almost perfect surrounding peripheral. The sloop hid a small segment of it, but not nearly enough; I could see over it, and under it, and it was all open.

I sunk against Flint's arm, and grabbed him tightly.

"Hey." He protested, digging at my thumb for a moment. "Ease up, it's not going to eat you."

"Yes it is!" I insisted. How he could stand to just casually walk out there, I have no idea. I was pretty sure I didn't ever want to become that jaded, either. But he got me dragged down the slope and down into the brushline, and once the forest closed around me, I felt a little less exposed… and a lot less panicked.

Starting to breathe again, I looked around. The crowded, close feeling of the trees helped to mitigate the fact that they were an easy fifty feet apart from one another, and the branchless space between the lower canopy and the tops of the brushy ferns below them. It had it's own brand of 'open', I guess, but that openness was filled with towering pillars of wood, breaking up the sense and offering points of grapple.

It was about as much open space as I could handle… it kept me on edge, but I wasn't frozen in terror, either. When he felt my vise like grip on him ease, Flint shoved me off of him, lowering my focus from the forest at large.

"No, Tori." Flint told me. "It really isn't."

I wanted to slap him.

He raised his left hand halfway, then hesitated, dropped it, and slung his right over his shoulder for the rifle. Once he had it in his hands, he turned away. "Come on, let's have a look around."

My attitude hesitated on me; wait… I felt certain I'd gotten the distinct impression that he really rather hated being in the forest. Was it a tactical preference, or just a generalized dislike of trees? I'd have to ask.

But that inability to decide which hand to use again… that part was starting to bug me. I took my own rifle off my back and hung onto it (more because I wanted something to do with my empty hands than because I wanted a gun in them) as I followed him.

I'm not trained to be observant like that, but the first thing I noticed after going about a yard was that Flint was leaving tracks some two inches deep.

Wasn't that… unlikely? Why would the soil in a forest be so fluffy and impressionable? I looked a little farther down, and lifted my own boot. Yes, I'm skinnier, yes I'm smaller in overall mass than Flint. But my Mjolnir weighs about as much as his. So we'd make tracks in soft soil that were more or less the same depth.

And sure enough, I was leaving obvious two-inchers, too. "Uh, Flint…?"

"What?" he sounded mildly annoyed, but when he got turned around and saw me looking down – with one foot in the air – he looked down, too.

I looked up. "Isn't this a bad thing?"

He looked back up, then, at me. "On the one hand, yes. On the other… more than yes."

"What does more than yes mean?" I asked, putting my lifted foot down.

"It means leaving tracks might be bad… but soil conditions in an environment like this permitting tracks like those… is twice as bad. It means whatever lives here doesn't walk."

"Doesn't walk?" I asked, starting to walk towards him again. He let me take about five steps before turning back around and continuing on, himself.

"Yeah." I saw his head start to tip back, so I looked up, too, past him. There, some six or eight trees away, was a soot-blasted topless trunk, standing between two others that looked like they'd been de-barked by a fifty. "Doesn't walk."

"Oh, crap." I commented. "Flying? Or hovering? Or… something to that effect?"

"Yeah." Was all Flint said. I saw him stick his rifle to his shoulder and aim down the scope at the top of that broken tree, so I did the same. My range finder told me it was out of range… anything I fired at the trunk would pepper it some fifty or so feet below where my scope was pointed. "Looks like forty millimeter rounds. Non-explosive, at that."

I blinked… he'd been looking for bullet scarring? I focused again, and tried to look for the same. "I don't see any bullet holes, Flint."

I heard him turn halfway around – the leaf litter was enough to permit me that much – and look at me, so I dropped my rifle. "They don't make forty millimeter rounds that don't explode, Tori."

"What's a forty millimeter round look like?"

He made an OK hand sign and showed it to me. "They're about that big around."

I gave a soft whistle. "That's a big bullet."

"Yes, it is. Forty millimeters is usually a standard rifle-fired grenade, at that." He put his hand down, restoring it to the MA he was holding. "And even the Covenant's equivalent had explosive properties."

"Something that big around too big to not tempt ordinance?" I asked.

"Something like that." He turned back around, and looked back at the top of that docked trunk. "But whatever was shooting the top off of that tree was not shooting explosive rounds."

"What would it look like if he had been?"

Flint shrugged. "It wouldn't."

Ouch.

.

ANUNA-02

My… our… arm still hurt. It was a minor throbbing, but enough to keep our attention. I personally wasn't too bothered by it – there was nothing anylonger wrong with it, after all – but the Machine was still unsure about the whole of being a fleshy organic thing. Despite being a massively overpowered and overbuilt augment, it was still being tentative about the use and care of a more or less normal body.

As over built as we were, after all… we were still not a heavily armor plated robot, and we did not whir or thunk or bang. We still squished. And I, personally, was glad for that much. I did not like to think of what my poor, battered and abused mind might have thought if I had been thrust into a steel cage with contacts and hinges and hydraulic hosing.

That would have to be a tale for another day. In the meantime, we walked quickly, the Machine taking us in what looked to be a specified direction. Nothing looked different enough to me for navigation, but the Machine probably knew where its own point of origin was, given that it had stayed here and gotten to know the surroundings for a while and I, conversely, was a recent development.

Why I had been turned into a terrible mockery of a living being was still beyond me. And I pined constantly for my old body, my old life, and my old situation. Ah, sweet, maddening boredom! I would savor that feeling, when next I felt it. In the meantime, I had to survive this chapter in my life, and somehow escape to tell of it.

How I could escape with the Machine governing my every move was still a pending problem, though. I missed my old companions, those who had come here with me and been slaughtered dishonorably like so much fodder for the eating. But they hadn't even been given that; not a one had been disturbed from their places of death. Not a one. Nary an insect had approached to offer their defaced bodies a second chance, at perhaps giving life to some other organism.

That was perhaps the greatest dishonor of all.

I could, for the most part, still see and move my eyes and sometimes even my head, so I roved both, looking around constantly. If my Machine counterpart had any appreciation for situational awareness, it did not show it. Personally I was not going to be slain yet again for a faulty Machine. We broke across and opening in the trees, and I yanked our head up to see the sky. The Machine was about to pull it back down to see where we were going again when we as a whole hesitated like that.

There was a con trail up there.

Had someone come? Or were the pieces of my transport beginning to break through the atmosphere and fall to the ground? I had not heard anything… but then, I had also not heard the Brutes appear, and they had come so far as to shoot me down! It was I who looked us down again, and took in the far treeline with renewed interest. I could hear the Machine thinking to itself, going over new data. But most of it was in machine coding and made little or no sense to me. I had learned to shut that out; it was just noise to me.

When it processed things in a living tongue, then I paid attention, and I absorbed each tidbit as if it were manna from the Gods. Any little piece – or perhaps all of them as a whole, assembled in such a way as eluded me now – might be my salvation from this Machine, and enable me to wrest control from it and then flee.

I certainly wanted to.

Standing in the clearing, I could hear the distant thunder of a far away thunderstorm, but the odds of it ever reaching here in any kind of time were fairly small. I just hoped it didn't rain something interesting, or the Sangheilian part of my new body might take exception to the exposure.

Especially since my idiot Machine counterpart had not yet seen fit to offer me anything to wear and I had been traipsing around out in the trees naked. How humiliating. If I survived to see freedom again, I knew that I would not be the same Anuna 'Vadum as had ventured here.

Or perhaps the crash and the leap from the tree we had crashed into had knocked some sense into it… because we went to a freestanding knob of rock, clawed the mossy growth off of it, and lifted off what became clearly a covering cap to reveal some rather confusing and complicated looking controls. The interface recognized either my hand's make or something my hand did (I carefully made note of both) because with just a small finger-wiggle, we replaced the cap and dropped the moss back onto it.

Stepping forward past it, the ground yawned open and we descended a long ramp into the revealed depths. Barely had we gone a dozen feet than the opening began to close, and ahead I could already see the beginnings of familiar architecture. We stepped out onto the narrow walkway set into the middle of the bottom of the perfectly circular tube corridor, and strode meaningfully forth.

At least we were nolonger idly meandering, like last time. Idly I contemplated the last time I had been through Forerunner structures, but I wondered quietly. I had discovered that reminiscing would often get the attention of the Machine, and then it would learn something new about me. But comparing what I was seeing now with what I had previously experienced was often the only way I kept my sanity. If I could have thrust my sword through this Machine that controlled me, I would have done so a dozen times over, and a dozen hours ago to boot.

I was not pleased at my treatment.

We walked as if we knew where we were going, even if only one of us did. I followed along for the sheer fact that I could not go elsewhere, or stay behind. Finally, around the thousandth bend and even down one short ramp, we arrived at another curious chamber. Here the ceiling had not begun to cave under the invasion of the forest's root clusters, but there was one spot near the far corner where what looked like a massive tap had ruined the ceiling, the corner, and the floor. Microscopic hairs hung from the ugly thing, but whether they absorbed heat, moisture from the air, or just the light from the overheads, I was unsure.

It was most definitely a tap root, however… even if it did resemble a Gravemind's reaching limbs. The Machine recoiled from the tree root suddenly, as if shocked and appalled at my thought; evidently I had thought it just a little too loudly, and had sent all the worst nightmares of any decent self-respecting Machine right down its throat.

Haha.

Keeping clear of the root, now, we went to the far wall, which suddenly popped some doors that came out and then slid along the walls to the right and left. Behind it was a shiny new suit of dark gray armor.

Ah! Something to wear! And, better still, it looked practical for my environment. For just a moment, I was pleased, and felt just a smidgen better about my situation than before. I started to reach for it when I remembered I did not have control… and then realized that I had in fact reached for it and then stopped. I looked at my arms, then leaned forward.

Happy to have control of my own body back, I took the armor down, and reassembled it upon my person. It felt custom fitted, as if it were designed with just exactly me in mind. Once I had the last of it on, I twisted my torso to one side, just reveling in the feel of having good armor on again.

Yes, I was still a helpless slave, but at least it was within my master's interests to not expend me meaninglessly upon the foes he doubtless had. There was no undersuit, but the armor locked into itself and would hinge. It was not, I found, powered, but it was also light, and aside from the minor restrictions of being hinged upon itself, fairly absolute.

Each piece had its own inner insulating, padding layer, so nothing chafed. But I was not given long to contemplate my new suit. Nor that I was naked beneath it – a strange feeling, to be sure. Rather, we were turned around and made to march back out the way we had come in, and while at first we seemed to retrace the exact path, at the last juncture we instead went in another direction.

It was then that I realized there was a little more to my clenched guts than apprehension, disgust and repugnance at my situation. A new fear etched in alongside all my others, as I came to wonder what exactly the Machine intended to do about fueling its new puppet.

We went through another irising door, and up to another processing unit, this one looking less like a hole in the wall that spontaneously emits custom built armor and a little more like an actual bit of machinery. There, we picked up one of the hoses – ugh, was I intended to feed like an Unggoy, from a nipple? – and it was unplugged from the port on the left and promptly crammed down our throat.

My personal gag reflex got it spat back out, and we coughed up the first bit of what looked like gray, lifeless sludge. Yuck! But the Machine stuck it back in anyway, and after it got me to show it how to swallow, it fed us on gray sludge.

Trapped in the back, I slowly turned green and became ill at the very thought. When we could swallow no more, the hose got plugged back into the port on the front of the unit, and we turned away. When I finally got let up, I found the flavor of whatever it was I'd just been fed nearly as repulsive as the look of it.

It was greasy, too… which, however repulsive it might have been, was actually not a bad thing. Greasy meant it had some protein quality, and I would not starve to death eating it. But that was entirely if it was a protein based grease, and not some vegetable oil.

Could have tasted better, though…

We finally finished our exit, and this time we made it back into the forest. Though honestly what we were really after was a mystery to me. Did the Machine want to leave the planet? Why had it not found some mechanized way to do so? Why was it using me? What cunning edge did I provide it? Aside, of course, from teaching it otherwise meaningless things like how to walk, blink, and swallow?

Or was it trying to force me to show it how to use instinct? I was not in the mood to be teaching such a nasty denizen anything, but alternatively, I did not particularly want to die if I could not find some way to take it out with me. I was a meaningless, honorless nomad at this point… but I was not without my mortal woes, and vengeance comes easily to those who have nothing to lose.

Maybe it would allow me to kill some of the invading Brutes before they were wiped out by the Machine's enemies?

.

FLINT-093

I admit that I was not happy leaving such an obvious trail. But there was nothing I could do about it, and I wasn't going to concern myself with figuring out how to float when I needed to be doing recon.

That was the mission, after all. Go forth and have a look. I'd taken the gun just because I always do, and because no recon is ever just reconnaissance. The enemy usually spots you, and if they don't, you usually wind up being confronted by a situation that needs amending now, not after the twelfth of never whenever you manage to extract and get back to make a report that can then be debated and finally sent back out with an actual combat unit.

But then, they don't often send Spartans on just recon. They send Spartans when they suspect that the recon isn't going to be just recon. Halfway smart, but why not call it what it is and just tell me outright that it'd be a combat drop?

Sure, there were no NC forces in the area, and I certainly hadn't seen anything resembling an armada come out with the planet and its sun. But all the same, my instinct had kept me alive thus far and I was not about to disregard it now. There was something here, something hostile, and something best left very much alone.

Why the Elites had come in might well be the same reason I had, all things considered. There's really very little you can do when a planet dumps you on your ass and then sucks you into its gravity well, all very suddenly. What had me really worried was that while I can well understand why I'd not be seeing any wild life… I wanted very badly to know why I wasn't hearing any birds. Or for that matter, bugs! There were no sign at all of anything other than plants, and of those, there were really only the kind that did not necessarily need hot-blooded creatures to facilitate their survival. Wind will pollinate as easily as a bug will, after all, but it has to be a certain kind of pollen for that to do any good for the plants in question.

So there was that issue.

Tori was being quiet, for which I was thankful, but the deeper into the woods we walked the more I wanted to just cut and run for it, go back to the sloop and take a stab at escaping. There's just no self respecting planet gonna drop into slipspace, after all. And certainly not back out again. That there was something here needed no verification. The part where it needed to be left very much alone, however… that part needed some serious enforcing.

And here I was, being a good little soldier, and heading in to poke it with a stick anyway. To say I felt rather like an idiot was an understatement. I hadn't lived this long just to go and get myself killed doing something dumb.

We had walked for nearly three hours before I found the first opening, but I stopped at the treeline and looked in from around the edge of a fern. The clearing looked unnatural, but it was also overgrown with moss and a strange grass. Why weren't there tree sprouts there? I could see no freshly dead tree trunks in the area, so a lack of time for them to get sprouted good was missing. There had been time. Someone was keeping the clearing groomed of trees.

But there was no one there… not even any floaty things.

Tori stepped up to the side of the next tree over, and looked in, too. She looked no less edgy than I felt, which made me feel better about being so edgy. I wasn't being paranoid if she was feeling it, too. But then, a forest lacking in animals and bugs would make even the most inobservant of people feel edgy. It was just wrong. Perhaps they'd never figure out what was missing or why, but the feeling would remain. Creepy would be a good word for it.

There is no excuse for such an unnatural silence as this place possessed.

"What do you see?" Tori asked me.

"Same as what you see." I told her. "Nothing."

"This is wrong." She mentioned. "There ought to be bugs, at least. Something."

I saw her picking at the scratches in the metal of her MA, and wondered why she hadn't machined it smooth before applying new bluing. Oh well, she was strange sometimes. Looking back out at the clearing, I wondered why it was clear. What would cause an interest in keeping it open? If I knew why, then I might be able to deduce who was doing it… if in fact the why did not prove to be hopelessly alien.

"Do we go in?" She asked.

"No." I turned from the fern and began to head along the treeline, supposing we would circumvent the clearing entirely and see what was beyond it. The opening wasn't that big – oh, about fifty meters by twenty-eight meters. Oblong, yes. Which was what had made me wonder if it hadn't been a downed tree at first. It certainly wasn't now, though. But it would be easy and simple to go around, and we'd never come out into the open where whatever had kept the place tended and open would be able to see us.

I was not in the mood to be seen just yet. That was the whole point of recon, after all. See without being seen. And I hadn't seen anything useful. Seen plenty that was creepy as hell. Seen plenty that looked very wrong, very out of place. But nothing useful. So I had to go deeper, risk more. Heighten my danger levels a little more.

Joy of joys.

To suicide missions like moths to flame, they say.

Well, a half-mile from the first one, we found another. But this one had some interesting freestanding architecture on it. It looked a lot like a classical city ruin from the Renaissance age, but it was, again, too small to be a city. Tori stopped about two trees back, seeming to look at it with that critical eye she sometimes has for very bad things. If her instinct is any better than mine, though… that would be another tidbit that just isn't fair.

But I went to the last tree, and since there was no particular fern to stand in and be hidden by, I crouched down next to the trunk and looked around it at the clearing. There used to be habitation here. But was there still? And if so, what kind? Nothing organic… people need food, and food comes with feet. Feet that pack down things like the hopelessly fluffy soil we'd left tracks all through.

Ever seen what your hamburger comes from? It's got hooves, doesn't it? Exactly.

I brought up my MA and was looking at the far end of the (yes, this one was oblong, too) clearing when I heard Tori make a noise that was not a word. I jerked the gun down and looked her direction, but she was gone.

"… Tori?"

A buzzing whine from the clearing got my attention away from behind me, though, and as soon as I saw it I knew I'd been right. Things that fly. It looked like a six-foot-wide disk with a fat middle and razor edges, but it had what resembled rotary machine guns mounted on the bottom on either side. Both were, sadly, pointed right at me.

"Oh, crap!"

I darted out of the way right in time to miss being hit by the first hail, but to where I went I found another just like it. This one had horrid looking battle scoring all over its armored hide, so I didn't bother shooting at it. What I had said to Tori earlier came back to me. Firing even non-explosive thirty-millimeter rounds at something like me would tear me all to bits.

And they had been fired at that thing and it was still operating. More rounds stitched the ground and the trees in my wake, but I still didn't see Tori anywhere. "Tori!" She'd vanished before the shooting started, so I felt confident she was still alive somewhere, but where remained to be seen.

I hooked a hard right around a really big tree, earning just a moment of respite when the thing deflected all the ammunition aimed at me. Up ahead, I saw another… different model… but it was the same thing. Quiet as a whisper the blindingly bright lances popped down and sizzled the ferns around me, the aim only correcting above me when one of the rotary cannon kind got within sight of it.

Shit, they were fighting each other, too! "TORI!" I hooked back left and made for the next tree up.

"Here!" She finally cried. "What the hell is going on? What are those things?"

"Where are you?" I made the next tree up – damn, I was only five trees from the clearing. I was going slow trying to evade those drones – and discovered I was nearly face to face with yet another one. It was the funny looking kind with the quiet heat lasers on it, but it was low enough that I was able to reach up with the butt of my MA and smack it right out of the air. When it spiraled into a tree and hit the dirt, I made a point to pounce on it, smashing it flat under a half-ton of Mjolnir boot.

"Where do I go? They're everywhere!" Tori complained. Out to my left I could hear the drones duking it out, the loud rattle of rotary cannons and the protesting hiss of vegetation being burned while wet. The same was going on behind me. So, I went left. I got about a dozen yards and found Tori's blip on my motion tracker finally, so I steered around the trees looking to get over to where she was.

She evidently saw my blip on hers, too, because she turned and met me halfway.

"Back to the sloop – now!" I caught her and spun her out of the way of another silent laser, then shoved her off in the correct direction. She's got no sense for it, so I usually have to point, but there was no time for that now. It was move or die… and I had no intention of getting hammered to mulch by a hovering droid.

Tori ran… boy did she run. I was going full tilt but she still got out ahead of me, and stayed there, very slowly growing the gap between us. Even having to evade and zig-zag around the trees didn't slow her up much, but when she got off course I made up some distance before she got back around and going the right direction.

Finally, when she was in sight but outside of tracker range, she spun on a heel and dumped to a knee in the dirt, shouldered her rifle and started pegging at the drones chasing me. I heard one of them explode in the air, and another lose power and dump into the dirt, but I kept going. If I tried to shoot, too, I'd waste time and get swarmed. The annoying buzzing whine that the big ones emitted had overlayed the entire forest, and the massive wave of pursuing drones – even despite their fighting each other, too – had filled up the bottom half of my motion tracker.

That kind of enemy action is always a bad thing. Somewhat reminiscent of Flood forms, swarming up the hill to get me. I remembered that hill, too… it had let John get through, get after Truth in a timely manner and kill the retard, but… I had still gotten swarmed and overrun.

And shot in the back with an SPNKr.

I hooked around the next to last tree between myself and Tori, and before she came back within sight she was up and running again, throwing magazines back and forth to reload her rifle. I saw a laser stitch a fern just inches to my left, so I went first right and then cut back hard left again in time to miss getting cut down by compensating fire. I was not about to be herded anywhere.

We'd left most of the buzzing whine behind, but the laser-firing kind were quiet. Telling where they were was harder, as I had to constantly glance at the HUD and take my footpath on faith while I was at it. I can do it… but going at a dead run while doing it will really test the ability. Somehow I managed to make it okay until Tori hit a clearing we hadn't found before and drew up short of going into it.

"Don't worry about it, Tori, just go!" I told her. She was far enough out ahead that it wouldn't matter… it was me who was going to have problems with that clearing. But again, I really didn't have time to be making circles to get around it, either. She backed up a step and launched back into her run, barely ahead of me anymore. Right behind her, I plunged out of the treeline in time to see the ground in the middle of the clearing had a split in it.

Forgive me for being distracted at the time, but it did take me a moment to realize that it wasn't any casual split in the ground. It was some twelve feet wide when Tori met it, but at a dead run her foot prints are some six feet apart… she coiled and jumped, and cleared the opening cleanly. She didn't even have to tuck and roll to make the far side. She just hit on her leading foot and kept going.

When I made the same breach, I struck the far side a little shy, but before I could feel affronted that she was a much better jumper than me, I felt it move. My focus dropped, and I looked at what I was holding onto, forgetting for a moment that my feet were dangling over empty air and that there were killer droids in the trees behind me.

"… what the hell…?"

The slit in the ground was getting steadily wider… and a glance over my shoulder told me it was now easily thirty feet wide and getting bigger. Just as I began to pull upwards and try to get out of the hole – it didn't look particularly shallow, let's just put it that way – I realized that right directly in front of where I was sliding to was this building roll of soil, moss and flowers. And behind that was one of the freestanding pillars.

I got a knee over the lip, got pushed into that roll and scraped right back off into the hole.

"Crap!!"

"Flint!"

I made splashdown on my back, so the splash was pretty spectacular. But since I was looking up, I did note that the pursuing droids were not going overhead. Nor were they coming down to get me. Why? Had we been herded anyway, and Tori just fast enough to get through before the drop was wide enough to catch her?

The comn kicked on, compensating the distance between us. "Flint! Where are you? They've stopped at the treeline…"

"Uh… I'm in water." I said, raising my hands to look at them as I sank casually through the liquid heading for the bottom. "Murky, kinda." It was hard as hell to see either of them… there was this black, soupy, grainy shit flowing past my arms and face and I couldn't see through it very well.

"The droids don't look like they're willing to come into the clearing. I'm coming back," Tori said. "Where did you nigzhbbbb?" The sentence ended in a harsh, loud buzz right into my ear, making me growl in protest… but I knew what that mangled word and then the buzz combined meant.

My comn was dead. Like… been smashed under a sledge, dead.

That's about when I finally saw the first lines of decay forming across my visor. A heartbeat later, the HUD went black, leaving me only ambient light to see what was happening to my armor.

"Oh, you have got to be shitting me."

.

TORI-138

I had gotten stopped, a shoulder tucked into the backside of a tree, and was looking around it at the line of hesitant robots in the other treeline. "The droids don't look like they're willing to come into the clearing. I'm coming back," I told Flint. "Where did you get to?" I couldn't see him… but I did recall having to jump a crack in the ground that looked rather suspiciously straight-sided. If he hadn't seen it in time to compensate, he'd probably dropped right into it. Which might be where the 'I'm in water' comment had come from.

And there was, from my current point of view, this carpet-roll of the thin soil and moss layer that had been over where that opening now was.

It looked a lot wider than when I'd leapt it… but I didn't really want to go out there and risk getting fired on by being in the open. Just because they'd quit flying after us did not mean they wouldn't fire on us still, if given the chance. On that note… the 'us' part had seemed to disappear on me, too. Where, exactly, was Flint?

He'd seemed mildly peeved, but otherwise sounded okay. But then again, he hadn't answered my last question. One by one the drones slowly backed away and went somewhere else, so when there was only one left, I ventured out. Quickly I made for the first freestanding arch, and tucked next to it, keeping a close eye on that retreating line of droids. Had they been trying to herd us here, in hopes that what had happened to Flint would happen to me, too?

We'd been moving fast. Too fast for them to readily keep up. Flint was in back, sure, but even he'd been some good distance out ahead of the droids themselves, forcing them to fire down narrow lines to try to hit either of us. So trying to herd us would have been impossible. We could have gone in any direction we wanted… case in point, this was not the direction we'd used to get to where we set those droids off.

When the last one looked gone, I ventured out into the open, and hesitated within reach of returning to my cover. When nothing happened, I straightened, and sprinted the last few meters to the carpet roll of moss and dirt.

Arriving, I sucked in a fast breath and screamed, "FUCK!"

There were broad metal doors over the hole, sealing it quite effectively. "Flint!" The world, he'd said, had come out of slipspace. I didn't really believe it was a real planet, sun or not, just that whoever had built it couldn't keep its exterior from behaving like one. Gather some space dust, get a soil layer. Gather some extraneous gasses, build an atmosphere. The thing was big enough to generate its own magnetic field, trapping all of the above and turning it into something of a broken ecosystem. Case in point… no bugs. No nothing at all, other than the trees.

So the odds of him being able to hear me – the odds of a radio signal getting through whatever in hell those doors were made out of – were abysmal. He hadn't answered me because he couldn't hear me anymore, and even if he was screaming at the top of his lungs, I'd never hear him either.

I'm in water.

So whatever was down there that had tried to capture him was flooded with groundwater. Natural enough, I guess. It certainly looked old enough to have rusted through – or better, been punched through by the tree's roots – and gotten some leaks in it. But they were not going to let me talk to Flint, that was obvious. I sent a Mjolnir-clad foot at the nearest freestanding pillar in anger, and cursed again.

"Fucking piece of ancient rusted out shit!" Yes, I was pretty good at cussing. I was even pretty good at cursing – the art of which, I'd been told, was nearly lost. Cussing is where you use words you don't want children to hear. Cursing, on the other hand, is where you use words children are actually taught to say, but you don't use them nicely.

I was justifiably (I thought) pissed off, because now I, the duly appointed non-combatant, was all by myself in one of the biggest combat zones known to Man. Worse still, my one and only source of combat-effective know-how had just been swallowed up by what could easily be a bit of broken enemy machinery.

Which meant getting him back out of it would be an interesting piece of work, for sure. I kicked the pillar a second time, and it buckled over and broke off, dropping onto its side in the disturbed mossy carpet. I watched that for a moment, but when it was over, I decided to go back to the sloop, and get some ordinance to peel open Flint's new cage. I certainly didn't have any plastic on me… and even though he hadn't really shown me more than a cursory 'you don't do this' on the stuff, I figured I needed it more than I didn't need to be messing with it.

I hit the treeline and instantly one of the saucers was upon me, belting out ammunition (this big… holding out an OK hand sign) at me as it came. I yelped and leapt clear of the first hundred rounds, but it pelted me with the overcompensation of trying to follow my retreat and my shielding broke.

I scrambled back to my feet and ran for it, now well aware of why Flint hadn't even tried to put up a fight. He knew his munitions, apparently, and his lack of explaining probably never even occurred to him. It just was, and the idea that I didn't know any of that likely never crossed his combat-addled mind. Don't get me wrong… if I need to know something, Flint'd tell me all I never wanted to know about it. I will never reiterate the rifle-how-to he gave me for that reason. But there are some things he forgets that I don't know anything about, and he assumes I know those things.

Most of the time (cue, most) it's not that big a deal, and it doesn't hurt that much. But I'd shot plenty of these bastards out of the air already and until they shot me back, I hadn't understood Flint's initial evasion tactic fully. Now that I did, I was all for keeping my hide intact… even Mjolnir isn't going to stop a thirty-millimeter whatchamacallit. I should have been dead… had I been wearing a Marine's standard issue get-up, I would have been.

Would have been quite dead, and perhaps in a few dozen pieces for my trouble. I thanked the god of shielding as I ran, aware I'd lost my direction almost as soon as I'd been assaulted. I figured out just how lost I was when I circled the tree I'd ducked around and nailed the saucer droid with some MA adoration.

The clearing where I'd lost Flint was nowhere in sight. And… I could not, for the life of me, figure out which direction to go to get back to the sloop. I looked for tracks in the soft dirt, but the drone had erupted all over my trail and even once I found a boot print, I discovered it was pointing the same way I'd gone to find the damn thing.

Not helpful. I wanted to retrace my steps, not follow myself forward! Still, trying to find tracks that are in the dirt when everything is overgrown with funny looking ferns and keep from getting shot at all at once is not an easy task. I was about to head for the disturbed wake in the fern's leaves when I saw one of the heat-laser type zooming in towards me, and it was leaving just such a wake in its path.

Damn, there went that idea. I shot the teardrop-shaped drone down and ran from its friends, figuring a generalized direction towards the mountains would get me into at least a sightline of the sloop, and then I'd be alright.

About fifteen minutes later (and one of the trees got brought down atop me in that time) it occurred to me that while finding the sloop might be a chore, once I'd found it, getting back to wherever in hell I'd lost Flint would be even harder. The damnable droids aside! I hoped he hadn't lost his gun when he fell… he'd need the thing if the inside of that flooded cavern was anything like the surface of this world.

Gah.

Escaping a collapsing monster of a tree that is longer than my sloop helped to swat some of the pursuing droids out of the sky, but after the first saucer all I saw were the teardrop type with the little bitty arms that they shot from. I wondered if they had territories… or if their presence was a mixed up jumble, and they moved around like clouds of bees. Charging headlong through the ferns and trying to keep them from getting across my visor kept me occupied for a while, until I felt I couldn't run anymore. I never saw a single rock, never saw the mountains… but I did charge headlong across three of the odd clearings. One was almost perfectly circular, though, rather than oblong.

The droids always went around them, never through, for some reason I never could figure. But when I found one where the dirt had been disturbed already, I half wondered if I'd come full circle. I did not see a carpet roll, though. Just a bunch of… wait… ah hell… those things patterned across the ground were Elite tracks.

Bunch of idiot splitlips had been through here, and now I was about to run through the same old gauntlet. Probably find what they found, too. I charged straight across the clearing, and punched into the woods on the far side only to trip up on something soft and meaty and fall kersplat on my face.

"Yaagh!"

I jerked to my knees in haste, but I did look back to see what I'd tripped over… the sight made me hesitate. It was an Elite… with about a dozen neat little holes burned into him. I lurched away, horrified and disgusted at once. Those droids really were trying to kill me! I turned and ran again, aware I had only a few more seconds before the droids coming after me got caught up. Out ahead, though, I heard a heartening sound.

Plasma rifle fire.

That was a sweet, sweet sound indeed. Surely if I could reconnoiter with some Elites, we could make some kind of stand and clear a path back to the sloop… or hell, I'd borrow some of their ordinance. Surely they could help me navigate back the way I'd come, and help me get Flint out of that hole.

Elites liked Flint. Right? They were his friends. He'd told me some of their names. Maybe if I told them his, they'd help me out. Especially since what I wanted to do was go and rescue the guy. All my scheming went up in shrapnel and fire when I plunged into the next clearing, though; it wasn't Elites. These were Brutes.

Actually… they looked kinda harried, too. I kept running, even though several saw me coming and spared me some ammunition. The plasma slapped harmlessly across my shielding, the rounds that struck me being insufficient to break through and hit my armor. When they finally saw what I was leading… or running away from, actually… it altered their aim.

One even waved me to cover. For a fraction of a second, I actually believed him… but only for a fraction. I'd aimed for him, though, and he was shooting past my head again when I zipped right past and kept on going. If I could shave off my pursuing party by running through the middle of a pack of Brutes, all the merrier. And if I could steal something explosive while I was at it… I looked around, but they didn't have much at all in the way of spare equipment.

By the tracks in the dirt, it actually looked like they'd run here in the same manner that I had, seeking cover to shoot from. And since the droids absolutely refused to enter any opening in the woods, it made the broken ruins an ideal place to take cover. Except.

During my momentary hesitation to look at what the Brutes had brought, one turned and tossed me a plasma rifle and commanded, "Shoot!"

I fumbled the rifle past my own, but even though I dropped it, I did actually turn back and send some MA ammunition downrange. My aim reset when my left foot rose suddenly, though, and I staggered backwards before dumping onto my ass. From between my knees I saw the thing come up out of the ground, wearing a moss hat, sorting itself on the underside as it rose.

I screamed at it – yet another model of droid – and stuck the MA into its face and fired off half my magazine. Several of my rounds actually bounced and zipped off my own shielding, but eventually the hammering broke its armor and I put it down. Seeing me do that, though, the Brutes began to howl like a pack of rabid dogs. Their cover was faulty… and more of the same were coming up out of the ground through what turned out to be access chutes all over the place.

I got up, swiped the plasma rifle, and ran for it.

Seeing I wasn't going to help them hold out any, a couple of them decided to shoot at me again, so I didn't feel too bad about abandoning them. I got into the trees again and hooked a hard right, intending to go back around behind the assault line where I'd come in. I was so high on adrenalin I didn't know up from down anymore, but I did know my legs hurt rather badly. I don't know how Flint does it… practice, maybe. But I ached, and even though I was high as a kite I still wanted to stop, and take the time to catch my breath.

Coming around the curve of the Brute's standing point, though, I heard something else curious, and it made me peel away from my initial destination. I didn't need to get that close to the droids' flanks anyway, but the noise sounded a lot like another MA firing off.

"Flint? Is that you?" I asked, hoping he was still on the same channel as before. "Flint! Please respond!" I knew I was begging for it to be so… if I didn't have to dig him out of the ground, I would be massively relieved… better yet, if he'd found a way out and had gotten to and through it without being killed.

But all I did was break through another treeline, and stumble to a stop in another clearing. This one had no freestanding anything in it, it was just plain flat. I looked around once, then picked a direction at random and went. I was down to a sprinting trot, though, rather unwilling to continue to run flat out. I was shaking, and I knew if I didn't aim on the fly then I'd never hit anything ever again.

"Flint, please, tell me you're out there." I came around the gajillionth identical tree that looked like all the blasted rest of them and found something different – it was an Elite! Yay! But he was running from something, so I stuck my MA to my shoulder and braced against the tree I'd come around.

He turned, then spotted me, and came my direction. He didn't have a gun on him, for some reason, but the teardrop chasing his ass certainly did. I shot it to bits and then tossed the plasma rifle I'd swiped to the guy. He caught it, fumbled it for a second, then got it right.

I waited for more, but there was only one droid for the moment, so I chinned on the external comn and turned to see my new buddy. "Are there more of you?"