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...

6. Never Forgiven

6: Never Forgiven

ANUNA-02

Convinced there was nothing here to stay for, but acting a little bereft of another place to be, my new human counterpart took us off through the trees again. It was not without merit, though… our position was overrun with bullets from too many directions, and we had to move or be cut down. The robots would never fly into the openings, I suppose, but they had no qualms with shooting into or through them.

As I followed the female warrior into the treeline, I wondered why. For the first time, my aloud thought got no answering response from the Machine. Reaching the treeline, and subsequently, cover, I saw the human swing right. I had been about to balance left, but instead chose to follow her and see where she was going. She charged headlong through the ferns, heedless of the massively obvious trail she was blowing through it all. I stepped mainly in her tracks, but there was almost no reason to. I over-printed them with the cloven V of my hooves.

She had an extraordinarily long gait for a Human, and was almost as quick as I would have been, before the Machine had altered me. Augmented as I was, I could have caught and passed her had I the wont. But I was patient, and I wanted to know what she thought she was up to…

I soon learned that there is meaning to the primal scream in more ways than the Brutes use it… she circled around through the treeline until we had come halfway around, I suppose doing it like that for the cover, but we came right up onto the retreating flank of seven of the heat-laser robots. She blew them all out of the air, efficiently brutal in each precision kill.

I was – the Machine was – awed. Myself because of her manner and style, and because I had not realized the true depth of her pain before then. And the Machine, because it did not realize that her creed of Human did that sort of thing on casual days. If my captor was a scientific study AI, and had no concept of battle or the finer nuances thereof, I would be very frustrated with it very soon, I just knew.

In the mean time, the slender female demon was bent as hell on flattening every robot in the forest… and hardly had the last teardrop hit the mossy soil than she had started moving again, reloading her weapon on the fly. Her motions were quick, and looked practiced, but she took the time to do a few things that made me wonder just how long she had been at it… was she new? She was not bad, or faulty, or even particularly incompetent. She had a grace about her that would have been the envy of the finest dancers of Sangheilios. But that does not make up for battle prowess, something 'Zelis had had in surplus.

He was… heh… not particularly graceful.

Capable, yes. As were all who survived their first combat drop. And their second. But grace was reserved for those who embedded themselves deeply within the more specialized reserves of any given military force. I followed the female through the brush wondering if she had a sense for where to find her enemy or if she were blindly tromping and hoping to get found.

It proved to be the former… the cloud of them we came to then was a little bigger, though, something that made the Machine grapple for the controls, and wrest them away from me. I fought, screaming in silent protest as I was sucked away from my own functions. I could still see, could still hear, but even as the Machine demonstrated pitiful aim with the DER we held, I began to notice things I knew the Machine was not looking at.

Things like the fact that there was more than one point of origin for the Human rifle fire. I observed quietly at first, but it didn't take a genius to notice after a robot broke apart around erupting shrapnel and a cry of "Hoo-ah!"

The female demon had ducked after several to the side, leaving us alone at the back of our initial assault point. The Machine should have known to move more than it was, but we stepped cautiously instead of quickly, and so we had a nice view when we came around a tree after the next (but certainly not the last) robot. Hot lasers lanced the ferns around us, but even as bullets tore into the hull of the thing from behind, the Machine regarded the ruddy-faced Marine ahead of us with something less than what I found satisfactory.

No!

I watched helpless to stop it as the Machine shot him down.

The depth of my dishonorable fall from glory dawned on a new day for me then. If the female demon saw me commit that atrocity, she would doubtless best my idiot Machine in battle and cut us both down. On the one hand, that was not a bad thing. But I craved vengeance against the Machine, and I knew that killing me would not harm the Machine. I needed to be freed from its grasp, so that I might return to the point of my shame and destroy it properly.

The Machine blew several more of the robots out of the sky, their glossy flanges and bulbous fronts fracturing under the plasma pouring from the DER in our hand. But the Marine had not been alone, and soon enough we encountered the rest of the men. I caught a glimpse of the demon's upper half over the top of a fern, but the Machine did not care who saw what. It also did not understand the merits of associative allegiance. We shot down two more of the meagerly armored humans before a fourth saw what had dropped the third and turned his little guns at us, screaming in protest.

Without preamble, the Machine fired back. He ducked successfully once, peppering our own dodging front with a magazine of sub-machine gun fire. I felt the bullets sting, felt one of them dig into a joint where the Machine had not armored me. The rest bounced off after leaving their stinging admittance of impact. I had no shields… curious.

But the squall of the last man down had gotten attention away from the panicking robots above us, and in the confusion of detonating robotics and rattling gunfire, I caught the glimpse of a golden reflection of sunlight.

Barely had the Machine swiped our claws over the face of the final Marine and yanked him off the ground by it – the motion broke his fragile neck – than we felt the harsh impact of the butt-end of a rifle land across the side of our own neck. We dropped the human and dropped to a knee, but though the Machine turned to face the point of origin for the assault, it did not correlate the demon's standing there with what had just happened.

I did.

"What the fuck is wrong with you?" She was screaming. She peeled back and smacked us across the face with the butt of that rifle again, and before we could recoil from the impact, she struck again. "You murdered them!"

While the Machine could not understand why it was under attack from what it had been told was an ally, I in turn could not understand why she was not merely killing us and getting it overwith. Instead we were subjected to the punishing pummeling of the back-end of her rifle, until finally we had curled onto the ground, where she sent a hard boot into our ribs as final statement.

"Don't you ever do that again, you pea-brained split-chinned bastard, or I'll gut you up one side and down the fucking other!" With that, she turned away and took off after the last visible robot. Apparently, their core processor was able to understand when it had been whipped, and the robots had been pulled back into a retreat. This, despite the ache granted our head and our ribs, refocused the Machine's disorientation. Shrugging off the pain – relatively speaking, it was admittedly mild, compared to what it ought to have been – and stood us up again.

But oh! The female was quite mad, indeed.

.

FLINT-093

When I ran flat-out, pushing as hard as I could, I went for a total of five seconds – I counted them – and did a terrific face-plant squarely into the trunk of a tree nine times as big around as I was.

Ow.

My impact did not knock the tree over, but I knew I made it think about the prospect. I had made a nice three-foot-deep divot of splintered and crushed wood fibers at my impact site, but you could really tell that whatever had run into the trunk had had legs. There was obvious parting at the bottom of the crushed spot. It was not, however, quite man-shaped.

I managed to shake the stars out of my eyes without unbalancing myself, but now I knew what full extension was like. I added that to my ever-growing checklist of don'ts, and began to navigate the forest at what amounted to a casual run. Personally, it took about as much effort as a half-hearted trot, but at the speed I was passing up trees right and left (with barely enough brakes to navigate reliably), my 'casual run' amounted to about sixty or seventy kph. Think big spotted cat, full-tilt chasing dinner down.

That'd be me.

Except there was no dinner involved, and food was pretty much the last thing on my mind. Rather, I was wondering how in all hells I was supposed to navigate this damn forest, since everywhere looked the same to me, and I had gone through gods-only-knew how much subterranean starship to come to my exit point. My HUD was confusing as hell, but so long as I could walk and see out, I was okay with that… for the moment. Being weaponless was a nagging itch, though.

When I saw something above fern-height out ahead, I went that way, figuring if they were droids, then maybe if they had a point of origin (and were not idly patrolling) then maybe I could retrace that and hope that it was somewhere I'd seen before. I didn't really get that chance, and even if I had, I doubt it would have made much difference. The droids (saucer model) saw me before I could tell which direction they had been traveling originally, and some of them changed vectors to intercept me. I really felt that first thirty-millimeter round, too.

It zipped straight at me, the very, very first round fired out, and I saw it coming enough to know I was going to get hit squarely. Not enough to be able to duck, though. When it hit, it really did hit me squarely center-of-mass, and dug in hard against my exo-plating. I felt the joints all go rigid – but not too stiff to move – against the blow, and just when I wished badly I had my MA, I felt my pauldrons shift and crawl.

That was the weirdest feeling to date.

It took me about a second to realize there were guns on my shoulders… but not long at all for me to recognize their utility meters. Weapon stats blinked up over my left eye, then my right, and then the pair synched and one reticule traced down to lock onto the saucer that had hit me while the other zeroed in on a follower. I had no idea how to make my sudden guns shoot, but when I closed my hands into fists, they began to belt out responding bullets.

Big ones! It was one half thrill and one half fright, but I pummeled the leading saucer out of the air and then focused both guns on the second one. Responding fire had mulched my surroundings, but when I next looked to see what was happening that I nolonger felt anything hitting me, I got to watch something pretty spectacular. As each thirty-millimeter slug came at me, the exo-plating would consolidate what looked like points of electric origin, then blow out a fat, scary-looking arc right where the round was calculated to hit. As the arc made contact with the slug, said slug would explode into shrapnel in a funnel cloud aimed away from me. The rounds were being punched right out of the air without pause to let them impact, not at all like my old solid-state shields.

Like I said. Spectacular! I wished Mjolnir armor had that function.

I started to put lead downrange (if it wasn't something else entirely I was shooting) when my guns suddenly disengaged on me, and put themselves away. I squeaked in protest, but at least the arc-puncher was still working. I ducked behind a tree anyway, just in case that feature had an exhaustion point. I stood there with my back to the trunk trying to figure out what I'd done in the first place that made the guns come out, listening to the sound of the annoying buzzing whine starting to surround me. Under it, I began to hear something else… rifle fire.

Rifle fire?

Tori!

I have no idea what happened to my brains, but I jumped around the tree trunk aiming for the source of that prattle of human munitions, all ready to punt the saucers out of the air with my bare fists if I had to. Tori had an MA, and I did not. That was something I was familiar with, something subsequently reliable. I don't know what I expected her to use after I stole it from her, but I wasn't thinking that far ahead. Indeed… why I leapt out in the first place was under some question; especially when I came face to face with the leading edge of one of the saucer droids.

My arc-puncher punched the idiot droid right out of the sky when it tried to shoot me point-blank, but when I bristled in alarm in reply, I saw my HUD reticules reappear. I raised both fists and crushed them down, burning ammunition fast and hard into two separate buddies of the first. There is no shame in being unwilling to waste a single second of a weapons' availability.

I was a soldier, god dammit, not an idiot! (even if I sometimes act like one…)

I was surrounded, though, and the saucers liked their elbow room. I was able to fire simultaneously at two as I came upon them, but the more I twisted around and around, the more I began to think I would never dig myself out of this heap of wrecked battle bots. While nifty as hell to watch and certainly detrimental (to some degree… it had a limited effective range) to the droids, my arc-punch proved to have a minor downside to it when I got pounded across one shoulder and wasted a buttload of ammunition trying to shoot through the resulting shrapnel.

I got annoyed, just a bit, but I kept it together. I was in my element, doing what I did best… but what had me all sorts of bothered was the part where I had never really seen these things before, and I had no idea where they came from or who was controlling them. If the monitor that had given me this armor was any indicator, then their base of operation was likely as old and just as fully automated. That did not stop them from being a pain in the ass. I've never shot down a Forerunner Sentinel before, but I'd heard all about it. Shooting these things down, though… they were easily twice as big and twice as bulky, with twice the attitude problem. Perhaps it was making up for the shortcoming of being utterly unable to do anything about me, whilst I systematically flattened them all.

Finally, I saw the dreaded exhaustion point reach out, and the arc that punched the round from in front of my face proved to be half-hearted and also the last. I spun around involuntarily at a harsh spray across my left side, but my spin was countered by the other systems in the suit – such as how when I intended to move, it would move me for me, and I had not moved in a manner to make myself spin like that.

I still wound up on my face in the dirt, but at that point, I was all for just dropping it and running hell for leather the other way. I had no idea if my direction of choice was the same direction I'd heard rifle fire from a while ago, but I could always reconnoiter later and investigate. For the moment, I'd been outgunned, and now I needed to figure out what to do with myself while my armor decided what to do with itself. I had no idea if the arc-punch would recover, or recharge, or if it was dead once it was dead and I was now SOL.

I ducked under a half-propped fallen tree on my way out, aware there were only a few more left. The first two overshot rather badly, having revved up to match my initial speed… but this thing had some remarkable brakes, and with just a minor slide through the soft soil, I got stopped fully in under twenty feet. At first I went to go parallel with the fallen tree, hoping to use it to hide further, but when I saw the first two overshoot, it was just too much to resist. An agitating enemy with its back turned for it is just like free candy.

I shot both down out of the sky. I could hear a third – at least one more out there – but I didn't see it immediately. I started to try to look for it, but that first thundering impact that had dropped me on my face came back to me in a delayed responding detonation of the ordinance inside that shoulder. I set my jaw, annoyed, but one thing my new suit had very much in common with Mjolnir…

I couldn't dig my thumb through this stuff, either.

.

TORI-138

I felt better when I was taking it out on the droids. It helped to stabilize my sense of loss. All the mean things I had said to him were beating me to a bloody pulp now, all the nasty things I had done. I acutely remembered striking his weak shoulder, even when I knew what that would do to him. Flint had been tough as nails, but even a nail will bend if you hit it wrong.

Meeting up with Marines had been a bit of a surprise… we had company, that fast? Had it been that long? I was so wound up, I hadn't looked at my mission clock since we'd left the sloop. Running from droids, chasing droids down, shooting at droids, being shot at by droids. Sure, their munitions would likely go right through me. But my bullets tore them all to scrap, too, and I was faster on the draw.

Having to deal with the idiot splitlip blowing the heads off of all the men, though… that had been weird and frightening and confusing and ominous… and I knew I wanted to kill him, too, just because I needed the vent, but I needed him. I needed someone, something, that was going to stay. I knew he could get me around, to just about wherever I needed to go, and I also knew that he knew Flint. That he seemed to feel no remorse for the admission of Flint being dead now hadn't occurred to me yet.

I was too busy being hurt by it, myself. I knew if he pulled another stunt like that one with the Marines, though… positive aspects my ass. I'd pop a cap in his head so fast he wouldn't know it'd been me that done it. I wasn't really angry at all, though. Not outwardly, at least. I was plenty mad at myself. But I knew the Elite thought I was pissed off at everything in general just by the way he kept looking at me.

Without anything to readily kill, I found my gun sagging in my grasp and blinding tears begging again. With what the forest harbored being mainly at large, and god only knowing how many of them there were, I did not have the luxury of collapsing in tears. I needed to be able to see, and I was not about to take my helmet off so I could wipe my eyes. I might get caught doing it, and then be dead for my trouble.

I missed Flint… I did not want to join him.

It was proving a hard hurdle just coping, knowing he wouldn't be there to grump at me or give me one of those quiet I'm-not-going-to-tell-you-shit smirks of his… I had always thought that being on a solo op without Flint would be a physical hardship. My inability or lack of experience with certain bits of military cadence, and whatnot. But when the event finally came to call… it was my emotions that were working me over.

I won't say I was heartbroken. I wasn't out of denial enough for that yet. But it sure hurt like hell. I wanted to go back to the sloop, dig out as much plastic as we had, drop the whole thing on those doors and blow the entire forest to hell peeling them open. I wanted to see the body… or given the method of death, the murk. I needed closure, and I knew there was only two ways to get it – seeing his lifeless carcass for myself, or having some ten or fifteen years to come to terms with the lack thereof.

I didn't have the stomach for either.

I also didn't have the first clue where the damned sloop was. I needed to strip out of my armor, put the guns away, curl up on the bed with the cat and cry myself to sleep in a ship even emptier than ever before. I couldn't handle being forced to stay active, alert, and on my toes like this. I just didn't have the option. It seemed every single mistake I had ever committed was coming alive in my mind, turning into monsters too great to best, too powerful to stand against. I was breaking down with every step I took, and I knew it.

I stepped through the treeline into a clearing I'd not yet crossed (I could tell because there were no tracks through the mossy ground) and paused to consider what I wasn't looking at anymore. Behind me, I could hear the Elite tromping along like he didn't give a shit who heard him coming. He was rather clumsy for someone who had walked through the fires of Delta Halo. Surely someone like that would have a lighter, softer step. I had heard the difference between the two displayed in Flint… aboard the ship, especially when he took to puttering about barefoot, he'd be plenty noisy about making steps, and never seemed to care. But get him in his half-ton of armor and set him on the battleground, and he'd get quiet like a whisper, even when crossing hard, unforgiving surfaces like crete.

My thoughts soon strayed as they usually do, and I finally focused on the clearing. Looking around at the seeming lack of architecture the opening had to offer made me wonder what kept the clearings open… especially the empty ones. Was there something under the surface that got close at certain points, and made the ground too thin to support something like a tree as big around as a Pelican? Considering the one that had swallowed Flint, that was rather likely.

I pouted meaningfully at the clearing; no matter where my muddied brains went, somehow I always managed to come back around to him. After leaving the asteroid, he'd been really all I had for company anymore. Still… this was making it difficult to get over it at least for long enough to get something useful done.

Like finding where we'd hidden our sloop.

"Any idea which direction the mountains would be, from here?" I asked, eventually. Hell… if we ran into more enemy between here and there, I was game for that. Shooting made me feel better. Shooting and killing gave me something to focus on that was almost as traumatic but with less of an emotional investment.

"I am unsure. There are a number of mountain ranges on this continent."

Great.

"To which did you intend to travel?"

I cast the lout an unappreciative look, but I have no idea if he caught it. "Never mind… which one is closest?"

Immediately, he turned partway and pointed past me. Across the clearing? Had I made some kind of demented half-moon arc through the woods? Boy… go far enough on my original track and I'd find mountains sure enough. But then I'd be confused as to which way to go from there. Not to mention, the memory of needing a whole lot of help just to get down the rocky slide into the trees nagged.

Man, I hate open spaces…

But with a sigh, I turned that direction and began to walk. Right as I did, I felt the ground stir lightly, and I paused. "… what was…" I didn't get to say "that" before the Elite reached out and snatched me by my shoulder and yanked me back so fast I stumbled off my balance and knocked right into him.

He wasn't holding still, though, rather being in full and hasty retreat. I kicked to get traction, and once I had it, I twisted free in time to knock my other shoulder into a tree and drop myself to my knees involuntarily. I can pretend to be klutzy with the best of them, after all. But I turned around once I stood back up, and I saw the place had grown several rusty spires, and coming out the top of said spires were more droids. All of them – and there were a lot – arched down and came buzzing after me, so I turned and made tracks.

I'd have been standing in the middle of that mess like a stupid idiot if Anuna hadn't gotten my attention off my own woes… but even still, as I ran I noticed I couldn't see the Elite anywhere. A glance at my motion tracker donut had me angling hard to the right, steering around a dozen trees in a zigzag pattern to catch up to him again. He got behind another tree from me, and when I came around it after him, I found he'd drawn up to a sudden stop back there.

He turned out from ahead of me so I didn't plow right into him, sticking his plasma rifle into the air and firing off several plasma rounds in my defense. I heard something mechanical smash and explode on itself, so when I hit the roots of the next tree up I turned around and shouldered my MA.

That was when I realized what the bulb-shaped part of the machines were for. The fifth one back peeled itself open like an onion and sprouted a shoot that was less than savory looking. When the first round shunted out of it, it headed up with a pair of spiraling flanges trailing blue smoke after it. The munition was about as big around as my hand, and it screamed like a woman being murdered brutally as it sailed in an arc through the air over my head.

I had just enough time to duck when it blew the top right out of the tree I'd been against a moment before, and instantly there were massive amounts of timber coming down to get me. I wasn't sure which way to go to avoid being speared to the ground by all the crashing limbs, so I feinted in a few directions before choosing finally and making a run for it.

"Stop! Stop! Not that way!"

I don't know why he bothered to speak at all, but I was grateful nonetheless when I felt an arm coil around my middle and yank me back, right out from under the shattered butt-end of a branch as big around as I was and some thirty thousand times as long.

I was rolled out of the Elite's grasp headed in a new direction through the falling timbers, and given a push to speed me on my way.

Okay, so maybe not having killed him earlier wasn't such a bad mistake on my part.

.

ANUNA-02

Running under a barrage of artillery was not something I had done since before the Schism, and at the time, it had been even before my ascension to Honor Guardianship. I had been quite the young, brash warrior then. Now, I was disgraced, shamed and desperate just to find and challenge my tormentor just once before I met my dishonorable end. I wanted to be remembered as the hapless fellow who went to investigate an anomaly and vanished within it, never to be seen again.

I did not want to be remembered as the savage animal the Machine had reduced me to. Hopefully the depth of my actions at its command thus far would not leave a terrible mark across the stars in the receding path of this human Demon.

She was such a spry little thing, so nimble. Given just enough time to process what the environment looked like, what was happening to what extent in what place, and where her assailants were, and which direction they were headed at the immediate moment… alright, so that is a lot of information. However, it is not all that much to ask, given that it does not involve hoarded intel that any given enemy force might not want the target to have.

Allow me to summarize… given enough time to grasp the full situation, she was highly unlikely to run afoul of much. I had needed to redirect her initial flight path, yes. But I got the feeling as I followed her through the crashing tree top that it had been an instinctual, un-judged dart to avoid an immediate death in favor of a not-so-immediate one.

That I had had enough time to correct her, and not join her, was a minor miracle. But that she knew where to be and where not to be at any given time once past that point was like watching poetry in motion. I was at a heightened state of alert, and yet still sluggish and feeling affronted that I was being left behind when I needed to be high as a kite on adrenalin, and yet even I, in my augmented, shamed state, could not keep up with her dancing steps.

I felt a falling branch clip me across the back, and surely it would have torn all the muscle from my bones had I not had the armor I now wore on. Even still, I felt the metal sheathing tug mightily on my frame, and I heard the scream of the stuff tearing, and I knew I had been given a nasty gouge across the backplate. I felt the bullet the human soldier from before had given me begin to itch, but it was a minor note of self-awareness amid a thrashing storm of streaming data. My brain was running fast enough to process it all, but I knew if it got any faster, I would be quite dead quite soon.

And right when I thought that I had covered a hundred miles and still was not near the edge of that collapsing tree, we broke the edge and surged out across open, uncontested air through the trunks of trees nonplussed by their neighbor's demise.

Oh… perhaps not demise. But it was quite the trim! Things like plants are hard to kill by merely chopping their tops out. One must do better than that… uprooting usually does the trick, though not always. Ahead, I saw the human female strike three steps up a trunk, spin over herself in mid-air, and then land braced facing back the way we had come. She had her rifle in her hands again, and was waiting, I suppose, for any of the robots to come over or through the settling branches. None did while I had my back turned, but I slowed us to a stop and turned around without running upwards across a tree trunk first. As such, I was a little off my guard when the Machine tore me off the control and pushed me into the back again.

My protests went unheeded, and I felt like I was clawing at a steel plate some foot or so thick, fighting against that punishment. What had I done? Why was I being tormented like this? Surely there was no reason! The Machine analyzed the data around the cropped tree top resting upside down on the forest floor, wedged up inside of a circle of its own trunk and some seven others. Some of the branches were still shaking, though much of that had stilled.

Behind us, I could hear other noises, but just as the Machine turned us around, we all three heard that wail of absolute, high-pitched agony. "Move, move!" The Demon issued, turning and leaping back into a fleeing run. The Machine followed her, obediently, but I was focused on listening to that other set of sounds, somewhere out ahead of us now. Since the falling artillery round was not my problem – if it killed us then it would not have been my fault – I could commit full brainpower to it.

I caught myself smiling… brothers!

But the feeling dimmed considerably. Surely they would recognize my shamed state at once and would cut me down out of a sense mercy, and then I would never be able to return to the Machine's core and destroy it. While having no especial wont to remain alive like this, I also did not feel quite ready to let go. I wanted my revenge, first. But the Machine was in control, and we pounded along out from under the next exploding, crashing tree that was shredding as it came down, bouncing from trunk to trunk as it fell. I could not make it listen when it thought it knew best, and I could only really effect what it did if it needed information out of me. Such as the use of the DER the Demon had foolishly given us.

Sure enough, as soon as the noble warriors came into our view, the Machine aimed and fired. Amid the immediate heyday of a swarm of the disk-shaped robots attacking, there was little time to notice. Their team had scattered and were hopping about through the trees using the trunks as temporary cover. It pained me to see them go down under robot fire, but it was worse when I watched my own hand extend and depress the firing stud on the DER I held. I slew one, and then a robot, and while I was firing on the robot, I saw several of the Elites cast me glances – myself, I noted, as well as my Demon companion.

She, too, was shooting down robots. When the immediate threat of the particular looming robot was gone, the Machine cut down two more of my unfortunate, unsuspecting brethren, sickening me to the core of my soul. I could not stop it, and I could not fight it for the controls. I was blocked out of motor function, denied all but the visual feed from our eyes… I was forced to watch, a silently screaming witness whom no one knew was there.

The Machine would never allow me to tell of its presence… nor would it allow that anyone knew what it had done to me. When the last robot fell to the ground, disabled and useless, there remained only one living warrior to stand from cover and turn to look my way. I saw him open his mandibles in formation of a word, and I even heard the first phonetic sound escape him. Barely had it, before the Machine shot him in the head, the plasma vaporizing a gaping wound through his long skull and killing him instantly.

Satisfied there were no more 'threats', the Machine lowered our DER, and looked around for the Demon. I hoped she was far from here, but when she appeared anyway, I felt heartened for it. I did not want to be alone, trapped inside my own body with the likes of this Machine. I did not need her to be in danger needlessly, least of all from my own treacherous hands, yet I also did not want to have to face this travesty by myself.

I was… weak.

I saw her look at the carnage, saw her nudge a few of the warriors with a boot, but though I knew she saw plasma wounds on several of them, she did not turn to me, and did not comment about it. She just turned past me and walked, heading for the general direction the Machine had pointed earlier that would take her to the mountains. As I curled in the back of my own mind and tried not to look out anymore, I felt the Machine turn us around, and set off after her, following as always.

I would either become very broken and useless before this was over, or very bitter and savage… I hoped it was the latter, as that would better enable me to destroy the honorless cur before I took my own breath.

The line of reasoning helped to stabilize my condition, and I knew that I just might get my wish. I was devastated, yes… but I had something to live for. Something I would not mind dying for.

I am stronger than the Machine gives me credit for.

.

FLINT-093

I had gotten so badly turned around in my retreat that I knew for damn sure (without even needing to ask) that I was most definitely not alone in the woods anymore. And I was less certain that the rifles going off had anything at all to do with Tori. You might say that one thing that clued me in was the soft rattling burp of an SMG… or, rather, several of them.

Tori was not equipped with one of those, nor was she with anything standard issue other than the magnum. Our MA6C battle rifles were specially crafted by this one tech back at Command HQ that I had talked to, and no Marine ever born would be brave enough to pick one up and try to shoot it. The caliber is normal enough for standard battle gear, but the gun itself is unreasonably heavy and ridiculously long and deep for a standard sized human guy to heft around.

It'd be a little like giving the smallest kid in the squad the SAW and expecting him to be able to shoot the damn thing… the gun would knock him flat on his ass after the fourth round was out. Said fourth round would also likely have been aimed sky-high, at that.

So being a bigger gun, made for a bigger guy (points at self), it tends to pack a bit more of a punch than standard issue. It also does not sound one bit like the standard issue MA series I had been using, before I'd gotten to talk to said tech; the MA5B. They were great guns, had more focus and more punch than the assault rifles we'd been given before the MA series came out, but I had always been frustrated with their stubbiness compared to my arms.

Which is why I really, really like that guy I'd talked to back at CHQ… great guy. Hope he gets a medal or something.

So that was mainly how I knew what I was hearing was not Tori being liberal. Rather, it sounded more like a shitload of guys, all shooting off at once… under the staccato of saucer-droids firing back, of course. There really is no bullet going to drown out the sound of a thirty-millimeter round going off. I trotted quickly up through the forest towards the sound until it had nearly quieted, and all I had to let myself know that the fight had been more than my imagination was the lingering echoes.

Reaching the site, the first thing I saw was my arc-puncher letting me know it was still online. I turned to see who was shooting at me, but I could tell by the backspray the rounds got turned into that it wasn't a saucer doing it.

"Hey." I protested, doing my level best to sound casual about it. The Marine looked harried, but he did lift his cheek off his gun and give me a puzzled look.

"Who's that?" He asked me.

I contemplated how to answer, since I had no idea how to get back out of the armor I had on in order to prove to him that I was, in fact, as Human as I claimed to be. Shrugging, I went with normal formal; "Spartan zero-nine-three, Chief Petty Officer. Any of your buddies left?"

He gave me an absolutely priceless look. "Mjolnir armor looks like that?"

I couldn't help it… I laughed at him. "This isn't Mjolnir."

He spared a hand to scratch his scalp, tipping up his helmet in the process. "Oh."

"You alone?" I asked, again.

"No… or I wasn't fifteen seconds ago." He answered, half-turning to glance back through the mulched ferns. For their lack, the sightlines were better, but the trees, debarked as they had been, were no less transparent as they'd been before the firefight. "Gibbs? You still out there?"

A voice from the trees off to my right answered back, "Gibbs is down… that you, Hannady?"

"Yeah… guys, we got some backup."

"From where?" I saw another fellow pass between two of the trees some three trees back, picking his way across the heaps of mangled machinery and tangled fern leaves, tripping up a little on a head-sized bit of tree bark. He paused when he caught sight of me, though, and I saw him quirk an eyebrow. "Hannady, what the hell is that thing?"

I cast Hannady a look. "Does it really look that bad?"

He just laughed. "Yeah, kinda."

"Damn…" Sure was useful, though, even if it was ugly. I made a mental note to see if I couldn't find something to get a good reflection of myself out of before I wound up destroying this thing… I wanted rather badly to know what I looked like, as I really honestly had no clue. Being shot at straight off the introductory by a Marine only doubled that itch.

The others soon gathered in, though, and I saw several of them were splashed with comrade's blood. None were injured – I figured that if any were, though, they'd have died of the wounds soon after infliction. Still, out of any kind of given military grouping, that still left me with about four guys.

And you do not send a measly fire team into a hot zone like this one. I sighed. "Any of you boys seen one-three-eight around?"

Hannady took a guess; "He another Spartan? Is he in Mjolnir?"

I pondered that for a moment, then wondered if it were possible to change the radio channel in my helmet or not. "Yeah, should be." Tori would be tickled to be referred to as a guy, though. Honestly, it wouldn't be the first time. I never understood the blind spot, but a lot of standard UNSC personnel have difficulty telling if a battle-dressed Spartan is a girl or not.

I always could… but then, I'd known the lot of them since before Mjolnir got developed, so that might be a bias of mine. I don't know.

Heads shook all around. I grumbled to myself for a moment, annoyed. "How'd you lot get here, anyway?"

"Caught a ride on a Pelican, down out of the UNSC Tickets For Two, sir." Hannady answered. "I saw a report saying you and your… missing?… friend were supposed to have arrived here two days ago."

I balked. "Two days? It's only been a few hours!" And me without a mission clock to be able to confirm… now, I can estimate, and I can get real close. But even I am not immune to disorientation. I can get all confused almost as easily as the next guy. But still… being told that I'd been aground for two whole days just felt all kinds of wrong. For one thing, unless both sunsets had happened while I was down in the starship, and time had slowed to a crawl for me while continuing on as normal aboveground, that certainly could not possibly be the case.

But then… this whole freakish planet was one giant slipspace engine, so there's that.

"When did you arrive, then, Chief?" Hannady asked.

I could only shake my head. "I don't know… it's been a hell of a day since we got down, but… I really doubt it's been two days."

The Marines seemed to confer about that. Nobody seemed to have any kind of real helpful commentary, though. Hannady soon looked back at me.

It was good enough timing for me, though – I had a couple of questions. "I've been hearing a whole lot of shooting wars going on ever since I got back topside… is that mess you guys, stirring things up with those droids?"

"Some of it is." Hannady told me. "We got reports of Brutes in the area, and we've found some of their bodies. No live ones. The Elites are also here, they arrived almost an hour after we did. Might see some of their guys running around, shooting down saucers."

I frowned. "I was told there was no one in the area, which is why I got sent here in the first place."

"You were." Hannady argued. "Like I said, it's been two damn days!"

I waved a hand at him. "Calm down, calm down. This isn't making any sense." And really, it wasn't… there are certain nuances to being mortal that simply cannot pause for that long. Being sleep deprived and a little hungry, for one thing… needing to piss, for another. But if the planet was being weird about its timeframe, that didn't seem too far fetched considering what all else I had learned thus far.

If it was a slipspace assembly that somehow attracted people to come and crash some of their technology onto the surface, thus making a kind of half-broken-up collection of eons of stuff… I suppose I could believe that, too. Which might, in turn, explain why there was a war going on between the two kinds of robot. They'd been collected here, and had never really liked one another.

But that's a question for the monitor I'd found, and I nolonger had the connection to that place. So scratch that. Right then, I had better things to do with my time. Like… find Tori, and make sure she wasn't going to make some stupid mistake with a whole hell of a lot too much ordinance on a pair of relatively thin, flimsy doors.

Doors I was nolonger trapped on the other side of, too.

Okay, so it wasn't much of a plan. But my first gut instinct about this place remained. So I decided to see about making it come into play; the whole time-continuum thing only made it worse.

Looking at Hannady, I said, "You call for evac and get the hell off the surface. Try not to fall into orbit, either. See about getting your Captain to tell the Elites to do the same. I'm going to go find one-three-eight, and as soon as I do, we'll join you. Got that?"

"Sounds like a plan… even if you're not who you say you are… sir." Hannady ventured.

"At least there's that." I grumbled at him, before turning and marching off in a new direction. On my way out, I heard him saying agreeable things into the radio, so I felt better about myself just a little. Even if I looked like a two-legged droid, he couldn't deny I had some good sense.

.

TORI-138

In the span of about fifteen minutes I found myself in the middle of a rash of fighting all over again. It wasn't hard – fights were springing up all over the damn place now we had company. Saucers and teardrops alike were charging in full-speed to challenge these invaders. We found great swaths of dead, long, sometimes burning heaps of wreckage, and on occasion, one or two still living or operational.

Anuna shot at them all.

I was beginning to think his little plasma rifle would never run out of ammunition when I finally caught him dropping the damn thing (god only knows if it was the first time or not) and picking up a new one off someone else's body.

For the ones too far gone to be helped, I couldn't really complain. But I knew I was only condoning a bad habit of his and I half wondered if he hadn't been sentenced to this world as punishment for just that. He'd shoot at anything, and he usually killed it. When we ran into the backside of another fight, this one over some dead Brutes but currently entertaining several Elites and some Marines who were trying really hard to help out, I felt half inclined to walk the other way.

More because Anuna follows me, than because I felt my aid wouldn't merit much. In fact, quite the opposite was true. I had gotten really good at taking droids down out of the air. But the fact of the matter remained, I was the only thing Anuna would not shoot at, or try to maim or otherwise kill. And he, conversely, was all I had to point me in the right direction. I have no sense for direction, and what with everything looking painfully alike in a forest like this one, there was no way I'd ever live long enough to find my own way out of it.

But with the rate of war building up, and our company growing in assault size, I knew that that tactic would not last me very long. I actually got to see a pair of Pelicans drop into one of the clearings, and they picked up everybody. Elites, humans. All jumped aboard and were whisked away, bleeding ammunition out the backs and filling the blood trays with brass. That was good… they didn't need to be here and I was glad to see them smart enough to be leaving. But I still couldn't find the damn mountains, nor the sloop Flint had parked in them, and I knew I did not want to sit on this world until nightfall.

God only knows what happens here after the sun goes down!

It had begun to get dim between the trees, so I knew I didn't have a whole lot of time left for that thought. Still, it wasn't dusk quite yet and there remained a few hours left to get to the sloop and get the hell out of here. I was still debating on what to do with Anuna once I got that far – to the sloop, I mean – because taking him to places where he might prove a hazard to others just didn't seem fair to those others.

Droids were everywhere, now, though, and we both would shoot as we moved, sometimes walking, sometimes trotting. Where before they had been sporadic, and were more liable to pounce with surprise, now they simply filled the forest, and were busily making all kinds of fresh scars on the trees that Flint and I had seen coming in.

Poor trees. They really did deserve a kinder ecosystem than this.

I didn't get to see the clearing up ahead until I had plunged right into it, but while I could see droids zipping by through the trees across the depth of it, none paused to consider us. I looked around once, rather expecting to see some familiar things, but I saw nothing I recognized from any earlier encounter. Indeed, if I ever saw the same clearing twice, it would entirely be the fault of my genocidal guide, and none of my own. He hesitated at the edge, but followed me out across the mossy, open ground anyway.

"I don't suppose you know what the hell is going on, huh?" I ventured.

"It's always been this way." Anuna answered, seeming entirely nonchalant. I wondered at his answer, and at his tone, but I wasn't sure what to make of it… surely the Brutes, Elites, and the UNSC didn't always fight over this planet against a pair of equally self-hostile droid models, did they? Maybe he wasn't talking about us meatbags, though. It had actually looked like the droids fought continuously when we'd started arriving.

I stepped briskly across the cleared area, wondering if there was another dissolution reservoir underneath me. "What's under this clearing?"

"Likely another extension of the Mass Transmitter."

I gave a mental hiccup. That rather made it sound like he'd been here a while. Surely the Elite cruiser shot down over this place had not been here to pick him up! What were the odds of someone getting a cry for evac out with a war like this going on? Especially given that he'd not had a gun when I'd found him! I paused my walk, and turned to see him fully. "What's a Mass Transmitter?"

"It was used in place of slipspace technology to transport starships between relay points, much in the same way matter streams were used to transport individuals and items from planetary surfaces into orbital stations during the same era." Anuna answered, giving me a blank look. Weird. He sounded a little like a dumb AI, prattling off data as if I'd asked that kind of question.

I frowned at him for several long moments, trying to figure out what was going on behind those black eyes embedded in his head. At times he seemed almost human, and then he'd be alien to me, but in an understandably organic way. And then there were times like now… times when he seemed robotic in nature, as if his brain were filled with transmitters, chips and wires, rather than synapses. I almost wanted to suspect he was one of the robots, parading around as a fleshy thing just to see if he could get away with it.

The sad truth was, though… I did not know him from any point in the past, and thus could not justifiably conjure any way to catch him in a lie. Nor could I ask him anything relevant to make him need to lie. I was stuck with baseless suspicions. Hell, for all I know, this is just exactly why I never really heard any stories about him from Flint – there's nothing worth the tell!

But yeesh… if this is what all Elites are like…

I turned back around, shaking my head and feeling at a loss, and made my way to the next treeline where I could go through and hope to find some rocks. It was a big flatland, covered in huge trees, but I was sick of it already. I missed the hilly, cliffs-and-bluffs terrain of the world where I'd met Andy.

Man… I even missed Andy, and I didn't know him, either!

I got into the trees again, and stepped softly for a while to tell where all the noise I was hearing was coming from. Gauging point of origin is not hard, if there is little enough echoing going on. Despite the kind of forest I was in, there was surprisingly little echo. Only certain sounds would resonate.

Which was odd.

But under the annoying buzzing whine of the saucer-droids, and past the soft bleating hum of the teardrop droids, and through the staccato rattle of distant Marine counter-fire, I could hear something else. Something I found a little odd. There was a tiny bit of Phantom heartbeat, and some throbbing Pelican engine noise thrown in there, as well as the occasional screaming or what-have-you. But this noise was new. I did not have a category for it.

It went kind of like this;

Tump-tump-tump-tump-WHAM-tump-tump-tump-tump-WHAM.

Like I said… I have no idea what that was.

Until I saw it.

.

ANUNA-02

I felt our head turn, and I heard a strange new sound. The sound of soil compacting suddenly and forcefully under something very heavy. The sound of bark splintering brutally under glancing, forceful impact. So I let myself look, let myself see again through the Machine's glancing look.

I did not understand what I was seeing when I saw it first, although despite the oddness of the articulating armor plating the first thing to pop to mind was human. The Machine, however, took great exception to the sight of the forbidding gray exoskeletal armor. Flashes of alarm and panic raced down through my mind, but they were not mine. Here was something the Machine had not seen nor needed to deal with in a long time, and it had thought that fight done with.

It had a name for them, but while it was hopelessly alien to me, it sounded painfully similar to my own old allegiance – Covenant. Whatever had worn that armor had been a member of a multi-race pact, and some of them had come here at some point in the distant past and made a large scar on the world doing it. Large enough, in fact, to shiver my otherwise unshakeable Machine captor.

I smiled at it, cheering it on as it came closer.

And closer.

And… wait.

I recognized that shape. I recognized that stance. I even recognized that motion. No Human could ever quite make a suitable mockery of that memory I had, no one but the original. Yes! Haha! I have no idea where he had gotten the luck to get that outfit, but it looked better than what I had on.

The Machine was so back on its heels that it did not have the processes in place to stop me when I cheered aloud, lurching forward in joyous greeting. "Zelis!"

The approaching form slammed to a dead halt before us, and its gaze swung to me. "Huh?" Came out.

I recognized the voice, too. Ha! I was good enough to know my old friend when I saw him, even when he wore a cunning disguise. "Zelis!" I said, again, feeling just a tad less jovial now the shock of recognition was past. "You live!"

"To my knowledge, the last time anyone mistook me for anything less was back when G'wi was still wearing bright, obvious, shoot-me yellow." He answered, sounding demure. Casting a glance over at the female Demon, he added, "Tori?" Well! He was certainly the same old 'Zelis I had always known… permanently sarcastic, with a touch of pessimism on the side.

Oh… I had not thought to ask what her name was. I too looked over at her, to find she seemed to go from puzzled and confused to blankly shocked. It is hard to gauge expression through such concealing outfits as the Demon creed wear, but after a while, it is easy enough to recognize. She stammered for a moment, obviously caught off her guard.

"Well, at least we're all here." 'Zelis decided. "It's time to go. I told the others to retreat, and hopefully they'll listen if they're smart."

"… Flint?" Tori asked.

"What?" He answered.

I looked from one to the other, the Machine slowly recovering its wits and deciding what to do. Evidently, it had decided that my reaction meant that 'Zelis was an ally, and it was processing this with much relief that I did not fully understand. If half of what it was considering about him were true, though, then I wanted very, very badly just to blurt to him my issues, and have him assist me with the correcting of it all.

Surely, surely, he would be able to assist, if the Machine so feared what he wore!

"He told me you dropped into a dissolution reservoir, and that you'd died." The female said.

Ouch… I hate moments of truth like this, especially when it was not I who caused the terrible lie to emit from my mouth.

I got a ponderous-seeming look from 'Zelis, but he just looked back at Tori and shrugged. "Well, it dissolved my armor, but it didn't do anything to me."

For the longest moment I thought I might see the female throw herself at him… to embrace? Who knows. But ultimately she relaxed her stance to straighten from her forward-leaning inclinations, and did not move from where she stood. I had a distinct feeling that my presence was what changed her decisions, but I was a little disappointed. I had questions, and I did not feel permissibly situated to ask them.

Still… if grumpy old 'Zelis had found himself a mate… that was almost as relieving as it was hilarious. I would have wanted to tell G'wi about it had I not been so focused upon the relief of my own shame. I did not necessarily expect to survive it, and therefore could spread no humor to anyone.

I was about to ask a query regarding 'Zelis's plans to depart, and pondering how to lure him instead back to the place of my imprisonment, augmentation, and subsequent shame, when the thunderous background noise came up to greet us all from 'Zelis's left flank.

Through the trees rushed a harried human, ducking large rounds from a disk-shaped robot, and before I could twitch to resist, the Machine had yanked the motor functions of my body from me and shoved me down, bringing up our DER and blasting both man and machine to smaller, more manageable bits. The Machine did not have time to compensate when I saw 'Zelis take major exception to that action, however, even when Tori leapt between us and I landed on the ferns alone.

"Stop!" She screamed, shoving him back. It took massive effort, I saw… interesting. I felt almost like a mockery of my Machine counterpart, then, eager to absorb information on 'Zelisee's armor in much the same way the Machine had been, to absorb information about myself and the female Demon.

'Zelis was not to be easily dissuaded, though, and I saw him shove her aside effortlessly, but with enough power to stagger her. "He killed that Marine, Tori."

She returned from his push, and shoved him back anyway. "Maybe he missed! He's your friend!"

The Machine sat us up, and gathered our legs beneath us to rise. I could feel the withering properties of 'Zelisee's glare on our skin, and I wanted to bow my head in shame… but the Machine only lifted it for me, seeming arrogant and challenging, daring the legendary warrior to fight us. It did not understand the merit behind why I called him 'Zelis, and Tori called him Flint. There was a reason my people had given him a warrior's name. Why I had given him a warrior's name…

"Anuna does not miss." I heard him say. Oh! How flattering a thing to proclaim over one he wanted so badly to smite down for that sin. I felt warmed inside, to know he thought so well of me, despite the situation that had caused such a comment to spring from him.

In a bold display of disrespect and callous accusation, I saw the female stab a finger at 'Zelis. "He's saved my skin twice over just since I found him, and he's kept me from getting hopelessly lost. I'm not going to stand here and just watch while you turn him to mulch!"

Ouch, a spitfire female indeed! Perhaps there are facets to the legendary 'Zelis that I had not been privy to… heh… indeed, rare are the warriors who choose females for themselves that (can or cannot immaterial) are willing to try to kick their asses. If 'Zelis was just such a warrior… I would never have guessed it!

I saw him studying her, as if warring within himself for a way to get around her without pushing her away. I wished he would just get it overwith… the Machine was antsy, and felt certain my initial greeting had been a ploy to disarm it so that 'Zelis would get close enough to kill us. At any moment, it was going to tear loose, and then I would be forced to fight a good friend to the death… perhaps for little more merit than the amusement of the Machine that held me captive.

I saw his broad shoulders sink just a little. "I can't let this slide, Tori."

She clutched her human rifle as if she meant to aim it at him and shoot it, all fired up and willing to argue until she ran out of breath.

The Machine hesitated… an external defender? Would it be made to watch these two combat, before ever being asked to participate? Personally, I hoped not. They seemed a decent pair, even if there seemed to be some tension between them. 'Zelis had strange tastes, but a female would do him good. This particular female seemed right up his alley in some ways… he hated useless people and having a mate as capable of war as he seemed appropriate. How in the world he had convinced her to fight at his side at all was a conversation I had missed… and would very much like to hear reiterated, some day! Obviously, it had not been convincing enough… she looked almost willing to slay him on the spot for an affront against me that he had yet to commit.

Or perhaps that had been half the point. Someone to keep him in line.

But had I been able, I would have sided with 'Zelis. I wanted him to kill me! I wanted him to kill the Machine, and I needed his friendship to grant me that reprieve. I needed this to end. Of all that I had known in the past, 'Zelisee was the lone soul whom I believed capable of delivery.

The argument seemed in slow-motion, but it went back and forth and back and forth several times over before finally, the female drew herself up, and made her case. "If you kill him… I will never forgive you."

'Zelis's response was both damning and heartening at once. "Some things cannot be helped."

I felt my hearts wrench in sympathetic pity for him when she turned on a heel and walked away from him… this would be a hard match for him to win. Not because of my augmentations, or because the Machine would be getting any kind of military combat aid out of me… but because his mate had turned her back on him because of this. I wanted badly more now than ever before to be able to scream it out, confess my shame, to reconcile them, and make her understand. 'Zelisee saw it. He understood, perhaps better than he realized. But why could not she too?

The Machine didn't wait. At the precise instant that it deemed its external defensive perimeter gone, it coiled us and launched in attack at 'Zelisee. I did not want to attack him so outright… but at least I would at last be able to see this to its grisly end and be done with it. If there was one thing I believed with all my hearts, it was that nothing, not even this evil, shameless Machine, could ever bring him down.

.

FLINT-093

Tori was a mess I knew I'd never figure out. But I swear, I thought I'd known who and what Anuna was. What got me was not the fact that he had murdered the Marine right in front of me, nor that Tori had defended him… or the somewhat hurtful part where she'd declared she'd always hold it against me forevermore if I won the fight I was about to pick…

It was the part where I hadn't gotten to so much as finish watching her stalk off. Anuna hit me like nine tons of bricks, attacking blatantly and savagely. I recognized none of his former particulars, none of the typical Elite mannerisms used during hand-to-hand combat sessions.

There was no background itch for the lack of an energy sword in his grasp, which I had found was true for almost every Elite I had seen fight. Crafted of energy or not, really, they really do love their knives.

There had been days when I had felt more kinship with the splitlips than with my fellow man, and yet there was nothing familiar about the creature I now tangled with. He was alien all over again. Perhaps there was something I had missed, some bit of his recent history between Delta Halo and now that had changed him, embittered him.

Made him mad at me?

We struck ground at the bottom of the starting arc and he started hammering my exo-plating with both fists as if he had some personal vendetta to satisfy against my personal self. I don't recall ever making him mad, least of all that mad. But his mandibles had crooked into that signature Elite snarl, and I knew I was in for more than a dance of wits.

He wanted to tear me apart… and he wasn't above cheating to do it. That alone made him all the more alien to me. What had happened to the guy?

I got an elbow between us and knocked him in the base of the jaw, sending his balance on me wide enough to lift him off and kick him aside. I was not about to be pounded into a shallow grave (more due to the soil qualities than because he was being particularly lethal right now) without first being deceased. He was barely off before he rebounded and came back to me, knocking a big face-sized fist off my visor and sending an alarming split snapping across from one side to the next.

My HUD didn't flicker, didn't even blink, but while I was not concerned about atmospheric pressure, that impact was still alarming. It had lifted my chin a little, but the nature of the armor I wore kept it from snapping my neck. I balanced into a brace and hit low, pounding my right into where I hoped the Elites kept their kidneys, sending my less-than-optimal left upwards to thread aside his own attacking strike.

He didn't even flinch. Damn, no kidneys.

Anuna got around my threading left and socked me center-of-mass, causing both sides of that fist to get arc-punched to hell and gone. He recoiled, howling, but he left himself wide open so I brought both fists up fast and hard (and hopefully a little accelerated) under his head aimed at his throat. Somehow, he snapped out of the way and I clipped the underside of his mouth instead, shattering out the teeth he had there. I felt the very end of his skull cave slightly, but honestly, it truly felt more like a bend than a break.

Like I had struck my fist into a metal plate.

When he turned back to respond to that, he had an upturned snout look on him, and when he reeled back the flesh on his face to snarl at me again, it made it look all the worse. But nothing about it resembled a broken face in the least.

What the hell.

We traded hard blows for several long seconds, him hitting me and me hitting him, and sometimes blocking one another, until he managed to catch a square strike that actually landed and earned me a satisfyingly choked sound out of him. Once he had me by that arm, though, he just braced his other under that elbow and lifted. I knew he was aiming for a tree trunk with me, but I brought up my legs anyway and curled my spine so I planted both boots in his chest with as much power as I had to offer, braced against his grasp on my arm.

When I came free, I tumbled once over my own head, and somehow got back balanced on my feet again. I suspected the suit was at fault for that, because barely had I gotten upright than Anuna was on me again, knocking me back and away into the ferns. He smashed his fist into my faceplate again, and the first crack branched. So I stuck my fist into his face again, jerking his head back and up. When he brought it back down – which I was counting on – I stuck my other fist across the side where his eye socket was, and slugged him right off the top of me.

Again… felt him bend. Dented, like metal.

I stuck a knee out and got rolled mostly upright before he came back, so I rolled my shoulders to bring my guns up, and closed my fists to fire them. Ammunition seared into him at point-blank, tossing him back and slamming him into a tree. I admit it rather hurt to see him like this… Anuna had been good to me. Needing to put him down was harsh.

Having to make a concerted effort in order to do so was beginning to wear on me. Why he'd turned on me like he had, I felt I would never know. But after today… I almost didn't care. Tori'd been her own brand of bother, but she'd kept me sane. And she could be… pleasant… when she tried. Anuna had called me brother once. Both had turned on me.

He didn't even have the excuse of being a Flood-form… nor being bloody infected, like I was! He came back down off that tree like a thing possessed, and rammed into me with a mighty wallop that felt like it should have come off the leading end of a diving Phantom. He hit me hard, so hard that I felt it badly enough to be winded, even through my new armor. The arc-punch slapped him off of me, but I was still left gasping, and for it he got in a free slug. He looked bent up and burnt and I could tell I was shattering his own armor for him, but I hadn't had the time or ability to tell what he'd done to my own hide thus far.

I knew it couldn't be good.

I turned him halfway around with my next hit, spinning as much of the suit's do-it-for-me as I could into that hit. If I was going to win… shit, I hadn't realized Anuna was built like a damn dreadnaught!! I certainly felt outmatched, and I hadn't even been fighting him for longer than a minute and a half yet. I hammered him through the minute opening he offered, sloppily, and pounded him back for a brief respite. When he'd finally gotten enough shit pounded out of him to stagger back a step or two, I sent in the uppercut I'd been saving and knocked him on his ass with a galloping headache for his trouble.

I've never liked traitors… done worse to Innies in the past. But Anuna wasn't an Innie. And what he'd betrayed was not my chain of command. It was a lot closer to home than that. Hurting him was almost as hard as letting him get away with it.

.

TORI-138

I found the sloop.

I have no idea how.

But I found the sloop, and I got across the open expanse of rocky crags and tumbled boulders, and I made it to the hull and I got it open. Once inside, I damn near broke the hatchkey making it pull closed again. I knew I needed to be nicer to the equipment but I was in such a tizzy I couldn't think straight anymore.

How could it have come to this?

Flint was not wrong, and I knew he wasn't, but as much as I knew that I should have done what he was doing now a while back… it didn't help the way I felt. I had, I suppose, allowed the splitlip to endear himself to me. Save my ass from certain death a couple times and that'd happen for anyone, but this was just a little different.

Anuna was a strange cookie, and certainly a hard soul to like. But in the end, I had known he'd been there for Flint when he in turn had needed backup. Had needed a friend. Had been unable to pick himself up. He'd done no less for me, and I had been gracious enough about it to only fuss, and not punish.

Flint was not as forgiving as I had come to assume… perhaps it was just me? Had I somehow earned some version of favor to be treated marginally kinder than all else? All I knew right then was how much I'd just wounded my own self. What quality my abandonment had had on Flint… I don't know. Likely, if I ever saw him again, he would never tell me.

Flint doesn't tell stories.

But I had been on an emotional rollercoaster for a long time, and I was officially exhausted. Spending a while angry with him, then suffering his loss, and believing him dead and gone… and when he turned back up again only to need to fight anew when all I had wanted to do was wrap myself around him and never let go…

It was just too much.

Initially I had planned to fire up the bird and fly away and never look back.

What actually happened was I hit the rack and collapsed there, up to my neck in my armor and my helmet rolling upside down across the floor, my face tucked into the cold, unforgiving steel around my arms.

I fought back the tears until I felt a soft weight strike the small of my back, and settle there. When I heard the sympathetic purr, I could bear it no more.

Even if I did see him again… the odds of him forgiving me were dismal.

And I had done it to myself.