Sorry for the long wait! I've been sick in bed with a fever since Tuesday afternoon, and what with Thanksgiving, which honestly shouldn't be a holiday, I've been occupied otherwise. Regardless, here's a fresh new chapter for all to read!

Have a good one, Wolfgang!

~Husky

"Our shields are running low. If we keep taking constant fire like this, we'll be wide open for anything that his the ship." Cortana announced. The ship rocked with blasts of plasma. From where he was sitting, Six could see a large mass of plasma roaring towards the bridge. It crashed against the silvery-white barrier that floated around the flagship, and the plasma spread over it like a thin layer of water before slowly fading in the vacuum of space.

"We're going to have to rely on "Hom" to honor her end of the deal." John said, clutching his shoulder. Something about the self-proclaimed prophet of the Enclave was shady, to say the least. The deal was sudden. Call him paranoid, but he had learned to follow his gut feeling over the years. He didn't trust her at all. He looked out to the cruisers outside.

"Polaski, how is Clancy doing?" Six asked, standing up and walking over to his friend. His face looked pained, but he knew that the marine had experienced much worse in the past week. Still, Six was worried.

"He needs some patching up, that's for sure." Polaski said. "I'm no combat medic, but I don't think there's any fatal damage."

"I can't feel anything around this whole area on my chest. All of the pain is everywhere else." Clancy said, cringing. "...But I can still fight.

"Yeah, well, the hope is that we won't have to." Six replied, holding his left hand out to Clancy. The slash across his chest was dark red, both from singed blood and plasma burnt flesh. The sword slash had, obviously, torn through his standard issue ballistic armor like tissue paper. It wasn't deep, maybe just deep enough to have broken his skin, but the slash looked much worse than it probably was. Along with that, he had a massive bleeding cut on the back of his left forearm.

If Hom hadn't warned them, he realized that they could have been caught completely off guard. Someone could have died. Clancy could have died.

Clancy reached out to Six and pulled up, bringing himself to his feet.

"Now that we've survived that attack," Haverson said, I think that you owe us an explanation. About Hom."

Six shook his head and held his hand out. "Now is not the time, lieutenant. You know about as much as I-"

"Who are the Enclave?" He cut in. "ONI has no previous records of them that I know of, and you seem to know them pretty well. How?"

Six sighed heavily. Haverson was stepping on his every nerve with steel-toe boots, something that he was used to dealing with when talking to his betters. No matter what he said to this Lieutenant, nothing pleased him. It was pissing him off. Then again, maybe it was time to give an explanation.

"I don't know who the Enclave are. According to what Hom said, I would guess that they're some sort of... Insurrection. Rebels with cause to overthrow the Covenant and destroy them." Six replied. "Me and the Chief have encountered them before a few times, namely in Aszod, the Truth and Reconciliation and the Pillar of Autumn."

"Aszod?" Haverson asked, startled. "Those savages were on Reach?"

"Talk about this later, you two!" Cortana said. "Right now, we need to focus on getting out of here!"

"Right." Haverson said. He brushed off his uniform with a hand and lazily saluted Six, then walked over the abundant Covenant corpses to check on the others.

Six barely returned the salute, and rushed up the stairs to John. He had so many things on his mind at the moment, he found it hard to believe that his head was still placed on his shoulders correctly. He thought about how the Enclave weren't trustworthy allies. He worried about Clancy, John and the rest of the team's injuries. But above both of them, he couldn't wait to get revenge for his family. To avenge all of them.

Well, most of them. But he still couldn't trust what has saw on the Autumn. It just... didn't make sense to him.

"How are we doing over here?" Six asked.

"Cortana is trying to get this hunk of junk out of this sector as fast as she-" John said. He was cut off by an extremely large explosion. The ship's weak shields took most of the impact, but the ship rocked at least 45 degrees clockwise. John lost his balance and fell into the guard rail along with Six. Those down on the bridge floor tumbled and struggled to stay standing.

The flagship leveled itself. "Damn, we cant take another hit like that! Not with our shields!" Cortana said under her breath.

John rushed back to the display terminals, putting most of his weight into leaning on them. "Great."

"That doesn't sound good at all." Six said. He walked to John's side and looked at the display screen, prepared for the worst.

Four Covenant cruisers were targeting the flagship, and they were getting ready to fire payloads of plasma torpedoes directly into the bridge.

"Cortana, double time. We can not take many hits like that!" Six said.

"No good," Cortana said. "I can't overcome our inertia in this ship. They're going to hit us... unless... unless I can get us into Slipspace."

"Whatever it takes." Six said.

After a moment of musical warbling, the display screen flashed a deep red.

"Oh no." Cortana said.

The first plasma torpedo hit the bridge. The silver shields flickered, barley able to take the hit. Dull blue fire smeared across the bridge's enormous half-circle window. Again, the ship rocked hard.

"Oh no, what?" Haverson demanded.

"This ship's Slipspace generator is inert!" Cortana replied. "The disabled NAV controls were a trick. It must have been that AI, from back in the Engineer tunnels! I can maneuver all I want, give orders to the Slipspace generator, but without the system powered up we're not going anywhere."

"AI?" Haverson muttered, and raised an eyebrow. "The Covenant have access to artificial intelligence?"

"Upload the coordinates to power coupling." John said. "I'll take care of it."

"I'm coming with you." Six said, motioning his hand towards John's arm. "You can barely move that thing."

John looked to Six. His shields were flickering, refusing to recharge correctly. He looked weary, despite his great stature, and Six knew that the Spartan-II wanted nothing more than to rest. Ignoring his pain and his sore body's cries for a break, John nodded at Six. They had each other's backs.

One more plasma torpedo splashed against the shield, and the entire bridge shook violently. There was a light chirp below Six's feet, but before he had time to take notice of the familiar sound, another shot struck with just as much force. Six stumbled backwards and tripped on the top stair. He fell, rolling and hitting just about everything on the way down. He landed face down, and he tried to get up almost immediately. He had landed on the chest of a dead Sangheili.

"Six, are you okay?" John asked, coming down the stairs after him.

A sharp pain in his side stopped him. Six sucked in air as the intense feeling wracked his stomach. He rolled over and looked down to his midsection to find that his knife wound had re-opened, and blood was freely flowing out of the incision in his armor. As he slowly attempted to stand, the pain shot through him. He rested his head against the Sangheili's chest like a pillow. He tried one more to stand, this time with even more pain, but with the help of John and a few seconds to collect himself, he was back on his feet.

"Six, your armor is breached." Dave said. "You're bleeding."

"Keen eye, private. Tell me something that I don't know." Six replied.

"Energy shields collapsing!" Cortana said. "Brace!"

The last shot hit the flagship, and everyone inside, like a train. Various vapors shot from pipes all across the walls, and Six nearly fell over yet again. He could hear the fission and hissing of the torpedo's impact, and yet again he heard the noise; a loud, electronic chirp.

"Another hit like that will breach the hull." Cortana said. "Moving this tub at flank speed. Ill do whatever I can to keep another hit like that away from the bridge."

"The power coupling coordinates, Cortana." John insisted, making his way back up the stairs. "We have no other options."

"Those won't do you any good." Cortana told him. "There are bound to be Elite hunt-and-kill teams waiting for you. And even if you managed to remove them, there is no way to repair the power coupling in time. We don't have the tools or the expertise."

John sighed. Cortana was right. He and Six weren't complete technological geniuses, no matter how he cut it. Besides the fact that neither had knowledge of how to repair a Covenant ship's power couplings, they didn't have the firepower to get down - past what was sure to be even more Covenant than Cortana knew - and fix the damn things. He hit his hand against the console's sleek body and went deep into thought. They needed a plan.

Suddenly, quite gargly chirp echoed from under the bridge stairs.

The sound broke John's train of thought, and he peered over the railing to identify the sound. A small tentacle poked itself out from in-between a pair of individual stairs, and an Engineer inched its way out of the opening. Six walked up the stairs to the creature and crossed his arms.

The Engineer trembled with fear as it noticed the Spartans' presence. It didn't know that there were two. It had seen one, and the other, but, because of its strange form of sight, it simply didn't know that there were two. It squirmed with uncertainty and Six looked it up and down.

"Maybe we don't have the expertise," He said. "But this thing does. Can you communicate with it? Tell it what we need?"

"Well," Cortana replied. "There is an extensive communications suite in the Covenant lexic—"

"Just tell it that we're taking it to fix something important." John said.

"All right." Cortana said.

The speakers on the bridge hummed to life, the sharp crack of an open channel echoing all across the room. Several chirps and clicks came from the speakers, and then there was silence. The channel closed, and the Engineer calmed down a bit. It made two chirps and a click, then latched itself to Six's shoulder.

"It says 'good' and 'hurry'. " Cortana said.

"Everyone else stay here." Six said. "Me and John are going to see to it that we make it out of here in one piece instead of pieces."

"If you insist!" Haverson muttered, his face weary. Blood trickled from his lip, a wound that he had acquired from an extremely hard right hook.

John looked at Johnson and Locklear. "Don't let the Covenant retake the bridge."

"Not a problem, Chief." Sergeant Johnson said. He pulled back the latch that held the clip in its slot, and the clip fell out. Locklear handed him an almost full clip, maybe two or three bullets missing, and he loaded it into the gun, smiling as he did. "Those Covenant sissies are going to have to tango with me before they set one foot in this room."

On the display screen, two of the Covenant cruisers fired again. John watched as plasma streaked across the black of space at high speed, flying towards the hill of the ship.

"Cortana, buy us some time." He demanded.

"I'll do what I can, Chief," Cortana replied. "But you'd better move fast. I'm running out of options."

Cortana was annoyed. Not only because she had been tricked by what was now obviously a Covenant AI, but because she had been defeated by a lesser program. It never would have happened, had she been using her full processing power to help the Chief. Perhaps turning off her emotions would prove sufficient. After doing so, she changed her mind. She wasn't going to be an emotionless robot for this. She was created to handle even more difficult situations that this one, and she knew that she could. She switched her emotions back online.

Now, all she had to do was think. An idea, a chance, anything. In a just under a second, rather slow for her, she had one; The incoming plasma might be disrupted by the moon Basis' nearby planet, Threshold, should she dare to go close enough to its atmosphere. It was a chance, and a rather insane one at that, but Cortana knew what she was doing. She had the control.

Kind of.

Taking engineering service paths down into the lower levels of a Covenant flagship, Six decided, was not the most fond experience that he had encountered in his days. The paths were dark, and turning on his night vision somehow made it even worse. What was night vision good for if not for sight in the dark? Even more unbearable was the fact that he had to make sure he wasn't walking directly into the Engineer clung to his shoulder. However, he really couldn't complain. The service tunnels were helping them get around what were sure to be masses of Covenant, and considering that the Spartans had maybe a few bullets and their knives between the both of them, the tunnels were the preferred route.

He could feel the ship vibrating as Cortana returned fire at the cruisers. He could imagine the blasts of plasma leaving the cannons burning white-hot. He thought about the crew back on the bridge. They had only been gone for maybe three minutes, but he felt something. A sense of impending doom, if nothing else.

"How does it look back there? Everyone still alive?" Six radioed over his communicator.

"Yeah, but there's a big problem." Locklear replied. "According to Cortana, she can't fire the cannons."

"Are you sure? I could have sworn that I could hear them-"

"Nada. That sound that you heard was the sound of the guns slowly frying themselves. They're useless without some sort of grav-"

"No need to report our problems, Locklear, I'm perfectly capable of doing such even in the most difficult situations." Cortana said over the com.

"Then I would assume we're doing fine." Six said sarcastically. The Engineer chirped.

She sighed heavily, a mix between a deep exhale and an activated groan. "Far from it. On each turret, the Covenant use artificial gravity control to shape and guide their charges of plasma. It acts basically as a sophisticated focusing lens. The problem is, something has already been in all of the directories and deleted the software used for our focusing lens." She said, her voice building with cool anger the more she spoke. "I swear that when I catch this guerrilla Covenant AI, I'll erase it line by line!"

"Any plans?" John asked.

"I'm down to one last option. Have you reached the couplings yet?"

"Almost." John replied.

"Alright. Be careful. Your and Six's suits are breached. Neither of you can function in a compromised atmosphere."

The Engineer chirped frantically, as if it was trying to say something. It floated to the end of the tunnel and hit a button on the wall. The narrow door leading out shot open, revealing to the Spartans an open corridor when they reached the end.

"How close are we?" Six asked. When Hom cracked his visor, parts of his HUD stopped working. She may have been helping them, but it confused him as to why she did that if her original plan was to ask them for alliance in the first place.

"We're getting close." John replied. "Watch your motion tracker."

Six looked down to the left hand corner of his visor. There sat said motion tracker, and at the moment it was clear of hostiles. A pair of dark red dots appeared at the top of the tracker, then passed over them. By the shade of red, they appeared to be below the Spartans' feet. As long as they didn't run into too much resistance, they would not have a tough time gutting what did stand in their way. The Engineer snaked back up and wrapped itself around Six's arm and shoulder, bubbling and squeaking lightly.

An enormous and close explosion vibrated the floor beneath them. As Six went to take another step, his foot missed the floor. He looked down as he tripped... No, sideways. He waved his arms. The gravity was disabled.

"Dammit." Six said. He grabbed a pipe on the side of the wall, John doing the same on the other side of the hallway but with one hand instead of both. He could kind of twitch his shoulder now, but moving it wasn't an option.

As they came up on an intersection between another corridor and an elevator shaft, John stopped.

"There are two paths, but only one way down." John said simply, and he pushed himself towards the elevator shaft. Six removed his hands from the pipe and pushed towards it as well, close behind his friend. He swam into the elevator door, eager to press forward, and looked down. Junk filled the shaft, bits of alien scrap and broken weaponry floating in the air below.

The Engineer released its hold on Six's shoulder once more, floating over to a tiny control panel on the wall. It tapped several buttons, and a blast door at the bottom of the shaft, which Six had believed to be the floor, slid into two pieces and moved apart, sighing as metal scraped metal. It looked at John, then clung to his bad shoulder. He winced under his helmet, but he didn't care too much. It didn't know what the injury was.

Funny how the creature didn't care what or who they were, either. Didn't it know that their races were enemies in war? It was clearly intelligent and sentient, and could communicate. Maybe it didn't know. Or maybe it simply didn't care.

Maybe all that the Engineer wanted was to do its job.

Again, I'm sorry about the long wait. Chapter after this one will bee out in the next few days.

I'm getting a PS4 ahhh I'm so excited! I have Infamous: Second Son sitting on my shelf and I can't pay it until the console comes in the mail next week! Next gen! Whoop whoop!

Have a good day, Wolfgang.

~Husky