A/N: Hello all! Palmer is hard to write. Forgive me if she isn't accurate. And if you don't, write Palmer and prove me wrong.

Disclaimer: I am in no way affiliated with Microsoft, Bungie, or 343 Industries. This is for my enjoyment and, hopefully, the enjoyment of others. I do not receive a profit.

And Palmer Said, Let There Be Sight

Kahn flanked left, battle rifle pointing. There was nothing. Carefully, he activated the Promethean Vision he had snagged back aboard the Pelican. He looked left and right, scanning for enemies behind walls. All he saw was the green outline of his team. SPARTAN Quin was being escorted by Reynolds, Brady was just a light blue outline, barely visible even with his armour ability, and Pearlman was almost indubitably away in the clouds, flying the bird.

Kahn whispered over his comm, "It's quiet . . . Too quiet. My Promethean Vision isn't picking anything up."

Pearlman was the one to respond. "Sensors don't show anything, but that doesn't mean there isn't anything there. The Covenant spoofed my bird over Reach in 2552. I was just lucky to escape, even though I was forced to watch another glassing . . ." Her voice trailed off.

Reynolds picked up the conversation. "But I thought the Storm was here to meet with one of their gods. Why would they tamper with his Promethean's equipment?"

Brady answered. "Don't forget that the Master Chief killed the Didact. Maybe the Storm has figured this out and has decided he isn't a god. The rest of the Covenant figured that out and are relatively peaceful. Heck, I visited Sanghelios to guard a diplomat. There was a statue of the Master Chief. A plaque identified it as A Monument For All Out Sins. Something about not being blinded by lies, lest a demon rise out of the ashes of a world they burned to take revenge."

Kahn opened his mouth to reply when his Promethean Vision flared a bright red in the approximate shape of a man. "Contact! Right in front of us!" He jumped out of hiding and brought his battle rifle to bear. He recognised the creature only as an unrecognised enemy. Squeezing off a trio of bullets aimed at the creature's head, Kahn blinked in surprise when light blue light just stopped the bullets without any of the crackling he had come to associate with energy shielding. The thing raised a squat, metal weapon glowing with a reddish light rather like on the joints of whatever armour the enemy was wearing.

Kahn ducked behind the wall and said, "What the hell was that!?"

He heard Stephenson's voice as the creature rounded the corner. "That's a Promethean-," The creature . . . Promethean . . . started firing little yellow bullets in a wide spray, "-Knight, an Artificial-," so SPARTAN Kahn leaned his weight onto his left ankle and rolled underneath the spread pattern. "- Intelligence created from an ancient-" Kahn popped up and shot several times, the blue shielding glowing brighter with each successive hit, "-human. They have guns-" before he ran out of ammunition. He began reloading and felt his shields drop alarmingly quickly. "-that shoot hard light. They-" Looking up, Kahn saw the yellow hard light bullets pinging against his shield and rolled, shooting his reloaded Battle Rifle as he went. "-can also teleport, so-" The Knight's blue shield broke and it quickly adopted a pose resembling a praying man. Knees slightly bent and arms folded up. "-kill them before they flee." Khan held the gun steady as he squeezed the trigger, but the figure was gone by the time the bullets reached where it had been. Activating Promethean Vision, Kahn located where the Kight had teleported to and, hoping to catch the Promethean by surprise, vaulted over the wall, burying six armour piercing rounds into the Knight, whose shields were still down. The Promethean dissolved into flakes of hard light, leaving behind its gun and a pair of spiky orbs.

He warily walked over and investigated the spoils of war. The orbs had a priming mechanism and were clearly meant to be thrown. A grenade of some sort, then. Kahn picked the grenades up and attached them to the hip-clip of his red armour when Stephenson came on the radio. "Those are pulse grenades, and that gun is called a suppressor. I'll have Roland run a patch through all the armours so that they will recognise Forerunner tech."

SPARTAN Kahn bent down and picked up the gun, which disassembled itself and changed slightly, becoming a little easier to hold. Kahn had no idea how the weapon did that, but he appreciated it all the same. He continued around the corner, barely aware of his allies.

Suddenly, he heard a small scream of surprise before Brady clarified. Her breathing was jagged, as though she was actively dodging and rolling. "Sorry if I burst someone's eardrums, but a pack of robot dogs just materialised right in front of me. They don't seem to be the Promethean Knight that Stephenson just told us about. No shields, and I can crush them underfoot."

"Yeah, sorry, Nebula. Didn't expect you to meet Prometheans on your first drop, but I suppose an incredibly important piece of Forerunner surveillance tech would be guarded by Forerunners. These guys are crawlers. Grunts that can climb on walls, basically. All you need is to go 'Boom! Headshot!' to kill 'em." Palmer. "Oh, and watch out for Watchers. They fly around, have shields, can cast shields on others, and a lot of other real nasty stuff like revive dead Knights."

Brady announced, "Got 'em all. Not that bad, but the nasties are damn fast. Let's all meet up and have Pearlman right over our head as we get to the ziggurat." Kahn blinked his green, and a moment later, so did four others. Activating Promethean Vision, Kahn located Brady and wove around walls, jumping over fallen columns to get to her. When his Vision flickered out, it said he was right next to a prone Brady, but if he didn't have his armour ability, Kahn would never have seen Brady. It wasn't her armour ability. She was just naturally sneaky.

She took off her Active Camo and stood up from her army crawl. A minute later, Quin and Reynolds came from the other direction and the hum of a Pelican appeared overhead. The next few minutes became a blur as the Prometheans appeared and died, only to come back with another fighting force.

Kahn was almost out of bullets for his battle rifle and knew he was in trouble when a Knight with explosive ordnance teleported not four metres in front of him. Whipping out his suppressor, he pulled the trigger, but the beast hardly flinched. With machine-like precision, it held up the incineration cannon attached to its arm and began to level it at SPARTAN Kahn.

Kahn didn't think, just rolled to avoid . . . nothing? He quickly activated Promethean Vision and saw a green outline carrying a knife near where the Knight had been. He blinked his green light at Brady and swapped his battle rifle for the incineration cannon.

Scaling a broken column, he saw for the first time just how thick the fighting was. Perfect. Kahn whispered, "I want everyone to extricate themselves from the battle. I found some high explosives."

He watched as the shadow of a shadow quietly snuck off the battlefield and saw blue and black armour facing back to back, each with a shotgun as they pumped rounds into alien A.I., Quin's sniper rifle slung over his back. The pair slowly walked out of the mess. Reynolds must have gotten the message across to Quin. The steady RAT-A-TAT-TAT of Pearlman's gun ceased as she said, "I thought you were Explosive Ordnance Disposal."

"I am. And I am disposing of this explosive ordnance. By using it." Kahn launched a ruddy, glowing globule of light. It splashed into the sea of Prometheans, immolating several. Kahn fingered a grenade, primed it, and threw it into the mass of enemy's hoping to group them together for another shot from the cannon. So Kahn blinked when a Watcher caughtit and threw the pulse grenade back at Kahn. He dove off of his perch on the pillar and fired another sphere of hard light into the mob.

Kahn rolled when he hit, and although his MJOLNIR armour absorbed most of the impact, Kahn's shoulder still burned. When he looked up, the top of the broken pillar he had been standing on was reduced to ash, but so was a sizable portion of the enemy. Kahn's HUD informed him that he had one last shot in the Incineration Cannon. Kahn didn't want to waste it, so he blew away one of the Knights with the fancy headdresses before tossing the gun down and picking up the recently deceased Knight's scattershot, claiming it for his own.

The SPARTANs were pressing forward when Pearlman came onto the radio. "Warning! Picking up multiple high energy signatures in the air. I'm pulling out." Kahn grimaced and settled down with the others at his back, digging in for the long fight. Looking up, he saw a blue circle issue out of nothing and watched as hundreds of Watchers issued out. They spread out, casting beams of light over certain areas. Kahn had no idea what they were doing, and they were too far away to kill with the weapons he had; Quin was pegging Watcher after Watcher with his sniper rifle.

The beams of light solidified themselves into packs of crawlers, and . . . eyes? At least, that's what they looked like. Until one of them shot a beam of hard light at the SPARTANs. They scattered, and Kahn found himself back to back with Reynolds. He too hefted the scattershot he'd grabbed. Kahn looked over at Brady guarding Quin as he pegged Watchers and the laser tower things. "Ready?"

Kahn barely processed this as be swung his own weapon to the enemy. "Ready." The two began a deadly dance, shooting and trusting the other would protect their back.

When the first Knight warped in, Reynolds shot it full in the chest and called out, "How do these weapons work, anyhow?"

Kahn pointed and shot. "Well, I can't be sure but-" BANG. "-Science says it uses hard-" Kahn sprayed his Suppressor at a charging Crawler. "-light, so I imagine it uses the-" By now, Kahn was shouting to be heard over the cacophony of bullets, hard light, and the rare explosion as Brady did her work and Quin blew away Knights with headshots. "-same concept as some of the shelved experiments-" Both rolled right to dodge an explosion from one of the Knights with yellow tattoos made out of hard light. The Promethean jumped in between the pair. Both shot once. Twice. The creature dissolved. Kahn backed up to Reynolds, pumping a round of hard light into a Watcher before it could reanimate its fallen comrade. Back to back with Reynolds, the pair began to advance toward the ziggurat and Kahn continued his explanation. "-experiments about getting temperatures below absolute zero."

"What? Isn't that impossible? And how does that relate to hard light?"

"Well,-" BANG. "-the experiments use quantum gases, like superchilled sodium ions, and once past absolute zero, the properties wrap around infinity, kind of like - Watch out!" The pair dodged a Knight and Kahn took its arm right off and expertly drove the attached blade into the main body, which vaporised. "-like when you divide by zero. What's really neat is when something that cold is hit by light, the photons actually transfer enough of their energy-" A small army of Crawlers interrupted the rhythm of battle by jumping at Reynolds. He started punching the sly beasts into submission, and a moment later, he ripped the head off of the one with spines and picked his scattershot up from where he had discarded it.

Kahn bent his knees into a ready position as Reynolds came back from where the Prometheans had corralled him. "When the photons hit a quantum gas, they spend enough energy trying to heat the atoms up to a 'real' temperature that they slow down or even stop. Chances are, the Forerunners used this concept." More shots and another incineration cannnon later, the group arrived at the base of the ziggurat.

A/N: I think this is actually true and has happened, but if someone who knows more about quantum physics reads this, please tell me if I am wrong about my explanation. Thanks!

Pearlman came onto the comm. "Get into the pyramid and I'll help Quin defend the base. One handsign from Reynolds was all it took for four SPARTANs to charge up the ziggurat as one descended from the low-hanging clouds. At the top, three SPARTANs began the walk into the bowels of the ziggurat. Quin laid himself down on the four square metre flat top that surrounded the stairs leading to the crypt in the centre. Pearlman flew around, providing air support.

The path down was quiet. No traps, no tricks, no enemies. What there was was a metal post that stood out from the stone blocks that made up the ruin. It gleamed as though polished daily, and was completely free of foliage. Fourteen rings floated about the pole, and a hard light panel rested on top. Kahn hit the switch. It reminded him of his first job. He'd been seventeen and training to be a surgeon. The number of dead in the war was astonishing, and he had wanted to help. All it had taken was pushing the wrong button on the drug panel. He should have double checked. The patient was allergic to what was supposed to be a mild anesthetic. His application for a Medicine Licence had been revoked. His father's words to him right after his arm had been crushed proved to be his last, but they had haunted Raj ever since. "You are no son of mine. I will not have someone who cannot even administer mild anesthetics trying to keep me from dying of something far more serious." Those words had been said through teeth gritted against pain, but Raj had caught the undercurrent of anger seeping through.

So he was understandably relived when Palmer came on. "Good work, Nebula. Not as fast as Opalescent, but barely slower. Roland says we have eyes. And a target. Head to your bird, Stephenson will brief you on the way."

The three SPARTANs charged up the stairs to a wonderful sight. Pearlman had brought her Pelican's cargo bay to the edge of the pyramid, and Quin sat on one of the seats, gun pointed in the distance. It bucked. Following the bullet, Kahn saw a group of Prometheans coming to intercept the departing Fireteam Nebula. The remaining SPARTANs stormed the Pelican. Once all were aboard, the Pelican lifted off. It oriented itself as Arianna's fingers danced across the console before jetting off toward whatever coordinates Roland had beamed to it.

A/N: Now that I have written everyone, chapters will get longer (hopefully), so I will take longer (on average) to update.