A/N: Until I get a few more yeas or some nays, I will wait on continuing Drifting By and By. That means Nebula is back in action. Enjoy!
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 There Was, And She Saw Dead Covenant
Juliette sat in the back of the Pelican, doing nothing. She started when Arianna shouted, "ETA: 1 minute. Buckle up back there, because this ride is going to get bumm-py!"
True to her word, Pearlman made the Pelican buck up and down to dodge the plasma fire that began to fly past the transperisteel windows. "It's getting too hot around here! No way I'll be able to provide air support. We'll settle down a little ways back and then troop out here on foot." With that, Pearlman spun the Pelican in an incredibly tight circle and hauled her proverbial metal ass of a Pelican out of the plasma fire.
Brady felt the engines switch, and could tell that Pearlman had begun the descent. Once the Pelican touched, five SPARTANs piled out, pulling out their favorite weapons. The group began the walk to the Covenant encampment that Roland had found using the surveillance equipment that Nebula had turned on. Brady asked, "So, Pearlman, we have 'Demon Armour'. Why not just let us jump out the back and take out the anti-air guns?"
"Because I wanted to join you. We'll just need to hike back to my bird once they're out."
"I'll come with to guard you, just in case."
"Do you not trust me to come back and pick you up?"
Brady let out a small, "Maybe," and Kahn started chuckling. A few more steps and the Pelican disappeared behind the foliage of the temperate forest that surrounded the Covenant base. From the few glances she had gotten, it was of Forerunner construction, with brilliant gleaming metal, glowing pulses of hard light, and sweeping, dramatic angles. Brady pressed on, a little ways ahead of the other SPARTANs.
The trees became more sparsely spread and the blanket of leaves on the ground began to thin. Five sets of armour slowed to a walk as they got closer and closer to the Covenant base. The leader in pastel green and yellow Venator armour held up her right fist. Red E.O.D., purple Air Assault, black Gungnir, and ice-blue Deadeye armour all came to a halt.
"What is it?" Reynolds whispered.
"I thought I saw something, a flicker of movement on the edge of my vision."
"Could it have been a bird?" Kahn asked. "My motion tracker hasn't picked anything up."
Brady was quick to respond. "I don't think so." At another hand sign, everyone formed up, adopting a V-formation with Brady at the front flanked by Kahn and Reynolds on her left and right, respectively. Pearlman and Quin trailed behind.
The group snuck forward quietly until Kahn whispered, "I see something." His fatal mistake came when he pointed at the patch of wavering air with his gloved hand.
The Elite roared as it uncloaked itself. Drawing its energy sword, the Elite charged at the group. It was too close for Quin's sniper rifle, Brady's body was in the way of Pearlman and Kahn's fire, the shotgun Reynolds had settled for was ineffective at such 'long' ranges, and the personal defence MD6 magnum Brady used was nowhere near strong enough to kill the Zealot before it got to her. Well, shit.
Brady pulled out her combat knife and charged the charging elite. The energy sword was stronger and had a longer range than Brady's combat knife, but both Brady and her knife were faster than the Elite. Even as it swung, Brady dodged backward and then rolled underneath the swing, ending up inside the Elite's reach. Before it could take its own weapon back and stab her, Brady plunged her knife deep into the Zealot's chest, through the energy shielding and through the armour. Once in, Brady twisted the blade for good measure.
She kicked the Elite off of her chest, wiping the blade off to avoid rust. Brady picked up its energy sword and walked over to the assembled SPARTANs. "How much you wanna bet that that was a scouting party that we just crashed?"
Unsurprisingly, it was Kahn who answered. "Nah. Five credits says it was a wedding, and you just killed the groom."
A/N: Credits. Money of the future, today!
As the voice of reason, Pearlman said, "It's likely that the Elite got a message back to base. You have invisibility, and Quin can scavenge Active Camo off of the Elite you killed. Why don't the two of you run infiltration, check out the scene?"
Reynolds was quick to point out, "But Brady doesn't know sign language."
Pearlman brushed him off with a flick of her hand. "You explain. He is quiet, doesn't talk much. Unlike this joker." She casually used the middle finger of her other hand to gesture to the red E.O.D. armour worn by Kahn.
Brady could tell that if they weren't knee deep in the enemy's neck of the woods, just a few trees away from the Covenant base, Kahn would have taken quite a bit of offence at that. Indeed, it appeared as though he was visibly trying to restrain himself from shouting out. Pearlman ignored Kahn's restraint and secured her victory with, "Don't forget that his Deadeye armour auto-zooms on things of interest."
Once Pearlman had hammered the last nail into the coffin, Reynolds made a rapid series of hand signs to Quin, who responded in kind and nodded to the others. He jogged over to the dead Elite and bent down, rummaging. A moment later, he stood up and Brady joined him. The two flickered before their forms wavered into nothingness.
The two invisible SPARTANs crept into the structure. They were on some sort of balcony, a second storey that wrapped around the wall. For a Forerunner structure, it was quite small, only a couple thousand cubic metres. The pair crept to the edge of the railing and peered down.
A small army of Covenant greeted them. A pair of Hunters, several Elites, a whole pack of Jackals. All were islands on the sea of Grunts, which pressed up against the walls and even a door recessed in the background. Stephenson came on with a whispered, "Those doors there-" A blue diamond marked both HUDs. "-are where the shield generators keeping us from bombing this place are."
"You have got to be kidding me."
"I'm not, unfortunately. Fortunately, here, here, here, here, and here are the anti-air guns." Each here was punctuated by the appearance of a red diamond in the general vicinity of the base. "Take those down so that you can fly over and drop behind the base. The back door is much less heavily guarded."
A quick motion to Quin was all it took to get the pair out of the area before their Active Camo ran out. Standing up once outside the base, Brady asked a question. "Good news or bad news first?"
Pearlman was quick to answer. "My father always told me to get the bad news first so that I could anticipate the good rather than worry about the bad."
"Bad news: There are five Covenant anti-air encampments keeping your Pelican down, Pearlman, and an entire armada, it looks like, is guarding the shield generator keeping Lasky from bombing this place to hell." Brady paused for a moment, giving ample time for the others to let loose carefully crafted strings of profanity. She interrupted Kahn during a particularly inventive and descriptive curse. "The good news now. If we disable the guns, Pearlman can fly us over the base and set us down around the back, which has fewer troops."
"How many fewer?"
"I don't know. Let's find out."
Quin, who had been following the conversation by watching Reynolds's constant updates suddenly made a series of hand signs, which Reynolds then interpreted. "Quin says, 'There are five gun placements and five of us SPARTANs. Why don't we each take one?' Personally, I like the plan."
Kahn, Brady, and Pearlman responded with, "Sounds good to me," almost in sync. A few moments discussion was all it took before the group scattered. Quin turned around and disappeared into the trees on the hill overlooking the first gun. As Brady turned to watch Kahn and Reynolds lope off in the direction of the furthest guns, she saw Quin scaling a tree, sniper rifle slung across his back.
Brady grinned and dashed toward her gun while Pearlman tried desperately to keep up. Brady glanced back just in time to see Pearlman's Sunspot visor disappear behind some trees as she headed toward her gun. Brady kept on in the direction her HUD showed for a minute more.
When she was thirty metres away from the location on her HUD, Brady registered a clearing and slowed to a stop behind a tree. Peering around it, she spotted the anti-aircraft gun. Really, it would be hard to miss. A reddish-purple, almost maroon, the gun was huge. Probably twenty metres tall, it towered above the trees, a long barrel with fishhook-like appendages running off the sides. The barrel was attached to a plasma core hooked into the ground by a metal pole that would be hard to break. Three graceful legs held the barrel directly above the plasma so that the superheated lighter-than-air gases could float up to the gun naturally.
First thing first. Brady crept out from behind her tree and activated her Active Camo. Her svelte form dissolved, dust thrown to the wind. If the Grunts guarding the gun had been looking, they probably wouldn't have seen her anyway. The Grunts fell one by one as she snapped necks, ripped off masks, and stabbed a few, coating her invisible knife with flourescent blue blood. The last few began to run around. Sadly, their paroxysms attracted a nearby Elite and his squad of Jackals.
The Elite roared a challenge, and Brady came to answer it. Drawing her energy sword, she ran at the Elite, who began to fill the air around her with superhot plasma, boiling spheres of energy that would have burnt her alive if not for her MJOLNIR armour. Brady swung her own plasma blade right through the Elite's energy shielding, armour, flesh, muscle, and bone, killing it in one blow.
A beeping HUD reminded Brady that several Jackals were firing at her. Rolling behind a tree, SPARTAN Brady waited for her shields to recharge. Once they had, she dashed from behind cover and drove her combat knife into the lead Jackal with the orange energy shield. Prying the gauntlet off, Brady advanced on the other Jackals, punching or stabbing them to death. As she approached the last pair of Grunts, who had picked themselves up and were now eating away at her nice shield, a beep and a green light informed Brady that Quin had shut down his gun. Of course, he also had the closest gun. And a sniper rifle.
Not to be outdone, Brady abandoned the Point-Defence gauntlet and trusted to her own shielding as she dashed at the Grunts. The pair stood right next to each other, so she bashed their heads together before running back to the middle of the clearing. Brady had no idea how Quin had destroyed his anti-aircraft gun, so she pulled out her energy sword and cut the pipe into two pieces. Plasma began to leak out of the generator, so Brady ran. Without magnetic fields to shape and stabilise the plasma, it began to cool down as fast as possible, and in as violent a way as possible. An explosion shook the clearing just after Brady got clear.
As Brady walked back to the Pelican, she noticed that Reynolds had activated his green. Damn him. Brady quickly turned hers on. By the time she got to the Pelican, all five greens were showing. Quin had beat her, of course, but by sprinting back, she arrived at the same time as Reynolds, whose encampment had been slightly closer. Kahn emerged from the foliage carrying the plasma generator cradled in his arms. "Anyone order bomb up-side down soufflé?"
A/N: Fun fact: Soufflé means 'blown' in French, hence his question.
Pearlman burst through the leaves in time to catch the tail end of his statement. "Why in hell did you take the unstable plasma generator out of its stabiliser rather than just blow it all up?"
As everyone clambered aboard the Pelican, Kahn answered smoothly. "I broke the shell of the stabiliser-pumper and actually fixed the stabiliser to the core, see." He made a gesture to a metal fixture attached to the plasma core. "Therefore, it won't blow up until I take that off. We'll have about eighteen seconds to get clear."
The Pelican lifted off and Reynolds yelled to be heard over the thrusters. "So you want us to affix it to the-"
He was cut off by Kahn, who was clearly excited about his plan. "To the shield generator and blow it all to hell!"
"If that works and you actually save us a ton of bullets, then you are a genius. If it blows us up, then you are the stupidest git ever . . . of all time," Pearlman bellowed from the cockpit.
Kahn's rebreathers bobbed up and down with his helmet as he shouted out, "Apology accepted!" Pearlman just groaned.
She flew steadily above the bunker now that the air around it was free of plasma fire. After setting down behind the Forerunner structure, five SPARTANs stepped out of the Pelican. Brady grinned under her helmet as the group approached the small back door. "Knock, knock."
The door slid open with a whoosh. An Elite turned from its duty at a console at the sound. It roared, attracting the attention of the entire room. Seven more Elites, thirty-eight Grunts, and twenty-three Jackals turned at the sound. One of them rushed at the opposite door to call for reinforcements, but Pearlman put several rounds of her DMR into both the Grunt and the door panel. It flickered out, keeping the door permanently closed. Meanwhile, the other Covenant massed in the room did the logical thing. They charged. Five against sixty-eight. An easy win. Right?
Brady didn't think. She pulled out her energy sword and combat knife. She lost track of her team. She felt the waves of fire called adrenalin burning away at her flesh, her skin, even her armour. They thought she was a demon. A demon she became. The outer coverings peeled off, leaving only the burned red skin, and the horns, and the tail. Brilliant eyes, glowing green, were all that remained. Oh, and a pile of dead Covenant.
Brady snapped back to herself when Kahn said, "Back up. I've found the shield generator and am setting our bomb." He made a swift movement with his hand and shouted, "Run!" at the top of his lungs.
Five sets of pounding feet, eighteen seconds, and one explosion later, SPARTAN Stephenson came on. "That was lovely. A few more cataclysmic explosions like that, and you'll be real SPARTANs. Starting orbital bombardment in just a minute. Covenant won't be able to use this base again after that.
"Get clear of the bombs in your Pelican and get back to the Infinity. Fireteam Crimson has found something, and Palmer wants all hands on deck if it decides to attack."
Five green lights winked, and a lone Pelican lifted off. A moment later, it was silhouetted by twin suns. One was the output of a fusion generator on the inside of a Forerunner Dyson Shell masquerading as a star. The other was a giant explosion.
A/N: Crimson is really fast. Palmer has said it a couple of times. That is why we are already to the artifact.
Oh, and review to tell me what I'm doing wrong (so I can stop doing it) and what I'm doing right (so I can keep doing it) in the reviews. I want you to help me improve my writing, and I am not afraid of criticism. Thanks!