Finally! Another update, and I'm finally getting to some of the action bits! It's only gonna get better from here, folks, so keep on reading!
Chapter 29
-somewhere-
Mia hit her head lightly against the stone wall of the underground tunnel, groaning in frustration as no new ideas came to her as to how to get out. After waking up in the dark, sitting around and waiting for somebody to come find her did not sound like such a good idea. She had felt her way along for what felt like hours, and every detail in the mossy stone around her felt the same. Even when her eyes had adjusted somewhat to the dark, only an endless tunnel met her hampered gaze.
Mia's hand scraped across a long, foreign object, which she investigated by rubbing her hand up and down along its length. Her nails scraped against worm-eaten wood, but she grasped at the chance. She grabbed the length of wood and tugged it from the wall with all her strength, pulling away a sizable piece. Satisfied that it was dry, she tore away a section of her long sleeve and wrapped it around the tip, then found the driest stones that she could and struck them against each other. After a few tries, sparks flew and caught the fabric of the makeshift torch, illuminating a small radius around Mia. With a sigh of satisfaction, she held the torch in one hand and made her way along slightly quicker, helped out by the light of her ingenuity.
There wasn't much difference to the ground around her. Grey stone shifted to black stone shifted to brown stone, with odd nooks and cracks overflowing with dark-dwelling plants that shrunk away from the light of the torch flame. What looked like a few rats scampered past her in their escape from the unnatural lighting. Neither the dark nor the life forms scared Mia too much. It was the prospect of being down here alone that frightened her more than anything.
"Can anyone here me?" Mia called down the earth passage tentatively, not wanting to alert the wrong type of attention, but still wanting some noise aside from her own footsteps. "Hello?" No response came back to her, and she continued on her way, her spirits slightly dampened with the prospect of being down here alone. She strained to ears to try to pick up the sound of a reply, but no sound came back to greet her.
"Oh, dear. It seems the dear Admiral is a little lonely. Poor little girl," a voice, crackly with static, echoed through some unseen source. Mia jumped, moving her torch around to locate the source of the voice. The static crackled as laughter pealed out of the audio output source, a small speaker connected to a mount in the wall. "What's the matter?" the voice taunted in a crazed manner. "Afraid of being alone?"
"You obviously don't know me too well," Mia retorted examining the microphone curiously.
"I know about more about you than you realize," the voice, now identified as male, responded maliciously. "Perhaps more than you know about yourself. Your likes, your dislikes, your fears, your past, the present…all of your life, right at my fingertips. And your fear of being alone in the dark is the least of the nasty secrets in your file."
"Why are you telling me this?" Mia asked the voice from the speaker. "Are you looking to blackmail me or something?"
"Let's just say that if you try to do something…funny, I will ruin you. You may not care if the people of Earth learn about some of these secrets, but I do believe that you would be utterly destroyed if Lord Hood took a look at some of the things that I saw, such as who your father was."
Mia's heart seemed to freeze at the voice's words. "You can't scare me so easily," she put up a brave face, and the voice laughed again, sinister and cold.
"Can't I? You are in no position to act afraid. Embrace your fear, Admiral. Let it consume you, like it has consumed the others down here in your eternal prison."
"I won't let you control me!" Mia yelled at the microphone one last time, taking off in the same direction that she had come. Laughter rang through different hidden speakers as she ran, completely surrounding her.
"Run away, little girl! Run away from the truth!" Mia tried to block out the ringing laughter surrounding her, bouncing off the stones. It seemed to make everything close in on her, pressing down on her with malevolent force. She screeched to a halt in a circular alcove, bringing her hands up to block her collision with the rock wall. The laughter pressed down on her from all sides, ringing in her very bones. She curled in on herself slightly, utilizing self-preservation to keep the destabilizing words from hurting her any more.
Several of the speakers suddenly gave a loud burst of static, and the laughter stopped completely. One of the speakers had exploded, and another fell from its position on the wall as a sharp-edged rock split the metal in two. In a matter of seconds, all four of the offending electronics lay sparking on the ground. Mia stood up straight, looking around for the source of the flying rocks. Her torch light illuminated a head of long, curly blonde hair and a set of wide blue eyes surrounded by black tattoos. She gave a breath of relief as another woman came into view, bouncing a rock in the palm of one hand.
"Thank you so much," the Admiral greeted the newcomer. "Those types of things shouldn't have an effect on me, but I think I panicked a little bit with the claustrophobia and the dark. You have my gratitude." The blonde woman said nothing, and Mia extended her free hand for the woman (a few years younger than herself) to shake. "Admiral Mia Tyette of the UNSC, by the way." The stranger stared at the hand extended, snapped to attention, and accepted the handshake.
Mia was confused at her savior's mute behavior. "May I have your name, please?" The other blonde woman thought for a moment, and slowly shook her head. She tilted her head up slightly to expose her throat and pointed to an area right at the center. A violent white scar stretched from near her jaw in a diagonal line, careful to avoid the major blood lines. "You had your vocal chords removed?" Mia asked, slightly sickened, and there came another shake of the head. The scar was much too imprecise for it to be a surgical procedure, she guessed. "An old battle wound?" A pause, and a nod of confirmation. "I'm…sorry to hear that."
The blonde shrugged, and she pointed in the direction that she had come, revealing another, taller tunnel than from whence the Admiral had been originally placed. "You think we can go back the way you came?" Mia guessed, and the other nodded her head vigorously. Then, she seemed to remember something and pulled up the sleeve of her left arm. Cursive scrawl in a fancy black tattoo decorated her underarm and spelled out the name of a particular state. Mia looked down at the writing and read it aloud. "Virginia? I can call you that?" Another nod.
"Okay then, Virginia," Mia hoisted her torch properly in her other hand. "Let's try and find some way out of this hell hole." Virginia gave a jaunty salute and bounded down the new tunnel like a wildcat, with Mia close behind.
-elsewhere-
South screamed in rage and punched the brick wall angrily as High School Musical began playing through the speakers. She was pretty sure that her eardrums were going to burst from the annoying racket.
"You son of a bitch!" she screamed to the microphones that she knew were hidden around somewhere. "When I get out of here and get my hands on you, I'm going to tear your ears off with my bare hands, then cut out your tongue with a rusty shovel!" A few of the cameras observing her noisily shifted their lenses to focus on her extensive ranting further, and she took a stone and smashed two of them to abate her anger slightly. It didn't help to stop the noise, unfortunately. Giving a few frustrated grumbles, South started jogging in a random direction, determined to get away from the sound of Stick to the Status Quo.
-elsewhere still-
It took quite a lot to scare Carolina, and she still would never admit to her own fears. However, the dark and being alone and the sound of unidentified creatures all around her certainly had her heart and head pounding with her misgivings. Carolina HATED the dark because it put her at a disadvantage, and in something that seemed to be modeled after the Hunger Games, losing was NOT an option. At least, she thought it was some sort of game show if the cameras staring at her were anything to go by.
With a grunt of annoyance and steely determination, Carolina took off running blindly in a random direction, figuring that going someplace new would give her some sort of idea of how to get out of here. However, after only a few minutes of running non-stop through the impenetrable darkness, she crashed into something hard and alive, and tumbled to the ground. An angry hiss and the sound of something going click click on the stone floor numerous times had Carolina seizing up. She had to go against something she couldn't see at all.
"Ah, shit," she cursed as something came rushing at her with a hiss.
-STILL elsewhere-
"Okay, Kao Jin has absolutely NO imagination!" Dawn ranted to herself as she walked down the stone hallway with practiced ease, completely ignoring the cameras that were training their lenses on her. "I mean, he stole this idea out of a CENTURIES OLD BOOK THAT EVERYONE READS! And he decides to stick us underground, in a place that I SHOWED HIM TO WHEN WE WERE GOING OUT?!"
"I thought that I had anger management issues sometimes," Chi whispered inside Dawn's head, not wanting to be seen by the cameras and having no holographic system to be projected from in the first place.
"Not only that, but he STEALS my armor. Like he doesn't have plenty of armor and weapons already!" Dawn snarled, smashing her fist into a camera that was focused on the wrong area of her body.
"Do you have a plan on how to get out of here?" Chi asked curiously, her interest peaked after reviewing that Dawn was the one who had shown this place to her mortal enemy.
"I know this place like the back of my hand, light or dark," Dawn reassured her AI. She paused as a few screams rang through the tunnel and bounced off the rock surrounding her. She picked up a random stone and checked that it was sufficiently sharp to act as a dagger, then took off running in the direction of the screams. "It's getting everyone ELSE out of here alive that I'm still working on."
-And, once again, elsewhere-
Fahjad hated politics. True, he was a 'warlord' on an independent colony on the outskirts of UNSC space, but he rarely had to deal with politics. It was one of the benefits of his job: work with the logistics of running a group of people just liberated from tyranny, be the leader of the group, and don't talk with the other Operators unless there's an emergency.
When he DID have to talk with the others, it would quickly dissolve into some form of argument or insult fest, and having UNSC present on the conversation was not only troublesome in trying to keep the peace and solidarity, but it was also embarrassing.
"You went ahead and violated the treaty that we set down years ago by allowing USNC into your COMPOUND?!" Fahjad sighed and shook his head as the high-pitched screech of Yellow Jacket rang through the conference room. It was good to have a few people that he knew, like his Spartan brothers and sisters, there just as moral support, but-
"I knew you were a UNSC brat, Red Stallion, but I never took you to be a traitorous idiot as well."
-when the insults started flying, that's when he got all flustered about being insulted in front of company.
"Yellow Jacket, can't you maintain SOME form of civility in front of these men and women?" Fahjad directed at the brown-haired, hook-nosed, wiry face staring down at him from one of the screens projected by Chickadee. "While we may be an independent planet right now, we can at least show some diplomacy towards our mother planet."
"Neither of you can be discounted in this regard." The calm, deep voice of Blue Andromeda rang out through the speakers, her compromise cutting across any sort of refutation from Yellow Jacket. "Red Stallion, you did violate the laws that we set down of not allowing UNSC troops onto our planet without the direct consent of ALL the Operators. However, that is a past point right now, and we must entertain our guests if we are to save those five women from the Insurrectionists. We ALL have lost something in this struggle."
"Thank you for your consideration, ma'am," Captain Thomas Lasky said to Blue Andromeda from onboard the Infinity. "I have been authorized to offer any sort of cooperation with myself, the Spartans, AND the Freelancers on your planet. Lord Hood has also expressed that he intends to work in full cooperation with the IAOC to defeat these Insurrectionists."
"Thank you, Captain Lasky." Green Solitude, an aging dark-skinned man with bright green eyes and the acting moderator for the meeting, nodded to the UNSC captain from his own screen. "Please convey to Lord Hood that we are willing to cooperate with him on resolving this hostage situation, but we reiterate that this is NOT an invitation for the UNSC to reclaim Terra Beta as one of its colonies."
"I will be sure to tell him as such," Lasky responded firmly. "Now, does anyone have any ideas on what we're going to get them out of there?"
"We first should know how they got down there in the first place," North suggested, approaching the front so that he had the attention of the four present Operators and Captain Lasky. "If we know how he managed to get them in the first place, we'll find a pattern that should lead us to where they're being kept."
"That does not seem entirely foolproof, coming from a common soldier," Yellow Jacket's second, Yellow Storm, remarked in the background. North did nothing to hide his bristle, but did not retort to the elitist remark.
"It may the best we have to go off of, at this point." A new screen appeared, and White Dragon slid into a chair, decked out in wrinkled white robes with gold trim. He looked slightly disheveled and unkempt, but none the worse for wear. "I'm no fan of the UNSC, but Kao Jin crossed a line when he kidnapped those women, much less three special agents and an Admiral. He needs to be brought to heel, if not put down altogether."
"You'd KNOW, wouldn't you?" Yellow Jacket snarled accusingly, despite the rebuke from Green Solitude. "Being a former Insurrectionist yourself."
"We can worry about that later," Fahjad finally spoke, standing up shakily from his chair. "We need to consider our options of what we can do at this point. Jin's made his demands. None of them are entirely ideal for any party aside from them."
"Let's start with the demands for having the people of Terra Beta submitting a declaration of surrender," Lasky suggested. "Has anybody been able to get a general idea about how the people feel about this?"
"I started asking around to some of the people, sir," Thorne stepped forward to stand by North, hands crossed respectively behind his back in a fist. "The unanimous consent here is, and I quote directly, "no way in hell"."
"The same is being said around the other Operator compounds, Black Phoenix's aside," Blue Andromeda confirmed, toying with a piece of her graying brown hair. A new screen popped up, and Julius stepped into view to join the meeting.
"The same can be said for New Kyoto," he confirmed. "The people are trying to keep a clear head, but we've got another situation on our hands that threatens Black Phoenix's family directly."
"Can't this wait?" Yellow Jacket sighed. "Now is not the time for us to be thinking about any possible pregnancy problems that have come up with one of the bastard children-"
"You will refrain from using such language in present company," White Dragon snapped, shutting Yellow Jacket up before he could finish. "Listen to the whole story before passing a judgment."
"As I was saying," Julius continued. "The Insurrectionists have also laid siege to the School, as well as the students and teacher inside. We have one of your former Spartans, Kirk, inside the school to provide protection. However, the Innies have collapsed the tunnels leading in and made it clear that anyone who tries to get in or out will be shot down. They aren't afraid to kill the kids, by the looks of it."
There came several exclamations of outrage from the present Operators and even a few of the Spartans of the newer generations. Green Solitude gave a whistle to bring everyone back to order, and he folded his fingertips together in concern.
"We have two situations that we must contend with," he counseled. "Letting our emotions get the better of us and run amuck will help neither group be freed from the Insurrectionists."
"I think we need to divide into two strategy teams to tackle each group and act like a pincer movement and close in on the Innies from both sides," White Dragon spoke up again. "An even number of Operators and UNSC for each team. "
"That sounds like as good a place to start as any," Fahjad agreed, and there were rumbles of assent from the Spartans and Freelancers in the room.
"Now hold on!" Yellow Jacket and White Griffin protested at the same time. "You're letting the UNSC actually interfere in our own politics?!"
"They have offered their cooperation, you two," Green Solitude responded, and he did not attempt to disguise the annoyance in his voice about the resistance to the solutions. "We must utilize it."
"All those in favor of forming two teams to find solutions to this problem, say 'aye,'" Blue Andromeda pressed the vote. A chorus of 'ayes' came from five of the Operators, and the vote passed.
"If I may make the suggestion," Julius spoke up, "I nominate Red Stallion as the task force leader for the school situation."
Fahjad was shocked, as were a few of the other operators. "I am honored for the nomination, Black Hawk, but why me, specifically?"
"Because the teacher on duty at the school since the siege started was your betrothed, Black Phoenix's sister."
Fahjad let a breath out of his chest. "Damn it, Kirk. Tell me these things sometimes. Don't just keep me in the dark," he muttered, then stood up straight from his wheelchair. "Fine. I accept the nomination to lead the school task force. To help me, I choose Master Chief and the other Spartan 2s, Tom, Agent New York, Black Hawk, Blue Andromeda, and…" He gave a sigh, but took the kill shot. "I also pick Yellow Jacket to assist me."
"I have no objections to that," Captain Lasky confirmed. "Do any of you Spartans have any objections?" There only came shakes of the head. The Spartan 2s felt confident with one of their own taking the lead. Yellow Jacket's face expressed how exactly he felt about this: pure rage twisted his face into a snarl at the opportunity for him leading the task force for rescuing Black Phoenix and the other women wrested from him.
"As Red Stallion has past influences with the UNSC, I nominate White Dragon to lead the effort of rescuing those five women from that madman," Green Solitude suggested. This time, Yellow Jacket could not keep his mouth shut.
"Are you insane?!" He screeched, and the speakers protested loudly to the sound input from his end. "You're letting a former INSURRECTIONIST lead this task force?! You're just asking for him to betray us to Kao Jin. For all we know, he's the one that helped them get captured."
White Dragon's pale face contorted in rage, but North beat him to the punch. "That's not fair, Yellow Jacket," he said into the microphone offered to him. "Hasn't Dragon shown that he's loyal to you guys? He may have been an Insurrectionist, but that gives us the advantage because he knows Kao Jin better than anybody." It felt unusual to defend the unfamiliar Operator, but he knew White Dragon better than the others. He was honorable, and didn't deserve being condemned just because of his past.
"Fair words, Agent North Dakota," Green Solitude acknowledged. "Yellow Jacket, I suggest you think of such things as decorum and loyalty before you open your mouth next time. White Dragon, do you accept the nomination?"
White Dragon blew out a breath to calm himself and stared at his audience. "I accept. Maybe this will be the chance for me to prove myself and show you that I AM loyal to the cause. Kao Jin has overstepped too many boundaries this time. Also, I am nominating Agent North Dakota to be my acting Second for this mission. In the event that something occurs and I cannot go into the field myself, he will be in charge."
Fahjad looked over to see Agent North's eyes wide with surprise, and congratulatory pats on the back from his Freelancer companions. No doubt the Offworlder was very surprised that he was held in such high esteem by one of the more aggressive Operators.
"I'll act as the eyes in the sky, if that's allowed," Lasky offered. "I can keep an eye out of the planet from above in Infinity."
"That would be helpful, Captain Lasky," Fahjad dipped his head to the Captain. "We need to separate to two different locations for this to work correctly. I can offer New Taipei as a base for the school operation, that way the Innies won't think we're being too obvious in terms of proximity."
"That might be the best option," Green Solitude agreed. "All those helping with liberating the School will utilize Red Stallion's compound as the base of operations. And…move the ones helping out with rescuing Phoenix and the others to New Kyoto. They should be able to find some information there that they can use. Meeting adjourned." With his declaration, the other Operators not present closed their screen and cut off communications. Only Captain Lasky was left, and he gave some instructions to the Spartans and Freelancers, but North wasn't really listening. He gave a jump and stepped out of his own thoughts when a hand clapped on his shoulder. He turned around and stared into the passive amber visor of the legend that had helped spark Project: Freelancer.
"Can you keep my Spartan brothers and sisters alive?" Wow, definitely not shallow question that the Chief was asking. North swallowed and stared up at the towering giant.
"I can't make any promises, sir," he started, "but I will sure as hell try to keep them alive, sir." Master Chief gave no verbal response to North, but instead gave his should one final squeeze of…reassurance? He didn't know. With a nod of the head, Master Chief turned and rejoined Fahjad and the other Spartans staying behind in New Taipei. York gave North a toothy grin, wished him luck, and sprinted off to join the others.
"Come on, North." North turned and saw Thorne and Tex approaching. Tex grabbed North's hand and led him forward. "We have a long way to go, a lot of answers to find, and a lot of people to save."
And...cut!
Okay, move onto the next chapter, which is a gift for you guys...FLASHBACK TIME!