Chapter Two
June 15th, 2077
Night City, Northern California
Arasaka Tower, Sublevel-Four
'One Month, twenty-five days, three hours, and fifteen minutes in captivity. They were practically at the mercy of these bumbling mammals, yet they are not closer to breaching MJOLNIR.'
UNSC A.I CHM-1692-1, codenamed Chamber was the sole Custodian of the MJOLNIR Mark V. Power Armor currently contains Sierra B259.
Callsign Cyrus.
Chamber's internal systems constantly fluctuated since their arrival on this oddity of a planet.
She subtly collected data as time passed, exploring the confusing yet primitive telecommunications network called 'The Net.'
From her constant prodding, she concluded that 'the Net' was the primary communications network used by this mirror Earth. Her exploration left her with abundant data that kept her busy throughout their captivity.
During her many escapades, she discovered other artificial intelligence inside the net.
These A.I and their subroutines were exotic, to say the least.
Each intelligence possessed approximately the same capabilities as a UNSC dumb AI, and their owners could vary from AI to AI.
Corporations or governments controlled some, but others made 'The Net' their home.
Data exchanges were frequent, and she was wary of tipping her hand to these AI.
Chamber may have been superior to them in every way possible, but even one mistake can cause her problems on this….Earth.
Speaking of Earth.
It wasn't their Earth that much was certain.
Events in this timeline were vastly different from what she had expected.
The collapse of the United States economy in 1994 was just one of many events that should not have come to pass, yet that is precisely what happened.
Conflicts in Central America, the rise of multinational corporations, the continued existence of the Soviet Union, and the fracturing of the United States.
These were prime examples of mismatching data that left her mind buzzing with intrigue.
The only thing keeping Chamber stable at the moment was the calming heartbeat of her proprietor.
Cyrus B-259.
He was a Headhunter, an even better well-kept secret than the ever-enigmatic Spartan III Program.
Headhunters were First-Rate operatives trained and augmented for covert action in hostile territory, whether Insurrectionist or Covenant.
Cyrus initially partnered with two other Spartans acquired from the Spartan Three Program, and for a time, they operated against Covenant and Insurrectionists.
Their commander officer, Colonel Ackerson, eventually turned their three-man team into two, taking the senior Headhunter as his personal grim reaper and leaving her Spartan steaming with contempt.
Chamber rarely commented on this event because she was introduced to Cyrus after losing his team leader. She didn't have the most robust grasp on their relationship, but she surmised that the three Spartans were relatively close.
The UNSC AI had to remind herself she was not a replacement for their missing member.
A notion that Cyrus would have no problem admonishing her for, but she digressed.
He was in a deep sleep again, one she found to be irritating since it left her with nothing more to do than explore the intricate nature of 'The Net' over and over again.
Cyrus regained consciousness a week ago but was in no rush to escape their confinement despite these scientists attempting to splice into their MJOLNIR.
She wasn't sure how exactly they came to be here, but she had a feeling that a mixture of forerunner technology and a havoc nuke was the catalyst.
Their mission was to prevent the Covenant from obtaining Forerunner tech at an outpost called 'Line Installation 2-4'. It was a defensive installation teeming with forerunner tech, of which most were capable of military applications.
The facility was in an undiscovered planetary system eighty light-years from Alpha Corvi.
UNSC Marathon-class heavy cruiser 'Sparrow' and her escorts discovered Installation 2-4 while on a routine scouting mission. They were in the final stages of excavating the site when a Covenant CAR-class frigate entered the planet's atmosphere.
The frigate bypassed the early warning radar systems due to an untimely magnetic storm, and before Taskforce Sparrow knew it, a Covenant Battlegroup was making its way into orbit.
The battle was a one-sided massacre in space as Covenant Naval Ships devastated the 'Sparrow' and her escorts. Ground-based UNSC forces activated the installation's ground-to-air defenses, but their position was overwhelmed by Covenant ground forces.
Reaper Team was inserted by the ONI Prowler' Silent Tomb' with a havoc nuke in tow.
It was apparent to Chamber and fellow Spartans that this was nothing less than a suicide mission, but neither Cyrus nor his Spartan Sister brought it up in passing.
None of them said a word when the UNSC' Silent Tomb' IFF signal disappeared into the void. No contact of any kind was exchanged between them and the ONI prowler.
It irritated the AI to no end. She hated how ONI treated their Spartans, dispatching them to missions classified beyond measure and suicidal to even the insane.
When the impossible happened, and they completed the assignment, ONI would welcome them back with a medal in one hand and a new mission in the other.
A task that was just as dangerous as all those that came before.
But it didn't matter anymore.
There was no Covenant, no UNSC, and no ONI.
No one left took advantage of Cyrus anymore.
The only rational endpoint was her Spartan marching out of this tower unscathed and unspoiled.
And it didn't matter whether he left a mountain of bodies in his wake.
Cyrus had the same dream again, operating in Arcadia's shattered streets shortly after a Covenant Strike Force glassed it into oblivion. He sat Back-to-Back with Eliza, the other half of his Headhunter team.
There used to be three of them, but Colonel Ackerson orchestrated their team leader's removal.
Both Spartans sat in absolute silence, scrutinizing their surroundings for the slightest activity.
Their environment was saturated with blown-out skyscrapers, the skeletons of those caught in the Covenant Glassing, and even corpses still fresh with plasma.
Fingers on triggers, nerves as cold as steel, and little else on their minds.
They came here to kill an Elite Field Marshall.
The Sangheili coordinated a dozen Covenant Advance Teams whose sole objective was to uncover and secure Forerunner artifacts local to the planet. The pair succeeded in killing the Field Marshall but at the cost of exposing their presence to a Covenant QRF.
The Headhunters miscalculated exactly how many covenant forces were still on Arcadia, and now they were forced to take shelter in the blown-out remains of the planet's capitol building.
It was quiet for once.
The pattering of covenant grunts and the growling of feral brutes gradually receded.
Only a tense stillness remained in their occupied space, but it would be interrupted by the most irritating of voices.
'Reaper Six, this is Oxide. Come in over.'
ONI handlers.
He can always rely on them to fill the void of content silence.
His partner raised her head subtly, signaling him to transmit back to their handler.
'Oxide, this is Reaper Six. Go ahead.'
'Reaper Six, UNSC 'Silent Voyage' is on station ready for extract over.' A rubble shift drew his attention as a Spec Ops Elite crossed his periphery, never discerning their presence.
As the alien passed, Cyrus brought up a map of their current AO. He promptly deduced a perfect extract zone five kilometers to their east.
'Reaper Six copies, grid coordinates to follow. 05986 break 10935, LZ Security is unknown. Be advised Covenant forces are active in the AO. Approximate size. Battalion level infantry mixed with armor, Covenant air assets active. How copy my last over?'
His partner's weight mimicked his own as he shifted to his feet. The movement required patience and timing as Covenant patrols wandered closer to their position.
Skulking in the darkness was slowly losing its viability as time passed.
'Oxide copies all. You have five mikes to reach LZ Balding. Covenant air pickets are too dense to stay any longer over.'
'Reaper Six copies, out.' Conversation over, it was time to exfiltrate, eyes branching over to regard his ever-silent partner.
'Ready?'
The only response Cyrus received was a stern nod before a voice roused him from his sleep.
Movement and anxious voices echoed once again.
Sleep was a complicated process for a kid born in the streets of Actium.
Street Kids who didn't sleep with an eye open didn't survive long.
In a worst-case scenario, they were thrown into the back of a car and would wake up missing a few vital organs. Cyrus hadn't been home in years and would never see his home planet again for the rest of his natural life.
He was an orphan.
His parents died when he was five years old.
A slip space accident spaced them and their transport ship all over the upper atmosphere of Actium.
Their passing did not solve problems but instead caused new ones.
The most prominent was waking up to an eviction notice taped to his front door.
He didn't even know what an eviction notice was until one of his neighbors explained it.
The hardest nights of Cyrus' life were those first few months living on the streets, with no food, no water, and barely any warm clothes for the harsh winter nights.
He only survived thanks to the city's benevolent downtrodden.
Growing up in the streets of Ferax, kids tended to pick up a few things.
Stealing became natural to Cyrus.
Watches were useless. Sell those as quickly as you can.
A telecommunications phone? Sell it to a Fixer.
Anything and everything that had some form of value to the civilized world was sold to the highest bidder possible.
Cyrus stole whatever he could to trade for food or water. There were numerous nights when he went to sleep hungry and dehydrated.
His most significant issue after his first year was finding a credible Fixer that wouldn't screw him over the first chance they got.
He got conned more times than he could count and soon realized that the female ones were the best Fixers for him to go to.
If only because of his tender age.
The first thing he ever stole was an expensive watch from some suit. It was too easy to feign regrets and appeal to the man's bloated ego for having the audacity to touch him.
The pretentious prick hadn't noticed his watch was gone until Cyrus was halfway down the street and melding into the packed crowds of Ferax.
Expensive cars, watches, phones, and radios were fair game to the youth.
Hell, he even tried to jack a UNSC Warthog once.
In hindsight, he probably should have paused when he came across a suit that didn't sit right with him. He was driving a new state-of-the-art X-55 Califore, a sweet-as-can-be automobile that could have fetched an acceptable price with his Fixer.
Too bad the suit was a fucking ONI Agent who had Cyrus tagged the moment he laid eyes on him. Usually, anyone caught irritating an ONI agent died, and their carcass was thrown into the nearest ditch.
Whatever that ONI spook saw in Cyrus gave the orphan an excuse to live, just not for himself anymore.
The spook was an instructor in the Spartan III Program, who promptly dragged his ass to a black site, dropped him in a pelican, and before Cyrus knew it, his new home was a place called Camp Currahee.
Camp Currahee was a place Cyrus both cherished and loathed simultaneously.
Waking up daily with a roof over his head was one thing he took too quickly. The only drawback was when an instructor kicked him in the stomach to wake him up the first time.
Said instructor's voice was raised an octave or two when the Spartan cadet's foot met his groin. Lieutenant Ambrose didn't take kindly to Cyrus's attempt to rid one of his instructors of the ability to have children in the future.
Chief Mendez was even less satisfied and made his life a living hell for weeks after the incident.
Still, he didn't regret the action.
The Instructor shouldn't have thrown him on a pelican and shipped him out without saying please, at the very least.
He remembers being ushered along with 300 other cadets into an auditorium.
Most were anxious.
Some were bored.
Others were probably eager to spill Covenant blood.
Cyrus was more interested in the nice comfy bed they provided him, but he would need to earn sleeping in that bed from now on.
'As per Naval Code 45812, you have all volunteered for UNSC Special Project, codenamed SPARTAN III. You have been called upon to serve. You will be the sword of Earth and all her colonies. We begin tomorrow.'
In Lieutenant Ambrose's speech to the cadets, something stuck out to Cyrus. A sword is what ONI regarded their Spartan III's, not shields to protect humanity but weapons to strike out into the heavens.
Cyrus wondered if he was looking too much into the wording for a while, but after Operation Torpedo, he realized why exactly they said sword.
The Spartan III's weren't meant to survive exceptionally long, and in the end, most of Beta Company, whose entire lives were defined by the sword-died by the sword.
The training and augmentations felt like a test to see how much Cyrus could take before he broke entirely.
Lord knows the augmentation was the worst pain he had ever felt.
The constant muscle spasms, his system vomiting liquid every hour, and the head-splitting migraines were just one of many irritating side effects. It often led him to question why he was even doing any of this in the first place.
His fellow cadets had every reason to be here.
Most of them had family or friends that got caught up in the war with the Covenant.
They lost everything, much as he did.
The only difference was the fact he had no one to blame.
Cyrus's loss was just another unfortunate accident in a galaxy filled with them.
Most, if not all, of his fellow cadets were driven by a toxic desire for vengeance and anger, something that could only ever be extinguished by death alone.
He was sure that nothing would sate their thirst for covenant blood.
He supposed it could also originate from the ONI propaganda filtered into their break rooms.
It always got the cadets' blood boiling.
He never really bought into the ONI propaganda too much.
He treated any mention of the Covenant in the mess hall with indifference.
Indeed, they were butchering his people across the galaxy, but he never had a personal stake in the matter.
It was like asking a civilian what it was like to fight in a war he had never participated in.
There was no connection between the two.
Secondhand experiences alone don't do it justice.
But sooner or later, even he found himself buying into the propaganda.
ONI was skilled at many things but excelled in stoking its citizens' passion for sacrifice.
Their favorite propaganda tool to use during training exercises and downtime was something they had in abundance.
Footage of the most recent Covenant incursion into UNSC space was their primary marketing tool.
It almost always had some video feed of a Covenant Elite or Brute butchering their way through a crowd of helpless civilians.
The one that hit him the hardest was when the Covenant arrived on Actium.
The Spartan III cadets were in the final stages of training when the ONI feed came through. A citizen of Actium had recorded a Jackal Squad breaching a middle school with all the children still inside.
It was the same school Cyrus would have attended if his parents didn't bite the dust.
It bothered him more than he thought it should have.
No one in the room had to see the rest of the feed.
Besides watching his home planet get glassed, he wasn't motivated to connect with his fellow cadets.
Cyrus got dumped into a pelican, shipped off to some random world in the middle of nowhere, and given augmentations he couldn't even dream of.
The only people he ever connected with in the program were Eliza and Casey.
Casey was the best Spartan III cadet in Beta Company.
If she wasn't stronger than you, she was faster than you. If she wasn't smarter than you, she'd outwork you. Everything about Casey was flawless, but individuals have difficulties when they are made to feel inadequate.
Oddly enough, these adequacies produced a rift between herself and the rest of Beta Company, a detachment he and Eliza decided to fill every now and then with their presence alone.
They didn't talk much, but working off each other's body movements became… natural with time.
The few words exchanged between the trio were short and to the point.
Why are you here?
To be entirely fair, the question Casey always asked was intended for him and never for Eliza.
He never answered the inquiry, no matter how often she asked him.
Casey never elaborated on whether she was questioning his presence in the program or just being around her.
He figured leaving her in silence was its own answer, and ultimately, Casey ceased her questioning.
Sierra-B312 Casey, Sierra-B291 Eliza, and Sierra-B259 Cyrus.
They were three people with almost nothing in common, and yet they stuck to each other like glue.
It didn't surprise them when they got pulled for the Headhunter Initiative. They didn't interact well with the rest of Beta Company. They were outcasts and embraced the stigma more than they probably should.
Eventually, their time together concluded abruptly.
Casey was being pulled for Colonel Ackerson's black ops team, focusing on insurrectionist activity in UNSC territory.
Cyrus would never know why this decision occurred, he opposed it, but orders were orders.
None of them said a word to each other when the moment arrived.
Cyrus and Eliza were transferred to the 'Dusk,' while Casey stayed aboard the 'Point of No Return.'
Years of companionship enhanced through conflict and despair have led to a departure without words.
All three of them would never forget one another, no matter what transpired in the rest of their admittedly short lives.
The last he heard of Casey's whereabouts was her new assignment on Reach.
Cyrus gathered through ONI comm channels that Ackerson was pissed that she got paired up with another Spartan team, Noble Team, or something close to that.
He could only hope that she survived long enough to see the end of the war, in humanity's favor at the very least.
Before waking up in this land, he recalled one last memory: back-to-back with Eliza fighting off hordes of covenant infantry while the havoc nuke was going off.
They were supposed to get in, plant the Havoc Nuke for detonation, and exfil.
However, circumstances changed when Chamber uncovered a Forerunner Artifact, unlike anything the UNSC had encountered.
The UNSC Excavation team deployed by the USNC 'Sparrow' discovered a Forerunner Dreadnought teeming with enough weaponry to level an entire Covenant Battlegroup.
The Headhunters could not let this vessel fall into Covenant hands, the UNSC was already at the breaking point, and the dreadnought would be the final nail in the coffin.
Breaching the Forerunner facility was difficult. More Elites were scouring the facility's interior than he had seen in a long while.
Eliminating the genocidal aliens and gaining passage was an easy task.
Getting out with their lives was a near-impossible directive. The conclusion to activate the Havoc Nuke and depart was instantly taken from them when an even more extensive Covenant Strike Fleet arrived.
There was no escape.
Maybe they could sneak past the infantry banging on the doors, but then the Covenant would disable the havoc nuke.
The Spartans had two choices leave and give them access to the Forerunner dreadnought or stay…..Fight….And die.
Cyrus stunned even himself when he didn't consider leaving with his life.
For years he wondered why he bothered with any of this, why he allowed himself to become a Spartan in the first place. Cyrus didn't have that patriotic bone in his body like the rest of his brothers and sisters.
At first, he believed that the only people he wouldn't hesitate to die for were Eliza or Casey.
But it's hard to keep that stance when the very future of your race is at stake.
Eliza didn't need to be told twice. She had the patriotic bone in her body.
A bone Cyrus once declared would get her killed one day and, most assuredly, him in the process.
He was right, but that didn't make him feel better, nor did it matter in the end
His sister was missing or dead on the periphery, and it was his prerogative to find her.
Dead or alive, Cyrus would find Eliza.
She earned that much.
'Cyrus.'
Crimson eyes shot open, and his optics drank in his MJOLNIR's heads-up display.
If there was one blessing from this situation, Chamber hadn't died on him just yet.
'Yes.' He began scanning the room, taking in every detail he could. Scientists were scrambling in a rush by the looks of it.
Something had happened, and it wasn't because of him for once.
'The tower is in flux. I'm detecting major spikes in communication chatter. It's sketchy, but there's been an incident at Konpeki plaza. Arasaka security units are mobilizing in corporate square and surrounding Arasaka Tower and Konpeki Plaza.'
'Access the Tower's security network. I want every system in this building at your fingertips. Elevators, doors, security rooms, even the fire suppression system.'
Adrenaline began to spike, nerves settling down with every breath.
'Already on it.'
Cyrus flexed his fingers subtly, attempting to get every range of movement possible. He had been waiting patiently for a distraction, a moment every subtly he could use to his advantage to escape. It was one of the first lessons Lieutenant Ambrose instilled in him.
The patient hunter always gets his prey.
'I'm picking up sporadic gunfire in the tower. It seems our night's going to be interesting.' The scientists around him fell into delirium, and the security teams assigned to guard Cyrus evacuated to the upper levels.
Patience did pay off sometimes.
'Good, we can use that to our advantage. Chamber, start the clock time to make our exit.'
Most violent events usually start with a loud bang from an automatic weapon, the crunch of smashed bones, or even the screams of the dead or soon-to-be dead.
However, the Arasaka Tower Massacre was different.
It started with the lights going out.