I blinked, going over the possibilities in my head, wondering just what exactly had happened to me.
The suit didn't wait for me.
A heads-up-display appeared in my vision and what looked like system diagnostics raced past my eyes faster than I could process most of them. The voice sounded again.
"Suit diagnostic in progress, please stand-by."
I waited and took in my surroundings. I was in a tunnel, probably no bigger than four meters across. Besides me and the remains of my MJOLNIR armor, it was empty. The walls were made of a dark rock and the ground was coated in a layer of fine gray dust.
I was on guard. Wherever I was, it was still hostile territory.
Before I had time to do anything else, the scrolling feeds on my HUD halted and the voice spoke up.
"Suit diagnostic complete. Operator integration in progress. Warning. Major system errors detected. Primary power cell not found, secondary power systems operating at twenty-six percent efficiency."
It was all too much to take in. I didn't have any frame of reference for what only twenty-six percent meant for my current situation.
"Error. Quantum translocation device not found. Constraint field projector not found."
One problem at a time, please.
"Geo-location system active. Micro-gravity thrusters active. Scanning and analysis functions active. Life-support functions active. Communications system active. Cyber-warfare suite active. Primary functions active."
Another realization hits me. The suit is telling me all this in a language I can understand, and that fact has me leaning towards the hope that this thing is man-made. That leads to even more questions though. Who built it? And if it wasn't built by humans, why would it be designed to fit humans and why would the interface be in a human language?
At least I was sure that it definitely wasn't a Covenant trap. The aliens regarded us humans as vermin and were waging a war of genocide against us.
You don't build fancy hardware like this thing for a people you're trying to exterminate.
"Minor damage to suit outer shell detected. Estimated time to repair, twenty-six minutes. Consolidating repairs to primary functions. Life support priority. Estimated time to operator repair…"
The voice paused, almost like it was afraid to say the next bit.
"…unavailable."
I didn't know what it was talking about. For someone who had just been crippled by an energy sword and flung unprotected through the vacuum of space, I felt great.
"System reboot complete, cleared to proceed."
All the information on the HUD cleared away, leaving only a dusting of white glowing icons around the peripheries of my vision. What looked like a topographical map was visible out the bottom left corner of my eye. According to the map I was in some kind of cave system.
I looked back at my MJOLNIR, seeing if there was anything left worth salvaging. My weapons were gone, lost in the decompression. Any gear that had been attached using the suit's magnetic plates was gone, but I still pulled a few things from a soft storage case that was mounted on the armor's left thigh. The things you would keep in an emergency kit.
Among them was a hand radio unit, always worth having just in case my MJOLNIR's internal radio failed, a sealed emergency ration, and a first-aid kit.
I examined the radio's casing, looking for any visible damage. I was in a situation with too many unknowns. I'm in an unknown suit, in an unknown environment, with no idea who could be listening in on the comms.
One other problem. I tried to speak and nothing came out. It was like I couldn't push the air out through my throat to make the sounds.
Trachea trauma? I didn't feel any pain, in fact I thought I had never felt better.
I feared it was neurological. How long was I stuck in the vacuum? Without air, cell death could cause brain damage. It could explain the possible loss of speech, but damage enough to cause that would surely have affected the other areas of my brain as well. There didn't seem to be any loss of motor function.
It would make trying to communicate with friendlies a problem though. My MJOLNIR was unsalvageable and without an IFF or the ability to identify myself verbally, not to mention my non-regulation appearance, getting shot at by my own side could easily become a possibility.
I tried to pull the helmet off put couldn't find any obvious release to remove it from the rest of the suit, but that wasn't the only reason I stopped. I opened up my ears and listened. Aside from my breathing and heartbeat there was nothing.
If you're not familiar with how sound travels, soundwaves travel by vibrating molecules in the air. If there's no air to vibrate, there's no sound. Which meant I was still in a vacuum, which had me wondering just how the hell I was alive.
There's no way I got cut out of my MJOLNIR, put into this suit while still in a vacuum, and was still ambulatory. It just wasn't possible.
Right, one problem at a time.
I needed to figure out where I was, and from there I needed to figure what happened to the rest of my unit. Blue team and the rest of Green team had made it off the CCS. The Night Fox was most likely destroyed.
I considered what to do when the suit-voice chimed in.
"Exit the cave system."
A blue dot with a distance value beneath it appeared on the HUD, pointing me towards a crevice.
You're ordering me around now? I thought.
I could have disobeyed, but what was I going to do? Just sit there?
I took an experimental step forward and noticed I was still in low gravity. Not enough to be weightless but every movement felt bouncy. A readout appeared in my HUD telling me the gravity was 3.64m/s^2.
I froze.
The MJOLNIR armor system was the brain-child of Dr. Catherine Halsey, the same woman who had been responsible for the creation of the Spartan II program.
A key and highly classified component of the armor was an advanced neural interface which allowed the armor to execute the will of the wearer at the speed of thought. The armor could process signals from the user's brain and execute them as actions at an average speed of faster than twenty milliseconds.
Moreover, the neural link meant that we didn't have to fumble with physical controls to access the armor's functions.
And my mystery suit had just done the same.
I approached the opening my HUD had highlighted. I took one last glance at my MJOLNIR. The armor has a built-in self-destruct to prevent it from being captured by the enemy, but in its current state the self-destruct was non-functional, so it would be staying put.
Each of my footfalls sinks into the ground a little, so I stop for a second when one of my feet kicks up something metallic. I knelt down and pulled an object out of the gray dust, a set of UNSC dog tags. I wipe away some of the dust with my thumb and see that they're mine.
Stamped into the metal was:
Ulysses-S086
Rank: Petty Officer Second Class
SN: 22193-55673-086
Blood Type: O-
DOB: October 12th, 2502.
Looking at it, it got me thinking. There's no last name on my tags because it had been stripped away from me during training. I hadn't heard someone refer to me by it since I was six. It had been drilled out of me and every other one of the Spartan II's by ONI's psych-indoctrination.
The date of birth was a lie too.
The one on the tags had me listed as eight years older than I really was. Disinformation, meant to cover up the fact that at the time we had gone into service we were only fourteen.
Child soldiers according to the United Earth Government's own laws.
I knew I was really born in 2510, but I'd forgotten my real birthdate and last name a long time ago. It just wasn't important.
Ulysses James Ludwig. Born on August 17th, 2510, to mother Maria and father Otto, on the human outer colony world of Hoffnung. Younger brother to Alexander and Frieda.
The long-forgotten memory came to mind like some kind of monster, wriggling its way up out of the dirt from where it had been buried, hoped never to be seen again. I'd forgotten it years ago. So, what was the cause for my sudden revelation? I didn't know it then, but I do now.
It's the suit, improving my memory retention and recall.
It was already in my head, worming its way through my synapses.
Haven't you wondered yet how I'm able to recount all this like it was yesterday?
There's no mention of an eidetic memory in my personnel file. Surely something Dr. Halsey would have noted, right?
Right.
I wrapped the chain of the tags around my wrist and kept going.
The passage was a small opening. It would be a tight fit, but clearly I'd gotten into the crevice I was standing in somehow. My new suit was also noticeably less bulky than my MJOLNIR.
I got down on my belly and wormed my way through the passage, using my feet to push myself. There was no light in the cave either. Instead, the suit had switched on some imager to brighten everything up so I could see. Thank God, I'm not claustrophobic.
Of course, if I had known then what this suit could do, I probably would have just gone through the cave wall, but I'm getting ahead of myself.
I pushed myself out of the crevice and fell a few feet onto the cave floor. As I impacted, a cloud of the gray dust floated up. I reoriented myself and stood up. The waypoint in my HUD had changed too. A path was marked out on my map.
I'm thinking this suit I'm in is carrying an onboard AI.
I'd seen R&D teams tinker with the idea before. Military units could receive real time tactical support by linking to the B-net, where an AI based on a starship, satellite, or an in-ground bunker would provide them with aid.
The problem with trying to get a soldier to carry an AI around with them, one that was actually useful in combat, was storage. AIs like that need a ton of space for all that processing power and memory. It just wasn't feasible, at least not as far as I was aware of.
I had bigger things to worry about though. In the dust, I saw tracks. I guess the suit noticed them too because it highlighted them on my HUD.
Multiple sets, two feet, two large toes and a heel, wide spacing.
Elites.
I didn't know if they were looking for me though. Maybe that blademaster from the ship had sent up a beacon and his friends had come looking for him. If I was alive, maybe he was here too.
I still didn't even know where here was.
Looking at the depth of the tracks, it seemed like they were in a hurry. Maybe six sets in total, it was hard to tell when some of the tracks overlapped. Looking around the cave, I could go left or right.
The elites had gone right. It occurred to me that maybe the only reason I hadn't been found was because the passage to the crevice I had woken up in was too small for them to fit through. Maybe that had been intentional. I noticed drag marks in the dust too. Someone had pulled something big and heavy through here.
Maybe something like a half ton of MJOLNIR armor.
The map in the left corner of my eye gave me an elevation number, showing the left path would take me out of the cave. It wasn't really a choice.
Without any weapons, my MJOLNIR armor, or a thorough understanding of the terrain I was going to have stick to evasion for now.
I'm lucky the suit seemed to know where it was going because I sure didn't. Every tunnel and every turn seemed the same, just more dark rock. I watched for my own boot-prints in the dust to make sure I didn't get turned around as I followed waypoints the suit gave me. I wasn't ready to trust it. The elevation seemed to be right though; I was going up towards the surface.
I didn't hear anything coming. I couldn't have, not in the vacuum.
The suit picked it up though.
"Threat detected."
Six white triangles popped up on my map, behind me.
I spun around. In my HUD, the triangles had appeared in my field of view too. I couldn't see the elites but the suit had picked them up somehow and was marking where they were relative to my line of sight. They were doubling back. I broke into a run.
I came out into a straight cave shaft when another three white triangles appeared. I had been caught in a pincer movement. Six to my back, three to my front, all closing fast.
I was left without any room to maneuver. I looked about for cover but the cave had been smoothed out. I had no weapons. It was a no-win situation. I had maybe ten seconds before they got line of sight on me and opened fire.
It's the moments like these when you have to stop thinking about what is going to happen that you have no control over, and instead focus on what you can do. I'm still a Spartan. I grabbed a stone from the ground, a rock about the size of my fist.
I'd never been a sports lover, but I could still pitch a ball at speeds that would make professional throwers look like amateurs. If I had to resort to throwing rocks at the enemy, so be it.
I flattened myself against the side of the cave wall, making sure I presented as little of a target as possible. Every second would count.
The three elites coming down the cave rounded the corner into my line of sight. They looked right at me.
And kept going like I didn't exist.
The six elites who were doubling back met them and the whole group stopped, just a few feet off to my right.
I got a good look at them as they talked, probably communicating on short range radios. Maybe the walls of the cave were absorbing the signals. They were all outfitted in ranger combat harnesses with jet packs attached and carried an assortment of weapons. Plasma rifles and repeaters, a few needlers, and one carried a carbine.
I gave a thought of thanks that none were carrying energy swords.
After my recent experiences being on the wrong end of one those weapons, not to mention being in such an enclosed space, I never wanted to see an elite with an energy sword again.
What was more important though was that I had somehow gone unnoticed. I looked down at myself. My body had vanished into thin air.
Scratch that, I could still see the slightest bit of artifacting left by the light warping process.
Active camouflage.
The Covenant had always had an advantage when it comes to personal stealth systems. They used light bending technology to generate a lensing field that hid them from view. It came standard issue on sangheili spec ops units.
We'd recovered elite combat harnesses with it built in but the techs had never managed to get it working for us. Humans had something similar, but not nearly as effective. They took the retroreflective panels that prowler ships used to cloak themselves and tried shrinking them down into a portable man-sized unit.
The problem was in order for the panels to be convincing, you had to put them onto everything a soldier was carrying, including his weapons and all his kit.
I looked at the rock in my hand and it was clearer than glass, just like the rest of me.
I hoped none of these elites had thermal imaging systems in their helmets. In the pitch blackness of the cave, they had to be using something to see. One thing that us Spartans had always been able to exploit with the Covenant's active camo systems was that they threw out a bunch of heat. I hoped this suit wasn't doing the same.
I couldn't hear anything of what they were saying because of the vacuum, but they seemed jumpy. One of them, the leader maybe, gesticulated wildly with one of his hands.
Whatever he said seemed to satisfy the others, because they turned and started heading back towards the cave entrance. I let out a breath I didn't know I'd been holding as they walked past me again. As they did, two of them turned back around as they walked away. Basic squad tactics, covering the rear. One of them looked in my direction again and seemed to pause.
My muscles tensed. Waiting for the second he brought his weapon up to fire, but it never came. He shrugged to other elite and the two quickened their pace to rejoin their squad.
The elites had just rounded the corner and vanished out of sight when one of the icons on my HUD flashed red. I faded back into existence, wondering just where the hell this suit had come from.
I followed the ranger squad at a distance all the way out of the cave, toggling the invisibility as I went. As it stood currently, I could maybe get a minute and a half out of it before it deactivated to recharge if I stood completely still, and it drained faster the quicker I moved.
I noticed I still had to worry about any dust I kicked up as I moved and the prints my boots left. Maybe that's what had the elites all shaken up. Maybe they would have noticed me if they hadn't trampled all over my tracks.
I finally had a frame of reference as I came out of the cave mouth though. The world was lit up and the suit's imaging system deactivated. Only it wasn't a world at all. I was standing on the surface of Kursk's moon, the light coming from rays from the system's sun bouncing off from the planet.
The ground was pockmarked with the evidence of millions of years of meteorite and comet impacts. Combined with its gray color, it reminded me a lot of Luna, Earth's moon and only natural satellite. Not that I had ever seen it or the homeworld in person.
Good news. There at least wasn't a Covenant fleet in orbit around the moon.
I know because the suit piped up with the bad news. A line appeared on my HUD, drawing my eyes to what it wanted me to see, and then it zoomed in towards Kursk.
There's the Covenant fleet. I'm thinking the one that exited slipspace and destroyed the Night Fox while we were aboard the CCS. Five CCS class Covenant cruisers, and a dozen SDV class corvettes. All holding in orbit around Kursk. Looked maybe like they were going to ground.
It made me angry.
I didn't need to imagine what the Covenant did when they attacked human worlds. I'd seen it myself, first hand.
It made me feel helpless. Standing there, not able to do anything about it.
At least they hadn't started glassing the planet. The process of completely destroying a planet's biosphere by saturating its surface with high-altitude plasma bombardments. The Covenant considered the practice of purging the infidels one of their holiest rites.
The bombardments disrupted magnetic poles, melted ice caps, made seas boil, split mountain ranges, caused earthquakes, burned green ecosystems to ash, and made the atmosphere uninhabitable.
Evil.
It was evil.
They're down there, I thought. I had to hope the rest of the Spartans had made it planetside after leaving in the phantom. We were supposed to be the advanced recon for a UNSC defense of the planet. The suit wasn't picking up any UNSC ships though.
"Reach the planet's surface; find a vehicle," the suit orders me.
UNSC fleet or not, I couldn't stay on this moon. It didn't matter how miraculous this suit was so far. It couldn't operate in a hostile environment forever. It had to run out of air eventually.
If the rest of my unit were still alive, they were down on the planet. So that's where I was going.
Those elites had to have gotten here somehow. That meant they at least had something capable of sublight-speed travel. I just had to find where they had parked their car, so to speak.
I found the enemy landing sight about three klicks north from the cave down in a wide crater with a rudimentary perimeter set up with barricades to create cover. The squad I ran into in the tunnels was off pursuing other objectives apparently because there was only one elite, a few jackals, and about a dozen grunts guarding a spirit dropship.
The type-25 Covenant dropship or 'spirit' as it is typically referred to by jarheads (or dextro-xur pattern warrior transport, as the suit is telling me, thanks) is about the ugliest, least aerodynamic looking craft I've ever seen.
Aerodynamics may not matter at all in space, but it always astounded me that the Covenant used the vehicle for in-atmosphere troop deployments when it literally looks like a giant tuning fork.
I observed the landing zone from a safe distance using my cloak and the suit's zoom function. The elite looked aggravated, judging by his body language. I'm guessing he didn't like being stuck on babysitting duty while the rest of his unit were getting all the honor and glory.
I spit on sangheili honor.
Where's the honor in massacring civilians who can't fight back?
The suit tagged all the enemies with little white triangles just like it had before. The elite was standing close to the spirit in the center of the crater and a jackal with a beam rifle was keeping a watch over the camp from an elevated position. That would be a problem.
Like Earth-descended birds of prey, jackals, or kig-yar, have exceptional eye sight. If I decloaked within its field of view, there's no way I wouldn't be spotted. I toggled the invisibility and moved from cover to cover to let it recharge whenever its back was turned, hoping it wouldn't notice the prints I had left in the moondust.
First things first, I needed a weapon. I picked a target of opportunity, a grunt patrolling the perimeter alone.
Apparently, nobody ever taught the little methane suckers to patrol in groups of two.
I waited until he crossed behind a piece of cover and out of the jackal's line of sight before snapping the grunt's neck, taking care not to damage the grunt's environment suit. If for some reason the methane tank on its back cracked, the escaping gas could send the grunt's corpse on an out of control thrust vector through the low gravity.
I bet that would draw a few eyes and give me away real quick.
I relieved the grunt of his weapons, a needler and a pair of plasma grenades. Two new markers popped up on my HUD, the first highlighting a weapons crate with four carbines in it, and the second marked out an elevated position back at the lip of the crater. The suit is feeding me real time tactical data.
I cloak, creep into the camp past more idle grunts and steal the weapon. None of them even notice as the carbine disappears into thin air, consumed by the suit's lensing field. A minute and a tall vertical leap through the low gravity later, I'm in position and ready to execute the plan.
I wait for a moment when both the elite and jackal's backs are turned to me and decloak. I prime the first plasma grenade and hurl it like a fast ball through the vacuum. My aim is good and it hits the elite square in the back. It flash-fuses to his armor and I shoulder the carbine as he starts panicking.
Half a second later the jackal turns back around and sees the elite. I can't hear it or see its face through its EVA helmet, but I can tell its squawking. I align the sight on the carbine and take the shot. An 8x60mm caseless radioactive projectile hits the jackal in the head and he barrels down from his look-out-post, dead.
A second later after that, I'm priming and throwing the second plasma grenade at the most tightly packed group of enemies I can see, four grunts and a jackal, standing there none the wiser to what was occurring in the soundless vacuum just as the first grenade explodes, gibbing the elite.
Both priority targets and almost half of the enemy force dead in less than five seconds. A good start.
Now everyone left is panicking, the grunts running about wildly without the elite to force them into a coherent unit. The remaining jackals, three of them armed with plasma pistols, activate their shield gauntlets, and start scanning about for targets. I drop them with the carbine.
From there its easy to pick off the remaining grunts who are too busy waddling about in terror to put up any kind of resistance.
I bound back down into the crater and loot the dead, before waltzing aboard the spirit. I'd never flown a real one before, but I had flown one in training simulators. How hard could it be?
As I'm getting the thing powered up and ready for takeoff, the suit chimes in.
"Threat detected."
The spirit doesn't have any view ports like a human vehicle would, structural weakness or something like that, so I look on its scanner instead and see the elite ranger squad from the cave approaching the crater rapidly. I guess someone called on the radio to tell them I'm stealing their ship.
I strapped myself into the pilot's chair, feeling uncomfortable. The contours of the chair weren't designed for my human backbone. I pull up on the controls and the spirit comes up smoothly in the low gravity.
As it climbs over the lip of the crater, I see the elites. Not that they can see me inside the hull of the ship, but I wave at them as I fly away, taking their only way off the moon with me.
I hope it set in for them just how short the remainder of their lives would be, watching as their armors' air supplies slowly ticked away as my suit's replenished, sucking it out of the spirit's on-board atmosphere.
No glory or honor for them. Just a slow, agonizing end.
So long split-lips. I hope you enjoy suffocating.