I had a lot of time to think during the transit from the moon to Kursk's surface.

Hours, actually.

I was lucky that Kursk's moon was in the part of its orbital rotation cycle that brought it closest to the planet, reducing the amount of time it would take me to travel between the two.

I'm sitting in the cockpit, or whatever is the aliens' analogue for a cockpit, going over the situation in my head. I had to hope the rest of my unit were still alive and were trying to find me.

We had agreed to meet planetside. We'd never agreed where on the planet we would link up though, so I would have to find a way to either locate them, or hope they were already trying to locate me.

Radio would be the easiest, I thought, if I could find one with enough power and range. During our training on Reach we'd come up with all sorts of signals and codes to obfuscate the true meanings of our messages.

Our all-clear signal was a little children's nursery rhyme with a six-beat, six-tone melody.

Olly Olly Oxen Free.

Olly Olly Oxen Free.

All out in the free, we're all free.

It was our secret. The only non-spartan who knew the meaning of it was Dr. Halsey.

Right.

Hey suit, remind me to redact that later.

Anyway, even with my current inability to speak, just the melody would be enough for the others to know I'm alive. I just had to hope they were listening for it. Failing that, I would just have to link up with any remaining ground forces, reintegrate into the chain of command, and wait for that UNSC counterattack.

Somebody would come for us, I was sure. ONI spent a fortune on us, the Spartan II's. They weren't going to let their investment die on some backwater planet. No, they'd send another prowler for us eventually.

We'd just have to make sure we were still alive when they showed up to retrieve us.

Which brought me back to the Covenant fleet. They hadn't started the glassing and were going to ground. The Covenant's main advantage over humanity was that their warships were far more advanced than ours. On the ground, it was actually a fair fight. The UNSC had us.

On the ground, the Spartans always won.

Problem was we couldn't take those victories into space.

Typical Covenant modus operandi was once naval superiority was achieved, they would just glass the planet from orbit and be done with it. No point in risking a protracted ground campaign. If they were willing to commit to a fight against dug-in resistance, that meant there was something of value on the planet worth fighting for.

Until I could reconnect with HIGHCOM, the mission was thus: keep whatever the Covenant were looking for out of their hands.

It crossed my mind that maybe what they were looking for was my mystery suit, and that I was painting a giant target on my back just by having it on. Not like I had a choice though; I couldn't find a way to take the damn thing off.

It was as I was entering the planet's thermosphere when a new indicator popped up on the spirit's controls.

It's a transmission from the Covenant fleet, I realize, when I hear what sounds like some sangheili space traffic controller ask for a report.

I don't know the language, but lucky for me the suit does and translates it for me.

My theory about where it came from changes again. I'm thinking that it's definitely not man-made, and the only reason the interface is in my language is because it gutted the on-board computer from my MJOLNIR and assimilated the computer's data into its own. That it probably got the sangheili translation program along with it.

Shame it can't speak the language back.

The covies love to talk in a flowery spiel, so the translation isn't perfect as the system is having to try and form a literal meaning from the elite's apocryphal phrasing.

"*Relic seeker* (transl. unclear) adjust course, for *sacred deference* (transl. unclear). Fleetmaster Vorumee wishes to know of the success of your mission."

Best I could gather was that they were ordering the unit of elite rangers I ran into back on the moon to rendezvous with the fleet for a debrief on their lunar excursion.

I recognized the name though. Vorumee. The elite from the CCS. The one who had seemingly made me into a paraplegic. I guess he wasn't as dead as I had hoped.

I'm not familiar with sangheili naming conventions but unless he had a relative with the same last name, he was alive and apparently the one calling the shots for the Covenant fleet, and the 'sacred deference' was his flagship.

That didn't bode well. If he was still alive it meant he likely knew that the rest of the Spartans had escaped the CCS and had units hunting them down on the planet. I felt guilty that I hadn't managed to kill him. It seemed like my failures kept putting my friends in danger.

My options were limited. I couldn't reply to the order. I couldn't speak sangheili, much less speak at all, and even then, what would I do? I could pretend to acknowledge their order but that would only fool them until they realized I was still on course for the planet.

My only choice was to not reply. With any luck they would assume it was just a communications malfunction.

"*Relic seeker* (transl. unclear), please acknowledge directive."

The silence held.

I fought the urge to punch the engines and put as much distance between me and that fleet that I could. Instead, I maintained my course and current velocity. Any deviation would make it look like I was panicking and then they would definitely know something was wrong.

"*Relic seeker* (transl. unclear), please respond."

The moment was so quiet. It felt like every muscle in my body tightened and all I could hear was the thumping of my heart, the beating inside of my chest quickly gaining speed.

They didn't try to communicate again. Instead, I saw six contacts approaching me from the rear on the spirit's sensors and knew I had been had. Six teardrop shaped blips, a seraph fighter squadron in attack formation on an intercept course, closing fast.

The spirit's sensors tagged them as friendlies, but you don't approach on an intercept course at that speed for a friendly chat.

"Threat detected."

Ah, crap.

I dropped all pretenses of trying to maintain the deception and fired the spirit's engines into a full burn.

They were closing at a distance of three thousand klicks when they opened fire. The good thing about Covenant plasma weapons is that they're slow.

Their muzzle velocity compared to conventional ballistics is almost laughable. The problem is that the magnetic field used to contain the plasma after it leaves the weapon gives the projectile a limited tracking ability as it travels towards its target.

Add in the fact that in space there's no cover and that limited tracking combined with the time needed to reach the target due to extreme distance made them plenty deadly. Essentially, the longer the shot took to reach, the more time it would have to adjust trajectory.

The spirit pinged the projectiles on sensors and I pulled the dropship into a roll at the last second, the projectiles narrowly missing as they arced past the spirit's belly.

Problem two. I'm in a relatively slow-moving dropship against half a dozen dogfighters. Seraphs could go toe to toe with the UNSC's longsword fighters.

By comparison, the spirit dropship handles about as well as a pregnant cow. In a tub like that, I'm a tortoise and they're all hares. Combine that with the fact that the seraphs all have energy shielding and there was no way I could win in a straight fight.

I wrenched the controls in a sudden turn as another volley from the seraphs raced past, barreling at the last second to take advantage of the fact that the plasma projectiles' tracking can't turn on a dime. They need time to arc.

They're closing at a thousand klicks by the time, I hit the mesosphere. The closer they got, the harder it would be to evade. I'm bobbing and weaving the spirit the best I can. I can't fight back and fly the ship at the same time. The spirit usually had a crew of two; a pilot, and someone to aim and fire the ships plasma cannonade, and I was short a gunner.

I hate flying, I thought when they score their first hit. The blue plasma streaked down the spirit's right fork, and the ship does a nasty lurch as the pods it uses for carrying troops shear open and vent atmosphere, the force of the decompression throwing the spirit off keel.

The suit alerts me to problem three as I try to get the spirit back under control.

"Warning, ship surface temperature exceeding safe parameters."

I was entering the planet's atmosphere too fast. I'd been so concerned about escaping the seraphs that I hadn't considered decelerating to reduce the heat of re-entry. I didn't have a viewport, so I could only imagine what the outside of the spirit must have looked like as it heated due to friction with the air, as the spirit came down through the atmosphere like a meteor at seven kilometers a second.

The air resistance did two things. First, it made the spirit tumble hard, it's unaerodynamic shape causing enough turbulence to jar me in the pilot's seat. I was uncomfortably hunched in the pilot's chair because it's non-human design forced me to sit like that, but the violent spinning had me pulling God knows how many g's of force, way more than any normal human should have been able to handle.

For normal humans, six g's of force for a decent duration is enough to be lethal. It causes the blood to pool in the body because it gets to the point where the human heart just isn't strong enough to overcome the force.

First you pass out, and then you die because your blood isn't circulating. Even trained pilots with special equipment can only pull up to nine g's for a few seconds at most.

I think I was pulling more than twenty and stayed conscious all the while. But I was struggling to man the controls. The g force made my limbs feel like they were made of lead.

The second thing the high-speed re-entry did was make the seraphs peel off. They don't do much better in atmosphere than the spirit does. But not before they took one more shot at me, and this time they got a clean hit. The plasma torpedo blew apart the spirit's left fork and sent the dropship into an uncontrollable descent.

They pulled away after that, climbing back up out of the lower atmosphere, thinking I was done for.

In the cockpit, red warning lights are going off all over the place, illuminating the whole cabin with crimson hues. I can't read any of the glyphs flashing on the controls, but the suit gives chimes in.

"Warning, terminal velocity descent. User input required."

User input required.

Basically, the suit's way of telling me to grow a pair.

Remember when I said I'm afraid of falling?

Yeah, in zero-g, I'm fine.

But in an uncontrollable violent spin inside of a crashing dropship?

Yeah, you better believe I'm white-knuckling. I didn't notice it at the time, but I'm holding onto a grip in the cockpit with my left hand so hard that my strength actually deformed it, leaving indents in the metal.

I'm freezing up. The suit is flashing altitude warnings on my HUD, saying impact is imminent and it's calculating probabilities of survival if I don't get out of the spirit and they aren't looking good.

Zero, in fact.

Something changed though. It was the first time I'd felt it there. My deepest held phobia of falling to earth and splattering like a bug was overridden and I hit some control and the spirit came out of the tumble. Still plummeting, but steadier.

"Warning, ground impact imminent; alter descent vector."

The suit orders me and shows me a map of the surface and where it wants me to aim my landing, saying it'll maximize my chances of survival. It decides not to show me what that probability is though.

It's a lake, I think. A big one.

I try course correcting the spirit one last time but the poor thing finally gives out. Its engine comes apart and the thing is shaking itself to pieces.

"Exit the vehicle."

You want me to do what? I think in a panic.

"Exit the vehicle; user input required."

I get what it's thinking. If I jump out and try and land in the water, I stand a better chance of living than I do if I crash into the ground inside a burning wreck.

I hit a control and the hatch for the cockpit goes open. It takes me a second to control my fear and pry my hand from the railing, and I see my grip has crumpled it to look a smashed tin can. I hit the release for the harness holding me to the pilot's chair and the air resistance sends me flying out.

My heart is pounding, thundering in my chest like a war drum.

I'm recalling Chief Mendez's drills on what to do in the case of parachute failure as I watch the battered remains of the spirit drift off at an angle and finally explode in air as the burning remains keep falling, only here I've got no chute at all.

My arms and legs spread out to increase my exposed surface area, trying to catch as much air resistance as possible to slow my descent. The suit gives me an altitude alert of thirty thousand feet and I start falling through clouds, obscuring my vision.

At twenty thousand feet I come out of the clouds and see my LZ coming up, a large lake. It's night time, but I see mountains and green forests. From that I high up I think I can see a settlement too, but its dark with no lights. The suit tags its location. Looking at the landscape, it reminded me of the forests on Reach where I'd trained.

It'd almost be nostalgic if I wasn't so terrified.

I'm at ten thousand feet when I remember I have to execute the rest of the maneuver. Because of the surface tension of water, hitting it at speed would be like slamming into concrete. I had to orient myself down like an arrowpoint, feet first to the water. If I came down on my stomach, I'd splatter.

That unbidden childhood image of hitting the ground and exploding like a water balloon comes back. I feel like that scared little kid again, looking over the edge of the platform on Chief Mendez's playground.

A timer pops up on my HUD, counting off the seconds until impact. When it hits ten, I bring my torso up, flatten my arms to my sides, and point my feet towards the water. The suit sounds off.

"Activating survival mode."

The suit surface shifts. I can barely hear it out over the roar of the air past my ears, but for half a second it makes a sound that reminds me of the shifting of stones in a rockslide. What used to be smooth slate-gray muscle now looks more like hardened scales that give off a slight green glow. I feel it tighten around my body, like a layer of armor. So tight it's almost choking.

"Brace for impact."

I hit the water and everything goes black.

I come to groggily.

The sky is an impermeable gray cloud. There is no sun.

The ground is a vast expanse of water. Its depths are dark and infinite, yet I'm lying on its surface. I'm not floating. The water is impermeable, yet when I put my hand to it, ripples go across its surface. It's an endless expanse of ocean that goes on for as far as the eye can see, and yet besides the ripples I leave in it, it is completely still.

It's almost primordial.

I realize I'm not alone.

It's the first time I see it. Her.

She's taller than I am. Even when I'm almost seven foot two, she is still at least a head taller. It doesn't seem like she should be real. Her skin looks as if it has never been touched by the sun, her hair is white but she isn't aged. Not a wrinkle. She looks thin, and her features are delicate.

Her eyes are sharp and pale, and they stare into mine as she kneels over me. For some reason, her gaze feels like it cuts through me. I'm flat on my back on the surface of the water. I can't move.

She says something in a language that is alien to my ears.

I find my words.

"Who are you?" I say, hesitantly.

She's watching me. Studying me?

She repeats herself.

"I don't understand," I say.

She shakes her head.

She speaks again, and I place the voice. I've heard it before, but now there's no mechanical growl or deep undertone to it. Here it's quiet and soft. Almost gentle, but it disguises an order.

"Wake up."

My eyes fly open as I'm hit with a jolt.

The voice is back to its stilted, mechanized state and speaks as my HUD stands empty.

"Warning, cardiac arrest detected. Charging defibrillator, please stand-by."

I hear a buzzing whir as it powers up. It's not my first cardiac arrest. My heart had stopped for two minutes during my Spartan augmentation surgery before the docs could revive me, but this is my first time experiencing heart failure while still conscious.

I'm fading away, darkness creeping into the corners of my vision when it hits me with another jolt. The darkness clears but my heart doesn't start beating.

"Charging defibrillator, please stand-by."

I feel the jolt and hear a thump for a few seconds before it disappears and I start slipping away again.

"Charging defibrillator, please stand-by."

The jolt strikes me a fourth time and finally my heart starts beating again at a steady rhythm. I suck in a breath and just lay there for a moment. I look down at myself and the first thing that pops into my head is huh, I don't think human legs are supposed to bend like that.

And then the pain sets in. Everything hurts. I felt like I had been run over with a thirty-one ton scorpion tank.

I can feel my fingers and toes curl, so I know my back isn't broken, but my right knee is bent out at a sickening angle. The voice chimes in and the HUD comes back online. I see a model of a human body and half the thing is flashing red.

"Medical diagnostic in progress, please stand-by."

I sit there, still and on my back, as I wait for it to finish. I realize just how dark my surroundings are as light scatters strangely overhead.

"Medical diagnostic complete. Warning, multiple bone fractures detected, multiple contusions detected, multiple internal hemorrhages detected."

It keeps going. I'm back to being unable to speak again but I do manage to let out a pained groan.

"Stabilizing. Generating osteoblasts. Generating fibrogen. Generating thrombocytes. Please stand-by."

The right leg of the human body diagram gets highlighted on my HUD.

"User input required."

It wants me to reset my leg, I think. It bent outward at the knee at a gross angle. All the ligaments in my knee were probably ruined. I must have come down on the water at an off angle. My right knee being the weakest point, it must have taken a lot of the impact.

My whole body was in pain, my hands shook with muscle spasms, but my knee hurt the worst. I would have to set it though to avoid any more damage. I reached down and grabbed my leg, clenching my teeth in pain.

My arms moved slowly. Every movement was sluggish, but I grabbed my thigh in one hand and my knee just below the joint in the other and wrenched it back into place, a silent cry of pain on my face as I did so. I fell back and laid there a moment as the suit deadened the nerve endings, and all the sharp pains subsided to dull throbs.

My eyes glance around and I finally realize I'm under water in the lake. I'm laying on the lakebed and see fish swimming around past my head, and green aquatic plants. It's all a little surreal. I curl my fingers experimentally into the soft lakebed and they bring up silt.

There are no CO2 bubbles coming out of my helmet though. It turns out the suit has this awesome respirator that takes in H2O molecules from the water and splits off the oxygen atom from the hydrogen ones. It pushes the hydrogen back into the water, but takes the oxygen and mixes into back into the carbon dioxide you exhale, and then recycles it back to the wearer for virtually unlimited breathable air underwater.

Before I can take that in though, the suit is shifting again. It seems like it's swelling.

Another thing it can do is take that gas and fill the suit with it to make itself buoyant, just like a scuba diver's BCD.

I'm still in pain as my body leaves the lakebed and starts floating upwards.

I break the surface and I see the moon shining down on me, it's a pale white light.

Eventually I float over and wash up on the shore of the lake, grimacing a little in pain when my body comes to rest.

Somehow, I find the strength to pull myself out of the water. I crawl up onto the shore using my arms and left leg, my right one still mangled.

It's in the reflection of the water that I really see the suit for the first time.

I'm a pretty muscled guy. Like all the Spartan II's, at the age of fourteen I already had the body of an Olympic athlete. But with all the slate-gray artificial corded muscle, I looked like someone had taken Atlas and skinned him alive.

There are metallic components too. The knees, feet, backs of the hands, tips of the fingers, groin, elbows, and head all gleam like chrome in the moonlight. There was a larger section at sternum as well.

That shininess would be a problem. I guess whoever designed this thing didn't care much for the subtleties of battlefield camouflage. Or maybe they just intended for the invisibility to always be running.

The chrome metal also stretched across the body like tendons, holding all the pseudo-muscle together. It also made up the suit's faceplate.

Two ever-glowing blue dots where eyes would be, right above the respirator mask.

Together, between the unblinking eyes and the shape of the respirator, I thought it was a bit like staring at a praying mantis. Always watching and looking alien.

At least I didn't look like a covie. My silhouette was still human. Because I couldn't speak, my best hope would have to be that if I ran into someone they wouldn't start shooting outright and at least give me a second to try and establish that I'm a friendly. I still had my dogtags.

Sitting there on the bank, I just took it all in.

It scared me, the suit, I mean.

I'd been in it for a few hours and sure, it had kept me alive, but I think I was afraid of just how smart it was. I didn't know what to make of what I saw between the crash and my wake-up at the bottom of the lake either. I had no idea who that woman was other than it seemed to be her voice in my ears.

I needed to find a broadcast station. I needed to find Kelly and the other Spartans and know they were alive, they would be able to help me. If we could get off this planet, I could find Dr. Halsey and she would know what to do with the suit.

"Injuries stabilized, ligament fibrogenesis in progress. Cleared to proceed."

Speak of the devil… I thought.

Except for my right leg throbbing, the rest of the pain was gone by then. I made to stand, being sure not to put any weight on my injured leg, and slowly limped my way up the bank.

The suit threw a new glowing-blue waypoint on my HUD.

"Investigate nearby settlement."

I'd have to start looking for my unit somewhere. There seemed as good a place as any.

I left the lake behind and made my way into the dark forest.