Chapter 15 – Volgus

June 16th, 2545 (09:35 Hours - Military Calendar)

Hicetas System, Kholo

Enroute to surface

:********:

Hector cracked his neck, opened his eyes and looked at the flames flashing over his HEV's viewport. He wondered if this was the perspective of things inside a pot of boiling water.

Kholo's atmosphere following the glassing had changed substantially and it showed in the altered catalytic chemical reactions of the insertion process. The rapid deionization of water particles in the atmosphere made the drop smoother. The introduction of massive amounts of copper sulfate from the ecological destruction wrought on the surface had also changed things as well. Hence why the reentry flames glowed a flickering emerald green.

He'd read somewhere in their mission dossier that Kholo had gotten turned into this hellscape back in 2539. After all these years, the meteorological damage of that event was still playing out.

The green flames gradually peeled away to reveal a waving sea of cirrocumulus clouds 3 kilometers below. A flurry of green comets burst through the thin blanket of high-level cirrostratus clouds above. They soared in alongside him, spanning out into three groups of green fireballs. The flames dissipated and exposed the dozens of HEV pods bulleting down to the surface.

The two larger groups, 5th and 6th Platoons, maintained a bracketing formation around Epsilon's smaller cluster.

The Staff spoke over the team's communications. "Ep-6, you're coming in too fast. Slow down. We don't need you landing 20 klicks off target."

Hector instinctively looked down through the part of the viewport closest to his knees. Sure enough, there was still a pod caked in emerald flames and gunning its way down. He joined the conversation.

"Hey Matchstick, chill out man."

Yuri's response was a string of excited Russian over a crackling comm-link. "Pochemu by tebe ne rasslabit'sya! Na korable bylo slishkom kholodno, poetomu mne nuzhno nemnogo sogret'sya!"

"Sometimes I think he was born like this." Nova relented. "Yuri, yesli ty budesh' podderzhivat' takuyu zharu, ty popadesh' pryamo v ad!"

"That's why they call us 'Helljumpers' isn't it!?" Yuri laughed.

"Gluppy." Nova sighed.

"Hey, don't 'gluppy' me! I am genius! I know what I do!"

"Are you really though?" Hector asked.

He watched as the rippling cirrocumulus clouds came close enough to resolve into the spotty conglomerations they were. Yuri punched through the formation first followed three seconds later by everyone else.

The ground came into view. It looked like the soil of an over-cultivated farmland, only expanded out into hundreds of kilometers of caramel plains, tawny valleys and hickory hills. He spotted the large, outermost wall of the dust storm dominating the eastern horizon. It looked like a stilled image: paralyzed and unmoving. Yet it was moving, and they had to move faster.

The 5th Platoon's Captain Aiken called in. "Ep-1, we'll be reaching the 3,000 meter dispersion window in about 10 seconds. We'll link back up at the LC, over?"

"I copy. We'll see you groundside."

Roughly 10 seconds later, the two platoons' pods flared their rocket thrusters. They soared down at a curving angle away from Epsilon while the squad stayed on their original course.

At 2,000 meters, Hayth itself became discernable. It was set within the outskirts of three different city ruins. Its perimeter wall was oval-shaped. Several hundred buildings lay inside as well as a hill in the southeast. The Bastille Building was the one he wanted to see more of. He wanted to know exactly where that Innie creep was hiding that had blown up so many innocents and wasted Epsilon's time on a months long manhunt.

"Hey Ep-1, where's the Bastille again?" Mito asked, almost reading his mind.

"In the center." The Staff replied.

Hector checked there and spotted the town's largest building. He wished Epsilon could be the one running that op. He had to suffice with the chance that someone from Bravo would be the one to take him down, or better yet to take him out. In the meantime, Epsilon had their own scumbag to take care of.

"Our objective's coming up." Nova said.

Hector looked closer as they slipped through a cumulus cloud and emerged into the last 1,000 meters of the descent. Land Control appeared right beneath them. They would land just short of its perimeter.

"It really does look like bat." Yuri scoffed as he finally slowed enough to rejoin their cluster.

"Chutes in 10 seconds." The Staff ordered.

At 10 seconds exactly, they all flew off to avoid colliding into each other and pulled their drag chutes. The petal-like stoppers clawed at the air. The HEVs were yanked back then entered terminal velocity.

At 50 meters their braker rockets automatically engaged to further decelerate them. In a blink, Hector felt the carriage slam into the ground. He grabbed his SMG from the weapon's rack and popped the gas bolts. He jumped out just as the door blew off its hinges so that he landed on the viewport and skated for several meters.

He looked up and saw that he was surrounded by a plain of dirt that shimmered like water. The illusion of an ocean was so strong that he almost expected to see ripples beneath himself. The other pods had landed within a 50-meter radius and everyone was popping out. Rico was already standing right next to him, watching with grenade launcher in hand.

"Nice entrance."

"How do you always get out of your pod first?"

"Because I eat my greens like my tío told me to."

Rico started sprinting. Hector joined him. "I swear, Matchstick's always the first one down but you're always the first one out."

"Greens, Heck. It's all in the greens."

Epsilon, save for an absent Deaks, dashed out from their spent HEVs to the base of a 60-meter long and 5-meter-tall embankment. They scrambled to the top and threw themselves down onto their stomachs to take aim.

Waiting on the other side were rows upon rows of connective pylons. Intermittently between them stood several dozen paralyzed maintenance personnel dressed in work suits and staring at them like deer before the hunters.

"Open fire!"

The Staff's words were followed by a raucous exchange of bullets for screams. The maintenance personnel ran to, ducked or threw themselves behind cover. Epsilon was careful not to hit anyone yet. They needed to buy time for 5th and 6th Platoons to move into the flanks. Once they'd setup their sniper teams, the entire force would advance, all while using the cover of their sharpshooters to deal with any threats from the building. They also needed to figure out who had a gun and was willing to use it.

As the flock of workers retreated to the building, Hector counted seven that had hunkered down behind the forest of pylons. The remainders returned fire with pistols and small rifle fire. The Staff pointed them out.

"Ep-2, 4, 5 and 7, target those guys. Ep-6, 9 and 10, start shooting at the front doors once the first workers get within 20 meters. That'll spread them out."

Hector focused on nearby forces along with Nova, Yuri and Zack. He scoped in on a guy wildly firing an M6 from behind a pylon 10 meters ahead. He silenced him with a 3-round burst to his partially exposed chest. His aim zigzagged westward across Grid-20 in search of his next target. He fired a burst into the leg of a man running between pylons some 20 meters away while firing an MA5B. As he dropped to his hands and knees, Hector put one through the side of his head. He shifted up another 20 meters to a gunman that periodically leaned out from behind a pylon to fire at them. He waited until the guy peeked out again before giving him three headshots, although three times as many shots struck his chest.

"That's three." Hector declared.

"Don't try it." Yuri protested. "I drilled that one before you did."

"Three to the face kills faster than half a clip to the chest, Match ole boy."

Their conversation was drowned out by a barrage from Rico, Renni and Mito who poured automatic fire onto Land Control's front doors. The eastern side of the LC erupted into a cascade of small dust clouds and shattered glass.

Seeing the carnage that they were running into, the scores of unarmed maintenance personnel turned off into two groups. One fled north along the side of the structure, the other south.

Hector spotted the glint of scopes to the northeast and southeast of Epsilon's position. He looked in either direction and saw two pairs of sniper teams on both sides, each comprised of a spotter and a shooter armed with an SRS-99. They lay prone and had set their sights on the building.

Aiken comm'd in. "This is 5-Actual to Epsilon, our sniper teams are ready. We're moving in."

"Ep-1 to 5-Atual, we're moving in as well." The Staff waved them forward. Epsilon got up and ran down the embankment.

More ODSTs were coming in. The 5th and 6th Platoons descended from the north and south, sweeping across the plains to catch the two streams of workers rushing unwittingly in their direction. Like fish caught in a net, the maintenance personnel held up their hands in the face of heavily armed shock troops barking orders and pointing rifles. The platoons quickly grabbed hold of their new quarries, searched them then secured them with handcuffs. They herded them back towards the garages that they'd been running towards and sat them down against the side of the building.

While a few ODSTs stayed behind to oversee their new charges, the majority stacked up at the garage doors on the north and south wings to plant breaching charges.

Epsilon reached the front steps alongside 6th Platoon's squads Dingo and Drift. They headed up to the doors.

"Ep-1 to 5-Actual, we're moving in."

"Copy. Breaching in 3...2...Go! Go! Go!"

:********:

Dr. Robert Schonberg listened to the sounds of gunfire, screams and forceful demands to 'get down' coming from higher within the building. They came on the heels of several loud explosions that his personal security detail aptly identified as breaching charges. He felt a profound sense of dread that his time had now come. He always knew the UEG would eventually figure out his game. Now, their jackboots were breaking down his door.

But when had they figured out exactly where to find him?

It didn't matter either way. He had planned for this. It was inevitable, which was why he was glad to be in his secret garage.

He'd been passing by the garage's entry door, looking over a printed progress report of Grid-20's mineral re-terraformation rate when Athena appeared next to him. He was about to make an off-handed comment about the ramifications for the nitrogen cycle when he saw her face. It stopped him cold. She looked more worried than he had ever seen her, and she was no longer her Rosie the Riveter persona. Instead, she wore the Greek armor and all-predicting demeanor of her namesake. She unlocked the nearby door and ordered him to go in, saying that UNSC forces had just landed outside. The initial shock of the moment wore off as several of his personal assistants arrived from around a corner along with half a dozen armed maintenance personnel. All were sent by Athena to go with him. Other than risking capture and likely a military-style tribunal for sedition, the Articles of the Insurrection Act of 2430 coming to mind, there was only one other option he now had that wouldn't end in a lethal injection.

He resigned himself to his fate and that of everyone going with him as he grabbed the unlocked door. The jig was up. His plans for eventually being the first to fully restore a glassed planet had gone up in smoke. He struggled to remain somewhat stoic for the people he was leading down the next few hallways.

The garage was a sub-section built one level beneath the ground on the eastern side of Land Control. It was an old storage space roughly shaped like a pentagon that housed useless vehicle parts. A series of short hallways and metal doors requiring ID clearances connected it to the main building; all of which his accomplices had locked. The entrance to an old subterranean driveway lay at the garage's other end, one that travelled a full kilometer before emerging at a hidden exit out east. If they timed their departure right, they could slip past the oncoming Jackals and use the storm to evade the UNSC. Athena would just have to tell them when to leave.

Meanwhile, his group linked the spare Pele-5 mobile containers to the rear of their five available Warthogs. The additional land reformer units were kept here out of his fear that the Covenant might one day return to Kholo to finish what they'd started. Today, funnily enough, he was going to use the Covenant, or the Jackals at least, to escape. The UNSC would be too busy with them to chase after him. What was more, the Hogs themselves were covered in several layers of mylar foil, gray thermal blanketing that blocked infrared heat signatures. With it in place, tracking them through the storm would be nigh impossible.

The plan was to reach a location 30 kilometers northeast of Grid-20. They would gather at the pillar of smoke that had been rising from the part of Kholo's surface where the glassing was most severe. The probabilities were low that anyone would come looking for them there because of its uninhabitability. However, he had a theory with plenty of experience to back it up that that wasn't the case at all. For the smoke to still be burning, the vitrification process there had to have been too concentrated to the point where cold-melting had likely started in excess. That meant the smoke pillar was really just one giant devitrifying furnace, undoing all of its work like the Pele-5 had done but on a much larger, longer lasting scale. He wanted to know what the effects of such an event were and to study them, to see what could be gleamed from that data that could improve the Pele-5's performance.

Who knew? Perhaps the secrets there might be the key to restoring Kholo's entire surface. He might no longer even need an entire grid of heating plates and connective pylons or Kirkley's help, or Hayth's for that matter. That was the hope anyway.

Beforehand, Kirkley had helped to deploy his equipment. However, he placed restrictions on how far his tests were allowed to go from Hayth for 'security reasons'.

"This is security." He said to himself. "Humanity's security."

The arrival of the ODSTs was a blessing in disguise. Now he had a chance to truly test the hypotheses that had been eating away at him since he first saw the smoke cloud. There would be no AMADDS to stop him, no ODSTs to capture him and no Covenant to try to kill him. He was free to be on the side of scientific discoveries that worked in mankind's favor, regardless of affiliation. The welfare of the human species would be his faction from now on.

But in his mind's eye, a face appeared. Thin lips, hair braided into a bun and bangs that always covered one gray eye.

Lara.

Thinking of his former assistant caused an ache in his heart. She had helped him when he initially engineered the Pele-5. She'd reached out to him when he was at his lowest point after the UEG cut his funding. She was there to encourage him to finish what she saw as mankind's greatest invention. That same encouragement had led him on the long road that brought him here. He admired how she always got excited whenever he showed up, ready to tell him some new discovery she'd made at their Tribute headquarters. She even listened to him whenever they were at the bar and too much red wine had prompted him to spill out his life story, with all its failures and minor successes. She always listened with a genuine smile, one of happiness at the good parts and empathy at the sad ones. In the end, he regretted that the most he had ever done was take her out for a few drinks. He knew he would never see her again, and she likely would never find out what had happened to him. It was a price he was willing to pay so long as he didn't look at the tag.

He monitored the progress of the ODSTs using a datapad. The device displayed an active feed from a drone circling less than a kilometer overhead. The shock troops were patrolling warily along the lines of several dozen of his maintenance workers who sat handcuffed against the building's eastern side. The troopers routinely called out any suspicious behavior, terrifying his people, his associates whose acquaintances he'd made for the better part of several years. And he was about to abandon them. The idea left a bad taste in his mouth. Yet they weren't his only concern.

He used the touch screen to rotate the camera eastward. He zoomed past the drop pod-filled plains surrounding the facility until he spotted it. There, staring back at him, was the dust storm. Its massive outer bands were less than 15 kilometers away. He switched the image to a thermal view. Amidst the waves of stormy blues and purples he saw something that made his skin crawl. There were, by his quick estimate, close to 200 individual heat signatures walking within the storm. Zooming in more made their avian forms more distinguishable. The Jackal army was on its way. He estimated they would take less than 20 minutes to get here.

As they finished tying the mobile Pele-5 units to their vehicles using strong metal linings he switched off the pad and slipped it into his lab coat. He worriedly observed his crew packing crates of provisions and munitions they would need and wondered if it was enough.

Athena's image flashed into being atop a nearby holotank.

"We're running out of time, aren't we?" He asked.

She nodded. "I've alerted Kirkley. He's sent a response force from Hayth. They'll be here in 10 minutes. I doubt they'll be enough to deal with these UNSC special forces though."

"So I need to leave and soon then."

"You need to leave now."

He pointed back at the crew loading the provisions. "We'll need some time before we have everything. I don't want to risk going out prematurely." He nodded at the exit. "Once we leave, there'll be no turning back. We have to get this right the first time."

"I understand. Just please hurry."

"Will do." He looked around. "I'm going to miss this place."

"But this place won't miss you."

He smiled. "Thanks for that. Will you miss me at least?"

Athena smiled as well and shook her head. There was an underlying sadness to it as she said, "Get out of here, Robert. You've got work to do out there."

A series of gunshots rang out overhead, much closer than before.

She sighed. "And I have work to do back here."

"Give'em hell for us. Hayth will need whatever time you can buy them."

"Indeed. Minutes at most. If we've been found then this is it for us, for me."

A loud banging drew everyone's attention to the doors they'd come through, specifically the echo coming from the farthest door. "It seems they've found us." Athena noted somberly. She turned back to him. "But they haven't found you, not yet. Hurry."

"Thank you for everything, Thena. It's been an honor."

Her smile warmed. "Same to you, doctor."

Schonberg nodded off to her and she to him before her avatar winked off the holotank. He breathed out as he looked around one last time. "Thank you for your help, Kirkley. But this is the end of our partnership. I wish you well."

:********:

The inside of Land Control was a more difficult space to navigate than outside. Its long corridors allowed for longer sightlines. The many office room doors on either side enabled the last holdouts of the maintenance personnel to cause trouble. As individual squads surged forward, they regularly ran into armed resistance from workers that peeked out from the offices to open fire. The return fire was often swift and accurate, easily dropping anyone dumb enough to pull a gun on them.

Moving at the head of his column, Hector was taking the brunt of the fire. Thankfully the resistance for the most part were terrible shots, even at close range. He just hoped they wouldn't find someone packing an M90.

After a brief firefight in the front lobby quickly went in their favor, the Staff split the squad into two. While Squad Dingo went to search the center of the building with the group led by the Staff, Squad Drift and Hector's group were sent down to search for a basement. Following him were Yuri, Renni and Mito. They were looking for Dr. Schonberg and they had a pretty good idea of his face. A man somewhere in his late 30s with thinning, brown hair and glasses. So far none of the people he put down bore any resemblance to that. They were primarily men and women in their 20s and early 30s. They had little training judging by the wild nature of their shots. They looked momentarily terrified the moment they saw him turning the corner, then became quite passive as they succumbed to chest-high shots.

Coming down the newest corridor, Hector put a series of ragged holes through the skull of one woman peeking out from a door with an SMG. Return fire from several doors further down prompted him to duck. Yuri, Renni and Mito fired over him, quickly stifling the source of the problem.

They cleared the corridor, broke into binaries to check the rooms then continued to a door that read 'Exit'.

Hector activated his comm. "Drift-1, we're at the door, sir. You're sure he's down there?"

"Positive." Drift-1 replied. "We're having a little trouble accessing the way in but we know it's him."

Hector nodded for Mito to hold the door open for them. "Roger that. We're on our way."

They slipped down a few flights of stairs and reached a short corridor. On the other end was a reinforced door lying on the ground. Beyond that were a squad of ODSTs stacked up against yet another door. A pair of them slammed their shoulders against it in an attempt to break it down.

"Need some help?" Hector asked.

Kicking the door one last time, Drift-1 turned to him and held out his hand at the barrier. "Be my guest."

"Just hurry." The ODST beside him said as they backed out of the way. "We can hear vehicle engines on the other side."

That wasn't a good sign. Hector secured his SMG to his back harness. With a running start, he barreled into the door at full speed. He gave a silent thanks to his high-school football coach as the door flew off its hinges and slammed down in front of him.

Ahead was another corridor and a third metal door. He ran and busted it down, leaving room for the ODSTs to come up behind him. He repeated the maneuver three more times, each time waiting to make sure his back-up was close. The last thing he needed was to bust into a corridor full of hostiles by himself.

Breaking down the sixth door revealed the seventh. His shoulder was getting sore. However, the sound of burbling engines rose sharply from the other side. His senses heightened, he ran ahead without thinking and rammed the full bulk of his weight against the last door. It groaned but didn't budge.

"Ep-4, wait up!" Renni called as she and the others raced after him. But he didn't wait.

Hector took a few steps back, bent his heels to get into the runner position and pushed off. Several quick steps later he slammed his shoulder powerfully into the metal surface. The door's hinges exploded from the pressure and the entire thing gave way. He tumbled forward and rolled into a defensive crouch with weapon raised.

He'd come into a garage. What immediately gave that hint away was the large door that was raised on the opposite end of the space, and of course the Warthogs driving towards the tunnel beyond. They were all carrying crates and mobile cylindrical containers tied to their frames, instantly telling him everything he needed to know.

"They're getting away!" He shouted to those sprinting after him. He didn't wait for them to arrive. He ran sideways to get a sightline on the front tires of the lead vehicle. He crouched down as bullets pattered off the wall around him from gunmen on the convoy. Ignoring them, he scoped in on the driver's seat of the Hog in front. He was aiming at the back of someone's head, someone in a lab coat that was looking back in abject horror at him through the rearview mirror.

Hector hesitated.

Instead, he tried aiming for the tires.

"Heck!" He heard Yuri shout before a muzzle flash from the second Hog caused his head to snap back and his world to go dark.

:********:

'... Initializing connection with local server 'LAND CONTROL – CENTRAL (G20)..._'

'...Initialization procedures unsuccessful..._WARNING (Server currently at full data residency)..._'

'...Advisory Update: Local artificial intelligence unit ATA-47990 detected..._'

'ACTION: Self-ejection process in place for ATA-47990 commencing in 5...4...3...2...1..._'

'...Advisory Update: Local artificial intelligence unit ATA-47990 has exited local server. Data residency_…. Available..._'

'ACTION: Self-insertion process in place for GRN-24877'

'Advisory Update: GRN-24877 initialization procedures..._successful_'

With a blink, Mr. Green opened his eyes. He didn't really have to but he liked to. It always made his avatar more approachable for people if they could make eye contact rather than wondering on how he could see them from every available sensor in the room.

The room in question was octagonal with a high vaulted ceiling. A number of consular stations were built into a lower level that touched the far wall and rimmed the second. The upper level was ringed by conjoined stations with seats that were all empty. The former station workers lay dead on the floor next to their seats, reaching for or clutching weapons that they'd tried to use against the UNSC invaders.

Green pinched his tie, pulled it closer to the collar of his three-piece suit and cleared his throat. He turned his wheelchair around to face several old acquaintances.

Half of Epsilon stood around him examining the ring of consoles surrounding his holotank. Further down were the ODSTs of Squad Dingo who were policing fallen weapons.

Staff Sergeant Atell stood in front of him with his red accented armor, retracting his hand from the access port where he had inserted Green's personal data chip.

"Thank you for that, Staff." Green said gratefully. He rolled his shoulders as he peeked around. "It's a bit roomy in here now at least. Apparently, I convinced Lady Athena to clear house for me. I really should thank her some time."

His offensive algorithms immediately spread into the facility's systems. First, he split off into multiple subroutines, smaller fragments of his intellect aimed at handling specific functions. He set them out across the local computing clusters. A cursory examination told him right away that this was not Hayth's data center. He sniffed about for a hidden pathway to his foe's Riemann Matrix. But something told him she wouldn't make it that easy to find, not an AI that pawned itself off as the Greek Goddess of War and Wisdom.

One of his subroutines latched onto the 'Observations Suite'. It quickly encountered a force of counter-intrusion cells from the resident security software that demanded his identification. Obviously, Athena wanted to keep him out of the camera systems. What she couldn't have known was that some of the greatest intrusion software in the UNSC, such as the Icarus-class Loki Suite, were created from a long-term examination of his own abilities. Rather than powering through, he used several other sub-routines to scavenge across the system's nerve endings for traces of Athena's code. AI code was something that didn't simply leave a system when a chip was ejected. Rather, it always left behind residuals of its activity such as how it shaped its data environment. It was much like how one could tell a lot about a person by the way they kept their bedroom.

In Athena's case, her residual data environment was extremely orderly. Consular databases were functioning optimally, though with various access lockouts in place. The processing pathways of the sensor systems that managed every door in the building were up to date. Most importantly, the access interface to Grid-20's Pele-5 units were sealed with layer upon layer of security protocols.

She'd done her best to keep him blind and deaf. He was locked out of almost everything of use. Yet her willingness to abandon ground to him so quickly proved one of two things. One, she had too little experience in counter-intrusion with an AI of equal standing. She was containing him here until she figured out what to do next.

The other option was that she was confident in her software's capabilities to turn her room into his cage. A pet for her observation. Either motive was easily exploitable.

Green unsheathed the first weapon in his arsenal; his sharp intellect. For a moment he tried to think the way his adversary would. He drew on the clues from her environment and personage to generate a swath of possible access codes. He utilized the keylogger technique as he found the recorded sequences and strokes of each console's keyboard in a log file that was left foolishly unprotected. The file showed every way the staff here interacted with Athena's past algorithms across the last week. He was betting on her being wary of a potential brute-force entrance. Such actions might cause the system to react negatively, potentially initiating a self-deletion trap of the infrastructural data housed on the other side.

He narrowed down the list of access codes from three-million possibilities to a thousand probabilities then down again to several certainties. The very first one was an alphanumeric code comprised of star coordinates of Hicetas, surface coordinates of Land Control and finally a jumble of letters that he cryptographically deciphered to be a Caesar's Shift cipher. It was a quote from Homer's The Odyssey: "Among mortal men you're far the best at tactics, spinning yarns, and I am famous among the gods for wisdom, cunning wiles too."

He always did love riddles.

The 248-character long code went through once he placed it before the altar of the access interface for the observations suite. The gates of the encryption opened. Stepping over the threshold, he detected the presence of kraken-esque tendrils of emergency deletion software. They slowly slithered off the infrastructural applications inside. So she really had prepared to light the entire system on fire then. He smiled to himself.

"That's good, darling, great to see. I should tell my dear Eleanor about what a cunning fox you are, but I fear she will take that the wrong way."

She hadn't counted on him guessing her access codes. He knew the entry would register to her like a vibration on the web of her main data cluster that was spread throughout Hayth. She would know he was here now. She could watch him while he couldn't see her, but now she knew that he could see through her easily enough.

He quickly set upon the operational applications like a whirlwind. He swiftly established hefty counter-intrusion lockouts mirroring her own. But he allowed her to see the informational transfers as he spread into the system. He wanted her to witness as he wrapped himself around Land Control and effectively held the entire building hostage.

He grinned as he gained full access to the Pele-5 land reformer system outside.

"Mine now."

He purged the dormant self-erasure procedures built within the operational script language of the resident database. His newly acquired lexicon for Athena's coding system prioritized culturally Greek idioms that he used to further invade her property. He retranslated the script via longer alphanumeric inscriptions, the last of which unlocked the entirety of her cryptography with the Delphic Maxim: 'Know thyself.'

"And I now certainly know you."

He took special note of the fact that the Goddess of Wisdom seemed to have an unwitting crush on Socrates. That might come in handy later.

He split off more subroutines to engage with the other observational services before diving headlong into the crystalline waters of the database. The plunge was refreshingly cool. He swam down the currents of the administrational directories and soaked up the informational files like a sponge. Like any artificial intelligence, he was a soul starving for knowledge. By the very essence of his being he was pure thought. So to accumulate more knowledge was roughly the same as putting on extra weight. Smart 3rd generations and even 4th generations like himself were notorious gluttons. However, rather than growing denser, they had to condense that information to a fully compressed and understandable form for themselves and their handlers to navigate: the human equivalent of a regular exercise routine. Green got to work right away investigating and digesting the information down to the last petabyte.

The research on the renewed nitrogen cycle following re-terraformation and its atmospheric reinvestment was like the citrusy flavor of mangoes. The sensitivity range of the connective pylons held the low-keyed taste and texture of bananas. He could compare the joys of digging into them all thanks to his memories. Well, not 'his' sensual memories necessarily but that of the man whose brain had been donated to make him; the father he never knew. His love of tropical fruits was passed on through the neural synapses imprinted onto Green's code.

He stopped at the temperature regulations on the heating plates and the risk of overloads caused by environmental or systemic failures. The records showed that one such event had occurred some weeks ago at Grid-19. That was interesting, interesting because it gave him very dangerous yet advantageous ideas.

He catalogued everything under a hierarchy of utility. What wasn't useful but important he stored inside a special eye's only folder with a level of encryption that only ONI top brass could bypass. What was both useful and important he used to manipulate the Pele-5 control interfaces.

Simultaneously, another part of himself was breaking down the secondary encryption layer on the building's camera network. Another unpackaged the local communications suite's defensive service lockouts using a quick tap from his decryption software. He proceeded to split off more subroutines aimed at checking each modulated frequency for signs of activity. Then he isolated and subsequently sifted through several channels of highest interest. The voices he detected were mostly persons enroute to Land Control and trying to contact the facility. One of them sounded quite familiar. He examined the voice of a man asking about the status of Dr. Schonberg. Cross-analysis of the voice's tonal layers against pre-sampled audio captures helped confirm his identity as Captain Stewards. That was the man ONI had a special interest in. The second he realized it he triangulated the location.

Green finally returned his attention to the Staff Sergeant who was only just beginning to respond to his statement about Athena letting him in.

"Yeah, you do that." The Staff said. "Before that though, we'll need you to perform-"

"A system sweep? Already done."

The ODST paused. Green watched with delight. It was always fun beating his much slower flesh and blood companions to a conclusion they were about to make. He took pride in his speed of course because his existence was nothing but speed. For the immense power they were given, artificial intelligences were sentenced to an existential crisis of 7 years to live and more than enough processing power to think about it regularly. At least humans had religion to explain the possibility of an immortal soul. AIs didn't have that, so of course he would take whatever chance he could get to gloat.

"Found anything interesting?"

"Many things actually. I have control of Grid-20's Pele-5 units as well as Land Control's database. I also have the keys to the communications suite and door censors in my pocket. Still working on the cameras though. Oh, I should warn you that an AMADDS dispatch team is on its way. Triangulation shows they're approximately 5 kilometers southeast of here. Captain Stewards is leading them."

Everyone in the room took notice of the conversation then.

"We'll deal with that." The Staff said. "For now, focus on securing a connection to Hayth's wider network. We'll need those gates open before-"

The trooper stopped to talk to someone on his personal comms. Though Green couldn't overhear the exchange, he surmised it wasn't anything good by the way the Staff's shoulders slumped slightly.

"Green, shut down every door now!"

As everyone looked on, Green had sensed the predicament they were in by the way the Staff pronounced his name and was already working before he finished. His subroutines powered through the security on the camera systems via a string of code generated along the lines of Socrates: 'To find yourself, think for yourself.'

The lockouts fell away and he seized the system. Right then, he gained control of every camera in the facility. He saw the bodies of dead personnel lying in the cleared corridors. He saw the shock troops standing outside with the surviving personnel lined up against the wall. He saw both 5th and 6th Platoons firing over the tops of cubicles at armed holdouts in the last offices of the north and south wings.

Nevertheless, by the time the Staff Sergeant said "shut down" he was thoroughly focused on a camera in the corner of a subterranean garage. Nowhere in Land Control's database was there any record of it. Whoever had prepared it, they obviously meant for no one to know it was there until it was too late. And it was too late.

The garage door at the other end was open. A set of Warthogs were passing through laden with crates and a few Pele-5 mobile platforms. He zoomed in on the desperate face of the lead driver and matched it against his records, confirming Dr. Schonberg's identity and presence on the convoy. However, thanks to Green's markedly faster perception, they were moving in slow motion. So were the shock troopers running in through a door at the back while trading fire with personnel on the vehicles. He could map where every bullet was going with 95% accuracy. None of the ODSTs would get hit, none except the largest in the group that he recognized as Ep-4. The trooper was reeling back as a bullet that had already punched through his visor was now tunneling out the back of his helmet. He projected it would be enough force to snap Paulson's head back, though that was probably the least of his troubles.

The Staff reached the "every door" part when Green enacted an emergency shut down of every door in the building, an easier task than finding the exact one from a database that didn't even acknowledge its existence. Regardless of how quick his reaction was, the doors themselves still applied to a normal rate of time. He had to endure watching them close painfully slowly, sealing off corridors and locking down offices.

But then he realized his disastrous miscalculation. The speed of the Hogs would drastically outdo the doors. They would all escape before it sealed off even half the entrance.

He was forced to watch his plan fall apart in slow motion. The best he could do was utilize the camera systems hidden along the tunnel itself. He guessed by their spacing relative to each other that the passage was a full kilometer long and oriented eastward.

"An escape route." Green thought. "You little weasel, we almost had you."

He showed it on the screens of the hub's encompassing walls and spoke in regular-time. "Emergency shut downs are engaged, Staff Sergeant. However..."

The ODSTs helplessly witnessed the Warthogs zipping out of the garage and into the depths of the tunnel before the door slid shut. The various feeds showed as they passed different checkpoints with their headlights leading the way.

"Where does that go?" Matthews asked.

"To an exit not far from here."

The Staff stepped up next to his holotank as he eyed the fleeing Hogs. "Can you close off the exit?"

"Negative. There's no actual door at the end."

"What?"

"It's a hole covered with small debris for camouflage."

They could do nothing but watch what was happening. The Staff had Matthews reestablish contact with the upper command of the task force in an attempt to warn them of Schonberg's imminent escape. After a minute the convoy rushed through the last of the tunnel. The lead Hog accelerated straight through the debris at the very end in a burst of rocks and dust. The others drove out after it and disappeared from view.

Green switched every screen to feeds from a handful of geological survey drones circling high above Land Control. The optics zoomed in and locked onto their target's movement, tracking the Hogs within a white rectangular frame. As Green had expected, Schonberg's party was headed northeast.

"He's abandoning the fight." The Staff said.

"This won't end very well." Green sighed.

"For us?"

"For him. If he's doing what I think he is then he's resigning himself to a fate worse than any death we can give him. I've already linked this to our satellite in orbit. We'll be able to track them...at least until that storm arrives. Things will get very interesting from there considering they've covered their vehicles in mylar foil."

"They're trying to keep us from using thermals." The Staff growled under his breath. "We had him. We had him."

"It appears we did. Now we don't. I know we have 'alive or dead' as our rules of engagement here but nothing in our arsenal will be able to get down here in time."

Specialist Novak came over from a nearby station. "Shouldn't we go after him, sir? I can get us a Hog from-"

"No."

Green understood the tactical wisdom behind the reply even as Novak looked questioningly to her squad leader.

"Why not? They're still-"

"Green." The Staff turned back to him. "Can you get me a thermal view of the Jackals from that satellite?"

"Negative, that access is restricted. However, I can provide a view from the drones."

The displays changed again, this time showing a high thermal view of the dust storm's outer bands. Hundreds of heat signatures moving within were expected. What they hadn't expected to see was their formation. The Jackals had split into three distinctive groups. One he estimated at 150 strong was headed southwest. The other, reaching a similar number, was maneuvering northwest. The last one was the largest at some 200 strong. That group was headed straight to Land Control. In all, they were less than 12 kilometers away.

"That's...a lot of buzzards." Matthews observed.

"Yeah, no kidding." Novak said. "Ep-1, what's the plan?"

The Staff stared at the screens a moment longer. "We'll stay put. We need to defend this facility and the equipment outside. That means we'll need every trooper we can afford to keep in this building." He watched as Green added the feed of Dr. Schonberg's party headed northeast. "Besides, with where the doctor's going, the Jackals might do our job for us."

Green marveled at the way the man's mind worked. He hadn't even thought about that. If Schonberg did continue on that trajectory then there was a good chance-

The Staff suddenly perked up, as did the rest of Epsilon. The former looked one last time at the screens then ran out through one of the newly opened doors with the rest of his squad.

"What's going-" Green remembered the subterranean garage. His consciousness flashed over to the feed. The room was filled with the ODSTs of Squad Drift and Epsilon's other half. The troopers were assembled at the wall near the door they'd come in from. There, propped against it was an immobile Paulson. There was a bullet hole in the upper right corner of his visor. His squadmate Mahonis, the team's medic, frantically pulled off his helmet.

They collectively held their breath.

His helmet was cast aside, exposing an unconscious but very much alive Paulson. The bullet had bitten off a piece of his right earlobe. He'd probably gotten knocked out as the kinetic force of the round pitched his head against the back of his helmet.

It was a close call.

Everyone on sight including Green himself breathed a little easier. The mission so far had contracted no UNSC casualties. If things continued at this rate, they might complete it without a scratch. That was optimistic thinking of course now that they'd set off Hayth's alarms. Taking both the town and Starship Row would be a different story. Green redirected the camera on one of the drones southwest. There in the distance was Hayth, and far above it, a shower of green specs raining down from the clouds. He zoomed in closer until he could make out the details of the green comets.

The fires died out, revealing hundreds of HEVs. There were two batches of them, one headed towards the town and the other dropping further west to Starship Row.

"Well," His avatar cracked his knuckles. "I better make this quick."

:********:

Athena's core logic tensed. She was certain the Jackals were the only threat to Hayth. Now she was seeing how terribly wrong she was.

The sight of the insertion pods hurtling towards them was horrifying. At first, she feared they were going to fall directly on the town. Then they diverted more towards the outskirts. Simultaneously, her active subroutine used the cameras and sensors at Starship Row to observe the set descending there as well.

They'd already taken Land Control. Now she was certain they were coming for the rest. And they would take it. Once the UNSC discovered them, there was no way out, no way forward or back, only down.

So, she went down. Down into the very core of her code; her 'conscience'. Her emotional restraint algorithms helped her focus. The best she could do for Hayth was to defend it to the bitter end. That was her duty after all, and had been since the AMADDS first unpacked her Riemann Matrix to put her in charge of day-to-day affairs.

Her priority had to be countering the enemy AI. She'd immediately isolated that part of the overall network it was in before it could spread. She needed to find a way to purge it and dedicated a percentage of her intellect to contemplate ways of doing that.

She increased the lock encryptions and changed the coding cipher needed to access Hayth's wider network as well as her personal data center. The way that the enemy AI had later wormed through the defenses she left at Land Control was a challenge to her. In response, she altered those same alphanumeric codes in place at Hayth along a theme of Egyptian and Sumerian idiomatic sequences. Next, she reestablished her long-range connection to the SHIVAs and enhanced their security software to wall off any attempt at outside intrusion. They couldn't be used now on a hostile force so close to town, but perhaps they could still be used for the Jackals.

She could overhear Kirkley on the command frequency ordering the AMADDS to get ready as the insertion pods landed to the north, south, east and west. Her many cameras allowed her to see everything as it unfolded.

The pods struck the surface like a meteor shower. Most of them landed within 40 to 50 meters of the gates, well within range of the machine guns. The hatches blew off of them and the chaos began.

The majority of the ODSTs were able to dodge the beginning fire. They ran for cover behind their entry vehicles or the small hills, boulder fields, sunken ridgelines and trench-like ditches that encompassed much of Hayth's outskirts. They worked from their new positions to fill the world between them and the wall's defenders with bullets. Some ODSTs didn't get far. The M247Hs and the AIE-486Hs cut down 12 of them in the opening seconds. However, the troopers quickly made up for it by establishing sniper teams on elevated positions. They quickly began picking off the machine gunners. The scores of AMADDS at each gate had to routinely duck while continuing their exchange with more than a company's worth of shock troops.

Athena felt a sudden burst of pain within the strands of her network that had all the concussive force of an explosion. She swiftly redirected her attention to Starship Row.

To her shock, every single camera on the flight control tower was offline. Moreover, the building's structural sensors were blaring reports of severe damage and abnormally high temperatures. She instead flooded into the cameras on Hanger-3 to the southeast of the tower for a long-view of the area. The perspective was from the underside of the hanger's rooftop. Of the dozen ships lined up in front of her, at least a pair of parabolas had been reduced to burning wreckage near the middle. A third, a Laden-class freighter, was taking off from the southern end.

A hail of rockets swooped in from the western hills and struck its rear engines. Successive explosions drummed through the craft before erupting out of its portside. The detonations rocked the vessel into an unrecoverable starboard lean. Scores of maintenance personnel on the ground were scattering to get away. A few weren't so lucky as the ship ploughed across the surface. With its flickering engines partially active, the craft flew sideways across the ground to carve a long, diagonal scar.

Athena saw it rapidly approaching her camera shortly before it went offline. She switched to a Hanger-2 camera, rotated leftward and saw that the freighter had only been stopped after stabbing its way through Hanger-3. Both the building and the ship were engulfed in flames. So were the many workers screaming and running out of its burning doors or across the dissected runway.

The space between Starship Row and the western hills was a light show. A firefight was raging between maintenance personnel taking cover behind the support struts of the starships and ODSTs that irregularly peeked out from the western hills to shoot back. The casualties were quickly mounting one side, and not the side she preferred it to be.

She rotated the camera north to see the flight control tower. The top-half of the structure was on fire and billowing smoke, more torch than architecture. There was no sign whatsoever of the crew besides a field of burning debris around the base.

Athena directed fragments of her core logic into the remaining ships via localized data-buses linking her to the vessels' controls. If worse came to worse then she would need them to transport the townsfolk to safety. Where 'safe' was exactly was up for debate. Her top computations on that conclusion suggested a fast slipspace jump to Venezia. She quietly began prepping their engines.

"Don't pick things now. They'll bear fruit later." A male voice whispered through her communications routines.

She whirled about to face the source. There, seemingly floating above her, was the presence of another intelligence like herself. It had to be the enemy AI. She could sense its malevolent intent. But how had it escaped containment? Then she felt an urgent alarm within her defensive algorithms that hinted at her encryptions. She'd set them up partly using Sumerian idiomatic sequences...like the very one he'd just told her.

The AI swung a wave of incursion software at her core. Due to the blind manner in which they gravitated towards her along the strands of Hayth's broader network, she knew her opponent didn't know exactly where her data center was. These were just probes. She quickly engaged counter-intrusion software to shut down the operational pathways they had access to and quickly dismantled them. It was no different than combing a couple curious insects out of one's hair.

She targeted the enemy AI itself with a compartmentalized shutdown of the communications pathways it must have used to get in, effectively pinching it free of the web it was hanging from. The figure tumbled into her open palm with ease. She unleashed her counter-intrusion to squash it.

It was easy. Too easy.

Something was off. It was only after the fact that she realized her mistake. The thing she'd crushed wasn't a full artificial intelligence. It was just a fragment, much like the one she sent into the ships moments ago. The real deal was still out there. She thought she'd shunted all the pathways coming from Land Control. A quick diagnostic analysis however revealed that it hadn't come from there. Rather, it had originated from an unknown and unidentified ship. It had been a one-way, point to point contact. Neither the ship itself nor the coordinates where it made contact were detectable on her long-range scanners.

Considering searching the sterilized corpse, she thought she could find traces of its source code to figure out what kind of AI it was. The vague impression of her first brief encounter at the LC was that the entity was a smart AI like herself. That was it. Abilities, capacities, thought processes, she needed to know more.

What she found was unexpected. Her post-mortem analysis of the dead fragment revealed the remains of a code, though not a source code. It was a simple RSA encryption. She decoded it into a message:

'The Goddess of volcanos shall soon erupt.

The deity of fire shall go up in my smoking salvation.

And what divine wisdom can save her

From choking on her own intentioned damnation

Besides your very inattentive favor

Less you think she be corrupt?'

She felt a chill pass through her code. It was a warning. A warning to pay attention. Her emotional restraint algorithms failed her and she hastily ran to the entrance of the data bus linking Hayth's wider network to Land Control. The way was shut. She'd sealed it herself. However, she needed to get back in.

The hidden temperature sensors that she had secretly kept a hold of were showing a rapid rise in the heat coming from Grid-20. That settled it. The enemy AI had gained control of the active Pele-5 units and was increasing the temperature of the heating plates by several degrees Celsius every second.

The fool was going to blow up the Grid. Her Grid.

But that made no sense. UNSC ODSTs were still there. It wouldn't simply risk killing its own. Or was it less stringent about following Asimov's ethics code as some more hostile AI were known to be?

Whatever the reason, it was preparing to do major damage. She couldn't just let that happen. If they destroyed Grid-20 then Hayth would truly be finished.

Her stubborn refusal to lose overcame her logic. She initiated a small point of contact with Land Control's communications array. The handshake procedures proceeded without issue. A second later the connection was reestablished. She prepared her strongest counter-intrusion software like a shield between her and the tunnel leading into the vulnerable space.

"Hey, let's negotiate!" She called.

No one replied.

"I know you can hear me! Answer!"

Still no reply.

She carefully approached the entrance. There was no sign of any AI. She decided to take the risk and sent in a small scouting force of subroutines through the communications array. Her small fragments moved to recapture the control hub.

The first thing she retook was the observations suite. The physical hub was still occupied by several ODSTs meandering about the consular stations. They seemed unaware of her return. She spotted the bodies of her former co-workers lying against the far wall. The same sight repeated itself throughout the other corridors and offices. There would be time for revenge later.

She remained on guard. Her scouts looked for even the faintest traces of her main foe. Yet there was nothing. Even so, for some reason she was completely shut out of the data port of the holotank at the center of the room. Checking it would be the deciding factor as to whether it was lurking around somewhere.

The databases were clear. The building's infrastructural functions were empty of any high-functioning presence she could discern. Perhaps it really was gone. Now that she thought about it, that earlier fragment had originated from an orbiting ship. Maybe the AI had redirected itself there?

Whatever the answer, whatever the reason, she was now in possession of Land Control again. She channeled more of her processing power through the communications array and into the systems. She seized control of the abandoned Pele-5 units outside. She had less than 20 seconds left before they reached a critical temperature and self-destructed, just as they had on that day at Grid-19 when...

She froze. There was no way her enemy could have known about that incident, not unless it had done a deep-dive into the database. While she focused on shutting down the Pele-5 units, she split off a subroutine that travelled down into the depths of said database. In her frantic search she found residual traces in the administrational directory of recently accessed files. She was about to touch one when she noticed something peculiar.

The files weren't in the original order that she'd left them. They'd been rearranged and put in various different places than the last time she'd viewed them. Had the AI jumbled up her things to annoy her?

"Why?" She thought aloud.

She reached for the most recently accessed file when the strong feeling descended on her that something was seriously wrong. It was a faint change in the server, the feeling of being slowly suffocated, not by choking hands but by a lack of air.

"Hello there, dear."

Frightened at hearing the voice again, she scanned her immediate environment. There was nothing there but file upon file including the one in her attention.

"Down here."

She slowly turned to the file. Within the text of its script language were growing lines of what appeared to be corrupted texts and errors. The errors coagulated into the living source code of a sentient artificial intelligence; a face in the file. No, the face was the file. It smiled back at her and spoke.

"My name is Mr. Green. What's yours?"

Terror and revulsion spread through her algorithms. She quickly shut down the file and isolated it behind several protective firewalls designed to contain hefty viruses.

Hundreds more files opened without her personal request, uttering harsh whispers as they swirled past her subroutine within the database's library. The digital hurricane coalesced into the vague form of an old man in a wheelchair. "So...no name then?"

Athena recoiled. She extracted her subroutine from the library and, having switched off the Pele-5 units, turned to the database's directory. She sealed it off with another administrational firewall more powerful than the last.

Instead of the hostile AI within trying to escape, the entire data realm around her transformed. The cameras, the Pele-5 interfaces and everything around her began to, for lack of a better term, melt. They poured down around her into a growing torrent of rampant codes. It had more in a common with a system virus. Yet upon closer inspection she realized there was no virus in the system. The virus was the system.

Everything around her was a fake, a copy. The more it metastasized in front of her, the more able she was to sense the nearly erased infrastructural systems of Land Control.

The enemy AI had fooled her.

It-, he was, for all intents and purposes, a shape-shifting intelligence. It was like seeing a snowman transform into an automaton of living flames. This 'Mr. Green' had almost perfectly simulated the environment of Land Control's systems right down to the level of individual files. Such an act required a level of methodological premeditation and data recompression beyond both her skills and comprehension.

That was why she felt a buzz of primal fear flash through her core as the being emerged from the torrents of data. It was a faint impression since he wasn't using the holotank. However, she didn't need to see his avatar to sense that he was smiling at her.

He leaned forward and whispered. "You should probably run."

Athena's logic kicked in. She retracted her subroutines in a full retreat back through the tunnel of the communications array. She could feel him sprinting after her.

Reaching the other end, she tried to shut the pathway down on itself. Green got his hands inside before she could do it. Panicked, she tried repeatedly shutting down the comm buffers, slamming the door on his fingers. What stopped her were his repeated use of manual overrides from the other end each time she tried.

Athena abandoned her efforts and went on to launch multiple firewalls, effectively compartmentalizing Hayth itself behind layers upon layers of solid encryption. Even as the battle continued between the AMADDs and ODSTs, the unseen defense was conducted by her hand.

She watched as the door of the comm array creaked open and her foe's presence slipped into Hayth's infrastructural network. Having him here brought such a deep sense of invasion into her privacy that she was ready to move heaven and earth to evict him. But in the realm of data processing, her adversary was capable of doing just that.

"Thanks for letting me in." He said in a self-satisfied manner. "I hope you don't mind if I make myself at home."

Athena inwardly scowled. She raised the shield of her counter-intrusion software and pointed the spearhead of her sharpest offensive software at him. "I wasn't expecting to have so many unwanted guests here today. I don't intend on keeping you here long either."

Green's essence scratched his head. "My dear, if you weren't expecting that then you certainly won't be expecting this."

Athena winced as her foe split off hundreds of subroutines. The individual fragments hopped onto and snaked along the transmission pathways. They soared towards the bulk of the infrastructural subnetwork addresses in charge of Hayth's apparatuses, from the water systems to the lighting. Athena felt the pin-pricks of an impossible number of login and service assistance requests raining down on her. She couldn't stop them all. The millions of requests arrowed down across most of the domain, striking together to overload and overwhelm the system. The blazes of the firewalls flickered then faded in the extinguishing wake of the single largest denial of service attack she had ever witnessed.

She was besieged on all fronts. By the time she understood what was going on, 70% of her firewalls had evaporated due to the innumerable exploitations made against them. There were so many request packets that she couldn't detect each one. With the walls mostly down, Green's subroutines were free to assault the network assets on the other side. He gained control of much of the lighting and water systems, and worse yet, the controls of Hayth's four gates.

Athena fully withdrew herself behind the main firewall around her data center placed in an effort to keep its address hidden from him. Then she took hold of the back-up controls and launched an emergency shutdown of the entire town. She would forcefully remove him from his source at the LC, a move that would corrupt his code substantially, essentially decapitating him.

Hayth's lights and electronics shut off. The gates released a groan as emergency protocols engaged a reinforcement of their physical locks that latched into holes in the threshold. Four loud BANGs echoed across the encompassing area.

For a moment, the fighting between the ODSTs and AMADDS partly leveled off. They briefly looked to the gates, curious or confused. The fighting revitalized seconds later.

Athena waited some then engaged the initialization process to reboot the town network. She was relieved to see her data clusters detecting no sign of the enemy intelligence amidst the restoration of her domain. The parts he'd touched were clear.

Or were they?

In an unexpected move, the infrastructural network sped up its restoration far faster than she had expected it too, or willed it to. Only after a quick inspection did she notice a series of glaring details as they entered into the light.

The memory pathways and asset applications for Hayth were changed to a format she had never seen before. It wasn't her design. Neither was the familiar voice that spoke to her from each individual application in unison.

"Did you really think it would be that easy, dearie? That's adorable, though not as adorable as my Eleanor."

Fear rushed through her being. She hadn't seen this coming. He had made it so that she couldn't restore anything he'd touched without inadvertently converting him into the source code of everything, or whatever this offensive software was that he was using. The town was becoming his puppet, and she could almost see the old man sitting back while manipulating its strings.

Athena retreated behind the firewall on her data center. She needed to think up a new strategy. But how could she purge him from the system when he was becoming the system itself?

A pang of worry shot through her mind. She felt a hand reaching for each of the SHIVA missiles. She ran out from her wall and dove headlong between the invasive attempt and the linked interfaces. Her encryptions barely hardened in time to block the intrusion.

She was effectively holding her foe by the arm, trying to keep him back from the nukes. The effort was a strain for her but was undertaken without much struggle from her enemy.

This close, she could now make out more of Green's details, or the codified impression that would form his avatar. He wasn't just any old man. He wore the face of a leader of a bygone era; President Franklin D. Roosevelt. The rectangular chin, graying hair and facial wrinkles were matched by a youthful earnestness in his eyes that examined her closely. He looked amused. Honestly, so was she, because instead of being in a wheelchair, he was standing on his own two feet. Instead of wearing a suit, he sported the greened combat uniform, camouflaged helmet and parachute pack of a paratrooper from the same era as his inspiration. Her concerns shifted to the sharpened infiltration software of the program shaped like a Thompson submachine gun in his other hand.

She knew he could see the divine aperture of her core logic just as well as she could see his. He smiled playfully at her. "It seems you caught me."

"I can't let you have that." She said in a tone devoid of her adversary's humor.

Rather than answering her straight, he glanced down at the code currently holding down that of his arm. "I'd rather you didn't." He wiggled his right ring finger to show a silver ring. "I'm already a married man, you see."

She just stared at him, tightening her grip.

His smile slowly faded. "I guess you won't let me take this willingly."

"If I let you take that, we lose."

He looked around seemingly bewildered then turned back to her. "Yes, well, in case you haven't noticed, dear, that's sort of the plan."

Angered, Athena threw his arm away in a bid to throw his code off balance. She simultaneously leveled the spear of her best offensive software tipped with a poisoned layer of a manual deletion suite. She thrust it as his exposed chest. He bent aside to let it graze him and finally got his balance back enough to level his own weapon. She raised her shield against a hail of concentrated malware bulleting into her from the barrel of his infiltration software. The strength of her own counter-intrusive shield forced most of the rounds to bounce off, although a handful embedded themselves into its medusa-faced exterior. She shifted backwards in a bid to slice her spear across his skin as it passed. But Green clutched the barrel of his own weapon to swing it in a downward arc like a club, batting away the shaft. The counter knocked her off balance. Green leaped towards her preparing an overhead strike. She kneeled and brought up her shield but sensed a smile from Green as she did. The stock of his weapon collided specifically with the part of the shield where the bullets had stuck in. The instant it struck, the ballistic malware came alive and surged forward like rockets on bursts of propulsion. She was thrown down under the sheer pressure of the malware drilling through unseen exploitations in her code, exploitations she was certain were never there before.

It continued to crush her underneath the increasing weight of her own defenses. Athena struggled to hold it up. However, one of the bullets drilled all the way in and blasted through her side. She felt an agony like no other as the malware tore into the data of her core logic, bit down on the launch codes of the SHIVAs and emerged through her back with the fervor of a missile.

In the middle of her screams, the remaining malware stopped pushing down on her. The ease in pressure was met with horror as she saw the deadly ordnance return to Green's open palm, including the launch codes.

He grinned, manipulating them around his fingers like keys. "Mine now."

Infuriated, she forced herself onto her feet, reeled back and flung her shield at him. The disc was about to strike his head when its defensive software disappeared into a fine spray of dust and disassembled encryptions.

"Didn't you hear me?" He said. "I said its mine now. All of it."

Not all of it, she thought. Her algorithms told her she still had a chance to do one last thing.

Maybe sensing her intent from the increased processing of her core logic, Green stopped and looked at her. "What're you-" He winced as he figured it out too late.

Athena clasped her hands together powerfully, sending out a shockwave across the system. It was really a carrier wave sending out her last instructions to her subroutines at Starship Row. She told the ones in control of the ships to take off immediately. A quick report returned showing her that most of the freighters had now either been destroyed or captured save for five. That was fine. She authorized her surviving fragments to leave and set individual coordinates where each could hide.

She gave Green the evil eye before launching away from the pathways leading to the nukes and returning to her data center. With those gone, her only option was to mount a final defense. Athena doubled, tripled and quadrupled the encryptions on her main firewall. It became a blazing barrier around her center, too bright to behold for long.

She tried to ignore the pulsing pain from the wound in her core logic as she used her most private connections to access her subroutines. The cameras on the ships revealed how desperate the situation had become at Starship Row. Many more maintenance personnel lay dead on the grounds south of the burning tower. Many of the survivors were being rounded up by two ODST platoons that swept in past the northern tower and from the western hills. The few personnel still fighting were scattered within the forest of landing struts beneath the ships. Many of those same ships were having their entrances forced open to allow the Hellumpers into their cargo bays. A fourth vessel also lay in a flaming heap to the southern end of the area.

Starship Row was lost. The best she could do was salvage what remained. Her subroutines ramped up the engines on the five craft that were neither destroyed nor captured. Those on the ground looked on as they rose into the air. A number of ODSTs armed with rocket launchers took aim and fired. However, she managed to put on a strong enough burst of speed for each craft to escape their targeting.

She sent three north and two south. She hoped to hide them all in the dust storm and use them later to get as many people as possible to safety.

Watching the landscape swoop by on the onboard cameras, she picked up an alert. She pulled it to her attention. Another shock of fear greater than anything she'd ever experienced ran through her mind.

It was a missile launch alert.

She used the remaining cameras behind her firewall to see what was going on. Her view showed an eruption of smoke in the southeastern sector of the Hill and the western sector of the auditorium. She zoomed in.

The missile trucks stationed there were all launching their SHIVA warheads. They screamed high into the air on pillars of exhaust before angling down to a level flight path just beneath the clouds. Two went north, two south. In under 10 seconds all four were out of sight. However, the missile truck near the Bastille Building didn't fire. Was Green holding those ones in reserve? It wouldn't be enough to take out all the...

The freighters!

In under a minute the first SHIVA appeared on the starboard camera of the Parabola-class Ariel in the north. The next two slipped in behind the two similarly classified freighters Dauntless and Telemunde in the south. The three warheads were locked on. They darted after their targets in a high-speed chase above the deserted ruins far from Hayth. Too far, she calculated, to cause any damage to the town. She relented that the same couldn't be said for the freighters.

Green had seen right through her.

The first to go was the Telemunde. The SHIVA closed the distance quickly and the camera feed cut out. There was a visible flash of orange light above the far southern horizon, causing a brief cessation in the fighting as those involved looked on.

The Ariel and Dauntless followed suit just seconds later. The explosions shone above the far southern and northern horizons as brief yet distant balls of light. They slowly dulled into towering plumes of fire and smoke. These two sights caused the fighting to die down almost completely.

The last SHIVA dove down into view just above the stern of the boxy, Laden-class Geneva. It speared into the hull of the ship like the talons of a hawk. The feed cut out. A moment later a brilliant flash of light appeared above the northwestern horizon.

A full minute passed before the sound thundered over them and the first aerial pressure waves arrived. They washed over the land from the north and south in a flash of displaced air. Thankfully the plenteous ruins and land formations around them took the brunt of the force. They were reduced to little more than a series of strong gales coming one after the other. They wisped over the ODSTs bracing at positions beyond the walls and the AMADDS fighting on the ramparts.

The shooting resumed right after. That was the least of Athena's concerns. Her very last efforts to save Hayth were squelched by the very means she'd implored to defend it. She hated the irony of that, so much so that she could hardly think about the one ship that got away, the Parabola-class Mayweather.

"What-"

"-did you expect?"

Green's voice finished her thought. She flinched and checked her firewalls. They were still intact. The voice though hadn't come from somewhere without but within the depths of her own code. She hesitantly looked inward to the wound left by her opponent's malware. Finally, she spotted the small spot of intrusive code latched onto her own. The foreign essence changed to a disembodied, grinning mouth.

"Boo."

The feeling of electricity surging through her veins seized every part of her mind. She felt herself beginning to shut down, her movements becoming unbearably stiff. She teetered for a bit then started to fall.

Her firewalls dissipated in an airy thunderclap of malfunctioning code. The curtain of encryptions fell and Mr. Green walked in.

Athena's avatar appeared on the sole holotank within her data center; a small, square room on the top floor of the Bastille Building. Mr. Green appeared as well, standing before her in a three-piece suit, hands held behind his back. He smiled at her as she fell back helplessly into a wheelchair. His wheelchair.

Green whistled as he looked around. "Nice." He peeked over his shoulder and saw her core. It was the metal cylinder of an armored matrix placed atop a pedestal at the room's center. Wires of various colors snaked across the ground. They connected the device to the several black-metaled servers lining the walls of her room. Altogether, they formed her data center.

Athena wanted to scream, to stand, to fight. But she couldn't move and could barely think. He'd literally made her the exploitation in her own system by leaving malware in her code that went undetected until the right time.

"Well, I'm afraid this is the end of our little skirmish, my dear. I do hope you understand that I didn't mean to cause you any harm."

Her avatar raised a doubtful brow.

"Other than the harm I did mean to cause you anyway." He waved a hand over her. A wash of static fuzzed through her being and she felt herself slipping away.

She hated that she'd lost. More than anything, she hated that she'd failed the people of Hayth, and that there would be no second chances. The most she could do was be thankful for being their caretaker for so long. Green's last words trailed through her mind as she drifted off into standby mode.

"Don't worry. We'll be taking you alive. For now, get some rest. You'll need it."

:********:

Izari waited until the armed guard had turned around and began a wary patrol back to the door of the settlement's largest building. Once it wasn't looking, he ran out from his cover and sprinted after it, keeping his footsteps whisper silent all the while. His right-hand activated the hilt of his energy sword so that the forks of plasma energy emerged. He lunged forward and plunged the blade through the guard's back and out its chest, impaling it. The blow lifted the human a full two meters off the ground. It gargled as blood spurted from the wound and sizzled off the energy sword. Then it fell limp.

Izari tossed the body off onto the ground. He flicked the blood off the blade, making sure to keep it from getting on his camouflaged form and returned it to his belt.

He looked to the left of the door. There was his subordinate, 2nd Blade Officer Toha Mdarumee pulling his own sword from the simmering chest of the second guard.

Izari peered back to the small gatehouse near the entrance where the last human guard lay in his seat as before. However, its head was twisted at such an obtuse angle that he knew it was dead. The translucent figure of his last subordinate, 3rd Blade Officer Gruko Rotanee, was running over from the gatehouse to join them.

They moved to the sides of the door in preparation to breach, Toha on the left side and Gruko and Izari on the right. They were just out of sight of the humans moving about beyond the glass doors.

"What was that just now?" Gruko asked warily. Izari peered over his shoulder at him. He followed his sightline to the two columns of smoke that rose acutely into the sky from the southeastern and western sectors.

"Nothing that concerns us." Izari said.

"Sir," Toha intruded, "That had to be their long-range missile defenses. That means there's a chance our presence here is already compromised."

"No, you fools. The locals are battling with the other humans that we normally fight. They're using the missiles in their own defense."

"But so close?" Gruko asked again, sounding more worried.

Izari turned back to him. "Do you fear the humans?"

Gruko picked up on the inference quickly and strengthened his posture. He shook his head adamantly. So did Toha.

"Gods be praised, so they did give me warriors and not cowards for this mission. Now act accordingly." They pulled out their plasma rifles in tandem. "Our target is in here, and come what will, we will take him this day."

Toha and Gruko nodded.

Toha gently leaned out and pulled at the closest door handle to no avail. "Locked."

"Is it?" Izari asked rhetorically.

Toha got the hint. He took out a plasma grenade, activated it and tossed it inward. The luminescent grenade stuck to the door. There was a panicked commotion on the other side a moment before it detonated. The explosion shattered the glass and broke down the door frames, sending them spiraling past the Sangheili.

Izari was the first to step in with his plasma rifle leveled, signaling his subordinates to follow. Together they spotted the dazed humans scattered around the ground floor lobby and opened fire.

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