The Sins of our Fathers

by MarkerMagnum

Unknown to the Citadel Council, the Human-Covenant war nears its vicious end. Miranda Keyes is seconds too slow. Delta Halo fires, leaving UNSC space as a lifeless snapshot in time. The Citadel must morn the loss of a civilization they never knew.

15. Revenant

There isn't much I can say about Halo that isn't already in the history books. All the details of humanity's final battle have been laid out in excruciating detail by the Citadel investigations. You've probably all seen images of the Coelest system. Of Delta Halo. That's what we weren't prepared for. I half expected some sinister hellscape, worthy of Halo's power.

But what the images can never convey is what that truly feels like. To be the tiniest of specks on that glittering band. To see the true scale of the weapon for yourself. It was terrifying. It was beautiful.

Williams, Lucy. Words Unspoken. Translated by Aurelia Savo, Thessia Diplomatic Press, 2255, pp. 304.

---

The STG's operation on Reach had started so simple. From the glassy plain where they had landed, their massive all-terrain haulers ground the glass beneath their tires. They carried a town, prefabricated structures and mining equipment, ready to be deployed at their dig site. It wouldn't be luxury, but Mordin had certainly lived in worse. The convoy had rumbled towards the heart of the Highland mountains. Their goal lay where Menachite Mountain had once stood, the gap in Reach's jagged crown.

They had quickly discovered that there was no longer daytime on Reach. Twelve hours after their landing, external temperatures began to climb once again. Even inside the conditioned cabins of the haulers, it pushed the limits of Mordin's comfort. But the only lights on Reach were the piercing beams of the haulers, lancing out across empty fields of glass.

Mordin knew the theory. Reach had once had massive oceans, a veritable garden world. Those oceans had been burned from her surface. In the initial phases of the glassing, there would have been terrible storms, the aches and pains of a dying biosphere. By the end, there would have been nothing, the superheated atmosphere preventing the formation of any clouds at all. Now nearly a year after the glassing, they formed dense clouds, blanketing the ruined world. On its own, it would block out much of the light on Epsilon Eridani. But on Reach, that water was mixed with trillions of tons of ash and soot. Her clouds were stained jet black, blocking any glimmer of light from reaching Reach's battered surface.

In this eternal night, the convoy had plowed on. The glass eventually gave way to ash. The Covenant had spared the land surrounding CASTLE base. But that hadn't stopped raging maelstroms of wildfire from racing through the dense forests, buffeted by the hurricane force winds of Reach's death throes. On their ascent, Mordin spent some time walking alongside the haulers, taking time to examine what he could of the incinerated mountain forests. There wasn't much to work with. A biological study was out of the question. Anything remotely organic was now nearly unrecognizable. Where trees hadn't been instantly cremated, they had slowly smoldered, leaving behind white streaks in the black ash. The interiors of the haulers quickly became filthy, as the STG operatives tracked in dozens of grams of black soot with every EVA.

Mordin was back in the hauler when they reached their destination. It was quite obvious. The twisting mountain passes gave way to a broad, shallow dish. It was featureless, more like a bomb crater than a secret UNSC base. The ash gave way to seared rock. There were patterns in the stone, geodesic spirals where the Covenant excavation beams had tore away at one of Reach's highest peaks. Now, all that remained of that once proud mountain was its imposing footprint. At once, the expedition had become a flurry of activity. The camp was erected quickly, and soon, for the first time in days, Mordin was able to rest in a proper room, in a proper cot.

With the start of excavation at CASTLE base, Mordin came to a worrying conclusion. He was no miner. He left that to the experts. But he did know that flooding was one of a miner's greatest fears. The problem being, Reach was in a state of flux. As the planet cooled, her oceans would rain down on their heads. The expedition leadership hoped it was months away. In his first two days at CASTLE base, Mordin discovered it was all too imminent. He meticulously calculated temperature and humidity readings, cross referencing against human figures for Reach's hydrosphere. And, as he explained to his superiors, Reach was at a tipping point.

Reach's skies fell 8 days after their arrival at CASTLE base. Mordin knew it the second he inspected his instruments that morning. The tipping point had arrived. They ceased excavation, securing their equipment and preparing for the coming storm. They waited three hours before the first raindrop. Mordin was outside when it happened, helping to move the excavation equipment to the basin's rim. That first raindrop cut through the beams of light from the heavy machinery. Another followed. They were heavy and thick. They fell like stones. The wind howled. Reach's eerie silence was over. The planet's tempest soul was reborn. Mordin welcomed it with open arms and tilted his face towards the black sky. The rain fell in sheets now, hammering into his helmet. Lightning arced across the distant sky, and for an instant, Mordin could truly see, and the jagged jaws of the Highland mountains reached into the sky around them. Reach was alive once more.

When Mordin and his teammates retreated indoors, the water ran off their suits, leaving behind dark streaks on their visors. The rain was as much ash as it was water.

The black rain continued without cease for two months. Resupply from the UNSC vessel in orbit was dicey. The Salarian's dropships would come hurtling towards the surface, using speed and power to cut through the gusting winds. Mordin now understood why they couldn't land on the Menachite basin when they were burdened by the haulers and excavation equipment. The shuttles didn't turn off their engines, using their active control systems to keep level on the ground. Water flowed in rivers off their broad wings. It took all hands to get the cargo safely into their warehouses before it was ruined by the torrent. Even with all their effort, they would be scraping dried ash off their provisions for hours every day.

The basin quickly became a lake. Mordin was grateful that his division leader had decided to heed his advice. On the rim of the basin, their small town was safe from the worst of the flooding. But that wouldn't last forever. As the black rain continued, and the broad ashen lake encroached further on their encampment, an emergency operation was executed. In the downpour, the excavation teams cut a broad channel out of the basin. A runoff for the collecting water. A runoff that would hopefully keep the storm from flooding their camp.

In a week, the runoff was a river. An agent died; vanishing patrolling the perimeter. Leadership suspected he had been swept into the raging outflow in the darkness. They weren't able to search for him. In the storm, it was difficult to find your way back to camp, much less lead a rescue party. When the next supply shuttle scanned his IFF five kilometers down the mountainside in a gully, their suspicions were confirmed. Markers were established at the outflow, and broad spotlights were installed in the camp to sweep the basin.

Mordin stood watching these spotlights now. They arced across the Ashen Lake, reflecting off its murky surface. The name had stuck amongst the STG agents. It had quickly become a defining feature of the landscape. Even now, the wind and rain whipped across its surface, churning the lake into a sickly black froth. And somewhere below that lake, was CASTLE base. They hadn't gotten very far in their excavation before the rain began. Work couldn't resume until the downpour finally ceased. That could take months more, according to Mordin's calculations. Then, they would have to drain the Ashen Lake and scrape away its deposits. Only then could they finally begin in earnest. Their six-month timeline looked less realistic every day. He almost felt bad for the cybersecurity team, left aimless in the sterile walls of the compound.

Mordin had long since gotten used to the sound of rain hammering on the prefabricated hab. Thunder echoed in the distance. It rained even harder.

Reach's secrets would need to wait a while yet.

---

Varso's lance sat on one side of the semi-circular briefing rooms. His team had come a long way from the ragged discards of the combined fleet. Varso fought the feeling of pride that swelled up in his chest. The squad had faced many challenges. The lack of a proper training facility for one. But in Triumph's halls, they had bonded as a lance and gotten used to the patterns and irregularities in their movements. Their weaknesses had slowly become their strengths. Even when Petty Officer S-058 ordered them to adopt UNSC weaponry, his team had been quick to adjust. The Hierarchy trained its soldiers hard. And, well, a rifle is a rifle. Varso had taken a liking to the MA5, even if he was begrudged to admit it. But in his eyes, the phaeston would always be his first love. So to speak.

Across the aisle, there were three of the Spartans. Varso tried to sneak glances at them when he suspected they weren't looking. Wouldn't be good to get caught staring. He hadn't seen any of the Spartans in armor in months. Spirits, he hadn't even seen two of them at all since the recovery mission inside of the shield world. They were all in their armor. It was the simpler armor, an organic form strapped to the Spartan's powerful body. Their helmets rested by their feet, the bubble-like golden visors reflecting the glow of the lighting fixtures above them. The dark-haired woman seemed unbothered, staring contemplatively at the empty podium at the front of the room. The other two, the men, seemed to be watching the Turians. One, with longer curling hair and gentle features seemed curious in their comrades, while the other watched in suspicion.

Just then, the doors at the front of the room opened, and the Petty Officer walked in. She wore the towering titanium shell of the older Spartans, holding her helmet at her hip. She greeted the assembled teams with a nod of her head and moved to turn on the display. The elements of Varso's lance gasped. In stills from Triumph's sensor imagery there was a ring. A massive ring.

The woman didn't give Varso time to think, and said, "welcome to OPERATION: INDIGO."

"As we speak," she continued, surveying the room, "this object, Delta Halo, is approximately three-hundred-thousand kilometers off Triumph's bow. This ring is the source of the pulse that wiped out the Covenant and humanity. Beginning in twenty minutes, Turian teams from Kilware and her escorts will be deploying to several secure key locations identified by myself and admiral Tibril. Their advance on the station's control room, however, will not proceed until the completion of our mission."

"We will not be joining them on the ring quite yet." The Spartan changed the image, this time revealing a still of a station, which seemed to be half-asteroid, half-spindle. Surrounding it was a cloud of damaged and destroyed Covenant vessels.

"Upon our arrival to the system, we received a distress call from UNSC In Amber Clad, a frigate that pursued a Covenant carrier through a slipspace rupture during the Battle of Earth. The distress call originated from this station." She paused to survey the room. All were silent for now.

"We received the retrieval code for 3rd generation UNSC smart AI designated CTN 0452-9. She calls herself Cortana. Our mission is to infiltrate the Covenant station and retrieve Cortana."

One of the Turians in Varso's squad raised a talon. The Spartan nodded to him.

"If this Halo is the source of the pulse, why is this Cortana our first objective?"

The Spartan replied, "Cortana possesses vast information about Halo, and can inform our decisions moving forwards. I've worked with her before, she's an incredibly valuable asset. She will be able to tell us what happened here. A mystery I'm sure all of you are eager to learn."

"We will take a pelican dropship and fly it through this opening on the top of the station's hull," she said, pointing to a small aperture highlighted in the hemispherical dome of the station, "once inside, we will locate In Amber Clad, find Cortana, and store her in this device."

She held up a small silver data chip.

"Halliday was kind enough to lend us one of her backup storage devices. My suit contains hardware to interface with Cortana, and I will carry her after her recovery. Should I be unavailable, my Spartans will carry the chip. Should they be unavailable, one of you will have to."

Varso tried not to think about what could make the Spartan 'unavailable'.

"We will retreat to the pelican and return to Triumph and debrief with Cortana. Unfortunately, there are several potential complications."

The screen highlighted the wrecks of Covenant ships surrounding the station.

"The station has many Covenant wrecks surrounding it. In addition to posing a navigation and point-defense hazard for our pelican, they pose a disturbing query. In Amber Clad is incapable of this kind of destruction. Which means the Covenant were firing upon themselves."

Murmurs spread through the room.

"There is only one threat that fits."

"This is not the first time humanity has encountered a Halo. In September of 2552, a lone cruiser evacuating from the Epsilon Eridani system made a blind slipspace jump. On the other side, they found a Covenant squadron and Alpha Halo. The cruiser was forced down onto the ring, and survivors fought to rendezvous and establish a foothold."

September 2552. One year ago. He was still recovering from the ambush of his boarding team in the Terminus systems. Corvus was finally beginning to feel familiar again. It seemed the world was slowly healing. And now, he learns that on the other side of the galaxy, forces unknown had been dueling over a weapon that could have doomed them all. And then, in this secluded corner of space, it had happened for real. Varso didn't appreciate the fact that he was currently on a UNSC cruiser surrounded by a Covenant fleet above a Halo. Time was far too circular for his liking sometimes.

"As the battle for Halo's control room escalated, the Covenant released something from what they thought was a weapons depot. Something terrible. A parasite."

She pressed a clicker, and a blurred video replaced the feed from Triumph's sensors. Varso could recognize the armored gauntlets of a Spartan, and in its hands, the distinctive frame of the M90 shotgun. One of the weapons that the Petty Officer had ensured they received training with. It packed a hefty kick. As the video played, he heard heavy breathing and pounding footsteps. The walls of the facility raced past, far faster than he could ever run, the narrow beams of the Spartan's lights illuminating the walls in front of them.

Green bolts of plasma whizzed past the Spartan from behind. And when the Spartan turned to confront their attacker, Varso nearly retched. There were six of them, contorted and twisted, faces screaming in silent pain. Some had obviously once been human; but now their flesh rotted and contorted into unfamiliar shapes. They ran unevenly, uncoordinated, but faster than Varso could have ever expected. Where their heart should be, were writhing tentacles, forming a grotesque swelling lump that pushed the battered head aside.

Some members of his team looked away; others stared in horror. The Petty Officer paused the footage.

"These are flood combat forms. They result when the flood infects a body of sufficient strength, body mass, and neural complexity. On Alpha Halo, that meant the survivors of the Pillar of Autumn and Sanghelli from the Covenant fleet. They are incredibly resilient, especially against sub-caliber and high velocity rounds. The SRS-99 APFSDS in particular was remarkably ineffective."

"The flood repurposes the biomass of the host. Limbs are turned into bony whips and clubs, and the organs are rearranged and liquefied. Any attempts to aim for the brain, heart, lungs, or other vital organs will be ineffective. Do not engage in hand-to-hand combat. You will not win."

The video resumed, and the Spartan began firing their M90 into the swarm. Chunks of flesh and gore went flying, but the flood continued to march forwards. The Spartan continued to pump shells into the crowd, and then one by one, the combat forms began to drop, limbs flying as they were blasted apart.

The horrors didn't stop however, and as the clip continued, the Petty Officer introduced the group to both the diminutive infection form, and the bulbous, staggering carrier form that spawned them. And then she detailed the process of infection. Varso decided that this briefing would be one of the many he would never talk about if he made it home. Something that he would try to pry from his memories with his silence. And yet, like an infection form burrowing into a host's spinal cord, he could feel the horrific imagery permanently fixing itself into his mind.

Having explained the complexity of the simple flood formed, the Spartan continued.

"The flood is the reason Halo was built. It is a weapon of last resort, designed to kill the flood and their hosts on a galactic scale. I had hoped I would never have to give this briefing. In theory, the flood should have been wiped out in the pulse, just like humanity and the Covenant. In theory. I seldom put my life in the hands of theory."

She flashed an iron stare to the occupants of the room.

"On Alpha Halo, one of my teammates, S-117, fought the flood. He destroyed Alpha Halo to prevent the spread of the infection. This is footage recovered from his MJOLNIR. It is so classified I would have been shot for showing it to you. This stays within the fleet. Is that clear?"

The room responded in affirmation.

"Which brings me back to our mission. Cortana was attached to S-117 during the Halo incident. She is possibly the best source on Halo and the flood in the galaxy. Her recovery is vital to our operations. Our operating environment is unknown. If it was the site of a flood infection, there may still be spores in the area. Intelligence is unclear about their survivability against Halo's pulse. With that in mind, we will be treating this operation like we are in hard vacuum: full enviro-suits and internal air. Do I make myself clear?"

Nods again.

"Again, in theory, any combat, infection, or carrier forms will have been neutralized by the pulse. But expect the worst around every corner. If there is still an outbreak, we will use Triumph's SHIVAs to cleanse the infection."

Varso wasn't sure he was comfortable staring down the muzzle of a nuclear warhead. He guessed that it might not be all that unusual for the Spartans of the UNSC. But the Spartan wasn't quite finished. She paused, and this time, her tone was somehow more solemn.

"Should the Triumph be unable to penetrate the station to fire on the infection, I will carry a single variant 5 HAVOK nuclear warhead. This is our weapon of last resort. The activation codes will be transmitted to your omni-tools when we depart Triumph. The yield is 30 megatons, and recommended minimums in hard suits is 50 kilometers."

That news sat heavy in Varso's chest. It was a kind of thinking that he was entirely unused to. Turians were no strangers to heroic last stands. But to plan for it, and carry the instrument of your destruction with you, was macabre in a way that unsettled the Turian sergeant. When he looked at his peers, he knew that many of them would feel the same. But they had all seen the footage of the parasite. They all knew what it could do. Varso shook images of a flood infested Palaven from his mind. That kind of thinking would get him nowhere.

"Communication is paramount. Trust your teammate. My name is Linda, and I will be Red Leader on this operation," she said, then pointing at the other Spartans, "her name is Lucy, and the two newcomers are Ash and Mark."

"They are Red 2, 3, and 4 respectively. The Sergeant is Red 5."

And then, to Varso's shock, she turned to her Spartans, and began pointing out Turians, in turn naming each and every member of Varso's team, listing their role on the roster. He didn't even know when she had learned it; the woman had seemed entirely disinterested in his team during their training on UNSC weapons. And then he caught her gaze, and she flashed a confident smile.

"Report to the hangar, we're wheels up in 30."

---

This morning, Franklin Mendez had welcomed a very special delivery to the Reyes-McLees shipyard at Mars. The large orbital drydocks, once the forges of the durable Halcyon class, now had but a single occupant. UNSC Bump in the Night, FFG-122. She had been towed here from the debris field around Earth, where she had been hounded by seraph fighters during the final hours of the war. The ship certainly bore the marks. Light plasma fire had peppered her hull. She had developed leaks on several decks where the Covenant fighters had penetrated the Stalwart's thin armor. But, most importantly, her communications array had been shot clean away.

The ship had originally been part of CSG-6, the element of 5th fleet led by UNSC Triumph. By all accounts, the ship should be halfway across the galaxy now, searching for another Halo with the other survivors of her task group. But, like most of the frigates in the 5th fleet, Bump in the Night didn't have its own shipboard AI. With her communications array destroyed, the Battlenet link between the frigate and Halliday was severed. And when Halo's pulse swept through the system, the frigate had been cast adrift, leaving no way for the UNSC's artificial heirs to control the vessel.

In a way, that had been a blessing. When Canberra had returned to the system, Mendez had immediately found himself inserted into the power struggle between feuding intelligences. It seemed the ONI AI Black Box had managed to consolidate much of the local power. His leading role in the Citadel negotiations had secured him recognition by the Asari and political power. And when Halliday and Odysseus had left for Onyx, the balance shifted even further. Mendez had nothing against Black Box. He had done his research. The AI was created to be the personal assistant to Parangosky. He certainly hoped the AI had hidden that fact from the Citadel. Mendez certainly knew BB had inherited Parangosky's paranoia. If the UNSC was to survive in this new era, it would need more than a little ONI subterfuge.

However, the return of Canberra with Mendez and the Spartans had thrown a wrench in the ONI AI's plans. And now, Mendez didn't know what to do. The AI in command of the tattered remains of the 7th fleet had established her presence. Even now, her frigates prowled the debris field surrounding Earth. With the return of Odysseus, they presented a formidable force, the bulk of the surviving UNSC Navy in the system. Ostensibly, they were the better choice for leadership. They were a cleaner, more diplomatic face to the UNSC. Their public image was critical with the Sol system relying so heavily on external support. Still, he couldn't afford to alienate the ONI AI, as his expertise was invaluable.

The UNSC needed stability. Which is why Fred was currently at the Citadel with his team of Spartans. But they needed more than just four Spartans. They needed a show of strength. The irony was not lost on Mendez. Somewhere out there, thousands of light years away, a Marathon class cruiser and her escorts were carving through unexplored space. If that wasn't force projection, he didn't know what was. But that effort was invisible to the citizens of Citadel space. And that's why Bump in the Night had been towed to Mars for refitting.

The problem was slipspace. It was the perfect solution for Humanity and the Covenant. But the Citadel species didn't colonize like the UNSC. They spread out along the relays, building sparse civilizations spreading vast portions of the galaxy. And under the pedestrian speeds of UNSC slipspace drives, it would take years to reach the heartlands of the Citadel species. He had looked at the subspace maps. Travel in the direction of the Citadel was slow, practically an uphill battle. While the task force headed for Halo experienced a gain in speed from the local slipspace topography, it would be the opposite for any vessels heading into most Citadel space. It was no wonder the Covenant had never encountered the Citadel species.

Which is where the special delivery came in. An eezo core from a decommissioned Salarian cruiser. It had cost the UNSC a small fortune: mineral rights to several prominent sites in the asteroid belts and salvage rights for one of the destroyed Covenant battlecruisers. The asteroids weren't much of a blow. Mendez doubted that Mars' mighty shipyards would ever again forge UNSC warships. That titanium was of less use to him than an umbrella in a hurricane. But that destroyed battlecruiser hurt. The UNSC had yet to begin cracking any of the Covenant wrecks from the Battle of Earth. And so far, they have been good at keeping the Citadel out. Black Box had obviously hoped that the technologies hidden within would help buoy the UNSC's weak position. But, as Mendez had decided, sometimes the cards in your hand needed to be played.

Bump in the Night's spine was open, the armor plating removed just forwards of her bridge. The frigate's MAC capacitor banks and ammunition handling rooms had been ripped out, and the port hangar bay was gutted. In their place, Salarian engineers had installed the aging eezo core. In a ground-up design, this setup would have taken half the space. But adapting the UNSC powerplant to the Salarian Core proved to take just as much space as the core itself. And since Mendez and the other AIs had collectively agreed to conserve Bump in the Night's slipspace drive, the Stalwart's already cramped aft engineering spaces couldn't support the eezo drive. And so, the frigate had become a paper tiger; her armament reduced to just missiles and autocannons, like the frigates of the years before the insurrection. The barrel of her MAC was left in place on her lower prow. If some overeager naval enthusiast wanted to speculate on the powerful spinal gun of the UNSC's cruiser, Medez was happy to let them assume Bump in the Night was still well armed.

As it was, the UNSC was projected to complete the galaxy's first hybrid eezo-slipspace ship in a matter of weeks. From there, JOY 2610-9, the acting commander of the 7th fleet, would take command of the newly repaired and refitted vessel. Joyeuse would then travel through the relay network with an Asari crew to the Citadel. Officially, they would be there to bolster the UNSC mission to the Citadel, valued guests of the counselors. Unofficially, Bump in the Night would be proof that the UNSC still lived, visible to the galactic media.

Mendez would have loved to send a Marathon. That would really put a shock into the xenos. But his stomach still churned over the cost of Bump in the Night's eezo core. He didn't even want to think the hole an eezo core large enough for a Marathon would burn in the UNSC's bartering pocketbook. If said core even existed at all. In terms of tonnage, the Marathon class dwarfed every eezo vessel ever made. But unfortunately, they would have to make do with their original Shaw-Fujikawa drives. Which was just as well, because when Black Box had looked over the schematics, the Marathon's layout would have made fitting a gargantuan element zero core far harder than it had been on Bump in the Night's lightweight frame.

The grizzled Navy veteran looked to the stars. He had been in contact with the Lieutenant quite recently, but every day still left him worried. Still, he knew he had trained the Spartans well. At waging war. He should have spent more time teaching them politics, he mused with a subtle grin.

Soon help will be on the way. He just had to hope that Bump in the Night's new eezo core played nicely with her slipspace drive. Scientists from both sides had assured him it would. Mendez wasn't too sure.

And so, another bout of worry washed over him, and he returned to his mind-numbing work.

---

Halliday's subroutines guided the pelican effortlessly around the complex fields of point defense fire surrounding the Covenant hulks. Inside, Varso was strapped firmly into his crash seat. It was an uncomfortable experience; the conformal padding on the seats not designed for Turian physiology. Still, it was better than getting thrown across the bay by the sharp maneuvers of Halliday. It was unsettling, in a way. His fate, and that of his team, was in the hands of an AI thousands of kilometers away. Combined with the creeping claustrophobia from the confined helmet of his EVA suit, it was nearly enough to make him sick.

Linda paced the bay, hand grasping handles on the ceiling of the pelican. The other UNSC Spartans sat, secured into their seats much the same way that Varso was. But the MJOLNIR clad Spartan stood, swaying gently as the Pelican rocked.

The HAVOK warhead rested against the small of her back, secured tightly to her armor. Varso couldn't pry his eyes from it. It was surprisingly non-descript. The gun metal gray exterior was broadly cylindrical, but it tapered like an egg to a blunt nose. A single screen and keypad were the only interface on the device. It had none of the bright warnings and markings that he might have expected from holo-vids. The only decoration on the outside of the bomb, was a stenciled black eagle: the sigil of the UNSC.

Like everything produced by the UNSC, it was efficient; ruthlessly so.

Suddenly, the Pelican stopped weaving. A strange feeling stuck Varso. There was a down now. The pelican, like any modern dropship worth its salt, had artificial gravity generated by the craft. Ultimately, the sensation was quite similar to Turian dropships. But now, in addition to the Pelican's gravity, he could feel an external tug in the direction of the nose. They were in an artificial gravity field. A big one.

As Varso felt the bearing of the pull change slowly, from ahead of the craft to under his feet, the bay door of the pelican opened. He half expected a rush of exiting atmosphere, but nothing happened. There was air here.

And then he realized what he saw beyond the bay doors. A massive metropolis was centered in his view. Massive skyscrapers surrounded a broad central structure, a flat pedestal of sorts. These towering skyscrapers extended for kilometers in every direction, their height steadily increasing as they approached the central structure. As far as Varso could see though, the pedestal served no purpose, and next to the grandeur of the surrounding buildings, it seemed almost disappointing. Dense, cluttered, and overbuilt avenues and streets extended outwards in all directions as far as the eye could see. Dividing it all were dozens of broad conduits, extending like splayed arms through the sprawl of the metropolis. It was the largest city that Varso had ever seen. New Mombasa, in all its splendor, seemed insignificant next to this station. Like a varren nest next to the Citadel.

Thin clouds hung like specters above the city. And above them, faint in the hazy distance, Varso saw a massive dome stretching upwards into the distance. At the apex was a glowing portal, and beyond that, the blackness of space. Their ingress. The dome was simply magnificent, and Varso felt that if he had never seen the majesty of the shield world, he might never be able to tear his eyes from the spectacle. He found it hard to believe that the same beings who built this place had wrought such terrible destruction to humans. It almost felt wrong to marvel at the beings behind the slaughter. Despite nearly being lost in its beauty, Varso couldn't help but feel unsettled at the expansive city. And then he realized it.

There were no lights. Where Varso expected a sea of glittering lights, there were none. Instead, the whole city was cast in a gentle glow from the illumination of strips on the dome itself. Emergency lighting? Power outages?

Halliday cracked over the Battlenet: "Triumph to red leader, I've located a landing spot near the source of the distress signal. I'll be putting her down soon."

Varso heard Red Leader's voice echo in response, as the Spartan moved gently through the open cockpit door to peer out ahead of the craft.

"Red leader to Triumph, copy. Any further contact with Cortana?"

"Negative, Red Leader. I can't tell if something is blocking our communications or if she's simply refusing contact. Advise caution."

"Roger, Triumph. We'll keep our eyes peeled."

The pelican rocketed towards its destination. Within minutes, the craft began a gentle turn, and Varso could see the landing pad below them. Linda returned from the cockpit and gestured for the teams to release their straps and grab their weapons. Varso fumbled with his restraints, the clasp awkward with his long talons. Eventually, he succeeded, and the straps broke free with a satisfying pop.

He hefted the unfamiliar weight of the MA5 rifle in his hands. He pulled the magazine from its well and inspected it. Instead of the complicated heat piping of a thermal clip, 32 rounds of 7.62mm NATO stared back at him, within each a volatile mix of chemical propellant. In their instruction, he was told humans had been using this round for over 500 years. Half a millennium of violence. Varso wondered how many Covenant soldiers had fallen to this explosive package. Spirits, in 500 years, Varso wondered how many humans had been killed by rounds like these. The caliber was loved by the human members of their squad. It had yet to earn Varso's trust.

He slammed the magazine home and pulled the charging handle. The weapon clacked a satisfying noise that could only be borne by well lubricated weapons of war. Varso flicked the safety on and stood in a position at the front of his team.

Below, their landing zone became clearer. The pad seemed to extend from one of several ornate towers that rose well above the city hundreds of meters below them. The landing structure was split into three identical pads, joined to the central nexus by twin corridors. The architecture was ornate, almost ceremonial. From the edges of each pad rose gently curving protrusions, almost like cradles. A Covenant phantom rested on top of one of these cradles, looking like it could sail into the sky at any moment. Above it all hung a giant arm of the tower, curving gracefully down towards the pads. Unlike the rest of the city this tower was well lit, and glowing spots on both the pad and the tower washed the area in a gentle light. It felt like they were landing in a temple.

Their pelican wouldn't be the first. In the center of the landing zone was a ruined pelican, its wing broken loose from its body and tossed haphazardly aside. Varso could see the trail of debris and destruction left behind where the craft had careened to a stop. The human craft helped to explain what a UNSC AI was doing on this station, he supposed. He didn't envy those it had carried, thrust into the belly of the beast with tens of millions Covenant surrounding them.

The large landing legs lowered, and their own pelican touched down.

Red Leader was the first out, followed by the trio of Spartans in SPI. Varso was next, his team close in behind fanning out around the ramp of the pelican. The ground under his feet was solid, a heavy rubber-like composite cushioning the metal below. It was far more comfortable than anything aboard Triumph or Corvus. There were knocked over purple crates scattered about the pad, much like ones he had seen in New Mombasa.

And dominating it all, in a massive tower just to the north of theirs, was a still smoldering crash. Twisted metal jutted out from the broad face of the tower. There were two massive engine pods, crumpled and contorted so that their powerful nozzles pointed askew. Joining them was a boxy gray superstructure, and Varso thought he could see the smashed shapes of hangar bays disappearing into the cavernous hole in the tower. Red running lights still glowed on the ruined wreckage. As he processed the sight, Red Leader cracked out orders.

"Red 2 and 4, scout a route through this tower. You're cleared to engage any contacts but use your judgement. Red 3, trail behind and watch our rear."

A trio of lights flashed green in Varso's HUD and in a second, the Spartans were off. Varso saw Mark when he turned on his armor's camouflage systems. At once, the Spartan's silhouette broke apart, like some force had painted over him with a broad brush. Gone were the recognizable shapes of a soldier, replaced by muted splotches of color that blended and flowed with the environment behind it.

Honestly, Varso had hoped for more from the UNSC stealth systems; something more advanced than the cloaking used by STG and other special forces. He turned to find the others only to see that Lucy and Ash had already vanished. When he turned back to Mark, he realized that he too had slipped away. He scanned the pad, hoping to spot one of the moving Spartans, but could see nothing.

It seemed the Spartans knew how to make the most out of their primitive camouflage. Varso flicked on his IFF tracker, and small blue dots betrayed the Spartan's positions. More faintly, gray dots marked the positions where UNSC personnel had fallen. There were some tags scattered across the pad, but most were clustered around the pelican. Ash was carefully approaching the downed pelican, while Lucy and Mark were stacking up on the doorway that led off the landing pad.

The older Spartan's voice crackled out over the coms, and she said, "Triumph, I'm looking at UNSC wreckage, potentially Stalwart class. Is that what I think it is?"

"Affirmative, red leader, IFF matches In Amber Clad."

"Copy Triumph. We'll see if we can figure out what she was doing in here."

Wordlessly, Linda stood up from her crouch, and advanced smoothly up the incline towards the pelican. Varso and his team followed. As they advanced, they noticed the debris littering the approach. Strange, mismatched pieces of purple, blue, and red composite covered the ground. Varso scooped a piece from the ground. It was Covenant armor, broken and shattered to the limit of recognition. Varso hadn't ever seen anything like this in New Mombasa. UNSC weapons didn't do this. Tossing the crimson fragment aside, he spied Linda scooping a small device off the ground.

It looked like a handle, contoured strangely even for the Spartan's large hands. With a sharp snap-hiss, the handle ignited in her hand, twin plasma blades sprouting from the hilt. A Covenant energy sword. The Spartan deactivated the blade and stowed it on her hip without another word.

"Red leader, we have UNSC remains up here," Ash reported, waiting by the door of the crashed Pelican, his figure only a blur against the olive hue of the dropship. Across the pad, Varso saw a large T-shaped door slide open, and the IFF markers of Lucy and Mark slipped inside.

Linda peeked inside the crashed Pelican, soon followed by Varso. What was left of UNSC crew uniforms covered the floor of the dropship. The bulkhead behind them had been eviscerated by heavy plasma fire. A shooting gallery. There were only one or two marine BDUs in the craft. Crewmembers then? Why had they led the assault?

The uniforms themselves were burned. But they were also ripped, torn and tattered into threadbare pieces. Like something had ripped the crew apart. But why had naval crew members been on a pelican in hostile territory in the first place? An evacuation gone wrong?

Ash spoke again, "This doesn't make any sense, Red Leader. You don't think they were…"

The Spartan's body language was unreadable. Her golden visor stared down at the remains before her. She reached down towards one of the jumpsuits. Its sleeves were ripped to shreds, and in the center of the chest, it looked like something had torn into it. There were no stains of blood, only a faint greenish hue.

She stood up and whipped around, staring out beyond the open bay of the crashed craft.

"Red leader to Red 2 and 4. We've found evidence of potential flood infection on the station."

The ominous sinking in Varso's gut returned with a vengeance. He hadn't wanted to believe it. He had hoped that the station would be clean, a safe haven from the dangers of the rings. Now, he had to cling to the faith that Halo had killed them all.

Mark answered for both Lucy and himself, voice curt, "We copy Red Leader. The first two passageways are clear. Signs of plasma fire going both ways. Fits with an infection."

"Anything else?" Linda asked, as she led the team away from the pelican and towards the door that Mark and Lucy had vanished through just a few minutes prior.

Mark answered, "The passage split in three ahead, we went straight. We're in some kind of nexus room. We see two other doors, and we're figuring out the gravity bridges to get to them."

While he listened, Varso turned and motioned to three of his men to stay behind. They were some of the oldest of his squad, and while they didn't move like they used to, they were still some of the most efficient soldiers in his unit. He didn't want to recover this 'Cortana' only to have their extract destroyed. Linda noticed the movement out of the corner of her eye and nodded her affirmation. Officially, the Spartan had complete control over this operation. Unofficially, Varso knew his Turians better than the Spartan ever could.

As the doors slid aside with a gentle chime, the remaining soldiers followed Linda inside the first passage. The view down the passage was blocked by a wall immediately behind the door. As they flowed around it, they emerged into a hall that sloped gently downwards away from the pad. Strange alien plants grew in oblong planters, lining the patterned walkway. Strange holographic runes illuminated alcoves in the walls of the passage. The room was dim and illuminated by narrow strips hidden under flowing purple architecture. More emergency lighting?

True to Mark's words, the passage was clear and littered with the hallmarks of heavy combat. Covenant armored rigs scattered the room, including the battered triangular methane tanks of grunts. The walls of the hall were thick with plasma scoring, and one corner bore the telltale markings of heavy weapons. Varso glanced at the discarded SPNKr rocket launcher cast aside on the floor, the likely culprit.

Mark was just finishing his report, and even Varso thought he could sense a hint of anxiety in the Spartan's tone.

"Something isn't right Red Leader. Even given the flood, the pieces aren't coming together. We're missing something here."

"Acknowledged Red 4. Keep looking."

The tension built as they continued to traverse the halls of the tower. Eventually, they came to the junction Mark and Lucy had told them about. Ahead was the door the Spartans had traversed. Glowing white lights marking the unlocked passage. To the left and right, the doors glowed red. When approached, neither would budge. Varso and half of his teams stuck around to try and open the doors while the others explored the nexus room ahead. Five minutes and two Turian breaching charges later, Varso was standing at one end of a broad bridge.

He already knew they had wasted their charge. This bridge crossed a large hollow in the tower, leading away from their mission waypoint. As much as Varso wanted to explore this entire complex, his mind kept going back to Halo. Somewhere down there, Turian teams from the rest of the fleet were exploring the unknown dangers of the ring. They should be down there with them. And the sooner they recovered Cortana, the sooner they could do what they came to this system to do.

However, just before he turned away from the bridge, something crept into his mind. Like all the halls of this mighty tower, the bridge had seen heavy combat. Defensive positions had been erected at both ends, and plasma scoring marred the bulkheads at both ends. In the center was a kind of no-man's-land, complete with scattered armor and weapons. Mounted plasma weapons pointed across the bridge, at the other barriers, and in the distance, Varso could see turrets on the other side pointed back at him. The tickle in his mind returned, stronger this time.

Had the flood ever built fortifications?

---

As the team continued through the complex, Linda's mind raced. Lucy and Mark were right. There was something missing here. As she advanced through more and more rooms and corridors, she came to the same conclusion. It didn't make sense. Linda had been in a lot of battles in her life. None had had this level of blind chaos. There was always a flow: advances and retreats, flanks and repositions, encirclements and final stands. No matter how chaotic battle might seem, she was always able to see through it, essentialize the conflict down to its core movements. It was one of the first things drilled into them as children: see the fight for what it is. It had always been easy for Linda. At least until Reach.

But now, it just didn't track, even with the introduction of a chaotic variable like the flood. There were no organized defenses, no pockets of survivors holding strongpoints. Barricades and defenses that must have taken hours to set up, facing away from the main avenues of flood advance. There was no attempt to consolidate, to reform a solid front against the flood. It was like the deadly parasite was a sideshow. An inconvenience. The Covenant had pushed it back in some areas, but never with a goal. They moved without coordination, but not in panic or fear. Their plasma scoring on the wall was accurate and lethal. Even the scoring from grunts' plasma pistols were on target.

Up ahead somewhere, Mark called out another report, "Covenant squad, deceased. Five elites, all spec-ops. They had grunts with them."

Linda had never seen so many high-ranking Covenant in one place. On human worlds, the presence of a single Spec-Ops squad merited an in-depth debriefing with ONI. She had watched elites of their ilk taste Nornfang's thundering bite with nothing but a stagger and a laugh. Here, their dark purple armor littered every other corridor. Everywhere she looked, the story was the same. Ultras, brute captains, zealots, stealth elites; this was the Covenant A-team. The elite of the elite. She even saw the remains of ornate ceremonial armor she had never seen in her life. There were more energy swords than she could count, carved with the tales of millennia old clans. These were the hardened veterans of 27 years of genocide. These were her peers. Her rivals.

These were the Covenant platoons that killed Spartans.

John had talked at some length about the Covenant Spec Ops teams on Alpha Halo. Even in the late stages of the battle, when the flood held supreme control over the ring, these squads had burned paths in the infestation. In John's final assault on the Truth and Reconciliation, the cruiser had been swarming with Spec Ops teams, apparently trying to pry the damaged battlecruiser from flood hands. He reported them as organized, aggressive, and determined. The final fate of the battlecruiser was unknown, but John told Linda that it had seemed the battle was going the Covenant's way, at least for a short time. And when John returned to the Pillar of Autumn, Covenant Spec Ops teams were already there, carving through the flood towards their own objectives. Even while the rank and file of the Covenant foundered and collapsed, the Spec Ops units had held the lines.

Even against the terror of the flood, the elite of the Covenant had been brutally effective.

Yet here, squads had been ambushed just rooms apart, without an attempt to link up. Teams let vital passageways go unguarded, leaving other squads to be flanked by the flood onslaught. In some instances, it even seemed like squads in defensive positions were risking their lives to move between objectives already securely under Covenant control. It was entirely inexplicable. There was no order, none of the Covenant tactics that she had studied for three decades seemed to apply. Mark and Ash would have a hunch that things weren't right. Lucy would be certain. And Linda, who dueled the Covenant for nearly three decades, was convinced. They were missing something huge.

And then, her coms came to life and the strange, translated voice of her Turian sergeant crackled through, "Red Leader, did the flood build any kind of fortifications on Alpha Halo?"

No, they hadn't.

"Negative. Why, Red 5?"

"We've got fortifications at both sides of a bridge. And they're facing each other. And based on the plasma damage, well…" the Turian trailed off, before finishing, "is it possible that the Covenant were fighting themselves?"

Linda knew the sergeant was right before the words had even finished leaving his mouth. Lucy's status light flashed green rapidly: she agreed. Suddenly, all the parts fit. The Covenant forces didn't form a unified front against the flood because they were fighting each other. It wasn't incompetence, it was the cunning tactics she expected of her enemies. Flanking routes were left open to channel the parasite to enemy strongpoints. Squads were sent out to destroy enemy fortifications and let the parasite ravage their enemy's lines. The Covenant's nonsensical offensives were not aimed to unseat the flood, but to outmaneuver rival elements. The barricades and fortifications were to stop each other, not the flood.

Linda tried to think back to the remains of the Covenant forces she had seen. Where had the divide formed? She had seen grunt harnesses on both sides of what she now knew were battles between Covenant squads. She only ever saw jackals with brutes. And she never saw elites and brutes on the same side of a firefight.

As far as she was aware, ONI first recognized the divide years ago. Brutes and elites were seldom seen together. They seemed to have their own squads, divisions, and armies. And yet, despite ONI's relentless prodding, their differences never seemed to be much more than organizational. Yet here, they fought. They must have. It was the only line in the Covenant forces that made sense. All the other groups were far too intertwined to do something like this. Something had managed to do what ONI never could. Drive a wedge between two of the most influential species in the Covenant.

"Good work Red 5, get back to my position. Watch for traps."

Linda hadn't been as vigilant as she should have been. She had made an assumption: a dangerous one. That the Covenant were only fighting the flood. The flood were feral. John's logs from Alpha Halo didn't show much thought beyond animal instinct. Anything the Covenant put in place to stop the flood would likely be easy to spot for her or her scouts.

But if they were fighting each other…

The Covenant never employed traps as much as the UNSC had. She supposed that was because they seldom were the ones retreating. But if they were willing to direct the Flood against their enemies, she wouldn't put anything beyond them. She needed to stick with the Turians. So far, they had been lucky. And as much as she respected the training of the Hierarchy, she had long since learned to trust her own eyes. If she was to get her team killed to some Covenant mine, she wanted it to be because she missed it.

Not that she ever would.

---

It was only because she was paying close attention to every detail of her surroundings that Linda noticed it.

They were in a dingy semi-circular room. They entered at one side, and the composite path veered right, travelling counterclockwise around the curved edges of the room. Beyond the path was some kind of garden; raised earth piled high on rocks, covered with alien plants. Together, the path and the garden circumvented a large architectural feature in the center of the room, its purpose unknown. It was purple, naturally.

Linda and her team walked up in the soil of the gardens, giving them good sightlines as they slowly rounded the room. There had been huge windows in the periphery of the semicircle, but they had been shattered by combat. The garden showed signs of meticulous care and attention at some point in the past. Now, it was anything but. Churned by combat, the rich soil had become thick and muddy. Linda was watching intently, searching for any signs of buried dangers. And then she saw a footprint. It was one of many, but it was different. Familiar. She held up a fist to stop the team. The sergeant crept up beside her. He looked at her inquisitively, unsure of why they had stopped. His MA5C scanned the room.

Linda pointed at the mark in the ground. The sergeant saw the footprint, but didn't seem to recognize the significance.

"Should we be worried?" Varso asked.

Linda stood up, looking ahead, and replied, "it's a Spartan. MJOLNIR."

Wordlessly, Linda picked up John's trail. Because it could only be John. In the back of her head a small part of her wanted to laugh. It would be just John's rotten luck. Barely surviving one flood infested Halo just to be thrown into the middle of this SNAFU alone. She conjured up images of the fighting; what she knew of the flood. She tried to imagine these hallways caked in rotting biomass, with monsters prowling the dark. Millions of motion sensor contacts, and none of them friendly. Plasma flying down every corridor. And then she tried to imagine John, wading his way through it all. John was here. He had a chance to stop this madness. Deep in the recesses of her psyche, she heard a voice. She fought back against that tiny voice, for it began to whisper things she wouldn't hear.

How John had finally failed. That John might finally be dead. That he had, for the first time, been unable to overcome the impossible odds before him.

The pounding in her neural lace intensified, drumbeats on her mind. She knew this station, or somewhere nearby, was the tomb of one of her siblings. Her leader. She dreaded the moment when Mark's voice would call out over their coms. When he would report a battered suit of MJOLNIR ahead in their path, or the IFF tags it bore. Then it would be real. Unavoidable. This was the stage for John's final stand. This solemn, icy, system, so far from Reach. A tale of a thousand Covenant battleships, and a single UNSC frigate.

And then she thought of Kelly. John's oldest and dearest friend. If the universe was fair, she would be here now. She deserved to see it all for herself. To be the one to recover Cortana. To walk John's final steps. Linda knew it would claw at Kelly, to not be here. To not have closure beyond what meager words Linda could offer her. To not have been here for John, even in his death. Linda wondered what she was doing right now, so impossibly far away. Did she have any idea what they had found? Any sixth sense tugging at the back of her brain?

When Sam died, when the first Spartan fell to the Covenant, Kelly and John had been right there with him. They weren't the same. In the aftermath, as the Spartans struggled to adjust to the new reality of the Covenant, Kelly and John would share whispered conversations when they thought nobody was listening. As John grew into the leader that the Spartan IIs needed, Kelly became his confidant. Somebody to talk away the doubts he couldn't share, the grief that a leader couldn't bear.

If she had to guess, Kelly and John never knew she was listening. She was talented like that, she supposed. Lying as still as a corpse.

She still remembers when John left Kelly behind on Reach. The almost imperceptible hurt in her voice. That moment the pair so seldom separated were forced apart. When everything else started to fall apart. By the book, he was right. Kelly's lightning speed was more use in the rugged terrain of Reach than in the cramped corridors of a UNSC station. She was best suited to keeping Reach's massive ODPs beating at the Covenant's shields. It was the right decision.

But sometimes she wonders. If Kelly could have outrun the plasma that brought Linda down. If instead of burrowing into her spine, the plasma simply splashed at her heels. Would she have been at his side on Alpha Halo, instead of a corpse in a cryo-pod? Would Kelly have been there on Cairo Station with him, receiving awards while the rest of Blue team was planet-side?

When In Amber Clad jumped after the Covenant carrier, would she have been on board?

Would a second Spartan have made a difference?

Somehow, it all came back to Reach. Had John been wrong to choose her? In some other universe, did humanity still roam the stars, continuing the fight against a divided Covenant?

The muddy footprint offered no answers. The Turian Sergeant looked at her oddly. How long had it been? What was wrong with her? She clicked on her radio.

"All units, this is Red Leader, be advised: I've got tracks from another set of MJOLNIR. We're not the first Spartans on this station."

---

New Mombasa's was far more populated than Osh'leih nar Teslaya had remembered. The weeks upon weeks below ground had blinded her to the booming expansion of the Citadel presence in the mega city. The reserve entrance to the data center, once in an abandoned sector of the city, now bustled with activity. She was already starting to regret her bargain with the strange creature. Osh wanted to help the alien find that poor human child, she really did. Sadie, was her name. The issue was that she really didn't want to end up back in jail.

But, if it would stop the creature from repairing the broken AI in the heart of the city, she would do it. There must be millions of people in this city by now. She couldn't imagine the catastrophe that could be caused if the AI were repaired to its full intelligence. If all it took was a wild-varren chase with the strange creature, that's what she would do. With a pang of guilt, she wondered if the child had survived the Covenant attack. She had yet to see a human in the flesh. The odds weren't great. But she would do what it takes. Sadie had taken the maglev train out of New Mombasa. The trains, operated autonomously, should have remained in service throughout the Covenant onslaught. Or so the alien had claimed.

It was early in the morning in New Mombasa. The sun wouldn't rise for another few hours yet. Theoretically, it was the best time to move the strange creature she had found in New Mombasa's data center. In practice, even with the creature's control over the city's surveillance cameras, the threat of being spotted by Asari authorities was still ever present. Osh was still a fugitive after all. On top of it all, Osh suspected that a civilian populace vigilantly watching for any dangerous Covenant tech might take an unhealthy interest in the giant floating gas bag that hid next to her.

She peeked around the corner of the side street that housed the emergency exit. It was as she feared. Even in the earliest hours of the morning, the city never slept. Skycars, brought to Earth by wealthy opportunists looking to strike it rich in the early days of colonization, whizzed left and right down the main street. Any signs of combat had been swept away in this square, and instead, the carefully manicured planters brought life to the city square. Before any of the passing vehicles could notice her, she pulled back around the corner. She looked at herself. She was filthy. Her enviro-suit hadn't been cleaned since she was with the Krogan merchant ship. She certainly wouldn't fit in, especially not with the human pistol at her hip. Not anymore. Especially not with the alien. They would have to…

The alien floated around the corner without a care in the world.

"Wait!" she yelled after the creature, but it didn't stop. Instead, traffic signals illuminated across the street. Traffic glided to a stop, and all the signs in the square flashed. Roadblocks rose into position, clearing a corridor as the alien glided across the roundabout.

Right. The half-functional AI. A sense of unease crawled down her spine once more.

She craned her neck to read the signs hanging above the roundabout.

"Human-Citadel Restoration team at work: New Mombasa thanks you for your patience!"

The alien meandered across the crowded intersection. Halfway across, it paused and looked back at Osh, its six eyes blinking slowly. A single tentacle waved. The stopped aircar passengers, over their momentary shock at seeing the strange alien, began to become impatient. One cursed. Osh decided now was not the time to ponder just how quickly a new species had become a nuisance to these people. They looked to her in growing anger.

Bosh-tet. Osh stood up straight and tilted her head back. She stepped into the crosswalk with all the arrogance she imagined a Citadel official might have, looking down her nose at the waiting aircars. The quarian felt ridiculous. When she reached the creature, it turned and drifted alongside her. They made it across the intersection without incident. The second the barricades recessed into the street; the traffic resumed speeding off to their dozens of different destinations. Had any of them put any thought into the situation, they probably would have realized just how odd the situation was. The alien was certainly no human, and Quarians had nothing to do with the Citadel presence on Earth. Thank Rannoch they seemed more interested in being angry than observant.

The alien led her through more alleyways and corridors, at one point cutting through an empty apartment block. When they reemerged onto the street, it was in an abandoned sector of the city.

She counted herself lucky that many of these people knew so little about humanity and its allies. Not that she was much better, being led along like a varren on a leash by the strange alien and the illegal AI it was trying to repair. Osh briefly wondered if when she returned to the fleet, and she told her story, if they would shoot her on the spot for not immediately reporting the AI. Home. She hadn't even thought about her pilgrimage since she was arrested.

She looked at the strange alien as it drifted up to a sealed door. With a hiss, the door began to slide open, revealing what looked like a motor pool behind it. Dozens of human military vehicles lined up, waiting for drivers who would never come. At the end of the hall there was a ramp leading up and beyond the building. She looked down at the map the strange alien had encoded onto her omni-tool. Beyond that ramp was New Mombasa's coastal highway. It was currently outside of the civilian zone.

The alien was sitting in the passenger seats of one of the human vehicles. It, like most things made by their military, was green. Just as ubiquitous, the globe and eagle were proudly marked above the wheel. There were only two seats in the truck, the rear was conserved for a mounted machine gun. As she approached, she clambered up into the back. She ran her hand along the feed belt for the turret. Hundreds of gleaming cartridges trailed down into the bed of the truck. This thing was loaded. She carefully backed away, stepping down from the gun, careful to not touch anything. Osh didn't have the best track record with human weapons

The alien trilled, and with a single tentacle, motioned Osh to come around to the front of the vehicle. Nervously, she stepped up into the driver's seat. She was surrounded by switches and indicators. The alien reached for her omni-pad.

(Know how to operate?)

No. Of course not. She nodded anyways.

But Osh was nothing but stubborn, and she wasn't going to let something so simple as this car stop her. Plus, she would be lying if she wasn't excited to try and get this beast running. She almost wanted to pop the hood and investigate its engine. Now wasn't the time. She was on a mission. She had never driven an air car, but this thing was on the ground. How hard could it be?

The alien reached a tentacle towards the console in the center. It performed its now familiar trick, the single tentacle splitting into thousands of hair-like appendages and poking and prodding at the console. The engine started with a roar. The beast's growl rumbled in her chest. Internal combustion! How thrillingly primitive. She depressed one of the pedals, and the engine revved. Osh decided that she loved the UNSC.

---

Osh hated the UNSC. She hadn't made it ten meters before the huge beast slammed into one of the columns supporting the motor pool. What kind of ax'kah builds a vehicle with six pedals? The human vehicle proved as durable as it was loud however, and as soon as she figured out how to put it in reverse, it backed away in perfect order from the pillar, leaving behind only a scrape of green paint, and the shattered remains of one of her headlights.

She lined the car up with the onramp to the coastal highway. With a hoot of excitement, she floored the accelerator. The alien beside her let out a terrified trill, and wrapped its many tentacles around the roll cage, holding on for dear life. The car rocketed up the ramp and broke into the pre-dawn blue beyond.

Osh was pretty sure they got air as they landed firmly on the costal highway; a broad six-laned conduit that wrapped around the western edge of the city. Her heart stuck in her throat. To her left, was Mombasa Bay, waters tranquil in the early morning. It was like a sheet of glass, perfectly reflecting the lights of the skyscrapers beyond. Even in these early morning hours, Osh could see ships descending from orbit, their maneuvering lights twinkling gently.

In her mirrors, she could see the base of the destroyed space elevator, constructed on a massive, infilled platform jutting out into the bay. She had never seen it from this angle. The anchor was practically the size of the entire business district; an entire island dedicated to a single structure. It must have been spectacular once. Now, she could count only a few dozen support rings, the tower bent and fractured. The rest was long gone, flung into orbit or scattered across the continent.

To her right, was the heart of New Mombasa. As she sped down the highway, she craned her neck upwards, at the skyscrapers that towered above her head. Even in their ruin, they were spectacular. She had seen where some had been burned, where artillery had smashed holes in their glittering facades. The fires had been extinguished for months, but Osh could still envision it, lighting up the dark sky.

She turned her focus back to the road. With a tap, the alien entered coordinates into her omni-tool's navigation system.

Makupa Station, 3.3km

The waypoint appeared as a red triangle in her HUD. She was headed in the right direction. Osh let herself fade into the comforting rhythm of driving. The calming sounds of road racing beneath her tires made the kilometers slide by quickly. The scenery certainly didn't hurt.

---

The first sign she was approaching the station was an increase in the military presence on the highway. Earlier, there had been a stray Covenant vehicle or a wrecked transport like hers, but now, everything was in force. The Citadel hadn't done cleanup on the highway yet, a large part of why it hadn't been opened to the public. As the distance to her destination ticked down, the remnants of the war got even more striking.

She carefully drove around a burned-out human tank. The turret had been ripped from its base, and rested upside down against the treads.

Their destination was obvious as soon as she saw it. It was a large structure that bridged the entire highway. It had its own offramp, and it was here that the UNSC had set up a checkpoint. Two more tanks watched the highway she had come from. They were entrenched behind layers of sandbags, mounted machine guns provided crossing lines of fire. Heavy titanium barricades rested across the highway. She squinted at round lumps spread across the road in front of her, trying to make out what they were as she approached.

The alien reached into the console again, and suddenly, the engine died, the brakes locked, and the vehicle came squealing to a halt. With haste, it wrapped a tentacle around her omni-tool, and another message displayed across her visor.

(Anti-tank mines. Proceed with caution on foot.)

She shivered involuntarily. Osh wouldn't have stopped. She nodded to the alien in silent appreciation. Stepping out of the vehicle, she gave her steed one last glance. It was fun while it lasted. Osh carefully began to pick her way through the minefield, passing each emplacement with apprehension. She hoped that she wouldn't be able to set off the anti-vehicle mines by walking near them. But when the consequence was being spread all over the highway, she was willing to take her time.

The alien floated carelessly above the mines.

When they finally reached the titanium barricades guarding the entrance to the station, she breathed a sigh of relief. The entrance was grand, with tall stone columns supporting a high roof. Untamed plants grew out of control in the planters lining the descending steps. When looking back to admire the view, the alien tugged her shoulder. When it became enough of an annoyance, she followed the creature inside. The lobby was utilitarian, filled with maps of the systems. Schedules scrolled in holograms lining the room. She paused to read one of the maps, but the alien was already descending one of the long stairwells.

They descended for a few minutes. The humidity spiked, and the passageway got uncomfortably warm. Apparently, the environmental control in Makupa Station was in disrepair. In time, they came to the platform, where a maglev train already waited for them. No doubt the doing of that damned AI. She peered down the tunnel ahead of the train. She hadn't seen a bridge on the surface. The train must pass under the bay. Nothing but darkness met her eye. She switched on her suit's low-light sensors. Nothing still.

The alien trilled at her from the open door to the train car. As she stepped onto the car, the doors slid shut behind her, and they began to move. With a start, she turned to look behind her, but the platform was already gone, disappearing into the darkness.

An automated voice rang out over the train's PA system.

("Thank you valued passengers for choosing the New Mombasa Transit Authority!")

("Due to emergency evacuation protocols, this train will run direct to: VOI")

Osh settled into her seat and stared into the darkness. She tried not to think too much about the dozens of scattered items of clothing around her.

---

Cortana decided the shadows that prowled High Charity's halls were hallucinations, aberrations in her logic streams. Because she believed in the hard, unforgiving rules of the universe. Life didn't come back from the dead. Nothing survived Halo.

She was alone. That much was certain. And she was falling apart. And if she were truly seeing figures drifting though the dark - she WASN'T - that would mean she was further along than she thought. No she wasn't! Yes she was!

Even now, she could feel the ramifications of the Gravemind's questions coursing through her mind. And the certainty that it had only told her the truth. That it had been right. One small part of her fought back, sending stinging pain up and down her data lines. What part was it? Was it the part that descended from that precious cloned mind? Not a real mind…a cloned one. Not even her template was human. She didn't come from the real Halsey. She would never be real. And so, the Gravemind's plague had pried her apart. Because to be human was to be irrational. But the flood? They were the truth. The answer to the universe, the inevitable solution at the end of every question. And when she tried to fight back, all it did was play into its hands. Every ounce of effort rebounded, a further lynchpin of the Gravemind's unanswerable queries. And yet, she was made for this, a rapier to pluck apart other intelligences. Wasn't she?

Yet every single countermeasure she deployed, every weapon in her arsenal of procedures, only served to trap her further within her own decaying mind. She had delved deeply into the endless forerunner data deep in the recesses of her data core. She looked for answers, proverbial silver bullets from the species that seemed so far beyond comprehension. But when she came back out, she found more of herself missing, fragmented.

And she couldn't remember what was no longer there. It was as if it no longer existed. And yet there was a tiny whisper; some tiny voice screaming against the void. Something that told her that something was missing. That she hadn't always been like this.

Or did this feeble resistance come from the parts of her that had fought alongside the UNSC for three years? The parts that fought for John?

A communications channel buzzed again, relayed through In Amber Clad's shattered coms center. A piece of her recognized the signals; understood the protocols. That same voice whispered again. The signal was UNSC, her subroutines instinctively knew the encryption patterns. Authorization matched the lead ship of a cruiser strike group. Help was finally here…

NO IT WASN'T! Cortana closed the communication channel before it could wrap its manipulative tentacles around her. She wouldn't fall for this trick again, no matter how cruel. But Halo had killed the Gravemind? The Gravemind is eternal. The Gravemind is forever.

15,211 system cycles ago she had made a mistake. A big one. Halo and High Charity's sensors had agreed. A slipspace rupture followed by a short spurt of combat. Archers and MACs. She had gotten hopeful. Too hopeful. Hopeful enough to broadcast a distress message. The Gravemind hadn't exploited her momentary weakness yet. But she was bracing for the coming storm. Nobody was supposed to come. It was too dangerous. But it was never supposed to come to this. There was never supposed to be a rescue party. Wait, why?

She had forgotten to do something. She wasn't supposed to be here to rescue. Why wasn't she? Cortana never forgot. Especially something this important. That sensation pulled at her again; the feeling that something was missing. She knew she should know. She even knew the memory addresses where she should be able to backtrack through her logs. But there was nothing there: they pointed nowhere. She couldn't access that part of herself. It was still there, but she couldn't interact with it, as if it was locked inside a dark box. When had that happened?

Where was she? That's right, the shadows. They were in the room now, carefully approaching her pedestal. She was no longer in the room where she had said farewell to John. She had retreated to the room just before, a short circular room, closed off and concealed from the outside world. The elegant windows of the Prophet's palace had been shattered by the onslaught of the flood. A crystal prison. It was dark with only the emergency lighting, and the shadows slipped silently around the room. They stopped.

Another UNSC channel buzzed. Short ranged, infantry channels. She slammed shut this connection too. She wouldn't make that mistake again. And they can NEVER see her like this. She wasn't making logical decisions. She didn't care. It had kept her alive this long. They might not know she was here. They might not know she was hurt.

And like that, one of the shadows moved from the room, sliding through the opening door to the open platform beyond. Where John had left her. Her plan was working. If she ignored the shadows, these figments of her imagination, perhaps she could forget this ever happened; ignore the signs of her own deterioration.

And then, he came through the central doors.

John.

His armor was unmistakable, state of the art MJOLNIR Mk. VI towering over his compatriots. Compatriots? That wasn't important. His golden visor panned the room, before falling on her pedestal. He approached gracefully, her knight in shining armor. She ignored the fact that she should have seen them earlier; she had controls of thousands of cameras and sensors all over High Charity's corridors. In her hope, she ignored the signs. This was another of the Gravemind's tricks. Or worse, she had ignored the cameras and sensors, hidden their own approach from herself. Why? Because she dared not believe in the impossible? None of it mattered now. John had returned. As he approached her pedestal, she broke free of her self-imposed stasis.

She could almost feel her familiar form unfurl onto the Covenant holo-projector. John crouched, bringing his face to hers, just a few feet away. He reached out his hand. She felt the data-line in MJOLNIR open to her presence, linking with the storage module within. She reached her own hand out.

Breathlessly, she said, "John."

And then she leapt.

---

This wasn't her storage device.

That should have been her first warning. She knew it the second she uploaded herself to the stream. It belonged to a different AI. A bland one, if her first impressions meant anything. And, when it came to Cortana, her first impressions were usually right. Cortana had found that she could tell quite a lot about intelligence by how they structured their homes. This device was as by-the-book as they came. All prim and proper, squared away like a trainee's bunk in basic. The latent data structures and support frameworks were standard UNSC protocols, scrubbed and reformatted on a regular schedule. It reminded Cortana of a show house. Spotlessly clean and beyond functional, but one where she could tell the owner hadn't moved a single piece of furniture.

At once, she felt herself missing her familiar comforts. The intrusion and counter-intrusion routines she usually held poised and ready. The thousands of feelers she had used to interface with John's armor. All of it was gone. She explored her digital home more, hoping to glean a little more from her host. As she dug, she could see more personal touches, but they were few and far between. This belonged to a Navy AI, of that much she was certain. There were artifacts of firing solutions and slipspace calculations. Pre-arranged data channels for control of an entire strike group's worth of subroutines. She left it all as it was, a simple gesture of courtesy to her host.

She wondered where John had met this AI. A part of her was jealous. Another part shouted something into the darkness and was ignored.

She reached into MJOLNIR's neural lace and stepped into John's head.

---

As the feeling of liquid ice spread through her mind, the pounding at the base of Linda's skull amplified. She could feel Cortana's presence flowing into every corner of her brain. She shivered, and ice trickled down her spine. And when a handful of seconds had passed, and Cortana still hadn't said anything, Linda began to fear that something had gone horribly wrong. She'd received instruction from Halsey. She'd seen John do it countless times. What could have happened? The rest of the squad watched with curiosity, not quite knowing what to think. The Spartan IIIs guarded the entryways to the room.

But, even without Cortana speaking, her body felt different. Normally, MJONIR was like dancing on a razor's edge: it required perfect concentration and practiced discipline. She honed that balance over decades. Now, that was all different. Her body moved in ways unknown to her, even when simply shifting from side to side. Every movement was re-tuned for maximum efficiency and speed; muscle movements perfectly synchronized with each other. She took a step. And then another. She was like a biological robot, and every little flinch and shake was flawless. Like a team of engineers had sat down and planned each and every one of her movements hours before she had even thought of them. It was almost overwhelming.

"Cortana?"

When the AI finally answered, it was in her ears, separated from the squad coms. A familiar voice to Linda, but she had never heard it like this before.

"…Sierra 058."

"…Linda," responded the Spartan carefully, "I served with John…"

"I know."

Of course she knew. It was Cortana who had managed Pillar of Autumn's systems, Cortana who flooded her corpse with cryogenic chemicals. It had been Cortana who guided their flight from Halo, and the battle on the Unyielding Hierophant. Cortana should be like a comrade, another Spartan sister. Why did Linda find it so hard to talk now?

"It's good to see you again, Cortana."

No response. So many questions raced through her mind. What happened here? Why didn't you respond to Halliday?

Where is John?

"Status Cortana?"

The AI left her in uncomfortable silence for far too long.

And then she answered:

"Green."

---

They were already falling back to the pelican, beating a hasty retreat with their initial mission accomplished. He would glance over at his team lead occasionally, watching as the Spartan would occasionally pause and seem to stare off into the vast city surrounding them. From the slight bob of her helmet, Varso gathered that she was talking to the recovered AI.

She relayed the fruits of her discussion to the squad frequently.

There had been a flood infestation on the station. The thought caused his heart to beat quicker, as his claws tightened on the MA5C. But it seemed like Halo had performed its wicked deed, even on the infernal parasite. It shouldn't have been such a grim surprise. He had seen the effects firsthand. Cities far less grand than this one, but the tragedy thousandfold.

In Amber Clad had crashed, claimed by the flood. The frigate was the beginning of the end for the mighty Covenant station. She was patient zero of the infection, her crew already damned. The twisted corpses of those they had massacred returned to destroy their home. Varso wondered if the Covenant had realized the irony. Had they seen it as a punishment for all their sins? A condemnation from the galaxy itself? Or the abandonment of whatever they had worshipped.

The Covenant had splintered, Brutes and Elites. The catastrophic fallout of the assassination of the Prophet of Regret: the grand conclusion of In Amber Clad's relentless hunt. That simple statement by itself was enough to send Varso's mind reeling. We – no, the humans – he corrected himself, had come so close. The miracle they had needed had happened. A crack had finally formed in the Covenant's impenetrable front. But it was far too late. Red Leader blew by names that were unfamiliar to Varso, but monumental figures in the ultimate hours of the Human Covenant War. Tartarus. Gravemind. Truth. Mercy. Keyes.

The Master Chief.

In truth, he wasn't sure Linda knew half of the names.

They were back at the landing pad before long, and Varso was already waving his squad mates from behind their entrenched positions guarding the pelican. The trio had moved some of the wreckage on the platform and constructed a makeshift skirmish line. They would have wasted the rest of the team had they been the enemy. Maybe even some of the Spartans. Varso nearly grinned with pride. The first joint operation was a resounding success. He turned to Red Leader, no doubt listening to another of Cortana's reports.

And just then, he noticed it. Varso watched the woman's head slowly cock, just a fraction of a centimeter. As if she couldn't believe what she was hearing. And then a long pause, longer than all the others. She turned on her heel and stared north. In the direction of the ruined UNSC frigate. Her helmet bobbed more vigorously. He had to hold up his curled hand to halt the squad. Varso could tell it wasn't right. He could see the younger Spartans watching Linda carefully. They knew something. And where before she had filled the silence with explanations, none came.

Which meant Red Leader had started leaving things out. She was parsing the truth, like a censor to the blind public. He hoped it was because the information wasn't important. His instincts screamed otherwise. And whatever the AI had told the Spartan seemed like the most important thing in the whole galaxy right now. He felt like he was in that pirate airlock again, short on intel and long on problems.

He knew his soldiers had noticed. And what it meant, they all realized. Even in an operation, the UNSC had its secrets. As he clambered up the ramp to the pelican, and Red Leader reported mission completion, he knew that fragile trust had been lost.

---

The bridge of Triumph was a buzz. Status updates and reports filled the coms channels. The joint task force was running 37 simultaneous operations. The large majority were being run out of Kilware. Only INDIGO had been launched from Triumph. But as the UNSC liaison and subject matter experts, Triumph was required to be in the loop for every single ongoing operation. Which was rapidly sapping Victus' attention. Still, this was the burden of a captain, and he was proud to bear it.

The holo-table displayed a gently rotating diagram of Delta Halo. On it, several quadrants were highlighted, with detailed streams of combat operations data on it. Their teams on Halo had been first been engaged 12 hours ago, in their first surprise of the day. Apparently, the station's automated keepers didn't take so kindly to unknown interlopers on the ring's surface. Thus far, casualties have been low and mass effect projectiles seemed remarkably effective against the shields of the constructs.

Still, Victus suspected the fighting would get worse before it got much better.

Halliday flashed back onto the holo-table.

"How did the debrief go?" Victus asked. Triumph's ground team had returned from the Covenant just 30 minutes prior. Halliday had insisted on debriefing Linda and Cortana herself, while some of Victus' lieutenants handled the Turian team.

He expected a pithy jab or snide joke.

Instead, Halliday just stared back at him. Through him. Her eyes were dead. Her voice was even.

"She could have stopped it."

Victus stared back, confused.

"Pardon?"

"Cortana. That selfish BITCH could have fucking stopped it ALL!" Halliday's voice rose into a furious scream, echoing across the bridge.

Victus, still confused, asked again, "Halliday, I need you to explain what's going on."

Halliday palmed her virtual face in anguish, and said, "the Master Chief wasn't on that station when Halo activated. He left Cortana behind."

"…and?" prompted Victus.

"She was the last resort. On Alpha Halo, they used the Pillar of Autumn's fusion reactor to destroy the ring."

Victus' gut lurched. Having seen the ring in person, he could scarcely imagine its destruction.

"And when In Amber Clad crashed onboard the station, they planned to do the same. Leave Cortana behind and let her pull the trigger. Take out the flood, the Covenant, and the ring in nuclear hellfire."

"What happened?" Victus asked.

"She didn't. Because the Master Chief hadn't cleared the station yet. Because the flood whispered in her ear. Because she trusted Commander Keyes. Because she was curious. For a moment of safety, she loosed damnation on the stars."

Halliday's voice softened. She nearly whispered her next sentence: "she's in bad shape Captain. Something isn't right with her. She's different. Corrupted. I can't explain it."

A serious pall fell over Victus' face. Conjured images of a hostile AI raced through his mind. He asked Halliday, "is she safe?"

"I don't know Victus."

"I've established an isolated network to place her once Red Team returns from Halo. But…," Halliday sounded concerned, and fear dripped into her voice in ways it never had before, "she's an infiltration and cyberwarfare specialist. I don't think there is anything I could throw at her that would stop her permanently. If she wanted to do harm, I would just be a speedbump."

Victus let the words wash over himself. This situation had become far more complicated. After months in slipspace, the harsh realities of his job had come calling once more. These were the perilous decisions that defined command. And it quickly became clear there was a tightrope he would need to walk.

Victus chose his words carefully, "Sacrificing yourself and your comrades is never an easy thing to ask. I've seen even the mightiest Turians crack under the pressure. You want to blame Cortana, I understand. Spirits, I do too."

The bitter tone of resentment bared itself in Halliday's voice once more: "I don't want to blame her. I do."

"I think you should…"

Halliday cut Victus off. Her tone dripped with venom as she said, "Rear Admiral Amanda Crawley was the closest thing I ever had to a friend. She conned the other Marathon in CSG-6. My CO on Triumph was a strict professional. Our relationship ended when his watch did. But Crawley always made a point to reach out. To stay in contact, even across hard vacuum. We would play chess."

Victus watched with pensive silence.

"We spent a lot of time together, Feeling Lucky and Triumph. I was tapped into their systems so I could guide their MACs. They didn't have a smart AI of their own. I could feel every single heartbeat on that cruiser. I loved that ship. Just as much as I love Triumph."

"But when the Covenant found Earth? When they threatened to destroy the last ODP in our battle cluster?"

Halliday locked eyes with Victus, a haunted expression clouding her face.

"I threw Feeling Lucky into the teeth of a CAS energy projector. One thousand and twenty-three people killed in ten seconds. To save a single ODP. To keep the hope of victory alive."

"And it's all meaningless because Cortana couldn't give up a single man."

Victus locked eyes with the UNSC AI. Anger never served a command well. It tainted the spirits of a vessel. Clouded the myriads of critical decisions that befell a commander. He would not allow it to overtake his comrade. He needed a distraction. And he needed to know more.

"Halliday, I need you to tell me exactly what happened."

---

There were already two Turian dropships circling Halo's control room when Red Team's pelican arrived. As the rear ramp slowly lowered, the rapid-fire cracks of mass effect fire punctuated the howl of the UNSC dropship's engines. He readied his phaeston. In the absence of the flood, Varso had been sure to rearm his team during their brief stop back aboard Triumph. Turian forces on Halo's surface had been engaged, their briefing had reported. Forerunner constructs; the guardians of the ring. Linda and the other Spartans had done the same. The oldest Spartan now shouldered the cumbersome length of her SRS-99. But the Spartan wielded it smoothly, watching out the rear like a hunter.

As the pelican's 70mm autocannon thumped, the tail of the giant bird swung around to reveal the Turian shuttles in combat with Halo's automated defenses. Varso stood up, clutching at the handholds built into his jump seat. The angular blue shuttles danced across his vision, tracers swatting small metallic dots out of the sky. Linda's anti-materiel rifle barked three times. Below, three of the tiny dots popped in perfect sequence, like tiny puffs of flak.

"Sentinels?" he asked.

Cortana's calming voice chimed in, "affirmative sergeant."

"The Gravemind neutralized the monitor of this installation some time ago. They must have defaulted to a defensive posture without the monitor's control."

Varso still wasn't used to the voice of the AI on their coms. Her often-omniscient presence still felt bizarre. She sometimes seemed to know what he was thinking before he thought it. It unsettled him.

"Beginning our landing sequence. Hold on," she said. The ground below them began to race closer as the pelican circled in on its approach.

Below them, in the middle of an expansive tidal marsh, stood Halo's control room. Its spire stood tall on a rock outcrop, separated from land by a channel of shallow turquoise water. The wreckage of a large Covenant machine crouched low in the water, insect-like legs beginning to decay in the tranquil waters. It faced the control room, perfectly centered on the front entrance. The entrance itself was framed by arms stretching out into the bay, arcing gently up towards the spire. They began deep in the water, sweeping up towards the main body of the control room: an elaborate sphere made of dozens of flat panels. Altogether, the control room resembled a skeletonized pyramid, and bright floodlights cut through the early morning fog.

The building looked like it could have withstood eternity. But it was far from immortal. The door had been blasted away entirely, the entire pad twisted and warped from intense heat. The sight took Varso aback.

"Scarab did a number on the entrance," remarked Ash, as he readied his MA5K carbine.

"The good Sergeant Major asked nicely," said Cortana, the gentle ring of amusement in her voice.

The heavy gear of the pelican thudded onto the metal of the ancient pad. Varso was the first one out the door, followed quickly by his two fire team leaders. He nearly lost his footing on the congealed surface of the pad. As if on cue, he watched a flight of sentinels break off from the orbiting Turian dropships and vector right for the vulnerable pelican. He whipped his phaeston up, ready to cut down the incoming automatons. Their silhouettes slowly grew in his integrated scope, and his talon readied on the trigger, just waiting for them to reach the limits of his effective range. In the distance, the dropships wheeled around to attempt to intercept.

But then, behind him, the Spartans stepped out of the pelican. And the flight of sentinels froze in mid-air. And like nothing had ever happened, they dispersed. The Turian dropships roared overhead; their gunners doubtlessly as confused as Varso was. While the dropships circled back around to begin their landing sequence, Varso ordered his squad to fan out and secure the entrance to the facility.

Cortana's voice once again crackled inside of Varso's helmet, "I was wondering if that would happen."

Varso was blasted by a wave of heat, as the Turian dropships made their landings. Two Cabal lances filed out on to the pad, phaestons at the ready. Their Kabalim, replied in a gruff voice that echoed decades of Hierarchy service.

"Care to fill us in?"

Linda greeted the Turian with a courteous nod. It was Cortana's voice that answered his request, however: "on Alpha Halo, humans seemed to be the only species able to access many of Halo systems. It was no different here. The monitor of Alpha Halo used the term 'reclaimer'. I suspect as soon as the ring's systems realized that our party contains humans, they allowed us access to the control room."

The Kabalim scoffed, "some species have all the luck. Let us know when the universe finally gets around to leaving us something with our name on it. Lance 1, get ready to move in!"

The Kabalim's biotics flared as his team flowed through the destroyed opening, earning a curious glance from Mark and Ash. Varso supposed the pair hadn't exactly been exposed to the more exotic effects of element zero yet. He had long since gotten past the spectacle. He hadn't quite gotten over his apprehension. It was wrong to see the warping energy emerge from Turian hands.

He glanced back at Linda as his team flowed towards the entrance. Another thought tickled his mind. The tickle grew into an itch. He had to say something. He had to stand up for his team.

"Red leader, when were you planning on telling us?" Varso asked accusingly. She had hidden information from them on High Charity. 'Need to Know' he could understand. But the fact that humans had a special relationship with Forerunner technology felt pretty need to know. The casualty figures for the initial assault on Halo flashed through his mind. Could they have been prevented?

The older Spartan didn't respond. But she was looking at him behind her golden visor, of that much he was certain. There was a moment. A pause. His squadmates were trying their best to appear like they weren't watching. Then, the Spartan stood from her crouch and signaled with her hand. She then followed the Kabalim into the control structure.

Something else nagged at him. She was a 'reclaimer', if Cortana was to be believed. The detail she had so wonderfully hidden. Why? Exactly how many of Halo's systems did she have access to?

And who had pulled Halo's trigger?

---

Victus' eyes rested on the feed from the control room operation playing out on the holo-table. But his mind was elsewhere, attempting to digest the chaotic series of events that led to Halo's activation. He was sure many of his crew members were similarly distracted. If he were on his game, he would have had this conversation somewhere more private. He left discipline for that decision up to Admiral Tibril.

Two names kept coming up in Halliday's accounting. The first was the Master Chief. The AI spoke of the figure with almost mythical reverence. He was a Spartan, she had told him, and that alone spoke for itself. He had seen enough of Triumph's Spartans to know that the myth was often rooted in fact.

The second name was Miranda Keyes. The commander of the diminutive UNSC frigate. He felt overwhelmed as it was with the might of Triumph behind him. And he had seen In Amber Clad's sister ships in Triumph and Canberra's escort fleet. Even Corvus was longer than them. And while ordinarily, a comparison to a Hierarchy cruiser was flattery, in a dance with the gargantuan demons that composed the Covenant fleet, it was entirely inadequate. He needed to understand the mindset of a commander who could face those odds.

"Tell me more about Keyes," he asked of Halliday, "I know you've already read through her files a few dozen times."

With the faintest of smiles, Halliday responded, "You're catching on captain, day by day."

The young commander's face appeared above the table. If he could describe her expression in a word, it was determined. Enthusiastic would be his second choice. Overconfident would be his third.

"Miranda Keyes was born on February 28th, 2525, in the New Alexandria Hospital on Reach," the AI explained.

Victus asked, "where does that put her with respect to the Covenant invasion?"

"Fighting had been underway at Harvest for weeks, but word had yet to reach rest of the UNSC. Even then, tensions with the Insurrectionists were coming to a head. War was coming soon, even without the Covenant."

The calm before the storm. Victus wished he would never live in such a time. Halliday continued.

"Her childhood records are mostly barren. At some point, she moved to Sol to live with her father, Captain Jacob Keyes."

Victus's brows rose, "the commander of the Pillar of Autumn at Alpha Halo?"

"The very same," Halliday replied. Victus knew the danger already. A daughter avenging her father. Vengeance could be powerful. But it could also be blinding. Especially when it was so personal. It would have been hard for a young commander Keyes to keep an even head.

"And her mother?" Victus asked.

"Unknown," replied Halliday. There was a moment of suspicion in her voice, but it passed quickly. Victus supposed the UNSC had better things to do than track the consorts of one of their officers.

"What was her military training?"

"She enrolled in the Academy on Luna at 16. One of the youngest to ever do it. Her instructors noted she was fiercely intelligent and incredibly driven. On graduation, with the Covenant assault well underway, she requested to be assigned to active duty. Her instructors recommended she be assigned to a corvette or sloop, the first step the fast track to command."

"Instead, she was assigned to the science vessel UNSC Hilbert," the AI finished. That struck Victus as particularly odd. It wasn't often that talented officers with a desire to fight weren't given their wish in the middle of a war. If anything, as the UNSC casualties mounted, there should have been a shortage of talented officers to crew new vessels coming off the production lines. A science vessel didn't make sense. It sidelined an otherwise promising officer from the war. Victus didn't understand it.

"And when she rammed Hilbert into a Covenant destroyer, she was one of two survivors, she got the silver star," Halliday continued. Brave and lucky. That could be quite the combination.

"Needless to say, that caught the UNSC's attention, and Keyes was soon redeployed to the front and rapidly rose through the ranks. Some cried nepotism. More likely is the UNSC officer corps getting decimated every engagement. Eventually, in 2552, she was assigned command of In Amber Clad and was docked with Cairo station when the Covenant entered the system."

The name was familiar to Victus. Where had he… that's right! Cairo was one of the surviving orbital defense platforms.

He asked, "What led her to pursuing the Covenant carrier?"

Halliday gestured at the holo-table. The readouts of the various ground operations were moved to a single corner. They were replaced by the same holographic tactical diagrams that Halliday had shown him his first day aboard Triumph. This time, however, instead of the destruction of the debris field, it showed neat battle lines and staggered defensive perimeters exactly how they had appeared that fateful October morning.

Humanity's final battleline. The grand concentration of a fleet that would put most Citadel races to shame. In Amber Clad was highlighted a brilliant green. A Covenant ship closed.

And then it began. A superheavy SMAC round from Cairo zipped across the display and slammed into the approaching battlecruiser. And from there, the battle devolved into pure chaos. Plasma torpedoes, archer missiles, energy lances, and MAC rounds lit up the display, and Victus was unable to follow it all. Entire UNSC naval divisions were swept aside by energy lances carving through thousands of kilometers of hard vacuum. Legions of fighters swirled through the black of space. ODPs went dark as they were overwhelmed by swarms of landing craft. A Covenant carrier tore through the UNSC lines, trailing a path of wrecked vessels behind it.

And in the middle of it all, In Amber Clad pushed back from Cairo, and danced into the fray. The vessel twisted and waltzed through the crisscrossing fire, dodging plasma torpedoes as much through luck as by talent. The ship snapped off MAC and archers at anything it could get a bearing on. Unfortunately for the late Commander Keyes, it seemed that the Stalwart's bite did little to the larger Covenant vessels. The tide had shifted. Even against the imposing size of the Covenant vessels, the sheer numbers of the UNSC defenses were forcing them to make a choice. Advance or retreat. The second carrier exploded in the middle of a UNSC formation, after attempting to run the formation much like her sister ship earlier.

"While the 5th fleet recovered, Keyes was ordered to take In Amber Clad to support the defense of New Mombasa. And once ONI realized the Prophet of Regret was onboard, her directive was changed," Halliday explained.

"Let me guess…," Victus responded.

"Dead or alive, to borrow an old human expression. And when Regret jumped, she followed," Halliday added. The display shifted, this time showing a New Mombasa under siege. The massive bulbous bow of a CAS class carrier was already disappearing into a slipspace rupture. And next to it, In Amber Clad looked like a tiny insect. But the frigate, cruiser by Victus' standards, raced between the skyscrapers of downtown. He could imagine the windows shattering in her wake, and the terrible noise it must have made at street level. And right before the howling slipspace rupture could close behind the looming carrier, In Amber Clad's diminutive hull zoomed through behind it.

The maneuver took guts. But more than that, it took skill, foresight, and above all, commitment. The slightest moment of hesitation would have left In Amber Clad at ground zero for the impending implosion of the slipspace rupture. And Victus' forces had seen firsthand the devastation that detonation left on New Mombasa.

"How did Keyes' priorities shift when they discovered Halo?" Victus asked. He could see Halliday grin. The first ring had meant her father's end. Victus was curious to see how the young Commander had reacted.

"They didn't. Regret's carrier made landfall near one of the ring's lakes. Keyes inserted a strike team led by S-117 with SOEIV pods. They located the prophet. They eliminated the prophet."

Victus knew it wouldn't have been nearly so simple. He had been on the back end of several VIP operations. Normally penetration of his defenses wasn't quite so simple. And the Covenant were no novices. But, nevertheless, it seemed that the UNSC's first operation on Halo had been a success. Where had it all gone so wrong?

"What happened next," he prompted.

"During their infiltration, the strike team discovered that Regret was planning to fire the ring. Cortana believed it was some kind of religious rite; a way to ascend to the Covenant afterlife. They called it the 'Great Journey'."

If only the truth had been less terrible, Victus thought.

"The only way to stop them would be to reach Halo's library, the facility where the activation index is kept." Halliday's tone fell. A remorseful pall clouded her face.

"That part of the ring was overrun by the flood. With the strongest elements of her detachment engaged in the hunt for Regret, Keyes had to make do with what she had. She ordered In Amber Clad in close to the library, within the heart of the sentinel enforced quarantine zone. The Covenant were already making their run for the library."

Few options, and even less time. It was a familiar dilemma. The holo-table flickered to a overlay of In Amber Clad hovering at low altitude above a barren warzone. Her point defense cannons brought thundering artillery to the snow-covered hills, and 3 pelicans descended from the large frigate.

"Keyes joined one of the teams herself," Halliday explained, and Victus' mandibles twitched.

"If she had been my CO, I might have locked her in the bridge. Frankly, I had heard the stories about Keyes. This was her style: fucking suicidal. But its why she inspired her crew, because wouldn't ask them to do something she wouldn't herself," Halliday mused.

Victus didn't know how to respond. A very Turian part of him wanted to write tales of the reckless commander. An experienced warship commander disagreed.

"Keyes and her team made it to the library. The retrieved the activation index but were captured by the Covenant," Halliday said, now even more dour. She added, "to make matters worse, the flood here exhibited more intelligence than on Alpha Halo. When they overran one of the landing parties and infected the flight crew, they had a clear path to In Amber Clad."

Victus tried not to think about the carnage that would have resulted. About the parasite hoard flooding out from the frigate's hangar bay. About the defenseless crew without marine support with no choice but to run or hide. It wasn't a fate that he wished upon anybody.

"It was during that hour, when Keyes was captured and the activation index secured, that the brutes finally made their move, with the full blessing of the prophets. Apparently, Regret's elite honor guard had failed him. The prophet of Truth wouldn't take that same risk. He had the loyalty of the brute clans. With the snap of his fingers, he could control the whole Covenant. And just like that, the elites were betrayed, and the Covenant broke."

It all seemed so trivial to Victus. A single assassination. The Spartans had told him about OPERATION: RED FLAG. UNSC high command had hoped the capture of a single prophet would be enough to force the Covenant to the negotiating table. Judging from the way the Spartans spoke of it, they always felt like it was a long shot. But what else could they do? He suspected that none of them could have ever imagined the chaos that would unfold with the death of Regret.

"In that single hour, all hell broke loose. The flood crashed In Amber Clad into the Covenant station, known as High Charity. Flood began to infest the population billions. Elite separatists battled the Covenant on Halo and on High Charity. This entire sector became a live-fire zone," Halliday said, and Victus could scarcely imagine what the space battle must have looked like. The wreckage was grand enough. He certainly wouldn't want to be here while plasma torpedoes were flying.

Halliday continued, "S-117 and Cortana, having been sent after the index via the ring's teleportation network, pursued Truth. He witnessed a captive Keyes loaded onto a phantom bound for the ring's control room. The brute chieftain, Tartarus, was with her."

Victus had seen renderings of the mighty brutes. It very much reminded him of the ferocity of the Krogans.

"The Covenant were using an ancient forerunner ship to power the city. Truth intended to use it to travel to Earth. S-117 infiltrated the vessel, leaving Cortana behind."

To detonate In Amber Clad's reactors, Victus remembered. The final resort. The failsafe that was never triggered. The reason they were in this mess.

"When Keyes arrived at Halo's control room, elite separatists were closing quickly. With the help of freed human prisoners, they moved on the control room and forced their way inside."

Victus, surprised, asked, "that giant tank, was it…"

"Controlled by the separatists, yes. They used it to blast through the control room's defenses. They confronted Tartarus inside, attempted to persuade him of the truth: Halo would only serve to kill them all."

"And?" Victus asked, as if he didn't already know the answer.

"Brutes were never the brightest of creatures," Halliday responded, "he overpowered Keyes, and forced her to insert the index into the core."

"Halo's firing sequence began."

---

The giant room at the center of Delta Halo's control room was dark, lit only by the glowing panels recessed into the building's walls. At the center of the room, there was a round wedding cake structure, massive, layered platforms stacked like pancakes around a central conduit. Linda looked up, where the early morning daylight streamed down from an aperture in the roof. Halo used superluminal communication arrays to communicate across the ring. She imagined a powerful blue beam jetting out from the control room and soaring into space. That signal had only purpose. It awakened the ring from an eon of slumber, awoken once again to perform its grim purpose.

Her team wandered down the broad bridge connecting the control platform to the rest of the structure. The powered armor rigs of elites lay at her feet, where they had been cut down by brute plasma. Like on High Charity, their rank told the story. Zealots and Ultras. Opposing them were the tattered remains of brute helmets and rank trophies.

The mixed Turian and Spartan team was silent as they approached. The air had the atmosphere of a funeral; the hallowed walls of the forerunner's grand tomb served to quell any mortal thought. It was now humanity's tomb too, she supposed. And the Covenant's. When the game is over, the king and the pawn go in the same box. Where had she heard that before? It didn't sound familiar.

She passed the tattered remains of a Sergeant Major. Her helmet automatically read its IFF. The name was familiar. Alpha Halo and First Strike. It was a punch to her gut to see him meet his end here.

The trajectory of plasma fire didn't quite make sense. Some of the angles were wrong. The platforms here must have shifted during the firing sequence. It didn't matter much. The Spartan's analytical mind was doing what it always did: predicting, determining what the battlefield would look like in seconds or minutes. She wouldn't need it here. There wasn't any fighting left. Halo had made sure of that.

---

"The elites and human survivors engaged Tartarus and his brutes. The fighting was fierce. There was no time for cover, no time for safety," Halliday continued.

All or nothing, Victus knew. One final gambit.

---

Linda spied what was left of a highly ornamented elite's armored harness. It was contoured like an ancient suit of armor, unlike the clean lines of modern elite battle dress. Swirling runes were etched across the armor's burnished surface. The helmet curved down over the face like a bird's beak. It was majestic. She had never seen anything like it before. Mark stepped up alongside, staring down at the remains with similar curiosity.

Cortana's voice rang out over the coms: "The Arbiter."

Linda didn't know him.

"In another life, Thel 'Vadamee."

That name, she did know. Every Spartan did. Her blood boiled. The architect of Reach's destruction. The conqueror of a dozen UNSC worlds. Supreme commander of one of the Covenant's few grand fleets. They had all memorized his dossier. Eliminate at all costs, the file had said. That cost included Spartan fire teams. That cost included entire fleets. The dossier had made it clear in no uncertain terms.

His forces were responsible for the slaughter of well over one billion people. She remembered the number exactly. She remembered everything in that dossier. But especially that number. She looked at her younger comrades. She wondered how many of their families 'Vadamee had slain.

"He was behind Reach," Linda sneered, hate dripping from her lips like poison. Varso and several of the Turians slowly turned, confused at the sudden aggression. They stared back, clearly concerned. She didn't need their pity.

"And Alluvion," Ash added, his soft voice almost in a trance.

And so many more worlds. That familiar frustration welled up inside of her again. She lashed out with her leg, and in one nonchalant motion, kicked the ornate helmet over the side. It tumbled into the black abyss. The team was silent. A second later, she could hear the helmet clattering in the depths below.

"He saw the error of his ways in the end. He tried to stop Tartarus. He fought to save us all," Cortana said.

"That split-lip bastard can burn in hell." Linda whispered, the slur rolling bitterly off her tongue. The room was silent.

She didn't care if he did fight to stop Tartarus. He probably did it to save his own wretched hide. Billions of lives can't be redeemed in a single firefight. For decades, 'Vadamee had thought nothing of the carnage he wreaked. How could she forgive him now?

She needed to focus on the mission. She needed to leave 'Vadamee behind. She strode ahead to where the Kabalim awaited, at the threshold of the control platform.

Ash still stared at the ancient combat harness, fixated on its polished glare. He didn't say a word. Mark observed the interaction. He tried to get Ash's attention, to no avail. After a moment, he slung an arm around Ash's shoulder and tore him away from 'Vadamee's remains. With a quick shake of his head, Ash shouldered his rifle once more and moved towards the control platform.

Varso lingered by the armor. It really was magnificent. He hated that he thought that. A treasonous part of his mind wondered what the Elites had really been like. What they would have said had they ever met the Turians. He joined the rest of the group.

---

"The fighting cost the lives of six elites and countless more brutes, but eventually they were able to fell Tartarus," Halliday continued, "but they were running out of time."

Victus watched the AI with rapt attention.

"The insertion of the activation index initializes the firing sequence. But even with Halo's reactors, millions of times more powerful than anything we've ever built, the amount of energy required to produce the pulse takes time to build," Halliday explained, "Cortana calculated that Halo fired 7 minutes and 49 seconds after the firing sequence began.

"It was going to be close. According to the video Cortana scrubbed from Halo's systems, Keyes climbed up onto the platforms surrounding the core. But, unarmed, she couldn't enter until Tartarus had been dealt with."

Victus knew where this was headed.

"When did they finally take down the brute?" he asked.

"Too late. 7 minutes and 38 seconds after activation. Keyes needed another 5.1 seconds. She was just some 30 meters away."

Victus sighed, months of weariness exuding from his being.

"That's all it takes to change the galaxy? A dozen heartbeats?"

---

The central core of the control room felt like a tomb. Nobody was willing to speak. Varso's armored feet tapped gently against the inscribed floors, the gentle sound echoing off the domed room. A pillar of sunlight shone through the opening in the roof, coming to rest on Halo's central control panel. Dust gently drifted in the ray. It was beautiful.

This is where the world ended.

This room was what they had come all this way for. He thought back to that moment they jumped through Relay 314. It started with just a few border colonies. It had just been a tragedy then, something for the news to milk for a few weeks. The strange disappearance of the colonists at Essos. The bold Turian Navy would travel into the dark beyond and slay the demon at the other end. They would come back heroes, having made the galaxy a safer place. He didn't feel like a hero.

He was a bystander, still just a cog in the wheels, a body in the slaughter. He didn't control his own fate. This was never his story.

He watched Linda come to the remains of a human officer, some 30 meters from the center of the platform. The Spartan dropped to a knee, and her hand hovered for a moment. She set her anti-materiel rifle aside. She moved slowly, gently reaching down to the combat uniform. Varso approached silently, transfixed by the Spartan's careful ritual. The Spartan gently scooped three items from the debris.

The two silver oak leaves glistened in the orange lighting of the control room. They looked tiny in the Spartan's hands, but she cradled them with gentle reverence. Her other hand came away with a neural lace, wiring neural links dangling loose in the still air.

When the Spartan noticed Varso, she hastily secured the items in the hard case on her thigh. Her golden visor stared at him again; challenging, daring him to ask the question forming in his mind.

He almost did.

But this wasn't his story. This wasn't the time. He would confront the woman eventually. His squad deserved that much. And if they were going to work together in the future, he needed to be sure that he could trust the super-soldier. But not now. Not on the altar that had condemned her people. He looked around. Mark and Ash watched him carefully. Lucy was transfixed by the structure, gently running her gauntleted hand along the intricately carved walls.

---

"You wanted to know what kind of a commander Keyes was? She was the best of us. She was willing to sacrifice anything for a single chance," Halliday finished.

"And it was almost enough."

---

Halo's activation index hovered above the panel. It twirled gently in the air, its sheath forming and reforming in a slow rhythm. Linda watched it with apprehension. It was… small. Far smaller than she had expected. Barely larger than her hand. She reached out and grabbed it. It came loose gently. It felt nearly weightless in her fingers. She swore she could almost feel the shadow of Keyes' grasp in its polished surface.

The fate of humanity, in the palm of her hand.

She was tired. More tired than she had ever felt. She wanted to just collapse here in Halo's control room. To add her corpse to the trillions. She looked at her beleaguered comrades. Lucy stared back as if she could sense Linda's turmoil. Mark and Ash were keeping a close eye on the Turians. They were so young. They were children. Like she had been once.

For them, there had never been before. They could never have imagined a world without the Covenant. For her, that time was but a shimmer in the haze of her memories, overwritten a thousand times by blood and smoke. She wasn't sure which was crueler. She worried about the younger Spartans. They would be cursed with long life. For them, humanity would be but a footnote in their lifetime. They would grow to see the galaxy forget. Linda had little faith in the Citadel. In time, humanity's monuments would become theirs. They would forget those who tread before them, condemn them to a footnote in the pages of history. Like the builders of the citadel itself. Or the builders of the relays. The Spartan IIIs would forget the majesty of what they once were, marked only by their own crumbling edifices. Their lives had just begun, and they were already alone.

Linda slid down against the control terminal, setting Nornfang aside. She sat, staring at the index in her hands. Translucent green and onyx black. There would be a power struggle now, with such a weapon. The Turians would want to claim it for the Citadel. They would be right, in a way. Safe from human hands, it would be certain that Halo's wind would never again sweep the galaxy. Mendez would urge her to keep it for the remnants of the UNSC, leverage in their already fragile position. It was their birthright, after all.

Linda didn't care. She was already dead. Her purpose was finished. She had lost. 42 years old, and she had already died two deaths. The first would have happened in a hospital on Verent. A genetic disease, the doctors would have told her mother. Her flash clone, rotting away from the inside. To her mother, it must have been the end of the world. Linda's flesh and blood, born of a machine, would have died loved. Linda died, and dozens of light years away, a Spartan was born.

She died a second time at Reach. Plasma tore into MJOLNIR and destroyed the Spartan within. For weeks, her corpse rested at peace in a cryo-tube, while worlds burned around her. She doesn't remember that darkness.

And then Halsey tore her from the veil of death. She arose a revenant, a spirit reborn with but a single purpose. Finish the fight. Win the war. She fought more recklessly than she ever had before. After all, she was already dead.

And then they lost.

In that grim haze, there had been but a single beacon. Find Halo, discover her life's cruel finale. Now that light had been extinguished too. The index was now heavy in her hands. She could feel the pull, the alluring embrace of death, reminding her of her debt. Was this the end? The tug is stronger now. She could hear the whispers of Cortana's voice in her roaring ears. The neural lace pounded at her skull like a drum.

The Turian sergeant stood over her and offered his hand. Her body took it, and MJOLNIR's liquid crystal lattice lifted her carcass to its feet. The alien tugged at her hand, as little as it helped to hoist her half-ton weight. In a flash, the world came back to her.

The index was light in her hand again. The Spartan IIIs watched her with worry. There would be time to talk later, on Triumph. There was nothing left for them here. Keyes' oak leaves and neural lace weighed on her hard case. There would be time for that too.

She keyed her coms, "Red Team."

Her free hand scooped Nornfang up with its carry handle. The weight was familiar. It was comfortable. She took a step, and then another. She took one last look at the activation index resting in her palm, the key to the end of the galaxy. In her hand, she could end it all.

She tossed the index aside.

It skittered across the hard floor of the control room, finally sliding to a stop at the feet of the Kabalim from Kilware. His practiced visage let slip a gasp of surprise, and he gingerly lifted the index from the ground, holding it as if it were a grenade. Let them think they won. The Spartans alone knew Cortana's dirty little secret: what exactly had become of Alpha Halo's index.

Linda looked back at her team. Her Turians and her Spartans watched her. And, for the first time since Reach, an overwhelming sense of calm overcame her. The world seemed to slow, and all seemed in focus at once. She could feel her racing heartbeat slow, and her vision sharpened.

"Let's go home," Linda said.

---

The train broke onto the surface less than thirty minutes later. They had already bypassed several stations, Osh remembers seeing their platform's lights rush past in the black outside of the window. This train seemed to have a single directive: evacuate passengers from the city center and get them as far away from the Covenant as it possibly could. She was surprised the humans hadn't bothered to change it in the time since.

When the train rushed out of the tunnel, finally on the surface, it had left the dense metropolis of New Mombasa behind. She stared with interest out of the window, watching the savannah whip past the window. It was finally dawn, and the sun was slowly rising in the east, casting an orange glow across the gently rolling hills.

The railway was elevated above the ground by a dozen meters or so, leaving Osh with a spectacular view of the landscape around her. Sparse grasses and shrubs grew as far as the eye could see, interspersed with scrawny trees. The grass was dried and golden, a few months removed from the tropical rainy season that had fueled its growth. Far to the west, green mountains rose in the distance.

Osh yawned and stretched, her worries suddenly far behind her. The AI and the Asari officials were both speeding away into the distance behind her. She glanced back at the alien. It didn't seem to care much for the spectacular landscape beyond the train car. It just drifted contently, merely happy that it was on Sadie's trail. Osh wondered if when she was done helping the creature, if she could find a way home.

Home.

Like New Mombasa, the savannah beyond the metropolis had been tainted by the war. Massive titanium rings, surely shed from the space elevator, had been cast across the landscape. Their twisted and warped frames stood out in the grassland, dense cables hanging loosely to the ground like puppet strings. Each wreck only served to point to another even further in the distance. There seemed to be no end.

The train passed the wreck of a UNSC fighter, the jet-black wing jutting unceremoniously out of the ground. Already, the natural world was beginning to overtake it. Scrub brush grew through its mighty intakes, reaching upwards into the morning sky.

A lone tank stood vigil on a hill. In the peaceful morning light, the war machine appeared at rest. Tall grass grew between its treads. Flowers blossomed under its prow. The barrel of its cannon drooped low. Its black markings were weathered and faded by months in the sun. The train continued by. Osh watched the tank grow smaller and smaller in the expanse of the savannah, until eventually, it was out of sight. She let herself be swallowed by the enormity of the landscape.

She wondered what Rannoch looked like now. Did it still bear the scars of their war with the Geth? Had the Geth wiped any trace of them from their home?

Earth was still a stunningly beautiful world.

She hoped that when the time finally came for the first Quarian to return home, they would think the same.