Silva looked at McKay and shrugged. “Well, it was worth a try, but it looks like he’s too far gone.”
Jenkins half expected the other to lunge forward again, but having shared in the human’s pain, the alien consciousness chose that moment to retreat. The human surged into the gap, made hooting sounds, and used his good hand to point at Silva’s right boot.
The officer looked down at his boot, frowned, and was about to say something when McKay touched his arm. “He isn’t pointing at your boot, sir, he’s pointing down. At the area under the butte.”
Silva felt something cold trickle into his veins. “Is that right, son? The Flood could be directly below us?”
Jenkins nodded emphatically, rolled his eyes, and made inarticulate gagging sounds.
The Major nodded and came to his feet. “Thank you, Private. We’ll check the basement and be back to speak with you some more.”
Jenkins didn’t want to talk, he wanted to die, but nobody cared. The guards left, the door clanged shut, and the Marine was left with nothing but a broken arm and the alien inside his head. Somehow, without actually dying, he had been sentenced to hell.
As if to confirm that conclusion the other surged to the fore, yanked at the chains, and beat its feet on the floor. Food had been present, food had left, and it remained hungry.
The Master Chief spotted the next way point, put the hijacked Banshee down on a platform, and entered the complex via an unguarded hatch. He heard the battle before he actually saw it, made his way through the intervening tunnel, and peered through the next door. As had occurred before, the Covenant was busy taking it to the Flood and vice versa, so he gave both groups some time to whittle each other down, left the security of the tunnel, and proceeded to tidy up.
Then, eager to replenish his supplies, the Spartan made his ghoulish rounds, and soon was able to equip himself with an assault weapon, a shotgun, and some plasma grenades. Even though he didn’t like to think about where it came from, it felt good to dump the Covenant ordnance he’d been saddled with, and lay his hands on some true-blue UNSC issue for a change.
Pulse generator one had been dealt with, and he was eager to disable number two, then move on to his final objective. He stepped into the beam, saw the flash of light, felt the floor shake, and was in the process of pulling away when the Flood attacked from every direction.
There was no time to think and no time to fight. The only thing he could do was run. He turned and sprinted for the corridor he’d used to enter the chamber and took two powerful blows from a combat form. He bulled his way between two carrier forms and leaped out of the way as they detonated like grenades. New infection forms spewed from their deflating corpses.
There was barely enough time to turn, hose the closest forms with 7.62mm, and toss a grenade at the group beyond. It went off with a loud wham!, broke glass, and put three of the monstrosities down.
He was out of ammo by then, knew he lacked the time necessary to reload, and made the switch to the shotgun instead. The gun blew huge holes through the oncoming mob. He charged through one of them, and ran like hell.
Then, with some pad to work with, the human turned to gun down the pursuers. The entire battle consumed no more than two minutes but it left the Chief shaken. Could Cortana detect the slight tremor in his hands as he reloaded both weapons? Hell, she had unrestricted access to all of his vital signs, so she knew more about what was going on with his body than he did. Still, if the AI was conscious of the way he felt, there was no sign of it in her words. “Pulse generator deactivated – good work.”
The Chief nodded wordlessly and made his way back through the tunnel to the point where the Banshee waited. “The Pillar of Autumn is located twelve hundred kilometers up-spin,” Cortana continued. “Energy readings show her fusion reactors are still powered up! The systems on the Pillar of Autumn have fail-safes even I can’t override without authorization from the Captain. We’ll have to find him, or his neural implants, to start the fusion core detonation.
“One target remaining. Let’s take care of the final pulse generator.”
A nav indicator appeared on the noncom’s HUD as he lifted off, took fire from a neighboring installation, and put the attack ship into a steep dive. The ground came up fast, he pulled out, and guided the alien assault craft through a pass and into the canyon beyond. The nav indicator pointed toward the light that spilled out of a tunnel. The Banshee began to take ground fire, and the Spartan knew his piloting skills were about to be severely tested.
A rocket flashed by as he pushed the Banshee down onto the deck, fired the aircraft’s weapons, and cut power. Flying into the tunnel was bad enough – but flying into it at high speed verged on suicidal.
Once inside the passageway the challenge was to stay off the walls and make the tight right- and left-hand turns without killing himself. A few seconds later the Spartan saw double blast doors and flared in for a jarring landing.
He hopped down, made his way over to the control panel, hit the switch, and heard a rumbling sound as the doors started to part. Then there was a bang! as something exploded and the enormous panels came to a sudden stop. The resulting gap was too small for the Banshee, but sufficient for two carrier forms to scuttle through. The beasts scrambled toward him on short, stubby legs. The humpbacked bladders that formed their upper torsos pulsed and wriggled as the infection forms within struggled for release.
The Chief blew both monsters away with twin shotgun blasts, and mopped up the rest of the infection forms with another shot. He paused and reloaded; there were bound to be more of the creatures on the far side of the doors.
Resigned to a fight, he stepped through the crack and paused. There was no sound beyond the gentle roar of machinery, the drip, drip, drip of water off to his right, and the rasp of his own breathing. The threat indicator was clear, and there were no enemies in sight, but that didn’t mean much. Not where the Flood were concerned. They had a habit of coming out of nowhere.
The cave, if that was the proper word for the huge cavern-like space, featured plenty of places to hide. Enormous pipes emerged from the walls and dived downward, mysterious installations stood like islands on the platform around him, and there was no way to know what might lurk in the dark corners. Lights, mounted high above, provided what little illumination there was.
The human stood on a broad platform that ran the full length of the open area. A deep chasm separated his platform from what appeared to be an identical structure on the other side of the canyon. One of two bridges that had once spanned the gorge was down, leaving only one over which he could pass – a made-to-order choke point for anyone who wanted to establish an ambush.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot of choice, so he marched down to the point where the remaining span was anchored, and started across. He hadn’t gone more than thirty paces before fifty or sixty infection forms emerged from hiding and danced out to block the way.
The Spartan held his position, waited for the Flood forms to come a little closer, and tossed a fragmentation grenade into the center of the group.
The cavern ate some of the sound, but the explosive device still managed to produce a bang, and the resulting shrapnel laid waste to all but a handful of the creatures.
There were two survivors, though, both optimists, who continued to bounce forward in spite of the way in which the rest of the group had been annihilated. A single shotgun blast was sufficient to kill both of them.