“I assume,” he said, “that’s bad.”
“The Covenant think so. They’re terrified that the Flood will repair the ship and use it to escape from Halo. They sent a strike team to neutralize the Flood and prepare the ship for immediate departure.”
The Chief peered down the corridor. The bulkheads were violet. Or was that lavender? Strange patterns marbled the material, like the oily sheen of a beetle’s carapace. Whatever it was, he didn’t care for it, especially on a military vessel, but who knew? Maybe the Covenant thought olive drab was for wimps.
He started forward, but quickly came up short as a voice that verged on a groan came in over his implants. “Chief... Don’t be a fool... Leave me.”
It was Keyes’ voice.
Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK. He clung to the tether of his CNI carrier wave, and “heard” familiar voices. An iron-hard, rasping male voice. A tart, warm female voice.
He knew them.
Was this another memory?
He was struggling to dredge up new pieces of his past to delay the numbing advance of the alien presence in his mind. It was harder to maintain a grasp on who he was, as the various pieces of his life – the things that made him who he was – were stripped away, one at a time.
Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK.
The voices. They were talking about him. The Master Chief, the AI Cortana.
He felt a sense of mounting panic. They shouldn’t be here.
The other grew stronger, and pressed forward, eager to learn more about these creatures that were so important to the struggling prisoner who clung so stubbornly to identity.
Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK.
Chief, Cortana, you shouldn’t have come. Don’t be a fool. Leave me. Get out of here. Run.
The presence descended, and he could feel its anticipation of victory. It wouldn’t be long now.
“Captain?” Cortana inquired desperately. “Captain! I’ve lost him.”
Neither one of them said anything further. The pain in Keyes’ voice had been clear. All they could do was drive deeper into the ship and hope to find him.
The Chief passed through a hatch, noticed that the right bulkhead was splattered with Covenant blood, and figured a battle had been fought there. That meant he could expect to run into the Flood at any moment. As he continued down the passageway his throat felt unusually dry, his heart beat a little bit faster, and his stomach muscles were tight.
His suspicions were soon confirmed as he heard the sounds of battle, took a right, and saw that a firefight was underway at the far end of the corridor. He let the combatants go at it for a bit before moving in to cut the survivors down.
From there he took a left, followed by a right, and came to a hatch. It opened to reveal a black hole with jagged edges. Farther back, beyond the drop-off, another firefight was underway.
“Analyzing data,” Cortana said. “This hole was caused by some sort of explosion... All I detect down there are pools of coolant. We should continue our search somewhere else.”
The AI’s advice made sense, so the Spartan turned to retrace his steps. Then, as he took the first left, all hell broke loose. Cortana said, “Warning! Threat level increasing!” and then, as if to prove her point, a mob of Flood came straight at him.
He fired, retreated, and fired again. Carrier forms exploded in a welter of shattered flesh, severed tentacles, and green slime. Combat forms rushed forward as if eager to die, danced under the impact of the 7.62mm rounds, and flew apart. Infection forms skittered across the decks, leaped into the air, and shattered into flaps of flying flesh.
But there were too many, far too many for one person to handle, and even as the Chief heard Cortana say something about the black hole he accidentally backed into it, fell about twenty meters, and plunged feetfirst into a pond of green liquid. Not in the ship, but somewhere under it, on the surface below. The coolant wasso cold that he could feel it through his armor. It was thick, too – which made it more difficult to move.
The Master Chief felt his boots hit bottom, knew the weight of his armor would hold him in place, and marched up onto what had become a beach of sorts. The cavern was dark, lit mostly by the luminescent glow produced by the coolant itself, although streaks of plasma fire slashed back and forth up ahead, punctuated by the steady thud, thud, thud of an automatic weapon.
“Let’s get out of here,” Cortana said, “and find another way back aboard the ship.”
He moved up toward the edge of the conflict and let the combatants hammer each other for a bit before lobbing a grenade into the mix, waiting for the body parts to fall, and strafing what was left.
Then, having moved forward, he was forced to fight his way through a series of narrow, body-strewn passageways as what seemed like an inexhaustible supply of Flood forms came at him from every possible direction.
Eventually, having made his way through grottoes of coolant, and past piles of corpses, Cortana said, “We should head this way – toward the ship’s gravity lift,” and the Spartan saw a nav pointer appear on his HUD. He followed the red arrow around a bend to a ledge above a coolant-filled basin. Even as he watched, a dozen carrier forms marched up out of the green lagoon to attack a group of hard-pressed Covenant soldiers.
The Spartan knew there was no way in hell that he’d be able to force his way through that mess, turned, and made his way back down the trail. A sniper rifle, just one of hundreds of weapons scattered around the area, was half obscured by a headless combat form. The petty officer removed the rifle, checked to ensure that it was loaded, and returned to the overlook. Then, careful to make each shot count, he opened fire.
The Elites, Jackals, and Grunts went down fairly easily. But the Flood forms, especially the carriers, were practically impossible to kill with this particular weapon. With few exceptions the heavy round seemed to pass right through the lumpy-looking bastards without causing any harm whatsoever.
When all of the 14.5mm ammo was gone, the Chief went back for the shotgun, jumped into the green liquid, and waded up onto the shoreline. He heard an obscene sucking noise, saw an infection form trying to enter an Elite’s chest cavity, and blew both of them away.
After that there was more clean-up to do as some combat forms took a run at the human and a flock of infection forms tried to roll him under. Repeated doses of shotgun fire turned out to be just what the doctor ordered – the area was soon littered with severed tentacles and scraps of wet flesh.
A pitch-black passageway led him back to another pool where he arrived just in time to see the Flood overrun a Shade and the Elite who was seated at the controls. The Spartan began firing, already backpedaling, when the Flood spotted him and hopped, waddled, and jumped forward. He fired, reloaded, and fired again. Always retreating, always on the defensive, always hoping for a respite.
This wasn’t his kind of fight. Spartans were designed as offensive weapons, but ever since they’d landed on the ring, he’d been on the run. He had to find a way to take the offensive, and soon.
There was no break in the endless wall of Flood attackers. He fired until his weapons were empty, pried energy weapons out of dead fingers, and fired those until they were dry.
Finally, more by virtue of stubbornness than anything else, and having reacquired human weapons from dead combat forms, the Master Chief found himself standing all alone, rifle raised, with no one to shoot at. He felt a powerful sense of elation – he was alive.