The Flood (35 page)

The other used his right hand to grab his left, jerked hard, and exposed a shard of broken bone. Then, as if hoping to use that as a knife, the combat form lunged forward. The chains brought the creature up short. Jenkins felt indescribable pain, began to lose consciousness, but fought his way back.

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.

He slipped some additional shells into the gun’s magazine tube, took a deep breath, and moved forward again. He made it about halfway to the other side before a mixed force of combat forms, carrier forms, and infection forms started to gather at the far end of the span. Another grenade inflicted casualties, but they charged him after that, and the Master Chief was forced to retreat, firing the assault weapon as he did so.

It was nip and tuck for a few seconds as combat forms launched themselves fifteen meters through the air, carriers charged straight in, and the omnipresent infection forms swarmed through the gaps. Retreating, the Spartan had already reloaded three times before his back hit the wall, and the last combat form collapsed at his feet, started to rise, and took a blast in the head.

Once again it was time to reload both weapons, step out onto the gore-splattered bridge deck, and attempt another crossing. This one was successful, with only light opposition on the other side, and an opportunity to replenish his ammo.

The next set of blast doors opened flawlessly, allowing the Spartan to enter a relatively short section of tunnel that led back to the surface. Determined to use stealth if at all possible, he slipped out of the passageway, scrambled up over the snow embankment to his right, and ran into a group of four Flood. A grenade took care of two – and the assault weapon finished the rest.

A Banshee swooped in, burned a long line of dashes into the snow, and continued up the valley. The Chief was surprised to get off so lightly, but given the darkness and all of the confusion, it was possible that the pilot had mistaken him for a combat form. A worthy target, to be sure, but not something to turn around for. Particularly not when the valley was full of combat forms.

He was careful to hug the face of the cliff and stay within the cover provided by the boulders and trees that lined the edge of the valley. The incessant thud of automatic weapons and the whine of plasma weapons testified to the intensity of a conflict raging off to his left.

Then, just as he was starting to believe that he could slide by without firing a shot, he came up over a slight rise to see that the Covenant and Flood were engaged in hand-to-hand combat within the depression below. A grenade followed with bursts of fire from the MA5B decimated both groups.

Snow crunched as the human made his way down through the bloodstained snow, past the spot where a trio of greedy infection forms squabbled over a wounded Elite, and up another rise to a stand of trees where a combat form and a carrier tried to jump him. Both of the Flood staggered as bursts of 7.62mm slugs cut them down, and they flopped onto the snow.

Having broken through the perimeter of the battle, the Master Chief was able to follow the nav indicator into a second valley where he came upon a group of dead Marines, loaded up on ammo, and tried to decide whether to stay with the scatter gun or trade it in for a sniper’s rifle or a rocket launcher. It would have been nice to have all three, but that many weapons would be unwieldy, not to mention damned heavy. In the end he went with the rifle and shotgun and hoped it was the right decision.

The Spartan checked the Marines for dog tags, discovered that they had already been taken by someone else, and took the time required to drag the bodies into a nearby cave in the hope that the infection forms wouldn’t find them. That seemed like a good place to stash the extra weapons – so that’s what he did.

Then, having followed the second valley to the point where it opened onto a
third
valley, he came across a now-familiar scene. The Covenant were battling the Flood with everything they had, including Shades, a brace of Ghosts, and two extremely active Wraiths, but the Flood had plenty of bodies to throw back at them and didn’t hesitate to do so.

What the Chief wanted was the Banshee that was parked at the head of the valley, but in order to get at the aircraft it would be necessary to cut both groups down to size. He stayed right, slipped along the cliff face, made use of a thin screen of trees and boulders to hide his movements from those out toward the center of the valley. Finally, having passed behind a house-sized rock and found a vantage point that allowed him to look out on the area where the vast majority of the Covenant were congregated, the Spartan unlimbered the S2 AM, selected the 10X setting for the scope, and began his bloody work.

In this particular situation he selected the softest targets first, starting with the Grunts on the Shades, followed by the outlying Jackals, all in hope that he could inflict a lot of casualties before the Elites took notice and sent the tank to get him.

The problem was that the little world inside the scope was all-consuming – a fact that caused him to let down his guard. The first hint he had that a Flood form had come up behind him was when it whacked the Spartan in the head.

The blow would have killed anyone else, but the armor saved him, and the Chief rolled in the direction of the blow. The long-barreled S2 wasn’t well suited for close-in combat but that’s what he had in his hands. There was no time to aim as the Flood form charged, only time to fire, and that’s what he did.

The slug caught the ex-Elite in the chest. The combat form didn’t even flinch as the bullet passed through its spongy center of mass. A tiny spurt of gray-green ichor trailed from the entry wound, as the creature swung a vicious blow at the Master Chief.

He ducked the attack and dropped the rifle. He dived, tucked into a roll and came up with his sidearm in his hand. He emptied the clip into the beast. One round blew its left arm off, and the final round made a foot-wide exit wound in the Flood’s back.

He kicked in the creature’s chest, crushing the infection form within. He collected the S2, and frowned. He studied the fallen Flood for a moment, and saw that the creature’s insides were rapidly liquefying. The velocity of the S2’s projectile had passed through the nonvital mass of the creature’s chest and just kept going.