The Flood (36 page)

Another nasty surprise, courtesy of the Flood.

After a quick look around to make sure that there weren’t anymore surprises lurking in the vicinity, with his heart still beating like a trip-hammer, the Chief went back to his grisly work. Three more Covenant warriors fell before a barrage of fireballs arced high into the air to land all around his position. One came so close that just the bleed off it was enough to push his shielding into the red and trigger the alarm.

He pulled back, switched to the assault weapon long enough to ice a couple of overly ambitious Grunts, and switched back to the S2 as he rounded the opposite side of the big boulder. He selected a spot where he could go to work on both the Covenant and the Flood, and settled in.

He wanted to nail the Elites now and, thanks to the powerful 14.5mm armor-piercing rounds, he could drop most of them with a single shot. Combat forms were a different story, so he switched to the pistol. It was less accurate, but did the job. It wasn’t long before more than a dozen bodies were laid out in the snow. But then the word was out. Soon the mortar tank moved into position to bombard his new position, and it was necessary to pull back.

The Wraith was a problem, aserious problem, which meant there was only one thing the Spartan could do: hike back to the weapons cache and trade the rifle for the launcher. It was a major pain in the ass, but he didn’t have much choice, so he pulled out.

It took a full half hour to make the round trip between the valley and the weapons cache, so he expected things to have calmed down a bit by the time he returned. That wasn’t the case, however, which suggested that the Flood had thrown even more forms into the battle.

The Chief followed his own footprints back to the hiding place next to the big boulder, put the launcher on his shoulder, and hit the zoom. The Wraith, which was busy hurling bombs down valley, seemed to leap forward. As if somehow aware of his presence, the tank spun on its axis, and launched a bomb toward the rock.

The Spartan forced himself to ignore the artificial comet, locked onto the target, and triggered the rocket. There was an impact and a loud
crump!
followed by smoke – but the Wraith continued to fire nonetheless.

Now, with fireballs exploding all around him, the Master Chief had to take a deep breath, hold the tank at the center of his sight, and pull the trigger again. The tube jerked, the second missile ran straight and true, and hit with a loud
craack!
. The Wraith opened like a red flower, burped pitch-black smoke, and nosed into a snowbank.

“Nice shot,” Cortana said admiringly, “but watch the Ghost.”

It was good advice, because although the attack vehicle had held back up to that point, it came skittering into sight, opened up with its plasma weapons, and threatened to accomplish what the rest of the Covenant soldiers hadn’t.

But the Chief had reloaded by then. The rocket tube was the right weapon for the job, and a single missile was sufficient to send the attack vehicle flipping end-for-end to finally wind up with its belly in the air and flames licking at the engine compartment.

With that problem out of the way the Chief came to his feet, slapped a fresh load into the launcher, and made a beeline for the Banshee. He was halfway across, with nowhere to hide, when a pair of Hunters emerged from a jumble of boulders.

Now, grateful that he still had some rockets, he had no choice but to stop, drop to one knee, and take them on. The first shot was dead on, hit the alien in the chest, and blew the bastard apart. Another rocket flew over the second Hunter’s right shoulder and cut a tree in half. The big alien started to lumber across open ground, picking up speed and charging its arm-mounted cannon.

It was a waste of ammo to pepper the front end of a Hunter with 7.62mm rounds, and slow though he was, the alien could still bring him down with a blast from his arm-mounted fuel rod cannon.

So he put his sight onto a target so big he didn’t need to zoom, and let fly.

The Hunter saw the missile coming, tried to deflect it with his shield, and failed. Seconds later pieces of warm meat showered the area, melted holes in the snow, and continued to steam.

The Chief ran past without a second look, jumped onto the Banshee, and strafed the rest of the Covenant forces on his way down the valley. Judging from the way the nav indicator was oriented, the Spartan needed altitude, a lot of it, so he put the alien attack ship into a steep climb.

Finally, when the red delta flipped over, and started to point down, he knew he was high enough. He did a nose-over and caught his first glimpse of the way point below. The surrounding area was dark, and snow continued to fall, but the platform was nicely lit. He lowered the Banshee onto the pad and had just bailed out of the pilot’s seat when the Sentinels attacked. “This is the last one,” Cortana said. “The Monitor will do anything to stop us.”

The Chief blew three of the pesky machines out of the air, backed through the hatch, and let the door close on the rest.

“We’re close,” the AI commented. “The generator is up ahead.”

The Chief nodded, stepped out into a room, and felt a laser burn across the front of his armor. It seemed that the Monitor had posted Sentinels
inside
the complex, as well. Not only that, but these machines had benefit of intermittent force fields, which were resistant to automatic weapons fire.

Still, he had a couple of 102mm surprises in store for the electromechanical enforcers, which he fired into the center of the hovering pack. Three Sentinels were blown out of the air. A fourth did loops as it tried to rid itself of a plasma grenade, failed, and took another machine with it. The fifth and sixth succumbed to a hail of bullets as their shields recharged, while the seventh slammed into a wall, crashed to the floor, and was busy trying to lift off again when the Chief stomped it to death.

The way was clear at that point and the Spartan was quick to take advantage of it. A few quick strides were sufficient to carry him into the central chamber where he was free to approach the final pulse generator.

“Final target neutralized,” Cortana said as the noncom stepped back a few moments later. “Let’s get out of here.”

“Let’s find a ride and get to the Captain,” the Chief agreed, as he prepared to leave.

“No, that’ll take too long.”

“Do you have a better idea?”

“There’s a teleportation grid that runs around Halo. That’s how the Monitor moves about so quickly,” the AI explained. “I learned how to tap into the grid when I was in the Control Center.”

“So,” the Chief asked, somewhat annoyed, “why didn’t you just
teleport
us to the pulse generators?”

“I can’t. Unfortunately, each jump requires a rather consequential expenditure of energy, and I don’t have access to Halo’s power systems to reroute the energy we need.” She paused, then reluctantly continued. “There may be another way, however.”

The Spartan frowned and shook his head. “Something tells me I’m not going to like this.”

“I’m pretty sure I can pull the energy we need from your suit without
permanently
damaging your shield system or the armor’s power cells,” Cortana continued. “Needless to say, I think we should only try this once.”

“Agreed. Tap into the Covenant network and see if you can find him. If we’ve only got one shot at this, we should make it a good one.”

There was a pause as Cortana worked her magic with the intrusion and scan software. A moment later, she exclaimed, “I’ve got a good lock on Captain Keyes’ CNI transponder signal. He’s alive! And the implants are intact! There’s some interference from the cruiser’s damaged reactor. I’ll bring us in as close as I can.”

“Do it,” the Master Chief growled. “Let’s get this over with.”

No sooner had the Spartan spoken than bands of golden light started to ripple down over his armor, the now-familiar feeling of nausea returned, and the Master Chief seemed to vanish through the floor. Once he was gone only a few motes of amber light remained to mark his passing. Then, after a few seconds, they too disappeared.

He wasn’t here, wasn’t there, wasn’t
anywhere
insofar as the Chief could tell from within the strange never-never land of Halo’s teleportation net. He couldn’t see or hear anything, save a sense of dizzying velocity. The Spartan felt his body stitched back together, one molecule at a time. He saw snatches of what looked like the interior of a Covenant ship as bands of golden light strobed up and disappeared over his head.

Something was wrong and he was just starting to figure out what it was – the inside of the ship seemed to be upside down – when he flipped head over heels and crashed to the deck.

He’d materialized with his feet planted firmly on the corridor’s ceiling.

“Oh!” Cortana exclaimed. “I see, the coordinate data needs to be–”

The Chief came to his feet, slapped the general area where his implants were, and shook his head. The AI sounded contrite. “Right. Sorry.”

“Never mind that,” the Spartan said. “Give me a sit-rep.”

She patched back into the Covenant computing systems, a much easier task now that they were aboard one of the enemy’s warships.

“The Covenant network is absolute chaos,” she replied. “From what I’ve been able to piece together, the leadership ordered all ships to abandon Halo when they found the Flood, but they were too late. The Flood overwhelmed this cruiser and captured it.”

“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.