Fourteen: Delta Halo
In the void of space, everything was momentarily undisturbed. Had it been a forest on Earth, the deer residents would have been grazing placidly, and other prey animals would have also been searching for food.
It was in that moment that the undisturbed stretch of space was torn open, light boiling out of the rent, and Regret's carrier streaked out of the opening, bringing with it several segments of buildings, what looked like a piece of the tower from the center of the city – and the In Amber Clad. The whole of the hip jerked at her sudden stop, sending the crewmembers hurling forward as the ship's change in momentum failed to immediately change their own. "Report," Miranda Keyes called the moment she reoriented herself.
"Both engine cores have spun to zero," one of the crewmen replied, "We're drifting."
"Archer pods are cold," another stated, "I'll need to re-key the system."
"Do it," the Commander told them, "and find out where we are."
Inside one of the ship's many bays, ODST drop pods lined the walls, Sergeant Johnson and the Spartans already inside. Blue, Red, White, and Gray Teams had managed to make it onboard before the In Amber Clad had made its assisted jump, leaving the rest of their brothers and sisters behind on Earth. "Sorry for the quick jump, Sergeant," Keyes said to him over the COM, "Are you still in one piece?"
"I'm good," he replied, "Chief?"
We're fine, Epheria interjected before the Spartan could say anything, speaking for the first time in ages. Just as she spoke, one of the crewmen on the bridge hailed for the Commander's attention.
"Ma'am, there's an object, coming into view now."
The woman inhaled sharply when the crewman brought up the image on the main screen, and she routed it down to the AI. "Cortana," she asked, "What exactly am I looking at?"
The construct took only a moment to reply as the In Amber Clad glided through the debris field of New Mombasa bits, an immense blue gas giant with a seemingly tiny ring between it and its moon, "That… is another Halo."
Johnson choked on his cigar and managed to get out, "Say WHAT?"
Miranda leaned forward slightly in her seat. "So this is what my father found." Then, to the construct, "I thought Halo was some kind of super weapon?"
"It is. If activated, this ring will cause destruction on a galactic scale," the AI replied. She pinged the area, searching… and received a whisper in response from the far side of Substance.
S-104 eyed the Halo on the screen in his drop pod as Miranda said, "I want all the intel you've got on the first Halo, schematics, topography, whatever. I don't care if I have the clearance or not."
"Yes, ma'am."
Keyes turned her attention away from the artificial intelligence as data began streaming into the ship's memory relays. "Where's our target?"
"The enemy ship is stopped just above the ring, ma'am. We're going to pass right over it," the second crewman replied, checking the displays in front of him.
"Perfect," she said as the In Amber Clad glided ever closer to the Halo, "Given what we know about this ring, it's even more important that we capture the Prophet of Regret; find out why he came to Earth, why he came here." To Fred, "Chief, take first platoon. Hard drop, secure our landing zone." He nodded to confirm, though she couldn't see him. "Sergeant, load up two flights of Pelicans and follow them in."
"Aye, aye, ma'am," he said and opened up his drop pod to clamber out.
"Until I can move and fight, I'm going to keep a low profile. Once you leave the ship, you're on your own."
Johnson banged twice on the Senior Chief's pod as he walked by, and the Spartan banged back, saying to Miranda, "Understood."
On the bridge, one of the crewmen alerted them; "Over the target in five."
"Hang on to your helmet," Cortana advised as the ship passed over the ring, their pod jolting as the clamps holding it in released, and they slid smoothly out of the ejection chute, the other pods dropping out behind them. The small hail of HEVs began to visibly heat as they entered the ring's atmosphere, the friction slowing them down and causing the temperature to rise. As they dropped through the clouds and left fiery tails behind them, their airbrakes snapping open before their braking thrusters fired, Cortana said, "Mind the bump," about seven seconds before they hit the ground with a bone-jarring thumb.
Fred kicked open his pod, SMG in hand as he quickly assessed the situation. There were two nearby plasma turrets that needed to be taken out to ensure that it was safe for the Pelicans that would follow with reinforcements, and he grabbed his rocket launcher from his pod, briefly checking to make sure that Epheria was still chilling in her holster – Aw, you do care! – before moving into position, a Helljumper right behind him. He dropped to one knee and brought his launcher to bear on the nearest of the turrets, locking on and letting the rocket fly before turning to the one that had been set up atop the ruin of some Forerunner stone structure. As he reloaded after destroying that one as well, he heard a stern-sounding ODST call, "Clear this LZ, the Pelicans are right behind us!"
He scrambled up the embankment and took cover behind one of the drop pods as a pair of Jackals fired on him, but the continuous fire of his SMG put both of them down before they could do any serious damage. The rest of Blue Team was clustered on the far side of the ridge, going hand to hand with a set of Grunts and Jackals rather than waste ammo on such close-range targets, and they advanced up through a short slope cut out by rainfall over the past hundred thousand years; all of the humans regrouped and moved up into the ruin itself via two different routes, catching the Grunts hiding on the ground floor between two lines of fire and slaying them easily. The Elites both inside and out posed more of a problem for them, but they, too, were taken out. Fred and Sam advanced up a set of stairs to the upper floor and snapped the neck f the Grunt manning the plasma turret before firing on the Jackal that was with it.
"Artillery disabled, Sergeant," Cortana said over the radio, "Landing zone secure, for the moment."
"I hear ya," Johnson replied, "Startin' our approach, hang tight."
Cortana snapped off the radio, then said, "Easier said than done. Inbound Phantoms, Senior Chief." He and Sam took up positions on the second floor, while Linda climbed up onto the roof and temporarily concealed herself in the tree branches, intending to put her beam rifle to good use when the aliens arrived. The Phantom was right on time; everyone had just finished getting into position when it came to a stop overhead and fired on them as it dropped its load of aliens to fight the humans. There were only a handful of Elites and Grunts, mostly Jackals from the first Phantom, and a handful of well-placed grenades took them out, Epheria distorting space again so that they were riddled with shrapnel.
"Another Phantom, on approach," the construct warned, but she was confident that they would be able to slay the aliens; they wouldn't have survived this long if they couldn't. Instead, she pinged the whisper again through the In Amber Clad and received a more solid response, put out a status request to the whisper.
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/UNSC AI "CORTANA" SERIAL NUMBER [CTN 0452-9] REQUEST ACKNOWLEDGED.
/FLOOD STATUS UPDATE FROM FoS: FLOOD CONFIRMED RELEASED. CAUSE: UNKNOWN. AS OF 2453, ENEMY GRAVEMIND PRESENT ON HALO. LOCATION: LIBRARY. FORM: LESSER FULL GRAVEMIND (PROTOFORM COMPLETE AS OF 2509).
/MONITOR STATUS UPDATE FROM FoS: 2401 PENITENT TANGENT CAPTIVE OF GRAVEMIND. LOCATION: LIBRARY. CONDITION: UNKNOWN.
/HALO STATUS UPDATE FROM FoS: ALL SYSTEMS NORMAL. GENERATORS SIMULATING ONE (1) EARTH-STANDARD GRAVITY (ACCELERATION DUE TO GRAVITY IS STEADY AT 9.81 METERS PER SECOND). ATMOSPHERIC CONTENT NORMAL: APPROX. 60-40 NITROGEN-OXYGEN ATMOSPHERE. CORE: ONLINE, STATUS NORMAL. PULSE GENERATORS: OFFLINE PER COMMAND OF FoS SUPREME COMMANDER, REASONING: "Don't need the thing actually firing if Miranda doesn't get to the Index in time." INDEX: NORMAL, LOCATION: LIBRARY (ADVISED TRANSPORT TO SECONDARY LOCATION ASAP DUE TO PROXIMITY TO ENEMY GRAVEMIND).
/ALIEN RACE DETECTED ON SURFACE, CONFIRMED AS [PROPHET OF REGRET] AND "COVENANT." TARGETS HAVE BEEN ADDED TO LOCAL SENTINELS' ROSTER.
/RECLAIMERS DETECTED. THOSE RECOGNIZED CONFIRMED AS: [COMMANDER MIRANDA KEYES]; [SERGEANT MAJOR AVERY J. JOHNSON]; SPARTANS [006], [015], [034], [042], [058], [068], [077], [087], [092], [093], [103], [104], [111], [123], AND [130]; AND UNSC AI "CORTANA" SERIAL NUMBER [CTN 0452-9]. NO ACTION TAKEN.
/EDIT? Y/N
/CTN 0425-9: N. END TRANSMISSION.
/DISCONNECTING…
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Cortana returned to Fred's armor in an eye blink, having barely left; to an AI who could still run five billion simultaneous processes, simply receiving a status update from the onboard computer of the Fleet of Shadows was like twitching a finger.
The Phantom carried three Elites this time, and more Grunts than Jackals, but that still didn't mean they were able to put up much of a fight against four skilled Spartans. They had barely clear the drop zone of aliens when Cortana spotted the two Pelicans that Johnson had loaded up. Both were holding reinforcements to hold the locations that they'd taken, and one carried a Warthog so they could press on much faster. Of course, that also meant that one of the Spartans would have to either stay behind or continue on foot; Kelly gestured to herself. As the fastest of the Spartans, she would be able to keep up with the Warthog in the way another could not, and she had the endurance to match it.
Fred nodded reluctantly, giving her permission, before Johnson spoke up. "I got a good view comin' in. There's a big building in the middle of this island's lake."
"I saw it, too," Cortana replied, "It looked like a temple. If I were a megalomaniac – and I'm not–" Epheria started laughing but tried to cover it with coughing, "-that's where I'd be."
Their Warthog landed with a thud, and the three Spartans climbed aboard, Kelly already jogging on ahead of them. The ODSTs that had dropped in with them would stay behind and cover their backs to prevent any aliens from getting in behind them, while they would be on the front lines, absorbing bullets, kicking ass, and taking names; it was very much a love-hate relationship.
Beyond the tiny canyon was an immense lake with a handful of ancient stone structure jutting out of it like buttes in a desert. The rock walls around the lake were almost sheer faces, gray and very much weathered. Fred gunned the LRV through a tight curve and dropped off a small ridge, drawing the attention of a pair of Jackals who were assigned to guard it. Sam swung the turret around and fired a handful of bullets into each as an ODST said over the local radio: "Dear Sarge, Kicking ass in outer space, wish you were here."
"I heard that. Jackass," Johnson growled back, and the Spartans allowed themselves a brief roll of the eyes before they got back to work, following the pathway along the edge of the cliff to a large structure on their side of a gulf, some kind of bridge and attached control center. Of course, the Covenant were already there, and the aliens came out to greet them with plasma fire. An Elite manned a Ghost while two Grunts took over the plasma turrets and began gunning for the Warthog and Kelly, who took the remaining Ghost and began chasing the Elite. Fred chose to mow down the Jackals that had run out in front of the Warthog to try and stop it, saving them some ammo, and Cortana snickered quietly in the back of his head. He ignored her in favor of spinning the wheel to bring them around before they went careening off the edge, driving them across part of the retracted bridge as Cortana said, "They're trying to bottle us up on this side of the gorge, but the controls for extending the bridge should be in the center of this structure." She flipped up a nav point on their HUDs and let them at it.
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"Commander."
From where he was facedown, slumped at his desk, "Mm?"
"They're here~."
"I gathered that. Now, the only real option we have for not getting shot is to stay out of the Spartans' way; Cortana will keep appraised of their location as often as possible so we can get out in time." [Right?]
'You got it.'
"Alright then. Everyone knows where to be, so let's move."
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"Good, the bridge is down. Now about those Wraiths…" Cortana said over the radio, and Johnson replied with something to the effect of there was a tank en route. Using the bridge control tower as cover, the Pelican dropped their Scorpion off and headed out over the lake to an unknown destination. Rather than risk all of them getting killed by a single plasma bomb, Fred manned the tank, Kelly remained on her Ghost, and Sam and Linda took the Warthog for a spin; the two alien vehicles couldn't focus on all three of them at once, enabling S-104 to take them out with a handful of well-placed shells.
A foursome of Ghosts came skittering out to take their places, but once again, human weaponry proved to be superior; the Spartans continued on virtually unimpeded, following the path through a short stretch of tunnel and out behind a waterfall. There, they were met by more Ghosts and a Grunt manning a plasma turret, but these offered little resistance to the ninety millimeter tungsten shells of the tank. Another tunnel opened up into some kind of courtyard with what had once been an elegant fountain in the center. Now there were immense chunks of brick strewn here and there, thrown about by nature's violent storms and torn up by large trees that clung to the buildings.
Of course, it was swarming with Covenant. While Fred used the tank to take out the Ghosts holding position on the far side, Linda clambered out of the driver's seat of the Warthog to bring her sniper rifle to bear on the aliens. With all four of them using their available weapons, it took no time at all to clear the area of visible enemies, and they picked of the rest as they crossed to the other side. As they left, only Cortana noticed the one unnatural thing in the courtyard: a black-armored figure hiding high up in one of the trees, not John, but likely one of his Infected. Blue Team followed a ramp down a level and encountered still more Ghosts and Grunts with the odd pair of Jackals here and there before descending another level and coming across the same thing. They turned and emerged into the sunlight after gunning down a pack of Grunts covering the exit from the top of the next structure.
There was the usual plethora of enemies, everything from yet another handful of Ghosts to a clutch of Grunts manning plasma turrets overlooking the path to the interior of the structure. They cleared the path and followed it below the building to the back, where a ramp led up onto the second level. It was then that Kelly noticed a Pelican inbound and alerted the others so they could clear an LZ; there were a bunch of Covies between them and the center of the complex that they needed to head through. Fortunately for them, the aliens had set up plasma barriers, which made it easy for them to toss a few grenades over the top and watch the fireworks.
The Grunts were killed instantly, but the Jackals and Elites were not so lucky; the Spartans swept through and shot the survivors as the Pelican dropped of weapons canisters and backup for them. The Marines hopped out of the Pelican as it hovered over the stone surface, bringing their weapons up to shoot the aliens, and while the ordinary soldiers provided cover fire, the Spartans quickly loaded up on ammo. "They're all pouring out of the middle!" one of the soldiers called, and the super humans responded quickly, letting bullets precede them as they wove through a brief stretch of pillars and engaged more Covenant soldiers, following their enemies through the ruins of the once grand Forerunner structure…
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"How goes the campaign back at Alpha Halo?"
"Spectacularly. I finally figured out how to prevent the combat forms' pain from hurting me, so we're A-okay. The Arbiter's dealing with the quote-unquote 'heretic' right now, and for the life of me I can't remember his name."
"Me either, so don't worry about it – "
[Venera, Kenera, if you're going to do what I think you're going to do, I'm going to make sure that Cortana finds out. And she's going to kill you.] John heaved his armored bulk out of the specially-designed chair and snapped on his helmet plates and active camo, mentally activating the fleet's teleportation generator to beam him down to the surface.
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The Spartans sidled through a thin crevice in the rock face before them and found themselves up to their knees at the base of a small waterfall. The water flowed away to their left through a short canyon cut by the water before dropping away out of sight. A Jackal patrolled this short stretch of water-soaked rock, its beam rifle cradled in its arms like it was a child, but that vision of false innocence was ruined when Kelly stepped up and snapped the bird-like alien's neck from behind. It was then that the humans took a good look at their surroundings, assessing the terrain for combat; the trees had thick enough branches to support their weight and seemed to grow right out of the ruins, and, as usual, the Covenant were everywhere, though in thinner numbers than previously seen.
Kelly took up the fallen Jackal's beam rifle, and together she and Linda began picking off the visible aliens, including those that came out of hiding to check on their now-deceased comrades. The humans then dropped down to the lower levels once there was a much lower risk of being picked off or jumped by cannibalistic Covenant. "People always bring me to such nice places," Cortana said in the background as the Spartans and Marines advanced through the overgrown ruins of a Forerunner complex, splitting up to maximize their possibility of egress through the battlefield and gunning down every nonhuman they came across. After dealing with the Flood on Alpha Halo, even the utterly-obnoxious Yam'ee were nothing more than flies to be swatted, not even impeding their progress.
Once across the miniature canyon, the group of attackers passed through a short stretch of cave and out into another very narrow canyon. Beyond that was another Forerunner complex, and while it was not the one that Regret was in, it proved that they were on the right track. "Good," Cortana said suddenly, "Still no word about In Amber Clad on the Covenant battle net.
"It's odd; the Covenant know we've made landfall, but they don't seem to consider us a very serious threat. Boy, are they in for a big surprise. /Epheria, would you mind staying with Commander Keyes from here on out?/"
/Gladly./
Fred glanced down when the custom fitted pouch on his hip suddenly lightened, but he was not at all concerned; the goddess disappeared from time to time, and no one seemed to be able to stop her.
Linda and Kelly took notice of numerous Covenant soldiers throughout the complex before them and used their long-range weapons to take out the Jackals on the roof and the Elites further in before they actually reached them, making future combat in the area easier and providing cover for the other two as they proceeded down the ramp to the entrance. The door slid open before them, and they slipped in once the women joined them, guns at the ready. Their motion trackers showed enemies in the next room, most likely Elites, and Cortana muttered, "Honor Guard, watch yourselves."
How she knew, they were unsure but they took her advice just the same, boosting their shields and prepping some grenades. Just beyond a steel partition was a holographic display of Regret, two Honor Guard on either side, and there were two more concealed in the pillars to their left and right, respectively. Linda managed to kill one of them before the aliens recovered from the shock of seeing four "Demons" waltz into the complex, and Sam went toe-to-toe with the other in the immediate vicinity, snapping its neck even as the other three finished off the remaining two.
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The Prophet was intoning something in the Covenant language, and as the Spartans were about to turn and leave, Cortana said, "Wait, go back." Fred paused but laid his hand on the holoprojector's input, letting the rampant AI sort herself into the access port before moving his hand off so she could activate her avatar. "That's what I thought he said." She turned to the Spartans. "The Prophet of Regret is planning to activate Halo."
Fred inhaled sharply, then said, "Are you sure?"
Cortana snapped her fingers – "I shall light this holy ring, release its cleansing flame, and burn a path into the Divine Beyond!" – And snapped her fingers again to shut him up. "Pretty much," she replied.
The Senior Chief opened a channel to the In Amber Clad. "Commander, we've got a problem."
"So I hear," crackled over the radio, "but from what I understand, the Prophet will need an object – the Index – to activate the ring. I've located a Library similar to the one you found on the first Halo. If the rings work the same way, the Index should be inside."
"I'll bet the Covenant are thinking the exact same thing," Johnson broke over the channel.
"Then we'd better beat them to it, Sergeant. Extract your men and meet me at the Library."
"Yes, ma'am."
"I'll secure the Index, Senior Chief," Miranda said as the Spartan reclaimed his onboard AI, "You take out the Prophet. He's given us all the intel we need."
**********
It's the fear
Fear of the darkness
Growing inside of me,
That one day will come to life.
(Have to save)
To save my beloved,
There is no escape,
Because my fate is horror and doom.
-"It's the Fear," Within Temptation (The Silent Force)