Nineteen: The Siege

"You're leaving us."

John looked away from his ships to face Lord Hood. "Not much of a choice, sir. Not if we all want to live."

The fleet admiral tilted his head, acknowledging that he had a point. "How will you get there? To this 'Tower?'"

"Using one of the weapons on the Perfect Storm," he responded, "the Fleet can create binary black holes of almost equal size, and far enough apart that they won't immediately fall into one another. The intense gravity will be enough to pull the fabric of space tight enough and thin enough between them for Epheria and Xo'ar to punch through and guide us to the Tower. The enemy goddesses are telepathic and paranoid. If my Infected and I think out of sync, it might disorient them enough to give us the upper hand."

"A sound enough plan," Hood acknowledged. They stood watching the fleet prepare for departure, having been in geosynchronous orbit around Earth off and on for a number of years now. "Take the other Spartans with you."

"Sir?"

"Take them with you. You might not be one of ours," he said, "but they consider you to be a brother. They want to go with you, help you, and I suspect that they'd stow away on board if they thought they could get away with it. If you succeed, the guardians of the Tower can send them back to us. If you fail, I suspect none of us will live to know it." Hood looked back at him. "Take them with you."

"Yes, sir."

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It was illogical, he knew, to be so close to twin black holes and actually be able to see the tear in the fabric of space-time forming because of the gravitational fields of the singularities. His sharp mind theorized that it was possible the extreme gravities were "canceling one another out" to a certain extent with regards to the light wave-particles, enabling more of them to escape than a normal singularity. However, in the rent between the singularities, he could see nothing, not even the blackness of space.

"Naught but the vastness of the abyss..." he whispered before ordering the Fleet forward, trusting Epheria and Selenica to protect them from the environmental extremes that they were about to subject themselves to.

Even though alarms were flashing everywhere, sparks flying, cables snapping, metal rending, he barely felt the increase in gravity as they accelerated towards the swiftly collapsing stars and forming tear in the universe, the void between the worlds swallowing them up as it began to expand -

For a moment, there was nothing.

Absolutely nothing.

Neither light nor darkness, neither cold nor heat, neither pleasure nor pain.

Not even each other.

They were alone inside their own heads. Though the other Spartans had never known what it was like to share minds with a hundred thousand others, the Infected screamed into the void with an utter, agonizing sense of loss as they were suddenly and cruelly torn from the :other halves of their Selves:, the people who had been as much a part of them as an arm or leg for more than a hundred thousand years. They reached out for one another, screaming and weeping – right before they snapped back together, practically tripping over themselves in their struggles to re-fuse their minds as fast as they possibly could, unintentionally sweeping the other Spartans' Selves in with them. The warriors were almost instantly overloaded by the sheer amount of information the Infected exchanged in that moment, knowledge about the past, present, and possible futures from the Gultanr, the humans' own memories and thoughts and perceptions swirling into the vast repertoire of data they all shared in that single snapshot of time.

And then the vast, ancient consciousness belonging to the Gravemind called SPARTAN-117 and Commander and Loico Inkáno and John reformed and descended upon them, the Infected seamlessly integrating themselves into their own little niches within the edges of his mind, bringing to bear the analogy of a body to their minds; each of them was a single bit of tissue in a body, he the mind that controlled them all, but they had been together so long that the loss of even a single "muscle" would damn near cripple them –

John was running.

He wasn't sure how long he had been putting one foot in front of the other at a slightly less-than-top speed; so far as he knew, his boots - and those belonging to the people matching his stride behind and on either side of him - had always been rhythmically crunching over the massive drifts of snow and ice that lay beneath the starry night sky. They could have kept on running forever - their bodies were not getting tired, and it was so soothing to just let loose and run free - but then instinct screamed at the Chief. He ducked a strike and reflexively slammed his elbow into the face of his enemy. It was a twisted Promethean Knight; he activated the newly integrated hard light swords in his armor and sliced the creature in half. More corrupted Knights and Flood were appearing around them at an exponential rate, but the Spartans and Infected were far from defenseless. For every one they cut down, there were two more to replace it, but they were steadily making progress, careful not to let themselves get separated in the melee.

When they reached the courtyard surrounding the base of the Tower, Epheria and Xo'ar were able to draw on its power and set up a barrier to keep the enemy goddesses' projections out. John transferred the one of the Shards holding the Goddesses to Fred as they dropped to the ground for a breather, nodding to his brother-in-arms. When they recovered, the two men raced through the golden arch leading to the interior of the Tower. The Infected purposely thought out of sync just as they had planned, moving inside after the Spartans. The Tower reminded the Chief of the prison of the Primordial, the false Precursor – an immense tower with thick walls and a monster inside.

The false Goddesses were unmasked now, showing what they really were: scaly, bulky, snake-like creatures with long necks, limbs, and tails; hunched shoulders and slightly curved backs like the Sangheili; flat, ugly faces further distorted by hateful snarls, six-fingered hands curled into fists at their sides, heads jerking swiftly as they tried to face all hundred-thousand-plus of them at once. They were moving slower than they should have been, indicating that the Goddesses' prediction was dead-on; they were trying to read all of their minds at once and process their threat level, but because their thoughts were constantly changing state with the tone of their interactions, even the P'Vort "Goddesses" couldn't keep up.

It was almost over with the first attack. Lusa'Nia barely leapt out of the way in time when Fred turned the barrel of the Goddess-turned-Shard-turned-energy-gun on her, John lunging for Mak'Ara with the other Shard weapon, his a sword. He didn't want to risk shooting his family. Both goddesses formed their own weapons, a kusarigama and a claymore, from nothing but the air inside the Tower and turned the blades against the Spartans. The Parallel personnel darted in to strike whenever they saw an opening or even just when the enemy goddess's back was turned to them. They all scattered out of the way when Mak'Ara used the power of the Tower of Eternity to generate a temporary tornado. Fred and John switched their targets when the whirlwind provided cover for them to do so.

The long chain of the kusarigama came whipping out of the mist stirred up by the tornado even as the storm disintegrated against one wall. John ducked below it but let it coil around his left arm, gripping it tightly and wrenching it toward him, jerking Lusa'Nia off her feet and bringing her flying towards him. She snarled and kicked off the ground to flip over him, dodging a flash of fire that followed the pass of Epheria in her Shard's weapon mode. John caught a glimpse of two other Spartans – Jarran-068 and Gareth-118 – attacking Mak'Ara from behind out of the corner of his eye, backed up by the Nep'Thalia and Gramlek.

His family – both halves of it – working seamlessly together.

He turned his attention back to Lusa'Nia, hefting the razor-edged sword that Epheria's Shard had shaped itself into as Wolfgang leaped at the enemy goddess from behind, driving her towards him as he charged forward. The Shard sword cleanly severed the chain from the kusarigama, another one appearing in its place, but he whipped the segment around his arm forward the same way he did when he was using his muchi-naginata, the weighted end slipping past the goddess' guard and wrapping around her throat. He spun around, hurling her toward one of the crystalline walls of the Tower about thirty feet overhead –

Ferial was already there to intercept her with a solid kick to the gut, sending her spinning back to earth even as the Gultanr matriarch twisted to grip the wall Lusa'Nia had been about to slam into. Linda met the goddess with an insanely powerful punch before she hit the ground, sending her flying back toward the Commander. John brought his sword up, intending on using her own forward momentum to split her in half along the length of the blade, but she twisted in mid-air just enough to bring her out of danger. He recovered enough to sever one of her arms between the shoulder and elbow, and she hit the ground with a painful sounding THUD, skidding across the smooth floor and leaving a long streak of neon-orange blood behind her before she spun back to her feet.

It was just for a single instant, barely more than the blink of an eye just as Selenica had said, but he saw it just the same – a pause, a brief moment where Lusa'Nia's guard was down as she prepared to draw energy from the Tower to use as an attack against him. John bolted forward, Goddess-turned-Shard-turned-weapon drawn back to cleave her head from her body in a single pass – she saw, brought the blade of her kusarigama up to defend too late. The Shard sword had passed over half way through her neck when he felt her hand slam against his chest plate, channeling malicious black energy into his body –

His whole form seized up, muscles not responding, but his momentum was enough to pull the sword the rest of the way through her neck, the enemy goddess disintegrating into nothing even as his frozen form hit the floor of the Tower in a twisted parody of the way he arrived in it for the very first time.

It was the pain that let him know what she had done in her final moments. Before he was even conscious of it happening, he had locked down both his mind and his armor, increasing the current running through the synthetic fibers of the false undersuit to quintuple their tensile strength and prevent the now-active Flood transformation from tearing through it. He blinked – and found himself inside his completely dark mind, dark save for the faint blue glow that lit the area from the ground beneath his feet.

Instinct called; he dodged the strike with centimeters to spare and spun to face the giant Flood thing that had attacked him. It had to have been at least twenty feet tall and had two long tentacles bulging with muscle that replaced its arms. Its torso was bulky and hunched over, no doubt containing multiple infection pods to animate it, and though they seemed too thin to hold its bulk up, its legs were also thick with cobbled-together muscle. As one of the arm-tentacles whipped past him, he saw several long and dangerous bone spurs tipping the end, promising a painful demise if it got too close.

"Aw shit, here we go," the Spartan growled before lunging away from the next attack from the Flood Juggernaut.

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The moment Mak'Ara joined her sister in nonexistence, everyone was all over the fallen Spartan, Venera and Kenera flipping him onto his back so that he could be checked over. He followed the action limply, not responding to their calls; the lights were on, but nobody was home. They all had felt his mind sealing itself off from the outside world, but no one knew why, not even Epheria and Selenica. "He's literally just powerful enough to draw on the energy of the Tower – he's using it to keep all of us out," the white-haired goddess said, her fingers on his temples as she tried to remain calm and slip though the shields he had around his mind.

It was like trying to beat down a reinforced steel door with a toothpick.

"His armor's locked down," Areana called, futilely trying to override the abnormally robust security protocols that had essentially trapped the Spartan inside his own armor, "I can't even get his biomonitors; it's like he's not there, like he doesn't exist."

Cortana was unable to do anything either. Every attempt she made to infiltrate her fiancé's armor was met with powerful resistance, and every time she unraveled one of the security data strings, there were a hundred more to replace it. All of them were helpless in the face of whatever Lusa'Nia had done to him, unable to respond to any threat or reverse what had happened, unable to do anything but the one thing they all hated most: wait.

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It was as strong as it was ugly, he'd give it that much as it forced him to dodge yet another whipping tentacle. The number had multiplied several times, like the heads of the hydra, with every cut he made on its body, more of the thick, muscled tendrils shooting free from the slices he made with the plasma swords he had created. Guns had proven to be largely ineffective from the get-go, even the Covenant's plasma rifles; they cauterized the flesh for only a moment before it was good as new again. The plasma swords he now wielded weren't much better in that respect, but they were much better at detaching parts than the other weapons he'd tried to manifest in his mental world.

A tendril slammed against his left leg, his shields going down to nothing with that single hit, shattering bone, tearing muscle, and knocking his feet out from under him. He rolled to one side to avoid the tentacle that bore down on him from above, spikes plunging through the film separating the dark cavern of his mind from the strange blue light below. The light responded like water, displacing around the tentacle and splashing up into the air – for a moment, he could hear the outside world, the panicked cries of his Infected, felt the massive concern of the other Spartans before the "water" settled again, and the connection was gone.

His leg was already healed, but doing so had weakened him somehow; he could feel it in his "bones," a faint weariness that hadn't been there a second ago. He ducked another strike, lifting one of the blades so that the tentacle severed itself on the humming edge as it passed overhead. The juggernaut screamed and lashed out with a fresh appendage, again breaking the surface of the water-light and again it established a connection to the outside world.

But this time he only heard one voice.

"John…"

"So you did miss me."

"Halo doesn't kill Flood, it kills their food: Humans, Covenant, whatever—we're all equally edible. The only way to stop the Flood is to starve them to death. And that's exactly what Halo is designed to do: wipe the galaxy clean of all sentient life."

"You did that on purpose, didn't you?"

"Halo ... It's finished."

"Unfortunately for us both, I like crazy."

"You always bring me to such nice places."

"Don't make a girl a promise... If you know you can't keep it..."

"Could you sacrifice me to complete your mission? Could you watch me die?"

"I have defied Gods and Demons..."

"I am your shield... I am your sword."

"This is the way the world ends..."

"A collection of lies; that's all I am! Stolen thoughts and memories!"

"It was the coin's fault! I wanted to make you strong, keep you safe! I'm sorry, I can't..."

"I'm just my Mother's shadow... don't look at me, don't listen! I'm not who I used to be..."

"I have walked the edge of the abyss; I have seen your future, and I have learned!"

"There will be no more sadness, no more anger, no more envy!"

"This is UNSC AI Serial Number CTN0452-9. I am a monument to all your sins."

"...You found me..."

Cortana.

A vision of the Flood's desire flashed in front of his eyes – the Spartans and his Infected, shambling about as true combat forms, no longer individual people bonded by blood and battle, the brave human and Sangheili men and women who'd tried to stand against them in pieces on the ground or equally consumed by the virus. Earth was burning in the background, sky dark and choked with smoke and spores, the ruined land itself almost invisible under a thick mist of Flood spores. Overhead human and Sangheili ships alike were trying to jump to Slipspace with the last of the survivors and being gunned down by ones that he'd taken over, slamming into the surface and sending great plumes of dust and spores high into the atmosphere.

But that was not the worst of it, not in his eyes.

The worst was that Cortana – his little red AI, his tovarisch, his fiancée – was curled up on his hands, sobbing, crying out for him, clinging to herself, the strands of code that made up her body twisted and snarled around one another, tentacles unfurled from his body and hovering just out of reach of her holographic form, serving as the conduits he was using to get into her systems, to torture her and cause her pain like he had never done before.

:RAGE:

YOU DARE

:fury-beyond-fury – hatred-beyond-hatred:

I'M GOING TO KILL YOU

John let out a terrible, feral snarl and lunged forward, grabbing the tentacle that the Juggernaut whipped towards him and crushing it in his powerful hands before he physically ripped it out of its socket, tore it from the main body of the monster – and though it screamed more terribly than it ever had before, the tentacle didn't regenerate.

Swords forgotten, the Spartan charged the creature and slammed its legs out from under it. Its body hit the "water" but did not go under, and he leapt onto its back even as it struggled to regain its feet, plunging his hands into the mass of flesh and putting all of his strength into ripping the body open. It finally gave in to his greater power with the sickening sound of rending flesh and spurting blood, coating his body in the green fluid. He brought one of his boots down onto the bundle of nerves that passed for its spine with his whole half-ton weight behind it, the bone snapping with ease. The creature screamed again, its lower body no longer responsive, but he was far from done, forcing the upper part of the spine away from the lower, a substantial piece snapping off in his hand as he searched for –

The sac containing the infection pods that animated the Juggernaut.

Its remaining tentacle whipped towards his head, trying to decapitate him with the bone spurs on the end, but he caught it under his arm and used the sharp edges to cut the sac free of the amalgamation of corpses. The pods were pulverized to nothing in his grip almost instantly as he leaped free of the Juggernaut's death throes. He came back to earth twenty feet away, expression colder than absolute zero as his breathing evened out, watching the Juggernaut finally still, then dissolve into motes of green light, the fragments being absorbed into his body – and then the constant resistance of his Flood instincts, the ones that he was constantly fighting to contain, was gone, leaving him at peace in his own head for the first time in a long time.

The strange glowing-lake-in-an-underground-cavern surroundings faded out at the same time that the Tower of Eternity faded in, and once again he was looking up at the multicolored translucent crystal stretching into infinity overhead. The air in his lungs was stale; he coughed to refresh it, feeling slowly trickling back into his limbs, and almost instantly there were cries all around him, responding to his actions and sounds.

A face appeared over him, one that he knew as well as his own - black hair cut at an angle spilled down around her aristocratic face, nearly-glowing sky blue eyes wet with unshed tears – the face he had helped create, the one he had given her.

Cortana.

"I love you," he whispered, and she smiled, choking on a sob before she leaned in to wrap her arms around his upper body and cry into his shoulder.

**********

I've held on too long just to let it go now,

Will my inner strength get me through it somehow?

Defying the curse that has taken hold,

Never surrender; I'll never be overcome…

-"The Curse," Disturbed (Indestructible)