One: Dawn

John's vision was fuzzy, unfocused when he woke. He had a slight headache, but it faded quickly after he shook himself, forced it back.

"Chief!"

Cortana. His breathing quickened, adrenaline beginning to pump through his veins.

"Easy," said the AI, "You've been out for a while."

The Spartan pushed experimentally on the glass of his cryotube, seeing if the latches had released though the pod hadn't opened. It was still sealed tight. He laid back. "Where are we?"

"We're still adrift on the Dawn," she reported, turning away slightly to fiddle with a display that popped up next to her.

"Why did you wake me?"

"Hang on," Cortana said, "Bringing your systems online now." The Chief glanced down at his forearm guards, noting that the nanotech updating appeared to have run while he was in cryosleep. "I rewrote your suit's firmware while you were out."

That explained the new HUD, too. "You've been busy."

"Activating the ship's gravity generators." Some of the ship's reactors must still have been online. Everything floating around in the cryobay dropped to the deck a few seconds later, amid muffled reports from the ship's automated systems. The Spartan felt the weight of his suit settle on him. "Chief, look up. You need to pull the manual release," the AI told him.

The cryotube's latches must not have popped automatically when he was thawed out. He glanced up and pulled the handle, unsealing the tube with a hiss of escaping gases. He climbed out and immediately moved over to Cortana's holopanel.

"Seems like old times," she said, smiling at him.

"Ready to get back to work?"

"I thought you'd never ask." She folded her arms, then disappeared in a spike of blue-white light. He yanked her chip.

The moment he slotted her into his helmet, he knew something was wrong. She was warm, almost hot, not cold the way she had been when they interfaced for the first time. Alarms began going off in the back of his mind.

'No. No, not here, too. I can't lose her…'

"We've got intrusion alerts lighting up on multiple decks," Cortana stated, apparently not noticing his rising distress, "Our best bet to figure out who's boarding us is the Observation Deck, four floors up."

John pushed aside his concern to be dealt with later. He made his way out of the cryobay and down a short hall to a tech room. A sickly yellow hologram of the aft end of the Dawn was suspended between floor and ceiling holoprojectors. His eyes raced over it, assessing, then dropped to the display in front of him. "Could it be a rescue team?" he asked the AI, reactivating the weapons systems with a few quick touches.

Cortana was about to reply when the ship shook under them with a grinding clang. "Wouldn't bet on it."

He moved up a short staircase, down another hall, and up another staircase before his curiosity got the better of him. "How long was I out?"

"Four years, seven months, ten days," was the reply.

He frowned. "Someone should have found us by now." 'Like my Infected. If they're real, and followed me here. Was it all really just a dream?'

Another tech room, yet as he entered it, there was another wailing grind. But this one wasn't another impact – a red, orange, and gold wave of light passed through the ship. "What was that?" he demanded, automatically darting backwards as it made screens flash and spark.

"Sensor scan, high intensity!" Cortana called, "Doesn't match any known patterns."

John growled softly, though not at her. He recognized the scan as Forerunner, similar to the ones used on –no. No, he wouldn't think it. He dared not, lest it provoke an unpleasant reaction. "How close are we to the Observation Deck?" he asked instead, assault rifle at the ready. His motion tracker wasn't picking anything up, but he :knew: that there were others in the ship.

"It's directly above us," Cortana answered. He sprinted down another hall to the elevator banks. "The elevator doors look sealed tight."

Not a problem for a Spartan. He swung his assault rifle around so that it was caught by the magnetic panels on the back plate. Then he braced himself, and began prying open the doors.

"Chief, be careful-"

The vacuum beyond the door yanked it open the rest of the way, dragging him toward it as the air rushed out of that section of the ship. There was a crash behind him; he spun around to see a handful of cargo modules flying toward him, pulled by the force of the decompression. The Spartan managed to block them from doing any severe damage, but the force behind them was enough to send him slamming into the opposite wall of the elevator shaft.

"-because some areas might have lost pressure!"

"Right," he said dryly, and started to climb. He was unsure if it was the drag of the vacuum or the fact that he was used to his strength being enhanced by the Flo- no!... but it seemed harder than usual to climb up to the next level, evading falling debris as he went.

When he climbed free of the shaft, he sensed the Sangheili before he saw the warped shimmer of his active camouflage. He caught the hand holding the plasma sword and punched the alien with his free one. The Elite was stunned from the blow long enough for the Spartan to wrestle him backwards and throw him down the elevator shaft.

"I thought we had a truce with the Covenant," he growled, his gaze flicking toward the Observation Deck. There was no movement on his motion tracker, but he could sense the aliens anyway.

"A lot can happen in four years," Cortana replied, "Either way, he's probably not alone. We should be careful."

There was a Sangheili at the blast shield controls, with a clutch of Grunts scattered about the deck. Most of the latter were sleeping, and the former's back was to him, making it incredibly easy to sneak up on him.

The Chief's combat knife sliced into the side of the Elite's neck, severing a major artery and biting deep enough into the alien's spine to kill it instantly. Unfortunately, the sound of their leader's body hitting the deck woke the Unggoy. The little aliens began running around in a panic, firing wildly whenever they saw him. He gunned them down one by one, then returned to the blast shield controls.

"The good news," Cortana said as he tapped the key, "is these Covenant aren't outfitted like standard military. It's possible we just came across a rouge salvage ship." The thick metal panels retracted as she spoke – revealing a veritable army of alien ships outside their doors. "Or, we might have stumbled into an entire Covenant fleet."

John darted backwards away from the windows as the AI alerted him to Phantoms moving to board them from either side of the Observation Deck. He checked his ammo status and grabbed some more for both his assault rifle and his Magnum before bringing his weapons to bear on the Covenant that came in. "We need to get off this ship," the Spartan hissed as he slammed the butt of his rifle against the spine of the last Grunt.

"We've got bigger problems," the AI retorted, "We've got a cruiser on an intercept course. Head for the elevator banks."

"Didn't the ship's sensors say we still had weapons systems online?" he asked, heading back the way they came.

"Yes," she answered, "but since the ship was torn in half, we can't access the weapons stations. We'll have to fire them manually from the outer hull."

The doors slid shut behind them. John took a deep breath to steady himself as they began to descend. It was easy for him to slide back into the mindset of :eliminate threats between point A and point B to complete objective:, having spent so long doing exactly that. He pushed aside his body's aches and pains in favor of fighting off the Covenant threat.

The elevator doors opened. The Spartan moved through hatch after hatch, gunning down all of the Covenant aliens in his way. Finally he reached the airlock leading onto the hull.

"The auxiliary launch station should be to your left out of the airlock," Cortana told him, right before his HUD started to distort around the edges with streaks of blues and pinks. "You'll have to prime the launch for ignition!" Even her voice was warped.

'No! No, please, not here, not now when I can't help her…!' Worry spiked through his body, muscles coiling tight. "Cortana?"

"It's nothing," she insisted, voice still distorted, "Just get to the launch station."

The outer hatch of the airlock slid open. The Spartan stepped out onto the deck – and flinched, recoiled when he beheld the massive outer wall of the Shield World Requiem. "Uh- I'm sorry," Cortana interrupted, her voice back to normal but filled with surprise, "did I miss orbiting a Forerunner planet at some point?"

"One thing at a time," the Chief said, both to her and himself. There was a battle rifle floating a little above the deck a short distance from his entry point. He swapped his AR for it and began picking off the Covenant between him and the launch station, which he could just make out on the far side of the deck on a raised platform. He gunned for the Jackals first, taking out the snipers before wearing away at the rest. The Unggoy were next, more problematic than the Sangheili because of their sheer numbers, then the Elites themselves.

The Spartan hated space ops; because of the vacuum, he couldn't hear any enemies sneaking up on him, much less the sound of his own boots as he sprinted up the ramps to the launch station. The panel flashed green, the deck under him rumbling as the missile was primed.

Across the deck, one of the silo doors opened, the missile nosing out, but it stopped before it emerged completely, the vibrations of its grinding travelling through the deck. "Great!" Cortana shouted, panicky but sarcastic, "The blast door's jammed! The missile won't fire until it's cleared! Get down there!"

John was already moving around the control panel and jumping back down to the deck below. He felt no fear as he ran across the other silo doors, gunning down the Covenant that were dropped in his way. He circled around, threw all of his not-insubstantial weight against the damaged accelerator. It ground forward a few feet, then he kicked it into place. It sparked as it charged the missile, arming its payload. "You did it!" his AI cried, "Get back!"

The Chief did exactly that and lunged away from the wash of heat from the missile's engines. Every inch of him was still extremely adverse to fire; he doubted he would ever be able to look at flamethrower again without flinching, much less pick one up and use it.

The missile slammed into the cruiser and detonated, breaking it to pieces. But there were at least seven more visible, with more out of sight, blocked by the bulk of the Dawn. There weren't enough missiles for all of them. Even so, the Chief allowed himself a short moment to relish their small victory-

-right before the sensor above Requiem's gateway scanned him with the same red-orange-gold light from before.

"Chief?!"

"The Covenant weren't the one's scanning us," he reassured her, all the while thinking, 'By the Tower, here we go…' The panels protecting the entrance to the inner surface of Requiem began to retract, bright light from the spilling out to wash the area in white. The Spartan felt the gravity well inside take hole of them and start dragging them – all of them – inside.

"So, NOW can we worry about the giant metal planet?!"

John turned and ran for the airlock. "We've gotta hurry," Cortana was shouting, no doubt struggling to filter through what data she was receiving from the Dawn and his suit. "The second we cross the dome's event horizon, its atmosphere is going to tear us apart!"

"Where are the closest escape pods?" he demanded, running at full speed without even bothering to grab his weapon.

"Aft vehicle bay," she reported, "I'm tagging the closest airlock, GO!"

The Chief ignored the ship's system alerts as he darted inside the hatch and waited impatiently for pressurization. When the inner lock finally opened, he bolted once more, disregarding the fleeing Covenant in favor of heading for the vehicle bay. More than once, the deck dropped out from under him as the ship fell apart, but Cortana's nav point and his own innate sense of direction kept him on the right track.

Until he reached a side hall where something slammed into the Dawn and caused a catastrophic depressurization, pulling him from the ship even as he fought to keep himself inside. His hands were torn free of the railing, his body dragged out into the vacuum of space, and he thanked whatever gods were out there for the resilience of his armor as he swatted away debris trying to crush him.

They managed to pass without incident through the remains of a cruiser before they were broadsided by a section of hull plating. The impact knocked the Spartan unconscious instantly, so that he was unable to control their descent as they fell.