Interlude: A Counterfeit Existence

The dropship was standing room only, but even so the Marines and ODSTs gave the four Spartans a wide berth. John and his team were the only ones who didn't, who stood next to them as if they were just other soldiers.

It was hard not to stare. In the world he remembered, Riz, Joseph, and Joshua had all been killed, one way or another, and Maria had retired - been critically wounded, he'd heard - and started a family. Yet here they all were, alive and well and on active duty, though to his well-trained eyes, Joshua was injured, something with his left arm. He didn't seem to be in too much pain, but for it to be visible it was probably a cracked bone, nothing major. Still…

To stop himself from murmuring 'oly oly oxen free,' he said, "You should get that looked at when we arrive."

The Spartans heard him over the rest of the chatter in the troop bay. Four gold visors turned to look at him.

"Your arm," he clarified, directing it to Joshua, "You're holding it closer to your side than the other, like it's tender and you're trying to protect it. And whenever we hit turbulence-" He paused as the Pelican did exactly that, then resumed. "-you flinch, like it hurts. If you are injured, you should get it looked at when we arrive. Don't need a minor injury causing a major one."

He saw faint surprise in their body language - that he'd noticed? That he was concerned about them? He didn't know. "Yes, sir," said Joshua.

John barely stopped himself from rolling his eyes. "It's a suggestion, son, not an order. With as long as you've been fighting this damned war, I trust you know your own limits."

Ambience-of-Night held up his medkit in wordless offering.

"Save it until we land, Lieutenant; no room here."

The Lifeworker gave an exaggerated pout but said, "You got it, Sarge."

The Spartans raising their eyebrows was nearly a tangible thing. "What?" John asked.

"He's an officer," said Maria.

Ah.

"Sarge's known me since I was a fresh-faced little punk right out of medical school," said Ambience, giving John a playful nudge with his hip, "I had almost no idea what I was doing, so I just followed his lead, and it's worked out pretty well so far."

John snorted. Technically speaking, it wasn't even a lie. Ambience-of-Night had just finished his mutation to first form when the enemy Flood invaded his home planet. The Fleet had been deployed in an attempt to halt the spread of the infection, to no avail, so they had switched to evacuating civilians before razing some areas of high infection and shooting down infected ships. Ambience had been one of the civilians they'd rescued, and then he'd sort of never left.

"That's only because HIGHCOM's never forced you to countermand one of my orders," the infected Spartan said dryly.

"Like I said, it's worked out pretty well so far."

The Pelican landed with a jolt, and 029 was unable to conceal a hiss of pain when his arm was jostled, pressing it close with his uninjured hand.

The Lifeworker reached out a hand, face twisted in sympathetic pain, then dropped it to clutch at his medkit. It was full of Forerunner equipment disguised as UNSC standard issue, which would let him work without having to compensate for inferior technology. "Please let me treat you," he nearly begged, "I don't like seeing people walking around wounded when I can help them."

Despite being over a hundred thousand years old with more combat experience than all the S-IIs combined, Ambience still conveyed perfect innocence, along with earnestness and genuine compassion. After a moment, Joshua relaxed and nodded, and the Forerunner beamed.

"I'll tell whoever's in charge where you've gone," said John.

"Thanks, Sarge!"

When they disembarked, Ambience followed the Spartans, while John, Venera, Kenera, and Ferial reported in to Major Silva. The man was exactly as the Spartan remembered him, albeit far less unpleasant because this time around he didn't know there was a Spartan in front of him.

"From the UNSC Trafalgar, huh? How'd you end up on the Autumn?" he asked after Wellesley brought up their falsified CSVs.

"Admiral Fitzgerald deployed us to help defend Reach from the ground, sir," John lied through his teeth, "The Savannah reported that the Covenant shot her down, right before we lost contact with her too. And the Pelican we got picked up by - Bravo Twenty-Two - the pilot said Miss Cortana ordered him to just grab everyone he could find, so here we are."

That, too, wasn't entirely a lie.

"Hm. Well, good to have you. Lieutenant McKay will get you situated."

"Yes, sir."

McKay put them next to the Spartans, which was very convenient for their purposes - easier for him to sneak out to see his AI. But it also made it laughably easy to link up with Ambience's perception.

The Lifeworker didn't even blink when Joshua peeled back the undersuit of the MJOLNIR, revealing ghastly pale flesh thick with scars from weapons and surgeries. He'd seen them before on John's body and had long since become desensitized to the evidence of the Spartans' history. He just settled in and started treatment, and not just on Joshua but on the other Spartans as well; when one of them finished, another took their place without a word.

He was still present when the rest of Blue Team arrived, humming softly to himself as he treated Grace for a fractured vertebra. The incoming Spartans automatically saluted when they noticed his lieutenants' bars, but he waved them off. "At ease," he said, "None of you need to salute me - in fact I'd rather you didn't, unless we're around someone who'd get onto you for that. I'm Ambrose Night, but you can call me Ambi."

"Understood, sir." Fred pulled his helmet off, and Cortana appeared on the visor, squinting at the Lifeworker.

"Ah, Miss Cortana!" Ambience said cheerfully, "Glad you made it. I'll have to tell Sarge; he made me promise to wake him when you needed him."

Wake me when you need me.

She drew herself up slightly; she recognized the coded statement. "Did he now."

"Yes, ma'am," he answered, "And if there's one thing I've learned about Sarge, it's that when he makes promises, he keeps them, and expects the same of everyone else."

The Lifeworker turned just slightly to look her in the eye, and understanding dawned. A personality spike bloomed - "John's here?!" - but she got it under control before it could expose them. "Good. The Trafalgar, yes? I need to coordinate with Major Silva and Wellsley on Captain Keyes' rescue mission, but I'll be glad to take his report after."

"Yes, ma'am."

-------------------------------------------

"You know me."

Cortana jolted out of her semi-stasis at the sound of his voice, and whipped around to stare at him as he walked up out of the dark.

"When I make a promise…" John knelt next to her holotank and laid a hand over the edge, careful not to block the emitter.

"You keep it," Cortana finished barely above a whisper and reached out to touch him. But her tiny hand just passed right through him, immaterial, and her expression twisted in pain. "Are you really here, John? I dreamed of this for so long…"

"I'm here."

"What happened? You weren't with the other Spartans, and your biological family doesn't exist. We looked for you for so long-!"

"It's… a long story. I can give you the Cliff's Notes now and have someone waiting for you in the Control Room with a data drop. But it's...not remotely pleasant."

She knelt on the holotank and tried to touch him again. "Tell me."

"'I cannot tell my story without going a long way back,'" he quoted, and then he did.

The AI listened in silence as he gave her the gist of all that had happened since they both were taken from the Dawn - the Forerunner-Flood War, and everything that followed. When he was finally done, she said, "Show me."

He turned his hand over and let the Change roll through him, shivering through his flesh like nails on a blackboard. His veins darkened as the Flood super cells flowed, turning deep green, and his fingers grew into razor sharp Flood talons.

Again, Cortana tried to reach out and touch, and again her hand went right through him. She sighed. "I'm sorry I wasn't there for you."

"Don't be," he replied, "You've got enough on your plate as it is. I'd have someone bring you a complete recompiler as well if I didn't think the UNSC would find it suspicious."

"Me suddenly recovering from rampancy? ONI'd probably pull me apart trying to figure out how it happened."

The infected Spartan growled quietly - and he wasn't the only one.

The others emerged from the dark. Ambience, Venera, Kenera, and Ferial weren't the only ones who'd come with him to Installation Zero-Four, but because of some bullshit elsewhere in the galaxy, they were some of the few who'd been able to stay. The rest were of infecting the corpses of those who'd landed on the ring without surviving the landing in question, adding to the "army" of Pure Forms. It would help them convey the danger of the Flood without infecting living people, which John was extremely reluctant to do; that would bring a whole host of problems.

The rest of the Last Fleet was off dealing with another wave of discord set off by the collapse of the Third Ecumene fifty years prior. The war that set off - the Reaving - had been almost as ugly as the Human-Covenant War, save far more widespread and far less one-sided. It had taken a tremendous amount of effort to stop the fighting from spilling over into human and Covenant space. As it was, both the Lituni - effectively the Khajiit from Skyrim - and the Adonte - "the Grays", as humanity knew them - had been forced to completely abandon their home star systems, and Maethrillian itself had come under attack.

It was winding down now - most of the aggressors had been killed or otherwise suppressed - but there was still occasional violence that the Fleet dealt with to let their allies focus on recovery. This wave had probably been their last gasp, so John had dispatched all of their ships - except for Winterspell and the Cryptic Whisper - under Nethalia's command to finish it off for good.

The Spartan introduced the aliens to his AI. "Thank you for taking care of my Spartan," Cortana said with a soft smile, "I know he takes a lot of looking after."

"Hey!"

"You can thank us by telling us 'baby Chief' stories for blackmail."

"Hey!"

"You knew this was going to happen," said Kenera, not making even a token attempt to rein in her more rambunctious twin.

"Yes, but I had hoped that she would have at least waited until I was out of earshot."

"Why would I do that?"

John sighed so loudly that it made Cortana start laughing. "It's nice to see that you've lightened up a little over the years," said the AI, "You were always so serious."

"The Human-Covenant War is a serious thing," said the Spartan, "But I've also had a hundred thousand years to - learn how to be human, I suppose. The Forerunner-Flood War was horrific, in a way no amount of documentation could ever hope to convey; I needed some way to cope that wasn't self-destructive. And everything since hasn't been a hundred millennia of constant fighting, or training for fighting. I've found other things to occupy my time - I had to. All of us did. These two have taken to setting off fireworks on my ships-"

"At least it's not napalm!"

"-and this one was trying to breed dragons at one point," John said, gesturing to Ambience while ignoring the twins' protests.

"Did you succeed?"

"Yes!" Ambience beamed at the AI, then saddened. "But we couldn't make them very big before they got too heavy to fly, and they couldn't breathe fire for very long either. I think the longest we clocked was around fifteen seconds?"

"And what about you?" Cortana asked, turning to Ferial.

"I garden."

"And by that she means, 'I keep poisonous and carnivorous plants.' She's very proud of her collection."

"You'll have to let me show you when you finally come aboard."

"I hardly think the UNSC is going to just let me go."

"Yeah, well, they can deal. Or we can trade; I know we have things they want, and they have you. I'm sure Doctor Halsey and ONI would be quite glad to let you go in exchange for the Librarian's personal ship."