One: Reborn Along With Sorrow

John's vision was blurred when he woke. That concerned him, but he couldn't understand why - until he came fully awake and jerked in the cryotube, slamming his hands against the glass and frantically looking around.

A UNSC ship - the Dawn. What-? Where was-?

His mind was quiet.

His mind was quiet.

He hadn't been alone in his own head for a hundred thousand years; not even his Flood-self had been spared in the return. And all his extra senses were gone, too - the ones he hadn't even realized he'd grown to take for granted - leaving him deaf and blind and afraid. His skin crawled - but the Change didn't come.

His heart rate skyrocketed, breath coming in gasps. But Cortana was calling for him, so he forced back the panic, the fear - where is my fleet where are my people I'm naked deaf mute blind alone in the dark.

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

The latches of the cryotube hadn't been released. He forced himself to lie back again and wait. "Where are we?" Strange, to think that UNSC Standard was now alien on his tongue; he could hear his own accent from a hundred thousand years speaking Digon and the Common Tongue. It would fade quickly, though, as he got used to it again. (Hopefully.)

"We're still adrift on the Dawn," she answered, turning away a little to tap on a display that popped up next to her.

"Why did you wake me?" If it had been because of the Fleet, she would have said as much right away.

Or now. Instead, she said, "Hang on. Bringing your systems online now."

The Spartan glanced down at his armor, noting that the plating had changed; she must have had the nanotech running updates while he was frozen.

"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."

The main reactor must have still been online, despite all the damage the ship took from the portal and the time since. Everything floating aimlessly through the cryobay dropped to the deck, amid muffled reports from the ship's automated systems.

"Chief, look up. You need to pull the manual release."

The latches must not have popped automatically when the thaw cycle finished; something somewhere had malfunctioned. Understandable; the whole ship was a wreck. He pulled the handle and stepped from the tube, heading straight for the AI.

"Seems like old times," she said with a grin, but it didn't reach her eyes.

There would be time later to talk. There would. "Ready to get back to work?"

This time the delight was real. She folded her arms and said, "I thought you'd never ask."

She vanished in a spike of light, and he ejected her chip to slot her into his helmet.

Hot. She was hot in his mind, like molten metal - like when he got her out of High Charity. He stopped. "Cortana?"

They were still in tune with one another; she understood but said, "No time. We've got intrusion alerts lighting up on multiple decks. Our best bet to find out who's boarding us is the Observation Deck, four floors up."

The Spartan pushed aside his concern - for the moment. He made his way out of the cryobay and into an info station. A sickly yellow hologram of the aft half of the Dawn was suspended there, alert beacons and what few readings the hulk was able to put on display. He prodded the controls and waited until the system said that the weapons systems were online before he kept moving. "Could it be a rescue team?"

There was really only one worth mentioning at this point. Cortana was about to reply when the ship groaned under them. "Wouldn't bet on it."

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

"Four years, seven months, ten days."

That made him frown. It had been seven months since their return. "Someone should have found us by now."

They both knew who he meant, but Cortana didn't have an answer any more than he did. She stayed silent, and he kept moving up through the ship.

Another info center, but as he entered it, the ship groaned again. But this time it wasn't an impact - a red-orange-gold wave of light passed through the ship. He darted backwards, lifting the assault rifle he'd taken from the cryobay, but the energy passed harmlessly through him. "What was that?!"

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

They both knew it was Forerunner, but whatever installation was scanning them was unknown to them. That in and of itself was alarming; a hundred thousand years roaming the galaxy, and there was a Forerunner installation they didn't know?

More than alarming. Terrifying.

John kept moving. "How close are we to the Observation Deck?"

"It's directly above us," the AI answered.

His motion sensor wasn't picking anything up in range, so he slapped his assault rifle to his back plates and ran for the elevator banks.

"The elevator doors look sealed tight," said the AI, but it wasn't a problem for a Spartan. He'd fought with worse, and likely would again. He braced himself on the deck and began pulling them open.

"Chief, be careful-"

The vacuum beyond the door ripped it open the rest of the way, and he skidded a little along the deck as the decompression pulled him in. Then there was a crash behind him, and he whirled to see a handful of cargo modules flying toward him, caught in the drag. The Spartan managed to block them from doing any severe damage, but the collision made him lose his footing, enough force behind it that he slammed into the opposite wall of the elevator shaft.

"-because some areas might have lost pressure!"

"Right," he said dryly, and started to climb. He felt weaker than normal, limbs just slightly shaky and slower to respond than he liked; it might have been cryo-sickness, but it might also have been that he wasn't used to being completely human again. For too long he'd had the strength of the Flood layered atop that of a Spartan.

(Or it might have been something more sinister. There was something drifting in the back of his mind, just out of reach…)

When he climbed free of the shaft, a Sangheili decloaked and came at him, snarling, a plasma sword ignited. The Spartan darted forward, caught the hand wielding the blade with one hand and punched the alien with the free one. The alien's shields weren't up – probably wasn't expecting one of the Demons onboard – and the blow stunned it long enough for the Spartan to throw him down the elevator shaft.

"I thought we had a truce with the Covenant," he growled, eyes flicking up toward the Observation Deck. If there were more foes, that was where they would be.

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

There was another Sangheili at the main controls, with a clutch of sleeping Grunts scattered over the lower deck. The Elite's back was to him, which was very much to the Spartan's advantage.

His combat knife pierced the alien's neck, severing a major artery and biting deep enough into the spine that he was dead before he hit the ground. But the sound of his body falling woke the Grunts, and they sprang to their feet and ran around in a panic, firing wildly whenever they spotted him - or thought they did.

The Chief gunned them down, then returned to the blast shield controls. "The good news," Cortana said as he pressed the key to open the shield, "is these Covenant aren't outfitted like standard military. It's possible we just came across a rogue salvage ship." The blast panels retracted as she spoke - revealing something that was definitely not a salvage ship. "Or, we might have stumbled into an entire Covenant fleet."

John was already moving back into cover even before Cortana alerted him to the Phantoms moving to board them on either side. He checked his ammo and grabbed more for both assault rifle and Magnum before bringing them to bear on the would-be boarders. "We need to get off this ship," he told her.

"We've got bigger problems," the AI reported, "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 confirmed, "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 shut behind them. John took a deep breath and forced himself to be calm. This was no different than what he'd been doing all his life - eliminating threats to complete the objective. He pushed aside his body's aches and pains in favor of fighting off the Covenant invaders.

The elevator doors opened, and the Spartan headed out, moving through hatch after hatch and gunning down all the Covenant in his way. Finally he reached the airlock leading out 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.

Worry spiked through him, his entire body going tight. "Cortana?"

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

The airlock pumped the atmosphere out, and the outer door slid open. The Spartan stepped through - and jerked back a little, eyebrows climbing to his hairline. "Uh- I'm sorry," Cortana said, her voice back to normal but filled with surprise that matched his own, "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 drifting nearby, barely held in place by the Dawn's minimal gravity. He set his AR loose and snatched the BR up to pick off the Covenant between him and the launch station. He could just see the station on the far side of the deck, on a raised platform overlooking the missile bays.

There were Jackals with carbines on upper levels, guarding the rest of the Covenant below. The Spartan aimed for them first, then went after the Grunts, more problematic than the Elites because of sheer numbers. The Sangheili were last, only a few, but one of them was an old veteran who actually knew what he was doing and played cat and mouse with the Spartan until the human finally slipped around and unloaded a full clip from the Magnum into him.

John hated space ops, both because of the minimal gravity, and because in the vacuum, he couldn't hear anyone sneaking up behind him, or even the sounds of his own boots as he sprinted up the ramps to the launch station. He hit the controls, and the panel flashed green, the deck shaking under him as the missile was primed.

On the other side of the deck, one of the silo doors creaked open, the missile sliding out part way, but there it stopped, grinding in place. "Great!" Cortana shouted, panicky but still sarcastic, "The blast door's jammed! The missile won't fire until it's cleared! Get down there!"

He was already in motion, circling the control panel and jumping down to the deck, running across the other silos. Once he reached it, he saw what the problem was and threw his weight against the damaged accelerator, finally kicking it into place. It sparked alarmingly but armed its payload, and the missile launched from the tube. "You did it!" she cried, "Get back!"

The Chief did as instructed and scrambled backwards, feeling the heat from the engines even through his armor, no longer infected but still wary of fire.

The missile slammed into the unshielded cruiser and detonated, breaking the ship apart. But there were at least seven more just in his field of vision, with more out of sight behind the bulk of the Dawn. There weren't enough missiles for all of them, and the ship herself was in bad shape. Even so, the Chief allowed himself a brief breath of relief-

-right before they were scanned again by the Forerunner Shield World, red-orange-gold energy shivering over his skin.

"Chief?!"

"The Covenant weren't the one's scanning us," he reassured her, right before panels in the shell folded back, bright white light from inside momentarily blinding him before his visor polarized. Then he felt the slow but irresistible pull of gravity - of a gravity well somewhere within.

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

John turned and bolted for the airlocks. "We've gotta hurry!" Cortana was shouting, running 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, not 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 through the hatch and waited impatiently for repressurization. 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 a Covenant ship slammed into the Dawn and scraped past, tearing an enormous gash in the hull and causing catastrophic depressurization of what was left of the ship. It ripped him out into the emptiness even as he fought to keep himself inside. His hands were torn free of the catwalk's 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 that seemed to be trying its hardest to crush him.

They managed to pass without incident through the remains of a cruiser before they were hit broadside by a section of hull plating. The impact knocked the Spartan unconscious instantly, leaving him unable to control their descent as they fell into the planet.

When the Chief woke, they were on the inner surface of the shield world, and his entire body was screaming at him to stay where he was. He listened to it only long enough for the ache of the crash to fade - though other aches persisted long past what they should have. Then he struggled to get his body to respond to his commands.

Cortana had already activated the MJOLNIR's first aid systems, which included painkillers, so at last he was able to get his fingers to twitch, then curl into a fist. There was debris on top of him, restricting his movement; he pushed it off, then sat up and looked around. They were surrounded by the burning remains of both the Dawn and Covenant cruisers, broken hulls and gear scattered for miles around. The Spartan groped for a nearby weapon, then pushed himself up onto one knee.

Cortana was ominously silent in his helmet, but he could still feel the warmth of her presence. "Where are we?" he asked lowly.

Her voice was tired. "Checking coordinate impact data – we have asked you to give up your family, your childhood, your future-"

John tensed when he heard the distorted recording of Doctor Halsey. He shook his head in an attempt to clear it, then reached back and pulled out his AI's chip. "Cortana!"

Her hologram appeared over the chip in a flare of light. "I'm sorry," she apologized, hastening to reassure him, "It's the crash, I'm fine."

"Something was wrong even before we left the Dawn." That was putting both things lightly. He could take a guess as to what was wrong with her – the same thing that had been wrong There. But she'd been recompiled; she should have been fine.

"Chief, really. I'm fine."

It might have been enough to convince him if her voice hadn't come out distorted again. He got to his feet without taking his eyes off her. "Cortana," he said, gentle but firm.

The AI's gaze dropped to her feet. "The Dawn - her systems and the chip couldn't handle it. I had to switch back to a partial..."

To the Riemann matrix. A partial one, but with the burden of all the data she'd taken in - from him, from the Fleet, from her own life - it was too much.

She was dying.

"We need to get back to the Fleet," he said.

She looked up, and he depolarized his visor so he could look her in the eye. "I won't recover from Rampancy, Chief," she said.

A thin veneer of cover, if anyone got a hold of the helmetcam footage. Even so, she looked as if she was trying to accept it herself even as she said it to him.

The Spartan resisted the urge to try and :reach out: to her. He knew he couldn't (deaf and blind and alone in his own flesh), and it would only hurt worse to try and fail. "If we can just capture a Slipspace-capable ship," he told her, "we can get home and fix this."

Cortana looked up at him in silence, seeing the strength of his conviction in his eyes. Then she said, "Don't make a promise you can't keep."

A pair of Phantoms zipped overhead, ruining the moment. "We need to move!" the AI said, then vanished in a flare of light.

John slotted her chip back into his armor and started forward. As he moved down a short slope and further into the wreckage, she said, "It doesn't look like the Covenant fared much better than we did."

"How many ships made it through the roof?"

"More than enough for our purposes."

The super soldier nodded and picked his way through the wreckage, grabbing a few undetonated grenades and more ammunition as he went, checking it all over to make sure it was undamaged and still worked.

There was a crevice in the rock on the far side of the canyon. He headed through it at half pace, tense and ready for combat. He was so wound up that he almost fired off a shot when Cortana spoke. "I'm picking up a faint transmission on the high-band," she reported, displaying the waves off to one side on his HUD.

"Covenant?" John asked.

"I don't think so," she replied, "the pattern's different. I'll try to triangulate its position."

He wanted to tell her to ignore the transmission and focus on finding them a way back to the Fleet. Instead he stayed silent, intent on keeping his footing as the ground sloped sharply upward. The light of the shield world's false sun made it impossible to see what he was making his way toward, but his motion tracker showed no contacts in range.

They emerged onto a ridge overlooking an enormous power complex, a trine of pylons floating over their housings and gathering vacuum energy from space itself. He took a moment to admire the architecture, the technology inside, the painstaking research and precision that went into constructions like it. Then he moved on, following the ridge as it curved away.

The wreckage of a hangar bay had hit the ground and fragmented, letting its contents spill out. Warthogs were strewn about like toys in the grass. Most were broken, some on fire, but there were two or three still drivable. The Spartan ran brief systems checks, then mounted up and got moving.

As he rounded a curve, Cortana began speaking, "Chief… about my 'condition…'" When he lifted his chin to show that he was listening, she continued, "I didn't want to mention it, seeing as how it's a complete long shot, but… it is possible that getting back to the UNSC could help me find a solution for my Rampancy."

He understood. More cover, but also an option in case they couldn't find the Fleet in time. "How?"

"Well, as far as I know, I'm the only AI ever generated from living tissue – a clone of Dr. Halsey, to be precise. It may be possible to recompile my neural net by replicating those same conditions - but that means getting back there. Soon."

John guided the LRV through more wreckage from the Dawn, eventually moving out into a series of grassy canyons. They drove in silence for a time, then Cortana spoke again. "Chief, I'm hearing that strange signal again, stronger this time."

"Do you think there's something to it?"

"I'm curious more than anything. Its behavior is… odd."

The Spartan stopped the Warthog where the canyon let out on the edge of a wide grassy plain. The Covenant had already set up towers and barricades amongst the spurs of rock. A Phantom dropped off its load of soldiers to his left on a stretch of clear ground.

The Chief hopped out of the driver's seat and climbed up to the machine gun turret instead, waiting until the Phantom zoomed off to open up. The Jackals and Elite went down fairly quickly, but then one of the Grunts hopped into a Ghost and came zipping towards him. Despite the notorious inaccuracy of the machine gun turret, he was able to kill the Grunt without doing too much damage to the other vehicle. He abandoned the Warthog in favor of the Ghost and darted towards the Covenant, both shooting and ramming the aliens with justified malice.

He was about to leave the Ghost behind and move one when he noticed the orientation of the ramp and grav lift of the tower that he had shot down. It was right before the ridge stopping him from continuing on in the Covenant vehicle. It looked like if he used the Ghost's boost, he could get enough forward momentum and upward motion from the grav lift to clear the ridge and continue on without having to go on foot.

"What are you doing?" Cortana asked as he moved the Ghost into position.

"Bringing this with us."

The AI let an amused hum. "If you fail, I'm going to laugh at you. Just warning you now."

John hit the boost. The Ghost shot up the ramp and into the grav lift. It tumbled once in the air, but cleared the lip with room to spare. The Spartan allowed himself a small smirk before moving through the canyon, gunning down a trio of Grunts who had come to investigate the commotion.

"If we're going to hijack a ship from these Covenant, we're going to have to find out where they're landing first," Cortana stated as John boosted over another small ledge.

"I don't suppose you have a plan for that?"

"We could always ask nicely."

"'Asking's' not my strong suit."

The Spartan gunned down the Covenant forces in the canyon beyond their crevice-pathway. There was a Forerunner structure on the far side that the Covenant – these "Storm Covenant" – were holding. He killed them too, along with the Zealot leading them.

"That Elite dropped his camo module. Let's have a look."

John jumped down from the Ghost to pick it up.

"I'll run a patch with your suit's firmware. Who knows – it might come in handy."

"Thank you," said the Spartan, "I'm sure I'll enjoy being able to invisibly slay my enemies once again." Cortana snorted in his ear, and he allowed himself a small smile of his own.

The door at the back slid open as he climbed back onto his Ghost. As he steered it inside, the AI brought up another wave display. "There's that phantom signal again."

John paused for a moment to listen. "I heard something that time."

The signal faded away. The inner door slid open, and John guided the Ghost into the chamber beyond. Then he started, involuntarily jerking the Covenant LRV backwards. "Sentinels."

"I wondered when they'd show up."

The machines weren't attacking, but he had every reason to be wary of them. When Guilty Spark went rampant, they had just been doing their job, but it had shown him how easy it was for rogue Forerunner AI to add "Reclaimers" to the local Sentinels' targeting roster.

For the moment at least, they seemed content to guide him to the control panel at the back of the chamber. He touched the interface, and a holographic sphere flickered to life overhead. "It's a localized site Cartographer," Cortana informed him, "Hm… Okay – 'in service of Forerunner Shield World designate Requiem.'"

"Requiem. At least we know where we are now." 'That name is familiar. Divines, why is it familiar…?'

"Let's see if it can tell us what the Covenant are so interested in." When the AI tried to access the information, the hologram turned red, flickered, and disappeared. "Huh."

"What happened?"

"I don't know… It locked up."

The Spartan frowned and turned back to his Ghost, only to find that it was no longer there. He glared up at the Sentinels innocently orbiting the Cartographer, then pulled out the SAW that he picked up in the Dawn's wreckage. The Chief jumped down from the map platform and began walking back the way they came, when he noticed a ramp leading down below the central "spine" of the room.

He ducked down into it, and spotted a Forerunner sigil against one wall – the Eld of the Mantle of Responsibility. As he got closer to it, he saw that there were glyphs inscribed on the symbol. "'Guardianship for all living things lies with those whose evolution is the most complete,'" he read aloud, "'The Mantle of Responsibility shelters all.' What bullshit."

"Agreed. Still, this is very interesting."

"Maybe," he replied, "but it won't get us home." With no further information forthcoming from the Eld, he headed back up to the main floor.

"I'm detecting power fluctuations in several locations," Cortana said after a moment, "I'll put them up for you." A pair of orange nav points appeared on his HUD. "Hopefully we can find some way to get this Cartographer back online."

John headed for the closest nav point. He recoiled once more when more Sentinels glided out of the side chamber right in front of him, but for the second time, they left him alone. He still waited until they were far enough away to be comfortable before he turned his back to them.

In front of him was a simple enough console: a thin black rectangle perpendicular to the floor with a large green button in the center. He pushed the button and extended the light bridge, then walked across it to the power core. The Spartan reactivated it, but as he did so, his shields dropped to zero, the alarm beeping, and the platform under his feet began to drop.

Purely out of reflex, he turned and jumped back up onto the light bridge, lifting his SAW. "What's it doing?" he demanded.

"It's alright," Cortana assured him. After a momentary pause, she continued, "This energy is actually a ferroelectric data field. Your shields are just cycling in response to the chamber's charge."

The warrior relaxed a little. "Will this bring the Cartographer back online?"

"Partially," the AI answered, "This type of processing system usually works in parallel. We'll have to locate its twin."

The Chief left the power core behind, but not before he peered over the edge. The platform had simply descended to a lower level, but even so, he hadn't liked getting caught off-guard by it.

He was about to reenter the main chamber when his motion tracker flashed red with hostile contacts.

Some Covenant had finally found a way inside.

John crouched and switched his SAW for his battle rifle, then crept forward a bit at a time. A handful of Elites, a few of Jackals, and a small army of Grunts were now in the central chamber. The Spartan activated his new (well, new to him) active camouflage and began picking them off one by one, backing up when the battery ran down and he decloaked. After a few minutes, all of the aliens he'd managed to coax out of hiding carpeted the floor of the chamber, and he hopped down from his perch to pursue the stragglers.

He ran out of ammo for his BR in the ensuing firefight, so he dropped it in favor of a carbine he took from one of the Jackals. He was far more likely to find ammo for it than either of his human weapons, he reasoned when he swapped it out, even with the Dawn's wreckage scattered over the inner surface.

The Spartan headed across the room to activate another light bridge, then the second data field. Again, he jumped back onto the first bridge rather than descend to the lower level. As he walked back across the bridge to the main chamber, a set of signal waves popped up again. "Is that the same signal?" he asked his AI. For a second, he distinctly heard a male voice say, "FLEETCOM actual," and "UNSC survivor 883."

"Yes!" Cortana crowed, "Mayday, mayday, mayday! UNSC AI Cortana to Infinity, please respond!"

There were more Covenant in the main chamber again. As the Chief started shooting, he heard FLEETCOM respond to the Infinity, who apparently hadn't received Cortana's transmission. "No response," the AI reported, "but from the strength of that signal, the Infinity has to be close by!"

It took him twice as long to clear the room, mostly because there were twice as many enemies. He nailed as many of them as he could from afar with the carbine, then once again switched back to his SAW for up close and personal. At last, he made his way back to the Cartographer. He slotted Cortana's cartridge into the map's interface.

Cortana appeared on the holo display, along with the image of Requiem. When she reached out to interact with the display, it flickered red again and beeped in alarm before returning to normal. She shook her head and spun the dial, interacting with the map. A number of red tags appeared around the hologram of Requiem. "The Cartographer keeps acting like the transmission is coming from everywhere on the planet at once," she told her Spartan, "It doesn't want to triangulate Infinity's signal."

The hologram flickered again, and all but one of the red tags disappeared. The tag that remained was at the core of the planet.

The Spartan's skin crawled, akin to the prelude of the Change, but again nothing happened. Something was wrong.

"I got it!"

"That can't be right. Scan again."

"We've already passed through one layer of the planet's surface," the AI answered, "It's not crazy to think that someone else made it deeper inside than we did."

"You mean the planet's hollow?" He'd never heard of a shield world quite like this 'Requiem.' All the ones he knew of were Dyson spheres, with the inner surface made habitable, not this - matryoshka doll stuff.

Cortana seemed to understand at least part of his confusion. "Let me see if I can figure out a way for us to reach these coordinates that doesn't involve us digging a really big hole." A new map, horizontal, long and thin, popped up at about head level. "There's a Terminus on the far side of the complex," Cortana said, turning to look at him, "We can portal to the planet's core from there." She shot a glance back at the hologram.

"What?"

"…I don't know."

John made an executive decision, then; Cortana was a valuable resource for the UNSC, but first and foremost, she was his wife, and the only person from the Parallel that he was sure was still alive. Getting her to safety surpassed the danger of the Storm Covenant - and whatever was making his skin crawl - on his personal priority scale. "If we have a shot at getting you back to Infinity, we're taking it."

When she assented, he reclaimed her chip and turned to head deeper into the complex. Yet as he walked away, he heard the Cartographer glitch again behind him. He put it out of his mind for now and asked the AI, "What do you know about Infinity?"

"Not much," she answered honestly, "She was supposed to be massive, but the project was only in prototype when we left."

The Spartan ghosted down a short hall and exited into a large underground cavern. Or, formerly underground; part of the ceiling had crumbled onto the bridge spanning the chasm, letting sunlight in. It had also let in several Phantoms' worth of Storm Covenant. He fought his way across the first half of the bridge; the array of combatants was fairly standard, nothing to sneeze at, but nothing to get worked up over, either.

There was a Banshee on the upper level of the main bridge, just a short way across a lower, smaller bridge – a choke point. There were some Grunts, a few Jackals, and a pair of Elites on the other side. The Chief took out the Jackal snipers first, then the Sangheili, then the other Covenant, even going so far as to punt one of the Kig Yar off the edge to conserve ammo. Then he took to the skies, rolling the Banshee to avoid fire from the other aircraft.

The Spartan switched to the fuel rod gun and blasted one Banshee apart right away, then switched back and pursued the other, careful to keep himself out of range of the bridge below. When the second Banshee was also destroyed, he turned his fire on the infantry, hitting the Elites with fuel rod charges. One of them managed to dodge the initial blast, but misjudged his leap. He ended up flinging himself off the edge of the bridge.

John let out a quiet huff of laughter, then moved to strafe the remainder. They died under a hail of plasma, and he set the ship down on the far end of the bridge. As another huge door slid open at his approach, Cortana piped up, "Chief, the Covenant net's going crazy. They're ordering all units to converge on the tower."

"I guess we got their attention." The Spartan walked to the other end of the hall and waited for the next door to open in front of him, taking up his carbine as the light spilled in.

A Phantom had just dropped off a number of Unggoy near the door. The Chief picked them off quickly, but the gunfire drew the attention of the other Covenant in the area. Two Ghosts came zipping around the processional way leading up toward the tower. Through a stroke of his usual incredible luck, he managed to kill one of the Grunt pilots before the alien even fired a shot, then crouched and let the other Ghost's shots fly over him. When the firing stopped, he peeked up, took aim, and fired off a handful of shots, the last of which sent the Grunt sprawling to the ground, its Ghost moving an additional few feet before shutting down.

There was some UNSC ammunition scattered around the canyon. The Chief stocked up, and took out the Grunt manning the Shade turret set up nearby. He sprinted back to one of the Ghosts, bringing its guns to bear on the other Covenant running around on the processional way, then the ones taking cover on the observation decks on either side of the path.

The tower and the path leading up to it had been built to mirror something, the Spartan was sure. But exactly what it mirrored, he didn't know, nor had he ever seen. Still, he knew enough to recognize that, to get angry at the Covenant on the Forerunners' behalf for turning something sacred into a warzone. They worshipped the Forerunners – they should have been more respectful of their constructs.

John gunned his way to the lift in the tower, clearing out the Covenant in his path, even the Hunters the aliens deployed in an attempt to take the tower before he could. He put away his weapons the moment the area was clear, and entered the Cathedral. Massive machine panels retracted in pairs as he approached, opening up the space inside, then simultaneously slid back into place when the lift at the back of the hall carried him up.

The Cathedral was lit with soft, sourceless blue light as he walked the path up to the Terminus interface. There were a number of low, square pillars on either side of the path, ripples of light travelling up their lengths to illuminate the sigils on their sides in a brief flash.

When he inserted Cortana into the system, the Cathedral came alive, portal anchors snapping together, suspended in the air. "According to the Cathedral, this Terminus is just one node in a large transit grid that spans the entire planet…" She trailed off.

"What?"

"When I tried to access the outlet closest to Infinity's transmissions," the AI answered, opening the console, "the system responded with this."

A symbol appeared, one he knew well. No matter the changes wrought in him or how monstrous he became in the battles he fought in the Parallel, that symbol was always engraved into his armor, integrated into the sigil for the Fleet. "Reclaimer," he said, "humanity." Though he was a little hesitant to move forward, wary of something he didn't know, the Spartan knew he had no choice if he wanted to save his AI. "That's got to be Infinity. Can you get us to those coordinates?"

"Let me try to open a portal." Cortana tapped at the display, the Terminus shifting as it obeyed her commands. There was a thunderous clank, and the pillars began to rise with the Terminus platform. "I'm picking up unknown energy signatures!"

"Where?" He could sense something too, but the Spartan didn't have her precision any longer, what had once been a shout now only the faintest of whispers.

"This can't be right!"

And then Forerunner constructs - blue-accented, bipedal, insect-like things - began materializing on the plinths, their carapaces fluttering like wings to vent heat.

"Set a waypoint out of the tower." John knew that Cortana was struggling with the Terminus, but he couldn't save her if she was destroyed before they reached the Infinity. Her safety was his top priority. They had to get out. "Cortana?"

A portal swirled open. "How did…" But like him, Cortana wasn't about to look a gift horse in the mouth. "Quick! Into the portal!"

Without thinking about who created it or where it led, John snatched her chip from the system, then turned and threw himself into the vortex.