Another of the misshapen bipedal hostiles shambled by, and he recognized the shape of the creature’s head – the long, angular snout of an Elite faced him. What held his fire was where the head was located.
The alien’s skull was canted at a sickening angle, as if the bones of its neck had been softened or liquefied. It hung limply down the creature’s back, lifeless – like a limb that needed amputation.
It was as if something had rewritten the Elite, reshaped it from the inside out. The Spartan felt an unaccustomed emotion: a trill of fear. An image of helplessness – of screaming at a looming threat, powerless – flashed through his mind, a snapshot of his cryo-addled dreams aboard the Pillar of Autumn.
No way is that going to happen to me, he thought. No way.
The beast shuffled by, and moved out of sight.
He took a deep breath, exhaled, then burst from his position and charged for the center of the room. He battered aside the shambling beasts, and crushed a handful of the small spherical creatures beneath his boots. His shotgun boomed and thick, green blood splashed the floor.
He reached his objective: a large lift platform, identical to the one he’d ridden down into this hellhole. He reached for the activation panel, and hoped that he’d find the up button.
One of the hostiles leaped high in the air and landed next to him.
The Chief dropped to one knee, shoved the barrel of the shotgun into the creature’s belly and fired. The beast flipped end over end, and fell back into a clot of the smaller, round hostiles.
He dove for the activation panel, and stabbed at the controls.
The elevator platform dropped like a rock, so far down and so fast that his ears popped.
Where the hell was Cortana when you needed her? Always telling him to “go through that door,” “cross that bridge,” or “climb that pyramid.” Annoying at times, but reassuring as well.
The basement, if that’s what it was, had all the charm of a crypt. A passageway took him into another large space where he had to fight his way across the floor to a door and the tunnel-like corridor beyond. That’s when the Spartan came face-to-face with something he hadn’t seen before and would have preferred never to see again: one of the combative, bipedal beasts – this one a horribly mutated human. Though the creature was distorted by whatever had ravaged his body, the Chief recognized him nonetheless.
It was Private Manuel Mendoza, the soldier that Sergeant Johnson loved to yell at, and one of the Marines who had been with Keyes when he disappeared into this nightmare.
Though twisted by what had been done to him, the Private’s face still retained a trace of humanity, and it was that which caused the Master Chief to remove this finger from the shotgun’s trigger, and try to make contact.
“Mendoza, come on, let’s get the hell out of here. I know they did something to you but the medics can fix it.”
The reanimated Marine, now possessed of superhuman strength, struck the Chief with such force that it nearly knocked him off his feet, and triggered the suit’s alarm. Mendoza – or rather, the thing that had once been Mendoza – waved a whiplike tentacle and lashed out again. The Spartan staggered backward, pulled the trigger, and was subsequently forced to pull it again as the twelve-gauge buckshot tore what had been Mendoza apart.
The results were both spectacular and disgusting. As the corpse-like horror came apart, the Chief saw that one of the small, spherical creatures had taken up residence inside the soldier’s chest cavity, and seemed to have extended its tentacles into other parts of what had been Mendoza’s body. A third shotgun blast served to destroy it as well.
Was that how these things worked? The little round pod-things infected their hosts, and mutated the victim into some kind of combat form. He considered the possibility that this was some kind of new Covenant bio-weapon, and discarded it. The first of these combat forms he’d seen had once been Elites.
Whatever these damned things were, they were lethal to humans and Covenant alike.
He quickly fed shells into his shotgun, then moved on. The Spartan moved as fast as he could – at a dead run. He charged into another room, scrambled up onto the gallery above, blew an Elite form right out of his boots, and ducked through a waiting door.
The area on the other side was more of a challenge. The Chief had the second floor to himself, but an army of the freaks owned the floor below, and that’s where he needed to go.
Height conferred advantages. Some well-placed grenades, followed by a jump from the walkway, and sixty seconds of close-quarters action were sufficient to see him through. Still, it was a tremendous relief to pass through a completely uncontested space, and into a compartment where he found anew development to cope with.
In addition to their battering attacks, the creatures had acquired both human and Covenant weapons from their victims, and these combat forms were even more dangerous as a result. The combat forms weren’t the smartest foes he’d ever encountered, but they weren’t mindless automatons, either – they could operate machines and fire weapons.
Bullets pinged from the metal walls, plasma fire stuttered through the air, and a grenade detonated as the Master Chief cleared the area, discovered a place where some Marines had staged a last stand on top of a cargo container. He paused to recover their dog tags, scavenged some ammo, and kept on going.
Something nagged at him, but what was it? Something he’d forgotten?
It came to him all at once: He had nearly forgotten his own name.
Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK.
The droning chant that had lurked at the edge of his awareness buzzed more loudly, and he felt some kind of pressure – some sense of anger.
Why was he angry?
No, something else was angry... because he’d remembered his own name?
Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK.
Where was he? How did he get here? He struggled to find the memory.
He remembered parts of it now. There was a dark, alien room, hordes of some terrifying enemy, gunfire, then a stabbing pain...
They must have captured him. That was it. This might be some new trick by the enemy. He’d give them nothing. He struggled to remember who the enemy was.
He repeated the mantra in his head: Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK.
The buzzing pressure increased. He resisted, though he was unsure why. Something about the drone frightened him. The sense of invasion deepened.
Is this a Covenant trick? he wondered. He tried to scream, “It won’t work. I’ll never lead you to Earth,” but couldn’t make his mouth work, couldn’t feel his own body.
As the thought of his home planet echoed through Keyes’ consciousness, the tone and tenor of the drone changed, as if pleased. He – Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK – was startled when new images played across his mind.
He realized, too late, that something was sifting through his mind, like a grave robber looting a tomb. He had never felt so powerless, so afraid...
His fear vanished in a flood of emotion as he felt the warmth of the first woman he’d ever kissed...
He tried to scream as the memory was ripped from him and discarded.
Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK.
As each of the fragments of his past played out and was sucked into the void, he could feel the invader enveloping him like an ocean of evil. But, like the pieces of flotsam that remain after a ship has gone down, random pieces of himself remained, a sort of makeshift raft to which he could momentarily cling.
The image of a smiling woman, a ball spiraling through the air, a crowded street, a man with half his face blown away, tickets to a show he couldn’t remember, the gentle sound of wind chimes, and the smell of newly baked bread.