He had moved through the new chamber – a high, vaulted gallery, dimly lit with pools of gold-yellow light. For the first time since Spark had dragged him here, he had a moment of respite. Ever since entering the Library, the Spartan’s head had been on a swivel. Wave after wave of hostile creatures had attacked him from all sides.
He popped a stim-pack, downed a nutrient supplement, and gathered up his weapon. Time to move out.
As he proceeded deeper into the Library, he found a corpse – a human one. He stooped to examine the body.
It wasn’t pretty. The Marine’s body was so mangled that even the Flood couldn’t make use of him. He lay at the center of a large bloodstain wreathed by spent brass.
“Ah,” 343 Guilty Spark said, peering down over the Spartan’s shoulder. “The other Reclaimer. His combat skin proved even less suitable than yours.”
The soldier looked up over his shoulder. “What do you mean?”
“Is this a test, Reclaimer?” the Monitor seemed genuinely puzzled. “I found him wandering through a structure on the other side of the ring, and brought him to the same point where you started.”
The Chief looked down at the body and marveled at the fact that anyone could make it that far. Even with his physical augmentation, and the advantages of his armor, the Spartan was reaching the end of his endurance.
He checked, found the leatherneck’s dog tags, and read the name. MOBUTO, MARVIN, STAFF SERGEANT, followed by a service number.
The Chief put the tags away. “I didn’t know you, Sarge, but I sure as hell wish I had. You must have been one hard-core son of a bitch.”
It wasn’t much as eulogies go, but he hoped that, had Sergeant Marvin Mobuto been there to hear it, he would have approved.
A good trap requires good bait, which was why McKay had one of the Pelicans pick up Charlie 217’s burned-out remains and drop them into the ambush site during the hours of darkness. It took three trips to transport a sufficient amount of wreckage, followed by hours of backbreaking effort to spread the pieces around in a realistic way, then position her troops in the rocks above.
Finally, just as the sun speared the area with early morning light, everything was ready. A phony distress call went out, and a specially prepared fire was lit deep within the wreckage. Scattered around the “crash site” were some “volunteers” – the bodies of comrades killed on the butte had been laid out where they could be seen from the air.
As half of the first platoon tried to get some sleep, the rest kept watch. McKay used her glasses to scan the area. The fake crash site was located between a low, flat-topped rise and a rocky hillside, covered with a jumble of large boulders. The wreckage, complete with a trickle of smoke, looked quite realistic.
Wellsley believed that having first dismissed the Marines and Naval personnel as little more than a nuisance, the enemy had since been forced to change their minds, and had started to take them more seriously. That meant monitoring human radio traffic, conducting regular recon flights, and all the other activities of modern warfare.
Assuming the AI was correct, the aliens would pick up the distress call, backtrack to the source, and send a team to check the situation out. That was the plan, at any rate, and McKay didn’t see any reason why it wouldn’t work.
The sun inched higher in the sky, and down among the rocks the temperature rose. The Marines took advantage of any bit of shade that they could find, though McKay was privately pleased that the customary bitching about the heat was kept to a minimum.
Thirty minutes into the wait McKay heard a sound like the whine of a mosquito and started to quarter the sky with her binoculars. It wasn’t long before she spotted a speck coming down-spin. Very quickly, the speck grew into a Banshee. She keyed her mike.
“Red One to squad three – it’s show time.”
The officer didn’t dare say more lest any Covenant eavesdroppers grow suspicious. She didn’t have to say much more, though. Her Marines knew what to do.
As the enemy aircraft came closer, members of the third squad, some of whom were made up to look as if they were injured, hurried out into the open, shaded their eyes as if watching for an incoming Pelican, pantomimed surprise as they spotted the Banshee, fired a volley of shots at it, then ran for the safety of the rocks.
The pilot sent a series of plasma bolts racing after them, circled the crash site twice, and flew off in the direction from which he had come. McKay watched it go. The hook had been set, the fish was on the line, and it would be her job to reel it in.
Half a klick away from the phony crash site, another Marine, or what had been a Marine, emerged from a subsurface air shaft, and felt the sun hit his horribly ravaged face. Well, not his face, because ever since the infection form had inserted its penetrator into his spine, Private Wallace A. Jenkins had been sharing his physical form with something he thought of as “the other.” A strange being that didn’t have any thoughts, none that the human could access, at any rate, and seemed unaware of the fact that its host still retained some cognitive and possibly motor functions.
That awareness was entirely unique to him insofar as the leatherneck could tell, because in spite of the fact that some of the bodies in the group had once belonged to his squad mates, repeated attempts to communicate with them had failed.
Now, as the untidy collection of infection forms, carrier forms, and combat forms emerged to bounce, waddle, and walk across Halo’s surface, Jenkins knew that wherever the column was headed it was for one purpose: to find and subsume sentient life. He could dimly sense the other’s yawning, icy hunger.
His goal, however, was considerably different. After it had been converted into a combat form, his body was still capable of handling a weapon. Some of the other forms had them – and that’s what Jenkins wanted more than anything. An M6D would be perfect, but an energy weapon could do the job, as would any grenade. Not for use on the Covenant, or the Flood, but on himself. Or what had been him. That’s why he’d been careful to conceal the full extent of his awareness from the other. So he had a chance of destroying the body in which he had been imprisoned and escape the horror of each waking moment.
The Flood came to a hill and, following one of the carrier forms, soon started to climb. The other, with Jenkins in tow, tagged along behind.
McKay knew the trap was going to work when one of the U-shaped dropships appeared, circled the phony crash site, and settled in for a landing. Once free of the ship the Elites, Jackals, and Grunts would be easy meat for the Marines hidden in the rocks and the snipers stationed on top of the flat-topped hill.
But war is full of surprises, and when the Covenant ship took off again, McKay found herself looking at everything she had expected to see plus a couple of Hunters. The mean-looking bastards would be hard to kill and could rip the platoon to shreds.
The officer swallowed the lump that had suddenly formed in her throat, keyed her mike, and whispered some instructions. “Red One to all snipers and rocket jockeys. Put everything you have on the Hunters. Do it now. Over.”
It was hard to say who killed the Hunters, given the sudden barrage of bullets and rockets that came their way, but McKay didn’t care, so long as the walking tanks were dead... which they definitely were. That was the good news.
The bad news was that the dropship returned, hosed the boulders with plasma fire, and forced the Helljumpers to duck or lose their heads.