Then, eager to replenish his supplies, the Spartan made his ghoulish rounds, and soon was able to equip himself with an assault weapon, a shotgun, and some plasma grenades. Even though he didn’t like to think about where it came from, it felt good to dump the Covenant ordnance he’d been saddled with, and lay his hands on some true-blue UNSC issue for a change.
Pulse generator one had been dealt with, and he was eager to disable number two, then move on to his final objective. He stepped into the beam, saw the flash of light, felt the floor shake, and was in the process of pulling away when the Flood attacked from every direction.
There was no time to think and no time to fight. The only thing he could do was run. He turned and sprinted for the corridor he’d used to enter the chamber and took two powerful blows from a combat form. He bulled his way between two carrier forms and leaped out of the way as they detonated like grenades. New infection forms spewed from their deflating corpses.
There was barely enough time to turn, hose the closest forms with 7.62mm, and toss a grenade at the group beyond. It went off with a loud wham!, broke glass, and put three of the monstrosities down.
He was out of ammo by then, knew he lacked the time necessary to reload, and made the switch to the shotgun instead. The gun blew huge holes through the oncoming mob. He charged through one of them, and ran like hell.
Then, with some pad to work with, the human turned to gun down the pursuers. The entire battle consumed no more than two minutes but it left the Chief shaken. Could Cortana detect the slight tremor in his hands as he reloaded both weapons? Hell, she had unrestricted access to all of his vital signs, so she knew more about what was going on with his body than he did. Still, if the AI was conscious of the way he felt, there was no sign of it in her words. “Pulse generator deactivated – good work.”
The Chief nodded wordlessly and made his way back through the tunnel to the point where the Banshee waited. “The Pillar of Autumn is located twelve hundred kilometers up-spin,” Cortana continued. “Energy readings show her fusion reactors are still powered up! The systems on the Pillar of Autumn have fail-safes even I can’t override without authorization from the Captain. We’ll have to find him, or his neural implants, to start the fusion core detonation.
“One target remaining. Let’s take care of the final pulse generator.”
A nav indicator appeared on the noncom’s HUD as he lifted off, took fire from a neighboring installation, and put the attack ship into a steep dive. The ground came up fast, he pulled out, and guided the alien assault craft through a pass and into the canyon beyond. The nav indicator pointed toward the light that spilled out of a tunnel. The Banshee began to take ground fire, and the Spartan knew his piloting skills were about to be severely tested.
A rocket flashed by as he pushed the Banshee down onto the deck, fired the aircraft’s weapons, and cut power. Flying into the tunnel was bad enough – but flying into it at high speed verged on suicidal.
Once inside the passageway the challenge was to stay off the walls and make the tight right- and left-hand turns without killing himself. A few seconds later the Spartan saw double blast doors and flared in for a jarring landing.
He hopped down, made his way over to the control panel, hit the switch, and heard a rumbling sound as the doors started to part. Then there was a bang! as something exploded and the enormous panels came to a sudden stop. The resulting gap was too small for the Banshee, but sufficient for two carrier forms to scuttle through. The beasts scrambled toward him on short, stubby legs. The humpbacked bladders that formed their upper torsos pulsed and wriggled as the infection forms within struggled for release.
The Chief blew both monsters away with twin shotgun blasts, and mopped up the rest of the infection forms with another shot. He paused and reloaded; there were bound to be more of the creatures on the far side of the doors.
Resigned to a fight, he stepped through the crack and paused. There was no sound beyond the gentle roar of machinery, the drip, drip, drip of water off to his right, and the rasp of his own breathing. The threat indicator was clear, and there were no enemies in sight, but that didn’t mean much. Not where the Flood were concerned. They had a habit of coming out of nowhere.
The cave, if that was the proper word for the huge cavern-like space, featured plenty of places to hide. Enormous pipes emerged from the walls and dived downward, mysterious installations stood like islands on the platform around him, and there was no way to know what might lurk in the dark corners. Lights, mounted high above, provided what little illumination there was.
The human stood on a broad platform that ran the full length of the open area. A deep chasm separated his platform from what appeared to be an identical structure on the other side of the canyon. One of two bridges that had once spanned the gorge was down, leaving only one over which he could pass – a made-to-order choke point for anyone who wanted to establish an ambush.
There wasn’t a hell of a lot of choice, so he marched down to the point where the remaining span was anchored, and started across. He hadn’t gone more than thirty paces before fifty or sixty infection forms emerged from hiding and danced out to block the way.
The Spartan held his position, waited for the Flood forms to come a little closer, and tossed a fragmentation grenade into the center of the group.
The cavern ate some of the sound, but the explosive device still managed to produce a bang, and the resulting shrapnel laid waste to all but a handful of the creatures.
There were two survivors, though, both optimists, who continued to bounce forward in spite of the way in which the rest of the group had been annihilated. A single shotgun blast was sufficient to kill both of them.
He slipped some additional shells into the gun’s magazine tube, took a deep breath, and moved forward again. He made it about halfway to the other side before a mixed force of combat forms, carrier forms, and infection forms started to gather at the far end of the span. Another grenade inflicted casualties, but they charged him after that, and the Master Chief was forced to retreat, firing the assault weapon as he did so.
It was nip and tuck for a few seconds as combat forms launched themselves fifteen meters through the air, carriers charged straight in, and the omnipresent infection forms swarmed through the gaps. Retreating, the Spartan had already reloaded three times before his back hit the wall, and the last combat form collapsed at his feet, started to rise, and took a blast in the head.
Once again it was time to reload both weapons, step out onto the gore-splattered bridge deck, and attempt another crossing. This one was successful, with only light opposition on the other side, and an opportunity to replenish his ammo.
The next set of blast doors opened flawlessly, allowing the Spartan to enter a relatively short section of tunnel that led back to the surface. Determined to use stealth if at all possible, he slipped out of the passageway, scrambled up over the snow embankment to his right, and ran into a group of four Flood. A grenade took care of two – and the assault weapon finished the rest.
A Banshee swooped in, burned a long line of dashes into the snow, and continued up the valley. The Chief was surprised to get off so lightly, but given the darkness and all of the confusion, it was possible that the pilot had mistaken him for a combat form. A worthy target, to be sure, but not something to turn around for. Particularly not when the valley was full of combat forms.
He was careful to hug the face of the cliff and stay within the cover provided by the boulders and trees that lined the edge of the valley. The incessant thud of automatic weapons and the whine of plasma weapons testified to the intensity of a conflict raging off to his left.