FOUR
It is fair to say that the group of Covenant soldiers standing outside the medbay was far more surprised than Baird was. He was expecting unthinkable trouble. They were expecting to find a wounded, cowering, and almost certainly unarmed medical technician. What they found instead was a highly trained and highly capable 220-pound Orbital Drop Shock Trooper carrying a 20-pound titanium bottle.
He didn‘t have time to form a complete picture, but the instinctual snapshot he took as he rolled out of the medbay doorway and right into the small group of aliens was plenty. Four Grunts, two Jackals, and, in the shadows on the far right, a figure so tall and imposing it could only be an Elite.
―Christ."
He came back up to his feet at withering speed, breaking the first Jackal‘s jaw and neck instantly with the extinguisher‘s unforgiving mass. Fragments of beak and tooth glittered in the dark. The Jackal simply collapsed, falling backward as the momentum of the cylinder and the human wielding it snapped the life out of him. The Carbine he was holding fell with him.
Baird caught the Carbine even as he dropped his makeshift battering ram. The extinguisher landed on its activation stud and the resulting explosion of halon gas and sound bought him his life, as a Carbine round from the other Jackal, who was far less panicked than the Grunts, sliced through his Cro-Magnon brow, nicking bone and knocking him backward on top of the fallen Jackal. As he fell, he fumbled, found, and fired the Carbine trigger. Three rounds eviscerated his would-be killer.
The Grunts squealed and scattered. Two of them ran right past him and vanished into the medbay.
A third tripped, its plasma pistol clattering across the floor. The fourth wasn‘t so lucky. As Baird rose to his knees, then his feet, wheeling, trying to get a bead on the Elite—there was a blur, a flash of light and thunderous impact. His breath was knocked out of him.
The Carbine fell from his hands. He looked down at a strange scene. The fourth Grunt was pressed up against his belly, squirming, staring up at him and wailing. The Grunt was impaled on a fork of blinding light, a Covenant energy sword. The twin tines of superheated, seething energy had passed through the Grunt. And through Baird.
He looked up into the face of the Elite. The massive creature regarded him through cold black eyes.
It tilted its head. Baird wondered what the gesture meant. And the Elite yanked the blade from both of them. The Grunt fell dead, Baird, back to his knees, clutching his belly.
Ferocious, burning pain seemed to consume his entire torso. He felt like his innards were boiling.
He looked down at his hands, expecting to see blood. There was none. The two holes in his clothes smoldered, the flesh beneath fused and cauterized. Baird fell face forward into blackness.
FIVE
―Wake up."
His mother again. It was time to go to school. But it wasn‘t the same. He wasn‘t cold. He was burning. He was on fire.
―Wake up." Insistent, but worried. Not mother. Mo Ye again.
―I‘m dead."
―You‘re not dead. But you‘re not in good shape. The blades passed right through you. Scorched a lot of stuff. Missed your spine by a distance I can‘t even make myself repeat."
―I feel like I‘m dying."
―That‘s not surprising. You have serious burns. And significant injuries. Internal and external. I‘m going to give you some meds, and we‘re going to try again."
―It didn‘t work out so good last time." He coughed and a spasm of pain squeezed him like an invisible fist. ―I‘m tired. I want to go to sleep." He realized that he did very badly want to sleep. And part of him knew what that really meant.
―I know," she said. ―I‘m sorry." Her voice, a perfectly directional whisper in the dark, was filled with what sounded like a lover‘s sorrow. No more mean old lady.
Baird tried to wriggle out from under a Jackal‘s body. The creature, which looked so light and birdlike, was incredibly heavy. With a groan of pain, he pistoned his feet against it and shoved. It rolled off, and he rolled free.
She told him what had happened when he blacked out. The Grunts had simply piled up the
corpses—their own fallen and Baird‘s supposed carcass—on top of each other in the medbay. Mo Ye had stayed quiet.
The big Elite had been suspicious and visibly angry. He had barked orders at the Grunts and communicated the events back to the Heart of Midlothian ‘s bridge, where presumably other Covenant troops—and those Engineers —were attempting to crack Mo Ye‘s main systems. The Elite had shown a little more caution this time—and smashed the autosurgeon.
He raised himself up on one arm, then another. He grabbed the dented, scorched edge of the
autosurgeon table and hauled himself up, grimacing in agony and suppressing a shriek.
―Meds," he gasped.
―Yes. Meds," she said.
The dispensary clicked and hissed open. Inside the plastic cubby were four vials: two identical, full of clear liquid, the third blue, the fourth a distinctively piss-colored yellow. There was a very old-fashioned-looking pneumatic handheld syringe gun beside them.
―What are these?" he asked.
―A painkiller, a beta-blocking sedative, a metasteroid for the burns and interior inflammation, and a Waverly-class augmentor ."
―What‘s an augmentor?" he asked. But he already had an inkling.
―This one‘s a cocktail. It contains a derivative of phenylcyclohexylpiperidine, an artificial slow-release synthetic adrenalin and a rapid coagulant."
―You‘re talking about a Rumbledrug."
―There‘s no pretty way to paint it," she said.
Rumbledrugs had become notorious in the sporadic colonial insurrections. Notably on Hellas and Fumirole. On both worlds, they‘d been used by rebels in a vainglorious attempt to fight Spartan-IIs.
The drugs were certainly fearsome. The effect on human physiology was impressive in the short term. Unencumbered by the body‘s normal safety limits, subjects were capable of feats of enormous strength, but the subsequent lack of control and mental instability together with the immediate physiological damage meant that users often died long before they ever laid hands on an actual Spartan. But not before doing tremendous damage to themselves and anything that got in their way.
―The beta-blocker will keep you focused," she said, as if sensing his thoughts, ―and calm."
Sweat poured down his face. His guts roiled. Pain wracked him.
―The plan this time?"
―Same as before."
He loaded the syringe, one vial at a time, and with each of the four shots felt progressively better.
As the last one flooded his arteries with a cooling rush, he felt almost good .
He looked at his wounds through the holes in his T-shirt. The punctures were about two inches across, thick lateral slits. He felt around to his back, twisting to see in the medbay‘s mirror, the darkness hampering him. Two exit wounds, a little smaller, spanned his spine. The skin around them was dark red and black, like ripples on a pond, spreading outward in twin elliptical shapes. It looked angry and painful, but he felt nothing.
―Mo Ye."
―Yes, Baird?" she replied.
―Why didn‘t you try to inject me with the autosurgeon? The syringe at least looked like it would still work."
―Because, like I told you before, in this condition, I can‘t do anything to harm a human."
He nodded. ―I understand. How long do I have?"
―I can‘t say. With the drugs, maybe an hour or two. Without them, you‘d be dead sooner. Which is the only thing that allows me to even tell you about the meds."
―Then there‘s no time to waste."
―Baird . . . once you leave the medbay, you‘re on your own. I‘m trapped here, dumb and useless and disconnected. They‘re not going to risk giving me any more access to ship systems until they have what they came for. ‘Til they reconnect my systems. And I don‘t see any reason why they‘re going to do that."
Baird looked at the mess around him. Dead bodies, but weapons too. He picked up a plasma pistol, retrieved two plasma grenades from a bandolier on a Grunt‘s armor, and grabbed the carbine from where he‘d dropped it.
By habit, he checked his weapons, patting himself as if for reassurance that he had everything. He patted the empty spot where his combat dagger usually sat. He looked around. On a stainless-steel tabletop was a gruesome-looking surgical blade, with a nanometer edge that glinted wickedly in the red glow. He picked it up carefully and bound the delicate surgeon‘s grip in a thick swath of surgical tape, creating a more practical handle, and slid it very carefully into his belt.
―Baird. I wish I could do something more." Mo Ye sounded frustrated.
―Then wish me luck." And he was gone—into the cold darkness of the ship‘s dead corridors.
SIX
He encountered a frozen tableaux of carnage. The Covenant had simply left the dead where they fell, or piled them against walls. Human gore and viscera everywhere and not a trace of reciprocal Covenant blood.
The drugs were working perfectly. The Destroyer was not large; he kept to the shadows and snuck through some of the ship‘s duct systems. He felt almost elated , like a ghost. But he could also feel the damage in his guts, a kind of dull, removed itch, like a memory of pain. And it felt wrong. He knew he was dying, but at the same time, he‘d never felt stronger. He felt these conflicting clocks ticking, both counting down to something fatal. He made it undetected to the engine room in less than fifteen minutes. What he found there almost made him quit.
The engine room door was scorched and hung on its track, jammed forever in a half-open position, like a slackened jaw. They‘d been here, but there was no sign of them now. Just more human
corpses. The engine bay was massive, ceilings vanished completely into blackness above him, but the systems were still humming and there was more light here. More light to illuminate the bodies of the crew.
Some of them he recognized, even through horrific burns. He stepped gingerly, respectfully, over them, heading for the control head unit beyond the bulk of the Shaw-Fujikawa drive.
It was a fairly banal instrument, considering its prodigious power. The slipspace drive could literally rip the fabric of the universe apart but could be controlled either remotely by AI, as was the norm, or manually, via a simple keyboard and touch-screen.
Mo Ye had walked him through the procedure several times, made him repeat it back to her. It was simple and it sounded foolproof. As he rounded the bulk of the control panel he saw what they‘d done and sighed.
Melted to slag. Deliberately. And as he examined the Shaw-Fujikawa drive itself, he saw they‘d attempted to wreck it too. It was impossible to know if the drive still functioned or not, but he knew for certain the control panel was FUBAR.
―Plan B," he muttered to himself and started running back the way he‘d come—glancing regretfully at the perfectly functioning row of lifeboat pods.
The trip to the bridge wasn‘t as uneventful as that to the engine room. He ran around a corner and surprised two Grunts, one of whom appeared to be sucking food from a nipple atop a weird little tank on the floor. Baird didn‘t stop to examine it. He shot one straight through the face with the Carbine and with the stock caved in the skull of the would-be gourmand. Neither had time to react or even squeak a warning, but the loud metallic report of the stolen Carbine was sure to attract attention. He kept moving.
Now he really had their attention. He heard a clamor behind him as Covenant troops reacted to the sound. Every sense, every instinct in him screamed panic, but something, he liked to think his own personal tenacity, held him steady. Kept him moving forward. Part of him knew it was the chemicals coursing through his blood. Another part of him wanted to sit down in the dark, cross his legs, and wait for it all to be over.
He remembered walking home from school one day. The world was white with snow. Black,
leafless chestnut trees spidering into the gray-yellow sky, itself pregnant with more flurries to come.
He remembered the chill sweep of the Water of Leith, the tenacious little river cutting a black ribbon through the pristine white.
He remembered carefully stepping through the snow, lifting his little legs high to make crisp, clean footprints, like Good King Wenceslas. He remembered the thwomp as he deliberately fell backward, arms spread to absorb the impact. Lying there, staring up at the sky. The simple depth of the imprint he made in the snow protecting him from the bitter wind. He remembered feeling warm and safe and remembered thinking, even as a child, ―This is how people freeze to death."
This is how people freeze to death.
What exactly are you doing, Baird? he thought to himself as he ducked under a moribund heating conduit, now glittering with ice, and into a pipe-tangled corridor not much wider than his own broad shoulders.
What’s plan B? Charge into the bridge and ask them to throw down their weapons? Fix Mo Ye with less than an hour to live and only the barest grasp of how an AI even works?
The plan, he decided, was to keep moving, keep shooting, and make sure that these motherfuckers rued the day they boarded The Heart of Midlothian . The plan, he grinned to himself, was to take their precision operation and turn it into an embarrassing and memorable clusterfuck . He couldn‘t win , but he could act like a broken autosurgeon: First, do harm .
Two more Jackals sprinted by in the darkness of the main Deck 4 hallway to his right. He froze.
Surreal in the blinking red strobe of the emergency lights, their birdlike gait matched their raptor skulls. Their clattering footfalls masked his own sounds.
So they were looking for him. Let them look. Let them find him .
The pipes intersected and then branched ahead, blocking his already claustrophobic route, but he knew where he was—Astronav, which meant the bridge proper was just around the corner. To his left a bulkhead wall, to his right, a gap in the pipes into the main corridor, and beyond that, the bridge.
He slowed, stopped, and waited. Listening. Silence, but his jangled nerves and superattenuated senses caught something else. The slight smell of activated methane gas. Something was here. He chanced a look around the corner, his head a blur in the darkness. Two Grunts, guarding the bridge entrance. They didn‘t see him.
If he gave away his position now, it would all be for naught. Think .
He looked to the heavens for some kind of inspiration, seeing instead the spiderweb of conduits and pipes hanging feet below the ceiling proper. Space was a premium on a Destroyer, and that meant sharing headroom with plasma conduits, air-conditioning, electrical cabling, and a myriad of power and life support systems, like a steel gray circulatory system.
He took the ugly surgical blade from his belt and put it between his teeth, its cruel edge facing outward, and quietly hauled himself into the piping, with agility that belied his bulk, and vanished silently into the dark.
When the second Grunt heard the weird choking sound from his partner and turned, he had just enough time to see the looming human‘s eyes glint in the darkness before the blade sliced through his own neck, almost decapitating him. His breathing apparatus hissed a mist of cold methane into the equally frigid air. The smell of Grunt blood mingled with the gas to create a rank, coppery smell like an olfactory pastiche of human blood. Baird lowered the Grunt gently and quietly to the floor, like a sleeping baby.
But Baird was shaking now. The exertions were taking their toll. No pain yet, but God knew how much internal trauma he‘d suffered, and how long he had left.
He looked at the doors to the bridge. Their solidity and silence seemed to mock him. The
bioluminescent blood from the fallen Grunts, blue and steady, cast almost as much illumination as the emergency lights, but that light was already fading, losing what potency it had. Like himself, he supposed. And the plan formed in his mind, just like that. It wouldn‘t work, he thought, but it didn‘t matter. All bets were off.
Baird breathed deeply. Got control of his shakes. He wiped blood from his hands on the pants of his uniform, smoothed the stubble of his close-cropped hair, palmed the door security pad, and strode confidently into the bridge as he were the captain himself.
SEVEN
The scene before him was bizarre. Perhaps a dozen Grunts, several Jackals, and two Elites stood intently watching two hovering gray armored blimps, perhaps four feet long, as they trailed their tentacles over the bridge computer terminal. Engineers , he supposed.
At the sound of his entrance one of the Grunts turned, almost bored-looking, and then shrieked an unintelligible warning as it saw who, or rather, what, he was.
Baird threw down the Carbine, put his hands up, palms facing outward, and yelled as loud as he could: ― I CAN GIVE YOU THE EARTH COORDINATES! "
The Jackals either didn‘t care, or more likely, didn‘t understand a word, and leveled their Carbines at his head. Only a thunderous roar from an Elite stopped them from perforating his skull.
The Elite stood eight feet tall. In the comparatively bright light of the bridge, Baird saw the dark gray, almost black, armor. He‘d faced countless Elites in combat, but this one was like nothing he‘d seen before. The Elite‘s saurian face was largely hidden by an impressively decorated helmet.
Whatever ranking it was, it looked important .
It was the same one who‘d stuck an energy sword through him at the medbay. And he knew
instantly that the Elite recognized him too. It was staring at the burned flesh and fabric at Baird‘s abdomen. Then it looked at Baird‘s face. Baird had no idea what the Elite was thinking but hoped he recognized confusion, at least.
― I can give you the Earth coordinates! " he yelled again, glancing at the circle of gun-wielding aliens now forming around him. ― All I ask is that you let me go, let me take a lifeboat. Let me live. "
The Elite tilted his head and glanced at the Engineers. One of them rotated slowly, like an airship, its weird spiderlike eyes glinting inscrutably. It made a chirping sound, a trill warble. The Elite nodded and barked something back at the Engineer.
The circle of onlookers widened a little—as if to let him through—and so he gingerly stepped forward. He addressed the Engineer, wondering if he had this all right. The drugs were starting to fade, and the returning pain was making things shaky, confusing .
―You have to reconnect the ship‘s AI system. She has the coordinates. She‘ll obey me, but not you."
The Engineer rotated to face the Elite and again chirped. Again, the Elite barked something, glaring at Baird the entire time, shaking his head. Baird stepped forward, closer to both. The Elite snarled a final order at the Engineer and unsheathed his sword. The points of it hissed and sizzled, leveled at his neck. A fairly universal warning: Don’t try anything funny .
The Engineers both turned back to this new task, literally disconnecting some of the cabling and then performing more delicate ministrations with those strange tentacles. A light flared on the bridge console and an automated voice announced blaringly, ―BASELINE REINITIALIZATION OF
UNSC BATTLE CLASS SMART AI ‗MO YE‘ PLEASE WAIT."
A few seconds later and a small dais in front of the bridge terminal flickered to life with Mo Ye‘s diminutive form, brightening back to wakefulness, reconnected and fully restored.
Baird turned and spoke directly to her. ―Good to have you back, if only for a moment. I need you to give them the slip-space coordinates for Earth."
She looked back at him, trying to figure out what the hell he was up to.
―Mo Ye, these creatures want Earth‘s location." He winked. ―Are you reconstituted enough to give them access to those, uh, coordinates ?"
Mo Ye looked desperate, pained. ―Baird—I have access to all the ship systems now, but they‘re being careful, they think you‘re trying to trick them. What we talked about in the med-bay is still true. I can‘t override the first law in my current condition."
He winked again, a great big shit-eating grin spreading across his face. ―Security clearance: Robot , passcode: Asimov ."
An Engineer chirped an explanation, calmly. Things seemed to be progressing as the human had promised. A sense of excitement, a murmur, spread though the assembled Covenant—they realized they were on the brink of a great military breakthrough.
But Mo Ye moaned as she realized what Baird was up to. ― No . . . Baird . . . wait . . . "
Baird did not wait. Baird turned around and looked up at the Elite‘s puzzled face. He hauled back his right arm and with an open hand, slapped the Elite straight across the jaw with all the force his drug-fueled system could muster. The impact broke bones in his hand, and he felt a satisfying reciprocal crunch from the Elite‘s jaw. The massive alien staggered, sagged, and fell to one knee, stunned by both impact and surprise.
Before it could do anything else, Baird looked him in the eye, now level with his, and said, ―Well, you stupid arsehole? Think you can do it right this time?"
The Elite roared in fury as he swung the energy sword in a scything arc and took Baird‘s head off cleanly at the shoulders. Baird‘s body keeled lifelessly backward. Arms spread out wide, as if falling backward into snow.
The Elite spun around and glared at the AI‘s shimmering form.
―Passcode accepted ," she sneered sarcastically, her eyes lit from within by some
unknowable emotion . ―Self-destruct sequence initiated. Four minutes and counting ."
The Elite barked at the Engineers, who were already moving, herding Grunts out the door, and translating the grave news of the impending destruction.
The Elite started a quick-march back to the Covenant boarding pods, just a few floors below, glancing at an arm-mounted chronograph. He chanced one hate-filled glance back at Mo Ye,
standing, arms folded, on her plinth. She stared at him with a coldly venomous expression and spoke flatly this time.
―I‘m kidding. There‘s no need for any countdown whatsoever."
The Elite blinked.
The Heart of Midlothian‘s network of shaped nuclear charges briefly flowered in the shadow of the gas giant like a beautiful little star. Then, as the chain reaction crushed the exotic fissile materials in the engine bay, it burst outward like a supernova.
The explosion washed away the Covenant Cruiser and its nameless gray escorts like a blizzard covering footsteps in the snow. And soon, all was quiet again. And cold. And peaceful. Like midnight.