Seven: The Maw (Light Fuse, Run Away)

Because the Spartans were in a dropship and not a Banshee, they had to be very careful when they unloaded themselves into the same escape pod dock that John had gone into in the Origin. However, Cortana obliged them this once by taking control of the ship and holding it in place, then reprogramming the autopilot so the thing would buzz off to Alpha Base. "We need to get to the bridge," the AI said as the dropship zoomed away, "From there, we can use the codes to initiate a detonation of the ship's fusion engines." Then, her voice filled with sarcasm, "I hope we'll be able to destroy it this way; I don't have a backup plan."

The Spartans ignored her, moving the only direction they could through the burned out halls: left. That, in turn, forced them to move through the Autumn's maintenance access ways when a scorched blast door blocked their path. Moving single file through a very small and dimly lit passageway was not their idea of a safe combat zone, but since when has any combat zone been safe? Infection pods boiled up out of the floor, climbing a ladder through one of the hatchways in the ceiling of the floor below, and Kelly managed to angle her plasma rifle up and around Fred to help him pop them. The latter of the two tossed a grenade down the hole to clear away the others that they could see skittering around at the base of the ladder, and they all heard the POW that indicated the presence of carrier forms, as well as the hissing of the Sentinels' lasers. When it all went silent, they dropped down to the lower level and took cover behind the support beams, their assault rifles rattling as they fired on the floating toasters, which exploded and clanged to the floor. They charged past the slag and went around a curve –

Where more infection pods darted in though one of the open lifeboat hatches and swarmed their ankles, furiously attacking the plates protecting their legs. The Spartans decided not to waste ammo and stamped them to death before continuing on to a locked hatch.

BANG.

"Dammit."

BANG.

All of the Spartans backed up, and Kelly and Linda primed grenades for when the door broke open.

BAM!

The hatch's locks snapped, letting the combat forms spill into the much large hall, and the rest of Blue Team opened fire on the nearest ones, the two females' grenades sailing toward the back and blowing the others to hell. They let fly a frag around the corner to kill the ones their motion trackers picked up, and headed though the hall, though they stopped dead when they heard the growl of the Hunters beyond. That made them pause, and they could hear the tell-tale howls of the Flood as they engaged the beasts. After a brief conversation over their COM, Kelly crept into the larger hall to scope out the situation. There were Flood clogging the hatches to the mess hall, and based on the occasional green glow and "WORT, WORT, WORT!" the Covenant were inside.

Fantastic.

A pair of frags took care of the Flood, and Linda's quick trigger finger dealt with the Hunters, who were spinning around whilst trying to get rid of the Infection pods clinging to their feet. They charged in after the Elites and their Grunt minions, and when the fuel rod guns some of the Grunts were carrying exploded, they took plenty of the Covenant with them. Unfortunately, two more Elites and a handful of the Unggoy tore out of one of the side passages, but these were also taken care of with some plasma grenades. The subsequent explosions by the fuel rod guns took out more of their foes than expected and enabled them to more on through the hatch, the opening for the bridge off to their left.

There was yet another squad of Covenant SpecOps on the actual bridge itself, but the eight Spartans were more than a match for them and approached the main console when the last body hit the ground. Fred slotted the AI inside the holoprojector next to the main view screen, and she shimmered into view, form as crimson as ever. "I leave home for a few days, and look what happens," she muttered, crossing her arms and shaking her head, "This won't take long." She touched a finger to her temple, then continued, "There." A twenty-minute timer flashed up on the screen. "That should give us enough time to get to a lifeboat and put some distance between ourselves and Halo." Fred reached for her chip –

"I'm afraid that's out of the question, really," 343 Guilty Spark said over the ship's PA system.

"Oh, fuck off," the AI snapped.

"Ridiculous," the Monitor continued as if he had not heard her, "That you would imbue a warship's AI with such a wealth of knowledge! Weren't you worried it might be captured? Or destroyed?"

Cortana had tracked him down; "He's in my data arrays," she growled, "A local tap."

"You can't imagine how exciting this is!" Spark said, "Having a record of all our lost time. Human history, is it? Fascinating." He zoomed about in Engineering, continuing, "I will enjoy every moment of its categorization! To think that you would destroy this Installation, as well as this record? I am shocked. Almost too shocked for words."

[Shut up then.]

'Be quiet.'

On the bridge, the countdown came to a sudden halt with a little over nineteen minutes to go. Cortana's voice was incredulous. "He stopped the self-destruct sequence."

"Why do you continue to fight us, Reclaimer?" The Monitor sounded like he was berating a disobedient child. "You cannot win! Give us the construct, and I will endeavor to make your death at least relatively painless and-"

Spark's voice cut off mid-sentence, and the UNSC AI smirked. "At least I still have control over the COM channels."

"Where is he?" Fred demanded of her.

"You could say please. I'm detecting taps throughout the ship, Sentinels most likely; the Monitor… he's in Engineering. He must be trying to take the core offline; even if I could get the countdown restarted… I don't know what to do."

"How much firepower would you need to crack one of the engines' shields?" Grace, the explosives expert, asked her.

"Not much. A well-placed grenade, perhaps, but why-"

She turned to see Grace tossing a grenade with one hand and resting the other on the rocket launcher that Sam still had, and the AI's eyes widened. "Okay," she declared, "I'm coming with you."

Once again, Fred reached to pull out her cartridge, and Cortana cried a warning as Sentinels appeared at the bridge's bay windows. Fred tugged her from the console and ducked below the barrier, letting the other Spartans take care of the problem while he put her chip back into the slot in his helmet. All of the toasters were gone when he reemerged, and the eight humans headed back out into the hall as Cortana said, "Head to the cryo chamber. We should be able to reach the engine room through there."

The door that they had come through was sealed, and they couldn't run through the solid wall to their right, so the group turned left and headed past one of the support beams, coming across a sealed hatch that promptly burst open and spilled Flood into the hall. The Spartans' shotguns and assault rifles tore holes in their bodies and the titanium A of the walls behind them, and once the area was clear, they found themselves in a small scale armory and quickly scavenged for ammo. They were about to head through the far door when a low grunt alerted them to the presence of a Hunter pair on the other side, and they saw a handful of combat forms go skipping by through the fiberglass panels of the door.

Literally skipping.

Cortana started laughing, and the Spartans all looked at one another, each having an identical expression on their faces behind their visors.

What the fuck…?

While they were busy trying to figure out if they really saw what they thought they'd seen, the Hunters and the Elite with them had come under fire and were returning fire on the Parasite. A plasma bomb from one of the Hunters was sufficient to take care of the lot but also set off a chain reaction with the grenades on their persons, killing one of the armored worm colonies. The other roared in loss, and the human warriors took that opportunity to charge from their hiding place and pitch a few plasma grenades at the Hunter's turned back, the subsequent explosions killing it instantly and sending it flying to crush the Elite with its immense weight. Sam shot the Sangheili between the eyes, and they moved on down the next stretch of hall, where they came across some Infection Forms attempting to tango with four Sentinels. Though the little bugs were doing a surprisingly good job, their hopes of winning first place in a dance contest were not to be, as the Sentinels zapped them to bits, and then the Spartans took them out.

[Aw, man! I was gonna take them on So You Think You Can Dance?, you jerks!]

Cortana snorted as the humans ducked under a half-raised hatch and gunned down the two Sentinels waiting for them in the next hall, passing through the door just beyond them. The arrow on the floor said "Cryo B," so they must have been in the right place; the Flood and the Sentinels were having a battle royale in the far corner of the room, and no one took any notice of them when they slipped past up the ladder and onto the second floor. There, an Infected Elite and human took exception to their presence and fired wildly in their direction, but they and the Sentinels that were hovering in a glass hall in the center of the room were annihilated with a couple of shotguns-to-the-face. They pressed on into the next hall, where the Flood came at them in droves and Sam found reloads for his rocket launcher. By taking out the carrier forms first, the explosions and grenade detonations they caused wiped out a lot of the combat forms charging at them, enabling the Spartans to pass mostly unhindered.

The main passages beyond were blocked with debris, forcing the Spartans into another maintenance access way, where they encountered a Grunt being chased by a dozen Infection Forms. They let the Flood take care of it and continued on to the next hall, where the Covenant and the Sentinels were attacking one another as if there was no tomorrow. Which there wouldn't be, or at least not for them. Red Team came out and faced the Sentinels, and with Blue Team facing the Covenant, they blew the hell out of everything in sight, high-tailing it out of there before the Flood spotted them (they had just come bursting out of a hatch at the opposite end of the hall).

"We should head to the armory first; stock up on ammo," the construct suggested to the warriors, and they did so, following the arrows on the floor. There was a wealth of munitions just lying around, having fallen from its racks when the ship crashed, but something made Fred raise his head from reloading his shotgun. Instinct prickled at his spine and made the hairs on his neck stand on end, and the low hiss of a hatch sliding open made him pause. None of the Spartans were close enough to one to have made it open, but it had, at the very back of the armory. He fired at a slight heat distortion in the air, and a Flood combat form staggered and died, letting him spin to take out the other. That made them quicken their departure from the armory; now each of them was carrying a rocket launcher and either an assault rifle or a shotgun.

"Okay, here's the plan," Fred told them when they paused in the hall just outside engineering, "We're splitting up into teams of two, and each team is going after one of the reactor shields. Grace, Linda, Douglas, and Alice, you're handling the rockets; the rest of us will expose the shields and cover you. When we're done, we'll regroup on the third floor; Cortana says that there's a service lift that can take us out into one of the hangars, when Foehammer can pick us up."

The others nodded in acknowledgement, and they proceeded inside, splitting up to deal with their fusion reactor. The foursome in charge of the rockets remained on the second floor to enable a faster dealing with it, while the other four quickly made their way up to the top floor, blowing Sentinels out of the air and sending the Flood back to hell where they belonged. Whatever controlled the latter seemed almost desperate to stop them; it was throwing everything it had at them, Elites and humans and carrier forms.

Not that John was, of course. He just didn't want to have to haul all the combat forms all the way to Delta Halo when they decayed and stunk worse than rotting fish, and the carrier forms popped every five seconds. The infection forms were fine; they were already boxed up in one of the cargo holds on the MoonBlade, which was en route to Installation Zero-Five.

Cortana swiftly walked them through the process of opening the exhaust couplings leading to the primary fusion drive shaft, and the couplings pulled back almost as one, letting the four Spartans on the third level turn their weapons on the Flood and Sentinels, ignoring the random statements of the Monitor in the background. The four with the rocket leapt up onto their respective couplings, steadying themselves when the immense conduits began to retract, exposing the shafts that were their targets. It may have taken a couple of tries, but all of them got at least one rocket into the core, causing the openings to explode with equal force. The couplings contracted automatically, returning to their closed state, but it was too late; the Spartans leapt up onto the third floor and tore off in the direction of the elevator, vaguely hearing Cortana shout, "We've got fifteen minutes; GO, GO, GO!" amidst the explosions now taking place as the reactors send out surges of power, blowing out various systems with the increased voltage.

The door leading to the lift was locked but exploded outward when the last of the Spartans rounded the corner; the lift was somewhere above them but they could hear it descending. "Back up; Covenant!" Cortana called, and Linda and Grace sprinted to the fore of their pack, rocket launchers still on their shoulders, simultaneously firing when the lift dropped into view, bearing an Elite and its clutch of Grunts. The aliens screamed and died in the ensuing explosions, leaving the Spartans free to claim the lift. After the fiberglass doors slid shut but were blown out by another explosion, Fred mashed a button, and instantly the eight fighters were rushing upwards, staying well clear of the edges.

"Cortana to Echo Four-Nineteen, come in Echo Four-Nineteen," the AI cried over the COM link, sounding surprisingly desperate on the line.

"Roger, Cortana," Foehammer replied, "I read you, five-by-five."

"The Pillar of Autumn's engines are going critical, Foehammer; request immediate extraction. Approach the crash site and be ready to pick us up at external access junction 4-C as soon as you get my signal."

"Affirmative, Echo Four-Nineteen going on station."

The explosions shaking the Autumn abruptly increased in frequency and intensity, and Foehammer was back on the radio a moment later.

"Echo Four-Nineteen to Cortana, things are getting noisy down there; everything okay?"

"Negative, negative," the AI called as the Spartans emerged into a Warthog storage bay. They had any number of vehicles to choose from, and after about fifteen seconds, three of the reconnaissance vehicles went tearing out the opposite opening, the first two carrying three Spartans and the last one holding two. "We have a wildcat destabilization of the ship's fusion core; the engines must have sustained more damage than we thought!" To the Spartans, who had just driven through a firefight between the Covenant and the Flood: "Analyzing… we have six minutes before the fusion drives detonate. We need to evac now! Activating final countdown timer; when it reaches zero, the engines will detonate. The explosion will generate a temperature of almost one hundred million degrees. Don't be here when it blows."

The three vehicles each took their own path through the room, reaching the end at almost the exact same time, and it was much the same for the subsequent tunnel. The next room was a bit harder, but they all kept to one side, where a bridge extended over a series of barricades. They wove through the next two rooms and tunnels, and Cortana opened up a COM channel. "Cortana to Echo Four-Nineteen, request extraction now, on the double!"

"Affirmative, Cortana; Foehammer inbound."

Unbeknownst to any of the Spartans but not to their AI, John had been tailing the three Warthogs from the rims that ran along the edges of the Autumn's dorsal vehicle storage, the Dragon-horse effortlessly keeping up with the speeding LRVs, the Spartan himself monitoring their COM chatter. He dropped back a little, calculating the distance necessary for the leap…

All three of the Warthogs dropped about six feet and skidded to a stop on a circular section of bridge when Cortana said, "This is where Foehammer is coming to pick us up; hold position here!"

The Pelican appeared from off to their right, trailing smoke and tailed by two Covenant Banshees, which Cortana alerted her to, calling for her to evade and hoping that John had a plan to save her-

The plasma bomb impacted on the back of the Pelican at the same time as the Dragon-horse and its almost completely invisible rider landed on its nose; the beast's tail broke through the glass of the pilot's view screen, wrapping around Foehammer and yanking her free of the seat, the buckled seatbelt still attached to her. Just before the now-pilot-less Pelican soared underneath the bridge where the Spartans were, the Dragon-horse leaped up onto it, dumped Foehammer into the empty seat in the third Warthog, and tore off back in the direction that it had come, effortlessly finding platforms to jump off of and send it and its rider back onto the top of the Autumn, where it promptly vanished.

"Umm… Okay… Thank you?"

They could hear Cortana giggle for a second and say, "Woo – ooo – ooo – ow. Impressive," before she was back to business. "Calculating alternate escape route… Ship's inventory shows two Longsword fighters still docked in launch bay seven; if we move now we can make it!" Instantly, the Spartans put the pedal to the medal, barely giving Foehammer time to fumble for part of the seatbelt, using it to anchor herself to the vehicle while still enabling a quick getaway.

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Meanwhile, John had just leapt into the fish-shaped transport with his infected mount and shouted, "Let's MOVE, people!" The Infected at the consoles shut the doors immediately and performed a severely abbreviated pre-flight checklist: "Everything's okay - let's go!" The thrusters activated with a roar and sent them blasting away from the dying ship and the ring it was taking with it.

Over their internal channel, the Spartan bellowed, [Attention all Infected! You have one minute and fifty seconds to get off Halo! That is all!]

"Hi-ho, hi-ho, it's off to Basis we go-"

"NO SINGING!"

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The nav point on the Spartans' HUDs had gone from one kilometer down to nine hundred and ninety-nine meters and was counting down from there. Cortana shouted at them as they wove through the pillars in one of the tunnels, "Up ahead there's a gap in the trench; at top speed we should be able to clear it!"

They dropped no less than thirty feet and saw what Cortana meant while in free fall: there was a six-foot gap in the path, meaning that they would have to jump it in a manner that sent ripples of déjà vu through their minds as they sped towards it. All of the vehicles cleared the space, though there was a dangerous moment mid-leap where it looked like two of the Warthogs were going to collide, but the Spartans got control of the LRVs again. They were airborne again briefly when the tunnel they were entering dropped sharply, and the group of nine individuals passed through a very narrow tunnel with a path barely wide enough to accommodate the Warthogs in single file, but they made it.

There were some large cylinders preventing them from driving right up to the Longswords, so they bailed out, Sam saying, "Sorry, Foehammer," right before he snatched her up in a fireman's carry and ran full-tilt for the nearest of the fighters. By unspoken accord, Blue Team went in one and Red Team in the other, and the moment they were sealed and briefly checked over, the two fighters blasted out of the hangar, angling up toward the sky.

Behind them, explosions rippled the length of the Autumn, even as John's extra Flood forms marched resolutely to their doom, all of the Infected having evacuated the moment John gave the order.

The Longswords shook as they escaped the atmosphere, engines at full power to get them away from the dying ring, the g-forces forcing the Spartans who were not sitting to cling to each other and the headrests of the seats where Foehammer and Linda, and Grace and Douglas, respectively, were at the controls, aiming the fighters for the large gathering of UNSC and Covenant transports well outside of the explosion's range.

For an instant, the darkness of space was lit with the incredible brilliance of an utterly silent explosion, part of Halo breaking off following the initial detonation but before the shockwave rushed outward, giving all of the transports a vigorous shaking when the fighters decelerated to group with the other personnel. All of them swung around to watch as the small piece that had broken off went spinning across the gulf to break through the other side, shearing off a longer section of the ring. All over, large breaks were appearing in the land, in the seas, in the deserts, in the mountains, in the metal of the ring itself, and all of the Infected and the UNSC personnel – all of them, even the "seventy-sixth Spartan" – were completely and utterly silent, watching the destruction with both wonder and sorrow; Halo had been built for a terrible purpose, almost two terrible for words, but it had been beautiful just the same.

"We did what we had to do," Cortana said finally, "For Earth. An entire Covenant armada obliterated, and the Flood… we had no choice." They could all hear the same sorrow in her voice that they held in their hearts; though they had survived, they had lost a lot of good people down there, and there had been countless wonders that would now remain forever undiscovered in the ruins of the ring, wonders that could have brought victory to the UNSC. "Halo… It's finished."

"…No," Fred said after a moment, broadcasting it so all could hear, "I think we're just getting started."

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[ROGUE PROCESS x.X.x ERROR-ghost117]: And so ends the first of the three rings. We now walk the [Path of Demons] together, and our [Great Journey] has only just begun.

[ROGUE PROCESS x.X.x ERROR-ghost117]: /End log: Installation Zero-Four. /Begin log: OPERATION: First Strike.

**********

I feel it deep within, it's just beneath the skin

I must confess that I feel like a monster

I've gotta lose control, he something radical

I must confess that I feel like a monster

I, I feel like a monster

I, I feel like a monster

I, I feel like a monster

I, I feel like a monster

- "Monster," Skillet (Awake)