Derelict

Faintly, Kodiak-G114 could hear the ebb and swell of waves filter through his helmet’s speakers, seawater piling into crests which folded on themselves and crashed against the sides of a bulbous, violet monolith stranded in the surf. Their resounding booms and the angry hiss of seawater vanished as he freefell into the shadows of a gap in the leviathan’s back.

A solid surface came up rapidly. Bending so his knees absorbed the fall, Kodiak landed on all fours and quickly scanned his surroundings. The empty, squarish room was unremarkable except for the lustrous purple hue of every surface, gleaming in the diffused beam of a skylight torn from the sloped ceiling. These were the compartments of a Covenant starship.

This starship, however, was long dead. The transport had crashed in the ocean shallows years ago after bringing Jiralhanae colonists to the unclaimed planet. Once the passengers had scavenged all they needed to begin their new lives, the succession of alien warlords to hold dominion over Stavros in the intervening time hadn’t deemed the unarmed vessel worth dragging back out of the planet’s gravity well. Thus, it had been left to rust where it ran aground a mile offshore.

None of this made the alien vessel’s bones feel any safer to a Spartan who’d trained most of his young life to kill the creatures such ships carried. Each dim radiance panel was still intact, leaving the chamber to look as though the last being to leave had simply turned out the lights behind them—and could be back at any time.

Shuffling to put his back against a wall, Kodiak tapped a screen embedded in the wrist of his white-and-orange MJOLNIR armor. Now that he was under the vessel’s radiation-shielded skin, a scan could be projected through every section of the ship. The UNSC had devised dozens of redundant ways to track a target, but this one knew them well enough to circumvent them all—except one. In his Heads-Up Display, a bar graph spiked as the scanner found a concentration of an element the Covenant weren’t prone to using: titanium.

He was on the right track. The next track in the trail lay somewhere in the broken vessel’s hull, and if he’d been fast enough, perhaps its end. He set his scanner to track the source’s distance—a counter appearing in the corner of his HUD—and reached over his shoulder.

His hand touched the stock of a rifle, unlocking it automatically from the magnetic clamp on his back. Pulling it over his head, he briefly inspected the weapon—magazine secured bullpup-style behind the grip, blue glow from the ammunition counter on a small dorsal readout, steel sheath wrapped over the barrel—and paused. The moment of indecision was shunned as soon as he realized it was there, and he flicked off the assault weapon’s safety. This mission had no more room for hesitation than any other.

Kodiak advanced slowly, sparing an eye every few seconds for his motion tracker. No blips of red flared on its blue field. The counter beside it ticked down only as fast as Kodiak moved forward. His target, if they were here, appeared to be holding position. They either didn’t know he was here, or were lying in wait.

When he came to a door, the interlocking panels failed to slide out of his way. The alien vessel was so excessively advanced that nothing worked without power. Checking again to be sure he was alone, Kodiak found the circular panel at its center and used the friction of his open palm to turn its featureless surface until he felt it unlock, then rotated one of the side panels up and into its door pocket the same way.

The counter dropped steadily. Fifty meters. Forty. Twenty-five.

At twenty, Kodiak second-guessed the placement of his every step, fixated on the open door ahead. The deck beneath him was uneven, the listing ship making shrapnel and discarded bolts pile in one side of the corridor. Darkness filled the room beyond save for a single shaft of daylight, revealing a crumbling mess where scavenged structural supports had given way, toppling several decks into the room below. The unvarnished debris seemed to absorb light, making the glowing ray stand in sharp contrast which blinded Kodiak’s night vision and VISR filters.

The counter placed his target on the other side of the room, unless they’d simply abandoned their titanium armor. He didn’t think it likely. But then, the target hadn’t moved since he’d arrived. Kodiak took up a crouched position by the open door, rifle held up and level. Had he caught them sleeping?

Something moved inside the room on his left, one of the indistinct shapes his mind created in the darkness suddenly shifting over another—right where the point he’d naturally taken was most open. Hair-trigger reflexes jumped him left to put the doorframe’s other side between him and it.

A rattling cough dragged out into a drone as a swarm of glowing lead flew at him—from the right, exactly where his counter said the target would be!

A feint, and one perfectly executed. Submachine gun fire spanged off his MJOLNIR’s energy shield, making it flare gold and dropping the shield status bar in his HUD as alarms began ringing. It was directed at his faceplate, trying to blind him with the shield’s distress and make him hesitate longer in the open.

But the M7 being fired at him wasn’t accurate enough, letting several shots go wide. Instead of choosing between the meager cover on either side of the door, Kodiak threw himself flat and trained his assault rifle on the enemy’s muzzle flash.

An augmented body custom-fitted to a reflex-enhancing suit locked tightly around a precision-engineered assault weapon, acting all as one fine-tuned machine; eyes and reticles guided the alignment of hands and barrel before finger depressed trigger released pin to discharge bullet, returning fire in a controlled burst.

A figure appeared in the darkness, Kodiak’s eyes filling out their form between a spiderweb of golden lines in a personal energy shield, flaring in response to his hits. The ambush foiled, they bolted, sprinting deeper into the shadows of the half-collapsed chamber. Not about to lose them now, Kodiak sprang to his feet and pounded after.

His quarry was fast, and knew the terrain, but he kept pace. Where she could dodge fallen beams and dangling power cables just a bit faster than he could, his advantage in strength proved just enough to batter some obstacles out of the way. She took notice, and shoved her submachine gun-filled fist his way to fire a few discouraging rounds. The debris she’d led them into, however, now blocked her shots, unable to even stop Kodiak’s shield from starting to recharge.

Kodiak nearly closed the distance, could’ve brought the chase to a halt by dragging her into a hand-to-hand fight, but his target had thought ahead about her escape. She swung her weapon forward and lit her way with its flash, hurling tracers into an oncoming wall. Struggling to see her target through the overlapping debris, Kodiak thought he saw the dim glow of a charged plasma battery the second before that part of the wall bloomed into brilliant fire.

Instinct stopped him short of the explosion, but his target fearlessly charged on. As the initial fireball flickered out, the flames survived in myriad colors atop pools of leaked plasma fuel, probably staged long before Kodiak’s arrival. In their hellish green and orange and violet glow, Kodiak at last saw his target clearly: a MJOLNIR suit, familiar not only because it resembled his own. It was painted entirely in gold, awash with colors of the flames surely hot enough to melt steel she dashed unhindered through.

An open corridor lay on the other side of the blaze, which his target dove down, leaving Kodiak far behind—but giving him a long, unobstructed shot at her back. Kodiak brought up the rifle and sighted down the optics, holding until he was steady…

The shape of her HAZOP armor resolved in his crosshairs. The variant allowed her to walk through flames with impugnity, like on Stratos when she’d taken on the danger of scouting through caustic fumes to rescue a teammate, or the countless times she’d ducked inside a burning building to pull someone out as he held the exit stable. He wasn’t stabilized yet. Not stable enough to—

She was gone. Turned around a corner at the far end of the hall. Kodiak released the breath he’d held to ready for his shot and glanced around. He could follow her down the cooling corridor in just a few minutes, but she was expecting that delay. There had to be another way through, and in a moment he spotted it. The deck above, blown out by the explosion, led into corridors of its own running parallel to those below. Shouldering his rifle, Kodiak began to climb.

He was right about her expectation. As soon as she entered the next open room, a hangar shorn open by the scuttling to allow an unobstructed vista of the sea all the way to the brightly lit horizon, she slowed up. That was when Kodiak dropped beside her.

Startled, she tried to bring the submachine gun to bear. Kodiak intercepted her wrist and slapped the arm aside, but she turned with it and spun away, dancing just out of his reach—only to be cornered against the deck’s edge, with nothing but the starship’s ribs jutting into open sky. Nonetheless, as Kodiak advanced, she carefully trotted out onto one of the ribs like a balance beam, looking to jump to the next. Kodiak unshouldered and raised his rifle, unhurried. He’d already seen the jump was too far.

“Drop your weapon, Amber!” Kodiak barked. “There's nowhere to run.”

Before the last word had left his mouth, her pace had faltered, slowing up as the beam narrowed beneath her until it had no more footing to offer. She froze, neither looking for an escape nor turning to face him. The beam hadn't extended far enough to carry her out from under the vessel’s shadow, casting her stocky silhouette dark against the clear sky beyond.

“Nowhere to run.” Amber sighed through the crackle of her helmet speakers, softly catching the last of her breath. “Now that I think about it, they've been telling us that our entire lives: you have a place with us. They just leave out the ‘or else.’ ”

Kodiak choked up on the rifle's stock. His pulse pounded in his head, heart beating strong enough after the chase he feared it would throw him off in some crucial moment, fast-approaching now that she'd suddenly left herself vulnerable. “Then you knew it would come to this,” he called. “So just put the gun down and come with me.”

The command went unheeded, but Amber's voice broke as she replied, “I don’t know what I thought was going to happen.”

All Kodiak's resolve was undone by the regret poured into those few words. The mental image he'd held onto since his mission briefing—of a hard-hearted traitor who'd rejected her duty—was shattered by the reality of his friend, sorry for what she'd done and looking to him for help... through the reticle of his gun sights.

Fingers numb with shame, Kodiak's grip on the rifle weakened, all the machine’s lethal precision rendered meaningless as its muzzle dipped away from the target. A selfish, recriminating side of him demanded justification for letting his guard down, the conflict driving him to ask, “Then why did you have to get in the way? It was just one village, ONI probably does worse every week—and so do the Covenant that come from places like those.”

“So we should just be like the rest of them?!” Amber shouted, turning to face him at last. The sealed titanium had no expression, but in the thousands of hours their team had spent together, their helmets were a second face as much as the armor was a second skin: a mask, but a familiar one, no less associated with the person beneath it. Amber had been the only one in Machete whose faceplate was silver, and with her chin tucked low, its upper rim became a hostile, convex curve. “We can bend steel bare-handed, but we're still so weak total innocents threaten us? Does murdering them make us so much safer?”

“They... they knew about the map room.” Kodiak struggled to think back to the briefing. To the officer's rhetoric he'd heard but never in his life really cared to listen to. “They might have known where it led. If the Covenant had found them, they could've—”

“Might, if, could.” Amber shook her head. “I know you don't believe that.”

“I don't.” Kodiak admitted. “But what were we supposed to do?”

Something about the question made him feel like a coward. It felt less like searching for an answer he really wanted, and more like an excuse. He feared there were better questions he was too afraid to even think of.

The way Amber tilted her head, softening the angle of her helmet as if from anger to surprised pity, seemed to confirm it. As though expecting him to know. “You could've been a hero.” She replied quietly. “That's what you always told me we were supposed to be.”

“Did...” The question caught in his throat as he tasted its accusation, but the sting of Amber's disappointment forced it through. “Did being a hero have to mean killing Morgan?”

“IT WAS AN ACCIDENT!” Amber screamed, arm swinging wildly to fling her submachine gun away. It rebounded off the beam hard enough to bend its stock, and spun away over the abyss toward the water below. Without it Amber stood defenseless, but stared him down with head bowed and fists clenched at her sides.

“Then come back with me!” Kodiak pleaded, letting go of his rifle to answer Amber's fists with an open hand. “We can explain it to them, Erin can help—”

“Help what?” Despair overtook Amber's voice as the anger drained from her shoulders and out through her unclenching fingers. “I sabotaged their black op and killed another Spartan. Nothing can help that.”

Amber placed her gauntlets on either side of her helmet. With a subtle twist, she released its airtight seal and pulled the helmet free to turn it over in her hands. Dark bangs veiled her ashen face as she stared into its mirrored visor.

“They have places for people who cause them too much trouble. Places like Midnight, where they can lock me away to starve for anything but my own company. And if they're feeling generous, that won't just be the lie they tell you about what happened to me.”

“I won't let them.” Kodiak vowed.

A pained laugh grated through Amber's teeth. She looked up, and despite a fond smile, tears streamed from the corners of her gray eyes. “If you had that choice, you wouldn't be here.”

The helmet hanging by her side from a limp arm slipped from her fingers. It tumbled away, glinting briefly in the sunlight before Kodiak lost sight of it below the deck’s edge. His eyes flicked back up to find she'd taken a step back.

“Amber—wait!” Kodiak started, panic both urging and keeping him from stepping onto the beam after her.

“I won't let them put me in a cage and forget anyone wouldn't go along with them.”

“Stay where you are!”

Amber's smiling lips closed as her hair was caught up in a rush of wind, sending ripples to the end of each dark strand—as she stepped from the side of the beam and dropped.

Kodiak sprang to the edge on his knees—both hands grasping the brink, his rifle gone—and tracked her descent. Amber plummeted as a golden flash, hair foxtailing behind her. In seconds she hit the water and disappeared, folded under the waves and into the darkness below.

Frantically, Kodiak scanned the surface of an ever-widening area around her impact, hoping against reason she would resurface. Bolted into her MJOLNIR suit, she’d sink like a stone and be anchored to the bottom. With her helmet, the armor could supply her with air for ninety minutes. Without it… maybe ten, twenty at the most, if her augmented physiology stretched whatever oxygen hadn’t been torn from her lungs by the fall. Only one heart-rending thought kept him from diving over the edge after her: that she didn’t want him to save her.

Desperate to feel less useless as he knelt motionless on the brink, Kodiak’s fingers fumbled for the visor controls on the side of his helmet, mind still too feverish to ask if he really wanted to see a figure below struggling desperately for air. Infrared showed nothing below the water’s surface, ultraviolet just different colored nothing, night vision little more than static.

Staring at the fizzling wall in his Heads-Up Display, Kodiak realized he was stalling, working through irrelevant options so he wouldn’t have to see. Returning his visor to normal, he checked the simple point-to-point distance tracker and the counter appeared in the lower corner by his motion tracker. It held steady, rolling up and down only by a few decimal points at what must’ve been almost fifty meters underwater—dangerously low.

Ten minutes passed, and Kodiak waited. No change came from the counter, or the water’s surface. Another ten, the pit in Kodiak’s stomach growing as each passed, and still he waited.

An hour. Ninety minutes. A hundred. A hundred ten.

At a hundred eleven, Kodiak crawled back from the edge. He couldn’t bear to look any longer. How long had she been dead while he sat staring? An hour, or only choked the last reserves from her helmet a few minutes ago? Maybe she’d freed herself from the MJOLNIR somehow—but she couldn’t have resurfaced without him seeing, and as he hadn’t… Amber was dead.

Kodiak’s helmet tapped the floor as he curled up, shaking as he wept and cursed Erin and Parangosky for sending him after her, cursed the UNSC for making them Spartans, cursed the people Amber had tried to save for ever existing. Cursed himself for failing her, at every turn.