Pursuers

First, the main power generators went offline, and no amount of troubleshooting seemed to bring them back online. Luckily, the auxiliary power systems kicked in and life support returned – it wasn’t a total resolution of problems, but at least the lights were on and the oxygen was pumping. Resorting to centripetal force beat not having gravity at all.

The bad fortune didn’t end there, however. Communications with the rest of human civilization were cutoff. The Smart AIs went missing. For Roxanne, this wasn’t a new phenomenon after spending the last three months running from the pursuant Office of Naval Intelligence and their Colonial Security lackeys. Regional power outages were an expected occurrence for high-value fugitives like herself; at least they would be if the UNSC Navy presence wasn’t dead in the water as well.

Whatever killed the power on the habitats and starships orbiting the dust ball called Reach wasn’t tied to military intelligence, and it certainly wasn’t intended for dear little fugitive Roxanne-D107. It took another two days of involved spacewalks to rescue stranded starship crews and complete checks on the power grid before the glorious conquerors arrived.

The main power systems came back online suddenly, breaking light fixtures across Roxanne’s station from the sudden power fluctuation. The real damning surprise, however, came in the Slipstream arrival of two giant owl-like machines the size of UNSC cruisers. Overhead speakers were spontaneously hijacked, and some propaganda-like speech was given by a female voice, promising salvation or destruction for those deserving and that the Created had arrived.

Roxanne didn’t really get who or what the giant, shiny alien ships were or who they represented but their representative spoke earthborn English perfectly. Maybe she would have stuck around to see what happened next, but after getting acclimated to being on the run – the preteen Spartan was easily spooked.

The moment giant Forerunner automatons began teleporting into the hallways, she was wide-eyed and sprinting for an escape pod. With just a dingy jumpsuit, a deftly hidden bug-out bag, and a life support helmet, she sealed the reinforced doors behind her and climbed into the cockpit of her commandeered Bumblebee reentry craft. She could hear the dull banging and shouts of confusion at the other end of the doors and through the metal around her, but Roxanne didn’t slow.

She inserted a salvaged thumb drive containing an ONI bypass-key program and hoped it worked as intended. There was always the possibility that the SinoViet Corporation patched its legacy operating systems, and this would become a very short escape attempt.

Tapping her fingers anxiously on the Bumblebee console, Roxanne allowed herself a sigh of relief as the SinoViet logo and animation were promptly replaced by a black screen and familiar digital scroll, announcing the little skeleton key performed its magic.

The screen ran through several walls of passing text, much of it gibber-like decryption codes. Months before, the bypass tool served as Roxanne’s magic wand, allowing any human vehicle to become her own in a battlespace. She only used a few times in the field, but always on the prerogative of her ONI superiors – never on her own accord.

Walls purred to life around Roxanne’s omnidirectional seat, light fixtures kicked into flickering and flaring spasms, and machines beeped and honked into activity. While not innately familiar with the Class-5 family of Bumblebee reentry vehicles, another advantage of her bypass-key was the intuitive directions and procedures stored on the little data stick. All the physical steps found in a traditional diagnostics check could be summed up in a matter of seconds with a push of a button; ONI at its finest.

Roxanne clicked the diagnostic initiator and closed her eyes to remember the vague similarities between Bumblebee and Pelican dropship reentry processes once drilled into her head by special skills instructors during training. It didn’t return to her vividly, but the basic principles were there, floating in her mind; she called upon them all the same.

Opening her eyes, the Spartan buckled herself into place, donned her life support helmet and tapped a few more touchscreens to connect her heads-up display to the Bumblebee. The diagnostics pinged back positive along with the reentry vehicle’s designation: Lima Oscar Lima 12.

LOL-12 hummed at Roxanne’s very command, her helmet and neural implant linking to the little spaceship’s nerve center. A quick swap to external cameras and the networked imagers aboard the station informed her that the giant owl ships were holding their orbits and keeping a moderate distance from the human facilities. The door pounding of station residents had quieted down finally as the crowds raced elsewhere to escape the stalking Forerunner machines in the hallways outside.

Knowing of their infamous teleportation capability, Roxanne waited no more and activated LOL-12’s manual release override. There was a popping noise from armored doors outside, parting for atmosphere and vacuum to meet. A second more passed with the only new noise being the whoosh of space wind slipping by the pod as it descended out the side of the SinoViet space station and down towards Reach below.

Roxanne closed her camera view in favor of her naked eye tracing the rounded horizon and the blackened surface of a world she once called home so very long ago. Reach approached little by little, growing bigger and bigger with every second that passed. A red tint shaded the edges of LOL-12’s reinforced window view and the first violent hints of the planet’s atmosphere became known.

The Spartan clenched at her armrests as her body was shaking about within her seat’s confines and the extreme temperatures caused her body to spontaneously sweat. Roxanne growled to herself in frustration as the hard burn, unguided reentry took its toll on her body and the lifeboat.

She didn’t do herself the service of planning a reentry path and now she knew she screwed up. Roxanne grunted in frustration as the pressures and tumbling only grew more violent with the rising temperatures in the Bumblebee’s crew cabin. The girl’s head was forced painfully into the left side of her headrest while her eyes struggled to keep open against the inertial forces working against her. Lights and sights were blurring together, too fast for her to process but the rapidly changing of space-black to planetary-white was enough to tell the girl she had stumbled her way into an uncontrolled spin.

Even with her augmented strength and blood, Roxanne couldn’t muster the resolve to challenge gravity and her mind began to slip in and out of conscious. A series of warning chirps reported the loss of oxygenated blood to her brain, but it was beginning to sound more like actual birds by the second. Roxanne slipped, her mind descending to a point of pure instinct. Everything turned white and she abruptly lost track of what was happening.

Darkness. That was all she managed to recognize as her mind promptly began to reboot itself; the danger finally reaching an end.

She didn’t get the chance to rest, however. Skittering noises scampered all around her. The dull, metallic chants of thousands of feet pounding the earth at once. Wincing, Roxanne muttered to herself for the first time in some hours. “Where’d the marching band come from…?”

Blinking into awareness, she noted firstly the extent of shattered glass sprawled across her thighs and the floor below her seat. Roxanne then noted the scraps of metal, remains of her control panel, were strewn about the interior of LOL-12’s cabin. There was a pressure atop her legs; looking down, Roxanne grunted at the sight of the touch screen section had crumbled around her waist, trapping her beneath a cubic foot of metal.

Glancing up and out what remained of the cockpit window, Roxanne spotted two or three more Bumblebee-type escape pods – designated LOL-13, 15, and 17 according to her HUD. Together, the crashed lifeboats were swamped in a dust storm of unknown proportions with sharp specs of dark glass waiting to present lethal hazards to the more adventurous and least cautious. Individual IFF tags also popped up on Roxanne’s HUD, marking engineers, security personnel, and civilians among the wreckages – many of them alive.

Roxanne wanted to smile at that, knowing that more people had gotten away from the Prometheans. And no thanks to her but at this point, she was just looking out for herself. She had to. Some part of her shifted uncomfortably at the selfish thought, this idea of fighting only for herself.

She was a Spartan; well, not anymore. Or maybe she still was. What made her a Spartan anyway? Her augmentations? Her scarred-up armor, buried somewhere? Her identity? Her service to Mankind?

Those wandering thoughts didn’t last long. The breather and confusion and peace ended as soon as they began. Faint humming hissed over the whirling winds of Reach’s grasslands as aircraft began their approach. Glowing orange circles descended from the sky, forming into the vague outline of aircraft as they got closer.

Glowing orange sections. Silver-colored bodies made of an unknown metal. Technology beyond even contemporary aliens. Prometheans again. It was the Prometheans.

Panic swamped Roxanne once more as she noticed orange dots dancing at ground level around the escape pods, just out of sight in the shifting darkness. Tens. Hundreds. Thousands?

The scuttling noise suddenly became familiar – began to make sense. She didn’t know how long she had been out, however; Roxanne had lost her head start already. Promethean Crawlers chittered and clicked at one another in the darkness as they examined the human escape pods from top to bottom.

Gunfire erupted from LOL-15 and immediately all hell broke loose. Bolts of orange flashed across the darkness, outlining two SinoViet troopers near the escape pod’s rear door. They took hits from the Promethean weapons and immediately disappeared in flashes akin to lightning. Their bodies shattered and shriveled up in mid-air, transforming into the very dust that spun like a tornado around Roxanne’s own escape pod.

No. No. No! She had to get out of here. Greater panic raged in her heart and blood as she pressed two hands to the base of the touch screen board. The metal sheet groaned under the force of an augmented child-soldier and slowly crumpled under her determined weight. It was by no means impressive when compared to what Roxanne could do in armor, but it was a respectable feat on its own.

Gunfire continued to roar from LOL-15 but eventually quieted only to be replaced by more gunfire from 13 and 17. Crawlers popped into orange dust and Forerunner shrapnel while human security troops flashed into bits of dust as weaponized hard light disintegrated their bodies.

Roxanne wanted to scream as she heard the blood-curdling shouts of agony and surprise as the mercenaries were turned into nothing in seconds. She couldn’t see their faces, but she could vividly imagine their deaths. Their bodies glowing little by little, as if in slow-motion, turning a fluorescent orange color, evaporating down to their muscle layers as their skin disintegrated followed by said muscles, then the skeleton, and then that too. Gone to dust and nothing else.

Gone, gone, gone.

Yanking her combat knife from her bug-out bag strapped securely to her mid-drift, Roxanne aggressively slashed her buckled restraints and freed herself from her chair.

Seconds flew by and the gunfire stopped. Roxanne didn’t bother with the rear door of LOL-12; the doors were jammed shut and her console was gone so there was no way of activating them. Instead, she mustered her way straight through the mess of glass, relying entirely on her jumpsuit to keep her from being exposed to the radiated and shrapnel-filled air that dominated the surface of Reach.

Glass crunched under her boots and she gave pause only to survey the sea of Promethean Crawlers curiously drifting between the escape pods, examining them for the survivors within and for the threats they might hide. A few of them glared straight at Roxanne with their bright orange holes that could be loosely described as eyes.

She didn’t bother waiting to see if they’d shoot. She sprinted atop the downed Bumblebee lifeboat and leaped over the crowd of Crawlers to the best of her ability. She didn’t make it very far and ended up crushing one of the Forerunner robots under her boots.

She still didn’t look back yet.

Run, run, run.

Skittering noises followed Roxanne as she ran. She ran past rocks and rebar, past sludge ponds and starship debris. The skittering followed.

Roxanne tripped over herself, descending the length of a previously unseen cliffside only to collect herself in a tangled, bruised mess at the bottom. She groaned in pain but compartmentalized the grinding pain erupting from her knees and right shoulder.

The Spartan finally looked back from where she fell and could barely make out the glowing orange eyes rotating in the darkness from above, searching for the hunting scent they just lost. Roxanne didn’t know if she could continue running; uncertain of what to do next, she looked at the cliff and stared up at it. Soft and powder-pounded with the extent of glass dust, she reached once more into her bug-out bag and pulled out a tarp and folding trench shovel.

Frantically stabbing at the dust and dirt, Roxanne cut a small outcropping of dust and dirt from the cliff face, leaving a mound of soft sediments at its base. It wasn’t a big pile, but it was enough to look like an extraordinarily large anthill.

Laying the tarp on the ground, she pushed the mound over the tarp and spread the dirt over it until it disappeared from her initial inspection. Satisfied in a haphazard and panic manner, Roxanne scamper-crawled underneath the tarp and pushed herself as close to the cliff face as she could.

The skittering noises drew closer, the signs of the Crawlers getting ever closer as she knew full well that the dog-ant-like Forerunner automatons were capable of all-terrain to the next level, capable of climbing over-all sturdy surfaces.

Roxanne dredged up more dirt with her arms, pulling them closer to her in hopes of further hiding herself among the dust.

The skittering continued to approach, little by little. A whimper escaped her lips as fear gripped her heart. Please, please. She dared to hope once more to get lucky and escape her pursuers.