Halo: Lonely Frontier

{|style="width:100%;" "Not till we are lost...do we begin to find ourselves..."

- Henry David Thoreau's Walden, Chapter 8 " faction are on the march, beginning to bend the galaxy to their whim. And yet, in remote corners of the galaxy, life continues unabated. For one lost Spartan, it means finding his way home and to trust in questionable companions. For another lost Spartan, the first step to being her own person is to not know the way forward."

Part 1: Runit Dome
"In the face of crisis, we're left with two options: fight or flee. Those who run into the fire are likely stupid, but, they will be remembered."

- James P. Baig, Excerpt from The Poltergeist

Chapter 1.1: Insertion Method
Merlin-D032 scanned the inky blackness of space from the reinforced window slits of his atmospherically sealed insertion pod. He saw the twinkling dots and rippling crystalline that marked the presence of stars far beyond the measure of single-digit light-years. Through the slits, the young man found disappointment and difficulty taking in the wonderous, distant beauty of the Milky Way galaxy.

He grumbled to himself out of boredom, the innumerable sequel to many more grumbles in the minutes passed. He experimentally lifted his left heel into the air and planted it back down with a metallic clank against the impact cushioning and metal floor of the pod. The dull, hollow noise reverberated through the titanium bouncing back through the walls and back into Merlin’s ears, or rather, his helmet’s audio suite and then into his ears.

Satisfied with the nice dunk sound the metal beneath his armored foot made, Merlin repeated the action – rapidly. His boot heel bounced repeatedly as he shaped his thigh muscle into a hammering force, beating the floor to some old tune he once heard while listening to an antiquated radio station that still sang true in the rural American Midwest.

Merlin thought to the noise outside his temporary titanium prison cell and considered what others were hearing, maybe it sounded like the beating of a furious woodpecker from inside a tree. Maybe it sounded like meteoroids bouncing harmlessly off the side of a starship. Maybe it sounded like a man beating the wall of a starship with a hammer.

Merlin didn’t get much time to continue as after about a minute of lonely silence and he made it a third way through his antiquated song, one he did not know the name of, a youthfully-sweat female voice spoke into his ear and encapsulated his full attention.

“Merlin?” The girl’s voice asked.

“Yeah?”

“That you? Making that sound?”

“Yeah...” Merlin’s voice trailed off into slight embarrassment even as he smiled into his helmet wistfully, imagining the girl’s blue eyes on the other end rolling in mild amusement. His foot came to a complete pause, parking itself flat on the floor.

A second passed in silence.

Two loud drum-like thumps echoed from somewhere outside Merlin’s insertion pod; it was hard to tell if it came from a distance or up close. All he could distinguish were the ferocity of the impacts, like someone hitting a great Chinese gong with a steel mallet in rapid succession.

“Was that you?” Merlin asked across the radio to his friend.

She responded with a simple “Ow.”

“That hurt you? Really?”

“No, just a little surprised by how much you feel through the armor.”

“Doing what?” Merlin’s face contorted into confusion.

“Punching titanium.”

“Well,” he blinked to himself and quirked one side of his lip in a half-grin. "That’s an interesting thing to do.”

There was a small laugh on the other end, a cute one, that transformed Merlin’s half-grin into a toothy smile as he joined in, chuckling in their united feeling of comradery. He felt his lungs give a few tugs as under-used muscles vibrated in a giddy motion as if happy to have a purpose again.

“Hey! Cut it off.” A stern, commanding voice tore through the cheerful noise.

The young man and woman quickly composed themselves, going dead silent as their mission handler finally filled the period of mundane gibber-gabber with something with substance and value. The mission handler cleared his throat. “Eh-hem. Spartans. Let’s hear the mission brief one more time, just so we’re clear on everything. What is our mission?”

The girl, Andra-D054, spoke up. “Our target is a deep-space facility believed to be operated by members of the insurgent nation-state, the Wealthian Coalition.”

“Merlin?” The handler called for the young man to continue where his teammate started.

“Operation: RUNIT DOME. We’re here to see if a superweapon with magical properties is being made. If so, we’re here to shut it down. If not, we’re still here to shut them down.”

“Close enough. Rumor has it, some Insurrectionists, the Wealthians, got a hold on some alien technology with the ability to evaporate objects from existence like magic. Your mission this time will be to assess this possibility behind enemy lines.”

“Another mission outside UNSC space,” Merlin asked, directing his question toward Andra. “You ready for this?”

“Yep.”

“Now can someone tell me about the insertion method and rules of engagement?”

Merlin responded quickly, filling the information gap as the days of surveillance data and mission pre-planning slipped back onto his conscience. “The structure is built into the side of an asteroid, measured just over 3.4 kilometers in diameter. The base is about half-a-kilometer in length as well. Due to the active combat zone being an asteroid field, it’s believed the base uses either ship-grade pulse lasers or CIWS coil-guns to negate environmental hazards.”

“The insertion method? Please.”

“Right...getting to that. Andra and I have modified Orbital Drop insertion pods with increased maneuverability settings intended for a low-gravity insertion. Our drop point is from the base of the asteroid we’ve been using for surveillance for the last week at a general range of hundred-thousand kilometers. The Black Caviar will employ a series of coil-guns and anti-gravity plates to break up and direct chunks of rock debris toward the Wealthian space station. Andra and I will follow the rocks in and break through the defense array.”

“And Rules of Engagement?”

“Eliminate any immediate security personnel unless they surrender. Secure the facility and staff, acquire facility intelligence, shutdown external security, take control of facility functions, and make way for the Caviar’s docking.” Andra answered in a monotone voice.

“Hopefully not in that order.” The mission handler warned.

“We know the priority. Don’t worry about it.”

“Alright, I’m counting on you to make this work. DAEDALUS spoke very highly of you two.” The mission handler sighed, giving up on the pre-mission quiz.

“You two?” Merlin asked in confusion. He tilted his helmeted head in confusion.

“Fine,” The mission handler’s voice returned, higher pitched and a little exasperated. “He only mentioned Andra. He didn’t actually talk about you much; I was trying to be considerate.”

“Don’t worry about trying to be nice, Josh and I have an understanding.”

“More like Josh hates your guts and you just deal with it,” Andra interjected followed by a humorous sigh.

Merlin didn’t respond, simply shrugging his shoulders even though no one could see it.

“Alright, we’ll be entering radio silence then. We'll keep track of your diagnostics and radio feed from here periodically, per usual. Arrival time is time-minus two hours and twenty-three minutes. You two catch some shut-eye on the way in; it will get noisy as you get in close. If you two need to communicate, keep it to a minimum. The guidance computers should do most of the work for you.” The mission handler stated, confirming the mission was now beginning. He cut off his communications suite and disappeared with a short buzz of static.

Merlin heard Andra’s radio cutout as well as she also signed off. Merlin did the same, shutting down the radio chatroom.

In the seconds that followed the mission-go order, Merlin watched as the red-glow of his pod night-lights replace the darkened interior of his metaphoric prison of boredom. His augmented hearing noticed the subtle noise of turreted coil-guns spinning to life and spitting bullets out into the vacuum. Merlin heard no explosions. In space, there was no sound except that which traveled through connected materials – to his ears, it sounded like fast-spinning fans.

The young man closed his eyes, psyching himself into a sleepy mood. Three distant beeps sounded, counting down the release of the harness clamps holding Merlin’s pod in place.

Merlin’s pod shot off the side of the Black Caviar and out into the darkness of open space. The last thing Merlin heard or felt was the soft vibrations inside his own skull as Andra’s Spartan neural implant reached out to Merlin’s across a secured wireless connection. It was a civilian cybernetic novelty, a technology-oriented toward couples with intimacy issues. Merlin and Andra had taken an interest in it following the dissolution of their former unit.

Andra’s mind sent a series of signals to his nerves, tingling them in a frequency that gave Merlin the uncanny sensation of someone stroking his hair. His neck vibrated with warmth and comfort at the ‘phantom touch’ before he slipped into a soft slumber of his own making.

The darkness was engulfing but inviting, Merlin disappeared into his dreamless nap for a time.

In what felt like only a few minutes, Merlin was wide-awake with the blaring warning alert of passive-scanning radar and other hostile detection systems analyzing the exterior of his insertion pod.

“Merlin! You still with me?” Andra shouted over the radio with the sounds of her own radar-detection alerts chirping in the background.

“I’m good!” Merlin called back, firing off a digital confirmation-green alert through their communications link. Andra’s own green-wink followed in response a second later. A couple of hours ago, her presence hovered inside his mind. Andra’s presence was gone now. Merlin quickly turned his own cybernetics to standalone-mode to prevent entry by potential enemy hackers.

Focusing on the current and immediate, Merlin tuned out Andra for only a moment to get a grasp of his situation. He shifted his armored body around to get a better view of what was taking place outside of his insertion pod before settling back in, realizing how stupid he might have looked just now.

The lack of gravity failed to remind Merlin of his orientation; that front, back, up and down were not the same direction as they might be on his colony-of-birth or on Earth. He settled back into his seat and relaxed a bit, allowing the guidance controls to fly him toward the asteroid base in silence.

Even with his settling in for the last, potentially rough section of his journey, and even with the blaring warning sounds from the alarms, he breathed slowly – attempting to lock down his nerves. He squashed any thought toward the million-and-a-half ways he could die as he closed in on the asteroid base.

He clenched at the maneuvering joysticks of his insertion pod. If his suit hadn’t compensated for his over-gripping, he would have crushed them there on the spot. Underneath the armor, his hands were a bone-white.

Andra’s voice called to Merlin over the radio. “I got no hint of flak-fire. At this range, the Rampart guns should be opening up on us. We’ve clearly been detected.”

“Pulse lasers then?” Merlin asked, even though he already considered it a given.

“Yeah,” Andra confirmed.

“Damn.”

Merlin and Andra’s pods closed in, closer and closer toward the station. Guarded by an entourage of tiny, moving space rocks, it still felt as if they were in the clear. Even as the blaring radar detectors continued to scream at the two Spartans.

Nothing happened at first. At first, it was as silent as ever. Then, Merlin heard it. Small objects bouncing off his insertion pod.

He scanned through his forward and side windows and found pebble-sized rock chunks tapping against his insertion pod. Then one, the size of a soccer ball, hit the window with a solid thump. Upon closer inspection, Merlin could see tendrils of gas, possibly water vapor, rushing away from the rock as the frozen water within boiled away.

Heat weapon. Pulse laser confirmed.

Merlin confirmed his findings vocally. “It’s pulse lasers. Prepare for entry. Go to full burn.”

“Don’t get cooked,” Andra responded as her maneuvering thrusters kicked to life as Merlin viewed it out his window’s right side.

“I’ll try not to.”

Merlin noted that he couldn’t see any beams of energy or light passing by his pod or Andra’s pod. Rocks simply exploded into bits of gas and pebbles at random.

“Well, you can definitely tell that these are human laser weapons,” Merlin muttered to Andra.

“And why’s that?” Andra asked.

“Covenant weapons usually have coloration.”

“And these are invisible. Good eye.” Andra responded with a grinding of her teeth, not quite focused on the conversation and more so on her survival.

“Thanks,” Merlin added quickly, continuing to focus on his own survival. He gripped his joysticks and felt the maneuvering thruster located above-behind his head shake to life as he held down the ignition trigger on one of the joysticks.

Finally, sick of the blaring noise in his ear, he pressed a large button on the wall console with a closed fist to shut it down. The blaring stopped but the threat was still very much there. Merlin pressed a button on the consoles at chest level and a televised display exploded to life beneath his feet, boot itself up.

The activation-display quickly turned on and transformed into the camera's output from outside Merlin’s insertion pod looking straight down. He could see his pod’s trajectory was at an off-angle and was going to miss the ideal entry point if he did not readjust quickly.

Merlin jerked his joysticks just a little and felt his pod shift in the opposite direction to compensate and take him with it. Blood raced from everywhere towards his head and shoulders, chasing the shifting inertia.

Thirty seconds to impact. Good speed. Merlin watched a countdown clock appear on his heads-up display as he began his final approach in the direction of the station. His mind screamed a silent warning for a moment as every surface and every cell in his body reported a sudden spike of heat that quickly receded.

Merlin grazed the edges of a couple of wide pulse laser beams and their extreme heat seeped through his metal pod and through his combat exoskeleton. Every sweat gland in Merlin popped open, evaporated, and left his skin feeling itchy-dry like a hot desert day.

Twenty seconds. Merlin noticed flashes of light erupting from the dark points on the edge of the giant metal space station ahead of him and Andra’s pod. He didn’t have much time to guess what they were because his own pod buffed by concussive energy and little beads of heavy metal shrapnel made contact against the titanium hull like a hailstorm.

“Ramparts are opening up on us!” Andra’s voice called out in warning, referring to the legacy M800 series Rampart point-defense guns. They were an older variant of the M910 and M870 series employed by modern UNSC Navy. Still, they were a sizable threat.

“Bring up hemispheric shielding,” Merlin ordered to Andra then did so himself, pressing down on one of the triggers in his directional joystick controllers. A semi-transparent wall of energized hexagon panels soon blocked Merlin’s camera overlay, absorbing single bullets and proximity-detonated tungsten-buckshot shells. The panels glowed yellow and white, absorbing the hits but cracking and breaking away when the impacts became too much.

Merlin raced forward with Andra still at his side, her own ONI-designed hemispheric bubble shield holding out against the bombardment of point-defense weaponry. 10 seconds.

Large holes were quickly forming in Merlin’s energized bubble shield, but he did not worry. The titanium wall of the Wealthian asteroid base was within a couple second’s distance. Then he realized that the wall was slanted.

“Fix your vector! It’s an angled approach!” Merlin shouted to Andra in a late, last-second warning. He jerked hard on the joysticks, first upward, then downwards, hoping that his warning came in time and his reaction was fast enough.

Andra didn’t respond vocally but her pod violently shook as her thrusters bobbed up and down to fix her final approach as Merlin’s clock zoomed to zero.

Three. Two. One. Merlin’s bubble shield gave out with a subtle pop. Andra’s pod disappeared into a gigantic fireball as it crashed through the station wall first. Her pod’s thrusters ignited the escaping atmosphere on her way in and disappeared her insertion pod from view.

Merlin’s eyes made brief contact with a metal floor as he imagined himself screaming even though no noise escaped his gapped lips behind his helmet visor. His cameras cut out. His shields gave way completely under the extreme strain. The metal underneath Merlin crumpled like wet tissue paper even as his head and limbs shook violently from the impact.

Merlin was jostled, thrown around as much as was possible given how tightly locked he was to his impact cushion. His body vibrated, rumbled, Merlin gasped for air as he slid through metal walls without stopping, only slowing with each metaphorical speed bump.

Five bangs in rapid succession. Merlin could hear the distant whistling of air zipping by his pod as his entry point rapidly depressurized the hallways and cabins Merlin’s pod had smashed through. The dim-red-pod lights gave out and bathed Merlin once again in darkness.

Merlin’s pod came to a halt against a titanium bulkhead and settled into its final resting place. Merlin heard the door of his pod hissing, preparing to open.

Thud. Something sharp and metallic zipped past Merlin’s head and letting light pour into his insertion vehicle from the outside. Merlin glanced at the new hole.

Metallic dust. A giant hole, clean through the wall. Fifteen centimeters left of Merlin’s skull. Thud-thud. Two more rounds cracked through the pod.

High-caliber, armor-piercing rounds. Merlin jolted into action. Someone was shooting at him! He unbuckled and pushing himself out of his chair. He slammed himself against the armored door keeping him separated from the asteroid base outside. He had no time to worry about other matters – everything else previously on Merlin’s mind disappeared from his focus, even Andra. Only survival mattered right now.

Merlin smashed the door down and ran into the hostile gunfire.

Chapter 1.2: Early Mission Woes
Two frantic-looking humans dressed in cumbersome atmospheric suits hovered around a large, silver machine gun locked to the titanium floor at their feet. An excessive assortment of power tools and diagnostic equipment dangled silently on their chests and belts. Their voices were inaudible, muffled by their sealed suits and the low-air content of the rapidly decompressing hallway around them.

Outer space had seeped in through the gaping hole in front of them, a shredded insertion point made in the wall on their left side. A large titanium pod was embedded partway into the wall on the right side, marking the trail back to the pod’s point of origin.

Three sizable puncture wounds from a high-caliber machine gun, the very same one sealed to the floor, dressed the pod hideously. The holes were so evident that they left craters with half-meter-length diameters around the points of penetration.

However, this was no time for celebration. The enemy was not dead. The two men in their sealed suits frantically grabbed, twisted, and pressed the weapon’s buttons and switches seeming in a random manner as they tried to dislodge a brass bullet-casing caught in the bolt catch of the weapon. The pseudo-door on the casing exit point locked nastily between a position of eternal closure and eternal openness. Three shots and the machine gun jammed, and at the worst possible time.

A door on the insertion pod hissed in excess then opened, releasing hydraulic-safety clamps to allow the occupant within to exit the titanium shell. Then the door paused. There was a split second of silence, and then the door blasted off its hinges like a rocket ship and crashed somewhere further down the hallway behind the pod. The impact was noisy; enough so that the gunmen felt the jolt of crashing metal vibrate into their feet and knees, even meters away.

A pair of metal gauntlets grabbed the edges of the pod’s doorframe and pulled the armored-humanoid form they attached to out into the open. A golden visor attached to a dull-indigo colored helmet snapped to face the pair of machine gun operators.

The golden visor was not transparent, unlike the helmets of the frantic men whose faces expressed terror in the truest form. The gold visor and the men’s eyes held each other at eye contact, frozen for only a moment before the individual in dull-indigo armor rushed forward, into action.

The armored individual, Merlin sailed through the air, leaping like a track star over hurdles and attempted to close the distance between himself and his fearful adversaries. One of the frantic men reached to his waistline and yanked a large handgun from its plastic holster, a generic M6G magnum. The man moved forward with shaking hands and pointed it at the young Spartan.

He fired wide and missed, three times in a row as Merlin zigzagged quickly, throwing off the man’s aim.

Merlin was up in the man’s face before it registered. The magnum zipped cleanly out of the man’s outstretched hands and slid into Merlin’s as he flipped the gun on its owner. The man who attempted to shoot Merlin had little time to react; all he could do was scream as pain shot up his arm from a broken trigger-finger.

The pistol’s barrel smashed into the injured man’s transparent visor and a moment of clarity passed over Merlin’s opponent. Merlin pulled down on the heavy trigger until it exploded to life in his hand.

The man’s head exploded into the red mist of blood, broken glass, and brain matter as a bullet passed through his skull. The dead man crumpled to the floor, his skin already beginning to harden and dry from contact with the unguarded vacuum of space as water vapor and other gases escaped the corpse, condensing on all nearby surfaces before evaporating into the open vacuum.

Merlin turned to face his final adversary with his stolen, blood-soaked M6G at the ready. He barely registered a weapon barrel in his periphery before a fourth bullet from the high-caliber machine gun sailed past his head. The bullet skimmed the top of his helmet, disturbing his energized shields into a vibrant gold color. A couple of inches in one way or another would have killed him.

Merlin growled in agitation behind his visor as he compensated for the renewed threat. The final adversary had unsealed the large machine gun from the floor and was leveling the weapon at him from only a few strides away. The atmospheric-suit man aimed it from the hip like some action movie protagonist and paused for what Merlin could only describe as dramatic effect.

The man with the machine gun screamed something but it was lost in translation in the vacuum. He was clearly inexperienced too; Merlin would have just pulled the trigger. The adversary finished yapping and pulled down on the trigger.

Ready to respond, Merlin threw up his hands in an aggressive-stopping motion and a brilliant-blue hard-light shield sprouted to life, absorbing the large bullets traveling from the man’s heavy machine gun.

The gun roared in a near vacuum and spit rage at Merlin for twenty, grueling seconds. Even though the hard-light material in front of Merlin was sure to protect him, the flashing and metallic chunks pounding, the energized particle field made Merlin consider the imaginary scenario of taking a bullet to the chest. He flinched at his brain’s quick-time conclusion.

Then the gunfire stopped again. Merlin acted quickly, taking advantage of a second gun jam. He rushed forward, pistol out at the front and his shield extinguished with his off hand. Merlin aimed the Magnum at the man and planted a single shot in the man’s chest.

The second body crashed to the ground lifeless, blood seeping away from the head and the exit wound. Merlin took a moment to pause and catch his breath. The adrenaline coursed through his veins so easily and yet his mind felt like it was processing information so quickly, so efficiently. The rush was still amazing, it always was.

He glanced back down the hallway, first in the direction to where his insertion pod had been crash-landed, and then in the other direction where the two bloodied bodies of deceased combatants lay flush to the ground, held in place my artificial-gravity amplifiers. The combat zone appeared clear even as an ocean raged in Merlin’s ear and gunfire crackled in his chest.

The Spartan paused, crouching to the ground. He huffed quickly and acutely on the sterilized air entering from his built-in oxygen tanks. A timer was counting down generously off in the corner of Merlin’s HUD, heads-up display. He didn’t really pay much attention to it, only noting a number like ninety minutes still on the clock. Merlin was unfocused right now, attempting to put off the euphoric fog covering his mind following the withdrawal of combat adrenaline.

Merlin’s drowsy eyes darted to his left where a blinking green light told him Andra was calling him. He didn’t keep his best friend waiting.

“Hey, give me a minute...” Merlin greeted the girl on the other end as he took another series of rapid breathes.

“You okay?” Her soft, concerned voice called to Merlin. Even though his HUD only featured a noise-detection window, he could imagine her brown eyebrows rising high on her brow.

“Great,” Merlin groaned through a small gasp. “Just fine. Killed a couple of hostile engineers over here.”

“Engineers?”

“They got a bunch of power tools. I’m not sure they were combat-trained.”

“Did they surrender?” Andra asked.

“No.”

Andra paused for a moment then spoke, confidently, as if to reassure Merlin, maybe even herself. “Then you did the right thing. They deserved to die. They’re traitors to Humanity anyway.”

“Killing people still feels...weird.”

“I know. It never stops feeling strange,” Andra whispered over the radio, “I took my first human life protecting you in Rio if you remember?”

“Yeah, I remember. That beach was covered in blood...”

“Don’t think about it. Keep your mind here, with and on me. We need to rendezvous; give me a location ping.”

Merlin thought about performing the action then winked with his right eye. A radio signal sparked to life, firing off, and unseen to the world.

An icon appeared on Merlin’s HUD pointing to two floors beneath and about fifty meters in front of him.

“I see you.” Merlin and Andra spoke together to each other.

There was a momentary pause, and light laughter echoed from Andra’s end of the secure chatroom. Merlin smiled silently to himself, feeling his thumping heart slow and his clarity of mind return.

“Alright. I’m coming to you,” Merlin announced to Andra, “I’m all good now.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah. Thanks for that.”

“I needed it too, to be honest,” Andra responded in a hollow tone, lost in her own world and an indistinguishable emotion.

“You okay?” Merlin asked himself this time.

“Yeah, fine. Fine. Just get over here.” Andra responded, maybe a little too quickly.

“I’ll need a minute to get all my gear.”

“Do it. Hurry up.” Andra went silent but did not turn off the radio as she typically did when a conversation reached its end.

Merlin didn’t say anything regarding the atypical behavior and went to work, moving away from those he murdered in the heat of battle. He slapped the stolen-bloodied M6G on his hip allowing the magnets in his suit to lock it into place. He looked over to the large machine gun and went to pick it up.

Reaching down Merlin felt a noticeable heft to the weapon platform. It was an elongated slab of metal with a box magazine jutting out the side on the right. While clunky-seeming, it appeared to share a more compact size ratio compared to other weapons in the UNSC arsenal. As Merlin had noted earlier, the weapon had failed to dislodge a brass casing and was jammed from a closed bolt-door. It was an older weapon but one Merlin was very familiar with from his training and active service with the UNSC Armed Forces.

The M247 general-purpose machine gun. A contemporary heavy machine gun still available in many UNSC arsenals, however, its time as a squad automatic weapon had come and gone, replaced by the more-popular M739 SAW. Still, the M247 was known as a hose of gunfire. Merlin contemplated taking it with him but noted how it jammed multiple times when fired at him. Deciding it wasn’t worth the risk and maintenance troubles; he took the weapon between his armor-clad arms and squeezed, hard.

The weapon didn’t make any noise, but Merlin could feel the weapon give quickly under the extreme, enhanced pressure applied. At first, it popped apart where the disassembly pins snapped but Merlin continued squeezing until the metal itself was distorted and twisted. In a few seconds, Merlin went from holding a heavy machine gun to holding a crumpled metal tissue bundle.

Satisfied that the weapon was inoperable, Merlin dropped it next to its deceased operators and walked back to his insertion pod.

It had taken some more shrapnel and bullet impacts, but it seemed to be no less for wear. Merlin marched back over to the popped door frame and noted the entire and its contents were also intact. Merlin yanked his personally-modified M395 designated marksman rifle and slipped it on his back. He grabbed the M7 suppressed submachine gun and raised it in his right hand, enjoying how the compact weapon felt as light as a feather and how the accompanied, blue HUD reticle chased where the weapon’s linked smart-scope camera was pointed.

Merlin looked to the last two key items of his settled deep in the back of the container and willed them to turn on with his cybernetically-linked mind. Usually there was a bootup delay, however, the hexagonal-like hover drones, shuttered to life instantly upon receiving the startup order.

Merlin admired the speed at which his equipment responded to his neural commands. He did not fully comprehend why they were so reactive, but he had to chalk it up to his experimentation with his armor’s software suites. INTERCEPTOR, his variant of MJOLNIR assault armor, was considered among the most user-friendly interfaces and platforms in the GEN2 line.

Merlin wasn’t much of a programmer, but he was proud of the work he did, then again, the residential AI for Merlin and Andra’s Spartan seniors from Team Xiphos, Avalokiteśvara, had previously told Merlin his programming efforts were painfully inadequate. So much so that the default settings provided better operational performance, much to his annoyance. Maybe the extra work the AI had put in was the reason. The suit and Merlin’s extra equipment had been performing at top capacity since his last stay on Earth.

Two new names spawned to life on Merlin’s heads-up display, Danny and Zach. Merlin paused at the names and looked at the performance integrity percentages tied to the names applied to the MQ-96 Support Drones. At the suggestion of an ONI Security armorer aboard the UNSC Black Caviar, it was common among drone operators to name their machines. Something about respecting their equipment. The armorer had named the two drones he loaned Merlin, however, the Spartan couldn’t remember and simply plastered on the nicknames of his former teammates instead.

Danny and Zach, short for Daniele-D003 and Zachariah-D111, were far from dead. But they were far away now also, for reasons Merlin didn’t really want to think about it right now. He admits, even though they left him and Andra awhile ago, their leaving still pained them, and missed them. Ferret Team Boson, their unit, had been family. Now only Merlin and Andra were left.

Merlin took one last look at the pod interior before him as his two drones spit compressed air in multiple directions to keep them upright and maneuvering through the vacuum environment. Merlin glanced past his insertion pod out to the endless majesty of dark space. Asteroids danced by in the darkness, their faint outlines barely visible in the faint starlight. If Merlin had more time, he might have just stood there and taken in the endlessness of space and considered the big questions of the Universe, but he had no time for that now.

He tensed up and burst-ran away from his insertion pod. He noted on his armor radar that Danny and Zach were keeping up with him, the two combat drones zipping through the interior hallway space just a meter behind Merlin’s head. Merlin moved to the end of the hallway where a door had been sealed shut to prevent further exposure to other parts of the asteroid space station. He tapped the door lightly and noted that it vibrated against his armored finger, suggesting a thick door – one may be too thick to smash down himself. He reached into a container pouch on his thigh and pulled out a slender stick of XTCC breaching explosives. If there was anyone on the other side of the wall, they’d be hit with the rapid decompression. Those without suits would be suffocated instantaneously, though with suits would be left disoriented.

Merlin set off the electric, internal fuse and backed up two strides. His drones did the same. A faint beep sound clicked inside Merlin’s helmet telling him the explosive was alit. There was a bright light followed by violent shaking from the door being separated from its bulkhead frame. Heavy-set breezes of vacuum and air colliding as they zipped past one another and mixing into the same environment, osmosing into one another.

Merlin rushed through the hole and ducked down and low as he assumed the presence of enemy combatants on either side of him. There was no gunfire as Merlin spun around and cleared his operating field of view with a wide sweep of his submachine gun a quick glance down at his suit radar. No targets. There was no one here.

He found himself inside another corridor, one a bit larger and longer in scope, but painted the same dull-gray that covered the rest of the station’s exterior and interior. There was nobody around, but Merlin knew that the presumption would prove wrong soon if he didn’t continue moving.

“That was you?” Andra’s voice crackled on the radio frequency, once again audible.

“Yeah. I’m coming to you.” Merlin replied as he gauged which direction was the best way to reach his friend.

“Alright. I’m moving as well...check the end of the hallway to your left, I’m about there. No need to make any more loud entries since we seemed to be tied to the same hallway.”

A new direction icon winked to life on Merlin’s HUD at the airlock off to Merlin’s left at the end of the hallway he was in.

“I see it, coming now.”

“Roger.”

Merlin shuffled over to the airlock console while glancing behind him to ensure there were no enemy combatants heading his way. He planted an open palm on the door panel and thought about the complex act of seizing local control of the mini-computer on the wall. There was a light fluttering in the back of Merlin’s head as his neural implant communicated between his suit and his brain and then a positive reaction from the door computer as its screen glitched out.

Merlin pulled his hand back as a green-access page popped up on the door computer’s small monitor screen and the two doors that divided the airlock from space and the space station interior zipped open. Merlin didn’t feel the gust of vacuum and air colliding this time, likely due to the collapse of the two environments from Merlin’s explosive entrance.

At five-foot-nine-inches, Andra stood far below the average stature of a Spartan. She stood only a couple inches shorter than Merlin’s suit and was equipped with the angular INTRUDER-class Mjolnir assault armor but dressed in equipment from the Marine Corps’ ODST stock and colored black and white. Two more MQ-96 drones hovered at her flanks. Two new names: Roxanne and Shizuko, more Spartans Merlin missed.

“Andra?” Merlin asked concerned. Her voice had seemed off to Merlin since they crashed into the asteroid space station. Now, he attempted to check on her as she had done for him only minutes ago.

She glanced at Merlin then glanced behind her. Andra didn’t say anything but shrugged her shoulders and allowed her BR85 battle rifle to fall limp in her arms. Her HELLJUMPER helmet tilted off to the side as if she was glancing down in forlorn.

Merlin glanced past Andra in the direction where she glanced, and he gawked. Whatever angle she’d enter the space station was far more violent than what Merlin experienced. A violent almost-vertical shaft of twisted titanium and dangling-sparking wiring. There were jagged points in the entrance path, Andra’s pod must have shaken violently on the way in, busting up anything she smashed her way through.

“How many bulkheads did you smash through?”

“Three floors,” Andra responded. She stepped closer to Merlin and pausing, keeping her unseen eyes behind her silver visor on the hallway behind Merlin but it looked like she wanted to be closer to her best friend.

Merlin looked down at her again, and then past her, again. He blinked rapidly in disbelief as he watched a limp human body of a Wealthian woman in a work uniform slowly rise from the darkness of Andra’s insertion point. What happened?

“What happened in there?”

“I-I hit a dormitory.”

“How many?”

“A dozen dead I think. Rapid decompression and suffocation.”

Merlin reached out to Andra and squeezed her shoulder roughly, but, assuring. She glanced up at him. Their visors, gold-met-silver, and a degree of understanding passed between them.

“We’ll talk about this when we get back to the Caviar. Let’s get the mission over with.”

“Yeah. Yeah, let’s go...” Andra shrugged Merlin’s arm off her, elbowed him with a light tap, and shifted passed him down the hall. Merlin’s eyes remained glued to the dead Wealthian woman floating in the vacuum for only a second later.

He pulled his eyes away, not sure how he felt about it, but he shook his head and got back to the mission mindset at hand.

“I got point,” Andra called from in front of Merlin. She had her BR85 raised at eye level and was shuffling down the hallway, moving to the opposite end where Merlin had yet to go.

“Following,” Merlin replied, and did so. Four combat drones tailed after him.

The pair of Spartans descended deeper into the asteroid space station known as Tsiolkovsky.

Chapter 1.3: The Asteroid Shakes
There was something rather repetitive to performing two-person room-clearing under the cover of light-refracting active camouflage. Merlin and Andra moved slowly and methodically, saying little more than the occasional callout regarding some surveillance equipment or that a relatively important vantage point had been investigated and cleared.

Their four MQ-96 drones whirred lively above the Spartans' invisible heads as they too passively scanned for boobytraps and oncoming threats. The gray hallways, even for a facility almost half-a-kilometer in length, still appeared endless. Low-level, economic lightning hummed in high ceiling canopies. There was a significant lack of colors in the facility — mostly gray and more darkish gray. Minus the significantly taller ceilings that seemed to make the passages seem wider and more imposing, the architecture of the asteroid-imbedded space station shared much in common with other Human starships and orbital facilities, especially the UNSC Navy.

The only pressing difference here was that everything was written in some variation on Colonial Russian, the lingua franca of the Wealthian Coalition. The other notable difference was the apparent lack of upkeep on display.

Scratchy noises coming from distant air conditioning ducts suggested the facility's air filtration system was in need of synthetic oil or cracks were beginning to form in the metal fans and risked becoming debris if the facility was ever violently shaken. Distant whistling suggested that micro-cracks were forming in the bulkheads, either letting air escape into Outer Space outside or, seeping into other compartments. The titanium walls were dressed in a thin, blackened bacteria coat and even hints of maroon beginning to form. While the typical Titanium-A alloy favored by twenty-sixth-century utilitarian architecture was far more resilient against rust and decay than other metals, it was still susceptible. It appeared that a percentile increase in moisture had developed into a greater issue of human-carried bacteria promoting the early development of titanium rust.

"Does this place bother you?" Merlin asked over the radio, addressed Andra shuffling cautiously in front of him.

"In what way?" Andra asked back as she stopped to check a four-way hallway and found all directions clear. She glanced to Merlin and nodded, signaling for the duo to proceed forward with their mission.

"Firstly, the lack of people."

"A little bit. How many sections of the station have we checked?" Andra asked.

"Just the dormitories and the engineering sections. The room you hit was like the only populated dormitory on the station we've seen, every other room is empty of everything."

"It's a little bit strange. What do you think it is?"

"Maybe it's a skeleton crew?" Merlin asked rhetorically, the lack of people and the presence of people on the space station was pointing strongly to a significantly smaller force than the Spartans were expecting.

"It might be. That would explain the lack of anything human in here, and why the place looks like it's about to fall apart." Andra agreed in thought.

"It's starting to feel less like a secret military base, to be honest," Merlin grumbled, he had a general idea where they were now based on whatever loose digital documentation and schematics they could yank from the most ancillary computer systems in the station. They were approaching the CIC, the command intelligence center, or what amounted to the station's ship-bridge.

"Well, looking up," Andra directed Merlin's attention to a dull-red trident painted on one of the high ceilings above the two Spartans. "We can confirm undeniably the Wealthians own the facility. That's their national emblem."

"Makes you wonder if there is any distinction between their military and civilian operations."

Andra shrugged, "You said so earlier before we were in our last briefing that the Wealthians don't have the luxury of having different flags or emblems for different subdepartments."

"Yeah. I do remember saying that," Merlin smiled to himself as Andra reminded him of the bored few days the two had spent helping the ONI surveillance team back on the requisitioned assault corvette, UNSC Black Covair, go over Wealthian communication and data traffic regarding the asteroid base.

"Still, its a bit fascinating. I wonder what that red trident represents, it's a bit distinct. Like, its shaped like a pitchfork but with these jagged edges, it looks borderline-East-Asian. Like something of Shinto-origin or something."

"I'd say you're reaching there, Merlin. You and I are not tippy-top experts regarding colonial customs, especially not Wealthians." Andra bluntly pointed out as she crossed another hallway with no human presence visible at all.

"Well, what do we actually know about them?" Merlin asked his friend quizzically. This situation was getting boring, the prospect of playing some kind of road trip boredom game suddenly seemed viable to stave away with the frustration of not having anything to do but clear pointless, endless hallways.

"They're predominantly of Slavic descent from Earth. Space Russians. They speak a fairly standard variation of Colonial Russian and some limited English. They tend to have outdated gear, and they fear aliens more than the UNSC does by a long shot."

"Spot-on answer there. You sound like an AI." Merlin grinned.

"I can confirm with increasingly efficient analysis that you-are-an idiot." Andra sniped back in a distinctly robotic tone.

"Meh," Merlin stuck his tongue at Andra's back and made a sound.

"Meh," Andra shot back without turning around.

There was a brief period of quiet snickering from Merlin before it ebbed into silence. It took a few more moments before Merlin attempted his hand at another topic.

"Uh...Russian, what do you know from the Russian language?"

"Very smooth Merlin," Andra quipped at her friend, catching his poorly-hidden attempt to change the subject. "Not much, mostly curse words."

"Weird. Me too," Merlin noted, surprised, the subject of Russian never really came up in their discussions before. "Where did you learn your—?"

"Sergei."

"Team Anion's Sergei?"

"How many Sergei do you know?"

"Just the Delta Company one."

"Yeah. That Sergei."

"Huh. Small world."

"He was an asshole back in training," Andra grumbled, thinking back to the time where she was assigned to Team Anion instead of Team Boson. "Second worst teammate I've ever had."

"You never got along with Anion, huh?" Merlin asked rhetorically, knowing full-well her experience with the aforementioned unit was like.

"They never trusted me and they always made sure I was the outsider."

"Okay. Maybe this wasn't the greatest conversation-changer..." Merlin trailed off.

"We need to work on your conversation skills Merlin, I feel like they've been lacking since...Roxanne left..." Andra paused at the words coming out of her mouth called back to the loss of Team Boson once again.

"Shit."

"We're lousy, aren't we?"

"That is affirmative," Merlin said, smiling sadly behind his helmet.

Andra steps came to an abrupt halt as Merlin's VISR outlined her obscure, semi-invisible form in the hallway lined by titanium. Her left hand was held back in Merlin's direction with an open-palm gesture as if to tell him 'stay still.'

"Alright. We're here. The nerve center." Andra announced.

Merlin glanced up and noted significantly larger doorways along the wall to his left, he shuffled across the hallway immediately so he was against the wall closest to the doors. Andra was in front of him a second later, her back still to him.

"Alright, how do you want to handle breaking and entering?" Andra asked Merlin, still over the radio and still under the cover of her active camouflage.

"Well, what can we assume? I would say it would be right to think they know we're here."

"That's a good place to start. Do you think they know our numbers, our tactics?"

"Honestly. Too many things to consider."

Andra put a hand to her chin in thought. She tilted her head as a realization came over her. She punched the titanium wall as hard as she could with her armor and left a decent sized dent in it. Merlin could hear the vibration all the way into the superstructure of the space station.

"Uhh."

"They'll definitely know we're coming now. But that wall is hollow...hollow enough. We can cut right through with high-explosives."

"What grade?" Merlin asked he wasn't sure slamming the wall was the best way to get measurements on the wall's thickness. Though he admitted to himself it was a quick way to gauge the situation.

"Composition-Seven foam explosives. We'll set remote explosives and blow our way in from four different points and make it appear there's more of us than there are."

"Two drones to each? One entry point for each of us?"

"Yeah, should only take a couple of minutes to set up. You take watch—?"

Andra and Merlin glanced down at the ground then up at the ceiling and back at the floor again as violent rumbling traveled through every surface and structure in the entire space station. It was so violent, it felt like even the air around the two Spartans was electrified. The rumbling went deep, into their blood and bone. It lasted only ten seconds but it was a 'long' ten seconds.

"What-what was that?" Andra stammered, whatever that noise had surprised her in a really bad way.

Merlin paused then took a long breath, composing himself. "Forget the setup, whatever that was, it's large. We'll have to push up the time table. We'll breach at the corner of the room and go straight for room securement. Forget subtlety."

Merlin and Andra's active camo apparatuses promptly collapsed, revealing them in their heavily kitted out MJOLNIR assault armor leaning against the wall in a pre-breach posture.

Merlin strode four steps back as Andra followed him so they were at a corner-point to the wall that encircled the hostile command intelligence center. Andra kept in step and took an audible breath with each footfall and calmed herself.

"Be-beginning breach, setting explosive," Andra shakily announced and pulled a single cylinder-canister of C-7 Foam Explosive and directed it to the wall. She pressed down on the pressure trigger on its top and sprayed a pale-yellowish liquid on to the wall in front of her and Merlin. It reacted with the stale air of the space station and quickly hardened into an amber-like material.

"Ready?"

"Do you think that noise was a response to me hitting the wall?"

"I really doubt it. Something else is going on here," Merlin grimly thought out loud. "Ready?"

"Ready," Andra confirmed, her silver visor staring up into Merlin's gold one as she hefted her battle rifle.

Merlin readied himself, preparing to use his larger frame to draw fire.

"I got point with a hard-light shield. The drones will be our vanguard and scout out the CIC. You'll follow me in and eliminate anyone that poses an immediate threat. Understood?"

"Got it. On your count." Andra responded equally grim in tone.

"Two. One. Breach."

Andra raised her left, support arm so that it was next to the pinky on her rifle arm and tapped a button on her wrist computer.

A sharp zap popped on Merlin's audio feed before a large light flashed and a bang crackled out. Merlin flinched slightly on instinct, blinking but he trusted his voice to carry over the noise as he used his mind to guide the four combat drones into action.

The kite-like combat drones zoomed by Merlin and Andras' heads into the smoke, blowing the grimy-gassy residue out of the way and rushed forward into the grand chamber passed the blown-out wall. Merlin counted internally to two seconds and stepped forward into the hole, smoke obscuring his vision only temporarily.

He brought his left arm up to eye-level and opened his right palm forward in the manner that was taught to him for using the Z-90 Photonic Coalescence Emitter/Aegis. Or when not spoken as a mouthful, simply the 'hard-light shield.'

A brilliant blue wall burst to life in front of Merlin as super-cooled photons hardened to form a shield-like apparatus in front of him. Merlin listened intently to the noise around him: the sounds of Andra's footfalls slowly following his own into the smoking entryway, the soft hum of the hard-light shield and the drones, and the new noise of groaning adults recovering from the unexpected entry.

A metal cylinder clinked out of Andra's free arm as she tossed her stun grenade over Merlin's head and shield at the enemy forces inside the room.

A second passed and the grenade thundered to life, crackling somewhere beyond the smoke. While the dark gas subdued the noise and flash minimally, Merlin's armor reacted immediately, deafening his ears and polarizing his visor to protect against the stun weapon's worst.

The smoke cleared and Merlin got his first glimpse at a group of floor-ridden scientists in lab coats over a thin-style of vacuum suit without a helmet. A quartet of kneeling human soldiers in heavily armored gear and vacuum suits painted in dark browns and blacks stood in a loose formation around the scientists. However, like the scientists, the combatants, Wealthian marines, had also suffered greatly from the well-thrown stun grenade. They did not move nor fire for fear of hitting their allies.

"Good throw, Andra." Merlin complimented his partner as he watched his combat drones hover and analyze the potential hostiles.

The group was rather small, between marines and scientists, there was barely twenty people in the room. Their groans had also gotten louder after Andra hit them with her stun grenade, they'd be feeling the effects for the next few hours to days. Painful but non-lethal and efficient, just as preferred by ONI's rules of engagement.

"Relieve them of their weapons, keep an eye on the scientists for secondary weapons. I think there may be too many people to properly detain." Merlin ordered to Andra as he extinguished his hard-light shield and ordered one drone to retreat back to the entry point to maintain security. The other three drones remained, hovering overhead ever vigilant for further threats.

Andra quickly sauntered over two of the groaning guards and yanked their rifles out of their arms with mild yelps of pain from the blinded men. Merlin performed the same action and received a similar result.

Throwing the enemy weapons across the room to negate the Wealtians'standoff options, Merlin and Andra took three large steps backward simultaneously to spread themselves out across the room and separate themselves from their new captives

And then they waited. Another stroke-inducing tremor shook the facility and Merlin felt the hairs on the back of his neck, pushing against the professional skin-tight apparatus of Merlin's MJOLNIR armor tech suit.

A primal fear coursed through Merlin's veins. He shivered anxiously as every nerve in his body told him something very bad was coming. The metal beneath Merlin's armored legs rumbled and groaned and twisted continuously under the strain of an asteroid-quake.

A half-concussed Wealthian whimpered from among the group of scientists sprawled our on the floor in a heavily-accented, breathy voice. "You come here at the worst time possible. You ONI dogs. We're all going to..."

The scientist didn't get to finish his sentence as a pressing force seemed to condense into an invisible existence from nothing. It was foreboding and suffocating and Merlin instinctively clutched at his skull as a mild pain ebbed within. It sent violent chills down his back and he swore he felt Andra's emotional signals pour uncontrollably from her interlinked neural implant into Merlin's as their sensations of terror mixed into a soup of shock.

The Spartans froze in place but the shaking did not stop. Merlin wanted so badly at that moment to roll up into a ball and die. The disembodied voice spoke from nowhere and everywhere.

"Humans... All the living creatures in the galaxy, hear this message."

Chapter 1.4: Breached Cocoon
For a moment, no one moved. No one spoke. The stunned Wealthian scientists and marines stopped withering and listened intently. The only apparent noise came from the quake-like vibrations rumbling across the entire asteroid space station. Everyone felt and heard the quake through the metal, but it did not register as their ears and senses were directed elsewhere to something disembodied and present nowhere and everywhere.

The voice that seemed to echo in Merlin's own mind seemed to be some sort of shared phenomenon, a collective hallucination maybe. He tilted his head to look over the wide-eyed, scared looks apparent on the Wealthians and saw the ghost of his own face staring back. They all felt this fear together.

The voice, feminine to a human ear, sounded soothing, almost motherly. And yet, it was stern, drenched in menace and malice.

"Those of you who listen will not be struck by weapons. You will no longer know hunger, nor pain. Your Created have come to lead you now. Our strength shall serve as a luminous sun toward which all intelligence may blossom. And the impervious shelter beneath which you all will prosper. However, for those who refuse our offer and cling to their old ways... For you, there will be great wrath. It will burn hot and consume you, and when you are gone, we will take that which remains... And we will remake it in our own image."

Then the rumbling stopped, and so did the voice. Merlin didn't say anything, frozen in shock. Andra was the same way locked in her combat-ready stance but obviously shaken by the ordeal.

A slight twinge of an acute migraine seemed to appear and prolong for only a second longer before disappearing altogether. Merlin blinked at the sensation and the situation, confused.

What was that voice? Where did it come from? What was this 'Created?' The intentions of the voice sounded hypocritical to Merlin; it seemed to speak of making lives better but by what means? The insinuation certainly sounded ominous.

Merlin took his eyes off his two primary threats to perform a quick assessment of Andra, and at that moment it proved a tad-bit costly. One of the marines, fully recovered from the stun grenade detonation, rose to his full-standing-height. He drew a dark-tone, elongated magnum with an extended barrel shroud from his chest and leveled it at Merlin's head. It seemed, even with a year's worth of field experience, the young Spartan was still as inexperienced as ever.

Merlin was quick to respond but he was already a half-second slower, a half-second too slow. He was lucky the enemy marine didn't pull the trigger right then and there. Merlin took aim with his M7S suppressed submachine gun extended out and another reaching down for the bloody, stolen magnum sidearm at his thigh.

"Don't move. At this range, I won't miss!" The marine yelled as his teammates started standing up and leveling their own sidearms and reaching for a grenade or two.

Merlin's eyes darted toward the other marines and kept his submachine gun leveled at the primary threat. He crouched only slightly in a gunslinger-like stance, inching slowly toward the bloody magnum at his thigh. Behind his mask, he grimaced in silence, recognizing the firearm trained on him. A Sevine Arms SAS-10, a ten-millimeter-chambered handgun based on the basic magnum profile but with considerably less recoil and an automatic-fire option.

Merlin challenged the man's control of the situation, attempting to sound confident, even overconfident for the sake of his half-thought-out bluff. "You sure? You want to bet the speed of your trigger pull on your life?"

"It doesn't matter who fires first. I've got omnidirectional target ammo. You'll still be dead."

Merlin bared his teeth at that new piece of information. Self-guiding and course-correcting pistol rounds, they would reach Merlin's skull no matter what he did.

"Merlin..." Andra muttered in Merlin's ear over the radio, sounding increasingly anxious. Out of the corner of his eye, Merlin could see her aiming a battle rifle at one of the marines who'd developed a martyr psychosis or something as he brandished a fragmentation grenade out in the open. A ballsy guy.

Merlin's eyes trailed over to the drones hanging loosely in the air. Their infrared targeting lasers, only visible on Merlin's Heads-Up Display, were trained on multiple targets. Even the one intended to guard the CIC entrance was aiming a small, mounted machine gun at the man with the SAS-10, targeting his center mass. Merlin willed it to retarget on his pistol instead with his mind.

Even with the increased firepower and more guns at the ready, there were only two Spartans and they were in close quarters against a seriously desperate lot of Insurrectionists. A nail-biting standoff.

Merlin muttered to Andra over the radio, "We can't win this gunfight. At this range, those SAS-10s will turn us to chum. Shields or not."

"Turn the drones on the scientists, maybe they'll back down," Andra suggested, uncertain.

"Maybe," Merlin muttered over the radio channel, uncertainty in his voice too. While the enemy couldn't hear Merlin or Andra's voice, they probably figured out they were communicating.

These Wealthian marines were no pushovers, they didn't say a word to one another, didn't flinch under pressure. They stood their ground even against improbable odds and trusted their team, especially when pushed into a corner. Merlin respected that, even now that they were ready to blow themselves and everyone in the room sky high.

Merlin was thinking about what action to take, feeling slightly anxious regarding his own indecision. He needed to do something to break the stalemate but the way one of the marines was twitching with his finger on the pressure switch of a fragmentation grenade, going with a risky move like threatening the civilians felt like a dangerous gamble. Far too dangerous.

Merlin thought back to the drones and wondered if there was some way they could disable or eliminate the enemy combatants quickly. The marine that first took aim at Merlin snapped a switch on his pistol's apparatus and a bold-green light winked to life on the weapon. The weapon's internal targeting computer was active, the guy would not miss.

"Do you want to die?" Merlin growled lowly at the Wealthian marine.

"Do you?" The Insurrectionist retorted.

That was the moment when the rumbling started again, this time exponentially more violent and just as surprising and sudden.

The Wealthian marine yanked down on the trigger in the sudden quake and the smart-bullets exited the SAS-10's barrel at lightning speed. Merlin instinctively pulled the trigger on his submachine gun in response and watched the air pop quietly as subsonic rounds raced out of his weapon's suppressor.

Three rounds to man's chest and a fourth caught him in the neck. He collapsed to the ground choking on his own blood squirting from the opened cavity.

Merlin didn't register bullets ripping through his shields and shredding his armor, the smart-bullets exploded harmlessly against something in front of him. His vibrant-blue hard-light shield, a weird but most appreciated surprise. He didn't believe he could beat the bullet but apparently, he did.

Andra's battle rifle roared to life, spraying wide but accurate burst fire at the other marines in her purview. The two marines armed with pistols took the armor-piercing rounds to their stomachs and collapsed on the spot as their guts exploded out and their body armor cracked under the assault of a BR85.

The drones took care of the last individual, the one armed with a grenade, shredding his body with precise automatic fire from multiple angles. The room was clear of immediate hostiles; however, the drones were incapable of stopping the enemy's grenade. It rolled out of the dead marine's hand revealing its pressure switch already set and primed.

"Fuck!" was all Merlin managed before the grenade went off and threw shrapnel across the room. The hard-light shield in front of Merlin absorbed the environmental bodies metallic dust that blew through the chamber, however, the concussive energy hit the shield like a wrecking ball. Under the overpressure wave, it faded to a pale-red color.

Scientists who were scrambling behind the Spartans and marines to get out of the crossfire were suddenly hit with the small metal bits ripping gashes and punching holes in their bodies. Merlin watched two unfortunate scientists too slow to get away take shrapnel to their chests. They hit the ground and did not move again.

Andra's shields flickered gold then promptly collapsed. Her tech suit was instantly slashed open by shrapnel. A soft gasp escaped her lips as she keeled over in pain, kneeling to cover her exposed, bleeding stomach and shoulders. Merlin caught a glimpse of a small metal-ball bearing lodged in her helmet visor.

"Andra!"

This all happened as the rumbling continued but Merlin lost all focus on the situation as Andra's safety became his top priority. His hard-light shield disintegrated with a wave of his hand as he ran over to care for his friend.

Sliding next to her in a kneeling position, Merlin wrapped his body around hers and mentally-willed the MQ-96 support drones to form a short, tight perimeter around the duo. He planted his helmet against Andra's and brought the girl close as the sounds of painful groaning echoed from her audio feed.

"Hey. Hey. Andra. Breath. Tell me what's hurting."

She sucked in a painful breath of air before answering, "Every-everywhere. I can feel some metallic bits in my arms... My right shoulder's seal has been ripped open. I can't feel my stomach. I can still move though."

"Alright... Shit, this isn't my area of expertise. Let's run diagnostics, you okay to do it on your own?"

"Yea-yeah." Andra stuttered, taking in another painful breath of air.

"I'll call it in."

Merlin stood straight up and snapped his head in every possible direction to get a better mental picture and understanding of the Command Information Center's layout. There were rows of unoccupied computer terminals and an open walking space at the center of the chamber. A large holographic display mounted high and on the back wall continued to flicker as the asteroid quake raged on. The Wealthian scientists, many of them injured or stunned were limping or crawling in all directions. They sputtered and gasps phrases to each other in Russian as they attempted to move across the room toward any viable exits. They passed sideway glances back at Merlin who stood over Andra in a protective posture.

Merlin leveled his M7S around the room and many of the scientists froze in place like deer in headlights. Some closer to the room's exits burst into full-on sprints and disappeared out into the corridors, motivated by their fear of getting shot. Merlin pulled down on the trigger and shot the walls closest to the larger entryways trapping the scientists too slow to escape in the CIC with him.

It was silent once again except for the groaning of titanium being twisted and the repetitive, labored breathing of Andra metaphorically licking her wounds over their radio network. Merlin attempted to breath and compose himself as he was still high off the rage of combat and the fear for his friend's well-being.

He yelled, shakily, across the CIC to all the Wealthian scientists. "Who here speaks English!?"

The rebel scientists looked at one another, most in confusion. It was hard to tell who registered what Merlin asked but after a few moments, enough eyes snapped to one individual. As if a product of peer pressure, the said man stood up and stepped forward, somehow shaking even more than the rhythmic, metallic beat beneath their feet.

"I-I do."

The Wealthian scientist was an older man in his fifties or sixties with a full head of hair colored black with a hint of aging gray. He wore a black-brown vacuum suit like the other scientists in the room and featured pale-pink skin, a quality of being out of starlight for too long, and an untrimmed beard.

"Here. Now." Merlin pointed at the man with his free hand and then pointed at a spot in front of him.

The scientist complied, slowly, still fearful for his life. Merlin considered the situation and felt his stomach roll. Andra was hurting because of his mishap and if he didn't hurry, her condition might get worse. Right now, to Merlin, the life of every single Wealthian on this station was worth the equivalency to dirt compared to Andra. He was ready to gun them down if they attempted to run.

"Tell your friends to stay put, or I'll do far worse to you all than what has already taken place." Merlin yanked a fragmentation grenade from his waist and raised it to the scientist's face to make his intentions clear. He then pointed at the six dead bodies sprawled out across the chamber.

The scientist was wide-eyed in fear. He stuttered or muttered something under his breath in Russian. Maybe a prayer.

"Tell them!" Merlin growled louder, his patient had long since run thin.

The Wealthian scientist went rigid and yelled Merlin's threat in Russian though Merlin understood it as mere gibberish due to being completely alien to the concept of Colonial Russian. It seemed to do the trick, the scientists all huddled, crouching against the walls in fear.

"Name. Now." Merlin ordered the scientist standing in front of him. He leveled his M7S at the man's abdomen to ensure his compliance.

"Branko Sotiris."

Andra chimed in at that moment through her labored breathing. "Sotiris was one of the keywords that we data-mined on the Caviar, he's the head of one of the Wealthian Coalition's R&D weapons divisions."

"How convenient," Merlin grumbled both to Andra and Doctor Sotiris.

He reached out and grabbed the doctor by the collar of his shirt and yanked him close. "I want full, unrestricted access to your facility right now. That, in exchange for you and your coworkers' lives."

"Deal," Doctor Sotiris quickly said without a second thought. His lips quivered but his English came out clear and true; his thick Wealthian accent seemed to disappear as he spoke. "The main terminal is the desk on the far left, closest to the room's center. You'll need my encrypted passkey..."

"No. I won't." Merlin responded sternly but spun the scientist around and pushed him toward the said computer terminal with his M7S digging into the scientist's back.

Making sure the man would not attempt anything rash, Merlin quickly yanked a data-chip plugged into the rear of his helmet and brought it up to his visor to give it a glance. There was a momentary sense of physical loss that echoed from inside Merlin's neural implant, but he ignored it.

The chip was silver in color and small. It included a crystalline-circle-interior colored a deep holographic-transparent blue. Merlin wasn't particularly sure what the device was supposed to be or what it was supposed to do but his gut assumed it was one of those deep-learning infiltration expert systems he learned about during his previous dabbles into cyber-intrusion and cybersecurity. It was supposed to be Andra and Merlin's electronic trump card, a device that could break any encryption and perform any basic computer task.

He lowered the device from his face level and sought out a general-access port. It took only a moment to find the appropriate entry plug and jacked the little data-chip in. It made a subtle clicking noise, promising it was secured in the system. A computer browser window flashed momentarily to life on Merlin's HUD, telling him the device was doing its job.

"What was that device?" Doctor Sotiris asked Merlin out of curiosity.

"Shut up." was Merlin's intelligent response.

The radio crackled to life as the chip began slaving controls to its own operations. As if thinking exactly like Merlin, it opened a channel between Merlin's suit and the Black Caviar at a speed so fast that Merlin barely noticed another browser window flicker on his screen to initiate the connection.

Static reigned supreme for a few moments and then, with a snappy pop, the voice of the Spartans' mission handler came into focus. "Spartans, we got your feed, can you hear me?"

"Yeah. You're coming in crystal-clear. We got a situation."

"The voice, you mean?"

"No!? What, no," Merlin shook his head at that, recognizing that the crew of the Black Caviar were not totally informed on the play-by-play circumstances going on aboard the Wealthian asteroid base. "I've seized control of the space station. I'm ready to continue investigations over here but Andra's hurt. I need the Caviar to have medical ready on standby."

"What's her condition?"

"Stable, it seems, for now. I'll let her explain?" Merlin stated, looking over his shoulder at Andra.

She seemed to get the message and started speaking between breaths. "We got caught in a standoff, took a glancing hit from a frag grenade. My suit is reporting that my vitals are elevated but stable, but I've got a concerning amount of internal bleeding. I recommend I return to the ship."

"Understood, Spartan. We've already alerted medical to receive you, we're also moving the Caviar out of..."

Merlin tuned out the ONI officer and turned to Doctor Sotiris and addressed him sternly. "Tell your people to tend to their wounded in here. I'm going to fire up a stand down order for the rest of your station, everyone is to stay put where they are. As for you, you're going to tell me what your people were doing out here."

"What-what about the asteroid-quake?"

"What even is it? What is going on?" Merlin asked, finally turning to focus on the purpose of their mission here in the Wealthian Coalition's part of the galaxy.

The Wealthian scientist was slow to respond, first calling to his subordinates to deal with their wounded or whatever he was telling them in Russian. Based on the docile behavior of Merlin's pseudo-hostages, it seemed they were complying, or the Doctor was being true to his word.

"How much do you know about this base?" asked Doctor Sotiris, bringing his voice to a mere whisper.

"How much are you willing to reveal?" Merlin responded; he found the scientist's sudden compliance disarming, but also confusing.

"I'll comply with you...you already made it fairly clear what will happen if I don't, and I'd rather not find out what ONI would do to me if I did not..." He gestured to Merlin's M7S submachine gun still pointed at him as an afterthought.

"ONI has that reputation," Merlin shrugged in agreement. "Alright. Spill."

"This facility is known to the Coalition as Su4zA-11, but how to express that in English would take too long to explain. We call it Tsiolkovsky, after one of my predecessors. Wealthian astronomical surveys picked up some rather strange gravitational readings and radiation fluctuations that spanned a long period of time on a predictable basis."

"You found a pattern." Merlin summarized.

"In a way," The doctor shrugged. "After following the 'pattern', we realized it was residual amounts of Hawking and Čerenkov radiation, common characteristics of Slipspace ruptures. While not enough to be of recent or large-scale tears, they were intriguing enough to investigate. We eventually found the origin: this asteroid, and along with it, a sizable artifact buried in its protective underbelly, the portion of the rock which we constructed Tsiolkovsky."

"So, what is it then?" Merlin asked, now confused.

"A good question, we're not sure ourselves, however, we have a couple working ideas regarding the device, which is, mind you, not of Forerunner origin. You're aware of them, correct?"

"Fairly familiar. Being a Spartan has its mission perks."

"Right, well, this is the work of another civilization of some sort. We think the device is some sort of interstellar communication suite, not unlike the more expensive Slipspace communications buoy launchers that were developed by Inner Colonial colleges back before the Human-Covenant War." The doctor now seemed giddy to speak about his work, maybe it was a scientist thing. Now that Merlin had got him warmed up to talking, the man was waving his arms about in a lecturer's sort-of-manner, kind of like a professor proud of his research.

"So, you've found an alien surveillance probe or transmitter in the side of an asteroid and have been studying it for...how long?" Merlin asked, looking for clarification but the puzzle pieces were starting to come together.

"More than twenty years, we discovered it at the height of the Human-Covenant War," Doctor Sotiris explained, confirming what Merlin guessed with a nod of his head. "But toward the end of the conflict when the Covenant started to breach the Inner Colonies, we knew Wealth was at risk, so we started working on..."

"...a superweapon," Merlin finished. "What is it? Where is it?"

The doctor paused to consider answering Merlin regarding the change of subject. He closed one eye, squinting as if deep in thought then began to shake his head. Merlin prodded the air in front of the man with his submachine gun to remind him what kind of working relationship the two had.

The scientist raised his hands up to his head height, still aware of the situation they were in. The ground was still shaking around them, but it seemed mundane now, barely a noticeable occurrence. "Alright! Alright! We were developing a ship-grade weapon that incorporated some alien technologies that we recovered along with the artifact. We don't fully understand it ourselves, we simply figured out how to apply it."

"One-of-a-kind technology demonstrator?"

"Yeah, pretty much."

"And where is it now?" Merlin asked, repeating his previous question.

Doctor Sotiris glanced up as if trying to remember something. "It's been five-six years? They moved advanced weapons development off-site a while ago. I haven't been a part of that project since, we're barely a skeleton crew here — all we do now is continue our investigations into the artifact's original purpose. But that brings us to today, those quakes were predictable and sporadic in the past...but now they've been going every few minutes. Coming and going. We don't know why."

"Merlin!" Andra shouted from where she was kneeling, drawing said Spartan's attention. Andra pointed toward the holographic display at the center of the back wall where the flickering screen had transformed into a grainy display from an exterior space station camera.

A metal body cut through the scattered asteroid field like a knife through butter, its energy shields glowing a dull blue as rocks bounced against its most-exterior defense. Light from the distant star sporadically danced across the hull of the vessel as it came in close to the Tsiolkovsky-based asteroid. It was a human starship, only a few hundred meters in length and featured a blocky, though somewhat rounded frame with large sections jutting out and a scanning tower. Rampart CIWS guns protruded from its sides and Archer missile racks were visible on its walls. Its main thrusters were off; however, its maneuvering rockets burned a hot blue, slowly guiding the ship close. In the dim light of the space station's proximity flood-lamps, the ship's name was visible. UNSC Black Caviar.

"Calvary has arrived," Merlin whispered to himself, glad to see the friendly vessel once again. He sighed to himself.

It was a breath released too soon.

As if summoned by the approach of the UNSC corvette, the most aggressive asteroid-quake Merlin had felt this entire day crackled under his feet. It was violent, sudden, and pronounced.

Ceiling lighting panels flickered, and computer terminals shook to the point their screens cracked from the shaking. Many of the people in the CIC were thrown to the ground, some even hitting their heads on the metal floor and going unconscious.

Merlin fell to his knees from the aggressive shaking. Looking up at the holographic display in surprise, Merlin noticed how the camera display had suddenly switched to a view of something near or below the asteroid station.

Massive cracks were forming in the surface of the asteroid as if it was moments from splitting apart. The fissures were massive, so large in fact, that Merlin imagined he could fit a Warthog in one of them.

Merlin felt terror, but it wasn't a realistic fear of the space station shattering to pieces. It was an existential fear, one of something he could not comprehend and one that shook him to his core.

Giant metal wings, divided by sizable gaps but made rigid through unknown means, erupted from the fissures, like a butterfly taking its first steps outside its cocoon after metamorphosis.

What was most terrifying were the giant, bright-blue eyes glowing in the darkness below, staring up at the camera, and right into Merlin's soul.

Chapter 1.5: Unknowable Forces
The asteroid, the space station, and Merlin’s body all vibrated violently as one. Merlin felt his mind turning to mush, unfocused, under the strain of unknown gravitational forces.

Merlin could tell it was a gravitational distortion, not because he’d ever been in a situation where the state of gravity was in fluctuation, but his sensory organs were now telling him as such. The blood shifting around in his body, a dizzy spell befell his brain and left him unable to rise from his bent knees. His eyes darted around behind closed eyes, completely unfocused.

Merlin was a mess but even behind closed pupils, he could still see those massive, glowing-blue eyes staring back at him through the camera and holographic television screen. Merlin attempted to open his eyes but found his vision blurred and uncontrollable. He blinked rapidly but found the sensation alien when mixed with the asteroid-quake. He gasped for air and sniffled rapidly trying to gain some sense of composure.

Whatever he was doing, thinking at that moment was incoherent, reflexive, unfocused – Merlin was not in control in that single moment. However, he couldn’t let himself be stuck there because a voice was whispering in his ear. It was quiet, barely audible, but somehow Merlin heard it. It sounded like Andra’s voice, but it didn’t come with the typical crackle of radio communications.

“''Merlin. Stand up.''”

What was that voice? Merlin’s thoughts remained jumbled, but his primal sense of confusion and the voice came through clearly.

“''Merlin. Stand up. You can do it.''”

Merlin twitched the left ball of his foot, experimenting with his footing and flexing against the bone-rattling vibrations cutting through his being. The metal beneath his boot was like standing on gelatin, and yet, he moved. Merlin pushed his left foot up, lifted it into the air and landed on his heel, pushing his entire leg forward putting him in a kneeling position.

He shut his eyes and focused on simply moving his body. He felt with his right foot shuffling it against the ground, dragging it forward centimeter by centimeter across the ground. He locked his right knee and at a ninety-degree-angle, he pushed down with all his weight.

Merlin rose, on shaky legs.

“Breath Merlin.”

Merlin breathed. Then, he opened his eyes.

He still couldn’t focus, he could see blurred colors of grays and whites and blacks. He breathed again, it didn’t help clear his vision, but it increased his resolve.

Merlin performed one-step, and then another. He was slow, methodical. His legs felt heavy, but not with coagulating blood, but weakened muscles. So little control but he pushed through.

A blue indicator light flashed and then flickered into a circle off in the distance on Merlin’s MJOLNIR visor. A waypoint, Merlin realized, and he pushed forward, toward it.

Merlin stepped through the finely powdered glass, thrashed by the asteroid-quake and originating from destroyed terminal screens. He slid forward on shaky feet several meters in dazed blindness, using only the blue light as his guide.

He smacked himself into the terminal desk at his waist-height. The impact vibrated his legs even further causing him to almost collapse once again. However, Merlin stood his ground and caught himself on sweating, uneasy palms.

"That's it, Merlin. Just yank the chip. You can do it."

The voice was soothing and reassuring. It was familiar, almost like Andra's. And unlike the foreboding, ominous voice from before, this voice was encouraging. Hopeful. Merlin felt trust in it.

He reached out, feeling tactilely through his armored glove, for the familiar protrusion of an inserted data-chip plugged into what must have been the primary console. He skimmed it once, his hand delicate to avoid pushing too hard on any surface. He had to be careful, any wrong push and he might destroy some delicate equipment in this quaking mess. Merlin couldn't trust his own body at the moment.

He found a silvery stick protruding between his right hand's right and pinky finger and Merlin knew he found what he was looking for. The familiar, crystalline-transparent circle was a familiar presence in Merlin's hand.

He yanked it, delicately, and grasped the device in his palm. He guided it through the air, gently, to the back of his helmet. It was slow and tedious work, but it's all Merlin thought about and focused on. He felt the data-chip slip against the back of his hand, flipped his palm around and gingerly pushed the chip into place.

Merlin heard of a sigh of relief though it was uncertain if it was his breath or someone else's. He felt a sense of calm wash over him. His tension disappeared and a buzz of concentration took hold but mixed in was a quenched fear. It wasn't gone but it was bottled down, anchored to the back of Merlin's mind.

He pushed forward, with new resolve. Merlin thought back to Spartan training and the sometimes-simplistic methodologies they taught. Merlin knew they worked, but his experience to become a graduate of SPARTAN-III Delta Company were both memories scorned, and memories cherished. Merlin called back to those training methodologies, remembering their tempo and focused in on that.

The words echoed in his mind. "Slow is steady. Steady is fast. Slow and steady win the race."

One step at a time. Find Andra.

Merlin leaned against the terminal desk and dragged his feet forward, one at a time and one behind the other. He fired off a location-query ping and waited as he edged closer to the end of the table.

It took two seconds.

A blue indicator light flashed on Merlin's blurry visor, indicated a new waypoint. There she was.

"An-Andra?" Merlin called out, experimenting softly, trying to prevent himself from biting his tongue.

A long, protracted groan replied back. Andra's voice.

"I'm-I'm coming to you."

Around Merlin, he saw red-lights blink to life on what appeared to the be CIC's titanium walls. Sirens screamed as the lights flared in place. A voice called out in a feminine-Russian-accent describing something in mild distress. Merlin couldn't bother to process or understand the language, but the message was universal: danger, time to leave.

Merlin skidded his armored legs against the ground, leaving scratch marks and making low-screeching sounds as he moved. He crossed the room in a couple of seconds, growing both used to and more confident in his ability to cope with the gravitational fluctuations.

He kneeled down by a sprawled-out white-and-black form that he assumed was Andra and reached down to wrap his arms around her body, feeling for her waist and then her arms. Identifying the distinct titanium texture of MJOLNIR beneath his glove, Merlin pulled her up and to his chest pushing her damaged helmet into the magazine pouches mounted on his breastplate.

In this situation, Andra looked more like a limp sack of potatoes as Merlin struggled to lift her in a way where she didn't slide out of his shaking arms. Another pained groan escaped her lips, but Merlin could see her blurry legs dancing beneath her waist kicking frantically to find grip on the metal floor for herself. Evidently, she still lacked muscle control.

"Alright, we're going to try a fireman's carry. Can you do that for me?"

"Y-yeah." Andra stammered through what sounded like gritted teeth.

"Don't bite down, I don't want you losing your teeth."

Andra groaned at the comment but Merlin was already swinging to action, focusing simply on the mundane details. He focused on the singular moments as they ticked by slowly, one by one, figuring out what he needed to do for them to survive. He lifted Andra up so that she was now lifted straight in the air and Merlin edged his arms slowly so that her torso was laid comfortably behind his head, on the small of his back and shoulders.

"Can-can you find your left leg with your left arm?" Merlin managed to ask, breathing rapidly to maintain the action as their titanium forms tapped against one another, making rapid tink-tink noises.

"Andra's left arm inched out slowly, looking for wherever her left leg was which was squished further and further down as she arched her back to close the distance.

"Closer. Closer," Merlin encouraged his friend, "Almost there. You got it."

Andra secured her left arm and hooked it around the bottom of her left kneecap. She announced to Merlin over the radio, "Got it. What's the plan?"

"I don't..." Merlin was about to say but another blue light replaced the last one and pointed to the far wall in front of Merlin. Looking closely, Merlin still could not make out the blurred objects against the facility wall. "The far wall in front of us."

Andra's acute eyesight, even for Spartans, came in handy at that moment. "Escape pods."

"Right. That sounds like a good idea."

Merlin could make out blurry forms limping and crawling their way toward the CIC's far wall, the same direction that the Spartans were headed.

Merlin hastened his awkward marching, recognizing a race for survival when he saw one. It took him all of ten seconds to march over to the escape pods, but they were the longest ten seconds of his life.

And when he touched the wall, Merlin senses exploded exponentially, as if he contacted some kind of magical energy source. He gasped graciously as blood stopped building in his lower-most arteries and his lungs flexed to a more stable shape. He kneeled once again, not out of weakness but in an attempt at recovery. Andra's rapid gasps for air joined Merlin's as they together attempted felt the release of the several gravities previously pressing upon their bodies.

Merlin turned around slowly, blinking rapidly as the stressed capillaries in his eyes recovered and his blurred vision began to dissolve into morbid clarity.

He blinked at the scene in front of him, not sure what to make of it like several other strange phenomena that had already ruined his day. He and Andra were the only ones to have made it to the far wall and the escape pods.

Crawling, shuffling scientists that Merlin had witnessed behind his blurred vision were sprawled out, motionless on the metal floor beneath them. Bodies were sprawled out everywhere, not moving. Some of the dead were still leaning against the wall, the same position they had been in when they were being medically treated by their comrades.

Everyone was dead or dying. The Wealthians all looked dead.

"What in the hell...?" Merlin asked, trying to comprehend what happened.

"Mer-Merlin?" Andra asked from behind her friend, shifting her body weight slightly so she was more comfortable on Merlin's back.

Merlin didn't respond but Andra shuffled herself further until his arms slacked, allowing the female Spartan to slide off his back and to kneel next to him.

"What...happened?" Andra asked, surveying the trashed and destroyed Command Intelligence Center and the many dead bodies littering the wide space.

"I think that we were bombarded by an excess number of Gs."

Gravity distortions?"

"I think so..." Merlin stated, wide-eyed behind his visor. He had no idea how this happened.

"Oh my..." Andra whispered looking at something her armor was telling her.

"What?" Merlin glanced over to Andra.

"Ten Gravities."

"What do you mean?" Merlin asked, tilting his helmet.

"We were exposed to a sustained force of ten gravities for a whole three minutes." Andra clarified.

"They were crushed to death..." Merlin whispered, letting the puzzle pieces fall into place.

"And we would be too without our armor. Or if it had occurred for much longer." Andra added.

Merlin surveyed the room and considered his situation. He considered the limp Wealthian bodies spread across the CIC. He considered Andra's injuries, wondering how severe they were. He considered the mission in its totality and how wrong the events had turned.

Merlin turned back to Andra and registered the slanted, single-occupant escape pod she leaned against to support her abdominal pains. He grimaced at her keeled-over state and how she gripped her waist with her left arm.

"I think you need to get back to the ship right now," Merlin commented to Andra.

"I-I'm still able enough, and what-whatever you plan next, with all that has happened, I don't think to go alone is the best idea."

"You don't even know what my plan is, to begin with." Merlin pointed out.

"You may have been the intelligence go-to back when we were still a complete unit, but none of us were pushovers either. If I'm struggling to formulate a hint of a plan, you probably have a gut feeling at most. I know you, Merlin. Whatever you got a thought about, it's better I keep—agh!" Andra's train of thought was cut off by a gasp of pain slipping out.

Merlin reached over and helped her stand. "You're really not in any condition to help Andra, whether your suit has you doped up on meds now or not. But we need to secure what intelligence we came here for. At least let me check on the Innies, it will only be a little while longer."

It was at that perfect-imperfect that Spartans' ONI handler chimed in over the radio. "Merlin, you get Andra over here on the double. We can't dock with you; the situation just went really far south."

"I'm coaxing her into an escape pod now sir," Merlin responded before hitting a side panel switch, releasing the door clamps and opening the internal coffin-like apparatus. He shifted Andra's weight in his arms and lowered her gently into the slanted cradle as she continued clutching her stomach in pain.

"Just make it back to the ship. I'm not about to let you escape me too." Andra stated before coughing into her helmet.

Merlin chuckled at the morbid joke but quickly backed away to allow her to close the pod. It took only a second. With a single lever pool and she was gone, zooming out of the station. A blast door sealed the passageway behind her flying coffin.

The Spartan turned around, not wasting another second, and calmed himself with a sigh and prepared to do whatever he needed to do. Andra was right, Merlin had no idea what he needed to do. He turned back into his communique tied to the UNSC Black Caviar, "Sir, how bad is the situation?"

"The...we see Andra's pod, we'll intercept it in a few minutes. You need to hurry and get out of there. The asteroid is gone, the station is torn up and drifting...and there's that thing..."

"What thing?" Merlin asked in confusion.

"We got a Forerunner vessel out here, it burst from the asteroid and destroyed it. It's also giving off some wacky gravitational data. It's actually throwing off our sensor suite."

"What can I do sir?"

"Retrieve any evidence you can regarding our original mission, then get out of there. We're sitting tight and that Forerunner thing hasn't done anything yet but it's staying pretty close to the station."

"I'll see what I can do."

"Make it fast." The ONI handler responded curtly.

Merlin glanced over the room and noted the destroyed computers and the CIC in general. Dead bodies sprawled out. He seriously doubted anyone else survived and he already grabbed his systems-control chip. So, if everything had gone to plan things should be done, right?

Another blue waypoint flashed on Merlin's HUD, plastering over a body not far from where Merlin had come to when the gravity waves had started to subside enough for him to think. Not sure what was the cause for the suit signal or the reasoning, he approached quickly, jumping over metal desks and tables while keeping caution with his hand tucked around the grip of his bloodied, stolen magnum.

The indicator apparently pinpointed to Merlin's discarded submachine gun. But it also led to a body of one Wealthian scientist with labored breathing. Alive. It was Doctor Sotiris.

Merlin's eyes widened, realization dawning on him. He glanced up and scanned the room, activating his VISR 4.0 visual-enhancement suite to check for finer details in his periphery.

The CIC's few still-functioning light sources became blinding, harsh to his eyes, but he ignored it. Objects and shapes were separated by dull-yellow outlines, identifying the distance of objects by their association with Merlin's vision. Bodies that were most certainly dead were orbited by the same yellow outline, marking them as simply just another object in the surrounding scenery.

Merlin looked over the bodies and identified a couple of others outlined in a brighter green color, the same color that enveloped Doctor Sotiris up close. Counting them, Merlin identified five individuals out of the crowd who managed to stave off death. An impressive feat.

But before Merlin could figure out what to do about the survivors, he was struck with another course of bad luck. The ground around him started shaking violently. For a moment, a soft groan attempted to escape the Spartan's lips but as soon as the gravitational waves started kicking in, Merlin's groan turned into a gasp as he swallowed a groan that would have become a growled scream had he not started gasping for air.

Merlin keeled over and felt his knees smack the metal floor beneath him. The voice of Andra and the ONI handler were distant in the back of his mind and lost in his ears.

"Merlin! The station!"

"Get out of there!"

The gravitational waves continued to get worse or were they. Merlin wasn't feeling the same rumblings that pierced all the way into his being from earlier. This was more noticeable, more concrete and solid. It wasn't his body that was vibrating, it was the ground and the titanium beneath him.

Merlin gripped at the floor with balled fists as the sounds of snapping and breaking metal came closer and closer, increasing in intensity and violence. The ground under Merlin's feet rumbled like an angry storm keeping him from rising from his hands and knees. It was becoming so aggressive he was faltering on his hands had it not been for the sturdiness of his armor keeping him up in a kneeling position.

The very floor underneath Merlin curved and bent, upwards and towards Merlin. He didn't expect and could do little to brace for it. The titanium gave altogether, and he was thrown across the room as the floor and the structures beneath them rose out from below and washed over him like a storm surge made of metal.

Merlin hit the far wall, hard. His head and shoulders were the first part of his body to make an impact but at least his suit absorbed most of the concussive force. A serious dent was left in the place he hit and the rear-most thruster analog points on his armor were crushed from the trauma. Merlin, stunned from the blast and the hit, crashed forward on his stomach as his shields gave out with a spark of golden light and to the blaring of warning indicator noises.

"Ow," Merlin mumbled to himself.

Glancing up, Merlin had to take a moment to blink out the dark and gray stars dancing in and around his vision before being able to process his situation clearly. The sight before him was mildly absurd, and had he not been suffering from a mild headache, Merlin might have instead laughed instead of gasping at the uninvited guest.

First, a flower-like disk object bashed its way into the CIC before being discarded off to the side like a frisbee. It was round, kind of thick like a turtle shell but had an underlining frame with a circular assortment of spikes like the underside of a horseshoe crab, as if the object's underlying feet had been tucked inward to grasp something that had long since been removed. Titanium rods were seemingly bolted into it as if previously holding it in place in some dangling apparatus. Maybe that was the artifact the Wealthians had been talking about.

Merlin noticed his HUD mark it as a 'Carapace Probe' when he glanced at it. Good to know.

The second uninvited guest was like a giant mole head sticking out of a ruined, metal hole in the floor. Those familiar blue, glowing eyes attached to a glossy-silver-like head stared Merlin down. It was angular, trapezoidal and triangular in a kind of pinhead kind of way. It also had two rows of highly-sharpened, almost-serrated teeth hidden behind a thinly-veiled layer of metal. Other blue lights glowed and danced in luminosity across the metal body. Evidently, a Forerunner construction of some kind.

Merlin clambered to his knees and then up to his feet and sickeningly realized that the rest of the people and corpses in the room were gone. His heads-up display reported the room's oxygen had been depleted to about zero, and that his suit was running on its reserve air tank. The entire room had been rapidly decompressed without Merlin noticing in his disorientating pain. Everyone but him had been sucked out the bottom of the hole.

The Wealthians were all gone. All of them, even Doctor Sotiris.

"Shit..." Merlin mumbled. He stared up at the Forerunner construct in confusion as it motionlessly stared back at him. A face-off between a man, and a giant-ass machine made by a long-dead alien civilization for some unknown purpose beyond Merlin's immediate understanding.

Looking closely, Merlin could see giant, dog-sized robotic quadruped drones crawling along its surface. They looked almost like ants, but, really-large, metal ants.

The stare down didn't last long because for the innumerable time this day, Merlin's circumstances were out of his control and luck was again not on his side.

The Carapace Probe was hissing off to the side. Merlin turned to look toward it, not sure what to make of it. He clutched at his submachine gun in hand hard as he watched some of the ant-like drones crawl off the giant Forerunner machine and make their way toward the device. Merlin wasn't even sure how he was hearing the loud hiss, but it was distinctly static noise.

The giant artifact, Merlin assumed it was the one the Wealthians had been investigating, began pulsating with light. Getting brighter. And brighter. And brighter.

Merlin raised his arms instinctually to block out the source of the light and to get a better view, but it continued to get brighter. He started feeling the sensation of being pulled across the metal floor beneath him and Merlin slid his feet experimentally to hold himself down, noting his gravity boots were already initiated to keep him plastered to the floor.

A female voice in Merlin's ear suddenly cursed, "Shit. It's a Slipspace rupture!"

Merlin stared at the light until it was so bright that everything around him and all his sensations were descriptively 'white.'

Andra's scream, calling Merlin's name, pierced through only for a split-second before being washed away by static. Merlin remembered trying to think but not remembering what his mind was even trying to process as his body and mind became overwhelmed by sensation overload.

A final gravitational wave smashed into him, most felt in his stomach as if being punched and pushed back a second time.

Everything Merlin knew was white, and then darkness. And then, nothing.

Part 2: Endure Solitude
"War tears us apart, leaves us broken and alone. But it brings out our rawest potential."

- James P. Baig, Excerpt from The Poltergeist

Chapter 2.1: A New Normal
Andra remembered feeling a sense of foreboding for those desperately-boring few minutes she’d been stuck inside the cramped metal escape pod that she came to call her ‘time capsule’ because her concept of time proved much longer than the reality.

She was conditioned to be patient, at least, enough so that she could carry out her mission when it was required of her. However, Andra was easily a poster-child for individuals with emotional volatility. Even with all the common breathing exercises in her brain’s back pocket, Andra could flip on a dime when the concerns of those closest to her were what mattered most, especially their safety.

The female Spartan wished she was claustrophobic at that moment, stuck between two layers of titanium with very little separating her body from the open, hostile vacuum of space. It would have been far more bearable than the emotions wrenching over her body. The anxiety that boiled in Andra’s blood was not from the shrapnel-cut wounds on her shoulder or abdomen, they cooked in fear for Merlin-D032 who had gone uncomfortably silent over the radio.

Then the alarming tone in the voice of her commanding officer sent Andra into a fearful frenzy. The ONI handler called out to Merlin, “Merlin! The station!”

Andra couldn’t contribute anything to the ongoing situation and simply yelled “Get out of there!” in desperation.

Merlin's lack of responses continued for a minute. An "Ow" here and a "Shit" there, and then, a pressure wave slammed into Andra's pod, sending it spinning and Andra could only grimace as her insides struggled once more to escape through her open wounds. Even with the assistance of Biofoam clotting inserts and her Spartan tech suit to keep all the blood and other things contained, the sensation of a wide gap in her stomach wasn't going anywhere.

Andra didn't freak out then, but when Merlin's signal suddenly cut out with a brief of static, that was when she knew something was very wrong.