Epimetheus

Officer Pynes bit off a square of chocolate and loudly chewed, crunching through the rich outer shell and into the nutty nougat inside.

“I mean,” he said, through a full mouth, “it doesn’t make sense to me,” he said. “Why would a retired ONI Admiral need all this private security?” He motioned around at the ‘break room’, where ten other guards sat around idly chattering their lunch break away.

Three were hanging around the coffee machine, waiting for their chance to deposit a few credits and be rewarded with a rich, steaming cup of life-saving liquid. Five were sitting on a corner couch around a coffee table, a deck of cards between them, and another two were standing off in the corners, lit cigarettes between their fingers.

Officer Lyonel sipped coffee from a plastic cup and sighed, shrugging his shoulders. “I dunno,” he said with a sigh.

“I mean, the war’s over, right?” the security guard asked, taking another oversized chomp of the sugary candy bar. “Why would she need so many guns protecting her front door? This is a civilian apartment complex.”

Lyonel took a gulp of his coffee to fight off the coming headache, and give him strength to get through another conversation with Pynes. “This whole floor is ours,” he said. “The break room, the other apartments as bunks, she has a lot of money squared away in this place.”

“That just makes it even weirder!” Pynes said around a mouthful of sugar, pulling the wrapper down to expose more of the treat.

Lyonel took a deep swig of his coffee, draining the last few dregs of it.

He sighed, tossing the cup over towards the wastebasket at the door. “War hasn’t been over for long,” he said. “People are still rebuilding. Hell, there are probably still colonies under attack. It’s only been eight months.”

“Well, that’s my point!” Pynes stuffed the last squares of chocolate into his mouth and raised his hand at the other man, nodding his head. “Surely all of us could be better spent somewhere else, rather than guarding a greying old woman?”

“Hey!” Lyonel shot him a loot, knitting his brows together. “Don’t let her hear you say that. I hear she used to be a real piece of work. Remember, she ain’t Navy,” he threw a thumb over his shoulder, motioning up one floor to her penthouse. “She’s ONI. Maybe that’s why she needs all this security.” He leaned back in his chair, stuffing a hand in his pocket.

“Ooh,” Pynes gulped his chocolate down and crumbled the packet into a fist. “Some hush-hush sorta shit?” he waved his fingers in a mystic fashion. “C’mon, man, get real. If that was true, she wouldn’t still be using her real name, would she? And she definitely wouldn’t be going by ‘Admiral’, still, would she?”

Lyonel tilted his head. “Does she really make you call her ‘Admiral’?”

“Admiral, Ma’am, you name it.” Pynes shook his head.

“Hmm, maybe she’s just into that sorta thing,” Lyonel said with a smirk.

Pynes shuddered. “Dude, don’t make it weird.”

“Well, whatever the case, just be glad we’re here, and not on Earth, or, hell, on some colony trying to keep the population quiet until relief supplies show up.” Lyonel shook his head. “Lotta planets out there still need ‘em.”

“Yeah, yeah.” Pynes sighed, standing up and heading towards the rubbish bin. “I just wish there was something to let us know why she needs so many guns.”

He turned around after putting his chocolate wrapper in the trash bins, just in time to see a flashbang grenade roll from outside underneath the table in the middle of the room.

“Grenade—!”

The flashbang detonated and threw the table off of the ground. Lyonel yelped as his eyes squeezed shut, and his chair was thrown back. Pynes lifted an arm up to cover his face, while the other went for the pistol strapped to his side. He fumbled with the holster, before yanking the SOCOM out of the leather bindings.

His ears were still ringing, and his vision was clouded, but he still raised his pistol on instinct alone, and aimed it towards the door to the break room. He saw a silhouette, framed by the lights in the hallway beyond, aimed at it, and fired. His eyes stung, his ears only heard muffled thumps, but he continued to pull the trigger.

The others recovered, and aimed at the figure as well. Soon, all twelve guards were firing at the stranger in the hallway until their guns went dry. Shell casings clattered to the floor, gunsmoke filled the room, and all of them paused when their magazines emptied, and the shadow in the doorway remained unmoved.

Pynes was the first to approach it, being the closest. A yellow and rust coloured suit of EOD MJOLNIR stared into the room, in total, stoic silence. It had an M6 drawn, aiming at the wall at the far end of the apartment, somewhere where the kitchenette met the rest of the dwelling. The room reflected off of the burnished visor, but the rest of the Spartan remained as unresponsive as a statue.

He waved his hands in front of the apparition, and it didn’t react. He peered around it, and saw at least a hundred bullet holes in the wall behind it. With a sinking pit in his chest, he reached out and tried to push the Spartan. His hand slipped right through it, the illusion spluttered as the projectors tried to keep the hologram perfectly uniform.

Pynes look down, and saw a device about the size of his forearm, thrumming with energy, and projecting the image into the air.

“It’s a hologra—!” he got cut off by a harsh impact to his throat. Something slammed into him so fast all the air was sucked from his lungs in an instant. He dropped to one knee like someone pulled a rug out from under him, and he had just enough of his senses left to see the faint shimmering of active camo around a large, looming armour, before a fist struck the side of his head, and he collapsed to the floor.

The rest of the guards watched, their jaws agape, and their eyes wide. The shimmering form turned to look at the rest of the guards, spread out over the room in groups. A rippling wave started at their armoured boots, and worked its way up across the entire body, ending at the visor, before the camo corrected itself, and the shimmering vanished once more.

Lyonel backed away from the table, frantically hitting the magazine release on his gun. The metal slab slipped from the receiver and dropped down towards the floor.

There was a grunt of pain from near the coffee table, and Lyonel spun to watch. The shimmering ghostly form emerged in the midst of the five men, their card game forgotten. The Spartan kicked out at one man, inverting his left knee with a wet crunching sound. Before he could scream, an armoured gauntlet grabbed the back of his head and brought his head down into the glass coffee table. The furniture shattered, and the man fell, grabbing at his face and screaming.

A second man went to strike at the supersoldier. The spartan turned, grabbed the fist, and twisted the hand around. The arm popped at the elbow joint and hang limply. The Spartan pulled the arm, making the man stumble forward, and the Spartan brought a knee up into the man’s face, snapping his head back, and causing him to slump over onto the couch, nose and jaw broken.

A third thrust his gun at the soldier. A hand batted it away just as the first shot sounded off, bathing the angry-looking EOD helmet in bright, harsh yellow. The hand closed around the gun, wrenching it free of the guard’s hand, and swinging it around to clip the last man in the side of the head. The Spartan jumped up, slamming both of her legs into the last man standing in the group of five, knocking him away across the room, and into the kitchenette. The three men there scrambled to get out of the way.

A second later, the Spartan was shooting at the two men standing in one corner. Bullets tore through their black trousers, biting at their knees, and making them collapse in writhing pain.

The three men in the kitchen aimed their guns at where the Spartan was a second before, but the camo already masked the armour’s outline. The Spartan was on them in a second, light glinting off of something metal enclosed within the other hand. She slashed at the lead man’s chest, opening up an angry gash in the front of his suit. He stumbled forward, clutching the wound, and she raked the edge of her knife along his back, as well. He fell to the ground, and she turned, spinning the knife in one hand and driving the point deep into the gun-wrist of a second man, wrenching it around. He screamed, dropped his gun, and she kicked him away into the fridge. He hit it, and dropped to the ground along with everything in the busted ice-box.

The last man popped a round off at her. It missed by a hair's breadth. The supersoldier knocked the gun away, drove two fists into the man’s chest, then a flurry of blows to the man’s head. He dropped to the ground a second later.

Lyonel finally managed to get a magazine into his pistol, pulled back the slide, and fired off a panicked slot at the Spartan. The bullet slammed into her stomach, making the supersoldier stumble. She dove to one side, avoiding the next shot, and came up on one knee.

Lyonel took aim, there was a flash of metal, and a stabbing pain in his gut. He looked down to see a combat knife embedded in his stomach, down to the hilt. There was a warm feeling, and he blacked out.

There was silence in the apartment. The Spartan dropped her camo, breathing heavily, and looking around the room. There were few men still conscious.

“Spartan?” Her comms crackled. ''“What the hell was that? We said non-lethal!”'' the voice was filled with ire.

She looked around at the men once more. “They’ll all live,” was all she said.

A lancing pain in her stomach made her look down. Blood seeped through her fingers.

“Spartan Lones?” the voice sounded out again, sounding much more concerned this time. “Your vitals just spiked, are you hurt?”

“I’m fine.” Lones chinned the control in her helmet to administer morphine, and biofoam. She stooped down, grabbing a pistol, and chambering a round, before leaving the apartment. “Let’s go get the Admiral.”