This fanfiction article, Count the Seconds, was written by LastnameSilverLastname. Please do not edit this fiction without the writer's permission.
Evelina checked her H.U.D, counted down the seconds from twenty, then popped the airlock door. Warm air flooded into the compartment, replacing the clean, sterile environment of the ONI Prowler. She stepped onto the station and gave herself a few seconds to adjust to the difference in gravity; residents of Lori were used to the increased gravity of their planet, and that transferred over to the majority of public spaces onboard the Lori Orbital Elevator station.
The Spartan’s entourage stepped out of the airlock behind her, fanning out into a loose semi-circular formation as they went past the control terminal to register their arrival. The man sitting in the plexiglass booth gaped at them as they walked past, a cigarette falling from his mouth.
He didn’t even remember to ask them for their names before they had disappeared through the baggage claim, and into the station proper. It was a miasma of blocky, brutalistic corridors at first, but it soon began to fill out into more approachable public spaces.
While the living conditions were decidedly urbane, there was enough open space for the crowd to amble and meander through the market stalls and shanty hole-in-the-wall cafes adorning the sides of the torus.
A monorail jutted from the metal overhead, then passed over the squared commercial buildings and curved around until it was out of sight on the other end of the circular station. When the space tether was built, she was one of the first models to go up. This meant that the Lori stood much taller than other, contemporary elevators built in human space. Back before the refinement of engineering and grav-tech.
While the freight lift that transported goods could travel up and down the elevator at breakneck speeds, the personnel elevators were limited by how many G’s the workers that were needed up on the station could endure.
Eventually, the top of the station was expanded to include semi-permanent residential areas, followed then by hydroponics segments, then commercial zones, then a transport hub encircling the ringed construction. Soon the station had become a thriving trade-centric community tens of thousands of kilometers above the surface of the planet.
Spartan Slade stepped into the dull overhead lights and surveyed the open commercial square with her tri-lensed visor giving her a tactical readout on every person currently in view. Much of the information was sequestered away—filtered or deemed inconsequential by her AI.
Evelina brought a hand up to her ear, tapping on the attached AI data module attached to the left hand side of her helmet.
“Alright, Annabelle,” she surveyed the crowd and the shops ahead. “Who are we looking for?”
There was a sensation of icy liquid filling her mind, and a glossy voice spoke up from somewhere inside her ear canals, not from the external speakers.
“Spartan Andrew Inaheim,” the AI said. “Former leader of Fireteam Nightlight.”
Slade reached back and scratched the back of her helmet, feeling a tingling at the base of her spine. While the data module attached to her helmet housed the majority of the AI’s necessary software, the bulk of the AI proper was slotted right into the housing module at the base of Slade’s helmet.
“Nightlight?” she asked, arching an eyebrow. “Who names these Fireteams?”
“He did,” Annabelle said. A face appeared on her HUD, followed by a lengthy file with text too small for Evelina to read. Relevant information was highlighted in bold blue text, enhanced and zoomed in for her to read, before falling back into the rigid miasma of scrolling text.
Words like ‘AWOL’, ‘aggressive’, and ‘loose cannon’. In another life, perhaps Evelina would’ve gotten along with him.
“Disappeared March of last year,” Annabelle continued. “Believed to have various sympathies, stationed onboard the UNSC Constantine as part of reconnection efforts, ship suffered an explosive decompression in weapons storage, and she lost most of her complement of HAVOKs, as well as Spartan Inaheim.”
A man stepped up alongside Evelina, carrying his helmet under one arm, and puffing on a cigarette with the other. “So, armed, dangerous, ready to commit an act of terror.”
Evelina turned to the man, dragging her eyes up and down his ODST armour. It was standard issue, right up until the helmet, which fanned out in an array of sensory modules and supplementary lenses, framing a central group of lenses that included everything from IR sensors to ATID pulse generators.
The helmet was impressive, but while they needed a different lens for each function, Slade’s own hardened external visor filtered out the busywork and aimed for a sleeker design. Three lenses, mounted in between an up-armoured attachment onto the armour’s outer layer.
“Fan out,” she told him, motioning a finger up to his cigarette, “put that out, and get in gear. I want full eyes as we sweep the station.”
He nodded, taking another puff, before dropping the cigarette onto the deck, and snapping off a mocking salute. “Yes, ma’am!”
He stepped away from the Spartan, placing his helmet over his head and twisting it in place to form a vacuum seal.
“Alright, boys,” he said over team-comms. “You heard the lady, full sweep, no stone unturned. Let’s get this done.”
The team of five moved into the crowd, with the Spartan trailing a few steps behind. She kept her distance mainly because the Spartan and her entourage stuck out immediately, not in small part due to their heavy UNSC-grade MJOLNIR armour and plated BDUs.
Spartan Evelina Slade had much more gear packed around her armour than her companions did. A rifle, pouches for extra ammunition, a ballistic shield, and four prosthetic limbs gave her the appearance of a cybernetic war machine more than a human of flesh and bone.
The civilians around them gave them a wide berth, parting around the team as it moved deeper into the commercial zones towards one of the transit hubs. The crowd didn’t move to reform as the Spartan followed in her team’s wake, deciding it best to leave the eight foot behemoth with three glowing lenses alone.
She rolled her shoulders, a shiver of discomfort walking its way up her spine.
“You sure he’s here?” she asked, scanning face after face in the crowd. Each one came back as a negative match, linked up to the Lori’s own database of current residents, visitors, and registered workers.
“If I was smuggling a HAVOK-grade tactical nuclear warhead,” Annabelle said, “I’d do it through here. Less likely to be spotted, less likely to get caught, and the tether makes a fantastic backup target if he does.”
“Why not just head planetside in a smuggler craft?” Evelina asked, looking over her left shoulder as though expecting a figure to be standing there.
There was an electric scoff, like the sound an unplugged headset would make when the jack lingers in the port for too long. “The UNSC doesn’t just sit idly by when nuclear-grade armaments have been stolen. Everything bigger than a fighter is being actively screened by the colonial administration.”
“Think he’ll be in armour?” she asked.
There was a pause. A thousand calculations ran through Annabelle’s head at once before she settled on an answer. “I would be,” she decided. “No-one would dare question a Spartan with a briefcase, especially if escorted.”
Evelina tilted her head in affirmation at that. Even the local security officers avoided direct eye contact with her when she looked, preferring instead to sneak glances when they thought her head was turned far enough away.
Evelina felt the tingle of discomfort rake its ugly fingers down her back again, so she continued with her questions.
“Why do we think this Colony is his target?”
“Closest to his point of disappearance,” Annabelle answered. A map appeared on Evelina’s HUD showing local systems, followed by a square containing a damaged UNSC Destroyer appearing beside one of them.
“The Constantine worked on reconnecting it, and it has an active independence movement that recently turned…” The display changed to images of a protest in the heart of the colony’s capital city. “Let’s say more vocal about their displeasure at a UNSC presence.”
“Got it.” Evelina nodded. “Thank you, Annabelle.”
“My pleasure, Spartan.” Her tone turned teasing. “Why you needed a second briefing is beyond me.”
“For the record, Annabelle.” Evelina tapped the side of her up-armoured visor. “For the record. Section Zero is always watching.”
“Oh, of course. Our omnipresent sponsors.”
Spartan Slade flicked the AI data housing port attacher to her helmet. “Be nice,” she said, then keyed her team comms. “Talk to me, fellas. What do we see?”
“Well,” the voice of a man came through the speakers. “I see food vendors selling fried hamdogs at fifteen creds. Not bad, considering you get a free drink with it.”
Evelina blinked and sighed. “Is the target having a greasy lunch?”
“No, ma’am, can’t see him,” the man said.
“Hmm,” Slade’s mouth tugged upwards at the corners. “Then how about focusing on locating the target, before we think about sampling the local bargain buys, hmm?”
“Yes, ma’am.” the voice said.
Slade shut her eyes and kept walking, passing beneath the awning of a noodle shop. Two of the three stools were occupied, and both turned around to watch her go. The owner of the establishment dropped the bowl he was making as he turned around.
Evelina held their gazes as she walked, flexing her forearms into fists. The desire to reach back and grab her weapon almost overtook, but that would just cause the residents even more distress. She suppressed it, but it didn’t die down quietly. A part of her brain screamed at her for being unarmed in potentially hostile territory, but there was no need to get twitchy until positive contact was made.
Evelina’s eyes drifted over the booths and corrugated steels that enclosed some of the shops and eateries. Some of them were condemned, some still were shut. She didn’t have much time to look at them all, as her comms unit crackled, and a half-panicked voice sounded out over the other end.
“Target spotted.” The man barked. “Transit hub Bravo, two hundred yards from your current position.”
Evelina thought about asking for a direction, bearing, or even a way to get there. She didn’t have to think for long, because Annabelle was already one step ahead of her.
“Marking a waypoint,” she said immediately.
Her brain paused, the thought halfway between her head and her lips, so she backtracked and thought of something else to ask. “Give me a status,” she managed. “I wanna know everything.”
In response, her helmet HUD narrowed, and screens appeared to the edge of her vision on the left and right. The squares held helmet feeds from the rest of her team, no-doubt being transmitted by one of the many supplementary lenses or functions attached to the NISHAN helmet.
“Target is armoured, armed, carrying a green reinforced briefcase,” one of the men said. The HUD marked him as the one talking by surrounding his name with a green box. Corporal Iqlan Harston. “IFF tag disabled, escorted by five armed insurgents wearing UNSC armour.”
“Are we sure it isn’t just a UNSC squad?” Evelina asked.
“No, ma’am,” the man from earlier spoke next. His name was highlighted, too, Sergeant Lawrence Burnside. “I’m getting nothing on their IFFs, neural implants, and no BDU handshake protocol from the marine onboard-computers, nor comms.”
Annabelle’s status light winked beneath the feeds, displaying target IDs for each of the men, cross-referenced to a local copy of the UEG’s Most Wanted. “Confirmed target ID. Intel was good on this one, priority one is to apprehend.”
Before Evelina could ask any more, one of the helmet feeds was filled with a bright flash. Two of the insurgents were pointing up at where the squad were watching them, and the rapport of gunfire filled the station from up ahead.
“We’ve been made!” the Sergeant yelled, and the feeds were thrown into disarray as the squad broke for cover, dragging the wounded man along with them.
Evelina fought down a pang of motion sickness at the overabundance of information on her screen, and her armour cut the feeds. The transit hub was up ahead, and the last thing she needed was the targets moving away from the station.
Evelina plunged into the tense, rapidly-moving crowd, pushing her way over to the side of the commercial zone towards a terminal. She slammed her hand onto the touchscreen, and thought about establishing a link to the station’s intranet. A second later, a progress bar appeared on her HUD.
“Annabelle, lock down the entire station’s transit grid,” she ordered.
“Already done,” Annabelle said.
“Target is on the run!” Corporal Harston’s voice was now tinged with pure fear, and Evelina made a mental note to chastise the man for letting his nerves get the best of him.
Evelina yanked her hand away from the terminal.
“Likeliest destination is the freight elevator down planetside—upper level freight storage areas,” the Sergeant chimed in.
“I agree,” Annabelle said. “Relaying the target's most-likely location.”
The Spartan slid the MA5K off of her back, shouldering the rifle and clicking the safety off. “I’m on my way! Can you hold off the insurgents?”
“Yes, ma’am,”the Sergeant said. “Don’t worry about the small fry, go catch the big fish!”
“Solid copy,” Evelina said, before severing the link and taking off up the stairs into the transit hub up above. She took a left turn, past the terminal where the skirmish was now erupting into a full on firefight.
With a pulse of indecision eating at her, she turned her attention away from the door, and began to jog off towards where the tracker was leading her. She came to a sliding double-door, and keyed the controls for it to open.
She muscled through it before it was even halfway open, coming to another open commercial zone, but this one shaped more like a conventional shopping centre, no bigger than a Frigate’s hangar bay. She had come out on the upper level, and came to a halt by a guard railing, overlooking the plaza beneath.
In the middle of the public space was a model of the Lori, suspended by wires and hooks from the ceiling about thirty feet above them. The circular construction spun a bit, tugged along by overhead motors.
She saw the target down below, his lime green MJOLNIR armour sticking out against the surrounding gunmetal grey deck plating. He was surrounded by a greenish-yellow outline, and an arrow pointed to him showing him all the target data she could ever want.
He was heading for a door at the ground level, but paused before walking through. Turning around to look up at her, he froze in place. They stood that way for a moment, his hand clutched the briefcase closer to his thigh, squeezing the handle so hard that it dented around his fingers.
Evelina vaulted the railing before the target turned to flee. She hit the ground hard, but by that point the man was already running at a dead sprint away from her, deeper into the maze-like corridors of the station proper.
While she was recovering from her vault, she felt her senses sharpen, a rush of energy infused her muscles, and something on her armour clicked off.
“I’ve administered a shot of adrenaline,” Annabelle said. “And deactivated your armour’s safety features. Try not to chafe.”
Furrowing her eyebrows, Spartan Slade tensed her muscles, feeling like she could do a lap around an entire planet without tiring.
“Let’s get this son of a bitch,” she grinned beneath her helmet, and pushed herself up into a dead sprint, denting the decking behind her with the force of her movements.
While the target’s general location was unknown, her armour calculated the most likely path through the tangle of hallways and half-blurred sliding doors. Slade ran through them all, not caring about who or what she passed along the way.
Up ahead, a yellow outline revealed a figure clad in armour just like her, sprinting at top speed with an armoured briefcase clutched close to his chest.
Evelina redoubled her efforts, passing underneath a sliding door that was swinging shut as she approached. The door’s sensors barely had enough time to register her presence before she had ducked underneath it and was gone.
She thought about her connection to the station, wondering if it had been severed. Her armour responded, bringing up the station’s information network in the bottom left hand side of her screen. Slade’s eyes flicked towards it, but she kept running.
“Annabelle,” she huffed in exertion. “Can you lock down the station’s bulkheads?”
A red X appeared in the bottom left of Evelina’s HUD, replacing the information network display. “I don’t have the authorisation,” her AI said. “I’m being locked out by the station AI.”
“Dammit!” Evelina cursed.
Her target banked hard right, slinging himself up a flight of stairs three steps at a time. Evelina came up on the same turn and tried to angle herself to go around it without breaking stride. She ended up sliding on the polished metal floor, slamming straight into the wall.
Grunting, she pushed herself off the wall and up the stairs. They were passing out of the commercial zones and into the work levels, the gunmetal grey walls and advertisements turned to olive drab decking and metal air vents.
Whereas before the utilitarianism of the station was coated in a thin veneer of friendly, gentle colours, here it was in full display.
“We have two minutes, thirty seconds before the freight elevator leaves the station,” Annabelle said. “Then a further two hours of transit.”
“What about personnel elevators?” Evelina asked, pushing herself despite the burning in her chest and the withering pulsing beats in her legs.
“None are currently docked with the Lori.”
Evelina slowed to a jog, then a crawl, looking around at the crossroads she had come to. She was missing something; her target—disappearing as he was down another corridor’s corner—was trying to give her the slip, not running right for his destination.
“Get me the fastest route to the freight terminal,” Evelina ordered.
“That seems counter-productive,” Annabelle said.
“We can’t chase him,” the Spartan said, her eyes darting between doorways. “We’ll never make it. We have to cut him off.”
“To the right,” she said.
Evelina sprinted down the rightmost passage, her prosthetic limbs protesting with each step she forced herself to hurl down onto the deck plating. She needed a way to slow her target down, or he’d make a beeline right to the terminal as soon as he realised she was no longer wasting effort running him down.
A comms link was established a split second later, directly to the station’s security personnel. Evelina almost started speaking, before a wheezing cough broke her words.
“This is Spartan Evelina Slade, Office of Naval Intelligence Section Zero. We have reason to believe a terrorist incident is about to occur on the Lori. Muster a security detail at the freight elevator terminal, and lock down the station.”
Spartan Slade almost took a tumble down a utility step at the perfect mimicry of her own voice, but any thought of chastisement was blocked by appreciation. Evelina needed every breath her lungs could gulp down, rather than wasting in on calling in support.
Slade felt her legs burning, the walls and hallways of the Lori work district passed by in a hazy grey blur. The thought of how long she would have to endure the sprinting wormed its way up from her subconscious, almost at the same time as a countdown and a distance appeared above the waypoint to the terminal.
She sent a thanks to Annabelle, her throat and lungs too busy with their beleaguered breathing to be of much use in any other way.
Evelina turned a corner, skidding to a crashing halt against the a framed advertisement for Dane Derrick’s Discount Diner, shattering the glass frame in a shower of sparkling shards. The Spartan pushed off from the advertisement, denting the metal as she did, and sprinted past the frightened faces of onlookers clutching their bags or their partners close.
There were cracks up ahead, the bellowing thunderclaps of pistol shots. The sound grabbed a hold of Evelina by the throat and choked her breathing.
“Gunfire detected up ahead.”
She turned the corner, and emerged out from a final sliding door into a freight area. Containers were being hauled out of side airlocks into the holding area, there were throughways and alleys between container stacks, and the omnipresent thrum of cranes and hoists.
There, at the center of the room, a wide elevator supported by struts and cables. The main artery of the Lori, and its only way to ferry massive amounts of cargo down to the planet without the need for ships.
Slade took off towards the lift as fast as her sluggish body would allow her to. In front of the cargo lift doors were security officers; some shot, some beaten, some still twitching as blood pooled around their prone forms. Her target was stepping onto the lift, his fist slamming down on the button.
A wailing klaxon filled the room, and the shutters and bulkheads began to drift shut. Slade put her rifle back over her shoulder, affixing it onto the back of her armour with a click, and reached down to the small of her back.
A foldable titanium ballistic shield came out, and she snapped it open as she ran. The target up ahead turned around just as she raised the shield up in front of her face.
The target spun around, briefcase swinging, and a gun in his other hand. He raised it up to Evelina as she sprinted for the open doors. Evelina had just enough time to raise her ballistic shield attached to one of her arms.
The slugs pinged off of the metal, the target emptied the entire magazine into her in an effort to slow her down.
The doors were closing, the freight lift already descending down the inner tube of the Space Tether. The rogue Spartan disappeared from view, and the top of the lift descended down towards Slade as she approached.
The doors were nearly shut, with just enough room for her to squeeze through, but not enough for her to make it all the way through. She’d be caught, and crushed by the hydraulics.
“We’re not going to make it.” the voice of her AI said.
Evelina grit her teeth. “We’ll make it.”
Slade tilted herself backwards and hit the decking, bringing up her shield in the process, and letting her residual momentum carry herself across the floor. The armour attached to her thighs and lower legs made a horrific screeching noise as they scraped along the corrugated black steel beneath. Paint and scratch marks appeared behind her as she went, her full velocity carrying her across the plating.
As she passed between the doors, she thrust her shield forward as she slid, pinning it between the closing bulkheads. A tremendous pressure began folding it at the seam, but it slowed the closing just enough for her to slide through.
Slade let go of the ballistic shield, dropping her arms above her head to make as small a profile as possible, she passed into the freight lift at the last moment. She slid beneath the shutters, between the bulkheads, her shield straining to hold them back. As her head slid beneath the descending elevator’s roof, the metal holding the doors open snapped away, and the doors slid shut with a hiss.
All of a sudden, she came to a halt, dangling from the ceiling. Like a guillotine, the metal of the lift’s ceiling was slicing clean through her prosthetic arm, pinning the robotic limb in place. Evelina grunted as she strained. There was a tearing sound, the sensation of crushing, and Evelina hung there for a second as the crushing pressure threatened to rip her shoulder joint out of its socket, and take the flesh with it.
The SHIKARI wrenched herself to one side, ripping the remainder of her arm away from the roof. A sensation of weightlessness overtook her, and her stomach turned as she fell down the ten feet to the bottom of the lift with a clang, knocking the wind from her in an explosive rush of air that fogged up her helmet’s interior screen.
“I told you we wouldn’t make it.”
Evelina couldn’t find the words to ask for a full damage report, but luckily she didn’t need to.
“You have lost your prosthetic arm,” Annabelle said, “your ballistic shield, and your energy shielding strength is down to 50%.”
Slade groaned, letting herself fall limp on the decking. “Fantastic,” she said. She stood on shaky feet, reaching back with her severed prosthetic arm for her rifle. When her hand didn’t respond, she rolled her eyes and reached back with her other arm.
She stabilised the weapon on what remained of her prosthetic stump, sliding her other hand through the trigger guard. Her visor swept the area, highlighting everything in a yellow outline.
A bout of queasy motion-sickness played across her gut when she looked at the walls of the lift.
The cargo lift wasn’t made for comfort of passengers as a primary concern. To that effect, the lift itself was more of an open rail cart, a floor, a ceiling, and support struts to hold the two together. The walls were rushing by at an increasingly-frantic pace as the lift began to accelerate towards the planet below. After a while, the lift would hit maximum velocity. While the cargo would be safely strapped down and cushioned, humans didn’t have that luxury.
Soon, she’d enter freefall, and subduing her target would become that much more challenging.
She began to step deeper into the maze of strapped down cargo containers and shipping crates. There was enough stored to feed a whole settlement for a week, and her target could be hiding anywhere inside it.
Her armour’s intrusion software could have made short work of finding him, but the second it popped up on her HUD it vanished again with the words ‘NO VALID HOST’. Evelina’s brows furrowed at that.
“Alert: Target has deactivated his MJOLNIR handshake protocol and neural implant,” Annabelle said.
Spartan Slade hummed, gripping her weapon tighter. “So, old fashioned way it is then.”
“Alert!” Annabelle’s voice was much more frantic this time. “I’m reading an activation signal for a HAVOK-Grade nuclear payload!”
Evelina turned her head to the left out of reflex again. “Can you stop it?”
“Negative. You’d have to interface with the case directly. We don’t have much time!”
Evelina’s throat turned parched, and she swallowed around a nervous lump. “How long?”
“All UNSC nuclear armaments have a minimum timer to allow friendly forces to reach minimum-safe. No less than 120 seconds.”
Evelina started to count them down. In response, a timer appeared on her HUD. She had 115 seconds.
“On your left!” Annabelle yelled.
Evelina turned, squeezing the trigger of her MA5K before she had even sighted her shots. They went wide, and the gun’s barrel was stopped short by an armoured gauntlet, a second of which was headed for her face.
She ducked underneath it, tossing her rifle away rather than keeping it to occupy her only free hand. She jabbed the stump of her sparking prosthetic into the unarmoured midsection of her enemy, making him double over.
With a raised fist she brought an elbow down on the man’s back, followed by a knee to the head. He caught Evelina’s leg and wrenched it to one side with a violent twist of his upper body.
Evelina felt a sharp, white-hot stabbing pain lance its way up her left leg. The Spartan continued to twist it, and Evelina could feel the false limb being worked free of its moorings. She used her other leg to hop, pushing herself up off the deck, then jamming both of her legs out in a drop kick. Both feet connected with the other Spartan’s chest-plate, sending him sprawling back, and freeing her limbs.
She was up in an instant, but so was he, fumbling for the pistol on his belt and bringing it up just before Evelina could reach cover. A single clap of thunder filled the lift, and a slug slammed into her helmet, knocking her off balance and sending her to the floor.
A sparkling golden energy field appeared around her, and Annabelle’s voice sounded out a second later. “Alert: Your shields are about to fail. Prioritising other systems.”
Another shot dented the metal of the container, having pierced clean through the other side and the cargo within. Evelina kept herself low, working her way around the other side of the container. She’d begun to feel lighter on her feet, like whatever force kept her tethered to the deck was lessening.
A quick look towards the walls told her why.
“Lift velocity at 42 meters per second,” Annabelle said.
“Thank you, Annabelle,” Evelina said, crouching by the edge of the container and peeking around it.
Her target snapped his pistol towards her and pulled the trigger, only for a click to pierce the silence instead of a flash of light and sound. The man paused, looking down at the pistol in disbelief.
Evelina pushed off of the deck and sprinted at him at full tilt.
The man drew back, throwing the empty pistol at her. Evelina batted it away, but her arms couldn’t block the resulting punch that the other Spartan threw at her face. It connected with her helmet and cracked one of the visor lenses. Her VISR system immediately severed the feed from that lens and prioritised another, leaving her with unhindered visuals.
She struck back with a hook to the man’s ribs, prioritising places where his armour didn’t protect. The soft bodysuit underneath was good for protecting against small arms fire, but a punch from a Spartan still felt like a punch.
He grunted, doubling over at the blow and throwing his body at her, grabbing her around the waist and tackling her to the floor. He brought a knife out as he fell, straddling her waist and bringing the glinting edge of the blade towards her throat.
She grabbed at his hand with her one good prosthetic, straining against the man’s strength. He placed his second hand on the back of the knife handle, and bore his entire weight down on the blade.
“Velocity at 73 meters per second. Prepare for freefall.”
Evelina threw her head to one side, angling the knife so it plunged down into the decking, before bucking her hips and lifting the man off of her. The freight lift fell out from under them both, sending them up into the air. A feeling of weightlessness enveloped Evelina, and she began to tumble out of control as the lift peeled away beneath her.
“Freight elevator is about to reach maximum velocity.”
The man spun around in the air, flipping the knife on its end and launching it at her with all his strength. The blade buried itself in Evelina’s right shoulder, just at the point where her implants met the flesh. She began to scream, pawing at the blade with the worthless stub of her left arm. Blood began to pool in the air.
The timer reached 60 seconds.
The man pinned his arms and legs to his side, angling his body to head back down towards the freight lift. Evelina followed his path and saw why; her rifle was flipping end-over end, sparking in the lights as they raced past, and still loaded.
Evelina drew her arms into her chest and tucked herself into a roll. When her face was perpendicular to the floor of the lift, she spread her limps out as wide as they could go. Her armour’s thrusters pulsed, and she let herself ride upwards, impacting the ceiling of the lift with a thud.
The knife came loose from her shoulder, she braced herself on the ceiling, then pushed herself off with all the force her legs could muster, pinning her limbs to her body and redlining her thruster pack. She raced towards the man, slamming into him just as his fingers brushed up against the handle of her rifle.
She slammed him into the deck, hand immediately going to his head to bring it up and smash it back down onto the deck plates, visor first. She heard a cracking sound, so she did it again, and tried to do it a third time before the momentum of their impacts began to push them back.
The man was dazed, reeling from the blows, and Evelina’s eyes darted to one side, towards the wall rushing past them at a speed that turned it into a blurry mess of metal and bolts.
“No!” Annabelle yelled at her. “Spartan, wait!”
Before Evelina could register the AI’s words, she had already angled the rogue Spartan’s body into the wall. She pressed her hand down on the back of the man’s helmet, pinning it to the rushing deckplate. Sparks, paint, and armour plating chipped away, and it took Evelina a while to realise that she was yelling behind her visor, putting all of her strength into her remaining prosthetic hand to make sure his helmet stayed flush against the wall rushing past them as they fell.
Eventually the sparks, paint, and metal scratches gave way to red chunks and streaks. The sound of metal grinding on metal gave way to the mulching sound of meat being stripped from his face, then the crack of his skull.
She tossed the body to one side, tucking herself into a backwards roll away from the wall, letting the corpse of the man float to one side while she drifted towards the centre of the lift.
Slade stopped her yelling, voice and throat hoarse, and ears ringing. She felt drained, the wear and tear of her fight weighed on her body and mind, her muscles started to pulse with angry aching beats of her frantic heart.
She let herself go entirely, her arms and legs drifting up. The sensation of falling had long since left her, now there was only the clattering of the lift as it descended.
The body of the rogue Spartan continued to cartwheel about, the top left hand side of his head looking like it had been cut away at a slanted angle by a laser cutter.
“Good work, Spartan,” Annabelle said. “It’s not like priority one was to capture the target alive, or anything.”
“We got him,” Evelina replied. “That’s all that matters.”
“I don’t mean to rain on your parade,” Annabelle said, “but perhaps we should secure the warhead.”
Evelina pushed herself off the ceiling, searching the expansive hold for the armoured green case the target had. It was cartwheeling lazily in the centre of the cargo lift, and she pinwheeled her arms to get towards it.
Once she had her hands on the case, she turned it over, placing her hand on it so that Annabelle could disarm it. It took less than a second, but the last number that Evelina saw on the bright red display was 13 seconds.
She let the case go, letting her arms and legs float upwards. There was nothing else to do but wait for decel, and she started counting down.
