Halo: First Strike

by Eric S. Nylund

  "Negative," Cortana replied, and her voice took on a new chill. "Admiral Whitcomb is quite adamant that we risk another Slipspace transition—regardless of the cost in human life. Otherwise, it would be weeks before we would be able to contact UNSC High Command."

  HighCom? Two facts suddenly clicked into place: the Admiral's need to contact the rest of the Admiralty—no matter the price—and Dr. Halsey's attempts to revive Linda.

  "What's compelling the Admiral's tactics, Cortana?"

  Cortana's holographic outline softened. "I told you this before, Chief, but apparently it did not stick in your semiconscious state." She then came into sharp focus and crossed her arms over her chest. "The Covenant have discovered the location of Earth."

  The Master Chief stood, suddenly wide awake and alert. He set aside his pain and fatigue.

  "Explain," he demanded.

  Cortana outlined her discovery of the encoded subchannel within normal Covenant communiques. She explained how the Covenant's military orders were disseminated with startling efficiently, and she then showed him symbols that represented the coordinates for Sol... and Earth.

  He stood mute and listened. The UNSC had worked so hard, for so long, to preserve this secret. It was only a matter of time; he had always known that the Covenant had to find Earth sooner or later. He had, however, always thought it would be later ... and never now.

  The Master Chief stared at the tiny triangles, squares, dots, and bars that made up the spatial coordinates. "We've seen these before, on Cote d'Azur."

  "Yes. And according to Doctor Halsey, her team on Reach found similar markings in the underground vaults."

  "What's the connection?"

  "Unknown."

  The Master Chief put these facts aside for the moment; the greater meaning of the symbols and translation he'd leave up to Cortana and ONI. The only insight that mattered to him was that the Covenant were going to attack Earth.

  "Was there a timetable or any other data encoded on the sub-channel?" he asked.

  "Affirmative. There's a coordinated series of orders to Covenant warships scattered across the galaxy to rendezvous with a mobile command-and-control base they call the 'Unyielding Hierophant.' When they have sufficient force, they will collectively make the jump to Earth."

  The Master Chief moved toward the medical bay's doors. They automatically parted. "Where is Admiral Whitcomb?" "The Admiral is currently on the bridge," Cortana replied. "But Doctor Halsey gave me strict orders that you are not to—"

  "I don't take orders from civilians," he snapped. "Not even her." The Master Chief passed out of the medical bay and marched down the corridor.

  "You know," Cortana said, her voice now coming from his helmet speaker, "your attitude has degraded since we started this mission—even before the battle for Reach."

  "Noted," he replied.

  The dim white light flooding the Gettysburg's passages was a welcome change from the blue illumination the Covenant used on their ships. John was glad to have his feet once more firmly planted on the raw steel decks of a human vessel, even if the walls of this passage were soot-stained.

  He entered the Command elevator and punched the button for the bridge. The gentle acceleration made new pain flare along his arms, and ligaments popped in his chest—but he gritted his teeth and banished the pain from his awareness.

  When the doors parted, the Master Chief paused, taking in the sad state of the Gettysburg's bridge. The front viewports had been blown out and recently replaced with welded plates of hull armor. A trio of monitors had been hastily bolted in place over them. Crystallized freeze-dried blood covered the navigation and ops consoles. Only three control stations were lit: engineering, computer status, and MAC ops.

  But most disconcerting was that only Admiral Whitcomb and Lieutenant Haverson were present on a bridge that usually needed a staff of thirty officers. The room was as still and empty as a tomb.

  "Master Chief," Admiral Whitcomb said, slightly surprised.

  "Sir." He stood at attention and snapped off a crisp salute. "Permission to enter the bridge." "Granted, son," the Admiral said. "What's your status, Chief?" Haverson asked. "Doctor Halsey told us it would be days before you recovered."

  "I'm one hundred percent, sir," he said.

  As if she had heard this statement, Dr. Halsey opened a COM channel, and a tiny video feed popped onto his heads-up display. Her glasses reflected an ambient orange light from wherever she was, and he could not see her eyes.

  "John, I need to speak with you."

  "I'm with Admiral Whitcomb and Lieutenant Haverson, ma'am. When I'm done I can speak with you."

  She was silent a moment, then said, "Very well." The COM winked off.

  The Master Chief felt a pang of regret for being so terse with her.

  "Get over here, son," the Admiral said. He returned his attention to the clear plastic wall dotted with stars and the diamond symbols that represented UNSC military outposts in this region of space. "We're in something of a tough spot."

  He marched to the Admiral and Haverson and studied the chart with them. "Cortana's briefed me, sir. The Covenant know Earth's location and are on the move, most likely preparing a massive attack."

  "That's the gist of it, I'm afraid," Haverson said, and the Chief noticed deep circles of fatigue ringing the younger man's eyes. "To complicate matters, we can barely navigate. We've been working around the clock to restore our ships, but we'd need an engineering crew of a hundred and a space dock to get these wrecks into fighting shape."

  Admiral Whitcomb frowned at the Lieutenant's dour assessment and added, "Another trick is that the crystal we picked up on Reach emits radiation in Slipspace. Enough to kill everyone after only a few more hours of exposure.

  "But we're hanging on to the alien device. It changes the properties of Slipspace, as you already saw—but with one more twist. In the few minutes we were in that tangled version of Slip-space, we traveled here"—he drew a tiny circle on the map, centered on their position—"which under normal circumstances should have taken us days."

  "We attempted to briefly jump again," Haverson added, "but nothing extraordinary occurred. This unusually long jump may have been caused by the energy added to Slipspace by our battle with the Covenant."

  "In any case," Admiral Whitcomb said, "if we learn what makes this crystal tick, it'd give us a hell of an edge on the Covenant."

  "I see, sir."

  The Chief scrutinized their location—not quite the definition of the middle of nowhere, but close. He noted that there were three star systems within the circle.

  Haverson also peered at the chart. He touched one of the star symbols within their range, and statistics scrolled alongside the object. He sighed. "This system was glassed in 2530, so there's no chance there would be anyone to help us there. And the other two systems. .." He shook his head. "Uninhabited."

  "Hell," Admiral Whitcomb said and tugged on his mustache, "we pulled out of this region of space almost as soon as the war started. The Covenant came in, burned Eridanus and the other Outer Colonies, and then moved on without batting an eye."

  "Eridanus?" The Chief stepped closer and touched the data scrolling next to the tiny star. "I know this place." He turned to the Admiral. "And there is a human colony there, sir—just not one that the UNSC cares about anymore. If I had to guess, I'd bet

  that the Covenant never found it, either. We might be able to expedite repairs there." The Admiral stared thoughtfully at him. "You sure? Sure enough to bet our lives and Earth on that hunch, Chief?"

  The Master Chief looked again at the tiny dot on the map.

  It wasn't Eridanus he was thinking of. It was the surrounding asteroid belt ... and a mission he and his team had executed twenty years ago.

  "Yes, sir. I'm sure."

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  TIME:DATE STAMP [[ERROR]] ANOMALYRevised dateestimated 0450, September 12,2552, captured Covenantflagship Ascendant Justice, in Slipspace en route to Eridanus system.


  Dr. Halsey buzzed the door open, and the Master Chief entered the clean room.

  "You wanted to see me, Doctor?" He quickly looked the room over—taking in the adjoining surgical suites, and the strange orange sterile-field lamps set every meter into reflective recessions in the tiled walls.

  Dr. Halsey had clamped five displays onto the arm of one of the contoured examination chairs in this room. She sat cross-legged in the chair and balanced a large alphanumeric-symbolic keyboard on her lap. Perched precariously on the side tray were Styrofoam cups of half-drunk coffee.

  She waved the Chief forward. "I see you are ignoring sound medical advice by moving before you have fully healed."

  "I'm fine, ma'am," he replied.

  She snorted in disbelief. "John—I've never known you to tell an outright lie. I'm picking up telemetry from your armor, right now." She swiveled one of the monitors on her chair so he could see erratic biosigns pulsing on the screen. "What with the burns, contusions, fractures, and internal bleeding, you should be in shock. The only sleep you've gotten in a week was unconsciousness brought on by your wounds. And you say you're 'fine'?"

  He stood and said nothing. "Very well. I suppose you know your limitations better than anyone else." She turned the display back around. "I wanted to

  speak about your report on the alien construct—Halo. I've pieced together a bit of the story based on Admiral Whitcomb's recounting of your adventures, Cortana's debriefing, and the mission logs of Locklear, Johnson... and the curious partial mission log of one PFC Wallace Jenkins."

  The Master Chief shifted uneasily.

  "There are inconsistencies that I must resolve before we get back to Earth." She pushed her glasses higher onto the bridge of her nose. "One of them is Sergeant Johnson." She tapped in commands on her keyboard. "Please step closer, John. I want you to see this with me."

  The Master Chief moved alongside her chair. His massive weight thudded through the thick deck plating. Two meters tall and half a ton of metal and somehow Dr. Halsey couldn't help thinking of him occasionally as the same little boy she had stolen from his parents in Elysium City.

  No. John had changed. She hadn't. She was the one who still carried the three-decade-old festering guilt.

  She took a deep breath and refocused her attention on the video records before her. On screen played mission logs that showed Covenant and Marines in firefights, the odd Forerunner architecture in the interior of the Halo construct, and the terrifying omniparasitic life-form known as the Flood.

  She replayed the mission record of Private Jenkins and the first Flood attack.

  John stiffened as Captain Keyes appeared on screen and as the Flood consumed the Captain and his squad. Sergeant Johnson was there, too, fighting and cursing ... until the hordes of tiny, podlike Infection Forms swarmed over him.

  "The Sergeant survived," she said. "The only human to have direct exposure to the Flood meta-organism and walk away." "I know," the Master Chief whispered. "I'm not sure how he survived. How could anyone live through that?"

  "That's the simple part," Dr. Halsey told him without looking up from her displays. She tapped a key, and the Sergeant's medical records flashed on screen. "See, here?" She touched a file dated three years before. "He was diagnosed with Boren's Syndrome."

  "I haven't heard of it," the Chief said.

  "I'm not surprised. It's caused by exposure to high-yield plasma. Like the burst released by a Covenant plasma grenade. We don't see many cases—people usually die from the direct effects of those weapons long before these secondary symptoms manifest.

  "Apparently, the Sergeant captured a crate of plasma grenades from the Covenant during the Siege of Paris IV He used them all—received a commendation for bravery ... and a twelvehundred-rad cumulative dose of radiation as an unanticipated bonus."

  John was silent for several minutes. Dr. Halsey wasn't sure if he was reading the computer files, contemplating her words, or trying to confirm all this on a private COM channel with Cortana. His impenetrable armor made discussions with normal social conventions nearly impossible. It irritated her, yet without that armor with its constant hydrostatic pressure and automated biofoam injectors, John would have literally fallen apart by now.

  For a fleeting moment she remembered when she had first read Alexander Dumas's Man in the Iron Mask. She had felt terror when the noble prisoner had been encased within that metal shell. How did John cope with the constant suffocating enclosure?

  The Master Chief finally said, "I don't see the connection between the Sergeant's sickness and his surviving the Flood."

  "Boren's Syndrome," Dr. Halsey explained, "is characterized by migraines, amnesia, and brain tumors . .. and without the proper treatment, death. It disrupts the electrical signals in a per-son's nervous system."

  "Is it treatable?"

  "Yes, but it requires thirty weeks of intensive chemotherapy. Which brings me to this." She hit the NEXT PAGE key and an official "Refusal of Treatment" document appeared on screen. "The Sergeant did not wait thirty weeks to get back and fight."

  The Master Chief nodded, understanding the heroic, futile gesture. "How did this disruption of his nervous system save him?"

  "I've deconvoluted the biosigns of the soldiers overtaken by the Flood. The parasite interfaces with a host by forcing a resonant frequency match to each host's neural system."

  "And the Sergeant's nervous system is so jumbled that the Flood couldn't force a match?"

  "Correct," she said. "Further blood tests show his system bearing traces of Flood DNA—very much dead and noninfectious, but some gene fragments are intact. I believe this is proof of a failed attempt to possess him. It also appears to have imparted him with some curious regenerative abilities, although I cannot yet fully confirm this side effect."

  The Master Chief seemed to relax a notch from his usual ramrod stiff at-attention stature. This new information seemed to put him at ease. "I think I see."

  "No," Dr. Halsey told him, and she removed her glasses. "You don't."

  "Doctor?"

  "Discovering how he survived is not what I wanted to discuss. It's what happens next to Sergeant Avery Johnson."

  She shut off her monitors and eased back into the chair. "I've prepared two separate reports on this for ONI Section Three. The first has all relevant data on my analysis and the possible technology to counter an initial Flood infestation. The second includes the source material: Private Jenkins's and Sergeant Johnson's mission logs and the Sergeant's medical files."

  She downloaded the reports onto two data crystals and ejected them from the port on the chair's arm. She set the clear cubes on the tray and gestured for John to take them. "I leave it up to you which to deliver to Lieutenant Haverson."

  "Why would I withhold any data, Doctor?" the Master Chief asked and glanced at the crystals.

  Her eyes focused past him as she struggled to find the words to match her conflicting emotions. "For a long time I had thought that we had to sacrifice a few for the good of the entire human race." She took a deep breath and let it go with a heavy sigh. "I have killed and maimed and caused a great deal of suffering to many people—all in the name of self-preservation." Her steely blue gaze found him. "But now I'm not sure that philosophy has worked out too well. I should have been trying to save every single human life—no matter what it cost."

  Dr. Halsey pushed the tray bearing the data crystals toward the Master Chief. "If you give ONI the first report, they may be able to find a countermeasure for the Flood. Maybe. They would have a slightly better chance, however, if you give them the second report."

  "Then I'll give them the second report." He picked up the crystal.

  "Which will murder Sergeant Johnson," she said with a chill in her voice. "ONI will not be satisfied to take a sample of blood. They will dissect him to find out how he resisted the Flood. It will be a billion-to-one shot that they'll ever replicate his unique medical conditions—but they'll do it anyway. They will kill him because t
he trade-off is worth it to them."

  The Master Chief picked up the other crystal and then stared at them both lying in his gauntleted hand.

  "Is it worth it to you, John?" she asked.

  He curled his hand in a fist and held it close to his chest. "Why do you want me to make this choice?"

  "One last lesson. I'm trying to teach you something it's taken me all my life to realize." She cleared her throat of the lump thickening there. "I'm giving you the chance to make the decision that I thought I couldn't make."

  She glanced at the clock on her display. "I'm sorry. Linda is almost prepped for surgery, and I have several things I must accomplish before then. You should go."

  The Master Chief obediently turned and strode toward the exit, but halted in the doorway. "Doctor, don't let her die again." He then left the room.

  Dr. Halsey watched until he rounded the corridor and was gone. She hoped she saw John again before she did what she had to do, but she might not. Would the thought she had planted within him take hold? The gesture might be the only thing she could do to atone for what she'd done to him and the other Spartans.

  Such thoughts were luxuries when there were only three hours before Ascendant Justice exited Slipspace. There was too much to do before then.

  She turned all the monitors to face her and typed in the command to unsquelch Cortana. "Lock the door," Dr. Halsey ordered Cortana. "Boost counter-intrusion measures to level seven."

  ERIC NYLUND 247

  "Done," Cortana said. The irritation at having been silenced for the last five minutes was like barbed wire in her voice. "What precisely was all that about? Teach the Master Chief a lesson? Giving him a choice? Save one man instead of billions?"

  Dr. Halsey ignored her and rapidly typed in commands on her keyboard. "Give me access to your core coordinates four-fourseven."

  "Block removed," Cortana said with an exasperated sigh. "Are you going to answer my question?"

  "I'm tired of sacrificing others for the 'greater good,' " Dr. Halsey replied. "It never stops, Cortana ... and we're running out of people to sacrifice." She tapped in a final command for the memory-wiping worm function and punched the ENTER key.