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The Prisoner by Chris Cox
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The Prisoner (part 1)
Date: 29 January 2001, 10:28 am
The jeep roared down the narrow, wooded valley, tyres spinning in the soft loam of the track. Dozens of small creatures, furred like mice but with elongated, snake-like necks scattered at the sight of the approaching vehicle and bolted into the undergrowth. The three SolCore marines on the jeep paid them no attention. They were hunting bigger game.
As the speeding jeep neared the end of the valley, the third marine, who sat manning the triple-barelled machine gun mounted in the raised rear of the vehicle, spotted a movement in the trees to one side and shouted a warning. The driver slammed on the brakes, sending the machine skidding to a stop, and the gun swiveled round on well-lubricated bearings to take aim at the shape of a distant Covenant warrior scrambling to hide itself in the undergrowth. The sergeant in the passenger seat yelled out for the gunner to fire, and he squeezed the trigger, starting the three barrels whirring into motion as the the weapon spun up to full speed.
The blow came from behind, a blast from the shoulder-mounted weapon of a second Covenant warrior concealed behind a fallen tree on the other side of the track. It struck at the base of the gun, boring through the thin skin of the jeep and exploding inside the rotation gears. The weapon was blown off its mountings, sending the gunner flying out of his seat and onto the ground beside the vehicle. The other two marines dived out tumbled, hitting the ground with rifles ready, training them on the alien behind the log. It had ducked back down again, and was no longer visible. Both men sweated, scanning the foliage for movement, fingers poised over their triggers.
Nothing moved.
The marine who had been driving the jeep glanced across at the sergeant, unsure of what to do. He was trying to edge round to the other side of the jeep, searching for the first warrior in case it was trying to creep up behind them. Then the silence was broken by the deep roar of another alien somewhere further back along the trail, and the woods erupted with a dozen more Covenant warriors, leaping from their hiding places and firing a lethal volley of energy blasts and razor-sharp crystal shards.
The sergeant got up and dashed behind the jeep, crouching in the cover of its bonnet and returning fire with a grenade from the launcher on his rifle. The second marine was less fortunate, catching an energy blast in the arm as he scrambled to get under the vehicle. As he stumbled against its side, a burst of glassy spines pinned him to the front tyre and then exploded inside him, spraying blood and tiny crystal splinters over the already shrapnel-scattered earth.
The sergeant crouched behind the jeep, taking a few snap shots at a few of the alien warriors crossing the trail to get behind him. He leaned out to see the gunner, who was lying motionless in the dirt next to the wreckage of his weapon. With a silent curse, he rolled up into the front seat of the jeep, gunned the engine and accelerated away from the rapidly converging Covenant, swerving to dodge the fire which followed him. The aliens jogged after the vehicle for a few seconds, before a voice from the woods ordered them to cease.
The Covenant leader, distinguished from the others by his crimson armour and warpaint, stalked out of the shrubs from where he had been firing and surveyed the results of his ambush. A cursory glance at the mangled corpse of the previous driver confirmed the kill, while a brief kick moved the smashed machine gun from his path. One of the other warriors was standing over the crumpled form of the gunner, and reached down to press its fingertips against his body. It felt blood still flowing.
"This one lives, honored leader." it growled, and drew its blade to finish him off.
The leader approached the gunner's prone form, thinking for a moment. He turned to the warrior. "Take it. Remove its weapons and bring it to the staging post at landing site four." He turned away and gazed into the forest, thoughtful for a moment. This was far from standard procedure, but might conceivably be enlightening. Knowledge, as the prophets said, is the father of victory. Suddenly remembering something, he activated his communications link.
"Scout squadron two."
"Reporting, honored leader."
"A light human vehicle approaches your patrol zone from planetward. Destroy it."
Pain.
Pain everywhere, but especially in the legs.
Pain, especially in the legs, and a deep, loud humming noise, apparently coming from all around.
Private Andrew Young, SolCore marine corps, previously attached to the SCS Pillar of Autumn, forced his eyes open. The scene that greeted them was not familiar. There was no forest, no track, no Warthog, and no sky. There was simply a sheet of dull metallic grey suspended a few metres above his head.
He slowly tracked his eyes across the sheet, tracing it to where it connected to four walls of the same grey material. He turned his head on one side to look down one of the walls. This hurt, but he moved anyway, anxious to discover exactly where he had ended up. His eyes came to rest on a Covenant soldier, sitting watching him from a seat on the opposite side of the room.
On reflexes alone, he tried to jump to his feet, only to find that his legs would not support his weight, sending him tumbling awkwardly against the wall. He groped at where his belt holster should have been: nothing. Bearing in mind his trousers and boots had been removed, he guessed that the knife that he kept hidden in his left boot wasn't there either. His legs were coated in some kind of transparent sticky film, through which he could see several deep wounds which the film was preventing from bleeding.
The alien glanced in his direction, apparently unconcerned at his sudden awakening. It was toying with one of the energy-blades the Covenant used, turning it on and off as it stared through the field-plane of the blade. Seeing that he was conscious, it deactivated the weapon, bowed its head slightly, and muttered several words in its unfamiliar tongue.
A minute or so later, by Young's reckoning, a door opened in the wall behind the guard, separating seamlessly from the surrounding metal. A second alien, this one in red armour, stepped inside, growled a short phrase to the guard and watched while it rose and walked out of the door. The hatch closed again, fitting precisely into its opening. The second alien watched Young with interest. He stayed where he was, propped up against the opposite wall.
After a short pause, the red-armoured figure paced to the centre of the room, produced a small pyramidal device from behind its back, and placed it on the floor. It then walked to the guard's former seat and sat down. Then it spoke, and the device spoke with it.
"Why are you here, human?" it asked.
Young tried to curse at it, but his throat was dry and all that emerged was a feeble croak. He coughed, swallowed, managed to coerce his vocal cords into action again. "Fuck you." he managed.
The alien seemed unconcerned at the insult, which he presumed the pyramid had translated back into the growl that he heard after he spoke. It leaned back in the seat. "You are a long way from your home, human. Why are you here?" He stayed silent. It tilted its head to one side. "Perhaps a different approach is necessary. Do you know where you are?"
Young coughed again. "Inside one of your friggin' ships, looks like." he said. The humming was still there, all around him.
The creature gave what looked like a laugh, a series of sharp intakes of breath with the four sections of its jaws spread wide. "Not so, human. We remain on the ring construct. The sound you hear is that of our landing craft, parked above this camp."
So he was still on the Halo. That at least was a good thing. Not that it really helped at this point.
The alien continued. "The question is, human, do you know where this construct is? Do you understand why you have come here?"
"Unless you hadn't noticed, you were shooting the shit out of us." Young had regained his voice. "Do you dumb lizards know what 'running away' means?"
"Your lack of cooperation is disappointing." it said, still apparently without a trace of anger.
"What do you want from me?" he spat, glaring at the alien. It leaned forward in the seat, leveling its eyes at him.
"I want to know who you are. I want to know what you are and why you are here. Then I may decide your fate." Then it stood up, walked to the door, opened it and left. As the door closed, Young could just make out the green of grass outside. Then the lights in the room shut off, and darkness reigned again.
The Prisoner (part 2)
Date: 13 February 2001, 10:33 pm
Young couldn't tell how long he had waited before the alien returned. With no light, and only the constant droning of the Covenant landing craft above, nothing seemed to change from one moment to the next. Not even the pain in his legs, for although the sticky dressing seemed to stop him from bleeding to death, it did nothing to alleviate the pain of his wounds. He had tentatively poked at the injured limb and he was fairly sure that nothing was broken, though the pain from the shrapnel wounds was enough to stop him moving.
It came in silently, with a short sideways glance to what he assumed was guard on the other side of the door. The lights activated again as it stepped into the room, then dimmed slightly as it sat down again on the chair. It prodded the pyramid on the floor with a toe to ensure that it was still working.
"I trust you have been considering your position." it said. "You need not die here, if you choose to cooperate."
Young dragged himself into an upright position. "Kill me here, kill me later. You're not going to let one of us live, are you?"
The creature paused for a moment. "You misunderstand our motives, human. We do not make war for pleasure. We fight only because we are obliged to do so. And there is no honour in slaying a captive."
Young looked it in the eye and laughed. "Obliged? What the fuck did we ever did to you? First ship of yours we meet opens fire on first sight, then you come after the rest of us. Christ, what did we do?"
"Our first encounter was unfortunate. We were warned, before we met you, that a race would be found that would steal that which was rightfully ours. We assumed, correctly, that your race was the one of which we were warned."
Shaking his head, Young glared into the aliens eyes, half-concealed as they were underneath its helmet. "We haven't got anything of yours. How can we steal anything when we're dead?"
"The High Prelacy came to the same conclusion. Yet it need not always be so, because now we are here." Young stared at it, not understanding. The creature paused, then pulled at the lower edge of its helmet. Something clicked, and the jaw shield fell loose against the thing's shoulders. It took hold of one of the blade-like horns on the side and lifted it, removing the upper section too.
Underneath its armour, the alien's face was quite different to what Young had imagined. Its skin was grey, smooth and supple, mostly concealing the angles of the skull. The four jaws fitted together perfectly, sealing with darker, less taut tissue that came together in a strange cross where the four met. The top of the head was elongated and but slightly rounded. There were no bony plates, no scales, and the horns on the helmet had no equivalents in the flesh.
"Surprised, human? When you crack open our shell, we are not so different to you." Despite having removed its helmet, he was still unable to read the aliens expression. He guessed that a smile would be difficult with a set of jaws like that. "And now we have found this place, we need fight no longer. Now we have found this jewel of technology, if we can prevent your from stealing it we have no more reason to hunt your race down."
"We ain't stealing nothing. We found this ring first: we got a right to what's on it." Strange though it seemed, he was not afraid. If the alien was going to kill him, it would have done it by now. "What do you want from me?"
It tilted its head again. "I want to know why you came here. Why in your moment of need, you chose this abandoned construct to flee to." It brought its face closer to his until he could smell its breath, which had an unfamiliar, vinegary smell. "I want to know what this thing is. You know, don't you, human?"
Young started to smile. "You don't know, do you? You smug bastards don't even know what the ring does. Well screw you, 'cos I don't know and if I did I'd die before I told you."
"Your attitude is most obstructive. I am not completely ignorant of your ways, for I observed your flight from the world you called Reach. Your vessel did not make for this system directly, but only came here when damaged too badly to evade us. You were trying to hide this from us."
"Bullshit."
"I doubt that, human. Although, if you were trying to make it appear that you were hiding this place... then perhaps you were attempting to lead us into a trap?" It snorted, wrinkling the skin across its nose. "No matter. One way or another, we will win this battle. The only thing in question is how many of your people must die before our victory."
"We ain't gonna surrender. Not after this. If we go down, we're taking you bastards with us."
The alien paused again. "That is what I might have expected. I said that we are not as different as you imagine. If your warriors will not surrender, then perhaps we may come to some kind or arrangement."
Young spat, falling short of the creatures feet by several inches. "I don't think so." It let out a rumbling sigh.
"I tire of this. Tell me the function of this construct, and I will spare you and as many of your people as I can. Otherwise, you and all of them will die." It stood, replacing its helmet and jaw guard. "Consider, human. The more trouble your people cause for us here, the more likely it is that the Prelacy will decide to seek out your homeworld and destroy you once and for all. You cannot win. But you may yet mitigate your loss." It walked to the door, which opened. "You have until morning to reconsider your position."
It left, and the lights went out.
* * *
Some time after it had left, Young dragged himself to a crouched position and began to crawl along the wall toward the door. Every movement of his legs brought renewed pain, but he carried on edging along the floor, using the wall as a guide, until he reached the point where he remembered the door opening. When the alien had walked up to the exit, the door had opened, so presumably there must be some sort of mechanism there for opening it, he reasoned.
He ran his fingers along the surface of the wall, feeling for the edges of the door. They were there, and he could trace the route the seams took up towards the ceiling, but the join was too small to fit anything in between. He felt around on the floor beneath him, in case there was anything as simple as a pressure pad. The floor was flat and smooth, and he could find nothing.
The only other option, as far as he could think, was something in the wall, though searching the wall would entail standing up. He shuffled around so that his less injured leg was underneath him, tested it with a little weight. It hurt, but would probably support him for as long as it took to search. He stood up.
The pain was debilitating. His leg felt as if shrapnel was still embedded in the flesh, but it held, and he stayed upright. Anxious to complete his search before any of the Covenant returned, he ran his hands across the walls beside the door seams. Nothing. Then, reaching upwards, he tried above the door. Slightly offcentre, above the upper seam, was a small rectangular panel. He felt around to the top of the panel and found a catch, which opened readily and released the panel. He shifted his weight a little and started to move his fingers inside.
He had got as far as identifying a small cube, three cylindrical objects and a bundle of what felt like wire before he heard something move outside the door. He stumbled back, hearing the locking bolts on the door slide back, and fell to the floor in the middle of the room, wincing from the burning pain in his legs. The panel was still open.
The door folded back and upwards and the lights activated again, revealing a Covenant warrior in the standard blue armour at the door. It might have been his former guard, but of course he had no way of telling one of the aliens from any other. It stepped inside, glanced at his prone form, and placed a bowl of green soupy liquid on the floor. It glanced at the pyramid and pointed at the liquid. "Eat."
Somehow missing the open panel, the guard left and closed the door behind itself. The lights remained on, presumably so he could see to eat. Young listened, hearing the footfalls of the alien dying away into the distance. Leaving the bowl where it lay, he dragged himself to his feet again and hauled himself up against the door to the panel. He could see the contents now: the cube, attached to the bottom of the cavity inside, three small cylinders, two blue and one yellow, and a bundle of transparent cables connecting the cube to the one of the blue cylinders and the yellow one.
He listened again, hearing nothing outside the door. Carefully, he pulled the cable out of the blue cylinder. The door made a clicking noise, but remained closed. He tested his other leg, which was hurting more now, but might conceivably hold up until he got away from the vicinity of the camp. He strained to hear anything, but there was only the constant droning of the landing ship above. Preparing himself, he plugged the cable into the second blue cylinder.
The door clicked again, and then opened.
Breathing a sigh of relief, Young sagged down onto his knees and peered through the door. On the other side stood his red-armoured Covenant interrogator, who growled a few words which the pyramid failed to translate and kicked him in the stomach, sending him sliding across the floor and onto the bowl of green soup.
"I fail to see how your race's brains work." snarled the alien, stepping into the room after him. "I bind your wounds, offer you safety and the survival of your people, and you repay me by trying to escape. I have tried to trade with you, to bargain for this world so that less blood may be spilt, but this does not interest you." He started to say something, to protest that he knew nothing about the Halo, but it kicked him again. This time it was in the leg, and the fresh waves of agony that pulsed through his body stole his voice.
His assailant grunted. "Were it not for your injuries I would be tempted to beat the secrets of this place out of you. As it is, we shall have to extract the information by different means." Another guard came in, and the interrogator motioned towards where Young lay curled up on the floor. The alien grabbed his arms and lifted him off the floor, carrying him out of the door and across a short stretch of open ground to another similar building.
From the few glances he could take as he was carried across, he saw that the staging post was a collection of such buildings, probably prefabricated structures brought in the landing craft. Inside the new building, the guard dropped him onto an inclined table and pulled his arms out straight, tying them down to the table with short straps. The red-armoured alien arrived beside the table, dropped the translator pyramid beside him and brought a curved device from a rack on the far wall.
"If your conscious mind will not give us the information we require, then we will bypass it. Your soul cannot lie." it said, adjusting the device, which Young could see was lined with tiny crystalline spines on the inside of the curve.
"I don't know anything..." he started to say.
"We shall see." the alien replied, and placed the device over his head. He felt the spines piercing into the skin of his forehead, and his vision began to blur. The room dissolved into a hazy grey mass, and the masked face of the interrogator grew to enormous proportions, eclipsing the door, the ceiling, and eventually the remaining blur. He was left floating in orbit around it, drifting a few feet from its massive jaws, which opened like the abyss itself in front of him when it spoke. "We shall see." it said again, its voice like the grinding of continents.
Then the bottom fell out of the world, and he plunged down to a different place.
The Prisoner (part 3)
Date: 17 March 2001, 8:27 pm
He fell to the ground, rolling as he landed. The first thing that he noticed was that the pain that he expected in his legs did not appear. The second was that he was no longer indoors, strapped to a table, or half-naked.
He climbed to his feet, testing his newly-healed limbs. He was standing in the middle of a ruined street, between rows of shattered buildings. The place was not familiar, but was almost certainly the remains of a human settlement, because there were charred corpses lying scattered across the scene, and they were definitely not Covenant.
"This was the first that we found." the voice of his tormentor appeared from behind him without warning, and he spun to face the alien. It stood facing him, relaxing against the side of something that might once have been an apartment block. "From what we could glean from the transmissions sent in the aftermath of its destruction, this planet had a population of more than 500 million of your people."
"Yeah, and you killed them all." he replied. "Tell me something I don't know."
The alien turned away and walked through the remnants of a doorway. "Come." it said. He tried to remain where he was, but he seemed compelled to follow. He followed it through a collapsed building, over piles of plascrete and structural steel fallen from higher floors, to emerge from a door on the other side into a second street. The street was as ruinous as the last one, but the buildings lining its sides were taller, more carefully constructed, older. As he looked around, he noticed that the sky had a different hue, the blue tinged with green. He had been here before...
"This world was cleansed by the fourth holy fleet relatively recently." the interrogator continued. "You should be aware of this, because you were born here." Young remembered now: the green sky of his homeworld, the gas giant moon Fulcrum. The city must be Carlstown, the only sizable settlement on the planetoid. The Covenant had reached Fulcrum two weeks after the Pillar had been assigned to the Reach defence fleet. Three generations of his family had been on Fulcrum when the arrived, and now they were all dead. Nothing had escaped, not even a distress transmission.
The interrogator crouched beside the skeleton of a ground car. "If this war continues, this will be the fate of all of your worlds, and all of your kin. You have the power to prevent this, yet you still choose to remain silent. How many lives is your pride worth?"
Young tried to step towards the alien, intent on taking a swing at it, but his legs again refused to obey his will. "I don't know anything. I don't know the answers you want from me. If I could just give you the Halo and make you all go away, don't you think I would?"
"Perhaps. You could, on the other hand, be intent on gaining the power of the construct for your people and then using it to defeat us." The alien gave what he assumed was a grin. "No matter. You now have no choice in the matter."
The ruins and the street faded, and were replaced by a wide, roughly hexagonal room. The metallic walls of the chamber were lined with glowing, translucent panes bearing various patterns of symbols unfamiliar to Young. In the centre of the room was a deep hollow, rimmed with more of the panes, which he guessed to be holograms as they hung several feet from the floor, unattached. Suspended over the hollow was another, much larger hologram, depicting the ring itself, slowly rotating in the air in front of him.
The interrogator paced across the room to one of the panes, moving its hand through the top of the hologram and causing it to change colour and reorder the symbols. It looked back towards him and his legs walked him up beside it. It stepped back from the pane. "This chamber, as far as we are able to discern, is linked to the primary control grid for this construct. Activate it."
Young was suddenly aware of many other aliens watching him from the shadows around the periphery of the chamber. Most were of the same species as the interrogator, but a few were of a different race, bulky bipeds with three-clawed hands and tall, flexible necks. He started to protest again, but his vocal cords ceased to operate abruptly before he could get a word out. He stepped up to the pane. His hand reached up towards the symbols, then stopped.
He could feel the assembled Covenant waiting to see what he did. The whole thing was a simulation, presumably an image of the real system, produced so he could show them how to use the Halo's systems. As he hesitated, he started to feel compelled to activate the device, although he did not have a clue as to how. The longer he waited, the more the feeling grew. He was desperate to activate it. The need to turn it on expanded in his mind until nothing else mattered, until he was searching everywhere in his mind for the answer. Nothing came.
He stood, motionless, hand outstretched ready to touch the pane, for what seemed like an eternity. Constellations of ideas ignited and burnt out, civilisations of thoughts grew up, flourished and collapsed under the relentless pressure of the need for the answer. Eventually, his mind gave way and he cried out, collapsing to the floor. There were murmurs from the assembled circle of aliens, and they faded out of existence, melting back into the shadows. His interrogator stood over him.
"You are stronger than I expected, human. But every being has its limit. In time, I will find yours."
Then the chamber faded as a whole, and the illusion decayed, leaving him exhausted, covered in sweat, lying restrained on the table. The device sat beside his head, its spines retracted into its inner surface. He lost consciousness almost immediately, hardly remembering being carried back to his cell and left sprawled on the floor.
Gunfire.
Young was half awake, half trapped in the illusion still, his mind hanging on the divide between the two. He was back with his platoon, fighting his way out of the ambush at flame gorge, the narrow valley they had been hiding in when a force of Covenant scouts blundered into them. The firefight was so intense that the trees in the gorge were being ignited by stray shots, and they were all having to retreat to avoid the growing inferno.
More gunfire. Closer.
He was starting to regain consciousness. The flame gorge battle was more distant now, the shouts of his comrades less audible. Yet the gunfire was, if anything, getting louder. He opened his eyes, taking in the darkness of his cell. The shooting was definitely real. A bullet ricocheted off the wall of the cell, and a Covenant energy weapon answered from close by.
Slowly regaining control of his limbs, Young shuffled round and tried to sit up. Too late he found that his legs were still largely crippled, and he rolled back, wincing in pain. While he tried to compose himself, the door slid open and a blue-armoured Covenant warrior burst in, grabbed him by one arm and dragged him out of the door, into the dimness of the twilight outside. He looked around frantically, ignoring the agonising jerks as his legs dragged along the ground. From a patch of rocks to one side of the encampment, a group of marines was laying down fire on the aliens, advancing slowly towards the prefab shelters and heaps of supply crates. The landing craft was beginning to slowly rise up out of harm's way.
The warrior was dragging him towards one of the Covenant vehicles hovering at the opposite side of the camp, a smooth, purple craft with a turret floating, apparently unattached, above its rear. Gritting his teeth, Young wrapped his free arm around the alien's legs, sending it sprawling and himself straight down onto the hard ground. He scrambled to his knees, shuffling towards the marines as fast as he could manage in his injured, exhausted state.
He had barely crawled a few paces closer when the warrior, which had jumped to its feet, caught up and kicked him hard in the ribs. Snarling curses at him in its guttural language, it took hold of his arm again, dragging him to his knees and sending pain spearing through his wounded legs as they scraped across the ground. Still growling, it threw him to the floor again and bent down to get a better grip, when a burst of rifle bullets tore through its torso and brought it crashing down on top of him.
Pulling himself from underneath the dying alien's body, Young was relieved to see three marines dashing out from the cover of the rocks, heading towards him. A low droning from the direction of the Covenant vehicles indicated that they were moving off, turning their weapons on the prefabricated buildings and piled supplies as they went, burning what they could not take with them. Two of the approaching marines dived to the ground, keeping up the fire on the retreating aliens, while the third, a tall man wearing a HUD-equipped helmet, jogged over to Young and crouched down next to him.
"You okay?" He started, then noticed the spread of red gashes under the dressings on Young's legs. "Shit..." An energy blast from one of the Covenant vehicles ripped through a nearby shelter, sending glowing shards of metal bouncing across the ground. "We'd better get you out of here."
The marine turned and signaled to the other two, who began to edge back towards the rocks, and then activated his helmet comlink to order back the rest of the force. Young turned around, trying to see if the Covenant had got out of sight, and found himself looking into the face of the fallen alien behind him.
It was sitting awkwardly, crouched with one leg underneath, having somehow survived having most of its chest blown away. Purple blood flowed down its sides and dripped from its ruined armour, staining the earth below it. It had managed to recover its weapon and was pointing it at the other marine. Too late, Young yelled a warning and tried to grab hold of the gun, but before he could move the alien had fired a burst into the unknowing soldier's back, burning through armour and flesh, toppling him to the ground with half of his torso burnt to ashes.
A moment later, Young's hands closed around the weapon, wrenching it from the injured warrior's grasp and turning it on the alien. They sat for a few seconds, glaring at each other while the two marines scrambled back towards them, trying to aim their rifles past Young to get a shot at the alien. The Covenant warrior glanced over Young's shoulder at the approaching humans, snorted in resignation and lunged at him, jaws wide open. It had hardly moved an inch before he fired, blowing its head apart and briefly holding it in mid-leap. He kept firing into the corpse until the weapon began to glow from the heat and its casing started to crack.
He hardly noticed when one of the other marines reached him, took the gun from his hand and led him back to the cover of the rocks, crawling back in the face of fairly heavy fire from the Covenant vehicles, which had taken up position on a nearby rise. Friendly hands reached out from behind the boulders and carried him back from the fighting, to where a jeep waited with a field medic. Exhaustion and shock were beginning to set in, and with a combination of these and the painkillers which the medic administered, he sank into unconsciousness. He felt the jeep moving under him, and as the sky faded out the meaning of what had just happened sank in.
He was free.
* * *
The Prisoner (part 4 - Final Chapter)
Date: 09 April 2001, 8:02 pm
When Young awoke he was still on the jeep, strapped into the passenger seat while another marine drove the vehicle through a series of steep-sided gorges. As consciousness returned to him he looked down and was relieved to see that dressings had been put over his legs to replace the transparent alien ones, and that his injuries did not hurt so much anymore. The painkillers were obviously working.
He began to move his head and looked around. Another jeep was driving ahead of the one he was in, and by the sound he guessed that another was following behind. There were no Covenant in sight, no sound of the alien landing vessel, and humans all around. He breathed a sigh of relief. The marine beside him noticed his movement and shouted back over her shoulder.
"Yo, Add, he's moving." There was some noise from the back of the jeep and a face appeared between the seats.
"Welcome back. Thought you'd gone into a coma or something for a while." The face was smiling, belonging to a forty-ish man leaning down from the back of the jeep. "Addenstone, Epsilon platoon." he said, extending a hand. "You?"
Young managed to lift his arm to shake his hand. "Young, Beta platoon." His voice was rasping and his throat felt like sandpaper. "You got any water?"
"Sure." 'Add' reached down and handed him a flask from under the seat. After however long he had languished in the Covenant cell, the stale water tasted like heaven itself. Having drunk, Young looked around. The vehicles had left the gorges and were skirting a wide lake. In the distance, he could just make out a thin black spike standing out against the sky, evidently some sort of tower. They were heading straight towards it.
He turned back to Add, who was still leaning down to watch him. "Where are we heading?"
"We were supposed to be creating a diversion," the older man answered. "but command pulled the plug. The blues have troops dug in on both sides of the river a few klicks spinwards of here, and they're covering the only bridge. We were supposed to capture the supply dump where we found you, and hopefully draw off some of the troops from this side of the river so our guys on the spinward side can force their way across to join up with us."
Young nodded. "So why'd they pull you out?"
"The bridge force ran into a Covenant armour unit five klicks from the bridge. They had to turn back and scatter before they all got shot to pieces. They're going to try again tomorrow. Hopefully the blues won't have guessed what we're planning." He raised one eyebrow. "Luckily for you, we'd already opened fire on the camp before the pull-back order came in. If they'd told us a minute earlier, we'd never have found you. How long had you been in there?"
Young shrugged. "No idea. They picked me up after they hit our patrol near the three mesas: I've been out for so much of the last few days that I can't think how long I was there."
"Fine. You'll be safe soon." said Add, nodding. "We've been hiding in that tower up ahead for the last few days; it's easy to defend and the engineers have been trying to figure out how to get into the sealed chambers at the top. We're all hoping they find something good."
"Yeah. Like nukes." said the driver, grinning. "We could really use some heavy support."
"How far have we got now?" Add asked her.
"'Bout twenty minutes, if we carry on at this speed." She replied. Young thought she looked vaguely familiar, but he couldn't put a finger on where he had seen her. "After we get out from this basin, it's all flat terrain until the tower."
The jeep's comlink suddenly crackled into life, the sergeant in the following vehicle yelling for them to look behind. Add hopped back up onto gun mount and stared back across the side of the gently rippling water. Young twisted around in his seat and peered round the side of the jeep. Coming over the crest of the hill immediately beyond the lake was a huge formation of Covenant vehicles, ranging from the light one-man skimmers to large tubular transports with ten or twenty aliens apiece. "Shit!" Add exclaimed. "Where'd they come from?" He scrambled into the gun's swivel mounting and rotated the weapon to point backwards. "Step on it!" He yelled to their driver.
"What the fuck you think I'm doing?" she called back, gunning the engine and swerving up the side of the embankment beside the lake, taking the jeep over the top and out of the Covenant line of fire.
The little convoy of jeeps wound its way through a sparsely forested valley side, all the time maneuvering out of sight of the pursuing aliens. At their increased speed, they carried on for almost ten minutes of tense driving before the first of the alien skimmers came within firing range. The lead vehicle announced this fact with a blast of energy that sliced through a nearby tree. Add swept the trail behind them with the minigun, trying to throw off the aliens' aim.
Young was leaning round the side of the jeep. The two other marines had left their weapons in the rack behind his seat and he was holding one of them, trying to pick out any exposed Covenant drivers. However, the small skimmers which had caught up with them effectively shielded the driver from fire directed at the front of the vehicle, and no opportunity had presented itself. One of the skimmers got too close to the jeep behind theirs, and the gunner on the rocket-varient warthog blew it apart with a well-aimed missile.
As if in reply, one of the larger Covenant vehicles, of the type with a turret suspended in the air above the vehicle's rear, veered out of the trees from uphill and turned to match the course of the jeeps. As the skimmer turned so hard that its bottom plowed a trail through the leaf-litter on the ground, the alien in the turret sent a volley of energy bolts into the rearmost jeep. One wheel sheared off amidst a cloud of metal splinters, and the stricken vehicle bounced off course, crashing through the trees and bushes to the side. The Covenant vehicle's turret tracked round neatly and the gunner poured more fire into the disintegrating jeep, ending its progress as one bolt detonated the rocket magazine.
Add was cursing and blazing away into the front of their pursuer, his bullets glancing off the invisible energy shield over its hull. As the alien vehicle absorbed his fire, Young noticed that the gunner, with the turret turned away from their jeep, was exposed. Aiming as well as he could from the speeding warthog, he opened fire himself with the rifle on full automatic, emptying the whole clip at the alien. Just before the turret swiveled round to face them, he saw a splash of purple among the blue ricochets. It turned to bear on the jeep and then carried on turning, spinning round on the gunner's last command.
The larger skimmer was now stuck between the humans and the rest of the Covenant, unable to fire and actually giving them some cover. Add had seen this and stopped firing, but soon after he did the Covenant driver must also have noticed the death of his companion, because it dropped the vehicle out of the chase. However, just as Add took up aim at the smaller skimmers behind, the marine beside Young called out. Young turned to look, and saw the dizzying height of the tower stretching into the sky just up ahead. They had made it.
The two remaining jeeps raced down the remaining hillside towards the small complex of angular buildings at the base of the spire, dodging and weaving to avoid the Covenant fire. They followed the lead jeep as it made for a large entrance in the side of a vaguely triangular structure. As they neared the portal gunfire erupted from the surrounding buildings at their pursuers. Young could just make out a squad of marines deployed on the roof of the structure armed with portable rocket launchers, and concealed under camo netting beside the huge doors was a rare sight indeed: a human light tank. The ordnance began to take its toll on the Covenant skimmers and they scattered back into the woods, awaiting the arrival of their better-armed brethren.
When the jeeps had finally passed under the giant arch of the entrance and Young's eyes had adapted to the dim light inside, he could see that they had entered some kind of huge corridor, at least twenty metres high and wide. Another squad of marines crouched in the shadows near the door, and makeshift fortifications had been erected along the sides of the corridor. They drove through until the passageway opened out into a large circular chamber, apparently in the centre of the tower, with the ceiling so far above the floor it was lost from sight.
Spread across the floor of the chamber was a somewhat battered assortment of marines, crew from the Pillar of Autumn and military hardware. Crates were stacked against one side, rows of vehicles in various states of repair occupied the opposite wall. Three dropships accompanied the various ground vehicles, one of which was unloading the last of the squad it had been carrying. Young looked around for an entrance higher up in the walls, but couldn't see it.
The jeeps were parked alongside the other vehicles, and their driver climbed underneath to check for damage. Add led Young towards the centre of the chamber, where the marines had pitched tents and constructed impromptu barracks out of crates and the remains of some of the more badly damaged vehicles. "Welcome home." he said, grinning. "We've been here for about a week and a half now, hiding from the blues' air scouts." Young nodded, looking around at the bustle of the camp. Marines were resting, weapons were being cleaned, equipment was being repaired, music was being played in one of the makeshift buildings. It was good to be among humans again.
Add brought Young towards the largest tent, which was being used as headquarters for all of the marine units housed in the tower. Just before they reached the tent, a man wearing navy overalls jogged over to them and stopped. "Hey, Add. We got the door open!"
The old marine stopped and stared. "You're kidding me."
"It's open, I swear. You owe me fifty credits, sucker."
"Bull. You ain't getting a cred out of me until I see this for myself."
The technician shrugged. "Be my guest. We're shipping some more stuff up there in a minute. Coming?"
Young frowned. "Which door is this?"
"The door. The big locked door to the control centre at the top." said the tech. "We've been working on opening it for days now, but the whole system's powered down. Once we get inside and get everything working, we should be able to use some of the integrated defenses in this place to keep the god squad out."
"Fine. Be nice to get to see what's in there, anyway." said Add. "Lead on." The tech gave a mock bow and led them over to one of the dropships, which was being loaded with crates from a pile nearby.
"We can't get to the top through the tower structure." Add explained. "With the power down, none of the tower's systems are working, including the elevators. This is the only way to the top." He pointed to the dropship.
As the engineers loaded the last of the crates, Young, Add and the tech climbed into the hold along with the cargo. A few minutes passed, a marine waved the go-ahead to the pilot, and the dropship gently lifted off, leaving the ground and rising slowly up the inside of the chamber. The walls slid by, the lights of the camp fading below them, replaced only by the lights on the dropship itself.
Their ascent into the darkness at the top of the tower went on for several minutes, until the walls began to grow lighter again. The dropship slowed, pivoted in mid-air, and finally lifted up over the edge of a long bridge stretching from one side of the chamber to the other. The pilot set them down on the bridge and another team of engineers rushed in to unload the crates.
Young followed the other two men out of the dropship's hold, looking around the top of the chamber. The ceiling was barely thirty metres above their heads, and the bottom of the chamber was barely visible over the side of the bridge. One of the engineers shouted something to the tech, who ran over to help with the crates.
"What's going on?" yelled Add to his friend, over the top of the crate he was helping to drag.
"The blues are attacking the tower. They're forcing their way into the entrance corridor. We've got to get this stuff set up and this thing turned on, or we can kiss our asses goodbye." The tech disappeared into the hold again.
Young listened carefully. Sure enough, he could make out the sounds of gunfire echoing from down the tower. "Come on." said Add, motioning towards the doorway at one end of the bridge. "Let's see if we can't give these guys a hand." Each taking a piece of equipment unpacked from the crates, they jogged through the door and up a series of winding ramps, passing by numerous darkened side passages, until they reached a second doorway at the top.
This portal was surrounded by portable generators and other pieces of kit that the engineers had been using. The two halves of the door had been prised apart barely more than a metre, but the gap was wide enough to get through. "Shit. There goes fifty creds." Add muttered under his breath. They sidled through the opened doors and into the chamber beyond.
Unlike the rest of the tower, the room appeared to be powered, as the translucent panes that were spread across the walls were glowing with various unfamiliar symbols. The chamber was hexagonal, with a hemispherical pit in the centre. A holographic representation of the Halo was suspended above the pit, surrounded by more of the panes. Something was very familiar about the room. An engineer spotted them and rushed over to take the equipment they had brought.
Five or six of the engineers were working around the room, either operating the kit they had installed or working at the panes. They ferried more equipment into the chamber and set it up with the machinery already there, and the engineers managed to get the set of panes around the hologram to accept commands. The sounds of battle drifted from down the tower, occasionally joined by shouted orders and requests for backup from over a communicator.
Just as the engineers seemed to be making some progress, the sound of Covenant weapons fire echoed from much closer to their chamber. An engineer burst in through the door, threw down his load, and bellowed "They're up here! They landed on the outside!"
"Here." Add was holding his pistol out to Young. "Take it. Looks like we'll be cutting it fine this time." Young took the weapon, checked the clip. Add had unslung his rifle and crouched at one side of gap in the door. Young took the other side.
The first alien ran up the ramps straight into their field of fire, and dropped almost immediately, pierced through the head and torso. The next one stopped itself just in time and ducked behind a pillar, returning fire with a hail of crystal slivers from its weapon. Young and Add kept them back from the door, picking one or two off as they ran for the next piece of cover, and using the thick doors to protect themselves. Young's clip ran out, and Add tossed him another.
Young heard a shout from the engineers. All of their equipment was working, and they had gained access to the main controls. A few moments later, a Covenant warrior with the same compact, shoulder-mounted weapon that had injured his legs before his capture dashed across the nearest ramp, firing wildly through the gap. There was an explosion from within the chamber, and as Young cut the alien down with two well-placed rounds Add turned to see what had happened. He cursed.
Young glanced round. The alien's shot had struck the ceiling, spraying semi-molten metal fragments across the room. One such fragment had passed straight through one of the panes surrounding the central hologram and then straight through the engineer standing at it. The pane, being holographic itself, was undamaged, but the engineer was lying motionless on the floor. Add looked round again. "Take over!" he shouted. "I'll hold the door."
Young got up and sprinted across to the pane. The engineer was clearly dead, a smouldering hole through his chest, and he pushed the body out of the way. He turned to the pane.
It was the exact same pane that he had seen when under the influence of the Covenant device. The layout was the same, the alien symbols and diagrams were the same, even the colours were identical. As before, he did not have a clue what to do with it.
"What do I do?" He yelled to one of the engineers.
The man answered without looking up from his own work. "Turn on the link to the primary control grid. If we get that online, we can turn the tower's defenses on the Covenant."
Young looked back at the pane. There was nothing to indicate what any of the symbols meant or what any of the icons did. He turned back to the engineer. "I don't know how to work this thing!"
One of the other engineers ducked as a few more crystal shards flew through the doorway. "Hurry up or we won't be around to worry about it!"
Young stared desperately at the pane. He tried to remember any of the ideas he had run through while in the Covenant device, but nothing seemed to make any sense. He tried touching a few of the coloured icons at random. The display on the pane changed with each touch, but it became no clearer to him. The sounds of the Covenant were getting closer. An energy blast flew through the doorway and splashed against the far wall.
Despairing, he turned back to Add, who was struggling to reload his rifle. "I can't do this! I don't know how to use all this alien shit!"
Add glanced back, scrabbling around for another clip. "For Christ's sake, Young, get that thing on or we're all going to die!" He yelled over the din of the weapons fire.
Young looked around himself desperately, and saw that all of the engineers were looking at him. "Activate the goddamn control grid!" ordered the nearest one.
As if in a dream, Young stared from left to right. All of the engineers were glaring at him, and even Add was looking at him in desperation. The sounds of firing were still coming from the door, but even with Add unable to fire back, they were not advancing through it.
My God, he thought. This isn't just like the Covenant device, this IS the device. I never escaped. I never left it.
With a scream of frustration, he turned the pistol on the nearest engineer, and the next, and the next. Men in SolCore naval overalls crashed to the floor all around him. When the clip was empty, he turned to the door, where Add was crouching. The marine stood up, but as he straightened his legs extended and his body inflated. When he had stood up fully, it was not a human but the Covenant interrogator that stood next to the door. The firing had ceased. The room was silent.
Young pressed the trigger, and the hammer clicked on the empty chamber of the pistol. The alien growled in exasperation. "My patience is almost at an end, human. I fail to see how you continue to hide your knowledge from me."
Young dropped the pistol and lunged at the interrogator, his fist connecting with its head. It did not so much as flinch. As he stared at it, the disbelief in his eyes now turned to resignation, the alien swatted him out of its way like an insect. "You have not defeated me, human. I still have a few more techniques to use, and you cannot hold out forever. We are not finished here."
"You are finished." Young rolled over to see who had spoken. In the place of one of the fallen engineers there now stood a second alien, also dressed in red armour, glaring at the interrogator. "Had I learned of this travesty earlier, you would have been finished long ago."
The interrogator snorted. "I could save all of us a lot of trouble if I can extract this information from this creature. Why bother hunting them down, when we might control the construct ourselves and let it do our work for us?"
The newcomer advanced. "You are a fool, Maugur. Your incompetence forced us to fight these filthy creatures here in the first place. Now it is stopping you from fighting altogether."
Maugur snarled. "I am working to foreshorten this war."
The other alien stepped forward until its face was a few inches from that of the interrogator. "You are a blind fool. Is it not obvious by now that this thing knows nothing about the workings of the construct? If the humans really were intending to use the construct against us, surely they would be converging on the appropriate structure. They have as little idea of how to use it as you do."
"I will not be addressed in this manner." Maugur bared his teeth, opening all four mandibles slightly. His adversary drew in his breath in the rattling manner that Young was interpreting as laughter.
"You forget, Maugur, that while we are on the surface of this construct I am in command. If you cannot accept your place, return to the fleet and I will cleanse this place of the humans myself."
Maugur lowered his voice, growling with barely-restrained rage. "What are your orders, honored leader?"
"Leave this simulation and order the troops to break camp. The landing vessel is to return to the Purity of Spirit. We will not require it because we will not retreat." The seething Maugur snorted in affirmation and faded out of existence.
The remaining alien turned to where Young lay crumpled on the floor. "Maugur would have you killed now, for he has no honour. Much as I would like to see you dead, to kill a prisoner would dirty my name." The room faded, and Young could feel the device on his head. The dull metal walls of the Covenant shelter reappeared round him, and he was in the real world again, strapped to the table. The alien reached down and removed the device from his head.
As he lay still restrained, Young saw another alien enter the room and start remove the dressings on his legs. Pain speared through him again briefly, but stopped when it pressed a rounded object against his legs. This done, the alien redressed the wounds with a different, more rigid dressing and left. The red-armoured one returned and undid his bonds. It roughly lifted him from the table and set him on his feet beside it. To his surprise he was able to stand, the dressing taking some of his weight and what must have been a painkiller from the rounded thing making the wounds bearable.
"You are free to go now, human." The alien intoned. "I will order my swords not to kill you while you leave, but once you are gone from our sight you will be fair game again." It looked down into his eyes. "Do not mistake this act for compassion, human. My name is Kholai, and I am not a coward who slays his own prisoners. But the next time we meet, I will kill you. One way or another, your race will perish here."
Young found his voice. "I'll be sure to return the favour." Kholai ignored him, and pushed him out of the door. A squad of Covenant warriors saluted their leader, who growled an order to them in their own language. It was only then that Young realised that the alien had itself been speaking in English, without the help of the translator device. Kholai led him to the edge of the camp, and before he left, he turned to the alien.
"If you despise my species so much, why do you speak my language and why did you think that I was telling the truth when..." He thought quickly. "...Maugur said that I was hiding something?"
Kholai ignored the question. "Go."
Young shrugged and began to make for the cover of some woods on a nearby hill. He had gone only a few metres when Kholai spoke again. "The warrior who fights best is the one who knows his enemy." Young turned to answer, but the alien had already turned away and was pacing back to the camp. Searching the skyline for landmarks he might recognise, Young walked on towards the hill.
As the landing craft rose into the sky, the Covenant left the remains of their camp, skimming off planetwards in an assortment of vehicles. Inside one transport, a lesser Covenant leader spoke to Kholai. "Shall I dispatch a warrior to kill the human now, honored leader?"
Kholai shook his head. "No. The tracer placed inside the fabric of his wound dressing will lead us to his comrades. The first thing the humans will do when he finds them is replace our dressing with one of theirs. When the dressing is removed, the tracer will activate. When it does so, inform me and we shall fall on them."
The second alien nodded, obviously impressed by his ingenuity. "Yes, honored leader."
Kholai performed the equivalent of a smile. "The warrior who fights best..."
Remembering the proverb, the subordinate nodded again. The two exchanged knowing looks, and then returned to their battle prayers with the rest of the warriors.
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