"I was invited to visited the War Museum about seven months before it was opened to the public. I knew that my contributions would be minuscule at best , but I felt that I had to go. Someone had to make sure that they got it all right."

"It didn't take long for the... for the interviews and the questions about the pitched door-to-door fighting in the Luna arcologies to stir up some old nightmares. By the second day, I couldn't sleep at all, so I jotted down a list of men and women I'd trained with, soldiers I'd served with. I did my best to trace their careers through their retirement or, far too often, their deaths. It brought about a strange peace as I spent hours hunting for names and learning of their final resting places, because I was finally able to let go."

"There was a name that wasn't on my list because, frankly, Gui Montag definitely numbered among the bad memories. I knew him for most of my first tour, but the one thing I remember most of him was how he killed a fellow Marine, a friend of ours, and threw him out of the vehicle to save the rest of us. But maybe there is such a thing as fate, because the odds of me seeing his name amongst the billions memorialized in the Museum were simply astronomical. And I tell you, I was utterly transfixed. My first instinct was to turn away, but seeing his name and reading his service record made him into a human being again, not the amoral specter that haunted me for all these years."

Corporal James Rayndar, UNSC Marine Corps (Ret.)

2136 Hours, 20th September 2552 (Military Calendar)
Base of Beacon Tower (Inoperative)
Halo

"June? Are you still with me?"

In the dark, all Montag could see with the naked eye was the faint glow of her needler. "Yes. Where are they?"

"In range." Stupid answer, really, but how was he supposed to point them out if he and June couldn't even see each other? "On my mark, advance to the outbuilding, pick up any weapons you see."

Static was vanishing from his HMD as the unit rebooted, isolating damaged hardware and restoring corrupted programs. Montag began to breathe evenly as the world around him was revealed once more. It was better to see the monsters that were really out there than it was to be left alone with the ones he could imagine, because those couldn't be killed by bullets or by fire.

Maybe.

At the click of a button, the pre-igniter sparked and burned steadily. As a certain book said, "Let there be light."

"Wai-" June interjected.

A pair of abominations had paused, listening. Before Montag could squeeze the trigger, they turned and ran. Something they heard?

"Sierra." It occurred to both of the soldiers simultaneously.

"Revealing our position in three, two..." Montag whispered, raising the flamethrower. A short jet of fire lit up the night, hopefully bright enough to pierce the rain. The pyrosene rained down some fifty meters away, dancing in step with the shadows.

Some of the shadows danced of their own volition.

Montag let out a short curse and torched a strip of ground. A dozen monstrosities were caught in the fire, leaving a few stragglers for June to take care of. Her needles punched through their sacklike bodies, but were hardly more than an inconvenience until they detonated.

They both missed one. It bounced onto the ramp, made a beeline for Montag, and burst like a rotten gourd when he stepped on it. There was a hard knot of something under his heel, perhaps tentacles. Whatever it was, it started gnawing on his sole and didn't stop until he'd stomped on it a few times.

"June, please tell me you have a plasma pistol. That needler's not good."

Her reply was drowned out by a Warthog's horn.

"Liz," she exclaimed. Before Montag could protest, she'd jumped off the ramp and ran towards the fire.

"Wait," Montag shouted, seizing the Rifle and running off to catch up. "Wait, you don't know that it's them!"

She was a lot less encumbered than he was, and he lost ground quickly. She disappeared around the bonfire, and if she answered his warning, he didn't hear it. He did, however, hear the gunfire.

He caught up a few seconds later, belatedly dropping the Rifle and priming the flamethrower. There was Da Vega, a couple of flares at her feet and an assault rifle aimed at June and Montag. There was the Warthog, the front end banged up and covered with pus-yellow gunk. To his surprise, there was also a Shadow, in much the same condition.

"Hands up, the three of you!" Da Vega shouted. Whatever the followup was, Montag wasn't paying attention. He was too busy doing the mental math and coming up short.

He half turned and caught sight of something following him, something tagged on his IFF as "DOC". The limp heads and bulging muscles of the Elites were absent. If one ignored how tumor-like growths were spilling out of the exit wound on the head, or how the pupils had dilated to consume most of the eyes, or how the breastplate removed to let a trio of tendrils sprout from a festering sore, Dirkins still looked positively human.

Having seen other people attempt it, Montag knew better than to torch something that was about to tackle him. He flicked the kill switch on the flamethrower, yanked the energy sword off his belt, and swung it in an intercept course.

He expected it to burn a thin slice through the abomination that wore Dirkins's body, an expectation grounded in twelve years of experience, and an expectation betrayed when the sword flared and burned a decimeter-wide path across the abomination's torso. The intervening matter exited the thing's back in a jet of flesh and superheated gasses.

The abomination was killed instantly, but its momentum wasn't. Two halves of Dirkins slammed into Montag, bowling him over.

He opened his eyes when a third of a clip of MA5B ammo pumped into the corpse beside him. He rolled away, wanting to put as much distance between him and Dirkins as possible, but a shot to the mud by his head brought him to a halt.

"Stop," Da Vega ordered, redundantly. "Did it bite you?"

Behind her, Liz was asking June the same question, but in a less hostile, more sisterly way.

"That's not how they spread, Rose," Montag ventured.

"Check him out, Rose," Kanoff called from somewhere by the Shadow. He had a T-42 plasma cannon aimed at Montag, the barrel cowling still smoking. "I've got you covered."

"Stand up, drop the sword and your sidearm by the flamethrower, arms out," Da Vega ordered as Liz started calling for Jonesy. When Montag complied, she gestured at his left arm. "What happened there?"

The armor plate on his arm was deeply scored. Montag remembered the abomination that had whipped him with those tentacles they all seemed to grow out of their hands. It was a glancing blow, yet it had still cut three ragged centimeter-deep grooves in ballistic armor.

"Remove the plate," Da Vega ordered. "And the sleeve."

"It didn't break skin-"

"I'll be the one to judge that, Montag."

Montag unclipped the armor plate and rolled back the sleeve. Beneath, there was a harsh purple and olive bruise that ran the full length of his upper arm.

For a while, there was only the sound of Liz and June shooting at something beyond the reach of the flares' light. That same light danced over Da Vega's stony expression, played along the rifle she held.

"Go stand against the Shadow, hands on the hood. Gerry, if that bruise starts growing, shoot him."

Hands over his head, Montag nodded approvingly and stepped past her. "That's what it takes, Rose. When everything boils down to a nightmare, that's when we set aside our humanity."

"What are you talking about?"

"I'm saying that there's a point where you have to do what's necessary. Treat contacts as hostile until proven otherwise. Give orders at gunpo-"

A kick to the small of the back cut him short. Already tense from carrying a flamethrower, anti-materiel rifle, handgun, and ammunition for all three like the protagonist in a generic shooter game, he crumpled into the mud.

"I'm nothing like you, jackal. You didn't need an excuse to abandon us on the Autumn. And you didn't need an excuse to give us orders at gunpoint."

"No. Things had to go to Hell first. I learned it on Siberia Prime."

"Nobody was holding a gun to our heads on Reach or Beta Base, Montag."

"Those were defeats. This is Hell. Siberia Prime was Hell." Montag said as he eyed Da Vega's assault rifle. "Sanity has gone out the window, the dead aren't staying dead, and we are the last humans in the universe. This is bare-bones necessity, survival."

That was when Da Vega lost interest in the debate. She turned to the Warthog, away from Montag. "Get off your knees, get up against the Shadow. I'm not going to order you twice."

When Montag complied, Kanoff took over. He'd swapped his plasma cannon for a shotgun, which he kept leveled at Montag's back. He looked uncomfortable: uncomfortable with the dead returning to life, uncomfortable with guarding Montag, uncomfortable with standing out in heavy rain. Uncomfortable with two friends dying when he wasn't around to protect them.

"What happened to Jonesy?"

Montag shook his head. "Got beat up when he crashed the Spectre. Burned his lungs out saving us, then one of the little monstrosities got him."

"What, the little beach balls?"

"Beach balls..." Montag repeated incredulously. "How do cancerous lungs with spider legs look like beach balls?"

"Well, partially deflated," Kanoff admitted. "And when they pounce, it looks like a beach ball bouncing. We saw a dozen of them catch up with an Elite..." He shuddered. "You're sure you didn't get bitten or anything? It'll be hard to maintain a perimeter with just three people."

"I'm not feeling sick or anything. Whatever those things are, I think they spread through the... the fleshsacks."

"Don't know that for sure," Kanoff argued. "Could be a viral component that carries the infection. You don't know that somethings wrong until your head splits open and the tentacles inside start eating the rest of us. Boom: and then you're a zombie."

Montag glanced over his shoulder and relaxed when he saw Kanoff's halfhearted smile. Coping mechanisms. Some were more annoying than others. He expected paranoia, understood it, but Kanoff just had a look in his eyes like a recruit on his first day of live-fire training. There was a disconnect there, a refusal to emotionally grasp the magnitude of the danger.

The sniper turned back to the Shadow, watched as the blood of the abominations washed away. Some of it stuck, puffing out like barnacles, sprouting hairs and little fins.

"What happened to the Warthog?" he asked. Da Vega had popped the hood, and was shoulder-deep in the vehicle's inner workings.

"We ran over a boomer. One of the fat ones they grow from Grunts. It went off like a landmine and nearly tipped us over. According to the dash computer, the fuel line is leaking, so she's trying to replace it."

Montag turned to face Kanoff, ignoring the shotgun a hand's breadth from his sternum. "We've talked for a full minute. Are you satisfied that I'm not infected?"

"Mostly. Let's see your bruise."

Montag held his left arm out in front of his chest, and then casually batted the shotgun away. His fingers caught on the flashlight and tightened as if he was going to twist it out of Kanoff's grip. Kanoff countered, overcorrected when Montag let go, and was taken by surprise when the sniper clamped his hand on the receiver and flicked the safety on. There was a glint of steel that moved like a snake striking, and he felt Montag's combat knife pressed against his jugular.

"Two lessons," Montag hissed, somehow louder than the assorted curses from Da Vega and the twins. "Lesson number one is that you always stand two paces away from your prisoner. Lesson two is that you'd better be willing to shoot if they so much as blink without permission."

Kanoff nodded as the color drained from his face. It was a look Montag had long associated with people who had major arteries severed.

"You want to know how Jonesy died?" Montag snarled. "He died after... after killing a dozen of those shambling abominations with a weapon he'd never even seen before, and that was after he'd burned his lungs out on rocket exhaust. You have used this gun since we dropped here. This squad has every right to expect better of you."

Montag's prisoner nodded, tried to look remorseful. Mostly, he just looked scared.

"Relax," he said, withdrawing the knife and holding it up in front of Kanoff's face. "I had the cutting edge away from your neck."

Kanoff's expression was, in a word, bewildered. He opened his mouth to speak, but was interrupted.

"Stand aside, Gerry," Da Vega yelled. She'd crawled out of the Warthog's engine bay, and was slowly circling around the two Marines, sighting down her assault rifle.

"Go ahead," Montag replied as he moved to keep Kanoff between him and Da Vega. "If you think I'm infected, stand aside and let your girlfriend shoot me.

The detachment was gone, replaced by a curious cocktail of emotion: relief, resentment, embarrassment. Kanoff wouldn't however, stand aside. Montag would do the same were their roles reversed, if only because they couldn't afford to lose another person. He was counting on Kanoff's reasons being less pragmatic, more emotional. Kanoff couldn't step away and let a fellow human being come to harm.

"It's alright, Rose. He's clean."

"The Hell it is. He's a loose cannon."

"You're the only one pointing a gun at anyone, Rose," Montag called back.

"Don't play mind games, Montag. You're awful at them."

"If I'd been slower or if Gerry had stood aside, I'd be dying right now. The only one who's been in danger here is me. If you want to continue with the Venezian standoff until we're overrun by abominations, go ahead. If you want to talk, lower your gun."

Da Vega seemed to think about this, then she lowered her rifle and gestured for Kanoff to guard the perimeter with the twins. Not once did she shift her glare from the sniper. Montag stood there, weaponless and ankle-deep in rain-saturated sod, unsure if she actually intended to keep her part of the cease-fire.

Quick as a snake striking, Da Vega brought the rifle up, sighted along it, and squeezed off a round. The bullet hissed past Montag's head and ricocheted off the Shadow into the rainstorm.

"You were teaching Gerry a lesson, I was aiming to miss. We're even," she said. The way she glared at Montag indicated that 'even' referred to a balance of actions, not to a feeling of goodwill or trust between them. "I need a few more minutes. Keep watch for zombies."

Montag retrieved the weapons where he had dropped them, stowed the flamethrower, and trudged over to the Warthog.

Da Vega's curses were long, florid, and almost entirely incomprehensible to Montag. Offhand, he wondered if she was cursing the rain or the lack of light. He was about to help out with the flashlight on the Handgun, but thought better of it and unclipped a light from his belt.

She looked over her shoulder and squinted into the light, displeased to see her least-favorite human being. "Shouldn't you be manning the perimeter?"

"What's wrong with the 'Hog?"

"Fuel line ruptured. Gotta patch it first, flush the air out, and get the checkvalves on either side to open." The polymer hose in her hands was already covered in patches, a testament to the leak's elusiveness. "We'll be up and running in five, and then we'll be running faster than the zombies can keep up."

"We're going to continue to the Pillar of Autumn."

Da Vega wiped the rain off her face in frustration before she replied. "Why? What's so important about the Pillar, Gui? It's not about getting us patched up, it's not about getting June a prosthetic arm, and apparently it's important enough to wade through the results of Mother Nature's bad acid trip."

"I'm going to breach the reactor, initiate a wildcat destabilization," Montag said, surprising himself with how monotonous he made it sound. It was almost as if he was rattling off his service number. "The explosion should compromise the Ringworld's structural integrity enough for it to rip itself apart."

Da Vega's hands quit working the fuel line. "... Why?"

"Because there's no way off this Ringworld. Because the war's over now that Reach has fallen. Because the Ringworld is a monument to macroengineering by a long-gone race, and the Covenant is going to rape and pillage it. Because the Covenant, perversely, think this is some sort of religious icon. Most of all? Because there's no way home, not for any of us. Major Sherman confirmed that the only way we were getting off this Ringworld is by capturing a Covenant cruiser."

Montag smiled dryly. "I think we all know what the success rate of that is."

Da Vega recovered from her shock fast. "When were you going to fill us in, Gui? Were you going to torch the Autumn first? Give us five minutes to reach minimum safe distance?"

"I was afraid, Rose-"

"Afraid we'd have our heads screwed on right?" she asked, her voice loud enough for the other Marines to take notice. The twins dutifully kept their eyes on the flare-lit perimeter, but Kanoff's gaze lingered on Montag. "Afraid that we'd value our lives more than your personal death-wish? You and your whatever-it-takes philosophy-"

"That's it," Montag interjected. "That's exactly it. What if I'm in the wrong? What if I'm insane? If I brought it up with you guys, I would be confronting the philosophy that's driven me for half my adult life. And... I'm afraid that I'd have to admit that I'm wrong. That San Lorenze, that Siberia Prime, that Inchon would become reprehensible acts of evil, not necessary acts of war. What if I can't tell the difference between right and wrong?"

"You can't be that far gone, Montag."

"You think so? Do you know what had to happen for me to even start questioning this? I had to completely lose control. I had to..."

Montag glanced at the rest of Sierra Squad, weighing the variables in his head. Were they close enough to hear him? Were they having trouble fending the abominations off? Did he have time to tell Da Vega everything?

"Back in February, an Insurrectionist cell staged a Covenant attack, posed as refugees, and captured the frigate Mid-morning Horizon. I was still an ODST back then, stationed on the Inchon, the destroyer tasked with the retrieval of the Horizon."

The sniper leaned over the Warthog's engine compartment and met Da Vega's eyes. "Question: Just how much are you comfortable with knowing?"

The vacuum doors sealed the hangar, though the armored bulkheads stayed retracted. No sense in locking the hanger down if it was going to be handling a lot of traffic.

An automated forklift rolled out of its garage. Unperturbed by the jets of atmosphere filling the room, it rolled up to the Pelican and retrieved a crate from the magnetic clamps. It retreated to its hideaway with the cargo, a motley assortment of guns, provisions, and computer equipment that the Innies had brought with them. Stuff for ONI to go over for evidence, before shipping it all to the recycling centers.

From the Pelican's cockpit, Montag watched the external atmosphere pressure normalize. When the gauge indicated that the pressure was equalized, the pilot opened the blood tray to the waiting MPs. While the pilot waited for the clearance to take off again, she calmly pulled the maintenance log on the Pelican and started a census of the Pelican's new bullet holes.

"Be sure to schedule a thorough cleaning of the blood tray," Montag said, cracking a joke that had probably been coined when the Insurrection first broke out. "We just transported a load of human waste."

"Ain't no detergent known to man could eliminate the taint, Montag," Sidney mumbled. She glanced into the tail camera, currently showing the MPs herding the Innies into a deserted corner of the hangar. "See that girl in back? Why's she got her kid with her?"

Montag leaned in for a closer look. The woman in question was cradling a bundle of cloth, in which a child not six months old slept. "Half the Innies claim to be noncombatants. Lot of children. Probably made their story more convincing when they met up with the Mid-morning Horizon."

"Damn inhuman thing to do," Sidney replied, settling back in her seat. "Even if that brat is going to grow up to be a good little terrorist, risking exposing him to combat like that..."

Montag glanced at her, and shrugged. Sydney was an excellent pilot, but interaction with the enemy for her was strictly limited to what she could see, hear, and gun down from the cockpit of her Pelican. "If you ever get the chance to talk to them, don't bother. Listening to Innies is like... like the exact opposite of hearing a person speak a language you don't know. The words are familiar, but the logic, the reasoning, it's completely alien."

"Think I struck a nerve," Sydney remarked.

"I've been fighting them for five years," Montag insisted. "I've spent all that time looking for a rational reason for them to be fighting us, and I haven't even come close. The only thing that makes them better than the Covenant is that they're human. Maybe. Maybe it only makes them worse."

A group of solemn Navy types climbed into the Pelican, the crew that would bring the Mid-morning Horizon back to dock.

"This is where I get off," Montag said. "Fly slow; your new cargo has "Handle with care" written all over it."

"The battle itself had been awful. These Innies..." Montag trailed off as he searched for a suitable word. "They were drifters. Cruising around ever since the Covenant had returned to Arcadia. They were desperate, and not all of them were run-of-the-mill criminals. Some were professional agitators, present to score a major victory for the URF. So, after we'd retaken the Horizon, saved some of the hostages, and transferred the Innies over to the Inchon-"

"Wonder how they got these aboard?" Collins asked. The crate had been unloaded from the forklift and opened. Inside, dozens of firearms were sealed in clear plastic evidence bags. Out of boredom, the ODSTs had spread them out on the deck, admiring the weapons that had been arrayed against them a few hours before. BPKs of various makes and states of repair were the most common, though they had been supplemented with shotguns, confetti makers, even a Riveter that had clearly seen better days.

"Ask them," Willard replied. "Them" were the Innies sitting at the other end of the bay, in a corner that had been cleared of machinery. The ones that ONI had deemed dangerous had been restrained and taken deeper into the Inchon. All the others had been left for the ODSTs to guard, a situation made necessary by the fact that over two hundred Insurrectionists had been captured.

Montag held up one of the bags, blinking as Collins snapped pictures. Each camera flash sent a spike of pain racing through his head, courtesy of a few near misses in the corridor battles.

The gun was tagged as a Szu T-22 tactical shotgun, though the number of mods made identification tenuous. Considering that the ONI agent who bagged the weapon had included the spare ammunition in the bundle, his or her knowledge of firearms was probably theoretical.

"Hey," Soung shouted as she dug a plastic bag out of the crate. "An honest-to-God Uzi sub-machine gun! Screw evidence, this thing belongs in a museum!"

"Pardon me a minute, sir," Sergeant Nesfield said, before switching her helmet radio off. "Soung, if you so much as stretch the plastic on that, I'll chuck you out the airlock. The rest of you, cut the chatter!"

"No, sir, it won't be a problem. Understood," she continued when her squad complied. With an exasperated sigh, she tore off her helmet and massaged her temples with one gloved hand. "We're not getting those MPs back. ONI has several dozen terrorists they want to put on trial, so those get the professional security. Meanwhile, we'll be on babysitter duty until we get back to port."

"That's a twenty-hour trip," Collins said over the collective groans.

"Hey, if we're the ones watching over these guys, that means that they're nobodies, right?" Soung asked. "Light duty is fine by me."

"They're Innies. The only thing keeping them in check is the fact that we can survive hard vacuum, and they can't."

Timothy snorted. "We should have spaced them in the first place. We were blowing bulkheads to get into the frigate, should have blown a few more and let the vacuum have them."

"You can see where I'm going with this, right?" Montag asked, taking a perverse pride in the horrified look Da Vega gave him. "If you haven't heard of the Inchon, you've probably heard of the Mid-morning Horizon. And the question is, was I angry? Did I want revenge?"

Montag looked upward, perhaps past the rainclouds above. "Ultimately, I think I was at the point where it didn't matter what I thought. I just did."

The Mid-morning Horizon gleamed in the light from Ceti Mu, still rotating about its long axis from the hits it had taken. From this distance, the ODSTs could see the dropships and EVA craft swarming around it, repairing it enough for the journey home. From this distance, the ODSTs were close enough to be blinded by the sun that bloomed amidships.

"Sidney," Collins breathed, dropping his camera. "Sidney!"

Nesfield was instantly back on her radio, trying to get a handle on the situation. Montag tuned the chaos out as he watched as the expanding debris field enveloped the surrounding shuttle craft As soon as the sun had been born, it faded and set, moving out of the field of view afforded by the hangar doors as the Inchon took evasive action. Montag barely felt the ship turn over the hollow feeling in his stomach.

It was obvious what had happened. A bomb planted deep in the reactor machinery where ONI couldn't find it or get to it in time, or perhaps one of the SHIVA warheads on a delay timer. Trap set by Innies to make sure that more UNSC than URF personnel died that day. Innies who spat on the idiots that offered help, Innies who killed anyone that questioned their nebulous political philosophies.

Covenant.

Montag dropped the shotgun he'd been holding up for Collins and rubbed his temples. The headache that had been building since he'd helped retake the Mid-morning Horizon was gone. In its place was something comparable to a migraine in that it was nothing like a migraine at all. No pain, just clarity. Like a diamond bullet.

They were no better than the Covenant. One was a collection of mongrel races whose religion had dictated that Humanity was to be exterminated rather than incorporated. The other was a heterogeneous alliance of communists, fascists, anarchists, and libertarians, united only by destructive ideals of self-governance and a willingness to betray their own species in the vain hope that they would be spared.

No difference.

"Timothy," Montag whispered over his radio. "How much does M90 ammunition cost?"

"What?" the soldier blurted, understandably too distracted to formulate an intelligent answer.

"How much. Does the UNSC spend. On a box of twelve M90 shells?" Montag reiterated as he got to his feet, shotgun now in hand.

"Something like two credits. Why? Where're you going?"

"To save the UNSC enough money to buy a cup of coffee."

Montag tore the bag off the shotgun, pulled a magazine out with it, and slid it into the receiver. His footsteps echoed throughout the hangar, a rhythm that was broken by the rumbling of debris against the Inchon's hull. He let his feet carry him to the corner that the Innies were huddled in while he stared at the tag dangling from the trigger guard. It was a list of modifications to the weapon, the illegal ones highlighted in red. Much of it was harmless, even downright stupid like the vertical grip on the pump. The detachable box magazine and the the lack of a trigger disconnector were something else. Someone could fire the gun as fast as they could pump it, provided they held the trigger down. Room-sweeper.

The Innies turned around when they heard him pump a round into the firing chamber. They looked at him like mice, like sheep, like Grunts in the headlights. Not like people.

Montag stopped and clicked his heels with a Boy Scout grin. "Good evening ladies and gentlemen. This may come as a great surprise, but the UNSC has been fighting an alien menace for two and a half decades. These aliens have a nasty habit of glassing our colonies, hunting down survivors, and doing everything else it takes to put Humanity on the Endangered Species List."

Silence filled the hangar when Montag paused. Even the rest of the ODSTs had shut up to watch what he was doing, trying to convince themselves that he wasn't crazy enough to-

"I'm sure that this is the first you've heard of this. Otherwise, I can't see how you could justify scuttling one of the few weapons we have to keep the Covenant at bay. Ignorance is no excuse, as the old saying goes, and your actions demand justice. Unfortunately, we don't have the resources to detain you all and put you on trial, as we need everything we've got on the front lines. So, effective immediately, we'll be releasing you from custody."

Montag's boyish smile only got wider as he brought the shotgun level with an Innie's face and pulled the trigger.

"Stop."

Montag blinked, surprised by Da Vega's interruption.

"I don't want... I think it would be better if I didn't know." Her glare had softened into that same look of shock and revulsion that June had given him earlier, when he'd awarded that medal to Jonesy. "How are you still in a uniform after that?"

"Because my own squad mates couldn't decide whether to stop me or not, not at first. Between me, the ODSTs, and the remaining Innie, someone up the chain of command decided that it didn't have to be a big deal."

Montag shrugged, or maybe shivered from the rain. "That's why I was shuffled back into the Corps with barely a demotion. Because someone made the same decision that Morris made, and decided that I could still be trusted to kill Covenant on demand."

"You killed civilians. Human beings."

Montag's cheek twitched. A dozen clarifications and excuses were at the tip of his tongue, each of them well-used. Old habits died hard.

"Yeah. Human beings."

"Do you honestly expect us to trust you after... because you told me about that?"

"No," Montag sighed. "I'm just trying to get this all out there, trying to say that I realize that I'm in the wrong. I'm not sure how to go about it, but I'd like to die a better human being. And if it wasn't for that one incident, I would never have been forced to admit that I crossed the line. I wouldn't have been wracked by denial and uncertainty. And I would still have wanted to blow the Ringworld apart, if I'd ended up here, but I wouldn't have tried to get you guys on board with the plan. I would have just slipped away and done it when I got the idea."

Da Vega's gaze shifted from Montag to the fuel line in her hand, over to the Marines holding the perimeter, and then back to Montag. Finally, she reached a decision.

"You're a lousy human being, Montag. But I pity you," she said as she shut the Warthog's hood and grimaced at the mold-like growths on the vehicle's front. "We'll do it on two conditions. When we get to the Autumn, we try to make contact with the rest of the UNSC on Halo, figure out if there's a better way. Second condition is that I get final say in that last part."

"Alright," Montag said, removing his glove. "Shake on it?"

Reluctantly, Da Vega took his hand.

"Everyone mount up," he called as Da Vega shut the hood. "We're moving out now."

"Montag, no," Da Vega said. "They deserve to be told in person, not over the radio."

To his credit, the sniper barely paused. "Our objective is the Pillar of Autumn. We will evade alien hostiles, hole up, and attempt to make contact with human survivors. Our final action will be to breach the Autumn's reactor core and scuttle the Ringworld."

"Wait," June interrupted. "What about minimum safe distance?"

"If you can fly a Pelican and want to take your chances against Covenant warships, I'll give you a fifteen minute head start. If not, I recommend a last stand in the reactor room."

Da Vega sided with Montag. "Take a look in the Warthog, June. We captured some new weapons when we took the Shadow, but we still burned through half our ammo in the attempt. God knows what these things are, but they're going to keep coming long after we run out of ammo and fuel."

"There's a lot we don't know," Montag admitted. "This is all moot if there's human survivors to link up with, but we have to make a decision now, before circumstances force a decision upon us."

"Hey, I'm all for a big stand, last-one-turn-off-the-lights ending," Liz interjected. "But are we sure that the Autumn will do anything to Halo? I'm not sure if you got a good look on the way down here, but Halo is huge. Jonesy couldn't measure how far it was to the bottom when we were on the gondola."

"Yes, it should," Kanoff said. "A ship's MAC round has a yield upwards of a teraton. The biggest bomb mankind has ever dropped was a one-fifty megaton, and the blast from that managed to trigger earthquakes across the planet. Whatever Halo is made-"

"Yeah, but that's the MAC, right?"

"The energy has to come from somewhere, Liz," Montag said. "If the MAC has a yield of a teraton of TNT equivalent, that means that the reactor has to put out that much energy in the minutes it takes to charge the gun, plus energy for maneuvering, life support, A-grav, and inertial damping."

"But the Autumn crash-landed, what, almost three days ago? Wouldn't the reactor be in standby mode by now?"

"Standby mode on a capital ship isn't that much different from normal running," Kanoff pointed out. "Unless a ship is in drydock for repairs, it has to be sixty seconds from full combat capability. What standby mode actually does is it stores energy in a ready-to-tap state within the reactor, but it doesn't harvest any more than it needs for basic functions."

"Right. Completely different from terrestrial reactors," Montag said. "I was hoping that Jonesy would have been around to come up with a more elegant plan, but... I guess we're stuck with piling explosives in one area and hoping that it cracks the engine shield."

"What about the T-48?" Da Vega asked.

"The what?"

"The mining explosive we captured. Remember, the Covenant were going to use it to destroy the Pelican we salvaged?"

"Pardon me," June interrupted sourly. "Aren't we buying the house unseen here? First, there's them between us and the Autumn, even if we all agree on the suicide mission."

"Basic geometry, June. Not sure if you got a good look last time we had clear skies, but we're on a Ringworld and I'm pretty sure that there's only so far you can run before you find them coming the other way."

"Hey!" Liz shouted. "Can I please talk to my sister for a few seconds? Before," she added when June started to interrupt. "You two kill each other?"

Montag shrugged and walked to the Shadow. He nodded at Kanoff and Da Vega when they turned to follow him. "Thanks for backing me up."

Da Vega grunted noncommittally. Kanoff was more forthcoming. "Hey, the way things are going, the Autumn may as well be on the far side of Halo. Ask me how I feel if we actually get there, because I'm pretty much in denial at the moment."

"Point taken. What's the country like out there?"

"Rough. The Shadow is going to have to go first, since it's such a good battering ram." Da Vega said as she slid into the driver's seat. "Fortunately for us, They don't seem to drive vehicles, so we can outrun them if we meet them."

Montag stepped through the Shadow's deck and off the other side. He blinked, and his HMD switched to an infrared display, then motion sensitive.

"Kanoff, which way did you see them go?"

"I dunno..." Kanoff leaned into the Shadow's cabin to look at Da Vega's assault rifle. "East-ish."

"Head north, then. Get into the open, then head spinward."

The sniper paused. There was a strange ghosting effect on his HMD. The motion sensitive filter had several options, and it was currently set to highlight irregular motion. The grass getting beaten down by rain was something the filter had quickly picked up on, and was tinted blue. But purple splotches perhaps two meters wide were moving across the ground, slowly moving toward the tower.. Puzzled, Montag switched back to infrared, and the splotches disappeared.

He looked up.

Flying overhead in loose formation were lights like distant streetlamps in the fog, all moving in Kanoff's 'east-ish' direction. It was impossible to say how high they were until a number of them broke off and descended below the smoke cloud billowing from the beacon tower. After establishing a holding pattern around the wreck, they turned to face the Marines.

"Montag..." Liz said.

"I see them," he replied as the Shadow lifted off the ground. The things had an angular, insect like appearance to them. They were probably drones of some sort, though not the angular, insect like flying Drones that the Covenant deployed once in a blue moon. These were metallic gray and had the appearance of a down-ward pointing arrow when they were seen head-on. An arrow tipped by a blue light, pointing towards an infinitely more ominous red one.

Montag barely made it back into the Shadow before it began moving. There was a great commotion, the sound of something raking the back of the Shadow. June shouted something about focus weapons while the LAAG hummed to life and began returning fire. He could also hear the Warthog's engine keeping pace with the Shadow. Apparently, Sierra Squad was staying together for one last hurrah.

The trees passed the Shadow, seemingly as distant as his squad. The interior cabin was well shielded from the air and the rain rushing by, and the hover effect canceled out the natural dips and bumps of the forest. It was as smooth as a highway, or a subway.

When he thought that they had left the drones behind, a rolling boom sounded nearby, like a volley of rockets hitting pay dirt. Montag threw himself against the rear wall of the troop bay as a trio of red needles embedded themselves in the center wall. As he watched, they burned white hot and then sublimated.

One last hurrah.

The sniper blinked. Closed his eyes.

"One last job."

Montag cracked one eyelid open.

Minister of the Interior Nikitin sat before him. He'd been the architect of the Zima program, been in charge of integrating Superintendent Demidov into Siberia Prime's defense programs, if not the other way around. He was the reason why the conflict had dragged on for four months, the reason why Montag had spent three months building a Hell for Man and Covenant alike in the ruins of Lublanska.

And now he was hiring.

"We're calling it Zima 26," he said, not blinking as a few more red needles zipped into the troop bay. He didn't raise his voice as a loud explosion sounded nearby, followed by a great crashing sound and Kanoff's whoops of joy. Didn't have to; Montag had heard the offer before. "We can't exactly use it as a shield now that the Covenant have changed their tactics, but we can use it as a diversion, give the evacuation some living room."

Nikitin was gaunt, thinner than the last time Montag had met him. Not enough food, not enough sleep, too many worries, too many compromises. All for nothing.

Half a day ago, the Covenant capital ships that had established orbital dominance over Siberia Prime had descended. Metrograd had been the first, and now all the great cities were being systematically glassed.

Montag turned that thought over in his mind as the subway train shook. If he had a mirror, he could count the similarities between him and Nikitin. He wasn't alone.

Clancy had that same look when they had volunteered to board the Covenant Corvette. So had Demarest, when you caught him off-guard. Particularly towards the end. Montag was merely the last in line, meeting his final challenge hundreds of light years from where he'd met those men.

End of the line. He wasn't sure how he felt about that.

2202 Hours, Covenant Defilade

If he were to allow himself one moment of overconfidence, Vlar 'Koalomee would have hazarded that the Parasite could not stand up to organized military might. The military might, he reminded himself, lasted only as long as the ammunition and batteries held. And the organization would buckle once the Parasite found a new angle, a new tactic. Which, to be fair, was something it had proven itself to be singularly good at.

Under fire from the Wraiths and Phantoms, the Parasite had gotten close to the fortifications, even breaching the lines at some points. One of the creatures that had spearheaded that those breaches lay before Vlar. It had never been a Sangheili or a Human; rather, it once had been both before the Parasite fused them together. Realization was spreading through the ranks that they were not just food or hosts, but raw materials that would be broken apart and put to use as the Parasite saw fit. Accordingly, the Warriors of the Covenant were fighting harder, but were increasingly leery of exposing themselves.

He stepped back as a Major Domo began to quarter the construct with an energy sword, the only sure way to prevent reanimation. Behind him, Creiva 'Dontaree was checking the charge on his repeater with a grim expression.

"We need something to burn the bodies," he remarked. "If they can not only turn us, but assemble new abominations from the cast-off parts of the dead, butchering the bodies will only delay them."

"As long as we are wishing for what is not, why not wish that we are home at our Dochas, celebrating victories the likes of which our ancestors never dreamed?" R'kate retorted as he loaded his needle rifle. "Or perhaps waging war on a distant human world, against a foe that has the decency to stay dead?"

The masses in the thrall of the Parasite were gathering for an attack. They were spread out in craters and under charred foliage, dispersed enough that the nearly-constant firing of the Wraiths couldn't dent their numbers, deep enough in cover that the hail of plasma bolts and needles was hardly more than a nuisance. Yet from the way the larger constructs were moving to the fore, the Parasite clearly expected a breakthrough soon.

One of the Kig Yar pointed into the sky and shrieked "Nester!" It was one of the crude names its kind had for a Human dropship, apparently inspired by the similarities to a gravid female.

Vlar banished the lurid particularities from his mind and looked skyward in the direction the soldier was pointing. A dropship was hurtling toward the entrenchment at full speed, its underside glinting in the light from the fiery landscape. It was less of an aircraft than a guided projectile, doubtlessly aimed at the Wraiths in the center of the Covenant position.

It was Death's work. She would sweep away Legion 'Kandonom's last defense while Vlar was forced to watch for those last few heartbeats. She had, with great care, left him helpless to avert disaster. Even if he could give the order in time, even if the Wraiths could take aim and let off a volley, the Humans built their dropships like brick-

That thought was cut short as a flash of lightning enveloped the aircraft and struck the Parasite-besmirched valley. The thunderclap was loud enough to rattle Vlar's teeth and was still echoing across the hill when a gentle hail of molten metal began to fall.

He was unsure of whom to thank for that miracle. The Wisdom of the Forerunner came to mind out of habit, but they had been notably sparing in divine intervention recently, and Vlar couldn't think of a reason for that to change. He cycled through a list of myths and half-forgotten deities as he took a breath of relief, and was somewhat disappointed when the Dauntless Courage dropped beneath the clouds.

"Braggarts," the Kig Yar hissed, its voice almost lost amongst commotion the carrier's point-defense lasers caused as they raked the Parasite-held ground. "No gratitude from me! They could have fried that Nester any time."

Offhand, the acting commander of Legion 'Kandonom had to agree, though he was far too relieved to care. He began giving orders for withdrawing to the center of the Palisade, where a gravity lift was already retrieving the three Wraiths.

It was a last fighting retreat. Kig Yar and a few remaining Lekgolo brought up the rear, while a few brave Shade pilots provided covering fire. The Parasite surged over the ramparts, only to be beaten back by warriors with hope renewed and worries about conserving ammunition banished.

The Legion clustered under the violet light, and for a moment Vlar worried that Shipmaster 'Kandonomee would leave them to die. Then a score of warriors ascended into the carrier, then another, then a third. Soon, all that remained was a small guard. Two Lekgolo, Creiva Dontaree, and Vlar himself.

"Go on," Vlar ordered as he pulled out a plasma grenade.

"Enough dead warriors today," Creiva countered. The Lekgolo, on the other hand, hardly needed to be told twice.

Vlar fired three shots at a dead Unggoy, killing the parasite that was burrowing into it. "Out there is a murderer and a thief, a Human who spreads dishonor upon all unfortunate enough to cross its path, yet blessed with all the luck in the world. And I have failed to bring justice to it."

The grenade in Vlar's hand flared to life, the outer shell sublimating into a luminous blue plasma that warped Vlar's shields. "And out there," he continued. "It is at the mercy of the Parasite. I suppose that will have to serve as justice enough."

Creiva pursed his mandibles and stepped back into the gravity lift. A moment later, he was gone.

The acting commander of Legion 'Kandonom surveyed the battlefield that had been relented to the Parasite, the misshapen constructs and corrupted warriors who crawling after him. With a flick of his wrist, he dropped the grenade and stepped into the lift.

There was no feeling of acceleration, only the rush of air and change in perspective to let him know that he was being carried out of reach of the little perversions. Beneath him, the parasites milled about, hoping to follow him heavenward, only to die in the blast of the grenade.

Moments later, the entire hill disintegrated under the combined power of a battery of point-defense lasers.

The lift drew him up into the depths of the carrier, into a staging room intended to field an entire Legion. The remnants of Legion 'Kandonom did not come close to filling it.

No sooner than the airlocks had clicked shut than he realized that the doors were all blocked by shielded gun turrets and barricades. The Wraiths had been moved to the corners of the bay, and now had their guns trained on the rescued warriors. Alerted by a cacophony of chirps and rustles, Vlar glanced up and saw that the ceiling was packed wall-to-wall with armed Yan'mee.

"Legion 'Kandonom," a voice boomed through the hangar, drowning out everything else. "Know that I am Shipmaster Vasai 'Kandonomee, blood-brother to your late Field Marshall. Had I not intervened, your position would have been overrun in short time."

Vlar finally caught sight of the speaker. Vasai was standing upon a balcony dressed in full battle regalia, with overshields gleaming under the purple lights. He was flanked by two squads of Ultras, enough protection to have wandered unharmed through the deepest parts of the Parasite's territory.

"As the one who engineered your rescue, and as the captain of this vessel, it is my right to subject you to quarantine until we can properly decontaminate every last one of you. Therefore, you will disarm, remove your armor, and not stray beyond the boundaries we've marked upon the floor. To disobey is to forfeit your life."

Those last words had to be bellowed to be heard over the Legion's shouts. The warriors weren't challenging him. Rather their ire was directed inward, had grown from suspicious mutterings to heated arguments. The soldiers who had fought nightmares were realizing that their escape may not have been so clean after all. Relief turned to paranoia, which would turn to hostility if left unchecked, which would beget bloodshed if the Dauntless Courage's crew were forced to intervene.

It was his duty to guide the warriors of Legion 'Kandonom through this. His duty by way of rank and by virtue of studying under Mortumas 'Kandonomee. His decisions had led to the Legion being ambushed by the Parasite, his quick thinking and peerless effort that saved them, and Vlar would die before he saw it all wasted.

Silently, Vlar 'Koalomee reached out and grabbed the barrel of a carbine that was being waved at the Yan'mee above. The owner rounded on Vlar and tried to twist it out of his hand, only to pause when Vlar removed his own helmet. Vlar released the gun, knelt down, and began to systematically strip his armor off, laying out the pieces according to size and function. A few warriors followed his lead when they saw him, with Creiva 'Dontaree among the first. The rest at least lowered their weapons and their voices.

"I order every last warrior who pledged his honor to the late Field Marshal to power down your shields, remove your armor, and let the Yan'mee collect your weapons without protest," Vlar shouted as he stood. "Of course, the Lekgolo pairs are excepted by necessity. In addition, you are all to split into groups of four and watch each other for signs of corruption. If any of you is suspected of being host to the Parasite's taint, he is to be isolated under the watch of the Lekgolo."

The clattering of armor was almost as loud as the chattering of the Yan'mee drones above by the time Vlar finished. He matched gazes with anyone who hesitated until they relented.

The Yan'mee descended and retrieved the discarded items, and for a moment, Vlar was lost in a storm of amber carapace and diaphanous wings. When the air cleared, Shipmaster Vasai 'Kandonomee stood in front of him, his guards half-encircling the two.

"I have half a mind to burn the scraps your lot carried in with you. I do hope you weren't carrying anything... important."

For a moment, his mandibles pressed tightly together, hiding the teeth and letting the not-subtle-at-all threat hang in the air. "Come with me."

Vlar glanced back to the Shades and Wraiths aligned against the Legion, ready to fire at the slightest hint of infection. "And what of my warriors?"

"Any bloodshed within these walls will be of their own making," Vasai replied. "I order you one last time: come."

2214 Hours, Forward observation deck of the Dauntless Courage

The lone occupant of the observation deck was a Huragok. Vlar's experience with them was limited, but it seemed to be mournful, limply staring at the rapidly receding landscapes of Halo.

"Get that damnable thing out of here," Shipmaster Kandonomee barked. Immediately, three Kig-Yar guards Vlar hadn't seen stepped out of the shadows and guided the holy being out of the room.

"Ever since we arrived here, the Huragok have been abandoning their duties and taking passage to Halo," Vasai explained. "We had to assign tenders who would ensure that their work gets done. And yet, with the emergence of the Parasite, their urgency has only grown."

"As for more... immediate matters," the Shipmaster continued. "I granted choice weapons to the finest troops present at Halo, upon the promise that the murder of my own kin would be avenged, and that the Docha Blade he carried would be restored to our possession. And yet, as I watched on the Luminary, the Human slipped out of your grasp without losing a single compatriot. Legion 'Kandonom fought well, and yet their leadership was inept... and, I couldn't help but notice, very far away."

"Inept," Vlar repeated, his disbelief audible. The guards that the Shipmaster had brought along were circling again, weapons drawn.

"What would you call it? The warriors that my kin had hand-picked and trained over half his life were delivered straight into the maw of the Parasite. Half their number was lost before they could retreat. And when I had begun to believe you could pull them through with the translocation system you discovered, you abandoned it. And only then did you contact me and beg for help."

The guards were silent now, but it was a different kind of silence. Rather than the unobtrusiveness expected of any bodyguard, there was the baited silence of predators waiting for the opportunity, for their prey to make a single misstep. Would they converge upon him and cut him with metal blades? Or was he so low in Vasai 'Kandonomee's estimation that they would simply shoot him and throw him from the ship?

"You saw the Parasite advance upon us in your Luminary?"

"As plain as stormclouds rolling across the sky. Are you about to claim that you couldn't see them in yours? That a grain of sand in your eye blotted out the Parasite's taint, or that the Luminary simply omitted them?"

"I can only guess. Perhaps the Luminary that the Prophets have blessed us with..." Vlar paused as he saw a shadow of contempt pass across the Shipmaster's face. "Our Luminaries were patterned after designs found in the Dreadnought. Perhaps the Luminary we worked with wasn't designed with the Parasite in mind. Perhaps the Parasite itself had taken to the system and hid its presence from us."

"That is what you claim? That the Parasite could access the machinery designed by the Forerunner? Upon other ears, that would be heresy, not just foolishness."

"You accuse me of leading my troops from afar, yet I was closer to the Parasite than you ever were," Vlar retorted. "I've seen the Parasite burrow into our finest warriors, I've seen it anticipate weaknesses in our defenses with unerring accuracy, and I can't help but wonder if the Parasite can rip knowledge from the minds of those in its thrall. You call it foolishness, yet we have seen the Humans turn the Forerunner's works to their own ends. You denounce me as an incompetent for losing the Docha blade and half of Legion 'Kandonom, yet I have saved that which Mortumas prized most in a situation when even he would have been overwhelmed."

Vlar's short speech had as much effect upon Vasai as wind would upon a rock, but a member of his escort burst out laughing.

"Spare him, Shipmaster. If this is how well he spins failure into virtue, perhaps he should be the one to present our case before the Heirarchs."

"Then he shall be spared," Vasai answered, taking grim satisfaction in Vlar's confusion. He gestured for Vlar to stand. "Look beneath you. Halo is lost to us, and even now we seek refuge on the far side of the planet. The burden of blame will fall upon our shoulders."

"We'll take it back," Vlar insisted. The Covenant had wandered the galaxy for too long to give up on ascension now. "When do reinforcements arrive?"

"There are no reinforcements," Vasai stated flatly. "In all this time since we first gazed upon Halo, we have heard nothing from High Charity, and our sendings have gone unanswered. You have been told differently?"

"But the Lesser Prophet said that High Charity would be here within days."

"Yes, he has said many things," Vasai replied, waving away his guards. They retreated into the shadowy alcoves that lined the room, deaf to the words that would pass between the Shipmaster and his prisoner. "Tell me, in whom did authority rest when we fell from Slipspace and cast our eyes upon Halo? Did the Writ of Union not grant the role of leadership to the San Shayuum in matters spiritual and political?"

"That was the role that was solely allotted to them," Vlar answered. "But the Humans were due to arrive; we followed them here from their fortress-world. The Writ of Union states that all shall walk the path, but the Sangheili protect the faith."

"Then you see where the strife between the Lesser Prophet and our Fleetmaster blossomed. Just as the Prophet would not dare let the Fleetmaster 'Vadamee assume control over the exploration of Halo, the Fleetmaster couldn't let a Prophet dictate military matters. They were at a stalemate until the Prophet took the warriors loyal foremost to the Fleetmaster and cast them to the wind in preparation for a coup. Sesa 'Refumee and Loka 'Bandolee to the distant refineries, your own Field Master to a Human stronghold."

Vlar flexed his mandibles, trying to wrap his mind around the Prophet's actions. The San Shayuum were adverse to bloodshed and prone to debate long after the point where exchange of words became meaningless. But they were, as a rule, benevolent; their keen leadership deserved just as much credit as the Shangheili's military prowess for the spread and prosperity of the Covenant empire.

The edict hadn't been given by the Prophet himself; it had been delivered over the radio through a simpering underling. An underling backed by the authority of the Minor Prophet he represented, who derived his authority from the Writ of Union and the Heirarchs.

The acting commander of Legion 'Kandonom grabbed the railing for support as fire kindled in his hearts.

The underling, nameless save for the office of his master, had spoke of an urgent need to cull the Human vermin before the throne of the Covenant Empire arrived. He had couched the command in well-wishes and apologies for misunderstandings, smiling as the lies slipped loose from his mandibles.

And that false command, the needless haste, had killed Vlar's teacher.

"Where is the false Prophet now?"

Vasai 'Kandonomee glanced at the communicator in his handset, an expression of mild worry crossing his face. "The fool has taken station upon the Truth and Reconciliation, claiming that his security forces would turn the Flood back. All for the best, I would imagine. The path is wide, but shortsighted ambition takes up so very much room."

The Shipmaster turned and strode for the exit, still talking over his shoulder. "When you have regained your composure, return to your Legion and keep them civil. When we have reached the far side of Threshold, we will begin decontamination."

A few heartbeats later, Vlar was alone with his thoughts, puzzling out his lot in life as the universe turned beneath him, the stars slowly arcing across the floor.

The last of Halo disappeared from view. At this distance, it was but a ribbon of blue and white, unmarred and unspeakably beautiful. Lost to the Covenant because they could not live up to their name and founding promise, because they had abandoned unity for mutual suspicion and ambition.

The Parasite... a test of the Forerunner? Vlar was conflicted, torn between a life of faith and his new-found doubts.

But as a divine test or a mundane threat, the Parasite had revealed rifts in the Covenant, rifts that Vlar couldn't help but fear might threaten the integrity of the Covenant as a whole.

Perhaps the sun was setting on the Age of Reclamation.

0145 Hours, 5125 meters from Pillar of Autumn crash-site

"What is that?"

Montag squinted, trying to resolve the splotches of green and gray on his HMD into a coherent image. "Don't stop. Circle around."

"No need," Kanoff answered from above. "It's a huge piece of the Autumn. Part of a Longsword dock, I think."

"Circle around," Montag ordered again. "If it fell off the Autumn, I want to see if it dug a trench out as it hit. Give us an idea of which direction it was falling from. June, can you pick anything up on radar? Or the radio?"

"Nothing on either one," she reported back. "I don't think that the radar's working."

"Alright, just keep moving," Montag said as he spied something. Where the dirt, boulders, and wood chips had piled up against the condominium-sized debris, flickers of white on his HMD turned a rich red color when he switched to infrared. "I'm seeing scattered metal parts glowing in the infrared spectrum. I think they might be destroyed drones."

"Like they were fighting Covenant or... them?"

"Not Covenant," Montag insisted. "We'd have seen the bodies by now. The abominations just get up and walk away as soon as another fleshsack burrows into them."

"The Covenant could be dragging off their dead," Kanoff pointed out. In times like these, I think they'd get around to changing SOP."

"Or the drones did it for them... Or They came through and picked everything clean," Liz chimed in.

"Less chatter, more watching where we're going," Montag ordered as he shouldered the Rifle. He'd be fine if it was only the Covenant, but if it could be any faction in a three-way war, he preferred to play it safe.

The Shadow shifted to the left, and he grabbed for an overhead handle to steady himself. They had finally come around far enough to run into the elongated crater left by the impact. Heavy rain had collapsed the walls and filled it in, yet it was still several stories deep. Montag glanced toward the wreck, wondering if its trajectory had been severely altered by the Ringworld's atmosphere, or if they could find the Autumn by extrapolating its path. For the past kilometer, they'd driven over patchy ground and denuded trees, as if a blast wave had shucked off the branches and stripped the bark away. Closer still, the trees were uprooted or shattered. It was hard to imagine that even a hunk of metal as large as a warehouse could do that, so it stood to reason that the Autumn's trail wasn't far off.

"We flew overhead when we raided the Autumn, didn't we?" Liz asked. "Anybody think this looks familiar?"

"I think it looked a lot different from the air," Kanoff replied. "I don't remember the damage looking anywhere near this bad."

Off to his right, just on the other side of the wreckage, dozens of bolts of lightning seemed to strike at once. Most unlike lightning, the bolts lasted for several seconds, sweeping along the holes and converging on dark forms.

"Drones at five o'clock!" Montag shouted. "Hard le-"

He shut up and scrambled for a handhold as Da Vega spun the Shadow away from the trench and boosted away. Trees that had been felled during the impact scratched against the underside of the vehicle. The snapping of limbs and rustling of needles was punctuated by a number of wet thuds, the origin of which were explained as two limbless abominations rolled past Montag, followed by a rapidly-swelling tumor.

A split second before the explosion, Montag realized that the abominations were rolling into the path of the Warthog. Afterward, the roar of the 'hog's engine was undiminished. Evidently, June was smart enough to leave some distance between her and the Shadow.

A fourth abomination survived with one arm intact and grabbed onto the deck. The sore in the chest had swollen into a hivelike structure, almost completely obscuring the fleshsack that occupied it. Montag stomped on the sore and found that what looked like swollen skin was actually cartilage and hard tissue. Either way, the abomination was torn loose.

"Kanoff, grab onto something!"

The ground was a blur of dirt, rocks and branches, the latter becoming increasingly rare. Montag barely had time to shoulder the Rifle and grab onto the overhang before the ground fell away. The Shadow got a full second of airtime. Mud sprayed out from beneath the Shadow's gravity cushion as vehicle met ground again, now sloping steeply downward. The sniper almost lost his footing, and scrabbled toward the end of the troop bay when he heard the flamethrower break free of its duct-tape restraints, snatching it just before it was lost over the side.

The ground evened out, the Spectre started to slow, and came to a shuddering halt as if it struck a brick wall. Then whatever it had hit hit back.

The Shadow went one way, Montag went the other, and the flamethrower went a third. He caught a glimpse of the Shadow spinning off into darkness just before his legs were jerked out from beneath him. He tumbled, slapped into the ground, and slid to a halt.

'Mud,' Montag realized, rolling over. Debris had ripped the ground almost to the bedrock, and heavy rainfall had left an ankle-deep layer of mud that smelled rancid, like...

He froze as he saw what the Shadow had hit.

It was built like a human torso, with the head and pelvis sheared off. It was indeed built, as if a dozen bodies had been torn apart and grafted together to make it, with arms as thick as tree trunks and a cratered chest the size of a Warthog. From a weeping cyst in the chest, five fleshsacks glared at Montag.

It was an inverted eye, an empty socket that could still see, and it had seen Montag. They had made eye contact in the same way an insect and a biologist could meet eyes. There was a terrifying moment of vertigo as Montag realized that he was looking into an abyss, far deeper and more malevolent than he could comprehend.

The monstrosity limped over to the Shadow, which had landed upright, and placed a paw on the arch.

"No," Montag breathed, feeling pain well up in his chest. "No, no, don't-"

It shifted its weight, and the Shadow slowly buckled, tearing in half and sinking into the mud.

Montag wanted to tear his eyes away, to look at something other than the loping giant that had been constructed in defiance of rationality. The rising moon behind it obliged him and gave the sniper something else to focus on.

It was no moon, it was another drone; one larger and obscured behind a brilliant blue shield, like the energy barricades the Covenant had.

The towering monstrosity stepped over the Shadow's remains and loped off out of sight. The drone turned to track it, sweeping the area with pink needles. A dozen rockets were fired, their paths curving away from vertical and terminating in the ground around the giant.

Montag broke out of his shock and unsteadily got to his knees. It was a nightmare, one he could ignore. No different from his hallucinations, and he'd learned to ignore them over the years.

One step, then another. The old habits and strategies that he had drilled into himself on Siberia Prime, were rising to the fore. Look around, assess the damage, break the impossible long-term goal into attainable short-term goals, shut down whatever part of you that's beginning to doubt.

At his feet was the defoliator. As good a place as any to start.

He pried it out of the muck and held it upside-down so that the rain would wash the mud off. Through the ringing in his head, he tried to get his bearings, establish the relative positions of the Shadow and the Warthog.

Regroup, retreat, get as much distance between Sierra and the abominations and the drones as possible. They'd have to leave in the Warthog, Montag realized, because the monstrosity had totaled the Shadow. Half consciously, he was deliberately not thinking about who might be injured or dead.

The moonlike drone shattered, and the smaller drones around it fared little better. In the light of the fireball, Montag saw a newer abomination charge the Shadow, rapidly covering the distance with bowed legs. Two long, muscular tentacles tipped in knotted masses of flesh sprouted from a trunklike torso.

No time to check the fuel canister or the pump for ruptures. Without hesitation, Montag primed the defoliator.

It seemed to spy him. The new abomination was more cautious than others of its ilk, or perhaps more clever. It lunged, shifted direction, and bounded off into the rain, cloven feet churning the mud.

The sniper blinked, switched his HMD over to an infrared filter. Nothing.

How fast had it moved? Eighty klicks per hour, at least. If it was afraid of fire, did it withdraw for something else to take its place, or was it circling around him?

"Kanoff, Da Vega, did either of you see where that thing ran?"

"Yeah..." Kanoff replied breathlessly over the radio. "Loped off spinward. I think."

Montag frowned, his eye flicking up to the compass on his HMD. If anything, he'd thought that the thing had gone north. Was it circling around behind the Shadow, or was his sense of direction off? "Alright, both of you, get prepped to evac in the 'Hog. Grab what weapons you can. June, Liz, I need a sit-"

He finally figured out where the sound of the Warthog was coming from. June had stopped by the Shadow, and the FAV was almost completely obscured by the Shadow's bulk. Montag started to walk toward the rest of Sierra Squad when his whole boot sank into the mud.

"No can do, Gui," Kanoff replied, his voice drained of emotion. Whatever the rest was, Montag didn't catch it, as he'd looked down to see what he had stepped in. It was the footprint of the loping monstrosity, still slowly filling up with mud.

Kanoff had said that the 'thing' had 'loped off spinward', Montag realized as a chill ran down his spine. He'd thought Montag's query had referred to the loping monstrosity; perhaps he hadn't even seen the other one.

Which meant that Montag was looking in the wrong direction.

The sniper spun around. The tentacled abomination was rushing him. It was twice as tall as an Elite, yet its footsteps perversely quiet for its size. But now that he saw it, it showed up on infrared clearer than the fleshsack-animated corpses had.

It showed up even better when Montag torched it, catching it in the torso with a geyser of pyrosene.

It screamed, loud as a subway train pulling into a station, with an undertone like a foghorn. But whereas other abominations had wilted or slowed, this one was a juggernaut. It only kept coming.

Montag did the math, arrived at a conclusion, and kicked his feet out from under him. Gravity, or perhaps centripetal force, carried him to the ground where he curled into the fetal position.

A flaming tentacle swung over him, passing through the space where his abdomen had been two seconds before. A second tentacle followed, lower, closer.

Its footsteps had been as quiet as a body hitting the floor, barely audible over its bellowing. But as it ran over Montag, arms flailing and flesh burning, the hoof that landed half a meter from Montag's head sounded like a dud artillery shell.

The juggernaut continued, swinging like a blinded boxer before it realized that it had overshot its quarry. It planted its feet and tentacles into the ground to stop and turn. Like a true predator, it was silent now, intent on finding its prey despite the flames stripping chunks of flesh off its body. Montag held his breath and hoped that it wouldn't hear him over the sound of June gunning the Warthog's engine and putting the vehicle in gear.

One of the tentacles swung over Montag, then the other, each one leaving a peculiar smell of burned flesh and composting grass, each one cracking like a whip. Montag buried himself deeper into the mud and cringed when a tentacle whipped the ground beside him, leaving a furrow four meters long. The other tentacle slammed into the ground, pulled free, and swept toward the first one.

The heat was bearable, drenched as Montag was, but the smell made him sick to his stomach. It was like roast pork mixed with something worse, something that comes out of a week-old corpse when you step on it, something that was fuel to the fire of his fight or flight instinct, urging him to crawl away from the blind abomination, but the mud was sucking him back, holding him in place for the-

The abomination's skin was shucked off by a hailstorm of 12.7mm bullets. It staggered from the gunfire catching it to the flank, whipped its tentacles up and around to protect itself, and was toppled when the Warthog rammed it.

June threw the Warthog into reverse and pulled out from under the juggernaut's corpse. Montag thought she was going to pick him up, but she fishtailed around him as the gatling gun revved up again. She hit the gas and the 'Hog shot off into the rain, another juggernaut in close pursuit. In seconds, the only sign that the Warthog had been there were the tire tracks in the mud.

The lone sniper stood numbly, tried to get his bearings again. Shadow behind him, crater wall to his left, a lake of rainwater to his right. Before him, barely visible through the rain, the clouds had broke enough for some sunlight to get through, like the first fingers of dawn.

He picked his way to the Shadow, giving the scattered munitions a cursory glance as he passed them.

"Not what I expected," Kanoff called out. He was leaning against the Shadow, plasma cannon hanging loosely from its improvised strap. Even in the bad light, he looked unnaturally pale. "Not what I expected from a zombie apocalypse at all."

He quit smiling when Montag got closer. "What the Hell happened to you?"

The sniper was stunned. Kanoff was clearly injured, blood was seeping out from where he had his hand clamped, and yet he thought that Montag looked worse for the wear?

"Forget about me," Montag said. "What happened to you?"

"Got thrown out when the Shadow rolled. Hurt something. Bad." He inhaled, which turned into a hiss of pain. "Then that huge drone hit me with... with a needle. Didn't explode, just burned its way out."

He parted his hands for a moment. In the poor light, it was hard to see what the needle had done to his stomach.

"Keep pressure on that wound," Montag ordered. "When the Twins get back, we'll get you lying down."

"Don't think I'll last... did you see any biofoam canisters out there?"

"No." Montag unholstered the handgun and checked the clip. "I'll go look. Where's Da Vega?"

"Rose is still in the cabin. The loper, it caved the front end in. She's pinned to her seat."

"I'm sorry." Montag had nothing else to say. There was the old habit trying to reassert itself, telling him to push the news away, to rationalize it, to find reasons to despise her. It was an instinct, like lighting matches and knowing how to not get burned. It was a habit he was actively fighting: he doubted that he had more than a few hours left to live, and he wasn't about to fill those hours with the mistakes he'd been making for years.

But how to put all of that into words and communicate it? Best he could do was a two-word apology, the most inadequate one he'd ever had to use.

"It wasn't her fault, Gui," Kanoff insisted, perhaps detecting some of the sniper's inner turmoil. "There's no way she could have seen that loper in time. I didn't even-"

"I never doubted her," Montag insisted, giving Kanoff a reassuring pat on the shoulder. "I'm going to look after the biofoam. Watch yourself; we still have a restaurant to open."

"Are you kidding," Kanoff laughed. "Here? The whole neighborhood's gone to Hell."

Montag sidestepped him, ducked into the remains of the troop bay. He quickly located the Rifle, checked it for damage, and loaded a shredder clip into it. He retrieved his backpack next, hunted for a medical kit, and took it with him.

"Here you go," he said as he emerged from the troop bay. "Dirkins consolidated our medical supplies, so there should be a biofoam canister in there."

Kanoff accepted the kit and passed his binoculars to Montag. "See the end of the storm, out on the horizon? Take a close look at it."

Montag accepted the binoculars and set them to their maximum magnification. The impact crater ended, perhaps a few kilometers away. At the end, some sort of hill rose into the sunlight, and Montag's heart skipped a beat when he recognized the exhaust nozzles. Months ago, he'd first seen the Pillar of Autumn from the very same angle, back on Reach.

He was so close, it was heartbreaking.

"Keep them," Kanoff said when Montag tried to return the binoculars. "You'll get more use out of them than I will. You've got to blow the Autumn, but that's your struggle. I went along with it because Da Vega did, and I'm staying with her."

"You're giving up?" Montag asked before he could stop himself.

"No. I wasn't in this last push for you," Kanoff replied. He winced, clutched his chest, and slid down the bulkhead he was leaning on. "I didn't care... but Rose did... and I cared about her. I- my path ends here. You... I think you're supposed to find your end... in the Autumn."

That was it then.

"It's been a pleasure knowing you, Gerry."

"Yeah, same to you... Gui Montag," Kanoff replied as he accepted Montag's hand. "Give 'em Hell."

0154 Hours, 76 meters from Shadow crash-site

Keeping the LAAG on target was impossible. The Hog was plowing through mud and bouncing off rocks and debris that had been ground off the Autumn's underside. The targets themselves, twin juggernauts that had taken chase, jinked from side to side as they kept pace with the Warthog.

"June, find level ground!" Liz shouted, risking a glance forward. The path was clear of enemies, but the sloping walls of the crater loomed near.

Her sister glanced backward, and their eyes met. June's expression was one of grim determination, and more comfortingly, the gears were turning.

"Take aim," she called back. "Braking in three, two-"

On one, the Warthog lurched to a rumbling halt. The leading juggernaut tried to sidestep the gun, but Liz easily corrected. The gatling gun revved up from zero to five-fifty rounds per minute, and every bullet fired tore through the monster's mid-section.

The juggernaut folded in half and tumbled to a stop. The other one vaulted over it and landed close enough to swipe at the Warthog.

The whole vehicle twisted under Liz's feet. She grabbed ahold of the gun and held on as her sister gunned the engine.

The juggernaut lost little ground, and it gained on them even as the Warthog climbed the crater walls, even as fifty-cal bullets stitched a row of holes across its chest. By the time they'd reached the crater's lip, it was close enough for its rainslick carapace to be stained blood red by the Hog's taillights.

While its arms and legs flashed red, the ammunition counter flashed yellow, indicating that there was less than a hundred rounds left. It was suddenly and painfully obvious to Liz that she needed to conserve ammo, not waste it on nightmares that seemed to be immune to bullets.

She unclipped a frag grenade from her belt, armed it, and dropped it over the side. It exploded right next to the juggernaut, breaking its stride. The follow-up was a plasma grenade lobbed squarely onto its midsection.

It keeled over and lay still. It didn't stir when June turned around and rammed it, nor when Liz blew its knee apart with an overcharged plasma bolt.

June parked the 'Hog meters away from the corpse. Silently, the sisters watched the sky around them, the formations of drones that were visible now that the rain had lightened up. Focus beams raked the ground like distant lightning strikes, and return fire was seen intermittently.

"I'm sorry, sis," Liz said, crestfallen. She turned to look behind her, and saw much the same. "We'd have to do just as much shooting to get away from here as we'd do to get to the Autumn."

That had been her hope, her foolish hope that she'd shared with June to get her to go along with Montag and the others. She'd hoped that, somehow, the monsters were a local outbreak, and that Sierra Squad could simply drive away. Montag could be talked down, and they'd steal a Pelican and meet up with the rest of the Marines.

That hope seemed pointlessly optimistic now, a dream of spun sugar. A weary acceptance set in, weighing on her like a heavy coat. She thought of Montag and his dour pessimism, and wondered if he'd ever had hopes like that.

"Are we good for ammo?" June asked as she put the Warthog through a three-point turn.

"No. Are we going back for the others?"

"Hell yes."

"Semper fi," Liz said. The last word almost morphed into an obscenity when she caught sight of the juggernaut. It was charging the Warthog in a four-limbed gait, blood still leaking from the score of bullet wounds in its abdomen.

It dived and tackled the vehicle squarely in the side as June gunned the engine. There was the tortured shriek of buckling armor plating, the hiss of breath as the LAAG crushed her chest, and then a dizzy nausea as Liz rebounded and became momentarily airborne.

The ground yielded more than she did.

Liz coughed up mud, waited for the stars to clear from her vision. She was worse off and better off than she thought she'd be after a car wreck. She was still alive, but the pain outstripped anything she could have imagined.

She tried to roll over, but the mud sucked at her, and a sensation like a shard of glass racing up her arm and into her neck overwhelmed her. She fell facefirst into a clump of rainsoaked turf, unable to process any thoughts more coherent than "Make the pain stop."

Out of the corner of her eye, she saw a juggernaut advance on the Warthog, hunched over, arms curled in front of it like a boxer. Behind it, walking corpses started shuffling into view, a motley mix of once-Humans and former-Elites, all of which were armed.

If they wanted to destroy the Warthog, they'd have done it already. Liz felt a little ridiculous, realizing that the... whatever they were, they had been trying to capture the Warthog. And whatever they wanted it for, they forgot about it the moment a dozen golden lances struck the juggernaut and lopped off one of its knees.

More beams struck it in the back as it stumbled forward. It held itself upright with its tentacles, and then shuddered as the beams struck something vital. Lifelessly, it toppled like a tree, meeting the ground with a wet thud that Liz felt from twenty meters away.

The corpses had dove for cover at the first sign of the drones, and were now firing back. Needles, bullets and plasma bolts flew skyward, eroding the soap-bubble shields of the drones. The drones were outnumbered, but fought smart. They concentrated fire, lopped off limbs and speared the corpses through the chest. The actual killing of the corpses seemed to be an afterthought; they appeared to be defenseless, if not harmless, when their arms were cut off, and the drones spent more effort destroying the dropped weapons.

Liz rolled over and made a second attempt to push herself upright when she saw a corpse charging her. Another lance of pain raced up her arm, and she collapsed. With her good arm, she grappled for the plasma pistol clipped to her belt.

She needn't have bothered. The corpse vaulted over her, leaving behind a smell like something dredged from the bottom of a lake. Without breaking stride, it continued its race to the Warthog, scrambled into the gunner stand and revved up the gatling gun.

Throughout the clearing, the corpses scrambled for cover again as a volley of rockets flew over the treetops and saturated the area with thunderous explosions. Another large drone, its bulk protected behind a shield like that of a Jackal's defense gauntlet, followed the rockets. It ponderously turned to face the Warthog as a stream of .50 caliber bullets tore into the shield. The shield flickered, dimmed, and held strong as the Warthog ran out of ammo.

Liz's heart skipped a beat.

The corpse wasted no time in leaping out of the gunner stand, but its legs were cut out from under it before it could touch ground. For good measure, a trio of yellow beams played along the length of the gatling gun's barrels and bored a hole through the receiver.

With deceptive serenity, the large drone drifted out of the clearing, leaving a handful of drones to clean up the remaining corpses.

"Liz?"

Her sister was already there, shaking her shoulder. "Are you alright?"

"Sis," Liz said, not quite sobbing, not quite sighing with relief. "I broke my arm."

"Which one?" June whispered.

"Landed on my left arm," Liz gurgled as her sister felt up that limb. "'s alright. I wanted to... I thought I'd get one of my arms replaced with a prosthetic so we could still be twins. Not sure if I'd get the left one replaced, same as you, or if it'd be the right one so we'd be mirr'r images of each other..."

June slapped her shoulder, hard. "You're fine, it's not even fractured. Don't talk like that," she snarled. "Now get on your feet, soldier."

She took Liz by the collar and hauled upward. "On. Your. Feet!"

Liz almost stumbled as June shoved an assault rifle into her arms. The injured arm still hurt, but the pain wasn't as acute.

The Warthog was parked not fifteen meters away. She could get there. It was as easy as following her sister's lead.

The injured Marine fired a few half-hearted warning shots at a pack of parasites. Her shots went wild, but a radiant focus beam swept through them, surgically popping each one. She craned her neck upwards to stare at the drone. Sierra Squad hadn't seen the drones before, didn't know where they had come from, what controlled them, or even how to communicate with them. Yet the drones were fighting alongside the humans, or at least driving the monsters off. Perhaps "The enemy of my enemy is my friend" transcended species boundaries.

On the other hand, that phrase assumed an equal partnership. If the drones had destroyed the monsters that had pursued Sierra Squad, that indicated that the humans were bait. And judging from now the drones were slicing up bodies, they were in the business of denying everything to the parasites. Scorched earth tactics.

As a direct consequence of watching the sky and not her step, Liz stumbled over a dismembered limb. She righted herself in time, but when she looked up, she saw that she'd fallen behind June. Her sister was a few paces ahead, waiting for her to catch up.

And behind her, the drone had turned to face them.

Scorched earth tactics.

Liz shouted something, she wasn't sure what. Everything was too slow, her body was too heavy, the long grass tangled and caught her every step as she rushed her sister.

Right up to that last moment, June had that look of dawning comprehension, knowing that she was in danger but not knowing what quarter it came from. Right before they met, June dropped her shotgun and spread her arms as if to hug her sister.

Liz tackled her sister hard enough to knock the wind out of her. The ground was just as harsh, probably moreso for June. If she were to be optimistic, it was probably better than getting thrown off the back of the Warthog, and definitely more wholesome than getting cut apart with a laser.

Lightning flashed overhead, with a crackling hiss rather than a booming thunder. Liz took a breath, enough to say she was sorry, enough for a goodbye. But lightning flashed again, and a white-hot knife buried itself into her back. It burned through armor, through skin, through muscle and bone, criss-crossing her spine and pulling out at the small of her back.

She lay there, grateful that it was over. Too grateful to wonder how bad it was, or see what parts of her body she could still feel. It was easier to lay there, close to her sister, and watch the black mist coloring the edges of her vision.

0201 Hours, 983 meters from Shadow crash-site

June ran her fingers down her sister's back, along the jagged cut in the armor from which steam wafted. A dozen synonyms for 'fatal' ran through her mind, words with no place to connect.

"I thought I'd found you... I thought I'd saved you."

She turned her head, looking for the drone that had, if not killed her sister outright, had certainly doomed her to die. It was fending off the corpses, its shields faltering under a hail of bullets, but still fighting back with that hateful focus beam.

An eye for an eye, a life for a life, even if it had no life for her to take. Even if the drone's only fault was a line of code that determined that she and her sister were to be denied to the parasites.

She reached for Liz's belt and unhooked a plasma pistol from its carabiner clip.

"One one-thousand, two one-thousand, three," she whispered in a singsong voice before releasing the trigger. The overcharged bolt flew true, and the drone fell from the sky the moment its shields collapsed, breaking into pieces before it even hit the ground.

The depleted pistol was dropped and forgotten as June slid out from under her sister, rolled her over, cradled her head. Words of apology and gratitude came to mind, but nothing that would sum up the emotional hurricane inside her. She was about to lose the one constant in her life, the person closer to her than anybody else had a chance to be. June was terrified, and she knew her sister was too, because Liz would be forced to abandon her twin and face death alone. Given what was out there, closing in on them, it was hard to say which fate was worse.

"I'm here for you," June whispered, hoping that Liz had enough life left in her to hear those words. "I've always been here for you."

She gently removed Liz's helmet, brushed her hair back and pulled the family photo from the brim of the helmet, held it up for Liz to see, and then pressed it into her hand. Her sister's fingers curled around her own, and the corner of her mouth twitched.

A walking corpse that thought it was sneaking up upon easy prey was caught flat-footed when June picked up the MA5C her sister dropped and opened fire. The rifle was too front-heavy to shoot one-handed, as the magazine as mostly empty. The muzzle dipped, and the bullets punched a staggered line of holes down its abdomen and across one knee, tripping it up.

The rest of the mag, when emptied into the corpse's torso, proved sufficient to turn it into a real cadaver.

June hit the release stud and glanced at her sister, hoping to see a spare magazine on her belt. To her surprise, Liz already had one out, and was struggling to line it up with the assault rifle's magazine well. She lowered the rifle onto the magazine until it clicked, after which Liz reached out, hooked a finger onto the charging handle, and managed to pull it back far enough to chamber a round before her hand slid off.

Twenty rounds left in the magazine, and Liz had struggled to even lift that.

The hissing of near misses cut that train of thought short. Another corpse had come up behind her with a shotgun. It missed the first time, but the second shot got closer. A handful of pellets flattened against her armor, and one creased the skin on her neck.

June turned, rested the assault rifle on the stub of her injured arm, and peppered the corpse with four and five-round bursts. The corpse held its ground, largely because most all of her shots weren't even coming close. The tentacle that was wrapped around the shotgun contracted, pumping another shell into the chamber.

She twisted and threw herself prone. With the assault rifle held by her outstretched arm, she aimed down the electronic sight and buried the last three rounds in the corpse's chest.

"I'm not leaving you," the Marine whispered to her sisteras she got up out of the mud. The corpse lay still as she walked over, shoved the MA5 into its chest wound, and twisted until it was buried past the flashlight. When she saw no response, June pulled the shotgun out of its hand, and checked the magazine.

In the distance, the last drone was destroyed, and all across the clearing, corpses rose to their feet and hunted for new prey. Weapons were few and far between, but it hardly mattered when she was hopelessly outnumbered.

"'s alright," June whispered to herself. "Just got to get Liz to the 'Hog and..."

As she backpedalled to her sister, she glanced toward the Warthog and suppressed a scream of frustration as she saw a trio of boomers waddling into the space between her and the vehicle. Instead, she raised the shotgun and fired at the leading boomer. True to its name, it flopped onto its vestigial face, swelled, and exploded. Its brethren were torn off their feet and sent flying.

"Going to get you back..." June trailed off as she did the math. Instead of three slow and explosive proto-zombies between her and escape, there were now any number of agile parasites waiting for her. She couldn't get past them without a gun, and couldn't carry her sister and a gun at the same time.

June flipped the shotgun, caught it by the pump, and shook it down and up hard enough to rack a shell into the chamber. She loosened her hold on the pump and caught the gun by the pistol grip. She swung the gun in an arc, so that at its apex, it lined up with the fleshsacks crawling out of the boomer's remains. When she fired, the recoil rattled flesh all the way up her arm, and her cry of pain was drowned out in a hail of plasma bolts.

She flipped the shotgun as she fell to her knees and barely felt the pump hit the palm of her hand over the pins and needles tingling. Wearily, she braced the stock against her hip and pumped the shotgun.

Dozens of fleshsacks streamed out of the darkness, skittering out of the path of the shotgun's flashlight. Beyond them, beyond the shotgun's effective range, a corpse was covering her with a plasma rifle, waiting for her to succumb to her injuries, waiting to see if it should help her along even further.

The end of the shotgun dipped down as gravity and leverage pulled the gun from her hand. June surprised herself by relaxing her arm and firing the last shell into the ground. The fleshsacks surged forth.

That was it. She was out of ammo, out of strength, and outnumbered. As her drill instructor had taught her and her sister, there was a world of difference between fighting and struggling. It didn't matter how many of the things she killed if they got to her sister anyway

Liz was lying right next to her, as peaceful as if she were sleeping. She had no breath to breathe, no tears to cry, and June was dead-set on making sure she stayed that way.

The first fleshsack that leaped onto her skittered across her chestplate and tore into her side. Another one landed on her shoulder and darted down her arm. It sunk a tentacle into her wrist and cut off all sensation June had in her hand, but it was too late. She'd already pulled a frag grenade from her belt, primed it, and released.

0159 Hours, Shadow crash-site

Kanoff eased himself into the Shadow's cockpit, dragging the T-42 behind him. If he watched one side, and Montag watched the other, they could protect Rose. Probably. Kanoff knew better than to crunch the numbers on that idea.

He reached out for her wrist, felt for a pulse. It was weak and infrequent, a sharp contrast to the rain hammering down on the husk they had sought refuge in. He lowered his hand and laced his fingers with hers, tried not to look at the mangled remains of her legs.

"You know, it just occurred to me that we could cut you out with Gui's sword..." he said. He glanced at the blood-soaked seat and shook his head. "Fat lot of good it'd do though."

With his free hand, he released the monopod on the plasma canon and tried to wrestle it into firing position.

"Remember trading stories of why we signed up? I joined because I didn't care. Following orders and letting others do the thinking for me sounded like a good plan. Just until I found something that I could be ambitious about."

The plasma cannon hummed to life, and the hail of plasma bolts it fired went nowhere near the intended target. The zombie had ducked and rolled out of sight before he could correct.

"Turns out, that something was you, Rose. Maybe it was only ever just mutual infatuation, but I wish we could've had more time. I think we could have made it work."

Another zombie came at the Shadow, ducking under the plasma cannon's line of fire and running on all fours. Kanoff let go of Da Vega's hand and hefted the plasma cannon, ignoring the needle of pain in his chest.

"Not doing that again," he whispered as he primed a grenade and threw it at the newly made corpse. The flash of blue energy left him seeing stars and little else.

"Crap," he muttered as he squeezed the trigger again. A stream of blue bolts lit up the night. It was some small relief to know that he wasn't blinded, he'd just ruined his nightvision.

"I'm babbling, I'm sorry, I just don't know," he continued. "I'm supposed to be saying how much you mean to me, because you're dying and might not even be able to hear me now, but life... life really threw us a curveball. First Halo, then parasite zombies-hold on."

He picked Da Vega's assault rifle out of the rent it had fallen into. Tenderly, he checked the magazine, raised it to his shoulder, and fired at the dark figures waddling in his direction. One of them stumbled, swelled, and burst.

Kanoff swept the rifle from side to side, forsaking accuracy for covering fire. The little sacks of flesh scurried across the mud, ducking behind debris and rocks.

"Can't see," he breathed. The strobing light from the muzzle flash made it hard to see if he was hitting anything. Belatedly, he remembered the flashlight on the underside of the gun and fumbled for it. Instead, he found a deep gash in the plastic casing. Pressing what was left of the button produced a weak light, hardly better than nothing.

The ammunition counter finally finished its countdown from sixty. He blinked away the blotches and peered into the rain. The fleshsacks broke cover, streamed across the ground, their bodies faintly pulsing with bioluminescence in time to the shivers running down his spine. He could hear, over the dull ringing in his ears and the sound of Montag firing his sniper rifle, the cries of the fleshsacks, like hinges that had gone too long without oil.

Kanoff coughed, fought a combination of nausea and panic. The smell of spoiled meat and propellant mixed together, made his stomach turn over. He felt along Da Vega's belt, looking for extra ammunition or a plasma sidearm, something. The last thing he expected to feel was Da Vega's hands closing around his own, or for something round and heavy to fall into his lap.

He dropped the MA5C and picked the object up. It was a glassy smooth sphere, with a single indent. Da Vega whispered something, but it was lost in the rain and the tapping of tentacles on the Shadow's hull.

"Right," he said as he primed the grenade. "I'll see you on the other side."

0204 Hours, Shadow crash-site

Montag glanced at the small pile of ammunition he'd gathered, barely a scratch of what Sierra Squad had taken from the Pelican. The rest had been lost or spent at a rate that made the successful completion of the journey doubtful, at best. After weighing concealment against protection, he pulled the base of a plasma barricade out of the pile, set it into the ground, and activated it.

The sniper's eyes drifted toward the horizon, toward the misshapen form of the Pillar of Autumn. It couldn't be more than five kilometers away, a distance that could be walked if it weren't for the battle raging throughout the crater. A battle that had settled down some since Sierra Squad had arrived.

Montag sighted through the Rifle's scope and activated the nightvision filter. There were distinctly fewer drones to bee seen as he panned across the crater, and where the remaining drones had clustered together, the abominations had converged.

One of the large ones, one with a shield like a full moon, fell from the sky as two rockets struck it in rapid succession.

"Still alive, I see," the Shadow said, looking over Montag's shoulder. I guess we really are hard to kill."

Montag turned around to look the Shadow in the eyes, or rather, in the eyepieces. Two hooded lenses glinted wickedly in the firelight, set deep inside a plastic gas mask. A threadbare greatcoat completed the Shadow's outfit, out of place anywhere but a certain planet hundreds of lightyears away, four years ago.

"Petrol? Is that you?"

Peter?" the Shadow replied. "Your conscience? No, you want a devil on your shoulder, so that's what I am."

Without elaboration, the Shadow strode past Montag and gave the T-48 a mocking kick. "So, do you really think that the twins are coming back for us?"

"If they're still alive, they will," Montag retorted. He sighted on an abomination and squeezed off three rounds. At least one of the bullets passed through the fleshsack, stopping corpse in its tracks.

The Shadow was there when Montag ducked behind the plasma barricade, calmly loading bullets into a BR-55 magazine. "You wouldn't. You'd find some excuse to hide away, leave them behind. Not out of cowardice, naturally, but pragmatism. Maybe you'd know, with all of your combat experience, that coming back would be a suicide mission."

"They aren't like that!"

"No? You were the one who was so proud when Da Vega held you at gunpoint. Deep down, you want to have been right. You're happy to have this little night prove that, if your way isn't the right way to approach warfare, it's at least what everyone defaults to when Hammond's exports hit the fan."

The rythmic burst-fire of Kanoff's assault rifle merged into fully automatic fire, the percussions echoing hollowly off the crater walls.

"What if I ordered you to run for it?" the Shadow asked. "That would be alright, wouldn't it? You could always tell yourself that you were just following orders.

Shivers ran down Montag's spine as he activated his radio and hailed June. He needed somebody to talk to, somebody that didn't know him as well as the Shadow did. "Montag to Warthog. Advise on situation."

Silence settled over the crater as he checked his ammunition, listening in vain for a response. Anything other than the tapping rain and the moans drifting through the stagnant air.

"June, Liz, respond."

The sniper rolled to his feet and pulled the Handgun out of its holster. The safety was flicked off, the targetting laser was turned on, and a ghost of the beam could be seen reflecting off raindrops as he scanned for hostiles.

"Please. If you're still out there... If anybody's out there..." he whispered. In the corner of his HMD was a wireless icon. When selected, it expanded into a list of all the transponders his radio could pick up. The Warthog was at the top of the list, the associated stats under its serial number indicating that it was still in running condition.

Da Vega was the first below the materiel list. Her standard-issue neural interface was just barely registering a heartbeat. She was listed as incapacitated, priority for medical attention if only Sierra Squad still had a corpsman.

Under her, Kanoff registered second, with elevated vitals and a lowered blood pressure.

Montag's heart skipped a beat as he caught sight of Liz and June. June's stats were blank, not even a signal, while her sister...

Liz's vitals were flat. She was dead.

"Kanoff," Montag muttered. His mouth was dry, his lips sealed together. It took a herculean effort just to separate them and force that little bit of breath into coherent words. "Kanoff, I-"

Behind him, a bright blue explosion ripped apart the Shadow's cabin.

The echoes had long died down when Montag spoke again.

"Is there anybody out there?"

It wasn't alone.

It shared thousands of minds. The collective thoughts and experiences of parasite, host, and construct were its own, and its will was theirs. But some infection forms and some hosts were in the thrall of other Compound Minds, intelligences which had not reached enlightenment. Lost in the darkness, driven by instinct, they were not ready to merge.

No matter. They could still coordinate, still make preparations to escape their prison. And the Intelligence could still feed them information, push them nearer to true sapience.

The nearest one was separated by a large fraction of Halo, embedded in the deepest part of a crippled Covenant ship. The Covenant who had arrived to recapture the cruiser and rescue their leader were failing to hold their ground. They could not take the bridge, nor halt the repairs being made to the engines. And they did not know of the astrogation data being harvested from the ship's computer and the mind of a captured Human.

The harvesting was interrupted as a blow was struck to the Central Mind itself. The hosts in its thrall were thrown into disarray as it tried to recombine and recover from the wound it had been dealt. Like a candle flame as the wind rolled through, it flickered uncertainly before being blown out.

The Intelligence extended its influence and captured the thralls. Barricades were hastily erected, hosts were called back to their tasks, but the Truth and Reconciliation was lost. The new Covenant reinforcements fought through the ship, crushing defenses and eradicating all trace of host and parasite.

There was another Compound Mind, further away. The Covenant Armada had included a ship dedicated to carrying food for the rest of the fleet. A relative handful of hosts and infection forms had infiltrated the ship and spread, converting the food-animals, the crew, and the security detail. The resulting Compound Mind was anemic, rich in biomass but deprived of truly sentient life. But it relentlessly devoured the knowledge that the Intelligence fed it, a flame that was shining brighter, burning hotter. And as soon as the command codes could be deciphered, the Infinite Succor would be bound to the backwater worlds of the Covenant Empire.

And it too was blown out.

For the first time since its release, the Flood was a single unified whole. Every parasite, every host, every construct and amalgamation was an extension of a single Intelligence.

Forerunner, Covenant and Human. By itself, neither faction could have stemmed the Flood. But even struggling together, they were a considerable obstacle.

Work on the warship was redoubled. Hosts and constructs were recalled and set to guard the Central Intelligence. The ones who would not make it in time were organized into lances, set to strike deep into the foundations of Halo and disrupt the transportation network.

Victory would not be assured, not until this warship, this Pillar of Autumn, ventured out into the stars.

A/N: Five years ago, if you had told my younger self that I wouldn't finish Isolation that summer, I wouldn't have believed you. If you had told me that Isolation would span thirty chapters, I would have called you a liar. If you had told me that I wouldn't finish for more than five years, I would have had some probing questions about winning lottery numbers and the like.

The closer I get to the end, the harder it is to write. I don't think that I'm getting bored with writing, it's just that... well, it's easier to build a story up than it is to bring it to a close. It's always been like that for me; got a dozen outlines for stories set in various fictional universes, but few with any real endings to them.

As for other going-ons, readers with sharp memories might have recognized the Juggernaut, a Flood unit cut from Halo 2. As for some other, stranger forms mentioned, I follow a theory that there is a stage of development for the Flood, where they have progressed beyond merely infecting hosts, but are not able to produce Pure forms yet, and would instead fuse bodies together.

The whole concept dates back to a several-dozen page long thread on the HWF where we theorycrafted a Flood faction that could appear in multiplayer, but not singleplayer. I mean, ES wouldn't stoop to breaking canon and shoehorning in the Flood just for the sake of a third faction. Not only would that necessitate shoving the Spirit of Fire and everyone on it into a dark corner for the rest of the war, but it would be the same lame plot twist we'd seen throughout the original trilogy.

And yes, I'm still bitter about the whole thing. ; )

Also, Mass Effect reference up there. Apologize. Couldn't resist.
And Left For Dead. And The Walking Dead. And Dead Winter. Hell, probably anything with "Dead" in the title, short of Dead or Alive.

And on a final note, if you had told my past self that Bradbury would still be alive five years after I started writing this, I wouldn't have believed that either. Obviously, the inspiration I took from Fahrenheit 451 and his other works have faded with time, but... well...

Rest in peace, sir.

As for the rest... aw Hell, I'll save it for the last chapter.