One-Way Trip, Chapter Two

Chapter Two.

A demon stalked through the corridors of the Ardent Prayer, and his rage knew no bounds.

According to a few Spartans, including one Emile-A239, Jorge wasn't quite the professional killing machine. Perhaps that was so; he liked to think of himself as a human being despite his role in life, and even though it annoyed some of his superiors, Doctor Halsey included, he tried his best to be more like a man than a living weapon. But there came times when humanity didn't even figure into the equation, and this was one of those times.

He decided to stop shooting when he figured out the persistent little pricks were much easier to just pummel to death. A left hook here, a sharp jab there, and Grunts were sent bawling to the floor, where they quickly expired. He rapidly overtook one that was running away and reached his arm around, caught it by its breathmask, and in one easy twist snapped its neck. It was dead before it hit the floor.

Jorge continued forward, keeping in mind which way led back to the bridge, and stopped short when he reached a series of openings. He wasn't quite sure what they were for, or what they contained, so he reached for his sidearm and made sure it was fully loaded before proceeding. The first four were empty, and they looked a little bit like doorless water closets, outfitted with strange basins that had a sort of control panel around them. The fifth, however, was occupied by a single red dot that remained still on his motion tracker. Jorge moved slowly, sidearm raised, idly wondering if he was about to stumble across a Grunt taking a piss.

It was no Grunt, nor was it pissing, and it let out an enraged roar before hurling all six hundred pounds of itself at the Spartan, a flash of blue-silver armor and leathery saurian hide.

Jorge fired off three shots before the Elite slammed into him. Two of the shots grazed shields, while the third went wide; the force of the impact caused the pistol to fly out of Jorge's grip. The alien bellowed and began to pound at the Spartan with its bare hands, massive fists slamming one after the other and draining Jorge's shield strength. Jorge braced against the Elite with his right arm and strained to reach the pistol with his left. The alien took the opportunity to rear back, delivering a swift kick to the Spartan's helmet and then stepping down hard on his outstretched arm.

Jorge held back any noise and instead decided to exploit the cocky Elite's bravado, using MJOLNIR's force-multiplying circuits to suddenly leap up and attack, reversing their positions. Because his right arm was still bent, he landed hard, a thousand pounds of man and armor, on the Elite's midsection. There was a distinct soft, almost squishy cracking sound, and the Elite loosed a roar of pain. Its clawed hands scrabbled at the Spartan's chest armor and helmet as it coughed up indigo blood, its slitted pupils dilating. Jorge held it down, biting back his own utterance of pain, until it ceased thrashing and started to twitch, eyes rolling back into its head. He then picked up the pistol with his good hand and shot the Elite through head, right between the eyes. The corridor was silent again, aside from the Spartan's panting.

Jorge stood and tried to move his left arm. It wasn't a bad injury, as Spartan injuries went, but the MJOLNIR hadn't reacted well to the stomping in its unshielded state. If he hadn't been wearing the armor, his ceramic-plated bones might have escaped unbroken, but there would've been a hell of a bruise. A normal human would have had their radius and ulna shattered beyond repair, practically pancaked. The Spartan merely grunted and continued on his way, mindful to keep the MA37 handy instead of the Magnum.

Step one, clean house. Step two, get house out of the Great Life-Sucking Abyss. Step three, get a new house, preferably one belonging to the UNSC. It sounded simple when he said it in his head, but in reality, it was well-nigh impossible. But killing all the remaining hostiles in the corvette would greatly improve his chances of survival, so he was going to do it. Step Two could wait until Step One was finished.

He went down to one of the lower decks, down a spiral staircase that had rounded lavender bumps instead of stairs, and found a few Jackals trying to squirrel away what looked like melons, dried fruit and miscellaneous foodstuffs. Since he couldn't really ask them what it was, he just killed them and made a mental note of where the stash was located. He came across what might have been the Covie equivalent of a mess hall, though it was empty and lifeless.

There was a conspicuous amount of dead Grunts that he had not killed, and judging from the behavior of the Jackals, he guessed the birdlike aliens were intending to jump ship with whatever valuable goods they could get their claws on. He wondered whether they were aware that they were in Slipspace, and what sort of craft might be hidden somewhere on board capable of leaving the Corvette.

His suspicions about the Jackals were confirmed when he reached what must have been the infirmary. There were a few Grunts squealing and growling, trying to take large canisters away from the Jackals, and the Jackals were having none of it. One of them snarled in its guttural language and fired off a shot at the nearest Grunt, damaging its methane tank so that it fell onto its side and spun pathetically from the force of the escaping gas, then asphyxiated. The remaining four Grunts howled in rage and tried to attack the Jackals with what appeared to be medical tools, but were gunned down.

Jorge remained silent and hidden as he watched the Jackals haul off their booty through the nearest doorway. Wherever they were going, there had to be a ship, maybe a lifeboat of some kind. He followed them at a distance, moving with more stealth than his size gave him credit for.

They continued down into the bowels of the ship, slow going given the size and walking speed of Jackals. When they reached what looked like a row of vats, Jorge was a bit confused. But then one of the Jackals tapped the holographic keypad to the right of the "vat" and it cycled open, and it dawned on Jorge that these were the escape pods. Instead of being on the sides of the ship, as UNSC lifepods were, these were located along the bottom, in the same general area that Banshee and Seraph fighters launched from.

Fascinating, Jorge thought, and he wondered if he was the first human to learn this interesting tidbit. He watched as the Jackals started loading their loot into the pod and decided they didn't deserve to take it.

Four well-placed shots and two snapped necks later, Jorge began making his way back to the upper levels of the corvette, up the same winding staircases he had come down. He was loathe to use the gravity lifts until he knew exactly where he'd end up once he went flying into the air. According to the time displayed in his helmet, over six hours had passed since he set off the Slipspace bomb. Knowing that gave him a strange sense of urgency, and he quickened his pace as he sought to get back to the bridge. The closer he got to that hangar, the higher his radiation counter got, and he wasn't willing to be exposed to the stuff for longer than was absolutely necessary.

He kept looking over his shoulder, expecting Six to be right behind him as she always was lately, and then had to remind himself that he was, in every sense of the word, alone on this ship.


The bridge was as lifeless as it had been when he first discovered it. Jorge knew that the Engineer couldn't have gotten far, and he most certainly did not want it fooling with the fried Slipspace drive in the hangar. So he searched for it, cautiously moving up and down the many corridors that linked to the bridge. The last thing he wanted to do was scare the poor thing away, especially now that he had a vague idea of what to use the savant-like creature for.

He was about to turn around and double back to the bridge when a distinct musical moaning reached his audios. He frowned, turning and realizing that the thing must have gone to the hangar.

The sight that met him when he entered the corpse-littered span of room was pitiful. The Engineer had found its dead buddy and was hovering over the lifeless form, its whines having taken on a sorrowful tone. Jorge had never seen a Covie cry over the dead, and he watched silently as the Engineer's tentacles split into fine finger-like cilia, touching the fallen one. He wondered if the Engineer thought it could somehow bring its partner back to life. It was certainly more emotion than the Sorvad girl had shown when her father died in the Visegrad Relay, back when the invasion of Reach began; suddenly he couldn't help thinking of the Engineer as a poor abandoned survivor, and that brought with it an almost irritating pulse of empathy. It's an alien, no point in tacking human feelings on it, logic told him, but still he stepped toward the Engineer with his weapon pointed down at the floor.

"Hey," he said, because really he couldn't think of anything else to say. He didn't know if the thing even understood a word of English. But he knew he had to at least try to communicate with it if he was going to enact the sketchy plan that had formed in his mind.

At the sound of his baritone voice, the Engineer gave a lurch, air bladders squelching as it wove in the air and turned to look at him with its narrow head. It had six round black-button eyes, three on each side of the head, and a multitude of tentacles that shrank up toward its large, airborne body as if it was afraid Jorge would try to grab them. Jorge could almost guess its thoughts, here among all the Covenant dead: You shot them, your friend killed my friend, why should I trust you? And you have a gun.

"It's alright," he said. "I'm not gonna hurt you." It was exactly what he'd said to Sara, and he hoped it sounded sincere enough for a terrified alien to understand his meaning. He let his right arm fall to his side, rifle hanging from it, and lifted his left up toward the Engineer, to show there wasn't any weapon in that hand.

The Engineer made an odd whistling noise and started forward, extending a pair of tentacles like arms. It tried to grab Jorge's hand but his shields repelled it, flaring gold where the creature attempted to touch his armor. The Spartan decided to take the risk and took off his helmet, cutting off the shields, then tucked the helmet under his right arm. The Engineer practically yanked his left hand forward, tentacles splitting into fine cilia that ran along the dented surface of his damaged armor. In a matter of seconds, the drab olive plating came off in sections and was then put back on, not quite undamaged but certainly more functional than before. Jorge flexed his hand, forming a fist, and there was no longer pressure on his wrist. "Thanks," he told the alien, nearly amused by the experience.

The Engineer made a faint moaning sound, but it wasn't a sad sort of moan. Jorge turned his head and then his body with it, watching as the creature floated around him as if it was looking at a fascinating new toy. He wasn't about to let the thing start fooling with random sections of his armor, but he could tell it was now completely interested in the MJOLNIR.

"Yeah, you like that, don't you?" As if in cheerful response, the Engineer emitted another whine. "Well I'm not gonna let you mess with it, but I know something you can mess with. I know this Corvette's got a Slipspace drive, and you probably know how it works."

It was probably useless, talking to the alien as one would a fellow English-speaking human, but Jorge thought he saw something like understanding in the Engineer's dark eyes.

He realized too late that he mistook excitement for understanding. One delicate tentacle reached up and split into many tiny sections, playing over the pitted surface of his chestplate, while another snaked around to the back of his neck. Jorge started to move, hair-trigger reflexes reacting to the unwanted closeness, and then suddenly he froze stiff. The Engineer had found his neural interface.

Damnit, should have expected this, he thought sourly, wondering if turning abruptly and punching the thing would in any way endanger his own mind. He knew that inserting an AI chip into the port on the back of his helmet would grant an AI a connection to his mind, but had never heard of any artificial intelligence getting direct access to a human brain before. And the fact that this particular artificial intelligence was a Covie, however harmless, didn't sit well with him at all.

"You get out of there," he growled, hoping the Engineer was attentive enough to get the message: or I'll make you.

For a moment he thought the creature would do something harmful, like remove the interface, but instead it withdrew its probing tentacles and floated around to look at him directly. It had such a passive, inquisitive face that Jorge couldn't imagine it bringing harm to anything. "Yeah, that's part and parcel of my head. Don't touch it," the Spartan grunted, as if he were admonishing a wayward child. To punctuate the statement, he shoved his helmet down onto his head.

The helmet only delighted the Engineer even more. Jorge recoiled as tentacles came up to touch his visor. "Hey, now, this isn't for you," he said, stepping back. He gently waved away the blue and purple appendages. "I bet getting this derelict hulk out of Slipspace would be much more fun than a boring old helmet, anyway."

I'm trying to entreat an alien that probably can't understand why I keep making noise at it. Heh, I bet Kat would know what to do. Rig up some sort of device to translate, perhaps. These sorts of things are more her specialty. He watched as the Engineer floated a little to the left, then to the right, like an enraptured child fidgeting. "I'm not exactly keen on forcing you at gunpoint," Jorge said aloud, depolarizing his visor so the Engineer could see his face. "But I need your help if I'm going to get out of this place."

As if pulled by an invisible string, the Engineer suddenly floated past him and made a beeline for the corridor that led to the bridge, moving far more quickly than the Spartan expected.

"That works," Jorge mused, jogging after the Engineer and taking care not to soil his boots on the corpses.