Coming up: It's less of a guideline and more an absolute, really...
Chapter 7:
The screaming from within Primal was getting louder.
They hate you.
“Keep them away from the civilians!”
“Form a firing line – now, gods damn you!”
They betrayed you.
“Those are our own people!”
“Not anymore they aren’t. Not after what they did to Delta and Epsilon.”
They left you here to die.
Zeta was trying to rush the scientists back onto the frigate as Beta and Gamma pounded back towards the docking spar in an attempt to beat Primal’s crew there. If they opened fire now, they’d only end up slaughtering their own comrades and the people they were supposed to protect. The closest soldiers were less than a hundred meters away, not quite at the tip of the docking spar that Kerrigan and Primal were both anchored to.
Almost there.
They didn’t quite make it.
Now they want to take what is yours. Take you.
The first indication of attack was not the howling, screaming mob clutching impromptu weapons that Zeta had expected, but the metal-on-metal skittering of flash-bang grenades bouncing and rolling out of Primal’s airlock. These were not the garden-variety form of the weapon, but ones intended to overcome the low-grade dampening systems built into light armour. Light armour that, for example, Zeta squad was equipped with.
They’ll drag you away, into the dark.
Senses magnified by their helmets’ sensors, the mercenaries staggered, temporarily blinded and deafened as the grenades exploded with thunderclaps and brief but nonetheless painful, searing brilliance. Zeta’s recovery was fast, far faster than any unarmoured troops exposed to flashbangs could have managed, but it wasn’t quite fast enough.
Strap you down to the biobed, stick needles in your eyes just to see what they can see.
The civilians that Zeta had been trying to rush back into the safety of Kerrigan did not have the benefit of these modifications and the effect flash-bangs intended to incapacitate foes with auto-dampeners had on unprotected and unshielded ears and eyes were catastrophic. The bang of their detonations ruptured eardrums, the pulse of light from them so intense as to burn out retinas. Men and women howled in pain, staggering blindly about in panic, knocking each other down as they clutched at their tearing, flash-burned flashes and bleeding, ringing ears.
Cut you open and put you back together all wrong and laugh at the results.
Less of a coordinated assault than dozens of individuals acting in accidental concert, the blood-maddened crew and passengers of APSS Primal swarmed out of the airlock, screeching like animals. The docking spar was not wide – only enough for the on-and-offloading of large cargo pallets and small vehicles – which wasn’t nearly enough to allow the mercenaries to create the kind of open killing field that would allow them the best use of their firepower. The idea of a pitched infantry battle being waged across the hangar was not a concept that had ever occurred to DROP 47’s designers, nor had such an event figured into the deployment plans of Colonel Shaw.
They’re going to take you apart.
One member of B Company’s A Squad leapt from Primal ramp landing amidst Zeta. A flash of movement and Sergeant Morishim was down, her throat opened to the bone by a sweep of the jagged bayonet on the end of the man’s gun. Even before she hit the deck, her killer was moving, shooting and slashing his way through the panicked, screaming scientists.
It’s what you’ve always known, isn’t it? The Old Man had a Plan. You’re the guinea pigs.
Still half-blind from the flash-bangs, Lance Corporal Jezebel Fabre nevertheless managed to draw a bead on her erstwhile companion. The staccato burst from her carbine threw his shredded corpse to one side, but her fire also wounded or killed an additional three civilians. This did not have a particularly calming effect on the scientists and they stampeded, shoving each other out of the way in a desperate charge to get aboard Kerrigan and the safety it promised.
Show them what you’ve learned. What the whispers in the dark told you, the only friends you have. The only friends you can trust.
A scream faded into the distance as one of the unlucky scientists was tipped over the edge of the railing, plummeting towards the lower levels of North-4 Bay. A woman cried out as she was trampled beneath her co-workers’ feet. Over the comm-links, Shaw and Kuhn were both shouting at their people, trying to restore some type of order, but it was like trying to break a tsunami with a teacup.
Don’t let them take you.
“Back, get back!” Zeta frantically tried to push the men and women of Hadley-Wright out of their firing lines, but the mercenaries weren’t trained for crowd control and in their own fear and panic, most ended up simply clubbing the scientists out of their way, stepping over the bleeding, crying bodies of the people they’d been paid to protect.
You can’t trust them.
Gunfire ripped back and forth between the marines guarding Kerrigan and the tainted soldiers of Primal, the former constrained by the terrified expedition members swarming over them. The men and women of B Company didn’t share the same restraint and fired back with abandon, not even caring if their comrades happened to wander into their lines of fire, their cries of bloodlust simply growing louder and more ferocious, incomprehensible invectives and pleas distorting their already-macabre features.
Kill. Kill and eat. Protect yourself.
Their eyes were wild, their armour pitted, scored and dented. Some didn’t even wear helmets, their faces scarred with cuts and scratches. Some had been obviously self-inflicted, their wounds cut into shapes and patterns that only made sense to them. Others had decorated themselves with what appeared to be kill markers, or macabre jewelry made from bullets, shell casings, shrapnel and parts of their victims.
You have to kill them. It’s the only way you can be safe. They’re going to kill you.
Given a target for their rage, a place to focus the madness that had had no place else to go but upon each other, the passengers and crew of Primal flooded onto the docking spar, ripping and tearing at everyone and everything in their path, even one another.
Protect yourself.
And the killing began in earnest.
Hurt them. Before they do it to you.
~
Shannon watched in horror as signal after signal went dead, the harsh squeals of Zeta’s flatlines ringing in her ears, an inescapable punctuation to the carnage she’d just witnessed. Desperate scientists were scrambling up into Kerrigan airlock, leaving their slower and wounded companions behind to die, as Primal’s forces butchered them, shrieking and hissing at one another as they fought over the dead and the still-living, mouths smeared red, weapons spattered and streaked with gore.
When Captain Shelby had sealed Primal, almost two-thirds of its complement had been trapped inside, the innocent and afflicted alike. Within the frigate, there had been nowhere to go, few places to hide and no one to trust. Degeneration had occurred rapidly. Paranoia. Hunger. Fear. Anger. Hatred. Constantly hunted. Unable to sleep, listening to the voices and seeing things, real and imagined, that no one should have ever seen. No allies, only enemies. Any attempt at escape brutally punished by the troopers who should have been helping them do so.
Under those conditions, it took very little to turn even the most civilized, intelligent man or woman into a snarling, puling animal. And those that didn’t became prey for the others.
They didn’t even seem to realize that Beta and Gamma were still there, still shepherding the surviving technicians and scientists deeper into the bay, as they closed with their former comrades.
A woman in the uniform of a Hadley-Wright technical surveyor looked up, strings of meat hanging from her mouth. She had once been very beautiful. Her eyes fixed upon Shannon and she raised a bloody hand, clutching a serrated axe in it, pointing towards the corporal. Part of Shannon’s mind was analyzing the weapon; it hadn’t come from the standard equipment found on the frigate or in one of Artemis’s companies, so it was custom-made; either a trophy taken from its original owner or fabricated in one of the frigate’s machine shops.
The ramifications of either possibility were not terrible pleasant to dwell on. Fortunately, Shannon didn’t have long to do so.
The woman screamed, a wordless cry of pain and rage, challenge and madness, sprinting towards the soldiers and the expedition members behind them. One woman with an axe. Not a threat.
But the dozens behind her... those could be. Shannon pulled Emily and the other doctor – Salvador Ramone by his nametag – down behind her. A bullet thudded into her back, flattening against her cuirass and leaving a bruise in the flesh beneath it, but she was otherwise unharmed. Unattended, the stretcher carrying Michelle simply drifted away, but Emily managed to pull Hernandez’s over to Ramone and Emily, lowering her squadmate behind the makeshift cover.
Hayes looked around the heavy crate, eyeballing the distance to the other stretcher, her muscles tensing as she prepared to make a run for it. A hand fell on her shoulder; Abigail.
The other woman shook her head. “Don’t.”
“I can’t just…!”
“You can, sir.” You will was the unsaid addendum.
Screaming in multiple languages, they charged. Gibbering nonsense to the rest of her squadmates, Shannon could nonetheless pick out fragments of each shriek, subconsciously processing the disparate, ranting dialects as she fumbled for her pistol.
“I just want to be alone!”
“Why don’t you love me anymore?”
“Jesus loves you! But I don’t!”
“This is all your fault!”
“Get out! Get out of my garden!”
“This is mine! It’s all mine!”
“Look at what you’re making me do!”
“Why can’t you just be good?!”
The pistol shook in her hand as she brought it up, the targeting reticule drifting over a man in a life sciences uniform. Pull the trigger! her training and her sense of self-preservation ordered her. Pull it! Shoot! They’re the enemy!
You came here to save them! another voice shouted back. You don’t kill. You can’t. It’s not what you are. These aren’t targets on a shooting range. They’re people. Men and women with hopes and dreams. They’re not the enemy. They’re sick. You can’t kill them.
Shoot them! Shoot them now!
This isn’t right! You know it!
“Goddamit, Halo!” Abigail snarled, giving Shannon a shove. “Shoot! Shoot them or we all die!”
Shannon squeezed the trigger. Her personal sidearm was a Merkilov ‘Chaos-bringer’ HCP-177a, a large-caliber pistol intended to fire a wide variety of bullets, including armour penetrating, high explosive, long-distance sabots and many other specialty rounds. Currently loaded with ‘hammerheads’, bullets with relatively little penetration, but intended to hit as hard as possible.
The pistol bucked in her hand, the bullet flying straight and true, smashing into the chest of the man in the life sciences jacket, pulping his ribs and pulverizing his heart and lungs. He was dead even before his body hit the ground.
She’d just killed someone.
The barrel dipped as her mind played the scene of the soldier’s execution over and over. She’d seen people die before. But she’d never been the one to do it. “I…”
“Keep it up!” Donowitz roared at the squad as they opened fire, the sergeant throwing a scientist to the deck, giving them a boot to the rear as encouragement to join the others behind Beta and Gamma. “Controlled bursts, stay off autofire!”
Unfortunately, they weren’t facing a mindless horde of fleshy automatons. B Company’s soldiers dove for cover as Beta and Gamma’s fusillade sliced towards them, sheltering behind abandoned crates or the door frame of Primal as they sniped back at D Company in return. Whether their goal was to intentionally provide suppressive fire for their more bloody-minded comrades, or this was simply a byproduct of their actions didn’t matter. Beta and Gamma had to hastily seek out protection of their own, preventing them from simply mowing down the rest of attacking horde, who redoubled their efforts to close with the mercenaries where their gaffs, bludgeons and blades could be used to better effect. As the dead of Zeta Squad could attest, even a knife could kill if someone got it through the bodyglove into your neck, it was used to saw your arms and legs off or someone bludgeoned you to death inside your armour.
Even consumed with rage, the horde was not completely mindless and they loped forwards, holding themselves low, ducking from cover to cover, using the very equipment Kerrigan had begun offloading to protect themselves. Bullets, Molotov cocktails and even crude, thrown weapons arced towards Beta and Gamma and the mercenaries replied in brutal kind.
Emily was all but screaming in terror, her hands over her ears as the cacophony of gunfire and shrieks filled the bay. Shannon kept the doctor pressed down on the deck as something sharp whirled overhead, jabbing into the front of the crate. Some crude purpose built munition; a ball filled with spikes that ejected as soon as it hit something. A drop of liquid slid lazily from the spines; poisoned.
Hayes gritted her teeth and forced her hand to tighten again, the recoil shuddering up her arm. A woman fell to the deck, her right leg gone at the hip. She didn’t even seem to register the pain, dragging herself onwards with filthy fingernails, a pistol still clutched in one hand. There’s something wrong with her. Adrenalin could only do so much; a wound like that should have bled her out in seconds. Something else is wrong here.
Shannon fired again and again, even as her mind focused on that anomaly. She sheltered behind the crate, slapping a fresh clip into her gun as B Company’s fire whined through the air centimeters above her head, or stitched across the front of the cargo container. It was from Primal, offloaded and abandoned, but filled with heavy industrial goods, an excellent bullet shield.
Not all cover offered equal protection; Gamma Six had misjudged the security offered by her own crate. It was taller than the mercenary and just as wide, but whatever equipment it had held had been emptied, leaving it all but hollow. A burst of fire blew right through the flimsy walls; two of the bullets passed through the crate and punched into Gamma Six’s backplate, one round continuing out the front of her armour, blowing a fist-sized hole in her ribcage. Without even a word, she slumped to one side.
Shannon was closer to the downed soldier than Gamma’s own medic and she hissed an order at Ramone and Delphini to stay down as she scrambled towards the Gamma squad member. Abigail sprung up, scything bursts of fire back and forth, providing her partner with cover fire of her own as she darted across the bay, grabbing Gamma Six and dragging her to safer ground. Two more bullets ripped through the container, one perilously close to Shannon’s head.
“Fire in the hole!” Gamma Four shouted, pulling out a concussion grenade, popping the pin from its tab, finger jabbing onto the safety. His arm cocked back to throw, when a bullet smashed through the front of his helmet, just left of the bridge of his nose. He toppled backwards, already dead. His corpse hit the deck, the grenade sliding out of his nerveless fingers.
“Live grenade! Live grenade!” Shannon heard someone shout a warning in her own voice.
Gamma Three dove for the weapon, tossing it over the embankment, but it didn’t get nearly enough away before it detonated, a wash of heat enveloping from it as a massive ephemeral boot hit Shannon in the back, knocking her to the ground.
~
Abigail Hutchins had been born on Darkknell, a world every bit as pleasant as its name sounded. Her upbringing had not been nearly as enjoyable as that of Shannon’s. Her world was not one of perfect, glistening towers. Of carefully-managed industry and ecosystems. Of a government that cared and supported for all its citizens. She’d never had the education that was freely given to all Halo children. Her genotype was not predisposed towards intelligence and peacefulness. She was what some Halos referred to as a ‘mutt’, a blending of lineages and nationalities, a stray dog that had never known her parents.
“Back! Go back to Hell, you motherfuckers!”
On Darkknell, only the strong survived. One of many wharf rats eking out a living on the docks of the Black Ocean, Abigail had most definitely survived. By being smarter and out-thinking her enemies. By being prettier and bartering with whatever she had. And by being meaner, the very epitome of a vicious mutt that so haunted the dreams of Halos.
“I’m hit, but still in it!”
But none of them had ever had to sneak up behind someone in a dark alley and club them over the head to steal a precious, only-slightly-mouldy block of cheese. None of them had ever had to rent themselves out to a shift of sweaty shipworkers. None of them had ever had ever had to do any of the things that she had had to do to survive. She supposed she should have hated Shannon; many of the company had expected her to.
“My face… my face!”
Upon seeing the Halo for her first time – eyes wide as saucers as she wandered around Artemis One in a uniform that never seemed to sit right no matter how many times it was adjusted, in awe and a little afraid of the men and women around her – Hutchins had remarked that she’d seemed like ‘a retarded puppy’ and she’d taken the FNG under her wing, expecting to have her hands full. But Shannon had been a quick study and if she’d never blooded herself, there were few complaints after her squadmates watched her pull them or their wounded friends to safety and carry out battlefield surgery that would have impressed some hospitals.
“Get off of me! Get off get off get off!”
Abigail had always been a little jealous of Hayes. How quickly she assimilated new information, how much the Old Man and Shaw doted on her. She was an investment. After her field career was over, she’d be able to go back to being a Halo and work in a laboratory. There wasn’t any rosy future like that for Abigail Hutchins. Growing up on Darkknell had hurt her, given her skills and temperament that made her unfit for normal society. There was no future for her but a forgotten death on a battlefield, or having her throat slit in an alley outside the bar where a burned-out husk of a woman told the same stories too many times and drank to forget the rest.
“They’re too fucking fast!”
If Halos had the galaxy waiting for them on a silver platter, Darkknells had nothing but what they could hold onto and for no longer than that. But Abigail would be damned if she let it get taken away from her one second sooner and double damned if her still-a-bit-naïve retarded puppy of an adopted sister was going to share that empty future.
“Keep your heads down!”
Whenever they had an opening, they charged. And they had plenty of openings as Betas and Gammas had to drop behind cover to shelter from the hail of bullets ripping up at them, had to duck away from grenades, thrashed about as Molotovs set them on fire, or flinched back from the impossible carnage. An overweight man lay smoking and twitching from where he’d fallen after grappling with Donowitz. A bloody smear was spread across the deck where a woman had pulled off Hasker’s helmet and jammed a shiv in his eye seconds before his partner cut her down.
“Fuck you! Fuck you, too! Oh, you want some of this? There’s enough for all of you!”
They were breaking through.
“My… my arm! She took my arm! She took my arm!”
Unlike many of her comrades, there was no hesitation in Abigail’s actions as she gunned down the first rank of men and women charging them, seeing not the faces of people she’d known, drank and laughed with, but targets to be destroyed. Only the strongest survive. A man brandishing a wicked, stained hook in each hand leapt at her; she blew his guts across the floor, sidling towards Shannon as the medic pulled herself up groggily.
Abigail thumped Hayes on the shoulder, getting her attention. “You fit?”
“I’m fit,” the corporal responded, fixing her attention on Gamma Six. The woman had bled out, probably even before she’d gotten to her.
“Fit to fight?”
Shannon nodded; Abigail could see her eyes through her visor, wide and just above them, reflected on the polarized faceplate, was the looming silhouette of an attacker. Hayes scrabbled for her pistol, but Abigail simply swung around and sprayed the maddened crewer with fire, his bullet-ridden body crashing messily to the deck.
“Let’s get to it, then.”
“Wait. Wait,” Shannon’s head cocked as she looked over her partner’s shoulder. “They’re changing tactics.”
They were. They’d stopped charging, hunkering behind crates and boxes, heads turned towards the battle for Kerrigan’s debarkation bay, where ship security was fighting their losing battle to both save the remaining scientists and keep the frigate clear from attackers. They only had small – often ‘less-lethal’ – sidearms and padded vests for protection. Primal’s complement were so crazed that they didn’t notice anything less than an outright incapacitating wound and then it still took a while to catch up with them. In the closed confines of the spar and the bay, Kerrigan’s security services didn’t have a chance.
“Grenadiers,” Donowitz’s voice came through the comm, breathy with exertion, but hard and determined. Gamma One had had a gaff jammed up under his cuirass, ripping his insides up. Gamma’s medic had already given him the overdose of painkillers he’d asked for. “Load bangers, incendiaries and frags, alternating pattern. They’re hunkered, so we need to drive them out, or kill them where they stand. How many we counting?”
“Thirty-two casualties, forty-three effective on the spar. At least three dozen more made it into the ship,” Shannon replied without even thinking. “Counting twelve marine combatants, two dead. Lowball of six made it aboard Kerrigan.”
Abigail cocked her head towards Four; there’d been something in Hayes’s voice…
“All right then,” Donowitz said. “Everyone who can run, with me. Grenadiers and injured – you’re our cover. Make sure none of them get by you and attack the civvies. Three – you stay, too. You hold, you hear me? Okay. On the cont of three… one…”
“Wait.” Shannon’s voice broke onto the comm, that single word rushed and urgent. “Wait.”
“Three, what the fuck?”
“They’re moving differently,” Shannon replied. “Something’s coming.”
Hutchins gave her opponents a more critical eye; Hayes was right. B Company’s troops were falling away from the cover of Primal’s hatch, running towards Kerrigan, even as shipboard security pouring fire into them. “They were distracting us with that rush, keeping us pinned. They want to take the ship,” Abigail breathed in horror.
Shannon shook her head. “No.” Abigail didn’t see it. It wasn’t a coordinated assault; the attack on Kerrigan was half of their motivation. They were running from something. “They’re trying to escape.”
“God save us,” someone else whispered over the comm as they clued in. “The Ghosts are coming.”
One of the retreating B Company mercenaries was too slow in falling back and a massive armoured gauntlet snapped out, wrapping around their head and lifting them clear off the deck. The trapped soldier kicked and thrashed uselessly in the grip of the power-armoured trooper that held them, the massive figure slamming their prey down into against the deck, or up against Primal’s hull. Again. Again. Again. Even from this distance, over the screams and gunshots, Shannon thought she could hear the crack of the mercenary’s bones as the trooper pulverized them inside their armour, hurling the bleeding, broken corpse over the rails of the docking spar.
“Down, get down!” Donowitz hissed urgently, knowing what little good that would do if G Squad came after them. Luckily it seemed the Ghosts had other plans – they were after their retreating comrades. Lucky for Beta and Gamma. Not Kerrigan.
They marched implacably after Primal’s retreating crew and company; in her earpieces, Shannon could hear someone on Kerrigan screaming to seal the airlock, but if anyone from the frigate was still alive in the loading bay, it took too long for them to respond. At last, the vast boarding ramp began to grind closed, but too slowly and too late. Instead of keeping the infighting men and women of B Company off their ship, they’d only succeeded in sealing themselves in with them.
“Okay,” Donowitz said. “Okay. We still need to punch through to get back on Kerrigan. Hennigar, Alomar – just like we talked about. Get ready with the bangers. The rest of you, stay tight and don’t give them an opening to-”
Hard, reverberating thunder crashed through the bay as Kerrigan’s thrusters activated, the harsh, squealing cry of tearing metal following soon after as the frigate wrenched itself free from the docking spar, shaking the entire deck. Men and women clutched for handholds as boxes, bodies and the injured were tossed and bounced as the frigate ripped its way free, clawing about in mid-air, the heat of its thrusters washing over them.
The remaining men and women of D Company watched their only hope of escape flee back out the airlock, into the Mists.
A low, soft moan echoed through the chamber as the remaining members of Primal’s complement turned their attention back to Beta, Gamma and the stranded scientists.
“No one’s coming for you now!”
Spoiler
