September 22nd 2552
“British...” James stared down at the small metal box with its edges rounded before him and let out a quiet sigh as he decided how hungry he actually was. The fierce rumbling from his belly answered that question for him. He glanced up with a smile but Kore was staring listlessly into nothing.
“Its like they want to beat you over the head with it.” He continued as he reached in and pulled out a small plastic packet with three teabags inside. “Its meant to be a day ration who needs this much tea?” he dropped the packet onto the makeshift table, the pair of them were in the space Kat had turned into her field lab. Considering what Kore was he thought some privacy was prudent.
“So what’s your endgame?” Her head snapped up at his question and he reached in to pull out one of the self cooking bags, all day breakfast printed on the front without the ingredients of course you would not want to frighten anyone away after all. He bent the bag in half and felt something click inside.
“What are you talking about?” She spat but James could tell her heart was not in it.
“This alliance, you what, leave the Covenant to join humanity? You know we are not exactly winning this war right? So what is the plan here, it's not everyday some shapeshifter aliens decide to throw there lot in with the guys getting vaporised from orbit.”
“The Changelings were never part of the Covenant, we joined Humanity to escape them and Equestria.” James nodded as he pulled open the bag and saw the piping hot breakfast mush, it smelt nice at least.
“What's Equestria? I feel like I am missing a lot of context here.” He picked up a small metal scoop from the box and started to eat his meal, at least it was warm. Kore looked at him for a while before she sighed and slumped back into her chair.
“Changelings are a tribe from Equis, just like that Griffon and the Unicorn that you sighted. Thousands of years ago ponies became very powerful and began conquering the world. Changelings refused to bow down to them and as punishment we were banished to a prison, our entire race was not allowed to expand beyond ten thousand people, the ponies also made sure that while we had enough food to survive we never had enough to ever sate our hunger. This was our existence what they decided for us, an eternal punishment.” Kore looked up at James who set aside his food and frowned.
“Thousands of years of this?”
“They crushed any rebellion, they hunted down any who escaped, if we had too many children they would take away the oldest first! This history of my people has been the history of imprisonment!”
“So all the other people on your homeworld became this Equestria? All the other tribes? This is incredibly implausible, how did so many sentient species come to exist on a single world?”
“I don’t know, something to do with magic? Equis is saturated in it and most other worlds only have trace amounts. Anyway eventually Equestria began to colonise other planets and encountered the Covenant, they joined and became a powerful faction within that genocidal Empire.”
“How did the changelings escape?”
“We were in a prison for thousands of years trying to escape, eventually you find a way. Not many of us made it, the ones that did hid within Covenant society, Equestria could not get away with dragging suspicious members of the Covenant away to the dungeon to torture them into confession if they were a changeling. We slowly rebuilt our number and waited for an opportunity.”
“Humanity was that opportunity?” Kore nodded.
“The Covenant created from whole cloth religious justifications for attacking Humanity, we gathered as many Changelings as we could and the decision was unanimus, we could not abide by the genocide of humanity, but we were weak and few in number, we would have only burdened you rather then helped you fight against evil. So we sent our brightest minds to meet Humanity and give you all the information we could while the rest of us set out to infiltrate and secure ships to provide to Humanity.” James finished off his meal before he responded.
“So you expected us to accept you from the start” Kore shrugged.
“No Idea, I was born on Reach, Changelings have been helping humanity since the war be-” With a thundering crash the door was thrown open causing James and Kore to leap to there feet and turn in surprise towards the fabricated door. The sounds of the battle outside had ceased.
Three figures stormed into the room, Lieutenant McKay in the front with two Spartans flanking her. Kore took a step back in fear as she looked into the skull scratched into the helmet of one of the Spartans and bruised and broken face of Kat as she glared at her.
“This the one? Looks good, I would never know.” the concealed Spartan spoke with a quiet and deadly masculine voice.
“Saw it with my own eyes, its a green flash and then she is changed.” Kat was looking at McKay who studied Kore carefully. Kore took another involuntary step back but bumped into James who rested a hand on her shoulder.
“I think you need to show them.” His voice was calm and comforting. She looked at the three people before her before taking a breath and dropping her disguise. With a shimmer of green fire the petite pale women was replaced with a feminine humanoid with segmented black plates over its body and deep gouges bored into her arms, a tall frill sticking out from the back of her head and a pair of pale green insectoid wings fluttered uncertainty on her back as she stared forward with uniformly blue eyes. There was a long pause as the new Spartan and Mckay stared at her.
“What the fuck.” The spartan broke the silence as he stepped forward and looked at her “do it again.” He demanded and Kore let out a squeak of fear before another flare of green fire passed over her form and she was back to her human disguise.
“No, do someone else.” Kat said quietly, her bruised and bloody face meeting the changelings eyes with a fierce intensity. With a third flash James was face to face with his doppleganger, Kore shedding the form of a young woman and taking flawlessly the tall and stocky frame of the american engineer.
“How the hell are you doing this?!” McKay demanded reaching forward to touch Kore’s face and chest to make sure it was not a hologram.
“Its natural, all changelings can do it.” Kore said in a perfect mimicry of James’ voice.
“You are saying we have an alliance with these things?” The male spartan spat.
“If she was hostile why would she show us this? Why did she attack the griffon?” James stepped forward as Kore dropped his form in favour of her natural form.
“We are talking about an alien that can take human forms, she just admitted without any prompting that she can copy the appearance and voice of anyone!” Mckay crossed her arms.
“This is a precarious situation, but if there is infiltration it is at the highest levels of the ONI, orders are baked into the UNSC command codes.” Kat looked at Kore before shaking her head. “We need the Lieutenant, she has enough black ink on her file to know all about this shit.”
Wellsley appeared unceremoniously from the holographic projector. There was no indication that the AI understood the tension in the room as he began to speak immediately.
“The Covenant are engaging in a general retreat across the entire ring. The evacuation order and some internal conflict were the last things I could decypher from the Covenant battle net, it's a mess right now gaining any intelligence at this point is next to impossible. However before the network became strangled something interesting happened.” Wellsley glanced about the room waiting for someone to speak.
“Go on.” McKay nodded as she crossed her arms, she spared the time to glance over at the exposed changeling, Wellsley seemed to be taking that in his stride.
“The Battlecruiser Truth and Reconciliation attempted to leave the surface of the ring after they reported some sort of broken quarantine, one of the ships in orbit fired upon it and the ship returned to its position. Right now its undergoing evacuation.”
“So there is a Battlecruiser without a full crew on the surface?” McKay looked at Kat as Wellsley nodded.
“There is also a Battlecruiser in orbit that has been the subject to a boarding action, the last reports I can access suggest that its captain and crew were executed for some transgression and the ship has been left with only a few personnel that are keeping it in a stable orbit.”
“Two vectors of escape!” James smiled and found himself almost giddy, the idea of surviving this ring had been absurd but to see the Covenant blunder this battle so utterly. The thrill of survival sent a jolt of energy through his worn body.
“Yes, I would recommend a general assault on the Truth and reconciliation followed by using our remaining air assets to deploy our ODST and Spartans to the Battlecrusier in orbit, with both ships secure they can protect each other as a slipspace course is plotted.” McKay nodded at Wellsley and looked thoughtful before she spoke.
“I wish we had Silva but he has not called in since he went to that weapons cache, no word from Cortana on the control room either.”
“We don’t know how long this chaos in the Covinent’s ranks will last.” Kat turned away from Kore, happy to be dealing with a threat she knew how to manage.
“You are right.” McKay sighed. “Get your team together, you will be leading my boys and taking Wellsley along with you to secure the Truth and Reconciliation, when you get control fly it over the butte to load up the rest of us, then we make an immediate orbital insertion of this other Battlecruiser.”
“The Sacred Inquisitor” Wellsley informed them as the Spartains snapped to a neat salute and left to prepare. McKay turned about as Wellsley flickered and disappeared.
“Now what do I do about you?” The women mused as she looked at the alien form of Kore.
The route to the bridge was simple, despite most of the internal security systems being gutted there were still enough sensors and cameras to ensure that her path was far outside of common Covenant patrols. It was a simple matter of tapping into the ships systems and overcoming the few security measures that had not been destroyed when the AI pair had been extracted from the Pillar of Autumn.
Halsey was sitting in a navigator's chair, mostly because it had miraculously survived the heat of reentry with only minimal damage to its layer of padding giving her a moderately comfortable place to work from. But it also allowed her access to one of the many consoles that dotted the bridge with only a partially melted screen, distorting but not obscuring the interface as she explored the ships systems.
Indeed there was a single ship still in one of the hangar bays, a Longsword too small to carry a slipspace drive. Halsey's options were limited, however she now had a means to escape to space, now she just needed to collect her spartans and then launch an assault upon the Inquisitors ship, with the sleeping crewmen it was the only viable means of escaping the solar system.
There was a quiet pop of displaced air and a heavy sigh as Halsey's blood ran cold, she quickly crouched down as quiet as she could manage. She disengaged the safety on the pistol she had recovered. Hoofsteps, the rhythm of the sound confusing Halsey for a moment but after reminding herself of the alien was a quadruped. Something nagged at Halsey's mind as she regulated her breathing.
There was another long pause and the quiet tapping of a keyboard being manipulated. A faint mulberry glow that lit the burnt shadowy room before there was a loud sniff followed by a choked breath and a low wine. Halsey was dumbfounded as she listened to the Inquisitor fight back a sob.
Halsey slowly lifted herself to her feet and looked through the server banks separating her from Twilight Sparkle The mare was looking out through the shattered bridge window as let out a quiet sniffle. The floorplate Halsey was stood on creaked quietly. The ears, Halsey watched as Twilights ears twisted about to face her an instant before the mare snapped her head back to glare before her gaze turned from scorn to shock.
“Cathrine?” Halsey darted back from the server bank and quickly darted around the corner to point her pistol at the mare only to find her hand yanked roughly upwards. “Oh no we are not having a repeat of that episode Doctor Halsey.” There was a moment of pause as Halsey’s hand was pried roughly from the pistol but the moment allowed her a moment to examine the mare.
Halsey considered herself perceptive and it would not be arrogant to say that she had an incredible eye for detail and an excellent memory, it was not the larger, thicker set body and wings that stood out to her the most but the poise and confident expression upon her face.
“What are you even doing here?” Twilight demanded. “This ship has a covenant garrison, Why come here and not back to the Human base?” Before Halsey could respond the mare turned away stomping her hooves in frustration as she did so and let her magic holding her wrist dissipate. “We don’t have time for this, whatever you are up too forget it, stay close and keep your head down.”
“A more apt question would be why are you here.” Halsey glanced about before she stepped closer to the mare tapping away at the bridges main console, her eyes widening as she realized what the mare was doing. “You have Keyes security codes. How did you get them?” Her voice was harsh, unusually emotional.
“He died trying to save me from the flood, God knows why.” Twilight let out a sigh and shook her head before returning to the screen. “It looks like the reactor is still active in a standby state, she held up well.”
“The reactor core, now why would you be interested in tha- of course. The ring’s atmospheric and artificial gravity systems would force all the energy of a detonation outwards through the ring.” Halsey found herself smiling at the simplicity of the plan.
“That is the idea, hopefully the cascade should be enough to destabilize the structure. Having you here complicates things somewhat.” Twilight turned away from the console to glare at Halsey.
“Don’t you worship the ring and its creators? This seems like an uncharacteristic move for you Inquisitor.”
“I had a change of heart, still I need to address the garrison here and see if they have access to any transports, when this reactor goes critical we need to be at least in low orbit if we want to survive it.”
“They don’t as far as I can gather the ones that could fled when the order was given and the ones that stayed simply don’t have the means to leave the surface. There is however a longsword fighter in one of the hangers that is ready for takeoff, I would need you to transport a package there for me before I am willing to leave.”
“I need to be here for the Lieutenant and Cortana, hopefully the rest of the Spartans too if they can find them. If you don’t want to leave I could simply carry you.” Halsey let out a yelp of surprise as she found herself levitated several feet off the ground by a grinning Twilight.
“I have a wounded Spartan in a medical bay on this deck!” Halsey shouted not amused in the slightest.
“It is incredibly irresponsible to trust me with that information Cathrine, I am a member of the Covenant.” Twilight set the women down and set her face into a stern almost familiar expression.
“One that seems to grasp the function of this installation. I would be happy to play cloak and dagger ONI games with you when the fate of all living things does not hang in the balance.” There was a pause as Twilight stared at her before letting out a long suffering sigh.
“Very well, let's grab this Spartan, we need to hurry. We have a slim deadline.” Twilight presented the floating pistol to Halsey who plucked the weapon from the air before the pair of them left the bridge.
Gilda stalked forwards moving as little as possible to prevent excess heat building up and forcing her to drop her cloak. Damp pulsating flesh oozed under her paws as she moved through the infected corridors surrounding the engine section of the ship. Unused corpses and rancid yellowing meat lined the walls revealing the grizzly origin of the biomatter coating the bulkheads around her.
Animated corpses would lumber about in small parties, some leaving the infected sections for the wider ships and others returning with fresh bodies or biomass, many thousands more than she could reasonably fight. The hall leading to the engine control room was protected by a trio of infected ponies and a hunched over Unggoy, all of them had warped faces locked into expressions of agony as the snapping red ribbon feelers of the parasite puppeted the bodies.
Behind the four guards was a thin membrane door, the biomass acting as a clenched muscle that prevented passage. She had witnessed a dead Unicorn pass through the section several times, it seemed the parasite was using the Unicorns to operate the mechanical sections of the ship.
So she waited for another to pass so she could access the room without alerting the greater parasite, she had been surprised to find her presence was unknown to the larger organism considering she was likely standing inside of it, but supposed that given the incredible extent of it and the doubtless manifold sensations it had to process that the minor sensation she made as she passed over the organic floor.
“Dash to Gilda.” With a thought Gilda sent an acknowledgement to Dash, she would normally be confident enough in her armour’s ability to dampen sound but there was no need to test her luck. “The Ops team are moving off to one of the medical bays to get the bucking coward out of his hole, once he is safe they will get a ship to dock and we can get the civilians out.”
Gilda sent another ping of acknowledgement as another infected Unicorn lumbered down the passage, there was a pause as it stopped just before the large organic barrier and with an unsettling wet sound the muscle relaxed opening a round hole that the Unicorn wasted no time stumbling through. With feline grace Gilda darted in behind the corpse before the door could clamp shut once more.
The engine control room was large and modeled in a similar manner to a battleships bridge, a raised section with a desk in the middle from which the chief engineer can look out over the stations of her subordinates. The infection had perverted the station, cysts of infected matter coated workstations and workers that had been caught at their stations worked there still with faces contorted into expressions of horror and agony as their bodies were puppeted.
At the raised workstation dozens of bodies were piled up as if the infection was preparing for some dark ritual. Gilda wasted no time, with a single overhead strike she brought the butt of her rifle down upon the dead mares back. Before the destroyed corpse hit the ground she darted forward and grasped the head of one of the many idol bodies the infected had protecting the control room and twisted, matter had no choice but to yield to the Griffon and another puppet fell with its strings cut.
The others reacted as one, but slowly. Coordinated only in the graceless blind attack on the unseen intruder. Gilda simply moved this way and that, her camouflage flickering as her rapid movement caused incredible searing heat to build up over her armour. Plasma weapons were discharged, weak disorganized magical blasts fired and limbs that had been mutilated into weapons swung uselessly as Gilda performed her grizzly work. There was that awful sound denoting the entrance opening and the lion eagle spun about drawing one of the many runestones from her hip and letting out a screech, a command in the first tongue to demand the universe alter itself to her whim.
It resisted as it did all who would exercise control over the energy that permeates the universe but it did not daunt her, though her armour and the shimmering displaced light that coated her form motes of arcane origin formed and where propelled forward striking the puppeted corpses that tried to crawl through the door. Fire, if it could be called that, dark energy that licked and unmade flowed down the hall away from her. It moved as if eager to kill darting from one cluster of organic matter to the next, it would continue for a time before its own nature unmade it.
Her camouflage failed and the glowing Griffon was revealed to what remained of the dead defenders, runes painted into her flesh lit brightly as they struggled to contain the magics that ran rampant through her nervous system. Magics that would have rendered all but the most powerful Unicorns ash submitted, unwillingly, to the Griffon Knight.
She turned back to the battle leaving a glowing trail as she darted from one enemy to the next rending them apart with blunt force and savage application of her talons. When it was done Gilda stood lamely for a moment, the strange trance one felt at the end of a battle. She shook herself awake again and turned to the engine controls ripping an imobile corpse from its station and throwing it away as she began to diagnose the console.
The ship's systems were a mess, but Gilda found what she needed, the controls to the slipspace drive she began to deactivate its localised shielding. The equipment would function without shields and would do so safely, they were purely there to prevent the drive from being destroyed should that section of the ship receive damage. Now that it was unprotected she simply needed to fight her way to the drive and destroy it. Hopefully by then Dash would have the ability to activate the ships self destruct sequence.
There was a gurgling cry, it seemed that she had less time then she expected, she turned to meet the dead with her own blood call.