Materializing on the other side of the portal behind Marko and Twilight, Ishmir kept his M392 DMR shouldered and eye angled behind the battle scope. Aiming as he walked, the Spartan aimed into Twilight Sparkle’s blind side as the three of them swept the area on the other side.
The transition through the portal had taken less than a second, and all three of them had expected to be marching into a Covenant ambush. Twilight had even stowed her weapons and erected a large magical bubble for them to step through in. but there was no welcoming committee on the other side.
She lowered the shield and the Spartans were able to look around without the purple polarization of her magic.
They had appeared at the top of a large tower, almost like a giant anthill within a massive dyson-sphere. The tower had a uniform slope to it for the most part, rising along the staircases steeply before reaching flat platforms every twenty or so meters. Crowns of fins circled each platform like hard-cover points making the tower an attacker’s nightmare.
“Flintlock to Solar Flare-Actual,” Ishmir reported on the comms. “We’re through safe and sound.”
“Affirmative, Spartans,” came Celestia’s uneven reply. “Communications through the portal are deteriorating. We shall go silent until you require our assistance.”
“Roger that. Flintlock, out.”
Lowering his rifle, Ishmir tried to take in the entirety of the vast warehouse laid before him. Although ‘warehouse’ was wholly inappropriate to describe the cavernous wonderland.
From their perch stretched a space so large that he detected a slight arc like the curve of a planet in the lay lines etched into the cavern walls. The roof was beyond his VISR’s range finder and thin black clouds drifted throughout the space like it had its own weather system.
The walls were home to a massive honeycomb of storage containers, all of them home to pieces, parts and equipment. There were floating islands in the midst of it as well, cradles holding what looked like forerunner starships, platforms where dormant bipedal walkers remained in hibernation clueless of the phantom drop ships floating over their heads. There were long fabrication lines of still robotic arms. Cold and inactive forges the size of battleships.
There was altogether too much to take in all at once. And so much of the machinery was so alien none of Flintlock could discern their function.
“Don’t ancient master races ever build anything small?” Marko commented quietly.
“Clearly not.” Angling his gaze downward Ishmir spotted the fleet of phantoms taking off across the cavernous space.
They were clearly exploring, looking for something. Then again a hunch told Ishmir the aliens had found exactly what they were looking for. A forerunner tech stockpile like this could tip the war against humanity into their favor significantly.
As if the Covenant needed an upper hand in the first place.
“Check it out,” Ishmir pointed, lowering his gaze a little further.
Hovering at the foot of the tower under the portal hovered an idle phantom. Its engines were powered down and gathered around under it were a small collection of alien infantry.
Shouldering their weapons the trio silently descended the steps towards the phantom. On the platform just fifty meters above the gaggle of aliens chatting below, Flintlock went to ground and crawled quietly into firing positions.
There were only a pair of grunts with a pair of jackals standing guard. They were facing away, down a corridor leading into a floating facility attached to the tower’s hip. Likely they were left behind seeing off a larger expeditionary force sent to explore.
Ishmir sat up and aimed his scoped rifle carefully. “I’ll cover from up here. You two go in and take them out quietly.”
Marko beamed a green acknowledgement light and Twilight quietly nodded. Like shadows they skulked down the last flight of stairs and swept behind the ignorant aliens.
The Spartan drew his blade at the last moment before he fell upon the jackal and grunt on the left. Twilight pounced on the aliens to the right, her horn glowing as she conjured a bayonet of glassy purple light.
Her hooves connected with the grunt, catching the alien by surprise and forcing it to the ground. At the same time her magical knife came up and stabbed the jackal in the throat before tearing away sideways to skewer the grunt’s skull.
It was over in less than a second. Marko double checked, stepping into the grav-lift under the phantom and ascending to the drop ship. There was a sound like a cat being strangled, and a moment later Marko descended again, fresh blood dappling his armor.
“All clear,” he reported as he landed and Ishmir descended the steps to join them.
As they were orienting themselves, Ishmir looked down and caught Twilight staring at the dead grunt under her. Walking over, he leaned sideways and stepped into her line of sight.
“Hey, Warlock. You okay?” he asked. “Did the fight on the Kraken shake you?”
Twilight glanced up like he’d startled her, then paused to think. “No… it didn’t.” She shrugged. “And somehow that worries me a little more.”
Ishmir honestly wasn’t sure what to say about that. He wasn’t a combat shrink… in fact, he’d never even met a combat shrink. He’d been so fueled by hate and revenge himself that he’d been killing Covenant for a very long time without feeling any sort of remorse. He’d never even considered them worthy of remorse.
And three guesses as to how exactly Marko felt about killing the aliens, but I bet you’ll get it in one.
“It’s alright,” Ishmir figured. “We’ll focus on doing the job now. We can sort out how you feel about all this later.”
Twilight Sparkle smiled. “Okay. Just so long as you are there to help me through it.” She lifted her gaze a little and looked at Marko. “Both of you.”
“Heh. You can’t get rid of us that easy, princess sparkle-butt.”
Readying themselves, the trio pushed on into the corridors of the attached facility. Comfortably enclosed when compared to the exposed, open spaces behind them, the corridors were perfectly straight with smooth walls widening slightly from the ground before they angled smoothly to taper up towards the high, narrow ceiling. Glowing lights were evenly spaced along the buttresses and ceiling, the buttresses forming little alcoves of cover for them to dip in and out of.
Turning the corner they came to a particularly long stretch. Standing at the end were three hulking figures. The brutes were all clad in crimson power armor, two of them stood watching as the third sat hunkered over the door at the very end. They were barking and snarling, clearly complaining at something. It wasn’t until the third hunkered over the door stepped back that Twilight realized what they were doing.
They had made a mess of the doorway. It was buckled and smashed like they had failed to open it the normal way and were now resorting to relentlessly punching it until it yielded.
Ishmir held up a hand, halting his comrades, then gestured to Marko. The olive green Spartan nodded at Ishmir’s cryptic hand signals before translating for Twilight Sparkle by holding up three fingers.
Then two.
Finally one…
Marko broke cover first as Ishmir took aim. The DMR cracked, peppering the brutes with several neat shots to the chest plates and helmets as Marko rushed in close, his shotgun hungry for death.
Twilight mimicked Ishmir, stepping around cover and let her assault rifle tear into the brutes. They howled and swatted at the sparks erupting from their armor. But they were only stunned for a moment.
One of the brutes turned with a weapon in hand. It was a heavy looking mechanical contraption sporting a massive blade along the grip, heavy enough the brute had to fire from the hip. And when it did the weapon let out an intimidating bark, propelling a projectile into the wall beside Twilight.
The grenade round exploded on impact. Twilight’s teeth rattled with the overpressure and she was flung sideways. Her head was spinning well before her face made contact with the ground.
Her MA5C clattered where it landed just beyond her hoof’s reach, but Twilight Sparkle was too groggy to do anything about it at first. By the time she pressed her hooves to the ground and clawed her way closer while firing up her magic, there was a beastly howl.
Looking over she saw one of the brutes rush her. The alien was down on all four, berserking right past Ishmir, making contact with the Spartan’s rifle as it bounded, knocking him over. Ignoring the human however the brute made a bee-line for the princess, leaping high into the air with fists raised over its head and bearing down on her.
Twilight dropped her levitation spell and erected a shield just in time. The brute’s fists came down and slammed into a thin film of purple light. Ripples cascaded across the shield and sparks spluttered from Twilight’s horn where she concentrated on keeping the shield erected. She widened it to a disk shape, like a giant contact lens so the brute couldn’t reach around it and grab or punch her.
Though as she was exerting herself the brute let its fists fall with methodical hammer blows, thinning the shield out and bending it’s edges inwards. Twilight tried to focus on widening the shield, but she could barely keep it erected, never mind in shape. Soon enough he barrier was no more than a flickering cocoon practically wrapped around her body; Twilight even pressed her hooves against the inside to give it some more integrity.
The brute slid its fingers over the shield, growling and drooling as it crushed, no doubt itching to do the same to Twilight’s windpipe. The alicorn huffed and tried to press outward, but only found that her efforts allowed the shield to collapse just a little more. Cracks, as if the shield was made of glass, formed across the surface.
At the same time she saw Marko further down the corridor going toe to toe with another brute. Both had stowed their primary weapons and Marko had his custom knife in hand.
He ducked and darted under the brutes clumsy blows, but every strike the Spartan made glanced off an armored surface. Until finally the brute caught Marko’s wrist in its beefy hand and locked his arm over his chest. Marko cried out and struggled, but the towering brute pushed with ease, pinning Marko to a wall and lifting him up so his armored boots only kicked air.
At the same time the alien reached back, drawing a long, terrible knife, its blade lined with horrific nooks and edges. The brute wasted no time in spinning the hilt between its fingers and sliding the blade forward.
Marko caught the brute’s hand and pushed with all his might, but it only served to slow the stabbing motion. The point of the knife found a soft surface between the Spartan’s chest plate and shoulder pad and gently plunged forward.
The headhunter screamed with every inch that passed into his shoulder, ruby droplets of blood spilling down his side until the weapon was hilted in his flesh.
Twilight’s heart stopped at the sight. “No!” she screamed, her voice suddenly picking up to a volume she thought her throat could not handle. “Marko!”
Her eyes squeezed shut and she focused her magic harder. But something else happened. Something unexpected. A surge of electricity rose from around her heart, a sensation she’d felt once before a very long time ago. A spark of magic that resided within her soul.
Her eyes jerked open and instead of looking into the innocent disks of purple like before, the brute looming over her was blinded by the pure white light spilling from Twilight Sparkle’s skull. The light around her horn intensified. Her shield thickened and with a cry she expanded the bubble until it exploded into a shower of energy shards.
Several embedded into the ceiling and wall. A whole swarm of the shards were sticking out of the brute’s chest as it was flung backwards. While the alien was stumbling for balance, Twilight’s magic caught her assault rifle and brought it up before she emptied the magazine, turning the brute’s face into pulp.
She was on her hooves as it fell. The brute holding up Marko looked back and spotted her.
Drawing the knife from Marko’s shoulder, the alien aimed for a split second, then drew back and flung the weapon at Twilight.
However before it even got close the alicorn had holstered her rifle and caught the spinning knife in her magic. Charging forward, Twilight turned the knife around and slashed forward. The point plunged straight into the base of the brute’s spine, dead center and just above the tailbone.
The alien slumped nearly instantly, its legs giving out from under it. The sudden sag gave Marko enough space to work with.
Curling into a ball he kicked both feet against the brute’s chest and shoved it off him before dropping forward and slicing his knife clean through the alien’s throat, sending a spurt of black blood spraying across the ground between is boots. The cut was clean, effortless, and didn’t quite decapitate the brute.
Twilight’s eyes returning to normal, she finished it off by levitating her pistol around and putting a single dead-check into the gasping alien’s head.
Across the corridor while all this was happening, Ishmir was suffering his own minor struggles. His rifle had popped the last brute’s armor before he’d been disarmed. But with pistol in hand and the range between them reduced to the maximum engagement range for influenza he had issues finishing the brute off.
It loomed over him, swiping and striking, and for every block Ishmir watched his shield energy readout drop a sliver.
Ducking and letting the brute punch a wall, Ishmir brought his pistol up to press against the brute’s eye socket, but before he could shoot it brought up a forearm and deflected the weapon. Instead Ishmir put a round in the ceiling. His wrist flexed and he fired twice more, only shaving a few hairs from the brute’s ear.
Drawing back, Ishmir tried to fire from the hip, but the brute kicked him in the side, making his aim go wide. Another attempt let the brute catch him by the wrist, putting three more round into the wall before it twisted sharply like it wanted to tear his arm off.
Ishmir purposefully dropped his pistol, then caught it in his free hand, bringing the barrel to the brute’s gut and letting his last four rounds fly through the alien’s exposed abdomen. The creature howled and doubled over, letting Ishmir drop it with a sweeping kick to the back of the legs. The larger, heavier alien went down hard, and after a lightning quick reload, Ishmir finished it off with a double tap to the head.
The last two brutes were dead checked at the same time before Ishmir and Twilight holstered their M6C/SOCOMs again.
“Are you okay?” Ishmir asked as he approached the others, scraping up his fallen rifle as he did.
Marko huffed, taking a knee and pulling an emergency biofoam canister from his gear. “It’s just a flesh wound.” He still winced as he popped the nozzle into the gap between his armor the brute had exploited and filled the gaping knife wound with biofoam.
It stung like hell, but the foam would stop bleeding and hemorrhaging. Within moments the pain had been numbed, but that had never bothered Marko much anyway. At least while it hurt he knew he was still alive. Tossing the empty can, Marko retrieved his shotgun and stood ready again.
“You scared the shit out of me,” Twilight commented with a frown. Calming down she suddenly found herself inexplicably angry with Marko, and the Spartan noticed.
“Right. Like I let myself get stabbed on purpose just to fuck with you. Grow up, Warlock.”
The pony snorted in response, bucking him lightly in the shins.
While they were going back and forth, Ishmir checked the damage the brutes had done trying to force the door that stood in their way open. It was buckled and shattered, but they had only succeeded in opening it a crack. And despite how the lights illuminated when the trio closed in, there was no way the door would open on its own anymore.
With a sigh, Ishmir stepped in, pushed his fingers between the seams and pulled hard to one side.
“I knew the brutes were stupid,” Marko chuckled, “but I never thought they were too stupid to operate doors. Even Ishmir can operate doors.”
Ishmir sighed, proven to the contrary as he struggled. “Could you shut up and help me with this?”
“You need a big, strong man to do it for you?”
“Yeah, find me one will you?”
With Marko taking one side and Ishmir on the other, they managed to peel apart the battered doors with a groan of the alien metal screeching on their broken tracks.
Stepping through the arch the Spartans aimed their weapons in to the chamber beyond. It was only four meters across. After the agoraphobia-inducing space of the facility so far, this room looked suffocatingly small.
As the trio stepped forward holographic glyphs – dots, dashes lines and polygons – sprang from the stone floor and twisted around them. The sudden motion snapped the headhunters into combat mode, the two of them sweeping for contacts.
Only Twilight didn’t have her weapon ready, gently levitating it to her side and snapping it into the magnetic holster on her armor. As she stepped forward, her hooves echoing through the hollow space, Ishmir reached out to stop her.
“Careful, Warlock,” he warned, eying the readouts on his HUD in case of foreign radiation or gasses they would have otherwise missed.
Even though she couldn’t see the green readouts on the SPI armor’s systems, Twilight shook her head and kept moving towards the center of the room. “No, it’s okay,” she said soothingly, eying the glyphs as she went. “Stand perfectly still. Don’t touch the glyphs.”
“Okay… why not?” Marko asked, clearly having trouble holding position as one of the symbols was practically kissing his visor.
“I recognize these symbols,” Twilight said with some awe as she brushed past some of the glyphs. They seemed to dart about, reacting to her presence. She could even spread her wings and brush them from side to side, juggling them around the room like they were suspended in zero gravity.
In the middle of the room she reached up and tapped a small blue square with her hoof; it blinked in response.
“These are similar to old Equestrian symbols,” Twilight explained, observing the square from all sides. “Very hard to read. There are simple two-dimensional translations, but to really get all the detail you need observe them from all sides.”
“No time for details, purple-turd,” Marko told her.
Twilight frowned almost irritably. “All the meaning is in the details, dipshit.”
“I promise Ishmir will bring you back on a date later,” Marko retorted, drawing a sharp gaze from Ishmir.
Biting her lip, Twilight concentrated on the symbols, then looked up. “This way.”
They crossed the room and the floor lit a brilliant blue before Twilight as if it were reacting purely to her presence, ignoring the Spartans altogether. On the far end they ran into a blank wall where the princess pointed to a slightly brighter blue dot on the wall.
With Marko and Ishmir in firing positions to either side of her, Twilight lightly pressed her hoof to the dot, ready for trouble.
The wall slid apart and revealed for them a spherical chamber at least twenty meters across. The platform they stood on was suspended in the midst of it and in the center was a control panel glowing with bands of light at the very center.
Entering, Twilight quickly trotted into the middle and observed the holograms shifting and changing before her eyes.
“This looks like a control center.” She ran a hoof over the symbols as if she were reading braille. “We should be able to find, ah” – she tapped a small triangular glyph – “a map.”
The lights on the console faded, replaced with a single vertically spinning disk. As it turned to face them, it was revealed to be a symbol representing some kind of star-topped scepter with a pair of curved flanking blades ending in points near the top of the glyph.
“Caretaker?” the Spartans heard Twilight whisper under her breath. “What does that mean…?”
She barely finished the thought when light exploded around her. Holographic geometry flashed and zoomed into a distant perspective. A sphere of symbols, topology lines and shapes swelled over the console until it touched the apex of the room.
“A map?” Marko asked. “Great. Figure out where the fuck in the galaxy we are.”
Twilight scrutinized the spherical object before her, then looked at the small dot she called ‘caretaker’ somewhere in the heart of it. Then her eyes widened with realization, spotting familiar landmasses and bodies of ocean across the sphere of symbols.
“We didn’t teleport to another planet,” she explained with awe. “We’re still on Equis… well, we’re actually inside the planet. This is the planet’s core!”
Marko coughed. “Is it really that impossible, or does it just sound that way?” He looked to Ishmir for support, but his buddy just shrugged.
“Why not though? We know forerunners are masters of slip-space technology. This could be a bubble dimension within the planet the size of a refrigerator. On the outside it might be small, but it’s infinitely huge on the inside.”
Flintlock-Two shook his head, palming his visor. “… my head hurts.”
Rearing up, Twilight touched her hooves to a couple of symbols and played with them. A holographic structure passed through Marko as the map expanded. She focused through layers of the surrounding structure until she had closed in on their representative location. The Spartans found themselves looking at their current spherical map room, with two tiny little armored Spartans flanking the scaled down forerunner symbol for caretaker between them.
“Well, at least we know where we are. Any idea how we kick the Covenant out?” Marko asked.
Twilight though for a moment and swept through the map again. Soon enough they were looking at a scaled down version of the enormous forge chamber they had seen the Covenant explaining. It looked like the phantoms had set down and there were foot mobiles exploring the various rows of machinery and equipment.
She blew up the image and then tapped a few other icons. Several lines of alien text scrolled down in front of her face, and Twilight had to read them from three angles before she got the full picture of what they were trying to say.
“It says the security ancillary is offline,” Twilight Sparkle translated slowly. “But sentinels are prepared for manual tasking.”
“What’s a sentinel?” Marko asked Ishmir.
“Don’t know. But whatever they are they’re waiting for target data.” Twilight Sparkle nodded to confirm and Ishmir mulled it over a moment. “Set the Covenant as targets. Let’s see what happens.”
Twilight nodded and set to work touching a series of panels and glyphs. Soon enough the Spartans were able to see she had programmed in the targets as the miniature representations of the Covenant and their drop ships turned from a cool blue into red.
Twilight finally stepped back and as quickly as the map had materialized, it faded from view.
The trio stood around, glancing at each other and waiting. Nothing seemed to be happening. They listened but there was nothing to be heard.
“Did it do anything?” Marko finally asked.
And as he did the Gods answered with thunder. The noise of battle rushed in all at once rolling in the way Flintlock had come. There was a wail of Covenant energy weapons as well as the hum of some kind of weapon they hadn’t heard before in retort. Explosions rang out, and by the sound of grinding metal it sounded like a whole phantom was plucked out of the air and smashed into the ground.
The screams of the Covenant sounding a retreat followed.
“Sounds like something is slaughtering the shit out of them out there,” Marko said. He paused, then tilted his gaze to his fellows. “Wanna watch?”
Ishmir and Twilight shot each other a glance and then shrugged. “Yeah, okay.”