Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [112]
“How many you make out, Gersten?”
“Lots,” he said, wide-eyed.
Great help that was . . .
The noises reaching to them through the darkness swelled, sometimes familiar, yet also utterly warped, alien, broken. Benti couldn’t slow her breathing, her hands cold on her rifle.
Tsardikos came running toward them in a final burst of speed, terrified and swearing. He jumped over her, spun into position behind and fumbled with his weapon.
“Took your damn time,” growled Orlav. Tsardikos ignored her.
“I don’t think they’re Covenant,” Benti said. Behind her, Clarence shifted, his calf against her hip. He had her back. Again.
Orlav smacked a flare and tossed it out into the passageway. They waited, stinking of shit, like a group of cowering sanitation workers. With guns.
The first of their pursuers staggered into the spluttering light.
They weren’t Covenant.
>Lopez 1501 hours
At last they’d found a body. Never thought she’d sound a silent huzzah for that. Never thought evidence of death could be such a relief.
Security stations and checkpoints were choked with furniture, the doors themselves jammed. Sometimes on purpose. Most of the blockades had been torn apart, great gouges left in the steel walls and floor. In the process of finding a path through the debris, they’d been funneled into one of the crew’s rec rooms. Archaic ceiling fans. Pool tables. Bar stools and a TV. One wall with a blown-up photograph of the beach on some tropical island. An honest-to-god facsimile of a tiki bar in another corner. Something about it made Lopez think of the words in denial. Even down to the plastic tiki glasses still sitting on the counter.
Nothing disturbed; no one had fled here.
It almost looked normal.
Except for the body.
Or two.
Honestly, it was hard to tell.
Right about then, looking at the pieces, Lopez could have done with some answers. Real answers, not the extra mysteries she was being offered by Smith. Remembering Rabbit, the last conversation with Burgundy, Ayad still gone.
Too many more unknowns and her soldiers were going to start to fray. No matter how she tried to stop that from happening. She’d seen it before. It had damn near happened to Foucault before he’d turned the situation around. Become a hero.
So there was Mahmoud muttering under his breath while Rakesh and Singh focused on the tiki bar. Only Percy, at her side, seemed unable to look away.
“I get the feeling this wasn’t a very happy place,” Percy said.
This wasn’t the battlefield. This wasn’t what they’d signed on for.
The storage cupboard at the far end of the room had been wrenched open so hard the hinges had spun off and the door lay crumpled to the side. Inside, pieces. Leftovers. She couldn’t think of it as anything else. Flesh she knew to be Covenant. Skin she knew to be human. And something half grown across them, inside these pieces, bulging the muscle and mottling the skin. They couldn’t have been here long enough to look that rotten. Something in the physiology had altered, shifted, from the inside. A massive protrusion from what should have been a shoulder, but it wasn’t an arm. It looked like a growth of bone, grotesque and huge, with strips of flesh gripping it tenuously.
Savage. Brutal. Made her remember John Doe’s wounds. Had he ever been in this room? Guard or prisoner?
“Sarge, what the fuck is that?” MacCraw pointed, as if she hadn’t noticed.
“Well, MacCraw, that there,” she said grimly, slipping into a drawl, “that’s a hand.” Death had not relaxed it. The fingers didn’t curl, the palm didn’t fold. Flat, with the fingers straight, rigid and stiff.
“What the hell is that other thing, Sarge?” MacCraw again. Was he never going to stop cataloging?
“Almost looks like they got fused or something hiding in the cupboard,” Rakesh said in a distant voice. “Together,” he added, more distant. Clearly not believing it for an instant.
But none of that really got to Lopez. What got to her was the carefully tended bonsai