Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [121]
Silence between them. Foucault thinking of his superior officer with the glass eye.
This time, Rebecca broke first.
“Okay.”
Foucault struggled not to raise an eyebrow in surprise.
This time it was the AI’s turn to lean in and whisper. “Somewhere private, Commander. I have something to show you. Something you won’t want your crew to see.”
>Burgundy 1520 hours
Hands and claws and deformed bodies and the stink of something so foul she’d vomited. Forming a living conveyor belt, passing her along the passageways. Always the roar of their anger to drown out her screams.
She’d gone down fighting, but she’d gone down. The mistake had been thinking Cranker had still been Cranker, Maller still Maller. A shot through the heart didn’t do it. A shot in the leg didn’t do it. By the time she’d figured that out, they’d had her. Maller had broken one of her legs as she’d tried to get to the pilot’s seat. Cranker had knifed her in the side.
As she’d lain there trying to get up, Cranker had kicked her, and Maller had reared up with fist and claw held high, like he was going to finish her off. But then a whole bunch of the small ones, the ones like bouncing beach balls—that’s what her mind made them into so she could handle it—had come surging up the gangplank. Cranker had stopped, and Maller with him.
They’d stood there, heads held like they were sniffing the air, or like they were receiving information. Plants reaching for the light.
By then, Burgundy had begun to go into shock, the pain draining away. She couldn’t get over the strangeness of those living beach balls, which made her mind flash to images of the ocean when she was on leave. A strange, quick glimpse of Benti drinking a piña colada, Clarence alone in the distance like a lost soul, wandering through the surf, looking for seashells. Surely Lopez had to be somewhere. The sarge would come and save her.
She’d tried to resume her epic journey to the pilot’s seat, but Cranker and Maller had come to some kind of decision.
Suddenly, Cranker was picking her up and slinging her over his shoulder, growling as he did it. The pain of that cut through the shock, her leg a burning plank of wood. She screamed, beat at him with her good arm, only realizing in that second that her right arm hung useless across Cranker’s back. Across the horrible nodule of a passenger he’d picked up. There was a wetness that clung to her that she realized must be blood.
Maller brought up the rear, followed by the beach balls. She closed her eyes against that sight, and most of the time since she’d tried to keep them shut. It was her only defense against what was happening.
Because now, slowly, laboriously, with starts and stops where Cranker carried her again, she was being passed along by a great community of the horribly transformed—down corridors, pushed through airducts, sometimes dropped as Cranker and Maller fought with some new monstrosity that apparently hadn’t gotten with the program. Whatever the program was.
Sometimes now she tried to reason with the two Marines. “Cranker,” she’d say, “please take me back to the Pelican. I know you’re still in there. I know you can hear me.” Or she’d say, mumbling it a bit because she felt so weak, “Maller, I know you don’t want to do this. I know you want to help me. Please, please help me” Once she even said, “If you’d just put me down, I could do the rest. I can find the sarge. I can explain it was a mistake.” She laughed bitterly at that one, knowing everything was past repair, and her laughter dissolved into panicked sobs again. She was alone.
Cranker and Maller never answered. Cranker and Maller had their marching orders, and they didn’t come from the sarge.
>Lopez 1527 hours
“Hell of a big virus,” Lopez said, pushing Smith ahead of her. He’d pleaded his case for a while, told her he’d launched the empty escape pods