Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [34]
“Does the Asimov thingy . . .”
“Rule of Robotics.”
“Yes, yes, does the Asimov thingy only count for humans?”
“Of course. I don’t feel terribly responsible for Covenant safety, Baird.”
“So what do you have access to?”
“Some doors,” she said. “And a lot of meds.”
THREE
___________
Holding a fire extinguisher in his hands, now marginally warmer in two layers of sterile surgical gloves, he watched his breath condense as he tried to calm himself. Motes of dust and tiny crystals of frozen liquid danced and sparkled in the chill air. In the red pulse of the emergency lights, it looked like a faint snowstorm of blood. He supposed some of it probably was. He shuddered and closed his mouth.
The oxygen was still good, but most other systems had either died or been killed by the boarding party.
“So we don’t know if anyone is out there?”
“Not until we open the door,” whispered Mo Ye. “It would be prudent to assume your awakened state has shown up on their scans. They were scanning for life signs when they swept the ship.”
“And the plan if there’s nobody out there?”
“You make your way aft, get to the engine room, and manually instigate an attraction coordinate. We’ve been through the procedure. You’ve read it back to me. It will work. You’ll escape in a lifeboat. The ship will spin up and jump into the nearest large mass. That should be the red giant about fourteen million miles starboard. That ought to cook their goose.”
“Aren’t there safety procedures and systems to prevent this kind of shit?”
“There were. Luckily for us the Engineers truncated those along with my systems. It should work.”
“But you’re not sure.”
“I’m only sure of the seconds leading up to my schism. But I am sure that if we don’t try, they are eventually going to crack my encryption and lead the Covenant directly back to Earth, Cole Protocol be damned.”
He hefted the dense bulk of the fire extinguisher. Literally cold comfort.
“Okay, then.” He breathed deeply. Calmed himself. Murmured an internal, calming battle mantra. “Open the bloody door.”
FOUR
___________
It is fair to say that the group of Covenant soldiers standing outside the medbay was far more surprised than Baird was. He was expecting unthinkable trouble. They were expecting to find a wounded, cowering, and almost certainly unarmed medical technician. What they found instead was a highly trained and highly capable 220-pound Orbital Drop Shock Trooper carrying a 20-pound titanium bottle.
He didn’t have time to form a complete picture, but the instinctual snapshot he took as he rolled out of the medbay doorway and right into the small group of aliens was plenty. Four Grunts, two Jackals, and, in the shadows on the far right, a figure so tall and imposing it could only be an Elite.
“Christ.”
He came back up to his feet at withering speed, breaking the first Jackal’s jaw and neck instantly with the extinguisher’s unforgiving mass. Fragments of beak and tooth glittered in the dark. The Jackal simply collapsed, falling backward as the momentum of the cylinder and the human wielding it snapped the life out of him. The Carbine he was holding fell with him.
Baird caught the Carbine even as he dropped his makeshift battering ram. The extinguisher landed on its activation stud and the resulting explosion of halon gas and sound bought him his life, as a Carbine round from the other Jackal, who was far less panicked than the Grunts, sliced through his Cro-Magnon brow, nicking bone and knocking him backward on top of the fallen Jackal. As he fell, he fumbled, found, and fired the Carbine trigger. Three rounds eviscerated his would-be killer.
The Grunts squealed and scattered. Two of them ran right past him and vanished into the medbay. A third tripped, its plasma pistol clattering across the floor. The fourth wasn’t so lucky. As Baird rose to his knees, then his feet, wheeling, trying to get a bead on the Elite—there was a blur, a flash of light and thunderous