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The Carbine fell from his hands. He looked down at a strange scene. The fourth Grunt was pressed up against his belly, squirming, staring up at him and wailing. The Grunt was impaled on a fork of blinding light, a Covenant energy sword. The twin tines of superheated, seething energy had passed through the Grunt. And through Baird.

He looked up into the face of the Elite. The massive creature regarded him through cold black eyes. It tilted its head. Baird wondered what the gesture meant. And the Elite yanked the blade from both of them. The Grunt fell dead, Baird, back to his knees, clutching his belly.

Ferocious, burning pain seemed to consume his entire torso. He felt like his innards were boiling. He looked down at his hands, expecting to see blood. There was none. The two holes in his clothes smoldered, the flesh beneath fused and cauterized. Baird fell face forward into blackness.

FIVE

___________

“Wake up.”

His mother again. It was time to go to school. But it wasn’t the same. He wasn’t cold. He was burning. He was on fire.

“Wake up.” Insistent, but worried. Not mother. Mo Ye again.

“I’m dead.”

“You’re not dead. But you’re not in good shape. The blades passed right through you. Scorched a lot of stuff. Missed your spine by a distance I can’t even make myself repeat.”

“I feel like I’m dying.”

“That’s not surprising. You have serious burns. And significant injuries. Internal and external. I’m going to give you some meds, and we’re going to try again.”

“It didn’t work out so good last time.” He coughed and a spasm of pain squeezed him like an invisible fist. “I’m tired. I want to go to sleep.” He realized that he did very badly want to sleep. And part of him knew what that really meant.

“I know,” she said. “I’m sorry.” Her voice, a perfectly directional whisper in the dark, was filled with what sounded like a lover’s sorrow. No more mean old lady.

Baird tried to wriggle out from under a Jackal’s body. The creature, which looked so light and birdlike, was incredibly heavy. With a groan of pain, he pistoned his feet against it and shoved. It rolled off, and he rolled free.

She told him what had happened when he blacked out. The Grunts had simply piled up the corpses—their own fallen and Baird’s supposed carcass—on top of each other in the medbay. Mo Ye had stayed quiet.

The big Elite had been suspicious and visibly angry. He had barked orders at the Grunts and communicated the events back to the Heart of Midlothian’s bridge, where presumably other Covenant troops—and those Engineers—were attempting to crack Mo Ye’s main systems. The Elite had shown a little more caution this time—and smashed the autosurgeon.

He raised himself up on one arm, then another. He grabbed the dented, scorched edge of the autosurgeon table and hauled himself up, grimacing in agony and suppressing a shriek.

“Meds,” he gasped.

“Yes. Meds,” she said.

The dispensary clicked and hissed open. Inside the plastic cubby were four vials: two identical, full of clear liquid, the third blue, the fourth a distinctively piss-colored yellow. There was a very old-fashioned-looking pneumatic handheld syringe gun beside them.

“What are these?” he asked.

“A painkiller, a beta-blocking sedative, a metasteroid for the burns and interior inflammation, and a Waverly-class augmentor.”

“What’s an augmentor?” he asked. But he already had an inkling.

“This one’s a cocktail. It contains a derivative of phenylcyclohexylpiperidine, an artificial slow-release synthetic adrenalin and a rapid coagulant.”

“You’re talking about a Rumbledrug.”

“There’s no pretty way to paint it,” she said.

Rumbledrugs had become notorious in the sporadic colonial insurrections. Notably on Hellas and Fumirole. On both worlds, they’d been used by rebels in a vainglorious attempt to fight Spartan-IIs. The drugs were certainly fearsome. The effect on human physiology was impressive in the short term. Unencumbered by the body’s normal safety limits, subjects were capable of feats of enormous strength, but the subsequent lack of control