Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [36]
“The beta-blocker will keep you focused,” she said, as if sensing his thoughts, “and calm.”
Sweat poured down his face. His guts roiled. Pain wracked him.
“The plan this time?”
“Same as before.”
He loaded the syringe, one vial at a time, and with each of the four shots felt progressively better. As the last one flooded his arteries with a cooling rush, he felt almost good.
He looked at his wounds through the holes in his T-shirt. The punctures were about two inches across, thick lateral slits. He felt around to his back, twisting to see in the medbay’s mirror, the darkness hampering him. Two exit wounds, a little smaller, spanned his spine. The skin around them was dark red and black, like ripples on a pond, spreading outward in twin elliptical shapes. It looked angry and painful, but he felt nothing.
“Mo Ye.”
“Yes, Baird?” she replied.
“Why didn’t you try to inject me with the autosurgeon? The syringe at least looked like it would still work.”
“Because, like I told you before, in this condition, I can’t do anything to harm a human.”
He nodded. “I understand. How long do I have?”
“I can’t say. With the drugs, maybe an hour or two. Without them, you’d be dead sooner. Which is the only thing that allows me to even tell you about the meds.”
“Then there’s no time to waste.”
“Baird . . . once you leave the medbay, you’re on your own. I’m trapped here, dumb and useless and disconnected. They’re not going to risk giving me any more access to ship systems until they have what they came for. ’Til they reconnect my systems. And I don’t see any reason why they’re going to do that.”
Baird looked at the mess around him. Dead bodies, but weapons too. He picked up a plasma pistol, retrieved two plasma grenades from a bandolier on a Grunt’s armor, and grabbed the carbine from where he’d dropped it.
By habit, he checked his weapons, patting himself as if for reassurance that he had everything. He patted the empty spot where his combat dagger usually sat. He looked around. On a stainless-steel tabletop was a gruesome-looking surgical blade, with a nanometer edge that glinted wickedly in the red glow. He picked it up carefully and bound the delicate surgeon’s grip in a thick swath of surgical tape, creating a more practical handle, and slid it very carefully into his belt.
“Baird. I wish I could do something more.” Mo Ye sounded frustrated.
“Then wish me luck.” And he was gone—into the cold darkness of the ship’s dead corridors.
SIX
___________
He encountered a frozen tableaux of carnage. The Covenant had simply left the dead where they fell, or piled them against walls. Human gore and viscera everywhere and not a trace of reciprocal Covenant blood.
The drugs were working perfectly. The Destroyer was not large; he kept to the shadows and snuck through some of the ship’s duct systems. He felt almost elated, like a ghost. But he could also feel the damage in his guts, a kind of dull, removed itch, like a memory of pain. And it felt wrong. He knew he was dying, but at the same time, he’d never felt stronger. He felt these conflicting clocks ticking, both counting down to something fatal. He made it undetected to the engine room in less than fifteen minutes. What he found there almost made him quit.
The engine room door was scorched and hung on its track, jammed forever in a half-open position, like a slackened jaw. They’d been here, but there was no sign of them now. Just more human corpses. The engine bay was massive, ceilings vanished completely into blackness above him, but the systems were still humming and there was more light here. More light to illuminate the bodies of the crew.
Some of them he recognized, even through horrific burns. He stepped gingerly, respectfully, over them, heading for the control head unit beyond the bulk of the Shaw-Fujikawa drive.
It was a fairly