Halo_ Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe - Eric Nylund [37]
Mo Ye had walked him through the procedure several times, made him repeat it back to her. It was simple and it sounded foolproof. As he rounded the bulk of the control panel he saw what they’d done and sighed.
Melted to slag. Deliberately. And as he examined the Shaw-Fujikawa drive itself, he saw they’d attempted to wreck it too. It was impossible to know if the drive still functioned or not, but he knew for certain the control panel was FUBAR.
“Plan B,” he muttered to himself and started running back the way he’d come—glancing regretfully at the perfectly functioning row of lifeboat pods.
The trip to the bridge wasn’t as uneventful as that to the engine room. He ran around a corner and surprised two Grunts, one of whom appeared to be sucking food from a nipple atop a weird little tank on the floor. Baird didn’t stop to examine it. He shot one straight through the face with the Carbine and with the stock caved in the skull of the would-be gourmand. Neither had time to react or even squeak a warning, but the loud metallic report of the stolen Carbine was sure to attract attention. He kept moving.
Now he really had their attention. He heard a clamor behind him as Covenant troops reacted to the sound. Every sense, every instinct in him screamed panic, but something, he liked to think his own personal tenacity, held him steady. Kept him moving forward. Part of him knew it was the chemicals coursing through his blood. Another part of him wanted to sit down in the dark, cross his legs, and wait for it all to be over.
He remembered walking home from school one day. The world was white with snow. Black, leafless chestnut trees spidering into the gray-yellow sky, itself pregnant with more flurries to come. He remembered the chill sweep of the Water of Leith, the tenacious little river cutting a black ribbon through the pristine white.
He remembered carefully stepping through the snow, lifting his little legs high to make crisp, clean footprints, like Good King Wenceslas. He remembered the thwomp as he deliberately fell backward, arms spread to absorb the impact. Lying there, staring up at the sky. The simple depth of the imprint he made in the snow protecting him from the bitter wind. He remembered feeling warm and safe and remembered thinking, even as a child, “This is how people freeze to death.”
This is how people freeze to death.
What exactly are you doing, Baird? he thought to himself as he ducked under a moribund heating conduit, now glittering with ice, and into a pipe-tangled corridor not much wider than his own broad shoulders.
What’s plan B? Charge into the bridge and ask them to throw down their weapons? Fix Mo Ye with less than an hour to live and only the barest grasp of how an AI even works?
The plan, he decided, was to keep moving, keep shooting, and make sure that these motherfuckers rued the day they boarded The Heart of Midlothian. The plan, he grinned to himself, was to take their precision operation and turn it into an embarrassing and memorable clusterfuck. He couldn’t win, but he could act like a broken autosurgeon: First, do harm.
Two more Jackals sprinted by in the darkness of the main Deck 4 hallway to his right. He froze. Surreal in the blinking red strobe of the emergency lights, their birdlike gait matched their raptor skulls. Their clattering footfalls masked his own sounds.
So they were looking for him. Let them look. Let them find him.
The pipes intersected and then branched ahead, blocking his already claustrophobic route, but he knew where he was—Astronav, which meant the bridge proper was just around the corner. To his left a bulkhead wall, to his right, a gap in the pipes into the main corridor, and beyond that, the bridge.
He slowed, stopped, and waited. Listening. Silence, but his jangled nerves and superattenuated senses caught something else.