by Matt Forbeck
CHAPTER 30
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Is she going to live?” Molly asked Dinok ‘Acroli as he labored over Kasha.
“There is a fair chance,” he said without looking up. “If you and the others can give me some room.”
When the Servants of the Abiding Truth had cleared out, most of the students and staff who remained in the dining room had fled. Dinok had stayed behind to check on Kasha, while Molly, Kareem, and Gudam had raced down from the relative safety of the operations room to see what they could do to help. The answer appeared to be nothing.
Tom stomped in through the broken recreation-yard doors, his assault rifle at the ready. Molly had never before seen him fully kitted up in his Mjolnir armor, and it stole her breath. He towered over them like a magnificent statue that had come to life in ablative armor and a mirrored faceplate.
“Report,” he said to Molly.
“They shot Kasha. And killed Karl. And also a boy I didn’t recognize too.”
“Wong Xu,” Kareem said.
“I don’t think Wong’s dead,” Gudam said. “Someone picked him up and hauled him away when they cleared the room. He might still make it.”
“Who is ‘they’?” Tom asked.
“Dural ‘Mdama and the Servants of the Abiding Truth,” Molly said.
“Bakar’s brother,” Kareem added.
“They took both Bakar and Prone to Drift,” Tom said. “I have to go after them.”
“We’re coming with you!” The words blurted out of Molly’s mouth before she could even think about them.
“Appreciate the offer, Molly,” Tom said. “But these are armed Sangheili warriors, and as you’ve seen, they have no compunctions about killing anything in their way. You need to stay put here. I’ll report back in once I take care of the situation.”
Tom gave the three of them a nod. “I’m proud of how you’ve handled this so far. Good luck.”
With that, the Spartan turned and ran out of the dining hall the way he’d come. Molly followed after him, all the way to the door. Kareem and Gudam came right behind her, but Tom was already long gone and in full sprint.
“We need to do something to help,” Gudam said. “That Sangheili has Bakar and Prone!”
“We’ll never catch up to Tom,” Kareem said. “Do you have any idea how fast a Spartan can move on foot?”
“We don’t have to catch him,” Molly said. “He’s chasing the Servants. We just need to catch up with them.”
“Sangheili are pretty fast too,” Gudam said.
“They’re charging into a battle,” Kareem said. “And they have a couple hostages. That might slow them down a bit.”
Molly looked back to see if anyone might try to stop them. Dinok was still trying to patch up Kasha, and all the other students and adults hadn’t come out of hiding yet. “It’s now or never,” Molly said. “Let’s go.”
She knew Tom was right to warn, but Bakar was their friend. What did Tom expect them to do? Sit around and wait for Bakar to be slaughtered? Molly refused to let that happen, and she knew that Gudam and Kareem felt the same way.
Without any more hesitation, they raced out into the recreation yard and spotted Tom sprinting away faster than a Warthog. Gudam huffed just watching him go. “We’re never going to catch him.”
“We probably don’t want to anyhow,” Molly said, jogging after Tom. Gudam and Kareem fell into step next to her. “We’re unarmed and wouldn’t be much good in a fight against those Sangheili.”
“So why are we doing this again?” Kareem asked, finally realizing how dangerous what they were doing might be.
“Just because we can’t fight them doesn’t mean we can’t help,” Molly said as they edged around the school. “Besides, Prone told us that he could stop the Guardian permanently if we could get him close enough to the thing. Remember we’ve only got a small window before the Guardian reactivates and tries to bring Onyx back to realspace. If it does that, how much do you want to bet that Cortana will send others to help it?”
“So we have to get Prone free from the Servants right away?” Gudam said. “That doesn’t sound like something we’d be able to manage. I mean, we’re pretty amazing, sure, but maybe not amazing enough to stand up to a full squad of the Abiding Truth’s finest warriors.”
“I’m kind of hoping Tom will take care of that part for us.” As Molly spoke, they saw Tom veer off from the beeline he’d been making toward a Forerunner spire in the distance, overlooking the lake. A lot of fighting seemed to be going on around it, and Molly wondered why he’d decided to break away from it.
“There they are!” Kareem pointed down a street off to the left. Molly got just a glimpse of Prone being towed along by a handful of Sangheili warriors as they crossed the street a couple blocks away and headed into an outcropping of tall cypresses surrounding the lake.
The Servants had switched directions, but Molly wasn’t sure why. Maybe to avoid the battle, or possibly because they had a different plan from before. Tom, being as sharp as Molly knew he was, seemed to have spotted it right away and corrected his course. Fortunately, Kareem had spotted the Servants, or Molly and her friends might have missed the change in direction altogether.
“Keep after them!” Molly pumped her legs as fast as they could go.
“But keep our distance too,” Gudam said. When Molly shot the little Unggoy a look, she shrugged. “We can’t help our friends if we get killed!”
Gudam had broken into a fast scramble, using her knuckles like an ape. It was impressive to see her move so quickly.
The three kept after the Servants and Tom for a long time, pressing deep into the rolling hills that skirted Paxopolis. Molly couldn’t remember ever having run so far in her entire life. Her heart felt as if it were going to burst out of her chest, but she kept on, as did the others.
The run gave her a new appreciation for the training that Tom and Lucy had been putting her and her friends through. Without that, they would have had to stop long ago.
Thankfully, the Servants didn’t seem to be running at top speed, probably because they had two prisoners that weren’t terribly cooperative. Despite that, Molly and Kareem began to pace themselves so Gudam could keep up, recognizing that the Spartan might begin to glance behind him as he began to catch up with the Servants.
The three of them kept far enough back that they barely saw the Servants. They were also careful to avoid Tom. Molly was confident that the Spartan could have easily caught up with the Servants by now, but he held back instead, slowing to a stalking pattern and using the trees as cover. Molly and the others followed his example.
Soon, Molly recognized the hills they were trotting over and the look of the trees they were approaching. “It’s the Repository.” She’d broken a good sweat and was panting hard now, even though they had slowed down. “That’s where we’re going.”
“The portal!” Kareem said. “They’re going to use that to escape!”
“There’s no way we can get there fast enough to stop them,” Gudam said. Despite struggling to keep up earlier, she didn’t seem tired at all.
“But Tom can.” Molly pointed at him.
The Spartan had now kicked into high gear, moving quicker as the distance began to close between the Servants and their goal. The Spartan had likely already figured out where the Servants were headed, and he wasn’t about to let them get away from him. As Tom began to accelerate, he veered off to the left of the trail, as if to cut around the Servants in a wide circle.
“Where’s he going?” Gudam asked. “Aren’t they right in front of him?”
“He’s trying to cut them off before they can make it to the portal,” Molly said. “That should stop them cold.”
Kareem didn’t seem so sure. “Unless . . .”
“Unless what?”
“Well, there’s a lot of them, and Spartan or not, there’s just one of him.”
Molly scowled at Kareem, and he shut his mouth. Personally, she d
idn’t want to think about how badly the Servants outnumbered Tom. He was a Spartan, and in Molly’s mind that was enough. He could take them all on.
She only hoped she was right.
As they approached the top of a hill overlooking the Repository, the three of them hunkered down and crept up low upon it. They got into a prone position, lying on their bellies as they crested it, hoping no one beyond it would see them. Though the Repository was still far off, Molly had a perfect view of it. She could see through the structure’s front door, which must have been open during the Guardian’s attack, and the gated frame of the portal at its far back.
The portal stood inactive and lifeless.
Below them stretched a long field with trees scattered across it. Molly could see the pack of Servants and their prisoners as they moved down the hillside toward the Repository’s front entrance, but there was no sign of Tom.
If any people were left in the Repository, Molly didn’t see them, and it seemed to be entirely empty. The hangar looked mostly locked down, apart from a few open doors on both sides.
Then Molly saw the Spartan burst from the tree line on the far left, well outside the Servants’ field of view. Tom ignored the front entrance where the Servants were headed and instead launched straight through one of the hangar doors, right to where the portal was. Once inside, he slowed down and found cover at a barrier Molly hadn’t noticed before.
“The UNSC must have put those up after the monster came through the portal,” Kareem said. “They’re probably not designed to keep things from going into the portal so much as coming out.”
Gudam pointed toward the front of the Repository. “Here come the Servants! Do you think they saw Tom get in front of them?”
The Servants certainly looked wary of their surroundings. Dural led the Sangheili force from the front, with a wall of warriors spreading out just one step behind him. Bakar trailed along after, under the control of a warrior who had a rifle pointed into his mandibles, and two more warriors had Prone to Drift in tow by the Huragok’s tentacles.
Then the Spartan appeared from behind the barrier, his weapon raised.
The Servants slowed to a stop as they saw what barred entry into this portal. Dural ignited his energy sword, and the rest of the warriors leveled their weapons at Tom. The Spartan opened fire, and they scattered to the sides—taking cover behind vehicles near them—but kept pressing toward him. One of the Sangheili warriors dropped in his tracks, but that loss didn’t deter the others.
As the Servants closed on Tom, they returned fire in coordinated bursts, blasting him with an unrelenting stream of fiery bolts of plasma. Most of these splattered off the barrier in front of him or smacked into the portal frame itself, but a few of them caught Tom dead in his chest. The energy shield his Mjolnir armor produced glowed bright with the effort of ablating those shots, but it somehow held intact.
Tom cocked back his arm and heaved something up and over the barricade. Given that the Sangheili dove to the side, it must have been a grenade.
The explosion took out two more of the Servants’ warriors. It also caused Bakar and Prone and their captors to stop dead, well clear of the blast. They held there, waiting for the fight to be over.
Tom then leaped on top of the barricade and fired again on the warriors storming at him. They were coming from all directions now. Another of them dropped, and then another, but they still outnumbered him. Molly couldn’t imagine how he would survive.
A pair of plasma grenades arced through the air toward the barricade. Tom somehow caught one of them and tossed it back at the Sangheili, but the other landed right in front of the barricade. Even from this distance, Molly could see how vicious the explosion was, and the sound thudded through the air a split second after.
The blast knocked Tom tumbling high into the air. An explosion that close should have killed anyone instantly, but when the Spartan began to fall, he tucked into a somersault and rolled back to his feet, ready to keep fighting.
Molly couldn’t believe what she was seeing. Her amazement at what Tom could do was tempered, though, by her fear for him, Bakar, and Prone.
Despite the Spartan’s bravado, he wasn’t quite as steady on his feet now. As he turned to face his foes, Dural appeared right in front of him. With Tom’s shields exhausted by the grenade, the Sangheili leader struck hard and fast and speared his energy sword right through the Spartan’s middle.
Gudam stifled a scream as Tom went down. Dural kicked the Spartan off his blade, then thrust it high into the air as he roared in triumph. The rest of the Servants who were still breathing followed suit, and they began ushering their prisoners toward the portal’s frame.
Tom’s body lay still. A swirl of smoke rose from the sword wound.
“That’s it,” Kareem said, completely petrified. “I can’t believe they killed him. They killed Tom.”
Molly smacked Kareem on his shoulder, and her eyes filled with tears. She could barely breathe. “We can’t just give up. Not now. What about Bakar and Prone?”
“Did you see those guys just take down a Spartan? There’s nothing we can do, Molly.” Kareem’s face turned pale. “What kind of chance do we have against those warriors? Against the Pale Blade?”
“I don’t know,” Molly admitted. “But we’re not dead yet, so we’re not giving up.”
“But—” Gudam started.
“I know!” Molly shouted in a hushed voice, not sure how well the Servants could hear from this distance. “It is hopeless! We don’t have a chance, but I’m not going to let them take Bakar. Or Prone. There has to be another way!”
“But they’re getting away,” Gudam said meekly, pointing down at the Servants. They had hauled Prone to the portal’s frame, and the Huragok was working at some kind of terminal next to it, a metallic sphere covered with glowing blue symbols. Bakar kept turning back to gaze at Tom’s body and then averting his eyes.
Within seconds, Prone had activated the portal, and a blue glow flowed into its frame. Dural shouted something at the Huragok in Sangheili, but it didn’t seem to faze Prone. After a bit of snarling among themselves, the Servants began to file through the portal one by one.
Soon, they were all gone, yet the portal remained active. Despite how far away it was, Molly could hear the portal’s low trilling in the silence that rang after the Sangheili left.
Without another moment’s hesitation, Molly stood up and sprinted down the hill, straight for Tom. As she went, she kept a close eye on the fallen Servants. None of them were moving, but neither was the Spartan. She heard Kareem and Gudam following behind her but didn’t look back.
When she reached Tom, she couldn’t tell if he was still breathing. He just lay there in his armor. How could he survive after what happened to him? She tried tugging on the armor, but it was far too heavy. It felt like trying to move a truck.
“Tom! Tom! Can you hear me? Are you okay?” she asked with tears in her eyes.
She feared she knew the answer, although she couldn’t bring herself to accept it.
He was gone.
But then his visor depolarized, revealing closed eyes that slowly fluttered open. “I’ve been better.”
She let out an emotional laugh at that, mostly from sheer relief.
“Armor’s keeping me alive.” Tom huffed in pain. “For now.”
“The Servants took Bakar and Prone. They left through the portal.”
Tom groaned. “Great. If I survive this . . . Mendez is going to kill me.”
“We’re going after them.” Molly looked to the others for confirmation. Kareem gave her a stiff nod, and Gudam smiled in a way that showed all her teeth.
“Belay that,” Tom said, struggling to speak. “Too . . .”
He passed out before he could finish.
Molly gazed down at him through his visor. He looked like he was still breathing, although it was hard to tell.
“Shouldn’t we try to patch him up first?” Kareem said.
“With what?�
�
Kareem shrugged. They didn’t have anything on hand, and the Repository was mostly locked down.
“Even if we had the right supplies, we’d never be able to get his armor off him,” Molly said.
“Also, he said the armor’s the only thing keeping him alive,” said Gudam. “Maybe we should go for help.”
“But then who’s going to help Bakar and Prone?” Molly asked. “We can’t just let the Servants take them.”
“You’re right,” said Gudam. “They’ll use Prone against us, and they’ll kill Bakar for sure! But how can we stop them? If Tom couldn’t manage it, what hope do we have?”
“Tom killed a bunch of them.” Molly started toward one of the fallen Sangheili. It had been a long time since she’d seen a dead body up close, and she had to steel her stomach against it.
A plasma rifle lay on the ground next to the corpse. Molly picked it up. It was heavy and large—and warmer than she would have guessed. She pointed it away from Kareem and Gudam and pulled the trigger. A burst of plasma bit into the dirt, as the rifle’s recoil tried to shake it free from her grip.
She motioned toward a couple of other fallen warriors. “And now we have weapons. We just follow after the Servants and hope they give us a chance to use them.”
Kareem and Gudam quickly picked over the fallen Servants for things they could use too. Kareem grabbed a storm rifle for himself, while Gudam found a plasma pistol.
“This is insane, you know that, right?” Kareem said.
Molly led the way toward the portal, raising her weapon and taking a deep breath. “Of course it is, but what else are we going to do? Could either of you look at yourself in the mirror tomorrow if we didn’t at least try to save those two?”
Neither Kareem nor Gudam said a word. They answered with their feet.
The three walked up to the portal, and Molly took a deep breath. Then she plunged through it and hoped she would land safely on the other side.
CHAPTER 31
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