Shadow of Intent (HALO)

by Joseph Staten

  But now the Prelate cursed their tower’s claustrophobic conditions as he was forced to lean power to his anti-grav belt and decelerate into its low-ceilinged entry hall. His feet grazed the hall’s polished stone floor as he swung to avoid a trio of San’Shyuum in their thrones, so laden down with personal possessions that they didn’t see him coming. Having avoided this collision, he angled up a ramp to the gravity lifts, chose a tube that served his apartment, and boosted into its shimmering field. Ten, twenty floors went by in a blur. But then the whole tower shuddered, slamming the Prelate against the tube’s glassy walls. Sliding and tumbling upward, he almost missed his apartment, but managed a wild thrust with his arms, caught a railing, and levered himself into the entry passage.

  “Yalar!” the Prelate shouted as he palmed the lock on the apartment’s door and shouldered through before it split fully open. “Yalar, I’m here!” He cut power to his belt, landed hard on his feet, and sprinted across the bare floor of their common room, hurdling a low wooden table, and then knifed through a curtain strung with garnet beads into the triangular hall that led to their sleeping chamber. A few steps into the hall, and the tower shook again—more violently this time. Motes of lavender light burning in alcoves that ran the length of the hall sputtered out, and suddenly the Prelate was in total darkness.

  This was the moment in his nightmare when Tem’Bhetek became fully aware he was dreaming. All that came before—the fireworks, the frigate, the Flood—these were inevitable. But now, with the tower trembling around him, Tem was conscious of his ability to alter what came next. He held his breath and listened . . . and heard a mewling in the dark.

  The Prelate stepped toward the muffled cries, hands groping along the walls. As he entered the sleeping chamber, he stopped and let his vision adjust to a wan light seeping through the curtains drawn across the balcony window. Slowly the shape of his wife resolved, sitting in the middle of their padded sleeping pallet. Yalar was draped in a diaphanous pale yellow nursing gown. Their child was cradled in her arms, swaddled in a copper blanket. As the babe redoubled its wail, Yalar began to sing:

  This path, where does it lead?

  Take my hand, walk with me.

  Into the light, forever free?

  Take my hand, walk with me . . .

  It was an old San’Shyuum lullaby, and as Yalar hummed its sweet melody, the Prelate’s mind raced with all the things he’d said before—all the ways he’d tried in previous dreams to get his wife to leave their bedchamber before it was too late. But as always, the nightmare didn’t wait. And before he’d landed on something new to say, Yalar stopped singing, raised her large, long-lashed eyes, and said:

  “We waited for you.”

  “I . . . I was close.” The Prelate’s voice was ragged. “Just outside the city.”

  Yalar lowered her gaze to the child crying in her arms. “But you weren’t here.”

  The Prelate felt a change in the air; something old and patient and powerful stretching out from the deepest shadows of the room. “Please, my love.” He stepped forward, hands outstretched. “Come with me. Now.”

  But Yalar shrank back into the folds of her gown and began to sing again:

  This path, where does it lead . . . ?

  A single Flood spore wafted past the Prelate. It took all his strength not to reach out and crush its ragged spines, its ugly, pulsing core. He had tried once before, but fighting back had only accelerated what was to come.

  “We can leave this place,” Tem said. “You and me and . . .” He looked blankly at the child. We two are now three, Yalar had said in her message. But she had told him nothing else—not revealed the gender of their child.

  “Our son? Our daughter?” Yalar said. “I wanted it to be a surprise. But now”—she choked back a sob—“you will never even know its name.”

  The Prelate winced, trying to keep his own emotions in check. “I fought through the Sangheili ships. I made it to the stalk.” But then his rage began to build, just as it always did. “But the dome was overrun! And the Minister told me that the Flood—!”

  “Boru’a’Neem!” Yalar said with disgust. Her head rose up on her long neck like a serpent preparing to strike. “You went wherever he ordered you to go! Did whatever he needed you to do!” Her voice plunged to a whisper and then stepped back to a scream. “But when we really needed you . . . You. Weren’t. Here!”

  Their child loosed a full-throated wail, wriggling its little limbs inside the blanket. Yalar rocked it close to her chest and continued:

  Take my hand, walk with me . . . !

  But she was out of tune now and frantic. Her body shook. She began to cough. Arms trembling, Yalar thrust their baby toward the Prelate. “Take it, Tem!” she gasped. “Take it and go—!”

  Then her lips exploded open, releasing a cloud of Flood spores.

  The first time the Prelate had this dream, this was the moment he woke. Eyes wide and screaming. But he’d since learned to fight the urge to wake—coaxed his body to release some of the Promissory-implanted chemicals designed to enhance his combat capabilities to keep him focused on the dream. Each time the nightmare came, he was able to stay submerged a little longer. Like a diver with limited air, he willed his body to relax into the depths of his despair. . . .

  Tem’Bhetek now snatched the wailing child out of his wife’s arms and leapt away as pulsing green boils rose on Yalar’s neck and shoulders. Flood tendrils, slick and sharp, burst from these sores, tore through her gown, and coiled around her body. She pitched backward onto their pallet, thrashing her arms and legs and shrieking as the parasite burrowed into her brain.

  Just then, the balcony window shattered. Light stabbed through the curtains as a Phantom dropship hovering outside opened fire with its nose-mounted turret. The Prelate rolled to the floor and curled around his child, shielding it from the plasma bolts as they seared overhead and burned into the bedchamber’s walls. Even before the firing stopped, the Prelate heard the clang of armored feet, the telltale crack and sizzle of activating energy blades. He rose to find three Sangheili in silver armor circling the pallet, eyeing his Flood-stricken wife.

  “Don’t touch her!” the Prelate roared, rising to his feet.

  The Sangheili snapped their heads in his direction. The one closest to the Prelate snarled and raised its blade. . . .

  But right as it swung to cut the Prelate down, tendrils shot out from Yalar’s body and wrapped around the Sangheili’s sword arm, stopping it mid-swing. More of the muscular Flood fibers whipped around the Sangheili’s neck. Then Yalar flung herself backward, pulling the warrior with her, using whatever part of her mind that remained in her control to try to keep her family safe.

  But it wasn’t enough.

  The other Sangheili went to work, slashing Yalar with their blades until there was nothing left but sizzling flesh and bloody cloth. Feet locked to the floor, Tem loosed a guttural, wordless cry that ended in a wail as the Sangheili prodded Yalar’s remains with the two-pronged tips of their blades.

  Then the swordsmen came for him.

  In the Prelate’s dream, the Sangheili’s eyes began to glow bright as their blades as they slid through the slanting shadows cast by the tattered curtains. Their limbs stretched, and they flowed around him like quicksilver, rattling their bony jaws.

  “I’ll kill you!” The Prelate squared his stance, cradled his child with one hand, and made a fist with the other. “I will kill every last one of you!”

  Then his baby laughed. The Prelate looked down into the infant’s eyes; one blue, one green, just like his own. The child gurgled a string of happy nonsense words.

  Yalar’s voice echoed in the shadows:

  Into the light, forever free . . .

  And Tem felt a surge of hope: Tonight is not the same. Tonight I will save my child!

  He activated his anti-grav belt and launched himself through
the cordon of Sangheili, twisting to avoid their blades. As the Prelate hurtled through the window frame, the Phantom’s turret tracked him and opened fire. But Tem was already halfway into a dive that took him under the Phantom’s belly, beyond its field of fire. Flying with his back to the lower districts, the Prelate stared at his reflection as it rippled across the Phantom’s polished hull. Stay asleep, just a little longer. . . . Then he was up behind the dropship, where he maxed power to his belt and shot toward the holy city’s star.

  The atmosphere was thick with spores now. The other towers, the arched walls of the dome—everything except the star’s bright disc had disappeared into the murk. Two empty barges appeared above the Prelate, trailing limp streamers and shedding flowers. He jerked hard right to avoid a collision. A tower somewhere off to his left groaned as its anti-grav systems failed. Tem waited for the crack and boom of exploding stone as the tower hit the lower districts. But instead there was only a wet, muffled crunch. He looked down and saw dark shapes moving in the sea of spores below: tendrils winding back and forth, like animals tracking his scent.

  Then the spores began to thin, and the Prelate burst through the top of the cloud, no more than a kilometer below the simulated star. This close, he could clearly see how the illusion worked—how the star was really just a broad disc of many overlapping energy fields that filled a hole in the apex of the dome wide enough to accommodate the Forerunner Dreadnought, should the San’Shyuum ever need to move it. Viewing platforms hung around the rim of the disc, and the Prelate knew these were linked to passages through High Charity’s hull, emergency shuttle bays, and, finally, escape from the nightmare. You’re close! Closer than you’ve ever been before! Tem willed his belt to lift him higher, faster. . . .

  A Flood tendril slashed up from below, striking him across the arms and pulling his child from his chest. The little bundle tumbled down and out of reach, a loose corner of its copper blanket fluttering behind it. The Prelate spun head over heels, kicking the tendril aside, and dove after his child, following its cries as it careened toward the undulating clouds of spores. An instant before the child disappeared, Tem caught it by its blanket. Then he arched his neck and spine and, straining against the gee-forces, climbed once again toward the star.

  The child was beside itself. There was no laughter now, only tears. The little creature thrashed its arms against the Prelate’s chest. He held the infant tight, but this only made it more upset.

  It screamed, loud enough to jar Tem half awake. He shut his eyes, took a deep breath . . . and sang.

  There is a path, where does it lead?

  Take my hand, walk with me!

  Into the light, forever free?

  Take my hand—!

  But before he could finish the verse, tremendous spouts of Flood biomass rose from the clouds; pulsing stalks of half-consumed flesh; grotesque monuments to the holy city’s millions of devoured souls. Tendrils sprouted from these stalks, crisscrossing the air above the Prelate. He tried to maneuver through the gruesome thicket, but the Flood lashed around him, trapping his legs, his chest, his child.

  Tem’Bhetek strained his anti-grav belt well past its operating limits. The device’s lifting pods buzzed a warning, growing hot and heavy on his hips. . . .

  And then, through the fields of the simulated star, the Prelate saw a ship. A gleaming vessel with a hooked prow, the pride of the Sangheili fleet—Shadow of Intent, maneuvering into position above the holy city. For most Covenant in need of rescue, seeing this assault carrier so close would be a profound relief. At first, even the Prelate’s heart leapt. But his hope shattered as soon as he saw the carrier prepare to fire the plasma fountain in its prow.

  “No!” the Prelate shouted. “We’re still alive, you Sangheili bastards—!” But the rest of the curse died in his throat as Flood tendrils coiled around his neck and plunged into his mouth. Tem bit down, trying to sever the fleshy cords as they slid rapidly past his teeth. But the Flood held his jaws open, keeping him trapped in a gurgling rictus of rage.

  The capacitating torus of Shadow of Intent’s plasma fountain quavered as it built its charge. Targeting vanes irised into position around the magnetized muzzle, preparing to direct the superheated gases already flooding the breech. There was no sound when the fountain lit, but High Charity rumbled as a pillar of white-hot fire struck the holy city’s star, obliterated its fields, and then lanced into the dome. The Flood clouds ignited with a roar. A wall of pressure and heat rushed toward the Prelate. He struggled in the Flood’s grip, his child screeching in his arms, but just as the wall hit—

  The Prelate fully woke, his ears ringing with the insistent wail of an alarm that told him his cruiser had successfully made a slipspace exit.

  Tem lay on his back upon his cabin’s narrow pallet, his black tunic wet with sweat and plastered to his skin. As his heart pounded in his chest, keeping time with the alarm, he felt a Flood tendril slither along his neck. He reached to grab it . . . but of course there was nothing there.

  Balling his fists into his eyes and closing his mouth to mute his rage, the Prelate screamed. He had gone deeper into the nightmare than he ever had before, but at the end, there it was: Shadow of Intent. There was no hope of saving his family, not even in his dreams.

  The Half-Jaw had robbed him even of that.

  Tem smashed a fist into his cabin’s metal wall, again and again, until he left a dent in the glossy turquoise panel and his hand was throbbing. You fool! It never mattered anyway. It was always just a dream!

  For the reality was the Prelate hadn’t been inside High Charity when it fell. He had not seen his wife or his newborn child consumed by the Flood. Not with his own eyes.

  Instead he had been at the helm of his cruiser, locked in combat with Sangheili warships in the space around the holy city. This fight was the culmination of his long years of training, the climax of the Schism. The Sangheili hadn’t expected such a vast and well-prepared mutiny, and in the moments before the human frigate infested with the Flood slipped into the dome, the Prelates and their Jiralhanae crews were winning. But then, one by one, the Prelate-controlled warships had peeled away from the battle to evacuate High Charity’s San’Shyuum.

  What had been a perfectly executed surprise attack became a defensive scramble as the Prelates switched from trying to defeat the Sangheili warships to merely keeping them at bay while the San’Shyuum filled their own ships and slipped away. At first, the Sangheili let these vessels go. Then, as the threat of the Flood spreading beyond High Charity increased—as the Flood spilled down from the dome to the stalk where the rescue vessels had been docking—the Sangheili sent a message in the clear: ALL SHIPS ATTEMPTING TO LEAVE THIS SECTOR WILL BE DESTROYED.

  The Flood had almost doomed the galaxy once before, and the Sangheili weren’t willing to let that happen again.

  Shadow of Intent was the linchpin of this grim quarantine, and the Prelates had no ships that could match it one-on-one. The plan had been to overwhelm the carrier with multiple cruisers after the Sangheili fleet’s lesser vessels had been dispatched. But by then the San’Shyuum fleet had dwindled. And while Tem’Bhetek was still in the fight, his focus had shifted from how to destroy Shadow of Intent to how to save his family. When Tem received the Minister of Preparation’s desperate call for rescue, he quickly disengaged and hastened to the stalk.

  As soon as the Prelate was docked and had a hard line to the city’s communication network, he had attempted to call Yalar. But the network had either been down or overloaded, and he couldn’t reach her. Waiting on the boarding gantry for the Minister to arrive, he had thought of abandoning his post, flying up into the dome. And he had just made up his mind to do it when the Minister’s Jiralhanae honor guard hustled him through the gantry airlock. Even though the shaggy warriors’ panic-stricken reek told him volumes about what had happened in the dome above, the Prelate asked the Minister: “My family. Can they be saved?�
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  Boru’a’Neem had leaned forward in his throne and grasped the Prelate’s arm. “The Sacred Promissory is lost!” His eyes were filled with a wild and consuming fear. “Nothing lives inside the city now except the Flood!”

  This had been too much to take. The Prelate had shrugged off the Minister’s grip and staggered toward the airlock.

  “They’re gone, Prelate!” the Minister shouted after him. “There is nothing you can do!”

  Tem’Bhetek’s knees had buckled under the weight of this pronouncement. And the only thing that had brought him back to his feet—the only thing that kept him from kneeling there in the gantry until the Flood spilled down the stalk and devoured him as it had his wife and child—was the Minister’s solemn promise:

  “Help me escape this place, and I swear, we will make the Sangheili pay for what they’ve done!”

  At that moment, the Prelate had no real understanding of what the Minister meant. It would be many days before his mind could process anything but grief and he learned the full extent of the Sangheili’s betrayal. How they had failed to contain the Flood on the sacred Halo ring. How the Arbiter had turned on the Covenant by forging an alliance with the Flood’s Gravemind as well as with their human foes. By that time, the Prelate’s cruiser had joined a flotilla of San’Shyuum ships that had managed to escape High Charity. This brief rendezvous was joyous for some as they were reunited with loved ones thought lost.