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FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: FOUR HOURS INTO RECONNAISSANCE PATROL
Mendez did the calculations in his head again as he waded through long grass that left burrs on his pants Three thousand tihteen They could eke out their ehteen days if they scraped by on a rock-botto that crap It’s going to seeer How bad can lizard be? I ate a lot worse in escape-and-evasion training
As far as he knew, Halsey didn’t carry an escape belt, which meant she didn’t have a survival pack that included three bars of thebut nutritional y dense substance known to ency bars found regular MREs to be a damn five-star restaurant experience by comparison It was just as wel the escape belt included an ani anything that moved
But he and the Spartans would have to pool their supplies to feed Halsey if push came to shove He wasn’t sure if he resented that or not
Okay, stay hydrated, and hope the Forerunners thought of everything
The two structures looked ot to them Their wal s seemed to be either tiled or decorated with ashlars It was hard to tel with Forerunner structures because they had a habit of shifting and changing rid of indented lines at regular intervals The grass gave way to scattered trees Mendez kept a wary eye above hiht up with hi to ask a question but he didn’t say anything They walked side by side in silence for a while, picking their way through the trees, dividing their attention between scanning for possible threats in the branches and checking the ground beneath for anything edible Mendez couldn’t see Toh by now to pick up on his h
"You okay, son?" Mendez asked
"Yes, Chief"
"You know you did al you could"
"Yeah It’s just the first time someone’s sacrificed their life for me Deliberately, I et harder until Tom made peace with himself about it But it ay too soon Kurt, Wil iaraves yet, and everyone--hie where the deaths hadn’t becoral part of the new reality Mendez found hiwho he’d lost He hadn’t forgotten about it; it was just that grief was set aside out of habit because that was the only way to cope, and every so often it would coht like needing to tel Kurt so that he was dead
They didn’t have a war to fight any longer Terrible as it was, coive you time to think until much later Now they al had plenty of quiet time on their hands to brood about the people they’d lost
"We don’t know he’s dead," Tom said "Only that he didn’t make it into the sphere"
Mendez just looked at hi anyone It didn’t spare them the reality that would eventual y hit them al the harder
"Even a Spartan can’t hold off a Covenant army," he said And even Spartans lose one buddy too ht of Lucy
"No -ho BS we spin the public"
Toetic, as if he was e at straws Mendez turned slowly and took a few paces backward to check behind, but he wasan eye on Halsey You wouldn’t stop at anything, would you, Doc? Kel y a more like close protection She didn’t seem remotely troubled by the fact that Halsey had abducted her for this jaunt
Not for the first tis we accept I used to be a regular guy, and now look at the crap I get up to
Halsey glanced at him for a second, al suspicion Yeah, so Ackerson took her research and Mendez had cooperated with hiram because she didn’t think her next tranche of candidates was good enough What did she think this was, some private hobby, that al those lives lost and al that pain could just be flushed because it didn’t meet her personal standards? If she’d cal ed it a day because her conscience had kicked in, that would have been different But it hadn’t And Ackerson, unlovable dick or not, at least ram hadn’t been wasted
Wonder where he is now?
Listen to yourself, Mendez Denial You’re still in goddamn denial The UNSC used child soldiers Under-tens Tin-pot dictators who did that ended up charged ar crimes What does that make you?
Mendez forced hiht in front of hiuilty labor was only going to get harder He brought the patrol to a halt fifty meters from the towers to assess the entrance and the safest way to approach, looking up at the concave wal s for anything that resembled doors He couldn’t see any, but that didn’t necessarily mean there was no entrance
He opened the radio attached to his col ar "Lieutenant? We’ve reached the foot of the tower We don’t see you"
"We took a detour, Chief" Fred sounded upbeat "Got so for your position"
The trees and grass ended fifteen meters from the tower A paved perimeter surrounded the whole structure, like a service road stones Mendez walked a few old stone blocks in the hope of seeing a hairline split that would indicate an opening He didn’t plan to touch it until the other squad caught up with hiered an unknown mechanism that sed the behind him She didn’t touch the wal either
"If this place is a survival bunker, then there has to bethis out," Mendez said "There’l be whatever the Forerunners needed to start rebuilding after it was safe to coet ships in here?"
Kel y took off her helmet to scratch her scalp "Let’s hope they were as smart about expiration dates as they ith dimensional physics"
"But hoould they knohen it was safe outside?" Olivia asked "Okay, they’d have a good idea in theory of how long the Halos would take to wipe out the Flood, but if al that was left of their entire civilization was holed up here, they’d want to make absolutely sure"