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He dove for the activation panel, and stabbed at the controls.
The elevator platform dropped like a rock, so far down and so fast that his ears popped.
Where the hell was Cortana when you needed her?Always telling him to “go through that door,” “cross that bridge,” or “climb that pyramid.” Annoying at times, but reassuring as well.
The basement, if that’s what it was, had all the charm of a crypt. A passageway took him into another large space where he had to fight his way across the floor to a door and the tunnel-like corridor beyond. That’s when the Spartan came face-to-face with something he hadn’t seen before and would have preferred never to see again: one of the combative, bipedal beasts—this one a horribly mutatedhuman . Though the creature was distorted by whatever had ravaged his body, the Chief recognized him nonetheless.
It was Private Manuel Mendoza, the soldier that Sergeant Johnson loved to yell at, and one of the Marines who had been with Keyes when he disappeared into this nightmare.
Though twisted by what had been done to him, the Private’s face still retained a trace of humanity, and it was that which caused the Master Chief to remove this finger from the shotgun’s trigger, and try to make contact.
“Mendoza, come on, let’s get the hell out of here. I know they did something to you but the medics can fix it.”
The reanimated Marine, now possessed of superhuman strength, struck the Chief with such force that it nearly knocked him off his feet, and triggered the suit’s alarm. Mendoza—or rather, thething that had once been Mendoza—waved a whiplike tentacle and lashed out again. The Spartan staggered backward, pulled the trigger, and was subsequently forced to pull it again as the twelve-gauge buckshot tore what had been Mendoza apart.
The results were both spectacular and disgusting. As the corpselike horror came apart, the Chief saw that one of the small, spherical creatures had taken up residence inside the soldier’s chest cavity, and seemed to have extended its tentacles into other parts of what had been Mendoza’s body. Athird shotgun blast served to destroy it as well.
Was that how these things worked? The little round pod-things infected their hosts, and mutated the victim into some kind of combat form. He considered the possibility that this was some kind of new Covenant bio-weapon, and discarded it. The first of these combat forms he’d seen had once been Elites.
Whatever these damned things were, they were lethal to humans and Covenant alike.
He quickly fed shells into his shotgun, then moved on. The Spartan moved as fast as he could—at a dead run. He charged into another room, scrambled up onto the gallery above, blew an Elite form right out of his boots, and ducked through a waiting door.
The area on the other side was more of a challenge. The Chief had the second floor to himself, but an army of the freaks owned the floor below, and that’s where he needed to go.
Height conferred advantages. Some well-placed grenades, followed by a jump from the walkway, and sixty seconds of close-quarters action were sufficient to see him through. Still, it was a tremendous relief to pass through a completely uncontested space, and into a compartment where he found anew development to cope with.