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Spartans Forever by Infection Form 143
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Spartans Forever: Part I
Date: 21 June 2006, 6:43 am
A single drop ship hovered quickly to the outskirts of a concrete jungle, to drop a small squad of Spartan Ops. Their mission: stop a rabble between a rouge government, the Covenant Republic, and the UNSC. The squad was tense, for many troops, this was their first mission as part of the SPARTAN-III program. Suddenly, loud rock music filled the ship; this caused discomfort among the soldiers. "Sergeant Hamilton, sir?" Asked one soldier, Dan Tomahawk.
"Yeah," said Hamilton. "What do you need, rookie?"
"I thought we were trying to be stealthy," said Tomahawk. "I don't think this is helping us get in unnoticed."
"Stow it, rookie," yelled the Sergeant. "I heard back on the Reach colony that the Covenant Drones can't stand loud noises. It should confuse them enough to provide some cover for the LZ."
"I understand." Said Tomahawk. Suddenly, the drop ship shuddered, and rocked.
A voice then came over the intercom; it was the pilot making an announcement. "Alert: the LZ is hot. Repeat, the LZ is hot. Five to dirt, get ready troops." The Spartans performed one last diagnostics check on their MJOLNIR mark II armor, and nervously prepared for the mission.
Usually the Spartans weren't nervous about a simple crowd control response, but this area of the galaxy was said to be infested with the Flood parasite. The drop ship landed quickly while mist evaporated in the sunlight. Tomahawk gripped his right arm. The thing had been twitching and bugging up all week. But it wasn't his choice, he had lost the arm in battle, and it was replaced by Covenant technology. He was thankful, though. Thankful he only lost an arm.
"How long has it been?" Asked Hamilton.
"Excuse me?"
"I looked over your medical records," he explained. "How long has it been since you lost your arm?"
"Three years…they also gave me some freak implants."
One of the troops, who had been listening in, said sarcastically: "Well they must have done a hell of a good job."
"Why don't you shut the hell up Tanner." Said Hamilton.
The soldier bit his lip and turned away. The ship shuttered one last time before sounds of landing gear were heard. "Alright" Said the pilot over the intercom. "Good luck, Marines." With that note the Release hatch screeched open, and the troops were off.
They split up into six groups of two, and darted off in all directions. Each group either found cover, or circled around the LZ.
"Tomahawk!" Screamed Hamilton. "I need you to call in HQ, tell them that this place is crawling with Covvies!"
"I'm on it, Sir!" The Spartan soldier turned from the pile of rubble, and dove into a nearby alley way. "Unit 117, do you copy?" He said into his comlink.
"Yeah, what do you need?"
"What is your location?" Tomahawk asked as he place his firing icon over an Elites head, and fired a 7.62mm capsule into it. He charged the gurnt patrolling with it, punched his jaw, and grasped his hand around it's breathing apuratus and ripped it right off.He kneed it in the face, and left it to sufficate on the floor.
"Um, me and Tanner are on a rooftop taking out some patrol units by the Northern Comunication Tower, why?"
"Hold your position and keep firing,we have to clear that tower to transmit a message to HQ."
"Alright Dan, will do."
"Give em hell, Marine."
"John out." The message ended as Dan rounded a corner, and found himself face-to-face with a Hunter.
"Oh, sh--" The hunter charged toward him, barely fitting through the narrow alley. The gound shook as it gave chase after the Spartan, screaming "Demon is good kill!" It charged it's fuel rod gun. The Spartan grabbed for a grenade but found none. He reached for the corpse of the dead Elite, and nabbed a Plasma grenade. He pressed down to activate it, and stuck it snugly onto the spongey orange flesh, and waited for the fireworks.
He dove into an open door, and felt the hunter's blood drip through his armor. "S-O-B didn't know who he was messin' with." He walked out of the building, and continued to the spot where he had discovered the monstrosity. When he reached the area, he climbed down a flight of blood-slicked stairs. He appeared to be in a large Courtyard where a large battle had apparently been fought.
He heard moaning, and looked on his threat indicator, and a yellow dot appeared in the top-right corner. "Hello?" He shouted. "Any UNSC personell please respond."
"Over here." Said a stuttering voice. The Spartan followed it, and saw a group of Marines, with a medic hastily trying to nurse all of them at once. The injured Marines seemed to be decaying, as if they had been dead for ages, they smelt like it too. "Glad someone showed up." Said the medic. "Private Noland Holmes. Glad to meet you." He said as he extended a hand.
Daniel shook it with sneaking suspicion. "Spartan 129. What hppaened?"
"Oh, right." Said Hlomes. "Well, I'd think it's obvious, don't you?"
"The Flood?"
"Bingo."
Spartans Forever: Part II
Date: 29 June 2006, 9:01 am
"Just so you know, this episode is more talk than action."
-IF143
Second Lieutenant Daniel Tomahawk sighed, cursed, and then scoffed under his breath. He leaned against a pedestal that protruded from the planter to his right. He had time to gather his thoughts before responding to the fact that the Flood parasite lurked in the very tunnel he stood about thirty feet away from. This situation made that narrow escape from a towering hunter look like child's play.
The Flood was a strenuous opponent to humans. However, they are merely a parasite. Thusly, they were always looked down upon. The Spartan soldier had never encountered a Flood form before, but he heard countless survivor stories and seen so many experiments that he was made confident the Flood were a force like no other.
His armor suddenly felt much heavier than ever before, and he suddenly felt claustrophobic in the closed quarters of his mask. He unlatched it, and took it off to breathe. The light from the sun was brighter than it seemed to be without a tinted visor to see through.
He blinked, and ran his hand through his hair. His eyes opened, and he looked at Medic Holmes. It seemed that he too was devastated that the Flood had come in contact with him. He was pale, and is eyes would flash back and forth across the courtyard. Blood stained his clothes and chest plate. He wore rubber gloves and a nervous smile on his face.
"So," said the medic. "What should we do about this? I mean, i don't want to end up like him." He pointed a finger toward one of the marines on the floor. Tomahawk noticed a bullet the dead marine had taken to the skull, and several intrusion scars in the ribcage area. His skin appeared to be rotting, with a strange side-effect of mutation. He- no, now Tomahawk realized it was an IT, seemed to be growing strange tentacles.
"The professional thing to do..." Tomahawk placed the mask over his face. "Would be to take out every last one of them. However, seeing as that is almost impossible, I think it would be best to tell my squad about thi-"
"NO!" Screamed Holmes. "If you do that, they'll quarantine this sector!"
"Uh," groaned Tomahawk. "That's kinda the idea."
"You don't understand," screeched Holmes. "We found something down there. It wasn't made by the Covenant."
"Then who-"
"Forerunners." Said a voice behind him. Tomahawk turned around, and Spartan 117 stood in the blood-soaked entryway, and shifted his assault rifle from hand to hand suspiciously.
"John?" Tomahawk blurted. "What are you-?"
"I was getting weird readings form in here, and I got suspicious." The Master Chief, a Spartan like no other, the only one known to have encountered the Flood, the one who had single-handedly taken out two of the existing HALO installations, a survivor.
"Sir," Tomahawk said. "You've encountered the Flood before. You know how to handle this kind of situation." He paused. "We need your help to get through this Subway and up to the Covenant's Base of Operations."
"Say no more..." he stopped.
"Sir?"
"Oh, right." He stepped down the stairs, and shuffled across the courtyard, muttering something that sounded like "Times like this I wish Cortanna were here."
He motioned Tomahawk and Holmes to move to opposite sides of the tunnel's entry. They nodded. Tomahawk began to take his position near the entry. "Hey," said Holmes. "Take this." He handed the Spartan a shotgun. "It's fully loaded. Aim for the head."
The Chief pressed down on the holo-panel, and the doors shuddered apart. Then, without warning (as usual), all hell broke loose. Several Flood forms spilled from the doorway, and attempted to tackle the three soldiers. Because Holmes was so vulnerable, they tried their best to keep him guarded.
Several combat forms leapt around the Spartans, in attempts to box them in. Infection forms spilled between the legs of the zombies, the three troops shot single blasts into the swarm, and a chain reaction began to pop continuously. Tomahawk chucked his last remaining plasma grenade into the crowd.
The bulky carrier forms popped, and the infection forms popped out. "I've never seen this many before in my life!" Shouted the Master Chief.
"I've never seen any before in my life!" Shouted tomahawk back to him, trying to appear cocky.
"Shut up and stay focused!" Screamed Holmes. He ducked under a leaping elite form, and slammed it in the skull with the butt of his shotgun. "There's too many! Head for the Subway!" The Chief took note of that, and hosed a few Flood forms with bullets, and cleared a path.
"This way!" The three sprinted through several infection forms and carriers, and closed the shutter doors behind them. Just when Tomahawk thought it was safe, he turned his back to the closing doors.
He felt a sharp pain in his back, and an infection form slid through his armor. suddenly, the world went black.
Then the coldness rushed in.
Spartans Forever: Part III
Date: 19 August 2006, 8:43 am
His mind was spiraling into the abyss. He didn't, no, couldn't realize why he felt the way he did, but he did feel death, nonetheless. He tried to move, but couldn't. He could feel the damp, firm earth beneath his body; but he couldn't se it. Spartan 129, Daniel Tomahawk, had been infected by the Flood parasite.
He heard muffled voices. One was deep, and raspy. The other seemed to stutter, and had a higher pitch. They made strange comments like: "Have you found it yet?" Or "Crap, my pliers broke." He tried to speak to them, but found that yet another one of his humanly functions had stopped working.
Without warning, His eyes flashed open, and some kind of medical instrument was plunged into his spine. "Aaaaarrrggghhh!" He shrieked. He craned his neck, and looked back. Private Holmes was busy trying to scoop something spongy out of Dan's armor, while Spartan 117, the Master Chief, stood behind him, with his flashlight on the surgery taking place.
"Holmes?" Asked Tomahawk in a slightly garbled and woozy voice.
"Oh, you're awake?" Asked Holmes, sounding wary. "I think you might just want to pass out again."
"Why?"
"Because this is gonna hurt like hell."
"May I ask why my back has been ripped open?" Asked Tomahawk, a bit more irritable now than before.
"Chief, could you hold him down, please?"
"Sure." A stiff voice answered. A hand pressed against Tomahawk's neck, and pressed it to the floor.
"You've been infected by the Flood parasite. And it's a damn good thing you're a Spartan, or all this operating on your spine would have killed you by now." He ripped the bulbous infection form from Daniel's spine, which popped after being squeezed by Holmes.
"JESUS CHRIST! How did that thing get inside me?"
"You turned your back on that swarm before the shutters closed." Said the Chief, removing his hand from Tomahawk.
Holmes began to re-attach Tomahawk's spinal plate to the MjOLNIR mark II armor. "You were knocked out for about an hour; we almost left you for dead." Said the Chief.
"Oh," said Tomahawk. "That's really comforting."
"What? He said 'almost' it's not like we did." Holmes said with the classic stutter.
The ground beneath Spartan 129 was soft, yet wet. Coarse, yet it felt comfortable. Or was it the morphine that made it feel comfortable? Who cares? He thought, and never addressed the topic again.
As he stood onto his feet, he surveyed his surrounding environment, or at least he tried to. The only thing he could see was the Master Chief and Holmes. Although he smelt a putrid odor, and he heard water dripping. The scenario was almost menacing. His threat indicator was far from blank.
"While Holmes was fixing you up, I took a chance to look around." Said 117, "I found power boxes down the corridor to the left, but the power cells are bone dry."
"Did you manage to find an exit?"
"No."
"Dammit." Said both Tomahawk and Holmes in unison.
"So, what now?" Asked Holmes nervously.
"Look at our threat indicators, and move away from the enemies." Said the Chief.
And they did. They made a three-man defense chain, Holmes was between the two Spartans, and was armed with an assault rifle. Both Spartans wielded shotguns, and took turns on flashlight duty, because of the long recharge times. The maze of hallways seemed to cause the navigation points on Tomahawk's visor jump.
The trio were constantly on edge, and uneasy about their surroundings. They would encounter a stray Flood or two, but nothing to serious. When they managed to navigate their way out of the darkness, guess what they found? More darkness. Although stray Covenant lamps left faint purple illumination along the bare corridor, navigation was still hell. Some parts of the halls were slicked with blood. There were times when the stench grew so bad, Tomahawk gagged.
"Stop." Said the Chief.
"Why?" asked Holmes, who now defended the back.
"Quiet." He paused. "You hear that?"
"What?" asked Holmes. That's when Tomahawk heard it: the groan of a hoard.
"Run." Said John. He began to move. Tomahawk and Holmes were planted to where they stood. The chief screamed "RUN!" Tomahawk began to sprint blindly behind the Chief.
"Why are we running?" He shouted. "I thought the flood were slow!"
"Whoever said that is a DUMBASS!!"
Tomahawk looked back. Holmes was sprinting slower than the Spartans, but he was keeping up without any problems. But Holmes lost his balance, and slipped on the damp floor.
"Chief, wait!" The chief looked back, and ran toward Holmes. As soon as they were about four feet from the marine, a grey tentacle emerged from the darkness, and grabbed Holmes' leg.
"NO!" Tomahawk leapt forward, and grabbed Holmes by his wrists. "HOLD ON!"
Holmes' wrists slipped from Tomahawk's grasp, and his screams echoed off the blank walls.
"Tomahawk, MOVE!" The Spartan was paralyzed; the Chief grabbed him, and flung him over his shoulder.
All proceedings after that were memorized as this:
The stench of the Flood getting closer, tentacles whipping at his helmet, and a glare. The next thing after that was emerging into the outskirts of the city, and the sight of thousands of cruisers locked in combat eerily looming spectacularly overhead.
Okay readers, if you want to post a reply or criticism to this story, please do so. If you found this story to be less than a 6/10, please keep in mind that I wrote it at 1:00 AM, and I was tired. If you liked it, thank you.
Look for the continuation of Tomahawk's journey in Mysteries of the Untold SPARTANs.
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