CFV-88, 3/3 - Trouble

May 04, 2009 10:29

The PINpoint demonstration seemed to have broken up what uncertainty had remained about Grif's truthfulness. With that hurdle passed, it was easy enough to outline for them the plan that had been drawn up. The rest of the crew would be pulled out of cryo in groups, checked out by the ship's medical staff, and briefed on what had happened to them. They were then dispatched throughout the ship to check it over, performing minor repairs as necessary to ensure that it could handle any pressures involved in being PINpointed en masse and maneuvering in any manner other then being pushed straight forward.

Grif helped out here and there, as he could. He eventually was able to tell the vast, interconnected tale of the Covenant War after their disappearance, the Civil War that followed, and how they in turn led to his ending up in The Future and later the Nexus. He heard their stories, not only about what happened in the Shield World, but the war with the Covenant in general. Paul, who had stood out as the only civilian in the briefing who wasn't also a scientific genius, was actually there as a reporter. During the war, his assignment was to tell the people about the war as it happened. Now, he spoke about having lived on Harvest, how he'd been away when the Covenant had hit it and how he'd gotten attached to the Spirit in the hopes that their efforts in helping retake the planet would also allow him to find his wife Carol and their kids. As he spoke, he also recorded the story, as he had the stories of everyone else on board who'd chosen to speak, hoping to compile them into a book of memoirs.

After a text conversation with a friend, he made sure to take the time, while he already had to PIN back to civilization for the PINpoints that his tech staff had prepared, to go to a grocery store. (As a fully-armored super-soldier, shopping is always an interesting experience, if only for the reactions one gets from the other shoppers. It gets even more interesting when one is going shopping for enough food to feed an entire warship for several days. The ship's cooks, in turn, were entertained by watching him move around the kitchen, as well as appreciating his help.)

2 May 3349

That alarm is really fucking annoying, Grif thought to himself, as he ran through the ship's corridors to the aft cryo bay. «Serina, what's going on?»

«Medical staff reported a problem while defrosting the last members of the crew,» Serina replied. She didn't sound particularly stressed, being capable of extensive multi-tasking, but she was a bit terse. «They suspect that someone in one of the pods had been infected by the 'Flood,' as you called them, that we encountered on the Forerunner Shield World, and now that he's waking up, the infection is quickly taking over.»

«Shit!» Frustrated by his progress, he started mapping out blank spots in the corridors' population, and PIN-hopping from one to the next rather than trying to plow through them. He rounded the last corner at the same time as the Red Team SPARTANs, and they entered the bay together.

Several pods were still occupied. One of them, however, was teeming with medical staff, all working at various consoles and keypads. He wasn't quite sure what exactly they were trying to do, but from what he could see through the pod's window of the thing thrashing around inside, at least one of the possibilities could be very very bad.

Switching from the radio to his helmet speakers, Grif exclaimed, "Fuck! Hey! Whatever you're doing, do not crack the seals on that pod!" He reached back and unracked his battle rifle from his back. A flash of PINpoint light delivered Grif's thruster/Gluon Gun pack, appearing behind him and dropping into the magnetic clamps the rifle had occupied. The pack, in turn, had clamps of its own into which he returned the rifle.

Serina resolved into being on the bay's holopad. "Aren't you discounting the possibility that they could save him with timely intervention?"

"Weren't you listening, when I told you guys about what was found at the Halo? Didn't you notice, when you were fighting them on the Shield World? The archaeological records about why there aren't any Forerunners around anymore? There's no coming back from Flood infection! It's like being bitten by a zombie, and if there's one thing that, in this universe, I'm an authority on, it's dealing with zombies."

The Flood-infected soldier's thrashing intensified, to the point where parts of the pod were starting to make noises from the strain. Grif ran up to it and started making motions between the medical personnel and the bay door.

"Out! Everyone who's not still in a pod or wearing MJOLNIR needs to get out of the bay, so Serina can lock down the room."

"And why would I need--"

Serina's question was cut short by Captain Cutter's voice calling out over the comm system. «Aft cryo! Report!»

Starting to get a little annoyed, Grif steamrollered over everyone else (namely, Serina and the medical staff; Red Team were content to have their weapons out and... at least mostly pointed at the pod, Grif was sure) to tell him that there was a Flood-infected person in one of the cryo-pods, and he needed the bay cleared of people who wouldn't be able to survive his opening a portal that would drop him and the pod into a spot of open space near the ship, just to make sure any Flood spores that might leak out got sucked out too.

Almost as though on cue, the Flood's thrashing managed to dent part of the pod's casing and crack the window slightly. Technically speaking, the seals were still holding, but Grif didn't like the look of that crack. He rushed forward and put one hand on it, activating his secondary shield projector to provide a temporary patch. "Now, Captain!"

There was only the briefest of hesitation. (Annoyance of being talked to like that on his own ship, ONI directives be damned, Grif suspected.) «Do as he says,» Cutter ordered. «All non-SPARTANs clear out. Serina, seal the room once they've left.»

Everyone acknowledged the order and set to following it. Once the door was closed and sealed, Grif took a more solid hold of the cryo pod and followed Serina's instructions in releasing the clamps holding it to the deck. Looking back at the other SPARTANs, he said. "If you really want, you can hop into the portal after me, but without any maneuvering gear, that's really not a good idea, so I recommend you switch on your boot magnets and hang here."

They nodded. "Good luck," Jerome said.

"Thanks." The glowing green portal opened under Grif and the pod, and with a whoosh of changing air pressure and a bit of extra thrust from his armor's gravitic systems, they dropped out of sight.

Ten kilometers behind the Spirit of Fire, Grif and the pod shot out of the other end of the portal, which closed behind them. He pushed the pod away, dropping the shield-patch and using his thrusters to more quickly put distance between them. His right hand reached behind him, the crowbar clamped to his forearm hooking onto the Gluon Gun's handle so he could bring it forward. A quick check confirmed that the firehose connection between the backpack and the gun's nozzle, as well as the power connections between the backpack and his armor's new Number Two reactor, were all good.

It was at that moment that the window shattered, followed shortly by the door being forced open. While he'd seen plenty of pictures in books he'd read about the Halo Incident and archaeology of Forerunner history, but this was the first time Grif had had a real, first-hand look at the Flood. It was, he thought, quite frankly disgusting, green-gray protrusions growing out of the now-deceased soldier's body and distorting its shape. Strictly speaking, it wasn't really much worse than some of the other forms of zombies he'd encountered on past Zombie Earth expeditions, but the fact that such a thing could exist in his own universe felt somehow insulting.

Setting his thruster-pack to maintain his current distance from the pod, Grif adjusted his grip on the nozzle's handles and fired. He was disappointed to find that other than the slight vibrations that resonated up through his armor, the vacuum of space largely muted the furious, raving howl that normally accompanied the incandescent purple-white helix of ravening molecular disintegration. The pod and its contents were small, as such things go, so it only took a couple of seconds' fire for them to dissolve into nothingness. He felt like he should have some sort of quip, but nothing was coming to mind just then, so he simply stowed the Gluon Gun's nozzle and PINned back to the ship.

When he arrived, Grif saw that the cryo bay had been repressurized and opened back up, and that Red Team and Serina had been joined there by Captain Cutter and Professor Anders, all of whom had been watching the proceedings on the bay's display screen. Cutter turned to him and asked, "All clear?"

Grif took off his helmet and nodded. "Yeah. We'll want to scan the rest of the pods before starting the wake cycle, so we can dispose of them with, hopefully, a little less excitement. I think my armor's sensor systems has some info I can pass to Serina. Running a ship-wide scan, inside and out, would probably be good insurance. Probably not necessary, since you probably would've had problems with active Flood on board long before now, anyway, but just in case."

"Sounds reasonable," Cutter agreed.

"Oh, also?" Grif finally got that feeling he was missing earlier, and grinned. "That shit I did out there's way less fun without any liquor stores to loot."

Everyone -- including the SPARTANs, as implied by their body language -- stared at him, utterly baffled.

"...What?"

Multiple sweeps throughout the ship determined that that one pod had been the extent of the Flood's infestation. With the last of the crew defrosted, the Spirit of Fire quickly reached as full a state of ship-shapeness as she was going to get without her Slipspace drive. Further, PINpoints were installed at regular intervals so that their fields of effect overlapped, having been synchronized by Grif's technical staff.

(Having seen the PINpoint in action, Professor Anders had taken every possible opportunity to disassemble whichever one was nearest and examine it as thoroughly as possible before Grif could find her and confiscate it. By their final day in deep space, he suspected that she'd already long since puzzled out their workings, but had continued taking them apart because she knew it annoyed him to have to deal with it. At that point, he considered just leaving her to it, but couldn't quite leave open the possibility that she was still at it in earnest, and also he really did need all of them fully assembled and in working order if this was to work.)

Finally, the time came that there was nothing left to keep them. Everyone who had been at the briefing gathered on the Bridge. From the position he'd taken up at the Bridge's large forward-facing windows, Grif turned towards the Captain's chair.

"Okay. They know we're coming, and are rolling out the red carpet. I've got the coordinates they're expecting us to arrive at plugged in. Anytime you're ready."

Cutter just sat and breathed in for a second, as though getting a feel for the right moment. The breath came out as he exclaimed, "Jump!"

Bright light twinkled all along the length of the Spirit of Fire as all of the PINpoints activated and the ship vanished. One moment, the view out of the front window was blackness with the occasional pinprick of light. The next, they were looking down at a lush, Earth-like planet, with ships and orbital stations in various orbits.

Grif made a dramatic sweep of his arm to the view. "New Reach, folks. Enjoy the view, while they escort us in."

Some time later, the ship was docked at one of the larger orbital stations. Representatives from Command and ONI arrived, and the process of getting everyone off of the ship and into new lives began. Grif saw to it that all of the PINpoints that had been installed were detached and sent back to his technical people. After that, he hung around a while, keeping his own eye on the proceedings, reasonably sure that the crew would be treated well but not quite able to believe it until he saw for himself. He needn't have worried, though, as they were all given heroes' welcomes, so after one final meeting with the core staff to say goodbye (including waving down their attempts at a salute, preferring handshakes), he PINned back to Blood Gulch.

plot|cfv-88, element|oni, place|spirit of fire, element|where's grif?, narrative|action

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