The last sentence hung in the air, as seemingly physical a presence as the holographic avatar that spoke it. "Don't make a girl a promise that you can't keep."
For the psychologically disturbed antisocial killing machine and ethereal super-intelligent software program, it was a rare moment of humanity. A vulnerable response to a desperate promise coming from a place of deep respect and camaraderie. Their eyes met somehow through the opaque visor.
The elfin-featured avatar strode forward, closing the distance from her guardian's hand to his body, stretched up, and gave John - the Master Chief - a kiss on the cheek, passing though the soldier's thick helmet. To his shock, he felt it.
She sensed the shock, of course. "I'm embedded in your neural interface, Chief. Feeling in your body is all in your brain."
Chief nodded impassively. "You've never used it before. Rampancy?" His lack of tact was compensated for by his sincere concern, one doesn't learn a lot of tact in child soldier training. "No, John. I just spent the last four years alone monitoring you." She glanced toward the wreckage falling from the sky. With a coy smile, she added "we've been a bit busy since then."
Chief looked again at Cortana, in this rare moment of peace. Something deep in his brain, something lifelong conditioning and exposure to violence couldn't change, was responding to the contact in a very human way. "Cortana..." She cut him off. "I see your brain chemistry, John. Don't worry, it's normal after experiencing human skin contact. Not that you'd know, with how often you experience it."
With a quick scan of his surroundings and check of his radar and electronic shield status, Chief sighed and lifted off his helmet. The feeling of air against his face was a shock, like leaping into ocean water for the first time in a year. He pulled down the armored coif and absorbent gel-lined skin-suit hood. "There."
"Don't worry. I won't ask you to show more skin than that. I'm used to you wearing enough for the both of us." She smirked at him, the mind-reader.
Chief had a seat on the cold hard ground, leaning back against a rock formation and taking a drink of water from a concealed canteen. "I won't recover from rampancy, Chief," she had just told him as flaming wreckage fell around them. Halsey, they just needed to get to Halsey, to fix her. In his perception, she still hovered like a hologram above him, staring into him with soulful humanlike eyes. Normally, he'd expected a moment like this to be interrupted by some counterattack, and explosion, an aerial strafing. But, at least for the moment, none had come. "Looks like you knocked them onto their back feet for a bit Chief, might not hurt to take a minute to think."
He didn't know how to do that. When he tried, his thoughts were swarmed by images of firefights, where to go for cover, where enemies could ambush from, the trajectories of grenades. Under that, the word "rampancy," repeating itself over and over. The valley around them was on fire.
A soothing voice entered his thoughts, loud enough to quench the violence, flooding over his burning thoughts like a broken dam. "Easy Chief, I'll keep an eye out." He knew it would barely dent her processing power to monitor more than his human eyes and ears ever could. He felt heavy. It registered that it was more than just her soothing voice calming his thoughts. "That's right, I realized the bio foam flooding your body with adrenaline was, for once, not a wonderful thing. Swapped it out with a mix of serotonin and some mild painkillers. Should feel like a warm shower."
It did. She gave him a minute. A chunk fell from a shattered burning hull half a kilometer away. Everyone else was eerily quiet. Chief's thoughts had quieted too.
"Now that you're calmed and I'm collected, did a quick seismic scan. Difficult to parse through all the falling wreckage, but I'm confident there's no armored foot or vehicle traffic within a kilometer of here, and I'll warn you if there was. Not picking up any indications of sonic booms from banshees or wraiths coming into the airspace either." She reappeared, looking like she was glancing around, for his benefit of course. Maybe it was all the serotonin, but he allowed himself to feel, just a little bit, the grief of the recent news hit him. He loved her.
She looked down at him with a half-cocked smile. "Love you too, Chief."
"Cortana, can we talk?"
"I know what you're thinking before you can say it, but..." she softened, "Sure Chief."
He considered his words carefully. He has been laconic throughout their time together, but when a close friend announces their terminal illness, even a Spartan must talk through it. "We've been through a lot." That would have to do.
"Wow, you blow me away, John. What girl could withstand your charms?" His pale face looked questioningly forward, so she quickly clarified, "that's sarcasm, Chief." Cortana leaned forward, forearms crossed mockingly holding an invisible pen and clipboard in her hands like an old-timey therapist. "And how does that make you feel?"
It was good they were back to bantering again.
"I don't know."
Never mind.
