| abstract
| - Spartan Leon Sikowsky had sat patiently for long enough. If the match was taking this long to set up, something had to be going wrong, and he intended to find out about it. He stood up, and the other three members of Fireteam Valiant looked up. There was little else to stare at in the confined space of the pre-game lobby, the only furnishings being two plain benches placed along either of the narrow room’s long walls for the Spartans to wait on while War Games competitions were prepared. But after watching the digital mission clock in his helmet change once a minute as his only entertainment for twenty minutes, he had gotten over any pre-combat jitters, through boredom, and was now wondering what the problem was outside this cramped, windowless room. He’d been scheduled to have a Firefight simulation start seven minutes ago, and this was too long a delay to go without notice. “Roland?” Leon queried into his com, which being set for War Games would be monitored by the Infinity’s AI. “Roland, what’s the deal? Why hasn’t the match started yet?” Valiant’s new recruit, Bill Olsen, who’d been seated across from the team leader, turned to the Spartan sitting next to him. “Does this happen often?” Brian Donaldson shook his head. “Nah, first time. It’s always been quick before.” “Maybe the rookie’s bad luck.” Suggested the armored Spartan to Leon’s right, Corin Davis. To try and stifle the conversation, Leon started talking into his radio again. “Roland! Would you pick up?” His persistence was rewarded by a yellow figure appearing in his helmet. The way the other team members turned their helmeted heads, Leon knew the AI was projecting himself on each of their helmets to appear as though his avatar was floating in the room with them, hovering midway between the floor and ceiling. The illusion of a human in ancient flight combat gear moved its lips in sync with the voice he was projecting through the speakers in their helmets. “Yeah, yeah, keep your armor-plated pants on, Sikowsky. We’ve just had a bit of a snag crop up, that’s all.” “A snag?” Leon repeated, tilting his head. When he did so, he caught a small error in Roland’s projection when he moved suddenly. “What do you mean, ‘a snag’?” Roland unclasped his hands from behind his back and put them up in a placating gesture. “Relax, Ion Team’s working on getting it fixed. There’s just going to be a bit of a delay, that’s all.” “What kind of delay?” Leon asked. The AI seemed to hesitate to answer, which only frustrated him more. “Roland, open this door. I want to talk to Ion about this.” The avatar rolled its eyes dramatically. “All right, jeez.” His gold glow flickered out, and the door on one end of the room opened up to allow them onto the combat deck. Leon stepped out from under the waiting room’s low ceiling with his team behind him, and into a cavernous open space, larger even than the motor pool that housed the Infinity’s vehicle complement. While he’d been here many times, this was the first that he’d seen it without an artificial environment masking everything with holograms and hard light barriers. It could have been mistaken for the empty inside of a huge warehouse, with the floor, ceiling, and each wall perfectly flat planes that stretched on for at least a few hundred meters. For the first time, he noticed the grid across the floor which separated millions of squares, each able to be raised or lowered independently to create sloping terrain. It explained the rough feeling of the ground under his boots Leon had sometimes felt while playing. Hologram emitters were now visible at regular intervals on every surface. Normally, they made the entire room one big holotank, creating a virtual landscape with holograms and hard light that Leon would walk out onto, sometimes finding himself at an industrial complex, or inside of a Covenant ship, or often enough just some bloody gulch in the middle of nowhere. There was only one thing in the entire hangar-like space, and that was a set of scaffolds three stories high, not even close to half the way to the ceiling, up against the wall that met where Leon and his team had come in on their left. He could see two figures standing on top of it, working at a section of the wall that had been dented and torn by some kind of impact, and started closing the distance between. It took a good half a minute for Valiant team to reach the bottom of the scaffold, and when they came upon it Davis shouted up, “Hey, Ion! What the hell? We had the training deck reserved!” The two Spartan technicians perched above turned and looked down, then at one another, as if just noticing their approach. Leon was sure they’d known, however, and just chosen to ignore them. The pair, one in white armor and one in tan, clambered down the skeletal metal frame to join Valiant Team on the ground before answering. When they did, the one in white addressed him. His helmet-filtered voice echoed slightly against the steel walls. “Sorry guys, combat simulation deck’s closed until further notice.” Kodiak pointed up over his shoulder to the damaged section of wall. “We’ve got repairs to make.” Leon’s shoulders slumped. War Games was broken? “What happened?” The other, Dyne, responded. “We had Crimson Team doing a Mantis training exercise yesterday, and one of the motor pool technicians must’ve forgot to unload a few live rounds before sending them up. They killed the bleep out of some of the holotank conduits, and luckily nothing else.” Valiant muttered amongst itself regarding this unprecedented ill fortune. Kodiak clipped a welding tool to his belt and shrugged. “We’ll have it up and running again in a few hours, once we replace the projector.” “So what are we supposed to do until then?” Davis asked irately, but Leon had suddenly lost interest in the conversation. Across from them, another waiting room door had opened up, allowing five Spartans in different variants of blue-painted MJOLNIR to walk out. Dyne was saying as he turned away, “I don’t know, maybe find something useful to do?” “Hey!” Leon shouted, causing the blue Spartans to look up at him. “We’ve got the training deck reserved, Majestic. Wait your turn.” “It is our turn.” Answered the other team leader, a cocky man named DeMarco. “Check the schedule.” The exchange had gotten the attention of his own team, and the technicians as well. Leon shook his head. “Well you’re going to have to move a slot back, because we haven’t had our match yet.” DeMarco looked as though he was about to argue the point when Kodiak called over to both of them. “No one’s getting any turns until the repairs are made. S’go away!” Looking back over his shoulder briefly, Leon exhaled in annoyance and turned back towards the waiting room his team had come in through. Olsen called after him, “Where are you going?” “Nothing to be done about it.” Leon grumbled loudly enough for the others to hear, shaking his head. “We’ll come back when War Games is fixed.” And the wait set in. As hours dragged on, more and more Spartan personnel loitered around when they’d finishing their duties for the day, only to find out the combat deck was offline. It had long since become the pastime of choice for the SPARTAN-IVs, like the IIs and IIIs before them, to hone their skills to their absolute razor’s edge and advance through the complex point systems and leaderboards. In that regard, at least, they emulated their predecessors. Without the training deck, they were forced to explore other options. Some rediscovered old projects and passions, working through another few chapters of a book that’d held its bookmark firmly pressed between the same two pages for months, or learned that the rumors were true and the Infinity did in fact have a variable-gravity gym. A few even took to relaxing and socializing in the mess halls. Others, unfortunately, found themselves hopelessly lost without War Games. “Shoot.” Brian said, shaking his fist for a third time. He chose scissors, and Majestic’s sniper, Madsen, chose rock. Dealing his vulnerable fingers a swift jab, Madsen leaned back and smirked. Bran shook out his hand, more annoyed than wounded, and muttered, “Shoot . . .” Madsen took it as the beginning of another round, and when he shook his fist Brian hurried not to be left behind, starting the whole thing over again. At the same table, Davis and the team’s own marksman, Angela Forrester, had both been somehow roped into a poker game with Marcus Stacker, Doc Darvinshire, and Lieutenant Coney. It soon became clear that this was less of a game and more of a con, with the former three doing little more than sit by forlornly as their chips passed from their hands and were warred over by the two latter in a battle of intellect, luck, and deception. The Spartans and Marine sergeant were far outmatched in said areas. Corin groaned as another hand went to Darvinshire, sweeping a sizeable portion of his remaining funds to her side of the table. “How does she win with only the ones?” “Because that’s an ace, genius. Letters beat numbers.” Stacker said ruefully, dealing the next round. Forrester raised an eyebrow. “Really? Oh. I shouldn’t have folded.” Corin groaned again and looked across the room to where Leon was seated. “Could you tell your girlfriend to go easy on us?” “That’d still leave you at the mercy of the Lieutenant.” Leon responded without looking up, making a careful adjustment to the firing mechanism of his disassembled MA5D which lay in neatly-ordered pieces on his own table. Stacker chuckled grimly. “She doesn’t have any when it comes to cards.” Leon continued to fine-tune the spring he was working on. A part in the back of his mind told him he’d never be satisfied with how he adjusted the weapon, but that was how it was. The task, or more accurately his dissatisfaction with it, was letting him weather the calm much better than his team. Before he returned to the game, Corin looked around the rest of the room. “Where’s Olsen?” Leon only shrugged. Unbeknownst to any of them, Olsen was in fact literally lost in decks below them, having wandered deep into the bowels of the unfamiliar ship. He’d strayed into maintenance corridors that hadn’t been used in days, walking in twisting, complicated circles and occasionally calling out something along the lines of, “Uh, Roland? Hello?” The AI’s avatar unconsciously smiled. The combat deck’s supercomputers always needed a great deal of help from him, and while they were inactive, he found he had a lot more free runtime which he couldn’t let sit inactive. Letting Olsen wander for a little while longer, he tracked some of the other Spartans roving around the Infinity . The projection of his avatar on the bridge, for example, could have clearly seen Spartan Tedra Grant where she wasn’t supposed to be if its eyes had been for anything more than show. She’d slipped inside to talk to the handsome new bridge officer that’d caught a few girls’ eyes when he’d come aboard last week. And interested in seeing how Spartans operated, he’d allowed it even with the possibility of ship operations being marginally hindered. Grant started off strong, smooth and confident, but the moment that Navy pretty boy’s eyes sparkled, Roland detected her heart rate quicken and the first of many stutters. When she accidentally snapped a datapad in half with her superhuman strength, she flushed and quickly excused herself under Captain Lasky’s disapproving frown. Roland made sure to have his avatar make eye contact with her as she left, grinning smugly to let her know he’d watched it all happen. Leon resecured the last screw to finish rebuilding his weapon, and considered taking it apart again as the poker game’s most recent hand went to Erin, wiping out Stacker and Forrester. Behind them, Majestic’s sniper lifted both his arms into the air, celebrating a victory of his own. “Yesssss!” Madsen hissed, in a whisper that imitated the roar of a crowd. “Seventy-six times in a row. Ahhhhh!” “That’s it, I can’t take it anymore.” Brian said, slumping to rest his head on his crossed arms splayed over the table. “If War Games isn’t fixed soon, I’m going into cryo until it is.” Just then, the Lieutenant’s TACPAD beeped. She set her cards face-down so Davis couldn’t get a casual glance at them, and tapped the wrist-mounted computer’s surface. “Ah. You might want to hold that thought. Ion just sent out the word, combat deck is back online.” “Finally!” Davis said, getting up and abandoning the one good hand he’d gotten all game. Leon stayed where he was and watched as he left the lobby, with Forrester and Madsen close behind. Brian was going to follow them, but when his team leader didn’t get up, walked over. “Hey. Did you get that?” He asked. “Yeah, I heard.” Leon considered his paint-striped rifle a bit longer, still half intent on rebuilding it again, but then decided it was probably best to pull himself out of a cycle before it began. “Come on. We can square off against Majestic if DeMarco’s too impatient to wait his turn.” Heading back down towards the waiting rooms, Leon took his time, walking alone as Brian rushed to catch up with the others. Presently, Olsen emerged from a side corridor that Roland had finally shown him. “Hey, War Games is back.” “Yeah, I know.” The recruit also outpaced him, eager to get back to their artificial combat environments. Majestic’s rookie, Thorne, caught up with him next. By now the same question coming in slightly different words from each person was getting a bit repetitive. “Yeah. I know.” He said even as Thorne opened his mouth. The blue-armored S-IV’s mouth hung open a second, then morphed into a grin. “Well, I’ll see you on the field.” And with that he hurried off to join his own squad as Leon shook his head. With so many Spartans returning at once to clog the schedules, the combat deck’s operators asked for Roland to work overtime subdividing the main room into several smaller arena projections to get everything moving again. Despite its complaints, Lasky had made it an order. Valiant stepped out of the waiting room into a sunny valley in midday, though Leon knew by the fact that he could stare without squinting at the star hanging overhead that it was fake. Davis readied his rifle, looking down the gorge with his helmet binoculars to try to spot Fireteam Majestic’s members on the other side. “Man,” he murmured, “I am never going a day without War Games again.” It was a sentiment shared by a great many SPARTAN-IVs.
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