Sergeant Avery Johnson grappled with the Elite, both of their hands jostling for control of the MA5B assault rifle between them. The alien was a seven foot tall mean mother and strong as hell, but Johnson would be damned if he wasn't going to put the boot to this extraterrestrial son-of-a-bitch. He owed his boys that much anyway.
They were out here on this blasted plain in the shadow of the wreck of the Pillar of Autumn trying to make the best of a bad situation, shipwrecked on an interstellar hula hoop those split-lipped, squid-faced bastards, the Covenant, called Halo, and fighting asymmetric warfare. That was hard enough business without the Flood complicating things. Johnson had seen a lot of strange things in his time as a space marine, but your own men coming back at you as undead monsters had to take the cake. To tell the truth, it made his blood freeze up.
But the Corps had a saying for when times would get hard: 'Fight through.' And right now, Johnson was managing all the fight he could muster. The Autumn had been loaded down with goodies for the almost suicidal mission of trying to capture a Covenant vessel, a Hail Mary to end the war by infiltrating and cutting off the Covenant top brass. That mission had gone down in flames along with the ship, but the crash site was loaded with gear to recover and make a stand with. A raid on the hulk seemed a natural objective, in spite of it crawling with alien bastards, those new laser-packing drones that had cropped up out of nowhere, and, now, the Flood too.
It had been like pulling teeth the whole way, too damn many casualties and good Marines cut down to plasma fire. Johnson was the last man standing, locked in hand-to-hand melee with this lone Elite, their two squads having near annihilated one another in hails of gunfire and explosions. He would make every last one of these goddamned aliens pay in kind for every drop of blood spilled.
He yanked on the rifle with all his strength, the Elite refusing to give ground, when a thunderous rumble from the distant wreck of the Pillar of Autumn shook the entire plateau. Smoke billowed from the ship. The Autumn had been packed with explosives, everything from flares to thermobaric heat-seekers and crashing headlong into Halo was bound to jostle something, but Johnson knew that kind of earth shaking could only mean one thing: the ship's fusion plant was going critical. And here he was, only a few klicks downwind, well within the blast range. "Oh, shi—" he said.
The will to fight slipped away, his arms slacked. Somehow the Elite seemed to recognize the same thing, the alien letting go of the rifle and casting its glance at the erupting starship, its four jaws hanging open. It had been said that the Covenant were religious fanatics. Was the Elite seeing the face of God about to run roughshod over the both of them?
Seeing the futility in doing anything else, Johnson lit up his last stogie he'd been saving before he spread his arms open inviting the Elite to a hug. "This is it, baby. Hold me."
The Elite understood his gesture and wrapped its arms around him in a deep embrace, its three fingers clamping lower and lower onto his back until they were firmly on Johnson's ass. Their armor pressed together, his head tucked against the leathery bumps of the alien hide, the scent of his own sweat mingling with the foreign scene of the Elite's musk, Johnson was surprised by a stirring in his uniform trousers.