By the time Black Team arrives on site, the colony is completely silent.
It's eerie, in a way that's hard to put into words. Like the aftermath of some unspeakable natural disaster. Only silent, empty streets, lit by a sky of steel and glass and artificial light, acting as a protective barrier against the true atmosphere of an inhospitable world. Stained with blood and rubble and scorch marks, yet completely devoid of bodies.
The true scale of the catastrophe only becomes apparent when they go deeper into the colony.
The place was a simple mining settlement, one of many posted up to exploit whatever resources the UEG could draw out of the countless worlds glassed during the Human-Covenant War. The mines had been sectioned off after workers had dug up something that immediately caught ONI's interest. All that was known that it was some kind of cache — Forerunner in origin.
They sent teams to investigate the site. The cache was opened, and all contact with both ONI assets and the settlement was lost in under an hour.
They could only assume the worst.
In the deeper parts of the colony, among the maintenance tunnels and the engineering sections, there are no signs of a Flood infestation. Instead what they find is enough bloodshed to paint the floors, the walls, even the ceilings with gore. There are little signs of human life, at most finding a severed hand here, a chunk of indescribable organ there. There are paths carved into the dried blood however, drag marks and shuffling, unsteady footprints that looked to have been dragging many, many somethings through the now-sticky pools of blood.
Black Team doesn't need to walk for very long to find the first bodies.
Or rather, the bodies find them first.
It starts off as a faint rumble coming from the far end of the transport tunnel, something barely perceivable to normal human hearing yet distinct from the natural hum of the colony's innards.
To the keen ears of a Spartan, that rumble quickly rises into a more discernible crescendo of dozens, maybe well over a hundred pairs of boots stampeding towards their position.
The corpses that come into sight, civilians and workers and soldiers alike, aren't twisted by any sort of visible infection or parasite. Instead they look as if they just stood right back up after suffering whatever terrible deaths befell them, even in spite of the grievous wounds their bodies held, walking and shambling and crawling and even sprinting along on missing limbs, severed torsos, and dragging, entangled masses of guts and viscera.
Black Team is beholden to a tide of living dead, hellbent on throwing themselves at their Spartan prey with nails, teeth, and whatever tools still remained clutched in their rotted hands.