The Cole Protocol

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “Nothing on the wounded or dead.”

  “Sir?” Faison wasn’t questioning Keyes this time, or annoyed. He wanted to know what Keyes was thinking.

  “The Pelican is down. If any of your men find a way to talk to the Midsummer Night, have them tell Zheng to stand off for now. That we have things under control.”

  “I’m on it, sir.” Faison went quiet.

  Keyes took a deep breath and another wave of dizziness hit him. They were losing too much air from the cargo bay. He had maybe another fifteen minutes before he’d start gasping.

  “Sir?” Faison was back. “We’re being jammed. Nothing’s getting out. There are some pretty hefty blast doors between us and the cockpit. We can start working on blowing those out to see if we can gain access to this ship’s comms.”

  “No,” Keyes said. “They’ll have more surprises. Not worth it right now. Get back and let’s regroup, figure out what to do.”

  “You have a plan?” Faison asked. Keyes smiled inside his ODST helmet. He sure as hell had a plan. But Keyes wasn’t going to broadcast it over a suit radio, not when the Insurrectionists aboard already showed a capacity for messing with their communications so easily.

  “No, Commander. I just want to regroup, take care of our wounded, and get ready for the Midsummer Night to come in. Get every ODST back to the cargo bay ASAP. Move it.”

  He motioned one of the Helljumpers over. The man’s tag read MARKOV.

  “Sir.”

  “This armor really vacuum proof?” Keyes asked.

  “Yessir.”

  “How long can the air hold?”

  “Fifteen minutes, sir.” Good, that hadn’t changed in his years off.

  “Alright, Markov,” Keyes looked around, then lowered his voice. “We need explosives. We’re going to widen one of these debris holes in the hull large enough to shove one of these containers through. Say nothing over comms, ask for anything you need in person and quietly. Grab as many battle rifles as you can, a pair of field goggles, and all the ammo you can hang onto. Move it.”

  Markov took off, and Keyes walked over to a puncture in the far side of the hull from the cargo bay doors. The ragged edges whistled as air leaked out the gap.

  Keyes walked back toward the wounded. “Listen, as everyone comes in relay this in person. Not over comms, understand? I need all these cargo containers searched and cleared out. Put the dead in one, the wounded in another.”

  Helljumpers flooded back into the cargo bay. As word of the order spread, each man started pulling their comrades toward the empty pair of containers.

  Markov came back with a pair of battle rifles and extra ammo magazines tucked into every pocket of his armor. Keyes looked him over. “Strip your armor, son, and hand me those rifles. Then I want you in the container with the wounded.”

  “Sir?”

  “I’m going to need to get out there in front of the containers.”

  “There’s other armor,” Markov protested. He pointed a black-gloved hand at the rows of dead men.

  Keyes got up close to the man’s helmet. “You want me to use body armor that may have been damaged in the explosion, that may have caused their injury or death? We don’t have time to check them over.”

  “Markov, strip your armor down, now!” A Helljumper with squad leader paint on the shoulder of his body armor had walked up behind the two of them. Faison.

  Markov removed his armor, and just as quickly Keyes started buckling up.

  “No plan, huh?” Faison said out loud. “Sure doesn’t look that way from where I’m standing.”

  Keyes finished snapping up. He was now another black-clad ODST Helljumper for all appearances. He slung the pair of battle rifles over his shoulder and checked to make sure the ammo was all secure.

  He looked at Faison. “I lied. I have a plan. They blew us up at the boarding, and they’ve set off the emergency beacon that’s bringing in the Midsummer Night. Because we obviously didn’t set it off. What do you think is the next step? I’m willing to bet this whole freighter is ready to blow the moment our ship gets close enough. So for now I want you to get this gap lined with explosives. I want a hole big enough to shove a container through. Wounded are in one container, dead in another. Any walking and fit Helljumpers I want jumping outside and throwing themselves clear of the freighter.”

  “We’re blowing out of here?”

  “Literally.” Keyes held up a battle rifle. “When you’re in zero-gravity training, rule number one about firing a gun! Make sure you’re braced or you’re intending to go flying.”

  “Newton’s third law, sir!” Faison nodded his head. “For every action there’s an equal, and opposite, reaction. You want us to use our weapons like pocket rockets, sir?”

  “Now you’re talking my language,” Keyes said. “Yes. We’re all going to jump ship and use our weapons to maneuver, but me first. I can get far enough clear of this jam to warn the Midsummer Night what’s happening, we don’t want them shooting at us by mistake.”

  “And we’re not using the bay doors because?” Faison asked.

  “When terrorists set off a bomb, it’s often designed to create panic so they can do real damage when people start to flee. And what’s the natural escape route here? Can you guarantee me that there are no weapons outside covering it?” Keyes asked.

  “Bay doors . . .” someone muttered.

  “Exactly. Plus, it’s pointed the wrong way. We have only fifteen minutes of air. We all need to head straight for the Midsummer Night. I want ODSTs hanging onto the container with the wounded, so they can navigate it as best they can away from the ship using their guns. Leave the dead tagged with a beacon, we’ll pick it up after-action.”

  Faison shook his head. “This is crap, sir. We’re risking our lives to jump clear of a ship with limited air when we should be taking the fight right to them . . .”

  “I’m not asking for your feedback, Faison,” Keyes said firmly. “This is an order.”

  For a moment they stood and glared at each other, then Faison backed down with gritted teeth.

  It only took another two minutes before the Helljumpers had the containers sealed, explosives primed, and were ready to rock. It had to be done quickly. If there were Insurrectionists still lurking around on the ship, somehow, it wouldn’t take long for them to realize Keyes had figured out what they were up to.

  The ODSTs had performed well, organizing the whole thing with quiet efficiency. The wounded waited inside a cargo container that had been dragged to the hole and the other Helljumpers got ready for their departure.

  “Let’s do it,” Keyes said, from a safe distance.

  “Fire in the hole!” Markov pressed a remote.

  The explosion rocked Keyes back, slamming him against the container behind him. Fortunately, this time he had on a helmet. Molten metal rained down, sizzling as it hit the cargo bay floor.

  Four Helljumpers rushed to the edge with Keyes. He felt the suit kick over to internal air as the pressure dropped. They grabbed his arms and legs.

  “You sure about this, sir?” one of them asked.

  “Get on with it,” Keyes said.

  They wasted no time asking him again; all four held him between them like he was a battering ram. They ran toward the side of the hull at a sprint, and then threw Keyes through the center of the ragged hole. One of the rifles caught on an edge and was ripped free.

  But he still had the other.

  Keyes flew out in a cloud of crystallizing vapor.

  Out of the corner of his eye he saw a series of muzzle flashes. Something struck him in the back, spinning him out of control. Stars cartwheeled around him. No more bullets struck; he was probably already far enough away that the black armor was too hard to spot. He’d only been visible because of the cloud of vapor ice around him.

  “Midsummer Night this is Keyes, come in.”

  He waited for a moment. There was no reply.

  Keyes grabbed his remaining battle rifle and tried to ga
uge his rate of spin while he breathed slowly to remain calm. He fired against the direction of his spin until he’d stopped and he could see Finnegan’s Wake off like a toy in the distance. He looked around.

  He couldn’t see the Midsummer Night out there, but he’d cleared the freighter in roughly the right direction. He just needed to get farther away.

  He tried to radio in again as he lined up a shot that would move him farther out in the right direction, but not fire bullets right back at the freighter where the ODSTs would be following. “Midsummer Night, this is Keyes, come in.”

  Again, no reply. Keyes fired the rifle off, a burst of fire aimed below the freighter, a few seconds above to compensate, moving him farther away into the quiet darkness. Keyes’s heart sped as he thought about how little time he had left. If Zheng had moved away, or to the other side of the freighter . . . Keyes willed himself to remain calm, and follow the plan. Life was full of what-ifs and they had no place in an emergency.

  Keyes emptied the battle rifle’s magazine, and ripped through the spares as fast as he could.

  In the far distance the Wake looked about as small as his thumb. He could see two specks of red metal falling away from it, and hoped it was the two containers and the rest of the ODSTs getting clear of the freighter.

  “This is UNSC Frigate Midsummer Night,” Zheng’s voice suddenly crackled in Keyes’s ears. “Identify yourself.”

  “Lieutenant Keyes, sir!” Keyes grinned. “The rest of the ODSTs are jumping clear of the freighter. We were attacked. Wounded and dead are in the two containers that were just shoved out. The freighter is most likely a big trap, sir, probably rigged to blow when you got close.”

  Keyes raised field glasses up to his helmet. Recognizing the model, the helmet’s heads-up display accessed the device and the view of the distant freighter zoomed. He could see a steady stream of Helljumpers using their weapons to propel themselves away from the gray craft: a swarm of black dots drifting out in the vacuum. “Well done, Faison.”

  The two containers became visible, the tiny figures of Helljumpers hanging onto them, their guns aimed at the ship. Once the first group cleared the ship, the Helljumpers hanging onto the containers started firing their weapons to get the bulky boxes moving outward.

  In the distance Finnegan’s Wake collapsed, sections of the ship straining against the ribs of its bulkheads and then caving inward. The Insurrectionists hiding on the outer hull had realized that the ODSTs were abandoning ship on the double, and were blowing it up while they could still take out what UNSC forces they could.

  “Helljumpers empty your magazines!” Keyes shouted, even as Faison screamed for them to do the same.

  The freighter blew out in a white-hot fireball of debris, the brightly colored shockwave of gas and debris stripping the containers of the Helljumpers clinging to them.

  In the bright light, and under magnification, Keyes saw the outlines of Helljumpers splayed out and spinning as they were tossed away from the vicinity of the destroyed freighter.

  Keyes stared in horror, forgetting to breathe. They hadn’t gotten clear in time, and because he insisted on going first, taking the risk of any Insurrectionist fire on the way out, he might be the only one to survive.

  “Scramble recovery vehicles!” Zheng shouted as a shock-wave of glowing gas slammed into Keyes.

  In the wake of the fireball came debris, and Keyes felt himself thrown farther away as a constant pitter-patter of chunks of the ship, along with even larger pieces of deck plate and machinery, flew past.

  A numb feeling of shock filled him.

  His first mission back was a failure. He wasn’t fit to be out here at all, and he had gotten some extraordinary men killed because of it.

  CHAPTER

  SIX

  EDDIE’S IN THE ROCK, THE RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

  A structure the size of the Rubble, with its hundreds of habitable asteroids with artificial gravity all connected by docking tubes, had a lot of places a man could get a drink. Eddie’s in the Rock was one of hundreds, and on any given ranking of the bars, it lay somewhere in the lower ten.

  Delgado knew that any ex-smugglers who would know anything about the Kestrel wouldn’t be anywhere trendy, or frequenting the larger habitats where slamming beats of flip music blared out from behind the doors built to look like industrial airlocks.

  No, they’d be holed up in one of the outer habitats, far from the core, where the asteroids were still being mined or hollowed out. Where the bar door was an actual airlock, in case some massive piece of construction equipment broke a hole in the rock while baking it and all the air blew out.

  Delgado had spent the better part of his day ducking in and out of the dark holes drilled into the sides of these habitats near the edges of the Rubble, places hastily equipped with permacrete and grating inside. Dressed up in a cheap pair of clean pants and a Distancia leather jacket, he had meandered through habitats without artificial gravity, and others where it was half a standard gravity to make it easier on the construction crews.

  Eddie Underwood looked up as Delgado walked into his bar. “Distancia, right?” His artificial right hand, a fake pink against Eddie’s white upper arm, jerked a bit as he cleaned a glass out with a clean rag. Eddie’s in the Rock was a dive, but one with an owner obsessed with cleanliness.

  “Yeah.” Delgado had shuttled mining supplies from one freshly finished habitat to another, as well as mining crews in a hurry to get from one end of the Rubble to the other. He was a known quantity in this crowd.

  Delgado sat at the bar. A crowd of heavy-set miners lined the counter, and toward the back scattered groups drank loudly in booths or played gravity ball on a table. A lean body-builder or heavy-crew worker sat alone in a booth in the far corner with his back to the door. “Heard about Melko Hollister?”

  Eddie nodded. He gave no indication how he felt about it, which Delgado could take. “What’ll you have?”

  “Here to ask a favor.” Delgado leaned on the bar near a corner post that ran up to the raw rock ceiling. Hanging over the bar was a stone arm. It was Eddie’s. He’d lost it while working on a crew, falling into liquefied rock with his hand out to try and catch himself.

  He’d retired after that. He had his lost arm jackhammered out of the cooled rock and started the bar.

  Eddie hadn’t said anything, so Delgado continued. “I know it’s soon, but I don’t have any crew. I’m looking for anyone in search of a ship to work on.”

  “Maybe I know someone,” Eddie said.

  “Looking for a whole crew,” Delgado replied. “Willing to pay a solid finder’s fee. I’ve got a chance for a cheap lease on a ship with a Slipspace drive, a one-time run sort of thing. I need the sort of crew that can handle Slipspace jumps without getting frozen. Particularly one with recent experience. Particularly anyone who’s gotten back recently from the Inner Colonies?”

  Eddie leaned forward. “Ya know no one is smuggling anymore. All the navs have been Purged.” Purged. Eddie capitalized the word with his voice. It was the topic of discussion throughout the Rubble. How they were getting cut off from being able to slip the occasional ship out and back over enemy lines. What little news of the outside world they’d gleaned, what supplies they’d managed to haul back, had all come to a halt. People were scared. Some speculated it was Insurrectionist hard cases, sealing them off from the UNSC. Others blamed the Kig-Yar, pointing out that the Covenant had, after all, destroyed Madrigal. They feared the Rubble would be next. Some claimed that the UNSC was cracking down on all nonmilitary travel.

  “There may a ship or two still straggling in,” Delgado muttered. “Some that might still have nav data and help me out.”

  “Like the crew from the Kestrel?”

  Delgado froze. “I wasn’t specifically looking for information about them . . .”

  “Huh . . . Well you’re not the only one. Miss Universe over there is, too.” Eddie jerked his head toward the booth in the shadows where the massive man sat. He shi
fted, and Delgado noticed the triceps flexing under the person’s shirt. He had to assume Eddie meant there was a woman in the booth with the guy.

  It wasn’t a bodybuilder sitting there. It wasn’t even a man. It was the Spartan, Adriana. He recognized her face. The last time he’d seen her, she had been surrounded by iridescent gray metal, and she’d worn the immensely powerful armor as if it had been a second suit of clothing.

  Now she wore a clean pair of pants and a tight, long-sleeved shirt in the manner of the off-duty miners in the bar.

  It didn’t camouflage the fact that she was well over six and a half feet tall and dominated the booth.

  It couldn’t camouflage the fact that she could, quite obviously, break any man in the bar in half. And many of them seemed to sense it and keep well clear.

  Delgado sat back down in the chair, and Eddie sighed. “You know her.”

  “No, not really, Eddie. Not really.” Delgado didn’t try too hard to sell that. He slid off the chair and approached the booth. “Can I buy you a drink?”

  She didn’t bother to turn, but waved him into the booth. “Hello Mr. Delgado,” she said. “Hunting for something, are we?”

  Delgado glanced around the bar. “Maybe. But the chances of me finding it are somewhat ruined now that you’ve arrived asking the same questions.”

  There were people paying too much attention to them near the other side of the bar. “I’m sorry,” Adriana said.

  Five men walked over before Delgado could suggest that they get the hell out of there.

  “What the hell are you two doing asking about the Kestrel?” The leader of the little group asked.

  “Hey, guys, come on.” Delgado held up his hands, placating them. “Let’s stay calm.”

  “Shut up.” These were large, muscled miners, their eyes glassy from being too far into the drink. “This freak’s been nosing around about stuff that’s not her business.”

  Adriana looked at the group. “I’m just asking a few questions. No reason to make this anything it’s not.”

  “What we don’t need, is some Earth-lovin’ she-hulk skulking about our bars, asking about things that ain’t none of her business,” another man snapped.