As Keyes ran onto the flat roof, he saw the running lights of the approaching Pelican wink off. The craft swooped by, blinding them with a sudden glare of a spotlight that then shut off almost as quickly as it had been flicked on.
“That you coming out on the roof, sir?” Jeffries asked.
“Better believe it,” Keyes grunted, sprinting away from the stairwell.
“Coming back around for the land, deploying the ramp,” Jeffries reported.
The Pelican banked and disappeared off into the night. Then it appeared again. Jeffries was throwing it full speed right toward the top of the building, skimming just over the rooftops in a near suicidal dash.
Keyes had to admire the skill.
From the street level the bright flash of a rocket launch lit up an alleyway and a rocket streaked for the Pelican.
“RPG!” Keyes shouted, but Jeffries had already kicked the tail of the Pelican out, crabbing it around in midair to face the rocket and present a smaller profile.
The rocket streaked by, missing but bathing the Pelican in an eerie orange light.
A second rocket flashed and leapt up from underneath the Pelican. It slammed into the belly of the craft, gutting it. Debris rained down out of the Pelican, and a second explosion inside rippled throughout the craft’s body.
It hung in the air, engines wailing, but not moving.
The third rocket slammed into its tail, and the Pelican dropped out of the air into the street below, sinking from eye level in an inferno of boiling metal and parts.
Keyes threw himself at the ledge of building, firing his sidearm into the street, but the Insurrectionists had already melted back into the shadows.
The flaming wreckage burned itself against the back of Keyes’s eyes as he waited for some movement, any movement, near the ruins of the Pelican.
“Lieutenant,” Watanabe grabbed him and yanked him back from the edge.
Chips of concrete stung Keyes in the face as gunfire hit the lip of the building. Watanabe locked his eyes. Keyes stood in front of Watanabe, frozen, as Watanabe grabbed him by the face to look right at him. “There’s nothing you could have done, Keyes.”
Keyes numbly ejected the spent magazine from his sidearm and slid in another. “I’m the one who transferred him aboard the Midsummer Night.”
“He was a good soldier and a good man. Jefferson flew hard, and now he’s down and we need to focus.”
Keyes stared at the ONI spook. Jefferson? What the hell was that? Watanabe was supposed to be a man of details, observant. But Jeffries hadn’t rated his attention, apparently. But then, that was a spook versus enlisted. They didn’t care about the man standing next to you. They had their own agendas.
“Keyes, you listening? Can you raise the ship?”
“I can try,” Keyes said.
By the stairwell Hansen fired three shots, and someone screamed.
Keyes moved away from the lip of the wall and closed his eyes. He flipped frequencies on the earpiece, and then looked up at the stars in the night sky. One of them was the Midsummer Night, parked in geosynchronous orbit. It hung directly over the city.
“Midsummer Night, this is Keyes.” He waited a moment, then repeated it.
A response came through, crackly and faded. “Keyes, this is Kirtley. Glad to hear your voice. What’s your situation?”
“Pinned on a roof,” Keyes reported. “Jeffries was hit by RPG fire; the Pelican is down. We’ve got Insurrectionists and a mob ready to tear our throats out.”
“Listen, hold tight,” Kirtley said. “There are ODSTs on their way.”
“They won’t get here in time,” Keyes said.
“Major Faison had it out with the captain, said you guys needed boots on the ground for support if a mob was moving in. They left early, before you called Jeffries. You need to hold out twenty minutes. Copy that? Twenty minutes?”
Twenty minutes. Might as well have been an eternity.
But it was a chance. “Tell them to space out and watch out for rockets,” Keyes said.
“Will do. Good luck, Lieutenant.”
Keyes ran over to Watanabe and Hansen. “ODSTs are on their way. Twenty minutes.”
Watanabe and Hansen glanced at each other. Watanabe held up his side arm. “Last mag.”
“Same here. Keyes?”
“I’m on my last mag too.”
The three of them looked down the empty stairwell.
“Twenty minutes, huh?” Hansen said.
“Twenty,” Keyes repeated.
“Well, I’m game to try it,” the ONI agent said, and steadied herself against the wall for a better shot.
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
SCYLLION WAREHOUSE DISTRICT, CHARYBDIS IX
“They’re not trying to push up the stairs hard enough,” Hansen said, ten minutes later.
So far Keyes had only fired warning shots. The rioters would peek around a corner and fire off a round, and he would too, and then there would be silence until the next rioter nerved up enough to try doing the same thing.
“She’s right.” Watanabe stepped forward, trying to look down the stairwell. He jerked back as someone fired a shot.
Plasma exploded against the walls of the foyer.
“They’ve got the Covenant weapons now.” Hansen shuffled back from the doorway.
“So why aren’t they rushing us?” Keyes asked. He scanned the rooftop. “They’re up to something.”
Hansen pulled a wicked-looking knife out of her boot and put it on the ground. “Keyes, go left, Watanabe, right. Just start checking the edges. Don’t pop your head over, just listen for anything. I’ll hold this point.”
Keyes and Watanabe took off at a crouch for the edge of the roof. Keyes skirted it, slowly moving against the concrete lip. The edge came up to his head.
On the other side of the building, he could see Watanabe doing the same.
Keyes made his way down one whole side of the building. His thighs burned from the awkward waddling by the end, and he paused to stretch them out.
Watanabe had stopped as well.
But he wasn’t stretching his legs. He had his gun out.
Three men leapt over the lip near Watanabe, with Kincaide vaulting the edge just behind them. The ONI agent charged them from the side, shooting down the first man, then the second.
Keyes couldn’t risk firing, he’d just as likely hit Watanabe at this distance, so he sprinted at the group.
Kincaide used the third man, a rioter, as a shield. He shoved the surprised civilian into Watanabe, then shot them both several times with a plasma rifle. Keyes felt sick as he watched Watanabe fall. The man may have been ONI, but he was crew and a fellow soldier, and Keyes realized he was screaming.
Keyes had his pistol up without a second thought. As Kincaide seemed to turn in slow motion, Keyes pulled the trigger.
He’d been aiming for the chest, but the first shot hit Kincaide in the shoulder. It spun the Insurrectionist back, and he struggled to bring the heavy plasma rifle back up to aim at Keyes.
Keyes shot him in the chest, then stomach, grazed his side, and then ran out of ammunition. He slammed into Kincaide, grappling for the alien rifle.
“Damn . . . UNSC . . . pig,” Kincaide spat, still trying to force the rifle up into Keyes’s ribs. “Go back to Earth. You don’t belong here.”
The memory of the explosions in the cargo bay of Finnegan’s Wake, the flaming Pelican Jeffries piloted going down, wounded ODSTs gritting their teeth and bearing the pain as they waited for help, all filled Keyes’s mind. He grunted and kept forcing the plasma rifle down until it was aimed at Kincaide’s feet.
He pulled the trigger, and a burst of white-hot plasma destroyed the Insurrectionist’s leg and threw Keyes back, still holding onto the rifle.
Concrete bubbled where they’d stood, and Keyes felt the legs of his uniform burning. He patted the fires out quickly, and looked back at Kincaide.
The man had lost his left leg, blown clean off at
the thigh. He’d been shot in the shoulder and chest.
Yet he now had a small pistol in his right hand, lifting it up to point it at Keyes with determination in his glazed eyes.
Without hesitation, Keyes blew the Insurrectionist’s head off his body with a burst of plasma.
His hands shook. He’d never shot a man before. He’d shot at people, fired warning shots, practiced in drills, but never actually looked at someone in the eyes who was about to kill him, and beat him to the draw.
Watanabe groaned, and Keyes crawled over to him. The plasma rifle had ripped through the ONI agent’s left torso, leaving a crisped mess.
Keyes gagged at the smell.
“This is bad,” Watanabe muttered.
“Don’t move,” Keyes told him. “Stay still, don’t close your eyes.”
“It hurts.”
Keyes bit his lip. “Just hang in there, Akio. They’re on their way. We just need to hang in there.”
Hansen fired three shots at someone in the stairway trying their luck. Watanabe grabbed Keyes’s forearm and grimaced, then let go.
Keyes looked down at the limp, dead body of Major Akio Watanabe.
He stood up and grabbed Jason Kincaide’s headless corpse, dragged it to the lip, and shoved it over. He heard the distant thump, and a crowd of people shout in surprise.
Keyes walked to the ledge and looked down. A fire truck had been commandeered, the ladder pushed up to the roof. Several hundred rioters milled below, many with plasma rifles.
“Listen up!” Keyes held up his newly acquired plasma rifle as he shouted. “Anyone else tries storming the roof, I’ll blow their damn heads off too.”
He fired the plasma rifle twice into the base of the ladder, and watched with satisfaction as metal slumped and the ladder slid off the side of the building, falling over toward the crowd.
Rioters scattered as it struck the street in their midst.
“Now,” Keyes snapped the word out, in full drill sergeant cadence. He may as well have been talking to a crowd of new recruits. “UNSC marines are about to arrive any second. If I were you, I wouldn’t want to be standing around here in plain sight, lest they get the mistaken impression you’re hostile, and act accordingly.”
Keyes turned around and walked away from the edge.
“Look,” Hansen said, pointing up.
Stars in the sky grew larger, twinkling brighter and brighter, until they could be seen streaking toward the building.
“The cavalry has arrived,” Keyes said.
CHAPTER
SEVENTEEN
SCYLLION WAREHOUSE DISTRICT, CHARYBDIS IX
Twenty single occupant exoatmospheric insertion vehicle pods came in high, ripping through the atmosphere, still glowing hot from reentry. Parachutes popped, enough to slow the human-sized capsules down a bit. Then at the last second rockets flared, lighting up the night sky in flames and thunder as all the SOEIV pods slammed into the reinforced structure of the roof.
Concrete dust hung in the air, and chips off the roof clattered down as the pods split open and ODSTs leapt out with their battle rifles drawn.
From the corner of the roof, in a pod that leaned precariously near the edge, one ODST hopped out. The SOEIV shook, and then fell off the edge onto the street below.
The Helljumper pulled his helmet off. It was Faison. “Miss us much?”
Keyes pointed at Watanabe, and Faison paused. “Damn. Didn’t like the spook, but still . . .” He pointed at two ODSTs and detailed them to wrap up Watanabe’s body. Keyes looked away and swallowed the lump in his throat. He’d seen too much death for one day.
“They’re firing RPGs around. It’s probably too risky for Pelicans,” Keyes said. “They took Jeffries out.”
“We heard about them coming in,” Faison said. He looked around. “But don’t worry, we’ve got it in hand, Lieutenant. You saved our asses back on the Finnegan’s Wake, now it’s time for us to even up.”
“I don’t want to see anyone else die down here,” Keyes said.
“Magnus! Jeremy!” Faison shouted. A pair of very tall and bulky Helljumpers ran over. “Grab four spotters, get your gear in place where you two can do your thing. Start marking targets. But stay in the shadows.”
“Yes, sir.”
“And someone,” Faison said into his mic, still hanging from his ear, “please start tossing grenades down that stairwell.” The mob had retreated when Keyes threw the body of Kincaide over the wall, but there were gunshots coming from the corridor and the street as the mob worked itself back up.
Two svelte ODST shadows meandered over to the side of the doors and skipped grenades down the foyer and into the stairwell.
“Fire in the hole,” one shouted, just before a fireball gushed out the door.
There were screams from the depths of the warehouse.
Keyes switched frequencies to the marine’s open chatter. He could hear the spotters with their night vision and thermal gear muttering. “See the one out by that window?”
“Yep, marked him.”
“Okay, I got one on top of the building. North-north-west. Near the water tower.”
“Sneaky. Yeah.”
Keyes followed Faison over to an edge, where he held his helmet over the lip for a second, then pulled it back over and reviewed the cam footage.
“Look at that,” Faison said. “All this excitement scared off the rioters. So, anyone left is an Innie.”
“Perimeter secure,” a Helljumper reported. “They’re not shooting at us yet.”
“Okay,” Faison said. “Bring on the decoy and let’s play find-the-RPG-launchers.”
A Pelican with its running lights on came in slowly, passing them overhead, and swooping around. “Take out your targets,” Faison said.
The two snipers, Magnus and Jeremy, were the focus now.
Crack. The sound of an SRS 99 carried over the rooftop. “Got Mr. Window.” The pair of snipers had crawled onto the top of the small structure above the foyer, a building on a building. It gave them unobstructed line of sight to the surrounding streets and buildings.
“Mr. Water Tower is . . . clear of the lattice . . .” Crack. “And he’s most definitely not going out to party tonight.”
“Moving location.” One of them jumped off and sprinted across the rooftop, the long barrel of the sniper rifle bobbing. He set up on the corner of the building, the edge of the gun resting on the concrete lip.
“While you’re huffing about, Mr. Street Corner is sighting on the Pelican . . .” Crack. “And down.”
Crack. “That’s the last one.”
Faison made a circling motion with his hand. “That’s how we do it, gentlemen. Bring the other Pelicans in.”
Two Pelicans descended out of the clouds and came in hard, slamming onto the roof. Hansen and Keyes ran up the ramps and buckled in; the Helljumpers followed.
The Pelicans dusted off, engines screaming as they zigzagged their way out of the neighborhood. An occasional zap of plasmarifle fire rang in the distance.
As the ramp shut, Faison staggered his way forward to Keyes and handed him him a cigar.
Keyes eyed the flaked exterior. “A Sweet William?”
“Nothing but the best, sir. A victory smoke.”
“A victory smoke?” Keyes looked over at Watanabe’s body. “We lost two of our own down there. Those rioters have Covenant weapons, now.”
“Sir, any day you come back from a mission alive, it’s a victory.” The Helljumper grinned. They were a different breed of soldier, Keyes had to keep reminding himself. They had to be. Packing yourself into a heatshield pod, braving the flames of reentry over a planet, and parachuting down into the middle of action, surrounded . . . that was a bit above the call of duty for a normal marine.
Keyes handed Faison back the cigar. “I don’t smoke. It’s against regulations.”
“Sir, I’ve seen you standing with a pipe, in the chart room, looking over maps.”
His grandfather’s pipe. It was
an heirloom, and Keyes kept it on him. It comforted him to have it in hand. An old habit. “And I don’t smoke it. But tell you what, marine, when I see a victory, I’ll smoke one with you. This wasn’t a victory, it was a cluster—”
“It wasn’t a complete loss,” Hansen said. She stood at the center of the Pelican, balancing as the craft shook and shuddered its way higher and higher. “The reason Kincaide was so set on eliminating us was that he realized he made a mistake. He told me the name of the next ship making a smuggling run while he was trying to bid up the price of the weapons. Said he’d done business with them.”
“And the name of the ship?”
“The Kestrel. These Covenant weapons, they’re a problem, Keyes. We need to figure out why the Covenant’s doing this. And we damn well need to stop it.”
“Hoo-ah,” one of the Helljumpers agreed.
Keyes folded his arms. The Kestrel.
They’d hunt it to the edge of the galaxy if necessary, as far as Keyes was concerned. Someone was going to have to pay for all the deaths on his watch.
“Sir,” the pilot of the Pelican shouted back into the hold. “Sir, the Midsummer Night’s hailing us.”
The pilot’s voice had cracked slightly.
Fear.
Keyes walked calmly up behind the woman’s chair, even though he could feel the kick in his stomach.
The pilot’s helmet twisted back. It had the name Carson stenciled on it. The Pelican bucked a bit as it passed over clouds, still gaining altitude. The craft was pitched up, aiming for the black of space. “The sensor stations at the edge of the system think something’s coming in. Something big,” she said.
“Covenant?” Keyes asked.
“Know of any other fleets planning to wing by this place?” Carson returned to getting them to orbit, and Keyes stumbled back down the steep angle.
“Are there any Navy ships scheduled to arrive?” he asked Hansen.
She shook her head. “Cole is still out near Harvest. Mawikizi’s main fleet is spread out around Ectanus. There are three destroyers picketing—”
“The Night’s main attribute is her stealth,” Keyes said, his mind rapidly running through some rudimentary plans on how three Destroyers and the Midsummer Night could face this Covenant fleet. So far only Admiral Cole and his battle group had ever scored a meaningful victory against the Covenant. And it was a loose secret within the Navy that Cole had thrown three ships against the Covenant forces for every ship of theirs he destroyed. Midsummer Night and the three other frigates would be facing long odds. “If it’s Covenant, we’ll have to utilize that stealth for a defense.”
The Cole Protocol Page 11
