The Cole Protocol

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Delgado looked over at the blond pilot. “Is there a problem?”

  “Yeah.” Finlay threw a punch to the gut that doubled Delgado up, coughing. “I don’t like Insurrectionists. You sons of bitches have cost us enough—now we’re covering your asses on some suicide mission?”

  Delgado staggered back, and Finlay stepped forward. Delgado planted his feet and head-butted the man in the face. Finlay staggered back, hand on a bloody nose. “You goddamned—”

  He didn’t get any further. Pilots and an officer surrounded him, pulling him away.

  “I’m not a damn Insurrectionist,” Delgado said as he walked by him.

  One of the other pilots joined him. “He’s a bit strung out by all this. He and Jeffries hit it off pretty quickly.”

  “Jeffries was the one who was killed?”

  “Yeah. Nice guy. Great pilot.”

  Delgado stopped. “I’m sorry to hear about it. But I didn’t kill him.”

  The other pilot nodded. “I know. Come on. They’re going to get Finlay patched up and calmed down. For all his testiness, you can trust him in the air, you understand? But we still should give him some space.”

  Delgado nodded and followed the pilot away.

  The plan was to have the Midsummer Night come in fast at Metisette’s upper atmosphere, then decelerate by aerobraking. Once the friction of the atmosphere had slowed them down, the ODSTs and Spartans would be released.

  Then Midsummer Night would boost up and out again, and loop back around to settle into orbit so that her Pelicans could retrieve the ground forces.

  But there was a good chance, Delgado knew, that even if they were successful, if the Spartans and ODSTs took too long they would all still be on the surface as the evacuated parts of the Rubble came down.

  Then Delgado wouldn’t be needed at all.

  The deck of the Midsummer Night vibrated. The ship had left its berth in El Cuidad, and was accelerating toward Metisette.

  Here we go, thought Delgado.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY

  MIDSUMMER NIGHT, EN ROUTE TO METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

  Keyes was back on the bridge of the Midsummer Night, but this time he sat in the commander’s chair. He hadn’t thought about Zheng in a while. Too much else going on.

  But as they thundered toward Metisette, he wondered what thoughts would’ve run through Zheng’s mind in this same predicament.

  Zheng had been feared as a suicidal leader, one willing to throw his ship against the Covenant. An unfair assessment, Keyes knew. And ironic. Because here Keyes was now throwing his own ship and crew into a mission that might well have the same result.

  He’d promoted Dante Kirtley to Ops. Rai Li remained on weapons. A junior officer, Lieutenant Second Grade Jason Burt, managed communications.

  And Keyes had navigation rerouted to the commander’s chair, because what they were about to do was beyond tricky.

  “How are you doing on your end, Juliana?” Keyes asked.

  “Slinging mass and burning fuel, Lieutenant.” All throughout the Rubble docking tubes had been severed as the last of the occupants pushed their way through.

  Deputies with bullhorns shouted and directed traffic toward the Exodus habitat, but so did every computing device in the Rubble. They’d all been taken over by Juliana and were blaring the need for evacuation. She’d shown Keyes some of the organized chaos.

  “I just took out the five Kig-Yar communications relays,” Juliana reported. She’d used the last of her mass drivers to fire hyperkinetic slugs of metal at each of them. Now Kig-Yar comms were down to line of sight.

  “And here comes those annoying Kig-Yar ships that have been hovering around.”

  Keyes smiled. It was a small trap for the Jackals. Knowing that they would move in, Rubble ships with missiles were lurking around the mass drivers to ambush them.

  Juliana fed Keyes grainy video showing sparks of fire and tracers lighting up the vacuum, and the resulting return fire of plasma as Kig-Yar and Rubble ships fought it out over the mass drivers.

  “Where’s the Infinite Spoils?” Keyes asked. That was the one he was nervous about. That Jackal ship could match his frigate, from what he’d seen while aboard it.

  “Keeping back. You said there were Sangheili aboard it?” Juliana asked.

  “We saw Elites, yes,” Keyes replied. “While we were retreating.” A screen popped up on the arm of his chair, showing him a diagram of where that ship lurked. It was moving toward several of the large habitats, now thankfully abandoned.

  The screen jumped to video showing plasma ripping apart the large asteroids and boiling rock as clouds of air burst out along with slagged metal.

  Hopefully destroying those parts of the Rubble would keep that monster at bay until Keyes was done.

  Then he looked forward to engaging it.

  He shut the views down and brought up Metisette.

  “Good luck, Juliana,” Keyes said. The decoupled habitats that Juliana commanded were trailing far behind Midsummer Night on a seperate trajectory.

  The Rubble trailed behind Hesiod in the same orbit around the sun as the gas giant. And Metisette orbited Hesiod. That meant that soon Metisette would disappear behind Hesiod from the point of view of the Rubble. Keyes was rushing to catch Metisette even as this happened. His signal to Juliana, a direct line-of-sight signal, was failing even now as Hesiod’s stormy atmosphere began to get between them.

  Juliana’s trajectory was different. The pieces of the Rubble under her command were much slower. She was moving them forward from their trailing point behind Hesiod to a point where Metisette would be when it came out from behind Hesiod in its orbit.

  To be strict about it, the Rubble wouldn’t rain down upon Metisette. Instead, Metisette’s orbit would swing the moon around Hesiod at breakneck speed right into the pieces Juliana had jockeyed into place.

  The effect, however, was the same.

  The Redoubt would be destroyed.

  If they all did their work.

  Keyes had the frigate moving so fast it was shaking. The reactor could be close to overheating, yet no one breathed a word about how hard they were pushing the ship. They all knew they needed each additional second.

  “ODSTs ready?” Keyes asked.

  “Standing by,” Lt. Kirtley reported.

  “Aerobraking in four minutes. Everyone strap in and hold on.”

  The Midsummer Night was in the shadow of the moon now, streaking toward it like an arrow toward a bull’s-eye. Keyes could see the swirls and outlines of the moon’s clouds.

  It grew over the next minutes until it filled the cockpit with its strange orange- and red-hued light. Keyes was aiming his ship deep into the thick atmosphere, counting on the immense friction to slow Midsummer Night down.

  He’d timed this down to the millisecond, run it by Juliana, and now all he could do was let the ship’s computers continue with the course . . . and hope.

  They’d picked up Jackal contacts, but they’d approached too fast for them to engage. They’d run right through the cordon before the Kig-Yar even realized they were there.

  “Aerobraking!” Keyes shouted.

  They hit Metisette’s atmosphere and the ship began to buck and pitch. A junior officer standing by was thrown clear across the bridge.

  “I gave orders to strap in, damn it,” Keyes snarled as the young man grabbed someone’s chair, his arm bent at an impossible angle, his face bloodied. “You’re endangering the bridge crew.”

  The man crawled away and got himself to a safe place and strapped in, moaning loudly due to his injuries.

  A fireball grew around the frigate, heating up as they continued to thunder through the high atmosphere of Metisette. Deck plates creaked and groaned as they readjusted. Keyes glanced at the readouts. They were losing speed. Dramatically.

  They were also losing hull integrity. The friction was burning off plates every second.

  Keyes tapped the screen. A second set of preloaded routin
es sprung into effect. Thrusters fired, slowing them down even further.

  He glanced at the topographical map of Metisette that Juliana had uploaded to his computers.

  “One minute!” Keyes shouted. They were closing in on the Redoubt.

  They would be moving fast when they shot the ODSTs out. He could only hope the pods and their bodies could handle what came next. He didn’t know of anyone who’d attempted dropping ODSTs in a maneuver like this.

  The seconds ticked by as he waited. A hull-breach alarm sounded, and Keyes looked over at Kirtley.

  “Hull abrasions, no serious structural damage, within expectations,” the lieutenant reported. The aerobraking had lost them a lot of hull, but the ship would hold.

  “The ODSTs are go in ten,” Keyes said. He tapped the console to give authorization.

  The Midsummer Night’s computers took care of the rest, spitting the ODSTs out from a bay like bombs being dropped on an enemy city.

  Keyes watched them fall away like dangerous, black spores on another screen, then looked up as emergency klaxons went off.

  “Covenant antiaircraft fire!” Rai Li shouted.

  Teardrops of contained plasma rose to meet their ship.

  Keyes turned off the thrusters and slammed on the main engines. All ahead full, he thought with a grimace, as plasma grazed the sides of the ship.

  The Midsummer Night shuddered and clawed its way along, struggling to escape the moon’s gravity and get back into orbit.

  “Come on, girl,” Keyes found himself muttering quietly to the ship. “You can do it.”

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-ONE

  THE REDOUBT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

  Jai felt the SOEIV slam against him as it fired rockets to reach a sane velocity right before it slammed into the ground. The front popped off, and Jai stepped out onto the surface of Me-tisette with his battle rifle up.

  Four SOEIV had already hit the ground around him. Two ODSTs stumbled out; one fell to his knees.

  “Shit, I can’t even see straight,” he muttered over the comm channel.

  “Can the chatter,” Jai said. They’d had a brutal launch from the ship and a rough journey down filled with Covenant antiaircraft fire picking them off. And even Jai had been slightly rattled by the whole experience.

  But they were in enemy territory right now. They needed to get sharp, and quick. They had four hours of air strapped to their backs with rebreathers and tanks. They needed to get this mission wrapped up as fast as possible.

  The air was thick and red, and a similar eerie red fog covered everything around them. Jai continued looking around. They’d landed within a mile of their target: the spirelike building along the banks of the methane river that housed the sensor equipment capable of spotting the Rubble.

  On Juliana’s map it hadn’t looked so imposing, Jai thought.

  “We launched with three Shivas,” Jai radioed. “Tell me at least one of them managed to make it down.” He glanced at their ID pips briefly to get their names.

  Mutuku was yanking on the front of an SOEIV. The front popped loose, and a fully-suited ODST fell out.

  “Jones ate it.”

  The other Helljumper, Adams, yanked the other pod open. “Your bomb, sir.”

  Jai ran over. Good. He glanced around. The other SOEIV pods must have landed all over the damn place. They were the only ones out of fifteen supposed to hit here.

  They’d have to do.

  Jai dragged the Shiva free from the pod. A foldable frame with wheels came loose as he yanked on it.

  “Form up.” Jai grunted from the strain of shoving the frame under the large missile. Once underneath it, he pressed a button, and the wheels deployed.

  With the two marines covering his flanks, Jai started pulling the nuclear warhead toward the building.

  Mutuku opened fire. Jai looked over to his right to see two Unggoy tumble to the ground, dead.

  Ahead, more materialized. Jai gunned them down, realizing that they were only lightly armed.

  “We caught them off guard,” Mutuku observed. “They’re carrying pistols.”

  “Good for us, then,” Jai said. “Keep moving.”

  More Unggoy Grunts came, a fast frontal assault in two waves of ten. Jai picked them off as Mutuku and Adams held off attacks from the sides.

  They sprinted for the building’s door, which Jai kicked down. He threw a grenade inside and ducked as a cloud of debris flew out over him.

  Three Kig-Yar hid behind energy shields in the far corner of the room. Jai left the Shiva behind and took cover around the nearest corner.

  Mutuku and Adams got the Jackals’ attention with a burst of rifle fire; Jai threw a grenade behind them. As they turned around to shield themselves from the blast Jai picked them off.

  “We need to clear the building,” Jai said.

  “We’ll hold the door,” Adams said.

  Jai ran down the hallway that the Jackals had come from. He turned a corner, and found himself face-to-face with another. He swept the butt of his rifle up without a second thought and caught it in the chin. The alien flew backward in a spray of purple blood.

  Jai barely slowed down his run.

  He got up a set of ramps without anything getting in his way, but as he started moving from room to room he found plenty of Grunts inside.

  They were armed with plasma pistols. Jai hardly bothered keeping a count. He just moved from room to room, a gray killing machine.

  Within fifteen minutes he’d swept the entire building. The rest of the upper floors looked to be just equipment. If any Grunts were hiding up there, they were cowering away and not going to present a problem.

  He sprinted back to the foyer where the two Helljumpers waited. “How are we looking?”

  Adams sighted down his rifle. “A handful of Grunts made a run on the door. We dropped them. But I think there are a lot more out there gearing up to come our way.”

  The building was half a mile upstream from hundreds of thousands of Grunts waiting to board hundreds of Jackal ships. Jai curled his lip at the thought of so many Grunts attacking. They wouldn’t need weapons, they could just throw themselves at the team. “There’ll be more,” he said.

  Satisfied they had the situation under control, he pulled the Shiva down the corridor. He’d spotted a thick door leading to what looked like a maintenance room.

  He kicked the door open and smiled. A whole room of Covenant junk—consoles, chairs, screens.

  He wheeled the Shiva into the heart of the room and pulled the cart out, smashing it to uselessness so the Shiva couldn’t be easily moved.

  “Jai, they’re pressing hard,” Mutuku radioed over the sound of plasma fire striking nearby. battle rifles clattered. “Maybe a hundred Grunts this time.”

  “On my way soon,” Jai promised.

  He shoved Covenant junk up against the Shiva after checking the readout on the front. The timer said they had two hours before Pelicans would be back to rescue them.

  Once he had the Shiva covered he left it, closing the heavy door behind him.

  “Stowed our present away?” Adams asked from the side of the entrance.

  Jai held his rifle up and scanned the murk outside. A lot of dead Unggoy lay out in the mist. “Safe for now.”

  “Now we stay put until the antiaircraft guns go down.”

  An explosion in the distance made them jump.

  “Well, there goes one,” Jai said, checking his ammo with a sense of satisfaction.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-TWO

  THE REDOUBT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

  Adriana opened her eyes inside the HEV. How long had she been out? The HEV had slammed into a building before the retro-rockets had finished their full burn, bringing it to a near stop. It had bounced down the side and hit the ground head-first, crumpling badly. She’d been knocked out by the impact.

  In the dark she couldn’t tell if her vision was okay, but she had a raging headache and what felt like whiplash.

/>   She slapped the cover-eject switch and the explosive bolts on the cover thudded. It hardly moved an inch, but now streams of orange light came in from around cracks between the cover and the pod.

  The HEV was facedown on the ground.

  Adriana swore.

  She pulled her knees up, forcing herself back against the restraints and padding, compressing it to get her feet under her.

  The knees of her armor ground and scraped against the cover, but she finally planted her feet.

  Then she pushed the entire HEV up, lifting it onto her shoulders. She heaved it off to the side where it landed with the restraints facing the sky. It would have been a lot easier had it landed like that, she thought.

  She looked around.

  “Oh . . .”

  Tens of thousands of Grunts turned to face her, ripples of activity passing through their ranks like wind through tall grass. Since nothing had initially popped out of the pod, they’d ignored it and continued to line up to board the giant troop carriers that awaited them in this plaza.

  Adriana was supposed to land outside the Redoubt, close to one of the antiaircraft emplacements. Not here.

  “. . . shit.” She dove back into the HEV as plasma-pistol shots struck the sides.

  The HEVs held a little bit of rocket fuel to allow soldiers to use them to easily hop over to a new location. But that required them to be standing up, in the position they were designed to land.

  Adriana triggered the emergency burst with the HEV lying flat anyway, and the HEV took off across the mile-long plaza. It plowed through Grunts who flew overhead in sprays of bright-blue blood, constantly thumping and shivering as it made its way through the tightly packed mass.

  The engines finally sputtered, then stopped, and the HEV ground to a halt over the icy rock.

  Adriana vaulted out and ducked behind it with her battle rifle in one hand, yanking a rocket launcher out with the other. She was out of the main mass of Grunts. Those still hovering couldn’t decide whether to chase her or continue boarding their vessel. A massive, purple-stained gap in the center of the Unggoy formation indicated the path the HEV had rocketed through.