The Cole Protocol

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Some hundred Grunts finally peeled off to make a run at her. Adriana fired in short, controlled bursts, watching wave after wave of Grunts tumble forward and die.

  There were so many.

  She was quickly running out of ammunition, and now hundreds of outraged Grunts had drawn their pistols and started a second assault on her position.

  Just not enough ammo, she thought, checking her heads-up display. And she didn’t want to use the rockets. Those were her last resort.

  Screw it, this was a last-resort situation; it was her against a moonfull of Grunts. She popped up with the launcher on her shoulder and unleashed everything she had before ducking back for cover.

  As the plaza boiled with rocket fire, she looked for blips on her heads-up display. Some of the signals were of HEVs that were weapons caches, dropped alongside the regular HEVs. She needed one right now.

  She spotted one half a mile away.

  Adriana threw the empty rocket launcher away and dashed from the large open grounds of Grunts before they could regroup.

  She grinned as she approached a larger, bulky HEV that had struck into the side of one of the many tall structures that ringed the plaza. The Jackals had just grounded ships and turned them into buildings, by connecting them. Almost as ramshackle and bizarre as the Rubble, she thought, as she ripped the cover off the HEV.

  A quad bike almost fell out onto her.

  “A Mongoose?” she whispered. Useless. The four-wheeled ATVs just meant you were a biking target.

  Several Grunts rounded one of the arches of the building. Adriana picked the Mongoose up by the handlebars, using it as a shield, and then ran into the small group, slamming the Grunts into the ground with it.

  The Mongoose worked well as a weapon, a giant four-wheeled hammer that she used to crush three more Grunts in explosions of purple blood, until the wheels had all bounced off, the chassis warped, and finally snapped.

  Adriana tossed the ruined machine away. Her muscles would pay for that later, but for now, there was too much adrenaline for her to notice.

  In the distance, a long line of Grunts moved through the mist and buildings at her.

  She checked her ammo and prepared for the onslaught, just as a distant explosion caught her attention.

  They needed all the antiaircraft emplacements knocked out. They needed it more than they needed some extra dead Grunts. No matter how many she killed, they just kept coming at her. She needed to think smarter.

  Adriana sprinted for the distant river of methane, visible by the fog banks created by the waterfall as it hit the warm grounds of the Redoubt.

  Plasma fire hit the rocks near her, kicking up steam and molten splashes that stained her armor. Adriana ran faster than she ever had before in training, or in battle.

  This was staying smart. She needed to find a way to rendezvous with the ODSTs trying to take out the second emplacement.

  In the dense fog she had to slow down a bit, but it gave her a chance to catch her breath. The motion tracker in her heads-up display, overwhelmed up to this point, cleared, and showed friendlies.

  Four Helljumpers were pinned at the riverbank behind their HEVs by Grunts.

  Adriana ran up behind them. “What’s the situation?”

  “Two Jackal snipers. Lots of Grunts. Every time we try to break out of the fog and make a run at the antiaircraft gun they pick us off.”

  “You have the charges ready for the antiaircraft gun?” Adriana asked. “Who’s placing them?”

  One of the Helljumpers raised a hand. “Dobey took one in the head on the third attempt. But I can place them.”

  “There were supposed to be sixteen of you.” Adrienne pulled out the near-empty magazine on her battle rifle and slapped a fresh one in.

  “Ten of us made it down—we lost six trying to get up to the damn thing.”

  Adriana looked out into the rolling banks of orange-lit mist. Large boulders of ice and rock on the edge of the Redoubt made for good hiding places, both in the mist and outside of it.

  “Let’s stop at five attempts to charge that gun, shall we? I’ll take point.” She wasn’t sure how much longer she could keep this pace up. She could feel her blood pounding since the moment she’d stood up, surrounded by a sea of the enemy.

  She realized now that she almost went out in a blaze of glory, until she’d spotted the river and came to her senses.

  But she was still struggling to think clearly and not merely react.

  She took a pair of large stones and threw them out right where the boundary of the mist ended. Two sharp bursts of plasma vaporized them.

  That was enough for Adriana to pinpoint where the shots came from.

  Adriana tossed a pair of grenades in a high arc, one right after the other, using her strength to get them higher than any normal human toss could.

  She counted off two seconds, then radioed, “On me!”

  The sprint through the mist took another several seconds. She dodged waist-high pieces of rock as she made her attack. Just as she was about to burst out of the mist, a good fifty feet ahead of the Helljumpers struggling to keep up with her, two grenades exploded behind the pair of boulders where she figured the snipers were taking cover.

  It was all the distraction she needed to cover the ground to the first Jackal’s boulder. The Jackal was already turning to face her when Adriana brushed the long Covenant weapon he held aside and struck him.

  Adriana grabbed the Jackal by its feet, whipping it around, until she found a boulder and bashed him against it. The Jackal died in a spasm, its spine pulverized against the rock, its suit leaking air.

  Rock exploded around her, and she dove behind another boulder.

  Three Grunts rounded on her, and Adriana used the last of her precious ammo for three head shots, taking a deep breath before each one to center her aim. She hardly noticed their grazing plasma fire.

  A grenade explosion from the other sniper’s position got her attention. Adriana sprinted around another boulder, rifle up and at the ready, and found a Helljumper finishing the sniper off with a handgun.

  The silvered faceplate turned to look up at her. “All clear,” the Helljumper radioed.

  One of them had gotten hit by the sniper as they’d rushed the position. But the Helljumper with the charges was still on his feet.

  Rising over the haze and boulders by the river were the large tripod legs of the Covenant antiaircraft battery.

  Adriana pointed. “Get that thing rigged ASAP, soldier. You two, follow me, we’re creating a perimeter. He rigs it, we hold it.”

  She bent over the dead Helljumper for his extra ammo magazines, and before she stood back up, tapped his helmet.

  “Okay gentlemen, let’s do this. We have an hour before the Pelicans return.”

  They fanned out into the boulders, watching for more Grunts and Jackals.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-THREE

  METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

  Delgado avoided looking over at his copilot. He didn’t want the UNSC pilot seeing the pale look of fear on his face as they bucked and kicked their way through the thick atmosphere of Metisette.

  Keyes had come at the moon fast, used its soupy atmosphere to burn off their speed, then sped back up into orbit to loop back around and drop the Pelicans off.

  Several smaller Kig-Yar ships had come after them, but most of the troop carriers that had lifted off Metisette were staying well clear of the UNSC frigate.

  The Kig-Yar ships attacking them were small, but then so was Keyes’s frigate. Keyes was drawing them off, away from the drop zone.

  It was mostly working.

  As long as the antiaircraft guns didn’t fire when Delgado and the five other Pelicans came in over the Redoubt, this insane, highly fragile plan would work.

  Delgado watched as the clouds parted, and slammed his Pelican hard right to avoid a massive Kig-Yar troop carrier climbing up and away from the complex.

  He wobbled back on course, looking over to the right
to see another Pelican with a sheered tail diving and tumbling its way toward the ground.

  “That was Finlay,” someone radioed.

  Delgado came in low over the remains of the antiaircraft emplacements with a smile, and touched down in front of the large spirelike building. The other Pelicans made similar flare-outs and landed in a row.

  He fumbled for a second when trying to find the switch to lower the ramp, but the copilot was on it. The moment the ramp hit the ground, boots stamped their way up and into the Pelican.

  Delgado turned around to see both Spartans standing behind him. Their armor was hardly recognizable: dented, carbon burned, peeling and flaking from heat and plasma and abuse.

  They looked as if they’d fought through hell itself, Delgado thought.

  Helljumpers snapped themselves in along the sides of the bay. Several hung out the back of the Pelican, firing back at a solid mass of Unggoy who started to flood the area. Plasma filled the air and slapped the sides of the Pelican.

  The Spartans looked back, then tapped Delgado on the shoulder. “That’s everybody. Go go go,” he heard Jai yell over the radio. “The Shiva has ten minutes.”

  Delgado had the time up on a counter in his heads-up; he knew damn well how much time they had.

  He rammed the engines up full and pulled out over the Redoubt, moving upriver as fast as he could as Helljumpers fired their last few bursts from the closing ramp.

  Once well clear of the Redoubt, and with the cabin repres-surized, Delgado began a slow spiraling climb with the other four Pelicans.

  A giant flash of light filled the inside of the Pelican. In the distance the Shiva went off. As the initial blast faded, they could see the plume of the explosion reaching up into the sky, slowly turning into a giant mushroom.

  Then Delgado’s slow spiral took it out of sight.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-FOUR

  THE REDOUBT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

  Reth sat at a table as a healer checked him over. He’d been inside a command center when the massive explosion occured, and since many of the Kig-Yar ships grounded to make the skeleton of the Redoubt were fighting ships, he was therefore well shielded. He’d been safe.

  But he’d gotten a high dose of radiation.

  The healer left him with pills to take, and Reth stalked his way up to an enclosed balcony carved out of a large airlock. The Redoubt was a mess. It was a good thing they were moving out to take the Rubble, he thought. Rebuilding this would be expensive.

  There were Unggoy leaders wanting to see him, shocked by the damage the humans had done and wondering what it meant for the timeline they had in mind for their continuing development of Metisette as a world for themselves.

  Reth growled.

  Humans.

  When the Prophet set him on this task, Reth had done it to raise his profile, and that of the Kig-Yar. He’d also enjoyed the guilty pleasure of working with the humans. Their profitminded goals and Kig-Yar-like love of trade and smuggling and piracy had meshed. He’d been slightly disappointed to have to destroy the humans throughout the Rubble as the endgame of this grand experiment.

  Now though, he wondered if the Prophets weren’t right. The humans were unconscionable reprobates, too dangerous to let live. The Prophets’ call for their extermination was starting to make sense to him.

  Reth looked forward to taking the Rubble. Even more so, to getting the Exodus and the location to their homeworld on it.

  He’d happily burn it all for the Prophet, now.

  Reth left the balcony and donned a long cloak, his air supply for the walk across the plaza, and a pair of plasma pistols. He walked out in the plaza where droves of terrified Unggoy stood.

  They’d all been dosed with antiradiation meds. Many had died in the blast, but Reth had had those bodies bulldozed away, and cleared the way for Unggoy waiting in the lower warrens to line up and get aboard the troop carriers. He had only lost a few thousand to the bomb, thankfully, as the communications and scanning station was miles upstream of the core Redoubt plaza.

  It was time to repay the humans for their deeds, he thought, as he walked toward his shuttle and several of his senior Kig-Yar officers.

  Unggoy were shaking and looking up into the sky. It was growing brighter.

  Reth stopped and looked up. Giant fireballs were streaking down, growing larger and larger.

  The humans had taken out the antiaircraft batteries and his ability to see . . . to see this coming. He ran for his shuttle, shoving frightened Unggoy aside.

  “Go!” he screamed at his pilot in the cockpit. “Get off the ground!”

  The shuttle fired its engines and started to rise, and Reth saw the first giant mound of rock slam into the Redoubt.

  But where had they come from? he wondered, as the shock wave threw his shuttle aside and dashed it against the side of one of the large buildings.

  The wreckage of the shuttle slid to the ground as debris and rock rained down on it.

  A dazed Reth looked up through the cracked glass of the shuttle; he stared directly up at one large fireball that plummeted right at him.

  It was irregularly shaped, he thought, with large docking collars sticking out of one side, melting away into slag as the heat deformed them.

  A piece of the Rubble, he realized just before it struck, vaporizing everything in an immense release of hyperkinetic energy and destruction.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-FIVE

  METISETTE ORBIT, 23 LIBRAE

  Thel looked at the glowing, cratered remains of the Redoubt from orbit. “Nothing remains of Reth’s fleet. There is no sign of Reth himself, either.”

  A stillness descended on the bridge of the Infinite Spoils as both Zhar and Thel contemplated the destruction the humans had wrought on Metisette.

  “And now what, Shipmaster?” Zhar asked. “We have destroyed prime targets in the Rubble; the rest has dashed itself against Metisette.”

  Thel looked at the Unggoy working for them, and thought about Saal, brooding somewhere deep inside the ship.

  “Some might say we have done our mission well, Zhar. Do you think the Prophets will believe it when they arrive?”

  Zhar looked at him, his mandibles flexing slightly as if tasting the air for clues as to what Thel might want as an answer. His once proud mind had become erratic in the face of the idea that the Hierarchs may have had differing goals, and that they’d gotten caught in the middle of some machination between the Prophets of Regret and Truth.

  Thel knew that Sangheili honor demanded they rise above it. He cleared his throat. “Reth’s invasion fleet is in disarray. The Hierarchs will not be happy if we stand here and let the last of the humans escape with the location to Earth and the only chance all these loyal Unggoy have to live.”

  Thel looked at the Unggoy on the bridge as they paid close attention to him, without looking directly at him. So maybe Sangheili could play politics, Thel thought to himself, or at least set aside the desire for direct combat for a bit, despite the fact it coursed through their blood.

  “What do you mean?” Zhar said.

  “The Hierarchs want loyal subjects and true believers,” Thel said. “I cannot imagine what would happen to all these surviving Unggoy if they do not try to take that asteroid in which the humans are trying to evacuate the system.”

  Unggoy eyes balefully watched Thel pace the bridge now.

  Zhar coughed. “Their lives would all be forfeit.”

  Thel nodded. “They would indeed.” He turned to the Unggoy in the room. “Tell your surviving brothers to board the Exodus asteroid. We will provide cover for the action, but then stand clear. That human ship is too much of a match for this ungainly Kig-Yar boat.”

  He walked over and shut off the screen showing the ruins of the Redoubt. “The Unggoy will take the asteroid, or die trying.”

  If the Hierarchs were to let any of them live, there was no other option.

  Zhar got up and walked over to Thel. “If the illustrio
us Hierarchs cannot agree on these things, what else do they disagree on, and what else might just be Prophet manipulation, Shipmaster?”

  Thel grabbed Zhar’s arm, and Zhar growled. But Thel looked his fellow Sangheili in the eye and whispered, “Such thinking lines the path to heresy. Do not indulge in it.”

  Zhar pulled free and left the bridge.

  CHAPTER

  SIXTY-SIX

  HABITAT EXODUS, THE RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

  From the moment the evacuation protocols had blared into life, Karl Simon’s day had been a blur of tubes and long lines, waiting to board a habitat he’d never heard of until today. And it was a habitat that was going to jet them toward a new system. Away from home.

  A home that was under attack.

  It reminded him of the day the Covenant attacked Madrigal: the same nervous lines of people, hushed rumors, and fear that hung in the air.

  At the very end, Karl had been shuttled to the Exodus in a cramped supplies freighter. He’d looked out the pilot’s windows and seen the craters and pitted surface of what looked like a tiny moon.

  The Exodus was six miles of potato-like asteroid, with a diameter of two miles. The freighter was a fleck of dust next to it, and the Exodus filled the windows as far as they could see as they approached it.

  We did this, Karl had thought with a momentary flash of pride.

  He’d been hustled to what felt like a stadium near the core of the ship, moving through miles and miles of corridors, following instructions on a card that had been handed to him in the shuttle.

  A hundred thousand other refugees, their murmuring echoing around the walls and ceilings, all had assigned chairs that matched numbers on their cards.

  But now, the moment Karl sat, an usher appeared. “Karl Simon?”

  “Yes?”

  “Volunteer for the Rubble Defense Force?”

  “Yes.” Karl had signed up during the early days of the Rubble, when they’d been looking over their shoulders every day, expecting the Covenant to return.