by Kelly Gay
Annoyed, she placed her hands on the tactical table and leaned forward, her back to Lessa as she tried to regroup. She ran a hand over her face, then drummed her fingers on the table.
Cade was wrong. She preferred keeping her body parts intact, and she sure as hell didn’t plan on waltzing right into that ship. “Well, I’m not giving up, that’s for damn sure. We’re right here. Radiant Perception is right below us.”
Niko came onto the bridge and was immediately taken by the Hunter’s image hovering over the table and completely oblivious to Rion’s tension. “Hard to believe that thing is made up of worms.” He shuddered and then checked the life sensor. “Huh. Pretty faint for its size. Maybe it’s meditating.” At Lessa’s laugh, he gave an offended look. “What? I read it somewhere. Maybe you should try it sometime: you know, reading.”
“Okay,” she said, rolling her eyes.
“Also I read they form pairs, like mates or brothers, and they’re super tight. If one of them is killed, the other one goes nuts, like completely berserk. They feed on metals and alloys, so certain tech, circuitry, and infrastructure, are all possible meals, depending on what they like. . . . I’m not sure, but you think it might be able to sniff us out through our gear or through Diane?”
“Maybe,” Rion said thoughtfully. “The destroyer still has power though. Could be enough to sustain and feed that thing for years.” No doubt the Covenant Empire had certain protocols in place to keep their Hunters from feeding on their tech. But the Hunter had obviously found a way. To survive, you adapt. Unn Birger had told her that. Many times.
“Well, it could be bored eating Covenant tech. We might be like some new and delicious snack, and it’ll come running like Lessa does every time you make brownies.”
Behind them, Lessa snorted, then said, “Well, there’s nothing on intel to suggest they like to snack on human tech. . . .”
“Why don’t we just take it out?” Niko asked.
“Can’t risk it, not until we know where the buoy is. We’d have to use cannons, grenades, or heavy fire to stop a Hunter. If we do, that’ll alert the Sangheili, and alerting the Sangheili means my hunt for the buoy would be cut short. And that’s not going to happen.”
“Well, I kind of prefer staying in one piece. . . .” Lessa said.
Rion sighed and turned around so she could see both siblings. “You’ll both stay here. This is a quick stealth grab. Hopefully we can avoid that Hunter and the Sangheili altogether.”
“Assuming by we, you mean you and Cade,” Niko said drily. He hated being left behind, but his talents were far too great to risk putting him in the field.
“The buoy won’t retrieve itself. Cade and I will go in, start on the bridge, and use Diane to locate a signal. Once we know where the buoy is, we’ll figure out the rest. . . .”
“Fine. You want me to system-check the av-cams? Been a while . . .”
“Yeah. Have Kip give you a hand.” The last system check on the active camouflage units had been six months ago before a job on Shaps III. They were old units, traded by a couple of Zealots in return for half a dozen concussion rifles. The Zealots got the better end of the deal at the time, but over the long haul the av-cams had certainly earned out their initial loss.
“Once you turn Diane on and link up with me, your camo will be compromised. We can scramble comms, make it look like static, but if someone is paying close attention . . .”
“Let’s hope they’re not and the scrap is keeping them distracted,” Rion said, making her way off the bridge.
“Where are you going?” Niko asked.
“To check on Cade.”
And she sure as hell hoped he’d cooled off by now, especially since she’d just volunteered him for a tour of the Radiant Perception.
* * *
Rion found Cade in his quarters, lying on his bunk, hands tucked behind his head and staring up at the ceiling. She sat on the mattress near his knee. “You know I have to go down there.”
Always forward. Only forward.
His chest rose and fell with a deep sigh. He pulled his attention from the ceiling. “I know. You’re incredibly transparent when it comes to things you want.”
At her eye roll, he rose onto his elbows until they were eye level and laid it all out. “You’re going in dark. You’ll check things out. Make a beeline for the buoy and then improvise your way out.” A lopsided smile pulled at one corner of his mouth, but his eyes were worried and still annoyed.
“Your point?”
“We’ve been crewing together for six years. We play our little games, you and me. Take what we want from each other, dance around any kind of future or possibilities . . .”
As Cade tried to find the right words to continue, Rion realized that he’d summed up their relationship with a few simple sentences, words that sounded so easy and maybe even a little empty. But they weren’t. At times, she’d had similar thoughts. Wanted possibilities, wanted to admit feelings, admit loneliness and fears, and look to a committed future together. But the places they went to, the people they dealt with, the risks of space travel . . . Rion didn’t like to lose or hurt or contemplate the possibility of future losses.
And neither did Cade. He’d already lost his family, a wife and two children. Parents and siblings. He didn’t want to lose again, and especially not to some crazy-ass undertaking on a wrecked destroyer with, of all things, a Hunter on board.
She understood.
But she was still going down there. And he damn well knew it.
Cade returned to staring once more at the ceiling with a tic in his jaw. “I’ve been thinking about the first time we met, when Sorely threw you against the bulkhead.”
She smiled at the memory. “I never hit the bulkhead.” Because Cade had been lined up there with the rest of the crew, watching in the cargo hold of Birger’s ship, and she’d plowed right into him. He’d boosted her up and whispered in her ear: Old left shoulder injury. Knees are bad too. Then he’d pushed her toward the fight with a smack on the ass. It had shocked her so much that she’d glanced back at him, surprised by his audacity, and when she turned back to the fight, Sorely’s fist met her face. She dropped like a stone, the world spinning. Slowly, she’d rolled to her belly and pushed up to see Cade wincing apologetically. And then she’d gone for Sorely’s knee and then his shoulder.
She won that fight because of Cade.
It had been a shifting point in her status on the ship and in her career to follow.
“You trying to tell me I can’t win this fight?” she asked.
His brow lifted and he nudged her thigh with his knee. “No, Forge. I’m telling you I’ve got your back. Like always.”
Her chest expanded a little, an uncomfortable pressure building there, full of regrets and wonderings and possibilities. “Good,” she said, then cleared her throat. “Now tell me how you think we should deal with this Hunter.”
TEN
* * *
* * *
Surface of Laconia, Procyon system
The oxygen on Laconia was thin, but not enough to warrant a suit and tank. All they needed to add to their wardrobe were jackets for warmth, and instead of tanks on their backs, they carried weapons and the active camouflage units that would render them nearly invisible as they approached the destroyer. Cade, with his rifle at the ready, walked beside Rion over the lava flats, a sack of grenades strapped to his back and two on his belt. There was a harsh nip to the temperature and a sting in the nose from the sulfur in the air. Ace lay three kilometers behind them, nestled in the dugout of two volcanic ridges.
“Keep an eye on those Sangheili,” Rion reminded Lessa over comms.
“Will do, Cap.”
Rion wasn’t too concerned. Gek, if it was him, wouldn’t be dedicating resources to looking for life signs or scanning the area with any real intensity. He’d be more concerned with the Hu
nter in the ship and finding his loot. Gek was more a worry to them if they had to engage the Hunter, and by doing so, alert the Sangheili to their presence.
“You ever kill a Hunter, Cade?” Niko asked over comms.
“Nah. Jackals, yeah. And Grunts. A lot of Grunts. But no . . . no Hunters. Not directly anyway.”
“Ever see one killed?”
“More than enough, I suppose. Rocket launchers usually got ’em. Trick is to hit them in the waist area, in their soft, unprotected parts.”
“How about an Elite? Have you killed one of those?”
“Yeah, a few . . .”
“Ever see a Spartan?”
Static, and the crunch of their footsteps over hardened lava, filled the ensuing silence as though the entire galaxy paused to acknowledge the word. These were the things that Cade never really talked about. Spartans were the stuff of legend, human civilization’s biggest, baddest soldiers. Everyone had heard the insane tales, the near mythological feats. They’d watched grainy footage, read firsthand accounts in the news and on forums, seen images caught on camera and put on chatter, or sanctioned clips released by the military. . . .
“A time or two,” Cade answered.
“And?”
He remained quiet. Thinking. Remembering.
“Well, kid . . . they’re everything people say they are and more. Bigger than you expect, more agile than you expect, and if you thought they were badasses before, when you see them in action, that word doesn’t even come close. They can do things that would blow your mind. Sometimes you had to wonder if they were more machine than human. . . .”
Cade’s words settled into the radio silence; the only sound once more was the crunch, crunch, crunch of their boots on the ground.
“Kip, how’s that Hunter looking?” Rion asked.
“Hasn’t moved.”
“Less?”
“All eight sigs are still on board the war-freighter.”
“Diane’s got a location radius of half a klick, so once you get into the ship, just give me the all clear and I’ll turn her on,” Niko said.
As they drew closer to Radiant Perception, the true measure of the vessel’s scope and size was astonishing. She was held tight by the grip of the lava field. A good third of the bow’s bulge was buried along with the repulsor engines at the stern, while the upper portion of the midsection lay exposed. But it was the two visible wings that caught Rion’s attention the most. They curved up from the stern like the giant tusks of some fallen alien behemoth. Beneath the volcanic dust and ash, the sleek curves still held a lavender sheen despite the years; the nanolaminate alloy had never rusted, never faded. . . .
It looked as though she’d simply sunk in lava and couldn’t get out, her exotic skin able to withstand the intense heat. Though due to the crash, the lava would have seeped into holes and cracks, filling up volume, and cooling into natural grappling hooks, holding the ship in place.
“Radiation levels are good,” Rion said, noting her readout. “Must have shut down the fusion reactors.” The more she studied the wreck, the more certain she became that the landing had been a somewhat controlled descent.
They continued, passing under the shadow of the destroyer, like ants marching around a sleeping dinosaur. There were a few jagged openings on the hull, some from the landing, but the rest obviously the result of enemy fire.
“Rion.” Cade gestured to the opening they’d seen on the holo-image, a massive hole blown in the hull right behind the midsection’s convergence with the bow. “Something that size . . . had to be a MAC.”
Rion stopped and regarded the enormous hole. Then, she stepped past Cade, giving him a grin and a pat on the shoulder as she went. “Well, that’s awfully nice of the UNSC, leaving us a door and all.”
“We always did aim to please,” he drawled from behind her.
Rion paused at the entrance and studied the blueprints once more in relation to the hole in front of them and committed to memory the best path to the bridge.
“All right, kids, we’re inside. Going comm dark,” she quietly told the crew. Once she acknowledged their replies, Rion shut down her link.
The MAC rounds had done an impressive amount of damage on the inside of the ship, where mangled conduits, cables, and fiber optics lay strewn among the ruins of interior bulkheads, decks, and infrastructure. Once Rion and Cade oriented themselves and saw beyond the wreckage, finding a passageway in the right direction was no trouble—a tight squeeze through a bent bulkhead, and then they were on their way to the bridge.
The ship was a maze of dark-lavender-tinted metal, open decks, twists and turns, ramps and access bridges over vast spaces. A few dead ends from closed bulkhead doors cost them some time. In areas that held little damage, the interior lighting was still on, casting the corridors in an eerie violet glow. But what struck her the most was the number of casualties. Hiking through an immense ship strewn with the remains of long-dead Covenant was a first. She stopped counting the times they came across Hunter remains or stepped over groups of skeletons still wearing their armor, still holding weapons . . . and she had to wonder if their deaths were the result of the crash or if they were all victims of the surviving Hunters on board.
When they passed over the deck above a large shuttle bay, Rion knew they were getting close. “The salvage on this thing could feed us for decades,” Cade said as he climbed over a dislodged console, pausing at the top to reach back and grab Rion’s hand. As their hands connected, he laughed. “Or at least spring for Niko’s raise.”
“Thank God he’s not seeing this or I’d never hear the end of it. Kid’s due, but I’m waiting for him to go one day without asking. One day . . .”
“Tyrant,” Cade said.
She smiled. “Why, thank you.”
As they descended the other side of the debris and continued, Rion studied the dropships and support vessels still anchored in the bay below. “I don’t see any damage on those.”
“Me either. Looks like any of them would fly with little or no repair.”
What really astounded her was that all this tech and surplus had been sitting here for more than two decades—a known and documented site in certain circles, and no one in those circles had come calling. The fear of the Hunters—or the mere rumor of them—had made this site a true treasure trove. And Rion wanted to keep the rumor intact, because she had every intention of coming back for more.
They continued up an access ramp. Ahead was a large opening, one that the blueprints marked as leading directly onto the bridge. Cade paused and motioned for them to stick close to the wall. Rion moved to the bulkhead, relieved the blast doors weren’t closed, and eased quietly along with Cade in front, knowing that whatever was causing the weak life sign lay somewhere beyond.
Near the entrance, Cade stopped, met Rion’s gaze, and then gave a quick nod before ducking his head around the door in a fast, efficient manner. He pointed to the right, indicating caution in that direction. Then he disappeared around the left corner.
Rion followed his lead, but her attention stayed right where a large lump of metal lay in a deep corner.
Hunter.
Its massive two-ton shield lay discarded on the floor along with a fuel rod cannon nearby. There were open places in its body armor where the Lekgolo worms could be seen. But there was no movement. No outward sign of life.
They moved away from the doors, backs pressed against the wall until they came to a bend and found cover there. Behind them lay a second lump of armor—another Mgalekgolo, this one dead, given the dried-up bits of brown-orange flesh clinging to the metal and spread out on the floor.
So there had been a pair.
Rion leaned against the wall, allowing herself a moment to regroup. The dead Hunter, the weak signal of the one that remained—one that had possibly lost its bond brother—all came together to suggest that perhap
s she and Cade had gotten very, very lucky. Because from her viewpoint, the Hunter in the corner didn’t appear to be a danger, it appeared to be dying.
Cade’s trigger finger tapped on the side of his rifle. He wanted to kill it, now, while it was vulnerable. After getting his attention, Rion shook her head. His eyes narrowed to fine angry points and his mouth went tight.
Despite her obvious reluctance to fire her weapon and alert the Sangheili, executing a living creature that posed no threat, no matter what it was, wasn’t part of Rion’s bag of tricks. She had some scruples. Cade, however, obviously disagreed, his expression saying he had every right to cut down the hostile, sleeping or not. To him, that Hunter represented the brutal slaughter of hundreds of his fellow soldiers. . . . It was still the enemy, and for a part of Cade, the war would always rage on.
When Rion motioned her desire to start the search, he declined, indicating he was staying put to keep an eye on the beast. She wasn’t surprised. “I’m going to take a look around before activating Diane.”
Rion moved away and got her first good look at the bridge. Seeing a control room so elaborate and alien made her wonder how the hell they’d ever survived the war at all. With ships like these, and the technology the Covenant wielded . . . it was a miracle and a testament to humanity’s will and strength that they’d emerged from the onslaught. Bruised and grieving, yes, but still intact.
The command area rose from a thick column in the center. Several ramps around the space led up to stations and platforms, decks where, in the past, one could access the light bridge that led to the central hub.
Rion started checking each station, looking for anything that appeared out of place. The bridge had sustained minimal damage—not enough to account for all the casualties in her path. She tried to put the gruesome sights behind her and focus on checking counters, corners, any place the buoy might have rolled or fallen or been stashed.
It had been relatively easy to remain hopeful before. Every clue leading her to this moment had felt like fate was guiding her hand. But after two hours went by, she began to lose faith.
