Legacy of Onyx

by Matt Forbeck

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  For my friend Stewart Wieck, who left us far too early. He lived like a warrior-poet, always dedicated to his family, friends, and fans—in that order. And he died with a sword in his hand.

  Also, as always, to my wife, Ann, and our kids: Marty, Pat, Nick, Ken, and Helen. No matter where life takes us, you’re all forever in my heart.

  HISTORIAN’S NOTE

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  * * *

  While this novel begins in 2549, a few years before the end of the Covenant War, the bulk of Halo: Legacy of Onyx takes place in 2558 and steps into the average lives of those who are trying to normalize and rebuild. Its tale comes to full stride alongside the Halo: Fractures short story “Lesson Learned,” which follows a pair of Spartan-IIIs who are suddenly requisitioned for a highly classified assignment in the most mysterious location in the galaxy.

  CHAPTER 1

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  Memory fades.

  Especially memories from childhood. The older one gets, the further they recede, until it almost seems as if there were no childhood at all. Molly Patel was not that old and she could barely remember anything from before she was seven.

  She could, however, remember some things that happened when she was seven. There was one thing in particular she would never forget. Nine years ago, back in 2549. The day her homeworld—Paris IV—died.

  She remembered the sky burning.

  Monstrous alien starships scudded through the blazing clouds, glowing with unearthly power. Gargantuan machines hung in the sky, spitting out smaller craft that swarmed among them like angry hornets, hurling down destruction on everything below.

  Wave after wave of those vessels brought hell to the surface of her planet. The invaders spilled out the sides of their transports, violent energy blasting from their weapons as they cursed her people in strange alien tongues. Their sole purpose was to attack the humans on Paris IV, to destroy their homes, to kill every single one of them.

  The only thing that kept Molly and her family alive during the global assault was, simply, that the invaders hadn’t yet caught up with them on their terrified attempt to escape.

  “We’re not going to make it,” her mother, Brigid, mouthed as their vehicle raced down an empty road that wound out of their neighborhood, tracing the shoreline and leading toward the nearest evacuation point. In a moment of panic, Molly’s mother had slipped into unveiled honesty. Had she given it thought, she would probably have said something different, at least for Molly’s sake.

  Before Molly’s family had left their house, her mother had frantically strapped her into the seat as if Molly was an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper—one of the legendary Helljumpers who would launch down from a perfectly good UNSC ship into the heart of war. Those were the good guys. The ones who were battling in the streets to save Molly’s homeworld—and failing miserably.

  Molly remembered the lines of worry on her mother’s face as she peered back from the front passenger seat. That expression had been deepening for hours, ever since the first signs of the invasion, and now those lines looked as if they might actually crack, causing her to crumble with them.

  Molly wanted to say something to her mother to make her feel better, but she was seven. She didn’t have the words. If she was being honest, she maybe still didn’t.

  Somehow, her mother stayed strong.

  “We would have been killed going the other way for sure,” Molly’s father, Gotam, had said with a slight quiver in his voice. “You saw what they did to the highway back there.”

  The family was heading for the spaceport, just as the emergency broadcasts had insisted, but they had gotten a late start. Molly’s parents had been trying to contact her older sister, Grace, who had spent the night at a friend’s house. When they tried to call, they found that the comm lines had all been completely overloaded with traffic. They couldn’t get through to her, no matter how hard they tried.

  Eventually, her parents had given up and driven as quickly as they could to the house where Grace had been. When her mother dashed through the open front door though, no one was inside. The family Grace was staying with had already abandoned the place. They’d taken Molly’s sister with them—or so Molly had hoped.

  That was when things started to come unglued for Molly. She started to cry, just a little, as softly as she could. She was missing Grace already. The horror of losing track of her sister at such a crucial moment had marred her mom’s face when she returned to the car. Another thing that Molly still remembered, and quite clearly: that look.

  Her dad had assured both of them that Grace would be fine. That she had probably left in the first wave of evacuations. They just needed to get off the planet themselves now, he told them. Eventually they’d find her.

  Of course, they never did.

  By the time they got close to the highway that led to the spaceport, even Molly could see they would never be able to even reach that road. Vehicles just sat there, stacked in either direction as far as the eye could see. They moved but in almost imperceptible increments.

  Molly’s dad stopped the car and got out, scanning the road every which way to see what their options might be.

  That’s when things really fell apart. The aliens, who had been a remote threat entirely out of sight, suddenly became very real.

  A gigantic, unnervingly strange ship—larger than any building Molly had ever seen—descended from a dark cloud and came thundering in over the highway. It loomed there ominously for a long moment, casting its vast shadow over the thousands of vehicles clogging the road for kilometers ahead, as if it were waiting for something.

  Orders?

  A word from their alien gods?

  Then the ship fired a massive beam of energy from its belly. It lanced straight down to the ground, several thousand meters in front of where the family’s vehicle had stopped.

  Molly’s mom shouted at her to shield her eyes, but the pull of her own curiosity was stronger than her mother’s voice. She stared at the staggering destruction stretching before her for as long as she could. She was simply too stunned to blink, much less turn away. It was unlike anything Molly had ever seen in her life—or had seen since.

  The beam was so bright it physically hurt her eyes, but she couldn’t tear her gaze from it. Although it struck the road more than a kilometer away, she could still feel its scorching heat on her face, as vehicles exploded and the earth below the beam completely gave way. Even through the hundred-meter waves of dust and debris the ship’s weapon kicked up, Molly could see what the aliens were doing to the surface of her planet—the place she had called home. The beam melted everything it touched into a bright, glowing slag that flowed like torrents of lava, churning out and away from the beam’s impact before it shifted from white to red to black as it cooled.

  Molly’s dad wasted no more time. He leaped back behind the wheel and spun the vehicle around, taking off in a new, desperate direction as he hunted for another route to the spaceport. He didn’t have a plan, and he had no time to come up with one. This gut reaction was the best he could muster.

  But so far, that hadn’t done Molly’s family much good.

  “We’re still ten kilometers from the evacuation site,” her mom said. “We should have left sooner, Gotam. We shoul
dn’t have let Grace—” Brigid stopped herself. “I wish we lived closer.”

  “Stop. How could we have anticipated this?” Molly’s dad said, as they darted past an abandoned car on the side of the road. “And Grace will be fine, Brigid. She has to be.”

  Molly craned her neck as they bolted down the highway. She was trying to watch a cluster of people who had gotten out of their vehicle. They were on their knees, praying.

  Some part of Molly, even at the age of seven, had wondered if those people had the right idea.

  She had seen the ship. She had seen what the aliens were capable of. Who can escape that? And if we can’t get away, what is the point in running now? Maybe it would have been better to pull off to the side of the road as well and make their peace while they waited for the end to come.

  In the end, Molly was glad it wasn’t her decision to make. She was just a kid back then, but even when she recalled this moment years later, she wasn’t sure she would have kept on going.

  Another vehicle suddenly hurtled past them, headed in the other direction. On this road, they hadn’t seen anyone going away from the evacuation point all morning. That car was headed toward the destruction. Why?

  “Not a good sign,” her mother remarked.

  “That’s insane,” Gotam replied, shaking his head. “They go back that way, they’re going to run straight into the Covenant.”

  “What could be so much worse in this direction?”

  “At this point? Nothing.”

  Without thinking, Molly instinctively reached over to the empty seat next to her, the one where Grace should have been. She’d done it hundreds of times before—it was like second nature—but this time, Grace wasn’t there to comfort her. Molly’s heart sank, and she bit her lip.

  In the far distance, the city of Mímir suddenly came into view, its towers defiantly spearing up into the sky. Molly’s family had chosen to live on the outskirts, farther from the spaceport. She’d often wondered if that decision had cost them precious time.

  Without warning, another huge Covenant ship descended from the clouds and ignited its own ground-melting weapon, ripping into Mímir’s skyscrapers as if they were paper. It was humbling to see such majestic human structures tumble to the ground in seconds. For a long moment, the car was filled only with silence. Nothing could have prepared them for what this day had brought. It was too awful for the imagination. Then the silence was jarringly broken, drawing Molly’s attention back to the road ahead.

  “There’s another one,” Molly’s mom said, as a second car passed theirs going the opposite direction.

  Her dad cursed. “And there’s more up ahead of us. What’s going on?”

  From the backseat, Molly peered between them, trying to figure out what the other drivers were doing if the evacuation site was their only chance for survival. Stumped, she looked past them and toward the spaceport as it came into view. It still seemed so far away, like a cluster of tall buildings emerging from the sea.

  One after another, ships—human ships—rose stridently up into the sky on tails of fire and smoke. They weren’t alone though. Smaller Covenant craft suddenly burst from within the clouds and chased the escaping ships as they fled. Some of the refugee shuttles managed to soar straight past the aliens, whisking their passengers from the grim fate of Paris IV to the safety of invisible stars.

  Other ships weren’t so fortunate. The swarm of Covenant fighters caught them, unleashing a barrage of white-hot energy at their hulls, transfixing each for a moment like a moth in a flashlight’s beam—until it exploded in a flash.

  Like thunder that came after lightning, the noise of their destruction didn’t reach Molly’s ears until seconds later, a series of low thuds punching through the air, synced with the precise order of destruction. The impulse to weep over those who had died followed almost immediately, even though Molly had likely known none of them.

  But they were humans. Fellow citizens of Paris IV.

  For a brief moment, Molly wondered if Grace was on one of those ships. For a seven-year-old who loved her older sister, there wasn’t much that could be more painful than that. The vision of the falling debris still choked Molly up when her mind went back to that day.

  At the time, she didn’t think she was making that much of a commotion in the backseat, but her mother noticed soon enough. She reached back and held Molly’s hand to comfort her, but her father didn’t respond at all. He was too focused on something up ahead. Molly wiped the heavy tears that had welled up in her eyes and tried to see what her father was fixated on.

  The road rising before them led toward a bridge that extended over a river flowing into the nearby ocean: the location of the spaceport. Molly followed the structure of the bridge with her eyes and spotted a tremendous gap in its center. It had been severed completely in half. Long, twisted bits of rebar stuck out of the ends of the shattered concrete like broken fingers reaching for the other side.

  “Well, that explains why everyone was turning around,” her dad said. His voice sounded distant, unreal, as if in complete disbelief. “Dammit. The nav system should’ve reported that.”

  Her mom grimaced. “If the Covenant hadn’t taken down all the comm networks, it would have.”

  Her dad punched the dashboard with his fist and cursed again. He looked down at the readouts for what seemed like a long time and then, without warning, stomped on the accelerator. The engine growled like a starving beast, and the vehicle suddenly launched forward.

  Molly’s mother somehow held back her surprise and managed to gently put her other hand on his arm, clearly straining to be as calm as possible. “The bridge is gone, Gotam. We can’t make it across.”

  “Do we have any choice?” Molly’s dad glared down the road ahead as the vehicle rocketed onto the actual bridge. He showed no sign of stopping. “Isn’t it better to die trying?”

  As the car veered around a handful of abandoned vehicles and shot toward that horrifying gap, the weight of what her father said hit Molly, and she screamed in terror. She couldn’t help it any longer. Her mind started imagining the feeling of falling.

  They were only seconds from tumbling headlong into the open sky past the bridge’s shattered edge and from there straight down into the water below. Maybe that would have been better than being melted to death, but by how much?

  “Hon. We can’t make that jump.” Brigid’s grip on Gotam’s arm tightened, but her voice remained steady and even, as she refused to look ahead.

  Molly couldn’t keep her eyes off the road.

  As the vehicle rushed even closer toward the edge of the bridge, her dad suddenly blinked as though he had finally snapped out of a trance. He switched feet and stomped down on the brake pedal instead. The sudden change in momentum thrust Molly forward against her seat restraints until they bit into her shoulders, and the car swerved back and forth, struggling desperately to come to a stop. She could smell the stench of burning rubber, and she wondered if maybe he’d changed his mind a little too late.

  The car violently came to a rest though, just shy of the last possible moment. The horrible fall Molly had expected never came. The empty space beyond the broken steel and concrete stretched before them. They sat only meters from the edge.

  “Okay . . . okay. You’re right,” Gotam said, his voice shaking. Molly had never heard him like this. Beads of sweat rolled down the side of his face as his hands gripped the wheel. He took a deep breath, trying to steady himself. “We have to go back.”

  “And then what . . . ?” her mom asked.

  “I . . . really don’t know.” He swallowed hard, then put the car in reverse, hit the gas, and wrenched the wheel around, spinning in the opposite direction. “Maybe we can make it to the tunnel at Cochineal Pass,” he said.

  “You think that’s going to save us?” Brigid asked in disbelief.

  The car lurched forward again as Gotam leaned on the accelerator and wrestled it back into the middle of the road. “Has to be better than standing unde
rneath one of those ships with nothing between you but empty sky.”

  Like the cars they’d seen before going in the opposite direction, the family now raced back as fast as they’d come. Soon they passed once again the same people praying on the side of the road.

  More of them stood gathered there now. A few new carloads had joined, probably seeking solace in one another’s company for what they knew would be their final moments.

  Molly caught a flash of them that she never forgot, an image imprinted in her mind. They were standing there clutching one another’s hands. Even years later, she could still make out their faces.

  Some of them hugged their loved ones tight. Most wept.

  Once their car zipped past the roadside supplicants, Molly turned forward again and peered through the windshield. One of the Covenant ships a dozen or so kilometers away—probably the same one from before—was slowly canting toward their car. Its unrelenting beam continued destroying everything in its path like a tornado of light.

  For a second, Molly wondered what had happened to the traffic they’d seen ahead. Before she could give it much thought, it quickly grew warmer in their car. Her skin went moist with sweat. The ship was still far from them, but its blindingly white beam was slowly drawing closer, causing a swift ascent of the temperature, like that of a heating oven.

  Molly’s mom reached back and held her hand. “It’s going to be all right, Molly.”

  Even then, she could tell how much of a lie that was—that her mother was saying it simply to help her feel better. Still, Molly couldn’t blame her.

  “I know, Mommy.” Molly could lie too.

  As her dad squeezed every bit of speed he could muster out of the car, the enormous ship edged toward the vehicle from the right, and the vicious sound of its weapon grew impossibly loud. Just over the guardrail, stretched out below, Molly could see the valley where the beam had launched its approach. It bore a long, jagged trench of scorched earth.