by Troy Denning
“And you haven’t had them removed?” John asked.
“No, and I’m not going to,” Halsey said. “They’re vital to my operational strategy.”
“What strategy?” Johnson asked. He turned to John and spoke over TEAMCOM. “Did she tell you about any operational strategies?”
Halsey turned and tapped the bud in her ear. “I can hear you, Sergeant Johnson.”
“Still a fair question,” Johnson said. “And how long have you known that Lieutenant Commander Nyeto has spies in his command?”
“I’ve known that Nyeto is a spy since the after-action briefing on Seoba, when he exposed John’s age,” Halsey said. “There’s only one way he could have developed that information, so I swept my office and lab for eavesdropping devices.”
“And you found some?” John asked.
“Oh, many,” Halsey said. “Some quite sophisticated. I almost missed the data miner in my lab systems.”
“That makes me feel better.” Fred raised his arm and twisted the armor-encased limb back and forth. “Any chance our Mjolnir systems are compromised?”
“None.”
“How do you know?” John asked.
Halsey appeared puzzled by the question. “Because you’re still alive, John. Hector Nyeto has been trying to destroy the SPARTAN-II program since the moment he learned of it. I should have seen what he was doing sooner.”
“We should have seen it too.” Kelly tipped her helmet toward the others, suggesting that the entire team should have been more suspicious of the man, then said, “Are you sure our systems are clean? The last thing we need is a rogue subroutine putting our armor into lockdown in the middle of a battle.”
“I’m sure,” Halsey said. “Nyeto isn’t the only one who knows how to use surveillance devices. The maintenance module hasn’t been breached.”
“So let’s say ninety percent confidence,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Have your onboard computers run a diagnostics check on your suit systems, then run one on the computer itself. If anything looks funny—”
“I can hear you,” Halsey reminded him. “And I wouldn’t let you go out if there was any chance your systems had been compromised.”
“Yes, you would,” Johnson said. “The Spartans may be your creations, Dr. Halsey, but they’re soldiers. You’re not doing anyone a favor by trying to sugarcoat that.”
Halsey thought for a moment, then nodded. She turned to John and said, “We’d better put that confidence rating at eighty percent, then. One of Nyeto’s people could have been in the maintenance module before I realized there was a problem.”
“Fair enough,” Johnson said. “Now, about your operational strategy . . .”
“What about it?”
Johnson merely cocked his helmet to the side, a gesture of frustration that he had picked up from the Spartans.
Halsey sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”
She glanced up at the bulkhead display, where the tactical map showed the various chases between the alien fighters and the Vanishing Point’s Baselard strikers continuing unabated. The Baselard squadron diving down Etalan’s gravity well was shooting through the enemy fighter swarms and well on its way toward the logistics fleet’s orbit, and John knew it wouldn’t be long before the two Spartan teams in the center of the formation had to fake the destruction of their craft and go extra-vehicular. Rather than missiles, the Spartans’ Baselards were carrying pods full of chain-linked debris that would help camouflage their Mjolnir armor from pursuers—and, with a little luck, cause a few high-velocity collisions.
A separate trio of Baselard decoys was closing on the Vanishing Point from a slightly lower orbit, with another swarm of enemy fighters on their tails. These Baselards were part of a second mission that would target the munitions carriers. The plan called for Blue Team to infiltrate the munitions ships by flying a captured Banshee straight into one of their hangars. Once inside, the Spartans and Johnson would crash their Banshees in an area where it would be difficult to jettison the fighters, then activate the thirty-second timers on their Havoks, leave them inside the cockpits, and extract by going EV for a prowler pickup.
As a precaution against losing all twelve of Task Force Yama’s Spartans in the same attack, Blue Team’s mission would only be a “go” if it appeared that Green and Gold Teams’ mission was proceeding as planned. So far, that seemed to be the case, and the three decoys would be leading their pursuers past the Vanishing Point’s bow in nine minutes. Given that it would take Johnson and Blue Team five minutes to fire up their captured Banshees and another two minutes to depressurize the hangar, there wasn’t a lot of time left for Dr. Halsey to explain the subtleties of one of her intricate strategies.
“You’ll need to trust me on the details of my strategy for now,” she said. “But one of the devices we captured from the downed vessel on Seoba was a holographic slipspace chart.”
John almost gasped. “And you can read it?”
“A little better every day,” Dr. Halsey said. “In fact, I believe I’m well on the way to discovering the Covenant’s primary supply depot for this area of space.”
“Well on the way, huh?” Johnson asked. “What’s that mean, exactly?”
“That I’ve identified several possibilities,” Halsey said. “If we succeed here and force the invasion fleet to resupply, I’ll be able to narrow that number down to one.”
“And then we can slip in and nuke it,” John said. The implications were huge. Even an unsuccessful attack on the Covenant supply depot would force the aliens to divert resources to defending it. And actually destroying it? That would not only shake their confidence, but it would erode their ability to carry on offensive operations in this part of human-occupied space. “I like it.”
“I thought you might.” Halsey pointed at the trio of air-skimmers. “But first you have to eliminate those. It’s the only way to force the Covenant’s hand.”
CHAPTER 20
* * *
* * *
0559 hours, March 26, 2526 (military calendar)
UNSC Point Blank–class Stealth Cruiser Vanishing Point
Assault Approach, Planet Etalan, Igdras System
Not one of the captured Banshee fighters looked combat-worthy. Their hulls had been carefully riddled with cannon holes, their canards and tail stabilizers had been shot half off, and their identifying symbols had been obscured by soot or gouging. Impact stars and stress cracks had been painted across the integrated antennas in the canopies—a precaution to explain their comm silence to any Covenant pilots visually checking on the craft. John was pretty sure that if Dr. Halsey had known the Banshee equivalent of a flat tire, she would have added that too, as a way to cover for any deficiencies in Blue Team’s piloting skills.
Fortunately, the Spartans had spent most of their spare time in Dr. Halsey’s projects hangar learning how to operate all manner of captured Covenant equipment, and they were decent pilots. Even more fortunately, all of the Banshees were in at least fair working order and capable of holding their own in a dogfight, and John had every reason to believe they would hold together long enough to get him and the rest of Blue Team into the middle of the alien logistics fleet.
Once the hangar hatch had snicked closed behind Dr. Halsey, John made a twirling motion with his finger, signaling the team to take their Havoks and load up. He stepped into the middle Banshee, lying prone on the pilot’s cushion and securing his own Havok to a temporary magmount on the back of his Mjolnir armor.
John pulled the opaque canopy down and sealed the cockpit, then brought the fighter’s impulse drive online and activated the instrument console. He couldn’t read any of the symbols that appeared in the holographic readout panels, but after a few lessons from Dr. Halsey, he and the four other Banshee pilots—the other members of Blue Team and Avery Johnson—had learned through trial and error what panels they needed to watch closely.
Once the drive’s panel had assumed a warm amber glow and the symbols remained more
or less steady, he pulled the stability harness up over his flanks and hips, then placed his hands on the control grips to either side of the viewscreen. A blue luminescence arose inside the spheres, and more symbols began to swirl through the holographic readout panels. He slid his palms toward the front of the control grips.
The Banshee rose off the deck and hovered in place. Through the wide-angle viewscreen, John could see that the four other Banshees were also floating about a meter off the deck. In front of them, a remotely piloted S-14 Baselard was powered up and trembling on its struts, its single thrust nozzle glowing pale orange with thermal buildup.
The throaty voice of the Baselard’s remote pilot, who would be controlling the S-14 from an observation bubble high in the Vanishing Point’s stern, came over the internal comm channel.
“Hangar depressurized,” she said. “Blue Team ready?”
A row of LEDs—including one for Avery Johnson—winked green inside John’s helmet.
“Affirmative,” John said. “Blue Team ready.”
The hangar lights darkened; then the exterior doors retracted to reveal the pallid face of the planet Etalan. The entire world was suffocating in its own ash, with slate-gray bands of ground showing between pearl-colored ribbons of airborne smoke. In a clear swath, John could see a hundred giant, charcoal-colored plumes billowing up from an orange lake of lava as wide across as his palm.
“Ten seconds,” the remote pilot announced.
John could not quite understand what he was seeing on the planet below. From what he had been told about the Covenant’s method of orbital bombardment, the aliens could glass no more than a few square kilometers of ground at a time, leveling man-made structures and incinerating plant life with plasma beams so hot they melted the silica in the ground itself. But what he saw on Etalan was on a whole new level. It was as though the Covenant had punched through the planet’s crust into its mantle, creating a volcanic geyser that was going to burn away the last traces of humanity by flooding the entire world with molten stone. And if the aliens had that kind of power, if they were capable of cruelty on such a massive scale, Task Force Yama had to slow their invasion.
Whatever the cost.
“Five seconds,” the remote pilot announced. “You should be able to see the decoy flight crossing from right to left, and on course to pass above the eruption.”
She had barely finished speaking before slivers of plasma began to lance past the launching portal, followed an instant later by the wedge-shaped silhouettes of three S-14 Baselards. A breath later, the cruciform shadows of an alien Banshee squadron appeared on their tails, closing slowly, but filling the intervening distance with white fire.
The Vanishing Point cold-launched a salvo of twenty pre-targeted M42 Archer missiles, using compressed air to push them out of their firing tubes with engines quiet. In the hangar, the remotely piloted Baselard retracted its struts and shot out of the launching portal. It was accelerating so hard that, in a heartbeat, its thrust nozzle shrank from a two-meter circle of blinding brilliance into a white dot the size of a thumbnail.
It attacked the Banshee squadron at once, firing both of its M42 Archer missiles and opening up at extreme range with its twin rotary cannons. An eyeblink later, the Vanishing Point’s Archer salvo ignited engines and flew after the Banshees as well. The astonished aliens broke formation and scattered, leaving the three Baselards free to roll out and escape.
“Blue Team, launch,” John ordered.
He pushed the control grips forward, and the captured Banshee blasted from the hangar at such speed that only the stability harness kept him from sliding toward the back of the cockpit. Johnson and the rest of Blue Team followed in the remaining Banshees, and they all fell in behind the remotely piloted Baselard. Behind them, John knew, the Vanishing Point would be vacating its waste holds, dumping depleted fuel pellets, empty shell casings, irreparable equipment, damaged parts, and any other kind of metallic refuse that a long-range sensor probe might interpret as shards of destroyed space fighters.
John began to tap the undersides of the control grips, pouring plasma bolts into the tail of the remotely piloted Baselard. His companions did likewise, and the space fighter quickly self-destructed in a giant fireball designed to draw the aliens’ attention—and help the Vanishing Point withdraw undetected.
Elite voices began to sound inside the cockpit, no doubt other Banshee pilots asking for identification from Blue Team. John ignored them and led his flight straight toward the reassembling squadron.
Since they had no way of convincingly communicating with the aliens, the team’s best chance of slipping into the enemy formation was to ignore any attempt to contact them and hope the Covenant would assume their comm equipment had been damaged. And if that didn’t work? The Vanishing Point and her two escort prowlers were staying close in case Blue Team needed a distraction.
When no one in Blue Team responded to the hails, a trio of enemy Banshees broke away from the squadron and came out to intercept the new arrivals. John kept his fingers away from the weapon controls. He had no idea what the alien protocol might be for such situations, and he didn’t want to find himself automatically responding to a challenge rush or signal burst. He wished he had thought to suggest the same thing to the others, but it was too late now.
To prevent the possibility of the Covenant noticing strange transmissions coming from the “damaged” Banshees, Blue Team would be maintaining complete comm silence until it grew apparent that the enemy wasn’t buying their act.
The intercepting Banshees swelled quickly from tiny specks silhouetted against thumb-size thrust halos into drooping crosses being pushed along on thirty-meter efflux tails, then dropped their noses and flashed past beneath Blue Team. On his own craft’s tracking panel, John saw the enemy fighters swing up behind his flight and match velocities. Two of them hung back, ready to open fire on the formation from behind, while the third crept slowly forward, passing within twenty meters of each “damaged” Banshee—no doubt so the pilot could inspect them. Finally it reached the front of the formation and hung alongside John at about the same distance.
The enemy pilot remained alongside for nearly a minute. When Elite chatter started to sound over John’s comm system, it began to seem likely that the alien had been awaiting some signal and was requesting instructions from his commander. John tried the standard wing waggle, but that drew no response. He slid his hands toward the back of the controls.
The Banshee responded by dropping its tail and lifting its nose, and John quickly returned his hands to the original position. More comm chatter filled the cockpit, and the alien inspector finally moved ahead of the flight. He rocked his own craft in a manner similar to what John had done, then led the entire flight back into the main squadron.
Once all the Banshees were together, the unit commander quickly aligned them above the logistics fleet and began to sync orbits. Because of the squadron’s much higher orbit, the process would involve a lengthy series of thruster burns timed to drop it into position either just ahead of or behind the logistics fleet. John relaxed a bit. They had planned this attack to the last detail that could be foreseen, and that was what made it possible to handle the little things they had no way of predicting.
Below him, he could see the tiny wedges of twelve Baselards juking and jinking as they tried to drop into orbit ahead of the logistics fleet. He suspected that the eight missing craft had been destroyed as they passed through the fighter screen, but the fact that the squadron had not aborted its run suggested that the Baselards carrying Green and Gold Teams were still intact. Which was a good thing. With so many enemy Banshees in formation behind them, Blue Team had just passed its own mission’s no-abort point.
Planning.
It was as much of an asset to the Spartans as their Mjolnir armor. A pair of Baselards burst into orange flashes and vanished. John watched for hints that it had been one of his Spartan teams going EV, but saw no signs either way—no tiny specks silhouetted
against the pearly clouds below, no Covenant fighters circling back to attack unseen targets, no flickers of small-arms fire. Either the attack was working as planned, or the Vanishing Point had just lost two more fighter crews.
The thought made John queasy, and he found himself feeling a bit guilty about all of the lives being sacrificed to deliver his Spartans to their targets safely. At least the cause was worthy. Assuming Dr. Halsey was right about finding the Covenant supply depot, succeeding today would not only slow the enemy invasion, it would give Task Force Yama the opportunity to serve the Covenant a pushback they would never forget.
Another pair of Baselards exploded, and John now felt confident that both Green and Gold Teams had gone EV to attack their targets. When their Havoks detonated, Blue Team would take advantage of the inevitable confusion to slip away from their escorts and head for the three air-skimmers. After that, it would be a simple matter of flying into the closest hangar and crashing their Banshees, then setting a timer switch and shooting their way out before their own Havoks detonated.
The Banshee squadron escorting Blue Team dropped into orbit ten kilometers behind a huge, pear-shaped materials freighter, and John started to worry about timing. If the Green and Gold Team bombs didn’t detonate before—
John’s viewscreen flashed silver as the freighter suddenly vanished in the white wink of a nuclear detonation. His comm system erupted first into static, then into unintelligible chatter as the aliens reacted to the vessel’s destruction. John checked his Banshee’s tactical readout and saw the logistics fleet stretched out along its orbit, a gently arcing line of alien symbols shaped vaguely like commas, asterisks, and wavy equal signs.
Another white wink appeared in the distance, this time so far away it was little more than a flare atop the rim of Etalan’s gray horizon. The chatter coming over the cockpit comm system was now a full-blown cacophony, and swarms of fighter-dots began to appear beneath the remaining symbols on the tactical readout.
