by Troy Denning
Once they were outside and began to drift apart, it grew easier to bring themselves under control. They quickly formed into a proper fireteam, with John and Kelly thirty meters from each other in front, and Fred and Linda about twenty meters behind them.
They activated their thruster packs and began to descend toward a small oval of light set amid a vast wall of oval lights. In his mind, John heard Avery Johnson warning him not to lead from the front. Trouble was, when units got this small, there was no place left but the front.
Besides, Chavez and Small Bear and the rest of Third Platoon and a lot of other courageous Sierra Force soldiers had sacrificed their lives well. Much of the alien fleet-support ring was starting to fall out of orbit in ruins, two space elevators had been destroyed, and at least one Covenant city on Naraka’s surface was now a radioactive ruin. The mission had already succeeded.
Whatever happened next, the Covenant was going to know that humans fought back.
The hangar mouth yawned wider as the team drew nearer. John began to see shadows along the threshold. It was hard to tell their species, but most seemed to be dragging hoses and pulling lev-carts—so they were probably just maintenance hands, and not much of a threat in their own right. If John’s assumption was correct—that the Banshee pilots were a Covenant special-forces unit assigned to hunt down infiltrators—then the aliens’ most capable fighters would be twenty decks above, rushing to intercept Blue Team before they breached the transit tube hatches.
Assuming that everything went according to plan, those unknown hunters would die having never seen a Spartan, when one of Blue Team’s Havoks detonated twenty decks below. And that was just fine with John. He didn’t feel any need to look them in the eye or acknowledge their courage. All that mattered to him was stopping them, and he didn’t much care how he did it.
Blue Team dropped even with the hangar mouth, and John confirmed that his assumption about the source of the shadows had been correct. In the silvery work light, he could see a three-Jackal crew tending each of the Banshees, with a couple of Grunts puttering nearby in an open cockpit. He saw no sign of a security team, though there were plenty of dark corners where a Brute or two might be lurking, and in the back of the large chamber stood a pair of luminous blue columns that he assumed to be alien lift tubes.
“Looks like we’re good to go,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Everybody ready?”
A trio of status lights winked green inside his helmet. Since he had only twenty-eight rounds remaining in his MA5B magazine, he switched his fire selector to single and hit his thrusters.
John’s HUD flickered and dimmed slightly as he passed through the energy barrier at the hangar entrance; then his boots thudded to the deck as the artificial gravity kicked in. He immediately opened fire, concentrating on the left side of the hangar and putting a single round into every alien he saw. The Jackals went down either limp or convulsing, but always with surprise in their eyes. The Grunts either collapsed or exploded as their methane packs detonated.
A couple of breaths later, M99 rounds started to drop John’s targets before he could, and Fred’s voice sounded over TEAMCOM.
“We’re in. Step two.”
John and Kelly stopped firing long enough to move over to the nearest Banshees and reach inside, bringing the impulse drives online and activating the instrument consoles. They checked to make sure the controls responded to their touch, then repeated the sequence on the next two.
Assured that at least four of the craft were operable, John said, “Good to go. Step three.”
He and Kelly fired a few rounds to keep the enemy confused and their heads down, then dropped behind cover and removed the last of the Havoks from their magmounts. They opened the control covers, then tucked the bombs under their arms. John looked over to see if Kelly was ready and received a green status wink in return.
“Go!”
Each holding a Havok in one hand and an assault rifle in the other, they jumped up and raced toward the lift beams in the back of the hangar. So far the maintenance crews were either hiding or dying, and nobody opened fire. The assault was going even easier than planned.
So far.
Twenty paces from the lifts, John said, “Initiate.”
“Affirmative,” Kelly replied. “Initializing.”
‘Szatulai stepped out of the gravity lift to find fifty Kig-Yar standing beside the overturned cargo sleds they used to haul scrap away from the Hammer of Faith, the supercarrier being built in the huge construction kreche. Their long muzzles were hanging agape, and they were staring after Castor and Orsun as the two Jiralhanae pushed their way up the traffic-choked passageway, bellowing at the drivers to clear the way and flipping their sleds aside when it proved impossible to comply. The passageway curved out of sight before ‘Szatulai could see what was blocking traffic, but he had no doubt that it involved the Spartans.
A trio of Second Blades in black Bloodstar armor stepped out of the gravity lift and turned to follow the two Jiralhanae.
“Wait,” ‘Szatulai ordered. When the trio obeyed, he switched from the Bloodstar battlenet to his helmet’s external speaker, then turned to the nearest sled driver. “Does this passageway not lead to the Ringroad?”
“It does—” The Kig-Yar hesitated, clearly struggling to recall the honorific appropriate to someone wearing the armor of the Silent Shadow, then said, “First Blade. We’re scheduled to deliver this load of hull trimmings to The Forge of Faith, but the emergency pressure hatches came down.”
‘Szatulai’s stomach began to churn. “Why?”
“A pressure breach in the Ringroad.” The Kig-Yar pointed toward an observation blister about ten sleds up the passageway. “Chardal and Gulo claim they saw four soldiers in strange armor pulled through the hole, but they always claim to know . . .”
Paying no attention to the rest of what the Kig-Yar said, ‘Szatulai turned back toward the gravity lift and began to issue orders over the Bloodstar battlenet.
“The demons are going around us,” he said. “Back to the hangar . . . now!”
John and Kelly stopped twenty meters from the lift tubes and tucked their assault rifles under their arms, then shifted the Havoks to both hands and pressed the fuse triggers. John’s onboard computer commenced a two-minute countdown on the HUD.
A blue glow arose inside both antigravity lifts, and a pair of Elite warriors dropped into view. They were wearing that glossy red-black space assault armor that John had seen several times before, and both were holding plasma rifles.
“Throw and go!” John ordered.
He flung his Havok toward the antigravity lift, using an underhanded pitch and putting his body into it. The device was small but heavy, and it flew only about halfway before dropping to the deck and continuing to roll.
Kelly’s did the same, and the two aliens raised their plasma rifles to fire.
The Elite in front of Kelly took an M99 round in the chest and went flying into the bulkhead, overload static still crackling across his cratered torso armor. The alien in front of John simply erupted into a ball of flame and flying limbs as one of Fred’s SPNKR missiles hit home.
Two more Elites had already stepped out of the lift, and another pair was following. Had John been in their position, with a couple bomb-looking things rolling toward an elevator that would carry them into the depths of the installation, he would have gone for the damn bombs, would have raced them to the front of the hangar and dumped them into space, and it wouldn’t have mattered that the enemy was in his way—because if those bombs went off, everyone was going to die anyway.
The Elites didn’t seem to care about the shipbuilding dock. Nor did they seem to care about dying. All they wanted to do was kill the Spartans.
They stepped over the Havoks and brought their plasma rifles up . . . and met the same fate as the first two Elites, this time with one taking an M99 round in the helmet, and the other cartwheeling off in two separate directions after catching Fred’s SPNKR missile on his low
er pelvis.
The countdown on John’s HUD reached 1:45.
“Retreat already!” Fred yelled.
John was retreating, and so was Kelly, backpedaling as fast as they could, pouring rounds into the next two ranks of charging Elites and trying to dodge return fire. Neither action was going very well.
John emptied his magazine without taking down his target’s energy shields, and while he was switching to the underslung grenade launcher, he took a plasma bolt in the shoulder. It penetrated his armor and screwed up his aim just enough to send the grenade flying off to detonate harmlessly in a corner.
Then the Elite was on him, tossing his plasma rifle aside and bringing up his hand with one of those red energy swords. John blocked the sword with his assault rifle and barely managed to duck out of the way as the crackling blade sliced through the barrel. He stomp-kicked the alien’s knee and saw its leg buckle sideways, then sprang away and snatched his M90 off his rear magmount and put a round into the Elite’s helmet. Its energy shield finally went down, and mandibles and purple blood flew in every direction.
The countdown on John’s HUD read 1:34.
He racked another shell and opened fire on the next Elite, but this one was even more agile than the others and sidestepped the moment John’s finger pulled the trigger. Then it leapt forward, bringing its energy sword around in a head-high strike that was a little too obvious. Rather than duck and expose himself for an easy reverse slash, John spun inside the blow and jammed his shotgun up beneath the Elite’s helmet.
Again, the alien was too quick, tipping its helmet aside just before John opened fire. But this time, at least the energy shield crackled and went down.
John pumped another round into the chamber, then felt the Elite’s free arm snaking around his chest, trying to take advantage of his shoulder wound to immobilize for the coup de grâce.
Bad mistake.
First, pain was nothing to a Spartan but incentive to fight harder. Second, Spartans wore power armor backed up by a neural interface. All they had to do was think, and their Mjolnir reacted. John thought about ripping the entrapping arm away, his shoulder erupting in anguish as his hand moved over the top of the Elite’s forearm. He clamped tight and shoved downward, using the alien’s own wrist to block the energy blade driving up toward his chin.
The Elite’s hand fell, severed at mid-forearm, and the blade kept coming. John leaned away and managed to avoid taking the point under his helmet. But he sensed pressure along the side of his neck and felt blood trickling down inside his skinsuit.
John’s ears began to drum with panic, and he tried to assure himself it wasn’t the carotid. If that had been cut, he would already be falling unconscious.
And he wasn’t.
So he jammed his shotgun down on the Elite’s foot and fired. The alien’s grasp loosened and it began to topple, still holding the sword next to John’s neck.
John went with it, jamming his free hand up inside the alien’s sword arm and pushing it away. They collapsed to the deck, John still on top and holding the blade at bay. He started to beat the alien’s sword arm with his shotgun barrel, so unnerved by his close call that he didn’t stop even after the wrist snapped sideways and the energy blade sizzled out . . . not until Kelly stepped up behind him and gently pulled the shotgun from his hand.
She pumped another round into the chamber, then placed it against the badly wounded Elite’s helmet and sent brain matter fanning across the deck in every direction.
“You okay, John?”
“Fine.” John sprang to his feet and took the shotgun back, then looked down at the mess that had nearly killed him. “Just another friggin’ alien.”
John glanced around and, fifty meters away in the back of the hangar, saw a pair of black-armored Brutes stepping out of the antigravity lifts. They were armed but confused, their helmets swinging back and forth as they looked from one Elite corpse to the next.
The countdown on John’s HUD reached 1:00 and began to flash red.
“Let’s get out of here.” He turned and started for the Banshees, slapping patches on his armor as he ran. “While we still can.”
The four Blue Team members jumped into the nearest fighters, then slipped into the stability harnesses and pulled their canopies down.
Fred’s voice sounded over TEAMCOM.
“Heads up. Those Brutes could be trouble.”
John put his hands on the controls and felt the Banshee rise beneath him, then turned toward the back of the hangar. The two Brutes were only about thirty meters away and racing forward with surprising speed for their size; but as John watched, they tossed their weapons aside and angled toward open Banshees.
He thought about opening fire on the pair, but the countdown on his HUD was flashing a big red :36, and he had not forgotten what happened the last time he was in a Banshee when a nuclear device detonated nearby. He swung his craft toward the hangar exit.
“We are letting those escape?” Linda’s voice was neither approving nor disapproving, just curious. “Why?”
“Remember Etalan?” John pushed his controls forward and led Blue Team out of the alien hangar. “Poor gamma shielding.”
The Spartans shot out of the hangar and pulled up, accelerating hard to climb into a higher orbit before the Havoks detonated. John kept one eye on the countdown in his HUD and the other on the Banshee’s tactical holograph.
The Banshees carrying the two Brutes departed the fabrication barn at :23 and dived toward Naraka, using the planet’s gravity well to help put as much distance as possible between themselves and the impending detonation. They began to pull up at :17 and dropped out of the bottom of the holograph at :12, and John suspected they would enter a stable orbit before the Havoks’ gamma pulse knocked out their instruments.
As Blue Team’s Banshees continued to climb away, the enormous fabrication barns—and the half-built ship they flanked—did not drift toward the bottom of the tactical holo so much as shrink and shift aft. Other Covenant fighter craft began to flit through the display, and a sporadic stream of alien voices sounded from the cockpit speakers. By the time the countdown on John’s HUD reached :10, the image had finally reached the back edge of the display and started to move off.
John couldn’t read the alien symbols on the tactical holo, so he had no idea whether Blue Team would be far enough from the detonation point to avoid having their instruments knocked out—or whether there were any prowlers even left to retrieve them.
What he did know was that someday there wouldn’t be, that even Spartans weren’t immortal.
If he kept pushing limits and jumping at assignments everyone else considered suicide, it wouldn’t be only the support troops and prowler crews who got killed. It would be him and Blue Team and—eventually—the entire squad.
But what choice did they have?
Operation: SILENT STORM was only the beginning. Naraka was being hit hard, but John had already seen enough from the Covenant to know the UNSC wasn’t going to win the war in a single battle. The aliens would recover from the shock of an attack inside their own space and return with a vengeance . . . and when they did, the Spartans would be waiting.
Ready to do the impossible.
They would just have to be smart about it.
The countdown on John’s HUD reached :05. John activated his locator beacon, then spoke over the encrypted Sierra Force channel.
“Sierra-117 requesting Blue Team extraction, four members. Repeat: all four members.”
Somewhere out there, a prowler acknowledged with a single click.
The Havoks detonated, and the Banshee instruments blossomed into static and died. John popped his canopy and, as the starfighter tumbled, pushed himself out into space. Fred and the rest of Blue Team were doing the same, and they fired their thruster packs, maneuvering themselves into a recovery line with fifty-meter spacing. Below and behind them, a few glowing remnants of the megaship fabrication barns were fluttering away in separate directions, al
l that remained of a mighty behemoth that would never have the opportunity to terrorize humanity.
John could only guess how many alien workers had perished with the vessel, but the number had to be in the tens of thousands—possibly even hundreds of thousands. For an instant, he was tempted to think of them as innocent victims of the war, much like the millions of people who died every time the Covenant glassed another world. Then he remembered what they had been building here, and he realized there could be no comparison. The workers who had died aboard the fleet-support ring were as much a part of the Covenant war effort as the officers who commanded their fleets and the warriors who fired their plasma rifles. They were all working toward the destruction of humanity—and John refused to feel bad for beating them to the punch.
A double click sounded inside John’s helmet, and he fired his attitude thrusters, slowly spinning himself around until he saw the dark silhouette of a UNSC prowler blocking the stars beyond, the mouth of its open drop bay a dim purple square yawning ever larger as it swooped toward him.
John tapped his maneuvering jets ever so gently, spinning himself around so that he was oriented boots-down as the bay swallowed him up. The moment he crossed the threshold, a pair of Black Dagger assault troopers stepped into view and grabbed him by the arms, helping him decelerate into the prowler’s artificial gravity and guiding him onto the deck.
“Welcome aboard, Master Chief.” The voice came over the command channel, and it belonged to Captain Nelly Hamm. “We’re packed to the gills, but it’ll be an honor to make room for you and your Spartans aboard the Night Watch.”
EPILOGUE
* * *
* * *
Ninth Age of Reclamation
36th Cycle, 185 Units (Covenant Battle Calendar)
Fleet of Inexorable Obedience, Assault Carrier Pious Rampage
High Equatorial Orbit, Planet Zhoist, Buta System
Seven times Nizat ‘Kvarosee had stood in his observation blister watching worlds burn, and not once had he considered that one day it might be the Covenant’s turn.
