Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story

by Troy Denning

  “That we know of,” Fred said. “Dr. Halsey has played both sides before.”

  “Only when she had no other choice,” Kelly said. “And only because Colonel Ackerson and Admiral Parangosky gave her good reason to.”

  “Doesn’t change the fact that she did it,” Fred said. “Or that she could be doing it again.”

  “Wait,” Chapov said. “Those rumors about her working with Covenant splinter groups—they’re true?”

  “It’s all rather complicated,” Kelly said. “Don’t trouble yourself over it.”

  “Don’t trouble myself?” Chapov echoed. “A known traitor sends us to this godforsaken place to—”

  “Dr. Halsey is not a traitor,” John said. “She’s just someone who doesn’t let the rules get in her way.”

  Chapov said nothing for a moment, then asked, “Is Commander Palmer even aware of this mission?”

  “You don’t report to Commander Palmer,” John said. He didn’t know the answer to Chapov’s question, because he had no idea whether Captain Lasky would have felt it necessary to inform Sarah Palmer, the commander of most Spartan units aboard the Infinity. “You report to Major Van Houte, and he works for Dr. Halsey.”

  “So you see my point?” Chapov said. “We’re down here with our asses hanging out and no idea why. We need to assume the worst.”

  “Dr. Halsey did not set us up,” John said.

  “But someone else might have,” Fred said. “The kid has a point. Those Seraphs are eyeing us for a reason.”

  John ran his gaze around the horizon, watching the distant specks as they watched him right back. He could think of a dozen reasons a flight of Seraphs might want to keep tabs on his unit—but only a couple that involved faking an attack.

  Either the Banished wanted something that Blue Team had—such as their biometric spoofers—or they were looking for intelligence, trying to figure out where the Spartans and their companions were going.

  Or maybe both reasons were true.

  That didn’t necessarily mean the Banished were trying to go to the same place as Blue Team or recover Dr. Halsey’s assets. But it was a possibility they dared not ignore. Not with what was at stake here.

  “Okay, Special Two—you win,” John said. “We’ll assume the worst.”

  “Really?”

  “It’s only smart,” John said. “Blue Four, you’re with us. Blue Two, you and Special Crew get those machines up here as quickly as you can. We’ll head down Hosszú Völgy into the basin.”

  Fred’s status LED winked green, but Lieutenant Chapov was not as quick to see what John was planning.

  “I don’t understand,” he said. “You’re just going to let them follow us?”

  “Of course,” John said. “That’s how you lead someone into an ambush.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  1442 hours, October 7, 2559 (military calendar)

  Kisköre Manor, Juh Mező Township

  Arany Basin, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

  The terrain ahead was almost too good to be true. An old irrigation canal left the natural river channel on an outside bend and cut across the glass barrens as straight as a laser beam. The canal was deep enough to hide John and the other Spartans from aerial surveillance, so they would be able to advance unseen most of the way to the enemy-occupied farmstead roughly five kilometers distant. That compound was ringed by a shield barrier and lookout towers, so Blue Team would probably be exposed to at least one observation platform during the final part of their approach. But a simple diversion would buy Fred a couple of seconds to rush forward and fire a rocket into the gunner’s platform.

  John’s only hesitation was that he still wasn’t quite sure who the enemy was (Banished? Keepers?), so it was hard to predict how the defenders were likely to respond to a shock attack. Still, he had to do something to get rid of the surveillance flight from Tárnoc Gorge. No matter how many Seraphs Blue Team ambushed—having already destroyed two and damaged five since entering Arany Basin—there always seemed to be another ready to take its place. Clearly, this was one fight that wouldn’t be won through attrition.

  “This target looks like a go,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Thoughts?”

  He waited in silence, giving the rest of Blue Team time to weigh their responses, scanning meanwhile for signs of an imminent flyover. The Seraphs were still trying to disguise their intentions, swooping in two or three times an hour for halfhearted strafing runs that fooled no one. Either the enemy was trying to protect the biometric spoofers in Blue Team’s possession, or they wanted to know the Spartans’ ultimate destination.

  And it really didn’t matter which.

  The biometric spoofers’ only function was to open Dr. Halsey’s secret vault. So if the enemy wanted them, they were probably after the same assets Blue Team was—meaning they probably knew more about those assets than John did. All he had been told was to retrieve a lockbox with an Avar saber imprinted on the lid and the three cryobins secured in the cryogenic portion of the vault—and not to ask questions about any of it. Just follow orders.

  And normally, that would have been fine with him. Dr. Halsey had a well-earned reputation for not letting conventional morality impede her research, and cryobins were used to store biological material. As long as Blue Team didn’t know what the bins contained, they couldn’t be accused of violating military law by obeying an order to recover them.

  The lockbox was even more of a mystery. The Avar saber on its lid was the emblem of SWORD Base, and John had heard whispers about an operation that Noble Team had conducted there during the fall of Reach, when Covenant forces were overwhelming the planet. There could be a connection, but given what had been going on at the time, it was hard to see how a lockbox from SWORD Base could have ended up in Dr. Halsey’s laboratory—or what it might have to do with stopping Cortana now.

  Which would also be fine, if there was no possibility the Banished were after the same assets. Had John known more about the contents of the four containers, he would be in a better position to assess the enemy’s intentions.

  But none of that changed the problem at hand. To complete the mission, Blue Team had to get its two excavation machines to CASTLE Base. And to do that, they needed to steal a ride and slip away from the surveillance flight harassing them.

  After a few moments, Fred spoke over TEAMCOM. “I’m good with go.” He was now fifty meters downriver from John, also lying on his belly and peering over the top of the glassy bank. “We’ve seen seven Phantoms and three Spirits come or go in the last twenty minutes. This has to be a Banished transport base.”

  “And you think our friends in the Seraphs will just let us steal a transport and fly off?” Kelly asked. She was fifty meters upriver on John’s other flank. “I have my doubts.”

  “I have no doubts,” Linda said. She was a hundred meters beyond Kelly, at a bend where Special Crew was waiting on the silver-blue riverbed with the excavation machines. “The Unggoy in the lookout towers are not watching the approaches to their base. They’re watching the Seraphs circle.”

  “And that means what, exactly?” John asked. He couldn’t even see the Unggoy lookouts from that distance, but he also didn’t have Linda’s sniper optics—if she said they were watching the sky, then that was the situation. “That these two groups are hostile to each other?”

  “That they’re at least suspicious of each other,” Linda said. “If they were in communication, the sentries would not be fixated on the sky. They would be watching for us on the ground.”

  “So, it’s a perfect setup to lose our tail,” Fred said. “I say we slip into the base and blow up a bunch of stuff. The hostiles on the ground will blame the ones in the air and launch a fighter strike. We steal a Phantom, fetch the excavation equipment and Special Crew, and disappear in the chaos.”

  “Why do your plans so often call for blowing stuff up?” Kelly asked.

  “I like to make a statement.” Fred paused, then grew more serious. “Why? Do you see a pr
oblem with that approach?”

  “Only that we’re reading an awful lot into the skyward gazes of a few Unggoy,” Kelly said. “What if they’re just bored?”

  “No, it’s more than that,” John said. “Remember those skirmishes we saw in the distance from Tárnoc Gorge? There’s a lot of hostile activity down here that we don’t understand.”

  “Which is why we need to be careful about our assumptions,” Kelly said.

  “True,” Linda said. “But those Seraphs haven’t strafed us since we moved to within twenty kilometers of this base. They’re standing off, and there’s a reason.”

  “And whatever that reason is, we need to take advantage of it,” John said. “We don’t have enough ammunition to keep shooting at Seraphs every time they fake a strafing run.”

  “But if we don’t fire on them, they’ll know we see through their ruse,” Linda said. “And then their targeting will improve.”

  “So we need to change the situation,” Fred said. “We either do this now, or we call for support.”

  Kelly sighed into her helmet comm. With the Banished already on alert, calling for support would be the first move in a battle that escalated into something big enough to draw Cortana’s attention. And once that happened, the probability of completing Operation: WOLFE would plummet—as would their chances of returning to the Infinity at all. The last time they had drawn Cortana’s attention, she had nearly sealed them in a Forerunner cryptum for ten thousand years.

  “I see your point,” Kelly said. “It does seem that boldness is the order of the day.”

  “Then we’re a go,” John said. He wasn’t taking votes, but every Spartan on Blue Team was an ultra-elite soldier with more than three decades of combat experience. He would have been a fool not to solicit their input before making the final call. “We’ll use Fred’s plan.”

  John outlined how they would execute it; then everyone except Linda—who would remain on overwatch until the rest of Blue Team was in position—slid down the glassy riverbank. The drop to the bed was only fifteen meters—even before the Covenant plasma bombardment, the Lapos River had been a flat, braided flow that filled its channel only a few weeks each spring.

  Now the river was a smooth-walled viaduct about seventy meters wide, its bottom blanketed by pools of dirty water that drained at irregular intervals through cracks and holes in the lechatelierite. Occasionally the riverbed was transparent enough to see a subterranean river flowing a couple of meters below the surface. In places, the glass was pitted with craters and holes left over from the Banished invasion. Twice the load-haul-dump machine had dropped a wheel through a thin spot where a mangler spike or high-caliber bullet had caused a shard to flake off underneath.

  John stepped over to the drilling jumbo, where Major Van Houte was standing on the operator’s platform next to Lieutenant Chapov. “All clear on Special Crew’s part of the plan?”

  “It would be hard not to be,” Van Houte said. “Continue down the riverbed well past the canal, and make sure the Seraphs catch a few glimpses of us. We want them to think the mission is continuing right along.”

  “Right,” John said. “But make the glimpses quick and partial. We don’t want the hostiles to start wondering why there aren’t any Spartans with you.”

  “One question.” Chapov waited for John to nod, then asked, “Should we stop before we reach twenty kilometers from the other side of the base? The surveillance flight is bound to make a reconnaissance run as soon as we clear the standoff distance.”

  “No need to worry about that, Lieutenant,” Mukai said. “This will be over long before we hit twenty kilometers.”

  “But what if it isn’t?” Chapov continued to look at John. “We should have a contingency plan, no?”

  “Seems like you just made one,” John said. He wasn’t sure whether the kid was still trying to impress him, or just didn’t understand how fast Spartans moved. He looked back to Van Houte. “Once the fighting starts, take cover someplace with a good view upriver. We’ll be coming down the channel, skimming the riverbed and trying not to draw attention. Signal when you see us.”

  “Affirmative,” Van Houte said. “We’ll dig in on the south bank.”

  Kelly and John assumed their usual positions at the head of the column, with the excavation machines in the middle and Fred bringing up the rear. Out here in the glass flats, the only cover was the depth of the river channel, so they were careful to stay fifty meters apart—close enough to support each other, but separated to avoid losing two elements to a single piece of ordnance.

  It took only a few minutes to reach the next bend. The glass on the riverbed and both walls grew pocked and soot-starred with the evidence of a recent battle—presumably the one that had driven the rehab pioneers from their farmstead. Mukai and Chapov had to slow down, snaking the excavation machines around the holes and thin spots left by heavy-weapon strikes. Through the larger breaches, John could hear the chortle of flowing water—though he dared not step close enough to peer into the river. The lechatelierite would be too thin at the edges to support a four-hundred-and-fifty-kilogram Spartan.

  The battle damage grew heavier as the irrigation canal came into view, and John realized the residents of the farmstead had probably fled their homes and escaped down the canal before being caught and attacked in the river channel.

  Kelly went to the south riverbank, where she would not be visible to the circling Seraphs, and took a knee thirty meters from the canal entrance. As John moved up to join her, he noticed a meter-wide water collection trough ahead, cutting across the width of the riverbed and feeding into the canal.

  “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” Kelly asked.

  “That the rehab pioneers couldn’t have been irrigating much with that canal? What’s left of the river is flowing under the glass.”

  “That too. But actually, I was wondering where all the bodies have gone.”

  John took a more careful look. All signs of blood and gore had been washed away some time ago. But the water-collection trough was filled with shell casings and mangler spikes—no doubt washed into it during major rainfalls, when the water flow would be too heavy to drain away through the crevices in the riverbed. And there appeared to be as much impact-chipping in the lechatelierite as plasma-boring, which meant the rehab pioneers had been equipped with plenty of firearms, and they had fought back hard.

  “Maybe the Banished didn’t win,” John said.

  “Then how come the Banished are the ones in the farmstead?” Kelly replied. “It’s more likely that some of the pioneers survived and came back for their dead.”

  “So where are they now?” John pondered the question for only an instant before adding, “Forget I asked. It’s not part of the mission.”

  The drilling jumbo rounded the bend and continued toward the irrigation canal. John and Kelly crossed the riverbed and fell into line between it and the load-haul-dump machine, about twenty-five meters from each. A cluster of blue efflux-points was visible just above the river’s south bank, moving back and forth in the distance, so John knew the enemy surveillance flight was theoretically able to see Blue Team and Special Crew. At that range, it would be tough for their sensor systems to separate target signatures from the background scatter. But there would be certain anomalies in all the noise that any reasonably experienced pilot would be able to interpret anyway.

  In order to keep the pilots confused about those anomalies, John and Kelly approached the irrigation canal moving back and forth to the load-haul-dump machine a few times, taking cover behind it for a moment or two. Fred came up and did the same, and John called Linda forward with a trio of comm clicks.

  As they passed the entrance, Kelly and Fred slipped into the canal, where they would be hidden from surveillance. John continued to jog along between the LHD and the drilling jumbo, still moving about to confuse watchers, until the river turned west and he could hide from the Seraphs in the sensor shadow along the south bank.

  Sp
ecial Crew continued west with the excavation machines, swerving back and forth across the river channel more than John had expected. The erratic course was not deliberate. The riverbed ahead grew even more battle-damaged, forcing Special Crew to weave around a lot of weak spots in the lechatelierite.

  The machines were half a kilometer distant before Linda reported that she had resumed overwatch. John waited until the drilling jumbo headed back toward the north bank, where it would draw the attention of the surveillance flight away from him. Then he sprinted back to the bend and jumped a meter-high weir into the irrigation canal.

  No more than twenty meters wide, the canal was about five meters deeper than the riverbed, with high vertical walls coated in cloudy, silver-colored lechatelierite. As with the river channel behind him, the glass underfoot was pocked with impact divots and blast craters. Most of the damage was confined to the bottom of the canal and the lower few meters of the walls, so it seemed likely that the battle had started here with an air attack.

  After a quarter kilometer, the canal’s depth abruptly went from twenty meters to just four as it transitioned from storage reservoir to conveyance trench. The original dams and pumping equipment had been destroyed during the Covenant plasma bombardment, but a new draw pipe rose along the far wall to an overturned pump house—no doubt installed by rehab pioneers.

  John climbed from the reservoir into the trench and found Fred and Kelly crouching along the canal’s south side. Linda was higher, standing watch on a recessed platform that she had chopped into the lechatelierite about halfway up the wall. She had engaged her experimental GEN3 passive camouflage package, and her Mjolnir had assumed a fractal, ash-silver pattern that made her difficult to distinguish from the surrounding glass. It worked like a charm.

  John checked the line of sight to the farmstead. Even when he jumped to get a better angle, he couldn’t see any of the lookout towers ringing it—which meant that the Unggoy sentries couldn’t see him either. That would change as they drew closer to the compound, but with the canal providing cover from any aerial surveillance that wasn’t directly overhead, they would have at least three kilometers of easy movement. Maybe four.