Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story

by Troy Denning

  The Warthog reached the ramp, and the lieutenant steered down it at a speed that had John reaching for the front roll bar. It wasn’t that he minded traveling fast on narrow roads with steep drop-offs—he just preferred to have a Spartan behind the wheel when he did.

  John flashed his status LED again, in case the amber flicker had meant Linda was passing somewhere near the base during their conversation about Fred and his helmet—which wasn’t as unlikely as it sounded.

  After ducking under the lechatelierite back at the Lapos River, Linda and Special Crew had clearly elected to enter the militia’s labyrinth of underglass passageways. If they were following orders—and with Linda, that was unquestionable—they would still be trying to reach CASTLE Base, and might well have decided that the safest way to proceed was to stay underglass and travel through the militia’s labyrinth for as long as possible.

  But Linda would still be eager to determine Blue Team’s status, and if she’d been close enough to overhear the TEAMCOM transmission, she wouldn’t hesitate to leave Special Crew somewhere safe for a few hours to investigate. As the Warthog descended the ramp, John scanned the perimeter of the base, looking for likely observation posts that might also block a TEAMCOM signal. There were plenty of empty buildings, idle equipment yards, and untended materiel stacks where she could be hiding.

  But there were only five openings by which Linda could have arrived, all vehicle-sized passages located on the upper terrace. Each was guarded by a five-member sentry detail, and they looked attentive enough that it would have been difficult for even a Spartan sniper to slip past without disabling someone. And since John saw no sign of a search, Linda was probably not inside the base.

  The Warthog reached the next terrace, and the lieutenant whipped it into a tight hairpin turn that had the rear end skidding toward the edge. John glanced over the drop-off and, on the terrace below, saw a company of M274-M Gungooses forming up in a long double column.

  Apparently interpreting his glance as a comment on her driving, the lieutenant slowed down and said, “I’m sorry, sir. I forget that not everyone knows who I am.”

  “And who would that be?” John asked.

  “Bella Disztl,” she said.

  John had never heard of her. He glanced back at Kelly, who gave a quick helmet shake.

  Disztl sighed. “Don’t they have DuroCam on Spartan bases?” she asked. “Five-time winner of the Tantalus Ten Thousand?”

  John queried Tantalus 10,000 on his onboard computer and saw that it was a five-day cross-continent open-buggy endurance race on the planet Tantalus. Bella Disztl had won it outright four times and been awarded a judge’s victory once—when the two drivers who finished ahead of her tested positive for stim-pack enhancement.

  “Oh,” John said. “Sorry. Reach is just the last place I expected to meet a famous buggy driver. It’s an honor to have you behind the wheel, Lieutenant.”

  Disztl snorted a laugh. “If you say so, sir.”

  It was the second time she had called him “sir,” and John didn’t think she was trying to be inappropriate.

  “I’m not really a ‘sir,’ ma’am,” he said. “Master chief is a senior enlisted rank, not a commission.”

  “In the Viery Militia, we measure soldiers by their capabilities. So you’re a ‘sir’ to me… sir.”

  Once they were past the column of Gungooses, she took another ramp, and they dropped to the next terrace. When John looked over the edge this time, it was down forty meters of smooth shale into a long pool of stagnant water. In several places, he could see bubbles rising from the murky depths with a clockwork cadence.

  At the far end, four kilometers away, a barely discernible fan sat in a tunnel mouth, surrounded by a glass-block collar. To be visible at such a distance, the fan had to be at least twenty meters in diameter, and it was drawing so much air across the water that the pond rippled in the breeze.

  “Why is that fan there?” John asked, pointing.

  “Smoke and firedamp,” Disztl explained. “The coal seam is still smoldering down there. The fans pull the gases out before they rise into the base.”

  She floored the accelerator, and the Warthog shot down the terrace, horn blasting as it squeezed between the glass-block buildings on her side and the forty-meter drop on John’s. He held on to the roll bar, reminding himself, probably not for the last time, that he was riding with a five-time Tantalus 10,000 winner.

  CHAPTER NINE

  1924 hours, October 8, 2559 (military calendar)

  Juh Mező Aqueduct, Gödöllő Steppe

  Arany Basin, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

  During her three decades of interstellar war, Linda-058 had traveled countless kilometers of empty trail on more dead planets than she could name. No path had ever seemed quite so desolate to her as the abandoned aqueduct through which she was running now, no journey half so bleak. There were no gossamer-winged cherots flitting through the underglass gloom, no gupers fleeing the droning excavation machines behind her, no kropeys slithering away from her pounding boots. There was not a strand of moss dangling from the cracked lechatelierite overhead, no mildew staining the damp walls… nothing.

  And she hated the Covenant for it.

  Before they came, Reach had been a bustling world of verdant beauty and quiet joy. It was here Linda had been taught to fight and think, been molded into a super-soldier who could stand against any enemy. Here, she had come to trust the only friends she had ever known, and learned to embrace what the Office of Naval Intelligence had made from a confused six-year-old girl.

  Now Reach was a barren sweep of glass. All of it gone.

  The Covenant had stolen her past. She wanted to put a 114mm HEAP round through the head of every alien she saw (yes, even the ones who were supposedly allies now, she realized with a sharp pang of guilt), to burn their homes and raze their cities and wipe even the memory of their malevolent empire from the galactic record.

  And she despised herself for being so weak. Because hate was surrender.

  Hate gave control of one’s thoughts and feelings to the enemy. It made a soldier predictable, and when a Spartan became predictable, the next thing she became was dead.

  So a Spartan could not hate.

  Linda allowed her dark thoughts to wash over her, observing her anger and despair without bringing it into her heart, letting it all pass through and be gone. The last order John had given her was to carry on with the mission, so she began to focus her attention on that—on trying to lead Special Crew westward without exposing the excavation machines to attack, on the tire tracks in the bottom of the aqueduct. She wondered where they might lead, and whether John and the rest of Blue Team could be in the vehicles that had made those tracks… but none of that was her reason for following them.

  Yesterday Linda and Special Crew had spent five hours in an underglass labyrinth of erosion channels, drilling and digging their way through sand-clogged passages and man-made connector passages, trying to move toward CASTLE Base while remaining protected from the Banished air attacks. They had finally given up after making only two kilometers of westward progress, then returned to the point where they had left the river—and found a half-arrow scratched on the wall, indicating an explosive trap placed ahead.

  It was a common warning sign used by UNSC special forces, so it had seemed reasonable to hope it had been made by someone on Blue Team. Their hope had been reinforced by a few large boot prints among dozens of smaller ones in a sandy, churned-up trail that led into the aqueduct—where all of the boot prints had been replaced by the tire tracks that Linda and Special Crew were now following.

  Because the aqueduct was large enough to drive through, and ran northwest away from the Banished base, Linda had made the decision to continue along. Special Crew had enlarged a short section of passage so the excavation machines could pass through, then traveled after the tire tracks up the aqueduct.

  Maybe they were behind the rest of Blue Team. Or a party of starving scavengers�
�or even a pack of Banished. There was no way to tell. Linda’s efforts to clarify the situation by raising someone on TEAMCOM had failed—which meant nothing. With a multi-hour head start, whoever they were following could now be hundreds of kilometers ahead. TEAMCOM simply did not have that kind of range—not without signal boosters and repeater stations.

  The feeling of hate that had consumed Linda earlier was gone. But now her thoughts were racing wild—and, once again, her attention was wandering. She took a breath, then returned to the present, to the simple task of pursuing the tire tracks, noting the sensation of her heel coming down in the wet sand and her foot rolling forward until she sprang off her toes. She studied the gray light that filled the circular passage ahead, filtering down through the roof where the molten ground had burned through the titacrete and left behind a ribbon of ash-impregnated lechatelierite.

  As her stomach unclenched and her mind cleared, Linda grew more aware of the steady thrum of the excavation machines behind her, and of her own breath pushing through her helmet air exchanger, and of a steady hissing, like a tire losing pressure. But the sound was coming from alongside her, not from behind, and it seemed to be growing louder as she advanced. She stopped and raised a clenched fist, signaling the excavation machines to wait, then listened more carefully.

  The sound behind her gentled to a whisper, and the hissing became more of a whooshing. There was a barely perceptible rise and fall of volume, and it seemed to be coming through the west wall of the aqueduct. She turned to the excavation machines—the drilling jumbo was in front—and drew her finger across her throat.

  It took a solid moment for the machines to shut down. As Linda waited for quiet, she pressed her palm to the aqueduct’s titacrete wall… and felt no vibration. But the whoosh grew more discernible as the machines behind her fell completely silent. And when Linda held her helmet close to the curved wall, the sound blossomed into something closer to a roar.

  “What’s that rushing noise?” Chapov called. “Some sort of fan?”

  Linda looked up to see Lieutenant Chapov leading Major Van Houte and Chief Mukai down the aqueduct toward her. They were all carrying their weapons, a precaution that, after a dozen reminders, she was glad to see had finally been ingrained in them.

  “I think not.” Linda stepped back and motioned Chapov toward the wall. “Listen and tell me what you hear.”

  She could have increased the sensitivity of her helmet’s auditory sensors, but that was no substitute for putting an ear directly to the wall and listening to the sound waves reverberate through the titacrete.

  Chapov removed his helmet and pressed the side of his head to the wall, and his brow rose. “It’s a waterfall.”

  “It is?” Linda waved her arm along a five-meter section of wall. “Where is it loudest?”

  Chapov moved back and forth, selecting three separate places along the wall, then finally stepped back and pointed to the rightmost spot.

  “There.”

  Linda banged the titacrete with her gauntlet and heard an echo from the other side. “Hollow,” she said. “Step back.”

  Chapov scrambled out of the way, but as she drew her arm back, he said, “Wouldn’t it be safer to use the drilling jumbo?”

  “How?” Mukai asked. “There’s barely room to drive it straight down this pipe, and the drilling heads only articulate thirty degrees.”

  “Trust me. This is safe,” Linda said.

  She stepped forward and drove her titanium gauntlet through the titacrete, creating a hole a little larger than her fist. The roaring grew instantly more distinct and identifiable as the sound of a small waterfall. She punched four more times, enlarging the opening to about twice the size of her helmet.

  Beyond it lay a deep sinkhole, with a bottom of jumbled sandstone blocks half-buried in mud. It was easily forty meters long and fifteen wide, and lit by a lozenge-shaped “skylight” of gray lechatelierite. The waterfall she’d heard was at the far end, pouring out of an underglass erosion channel that looked double the size of the aqueduct.

  It reminded her of the waterfall at the head of Black Iron Gorge, which she had descended during a training mission with John, Fred, Kelly… and Sam-034, who had been the first of too many Spartans lost to an alien attack. She had not thought of that event in years, but the sight of the waterfall brought back their wild ride through the gorge, on rafts of lashed logs. Sam had been a natural riverman, and had nearly gotten them through the worst of the rapids in one piece.

  Nearly.

  Chapov shoved his head into the hole next to Linda’s. “There’s our route west.”

  Linda glanced up at the cavity ceiling and saw a rosy blush at the far end. Between the heavy overcast and the ash-impregnated lechatelierite, a diffuse glow was the closest thing to a setting sun they could expect to see from under the glass. And it was brightest directly over the erosion channel behind the waterfall.

  “Maybe,” Linda said. “But how do we get there?”

  “Get where?” Van Houte asked.

  Linda backed out of the hole so he could take a look.

  “Very pretty,” Van Houte said. “But if that’s the way out, and even if we can get there, how do we know it’ll take us west? The last thing I want is to spend another day wandering through this underglass maze.”

  “The mountains are to the west,” Chapov said. “And streams generally flow straighter than rivers. They don’t drop as much sediment, so they don’t form as many oxbows. Trust me, that stream will take us into the mountains.”

  “Eventually,” Van Houte said. “If the erosion channel stays deep enough, and if it doesn’t come up out of the ground the way it’s disappearing into it here.”

  “Maybe that’ll happen. If it does, we wait until dark and break out onto the surface, then make a dash for the mountains.” Chapov pulled his head out of the hole, then pointed up the aqueduct they’d been following. “But our current route is carrying us northwest, when we need to go southwest. For every kilometer the aqueduct takes us in the right direction, we’re also traveling half a kilometer in the wrong direction.”

  Van Houte stepped away from the hole. “I know how to navigate, Lieutenant.” He faced Linda. “But he does have a point. The longer we take to reach CASTLE Base, the greater our chances of being discovered and attacked again.”

  “All other things being equal,” Linda said. “But traveling on the surface under a hostile air umbrella is not equal to concealed movement under the glass.”

  “We’re only concealed until the hostiles figure out where we went and follow us under the glass,” Chapov said. “Then we’re rats in a maze full of cats.”

  “And our excavation machines are no match for Choppers,” Mukai said. She took her turn looking through the hole. “But we’d have to get our equipment across that sinkhole first, and it doesn’t look very stable.”

  “Our excavation machines are no match for Banshees or Seraphs either,” Van Houte pointed out. “What happens when the erosion channel closes, and we’re forced to travel over the glass? It won’t even be a contest.”

  “It doesn’t matter.” Mukai backed out of the hole. “Because you’re not taking my machines across that sinkhole.”

  “We don’t have to,” Chapov said. “We just cut a new road around the edge. That won’t be much harder than some of the excavation we’ve done already.”

  Mukai put her head back through the hole, then fell silent as she studied the possibilities. Van Houte cradled his MA2B in his arm and backed away. “I don’t know about this,” he remarked.

  “You don’t like this idea?” Linda asked.

  “Not much,” he replied. “What about the rest of Blue Team?”

  “Our orders are to continue the mission,” Linda said. “We proceed to CASTLE Base. If Blue Team is still capable, they’ll find us.”

  “I know how it works,” Van Houte said. “But I don’t see how we can continue the mission without them. Especially not with thousands of Banished on our ta
il. They’re going to find us sooner or later, and I hate to break it to you, but you’re the only Spartan here.”

  “But she is a Spartan,” Chapov said. “And we can run the equipment. We’ve already proven that.”

  Mukai stepped away from the hole, then stared at the ground and shook her head. “We can probably cut a road,” she said. “But that’s a sinkhole for a reason. If we touch off another collapse, we could lose the machines.”

  “And if we lose the machines,” Van Houte said, “the mission fails.”

  “Look, there are a lot of ways the mission could fail right now,” Chapov said. “We’re in dire straits, which means we need to change our situation again. And that’s worth taking a few risks.”

  “There’s no arguing with that,” Linda said. “But we also need to maximize our chance of success.”

  She tried TEAMCOM again.

  The only reply she received was Special Crew touching their fingers to their headsets, straining to hear a response that didn’t come.

  “We have to do it,” Chapov said. “It’s our best chance.”

  “Maybe you’re right,” Linda said. She paused for a moment, searching for the calm inside herself—and wondering whether what she heard it telling her came from her head or her heart. “But if Dr. Halsey had believed that one Spartan could do this job, she would not have sent four. We stay in the aqueduct and follow these tire tracks until we know what happened to the rest of Blue Team.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  1944 hours, October 8, 2559 (military calendar)

  Map Room, Logistics Base Gödöllő, Bük Burn Cavity

  Arany Basin, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

  John glanced over as Lieutenant Disztl pulled the Warthog into the crowded parking area and was relieved to see the speedometer dropping below thirty kilometers an hour. But instead of swinging into an empty spot, she continued past a long line of more Warthogs and Mongoose ultralight ATVs, then swung to a sideways stop in front of a glass-block building large enough to quarter an entire mechanized platoon with their vehicles.