Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story

by Troy Denning

  By the time John had pulled his sound-suppressed MA40 off its magmount, Mukai was already struggling to sit up.

  He pointed to the dark opening overhead. “Send up anyone who can hold a weapon,” he said. “We’re going to need all the support we can get.”

  Still wearing her helmet with the night-vision visor down, Mukai slowly tipped her head back and looked up through the hole. “Wow,” she said. “Pretty clouds.”

  “Breathe, Stella.” John had learned to use first names with casualties, both for its calming effect and as a way of keeping them focused on what he was saying. “Deep breaths.”

  “Cool,” Mukai said. “Does that mean I can call you John?”

  “You can call me anything.” John looked up through the breach. “I’m going to go blow up some tanks now. What are you going to do?”

  “Send up anyone who can hold a weapon. Hey, I can hold a weapon.”

  “Not you. You have a job to do. Remember?”

  “Right. Send ’em up. You’re going to need all the support you can get.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  0244 hours, October 11, 2559 (military calendar)

  Banished Armory, New Mohács

  Arany Basin, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

  John sprang through the opening into New Mohács, jumping more off his good leg than the wounded one because he knew the damaged muscle could take only so much exertion before it began to fail him. He landed two meters inside the shield barrier, on a broad perimeter road that the Banished had constructed around the entire base. His motion tracker showed no one nearby, though he knew that at least one Spartan—Kelly—would be hiding somewhere in the dark, ready to take out any hostiles unfortunate enough to stumble onto the security breach. There were no dead enemies visible—their bodies would have been dragged out of sight before Kelly concealed herself. He checked the adjacent lookout towers and found the sentry platforms unoccupied—at least by living guards. Linda had been busy.

  John called up the map of New Mohács and oriented it to a large glass-block building identified as REPAIR GARAGE. A smaller building stood just across an alley from it, labeled HARDWARE HOUSE. He flashed status green to let his team members know he was inside the base and moving on to his assignment; he received three green flashes in reply. So far, so good.

  John turned left and started down the perimeter road counterclockwise. During the planning phase, they had identified a large fabrication plant near the center of town as the only building large enough to serve as a fighter-craft hangar. So that’s where Fred would be heading, with Linda leading the way. She had to take out all of the sentries in the lookout towers before deactivating the shield barrier. Otherwise the remaining sentries would sound the alarm and send someone to reactivate the sectors she had taken down.

  John intended to follow Fred and Linda’s route for as long as possible, then cut across the town to a complex of old sports fields that were the only open space expansive enough to be an armored vehicle depot. He passed a couple of ruined buildings that had been half-razed to make room for the perimeter road, and pools of blood showed up in his NVS regularly—an indication that Linda or Fred had eliminated a hostile target, then stashed the body somewhere. Such measures could not hide Blue Team’s infiltration indefinitely, but they would delay the inevitable moment of discovery for minutes, and every second that passed before the Spartans were detected increased their chance of success.

  John passed the alley that led to the fabrication plant. He glimpsed a pair of blood smears high on a wall where Fred had killed two Jiralhanae, then saw a live one strolling through an intersection at the opposite end. He continued on, relying on speed, darkness, and the sound-dampening soles of his sabatons to conceal him as he passed the alley mouth—and aware that Fred would be taking out the Brute in a few moments anyway.

  He heard the cough of Linda’s suppressed MA40 up ahead, then a soft thud-thud as a dead sentry tumbled from a lookout tower. The sound was followed by the scuff of big feet coming down the alley he had just passed, so he stopped and peered back around the corner. Now there were two Jiralhanae, lumbering toward him from the direction of the intersection. One was drawing a mangler from the weapon’s hip mount, and the other held a spike rifle at chest level. John dropped to a knee and brought up his weapon—then heard two soft huffs as Fred opened fire with his suppressed MA40.

  The heads of both Jiralhanae rocked backward, a single round taking each of them through an eye, and they toppled over backward. Fred remained hidden for a moment in case there were more Banished coming around the corner, then emerged from a derelict building to stash the bodies. John flashed a green status LED to let him know he was covered, then waited until Fred had carried both Brutes through the darkened doorway from which he’d emerged. The utilitarian design of New Mohács’s glass-block apartment buildings and square-grid street plan seemed a poor replacement for the arched windows and domed towers that had distinguished the architecture of traditional Reavian towns, but it still angered John to see how much of the pioneers’ hard work had been destroyed by the Banished occupiers. It would have been too much to say that he was going to enjoy making the aliens pay for what they had done to the village—but he certainly wasn’t going to regret it.

  Fred flashed status green and came back out with his demolition packs over his shoulders, and John continued along the perimeter road. In the distance behind him, he heard a muted squealing—maybe a plasma rifle, or an overhead door rising on an unlubricated track—then muffled voices. He couldn’t tell what species. Then silence again.

  Normally he would never have sent his entire team out solo. Even for a Spartan, it was too easy to find oneself cornered and outnumbered. But in a situation like this, where surprise was everything and there were more targets than operatives by several orders of magnitude, it was a risk he had to take. And New Mohács was only a couple of kilometers across. If someone got into trouble, support was likely less than sixty seconds away.

  That was a lifetime in a firefight, but if anyone could last a lifetime in a firefight, it was a Spartan.

  As John approached the turn to the armor depot, his motion tracker lit up, showing ten figures coming down the avenue. He could slip into the shadows and hit them as they entered the intersection, but the attack would not be neat or pretty. There were simply too many of them to kill before the others reacted, and it would only take a couple of shouts or plasma bolts to alert the entire base as to what was happening.

  He would have to hide and hope they didn’t see him as they passed.

  John stopped and looked around. There wasn’t much cover, just a solid glass-block wall on one side and the shield barrier on the other. No place to conceal himself along either. He could race back to the last alley and hope to clear fifty meters faster than they could walk five, or he could ambush them as they rounded the corner and almost certainly alert the base.

  John slipped the demolition packs off his shoulders—if he took a plasma bolt in a detonator, there wouldn’t be enough left of his Mjolnir armor to tell he was a Spartan—then switched the MA40 to full auto.

  Linda’s voice came over TEAMCOM. “Blue Leader, let them into the perimeter road. You draw their attention, I’ll finish them off.”

  John didn’t bother asking where Linda was. To see him and the patrol both, she had to be on the roof of a nearby building. He hoped it was on the far corner, since that would give her a clear shot at the backs of their heads when they faced him. But no matter where she was, she would dispatch them.

  He flashed status green, then moved into the middle of the street and took a knee. He was only ten meters from the demolition packs—not nearly far enough—but it was all he had time for.

  John shouldered his MA40 and waited.

  A gang of Unggoy in full armor walked into the perimeter road and split into two groups, turning in opposite directions. They were probably guards on their way to relieve the previous watch, and the last thing they were expecting to s
ee was the shadowy figure kneeling in the dark in front of them. The ones moving in his direction stopped and squealed with surprise.

  There were only eight in the street, and still ten on John’s motion tracker. But waiting for the last two was out of the question. He opened fire, his assault rifle huffing steadily as it spat rounds into their heads. Four of them immediately went down, then the other four as Linda opened fire from somewhere above him.

  They were still falling as John sprang up and raced forward, his rifle already aimed down the avenue as the last two Unggoy came into view. They had their plasma pistols in hand, but were not yet ready to fire.

  John shot them both in the head.

  Linda stuck her helmet over the edge of the roof opposite. “Toss the bodies up here. I think we’re still undetected.”

  “Seems too good to be true,” John replied.

  They were attacking a complacent enemy at the hour when their troops were most likely to be asleep or inattentive, but… still. It had been more than five minutes since John breached their defenses with the LHD. Even for Spartans firing sound-suppressed weapons, that was a long time to remain undetected inside a densely occupied base.

  John put a fresh magazine in his assault rifle, then returned it to his magmount so he could toss the ten dead Unggoy onto the roof. That took another forty seconds, and retrieving the demolition packs took another ten. Linda had to keep watch for him the whole time. They were no longer following an attack plan, but if they had been, that would have been fifty seconds they couldn’t spare.

  John checked the map on his HUD. He was six hundred meters from the mechanized armor depot, six-fifty if he went down the next alley instead of the avenue the Unggoy had used. Fred should be approaching the hangar by now. John continued down the perimeter road toward the next alley.

  “Blue Three, sitrep breach?”

  “All quiet for now,” Kelly reported. “I eliminated a Kig-Yar patrol hustling toward the gate. There was some noise, but nothing seems to have come of it.”

  “Acknowledged.” The Kig-Yar had probably been on their way to check on the first patrol—the one John had killed outside the shield barrier, then pulled down into the underglass passage. “We’re running out of time. Blue Four, how far along are you?”

  “The south side is complete,” Linda said. That was good, because the militia’s mechanized assault would be coming from that area. “But that’s only sixteen towers.”

  Sixteen towers was bad. In total, there were sixty-four towers guarding the circumference of the base. And Blue Team needed to take them all out. The Banished would reoccupy any surviving towers and use them as firing platforms once the battle moved into the town proper.

  “But charges set?” John asked. “Detonators remote?”

  “Affirmative to both,” Linda replied. “Frequency tango-alpha-ten.”

  “Good.”

  Under normal conditions, Blue Team would not have talked this much during an attack. Encryption and frequency-hopping made it almost impossible to intercept and decipher TEAMCOM messages, but the transmissions themselves could still be detected by any decent signals intelligence unit, and that alone was usually enough to put an enemy on high alert. In this case, however, pre-attack reconnaissance had revealed no antennas or dishes to suggest that this base even had a SIGINT unit—and if it did, the unit would assume that any transmissions originating inside the shield barrier were from their own forces.

  “Anything we can do to move faster?” John asked.

  “Negative,” Linda said. “The work is slow. Sometimes there are two sentries, sometimes three or four.”

  “Understood,” John said. Before killing any of the sentries in a lookout tower, Linda had to wait for an opportunity to take out all of them in less than two seconds. Otherwise one of the targets would have just enough time to sound the alert. “We may have to do this the hard way.”

  “I fear so,” Linda said.

  “Then occupy a tower and be prepared to take down the shield barrier along the south side. Wait until the shooting starts, then eliminate the rest of the sentries at long range.”

  “Understood.” So far, Linda had been using her sound-suppressed MA40 because the rounds of her SRS99-S5 AM sniper rifle traveled at supersonic speeds, creating a sonic crack that could never be silenced. “I’m sorry I couldn’t be faster.”

  “Not your fault,” John said. “Blue Three?”

  Kelly flashed green to show she was listening.

  “Vacate breach guard,” John said. “As Blue Four clears each tower, you set the charges.”

  “Understood,” Kelly said. “Blue Four, counterclockwise?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Any questions, anyone?” When no one spoke up, John said, “Carry on.”

  A gold arrow appeared on John’s HUD map, pointing into the second alley down from the avenue the squad of Unggoy had used.

  “Follow this route,” Linda said. “I’ll provide overwatch as long as possible.”

  It would add another fifty meters to John’s trip, but it would be worth it. A vacant lookout tower stood across the street from the alley mouth; once Linda occupied it, she would be able to cover him all the way to the armor depot.

  “Affirmative.”

  Linda dropped off the rooftop onto the street and climbed into the lookout tower a few seconds before John reached the designated alley. He traveled down it and stayed close to the buildings, but otherwise did not worry much about concealment. Now that a second Kig-Yar patrol had been dispatched, speed was a more important element than stealth in maintaining surprise.

  Fred would be inside the hangar by now, taking out the roving guards so he could proceed to planting C10 cubes on each of the fighter craft sheltered there. The militia had estimated that there were fifty Banshees and twenty Seraphs operating out of New Mohács, which sounded about right. Fifty Banshees would be five squadrons, or a whole wing, and twenty Seraphs would be two squadrons. To support more fighter craft than that, the base would have to be twice as large as it was. Once Fred had eliminated the guards, it would take him about six minutes to attach the charges and evacuate to a safe distance.

  John didn’t think they actually had six minutes, but maybe fate had different plans.

  The number of armored vehicles was less certain. Militia recon patrols had seen squads of three to five Marauders, and up to ten Wraiths, accompanied by lighter armor such as Ghosts and Choppers. They had also reported seeing almost every kind of armored vehicle being transported into the base for repair. A smart armor commander tried not to send more than a quarter of his available force out on patrol at once, so that meant John could expect to find at least twenty functional Marauders and forty Wraiths at the depot.

  But probably more.

  Armor was always a high-maintenance asset. In the UNSC, 10 percent of any armored force could be expected to be out of service even at its home base, and that figure doubled when it was on the move, and doubled again once it entered combat. Among the Banished, where the supply lines would be less certain and the repair personnel less well-trained, John suspected he could double those figures yet again. So there were going to be a lot of armored vehicles at the depot, easily more than a hundred large pieces, in various stages of repair.

  As a result, John was going to need perhaps twice as long as Fred to plant his charges, and he wasn’t going to get it. The most he could hope for was to create enough confusion to keep the armor from deploying until reinforcements arrived to capture it.

  If there were going to be any reinforcements.

  A trio of armored Jiralhanae stepped out of a doorway ten meters ahead. He shouldered his MA40 and continued toward them, aiming at the one in the middle because he knew Linda would take the third figure in line, being closest to the door and therefore most likely to escape into cover. John took two more steps before the shimmer of an energy field enveloped the third figure’s form, and he realized Linda had opened fire.

  “Shiel
ds,” he warned, firing on the middle figure.

  He put a long burst into the Jiralhanae’s head, overwhelming the shields and punching through the helmet on the eighth or ninth round. He swept his fire toward the door, where the third figure was already escaping back into the building, and saw three holes open in the flank armor before his target vanished into the room beyond.

  “Go,” Linda said over TEAMCOM.

  John raced forward, noting as he ran that the first Jiralhanae in line was going down on his back, a line of bullet holes running up his chest. A puncture appeared in the warrior’s helmet just before it hit the glass, but by then his arms were already limp and his legs akimbo.

  John arrived at the doorway through which the surviving Jiralhanae had disappeared and reached around the jamb, holding his MA40 one-handed as he put three more rounds into the Brute’s back. When no return fire came through the opening, he changed magazines, took a grenade off his load-carrying harness, and tossed it into the room without activating the fuse.

  He heard the thunk as it hit the floor, then gravelly voices crying out in alarm. He stepped through the door and, seeing five unarmored Jiralhanae diving for cover, started around the room counterclockwise, putting two rounds into each of their heads, then reversed direction and put two more rounds through each of their torsos.

  He remained in the room long enough to confirm that there were eight sleeping pallets and five remaining sets of empty armor carefully stowed next to the empty couches. An alarmed voice was coming from the comm devices inside the helmets, no doubt demanding a situation report.

  John retrieved his undetonated grenade and started up the alley again, speaking over TEAMCOM as he ran.

  “They’re onto us. Blue Four and I just took out an inspection team with active shields.” Meaning the Jiralhanae had taken the time to power up before leaving their sleeping quarters, so they had probably been warned to be wary of infiltrators. “And there was a commander on their comm net demanding an update. Time to go to plan B.”