by Troy Denning
“I thought this was plan B,” Fred said.
“Right,” John said. “Plan C, then.”
“There’s a plan C?” Kelly asked.
“There is now,” John replied. “Blue Four, patch me through to Colonel Boldisar.”
Linda’s status flashed green, and a moment later Boldisar demanded, “Who’s on this channel?”
“Sierra-117,” John said. “We need you to start the mechanized assault now.”
“Twenty minutes early?!” Boldisar exclaimed. “Are you even in position?”
“As much as we’re going to be,” John said. “We need a diversion, so make it loud. Make it bright.”
Boldisar hesitated only a moment, then said, “We can do a diversion. Just tell me—are we going to make it into the base?”
“At least some of you will,” John said. “We’re doing what we can to improve on that.”
“I understand,” Boldisar said. “Should we bring a Havok?”
“Negative!” The entire reason John had agreed to call for UNSC support in the first place was to keep the pioneer militia from using a nuke. “You have the Havok with you?”
“Two of them,” Boldisar said. “Just in case.”
“You won’t need them. I already told you that.”
“Then how come we’re attacking early?” Boldisar asked. “We’re bringing them.”
Five Jiralhanae came around the corner, leaving John no time to argue. The Brutes were in full armor and moving fast. Three wielded mangler revolvers, while the other two carried skewer antitank weapons with rocket-sized projectiles sticking out of the barrels and sword-length bayonets mounted beneath. They were vicious weapons designed for an anti-armor role, but gleefully used by Banished Jiralhanae against enemy infantry.
John’s only advantage was that they were not wearing night-vision equipment, while he was sticking to the shadows along the walls where they would have difficulty spotting him.
At least until he opened fire.
He stopped and knelt, then aimed at one of the warriors carrying a skewer. “Right-hand skewer,” he said over TEAMCOM.
“Left-hand skewer,” Linda replied. Now five hundred meters behind John, she was well out of range of the manglers, so she asked, “Me first?”
“Affirmative,” John said. They were taking out the skewers because those big tank-busting spikes in the barrels could bring down the shields and punch through the titanium shell of even GEN3 Mjolnir. “When you’re—”
A supersonic crack echoed through the alley, and the left-hand skewer-bearer’s head erupted into a white spray in John’s NVS. He fired a seven-shot burst, and his target’s jowly face turned into a bloody mess before the knees started to buckle.
Linda fired again, and the head of a third Jiralhanae exploded into mist. The last two warriors attacked blindly, spraying spikes into the glass walls at the height of their own chests. John ran a line of bullets across their faces, and they dropped in the middle of the lane.
He slipped a fresh magazine into the MA40, then glanced up at the wall above his head and found the glass pocked by spike divots. Half a meter lower, and it would have been him lying in the street.
Or billowing skyward, had they hit one of his demolition packs.
The shrill whistle of a battle alert rose over the base, then Fred’s voice came over TEAMCOM.
“Permission to blow stuff up?” he asked. “A lot of stuff?”
“Permission granted.” John rose and raced down the alley toward the armor depot. “Blue Four, release overwatch. Take out the sentries.”
Linda’s status LED flashed green in John’s HUD, and her sniper rifle began to boom again. John’s leg wound was starting to throb, but he was still three hundred meters from his objective, and he needed to be waiting in the dark when the enemy crews headed for their vehicles. He willed himself to sprint faster and heard his breath rushing inside his helmet.
He was two hundred meters from his objective when the first crews began to pour into the alley and race toward the depot. They were primarily two Kig-Yar Marauder groups led by Sangheili squadron commanders, and single Jiralhanae Wraith drivers, all lightly armored and carrying only compact weapons such as plasma pistols and needlers. But John didn’t open fire. He couldn’t afford to get bogged down in a firefight. There would be dozens of other crews pouring into the depot from other routes, and if he wanted to keep the Banished armor from turning the militia’s mechanized assault into a bloodbath, he had to stop all of them.
A long chain of muffled explosions sounded from the hangars, shaking the entire base and filling the sky with an orange glow. The armor crews stopped in their tracks and looked up, the Kig-Yar chittering and squawking, their Sangheili commanders simply staring with mandibles splayed wide.
John kicked in the door of one of the glass buildings, then stepped inside. It was a sleeping quarters, lined with nests so recently vacated that the heat of the occupants’ bodies still showed in the infrared mode of his night-vision system. He opened one of the demolition packs and set the delay on ten detonators to two seconds, then stepped back through the door and saw that the armor crews were once again headed toward their vehicles.
John activated the first detonator and threw the C10 cube down the alley as far as he could, then reached for the next one.
The first cube exploded with a deafening rumble, blasting through walls and filling the alley with a fireball. He raced thirty meters forward before he finally emerged from the smoke to find a group of armor crews cowering in the darkness next to the buildings, their heads turned skyward, probably looking for the nonexistent bomber that had just attacked them.
He activated the next detonator and threw the C10 cube into their midst, then did it twice more before he finally reached the end of the alley and could see the depot yard off to his left.
Too late.
The yard was swarming with armor crews, the closest already climbing into the open hatches of their vehicles.
His earlier estimate of their numbers had been low. There were at least forty Marauders and sixty or seventy Wraiths—and judging by where the crews were going, most of them seemed functional.
The depot exit was directly opposite John, on the west side of the yard where nothing but the shield barrier separated the vehicles from the glass barrens outside New Mohács. Whatever he did next, it had to happen before someone lowered that barrier and the armor streamed out to meet the militia’s mechanized assault. The Banished would be badly outnumbered, but it would be tanks against Warthogs. The rehab pioneers might still win—but at a price so steep they’d wish they hadn’t.
John retreated into the alley, then kicked in the rear door of a large building that overlooked the depot yard. His plan was to climb up through the interior to access the roof. But he found himself looking into a large office filled with bustling Sangheili and bellowing Jiralhanae—probably the armor unit’s headquarters. He activated a detonator and tossed a C10 cube into the center of the suite, then stepped back through the doorway and crouched behind the wall of the adjacent building.
The C10 charge detonated, blowing the walls out of the headquarters building next to him. At least the Banished armor would now lack central control.
“Blue Leader is late to the party,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Blue Two, can you back me up?”
“Affirmative,” Fred said. “Thirty seconds out, but only nineteen cubes left. Plus six rockets.”
“Acknowledged,” John said. “Come in on the north corner of the yard and work your way westward toward the exit. I’ll do the same on the south side.”
Fred flashed green.
John continued issuing orders. “Blue Three, occupy the lookout towers flanking the depot exit. Keep the exit barrier raised as long as possible. Maybe we can bottle them up for a while.”
Kelly’s status LED flashed green; then Lieutenant Chapov came on. “Blue Leader… enemy armor… depart New Mohács at… yard?”
“Confirmed,”
John said. The signal was cutting out, probably because Chapov was still underglass, transmitting up through a ventilation hole. “Why?”
No reply. John repeated his response, both the confirmation and the question.
When there was still nothing, he stopped trying and glanced up along the wall he was next to. The building was three stories tall—just inside the range of the grappleshot on his left forearm. John raised his arm and fired the hook at the overhanging eave. Once it had caught, he checked to see if it was secure, then jumped hard and retracted the cable at the same time.
The grappleshot pulled him up to the eave, where he smashed his free hand through the nitralume roof and used the resulting hole as a handhold to pull himself completely onto the steep pitch. After a quick check to make sure nobody was watching from a nearby roof or window, he fired the grappleshot at the ridgeline, then secured the hook and pulled himself to the top.
The view to the south was obscured by dozens of other roofs, most just as high and some even higher. But in the distance, just four kilometers out, he could see a long line of Warthog silhouettes racing across the gray glass toward New Mohács. They were not traveling with their lights on—that would have made them easy targets and suggested that they were actually trying to draw attention. But spotlights and handlamps were flickering on and off irregularly, a nice touch that would make sure the Banished focused on the assault headed their way.
Down in the depot yard, the demolition of the headquarters building was not creating as much chaos as John had hoped for. A couple of enemy crews near the explosion were incapacitated or dealing with casualties, and a handful of Wraith drivers were cowering behind their vehicles searching for the source of the attack. But by far the majority were climbing into their rides and buttoning up.
John had three full demolition packs left, each containing ten C10 cubes with detonators already inserted but not set. His fourth pack was half-empty, leaving him a total of thirty-five cubes. Fred had just twenty-five charges, including the M19 rounds for the rocket launcher. Even if they hit with everything—and they wouldn’t—that was less than half of the Banished’s armored vehicles.
Better than nothing.
John straddled the roof ridge and lined up the C10 cubes from the half-used pack. He reset the detonator delays, starting at fifteen seconds and working his way down to eleven, then lobbed each cube out into the depot yard, trying to scatter them over a fifty-meter circle. Even with his night-vision system, it was too dark to see how many actually landed on a vehicle and adhered to it—if any did—but that was okay. The purpose of the first volley was to create confusion about the source of the attack and give him time to be more accurate with the rest of his throws.
Leaving the empty pack behind, he slid off the roof—
—and dropped into a street filled with Jiralhanae drivers on the way to their Wraiths. Firing the MA40 one-handed, he managed to shoot three in the head before the other twelve recovered from their initial shock and charged him.
John raced out of the alley to the edge of the depot yard—where the first C10 cube erupted just thirty meters away, creating a fireball ten meters high and flinging shards of armored vehicle in every direction.
Then the second cube detonated—and the third, fourth, and fifth. The shockwaves hurled John through a glass-block wall, his armor pinging with the sound of striking shrapnel, and he felt the heat of the explosions through his faceplate and hoped the detonators in his remaining demolition packs wouldn’t malfunction and go off at that moment.
They were military grade, so the chances weren’t high—but it was hard to forget they had been sitting on a shelf in a damp bunker under a meter of lechatelierite for the last seven years.
John was back on his feet while the blast-white was still fading from his NVS. He checked to make sure he had all of his weapons and equipment, then went to the street-side wall of the building into which he had just been hurled and kicked an exit hole.
Through the glass blocks, with his wounded leg.
Even Spartans made dumb mistakes in the heat of battle. His thigh instantly knotted up the way it had when the plasma bolt first burned through his armor, and he found himself imagining Dr. Somogy admonishing him, Idiot, I said to rest.
He kept going, limping and once again relying on his armor’s reactive circuits. Everyone made mistakes. The important thing was to recover fast and keep moving.
John peered through the hole he’d made and found a street full of open-beaked Kig-Yar being herded through the darkness by their Sangheili squadron commander. He set a detonator for two seconds, then activated it and tossed it down the street.
The explosion collapsed the wall he was using as cover, and he bolted out of the building just in time to avoid being buried beneath three stories of glass block. Some semblance of order was beginning to return to the depot yard, with crews climbing into their vehicles and the first Marauders and Wraiths rising on their antigravity pads.
John ran westward along the edge of the yard, reaching into the open demolition pack slung over his weapon arm and randomly setting a detonator delay. He did his best to pick battle-ready targets that were already on the move and under power, with a strong preference for the Marauders, since their direct-fire missiles would prove even more devastating to the militia’s Warthogs than the heavy plasma mortars mounted on the Wraiths.
Every twenty steps or so, he crossed paths with an enemy who seemed to realize he was an infiltrator and reacted to stop him. Mostly he took them out with two head shots or a burst to the torso, but on occasion the contact was so unexpected that he simply ran them over or broke his foe’s neck with a quick hammerfist—sometimes while still holding a cube of C10.
But for the most part, the darkness and the chaos in the depot yard served him well. He scored hits with most of the C10 cubes he threw, and by the time he drew near the exit, he was down to a single half-empty demolition pack. He was also out of MA40 ammo, and had only one magazine for his M7 submachine gun.
Not wanting to silhouette himself against the shield barrier’s red glow, he went down an alley and crossed to the perimeter road, where he was surprised to see that Linda had already blown the lookout towers and taken out the shield barrier along the entire south side of town. That meant the militia was less than two minutes out, since bringing the barrier down any earlier would have given the enemy time to react to the breach and prepare a defense.
To the north, the shield barrier remained up and glowing, so from the vantage of the depot yard, it would appear that the entire town was still protected. Once a squadron commander crossed the perimeter road and saw the truth, he would rush south to intercept the Warthogs as they entered town. Whatever else John did, he needed to stop that from happening. It would mean the difference between a hard-fought victory and a devastating defeat.
He went to the edge of the yard and took a position in a half-razed building on the corner of the perimeter road. Between his remaining C10 cubes, eight grenades, and his single M7 magazine, he had enough ordnance to fight for maybe sixty seconds. After that, he would have to draw his M6 and hop onto a Wraith, then pry open the hatch and capture it for use against the enemy.
It would be tough, but he’d done it many times before.
He set two of the timers on his last five detonators to seven seconds, and the rest to three seconds.
“Blue Two, status?”
“Northwest corner of the depot yard,” Fred reported. “No cubes, bingo MA40 ammunition, still six M19s.”
“Save the M19s,” John said. “The column will try to turn south on the perimeter road. We have to bottle that up. Blue Three?”
“No explosives,” Kelly said. “Plenty of MA40 ammunition. You want me to toss down a few magazines?”
Before John could answer, a deafening thrum filled the depot yard, and the surviving armor began to move forward, pushing disabled craft out of the way and scattering anyone still on foot. Clearly they had heard about the approaching War
thogs and were moving to intercept.
“Negative,” John said. “Vacate the towers and stay out of sight.”
Kelly flashed green; then the first Marauders were moving past his hiding place into the perimeter road—no doubt expecting the shield barrier to drop so they could exit the yard.
John rose and threw his first two C10 cubes at the Marauders leading the way across the perimeter road. To stop the rest of the armor from plowing through his area to bypass the coming wreckage, he hurled the last three cubes at a trio of Wraiths passing close by, then fled the building and began racing down the perimeter road.
Three steps later, the first shockwave hit, taking him square in the back and carrying him a good fifteen meters before dropping him facedown on the glass paving. He slid another ten meters on his chest plate, then managed to get an arm under himself and spin around.
“Uh, Blue Leader,” Fred said over TEAMCOM. “I don’t think they’re going to—”
John’s faceplate flashed white as a Marauder missile streaked away from the column and destroyed the closest lookout tower. He rolled to one side of the street and came up on his knees, the butt of his M7 pressed to his shoulder. With his NVS still blast-blinded, he couldn’t actually see the column flowing out through the now-opened shield barrier, but he could hear them—and the rising deep hum of their boosted antigravity propulsion drives, swiftly building to battle speed.
John opened the Viery Militia command channel. “Sierra-117 reporting armor breakout west side New Mohács,” he commed. “Repeat: armor breakout west side—”
“No worries,” Chapov interrupted. “We have you covered.”
“No worries?!” John realized he was starting to yell and ordered himself to calm down. It didn’t work. “Explain yourself, Lieutenant.”
“Give me a minute,” Chapov said. “Kinda tied up right now.”
Before John could object, a series of earsplitting bangs sounded out on the glass barrens. His NVS had cleared the blast-white from his faceplate, but when he turned toward the sound, he found himself looking at the only section of shield barrier still standing within half a kilometer.
