by Troy Denning
The entire file of Banshees dropped in behind the Pelican almost at once. Although they boasted the crimson-and-gray armor of Banished designs, no matter what the arrangement had been, John knew that inside these craft were Keeper pilots, just as devoted and zealous as the Covenant had ever been. They were almost as crazy as Chapov, flying through the narrow gorge two abreast and stacked two high, forming four-craft elements that would be able to unleash a hellish storm of concentrated fire. The lead element’s plasma cannons were already flashing, the Pelican’s armor pinging and sizzling as their fire hit home. A couple of bolts flashed through the hatch into the LHD bucket. John was already squeezing the LAAG triggers, not even thinking about it, just reacting on instinct and pouring rounds back toward the fiery muzzles of the enemy.
The rounded noses of the two lower Banshees collapsed inward under his attack. Both craft dropped into the river and tumbled along its surface. A pair of HEMP missiles hit the upper two Banshees, and a curtain of fire stretched across the canyon.
Fred and Kelly, of course.
John was already letting loose on the bottom two craft in the next element, swinging back and forth between them, punching holes in their canopies as they began to return fire. Then everything went sideways and he felt himself being pressed toward the deck as the Pelican banked hard around a sharp bend in the canyon. His targets didn’t make the turn and slammed into the cliffs on the outer wall of the curve.
Another pair of missiles flashed from the Pelican’s hatch and took out the two Banshees in the top of the element as they rounded the bend, eliminating the enemy threats before they had a chance to bring their cannons to bear.
“Reload!”
Fred and Kelly called the word simultaneously, throwing their empty Pilums back toward Linda and catching the ones she had already tossed toward them. With no enemy craft in view, John simply filled the canyon behind them with LAAG rounds, and when the third element of Banshees came around the bend, they ran into a wall of armor-penetrating rounds and disintegrated in midair.
By then Fred and Kelly had their Pilums shouldered and were waiting for the fourth element. The Spartans were pushing the Banshee formation back, giving it no chance to open fire as the Pelican disappeared around one bend in the gorge after another. The trouble was, that also limited their own opportunities to eliminate Banshees. And the Black Iron Gorge was only so long. When they reached the end, they would have to climb out over the Spartans’ old training site, and the remaining Banshees would be able to overwhelm them.
They managed to eliminate two more elements over the next five minutes. But that was only twenty craft—which meant there were still at least thirty behind them.
“Csáki Narrows coming,” Chapov said. “Be ready.”
As child trainees, Blue Team had descended the Black Iron Gorge during an exercise, and John remembered the Csáki Narrows well. A particularly bad set of rapids, the narrows had reduced their makeshift rafts into toothpicks and nearly drowned them all.
The narrows had seemed both endless and insanely fast, because the gorge was only fifty meters wide in that section. The close confines funneled the river through the channel and then straight down in a mad rush…
John connected another belt of ammunition to the one already in the LAAG, at the same time speaking over TEAMCOM. “You remember the narrows, right?”
“Oh yeah,” Fred said. “This is going to be fun.”
“No doubt,” Kelly said. “But for whom?”
The Pelican banked around a set of S-turns, then leveled out and dropped so low John could see its slipstream ruffling the surface of the churning rapids. He counted to two, knowing the Banshees were at least that far behind them, then opened fire.
A couple of breaths later, the lead element of the formation came around the bend and hit the wall of rounds streaming down the canyon. All four craft disintegrated and rained down on the water.
But there were four more craft behind them, and yet another four behind those. Plasma fire began to fly up the canyon toward the Pelican, hissing and chiming off its exterior. A bolt hit something on the drilling jumbo and deflected into the overhead. Another zipped past John and shattered the situation monitor. He knew Mukai was okay because he heard her cussing into TEAMCOM.
Kelly and Fred loosed a pair of missiles, then another pair, and the gorge filled with flames. John continued to fire, and the next element of Banshees emerged from the fireball into a torrent of slugs. One flew apart in midair and another veered into a wall, while a third dipped a canard into the river and went tumbling back down the canyon. The fourth exploded under the Spartans’ counterattack.
But the Banshees continued to come, and this time they were stacked three high, taking advantage of the narrows’ straightaway. To make themselves more difficult targets, they undulated up and down, climbing a little higher each time, all the while mercilessly shooting plasma bolts at the Pelican.
“They’re trying to line up a top attack!” Fred said over TEAMCOM. “Get off the deck!”
“It’ll be fine.” Chapov sounded utterly calm. “Just keep shooting. Keep them off the water.”
“You think?” Fred replied.
But he fired another missile, and so did Kelly. John began to lay his fire just a few meters above the churning river surface, concentrating not so much on hitting the Banshees as trying to keep forcing them up. He had no idea what Chapov was doing, but when a pilot said to do something on his bird, it was a good idea to listen.
Fred and Kelly knocked down two more Banshees with their missiles, and John took out another one. But there was a storm of plasma fire coming back in their direction, and the excavation equipment was taking so much damage that Chief Mukai finally got permission to raise the loading ramp to protect it.
Then the bolts began to find their way to the Spartans themselves, taking down John’s energy shields first, then Kelly’s and Fred’s simultaneously. They all had to duck behind the loading ramp while their shields regenerated, the plasma fire beginning to eat through the ramp.
A bolt cut the LAAG sling, and the gun dropped into John’s arms. He cradled the barrels in the crook of his elbow, then stood up to open fire—and discovered the Pelican was trailing so much smoke he couldn’t see his targets, only the crimson flashes of their plasma flying toward him. He fired anyway, keeping his rounds low as Chapov had ordered… and then the smoke parted.
The bright-blue disks of two propellant nozzles flashed past overhead—the stubby wings of a Broadsword rocking unsteadily as it passed through the Pelican’s slipstream. It must have been on the attack, because Banshees were falling everywhere from the sky.
John released the LAAG triggers, then the Broadsword pulled up, the smoke closed in behind them again, and plasma bolts began to fly toward the Pelican, this time coming from a few hundred meters farther down the gorge.
He was about to return fire when the smoke parted a second time to reveal another pair of propellant nozzles speeding by overhead. More Banshees fell, and when the Broadsword pulled up this time, the next element was a thousand meters down the gorge. Their plasma bolts kept coming, but they weren’t connecting—especially after a third Broadsword dropped in for an attack.
Chapov’s voice sounded over TEAMCOM again. “Secure troop bay for high-g maneuvers! Do it fast!”
As Mukai acknowledged the order, John and the Spartans chucked the LAAG and the Pilums over the loading ramp. With all the smoke trailing behind the Pelican, it was obvious that a hard landing was on the way—and no one wanted a loose weapon flying around the troop bay during a crash.
With the bay secure, the Spartans returned to their seats and buckled into their crash harnesses, while Mukai used her control relay to raise the loading ramp. The Pelican began to shudder and wobble. Whatever part of the Pelican was smoking was failing fast.
Van Houte’s voice sounded over TEAMCOM. “Lieutenant Chapov is going to set us down at the top end of the gorge.”
The location
he was talking about was the Spartans’ old training course, which was about four hundred meters above the river. John just hoped they had the power to make it. The gorge wasn’t as sheer or deep near its head as where they had entered it, but the walls were still steep. If Chapov tried to land on them, the Pelican would tumble into the plunge pool at the bottom of Iron River Falls.
“Once we’re down, evacuate the troop bay quickly,” Van Houte continued. “Our escorts are zero ammunition, and there are still three Banshees behind us.”
“Acknowledged.” John tried to check the tactical display in his HUD and realized the cockpit sync was down. He didn’t like what that implied about their avionics. “What about all that smoke?”
“Nothing to worry about,” Van Houte said. “We took a hit in the missile bay—it’s just some propellant burning off.”
“Missile propellant burning off?” Fred said. “If that’s nothing, I don’t even want to know why we’re shuddering so hard.”
“Don’t worry about the shuddering,” Van Houte replied. “We have bigger problems than uncontrolled vector pylons.”
A sharp jolt ran through the Pelican; then it tipped into a bank and began to snake up the gorge again. Fred and John looked at each other across the cargo stack, waiting for Van Houte to elaborate.
He didn’t.
Rather than distract the major with a question that would do absolutely nothing to get the Pelican out of the gorge and onto the ground, John focused on something that would contribute to the mission—organizing a quick evacuation.
Getting the excavation machines out of the bay had to come early. They were vital to the mission, and they were situated for quick roll-off. Mukai could undo the tie-downs while the Spartans organized the cargo. There was still some ordnance in the stack—two more Pilums and a case of SPNKr reloads, because Fred liked his M41 rocket launcher for ground combat. They could probably abandon it in a pinch, but it was on top, so they might as well toss it onto the drilling jumbo operator’s platform. If it fell off later, so be it. But they had to move it anyway.
It was all the stuff under the ordnance—the titanium haulage buckets packed with bins of enhanced gelignite, the winches loaded with spools of nanobraided titanium cable—that was mission-critical. CASTLE Base—or what remained of it after the self-destruct charges Dr. Halsey had set off to prevent its assets from being claimed by the Covenant—was two thousand meters down a vertical access shaft, one that would be at least partially filled with gravel and broken rock. So all that equipment came with them, even if it meant dragging it out of a burning Pelican while a trio of Banshees strafed them.
But their weapons came first. Weapons always came first. That’s why Blue Team was still alive and kicking after all these years.
“Listen up in the troop bay,” John said. “Once we’re on the ground, Blue Two will access the weapons locker and distribute our individual weapons. Chief Mukai, you and Blue Four will get the excavation equipment rolled off. Blue Three and I will drag—”
That was as far as John made it before the Pelican went into a steep climb and began to shudder so violently that it sounded like they were being pounded by fuel rod cannons. With no cockpit sync to check on his HUD, John instinctively looked to the shattered situation monitor above Mukai’s head, and then his gut finally accepted what his head had known all along—they were riding blind, and their lives were entirely in Lieutenant Chapov’s hands.
John went back to the evac plan. “Blue Three and I will drag the haulage buckets out and load them onto the LHD. Then we’ll clear the area—”
The Pelican bucked hard, as if it were dancing across the sky on its tail. Two holes opened in the deck behind the cargo stack as a pair of fuel rods exploded through the dropship’s belly armor. The blast wave was the worst part, slamming everyone in the troop bay back against the bulkheads, Blue Team’s helmets actually ringing.
Then they went weightless as the Pelican stopped climbing. John expected it to start sliding back on its tail, down into the gorge. But Chapov brought the nose down by timing a few last thrusts out of the uncontrolled vector pylons. The big chin gun began to chatter, and they went into a flat spin and dropped fast.
The Pelican couldn’t have been very high up, because they pancaked into the ground almost immediately, the tail section just a little downhill.
“Go go go!” John ordered.
Fred was already at the weapons locker, tossing John’s assault rifle over the cargo stack, then Kelly’s shotgun and Linda’s sniper rifle. John caught his MA40 in the air and raced aft past the drilling jumbo.
About halfway down, there was a long breach in the bulkhead where a fuel rod had grazed the Pelican’s starboard side. Through the hole, he saw the burning hulk of an anti-aircraft Wraith sitting on a rocky flat, with a jagged wall of mountains rising about a kilometer to the south. It didn’t much resemble the old military compound anymore, thanks to the Covenant, but it was in the right place and looked about the right size. Chapov had done his part.
By the time John reached the loading ramp, Mukai already had it down. He paused just long enough to make sure Blue Team was ready to engage, then led the way out onto the rocky barrens.
The Pelican had come down with its tail facing west, which gave them a clear view of the entire plateau, across two kilometers of broken rock all the way to the wall of brown, barren escarpments at the base of the Highland Mountains’ highest peaks. There was nothing coming toward them overland, and no Banshees in sight.
“Blue Four, watch our six,” John ordered. “Blue Two, bring out the last of our Pilums in case those Banshees show up. Blue Three, you advance on the port side. I’ll take starboard.”
Everyone flashed green, and John ducked around the Pelican’s tail and started up the starboard side. The burning Wraith that he’d spotted from inside sat thirty meters distant. Its fuel rods were crackling loudly as they cooked off, its charging gas teasing the flames into a spiral column.
The Pelican had crashed directly atop a second anti-aircraft Wraith, and one of the big fuel rod cannons had crashed down on its canopy. Van Houte was already out of the gunner’s seat and leaning over the Wraith’s cannon to peer down at Chapov.
John continued forward, his MA40 shouldered and ready to fire at any Keepers who climbed out of the Wraith behind Van Houte.
“Blue Three, sitrep?” he asked.
“I have a crippled Wraith thirty meters to the north,” she said. “Two crewmembers attempting to evacuate.”
“Take them. I’ll assist here.”
He reached the front of the Pelican and climbed up on the smashed Wraith to make sure the alien crew wouldn’t cause them any trouble, then saw that both Jiralhanae had bullet wounds between their eyes—Van Houte had already handled them. John circled around the nose of the Pelican, then climbed up opposite Van Houte and looked down toward Chapov.
Damn. The kid was in trouble. The Wraith cannon had smashed through the Pelican’s canopy right down the middle, carving a space between the two operator seats. The weapon’s muzzle must have caught something on the way in, because it had pinned Chapov to his seat. His chest was caved in and his arms were resting on top of the barrel assembly. His chin was covered in blood, no doubt expectorated from his internal wounds.
Chapov looked at John and tried to smile. “Best I could do,” he said. “The Broadswords…”
He coughed, and more blood foamed from his mouth.
“You flew a great mission, Lieutenant.” John did not try to assure Chapov that he was going to be fine. They both knew it wasn’t true, and he didn’t want to lie to a dying hero. “Legendary. We’ll handle it from here.”
“Wait,” Chapov gasped. He tried to say more, then looked to Van Houte. “You tell… him.”
“Right.” Van Houte looked across the cockpit to John. “The Broadswords did a flyover at Menachite Mountain. The Keepers are already there in force—and so is that intrusion corvette we saw from New Mohács.”
&nb
sp; John nodded. “Thanks. I thought that was likely.” He reached into the cockpit and squeezed Chapov’s shoulder. “Legendary.”
Fred arrived with a Pilum and an extra magazine, then climbed up and looked over Van Houte’s shoulder. “Oh, man,” he said. “What can we do for you, Lieutenant? Somebody who needs to know?”
Chapov shook his head. “Personnel has all that. Just report it.” He pointed his chin at the Pilum. “And leave that for me. You… need to get those excavation machines unloaded and get out of here. There are still three… Banshees coming.”
Fred’s helmet rocked back in surprise, and he looked across the cockpit toward John.
“Don’t worry about the Banshees,” John said. “We can—”
Chapov’s voice grew stronger. “I’m not asking, Master Chief. That’s an order.”
Now it was John’s turn to be surprised, but he didn’t argue. He came to attention and raised his hand to his helmet.
“Yes, sir.” He finished the salute, then looked to Fred. “You heard the lieutenant. Give the man his missile launcher.”
Fred placed the Pilum on Chapov’s shoulder in firing position. He then smashed a larger hole into the canopy so Chapov had the maximum range of fire—and placed the extra magazine in his lap. He could have released the seat and allowed it to draw to the back of the cockpit, giving the pilot complete freedom of motion, but there was no reason to risk it—who knew what the cannon was holding in place.
Then Fred came to attention and saluted. “Give ’em hell, Lieutenant.”
“You too, Spartan.”
Chapov returned the salute; then John and Fred went aft to help finish the off-loading while Major Van Houte stayed behind to share a few last words.
Chief Mukai already had both excavation machines on the ground, and Kelly was helping her strap the spare ordnance onto the jumbo operator’s platform. John caught Mukai’s eye.
“We can finish here,” he said. “You have a moment to say good-bye.”
“I already did.” She tapped her helmet jaw-guard, where the microphone was located, then tried to blink back a tear. “I have my orders.”
