by Troy Denning
“Glad to hear it,” John said. Alpha Squadron was already sweeping in to engage the Seraphs that had dropped down to protect the corvette, so it was time to sign off and let them do their job. “Happy hunting. Blue Leader out.”
The ground shuddered and the air whooshed as Alpha Squadron shot over Vanadinite Mountain. They were in echelon formation, the third Broadsword from the middle—Alpha Leader, presumably—wagging its wings as they passed.
The squadron split into three elements, the first four craft diving into a missile run. The shoulder of the mountain blocked John’s view of the actual attack, but he saw six Seraphs go after them, and the second Alpha element immediately bolt after those six enemy craft. The third element stayed high to engage the last three Seraphs.
The muffled thunder of missile strikes began to rumble out of the basin. By then Blue Team was well into Phase Two, with Fred and Kelly descending the mountain to collect Van Houte, Mukai, and the excavation machines.
John and Linda crossed the sandy gulch they intended to use for moving the excavation machines into the talus basin, then raced to the top of the next ridge. It overlooked Koldus Canyon, the narrow, winding gorge that was the Keepers’ only route to the old training compound where the UNSC battalions were landing.
The Keeper column was moving slowly but steadily, an indication that the lead elements were not having much trouble pushing through the mud- and rockslides scattered along their route—probably because they had been partially cleared earlier in the day by the same anti-aircraft Wraiths that had downed Blue Team’s transport Pelican… and killed Lieutenant Chapov.
There were only seven pieces of mechanized armor, all Marauders, still waiting to enter Koldus Canyon—and with the Broadswords out in the flats raining missiles down on anything with a hull, they were pushing hard to move forward. From his position, John had a partial view through the canyon mouth back into Rejtett Valley. He could see the geyser of slurry still flying from the access shaft. In the distance beyond, just visible over the top of its arc, the intrusion corvette continued to sit on the ground, its shields flashing as pieces of fighter craft rained down on it.
John opened a magnification window and saw what looked like the parts of four different Seraphs and two Broadswords scattered across the surrounding flats. He couldn’t understand why the corvette remained passive. Its energy shielding was proof against most Broadsword attacks, but if the UNSC downed the last Seraphs and started autocannon runs, they would eventually break through. At the very least, the corvette should have been in the air, using its own weapons to fend off air-to-ground attacks on the Keeper forces.
Instead it continued to sit quietly—not even activating the handful of weapons it could fire from the ground—and that troubled John. Good things rarely came of an enemy acting so unpredictably.
Fred’s status light flashed green, and John turned to see him and Kelly escorting the two excavation machines over the wet sand in the gulch below. John signaled them to continue. The gulch opened directly into the talus basin, just four hundred meters from the mouth of Koldus Canyon. But the last Marauder was already inside the canyon and passing below the ridge. By the time the excavation machines reached the talus basin, the Keeper column would be another kilometer closer to the training compound—and unable to return to the basin quickly enough to interfere with Phase Three of Blue Team’s plan.
John looked back to the inert corvette—then heard the distant growl of another inbound UNSC squadron. The remaining Seraphs tried to break off to meet the arriving threat. They lost two more craft immediately, with four Broadswords giving chase to the three that escaped. That left six friendly birds to provide close air support over the basin. It would have been all Blue Team needed—if not for the intrusion corvette.
“This will be interesting,” Linda said over TEAMCOM. “Look what the Infinity sent down.”
Twelve delta-shaped specks were dropping out of the clouds, tiny fans of blue propellant pushing them along. Longswords. No wonder the Seraphs were panicking. The workhorses of UNSC orbital strike doctrine, Longswords were capable of carrying a huge range of munitions, from their chin-mounted ALI-50 asynchronous linear-induction autocannons all the way up to Shiva-class nuclear missiles.
It was hard to say what ordnance they were here to deliver. John’s first guess would be Shield Buster ASGM-15 EMP-assisted missiles, which used an initial burst of electromagnetic energy to penetrate an energy shield before delivering a hull-penetrating charge. Or they might be carrying Octadarts, relatively small laser-guided bombs filled with octanitrocubane charges that simply blasted through the shield. There were a half dozen other possibilities, any one of them powerful enough to cripple an intrusion corvette—especially one that was still grounded.
But apparently the Longsword squadron appearance was the breaking point—when John looked back to the corvette this time, the vessel was finally rising into the air, a long line of tiny figures spilling from the hangar bay under its bow. He opened a magnification window again and saw that the figures were the same Gray Guards he’d spent so much time watching earlier. But now they were wearing jump-jet packs and carrying an assortment of weapons—everything from shock, spike, and plasma rifles to something that vaguely resembled a larger, blunt-nosed fuel rod cannon. At least the mystery of the lingering corvette had been solved—it had been waiting while the Gray Guards re-armed for heavy combat.
Now things were really about to heat up. John switched to the air command channel. “Alpha Leader, Blue Leader. Request urgent ground support mission.”
“Let me guess,” Alpha Leader said. “The jumpers?”
“Affirmative,” John said. There had to be at least a hundred on the ground now, and the line pouring from the corvette’s hangar bay showed no signs of diminishing. “Whatever you can do to thin them out. We’d need an ammunition drop to eliminate all of them.”
“We’ll do what we can. What about the geyser?”
“Continue avoiding,” John said. As long as the Keepers were still clearing the access shaft, he was going to let them. Better that than Blue Team having to excavate it themselves by bucket and winch in the middle of a battle. “We need that equipment intact.”
“Acknowledged,” Alpha Leader said. “Good luck down there.”
The Gray Guards continued to stream out of the corvette’s hangar as it rose past a hundred meters above the glass, using their jump-jets to control their descent. As soon as they hit the ground, they gathered into ten-jumper packs and started across the flats toward the talus basin, weaving and dodging as the Broadswords arrived and opened fire.
A few of the Jiralhanae hit their jump-jets and tried to bound across the flats in fifty-meter leaps. But they were less maneuverable in the air than on the ground, and the Broadswords took out every one of them.
Two Broadswords broke off and began to trail the departing corvette at different altitudes, dodging plasma fire from its tail guns while simultaneously shooting ALI-35 rounds into the jumpers still leaping from its hangar bay. Some of the guards blossomed into fireballs as their jump-jets ignited, with the rest simply going limp and plummeting to the ground.
The other four Broadswords continued to make low runs over the flats, trying to pick off the Gray Guards as they headed toward the talus basin. John could see right away that these four would not be as successful as the two craft trailing the corvette. The Jiralhanae were too spread out, with plenty of craters and boulders to use as hard cover. Some of the Gray Guards were returning fire with the odd-looking weapons—large, heavily bladed explosive-launchers of obvious Jiralhanae design. At first, John was pretty sure they were a new kind of fuel-rod cannon, given their muzzle action and the energy they were launching.
But they were not fuel-rod guns. Not even close.
The weapons were now firing some sort of red plasma incendiary that had a shallow ballistic arc. One of the incendiaries hit a Broadsword, exploding across the entire wing and into the fuselage. Within a second,
the skin began melting away in flames, then the entire craft was disintegrating as the frame burned. Whatever these new weapons were, John hoped none of them made it into the access shaft.
The Longswords arrived overhead, their huge wedges slicing across the sky a thousand meters above the surrounding mountaintops.
A woman’s voice sounded on the air comm channel. “Blue Leader, Alpha Two.” There was no reason to ask why Alpha Leader was no longer the one contacting John—it had been his Broadsword that was hit by the plasma incendiary. “Lima Leader is assuming local command.”
“Welcome, Lima Leader,” John said. “I mean that.”
“Happy to be here.” This voice was also female, but older and steelier than Blue Two’s. “Requesting guidance. That intrusion corvette has moved off three hundred kilometers—and it’s still going. He may be trying to draw us away. Do you want us to pursue?”
“Negative,” John said. “We just need him out of the way. It would be more useful to orbit on-station.”
“We have clearance to offer full support until bingo propellant,” Lima Leader said. “That gives you four hours.”
“That’ll have to be enough,” John replied. Longswords were too large and lumbering to provide the same kind of close air support that Broadswords did, but they had the firepower. A lot of it. “Weapons tight—and stay away from the geyser.”
“So we’ve been told,” Lima Leader said. “Twice.”
Laser-guided bombs began to rain down from the Longswords, raising a two-kilometer-wide ring of conflagration that blanketed the flats and overlapped the rim of the talus basin, dipping to within a half kilometer of the access shaft. At times the heat was so intense that John felt his Mjolnir’s climate-control system kick in to keep him at the optimal performance temperature.
And through it all, the muck continued to shoot out of the access shaft, arcing over the talus basin to feed the growing slurry dump behind the boulder wall. Whatever the enemy was doing down there, it was determined to see it through. But so was Blue Team, and now that the UNSC had seized control of Rejtett Valley, the time had come to take over the Keepers’ shaft-clearing operation.
John switched to TEAMCOM. “Phase Three.”
He pulled a control transmitter from his electronics pouch and disengaged the safety override, then depressed the activation pad.
“Engaging mines.”
“Preparing secondary charges,” Linda said. She tapped her own control transmitter and slipped it back into her pouch. “Concussion activation, five-, ten-, and thirty-minute delays.”
“Confirmed,” John said, starting back down the slope. “Let’s move.”
When Blue Team started across the talus basin, the Keepers would spot them. Realizing they had been lured out of position by the landing at the compound, the commander would almost certainly send a detachment back to defend the access shaft.
To make sure that detachment never arrived, the Spartans had buried a field of Lotus antitank mines near the mouth of Koldus Canyon and placed enhanced-gelignite charges on some cliffs a little farther up the route.
With a squadron of Longswords above them, the trap was probably overkill. But Blue Team hadn’t known about the Longswords when they were making their preparations. And in explosive situations like this, overkill was always welcome.
John and Linda caught up to the rest of the team near the end of the gulch. Major Van Houte and Chief Mukai were waiting behind a bend with the excavation machines. Fred and Kelly were kneeling at the edge of the basin, their passive camouflage packages engaged. John activated his own and joined them, leaving Linda to watch their back-trail.
The near side of the basin was pocked with strike craters and littered here and there with alien bodies. But most of the Keepers had been up on the flats when the fighting started and were now on their way through Koldus Canyon.
The scenario on the opposite side of the basin was different. It appeared that at least a few of the Gray Guards had survived the Longsword strikes and made it over the rim, because there was so much smoke rising from that area of the basin that it looked like a fogbank had rolled in. John opened a magnification window and saw that in places the sandstone boulders had been reduced to just sand—and the ordnance was continuing to fall.
But dozens of the Brute jumpers had cleared the bombing zone and were continuing to work their way toward the access shaft, now braving Broadsword strafing runs as they scurried from boulder to boulder. John had his onboard computer begin a count of still-advancing Jiralhanae and quickly reached fifty. If even half that number survived to set up a perimeter defense around the shaft, it could take Blue Team an hour to eliminate them—even with close air support.
And John was beginning to think they didn’t have that long.
The geyser was changing. The slurry was no longer arcing into the dump in a steady flow. Instead, there would be nothing for a few seconds, then a brief surge of gravel and stone, then nothing again for a few more seconds. It seemed like the workers down in the shaft were running low on muck. Worse, the material was beginning to look drier, as though it was no longer coming from the bottom of a mud-filled sump.
Possibly an entry tunnel leading into CASTLE Base.
Other than the Gray Guards approaching from the opposite side of the basin, the only obvious hostiles were the Kig-Yar and Unggoy still manning the pirate lift. There was always the possibility of a small force hiding somewhere in ambush, but that strategy required knowing the target’s route, and given the jumble of stone below, John doubted that even Mukai knew how she was going to get the bulky excavation machines to the access shaft.
“Blue Three will stay with Special Crew to defend the excavation machines and assist with route clearing.” John was speaking over TEAMCOM. “Blue Two and Blue Leader will advance on the access shaft at top speed—and deny those jumpers any chance to defend it. Blue Four will accompany us until she’s in range to begin offensive operations. Questions?”
When nobody had any, John checked his weapons and equipment, then disengaged his passive camouflage unit. Once everyone’s status LEDs had turned green, he gave the order to execute and led the way down into the talus basin.
Their gulch cut through the rim about five hundred meters above the basin floor, making for a steep descent. Given that it had rained that morning, the lechatelierite slopes were not as slippery as he had expected—perhaps because the sand granules in the mountains were angular enough to provide traction rather than deny it.
Even had they wanted to, there was no way to hide the excavation machines as they advanced toward the shaft. But Blue Team had unchallenged air superiority over the entire basin, so John didn’t even attempt a concealed approach. He simply sprang from stone to stone and boulder to boulder, relying on extreme range and his erratic changes of direction to protect him from any hand-carried artillery. And his leg injury wasn’t even throbbing. He covered the first kilometer in two minutes, taking no hostile fire at all.
It didn’t take the Gray Guards long to see Blue Team coming. They began to spend less time moving behind cover and more dodging through the open, some even risking short jump-jet hops. John saw twelve Jiralhanae go down in half as many seconds. But they were also more willing to exchange fire, and a trio managed to score shock rifle hits on a low-flying Broadsword. The EMP took down its shielding, and the electrolasers gouged long slashes through both wings and the skin of its fuselage. The wounded craft pulled up early and wobbled out of sight over the basin rim.
By then John had closed to within a kilometer of the shaft, with Fred advancing on his right flank and Linda on the left. But the surviving Gray Guards were even closer, no more than five hundred meters from their side. He estimated their number at thirty, though their sporadic movements into and out of cover made it hard to be certain.
The operators of the surface lift abandoned their workstations at the sight of the Spartans, and rushed to set a defensive line to screen their equipment. As before, there were
only ten of them—three Kig-Yar and seven Unggoy, all armed with plasma pistols. John marked them for Linda to eliminate and continued toward the shaft.
A surge of stone and gravel rose from the access shaft and hovered above it for a moment, then reversed direction and sank slowly back the way it had come. John didn’t know whether the reversal was prompted by Blue Team’s imminent arrival, or whether the Keepers below had finished their excavation. Either way, it wasn’t a good sign.
He and Fred were five hundred meters from the shaft now, but Linda had dropped off to set up her SRS99-S5. The Gray Guards opposite them were less than three hundred meters from their side of the shaft, which meant in range of beam and shock rifles. Knowing the talus would make it almost impossible to spot a marksman preparing to open fire, John and Fred stooped down, using boulders for cover whenever possible.
Linda’s sniper rifle boomed four times, taking out the three Kig-Yar in front of the pirate lift and igniting a Grunt methane tank. The rest of the Unggoy abandoned their positions and fled.
Unggoy were smarter than they looked.
More than could be said about the Gray Guards. They were only a hundred meters from the shaft now, but ten of them had practically crushed their jump-jet controls and were fifty meters in the air, scattering toward the north side of the shaft. John wasn’t sure what they were trying to do—maybe flank Blue Team, or follow the Unggoy’s example and withdraw?—but they were all rising on steep trajectories that were going to keep them off the ground for several seconds.
The Broadswords instantly swept in, swinging behind the jumpers and opening up with their ALI-35s.
Then the rest of the Gray Guards hit their thrusters, launching themselves in low trajectories straight at the shaft. It was a classic sacrifice-diversion beautifully executed, using part of their number to pull the Broadswords out of position so the rest of the force could maneuver. At first John thought the jumpers were moving up to establish a defensive perimeter around the shaft, and would use their next jump to cross it.
