by Troy Denning
“More than you can possibly understand.” Damon’s smugness was almost enough to make Veta regret asking. “But explained simply, the Jenny Lynn Tantalite Mine is a two-level block-caving operation. The uppermost level—where we are now, as we follow Papa-10 and the Jiralhanae underground—is the access level. It provides a way to reach the tantalite deposit, via two long adits that have been driven into the mountain on either side of the ore body. I assume everyone can see how the two adits form a V around the yellow-shaded tantalite zone at the heart of the map?”
A series of mic clicks confirmed that everyone could.
“Good,” Damon said. “Now, turn your attention to the lowest level. Situated seven hundred meters beneath us, this is the haulage level, where the ore is taken from the mine via a long tunnel that opens into a nearby valley. In very basic terms, the tantalite is blasted free of the host rock from the access level and allowed to tumble down a chute to the haulage level, where it is removed from the mine via the tunnel and transferred to a nearby mill for processing.”
Damon paused a moment, then added, “Rather, that’s how the mine once operated, before Meridian was glassed by the Covenant.”
“What about all this other stuff between levels?” Mark asked. He was referring to a maze of passageways that connected the two levels in a vast, three-dimensional web labeled things like RAMP, STOPE, DRAWBELL, and WINZE. “There must be fifty kilometers of tunnels and shafts on this map.”
“Technically, there are zero shafts and only one tunnel,” Damon said. “Adits are sometimes referred to as tunnels, but that’s not the correct—”
“Save the vocabulary lesson for later,” Fred said. “Just tell us how many kilometers of mine we need to search.”
“That will depend on your tracking efficiency, of course,” Damon said. “But Mark G-313’s estimate was rather low. The Jenny Lynn mine has over ninety-seven kilometers of mapped, underground passageways.”
“Ninety-seven?”
“There could be more,” Damon said. “Mine maps fall out of date rather quickly. Shall I continue to explain the Jenny Lynn operations?”
“Negative,” Fred said. “Lopis?”
“Yes, Lieutenant?”
“What you said aboard the Turaco? You were right.” Fred must have signaled the advance, because the Blue Team designator symbols on Veta’s HUD began to move again. “This op isn’t going to be so simple after all.”
CHAPTER 24
* * *
* * *
0401 hours, December 16, 2553 (military calendar)
Adit 2, Jenny Lynn Tantalite Mine
Moon Meridian, Planet Hestia V, Hestia System
A thousand paces into the darkness, Adit 2 ran past a charging station with three large-equipment bays. In the first bay sat a giant, rubber-tired JOTUN Arilus utility truck fitted with a specialized tool package that Damon had earlier identified as a drilling jumbo—four boom-mounted boring lasers powered by a battery pack the size of an ODST drop pod. Beside it sat a long, low Traxus Heavy Industries powder wagon, which had an enclosed cargo box and a hose that pumped slurried explosives into boreholes. Judging by the thick layer of orange grime that coated everything—including the operators’ seats—both vehicles had been idle since the glassing of Meridian two years earlier.
The third bay sat empty. But on the muddy floor a ring of boot prints and a set of huge tire tracks suggested the Papa-10 survivors had boarded a piece of equipment and driven away into the adit. The cutout contained only a couple of Jiralhanae tracks, so Veta suspected the Keepers had been close enough to watch the vehicle depart.
And there had been no question of giving chase in the drilling jumbo or powder wagon. Both vehicles still had green power lights shining beneath the grime on their control panels, but their tires had all been cut through the sidewalls. And the tool used to do it had been hot—the slashes were still so warm that the residual heat triggered the infrared display on Veta’s HUD.
Mark and Ash stepped out from behind the powder wagon, their helmet lamps on low power and casting yellow cones across the empty bay.
“Clear,” Mark reported over TEAMCOM. “But someone took a couple portable laser drills off the jumbo. And they jimmied the loading hatch on the powder wagon.”
“Did they get anything from the powder wagon?” Fred asked. Along with Kelly and Linda, he was fifty paces down the adit, securing the point while the Ferrets searched the cutout. “Please tell me it was empty.”
“Spotless,” Ash confirmed.
“Of course,” Damon said. “UEG Mine Safety and Health Administration protocols require that vehicles used to transport explosives be thoroughly cleaned and flushed prior to entering a charging station.”
“What about the jimmied hatch?” Mark asked.
“That is quite a serious matter,” Damon said. “MSHA requires that any theft of explosives be reported to local authorities within one hour of discovery, and to MSHA within twelve.”
“We’re Spartans, Damon,” Kelly said. “We don’t do filing.”
“They’re looking for explosives,” Fred said. “That can’t be good.”
“I should say not,” Damon replied. “There’s nothing more dangerous in an underground mine than uncontrolled blasting.”
“Thanks for pointing that out,” Veta said. “I wouldn’t have guessed.”
Veta accessed the Jenny Lynn map she had copied at the portal, then began to search it for explosives storage magazines. The map showed one ahead, about two hundred meters deeper into the adit. By now, the Papa-10 survivors would almost certainly be past the magazine . . .
An invisible wall of pressure slammed into Veta from the side, lifting her off her feet and hurling her a half dozen meters down the adit. She landed in the mud and slid another few meters on her belly. Her ears ached with speaker pop, her HUD flickered, and her faceplate was covered in orange slime.
She lay motionless, trying to catch her breath and wondering whether she had been hit by a mauler blast or run over by mine equipment. It dawned on her slowly that she was more surprised than hurt, that her armor was intact and her only pain was from muscles knotting in shock. She checked her hands and found she was still holding her MA5K—combat training was good for something—then rolled to her knees and swiped at the mud caked across her faceplate.
The effort didn’t accomplish much—just reduced a total blackout to a cloudy orange smear. She took a calming breath, reset her HUD, and was relieved to see her systems come back up—especially TACMAP and infrared imaging. Still, she could not actually see. She felt the mountain squeezing down around her.
She took another breath.
“. . . repeat, no contact,” Fred was saying over TEAMCOM. “Hold fire, continue advance, report.”
Veta’s motion sensor showed Fred moving up the adit along the right-hand wall. A memory from the mining section of her hostile-environments training kicked in, and she found herself thinking of the wall as a rib, because in ancient times, when passages were dug by hand, miners would lie on their bellies, and they thought of the surrounding rock as part of their own bodies. So the floor became the belly, the walls the ribs, the ceiling the back, the virgin stone into which they were drilling the face. The terminology only made the adit feel tighter, and Veta found her breath coming fast and shallow.
Kelly was the first to report. “All good.” She had shifted to the center of the adit and was following ten meters behind Fred. “Negative contacts.”
“Terrain mapping down,” Linda said. She was ten meters behind Kelly, moving along the adit’s left rib. “Good otherwise.”
“Impaired visibility.” Veta was struggling to clear her faceplate and remain calm. “What the hell was that? An artillery strike?”
“It was almost certainly a gelignite packet,” Damon said. “Gelignite is a stable form of blasting gelatin often used in small quantities to clear oversize boulders from stopes or ore passes. It seems reasonable to assume that someone found a blasting
magazine and used a packet to improvise a grenade.”
“That felt a hell of a lot more powerful than a grenade,” Fred said.
“I am certain it did,” Damon said. “The adit focuses the pressure waves, so any uncontrolled explosion strikes with a force far in excess of normal. Had that blast been as powerful as an artillery shell, the only survivors would be the ones wearing Mjolnir.”
“Now you tell me,” Fred said. “Ash, status?”
“Negative HUD,” Ash reported. “Everything else okay.”
“All good,” Mark reported.
“Uh, not really,” Ash said. “Your camouflage is out.”
“It is?”
Veta looked toward their location in the charging station, but saw only her HUD displays and the inside of her muddy faceplate.
“Damn,” Mark said. “No camouflage, I guess.”
“Olivia?” Fred asked.
There was no response, though Veta’s motion detector showed Olivia’s designator symbol approaching. Veta continued to wipe at her faceplate until her headlamp revealed a cloudy, mud-streaked view of the Gamma coming up beside her. Olivia’s active camouflage was still functional, but only semi-effective because her armor was coated head-to-foot in orange mud. Veta imagined her own SPI was in much the same condition. Olivia touched her fingertips to the mouth area of her faceplate, then signaled thumbs-down.
“Olivia’s mic is out,” Veta reported. The Gamma nodded vigorously, then switched to a thumbs-up signal. “Everything else is okay. But one more blast, and we’ll be better off without armor back here.”
“We’ll make contact soon, Inspector,” Fred said. “Mark and Ash, close it up. I’m hearing thonging ahead.”
“Thonging?” Mark asked.
“Just get up here.”
“Affirmative,” Mark said. “On our way.”
Mark and Ash deactivated their helmet lamps, then emerged from the charging bay and sprinted up the adit.
Veta and Olivia hung back to provide counter-ambush cover, Veta using a bare hand to wipe more mud from her faceplate, while Olivia tried in vain to reset her microphone. They reached an access tunnel that crossed over to Adit 1 on the left side of the ore body. They scanned it with their imaging systems and saw no sign of any hostile presences; then Veta waited at the intersection while Olivia hustled down the tunnel to clear it. The Gamma advanced about two hundred meters before disappearing around a corner into Adit 1.
A moment later, Olivia reappeared at the far end of the access, used her hand-lamp to flash the CLEAR signal, then started back with her helmet lamp on high power, double-checking to be sure their imaging systems hadn’t missed anyone lurking in a cutout or behind a boulder. For Veta, it was a nerve-racking wait at the intersection. She had to divide her attention in two directions, be ready to provide cover fire in either, and try not to think about the possibility of another blast leaving her buried beneath thousands of tons of rock.
As soon as Olivia returned, they hurried after the rest of the team, now fifty paces ahead in Adit 2. Passages marked on the map as stopes began to open to the left, where the ore body was located. A little larger than the adit, they were short and rough-cut, with loose rock hanging along the ribs and back. None was more than fifty meters long, and all ended in a vast, black cavern where the ore body had been extracted by the mining operation. But they were strewn with boulders and lined by niches large enough to conceal a Jiralhanae, so Veta and Olivia took turns clearing each one before continuing up the adit.
Veta emerged from the sixth stope to find Olivia advancing along the opposite side of the adit. The Gamma had done her best to wipe her armor clean, but it was still so mud-streaked that she resembled some kind of mine phantom haunting the darkness. It was hard to guess whether she was looking straight up the adit or toward the mouth of the next stope—and with a nonfunctioning mic, it would have been impossible for her to answer, even if Veta had asked.
Veta deactivated her headlamp and started up the adit behind Olivia. Her thermal imaging showed the team’s lead element holding position fifty meters ahead, four human-shaped blobs decreasing in size from left to right—the blobs on the left were closer than the ones on the right. There was no fifth blob, but Veta knew that was only because Ash’s active camouflage remained fully functional and would be shielding his infrared signature.
Veta assumed for a moment Fred had just halted the advance to give her and Olivia a chance to catch up; then a pair of larger blobs moved into view. They were about thirty meters beyond the advance element, even taller than the Spartans, and twice as broad.
A pair of laser swirls appeared above their heads, so distant and fleeting they were little more than flickers on Veta’s HUD.
A larger blob moved into view in front of the swirls; then a hollow clang echoed down the corridor.
“Contact!” Fred said over TEAMCOM.
A series of muzzle flashes lit the darkness ahead, momentarily silhouetting the distant figures of several Spartans, and the clatter of automatic weapons echoed down the passage.
Veta brought her MA5K to her shoulder, but the larger blob had already vanished from sight, and she found no targets. She focused on the laser swirls and squinted. Her thermal imaging system quickly magnified the view. She saw two human-shaped figures standing about two meters off the ground, concealed from the waist up and holding bulky, tube-shaped weapons with white-hot barrels.
Not weapons, Veta realized. Laser drills.
The two figures ducked away from each other; then another clang sounded, and this time Veta recognized it as the sound of stone striking metal. The Jiralhanae were fighting with rocks, and the Papa-10 survivors were holding them off with hand tools.
Fred reached the same conclusion. “It looks like both sides are out of ammo,” he said. “Blue Team will hit the Jiralhanae in the stopes—either push them back or kill them.”
As Fred spoke, muzzle flashes filled the adit ahead, and the blocky silhouettes of three Mjolnir-armored Spartans crossed the passage, approaching their targets.
“Ash and Mark will relieve and resupply Papa-10,” Fred continued. Even inside Veta’s helmet, his words were barely audible over the echoing crash of small arms. “ ’Livi and Lopis, set a pursuit ambush in case—”
The command ended in a muffled clang; then Fred flew back into the adit, arms spread wide and a tire-size boulder in his faceplate. Veta’s imaging systems showed a Jiralhanae-size blob starting out of the stope after the Spartan—then the thermals were washed out by the blinding glare of four powerful lamps.
Veta blinked twice. Her faceplate magnification returned to normal. She realized she was looking at vehicle headlamps.
Vehicle headlamps that were growing rapidly larger.
“Heads up!” Ash warned over TEAMCOM. “Papa-10 is making a run for it!”
The headlamps rose, then dipped as the vehicle’s front wheels bounced over Fred’s armored body. An instant later, the rear wheels reached him, and the orange glow of taillights briefly illuminated the passage beyond. Veta glimpsed a massive rock pile, probably a cave-in, and knew why Papa-10 had stopped to fight.
There had been no place for them to run.
Veta checked Fred’s status on her HUD. His respiration was elevated and his heart rate racing, but both were steady. Not bad for a guy who had just been run over by ten-ton machine. She wanted to ask for a health check, but it would not be a smart time to fill TEAMCOM with useless chatter. Besides, Ash, Mark, and the rest of Blue Team were all closer. If Fred needed help, he would get it.
The vehicle continued to approach. Hanging in front of the headlamps, Veta could make out the loading scoop of a huge load-haul-dump machine. The bucket was at least two meters across, raised and tipped up, decent cover for the two men standing inside it. One of the men held a laser drill, ready to activate its beam and repel anyone who attempted to climb into the bucket. The other was cradling several gray, hand-size packets against his belly, carefully inserting a handful
of time-delay detonators.
“Crap!” Veta said over TEAMCOM. “They’re making more grenades!”
A burst of fire sounded from a stope mouth just a few meters up the adit, and Veta assumed Olivia was trying to take down the grenade maker. But when she glanced over, Olivia was firing along the rib of the adit, aiming at something else, another target hidden from view by the approaching LHD.
Veta swung her MA5K toward the grenade-maker, but both men had ducked down inside the loading bucket. The LHD was huge, so wide, it had only a half meter’s clearance to either rib of the adit, and it was coming fast, its headlamps casting a halo of light on the surrounding rock.
Veta could just make out the operator’s compartment on the left side of the ore box, tucked in behind the huge left-front tire. The ore box alone was the size of a Warthog, with a dip in the front wall so the bucket could rock back and dump. Veta saw nothing protruding above the dip. If the LHD was carrying anything beyond the Papa-10s, it wasn’t much.
Olivia remained eight paces ahead of Veta on the left, tucked into the mouth of a stope. As the LHD passed, the Gamma continued to fire along the rib, treating the Papa-10s riding in its bucket as friendlies. Veta switched off her active camouflage and stood in the vehicle’s lamp beams. Holding the MA5K in one hand, she lifted the other and motioned the operator to stop.
The loader bucket rose to shield the operator’s cabin from attack. Then the LHD accelerated.
The Papa-10 survivors were not looking for friends.
Veta started to leap for the stopes—then recalled the gelignite packets and realized what a mistake that would be. Instead, she threw herself prone and rolled to the center of the adit.
“Cover cover cover!”
As she yelled into her microphone, Veta swung onto her back with feet pointed toward the looming LHD, unable to see anything but the dark steel of its bouncing loader bucket. As long as she remained in the center of the adit, she would be safe from the giant tires. But if the operator realized she was there and dropped the bucket, Veta’s SPI armor would not stand up to a crushing nearly as well as Fred’s Mjolnir.
