First Strike

by Eric Nylund

  Edges of its shattered hull glowed red and then white hot as their superheated atmosphere vented. The bolt ripped through the engineering compartment, shattered their reactors, and the entire warship blossomed into fire and ejected trails of golden sparks and dying flickers of static electricity.

  The five plasma bolts that the Covenant cruiser fired at the Gettysburg dispersed into a red haze. There was no longer any magnetic force to shape and guide them to their intended target.

  The bridge crew watched the explosions fade from the forward screens. The Admiral said, “Status?”

  Fred tapped the screen of the Engineering station and reported: “Engines and reactor offline. That magnetic pulse did something to them.”

  Static washed over Weapons Station One as the Master Chief looked up and said, “MAC accelerating coils intact. Drone one destroyed. Retrieving drone two, sir.”

  Cortana’s holographic presence was missing, but her voice sounded triumphantly through the bridge speakers: “Turret number three destroyed. But if we ever get any of the other six turrets in working order, we’ll have a formidable arsenal.”

  “We may not get that chance,” Lieutenant Haverson remarked as he bent over the NAV station. “Contacts inbound. Small ships. Dozens of them. Transferring to the forward screens.”

  Armored Pelicans, exoskeleton welders, a handful of Longsword singleships, and the odd stealth Chiroptera-class vessel appeared on screen.

  “Jiles’s fleet,” Haverson stated. “And he has us exactly where he wants us—dead in the water.”

  “Incoming transmission,” Cortana said. “Piping it through.”

  “Admiral Whitcomb?” Jiles’s rich and resonant voice flooded the bridge. “Can I be of some assistance? A tow, perhaps, back to our base so we can expedite repairs to your ships?”

  “That would be most kind of you,” the Admiral said and eased back into the Captain’s chair.

  Two Laden-class cargo ships came alongside the Gettysburg and attached; their engines rumbled.

  “I don’t understand,” Haverson whispered. “He had us.”

  “No, he didn’t,” Admiral Whitcomb replied. He scowled and added, “Governor Jiles may not like it, but he needs us now. The Covenant aren’t going to send just one ship. After this one goes missing for a while, there’ll be more. A lot more. This is only the start of the battle, son.”

  John and his remaining teammates sat in the Gettysburg’s machine shop. The room was large enough to fit a Longsword inside, and the walls, ceilings, and deck had robotic arms tipped with welders, multitools, and hydraulic presses. Three of the arms had high-intensity spotlights directed onto the walls and provided a clear, cool, indirect illumination that the Master Chief found soothing after having one too many plasma blasts etch his retinas.

  They were here because Admiral Whitcomb had ordered the Spartans to repair their equipment and get at least six hours of sleep. The machine shop was a solid room, reinforced, and unlikely to breach in case they were attacked again.

  Linda sat in the corner with her helmet, back torso, and shoulder MJOLNIR armor sections removed.

  Fred and Will used two robotic arms to hold her armor in place. They swapped out damaged plates and components with the spare parts they’d found in ONI’s CASTLE facility on Reach.

  Angry red scars crisscrossed Linda’s pale body—the only external trace of her double transplant operation. Against Dr. Halsey’s advice for strict bed rest, Linda had hobbled down here with her team. She sat cross-legged before a disassembled SRS99C sniper rifle and selected gyro compensators, optics, and adaptive texture barrel sheaths. Linda proceeded to reassemble the precision-made weapon with the care of a loving mother caressing her newborn child.

  Without looking up from her rifle she said, “Now I know what you have to do to get a couple of days’ R-and-R in this outfit.”

  “I heard,” Fred remarked, “that you spent the whole time sleeping, too.”

  “That’s why she likes to snipe,” Will replied. “I caught her snoring last time she posted in that tower on Europa.”

  John was glad they could joke about her return from the dead. He couldn’t bring himself to join in, though. He had accepted the mantle of command, and CPO Mendez had taught him to repress his external emotional reactions to preserve his authority. Right now, he resented that.

  Kelly rolled over and woke up. She nudged Grace, and they sat up, shaking their helmets. “0400,” Kelly told them. “That was six hours.”

  “Felt like a fifteen-minute nap,” Grace muttered. “I just closed my eyes. You’re kidding, right?”

  Kelly looked over to Linda and drew her two fingers across her helmet in the smile gesture. Linda returned a rare, bare smile to her.

  The smile looked odd to John. He wanted to smile, too, but nothing much—apart from Linda—in a long time had given him cause: not the hordes of rebels crawling over and through the Gettysburg whom Admiral Whitcomb trusted too much, nor the imminent return of Covenant forces before their engines and weapons could be repaired…and certainly not the hundreds of dead crew members aboard the Gettysburg, whom they had collected and placed in cargo bay seven.

  The slight click of metal on metal alerted every Spartan in the room. Pistols drew in a blur of motion and rifles leveled at the side hatch as it eased open with a squeak.

  Sergeant Johnson and Corporal Locklear stood in the doorway—frozen.

  “No one told me this was target practice,” Locklear muttered. “Else I woulda painted a bull’s-eye on my chest.”

  “Master Chief,” the Sergeant said. “Reporting as you requested.”

  John nodded and lowered his gun, as did the other Spartans. “Come in, Marines.”

  As he holstered his weapon, John’s hand brushed against the belt compartment that held Dr. Halsey’s data crystals. He hadn’t decided which to give to Lieutenant Haverson. Did he sacrifice the Sergeant to save billions from potential Flood infestation? Did it even matter? He had every reason to believe that the Flood had been destroyed with Halo—but what if he was wrong?

  “I wanted you both down here to help us discuss our tactical options,” John told them.

  The COM pulsed to life. Dr. Halsey said, “Master Chief?”

  “Yes, Doctor?”

  “I need Kelly to report to Medical Four,” she said. “She requires one last injection of dermacortic steroids. And I could use her assistance on another matter.”

  John nodded to Kelly.

  She slowly stretched, stood, sighed, and marched out of the room. “I’ll be right back,” she said, flexing her burned hands. “Don’t plan the overthrow of the Covenant Empire without me.”

  “She’s on her way, Doctor.”

  The COM snapped off.

  The Master Chief turned to his Spartans and the Marines. “Let’s go over what we know and see if we’ve missed anything—any way to exploit the enemy’s plan.” He set down a data pad with a star map glittering upon its surface.

  “The Covenant are on their way to Earth,” he told them. “They are gathering at a battle station and then jumping en masse to the Sol system.”

  “What happens then?” Fred asked.

  “Assuming we get to Earth first,” Linda answered, “our Fleet will be waiting for them, and”—she pulled back the bolt on her rifle with a clack—“they’ll give them a warm reception.”

  “But what chance will our forces have?” Will asked. There was no fear in his voice, just cool logic. “You saw Cortana’s report. There will be hundreds of Covenant warships. I don’t think our Fleet or even Earth’s orbital MAC platforms can repel a force that powerful.”

  “No,” the Chief quietly said. “They can’t win. They’ll try. But the Covenant will eventually take down one of the orbital MACs, slip through, and pick off the ground-based generators. Just like on Reach.”

  Fred visibly flinched.

  Locklear twisted the red bandanna he had tied on his biceps. “So we get to watch another fight in space?”
he hissed. His fists trembled with barely checked rage. “There has to be a way to get to those bastards first—on the ground where we can win. Hell, I’d even take my chances in hand-to-hand combat. Anything but floating in zero gee and watching Earth get burned.”

  “What about our original mission?” Linda asked. “Find the Covenant home world?”

  “Our priority has to be to warn Earth,” the Chief answered. “Admiral Whitcomb would insist…and he has the authority to scrub our mission.”

  “And there’s no ground between here and Earth where we can take the fight to them,” Locklear said. He unclenched his fist and dropped his gaze to the deck. “Sometimes,” he whispered, “I really hate this war.”

  Sergeant Johnson worked his mouth but said nothing. He set his hand on Locklear’s wide shoulder and whispered, “Stand tall, Marine. Try to—”

  The Sergeant’s gaze fell on the data pad and the star map. “Hang on a second. What was it you said about no ground to fight on between here and there?” He grinned and picked up the data pad. “What’s this?” He tapped a dot on the map, squinted, and read the tiny words. “This…‘Uneven Elephant’?”

  “Unyielding Hierophant,” the Chief corrected. “According to Cortana, it’s a command-and-control center, a mobile space platform where the Covenant fleet will rendezvous before their final jump to Earth.”

  “Well, there’s your ground,” Sergeant Johnson said. “On this ‘elephant’ thing.”

  Will got up and walked over to the data pad. “It fits with the timetable. This station is on the way to Earth.”

  Fred offered, “We can drop out of Slipspace in a smaller craft. Go in and—”

  “And do what you Spartans do best,” Locklear said. “Infiltrate, kill, and blow shit up. If there’s room in this operation for an ODST, pencil me in.”

  The Master Chief looked to the data pad, then to his team, Locklear, and the Sergeant. They were right: For the first time, they’d know when and where the Covenant would be. If they hit the enemy hard enough, they could stop them before the Covenant hit Earth…and delay Armageddon.

  The Master Chief gave rapid-fire orders:

  “Fred, Will: Get Linda’s suit back together ASAP.

  “Locklear, you’re on weapons detail again. Scrounge every pistol, rifle, ammo bag, and scrap of explosives on this vessel and haul it to Ascendant Justice’s launch bay.

  “Grace, Linda, and Sergeant Johnson: Get that Covenant dropship ready for its last flight. Reinforce the hull for a Slipspace-to-normal-space transition.

  “And I’ll take this plan to Admiral Whitcomb—make him see that it’s the only way. We’re going to take this fight to the Covenant. We’re going to launch a first strike.”

  Chapter Thirty

  0440 Hours, September 13, 2552 (Revised Date,

  Military Calendar) Aboard Hybrid Vessel

  Gettysburg—Ascendant Justice, Station-Keeping

  In Eridanus System.

  Time was running out.

  Dr. Halsey could feel the Covenant nearly upon them and her window of opportunity shrinking to a pinpoint. Only a few more things to take care of before she could go—before she started something she couldn’t stop.

  Someone approached the clean room, heavy footfalls that could only be a Spartan in MJOLNIR armor. Kelly appeared and waved from the other side of the glass partition that separated the clean room from the rest of Medical Four. Dr. Halsey buzzed her in.

  “Reporting for treatment, Doctor,” she said.

  Kelly hesitated a moment as she glanced about at the unsterile environment the doctor had been working in: Styrofoam cups littered the surgical instrument trays, thermal printout paper curled from the biomonitors—and the radiation-emitting crystal they had found on Reach sat on a nearby instrument tray.

  “I thought that crystal was in the reactor room,” Kelly said. “Behind plenty of radiation shielding.”

  “It’s perfectly safe,” Dr. Halsey said, “as long as we’re in normal space.” She picked up the crystal and slipped it carelessly into her lab coat pocket.

  “Lie down please, Kelly.” The doctor gestured to the contoured treatment chair. “Just a few more injections and we’re done with your burn therapy.”

  Kelly sighed and eased herself onto the reclined chair.

  Dr. Halsey removed a cloth covering a pair of injectors. She clicked them into the ports on Kelly’s MJOLNIR armor that threaded directly into her subclavian and femoral veins. “Keep doing your physical therapy, and the dermacortic steroids will remove most of the scarring and restore your full mobility within another week,” she explained.

  “A week?” Kelly growled and struggled to rise. “Doctor, I need to be one hundred percent ASAP. The Chief has a mission—”

  Dr. Halsey activated the injectors, and they hissed their contents into Kelly’s body. She relaxed and slumped back on the table, unconscious.

  “No, Kelly,” Dr. Halsey whispered. “You’re not going on the Chief’s mission. You’re going on mine.”

  The sedative in her bloodstream would knock out an ODST in peak condition for the better part of a day. Halsey estimated that Kelly would be unconscious for a little more than two hours. By that time they’d both be far enough along that there’d be no turning back.

  Dr. Halsey swiveled one of the displays to face her. She executed the memory-erase command—wiping clean Cortana’s recollection of the research they had done on old ONI lockdown codes. She folded the printout of their results and stuffed it into her pocket.

  “Cortana?”

  “Yes, Doctor?” she replied. Her voice through the room’s speakers sounded distracted.

  “Locate Corporal Locklear and have him report immediately, please.”

  “Done, Doctor Halsey.”

  “Thank you, Cortana. That will be all.” She added in a whisper so low that only she heard: “Take good care of them all for me.”

  Dr. Halsey adjusted the examination table so it lay flat, and then loaded medical supplies and equipment onto its undercarriage. She placed a bag with four submachine guns and sixteen full clips of ammunition on top of the supplies.

  She found a lukewarm cup of stale coffee and gulped it down to the dregs.

  Corporal Locklear appeared at the open entrance to the prep room. “Hey, Doc. Cortana said you needed me?” he said tersely. He smoothed his hand over his shaved head. “I’m kind of busy right now, so if this can wait—”

  “Whatever you’re doing,” Dr. Halsey told him, “this is more important.” She nodded to Kelly’s prone form. “I need your help getting SPARTAN 087 to the launch bay.”

  “Is she okay?” he asked and took a step toward her.

  “She’s fine, but I have to transfer her to the asteroid base. They have a piece of equipment necessary to complete her treatment.”

  Locklear appeared unconvinced. “But I just saw her—”

  “She’s fine,” Dr. Halsey assured him. “Just sedated. This procedure is…unpleasant, even for a Spartan.”

  Locklear looked into Dr. Halsey’s eyes and then nodded, accepting this explanation. He moved the head of the table and wheeled it through the doors, the med bay, and out into the waiting elevator.

  Dr. Halsey followed on his heels.

  When the elevator doors closed, she turned to the Corporal. “Your hand, please.”

  He looked puzzled but held out his hand.

  Dr. Halsey took it and turned it palm-up. She set the long, luminous blue artifact in his grasp. The light emitted by the alien artifact shone onto their faces and made the interior of the elevator colder. “This is what the Covenant so desperately want. They tore up Reach to get it. They followed us into Slipspace. And Polaski died protecting this thing.”

  She watched Locklear carefully, gauging his reaction, and saw that he pulled away slightly at this last remark; it had hit home.

  “And what the hell am I supposed to do with it?”

  “Keep it safe,” she told him. “Guard it with you
r life, because if the Covenant ever get it, they’ll be able to jump through Slipspace a hundred times faster than they can now. Do you understand?”

  Locklear closed his large fist around the crystal. “Not really, Doc. But I can take care of it.” He paused and wrinkled his forehead in confusion. “But why me? Why not ask one of your Spartans?”

  “‘My’ Spartans,” Dr. Halsey replied in a whisper, “could be ordered to hand it over to Lieutenant Haverson. And he’d risk getting it back to ONI Section Three—even if he had to gamble that the Covenant might get it.”

  Locklear snorted. “Well, as much as I don’t like El-Tee White-bread, I’d hand it over if ordered, too. What’s the big deal, anyway? We’re almost home.”

  “Almost,” Dr. Halsey repeated, and she gave him a slight smile. “But the moment you jump, this crystal emits radiation like a signal flare. The Covenant will find this ship…and maybe this time they’ll win the battle in Slipspace.”

  Locklear grimaced.

  She held his steely gaze a moment and then finally let go of his hand. “So I know you’ll do whatever it takes to prevent this object from falling into enemy hands.”

  He nodded grimly. “I read you, Doc. Loud and clear.” There was a hint of respect in his voice. “I know what I have to do…count on it.”

  “Good,” she said.

  The elevator doors parted. Locklear stuffed the crystal into his ammunition vest, and Locklear wheeled the table into the Gettysburg’s launch bay. “Where do you want her?”

  The bay was a beehive of activity: A hundred of Governor Jiles’s crew jogged to and from passages carrying data pad schematics and field multiscanners; robotic dollies carried fat Archer missiles, spiderlike Antilon mines, and slender pods of deuterium fuel for the Gettysburg’s auxiliary reactors; three Longsword fighter craft were being repaired; exoskeletons thudded along the deck, carrying plates of titanium and welding them in place.

  “There,” Dr. Halsey told Locklear. “Take her to that ship.” She pointed to Governor Jiles’s Chiroptera-class vessel. It sat on the deck looking like a sleeping bat. Its oddly angled stealth surfaces blended into the shadows.