by Eric Nylund
He stood straighter and returned their salute. He was intensely proud of them all.
The Spartans scattered and gathered their gear, racing for the dropship bay.
The Master Chief watched them go.
This was the mission the Spartans had been tempered for in mission after mission. It would be their finest moment... but he knew that it might also be their last moment.
Chief Mendez had said that a leader would be required to spend the lives of those under his command. The Master Chief knew he would lose comrades today—but would their deaths serve a necessary purpose... or would they be wasted?
Either way, they were ready.
John tapped the thrusters and rotated the Pelican dropship 180 degrees. He pushed the engines to full power to brake their forward momentum. The Pillar of Autumn had dropped them while she had been cruising at one-third full speed.
They’d need every millimeter of the ten thousand kilometers between them and the docking station to slow down.
The Master Chief had taken the Spartan’s modified Pelican, rigged with explosives. The station would be locked down—every airlock sealed. They’d have to blast their way in.
He glanced aft. Linda checked one of the three sniper rifle variants she had brought. James inspected his thruster pack.
He had picked Linda because no other single Spartan was as efficient at long-range combat. And that’s what the Master Chief wanted: long-range combat. If it came to hand-to-hand combat in zero gee with hordes of Covenant troopers... even his luck wouldn’t hold out too long.
He had picked James because James had never quit. Even when his hand had been burned off, he had shrugged off the shock—at least for a while—and helped them dispatch the Covenant behemoths on Sigma Octanus IV. The Master Chief would need that kind of determination on this mission.
He took a long look out the front of the Pelican. Their sister dropship initiated a burn and hurtled toward Reach.
Kelly, Fred, Joshua... all of them. Part of him longed to join them in the ground action.
The radar panel blinked a proximity warning; the Pelican was one thousand kilometers from the docking ring.
The Master Chief tapped the thrusters to align the dropship. He squelched the proximity alert.
The alert immediately re-sounded. Strange. He reached for the squelch again—then stopped as he saw the space around the Pelican change. Motes of green light appeared, pinpoints at first, which swelled like bruises on velvet black space. The green smears lengthened, compressed, and distorted the stars.
—a Slipstream entry point.
The Master Chief cut the Pelican’s engines, slowing them for impact.
A Covenant frigate materialized a kilometer from the dropship’s nose. Its prow filled their view screen.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
0616 Hours, August 30, 2552 (Military Calendar)
UNSC Pelican dropship, Epsilon Eridani System near Reach Station Gamma
“Brace for maneuvering!” the Master Chief barked.
The Spartans dove for safety harnesses and strapped in. “All secure!” Kelly shouted.
The Master Chief killed the Pelican’s forward thrusters and triggered a short, sudden reverse burn. The Spartans were brutally slammed forward into their harnesses as the Pelican’s acceleration bled away. The Master Chief quickly shut down the engines.
The tiny Pelican faced the Covenant frigate. At a kilometer’s distance, the alien ship’s launch bay and pulse laser turrets looked close enough to touch on the view screen; enough firepower to vaporize the Spartans in the blink of an eye.
The Master Chief’s first instinct was to fire their HE Anvil-II missiles and autocannons—but he checked his hand as he reached for the triggers.
That would only attract their attention... which was the last thing he wanted. For the moment, the alien vessel ignored them—probably because the Master Chief had shut down the Pelican’s engines. But the ship also seemed dead in space: no lights, no single ships launched, and no plasma weapons charging.
The dropship continued toward the docking station, their momentum putting distance between them and the frigate.
Space around the Covenant ship boiled and pulled apart—and two more alien ships appeared.
They, too, ignored the dropship. Was it too small to bother with? The Master Chief didn’t care. His luck, it seemed, was holding.
He checked the radar—thirty kilometers to the docking ring. He ignited the engines to slow them down. He had to or they would crash into the station.
Twenty kilometers.
Rumbling shook the dropship. They slowed—but it wasn’t going to be enough.
Ten kilometers.
“Hang on,” he told Linda and James.
The sudden impact whiplashed the Master Chief back and forth in his seat. The straps holding him snapped.
He blinked... saw only blackness. His vision cleared and he noted that his shield bar was dead. It slowly began to fill again. Every display and monitor in the cockpit had shattered.
The Master Chief shook off the disorientation and pulled himself aft.
The interior of the dropship was a mess. Everything tied down had come loose. Ammunition boxes had broken open in the crash landing and loose carriages filled the air. Coolant leaked, spraying blobs of black fluid. In zero gravity, everything looked like the inside of a shaken snowglobe.
James and Linda floated off the deck of the Pelican. They slowly moved.
“Any injuries?” the Master Chief asked.
“No,” Linda replied.
“I think so,” James said. “I mean, no. I’m good, sir. Was that a landing or did those Covenant ships take a shot at us?”
“If they had, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. Get whatever gear you can and get out, double time,” the Master Chief said.
The Master Chief grabbed an assault rifle and a Jackhammer launcher. He found a satchel. Inside was a kilogram of C-12, detonators, and a Lotus antitank mine. Those would come in handy. He salvaged five intact clips of ammunition but couldn’t locate his thruster pack. He’d have to do without one.
“No more time,” he said. “We’re sitting ducks here. Out the side hatch now.”
Linda went first. She paused, and—once she was satisfied the Covenant weren’t lying in ambush—motioned them forward.
The Master Chief and James exited, clung to the side of the Pelican in zero gravity, and took flanking positions at the fore and aft ends of the dropship.
Space dock Gamma was a three-kilometer-diameter ring. Dull gray metal arced in either direction. On the surface were communications dishes and a few conduits—no real cover. The docking bay doors were sealed tight. The station wasn’t spinning. The dockmaster AI must have shut the place up tight when it detected the unsecured NAV database.
The Master Chief frowned when he spotted the tail end of their Pelican—crumpled and embedded into the station’s hull. Its engines were ruined. The dropship jutted out at an angle; its prow and the charges of C-12 that were supposed to have blasted them into a Covenant ship—now pointed into the air.
The Master Chief started to drift off the station. He clipped himself to the hull of the dropship.
“Blue-Two,” he said, “police those explosives.” He gestured to the prow. The motion sent him gyrating.
“Yes, sir.” James puffed his thruster pack once and drifted up to the nose of the Pelican.
The Spartans had trained to fight in zero gravity. It wasn’t easy. The slightest motion sent you spinning out of control.
A flash overhead reflected off the hull. The Master Chief looked up. The Covenant ships were alive now—lances of blue laser fire flashed and motes of red light collected on their lateral lines. Their engines glowed and they moved close to the station.
A streak crossed the Master Chief’s field of vision in the blink of an eye. The center Covenant frigate shields strobed silver; the ship shattered into a cloud of glistening fragments.
The orbital guns had turned and fired on the new threat.
This was a suicide maneuver. How did the Covenant think they could withstand that kind of firepower?
“Blue-One,” the Master Chief said. “Scan those ships with your scope.”
Linda floated closer to the Master Chief. She pointed her sniper rifle up and sighted the ships. “We’ve got inbound targets,” she said, and fired.
The Master Chief hit his magnification. A dozen pods burst from the two remaining Covenant ships. Trails of exhaust pointed right at the Spartans’ position. There were tiny specks accompanying the pods; the Master Chief increased his display’s magnification to maximum. They looked like men in thruster packs—
No, they were definitely not men.
These things had elongated heads—and even at this distance, the Master Chief could see past their faceplates and noted their pronounced sharklike teeth and jaws. They wore armor; it shimmered as they collided with debris—which meant energy shields.
These must be the elite warrior class Dr. Halsey had conjectured. The Covenant’s best? They were about to find out.
Linda shot one of the EVA aliens. Shields shimmered around its body and the round bounced off. She didn’t stop. She pumped four more rounds into the creature—hitting a pinpoint target in its neck. Its shields flickered and a round got through. Black blood gushed from the wound and the creature writhed in space.
The other aliens spotted them. They jetted toward their location, firing plasma rifle and needlers.
“Take cover,” the Master Chief said. He unclipped himself and clung to the side of the dropship.
Linda followed—bolts of fire spattering on the hull next to them, spattering molten metal. Crystalline needles bounced off their shields
“Blue-Two,” the Master Chief said. “I said fall back.”
James almost had the explosives rigged to the nose free. A shower of needles hit him. One stuck the tank of his thruster harness—penetrated. It remained embedded for a split second... then exploded.
Exhaust billowed from the pack. The uncontrolled jets spun James in the microgravity. He slammed into the station, bounced—then rocketed away into space, tumbling end over end, unable to control his trajectory.
“Blue-Two! Come in,” the Master Chief barked over the COM channel.
“Can—control—” James’ voice was punctuated with static. “They’ve—everywhere—” There was more static and the COM channel went dead.
The Master Chief watched his teammate tumble away into the darkness. All his training, his superhuman strength, reflexes, and determination... completely useless against the laws of physics.
He didn’t even know if James was dead. For the moment, he had to assume that he was—put him out of his mind. He had a mission to complete. If he survived, then he’d get every UNSC ship in the area to mount a search and rescue op.
Linda shrugged out of her thruster harness.
The suppressing fire from the aliens halted. Covenant landing pods descended toward the station, touching down at roughly three-hundred-meter intervals.
A pod landed twenty meters away. Its sides uncurled like the petals of a flower. Jackals in black-and-blue vacuum suits drifted out. Their boots adhered to the station’s hull.
“Let’s pave a path out of here, Blue-One.”
“Roger that,” she said.
Linda targeted spots their energy shields didn’t cover—boots, the top of one’s head, a fingertip. Three Jackals went down in quick succession, their spacesuits ruptured by her marksmanship. The rest scrambled for cover inside the pod.
The Master Chief braced his back against the dropship and fired his assault rifle in controlled bursts. The microgravity played havoc with his aim.
One Jackal leaped from his cover—straight towards them.
The Master Chief switched to full auto and blasted his shield with enough rounds to send the alien flying backward off the station. He spent the clip, reloaded, and got out a grenade. He pulled the pin and lobbed it.
He threw it in a flat trajectory. The grenade ricocheted off the far side of the pod and bounced inside.
It detonated—a flash and spray of freeze-dried blue vented upward. The explosion had caught the enemy on their unshielded sides.
“Blue-One, secure that landing pod. I’ll cover you.” He leveled his rifle.
“Yes, sir.” Linda grabbed a pipe that ran along the station and pulled herself hand over hand. When she was inside the pod, she flashed him a green light on his heads-up display.
The Master Chief crawled toward the prow of the Pelican. As he crested the ship he saw that the station was swarming with Covenant troops: a hundred Jackals and at least six Elites. They pointed toward the Pelican and slowly started to advance on their position.
“Come and get it,” the Master Chief muttered.
He pulled two grenades from his satchel and wedged them into the C-12 on the nose of the ship. He pushed off and propelled himself back to his teammate.
She grabbed him and pulled him into the interior of the open pod. Bits of a dozen dead Jackals pasted the inside.
“You’ve got a new target,” he told her. “A pair of frag grenades. Sight on them and wait for my order to fire.”
She propped her rifle on the edge of the open pod and aimed.
Jackals crawled over the Pelican—one of the Elite warriors appeared as well, maneuvering in a harness, flying over the ship. The Elite gestured imperiously, directing the Jackals to search the ship.
“Fire,” the Master Chief said.
Linda fired once. The grenades detonated; the chain reaction set off the twenty kilograms of C-12.
A subsonic fist slammed into the Master Chief and threw him to the far side of the landing pod. Even twenty meters away, the sides of the craft warped and the top edges sheared away.
He looked over the edge.
There was a crater where the Pelican had been. If anything had survived that blast, it was now in orbit.
“We have a way in,” the Master Chief remarked.
Linda nodded.
In the distance, where the station curved out of view, more Covenant pods landed—and the Master Chief saw the silhouettes of hundreds of Jackals and Elite fighters crawling and jetting their way closer.
“Let’s go, Blue-One.”
They pulled themselves toward the hole. The detonation had blown through five decks, leaving a tunnel of ragged-edged metal and sputtering gas hoses.
The Master Chief called up the station’s blueprints on his display. “That one,” he said, and pointed two decks down. “B level. That’s where bay nine and the Circumference should be, three hundred meters to port.”
They climbed into the interior and into B deck’s corridor. The station’s emergency lights were on, filling the passage with dull red illumination.
The Master Chief paused and signaled her to halt. He pulled out the Lotus antitank mine from his satchel and set it on the deck. He set the sensitivity to maximum and triggered its proximity detectors. Anything that tried to follow them would get a surprise.
The Master Chief and Linda gripped the handrails along the corridor and pulled themselves up the curved hall.
Flashes of automatic-weapons fire flashed in the low light, just ahead of their position.
“Blue-One,” the Master Chief said, “Ahead, ten meters—there’s a pressure door open.”
They quickly took positions on either side of the door. He sent his optical probe around the corner.
The docking bay had a dozen ship berths on two levels. The Master Chief spotted a few battered Pelicans; a station service bot; and in berth eleven, a sleek private craft held in place by massive service clamps. Where the ship’s name should have been painted on the prow there was only a simple circle. That had to be the target.
Two berths aft, four Marines in vac suits were pinned down by plasma and needler fire. The Master Chief turned his optical probe and saw what was pinning them down: thirty Jackals wer
e in the forward portion of the bay, slowly advancing, under cover of their energy shields.
The Marines tossed frag grenades. The Jackals scrambled for cover and turned their shields.
Three silent explosions flashed in the vacuum. Not one of the Jackals fell.
Another explosion rippled through the deck—behind them. It shook the Master Chief’s bones in his armor. The Lotus mine had detonated.
They didn’t have much time before the Covenant force outside caught up with them.
The Master Chief readied his assault rifle.
“Take those Jackals out, Blue-One. I’ll make a break for the Circumference.”
Linda gripped the edge of the pressure door with her left hand, propped her rifle across it, and curled her right hand around the trigger.
“There are a lot of them,” she said. “This may take a few seconds.”
A flicker of a contact appeared on the Master Chief’s motion tracker—then vanished. He turned and brought his assault rifle to bear. Nothing. “Hang on, Blue-One. I’m going to check our six.”
Linda’s acknowledgment light winked on.
The Master Chief eased back down the passage ten meters. No sensor contact. There was just dim red light and shadows... but one of the shadows moved.
It only took an instant for the image to fully resister: a black film peeled away from the darkness. It was a meter taller than John and wore blue armor similar to that on Covenant warships. Its helmet was elongated and it had rows of sharp teeth; it looked like it was smiling at him.
The Elite warrior leveled a plasma pistol.
At this range, there was no way the creature would miss—the plasma weapon would cut through John’s slowly recharging shields almost immediately. And if John used his assault rifle, it wouldn’t cut though the alien’s energy shield. In a simple exchange of fire, the alien would win.
Unacceptable. He needed to change the odds.
The Master Chief pushed off the wall and launched himself at the creature. He slammed into the Elite before it had a chance to fire.
They tumbled backward and crashed into the bulkhead. The Master Chief saw the alien’s shield flicker and fade—
