They crunched through the forest, branches snapping beneath their feet. Victor cringed at every crack and rustle, but it was impossible to be truly silent in the forest. He and Saskia had learned that last night. Every time they spotted Owen’s light in the distance, they would try to move forward without making a sound. And every time, Owen would shine the light in their faces and tell them they’d lost. Again.
At least there didn’t seem to be any sign of the Covenant out here tonight. Owen had said that they tended to patrol closer to town, which was where he was surveilling now. Victor figured there wasn’t going to be anything of interest out here in the forest. But this was where Owen sent them, and Victor wasn’t in much of a mind to try to sneak into town again anyway. Not after what happened last time.
They continued on in silence. Victor swept his gaze around, alert for the soft glow of alien light. Nothing. A whispering brushed through the tree leaves, and Victor felt drops of water on his skin.
“Great,” he mumbled.
And then, as if the clouds had been waiting for him to speak, water poured out of the sky in a thick curtain, shredding the tree leaves and soaking Victor and Saskia instantly.
“We should just go back,” Saskia said.
“Easy for you to say,” Victor snapped. “You don’t have anyone in the shelter.”
She recoiled and looked away, and Victor felt a sting of guilt. But just a sting. Saskia was the only one of them who seemed to not care that all the survivors were trapped in the shelter while the Covenant crawled over their hometown.
It’s not her hometown, Victor thought. He plunged forward into the forest.
“We’re not going to find anything,” Saskia called out to him, after a pause. Her voice was small and plaintive against the rain. “If I thought there was a chance, I wouldn’t—”
Victor stepped through a gate of trees, into the brunt of the storm. A clearing, big enough that the wind was blowing the rain at him sideways. Why was there a clearing like this in the forest? The forest was protected by the Meridian government. It was supposed to be untouched.
Of course, there had been a city computer nestled in it. People in Brume-sur-Mer weren’t great at following the rules.
He pulled the rifle off its sling and carried it loosely in front of him. The clearing was huge—he’d almost think it was the edge of the forest if it weren’t for the dark wall of trees off in the distance.
“Saskia!” he hissed.
“What?” She materialized beside him, then let out a little gasp.
“I know, right?” Victor fumbled for his comm pad and switched on the light. But the clearing was so big it swallowed up the light, and all Victor illuminated was a bunch of wet grass drooping in front of him. When it was dry, it probably came up to his knees. “I think it’s been like this for a while.”
“Yeah, it doesn’t look recently cleared.” Saskia had brought out her comm pad as well, and her light blinked and shimmered in the rain. Victor imagined Owen jumping out of the woods, shouting, “You’re dead! Put that light out!” But there didn’t seem to be any sign of the Covenant out here.
Saskia waded forward through the grass. Victor stayed closer to the trees, moving around the perimeter of the clearing. He wanted a sense of how big it was. Maybe that would give him an idea of what exactly a massive clearing was doing in the middle of a protected forest.
His light bounced off something and reflected back at him. He froze, his body prickling with fear. The rifle tucked in the crook of his elbow felt clumsy and useless.
They should have listened to Owen. They should never have brought out their light. He was a Spartan and they were just—what? Kids?
Except no one was attacking. There were no incomprehensible alien screeches. Victor tilted his comm pad and set off another shower of light.
Metal. There was something metal over there.
He moved closer. The sphere of light revealed things in pieces—a slab of cement, a scatter of rusted mechanical parts lying half-hidden in the grass. A metal wall.
It all looked very human. And also very old.
“Saskia!” he hissed. “Over here.”
He moved closer, whipping his light around, trying to piece together the fragments. Everything was blurred by the rain, but he was fairly sure he was looking at some kind of enormous metal building. It was nestled into the tree line and was largely overgrown by the vines and vegetation, but the glint of metal was inescapable.
Saskia jogged up to his side.
“You’re seeing this, right?” he said.
“It looks like a hangar.” She strode forward, up on the slab. Victor followed. The slab was broken and cracked, plants pushing their way through the decay. He kicked at one of the cement chunks.
“This place is ancient,” Saskia said. “Look at this lock.”
Victor stepped beside her. They were underneath an awning, and it was a relief to be out of the torrent of rain. Saskia had her light fixed on a rusted metal keypad.
“It’s not a holo?” Victor leaned forward, frowning. “This is old.”
“Did you know about this place?” Saskia looked over at him, her eyes big and luminous beneath her stringy, wet hair.
Victor shook his head. “Did you?”
“Is it some of my parents’ work, you mean?” Saskia laughed a little. “No. This is way too old.” She peered up at the wall in front of them. “It’s freaking huge!”
Saskia was right about that. The building stretched far out of the net of Victor’s light, disappearing into the woods and the rain.
“Do you think we can get in?” Victor said.
Saskia shrugged. “We can try.” She reached over and pressed the number seven on the keypad. It lit up yellow, the light pale beneath the coating of dust.
“Please enter your access code,” said a polite female voice. Not Salome.
“Too bad Evie’s not here,” Victor said. “She could hack into this like it was nothing.”
Saskia wiped her hand over the keypad’s base, smearing the dust into mud. She shone her light up close to it, squinting. Then she broke into a grin.
“Sweet,” she said. “Watch this.”
She hit the 0 key several times in a row—Victor lost count, but it was long enough that he thought she might have been messing with him. But then there was a long, low beep, and that mechanized female voice said, “Override accepted. Enter access code.”
“What’d you do?” Victor asked.
Saskia grinned at him. “This is a CDS name keypad.”
“Your dad’s company?”
“The company he works for, yeah. They’ve been around forever, although under different names. I took a risk on the override codes not changing, though. Anything from the last fifty years or so would have triggered an ATLAS protocol and shutdown.” She turned back to the keypad, fingers hovering above it. “Now I just need to remember the base code to open it up.”
Victor’s early irritation with Saskia vanished, replaced by that warm feeling that had followed him around the halls of their high school, before the Covenant had invaded.
She entered a code but was immediately blasted by a buzzer and the voice saying, “I’m sorry, I don’t recognize that code.” Victor flinched; the buzzer seemed to reverberate through the woods, even with the pounding rain.
“Crap!” Saskia muttered. Then: “Oh wait, I think I put it in wrong.”
Victor straightened up. “Let’s hope so. That buzzer was—loud.”
“I know.” She looked at him sideways, the way she did. “I’m sorry.”
She entered another keystroke, and this time the keypad’s light turned green and instead of a buzzer there was a scraping, groaning noise that was just as loud.
“This is worse,” Victor said, clutching at the rifle.
“Yeah, but the hangar door is opening.”
And it was. The wall in front of them was being drawn slowly into the building. Dust billowed out and clung in streaks to Victor’s
wet clothes. It was accompanied by a chemical scent, sharp and pungent and blessedly not at all like the toxic scent of plasma. This scent was unpleasant enough but still recognizably human. It was a scent Victor associated with his sisters, because every time they came to visit, he and his family would meet them at the landing pad where the UNSC dropships came in.
It was the scent of starship fuel.
Victor ducked into the hangar as soon as the door was high enough. The rhythm of rain on the roof was thunderous, and the door was still screeching its way open, but there was a stillness in the place itself. Like a tomb. Like a place no living thing had been in decades.
Victor lifted his light, but the space was too big for him to see anything. Something lurked in the darkness. Something big. His heart fluttered.
There was a buzz, a loud electrical whine, and the hangar flooded with sickly yellow light. Victor yelped, and his eyes watered as they adjusted to the sudden brightness.
“Turn that off!” he said. “It’ll be a beacon—”
“I closed the door,” Saskia called back. “We should be fine.” Her footsteps echoed across the space. Victor took a deep breath. Looked up.
A starship. It was clearly human, but it didn’t look like any of the UNSC ships Victor had seen in holos. It was an enormous vessel, several dozen meters in length and almost completely filling up the length of the hangar. The nose was rounded and it tapered toward the rear, where there were four engines at its tail. The craft hunched over like an old man, wings jutting out at its sides with an exaggerated set on its tail. It wasn’t a capital ship like the ones Meridian was fighting the Covenant with, but it was clear it once carried hundreds of passengers.
It was also as ancient as the hangar, covered with a film of dust. Victor’s heart fluttered again.
“Wow,” Saskia breathed beside him. “You think it still works?”
“I don’t know.” Victor moved closer to it. He’d never seen a starship like this up close, having never gone off-world. It was bigger than he expected. Bigger than the dropships that brought his sisters home. But was it armed like they were? He couldn’t tell.
“Why is this here?” Saskia said. “I mean, how could this be here all this time and no one knows about it?” She swiped her fingers against the ship’s side. “Look at this dust! And the cobwebs.” She pointed up at a net of fine white silk draping between the engine turbines on its wings. “Who just forgets about a hangar in the middle of the woods?”
Victor stopped. Beneath the dust was the familiar outline of a symbol he’d only seen in school holos: a lopsided circle bisected by two lines.
“The Sundered Legion,” he said.
“What?” Saskia laughed. “They haven’t existed for fifty years! How could they possibly—”
“I don’t know,” Victor interrupted. “But that’s totally the Sundered Legion’s insignia. Look.”
Saskia walked over to him and tilted back her head to peer up at the symbol. “I can’t believe it,” she said. “You think this place has been here for half a century? Or more? Without anyone finding it?”
Victor shrugged. “It’s pretty far into the woods. And people may not want the UNSC knowing how loyal Brume-sur-Mer was to the insurrectionists back then. It’s a lucky find for us, though.”
“Assuming someone can fly it.” Saskia strolled down the length of the ship, running her fingers along the side. A cloud of dust trailed in her wake.
“I’m sure Owen can,” Victor said. “Those Spartans can do everything.”
Saskia stopped and looked over her shoulder at him. In the harsh, buzzing light, her skin turned ashy and pale, and she looked like a ghost. “I hope you’re right.”
She turned away, continued her slow walk around the perimeter of the ship. She moved like a dancer, soft and graceful, and Victor felt the heat of his old crush like he was still staring at her from the far corner of calculus.
She disappeared into the shadows, and Victor turned back to the starship. He wished his sisters were here. They’d probably know how to fly this thing. Victor didn’t even know where to start without a holo-panel and voice commands.
“Victor!” Saskia’s voice echoed from the back of the hangar. Victor went cold—had something happened to her? He jogged down the length of the ship, his heart pounding, his palms slippery against the stock of the rifle.
But when he found her, she was crouched in front of an antique comm station.
“Check this out.” She peered over at him, grinning. “It still works.”
Victor knelt down beside her. The comm was coated in the same thick layer of dust as everything else, but there were definitely a row of lights glowing beneath the grime.
“But the channels are all jammed,” Victor said. “We couldn’t even get your comm station to work.”
“Yeah, but the one at my house isn’t military-grade. This is.” She thumped the side of the comm and dust billowed up in a cloud. “If we could get word to Port Moyne, maybe they could send backup to help get people out of the shelter.”
“That would be awesome, except Owen said the Covenant were scrambling everything.”
“It’s still worth trying.” She ran her fingers along the side of the station. Suddenly, the lights flared and a crackle of static shot through the hangar. Victor winced.
“I’ll turn it down,” she whispered, pressing the control keys along the side. The static roared on, though, filling the room like an alarm bell.
“Do something!” Victor hissed. “Turn it off!”
“I’m try—”
“—any word on the situation in Brume-sur-Mer?”
The voice was tinny and far away and shimmered with static and for a moment Victor thought he’d imagined it. But Saskia had frozen in place, her eyes wide.
“Working on it.” The second voice came through more clearly, and both Victor and Saskia pressed closer to the comm. Victor no longer cared about the noise—it sounded like someone was coming to help them after all.
“Report.”
A crackle of static. Victor held his breath.
“Shield still up. Can’t see what they’re doing in there, but we’ve got our suspicions.”
Victor and Saskia looked at each other, eyes wide.
“Go on,” crackled the first voice.
“We’re thinking there’s an artifact under the town. Can’t confirm, of course—”
“An artifact?” Victor whispered.
“So we’re in the safe window, then? While they’re looking for it, we’ve got a low risk of glassing for the time being, correct?”
More static. Victor’s heart vibrated against his rib cage. Answer, he thought. Answer.
“With forces still on the ground, absolutely. But if they get what they came for—”
Suddenly, the static flared up, swallowing both voices. Victor stared at the comm in horror. “What about the survivors? What did they mean ‘artifact’—”
A brush against his arm: Saskia. “At least they’re not just leaving us alone,” she said softly. “At least they’re acknowledging us. That means there’s still hope.”
Victor nodded. Saskia pressed a few buttons again, but all it brought up was static. Whatever wires had crossed to give that fragment of a conversation had unraveled themselves. There was only white noise.
They regrouped a little after midnight, meeting in the dining room of Saskia’s house, all of them still dressed in their dark clothes, their hair stringy and wet from the rain. Dorian and Evie reported what they’d found: a Covenant vehicle drilling into the old neighborhood in the center of the city.
Victor went cold, his body prickling with sweat.
“Drilling?” Owen leaned forward on the table, his armor clanking against the stone tabletop. “Are you sure?”
“I don’t know what else it could be,” Dorian said. “They were shooting a beam of energy into the ground, like they were boring a hole.”
Owen narrowed his eyes. “What did the vehicle look li
ke?”
“Weird,” Dorian said. “You could tell it was Covenant. Maybe five, six meters front to back.”
“It walked on four legs,” Evie added. “It moved more like a robot.”
“It’s a Locust,” Owen said. “I’m familiar with it. If we can get enough firepower, we might be able to take it out. What else did you see?”
“They’d clearly been there before,” Evie added, and then described the state of the main street, everything scorched and crushed. Victor couldn’t stop thinking about the drill, though. He kept hearing the staticky voice on the comm, talking about an artifact.
“Could the drill hit the shelter?” Owen asked.
Dorian looked over at him. “The shelter doesn’t go under the old part of town,” he said. “That’s not what they’re doing.”
“Are you sure?”
“Of course I’m sure. I’ve spent the last five years working with my uncle. I know the entire layout of this place.”
Owen accepted this with a curt nod. “Fine. So they aren’t interested in the civilians. That’s good.”
“There’s something else they want, though,” Saskia said in a small voice.
Everyone turned to look at her.
“She’s right.” Victor’s voice was rough, scratchy. “We found this old military comm station and we—we overhead something.”
“A military comm station?” Owen frowned. “Where?”
“It was in a hangar in the woods. Covered over with vines and stuff. We think it’s from the old insurrectionist days.” Saskia took a deep breath. “We found a starship too.”
“What?” said Dorian. “And you didn’t lead with that?”
“We’re pretty sure we overheard a UNSC military channel,” Victor snapped. “And they were talking about some kind of artifact in Brume-sur-Mer.”
The room went still, the air electrified with a jolt of terror. The only sound was the rain pattering against the glass, and Victor wondered if he’d ever be able to hear that sound without thinking of the Covenant and the invasion.
Battle Born Page 14