Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe

by Various

“This was a goddamn trap.”

  SIX

  * * *

  Fair Trade

  TIME WAS running out. Despite the immediate odds, Jonah knew he didn’t have much time to make his escape before the base camp was overrun with Covenant regulars, never mind the six hard-asses standing in front of him.

  The other squad’s gotta be doing better than this, he hoped, as his mind flashed to the second team of Headhunters operating on the other side of the valley.

  As if reading Jonah’s mind, the Sangheili who’d killed Roland spoke. “Your fellow conspirators are dead. Like the one here, slaughtered like pups—helpless and weak.”

  Jonah was impressed. If the Covenant had such high-level Spec-Ops troops stationed on such a remote moon, then one of two options was true: Either ONI had gotten their intel right and this place was, in fact, a pretty damn big deal to the Covenant, or the Headhunters had been doing their job so well that this whole scenario was one big alien boondoggle devised to draw them out. For a moment, thoughts of Roland’s death and six large obstacles standing before him dissipated, and Jonah found himself strangely satisfied—if two or more teams of the Covenant’s absolute top-of-the-line Elite squads were tied up babysitting a site so far from the frontlines, then they weren’t on the frontlines, which was a win for the UNSC no matter how you sliced it.

  “You idiots set this up,” he called to the Elite. “This . . . all of it. You wanted us . . . heh. Yer afraid of us. I’m flattered.”

  “You are dead,” one of the Elite hissed.

  “Could be. Don’t matter.”

  “You value your life so little?”

  “No. Not really,” Jonah explained. “I kinda like being me, actually. But you being here, means yer not somewhere else, get it? All this . . . these resources, all yer skill, wasted on a few ‘pathetic’ humans makes me feel kinda good—kinda special. And if you think yer taking me out without losing a limb . . . you’ve lost yer goddamn mind.”

  “We’ll see who’s lost their mind, once we have carved your flesh and you’ve screamed your secrets to the stars,” the main Elite replied.

  These guys were different, and Jonah admired them for it.

  Usually Covenant battlefield doctrine was simple and to the point: “Take no prisoners.” And while this new brand of Elite seemed to be playing a different game, Jonah was fairly certain that, had they wanted, he would already be dead. After all, they had the numbers and, up until a moment ago, the added advantage of total surprise.

  “This ends one of two ways, chief,” Jonah said. “I either walk out of here, yer teeth hangin’ from a string around my neck, or I die with my fist down someone’s throat.”

  Jonah made a come-hither motion with his SMG, before finishing, “So let’s start this party, I’m late for a hot date, and I don’t wanna keep yer sister waiting.” Jonah was unsure if the familial insult would translate, but by this point he couldn’t care less. It was time to dance.

  “You can sense your end, human. That is good. If it brings you any peace, the whole of your kind will soon follow suit.”

  The lead Elite clicked something to his squad in their native language.

  Three of the Elites leveled what looked to be modified carbine rifles at Jonah, while two others began moving toward him, igniting their energy swords. As the blades sparked to life Jonah noticed something he’d earlier mistaken as a trick of Roland’s blood on the Elite’s blade—these energy swords weren’t powered by the same blue-white energy source as the Covenant’s typical plasma-based cutlery. Instead they were comprised of a reddish energy combined with the white flicker of electricity, which caused them to emit a blood-colored glow.

  Jonah couldn’t guess at the difference between these new swords and the more commonly used blue-variant, but he was sure of one thing: his attackers were full of surprises, and he felt a twinge of fear creep up the back of his neck.

  The two sword-wielding Elites moved forward carefully, as if stalking prey.

  Jonah laughed. “You know I can see you, right?”

  The Elites didn’t alter their approach, maintaining their speed and positioning—muscles tensed, ready to strike.

  “We are aware of your visual upgrades, human. As stated, we’ve already been through this with your friends. Lay down your arms and surrender yourself for inquisition.”

  Jonah shifted his gaze to Roland’s body, keeping the Elites squarely in peripheral view. “Twenty credits says yer all dead within . . . let’s say . . . the next thirty seconds.”

  The lead Elite scoffed. “We will end you before you so much as bruise our egos, dog. Now, lay down your weapons—”

  “Seriously. I know you might not have any credits handy, but I’m willing to take the Covenant equivalent.” Jonah let the offer stand for a brief instant, then dropped his SMG to the turf.

  “We got a deal?” The two approaching Elites picked up their pace, as the others steadied their aim.

  Jonah relaxed his posture, let his knees flex and his back and shoulders slouch.

  The two Elites were almost within reach. Jonah bent into a deep crouch—his muscles contracted, taunt—before tumbling back, head over heels, coming up a good ten yards from the nearest Elite. Hunched in a low squat, Jonah held a disruptor in one hand, his charge detonator in the other.

  While Roland had been responsible for demolitions on most missions, with Jonah preferring to focus on direct combat, both members of a Headhunter squad were required to carry the proper charges and triggering mechanisms necessary for fieldwork to ensure redundancy should any unforeseen complications arise. And though Jonah would’ve preferred another way out, he was fully aware that his luck had run dry, and as he and his fellow ’Hunters had been fond of saying since their earliest training days on Onyx: “When in doubt, blow shit up.”

  Jonah’s mind flashed to Roland one more time, and he silently thanked his partner for one last assist—“Clear.” Roland’s final breath had also been a parting shot at the Covenant bastard who’d run him through.

  These special division Spec-Op Elites may have been watching the whole show, but Roland was cloaked when he set his charges, so unless the Sangheili had the equivalent of VISR in those shiny new helmets, they didn’t know thing one about the explosives placed on the reactors all around them.

  “Clear” meant the primer on the charges had been initiated.

  “Clear” meant with a push of a button this entire section of the valley would light up as bright and hot as the surface of a star, nothing but scorched earth and charred bones in its wake.

  “Clear,” and Jonah had a plan, even if it meant kissing his own ass good-bye.

  He raised the disruptor. “Know what this is?”

  “Take him!” the lead Elite called.

  But Jonah had allowed the two closest Elites to get within arm’s length in order to block the line of fire of their three squadmates with ranged weaponry. If the they got close enough to cut him he’d still have time to blow the fuse and take them all to hell right along with him.

  Jonah activated the disruptor and tossed it in a low arc toward the four farthest Elites while dodging a swipe from one of the energy swords, but he was too slow to avoid the second’s grasp.

  The Elite yanked him to his feet, ripping his shoulder from its socket. Jonah screamed in pain.

  The energy field from the disruptor expanded as it hit the ground at the feet of the farthest group of aliens, shutting down power to their weapons and armor.

  The Elite holding Jonah shook him like a rag doll. “You dare defy us, filth? You will suffer for your sins.” He raised his sword, using the very edge of the blade to cut a gash across Jonah’s faceplate, digging into the flesh beneath. Jonah’s left eye sizzled and popped as the blade passed through. For the second time in recent memory, the Spartan screamed, but he still held tightly to the detonator, thumb pressed firmly on the tiny unit’s ignition switch.

  The second sword-wielding Elite stepped up and grabbed him by the n
eck.

  In Jonah’s mind a thousand witty remarks echoed, an infinite chorus of banter to die to, but instead of uttering a word, Jonah simply glanced at the beasts above him, these “elite” commandoes whose body count quite possibly surpassed his own, and thought to himself, Six of you, one of me. Fair trade, as he released his thumb from the detonator.

  After that everything went white.

  BLUNT INSTRUMENTS

  * * *

  FRED VAN LENTE

  ONE

  * * *

  Fireteam Spartan: Black’s objective was not difficult to locate. All one had to do was look for the enormous pinkish-purple plume of energy spearing out of the horizon on the colony world Verge. They bled silently through ten square kilometers of heavily fortified enemy anti-aircraft positions toward the perpetually shining beam until at last they reached the remains of Ciudad de Arias.

  This city had been among the hardest hit in the initial Covenant assault a few months prior. The buildings leaned and listed in their foundations like beaten boxers right before a climactic keel to the mat. It took Black-Four a few minutes to identify an apartment tower that looked stable enough for them to scale without it collapsing beneath their feet.

  Once they reached the penthouse, they passed stencils of pandas and koalas still visible on the charred walls as they entered what they assumed had been a child’s room. They lay on their bellies and looked out through the vacant holes where windows once were.

  Their massive target drifted about five blocks away, casually knocking over fire-gutted husks into clouds of rubble. Thanks to their untranslatable and unpronounceable Covenant name, FLEETCOM simply dubbed the enormous machines “Beacons.” Nearly fifty stories tall and five city blocks wide, the Beacon looked to the Spartans’ eyes like a perfectly symmetrical beehive floating atop four antigravity stilts. Out of its gaping lower orifice swarmed a buzzing cloud of Yanme’e, the glittering, winged insectoids humans called Drones. Clicking and screeching and hissing and squealing in a teeth-gritting cacophony, the swarm tore deep below Verge’s surface with handheld antigravity grapplers that yanked up great chunks of regolith. The Drones flew back up and deposited the rocks inside the Beacon’s hollow, irradiant heart, where the helium-3 inside them would be extracted and converted into pure fusion power. The energy was then projected skyward, focused in the form of a massive purple beam erupting from the Beacon’s summit. A weblike constellation of Covenant satellites orbiting Verge transmitted the power to the fleet blockading the colonies on Tribute, in the Epsilon Eridani system.

  Like every other colony world’s, Verge’s helium-3 deposits had been trapped in the second mantle laid down over her original, natural exosphere during the spallation-heavy terraforming process. The Beacon would drift from continent to continent, gathering and extracting all the He-3 it could, until Verge was picked clean, a few weeks from now. Then the machine and its crew would be drawn up into a battle cruiser so the Covenant could glass the planet from space.

  Unless, of course, Spartan: Black blew the godforsaken thing to kingdom come first, cutting off the primary fuel source to the fleet blockading Tribute and giving the colonists there a fighting chance.

  Which was exactly what they planned to do.

  “What do we see, people?” Black-One asked. Befitting their highly classified status as an unconventional warfare (UW) unit, Spartan: Black’s ebony armor had been created as skunkwork prototypes in a top secret parallel development lab in Seongnam, United Korea; as such, MJOLNIR: Black boasted a few variant design elements and enhancements completely different from the standard-issue combat exoskeleton. Its HUD magnification, for example, was much greater than the standard Mark V or VI, with a field of view of nearly five thousand meters. From this distance, Spartan: Black could zoom in on the support troops milling beneath the antigrav “feet” of the Beacon and see them as clearly as if they had been standing across the street.

  “Two Hunters per pylon,” Black-Two said, noting the stooped, spiny-armored behemoths. Each creature’s right arm terminated in a gun barrel studded with luminescent green power rods. “Armed with standard assault cannon.”

  “Complemented by two—no, three—Jackals at each corner,” Black-Three added.

  The spiky-crowned, beaked aliens carried, in addition to plasma pistols holstered at their sides, some kind of long pole made of a translucent purple-pink crystalline material. Occasionally, a Drone would flit away from the larger swarm in a confused, almost drunken fashion, and a couple of Jackals would descend on it with a shriek, stabbing the stray in the neck, where it wore a translucent reddish-orange collar. The bugger quaked spasmodically with pain, clutching the collar with its front claws; it could take only a thrust or two from the Jackals and the resulting seizures before it fell dutifully back with the swarm and resumed whatever task it had abandoned.

  “Jackals aren’t just security,” Four said. “They’re also management.”

  “Very nice to meet you,” Two said. “I look forward to killing you.”

  No one said anything for almost five minutes. They just watched the enemy work.

  Finally, Three said, “Hunters and Jackals—they’re just another day at the office. I mean, I can kill Tree-Turkeys in my sleep. And Can-o’-Worms are something you can sink your teeth into. But the buggers—how many are there?”

  “I’ve got a hundred, a hundred fifty so far,” Four said. “But I’m not sure . . . some I may have counted twice. They’re moving pretty fast down there.”

  “One-fifty . . . Jesus,” Three said. “How are the buggers going to react when we bring the hammer down? Can they use those grappler things as weapons? What kind of intel do we have on their tactics and behavior?”

  “We have jack,” said Two, the fireteam’s intelligence officer. “Covenant’s rarely deployed them as combatants.”

  “Jesus,” Three muttered again, shaking his head. “I hate surprises.”

  “If it was easy, they wouldn’t call us heroes,” One drawled.

  “I’d prefer a pat on the back,” Three said. “But I gotta be alive for that.”

  “Two,” One said, “find us a room in the interior where we can mull this over and catch some Z’s without being seen from the street.”

  “Copy that, Chief.” Black-Two backed out on her stomach until she reached the nursery’s doorway, then got up into a crouch and made her way quickly but cautiously through the rest of the penthouse. She determined that what was left of the kitchen had no good sightlines to the perimeter and prepared to return and tell One but was stopped by a fluttering, flapping sound from a doorway on the north side of the room.

  She pressed her back against the wall and peered around the doorway. She was looking into a ruined family room, a flatscreen lying facedown and shattered on a carpet littered with tempered glass that once filled floor-to-ceiling windows. On the ground beside a sofa blackened and bloated by fire and the elements, a solitary Yanme’e Drone twitched his wings spasmodically.

  Two put both hands on the assault rifle hanging from her shoulder and silently lined up a shot at the crown of the bugger’s walnut-shaped head. Something seemed off about the creature, though. She didn’t pull the trigger.

  Two realized the Drone was on his back, pulsing the hinged armored plates that covered his wings over and over again in a futile attempt to flip himself over onto his belly. Two could now see that all four of his lower legs had been cut off and cauterized at the stumps. His two remaining arms didn’t have joints that allowed him to reach behind and push himself upright.

  Two watched him struggle for twenty seconds more. Then she emerged from behind the doorway and took several slow strides over to where the Drone lay. His orange, half-egg eyes were fixed at the ceiling and didn’t register her approach.

  Still covering the insectoid with the rifle, Two tucked one foot under the creature’s body and kicked him up and over. He began frantically beating his wings to stay upright while hopping up and down on the end of his abdomen.
The bugger was human sized, and they were now practically eye to eye. Two took a step back and made sure the Drone was staring down the barrel of the AR.

  Holding the gun steady with one hand, she flexed her other elbow in such a way that a compartment sprang open along the left foreaem of the skunkware MJOLNIR. A wand computer with a microphone, speakers, a digital ink keyboard, and every scrap of linguistics data United Nations Space Command had gathered on the languages of Covenant races popped out of the compartment and slid into her palm.

  “Identify yourself and your purpose,” Two said sternly, and waited for the Interrogator, as ONI had christened the device, to translate and broadcast the question in Yanme’e.

  The icon of a rotating circle appeared on the Interrogator’s display, indication it was working. After only a few seconds, the device emitted a faint series of clicks and screeches in a pitiful attempt to mimic Yanme’e speech. Two had little faith in it succeeding. Sure enough, a moment later, its display flashed: “Untranslatable.” Two cursed under her breath. Not enough was known about the damn buggers to make even that simple demand intelligible.

  With his head cocked quizzically, the Drone watched as Black-Two tried to rephrase the question a couple of different ways so that the Interrogator might translate, but no avail.

  Then the creature made an unmistakable gesture, extending one claw in her direction, then curling his digits rapidly toward himself: Give.

  Black-Two frowned. What little intel ONI had on the Drones suggested they had an instinctive faculty for technology. Cautiously, she handed the Interrogator over. There seemed little harm in it. A cord attached the device to her forearm to supply it with power and data, as well as ensure that the other half of a conversation couldn’t just walk away with it.

  The second the Yanme’e wrapped his claws around the device he popped open the access panel on its underside. He rearranged the circuits and microfilament wires in the Interrogator’s guts with such speed and precision that one would have thought he had spent every waking moment for the past twenty years working with them.