by Various
Two opened her mouth to protest, but found herself just watching, transfixed by the rapidity of the thing’s movements, which had a certain kind of flitting grace, like a dragonfly making its evasive way across the surface of a pond. Something in the device clicked.
And the creature started talking.
IN THE nursery lookout, Black-One was just starting to wonder what was taking Black-Two so long when her subordinate’s voice rang out from inside the apartment: “Chief! Better come here! Bring the boys, too!”
The rest of Spartan: Black walked into the living room to find Two tethered to the Drone by the Interrogator’s power cord. At first glance it looked like the Yanme’e was holding the Spartan on a leash.
“Whoa! Whoa! Whoa!” Instantly, the three other Spartans fell into an attack phalanx, Three and Four both dropping to one knee and raising their ARs while One remained standing, training her own weapon on the Drone’s head. “Spartan Black-Two!” she barked. “Step away from the hostile!”
Two held up both hands and made calming gestures. “It’s okay,” she said. “It’s okay. He’s not all that hostile. I named him Hopalong. Hopalong, meet the guys. Guys, meet Hopalong.”
Hopalong’s claws flickered across the translator’s digital ink keypad. “Hello, guys.” Normally, the Interrogator spoke in the inflectionless nonaccent of the midwestern United States. But whatever the Drone did to the machine’s insides had distorted the computer voice so that now it sounded more like a recording of intelligible speech played backward that just happened to also sound like intelligible speech.
“The hell, Two?” Three snapped. “Making friends?”
“He knows an alternate route to the Beacon, an underground one,” Two said calmly, but with urgency. “Tunnels that have been completely cleaned out of helium-3 so the buggers don’t go in them anymore. We can slip in under the antigrav pylons and take them out before the Covenant knows what hit them.”
“How did he know we were after the Beacon in the first place?” Three demanded. “You tell him?”
“Have you looked outside?” Two snapped defensively. “Like there’s anything else on this dirtball worth blowing up.”
“I can’t think of a single reported instance in which Covenant provided aid to human troops against their own kind,” One said, pointing her weapon at Hopalong. “We trust this bug . . . why?”
“See that?” Two pointed to the stumps where Hopalong’s missing limbs had once been. “The Jackals did that. They work the buggers to death on that thing.”
Hopalong’s claw flickered across the translator in short, staccato bursts. “Kig-Yar do this,” the machine said, using the Jackals’ own name for themselves. “I drop cache twice. Kig-Yar cut legs off. Say I worthless. Let me crawl from Hive. Think I die, but no. Then I see you come. Through city. I follow. I come here. Climb walls. See you. Know you help. You kill Kig-Yar. All Drones help. Hive help.
“Covenant conquered us. Jiralhanae and Sangheili. Overthrew our own Hive-Gods. Make Hive worship Prophets instead. Rule through fear and pain. Now they come for you. Together we stop them. Earth Hive and Yanme’e. Just give us freedom. Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.”
He reached up and touched the red-orange collar around his neck with both claws. He flicked at it, as if wishing to rip it off, but didn’t have the power.
“Freedom. Freedom. Freedom.”
Hopalong kept repeating the same click-and-whistle combination that presumably meant freedom in the Yanme’e language. Two yanked the translator out of the Drone’s hand and turned it off.
She pointed at herself, then at the rest of Fireteam Black, then made a “talking” symbol by slapping her thumb and fingers together. “We will get back to you,” she said loudly.
Fireteam Black went into the kitchen where they could still see the Drone but he couldn’t hear them, Interrogator or not.
The others waited for One to weigh in first. She didn’t say anything for a minute, then said, “I can’t shake the feeling there’s something not quite on the up-and-up about this. But maybe that’s because I don’t like a roach as big as I am coming up with my battle plans.” They couldn’t see her face beneath the reflective gray visor of her helmet, of course, but it was obvious to all of them she was wrestling with the idea. “Besides, inserting ourselves into local intra-Covenant disputes is a little above our pay grade, Two. We’re more the blunt-instrument type.”
Two glanced back at Hopalong. He lay propped up on the floor on the middle joints of his remaining arms—the elbows, she supposed—and rubbed his claws together in front of his mandibles, back and forth, back and forth, like a housefly, in some kind of hygienic ritual.
“Normally I’d agree, Chief, but the plan he’s proposing seems the best way to take the enemy by complete surprise and circumvent the Drone threat.”
“You can be sure he’s not leading us smack-dab into a trap?” The doubt in Three’s voice was unmistakable.
“If he wanted us dead all he had to do was whistle for his buddies the minute he laid eyes on us,” Four pointed out. “Why contrive some elaborate ambush?”
Black-One said, “I’ve got to say, the opportunity to hit the ground hot, inside the enemy’s defenses, and take out the objective before they even have a chance to mount any kind of a resistance . . .” She stayed silent for a second or two then announced, “Yeah, that’s just too good to pass up. Okay, Two. Tell the bugger he’s got a deal.”
Two went over to Hopalong to connect him to the translator again and give him the good news.
Once she was out of earshot, Four asked One, “And if it is a trap?”
Black-One looked straight at him. “Then we kill them all.”
“Now you’re talking,” Three said.
TWO
* * *
Fireteam Black waited until an hour before dawn, which was scheduled to arrive around 0600 hours or so. In the interim they downed some high-protein MREs, then helped Three remove eight medium-sized backpacks from a case he had humped all the way from the drop point by himself. Each Spartan slipped a C-12 “blow pack” over each shoulder. A single pack could punch a hole in the hull of a Covenant Cruiser, as Fireteam Black had had the pleasure of witnessing firsthand. They had little clue what kind of material the Beacon’s antigrav pylons were made out of, but the general consensus was that one pack per pylon should do the trick. And they probably only needed to knock out one or two pylons to send the whole thing crashing to the ground.
“And if not?” Four asked.
“Then we try harsh language,” One said.
Everyone chuckled. Pre-op gallows humor. Situation: normal.
Hopalong watched them the whole time, hop-hovering in place, glittering head bobbing from one side to the other; whether that was from fascination or boredom no Spartan could say.
They fell in to callsign order and snaked down the stairs and out of the apartment building in single file.
Hopalong chose to crawl face-first down the edifice’s side.
On the ground, One insisted that Hopalong point in the direction that he wished them to go; One then sent Four, with his battle rifle, to scope out the area. It never failed to amaze One, even after all these missions and engagements, how effortlessly Four simply melted into the shadows in his jet-black MJOLNIR, carrying his rifle by its barrel at his hip like it was a lunchbox. She and the others hunkered down behind piles of rubble and waited until the little yellow dot representing Black-Four on the circular motion tracker in the lower-left corner of their helmet displays briefly flashed green. Without giving any verbal commands, One rose to a crouch and sprinted in Four’s direction; Three leapt up quickly and followed; Two, a little bit more slowly, so the crippled Hopalong could keep up behind.
They zigzagged through the ruins of Cuidad de Arias like this for twenty minutes, until Four swept, at Hopalong’s indication, the basement of another crippled apartment tower via a side stairwell. An entire cellar wall had collapsed, burying a line of washing machines
and exposing a rough-hewn tunnel carved in the unnaturally raised mantle of the terraformed planet.
Black-One switched the order of their close alignment at that point, acquiescing to Hopalong taking the lead, Four following, then Two, then Three. She took rear guard. Their sleek train formation was belied by their stumbling progress through the rough tunnel, which had been carved out by insectoids expecting only to fly through it. So the “floor,” such as it was, was just as covered in fissures and protrusions and jagged edges as the “walls” or “ceiling.” It was more like an esophagus than a tunnel, snaking in cylindrical fashion down, down, down ever deeper into the earth. Hopalong now had the advantage, hastily flitting forward on his translucent wings, disappearing from view until the column of Spartans rounded a bend to find him hovering in place, impatiently beckoning them forward with a claw. Visibility was awful, provided solely by light enhancement in their helmet visors, bathing their environs in a lime-green gloom. The whole experience would have been extremely claustrophobic, had spending days at a time entombed within head-to-toe exoskeletons not cured every Spartan of any possible inclination toward claustrophobia a long, long time ago.
They clambered and crawled through the tunnel until, very faintly, they could hear the unmistakable hum of the Drone swarm at work far in the distance, and the warren walls began to tremble with the looming overhead presence of the Beacon. They were drawing near.
Three stopped abruptly in front of One, and she almost walked right into him.
He turned around, raised his hand before her, and raised an index finger—the UNSC silent signal for Heads up.
She peered around Three’s shoulder to the front of the line. Four had stopped as well and was turning to pass signs back to Two, who passed them to Three, who passed them to her.
A raised fist: Hold position.
Four disappeared into the darkness of the tunnel.
On her motion sensor One could see his yellow dot move eight, ten, fifteen meters away from their position—then he was out of sensor range.
Nothing happened for what seemed like a very long while.
Then the yellow dot reappeared on her sensor and rejoined the others. Four materialized out of the gloom.
He raised his forearm, clenched his fist, and pumped it up and down, rapid-fire: Hurry!
He disappeared back down the tunnel, and the others followed. In a few paces they entered a mammoth, ovular cavern, the top of which was covered with what appeared to be metallic scales, some kind of mineral deposit that caused the ceiling to gleam even in the subterranean nonlight.
Then One’s breath caught in her throat.
Spartans were not, as a group, especially well acquainted with fear, but when she spotted one of the “scales” overhead shudder, as if shaking off a dream, One knew exactly what she was looking at.
Sleeping Drones. Hundreds of them, dangling from the ceiling of the cavern, completely carpeting the rock above.
She had only the one chance to glance above before she returned her attention to Three’s back. He was in a crouch, weaving a nonlinear path through the cavern. One immediately intuited why: Four had gone out before them to scout the best route through the innumerable loose rocks and ankle-busting crevices in the cave floor so they could make their way through without noise. No need to wake the Yanme’e, no matter how friendly they were supposed to be. She knew for certain now that whatever Hopalong’s plan was, it wasn’t an ambush. If it were, they’d already be dead.
A distant noise kicked One right in the stomach: She could still hear a different swarm of Drones slaving away in the distance.
There were twice as many Drones here as they had previously counted. The day swarm worked while the night swarm slept, and vice versa.
That meant there had to be three to four hundred Drones all told in the area.
Black-One hoped they all shared Hopalong’s democratic sympathies.
After a few twists and turns beyond the large cavern, Hopalong signaled for a stop and the Spartans circled him. They were so close to the work site that the grinding, growling of the excavations drowned out all other sounds, and the tunnel walls shook so violently they were periodically showered by dust and stones from above. A possible cave-in wasn’t far from their thoughts.
Hopalong produced a thin broadcast data wafer.
“Hell is that?” Three shouted. In any other circumstances a whisper would have been preferable, but the harsh roar of digging practically prevented them from hearing themselves.
“Hopalong salvaged the broadcast wafer out of the video screen in the penthouse,” Two yelled back. “He rejiggered it to show abandoned tunnels that lead toward one of the Beacon’s pylons, and avoids ones being used for excavation now.”
“I’m not sticking that thing in my head!” Three exploded. “Who knows what kind of enemy worms or viruses Bug Boy stuck on it!”
“I saw him make it myself, while you guys slept.”
“Nothing personal, Two, but that doesn’t exactly fill me with confidence.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“You’ve got some serious Stockholm syndrome going on here with your six-legged boyfriend, that’s all I’m saying. Your judgment may be seriously effed up.”
“Sorry, I didn’t quite catch that.” Two got her back up. “You mind saying that again?”
With an explosive sigh that could be heard even over the grinding din surrounding them, Four reached between Two and Three and yanked the data wafer out of Hopalong’s claw. He stuffed it into the receiving slot on the side of his helmet.
Three stared at Four. “You’re a lot of help. I’m trying to hold an intervention for our sister here.”
“In for a penny, in for a pound,” Four said.
When a diode on one end flashed, indicating the upload was complete, Four yanked the wafer out and handed it to Two, who stuck it into her helmet too. One was prepared to order Three to do the same but that proved unnecessary. Soon all four of their HUDs featured translucent V-shaped arrows with range meters that indicated the direction of their individual pylons.
“Everybody set countdown timers for . . . T-minus ten minutes,” One said. “This spot is Rally Point Alpha. Return here once your blow packs are set. Then we’ll have Hopalong give his buggers the good news they’ve been liberated. We’ll evacuate them beyond the blast radius before detonating the C-12.”
One pointed at Hopalong, then pointed at the ground. “You stay here and wait ’til we come back. You got me?”
The Drone just cocked his head and wiggled his mandibles in her general direction.
Spartan: Black checked their assault rifles one last time. Locked and loaded.
“Let’s get some,” One said.
“Universe needs less ugly,” Three declared.
Then they headed off, alone, in four different directions.
Black-Two’s HUD led her down a wide rabbit hole that snaked several levels deeper into the earth so narrowly that she had to scale down feet-first. At the nadir of the passage, where it began snaking back up again, a fissure in the side of the tunnel faced a much larger cavern beyond.
Two turned on the horizontal lantern over her visor and peered through. The beam illuminated subway tracks, a stalled train, and several signs in Spanish in the human-hewn tunnel on the other side.
She flicked the light off and made her way up the rest of the tunnel in the green gloom of light-enhancement. The range counter in her HUD said she was within fifty meters of her antigrav pylon. The tunnel emptied out into another with a level floor and a ceiling high enough for her to stand up all the way again.
As soon as she did so, a Jackal rounded a bend, his beak pointed downward at a translucent glowing cube in his hands.
Right before he walked into her, he looked up, sensing an obstruction, and Black-Two unloaded her assault rifle into his face and neck. The deafening digging sounds reverberating off every inch of the warren completely drowned out the burp of the AR and the
Kig-Yar dropped without a cry.
Black-Two crouched behind the bend in the tunnel, but no companions of the dead Jackal emerged. Her motion sensor remained clear of red dots. The countdown on her HUD hadn’t quite reached eight minutes.
Near the floor, along one wall, she found a crevice big enough to stuff the Jackal’s corpse into in case any hostiles decided to come up the tunnel behind her. She scraped gravel to cover the purple bloodstains on the tunnel floor and accidentally kicked the smoky cube the Kig-Yar was holding. As the cube bounced across the floor she thought she could see three-dimensional images in the center of it. She picked it up and turned it over in her hands.
The sides of the cube were perfectly clear, and its interior was filled with a cloudy gel that churned and swirled as if it had its own internal air currents. In the center of the mist stood a slowly rotating three-dimensional image of a Yanme’e male, wings extended. A few Covenant characters floated near its feet. Black-Two had studied her Interrogator enough to recognize these characters as numbers—years, in fact. Two dates about a decade apart.
A trio of buttons appeared beneath Black-Two’s fingers on the surface of the cube. She tapped one, and the mist seethed, wiping away the large image of the Drone, and started cycling through a series of images inside an immaculate plasticine honeycomb marred by a spray of Drone legs, abdomens, heads, and splashes of their green-gray blood. Interspersed among these three-dimensional tableaus of slaughter were scenes of smashed eggs, presumably Yanme’e as well, shell shards hurled explosively against the luminescent hive walls, the not-quite-living insides scooped out and oozing across the floor. The same Kig-Yar character floated beside each image, every time.
The countdown on her HUD reached five minutes.
She removed the Interregator from her forearm and waved its optical scanner over the cube until it picked up the Jackal word.
While she waited for the Interrogator’s wheel icon to stop rotating, she played with the cube a little bit more, punching other buttons and seeing where they took her. In all cases, the mist wiped away the existing image and replaced it with another 360 degree three-dimensional image of an individual Drone, attached to various scenes of hive carnage, all accompanied by the same Kig-Yar character.