Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe

by Various

  “His name was Carlos Wambua, age fifty-two, widower, three adult children. The oldest still—” Cortana rattled off before John cut in.

  “He just sat there—the position of his feet,” John pointed at the man’s smoldering shoes with his chin for emphasis. “He didn’t even try to get away. From his position he would’ve been able to see the tee forty-seven even before it crested the bridge—that’s a little over eight hundred meters out.” He gave his gear a shake test then moved to the corner of the structure.

  “Your point being?” Cortana challenged. “Do the words ‘transfixed with terror’ mean anything to you? You may find this hard to believe, but most people find Scarabs to be rather unsettling.”

  With a barely noticeable shrug he began looking for a path to the mouth of the inbound tunnel—moving along the line of booths until he found a straight shot with no obstructions. It was seventy-three meters to the entrance. That meant he would be out in the open for about four and a half seconds—enough time for one of the Banshees in the air overhead to make a positive ID. He slung his rifle and hunkered down.

  Kelly had always been the fastest in their class—easily making her the fastest human being who had ever lived—but as he tore across the plaza, he was certain that his performance would have made even her take notice.

  Once he was within the tunnel, John slid to a stop against a burnt-out sedan. He unlimbered his rifle and considered the path ahead. This section of the tunnel was littered with vehicles; some gutted or otherwise destroyed, others merely abandoned. The area would have been perfect for an ambush. Unfortunately he was the one who had to move through it. The vehicles appeared to thin out some eighty meters farther in, but to get there would require patience. And so he began snaking his way through the environment—moving quickly but cautiously between cover. He checked the most likely hiding spots and the least, keeping his eye on his armor’s motion sensor and listening intently for any sound that seemed out of place. Working his way deeper into the underpass, he heard muffled curses and other sounds of agitated goings-on from about 150 meters ahead. He came to a stop alongside a lorry in pale green Technique Electronics livery and looked off to his right. The Moi Avenue junction was sealed off by heavy blast doors.

  “The main route is locked down as well,” Cortana huffed; the frustration in her voice was unmistakable.

  John hesitated a moment, waiting for Cortana to continue. The main Mtangwe route, a 390-meter tunnel that resurfaced in the center of New Mombasa’s industrial zone, had been his best bet to gain entrance into the city without being spotted by the enemy. The activity up ahead was promising, and he hoped it was from a maintenance crew who could release either set of blast doors; if not, his only choice was to head back to the surface.

  “That’s it?” John asked, finally. “It’s locked down and nothing else?”

  “I’m having a little trouble accessing the local net,” Cortana replied. “I’ll have it in a moment.”

  The Spartan edged around the cab of one of the omnipresent SinoViet lorries. About thirty meters away, near the blast door, were two M831s—the primary UNSC wheeled troop carriers that had become nearly as common in New Mombasa as the freight lorries over the past few weeks—and a squad of Marines who were busily pulling any useful bits of equipment out of them.

  “They’re from one of the ghost battalions out of Eridanus Two,” Cortana said with a near-audible sigh of relief. “First Battalion, Seventh Regiment; more specifically, this is Third Squad, First Platoon, Kilo Company.”

  ONE OF the Marines signaled the Spartan’s arrival to the rest of the squad and moved forward cautiously to greet him.

  “Holy crap,” Private Jemison blurted. “Sorry, sir, but holy crap, you’re a Spartan!”

  “Yes,” John said dryly as he jogged toward the Marine, but before he had the chance to utter another syllable, the distinctive report of a fuel rod gun rang out from behind him.

  “Get to cover,” John yelled as he brought his BR55 to bear, spun on his heel, acquired a sight picture of his target, and put a single bullet through the neck of the green-clad Grunt. Private Jemison’s MA5B flashed to his shoulder and fired off a long burst as the first shot from the fuel rod gun sailed past the Spartan and the Marines and slammed into the tunnel wall a little more than twelve meters away. The nearly decapitated Grunt reflexively fired a second shot, which impacted the roadway less than a meter away from where it was standing. The resulting explosion killed half of the aliens that were visible in the tunnel, including their commander—an Elite in red armor.

  The stray first shot had dug a four-meter-wide hole in the wall and dumped a literal ton of smoking, shattered concrete out onto the tunnel floor. Dark, brackish slop lazily spilled out, accompanied with a stomach-curdling stench—making it very clear that an opening had been punched into an adjoining sewer line. As if on cue, brilliant purple light washed along the walls as the massive, bulbous form of a Wraith slid into view from behind an abandoned commuter bus. Its carapace seemed to crack open—broad curving plates folded out of the way of its deadly plasma mortar.

  “Crap,” Jemison howled as he backpedaled. “Corporal, what do we do?”

  A tall, broad-shouldered redhead hopped down out of the back of the lead troop carrier and motioned with her left hand toward the opening in the wall. “Jump in that hole—it ain’t no worse than it is out here! Move it!”

  Jemison continued to back up until he reached the edge of the rubble, all the while firing burst after burst from his assault rifle into the advancing enemies. Corporal Palmer approached the Spartan, tapped his shoulder, and shouted, “You wanna come, big guy?” She moved through the rubble to the breach, motioning for the rest of the squad to follow. And in they went, one by one.

  John shouldered his rifle, took one step back toward the way he had come, and fired a burst into a mob of Grunts that had swarmed in past the Wraith, killing two and forcing the rest to scatter and dive for cover.

  “Chief, you should probably follow those Marines—they look like they need the help—and there are three more Wraiths on the way,” Cortana said thoughtfully.

  As the walls of the tunnel reverberated with the sounds of the charging plasma mortar, John dashed over to the rent in the tunnel wall—firing three more bursts from his battle rifle back at the advancing enemies as he went—then turned and disappeared into the breach. He had made it no more than thirteen meters when the mortar round slammed into the opening, sending a wall of concussion and heat that drove him to his knees and caused his shields to overload and drop. John got back to his feet, but Private Jemison, the second-to-last man to make it into the breach, was lying facedown in the now boiling muck—his organs ruptured and bones splintered from that same blast. Howls from the darkness told him that Jemison wasn’t the only casualty. He ran past Private First-Class Locke, whose split and blistered flesh and raw bone were visible through smoldering holes in his BDUs. He stepped over Private First-Class Galliard, who had been felled by a piece of rebar that entered just below the nape of his neck and exited through the bridge of his nose—the still-glowing chunk of steel protruded from the sewer wall ten yards farther ahead.

  When John reached the flow-through tunnel below the spillway, the remaining Marines skipped their eyes past him and looked back down the tunnel.

  “Where the hell’s the rest of my squad?” demanded Corporal Palmer as she stepped forward. “The Wraith?”

  “Affirmative,” John replied flatly. “They were killed in action.”

  “Then we’ve gotta go back.”

  “We’re going forward.”

  “No we’re not.” Palmer’s brow furrowed. “We are not just gonna leave them lying back there in this goddamn sewer!”

  Cortana spoke to the entire group over their helmet-integrated comm units. “They will be left behind just as the other twenty-three billion that preceded them were left behind. Because they could not be saved, and carrying them with us will only make us vulnerable.”
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  They looked at John like he was a monster; like an alien. In some of their eyes he could detect something deeper. Not horror; astonishment? Betrayal? Of course, it may have just been hearing Cortana speaking through his comms.

  “Who was that?” Palmer spat.

  “That was Cortana. She’s . . .”

  “She’s a real fucking bitch.”

  The Spartan stood in silence, head cocked slightly to the right. “Corporal, give me your TACPAD.”

  Corporal Palmer produced a notebook-sized device from her pack and passed it to the Spartan, and he flipped it open and showed them a traffic video with a time stamp from twenty-two minutes earlier—four Wraiths and fifty light infantry entering the Mtangwe Underpass.

  “It’s amazing how persuasive an argument overwhelming force can be,” Cortana whispered to the Spartan. John shrugged and moved toward what appeared to be a series of rungs imbedded in a flat section of the sewer wall.

  Cortana was the first smart AI he had ever worked with directly. Sadly, whoever died to make this AI possible had to have been a genius among geniuses. For example: The section they were in wasn’t on the grid; it dated from before construction had even started on the Mombasa Tether—itself more than two hundred years old. Cortana had plucked the plans for them out of the ether before he could finish his request. As far as equipment went, the AI was cutting edge. The only thing that bothered him about Cortana was her excessive familiarity; she was more like a pushy civilian that just happened to fit on a data crystal than a true military AI.

  “You can tell her that the rest of their unit has begun to dig in at Beria Plaza,” Cortana’s voice buzzed in his ear. “That’s a little under two kilometers away.”

  “Corporal Palmer, does Beria Plaza mean anything to you?”

  “It was between where that door came slamming down in front of us and where we were going.”

  “That’s where the rest of your unit is. It’s about two clicks due east of our current position. You’ll go up here,” John said, indicating the ladder. “It’ll take you up to the surface.” Cortana may have been busy looking for some way to get him onto the Covenant assault carrier, but not so busy that she couldn’t provide him the occasional blueprint, video feed, or other intel—whether it was helpful to his situation or not.

  “Okay.” Palmer nodded. “So you gonna follow this pipe all the way out to the Mombasa Quays?”

  “No. I’m going to make sure the rest of you make it out of here alive.”

  “Gosh! That’s awfully nice of you,” Palmer mugged—then the smile faded. “Look, you may be a Spartan, but . . .”

  “Exactly, Corporal. And if we had all been Spartans back there, none of us would have died. Now let me do my job.”

  Palmer’s jaw dropped. After about a second and a half she closed her mouth, snapped off a smug salute, pivoted on her heel, and then jogged over to the rest of the Marines.

  As the Marines stacked up at the base of the ladder, John readied his service rifle, swapped in a full magazine, and took station on the other side of the tunnel so he could keep an eye on them as well as keep an eye out for pursuers. He glanced over at the Marines as they moved into position to climb to the upper part of the spillway—and out of the sewer they had been slogging through for the past twenty minutes. While it may have only been a storm sewer, it hardly mattered this close to the Kilindini Harbor. He wondered if the oppressive stench was the reason for the soldiers’ sour expressions.

  “Chief,” Cortana whispered, “there was no way for you to save those three.”

  “Even so,” he muttered, “I could’ve wiped out that entire unit.”

  “Four Wraiths,” Cortana broke in. “Four. You rely too much on your luck.”

  “The limited space and the abandoned vehicles in the tunnel would have restricted their mobility as well as their ability to use their main weapons, especially if they brought all four down—which they did. I’ve been doing this for twenty-seven years, Cortana. And I know the exact limits of my luck.”

  “Then what? The rest of them die trying to support you?”

  “They started running as soon as the shooting started.”

  “Yes, Chief, but Corporal Palmer’s reasoning was sound—even without knowing about the other three Wraiths, she had more sense than to go up against armor without any antiarmor weaponry.”

  John watched as the last Marine started up the ladder and fired a burst from his BR55 back down the way they had come. He heard the heavy rounds gouge the ancient concrete, followed by the panicked cries of Grunts in the distance as they dove for cover—and into the semigelatinous, ankle-deep liquid. Hopefully that would keep them from coming any closer, at least until the Marines were all safely up on the spillway. There was precious little cover within the confines of the sewer, certainly not enough to avoid any incoming fire. The spillway would allow them to break contact with their pursuers—then he could get back to his mission.

  “Chief, I was serious about their being useful for getting us to our objective,” Cortana whispered in the Spartan’s ear.

  “Thanks. So you strongly suggest following them?”

  “I merely suggest we take them back to their unit,” Cortana whispered very sweetly. “They could be useful too.”

  Palmer called down from the top of the spillway, “Your girlfriend say to wait there—you coming or what?”

  “It’s an AI.”

  “Nice,” Cortana huffed.

  John turned his attention to the ladder. He looped his arm behind the rungs and popped them out, three at a time, until he had pulled out all of them he could reach; it wouldn’t stop their pursuers for good, but it didn’t have to. All it needed to do was slow them down. He sent four more rounds ripping into the darkness before jumping three meters up to the top of the spillway and following the sounds of the boots retreating up one of the drainage tunnels. He could hear the sound of wind in the trees and the pounding of the surf somewhere up ahead, and beyond that the staccato chatter of gunfire and dull thudding of explosions in the distance.

  The tunnel opened into a wide culvert that seemed to emerge from beneath the inner part of the island’s western sea wall—and directly behind the parking area for the Kilindini Park Cultural Center. The Marines had flattened out against the walls, stopping just short of the tunnel mouth. A Covenant beam rifle leaned unattended against the end of the culvert twelve meters away. Straddling a deep rut a half meter beyond the end of the culvert was one of the large, vaguely birdlike aliens that most UNSC personnel called Jackals. Its back was to them—a thin stream of fluid fell into the rut between the alien’s feet.

  The Spartan inched forward in uncanny silence, carefully gauging the distance between himself and the Jackal. He positioned his feet on the tunnel floor, assessing his footing and evaluating the strength of the concrete beneath him. He was less than seven meters from the alien when its head snapped to the side with a start, inhaling sharply. John sailed forward—covering the distance in two strides, his left arm a blur shooting forward, index and middle fingers outstretched together to form a spike. The Spartan’s gauntleted hand passed effortlessly through the Jackal’s skull just behind its left eye. John backpedaled, retreating into the darkness of the drainage tunnel—the grisly remains of his quarry dangling limply from his forearm, leaving a streak of brilliant purple blood in their wake.

  Corporal Palmer quailed momentarily and then glanced back at the group and motioned for everyone to stay low and quiet. She scooted up to the edge of the culvert in a low crouch. When she reached the end she popped the covers on her scope and slowly swung her BR55 over the low concrete wall. She could see the smoking remains of several variants of the UNSC’s ubiquitous Warthogs—M831 troop transports, M12 reconnaissance vehicles, even a couple of M12G light antiarmor rigs, all of which were arranged in a line partially shielding the main entrance of a squat concrete structure—a makeshift defensive wall. She could also see the Jackals overlooking the parking area from the roof
and the bodies of men scattered about below them.

  “It looks like a goddamn massacre out there,” Corporal Palmer stage-whispered. “There’re bodies all over the place—there’s a Grunt bleeding out and a Jackal standing not ten feet away from him poking at one of our boys. What the hell, man?”

  Private First-Class Sullivan scooted up next to her and stole a quick peek over the wall. “This shit happened ages ago—we woulda heard those sixty-eights goin’ off even down the pipes,” he muttered.

  Private Emerson tossed John a spare canteen and he rinsed the blood from his arm. Behind him, half a dozen meters deeper into the tunnel, one of the Marines was busily constructing what looked to be a miniature barricade. “Don’t hold onto anything you can’t fight with,” John said before stepping out into the culvert. He glanced over at the line of Warthogs and opened a private channel with Corporal Palmer. “Sitrep, over.”

  Palmer looked over her shoulder at the Spartan—a mere seven meters away, “Huh? I’m right over here.”

  John tapped his throat and pointed past her at the enemy. “A Jackal’s ears may not be very big, but they are very sensitive.”

  “Oh all right,” she grumbled, put her eye back to the scope, and continued, “Looks like a detachment of Army mech-inf got sent in to evac some civies or whatever out of this gift shop or whatever the hell that is—that being the structure that looks sorta like a giant concrete intake manifold. There’s a fountain about twenty meters northeast of the structure in the middle of what looks to be the parking area. But the fountain is busted all to hell and the entire parking area is under about four inches of water. I count about . . . eighteen civilians and . . . twenty ewe en es sea personnel—all dead—and half a dozen ’hogs. The ’hogs are strung out in a line from the center of the northeast wall of the structure to just past what’s left of that busted fountain. All but two of the ’hogs are out of commission. We might be able to use one of the other em twelve gees but its generator is holed—I wouldn’t trust it. Looks like the Covies’ve got a tee forty two set up on the roof at the eastern corner of the structure—the Grunt on it looks like it’s snoozing, though. So, along with the gunner, I’m counting twelve bad guys—eight Jackals; four Grunts. That ain’t counting the one Grunt bleeding out. They’ve got elevation on us so don’t take that number as a guarantee; it’d take a lot more than this handful of assholes to grease twenty-odd shooters—even if they were only Army. Over.”