by Matt Forbeck
Then the Phantoms arrived. They dropped off their troops by the shipload and kept coming back with more in wave after goddamn wave.
The top of that building ran thick with Covenant blood.
It was a long, miserable fight, more of a test of our endurance than our skill. When you’re in a target-rich environment like that, it’s hard to miss. You just have to keep fighting until you get the chance to be a little choosier.
Right about when I thought we’d seen the last of them and might find ourselves some breathing room, this Brute chieftain came leaping down out of the last enemy transport. He was swinging this gigantic gravity hammer, raining hell down on our heads. He took out a cop with a single blow, then turned around and smashed down Romeo, too.
Once Romes was flat on his back, the chieftain spun the gravity hammer’s shaft in his hands, bringing the bladed side of its business end to bear. Then he slammed it down into Romeo’s shoulder. That damn thing hit so hard it snapped Romeo’s sniper rifle in half and went right through his armor.
Going for the kill, the chieftain brought his hammer back over his head, intending for a two-handed chop with every bit of his weight behind it. Just as he was about to give dozens of ladies across the galaxy a reason to weep over Romeo, I saw my opening and jumped on the Brute’s back. I brought my knife down into that monster’s neck over and over, but he didn’t seem any more annoyed about it than if I’d been one of those bat-shaped leeches that used to feed on the octowhales back home.
Mickey got in on the fun and tackled the chieftain, too. He managed to hold the thing still long enough for Dutch to charge the Brute like a bullet train and knock him flat. The humongous beast landed on my knife, and simple physics drove my blade into him better than I ever could. I was so dedicated to killing the Covenant bastard, though, that I couldn’t get out of the way as he fell. He landed square on top of me, and it took both Mickey and Dutch to haul his carcass off.
Turned out Romeo was a lot worse. The chieftain’s gravity hammer had bitten deep into his chest, and the way he was wheezing, I knew he’d punctured a lung. We needed to get him medical attention fast, but with the Pelican down, our ride was gone, so we had to leg it out of there instead.
I didn’t see any percentage in trying to walk through the streets, though, as the Covenant completely owned New Mombasa by that point. So I slung one of Romeo’s arms over my shoulders and headed for the nearest train stop: Kikowani Station. I figured from there we could slip into one of the maglev tunnels and haul ass right out of town under the Covenant’s noses. We hustled down that way, stopping only long enough for me to use a can of biomedical foam to seal up Romeo’s punctured lung.
It was dark when we reached the station, and the first thing we discovered was that the Covenant had breached the nearby seawalls, and the tunnels had been flooded. We weren’t getting out that way.
The med foam had Romeo back on his feet again, but even if he’d been at a hundred percent, we had zero chance of fighting our way out of the city. Not before the Covenant finally got tired of hunting around for whatever they were looking for and just glassed the whole place.
But there’s a reason I’m in charge of Alpha-Nine. ’Cause I never give up, goddammit. Call me the man with the plan.
Just when the others seemed about to lose hope, I spotted the glowing lights of a Phantom skimming low overhead, and I pointed up at our last shot at getting out of there. “We’re going to steal that ride. It’s landing. Now’s our chance!”
I grabbed Mickey, and we headed for the Phantom, leaving Dutch to watch over Romeo. The entire time we raced over to it, I’ll admit I was terrified. What if the ship didn’t land? Or took off before we reached it?
When Mickey and I got there, it wasn’t as bad as I’d feared, but that’s only because I can fear it up pretty good. The transport was in the process of dropping off a payload of Covenant troops and we lit them up.
Just as I thought we were making some headway, another Phantom joined the first for a moment and dropped off some fresh fodder to join the fight.
We had to move fast before that happened again, or we’d wind up batting an unending flow of garbage. We killed everything in sight before that second Phantom came back for more. And then the Covies came streaming up at us out of the darkness anyhow. It was like they’d been entrenched there forever and we were the invaders.
While I kept the ground troops busy, Mickey made his way into the Phantom and took over the ship. Thankfully, between training sims and just raw intuition, he was able to pilot the hell out of that thing.
While he zoomed back for Dutch and Romeo, I hijacked myself a Banshee. Believe it or not, because the Covenant was spending so much time trying to root humans out of the city’s buildings, they’d left plenty of their one-man combat flyers lying around, just waiting for me to steal them.
I mean, how convenient!
I quickly caught up with the Phantom. I would have loved to be able to just jump into that big boat with the rest of my team and take off into the sky, but the Covenant still ruled the higher altitudes. We kept low to the ground instead. We caught a lot of fire that way, but it beat being shot down by something much bigger.
The worst part of it for me came the few times the way through was blocked. I had to actually get out of my stolen Banshee and fight forward far enough on foot that I could clear the way for the Phantom. I could have ordered one of the others to do it, but Romeo was hurt, Mickey was the only one who had a prayer of flying the Phantom in a straight line, and Dutch—let’s just say I didn’t have the heart to make him do something I wasn’t ready to do myself.
I had many chances to regret adopting that strategy. The biggest one came when we had to face off against the Covenant’s greatest ground weapon: the Scarab. It’s a tank the size of a building that walks around on four legs bent like a spider’s, and it bristles with enough weaponry to qualify as a mobile demolition platform.
Pro tip: Shoot them in the legs first. And it’s okay to cheer when you blow one of them up. You deserve it.
That whole march out of the occupied parts of New Mombasa might have felt a lot like victory if it hadn’t been for the fact that the Covenant had already won. We were just trying to find a way to be gone. But dammit if we didn’t make it.
It wasn’t until I rejoined the rest of the team on the Phantom that I realized that I’d made a mistake.
I checked in on Romeo to see how he was doing. He grinned up at me and said, “Just glad we didn’t go with your first plan. Look at those tunnels. Ones that aren’t flooded are probably packed with buggers. Hell, I wouldn’t go down there even if you ordered me to.”
And that’s when I knew where Veronica had gone on her mission.
One of the Covenant species is called the Yanme’e, although we usually refer to them as Drones or buggers. They’re these flying creatures that swarm over the places they’re sent, and they come at you like a bunch of angry hornets. I sometimes think of them as trolls because they like to hide under things like bridges and then ambush you at the worst possible moments.
They’re built kinda like beetles, and they flit around on twinned pairs of transparent wings that flap faster than you can see. They get enough lift out of them—and some strange Covie tech—that they can pick up a fully armored trooper with these vicious claws on the ends of their feet and haul him into the sky. Once that happens, you’re in bad shape for sure.
The first thing the Drones usually do when they set up in a place is build a hive made of spit, shit, and whatever else they can find lying around. It’s how they mark a conquered area as their own.
Despite their hive mentality—or maybe because of it—the buggers are just as sentient as any other Covenant species. And because it’s hard to hide behind cover from someone who can just fly over it, I find them even more dangerous. They’re not all that great in tight quarters or for carrying heavy w
eapons, but in the right place and time, they’re deadly foes.
If the Drones were infesting the tunnels under New Mombasa, it had to be because the Covenant had sent them there to conquer that space. But why would they do that? We don’t keep our soldiers underground, so there’s not much down there for them to go after.
Unless they were sent in after something else. A nonmilitary target that had some kind of value to the Covenant. Enough to pull the Drones away from the open-sky battlefield and shove them under New Mombasa to look for it.
My money was on ONI being smart enough to realize this. And if so, that meant they’d sent Veronica there to defend or recover whatever the Drones were after. She’d then come to Alpha-Nine for support, and so far, we hadn’t done a very good job of providing that.
I knew the guys weren’t going to like it. I mean, we’d just escaped the worst battle our planet had ever seen. But I made the command decision to go back and see if we could complete Veronica’s mission, the one thing that had been so important she’d pulled us away from raiding the Prophet of Regret’s flagship and trying to save Earth. Whatever she’d been after, if it was that vital to the UNSC, I couldn’t bring myself to ignore it.
And, to be honest, some small part of me hoped to hell we might find her, too.
Under the cover of night, I had Mickey fly us back toward the rubble he and Dutch had left behind after they’d blown the hell out of ONI’s Alpha Site. The entire city was still swarming with the Covenant, including a couple of Covenant capital ships hovering over the crater the Prophet of Regret had left behind when he shunted his own ship into slipspace.
It turned out that the Covenant was actually hunting all over the city for a portal to the Ark, a Forerunner installation from which they could fire all of the Halo rings across the galaxy at once. This was put in place to destroy the Flood and keep those monsters from wiping out the galaxy—by killing all sentient life first.
I know. Forerunner logic doesn’t always make much sense.
If you think they were crazy, though, they had nothing on the Covenant, which is based around a religion that worships the Forerunners. They thought that firing the Halo rings would launch their so-called “Great Journey,” which would uplift the Covenant faithful to the next plane of existence.
Imagine their surprise if they’d actually managed to pull that off. Makes me smile every time.
That didn’t concern us at the moment though. I had Mickey keep well clear of the crater. Now that we weren’t trying to escape, the other Covenant ships in the area didn’t pay much attention to us, but diving into that crater for a closer look would have been painting a “Shoot me!” sign on our backs.
Still, we needed to find some way to get into those tunnels that ran under Alpha Site, the ones that were buried deepest. I didn’t know how we’d manage it, but I knew that we’d find whatever Veronica had been after down there.
I had Mickey slow up while we looked for a place to land. “Fly like you belong here,” I told him.
As we got closer to the spot where we were supposed to have landed in New Mombasa in the first place, I clapped Mickey on the back and stabbed my finger toward a clear spot. He took my meaning, and the Phantom veered right for it.
I had Mickey drop me off there so I could get a better look, and then I waved him and the others back into the air with orders to head for the shipyards down the Waterfront Highway. That was the only place I could think of that they’d be able to hide for any length of time without making themselves a target.
With the team safe, I slipped through the city under the cover of night until I discovered that—like anywhere else I wanted to get to in that city—the Covenant had beat me to it.
I almost gave up hope and called for Mickey to pick me up and get us the hell out of there. It was one thing to try to finish a mission that we didn’t know much about. Call that foolhardy. But diving into certain death? That’s just stupid.
That’s when I heard Veronica’s voice calling for me over the comm. “Buck!”
I can’t remember ever being so relieved in my life. I’d just hauled my entire team back into an about-to-be-glassed city on little more than a hunch. Veronica had always stirred strong feelings in me, but I hadn’t till that point been a hundred percent sure I could trust them. Hearing her voice meant I’d made the right choice.
It also meant we still had a massive job to do, as soon as we figured out what it was.
“Where the hell are you?” I said.
“Data center, but we’re coming out.”
“We?”
“No time to explain,” Veronica said, “but do not, I repeat, do not shoot anything pink!”
I didn’t understand at the time, but I found out later that she’d gone into the data center to gather all the data from the Superintendent, this AI that ran every bit of New Mombasa’s infrastructure. It sat deep enough below Alpha Site that even Dutch and Mickey’s efforts to blow the place to pieces hadn’t reached it.
Maybe that was an error on their part, or maybe that had been by ONI design. It’s hard to tell with those spooks. Either way, I was thrilled to find out it meant that they hadn’t killed Veronica by accident.
And the cherry on the top of all that, as an unbelievable bonus, was that Veronica had stumbled across the Rookie on her way.
He’d been knocked cold for six hours after his landing and spent the rest of the time playing detective in the middle of a war zone. Trying to track us down had led him to Veronica instead, and he’d joined her on the mission she hadn’t yet revealed to the rest of us.
But finding the Rookie still alive and shooting wasn’t the biggest surprise that Veronica brought to the surface with her. She had a Huragok with her, too.
The Engineer didn’t look all that pink to me. Sure, it’s got some pink tips on some of its tentacles, but they’re mostly as blue and purplish as a bruised octowhale. So it’s a damn good thing I spotted Veronica and the Rookie with him when I found them in the building, or I might have shot him dead.
Turns out that an Engineer isn’t a natural thing. When you see one of those gasbags floating over you and reaching out with its purple tentacles and flailing its glowing blue cilia at you, well, that’s hard to believe, I know, but work with me here.
The Forerunners who built the Halos—those hoop-shaped artificial worlds with the ability to destroy the entire galaxy?—they also created the Engineers. I don’t exactly understand how the Huragok work—no surprise there—but they can fix just about anything you can break. They can also hook up to just about any kind of computer hardware in the galaxy. Forerunner, Covenant, and even human.
The Superintendent wasn’t doing so well. I don’t know if that had to do with the Covenant attacking the city, the Prophet of Regret entering slipspace right overhead, or the way Mickey and Dutch blew Alpha Site into bite-sized bits, but its data was as corrupt as any politician.
The Engineer though? The smelly bastard tried to fix it. He actually broke away from his Covenant handlers, locked himself in a room with the AI, and gave it a go.
Turns out even advanced biological constructs with computer interfaces at the business ends of their tentacles can’t fix everything without the right parts. They can, however, copy data at something like lightspeed, and they have enough onboard storage built into them to keep a full-on AI stuffed in a hip pocket.
If they had pockets. Or wore clothes.
You know what I mean.
While the Engineers had been brought into the Covenant, they hadn’t gone willingly. The Covenant had fitted them each with explosive vests and made it clear that if the Engineers didn’t follow their orders, they would find themselves transformed into unfixable messes.
That’s why other Engineers had been working against us—along with the rest of the Covenant—since we’d arrived. They didn’t have any choice.
It’
s also why they made a large boom after you shot them. It wasn’t just their lighter-than-air innards that went up, but those tricky damn vests they’d been welded into.
I gotta admit, when I found out about that, I felt bad for punching the tickets of the few that I’d run across before I met Vergil. But it’s not like I could have given them a hug instead.
Some of Vergil’s friends had given their lives to get his vest off of him so he could come over to our side to help. They knew the only shot their species had at winning their freedom was ensuring humanity defeated the Covenant, and they were willing to sacrifice themselves for it.
If that’s not heroism, then I don’t know what is.
To his credit, Vergil made the most of the chance he’d been given. Now it was just up to us to make sure that his pals hadn’t given theirs all for nothing.
First thing Veronica did when we had a spare moment was wait until I took off my helmet so she could sock me in the jaw for “abandoning the mission”—the one she hadn’t even told me about.
She made up for it a second later by planting on me the kind of kiss that makes a man forget all about who was right and who was wrong. Seems putting me in mortal danger had helped her put her feelings for me in perspective, too. Funny how an alien invasion can do that for you.
Once we got out of the data center and saw how screwed the entire city was, that stripped the warm glow right out of both Veronica and me faster than a dip in the Arctic. We had to fight our way out until we made it to the Waterfront Highway, the main drag out of New Mombasa. By no small coincidence, it also ran straight by the shipyards where the other guys were hiding out in our stolen Phantom. I considered calling them in for a pickup, but the Covenant activity in the air had only grown thicker. Getting them shot down wouldn’t be doing any of us any favors.
On the other hand, I didn’t see how we were going to be able to escort Vergil all the way down the highway without him getting taken out as well. The only advice I had for Veronica and the Rookie was to make sure we weren’t standing too close to him if that happened. At the time, we thought the gas that kept a Huragok floating made for a damn fine explosive on its own—whether he was wearing a vest or not—and could go off if he got punctured.