“Agreed,” Mike-120 now also chimed in over Jai’s helmet. “You don’t get interior design like this from a standard Martian shipyard.”
“Any idea who your new friend there is?” Adriana asked.
“A civilian, or some kind of civil-service type,” Jai replied. “Wounded. I know I heard plasma fire when coming to.”
“Me too.” More glass shattered and armored boots hit the deck as Adriana stopped waiting for Jai to free her and took matters into her own hands. “Someone must have opened my cryo-chamber and removed my weapons at some point,” she reported, sounding annoyed.
“Looks like we got picked up by the Covenant.” Mike mulled that over for a second. “But we’re still alive. That can’t be good.”
“The woman, why is she aboard a Covenant ship?” Adriana asked. “Mike . . . my hands are shaking. I can barely control them.”
Jai looked back and saw Mike free himself and lean over his cryo-chamber’s readouts. “This wasn’t a good thaw,” Jai said. “Keep your helmets on—stay alert. Mike, any more information about our situation?”
“Yeah: we got unfrozen on an emergency cycle. Done on purpose,” Mike reported. “We’re going to be grumpy and miserable for a while. Feels like they poured a million fire ants into my suit. Major cryo-itch.”
“How big of a nap did we end up taking?” Jai asked.
“It says . . . Military Standard Time has us on the first of September in the year 2558? That’s five years, eight months. That . . . that can’t be right.”
All three of them stood quietly for a second, digesting the information. Almost six years, Jai thought. They’d gone under the last day of 2552.
No time for this. “Okay. Sitrep,” said Jai. “We’ll figure out exactly what happened to us later. Right now, though, we’re apparently locked up in a Covenant ship of some kind and have been unfrozen rapidly. There is a badly injured civilian present—possibly the one who thawed us—and she’s armed with a Covenant weapon. Thoughts?”
“Look at that door damage,” Adriana said.
Yes, there it was. He should have seen that sooner. This unfreezing had affected him a bit more than he realized. It was extremely hard to focus. “You think she came in through that?”
“Burns on the back of her clothes?” Adriana asked.
Jai gently moved around the woman on the floor for a better look at the singed cloth of her uniform. “Yes, she’s got ’em.”
“Biofoam,” Mike called out. He’d been rummaging around his cryo-chamber and now threw a canister toward Jai, who was busy ripping the woman’s uniform open around the stomach. He held her down and yanked the metal out from just above her hip.
The civilian’s eyes snapped open, the pain jerking her out of unconsciousness with a startled moan. Her eyes were brown and matched her skin underneath all that fresh blood on her face. She hissed with pain but controlled it and looked around nervously.
“You’re hurt. I’m trying to help you,” Jai told her.
“Sharks,” she muttered, grabbing his armored forearm. Her fingertips scraped across the alloy plates. “Rojka too. Coming.” She scrabbled around for the plasma pistol and tried to pick it up.
“Shhh.” Jai jammed the tip of the biofoam canister under her torn skin. She grunted and dropped the weapon, eyes rolling up into her head. “I’m sorry.”
She passed out but was now packed with biofoam to stabilize the bleeding.
“We have no weapons,” Adriana said. Jai kicked the plasma pistol over to her. She stopped it with her boot and leaned over to pick it up. “This is a very small weapon.” Her tone suggested she didn’t even really think of it as a weapon at all.
“All we have for now,” Jai said, checking the unconscious woman for identification of any kind. “Mike? Any further ideas on where we are exactly or what’s going on?”
“Based on the size and layout of this room, I’d say we’re in a storage cavity of a late-war Covenant cruiser, probably ORS-class. Give me some time and space, I’ll get into their systems and pull out the info we need.” Mike ripped a cover off a nearby console and began pulling out strips of wire to connect Covenant information systems into his Mjolnir armor’s inputs.
“Something tried to kick this door in,” Adriana observed. “Look at the plasma burns. They cut through a large piece of it already. Why’d they stop?”
A trickle of blood dribbled out of Jai’s nose and down his lips, salty and sweet with cryochemicals. He took a deep breath and focused hard on ignoring the bonfire of pain slowly burning through his skin. He should be screaming and tearing at himself. Instead he drew on his training. “Adriana, stay by the door.”
Adriana posted up in front of it, plasma pistol drawn. Mike shifted around the console to keep the door in sight in case things went bad fast. Jai, meanwhile, pulled the unconscious civilian out of the pool of blood surrounding her. He dragged her toward the cover of what seemed to be the disassembled remains of a Seraph fighter.
“Yeah, someone’s mopping up down the corridor,” Adriana said, checking the pistol. “Maybe Unggoy? I heard one scream. Hang on—we’ve got something approaching now.”
An energy sword suddenly popped through their side of the door and slid down toward the deck, finishing the cut already present. Part of the door shivered and then flew forward as it was kicked in. As the debris bounced across the floor, Jai crouched in front of the civilian to protect her. The alien metal struck his raised forearms and knocked him back a few centimeters.
Jai stood as two Sangheili warriors burst in. They paused as they sized up the Spartans. Then they attacked.
Adriana opened fire on the nearest one, its back half-turned to her as it almost walked by where she stood up against the door. It spun just in time for her to smack into it. They both rolled across the ground, its energy sword slapping into the floor’s metal and skidding about. Adriana kept firing the plasma pistol point-blank up into its chin until it stopped moving, scorched pieces of its head oozing from between the helmet plates.
The second Sangheili ran straight into Jai and knocked him back into the Seraph. Parts scattered and Jai scrambled to get back on his feet, throwing a chunk of hull aside as he stood. The Sangheili raised its energy sword and slashed at him. Jai jumped back from the blade, trying to draw the enemy away and distract it, but the alien didn’t bite.
It paused and looked back, just in time to get tackled by Adriana. She’d since taken the energy sword away from the dead Sangheili by the door. She slashed at the alien, but it rolled to the side, parrying the blow before tossing her clear.
“Catch,” she called out to Jai as she landed on her feet.
Jai grabbed the plasma pistol that Adriana casually threw at him. Then she leapt again into the air and pressed her attack on the Sangheili.
The enemy creature scrambled to one side a split second before Adriana crashed onto the deck and dented the floor. She crouched, ready to spring once more, the energy sword casting a pool of blue light around her as she waited for the next move.
Jai opened fire. The Elite’s armor flared, and it scurried off in between the rows of dismantled Covenant vehicles lining the hangar.
The two Spartans moved closer together, back to armored back against the gloom, waiting. Adriana faced the hangar, Jai the light of the open door, anticipating that more Sangheili would pour through at any moment.
“It didn’t try to finish us off. Have you ever seen that happen?” Adriana asked.
“Dangerous fighter,” Jai said. “High rank. Naval commander of some sort.”
“Yeah, as strategy goes, three on one is not a good match,” Adriana replied. “It’s going to either call for reinforcements or try to take us out individually. Once it gets its breath back. I hit it pretty hard.”
Mike interrupted them. “I’ve gotten into their systems. Apparently—and I’m trusting that the translation software we had half a decade ago is still functional now—we’re on the Covenant cruiser Unwavering Discipline.” H
e paused. “It’s under attack and in the process of being boarded.”
“By . . . ?” Jai asked.
“I think . . . more Covenant?” Mike replied. “Some of the ID signs have changed—I’m not too sure what I’m looking at. It’s not normal Covenant designation info. I mean, we’re almost six years out of date, so—”
“So, no idea who exactly we’re dealing with,” Jai said.
“No.” Mike yanked the wires free of the panel now that he’d gotten what he needed. “And no UNSC here either. The ship battles are Sangheili on Sangheili, according to the sensor data I could snag. However, their systems are monitoring some human chatter from down on a planet that we’re orbiting. Not sure what exactly we’re in the middle of here.”
“Planetside is maybe where this civilian came from,” Jai said. “How do we get out of here?”
Mike waved a hand at the strange boneyard of stripped-out, half-built Covenant vehicles. “Give me enough time, maybe I could cobble something together. But you want the truth? Those boarders aren’t going to give us time.”
“Internal Covenant politics of some kind,” Jai said. “But if they’re hovering around a human world, we need to see what we can do to help. That should be clear to figure out, yes?”
He waited for a second, then Mike said, “Yes.”
“Yes,” Adriana agreed.
A consensus. Jai was relieved.
The vessel shook under their feet. Something big had hit it. Another series of thumps sounded across the hull. Jai looked around just as the eerie lighting above the cryo-chambers flickered and died. “Think that’s the boarding party?” Jai asked.
“Yes,” Mike agreed. “Second wave. Whoever’s defending this ship already absorbed a few boarding parties while we were defrosting.”
“Any particular way to get off the ship that you think we should focus on?”
“We look for something flightworthy in this mess while trying not to get shot?” Mike offered.
“If they had our cryo-chambers, then they probably have our lifeboat as well,” Adriana said. “If it’s still intact, that is.”
Jai tossed the plasma pistol to Mike, then bent down and picked up the civilian. “Let’s fan out and try to find it.”
“So that our new friend can snipe us one by one as we wander around its hangar?” Adriana asked.
“I said fan out, not split up. Stay within eyesight,” Jai said.
“With pleasure.”
Adriana seemed satisfied. They spread out and began walking through the shadows—the mangled skeletons of ruined Covenant craft.
Governor Ellis Gass and Vice-Governor Lamar Edwards walked past the consoles and screens of the underground command center. Surakan militia in beige uniforms hustled around, murmuring urgently to each other as officers conferred.
The lights in the command bunker flickered and died. A second later the emergency power kicked in, bathing everyone in dim red light. “It’ll take a half minute for them to switch over to the backup source,” Lamar said.
Backup energy came from a small reactor powered by a stolen and partially disassembled Havok thermonuclear device—one of the things Ellis had been briefed on the moment she became governor. No one felt it necessary to tell civilians there was an active nuclear device lying deep under their city. And Suraka had more than just the one highly powerful weapon. During the war, the planet’s former colonists had managed to fake documents and take advantage of the confusion of battle to obtain more than a dozen thermobaric bombs, which had been carefully smuggled to Carrow right under the UNSC’s nose.
And that didn’t include what the New Colonial Alliance had provided them during the early months of their resettlement: a fleet of ex-UNSC ground and air vehicles, as well as weapons and munitions, presently stored in a series of underground bunkers on the far side of the city. So far, the Surakans had only tapped into a small reserve of their supply. Ellis was confident that would change in the coming hours.
Lights blazed back on and the gentle, constant background hum of machinery shoved the sudden silence away.
“We need to meet with the military brass,” said Lamar.
“Who’s here?” Ellis asked.
“Grace, Aru, and Kapoor.” Lamar pulled Ellis aside into a nearby conference room, where three older, dour-looking militia officers waited around a table for Ellis and Lamar to join them. She recognized Kapoor and Grace. Ellis had been on a committee at some point about Surakan militia staffing levels. But right now, she couldn’t recall any of the details. At the time, she’d been more focused on getting the sewer systems repaired. Right now, storm water runoff didn’t seem quite so pressing.
Red stripes on the shoulders indicated they were officers. Three buttons over the stripes indicated that Ellis was standing in front of generals. Kapoor had been promoted since they’d last met.
“Generals,” Ellis said, nodding to them.
“We don’t have time for a fancy briefing with much in the way of visuals,” Lamar said. He leaned in close to Ellis and all but whispered, “I’m here to translate any concepts. Take a deep breath—you look like you’re about to topple over.”
Lamar leaned back and swiped through messages and updates on a screen he’d pulled up on the surface of the table.
Ellis looked directly at her generals. “Okay,” she began. “What are we looking at?”
“Bottom line: we are screwed,” General Kapoor said, each word snapped out crisp and distinct. “Ground-based long-range anti-aircraft and surface-to-space capabilities were all targeted in the first strike. Every single ship capable of jumping to slipspace on the ground or in orbit has been destroyed. We have thirteen non-slipspace-capable ships that retreated to the far side of Kiriken. But they’re just hiding in the moon’s shadow. If the Sangheili really want to ferret them out, it’d be easy enough.”
“I thought they’d scattered further away,” Ellis said.
“Fuel, Governor. They need to conserve energy if we’re to have the ability to strike back,” Kapoor said.
“And all our communications are destroyed,” Ellis said. “Is that still true?”
“We are working to rebuild the least damaged station.” General Grace delivered that. She wasn’t dour, Ellis noted, revising her earlier impression of the general, but simply exhausted. The general had yanked her hair back into a quick ponytail. Her red eyes and puffy pale face hinted at stress and lack of sleep.
For some reason, that helped. Ellis relaxed slightly and put her mind toward unpacking the situation in front of her. “We’ve lost the high ground to the Sangheili, and we’ve lost the surface to the Jiralhanae. We’re unable to call for help. We have thirteen ships at our disposal for local use only. And we have the militia, most of whom took to the ground under the city.”
“Civilians have evacuated to the unoccupied side of the city, Sector 31. Many of those are in shelters and bunkers where we can safely house them,” General Aru added. “More still are heading into the sewers.”
Ellis nodded. “Then dispatch militia with water and thermal blankets to the civilians we know went below and get them out. Relocate them all to Sector 31, if it’s secure.”
“I’ll issue the orders,” General Aru said.
“How much of the city do the Jiralhanae have, and have the Sangheili landed yet?” Ellis asked.
Lamar shifted in his seat. “We don’t know what exactly is going on between the Sangheili factions and the Jiralhanae who landed. So far, they’re razing the residential districts at the edge of the desert and have set up a perimeter. But they’ve left the financial center alone, as well as industrial and shopping—most of Suraka seems to still be relatively intact. Any response we make, we need to make sure we don’t antagonize Sangheili that are potentially willing to reopen talks. Fleetmaster ‘Kasaan’s people, in particular.”
“ ‘Kasaan’s fleet has been destroyed,” General Kapoor said. “From what we can tell by eavesdropping through our orbital relays, his flagship i
s being boarded even as we speak.”
That took Lamar down a peg. He looked at the table, shaken. He swiped his screens closed, unable to multitask between administration and what was happening in the room. Even though he’d been military, on the campaign trail last year both he and Ellis had deeply shared a vision of peace with the Sangheili and a focus on rebuilding Suraka. “I can’t believe it.”
“Okay, then. ‘Kasaan isn’t a player anymore. We can assume the Sangheili are, once again, our enemy,” Ellis said. “Our dream of peace with them is dead, Lamar. Think about it—most likely this was something they planned long ago. They found all our communications stations, every ship with slipspace ability, including commercial vehicles on the ground, and then attacked in synchrony. They’ve been studying us with a mind for a killing blow like this for some time, even as they asked for meetings. Generals, our options?”
They began to lay out scenarios. Some surprises were up their sleeves. Like four or five asteroids in a stable orbit, already prepped to be mined, that could be used to threaten the city of Rak or even to take out a Sangheili ship—that is, if they weren’t spotted and destroyed on the way in by enemy defenses. But they weren’t enough to do anything against whole fleets.
Out of the corner of her eye, Ellis watched Lamar wincing. “We cannot slug it out punch for punch,” he said. “We’ve run the simulations. The Sangheili may have fewer numbers, but their ships dominate what we’ve cobbled together. Our vessels are colonial leftovers and donations toward the dream of an independent planet out here. And let’s be honest: we’ve gotten away with autonomy because the UNSC chooses to look the other way. They can’t project strength this far out, especially since we occupy their selective blind spot in the JOZ.”
“Are you saying we should have sacrificed freedom and sovereignty to sit inside the embrace of those tyrants?” General Grace snapped. She was old-school, very pro–colonial autonomy even from before the Covenant War. Some rumors said she had worked with Colonel Robert Watts himself.
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