Lamar held up his hands, a placating gesture. “No. I’m saying we’re staring death in the face, and we’ve led almost a million human beings here to share our fate. I’m concerned with the very real possibility that we’ve all made a horrific mistake by severing all infrastructure ties with the UNSC.”
The generals collectively bristled at that.
Ellis leaned forward. “Look, we can’t change what we’ve done, whether it’s a mistake or not. We have to work with what the reality is now. So let’s focus first on the Jiralhanae. We still don’t know what they’re trying to do here, but it doesn’t seem like they’re out to take the entire city. So let’s start observing them and encircling them. Probe their defenses. Keep me briefed on everything we learn. In the meantime, let’s get the civilians as far from the Brutes as we can. Sector 31 needs to be as secured as our militia numbers allow. And contingency plans: I want three varying ones simulated and studied by the morning. I want options for getting communications back, getting civilians off-world in case massive destruction is on its way, and all our options for fighting back. Nothing’s off the table or too out of the box.”
Aru, Kapoor, and Grace nodded, reenergized. They stood up and filed out of the conference room.
As they left, Ellis leaned over and grabbed Lamar’s shoulder. “You okay?”
Lamar stared into space for a long moment, then took a deep breath. “In the war, as an officer . . . I sent a lot of people to die with the hope that those who survived would see peace someday.”
Ellis rubbed his upper arm. “You know, we had the meeting scheduled for tomorrow morning with the UEG envoy and the Sangheili. The governor’s shuttle they were set to use had a slipspace drive.”
“You can’t think about that,” Lamar said.
“I feel I have to. I’m not going anywhere, Lamar. But you served in two wars,” Ellis said. “You’re a soldier. Yet you still argue for some kind of peace here?”
Lamar leaned back in his chair and raised an eyebrow. “It’s because I’m a soldier I’ll argue for peace. I know the value of peace more than the average civilian ever will. I know it’s worth doing everything you can to secure it.”
“So is that going to be a problem for us?” Ellis asked. Even though she outranked Lamar, he technically had more authority than she did during a combat scenario like the one they now faced. As Surakan vice-governor, he actually had veto power over civil security and defense decisions in the event that the city was threatened. And the militia looked up to him. At one point, she’d been worried he’d run against her based on his service record.
“It won’t be a problem,” Lamar said. “Because doing anything for peace sometimes includes fighting for it, once everything else has been tried. I just want to make sure we’ve tried everything else first.”
“The Jiralhanae are in our city. Killing our people. We tried everything, Lamar. I think it’s time to fight.” She’d caught her breath, surveyed the field. It was crystal clear, Ellis felt.
She stood up to leave, but Lamar put a hand on her forearm. “One more thing: during the meeting, I checked up on Jeff for you. I got a message that he’s safe. He checked in per protocol. He’s with a patrol monitoring the Jiralhanae Prowler movements just outside the Rughet Factories. He’s sending some useful intel via drones they’re patching through and his patrol’s own sightings.”
Ellis took his hand. “Thank you, Lamar. I mean it. Thank you.”
“You must be proud of him,” Lamar said. “He’s very brave, volunteering to stay put.”
Ellis blinked back tears. “Yeah, that’s what I’m afraid of.”
“I got to know him when we were campaigning together. He’s smart brave, like his mother,” Lamar said with a smile. “That kind of brave keeps you alive in places like where he is. So you do well by him, okay?”
Ellis smiled back, let go, and wiped her eyes. “I’ll try, Lamar. Thanks again.”
The Demon Three moved through Rojka’s ship with impunity.
The rage that this could be happening built up inside the fleetmaster to a point where he feared it would overwhelm his very senses. He’d lost a strong fighter, Mrata, to their hands. That needed to be repaid, among many other debts.
He moved through the gloom with his active camouflage on, studying the Spartans so that he could decide just how to pick them off.
One Spartan he could face alone. But three meant he needed a careful strategy. The one hiding by the door that killed Mrata had hit Rojka hard enough that he still ached. He would kill that Spartan last.
Their apparent leader was quick on his feet as well, but unarmed and carrying the envoy’s body. That would be the first one to die.
“Fleetmaster.” Daga’s voice came to Rojka through an apparatus wirelessly connected to his armor and embedded in his ear-pore. “Where are you?”
“I hunt the Demon Three,” Rojka whispered.
“The second wave of boarders approach. We need you with us,” Daga hissed. “We struggled with the first wave already. Let the Demons go. It is time for a different fight.”
Let them go? Perhaps Rojka could have looked past his hatred and traded the Spartans to the more powerful kaidons of Sanghelios in return for promises of supplies, weapons, and additional warriors to fully secure the keeps of Rak. Perhaps . . .
Rojka clenched the hilt of his powered-down energy sword in frustration and anger. Maybe he could even have traded them back to the humans’ government, who apparently wanted them so badly, in exchange for some manner of permanent peace.
But truly, deep inside, he wanted the trio to pay for their crimes.
The Demon Three should not be permitted to live. Not when they’d taken so many Sangheili lives. He had been dwelling on what he should do since he had picked up that human shuttle among the debris of Glyke.
“Everything has been ripped from us,” Rojka said.
“Perhaps all that remains is choosing the honorable death,” Daga replied.
“I should have killed the Demon Three when I found them. I thought it clever to think like a human for once and use them as currency,” Rojka spat. “Now I pay the ultimate price.”
The old ways—no diplomacy, no negotiations, no contact. Just grievances aired in the fighting pit, the hot sand beneath your feet, a sword in hand, and your enemy a pace away.
Like the battle Thars now brought to him.
“Fleetmaster . . . know that we are taking a last stand in the command bridge,” Daga said. “We need to be at each other’s side if these are to be our remaining moments.”
Rojka nodded at the wisdom. It was time for him to leave. The Demon Three would die soon enough, along with the rest of his ship. He would have to comfort himself with that.
Unwavering Discipline shivered as more boarding craft struck the side of the bay. Molten metal sparked and lit up the hangar as the circular boring maw of one of the attack shuttles—a vicious and unrelenting breaching vessel known as the Tick—burst through the weak shielding holding back the vacuum of space and opened a corridor to give infantry access to the interior. Enemy Sangheili warriors poured into the area.
“The fight has come to me, it appears,” Rojka said. “Send additional warriors to my location, Daga.”
Rojka turned off his active camouflage. His energy sword flared on, covering him in a blue light that burned back the shadows.
CHAPTER 5
* * *
* * *
Hekabe listened to the staccato pops of the humans’ gunfire. There was a crudity to their ordnance and chemical charges that he found appealing. Throwing metal out of a barrel: it was so effective and destructive when the pieces struck. Like a spike rifle, but with smaller ammunition—an aspect of warfare the Jiralhanae had in common with these skittering pests.
But the humans tended to scurry around, popping up here and there. They had no spirit.
Hekabe’s warriors had done well. They had taken a large circular section on the border of the human city and
secured it. Streets had been barricaded at the edges Hekabe designated, and gun platforms rocketed overhead to provide full fire support.
Meanwhile, his massive cruiser had started demolishing the buildings and the ground with its plasma batteries, while thousands of Unggoy thralls toiled with machines—heavy excavation platforms like Scarabs, Locusts, and even their own bare hands—to push rubble toward the edges of the now-occupied Jiralhanae areas of the city.
Hekabe stood on the crater’s rim, towering above the site on the piles of rubble at the perimeter, and watched the massive destruction of the city with eager satisfaction.
But the crack of human weapons kept distracting him. The gunfire was getting closer.
“Kritus! Anexus!” Hekabe shouted. “What are the humans trying to do beyond the barricades? Is this their counterattack?” Judging by the sounds of the melee from the buildings near the occupied rim, just a couple of streets away from Hekabe, it seemed like a small one indeed.
“It might be only a first wave,” Anexus said. “We can call the ship to our aid or fall back to our artillery.”
Hekabe stared at Anexus. What foolishness was Anexus talking about? “The ship continues to blast the ground for the slaves and their overseers. You want to divert it for a smattering of humans?”
Anexus thought about that for a moment. “They should not stop digging?”
Hekabe considered killing Anexus on the spot. “No, they should not stop. No matter how many humans worm back out of their hiding places!”
“But there are many humans in this city,” Anexus said.
Hekabe laughed and picked up Oath of Fury, his gravity hammer. “Then let us go and cull their numbers so that they are not such a burden for you, Anexus. Follow me, if you are a true Jiralhanae and not frightened of these weak little aliens.”
Kritus roared in response and grabbed his weapons. Less enthusiastically, Anexus followed.
Hearing the battle cry, Jiralhanae warriors turned and saw the three of them running down the pile of rubble and toward the barricades. They joined the rush behind the wedge that Hekabe, Kritus, and Anexus now made.
The enemy gunfire increased, bullets pinging against nearby walls. Hekabe could see glimpses of human squads in the alleyways across the roads from the barricades. They were sneaking around, trying to snipe at the Jiralhanae emplacements.
“Get across there and destroy them,” Hekabe ordered as he clambered over one of the barricades made of rubble. Across the intersection, the humans maneuvered to keep a steady stream of fire on small groups of lesser Jiralhanae. Several of them shifted around with a larger machine gun on a tripod and opened fire, the heavy weapon chattering as it turned.
Ah. This is more like it, Hekabe thought.
Warriors just behind Hekabe fell, the salvo enough to wound or slow them down. But Hekabe continued forward into the shadows between two buildings where the humans hid, ignoring the metal slugs slapping off his armor.
The Jiralhanae chieftain burst into the humans’ midst. He was energized to see their small alien eyes open wide with fear as he appeared. From Hekabe’s experience, humans seemed to expect their enemies to shoot back and find cover. They were always shocked by a charge into direct fire.
They scattered before him, and rightfully so.
Hekabe raised Oath of Fury and slammed it hard into the street. The sound of the hammer’s impact echoed from every flat surface nearby, its gravitic energies expending violently in every direction. All around him, the bodies flew away and bounced off the building walls and ground when they landed. Many immediately perished, so close were they to the hammer’s strike.
There was a large splash of blood on Hekabe’s shins. These so-called human fighters didn’t even have real armor. They depended on their numbers and running away.
Such easy prey.
There, another one darted behind a toppled pillar the hammer had knocked over. The human was scrambling for safety. Just like the barn rodents on Doisac.
Hekabe dropped the hammer on it and was pleased to witness a pair of bloody legs soar into the air and a head carom down the crumbling wall facades.
His lips curled. This wasn’t a full attack. This was barely a pack’s worth of humans. He would have to discipline Anexus later for his panic. If Hekabe didn’t beat some sense into his subordinates, they would continue making mistakes.
Being a leader was tiring work.
Hekabe looked around. Dozens of humans dead. The sound of their weapons had ceased.
One of them, a male, remarkably still lived. Blood streamed from its nostrils as it crawled slowly toward a fallen rifle. As the human grabbed it, Hekabe knocked the weapon out of its hands and picked it up by the throat. They were so tiny and inconsequential that he could hold this vermin up with one arm.
“You will know my name before you die, human. I am Hekabe . . . and you are nothing to me,” he growled at it.
The human did not understand his words but kept struggling against his hold. It spat at Hekabe.
“Yes. That’s good. I admire that. Fighting until the end. At the end of the Great Schism, when the human and Sangheili vessels attacked the ship where my pack’s little ones huddled in the corner, I am told they called out for me and begged for mercy. Understand, they were too young yet to know the concepts of dying well as we do, human warrior. They did not know how to stand firm in the face of death. So, they begged. Do you beg?” he asked, grinning in satisfaction. “I do not understand your language, but you don’t look like you are begging.”
Hekabe increased the pressure on the human’s spindly neck and listened to its angry sounds.
“Do any of you understand the human language?” Hekabe asked of the other Jiralhanae now gathering around him. Unlike the Sangheili, who thought it warranted to use translation devices to learn of the enemy’s schemes, Hekabe had no plans on making any conversation with the aliens. Just killing them.
“It tells you its lineage,” a warrior remarked. “And its name. It calls itself Jaff. Of this world’s chieftain.”
Hekabe lowered his voice. “I see. And yet, even though I should be proud of the fact that my pack’s little ones died in battle, all I can do is think about how frightened they must have been. Whether they hoped I could still save them. Of their despair. It should not haunt me. But it does.”
The human struggled to dig its hands into Hekabe’s arm. It gasped for air.
“There are no other chieftains of this world now,” Hekabe announced, louder now. “There is only Hekabe!”
And no more of his pack would ever again die at alien hands.
Hekabe squeezed until the human’s neck audibly snapped and the body slumped in his hand. He casually tossed the body into the rubble.
“Back to the dig,” Hekabe ordered.
The outcome of this skirmish would certainly be enough of a message to the humans to leave the Jiralhanae alone to their work.
Through his heads-up display, Jai looked at the incoming Sangheili spreading out through the hangar. The first wave of boarders had breached the ship’s armored hull and were now opening its bay doors from the inside, giving dropships and other craft easy access to its energy-shielded interior. They hadn’t spotted the Spartans yet, as they were standing still among the cover provided by the rows and rows of disused and partially stripped Covenant craft. Jai shifted the civilian’s body in his arms slightly. They’d staunched the worst of her bleeding, but she needed real medical assistance soon. “We need to fall back.”
“No,” Adriana said. Her recovered energy sword flared to life. “Let’s take that boarding vessel.”
Jai could see from his cover at the end of one of the giant stacks of stripped Covenant parts that a ship-to-ship battle was taking place outside the hangar in the darkness of space, as brilliant flashes of distant light winked on and off. Point defenses of the Covenant ship they were on were still firing, stabbing plasma at the waves of Tick boarding craft looking to attach to its hull and bore their way in
. Chunks of debris from destroyed Covenant fighters and unlucky dropships tumbled about with every explosion.
“Mike?” Jai asked, a small note of frustration creeping into his voice.
“There’s a whole ship full of Sangheili on the other side of the hangar doors,” Mike said. “There are only twenty or thirty in this area. I think our odds are better here. I should be able to fly one of these Ticks—if we can clear the hangar and get aboard.”
They were ignoring Jai’s orders. He fought his annoyance as he ducked plasma fire, turning his back to it to protect the civilian, and huddled up behind a Covenant Phantom that seemed to be completely sawed in half.
“They’ve spotted us. What are we doing?” Mike asked.
Jai’s armored boots crunched the mechanical guts of the Phantom that had been ripped out from under the dropship’s armored skin, making it look as if it had been disemboweled, frayed cables trailing out from the body on the nearby floor like grimy entrails. This area was more like a junkyard packed high with spare parts than a smoothly polished Covenant war machine. Another puzzle to shelve away for later.
“You said you should be able to fly the Tick? I don’t like should,” Jai said. “I like can.” And Adriana had sounded determined, but not confident, about taking the boarding craft to begin with. They were throwing dice here. This was also a Tick breaching vessel. It wasn’t exactly made for precise exfiltration maneuvers in a battlespace. It was designed like a torpedo with a siege-bore, specifically for launching at enemy ships, impaling their armor, and then burning them open for boarding actions.
“Should’s better than dead,” Mike replied.
“We’re taking it,” Adriana repeated as she clambered over a nearby stack of dismembered wings. “They’ll put up a fight, but we can make it.” The two Sangheili who’d turned a nearby corner looked up as she dropped onto them, the enemy shooting wildly into the air at where she had been a split second earlier.
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