She beheaded one of them with the energy sword. The other hit her with its shoulder, slamming them both into the hull of a decommissioned Seraph fighter. Adriana rolled out of the dent she’d made in the Seraph’s hull as the Elite tried to fire its weapon point-blank into her helmet. Melted alloy splashed back onto them both as the plasma bolt missed and hit the Seraph’s undercarriage just a centimeter to the right of where Adriana’s head had just been.
Adriana spun around the Sangheili and climbed up its back, grabbed its neck with her free hand, and forced it hard to the ground under her. The energy sword flashed as the alien hit the floor while she simultaneously impaled it. It wriggled, screaming as Adriana leaned all her weight into the sword, the weapon burning slowly through its chest and down into the deck plating.
Jai heard heavy footsteps adjusting course in the hangar. “Well, we have their attention now,” he said. “We take the Tick.”
A Sangheili rounded the corner of several large engine pods stacked together. Adriana turned to look at it as Jai tensed. There was no way she could get out of the way in time before it fired on her.
A wave of plasma fire hit it first. Mike advanced calmly with the carbine he’d acquired from the headless Sangheili.
Adriana kicked the plasma rifle from the other dead Elite over toward Jai. “Okay then. The Tick,” she said.
Jai picked the rifle up, then carefully adjusted the unconscious civilian so that she rested over his shoulder. “I’ll cover.”
Mike fell back with him. Adriana ripped the bay door off a Covenant Phantom to their side, encircled by stacks of equipment. They stepped inside after her.
Jai glanced around at the gutted interior. “Is the ship we’re on some kind of recycling barge?” He looked at a jagged hole in the opposite side, the result of an explosion that clearly had occurred long before they’d arrived.
“Hold on,” Mike said, coming in after Adriana. “Check out your three o’clock.”
“Well, hello, old friend,” Adriana murmured. “Jai, it’s Whiskey Tango Foxtrot One.”
“The one and only,” Mike said. It was their designation. Self-assigned. Not protocol.
Jai followed them back out of the Phantom chassis, being careful not to hit the civilian’s head on the side of the hull. He glanced slightly right and saw what they were referring to: Whiskey Tango Foxtrot One was a battered UNSC Bumblebee. The Class-5 Heavy Lifeboat had burn marks all the way down the left side, but was otherwise intact. For Jai, it felt like it had only been a few foggy, confusing hours ago that they’d dragged the cryo-chambers and latched them to the inside of the escape transport. He could remember half-daydreamed snippets of doing that . . . somewhere in a murky past life. The tension as they’d struggled to get away from a dying ship above the surface of a doomed alien world. A feeling that it was a long-shot chance at survival, as he waited to be frozen. And then confusion when they’d suddenly woken. Apparently almost six years had passed like a bad dream, and now they were getting back aboard this death trap of an escape pod. Déjà vu all over again. “We all on the same page then?” he asked.
“If we can get it up and running, there should be enough fuel for round two,” Mike said. “The airbrakes haven’t been triggered yet either. We just used it to get off the Vacuna, not go planetside.”
“I count four Elites between us and the Bumblebee,” Adriana said.
“We’re going to be launching this thing out into the middle of a Covenant naval battle,” Mike said. “But it’ll pop out of here like a bat out of hell. I think we might be able to dodge the worst of it. The armor looks like it can still take a beating, as long as nothing too big gets slung at us. It’ll certainly be safer for reentry and planetfall than the Tick. Hopefully they haven’t been stripping it apart like everything else in here.”
“Okay, let me swing around to flank the long-necked assholes over there,” Adriana muttered. “Then we move. Run and gun until we get inside and close the door.”
“It’s a plan,” Jai said, as Adriana leapt over a nearby pile of tubing and Covenant engine parts.
“Okay,” Adriana said. Now she actually sounded merry to go along with her determination and, yes, in this case, confidence. A better combination, Jai thought. “Charge them.”
Jai held the civilian’s head to his shoulder with an armored gauntlet, trying his best to protect her as he shot the gap. He followed Mike out into the open, running as fast he could for the Bumblebee. His thighs screamed in protest, skin still searing with cryo-itch as his feet dug hard into the floor. When the half ton of Spartan got up to speed, he leapt up to clear the remains of a Banshee fighter and started firing at the first Sangheili he spotted.
It gaped for a second, then dove for cover as its armor shielding flared. Mike and Jai both focused their fire on it until it ran for safety.
Plasma fire exploded nearby, kicking up spare parts and sending debris scattering. “Take out the farthest one—he’s more accurate,” Jai said.
Mike crossed in front of Jai as Adriana slammed her way out from behind a pile of discarded ship-mounted weapons and hit the closest Sangheili with enough force to throw him fifty meters back. The limp alien slid across the deck plating.
A nearby Sangheili started shooting at Adriana. The shielding on her Mjolnir armor flared but held together as she rushed to meet it.
“Don’t chase them—get to the lifeboat!” Mike shouted as Adriana rounded a large stack of scrap metal and disappeared.
Jai slammed into the side of the Bumblebee as Mike tapped on a control pad. The rear airlock door opened, drawing from the vessel’s reserve power. Mike scrambled inside as Jai covered the open airlock door with his plasma rifle. “Adriana! Where are you?”
Lights flickered on and a familiar hum filled the interior of the Bumblebee as Mike climbed into the pilot’s chair and started the ready sequence. Something heavy clanged on the top of the Bumblebee.
Still holding the civilian, Jai crouched, aimed up, and stepped back.
“It’s me.” Adriana dropped down and jumped into the Bumblebee. “Spotted one of them with a plasma launcher. Thought I’d save us some trouble before he got us in his sights.”
Jai followed her into the lifeboat. Mike glanced back, and once he was given the all-clear, the thick airlock door thudded shut and hissed.
Outside, the sound of plasma fire plinked against the hull as two Sangheili ran toward the craft. More would be gathering around them shortly.
Jai set the civilian into the chair next to him and pulled the harness down over her shoulders. She stirred but didn’t wake. He glanced out through the narrow airlock windows at the approaching Sangheili. The reinforced glass scorched as more plasma fire hit it.
“Our buddy with the plasma launcher had a friend. So I borrowed their weapons,” Adriana held two plasma rifles up as she shoved her legs against the far side of the wall, just as Jai had done. The harnesses in here couldn’t be pulled down over their bulky armor; they were designed for a small crew of average-sized humans, with a large rear bay capable of carrying things like a heavy weapons cache or a slipspace drive—or a trio of Spartan-laden cryotubes.
Mike looked back at them. “Ready?”
One of the Elites that had reached the Bumblebee was now battering an energy sword against the airlock door in the back, attempting to tear his way inside.
“Go!” Jai said.
The lifeboat’s thrusters kicked on and blew the Sangheili standing behind it across the hangar deck. The Bumblebee screamed and screeched its way across the hangar floor, metal grinding hard.
“Mike?”
Mike tapped at controls to his sides, ignoring his teammates. The lifeboat bounced and then slapped the deck again. The scraping sound intensified.
“We won’t have any hull left if you don’t stop doing that!” Adriana shouted.
“Don’t interrupt the pilot—he’s busy,” Mike muttered. The Bumblebee bounced again, then stayed in the air just in time to clear the carcas
s of a Covenant Phantom. Jai noted that Mike was trying to stay low so that the Spirit dropship now breaching the atmosphere shielding at the front of the hangar didn’t shoot them with the massive cannon hanging off its undercarriage.
They wobbled again.
“Hold on,” Mike said. The thrusters punched. The Bumblebee flung itself out of the hangar and past the Spirit. “And cross your fingers.”
Bumblebees were fast, tiny, and hard to track—but they weren’t invincible. If one shot from a capital ship connected, they’d be a haze of glowing dust before they even realized they’d been hit. Covenant plasma fire crisscrossed the vacuum around them. Mike jammed the thrusters, changing their speed and course randomly, tumbling through space as he deftly navigated the dense field of enemy fire.
For several moments, Jai waited tensely for a final explosion of heat as Mike skillfully piloted them through fields of dying Covenant ships, hulls carved apart and spewing debris and alien bodies out into the vacuum. He was using the chaos of battle to shield them, deliberately moving through the smoldering remains so that they could hide among deorbiting junk.
“I’m trying to home in on a beacon down on the planet,” Mike finally announced, his voice ragged. “Hang on, I’ve got a readout here. We’re above an Outer Colony world: Carrow. The origin point of the beacon is a city called Suraka. It might be a leftover ping from before the battle up here started; it probably got hit hard by the Covenant, so we’re definitely really far behind enemy lines. It’s automated. Wait . . . someone’s actually down there . . . I’m getting some chatter, but a lot of it is encrypted and it’s not standard UNSC. I think there are definitely people hiding out down there.”
“That sounds better than nothing,” Jai said. He wondered if this was why the Covenant was here, to wipe out whatever human population remained planetside.
There had been entire worlds where that had happened. The Covenant usually got around to finishing the job. The last message Gray Team had received from the UNSC indicated that Covenant forces had reached Sol and begun the occupation of Earth. Extinction was immiment. Jai wondered if humanity had somehow survived, or were they above the last pocket of human civilization right now? Six years was a long time to be out of the loop.
But here the Sangheili had clearly been fighting each other. What had that been all about?
“I’m not even sure if I can get us there. We’re on a bad trajectory,” Mike said. “Steep. But I don’t want anything following us. We’re going to take a real beating on the way in.”
The air around the lifeboat glowed red with heat from reentry. Curtains of flame crept up around them to hide the ocean and clouds of the planet below.
Rojka watched the small human transport explode out of Unwavering Discipline’s hangar as he thrust his energy sword into one of Thars’s warriors. The dead Sangheili slumped to the ground. The Spartans had killed another eight or nine on their way out. Rojka another four. The remaining enemy had fallen back to their dropships and boarding vessels to regroup.
Cowards.
Seeing so many of his foes’ bodies around the hangar pleased Rojka. But it was shameful to see that so many of them had been killed by the Spartans, denying the fleetmaster and his crew the glory they deserved. And the Spartans’ seemingly successful escape was a humiliating capstone atop the whole affair.
Earlier Rojka had anticipated certain death fighting the boarders. He had hoped differently, but somewhere deep inside he knew there was no chance Thars himself would ever board Unwavering Discipline until Rojka was dead.
So be it. But he would go down fighting just the same, as would Rojka’s trusted inner circle. And while undermanned for a cruiser, the rest of Rojka’s thousand-strong crew aboard the Unwavering Discipline—the last ship standing of Rojka’s once-great fleet—were committed to battling Thars to the bitter end.
Still, the escape of the Demon Three chewed at the back of his mind, pulling his attention away from the honor of a last stand.
Before they managed to escape, he had come close to the human lifeboat but was unable to stop it. He had only enough time to toss a malakost tracker onto the transport before he was attacked by enemy Sangheili. The tracker would tenaciously cling to the vehicle’s hull exterior, no matter the duress. It would even survive reentry.
So once more, the Demon Three roamed free. Gray Team, the envoy had called them when she tried to open negotiations to acquire them.
Rojka had mostly stopped calling the humans nishum somewhere near the close of the war. It had been a hard adjustment. He had been taught to follow the teachings of the Prophets and the Path of the Great Journey by his elders since learning how to walk and hold a practice weapon. He had been a devout warrior from the earliest of ages.
It had all fallen apart so quickly. When Rojka learned that the San’Shyuum had betrayed their union with the Sangheili, stirring up a coup by the hands of the Jiralhanae, it felt like his world had been cracked apart: everything he had once put his faith in was ripped away. Rojka was demoted by the newly appointed Jiralhanae leadership, stripped of his fleet, and sent to the shipyards to take care of the old, damaged vessels, in that brief window of time when the Sangheili were thrown from the halls of power and the Jiralhanae took their place.
Shortly after that shift in power, the Arbiter and his allies led a rebellion that turned into a full-blown civil war—the Great Schism—resulting in the end of the Covenant’s campaign against the humans. Stranded in a band of ship debris being repaired around the Sangheili homeworld, Rojka had still believed. He still held to the Prophets’ words, hoping this whole controversy would pass like a bad dream. After all, this was their sacred calling, the cleansing war, their destiny—it was everything to them.
But the Covenant had really been torn asunder, and it was gone. Forever.
Now everyone was still trying to find their own way in the aftermath. A new way, as the Arbiter Thel ‘Vadam had pointed out in his pleas for all Sangheili to stand with him and make peace with humans. The universe held so much uncertainty, so much chaos. Rojka had welcomed the new leadership, even if he still longed for the old ways.
Despite the lies of the Prophets, the humans were just an intelligent species. Another civilization. That was it.
Yet that trio of Spartans? They would always be vermin to Rojka. Most Sangheili, no matter their allegiance or creed, could put aside all differences to see these Spartan wretches killed. For they were indeed demons.
Humans, Rojka found, he could make alliances with. Once you really dealt with them, you discovered that they were cunning and resourceful, even if they lacked honor and resiliency. The Sangheili actually stood stronger with their new human allies by their side. But he had been utterly imprudent to leave the Demon Three alive in stasis, as if they were some kind of bargaining piece to be traded, looted off the remains of something he had once plundered in space.
That was Kig-Yar thinking.
A true Sangheili would have killed the Demon Three the moment the intel came in confirming their location and he found them floating in deep space, frozen and smug, helpless in the face of their own atrocities.
Rojka had lost his world. He had lost his fleet. And within moments, he might likely lose his ship and his life. These things, he could barely make peace with. But seeing the Demon Three escape burned away at him with an indescribable rage.
His plan to die here would have to be postponed for the time being, Rojka realized. This could not stand.
He contacted the command bridge. “Armed engineering teams to the shield generators,” he ordered. “Restart the engines. I am returning to the command bridge.”
Ancients, judge me, he pleaded. But he had decided to forgo glory. What Rojka desperately wanted instead was vengeance. Fiery and pure.
He would do this for all Sangheili.
He was going to hunt down the Demon Three. For Glyke, he thought.
He would kill them all where they stood.
CHAPTER 6
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An aide appeared at the door of Ellis’s temporary office in the bunkers deep under Suraka. “Governor?” He fidgeted for a second when he got no response. He pushed the door further open and tried again. “Governor?”
Ellis pulled the stim patch off her forearm, crumpled it up, and threw it into the trash can by the plastic desk. “Just a moment.”
She leaned back in the chair, waiting as she rubbed her tired eyes. Then the warming sensation prickled the roots of her hair. Her heart sped up a beat and a flush crept up her face. Wakefulness returned.
“Okay,”—Ellis glanced at the aide’s name tag—“Cameron. Let’s go.”
Cameron led her out through the command center and to the meeting rooms. We’re in the middle of a war, Ellis thought, and somehow I’m spending more time in conferences and sitting around than I ever have before in my entire administration.
That seemed ludicrous. Surely she should be standing next to a commander near a field of battle, right?
But no, there were the endless planning sessions, documents, and decisions that had to be made from the bunker. Lots of decisions. And Ellis needed to be there for each one. She had to know what was happening. Because she was responsible, in the end, for everything that happened to Suraka. That’s what the people had elected her for. Trusted her to do.
Inside the meeting room, Ellis looked around the conference table, frowning. She seemed to be missing two generals. “Okay, General Grace, I’m ready. Where are Aru and Kapoor?”
General Grace looked up from reading documents on a datapad in front of her. “They’re resting. They were coordinating during the attack and never had a moment to stop.”
“Oh.”
Grace nodded curtly at the documents. “We now have a better idea of the Jiralhanae strength and how far they’re willing to press forward.”
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