“Generators!” Rojka shouted.
While the repair crews struggled to see if there was any possibility of reviving the shields, Rojka spat out orders. “Fire on anything trailing behind us! We only need to make it to the surface!”
What remained of Unwavering Discipline struggled and wobbled its way down through the clouds, trailing smoke and debris—a dark shadow of wrath bearing down on their prey below.
CHAPTER 8
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* * *
The Bumblebee cleared the jagged rock teeth of a mountain, snowcaps whipping by just underneath, and then fell out of the sky.
“Brace yourselves.” Mike possessed that overly calm way about him that pilots had just before catastrophe. This wasn’t his first crash landing.
The forward thrusters fired and the Bumblebee sank further down. Jai felt his stomach lurch. Through the windows, he could see a distant desert rushing toward them. The lifeboat tilted forward. The scrub of foothills and valleys slipped to face them.
They struck and bounced off a rocky incline. The ventral thrusters continued roaring to keep them just above the slope of the hill as they sped downward. Jai glanced backward to see the mountaintops in the airlock’s now-cracked windows, then twisted forward as a large pond reared up in front of them.
With an explosion of spray, the lifeboat struck the water and skipped back into the air, coasting just above the surface.
The thrusters kicked them off to the side, narrowly weaving around a column of rock that just grazed the Bumblebee. The craft spun slowly, turning sideways in the air as it passed the edge of the pond. The thrusters fired again and they were flying backward. Jai grabbed the nearest harness to keep steady.
Mike blasted the main rear thrusters at full. The craft slowed a little, and then the engines died out.
“Outta fuel,” Mike said in mock cheer as they dropped yet again.
They struck the rocky ground in an explosion of torn-off brush and a wave of dirt. The airlock doors immediately warped and the window glass burst inward at the sudden collision, the back of the Bumblebee buckling.
They finally slowed to a grinding stop.
Mike immediately started calling for local assistance. “Mayday Mayday Mayday, this is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot One . . .” It was difficult to tell how far they had missed the mark and where the city was in relation to their current position.
Jai moved to the back of the lifeboat through smoke that was now billowing out of every crevice. He and Adriana kicked once at the mangled airlock doors, rending them from their pressure-locked hinges and sending them sliding across the arid ground.
“Mayday Mayday Mayday, this is Whiskey Tango Foxtrot One . . .”
Jai wrenched the harness off the civilian, who miraculously appeared unharmed, other than by her original injuries.
“We have a fire,” Jai announced to Mike. “Clear out.”
Adriana moved outside, plasma rifle swinging around to make sure there was no trouble waiting for them. Jai followed, carrying the woman in his arms.
Mike kicked through the cockpit windows and climbed out to avoid having to negotiate his way through the marred interior and out the back. The smoke now began to pour out of the bulkhead, signaling a chemical fire of some kind in the hull plating. “This fire will be a beacon for anyone who might come looking for us,” he said. “We need to put it out.”
The dance and flicker of orange light grew from breaches in the ivory armor, black smoke pluming out of the wrecked Bumblebee in an expanding column.
Jai laid the civilian carefully down on a slab of rock. “We hit water on the way down, didn’t we?” he asked Mike.
“There’s a large pond a hundred meters ahead. Let’s push.” Mike grabbed the side of the airlock and dug his armored boots into the ground. Jai put his shoulder to it. Adriana silently slipped in between them and did the same.
The Bumblebee scraped first slowly, then slid at a decent clip, eventually tumbling like a boulder with each coordinated shove. They’d disregard the safety of causing more volatile damage to the craft just to get it underwater as soon as possible.
It was the first time they’d done something this synchronized when not under fire since Glyke, Jai thought. He missed it, working together without talking or planning. Just knowing what the team needed and doing it.
They finally managed to shove the Bumblebee over the banks and into the large pond, letting it roll down a steep runoff and plunge onto the surface. It burbled and smoked a little before it slipped most of the way under the water, effectively putting out the fire.
A vast shadow fell over the mountainside they’d narrowly missed on the way in. Jai leaned back to see a Covenant cruiser thunder overhead. Smoke and flames streamed from rents throughout the hull and it wobbled as it desperately tried to control its descent.
“Damn,” Mike said. Pieces of its hull broke free and showered toward the ground, slamming into nearby hills and valleys. Before they could even scatter for cover, it passed on, leaving a trail of black smoke the size of a skyscraper in its wake. It showed zero signs of stopping—or even being able to—but kept on going further toward a mountain range opposite where it finally disappeared beyond the horizon.
The faint sound of the impact rolled around the crags and peaks in the distance.
“Was that our ship?” Adriana asked, holstering her weapons.
“I think it was,” Jai guessed.
“Look at that,” Mike said, his eyes fixed in the other direction, from where the vessel had first appeared.
Beyond the mountains and the dark column of smoke left by the cruiser, dozens more ships fell slowly from the sky like burning angels seeking earth.
Unwavering Discipline struck ground, and it was almost as if the ship screamed as it died. The sheared hull elements shrieked in what sounded like anger and then began a mournful howl as more of the vessel’s great belly pressed into the planet’s surface and the ship’s insides collapsed floor by floor. The command bridge was almost immediately plunged into darkness and Rojka ‘Kasaan flew across the room, bouncing off the deck like a ragdoll until he smacked into a nearby pillar.
The roaring of his imploding ship continued for several minutes, even after the cruiser had come to a complete stop. Over the rending and warping, he could hear the occasional muted scream of a dying Sangheili, likely trapped as pieces of the ship fell down or buckled inward.
Silence finally fell over them like a gentle cloak.
Rojka lay still in the dark.
He still lived. Unwavering Discipline had lived up to its name and delivered him to the surface despite the hell it had endured.
He tried to sit up but couldn’t. Something in the darkness and chaos had pinned him to the floor. Rojka pressed against it, spitting and swearing in his elders’ tongue as he pushed. All he did was crush his chest even harder against the cool material.
Backup lighting and power somehow flickered on. He was trapped under one of the bridge’s large, swooping holoprojector pillars. It was intractably pinned below the command dais, refusing to budge free.
He wasn’t bleeding though. Something to be grateful for.
Feet thumped around the bridge’s wreckage and stopped in front of Rojka.
Keza, one of his special operation commanders, stood tall over him.
“This is all your doing,” Keza hissed. His energy sword sputtered as motes of swirling dust from the crash struck it. The surviving Sangheili glanced about, nervous. Fearing that one of the others would attack him, he also sought to strengthen his own courage. “Now I must end this madness.”
Rojka looked around as best as he could. Other surviving Sangheili crew stood by silently, watching the scene unfold. It became clear that they would not stop Keza, even if Rojka ordered it. But they would not help the renegade Sangheili either. This was their way. Combat, even between a superior trapped in wreckage against a subordinate with an overwelming advantage, was not to be interfered with. Still, Rojka dou
bted that anyone here would follow Keza. They would likely soon kill him, as he was a weak commander, though clever at times.
Rojka had thought him loyal too. More bad judgment on his part.
The Sangheili were not patricidal savages like the Jiralhanae, but it was tragically clear that they had much more in common than Rojka would have liked to admit. In war, weak leadership needed, of course, to be rooted out for a clan to survive. Unfortunately for Keza, Rojka would not go so quietly into the night.
He still had other scores to settle.
“Do you think that Thars will reward you for killing me? He will kill you as well.” Rojka forced himself to focus on moving his right arm. All he needed to do was free it. He pulled so hard he thought he could hear something in his shoulder pop.
“You have led us to ruin!” Keza screamed, and raised his sword high. “You have done all that you could to destroy us!”
Rojka managed to find enough purchase with his arm to finally reach his plasma pistol. As Keza swung down, Rojka twisted to pull his limb up and shot the commander in the foot.
Keza howled and dropped to his knees. But then he realized his mistake and quickly scrambled to recover, grabbing Rojka’s wrist and forcing the pistol’s barrel into the air just as the fleetmaster fired again. The shot veered wide, the plasma bolt splashing against the ceiling. Keza struggled to hold Rojka’s arm down while also maneuvering into a killing position.
“You should have just killed me and gotten it over with,” Rojka jeered, not letting go of the weapon as Keza tried to break his arm in two. Rojka fired again, just grazing the side of Keza’s head.
“Fleetmaster!” Keza bellowed.
“I am no longer your fleetmaster.” Rojka arched his back, panting, pulling his forearm toward himself. Keza’s sword bit down into Rojka’s side as the commander tried to finish what he had started. “I am simply your enemy now.”
Both Sangheili roared in fury and pain, each trying to summon one last spasm of strength to finish the other off.
Rojka’s arm moved a slight, nearly imperceptible twitch closer. He squeezed the trigger and shot Keza in the face. The commander’s right mandibles burned away in an instant, leaving a gaping hole of melted flesh. As Keza jerked back in horror, eyes wide, Rojka finally yanked his arm free and jammed the muzzle into what remained of Keza’s mouth, pulling the trigger again. Plasma burst out from the inside of Keza’s helmet with a gush of sizzling purple blood.
The Sangheili’s body toppled forward. Rojka grabbed it, brought it closer, and retrieved the dead traitor’s energy sword still in his grip. He activated it, jammed it into the column pinning him, and started cutting, ignoring the molten splashes that seared his skin.
When he stood free, he kicked Keza’s body aside and pointed around himself with the sword. His side burned where Keza had managed to injure him, but the sword had cauterized the wound shut. Rojka ignored it for now. “It is fair to attack your leader when you perceive him to be too weak or in grievous error. But I grow tired of those who wait for my back to be turned in order to strike! I am sickened of those who refuse to meet me in combat face-to-face!”
The other Sangheili, the ones who provided no aid during the skirmish with Keza, took a respectful step back.
The fleetmaster nodded. “I am Rojka ‘Kasaan. I alone created our fleet out of the discarded and forgotten ships. I led us to this new world. We have lost all of that because some will not follow me. So . . . decide on your path now. Bow to my authority as kaidon here and follow me to avenge your fellow Sangheili against the Demon Three, or leave my sight. Make your choice.”
Daga was the one who pulled himself up over the crumpled remains of the command dais and bowed to Rojka first.
Then, as one, the rest of the crew present all lowered their heads in submission.
“Good,” Rojka said, deactivating the weapon. “Now let us see what we can salvage from our ship. We still have a hunt in front of us.”
From inside the planning room, Ellis Gass glanced over the shoulders of General Grace and General Kapoor at the activity within the command bunker. The air here had changed. An anticipatory buzz now floated about, the hushed, funereal whispers shifting into nervous, determined chatter. The generals that had previously approached her with grim faces now had purpose in their stride.
They could all feel the sense of possibility here. That she was right. They would take advantage of this turn of affairs and exploit this weakness to make Suraka an utter quagmire for the Jiralhanae.
Their enemies would not take the city from her.
Several proposals floated on the screens around the planning room, as well as on paper. Old emergency schemes for dealing with UNSC occupation that had been kept hidden since the prewar days. Civilians throwing bombs, rigging buildings to blow, then escaping through sewers. Sneak attacks. Guerrilla warfare. Engineers came in and out of the meeting rooms with more diagrams and blueprints of the area the Jiralhanae occupied.
“We’ve retrieved the thermobaric bombs from the high-security facility on the other side of the underground complex,” one lieutenant reported, patching in from the field. “All twelve functioning excavation-grade explosives are now in place. They’ve been strategically distributed by scouting teams. At their current position, when they detonate they’ll completely eliminate all enemy activity at the edge of the occupied area, but will not directly affect the majority of the city apart from anticipated collateral damage.”
“We can get at most of the Jiralhanae on the surface with the bombs,” General Grace said. “But there’s still the matter of the cruiser above the city. They’ll have a secondary force in there ready to deploy, perhaps more. And they can glass us from the air, obviously.”
Travis Pope knocked gently on the window that looked into the planning room. Ellis shook her head. Now wasn’t the time.
“There are some strategies on file that might be worth considering for the second wave,” General Kapoor said, opening his briefcase.
Pope slipped in through the door and ghosted over to Ellis’s elbow. “Governor, I think you need to come with me,” he said in a low voice.
“What is it?” she asked, annoyed. The two generals had stopped talking and now stared at them.
“It’s best if I speak to you somewhere private.”
Something in his voice convinced her to follow him outside. “I’ll be right back,” she told Kapoor and Grace.
They looked annoyed at the interruption. They had people to lead, preparations to make. But they relented nonetheless. “Of course, Governor.”
She stood and left the room with Travis.
“I’m really sorry for the intrusion,” Travis whispered as he moved her through the command bunker toward her temporary office. “But we should discuss this away from everybody.”
Lamar was already there, waiting inside. He stood up as she entered and Travis stayed back, closing the door behind her.
“Lamar, what’s going on?”
“Governor, there’s an after-action report,” he said. “I’ve been holding on to it for confirmation.”
“After-action report about what?”
“Okay . . .” Lamar blew out a breath. “It’s from a survivor, someone from Jeff’s squad. She’s . . . she’s the only one who made it.”
“Oh God. What happened?” Ellis grabbed the edge of the desk to hold herself steady. “Tell me what happened, Lamar.”
But she already knew.
“The Jiralhanae captured him during an engagement,” he said with a solemn face. “Local command is listing Jeff as KIA. They don’t have physical confirmation, but there’s virtually zero probability that he survived based on the eyewitness account.”
Ellis slowly nodded as her worst fears came true. The world faded until it was just her own breathing and Lamar’s presence before her. “And they’ve taken no prisoners so far? You’re sure about this?”
“Yes, we’re sure. They’ve taken no prisoners.”
�
�Why wasn’t I told earlier?”
“This is not something I wanted you to hear from anyone else. I wanted some kind of confirmation before telling you. This is the best I could get.” Lamar took a step closer. His hand closed gently on her shoulder. “I am so, so very sorry for your loss.”
But it wasn’t her loss, Ellis thought. It was Jeff’s. Her son would never get to know anything else. A whole future had been extinguished. Her son had been extinguished. A light that had been so bright.
The smile. The sound of his laughter. She kept thinking about his wide eyes. She could still see the nine-year-old child covered in soot with a blanket wrapped around him as they evacuated to bomb shelters on the reserve when the Covenant first arrived on Mars. You’re going to be okay, she had kept saying. It’s going to be okay.
A lie.
“Please leave,” she told Lamar. “I need a moment.”
He exited without another word. After she closed the door hard, Ellis grabbed the guest chair and threw it against the wall. It didn’t break. It needed to break. She picked it up again and swung it against her desk. Screens flew off the surface and shattered on the floor.
Not better, but certainly satisfying.
She launched the chair against the window, the view there on one of the underground loading bays. She saw a handful of passersby outside flinch as it struck. The safety glass starred and fragmented but hung together. Lamar just stood there in the corridor outside, his back to her, almost at parade rest. Travis remained there as well, looking down at the ground, hands folded in front of him, waiting.
Ellis closed her eyes and wiped the tears away with the back of her hand.
She was not the only mother who had lost a child in Suraka. She needed to be stronger than this, but that burst of rage and grief made her feel even weaker than she had before. Ellis took a deep breath and composed herself, warding off other thoughts of Jeff and summoning what little of her strength remained.
She opened the door and tapped her waiting second in command on the shoulder. “Lamar. Come with me. I need you with me in the planning session.”
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