“If what Azikiwe says is true, all I need is one good shot and this is over,” Adriana said. She made her way to the side compartment of the Pelican’s rear bay and retrieved the SRS99-S5 AM sniper rifle provided the Surakans. “And I’m far, far better than just a good shot.”
“That’s right over the edge of that rifle’s range,” Sergeant Carson observed.
“One good shot,” Adriana repeated slowly. “Let’s go. We’re wasting time that no one has to spend.”
“Set us down,” Jai said to the pilot, grabbing an M392 designated marksman rifle from the wall mount and fixing it magnetically to his back.
The Pelican swooped around and dropped down onto the roof. Mike, Jai, and Adriana leapt out, followed by Sergeant Carson and her squad.
“If we’re overrun,” Jai shouted inside the bird, “don’t try to come back for us! We’ll make our own way out!”
“Yes, sir!” the pilot called back.
The Pelican roared into the air. As it spiraled away, a large bolt of plasma fire from the crater struck its tail, immediately killing one of its engines. It spun around in an uncontrolled dive and crashed between buildings several blocks away.
Carson’s squad stared at the dying Pelican, but Jai needed them to focus. “Get into the stairwells!” he ordered. “Make sure nothing gets up to the roof!”
The squad scuttled into motion, Carson leading the way. “We’ll mine the stairs,” she shouted back at them, ducking through the door. “It’ll slow them down even if they do get past the line.”
The three Spartans stood together for a moment of silence, then turned to look at the Phantom circling the building around them like a buzzard.
“You know, if the Sangheili lied to the envoy,” Adriana said, nodding toward the gunship, “then they’re probably going to ambush us now. This roof is just as good a place as any for them to try to take their revenge.”
An enraged kaidon, bitter at the destruction of his homeworld because of their actions. If he chose to attack, there was little Gray Team could do to stop them.
But the Phantom stopped wheeling about and landed on a neighboring building, deploying Rojka and eight of his fellow Sangheili.
“They’re not joining us on this building,” Mike said.
“Did you think they would literally stand shoulder to shoulder with us?” Adriana asked.
“No. I guess this makes sense,” Jai said.
“They agreed to carry comms so that the envoy can reach them for us,” Mike said. “That’s pretty damn close to shoulder to shoulder.”
“I can’t imagine that they’d be inclined to do much more than stand by if one of those creatures caught up to us,” Jai said. “But maybe I’m wrong about them.”
As Adriana quickly set up her rifle, Rojka walked to the edge of the opposite building and looked across the gulf at the Spartans. Jai cautiously faced him as well.
Then Rojka solemnly turned, his Sangheili falling in with him, and disappeared down the building’s stairwell.
“What was that all about?” Jai asked.
“We who are about to die salute you,” Adriana said, extending the sniper rifle’s tripod. “Those of us who are also doing something really risky salute you right back.”
Adriana set up the rifle on the edge, where she could lie prone and take in all of the vast crater. She began scanning for their target.
“Mike, spot?” Jai was already heading down the stairwell.
“I’ll spot,” Mike said, checking the sights on a modified Surakan MA37 assault rifle. “But where are you going?”
“Helping our Surakan friends out,” Jai said.
He hopped down from stairwell to stairwell to make time, slamming into the metal floors and denting them when he landed. He found an area with a broken window looking out on the intersection. The crossroad was packed with sandbags, and missile pods fired down the street toward the Sharquoi. The massive creatures never stopped pressing forward despite the constant fire. All firepower could do was contain them: one Sharquoi would die and another would appear around the corner, climbing over the bodies of its own kind for an opportunity to attack the Surakans.
Jai smashed the rest of the windowpane out and set the bipod of the DMR on the edge. It didn’t have the range of Adriana’s sniper rifle, but with the custom high-explosive ammo the Surakans used, it would do well enough at this range.
He looked down through the scope. He made a tiny adjustment to find one Sharquoi lumbering up the street, shrugging off gunfire. Jai moved his aim up to the creature’s strange head atop its broad, muscled shoulders. He focused on the large lump on its forehead. He wasn’t sure if it helped it see or connected it to the chieftain. Either way, it looked vital.
Jai held his breath.
He slightly increased the pressure on his index figure until the rifle fired. The tissue on the giant’s head vaporized and Jai started breathing again. The Sharquoi stumbled and landed on its hands and knees. It crawled forward at the sandbags as it blood gushed from its head onto the road.
Jai reloaded, listening to Mike calling out to Surakan militia for a sighting of the Jiralhanae chieftain over the channel. The Surakans had now withdrawn their aircraft, but militia hiding in buildings behind the lines or with sight lines on the crater constantly reported in, tracking enemy movements in the city and in the crater.
“The Jiralhanae we’re after—he’s the one without a helmet? He has shards of something sticking out of his skull, looks Forerunner?” Adriana said. “Yes?”
Melody’s voice crackled in their ears, patched in from the operations center. “Yes, that’s our guy. The technology—it’s a neural reader of some sort. Very invasive, and ONI theories say it might even have melded with his entire brain cavity by now.”
Jai reloaded. Got a bead on the crawling Sharquoi, bleeding out. Five of them had battled through the last barrage of missiles, RPGs, and a near-constant hail of gunfire just to get within reach of the Surakan barricade down by the first floor of their building. One was down, four remained. Jai fired and watched the shot hit the next Sharquoi in the side of its head. An RPG struck it a second later, sending it to the ground in a heap.
It finally stopped moving.
“The Jiralhanae chieftain is wandering into my sight line,” Adriana said. “Send visual through the closed-comm. Can I get a confirmation on the target?”
“Confirmed,” Melody said.
Three surviving Sharquoi moved at an alarming pace and crashed into the Surakans as the crossroads below erupted in the chaos of close-quarters fighting. Jai hefted the DMR and tried to find a shot but couldn’t at this angle. The Sharquoi rampaged through until nothing recognizable of the human defenders remained.
One of the Sharquoi now stopped, its head slowly turning until it seemed to look up at the window toward Jai with that strange socket in its head.
Melody half jumped as the vice-governor tapped her on the shoulder. She’d been leaning in to answer Adriana-111’s question. Screens showed grainy feeds from militia shoulder cameras scattered all over the city, but she was focused only on the feed the Spartan had patched through from her heads-up display.
The vice-governor looked concerned. “What happens after the kill?” he asked.
Melody glanced back at the video. She’d told Adriana she was clear to take out the chieftain, but she could see that Hekabe was roaming past rubble along the crater’s edge, moving in and out of her sight line. Adriana seemed to be waiting for a perfect moment. Melody could feel every heartbeat inside her own chest.
“I don’t know, Vice-Governor,” she admitted. “The Sharquoi will no longer be under Hekabe’s control, but they will likely still pose some kind of threat. We have little information as it is, and ONI said nothing about how they would function outside of the control mechanism the Forerunners implanted.”
“Please call me Lamar,” he said. “So this undirected chaos . . . theoretically we could fall back and engage as needed, right?”
“These are all just best guesses, Vice—” she stopped and corrected herself, “Lamar. It’s all theory. Whatever it is, it will be significantly more manageable than what you’re currently facing.”
Governor Gass tapped a screen showing a distant feed of Hekabe as a tiny dot walking around the far side of the crater’s rim, likely from a patrolling drone. “When he drops, we need to get to that thing from his head before someone else does.”
“There is a fast-response shock team standing by with orders,” said Lamar. “They’ll jump-jet out of a Nightingale to the spot. It should get them there faster than anything else we have. I also have squads on the ground to provide cover and rush there, if necessary.”
Melody gave them both a dubious look. “The Spartans aren’t going to take that thing.”
Governor Gass gave her a similarly impatient look. “We can’t make any assumptions. You told us Gray Team has been behind enemy lines in cryo for the last six years. How am I supposed to believe they won’t? We have Sangheili here hailing from the same group that started this mess to begin with. I don’t truly know what they’re doing here either, or what their motivations are.”
Or yours, her eyes accused Melody. The governor looked frayed, intense, and full of anger. The war had taken a toll on her. Melody needed to be very careful here.
“I am telling you everything I know,” Melody said reassuringly. “I am trying to help. So is Gray Team.”
“And yet,” the governor said, “we are only just now learning about these things. You’ve kept many secrets from us. Those are my people dying out there, Envoy. It could have been prevented. The blood here is on the UNSC. All we wanted was our own peace.”
“Hello,” Adriana murmured over the speaker. “We have a good shot, I’m taking it.”
Everyone stopped talking and watched the screens.
Rojka’s active camouflage faded away. His fighters hung off the sides of the alley, their fingertips dug into window ledges, looking down at him from high above as he approached one of the Sharquoi standing near the entrance. They had worked their way down through the human building to a level with access to the outside. Clambering down the exterior walls, Rojka reached the ground first and signaled for his soldiers to remain where they clung while he approached the street outside the alley.
Rojka was here to study this new threat. To learn how to fight it. If he died here, they would at least leave with information about how to attack one of these creatures.
This Sharquoi threw sandbags at the retreating humans in the street. Vehicles and debris were strewn around it; preoccupied with the humans before it, it had its back to the Sangheili. Another Sharquoi several meters away destroyed the missile pod the humans had operated, slamming it to the ground until small pieces fell from its clawed fists. Every impact had shaken the street like a gravity hammer, causing pieces of metal to ricochet off the sides of buildings.
The Sharquoi nearest to Rojka finally turned and noticed him. The lump of flesh in the bony forehead vibrated intensely. Some sort of echolocation, Rojka realized. Not an eye, but it served the same purpose.
“Roffka!” the creature roared below its jagged teeth, surprising the Sangheili.
“Hekabe,” Rojka said. He had never met the Jiralhanae chieftain before, but the chieftan apparently knew of him thanks to Thars.
“You will all die,” the Sharquoi said in a guttural voice, speaking Hekabe’s words. “I will hunt you all down. Then I will go to your keep and destroy all that you built here, until your bloodline is gone forever.”
Rojka activated his energy sword, the blue light of the contained plasma reflecting off the walls. He realized then that dying in a human alley was not the glorious death he had thought to attain. But he would meet this new challenge with everything at his disposal nonetheless.
The Sharquoi thudded forward, shoulders brushing the sides of the buildings. The creature was over five meters at full height, so Rojka had an advantage keeping in between these tightly spaced human structures: he could move with ease, but this creature would be limited by its size.
Rojka tensed as the beast closed to within meters. He would need all his speed to dodge those wicked claws. But if he could get up near that thick neck . . .
The distinct sound of a single high-powered human sniper rifle’s shot cracked from the rooftop above.
Another thudding step.
This was it.
The Sharquoi stumbled, however, and shook its head in confusion.
Instead of running forward, Rojka took the creature’s new motion in stride and stepped back so he could continue observing. Had the demons actually done it? The Sharquoi’s head leaned back, as if trying to comprehend the sky above it. It grumbled under its breath and then pushed against the walls, turning back toward the street.
“Fleetmaster: the Spartan has taken the shot,” the envoy confirmed, her voice crackling loudly from the small communications device she’d clipped to Rojka’s harness.
The Sharquoi startled slightly and turned its head back down into the alley at the sound of the words. The thrum of echolocation filled the area, bouncing down the narrow human corridor. It made another rumbling in its throat, seemingly confused. The air vibrated again as Rojka shifted his position, and the body language of the creature changed. The muscles in its great thighs bunched and the Sharquoi bellowed.
Behind it, beyond its great legs, Rojka saw the other Sharquoi milling around on the road. They were wandering about with an aimless curiosity.
Bullets struck them without warning. They swung their attention back toward the human militia down the street from them and charged.
“The creatures are attacking again!” Daga shouted from his vantage above.
“Assist the human warriors!” Rojka ordered.
The Sharquoi in front of Rojka bellowed again, edging closer to the Sangheili. This was the moment of truth. Although a thinking being, these creatures no longer seemed connected to Hekabe.
Will it attack? Is it aggressive by nature?
Rojka deactivated his sword, and backed away as if trying to calm a wild animal.
“See, I am no threat,” he said softly.
The Sharquoi thudded into motion, lunging toward him with impressive speed. It stabbed at him with one set of claws, but Rojka rolled out of the way. The Sharquoi was still quick, but it lacked the strategic intellect: it acted now only on instinct and anger.
Rojka activated his sword just as the impact of the Sharquoi slammed into him like a massive ocean wave and they both burst through the alley wall in a cloud of debris.
CHAPTER 20
* * *
* * *
Hekabe fell back and his head bounced off a hard slab of concrete. It felt like he had been slammed in the face by a gravity hammer. Then he became immediately aware of being disconnected from the device in his head. He was dwelling only in his own limited mind once more. He felt naked. Small. Insignificant.
Sniper. It had to be a sniper. He had heard the shot through other senses. He had seen the trail the bullet left in the air leading back to a building near—his thoughts scattered and came back together—the Sangheili fleetmaster, Rojka.
He had spoken to Rojka.
He had seen himself fall backward, blood splattering around him. His blood.
Now he lay still.
But he wasn’t dead yet. He was still thinking. And he was in pain.
He should be dead, by all rights.
He writhed on his back, hardly able to stand the burning in his left eye. He could feel the warmth of the blood seeping down the back of his skull. Then he felt something else . . .
A cold sliver of metal slipped around his forehead once again, this time on its own, and dug under his skin, scraping tendrils against the bone of his skull. The shot had injured him grievously, but this ancient machine somehow survived.
The pieces of the mysterious object that he carried so far to this world, that had burrowed inside him, now wriggled and
crawled even further down through his scalp. It penetrated even deeper than before.
Hekabe could sense the Forerunner device actively seek out the damage and seal it off, doing its best to repair the chunks of his missing flesh and stop the bleeding. The same technology that could weld itself to his neural tissue to control the Sharquoi could apparently also hold it together when damaged.
He must have lost brain matter with that impact—excruciating pain welled up where his left eye once was—but the rest of the Sharquoi network now moved to compensate. Hekabe felt that pieces of his own mind had spread out through the implants in the Sharquoi’s minds, and that the part of himself that he had deposited with each Sharquoi now returned back to him, igniting the ancient connection again. Hekabe could feel his own essence pouring back out into the network of Sharquoi.
He had control of it all once more.
Hekabe looked down at himself. Four Sharquoi surrounded him, their bodies creating an effective shield of hardened gray flesh, blocking any potential threats. Hekabe peered at himself through their eyes to see the horrible gaping hole in his left eye and the shattered bone around it. It all now glittered with Forerunner metal, holding his empty eye socket in place. It had shoved small fragments of itself throughout the bullet damage and fused Hekabe’s skull back together.
Hekabe grabbed the arm of the nearest Sharquoi and, leaning on Oath of Fury, he pulled himself to his feet. The pain began to drift away from him.
Three Jiralhanae had run up the side of the crater to see if their chieftain was still alive. Now they backed away from him, eyes wide with shock.
“Do you see?” Hekabe shouted. “Do you now see the power I wield? I cannot be killed!”
Hekabe closed his good eye to focus. Through his extended presence, he could feel the distant tickle of that other information deep inside the network. The wind. Some kind of ghost in the great biological spiderweb, with Hekabe at its center. Maybe this was how it always functioned—the Forerunner machine engulfing one’s mind into it and then distributing it all around so that he could survive.
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