“Here,” he wheedled, slowly picking the device up and brushing it off. “I can make contact from here. I will bring my ships to bear on the threat, and then they will come here for me.”
“Understand,” Rojka called out to him. “These Sharquoi are no normal threat. You must listen to the envoy’s words.”
“Of course, of course.” Thars half scuttled to the side of a large rock, leaning against it while clutching his shoulder.
Melody leaned over, talking to Thars in measured but rapid tones as she brought him up to speed. Occasionally Thars glanced back at Suraka, or nervously toward Rojka.
It would not be so difficult to stride over and stab that satisfied look out of his face, Rojka thought.
Thars finally activated the hologrip with a snap. The hologram of one of Thars’s commanders appeared over him, hovering in the desert air. “Shipmaster, you are alive! The enemy approaches. Our defenses are ready. We are just minutes away from finishing repairs on our drives.”
Thars looked pleased with himself. “Begin targeting the human ships, Commander. I will have adjustments to battle strategy based on information just given to me. But we must not delay engagement. Shoot them out of the sky.”
The image of the captain flickered out, replaced with a feed from some stationary camera, possibly on the mountain peaks around Thars’s camp. Rojka took in the scene: four Surakan ships flying over the mountains toward the Sangheili fleet, which was now just a handful of cruisers and corvettes. They were damaged but well armed.
In a few moments, Thars’s boasting would prove either true or empty.
Everything hung on this.
Ellis heard something large and angry pounding at the blast doors leading into the bay. The last of the tunnels had been blown up to slow the Sharquoi down. The militia gunfire had faded away in spurts and screams.
Every thud made her team jump.
“Almost there,” she murmured. They had the original Warthog the gauss cannon had been pulled from ready to go. The hybrid weapon lay on its side in the bed and was being assembled frantically by what was left of her team. They hadn’t had time to mount it on anything.
The doors creaked and bent inward.
“There are no more militia out there,” someone said, voice breaking.
Ellis’s hands shook as she applied a last piece of solder from where she crouched on the rear bed. Smoke curled up past her nose. She looked over and saw the door bend further. Thick, gray fingers reached underneath the lip and the Sharquoi on the other side bellowed as it struggled to force the door up.
The heavy blast door moved a half meter upward with a screech.
“We have to go,” the driver said. The Warthog lurched forward. Ellis yanked the soldering iron back just before she would have shorted out a circuit.
“No, not yet!” she shouted.
“They’re coming in!” the driver shouted back.
Rhodes ran over to another bench, pushing tools aside. “Do you think the gauss cannon will be enough? It can only knock out the Forerunner machinery for a minute or so.”
“Yes. If we can get to the Jiralhanae leader, it will be worth it. We need to finish wiring this up,” Ellis said.
Rhodes picked up a rifle from the table and fumbled around with it until it clicked. The bay door jerked upward again as the Sharquoi continued pulling at it.
“Go!” Rhodes shouted. He aimed the rifle down at the door’s lip and fired a burst. Bullets smacked the door, hitting a meter above the Sharquoi’s fingers. Rhodes aimed lower. Fired again. Bits of gray flesh splattered the floor as the shots tore chunks out.
The Warthog shuddered and started rolling through the bay. Ellis perched on the bed with what could only approximately be called a pulse cannon and held on as tight as she could. “Rhodes!”
She swore at the driver to stop, unwilling to leave one of her team behind, though she knew he was right to leave. They had run out of time. Two more engineers ran toward the door to join Rhodes. They carried knives and crowbars.
This was insanity.
Rhodes dropped to a knee and kept his rifle aimed right at the door. “Keep going,” he shouted in a shaky voice.
The door buckled and flew forward. It struck one of the engineers, killing him instantly before it bounced on. Three Sharquoi rushed into the bay. Rhodes stood in place and kept firing, right up until the moment one of the creatures took hold of him and swept him against a pillar in a spray of blood and concrete.
The driver slammed on the accelerator as Ellis desperately tried to get straps over the cannon and tie it into place. No time to wipe her tears away or even look back at the thudding and crashing as the Sharquoi continued Hekabe’s relentless attempt to kill them all.
CHAPTER 23
* * *
* * *
Melody crossed her fingers. If Thars’s fleet managed to stop the Sharquoi attack and turned this war against Hekabe around, she, Rojka, and the Spartans would likely be dead when the UNSC arrived. His Sangheili fleet, which only needed to hold off the attack for a short while before being able to fly once more, would come for him and kill with impunity.
But they would have saved many, many lives.
So every deep, hot, sandy breath out here felt so damn electric. It was another moment of life. But it might just be one of their last.
“We begin,” the Sangheili commander’s voice said. He sounds smug, Melody thought. So smug.
She watched the holographic image of tiny human ships hanging in the air over the blazing sandy desert as the device projected it in the center of the group. Rojka had slowly moved back to stand near the injured Thars, who leaned against a rock while holding out the hologrip in his hand. The Spartans kept their weapons ready and likely one eye on Thars, even though he did not look very mobile anymore.
“First wave,” the Sangheili commander’s disembodied voice informed them. Plasma leapt into the sky, rising inexorably toward the human fleet, striking and piercing ships at a distance. “We are successful, Shipmaster! These humans are piloting barges—they are not made for war. We are swatting them out of the sky like flies!”
Melody watched the carnage. For a brief moment, hope fluttered up from under her rib cage. The Sangheili sounded so confident of their win as the human ships rose upward, exposing their bellies as they climbed higher.
“Our drives are online!” the commander shouted. “We will rise to meet them—Wait. What? This is odd.”
“What’s going on?” Melody asked, though part of her already knew it wouldn’t be anything good.
“There are . . .” the commander began. “They—”
Thars struggled to his feet, suddenly concerned and ignoring the flash of Rojka’s energy sword as it pointed warningly toward his head. “Tell me what is happening. Tell me everything!”
The hologram shook. A new camera view materialized before them all, likely from one of Thars’s own ships. The human ships aimed to get above their enemies, not trying to get close to them. They passed through the plasma fire, not even bothering to attempt evading the horrendous and steady barrage. Torn apart, vomiting debris, they now plunged toward the camera, evidently on suicide runs.
“They cannot destroy all our ships that way,” Thars protested. “This makes no sense.”
As the Surakan ships fell through the fire, bursting apart from the Sangheili’s anti-aircraft fire, large gray bodies launched from the human ships’ hangar bays and plunged through the sky with uncanny speed down toward the Sangheili ships. Thars’s ships tried to take aim, but this was far more than the plasma could destroy.
“There are hundreds of them!” the commander hissed.
“Sharquoi! They are truly the Sharquoi!” another Sangheili officer said in the background, voice awed.
Another shift took place as various cameras suddenly went offline: a view from the side of a cruiser. Sharquoi struck the ground. Many of them didn’t move after impact, but enough survivors did. Lumbering to their feet, shaking th
eir heads, they waded into battle with any Sangheili that approached them.
Some Sharquoi managed to breach the Sangheili’s hangar bays, led by a handful of Jiralhanae with jump-jets. Other Sharquoi landed atop the Sangheili ships, their wicked claws tearing at the sides of the hulls.
“They are trying to rip their way in!” the Sangheili commander reported, shocked. “This cannot be real!”
“Destroy your slipspace drives!” Thars screamed at the hologram. “Destroy your ships! Turn your weapons on each other before it is too late!”
“You gave us orders not to—!” the commander shouted.
“No, I was wrong!” Thars replied.
“Shipmaster!” The hologram shifted to the commander again so that he could see Thars face-to-face while on his bridge. Other Sangheili worked frantically in the background.
“Do it!”
The all-too-familiar form of a Sharquoi broke through a wall at the rear of the bridge and smashed into the commander. The Sangheili’s body flew away, limp, and the camera went offline.
Thars dropped the projector in horror. Then he scrambled through the dust as it rolled away, shouting for anyone to listen.
Melody felt sick . . . and then came a faint moment of relief. She would live for a while longer, as Thars had lost. But at what cost? Her worst fears had been realized. “Hekabe and the Sharquoi are now able to get off-world.”
Rojka began to speak. “Thars, you are a small-minded hatchling of little strategic ability.”
Thars did not appear to even hear him, huddled over the sand in utter defeat.
Rojka took a step forward and continued. “You were arrogant. You thought you could be kaidon, but you did not properly secure this world. You acted before you had true strength over me, dooming your fleet and mine. You never had strength over Hekabe. You risked not just Rakoi, cousin, but all other worlds, even Sanghelios itself, by your actions.”
“It was not I who released those things! I did not do this!” Thars shouted.
“You brought Hekabe here to do your fighting for you, and therefore it is you who bears the shame for it. You have failed, Thars. You have failed in every possible manner, and in all things.”
Thars half twisted around in horror, struggling to get away as Rojka took another step forward and swung the energy sword into his cousin’s neck. The strike, long and clean, was so fast that Melody saw it only as a blur.
Melody held her hands over her mouth in shock. “I can’t believe you did that.”
Rojka snapped his energy sword off. “Believe it.”
She let out the gasp she’d been holding inside. “It doesn’t matter, does it? We failed as well.”
“It is true. But today I saw my enemies perish before me. So I will carry that memory with me until it is my time to go, however long or short that time may be.” Rojka sounded pleased. “Though I had hoped Thars would give me a greater challenge than this.”
Jai stepped forward. “You’ll get that from the Sharquoi and Hekabe.” He pointed back toward Suraka, where smoke spilled above the distant horizon and lazily gathered in the sky. “They still need Hekabe to control them, if they want to leave Carrow. We know where he is. We need a new plan.”
Ellis sat next to the pulse cannon latched onto the rear bay’s floor as the Pelican swung out over the Uldt desert sands. Only half her team had managed to escape; they were all strapped into the Pelican’s jumpseats now. The militia who’d picked them up were quietly staring out of the open bay door of the Pelican. Everyone appeared to be exhausted, not to mention covered in grime and blood.
Then there were those people from her team left back in the tunnels as she and her group made their way to the evacuation point where the Pelican waited.
So much death in the running retreat.
Long lines of civilian evacuees passed under them and entered the underground corridors, which led through the adjacent mountain range to the wastelands beyond. This passage would provide them the cover they needed to escape the Sharquoi. Lamar had no doubt plans to rig them with proximity mines, which could take the entire mountain down on anything that got close. Ellis gave the migration one last look as the Pelican leveled off and put the skyline behind it. Citizens fleeing on foot, carrying whatever they could into the Uldt heat.
There were pockets of militia running hunter-killer patterns against the Sharquoi, trying to draw them away from the evacuation. This would be a noble effort, but Ellis doubted any would survive. They were basically playing the role of diversion while the hundreds of thousands of humans who could fled into the belly of the earth. Eventually, their luck would run out.
“They’ll need to move quickly once they reach the other side. They won’t survive long out in that environment,” someone muttered over the comms.
How long could she survive out there, though? Ellis lived and worked in a major urban center. That was her life. She knew nothing about the desert, other than how nice it was to camp in or hike through. If they made it to the oases, they should be fine. But if they got caught out in the wasteland, during a sand storm—husbands, wives, children . . . Ellis shook off the thought. That was Lamar’s problem now.
“They’re out in the open once they get past the eastern mountain. If he manages to locate them, Hekabe will herd them however he wishes and kill them all,” Ellis said, in even more of a whisper. “So our plan needs to work.”
She was going to have to swallow her pride and find more allies in the fight ahead. She couldn’t do this alone.
It was now up to Ellis to get this makeshift weapon into the alien structure and end this once and for all. And for that, she needed Spartans. It would be risky. She had to take it though. There was no way the handful of militia on this bird could last a second down there.
“Found them!” the pilot shouted. “They didn’t disable the Pelican’s beacon, which made this a helluva lot easier.” Lamar had been furious to find out the Spartans had ‘requisitioned’ a Pelican for themselves. He hadn’t even wanted to give Ellis one. Every Pelican counted for the evacuation.
Their own Pelican flared out and landed. Ellis unbuckled herself and clambered out to the edge of the ramp. “Envoy! Spartans! Sangheili. We need to talk.”
They’d watched the approach warily. Now the alien kaidon, UNSC operative, and Spartans trooped up the ramp of Ellis’s Pelican. There were fresh burn marks and chips on the Spartans’ armor, but they were otherwise all still alive and functioning. Sangheili bodies littered the desert, and what looked like a Covenant dropship burned in the sand.
They’ve been busy, she thought.
“Did you gain control of the fleet, Rojka ‘Kasaan?” Ellis asked. Melody began to translate but the Sangheili seemed to anticipate what she asked. He shook his head, causing Ellis’s heart to sink.
Melody stepped forward. She was the worse for wear, Ellis thought. Covered in dust and sand, and looking as tired as everyone else seemed to feel. “Thars is dead, and the fleet has been lost. The only comms chatter we’re getting from Thars’s camp—what’s left of it, at least—suggests that the Sharquoi and Jiralhanae crew who survived are preparing the Sangheili vessels to attack Rak next. They’re deseperate to find more ships and get off this world.”
Ellis took a deep breath, plans realigning in her mind. She might not have access to support from the air, but if Hekabe’s stolen fleet was heading for Rak, they had an opportunity—and more specifically, they had time.
“I want to stop Hekabe.” She singled out the Spartan leader and directed her words at him. “Our militia is dying in the streets of Suraka, trying to hold back the Sharquoi so that civilians can get to safety. Everything we’ve got left is devoted to the evacuation. My vice-governor and my advisors will not let me take resources away from that. There isn’t much I can commit to an attack, so I need your help.”
The Spartans loomed large in the dark cabin of the Pelican. Ellis couldn’t tell if they were considering her offer or not until their leader cocked his hel
meted head. “What do you have in mind, Governor?”
She pointed at the cannon. “We built an electromagnetic pulse cannon out an M68 and a repurposed Havok core. Based on all the data we culled off Hekabe during the siege, our chief engineers believe this machine will be powerful enough to disable the Forerunner device the Brute uses to control the Sharquoi. It’s designed to fire a highly concentrated EM burst, which we believe will sever the Jiralhanae’s connection and make him vulnerable.”
“How sure are you that it works?” Melody asked, stepping forward and looking dubiously at the tangles of cables and power leads. Ellis knew it looked like an unholy mess of random, and probably dangerous, parts at this point. The half-disassembled Havok was welded onto the leg above the mount, and the gauss cannon was slung out on a large metallic frame.
“Sure enough that I’m going in with it,” Ellis said. “We designed it to be bolted onto a Warthog, or something that could move quickly if necessary. I need a team to support us during the attack. I need to get close enough to Hekabe to use it, and I need your help to do that.”
The female Spartan squatted down, leaning in close to the Havok. “This is a suicide run,” she said, sounding completely unconvinced. “We would be marching into the heart of Hekabe’s fortified position to attack him directly. With all of those creatures in there with him.”
“I know that. And I’ll need to be with the machine, in case anything happens to it. That’s why I came to you,” Ellis said, with one final effort to convince them. “Spartans who’ve been living behind enemy lines for years in secret seem like the kind of operatives I need to get this thing close enough to Hekabe. I’ve lost good people to build this weapon. Are you a soldier willing to use it?”
Jai looked over from the jury-rigged electromagnetic pulse cannon to Mike. “How’s the engineering side of this?” It looked like the mother of all rail guns to him, only with more cables and some unconventional mount. And it still had a viewscreen. Not many handheld weapons came with readouts.
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