by Troy Denning
The squad did encounter a steady stream of marine fire teams. They were advancing up the alley in leapfrog order, clearing every third building and leaving the others cut off behind UNSC lines. Clearly, Charlie Company had the enemy on its heels and was pressing the counterattack. With a little support, the battle would quickly become a mop-up operation—which was why the last thing Fred wanted to do was evacuate.
But he had his orders.
At last, Sergeant Nguyen turned back toward the main avenue. They entered a bakery shop ruin filled with the day-old corpses of fallen marines, then found themselves directly across from the Hotel Wendosa. It was only forty meters from the bakery to the hotel’s gateway, which sat at the back of a large crescent-shaped entry drive. The gate opening was more or less blocked by a wrecked Warthog, and Fred could see a couple of dozen marine sharpshooters peering over the privacy wall that flanked it.
But a few buildings up the avenue, no more than sixty meters away, a firefight was raging inside a large art gallery. A couple of dozen marines were crouching behind cabinets or lying on the floor behind support pillars, pouring fire toward the back of the shop. A storm of plasma bolts and spike flashes was coming back toward them, and it seemed clear that it would not be long before the UNSC position was overrun.
Fred would have liked to reinforce the outgunned platoon, but that was out of the question. The order to evacuate had been clear—and even if it hadn’t been, putting the Huragok and spy drone at risk would have been a gross dereliction of duty. But with Kelly and the other half of Blue Team working a skirmish ring around the Hotel Wendosa, he knew relief would be coming soon, even with comms still being jammed. This kind of force buildup was exactly what the Spartans were working to prevent, and Kelly would have marine runners ready to summon her the moment a breakthrough situation developed.
Fred glanced back at the so-called artifacts. The worm-thing remained draped over Olivia’s arm, and the Huragok was still attempting to slip past Lopis to get at it. He could probably have carried the worm himself and kept it shielded from incoming fire as they crossed the street, but the Huragok was another matter. Even if they could have attached a scramble grenade to it safely, the thing was too large to protect in the same way. There was no way to cross the boulevard without exposing it to fire from the surrounding rooftops and from the fierce firefight raging in the gallery.
“Is there another approach to the hotel?” Fred asked Nguyen.
“There’s the back gate,” Nguyen replied. “We could give it a go, but we’d have to fight the whole bloody way.”
Fred nodded. “Had to check.” He took a moment to formulate a plan, then motioned Mark to his side. “Can I count on you?”
Mark cocked his helmet to one side, then replied, “Why are you asking?”
“You’re off your Smoothers, dork,” Olivia said. She was at the front of the bakery shop, standing just behind Fred and Nguyen. “Twenty minutes ago, you were holding a knife to a marine sergeant’s throat.”
“He could have been an infiltrator,” Mark said.
“He could have been the Master Chief for all you—”
“That’s enough, ’Livi.” Fred turned to find Lopis studying the pair with a pensive expression, no doubt taking mental notes about the rate and nature of the Gammas’ mental deterioration. “Mark isn’t the only one who’s off his Smoothers—and I expect you both to hold it together anyway. Clear?”
Olivia dropped her gaze. “Sorry, Lieutenant.” She turned to Mark. “Sorry, Mark.”
“No problem, ’Livi. I know you’re not yourself right now.” Mark turned his faceplate back toward Fred. “And I’m not seeing things yet, Lieutenant—at least I don’t think I am. What do you need?”
Fred paused, waiting to see if Mark would grow impatient or take offense, then finally pointed toward the roof. “Top cover,” he said. “Try to get an angle on the firefight up the street, but take out anything that points a weapon our way.”
Mark looked toward the art gallery and nodded. “Copy that.”
“And once we’re across—”
“I’ll follow,” Mark said. “No worries, sir. I may be coming apart, but I’m not stupid. Not yet, anyway.”
Fred smiled and resisted the urge to slap him on the shoulder. “Glad to hear it,” he said. “You’ve got two minutes to set up.”
Mark snapped off a salute, then grabbed some ammunition and a spare BR55 battle rifle from a fallen marine and headed for the charred staircase in the bakery’s back room. Fred outlined his plan to the others, then took the worm-thing from Olivia and looked back up the street.
The firefight in the art gallery had taken a turn for the worse. Several marines lay writhing and screaming on the glass-strewn sidewalk outside, and through the windows, he could see another dozen being forced back by a wall of charging Jiralhanae. Fred glanced at the surrounding rooftops, wondering what was taking Kelly and the rest of Blue Team so long to arrive, and considered sending Olivia and Ash to support the marines.
But he was going to need the two Gammas in the street with him, both to draw attention away from the artifacts and to help with suppression fire, and he couldn’t risk the mission objective by dividing his force. The marines up the street would just have to hold on until Kelly arrived—and if they couldn’t, at least their deaths wouldn’t be for nothing.
Fred cursed whatever it was that was jamming comms and keeping him out of contact with the rest of Blue Team, then glanced over at Olivia. It was hard to say whether she would be slower than Lopis, but with her still-swollen legs, she would definitely be the slowest of the Spartans. “Ready?”
She nodded and flashed a nervous smile. “If you’re waiting on me, you’re wasting daylight.”
Olivia sprang through the window and raced toward the Hotel Wendosa with a limping gait as swift as it was awkward. If the Keepers in the gallery noticed her at all, they didn’t bother to open fire, and she was approaching the hotel’s crescent-shaped entry drive almost before Fred could signal everyone else forward.
Fred led the way himself, keeping the worm-thing shielded behind his body and using one hand to aim his battle rifle up the street. At the halfway point, the enemy opened up, spraying a handful of plasma bolts over the heads of the marines who were still trying to stop their charge. Fred’s shields flared but held, then Mark’s battle rifle began to crack from the bakery’s rooftop, and the enemy fire quickly dwindled away.
Fred reached the entrance drive and glanced back. Nguyen lay sprawled in the middle of the avenue, his armor shredded and his body convulsing. Ash and Lopis were still five meters behind Fred, each clutching a Huragok tentacle in one hand and pulling it along with them. Ash, who was on the side toward the enemy, was trailing blood and holding an elbow close to his ribs, but Lopis appeared uninjured. With its head-stalk craned around so that it could watch over the worm-thing with one set of three eyes and look up the avenue with the other three, the Huragok seemed frightened but healthy. And it was making no attempt to go back after Nguyen—whatever its other virtues, apparently the thing had no interest in becoming a combat medic.
From the other side of the privacy wall came the rising whine of Falcon rotors spinning up. Olivia suddenly appeared at his side.
“Captain Breit is chomping at the bit, Lieutenant,” she said. “You go in, and I’ll—”
Olivia’s offer was cut off as a wall of Jiralhanae came boiling out of the gallery, spraying spikes and plasma bolts down the avenue. There were no Kig-Yar or humans in the Keeper charge at all—as far as Fred could tell, it was all Brute. Mark’s battle rifle began to crack so rapidly it sounded like automatic fire, and the front row of warriors dropped with blood stars blossoming on their jutting brows.
By then, Ash and Veta Lopis were racing past, heading toward the gate with the Huragok in tow. Fred and Olivia fell back after them, opening up on full auto and raking fire across the Jiralhanae at face level. Another trio of warriors went down, and a dozen more were staggering
from the lead hail bouncing off their helmets and armor.
But the charge continued, the ground rumbling with Jiralhanae fury, and Fred’s battle rifle clicked empty. He ejected the clip and, cradling the worm-thing in the crook of his elbow, reached for another.
The avenue erupted into smoke and flame, and Fred looked up to glimpse a row of Spartans aiming rocket and grenade launchers out the second-story windows near the bakery. Kelly and the rest of Blue Team had arrived. Another flurry of detonations filled the air with shards of cobblestone and flying Jiralhanae parts.
And still the charge continued.
A wall of armored warriors emerged from the smoke in full assault mode. Fred’s energy shield crackled with hits. He slapped a new clip into the battle rifle and chambered a round—then felt a hand grab his arm and draw him back through the gateway, past the wrecked Warthog and into the hotel’s inner courtyard.
Reacting instinctively to protect the artifact draped over the same arm, he spun the intruder around and found himself pointing a battle rifle at the chest of the square-faced, crooked-nosed commander of Charlie Company, Captain Baldric Breit.
“What part of ‘at once’ did you fail to understand, Lieutenant?” Breit demanded. “Commander Nelson wants you and the ancilla on that bird now.”
Breit pointed across the hotel’s ravaged courtyard to where a plasma-scorched, bullet-riddled Falcon sat on a cratered driveway, its rotors whirling and wisps of blue smoke trailing from one engine.
Too stunned to contemplate the craft’s poor condition, Fred glanced down at the twitching worm-thing draped over his arm.
“Ancilla?” Fred gasped. “This?”
“That’s what the orders said.” Breit shook his finger toward the Falcon. “Now, go!”
“Negative, sir,” Fred said. He started to pass the ancilla to Breit. “I have people fighting out there.”
Breit pushed the ancilla back at Fred. “They’re my people now, Lieutenant,” he said. “Nelson’s orders were clear. He wants you to deliver the ancilla personally.”
Fred glanced over at the gateway, where Ash and Olivia were crouched behind the Warthog, pouring fire into the Keeper charge. He didn’t need to look over the wall to know that the area directly beyond had been turned into a killing field, with marines and Spartans firing down into the Jiralhanae mass from both sides. Had the enemy been anything else, Fred would not have been worried about the hotel grounds being overrun. But with a pack of Brutes coming at them, Charlie Company was going to need every Spartan available.
Fred nodded. “Copy that, Captain.” Though the mad Jiralhanae charge left no doubt that the Keepers of the One Freedom were on Gao to recover the ancilla, he still had a hundred questions about how they had managed to get there. But even if Breit had the answers, the middle of a battle was no time to be pressing a company CO for an explanation. He turned to Lopis, who was standing next to him, still keeping the Huragok’s tentacles away from the ancilla. “Let’s go.”
She shook her head. “Not without my people.”
“Your people are already aboard, ma’am,” Breit said. He looked to Fred. “But that Falcon is fully loaded and none too airworthy. The inspector will be staying here—unless she wants to take someone else’s place.”
“Not on your life,” Lopis said, showing no sign of fear for her own safety. She said to Fred, “I’ll help you load the Huragok.”
“Thanks, Inspector. I appreciate that.”
Fred didn’t know what else to say, how to express his respect for Lopis’s courage, or his own reluctance to leave the battle without his team, so he merely dipped his chin and led the way toward the Falcon.
The Huragok made it as far as the rotor wash, then refused to go a centimeter farther. Lopis tried several times to drag it forward, but the thing seemed completely panicked by the air blast. It pulled against her so hard that Fred feared it would snap a tentacle, and when that failed, it changed tactics and began to bite at Lopis’s fingers, trying to peel them off. Finally, the impatient pilot jerked her thumb for him to climb aboard and began to spin the rotors up faster. The Falcon rocked on its struts and started to kick up dirt and small shards of rubble. The message was clear: get aboard now, or she would use the rotor-wash to send Lopis and the Huragok tumbling across the courtyard—and Fred had seen enough combat pilots pull similar stunts to know the threat was not an idle one.
Fred waved Lopis away. She nodded and looked past him into the passenger compartment, then motioned to her team and allowed the Huragok to lead her away. Still holding the ancilla, Fred turned and hopped into the passenger compartment. He knew Nelson and Parangosky would both give him hell about leaving the thing in Wendosa, but better that than to risk losing the ancilla—assuming Nelson was right about what he had in the first place.
The Falcon was airborne almost as soon as Fred’s boots hit the bloodstained deck. He checked to make sure Senola Lurone and the other two members of Lopis’s field team were strapped in, then stowed the ancilla inside an armored cargo box and took a door gun. Normally, the gunner would clip himself into the safety harness that hung from the ceiling behind the M247 heavy machine-gun mount, but Fred ignored it. He was more than capable of staying on his feet through any maneuver the Falcon could handle, and if they ran into trouble, the last thing the pilot needed would be a half-ton Spartan flying around the passenger compartment at the end of a meter-long tether.
By the time he had the M247 ready to fire, the Falcon was well above the hotel’s privacy wall, its chin guns chugging as it sprayed suppression fire into the jungle. Behind them, Fred caught a glimpse of his Spartans pouring death into the smoky avenue between the hotel and bakery. He even saw the Jiralhanae charge and managed to swing the machine gun around in time to put a burst into the middle of pack. Two Brutes went down amid the corpse-filled street behind the Falcon’s tail.
Then the passenger compartment brace light began flashing, and the pilot put the Falcon into a tight, missile-evading turn that took it over Wendosa’s main avenue—and back toward the kill zone. Fred saw a pair of smoke trails rise from the jungle and opened fire on full auto, sweeping the machine gun’s barrel back and forth in front of the oncoming missiles. The first one dissolved into a fireball, while the second streaked past a dozen meters behind the Falcon.
For a heartbeat, Fred thought they were in the clear.
Then the purple flare of a particle beam rose from the kill zone.
The Falcon shuddered, and blood began to spray past the side door. The aircraft passed above the kill zone and out over the jungle, then the nose dropped and they began to wobble as the pilot struggled to remain conscious. Members of the Gao field team screamed in fear. Fred leaned out through the open door and looked forward, desperately hoping to see a clearing or river or some sign that suggested the dying pilot was taking them down under control.
All he saw was a steep, frond-blanketed slope dotted by limestone outcroppings. They were going in hard.
CHAPTER 20
* * *
* * *
0928 hours, July 5, 2553 (military calendar)
Hotel Wendosa, Wendosa Village, Montero Jungle
Campos Wilderness District, Planet Gao, Cordoba System
A distant boom echoed out of the jungle and broke through the battle din, and Veta knew the Falcon carrying Fred and her team had not pulled up in time. Her chest tightened and her knees grew weak, and all the fear and rage of the last thirty hours boiled out in a single shocked keen. Cirilo lay buried in the bottom of the cave, and now, the crash had probably taken out three more of Veta’s people. She was stunned and sick and so exhausted that she wanted nothing more than to collapse where she was and escape into a deep, dreamless sleep.
Instead, dragging the Huragok along by a tentacle, Veta turned and quickly headed back toward the gate. If there was any hope at all of helping her people aboard the downed Falcon, it would be from the Spartans. With their commander and a Forerunner artifact aboard, Blue Team would wa
ste no time starting toward the crash—and she was not about to let them leave without her.
The area beyond the gate was piled high with Jiralhanae bodies, and there were no more of the alien warriors rushing the hotel. But Olivia and Ash remained crouched behind the wrecked Warthog, Olivia still without her helmet and only half-armored, firing three-round bursts into the smoke-filled street. Veta began to fear the two Gammas had completely lost control of themselves and were now simply pouring lead into dead bodies.
But then Veta reached Olivia’s side and saw that the Spartan duo was actually firing down the street, into a mass of hulking backs in dark armor. The enemy charge had not been broken. Instead, the Jiralhanae were racing toward a column of smoke where the Falcon went down—and they were already well ahead of the Spartans.
Veta waited until Olivia clicked empty, then leaned close and touched the girl’s hand.
“ ’Livi!” Veta yelled. “Wait!”
Olivia’s brow rose, and her glance strayed to the Huragok behind Veta. “Why are you two still here?”
“Our friend doesn’t like rotor blast,” Veta said, jerking a thumb at the Huragok. “What are you doing?”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “What does it look like?” She slapped a fresh magazine into her rifle. “I’m working.”
Veta glanced up at the stone arch above her head and realized that neither Olivia nor Ash could have seen the Falcon go down. Their view was blocked—and even if it hadn’t been, they would have been too busy shooting Jiralhanae to notice the craft get hit. She laid a hand on Olivia’s arm.
“Olivia, think!” Veta urged. “Those are Brutes. They aren’t retreating—they’re going after Fred!”