John and the other Spartans shifted uneasily. A leak? It was possible. Déjà had shown them many historical battles that had been won and lost because of traitors or informants. But it never occurred to him that it could happen in the UNSC.
A flat picture flashed over the star map: a middle-aged man with thinning hair, a neatly trimmed beard, and watery gray eyes.
“This is their leader,” Dr. Halsey said. “Colonel Robert Watts. The original photo was taken after Operation: TREBUCHET and has been computer aged.
“Your mission is to infiltrate the rebel base, capture Watts, and return him—alive and unharmed—to UNSC-controlled space. This will deprive the rebels of their new leadership. And it will provide ONI a chance to interrogate Watts and root out traitors within FLEETCOM.”
Dr. Halsey stepped aside. “Chief Mendez?”
Mendez exhaled and unclasped his hands. He strode to the podium and cleared his throat. “This operation will be different from your previous missions. You will be engaging the enemy using live rounds and lethal force. They will be returning the favor. If there is any doubt, any confusion—and make no mistake: in combat, there will be confusion—take no chances. Kill first, ask questions later.
“Support on this mission will be limited to the resources and firepower of this destroyer,” Mendez continued. “This is to minimize the chance of a leak in the command structure.”
Mendez walked to the star map. The face of Colonel Watts snapped off and blueprints for a Parabola-class freighter appeared.
“Although we don’t know the location of the rebel base, we believe they receive periodic shipments from Eridanus Two. The independent freighter Laden is due to leave space dock in six hours for a routine recertification of her engines. She is being loaded with enough food and water to supply a small city. Additionally, her captain has been identified as a rebel officer thought to have been killed during Operation: TREBUCHET.
“You will slip aboard this freighter and hopefully hitch a ride to the rebel base. Once there, infiltrate the installation, grab Watts, and get off of that rock any way you can.”
Chief Mendez gazed at them all. “Questions?”
“Sir,” John said. “What are our extraction options?”
“You have two options: a panic button that will relay a distress signal to a preestablished listening ship. Also, the Pioneer will stay on-station … briefly. Our window here is thirteen hours.” He tapped the star map on the edge of the asteroid belt and it glowed with a blue NAV marker. “I’ll leave the extraction choice up to you. But let me point out that this asteroid belt has a circumference of more than a billion kilometers … making it impossible to canvass with ONI surveillance craft. If things get hot, you will be on your own.
“Any other questions?”
The Spartans sat, silent and immobile.
“No? Well, listen up, recruits,” Mendez added. “This time I’ve told you all the twists that I know of. Be prepared for anything.” His gaze fixed on John. “Squad Leader, you are hereby promoted to the rank of Petty Officer Third Class.”
“Sir!” John snapped to attention.
“Assemble your team and equipment. Be ready to muster at 0300. We’ll drop you off at the Eridanus Two docks. You’re on your own from there.”
“Yes, sir!” John said.
Mendez saluted. He and Dr. Halsey then left the room.
John turned to face his teammates. The other Spartans stood at attention. Thirty-two—too many for this operation. He needed a small team: five or six maximum.
“Sam, Kelly, Linda, and Fred, meet me in the weapons locker in ten minutes.” The other Spartans sighed and their gazes dropped to the deck. “The rest of you fall out. You’ll have the more difficult part of this mission: you’ll have to wait here.”
* * *
The weapons locker of the Pioneer had been stocked with a bewildering array of combat equipment. On a table were guns, knives, communication gear, body armor explosives, medical packs, survival gear, portable computers, even a thruster pack for maneuvering in space.
More important than the equipment, however, John assessed his team.
Sam had recovered from the augmentation faster than any of the other Spartans. He paced impatiently around the crates of grenades. He was the strongest of them all. He stood taller than John by a head. He had grown out his sandy hair to three centimeters. Chief Mendez had warned him that he was going to look like a civilian soon.
Kelly, in contrast, had taken the longest to recover. She stood in the corner with her arms crossed over her chest. John had thought she wasn’t going to make it. She was still gaunt and her hair had yet to grow back. Her face, however, still had its rough, angular beauty. She scared John a little, too. She was fast before … now no one could touch her if she didn’t allow it.
Fred sat cross-legged on the deck, twirling a razor-edged combat knife in glittering arcs. He always came in second in all the contests. John thought he could have come in first, but he just didn’t like the attention. He was neither too short nor too tall. He wasn’t overly muscled or slim. His black hair was shot with streaks of silver—a feature he hadn’t had before the augmentation. If anyone in the group could blend into a crowd, it would be him.
Linda was the quietest member of the group. She was pale, had close-cropped red hair, and green eyes. She was a crack shot, an artist with a sniper rifle.
Kelly circled the table once, and then selected a pair of grease-stained blue coveralls. Her name had been sloppily embroidered on the chest. “These our new trainee uniforms?”
“ONI provided them,” John said. “They’re supposed to match what the crew of the Laden wears.”
Kelly held the coveralls up and frowned. “They don’t give a girl much to work with.”
“Try this on for size.” Linda held a black bodysuit up to Kelly’s long slender frame.
They had used these black suits before. They were formfitting, lightweight polymer body armor. They could deflect a small-caliber round and had refrigeration/heating units that would mask infrared signatures. The integrated helmet had encryption and communications gear, a heads-up display, and thermal and motion detectors. Sealed tight, the unit had a fifteen-minute reserve of oxygen to let the wearer survive in a vacuum.
The suits were uncomfortable, and they were tricky to repair in the field. And they always needed repairs.
“They’re too tight,” Kelly said. “It’ll limit my range of motion.”
“We wear them for this op,” John told her. “There are too many places between here and there with nothing to breathe but vacuum. As for the rest of your equipment, take what you want—but stay light. Without recon data on this place, we’re going to be moving fast … or we’ll be dead.”
The team started selecting their weapons first.
“Three-ninety caliber?” Fred asked.
“Yes,” John replied. “Everyone take guns that use .390-caliber ammunition so we can share clips if we have to. Except Linda.”
Linda gravitated to a matte-black long-barreled rifle—the SRS99C-S2 AM. The sniper rifle system had modular sections: scopes, stocks, barrels, even the firing mechanism could be swapped. She quickly stripped the rifle down and reconfigured it. She assembled a flash-and-sound suppression barrel, and then to compensate for the lower muzzle velocity, she increased the ammunition caliber to .450. She ditched all the sights and scopes and settled for an integrated link to her helmet’s heads-up display. She pocketed five extended ammunition clips.
John also chose an MA2B, a cut-down version of the standard MA5B assault rifle. It was tough and reliable, with electronic targeting and an ammo supply indicator. It also had a recoil-reduction system, and could deliver an impressive fifteen rounds per second.
He picked up a knife: twenty-centimeter blade, one serrated edge, nonreflective titanium carbide, and balanced for throwing.
John grabbed the panic button—a tiny single-shot emergency beacon. It had two settings. The red setting alerte
d the Pioneer that it had hit the fan, and to come in guns blazing. The green setting merely marked the location of the base for later assault by the UNSC.
He took a double handful of ammo clips—then paused. He set them down and pocketed five. If they got into a firefight where he’d need that much firepower, their mission was over anyway.
Everyone took similar equipment, with a few variations. Kelly selected a small computer pad with IR links. She also had their field medical kit.
Fred packed a standard-issue lockbreaker.
Linda selected three NAV marker transmitters, each the size of a tick. The trackers could be adhered to an object and would broadcast that object’s location to the Spartans’ heads-up displays.
Sam hefted two medium-size backpacks—“damage packs.” They were filled with C-12, enough high explosives to blow through three meters of battleship armor plate.
“You have enough of that stuff?” Kelly asked him wryly.
“You think I should take more?” Sam replied, and smiled. “Nothing like a little fireworks to celebrate the end of a mission.”
“Everyone ready?” John asked.
Sam’s smile disappeared and he slapped an extended clip into his MA2B. “Ready!”
Kelly gave him John a thumbs-up.
Fred and Linda nodded.
“Then let’s go to work.”
CHAPTER
TEN
1210 HOURS, SEPTEMBER 14, 2525 (MILITARY CALENDAR) / ERIDANUS SYSTEM, ERIDANUS II SPACE DOCK, CIVILIAN CARGO SHIP, LADEN (REGISTRY NUMBER F-0980W)
“Spartan-117: in position. Next check-in at 0400.” John clicked off the microphone, encrypted the message, and fed it into his COM relay. He triggered a secure burst transmission to the Athens, the ONI prowler ship on station a few AUs distant.
He and his teammates climbed onto the upper girders. In silence, the team rigged a web of support nets so they could rest in relative comfort. Below them lay a hundred thousand liters of black water, and surrounding them, two centimeters of stainless steel. Sam rigged the fill sensor so the reservoir’s computer wouldn’t let any more water flow into the storage tank. The lights in their helmets cast a pattern of crossing and crisscrossing reflection lines.
A perfect hiding spot—all according to plan, John thought, and allowed himself a small grin of triumph. The tech specs that ONI had procured on the Laden showed a number of hydroponic pods mounted around the ship’s carousel system, something not uncommon for this class. The massive water tanks used gravity feed to irrigate the ship’s space-grown crops.
Perfect.
They had easily slipped past the lone guard in the Laden’s main cargo bay and into the nearly deserted center section. The water tank would mask their thermal signatures, and block any motion sensors.
The only risky element entered the picture if the center section stopped spinning … things could get very messy inside the tank, very fast. But John doubted that would happen.
Kelly set up a tiny microwave relay outside the top hatch. She propped her data pad on her stomach and linked to the ship’s network. “I’m in,” she reported. “There’s no AI or serious encryption … accessing their system now.” She tapped the pad a few more times and activated the intrusion software—the best that ONI could provide. A moment later the pad pulsed to indicate success.
“They’ve got a NAV trajectory to the asteroid belt. ETA is ten hours.”
“Good work,” John said. “Team: we’ll sleep in shifts.” Sam, Fred, and Linda snapped off their flashlights.
The tank reverberated as the Laden’s engines flared to life. The water tilted as they accelerated away from the orbital docking station.
John remembered Eridanus II—vaguely recalled that it once was home. He wondered if his old school, his family, were still there—
He squelched his curiosity. Speculation made for a fine mental exercise, but the mission came first. He had to stay alert—or failing that, grab some sleep so he would be alert when he needed to be. Chief Mendez must have told them a thousand times: “Rest can be as deadly a weapon as a pistol or grenade.”
“I’ve got something,” Kelly whispered, and handed him her data pad.
It displayed the cargo manifest for the Laden. John scrolled down the list: water, flour, milk, frozen orange juice, welding rods, superconducting magnets for a fusion reactor … no mention of weapons.
“I give up,” he said. “What am I looking for?”
“I’ll give you a hint,” Kelly replied. “The Chief smokes them.”
John flicked back through the list. There: Sweet William cigars. Next to them on the manifest was a crate of champagne, a Procyon vintage. There were fast-chilled New York steaks, and Swiss chocolates. These items were stored in a secure locker. They had the same routing codes.
“Luxury items,” Kelly murmured. “I bet they’re headed straight for a special delivery to Colonel Watts or his officers.”
“Good work,” John replied. “We’ll tag this stuff and follow it.”
“Won’t be that easy,” Fred said from the darkness. He flicked on his flashlight and peered back at John. “There are a million ways this can go wrong. We’re going in without recon. I don’t like it.”
“We only have one advantage on this mission,” John said. “The rebels have never been infiltrated—they’ll feel relatively safe and won’t be expecting us. But every extra second we stay … that’s another chance for us to be spotted. We’ll follow Kelly’s hunch.”
“You questioning orders?” Sam asked Fred. “Scared?” There was a slight hint of challenge in his voice.
Fred thought for a moment. “No,” he whispered. “But this is no training mission. Our targets won’t be firing stun rounds.” He sighed. “I just don’t want to fail.”
“We’re not going to fail,” John told him. “We’ve accomplished every mission we’ve been on before.”
That wasn’t entirely true: the augmentation mission had wiped out half of the Spartans. They weren’t invincible.
But John wasn’t scared. A little nervous, maybe—but he was ready.
“Rotate sleep cycles,” John said. “Wake me up in four hours.”
He turned over and quickly nodded off to the sound of the sloshing water. He dreamed of gravball and a coin spinning in the air. John caught it and yelled, “Eagle!” as he won again.
He always won.
* * *
Kelly nudged John’s shoulder and he was instantly awake, hand on his assault rifle.
“We’re decelerating,” she whispered, and pointed her light into the water below. The liquid tilted at a twenty-degree inclination.
“Lights off,” John ordered.
They were plunged into total darkness.
He popped the hatch and snaked the fiber-optic probe—attached to his helmet—through the crack. All clear.
They climbed out, then rappelled down the back of the ten-meter-tall tank. They donned their grease-stained coveralls and removed their helmets. The black suits looked a little bulky beneath the work clothes, but the disguise would hold up to a cursory inspection. With their weapons and gear in duffel bags, they’d pass as crew … from a distance.
They crept through a deserted corridor and into the cargo bay. They heard a million tiny metallic pings as gravity settled the ship. The Laden must be docking to a spinning station or a rotating asteroid.
The cargo bay was a huge room, stacked to its ceiling with barrels and crates. There were massive tanks of oil. Automated robot forklifts scurried between rows, checking for items that might have come loose in transit.
There was a terrific clang as a docking clamp grabbed the ship.
“Cigars are this way,” Kelly whispered. She consulted her data pad, then tucked it back into her pocket.
They moved out, clinging to the shadows. They stopped every few meters, listened, and made sure their fields of fire were clear.
Kelly held up her hand and made a fist. She pointed to the secure hatch on the starboar
d side of the hold.
John signaled Fred and Kelly and motioned them to go forward. Fred used the lockbreaker on the door and it popped open. They entered and closed it behind them.
John, Sam, and Linda waited. There was a sudden motion and the Spartans snapped their weapons to firing positions—
A robot forklift passed down an adjacent aisle.
The massive aft doors of the cargo hold parted with a hiss. Light spilled into the hold. A dozen dockworkers dressed in coveralls entered.
John gripped his MA2B tighter. One man looked down the aisle where they crouched in the shadows. He stooped, paused—
John raised his weapon slowly, his hands steady, and sighted on the man’s chest. “Always shoot for center mass,” Mendez had barked during weapons training. The man stood, stretched his back, and moved on, whistling quietly to himself.
Fred and Kelly returned, and Kelly opened and closed her hand, palm out—she had placed the marker.
John grabbed his helmet from his duffel bag and slipped it on. He pinged the navigation marker and saw the blue triangle flash once on his heads-up display. He returned Kelly’s thumbs-up and removed the helmet.
John stowed his helmet and MA2B and motioned for the rest of the team to do the same. They casually walked out of the Laden’s aft cargo hold and onto the rebel base.
The docking bay was hewn from solid rock. The ceiling stretched a kilometer high. Bright lights overhead effectively illuminated the place, looking like tiny suns in the sky. There were hundreds of ships docked within the cavern—tiny single craft, Mako-class corvettes, cargo freighters, and even a captured UNSC Pelican dropship. Each craft was held by massive cranes that traveled on railroad tracks. The tracks led toward a series of large airlock doors. That’s how the Laden must have gotten inside.
There were people everywhere: workers and men in crisp white uniforms. John’s first instinct was to seek cover. Every one of them was a potential threat. He wished he had his gun in hand.
He remained calm and strode among these strangers. He had to set the right example for his team. If his recent encounter with the ODSTs in the gym of the Atlas had been any indication, he knew his team wouldn’t interact well with the natives.
The Fall of Reach Page 8