by Various
“You know what it is we do, captain.” The Spartan shot a last glance over his shoulder at Leone, then donned the helmet, shutting off the sight of anything that made him seem human. “We are not delicate weapons. Put us in the field and things get broken.” He started walking away. “Believe me when I tell you. . . . You don’t want me close.”
Night fell quickly on Losing Hand, and Leone toggled the Warthog’s high beams to illuminate the trail in front of them through a veil of needle-fine rain. Robertson didn’t talk for a long while, but when he did, there was venom in it.
“So much for the hero,” began the sergeant, raising his voice over the rumble of the engine. “Looks like we’re on our own from here.”
“Kevin made his choice,” said Leone.
“Begging your pardon, Captain—you could have forced him.”
Leone caught the other man’s eye in the reflection on the inside of the windshield. “You think so?” He snorted. “Kevin’s no good to us unless he’s on his own terms.”
Robertson grunted with cold amusement. “With all due respect, sir, you really think we’re going to handle the Covies without his backup?”
Leone looked away. “Those aliens up there—even if it is them—are not our first concern, Sergeant,” he told him. “The locals are. You were at the town meeting; you’ve been on this damn rock for as long as anyone else, so you tell me! Ever since planetfall, we’ve been on the ragged edge with these people, and now someone’s going to go over. We don’t deal with this, and there won’t need to be an attack. . . . We’ll kill each other first.”
Robertson eyed him. “Those colonists like playing all that salt-of-the-earth, lone-pioneer crap. But if you’ll allow me to say, sir, these Losers think this planet is the whole universe. They’re too busy arguing over who gets to be in charge of it to notice anyone sneaking up behind them.” He leaned back in his seat. “If it were up to me? I’d declare martial law right here and now.”
Leone frowned. He had to admit Robertson’s evaluation of the fishers was close to his own, but the sergeant’s solution to dealing with them was a fast track to armed revolt. The captain pulled a gloved hand over his face, trying to rub away the fatigue weighing him down.
How the hell am I going to deal with this?
But then the radio crackled, heavy with renewed flare static, and the liberty of giving that question a thorough consideration evaporated.
“Ship to CO, respond!” Maher’s voice was urgent.
Leone tapped his comm bead. “CO copies.”
“Sir, we have a serious problem. The unknown craft has increased its delta-vee. It’s going to be here tonight.”
The Warthog skidded to a halt in the cargo bay, its rain-slick tires spinning on the metal deck. Outside, the downpour increased, throwing haze off the floodlights that illuminated the landing strip.
Leone vaulted out to find Maher marching toward him. The junior officer’s usually impeccable appearance was rough around the edges, his eyes haunted. “Report,” ordered the captain.
Maher took a breath, then said: “The solar flares have been increasing since the afternoon, and we kept losing the feed from the orbital drone. Something seemed off. . . .” He frowned, running a hand through his hair. “I had the techs pull what they could from the data, and it was confirmed. The intruder ship put on a burst of velocity.”
At his side, Leone heard Robertson curse under his breath. “Where is it now, Lieutenant?”
“Unknown. The drone’s gone dark, probably cycled into shutdown mode to weather the flares. The ship’s sensors are scanning the horizon, but we’ve got nothing.”
Silence fell between them, the hissing of the rain the only sound in the bay. Leone knew the crew was waiting for him to make the next decision. But we don’t have all the answers, said a voice in his head. Did that alien ship speed up to avoid the flares, or are they using them as cover?
And then something else occurred to him, just as Corporal Douglas came sprinting into the bay, her sodden parka trailing streamers of rainwater. “Sir! Coming up the road from the town—we’ve got twenty-plus foot mobiles, and a bunch of them are armed.”
“The fishers?” said Robertson.
Douglas nodded. “Captain, they look really pissed off.”
“What the drone sees, we all see,” said Maher, recalling what Leone had said when he granted the colonists use of the satellite link.
Leone drew his coat tighter around his shoulders and walked back toward the open cargo hatch. “I’m going out there. I’ll talk to them.” Robertson hefted his MA5 rifle and took a step after him, but Leone held up a hand. “Alone.”
“That’s a bad call,” insisted the sergeant. “Let me get some men, sir. Farrant and Channell, a couple of the others. They won’t hesitate if it comes to taking a shot.”
The noncoms had never really shown much respect for Leone as their commander, and maybe that came from circumstance. Before the war started, before Losing Hand, Darren Leone had been biding his time as Dark Was the Night’s helmsman, marking out the months until the end of his last tour. He knew what the others on board thought of him; that he was a makeweight officer running down the clock before he cashed out, only held over because of the war with the Covenant.
But circumstance had thrust him into this situation, made him captain of a ship by nature of the chain of command, given him responsibilities he had never wanted. In that moment, he felt like he was carrying the entire weight of the vessel on his back.
Leone straightened and gave Robertson a hard glare. “Your input is noted, Sergeant,” he told him firmly, putting hard emphasis on the rank. “You will hold here. That’s an order.” The captain marched out into the rain, not pausing to see if he was being obeyed.
There were a lot more than twenty, Leone realized. Low-trucks and ATVs arrived with the crowd of colonists, forming them into a loose cluster of hooded shapes in heavy coats and waterproof overalls.
Leone counted several firearms, mostly pump-action shotguns and hunting rifles, but alarmingly he spotted a couple of Covenant plasma pistols in some hands and found himself wondering how alien war salvage had found its way to this backwater world. He kept his hands at his sides, letting his parka’s hood flap back to show his face. “That’s close enough,” he called as they approached the edge of the landing apron.
He didn’t need to guess who was leading them. “You don’t tell us what to do, Leone.” Ryan Larsson had a shotgun of his own, a long and nasty-looking weapon. “You mind your damn job, man!”
“That’s been my deal since day one,” he replied, catching sight of Aoife standing close by. She was unarmed, and Leone saw his own fears reflected in her face.
“You tell us why those cannons ain’t up and runnin’!” came a shout—the old woman from the town meeting pushing forward so she could be heard. She jabbed a finger toward the turrets on Dark Was the Night’s dorsal hull, all of them drooping downward to aim at nothing. “Fire ’em up!”
“Fire up! Fire up!” Her words sparked off a brief chorus of heated chants from Larsson’s supporters.
“Babs here makes a good point,” Larsson snapped. “What are you waiting for, Captain? Or do we have to defend ourselves?” He gestured with the shotgun. “All your talk about the UNSC and your responsibility to us, but that Covie warship is on its way, and what are you?” He spat on the concrete. “Asleep at the switch?”
“You need to go back to your homes and stay there,” Leone told them. “Until we know what the situation is—”
“Situation?!” shouted another voice. “We saw the drone feed—it’s an invasion!”
Larsson nodded toward the ship. “Your own men agree with me, Leone. You know it, and I know it!”
More voices joined in, each one raised in anger, and every cry was backed by the sure belief that war had come to Losing Hand. Nothing Leone could say would sway them—he saw that now.
His only hope was to tell the truth.
“The guns
won’t fire.”
“What?” Larsson blinked and wiped rain from his face, as if that would make the captain’s words add up. “What the hell do you mean?”
“The point-defense weapons were dead before we landed on this planet,” Leone went on, spilling it all. “Our defensive and offensive systems were knocked out when the ship’s main circuit bus was fried. We barely classed as combat-capable when we were at full kick. Right now . . . we’ve got nothing.”
Larsson’s face turned an ugly shade of crimson. “You’re a lying sack of dregs, is what you are.” The terror and the panic the man had been keeping in check under the cloak of his rage threatened to break through. “So make them work, then!” he bellowed. “We need them!”
“My chief engineer has been trying to do that for months. It’s not going to happen.”
“You liar!” Larsson roared at him. “Did you pull the plug on those guns yourself, you damn coward?” The accusation spread through the crowd, all of them finding a sudden new reason to hate Leone and the uniform he wore. They didn’t need any truth to push them to it.
“Oh gods . . .” Aoife went pale as the reality of it set in.
Leone drew in a deep breath of wet air and called out, his voice carrying across the landing field. “Go back, all of you! We are going to meet this! That’s why we’re here—that’s what we do!”
“This is our home,” said Aoife. “We can’t just stand aside and do nothing.”
“You stay and it’ll end in bloodshed,” Leone told her. “We both know that.”
She understood—but she was only one person, and her brother’s fury was drowning her out.
“I told you before,” Larsson snarled, advancing on him, “you don’t tell us what to do!”
The black maw of the shotgun barrel came up toward Leone’s face and he flinched, staggering back a step. He twisted, seeing figures in green spilling out of the transport, soldiers led by Robertson, with rifles in their hands. Behind Larsson and his sister, the colonists raised their own weapons, safety catches rattling as they were loosed.
“No! No!” Leone brought up his hands, calling toward his crew. “Stand down! Back off and stand down!”
There hadn’t been a true war fought between humans since the Covenant had invaded, not since the shadow of the Insurrection lay over the galaxy—but no one had forgotten.
Robertson hesitated, and for a moment Leone thought he would ignore the order; but then the UNSC troopers pulled back from the edge and the muzzles of their rifles dipped toward the ground.
“Larsson . . . Ryan.” Leone met the other man’s gaze. “You have to trust me. Whoever they are, they’re coming here, and we can’t stop that. But if we do this wrong, everyone dies.”
“Listen to him!” shouted Aoife.
“Leone . . .” Larsson drew out his name in a low growl. “You’re old and you’re weak.”
The shotgun spun in the younger man’s grip, and the butt of the weapon came around in a blur of motion, cracking the captain across the face.
The world spun about, and Leone crumpled to the ground, cold asphalt slamming into him. He blinked away pain and looked up to see the gun filling his vision.
“And you’re in the way,” said Larsson, his finger on the trigger.
The echo of the single shot cut through the rain like a clap of thunder, and in its wake, time seemed to slow, the moment pulling against itself.
The gun in Larsson’s hand shattered halfway down its length, hammered into pieces by the pinpoint impact of an armor-piercing round fired from a quarter mile away. Larsson howled in pain, stumbling back as he frantically brushed fragments of red-hot metal from his coat.
Leone stared at the broken stub of the weapon as it lay sizzling on the wet asphalt before him, and then rose slowly to his feet. He instinctively turned in the direction of the gunshot and saw a towering figure jog into the nimbus of light from the overhead floods.
The Spartan slowed to a walk, cradling the sniper rifle in his hands, and Leone remembered an image he had once seen in a museum of a medieval knight carrying a lance. A blue armored gauntlet worked the rifle’s slide, and a brass shell spun out of the breech before the weapon went up over Kevin-A282’s shoulder and onto his back.
He followed us, Leone realized. He changed his mind. . . . Must have run all the way here. . . .
The expressionless gold visor scanned the faces of the colonists in the crowd. “You all want to think very carefully about what you do next,” he told them. The Spartan halted next to Leone and looked him up and down, taking the captain in with a glance and seeing he was uninjured. “Reporting for duty, sir.”
Larsson was in worse shape, however. Blood streamed off his hand, and his face was twisted. “You see this?!” he shouted, looking wildly at his comrades. He was searching for support and didn’t find it. Aoife shook her head, but he didn’t acknowledge her. A smarter man—a man ruled more by his hopes than his fears—might have backed off, but Ryan Larsson took the other road and went all in. “We don’t obey, so they bring in the attack dog!”
“If you’re ready to fight,” said the Spartan, “make sure you got the right target.” He nodded at Leone. “That’s not your enemy.” He moved to Larsson, towering over him, and prodded him in the chest with one ironclad finger, right above the heart. “What’s in here is. What you’re afraid of.”
“Ryan, we can’t fight each other,” his sister broke in. “This isn’t about who is in charge—it’s about survival!”
“She’s right,” Leone said, between heavy breaths. He caught a crackle of radio static in his ear, but his comm bead had been damaged by the blow from the butt of the shotgun, and the voice beneath the interference was unintelligible.
“You heard the captain,” said the Spartan, looking past the defeated expression that ghosted over Larsson’s face, toward the other colonists. “Go back to your homes and—”
Above them, the low cowl of oily gray cloud suddenly turned white, as if sheet lightning had exploded behind it. A powerful gust of wind battered down, and the clouds were pushed apart like an opening iris, projected away by the invisible force of gravity-control technology.
“Too late,” said Aoife, the words falling from her lips as they all turned to look into the night sky.
The alien ship had that same cetacean aspect to it that seemed to characterize all of the Covenant’s vessels. Smooth-skinned and curved where human craft were hard-edged and angular, the corvette looked like it should have been undulating through some deep ocean current rather than floating down toward the landing strip. The rain stopped, the clouds temporarily displaced by the vessel’s arrival, but the iridescent shell still glistened like annealed steel.
Half the size of a habitat block, it had about the same mass as Dark Was the Night, but it was still big enough to contain dropships and fighters, or a full battle cohort of alien warriors.
The air throbbed with power as the craft pivoted and settled into a low hover a few meters above the ground. The sound faded back to a low, menacing purr.
Robertson and the rest of the UNSC troopers formed a skirmish line, and Leone took a step toward them—but the Spartan put out a hand and stopped him before he could move away.
“Moment of truth,” he said.
All the raw panic, all the fears that Leone had locked away in the back of his mind now came flooding into him as a single certainty became clear. Whatever happens now, this is on me. I’m responsible for these people—all of them.
If this was an attack, then nobody on Losing Hand would survive to see the break of dawn. The fate of these people and Dark Was the Night would be lost to the ether, and it would be on his watch. Above, the clouds rolled back and the rain returned in force.
“There,” said the Spartan, and he pointed toward the flank of the vessel. A line of neon-blue appeared in a seam of the hull, and presently it enlarged to become a doorway. The ship extruded a ramp to the ground, and shadows within grew larger.
One of them stepped out into the downpour and took its first step onto the surface of Losing Hand. Leone met the gaze of the alien creature, and his breath caught in his throat. He had to stop himself from drawing his M6 through sheer ingrained reflex as the emerald-armored Sangheili craned its long neck around to take them in.
It marched forward, kneading the inert hilt of a plasma sword in its talon-like fingers. The alien’s quadripartite jaws flexed as it sucked in a breath and exhaled. The Elite’s gaze found Leone and the Larssons, barely giving them a look before settling on the Spartan. Its lips curled in what could only be a sneer.
But other shapes were moving behind it. Next out of the ship came a peculiar life-form that floated above the ground, trailing thin cilia beneath it. A single, serpentine head bobbed on a long neck, its attention drawn directly to the UNSC transport.
“What in the storms is that?” whispered Aoife. “Looks like a bag of snakes tied to a balloon. . . .”
“It’s a Huragok,” Leone told her. “The Covenant call them ‘Engineers.’ They can pretty much fix anything, so I’ve heard.”
The third figure to leave the alien ship was a human. Wearing UNSC battle armor, the muscular man had pale features and a shock of short ginger hair. He gave the Sangheili a sideways look and the alien nodded to him, stepping aside to let him speak. “Who’s in charge here?”
Leone glanced at the Larssons. “Well, come on, then. Just don’t do anything stupid.”
Ryan and Aoife warily fell in step with Leone and the Spartan as they came forward.
He gave a salute. “Captain Darren Leone, acting CO of UNSC Dark Was the Night.” He introduced Kevin-A282 and the colonists, and now that he was up close, Leone studied the new arrivals for some clue as to just what in the hell was going on here.