by Matt Forbeck
Unwilling to let their captive go, some of the Servants trained their rifles on Prone, and Lucy came at them in an all-out rush. When they were forced to turn their attention to her, they fired on her from all sides. Initially, her shields took the brunt of it, but Molly knew they couldn’t protect her forever.
“Shoot!” Molly shouted at Kareem. “Now!”
He hesitated. “What if I hit her?”
“That’s what her armor’s for. And if you don’t shoot, she’ll be dead either way. Shoot!”
Kareem lined up the circle on the Pelican’s viewport with the wall of Servants directing their fire toward Lucy, and he squeezed the trigger on the ship’s controls. The chin-mounted autocannon sprang to life with a beastly thrum and began pouring out hot metal slugs at the Servants.
Several of them spun about and returned fire, but it was too late. They hadn’t thought of the Pelican as a threat, and although they were determined to correct that mistake, Kareem’s booming shots began to hit their marks. The steady volume of heavy firepower easily overwhelmed the Sangheili warriors’ armor, ripping it to shreds, and one after another the Servants fell, most punched through by hundreds of rounds before they could take cover. Those who remained, somehow having found cover among the trees, began taking potshots at the Pelican’s cockpit and engines.
“Keep it up,” said Bakar. “The armor of this aircraft can only take so much.”
Gudam stared out at the carnage in silent horror, and Molly had to sympathize with her. While they knew the Servants would have done the same to them—if not worse—none of them had wanted to kill anyone.
“One with a grenade on your right!” Molly said to Kareem.
He deftly swung the Pelican in that direction, still letting loose with the guns, and pulverized the Servant midthrow. The hapless warrior dropped the live grenade among his fellows, and the explosion sent a fountain of dirt and dark blue blood into the air.
Molly patted Gudam on the shoulder, trying to comfort her. It wasn’t fair that they’d been pushed into this, but there weren’t any other options. This wasn’t murder. It was self-defense.
They were protecting themselves. They were protecting Lucy.
They were protecting Onyx.
In less than a minute, Kareem had taken out all of the Servants, and the Pelican’s guns wound down, smoke writhing from their hot barrels. Prone floated over to the ship as Kareem opened the hatch, but Molly ignored the Huragok while she sprinted across the broken ground to reach Lucy, who wasn’t moving.
When Molly found her, Lucy had a dead Servant draped across her—or parts of one, at least. Molly tried to pull the Sangheili off, but he proved too heavy. Fortunately, Bakar raced up and lent a hand, dragging away the warrior’s corpse.
Lucy had a hole burned into her right leg where a plasma blast had gone straight through her armor. The hot plasma seemed to have cauterized the wound, so she wasn’t bleeding, but she wasn’t moving either.
Lucy suddenly reached up and wrestled her helmet off, then gasped for fresh air. “Ow,” she said in a soft, raw voice, looking at the hole in her leg. “That’s going to leave a mark.”
“You’re alive!” Molly wanted to wrap her in a hug but was afraid she might injure her.
“Spartans never die.” Lucy grimaced in pain as she tried to move her leg. “But that doesn’t mean we don’t hurt.”
Molly and Bakar helped the Spartan to her feet—though it was Lucy doing most of the work. They could only do so much to assist someone in armor that weighed as much as a dump truck. Lucy leaned slightly on Bakar as she limped and hopped her way back to the Pelican.
“How did you know where to find us?” Molly asked.
“Prone sent me a message asking for help. Whenever he sends me anything, I know it’s important. He and I go way back. We’re pretty tight. You know I was the first human he ever met?”
“How much do you know about what is happening in Paxopolis then?” Bakar asked. “The Guardian shut down the power of the entire city and the research complex.”
“The Guardian? You mean the thing from Project: GOLIATH?” Lucy stopped for a moment to catch her breath. “Well, it might have taken out all of the power inside Trevelyan and Paxopolis, but I was pretty far away when that went down. Whatever it did, it didn’t reach me.”
By the time the group made it to the Pelican, Gudam already had Prone to Drift secured in the passenger bay. Lucy crawled into the space and lay down on the open floor, her breathing still ragged. “Sorry, kids. But there’s no way I’m climbing into that cockpit right now. We’ll have to hunker down here and wait for a ride.”
“What about the rest of the Servants?” Molly asked. “They could be on their way here right now.”
“We’ll just have to lock up and take that chance.”
“Kareem’s a pilot!” Gudam said. “He can take us wherever we need to go.”
Lucy peered toward where Kareem was still sitting in the cockpit. “Ever flown a Pelican before?”
“Lots of times. In simulation.”
Lucy winced in pain and lay back down again. “Well, we’re not talking about flying it into a dogfight. That might do.”
Kareem started to go through the ship’s preflight procedure. “Where should we go? Back to the Pax Institute?”
Molly looked down at Lucy on the floor. “Maybe the hospital instead?”
Prone to Drift vigorously shook his head, and she wondered why he didn’t just speak to them. Molly glanced at his belly and saw that in his captivity someone had shattered his slate.
“You have a better idea where to go?” Molly asked.
Prone nodded and turned his entire body about to point toward the left of the craft.
“What’s in that direction?” Molly asked everyone else.
“Perhaps he means the Guardian,” Bakar said.
“That’s right!” said Gudam. “I remember! Prone put the sphere into slipspace to cut us off from the outside, but he said that the Guardian would be trying to bring us back out. I wonder if we’re not too late.”
Lucy groaned out loud. “How much time do we have left before that happens? Days?”
Prone shook its head.
“Hours?” Molly said.
Another shake.
“Minutes?”
This time, Prone nodded.
Gudam squawked at that news. “Now that we showed the AI who activated the Guardian that we can cut her off from us, we’re sure to have gotten her attention. If the Guardian comes back online, she might just give it orders to stamp out Paxopolis and everyone in it. She could even send in other Guardians to help—a whole army of those things.”
“So,” Bakar said, “we are doomed.”
“Maybe not,” said Molly. “When we left the Institute, the Guardian had gone into a kind of standby mode. The machines it had already released were continuing to fight the local security forces, but that was it. The Guardian itself wasn’t doing anything to help them. If we can stop it before it comes back online, we can stop it from sending Onyx back into realspace, and we can probably keep everyone else locked out too. The question is, how are we going to do that?”
All eyes turned toward Lucy. She shrugged. “Not really sure how these Guardians are designed or what could bring that thing down, but this bird doesn’t have a ton of armament options. Just the forward autocannon and some missile pods on its wings.”
Molly focused back on Prone to Drift. “What do we need to do to stop it?”
The Huragok turned to Lucy and pointed at his own stomach, where his destroyed slate still sat embedded.
“Hey,” Lucy called to Kareem. “We need to get Prone’s slate fixed. Is there anything up there we can use?”
“I think there’s a long-range comms pad in a side compartment. It’s not exactly like what Prone had before though. Not sure if it’ll work.” Kareem quickly found it and brought it to the rear bay.
“If anyone can make it work, it would be Prone,” Molly said, g
iving it to the Huragok. Prone cradled it in his tentacles for a moment, his feathery cilia working feverishly to pull the back off the device and rewire it. Meanwhile, with a spare tentacle, he removed the broken slate, which had been damaged beyond repair. Once the new pad was ready, he slotted it into place.
A moment later, a voice miraculously emerged from the attached pad. “If I can get close enough to the Guardian,” Prone said in a calm and steady voice, “I should be able to disable the gravitational field that holds it together.”
Gudam clapped her hands together. “Which would bring it all crashing down!”
“Onto Trevelyan and Paxopolis,” Bakar responded. “What about the people there?”
“One problem at a time,” Molly said.
Kareem eyed Prone suspiciously. “How close?”
“Near the armature mainframe, located in the structure that looks like a face. Inside this are its vital systems. If I can reach that location, I can disable its gravitics. This will cause a systemic breakdown that would rend its component segments apart and send it to the ground. It should stop it permanently.”
“Which means it wouldn’t be able to bring us out of slipspace,” Molly said. “Onyx would be safe.”
Kareem let out a long breath. “Yeah, that’s close. Really close.”
Molly glanced around at the others. “We’re running out of time, and I doubt anyone at Trevelyan or Paxopolis can even get up there to do this. It’s up to us.”
They looked to Lucy for permission. She gave a slight smile and then a thumbs-up.
“Well,” Bakar said, “what are we waiting for?”
CHAPTER 36
* * *
* * *
Are you sure you can fly this thing?” Molly asked Kareem as she stared down at the ship’s control panel with its dizzying array of lights, keys, and throttles.
“How hard can it be?” Kareem cracked his knuckles. “I got the guns working, didn’t I?”
Gudam peeked around Molly to give Kareem a wary eye. “You don’t die in a fiery wreck if you can’t get the guns working.”
“Look, it’s not all that far—and I can’t make any guarantees, but I put plenty of hours in on the simulator. Of course, I was mostly flying Hornets and Wasps—but I know the Pelican. I can do it.”
“This doesn’t strike me as the safest idea in the world,” Gudam said nervously.
“We don’t have any choice,” Lucy said from the back. She’d been trying to hold things together, but she was starting to slur her words and was fading fast. “Let’s get started.”
Kareem spun up the Pelican’s vertical jets, and the ship hummed to life with new intensity. “Roger that, Spartan. Everyone got their seats?”
He took the controls as confidently as he could manage, and the ship rose off the ground. Then it suddenly tipped over to the right and dragged the tip of the wing along the turf, canting to the side.
They all winced, but Kareem wrestled the Pelican back to level. “Okay, that’s a bit touchier than I expected. Sorry about that.”
The ship lurched downward, but it hauled up shy of smashing into the ground. “That’s it,” Kareem said slowly, as if talking to a skittish animal on a fragile leash. “I’m getting the hang of this.” He brought the dropship high into the air. The Guardian hung in the far distance, probably a hundred kilometers away. “Nice and easy.”
He pushed the accelerator lever, and the Pelican shot forward. Strapped in, he and Gudam were fine, but the rest of them—except for Prone to Drift, who had already held on to a strap in the ceiling with his tentacles—almost went tumbling backward. At the last instant, they managed to grab handholds to steady themselves instead.
“Sorry!” Kareem shouted, as the ground far below swept behind them and the Guardian grew larger in the viewport. Molly felt relieved to be in the air, where at least no more of Onyx’s massive monsters could attack them.
Of course, they now had to worry about dying in a catastrophic crash.
Not to mention dealing with that Forerunner machine that seemed to stare gravely at them from far off. It may have been inactive, but its scowling face was still intimidating, even from this distance.
Once they felt confident enough to move about the bay, Molly and Bakar scrambled back to Lucy and discovered she’d passed out. “The pain must have been too much for her,” Bakar said.
“Maybe it’s for the best,” Molly said.
“How so?”
“At least she won’t have to watch us die.”
It occurred to Molly that they hadn’t asked any parents for permission for any of this. Or Kasha or Mendez. They’d barely even asked Lucy. They’d just made a decision and gone with it.
What choice did we have?
As Bakar had once said, It is simpler to wipe off your blade once it has been blooded. Molly wasn’t sure that was the best analogy for what they were doing, but it felt close enough.
If they failed, they wouldn’t have to worry about any kind of punishment from anyone anyhow. They were either going to be heroes or they were going to be dead.
The Guardian soon loomed large in the viewport before them, so big it felt as if they were flying toward a mountain. The lights that had once glowed along its edges were dark now, and the machine’s headlike structure had fallen slack. Even its wings had come down from the last time Molly had seen them.
To Molly, the Guardian almost looked defeated already. She had to remind herself it was only sleeping. And if the machine managed to rouse itself, they’d be the ones who were done.
“How much time do we have left?” Molly asked Prone to Drift. “Before it wakes up and sends us back into realspace?”
Molly had half expected Prone to project a countdown clock on his tablet, but he just shook his head back and forth. “There is no way to know for sure,” the Huragok said through the slate. “There are no protocols for such an event.”
“Excellent,” Molly snapped.
“Maybe it’ll be all day,” Gudam said hopefully. “There’s no reason why it can’t be all day, right?”
Prone shook his head from side to side, sinuously like a snake. “Since the moment I enclosed Onyx in slipspace, the Guardian’s subsystems have no doubt been trying to find a way to get around it. To pick the lock from the inside. It is a machine of incredible power and capacity. It will eventually get through.”
Molly saw sweat beading on Kareem’s forehead. His knuckles had turned white while he gripped the controls, and the Guardian had swelled large enough to fill almost the entire viewport. “I’m flying as fast as I can!”
Below, Molly saw the Pax Institute zip by on their right, then a number of towers and structures from Paxopolis went past soon after that. Pockets of scorched ground and debris from the initial defense effort remained scattered throughout, columns of black smoke marking where the frigates and fighters had crashed. They would reach Trevelyan soon.
Before being cut from outside communication, the Guardian had been hovering over Trevelyan, perhaps looking to take control of the aperture so it could allow ships inside Onyx. Below it sat the landing pad and terminals the Milwaukee had used when Molly had first arrived weeks ago. It seemed as if it had been so much longer than that.
Molly wondered about her Newparents. Had they been at work when all this happened? Had they made it home? Had they at least found each other?
Did they have any idea what had happened to her?
Molly hoped not. She wanted them to think she was sitting safely in the dining hall at the Pax Institute, doing anything to pass the time as the day wore on and the adults solved the bigger problems.
That way they wouldn’t worry about Molly. They wouldn’t know a thing about this incredibly brave and stupid thing she and her friends were about to do until it was over. By that time, no matter what happened, it would be too late for them to worry.
Then Molly saw the Guardian’s wings shift upward slightly, and she knew they’d already run out of time.
“It’s moving!” Molly shouted. “It’s waking up!”
Kareem, to his credit, didn’t panic. He didn’t slow down or veer away. He kept straight on course, headed right for the construct’s head. If anything, he flew faster now than he had before.
“What’s that mean?” Gudam almost sounded relieved. “Can we go home? I mean, what’s the point of trying to take on a Guardian that’s actually active? We don’t have a chance against that. Right?”
“The Guardian has managed to open a slipspace communication channel,” Prone to Drift said. “But the slipspace enclosure is still holding.”
“For how long?” Bakar asked. He was gripping the back of Kareem’s chair so hard his fingers were sinking into it.
“It is on the order of minutes. No more.” The deadpan delivery of voice from the Huragok’s tablet made Molly more anxious than a panicked report would have. Like a stoic diagnosis from a medical machine telling her she had a fatal disease, it just seemed unreal.
“Do we still have a chance to take it apart, Prone?” Molly asked. “Or is this all over?”
Prone to Drift hesitated for a moment. “Our chances of success have plummeted, as the Guardian may now defend itself against us.”
“I asked if it’s over!”
“The odds have yet to approach zero.”
Molly reached over and patted Kareem on the shoulder. “You heard him. Take us in.”
A thin, determined smile rose on Kareem’s lips. “My mom’s going to kill me for this.”
“She’ll be lucky if she has the chance.”
The Guardian seemed to notice them coming, possibly because nothing else hung in the sky. It began to turn, squaring its position with the Pelican and staring directly at them.
As it did, it opened its wings wide, like an angel about to take flight. Blue energy flared from a series of ports at its center, all the way out to the tips of its wings, and it emitted a deep howling sound that felt powerful enough to shake the entire shield world.