by Matt Forbeck
“Can it shoot us down?” Molly asked.
“Its primary weapon systems are not online yet,” Prone responded, “but it may have passive systems.”
“I got us here.” Kareem hauled back the dropship to a sudden hovering stop only a few hundred meters from the Guardian. “What now?”
“Get me to the Guardian’s system mainframe. It is located near the head structure,” Prone to Drift said. “I can take it from there.”
As they edged closer to the Guardian, what looked like a power core in the middle of its torso began to glow brighter and brighter. As it reached a crescendo, it pulsed hard, and a flash radiated out from inside it like the shock wave of an explosion.
When the wave hit the Pelican, it buffeted the ship hard. Gudam screamed, and Kareem fought to keep the ship under control. Rather than continuing on toward the Guardian, he veered away and found that he could steer the ship easily once again.
“If it’s going to do that every time we get close, this is going to be one hell of a rough ride,” Kareem said. He spun the ship away from the Guardian and brought it around to make another pass at the construct.
“That may be its passive form of defense,” Prone to Drift said. “A shunting mechanism.”
Another blast sent the Pelican back even farther, as though the Guardian were swatting them away with an invisible field of energy.
“There’s no way I can get through that,” Kareem said.
“Not from this angle,” Molly said. “But maybe with a little help from gravity?”
She pointed up toward the sky above the Guardian, and Kareem nodded as he got the idea. “Yeah. The waves are coming at us head-on. That might just do it.”
“This is insane,” Gudam said, as Kareem raised the Pelican’s nose toward the sky and accelerated, bringing them higher and higher with every second. “It’s never going to work. What if we’re lining up directly with its weapons?”
“You have any other ideas?” Molly asked. “This is the only way.”
She understood how Gudam felt, though, and she clapped the Unggoy on the shoulder to show her support. Gudam turned and flung her arms around Molly, pulling her into an almost painful hug.
Molly returned the embrace. She needed it as much as Gudam did.
Then she gazed out the viewport and watched as they ascended high above the Guardian. It seemed to adjust its position slightly, as though it was observing them as they went.
They weren’t going to escape its attention.
“What are you planning?” Prone to Drift said, as the Pelican leveled off high above the Guardian.
“Getting ready to dive in.” Kareem worked the ship’s controls and brought its nose around in a gradual arc so that it was pointing down toward the gigantic creature. The Pelican’s gravity systems held them to its floor, but the juxtaposition with the Guardian outside made Molly’s head spin. They had to be several hundred meters above it, but it was so large it still looked as if they could reach out and touch it from this distance.
“Do you plan to crash this vehicle inside the Guardian?” Prone asked.
Molly realized that they should have probably run this plan by the Huragok before implementing it.
Kareem grimaced. “I wouldn’t say I plan to crash it, but there may be a strong likelihood of that happening.”
“There is no need to put yourself and the others in danger,” Prone to Drift said.
“We can’t come at the Guardian straight on,” Molly said. “It just knocks us away. By coming at it from above, even if it knocks out the power in the ship, gravity will take us the rest of the way.”
“I understand your plan.” The Huragok moved toward the back of the passenger bay. “But there is no need for you to risk your lives.”
Molly wasn’t sure what Prone was getting at. Then it touched the door release with one of its tentacles to open the Pelican’s rear ramp. Outside they could only see open sky. The wind roared into the Pelican, tousling Prone’s tentacles and their hair.
“I can get to the Guardian from here,” Prone’s slate said at full volume.
“What? No!” Molly said. “That’s crazy! You jump out from here, and you’ll die on that thing for sure!”
“I can float,” Prone said in its droning electronic voice. “Heights hold little danger for me.”
“And if the Guardian knocks you away?” Molly asked.
“Do we have any other choice, Molly Patel?”
“Maybe we can keep it distracted!” Bakar said. “Buy you time. Get close enough to get its attention, but not so close it attacks!”
“That sounds like a wonderful plan to me!” Gudam said.
Kareem nodded in agreement. “I think I can work with that!” He was continuing his slow plummet to the top of the Guardian. Soon it would be only a hundred meters away. At this distance, all they could see in the viewport was the construct.
“Very well,” Prone said. “But if you find it preparing to release another blast to shut off the power again, you must flee as far as possible and immediately land on the ground. This will be its first strategy once it regains control over its primary defenses.”
With that, Prone edged to the bay and floated out the back of the Pelican. Within seconds, the winds had carried him completely out of view.
Bakar dashed to the back of the Pelican and slapped the bay door’s release. The ship’s hydraulics whined as they drew the ramp up again. The silence and stillness that came after that didn’t last for long.
“Okay. Hold on, everyone!” Kareem shouted from the cockpit. “I’m going to make sure the Guardian can’t miss us!”
With that, he throttled the Pelican into a steep dive that angled wide of the Guardian by a scant hundred meters. Just as they were passing by the construct’s stern face, Kareem began pulling up and winding toward the right to circle around it. He gave the Guardian a wide berth, but kept close enough so that he could veer toward the machine—or away from it—at any instant.
The light inside the Guardian grew stronger than ever, and Molly wondered if maybe Kareem had miscalculated. If the Guardian let loose with a blast now, it might knock Prone to Drift too far away to reach it in time.
Molly shaded her eyes with her hand as she peered through the upper viewport at the space just above the Guardian’s head. The Huragok looked like nothing more than a fleshy balloon falling down through the sky, waving his tentacles slowly as he went. She worried that he might live up to his name and drift completely off course, if he was indeed prone to that, but he did not waver once in his path.
“Prone is in!” Molly shouted as the Huragok successfully slid between some of the floating parts near the Guardian’s head.
Everyone in the Pelican let out a long-held breath.
“How long do we think he’s going to take to do this?” Kareem asked.
“Hopefully not too long,” Molly said. “Why?”
“Because the Guardian looks like it’s gearing up to do something.”
She saw that the Guardian was slowly gathering energy toward the tips of its enormous wings, and a glowing blue sphere was forming at the machine’s center.
Molly recognized it at the same time as Bakar. This was precisely what Prone had warned them about. The Guardian was going to release another pulse and send the Pelican crashing into the ground.
“Dive for the surface!” Bakar shouted. “We must land, now!”
Kareem didn’t waste any time asking why. He nosed the Pelican straight down for Trevelyan far below, and they dropped faster than a stone.
“What’s going on?” Gudam shouted, as they all clutched at grips on the walls, trying not to get thrown around by the dropship’s momentum.
“The Guardian is about to shut down all power again,” Molly said. “It must have detected Prone inside it, trying to disable it. Maybe it decided this is the only way to get at him.”
“That’s not going to stop him,” Gudam said. “Will it?”
“Who knows,�
� Kareem said. “But it’ll get us for sure. And as high up as we still are . . . ?”
“Go, go, go!” Gudam shouted, now catching Kareem’s meaning. “Less talk, more move!”
Molly watched the ground get closer and closer, and she wondered if maybe Kareem hadn’t misjudged this entirely. At the speed they were going, if he didn’t pull up in time, they were going to wind up splattered all over the research facility.
At least it’ll be a quick end, she thought to herself. Maybe not entirely painless, but quick.
Gudam started screaming, and Molly joined her. A moment later even Kareem pitched in, hauling up on the controls as hard as he could. Bakar didn’t make a sound, but Molly could see the terror etched on his face.
Molly was sure they were all going to die.
But then something amazing happened.
Kareem yanked up the Pelican’s nose at a horrifying angle that nearly tossed her to the ship’s floor. Molly felt them hit something hard, and the entire dropship violently jarred up and back, tumbling over what must have been a tower. This sent most of them rolling to the back end of the craft, where Molly bumped hard against something and then scraped along something even harder.
By looking through the front viewport, Molly could tell the Pelican was spinning, nose to tail. Trevelyan flashed out of view, and the sky and Guardian high above came into it. That’s when she saw the blue light held by the Forerunner construct finally burst, sending out an instantaneous wave in every direction.
The power left the ship entirely. It felt as if the Pelican’s cords had been cut, and its nose now spun toward the ground again, as the vehicle dropped straight down.
Fortunately, the Pelican’s first impact had brought them surprisingly close to the surface. The Pelican hit the ground on its belly and continued to spin laterally. As the viewport came into focus again, Molly saw that Kareem had found a wide-open landing strip and the now-powerless craft was chaotically careening along it, scraping and skittering across its pavement as it ground toward a halt.
After a long, loud, screeching moment, they finally came to rest. They’d all fallen silent, most of them having screamed themselves out of breath. For a moment, they simply stared at one another in astonishment.
They were still alive! They began to cheer, but Molly cut them off.
Looking up through the cockpit’s viewport, she had one huge question that still hadn’t been answered. “What happens if Prone disables the Guardian and it comes down?” Everyone else fell silent. “Where will it land?”
She had been so preoccupied with stopping the Guardian that she had avoided considering the collateral cost. The Guardian had to wind up somewhere when it fell. What kind of damage would it cause, and who might be underneath it when it all came crashing down?
“There’s nothing we can do about that now,” Bakar said. “The protocol in an emergency like this would require evacuation from the area. Hopefully everyone obeyed.”
“We didn’t have a choice, did we?” Molly asked. “If we didn’t do this, a thousand worse things could have happened. This was our only chance. If Prone even succeeds—”
As the words left her mouth, the first piece of the Guardian came crashing to the ground from its tail section. Then another and another.
The gravity that held the ancient machine together had been disabled, no doubt by Prone. When the first piece smashed into the ground behind Trevelyan’s complex of buildings, Molly didn’t see it so much as felt it—like a short but violent earthquake, followed by a series of tremors for each additional segment.
The rest of the construct came hailing down from the sky soon after that, cascading piece by piece, some small and others unimaginably large. Each of them slammed into the ground with the force of an explosion, sending up clouds of dirt and debris, knocking down buildings and other structures, some only a few hundred meters away. Soon the dust and ash from this bombardment spread like a blanket of darkness and choked the air, billowing outward as it swallowed up all of Trevelyan, including the landing strip they’d narrowly made it to.
As the smoke enveloped the cockpit of the Pelican, Molly looked around at the others. My friends, she thought with a smile.
They were filthy, tired, and beaten up pretty bad.
But somehow, they had survived.
CHAPTER 37
* * *
* * *
Molly’s Newparents just about killed her.
She couldn’t blame them. She and her friends had put themselves into mortal danger, after all. More than once. As was suggested to her countless times over the next few days, if she and her friends had just stayed where they had been told to, they wouldn’t have wound up risking death. Which was all true.
But, as Molly was quick to point out, if she had done that, then Dural would have killed Bakar. The Guardian would have conquered Trevelyan and Paxopolis. And a lot of other people would have died. There wasn’t really any way to argue against that, and Molly’s Newparents didn’t press the issue too hard.
They were alive. She was alive. They all had a lot to be thankful for.
After the Guardian came crashing to the ground, Prone to Drift floated down from the sky on his own, rattled but safe. In all the confusion afterward—and the thick clouds of dust—no one could find the Huragok for a while, but he showed up back at the security facilities in Trevelyan the next day, much to everyone’s relief.
A lot of damage had been done to both the city and the research complex—including to many of the people who lived there. From the initial strike against the Guardian by Trevelyan’s local battle group to the Guardian’s catastrophic destruction, large swaths of the UNSC outpost had been leveled. Many people had died during the attack, but Asha pointed out that it was only a handful compared to what their losses could have been.
Asha and Yong had been coming back from the excavation site when the Guardian first rose, and they had been completely clear of the initial destruction. They had wound up locked in a powered-down tram for the duration of the event. It would take a week for the power to be fully restored to the city and all of its research sites.
Several dozen soldiers had been killed in the battle with the Forerunner soldiers and the Sangheili warriors that had raided both Paxopolis and Trevelyan, and the UNSC’s survivors spent a few days mopping up what remained of those threats. The distant sounds of firefights and skirmishes braced the nights that followed, but Molly still felt safe throughout. The most dangerous moments were already long past.
They could start to breathe easy at least, even as they began to count and mourn their losses.
Bakar had lost his brother. No matter how horrible Dural might have been, that still hurt him, and Molly could tell it was not easy. But questions still remained.
ONI sent a number of strike teams out to recover the bodies of Dural and the rest of the Servants who’d been with him, but they only located a handful. In addition, they couldn’t find the rest of the Servants who had invaded Paxopolis, which meant they had to still be somewhere inside Onyx. When the bulk of Dural’s invasion force had retreated through the portal in the middle of the city, though, they’d locked it down and covered their heads.
ONI had no idea where the Servants were and how many had survived. Still, Director Barton vowed that he would not rest until his forces found the Servants of the Abiding Truth and secured the research facility and the city.
The main challenge for those inside Onyx was that they were now on their own, completely out of contact with the outside galaxy. Trying to call for help from inside the sphere was deemed too risky, especially given the reports they had first received about what was happening on the outside.
Evidently, Cortana was winning.
But Onyx was tucked away inside the folds of slipspace, well beyond the reach of any outside threats. At least for now.
As soon as a squad of marines at the spaceport had found Molly and her friends trapped in the Pelican, they’d broken their way in and pulled the
m free. They’d put Lucy on an evac skiff and taken her immediately to the hospital, and to Molly’s relief they’d already found Tom at the Repository.
When things finally started to get back to normal, Director Mendez stopped by Molly’s house with an update: Kasha, Tom, and Lucy were all doing well and would heal up fine, thanks in large part to the incredible technology available at the local hospital. Lucy might have a bit of a limp for a while, but Mendez told Molly, “Given everything she’s been through already in her life, if that’s all she has to complain about, I’d count myself lucky.”
Kareem’s mom was absolutely thrilled to have him back home. She cried so hard, Molly thought she was going to join her.
Gudam’s parents—Momma Aphrid, Momma Beskin, and Poppa Marfo—smothered her with love when she came home. The other kids from her family paraded around as proud of her as if she’d single-handedly saved the day. That made Gudam grin, although Molly knew she couldn’t imagine having done it without her friends. Molly thought they might not let Gudam ever leave home again—but she was back in school when it reopened two weeks later.
Of everyone, Bakar probably had the most challenging time readjusting. Most of the Sangheili in their local keep were not pleased to discover that he was really Asum ‘Mdama, “nephew” to Jul ‘Mdama, who had done so much harm to their people. Once Kasha ‘Hilot had fully recovered, she took great pains to explain to everyone the events surrounding Bakar’s placement within the Arbiter’s clan. Bakar’s actions had already more than proved that he was no friend of Jul ‘Mdama’s Covenant or the Servants of the Abiding Truth. Eventually the other Sangheili came to see that.
As for Molly, she spent most of her time recovering at home while the school was being repaired. Asha and Yong joined her, since much of their work was on hold for the moment too. They would no doubt return to analyzing the Guardian soon enough, but not until ONI had cleared some of the debris from its demise away.