by Troy Denning
“I guess so, when you break it down that way,” John said. Nobody had mentioned the five prowlers standing by for rescue operations, but he could see that his reminders were only making the squad nervous. “Sorry for overbriefing, everybody. I just want us to be ready for surprises. What we know about the aliens would fit in a bullet casing.”
“And there’s our advantage,” Joshua said. “We know that we don’t know, which makes us careful. But the aliens may have been studying humanity for a while. They’ll think they know more about us than they do, and that makes them vulnerable.”
“Hadn’t looked at it that way.” It seemed a stretch to claim that ignorance was an advantage, but John appreciated the out Joshua was giving him. “Good point. The aliens have no idea how hard we’re about to hit them. Any questions?”
A chain of status lights blinked red inside his helmet.
“Okay then,” John said. “Captain Ascot is right about working on the margins, so stay off your rebreathers until we’re clear of the hatch. We may need every second of air we can save.”
The alert lamps on the drop-bay bulkhead changed from red to amber, and Ascot’s crisp voice sounded over the Starry Night comm net.
“One minute to maneuver.”
John and the other team leaders stood shoulder-to-shoulder in front of the jump hatch. Their team members lined up in columns behind them, each one grabbing the thruster pack of the Spartan ahead. Even with their physical enhancements and the Mjolnir’s mechanical strength multipliers, they would never hold fast through the wild acceleration of the slingshot maneuver. But that wasn’t expected. John just wanted to keep the members of each team close enough to support each other if an emergency arose.
The alert lamps began to blink.
“Thirty seconds,” Ascot said.
“Begin comm silence,” John said.
He had barely voiced the order before his Mjolnir’s onboard computer shut down all external communications. It was reacting not to his words, but to the intention that had given rise to them, accessing his thoughts via the neural lace implanted at the base of his skull. The interface allowed him to manipulate a half-ton of power armor as effortlessly as his own body, and to keep track of his fellow Spartans by merely thinking about them. Yet even after using it for the last few months, he still found it unsettling at times—especially when a targeting reticle or status readout appeared on his heads-up display before he had consciously summoned it.
The alert lamps flashed green as the Starry Night swung into the slingshot maneuver. Control of the mission had now passed to John—though that was, for the moment, a meaningless distinction. For the next few seconds, their fates would be determined by the laws of classical mechanics, and he could not have called off the launch had he wanted to.
John’s weight sank and shifted aft. The alert lamps stopped flashing, then the jump hatch split down the center and retracted into the hull, creating an exit portal four meters square. The bay had been left pressurized so the decompression would augment their acceleration.
He felt the push of escaping air and jumped.
John saw five white needles shining bright against the brown crescent of Netherop’s horizon, more or less where he expected to find the propellant tails of the Covenant spacecraft. He began to experience the full force of the slingshot maneuver’s thirty-g acceleration. Even with the hydrostatic gel inside his Mjolnir pressurized to protective levels, his vision narrowed and his chest hurt, and the back side of his body ballooned with pooling blood.
For a few heartbeats, the shining tails of alien propellant remained fixed in the center of his faceplate, growing longer and thicker as he began to overtake them. In his HUD’s motion tracker, he saw the three other Spartans of Blue Team lined up behind him in an undulating column, everyone struggling to hold fast to the thruster pack ahead, but still together after the initial furious acceleration. Gold and Green Teams were already beyond his motion tracker’s range, so he could only hope that their launch had gone as well as Blue Team’s.
Then the propellant tails started to drift across John’s faceplate, as did Netherop’s brown horizon, and he realized he was entering a roll. He felt his center of mass change as the Spartans behind him finally yielded to the minute variances in their launch vector and released their holds on each other. His roll accelerated, and stars began to streak past his faceplate in a dizzying blur. He checked his HUD and saw Blue Team drifting apart in a long arcing curve.
No matter. The assault squad had always intended to approach the target in loose formation, as it was easier to spot a group clustered together than one scattered across several kilometers of space. All John had to do was bring himself under control and continue toward the Covenant spacecraft.
The thought had barely formed in his mind before a waypoint marker appeared and began to gyre around the edges of his faceplate. He focused on it and began to feel dizzy.
And light-headed.
It had been seven seconds since he leaped from the jump bay, and he still hadn’t activated his rebreather. He might be getting a buildup of carbon dioxide.
The rebreather light activated in his HUD, and the dizziness faded as fresh air flooded his skinsuit. John felt refreshed. Although there was something creepy about a suit of power armor that seemed to know what he was thinking before he did, it did spare him the necessity of managing suit-systems when he had more important things to worry about.
John activated his thrusters with a thought and began to expel tiny bursts of propellant, being careful to fire against the movement of the waypoint marker and keep working it back toward the center of his faceplate.
It took only a few seconds to reach equilibrium. By then, the alien propellant tails had vanished from sight, and he had to remind himself that Covenant spacecraft were subject to the same laws of motion as human ships. Once they reached the desired orbit, they had to shut down their engines. If they kept accelerating, they would only climb higher and eventually break orbit altogether.
John would have liked visual confirmation that the Covenant was on the expected trajectory, but that wasn’t going to happen. The Spartans were still eighty kilometers from their targets, much too distant to spot the dark sliver of spacecraft roughly a dozen meters long and with cold engines.
Knowing his squad would not show up in his HUD—the motion tracker had a maximum range of twenty-five meters—John increased his faceplate magnification to its highest setting, then used his thrusters to begin a slow roll and start locating his Spartans.
Initially, he saw only a dark blur obscuring a distant field of stars. But when he rolled toward the planet, their forms were more distinct—tiny human-shaped figures silhouetted against the brown disk of Netherop’s clouds. If an enemy patrol happened to pass by in a higher orbit, there was a chance the pilots might glimpse the little shadows and realize what they were seeing.
But that seemed unlikely. The aliens would be even farther away from the tiny figures than John was, and they would be looking for spacecraft, not humans in airtight armor.
It took a few minutes to locate the twelfth squad member, but once he had, John felt an immense wave of relief. Given the number of missed intercepts at Chi Ceti IV, he had expected at least a couple of Spartans to be out of position by now. But his concerns had been unwarranted. In their new Mjolnir, with time to plan and marshal resources, the Spartans could not fail.
And John wouldn’t let them.
CHAPTER 2
* * *
* * *
0402 hours, March 5, 2526 (military calendar)
Spartan Extra-Vehicular Assault Squad
High Equatorial Orbit, Planet Netherop, Ephyra System
The alien spacecraft were growing more visible by the second, five dark slivers silhouetted against the curve of Netherop’s dingy horizon, swelling into thin black blades as the assault squad descended on them from above and behind. The Spartans were diving into Netherop’s gravity well at a shallow angle, traveling thi
rty-three thousand kilometers per hour relative to the planet—and at that kind of speed, reaction time didn’t exist.
Were someone to cross paths with a meteorite or a hunk of Covenant jetsam, there would be no opportunity to evade. By the time the object appeared on the motion tracker, it would have punched through the Spartan’s armor, passed through the body, and already be a dozen kilometers away.
Yet there was no sense of motion. The Spartans had stopped accelerating, so it felt like they were motionless in space. The vestibular fluid in their ears was still, and their organs were floating free in their torsos. Only the rapidly expanding cloud swirls on Netherop hinted at their true speed—the clouds, and the vessels stretching from thin little blades into thumb-length crosses.
As the silhouettes continued to swell, their forward-swept wings and twin nose-cannons grew apparent. John recognized them as an ex-atmo variant of a single-pilot fighter that UNSC pilots had nicknamed “Banshees.” Banshees were not especially deadly in combat, but the enemy used them for everything from atmospheric patrol to orbital interception, depending on the variant deployed, and they were a high priority on the Covenant equipment capture list.
But then again, what wasn’t?
The Covenant had made “contact” with humanity more than a year ago, when it happened upon a shipping lane near the planet Harvest. A local attempt to negotiate peace erupted into open warfare, with the aliens initiating a planetary bombardment and blocking all communications with other worlds. So superior was the enemy’s technology that the Colonial Military Authority did not even learn of the conflict until nine months later, when the CMA Heracles—the sole survivor of a mission to investigate the world’s sudden silence—limped home with a message from the aliens: “Your destruction is the will of the gods, and we are their instrument.”
FLEETCOM received the declaration on October 31. The following day, the Unified Earth Government mobilized the UNSC, the CMA, and all other military services against the alien menace. The Spartans were deployed on the second of November, and by the twenty-seventh, Samuel-034 was dead.
The UNSC had been on a full war footing for four months now, and so far it continued to reel. The alien foes had superior weaponry, superior mobility, and superior intelligence, and they were using all three to good effect, emerging from slipspace to destroy support bases and ambush convoys, to knock shipyards from orbit and bombard civilians with hundred-meter plasma beams. The UNSC had to find a way to eliminate the Covenant’s advantages—and so far, John’s assault team was its best hope. Perhaps its only hope.
The waypoint marker in John’s HUD flashed yellow. He activated his thrusters and began to decelerate, flattening his angle of descent until he entered orbit. The Banshees were clearly visible in his faceplate magnification against the pearl haze of Netherop’s mesosphere. They were still a couple of kilometers ahead, too distant to offer protection from any mass-discerning sensor systems the mothership might employ.
Not that John actually knew the Covenant employed mass-discerning sensor systems. It was simply a theoretical possibility the UNSC’s own scientists were exploring. But given the enemy’s technological superiority, it seemed wise to be cautious.
He took a few moments to do another visual head count. When he was sure that everyone was in position, he used his thrusters to nudge himself into a slightly lower orbit.
The other Spartans followed his lead, and they began to creep toward the targets. This was the most dangerous phase of their approach. They were close enough to be spotted visually if a pilot happened to look back and had the right angle. Under different conditions, it would be smart to move in as fast as possible. But closing the distance more quickly meant dropping lower, which would make the Spartans even more visible. Better to stay behind the Banshees and hope for the best.
After forty minutes of inching closer, the Spartans remained undiscovered. The silhouettes of the craft had swollen to the size of a head, and the lines of their drooping wings were thickening into three-dimensional forms. John brought up a mission projection on his TACMAP and saw that the Covenant mothership would appear above the planetary horizon in eight minutes. After that, Netherop’s bulk would no longer shield the assault squad from the vessel’s sensor umbrella. In theory, the Spartans would remain as undetectable to the aliens as the Starry Night and her sister prowlers. In theory.
John extended an arm above his head, signaling the squad to form on him, then dropped into a lower orbit and began to quickly overtake the Banshees. His Spartans closed up, grouping themselves by team, but taking care to maintain a spacing of a hundred meters. That was tight enough to support each other if necessary, but far enough apart to avoid presenting an eye-catching cluster of dark forms—or a massed target that could be taken out by a single plasma strike.
After nine additional slow minutes, the Spartans were finally close enough to make out the knobby equipment pods at the tips of the Banshees’ drooping wings. John raised his hand and, closing his fist, made a twisting motion. The squad tightened formation, arranging itself so that there were at least two Spartans fifty meters below each spacecraft.
John raised a thumb and used his thrusters to ascend into orbit behind the leftmost Banshee. Fred climbed into position beside him, with Linda and Kelly behind the next spacecraft over, while Green and Gold Teams slipped into place behind the other three craft. The aliens maintained their formation.
So far, the mission was going flawlessly. But John wanted to be ready, in case that changed.
He unlimbered the M99 Stanchion Gauss rifle magclamped across his back and made sure there was a round in the chamber. While M99s were normally used as extreme-range sniper rifles or antimatériel weapons, their accuracy and recoilless firing mechanisms made them ideal weapons for zero-g infiltration operations, and he had equipped half the squad with them. The other half was carrying M41 rocket launchers. The M41s were less accurate than M99s, but they had more combat applications, and like the M99s, they could be fired without sending a weightless gunner into an uncontrolled spin.
The Covenant mothership now materialized above Netherop’s horizon. Just visible through the planet’s thick corona of atmosphere, the vessel appeared as a hazy gray drop not much larger than a pinhead. But John knew from previous observations that it had a long, tapering tail that curled down into an open hook.
If the Banshees followed prior procedure, they would return to a maintenance hangar located in the interior of the hook. After being serviced, they would be moved out of the hangar and suspended beneath the elongated tail, ready for immediate launch.
John suspected the trickiest part of the assault would be advancing through the tail. It was an obvious choke point that would be sealed at the first sign of trouble—which meant the Spartans either had to board forward, or capture the hangar without allowing an alarm to be raised.
At least they had options.
They remained behind the Banshees and continued to close, the mothership’s tiny shape growing longer and darker as it slowly drifted higher above Netherop’s horizon. The ONI analysts aboard the Starry Night had measured the vessel’s length at 550 meters and its horizontal and vertical beams at 110 meters—about the size of a UNSC light frigate. A standard complement for a human warship that size would be about 250 crew plus the same number of combat personnel, but there was no guessing how many aliens might be crammed aboard such a vessel.
The mothership passed out of sight in front of the Banshees, and John signaled the assault squad to slip in tight, within a few meters of the spacecraft. When the mothership emerged from behind the Banshees again, it would be above the Spartans relative to the planet, and he didn’t want a lucky alien to glance down through a porthole and see a dozen humans silhouetted against Netherop’s brown clouds.
John and Fred stopped about two meters behind their target Banshee, positioning themselves just outside the tail stabilizers. This close to the mothership, the craft could probably sync orbits without firing its ma
in engine—but John wasn’t taking chances. As tough as the Spartans’ new Mjolnir armor was, he was not eager to see how the outer shell would hold up against a plume of white-hot propellant.
It was a precaution John was glad he had taken when the Banshees raised their noses and ignited their engines for a half-second burn. The Spartans climbed after them, but thruster packs were no match for main engines, and the Banshees quickly pulled away. A moment later, the mothership appeared over them, a huge, tear-shaped darkness looming against the starlit beyond.
The Banshees used their maneuvering jets to bleed off excess velocity and sync orbits, then brought their noses down and positioned themselves about fifty meters beneath the belly of the mothership—no doubt awaiting authorization to dock.
All five were facing aft, toward the interior of the hooked tail, and the pilots could not see the Spartans climbing back into position behind them. Beyond the spacecraft, the mothership’s belly was as dark as a closet, suggesting it lacked any viewports or observation bubbles through which the assault squad might be spotted. But the mouth of the maintenance hangar was a bright, flat-bottomed oval facing forward, and although John was still too far below to see inside, he knew there would be plenty of crewmembers looking toward a flight of arriving Banshees.
John raised a fist to bring his assault squad to a halt, then lifted his index finger and made a circling motion. The Spartans began to tighten their formation and prepare for boarding action.
One by one, the Banshees rose into the docking hollow beneath the mothership’s tail, then drifted through the hangar mouth. A faint shimmer suggested the presence of some sort of energy barrier.
John waited until only the last craft remained, then gave the thumbs-up. Being careful to remain near the tail of the craft, the squad rose alongside the Banshee, their weapons shouldered and off-safety.
As more of the hangar interior came into view, John found himself looking into an oblong vault thirty meters deep and twenty wide. Lit in ambient blue-white light, it had an arched overhead and bulkheads lined by curved alcoves filled with equipment and supplies. It was bustling with the tall, vaguely avian aliens that the UNSC had nicknamed “Jackals.” There were also a half dozen winged, insectile creatures, and two of the short, mask-wearing bipeds known as “Grunts.”