by Troy Denning
The last Banshee began a leisurely drift toward the hangar mouth, an indication that the Spartan assault squad remained completely undetected. With any luck, John and his teams would soon be the proud new crew of a Covenant frigate . . . or whatever the analysts decided to call it.
John motioned Fred and Kelly forward to deal with the pilot, then shouldered his M99 and placed the scope in front of his helmet. An aiming reticle appeared on his HUD, and he scanned across the hangar, selecting his target. He was the third sniper from the left, so attack-by-surprise protocol dictated that he take the third high-value target from the left. And standard priority was clear: commanders, comm techs, countersnipers, high-mobility personnel, heavy weapon operators, everyone else. The challenge with the Covenant was that humanity hadn’t engaged them long enough yet to learn the nuances of those roles or how they related to the species and armor. They would just have to leverage what little available intel and speculative theories they had at their disposal.
John didn’t see any obvious commanders or comm techs, so he set his sights on number three, one of the insect-aliens—he thought of it as a Drone—then nodded. He waited a one-count, let out his breath, and fired.
A faint glow flashed along the M99 as the electromagnetic coils charged and drew the projectile down the barrel; then the Drone’s body erupted into a spray of blood and chitin. John shifted to the next target inward—one of the Grunts—and fired again. This time, there was an orange ball as the creature blew apart in flames.
John looked away to check on the final Banshee. Fred was holding the edge of the cockpit with one hand and using the other to drag the tall pilot out through the shattered canopy. Kelly was on the opposite side, holding herself in place while firing M6 pistol rounds into the alien’s techsuited chest.
When John turned back to his targeting reticle, he spotted a pair of similar aliens moving toward an alcove at the back of the hangar. Like the pilot Fred and Kelly were attacking, these were taller and more powerfully built than Jackals, with strong shoulders and compact, oblong heads. They wore the same sinewy techsuit as the other pilot and seemed to have a proud gait to their movements, which told John they likely held some level of leadership. He took them out with two quick shots, then looked for more targets. Finding none, he tossed the M99 aside—flinging it toward Netherop proper so it would drop out of orbit and burn up during atmospheric entry—then reached back and pulled his MA5K carbine off its magnetic mount. He checked to make sure the sound suppressor was still attached, then activated his thrusters and led the way into the hangar.
His HUD system flickered and dimmed as he passed through the energy barrier and entered the ship’s artificial gravity field, but it returned to normal the instant his boots hit the deck. John noted the phenomenon without letting it worry him. Mjolnir armor was supposed to be shielded against electromagnetic interference, but ONI clearly had a lot to learn about the alien technology, and the glitch might reveal something useful to the science jockeys in the Section Three Materials Group.
The rest of the assault squad appeared on John’s HUD, and the Spartans quickly swept the hangar, putting two rounds into the head of any alien that remained in less than three pieces. Several Jackals had turned toward luminous ovals set into the hangar bulkheads, but they had all died well short of their goal. If they had been trying to sound an alarm, it seemed unlikely they had succeeded.
The same was true for the pilots of the Banshees. Three of them had perished with their helmets under their arms, which would have prevented them from accessing any comm systems that might be integrated into their techsuits. The fourth pilot—the last to enter the hangar before the Spartans launched their attack—had taken an M99 round as he raised his canopy, and now his head and helmet were splattered all over the cockpit interior.
John could hardly believe it. The entire Spartan assault squad was inside the hangar, and the enemy did not yet know it had been boarded. Missions just didn’t go this well.
CHAPTER 3
* * *
* * *
0502 hours, March 5, 2526 (military calendar)
Unknown Covenant Frigate
High Equatorial Orbit, Planet Netherop, Ephyra System
With a quick check of his HUD, John confirmed that the atmosphere in the carnage-strewn hangar was breathable—which was a good thing, since he had just fourteen minutes of rebreather capacity left. The Mjolnir’s onboard computer anticipated his next request by shutting down his rebreather, and warm, acrid air began to flood into his helmet.
He activated his suit’s external speaker, going to voice comm. “External air, everyone.” Their own rebreathers would recharge as new air ran through the Mjolnir’s filtering system. “Gold Team, execute the equipment dump. Include a couple of those four-jawed pilots. I don’t know if the xenos have dissected any yet.”
He was talking about the xeno-scientists of Section Three’s new Beta-3 Division, a fast-growing ONI unit dedicated to analyzing and replicating Covenant technology.
Joshua-029’s status light flashed green in acknowledgment; then he and the rest of Gold Team began to retrieve different types of weapons and tools. Once they had packed the Banshee cockpits full, they would close the canopies and push the spacecraft out of the hangar for recovery by the support prowlers. It would tie up Gold Team for a while, but John had insisted on it as a hedge against mission failure. That way, even if the assault squad could not capture the ship, the UNSC would still get something worth analyzing.
John took Blue and Green Teams to an oversize iris hatch at the back of the hangar. The bulkhead around it was cratered with strikes from M99 rounds that had passed completely through their targets. But none of the projectiles had penetrated the ship’s thick armor and actually breached the hull.
John was still looking for a control pad or mechanical release when the hatch leaves suddenly retracted—and revealed a pair of Jackals coming from the opposite direction, descending a gray-blue passageway that curled down the vessel’s hooked tail. They were clucking and squawking at each without paying much attention to where they were going. John stepped through the hatch and put a round through the head of the one on the right. Fred followed and took the one on the left.
Both Jackals flew backward and landed on the deck, and the hatch closed behind the two Spartans. Guessing that it responded to proximity, as had the hatches aboard the Covenant ship Blue Team had boarded at Chi Ceti IV, John sent Fred to secure the passageway ahead, then tossed one of the bodies back toward the hangar.
The hatch opened, and the rest of Blue and Green Teams stepped through.
“Green Team, secure all compartments and intersections as we move forward,” John ordered.
John hurried after Fred, who had already vanished around the curve of the passageway and was almost beyond the range of the motion tracker on John’s HUD.
As they advanced, John was surprised by the simple sensation of walking. Although the passageway curled steeply upward as it followed the curve of the mothership’s hooked tail, it always felt like “down” was beneath his feet. Clearly, the aliens’ control of artificial gravity was a lot more refined than humanity’s.
Big surprise.
After fifty meters, they reached the top of the vessel’s hooked tail. Instead of flipping pedestrians upside-down, the passageway ran through a ninety-degree twist, shifting the deck to what seemed like it should be a bulkhead. Then it ran through another twist, so that now it had the same orientation as the hangar deck below.
The assault squad was still in the mothership’s tail, but as they hurried forward, more iris hatches began to appear in the adjacent bulkheads. The first hatch opened automatically as they approached, and Kurt stepped inside. He fired a few rounds, then stepped back into the passageway. “Supply locker.”
Blue Team continued up the passageway on its own. Green Team followed, their sound-suppressed rifles coughing softly as they cleared compartments. After fifty meters, the iris hatches were replaced
by tall, swinging hatches that did not respond to proximity. And there were a lot of those entrances, spaced every few meters.
“This is dangerous,” Kelly said. She looked back down the passageway toward Green Team, which was lagging about thirty meters behind as they paused to clear each compartment. With that much gap, someone could step out of an uncleared compartment between the two teams and wreak havoc by forcing them to fire toward each other. “You want me to blow the ones that don’t open?”
She had a fifty-meter coil of breaching cord in one of her cargo pouches, and it would take only three seconds to place it and blast open each hatch. But John counted twenty hatches, and that meant delaying their advance by a full minute.
John paused for a second, thinking about where they were in the ship and how that might be related to the change in hatch style. But mostly he found himself trying to decide whether it was more dangerous to risk splitting up, or to give the enemy an extra minute to trap them in the tail of the vessel. Either way, if something went wrong, he would get someone killed.
“John?” Fred urged. “We’re seventy seconds into the mission—”
“Keep going,” John said. If they were still in the tail of the vessel, that meant they had to be in the narrowest part. “Nothing’s coming out of those hatches.”
Blue Team continued to advance, but Kelly asked, “You sure about this?”
“Sure enough,” John said. He wasn’t, not when he was risking the lives of his Spartans, but he had to make a call. “We’re above the Banshee racks. Those hatches are sealed because they serve airlocks.”
Kelly didn’t reply for a moment, then said, “You’re smarter than you look.”
“That’s a relief,” Fred said. “But let’s watch our six anyway.”
“On it,” Linda said. “I’m smarter than John looks too.”
“Thanks, team.” John was not offended by the banter. In fact, he was glad to hear his team joking and easing the tension. “When we get back, you’re all volunteering to swab the hold.”
The declaration was greeted with snorts, and they continued up the passageway toward an oversize iris hatch that John figured opened into the main body of the ship. Until now, the mission had depended on speed and stealth, but once they crossed that threshold, success—and survival—would depend on shock and firepower. A dozen paces from the hatch, John called a halt so Fred could shoulder his rocket launcher and everyone else could open their grenade satchels—then his helmet speakers popped as someone went active on the prowler squadron’s comm net.
“Contacts! Two adrift—make that three—with no power.” The voice was excited, male, and speaking English with an unfamiliar Outer Colonies accent. “It has to be the assault squad, dumping—”
“Close transmission!” a second voice interrupted. “You’re not internal. This is SQUADCOM!”
“SQUADCOM?” the first voice said. “Oh, sh—”
The voice cut off in midsentence, no doubt because he had realized his mistake and closed the channel.
“What the hell?” Kelly demanded. “Are they trying to blow—”
“We’ll figure it out later.” It was hard to imagine a Prowler Corps crewman deliberately undermining the mission, but mistaking the squadron comm net for an internal channel was not an easy error to make. “Keep moving.”
John waved Kelly toward the hatch.
Kelly stepped forward. The hatch remained closed.
“Not good,” Fred said. An alien voice began to bark orders from a bulkhead speaker. “Might even call it a mess.”
“But just a little mess,” John said. “We can still do this.”
Fred tipped his helmet toward John. “Did I say we couldn’t?”
“No.” It had not been Fred he was trying to convince, John realized. Irritated by his doubts, he turned to Kelly and said, “Blow it.”
Kelly was already pulling the breaching cord from its cargo pouch. “I’ll give it a little extra, in case there’s a reception committee on the other side.”
“Affirmative,” John said. “Fred, be ready. Both tubes.”
Fred’s status light flashed green. “Is there any other way?”
The M41 SPNKR had a disposable double-tube loading system, so two rockets could be fired in quick succession—a feature that often proved useful against enemies lying in ambush.
At least, that’s how it went in mock battles against human enemies.
John pushed his doubts aside and activated TEAMCOM. “Comm silence lifted,” he said. “The aliens know we’re here.”
“No shit,” replied Daisy-023. Gold Team’s infiltration specialist, Daisy was probably the most intractable of the Spartans. “If we get out of this, I’m gonna find the dumbass who gave us away and rip his—”
“After the mission,” John said.
“Seriously?” Daisy asked. “You’re okay with that?”
“All I care about is the mission,” John said. “Let’s do that first.”
John was reacting to this setback as he had been trained, swiftly and forcefully. But in the back of his mind, he was asking himself how many of his friends would die because of the sensor operator’s mistake, and he could not help wondering whether he should abort while he still could.
Kelly said, “Stand clear.”
Fred dropped to a knee five meters from the hatch, while John backed up against the side of the passageway alongside Kelly and Linda. After a quick glance to confirm everyone was in position, Kelly detonated the breaching cord. The hatch vanished behind a curtain of smoke and blast flash, and a dull clang echoed through John’s helmet as the pressure wave slammed it against the bulkhead.
An orange streak filled the passage as a Special Warfare M21 antipersonnel rocket shot past. Half a second later, a loud boom shook the deck beneath John’s feet. A plume of black smoke billowed back through the hatchway, bolts from enemy plasma weapons already flying out of it.
At least he could stop wondering when the mission was going to take a bad turn.
John reached for a grenade, and Fred rose to his feet and fired his second rocket into the smoke at a slight downward angle. The deck shuddered with another explosion, and the spray of plasma bolts dwindled to a stream.
John thumbed the primer slide on his grenade and pitched it down the stream of bolts. A smaller bang followed, and the plasma fire ended. He stepped through the open hatch and found himself in the ship’s main passageway, a broad, smoky corridor lined with burned and mangled bodies. All of the casualties appeared to be species he had already seen. Most were Jackals, but a few were the same as the Banshee pilots—tall, powerfully built saurians with compact heads and jaws with four mandibles. Unlike the pilots, however, these wore thick, contoured armor and sleek, oblong helmets with a long, sharply-pointed neck guard. And three of the aliens were the same vaguely man-sized creatures they had encountered in the hangar. They resembled insects with undersize wings, four limbs, and five lanky body segments.
Most of the aliens were unarmored, with no weapons larger than a sidearm, so John guessed they had been an improvised force of officers and support crew. Some were still writhing, and others lay with a plasma pistol in hand or nearby, so he put two rounds into the heads of all of them. The last thing he needed was a handful of wounded survivors attacking from the rear.
John glanced at his HUD. The rest of Blue Team was in position immediately behind him, and Green Team was about halfway through the tail. He started up the passageway at a sprint. Blue Team’s objective was to capture the bridge, which the xeno-engineering analysts aboard the Starry Night had assured them would be located high in the mothership’s bow. John suspected the analysts were just making an educated guess, but that was okay—he would have figured the same thing.
Green Team stepped through the blown hatch behind them, then immediately split down intersecting passageways, searching for a route below. Their assignment was to secure the engineering deck, and the location of the thrust nozzles almost guaranteed it would
be in the belly of the vessel.
Gold Team would provide tactical support, coming in from the hangar to eliminate pockets of resistance and launch rear-attacks on enemy units that attempted to ambush either Blue or Green Team. Given past engagements with the Covenant, prisoners seemed unlikely, but should any aliens choose to surrender, Gold Team would also be charged with securing them.
Blue Team met little resistance as it advanced, eliminating perhaps fifty aliens who attempted to flee down intersections or take shelter in nearby compartments. By the time they had traveled three hundred meters, the ship appeared deserted—a sure sign that the enemy was organized and aware of their location.
The main passageway ended fifty meters ahead, at a double-width, horizontal-oval hatch with a seam across the center. As they approached, John saw that the deck to either side was shiny with wear—probably from feet moving back and forth as a pair of sentries repeatedly entered and left attention.
John signaled Kelly to blow the hatch, then sent Fred and Linda back down the passageway to take covering positions. The Covenant was most likely to attack as the Spartans advanced into the hatchway, but it would also be sound tactics to hit them from behind before they blew it. As Kelly placed the breaching cord, John activated TEAMCOM.
“Blue Team preparing to storm possible bridge approach.” The aliens would probably capture the transmission, but their chances of breaking TEAMCOM’s double-encryption protocols were nil. “Green Team sitrep?”
“On third deck and still laying below,” Kurt reported. “Meeting moderate but steady resistance from Jackals and those flying roach guys.”