by Troy Denning
John did not wait to see the yellow blister rise. He dived for the nearest hatch and felt the ship rumble as he bounced off the edge and landed inside a spherical escape pod lined by crash couches and safety harnesses. He spun to his knees and lurched back toward the entrance, hands slapping at everything that could possibly be a control panel—and hoping Linda was clear of the hangar.
The hatch closed, and in the next instant, he began to ricochet around the interior, his Mjolnir armor going into gel-lock as the Covenant ship outside flew apart in a cloud of flame and metal and his escape pod tumbled away.
CHAPTER 4
* * *
* * *
0840 hours, March 7, 2526 (military calendar)
UNSC Valiant-class Cruiser Everest
Deep Space Transitional Zone, Dynizi System
The elevator made its first stop, and the doors opened to reveal a double-width passageway with a spotless deck and a recently painted overhead. The bulkheads were lined with life-size holographs of great naval commanders, dating all the way back to Themistocles and Lysander. Across from the elevator stood a pair of sentries uniformed in service dress blues and armed with MA5B bullpup assault rifles.
Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson stepped to the back of the car, making room for new riders, and assumed proper posture in case they happened to be officers. Which seemed likely, since the Navy did not post armed guards to secure access to crew decks. Even more telling was the sweet air beginning to drift in from the passageway. No ventilation chief wanted a bridge officer yelling at him about moldy ducts and musty scrubbers.
But no one boarded. The sentries glanced toward Avery, but did not otherwise acknowledge his presence. The doors remained open, giving him time to study the holograph directly across from the elevator. Situated between the two sentries, it depicted a pointy-bearded Korean warrior in a conical helmet and knee-length hauberk. He didn’t recognize the Korean’s image from memory, but the information at the bottom read Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who defeated a Japanese fleet of 133 ships with just 13 ships at the Myeongnyang Strait in 1597.
Avery hoped the UNSC had a few admirals like Yi Sun-sin. The odds facing humanity right now were a lot worse than ten to one.
After a moment, he realized the elevator had not stopped to admit new riders. He glanced over at the control panel and saw that he had arrived at Level Nineteen, the destination selected for him when he was ushered into the car. He hadn’t noticed at the time, but Levels Thirteen through Twenty could only be accessed via biometric thumb-scanner. Levels One through Twelve could be reached by simple touchpad. There was another thumb-scanner at the Hangar Deck level, then the touchpads began again, increasing in number from First Deck through Thirty Deck.
Avery had been aboard enough large vessels to know this was standard ship layout. The Hangar Deck was always considered Zero Deck. Everything above the hangar was a “level,” rising from one to as high as necessary. Everything below the Hangar Deck was “belowdecks,” starting at First Deck and descending through Second Deck, Third Deck, etc. What he did not know was why he had been sent to a command level of what seemed to be one of the largest vessels in the UNSC Navy.
Just three minutes earlier, Avery had stumbled out of a transfer shuttle and descended the boarding ramp onto a hangar deck the size of a small city. Still groggy and shivering after a three-week slipspace jump, he had been far from his usual handsome self—his black mustache had gone from close-trimmed to unkempt and spiky, while his brown skin had been dry and itchy—and waiting for him at the base of the ramp had been a burly lieutenant with a Hangar Boss insignia above her pocket.
“Staff Sergeant, you look like something I just scraped off my boot heel.” She was tall and broad-shouldered, with black lip-gloss and blond hair pulled into a bun. “Have you been drinking?”
“I wish, ma’am.” Avery came to attention. “It’s just cryofog. They pulled me out of a sleep tube about five minutes ago.”
The lieutenant wrinkled her nose. “That explains the smell.” She crooked a finger and turned away. “This way, marine.”
Avery had followed her across three hundred meters of deck to an elevator bank. She’d reached inside an open car and thumbed the control panel, then pointed him inside.
“Welcome aboard, Sergeant Johnson.”
Avery had still been so foggy-headed that he had not thought to ask where he was going—or even what ship he was aboard. His original orders had called for him to join the 11th Marine Force Reconnaissance/ODST Battalion at Neos Atlantis, then ship out to fight aliens in the Outer Colonies. But instead of awakening in orbit above the planet’s familiar green ice ball, he had emerged from cryosleep to find himself aboard the UNSC transport schooner Santori, in the middle of a major battle fleet so far out in deep space he couldn’t even tell which star was the local.
His first assumption was that the 11th Recon had left Neos Atlantis early, and his transport had been diverted to join them in transit. Now he was beginning to wonder. When a marine staff sergeant boarded a ship to join a combat unit, he wasn’t usually received on a command level.
Finally, the sentry on the left asked, “Something wrong, Sergeant Johnson?”
“Possibly.” Avery was a little surprised to be addressed by name, since he had not seen her gaze drop to the name tag on the breast of his combat utilities. “Where am I?”
“The Flag Deck.” An attractive petty officer second class, she had pale skin, hazel eyes, and short red hair barely showing beneath her white-and-blue bucket cap. “You think we put on these dress blues just for you?”
“Never crossed my mind.” It was beginning to sound like Avery was in the right place after all. He stepped out of the elevator, then asked, “The Flag Deck of what vessel?”
The sentry narrowed her eyes and glanced toward Avery’s name tag, apparently confirming that he was who she thought he was, then said, “You’re aboard the UNSC Super-heavy Cruiser Everest, flagship of Vice Admiral Preston J. Cole, commander Battle Group X-Ray.”
Damn. Preston Cole had been a decent battle commander twenty years ago, before the Office of Naval Intelligence identified his second wife as an insurrectionist spy and forced him to retire. Over the next several years, the gossip vids had mentioned a couple of short marriages and bitter divorces, and Avery seemed to recall something about a long hospital stay for a double organ transplant. If FLEETCOM was reactivating guys like him and giving them command of frontline battle groups, the UNSC was in worse trouble than Avery thought.
He grunted, then asked, “And I’m here because . . . ?”
“I have no idea.” The sentry looked him over from head to foot, then arched a brow. “Only thing I can figure is there’s more to you than meets the eye.”
“On occasion.” Avery wasn’t sure whether she was flirting or putting him down, but he was a noncommissioned officer and so was she, so he didn’t see anything wrong with finding out. He grinned and added, “I could tell you about it over coffee.”
She almost smiled back. “You’d have to shower first.”
“I can do that.”
The second sentry, a smooth-faced petty officer third class with puffy cheeks and pale hair, cleared his throat.
“Sergeant Johnson, the admirals aren’t known for their patience.” He extended a hand down the passageway. “It might be wise to arrange your date with Petty Officer Anagnos on your way out.”
Avery gave Anagnos an apologetic shrug, then glanced down the passageway past the holographs of a dozen ancient naval commanders. At the end, he saw a set of double doors. On the left-hand door was a large brass plaque that read CHESTER W. NIMITZ. On the right-hand door was a plaque that read SECURE CONFERENCE SUITE.
“Son, did you say admirals, as in plural?”
“That’s right, Sergeant.”
Avery groaned. “I was afraid of that.”
Wondering what he’d done wrong this time, he picked up his duffel bag and started toward the doors. Along the way, he passed holo
graphs of Marcus Agrippa, Oliver Hazard Perry, and Isoroku Yamamoto. Between the three of them, they had saved Rome at Actium, won control of Lake Erie during the War of 1812, and crippled the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. With any luck, their ghosts would be among the admirals waiting in the Nimitz suite, because the way the war with the Covenant was going so far, Preston J. Cole would need all the help he could get.
As Avery approached, the doors parted and slid aside. Beyond the threshold stood a young ensign in dress blues, his jaw set and his hands clasped behind his back. Avery stepped through the doorway into a rectangular compartment with a waiting area on one side and a galley on the other, then dropped his duffel bag next to his leg, came to attention, and saluted.
“Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson reporting as . . .” He hesitated, realizing that he hadn’t actually been ordered to report, then said, “As directed.”
The ensign returned his salute smartly, then reached for Avery’s duffel. “Let me stow that for you, Sergeant. You won’t be bunking here.”
“Thank you, sir.” Avery allowed the ensign to take the bag, then said, “My personal weapons are in the duffel, unloaded or sheathed.”
“You’re a squared-away marine. May I offer you anything from the galley? Coffee or a sandwich?”
Avery shook his head, then added, “Nothing, thank you. Unless you have some odor neutralizer handy. I’m coming straight from the cryotube.”
The ensign—his nameplate read A. TISCHLER—gave a wry smile. “I’d never have guessed.” He dropped the duffel behind a counter, then took a bottle of Rejuverol from the beverage cooler. “No worries. They knew what they were getting when they told Lieutenant Ruta to send you straight up.”
“What’s their hurry?” Avery asked. “Nobody’s bothered to tell me what I’m doing here.”
“I wish I knew, Sergeant.” Tischler pushed the bottle of Rejuverol into Avery’s hand, then stepped over to an interior door and pressed a thumb to a biometric scanner. “No need for introductions. They already know who you are.”
The door slid aside. Avery stepped through, then came to attention and brought his hand up in a salute. He found himself in a large compartment with a holographic star map at one end and a conference table at the other. On the far side of the table sat two gray-haired officers with the triple stars of vice admirals on their collar tips. One was a haggard-faced man in his midfifties, dressed in a white service uniform with no jacket and the name P. J. COLE above his breast pocket. The other was a hollow-cheeked man in blue camouflage utilities with no unit patch, name tag, or service badges—a not-so-subtle hint that he was from ONI and therefore not to be screwed with.
Across from them sat a slender woman in a white lab coat. She had her back to Avery, so all he could tell about her was that she had collar-length chestnut hair and was completely unintimidated by vice admirals. She was wagging a finger in their direction, pumping her arm up and down and lecturing the pair like schoolboys.
“. . . can’t defeat an enemy it doesn’t understand, Admiral,” she said. “We must try again.”
“To what effect?” the ONI admiral demanded. “You said yourself it might be a year before the Materials Group understands the alien technology.”
“Wars rarely end in a year.”
“This one might be an exception, Dr. Halsey.” As Cole spoke, he flipped Avery a return salute, then pointed him toward the empty chair at the head of the conference table. “The UNSC has two choices at the moment, one rotten and the other lousy. Either we engage the enemy right now and start losing fleets in battles we have no chance of winning, or we mass at strong points and let the enemy glass everything else.”
Glassing was a relatively new term to Avery, but one that had already grown much too familiar. It referred to the results of an alien plasma bombardment, which struck a planet’s surface with so much heat that the silica in common dirt fused into glass. It seemed to be the Covenant’s favorite method of reducing human worlds to uninhabitable wastelands.
“I should think the answer is obvious,” Halsey said. “We mass at the strong points. It will take the Covenant at least two years to locate all of our undefended worlds, and by then the Materials Group will have reverse-engineered—”
“Catherine, FLEETCOM can’t do that,” said the ONI admiral. He was referring to Fleet Command, which oversaw the deployment and combat operations of the entire UNSC Space Navy. “We’d be leaving hundreds of worlds defenseless. We’d be condemning billions of colonists to death by plasma incineration.”
“And if you commit prematurely, you will lose every fleet you send—and leave hundreds of worlds defenseless anyway.” The woman paused and watched Avery ease himself into the chair Cole had indicated, then looked back to the ONI admiral. “I think you need to make FLEETCOM understand that, Admiral Stanforth. There is nothing you can do to save those people—not until I can give you the tools you need to fight.”
In his chair at the head of the table, Avery sat ramrod straight and wondered what the hell he was doing there. He’d never heard of the Materials Group, or Dr. Catherine Halsey, or ONI Vice Admiral Stanforth—which, in the tradition of clandestine services everywhere, probably meant he didn’t want to. Even more confusing, both admirals were talking to Halsey as though she had equal say in their decisions.
Which didn’t make any sense. Now that Avery was sitting adjacent to her, he could see that Halsey wasn’t even military. Beneath the lab coat she was wearing a form-fitting jumpsuit that had more in common with a laboratory clean suit than a uniform, and in her piercing blue eyes there was a stubbornness that would have been disciplined out of her the first week of boot camp.
After a moment, Cole leaned forward and braced his forearms on the table. “Point taken, Dr. Halsey,” he said. “But if FLEETCOM decided to pursue your plan—”
Avery snorted at the absurdity—he was so shocked it just came out—then swallowed hard as three heads swiveled in his direction.
“Pardon me.” He opened the Rejuverol he had been given by Ensign Tischler. “Something just went down the wrong pipe.”
Stanforth smirked. Cole merely frowned and looked back across the table, leaving Avery to wonder if the reactivated admiral’s instincts could really be so rusty that he would consider Halsey’s plan. The minute the UNSC began to abandon planets and mass at strong-point worlds, the Outer Colonies would go into full rebellion, and the UNSC would have two wars on its hands. Not to mention billions of dead civilians. No commander could accept that kind of casualty figure.
But Cole seemed determined to entertain the idea. “If we could persuade FLEETCOM to pursue your plan, Dr. Halsey, how can we be sure the aliens will go after undefended targets first? Why not destroy our strong points, then locate and eliminate the defenseless worlds at their leisure?”
“That’s hardly an efficient invasion strategy,” Halsey said. “The most effective way to advance is shock penetration—bypass strong points to secure easy victories and seize enemy territory, then bring up heavier units to reduce the strong points in a more measured fashion. That’s been optimum infiltration strategy since Oskar von Hutier used it in Operation Michael in 1918.”
“But have the aliens studied Operation Michael?” Cole asked. “More importantly, could they know a better way?”
Stanforth nodded. “Technology dictates strategy,” he said. “And since we don’t understand their technology—”
“We can’t anticipate their strategy. I see that.” Halsey was quiet for a minute, then said, “And it’s all the more reason to attempt another ship capture.”
Ship capture. Avery had a sinking feeling he’d just heard the real reason he was here. Earlier that year, he’d actually boarded a Covenant vessel near the planet Harvest, then ended up fighting a protracted surface battle against a company of alien warriors. There were probably only a handful of marines in the UNSC who could say the same thing, and that made Avery a pretty good choice to lead a suicidal boarding action.
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But Stanforth vehemently shook his head. “Another capture attempt is too risky,” he said. “It keeps the assault squad aboard too long. We’re lucky we didn’t lose our Spartans at Netherop.”
“It wasn’t luck, Admiral,” Halsey said. “It was training and capability—and the mission was not a total failure. I’ve already ascertained a great deal from the captured Banshees. We’re still learning how to operate them, but I can tell you that, despite the lack of instrumentality and the enigmatic architecture, the drives and even the weaponry don’t seem as effective—”
“Yes, that’s great,” Cole interrupted. “But is it going to help us this year?”
Halsey hesitated, then said, “It’s a mistake to focus on the short term, Admiral.”
“The short term is all we have.” Cole sank back in his seat, and his tone grew firm. “Dr. Halsey, I’ll get you an alien ship if the chance presents itself, but capture can’t be our prime objective. We lost thirteen vessels taking Harvest back—against one Covenant defender. If we don’t blunt the Covenant advance, the Outer Colonies will be so many glass marbles by this time next year.”
“I’m afraid I agree, Catherine,” Stanforth said. “It’s the only way to buy the time your group needs to give us a fighting chance.”
Halsey sighed, then reluctantly nodded. “I’ll support the operation however I can, naturally.” She turned to Cole. “I look forward to hearing your plan.”
“So do I.” Cole’s gaze slid toward Avery. “As soon as we develop one.”
Avery’s stomach clenched. He hadn’t even heard that the UNSC had counterattacked at Harvest—much less what it had cost them. “You’re asking me for input, sir?”