by Troy Denning
So, five inbound vessels.
One minute remaining.
The waypoint remained steady in the center of his HUD, the arrow pointing straight into the white haze ahead. The distance now read five to seven kilometers. No way they were going to find the Starry Night before the Covenant reached Seoba’s surface. Had the squad been wearing their thruster packs, John would have given the order to use their maneuvering jets to augment their speed. But when they had donned their Mjolnir, they’d been preparing to babysit prisoners, not go into combat. The quartermaster hadn’t thought to issue them any packs.
In all fairness, John hadn’t thought to ask.
Fortunately, Seoba was a big place. Even after the Covenant arrived, even with five vessels, it wouldn’t be easy for them to find the Spartans—or the Starry Night’s crash site. Plenty of time.
The enemy plasma bolts began to rain down inside the quarry again. The sublimation fog settled back in, and the Spartans resumed running through a ground cloud. A minute passed, and the fog swirled as something big and twinkly passed overhead. Another couple of minutes, and three more big twinkly things passed by, lower this time, and crossing back and forth over the quarry. The maximum distance to the target had fallen to five kilometers, and still they saw no sign of debris.
John tried to tell himself that was good news. Once they started to find debris, they would know for certain that the Starry Night had disintegrated before impact. Until then, there was still hope for a controlled crash.
By the time the maximum distance had diminished to two kilometers, the fog had dropped to shoulder-height, and John could see why the distance readings were so uncertain. The Starry Night had crashed about halfway up the quarry wall, demolishing a two-hundred-meter section of terrace, which in turn had created an icy avalanche that stretched all the way to the quarry floor. The prowler sat partway down the debris fan, perhaps seven hundred meters from the bottom.
At least, part of it did. All John could see of the vessel was the aft section, primarily the thrust nozzles and tail. Everything forward of the wing crescent was either buried in blue ice or missing entirely—and there was an awkward bend in the fuselage that made it difficult to tell which.
“Okay, that’s bad,” Fred said over SQUADCOM. “Maybe even really bad.”
“Not entirely,” John said. “At least it didn’t vaporize. There could still be someone—”
“Not the crash,” Fred replied. “Look.”
He pointed back along the length of the quarry, toward a distant silhouette just sliding into view over the rim of the pit. Shaped like a pair of teardrops connected by a thin middle fuselage, it was covered in randomly placed rows of glistening blue lights. John hoped it might be just another of the vessels that had been passing back and forth over the quarry since the Covenant arrived, but no such luck. Once its stern was clear of the quarry wall, it dropped into the pit and began to descend toward the downed prowler.
“Crap,” Kelly said. “Are they trying to recover it?”
“They’re sure not here to offer assistance,” Fred answered.
Fred’s conclusion was confirmed an instant later when the vessel began to spray plasma bolts in the Spartans’ direction. Its primary cannon was more of a ship-to-ship weapon than antipersonnel, so the strikes tended to land where the Spartans had been rather than where they were. Still, the curtain of sublimation fog quickly rose again, and once more the squad found itself chasing waypoints through a flashing cloud of grayness.
John did not have to remind anyone to dodge and change speeds. They knew as well as he did that the fission reactors powering their Mjolnir armor would be putting off enough heat to light them up like signal flares on even the crudest form of infrared sensor. Giving the alien gunners a steady vector would be a sure way to get vaporized.
“This is no longer a rescue mission,” John declared over SQUADCOM. He was pretty sure everyone knew what needed to be done, but it was always good procedure to spell things out. “Our first objective is to deny equipment recovery to the enemy. We can’t let the Covenant capture any of the Starry Night’s data.”
“Affirmative.” Joshua’s tone was enthusiastic, almost cheerful. “What’s the plan?”
“Open to ideas,” John said. “But let me check in with the bat patrol.”
His HUD showed the distance to the target as thirteen hundred meters, so he estimated they were still about thirty seconds from the base of the avalanche run-out, and probably three or four times that from the prowler itself. The fog had risen back above his head, and he couldn’t see how far away the alien ship was—but he doubted it would take the Covenant vessel more than a minute to reach the crash site.
John opened the command channel. “This is Blue Leader,” he said. “We have a situation.”
Crowther was on the channel instantly. “Go ahead.”
“We’ve sighted the Starry Night,” he said. “It’s damaged, but appears largely intact.”
“Good news.”
“Negative,” John said. “The aliens have spotted it too. One of their vessels is moving to recover.”
Crowther was silent for a moment, then said, “John, you can’t let that happen.”
“I figured that.”
“I mean it,” Crowther said. “The data on that prowler . . . the NAV computer alone could give away everything from the locations of our smallest outposts to the force deployment of the entire UNSC. You need to confirm the destruction of all onboard data devices. Clear?”
“Yessir,” John said. “So . . . wouldn’t it be ideal to have some sort of self-destruct capability aboard?”
It was Nyeto who answered. “You bet. There’s a one-megaton Fury tactical nuke in the engineering compartment. It’s programmed to detonate automatically if it determines there’s been a catastrophic event. Trouble is, if there’s somebody alive onboard, it won’t make that determination until there hasn’t been any shipboard motion for two hours.”
“So, there are definitely survivors?”
“Definitely might be overstating it,” Nyeto said. “I’d commit to likely. There might be other reasons it didn’t switch to automatic.”
“Only one way to find out.” John checked his distance to target—one kilometer. “Go up there and look.”
“Up there?” Crowther asked. “Explain, soldier.”
“The prowler is on an avalanche slide,” John said. “About seven hundred meters above us. It’s going to be tough to reach it first.”
Somebody sighed heavily; then Crowther said, “Commander Nyeto, isn’t there some way to remotely activate the self-destruct?”
“Sure,” Nyeto said. “The flight commander can do it. But the Starry Night is Ascot’s boat, and she is the flight commander.”
Another sigh. “And if the flight commander is unavailable?”
“Then it’s the wing commander,” Nyeto replied. “But same problem, since that’s Ascot too. The last backup is the captain of the Vanishing Point.”
A third sigh. The Vanishing Point was holding station two planetary orbits out. Even at the speed of light, it would take nearly an hour for a request to be sent and the return signal to arrive.
Crowther said, “John, I hate to—”
“We’ll find a way, sir.”
On SQUADCOM, someone warned, “Incoming!” Finger-size lances of bright white fire began to shoot through the fog.
“Anything you can do to keep the other vessels off our backs would be appreciated,” said John. “One is about all we can handle.”
“That could be tough,” Nyeto said. “Prowlers aren’t designed for ship-to-ship—”
“We’ll find a way,” Crowther said, cutting Nyeto off. “Stand by for instruction on manually activating the self-destruct—”
“No time,” John said. A small vehicle had appeared on the edge of his motion tracker, and it was coming his way fast. “But no worries. If it’s a nuke, a Spartan can detonate it.”
A stream of plasma bolts c
ame flying out of the fog, a couple glancing off the titanium shell of John’s Mjolnir at chest height. He threw himself to his belly, dropping below the plane of fire, and rolled left. His motion detector showed the unseen vehicle changing course to follow. The plasma fire continued to fly past overhead, a hint that the driver was as blind in the fog as John and fighting by instruments only. John pumped a grenade into his assault rifle’s underslung launcher and rolled twice in the other direction, then came up on his knees, ready to fire.
The vehicle was barely visible but swerving in his direction, not emerging from the fog so much as manifesting inside it like some kind of ghost. It was almost on him now, wide in the front and narrow in the back, with nothing beneath it but a shimmering cushion of emptiness. In its cockpit, hunched behind the vehicle’s winged chassis rode a huge Brute in deep-red armor. John extended the MA5B with one arm and fired the launcher. The grenade caught the Brute in the side of the helmet and detonated in a white ball.
A clatter sounded inside John’s helmet as his Mjolnir was pelted with bits of metal and bone. The vehicle weaved past with the lower half of the Brute’s body wobbling in the seat, leaking red mist into the fog.
John checked his HUD and saw four more vehicles dipping in and out of view on his motion tracker. Only half of his squad was in range, so he doubled the number of enemies, estimating there would be fewer than ten vehicles left.
“Green and Gold Teams, take out the rest of those hoverbikes. . . .”
A line of LEDs winked green inside his helmet.
“Everyone else . . . with me.” John continued toward the waypoint on his HUD, still sprinting. After a seven-kilometer sprint and a close encounter with another hoverbike, he was finally starting to breathe hard. “And load your grenade launchers.”
There was another line of green flashes, but Kelly said, “John, even if we had the range, you know these forty-mike-mikes aren’t going to scratch a prowler’s armor.”
“They won’t need to.” John checked the distance to target and found the range between one and eight hundred meters—which he interpreted to mean it was a hundred meters to the base of the avalanche, and another seven hundred meters up-slope to the prowler. “We’ll bring it to us.”
Kelly was silent for a moment, then finally said, “Or on us.”
By then, they had closed to within forty meters of the avalanche, and John was starting to see faint pyramid shapes hanging in the graying fog ahead—the corners of ice blocks protruding from the avalanche run. He took a flying leap and, in Seoba’s weak gravity, was able launch himself ten meters off the quarry floor.
The fog blanket was only three meters thick, so he had a clear view of the slope above for a full second. He almost wished he hadn’t. The alien vessel had floated to a halt about thirty meters from the impact site and was hovering over the adjacent terrace, dropping a patrol of EVA-equipped soldiers—Elites, Brutes, and Jackals—down a blue column of light that looked like some sort of anti-gravity elevator. The lead elements of the company were already circling the Starry Night and looking for a way inside.
As John started to drop, a plasma bolt thicker than his waist flashed past at an angle and vanished into the fog. An instant later, a geyser of mist and ice shot twenty meters up and blossomed into a cone.
Grace-093 cried out over SQUADCOM, then abruptly went silent, and Joshua ordered, “Daisy, take—”
“Got her.”
By then, John was starting his downward arc. He glanced up and glimpsed a second Covenant vessel gliding over the quarry rim, the blue dot of a fresh plasma attack already pulsing in the muzzle of its bow cannon.
“Green and Gold, be ready for more vehicles.” John shifted to the command channel. “Commander Nyeto, how about that support? We’ve got a second bandit firing on us and more on the way.”
“Setting them up now,” Nyeto said. “No worries.”
“Please stop saying that, sir.” John sank back into the fog. Another bolt flashed past overhead, and SQUADCOM crackled with static as somebody went offline. “And hurry. We’re taking casualties down here.”
John dodged to the bottom of the avalanche and took a knee in the ice, then pointed his grenade launcher up the slope and switched back to SQUADCOM.
“Mass grenade fire,” he said. “Maximum range, directly below the Starry Night.”
“John, wait!” Fred exclaimed. “That could bring the whole slope—”
“On one,” John said. “Two, one—”
He launched his grenade, and a row of LEDs winked green as the other Spartans acknowledged their own launches.
The volley was still in flight when the slope vanished in a silver blink. It took a moment to register that the flash had been a plasma strike landing a couple of meters away. John felt a gentle shudder in his boot soles, then suddenly there was a wall of ice rising up before him, full of tumbling slabs and churning snow. He turned away and leapt for the sky, trying to gain enough height to land on top and surf it out, but it was no good.
Avalanches could move all at once, the bottom sliding out from beneath the top, and when that happened, nobody was fast enough to dive out of the way . . . not even a Spartan.
John felt the wall hit his feet and roll up his legs and swallow his hips and torso, and it had him, hurling him forward and down, then around and back up inside a mass of icy debris, and he lost all sense of direction, knew only that he was tumbling head over heels and then he wasn’t, he was just there, hanging in the dark, with no idea of what was up and what was down, SQUADCOM filled with curses and questions and none of it making any sense at all.
CHAPTER 15
* * *
* * *
0909 hours, March 19, 2526 (military calendar)
Quarry Floor, Seoba Ice Quarry
Moon Seoba, Biko Planetary System, Kolaqoa System
Status reports began to scroll down John’s HUD as the Mjolnir’s onboard computer, sensing his desperation to know how badly the avalanche had decimated the squad, began to query its counterparts in the other Mjolnir units. Naomi-010 and Solomon-069 were listed as incapacitated. Four more Spartans, including John himself, were listed as immobile—probably because they were trapped beneath tons of snow and ice. But no one was KIA yet, and that left half the squad available for immediate action.
“Son of a . . .” Fred said. The avalanche was not deep enough to block comm waves, so Fred’s voice was as clear as if John had been standing next to him—rather than buried somewhere beneath him. “It worked.”
By worked, John assumed that Fred meant the avalanche had carried the Starry Night to the quarry floor. “Then don’t stand there talking about it,” he said. “You’re in command now. Board it and blow it.”
“What about survivors?” Fred asked.
“Rescue if possible.” John switched to the command channel so he could report to Crowther and Nyeto. “Squad elements boarding the target now. Where’s our support?”
“On the way,” Nyeto said. “No worries. They don’t even know we’re here.”
No worries, still? John had to fight to keep from yelling. “Sir—I want them to know you’re there. You need to get them off—”
“We’ll be there soon.” Crowther didn’t sound quite as confident as John would have liked. “Just hang on.”
“I have a plan,” Nyeto added. “The best way to be sure the Covenant doesn’t come back on you is to eliminate them on the first pass.”
John bit his tongue, battling the temptation to ask how long that would take. His Spartans were being used as bait—again—and the only thing he could do about it was soldier up, get unburied, and try to keep them alive.
“Affirmative.”
John activated his headlamp and saw nothing but blue ahead of him. He was hanging in tightly compressed ice and snow like a beetle in amber, with the limbs on one side of his body pulled back behind him and those on the other curled beneath. His helmet was cocked at an angle that made his neck feel like the neural splice
at the base of his skull was a putty blade pressed against his spine, and he didn’t have the vaguest idea which way was up.
The onboard computer displayed an arrow on his HUD, pointing toward his left shoulder. When John did not react, the words WHAT ARE YOU WAITING FOR, SOLDIER? appeared beneath the arrow. Either the onboard computer was developing a sense of humor, or it had used John’s neural interface to access his memories of Chief Mendez—the SPARTAN-II program’s primary training instructor on Reach.
John began to twist his left hand back and forth, trying to create a little space. Most victims buried beneath the incredible weight of an avalanche couldn’t even do that much . . . but most victims weren’t wearing fission-powered Mjolnir armor. John quickly created a space around his hand, then around his forearm, and he began to dig, scraping the ice down toward his elbow and pushing it down under his arm. Before long, he had his entire arm free. He cleared the space around his helmet and worked his other arm loose, always pushing the ice downward, and soon his entire upper body was mobile.
After a minute of that, it was another minute of just crawling, continually pulling himself up, then pushing packed ice and snow downward. His assault rifle had gotten lost at some point during the spin-cycle, but he didn’t bother digging around for it. It was probably packed so full of ice that it would be good for nothing but a club. Besides, he still had his M6D sidearm, and with its 12.7mm semi-armor-piercing high-explosive ammunition, it would be easier to clear and almost as effective as the assault rifle. In fact, in the hands of someone who knew how to operate it, the M6D had remarkable stopping power, and it was one of the most effective conventional infantry weapons the UNSC had at its disposal.
But the sidearm didn’t have an underslung M301. The grenade launcher he was going to miss—especially since, as he climbed, Green and Gold Teams began to chatter over SQUADCOM, coordinating attacks on what was beginning to sound like an endless stream of vehicles.
When John finally broke through to the surface, he found the downed prowler almost on top of him. The surface of the run-out drift was above the fog blanket covering the quarry floor, so he could see that the Starry Night lay a dozen meters away. She was resting upside-down with her stern buried and her forward fuselage rising from the run-out drift at a thirty-degree angle. All that remained of the bow were the soot stains it had left on the fuselage’s crumpled neck when it exploded.