by Troy Denning
John didn’t know whether the detonations were the work of Green Team or Gold, but it was clear that one of them had succeeded and its members were on their way to the extraction point. They had definitely inflicted some damage on the Covenant’s logistics fleet, but it was going to take far more than a two-vessel loss to make Halsey’s strategy work.
The other two materials freighters suddenly vanished into balls of blazing light, and John knew that his second team of Spartans had completed its mission. One detonation was so close that his Banshee’s instruments flared gold as the pulse of gamma rays overwhelmed its radiation shielding. The comms fell silent, and a second later the cockpit sank into darkness as the readout panels and control grips flickered out. Etalan’s gray horizon began to tip and slide past the canopy as the Banshee started a slow tumble, dead in space.
“What junk,” Fred remarked over TEAMCOM. “They call that radiation shielding?”
John was about to chastise him for breaking comm silence, then noticed all of the other Banshees drifting dead in space around him and realized that comm silence was no longer needed. The pulse had taken out the entire squadron’s instruments and controls, so the Covenant pilots no longer had the capability of noticing a TEAMCOM transmission. And with logistics vessels vanishing one after another, the comm officers in the rest of the fleet were going to be too busy and confused to track down a few stray signals that probably sounded like blast static anyway.
But there was a drawback, of course. A big one.
Blue Team’s Banshees were just as dead in space as those of the Covenant. If the Spartans stayed with their craft, they would be out of the battle and eventually taken prisoner by the Covenant’s recovery teams. Which meant that Blue Team had to go EV, because the only mission outcome worse than dying and triggering their Mjolnir’s automatic self-destruct mechanism was not dying and allowing the enemy to capture it.
“We still need to take out their munitions train,” John said over TEAMCOM. He didn’t need to remind them of what Dr. Halsey had said—that taking out the munitions carriers was the key to her strategy to find the enemy supply depot. “Anybody have a visual on those air-skimmers?”
“Maybe,” Fred said. “What do they look like?”
“Big and fat,” Avery Johnson said. “Like an overstuffed cigar with a huge megaphone on the front.”
“How do you know that?” Linda asked.
“ ’Cause I’m looking at two of ’em right now,” Johnson said. “The first one is going to pass underneath us in about . . . hell, I don’t know. Soon.”
“EV range?” John asked.
“Are you crazy?” Johnson replied. “Making an impromptu EV attack . . . under these circumstances?”
“We have to go EV anyway,” Fred said. “These Banshees are toast.”
“And there is no way a prowler can retrieve us from this orbit,” Linda added. “Not when it will soon be filled with Covenant search-and-rescue craft.”
“So we might as well do something useful while we’re out there floating around,” Kelly said. “Are the air-skimmers in range?”
“For you nutjobs, probably,” Johnson said. “I’ve spun away from them now, but my rangefinder had the leader at fifty-two kilometers. I’d guess that puts their orbit about ten kilometers below ours.”
Ten kilometers was nothing at orbital velocities, but the timing could be difficult. If Blue Team failed to transfer to the lower orbit in time to intercept the targets, they would have to drop into an even lower orbit and try to catch up—or remain in a higher orbit and wait for the air-skimmers to pass underneath them again. Either maneuver would take time to execute, and there was no telling how soon the alien fleet would break orbit and flee into slipspace.
It was now or never.
“Prep for EV,” John said. Since they were already wearing sealed armor, all the process entailed was switching their air supply to their rebreather systems—a task the onboard computer performed for John automatically. “I’ll take the first skimmer. Kelly has the second, Fred the third. Linda and Sarge, you know what to do.”
There was a reason Linda and Johnson were armed with M99 mass-driver sniper rifles instead of the MA5Cs that everyone else carried. The M99s used magnetic accelerator technology to fire undersize ammunition at velocities so high that the rounds created shockwaves as they passed through their targets. The rounds might not be able to pierce a Covenant fighter’s energy shield, but they could penetrate thirty centimeters of titanium armor, and in the vacuum of space, their range was limited only by the accuracy of the person firing. They had been included in the team’s load-out to discourage any harassment by Banshees and other unshielded craft during extraction, but they could serve the same role on an attack insertion.
Three status LEDs flashed green inside John’s helmet, but one blinked amber.
“Go ahead, Linda.”
“The air-skimmers have already deployed their fighters, so there won’t be much hangar traffic,” she said. The original plan had called for John, Fred, and Kelly to simply park their Banshees in a hangar, then leave their Havoks in the cockpit and exit on foot. Now that their Banshees had been disabled, that wouldn’t be possible. “How will you bypass the energy shields?”
John hadn’t actually worked out that part yet, but Avery Johnson had. “Won’t have to,” he said. “The skimmers are still retracting their collection cones.”
“So?” Linda said.
John realized what Johnson was thinking. “So it’s pretty hard to skim gas with your energy shields up.” He checked to make sure the magclamp holding the Havok to his back armor was secure, then reached for the canopy’s manual release. “If we can intercept before they secure the collection cones, we won’t need to board.”
“Piece of cake,” Fred said. “We just intercept an alien vessel traveling twenty-five thousand kilometers an hour, slip through its fighter screen, land on the hull long enough to stick a thermonuclear device on it, and get clear before the device detonates.”
“Technically, you don’t need to get clear,” Linda said. “But I would miss your wisecracks, so do your best.”
“Everybody gets clear, got it?” John released his stability harness. “Jump-off in three, two—”
He pulled the manual release. The canopy popped open, and the decompression lifted him out of the slowly spinning Banshee. The maneuvering jets on his thruster pack began to fire intermittently as his onboard computer worked to stabilize his tumble. He pulled his MA5C assault rifle off its magnetic mounts and worked to orient himself, trying to keep his gaze fixed on Etalan’s gray surface and locate the fat cigar shapes Johnson had described.
At first, all John saw were disabled Banshees drifting past. He had no doubt the Elites inside were surprised to see Spartans going EV in the middle of their formation. But so far none of them seemed to be popping their own canopies to offer battle—which was hardly surprising. Most pilots were not equipped for zero-g small-arms combat.
Once his tumble had stabilized, John located a trio of purple, finger-length tubes drifting across Etalan’s gray face. They had bulging centers, visibly contracting cones at the front end, and swarms of fighter-specks swirling around their entire length. He designated the lead vessel as his target. The Mjolnir’s onboard computer placed a waypoint on his HUD that pointed at a spot just above the planet’s horizon, then initiated a thruster burn.
“Blue Leader on intercept vector target one. ETA . . .”
John paused while the computer put the figure on his HUD, then was momentarily taken aback at what he saw—apparently, it was going to require a constant thrust maneuver to catch the air-skimmer. He just hoped the computer was leaving some propellant in reserve so he would be able to accelerate away after attaching the Havok.
The waypoint rose a little higher, and the ETA adjusted upward.
“Five minutes twenty,” John read.
“I’ll be on your six,” Avery Johnson reported. “A thousand meters back.”
“Negative,” John said. He only had two snipers available right now, and he wanted them covering his people . . . not him. “Go with Fred or Kelly.”
“Blue Two and Three have closer intercept angles,” Linda said. “I’ll be able to cover them both for most of the way.”
“Most isn’t good enough,” John said. He wasn’t going to risk losing Fred or Kelly so he would be covered. Not when Sam had died because he had stepped in front of a plasma bolt meant for John. No chance. “I want Blue Two and Three covered separately.”
“John, you need to get over the hero complex,” Johnson said. “Blue Four’s disposition makes the best use—”
“Sergeant, I’m in command of Blue Team,” John said. “Let’s do it my way.”
“I almost wish we could,” Johnson shot back. “But I’m committed to this vector.”
“You’re what?”
“You can yell at me . . . but later, okay?” Linda said. “I had to make a snap decision, and that’s what I decided.”
TEAMCOM filled with static and space flared white as a Havok detonated behind them.
“Oh, yeah,” Johnson said. “Fire in the hole. I left my Havok in the Banshee.”
John did not need to ask Staff Sergeant Johnson’s reasoning. The last thing Blue Team wanted was to leave witnesses who could describe their infiltration techniques—and the detonation would help cover their target approaches. If a sharp sensor operator happened to defeat their armor’s ablative coating and notice a few contacts moving away from the detonation, there was a good chance it would be attributed to explosion debris and not investigated further.
John let out a sigh. He was starting to remind himself of Crowther, focusing on how much control he had rather than on getting the job done.
“Good thinking, Sarge.”
“Imagine that.” Johnson’s tone was about half amused and half irritated. “The old guy has a few tricks up his sleeve.”
By now, the lead air-skimmer was just a dozen kilometers behind John and about five below, in a position where he could keep an eye on it without having to wrench his helmet around. It had swelled to the length of his arm, and to him it looked more like a pregnant cigar than an overstuffed one. Its hull was lined with bands of blue lights that occasionally seemed to writhe or wink as an escort fighter passed over. The fighter craft themselves were still just specks, too small to identify . . . and an indication of just how massive the munitions carrier actually was.
The cone at its bow had contracted to about half its previous diameter. Now it seemed to be slowly sliding back into the vessel itself. Even more alarming, the stern was trailing a faint blue glow—a sign that it was firing up its reactors and preparing to break orbit.
The ETA on John’s HUD gave him almost three minutes to interception. He watched the cone carefully, trying to figure out how soon it would be fully retracted—since that would probably be when the huge vessel reactivated its energy shields.
The construction of the cone seemed as strange as everything else about the aliens. From what John could see, it consisted of eight flexible poles that occasionally sparked and crackled with energy as they were drawn into the air-skimmer’s bow. The gossamer panels between them seemed to wrinkle like cloth one moment and flicker like light the next, and from John’s angle, he could not see whether they were vanishing into the bow with the poles or just fading into nothingness.
The cone was down to a quarter of its original length when fighter specks began to bleed away over the air-skimmer’s sides. At first, John feared they were returning to the hangar in preparation for breaking orbit. But when a quarter of them remained on station above the vessel, he realized something else was happening.
The mystery was solved a few moments later when a pair of bell-shaped silhouettes appeared above Etalan’s ashen clouds—the Vanishing Point’s escort prowlers approaching in a low retrograde orbit. The two Razors were engaged in recovery operations, plucking Green and Gold Teams out of low orbit after their attacks. But, of course, the Covenant would not know that. The aliens would assume the two craft were preparing for a strike on their munitions train. John hadn’t actually planned on having the recovery operations serve as the diversion for Blue Team’s attack, but he was grateful for any help he could get.
Lances of light began to streak back and forth as the two sides opened fire on each other. The human attacks appeared to be coming out of nowhere, though John knew that was just an illusion. Each prowler was being escorted by some of the Vanishing Point’s Baselards, but the UNSC fighter craft were too small to be visible at such an extreme distance.
When the ETA on John’s HUD reached two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, the onboard computer chimed a warning. He shut off his primary thruster and used the maneuvering jets to swing him around so he was descending toward the interception point backward. Two seconds later, he reignited the primary thruster and fired it hard, decelerating in preparation for syncing orbits with his target.
No stealth system was perfect, and even the ablative baffles affixed to his thruster pack could not conceal the sudden heat blossom of a triamino hydrazine blast pointed directly at an alert enemy. In the next heartbeat, a handful of fighter flecks rose from the small swarm keeping station above the air-skimmer and streamed toward John.
There were only eight of them. But when a soldier’s only antispacecraft weapon was a MA5C assault rifle—and evasive action was impossible because he was on an intercept vector that could not be varied—that was eight fighters too many.
“Sergeant, are you seeing this?”
“Damn right,” Johnson said. “You want me to do something about it? Or would you rather handle it on your own?”
The pointed questions were obviously a reminder of John’s attempt to overrule Linda’s decision to have Johnson cover him, but the wily sergeant was not the kind to rub in a mistake for no reason. He was trying to teach John a lesson he wouldn’t forget—and John wouldn’t have minded so much, if all hell weren’t about to break loose on him.
“Just give them something to worry about,” John said. He could not help thinking that either Fred or Kelly might be facing the same situation right now—without backup—but there was nothing to be done about it except trust Linda’s judgment. “Can you tell what kind of fighters they are?”
“Banshees,” Johnson said. “The Seraphs went after the prowlers.”
“That’s something, I guess.” Banshee fighters were smaller, lightly armed, and far less resilient than Seraphs—primarily because Seraphs had energy shielding. “All of them?”
“All the ones I can see through this scope,” Johnson replied. “Shooting past you. No sudden moves, Blue Leader.”
“No problem.”
Sudden moves could be catastrophic during an active thruster maneuver, since they could throw off the traveler’s center of gravity and send him spiraling out of control as his thruster nozzle pointed in different directions. If that were to happen, his onboard computer would take control and bring his tumble back under control within a few seconds—but by then, John would be off-vector and completely unable to intercept the target.
He continued to watch between his feet as the Banshees approached. They were coming straight at him now. Their efflux glow made them look like eight pinhead-size halos rising up beneath his feet. His own thruster exhaust was dark but hot, and it created distortion waves that made the halos seem to jump and bounce as they approached.
One of the halos veered off, either hit by M99 fire or reacting to it; then it curved away and descended toward the air-skimmer. It didn’t seem possible that Johnson had actually hit the craft at a range that was probably in excess of fifty kilometers, but he saw no other explanation for the Banshee’s sudden departure.
“Did you get it?”
“All the way from here? I’m good, but not—” Johnson broke off as the Banshees opened fire, hiding their halos behind a blinding spray of plasma bolts. “John, abort!”
“Ne
gative.” Covenant plasma bolts began to flash past him on all sides—but not closely. He was still a small target, and the enemy was still a long way off. “Keep firing.”
The plasma barrage continued to intensify, and John lost all sight of the enemy behind what had become a column of white fire boiling up around him. He checked his ETA and realized he would never survive the two minutes it would take to sync orbits, much less the time it would take to execute a proximity maneuver and actually land on the air-skimmer’s hull. Eventually the range would drop to the point where the Banshee plasma cannons grew accurate. Of course, Johnson’s aim with his M99 would grow more accurate too—but there were still seven Banshees and only one Johnson.
Hoping to obscure some of the enemy targeting sensors, John emptied the MA5C’s underslung grenade launcher. The plasma barrage abated for a moment, then quickly reintensified as the Banshees reacquired the heat signature from his thruster pack.
In response, John shut down the thruster pack, and the waypoint on his HUD began to drift as the onboard computer struggled to calculate a new syncing vector. But John didn’t actually need to sync orbits; he just needed to intercept the air-skimmer for about a second. He fired a maneuvering jet, spinning himself around so his primary thruster was no longer pointed toward the approaching Banshees, and the fountain of oncoming plasma fire quickly grew more diffuse as they lost their targeting data.
John breathed a little easier, then felt a maneuvering jet fire as his onboard computer put him on a new interception course. The ETA on his HUD lost forty seconds, and he found himself with less than a minute before impact.
“John, I’ve lost you,” Johnson said. “Are you—”
“Keep firing!” John slid the Havok’s control panel open and checked his new ETA—fifty seconds—then entered a time delay of thirty seconds. He set the trigger to automatic but didn’t initiate the countdown. “And set an avoidance vector. In about forty seconds, you’re not going to want to be within five kilometers of that skimmer.”