by Troy Denning
“Belay that order,” Crowther said.
Johnson felt an almost imperceptible shudder beneath his feet, as though the Ghost Song were reacting to Crowther’s audacity. The communications officer paused only long enough to glance to Nyeto for a confirming nod, then began to prepare the burst transmission. Nobody seemed to be looking in Avery’s direction, so he let his hands drift over his thigh pouches and slipped his fingers under the flip-up covers.
Crowther’s gaze moved from the communications officer to Nyeto. “Commander, sending that microburst will accomplish nothing,” he said. “There won’t be a response because Sierra Force already knows exactly what you really are. I’m hereby relieving you of command and charging you with treason against the UNSC.”
“Relieving me of command?” Nyeto laughed and leaned forward, his left hand dropping out of view down in front of his chair. “That’s funny.”
In a flash, Avery drew both pistols from his thigh pouches. He aimed one at the back of Nyeto’s chair and offered the other to Crowther, but the flight deck’s sensor operator was already spinning around, bringing up an M6E sidearm. The muzzle flashed twice, and Crowther went down with a crater in his forehead and blood spurting from his clavicle.
Avery returned fire with both pistols, blasting the sensor operator from his seat and putting two rounds into Nyeto’s chair, then realized he was stumbling back, his torso armor hammering into his chest as he took round after round, the attack coming from the navigator and the copilot. Hell, even the communications officer was now firing at him, and she was supposed to be preparing a burst transmission.
Apparently everyone on the flight deck was a damn traitor.
Knowing his armor could not keep absorbing bullet impacts forever, Avery backed away through the flight deck hatch, still shooting, then started down the starboard passageway and saw a trio of crewmen coming toward him. All three were armed with M7 submachine guns, but holding their weapons muzzle-down as they raced into combat.
Not infantry-trained, clearly.
Avery charged, emptying his clips as he ran. There was a very small chance that the three crewmen were a legitimate security detail reacting to an order from their commander, but of course there was no way to sort that out in the middle of a firefight.
One of the trio sprayed a burst into the wall as he went down, but those were the only shots any of them managed to fire.
Avery tucked his pistols into his thigh pockets, then snatched up the two submachine guns that hadn’t been discharged and started aft. He didn’t like leaving the third weapon behind when it might be used against him later, but the situation had gone south in a hurry. As much as he refused to believe an entire flight crew could go renegade, there was no arguing with what had happened to Crowther. Hell, from what he had observed so far, the Ghost Song’s entire complement could be insurrectionist traitors.
He needed immediate reinforcements.
Avery brought up the assault armor’s HUD and eye-selected First Platoon Alpha’s comm channel.
“Red eagle!” The prearranged code that would tell First Platoon to take the prowler by force. “Red eagle, now!”
Five meters down the passageway, two hatches slid open simultaneously on either side of the corridor. One led into the two-deck engineering hold in the middle of the vessel, the other into a crew cabin. Firing both weapons, Avery put a suppression burst through each portal.
A second later, once he was sure his would-be attackers were ducking ricochets instead of watching the passageway, he stopped firing and raced past, then spun around and found two gun barrels emerging from each opening. One was high and the other low, which was smart. But all four weapons were pointed up the passageway in the direction he had been coming from, which was dumb.
Avery stepped between the hatches and emptied an M7 magazine into each opening, firing low first because he knew the recoil would naturally cause the weapons to rise. The air filled with red mist and smoke, and four bodies tumbled out into the passageway.
“Damn, Sarge!” Captain Hamm’s voice sounded inside Avery’s helmet, coming over the Alpha Company command channel. “Leave a few for the rest of us!”
“There’s plenty to go around.” As he spoke, Avery was careful to keep an eye on the motionless crewmen lying at his feet. It was still remotely possible that one or two were alive. “Crowther’s dead. Looks like the whole crew is with Nyeto.”
“All of Ghost Flight, actually,” Hamm said. “And they were expecting this.”
Another brilliant observation from an officer. Avery took his eyes off the dead crewmen just long enough to check the passageway behind him. Relieved to see Hamm approaching with a pair of Black Daggers beside her, he smashed the stocks of the empty M7s against the edge of the hatchway and took a replacement from the hands of a petty officer first class who had died with his one remaining eye wide open.
By then, Hamm was stepping to Avery’s side, motioning the two Black Daggers to check the compartments beyond the body-clogged hatches. Only then did Avery feel secure enough to take a longer look back down the passageway toward the drop bay.
There were only two more assault troopers in the passageway.
“Where’s the rest of the platoon?”
“Vacced,” Hamm said. “Your ‘red eagle’ was a tad late.”
Avery’s heart sank. “Damn it. Nyeto blew the jump hatch?”
“About twenty seconds before you called,” she said. “The decompression caught us by surprise—took about two blinks to empty the bay. Connor grabbed the hatch release, and I held on to his ankles, watching everybody go. It was like seeing a vacuum cleaner suck sardines out of the can.”
Avery thought for a moment. Nyeto had told the comm officer to broadcast in the open—and tapped his fingers on the arm of his chair.
“Oh, damn,” Avery said. “Nyeto gave his crew a go signal. It was nonverbal, but I should have caught it. Warned you. I’m so sorry.”
Hamm waved him off. “They’re still alive, Sergeant. Our guys were buttoned up,” she said. “All we have to do is take the flight deck and go pick them up.”
“After we hit the L-point,” Avery said. “We don’t do that, this mission is a bust.”
“The Night Watch is carrying on,” Hamm said. The sole surviving prowler from Watch Flight, the Night Watch had been attached to Ghost Flight to replace the Ghost Star, which had been lost at Seoba. “She’s carrying Third Platoon under Olinda MacDonnell.”
“I thought Third Platoon was at half-strength after Seoba.”
“They are,” Hamm said. “But Olinda is kind of the Black Dagger version of John-117—stubborn as hell and doesn’t know when to quit. She’ll get the job done, one way or another.”
A couple of assault rifle bursts sounded inside the engineering hold; then Hamm’s trooper returned and gave a thumbs-up. Hamm looked up the passageway in the direction of the flight deck.
“How many did you get down there, Linberg?”
“Two,” Linberg reported. Her voice was a bit quavery. “Not sure whose side they were on, but they had weapons and wouldn’t drop them.”
“That makes them the enemy,” Hamm said, reassuring her. “Johnson, how many have you taken out?”
“Seven in the passageway.”
“Seven?”
“Plus the sensor operator on the flight deck,” Avery added. He didn’t care for the note of surprise in Hamm’s voice—it made him think she had a poor opinion of what old sergeants could do. “Maybe Nyeto too.”
“Just maybe?”
“Best I could do.” Avery pointed to the dimples in his chest armor. “I was taking fire and trying to shoot Nyeto through a chair.”
“We’ll take it from here, Sergeant.” Hamm sounded amused. She turned to the two troopers who had been waiting behind them. “Counting our measly six, that’s fourteen. That means Nyeto still has two crewmen running around loose, and someone might have left the flight deck too. Don’t let us get surprised.”
&n
bsp; The troopers answered almost in unison, with young-sounding voices: “Yes, ma’am.”
Hamm turned to the trooper who had checked the crew cabin. He had a flat-black second lieutenant’s bar on the collar of his armor, which made him First Platoon’s new lieutenant, Nolan Connor.
“Let’s take this bat, Nolan,” she said. “I don’t want our people adrift any longer than necessary.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Connor pulled a coil of thermite-carbon cord from one thigh pouch and a pair of flashbangs from the other. “Which do you want, Sergeant?”
Before answering, Avery glanced around at the weaponry everyone was carrying. All five of the Black Daggers held MA5B assault rifles, which were decent weapons for close-quarters boarding actions. Their selectors were set to three-round burst fire, and the red paint on their magazines meant they were loaded with hollow-point ammunition that was perfect for the current circumstances—highly effective against unarmored personnel, but unlikely to penetrate equipment cabinets, hulls, or viewports. They knew how to take a flight deck.
Avery clamped the M7 to his armor, then reached for the thermite-carbon cord. “Let me have the T-C-C,” he said. “I wouldn’t want to get in your way when the shooting starts.”
They moved forward at a trot, the two young troopers clearing each compartment they passed.
When they finally reached the flight deck, no one was surprised to find it sealed from the inside.
Hamm sent the two young troopers to clear the port side of the prowler, then stood watch while Avery pasted the T-C-C in place.
The hatch was designed to suck tight against its seals in the event of a pressure loss in the main body of the ship, so when Avery ignited the T-C-C, it would fall inward. As it dropped, Connor would toss both flashbangs into the compartment, and Hamm would step inside and shoot the traitors while they were still stunned from the flashbangs.
And, with any luck, they would do all that before Nyeto located Sierra Force and started hitting them with tight-beam transmissions to draw the attention of the Covenant.
Avery was pressing the cord down the last side when a young trooper’s voice sounded over the platoon channel.
“Captain, we can’t access the emergency airlock.”
“Why not?” Hamm asked.
“Unclear. The pressure is equalized. We should be able to open the hatch.”
“What do you see inside?”
“Nothing. The viewport is fogged.”
Avery didn’t like the sound of that. He came to the corner of the hatch and ran the T-C-C across the bottom. The whole reason airlocks had viewports was so that if something was wrong, you could look inside and see the problem. He reached the detonation cap and wrapped the extra cord around it to complete the circle, then looked up to see if Hamm was ready . . . and, on the wall above her head, saw a dark bulb about the size of a pencil eraser.
A security camera.
“Oh, shit,” he said.
Hamm’s faceplate dropped in his direction as a tremendous boom sounded somewhere aft, and she rose off her feet and flew down the passageway, bouncing off the bulkhead and vanishing down the portside passageway. And Avery went tumbling after her, his arms and legs tangled with Connor’s, and together they hit the bulkhead and ricocheted down the portside passageway after the captain.
The air was filled with blankets and pillows and clothes, tools and crates and weapons, all of it sailing toward the midpoint of the passageway and disappearing through a jagged hole where the emergency airlock used to be.
Avery saw Hamm being drawn toward the breach, flailing and clawing at the bulkheads; then she jackknifed at the waist and went through the hole. Connor was next, back arching and head going first. Avery’s stomach rose as though he were falling, then he felt himself bend at the waist and suddenly he too was out among the stars, his ragged breath roaring in his ears and his heart hammering in his chest.
Vacced.
Avery was not wearing a thruster pack, so he had only his assault armor’s integrated maneuvering jets to stop his tumble. He began to fire them carefully, in half-second bursts that slowly brought his spinning under control, then his head-over-heels flipping, and finally the stars stopped whirling past in mad paisley patterns and he found himself adrift in the emptiness.
The comm channels inside his helmet were not quite silent. He could hear Hamm and the others huffing into their helmet mikes, trying to bring their own breathing under control. There was a clatter that sounded like chattering teeth, and a low growl that was probably a young trooper groaning in pain.
Avery used the suit’s finger-position maneuvering controls to begin a slow spin, and quickly located a nearby mass of shadow that could only be the Ghost Song. Beyond it to the left lay the outpost in Libration Point Three, now a thumb-size smudge of green dotted with flecks of brightly lit installations. Naraka itself lay beyond the libration point, a massive emerald disk swaddled by ribbons of golden cloud, with a heavy band of orbital facilities twinkling high above its equator.
There was no sign of the rest of First Platoon Alpha, which was no doubt dozens of kilometers away by now after being decompression-launched out of the drop bay. Nor did Avery see any sign that the Ghost Song had located Sierra Force yet, though he knew that couldn’t last. Sooner or later, Nyeto or one of his people would spy a cluster of wedge-shaped silhouettes diving toward Naraka, blotting out distant stars as they moved to attack. After that, it would be a simple matter for the traitors to do their work, to send a message—or even a missile—that would warn the Covenant of the approaching Spartans.
And there was only one way to stop them.
Avery activated his emergency locator beacon, then watched in delight as a dozen bright slivers of light appeared inside the Covenant outpost and came streaking in their direction.
“Johnson!” Hamm snapped over the First Platoon channel. “Are you trying to get us captured?”
“No, ma’am.” Johnson grinned as all three of Nyeto’s prowlers suddenly fired their engines and turned to flee. “I’m trying to get Commander Nyeto killed.”
CHAPTER 25
* * *
* * *
1519 hours, April 15, 2526 (military calendar)
UNSC Razor-class prowler Black Widow
Insertion Approach, Planet Naraka, Agni System
The harsh beep of a heads-up alarm broke over the Black Widow’s flight deck, and John-117’s heart climbed into his throat.
With Sierra Force approaching Naraka and Dagger Force already infiltrating the enemy’s libration-point outposts, the assault plan was both immutable and at its most vulnerable. His HUD showed eleven minutes before a wave of nuclear detonations was due to take out the Covenant picket squadrons. During the confusion that followed, the four prowlers of Sierra Force would penetrate the alien defenses and insert a platoon of Spartan-led space-assault troopers at four different locations near the orbital fleet-support ring. The platoons would then use EV tactics to board and destroy as many facilities as possible from the inside, using time-fused nuclear devices and tubs of a high-yield explosive called octanitrocubane. Nicknamed “octas,” the tubs cost more to produce than a Havok thermonuclear device, but they were worth it because they were shaped charges and their explosive yield did not decrease in a vacuum.
But none of that would matter if Sierra Force wasn’t in position when Dagger Force began its attack.
The sensor operator silenced the heads-up alarm, then turned toward the commander’s chair at the back of the flight deck.
“Ma’am, that was a space assault distress beacon transmitting in the open.” The sensor operator glanced toward John, then added, “The identifier reads Staff Sergeant A. Johnson.”
“Avery Johnson?” Esme Guayte’s voice betrayed her surprise. Dressed in black utilities with her name and lieutenant’s rank appropriately displayed, she was a small woman with stocky limbs who nevertheless made the oversize chair seem as though it had been built just for her. She regained her c
omposure, then asked, “Any other signals?”
“Negative.”
The communications officer, sitting at her station on the opposite side of the flight deck from the sensor operator, pressed a fingertip to her earphone.
“Actually, ma’am,” she said, “I’m picking up some suit chatter on the First Platoon Alpha comm channel. I don’t have their encryption up, but if you give me a minute—”
“I’ll let you know if I need it.” Guayte kept her attention fixed on the sensor operator. “Ensign Jones, what’s the enemy reaction?”
“Heavy,” Jones reported. “I have nine—make that ten—frigate-size vessels departing the Point Three outpost.”
“What vector?”
“Too early to tell,” Jones replied. “Could be the emergency beacon, or it could be us.”
“Very well,” Guayte said. “Keep me informed.”
She looked over at John. She was no doubt thinking the same thing he was—if the communications officer was picking up suit-to-suit chatter, it could only mean Avery Johnson wasn’t the only soldier floating around out there. Clearly, something had gone very wrong with the effort to take control of Hector Nyeto’s prowlers.
Guayte continued to look at John.
Finally he realized what she was waiting for. He couldn’t believe what he was about to say, but Avery Johnson understood signals discipline as well as anyone. He would never compromise the mission by activating an emergency beacon the enemy was sure to detect. The only reason he would do something that drastic was that he wanted the Covenant to hear it.
John just wished he understood why.
“I think we have to stick to the plan.” John was careful to phrase his decision as a suggestion. Crowther might have put him in charge of the mission, but he was enlisted and Guayte was the highest-ranking officer aboard the prowler. If push came to shove, there could be no doubt whom the crew would obey. “We need to stay on mission.”
Guayte’s lips tightened, but she gave John a crisp nod. “Very well, Master Chief.” She turned forward again. “Detection, continue to monitor the signal. Navigation, fix the location for return. We’ll try to swing by later and pick them up.”