by Troy Denning
John banged his fist against the hatch so hard that he dented it, then took a breath and stepped back. An order was an order, and Small Bear had been clear about what she expected.
John turned around to find the rest of Blue Team and six Third Platoon survivors watching him expectantly. Fred sat in the driver’s compartment of a half-loaded cargo sled that looked large enough to haul an entire platoon—along with a couple of pieces of field artillery. The sleds were simple vehicles, little more than an egg-shaped driver’s compartment attached to the front of a cargo bed long enough to hold two Spartans lying end-to-end. Several more sleds were parked along the sides of the transit tube, most in various stages of being loaded with a variety of materials.
“You heard the lady,” he said. “Let’s make this count.”
He received a chorus of enthusiastic replies and helmet bobs, but they still needed a plan. John looked to Fred.
“You figure out how to drive that thing?”
“Sort of,” Fred said. “The controls aren’t too different from the Banshees, at least in how you work them.”
“Close enough,” John said. He turned to the surviving assault troopers and motioned them onto the sled. “If we want to stay ahead of the Covenant and knock out enough installations to take this ring down, we need to move fast. Spartan-104 will show you how to operate this thing. Once you’re good, he’ll turn it over to you and switch vehicles. Clear?”
The troopers dipped their helmets in quick nods, and a husky male voice said, “So far.”
“The rest is easy.” John outlined a simple plan, then finished, “When you’re out of octas, exfiltrate the best way you can and call for a ride.”
The troopers piled their spare SPNKR barrels onto the sled behind Fred, then moved forward to learn how the vehicle was operated. John slipped into the driver’s compartment of a second vehicle, which was loaded about three-quarters full with ingots of some kind of silvery-blue metal. Kelly and Linda mounted a third vehicle, also loaded with the metal ingots.
As Fred had indicated, the controls were similar to a Banshee’s, but much simpler. There was basically a pair of handle grips to control speed and vector, and no weapon triggers.
John placed his weapons in the driver’s compartment beside him, then straddled the driver’s bench and placed both hands on the grips. The vehicle immediately whirred to life, its antigravity pads lifting it about a half meter off the floor. He moved the grips forward, and the sled began to accelerate.
Kelly and Linda came up beside him, Kelly driving and Linda kneeling in the cargo bed, using a stack of ingots as a firing rest for her M99. Fred brought up the rear, his voice echoing in John’s helmet as he instructed the Black Daggers in driving the alien vehicle.
The transit tube was basically a flattened oval about five meters high and three times that in width, with one “roadbed” running along the “floor” of the tube and another along the “ceiling.” Presumably, the aliens used artificial gravity to keep the sleds secured to the appropriate surface, with the floor designated for outbound traffic and the ceiling for empty inbound traffic.
Along the walls ran a two-meter viewing band, through which John could see the criss-crossing beams of the transit tube’s trussing armature. Through the armature gaps on the left side, he saw Naraka’s cloud-mottled face. If he craned his neck far enough, he could see distant sections of the fleet-support ring. To his delight, the ring had a visible gap about a quarter of its circumference behind him, and he did not see the blue spoke of a space elevator running down to the planet’s surface beneath the gap. At least part of Green Team had made it that far, and they had destroyed at least one orbital facility. But it was going to take more than a small gap like that to destabilize the entire ring. Blue Team still had a lot of work to do.
Through the right-hand band, John could see the Covenant fleet departing its shielding orbit, repositioning itself to . . . what? Fire plasma cannons against its own support installations? The aliens would no doubt launch swarms of starfighters, but even they would not be of much use against a force that had already infiltrated their facilities. It was an infantry fight now, and in that arena, the Spartans held the advantage.
John felt the sled wobble as Fred jumped aboard and dumped an armload of SPNKR barrels into the cargo bed. A few minutes later, the dark oval of a closed hatch appeared at the end of the transit tube ahead.
Fred grabbed his SPNKR and kneeled in the front of the cargo bed, and the barrier vanished in an orange ball of flame and smoke. John aimed the sled at the center of the ball and, ducking down in the compartment to make himself as small a target as possible, drove straight into the flames.
The sled bounced a couple of times as it struck the edges of the jagged hole, and then they were shooting across the deck of one of the orbiting fleet-support facilities that were linked by the transit tube. This one looked like some kind of huge smelter.
A few needles and plasma bolts rained down from the girders overhead, but the barrage was so light and poorly aimed that it had to be coming from an amateur security team rather than a military unit. John kept the control grips pushed forward and barely bothered dodging, while Fred created confusion and conserved ammunition by flinging ingots at anything they passed.
At the speed they were traveling, the heavy ingots landed with the force of a rocket strike, taking out cargo sleds, cranes, even a crucible filled with molten metal. So far, John’s strategy of moving fast was working well—the enemy was obviously scrambling, unable to move effective forces into place quickly enough to defend themselves.
A textbook raiding technique.
Except for losing most of Third Platoon. Casualties that high were never textbook.
The cargo sleds reached the far side of the smelter and entered the transit tube. Linda and Kelly pulled up beside Fred and John to maximize firepower if they ran into trouble ahead.
Having paused to find a good place to hide their octa, the Black Daggers had fallen a couple of minutes behind by the time they entered the transit tube, reporting one trooper injured.
John started a new two-and-a-half-minute countdown. The team would have to breach the transit tube before the octa detonated in the smelter—or risk being taken out by their own shockwave.
They reached the next installation at just over two minutes. Again, the hatch was closed, and again Fred hit it with a SPNKR rocket. This time, most of the fireball blew back into the transit tube, and John glimpsed something dark looming on the other side of the destroyed hatch.
“Second rocket!” He began to decelerate. “Barricade!”
Fred fired again, and a gaping hole appeared in the dark mass—but not a hole large enough to drive the cargo sled through.
John stopped the vehicle short and adjacent to the door, then grabbed his weapons and fired a grenade one-handed through the hole.
“Kelly—”
Kelly was already charging through the hole, firing as she moved. Fred followed close behind, the SPNKR clamped to his back and four extra barrels tucked under his arm. In his other hand, he carried his assault rifle. He let off a burst as stepped through the hole, and an instant later, the firefight had ended.
“Clear!” Kelly reported.
Linda stepped through, heavily burdened with her M99, an MA5B, and an extra case of barrels for Fred’s SPNKR.
The Black Daggers arrived just as the countdown on John’s HUD reached zero. He wasn’t sure how much time actually remained until the octa in the last installation detonated, but it had to be less than thirty seconds.
As the assault troopers piled out of their sled, he pointed at the wall of the transit tube. “Hit that with a rocket,” John said. “We need a vacuum cushion between us and the detonation.”
The troopers ignored him and carried their wounded companion through the breached hatch.
“Already taken care of.” It was a husky-voiced trooper bringing up the rear of the line who said this. “You don’t have to be a Spartan to
know what happens when you set off an octa in a confined space.”
He disappeared through the breach after his companions, then stuck his head back through. “Better come along, Chief. There’s going to be a hell of a wind in about ten seconds.”
Feeling a bit foolish for thinking someone of a Black Dagger’s training and experience would need reminding about shockwave hazards, John stepped through the hole and added one to the count of facilities that he could be certain Sierra Force had destroyed.
The aliens had toppled one of their cargo sleds in front of the hatch in an effort to defend their installation, and John helped his fellow Spartans turn the vehicle around so that its rounded nose was pushed into the hatch breach.
When a charge ruptured the transit tube a couple of seconds later, the decompression sucked the sled’s nose deeper into the hole, holding the pressure loss inside the installation to a whistling breeze.
By the time they’d finished, a trio of Black Daggers had returned with a pair of replacement cargo sleds and a fresh casualty. Leaving the Daggers to plant their next octa, John and Blue Team climbed into the first sled and took off across what appeared to be a small-arms factory. They exchanged fire with a security detail that was taking cover behind the intermittent bulkheads that separated the transit lane from the work floor, simultaneously tossing crates off the sled to keep everyone else’s heads down, and quickly reached the transit tube portal on the far side. The Black Daggers lagged behind in their sled, engaging in a more protracted firefight as they looked for a place to secure their octa. John didn’t see where that was, because by then, he and the rest of the Spartans were in the transit tube and speeding away again.
They didn’t have time to stop. If what was left of Sierra Force wasn’t able to destroy at least eight more facilities, their chances of bringing down the orbital ring fell off sharply. If they managed to destroy a total of nine installations instead of ten, Dr. Halsey’s estimates gave them only a seventy-one percent chance of destabilizing the ring. If they managed to destroy only a total of seven facilities, their chances of success fell to just forty-nine percent. John hadn’t even bothered to memorize the odds below that—he hadn’t brought Sierra Force all this way to take longshots. He was going to find a way.
The trip through the next few installations went much the same, with the Covenant security teams trying new tricks to slow the Spartan advance, and the Spartans finding countermeasures to circumvent them. The Black Daggers ran out of luck in the sixth facility, when the husky-voiced trooper—John hated that there had been no time to ask the man’s name—spoke over the platoon channel.
“Afraid we can’t keep carrying your water, Blue Team.” His voice was pained and gurgling. “We’ll be going out with our octa this time.”
“Acknowledged,” John said. “You did the 21st proud.”
“ ’Course we did,” the trooper said. “Just make sure you finish—”
The transmission ended in sharp crackle, and John instructed his onboard computer to log the time and conversation so he could recommend the man and his companions for a commendation—assuming he made it back himself.
As Blue Team approached the next installation, John glimpsed a set of efflux tails through the transit tube’s lower viewband and stopped the vehicle to investigate. What he saw was both elating and dismaying.
About a quarter of the orbital fleet-support ring was now in ruins, with most of the missing sections directly behind Blue Team and, farther around the circle, a much smaller gap where Green Team had taken out what appeared to be about three facilities. Counting the six installations that Blue Team had destroyed, that made nine—and the orbital ring was already beginning to show signs of destabilization. There were long pieces of transit tube falling out of orbit and entire facilities plunging into Naraka’s atmosphere, bright trails of fire behind them.
But the orbits below the section Green Team had destroyed were also filled with Covenant fighters. Many were flitting madly about, firing on tiny specks and unseen targets that might well be Green Team Spartans or their Black Dagger companions. A few craft seemed to be pursuing more deliberate strategies, traveling to specific points along the ring to cut off the advance of potential infiltrators.
And a few kilometers below that, a flight of ten Banshees was passing beneath the viewport where John stood, heading for a point that looked to be a couple of installations ahead of the Spartans’ current location. John dropped to his knees and craned his neck around, trying to see the Banshees’ destination, and caught a glimpse of a vessel under construction, with a bow so huge that at first he thought he was seeing things.
Fred’s voice came over TEAMCOM—the only channel they were using, now that everyone in Third Platoon was gone.
“John?” he said. “Now’s kind of a bad time for a nap.”
“Very funny,” John said. “Come here, wise guy. Give this a look.”
Fred came over and kneeled in front of John, then began to crane his neck around. “Okay, what am I . . .” He let the sentence trail off and whistled. “Wow. What are they building there?”
“Who cares?” John said. “Either way, we’re going to blow it up.”
Linda and Kelly came over and sneaked a look at the vessel.
“I like it,” Kelly said. “Going out in style.”
“Or not.” John pointed to the Banshee fighters crossing below. “There’s our ride out of here.”
Linda studied the Banshee flight for a moment, then craned her neck to look at the huge ship again.
“I see only one problem,” she said. “That vessel must be more than twenty kilometers long and hundreds of decks high. Even if the Banshees intend to set down there, we could spend days looking for them.”
“We’ll think of something,” John said. “But if I were to guess, whoever is in those Banshees is coming to us.”
John led the way back to the cargo sled, and they resumed their advance.
The next facility turned out to be a dormitory, so after blasting their way in, they had to shoot their way across a thousand meters of metal-floored lobby, laying heavy suppression fire on at least fifty Jackals. The aliens were so poorly trained that their idea of blocking an advance was to hide behind the furniture on both sides of the kill zone and lay blind plasma fire in an inadvertent crossfire. They hit each other more than they did the Spartans or their vehicles, and they weren’t wearing armor. By the time Blue Team emerged on the other side, Fred was down to two SPNKR missiles, John had just three grenades, Kelly had two, and nobody had more than a single magazine for their assault rifles.
But everybody still had an M6 sidearm with a full clip, John still had twelve shotgun rounds in his M90, and Linda had fifty-two for her M99. So they were well-supplied for both long-distance combat and close assault. It was just the in-between ranges—where most firefights actually occurred—that would be a problem.
Not over yet, John thought. We can do this.
As they rode toward their next firefight, Blue Team spent their time brainstorming plans, and by the time the transit tube began to branch into different forks and levels, John thought they had something workable.
They stopped and reset the fuses on their remaining ordnance—two octas and four Havoks—to two-minute delays, then went to the viewing band and took another look at their final objective: a massive tangle of girders and airtight passageways that probably massed more than all of their other targets combined. Annihilating it would unbalance a whole section of the orbital ring. And the wreckage that wasn’t vaporized in the blast would be hurled away with immense force, dragging along everything to which it was attached. The entire structure would slide out of orbit and plunge flaming into Naraka’s cloudy atmosphere, virtually guaranteeing a severely hemorrhaged Covenant supply chain—a bloody nose John hoped the aliens would not soon forget.
Now that they were almost directly above the space docks, they also had a much clearer view of the vessel itself. Most of the immense ship they�
�d spied earlier was hidden between the two huge fabrication barns that hung down to either side of its patchwork hull. But the oval bow had already been completely covered. To John, it resembled the head of one of those huge, grinning whales whose pictures he had seen during the Earth module of his human-history classes.
The Banshee flight that he had seen before had already arrived and disappeared into one of the fabrication barns, but John could see a lot of rushing silhouettes in the mouth of a hangar about a quarter of the way down the starboard barn. Given the timing and circumstances, he thought it safe to assume he was looking at the Banshee flight’s location. He pointed to the hangar.
“Set that as your waypoint,” he said. “Then check the pressure integrity and rebreather status of your Mjolnir.”
“I’m going to need some patching,” Fred said.
“Who isn’t?” Kelly asked, reaching for a cargo pouch. “I just hope we have enough.”
“We do.” Linda drew two handfuls of patches from her thigh pouch. “I brought extra.”
Some of the patches had Black Dagger insignias on the split peel, but John didn’t ask. Battlefield scavenging was a necessity for behind-the-lines operators.
A few minutes later, they backed to the far side of the transit tube; then Linda opened fire on the viewing band with her M99. The first round barely dimpled the sturdy material, and the second merely created a cloudy disc. But they had a lot more high-impact sniper rounds than they did SPNKR missiles, so John had her keep trying.
The fifth round created a web of outward-radiating stress cracks. Five more shots around the perimeter of the web produced more cracks—and a high-pitched whistling as the transit tube began to depressurize. John motioned Fred forward.
“Give it a kick.”
Fred sprang into a two-booted flying side-kick that shattered the viewing pane and sucked him out into space.
“Like that?” he commed.
No one answered. They were too busy trying to avoid being knocked into a tumble as they were pulled through the breach together.