by Troy Denning
John understood Van Houte’s concern. Reach had once been a vital support world to the UNSC, a supplier of vast amounts of war materiel and home to more bases than John could name. Given the low-intensity conflict in the Arany Basin, it was beginning to sound like there was an entire horde of raiders foraging the planet’s old UNSC installations.
That was hardly surprising, given the vast amounts of military hardware that had been abandoned during the Reach bombardment. But it did make John rethink the enemy’s likely identity. The Banished and the Keepers of the One Freedom loved to forage Forerunner sites, but neither group had much interest in UNSC technology—certainly not enough to launch a continental-scale salvage operation. Both organizations were predominately alien, and human equipment just wasn’t that valuable to them.
“What about the Highland Mountains?” John asked. The greatest concentration of bases was in that location, including the Reach Military Complex where the Spartans had been billeted during their training as children. “Especially around—”
“I would have mentioned CASTLE Base,” Van Houte said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. If I happened to be looking the other way, or they launched while we were still on the far side of the bay, or there was a ridge of mountains in just the right place—”
“Understood,” John said. “We could have a dozen flights coming straight at us and not know it.”
“Probably not a dozen,” Van Houte said. “But more than a few.”
John glanced across at Fred. He wasn’t about to abort, not when Dr. Halsey was counting on them to retrieve what she needed to end Cortana’s despotic reign. But if the alternative was getting shot down…
“Getting complicated fast.” Fred shrugged. “What else is new?”
“It won’t be complicated for long,” Van Houte said. “We’ll be fine once we disappear.”
John didn’t see the Special Delivery going sensor-invisible anytime soon. At their speed, even the Owl’s fused-carbon phenolic laminate skin could not shed heat fast enough to “disappear.” The craft would light up like a torch on even the most primitive thermal-imaging system.
The sound of alert buzzers came over the internal comm net.
“Finally.” The buzzers fell silent, and Van Houte’s voice dropped to a mutter. “They… long enough.”
John resisted the temptation to ask who had taken long enough and checked the combat information system on his HUD. He found a flight of Seraphs approaching from the direction of the Szarvas Regeneration and Salvage Facility. The display listed their range as 508 kilometers, well beyond the Owl’s detection limit—which he found puzzling, until he noticed the Seraphs’ altitude and realized they were still climbing in an effort to maximize their own detection ranges.
So the enemy didn’t have an orbital combat control system either. The Seraphs would be using their onboard sensor systems to hunt down the Special Delivery—which John might have found comforting, had the Owl not been dropping below 4,500 meters altitude at Mach 5, trailing a sonic wave that had to sound like an artillery barrage to anyone approaching from the right vector.
“You were beginning to worry me,” Van Houte whispered. “Now, where are the rest of you?”
“Sir?” Chapov asked. “Are you talking to me?”
“Are you piloting a Seraph, Lieutenant?”
“Of course not.”
“Then I’m not talking to you,” Van Houte said. “How are my missiles coming?”
“Disabling the ignition system on the sixth Argent now.”
“Good.” Van Houte’s voice lowered to a whisper again. “We’re going to be dropping them any—”
The alert buzzers sounded, and two more Seraph flights appeared on the combat information display on John’s HUD. The first was the tracking flight that had originally spotted them, now approaching from the direction of SWORD Base at Mach 10. The second was an entire squadron of ten additional Seraphs, approaching from New Miskolc at Mach 9. Both flights were diving down from altitudes of slightly less than 10,000 meters, being vectored in by the high-flying interceptors from Szarvas. They would need to decelerate soon or risk overshooting the Special Delivery.
“Lieutenant,” Van Houte said, “is that last missile ready yet?”
“N-negative.” Chapov sounded irritated. “I mistyped the override code.”
“Imagine that.” Van Houte chuckled. “Relax, son. We’re in no big hurry.”
It didn’t look that way to John. Now that the enemy had the Special Delivery in sensor range, all three flights were diving to attack altitude, and over the Owl’s internal comm net, he could hear proximity alarms sounding off in the cockpit.
He wondered how long it would be before the shooting started, and the answer appeared on his HUD.
ESTIMATED TIME TO INITIAL ENGAGEMENT: 83 SECONDS
It was almost the same as the minimum time to interception the computer had displayed the last time John checked. But with the combat information system providing vectors and locations for the enemy craft, the computer now had the data to refine its estimates. John just wished he knew why Van Houte sounded so damn calm with interception flights arriving from three directions.
The proximity alarms sounded again, and more Seraph designators appeared in John’s HUD, coming from the direction of Fenyot Basin. That kind of hurt—Fenyot Basin had been a favorite training site for the Spartans, and John didn’t like to think of a bunch of Jiralhanae raiders bashing around the hoodoo maze where he and his comrades used to play monthlong games of sniper elimination and stealth tag.
The alarms suddenly fell silent, and Van Houte said, “Prepare for vanishing maneuver.”
“Vanishing maneuver?” Linda had finally removed her hands from her thighs and was looking forward, toward the cockpit. “I have never heard of such a thing.”
“My own invention,” Van Houte said. “Insert like a fireball, vanish like a ghost. Chief Mukai will tell you what to do.”
“Man the firing ports?” Fred asked.
Van Houte broke out laughing. “Good one, Spartan.”
“Who’s joking?”
“You are,” Mukai said. She reached up to the collar of her black insertion suit and thumbed up the cooling system. “If we open the firing ports at this speed, those interceptors won’t need to shoot us down.”
As she spoke, the Special Delivery suddenly nosed up and slid into a wingover, then dropped back into its dive… facing backward. The Owl’s rear hatch, which had only a thin layer of ablative heat shielding, began to take the brunt of the air friction, and the interior of the troop bay shot up fifty degrees. The skinsuit inside John’s Mjolnir activated its cooling circuits, and he began to understand Van Houte’s plan.
Every planet in the galaxy was bombarded by a constant rain of meteors, sometimes large enough to become bolides and explode into a brilliant burst of light and fragments. If Van Houte could time his “vanishing maneuver” just right, he might be able to fool the Seraphs into believing they had been tracking such a fireball, then use the Owl’s stealth capabilities to slip away in a rain of decoys and unignited missiles as it dropped to subsonic speed.
“Prepare for deceleration.” Mukai pressed a valve on her lapel, and her pants ballooned as her suit began to squeeze her legs and hips to keep the blood from pooling in her lower extremities. “High-g protocol.”
John tightened his belly and legs, then watched in astonishment as the situation monitor overheated and sparked into blackness. Below it, Mukai’s face grew pink and sweaty, then quickly grew dry and red as her sweat evaporated. He looked aft, over the back ends of the excavation machines, and saw the Owl’s loading hatch paling from steel blue to ash gray. A circle in the middle started to glow white and expand.
“Major, you’re about to melt through—”
“Tell me something I don’t know, Master—”
The transmission ended in a blast of static; then John was thrown against the side of his harness as the Special Delivery fired its main engines and began
to decelerate. John’s Mjolnir initiated automatic g-force protocols, using its hydrostatic gel layer to keep his blood in his torso and head.
The excavation machines strained against their mooring chains, the tremendous g-forces lifting them toward the rear hatch. The hoisting winches and haulage buckets stacked on the cargo platform on the back of the load-haul-dump wagon began to strain against the high-tensile net holding them in place. John checked the combat information display on his HUD and saw that the Owl was pulling twenty-one g’s in deceleration. A loud pop sounded from the forward bulkhead.
“Whoa!” Mukai’s outburst was answered by a metallic ping and a long sonorous peal, and she cried, “Cheap… Imberian… crap!”
She fell silent, and John found the soles of her boots bobbing up and down in front of him. She was still strapped into her crash harness, but three of the jump seat’s mounting brackets had failed, splitting along the fastener slots and pulling off the bulkhead bolts. Her arms were draped over the sides of the chair, limp and swinging in the green light, and it seemed apparent she had blacked out after her exclamation.
John’s HUD showed twenty-three g’s, and the Special Delivery’s engines were still firing. He and the other Spartans could handle another fifteen g’s before they had to worry about blacking out, but it was a wonder the pilots were still conscious.
The last mounting bracket on Mukai’s jump seat pulled away from the bulkhead, a long split opening between the fastener slots. In another breath, she was going to pull free and fly toward the back of the troop bay.
John extended an arm to catch her, as did Fred and Kelly, but when the flange finally failed, it was Linda who plucked Mukai out of the air and clamped her tight to her Mjolnir’s breastplate. Even with powered armor, Linda’s arms shook with the effort of keeping the chief from flying free.
Van Houte’s voice sounded over the Owl’s comm channel. “Launch… decoys.”
John checked the combat information display and saw that the Special Delivery had decelerated to Mach 2.5. Protocol dictated that decoy doors remained closed at anything above Mach 2, but he assumed Van Houte knew the Owl’s actual tolerances far better than he did.
At least he hoped so.
“Lieu… tenant?” Van Houte’s voice was strained, as it should have been. The combat information display showed the deceleration force hovering at twenty-five g’s. “Oh… hell. Launching.…”
The Special Delivery shook violently, and its nose began to slue back and forth as air pushed into the decoy bays and Van Houte fought to retain control. Two sharp clangs sounded aft. John looked back to see the rear section of the drilling jumbo lifting off the deck, a pair of broken D rings dangling from its mooring chains.
Midmaneuver or not, he had to warn the pilot.
“Major—”
“Dropping… missiles.”
The Special Delivery pitched and wobbled as a thousands-of-kilometers-per-hour wind entered the open missile bays from the wrong direction. The drilling jumbo slammed down on its rear tires, then began to buck wildly as the deck rose and fell beneath it.
“Cut thrust!” John shouted. “Cut—”
Van Houte killed the drives, but the Special Delivery’s nose had already come up again. The deck rose beneath the jumbo. The heavy machine slid aft and crashed into the loading hatch. The entire Owl shuddered, and the port safety bolts snapped free and ricocheted off Linda’s armor. A wedge of darkness appeared along the far edge of the loading hatch; then a shrill whistle filled the troop bay, and a two-thousand-kilometers-per-hour wind tried to rip the Spartans out of their crash harnesses.
Linda still gripped Mukai, clutching the chief to her breast like a baby.
Sirens and alarms blared inside John’s helmet, and the combat information system flashed so many warnings in his HUD that his faceplate looked like a lightning storm inside.
“What’s happening back there?!” Van Houte demanded. The craft banked to starboard, pushing the jumbo into the loading hatch even harder. “It feels like I’m flying a Warthog… with a flat tire!”
“Loose cargo.” John hit the emergency release on his crash harness. “Cease banking.”
“Not an option.” The Owl’s nose began to rise. “We need to come around and shed speed now.”
There was nothing but a hydraulic cylinder securing the port side of the loading hatch, and it was no match for the weight of the drilling jumbo. The cylinder began to extend, and the wedge of darkness continued to expand, and the hatch itself started to deform.
“Affirmative.” John pushed the crash harness up and out of the way. “Attempting to secure the cargo, but the loading hatch is already taking damage.”
“No choice,” Van Houte said. “We disappear now, or we have a squadron of Seraphs designating us as their destination.”
John stepped toward the runaway jumbo and found the rest of Blue Team following his lead. After three decades fighting side by side, it often seemed his fellow Spartans knew what he wanted before he opened his mouth to transmit it. He reached for a tie-down hook and found Kelly already holding the chain attached to it. On the other side of the vehicle, Fred had the tie-down hook, while Linda was securing a half-conscious Mukai in the crash harness Fred had just abandoned.
The Owl’s nose came up steeply, and even the sound-dampening traction soles on the bottoms of their sabatons were not enough to keep the heavy jumbo from dragging them aft. John’s HUD was now showing the Special Delivery’s speed in kilometers per hour instead of Machs, which meant the craft had dropped below the speed of sound on Reach. It was probably already flying in stealth mode.
John reset his feet and pulled hard against the heavy jumbo. Next to him, Kelly dropped to her rear and braced a foot against the cargo platform on the back of the load-haul-dump machine. She was spun sideways as the jumbo continued to push into the hatch, and the hatch continued to deform.
“Cease… climbing,” John said.
“Not an option,” Van Houte said. “We’ve got hills. Big hills.”
The safety bolts on the starboard side of the hatchway popped free and clattered off the LHD; then the wind slipped behind the hatch panel and tore it completely open, forcing the Owl’s tail down. The nose pitched upward almost vertically, and the jumbo shot toward the gaping hatch, its locked tires skidding down the slip-resistant deck as though gliding on ice.
“Let it go!” John released the drilling jumbo, then grabbed for the collar of Kelly’s armor and dived for the starboard side of the troop bay. “Secure yourselves!”
He hooked his arm through a crash harness and felt the Mjolnir’s force-multiplying circuits react, securing him and Kelly in place as the jumbo shot out through the hatch—then reached the end of its front tie-downs.
The back end of the machine rocked upward and hit the upper threshold of the hatchway, and that was the only thing that kept it from snapping the front chains and plummeting out of the Owl and into the night. John checked the motion tracker in his HUD and found Fred and Linda secure on the other side of the troop bay, with Mukai still tucked safely into Fred’s crash harness.
But the drilling jumbo was far from secure. It was now hanging halfway out the open hatch, still attached to the deck by its forward tie-down chains, rocking back and forth on its frame as the unrelenting wind tried to tear it free. Beneath it, the damaged hatch panel was catching the air, keeping the Owl pitched upward like a rocket plane climbing for orbit—except that it wasn’t climbing. The engines remained quiet, and any attempt to power them up would fill the troop bay with hot efflux.
John noted the altitude in his HUD. The Owl was at two thousand meters and dropping—which was pretty amazing, considering there were mountains to either side rising to twenty-five hundred meters. The only good news was that he didn’t see any Seraphs following them in—though that was probably only because the mountains were hiding their sensor signatures.
“Put us down,” John said. “No engines.”
“No engines, n
o problem,” said Chapov. The copilot had seemingly recovered from his blackout and was now flying the Owl. “But you have about ten seconds to get back into your crash harnesses.”
“And I wouldn’t be late,” Van Houte added. “Lieutenant Chapov may be a hotshot, but even he can’t work miracles.”
Kelly was drawing herself back into her seat. John did the same, then looked across the troop bay to see Fred and Linda already pulling their harnesses down. An Owl’s troop bay was designed to carry up to ten Spartans along each side, so there were plenty of empty spots, even with Mukai still in Fred’s original seat.
John’s harness locked into place with three seconds to spare.
“We’re ready.”
“Good,” Chapov said.
A deafening clang sounded from the Owl’s tail; then John saw the loading ramp fly up and launch the drilling jumbo forward. In the next instant, his seat bucked so hard he rose into his crash harness and felt the shoulder bars bend. The jumbo hit the end of its last mooring chains and decelerated rapidly as they broke, skidding forward across the nonslip deck and shattering the situation monitor hanging on the forward bulkhead—then tipping toward John’s side of the bay.
He thought the Special Delivery had gone into a side roll until he realized he was still sitting upright, that he was being thrown against the wall behind him, and he brought both hands up to prevent the jumbo from smashing him and Kelly. Somehow Chapov had landed the crippled Owl on its belly, and now it was plowing through the glass, level, fishtailing, and quickly decelerating.
“Brace yourselves!” Chapov warned.
John thought there must be a cliff or ravine coming. Instead, he heard a series of quarter-second hisses as Chapov used the attitude thrusters to bring the Owl under control, and then a single long whoooosh as the nose dropped and the craft finally slammed to a full stop.
For a moment no one spoke. John’s view across the bay was blocked by the drilling jumbo. He carefully pushed it back onto all four wheels, and heard Mukai give a small, startled cry as it crashed back to the deck. Thankfully, she was still alive and conscious again.