by Troy Denning
Then Chapov’s voice sounded over the intercom, relaxed, cocky, and unhurried.
“Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the pilot and crew of the Special Delivery, welcome to Reach. The time is 0241 military standard. I suggest you collect your weapons and equipment and exit the craft as quickly as possible. We have company on the way.”
CHAPTER TWO
0241 hours, October 7, 2559 (military calendar)
UNSC Owl Insertion Craft Special Delivery
Vadász Dombok, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach
It was so dark outside the Owl’s hatchway that even the fused-mode night-vision system in John’s Mjolnir helmet couldn’t gather enough light to provide an unmediated image. The terrain appeared inside his faceplate as a digitally rendered outline in green, with the illusion of volume provided by areas of shading and highlighting. The result was something like an impressionist painting, an interplay of light and shadow that suggested the Special Delivery had ended its flight on a long, broad terrace clinging to the side of a moderately steep ridge. Directly behind the Owl, framed by its loading hatch, lay a narrow, snaking furrow of scintillation that could only be its crash path. To the left hung a curving darkness that promised a bottomless abyss—but which might deliver nothing more than a shallow ravine.
Knowing there was still a fair amount of thermal radiation rising from the planet’s glassed ground, John had his onboard computer adjust the NVS input toward near-infrared. The image immediately grew crisper and more colorful, with the ground now represented by subtly fluctuating bands of orange and pink, the air in calm blue, and the clouds overhead a boiling mass of yellow and green. The crooked furrow of the Owl’s crash path resolved as a hot crimson trough filled with jagged shards of broken lechatelierite, stretching for a kilometer and a half behind them.
John leaned a little farther out of the hatchway and performed a quick scan of the sky, checking for inbound Seraphs and still wondering whether they belonged to the Banished or the Keepers—or maybe even to some new horde of Jiralhanae scavengers that he had not heard of. That was the trouble with this Pax Cortana. She was clamping down on interstellar civilization with an iron fist, and the harder she squeezed, the more insurgents she was going to have shooting out between her fingers.
When John saw no crimson halos blossoming above, he extended an arm behind him, pointing toward the weapons locker where his motion detector told him that the other Spartans were already gathering their weapons and equipment.
“Blue Team, adjust your NVS to near-infrared—you’ll be able to see better out here,” John said. “Linda, you’re overwatch. Make sure you have plenty of ammunition for the S5.”
“Always.”
Linda slipped past and sped down the ramp, a fully packed load-hauling harness slung over one shoulder. She carried a standard MA40 assault rifle—the most recent addition to the line, which featured the storied MA37—in one hand and a customized SRS99-S5 AM sniper rifle in the other. The sniper rifle had been manufactured to special tolerances for the Misriah Armory’s competitive shooting team, which made it less than ideal as a field weapon—its unique parts were hard to replace on a mission, where dirt and grime and hard shocks were impossible to avoid. But Linda treated the thing like a baby. She even had a name for it—Nornfang, in honor of the Norns of Norse mythology, who wove the fate of all things in the cosmos—and she claimed it increased her effective range by two hundred meters. So John had never questioned whether the trade-off was worthwhile. It had to be, or Linda wouldn’t be carrying it.
At the bottom of the ramp, she turned right and climbed out of the crash furrow, then started across the terrace toward the slope, her feet slipping every now and again where the dust lay just right on the glassy surface. The hill crest was about six hundred meters above her, a long ridgelike summit that was almost too close for sniper work, since it would be within range of some of the enemy’s common longarms.
John watched until she started to climb, so he would have some idea of where she was placing her sniper’s nest, then looked toward the front of the troop bay. Mukai was pulling equipment out of the forward lockers at a furious pace. Fred and Kelly were already geared up, their weapons affixed to the mounts on the back of their armor, their torsos and waists engirdled by slap-mount harnesses strung with hard-sided cargo pouches.
“Fred, you and Chief Mukai unload the excavation equipment and get ready to move out—fast.”
Fred’s LED flashed green on the team status bar inside John’s helmet; an instant later, Chapov’s voice sounded over the comm net.
“Don’t set the SDD yet.”
In the Special Delivery’s case, the self-destruct device was a fist-sized block of an explosive called octanitrocubane. It was a downgrade from the Fury tactical nukes that most stealth craft had carried during the Covenant War, when FLEETCOM hadn’t minded a little collateral damage if it meant destroying a nearby enemy vessel. But octanitrocubane was still powerful stuff. A small quantity would disintegrate the Owl so completely that even its nanoblack biopolymer coating would be unidentifiable.
“Affirmative,” John said. “Problem?”
“Nothing to worry about,” Van Houte said. His voice sounded strained. “I’ll handle the SDD from here. Just make sure you’re clear before those Seraphs find us.”
John was already starting down the loading ramp. “What about you and Lieutenant Chapov?”
“I’ll be fine,” Chapov said. “But Major Van Houte is—”
“Still in command of this bird,” Van Houte interrupted. “Evacuate and move out.”
“Don’t tempt me,” Chapov said.
“That’s an order, Lieutenant.”
“Sorry, sir,” Chapov said. “But I can’t obey that order until I confirm you haven’t suffered a traumatic head injury. Your judgment could be compromised.”
“Do I sound like I have a head injury?”
“Impossible to tell,” Chapov said. “We’ll have to extract you first.”
“Help is coming.” John was starting to like Chapov. The kid might be arrogant, but he was determined. “Kelly, join me up front.”
“I’ll bring your gear, shall I?”
“Affirmative.” If a flight of Seraphs showed up while they were still trying to extract the pilots, there wouldn’t be time to go back for anything. “Thanks.”
John stepped off the ramp and started forward. The Owl had made a hard landing rather than actually crashing, so its tail and wings were still attached. But it had broken through the vitreous ground crust and cut a trough through the sandy substratum, creating a waist-deep channel still glowing orange with thermal bleed-off.
He clambered over the wing and found the nose of the Special Delivery buried beneath a shelf of lechatelierite, with jagged plates of the glassy stuff leaning against the fuselage along both sides. That Chapov had somehow kept the craft from catching a wingtip as it plowed the long furrow was impressive—John doubted that he himself could have done it, even with his enhanced reflexes.
John tossed a few random pieces of lechatelierite aside, then dropped to his knees and peered into the darkness next to the Special Delivery. The nose was jammed tight into a cramped cavity between the vitreous crust and the sand-bed beneath. The cockpit area was so flooded with residual heat that all he saw was a red fog, and he could not get a clear image no matter how he tried to balance his night vision’s fused-mode technology.
He activated his external helmet lamps and crawled into the cavity. The Owl had a double-cockpit design, so the copilot’s seat was located above and behind the pilot’s, with a separate bubble canopy covering each. Both pilots had tried to raise their canopies so they could evacuate, but the shelf of lechatelierite had prevented the pilot’s from rising more than a few centimeters.
The copilot’s canopy had risen about half a meter because the cavity had been opened larger and higher over his cockpit. Chapov’s upper body was visible on the near side of the craft, his arms splayed against the sid
e as he struggled to pull himself free.
As John approached, Chapov gave up and squinted into the light through his helmet’s transparent faceplate. “I tried for a belly landing,” he said. “But with all that weight hanging out of an open hatch—”
“No one’s complaining, Lieutenant.”
John rose to a crouch, pressing his shoulders against the cavity ceiling, and shined his light into the cockpit. Chapov’s flight suit was still partially inflated, bulging around his hips and preventing him from pulling free.
“Cover your face.”
“What?”
John rapped a knuckle against the aluminum oxynitride canopy. “This could shatter your faceplate when it breaks.”
John grabbed the bottom lip of the canopy with both hands, and Chapov buried his face in his arms and looked away. Transparent aluminum was actually a polycrystalline ceramic rather than a metal, and it did not bend in the slightest when John began to pull. So he braced his feet against the side of the Owl and tried harder. The force-multiplying circuits in his armor activated, and he felt the Mjolnir adding its power to his strength.
The hull dimpled beneath his boots, but the space between the canopy and the rim of the cockpit did not expand.
“Don’t be crazy,” Kelly said. She placed their gear on top of the Owl’s wing, then ducked under the lechatelierite beside him. “That stuff is designed to stop plasma cannon rounds. You can’t break it alone.”
“Now you tell me.” John shifted forward, folding himself nearly double in the cramped cavity, and waited as Kelly arranged herself next to him. “Say when.”
“When.”
They pulled together… and suddenly dropped into the sand as a crescent of canopy snapped off in their hands. Chapov immediately rolled onto his chest and slipped out of the copilot’s cockpit, then squatted at John’s feet, shining a wristlamp into the confined space next to Van Houte.
“You’ll never extract the major in the same way.” The eyes behind Chapov’s faceplate were gray-blue, the nose narrow, and the mouth wide with thin lips. “There’s no room to get in there, unless you start digging.”
“No time for digging,” Van Houte said over the comm. “Just let me know when you’re clear of the SDD blast radius.”
“No. We’ll find another way.” John rolled to his knees and peered over Chapov’s shoulder. There was maybe a head’s width of cavity between the Owl’s nose and a wall of sandstone bedrock, and the canopy was pressed tight against a meter-thick ceiling of lechatelierite. “Blue Four, sitrep?”
“I’m still climbing the ridge,” Linda said. “But I see no inbound Seraphs yet.”
“Let us know if that changes.”
Linda’s status light winked green, then Van Houte was on the comm again.
“Don’t you dare risk the mission to extract me,” he said. “It’s my mistake that put me here, and I’m happy to—”
“What mistake?” John asked. He sat back on his haunches, then looked back at Kelly and shook his helmet. Chapov was right: there was no time to dig a cavity large enough to extract the major. “We’re on the ground, alive and with our equipment intact.”
“I decelerated too hard,” Van Houte said. “That caused an equipment failure, endangering the craft and the mission.”
“You did what you had to.” As John spoke, Chapov dropped his chin—no doubt thinking of the deceleration tolerances Van Houte had exceeded. Ignoring him, John added, “And I don’t see any Seraphs strafing us.”
“Yet,” Van Houte said. “Move out. That’s an order, Master Chief.”
“Sorry, Major,” John said. “You got us to the ground, so it’s my mission now.”
He was referring to a long-established ONI protocol: once a mission reached the ground, command passed from the flight commander to the leader of the special forces team.
John pointed Chapov toward the rear of the Owl. “Join up with Fred and Chief Mukai. Maybe you can drive one of the excavation machines.”
“Of course,” Chapov said. He stepped close and switched off his comm mic, then spoke in a low voice through his helmet voicemitter. “But you do know the major exceeded g-tolerances, right? If he’d given the yoke to me earlier—”
“We’d have been splattered all over the glass,” John interrupted, also speaking only through his voicemitter. “You blacked out.”
“But I wouldn’t have, if we had stayed inside tolerances,” Chapov insisted. “The equipment wouldn’t have come loose either.”
“And we’d have had a dozen Seraphs chewing our tail. Instead, they’re still behind us searching for bolide debris.” John pointed again toward the back of the Owl. “The major made a good call. Go.”
Chapov hesitated, his narrowed eyes hinting at distress more than resentment. It was clear he had more to say, but now was hardly the time—and John wasn’t sure it ever would be. It was a bad idea to second-guess a seasoned superior.
“Now, Lieutenant.”
Chapov’s faceplate grew gray and opaque as he activated its night-vision mode. “Right away, Master Chief. Sorry.”
He spun on his heel and scrambled onto the Owl’s wing, and finally John understood. It hadn’t been Van Houte at the yoke when the maimed Owl came down—it had been his hotshot copilot, and Chapov felt like he had let the team down. Maybe he wasn’t quite thinking of it that way yet, but he eventually would. That was why he was trying to convince John that the hard landing hadn’t been his fault. Because, really, Chapov was trying to convince himself.
John switched back to the comm net. “And, Lieutenant?”
Chapov stopped on top of the wing, but didn’t turn around. “Yes, Master Chief?”
“This is nobody’s fault,” John said. “You made an incredible landing under the circumstances. Anybody else would have had us spread out across ten kilometers of glass.”
Chapov paused a moment, then said: “Maybe only five kilometers. Major Van Houte is a pretty decent pilot himself.”
The roar-scrape-crunch of steel ripping into glassy ground sounded somewhere beyond the Owl as Chapov hopped off the wing and started toward the loading ramp. John switched off his external lamps and watched through his NVS as Chief Mukai pushed the LHD’s excavation bucket into the wall of the crash furrow, using it to cut a ramp out of the trough. Fred was up on top of the lechatelierite, standing off to one side and waving her forward.
“Blue Two, is the drilling jumbo operational?”
Fred nodded without looking away from his work. “Affirmative. Are you thinking what I am?”
“Probably,” John said. “Have Lieutenant Chapov bring the jumbo forward. Blue Four?”
“Setting up on the ridge now,” Linda replied. “I have confirmed sixteen—now eighteen—bandits over the decoy impact zone. Nothing coming our way yet.”
“Good,” John said. “Can you identify the search pattern?”
“Expanding grid, I think,” Linda said. “Definitely systematic.”
“Acknowledged,” John said. Systematic suggested Keepers of the One Freedom—or at least not Banished. He knew from UNSC intel that the Banished tended to be more unpredictable and random in their approach, since they were led by a mob of chieftains competing to win the favor of a fierce Jiralhanae warlord named Atriox. The Keepers were more organized and rigid in their structure, with a strict chain of command and a religious doctrine dedicated to joining the ancient Forerunners in divine transcendence—akin to what drove the Covenant during the war. “That gives us some idea of what to expect—and how much time we have.”
“But there is a problem with your plan,” Linda said. “The terrain down there is as dark as a grave—until you activate your lamps.”
“Even under the glass?” John asked.
“It is just a pinpoint, like a star through fog,” Linda said. “I doubt the Seraphs can see it from so far away. But if you ignite the plasma drills—”
“They’ll shine us up like an emergency beacon,” Kelly finished. “So yeah, that
won’t work.”
“You see?” Van Houte said. “You need to put the mission first, Master Chief.”
“I know that.”
The scraping sound stopped as the LHD finished the ramp and climbed out of the crash furrow. Mukai started up the slope toward the top of the ridge—then abruptly started toward the nose of the Owl.
“Cut a line a little in front of the cockpit.” She had attached her flip-down night-vision visor to her helmet. “It doesn’t need to be deep—just enough to give me some bite.”
“What are you thinking?” John asked.
“That you’re wasting time,” Mukai said. The LHD was already rolling past the Owl. “No offense.”
“None taken,” John said. He wasn’t sure whether the LHD could break up a meter-thick blanket of lechatelierite, but Mukai probably was. Like everyone on the mission, she had been cross-trained on the excavation equipment, and as a crew chief she would consider it a point of honor to learn the specifications of both machines by heart. “I should’ve known better than to ask.”
“It’s okay, Master Chief,” Mukai said. “You’ll learn.”
John chuckled at that.
“Blue Two,” he said, “you and Chapov collect the gelignite bins and find a route over that ridge. Blue Three, you’re still with me, on shotgun.”
A pair of status lights winked green. John and Kelly grabbed their gear off the wing and slapped their weapons and load-hauling harnesses onto their Mjolnir’s magnetic mounts, then climbed onto the Owl’s fuselage. By then, Mukai was thirty meters in front of the downed craft, swinging the LHD around in preparation for her rescue attempt. The vehicle was remarkably silent for such a powerful machine, its TMCD compact fusion reactor making no sound at all and its hydrostatic transmission humming quietly as it approached.
Kelly loaded her M45E tactical shotgun with plastic-saboted strike rounds, then led the way off the fuselage onto the smooth expanse of lechatelierite terrace. Here and there, the plasma-fused ground was covered by a thin layer of dried mud—the result of seven years of post-glassing dustfall—and walking on it was like crossing a silk-draped ice rink. They stopped four paces later, guessing that would be about a pace in front of the Owl’s nose, and faced away from the waiting LHD.