First Strike

by Eric Nylund

  The window flexed, crackled, tiny flakes popped off…but the translucent material remained stubbornly intact.

  John was thirty meters from the surface—he’d have to veer off now, or impact upon it. He gritted his teeth and braced himself.

  Ten meters.

  The window’s smooth surface flashed into a jigsaw mosaic. The squealing of glass over glass filled the air. It shattered.

  The entire length crumbled and instantly blasted into the vacuum of space—swept out by the pressurized atmosphere filling the interior of the station.

  John tried to maneuver the Banshee. He bounced into the repair bay, rolled the craft over and upright—fell off, tumbled though the airlock…and drifted away into the darkness of space.

  He flailed his limbs in the zero gravity, and the tether on his belt snapped taut. He recoiled back toward the Banshee. Linda held on with one hand and held out the other to him. He climbed back aboard and tapped the thrusters to stabilize their pitch and yaw.

  Behind them the station vented gas as well as the bodies of Covenant Engineers, Grunts, Jackals, and Elites. Clouds of metal junk bled from the ruptures. Tendrils of steam flash froze into glittering ice crystals.

  The Covenant fleet moved as well—some cruisers closed with the station, others moved farther away. There were five hundred alien warships without leadership from their command-and-control center, and they reminded John of motes of dust in a sunbeam—silently floating in every direction.

  John spotted a dropship drifting a kilometer ahead, dead in space.

  He clicked his COM once and dropped a NAV marker onto a Covenant craft. Fred and Will’s acknowledgment lights winked on.

  John pulsed the Banshee’s engines once and let its inertia carry them to the dropship. He hoped the rest of the Covenant Fleet was trying to figure out what had just happened…and not paying any attention to one more piece of debris floating in space.

  The Banshees gently impacted onto the tumbling dropship. John grasped the hull, and Linda scrabbled over him, opened the port access hatch, and entered. Fred and Will drifted closer, and John helped them aboard.

  He hesitated and took another look at the Covenant fleet. Hundred of ships without control. But how long would that last? Even if the station’s reactors chained and blew…the Covenant still had enough force to destroy Earth’s defenses and burn it to a cinder.

  All they had done was buy a little time: as long as it took for someone to take charge of the Covenant fleet. That wasn’t enough, but John wasn’t sure what else to do.

  He crawled to the hatch, entered the ship, and sealed it behind him.

  Linda stood at the pilot’s console while Fred stood beside her manning the ops station. An engine schematic appeared in front of Linda, and power pulsed through its plasma coils. The interior lights dimly glowed.

  “Where to, Chief?” Linda asked.

  “Away,” John said and looked at the system NAV display. He pointed to the tiny moon orbiting the nearby planet. “Get us into the moon’s shadow. But slow. Try not to attract any attention.”

  His countdown timer read 5:12. They might still have time.

  “Roger,” Linda said.

  The dropship spun about and gently moved away from the station, almost imperceptibly accelerating toward the tiny moon covered with black and silver pockmarks.

  Fred hunched over his console. Thick spiky lines representing the Covenant F-through K-bands fluxed and flickered on his screen. “Covenant COM channels are jammed,” he reported. “Communiqués and queries to and from every ship in the fleet wondering what the hell is going on. And the station’s COM channels are all full of those copied Cortanas…and she’s just repeating different system error codes.”

  “What’s this?” John asked, leaning over Fred’s shoulder. He pointed to one COM band with only a single spike.

  Fred looked at the Covenant calligraphy for a long moment, and then inhaled sharply. “If the translation software is working right,” he whispered, “that’s the E-band…it’s one of ours.”

  Fred snapped on the external speakers. Six tones beeped, stopped, and then repeated.

  “Oly Oly Oxen Free,” John breathed. “Send the countersign, Fred.”

  “Aye, Chief. Sending now.”

  Who could have sent that signal? There was no other living Spartan in this system. Unless it was Dr. Halsey and Kelly. Had they somehow tracked them?

  “It’s about time you showed up.” The drawling voice of Admiral Whitcomb was loud and clear over the COM. “Switch to encryption scheme ‘Rainbow.’”

  John nodded to Fred, who ran a shunt from the Covenant COM into the data port in the back of his helmet. “Decryption online,” Fred reported.

  “Admiral,” John said. “With all due respect, sir, why are you here?”

  “Lieutenant Haverson suggested we drop out of Slipspace on the edge of this system—hide in the Oort cloud and gather a little intel.” The Admiral sighed. “Well, I took one look and figured that even if you took out that station…hell, son, there’d still be a couple of hundred Covenant ships within spittin’ distance of Earth. Me getting there and warning them about it wouldn’t make a lick of difference. So I’m going to do something about it here and now. You’ve done your part, Chief. Leave the rest to me.”

  There was a pause, then the Admiral asked in a low, serious tone, “You did get it done, didn’t you, son? You got that station rigged to blow?”

  “Yes, sir.” John linked his mission timer to the COM. “Four minutes thirty-two seconds and counting.”

  “Perfect, Master Chief. Bring ’em on back to the barn. Stay on your heading. Your instincts are dead on. We’re on the far side of the moon and are waiting for you.”

  John motioned to Linda to increase their velocity. She pushed the acceleration stripe to three quarters power.

  “Waiting, sir?”

  “Whitcomb over and out.” The COM went dead.

  John looked to Will, Fred, and Linda, and they all shrugged.

  He pushed the acceleration stripe to full velocity, and the dropship entered a high orbit around the splotchy moon, arcing around to the far side, where the battered Gettysburg waited for them.

  But only the Gettysburg.

  “Where’s Ascendant Justice?” John whispered.

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  1825 Hours, September 13, 2552 (Revised Date,

  Military Calendar) Aboard UNSC Vessel

  Gettysburg, Near Covenant Battle Station

  Unyielding Hierophant.

  The Master Chief and Blue Team stepped off the lift and onto the bridge of the Gettysburg.

  “Sir—” John started to salute Admiral Whitcomb, but neither the Admiral nor Lieutenant Haverson was there.

  The only two on the bridge were Sergeant Johnson, who stared at the forward viewscreens, and Cortana, whose holographic figure burned bright blue and streamed with code symbols and mathematics beyond John’s comprehension.

  Sergeant Johnson turned toward them. He looked the Spartans over and frowned, noting that not all of them had returned.

  “I’m not sure what that thing is.” The Sergeant nodded to viewscreen one, centered on the Covenant command-and-control station. “Don’t look like any ‘uneven elephant’ to me—more like two squid kissing. Whatever it is, damned glad it’s going to blow up. Nice job—almost as good as if we sent in the Marines.” One corner of his mouth quirked into a smile.

  “Where’s the Admiral?” the Master Chief asked. “And Lieutenant Haverson?”

  The Sergeant’s half smile vanished, and his eyes darkened. He moved to Weapons Station One. “I’ll show you. A Clarion spy drone is nearly in position.”

  The center viewscreen fuzzed with static and then resolved to show the Ascendant Justice moving out of the shadow of the moon. The once formidable Covenant flagship was a wreck; its hull was breached in a dozen places, its skeletal frame exposed, and only a handful of plasma conduits flickered with life.

  �
�I don’t understand,” the Chief said. He stepped closer to Cortana’s hologram. Being near the real Cortana—not one of her fragmented copies—reassured him that everything was under control. “What’s going on?”

  “Stand by, Chief,” she replied. “I’m attempting to attune Ascendant Justice’s Slipspace drive to the Gettysburg’s mass and profile.”

  “That’s what we were up to while you were off sight-seeing,” the Sergeant told him. “We pulled the Slipspace matrix out of our piggybacked ship and slapped it into the Gettysburg.”

  John wheeled and faced the viewscreens. Ascendant Justice couldn’t jump? Then why was it headed straight toward the Covenant fleet? A decoy? He glanced at the countdown timer: 2:09 left.

  “Not a decoy,” he whispered, “…a lure. Sergeant, get a signal to Ascendant Justice. Bounce it off that spy drone if you have to.”

  “Roger, Chief,” Sergeant Johnson said and tapped in commands. An error warning blared. He shook his head, puzzled, and tried again, carefully retyping.

  “Linda, take the NAV station. Fred, you’re on Ops. Will, give the Sergeant a hand at Weapons One.”

  Blue Team jumped to their assigned stations.

  Will edged the Sergeant aside and quickly tapped three buttons. “COM patch established,” he reported. “On viewscreen two.”

  The bridge of Ascendant Justice appeared on screen. Lieutenant Haverson and Admiral Whitcomb stood on the central raised dais, adjusting the holographic controls. Behind them, the wall displays showed Covenant ships closing on their position.

  Admiral Whitcomb smiled. “Glad to see you made it safely aboard, son.”

  “Sir, that fleet will destroy you before you can fire a single salvo.”

  “I don’t think so, Master Chief,” he replied and tapped the holographic display. A slim blue crystalline shard appeared—an exact copy of the alien artifact they found on Reach. “I’m sending this image to every ship in the system and letting them know it’s theirs for the taking…if they dare to board this ship and face Earth’s best warriors.” He laughed. “I think that’ll appeal to those Elites and their overinflated sense of honor.”

  John nodded. “Yes, sir. It will.”

  He looked at the countdown timer: 1:42.

  The Covenant fleet turned and moved toward the incoming Ascendant Justice. A cloud of cruisers and carriers. Hundreds of them. Impossible odds.

  “Fire turret four, Lieutenant,” the Admiral ordered.

  “Firing!” Haverson replied, his face set in grim determination.

  A lance of plasma discharged, arced, and impacted upon the nose of the nearest carrier. The energy splashed over their shields and dissipated.

  “Turret five, Lieutenant. Take them down.”

  “Firing five, sir,” Haverson said.

  A second plasma bolt followed the first. It blasted the carrier’s weakened shields and melted armor and hull, exploding through the foredecks. The ship rolled and crashed into a cruiser that had come too close.

  “Nice shooting, Lieutenant,” the Admiral murmured.

  The Covenant fleet responded with a blinding volley of laser fire. Pinpoints of energy concentrated on Ascendant Justice’s aft decks, boiled armor off in thick layers—sheared through to the other side, severing its engines.

  The Admiral smiled. “A sound tactical response. Good thing they don’t know we’re just using that slingshot around the moon and our inertia to do the rest of the job.” He glanced at the displays and the station growing larger on them. “Hang on, Lieutenant. Brace for impact.”

  Ascendant Justice drifted closer to the station.

  It crashed into the central ring, crushing the structure, and continued forward, dimpling the hull of the pinched center section…and finally ground to a halt with its nose impaled within the Unyielding Hierophant.

  The center viewscreen on the bridge of the Gettysburg shattered into static and then slowly resolved. The wavering image of Admiral Whitcomb pulled himself upright. A gash from his temple to the corner of his mouth wept blood. Lieutenant Haverson groggily got to his feet as well, his arm held at an odd angle, broken.

  “Systemwide transmission,” Admiral Whitcomb barked to Haverson.

  “Aye, sir,” Haverson said and clumsily adjusted the COM.

  “Come on, mighty Covenant warriors,” the Admiral shouted. “We’re here in the middle of your fleet with your ‘holy of holies.’” He flicked his finger at the holographic shard, and it pinged as if actually struck. “Come and get it!” He laughed again.

  Hundreds of Covenant ships moved toward them. Grapple lines and grav beams attached to the broken hull of the Ascendant Justice. A thousand dropships and Elites in thrust packs filled the space around the flagship.

  The Master Chief watched the countdown timer: 0:27.

  Along the ten-kilometer dorsal bulb of the space station, patches warmed to a dull red, the heat from the overloading reactors becoming outwardly visible.

  “Move us back, Linda,” John said. “Keep us in the moon’s shadow. Use as much power as we can spare.”

  “Aye, Chief,” Linda replied. “Forward thrusters answering one third reverse power. Course one-eight-zero.”

  “Cortana,” he asked, “Slipspace generator status?”

  “Almost ready, Chief,” Cortana said. She bit her lower lip in concentration. “Capacitor charge at eighty percent. Adjusting final calculations. Stand by.”

  On screen the Admiral wheeled toward the bulkhead sealing the flagship’s bridge. Sparks cascaded along the seam as arc cutters on the other side penetrated. “Master Chief, I have final orders for you.”

  “Sir,” John said.

  “You watch and see what’s left of this rabble when we’re done with ’em. Do not engage under any circumstances. You get the intel and hightail it back to Earth and make your report.”

  “Understood, sir.”

  “Now listen, son, remember when we talked about the Alamo? You know every one of the brave defenders in those fights died. They knew the odds, but they hurt the enemy.” He gritted his teeth in pain. “Both were tactical defeats, but in the end they were also brilliant strategic victories. They made the enemy afraid. Just a few good soldiers fighting for what’s right made the difference.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  John remembered all those who had made a difference for him. Sam. James. CPO Mendez. Captain Keyes. The men and women who had fought and died on Halo. And now two more names to add to that list: Whitcomb and Haverson.

  The bulkhead blasted off its mounts and clattered onto the deck of the Ascendant Justice’s bridge. Silhouetted in the passage were dozens of Elites, their energy swords blurs of motion and light. Admiral Whitcomb fired a submachine gun.

  The central viewscreen dissolved into static.

  John watched for a moment, hoping the Admiral and the Lieutenant would reappear…but screen number two remained offline.

  Video feed from the Clarion spy drone filled the side screens. There were two hundred warships clustered tightly about the figure-eight-shaped Unyielding Hierophant. A similar number of ships circled in loose orbital trajectories. The formation reminded John of a miniature spiral galaxy…with a supernova core.

  The dorsal bulb of the space station shot with color—red, orange, and blurred with blue-white heat in a heartbeat; plasma tendrils erupted from the surface like solar flares. Internal explosions chained down the station’s length through the narrow center portion and into the ventral bulb, shattering that section and discharging bolts of lightning that arced along the station’s fragments and to the nearby ships.

  The Unyielding Hierophant became a roiling cloud of fiery plasma and smoke and static charges that enveloped the ships that had come to engage Ascendant Justice, ships that flashed white hot and, in an instant, vaporized.

  This thunderhead of superheated and pressurized gas ballooned outward to engulf the rest of the orbiting flotilla; heated their shields, which shimmered silver and popped like soap bubbles; melted t
heir hulls and consumed them.

  The blast cooled and the cloud dissipated—but ejected debris continued outward, leaving comet trails, and impacted on stray ships not near the epicenter.

  “Move the drone back into the moon’s shadow,” John ordered.

  “Aye, Chief,” Will said. “Thrusters responding.”

  The side viewscreens showed a hailstorm of molten metal streaking toward the drone’s cameras—then their view was obscured by the black- and silver-pockmarked surface of the tiny moon.

  “Cortana, is the Gettysburg ready to jump?” the Chief asked.

  “Slipspace capacitors charged, Master Chief. Ready when you are.”

  “Stand by.” John waited a minute. No one spoke. “Will, bring the drone back out.”

  “Roger, Chief.”

  The side viewscreen changed from moonscape to space. There was little left of the fleet or the command-and-control station—only clouds of smoke, glittering metal, and ashes.

  A few Covenant warships survived. Those that could slowly moved away from the blast site…others drifted dead in space. Perhaps a dozen of their original five hundred craft had come through the explosion.

  “A brilliant strategic victory,” John whispered, the Admiral’s last words echoing in his mind.

  “Cortana, get us out of here.”

  The Master Chief stood on the bridge of the Gettysburg and watched the stars blur and vanish into the absolute blackness of Slipspace.

  They had jumped away from the battle zone over the Unyielding Hierophant, emerged in normal space, and plotted their position. Cortana adjusted their course, and now they were finally on their way to Earth. Although they had overwhelming evidence that the Covenant knew the location of Earth, “overwhelming” was not absolute proof. The Cole Protocol still applied.

  “Slipspace transition complete,” Cortana said. “ETA to Earth in thirty-five hours, Chief.” The tiny hologram of Cortana continued to stare at him, and her slender brows knit together.

  “Was there something else, Cortana?” he asked.

  The furrow in her brow deepened. She sighed and crossed her arms over her chest. “I was wondering about the copy of my infiltration programming.” Cortana’s color cooled from blue to ultramarine. “I’ve reviewed your mission logs. Maybe it was the additional copying that caused its breakdown, but that copy did have some of my core personality programming as well. I just hope it’s not a sign of…some other instability.”