Oblivion, page 11
Then the prowler’s nose swung about and came up, bringing John and the Spartans the rest of the way around, planting their toes and knees firmly on the deck.
Petrov’s voice came over the intercom. “Impact!”
She was a few seconds early. John lay pinned against the deck, reminding himself to breathe, listening to marines yell, watching Covenant rounds punch through the jump hatch in front of him. He kept expecting Fred to crack wise—maybe hoping for some smart remark to break the tension—but all the Spartans remained quiet, their attention fixed on the fuel rod rounds striking half a meter from their faceplates.
And finally . . . impact.
The deck bucked hard, launching everyone toward the overhead. John felt the Mjolnir’s reactive circuits lock his gauntlets around the tie-downs, and the prowler slowed beneath him. The fuel rod strikes came to an abrupt end—the enemy fighters overflying their quarry. John saw the marines slamming backward in their safety slings, the grunts and cries almost loud enough to drown out the screech of tearing hull.
A ring of little smoke plumes billowed around the jump hatch, someone on the flight deck—probably Petrov, if she was still alive—blowing the emergency bolts. And the hatch tumbled away in two halves, revealing a brown and yellow blur . . . desert terrain . . . flashing past behind the Night Watch.
John yelled, “Go go go!”
He launched himself forward, sprinting out of the bay’s dim light into Netherop’s bright amber haze.
The countdown on his HUD read 8 SECONDS, 60 KILOMETERS TO LZ.
CHAPTER 7
* * *
* * *
0512 hours, June 7, 2526 (military calendar)
UNSC Razor-class Prowler Night Watch
Crash Site, Planet Netherop, Ephyra System
The buttons on Amalea Petrov’s commpad had never felt so small. She’d drilled the Catastrophic Event Self-Destruct Self-Initiation Override a hundred times, and not once had she failed to complete the task in less than the allotted forty-five seconds. But now that it counted, now that her prowler had gone down and she was kneeling in front of the engineering station with the self-destruction system security cover unlocked and pushed aside, now her fingers were too damn big to depress the correct keys and enter the proper codes.
Amalea exhaled slowly, then held her wrist-worn commpad close to the system command port. A message appeared on the system display: ENTER IDENTIFICATION CODE.
This time she tried a different approach. Instead of carefully entering each character, as she had on her first three attempts, Amalea tapped the pad quickly and naturally, as if sending a hurried message to one of her subordinates.
AMALEA 78^&9 PETROV TANGO VICTOT FOCTROT.
There were at least two typos in the code, but that was common for her messages, and the Night Watch’s AI seemed to recognize her natural pattern.
COMMAND?
SYNC PETROV COMMPAD NIGHT WATCH SELF-DESTRUCT CONTROL.
The display went blank—a security feature designed to make unauthorized users think they would soon be the target of a ship-wide security sweep. She waited, knowing it would be ten seconds before the next message came, and that any attempt to rush the procedure now would only result in starting over. It was a precaution that she doubted anyone who had ever actually been forced to abandon ship would have designed into the system. But she recognized its wisdom. If there wasn’t ten seconds to spare, the last thing a captain should be doing was taking control of her prowler’s self-destruct routines.
And maybe Amalea was making a mistake even with the extra ten seconds. She didn’t think the Covenant commander had actually been outsmarting her so far. After all, he—Amalea assumed it was a he, because the ONI intelligence briefings she had read indicated that the dead aliens recovered from battlefields were over ninety percent male—had taken the bait when she launched the slash-r recon Pelican as soon as the Night Watch entered orbit. And the subsequent launch of the slash-s close air support Pelican had caught him so flat-footed that she had come within sixty kilometers of dropping Blue Force right on top of his downed frigate. But the alien had surprised her with the number of fighter craft he had available. She had expected the second Pelican, the D75 TC/s, to draw off the last of his fighters so she could insert Blue Force unmolested.
Instead, he had hit her with two more waves. There were more Covenant stealth vessels in the area than she’d anticipated. Had she spent the standard ten or twelve hours making passive observations, Amalea might well have realized that. But as Covenant ships continued to arrive to defend the downed frigate, Blue Force would probably have lost all hope of capturing the vessel intact. It had been a tough choice, and even knowing it had cost her the Night Watch, she believed she had made the right one.
Still, it did trouble her that the Master Chief hadn’t seemed to support her. In all of their previous interactions, John-117 had always struck her as aggressive to a fault, so she had expected him to greet her boldness with enthusiasm. Now she didn’t know what to make of his concern. Did he really think she was taking too many risks? Or did he just resent her attempts to leaven the Spartans’ prowess with some cold calculation?
The system display returned to life with a new message: AUTHORIZATION CODE?
Amalea began to tap her commpad again: FLEET ^DMIR^L PETROV.
Her chosen code phrase was more than vanity; it was a reminder of what Amalea was striving for, an exhortation to stay focused and execute her plan.
The next step in that plan was making sure Blue Force captured the Lucky Break. If Amalea could seize the alien frigate, she would be responsible for the greatest coup of the war so far. Admirals Stanforth and Cole would not be able to help seeing what she had done with Blue Team—how she had elevated it to its full potential—and they would want the same for all of their Spartan teams.
And if Amalea could hone the fighting edge of all Spartan teams as she was doing for Blue Team, there would be no limit. FLEETCOM would entrust her with the development of other projects crucial to surviving the war—projects so sensitive she would only hear of them when she was placed in charge of them—and she would begin her sure and steady climb into the UNSC’s highest levels of command.
All Amalea had to do was capture one helpless frigate.
After a three-second delay, Amalea’s commpad chirped, and a new message appeared on the systems display above the command port:
CATASTROPHIC EVENT SELF-DESTRUCT SELF-INITIATION OVERRIDE SUCCESSFUL.
CONTROL OF NIGHT WATCH FURY MEDIUM FUSION SELF-DESTRUCT DEVICE RESIDES WITH LIEUTENANT COMMANDER PETROV.
IN EVENT OF COMMANDER PETROV’S DEATH OR LOSS OF CONTACT, SELF-DESTRUCT INITIATION WILL RETURN TO NIGHT WATCH.
CONFIRM?
Amalea tapped AFFIRMATIVE.
The system display went blank. She slid the security cover closed, then pressed her thumb to the biometric lock. A triple chirp assured her that should anyone attempt to access the self-destruct system cabinet, she would be notified. She stood, then checked the chronometer on her commpad. It had been over two minutes since the Night Watch’s pilot and copilot had made their incredible dead-stick landing, skipping the prowler up a narrow mountain bench in a display of skill and grace under pressure that had made her glad she always insisted on a rigorous training regimen.
But her bungled attempts to engage the override had cost her. By now, the enemy fighter craft would be returning to orbit the crash site—and that meant she would have to chance being strafed as she left the Night Watch. It wasn’t the thought of getting hit that frightened her, not really. What troubled Amalea was that now she had become the prowler’s self-destruct initiation trigger.
If she died, the Fury would detonate, initiating a thermonuclear explosion that would incinerate everything close by. The theory was that if a prowler needed to self-destruct, it was likely to be surrounded by hostile vessels, and there was no use passing up an opportunity to attack an enemy ship at close range. Again, it was not a feature that any prowler commander would have designed into the self-destruct system . . . but it did have a certain ruthlessness that Amalea admired.
In this case, however, that might be counterproductive. If she were to die, so would Blue Team—and that would mean complete mission failure.
Amalea turned aft and started for the drop bay—only to see John emerging from the life support section. He carried a hundred-liter storage tank under each arm, and he had a purifying filter attached to a hard point on the back of his armor. He immediately spun in her direction, and for an instant she thought he was about to hurl one of the tanks up the passageway at her.
“Commander?” John’s posture relaxed when he realized it was her, and he stepped out of the hatchway to allow the rest of Blue Team to pass. They were also carrying storage tanks under their arms. “What are you still doing aboard?”
“It’s my ship, so you first.” Amalea started toward John. “Why are you stripping the water tanks?”
“Ma’am, it’s hot outside. I mean, really hot.”
“Ah,” she said. “Good thinking.”
John cocked his helmet at her as though trying to figure out what she had come back for. “What about you, Commander? The first officer said all surviving crewmembers had been evacuated.”
“I’m not really a crewmember, John.” Amalea saw no reason to hide what she had been doing—in fact, there was a good case for making sure he knew. “And I needed to override the prowler’s self-destruct initiation trigger.”
“Oh yeah.” John’s helmet returned to vertical. “The Fury.”
“I thought you might understand.” A Fury Medium Fusion Destructive Device yielded close to a megaton—which meant that, on a planet with an atmosphere, the crater alone would be sixty meters deep and four hundred meters across. The heat flash would incinerate everything within two kilometers, and the conflagration zone would extend several times that distance. “And, Master Chief?”
“Yes, ma’am?”
“You really need to keep me alive when we exit the prowler,” Amalea said. “Can you do that?”
“Of course, Commander.” John looked down the passageway, and the rest of Blue Team stopped and made a space for her in the center of the group. “Just stay in the middle, and everyone will be fine.”
CHAPTER 8
* * *
* * *
0715 hours, June 7, 2526 (military calendar)
Near Night Watch crash site
Mountains of Despair, Planet Netherop, Ephyra System
A shapeless wad of hot sun, shining down through a blanket of low brown clouds onto a ribbon of dusty benchland. The benchland clinging to an arid slope so steep that the dust avalanches down in powdery gray fans. On the uphill side, the mountains loom skyward in an unending wall, their summits so high they vanish into the low brown clouds. On the downhill side, the slope drops over a line of cliffs into a searing mirage-filled basin, the basin so deep the floor vanishes beneath a shimmering blue sea of refracted light.
The Night Watch could have gone down in worse places, John knew. But it sure hadn’t gone down in a good place.
The survivors had hiked eight kilometers in two hours, more or less toward their intended landing zone near the Lucky Break—the downed Covenant frigate that John and Petrov and the rest of Blue Force still intended to capture.
Actually, intended might have been too strong a word for some of the marines in First Platoon. A lot of them were sweating profusely and doubled over with heat cramps, weak and staggering and dizzy. But they were still walking, and if they survived the fifty-kilometer hike to the Lucky Break, John had no doubt they would fight.
It was the hike that was going to be the problem for most of them. So far, the aliens had not bothered to strafe the column. Petrov claimed it was likely because the Covenant commander was low on Banshees and didn’t want to risk losing any to small-arms fire. And maybe there was something to that. Linda had already taken down two observation craft with her SRS99 sniper rifle, and they hadn’t seen another one for more than an hour.
John had a simpler theory.
The alien reconnaissance pilots had seen that the Night Watch survivors were dying in the heat, and the Covenant commander was just waiting them out. After all, there was no use risking Banshees and wasting ammunition when a deadly environment would do the killing instead. And any targets that did survive were going to be a lot easier to kill after a lengthy walk in the scorching heat.
That’s what John would have done, were the situation reversed. Wait the enemy out.
“What about in here?” Commander Petrov pointed into a big, steep-walled gulch cut into the mountainside above the bench. Dressed in her blue flight utilities, she had been traveling next to John since they departed the crash site, doing an impressive job of keeping pace despite Netherop’s high gravity. “It looks big enough to hold everyone.”
John stopped to examine the gulch. It was filled with masses of orange leafless plants that looked like chest-high candelabra, but the leeward rim was overhung by a cornice of wind-packed dust that would break free when the blast wave hit.
“No good.” John pointed at the cornice. “Look. That has to be a few thousand tons up there. We Spartans would probably survive, if we weren’t swept away. But a lot of First Platoon would be crushed, and anyone without a self-contained air supply would suffocate.”
Petrov blanched, then looked down the bench in the direction they were coming from. A line of marines and prowler crew was strung out for half a kilometer behind them, carrying the wounded and dragging water tanks uphill, already staggering in the gravity and forty-five-degree-Celsius heat. Lacking any environmental control in their emergency pressure suits, the marines had removed their masks and pulled their tops down around their hips, and the prowler crew had unbuttoned their utilities to their waists. But the air was warmer than their body temperatures, so the only cooling effect came from their own sweat, evaporating into the arid air.
“Well, we need to find cover soon,” Petrov said. “If we keep pushing this hard, it won’t matter how far away we are when I detonate. Everyone will be dead of heatstroke.”
John knew better than to suggest calling in a rescue mission courtesy of the Phyllis Wheatley—yet. Petrov had barely managed to assume remote control of the prowler’s self-destruct device—and Blue Team to pull the water tanks out of the reclamation system—before half a dozen Covenant fighters had returned and begun to circle overhead, ready to strafe anyone who tried to approach the vessel. Another ten had quickly arrived and descended to the crash site, precluding all hope of asking for help from the Wheatley.
John had a high opinion of ONI pilots, but the recovery ship carried only two Pelicans and twelve Baselards. The Baselards were space interceptors first and air-superiority fighters second, which made them too clumsy in atmospheric combat to prevail against a superior Banshee force. Until Petrov detonated the Fury and sanitized the crash site, the Night Watch survivors were on their own, and the only thing they could do was keep moving until they were far enough away to safely activate the self-destruct charge.
And when the charge was a one-megaton Fury tactical nuclear device, that was quite a distance.
“I mean it, John,” Petrov said. “We may need to take the chance, before we start losing people to heatstroke.”
“I know, ma’am.”
“And it’s not just our people I’m thinking about.” Petrov glanced back toward the crash site, then leaned in and looked up into John’s faceplate. Her face was flushed and dry, a sign that she herself was starting to succumb to the elements. “It’s been over two hours since we abandoned ship. Do you know what that means? It means the Covenant has been aboard my prowler for two hours.”
“I know, ma’am.”
John’s HUD showed exactly one-hundred-twenty-seven minutes since the Night Watch had gone down. But without a satellite network to provide global positioning coordinates, their distance from the crash site was a dead-reckoning estimate from the Mjolnir’s onboard computer, based solely on the length of John’s stride and the number of steps he had taken.
8.56 KILOMETERS.
The Fury Medium Fusion Destructive Device used as a self-destruct charge aboard UNSC prowlers was a “clean” bomb that didn’t release much radiation. At their current distance, the ship’s complement would be relatively safe from gamma rays, neutron bombardment, and fallout. And eight kilometers was just beyond the conflagration zone. As long as everyone was behind good cover, they would avoid third-degree burns.
It was the shockwaves that posed the problem. They wouldn’t be strong enough to cause direct injury to anyone lying in even a shallow depression. But they would uproot plants and hurl small stones, as well as trigger dust-slides.
John looked up the gulch again. If they climbed high enough, the mouth would serve as a baffle to divert the shockwave, and a few grenades would probably bring the cornice down before Petrov detonated the self-destruct charge. But the chute ran straight up the mountainside into the low brown clouds, two steep kilometers at a minimum, all of it lined by other wind-packed cornices and filled with dust. When the Fury vaporized the Night Watch, the whole mountainside would let loose and avalanche down on them.
“I can’t let my ship be the first prowler the Covenant captures,” Petrov said. She might have been suffering the early symptoms of heatstroke, but she was still very, very focused. “Even if it means taking our chances in the open.”
“I know, ma’am.” Stealth technology was the one area of space warfare where humanity wasn’t hopelessly outclassed, so allowing a prowler to fall into enemy hands would be as much a disaster for the UNSC as capturing a Covenant capital ship would be a boon. “But it won’t come to that.”
