Oblivion, page 24
‘Lakosee cocked his helmet in doubt, but gave a smart mandible clack and said, “As you command.”
At last, the infidels began to pour out of the ravine. Nizat’s Fleet Rangers fired from across the chasm, raining particle and focus beams down on their heads. The humans answered with a sustained rocket volley that left the canyon rim flaking and cloaked in smoke. Nizat and ‘Lakosee rose and began to race down the road toward the ravine, firing as they ran.
The rocket fire had barely died away before two of the infidel vehicles climbed out of the ravine and turned down the road away from Nizat and ‘Lakosee, their weapons also firing across the canyon at the Fleet Rangers. Behind them followed a hundred humans on foot. Nizat and ‘Lakosee continued to pour a steady stream of plasma bolts into their flanks.
Instead of turning to meet them, the entire mass turned after the vehicles and fled down the canyon on foot.
“What is wrong with them?” ‘Lakosee demanded, now firing at the infidels’ backs.
Before Nizat could answer, a handful of humans at the back of the mob turned and began to spray rounds up the canyon toward him and ‘Lakosee. Nizat’s energy shield began to crackle with overload static, then one of the infidels slightly elevated his rifle. A much larger round—about the diameter of three fingers—came flying out of the weapon’s lower barrel and landed fifteen units in front of Nizat.
Grenade.
There followed a white flash, and Nizat felt himself flying backward.
What happened after, he doubted he would ever recall. But he certainly had not been hurled into the canyon. The next thing he knew, ‘Lakosee was kneeling over him, shaking him by the armor. After a few moments, he realized the steward was yelling at him, but with a voice that seemed weak and very far away.
“Fleetmaster, are you well?! Wake up!”
Nizat pushed ‘Lakosee away and sat up, then felt something clack against his abdomen armor and looked down to see the shattered remnants of one of the anti-gravity harness pods dangling by the connecting cable. He quietly thanked the gods that at least it was not the pod containing the Luminal Beacon.
“Fleetmaster—”
“I am fine, Tam.” Nizat was not entirely sure of that, but there was no pain—and that was good enough. “Help me up.”
‘Lakosee pulled him up, and Nizat was astonished to see the entire human column fleeing down the canyon—away from them. “The infidels are running from us?”
“I could not believe it, either,” ‘Lakosee said. “Are they cowards?”
“I doubt it,” Nizat said. “Mad as gartls, perhaps—but not cowards.”
He did a quick count of the humans he could still see—and estimated that the mob was about four times that size. That put the number of survivors at no more than eighty. And considering that they were the crew of a salvage ship, only a small percentage would be seasoned warriors. Perhaps the enemy commander had simply decided that with a cadre of Sangheili firing down from the canyon rim, his company could not survive a charge.
Or perhaps he had intended to flee down the road all along.
The infidels had a fondness for turning their vessels into bombs, which they triggered the moment the Covenant captured them. Nizat saw no reason to believe they would treat a salvage ship any differently. The human shipmaster had probably prepared a self-destruct charge when he saw Nizat’s cadre crossing the plateau, and now he was simply trying to get his crew to a safe distance before it detonated.
Nizat turned to ‘Lakosee and said, “Have the spanning troop resume operations, then come with me.” He pulled the mangled anti-gravity harness off his armor and handed the intact pod back to ‘Lakosee. “Remove the Beacon from that pod. Before we give chase, we’ll need to find another decoy to carry it.”
“Give chase?” ‘Lakosee said. “Won’t the humans find that suspicious?”
“No doubt,” Nizat said. He started down the road toward the mass of human corpses. “But what choice do we have?”
CHAPTER 15
* * *
* * *
1228 hours, June 7, 2526 (military calendar)
UNSC Phyllis Wheatley Landing Site, Crystal Bush Plateau
Mountains of Despair, Planet Netherop, Ephyra System
Eighteen kilometers into Blue Team’s run, the ground started to roll in a series of high, gentle hills that blocked their view of the plateau ahead. The crystal bushes were slowly giving way to tall, diamond-shaped sheet plants that tried to enfold any object that brushed against them. John’s legs burned from exertion, and his lungs hurt like he was breathing ammonia. His skinsuit was having trouble bleeding off body heat, and he could hear the accumulating dust rasping in the Mjolnir’s joints.
But his HUD showed only a thousand meters to the Wheatley. It had been just thirty-three minutes since Captain Dkani’s emergency transmission reporting the approach of a large alien force from the Lucky Break, and the distant scream-crump of Covenant plasma cannons suggested to John that he and Fred and Linda had arrived in time to repel the boarding attempt. He tapped the stock of his BR55 over his forearm to make sure the barrel was not packed with any dust or residue.
“Weapons check,” John said over TEAMCOM.
The team was still running in an exaggerated stagger formation, but now Fred was on point, with John about a hundred meters behind him and to the right. Linda was roughly a hundred meters behind John, and also to the right.
John retracted the BR55’s charging handle and flicked the fire selector through each position, checking to see that the trigger moved freely. All of the UNSC’s battle and assault rifles were designed to function under harsh conditions, but the fine dust kicked up by kilometers of hard running was proving hard on equipment. It slowed fans and clogged filters, and it collected on even a thin film of gun oil to create caked-on layers that cushioned hammer strikes and limited trigger motion.
Once John had confirmed the BR55 was still functional, he exchanged it for the M7 submachine gun and quickly repeated the process. Next he checked the dust seals on the missile tubes he was carrying for Fred’s M41 rocket launcher. Then he performed a visual inspection of each of his grenades, paying special attention to the priming slides. He had to bleed a little air through his ventilator to blow some dust out of the slides, but otherwise all of his weapons were in good shape. They should have been. The team had already performed two checks during the long run.
John returned all of his grenades to their satchel, then grabbed the BR55 again and checked Fred’s and Linda’s status lights. Both green. Weapons ready. His HUD had him at seven hundred meters from the Wheatley, with Fred still a hundred meters ahead.
Fred and Linda had to be as exhausted as John was—the Mjolnir’s force-multiplying circuits could not do all the work. But everyone’s hydration tubes were now delivering a monosaccharide-glycogen solution that would provide energy for the coming fight. Which meant they should be ready to do battle without taking a rest break.
Still, it paid to be sure. A nineteen-kilometer near-sprint was tough, even for Spartans.
“Everybody able to engage?” John asked. “All support equipment operational?”
A pair of status lights winked green inside John’s helmet.
“I’m good to go,” Fred said. He crested a hill and started down the other side. “But something feels wrong up there.”
“Like what?” John didn’t doubt Fred’s instincts—they were nearly always accurate. But it was hard to prepare for something. “Be more specific.”
“Okay. It’s kind of a stomach flutter—”
“Can it,” John ordered. “This is no time for wisecracking.”
“Who’s wisecracking?” Fred replied. “I’m telling you, something just feels wrong.”
“It has to be the artillery,” John said. “That’s all we have to go on right now—what we’re hearing.”
“No,” Linda said. “I think the trouble is in what we are not hearing.”
John crested the hill behind Fred. A sliver of dull-gray metal grew visible ahead, barely peeking over the top of another, higher hill. It had to be his first glimpse of the Wheatley.
“What aren’t we hearing?” he asked.
“Rockets,” Linda said. “Point-defense guns.”
She was right, of course. The Wheatley was just a salvage vessel, but even those carried missile pods and point-defense systems. Unless the missile pods happened to be pointing in the right direction, they would be useless against a surface force.
But at least a couple of the point-defense turrets should have been in position to defend against the alien boarding party. The weapons relied on magnetic linear accelerator technology to launch streams of 50mm high-explosive projectiles at incoming threats, so John and his companions should have been hearing an endless chain of cracking and banging as the supersonic rounds broke the sound barrier on the way to their targets, then detonated on impact.
John heard only the sporadic plasma cannons. No rockets, no grenades, no rifle fire. No defensive sounds at all . . . until a faint crackle he recognized as a striking microwave blast whispered over the hilltop. The crackle was followed by a muffled boom and a distant cheer.
A cheer raised by young voices.
Then cut short by the scream-crump of plasma cannons. A microwave weapon crackled again, then fell silent and was answered by more frequent Covenant fire. John began to have a sinking feeling.
As Fred approached the crest of the next hill, John said, “Let’s stop to reconnoiter. I want to understand the situation before we engage.”
“What’s to understand?” Fred dropped to his belly and began to crawl toward the hilltop. “A bunch of kids are fighting a bunch of aliens over an ONI ship—and they need help.”
As Fred spoke, he was already peering over the hill. He immediately dropped back down and began to prepare the M41 for firing.
“That bad?” John asked, still ascending.
“Not exactly,” Fred said. “You’ll see.”
John stopped twenty meters short of the hill crest, then crawled the rest of the way on his knees and elbows. He was still breathing hard, but it was a relief to finally stop running. He took a sip from his hydration tube, and his legs and arms immediately began to feel stronger as the rejuvenating solution did its work. He detoured around a stand of sheet plants, not wanting to draw attention to himself by triggering their enfolding response. Then he pushed his head up to see what lay beyond the hill.
The Wheatley stood wedged into the shallow valley below, a colossal horseshoe-shaped vessel that rose as high as the knolls that flanked it. The two legs of the ship rested on struts as large as main battle tanks, and between the struts hung the collars of thrust nozzles large enough to cover an entire Razor-class prowler.
Atop the ship’s arch-shaped hull, several bands of viewing ports marked the locations of the bridge and habitation compartments. The inner edge of the arch was lined on either side with the tips of fifty huge claws, which could be extended to grapple the hull of any vessel with a beam less than four hundred meters.
In his mission briefing, John had learned how the Wheatley intended to retrieve the target. After Blue Team boarded the Lucky Break and killed all of the aliens aboard—presumably before any of them detonated a self-destruct charge—the big salvage ship would slip down over the Covenant frigate and grab the vessel in its claws. Then the behemoth would launch them both out of Netherop’s gravity well, jump into slipspace as soon as possible, make a long series of random follow-up slips, and return to human-controlled space.
Hopefully without a Covenant fleet close behind.
The target of the mission—the Lucky Break itself—sat on the opposite side of the plateau, a refraction-blurred disk whose purple hull looked more like a shadow than a frigate. The only hints of detail John could see were its long neck and dovetailed stern. The heat shimmer prevented him from viewing the notch that had been put in its stern by the destroyers of Task Force Pantea, when they jumped it and kicked off this whole mess.
And between the two vessels, roughly a thousand meters from the Wheatley and four thousand from the Lucky Break, twined the same narrow canyon through which the Forgotten Highway ran—the same deep chasm out of which Blue Team had climbed when they captured Lena and the two boys in their mountain runner.
With its meanders and shadowed depths, the canyon resembled a big black snake sunning itself on the narrow plateau. On the side closest to the Wheatley, there were half a dozen wide spots where large ravines dropped out of the mountain range and cut huge notches in the canyon rim.
On the near side of the chasm, four of the indigenous mountain runners were dancing back and forth along the rim, dodging incoming plasma bolts. The farthest runner was so distant it appeared little more than a pinhead of blurred light, while the closest was about the size of John’s palm. They were clearly returning fire with their microwave weapons, because across the canyon, crystal bushes were disintegrating into a glitter haze and sheet plants were bursting into dancing columns of flame.
As battles went, it barely qualified as a skirmish. But when John magnified the image, he saw that the fighting had been much heavier earlier. The plateau on the Covenant’s side of the chasm was littered with the indistinct forms of equipment and bodies—nineteen of them, to be exact. Another six aliens, all Elites judging by their body shapes and the way they moved, remained in the fight, operating a trio of plasma cannons that remained more or less attached to crippled assault vehicles. Two of the weapons, each manned by a single warrior, were a hundred meters back from the rim, putting them at the limit of their effective range as they fired across the canyon.
The third cannon had been dragged forward onto a promontory, a hundred meters closer to the Wheatley, providing the aliens with a 270-degree field of fire that included all four mountain runners. It was being operated by a gunner and a spotter, supported by two Elites armed with long-range beam rifles.
John could see no other forces—dead or alive—anywhere on the plateau, but a quick inspection of the Wheatley’s hull revealed why no one had heard the point-defense guns being fired. All six of the canyon-facing turrets had been shredded by some anti-materiel fire.
The evidence was of a quick but deadly engagement between the Covenant forces and the Wheatley, but John had no idea what had happened after that. And he didn’t understand why the Castoffs were risking their mountain runners and their own lives in a cross-canyon artillery duel. All they had to do was withdraw to a safe distance, then slaughter the Elites as they climbed out of the canyon.
But, of course, they were just kids—and not even trained kids. It would have been more surprising had they been using sound tactics.
“Blue Four, take the two gunners in back,” John ordered. “Blue Two, take out the cannon on the promontory. I’ll make sure we don’t take any fire from the Castoffs.”
Linda and Fred flashed green status LEDs, which quickly switched to amber as they moved into position. John had the onboard computer assign the promontory cannon as his waypoint—not because he intended to advance toward it, but that he wanted to keep track of its location. Then, knowing he had the greatest distance to travel, John moved forward in a high crawl, going as fast as he could on hands and elbows.
He was carrying his battle rifle in the crooks of his arms. Twice, as the butt brushed a sheet plant, it was torn from his grasp when the leaf enveloped it. He simply tore the plant apart and pulled the weapon free, then crawled into a new lane and continued more carefully for a dozen meters. The only aliens with weapons capable of reaching him were the two Elites with beam rifles, and he was pretty certain they were too busy trying to nail the Castoffs to notice him.
John and his companions were seven minutes into their crawl when the unmistakable boom of a striking plasma round sounded from the chasm. John stuck his head up in time to see a pillar of flame rising from the second most distant mountain runner. Two Castoffs were flying over the front end—no hope of survival for them. And that might have been a mercy. The fire plume was from exploding batteries—and that meant burning acid everywhere.
Linda’s status LED went green.
“Blue Four, cleared to fire.” John ducked back down and continued crawling. “Blue Two, continue advance.”
Normally John would have waited until everyone was in position to engage, but he didn’t want any more Castoffs getting wounded. Medical attention ate up resources, and he was already down one Spartan because he had left Kelly behind to help Arne and Oskar.
Besides, he wasn’t sure how much time remained. Kelly’s last message had warned of an Elite special forces unit coming up behind them, and he needed to have the situation here under control before the next wave arrived.
John heard Linda’s SRS99 boom twice. Her LED flashed green three times, indicating target down. He dropped to his belly and slowed his crawl, being more careful now to avoid giving his position away. If the enemy was any good—and it was always smart to assume they were—the two Elites with the beam rifles would have realized the moment Linda fired that the situation had changed. Now they would be searching for real threats to pick off.
The SRS99 boomed three more times, and Linda’s LED flashed green again. She rarely missed, but the temperature gradients were taking a toll on her accuracy. She seldom needed three shots to take out a target. John checked his waypoint and saw that it was indicating on his left at a forty-five-degree angle. Time to start closing the distance. He turned toward the waypoint and continued his belly-crawl.
Fred’s LED turned green. That would put him just inside the M41’s maximum range of four hundred meters, so probably at three-seventy or so. John wasn’t aware how close that was to the canyon rim because he didn’t know how wide the chasm was at the attack point. But his BR55 had a range of nine hundred meters. That was enough.
