Oblivion, page 25
John double-checked that the battle rifle’s barrel was still clear of dust, then flicked the selector to full automatic.
“Blue Two, engage when ready.”
A second passed, then two, then a crackle echoed across the chasm as a microwave weapon struck something on the Covenant side of the canyon. Finally the roar of two rockets sounded to John’s left. He brought the BR55 to his shoulder and rose, turning in the direction his waypoint indicated—and found his view blocked by a towering sheet plant. He opened fire anyway.
The sheet plant folded in on itself, revealing a column of greasy gray smoke rising from the promontory across the canyon. The blue flash of a particle beam streaked out from the base of the smoke pillar, traveling in Fred’s direction.
“Mine,” John said over TEAMCOM.
He linked his HUD with the BR55’s scope and swung the barrel toward the source of the particle beam. It took a couple of heartbeats, but finally he spotted an Elite warrior kneeling in the smoke, bracing his beam rifle on a section of broken chassis. John put the crosshairs low on the alien’s flank, just under his elbow, and fired a long burst.
The alien’s energy shield crackled, and the enemy leaped back and swiveled toward John, trying to bring his beam rifle around to counterattack. Bad mistake. John adjusted to center mass and continued to fire. The Elite tumbled over backward, armor pushed inward and weapon flying free.
John didn’t hear the reports of Linda’s SRS99 until his magazine was empty. He ejected it without thinking and slipped a fresh one into the receiver, already sweeping his scope back and forth across the promontory, searching the smoke for any surviving Elites.
“All targets down,” Linda said. “No sign of reinforcements from Lucky Break.”
“How about behind us?” As John spoke, he was turning toward the Castoffs and their mountain runners. “Any sign of those Umbras?”
“Nothing yet,” Linda said. “I’ll maintain watch.”
“And stay out of sight,” John said. “Blue Two, same for you—but you have the Castoffs. Don’t let them fry me.”
Both status LEDs flashed green.
John resisted the temptation to walk toward the mountain runners. He couldn’t afford a misstep. Those took time to straighten out, and if Kelly was right, the Elite special forces would be arriving in less than an hour. He pointed his BR55 at the ground and raised his free hand in greeting, then turned his voicemitter up to maximum.
“I’m not an alien,” he called. “I’m human, and I intend you no harm. But we really need to talk.”
The surviving mountain runners scurried toward him, the one in the center approaching dead-on, while the other two spread out to flank him. Not bad tactics . . . but not great either. The Castoffs didn’t seem to realize that as long as they remained seated high in their vehicles, they were easy targets for his unseen companions.
The runners stopped twenty meters away, easily inside the range of their microwave weapons, but far enough to make it difficult for John to charge one. There were two Castoffs in each vehicle, a driver and a gunner, all fair-haired and all dressed in dust-colored robes made of the same coarse cloth that Lena and her companions had been wearing. They appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties, which made them quite a bit older than the other Castoffs John had seen so far. But they were all so gaunt and sunken-eyed that it was difficult to be certain.
The gunner of the middle vehicle, a long-faced male with a heavy brow and a blade-thin nose, leaned around the dish of his microwave weapon.
“You are human?” He narrowed his blue eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“Trust me, I’m just wearing special armor, but I am human. Lena and Oskar can confirm it when they arrive.”
“Lena and Oskar, they are with you?” It was the driver in the vehicle to John’s right who asked this question. A square-jawed woman with broad cheeks and pale-green eyes, she was about the same age as the gunner of the other vehicle. “Anyone else?”
“Arne too,” John said. “But they’re not with me. They’re with another of my people.”
“Of course,” said the blade-nosed man. “What do you want for them?”
To John’s eye, he and the green-eyed woman appeared to be about the same age as marine lieutenants fresh out of OCS—and probably the oldest Castoffs present. Since they were the ones doing the talking—and everyone else was watching in expectant silence—he decided they were probably the two captains Lena had mentioned.
The Mjolnir’s onboard computer displayed their names as a reminder on his HUD. Samson and Roselle.
“They’re not hostages,” John said. “We all just need to work together.”
“And Berg and Greta?” asked the woman—Roselle. “If we work together, will you return them as well?”
“We don’t have Berg or Greta,” John said. “I’m sorry. I think they were probably killed when our ship self-destructed. That was a long distance back, where we crashed.”
“The big flash?” Roselle asked.
“That’s right,” John said. “A member of my team saw two scouts just before the blast. We found a piece of their mountain runner afterward.”
Roselle nodded and shot a pained look toward the blade-nosed man—no doubt Samson. They seemed too young to have kids old enough to send on scouting missions—and from what Lena had said, parents did not usually live long enough on Netherop for their offspring to remember them—but the Castoffs’ children must have come from somewhere. He could only imagine that Roselle and Samson were old by castaway standards, and the parents of the other kids had already been taken by Netherop’s harsh environment.
As John waited for the news of their scouts’ deaths to settle in, a line of UNKNOWN designators appeared on his motion detector. Nine contacts were sneaking up behind him, arranged in a quarter circle so they could attack from several directions at once.
Had the contacts been aliens equipped with advanced Covenant weaponry, he figured that in open terrain like the plateau, they would have opened fire before closing to the twenty-five-meter limit of his motion detector. And had they just been a group of people walking up behind him, Fred or Linda would have alerted him via TEAMCOM. So it had to be Castoffs crawling through the brush, trying to position themselves to create an effective distraction for the gunners in the mountain runners.
John jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the approaching Castoffs. “Don’t even try. People will get hurt.” To emphasize his point, he switched to TEAMCOM and said, “Blue Two, give them a shout.”
A moment later, Fred’s voice yelled, “Nice mountain runners you have there! It’d be a shame if something happened to them!”
All six runner occupants glanced toward Fred, and when they looked back, John was holding his BR55 in one hand and his M7 in the other. The weapons were pointed at two different vehicles.
John turned his faceplate toward the green-eyed woman.
“Call them off, Roselle,” he said. “You can’t win, and we are not your enemies.”
Roselle’s brow rose at the sound of her name; then she turned to the blade-nosed man and said, “Samson, I think we’re not going to pull this off. Let’s hear the man out.”
Samson scowled, but shifted his gaze past John and said, “Fine. You heard your captain. Back away.”
John’s motion tracker showed only six contacts leaving the area. He did not turn to look.
“All of them,” he said to Samson. “I won’t ask again.”
“Do it . . . everyone,” Roselle said. She turned her palm toward the deck and made a quick slicing motion that instantly reduced the tension in her companions’ postures, then fixed her gaze on John. “It seems these things have eyes in their backs.”
His motion tracker showed six additional contacts departing—for a total of twelve. That meant it had missed three contacts arriving. What the Castoffs lacked in tactics, they made up for in stealth.
“That’s a start,” John said. “Now, have your gunners step away from their weapons.”
“And you will lower your weapons?”
“Sure.” John lowered the M7. “We’re all friends here.”
“If we were friends,” Roselle said, “you might tell us your name.”
“It’s John.”
Roselle looked doubtful. “That is a strange name for a . . . what did you say you are?”
“A soldier,” John said. “One who’s running out of patience.”
Roselle paled, then nodded to her companions. Two of the gunners backed away from the microwave dishes, but Samson remained behind his. John faced him and slowly began to lower the BR55, and Samson simultaneously slid away from his own weapon. When John’s battle rifle was finally pointed at the ground, and Samson was standing in the corner of his runner opposite the microwave dish, Roselle glanced up the hill toward Fred.
“Better?” Roselle asked. When John nodded, she tipped her head toward Fred. “Since we’re all friends here, you should invite him down.”
“Maybe later,” John said. “First, let’s talk about what happened here.”
“What’s there to talk about?” Samson asked. “We killed a bunch of aliens.”
As John turned to face him, Roselle said, “You shouldn’t have a problem with that.”
When John looked back to Roselle, Samson said, “Unless he’s an alien.”
“Are you an alien, John?” Roselle asked.
“I already told you, no.” John stopped swiveling from one to the other, instead fixing his faceplate halfway between them and looking toward whoever was speaking out of the corner of his eye. “And you didn’t drop all those aliens.”
“Okay,” Roselle said. “Maybe you killed six—”
“And the crew of the Wheatley”— John jerked a thumb toward the salvage ship behind him—“took out the other nineteen. Your weapons don’t have the range.”
Samson and Roselle glanced at each other; then Roselle sighed and looked back toward John. “It wasn’t our fault.”
John expected Samson to pipe in next, but he remained silent and merely looked expectant.
“What wasn’t your fault?” John asked.
“You tell me,” Roselle said. “You seem to know so much.”
John thought for a moment, recalling what the Wheatley’s communications officer had said over the emergency channel about not being able to hold off the Covenant boarding party, then decided he had a pretty good idea of what had occurred.
“When the aliens started to cross the canyon, the Wheatley’s crew exited the ship.”
“Abandoned it,” Samson said. “And we moved in to save it.”
“So you’re claiming salvage rights?” John asked.
“That’s colonial law,” Roselle said. “Finders keepers.”
“Not for military vessels,” John said. “And what would you do with it anyway?”
“You’d be surprised at what we can do,” Roselle said.
“I don’t doubt it.” John turned and pointed at the Wheatley. “But that? It’s never going to happen. Not even if you did know how to fly a starship.”
“Don’t be so sure we don’t,” Samson said. “Our ancestors were—”
“Pirates, I know,” John said. “That doesn’t mean you know how to fly a starship—and even if you did, you’d never reach the bridge.”
Roselle’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a threat?”
“It doesn’t need to be,” John replied. “Think about what happened to Berg and Greta. Military crews don’t just abandon a ship and leave it for the enemy to capture.”
“You mean . . .” Samson looked toward the Wheatley. “The big flash?”
John tipped his helmet in Samson’s direction. “Now you understand. Booby-trapped.”
The color drained from Roselle’s face, and she turned to the driver of the third runner. “Ebba—”
“I know.” Ebba was already reaching for the runner’s control globe. “I hope it isn’t too late.”
John watched the runner bound off toward the Wheatley, then looked back to Roselle and Samson. Always one more trick in their bags.
“When we get out of here, you two should apply for Officer Candidate School,” he said. “You’d be ONI admirals in no time.”
Both Roselle and Samson furrowed their brows in puzzlement, but John didn’t explain. The sarcasm had been meant for himself and his fellow Spartans listening over TEAMCOM, so he didn’t care whether the two Castoff captains understood. In fact, he was just as glad they didn’t, since if they had, their story about being marooned on Netherop for generations would be called into question.
After a moment, Samson said, “If we get out of here.”
“We will,” John said. “That’s a military ship. Unless someone has a roll of thermite-carbon cord, they’re not getting inside.”
Roselle eyed John as though he had just told a very dull joke. “You don’t understand, tall man.”
“You can’t breach a reinforced, triple-locked hatch from outside.”
“No need,” Samson said. “They are climbing a thrust nozzle into the torus chamber. There will be a service hatch with an internal emergency release.”
“An old pirate trick,” Roselle explained. “Our ancestors left us hundreds in our learning machines.”
“Oh.” John looked toward the Wheatley, wondering how long they had before a Castoff slipped out of the engineering section and tried to open a trapped hatch. “How long ago did they start?”
“Not long,” Samson said. “We had to wait until the aliens left too.”
John was starting to feel behind on the intel. “Left . . . ? Where did they go?”
“After the humans,” Roselle said. “At first we thought we would have to sneak aboard and kill the aliens in their sleep. But they were just hungry.”
Now John was really feeling confused. “Hungry?”
“Yes,” Samson said. “Why else would they go after the crew?”
“Maybe they were afraid of the big flash,” Roselle said. “And no alien would know about climbing the thrust nozzle, so they might have wanted someone who knew how to open the hatch without blowing everything up.”
There were problems with either possibility, but both honestly sounded more reasonable than anything else John could think of. He had heard the sordid tales of Covenant Jackals eating human casualties, so Samson’s suggestion was not entirely unlikely—even if John hadn’t seen any Jackals here on Netherop so far.
Roselle’s idea was not crazy either. The enemy commander could easily have anticipated the booby-trapped hatches, given the UNSC’s habit of using self-destruct devices to turn doomed vessels into devastating weapons. But it made no sense to leave the Wheatley practically unguarded, then take ninety percent of his Covenant force to capture a handful of humans so he could safely open the hatches—not when he had to know there was an entire platoon of marines on the way to capture his ship.
And there John was again, assuming the enemy commander thought like a human. He shook his head, frustrated with himself, and turned to find the third runner on its way back from the Wheatley. There were four heads protruding up behind the driver and gunner; evidently this Ebba had been able to retrieve the boarding crew before anyone made it into the torus chamber.
“Blue Four, keep an eye out for those Umbras that are supposed to be on our back trail,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Blue Two, come down and join us.”
“Us?” Fred asked. “It looks like the Castoffs are getting ready to clear out.”
John turned back to see Roselle’s and Samson’s runners squatting belly-to-the-ground while young Castoffs used the legs to pull themselves up into the passenger compartments.
“Going somewhere?”
“Is that a problem?” Roselle asked, far too innocently.
“Only if you’re heading over there.” John pointed across the plateau toward the Lucky Break. “We wouldn’t want any friendly fire.”
“With you, everything is a threat,” Samson said. “I am growing tired of it.”
“It’s not a threat.” Silently, John added, Unless it needs to be. “I just thought we should talk about getting you a ride off this planet.”
“In exchange for what?” Samson asked.
“How about not getting in the way?” John said. “Look, this isn’t complicated. Nobody wants to see you marooned here for another five generations. I’m offering you a way out. All you have to do is be here when it’s time to go.”
“How generous.” Roselle glanced over at Samson. “It almost sounds too good to be true.”
“Almost,” Samson said. “The UNSC has always been very free with its help. All it cost our ancestors was their liberty.”
“I thought your ancestors were pirates.”
“Pirates, Separatists . . .” Roselle shrugged. “Are they not the same to the UNSC?”
“Actually, no,” John said. “And especially not when it concerns the Covenant. We’re all in this fight together.”
“Our ancestors would find that very hard to believe,” Roselle said. She nodded to Samson, and both runners, now packed full of Castoffs ranging from toddlers John hadn’t seen before—an older companion had probably been hiding them in the brush—to young adults, rose to their legs. “But we will keep that in mind once we are off the planet.”
John forced himself to keep his BR55 pointed at the ground. Aware now of their Separatist heritage, he knew he wasn’t going to win their trust by trying to intimidate them—and if he didn’t win their trust, it would likely end very badly.
“You’re smart people,” John said. “So think this through. Even if I were to let you take the alien ship—”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Roselle asked. “I thought we were all on the same side.”
“We are,” John growled. “But you’d never get that ship off the ground. You don’t have time.”
“There you are with your threats again,” Samson said. “It’s always the same with the UNSC.”
“It’s not a threat,” John said. “I really can’t let you have that ship, but that’s not the problem. It’s the aliens.”
“But we killed all the aliens,” said Samson.
It hadn’t been the Castoffs who took them out, but John let it pass. He glanced back toward the hill and found Fred descending in the open, his battle rifle pointed at the ground, but ready to bring the muzzle up at a moment’s notice.
“Blue Two, engage when ready.”
A second passed, then two, then a crackle echoed across the chasm as a microwave weapon struck something on the Covenant side of the canyon. Finally the roar of two rockets sounded to John’s left. He brought the BR55 to his shoulder and rose, turning in the direction his waypoint indicated—and found his view blocked by a towering sheet plant. He opened fire anyway.
The sheet plant folded in on itself, revealing a column of greasy gray smoke rising from the promontory across the canyon. The blue flash of a particle beam streaked out from the base of the smoke pillar, traveling in Fred’s direction.
“Mine,” John said over TEAMCOM.
He linked his HUD with the BR55’s scope and swung the barrel toward the source of the particle beam. It took a couple of heartbeats, but finally he spotted an Elite warrior kneeling in the smoke, bracing his beam rifle on a section of broken chassis. John put the crosshairs low on the alien’s flank, just under his elbow, and fired a long burst.
The alien’s energy shield crackled, and the enemy leaped back and swiveled toward John, trying to bring his beam rifle around to counterattack. Bad mistake. John adjusted to center mass and continued to fire. The Elite tumbled over backward, armor pushed inward and weapon flying free.
John didn’t hear the reports of Linda’s SRS99 until his magazine was empty. He ejected it without thinking and slipped a fresh one into the receiver, already sweeping his scope back and forth across the promontory, searching the smoke for any surviving Elites.
“All targets down,” Linda said. “No sign of reinforcements from Lucky Break.”
“How about behind us?” As John spoke, he was turning toward the Castoffs and their mountain runners. “Any sign of those Umbras?”
“Nothing yet,” Linda said. “I’ll maintain watch.”
“And stay out of sight,” John said. “Blue Two, same for you—but you have the Castoffs. Don’t let them fry me.”
Both status LEDs flashed green.
John resisted the temptation to walk toward the mountain runners. He couldn’t afford a misstep. Those took time to straighten out, and if Kelly was right, the Elite special forces would be arriving in less than an hour. He pointed his BR55 at the ground and raised his free hand in greeting, then turned his voicemitter up to maximum.
“I’m not an alien,” he called. “I’m human, and I intend you no harm. But we really need to talk.”
The surviving mountain runners scurried toward him, the one in the center approaching dead-on, while the other two spread out to flank him. Not bad tactics . . . but not great either. The Castoffs didn’t seem to realize that as long as they remained seated high in their vehicles, they were easy targets for his unseen companions.
The runners stopped twenty meters away, easily inside the range of their microwave weapons, but far enough to make it difficult for John to charge one. There were two Castoffs in each vehicle, a driver and a gunner, all fair-haired and all dressed in dust-colored robes made of the same coarse cloth that Lena and her companions had been wearing. They appeared to be in their late teens or early twenties, which made them quite a bit older than the other Castoffs John had seen so far. But they were all so gaunt and sunken-eyed that it was difficult to be certain.
The gunner of the middle vehicle, a long-faced male with a heavy brow and a blade-thin nose, leaned around the dish of his microwave weapon.
“You are human?” He narrowed his blue eyes. “I don’t think so.”
“Trust me, I’m just wearing special armor, but I am human. Lena and Oskar can confirm it when they arrive.”
“Lena and Oskar, they are with you?” It was the driver in the vehicle to John’s right who asked this question. A square-jawed woman with broad cheeks and pale-green eyes, she was about the same age as the gunner of the other vehicle. “Anyone else?”
“Arne too,” John said. “But they’re not with me. They’re with another of my people.”
“Of course,” said the blade-nosed man. “What do you want for them?”
To John’s eye, he and the green-eyed woman appeared to be about the same age as marine lieutenants fresh out of OCS—and probably the oldest Castoffs present. Since they were the ones doing the talking—and everyone else was watching in expectant silence—he decided they were probably the two captains Lena had mentioned.
The Mjolnir’s onboard computer displayed their names as a reminder on his HUD. Samson and Roselle.
“They’re not hostages,” John said. “We all just need to work together.”
“And Berg and Greta?” asked the woman—Roselle. “If we work together, will you return them as well?”
“We don’t have Berg or Greta,” John said. “I’m sorry. I think they were probably killed when our ship self-destructed. That was a long distance back, where we crashed.”
“The big flash?” Roselle asked.
“That’s right,” John said. “A member of my team saw two scouts just before the blast. We found a piece of their mountain runner afterward.”
Roselle nodded and shot a pained look toward the blade-nosed man—no doubt Samson. They seemed too young to have kids old enough to send on scouting missions—and from what Lena had said, parents did not usually live long enough on Netherop for their offspring to remember them—but the Castoffs’ children must have come from somewhere. He could only imagine that Roselle and Samson were old by castaway standards, and the parents of the other kids had already been taken by Netherop’s harsh environment.
As John waited for the news of their scouts’ deaths to settle in, a line of UNKNOWN designators appeared on his motion detector. Nine contacts were sneaking up behind him, arranged in a quarter circle so they could attack from several directions at once.
Had the contacts been aliens equipped with advanced Covenant weaponry, he figured that in open terrain like the plateau, they would have opened fire before closing to the twenty-five-meter limit of his motion detector. And had they just been a group of people walking up behind him, Fred or Linda would have alerted him via TEAMCOM. So it had to be Castoffs crawling through the brush, trying to position themselves to create an effective distraction for the gunners in the mountain runners.
John jerked a thumb over his shoulder toward the approaching Castoffs. “Don’t even try. People will get hurt.” To emphasize his point, he switched to TEAMCOM and said, “Blue Two, give them a shout.”
A moment later, Fred’s voice yelled, “Nice mountain runners you have there! It’d be a shame if something happened to them!”
All six runner occupants glanced toward Fred, and when they looked back, John was holding his BR55 in one hand and his M7 in the other. The weapons were pointed at two different vehicles.
John turned his faceplate toward the green-eyed woman.
“Call them off, Roselle,” he said. “You can’t win, and we are not your enemies.”
Roselle’s brow rose at the sound of her name; then she turned to the blade-nosed man and said, “Samson, I think we’re not going to pull this off. Let’s hear the man out.”
Samson scowled, but shifted his gaze past John and said, “Fine. You heard your captain. Back away.”
John’s motion tracker showed only six contacts leaving the area. He did not turn to look.
“All of them,” he said to Samson. “I won’t ask again.”
“Do it . . . everyone,” Roselle said. She turned her palm toward the deck and made a quick slicing motion that instantly reduced the tension in her companions’ postures, then fixed her gaze on John. “It seems these things have eyes in their backs.”
His motion tracker showed six additional contacts departing—for a total of twelve. That meant it had missed three contacts arriving. What the Castoffs lacked in tactics, they made up for in stealth.
“That’s a start,” John said. “Now, have your gunners step away from their weapons.”
“And you will lower your weapons?”
“Sure.” John lowered the M7. “We’re all friends here.”
“If we were friends,” Roselle said, “you might tell us your name.”
“It’s John.”
Roselle looked doubtful. “That is a strange name for a . . . what did you say you are?”
“A soldier,” John said. “One who’s running out of patience.”
Roselle paled, then nodded to her companions. Two of the gunners backed away from the microwave dishes, but Samson remained behind his. John faced him and slowly began to lower the BR55, and Samson simultaneously slid away from his own weapon. When John’s battle rifle was finally pointed at the ground, and Samson was standing in the corner of his runner opposite the microwave dish, Roselle glanced up the hill toward Fred.
“Better?” Roselle asked. When John nodded, she tipped her head toward Fred. “Since we’re all friends here, you should invite him down.”
“Maybe later,” John said. “First, let’s talk about what happened here.”
“What’s there to talk about?” Samson asked. “We killed a bunch of aliens.”
As John turned to face him, Roselle said, “You shouldn’t have a problem with that.”
When John looked back to Roselle, Samson said, “Unless he’s an alien.”
“Are you an alien, John?” Roselle asked.
“I already told you, no.” John stopped swiveling from one to the other, instead fixing his faceplate halfway between them and looking toward whoever was speaking out of the corner of his eye. “And you didn’t drop all those aliens.”
“Okay,” Roselle said. “Maybe you killed six—”
“And the crew of the Wheatley”— John jerked a thumb toward the salvage ship behind him—“took out the other nineteen. Your weapons don’t have the range.”
Samson and Roselle glanced at each other; then Roselle sighed and looked back toward John. “It wasn’t our fault.”
John expected Samson to pipe in next, but he remained silent and merely looked expectant.
“What wasn’t your fault?” John asked.
“You tell me,” Roselle said. “You seem to know so much.”
John thought for a moment, recalling what the Wheatley’s communications officer had said over the emergency channel about not being able to hold off the Covenant boarding party, then decided he had a pretty good idea of what had occurred.
“When the aliens started to cross the canyon, the Wheatley’s crew exited the ship.”
“Abandoned it,” Samson said. “And we moved in to save it.”
“So you’re claiming salvage rights?” John asked.
“That’s colonial law,” Roselle said. “Finders keepers.”
“Not for military vessels,” John said. “And what would you do with it anyway?”
“You’d be surprised at what we can do,” Roselle said.
“I don’t doubt it.” John turned and pointed at the Wheatley. “But that? It’s never going to happen. Not even if you did know how to fly a starship.”
“Don’t be so sure we don’t,” Samson said. “Our ancestors were—”
“Pirates, I know,” John said. “That doesn’t mean you know how to fly a starship—and even if you did, you’d never reach the bridge.”
Roselle’s eyes narrowed. “Is that a threat?”
“It doesn’t need to be,” John replied. “Think about what happened to Berg and Greta. Military crews don’t just abandon a ship and leave it for the enemy to capture.”
“You mean . . .” Samson looked toward the Wheatley. “The big flash?”
John tipped his helmet in Samson’s direction. “Now you understand. Booby-trapped.”
The color drained from Roselle’s face, and she turned to the driver of the third runner. “Ebba—”
“I know.” Ebba was already reaching for the runner’s control globe. “I hope it isn’t too late.”
John watched the runner bound off toward the Wheatley, then looked back to Roselle and Samson. Always one more trick in their bags.
“When we get out of here, you two should apply for Officer Candidate School,” he said. “You’d be ONI admirals in no time.”
Both Roselle and Samson furrowed their brows in puzzlement, but John didn’t explain. The sarcasm had been meant for himself and his fellow Spartans listening over TEAMCOM, so he didn’t care whether the two Castoff captains understood. In fact, he was just as glad they didn’t, since if they had, their story about being marooned on Netherop for generations would be called into question.
After a moment, Samson said, “If we get out of here.”
“We will,” John said. “That’s a military ship. Unless someone has a roll of thermite-carbon cord, they’re not getting inside.”
Roselle eyed John as though he had just told a very dull joke. “You don’t understand, tall man.”
“You can’t breach a reinforced, triple-locked hatch from outside.”
“No need,” Samson said. “They are climbing a thrust nozzle into the torus chamber. There will be a service hatch with an internal emergency release.”
“An old pirate trick,” Roselle explained. “Our ancestors left us hundreds in our learning machines.”
“Oh.” John looked toward the Wheatley, wondering how long they had before a Castoff slipped out of the engineering section and tried to open a trapped hatch. “How long ago did they start?”
“Not long,” Samson said. “We had to wait until the aliens left too.”
John was starting to feel behind on the intel. “Left . . . ? Where did they go?”
“After the humans,” Roselle said. “At first we thought we would have to sneak aboard and kill the aliens in their sleep. But they were just hungry.”
Now John was really feeling confused. “Hungry?”
“Yes,” Samson said. “Why else would they go after the crew?”
“Maybe they were afraid of the big flash,” Roselle said. “And no alien would know about climbing the thrust nozzle, so they might have wanted someone who knew how to open the hatch without blowing everything up.”
There were problems with either possibility, but both honestly sounded more reasonable than anything else John could think of. He had heard the sordid tales of Covenant Jackals eating human casualties, so Samson’s suggestion was not entirely unlikely—even if John hadn’t seen any Jackals here on Netherop so far.
Roselle’s idea was not crazy either. The enemy commander could easily have anticipated the booby-trapped hatches, given the UNSC’s habit of using self-destruct devices to turn doomed vessels into devastating weapons. But it made no sense to leave the Wheatley practically unguarded, then take ninety percent of his Covenant force to capture a handful of humans so he could safely open the hatches—not when he had to know there was an entire platoon of marines on the way to capture his ship.
And there John was again, assuming the enemy commander thought like a human. He shook his head, frustrated with himself, and turned to find the third runner on its way back from the Wheatley. There were four heads protruding up behind the driver and gunner; evidently this Ebba had been able to retrieve the boarding crew before anyone made it into the torus chamber.
“Blue Four, keep an eye out for those Umbras that are supposed to be on our back trail,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Blue Two, come down and join us.”
“Us?” Fred asked. “It looks like the Castoffs are getting ready to clear out.”
John turned back to see Roselle’s and Samson’s runners squatting belly-to-the-ground while young Castoffs used the legs to pull themselves up into the passenger compartments.
“Going somewhere?”
“Is that a problem?” Roselle asked, far too innocently.
“Only if you’re heading over there.” John pointed across the plateau toward the Lucky Break. “We wouldn’t want any friendly fire.”
“With you, everything is a threat,” Samson said. “I am growing tired of it.”
“It’s not a threat.” Silently, John added, Unless it needs to be. “I just thought we should talk about getting you a ride off this planet.”
“In exchange for what?” Samson asked.
“How about not getting in the way?” John said. “Look, this isn’t complicated. Nobody wants to see you marooned here for another five generations. I’m offering you a way out. All you have to do is be here when it’s time to go.”
“How generous.” Roselle glanced over at Samson. “It almost sounds too good to be true.”
“Almost,” Samson said. “The UNSC has always been very free with its help. All it cost our ancestors was their liberty.”
“I thought your ancestors were pirates.”
“Pirates, Separatists . . .” Roselle shrugged. “Are they not the same to the UNSC?”
“Actually, no,” John said. “And especially not when it concerns the Covenant. We’re all in this fight together.”
“Our ancestors would find that very hard to believe,” Roselle said. She nodded to Samson, and both runners, now packed full of Castoffs ranging from toddlers John hadn’t seen before—an older companion had probably been hiding them in the brush—to young adults, rose to their legs. “But we will keep that in mind once we are off the planet.”
John forced himself to keep his BR55 pointed at the ground. Aware now of their Separatist heritage, he knew he wasn’t going to win their trust by trying to intimidate them—and if he didn’t win their trust, it would likely end very badly.
“You’re smart people,” John said. “So think this through. Even if I were to let you take the alien ship—”
“Why wouldn’t you?” Roselle asked. “I thought we were all on the same side.”
“We are,” John growled. “But you’d never get that ship off the ground. You don’t have time.”
“There you are with your threats again,” Samson said. “It’s always the same with the UNSC.”
“It’s not a threat,” John said. “I really can’t let you have that ship, but that’s not the problem. It’s the aliens.”
“But we killed all the aliens,” said Samson.
It hadn’t been the Castoffs who took them out, but John let it pass. He glanced back toward the hill and found Fred descending in the open, his battle rifle pointed at the ground, but ready to bring the muzzle up at a moment’s notice.
