Oblivion, page 3
“You are sure?” Linda asked.
“I’m sure,” John said. “Their commanders are afraid this plan will backfire if they don’t keep the pressure on.”
“And you bought that?” asked Kelly-087, who was rarely slow to speak her mind. “They’re just crazy to kill aliens.”
“That too,” John said. “Especially the crazy part.”
He had gone along with Bah’d’s plan because it protected the xenotime mine while assuring the cooperation of her subordinates, and that had been the safe play. He could have insisted on his own plan, arguing that Bah’d and her commanders were too sleep-deprived to make sound tactical decisions. And maybe he should have. But that would have meant risking Fifth Battalion’s cooperation and endangering the mission, and the mission came first.
The mission always came first.
“Blue Three, target acquired,” Kelly announced.
“Acknowledged.”
Still perched on the end of John’s Gauss cannon, the lizard-thing hissed at its own reflection and continued to block his line of sight. John was about the same distance from Kelly as she was from Fred, and it had taken less than ten seconds for the target to enter Kelly’s LOS after it had been acquired by Fred. It would not be long before Blue Team was ready to open fire.
The thought had barely formed before the Mjolnir’s onboard computer initiated a six-second countdown on his HUD display. At three seconds, John activated his voicemitter.
“Move it, bud.”
The creature spread its wings as though to take flight—then opened its beak and charged up the two-meter cannon barrel. With the targeting relay no longer obscured, the aiming reticle turned red, and John knew he had something in the M68’s sights. He just didn’t know what because the lizard-thing now blocked even more of his view. He raised his bracing hand to bat it aside—and saw a yellow gob shooting from its gullet.
John turned his head, taking the hit on the side of his helmet, and ribbons of mucus sprayed across the left half of his faceplate. The creature clunked against his helmet and began to peck and scratch; then he had it in his grasp.
He crushed it one-handed—not out of malice, but because he couldn’t risk it taking flight and drawing attention to his location—then dropped its body beside him and took a swipe at his faceplate. No luck. With the left side of his faceplate smeared yellow, he had to turn his helmet to get a clear view of the enemy column. His aiming reticle was set on a Wraith, which was floating along beside the bulbous operators’ cabin at the front of the combat bridging vehicle. Behind the first Wraith followed three more, in close formation and doing their best to screen the articulated cylinders that contained the CBV’s bridging equipment.
Nice try.
John increased his faceplate image magnification. The beaklike snouts of four Jackals—a tall, vaguely avian species that the Spartans had tangled with before—grew visible inside the operators’ cabin. He raised the nose of his Gauss cannon, resting the aiming reticle at the forward edge of the bubble-shaped observation canopy.
“Blue Leader, target acquired,” John said. “Initiate.”
Three status lights winked green inside John’s HUD; then Linda said, “Blue Four engaging.”
The CBV’s energy shield shimmered violently as Linda’s first burst hit home. Kelly added her fire to Linda’s, and the shielding dissolved in a spray of overload sparks.
By then the Wraiths were slowing to a halt and swinging their noses toward Sarpesi Ridge. Their only weapons capable of returning fire across the kilometer-wide Samalat Gorge were their plasma mortars, and those were mounted on fixed bases that required the vehicle to face its target.
Linda and Kelly each hit the CBV with a second burst, riddling the operators’ cabin with star-shaped holes and coating the remnants of the shattered canopy in Jackal blood.
A volley of white mortar shells arced away from the four Wraiths closest to the CBV. Too slow. Kelly and Linda were running for their next position before the rounds reached their zenith. John and Fred opened fire, each targeting the operators’ cabin. Flames and smoke started to billow out through the shattered canopy, so they ran their second bursts down the cargo cylinder.
The bridging vehicle veered sharply toward the gorge, but John had no intention of hanging around to see what happened. Scooping up the Gauss cannon in both arms, he launched himself from his scrape like a sprinter out of the blocks. There was no anti-infantry attack quite as horrifying as a plasma strike, which unleashed such a searing blast that anything inside the impact zone was flash-incinerated, while anything nearby by was merely knocked down and immolated. John had seen direct hits reduce concrete bunkers to swirling clouds of white-hot dust and near-misses leave men standing on smoking pegs of charred bone.
He angled across the slope toward his next position. With the lizard mucus obscuring half his faceplate, he had a choice: watch how the Covenant was responding to his attack, or turn his faceplate away from the enemy and focus on where he was running.
He chose running.
He had taken barely five steps when the jungle went white with plasma flash. A concussion wave hit him from behind, and the temperature spiked inside his Mjolnir. He kept his feet and continued to run, bouncing off the rubbery stalk of a giant sponge tree he barely glimpsed. He spun and kept going, knees pumping high to avoid tripping over deadfalls, eyes locked on the HUD waypoint directing him to his next scrape.
All three status lights in his HUD showed yellow. The rest of the team was still on the move, racing for their next positions. Had anyone been pinned down or KIA, their light would have shown red.
John switched to the Fifth Battalion comm channel. “First bridging vehicle down; disabled but destruction uncertain.”
“I can confirm destruction.” Bah’d sounded troubled. “It went into the gorge—pushing two Wraiths ahead of it.”
“And that’s not a good thing?”
“Of course it is.”
He waited for Bah’d to elaborate. The jungle flashed brighter as the alien fire intensified. Sponge trees and giant club mosses began to topple under the relentless concussion waves, and Linda’s and Kelly’s status lights changed to green. John outran the artillery blanket and began to breathe easier—then hit an outcropping obscured by the lizard mucus and nearly dropped the Gauss cannon. Still Bah’d did not speak.
“Major, it’s not too late to fall back,” John said. The waypoint arrow finally sank to the bottom of his HUD, and he looked down to see the two-meter hollow he had scraped into the slope earlier. “If you’re having second thoughts, you still have time—”
“Stop that, John. We are not having second thoughts.”
“Then why do you sound worried?” John asked. He dropped to his knees and propped the cannon barrel on the dirt pile he had left to serve as a weapon support. “What’s the problem?”
“The same as always,” Bah’d said. “The Covenant is not doing what we expected.”
John had already cleared a firing lane to the road, so even looking out only half his faceplate, he could see that at least five Wraiths had interrupted their advance to launch an artillery strike. That was expected. With Samalat Gorge between the column and the Spartans, there was no simply no way the Wraiths could advance and fire simultaneously. When he still didn’t see the cause of Bah’d’s concern, he again tried to wipe the lizard mucus from his faceplate.
He only succeeded in smearing it around some more. He gave up and magnified the image he could actually see—and thought he understood the reason for Bah’d’s alarm.
Instead of continuing forward as expected to secure the bridgehead—where Fifth Battalion was waiting in ambush—the single-seat assault vehicles had stopped with the Wraiths and were tucking in behind the big gun carriages. And the Grunt foot soldiers in turn were tucking in behind the RAVs, crouching on their knees and covering their heads as though expecting shrapnel to start raining from the sky at any moment.
“Am I seeing what I think I am?” John asked. Blue Team was about five hundred meters down-gorge from Fifth Battalion’s position overlooking the Nasim Bridge, observing from deep cover, so he didn’t have the kind of situational overview that Bah’d would. “I have Wraiths standing up for an artillery duel.”
“Not a duel,” Bah’d said. “The entire column has stopped. They are preparing to barrage.”
“To barrage?” John echoed. Artillery barrages were more effective at disrupting infantry units than actually destroying them, so they were typically employed to break up an enemy assault or support a friendly one. But with Samalat Gorge in the way, the only infantry assault possible would be airborne—and that was still unlikely, given the short notice and low cloud ceiling. “That seems like a stretch.”
“We can see dozens of combat support vehicles coming forward,” Bah’d said. Combat support vehicles were armored transports capable of carrying anything from personnel to ammunition and explosives to medical supplies—including the liquefied carrier gas used to recharge plasma weapons. “What do you think they are hauling?”
“Good point,” John said. “Alert your antiaircraft batteries. Have them give priority to transport craft.”
“I have done that already.” Bah’d hesitated, then said, “But what are we missing, John? You said yourself the Covenant wouldn’t launch an airborne assault in these conditions.”
“Maybe I was wrong,” John said, though he realized as he spoke that he couldn’t be. Were the aliens capable of launching a full-scale airborne assault, they would bypass Sarpesi Ridge entirely and drop directly on the Doukala Xenotime Works. “But let’s be ready for anything.”
The artillery blanket continued to intensify and creep across the jungle slope toward John, flooding the right side of his faceplate with blinding strobe light. The plasma rounds were the least of his concerns. The Mjolnir armor he and his Spartans wore would protect them from anything short of a direct hit. Besides, once the Covenant had flattened the jungle, Blue Team wouldn’t have to wait for the bridging vehicles to enter a predetermined firing zone. The four Spartans would be able to look down the entire length of the gorge and attack as soon as the remaining two CBVs came into range.
John switched to TEAMCOM. “Anyone see the next target?”
The status lights inside his HUD all blinked red.
“Then hold all fire,” John said. “They must be trying to get us to give our positions away.”
“Well, that’s a relief.” Fred’s tone was dry, as it always was when he cracked wise. “I thought they might be trying to kill us.”
“Keep making those dreadful jokes, and they won’t need to,” Kelly replied. “Your sense of humor could drive a lady to violence.”
“Let’s can the chatter,” John said. Normally he didn’t mind a little humor—it helped the team relax, and a relaxed team was an efficient team. But for the next few minutes, he needed the channel kept clear for injury reports and combat coordination. “Nobody really wants to die laughing.”
“Ha-ha,” Linda said, then: “Incoming!”
Then a terrible thunder was upon them, shaking the jungle and bursting through the canopy in globules of white-hot plasma. Chunks of scorched fungi caps showered the slope, and streamers of burning moss snaked through the air. Most soldiers were trained to cover their heads and stay flat under artillery bombardment, but Spartans weren’t most soldiers.
John kept his head up, cocking it to one side so he could watch for strike patterns through the clear half of his faceplate. Soil and flame jetted skyward in solid curtains, sponge trees and club mosses erupted into pillars of fire, concussion waves pounded his armor like forge hammers, and still the booming grew more ferocious. The ground quaked and the undergrowth vanished in winks of blinding heat-flash, the air growing so thick with smoke and mud it was hard to see the vase-shaped brilliance of fresh impacts. His onboard computer would keep monitoring his visuals, using millisecond-long spikes of light intensity to plot plasma strikes and infer the enemy barrage plan.
Linda’s status light changed from green to yellow; then her voice, almost lost to the roar of the barrage, came over TEAMCOM: “Moving!”
John knew her computer had projected a hit on her position and was now guiding her to a safer location. Still, his gut clenched. Plasma rounds incinerated everything within a twenty-meter radius of the strike, with an even larger secondary damage ring. The concussion wave alone increased the mortality risk of a maneuvering infantry soldier tenfold. Linda would be okay in her Mjolnir armor unless she happened to run directly under an incoming strike—but in a barrage this heavy, the chances of that happening were high. Close to fifty percent, according to his onboard computer.
John kept one eye on his HUD, waiting for Linda’s status light to return to green. But he was also careful to keep his faceplate turned into the bombardment so his onboard computer could continue monitoring the strike patterns. Sooner or later the plasma mortars would start running low on carrier gas, which meant the crews would need to resupply from the combat support vehicles. When that happened, the intensity of the barrage would diminish, and Blue Team would have a chance to locate its next target.
John glanced back toward the enemy column, but the smoke and debris remained too thick to see whether the combat support vehicles were moving into position behind the Wraiths . . . behind the Wraiths, where he had seen the Grunts and rapid assault vehicles taking cover earlier. Was the enemy really going to resupply over its own infantry and RAVs?
John switched back to the Fifth Battalion channel. “Bah’d, are those RAVs still taking cover behind the Wraiths?”
“They are,” she said. Even with his helmet speakers set directly next to his ears, the major’s voice was barely audible over the constant booming of the barrage. “The Covenant must have worse field intelligence than we do. They seem to believe we have some ability to offer counterbattery fire.”
John had no idea what the aliens believed—and it was probably a mistake to guess. “What about those combat support vehicles?” he asked. “Where are they?”
“Pulling onto the far edge of the road, behind the RAVs.” Bah’d fell silent. John began to fear the enemy was jamming their comms; then she finally asked, “How are they going to reload the Wraiths from behind the RAVs?”
“Good question,” John said. Linda’s status light returned to green, and he felt his gut untangle. She had reached a new position—presumably one that her onboard computer projected would be safe from a direct hit. “Stand by.”
Before Bah’d could acknowledge, Linda’s voice came over TEAMCOM. “New position in strike crater, twenty-seven meters from—” The thunderclap of a nearby hit sounded over the channel, and John’s heart climbed into his throat until Linda’s voice grew audible again. “—have LOS to second bridging vehicle.”
“What are you using?” Fred asked. “X-ray vision?”
“Negative.” Linda’s tone grew sharp. “What is wrong with you? The X-ray sniper scope does not even exist.”
“Yet.”
“Focus, people,” John said. The Spartans’ childhood training had inoculated them against the paralyzing effects of heavy bombardment—but no one was totally immune to that much psychological stress. Fred and Linda’s banter was just their way of relieving the nerve-grating tension of being shelled. “Under fire, remember?”
“Difficult to forget, Blue Leader.” Linda took a breath, then said, “I observed the bridging vehicle as I was changing positions. Visibility is fair at head height.”
“Good catch. Everyone, take a look,” John said, rising. “Carefully.”
Standing in the middle of a plasma barrage was dangerous even for Spartans, but it was worth the risk. If they could bring enough Gauss cannons to bear on the target, the barrage itself would mask their attack and allow Blue Team to destroy a second CBV without giving its position away.
“Linda, share your targeting coordinates.”
A waypoint arrow appeared on John’s HUD, fluttering around the inside of his half-obscured faceplate as he was buffeted by concussion waves from all sides. But visibility was much better at head height. The curtains of flying mud were almost nonexistent, and the smoke had thinned to a gauzy gray haze. Most of the slope below had been defoliated by the alien bombardment, so even through one side of his helmet, he could see all the way down to the Samalat Gorge. But when he looked in the direction of the waypoint, his view remained blocked by a corner of jungle that had not yet been flattened.
“Blue Leader, negative LOS,” he reported.
“Blue Two, target acquired,” Fred said. “Just the front half, but that’s enough.”
“Blue Three, negative LOS,” Kelly said. “It would take only a small move to correct that.”
“Hold position for now.” John staggered as another nearby strike nearly knocked him off his feet. “And back into your belly scrapes.”
Before dropping into his own scrape, John turned to examine the road on the far rim of the gorge. The line of Wraiths was barely visible through the smoke haze, a ghostly fringe of tiny purple arrowheads lobbing pinpoints of brilliance at Sarpesi Ridge. He increased his magnification and saw that the RAVs were still tucked in behind the Wraiths, and the Grunts were still cowering behind the RAVs.
Fifty combat support vehicles were pulling up on the far side of the road behind the Grunts, floating on air and resembling giant barrel-bodied beetles with bulbous heads. They had to be carrying the liquefied carrier gas the Wraiths would soon need to recharge their mortars. But there was no sign of any conveyor apparatus or filler nozzle anywhere on their exteriors, and the only attention the Grunts paid them was to move away.
