Oblivion, page 32
“Take cover!” Linda shouted.
The two engineers looked confused, and one started to open his mouth.
Linda fired the grenade launcher at the aliens’ feet and felt a blast of heat and shrapnel as the detonation flattened her targets. Not waiting for the fireball to contract, she stepped into their midst and alternated between the M7 and the MA5C, putting a burst through each helmet. The submachine gun clicked empty as the third helmet shattered, and so did the assault rifle as the fourth one puckered and split.
Linda turned toward the gray-haired woman, expecting to find a bloody mass. But the woman was on her side, curled into a fetal position, covering her head and screaming.
So far, so good.
Luckily, the Covenant had taken the brunt of the grenade blast, and the two engineers were staggering back to their feet. Both were peppered with superficial shrapnel cuts, and one was bleeding from the ear and the nose—a result of having his jaw clamped tight when the grenade detonated. The other had some shallow nicks in his scalp that were pouring blood like a waterfall. Head wounds were like that—they looked scary, and sometimes they were.
Linda tossed her M7 along with a couple of magazines to the one bleeding from his ear and nose, and pointed him toward his injured friend. Then she ejected the magazine from her assault rifle, inserted a fresh one into the receiver, and began to look for her next target.
There weren’t any.
The Castoffs had rounded the switchback in their mountain runners and were racing back down the road at full speed. They were whooping and yelling, firing their weapons in long inefficient bursts over the heads of the surviving Elites—who had evidently realized they were being flanked and decided to withdraw down the slope.
At a full sprint.
So much for fighting to the death.
There were only about twenty of them left, and Linda would have loved to finish the job. But a damage chime was sounding inside her Mjolnir, and there was going to be no shortage of wounded among the Wheatley survivors. She checked to confirm the Mjolnir problem was nothing important—just a small tear where a piece of shrapnel had slipped through a joint to her inner skinsuit—then turned back to the three lucky survivors.
“Everyone okay?”
One of the men pointed to his ears. That was what happened when you didn’t cover up before a grenade detonation. Their hearing would recover—mostly—in a few hours.
The woman seemed in better shape. Her face was bruised and swollen, either from the Elite or maybe just from landing on a rock, but she stood and seemed relatively steady on her feet. Her MOS patch indicated she was a research scientist. It probably also indicated what kind, but Linda didn’t recognize what an eye with a star-shaped pupil stood for.
Linda checked the woman’s rank and the nameplate above her pocket, then asked, “You’re okay, Captain Stocken?”
“Oh, yes,” Stocken replied. “Thanks to you.”
“Glad to be of service, ma’am.” Linda noticed an emergency locator lying in the belly scrape behind the captain and retrieved it, then held it out to her. “You must have dropped this, ma’am.”
“Thank you.” Stocken took the device and started to slip it into its belt holder, then stopped and passed it back. “Hold on. This must be someone else’s. I still seem to have mine.”
Linda looked down at the captain’s equipment belt and saw that there was indeed a locator in the proper pocket.
“So you do.” She slipped the extra locator into an empty pouch on her cartridge belt, then said, “Ma’am, I noticed a Section Three patch on your uniform.”
Stocken nodded. “That shouldn’t be a surprise, given what we were here to collect.”
“It isn’t.” Linda took the captain by the arm and started to lead her up the slope. “But fighting Elites hand-to-hand is hardly a Section Three MOS. Let’s find a medic and get you checked out.”
“I’m fine.” Stocken jerked her arm free. “I was watching you fire from the . . . well, whatever that many-legged vehicle is.”
“It was nothing, ma’am,” Linda said. “We’re trained to—”
“I know what you’re capable of, Spartan,” Stocken said. “I’m interested in the last alien you killed from the vehicle. It looked like he had a fairly heavy personal shield.”
“Yes, ma’am. That is how it seemed to me.”
“I saw an external generator,” Stocken said. “Is it still intact?”
“It seems likely,” Linda said. “The grenades only took his shields down. I had to kill him with a rifle burst.”
Stocken’s eyes grew so wide that the wrinkles vanished around them. “Then what are we waiting for?” She started up the hill. “Let’s go find the son of a bitch.”
CHAPTER 20
* * *
* * *
1510 hours, June 7, 2526 (military calendar)
Serpentine Canyon, Crystal Bush Plateau
Mountains of Despair, Planet Netherop, Ephyra System
A pall of black smoke appeared above the gorge, and images began to flash through John’s mind of what he had seen beneath such clouds before. Tank-sized pools of molten metal, roofless bunkers ringed by fifty-meter soot stars. Stray arms hanging from splintered tree limbs. Heads smashed flat against pavement.
A hundred bodies plasma-fused into a single corpse.
John did not try to force the images from his mind. He had witnessed atrocities, and any attempt to deny those memories would only bring them back later, and in a stronger, more insidious way. That was what Dr. Halsey had said, and she was usually right about such matters.
Instead, John focused on the task at hand. He was riding in the gunner’s cockpit atop Kelly’s captured Umbra, so he was on ambush-watch while she drove them through the gorge at breakneck speed. With her attention fixed solely on the road and its hairpin curves, she would see any obstacles blocking their way long before he did. So John kept his attention on the gorge walls, scanning side ravines for fresh rockfalls and scrape marks, and searching along the rims for alien silhouettes and suspicious-looking boulder piles.
He saw nothing.
The black smoke continued to thicken overhead, and John grew ever more concerned about the Wheatley crew. At first he had bought the idea that the Covenant was chasing them in an effort to capture someone who could disarm the ship’s self-destruct devices. Then a squadron of Banshees had shown up, and the Lucky Break had flown off. The enemy didn’t need to steal a ship to escape Netherop.
So why had the aliens continued to chase the Wheatley crew?
There had to be more to it than a simple desire to kill every human in sight. A quarter of the heat casualties that the Umbra passed along the road were Elite, and sport-hunters didn’t run themselves to death for the fun of it.
A little earlier, John had caught a few broken syllables of an emergency message from the Wheatley crew. The transmission had been unintelligible, which meant there was no longer a UNSC vessel overhead to amplify the signal and relay it down into the gorge. But at least there had been a message, and that meant someone in the crew was still alive.
Right?
John had tried TEAMCOM a dozen times since then and received no response due to distance or terrain or both. But the distance was decreasing, and the terrain configuration shifted every time Kelly powered the Umbra around a corner. He spoke over TEAMCOM again.
“Blue Leader, Blue Four, sitrep?” John waited five seconds for a reply, then said, “Blue Leader, Blue Four, status check.”
Linda’s status LED remained dark. That just meant she was out of range. She could be alive, dead, in trouble . . . or sitting by a pool somewhere, sipping an ice-cold gooro. He had no way to know.
After ten seconds, John signed off the same way he had every time before. “Blue Four, be advised—we’re coming.” There was always the possibility she could hear them. “We’re coming as fast as we can. Out.”
“Blue Leader, will you stop worrying already?” It was Fred’s voice, relayed into the gunner’s cockpit by the Umbra’s intravehicle communications system. John had no idea how the thing worked—he couldn’t even find the speakers—but it was so efficient that had he wanted to, he could have eavesdropped on every word spoken inside the transport bays. “We’ll get there in time.”
“No wisecracks?” John asked. “Maybe I should be telling you not to worry.”
“Just being careful,” Fred replied. “If I make you laugh too hard, you might fall out and get run over.”
The effort was there, but John could tell that Fred’s heart wasn’t in it. He was as concerned for Linda as John was.
“Thanks, but right now you’re not as funny as you think you are,” John said. “How are the passengers hanging in down there?”
“Not bad,” Fred said, “considering the driving.”
“I heard that,” Kelly said. “Would you rather I jumped us from bend to bend?”
“No offense,” Fred said. “But Petrov and First Platoon aren’t used to these kinds of maneuvers. It smells like a drop bay full of newboots down here. Even Lena and the boys are losing their lunches.”
Fred would not be too affected by the stench, of course. His Mjolnir had an integrated toxin-control system that would filter out most of the odor-carrying particles to prevent him from growing nauseated. Still, John was glad to be riding in the gunner’s station.
The Umbra swung around two more tight curves, and then John spotted some fresh scrape marks running up a near-vertical flume. The flume was adjacent to one of the tightest inward curves on the entire road, and that made it the ideal spot for an ambush.
There were only three ways to deal with an ambush against a vehicle. The best method was to call in an airstrike or artillery bombardment to clear the ambushers from their position. Unfortunately, that just wasn’t an option—even if John could get a signal inside the gorge.
The second-best method was to stop, dismount, and flank the ambushers. That’s what John would have done—had he not been so worried about Linda and the ever-growing pall of black smoke above the gorge.
The third method was to race through the kill zone so fast that the enemy had no chance to launch a successful attack. John checked the road ahead for loose ground or carefully placed corpses that might hide a concealed explosive. Seeing none, he braced himself in the gunner’s cockpit, pointed his BR55 toward the canyon wall, and began to yell over TEAMCOM: “Go go go!” He grabbed a grenade with one hand and with the other fired a short suppression burst toward the flume. “Go fast!”
Kelly did not need to be told why. They had drilled such maneuvers hundreds of times in training, so she just pulled the throttles back and took the Umbra as fast as she dared—perhaps even a little faster.
For such an ungainly-looking vehicle, the transport handled well, its force-cushions working like sway bars to keep the body from tipping too far outward, its rocket-like acceleration carrying it through the turn before the back end had a chance to drift. Nothing exploded as they rounded the corner, and as John glanced up the flume on the way past, he saw that it quickly narrowed into a chimney-like cleft.
And three meters up the cleft was a Castoff mountain runner. It was hanging in the wide part of the chimney with all ten legs splayed out, bracing itself against opposite walls. Four small blond heads were peering over the side of the passenger compartment, each one staring down the barrel of a UNSC assault rifle.
John lowered his grenade and his BR55. Then, in a breath, the Umbra was safely past the flume.
“Stop.” This time, John spoke over the Umbra’s communication system so Fred and First Platoon would not come out guns blazing. “It’s the Castoffs.”
Kelly decelerated as quickly as she safely could, and John tried TEAMCOM again.
“Blue Leader, Blue Four, sitrep?” If the Umbra was starting to catch up to Castoffs, it had to be getting close to Linda. “Blue Leader, Blue Four, status.”
Still nothing.
Once the Umbra had slowed to static hover, John stowed his weapons and slid down the hull. “Hang tight, everyone. We’ll be under way as soon as I can get a sitrep from these kids.”
Kelly’s and Fred’s status LEDs flashed green, and he could hear the voices of Lena and Arne rising from the gunner’s cockpit as he walked away. He couldn’t make out what they were saying, but he was pretty sure they were demanding to be released so they could rejoin their camp. Maybe later.
John had walked about twenty paces when the mountain runner clattered out of the flume and started down the road toward him. Roselle was standing at the front of the passenger compartment, manning the microwave weapon, and a blond boy barely tall enough to see over the front deck was standing at the driver’s orb. Protruding up behind them were the barrels of several assault rifles, along with the heads of four children even younger and smaller than the driver.
John raised his empty hands. “I’m friendly.”
“I already know that.” Roselle leaned around the microwave dish. “If I didn’t, your floating thing would be splattered all over the bottom of the gorge right now.”
John eyed the microwave weapon. Given the Covenant’s typically poor EMP shielding, she might have been right—had she been quick enough to hit her target as it raced past. He stopped fifty paces from the Umbra and waited for the mountain runner to get closer to him.
“Is anyone injured?” John had been taught that it was always smart to show concern over the condition of one’s native allies. In this case, he truly wanted to know. “Do you need anything?”
“To know if the road between us and Samson is safe.” Roselle tapped her earlobe. “What do you hear in your helmet?”
“Not much. There’s no signal, but it could just be terrain-blocking.” John didn’t want to give her false hope. He glanced skyward and added, “But that doesn’t look good.”
Roselle followed his gaze. “You mean all that smoke?”
“Right,” John said. “When it’s that dark—”
Roselle made a shooing motion. “Get back in your floating thing, John. There may still be aliens in the gorge, so we’ll follow a hundred paces behind.” She leveled a finger at him. “Don’t let anything shoot us.”
“I’m not sure you should follow yet.” John didn’t like the idea of Roselle and the children seeing the carnage the smoke suggested. It was not something they would ever be able to forget—especially if they happened across the body of Samson or a relative. “The battle might not be over, and even if it is, we don’t know who won.”
“The battle is over.” Roselle looked at John as though he were an inattentive child. “The smoke is from our steamers.”
John looked skyward again. Of course—the coal boilers in the mountain runners. “The runners are recharging their batteries?”
“Yes,” Roselle said. “So I’m pretty sure we won. Dead people have no need of charged batteries.”
“Fair point.” John started to turn around, then thought better of it and paused. “When we reach the battlefield, you might want to keep the younger ones back. It’s going to be ugly, no matter who won.”
Roselle’s face softened. “Good advice, John,” she said. “If you aren’t a father already, you’ll make a good one someday.”
“Thank you, ma’am,” John said. He had no plans to become a father any time soon—and probably not ever—but he was glad to see he was starting to win Roselle over. “I appreciate the vote of confidence.”
He returned to the Umbra and climbed back into the gunner’s cockpit. While Kelly drove, he used the intravehicle comm system to inform the others of what he had learned.
Lena was the first to comment. “So, Roselle is behind us, and you’re making me and Arne and Oskar ride with everyone throwing up? Nice.”
John ignored her and tried TEAMCOM again. “Blue Leader, Blue Four, sitrep? Blue Leader, Blue Four, status.”
This time, Linda’s reply came immediately. “Enemy has withdrawn.” Fred and Kelly’s status lights strobed green inside John’s helmet, and he felt his own stomach turning somersaults of joy.
Then Linda continued her report. “Twenty-eight Wheatley survivors secure, five immobile due to injuries.”
John’s elation faded. He was still thrilled to hear Linda’s voice, but the Wheatley crew had suffered a seventy-percent casualty rate, and he still had no idea why the aliens had placed such a premium on attacking them.
“First, glad to hear your voice,” John said. Kelly and Fred filled his helmet with more green blinking, though the strobing was not quite as fast now. “Second, what about the Castoffs?”
“No casualties,” Linda replied. “All twelve in good condition.”
At least that was something. Roselle and Lena would be happy with the outcome, even if Dr. Halsey and Admiral Cole were not.
Assuming Blue Team could even get back to Halsey and Cole.
“Status vehicles?” John asked.
“Two mountain runners good condition,” Linda replied. “Everything else . . . I guess there is nothing else.”
That meant they had a total of three mountain runners and one Umbra available to transport. As John started to do the math, his onboard computer displayed the answers on his HUD.
VEHICLE CAPACITY: 40. PERSONNEL IN NEED OF TRANSPORT: 69.
The onboard computer was assuming a capacity of six individuals per mountain runner. John knew he could probably squeeze ten kids and smaller adults into each runner, even leaving room for casualties. But the transport stations in the Umbra were fixed—a driver, a gunner, ten slots on each side, and the only way to double up was to have one kid stand on another kid’s shoulders, which wasn’t very practical. So that left him seventeen slots short—and only the four Spartans of Blue Team were capable of reaching a landing zone on foot.
Assuming they were even going to need a landing zone. There had been no recent contact with Task Force Pantea, so their only hope of escaping Netherop might lie in returning to the Wheatley and taking their chances in a lumbering salvage ship whose point-defense systems now lacked the capacity to swat away a fletterbug. When John and Fred climbed aboard the Umbra, First Platoon had been forced to leave two marines at the Wheatley, and maybe that had been a blessing in disguise. At least there would be someone there guarding it until everyone else returned.
