Oblivion, page 36
The marines were standing two meters apart, their left hands pointing their weapons at the ground, their right hands raised high and holding oversize carabiners.
A squadron of dart-shaped Nandaos was flying close escort above the Pelican, crossing back and forth in a tight diamond-weave pattern, launching air-to-air missiles and cannon fire at anything that so much as turned its nose in the dropship’s direction.
Kelly, fast as always, appeared from John’s right and raced ahead to take her position at the end of the extraction line. She then simply raised her arm and curled her hand down to form a hook. A Spartan’s grasp was stronger than any carabiner.
Fred took the next spot, then Linda, and John last. The Pelican deployed its SPIE line—a long, elastic cable that dangled sixty meters beneath the belly of the craft—and began the retrieval run.
With stiff, half-meter loops every two meters, the SPIE line had its own integrated sensors and AI-controlled fiber-tensioning strands that kept it extended parallel to the ground, just shy of two meters above the surface. As it passed over the waiting marines, it swung down one loop at a time to catch their upraised carabiners, then took the slack out of their harness rigs and jerked them into the air. John saw the first marine rise, followed by the second and the third.
Then the Pelican passed overhead, its thrust nacelles turned downward to hold it in a semi-hover while it was traveling so slowly. John heard the big nose cannon chugging as it opened fire on something behind him, but he didn’t dare turn to look. The SPIE line would do its best to adjust to any inadvertent movements on his part, but the loops only had so much play. If he pulled his hand out of the way, the Pelican would either have to leave him behind or make a very risky second run to retrieve him.
The seventh and last marine was lifted into the air, and John was glad to recognize Sesi Cacyuk as she sailed by overhead. Then the line caught Kelly and Fred, sagging ever so slightly beneath the weight of their Mjolnir. Linda rose next. Finally John heard the loop chime against the armor on the inside of his wrist.
He brought his hand down to his breast and felt the loop slip into place in the crook of his elbow; then the ground vanished from beneath his boots, and he felt the SPIE line starting to swing as the Pelican accelerated and turned away from the combat zone.
Being at the end of the line, he was in for a wild ride. About sixty meters below and behind the Pelican, he swung out over the basin in a wide, sweeping arc. The dropship’s greatest vulnerability at this point was to a surface-to-air attack, so John kept a careful watch on the ground. And he did not understand at all what he was seeing.
Where the Lucky Break had sat parked a short time before, there was now only the shallow, glass-bottomed crater typical of a big plasma strike. Next to the crater stood eight unarmored Elites, staring up at the departing Pelican trailing its long line of dangling soldiers. The aliens’ mandibles were splayed wide in rage . . . or maybe it was laughter. Given what little John knew of their species, it could have been anything.
As the Pelican straightened its course and turned toward the mountains, John swung around again. He found himself looking toward the long plateau that he and his fellow humans had traversed in their futile attempt to capture a Covenant frigate.
From this vantage, it did not look like a plateau at all. The face on this side was lined by hundreds of cave openings, all cut in geometric shapes such as trapezoids and diamonds, hexagons and triangles and even an occasional daring crescent, all arranged in neat, diagonal rows that ran from the base of the cliff to the top.
John was looking at a vast, primordial city built by a society that had perished a hundred—or a thousand—or possibly a million—centuries before. Whoever was here had lived and died and never reached the stars, then vanished so completely that no memory of them remained—even on their own planet.
It was the same future the Covenant wished for humanity, John knew—total oblivion, an eradication so complete that any knowledge they ever existed would be wiped from the history of the galaxy. And he had no idea why, could not imagine the cause of such brutal hostility from a civilization that humanity had not even known existed two years ago.
Then the Pelican passed over the cliff and began to climb. With the dropship now safely out of the combat zone, the pilot could fly a steady course, and the crew chief began to retract the SPIE line. John rose in fits and jerks as each soldier above him was drawn into the troop bay and freed from the recovery loops. Far to his left, he saw the bare slope and wrecked Warthogs where the aliens had attacked the Wheatley survivors. For a time they flew over the serpentine gorge through which the ancient road ran, a harsh environment Blue Team was fortunate to have traversed in one piece, but which had claimed so many others. The chasm was too deep and dark to see much of anything, but for some reason the pilot slowed and waggled his wings.
Finally they passed over the immense crater and pressure-swept blast plain where the Wheatley had stood on its struts only a few hours earlier. There was nothing here anymore, save for a cluster of supply pods that one of the Pelicans must have dropped to lighten its load. Apparently, the salvage ship’s self-destruct charge had been detonated as planned—after the Castoffs and other survivors had been recovered, John hoped.
Then John was pulled into the troop bay with the rest of Blue Team and First Platoon. The crew chief was a broad-faced woman with rosy cheeks and sparkling green eyes. She closed the belly hatches, then tapped John’s helmet and pointed him to one of the seats that lined the cargo bay.
“Take your seat, Master Chief,” she said. “It’s going to be a rough ride.”
John took the assigned seat and waited while the automatic crash harness came down. The Pelican accelerated hard, climbing for orbit. It was only then that he saw the alien corpse, still fully armored, lying in the center of the deck, strapped to the D-rings normally used to secure Mongoose ATVs. The huge Elite that Captain Stocken of Section Three had insisted on recovering looked as though its personal energy shield generator was still attached to its armor and intact.
At least that much had gone right.
John felt a pair of eyes on him and looked up. Captain Stocken was smiling at him across the bay.
“You did it, Master Chief.” The gray-haired woman jabbed a wrinkled finger at the armored form. “With the technology in that shield generator, ONI finally has a chance to turn this war around. Even though the namesake of this mission didn’t make it, this could just be the lucky break we’ve been looking for.”
“I hope so, ma’am,” John said. “We sure need one.”
John didn’t add what he was thinking—that if Section Three’s lucky break didn’t pan out soon, humanity could be done.
Instead, he turned toward the front of the troop bay, where the crew chief sat in her jump seat flanked by—he couldn’t quite believe it—Roselle on one side and Samson on the other. Near them sat Lena, Arne, Oskar, and three more Castoffs he didn’t recognize.
Lena raised a hand and waved. “Hey, John. I was getting worried about you.”
“You were?” John tried not to sound doubtful. “Well, there was no need to. Spartans never die.”
“Sure, John.” Lena rolled her eyes. “Whatever you say.”
John smiled inside his helmet, where no one could see, then turned to the crew chief.
“Chief, I don’t mean to tell you your job, but what were you thinking?” He pointed at the alien corpse strapped to the center of the deck. “Bringing an asset like that back into a combat zone?”
The crew chief shrugged, as unconcerned as crew chiefs always were by any criticism that didn’t come from their pilots.
“No choice,” she said. “We lost a bird on the way in, and the other two left the extraction point as soon as they were full.”
“The extraction point?” Kelly said. “What about the people I left behind on the road?”
“Back toward the Night Watch crash site?” the crew chief asked. “We checked. That’s why we were the last bird to the Wheatley.”
“And?”
“Sorry.” The crew chief allowed her gaze to linger on Kelly just long enough to suggest she meant it, then looked back to John. “But that’s why the hot line had to be us. We were the only ones that still had seats.”
Even packed to the gills, with no equipment or vehicles, a Pelican could hold no more than twenty people. John did the math and quickly realized that at least nine people had been left behind somewhere along the way—and given that their own Pelican still had three empty seats, it was more than that. And the capacity problem couldn’t have been at the first extraction point, or there wouldn’t be any empty seats.
The problem had to have come before the Wheatley, somewhere in the gorge. John looked back across the troop bay to Captain Stocken.
“One of the runners didn’t make it back to the Wheatley,” he said. “Why not?”
Stocken shook her head. “I don’t know.” She looked toward the front of the troop bay, then added, “I was in the first of those mountain runners.”
John turned to find Roselle looking apologetic. “Commander Petrov’s runner didn’t have as much battery power as I thought.” She shrugged, then made a dismissive wave toward the dead Elite. “But there was no way to recharge. We had to dump all of the coal to carry that thing.”
“But it’s okay,” Lena said. “She volunteered.”
“That’s right,” Roselle agreed. “I believe I heard her say something about Netherop being a great place for a deep-support operations base.”
John looked back to Roselle. “Tell me you didn’t.”
“Didn’t what?” Roselle raised her brows and did a decent job of looking innocent. “I am only telling the truth. Ask her.”
She pointed to the crew chief, who scowled and gave a reluctant nod. “I have no idea what happened in that gorge,” she said. “But I managed to contact Commander Petrov on the way to get you.”
“And?”
“The commander made it very clear you were the priority,” the crew chief said. “In fact, her exact order was, ‘Get the Spartans and get the hell out.’ ”
EPILOGUE
* * *
* * *
1010 hours, June 12, 2526 (military calendar)
UNSC Valiant-class Cruiser Everest
Deep Space Transitional Zone, Rendezvous Point Durga, Polona Sector
Wearing full dress whites, John-117 stepped into the interior compartment of the Chester W. Nimitz Secure Conference Suite aboard the Battle Group X-Ray flagship, the Valiant-class cruiser Everest. For once, the overhead was high enough that he had no need to duck, and the bulkheads were lined with holographic images of great military aviators from World War II on Earth. John recognized the portraits of Jimmy Doolittle, who launched a B-25 off an aircraft carrier to bomb Tokyo, and Lilya Litvyak, who was the Soviet Air Force’s first female ace. He made a point of standing a little straighter in their presence, rising to his full height as he moved to the end of a conference table surrounded by FLEETCOM brass.
“Master Chief Sierra-117 reporting as ordered.”
“At ease, Master Chief.”
Vice Admiral Preston J. Cole was seated at the far end of the table, which felt as long as an M512 cannon. To his left sat Dr. Catherine Halsey and to his right was Vice Admiral Michael Stanforth, a hollow-cheeked man who commanded ONI Section Three. All were dressed far less formally than John—Cole in a blue-camouflage working uniform, Stanforth in black ONI utilities with no name or insignia other than the triple stars of a vice admiral on his collar tips. Halsey wore her customary lab coat over gray utilities. They watched him with relaxed expressions, which made John think he had overestimated the gravity of the proceedings when he received a summons to provide “clarification” for a Court of Inquiry.
To Stanforth’s right sat a puffy-cheeked lieutenant from the UNSC’s Judge Advocate General Corps in blue service dress bearing the nameplate J. STONE on its breast. Across from him was a hazel-eyed woman with red hair and a thin nose, also in blue service dress. Her nameplate read B. NETT, and on her collar tips she wore the golden oak leaves of a lieutenant commander. Seated between her and Dr. Halsey, wearing plain blue working uniforms without insignia or rank, were the Castoffs Samson and Roselle. They were slouched in their chairs, looking out of place and uncomfortable, doing their best to seem bored. But John could tell by the couple’s pale complexions that the proceedings were scaring them to death. They glanced at John without seeming to recognize him. It was the first time they’d seen him without his armor, so maybe they thought he was just one more UNSC giant.
Cole gave John an understanding nod, then said, “Thanks for making the trip over from the Kayenta, Master Chief. I’m advising you that this is a formal proceeding, but nobody’s career is at stake here.” He shot a reassuring smile toward Samson and Roselle. “And nobody is at risk of confinement.”
Roselle rolled her eyes, and Samson glared.
Cole pretended not to notice. Whether or not the pair realized it, the inequality in the ranks of the two JAG officers sitting across from each other suggested that the admiral had seriously stacked the deck in favor of the two castaways—and John liked him even better for that.
Cole continued, “We’re just trying to establish what went wrong with the operation—”
“Pardon me, Admiral, but that’s an unfair characterization,” Dr. Halsey interrupted. “There may have been a lot that didn’t go as planned for us, but clearly this was a Covenant trap—perhaps to capture some of my Spartans—and we denied them their objective. Morever, we still recovered a vital piece of Covenant technology. That personal shield generator is of a type we’ve never even seen before.”
“Which I’m sure will yield some useful battlefield technology in a few years,” Cole said. “If we can last that long.”
Stanforth spread his palms. “We have to start somewhere, Preston.”
“I know.” Cole sighed and nodded to Halsey. “My apologies, Doctor. It’s just hard not to be in a hurry. Worlds are falling like dominoes.”
“Oh, I am in a hurry, Admiral,” Halsey replied. “Be assured of that.”
“I’ve no doubt, but that has nothing to do with this inquiry.” Cole turned back to John. “The reason you’re here, Master Chief, is that we need to confirm—”
“You said establish,” Stanforth interrupted.
“Ask you about some events that occurred—”
“That may have occurred,” Stanforth corrected.
Cole exhaled in exasperation, then finished, “On Netherop.”
Stanforth’s gaze shifted to John and remained there. As the not-so-secret commander of ONI’s Section Three, he was more or less the man who controlled the fate of the entire SPARTAN-II program. If he decided to pull the plug, that was it. The same if he decided to replace John as the squad leader or declare that his armor should be battlefield pink.
And he was making his expectations pretty damn clear.
Stanforth gestured to the JAG lieutenant. “Lieutenant Stone is here to represent the interests of the marooned.”
“Excuse me, Admiral,” said the thin-nosed JAG woman, Lieutenant Commander Nett. “That hasn’t been established. From what Samson and Roselle tell me, Commander Petrov volunteered to remain on Netherop.”
Stanforth glared at her and she gave it right back to him. John liked her already.
“Lieutenant Stone, we’ll start with you.” Cole gestured toward John. “Proceed.”
Stone turned toward John. “Spartan, uh, One-One-Seven, I guess . . . did Commander Petrov ever suggest to you at any time that it might be better for the mission to leave the castaways on Netherop so you and the other UNSC personnel could escape with the personal shield generator recovered by Captain Stocken?”
“She did.”
As soon as John spoke, Samson’s eyes bulged and Roselle’s jaw dropped.
“Wait! You’re John?” Roselle might not have known him without his helmet on, but she certainly recognized his voice. “You’re just a kid!”
John smiled. “Don’t let the smooth skin fool you,” he said. “I’m older than I look.”
It wasn’t a lie—not really.
“Are we done with the reunion?” Stone asked. “Because I’d like my question answered: Did Commander Petrov ever suggest to you that it might be better to leave—”
“My apologies, sir,” John said. He wasn’t going to let the lieutenant ask the question twice. “That’s correct, sir. She did.”
“And what was your response?”
“That I thought it probably violated the Uniform Code of Military Justice or the Colonial Administration Authority Laws of Deep Space.”
“ ‘Or something,’ you also said?’ ” Stone asked. “Do I have that quote correct?”
“That’s right.”
John wondered if Stone had been given access to his Mjolnir’s onboard computer data, because the guy knew things he shouldn’t . . . unless, of course, Stanforth had arranged for a temporary security clearance. It didn’t matter, because John had no intention of lying—but he would need to be careful about shading the truth.
“I felt certain that some law would apply under the circumstances,” John continued. “I just didn’t know which one.”
“I see.” Stone turned to Cole. “Let the record show that in time of war, no such law would apply. Commander Petrov’s suggestion was completely in line with all applicable standards of conduct.”
“So noted,” Cole said.
Stone turned back to John. “Now, Master Chief, is it possible that one of the castaways, perhaps Ms. Roselle here or a minor in her care, overheard this discussion?”
The guy was smarter than he looked.
“I have no way of knowing what they overheard.”
“I asked if it was possible,” Stone said.
“As I said, I don’t know, sir,” John answered. He saw Stanforth watching him, but it didn’t matter. He wasn’t going to lie for anybody. “We were in the middle of a battlefield. People were dying and calling for help. Roselle was a long way uphill, and I was concerned about being strafed by Covenant attack craft. So, sir, that’s what I mean when I say, I don’t know.”
