Oblivion, page 4
John didn’t know what the enemy commander was thinking, and he didn’t like that. While the Covenant had tremendous superiority in fleet and weapons technology, so far their ground troops had proven no match for elite human units like Force Recon or Orbital Drop Shock Troopers. But if they were starting to field leaders capable of anticipating UNSC tactics—and then turning those tactics to the Covenant’s advantage—the UNSC was in danger of losing the only edge it did have.
Once the support vehicles had come to a stop, the RAV drivers spun their vehicles toward the bridge and began to move off. John thought for a moment—hoped, really—that they might be making way for transfer operations. But when the Grunts simply crowded closer to the Wraiths without making any effort to prepare, he realized he was wishing in vain.
“Bah’d, be ready,” John transmitted. “The RAVs are moving on the bridgehead.”
“I can see that, John.” Bah’d’s tone was a little impatient. “We are ready.”
“Sorry, ma’am,” John said, though he wasn’t really. Given the exhaustion levels of Bah’d and her officers, it was only wise to state the obvious. “I just wanted to be sure you were seeing them.”
“We see, John,” Bah’d said. “Our view is better than yours.”
As she spoke, the combat support vehicles began to drop their struts and settle to the ground. Their cargo compartments began to spread apart like clamshells, each half folding outward along its length. In the bottom of each compartment lay a quivering mass of chitin that John did not recognize as a mass of kneeling figures until it shifted and began to rise, becoming a group of tall beings with segmented bodies and two sets of elongated wings. Their heart-shaped heads were dominated by luminous eyes and heavy mandibles, and each one’s cephalothorax and thorax was set above a mammal-like pelvis, with a long abdomen dangling down behind, resembling a fat ovoid tail.
Drones.
John counted twenty to a compartment, all armed with plasma rifles and not much else, and there were fifty support vehicles lined up behind the Wraiths. That was a thousand Drones. He had never heard of such a large formation before—or of them riding into battle hidden inside armored transports.
Now he understood the barrage.
“Prepare for air cavalry,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Battalion strength and coming hard!”
CHAPTER 3
* * *
* * *
1518 hours, June 5, 2526 (military calendar)
Sarpesi Ridge, Samalat Gorge
Karpos Mountain Range, Planet Mesra, Qusdar System
Still standing in the swirling smoke, still rocked by the searing concussion of nearby mortar strikes, John watched the combat support vehicles across the gorge rushing to unload. As the cargo compartment doors continued to spread open, hundreds of Drones clambered out onto the descending halves, trying to find room to fan their wings and prepare for flight.
“Bah’d, you’re seeing this . . . right?” John asked over the Fifth Battalion command channel. There was no way she could miss it, but in her exhausted state, she might have trouble recognizing what it meant—and what she had to do. “The Covenant is preparing to launch air cavalry. You need to—”
“Do you think I am blind?” Bah’d’s tone was gentle but annoyed. “Or an idiot?”
“Neither, ma’am.” John resisted the temptation to point out that her decision to redeploy across the bridge had left the Doukala Xenotime Works open to a long-shot air assault. “I just think you’re very tired.”
“Your concern is noted,” Bah’d said. “And stop calling me ‘ma’am.’ I am not your auntie.”
She switched to a different channel, and an instant later, rocket trails began to stream down out of the jungle above the Nasim Bridge.
The three combat support vehicles nearest the attack erupted into pillars of flame, but the rest of the column was beyond Fifth Battalion’s range. The Drones continued to creep out onto the spreading halves of their cargo compartments, fanning their wings and fiddling with something on their thighs and shoulders.
John increased his image magnification to maximum and saw that the Drones were making adjustments to little horseshoe-shaped pods affixed to their exoskeletons. Over the past few days, Blue Team had traded a lot of fire with Drones wearing such devices and had been close enough on a few occasions to establish that they didn’t seem to contain any spare equipment—not even ration packs or spare gas cartridges.
John thought the pods probably provided extra buoyancy, because Drones wearing them appeared more mobile than those without. But that was just a theory. Confirmation would have to wait until they could capture a few of the devices and deliver them to the science jockeys in ONI’s new Beta-3 Division, which had been established to analyze and replicate Covenant technology.
Whatever the pods’ purpose, it seemed clear the Drones were preparing to take flight. Their most likely objective was to protect the column’s bridging vehicles by taking out Blue Team’s Gauss cannons. That would be the obvious move—but the alien commander had already proven sly. He might very well be sending his air cavalry to seize the Doukala mine before it could be demolished.
John opened a UNSC command channel.
“Brigade Tactical.” He was using the call sign for the 24th Marine Engineering Brigade headquarters, located just a few kilometers away at the Doukala’s crushing mill. “This is Blue Leader.”
The reply came almost instantly. “Blue Leader, Brigade Actual.” Brigade Actual was Brigadier General Artur Pahlavi, commander of the 24th. Clearly, headquarters was more than a little concerned about the situation at the Nasim Bridge. “Go ahead.”
“Possible incoming air cavalry.”
“Through these clouds?” Pahlavi asked. “Did you take a head wound, Spartan?”
“Negative,” John said. “The enemy is already below the cloud ceiling, launching from ground transport. Drones with plasma rifles, estimated strength one thousand.”
“What . . . ? A thousand?”
“Affirmative.”
As they spoke, volleys of Anaconda missiles began to descend on the Covenant column, streaking down from the antiaircraft batteries hidden on the surrounding hilltops. The Anaconda launchers could only depress so far, and surface-to-air targeting sensors were easily confused by ground clutter. A lot of the missiles strayed into the hillside or disappeared into the gorge, and a few locked onto the heavier sensor profiles of Wraiths and dropped down their mortar tubes. The resulting explosions were not spectacular—carrier gas was pretty harmless until an electric arc stripped it of electrons—but John did see the cannon turrets blown off five of the big gun carriages.
“How soon?”
John didn’t know how fast the Drones could fly, or exactly how far it was from the Samalat Gorge to the Doukala Xenotime Works by air, but his onboard computer did. It displayed an estimate on his HUD.
“ETA between five and ten minutes, sir.”
“What about the Wraiths?” Pahlavi asked. “How long before they’re in our laps?”
“Uncertain,” John said. The barraging Wraiths would need to replenish their carrier gas before launching another major attack. But a good tactician would have held half of the fifty Wraiths in reserve to exploit a successful attack. And the Covenant commander had already proven a very good tactician who would be sending the reserve forward as soon as the bridgehead was secured. “About twenty minutes, maybe twice that. If we don’t stop them first.”
As the missile volleys continued, the Anacondas began to find the correct targets. Dozens of support vehicles burst into flames, and clusters of burning Drones leaped from the cargo compartments and dropped to the ground, still fanning the smoking tatters of their wings.
“Sir, you can make that Drone strength closer to eight hundred,” John said. “The Mesranis scored some hits.”
“Good for them,” the general said. “But it’s the Wraiths that worry me.”
“I understand, sir.”
“You need to stop those Wraiths, Master Chief,” the general said. “If you don’t, the Doukala is theirs.”
“I’ll keep you informed.” It was the military way of saying he’d do his best. “I need to get back to the fight, sir.”
“You do that,” the general said. “And stop those Wraiths. Out.”
Fifth Battalion had taken advantage of the Anaconda volleys to press its attack, rustling through the undergrowth alongside the road as they continued to pour flanking fire on the Drones. Through the dense foliage, John couldn’t see how many of the human soldiers were advancing. A careful tactician would have sent a single company to press the attack, while an aggressive commander would have sent two. Given Bah’d’s sleep deprivation, he wouldn’t have been surprised to learn that she had sent all three—and was leading the attack herself.
The Covenant RAVs were racing to meet them, spitting plasma bolts and flipping through the air one after the other as they triggered Lotus antitank mines. Then the closest Wraiths got involved, not even interrupting their mortar barrage as cannon turrets spun around. They began to chew the jungle down with direct fire, and the Mesrani rocket attacks quickly diminished to almost nothing. It was obvious that Fifth Battalion was never going to disrupt the Drone assault. They were in the wrong position to do anything but die.
John spoke again over TEAMCOM. “Blue Two and Four, take out the CBVs.”
The team’s status lights remained dark for just an instant as they absorbed what John was asking. With only two Gauss cannons attacking, Fred and Linda would need to fire at least four bursts apiece to take down each CBV’s shields and destroy it. Even under cover of a barrage, that would give the enemy time to locate them and return fire.
But the best way to stop the Wraiths from reaching the Doukala mine was to prevent them from crossing Samalat Gorge—and to do that, Blue Team had to take out the bridging vehicles.
“Shall I relocate and assist?” Kelly asked.
“Negative,” John said. “You’re with me.”
“Doing what?”
“Drawing fire,” John said. “We’ll knock down some Drones. That should pull the Wraiths’ attention away from Fred and Linda.”
John stepped into a tangle of fallen sponge trees and, still standing, rested the barrel of his Gauss cannon on a horizontal stalk. It wasn’t the steadiest firing support he had ever used, but he didn’t need pinpoint accuracy. The Wraiths’ cannon turrets had already broken up Fifth Battalion’s flanking attack, and now the Drones were leaping into the air and forming themselves into a battle line that hung above the road in a long, undulating ribbon. As long as John fired in the general direction of the Drones, he was going to draw a reaction.
“Blue Leader ready,” John said.
Before announcing her own readiness, Linda asked, “Fred, two-burst alternating fire?”
“Why not?” Fred replied. Alternating fire wouldn’t put a target down as rapidly as simultaneous fire, but it would make the Gauss cannons harder to locate and counterattack. “Might as well make the fun last.”
“You have a strange idea of fun,” Linda said. “Lock and drop?”
“Affirmative.”
Gauss cannons were too awkward to fire with real accuracy from a standing position, so Fred and Linda would have to rise above the smoke, mark the target on their HUD, then drop back to their bellies and brace the M68s on the preconstructed barrel supports in front of their scrapes. The software in their Mjolnir’s onboard computers would automatically adjust the HUD marker to account for their movement. But they would still be firing at the target manually, through blinding smoke. There was every chance they would need six or seven bursts to destroy the target.
Fred’s status light changed to green, as did Kelly’s and Linda’s.
The Drones were already sweeping forward over the Wraiths, so John set his targeting reticle on the middle of the line.
“Engage.”
He pressed the Gauss cannon’s trigger, activating a magnetic induction motor that accelerated the weapon’s steel projectiles to hypersonic velocity in little more than two meters of barrel length. The result was an earsplitting sonic boom, coupled with a stream of blue friction flashes that seemed to cross the gorge almost before the trigger reached the back of its guard.
The first Drones erupted into sprays of chitin and bug juice, and John ran the rest of the burst down the battle line, knocking out a dozen more before he reset the trigger and ran the second burst in the opposite direction. By then the Wraiths were pivoting toward him, preparing to concentrate fire on his position.
John cradled the Gauss cannon in both arms and sprinted toward Kelly’s position. Normally he preferred to avoid clustering. But with one side of his faceplate still covered in lizard mucus, he had to run toward Kelly if he wanted to keep an eye on the enemy.
The Drones were already starting over the gorge, taking as many casualties from their own plasma mortars as they were from Kelly’s M68. John knew better than to think the friendly fire would do much to diminish the barrage. The Covenant had proved many times that they valued the lives of their own soldiers less than the deaths of their enemies, and barrages were only effective as long as they were sustained.
A flash of heat and light enveloped him as a volley of plasma rounds detonated on his previous position. John found himself stumbling through the smoke as one blast wave after another pushed him across the slope. It took a half dozen steps, tripping over fallen club mosses and hidden tree stalks, before he finally managed to catch his balance again and take shelter behind a rocky outcropping.
A second burst of blue dashes shot across the gorge from Kelly’s position, and the hail of mortar rounds shifted away from John toward her. He clambered atop the outcropping to lie prone above the smoke, braced the cannon barrel against the rock, and opened fire again.
The Drones were halfway across the gorge. Even from five hundred meters, John could see their thoraxes and abdomens burst apart as each of his rounds hit. With the cannon barrel resting atop a stable support, he was able to move the aiming reticle from alien to alien with a precision that left the air clouded with flying chitin.
John took satisfaction in his efficiency, but he knew it would not break the Drone attack. At best, he and Kelly might eliminate half the battle line before it passed overhead and out of range, and that would still leave four hundred Drones to swarm the Doukala. The real goal remained the same: to draw fire away from Fred and Kelly, so they could eliminate the last two CBVs.
John checked the team’s status lights and saw that Fred’s and Linda’s had changed to amber—in good shape, but still working on the next bridging vehicle. He fired his second burst, then grabbed the Gauss cannon and leaped off the front of the outcropping down into the smoke. He hated to abandon such a great firing position, but not as much as he’d hate being there when the plasma rounds arrived.
Kelly’s status light was green, indicating that she was in a new firing position and ready to attack. John turned in the direction opposite to where he had run last time and started across the slope, back toward the Nasim Bridge. He wouldn’t be able to keep an eye on the Drones’ advance, but continuing to move toward Kelly would be too predictable and could put them in overlap proximity.
Again the air erupted into heat and swirling smoke and concussion waves as mortar rounds rained down on the outcropping behind John. He stumbled across a glassy crater—his last position, after it had been hit by a plasma strike—and found a splintered sponge tree that had somehow remained standing. He propped his cannon barrel into a notch formed by a split in the stalk, then looked out over the gorge.
The Drones were coming up from the gorge now, a long undulating bank of dark figures skimming through the smoke on fast-beating wings, their crooked arms holding plasma rifles beneath their elongated bodies, their heart-shaped heads swiveling side to side in search of targets. John opened up with his M68, tearing a twenty-meter hole in their battle line as his fire reduced a dozen Drones to a rain of chitinous shards.
A wall of plasma bolts swept back in John’s direction, but his position near the top of the ridge put him a hundred meters above his foes, and it was no easier to fire accurately uphill than it was downhill. Most of the Drone fire went over his head, and the closest he came to taking damage was a few pieces of charred sponge tree raining down on his shoulders.
John stayed behind the disintegrating tree and fired another burst, opening the gap in their line to fifty meters. The Drones continued up the slope in their original formation and on course, over the far end of Sarpesi Ridge toward the Doukala.
Instead of trying to suppress John’s fire by detaching a swarm to meet him, they were offering instead a devastating flank attack. Trying to hold his attention.
Never take the bait.
Leaving the Gauss cannon to drop at the base of the sponge tree, John grabbed the BR55 battle rifle off the magnetic mount on the back of his Mjolnir and spun toward his blind side.
He saw nothing. There were no Drones sliding into view as his mucus-covered faceplate swung back toward the ridge crest, only the blue dashes of Kelly’s cannon rounds streaming through smoke, chewing through the close end of the enemy battle line. The Drones weren’t turning to meet her either.
John didn’t like it.
But it was still time to move. He needed to abandon his position before the next mortar rounds arrived. Rather than continuing back toward Kelly, into the enemy’s next strike zone, he turned toward the ridge crest.
“Blue Three, cease fire,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Abandon the M68 and meet me on the reverse slope.”
Kelly’s status light winked green.
John raced for the ridge top, pushed along by the concussion of the first mortar rounds falling on his last position. He wasn’t worried about abandoning the two Gauss cannons because Blue Team had two spares stowed in the Fifth Battalion’s original command bunker above the Nasim Bridge . . . near the far end of the Drones’ battle line.
