Oblivion, page 6
He went with it and spun, bringing up his BR55 one-handed, spraying rounds into the dark mass of Drones skimming across the frond-tops behind him. The first two dropped, and then there was a fireball in their midst, spattering his faceplate with grenade shrapnel and bug juice, and the concussion wave toppled him over backward—until a titanium gauntlet caught the collar of his outer shell.
“Will you stop clowning around?” It was Fred. “We have places to be.”
As Fred pulled John back to his feet, the jungle to both sides of them erupted into small-arms fire—and it wasn’t just a couple of Spartans firing battle rifles. It was the thunder of an entire platoon’s worth of fully automatic weapons, mostly MA5B bullpups, but also a few M739 squad automatic weapons and even a couple of M247 general-purpose machine guns mounted on portable stands.
It was done in two seconds. The Drone swarm simply dropped to the ground in pieces and chunks, and an odd silence fell over the area, broken only by the distant rumble of the first mortar rounds falling on the Doukala mine.
John checked his motion tracker and saw a line of FRIEND designators stretching into the jungle to both sides of him. He made a visual check and found four squads of marines in full assault armor rising from concealed positions.
Kelly stepped to John’s side. “Confirming that Petrov is holding for us.” She turned her faceplate toward his. “Imagine that.”
“There was never any doubt,” Fred said. He tipped his helmet toward the extraction point behind him. “She’s eager to see you. Really eager.”
“Thanks for the heads-up,” John said, turning. “Let’s not keep her waiting.”
Linda dropped out of a sponge tree and fell in beside Fred. Together they led Blue Team onto a path of recently trampled ground that angled down the slope toward a gurgling ravine, where a makeshift landing zone had been blasted out of the jungle. The bed of the ravine was too narrow for the broad beam of a Razor-class prowler, so the Night Watch was sitting astride the little stream in the bottom, her struts resting atop downed tree stalks and club mosses on the steep banks. The vessel’s nose was pointed downstream in the general direction of the Doukala, with the stern upstream toward the arriving Spartans.
In the mouth of the open drop bay stood a slender woman in black battle dress, flanked by a pair of crewmen manning sling-mounted M247H heavy machine guns. As soon as she saw the Spartans emerging from the jungle, she jabbed a finger at John, then spun on her heel and stalked toward the back of the bay.
“Prepare for incoming,” Linda said over her shoulder. “Will you need backup?”
“Thanks, but I’ll survive . . . I think.”
John followed Fred and Linda into the drop bay, then returned his battle rifle to its magmount and started across the deck toward Lieutenant Commander Amalea Petrov. She had a worry-lined face with ice-colored eyes set over a button nose and a fine chin, all framed by chin-length, copper-red hair. But there was nothing delicate about her scowl, which only seemed to deepen as John approached.
He stopped a pace away and raised his hand in salute. Despite the current status of his faceplate, he did not remove his helmet. Petrov was well aware of his true age, but there was no use reminding her. Like most officers, she tended to take his opinions and recommendations more seriously when she was not speaking to a fifteen-year-old face.
Petrov snapped a return salute. “I told you fourteen minutes, Spartan. Not eighteen.” She glanced at her chronometer, then added, “Not nineteen.”
“We couldn’t complete the mission in fourteen minutes, ma’am.” John lowered his hand, finishing his salute, but did not apologize. When Blue Team was on the ground, he was in command of the mission, not Petrov—and apologizing to her for doing his job would only encourage her to keep blurring the lines. “We needed nineteen.”
“And did you?”
“Did we what, ma’am?”
“Complete your mission, Master Chief. Did you stop the Wraith column?”
“No, ma’am.”
The admission shook John more than he expected—not because the mission had failed, but because of the reason it had failed. Humanity’s one advantage over the Covenant—its superior infantry and better ground tactics—appeared to be slipping away.
The aliens had been just as good on tactical as John—perhaps even better. They had masked their intentions and attacked with the element of surprise. Even more alarming, they had taken advantage of a single mistake—Fifth Battalion’s redeployment across the Nasim Bridge—to carry the battle. If the enemy’s other ground commanders proved to be even half as good, humanity was in even more trouble than FLEETCOM thought.
“Master Chief?”
Petrov’s tone was sharp, and John realized he had missed a question. Between today’s plasma cyclone at Sarpesi Ridge and yesterday’s squall on the Bogadlan Plain, he and Blue Team had been fighting for twenty-two hours straight. Pretty soon, he was going to be the one suffering from sleep deprivation.
“Are you injured, I said?” Petrov demanded. “Or just ignoring me?”
“Neither.” John’s motion tracker began to fill up with FRIEND designators as the marine platoon began to pack the drop bay. “Analyzing.”
“Analyzing?” Petrov’s eyes narrowed, and she turned toward the access hatch that led forward into the Night Watch. “We’ll continue this discussion on the flight deck, Spartan.”
“Yes, ma’am.” As John started through the hatch after her, he activated TEAMCOM and spoke privately to his Spartans. “Head to the support cabin and get the maintenance team started on your Mjolnir. Whatever she’s fired up about, we’d better be ready.”
Their status lights winked green, and John followed Petrov. There were several places where they could have spoken privately, so John was not sure why she was taking him to the flight deck. But he did know she had a reason. Petrov was a cunning tactician who planned every move for maximum effect. It often made John wary of her, but he was trying to keep an open mind. Recently he had learned the hard way that officers who were more interested in being friends than leaders were the ones who really bore watching.
Petrov stepped through the open hatch onto a hushed flight deck manned by a full crew. The pilot and copilot sat in a dropped cockpit down in front. The communications officer and navigator were behind them, facing bulkhead-mounted instrument panels, with the sensor operator and weapons controller adjacent.
After a quick “carry on” to keep the flight crew focused on their jobs, Petrov dropped into the commander’s chair at the back of the compartment and began to punch buttons set into the control pad on the arm. A tactical display of the surrounding terrain appeared below a holopad affixed overhead just forward of her chair. It showed the ravine walls as rolling blankets of luminous green, the sky above as a narrow wedge capped by gauzy white clouds two hundred meters up.
She pushed a finger into the near edge of the holograph, where a line of tiny Ws—Wraith symbols—was passing by the ravine mouth.
“You put my crew and my prowler at risk, Master Chief,” she said. “You also did the same for yourselves and First Platoon. And it was for nothing.”
“It was my call,” John said. “We had to try.”
“Even if it costs the lives of everyone aboard?” Petrov asked. “Because it very well may.”
John stepped closer and leaned across the commander’s chair, turning his helmet so that he could study the tactical holo out of the clear side of his faceplate. The only hostiles he saw were the Wraiths, and they seemed entirely unaware of the prowler hiding four kilometers up the ravine.
Finally he said, “I don’t see the threat. The aliens don’t even know we’re here.”
“You’re looking at the wrong aliens.”
Petrov entered another command into her control pad, and the ceiling of white clouds in the holograph became a gauzy floor. The display wedge flared upward, all the way into space, where a steady stream of enemy Seraphs—each designated by a red S—was drifting past in low orbit.
But it was the designators at the bottom of the wedge that alarmed John. The aliens had deployed a lot of Banshee interceptors over the battlefield, and there were at least twenty circling just above the cloud floor, more or less above Sarpesi Ridge and the Doukala Xenotime Works.
Petrov looked toward the blond woman at the sensor station. “How many now, Ensign Gombaz?”
“I make it three squadrons of Banshees,” Gombaz replied. “And probably one squadron of Seraphs. It’s hard to tell, because our sensor window is pretty limited down here, and the Seraphs keep moving in and out as they change orbits to stay above us.”
“Any sign of the mothership?”
“No, ma’am,” Gombaz said. “But it’s there. Those fighters are coming from somewhere.”
“Very well. Keep me posted.” Petrov turned to John. “Those fighters weren’t here four minutes ago. We should have been gone before they arrived—not hiding out on the ground, hoping for a chance to escape.”
“We had a mission to complete.”
“Wrong. You had a mission you couldn’t complete.” Petrov shook her head, then spoke in a gentler tone. “Look, I know Spartans never quit—I get that. But you need to temper your determination with perspective, John. Sometimes your pride isn’t worth what you’re risking.”
“It wasn’t about pride, ma’am,” John said. “It was about denying a huge xenotime deposit to the Covenant.”
“If you say so,” Petrov said. “But we don’t even know what the aliens do with xenotime. And a Spartan is worth a dozen xenotime mines—in equipment and training costs alone.”
“It’s pretty hard to fight a war without taking risks.”
“It’s even harder to win a war without balancing risks against reward.” Petrov exhaled hard, then asked, “John, do you think Admiral Cole would have ordered me to pull Blue Team out of the middle of a mission if this wasn’t something bigger than a xenotime mine? A lot bigger?”
Before John could answer, the communications officer turned toward Petrov and said, “Excuse me, Commander.”
Petrov raised a finger, signaling John to wait, then nodded to the officer. “Proceed, Lieutenant Heuse.”
“Comms traffic indicates the 24th is launching a mass evacuation, twelve minutes from now.”
“Twelve minutes?” Petrov repeated. “Why so long?”
“The 24th is a full engineering brigade, ma’am,” John said. “It takes time to recover and load five thousand soldiers.”
Petrov shot John another scowl, but before she could rebuke him for injecting himself into the conversation, Heuse shook his head.
“That’s not the delay,” he said. “They found another of those weird tunnel networks beneath the ore body. The engineers think they can use it to collapse the Mesrani workings—and take out a bunch of Covenant armor. Shall I make contact and suggest they abandon that plan?”
Petrov thought for a moment, then shook her head. “Negative, Lieutenant. We don’t want the 24th to know we’re still here.”
“We don’t?” John was not eager to draw another of Petrov’s withering gazes, but he couldn’t contain his surprise. “How are we going to coordinate?”
Heuse gave him a sad look, then turned back to his instruments.
Petrov just appeared annoyed. “We’re a prowler, Master Chief. We don’t do coordination.”
“Yes, ma’am.” John had worked with a lot of prowler commanders over the last few months. They all shared two traits: they were exceptionally competent and exceptionally sneaky. But Petrov was in a class of her own. “You’re going to hide behind the evacuation.”
Petrov nodded. Reluctantly.
“Ma’am . . .”
John couldn’t quite find the words. The engineering transports were barely combat vessels, slow and lumbering, with thin armor and not much weaponry. They might survive the Banshees without the Night Watch escorting them. But once they reached orbit, they would be easy pickings for the Seraphs . . . and completely defenseless against the starfighters’ mothership.
“Is that ethical?”
Petrov’s expression went blank. “It’s effective,” she said. “At the moment, that’s all that matters.”
She entered a command on her control pad, and the tactical holograph was replaced by a two-dimensional video showing a disk swaddled in a pall of brown clouds. It took John a moment to recognize the world as Netherop, an uninhabited greenhouse planet that he had actually orbited during a failed attempt to capture a Covenant combat vessel. It was in the same sector as Mesra, only a couple of short slipspace transits away—and well inside the nebulous frontier where UNSC “wolf pack” task forces were stalking Covenant transit routes, jumping lone vessels and harassing supply convoys in an effort to blunt the enemy onslaught.
As the video continued, the orange streaks of seven errant missiles flashed into the image. They skipped across Netherop’s pearl-colored mesosphere, then abruptly lost velocity and sank into the planet’s brown atmosphere. Behind them came the long-necked disk of a Covenant light frigate—or what the UNSC would classify as such, at least. Its dovetail stern was flaring with missile impacts, and there was a notch at one corner that suggested it had been taking damage for some time.
The steely voice of Vice Admiral Preston J. Cole rang from the overhead speaker. “This video was taken above Netherop at 2100 hours, June third, from the bridge of the Kayenta.”
Less than two days old, John realized.
“The Kayenta is the leader of Task Force Pantea,” Petrov explained. There was no need to add that it was a Halberd-class destroyer without a marine complement. All of the UNSC wolf packs operating out of Battle Group X-Ray were composed of Halberd-class destroyers without marine complements. “She’s accompanied by the Chaco, Cibola, Mesa Verde, and Rio Grande.”
John did not ask what had happened to the other half of the task force. The service expectancy of destroyers on wolf-pack duty was measured in weeks.
Cole’s voice continued in the vid: “We’ve designated the Covenant frigate Lucky Break. Her shields and primary weapons were knocked out in the wolf pack’s initial MAC volley, and Captain Greyveld had the good sense to recognize an opportunity when he saw one.”
As Cole spoke, the slender, arrowhead profiles of a pair of Halberd-class destroyers slid into view behind the alien frigate, still chewing pieces off her stern with volleys of Archer missiles. The Lucky Break responded by swinging hard to port, trying to bring her flank around so she could deliver a broadside with a line of still-functioning pulse lasers.
It was a terrible mistake. The lasers chewed a few divots into her pursuers’ thick-armored bows, but the opposite rim of the frigate’s disk-shaped hull dipped into the mesosphere sideways, then flared red as the friction slowly began to drag the vessel out of orbit. For a few minutes, it looked as though the Lucky Break would be able to bring her long nose around and recover; then the nose dipped too, and she began a long, smoky descent into Netherop’s brown clouds.
The vid switched to a close-up of Admiral Cole’s gray-haired head. His face was slender and furrowed with deep worry lines.
“The Chaco sent its Pelicans down to take a look,” he said. “Only one of them made it back, but it had a vid of the other one taking fire from the Lucky Break’s pulse lasers.”
Cole paused so long that John started to wonder if the vid had gotten stuck. When the admiral finally continued, it was with a light in his eyes that made him look ten years younger.
“I don’t need to tell you what that means, Amalea, so I’ll get straight to the point. Section Three has already dispatched an ONI salvage ship to recover the Lucky Break, but its security company doesn’t have the expertise or equipment to board a manned Covenant frigate—much less secure it before someone activates the self-destruct charge.”
John exhaled slowly, then said, “So . . . we’re going to Netherop.”
Petrov paused the vid. “You don’t sound very excited about it,” she said. “In fact, it sounds like you’d rather stay here on Mesra.”
“With all due respect, ma’am, it’s never smart to get excited about bait.”
“Too convenient?”
“I don’t trust coincidence,” John said. “Netherop is where we made our first attempt to capture a Covenant vessel, so the enemy knows we’re watching it. And it’s close to Mesra, where they’ve had repeated contact with a team of Spartans.”
Petrov cocked her brow. “And you think they’d be willing to sacrifice an entire frigate to kill four Spartans?”
“Kill—or capture.” John turned his helmet so that he could see her whole face. “You’re the one who just said each of us is worth a dozen xenotime mines.”
“I can see that was a mistake,” Petrov said. “I’d better learn to keep my mouth shut, or your head won’t fit inside your big helmet.”
John was glad she couldn’t see him smile behind his faceplate. “Is that a joke, ma’am?”
“Let’s hope so.” Petrov paused, then asked, “The special unit?”
John quietly sighed. During the recent operation that had culminated in the strike on the Covenant depot world, the Spartans had repeatedly engaged well-trained warriors in dark-red armor. After a time, John had begun to believe the enemy had created a special Spartan-hunting unit. A month ago, he had made the mistake of mentioning his suspicion to Dr. Catherine Halsey, who was the creator, chief scientist, and administrative overseer of the SPARTAN-II program.
Two parts scientist and one part mother hen, Dr. Halsey had immediately distributed a list of precautions and procedures she wanted implemented whenever her Spartans were in a combat theater. John had been noticing hints of disbelief and mockery in the attitudes of some tradition-bound officers ever since.
“Too early to suggest it’s a special unit, ma’am,” John said. “Let’s wait until we see some red armor.”
“That wasn’t a dig at you, John.”
Petrov touched her control pad again. The vid began to move forward at triple speed, Cole’s face contorting in swift, comical expressions as his message continued.
