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  The muzzle of an M7 emerged from between two stone blocks, then Cirilo opened fire. The Sentinel’s energy shields shimmered and sent rounds bouncing in every direction. Fred cursed and slapped the grenade back on its mount, then leaped for the Sentinel.

  Sentinel energy shields deflected only fast-moving objects like bullets, so Fred hit the drone squarely from behind and drove it to the ground in front of Lopis’s hiding place. It fired its antigravity unit again and sent them both tumbling across the pit, its particle beam slashing stone as they rolled.

  Fred latched on to a utility arm with one hand and, unable to bring his battle rifle to bear, dropped the weapon and grabbed his M6 Magnum sidearm. The Sentinel righted itself and started to rise, then Lopis and Cirilo were there beside it, jamming their M7 barrels against its central body. Fred pressed the muzzle of his gun against the drone.

  “Fire!”

  The roar of unsuppressed gunfire filled the air, and the Sentinel dropped into a hollow between three limestone blocks.

  “Take cover!”

  Fred grabbed Lopis, who was nearest him, and leaped away, pinning her to his chest as he turned his back to the dead Sentinel and dropped into a protective crouch.

  But the Sentinel did not explode. In fact, it did not even release the customary electromagnetic pulse, and Fred found himself kneeling between two stone blocks with Lopis still pressed tight against his chest armor.

  “Uh . . . Fred?” Lopis gasped. “You’re . . . crushing me.”

  “Sorry.” Fred released her and turned around. Cirilo was crouched behind a chest-high rock, his helmet showing over the top toward the hollow where the demolished Sentinel lay. “They usually detonate.”

  As Fred spoke, a deafening crack echoed through the cavern, and the darkness turned boiling orange as a column of flame shot up from the far side of the pit. He checked his motion tracker and saw the flare of an exploding Sentinel about ten meters from Mark’s position. Mark was still firing up into the shaft, bringing down nothing but saurios. Olivia and Ash were nearby, weaving their way through the boulders as their own Sentinels continued to pursue them, tracking them better than should have been possible in their SPI armor—and certainly better than the Sentinels had been able to manage in the past.

  “Ash, Olivia, to me,” Fred ordered. “Mark, carry on.”

  Mark’s status light flashed green, and Ash and Olivia began to angle toward the center of the pit. A second Sentinel had been destroyed without releasing the customary electromagnetic pulse, and Fred could imagine only one reason for it: the ancilla had disabled the effect because it did not have shielding itself, and it was so close to the fighting that it feared being next to a Sentinel when it was annihilated. That was good news for Fred and the other Spartans, because it meant that if they happened to spot the thing, the little surprises they were carrying from the ONI death techs would probably work.

  Fred pointed Lopis and Cirilo to flanking positions with hard cover, then pulled a grenade off its mount and displayed it.

  “Grenades first,” he told them. “Helmets down until then.”

  The pair acknowledged with nods and scrambled off toward their posts. Fred retrieved his battle rifle and returned his sidearm to its mount, then dropped into position. In the next instant, Olivia raced up, her pursuer’s particle beam raising geysers of molten stone all around her.

  Fred watched her continue past, flipping and corkscrewing through the air as she sprang from block to block. A half second later, the third Sentinel appeared, a few meters above him and to one side. He armed his grenade and tossed it, leading the drone to account for velocity.

  But the Sentinel stopped short. It spun toward Cirilo’s hiding spot, and its particle beam lanced down into the cavity. The Gao’s scream ended in a yellow flash, then smoke began to pour from the hole.

  Fred’s grenade landed a few meters beyond the Sentinel, then tumbled down between the stones and detonated with a muffled thump. Fred felt a long shudder beneath his feet and realized the pit was not at all stable—but with the Sentinel already turning toward Lopis, he had other things to worry about. Fred leaped in under the drone and pushed his battle rifle up into its metal underbelly, then selected AUTOMATIC and pulled the trigger.

  This Sentinel detonated, metal shrapnel flying everywhere, and Fred found himself tumbling backward across the rocks, the shield status on his HUD draining before his eyes. He spread his arms and brought himself to a halt by slapping down hard, then sprang back to his feet—and felt the ground trembling beneath him. A low rumble sounded from somewhere deep below. The block he was standing on shifted and began to slide, and he thought for an instant that the whole pile would give way under him.

  Then the yellow streak of a particle beam split the darkness ahead, and the rumbling stopped. The ground seemed to settle, and Fred brought his weapon around and looked up.

  Ash was coming fast, the remaining Sentinel floating five meters behind him and five meters above, swinging back and forth as it worked to corner him. A beam streaked past Ash’s helmet, and the Spartan-III changed direction, cartwheeling down the flat side of a limestone block.

  Gut knotting with worry, Fred opened fire and saw his rounds ricochet harmlessly off the silvery bubble of the Sentinel’s energy shield. It spun to face him . . . and then Lopis and Olivia opened fire as well, and the silvery bubble began to flicker.

  Fred’s clip ran empty, and the Sentinel spun away and sent an orange beam toward Olivia. She threw herself into a lateral dive and rolled beneath a rocky overhang, then came up shooting.

  With his shields still recharging, Fred reloaded and charged, grabbing his second grenade with one hand and holding his battle rifle in the other. But the Sentinel had Olivia pinned in a bad place and knew it. The machine shot toward her, rising another couple of meters into the air so it could attack from above. A particle beam lanced down and began to cut a line along the top of the block.

  “Olivia!” Fred ordered. “Change—”

  A slab of stone three meters long dropped loose, catching Olivia across the backs of her thighs before she could scramble away. A single wail of pain rang out over TEAMCOM, then she began to clutch at the ground in front of her and started to drag herself free.

  Desperate to draw the Sentinel’s attention away from her, Fred yelled over TEAMCOM. “Cover!”

  Olivia pressed her faceplate to the ground and braced her head by lacing her fingers across the back of her helmet. The Sentinel pivoted away in the same instant, responding to the same warning as had Olivia. Fred wasn’t surprised. It only confirmed what he had already guessed—that the enemy had penetrated their communications.

  Now he tossed the grenade, arcing it well past Olivia to shield her from the blast. It landed about a meter beyond the Sentinel and exploded. The drone’s shields flickered out, but they absorbed enough of the blast to prevent the Sentinel itself from being damaged.

  Another ominous shudder rolled through the rubble pile. Fred ignored it and opened fire. The Sentinel was already evading vertically and horizontally as it swung around to rush him, and he managed to put only a few rounds into it. But he must have hit something in the antigravity unit, because it listed to one side and dropped to a couple of meters above the ground.

  Lopis and Ash popped up in flanking positions and let loose on the Sentinel. Ash was unsteady on his feet, shooting one-handed with his best arm hanging at his side, and still he forced the Sentinel to pull up short. Lopis was beyond her M7’s effective range, but she managed to stitch a few rounds down the side of the machine and blow off a utility arm.

  The Sentinel spun toward Lopis, its particle beam cutting a smoky smile through the rubble as it turned. Fred set his front sight on the thing’s “head” . . . and barely pulled his finger off the trigger in time as Olivia came leaping in from the other side, empty hands held wide. She landed atop the drone and locked it in her arms, then whipped her legs toward the ground.

  Her thigh armor was crushed and he
r legs so crooked they were clearly broken, but she was feeding on the pain, using it to fuel her strength and rage. It was an effect of the illegal mutagen given to every member of Gamma company during their augmentations. It was supposed to make them stronger and more dangerous when they faced death, and from what Fred had seen, the experiment had worked. But that didn’t mean he liked it.

  Unable to attack without hitting his own Spartan, Fred signaled Ash and Lopis to hold fire, then advanced carefully as Olivia somehow still stood on two broken legs and slammed the Sentinel into a slab of limestone. The machine continued to fire its particle beam, burning a hole down into the jumble of megaliths, and the low rumble continued to build from somewhere deep below.

  If Olivia heard it, she showed no sign. She simply dropped atop the Sentinel, screaming in anger and agony as her broken legs straddled it, then grabbed a rock as large as her torso and slammed it down on the machine’s shell.

  The Sentinel stopped firing. Olivia brought the stone down again, splitting the machine’s outer casing along the back. The rumble grew louder, and the pile began to tremble.

  “Pull back!” Fred ordered. “Out of the pit!”

  Lopis was already running, Ash turned to follow, and Mark’s status light winked green.

  Olivia pulled her sidearm and jammed the barrel into the Sentinel’s broken casing.

  “Sierra-291, disengage!” Fred knew better than to simply grab Olivia. In her rage, she might turn her weapon on him before she realized whom she was shooting. “Now!”

  Olivia pulled the trigger three times. A loud pop sounded inside the Sentinel, and something began to smoke and sizzle.

  “Spartan, that’s an order!”

  Fred raced over to Olivia and slammed the butt of his rifle into her head so hard that her helmet popped off and tumbled down between the rocks. She went limp for an instant, just long enough for him to wrench the pistol from her hand, then turned to look up at him with fury and anguish in her brown eyes.

  The stone beneath them began to shake and sink, and the rage drained from Olivia’s face. She looked down and frowned in confusion.

  “Lieutenant . . .?”

  “Engagement over, ’Livi.” Fred snatched Olivia up and threw her over a shoulder, then turned and ran for the edge of the pit. “I just hope we live to file the report.”

  CHAPTER 9

  * * *

  * * *

  0043 hours, July 4, 2553 (military calendar)

  Probable Launching Silo, 1,500 Meters belowground,

  Montero Cavern System

  Campos Wilderness District, Planet Gao, Cordoba System

  Veta fled the deafening rumble for twenty seconds before she finally stopped running. She wasn’t sure how far she had gone. In the vast darkness of the cavern, it was hard to judge distance and direction, and her lamp beam illuminated only a cloud of swirling guano dust. But she could tell by the crashing in her ears and the shuddering beneath her boots that she remained near the pit, and that the rockslide had not yet ended. She turned to see what had become of Fred and Olivia, and found only a billowing wall of gray.

  The voice of a young Spartan, either Ash or Mark, sounded in her helmet speaker. “Inspector, look to your eight o’clock.”

  Veta turned left and saw a helmet lamp activate, its blue-white beam clouded with floating dust. She followed the light another hundred meters to the cavern wall, where she spotted an empty Spartan-III helmet resting on the floor. Mark was kneeling in the dark nearby, still wearing his own helmet, peering through the scope on his battle rifle and slowly sweeping the barrel back and forth across the cavern.

  Ash sat a meter away, his back against the wall with his battle rifle cradled in his left arm. His right arm hung limp at his side, sagging from the shoulder and bent wrong at the elbow, but showing no other obvious signs of injury. It was Ash’s helmet resting on the ground, so Veta could see his face for the first time. He was young for a soldier, with smooth skin, just a hint of day-old chin fuzz, and clean-cut features that still retained some of their childhood softness. There was pain in his brown eyes, but in the rest of his face, Veta saw only alertness and determination.

  Veta went to his side and sat on her heels beside him. “Fred and Olivia?”

  “Coming, but they had to stop to give Olivia a quick patch-up.” Now that Ash’s voice wasn’t coming over a comm channel, it had a ragged adolescent edge that made Veta wonder if he was even legally an adult. “Sorry about your guy. He was tough stuff.”

  The sympathy hit Veta hard, almost physically, because she hadn’t even thought about Cirilo yet. She had seen the Sentinel take him out, so she had no illusions about his fate. But Veta had been so busy trying to survive herself that she had simply processed his death as another factor in the fight, something to be noted because losing him affected her own chances of making it. Now Veta realized she would never see her friend again . . . never laugh at his flirtations or confide in him. Given how he had died and the rockslide afterward, they would probably not even find his body—and that made her feel alone and angry, the way she had felt when she had escaped the monster’s cellar, only to learn that her father had passed away from grief while she was gone.

  Veta nodded. “Thanks . . . I’m going to miss him.”

  As true as that was, now was no time to mourn. They needed to recover from the Sentinel attack and figure out what they were going to do next—whether they could continue the pursuit, or would be forced to retreat and reinforce.

  She pointed at Ash’s arm. “How are you doing with that?”

  “No worries.” Ash raised his chin. “I can still fight.”

  “You made that pretty obvious back there,” Veta said. “But you might be more effective with your arm back in joint.”

  “You know how?” Ash asked. “To do it right, I mean?”

  “I’ve had the training,” Veta said. “But I’ve only treated bullet holes or knife wounds. This kind of stuff, I try to leave to doctors.”

  “No docs down here.” Ash studied Veta for a moment, then asked, “Those bullet holes and knife wounds . . . how many of those people made it?”

  Veta waggled her hand. “Not that many.”

  Ash smiled. “At least you’re honest.” He began to unbuckle pieces of armor. “Do it. No telling how fast things are going to heat up again, and Mark needs to keep watch.”

  Once his arm was accessible, Veta took his elbow in both hands and checked to see if there were any broken bones. There was a fair amount of squeezing and prodding involved, but Ash’s expression never showed pain. Finally, she cupped his elbow in one hand and took his forearm in the other, then began to gently pull and work the joint around. Ash’s arms were so large that she could barely grasp them, but after a couple of minutes, she felt the elbow slip back into place.

  “Good,” Ash said. Not even bothering to catch his breath, he stretched out on his back and placed his arm at a right angle to his body, then bent the newly repaired elbow so that it was pointing down toward his feet. “Go ahead.”

  Veta took his hand and began to gently move it in toward his stomach. “It looks like you’ve had this done before.”

  Ash shook his head. “First time,” he said. “But I’ve had the training, too.”

  His shoulder popped into the joint on the second try. He immediately sat up and began to work his arm around, testing its strength and mobility. Every time he tried to lift it to shoulder level, his eyes filled with pain, and he had to struggle to hold it in position. Ideally, the entire limb should have been immobilized to give the injury time to heal. But that was not a luxury the Spartan could afford right now, and Veta found herself wincing every time he tried to lift his arm into a firing posture.

  “Maybe you should give it a rest,” Veta said. “That looks like it hurts.”

  “Not as much as it did—and not as much as a Sentinel beam.” Ash slipped his arm back into the sleeve of his inner skinsuit. “Thanks.”

  “No problem,” Veta sa
id. “I’m sure you’d do the same for me.”

  Ash looked up, a thoughtful expression on his face. “Yeah,” he said. “I probably would.”

  Not quite sure how to take the reply, Veta merely shook her head and said, “Well, at least you repay favors.”

  Veta retrieved her M7 and kept a surreptitious eye on Ash as he rearmored himself; she was trying to decide just how old he might be. He had the size and musculature of a young man in his late teens or early twenties. But, aside from all the scars, he had the skin of a fifteen-year-old . . . smooth and almost hairless. And with its gentle features and large eyes, his face seemed even younger. She was tempted to just ask his age, but she feared the question would sound like part of the investigation and put him on his guard.

  Ash was just strapping on his last piece of armor when Mark’s voice came over Veta’s helmet speaker again. “Hold your fire. The lieutenant is coming in.”

  A couple of seconds later, Fred’s huge form emerged from the billowing dust into Veta’s lamp beam. He was cradling Olivia in one arm and using the other to carefully support her legs. She was missing her helmet, equipment belt, and leg armor, and the lower part of her skinsuit had been cut away to reveal limbs so swollen and purple that it was difficult to find the knees.

  Fred stopped and glanced toward Ash. “Your arm?”

  “Sixty percent, but serviceable.” Ash tipped his head in Veta’s direction. “Inspector Lopis knows her stuff.”

  “Good.”

  Fred knelt and laid Olivia on the cavern floor. She was conscious, but her dark skin had a mottled tone, and her breathing was shallow and rapid. She had a thin, oval face that made her look even younger than Ash—barely even a teen. Despite her stoic silence, her expression was tight with pain.

  Fred pulled a medkit off the magnetic mount on his armor and placed it on the ground next to Olivia, then his faceplate turned toward Veta. “Ash may need some help with her.”