Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story Page 19

  A pair of sentries in gray combat utilities with no insignia stood in front of the open entrance. The man was armed with an MA37 assault rifle and the woman with an MA5B, both likely salvaged—like everything in the Viery Militia—from the underground storage bunkers of an old UNSC facility. As John and Kelly dismounted the Warthog, the woman leaned through the door.

  “They’re here.”

  John expected to be challenged at the entrance, or at least told they would have to check their weapons. But the man simply waved them through.

  “Straight ahead, Spartans. They’re expecting you.” He pointed at the door lintel. “Mind your heads. One bump, and you could bring this place crashing down.”

  “And thanks for coming,” the woman said. “You’re the last thing we were expecting.”

  “That’s how we prefer it,” Kelly said. “The element of surprise and all that.”

  “Surprise being the operative word,” John said. He had not yet had the debriefing Colonel Boldisar had promised, so this would be his first opportunity to disabuse her of the notion that Blue Team was on Reach to support her rehab pioneers. “For everyone.”

  They ducked through the door into the foyer area of a large square chamber covered by a white nyonlin canopy supported by rods of bowed fiberglass. The perimeter was filled with dozens of support personnel in uniforms repurposed from random services, most bustling back and forth between two-meter display modules, updating unit-readiness reports, and reconciling intelligence dispatches. A few paused to gape at John and Kelly, but nobody stepped over to escort them—and none so much as blinked at the small armory attached to their Mjolnir’s magnetic mounts.

  “Not much in the way of headquarters security, is there?” Kelly said through her external voicemitter.

  “No, not much,” John said. “I wonder if any of them have actually ever been in the military?”

  He started toward the center of the room, where Colonel Sasa Boldisar stood on a ring-shaped platform with nine of her commanders. They were staring down at a holographic display in the center of the ring, scowling and gesturing and snapping at one another with an alarming lack of discipline. When Boldisar saw them coming, she stepped away from the scrum to meet them.

  John and Kelly stopped at the edge of the platform and came to attention. John brought his hand up in salute, but with Kelly’s right arm locked in a sling position, she simply remained at attention.

  “Spartans-117 and -087 reporting as requested,” John said.

  Boldisar’s brow shot up. “That’s not necessary, Master Chief.” She waved the gesture off with a flip of her hand. “We seldom stand on ceremony around here.”

  “I can see that, ma’am.” John held his salute. “But a salute is a sign of trust and respect—for both parties.”

  “Oh. In that case, thank you.” Boldisar touched her fingers to her temple in an awkward salute toward John, then glanced at Kelly with a look of uncertainty.

  Kelly used her left hand to tap the vambrace of her sling-locked armor. “My arm is impaired, and I’m afraid a left-handed salute is considered offensive in some services.”

  “Forgive me.” She saluted Kelly. “I can see I have a lot to learn about commanding Spartans.”

  John and Kelly turned their faceplates toward each other; then John said, “Ma’am, we’re not under your command. The UNSC doesn’t detach Spartans.”

  “Detach?”

  “Assign to another authority,” Kelly explained. “One doesn’t trust assets like us to someone else’s control.”

  Boldisar’s expression changed from disappointed to determined. “I see.” She pointed toward a set of stairs that provided access to the meter-high platform. “In that case, please join us. There’s something I’d like to ask of you.”

  She started back toward the knot of her commanders.

  Rather than bothering with the stairs, John and Kelly clambered onto the platform and followed Boldisar. Also made of glass block—as most man-made structures were in the reclamation zone—it was a little wider than a Warthog and strewn with upright touch displays and holoprojection equipment, where technicians and aides were hard at work monitoring systems and correlating data.

  In the interior of the ring floated a holographic map of the Eposz Reclamation Project. Easily ten meters across, the image depicted the heart of the Arany Basin on three different levels—surface, underglass, and subterranean. The upper layer portrayed the landscape that John had seen from the mouth of Tárnoc Falls, with a vast sweep of glass barrens broken by hundreds of swaths of open ground. The map was incredibly detailed, with tiny likenesses of the local buildings and red cubes or orange rings representing Banished facilities and perimeter defenses. Waterways—including the irrigation canal where John and his companions had been strafed by the Banshees, and the Lapos River where Linda had gone underglass with Special Crew—were shown in shimmering blue.

  The middle layer of the holomap was a web of purple veins, depicting a vast network of hollow areas that lay hidden beneath the lechatelierite. Most of the passages appeared natural, being serpentine lines that lay beneath water features such as rivers and streams. These were often dotted or broken, probably indicating areas that were difficult to transit due to wet conditions or underglass flooding. Occasionally a tunnel simply ended at a lake or pond marked on the surface map.

  Scattered randomly around the middle layer were other, larger features: long narrow openings that resembled the burn cavity in which the logistics base was located, big irregular depressions that might have been sinkholes, and several gently weaving lines that John could not even guess at. These all entered from the west edge of the map and often extended for great distances eastward without connecting to the network at all.

  The lowest level of the holomap showed the deep caves and underground mines in the area. There were only a few dozen, and most were not connected to the rest of the underglass network. But a purple line running up to the surface indicated where each mine or cave could be accessed, and whether it was via vertical shaft or decline tunnel.

  By the time John and Kelly reached the huddle of commanders, John had oriented himself well enough to identify the location of the farmstead where they’d first met Boldisar and Erdei—on the eastern edge of the reclamation zone—and Logistics Base Gödöllő—where they were now—a hundred kilometers outside the zone, directly to the west.

  He also now had a detailed copy of the entire map stored in his Mjolnir’s onboard memory. If the Viery Militia was going to treat its battlefield intelligence so casually, he saw nothing dishonorable in helping himself to it.

  Boldisar had to push into the middle of the huddle before the commanders stopped arguing. Most of them wore either a hand-sewn mael leaf or a cedar bough on their collar tabs—no doubt the Viery Militia’s equivalent of the gold or silver oak leaves worn by majors and lieutenant colonels in the UNSC marines. Other than Sasa Boldisar herself, the only officer John recognized was the bald and burly major, Istvan Erdei.

  Once her commanders had fallen quiet, Boldisar ran through a quick round of introductions—which John relied on his onboard computer to record—then gestured to John and Kelly.

  “I’m sure you’ve heard that the Master Chief and his team of Spartans will be joining us,” she said. “Maybe they can take control of the situation.”

  Before John could object to being volunteered for a mission on behalf of an army he didn’t even belong to, Boldisar turned to him, then pointed toward the holographic map, indicating a knot of darkened passages just to the east of Logistics Base Gödöllő.

  “There’s an enemy scouting patrol out there watching us,” she explained. “And it’s too good for our people to handle.”

  “That’s premature, Sasa,” protested a raw-featured lieutenant colonel. John’s HUD identified him as Rendor Borbély. “My rangers were dispatched less than an hour ago.”

  “How long would it have taken those Brutes to see our preparations?” Boldisar demande
d. “Then send someone back to report?”

  “Not as long as it took them to follow you and Istvan all the way back from Kisköre,” Borbély retorted.

  John began to have a sneaking feeling that maybe the scouts weren’t Brutes at all. He and Kelly and Fred had arrived with Erdei’s company only an hour ago… which made the timing about right, given that if Linda had been following them, she would have lagged behind and reconnoitered the area before approaching the base.

  “Nobody followed us.” Erdei sounded weary and angry, as though he had said the same thing many times already. “I told you, we had a rotating rear guard the entire way.”

  Linda would have expected a rear guard. She would have slipped past it as easily as most people opened a closed door, then spent her time traveling in the one place her surveillance targets wouldn’t be looking for her—in the pocket between the main body and the rear guard.

  “The last squad just came in five minutes ago,” Erdei continued. “After the perimeter cams went out.”

  “And how do we even know we’re looking for Brutes?” asked a slender major—Darda Tabori, according to the name on John’s HUD. She wore her blond hair pulled back in a waist-length ponytail, but otherwise carried herself with a military bearing. “The perimeter cams didn’t see anything before they went out, and we haven’t found any tracks.”

  “Jackals, then,” Boldisar said. “Or hinge-heads or Grunts, for all it matters. If Rendor can’t track them down, we are lost.”

  “Give me time,” Borbély said.

  “Time is the last thing we have.” Boldisar looked to John. “Will you explain that to them, Master Chief?”

  “Certainly, ma’am,” John said, ignoring for the moment that Boldisar probably had a lot more time than she thought. “Once I’ve been briefed on the situation.”

  “Isn’t it obvious?” Boldisar gestured at the knot of darkened passages in the holographic map. “The enemy has taken out our perimeter cameras.”

  “How much of the network do you have under surveillance?” John asked. “It can’t be everything we’re looking at.”

  “Of course not,” Boldisar said. “Just the approaches to our bases. The entire network would be almost a hundred kilometers. We don’t have that many signal relays.”

  John studied the map, then pointed to the three intersections just beyond the darkened tangle. “But you blocked the egress routes, right?”

  “The minute the first camera went down,” Borbély said. “I’m not an idiot.”

  “I never said that you were,” John said. That was the issue with an undisciplined army—when the pressure was on, its personnel started to focus on themselves instead of the problem. He faced Boldisar. “I’m sorry, ma’am, but I can’t honor your request.”

  “What request would that be?”

  “That I confirm you’re running out of time. As long as you keep those intersections blocked, that scouting patrol isn’t going anywhere.”

  “How would you know that?” Boldisar seemed more suspicious than she did relieved—and John didn’t blame her. “How do we know they haven’t slipped away already?”

  “The way I’ve been telling you,” Borbély said. “Some of the cameras went down after we blocked the intersection.”

  “Then why haven’t you found the patrol?” Boldisar insisted. “That’s less than two kilometers of passage, and you’ve had a hundred men searching in there for an hour.”

  John studied the knot of darkened tunnel. There was nothing in it that looked even remotely man-made, so it was probably some combination of erosion channels, burn cavities, and subsidence hollows. A Banished patrol might not be able to hide from a hundred men in there, but Linda certainly could.

  “Ma’am, the colonel is right,” John said. “The situation is under control.”

  “I wish I could be certain of that,” she replied. “Our entire attack depends on the element of surprise.”

  “Attack?” John had hoped that the battle preparations he was seeing were for a defensive fight, because the pioneers might actually have a chance of surviving that. “How many soldiers do you have?”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Erdei said. “Someone forced our hand when they busted into our tunnel at Kisköre. Now those alien devils know our plan, and we’ve got to move before they start closing up our tunnels.”

  “How many soldiers do you have?” John repeated. This was getting them nowhere.

  “Five thousand,” Boldisar said. “Give or take.”

  “What about the other bases?”

  “That includes the other bases,” Boldisar said. “Three thousand here, another two thousand spread between seven smaller bases.”

  “Including the Drifts?”

  Borbély scowled. “How do you know about the Drifts?”

  “Your security is rather poor,” Kelly said. She looked to Boldisar. “And please tell me that strength figure doesn’t include the Gönc Drifts, because half-trained children will not do anything in a battle but die.”

  “No, it doesn’t,” Boldisar said. “What kind of monsters do you think we are?”

  “No kind at all,” John said. Boldisar couldn’t have known that John and Kelly had started their Spartan training at age six, as that information was still highly classified. “But no one trains soldiers they don’t expect to need.”

  “We were preparing for a long war,” Tabori said. “The last thing we expected was for the UNSC to come to our rescue.”

  John forced himself not to glance in Kelly’s direction. It was hard to read much through a mirrored faceplate, but he suspected just about anyone present would have been able to read that.

  “Understandable,” John said. He began to study the holographic map in more detail, noting how a man-made passage departed the network near each Banished base and extended toward it. In three cases, it even reached beneath the base. “You were going to attack from underneath?”

  “We were,” Boldisar said. “But it’s taken two months to get this far, and it would take another three to finish the tunnels.”

  “And the Banished will destroy it all in three weeks,” Borbély said. “If it takes them that long.”

  “So we have no choice,” Boldisar said. “We have to take them out now—before we lose the only advantage we have.”

  “Attacking over the glass?” John asked.

  “Except where we have other access, yes,” Boldisar said. “We’ll approach as close as we can underglass, then break out onto the surface and attack.”

  “No good.” John spoke only over TEAMCOM, not caring that he might be overheard by the personnel tending to Fred in the infirmary. “It’s a desperation move.”

  “They’ll be slaughtered,” Kelly replied on TEAMCOM. “They have no air support, and from what we’ve seen so far, they are poorly—”

  “Still can’t put my helmet on,” Fred interrupted. “And I’ve got two nurses right here next to me, working on that hematoma.”

  “Affirmative,” John said. The TEAMCOM signal was a good reflector that bounced off almost any nonabsorbent surface, so he was not surprised that Fred was still receiving despite a line of sight blocked by forty meters of sandstone slope. And since Fred’s helmet would serve as a signal repeater, he was hoping that if Linda was somewhere nearby, she would be able to receive too. “Just stay where you are and await orders. Leave the equipment alone.”

  “I’m sorry?” Fred asked.

  “You heard me—the equipment. We don’t need you causing any more trouble than you have,” John said. “Confirm, Blue Four.”

  “Blue… Four?” Fred hesitated, then seemed to realize that John’s message wasn’t intended for him at all. Maybe his concussion was getting better. “Fine, I’ll confirm.”

  At the same time, Linda’s LED flashed green inside John’s helmet. It wasn’t as good as a verbal confirmation, but John would take it. If Linda hadn’t been the one disabling the perimeter cameras, she would have flashed red or yellow.

  �
�Master Chief?” Boldisar asked. “Did you have some thoughts you’d like to share?”

  Boldisar and her commanders were watching John intently, the ones with eager eyes no doubt waiting for him to pronounce their plan sound, the ones with furrowed brows probably hoping he would tell everyone else how crazy it was.

  But John had his own mission to think about, and that meant gathering intelligence wherever he could.

  He walked along the platform until he was above one of the gently weaving lines that entered from the western edge of the map. There were several breaks in the line—presumably the impassable sections—but the route was one of the few that linked to the militia’s tunnel network, joining it via a cave some distance west of Base Gödöllő.

  “What’s this passage?” he asked.

  “We call it a tubeway,” Tabori said. She’d been among the brow-furrowing contingent when Boldisar asked for John’s thoughts. “You see how steeply downward it slopes?”

  “Now I do,” John said. “This is where the Arany Basin starts to rise toward the Highland Mountains?”

  “Exactly,” Tabori said. “The lechatelierite cooled more slowly next to the ground than on the surface. The tubeways formed wherever the slope was steep enough for the molten glass to flow away before it solidified, and where there was a place for it to drain. The lechatelierite filling the bottom of that cave is a hundred meters thick. The crust is still hot to the touch.”

  “And that is how you travel back and forth to the Gönc Drifts, is it?” Kelly asked. Sometimes it seemed like the members of Blue Team had worked together so long that they could read each other’s minds. “Through the tubeways?”

  “Not unless we want to crawl,” said Borbély. “Most of those tubes are only half a meter high.”

  “Then how do you move back and forth to the Drifts?” John asked. “You can’t travel overglass—not with the kind of Banished air presence we’ve seen.”