Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story Read online

  “The Keepers?” John asked. Maybe his initial assessment of the Seraphs that had taken down their Owl hadn’t been a mistake after all. “They’re working with the Banished now?”

  “They are if they wear blue armor with gold trim,” Erdei said. “More Grunts than the other two tribes, lots of Kig-Yar, not many hinge-heads?”

  “That certainly sounds like the Keepers of the One Freedom,” Kelly said. “Though why they’re consorting with the likes of the Banished, I can’t imagine. They’re supposed to be more ideological.”

  “It’s the Keepers for sure,” Tabori said. “I recognized the armor from Gao—that’s how we identified them. They’re the ones who’ve been doing most of the sniffing around the mountains too.”

  “The Keepers have been on Reach the whole time?” John asked. “For two months?”

  Tabori nodded. “That’s right. They were the first to land.”

  Kelly tipped her helmet to one side, a something doesn’t make sense here signal. And John was thinking the same thing.

  The timing was all wrong. The decision to retrieve the assets from Dr. Halsey’s lab had been made only three weeks before Blue Team inserted. And it hadn’t even occurred to Dr. Halsey that Blue Team would need to spoof the vault’s biological safeguards until John had asked about the security systems.

  “They couldn’t have been waiting on us,” Kelly finally said over TEAMCOM. “Even she couldn’t have planned that far ahead.”

  John had quickly discounted Lieutenant Chapov’s suggestion that Dr. Halsey might have set them up so the Banished could capture the spoofers. But her history of collaborating with the enemy, and implementing long-term schemes for her own purposes, had made it impossible to disregard that theory entirely.

  But now he could. The timing issues alone were enough to disprove the theory—and even more conclusive, had Halsey been working with the Banished, the Keepers would not have been conducting a blind search of the mountains. They would have already known where to find CASTLE Base.

  “Agreed,” John said over TEAMCOM. He was mindful that there might be medical personnel within earshot of Fred’s helmet, so he was careful about what he said next. “But they’ve still been following us, and it’s not because they like our shiny armor.”

  “Hello?” Boldisar said. “If you two know something about the Keepers that would affect the armory assault, we need to hear it. Now.”

  “I’m sorry, ma’am,” John said. “It appears your intelligence is better than ours. We’ve been making some faulty assumptions about the Banished’s goals.”

  “Which are?” Borbély asked.

  “In light of the information Major Tabori just provided,” John said, “we’re going to have to reappraise that.”

  Boldisar smirked. “Then I guess we can rule out hiding in the Gönc Drifts until they decide to leave.” She ran her gaze around the group of her commanders, pausing to make eye contact with each one, then asked, “Are we all agreed?”

  They mumbled their assent or gave curt nods, and once she had their commitment, she faced Erdei.

  “Let’s put together a plan to take the New Mohács armory.” She glanced up at John and Kelly, then closed her eyes for a moment and seemed to come to a decision. “But I’m concerned about the advice our Spartan friends are giving us, and I have a feeling our attack will bring the Banished together in a manner we won’t like.”

  “It might,” Erdei said.

  “It will,” Kelly said. “You have them squabbling among themselves now, but you’re prey to them. When they realize you bite back, they’ll come together to put an end to you.”

  Finally Kelly seemed to be getting through to the woman. Boldisar nodded. “I agree.” She looked back to her commanders and held their gazes. “In fact, I’m counting on it.”

  Over TEAMCOM, Kelly said, “This can’t be good.”

  John dropped his chin to indicate agreement, then watched as Boldisar continued to speak.

  “So let’s think of the armory as the bait—not the trap.”

  Erdei appeared confused, but Tabori’s face paled, while Borbély’s eyes grew round.

  “You want to use a Havok?” Borbély asked.

  “Draw them in, blow them up,” replied Boldisar.

  “Wait.” John was aghast. “You have a Havok?”

  “We have several nuclear devices,” Borbély said. “But so far I’ve only been able to bypass the lockout circuits on the BB 2550s.”

  “Bloody hell,” Kelly said over TEAMCOM. “They’re serious.”

  John didn’t reply. He studied Borbély’s sharp features and weather-beaten face more carefully, seeking some hint of the technical skill it would take to bypass a nuclear device’s safety lockout system.

  Borbély flashed a sheepish smile. “I was a systems engineer at Rajtom.”

  “That answers one question.” Rajtom had been a Misriah Armory R&D facility located outside the Reach city of Erőd. John had no idea how many weapons systems had been created there, but the Havok was a Misriah Armory design. “And I assume that’s where your devices came from?”

  Borbély nodded. “We had an assortment in the storage bunker for research purposes.”

  “How lucky,” Kelly said. “Did you recover any other surprises you haven’t mentioned?”

  “Why should we tell you?” Boldisar asked. “The Master Chief has made it clear that you’re not here to liberate Reach.”

  “No, ma’am,” John said. “But we might be able to advise you on how to use your forces and weapons most effectively.”

  “I like the plan we’re developing now,” Erdei said.

  “You would,” Kelly said. “You haven’t had time to think through the problems yet.”

  “Such as?” Boldisar asked.

  “To begin with, you’ll have to be there,” Kelly said. “You can’t just leave the device in the village square and be on your merry way. Your enemies will grow suspicious and send someone to investigate while the rest of them stand off.”

  “I’ll lead the volunteers,” Erdei said. “There’ll be no shortage of them, if our efforts will rid us of the Banished.”

  “You might succeed in eliminating most of them,” John said. The instant-death blast radius of a thirty-megaton Havok was nearly seven kilometers. The heat flash would inflict third-degree burns on clothed flesh out to forty-four kilometers. So any Banished taking part in the assault on the New Mohács armory would be neutralized. “But you’ll never get them all. There will be plenty of survivors outside the kill zone.”

  “True,” Boldisar said. “But you’re underestimating how the thermonuclear annihilation of their friends will affect their morale. I think the survivors will abandon Reach before we do it to them again.”

  “That’s one possibility,” John said. “The other possibility is that the Banished have their own nukes.”

  The flash in Boldisar’s eyes suggested she had not considered that. But Erdei said, “Good point. You Spartans think of everything—especially when it comes to avoiding a fight.”

  “That might have something to do with how many we’ve been in,” Kelly said. “We know the cost—and how to weigh it.”

  Erdei ignored her and addressed his fellow commanders. “So you disperse after we take the armory. What could they nuke that they haven’t destroyed already?”

  Boldisar thought for a moment, then said, “We’d need to disperse the training battalions too. But I like this idea.” She stepped to the edge of the holograph and called, “Enlarge New Mohács. Let’s see what we can do about planning our evacuation routes.”

  As the commanders gathered around her, Kelly’s voice came over TEAMCOM. “I don’t think we’re going to talk them out of it.”

  “Yes, we are,” John said, also over TEAMCOM. They were cornered, and he knew it. Even if they left the rehab pioneers to their own devices, Colonel Boldisar would use the Havok—and that could not be permitted. “There are still thousands of utility satellites in the Epsilo
n Eridani system. If a thirty-megaton nuke detonates on Reach, one of them is going to notice it—and feed an alert into Waypoint.”

  “Oh, that would be bad.” Fred’s voice no longer sounded tinny and distant—a sign, John hoped, that the hematoma on his head had finally diminished enough for him to put his helmet back on. “Cortana would pick up on that for sure.”

  John felt Kelly tense without even looking in her direction. “Let’s avoid using her name in comms.”

  “Sorry,” Fred said. “I have a concussion.”

  “At least you have an excuse,” Kelly said. “This time.”

  “Is this channel secure now?” John asked.

  “My helmet’s back on, if that’s what you mean.”

  “It is,” John said. “Stand by for orders. Blue Four, status?”

  Linda’s status LED flashed green, an indication that the rangers searching for her were so close she could not risk speaking, even inside her armor. John flashed green on his own status to acknowledge that he understood, then pushed his way into the line of Boldisar’s commanders.

  “This plan would interfere with my mission,” he said through his voicemitter. “I can’t let you execute it.”

  Erdei whirled on him with fire in his eyes. “Try to stop us.”

  “If it comes to that, Blue Team will stop you.” John turned to Boldisar. “But I’d rather strike a deal.”

  “Okay, talk,” she said. “What kind of deal?”

  “There’s a risk that it would draw one of her Guardians.” John pointed upward, indicating Cortana, the unseen her who had the potential to tap into any data feed in the system. “Then again, so would detonating a Havok—just faster.”

  “Guardians we can live with,” Boldisar said. “In fact, given our trouble with the Banished, it might be nice to have one around.”

  “It won’t be,” Kelly said. “I’m willing to give you my word about that.”

  “Still, we’d have a chance with the Guardian,” Borbély said. He looked to John. “What are you proposing?”

  “An alliance,” John said. “We help you rid yourselves of the Banished. In return, you forget the nukes, and help us get where we need to go in the Highland Mountains.”

  “Where do you need to go?” Boldisar asked. “And what exactly are you doing there?”

  “I’ll answer the first question when it’s necessary for you to know,” John said. “And I’ll forget you ever asked the second one.”

  Boldisar gave him a hard look, then said, “No deal. I’m not agreeing to something like that blind.”

  “And surely not for three Spartans,” Erdei said. “So far all you’ve done is talk about avoiding fights—and exposed our tunneling operations to the enemy. I don’t see you three turning the tide against twenty thousand Banished.”

  John stepped toward the major, causing the man to stagger back ever so slightly. “Two things: first, it’s four of us.” He glanced over at Borbély. “Are you in contact with your rangers?”

  “I can be.”

  “Do it,” John said. He switched to TEAMCOM. “Blue Four, reveal yourself to the search party. Try to avoid harming anyone, but defend yourself if required.”

  “It’s not,” Linda replied. “They’re surrendering now.”

  “Acknowledged,” John said. “Call Special Crew forward and stand by for orders.”

  “Affirmative,” Linda said. “It’ll take a while for Special Crew to arrive. They’re resting in a hide five kilometers back.”

  “That will be fine,” John said. He looked toward Borbély, who was now holding a headset to one ear and staring at the platform with a gaping mouth, then spoke through his voicemitter. “What are you hearing, Colonel?”

  Borbély looked up. “It was a Spartan? You were the ones who took out our perimeter cameras?”

  Kelly used her left hand to pat him on the shoulder. “Don’t be offended. We weren’t allies at the time.” She looked over at Boldisar. “We are allies now, are we not?”

  Boldisar swallowed. “We’re getting close. But I’m not making any deals for four Spartans, either. You may be good, but you’re not worth a Havok.”

  “Which brings me to the second thing.” John looked back to Erdei, then said, “Four Spartans are just the beginning.”

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  0234 hours, October 11, 2559 (military calendar)

  Underglass Approach, Banished Armory, New Mohács

  Arany Basin, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

  The load-haul-dump machine went into reverse with a loud whine, then raced past the alcove where John waited with the rest of Blue Team and twenty Reavian rangers. Stella Mukai was driving, her swiveling control seat facing aft so she could run the vehicle backward as easily as she did forward. The only light came from the green dimdots glowing almost imperceptibly along the edges of the passage, but her helmet’s flip-down night-vision visor utilized light-gathering technology that allowed her to see clearly even in such dark conditions.

  The underglass pond where Mukai had to empty the bucket was seventy meters back, so John took the opportunity to step into the tunnel. It felt like he had a permanent charley horse in his quadriceps, but in the two and a third days since his visit to Dr. Somogy in the Gödöllő Infirmary, the wound had already healed to the point that he wasn’t limping as he walked forward.

  The faint light from the dimdots was more than adequate for his Mjolnir’s fused-mode night-vision system to provide a crisp picture of the ground through which they were excavating the passage. Unlike the sandy soil prevalent in most of the Arany Basin, the dirt around New Mohács was dense clay, so compacted it broke away from the working face in helmet-sized chunks.

  John came to the demarcation line between the sandy ground where the Viery Militia had stopped digging and the clay soil where Mukai had started work with the LHD. He didn’t know why the ground changed so abruptly there, but the militia’s engineering battalion had already driven the tunnel almost a kilometer, branching off an underglass erosion channel, and there was no possibility of rerouting it now.

  The tunnel’s working face was ten meters ahead, which meant Mukai still had roughly twenty meters to dig before passing beneath the shield barrier that surrounded the Banished armory. After that, it would be another ten meters to the storm sewers that had served old Mohács, which Blue Team would then enter and chart, doing their best to relate the passages to a map of New Mohács that the pioneers had drawn from memory. With any luck, their guesses about which buildings served as the Banished barracks, hangars, and weapons vaults would prove reasonably accurate, and John would be able to select attack points under the most important facilities.

  Then came the hard part: moving five hundred nervous militia soldiers out of the underglass tunnel network into the old sewer system and guiding them to their jump-off points. It would have to be done in near-darkness, with only a handful of soldiers wearing night-vision equipment, and it would have to be done quietly, with no yelling or shouting or accidental weapon discharges.

  And it all had to be done in less than an hour, because at oh-three-twenty, four thousand militia members would be launching an overglass mechanized assault on the base. The lookout towers and shield barriers had to be down by then, or the surface attack would not even reach the base perimeter. The rehab pioneers would simply be cut down out on the barrens, and then the thousands of UNSC troops that Blue Team had requested from the Infinity would be inserting without a secure landing zone.

  So John had bigger things to worry about than what kind of dirt Mukai was excavating.

  He glanced at the lechatelierite overhead. Through his NVS, it looked as bright as a cloud full of ball lightning. But from above, particularly from the lookout towers surrounding the armory, he knew the glass would appear to be as dark as ink—until someone inadvertently shined a handlamp up from below. Even a single LED cluster would light up the surface like a ribbon of moonlit sea. How the Viery Militia was going to move five hundred inexperienced
soldiers into position as quickly as it needed to, without alerting the enemy, he had no idea. But over the last two days of planning, preparation, and movement, Borbély and Boldisar had assured him numerous times they would, and the entire assault depended on the militia’s ability to keep that promise.

  He wished it didn’t. As a Spartan, John was not accustomed to relying on citizen-soldiers to execute an assault. But there were at least a thousand Banished inside New Mohács, and those odds were a little steep—even for Blue Team.

  He heard the LHD crunching up the passage behind him and retreated to the alcove, rejoining the rest of Blue Team and the Reavian rangers. None of the “rangers” had actually served in a military unit before joining the militia, but they had all been in at least one firefight with a Banished patrol, as that was the recruitment criterion.

  The platoon selected to join the Spartans in spearheading the attack had been avid hunters before the fall of Reach. According to Borbély, they could all move silently, conceal themselves, and fire their weapons accurately. Fred had also given them a crash course in combat demolitions, so “blasting stuff to hell” could be added to their skill set. That hardly made them Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, but it did make them willing, courageous, and, under the circumstances, better than nothing.

  A muffled crump sounded over the noise of the LHD, and John peered out of the alcove to see the squat machine pushing its bucket through the compacted dirt at the head of the passage.

  The LHD lurched forward into a blackness so dark that not even his dual-mode night-vision system could penetrate it. The front tires sank, as though dropping off a ledge, and the rear wheels stopped spinning. The machine quieted to a ready thrum, and then sat motionless, with Mukai leaning forward over the controls, evidently peering into the blackness ahead.

  “Special Three?” John asked over TEAMCOM. “Report.”

  No response. He waited a moment for the LHD to reverse; when that didn’t happen, he stepped into the passage and started forward. He caught a whiff of dampness through the Mjolnir’s ventilation system; then an alarm pinged inside his helmet, and his system switched to purified air.