Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story Read online

  A campaign that should be starting any moment now.

  After liberating New Mohács from the Banished, the Viery Militia had spent the next twenty-six hours preparing to hold what they had captured, calling on Blue Team’s expertise and Special Crew’s excavation equipment to erect a ring of fortifications around the village.

  To no one’s surprise, the Banished had spent their own time bringing in forces to counterattack, and now New Mohács was surrounded by enemy formations. The gentle ridge where John was hiding along with Fred and Kelly was about fourteen hundred meters south of the village, above a swale where two thousand Banished infantry stood waiting in the rain. They were gathered behind a long line of mechanized armor, twenty Wraiths interspersed among fifty Marauders, arrayed along the ridge ahead.

  The Wraiths were already attacking, lobbing rounds of crackling plasma across a kilometer of glass barrens in long blue arcs that frequently overshot the ring of freshly raised breastworks surrounding New Mohács. In John’s night-vision system, their oval-domed hulls and overlapping armor plates made them look vaguely like giant floating tortoises.

  But it was the Marauders he was most worried about. Wide in front and narrow in back, they were longer but slimmer than the Wraiths, with smaller reservoirs of carrier gas for their plasma cannons. Unfortunately, they were also nimble and quick, and in the narrow alleys and streets of New Mohács, their top-mounted gunners’ turrets would make them far more effective than Wraiths. So they were the vehicles Blue Team would be concentrating fire on first.

  Besides, the three Spartans had already arranged a little surprise for the Wraiths.

  Similar forces of Banished had assembled on the other three sides of New Mohács, ready to advance as soon as dawn came and they could see what they were shooting at. Blue Team couldn’t stop them all, of course. But John hoped that by disrupting the group on the south side of the village, the Spartans would cause enough confusion to delay the assault until support arrived from the Infinity.

  Assuming there was going to be any support, which was beginning to look doubtful. The gray light of false dawn was already spreading along the eastern horizon, and it would be morning in less than thirty minutes. General Doi would not insert the first wave of drop-troops after daylight—not when John’s request had included a warning to expect large enemy forces and hostile air superiority. The UNSC’s ubiquitous night-vision technology was about the only advantage the initial drop-troops would have, and Doi would not surrender it lightly.

  John backed a meter down the slope so his helmet wouldn’t be silhouetted against a brightening horizon, then flashed status green three times—make ready. He checked the silenced MA40 assault rifle lying at his side, clearing the suppressor and muzzle of mud, making sure the firing selector moved freely through all positions. Next he inspected the dust seals on the M41 rocket launcher on loan from the Viery Militia. Finally he examined the reload tubes on his magmounts, then switched his status to steady green.

  Kelly and Fred went green immediately after he did, and only then did Linda’s LED turn green as well. She was seventeen hundred meters away, lying atop a four-story building inside New Mohács. She was well beyond the barrage zone, but the steadily falling curtain of blinding plasma would prevent her from providing overwatch until the artillery was silenced—which John expected to be very soon.

  Over TEAMCOM, he said, “Ready Volley One.”

  “Volley One ready,” Fred replied.

  John shouldered the M41 and linked the sight to the night-vision reticle in his HUD, then returned to the ridge crest. The twenty Wraiths were the only armor actually firing on the Viery Militia right now, but not for much longer.

  An hour earlier, he and his two companions had infiltrated the enemy lines, then lurked in the darkness, quietly tossing cubes of C10 wrapped in adhesive sleeves at passing Wraiths as the Banished artillery glided into barrage formation. They hadn’t hit all of their targets, but they had managed to stick a cube near the mortar mounts of most of the Wraiths—and behind the turrets of fifteen Marauders as well.

  John targeted a Marauder near the middle of the line. Even with his helmet’s optical systems maximized, there was no way through the rain and darkness to tell whether it was one of the vehicles that had been tagged with a C10 cube. But the odds were good that it wasn’t—and that was what he was hoping for.

  He flashed his status LED to indicate he was ready to fire. Once Fred and Kelly had done likewise, John spoke over TEAMCOM again.

  “Execute.”

  The first fifteen cubes detonated in a simultaneous volley, sending pillars of white flame shooting skyward.

  John fired the M41 at his targeted Marauder. At such long range, it would take the rocket a few seconds to arrive, and it was hard to be sure the attack would disable the Marauder. Rather than waiting to see, John swung his reticle to the next Marauder and fired again.

  The first rocket was still in the air as he detached the empty firing tubes, grabbed his assault rifle, and speed-crawled backward. The exhaust flash could easily give away his firing position, so a failure to relocate was a good way to get killed.

  Once he’d traveled five meters down the slope, John deactivated his status indicator so Kelly and Fred would know he was moving to his second firing position, a similar spot about two hundred meters away. He could hear the Reavers, the Banished’s anti-aircraft walkers, on the other side of the ridge stomping through the darkness in search of aerial attack-craft. To the enemy, it would seem like the C10 blasts were the result of bombs dropped from above.

  As John ran across the wet glass, his thigh wound began nagging him again. He’d have to keep the injury in mind and avoid sprinting or jumping if he could. His performance metrics already had his functionality down to 96 percent. If he tore any more of the half-healed muscle, that would drop even further, and this was not the sort of battle where a Spartan could limp along at 85 percent without endangering his team.

  When he reached the second position, John attached the new tubes to the M41 rocket launcher, then crawled back to the ridge crest and switched his status back to green so the rest of the team would know he was ready. Kelly’s and Fred’s lights were already green. They were about a hundred and fifty meters to either side of him, well beyond motion-tracker range and far enough apart so they couldn’t all be eliminated by a single plasma round—but close enough to concentrate firepower if necessary.

  The enemy still seemed to have no idea where the initial attack had come from. The mechanized armor was moving into staggered formation to avoid making themselves easy targets for an aerial bombing run. The infantry was scattering, trying to avoid bunching up or being run over. John magnified the image and, through his helmet’s night vision, saw that most of their faces were still looking skyward, searching for nonexistent bomber craft. But a handful of grizzled Jiralhanae and sly-looking Kig-Yar were scanning the area of the ridge where John and the others had just been. Even if none of them had actually seen the rocket flashes behind them, they were certainly smart enough to realize that a rear attack was possible.

  Five Banished Reavers were walking back and forth along the bottom of the swale that separated the two ridges, their sensor dishes and shoulder-like missile pods tipped toward the sky. Before John could begin the sequence for firing the second C10 volley, Fred’s voice came over TEAMCOM.

  “Maybe we should target those Reavers instead of the Marauders. Five of them could take out a bunch of Pelicans.”

  “If there were Pelicans coming, I would think we’d be seeing insertion trails by now,” Kelly said.

  John glanced eastward, where the silver light of false dawn was rapidly turning into the red glow of true dawn. Then he looked overhead, searching the black sky for the tiniest streak of crimson that would suggest the fiery trail of a Pelican dropping out of orbit, and saw only the darkness of night clouds.

  “Good thought, Two,” John finally said. “But let’s stick with the Marauders. It’s beginning to
look like we’ll need to improvise our own extraction from this mess.”

  John didn’t need to add that improvising their own extraction would mean returning to New Mohács to regroup with Linda and Special Crew—and that meant doing their best to minimize the number of Marauders screaming through the streets, blasting everything in sight.

  “Can’t blame a guy for thinking positive,” Fred said. “Give the word.”

  “Ready Volley Two,” John said.

  “Volley Two ready.”

  John set his assault rifle on the glass beside him and shouldered the M41. “Execute.”

  Another round of detonations sent pillars of white flame shooting skyward. The Reavers immediately began to spray suppression fire into the air, filling the brightening sky with missile trails and tracer spikes. John fired on a Marauder sitting behind two Wraiths, then shifted to the next one—and found it already backing out of formation. He launched his second rocket at it, but it had barely left the tube before the Marauder spun toward him.

  “Stay sharp!” John grabbed his assault rifle and began to back down the slope. “We’ve been spotted!”

  The Marauder’s gunner followed the rocket’s propulsion tail back to John and sent a pair of plasma mortar rounds flying in his direction.

  Rockets were slower than plasma, so both of John’s attacks were still in flight as the plasma rounds shot past wide to either side. He saw his first rocket strike his originally targeted Marauder, sending a Jiralhanae gunner flying and a geyser of carrier gas shooting skyward as the pressurized turret feed emptied the tank; then he was too far below the crest to see whether his second rocket struck home.

  He heard it detonate too far away, just before another pair of plasma trails stretched past overhead and confirmed his miss. He lay flat on the wet glass, about forty meters below the ridge crest. The Marauder was coming up the other side, so its gunner would not be able to depress his plasma cannons far enough to hit John until the vehicle crossed over and started downhill.

  John checked his HUD. Neither Kelly nor Fred was in motion-tracker range, but both had switched to green status, which meant they were on their way to their third designated positions. Being careful to keep his helmet pressed to the glass and his hand low enough to avoid the stream of plasma rounds sizzling overhead, he pulled his last set of rocket tubes off his magmounts and reloaded the M41.

  As he worked, he said, “Blue Leader pinned down at position two. Blue Three, call the next volley while I take care of this.”

  Kelly’s status light flashed in acknowledgment. John heard her begin the sequence, then saw the Marauder’s two intake pods rising over the ridge crest. They were spread wide like a scorpion’s claws, and in his NVS, their mouths were glowing red with the heat of the engines they were feeding. He centered the M41’s sight midway between the intake pods and forced himself to wait until the front edge of the hull appeared, the antigravity field beneath it bright white in his NVS. He waited two more breaths… until he had a clear view of the forward projection pads.

  He fired.

  At such a short range, the rocket struck in less than a second, punching through the vehicle’s unarmored underside and detonating within the hull. Both Jiralhanae flew from their cockpits on towers of flame, and the hull dropped to the glass and began to bleed fire and carrier gas into the darkness.

  Normally John would have checked for escorts before moving. But the booming of the third C10 volley was rolling over the ridge crest, providing the perfect diversion. Carrying his MA40 in his left hand and the M41 in his right, he leaped to his feet and raced away—his left leg heavy as lead for two steps, his boot slipping on the wet glass until his thigh muscle loosened under the influence of the Mjolnir’s reactive circuits.

  He traveled ten steps before a stream of plasma bolts lit the sky over his head. He turned to see a third Marauder cresting the ridge, its cannons depressed as far as they would go and the gunner leaning forward in the turret, trying to get the vehicle to rock downward so he could hit his target.

  John raised his assault rifle and put a pair of three-shot bursts into the gunner’s faceplate. A cascade of blood, red and bright in John’s night vision, poured from beneath the helmet’s jaw-guards, and the Brute slumped forward over the plasma cannons.

  The driver swung the Marauder in John’s direction and accelerated, trying to run him down. John brought the M41 SPNKr up, stopped, and fired one-handed.

  The rocket entered the right intake pod and detonated, blowing it apart and flipping the Marauder onto its cannon turret just a few meters away. As it skidded past, John put a couple of rifle bursts into the forward cockpit for good measure. Once he was sure the driver wouldn’t be able to scramble free and come after him, he detached the SPNKr’s tubes and slapped the empty launcher onto a magmount.

  Kelly’s voice came over TEAMCOM. “Shall we fall back now?” She was a hundred meters away, holding her MA40 and kneeling in the bottom of the shallow swale at the base of the ridge. Fred knelt a hundred meters east of her, both of them silhouetted against a silver band of dawn light pushing through the rain clouds. “Or were you thinking of destroying the enemy out here in the barrens?”

  The question was tongue-in-cheek, of course. Even Blue Team couldn’t fight off a squadron of Marauders and two thousand infantry out in the open. They weren’t carrying enough ammunition.

  “No need to do it the hard way.” John started toward her at a fast run, holding back just shy of a sprint. He didn’t want to hold up the team by aggravating his thigh wound, and if he got sloppy and pushed too hard, the Mjolnir’s reactive circuits wouldn’t be able to compensate. “Let’s fall back.”

  The trio performed a rapid combat withdrawal, one member covering while the other two moved. It was standard procedure under the conditions, but the destruction of so much artillery had left the Banished too disorganized to pursue—or even identify the attack source. Fred had to empty most of a magazine taking out two sets of gunners and drivers when a pair of Marauders suddenly appeared over the ridge. Other than that, the three Spartans were able to skirt the enemy’s flank unchallenged, then move north toward New Mohács.

  The original plan had called for them to remain outside the village until the Infinity drop began, then link up with the first wave of troops to coordinate a counterattack. Absent the drop, the best defense would be to hide in the barrens and launch a high-intensity guerrilla campaign that would keep the enemy’s attention focused on them rather than New Mohács. But that would leave Blue Team separated from Special Crew and the excavation machines, and—as much as it pained John to admit it—their primary mission on Reach was to recover the assets Dr. Halsey needed to stop Cortana, not to support the Viery Militia.

  Blue Team dropped into an old streambed that cut across the barrens in front of the Banished artillery, angling toward the fortifications on the west side of the village. The entire channel was strewn with Lotus antitank mines, but Fred was the one who had put them there, and the sensors were not engaged.

  The stream bottom was slick with mud and knee-deep in flowing water, so it was slow going—and painful. They were traveling against the current, and every step tightened the knot in John’s thigh. It didn’t help that the lechatelierite-covered banks were only shoulder height. To keep their helmets below the rim, they ran hunched over for more than a kilometer.

  They were almost to the crossover point when the crack of an SRS99-S5 sniper rifle punched through the general roar and rumble of the plasma barrage surrounding New Mohács. A second crack sounded.

  Linda’s voice came over TEAMCOM. “Run faster.” Another crack. “You’ve been spotted.”

  Crack.

  Kelly slowed her pace, moving back toward John’s left side, and Fred appeared on John’s motion tracker, coming up from behind. John’s performance metrics had only fallen to 94 percent, but even a 6 percent drop-off was noticeable to a pair of soldiers who had been fighting at his side since they were fifteen.

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��Don’t even think about bunching up,” John ordered. “Blue Three, move out. I want you on a Vulcan when those Marauders open fire. Blue Two—”

  “I know, I know,” Fred said. He had already dropped out of motion-detector range again. “The rear guard stays in the back.”

  “Actually,” John replied, “I was going to tell you to keep up.”

  He picked up the pace and, ignoring the stab of pain that shot down his leg with each step, began to cross back and forth across the streambed, trying to stay in the shallow water, which didn’t put as much drag on his shins. John had intended to have Fred take the middle position, but Fred had clearly guessed that and taken action to make the switch impractical. It was okay; had it been Fred—or any other Spartan—contending with the effects of a wound, John would have done the same thing.

  Linda’s sniper rifle cracked again. John raised his helmet just high enough to see over the bank and found the glass barrens already shining with the light of a gray dawn. A half kilometer out, a ragged line of fifteen Marauders was coming fast and converging on his position. Another half kilometer behind them, only two Wraiths—all that remained after Blue Team’s C10 detonations—were still lobbing plasma toward the militia fortifications outside New Mohács.

  Crack. One of the Marauders went into a wild spin as the slain driver’s hands slipped from its controls.

  John hunched back down and continued to run. A tremendous rattle arose as someone behind the fortifications opened up with a pair of Vulcan light anti-aircraft guns. The attack was answered an instant later by streams of plasma bolts. John didn’t dare raise his head to look again, but he knew the LAAG fire would be dealing some serious damage to the oncoming Marauders. For Vulcans, designed as close-in air defense weapons, five hundred meters was medium range, and they fired five hundred armor-piercing rounds per minute that were just as devastating to ground vehicles as they were to Banshees.