Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story Read online

  By the time John reached the crossover point to the militia fortifications, the plasma fire had dwindled to half its original ferocity. He opened the militia’s South Quarter comm channel and heard a panicked garble as dozens of inexperienced soldiers choked the frequency with pointless chatter. No use trying to offer the pass phrase. Even had the sentries been able to pick it out of the stream of babble, they were probably too busy shooting at Marauders to respond with an advance command. John would just have to hope they weren’t so excited that they mistook him for a Jiralhanae in power armor—and that they hadn’t mistaken Kelly for one, either.

  John switched back to TEAMCOM. “Blue Three, Blue Leader beginning the crawl.”

  To his surprise, it was Lieutenant Chapov who answered. “Come ahead, Blue Leader. The sentries are expecting you.”

  “Great,” John said. “But what’s one of my equipment operators doing on the front lines? You’re mission-critical.”

  “It was my call,” Linda said. “When I saw you were changing the plan, I decided it would be wise to have a cool head at the sentry post when you returned.”

  John was not used to thinking of Chapov in those terms, but Linda was right. It had been the lieutenant’s quick thinking that prevented the Banished armor from interrupting the militia’s assault on New Mohács. And Chapov’s composure during the insertion run had allowed him to safely land a crippled Owl, just seconds after awakening from a high-g blackout. Despite John’s misgivings and the kid’s bumpy start, the lieutenant had proved himself worth having along twice already—whether he realized it or not.

  “Makes sense,” John said. “Coming across.”

  John poked the top part of his faceplate above the rim of the streambank and saw a line of tracer rounds sailing a couple of meters over his head. Thirty meters away, at the origin point of the tracer stream, he spotted a Vulcan LAAG firing over the top of the breastworks, with Kelly’s dome-faced helmet peering through the aiming slot in its gun shield.

  Confident she wouldn’t allow a round to drop, he glanced back to check on the enemy and found a trio of Marauders only two hundred meters away. They were weaving wildly in an effort to avoid Kelly’s fire, pouring plasma bolts back in her direction and clearly trying to converge on the crossover point. As soon as they saw John crawling the twenty meters to the militia fortifications, they would almost certainly switch their fire to him. There was only one reason for the Marauders to make such a foolish charge—and that was to kill the Spartans who had savaged their artillery line.

  A burst of LAAG fire hit the middle vehicle, punching a row of holes straight up the center, through the driver and then the gunner. The Marauder dropped an intake pod into the glass and launched itself in a series of cartwheels, sending weapons and pieces of vehicle flying in all directions. Linda’s sniper rifle cracked twice, and another Banished driver and gunner slumped in their cockpits and veered toward the edge of the battlefield.

  John pulled himself over the bank and began a high crawl toward the militia breastworks, head raised and assault rifle cradled in his elbows. A kilometer to his left, the Banished artillery was lined up along the edge of a farm field, lobbing so much plasma toward New Mohács that the fiery arcs reminded him of a cathedral interior. Their hulls were only partially defiladed by the drop-off where the rehab pioneers had cut the lechatelierite away—an indication of just how badly the enemy was underestimating the Viery Militia.

  The fortifications were mostly for show, occupied by a force just large enough to suggest the rehab pioneers planned to make their stand outside New Mohács. The real defenses—the bunkers and the tank traps and the minefields—were hidden just inside the village. Earlier, Blue Team had worked with the militia commanders to set up a series of collapse pockets that would funnel the enemy into kill zones flanked by emplaced gauss cannons and man-portable rocket launchers.

  The preparations were going to be a deathtrap for attackers, but they weren’t going to save the village. Without UNSC reinforcements, New Mohács would surely fall when the Banished air support arrived. The only thing the militia could do about that was make them pay a heavy price.

  John reached the breastworks and slipped through a dogleg entry passage into a sandy trench beyond. Wide enough for a Warthog to navigate easily, it was the source of the glass block that had been used to construct the breastworks ringing New Mohács. It was now strewn with Lotus antitank mines, which wouldn’t be activated until the token force of defenders withdrew from the fortifications.

  Because the Viery Militia was located on Reach, and Reach had been the UNSC’s primary depot world before being obliterated by the Covenant, it was the best-equipped force of irregular troops that John had ever seen. They had made good use of the assets still functioning, placing an untended assault rifle or light machine gun every two meters along the breastworks. A handful of volunteers were running back and forth along the firing platform, selecting weapons at random and pausing just long enough to take potshots at whatever they saw moving out on the barrens.

  The deception seemed to be working pretty well. The Banished artillery lines had spent half the night trying to soften up the ring of empty fortifications. They had dropped so much plasma into and behind the trench that the ground had become a virtual moonscape, with one rain-filled crater overlapping the next. There were a few dozen half-charred bodies and a handful of burned-out Warthogs scattered around the devastation—but the losses were almost nothing compared to what they would have been had the breastworks actually been manned.

  John found Kelly standing in a Warthog thirty meters to his left. She was no longer firing the Vulcan because she had taken out the last Marauder, but she continued to keep watch as Fred made the crossover crawl. In the Warthog’s driver’s seat was a slender lieutenant with blond hair cut blunt at the jawline.

  She smiled and saluted. “Master Chief.”

  “Lieutenant Disztl.” John returned the salute and called, “You’re here to collect us?”

  She raised her chin toward the firing platform that overlooked the entry passage. “As soon as Spartan-104 arrives. They want to consult.”

  John did not bother asking who “they” were, or what they wanted to consult about. He had told Colonel Boldisar and her commanders that the UNSC drop would happen by sunrise, or not until the following sunset. Now the Viery Militia was wondering how to hold on until nightfall. He wished he knew what to tell them.

  Fred emerged from the entry passage, and John pointed him toward the Warthog. Then he waved Chapov down from the firing platform that overlooked it.

  “You too, Lieutenant,” he said over TEAMCOM. “We need to do some planning.”

  Chapov hopped down. He was still dressed in his flight suit and wearing his pilot’s helmet with the night-vision equipment, but he had traded his MA5B bullpup for an BR75 service rifle. The kid understood the principle of the right tool for the right job. The MA5B bullpup was a good weapon for close-quarters fighting in buildings and village streets, but the BR75 was long-range, ideal for laying cover fire across a kilometer of glass barrens.

  As they followed Fred toward the Warthog, Chapov asked, “Planning for what?”

  “For how to get out of here,” Fred replied, “and on with our mission.”

  “What about the militia?” Chapov asked. “Are we going to just abandon them?”

  “It’s either that, or stay here and die at their side,” Kelly said, also over TEAMCOM. “And to blazes with retrieving those assets for Dr. Halsey.”

  “That’s right,” Fred said. “Who needs to worry about mission priorities?”

  Chapov’s chin dropped, and John realized the young lieutenant did not recognize the banter for what it was—an indication that Fred and Kelly viewed him as an equal member of the team, someone they trusted to look past the barb and see the point.

  John wasn’t sure how to communicate that. Developing young special-forces officers had never been part of his brief. But Chapov’s relentless effort
s to impress him had helped John recognize that being considered by the broader UNSC as the Master Chief, some of his informal responsibilities were just as important as the ones spelled out in writing. Youthful soldiers idolized him in a way he had not given much thought to until now, and how he responded to that adulation would shape the kind of soldiers they went on to become.

  After all, John wasn’t going to be around forever. Beyond his enhancements and experience, luck had been on his side for years now. But sooner or later, he was going to take a plasma strike in the chest… or fall into a star… or maybe even just get too old and slow to lead the fight.

  And it wasn’t the next generation of Spartans he was thinking about. The UNSC had that eventuality well in hand with the SPARTAN-IV program. Dr. Halsey might look down her nose at them because they didn’t have the same kind of physical strength and durability as her Spartan-IIs, but John had been training with some of the IIIs and IVs aboard the Infinity. What they lacked in brute force, they made up for in grit and resourcefulness—and in sheer numbers. He still found it hard to imagine hundreds of Spartans.

  Mostly John was thinking about all the nonaugmented men and women he had fought with—the Halima Ascots and the Avery Johnsons and the Miranda Keyeses who had dedicated their lives to defending humanity. Soldiers like that didn’t make themselves. They were developed by older, wiser leaders who recognized in them the same kind of potential that Marmon Crowther had seen in John all those years ago… that day on the edge of Covenant space, when Crowther had affixed the insignia of the master chief petty officer to John’s armor. Now, as hard as it was to accept sometimes, it was John who was the “wise old leader.” And with that reality came a duty he had never been trained for—and one for which it was probably impossible to be trained.

  But it was a duty nonetheless.

  As they arrived at the Warthog, John gestured Lieutenant Chapov toward the front passenger’s seat.

  Chapov shook his head. “I can squeeze into the back.”

  John continued to hold his hand out. “You’ll never hold on,” he said. “You haven’t seen the way Lieutenant Disztl drives.”

  Chapov looked more surprised than confused, and made no move to climb in.

  “Go on. You deserve it.” John gently shoved Chapov into the front seat, next to Disztl’s compact frame. “Lieutenant Maks Chapov, meet Lieutenant Bella Disztl, five-time—”

  “Winner of the Tantalus Ten Thousand—I know.” He extended a hand toward her. “Wow. What are you doing here?”

  “Taking my world back.” Disztl studied Chapov’s hand without taking it. “So, you’re a buggy fan?”

  “I drive a little too,” Chapov said. “But I followed all five of your wins on DuroCam. I knew those two clowns in forty-nine were on stim-packs.”

  Disztl flashed him a wide smile. “A pleasure to meet you, Maks Chapov.” She finally reached across and gave him a long handshake. “Any friend of the Master Chief’s is a friend of mine.”

  “Oh,” Chapov said. “The Master Chief and I aren’t exactly—”

  “Sure we are.” John lightly slapped Chapov on the shoulder, then hopped into the back of the Warthog. “Go with it, Lieutenant.”

  The bed was filled by the LAAG, its mount, and standing room for the gunner—in this case, Kelly—so there were no seats. John sat on top of the side panel behind Chapov, then wrapped an arm around the roll bar. Fred was sitting opposite him, simply grasping the top of the panel with both hands.

  John pointed to the roll bar. “You’ll need to hang on.”

  Fred’s faceplate turned toward the bar. With their augmented strength and balance, Spartans did not generally have a hard time staying inside any moving vehicle.

  “Seriously?” he asked.

  “Oh, seriously.” Kelly swung the LAAG around so the barrels were pointed rearward and her back was braced against the roll bar. “If you haven’t ridden with her—”

  Disztl floored the accelerator and the Warthog shot down the trench, tires rubbing against one wall and then the other, dodging twisted equipment and chunks of glass block and the remnants of other vehicles. Banished plasma bolts continued to rain down, the frequency no greater than before, but occasionally landing close enough to spray the Warthog with shards of shattered breastworks or beads of fused sand. Once Disztl even bounced a wheel off an overturned Mongoose to avoid dropping the passenger side into a still-fiery crater.

  John peered past Kelly’s legs and found Fred’s arm curled tight around the roll bar. “Now do you believe me?”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  0612 hours, October 12, 2559 (military calendar)

  New Mohács

  Arany Basin, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

  As John expected, it was a wild ride back into New Mohács. After five armor-clanging minutes in the trench, Disztl put the Warthog into a side-skid and made a fishtail turn onto a ramp John had not even seen until they were on it, then took them on a serpentine run across a hundred meters of barrens, banking off crater walls and bouncing rim to rim as they dodged through the plasma barrage into New Mohács and shot down a dogleg alley lined by LAAG bunkers, decelerating hard as they entered an even shorter dogleg alley lined by firing ports with rocket launchers and gauss cannons. At last they came to the checkpoint and Disztl stood on the brakes, bringing the Warthog to an abrupt stop that rocked them forward so hard John felt a jolt as the rear wheels dropped back to the ground.

  A pale militiaman stepped out of the guardhouse to greet them. Uniformed in a dark farmer’s shirt with a corporal’s double chevrons sewn onto the sleeve, he carried an M6E Magnum sidearm in a secured holster, with one hand on the flap. A little behind him, off to one side where he would have a clear firing lane at Disztl, stood a private holding an MA5B assault rifle at port-arms. In the street between them lay two Lotus antitank mines. The status LEDs on top were dark, indicating that the sensors were not activated. John knew there would be a third guard, concealed nearby, ready to activate the mines.

  Good. Their commander hadn’t forgotten the fifteen-minute lecture on checkpoint security that Fred had presented two days earlier.

  The corporal stopped a meter from the driver’s side of the Warthog.

  “Hello, Bella—um, Lieutenant Disztl.” He eyed Chapov for a moment, then said, “Identify your passengers.”

  “Really?” Disztl wiped the rain from her brow and flicked it vaguely in his direction. “They’re Spartans.”

  “I can see that,” the corporal said. “But it was the Spartans who said we had to identify everyone.”

  “By everyone, he means me,” Chapov said. He turned so his face would be visible through the opening left by the flight helmet’s retracted face shield. “Lieutenant Maks Chapov, UNSC special forces. That’s Master Chief John-117 behind me, Kelly-087 on the gun, and Fred-104 on your side.”

  “You can let us through now,” Fred said to the guard. “Apparently we’re late for a meeting.”

  “Yes, sir.” The corporal checked to confirm that the Lotus mines were still inactive, then nodded to his rifleman and saluted Disztl. “You’re free to pass, Lieutenant. Watch the mines.”

  Disztl rolled her eyes. “Yeah, you think?”

  She advanced cautiously for once, weaving the Warthog from one side of the road to the other to avoid the mines, then turned down a cross street onto the main boulevard. Here she actually had to drive even slower, as the puddle-dotted street was filled with tank traps and barricades designed to convert it into a killing field once the Banished armor entered the village. Still, New Mohács was only two kilometers across, and the militia headquarters came into view a couple of minutes later. A three-story glass-block building that had once served as the village school, it had been chosen not because of its size or central location, but because it had a subterranean storm shelter large enough to house the tactical planning suite.

  Disztl stopped in front of the building’s fortifications and dismounted so she could identify her passenger
s to the sentries stationed at the entrance. But only Chapov went with her. Kelly remained standing behind the LAAG with her helmet tipped back, looking into the sky, and John and Fred weren’t going anywhere until they knew what she was staring at.

  “Trouble?” John asked.

  “Maybe.” She pointed northwest, where a faint cluster of tiny orange trails was beginning to glow through the clouds, slowly growing larger and brighter as they came closer. “Maybe not.”

  John swung out of the Warthog, then motioned to the sentries. “Get Colonel Boldisar and her commanders out here,” he said. “Do it now.”

  The post sergeant scowled, but looked skyward—and immediately nodded to a female sentry whose braided black hair was so long it covered the rank insignia on her shoulders.

  “Do as he says, Földi,” the sergeant said. “Tell them to hurry.”

  John turned to Disztl. “I want you back in the driver’s seat. Chapov, get over to Special Crew. Make sure those excavation machines are ready to move—and make sure Major Van Houte puts someone on the roof, where TEAMCOM won’t be blocked.”

  “On it,” Chapov said. He circled the Warthog, timing it so that he was passing the driver’s seat as Disztl climbed in. He flashed her a big grin. “Nice to meet you, Bella.”

  “You, too, Maks.” She winked, then said, “Look me up when this is over. Maybe we can go for a buggy ride.”

  Chapov shot a guilty look toward John.

  “Move it, hotshot.” John pointed across the street. “Tell Major Van Houte to keep me posted on Special Crew’s readiness.”

  He returned his gaze to the sky, where the cluster of flame trails had grown long and bright enough to confirm that an insertion was definitely inbound. The flame heads were already showing their oval shape, even through the clouds and the rain, so it was clearly a flight of dropships rather than a fall of Single Occupant Exoatmospheric Insertion Vehicles.