Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story Page 34

  “Uh, the fact that they were following us,” Fred said. “We didn’t assume that.”

  “Very true,” Kelly said. “But perhaps it was just surveillance. Maybe they were just trying to determine why we’re on Reach.”

  “And now they’re in the Highland Mountains,” Fred said, “mounting a major operation to stop us from reaching CASTLE Base. That’s no coincidence.”

  “Maybe they’re not interested in CASTLE Base at all,” John said as the situation’s list of unknowns entered a dark territory in his mind. “Maybe they’re interested in what’s underneath CASTLE Base.”

  “Oh boy.” Kelly sighed, then looked to John. “What could possibly still be under there?”

  “If anything could survive a Covenant planetary bombardment, it’d be something Forerunner,” Fred said. “And they are Keepers. Forerunner stuff is definitely high on their ‘I want’ list.”

  “Whatever they may be after down there, it’s outside our mission parameters,” John said. “The assets are our priority. We need to get to CASTLE and secure them before that ceases to be possible. Getting down there in one piece is the only thing that matters right now.”

  As the Spartans talked, Banshees and Seraphs continued to stream toward the convergence point. Their propellant trails had grown so numerous that the situation monitor looked like it was filled with blue static-dashes. The band of glasslands at the bottom of the monitor had narrowed to half its former width, a sign that the Pelican and its escorts would soon be flying into the Highland Mountains proper—if they weren’t shot down first.

  Chapov’s voice sounded over TEAMCOM. “Master Chief, are you seeing this? It might be smarter to wait until that support you requested is available.”

  Shortly after leaving New Mohács, John had contacted Sarah Palmer again, requesting that eight squadrons of Broadswords and two marine battalions with full armor support be readied for deployment to the Highland Mountains. Palmer had promised to pass his request to General Doi on the next messenger relay. But John knew the support would not arrive anytime soon. The main body of the Infinity’s Broadsword wing was still being re-armed and refueled, and it took time to arrange an infantry deployment that size. The Infinity was at full battle alert, so the delay would be a matter of hours instead of days—but there wasn’t much anyone could do to speed the process beyond that.

  “Master Chief?” Chapov asked.

  “That’s going to be a long wait,” John said. He paused, trying to figure out why the Keepers were willing to risk a major air battle to keep Blue Team away from CASTLE Base… trying to figure out whether the two enemies could be after different things… trying to weigh uncertainties against uncertainties. Finally, he realized his lack of intel made an informed decision impossible. The Keepers might not be interested in CASTLE Base at all, but they were clearly interested in stopping Blue Team—and that meant nothing had really changed. John still needed to assume the worst, and Blue Team still needed to reach CASTLE Base as soon as it possibly could.

  After a moment, John said, “You’re the pilot, Lieutenant Chapov. You’re the only one who knows whether you can get us there.”

  Chapov hesitated for a second, then said, “Let me talk to the major.”

  The channel fell silent, and John continued to watch the situation monitor. As the mountains loomed larger, the band of rolling glasslands at the bottom shrank, and the enemy fighters grew more distinct. The tiny slivers of propellant trails elongated into needles, pushing along the cruciform specks of Banshees and the teardrop dots of Seraphs.

  Chapov came back on the channel. “It’s going to be a rough ride, but we’ll get you there. Chief Mukai, set the LAAG sling and weapon. We could need a tail gunner.”

  “Permission to add some missile capability to that station?” John asked.

  “It couldn’t hurt,” Chapov said. “But be sure you’re braced. We’re going to encounter some turbulence.”

  Mukai’s eyes went wide, but she quickly unbuckled from her crash harness. She removed the mounting sling from the forward storage locker, then paused to raise a brow at the combat knife in Fred’s hand. After he secured it in the shoulder sheath under his pauldron, she made her way aft, slipping between the two excavation machines to rig the sling to its support assembly in the overhead.

  Once she’d returned to her jump seat, John and Kelly freed the M41 light anti-aircraft gun from the cargo stack and went aft themselves. There was only half a meter of space between the two excavation machines—not enough for a Spartan in Mjolnir armor to squeeze through. John climbed onto the engine compartments, scraping his back-mounted fusion reactor against the overhead as he crawled forward.

  When he reached the LHD’s driver’s seat, Kelly passed him the LAAG so he could secure it into its sling assembly. By the time he was done, his HUD showed that their Broadsword escorts had assumed a loose cone-formation, with the Pelican protected in the center. The cone was three kilometers long and five kilometers wide at its base, but in the tactical display, it looked almost solid.

  He felt the Pelican accelerate and watched in his HUD as its velocity climbed past supersonic. Fred and Kelly had each grabbed an M57 Pilum from the cargo stack and were working their way aft. There was more room alongside the excavation machines than between them, so they were shuffling along the bulkheads sideways, Fred on the LHD side and Kelly on the side with the drilling jumbo. Linda was holding two Pilums, one in each hand. She had stopped behind the excavation machines and had two cases of high-explosive multipurpose missiles wedged between the two vehicles at chest height. There wouldn’t be room for her to fire a Pilum past John and the LAAG—and the backflash would have ignited the ordnance behind her anyway—so she would be handling reloads for Fred and Kelly.

  Meanwhile Mukai was struggling to keep her feet against the Pelican’s acceleration—it was already at Mach 2—as she checked the tie-downs on the cargo stack, making sure everything had been properly secured after the weapons were removed. In the situation monitor behind her, the swarm of bright-blue propellant discs had doubled from almost fifty to just under a hundred as the Broadswords called on their auxiliary engines to continue accelerating. A steady stream of smaller disks was pulling away out in front of them, ST/MMP air-to-air missiles streaking ahead to thin the cloud of whirling Banshees.

  Beyond the Banshees, John could see the drop-shaped hulls of probably thirty Seraphs, circling in front of the familiar peaks and cliffs of the Military Training Wilderness Preserve. The Seraphs would prove far more difficult to handle than the Banshees. Their lack of agility wouldn’t matter because their shields would simply deflect the Broadswords’ missiles, so it would come down to nose-to-nose dogfighting—the Keepers’ heavy plasma cannons against the Broadswords’ asynchronous linear-induction 35mm ASW/AC autocannons.

  John watched Mukai as she struggled back to her seat and buckled in for a rough ride. The velocity readout in his HUD showed the Pelican climbing past Mach 3, and then they were in the Banshee swarm.

  The little fighters rained down in flames as the ST/MMP missiles struck home, and dozens simply disintegrated beneath the Broadswords’ autocannons. But a handful slipped through the cone formation to make an attack run, their plasma bolts zinging and sizzling off the Pelican’s armor.

  Moments later, the dropship was through the Banshees, and the troop bay fell quiet again.

  John checked his HUD and saw dozens of Banshee survivors, all circling around to pursue. But at the speed the Pelican and its escorts were traveling, the little fighters were already twenty kilometers behind the battle—and falling another kilometer behind with every passing second.

  The Seraphs came in firing, approaching in a dangerous head-on attack, hammering away with their plasma cannons, a few swinging out to risk fuel rod shots at the Pelican.

  Bad mistake.

  Knowing their smaller missiles would be useless against the Seraphs—if they had had any left—the Broadsword pilots had already switched to their ALI
-35 autocannons. Accelerated to a tenth the speed of light by magnetic coilgun technology, the heavy rounds could deplete Seraph shields with a single hit and punch through nanolaminate hull armor as though it were rolled steel.

  Half a dozen Seraphs spiraled to the ground before the two formations even met.

  John ached to join the fray, but for now all Blue Team could do was watch as Lieutenant Chapov flew the Pelican through the heart of a firestorm. Explosions everywhere. Broadswords bursting into kilometer-long flame plumes, plasma bolts burning down the length of their fuselages. Seraphs dissolving into shard clouds under the hail of ASW/AC rounds. Keeper attackers and UNSC escorts going head-to-head, then blossoming into fireballs as they turned in the same direction and touched noses.

  A heartbeat later, the Seraphs and the Broadswords were past each other—fourteen Broadswords pulling up hard to shed velocity and claim the high ground; fifteen Seraphs converging on the Pelican, their plasma cannons starting to flash three kilometers away.

  “Everybody hold on!” Chapov said. “Things are about to get wild!”

  Fred glanced across the LHD at John, but said nothing. The joke that could relieve this tension simply didn’t exist. John braced himself between the overhead and the LHD seat and watched the situation monitor.

  Which suddenly grew blurry.

  John didn’t notice the Pelican had dropped into a dive—at Mach 3—until he felt his stomach rising into his throat, then his back pressing into the LHD seat as they went into a spin—at Mach 3. He had no idea how far it was to the ground, but he was pretty sure it wouldn’t be far enough.

  He checked Linda and found her wedged between the excavation machines under the two crates of missile reloads, then located Kelly peering over the top of the drilling jumbo. He couldn’t see her expression, but he could imagine her humming one of her old songs. Chief Mukai, eyes shut, had both arms crossed over her chest, clenching the straps of her crash harness, pressing her helmet against the bulkhead as if that might keep the mounting bolts from failing.

  John was afraid to check the tactical situation on his HUD, but did it anyway.

  The Pelican was spiraling toward a long, deep canyon that descended out of the heart of the mountains, fifteen Seraphs on its tail and all still blazing plasma fire at it. But the Keepers were two kilometers away and falling farther behind as the ground approached—and, unlike Chapov, they were decelerating hard.

  Two kilometers above them, the remaining Broadswords were wheeling out of their climb and starting the long dive back into battle.

  A pair of thumps rumbled up from the deck, and John’s throat clenched. Then he felt himself floating above his seat as the Pelican exited its roll and pulled up. The situation monitor on the forward bulkhead unblurred itself—and blossomed into a flashing ball of orange that instantly filled the screen and seemed to swallow the entire craft. The hull crackled and popped with heat expansion, and John felt himself being thrown forward as the Pelican decelerated. Hard.

  It wasn’t a crash. At the velocity they were traveling, he wouldn’t have felt anything—just blossomed into a spray of atoms dispersing into the atmosphere.

  John checked the tactical display in his HUD. Again. The Pelican had dropped into the gash of a canyon he’d glimpsed earlier and fired a couple of missiles into the walls, filling the air with sensor-blinding debris that forced its pursuers to pull up. Now it was flying through the same narrow canyon nose-up… yet continuing to travel parallel to the ground as Chapov used the belly shield and vector pylons to decelerate. Incredible piloting skills. That was something John had never seen before—and something he hoped to never see again.

  Assuming he survived this time.

  Then the Pelican’s nose dropped to level, and the g-forces began to push John around as the dropship banked and slipped from side to side, following the canyon’s sinuous channel upriver, deeper into the heart of the mountains. The Pelican’s own sensors were blocked by the walls looming to either side, but its onboard computer was being fed data from its Broadsword escorts. So the tactical display showed the complete battle, and it seemed apparent that the Seraphs weren’t going to be a problem for much longer. The Broadswords had fallen in behind them, now in textbook attack position.

  The smart choice for the Seraphs would have been to cut and run. They were too ungainly in Reach’s atmosphere to switch positions and turn on the nimble Broadswords, which meant they were just flying targets. And if they tried to drop down on the Pelican from above, they wouldn’t last long enough to open fire.

  Instead of doing the smart thing, the Seraphs did both dumb things. The first group, seven craft, pursued the Pelican. The second group fell back on Jiralhanae pack-hunting tactics, dividing into two elements of four. The elements turned in opposite directions, then circled back toward each other, trying to lure their pursuers into a suicidal head-on double pass.

  But the Jiralhanae weren’t the only ones who understood team flying. The Broadswords sent just four craft after the pursuit group—and began to down all seven Seraphs, one by one.

  The rest of the Broadswords climbed into a loop, then went into a tight line formation as they began their descent and arrived on the enemy’s flank—just as the two elements were crossing. They unleashed a wall of cannon fire that demolished all eight Seraphs in little more than a breath.

  By then the Pelican’s velocity had dropped to subsonic. Which meant the Banshees were a problem again. The swarm Lieutenant Chapov had outrun earlier was coming up fast, arranging itself into a long, narrow file so it could drop in behind the Pelican and open fire. There were still more than fifty Banshees, and while they were slower than Broadswords, they were also more agile. John couldn’t think of a better craft to pursue a Pelican through a mountain canyon—which made him wonder why Chapov wasn’t climbing up where the Broadswords would be better able to protect them.

  Looking forward again, John switched his attention from his HUD to the situation monitor above Chief Mukai’s head. It took a moment for his mind to resolve the reddish-black blur into canyon walls, flashing by so fast that it was difficult to make out the familiar jags and curves—but when he did, he realized that the Pelican was exactly where Chapov and Van Houte had planned to be all along: running up the Black Iron Gorge, straight into the heart of the Reach Military Complex hidden in the Highland Mountains.

  The gorge ended at the very location where John and the other Spartans had lived for years. Nestled among the hills and heavily wooded terrain was the compound that had housed them, the academy where they had learned combat tactics, and a vast network of obstacle courses and training facilities where they had become what they now were—Spartans. It had been home to Blue Team—but it was also the perfect staging area for a covert approach. The site lay only a few kilometers from the entrance to CASTLE Base. Even better, the two locations were connected by a series of ravines that would provide ample cover for sneaking into position unseen.

  Assuming they hadn’t been filled by mudslides, of course.

  And as fate would have it, the Complex was not far from Military Reservation 01478-B, known as “Painland” by those intimately familiar with it—home to the very same obstacle course where John and Cortana had worked together for the first time, long before she had gone rampant. It had been seven long years since, but he remembered that initial run with her like it was yesterday.

  It had been described to him as a live-fire test to familiarize them with each other’s capabilities. But one of Dr. Halsey’s rivals had rigged it to undermine the entire SPARTAN-II program. That John had survived and passed was largely due to Cortana’s ingenuity and situational awareness. It pained him that the place where it had all begun might now play a part in putting an end to her.

  Van Houte’s voice sounded over TEAMCOM. “Secure troop bay for slipstream exposure.”

  Mukai did a quick visual check of the bay, lingering on the cargo stack between her and the excavation vehicles, then shifted her gaze to the Spart
ans.

  “Passengers, report status.”

  John slipped out of his seat and positioned himself between the LHD bucket and the drilling jumbo’s boom assembly. He grabbed the LAAG handle with one hand, ready to spin it around and open fire the instant the loading ramp opened.

  “Blue Leader ready.”

  As the rest of the team reported, he checked the tactical display in his HUD. The Banshees had closed to firing range and were dropping into the gorge to begin their attack. The Pelican was flying thirty meters above the river, with nearly sixty kilometers of twisting gorge ahead.

  This would be a long ride.

  Once everyone had reported ready, Mukai extended her arm and gave a thumbs-up sign. “Troop bay secure.”

  “Lower loading ramp to control-neutral position,” Van Houte said. “All weapons, fire at will.”

  Mukai acknowledged the order, then pulled a control relay from her thigh pocket, tapped a three-key sequence, and held her thumb on a toggle control. A ferocious howl filled the troop bay as the ramp dropped to a horizontal position, and the Pelican’s tail slued side to side as the slipstream began to suck at the open bay.

  John swung the LAAG around and waited for the first targets to drop into his firing window; he knew that Fred and Kelly would be doing the same with their Pilum rocket launchers. Their field of fire upward was blocked by the tail assembly and downward by the open loading ramp. Normally that would have left the Pelican vulnerable to attack from both above and below. But in the narrow, twisting confines of the Black Iron Gorge, any craft trying to dive down from above would hit nothing but a canyon wall, and the Pelican was flying so close to the river surface that it would be impossible for a Banshee to come up under it.

  The only attack possible was from the rear.