Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story Page 36

  John nodded. “Affirmative.”

  He went into the troop bay after Fred and helped him drag the haulage buckets out. The cargo platform on the back of the LHD was sagging, so they loaded the haulage buckets—still filled with winches and gelignite bins—into the two-kiloliter mucking bucket on the front.

  Van Houte arrived running. “Time to go,” he said. “The Banshees are climbing out of the gorge.”

  Fred looked back across fifty meters of rock barrens toward the edge of the drop-off. “Not arguing—but how do you know?”

  Van Houte pointed into the sky, where two Broadswords were circling just beneath the cloud ceiling, one waggling its wings and the other doing barrel rolls.

  “Our escorts may be out of ammunition,” he said. “But they still have eyes.”

  “They couldn’t have used a comm unit?” Fred asked.

  “Whatever works,” John said. There were a dozen reasons pilots might signal visually instead of electronically—the most likely being that their squadron commander was dead and they didn’t have time to request access to the Spartans’ encrypted channels. “Blue Two, grab a Pilum and ride shotgun with Chief Mukai on the jumbo.”

  Fred flashed an acknowledgment and headed for the machine. No one really expected Lieutenant Chapov to take out the Banshees. But no one wanted to deny him the shot either.

  Major Van Houte was already climbing into the driver’s seat of the LHD, so John signaled Kelly to take lead, then fell in between the two machines on foot. Linda hung back on rear guard, ready to bring Nornfang to bear on anything that popped up over the horizon.

  They started across the charred vestiges of the compound, toward the ravine system that John intended to use for their approach to CASTLE Base. The ravine would connect to Longhorn Valley, a broad dale that wound back and forth across the western portion of the Highland Mountains. It eventually thinned down to another narrow ravine that cradled Big Horn River, yet another critical site in the Spartans’ training. Countless exercises had been conducted on that river during that time, forging them together into the team they now were—this place had made them.

  John wondered if, after completing this mission, they would ever make it back to Reach. It was a somber thought, but it wasn’t the first time it had crossed his mind. If the rehab pioneers had any say about it, one day the Covenant’s work would be undone and Reach would be restored. John might never see that day, but the thought of it gave him some measure of pride. Humanity wasn’t done with Reach yet.

  They had been traveling only a minute when Kelly raised an arm and pointed at the ground, about fifty meters to her left.

  “It really shouldn’t surprise me,” she said without breaking stride. “But that is about the last thing I ever expected to see again.”

  It took a moment for John to find what she was pointing at… then he saw a small object about the size of his own helmet, half-buried and curving up out of the ground. At first he thought it was a lump of lechatelierite or an oddly shaped rock, but the hint of brassy sheen made him realize he was looking at the top half of a bell.

  The same one the Spartans would ring three times when they completed the notorious obstacle course Chief Mendez had called “the playground.”

  “I don’t know why you shouldn’t be surprised,” Fred said. “I sure as hell am. I’d have thought some Jackal would have sold it as a war relic by now.”

  “They don’t know its worth,” Linda said. “To them, it’s just a hunk of brass.”

  “I’m glad for that,” John said.

  He thought about suggesting they dig it up after the mission, if they had time. Except they wouldn’t have time, and he knew it.

  And maybe it was better that way.

  He had been six years old the first time he rang that bell. A lifetime ago. He’d been assigned to a team with Kelly and his buddy Samuel-034, and told to win a race together. He had won all right, sprinting ahead alone to climb a greased pole and ring the bell three times.

  But he had left Kelly and Sam behind, and the goal had been to win as a team. All three of them had gone without dinner that night. For the first time, John had understood what it meant to depend on someone else to succeed—and to have them depend on him.

  To a six-year-old, it had been a simple but profound lesson. It changed the way he looked at the world, and also at himself, from then on. The next time the three of them teamed up, they had eaten well that evening. The bell was a big part of his past, but it belonged here on Reach with the rest of his childhood. If he removed it from the compound now… it would surely lose that meaning, and be just an ordinary bell.

  John had already passed it when a boom rolled across the barrens behind him. He spun in time to see the first Banshee in the sky beyond their downed Pelican, engulfed in flames and dropping back into the gorge.

  As he watched, the second Banshee flew out of the gorge—and was met by a white propellant lance rising from the Pelican’s cockpit. The Banshee erupted in a fireball, then fell onto the plateau and began to roll across the ground.

  The last Banshee arrived, dashing onto the plateau, swinging wide to approach the wrecked Pelican from the side. Its plasma cannons began to blaze, and John saw Linda shoulder Nornfang, the sniper rifle’s barrel tracking the craft as she prepared to open fire.

  But she didn’t pull the trigger, even when John felt sure she had the Banshee in her sights and had worked out where it would be when her bullet arrived. Even from two hundred meters away, he could see the flashes of the Banshee’s bolts punching through the Pelican’s hull. And still, Linda held her fire.

  Then the Banshee was on its target, pulling up hard to avoid a collision just as the Pelican ignited, a giant ball of white fire. The Banshee seemed to ride the explosion higher for a second, then disintegrated into a confetti of glowing shards.

  Linda lowered her sniper rifle.

  Fred said, “You know, I think we might’ve been underestimating Chapov—even after we stopped underestimating him.”

  “Yeah.” John pulled his sound suppressor from its storage pouch, then fitted it onto the end of his MA40. “I think we were.”

  He turned toward the bell and took aim, then rang it three times.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  1308 hours, October 12, 2559 (military calendar)

  Vanadinite Mountain, Csongrád Region

  Highland Mountains, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

  John didn’t do “waiting” well. Having time to plan was good. Having time to obsess over weak spots and contingency plans… not so much. Worse yet was replaying the recent past, spending hours second-guessing decisions he had made in seconds. Like now, wondering if there had been a way to save Bella Disztl, or if he had been right to let Lieutenant Chapov make that crazy flight up Black Iron Gorge. It had been Chapov’s call, of course—but John had known what he would decide.

  John and the rest of Blue Team were high on the shoulder of Vanadinite Mountain, doing surveillance on the approach to CASTLE Base. They had been lying in the shadows beneath a Warthog-sized boulder for two hours, looking out over a broad valley toward the stony slopes of Omeiite Mountain. Within the valley lay a huge basin where the Covenant’s plasma batteries had burned away Menachite Mountain seven years earlier, removing it all the way down to the roots.

  At more than ten kilometers across and close to two hundred meters deep, the basin resembled a vast open-pit surface mine. But instead of the terraced benches that mines used to control rockfall and erosion, its walls were steep lechatelierite slopes. Over the years, the rim had collapsed onto the slopes, and untold tons of talus and gravel had slid down onto the basin floor.

  Near the center of the basin, a jet of rusty-brown muck was shooting up from a massive hole, then suddenly changing direction to arc out onto a slurry dump at least a hundred meters away. Even from this distance, John knew exactly what he was looking at. He’d figured it out two hours ago—the moment he peered out into the basin and saw the muddy geyser risi
ng from the entrance to CASTLE Base.

  Located two kilometers underground, the base was accessible only via a vertical shaft that had served an old titanium mine. During their original assault on Menachite Mountain, the Covenant had enlarged the access shaft to five times its original diameter, then extended it another four hundred meters in order to reach an ancient Forerunner installation located below the titanium mine.

  Now the shaft was basically a huge sump, filled with mud and gravel from the surrounding basin. This was the main reason that Blue Team had brought along excavation machines and haulage equipment—so they could clear the shaft.

  The Keepers of the One Freedom were employing a different method altogether to clear it, and John liked their way better. They were using a pair of portable gravity lifts to remove the muck—one down inside the shaft to push it to the surface, and another at the top, positioned next to the shaft and angled to shoot the slurry out onto the dump.

  Earlier, John had increased his faceplate magnification window to medium and spent some time watching the surface operators work. There had appeared to be ten of them, three with the saurian frames and long-beaked heads of Kig-Yar, and seven with the stubby limbs and wedge-shaped methane tanks of Unggoy. None of them seemed to have much to do, the Kig-Yar pointing and gesturing while the Unggoy adjusted the angle and direction of the lift pad.

  Judging by the size of the Kig-Yar compared to the gravity lift, it was large for a portable model, with a pad fully ten meters in diameter. The pinch fusion reactor powering it was equally impressive, with a core chamber two meters high and four meters across. Most likely, it was one of the “pirate lifts” the Banished employed when they raided a city.

  John had never seen a pirate lift in action before, but he’d read about them. A Banished vessel would hover above a city, well beyond missile range, while raiding parties moved their portable lifts around to key locations—then gravity-lifted their loot straight into the hold. The Keepers obviously had no interest in collecting the slurry, so they’d been able to adapt the technique and clear the shaft even faster than a raiding band could clean out a town.

  So it made sense to let the Keepers do the work. Then all Blue Team would need to do was capture the shaft and descend two kilometers to CASTLE Base. And had their only opposition been the ten Keepers operating the surface lift, Blue Team would have done just that two hours ago.

  But the east side of the basin was bordered by a vast area of glass flats, created when the Covenant attack channeled the molten rock from the destruction of Menachite Mountain into the adjacent vale, Rejtett Valley. Bivouacked on those flats were more troops than even Blue Team could handle—three thousand Keepers mounted on Marauders, Wraiths, and Ghosts.

  An even bigger concern was the front-heavy intrusion corvette, sitting on the south end of the flats, about a kilometer beyond the basin. With his faceplate magnification pushed to maximum, John could see that it was surrounded by a ring of Jiralhanae guards. He had been watching them for the last hour, and he had not seen one so much as fidget. That kind of discipline was rare for Jiralhanae, as was their drab-gray power armor, and it made John wonder whom they served.

  So before Blue Team could take control of the access shaft, they had to also take control of both the talus basin and the glass flats—effectively all of Rejtett Valley. And they had to maintain that control. Blue Team had developed a plan to do exactly that, intending to empty the entire valley of Keeper troops. But it wasn’t simple.

  And it wasn’t fast.

  That last part concerned John the most. He liked to hit hard and quick, and this plan was more… deliberate. It had a lot of moving parts, and it required a lot of patience.

  The first indication that Blue Team’s long wait was finally over came when the Gray Guards—as John had come to think of them—began to leave their posts at the corvette and race under its armored bow to disappear into the internal hangar bay. Then the Keepers out on the glass flats began to stir, shouting to one another and gathering their equipment. John didn’t need to break comm silence to know that Blue Team’s support was finally arriving.

  The distant hiss of incoming Broadswords began to rise in the north, from the direction of the compound where Lieutenant Chapov had died saving the mission. Blue Team wouldn’t have to hold much longer. Things would start happening fast now.

  Which was just the way he liked it.

  The last of the Gray Guards disappeared into the corvette’s hangar bay. Keeper vehicles began to move north toward Koldus Canyon, which connected Rejtett Valley with the old compound. The first elements of the UNSC support battalions should already be seizing the site to use as a landing zone. That was one of the moving parts of the big plan that John didn’t control, but it was just common sense. He had to assume General Doi would send an advance detachment to secure the landing zone.

  The remnants of the Keepers’ badly savaged Banshee force began to rise into the air and stream north to offer air cover for their mechanized forces. Even the nine Seraphs circling high over Rejtett Valley closed formation and dropped down to protect the corvette.

  “We’ll designate the anti-aircraft Wraiths,” John announced.

  He spoke over his voicemitter, not TEAMCOM, because even a low-power transmission would risk alerting the enemy to Blue Team’s presence. Those Seraphs had been overhead all day for a reason, and that probably had something to do with using their surveillance technology to guard against exactly what Blue Team was preparing to do.

  “We need to convince that corvette that the first Broadsword squadron is just clearing the way for the main event.” John didn’t need to elaborate. The last place any ship of the line wanted to be during an air attack was on the ground, and for their plan to work, they needed to clear the corvette out of the valley. It was just too much firepower for them to neutralize with a SPNKr and a few grenades. “If that thing sticks around, this could get tricky.”

  “Get tricky?” Fred replied. He was lying so close to John that they were touching shoulders, all four Spartans sacrificing tactical spacing in order to speak by voicemitter. Van Houte and Mukai were in a sandy gulch two hundred meters behind and below them, waiting with the excavation machines beneath an overhanging cliff that would hide them from every direction but north. “If this plan gets any trickier, it could seem desperate.”

  “Desperate is good,” Kelly said. “You’re at your best when you’re desperate.”

  “Then I’ll be great today,” Fred said.

  The hiss of the arriving squadron was building to a roar, which meant the Broadswords would soon be close enough to detect an infrared guidance signal. John and the others slid their designator units into the multifunction receivers beneath their MA40 barrels, then synced the units to their helmet reticles, opened magnification windows in their faceplates, and located the anti-aircraft Wraiths.

  There was no need to discuss who would designate which Wraith. Blue Team had a well-drilled procedure. The Spartan at the left end of their line—in this case Linda—would start with the leftmost target and work inward. The two Spartans in the middle—Fred and John—would commence in the middle and work their way outward. The Spartan on the right end—Kelly—would go to the rightmost target and work her way inward like Linda was doing on the opposite end.

  Once John had located his target, he said, “Ready to designate?”

  Everyone answered in the affirmative.

  “Designate.”

  They touched their triggers, and the designator units began to emit needle-thin beams of infrared light that extended more than ten kilometers, each one touching the appropriate target. The Spartans couldn’t actually see the beams without engaging special faceplate filters, which would impair their vision in other wavelengths. But the Broadsword targeting systems would have no issues.

  A pair of the strike fighters launched two missiles apiece. The missiles’ guidance systems were locked onto the beams, so each weapon followed its designated beam directly into the
target, detonating with fatal precision against the Wraith hulls.

  The whole process took only three seconds, but it was still dangerous for the Spartans. If a patrolling Seraph or artillery piece happened to be scanning the area in the correct infrared wavelength, it would see the designator beams as clearly as the Broadswords did. And the Spartans wouldn’t even realize they’d been spotted until the counterstrike arrived.

  Blue Team quickly designated their next targets. With only three anti-aircraft Wraiths remaining, John shifted his designator to a Lich that was just taking off with a full load of warriors and equipment.

  The Broadsword missiles arrived two seconds later, destroying all three Wraiths and turning the Lich into a whirling ball of secondary explosions.

  No counterstrike.

  There wasn’t an upside in sticking around to designate lower-priority targets, so John jerked a thumb toward the back exit of their hiding place.

  “Phase Two. Move out.”

  Blue Team crawled out from beneath the boulder and moved a few steps downslope so they would be hidden behind the shoulder of the mountain, then removed the unwieldy designator pods from their MA40s. The Broadswords were visible now, coming in just under the cloud ceiling and dropping down for a close-attack run over Rejtett Valley.

  With the enemy already under fire, there was no sense maintaining comm silence. John opened the air comm command channel. “Broadsword Leader, Blue Leader. Nice shooting. We’ll be following you into the combat zone, so weapons tight.” Meaning attack only targets confirmed to be hostile. “And avoid the geyser—we’ll handle that.”

  “Blue Leader, Alpha Squadron Leader,” the Broadsword commander replied. “Explain geyser?”

  “Uh… you’ll know it when you see it.” John didn’t know how to explain the fountain of gravity-lifted slurry in less time than it would take the Broadswords to reach it. “Do what you can to drive off that intrusion corvette.”

  “No worries on the corvette,” Alpha Leader said. “We spotted him on orbital infrared. A special package is inbound.”