Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story Read online

  “Oh, damn,” Fred said on TEAMCOM. “Not now—not here.”

  “No, not here,” John answered. “And not yet.”

  He threw his head forward, rolling himself out of a feet-first vertical fall into a facedown horizontal drop, then stomp-kicked the shaft wall, launching himself back across the darkness toward the gravity field.

  When John reentered the field, he decelerated even harder than before, his heart crashing down into his sternum and his tongue pushing forward between his teeth. By now he was so close to the bottom of the shaft that the pirate lift appeared as large as his palm. It was protected by a handful of Gray Guards and a bunch of Keepers, all still distant and tiny, but illuminated brightly enough in the gravity pad’s violet glow that he could make out the weapons they were holding.

  Far too many shock rifles and plasma incendiary launchers.

  The amount of discernible detail suggested he was around three hundred meters above them—right at the maximum fast-winching depth. And most of the aliens seemed to be focused on Fred and Kelly, who had been raining death on their heads for more than a few seconds.

  The Gray Guards hit their jump-jets, trying to charge the Spartan attackers by flying up the shaft, but it was a poor strategy. Fred put an M19 rocket into the leader’s chest, creating a fireball that the others had to maneuver past, and Linda took out two more by putting her rounds through their propellant packs. The rest retreated to the shaft floor.

  When Fred used his second rocket to send several Kig-Yar flying across the shaft floor, John engaged his passive camouflage unit and held his fire. If he could get close enough before the enemy noticed him in the grav field, he could drop into their midst without having to worry about a gel lockdown—and keep them occupied long enough for Fred and Linda to down-climb the shaft walls.

  Or something like that.

  John confirmed that the M7 submachine gun was still on its magmount, but was unable to perform a weapons check. While he couldn’t distinguish the aliens’ facial features yet, he could see their arms, and even their hands when an arm moved away from the body. Two hundred meters. He was descending on them from the dark. Still, sooner or later, he would be illuminated by the lift pad’s purple glow.

  And when that happened, the Keepers would realize that the Gray Guards they’d left higher up at CASTLE Base weren’t going to be jumping into the gravity field. They would try to shut down the lift, letting John free-fall the rest of the way. He would need to keep them away from the controls, and have the Pilum reloaded.

  Fred dropped another SPNKr round on the heads of three Sangheili, while Linda downed two Jiralhanae Keepers. Only three Gray Guards and seven Keepers remaining, and John was pretty confident of that count, since they were all running for cover, either behind the gravity lift’s legs or among the boulders resting against the wall at the base of the shaft.

  Fred’s voice came over TEAMCOM. “No more cable. End of the line.”

  “Hang tight,” John said. “I’m working on something. Just keep their attention.”

  “Affirmative,” Fred said. “But it could be with rocks. I’m down to my last set of tubes.”

  “Save ’em for when you can make it count,” John said. “All I need is to keep them looking your way.”

  “That, we can arrange,” Linda said.

  Her sniper rifle boomed twice, and a Jiralhanae Keeper slumped over the boulder he was hidden behind.

  But the aliens had their own plan. Instead of using the rocks for cover, the last six Jiralhanae—three Keepers and three Gray Guards—grabbed man-sized boulders, charging back toward the gravity lift. They were covered by a trio of Kig-Yar firing beam rifles from behind one of the lift’s massive support legs—right where the controls were located. John didn’t have a shot on the Kig-Yar—at least not one that didn’t risk destroying the controls.

  And Blue Team wasn’t trying to capture the pirate lift just for the hell of it—they needed those controls intact.

  “Change of plan,” John said. Still in the grav field, he was close enough now to see individual faces, around a hundred meters. “Linda, take out the Kig-Yar riflemen. Fred, the Brutes.”

  Fred’s SPNKr roared, and a rocket dropped down from the darkness, taking the first Gray Guard in the flank. Linda’s rifle boomed, and a Kig-Yar head came apart in a spray of blood and bone. John was dropping into the purple glow of the lift pad now, so he wasn’t going to remain hidden much longer—especially not with five Jiralhanae rushing to board the gravity lift.

  There were two Gray Guards left. John targeted the one in front and fired—only to see the missile deflect as it crossed out of the gravity field. It punched into the wall and blew mud and gravel across the floor. He corrected and fired again, this time catching his target just as he was raising the boulder he carried to shield himself. The round’s shaped charge punched through the stone and sent a jet of superheated gore shooting through the backplate of the guard’s armor.

  No sooner had the charge landed than John’s stomach sank hard, and the lift pad began to recede below him. The surviving Jiralhanae—one Gray Guard and three Keepers—dumped their boulders onto the lift pad and, as the boulders began to rise toward John, climbed into the gravity field under them.

  “Hostiles coming up!” John shouted. “With their own cover!”

  He started to reload the Pilum—then realized that with the enemy on their way up, now was the perfect time for him to head down. It was crazy, but no worse than what Lieutenant Chapov had done taking them up Black Iron Gorge.

  And John had his Mjolnir armor.

  He slapped the rocket launcher onto a magmount and took a grenade in each hand, then threw himself into a somersault position, tumbling toward the edge of the gravity field. On his first roll, he glimpsed two plasma incendiaries and a pair of electrolaser bolts shooting up from between the rising boulders.

  The electrolasers hit almost simultaneously, the double EMP burst taking down his shields in a microsecond. The first plasma incendiary shot past harmlessly, but the second glanced off his right knee and burst.

  Most of the incendiary sprayed back into the gravity field where John had been a moment before, but part of it had impacted his armor, charring it so badly that white hot cinders flaked off his greave onto his sabaton. He heard metal popping and sizzling as the incendiary’s heat melted through the Mjolnir’s titanium-alloy shell, then felt the burn blisters rising on his shin and foot. But there was no time for damage assessment, because when he went into his next roll, he left the gravity field and felt himself fully plunging.

  “Advancing!” John said into TEAMCOM. He thumbed the grenade fuses and tossed them toward the boulders at the base of the shaft. “Cover!”

  “Cover in ten!” Kelly responded. “You just came into view.”

  John doubted that this battle was going to last another ten seconds, but no sooner had Kelly spoken than he rolled through his second somersault and realized she would be the only help coming. The Gray Guard and his three Keeper companions were ascending fast, using their floating boulder field as cover while they launched plasma incendiaries and electrolaser bolts toward Fred and Linda. The two Spartans were returning fire as best they could, but it was a lot harder to account for gravity deflection while firing into the field at a target under cover than it was firing back out at a target hanging from a thread.

  John grabbed the M7 submachine gun off its magmount, but by the time he was ready to fire, the lift was already a hundred meters above him. The Gray Guard hit his jetpack thrusters and moved to the edge of the gravity field, where he would have a better angle of fire, and launched a plasma incendiary toward Fred.

  Impact alarms started to chime inside John’s helmet. He laid the M7 on a torso mount and tucked his chin to his chest, then slapped out—just as he had learned to do in his hand-to-hand combat training here on Reach, all those years ago—driving his palms and forearms down onto the stone… twisting his hips ever so slightly, so his left thigh came
down on its outer side and the sole of his right foot landed flat on the ground… spreading out the force of the impact along as much of his body as possible.

  Despite everything, it still felt like he’d been hit by a speeding Warthog.

  And the gel lockdown only made it worse, squeezing John as tight as a pressure forge, holding every muscle rigid, every joint immobile. His ribs ached and his internal organs felt like they’d been compressed into a specimen jar. He couldn’t even breathe. All John could do was lie there waiting for the pressure to bleed off, staring up the shaft into the gravity field… where he could barely make out two tiny streams of electrolaser dashes flashing through the darkness toward Linda’s position. Her SRS99-S5 cracked twice, and then there was only one stream.

  At the edge of the gravity field, a tiny figure was dangling beneath the fast-rising hulk of a Jiralhanae. John opened a magnification window and saw it was Fred, hanging five meters beneath the last Gray Guard and rising fast. The Guard had dropped his plasma launcher and was digging at his collar with both hands, trying in vain to free himself from the grappleshot line Fred had looped around his throat.

  As Fred drew even with the Jiralhanae’s feet, he pulled a combat knife from his shoulder sheath. He reared back and, once he could reach high enough, drove the blade into the back of the Jiralhanae’s neck.

  John didn’t see what happened next, because a hostile appeared on his motion detector, approaching from the direction of the pirate lift. The lockdown pressure was still bleeding off—releasing it instantly would cause nitrogen embolisms—but he could actually breathe again. Another couple of seconds, and he’d be able to defend himself.

  He shifted his gaze toward the approaching hostile and found a ragged Kig-Yar limping toward him from the gravity lift, while a second Kig-Yar covered him from the operator’s station. The limper’s armor was shredded, with blood oozing from half a dozen shrapnel wounds, and the quills on the back of his head had been seared to stumps. He carried a carbine in one hand, which he kept pointed at John as he approached.

  “How you know?” His speech was passable—certainly better than John attempting Kig-Yar. “It was the humans, yes? Tell Toati now, he save you.”

  “Humans?” John could talk now—and it wouldn’t be long before he could do more than that. “Know what?”

  “Nasty demon.”

  Toati circled around John’s feet, then kicked him in his plasma-burned greave—and the whole leg moved. So did John’s hips, when he rolled them to check his range of motion.

  The Kig-Yar pointed the carbine at John’s knee. “Maybe you answer after Toati blow leg off.”

  “I don’t think so.”

  John swept his leg into Toati’s ankles, at the same time bringing his other leg up in a roundhouse kick that folded the Kig-Yar in two and launched him into the wall. It probably wasn’t necessary, but John snatched the M7 off his torso mount and ran a burst up Toati’s centerline.

  A whistle sounded somewhere behind him—maybe Toati’s partner squawking in alarm as he prepared to fire. John rolled back toward the gravity lift—

  The boom of a shotgun blast, and the second Kig-Yar flew out from behind the operator’s station and dropped to the muddy floor, a massive crater in his chest where an eight-gauge slug had punched through his armor.

  “Blue Three, that you?” When Kelly’s status LED flashed green, John did a quick scan for other threats, then asked, “Blue Two, Blue Four, status?”

  Both flashed green; then Fred said, “A few scrapes and burns, all threats eliminated. But I just passed CASTLE Base, and I’m still going up.”

  “We’ll take care of that ASAP,” John said. “Blue Four?”

  “I have no problems that can’t be repaired,” Linda said. “Request help descending. I am in no mood for lockdown.”

  “Acknowledged,” John said. “Wait there. We’ll use the lift.”

  He rose and looked across the pad of the gravity lift to where Kelly was still dangling from a fast-winch line, her body only two meters above the floor. Her armor was a little muddy, but otherwise she looked none the worse for wear.

  “Thanks for the cover,” he said.

  “Thank you for the diversion,” Kelly said. “He was so busy watching you, I had to whistle for his attention.”

  “Glad to be of service,” John said. He pointed at the nanobraided titanium cable from which she was hanging. “I thought the spools only had—”

  “Sheet bend,” Kelly said. “After your I’d rather fly trick, we had some spare cable.”

  “Mukai?” John asked.

  “Who else?” Mukai replied. They were speaking over TEAMCOM, so she and Van Houte were able to hear the whole conversation. “You have a problem with that?”

  “Not at all,” John said. Nanobraided titanium cable was supposed to be microspliced, not joined with knots, but John wasn’t about to tell the crew chief how to do her job. “It worked.”

  “Glad you agree.” As Mukai spoke, Kelly began to descend the last two meters to the shaft floor. “Now, if you’re done playing with the aliens down there, we have a job to do.”

  “Acknowledged.”

  John activated his helmet lamps and circled around the gravity lift toward Kelly, limping slightly on both legs, his right shin and foot in searing agony despite the biofoam injections, his left quadriceps cramping so hard he wondered if the myosin mesh had come loose. Still, he was in better shape than the enemy. The shaft floor was a morass of mud, blood, and body parts—essentially a massive, gore-filled sump.

  But when John ran his helmet lamps over the packed-mud walls, he could still discern hints of the ancient Forerunner installation he had seen once before, when he dropped in to rescue Dr. Halsey and her companions seven years earlier. The soaring arches and looming balconies—they were all still there, just packed like fossils into the untold tons of mud and gravel that had since washed down into the shaft.

  And buried somewhere beneath all that rubble was something the Keepers desperately wanted—something worth working with the Banished to acquire. Certainly that Kig-Yar, Toati, had hinted as much. John couldn’t even begin to imagine what it might be. UNSC intelligence had noted that both factions were enamored of Forerunner technology, but for different reasons. The Keepers valued it solely for religious reasons—becoming one with the Forerunners. The Banished just wanted the power and wealth it brought.

  What could they be looking for that served both purposes?

  And why now?

  After the fall of Reach, the Covenant had been in sole control of this world and certainly had ample time to strip the underground installation of any Forerunner artifacts. What could they possibly have left behind that would justify the effort that both the Keepers and the Banished were putting into recovering it?

  John couldn’t afford to dwell on it any longer. Not now, when so much else was at stake. This was a mystery Blue Team had not been assigned to solve, and one they had no time to investigate. The best he could do was record what he was seeing—and let what currently remained of the Office of Naval Intelligence worry about it later.

  So when John happened across a freshly excavated passage running northward from the shaft, he took note of it solely as a liability to be secured and paused only long enough to peer inside. Large enough for the Jiralhanae to walk down comfortably, the passage appeared to be many hundreds of meters long, running as straight as an arrow until it vanished into the gloom. No doubt that was where the rest of the Keepers had gone, and steps would have to be taken to make sure they didn’t return to interrupt Blue Team’s primary mission.

  John stepped inside the tunnel and listened. It was quiet, but maybe… just maybe… he could hear voices murmuring at the far end.

  Kelly’s voice came over TEAMCOM. “Ready when you are, Blue Leader. I could use an observer.”

  John came out of the tunnel to find Kelly already standing on the pirate lift operator’s platform, her hands inside the holographic control columns.
Over the decades, Blue Team had learned to operate a lot of different kinds of Covenant equipment, including various types of gravity lifts. Kelly’s body posture projected the confidence of being able to use the pirate lift as well—which was a good thing, because that was how John intended to lower the excavation machines to CASTLE Base level.

  “On my way.” John put his M7 on a magmount, then started to weave toward her, past dozens of alien corpses and rocket craters. “Let’s finish the damn mission.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  1820 hours, October 12, 2559 (military calendar)

  CASTLE Base, Csongrád Region

  Highland Mountains, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

  The fighting was done. At least, John hoped it was, because Blue Team was down to a 52 percent effectiveness rating. He had ported so much painkiller into his legs that it felt like he had a pair of stumps hanging off the LHD seat. Fred had lost his shields, his HUD, his weapon sync targeting system, and his magmounts to electrolaser EMP bursts. Linda had lost her long-range optics and had half her helmet melted by an incendiary round. She had some singed hair and second-degree burns where the heat had been too great, but the incendiary hadn’t gone all the way through, and she would be fine with a little medical attention. Nornfang was also going to need a lot of TLC before she made any two-kilometer shots with it again.

  Only Kelly was above 80 percent functionality, which was why she was the one on foot, standing in an open doorway using a telescoping long-bar to knock down loose concrete and rock from what used to be the ceiling of Dr. Catherine Halsey’s office-and-laboratory suite.

  After capturing the Keepers’ pirate lift, Blue Team had moved it into place below the CASTLE Base entrance and utilized it to lower the excavation machines. By the time they accomplished that, they had an ODST support company assigned to discourage any interference. The Keepers and Banished had left them alone, but even so, it had taken four hours of drilling, blasting, and mucking to clear the half-kilometer tunnel and maze of corridors leading into Omega Wing. Now they just had to get to Halsey’s ultrasecret vault, which was hidden inside an incubation cabinet on the opposite side of what used to be a two-room suite—now a tangle of beams sagging beneath a billion-ton jumble of boulders and broken concrete. John had the feeling that if they moved the wrong piece, it would all come crashing down on them. He lowered the LHD’s bucket onto the floor and shut off the engine.