Silent Storm: A Master Chief Story Page 4

  “Designate flying roach guys as Drones,” John said. “How long before you take the engineering deck?”

  “No idea,” Kurt replied. “We haven’t found it yet.”

  “Keep looking,” John said. “And keep me posted.”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Gold Team?”

  Before Joshua could respond, the hatch split across its centerline and retracted to reveal a large gray shaft. A trio of white fiery spheres came flying out at an angle, and John realized the enemy had chosen a counterattack tactic so crazy he hadn’t anticipated it: head-on assault.

  “Grenades—go go go!”

  Shoving Kelly ahead of him, he hurled himself through the hatchway . . . and found himself in a metal-walled shaft about four meters in diameter. They began to drop, not falling, but being drawn gently downward by an invisible force that had to be some kind of grav tech. Unexpected, but not necessarily a disaster.

  The hatch clanged shut behind the two of them, and a trio of muffled booms sounded out in the passageway.

  Sparks began to flash along the grav tube walls. A projectile deflected off John’s shoulder armor, and he checked his motion tracker. Five hostiles were clinging to the wall twenty meters behind him—which meant above him, since he was descending the grav tube face-first. He rolled onto his back, then felt more impacts as two more projectiles burrowed into his titanium breastplate.

  Still wasn’t a disaster, but getting closer.

  A line of the saurian aliens was hanging above the closed hatch, each clinging to a built-in utility ladder with one hand and firing some sort of Covenant carbine with the other. Sooner or later, one of them was bound to hit a soft spot in his armor, just as they had Sam’s. John raised his MA5K and emptied the magazine, running a line of fire straight up their column.

  His rounds deflected off some kind of personal energy barrier, ricocheting around the grav tube and coming back at the aliens’ flanks and deflecting again. The energy shields seemed to flicker out after multiple hits, but these guys were clearly elite warriors who knew how to maintain fire. When a lucky ricochet finally caught one of them in the throat, the four survivors stepped away from the ladder and began to descend after John and Kelly. Still standing upright, they arranged themselves into a circle and began to fire down through the center of their formation.

  Kelly opened up, squeezing off targeted three-round bursts. She caught one of the aliens under the mandibles and filled his helmet with gore. John ejected his ammo clip and reached for another, enemy rounds still impacting his armor, mostly glancing off, but some burying themselves deep in the titanium shell.

  A little deeper, and it would be a disaster.

  Above the enemy, the blast of a breaching charge launched the hatch itself into the grav tube. Fred and Linda stuck their helmets through the opening and poured targeted fire from above. The head of one alien erupted into a purple spray. The surviving pair adjusted to the situation instantly, one raising his weapon to meet Fred and Linda’s attack, the other continuing to lay fire on John and Kelly.

  A heartbeat later, John’s stomach flipped, and the invisible force drawing them down the grav tube reversed direction and began to carry everyone—aliens included—back up toward the blown hatch. As the aliens rose past it, they stopped firing and pulled dark orbs from their belt pouches.

  John and Kelly both yelled “Grenade!” over TEAMCOM. John slapped the new magazine into his MA5K and opened fire, but the orbs had begun to glow with white flame, and the two aliens were already throwing.

  Fred and Linda spun away, and the grenades flew through the opening into the main passageway. In the next instant, the two Spartans reappeared, leaping into the grav tube feet-first. They immediately raised their weapons and began spraying rounds at the enemy above them.

  The grenades detonated, a searing white brilliance pouring through the hatch and filling the shaft, and John lost sight of the pair. His own ascent slowed briefly as a concussion wave hammered him from above; then he and Kelly were rising past the open hatch.

  The passageway beyond was lined with dead enemies, clustered in four groups, all armored and armed with Covenant carbines. They were facing all directions, a sign they had died surprised and confused. Beyond them, Gold Team was advancing down the passageway, Joshua and Daisy leading the way with M301 grenade launchers slung under their MA5C assault rifles. The other two members were hanging back, ready to eliminate any more of the Covenant who made the mistake of thinking they could sneak up on a Spartan.

  Then John was past the hatch, still ascending the grav tube next to Kelly. The clatter of small-arms fire above fell silent, and he looked up to find Fred changing his magazine while Linda continued to aim her BR55 upward. The grav tube beyond was too littered with hatch doors and dead aliens to see what awaited Blue Team at the top of the shaft, but amazingly enough, it still appeared possible to capture this ship.

  John went back to TEAMCOM. “Gold Team, sitrep.”

  “Main deck under control,” Joshua reported. “Eliminated maybe two hundred targets. No casualties.”

  “How’s your ammo holding up?”

  “About half down,” Joshua said. “But Naomi has figured out those hinge-head rifles. We’ll be okay.”

  Naomi was Naomi-010, one of the Spartans’ more resourceful soldiers and a near-genius with any sort of equipment. By the age of ten, she had been a master armorer who was refining and modifying every infantry weapon the Spartans used, and currently she was the only one on the squad who seemed to completely understand the theory behind the Mjolnir’s reactive circuits.

  But John had never heard of such a weapon designation. “Hinge-head?”

  “The big ones with the four jaws,” Joshua said. “The ones that know how to fight.”

  The tall saurians, in other words.

  “Now designated Elites,” John said. “Take Gold Team and lay below. Disrupt any counterattack preparations—especially those led by Elites.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Gold Team moved out of motion-tracker range and vanished from John’s HUD. The clang of colliding metal drew his attention overhead, where a jumble of twisted hatch-sections and dead Elites were pinned against the top of the grav tube. To their left—on the side opposite the utility ladder—hung a single-width hatch, a vertical oval with a split down the center. A second utility ladder descended beneath it, each rung slightly offset so that it angled around the shaft wall to join the first.

  “Shouldn’t that hatch be open by now?” Kelly asked. “If it’s activated by proximity, all those dead Elites—”

  “It’s overridden!” John reached over and caught hold of a ladder rung. “Grab—”

  The gravity field reversed polarity and jerked John downward, and the order came to an abrupt end. His arm straightened, and his elbow hyperextended and erupted in pain. He held on anyway, his Mjolnir armor’s force-multiplying circuits droning as he fought the grav tube’s pull. Fred and Linda dropped past and shot down the shaft, their outstretched gauntlets clanging off the ladder rungs as they tried to grab hold. Kelly was somewhere below them, already beyond motion-tracker range.

  A new contact appeared on his HUD. John looked up and saw the hatch door splitting open, an armored hand reaching into the seam from either side. Both held dark orbs. Grenades.

  More grenades.

  John opened fire, raising his MA5K one-handed and running a burst up the widening seam. The first rounds were deflected by energy shields, but he managed to hit both grenades as they ignited in white flame and were released. He managed to send one tumbling back toward the enemy. The second fell to the deck, then rolled into the grav tube and was sucked down the shaft.

  “Incoming!” John warned over TEAMCOM. “Gren—”

  The detonations filled the tube with white heat, one blast boiling up the shaft from below and the other spraying through the half-open hatch above. John’s HUD flashed to static, and the first blast wave ripped one side of the ladder from the
wall. The second wave nearly impaled him on its broken rungs.

  John’s grasp remained secure, even when the rung in his hand snapped on one side and bent downward. He jammed his boots onto the ladder, slapped his MA5K onto its magnetic mount, and began to climb the offset rungs—the few that remained—ascending toward the mangled wreckage of the hatch.

  “Blue Team, report!”

  “Gel-locked, but uninjured,” Fred responded. “Lying in the bottom of the grav tube. Should be operational once the pressure bleeds off.”

  “Same as Fred,” Linda said. “Condition good.”

  “Under them both.” Kelly’s voice was thin with anguish. “Also gel-locked, but I have torso pain and blood in my underarmor. Must be a compound rib fracture.”

  John felt his gut clench. Compound rib fractures were dangerous, even for Spartans. With the jagged end of a bone moving around inside the chest cavity, something as simple as a deep breath could puncture a lung or lacerate the heart.

  “Copy,” John said. “Fred, get her out of the grav tube. I don’t want her getting slammed around any more.”

  “I can take care of myself,” Kelly said. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

  “And I don’t need an argument. Clear?”

  “Affirmative. But you’re being . . . overprotective.”

  By overprotective, John knew Kelly meant jerk. But if it kept his Spartans alive, John was okay with being an overprotective jerk. He was under the hatch now, and could hear the chattering of alien voices coming through the gap between its twisted halves. He poked his head up above the deck and glimpsed a relatively small oval compartment beyond, with a high dome overhead and a two-tiered bank of instrument consoles arranged in a semicircle around a central commander’s throne.

  The consoles were manned by busy Elites, most uniformed in white tabards striped by blue diagonals. But at least three armored Elites were pointing alien carbines at the hatch, and when they saw John peering through the gap, they opened fire.

  Already ducking out of sight, John grabbed a pair of fragmentation grenades from his satchel and thumbed the arming sliders.

  “Hold fast, Blue Leader,” Linda said over TEAMCOM. “I am unlocked and climbing. I’m with you in sixty seconds.”

  Sixty seconds was forever in a firefight, but with the hatch jammed open, John could probably hold his position that long. What he couldn’t do was prevent the enemy from tossing more grenades into the grav tube—and that meant Linda’s chances of getting blown up were about the same as her chances of reaching him alive.

  “Negative.” John brought his arm up and tossed his grenades through the half-open hatch. “Vacate and support Green Team. I’ve got this.”

  “Alone?” Linda asked. “That’s insane. You need support.”

  The ladder shuddered with the double-thump of the grenades detonating on the bridge, and a cone of flame and shrapnel shot from the half-open hatch and flashed across the tube above John’s head. He was already drawing two more grenades from his belt satchel.

  “The grav tube is a kill zone.” John thumbed the arming sliders and tossed the grenades through the hatch, this time trying for a higher arc that would carry them toward the front of the bridge. “Vacate. That’s an order.”

  Another pair of detonations shook the ladder. John poked his head up again and found the bridge littered with Elites, some broken and dead, some still writhing in pain, all torn and bloody. Here and there, a slender saurian head showed above an instrument panel, its beady eyes fixed on the hatch.

  In the center of the compartment sat the commander’s throne, its back panel warped and blackened from a grenade detonation. On the right side, a jagged limb hung above an armrest filled with glowing toggles and glide switches. On the left side, a leathery forearm in singed cloth lay stretched along the armrest, a pair of long alien fingers scratching at a boxy yellow cover about half the size of a human palm.

  It looked like a safety cover.

  John reached into the opening, grabbed a hatch panel, then hauled himself onto the top rung of the utility ladder.

  The fingers on the commander’s throne found what they were scratching for, and the yellow safety cover retracted into the armrest. A holographic keypad appeared in its place, and the fingers began to fly over glowing symbols.

  John drew his M6D sidearm and put a round through the Elite’s upper arm. The fingers touched another pair of symbols, and the keyboard vanished. A yellow blister—likely some kind of control button—rose out of the armrest.

  John put a second shot through the elbow, but the hand was already descending toward the blister. The round blew the Elite’s forearm half off and sprayed purple blood across half a dozen instrument consoles, but the alien retained adequate shoulder control to draw its arm back toward the chair. Its hand landed atop the yellow bubble, the heel of its palm coming down hard enough to punch it back down into the armrest.

  The ship did not self-destruct.

  Instead, the commander’s hand remained atop the blister, and an ambient green light rippled through the bridge. A trio of hidden panels retracted into the outer bulkheads, revealing open iris hatches on the three forward sides of the bridge. Elite survivors began to rise from behind their instrument consoles and spring toward the hatches, obviously less afraid of John than of what their commander had just initiated.

  Bad mistake. The last thing ONI wanted was survivors providing firsthand accounts of the Spartan boarding action. John opened fire with his M6D, blowing holes through Elite chests with .50-caliber nickel-plated rounds, and activated TEAMCOM.

  “Green Team, sitrep?”

  “Assaulting the engineering deck now,” Kurt-051 reported. “We’re going to take it, but it’s too easy. Something’s wrong.”

  “Like all hands abandoning ship?” John asked.

  “Not the Drones,” Kurt said. “They’re staying to fight. But everyone else—”

  “Break off and get out now.” John’s M6D locked open as it ran out of ammunition. “Gold and Blue Teams, you too.”

  “What happened?” Linda asked. “I can be on the bridge in thirty seconds. Maybe less. We can still take the ship.”

  John holstered his sidearm and thought about it, pulling the MA5K off its magnetic mount. There were no aliens left to throw grenades down the grav tube, so it wasn’t a kill zone any longer. But if he was right about that blister on the commander’s armrest, he’d still be putting her at risk—for no reason. The bridge was already John’s. All he had to do was walk in, secure the wounded, and make certain the commander’s hand did not leave the blister.

  John muscled the hatch panels apart and, shoving the MA5K through ahead of him, quickly checked the adjacent corners for ambushers. Seeing only pieces of dismembered Elites, he stepped onto the bridge and finally replied.

  “Negative, Linda.” John switched to SQUADCOM so that Halima Ascot and the rest of the prowler squadron would hear his report. “The alien commander has his hand on what looks like a dead man’s switch. I think he’s trying to give his crew a chance to abandon ship before he self-destructs.”

  “That’s supported by what we’re seeing from our position,” Ascot replied. “There are escape capsules dropping everywhere.”

  “I think I can secure the switch,” John said. “But I want the rest of the assault squad off the ship, just in case.”

  “Affirmative,” Ascot said. “The squadron is already moving to sync orbits.”

  “We heard.” John did not elaborate on the trouble the sensor operator’s mistake had caused his Spartans. That would come later, during the debrief—and, if he had anything to say about it, right before the court-martial. “Team leaders, let me know when you’re clear.”

  “Green Team clearing now,” Kurt reported. Once clear of the ship, the Spartans would drop into a preassigned orbit and await pickup by a prowler. “Rebreathers recharged to seventy percent, beacons on.”

  “Gold Team right behind him,” Joshua said. “Rebreathers rechar
ged to seventy-five percent, beacons on.”

  “Blue Two and Three commandeering enemy escape capsule,” Fred reported. He was Two, Kelly was Three. “Three’s pressure seal is compromised. We’ll try to repair, but check for friendly beacons before you open fire on any escape capsules.”

  “Affirmative,” Ascot said. “And good luck.”

  Only Linda had not reported. As he waited for her, John began to shoot wounded aliens—when he made his move to secure the commander’s dead man’s switch, the last thing he wanted was a still-capable Elite ambushing him.

  By the time John had finished and reloaded both of his weapons, he still had not heard from Linda. It wasn’t like her to disobey an order, but he glanced back down the grav tube just to be sure.

  Empty.

  “Linda? What’s the holdup?”

  “Drones,” Linda said. “An entire nest, herding me like a damn sheep. They do not want me to leave.”

  John cursed himself—she would probably have been better off joining him on the bridge after all.

  “What’s your situation?” he asked. “I don’t think I can wait much longer—I don’t know whether this commander is dead or alive, but his hand could come off that dead man’s switch any second.”

  “Go,” Linda said. “I’m almost in the hangar. They can’t stop me then.”

  “Affirmative.”

  John gathered himself to leap across the bridge—then thought, Drones. They could fly.

  He stepped through the hatch and spun right, bringing his MA5K up, and, sure enough, saw a Drone trying to track him with a plasma pistol. He brought it down with a quick burst, then spotted another on his motion tracker, dropping down behind him.

  He threw himself to the floor, rolled toward the commander’s throne, and came around firing. The Drone dropped to the deck in two pieces, and John rolled again, bringing a knee under and springing up, already stretching for the armrest.

  The throne spun away from him, whirling around in a three-quarter circle, the bloody hand still resting atop the yellow blister. John found himself looking over his shoulder into the pain-clouded eyes of the Elite commander. The alien’s head was cocked as though it could not quite understand what it was seeing—or could not quite bring itself to believe it. Its mandibles opened in a four-pointed star that might have been scorn . . . or laughter . . . then it twisted its shoulders and dragged its hand free of the armrest.