Shadows of Reach: A Master Chief Story Page 5

  “Can we risk some helmet lamps?” Kelly asked. “I’d hate to shoot someone’s foot.”

  “Blue Four?” John asked.

  “You may as well,” Linda replied. “The bandit formations are starting to loosen up and expand their search grid.”

  She did not need to explain her thinking. It wouldn’t be long before a pair of Seraphs overflew the landing site, and when that happened, there would be no hiding the Special Delivery from their thermal sensors. John activated his helmet lamps and shined them on the ground a couple of paces in front of Kelly, and she did the same.

  John checked his motion tracker to be sure Fred and Chapov were safely outside Kelly’s ricochet arc and, not seeing their designators, assumed they were still inside the Owl’s troop bay, collecting the drilling jumbo and gelignite bins.

  “Fire at will.”

  “Take cover,” Kelly said. “Firing.”

  She pulled the trigger, sending a flurry of eight-gauge slugs into the ground about a meter in front of the Owl’s nose. A curtain of dust and glass shards rose as high as their knees, but John could see the fire was proving even more effective than necessary. Capable of blowing a hole through a Warthog’s engine block, the steel rounds were punching a third of a meter down into the lechatelierite, creating an uneven, fracture-lined trench. As Mukai had suggested, it would give the teeth on the bottom side of the LHD’s two-kiloliter bucket plenty to bite.

  Van Houte’s voice sounded over the comm net. “I’m starting to see cracks above me. Am I to take it that Chief Mukai’s crazy plan is working?”

  “My plans are never crazy,” Mukai said. “You can set the SDD for fifteen minutes.”

  “Belay that,” John said. “Can you link it to your comm unit?”

  “I can,” Van Houte confirmed.

  “Then do it. Let’s give them something to worry about when they start chasing us.”

  “Always wise,” Van Houte said. “Just be sure you make a clean extraction. The comm option comes with an automatic deadman switch.”

  Kelly stopped firing and reloaded. John took the opportunity to pace the length of the trench, then stepped to one end and motioned the LHD forward. Three steps was three meters, and the LHD’s bucket was only two meters wide.

  “Does all that quiet time mean we’re clear to evacuate?” Fred asked.

  “Do you have the gelignite?” John asked. “And the detonators?”

  “You have to ask?” Fred replied. “Who leaves the fun stuff behind?”

  “Then you’re clear.”

  “And I suggest you hurry,” Linda said. “I make three bandits coming our way. I can’t tell if they’ve seen you yet, but I am sure they will.”

  “That’s only to be expected,” Kelly said. She took her place at the other end of the trench and shined her helmet lamps into it. “Why wouldn’t a flight of Seraphs pass over at just the wrong moment?”

  Fred and Chapov appeared on John’s motion tracker as they brought the drilling jumbo into the crash furrow and headed for the ramp Mukai had cut. Then the LHD’s bucket was dropping down between John and Kelly, and all his attention was on the bottom edge as it dug into the trench. The steel teeth bit deep, launching conchoidal shards into the air, but it wasn’t the way LHDs were designed to work.

  LHDs were made to scoop up loose stone and haul it away, not tear it out of the living bedrock. But Mukai knew how to get the most out of any machine. She gunned the engine hard, pushing the vehicle forward until the front tires rose off the ground and spun in the dark air.

  “Hit it again,” Mukai said. “It’s coming loose. I can feel—”

  Kelly was already firing, planting the first rounds at John’s end of the trench and working her way back. His shields flashed as two slugs ricocheted into him and deflected into the night, but a web of finger-width cracks fanned back toward the Owl, and the LHD dropped onto its front tires again.

  After that, the lechatelierite broke up almost instantly under Mukai’s assault, shattering into hundreds of chunks that the excavation machine scooped up and lifted out of the way. The resulting pit was not quite a meter deep, with a floor covered in glass nuggets ranging from the size of a fist to that of a flight helmet.

  “You’re close,” Van Houte said from inside his cockpit. “I can see your lamps.”

  “The bandits can too,” Linda said. “They’re dropping in for a strafing run, six o’clock on the Owl.”

  “They’re coming up the valley?” Fred sounded almost happy about the prospect. “Relax—we’ve got this.”

  “We do?” Chapov asked.

  “How about I’ve got this,” Fred said. “You take cover under the jumbo.”

  “The one with four bins of gelignite strapped to it?” Chapov asked. “That jumbo?”

  “Affirmative.” John didn’t know what Fred had planned—and there wasn’t time to ask. “Chief Mukai, I’ll finish up. Dump that load of glass and get the LHD out of here.”

  “On it.”

  John jumped into the pit Mukai had excavated. “And when the Seraphs open fire—”

  “On it.” Mukai had been Special Forces her entire career. She didn’t need John to tell her when to take cover.

  Kelly jumped into the pit beside John, and they began to throw and kick glass chunks out of the way. When they finished, there were only a few centimeters of ash-clouded lechatelierite between them and the Owl, and Kelly began to fire strike rounds into it. The slugs penetrated and, robbed of most of their energy, bounced harmlessly off the pilot’s canopy.

  “Be ready,” Fred commed. “Opening fire now.”

  “You?”

  “Them,” Fred said. “But no worries. I’m always ready.”

  Plasma bolts began to streak down out of the darkness, filling the night with flashes of crimson heat, burning through the Owl’s fuselage armor, melting long furrows into the vitreous ground to both sides of the pit. John and Kelly dropped to their bellies and continued to dig, using their gauntlets to smash the last lechatelierite nubs away from the canopy so Van Houte could raise it and escape.

  A bolt burned through the copilot’s broken canopy; then John’s shields flared and failed as two more glanced off him. Kelly rolled off the Owl and dropped into the narrow gap between its nose and the lechatelierite crust alongside it.

  “You can open fire anytime now,” she commed. “Please do.”

  “This is a mining machine,” Fred said. “Not an anti-aircraft turret.”

  Finally realizing what Fred was planning to do, John rolled into the gap on his side of the Owl, then switched off his helmet lamps and peered under its wing, back along the fuselage. The drilling jumbo was a bright, fuzzy block of red in his NVS, with a small puddle of dim red—Chapov—lying between its tires. The Seraph flight was a stack of tiny yellow lunate shapes spitting crimson dashes of brilliance down at the Special Delivery, the lead craft’s fire already stitching across the glassy terrace beyond the Owl’s buried nose, the second craft’s fire just starting to burn strike scars into the sand behind it.

  And Fred was an orange Mjolnir-shaped bulk standing on the operator’s platform at the rear of the jumbo, his helmet tipped back to watch the approaching Seraphs. The drill booms were fully extended and pointed at the sky, and his hands were on the controls, twisting and turning as he adjusted the positions of the emitter nozzles, trying to keep them arranged in a tight fan as he positioned them in front of the oncoming fighter craft.

  It wasn’t the worst idea Fred had ever had.

  Fred depressed the thumb switches on the ends of the two handgrips he was holding, and a pair of blue plasma beams shot skyward from the center drill heads. John’s view of what happened next was blocked by the Owl’s wing, but the strafing ended in a heartbeat. The heavens flashed gold and screamed with metal-drum thunder, and then there were flaming pieces of fighter craft falling all around.

  Fred was already grabbing the second set of handgrips. He hit the thumb switches and sent another pair of plasma
beams up into the darkness, this time from the drill heads on either end of the fan. The flashes were smaller this time, and spaced a few breaths apart, and a Seraph went spiraling toward the ridge missing a quarter of its hull and vanished in a sharp, glass-shaking clap.

  The third Seraph arced away in the opposite direction, wobbling wildly as the pilot struggled to retain control after a wild evasion maneuver. John lost sight of it as it arced over the ravine, but as he climbed out of the narrow gap where he had taken cover, he heard the distant crunch of a hard landing.

  “Nice timing, Blue Two,” John said. He checked his team’s status display and found all Spartan LEDs green. His Mjolnir wasn’t linked to the Special Delivery’s crew, so he couldn’t confirm their status automatically. “Condition jumbo?”

  “A little chewed up, but mobile,” Fred replied. “Down one boom and lost part of a bin.”

  “Part of a gelignite bin?” Chapov asked. Clearly he had come through the attack in one piece. “How are we not a crater in the sand?”

  “Good question,” Fred said. In fact, the nitrocubane-enhanced gelignite that the UNSC used was one of the most stable explosives available, which was why it had been selected for this mission. It could be burned without detonating, so it didn’t seem all that surprising that it could take a plasma strike. “Now, get up here and drive this thing. I’ll scout a route on foot.”

  “Chief Mukai, status you and LHD?” asked John.

  “Both unharmed,” she reported. “So far.”

  “Then get over the ridge as fast as you can,” he said. “Don’t wait for anything. Blue Four?”

  “The enemy is maneuvering to approach from across the ravine,” Linda said. “That seems very cautious. Perhaps they think our plasma drill is a new kind of anti-aircraft weapon?”

  So definitely not Banished. That faction would have come racing en masse, each Seraph trying to beat the others to the prize and steal the glory.

  A clatter sounded behind John. He reactivated his helmet lamps and saw the pilot’s canopy rising as Eznik Van Houte climbed out of the cockpit. Like Chapov, the major wore a flight suit still bulging around his hips with retained high-g inflation pressure. His weathered face was not visible behind his gray faceplate, but John could picture his tired brown eyes and bushy gray mustache.

  “Hold this.” Van Houte passed John a buckle-on survival belt packed with magazine pouches, ration packs, and a hydration flask, then reached into the cockpit and withdrew an old MA2B bullpup assault rifle dating from the days of the Insurrection. “And this.”

  John checked one of the magazines and found it loaded with penetrators—.390 rounds with copper jackets around depleted uranium cores. The major was a man who believed in putting holes in what he hit.

  Recalling that Chapov had been unable to retrieve his own survival belt when he evacuated, John gave the copilot’s canopy a gentle upward push. The electric motor engaged and, with no lechatelierite ceiling to cause resistance, finished lifting the canopy.

  Kelly reached in from the other side and withdrew Chapov’s survival belt, along with an MA5B bullpup assault rifle. It was a solid choice for a pilot’s emergency weapon, short enough to fit into the cockpit scabbard but with decent range and a suppressor-adapted barrel that made it ideal for stealth fighting.

  “Blue Three, catch up with the LHD,” John said over the comm. “Help Chief Mukai get over the hill. Major Van Houte, with me.”

  Kelly’s status LED flashed green. Van Houte buckled on his survival belt, then took his MA2B and started back toward the access ramp Mukai had excavated earlier.

  John extended an arm to block his way. “Sorry, Major, we’re in a hurry.” He lowered his arm to knee height, his elbow bent at ninety degrees. “Climb aboard.”

  “You want to carry me?”

  “Yes, sir,” John said. “Preferably conscious.”

  Van Houte gave a short laugh, then stepped over John’s arm, sitting in the crook of his elbow. “But the mission comes first,” he said. “If I start to slow you down—”

  “You won’t.”

  John deactivated his helmet lamps and pulled Van Houte tight to his chest, then sprang out of the crash furrow onto the glassy terrace. He glanced back across the ravine and saw engine flares the size of fingertips approaching in a five-across line. Behind that line was another, and behind the second still another. He did not take the time to look for a fourth line or a fifth, because once you reached overkill, your tactics didn’t change.

  John pulled two frag grenades off his load harness and depressed the priming switches, then waited as the first line of engine flares drew steadily closer. They were already in strafing range, but seemed to be more interested in reconnoitering the crash site than attacking it.

  “Shouldn’t we be running by now?” Van Houte asked.

  “We will be.”

  John continued to wait, watching as the first line of Seraphs approached. In his NVS, they looked like big yellow disks with a stream of crimson efflux shooting out between their forked tails. Their plasma cannons remained cold and dark, a sign that, on this pass at least, they were intent on identifying the mysterious weapon that had destroyed two of their fellow craft rather than killing anyone on the ground.

  And that was just fine with John.

  He tossed the grenades into the crash furrow, about ten meters behind the downed Owl, and remained where he was.

  “Now?”

  “Not safe yet.”

  “Safe?” Van Houte spoke the word as if he had never heard it before. “We’re Special—”

  The grenades detonated, creating a cluster of blinding flashes that washed out the thermal elements of John’s night vision and left him staring at a white faceplate.

  Linda’s voice came over the comm. “Move now, Blue Leader.” A green waypoint appeared in the white fog inside his faceplate. “The first rank is breaking formation.”

  John sprinted across the glassy terrace. The washout drained from his faceplate, and he found himself starting up the yellow-orange slope toward the top of the ridge. Progress was slow. For every three steps up, he slid one step back, the soles of his sabatons slipping on the thin mud-cake that covered the smooth slope. The drilling jumbo was five hundred meters above him and to the right, just preparing to crest a low saddle in the ridge. The LHD was two hundred meters below it and even farther to the right, angling toward the same saddle from the opposite direction. Fred and Kelly were a short distance ahead of the two vehicles, using their Mjolnir’s superior fused-mode night vision to find the route.

  Vehicles and Spartans alike were glowing crimson inside John’s faceplate—and they would be just as visible to the thermal sensors in the approaching Seraphs.

  “We need diversions,” John commed. “Anything to keep the enemy from focusing on us.”

  Three status LEDs winked green, and Linda’s S5 sniper rifle began to boom. John saw four muzzle flashes behind the waypoint in his HUD, perhaps fifty meters below the ridge crest, but did not look back to see if she had hit anything.

  She had. The only question was whether four rounds of Linda’s special ammunition—titanium-jacketed high-velocity armor-piercing 14.5mm depleted uranium—would be powerful enough to punch through a Seraph’s energy shielding. John was betting that they would, but it really didn’t matter. What counted was that the enemy pilots would see their shields flickering and realize they were under attack. Then they would start to think about who was hitting them and with what, and that would give John and the rest of the team enough time to get over the ridge.

  He took two more frag grenades off his load harness, depressing the primer switches and holding them in the same hand—then heard the screech of warping metal and looked over to see the large green sickle of half a Seraph hull lying thirty meters to his left. John started across the slope toward it.

  “Wait.” Van Houte pointed up the slope toward the ridge. The light-gathering night-vision system in his pilot’s helmet was not as flexible as
the dual-mode system in John’s Mjolnir, but it was good enough to indicate the top of the ridge. “We’re supposed to be going that way.”

  “This won’t take long,” John said. “I just want to confirm something.”

  Linda’s rifle began booming again, and he glanced over to see the second rank of Seraphs peeling off above the ravine. One of them was trailing hot fumes, and another was wobbling. Clearly, her special HVAP rounds were capable of piercing Seraph shields.

  “Blue Leader,” Fred commed, “uphill.”

  “Need a minute.”

  “A minute?” Kelly asked. “Are you mad?”

  John looked away from his footing long enough to see the third rank of Seraphs approaching. The crimson dots of their plasma cannons were already glowing bright along the front edges of their disks.

  “Distract them.”

  He tossed the grenades in his free hand down the slope and reached for two more. There was no chance of damaging a Seraph with frag grenades, of course, but they were good decoys. In the pitch dark below Reach’s heavy cloud cover, the multiple detonations would create hot spots that looked like ground-to-air missile launches to a thermal imaging system—and that would reduce his targeting priority to just about zero.

  The grenades exploded; as expected, a line of plasma bolts streamed across the ravine toward their dwindling fireballs. John depressed the primer switches on the next two grenades. These were his last, but there was no sense saving ordnance when using it was the best way to avoid getting killed.

  He heard another series of detonations—two, then two more—as Fred and Kelly tossed their own grenades, then glimpsed more streams of plasma converging on their fireballs.

  No enemy fire was directed at him though, and he reached the Seraph debris he had noticed a few seconds earlier. It was slightly less than half a craft, a sliver shaped like a waning moon, about fifteen meters long. He could hear the self-mending hull squealing and sizzling as it struggled to close a breach that could never be repaired, and even his helmet filters could not keep out the acrid stench of burning fuel rod propellant and boiled Jiralhanae blood.