Would they fire on the stalk? Or would they gather forces and follow them with another car?
"Will…" he said.
"I'm on it." Will returned to the override panel. "Interfacing with Stalk Control. Jamming the sequencing tracks. That should slow them down."
Linda eased next to Fred by the open doors. She set a tiny satellite dish down and it opened like a rose bud. "Getting a UNSC network handshake," she reported.
"Raise CENTCOM," Fred told her. "Tell them we need an extreme low-orbit extraction. We'll need a fast ship to get in before those Covenant ships at the top can—"
"Stand by," Linda said. "FLEETCOM contacting us." She turned to Fred. "It's Lord Hood on Cairo Station."
Lord Hood's unshakably confident voice came over the COM: "Give me a status update, Blue Team."
"Sir," Fred answered. "Covenant forces at the COE were after the mothballed nukes being shuttled up to the fleet. We've recovered twelve FENRIS warheads. We are en route to low orbit on the stalk. There's an entire company of Brutes on the ground with Wraith tanks and Banshee reinforcements."
Fred craned his head skyward.
Along the arc of Earth distant sparks and lines of fire traced patterns of destruction. Long smoking trails plummeted to the ground, ending in thermal blooms of impacted ships and plasma bombardment. The broken hulls of UNSC ships made a bone-yard of the thermosphere. There were Covenant ships in orbit as well… many more than Fred remembered… dozens.
He increased magnification directly overhead.
"There are two Covenant destroyers at the elevator's terminus near Station Wayward Rest."
"I'll send a prowler for an ELO extraction," Lord Hood said. "Get your team ready" There was an uncharacteristic hesitation, and then he said in a lowered voice, "One more thing has come up: a message from Dr. Catherine Halsey, and new mission."
Fred, Linda, and Will looked at one another.
"Dr. Halsey's message," Lord Hood explained, "was piggybacked on a carrier signal sent by Cortana through Slipspace. The message was subsequently detected by Pluto Slipstream Space Monitoring Station Democritus. It will make more sense if you heard and read the material. Set to encryption scheme thirty-seven."
Fred called up his encryption codes. Thirty-seven corresponded to code word SHEEPINWOLFSCLOTHING.
He input the code. "Ready to receive, sir," Fred told him.
Cortana's message played.
The Spartans listened to her automated distress on the new Halo threat and the Flood. John had been with her There were no specific details other than the single mention of him on the Forerunner ship. Lord Hood had to be sending them as backup.
But then Dr. Halsey's text message appeared, explaining the discovery of new Forerunner technologies, and the possibility of capturing and using them to neutralize both Covenant and Flood threats.
Fred reread the message; there was no mention of Kelly. His eyes lingered on the last line: "SEND SPARTANS."
He now understood why Dr. Halsey had left them, although not her reckless disregard of mission protocol. She had followed some clues found in the ruins of Reach, or perhaps within the alien blue crystal. It was a high-risk venture that had luckily paid off. If she had discovered a cache of technology, it could turn the tide of this war.
Fred held up his hands, palms up, and gave a slight shrug to his teammates, soliciting their opinions.
Linda nodded. Will gave the thumbs-up sign.
"We understand, sir," Fred replied, "and we're ready for redeployment. This Onyx system, though—" He rechecked the stellar coordinate embedded in the message. "It's weeks away with the fastest UNSC corvette."
"We'll just have to do our best," Lord Hood said. "The Pony Express stands ready and waiting for your team. They'll jump the instant you board. I'll send reinforcements if we can spare them."
Fred leaned out the elevator doors. Outside blue skies had turned to black and untwinkling stars now surrounded them. He squinted. In medium orbit were sleek Covenant destroyers… so much faster than any human ship.
"Sir," he said. "I think I've found us a better way there. But I'm going to need the detonation codes for these FENRIS warheads."
← ^ →
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FOUR
1420 HOURS, NOVEMBER 3, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) SOL SYSTEM, PLANET EARTH MEDIUM ORBIT NEAR UNSC CENTENNIAL ORBITAL ELEVATOR (COE)
Fred, Linda, and Will clung to the base of the turret, trying to make themselves as small as possible. It was not as imposing a weapon as its larger kin mounted upon Covenant battleships. With an energy coil about one-third the size of a Warthog it was barely capable of concealing three Spartans.
A great plan… as long as the weapon wasn't fired.
Two Covenant destroyers floated in the dark, their smooth hulls looking more like some deep-sea creature than spacecraft. A dozen Seraph fighter ships and a handful of shuttles
angled toward their base ships.
Fred gave a quick nod to the others.
It was working. At least, as well as any plan could that involved three humans against a
hundred Brutes and the combined might of two battle-ready warships.
The UNSC corvette Chalons had come, but not for a daring exfiltration. It had been a bit of misdirection, giving the Covenant ships something to focus on as the Spartans transferred outside the elevator car.
When two Covenant dropships came to collect the warheads, Fred, Linda, and Will had
stealthed under one of the vessels and—if their luck now held—they would be ferried away.
The "luck" part of this mission couldn't be taken for
granted… because above them sat a dozen—now armed— FENRIS nuclear warheads.
"A little slice of Armageddon," Will had called it.
Their dropship smoothly accelerated toward one of the destroyers, and an open shuttle
bay yawned before them. He spotted the other shuttle as they moved to the sister vessel. Then the hull of the
destroyer flashed before them and cut off the view. Artificial gravity tugged at them.
They'd made it inside.
The three Spartans slipped from the underside of the ship and rolled out of the shadows.
Fred and Linda took cover around either fork of the hull. Will leapt to the top of the vessel.
Ten Jackals and a score of Grunts stood in the open bay between the twin hulls of the dropship—a space usually encased by a gravimetric field, now dropped to allow them to
unload their stolen cargo.
Blue Team opened fire.
Three Jackals dropped, but the remaining vulture-head aliens snapped on their shield
gauntlets and fell back.
The Grunts scattered, and Will concentrated his fire on them, dropping six, igniting one's methane task, which exploded into a fireball and wiped out another dozen.
Fred and Linda combined fire on the leader Jackal in red armor. Its shield shimmered, failed, and armor-piercing rounds penetrated his body, making it shudder and dance.
Two Jackals screeched and primed and chucked plasma grenades at Fred.
Linda tracked them, fired once, twice, shooting both projectiles midtoss.
The grenades exploded into a spray of half-heated ionized gas, which made the Jackals' and Spartans' energy shields shimmer and drain.
Meanwhile, a pair of Jackals opened fire at Will; he dodged the shots, but was forced back.
A plasma bolt singed the hull near Fred, but he ignored it and focused on the pair targeting Will. He flicked his MA5B assault rifle to full auto and shot. Linda combined her fire and they dropped the Jackals.
The last four Jackals charged Fred and Linda—plasma pistols firing.
Linda made a fist and pumped it once.
Fred nodded and he faded back behind the hull, leaving a primed grenade on the
ground.
He reloaded, waited two heartbeats, and then twin blasts shuddered through the hull.
Fred mo
ved up and shot the wounded Jackals struggling to rise off the deck.
He looked for another target.
None but the Spartans stood. The cavernous shuttle bay of the Covenant destroyer was
empty save mangled and bloodied corpses of Jackals and Grunts. Fred pointed at Linda and then to the nukes on the ship. They had to get those things
defused. She nodded and moved toward the FENRIS warheads.
Fred strode to a set of pressure doors and the nearby control panel.
Three Spartans couldn't take a Covenant ship; not under normal circumstances, but Blue
Team had three advantages. First they had the element of surprise. What Covenant captain would dream three
humans might board and capture their ship?
Next, Blue Team had been on an enemy warship before; they knew the basic layout.
And last, and most important, the Covenant were slow to change. While their technology was centuries ahead of the most advanced the USNC could muster, it had become more dogma than science. They didn't innovate; they imitated.
Certainly they knew about the capture of the Ascendant Justice by John. If that had happened to a UNSC ship, there would have been new security protocols enacted on every ship in the fleet to prevent it from ever happening again.
Fred was betting their lives that the Covenant didn't think like that.
He retrieved the ONI datapad, newly updated with Covenant translation software, and set it upon the control panel. Purple lights flickered on the panel near the pad as the pad's
network-infiltration programs booted… and it slipped into the Covenant ship's system.
He was in. Just like having Cortana around… without the chatter.
Fred searched intership messages and found an alert: the team unloading the nukes was
overdo to report. A Brute team had been sent to see what was wrong.
Will and Linda took cover inside the dropship's cockpit. Fred wished he could join them. They powered up the ship. It lifted, turned, and backed into the far corner to protect the nukes from the next phase of his plan.
Fred returned to the datapad. He had little time before the entire ship was alerted to the invading army of three.
He scrolled through ship systems and found the icon he needed: an arrow encircling twin dots. Pressurized molecular oxygen. John had shown them that one. Fred overrode the ship's self-seal bulkheads—jammed them open. Every pressure door he secured—ajar. The ONI hackware churned as it stripped away security protocols. He primed the ship's life pods
and froze their air-lock hydraulics.
He flashed his red, amber, and green status lights to give Will and Linda a countdown.
As the green winked off, Fred gripped a handle on the wall and clutched the datapad.
As the amber light dimmed he slaved the controls for the
energy shield on the shuttle bay, the emergency life-pod releases, and the air-lock
overrides.
On red… he punched the master release.
A drum roll of thumps pounded the destroyer's hull.
The shuttle bay's energy shield vanished.
A hurricane pulled at Fred, blew out cargo pods, bodies, tools, small repair ships, and the
bodies of Jackals and Grunts.
He clung to the handle; one side of the metal bar bent and pulled free, but then the tremendous gale subsided. All the air had evacuated into space.
Fred rechecked his atmospheric reserves. They had been in combat and on the COE for a long time where no one was taking tiny breaths. His MJOLNIR suit had seven minutes of air left.
He went back to the datapad and checked: all corridors and rooms read zero pressure.
Unless there were Covenant forces in pressure suits, this ship was a ghost ship now.
Will and Linda joined him.
Fred routed power and the doors slid apart.
Blue Team entered the hallway and quickly made their way toward the bridge. Six dead Brutes lay on the floor. For all their ferocity, even they had to breathe.
Fred halted at another set of pressure doors and accessed the control panels. Linda knelt by his side, sniper rifle butted to her shoulder, aimed at the center of the doors. Will stood on the opposite side, a grenade in each hand, ready to throw.
Fred touched his helmet to the bulkhead, and listened, boosting his aural sensors. Nothing.
He then keyed the doors open.
The oval bridge was empty save for a single Covenant Hunter who miraculously clung to the railing of the command console. Inside the monster's eight-centimeter-thick armor, its body, composed of a colony of eel creatures, had oozed out and freeze dried onto the deck.
The three Spartans checked the life-pod hatches for any sign
of the enemy. Fred saw the open space beyond, stars… and the other Covenant destroyer turning toward them.
He moved onto the command platform and set the datapad in the interface location. Fred had to hurry; he had to move slow, too. Rushing now might cause errors that could cost them more time. It took all he had to focus on language matrices, numbers, and icons.
Will watched from a life-pod hatch, and whispered over TEAMCOM, "Destroyer on intercept vector."
Fred accessed the datapad's memory and got the Slipspace jump solution provided by a NAV Officer on Cairo Station. He hoped the Covenant ship would accept the human mathematics or they'd be stuck here.
Linda joined Will by the open hatch, peering through her Oracle sniper scope. "Ten thousand kilometers and closing fast," she said.
"Arm FENRIS warheads," Fred told her.
"Roger," she said.
This was where the luck part of their plan would be stretched to its thinnest. Had the Covenant shuttled the now-active warheads onto their ships? Would they notice the detonators had been primed?
"Confirmation signal lock," Linda said.
"Okay, come on," Fred whispered to the datapad.
The command surfaces lit and holographic geometries drifted over its surface. A tiny version of the console appeared on his datapad with English translations.
Fred grabbed the spherical Slipspace command and rotated it. Its ready status winked ultramarine. He input the jump coordinates.
The sphere then froze, and a white vector stretched toward tiny stars that appeared over the command surface. A blinking gold starburst appeared to initiate the Slipspace transition.
"Two-second countdown," he told Linda, "on my mark."
Will pulled the hydraulics from the open hatch, grasped the door, and rolled it back into place.
The bridge's main holographic viewer flickered on and showed the closing destroyer. Warning indicators pointed to the ships' heating lateral plasma lines.
"Two-second timer confirmed," Linda said. "Commands accepted and confirmed. All six FENRIS nukes show armed status."
"Mark!" Fred tapped the jump button.
Nothing happened…
Black space turned white.
Lord Hood watched from the command deck of Cairo Station, ignoring the warbling emergency signals.
The Covenant destroyer had maneuvered to optimal plasma range. He hoped the shields of the Spartan-captured ship staved off at least one salvo, and gave Blue Team the time they needed.
Spartan-104's plan had been inspired, yet in Lord Hood's seasoned opinion, suicidal. Dr. Catherine Halsey had once told him in confidence that Spartans considered it their duty to prove the impossible possible.
The Covenant ship's plasma lines reddened, bolts formed, and launched. At the same time, the enemy destroyer flashed inside their energy shields; its hull glowed and vaporized as the stolen nuclear devices onboard detonated. A circle of white light appeared an instant before Cairo Station's polarization shields cut the viewscreens. Thermal and radiologicals showed smears of amber and red mushrooming outward in a wavering torus.
Station Wayward Rest had been obliterated as well. The length of the Tallo Negro del Maiz crumpled and fell to the Earth.
There was no sign of the Spartan-held ship. There was no way to know if they had succeeded and jumped into Slipstream space or not.
Lord Hood chose to believe they had done the impossible anti whispered, "Godspeed, Blue Team."
CHAPTER
TWENTY-FIVE
1440 HOURS, NOVEMBER 3, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) ABOARD THE CAPTURED COVENANT DESTROYER BLOODIED SPIRIT, IN SLIPSTREAM SPACE
Fred sat on the bridge deck of Bloodied Spirit, breathing air tinged with the scent of Hunter blood. It smeiled like burnt plastic to him.
He polished a tiny quantum mirror and set it back into its sensor housing. This he slipped into the pauldron of his MJOLNIR armor and clicked the cover. The mirror had been encrusted with sea salt, causing his motion sensor to fail… and almost costing him his life back on Havana.
Linda passed a canteen to Fred and sloshed its contents to get his attention. He accepted it, opened his faceplate, and enjoyed a taste of nonrecycled water.
Were the three of them on this ship the last Spartans? Fred wondered if John was dead. Or Kelly. There was no mention of Kelly in Dr. Halsey's communique. And what had ever happened to Gray Team on a mission far outside the confines of UNSC space, now missing for over a year? He would never voice these worries. It might sap Blue Team's morale. But for the first time, real doubt eroded Fred's confidence. Doubt that John, Kelly, and the others were alive.
Linda touched his arm with a finger and dispersed these thoughts. She then patted the bullet-shaped nuclear warhead on the floor next to him. "Remember? The rebel base?"
They'd brought one of the FENRIS warheads up here in case
they needed a final option. Fred didn't think they would need it… but it was best to cover all contingencies.
"What insurgent base?" Will asked, rolling over and waking up.
"It was twenty years ago," Fred explained. "Rebels in the Tauri System claimed they had nukes to trade. Blue Team was sent in to recover the warheads, but it turned out to be a trap." He shook his head. "Would have worked too, if it hadn't been for Kurt."
Linda took the canteen and hoisted it. "To absent friends," she whispered and sipped.
She passed the canteen to Will, who drank deeply.
A red octahedral flashed over the Covenant command console. It projected amber beams onto the surface and the holographic geometries shifted.