1800 Hours, July 18, 2552 (Military Calendar) /Sigma Octanus IV, grid nineteen by thirty-sevenThe Master Chief surveyed what was left of Camp Alpha. There were only fourteen Marine regulars left—balanced against the four hundred men and women who had been slaughtered here.
He said to Kelly, “Post a guard on the dropship, and put three on patrol. Take the rest and secure the LZ.”
“Yes, sir.” She turned to face the other Spartans, pointed, made three quick hand gestures, and theydispersed like ghosts.
The Master Chief turned to the Corporal. “Are you in command here, Corporal?”
The man looked around. “I guess so . . . yes, sir.”
“As of 0900 Standard Military time, NavSpecWep is assuming control of this operation. All Marinepersonnel now report through our chain of command. Understand, Corporal?”
“Yes, sir.”
“Now, Corporal, brief me on what happened here.”
Corporal Harland hunkered down and sketched rough maps of the area as he quickly recounted thebrutal series of surprise attacks. “Right here—grid thirteen by twenty-four. That’s where they hit us, sir.
Something’s goin’ on there.”
The Master Chief scanned the crude maps, compared them with the area surveys displayed in his HUD,then nodded, satisfied.
“Get your wounded inside the Pelican, Corporal,” he said. “We’ll be dusting off soon. I want you torotate by thirds on guard duty. The rest of your men should get some sleep. But make no mistake—if thePelican gets fragged, we’ll be staying on Sigma Octanus Four.”
The Corporal paled, then replied, “Understood, sir.” He stood slowly—the long day of combat and flighthad taken its toll. The Marine saluted, then moved to assemble his team.
Inside his sealed helmet, John frowned. These Marines were now under his command . . . and thereforepart of his team. They lacked the Spartans’ firepower and training, so they had to be protected—notrelied upon. He had to make sure they got out in one piece. Another snag in an already dicey mission.
The Master Chief opened his COM link: “Team leaders meet me at the LZ in three minutes.”
Lights winked on his heads-up display—his Spartans acknowledging the order.
He looked around at the destruction. Thin sunlight reflected dully from the thousands of spent shellcasings strewn across the battlefield. Dozens of shattered Warthog chassis bled trails of smoke into thehazy sky. Scores of burned corpses lay in the mud.
They’d have to get a burial detail down here later . . . before the Grunts got to the dead.
The Master Chief would never question his orders, but he felt a momentary stab of bitterness. Whoeverset these camps up without proper reconnaissance, whoever had blindly trusted the satellitetransmissions in an enemy-held region, had been a fool.
Worse, they had wasted the lives of good soldiers.
Green Team’s leader jogged in from the south. The Master Chief couldn’t see her features through herreflective faceplate, but he could tell without checking his HUD that it was Linda by the way shemoved . . . that, and the SRS99C-S2 AM sniper rile with Oracle scope she carried.
She carefully looked around, verified that the area was secure, and slung her rifle. She snapped a crispsalute. “Reporting as ordered, Master Chief.”
Red Team leader—Joshua—ran in from the east. He saluted. “Motion detectors, radar, and automateddefenses up and running, sir.”
“Good. Let’s go over this one more time.” The Master Chief overlaid a topographic map on theirhelmets’ displays. “Mission goal one: we need to gather intelligence on Covenant troop disposition anddefenses at C.te d’Azur. Mission goal two: if there are no civilian survivors, we are authorized toremote detonate a HAVOK tactical nuclear mine and remove the enemy forces. In the meantime, wewill minimize our contact with the enemy.”
They nodded.
The Master Chief highlighted the four streams that fed into the river delta near C.te d’Azur. “We avoidthese routes. Banshees patrol them.” He circled where Firebase Bravo had been. “We’ll avoid this areaas well—according to the Marine survivors, that area is hot. Grid thirteen by twenty-four also hasactivity.
“Red Leader, take your squad in along the coast. Stay in the tree line. Green Leader, follow thisridgeline, but keep under cover, too. I’ll be taking this route.” The Master Chief traced a path through aparticularly dense section of jungle.
“It’s 1830 hours now. The city is thirteen kilometers from here—that should take us no more than fortyminutes. We’ll probably be forced to slow down to avoid enemy patrols—but we all should be in placeno later than 1930 hours.”
He zoomed into a city map of C.te d’Azur. “Entry points to the city sewer system are—” He highlightedthe display with NAV points. “—here, here, and here. Red Team will recon the wharf areas. Green takesthe residential section. I’ll take Blue Team downtown. Questions?”
“Our communications underground will be limited,” Linda said. “How do we check in while keepingour heads down?”
“According to the Colonial Administration Authority’s file on C.te d’Azur, the sewer systems here havesteel pipes running along the top of the plastic conduits. Tap into those and use ground-returntransceivers to check in. We’ll have our own private COM line.”
“Roger,” she said.
The Master Chief said, “As soon as we leave, the dropship dusts off and will move here.” He indicated aposition far to the south of Alpha camp. “If the Pelican doesn’t make it . . . our fallback rendezvouspoint is here.” He indicated a point fifty kilometers south. “ONI’s welcoming committee has stashed ouremergency SATCOM link and survival gear there.”
No one mentioned that survival gear would be useless when the Covenant glassed the planet.
“Stay sharp,” John said. “And come back in one piece. Dismissed.”
They saluted briskly, then sprinted to their tasks.
He switched to Blue Team’s frequency. “Time to saddle up, Blue Team,” he called out. “RV back at thebunker for orders.” Three blue lights winked acknowledgement in his display.
A moment later, the other three Spartans in his squad trotted into position. “Reporting as ordered,” Blue-Two announced.
The Master Chief quickly filled them in on the mission. “Blue-Two.” He nodded to Kelly. “You’recarrying the nuke and medical gear.”
“Affirmative. Who’ll have the detonator, sir?”
“I will,” he replied. “Blue-Three.” He turned to Fred. “You have the explosives. James, you’ll take ourextra COM equipment.”
They double-checked their gear: modified MA5B assault rifles, adapted to mount silencers; ten extraclips of ammunition; frag grenades; combat knives; M6D pistols—small but powerful handguns thatfired .450 Magnum loads, sufficient to crack through Grunt armor.
In addition to the weapons, there was a single smoke canister—blue smoke to signal for pickup. Johnwould carry that. “Let’s go,” he said.
Blue Team moved out. They quickly entered the jungle, in a simple single-file line with Blue-Four in thelead; James had an instinct for walking point. The line was slightly staggered, with John and Kellyslightly to the left of James. Fred brought up the rear.
They moved cautiously. Every hundred yards, James signaled the group to halt while he methodicallysurveyed the area for any sign of the enemy. The rest of Blue Team crouched, and disappeared into thethick jungle foliage.
John checked his HUD; they were one-quarter of the way to the city. The team made good time despitethe cautious pace. The MJOLNIR assault armor allowed them to push their way through the thick junglelike it was a stroll through the woods.
As the team moved on, the thin mist that permeated the jungle gave way to a hard, pelting rain. Thedamp ground gradually turned to mud, forcing the team to slow.
Blue-Four stopped dead and raised his fist—the signal to halt and freeze. John stopped in his tracks, hisrifle raised and sweeping slowly back and forth, searching for any sign of enemy movement.
Normally, the Spartans relied on their armor’s detection gear to locate enemy troops. But their motionsensors were useless—everything moved in the jungle. They had to rely on their eyes and ears and theinstincts of their point man.
“Point to Team Leader: enemy contact.”James’ calm voice crackled across the COM channel.“Enemytroops within one hundred meters of my position, ten degrees left.”
With exaggerated slowness, Blue-Four indicated the danger area by pointing.
“Affirmative,” John replied. “Blue Team: hold position.”
Although the motion trackers were of no use here, thermal proved effective. Through the thick sheets ofrain, the Master Chief spotted three cold spots: Grunts in their chilled environmental suits.
“Blue Team: enemy contact confirmed.” He added the enemy position to his HUD. “Estimated enemystrength, Point?”
“Lead, I make ten, say again, ten Covenant troops. Grunts, sir. They’re moving slowly. Double-fileformation. They haven’t spotted us. Orders?”
John’s orders said to minimize contact with the enemy where possible—the Spartans were spread toothinly across the battle area to risk a prolonged engagement. But the Grunts were heading right for theMarine bunker . . .
“Let’s take them out, Blue Team,” he said.
The team of Grunts slogged through the mud. The vaguely simian aliens wore shiny red-trimmed armor.
Craggy, purple-black hide was visible beneath the environmental suits. Breath masks providedsupercooled methane—the aliens’ atmosphere. There were ten of them, moving in two columns andspaced roughly three meters apart.
John noted with satisfaction that they seemed bored—only the point man and the pair on rear guard hadtheir plasma rifles at the ready. The rest chattered at each other in a weird combination of high-pitchedsqueaks and guttural barks.
Easy, relaxed targets. Perfect.
He gave a series of slow hand signals to the rest of the team; they faded back until they were well awayfrom the Grunts’ field of view.
The Master Chief opened the squadwide COM channel. “They’re seventy meters from this depression—” He keyed a NAV point into the team’s topographic display. “They’re heading for the western hilland will probably follow the terrain to the top. We’ll fall back now, and take concealed positions alongthe eastern hill.
“Blue-Four, you’re our scout—stay near the bottom and let us know when the rear guard passes you.
Take them out first—they seem alert.
“Blue-Two, you have overwatch at the top of the hill.
“Blue-Three, back me up. Silenced weapons only—no explosives, unless things go bad.”
He paused, then gave the order: “Move out.”
The Spartans crept back along their path and spread out along the hill.
John—in the center of the line—readied his assault rifle. The team was virtually invisible in the thickfoliage, and covered by the barrelwide tree trunks of the local flora.
One minute ticked by. Then two . . . three . . .
Blue-Four’s acknowledgment signal blinked twice in John’s HUD.Enemy detected. He relaxed his gripon the weapon, waiting——There. Twenty meters distant, the Grunt point man moved to the edge of the western hill, justdownhill from John’s position. The alien paused, his plasma rifle sweeping the area—then movedslowly up the rise.
A moment later, the rest of the formation came into view, ten meters behind the point man.
Blue-Four’s indicator winked again.Now.
The Master Chief opened fire, a short, three-round burst. The weapon’s muffled cough was inaudibleover the sound of jungle rainfall. The trio of armor-piercing rounds slashed through the alien’s throatprotection, rupturing the environment suit. The Grunt clutched at his neck, emitted a brief, high-pitchedgurgle—then fell to the mud, dead.
A moment later, the Grunt lines came to a clumsy halt, confused.
John spotted two strobe flashes, and the pair of Covenant rear guards dropped to the ground.
“Blue-Two to Lead: rear-guard eliminated.”
“Hit them!” John barked.
The four Spartans opened fire in short bursts. In less than a second, four more of the Grunt patrol weredown, dead from head shots.
The remaining trio of Grunts unslung their plasma rifles, swinging them wildly back and forth, lookingfor targets and chattering loudly in their strange, barking language. John sighted on the alien closest tohim and squeezed the trigger.
The alien splashed into the mud, methane bubbling from his shattered breath mask.
Another pair of sustained bursts and the last of the Grunts were down.
* * *Kelly policed the Grunts’ weapons and handed a plasma rifle to each of the team; the Spartans hadstanding orders to seize Covenant weapons and technology whenever possible.
Blue Team fanned out and continued on their way. When they heard Banshees overhead, they hunkereddown in the mud, and the fliers passed.
Ten more kilometers of rough terrain and then the jungle stopped and fields of rice paddies stretched outbefore them all the way to C.te d’Azur.
Crossing these would be more difficult than the jungle. They donned camouflage cloaks that maskedtheir thermal signatures and crawled through the muck on their stomachs.
The Master Chief saw three larger ships hovering over the city. If they were troop transports, they couldcarry thousands of Covenant soldiers. If they were warships, any direct ground assault against the citywould be futile. Either way it was bad news.
He made sure his vid and audio mission recorders got a good clear image of the vessels.
When they emerged from the mud, they were near the beach on the edge of the city. The Master Chiefchecked his map readings and made his way to the sewage outlet.
The two-meter diameter pipe was sealed with a steel grate. He and Fred easily bent the bars aside andentered.
They sloshed through hip-deep muck. The Master Chief didn’t like the cramped quarters. Their mobilitywas restricted by the narrow pipes; worse, they were bunched up and therefore easier to kill withgrenades or massed fire. Motion sensors picked up hundreds of targets. The constant downpour fromstorm drains above made the sensors useless.
He followed his electronic map through the maze of pipes. Light filtered in from above—beams ofillumination connected to the manhole-cover vent holes. Every so often something moved and blockedthat light.
The Spartans moved quickly and quietly through the sludge and halted when they reached their finalwaypoint—directly under the center of C.te d’Azur’s “downtown.”
With a tiny jerk of his head, the Master Chief informed Blue Team to spread out and keep their eyespeeled. He snaked a fiber-optic probe up through the drain grate at street level and plugged it into hishelmet.
The yellow light from the sodium vapor lamps washed everything topside in an eerie glow. There wereGrunts positioned on the street corners, and the shadow of a Banshee flier circling overhead.
The electric cars parked on the street had been overturned, and the waste receptacles had been knockedover or set on fire. Every street-level window was broken. The Master Chief saw no human civilians,alive or otherwise.
Blue Team moved up and over a block. The Master Chief checked topside again.
There was more activity here: a pack of black-armored Grunts meandered down the streets. Two vultureheadedJackals sat on the corner, squabbling over a hunk of meat.
Something else caught his attention, though. There were other aliens on the sidewalk—or rather,abovethe sidewalk. They were roughly man-size creatures—unlike any he had ever encountered. The creatureswere vaguely sluglike, with pale, purple-pink skin. Unlike other Covenant forces, they were not bipeds.
Instead they had several tentacular appendages sprouting from their thick trunks.
They floated a half meter above the ground, as if the odd, pink bladders on their backs kept them aloft.
One alien used a slender tentacle to open the hood of a car. It began to disassemble the car’s electricengine, moving with startling speed.
Within twenty seconds all the parts had been neatly arranged in rows on the pavement. The creaturepaused, then reassembled the parts with blinding quickness, disassembled and rebuilt it several timesinto different arrangements. Finally, the creature simply reassembled the car and floated on its way.
The Master Chief made sure his mission recorder had gotten that. This was a Covenant race neverdocumented before.
He rotated the fiber-optic cable to point down the opposite end of the street. There was more activityanother block away.
He retracted the probe and moved Blue Team a block farther south. He signaled the team to holdposition, then climbed up a short series of metal handholds until he was just below a manhole cover.
He cautiously sent the probe topside again, up through the manhole-cover vent.
There was a Jackal’s hoof directly adjacent to the probe, blocking half of his field of vision. He turnedthe probe with excruciating slowness, and saw fifty more Jackals milling back and forth. They wereconcentrated around the building across the street. The building resembled pictures that Déjà had shownhim years ago—it looked like an Athenian temple, with white marble steps and Ionic columns. At thetop of the steps were a pair of stationary guns. More bad news.
He pulled the probe back and consulted the map. The building was marked as the C.te d’Azur Museumof Natural History.
The Covenant had serious firepower here—the stationary guns had commanding fields of fire, making afrontal assault suicidal.Why would they protect a human structure? he wondered. Was it theirheadquarters?
The Master Chief signaled for Blue-Two. He pointed to the accessway that led under the building. Heheld up two fingers, pointed toward her eyes, and then down the passage, and then slowly balled hishand into a fist.
Kelly proceeded very slowly down that passage to scout it out.
The Master Chief checked the time. Red and Green Teams were due to report. He had James attach theground-return transceiver to the pipes overhead.
“Green Team, come in.”
“Roger: Green Team Leader here, sir,”Linda whispered over the channel.“We’ve scouted theresidential section.” There was a pause.“No survivors . . . just like Draco Three. We’re too late.”
He understood. They’d seen it before. The Covenant didn’t take prisoners. On Draco III, they hadwatched via satellite linkup as human survivors were herded together and ripped apart by ravenousGrunts and Jackals. By the time the Spartans had gotten there, there was no one left to rescue.
But the victims had been avenged.
“Green Team: stand by and prepare to fall back to the RV and secure the area,” he said.
“Standing by,”Linda said.
He switched to the Red Team COM channel: “Red Team, report.”
Joshua’s voice crackled over the link:“Red Leader, sir. We’ve got something for ONI. We’vespottedsome new type of Covenant race. Little guys that float. They seem to be some sort of explorer or scientisttype. They take things apart, then move on, like they’re looking for something. They do not, repeat not,appear hostile. Advise that you do not engage. They raise a pretty loud alarm, Blue Lead.”
“You in trouble?”
“Dodged trouble, sir,”he said.“But there is one snag.”
“Snag.” The word was charged with meaning for the Spartans. Getting caught in an ambush or aminefield, a teammate wounded, or aerial bombardments—those were all things they had trained for.
Snags were things they didn’t know how to handle. Complications that no one had planned for.
“Go ahead,” the Master Chief whispered.
“We have survivors. Twenty civilians hid in a cargo ship here. There are several wounded.”
The Master Chief mulled this over. It wasn’t his choice to weigh the relative worth of a handful ofcivilian lives versus the possibility of taking out ten thousand Covenant troops with their nuke. Hisorders were specific on this point. They could not set up the nuke if there was civilian population at risk.
“New mission objective, Red Team Leader,” the Master Chief said. “Get those civilians to the recoverypoint and evac them back to fleet.” He switched COM channels again, broadcasting to all the teams.
“Green Team Leader, you still online?”
A pause, then Linda spoke:“Roger.”
“Move to the docks and coordinate with Red Team—they have survivors we need to evac. Green Teamleader has strategic control of this mission.”
“Understood,”she said.“We’re on our way.”
“Affirmative, sir,”Joshua said.“We’ll get it done.”
“Blue Team out.” The Master Chief disconnected.
It was going to be rough for Green and Red Teams. Those civilians would slow them down—and if theyhad to protect them from Covenant patrols, they’d all get noticed.
Blue-Two returned. She opened the COM link and reported in. “There’s access to the building—a ladderand a steel plate welded shut. We can burn through it.”
The Master Chief opened up the team COM channel. “We’re going to assume that Red and GreenTeams will remove the civilians from C.te d’Azur. We will proceed as planned.”
He paused, then turned to Blue-Two. “Break out the nuke and arm it.”