The Ghost drivers on both sides of the ship were still looking upward, trying to figure out what had occurred, when more than two dozen assault weapons opened up on them.
Four of the rapid attack vehicles were destroyed within the first few seconds of the battle. The fifth, piloted by a mortally wounded Elite, described a number of large overlapping circles before crashing into the cruiser’s hull and finally putting the driver out of his misery. The Elite behind the controls of the sixth and last Ghost panicked, backed away from the wholesale destruction, and toppled over the edge of the precipice.
If the alien screamed on the way down McKay wasn’t able to hear it, especially with the steady crack, crack, crack of multiple S2 Sniper Rifles going off all around her. She keyed her radio to the command freq and ordered her platoon leaders to move up.
The assault force crossed the open area in a run, and headed toward the ship’s sternmost air locks.
Covenant troops stationed within the ship heard the ruckus and hurried outside, and were met by the sight of the still-smoking wrecks of their mechanized support, and an enthusiastic – if somewhat thin – infantry assault.
Most were simply standing there, waiting for someone to tell them what to do, when the snipers’ 14.5mm armor-piercing, fin-stabilized, discarding-sabot rounds began to cut them down. The impact was devastating. McKay saw Elites, Jackals, and Grunts alike throw up their arms and collapse as the rolling fusillade took its toll.
Then, as the aliens started to pull back into the relative safety of the ship’s interior, McKay jumped to her feet, knowing that one of her noncoms would do likewise on the far side of the hull, and waved the snipers forward. “Switch to your assault weapons! The last one to the lock has to stay and guard it!”
All the ODST troopers knew there were plenty of things to scrounge inside the hull, and they were eager to do so. The possibility that they might end up guarding a lock rather than pillaging the Autumn’s interior was more than sufficient motivation to make each Marine run as fast as possible.
The purpose of the exercise was to get the last members of the Company across what could have been a Covenant killing ground and to do so as quickly as possible. McKay thought she’d been successful, thought she’d made a clean break, when a momentary shadow passed over her and someone yelled, “Contact! Enemy contact!”
The officer glanced back over her shoulder and spied a Covenant dropship. The ungainly looking craft swept in from the east, and was about to deploy additional forces. Its plasma cannon opened fire and stitched a line of black dots in the dirt, out toward the edge of the drop-off.
A sniper disappeared from the waist down, and still had enough air to scream as his forward motion slowed, and his torso landed on a pile of his own intestines.
McKay skidded to a halt, yelled, “Snipers! About face, fire!” and hoped that the brief parade ground–style orders would be sufficient to communicate what she wanted.
Each Covenant dropship had side slots, small cubicle-like spaces where their troops rode during transit, and from which they were released when the aircraft arrived over the landing zone. Had the pilot been more experienced he would have positioned the aircraft so that it was nose-on to the enemy and fired his cannon while the troops bailed out – but he wasn’t, or he’d simply made a mistake, as he presented the ship’s starboard side to the humans and opened the doors.
More than half the ODST snipers had switched back to their S2s and had shouldered their weapons up as the drop doors opened. They opened fire before the Covenant troops could leap to the ground. One of their rounds hit a plasma grenade and caused it to explode. A control line must have been severed, because the dropship lurched to port, pitched forward, and nosed into the ground. Twin waves of soil were gouged out of the plateau as the aircraft slid forward, hit a boulder, and exploded into flame.
Secondary explosions cooked off and the twin hulls disintegrated. The sound of the blast bounced off the Autumn’s hull and rolled across the surrounding plain.
The Marines waited a moment to see if any of the aliens would try to crawl, walk, or run away, but none of them did.
McKay heard the muffled thump, thump, thump of automatic weapons fire coming from within the ship behind her, knew the job was only half done, and waved to the half dozen Marines. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”
The Helljumpers looked at one another, grinned, and followed McKay into the ship. The El-tee might look like a wild-eyed maniac, but she knew her stuff, and that was good enough for them.
The soil was still damp from the rain, so when the sun hit the top of the mesa a heavy mist started to form, as if a battalion of spirits had been released from bondage.
Keyes, exhausted by his captivity, not to mention the harrowing escape from the Truth and Reconciliation, had literally collapsed in the bed the Helljumpers had prepared for him and slept hard for the next three hours.
Now, awakened by both a nightmare and the internal clock that was still attuned to the arbitrarily set ship time, the Naval officer was up and prowling about.
The view from the rampart was nothing less than spectacular, looking out over a flat plain to the gently rolling hills beyond. A bank of ivory-white clouds scudded above the hills. The vista was so beautiful, so pristine, that it was difficult to believe that Halo was a weapon.
He heard the scrape of footsteps, and turned to watch Silva emerge from the staircase that led up to the observation platform. “Good morning, sir,” the Marine said. “I heard you were up and around. May I join you?”
“Of course,” Keyes said, gesturing to a place at the waist-high wall. “Please do. I took a self-guided tour of the landing pads, the Shade emplacements, and the beginnings of the maintenance shop. Good work, Major. You and your Helljumpers are to be congratulated. Thanks to you, we have a place to rest, regroup, and plan.”
“The Covenant did some of the work for us,” Silva replied modestly, “but I agree, sir, my people did a hell of a job. Speaking of which, I thought I should let you know that Lieutenant McKay and two platoons of ODST troops are fighting their way into the Autumn even as we speak. If they retrieve the supplies we need, Alpha Base will be able to hold for quite a while.”
“And if the Covenant attacks before then?”
“Then we are well and truly screwed. We’re running short on ammo, food, and fuel for the Pelicans.”
Keyes nodded. “Well, let’s hope McKay pulls it off. In the meantime there are some other things we need to consider.”
Silva found the easy, almost offhanded manner in which Keyes had reassumed command to be a bit irritating, even though he knew it was the other officer’s obligation to do so. There was a clear-cut chain of command, and now that Keyes was free, the Naval officer was in charge. There was nothing the Marine could do except look interested – and hope his superior came up with at least some of the right ideas.
“Yes, sir. What’s up?”
So Keyes talked, and Silva listened, as the Captain reviewed what he had learned while in captivity. “The essence of the matter is that while the races which comprise the Covenant seem to possess a high level of technology, most if not all of it may have been looted from the beings they refer to as the ‘Forerunners,’ an ancient race which left ruins on dozens of planets, and presumably was responsible for constructing Halo.
“In the long run, the fact that they are adaptive, rather than innovative, may prove to be their undoing. For the moment, however, before we can take advantage of that weakness, we must first find the means to survive. If Halo is a weapon, and if it has the capacity to destroy all of humanity as they seem to believe, then we must find the means to neutralize it – and perhaps turn it against the Covenant.