0744 Hours, August 30, 2552 (Military Calendar)

Epsilon Eridani System, Longhorn Valley,

Planet Reach. Five Days Ago.

Steamy clouds parted like a drawn curtain; a fireball one hundred meters across roared over Fred and Kelly’s position. Fred traced the line of flames back through the sky and spotted the faint outlines of dozens of Covenant warships in low orbit.

Fred’s Banshee skimmed over the treetops, down the mountainside. He pushed the craft to its maximum speed. Kelly followed, and they swooped into a valley and up onto the zigzagging ridgeline where Joshua had first spotted the Covenant invasion force.

He put aside thoughts of his fallen comrade. He had to focus on keeping his remaining team members alive.

Fred called up the mapping system on his heads-up display. A blue NAV marker, nestled in the crux of topological lines, identified their fallback position: ONI Section Three’s secure-and-secret research facility buried under Menachite Mountain. Two decades ago it had been a titanium mine, and then the abandoned tunnels were used as storage until Section Three had taken over the mountain for their own purposes.

“We’ll need to find a safe route through—”

A hail of purple-white crystalline shards hissed through the air, arcing up from the forest beneath them. Each shard looked like the projectile fired by a Covenant needler—but far larger. The shard that slashed past Fred’s cockpit was the size of his forearm.

Kelly dodged one projectile, which exploded in midair. Needlelike fragments bounced from the Banshee’s fuselage.

One tiny secondary fragment impaled Fred’s Banshee and detonated. The port canard of his flier deformed from the explosion, and the craft wobbled.

“Down!” he shouted, but Kelly was already a dozen meters below him and plummeting to a distant dry riverbed. He followed, trailing smoke.

Fred confirmed his position and guided his wounded Banshee onto a course that followed the flash-dried riverbed below. The path wound through the forest and sinewed close to Menachite Mountain. With luck, they could ditch the Banshees and make a short run to the ONI facility.

Overhead, a tangerine borealis pulsed from the north. Sheets of silver crackled across the sky, and the black clouds boiled, lit by the raging fires beneath them. They piled into thunderheads and spat lightning.

The massive warships that had been overhead moments ago accelerated back into the upper atmosphere. Their engines screamed and left blistering wakes across the swollen sky.

For a split second panic seized Fred’s throat. Then his training kicked in and his mind turned cold and metallic, and filtered through every fact he had on Covenant plasma bombardments. He had to think or die.

So he thought.

Something didn’t fit. Covenant plasma bombardment had always proceeded in an orderly crisscrossing pattern across the planet until everything on its surface was glass and cinder. The ships above hadn’t finished their work here.

He risked a glance to the left and right. One hundred thousand hectares of forest—the same forest that Fred and his fellow Spartans had trained in since childhood—was being devoured by walls of flame. Coils of heat and thick black smoke spiraled into the sky.

A wave passed over Fred and Kelly—he couldn’t see it, but he felt it: A thousand ants had gotten into his armor and bitten him. Static fuzzed his display, and then vanished with a pop. His shields dropped to zero and then slowly started to recharge. The grav pods on their fliers flickered and sputtered.

“EMP,” Kelly shouted over the COM. “Or some plasma effect.”

“Hard landing,” Fred ordered.

Kelly made an unhappy sound over the COM and snapped it off.

They plummeted out of the sky, gliding with what little aerodynamics and power remained in their Banshees. Fred nosed his craft over the steaming rocks of the dry riverbed. He picked a path between boulders and jagged granite fangs, pointed toward a ribbon of gravel.

There was just one problem: A pair of these rocks were slightly darker than the others… and they moved.

The creatures were huge and heavily armored and moved with slow, deliberate precision. Each held a massive metal plate like a shield. Fred hit the COM and yelled, “Heads up! Covenant Hunters dead ahead!” There was no time to evade the new threat. The nearest Hunter wheeled to face them, and the array of sensory pins along its back flared, anemone-like. The hulking creature raised its main weapon—a powerful fuel rod gun, mounted on its arm—at Fred. The barrel pulsed green.

The Hunter fired.

Fred killed the power, and his Banshee dropped ten meters. There was a flash as the orb of destructive energy split the air where his flier had been a second before.

The Banshee hit the ground, skidding through fist-sized rocks. The battered craft flipped and tossed him to the ground. The Banshee rolled end over end and crashed into the Hunter.

The massive alien brought up its thick, metal shield and shrugged off the wreckage as if it were cardboard. The fuel rod gun began to charge again.

Fred winced and rolled to his feet, ignoring the new pain the crash landing had caused. He needed a weapon. Pain would have to wait.

The Hunter lumbered toward him, then dropped into a crouch and charged ahead at terrifying speed.

There was a crackle of static on his COM frequency, and Fred heard one word: “Duck!”

He threw himself onto the ground and rolled to the side.

Kelly’s riderless flier soared over him and collided with the Hunter at full speed. The Banshee exploded and showered the area with glittering metal fragments.

The Hunter reeled as fire washed across its armor. It moved in slow, confused circles. Fred could see the bright orange smears of the Hunter’s blood staining the rocks.

Kelly landed on her feet next to Fred. She readied a captured plasma grenade and hurled it straight toward the second Hunter’s huge gun.

It lodged in the barrel of the weapon and detonated. Tendrils of energy covered the Hunter. The gun crackled and belched smoke.

Fred got to his feet. “Run!”

They weren’t going to engage a Hunter in hand-to-hand combat. They might lose—they might win, but in the meantime the rest of the Covenant ground forces would catch up to them.

They sprinted toward a tiny patch of forest ahead, perhaps the last trees standing on Reach. The Hunter, confused with its destroyed weapon—and its flame-wreathed partner—hesitated, not sure what to do.

“Didn’t you see while we were airborne?” Kelly said, concern tightening her voice. “There’s a sizable Covenant assault force just ahead.”

“Ground troops?” Fred said, boosting his speed to a full sprint. “How far?”

“Half a klick.”

That didn’t make sense, either. Why have forces groundside when you were destroying the planet from orbit? “Something’s not right,” he told her. “Let’s see what they’re up to.”

Kelly’s acknowledgment light winked red.

“They’re between us and the fallback point,” Fred told her. “We have to.”

They entered the stand of trees, paused, and looked back. The Hunter shambled after them, but it was a futile pursuit. Despite their occasional bursts of speed, the Hunters were too slow.

They were caught between Covenant forces on the ground and those in the air, and neither Fred nor Kelly voiced the one question foremost on their minds: Was there even a fallback position left? Or had the Covenant between them and the rest of their team found and destroyed them?

The COM crackled. “—is Gamma Team, Alpha. Come in.”

Fred replied, “Gamma, this is Alpha. Go ahead.”

There was a roar of static. “Whitcomb… too many. Got—you read?”

“Gamma,” Fred shouted. “The fallback is hot. Repeat hot! Acknowledge.”

There was only static.

“I hope they heard,” he told Kelly.

“Red-Twenty can take care of his team. Don’t worry.” She crept forward and waved him to follow. “Take a look at this.”

Fred glanced over his shoulder. No Hunter, and nothing on his motion detector. He followed Kelly, and parted a wall of blackberry brambles. Parked in a clearing were Covenant vehicles, lined in three rows of four: mortar tanks. The tanks had two wide lateral fins, beneath which were armored anti-grav pods. They were extremely stable and fired one of the Covenant’s most powerful ground weapons: the energy mortar. Fred had seen them in action; they fired a shaped blast of plasma that obliterated everything within twenty meters of impact. Titanium battle plate, concrete, or flesh—it all vaporized.

Marines called these tanks “Wraiths” because you usually got one look at them before they made you one.

There were a handful of Grunts milling about the tanks, as well as dozens of the floating Covenant Engineers. The Engineers swarmed over and under the machinery. Most interesting to Fred, the vehicles’ hatches were open.

“I can’t think of a better disguise,” Kelly whispered, “than five tons of Covenant armor.” She started forward.

Fred set his hand on her arm, holding her back. “Wait. Think it through. There are two possibilities. First, if the Covenant have found the fallback position, we go in guns blazing and carve a path for Delta Team to get out.”

She nodded. “The other possibility?”

“They don’t know that Delta Team is holed up under the mountain. Then—” Fred hesitated. “Then we have to draw them away.”

Kelly considered this, then said, “I was afraid you were going to say that.” She gave the dirt a tiny kick. “But you’re right.”

A blip appeared on their motion trackers, directly on their six. The contact was large and moving steadily toward them. The Hunter must have made up its mind—come to find them and stomp them into the ground.

“Move,” Fred whispered.

They crossed the field, quickly and silently, and the Grunts never saw them. Fred and Kelly reached the smooth-surfaced Wraith tanks. He gave Kelly a go signal, and she sprang into the nearest open hatch. A moment later Fred inched ahead to the next tank and eased inside.

He sealed the hatch behind him.

This was one of the most desperate and stupid decisions he had ever made. How were they going to take on an entire Covenant invasion force with a pair of tanks?

“Red-One,” Kelly said over the COM. “Ready when you are.”

Through the armored shell Fred felt the rumble and roar of Kelly’s tank starting.

His tank coughed and rumbled and rose a meter off the ground.

“Ready here,” he told Kelly. “Let’s take out the motor pool.”

“Affirmative,” she said, trying to conceal the faint trace of anticipation in her voice.

In unison the Spartans turned and fired at the far corner of the formation of tanks. Two blue-white blobs of liquid sun spat from the Wraiths and detonated. There was a dazzling light, an expansion of superheated white fire—and then there was glass-smooth ground and the smoldering skeletons of seven Wraith tanks.

More luck. If the tanks had been active, with hatches secured, they might have survived the first volley.

Kelly’s tank surged ahead and bulldozed aside the surviving tanks near them.

Fred turned, accelerated to full power, and smashed through a line of retreating Grunts, a series of small, satisfying thuds reverberating through the cockpit.

The two Wraith tanks shattered through a line of trees, splintering their trunks. Beyond lay the main Covenant camp. A thousand Grunts and Jackals ran toward them, weapons and personal shields ready, but none of them fired.

They charged past the two tanks.

“They think we’re on their side,” Fred said. “They’re going to see what attacked them. Let’s not show them otherwise until we have to.”

Kelly’s acknowledgment light winked on, and she pushed a path through the onrushing Grunts—who quickly parted before her.

Half a kilometer ahead was a stand of hexagonal gold and silver structures: the shielded tents of the Elites. There were half a dozen stationary plasma turrets, “Shades,” guarding them, and beyond them lay the mountain under which were ONI Section Three’s secret research caverns. The Covenant were there as well.

Without thinking, Fred tapped a control; the display magnified. A hundred Covenant Engineers maneuvered heavy equipment: laser drills and conveyor belts and Scarabs, giant insectlike machines that could easily bore through the entire mountain.

“They found the caverns,” Fred told Kelly. “Looks like they’re going to dig them out.”

But again…why? Why not just blast them from orbit? The Covenant didn’t typically take prisoners—except the occasional straggler to execute for sport. They didn’t go to this much trouble. Unless it wasn’t Delta Team they were after.

Fred keyed his COM. “Delta, if you’re listening, we’re coming in from south-southeast in a pair of captured Wraith tanks. You’ll know which ones from the fireworks. Keep your heads down and don’t shoot us.”

He keyed over to Kelly’s personal COM. “Blaze a trail, Red-Two! Kill everything and get to that entrance ASAP!”

“I’m on it,” she whispered, her voice thick with concentration.

A blue acknowledgment light flickered on… but it wasn’t Kelly’s. It was tagged as SPARTAN 039, Isaac. That was part of Will’s team.

So they were holed up at the fallback position. Relief flooded into him to know his team was here and still alive.

But he couldn’t hope—not yet. He had three hundred meters to cross, every millimeter of which was covered with a solid wall of Covenant Grunts, Jackals, and Elites—a path straight through hell.

Kelly rotated her tank about and fired at the remaining Wraiths and the cluster of Grunts trying to put out the fires near those she’d already destroyed. For a split second the ground was the surface of a sun; it flared, faded, and then was nothing but ash.

Fred fired his mortar—as fast as the tank’s power supply would cycle. He lobbed three silver-white projectiles at the concentration of Elites and plasma turrets. They had shields that protected them for a microsecond before they overloaded and collapsed. They flared like the “strike-anywhere” matches the ODSTs used to light their contraband cigarettes.

Kelly shot arcing projectiles into the hundreds of Grunts and Jackals running in every direction. Bodies charred midstride and turned to vapor. It was as if a dozen lightning bolts had struck in the center of the camp.

Grunts ran and ducked and shot at one another. The few Jackals tried to marshal the diminutive soldiers, but the Grunts, enraged or terrified, fired on them as well.

Fred caught motion in the corner of his eye—a shadow buzzed over his tank, and a blast rocked it from side to side.

That had to be Banshees. It made sense that they’d already have Elites in the air, on patrol. He cursed himself for not spotting them before. It was only a matter of time now. Without infantry support, sooner or later the Covenant ground and air forces would regroup and destroy them.

“Move!” he shouted over the COM. “Break off contact and get to the caves!”

Kelly gunned her tank and pushed through the wreckage.

Fred let her get ahead and paused to target the excavation equipment. He fired once.

Three rapid impacts thudded on top of his tank, exploded, and shook his teeth. He fired three more times at the excavation equipment and gunned the Wraith tank. It shuddered and lurched forward.

He gritted his teeth and smiled. On the display, the smoke cleared enough for him to see that the laser drill, conveyor belts, and the Scarabs had been reduced to piles of half-melted junk.

The display lost focus. No—Fred saw it wasn’t the picture; smoke poured into the cockpit.

“Banshees circling over you,” Kelly yelled over the COM. “Get out!”

Fred popped the hatch and crawled out.

Overhead, a dozen Banshee fliers turned to strafe his crippled tank.

Fred jumped, rolled to his feet, and ran. A NAV marker appeared on his heads-up display, over a gash in the side of the mountain where the cavern entrance used to be.

A red-hot sledgehammer hit him squarely in the back: a plasma pistol on overload. He reeled forward but didn’t lose his balance—and kept running. There was no time to stop. He glanced at his shield bar; it was completely drained, but it slowly began to recharge. He dodged and weaved back and forth. He couldn’t take many more hits like that.

“Hurry,” Kelly said.

He crossed the remaining hundred meters in seconds and jumped into a crater where there had once been a gate house and the secure entrance to ONI’s underground base.

Kelly stood, braced just over the lip of the crater, holding a Warthog’s chaingun. She aimed over Fred’s head and sprayed the enemy with thunderous suppression fire. SPARTAN 043, Will, stood next to her. Fred was thrilled to see them alive—and even more thrilled to see Will holding a Jackhammer rocket launcher.

“Get below,” Kelly said, and motioned with her head to the center of the crater. “We’ll cover you.” She continued to fire until she had depleted the chaingun’s belt of ammunition.

Will took aim and squeezed the trigger. A rocket knifed through the air, and a contrail of white smoke connected with the cockpit of an oncoming Banshee. The alien flier disintegrated in a ball of fire.

Fred turned and saw a shaft that plunged deep into the ground. A steel cable had been rigged to one side, and it angled into the depths.

He grabbed the line, jumped, and zipped into the darkness. He felt a sharp vibration through the line—once, then twice—as the other Spartans followed him.

After three hundred meters of free fall, he glimpsed a faint illumination at the bottom of the shaft, the feeble sickly yellow glow from chemical light sticks. Fred tightened his grip on the cable, and his descent slowed. A meter from the bottom of the shaft, he let go and landed in a crouch. He moved out of the way. The other Spartans landed next to him.

“This way,” Will said and moved ahead, through a set of elevator doors that had been forced open.

Fred noticed that Will moved with a severe limp, and remembered the Spartans he had sent here were injured. It was ironic that he had sent them out of the thick of battle, to end up in the middle of another dire situation.

Then again, they weren’t dead… which was more than he could hope for Beta Team.

They stepped into a corridor with brushed stainless-steel walls that mirrored and smeared the faint light from the chem lights.

Overhead there was a tremendous explosion. Rocks and dirt showered into the shaft, and dust blossomed through the corridor.

“Lotus antitank mines,” Will said. “A little something to slow our uninvited guests down.”

Two other Spartans, Isaac and Vinh, sat along either side of the hallway, behind rock barricades. They gave slight nods to Fred and kept their eyes and weapons on the end of the corridor.

“Where’s the rest of the team? And the Marines from Charlie Company?” Fred asked.

“They didn’t make it,” Will replied, his voice flat. “We were separated on the way here.” He shook his head. “No contact since then.”

Fred was quiet a moment. He listed those three as MIA on his team roster as well as the other Spartans on Will’s team. The list of Spartans he could account for had grown extremely short. Fred felt his stomach twist. “Any word from Beta Team?”

“Negative. No contact, sir.”

Fred clenched his teeth and marked Beta Team as MIA as well.

“Gamma Team?” Will asked.

“They’re out there,” Fred replied. “I heard them on the COM, but I couldn’t make out much. I warned them away from this position.”

“Good,” Will whispered.

The hallway dead-ended in a vault door.

“The retinal and palm scanners are broken,” Will explained. “There’s voice access, which we’ve tried, but there’s no response. This door must be a meter thick, so without cutting tools or a hundred kilos of explosive we’re stuck on this side.”

“You spoke to the people on the other side?” Kelly asked.

“The channel is open,” Will said. “But there’s been no reply. Everyone on the other side probably bugged out.”

“Or maybe you’re just not saying anything they want to hear,” Kelly said. She whistled a six-note singsong tune.

Will nodded. “I didn’t think of that.”

The tune had been the Spartan’s secret code from when they were young and training on Reach. It was their all-clear-it’s-safe-to-come-out signal. No one but the Spartans and a few very select outsiders knew of it… a few outsiders who might be still here.

Kelly keyed the mic and whistled the tune. She released the key and waited.

Two minutes ticked off Fred’s mission clock. Too much time sitting here, doing nothing, while the Covenant over their heads were undoubtedly figuring out a way to dig them out and tear them to pieces.

“It was a good idea,” he told Kelly. “We’ll recon the shaft. Maybe it’s not completely collapsed. Will you—”

A mechanism thunked and then hummed within the titanic door. There was a hiss as the seams parted, and the meter-thick door swung inward on perfectly balanced, silent hinges.

Bright light flooded the passage. A silhouetted figure stood on the threshold. As Fred’s display compensated and enhanced the image, he saw it was human, slight of figure, female. She wore a gray pleated skirt and a white lab coat with a data pad stuffed into the breast pocket. He caught the glimmer of her eyeglasses, black-rimmed with faint bifocal lines. Her gray hair was coiled into a tight bun.

But it was her face that caught and held his focus—he recognized the tight smooth skin that wrinkled only in the corners of her mouth and her gray-blue eyes. She was the intellect behind the SPARTAN-II program, and the one who’d invented their MJOLNIR armor.

She was Dr. Catherine Halsey.