0546 hours, March 26, 2526 (military calendar)

UNSC Point Blank–class Stealth Cruiser Vanishing Point

Assault Approach, Planet Etalan, Igdras System

An invasion fleet needed five things to press its advance: munitions, medicine, food, fuel, and spare parts. Fuel was rarely a problem because most vessels carried enough aboard to power their fusion reactors for years at a time. But eliminate any of the other four necessities and, sooner or later, a fleet was just so much scrap metal.

During the slipspace journey from Biko to Etalan, John-117 and Avery Johnson had decided to attack the Covenant munitions supply first and its food supply second, since those were the two quickest ways to bring the alien offensive to a standstill. The trouble was, after observing the enemy logistics fleet for several days, it was still hard to tell the munitions carriers from the hospital ships or equipment freighters. The Vanishing Point’s intelligence analysts were fairly certain that the vessels with transparent domes were agricultural ships, but there were three low-orbiting behemoths that remained a complete mystery to everyone. The trio kept skimming the atmosphere and sinking into orbital decay, then having to activate their engines and boost themselves out of trouble.

And time seemed to have run out. The alien logistics fleet was syncing orbits and bringing their fusion reactors to full power, probably because the Covenant assault fleet had secured the battlefield and was ready for replenishment. There was no way to confirm that supposition—the Vanishing Point and its two-prowler escort had been out of touch since slipping away from Task Force Yama six days earlier. But only a fool would think that Colonel Crowther and his Black Daggers could have tipped the battle in favor of the Biko Guards’ tiny armada and stopped the aliens from glassing the planet.

“This can still work,” Johnson said. He was standing with Blue Team in the Vanishing Point’s aft fighter hangar, watching a trio of green “friend” dots lead a swarm of red “foe” triangles across the display screen hanging high on the bulkhead. “Let’s take out the agricultural ships.”

“What we think are the agricultural ships,” Fred said. Like John and the rest of Blue Team, he was standing in full Mjolnir, holding an armed Mark 2521 Havok in the crook of one arm. “They could be petting zoos, for all we know.”

“Yeah, but at least we’d be eliminating all their petting zoos,” Johnson said. He wore black space assault armor and had his own Havok at his feet, next to an M99 Stanchion Gauss rifle. On his armor’s magmounts, he carried an M41 SPNKR rocket launcher. Technically, the SPNKR was a surface-to-surface weapon, but it could be devastating in space assaults, where its range and accuracy were not degraded by gravity and atmospheric drag. “So whatever they need petting zoos for, they’d be stuck until they could bring more forward.”

“I think we can do better than that, Sergeant Johnson.” Dr. Halsey’s voice came from the hangar hatch behind them. She crossed in front of Task Force Yama’s five captured Banshee fighters, then stopped in front of the team and continued in a low voice, “In fact, I’m quite sure we can eliminate the munitions carriers as planned.”

“You’ve identified them?” John asked.

“Do you really think I’d be allowing you to sacrifice my Banshees if I hadn’t? The value of those craft to my research is inestimable, and we have no idea when we’ll capture more.” Halsey turned to the bulkhead display screen and spread her fingers, expanding the tactical map until it showed fifteen red designators, all spread along a line on the near side of Etalan—the alien logistics fleet syncing orbits in preparation for departure. She pointed to a trio of crimson diamonds still preparing to transfer out of a low orbit. “Those big air-skimmers are the munitions carriers.”

“No offense,” Avery Johnson said, “but how can you be sure?”

His faceplate was turning between Halsey and the tactical map, where twenty green dots were diving into Etalan’s gravity well, blowing through the mass of red triangles and squares that had come up to meet them. Each green dot represented an S-14 Baselard Space Striker assault fighter with a two-person crew, while the red symbols represented two different kinds of alien fighters—triangles for exo-atmosphere Banshee fighters, and squares for a much larger and deadlier craft nicknamed the Seraph.

Fortunately, there were a lot of Banshee triangles and only a few Seraph squares in the swarm, and John was hopeful that the Baselard squadron would be able to penetrate the enemy fighter screen. The four Baselards in the center of the formation were crewed by Havok-carrying Spartans. If they could get near enough to the four logistics vessels identified on the tactical map by the red octagons, all eight of those Spartans would go EV and use the empty fighters as decoys while they sneaked their Havoks aboard the target vessels by infiltrating through a hangar, an airlock, or even a plasma-cannon port.

It was a risky mission, but to John that seemed par for course lately. The Spartans had been created to serve primarily as a high-impact force against enemy surface formations, so any space operation that involved them going EV was fraught with perils they were not equipped to handle. During an EVA mission, a Spartan could easily be lost to a stray plasma strike or a chance collision, and just like that, a soldier with eight years of expensive elite training, protected by a suit of armor that cost as much as a UNSC starship, would be gone.

But if one thing had become clear after fighting the Covenant for just a few short months, it was that humanity needed to fight the aliens however it could, even if that meant assuming exceptional risk for an operation with this kind of potential to rock the Covenant back on its heels. The intelligence analysts felt about seventy-percent confident that the vessels represented by red octagons were equipment freighters carrying the spare parts and raw materials needed to keep the enemy battle fleet operational.

If those ships could be destroyed, the Covenant fleet would be forced to avoid fighting until replacements were brought forward—a process that would delay their invasion timetable by at least a month. And in this war, a month’s respite might well mean the difference between humanity’s survival and its destruction.

But Spartans were too valuable and rare to risk lightly. Kurt-051 and Joshua-029, who were leading Green and Gold Teams in the attack, had firm instructions to abort their mission if it appeared the Spartans’ Baselards would not reach their targets. And, of course, there was a flexible but robust retrieval plan with five different contingencies for recovering each Spartan whether or not the attacks succeeded—or were even attempted. Despite this, John knew his fellow Spartans well enough to know that the last thing on their mind were mission aborting contingencies. They would do whatever it took to complete the objective.

After a moment, Halsey seemed to decide it would be easier to answer Johnson than argue with him. “I’m sure because I understand how the Covenant’s plasma weapons function,” she said. “Do I really need to explain the engineering to you, Sergeant?”

“How about the short version?” There was a suspicious undertone in Johnson’s voice, as though Nyeto’s was not the only command he viewed as being infiltrated by insurrectionist spies. “It’s not like I’m trying to build one myself.”

“Good, because humans don’t have the magnetic stabilization technology,” Halsey said. “But the theory is simple enough. A quantity of liquefied carrier gas is passed through an electric arc, where it’s stripped of electrons and transformed into a thermal plasma. Then it’s confined inside a magnetic capsule and launched at a target.”

“So the air-skimmers collect the gas?” Kelly asked.

“And cool and compress it into a liquefied form, yes,” Halsey said. “That’s why they’ve been dipping into Etalan’s atmosphere.”

John frowned inside his helmet. There was no way Dr. Halsey was a spy, but her story didn’t add up. “And it took you four days to figure that out?”

Halsey flashed him a tight smile. “Hardly,” she said. “I figured it out about five minutes after we arrived.”

“And you waited until now to tell us?” Johnson said, raising his voice. “Are you crazy? We could have planned—”

“No plan is adequate if the enemy knows your intentions,” Halsey interrupted. “And it’s impossible to be certain what kind of comm technology the insurrectionist spies we’re currently hosting have at their fingertips.”

“Are you telling us that there are still spies aboard the Vanishing Point?” Linda asked. Like Avery Johnson, she had a SPNKR on her magmount and an M99 Stanchion Gauss rifle resting on the deck at her feet. “Then why are they still alive?”

“I don’t know who they are,” Halsey said. “Or even if they’re aboard. All I know for certain is that this ship has more bugs than the kitchen in my first apartment.”

“And you haven’t had them removed?” John asked.

“No, and I’m not going to,” Halsey said. “They’re vital to my operational strategy.”

“What strategy?” Johnson asked. He turned to John and spoke over TEAMCOM. “Did she tell you about any operational strategies?”

Halsey turned and tapped the bud in her ear. “I can hear you, Sergeant Johnson.”

“Still a fair question,” Johnson said. “And how long have you known that Lieutenant Commander Nyeto has spies in his command?”

“I’ve known that Nyeto is a spy since the after-action briefing on Seoba, when he exposed John’s age,” Halsey said. “There’s only one way he could have developed that information, so I swept my office and lab for eavesdropping devices.”

“And you found some?” John asked.

“Oh, many,” Halsey said. “Some quite sophisticated. I almost missed the data miner in my lab systems.”

“That makes me feel better.” Fred raised his arm and twisted the armor-encased limb back and forth. “Any chance our Mjolnir systems are compromised?”

“None.”

“How do you know?” John asked.

Halsey appeared puzzled by the question. “Because you’re still alive, John. Hector Nyeto has been trying to destroy the SPARTAN-II program since the moment he learned of it. I should have seen what he was doing sooner.”

“We should have seen it too.” Kelly tipped her helmet toward the others, suggesting that the entire team should have been more suspicious of the man, then said, “Are you sure our systems are clean? The last thing we need is a rogue subroutine putting our armor into lockdown in the middle of a battle.”

“I’m sure,” Halsey said. “Nyeto isn’t the only one who knows how to use surveillance devices. The maintenance module hasn’t been breached.”

“So let’s say ninety percent confidence,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Have your onboard computers run a diagnostics check on your suit systems, then run one on the computer itself. If anything looks funny—”

“I can hear you,” Halsey reminded him. “And I wouldn’t let you go out if there was any chance your systems had been compromised.”

“Yes, you would,” Johnson said. “The Spartans may be your creations, Dr. Halsey, but they’re soldiers. You’re not doing anyone a favor by trying to sugarcoat that.”

Halsey thought for a moment, then nodded. She turned to John and said, “We’d better put that confidence rating at eighty percent, then. One of Nyeto’s people could have been in the maintenance module before I realized there was a problem.”

“Fair enough,” Johnson said. “Now, about your operational strategy . . .”

“What about it?”

Johnson merely cocked his helmet to the side, a gesture of frustration that he had picked up from the Spartans.

Halsey sighed. “I suppose you’re right.”

She glanced up at the bulkhead display, where the tactical map showed the various chases between the alien fighters and the Vanishing Point’s Baselard strikers continuing unabated. The Baselard squadron diving down Etalan’s gravity well was shooting through the enemy fighter swarms and well on its way toward the logistics fleet’s orbit, and John knew it wouldn’t be long before the two Spartan teams in the center of the formation had to fake the destruction of their craft and go extra-vehicular. Rather than missiles, the Spartans’ Baselards were carrying pods full of chain-linked debris that would help camouflage their Mjolnir armor from pursuers—and, with a little luck, cause a few high-velocity collisions.

A separate trio of Baselard decoys was closing on the Vanishing Point from a slightly lower orbit, with another swarm of enemy fighters on their tails. These Baselards were part of a second mission that would target the munitions carriers. The plan called for Blue Team to infiltrate the munitions ships by flying a captured Banshee straight into one of their hangars. Once inside, the Spartans and Johnson would crash their Banshees in an area where it would be difficult to jettison the fighters, then activate the thirty-second timers on their Havoks, leave them inside the cockpits, and extract by going EV for a prowler pickup.

As a precaution against losing all twelve of Task Force Yama’s Spartans in the same attack, Blue Team’s mission would only be a “go” if it appeared that Green and Gold Teams’ mission was proceeding as planned. So far, that seemed to be the case, and the three decoys would be leading their pursuers past the Vanishing Point’s bow in nine minutes. Given that it would take Johnson and Blue Team five minutes to fire up their captured Banshees and another two minutes to depressurize the hangar, there wasn’t a lot of time left for Dr. Halsey to explain the subtleties of one of her intricate strategies.

“You’ll need to trust me on the details of my strategy for now,” she said. “But one of the devices we captured from the downed vessel on Seoba was a holographic slipspace chart.”

John almost gasped. “And you can read it?”

“A little better every day,” Dr. Halsey said. “In fact, I believe I’m well on the way to discovering the Covenant’s primary supply depot for this area of space.”

“Well on the way, huh?” Johnson asked. “What’s that mean, exactly?”

“That I’ve identified several possibilities,” Halsey said. “If we succeed here and force the invasion fleet to resupply, I’ll be able to narrow that number down to one.”

“And then we can slip in and nuke it,” John said. The implications were huge. Even an unsuccessful attack on the Covenant supply depot would force the aliens to divert resources to defending it. And actually destroying it? That would not only shake their confidence, but it would erode their ability to carry on offensive operations in this part of human-occupied space. “I like it.”

“I thought you might.” Halsey pointed at the trio of air-skimmers. “But first you have to eliminate those. It’s the only way to force the Covenant’s hand.”