0559 hours, March 26, 2526 (military calendar)

UNSC Point Blank–class Stealth Cruiser Vanishing Point

Assault Approach, Planet Etalan, Igdras System

Not one of the captured Banshee fighters looked combat-worthy. Their hulls had been carefully riddled with cannon holes, their canards and tail stabilizers had been shot half off, and their identifying symbols had been obscured by soot or gouging. Impact stars and stress cracks had been painted across the integrated antennas in the canopies—a precaution to explain their comm silence to any Covenant pilots visually checking on the craft. John was pretty sure that if Dr. Halsey had known the Banshee equivalent of a flat tire, she would have added that too, as a way to cover for any deficiencies in Blue Team’s piloting skills.

Fortunately, the Spartans had spent most of their spare time in Dr. Halsey’s projects hangar learning how to operate all manner of captured Covenant equipment, and they were decent pilots. Even more fortunately, all of the Banshees were in at least fair working order and capable of holding their own in a dogfight, and John had every reason to believe they would hold together long enough to get him and the rest of Blue Team into the middle of the alien logistics fleet.

Once the hangar hatch had snicked closed behind Dr. Halsey, John made a twirling motion with his finger, signaling the team to take their Havoks and load up. He stepped into the middle Banshee, lying prone on the pilot’s cushion and securing his own Havok to a temporary magmount on the back of his Mjolnir armor.

John pulled the opaque canopy down and sealed the cockpit, then brought the fighter’s impulse drive online and activated the instrument console. He couldn’t read any of the symbols that appeared in the holographic readout panels, but after a few lessons from Dr. Halsey, he and the four other Banshee pilots—the other members of Blue Team and Avery Johnson—had learned through trial and error what panels they needed to watch closely.

Once the drive’s panel had assumed a warm amber glow and the symbols remained more or less steady, he pulled the stability harness up over his flanks and hips, then placed his hands on the control grips to either side of the viewscreen. A blue luminescence arose inside the spheres, and more symbols began to swirl through the holographic readout panels. He slid his palms toward the front of the control grips.

The Banshee rose off the deck and hovered in place. Through the wide-angle viewscreen, John could see that the four other Banshees were also floating about a meter off the deck. In front of them, a remotely piloted S-14 Baselard was powered up and trembling on its struts, its single thrust nozzle glowing pale orange with thermal buildup.

The throaty voice of the Baselard’s remote pilot, who would be controlling the S-14 from an observation bubble high in the Vanishing Point’s stern, came over the internal comm channel.

“Hangar depressurized,” she said. “Blue Team ready?”

A row of LEDs—including one for Avery Johnson—winked green inside John’s helmet.

“Affirmative,” John said. “Blue Team ready.”

The hangar lights darkened; then the exterior doors retracted to reveal the pallid face of the planet Etalan. The entire world was suffocating in its own ash, with slate-gray bands of ground showing between pearl-colored ribbons of airborne smoke. In a clear swath, John could see a hundred giant, charcoal-colored plumes billowing up from an orange lake of lava as wide across as his palm.

“Ten seconds,” the remote pilot announced.

John could not quite understand what he was seeing on the planet below. From what he had been told about the Covenant’s method of orbital bombardment, the aliens could glass no more than a few square kilometers of ground at a time, leveling man-made structures and incinerating plant life with plasma beams so hot they melted the silica in the ground itself. But what he saw on Etalan was on a whole new level. It was as though the Covenant had punched through the planet’s crust into its mantle, creating a volcanic geyser that was going to burn away the last traces of humanity by flooding the entire world with molten stone. And if the aliens had that kind of power, if they were capable of cruelty on such a massive scale, Task Force Yama had to slow their invasion.

Whatever the cost.

“Five seconds,” the remote pilot announced. “You should be able to see the decoy flight crossing from right to left, and on course to pass above the eruption.”

She had barely finished speaking before slivers of plasma began to lance past the launching portal, followed an instant later by the wedge-shaped silhouettes of three S-14 Baselards. A breath later, the cruciform shadows of an alien Banshee squadron appeared on their tails, closing slowly, but filling the intervening distance with white fire.

The Vanishing Point cold-launched a salvo of twenty pre-targeted M42 Archer missiles, using compressed air to push them out of their firing tubes with engines quiet. In the hangar, the remotely piloted Baselard retracted its struts and shot out of the launching portal. It was accelerating so hard that, in a heartbeat, its thrust nozzle shrank from a two-meter circle of blinding brilliance into a white dot the size of a thumbnail.

It attacked the Banshee squadron at once, firing both of its M42 Archer missiles and opening up at extreme range with its twin rotary cannons. An eyeblink later, the Vanishing Point’s Archer salvo ignited engines and flew after the Banshees as well. The astonished aliens broke formation and scattered, leaving the three Baselards free to roll out and escape.

“Blue Team, launch,” John ordered.

He pushed the control grips forward, and the captured Banshee blasted from the hangar at such speed that only the stability harness kept him from sliding toward the back of the cockpit. Johnson and the rest of Blue Team followed in the remaining Banshees, and they all fell in behind the remotely piloted Baselard. Behind them, John knew, the Vanishing Point would be vacating its waste holds, dumping depleted fuel pellets, empty shell casings, irreparable equipment, damaged parts, and any other kind of metallic refuse that a long-range sensor probe might interpret as shards of destroyed space fighters.

John began to tap the undersides of the control grips, pouring plasma bolts into the tail of the remotely piloted Baselard. His companions did likewise, and the space fighter quickly self-destructed in a giant fireball designed to draw the aliens’ attention—and help the Vanishing Point withdraw undetected.

Elite voices began to sound inside the cockpit, no doubt other Banshee pilots asking for identification from Blue Team. John ignored them and led his flight straight toward the reassembling squadron.

Since they had no way of convincingly communicating with the aliens, the team’s best chance of slipping into the enemy formation was to ignore any attempt to contact them and hope the Covenant would assume their comm equipment had been damaged. And if that didn’t work? The Vanishing Point and her two escort prowlers were staying close in case Blue Team needed a distraction.

When no one in Blue Team responded to the hails, a trio of enemy Banshees broke away from the squadron and came out to intercept the new arrivals. John kept his fingers away from the weapon controls. He had no idea what the alien protocol might be for such situations, and he didn’t want to find himself automatically responding to a challenge rush or signal burst. He wished he had thought to suggest the same thing to the others, but it was too late now.

To prevent the possibility of the Covenant noticing strange transmissions coming from the “damaged” Banshees, Blue Team would be maintaining complete comm silence until it grew apparent that the enemy wasn’t buying their act.

The intercepting Banshees swelled quickly from tiny specks silhouetted against thumb-size thrust halos into drooping crosses being pushed along on thirty-meter efflux tails, then dropped their noses and flashed past beneath Blue Team. On his own craft’s tracking panel, John saw the enemy fighters swing up behind his flight and match velocities. Two of them hung back, ready to open fire on the formation from behind, while the third crept slowly forward, passing within twenty meters of each “damaged” Banshee—no doubt so the pilot could inspect them. Finally it reached the front of the formation and hung alongside John at about the same distance.

The enemy pilot remained alongside for nearly a minute. When Elite chatter started to sound over John’s comm system, it began to seem likely that the alien had been awaiting some signal and was requesting instructions from his commander. John tried the standard wing waggle, but that drew no response. He slid his hands toward the back of the controls.

The Banshee responded by dropping its tail and lifting its nose, and John quickly returned his hands to the original position. More comm chatter filled the cockpit, and the alien inspector finally moved ahead of the flight. He rocked his own craft in a manner similar to what John had done, then led the entire flight back into the main squadron.

Once all the Banshees were together, the unit commander quickly aligned them above the logistics fleet and began to sync orbits. Because of the squadron’s much higher orbit, the process would involve a lengthy series of thruster burns timed to drop it into position either just ahead of or behind the logistics fleet. John relaxed a bit. They had planned this attack to the last detail that could be foreseen, and that was what made it possible to handle the little things they had no way of predicting.

Below him, he could see the tiny wedges of twelve Baselards juking and jinking as they tried to drop into orbit ahead of the logistics fleet. He suspected that the eight missing craft had been destroyed as they passed through the fighter screen, but the fact that the squadron had not aborted its run suggested that the Baselards carrying Green and Gold Teams were still intact. Which was a good thing. With so many enemy Banshees in formation behind them, Blue Team had just passed its own mission’s no-abort point.

Planning.

It was as much of an asset to the Spartans as their Mjolnir armor. A pair of Baselards burst into orange flashes and vanished. John watched for hints that it had been one of his Spartan teams going EV, but saw no signs either way—no tiny specks silhouetted against the pearly clouds below, no Covenant fighters circling back to attack unseen targets, no flickers of small-arms fire. Either the attack was working as planned, or the Vanishing Point had just lost two more fighter crews.

The thought made John queasy, and he found himself feeling a bit guilty about all of the lives being sacrificed to deliver his Spartans to their targets safely. At least the cause was worthy. Assuming Dr. Halsey was right about finding the Covenant supply depot, succeeding today would not only slow the enemy invasion, it would give Task Force Yama the opportunity to serve the Covenant a pushback they would never forget.

Another pair of Baselards exploded, and John now felt confident that both Green and Gold Teams had gone EV to attack their targets. When their Havoks detonated, Blue Team would take advantage of the inevitable confusion to slip away from their escorts and head for the three air-skimmers. After that, it would be a simple matter of flying into the closest hangar and crashing their Banshees, then setting a timer switch and shooting their way out before their own Havoks detonated.

The Banshee squadron escorting Blue Team dropped into orbit ten kilometers behind a huge, pear-shaped materials freighter, and John started to worry about timing. If the Green and Gold Team bombs didn’t detonate before—

John’s viewscreen flashed silver as the freighter suddenly vanished in the white wink of a nuclear detonation. His comm system erupted first into static, then into unintelligible chatter as the aliens reacted to the vessel’s destruction. John checked his Banshee’s tactical readout and saw the logistics fleet stretched out along its orbit, a gently arcing line of alien symbols shaped vaguely like commas, asterisks, and wavy equal signs.

Another white wink appeared in the distance, this time so far away it was little more than a flare atop the rim of Etalan’s gray horizon. The chatter coming over the cockpit comm system was now a full-blown cacophony, and swarms of fighter-dots began to appear beneath the remaining symbols on the tactical readout.

John didn’t know whether the detonations were the work of Green Team or Gold, but it was clear that one of them had succeeded and its members were on their way to the extraction point. They had definitely inflicted some damage on the Covenant’s logistics fleet, but it was going to take far more than a two-vessel loss to make Halsey’s strategy work.

The other two materials freighters suddenly vanished into balls of blazing light, and John knew that his second team of Spartans had completed its mission. One detonation was so close that his Banshee’s instruments flared gold as the pulse of gamma rays overwhelmed its radiation shielding. The comms fell silent, and a second later the cockpit sank into darkness as the readout panels and control grips flickered out. Etalan’s gray horizon began to tip and slide past the canopy as the Banshee started a slow tumble, dead in space.

“What junk,” Fred remarked over TEAMCOM. “They call that radiation shielding?”

John was about to chastise him for breaking comm silence, then noticed all of the other Banshees drifting dead in space around him and realized that comm silence was no longer needed. The pulse had taken out the entire squadron’s instruments and controls, so the Covenant pilots no longer had the capability of noticing a TEAMCOM transmission. And with logistics vessels vanishing one after another, the comm officers in the rest of the fleet were going to be too busy and confused to track down a few stray signals that probably sounded like blast static anyway.

But there was a drawback, of course. A big one.

Blue Team’s Banshees were just as dead in space as those of the Covenant. If the Spartans stayed with their craft, they would be out of the battle and eventually taken prisoner by the Covenant’s recovery teams. Which meant that Blue Team had to go EV, because the only mission outcome worse than dying and triggering their Mjolnir’s automatic self-destruct mechanism was not dying and allowing the enemy to capture it.

“We still need to take out their munitions train,” John said over TEAMCOM. He didn’t need to remind them of what Dr. Halsey had said—that taking out the munitions carriers was the key to her strategy to find the enemy supply depot. “Anybody have a visual on those air-skimmers?”

“Maybe,” Fred said. “What do they look like?”

“Big and fat,” Avery Johnson said. “Like an overstuffed cigar with a huge megaphone on the front.”

“How do you know that?” Linda asked.

“ ’Cause I’m looking at two of ’em right now,” Johnson said. “The first one is going to pass underneath us in about . . . hell, I don’t know. Soon.”

“EV range?” John asked.

“Are you crazy?” Johnson replied. “Making an impromptu EV attack . . . under these circumstances?”

“We have to go EV anyway,” Fred said. “These Banshees are toast.”

“And there is no way a prowler can retrieve us from this orbit,” Linda added. “Not when it will soon be filled with Covenant search-and-rescue craft.”

“So we might as well do something useful while we’re out there floating around,” Kelly said. “Are the air-skimmers in range?”

“For you nutjobs, probably,” Johnson said. “I’ve spun away from them now, but my rangefinder had the leader at fifty-two kilometers. I’d guess that puts their orbit about ten kilometers below ours.”

Ten kilometers was nothing at orbital velocities, but the timing could be difficult. If Blue Team failed to transfer to the lower orbit in time to intercept the targets, they would have to drop into an even lower orbit and try to catch up—or remain in a higher orbit and wait for the air-skimmers to pass underneath them again. Either maneuver would take time to execute, and there was no telling how soon the alien fleet would break orbit and flee into slipspace.

It was now or never.

“Prep for EV,” John said. Since they were already wearing sealed armor, all the process entailed was switching their air supply to their rebreather systems—a task the onboard computer performed for John automatically. “I’ll take the first skimmer. Kelly has the second, Fred the third. Linda and Sarge, you know what to do.”

There was a reason Linda and Johnson were armed with M99 mass-driver sniper rifles instead of the MA5Cs that everyone else carried. The M99s used magnetic accelerator technology to fire undersize ammunition at velocities so high that the rounds created shockwaves as they passed through their targets. The rounds might not be able to pierce a Covenant fighter’s energy shield, but they could penetrate thirty centimeters of titanium armor, and in the vacuum of space, their range was limited only by the accuracy of the person firing. They had been included in the team’s load-out to discourage any harassment by Banshees and other unshielded craft during extraction, but they could serve the same role on an attack insertion.

Three status LEDs flashed green inside John’s helmet, but one blinked amber.

“Go ahead, Linda.”

“The air-skimmers have already deployed their fighters, so there won’t be much hangar traffic,” she said. The original plan had called for John, Fred, and Kelly to simply park their Banshees in a hangar, then leave their Havoks in the cockpit and exit on foot. Now that their Banshees had been disabled, that wouldn’t be possible. “How will you bypass the energy shields?”

John hadn’t actually worked out that part yet, but Avery Johnson had. “Won’t have to,” he said. “The skimmers are still retracting their collection cones.”

“So?” Linda said.

John realized what Johnson was thinking. “So it’s pretty hard to skim gas with your energy shields up.” He checked to make sure the magclamp holding the Havok to his back armor was secure, then reached for the canopy’s manual release. “If we can intercept before they secure the collection cones, we won’t need to board.”

“Piece of cake,” Fred said. “We just intercept an alien vessel traveling twenty-five thousand kilometers an hour, slip through its fighter screen, land on the hull long enough to stick a thermonuclear device on it, and get clear before the device detonates.”

“Technically, you don’t need to get clear,” Linda said. “But I would miss your wisecracks, so do your best.”

“Everybody gets clear, got it?” John released his stability harness. “Jump-off in three, two—”

He pulled the manual release. The canopy popped open, and the decompression lifted him out of the slowly spinning Banshee. The maneuvering jets on his thruster pack began to fire intermittently as his onboard computer worked to stabilize his tumble. He pulled his MA5C assault rifle off its magnetic mounts and worked to orient himself, trying to keep his gaze fixed on Etalan’s gray surface and locate the fat cigar shapes Johnson had described.

At first, all John saw were disabled Banshees drifting past. He had no doubt the Elites inside were surprised to see Spartans going EV in the middle of their formation. But so far none of them seemed to be popping their own canopies to offer battle—which was hardly surprising. Most pilots were not equipped for zero-g small-arms combat.

Once his tumble had stabilized, John located a trio of purple, finger-length tubes drifting across Etalan’s gray face. They had bulging centers, visibly contracting cones at the front end, and swarms of fighter-specks swirling around their entire length. He designated the lead vessel as his target. The Mjolnir’s onboard computer placed a waypoint on his HUD that pointed at a spot just above the planet’s horizon, then initiated a thruster burn.

“Blue Leader on intercept vector target one. ETA . . .”

John paused while the computer put the figure on his HUD, then was momentarily taken aback at what he saw—apparently, it was going to require a constant thrust maneuver to catch the air-skimmer. He just hoped the computer was leaving some propellant in reserve so he would be able to accelerate away after attaching the Havok.

The waypoint rose a little higher, and the ETA adjusted upward.

“Five minutes twenty,” John read.

“I’ll be on your six,” Avery Johnson reported. “A thousand meters back.”

“Negative,” John said. He only had two snipers available right now, and he wanted them covering his people . . . not him. “Go with Fred or Kelly.”

“Blue Two and Three have closer intercept angles,” Linda said. “I’ll be able to cover them both for most of the way.”

“Most isn’t good enough,” John said. He wasn’t going to risk losing Fred or Kelly so he would be covered. Not when Sam had died because he had stepped in front of a plasma bolt meant for John. No chance. “I want Blue Two and Three covered separately.”

“John, you need to get over the hero complex,” Johnson said. “Blue Four’s disposition makes the best use—”

“Sergeant, I’m in command of Blue Team,” John said. “Let’s do it my way.”

“I almost wish we could,” Johnson shot back. “But I’m committed to this vector.”

“You’re what?”

“You can yell at me . . . but later, okay?” Linda said. “I had to make a snap decision, and that’s what I decided.”

TEAMCOM filled with static and space flared white as a Havok detonated behind them.

“Oh, yeah,” Johnson said. “Fire in the hole. I left my Havok in the Banshee.”

John did not need to ask Staff Sergeant Johnson’s reasoning. The last thing Blue Team wanted was to leave witnesses who could describe their infiltration techniques—and the detonation would help cover their target approaches. If a sharp sensor operator happened to defeat their armor’s ablative coating and notice a few contacts moving away from the detonation, there was a good chance it would be attributed to explosion debris and not investigated further.

John let out a sigh. He was starting to remind himself of Crowther, focusing on how much control he had rather than on getting the job done.

“Good thinking, Sarge.”

“Imagine that.” Johnson’s tone was about half amused and half irritated. “The old guy has a few tricks up his sleeve.”

By now, the lead air-skimmer was just a dozen kilometers behind John and about five below, in a position where he could keep an eye on it without having to wrench his helmet around. It had swelled to the length of his arm, and to him it looked more like a pregnant cigar than an overstuffed one. Its hull was lined with bands of blue lights that occasionally seemed to writhe or wink as an escort fighter passed over. The fighter craft themselves were still just specks, too small to identify . . . and an indication of just how massive the munitions carrier actually was.

The cone at its bow had contracted to about half its previous diameter. Now it seemed to be slowly sliding back into the vessel itself. Even more alarming, the stern was trailing a faint blue glow—a sign that it was firing up its reactors and preparing to break orbit.

The ETA on John’s HUD gave him almost three minutes to interception. He watched the cone carefully, trying to figure out how soon it would be fully retracted—since that would probably be when the huge vessel reactivated its energy shields.

The construction of the cone seemed as strange as everything else about the aliens. From what John could see, it consisted of eight flexible poles that occasionally sparked and crackled with energy as they were drawn into the air-skimmer’s bow. The gossamer panels between them seemed to wrinkle like cloth one moment and flicker like light the next, and from John’s angle, he could not see whether they were vanishing into the bow with the poles or just fading into nothingness.

The cone was down to a quarter of its original length when fighter specks began to bleed away over the air-skimmer’s sides. At first, John feared they were returning to the hangar in preparation for breaking orbit. But when a quarter of them remained on station above the vessel, he realized something else was happening.

The mystery was solved a few moments later when a pair of bell-shaped silhouettes appeared above Etalan’s ashen clouds—the Vanishing Point’s escort prowlers approaching in a low retrograde orbit. The two Razors were engaged in recovery operations, plucking Green and Gold Teams out of low orbit after their attacks. But, of course, the Covenant would not know that. The aliens would assume the two craft were preparing for a strike on their munitions train. John hadn’t actually planned on having the recovery operations serve as the diversion for Blue Team’s attack, but he was grateful for any help he could get.

Lances of light began to streak back and forth as the two sides opened fire on each other. The human attacks appeared to be coming out of nowhere, though John knew that was just an illusion. Each prowler was being escorted by some of the Vanishing Point’s Baselards, but the UNSC fighter craft were too small to be visible at such an extreme distance.

When the ETA on John’s HUD reached two minutes and thirty-seven seconds, the onboard computer chimed a warning. He shut off his primary thruster and used the maneuvering jets to swing him around so he was descending toward the interception point backward. Two seconds later, he reignited the primary thruster and fired it hard, decelerating in preparation for syncing orbits with his target.

No stealth system was perfect, and even the ablative baffles affixed to his thruster pack could not conceal the sudden heat blossom of a triamino hydrazine blast pointed directly at an alert enemy. In the next heartbeat, a handful of fighter flecks rose from the small swarm keeping station above the air-skimmer and streamed toward John.

There were only eight of them. But when a soldier’s only antispacecraft weapon was a MA5C assault rifle—and evasive action was impossible because he was on an intercept vector that could not be varied—that was eight fighters too many.

“Sergeant, are you seeing this?”

“Damn right,” Johnson said. “You want me to do something about it? Or would you rather handle it on your own?”

The pointed questions were obviously a reminder of John’s attempt to overrule Linda’s decision to have Johnson cover him, but the wily sergeant was not the kind to rub in a mistake for no reason. He was trying to teach John a lesson he wouldn’t forget—and John wouldn’t have minded so much, if all hell weren’t about to break loose on him.

“Just give them something to worry about,” John said. He could not help thinking that either Fred or Kelly might be facing the same situation right now—without backup—but there was nothing to be done about it except trust Linda’s judgment. “Can you tell what kind of fighters they are?”

“Banshees,” Johnson said. “The Seraphs went after the prowlers.”

“That’s something, I guess.” Banshee fighters were smaller, lightly armed, and far less resilient than Seraphs—primarily because Seraphs had energy shielding. “All of them?”

“All the ones I can see through this scope,” Johnson replied. “Shooting past you. No sudden moves, Blue Leader.”

“No problem.”

Sudden moves could be catastrophic during an active thruster maneuver, since they could throw off the traveler’s center of gravity and send him spiraling out of control as his thruster nozzle pointed in different directions. If that were to happen, his onboard computer would take control and bring his tumble back under control within a few seconds—but by then, John would be off-vector and completely unable to intercept the target.

He continued to watch between his feet as the Banshees approached. They were coming straight at him now. Their efflux glow made them look like eight pinhead-size halos rising up beneath his feet. His own thruster exhaust was dark but hot, and it created distortion waves that made the halos seem to jump and bounce as they approached.

One of the halos veered off, either hit by M99 fire or reacting to it; then it curved away and descended toward the air-skimmer. It didn’t seem possible that Johnson had actually hit the craft at a range that was probably in excess of fifty kilometers, but he saw no other explanation for the Banshee’s sudden departure.

“Did you get it?”

“All the way from here? I’m good, but not—” Johnson broke off as the Banshees opened fire, hiding their halos behind a blinding spray of plasma bolts. “John, abort!”

“Negative.” Covenant plasma bolts began to flash past him on all sides—but not closely. He was still a small target, and the enemy was still a long way off. “Keep firing.”

The plasma barrage continued to intensify, and John lost all sight of the enemy behind what had become a column of white fire boiling up around him. He checked his ETA and realized he would never survive the two minutes it would take to sync orbits, much less the time it would take to execute a proximity maneuver and actually land on the air-skimmer’s hull. Eventually the range would drop to the point where the Banshee plasma cannons grew accurate. Of course, Johnson’s aim with his M99 would grow more accurate too—but there were still seven Banshees and only one Johnson.

Hoping to obscure some of the enemy targeting sensors, John emptied the MA5C’s underslung grenade launcher. The plasma barrage abated for a moment, then quickly reintensified as the Banshees reacquired the heat signature from his thruster pack.

In response, John shut down the thruster pack, and the waypoint on his HUD began to drift as the onboard computer struggled to calculate a new syncing vector. But John didn’t actually need to sync orbits; he just needed to intercept the air-skimmer for about a second. He fired a maneuvering jet, spinning himself around so his primary thruster was no longer pointed toward the approaching Banshees, and the fountain of oncoming plasma fire quickly grew more diffuse as they lost their targeting data.

John breathed a little easier, then felt a maneuvering jet fire as his onboard computer put him on a new interception course. The ETA on his HUD lost forty seconds, and he found himself with less than a minute before impact.

“John, I’ve lost you,” Johnson said. “Are you—”

“Keep firing!” John slid the Havok’s control panel open and checked his new ETA—fifty seconds—then entered a time delay of thirty seconds. He set the trigger to automatic but didn’t initiate the countdown. “And set an avoidance vector. In about forty seconds, you’re not going to want to be within five kilometers of that skimmer.”

“John?” Johnson’s tone was worried. “John, what the hell are you doing?”

John kept his gaze on his ETA readout. He couldn’t afford to blow the timing. Thirty-six seconds.

“Son, listen to me,” Johnson said. “Don’t be a goddamn hero.”

John really wished the staff sergeant would shut up so he could concentrate.

The ETA readout reached thirty-one seconds. He initiated the Havok countdown and felt a thrill of satisfaction as it flashed thirty in the same instant as his ETA readout.

Below him, the air-skimmer had swelled to the size of a Mongoose ATV. The gossamer scoop in front had retracted so far into the vessel’s bow that it looked more like a cup than a cone, and the bloated hull was undulating like a soft-sided bag filled with liquid. A kilometer or two above the hull, John could see the teardrop shapes of the remaining escort fighters sweeping up in an ever-widening search pattern. Clearly they had been warned to expect his approach. If they could see him from their position, he might look like a small insect falling into the open maw of an enormous fish—except, by the time the fish reached him, he’d be long past it and there would be a surprise there instead.

John detached the Havok from its magmount and let it float free. The device was on the same interception vector he was, so even if the enemy fighters took him out, the Havok was likely to destroy the target.

John checked the ETA on his HUD. In fact, he could almost guarantee it would.

“Damn it, answer me, John!”

“I’m here, Sergeant.” John activated his primary thruster and shot past the air-skimmer, barely seven kilometers above its dorsal hull. “But, Sarge, with all due respect . . . you really need to stop treating me like a kid.”

Whatever Johnson replied, it was lost to blast static.

Space flashed white everywhere but in front of John, and his HUD showed the Mjolnir armor’s shell temperature climbing way above the danger level.

Priorities, though. As long as his HUD was still functioning, he was still alive.