1615 hours, April 15, 2526 (military calendar)

Upper Terminus, Unidentified Covenant Space Elevator

Geostationary Orbit, Planet Naraka, Agni System

Through the wall of the antigravity beam, John-117 could see Naraka’s horizon falling swiftly away. The distant stars were shifting parallax so fast they seemed to be sinking behind the planet, and above him the elevator terminus was finally coming into view—a tiny yellow oval at the moment.

But John was beginning to think it had been a mistake to assume that a Covenant lift beam would be as fast as a human space elevator.

He had told Small Bear to set a forty-minute delay on the Fury she had left at the bottom, and the countdown on his HUD had just dropped to five minutes.

Normally, that wouldn’t worry him, since Third Platoon was tens of thousands of kilometers above ground zero. Normally, that would be more than a safe distance. But John had no idea how the electromagnetic pulse of a one-megaton thermonuclear explosion might affect an alien antigravity beam, or how much of the shockwave would be funneled straight up the narrow column toward the platoon.

The countdown on John’s HUD reached 4:45. The terminus above continued to swell larger, and a tiny black dot appeared in the center. The dot was probably the portal where the elevator entered the installation. He kept his eyes fixed on it until the count on his HUD reached 4:30; it was doubling in size every five seconds. The elevator beam was about twenty meters across. . . .

His onboard computer did the calculations, and an ETA of sixty seconds appeared on John’s HUD. That gave them a safety margin of three and a half minutes between portal arrival and the detonation of the Fury left with Chavez. Plenty of time. John was relieved.

Then they began to decelerate.

The onboard computer did another set of calculations, and a new ETA appeared on his HUD: 3:05.

Then it helpfully posted the new safety margin in blinking yellow. Twenty-two seconds.

Over the platoon channel, John said, “ETA three minutes. Once we enter the support ring, we’re going to have to move fast and keep moving fast. Ready your device fuses now, three-minute delay and sixty-minute auto.”

The three-minute delay was stingy by design. It did not give an assault team much time to clear an area after activating the fuse, but they would be operating in a heavily populated environment, and a longer delay would give the enemy too much time to find the explosive device—whether a nuke or an octa—and toss it out an airlock.

The sixty-minute automatic was simply a safety protocol to keep the device from falling into enemy hands if it was lost—or the trooper carrying it was killed. If the timer was not disengaged with an override code, the weapon would detonate automatically in an hour.

John and the other Spartans entered the delays on the three devices they were carrying—the octas on their hips and the Havoks magclamped on their lower backs—while the Black Daggers worked in pairs to program the octas carried above their thruster packs. By the time everyone reported ready, the ETA had fallen to fifty seconds, and the entry portal overhead had grown so large it filled the sky.

A sky packed with spinning alien bodies and slowly tumbling crates.

“Bad sign,” Small Bear said. “There’s nobody pulling the cargo out of the elevator.”

“We can’t wait,” John said. “Fred, go left. Kelly, go right. Lieutenant, they could use some support.”

Small Bear assigned a fireteam to follow each Spartan; then Fred and Kelly hit their thrusters and led their support teams up the beam ahead of the rest of the platoon.

Their progress could hardly be called swift, since they were working against the decelerating force of the beam itself. But they were able to move ahead of the rest of platoon, then gather in a loose formation beneath the lid of slowly swirling crates and corpses.

Rather than alert the enemy to their presence by poking their heads out to look for trouble, Fred and Kelly simply grabbed the rim of the portal and pulled themselves up. They opened fire with rockets and bullets as soon as they were clear, then vanished into the terminus, their support teams rising out of the elevator beam into a torrent of return fire.

Three troopers fell back into the beam on Fred’s side and two on Linda’s, missing limbs or heads, their assault armor puckered in front and blown out in back by large explosive rounds.

“Kill zone!” Fred reported. Two more troopers tumbled into the portal. “Wedge-angle crossfire, at least two hundred hostiles at twenty meters, centered three o’clock off my exit bearing!”

“Breakout options?” John asked.

“Transit tube twelve o’clock!”

The ETA on John’s HUD showed thirty-two seconds. The Fury left with Chavez would detonate twenty-two seconds after that. What that might mean for anyone still inside the antigravity beam was the last thing he wanted to find out. He pictured the situation Fred had described inside the terminus . . . and realized almost instantly what he had to do.

“Lieutenant,” he said, “I need to break out Blue Team to run bombs through that transit tube. Can you give us a rolling screen?”

Small Bear hesitated, a sure sign she understood what John was asking of her, then finally answered in a thin voice: “Sure, Chief. We can do that.”

She began to issue the necessary orders.

John swapped his M90 for the MA5B and laid his finger on the trigger guard of the underslung grenade launcher, then switched to TEAMCOM. “Kelly, when we come out of here—”

“I was listening, John.” She paused, then added, “I wish there was another way.”

“Me too. Let me know if you have one.”

“I don’t.”

The ETA on John’s HUD read ten seconds. He and Linda used their thrusters to slip into position with Small Bear and her platoon. Sierra Force had not deployed any comm relay drones for fear of betraying its presence, but he knew from Lieutenant Guayte’s parting message that the two prowlers carrying Gold Team and First and Second Platoons Delta had been forced to abort their insertion run. Even more frustrating, there was no way to check with Kurt-051 and see whether Green Team had managed to recover and infiltrate the orbital fleet-support ring. With luck, they’d also made it this far, and there would be four more Spartans and another twenty-five space assault troopers helping Blue Team and Third Platoon destroy orbital facilities.

But John knew better than to count on it. There was just as good a chance that Third Platoon would be the only team to reach orbit at all—and the Covenant would not be shaken by a raid that knocked out just one or two installations. To be sure of taking down the entire orbital ring, Blue Team needed to destroy all ten facilities themselves.

John and Linda reached the top of the lift beam with Third Platoon, then pushed their weapons up through the blanket of drifting bodies and crates.

Small Bear’s voice came over the platoon channel. “Now.”

They blind-fired a volley of grenades and rockets in the general direction of the enemy and hit their thrusters, rising out of the portal into a firestorm. They were in a huge ovoid chamber stacked with crates, ingots, and bodies—all good cover for the enemy.

And these guys were soldiers.

John felt half a dozen spikes and needles glance off his armor and saw an ODST ahead of him separate into three parts. He fired a grenade toward a line of forms wearing the same red-black armor he had seen at Seoba.

Then Small Bear yelled, “Go go go!” and Third Platoon—what remained of it—raced forward, pouring bullets and grenades and rocket fire into a line of Covenant crouched behind a makeshift breastwork of metal ingots.

John fired another grenade over the troopers’ heads and started across the deck behind them, angling toward the mouth of the transit tube more than a hundred meters away. A trio of Brutes clambered over a stack of the metal ingots and tried to cut him off, but Fred stepped out from behind a stack of crates and hit them with a pair of SPNKR rockets. John took out the third Brute with a grenade, and he had a clear path all the way to the tube.

He stopped halfway there, dropping to his butt behind a pile of toppled crates to reload his grenade launcher. The safety margin blinking on his HUD had changed to red. Ten seconds until the Fury detonated at the bottom of the space elevator.

John finished the reload, spun to a knee, and stuck his head up to see an approaching Elite literally step through an ODST he had just split down the center with an energy sword. John opened up with his assault rifle. It took half a magazine to knock down the energy shield, but finally the alien’s torso armor puckered and began to seep blood. The alien kept coming and did not go down until John sprayed another dozen rounds into his knees.

Linda and Kelly sprinted past and took positions inside the mouth of the transit tube. Third Platoon’s rolling screen had fallen to a handful of troopers, and the aliens were pouring out of cover to mount a charge.

Five seconds.

“Disengage!” John called over the platoon channel.

He retreated toward the tube at a run, emptying his grenade launcher as he went. A handful of Third Platoon survivors sprinted past, so heavily laden with spare SPNKR barrels that they were barely keeping ahead of the Jackals and Elites that followed close on their heels. Fred and Kelly slowed the aliens with a couple of long MA5B bursts that left the second rank tripping over the bodies of the first; then Linda went to work with her M99, drilling Brute after Brute between the eyes and sending them tumbling into those behind.

Zero and out of time.

Nothing happened, except that Lieutenant Small Bear appeared ten meters away, a short figure in assault armor vaulting over a stack of ingots. A sword-wielding Elite followed close behind. John raised his assault rifle to cover her, then felt a hand grab his fission reactor.

“Get in here!” Kelly said.

She jerked John into the transit tube, and the Elite chasing Small Bear went flying backward as an M99 round blew his torso open. The lieutenant glanced back, then stumbled over the body of a dead Jackal . . . and was blown flat as the shockwave from the Fury detonation finally arrived, much reduced in power after climbing tens of thousands of kilometers up the elevator column, but still powerful enough to send bodies flying in every direction, knocking the remaining aliens off their feet and hurling them into the stacks of the breastwork.

Miraculously, Small Bear wasn’t hit by anything. She looked up, her astonishment at her survival obvious in the way she held her helmet cocked to one side.

John waved her forward, but as she rose, the decompression hit, sucking everything down through the empty elevator portal. Small Bear extended an arm, reaching for help, then went sliding back toward the center of the terminus.

John tried to help, but even a Spartan’s arm was not that long.

The transit tube’s emergency hatch irised shut, almost closing on John’s hand before he could pull it back. His helmet speakers filled with the startled cries and shouts of the wounded and the dying; then Small Bear’s voice sounded above the rest, her command status auto-dampening everything else on the channel.

“Carry on, Chief. Make it count.”

John banged his fist against the hatch so hard that he dented it, then took a breath and stepped back. An order was an order, and Small Bear had been clear about what she expected.

John turned around to find the rest of Blue Team and six Third Platoon survivors watching him expectantly. Fred sat in the driver’s compartment of a half-loaded cargo sled that looked large enough to haul an entire platoon—along with a couple of pieces of field artillery. The sleds were simple vehicles, little more than an egg-shaped driver’s compartment attached to the front of a cargo bed long enough to hold two Spartans lying end-to-end. Several more sleds were parked along the sides of the transit tube, most in various stages of being loaded with a variety of materials.

“You heard the lady,” he said. “Let’s make this count.”

He received a chorus of enthusiastic replies and helmet bobs, but they still needed a plan. John looked to Fred.

“You figure out how to drive that thing?”

“Sort of,” Fred said. “The controls aren’t too different from the Banshees, at least in how you work them.”

“Close enough,” John said. He turned to the surviving assault troopers and motioned them onto the sled. “If we want to stay ahead of the Covenant and knock out enough installations to take this ring down, we need to move fast. Spartan-104 will show you how to operate this thing. Once you’re good, he’ll turn it over to you and switch vehicles. Clear?”

The troopers dipped their helmets in quick nods, and a husky male voice said, “So far.”

“The rest is easy.” John outlined a simple plan, then finished, “When you’re out of octas, exfiltrate the best way you can and call for a ride.”

The troopers piled their spare SPNKR barrels onto the sled behind Fred, then moved forward to learn how the vehicle was operated. John slipped into the driver’s compartment of a second vehicle, which was loaded about three-quarters full with ingots of some kind of silvery-blue metal. Kelly and Linda mounted a third vehicle, also loaded with the metal ingots.

As Fred had indicated, the controls were similar to a Banshee’s, but much simpler. There was basically a pair of handle grips to control speed and vector, and no weapon triggers.

John placed his weapons in the driver’s compartment beside him, then straddled the driver’s bench and placed both hands on the grips. The vehicle immediately whirred to life, its antigravity pads lifting it about a half meter off the floor. He moved the grips forward, and the sled began to accelerate.

Kelly and Linda came up beside him, Kelly driving and Linda kneeling in the cargo bed, using a stack of ingots as a firing rest for her M99. Fred brought up the rear, his voice echoing in John’s helmet as he instructed the Black Daggers in driving the alien vehicle.

The transit tube was basically a flattened oval about five meters high and three times that in width, with one “roadbed” running along the “floor” of the tube and another along the “ceiling.” Presumably, the aliens used artificial gravity to keep the sleds secured to the appropriate surface, with the floor designated for outbound traffic and the ceiling for empty inbound traffic.

Along the walls ran a two-meter viewing band, through which John could see the criss-crossing beams of the transit tube’s trussing armature. Through the armature gaps on the left side, he saw Naraka’s cloud-mottled face. If he craned his neck far enough, he could see distant sections of the fleet-support ring. To his delight, the ring had a visible gap about a quarter of its circumference behind him, and he did not see the blue spoke of a space elevator running down to the planet’s surface beneath the gap. At least part of Green Team had made it that far, and they had destroyed at least one orbital facility. But it was going to take more than a small gap like that to destabilize the entire ring. Blue Team still had a lot of work to do.

Through the right-hand band, John could see the Covenant fleet departing its shielding orbit, repositioning itself to . . . what? Fire plasma cannons against its own support installations? The aliens would no doubt launch swarms of starfighters, but even they would not be of much use against a force that had already infiltrated their facilities. It was an infantry fight now, and in that arena, the Spartans held the advantage.

John felt the sled wobble as Fred jumped aboard and dumped an armload of SPNKR barrels into the cargo bed. A few minutes later, the dark oval of a closed hatch appeared at the end of the transit tube ahead.

Fred grabbed his SPNKR and kneeled in the front of the cargo bed, and the barrier vanished in an orange ball of flame and smoke. John aimed the sled at the center of the ball and, ducking down in the compartment to make himself as small a target as possible, drove straight into the flames.

The sled bounced a couple of times as it struck the edges of the jagged hole, and then they were shooting across the deck of one of the orbiting fleet-support facilities that were linked by the transit tube. This one looked like some kind of huge smelter.

A few needles and plasma bolts rained down from the girders overhead, but the barrage was so light and poorly aimed that it had to be coming from an amateur security team rather than a military unit. John kept the control grips pushed forward and barely bothered dodging, while Fred created confusion and conserved ammunition by flinging ingots at anything they passed.

At the speed they were traveling, the heavy ingots landed with the force of a rocket strike, taking out cargo sleds, cranes, even a crucible filled with molten metal. So far, John’s strategy of moving fast was working well—the enemy was obviously scrambling, unable to move effective forces into place quickly enough to defend themselves.

A textbook raiding technique.

Except for losing most of Third Platoon. Casualties that high were never textbook.

The cargo sleds reached the far side of the smelter and entered the transit tube. Linda and Kelly pulled up beside Fred and John to maximize firepower if they ran into trouble ahead.

Having paused to find a good place to hide their octa, the Black Daggers had fallen a couple of minutes behind by the time they entered the transit tube, reporting one trooper injured.

John started a new two-and-a-half-minute countdown. The team would have to breach the transit tube before the octa detonated in the smelter—or risk being taken out by their own shockwave.

They reached the next installation at just over two minutes. Again, the hatch was closed, and again Fred hit it with a SPNKR rocket. This time, most of the fireball blew back into the transit tube, and John glimpsed something dark looming on the other side of the destroyed hatch.

“Second rocket!” He began to decelerate. “Barricade!”

Fred fired again, and a gaping hole appeared in the dark mass—but not a hole large enough to drive the cargo sled through.

John stopped the vehicle short and adjacent to the door, then grabbed his weapons and fired a grenade one-handed through the hole.

“Kelly—”

Kelly was already charging through the hole, firing as she moved. Fred followed close behind, the SPNKR clamped to his back and four extra barrels tucked under his arm. In his other hand, he carried his assault rifle. He let off a burst as stepped through the hole, and an instant later, the firefight had ended.

“Clear!” Kelly reported.

Linda stepped through, heavily burdened with her M99, an MA5B, and an extra case of barrels for Fred’s SPNKR.

The Black Daggers arrived just as the countdown on John’s HUD reached zero. He wasn’t sure how much time actually remained until the octa in the last installation detonated, but it had to be less than thirty seconds.

As the assault troopers piled out of their sled, he pointed at the wall of the transit tube. “Hit that with a rocket,” John said. “We need a vacuum cushion between us and the detonation.”

The troopers ignored him and carried their wounded companion through the breached hatch.

“Already taken care of.” It was a husky-voiced trooper bringing up the rear of the line who said this. “You don’t have to be a Spartan to know what happens when you set off an octa in a confined space.”

He disappeared through the breach after his companions, then stuck his head back through. “Better come along, Chief. There’s going to be a hell of a wind in about ten seconds.”

Feeling a bit foolish for thinking someone of a Black Dagger’s training and experience would need reminding about shockwave hazards, John stepped through the hole and added one to the count of facilities that he could be certain Sierra Force had destroyed.

The aliens had toppled one of their cargo sleds in front of the hatch in an effort to defend their installation, and John helped his fellow Spartans turn the vehicle around so that its rounded nose was pushed into the hatch breach.

When a charge ruptured the transit tube a couple of seconds later, the decompression sucked the sled’s nose deeper into the hole, holding the pressure loss inside the installation to a whistling breeze.

By the time they’d finished, a trio of Black Daggers had returned with a pair of replacement cargo sleds and a fresh casualty. Leaving the Daggers to plant their next octa, John and Blue Team climbed into the first sled and took off across what appeared to be a small-arms factory. They exchanged fire with a security detail that was taking cover behind the intermittent bulkheads that separated the transit lane from the work floor, simultaneously tossing crates off the sled to keep everyone else’s heads down, and quickly reached the transit tube portal on the far side. The Black Daggers lagged behind in their sled, engaging in a more protracted firefight as they looked for a place to secure their octa. John didn’t see where that was, because by then, he and the rest of the Spartans were in the transit tube and speeding away again.

They didn’t have time to stop. If what was left of Sierra Force wasn’t able to destroy at least eight more facilities, their chances of bringing down the orbital ring fell off sharply. If they managed to destroy a total of nine installations instead of ten, Dr. Halsey’s estimates gave them only a seventy-one percent chance of destabilizing the ring. If they managed to destroy only a total of seven facilities, their chances of success fell to just forty-nine percent. John hadn’t even bothered to memorize the odds below that—he hadn’t brought Sierra Force all this way to take longshots. He was going to find a way.

The trip through the next few installations went much the same, with the Covenant security teams trying new tricks to slow the Spartan advance, and the Spartans finding countermeasures to circumvent them. The Black Daggers ran out of luck in the sixth facility, when the husky-voiced trooper—John hated that there had been no time to ask the man’s name—spoke over the platoon channel.

“Afraid we can’t keep carrying your water, Blue Team.” His voice was pained and gurgling. “We’ll be going out with our octa this time.”

“Acknowledged,” John said. “You did the 21st proud.”

“ ’Course we did,” the trooper said. “Just make sure you finish—”

The transmission ended in sharp crackle, and John instructed his onboard computer to log the time and conversation so he could recommend the man and his companions for a commendation—assuming he made it back himself.

As Blue Team approached the next installation, John glimpsed a set of efflux tails through the transit tube’s lower viewband and stopped the vehicle to investigate. What he saw was both elating and dismaying.

About a quarter of the orbital fleet-support ring was now in ruins, with most of the missing sections directly behind Blue Team and, farther around the circle, a much smaller gap where Green Team had taken out what appeared to be about three facilities. Counting the six installations that Blue Team had destroyed, that made nine—and the orbital ring was already beginning to show signs of destabilization. There were long pieces of transit tube falling out of orbit and entire facilities plunging into Naraka’s atmosphere, bright trails of fire behind them.

But the orbits below the section Green Team had destroyed were also filled with Covenant fighters. Many were flitting madly about, firing on tiny specks and unseen targets that might well be Green Team Spartans or their Black Dagger companions. A few craft seemed to be pursuing more deliberate strategies, traveling to specific points along the ring to cut off the advance of potential infiltrators.

And a few kilometers below that, a flight of ten Banshees was passing beneath the viewport where John stood, heading for a point that looked to be a couple of installations ahead of the Spartans’ current location. John dropped to his knees and craned his neck around, trying to see the Banshees’ destination, and caught a glimpse of a vessel under construction, with a bow so huge that at first he thought he was seeing things.

Fred’s voice came over TEAMCOM—the only channel they were using, now that everyone in Third Platoon was gone.

“John?” he said. “Now’s kind of a bad time for a nap.”

“Very funny,” John said. “Come here, wise guy. Give this a look.”

Fred came over and kneeled in front of John, then began to crane his neck around. “Okay, what am I . . .” He let the sentence trail off and whistled. “Wow. What are they building there?”

“Who cares?” John said. “Either way, we’re going to blow it up.”

Linda and Kelly came over and sneaked a look at the vessel.

“I like it,” Kelly said. “Going out in style.”

“Or not.” John pointed to the Banshee fighters crossing below. “There’s our ride out of here.”

Linda studied the Banshee flight for a moment, then craned her neck to look at the huge ship again.

“I see only one problem,” she said. “That vessel must be more than twenty kilometers long and hundreds of decks high. Even if the Banshees intend to set down there, we could spend days looking for them.”

“We’ll think of something,” John said. “But if I were to guess, whoever is in those Banshees is coming to us.”

John led the way back to the cargo sled, and they resumed their advance.

The next facility turned out to be a dormitory, so after blasting their way in, they had to shoot their way across a thousand meters of metal-floored lobby, laying heavy suppression fire on at least fifty Jackals. The aliens were so poorly trained that their idea of blocking an advance was to hide behind the furniture on both sides of the kill zone and lay blind plasma fire in an inadvertent crossfire. They hit each other more than they did the Spartans or their vehicles, and they weren’t wearing armor. By the time Blue Team emerged on the other side, Fred was down to two SPNKR missiles, John had just three grenades, Kelly had two, and nobody had more than a single magazine for their assault rifles.

But everybody still had an M6 sidearm with a full clip, John still had twelve shotgun rounds in his M90, and Linda had fifty-two for her M99. So they were well-supplied for both long-distance combat and close assault. It was just the in-between ranges—where most firefights actually occurred—that would be a problem.

Not over yet, John thought. We can do this.

As they rode toward their next firefight, Blue Team spent their time brainstorming plans, and by the time the transit tube began to branch into different forks and levels, John thought they had something workable.

They stopped and reset the fuses on their remaining ordnance—two octas and four Havoks—to two-minute delays, then went to the viewing band and took another look at their final objective: a massive tangle of girders and airtight passageways that probably massed more than all of their other targets combined. Annihilating it would unbalance a whole section of the orbital ring. And the wreckage that wasn’t vaporized in the blast would be hurled away with immense force, dragging along everything to which it was attached. The entire structure would slide out of orbit and plunge flaming into Naraka’s cloudy atmosphere, virtually guaranteeing a severely hemorrhaged Covenant supply chain—a bloody nose John hoped the aliens would not soon forget.

Now that they were almost directly above the space docks, they also had a much clearer view of the vessel itself. Most of the immense ship they’d spied earlier was hidden between the two huge fabrication barns that hung down to either side of its patchwork hull. But the oval bow had already been completely covered. To John, it resembled the head of one of those huge, grinning whales whose pictures he had seen during the Earth module of his human-history classes.

The Banshee flight that he had seen before had already arrived and disappeared into one of the fabrication barns, but John could see a lot of rushing silhouettes in the mouth of a hangar about a quarter of the way down the starboard barn. Given the timing and circumstances, he thought it safe to assume he was looking at the Banshee flight’s location. He pointed to the hangar.

“Set that as your waypoint,” he said. “Then check the pressure integrity and rebreather status of your Mjolnir.”

“I’m going to need some patching,” Fred said.

“Who isn’t?” Kelly asked, reaching for a cargo pouch. “I just hope we have enough.”

“We do.” Linda drew two handfuls of patches from her thigh pouch. “I brought extra.”

Some of the patches had Black Dagger insignias on the split peel, but John didn’t ask. Battlefield scavenging was a necessity for behind-the-lines operators.

A few minutes later, they backed to the far side of the transit tube; then Linda opened fire on the viewing band with her M99. The first round barely dimpled the sturdy material, and the second merely created a cloudy disc. But they had a lot more high-impact sniper rounds than they did SPNKR missiles, so John had her keep trying.

The fifth round created a web of outward-radiating stress cracks. Five more shots around the perimeter of the web produced more cracks—and a high-pitched whistling as the transit tube began to depressurize. John motioned Fred forward.

“Give it a kick.”

Fred sprang into a two-booted flying side-kick that shattered the viewing pane and sucked him out into space.

“Like that?” he commed.

No one answered. They were too busy trying to avoid being knocked into a tumble as they were pulled through the breach together.

Once they were outside and began to drift apart, it grew easier to bring themselves under control. They quickly formed into a proper fireteam, with John and Kelly thirty meters from each other in front, and Fred and Linda about twenty meters behind them.

They activated their thruster packs and began to descend toward a small oval of light set amid a vast wall of oval lights. In his mind, John heard Avery Johnson warning him not to lead from the front. Trouble was, when units got this small, there was no place left but the front.

Besides, Chavez and Small Bear and the rest of Third Platoon and a lot of other courageous Sierra Force soldiers had sacrificed their lives well. Much of the alien fleet-support ring was starting to fall out of orbit in ruins, two space elevators had been destroyed, and at least one Covenant city on Naraka’s surface was now a radioactive ruin. The mission had already succeeded.

Whatever happened next, the Covenant was going to know that humans fought back.

The hangar mouth yawned wider as the team drew nearer. John began to see shadows along the threshold. It was hard to tell their species, but most seemed to be dragging hoses and pulling lev-carts—so they were probably just maintenance hands, and not much of a threat in their own right. If John’s assumption was correct—that the Banshee pilots were a Covenant special-forces unit assigned to hunt down infiltrators—then the aliens’ most capable fighters would be twenty decks above, rushing to intercept Blue Team before they breached the transit tube hatches.

Assuming that everything went according to plan, those unknown hunters would die having never seen a Spartan, when one of Blue Team’s Havoks detonated twenty decks below. And that was just fine with John. He didn’t feel any need to look them in the eye or acknowledge their courage. All that mattered to him was stopping them, and he didn’t much care how he did it.

Blue Team dropped even with the hangar mouth, and John confirmed that his assumption about the source of the shadows had been correct. In the silvery work light, he could see a three-Jackal crew tending each of the Banshees, with a couple of Grunts puttering nearby in an open cockpit. He saw no sign of a security team, though there were plenty of dark corners where a Brute or two might be lurking, and in the back of the large chamber stood a pair of luminous blue columns that he assumed to be alien lift tubes.

“Looks like we’re good to go,” John said over TEAMCOM. “Everybody ready?”

A trio of status lights winked green inside his helmet. Since he had only twenty-eight rounds remaining in his MA5B magazine, he switched his fire selector to single and hit his thrusters.

John’s HUD flickered and dimmed slightly as he passed through the energy barrier at the hangar entrance; then his boots thudded to the deck as the artificial gravity kicked in. He immediately opened fire, concentrating on the left side of the hangar and putting a single round into every alien he saw. The Jackals went down either limp or convulsing, but always with surprise in their eyes. The Grunts either collapsed or exploded as their methane packs detonated.

A couple of breaths later, M99 rounds started to drop John’s targets before he could, and Fred’s voice sounded over TEAMCOM.

“We’re in. Step two.”

John and Kelly stopped firing long enough to move over to the nearest Banshees and reach inside, bringing the impulse drives online and activating the instrument consoles. They checked to make sure the controls responded to their touch, then repeated the sequence on the next two.

Assured that at least four of the craft were operable, John said, “Good to go. Step three.”

He and Kelly fired a few rounds to keep the enemy confused and their heads down, then dropped behind cover and removed the last of the Havoks from their magmounts. They opened the control covers, then tucked the bombs under their arms. John looked over to see if Kelly was ready and received a green status wink in return.

“Go!”

Each holding a Havok in one hand and an assault rifle in the other, they jumped up and raced toward the lift beams in the back of the hangar. So far the maintenance crews were either hiding or dying, and nobody opened fire. The assault was going even easier than planned.

So far.

Twenty paces from the lifts, John said, “Initiate.”

“Affirmative,” Kelly replied. “Initializing.”

Image

‘Szatulai stepped out of the gravity lift to find fifty Kig-Yar standing beside the overturned cargo sleds they used to haul scrap away from the Hammer of Faith, the supercarrier being built in the huge construction kreche. Their long muzzles were hanging agape, and they were staring after Castor and Orsun as the two Jiralhanae pushed their way up the traffic-choked passageway, bellowing at the drivers to clear the way and flipping their sleds aside when it proved impossible to comply. The passageway curved out of sight before ‘Szatulai could see what was blocking traffic, but he had no doubt that it involved the Spartans.

A trio of Second Blades in black Bloodstar armor stepped out of the gravity lift and turned to follow the two Jiralhanae.

“Wait,” ‘Szatulai ordered. When the trio obeyed, he switched from the Bloodstar battlenet to his helmet’s external speaker, then turned to the nearest sled driver. “Does this passageway not lead to the Ringroad?”

“It does—” The Kig-Yar hesitated, clearly struggling to recall the honorific appropriate to someone wearing the armor of the Silent Shadow, then said, “First Blade. We’re scheduled to deliver this load of hull trimmings to The Forge of Faith, but the emergency pressure hatches came down.”

‘Szatulai’s stomach began to churn. “Why?”

“A pressure breach in the Ringroad.” The Kig-Yar pointed toward an observation blister about ten sleds up the passageway. “Chardal and Gulo claim they saw four soldiers in strange armor pulled through the hole, but they always claim to know . . .”

Paying no attention to the rest of what the Kig-Yar said, ‘Szatulai turned back toward the gravity lift and began to issue orders over the Bloodstar battlenet.

“The demons are going around us,” he said. “Back to the hangar . . . now!”

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John and Kelly stopped twenty meters from the lift tubes and tucked their assault rifles under their arms, then shifted the Havoks to both hands and pressed the fuse triggers. John’s onboard computer commenced a two-minute countdown on the HUD.

A blue glow arose inside both antigravity lifts, and a pair of Elite warriors dropped into view. They were wearing that glossy red-black space assault armor that John had seen several times before, and both were holding plasma rifles.

“Throw and go!” John ordered.

He flung his Havok toward the antigravity lift, using an underhanded pitch and putting his body into it. The device was small but heavy, and it flew only about halfway before dropping to the deck and continuing to roll.

Kelly’s did the same, and the two aliens raised their plasma rifles to fire.

The Elite in front of Kelly took an M99 round in the chest and went flying into the bulkhead, overload static still crackling across his cratered torso armor. The alien in front of John simply erupted into a ball of flame and flying limbs as one of Fred’s SPNKR missiles hit home.

Two more Elites had already stepped out of the lift, and another pair was following. Had John been in their position, with a couple bomb-looking things rolling toward an elevator that would carry them into the depths of the installation, he would have gone for the damn bombs, would have raced them to the front of the hangar and dumped them into space, and it wouldn’t have mattered that the enemy was in his way—because if those bombs went off, everyone was going to die anyway.

The Elites didn’t seem to care about the shipbuilding dock. Nor did they seem to care about dying. All they wanted to do was kill the Spartans.

They stepped over the Havoks and brought their plasma rifles up . . . and met the same fate as the first two Elites, this time with one taking an M99 round in the helmet, and the other cartwheeling off in two separate directions after catching Fred’s SPNKR missile on his lower pelvis.

The countdown on John’s HUD reached 1:45.

“Retreat already!” Fred yelled.

John was retreating, and so was Kelly, backpedaling as fast as they could, pouring rounds into the next two ranks of charging Elites and trying to dodge return fire. Neither action was going very well.

John emptied his magazine without taking down his target’s energy shields, and while he was switching to the underslung grenade launcher, he took a plasma bolt in the shoulder. It penetrated his armor and screwed up his aim just enough to send the grenade flying off to detonate harmlessly in a corner.

Then the Elite was on him, tossing his plasma rifle aside and bringing up his hand with one of those red energy swords. John blocked the sword with his assault rifle and barely managed to duck out of the way as the crackling blade sliced through the barrel. He stomp-kicked the alien’s knee and saw its leg buckle sideways, then sprang away and snatched his M90 off his rear magmount and put a round into the Elite’s helmet. Its energy shield finally went down, and mandibles and purple blood flew in every direction.

The countdown on John’s HUD read 1:34.

He racked another shell and opened fire on the next Elite, but this one was even more agile than the others and sidestepped the moment John’s finger pulled the trigger. Then it leapt forward, bringing its energy sword around in a head-high strike that was a little too obvious. Rather than duck and expose himself for an easy reverse slash, John spun inside the blow and jammed his shotgun up beneath the Elite’s helmet.

Again, the alien was too quick, tipping its helmet aside just before John opened fire. But this time, at least the energy shield crackled and went down.

John pumped another round into the chamber, then felt the Elite’s free arm snaking around his chest, trying to take advantage of his shoulder wound to immobilize for the coup de grâce.

Bad mistake.

First, pain was nothing to a Spartan but incentive to fight harder. Second, Spartans wore power armor backed up by a neural interface. All they had to do was think, and their Mjolnir reacted. John thought about ripping the entrapping arm away, his shoulder erupting in anguish as his hand moved over the top of the Elite’s forearm. He clamped tight and shoved downward, using the alien’s own wrist to block the energy blade driving up toward his chin.

The Elite’s hand fell, severed at mid-forearm, and the blade kept coming. John leaned away and managed to avoid taking the point under his helmet. But he sensed pressure along the side of his neck and felt blood trickling down inside his skinsuit.

John’s ears began to drum with panic, and he tried to assure himself it wasn’t the carotid. If that had been cut, he would already be falling unconscious.

And he wasn’t.

So he jammed his shotgun down on the Elite’s foot and fired. The alien’s grasp loosened and it began to topple, still holding the sword next to John’s neck.

John went with it, jamming his free hand up inside the alien’s sword arm and pushing it away. They collapsed to the deck, John still on top and holding the blade at bay. He started to beat the alien’s sword arm with his shotgun barrel, so unnerved by his close call that he didn’t stop even after the wrist snapped sideways and the energy blade sizzled out . . . not until Kelly stepped up behind him and gently pulled the shotgun from his hand.

She pumped another round into the chamber, then placed it against the badly wounded Elite’s helmet and sent brain matter fanning across the deck in every direction.

“You okay, John?”

“Fine.” John sprang to his feet and took the shotgun back, then looked down at the mess that had nearly killed him. “Just another friggin’ alien.”

John glanced around and, fifty meters away in the back of the hangar, saw a pair of black-armored Brutes stepping out of the antigravity lifts. They were armed but confused, their helmets swinging back and forth as they looked from one Elite corpse to the next.

The countdown on John’s HUD reached 1:00 and began to flash red.

“Let’s get out of here.” He turned and started for the Banshees, slapping patches on his armor as he ran. “While we still can.”

The four Blue Team members jumped into the nearest fighters, then slipped into the stability harnesses and pulled their canopies down.

Fred’s voice sounded over TEAMCOM.

“Heads up. Those Brutes could be trouble.”

John put his hands on the controls and felt the Banshee rise beneath him, then turned toward the back of the hangar. The two Brutes were only about thirty meters away and racing forward with surprising speed for their size; but as John watched, they tossed their weapons aside and angled toward open Banshees.

He thought about opening fire on the pair, but the countdown on his HUD was flashing a big red :36, and he had not forgotten what happened the last time he was in a Banshee when a nuclear device detonated nearby. He swung his craft toward the hangar exit.

“We are letting those escape?” Linda’s voice was neither approving nor disapproving, just curious. “Why?”

“Remember Etalan?” John pushed his controls forward and led Blue Team out of the alien hangar. “Poor gamma shielding.”

The Spartans shot out of the hangar and pulled up, accelerating hard to climb into a higher orbit before the Havoks detonated. John kept one eye on the countdown in his HUD and the other on the Banshee’s tactical holograph.

The Banshees carrying the two Brutes departed the fabrication barn at :23 and dived toward Naraka, using the planet’s gravity well to help put as much distance as possible between themselves and the impending detonation. They began to pull up at :17 and dropped out of the bottom of the holograph at :12, and John suspected they would enter a stable orbit before the Havoks’ gamma pulse knocked out their instruments.

As Blue Team’s Banshees continued to climb away, the enormous fabrication barns—and the half-built ship they flanked—did not drift toward the bottom of the tactical holo so much as shrink and shift aft. Other Covenant fighter craft began to flit through the display, and a sporadic stream of alien voices sounded from the cockpit speakers. By the time the countdown on John’s HUD reached :10, the image had finally reached the back edge of the display and started to move off.

John couldn’t read the alien symbols on the tactical holo, so he had no idea whether Blue Team would be far enough from the detonation point to avoid having their instruments knocked out—or whether there were any prowlers even left to retrieve them.

What he did know was that someday there wouldn’t be, that even Spartans weren’t immortal.

If he kept pushing limits and jumping at assignments everyone else considered suicide, it wouldn’t be only the support troops and prowler crews who got killed. It would be him and Blue Team and—eventually—the entire squad.

But what choice did they have?

Operation: SILENT STORM was only the beginning. Naraka was being hit hard, but John had already seen enough from the Covenant to know the UNSC wasn’t going to win the war in a single battle. The aliens would recover from the shock of an attack inside their own space and return with a vengeance . . . and when they did, the Spartans would be waiting.

Ready to do the impossible.

They would just have to be smart about it.

The countdown on John’s HUD reached :05. John activated his locator beacon, then spoke over the encrypted Sierra Force channel.

“Sierra-117 requesting Blue Team extraction, four members. Repeat: all four members.”

Somewhere out there, a prowler acknowledged with a single click.

The Havoks detonated, and the Banshee instruments blossomed into static and died. John popped his canopy and, as the starfighter tumbled, pushed himself out into space. Fred and the rest of Blue Team were doing the same, and they fired their thruster packs, maneuvering themselves into a recovery line with fifty-meter spacing. Below and behind them, a few glowing remnants of the megaship fabrication barns were fluttering away in separate directions, all that remained of a mighty behemoth that would never have the opportunity to terrorize humanity.

John could only guess how many alien workers had perished with the vessel, but the number had to be in the tens of thousands—possibly even hundreds of thousands. For an instant, he was tempted to think of them as innocent victims of the war, much like the millions of people who died every time the Covenant glassed another world. Then he remembered what they had been building here, and he realized there could be no comparison. The workers who had died aboard the fleet-support ring were as much a part of the Covenant war effort as the officers who commanded their fleets and the warriors who fired their plasma rifles. They were all working toward the destruction of humanity—and John refused to feel bad for beating them to the punch.

A double click sounded inside John’s helmet, and he fired his attitude thrusters, slowly spinning himself around until he saw the dark silhouette of a UNSC prowler blocking the stars beyond, the mouth of its open drop bay a dim purple square yawning ever larger as it swooped toward him.

John tapped his maneuvering jets ever so gently, spinning himself around so that he was oriented boots-down as the bay swallowed him up. The moment he crossed the threshold, a pair of Black Dagger assault troopers stepped into view and grabbed him by the arms, helping him decelerate into the prowler’s artificial gravity and guiding him onto the deck.

“Welcome aboard, Master Chief.” The voice came over the command channel, and it belonged to Captain Nelly Hamm. “We’re packed to the gills, but it’ll be an honor to make room for you and your Spartans aboard the Night Watch.”