1433 hours, March 18, 2526 (military calendar)

UNSC Razor-class Prowler Ghost Song

Insertion Run, Mass Driver Launching Docks, Seoba Ice Quarry

John felt his weight sink as the Ghost Song pulled up, sweeping across Seoba toward the drop zone. The bulkhead alert lamps flashed one last time, flooding the crowded bay with steady green GO light, and the prowler decelerated hard. John could see nothing outside, but he knew they were entering the First Platoon dismount area. They would be a hundred meters above a kilometer-wide ice bench, with the vast quarry pit behind them and a ring of frozen slopes ahead. It was hardly an ideal drop zone, but they were infantry. They got out where they were told.

The jump hatch split down the center. Looking over the mass of ODST helmets ahead of him, John saw four troopers at the front of the platoon dive through the exit portal. Before he could blink, they began to trail plumes of crimson mist. Then a jet of vapor erupted from a thruster pack, and the entire four-trooper team vanished in a cloud of blood and flame.

The next team did not even hesitate. They stepped forward and spouted geysers of blood and tissue; then ricochets started to bounce off the overhead, and troopers began to drop everywhere in the bay.

John heard his own voice inside his helmet. “Damn it!”

Then he realized that this was the moment he had told himself to be ready for. It was a terrible moment, a tragic one, and he needed to fix it. He started forward, using his forearms to plow aside anyone in his way. The motion tracker on his HUD showed Avery Johnson following close behind.

Lieutenant Hamm’s voice came over the First Platoon comm channel. “Abort—emplacements! Abort!”

The Ghost Song began to glide forward. A trooper bounced off John’s thruster pack and went down with a hole twice the size of a thumb punched through the front of his helmet. John used his foot to roll him over and saw a star-shaped exit hole on the opposite side.

“John!” Johnson said over TEAMCOM. Although TEAMCOM was a Spartan-only channel, Dr. Halsey had given the sergeant access to facilitate his role as a Spartan-ODST liaison. “What the hell?”

“Look at the holes.” John maneuvered his boot to flip the trooper back over so Johnson could see the entry hole. “The same size. That means armor-piercing rounds—big ones. Probably depleted uranium.”

“Probably from Vulcans,” Johnson agreed. He was referring to the M41 light anti-aircraft gun, a cumbersome weapon that had to be either vehicle- or turret-mounted in order to fire accurately. “They were waiting for us.”

“I’ll buy they were ready,” John said. “But waiting? That would mean they knew—”

“I know what it means.”

The Ghost Song accelerated hard, climbing away from the Vulcan fire and leaving John’s stomach behind. He pushed forward another few steps and came to the jump hatch, where an injured trooper lay across the threshold, more outside the drop bay than inside it. Lieutenant Hamm and another ODST were holding the unconscious soldier by the arms, struggling against the prowler’s thrust to pull him back into the drop bay—and losing the fight.

John placed a boot in the guide track to keep the hatch from closing, then lifted the man inside and passed him to Hamm. Blood was frothing out of armor punctures in the soldier’s chest, abdomen, and hip. By dropping a casualty into the lieutenant’s lap, John hoped to buy a few moments to check the situation below. It worked. Hamm immediately hit the wounded man’s thruster pack quick-release and got busy saving his life.

John turned back to the portal. Two hundred meters below, a torrent of munitions strikes was spraying icy shards off the moon’s frozen surface. Seoba’s gravity was barely an eighth-g, so there was only a trace atmosphere, and the shards sublimated instantly into vapor and began to drift across the battlefield in banks of crystalline mist. In the milky twilight, John could see more than a dozen black-armored corpses scattered across the four drop zones beneath Ghost Flight’s prowlers. A like number of survivors were maneuvering through veils of glimmering fog, taking heavy fire from three sides as they tried to reach a row of ice-coated preparation docks.

It wasn’t easy to trace the enemy fire back to its sources, but a few heartbeats later, John spotted a series of bunkers dug into the steep slopes that ringed the dockyard. The emplacements had been carefully faced with layers of ice, camouflaged so perfectly that their locations were betrayed only by muzzle flashes blinking through their embrasures.

John was almost relieved. “They were ready, but not waiting,” he said, speaking to Johnson over TEAMCOM. “It took hours to build and camouflage those bunkers.”

Johnson came and stood next to him in the portal. “So?”

“So, we left slipspace less than thirty minutes ago,” John said. “They didn’t have time to build all that just for us. It’s general preparedness. Has to be.”

“That’s one possibility.”

“You think they were tipped off before we slipped?”

“I think it’d be foolish to rule that out.”

John thought for a moment, then said, “No way. That early, the tip would have to come from command level. Nobody else knew the target.”

“So you’ve never seen someone with brass on the collar let a secret slip?” Johnson asked. “Or put other loyalties before duty?”

As a matter of fact, John hadn’t seen a senior officer make either mistake, but he took the sergeant’s point. Colonel Crowther was doing a pretty good job of putting his own ego before the mission, so it wasn’t hard to imagine him—or some other brass hat—doing something that comprised mission security.

John exhaled in frustration. “Are you always such a pessimist, Sarge?”

“Yeah. I’m infantry.”

“Okay,” John said. “Fair enough.”

The Ghost Song was a kilometer above the battlefield now, and John could see the frost-crusted tube of a century-old magnetic mass driver rising up from the docks, climbing the face of a two-thousand-meter ice mountain. The end was located just below the summit, pointing at the pink-swaddled immensity of Biko. John knew from the mission briefing that the mass driver had once launched thousand-ton payloads of steel-encapsulated ice toward the planet. As the ice-capsules entered the exosphere, they were intercepted by the purchaser, then guided to a rendezvous in the stratosphere, attached to a dirigible, and floated gently to their final destination.

But, like the quarry itself, the mass driver had gone out of service in 2424, after Biko had finally developed a climate humid enough to supply its own rain.

On the summit of the ice mountain, just above the mass driver’s muzzle, sat the comm center Nyeto had mentioned earlier. It was surrounded by strike craters, but largely intact, with the relay antenna lying on its side and still half-attached to its base.

If the insurrectionists had a half-decent comm technician supervising repairs, they’d need no more than a half hour to erect a new antenna and restore their communications.

On the opposite side of the jump hatch, Lieutenant Hamm stuck the last patch over the last hole in the casualty’s armor, then passed the injured man off to a pair of subordinates. As she stood, she faced John and hooked a thumb toward the casualty.

“Smooth move, Spartan.” She was speaking over the First Platoon channel. “Don’t ever pull something like that again.”

“Of course not, ma’am,” John said. “I should have passed him to a corpsman.”

“Damn right,” Hamm said. “And you’re not supposed to be up here in the first place. You’re out of position.”

“Yes, ma’am.” As the platoon’s designated fire-support soldier, John was carrying a variety of heavy weapons. He removed the largest—a man-portable SPNKR rocket launcher—from the magnetic holder on the back of his Mjolnir. “Very sorry about that, ma’am.”

Hamm’s faceplate followed the SPNKR as John brought it over his shoulder. “Spartan-117, what the hell do you think you’re doing?”

“Volunteering, ma’am.” John armed the SPNKR’s first tube. “We need to take out those bunkers.”

Avery Johnson placed a restraining hand on his forearm, but John shook it off and linked the SPNKR’s targeting sight to his heads-up display. The conversation with Nyeto remained fresh in his mind, and he had no intention of letting Crowther’s jealousy screw up the assault—at least, not any more than it already had been.

Johnson grabbed John’s arm again. “John, you can’t fire that thing in here. You’ll crisp half the platoon.”

John glanced down at Johnson. “I know the safety parameters of an MAV/AV Bore 102mm M41 rocket launcher, Sergeant.” He put the firing rest on his shoulder and focused his HUD targeting reticle on the nearest bunker. The prowler was still climbing, and the distance had increased to a kilometer and a half. “Besides, we’re out of range.”

Hamm’s voice grew sharp. “Spartan-117—”

But John was already stepping out of the prowler. In Seoba’s weak gravity, it would have taken him nearly a minute to simply fall the eleven hundred meters back into the SPNKR’s effective range. He hit his thrusters and accelerated downward. That would cut his descent time to more like ten seconds. Still, if he gave the enemy gunners that long to track him on a straight line, he would arrive full of holes. Being careful to keep his HUD’s targeting reticle locked on the bunker, he began to make random changes of vector.

Avery Johnson’s voice sounded over TEAMCOM. “Blue Team, dismount! Come heavy!”

John continued to drop, and he began to see Vulcan muzzles flashing through the bunker embrasures. The weapons were using vacuum-suitable tracers, so he could see that the insurrectionists’ fire was lagging well behind his maneuvers—though by less and less as the range decreased. Finally, after he had descended a full kilometer, John reversed thrust.

He decelerated hard, but had built a lot of velocity and was still dropping fast. By the time he fired the rocket launcher, the range had fallen to 350 meters.

The missile streaked away in blinding brilliance, shrinking into a silver dot as John rolled into an evasive corkscrew. He felt a round glance off his thigh armor. The gunner was still firing as his bunker erupted into a spray of steam and ice.

John followed a second line of tracers back to another bunker and spotted the flash of an additional Vulcan. He designated it as a target and fired the SPNKR’s second barrel.

The round streaked away, then Seoba’s milky surface was coming up fast. John managed to get his legs under him as he landed, but lost his footing on the slick terrain and went sliding. He had managed to land in Alpha Company’s drop zone and was still on the ice bench between the quarry pit and the launching docks, gliding along on his back, watching arm-length geysers rise behind him as Vulcan rounds stitched the white ground.

Tossing the empty SPNKR aside, he rolled onto his hip and slapped off, launching himself three meters high in the weak gravity. John snatched the MA5B off its holder, then pumped an HE grenade into the underslung launcher and swung it toward the bunker from which his attacker was firing—then, before he could fire, saw the entire front wall erupt in a spray of bodies and ice blocks.

Kelly-087’s voice came over TEAMCOM. “Thanks for the invite, Sergeant Johnson. Blue Leader likes to hog the fun.”

“Not this time,” John said. He touched down almost gently, then turned to see masses of ice and what was left of their insurrectionist attackers fanning down the slopes below four more wrecked bunkers. “Let’s form up in the docks. Switch comms back to Alpha.”

A series of green LEDs acknowledged the order, and John raced across the ice toward the launching docks, using his thrusters and sometimes his feet to dodge enemy fire. The low gravity and poor traction made it difficult to change directions abruptly, and a few times he found himself falling to a knee or flying ten meters on a single course. Falling was not much of a problem, but there were still hundreds of insurrectionists hiding in hollows or behind ice blocks on the surrounding slopes, and they were decent marksmen. Whenever he continued on a straight line for more than a second or two, he began to feel small-arms fire dinging his Mjolnir armor.

John returned fire as he moved, of course, and took out a few attackers. But the battalion intelligence squad had either lost its reconnaissance drones or failed to establish a Mjolnir linkup, and the TACMAP on his HUD remained blank. So he devoted most of his attention to reconnoitering, looking for anything large enough to be an enemy hangar, or trying to guess how long it would be before the insurrectionists got their comm center working again.

Unfortunately, the largest part of the battlefield lay more or less behind him, in the sheer-walled vastness of the quarry pit itself. Easily ten kilometers in diameter, the pit was the shape of an octopus, with a large central cavity surrounded by long curving canyons that extended farther than John could see. The walls were pocked by caves with oddly shaped mouths, many of them large enough to hold a transport vessel of considerable size. The bottom of the quarry could not be seen from his angle, but a blanket of fog was rising into view, with prowlers dipping in and out as they swirled down to drop their platoons or lay fire on enemy positions.

In all likelihood, the insurrectionist transports were hidden somewhere in the bottom of the vast quarry, and it would fall to Crowther to be sure the enemy vessels were disabled before they could launch and sound the alarm. It was not a task John felt good about entrusting to someone else—least of all the colonel—but he had no choice. A convoy of tracked Civets was climbing a service road toward the top of the mass driver, their cargo boxes loaded with soldiers in pressure-sealed armor, heavy weapons, and equipment to repair the damaged comm center.

The Ghost Flight prowlers came swooping over the battlefield, their belly turrets spewing streams of 30mm rounds and their drop bays trailing dark-armored ODSTs. The incoming fire faded to almost nothing as the enemy took cover, and John hit his thrusters and leap-soared the last hundred meters to the fog-swaddled docks.

There was a total of ten separate structures, each about two meters high and as wide and long as a Pelican dropship without the wings. A set of ice-caked rails ran the length of their decks, serving as guide tracks for a huge gantry crane that stood about halfway to the bottom end of the mass driver. A half dozen ODSTs had already taken shelter in the sunken capsuling bays between docks and were standing on their toes, holding their assault weapons over their heads so they could return fire.

John dropped into an unoccupied bay near the center of the row and saw a flight of M28 Shrieker missiles flash from the prowlers toward the Civet convoy. The mountainside erupted into geysers and hid the Seoban sky behind a boiling curtain of steam; then a pair of yellow streaks lanced back through the fog toward the attacking prowlers. An orange ball blossomed inside the cloud and began a slow descent behind the mountain.

“That’s it for us,” Nyeto said, speaking over Alpha Channel. “We’re bingo ammo and down one bird. You’re on your own, Alpha.”

“Affirmative,” answered the raspy voice of Captain Zelos Cuvier, the Alpha Company commander. “Thanks for the ride, Ghost Man. We have it from here.”

John was not so sure. With enemy fire picking up again—and raining down from three sides—he didn’t need a TACMAP to tell him Alpha Company was more or less surrounded. And when he stuck his head up to check on the comm center, he could just make out a ghostly line of Civets still climbing through the fog toward the mountaintop. There seemed to be only about half as many as before, but that was at least seven vehicles—plenty to carry the repair crew and a heavy weapons platoon to protect them.

John’s motion tracker showed five friendlies entering the capsuling bay behind him—the rest of Blue Team, plus Avery Johnson and Lieutenant Hamm. He crouched down behind the cover of an ice-crusted steel half-capsule that had been hanging alongside the dock for the last century, then went to meet them.

Lieutenant Hamm was first in line. Not bothering to crouch—her helmet was still half a meter beneath the top of the dock—she stepped forward and jammed a gloved finger against John’s breastplate.

“You disobeyed my order.”

“Sorry, ma’am,” John said. “By the time I realized what you were saying, I was already two steps out of the drop bay.”

“Because you stepped off without authorization.”

“Spartans are trained to take the initiative.” As John said this, Fred and Kelly remained behind Hamm, looming over her and turning their helmets back and forth in astonishment. Linda just kept her faceplate turned toward the Civet convoy and showed no sign she was listening. “Naturally, I assumed ODSTs were too.”

“Cute.” Hamm grabbed John by the top of his armored chest plate, then pulled him down in an effort to equalize their height. “If I allow you to stay in my platoon, you’re going to learn to follow orders. And until you do, your life is going to be one long shitshine after another. Is that clear, Spartan?”

“Yes, ma’am.” John had never heard the term shitshine before, but he suspected it involved polishing hardware with a nonapproved agent. He glanced over his shoulder toward the magnetic catapult. “How about a suggestion?”

“How about a sitrep instead?” Johnson said, sounding almost mad. “That should have been the first thing you communicated when you rejoined your platoon leader. Or do they not teach battle protocol in Spartan school?”

“They do.”

John did not point out that Hamm had given him no chance to communicate anything before reading him the riot act, because he was pretty sure Johnson realized that already—the sergeant was a master at convincing officers that what he wanted them to do was their own idea. John pointed up the fog-shrouded slope toward the top of the mass driver, then began his situation report.

“Ma’am, there’s a convoy of seven tracked Civets climbing toward the disabled comm center at the top of the mountain. They have repair equipment, a security force of at least platoon strength, and heavy weapons—including at least one vehicle-mounted multiple rocket launcher.”

“The one that got the Ghost Star?” Hamm’s helmet tipped back as she searched for the convoy; then she finally seemed to see them. “Well, crap in a helmet. They’re halfway up now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” John said. “We need to stop them.”

“No kidding.” Hamm turned away and dropped her chin in the posture of someone carrying on a conversation inside her helmet, then finally returned her attention to her companions. “Ascot says no strafing runs. The prowlers are out of Shriekers, and with those rocket launchers on the Civets, she doesn’t want to risk losing another boat.”

“So . . .” Johnson sighed. “The hard way.”

Hamm shrugged her armored shoulders. “You know what they say—infantry is the queen of the battlefield.”

Just about every soldier who had been through infantry school in the last five hundred years understood the reference. In the game of chess, the queen was the most versatile piece on the board; and in a war, infantry was the most versatile force on the battlefield. Hamm studied the mountainside, trying to assess whether her platoon stood any chance of surviving an uphill assault on a convoy equipped with heavy weapons—all while being attacked from both flanks.

The answer was, of course, no way in hell.

Her faceplate shifted toward John and the rest of Blue Team. He felt pretty sure that she was pondering their capabilities, wondering whether the four of them could accomplish what would be impossible for an ODST platoon with ten times the personnel.

John knew they could, and he was about to volunteer when a squall of ice chips and fog began to roll over their heads. A trio of inbound friendlies appeared on his motion tracker, on foot about twenty-five meters away and coming from the direction of the gantry crane.

“Cover fire!” John ordered.

He and the rest of Blue Team rose to their full height and began to loose three-shot bursts at the slope beyond the trio, targeting the closest muzzle flashes first. The enemy fire trailed off as casualties mounted, but the survivors did not seem to realize how quickly they were being picked off and continued to attack from fixed positions.

Definitely irregulars, not well-trained.

The lead friendly took a round in the shoulder and went down face-first, sliding across the ice before pushing himself to a knee again. His companions came up on either side and slipped a hand beneath his arms, then continued forward in a straight line. Within a couple of steps, they were close enough to the capsuling bay that they were blocking Blue Team’s firing lanes.

“Forty-mike-mike,” John ordered. “High arc.”

All four members of Blue Team pointed their MA5Bs skyward and began firing 40mm grenades from the underslung launchers. In the weak gravity, the orbs arced so high they vanished into Seoba’s dark sky. A moment later, they returned to view, a dark rain falling slowly toward the enemy positions.

The insurrectionists stopped firing and craned their necks, all trying to guess whether they would be in a blast radius of a slowly incoming grenade. About half leapt up and scrambled for better cover—and were promptly cut down by the platoon of ODSTs that had taken positions on the gantry crane.

The trio of friendlies reached the dock and jumped down into the capsuling berth, the injured man falling on his rear as soon as his boots hit the ice. One of his companions knelt next to him and opened his thigh pouch, then extracted a patching kit and set to work repairing the hole in his armor. Any actual first aid would have to wait until the casualty reached a pressurized environment, but space assault armor was tough stuff. Even armor-piercing ammunition surrendered most of its kinetic energy penetrating it, so there was a good chance the wound was not serious.

The second companion made a beeline for Hamm. There was no rank insignia on his armor—it was never smart to help snipers identify high-value targets—but the name stenciled on his breast was CUVIER.

The company captain.

Cuvier stopped halfway between John and Hamm. Nobody saluted, but Hamm stood slightly more erect. Had one of John’s Spartan snipers been an enemy watching through a scope, the subtle shift of posture would have been enough to get the captain’s helmet blown off.

“Good work, Lieutenant,” Cuvier said over the First Platoon channel. “I like your initiative.”

“Sir?” Hamm asked.

“Sending in the Spartans,” Cuvier said. “That was brilliant. You saved a lot of ODSTs. Maybe the whole operation.”

Hamm’s faceplate shifted in John’s direction, but before she could set the record straight, Avery Johnson spoke up.

“It was quick thinking, sir. But don’t blame Lieutenant Hamm for jumping the gun. That’s all on me.”

“Jumping the gun, Sergeant?”

“Failing to confirm the deployment order. Once things started moving, I just got excited and—”

Cuvier waved him off. “There wasn’t time.” He turned back to Hamm. “By the time he explained the plan, it would have been too late to make it work. I know that.”

“Thank you, Captain.” Hamm’s tone was strained. “I appreciate your understanding.”

“But let’s keep this between us.” Cuvier’s faceplate pivoted toward Johnson, then to Fred, Kelly, and Linda, and finally came to a rest on John. “The colonel isn’t a big fan of spontaneity in combat operations, and I don’t want him blaming Lieutenant Hamm for doing her job. Clear?”

After everyone had acknowledged the order, Cuvier craned his neck to look up the mountainside toward the convoy of Civets.

“I was monitoring your conversation with Captain Ascot,” he said. “So, tell me, what do you need from me to stop that repair company without prowler support?”

Hamm looked toward John and his team. “Just your blessing, sir.”

“You have it,” Cuvier said, also turning toward the Spartans. “Tell me what you have in mind.”

“We need to beat those Civets to the comm center,” Hamm said, “and right now, the Spartans are the fastest thing we have. I suggest we send them up the mass driver.”

Cuvier continued to study the mountainside, no doubt inspecting—as John was—the ice-crusted tube running up the slope. A full three meters in diameter, it was easily large enough to hold the Spartans and any munitions they would need to demolish the comm center and attack the convoy. But over the course of a century without maintenance, several support towers had collapsed, and the curtains of ice hanging beneath some of the induction coils suggested that a half dozen seam welds had opened.

Most worrisome was a miniature glacier flowing out of the loading breech. Easily twenty meters wide and ten meters thick, it spilled from beneath the buckled hatch and spread out in a mound the size of a small house. Judging by how far it had pushed the hatch up, the bottom half of the tube was packed with ice that had accumulated over a hundred years of sublimation cycles.

Cuvier nodded in approval. “Excellent plan, Lieutenant. The enemy will never see them coming.”

“Because they’ll never get there!” Johnson objected. “You can see from here the tube is full of ice.”

“Half full,” John said.

After Blue Team’s success in taking out the bunkers, he was feeling good about his chances of proving just how crucial his Spartans were to the success of Operation: SILENT STORM. If they could reach the top of the mountain in time to demolish the comm center and take out the convoy, even Colonel Crowther would be forced to admit that the Spartans should be leading the way into battle—instead of bringing up the rear.

John turned to Cuvier. “Blue Team is in,” he said. “We’ll need some flamethrowers and thermite paste to handle blockages.”

“And C-7,” Fred added. The foaming explosive was especially suitable for use in a vacuum. “Lots and lots of C-7.”