Outcasts, page 11
“And you did not think to report this?” Varo’dai demanded.
“It only just happened. And the mirage makes it difficult to be sure of what we are seeing, even with the monocular.”
“I understand,” ‘Vadam said. “Inform us of any change, and report when it is no longer visible at all.”
As he finished speaking over the battlenet, Petrov asked, “What happened?”
“Perhaps you can tell me,” ‘Vadam said. “We thought we saw an object coming across the crater toward us. For a time, it appeared to be walking on many legs, but now it has turned back, and we cannot be sure even of that.”
“It turned back?” Petrov began to sweep her gaze across the clouds. “Now, that is interesting.”
“Then you know what it was?”
“Oh, yeah. We call them Runners.” A long series of sonic booms sounded in the distance, somewhere far above the clouds, and Petrov suddenly dropped her gaze back to ‘Vadam. “You have more dropships coming in?”
‘Vadam looked up and searched for contrails. The cloud cover was far too low for any to be visible, but a crackling hiss began to sound overhead, from the same direction as the booms. Then forty balls of luminescence began to shine through the clouds, half a sky ahead of the hiss and growing steadily brighter and larger.
‘Vadam had seen enough dropship insertions to recognize what he was seeing. As the flight continued to descend, he turned to his kaidons and found them staring up at the bright spheres, as surprised and confused as he was.
He turned back to Petrov. “No, Commander. Those dropships are not ours.”
Petrov’s eyes grew wide. “Well, then.” She studied ‘Vadam for several breaths, apparently debating what she wanted to tell him, then suddenly turned and began to run toward the cave.
Over her shoulder, she yelled, “This might be a good time to take cover!”
CHAPTER 8
The brown miasma of Netherop’s cloud cover finally cleared from the situation monitor, and Olympia Vale found herself looking down on a drab brown desert speckled with gray-green vegetation. A crescent of charcoal-gray crater rim curved down from the top of the screen, framing a shimmering pool of yellow-gray light. What lay beneath the mirage was impossible to guess. No matter what form of imaging sensor the mapping team used, the signal vanished without any return. It was one of the reasons Vale had decided to investigate this site first.
As the Owl continued to descend, the crater rim slid toward the bottom of the monitor ever so slowly. To avoid leaving contrails or creating a sonic boom that would betray its position, the stealth-capable dropship had made a controlled insertion a quarter of the way around the planet, then initiated target approach at just below the speed of sound, a little less than a thousand kilometers per hour.
Finally, the crescent of gray rim passed the bottom of the monitor and vanished from sight. For a moment, the crater basin looked like a lake of refracted light. Then a long mound of gray-brown dirt appeared at the top of the screen, rising above the mirage like a mountain on the horizon.
“We’re too high,” Keely Iyuska said. She was seated opposite Vale, on the far side of a Mongoose ATV secured to the deck of the passenger bay. Dressed in borrowed BDUs with an open-face helmet, torso armor, and no unit or rank insignia, she bore only a superficial semblance to the grim-faced Orbital Drop Shock Troops who packed the compartment aft of them. “That’s the tel, right there!”
“Recon first,” Vale said, speaking through the helmet voicemitter of her GEN2 Mjolnir armor. “Our job is to get some video of the objective, then secure a landing zone for the main body of the expedition.”
“Do we have time for that?” Iyuska asked.
“We have all the time we need.” As their venerable stealth cruiser Hidden Point had entered orbit above Netherop, they had observed a Sangheili flotilla inserting three Phantoms on a trajectory bound for the strange crater—which was another of Vale’s reasons for investigating it first. Now Iyuska was worried that by allowing the Sangheili to set foot on the tel before they did, the aliens would somehow claim exclusive rights to excavate the site. “We have a battalion of ODSTs inserting behind us.”
Iyuska’s eyes grew round. “Wait—you can’t fight over the dig. The site will be demolished!”
“Relax, Keely. We’re not going to fight an ally.” Vale synced the Owl’s reconnaissance system to her helmet’s heads-up display, then watched on a faceplate inset as the long, oval tel grew larger and more distinct. It was a bigger site than she had expected, and archeological excavation had to be done by hand. She began to worry that a single ODST battalion would not be enough to complete the job. “We’re just going to show up with more… resources.”
“And you actually think that will work?” Iyuska demanded. “Sangheili don’t like being bullied.”
“No, but they respect strength.” Vale tipped her helmet toward the civilian sitting in the adjacent seat and said, “Besides, Netherop is a human world.”
The civilian, Rosa Fuertes, exhaled sharply and looked at the ceiling. Dressed in lightweight tan pants and a sleeveless gray shirt, she had a haggard, weather-lined face and pale, rheumy eyes. Her hair was coarse and thinning, her complexion gray, her arms webbed with angry red veins.
Iyuska glanced at Fuertes only briefly before turning back to Vale. “You realize the Arbiter will never accept that rationale, right?”
“I do. But it’s better than any rationale he has. It will prevent him from arguing the Sangheili have first claim on Netherop.”
“Fools, all of you,” Fuertes said. “Nobody claims this place. It claims you.”
“It won’t be claiming anybody this time,” Vale said. “You’re here to make sure it doesn’t.”
Fuertes laughed. “I am here because you were dumb enough to hire a sick old woman. And if a Spartan is looking to me for protection, you are an even bigger idiot than I thought.”
“Or you don’t understand your own value,” Iyuska said.
“I understand well enough. But if there are any secrets buried on Netherop, I can’t tell you where to find them.”
“No,” Iyuska said. “But you may be able to tell us how.”
As they spoke, a colorless fissure appeared in the summit of the tel, as straight as a rifle barrel and perpendicular to the Owl’s insertion path. It quickly began to lengthen and grow wider near the middle, forming an elongated diamond so deep and bright it seemed to open into the very core of the planet. Worried that her HUD was malfunctioning, Vale closed its inset and turned to the situation monitor.
The tel had dropped to the center of the screen, but the fissure in the summit remained. It continued to widen, expanding into a long narrow rift filled with the unimaginable glow of a hundred billion stars. Vale stared into the light and found herself transfixed, for a breath… a thousand breaths… ten thousand breaths… as galaxies whirled up from nothing and flung their arms into the void and shrank into black holes so deep and hot they devoured reality itself. She saw the dark emptiness wink into existence as a single point of light, then swell into the blinding globule of an entire universe that collapsed instantly back into the colorless void.
Still Vale remained, on the brink of annihilation, witness to the creation of all things and the end of everything. She saw worlds blossom and planets crumble, the birth of stars and the death of suns, watched the cold wave of eternity swallow a universe of universes in the blink of an eye. How long she stayed, she did not know. She simply was, a woman trapped in the boundless amber of the cosmos, prisoner to a vast mystery filled with too much paradox and potential for any human mind to grasp.
Then the tel dropped off the bottom edge of the situation monitor, and Vale found herself back in her seat, staring at the shimmering lake of the crater mirage, now a vibrant orange.
She turned to Fuertes. “What just… what the hell was that?”
“You’re asking me? I thought I was having another seizure.”
“Not this time. Not unless we were both having one.”
The brain-wasting prion disease was worse than Fuertes had admitted during their initial meeting on Gao. On the way out here, she had suffered episodes several times during slipspace jumps. Vale had finally offered to let the woman complete her consulting contract from aboard Hidden Point, but Fuertes had smiled and declined, insisting she wanted to die on Netherop with all the children she had buried there. The reply had come so quickly and smoothly that it seemed rehearsed, but it had been impossible to draw more out of the old woman. Whatever Fuertes’s true reasons for insisting on being the one who returned to Netherop, she was determined to keep them to herself.
“Have you seen anything like that before, Rosa?” Iyuska asked. “Here on Netherop, I mean.”
Fuertes shook her head, her gaze still fixed on the orange mirage. “I have never seen anything like that anywhere.”
Vale glanced aft, where the fifteen ODSTs of Tango Team sat along the inner walls of the Owl’s passenger bay. Their helmet faceplates were all turned toward the situation monitor. It was impossible to see much more than their wide eyes, but the mere fact that they were openly staring at the display revealed just how unsettled they were.
Vale synced her Mjolnir’s onboard computer to the Owl’s combat information systems and brought up the tactical ground display. The crater floor remained hidden beneath an arcing swath of failed sensor readings, and the tel itself was even more of an enigma, an unreadable spray of terrain symbols erupting over the center of the map. But there was some useful intelligence along the top edge, where the crater rim curved across the starboard corner. On a bench of flat terrain between the rim and a nearby mountain sat a trio of red diamonds: the Sangheili Phantoms.
As the Owl continued its approach, the crater rim dropped toward the middle of the screen. Dozens of yellow caret symbols appeared on the bench of flat terrain, their tips all pointed away from the tel—toward a common point at the base of the nearby mountain. They were unidentified pedestrians, most likely Sangheili. And they were advancing toward the mountain at a pace fast enough to suggest they might be charging something.
Or fleeing it.
Vale requested control of the nose camera, then turned it aft toward the tel and put the image up on the monitor. The fissure had expanded into a huge eye-shaped oval filled with the same unimaginable brilliance she had found so mesmerizing the first time she’d looked into its depths. She felt herself falling once more into the abyss between space and time, her mind reeling as the glow began to rise out of the rift in a bright luminous dome.
It took an eternity… and the mere blink of an eye… but finally the Owl crossed out of the crater, and the bench land where the Sangheili Phantoms sat waiting appeared at the top of the situation monitor. The tel remained visible in the middle of the image, the luminous glow still rising from the rift in the center, growing ever larger, until finally a lance of blinding brilliance shot out and split the sky above, reaching up through the pall of brown clouds and slowly spreading across the width of the screen, until all she could see was a white, bright void opening through the bulkhead into the vast emptiness beyond.
A collective gasp arose from Iyuska, the ODSTs, even Fuertes, as they rose into their crash harnesses. Realizing the Owl had lost power, Vale synced her HUD to the combat information system—and found an empty display. She switched to the pilot’s helmet camera and, beyond the cockpit canopy, saw a mountainside rising fast as the dropship wobbled toward the ground.
The image in her HUD showed cockpit instruments flashing past as the pilot—a square-faced major named Rolph Chudzik—raced to save the Owl, calmly calling off items on the engine-restart checklist.
“Brace brace brace!” Vale called out. “We’re going—”
Her warning was interrupted by the voice of the female copilot, Thisbe Marchal, sounding inside her helmet. “Clear to restart, Major. Altitude three hundred meters.”
“Three hundred meters, aye. Restarting now.”
The Owl continued to fall. The view outside the canopy flashed across Vale’s HUD as Chudzik reached for an overhead reset toggle. For an instant, it seemed Vale was looking down into a boiling orange bed of lava, then into the glowing blue photosphere of a supergiant star, then into the black inky void of an event horizon.
“Inertial electrostatic confinement reengaged,” Chudzik said. The image in Vale’s HUD blurred for a moment, then settled on a human thumb, lifting the safety cover on a red charging button. “Deuterium injector ready, Lieutenant.”
“Clear to inject, Major,” Marchal said. “Altitude one forty meters.”
“One forty meters, aye. Restarting now.”
The thumb dropped on the charging button. The Owl shuddered as the fusion drives engaged… and the shoulders of Vale’s armor pressed harder into her crash harness as the dropship continued to plummet.
“Eighty meters,” Marchal reported. “What is that stuff down there?”
Vale could not see what the copilot was looking at because her HUD was still synced to the pilot’s helmet camera and his attention was now wandering over the instrument panel below the cockpit canopy.
“Don’t know,” Chudzik replied. “Don’t wanna find out.”
“Affirmative that. Forty meters.”
“Forty meters, aye. Engaging thrust.”
Vale sank into her seat as plasma began to pour from the thrust nozzles of the Owl’s powerful hybrid fusion reactors. Chudzik finally lifted his head from the instrument panel and began to survey the surrounding terrain. The fiery bed of ever-changing terrain Vale had glimpsed before was gone. Now the bench looked more like a foggy sea, with a haze of optical distortion hanging just above the surface and the rocky ground literally rising and falling in waves.
The Sangheili Phantoms lay twisted into long tubes of crumpled metal, rolling gently back and forth as the ground undulated beneath them. Half a dozen star-shaped dark stains lay scattered between the wrecks and the base of the cliff, strewn with shards of splintered bone and mangled armor. Vale had no idea what had just happened down there, but it was clearly bad. One of those blood smears could be the Arbiter… and if that was the case, another war between the Sangheili and humanity would be coming—and soon.
Vale synced her HUD to the Owl’s combat information system. To her relief, it had rebooted and was already relaying intelligence to the appropriate displays. She was less relieved by what else she saw: the drop cone overhead no longer contained the forty insertion craft carrying her ODST battalion.
Now there was just a debris cloud, fluttering slowly to the ground.
Vale felt herself tipping aft as the pilot brought the Owl’s nose up and began to accelerate, trying to clear the area as fast as he could.
She jumped on the internal comm immediately. “Turn around. Land on the tel.”
“What?” Chudzik’s tone was stunned. “Have you seen the drop cone, Spartan? Our insertion force is gone. The mission is over.”
“It’s over when I say it’s over.” Vale was hardly Chudzik’s superior, but she was a Spartan and the one who had put the mission together. “And we’re far from done here. I’m pretty sure we just found what we came for.”
CHAPTER 9
The rocky ground continued to rise and fall in meter-high swells, throwing so much dust into the air that Thel ‘Vadam could barely see the boulders crashing around outside the cave. From the relative safety of the entrance, the boulders were just blocky shadows tumbling back and forth as the terrain oscillated beneath them. Farther out, the landing party’s wrecked Phantoms were barely discernible, corkscrew silhouettes that made fleeting appearances as the wave crests lifted them into view.
Above the curtain of suspended dust, ‘Vadam glimpsed the familiar, droop-winged shape of a UNSC Owl. About the width of a thumb tip, it was silhouetted against the flank of the tel, flying just below summit height—a wise tactic that would make it a difficult target. The apparent size suggested the dropship was approximately six thousand units away, though that revealed nothing about how close it was to the tel.
But, clearly, much closer than ‘Vadam and his Sangheili.
“Is that a UNSC stealth craft I see?” ‘Ayomuu asked. He crouched in the cave mouth between ‘Vadam and ‘Talot, his stylized purple armor surprisingly effective camouflage in the shadowy environment. “Approaching the tel?”
“Preparing to land upon it,” Varo’dai said. She was next to ‘Vadam, on the side opposite the Oath Warden and ‘Talot. “They will be sitting on top within five centals.”
Thinking Varo’dai had produced a monocular from somewhere, ‘Vadam glanced over and was astonished to see that she was studying the tel with her naked gaze—proving once again how remarkable was her eyesight.
Before he could comment, ‘Talot demanded, “How can you know that? I am doing well to find it at all.”
“But you can see it is not fleeing the battlefield, yes?” Varo’dai replied. The apparent size of the Owl had dwindled by half, to the point that it was now barely visible. “It is staying low so it can approach the tel safely, but beginning to climb. It would not be doing that unless it was preparing to land on top.”
“Then why are we hiding in this hole like a bunch of snulbors?” ‘Ayomuu asked. “If we can see the dropship with no monocular, and the dropship is about to land on the tel, then the tel can be no more than ten thousand units distant.”
“That does not mean we can get there on foot.” ‘Vadam’s view into the crater was blocked by its rim, but his memory of the color-shifting mirages and waves of heat-refracted light that concealed its floor remained fresh. “We cannot even be certain it has a solid surface.”
“How fortunate, then, that we have someone who might know.” ‘Ayomuu cast a look toward the interior of the seam cave, where Petrov and her humans had gathered after leading ‘Vadam and the other Sangheili survivors to safety. “I am certain they can be persuaded to cooperate.”
“It is worth the attempt,” ‘Vadam agreed. “But it will be done my way.”
