Oblivion, page 12
“I don’t see how you can promise that, John. It’s not in your power to prevent. They’re already on board my ship.”
Petrov continued to look down the bench, gazing over the heads of her crew and the marines toward the Night Watch’s crash site. Even magnified through John’s faceplate, the prowler was visible only as a tiny delta-shaped shadow, surrounded by the barely visible dots of more than a dozen Banshees. All of the craft were blurry, and they seemed to be floating dozens of meters above the ground.
John knew it was an illusion—a superior mirage, caused by light being refracted as it passed through hot air above cooler ground. But that did not keep him from feeling uneasy. The Covenant employed all kinds of technology the UNSC had never seen before, and he could not help worrying that the aliens might be using some kind of powerful anti-gravity device to float the disabled prowler up into orbit.
John opened TEAMCOM. “Blue Four, is that prowler rising any higher off the ground?”
“Negative.” Linda was two kilometers down the bench, using her sniper optics to keep tabs on the aliens’ progress. “I am measuring the angle of refraction. The Night Watch remains on the ground, even if it does not appear so.”
“Any sign of surveillance craft hanging around?” Even if the Covenant couldn’t take the entire prowler, they might try taking measurements and recording images. “Or of a comm tower being erected?”
“I would have told you.” Linda sounded exasperated. “Immediately.”
“How about movement back and forth?” John asked. Even if the Covenant wasn’t trying to retrieve images and specifications, they would at least be attempting to snag as many instruments and engineering systems as possible. “Any signs they’re gathering equipment?”
“Unable to determine. The heat shimmer prevents my optics from resolving to that scale.” Linda paused, then added, “But, John, it has been two hours.”
“So I keep being told.” John let his gaze drop to the column of overheated marines and ship’s crew. Even if the aliens weren’t ready to start ferrying the prowler’s equipment back to their mothership—and after all this time, they had to be—the Spartans were the only ones in climate-controlled power armor. And that meant they were the only ones who could keep hiking. “Okay. Break off observation and rejoin the column. Blue Three?”
Kelly’s status light winked green to confirm she was listening.
“Give all your explosive ordnance to Blue Two, then find a good observation post and take over the watch.” Kelly and Fred were about half a kilometer ahead of John, looking for a good place to shelter from the self-destruct charge. “Let me and Commander Petrov know the instant you see any Covenant craft departing the crash site.”
“Affirmative,” Kelly said.
“Blue Two?”
“Let me guess,” Fred said. “The cornices?”
Blue Team could be like that. They had been training together since childhood. At times it seemed like they were somehow plugged into each other’s brains through their neural implants and onboard computers.
“Can you do it?” John asked.
“I think I can handle it.” There was a note of sarcasm in Fred’s tone. “As long as they don’t fight back.”
“How long?” John asked.
Fred was quiet a moment, then finally said, “Depends on what I find in the clouds, I guess.”
It took sixteen minutes for Fred to traverse to the gulch and climb up to the low brown clouds. He might have been faster, except that he was carrying two extra tube sets for his M41 rocket launcher, and enough grenades to fill a Brute’s helmet. In Netherop’s high gravity, the extra weight made it harder to be sure of his footing on the dusty slope.
The strange vegetation—what there was of it—didn’t help. He quickly learned to avoid any area near those orange candelabra trees, since they were showing only their crowns, and the rest of their habit was hidden beneath the powdery surface, a tangled mass of rubbery twigs that trapped a foot or leg as efficiently as it did any dust. And where the slabs of red shale protruded to form a ridge of solid footing, he first had to fight his way through a chest-high tangle of carnivorous bushes he quickly dubbed “paddle plants.”
The paddle plants tended to mass along the windward edges of the shale outcroppings. They had big, gray-green pads covered in a curly white fuzz full of tiny trapped insects . . . or at least, what looked like insects. The creatures were about half the size of a fingernail, but they had smooth blue skin, three emerald eyes, and five legs. And they were currently being eaten whole by scaly, thumb-sized grubs, each attached to the bottom of one of the pads by a throbbing umbilical.
Nice place, this Netherop.
Before climbing into the clouds to locate the head of the gulch, Fred glanced down its length to be sure everyone was clear of the mouth. He could see an almost unbroken cornice of wind-packed dust hanging over his side of the chute, sometimes extending halfway across. At the bottom, the gulch sank into a depression and entered a large, diamond-shaped cavern that ran all the way under the bench and opened into empty air on the other side. The sides were asymmetric, and the bottom was buried in dust. But, save for a few shell-shaped spall pits, the face was as smooth as concrete, and the top edges were as straight as anything a combat engineer would build.
It was hardly the way a human would design a giant culvert. But it obviously wasn’t the way nature would design one either.
Fred spoke over TEAMCOM. “What would you say if I told you that you’re on some sort of forgotten highway?”
“I’d say hurry up with those cornices,” John said. “Kelly thinks the Covenant might be loading their Seraphs.”
“Or it could be mirage ghosts dancing in the heat shimmer,” Kelly said. “It’s hard to tell exactly what I’m watching.”
“You are watching something,” Linda said. “I also see dark shapes moving between the Night Watch and the closest Seraph.”
“On it,” Fred said. Taking care to stay well back from the edge of the gulch so he didn’t prematurely collapse a cornice, he started up a shale outcropping into the low brown clouds. “There’s a culvert at the bottom of the gulch. It might make a good bunker, if you can dig down into it after I drop the cornices.”
“A culvert?”
John didn’t sound as surprised as he might have. Blue Team had spent the slipspace jump from Mesra preparing for their mission and studying what the UNSC knew about Netherop—which wasn’t much. The Military Survey of Uninhabited Planets listed Netherop as uninhabited, marginally survivable, of minimal strategic value, with no exploitable resources. The assessor’s notes added that the hostile environment had cut the survey mission short. The notes ended with the recommendation that a properly equipped expedition should return to continue the investigation. But a classified ONI addendum listed the planet as possibly abandoned—a nebulous designation that could suggest the survey had found anything from an old Colonial habitability probe to the presence of terrain features that could have been artificially constructed.
Fred could guess what had happened next: the survey had been electronically added to the MSUP by some clerk who’d read no further than “minimal strategic value, no exploitable resources,” and the assessor’s recommendation had remained unread until the first time Blue Team was dispatched to Netherop, in an attempt to snatch a Covenant survey vessel out of orbit.
And by then, there had been other things for the UNSC to worry about.
“A culvert?” John repeated. “Fred, you’re sure?”
“I’m sure it’ll make a good bunker.” Fred was well into the cloud layer now, surrounded by a greasy brown fog that seemed to coat his faceplate like oil. “Take a look. You’ll see.”
“If you say so,” John said. “Just hurry. If anything tries to leave the crash site, Commander Petrov won’t wait to detonate the Fury.”
“Understood,” Fred said.
And he did understand—the UNSC didn’t want the Covenant to learn the secrets of their prowler technology any more than the Covenant wanted the UNSC to learn the secrets of their energy shields and plasma weapons. So no aliens could be permitted to leave the crash site alive—not a single one, even if it meant everyone who had been aboard the Night Watch had to die.
A hundred meters into the clouds, the gulch finally narrowed to a couple of meters. It ended at the base of a shale outcropping, which continued straight up the mountain and vanished into the brown clouds about two hundred meters above. As usual, the windward side of the outcropping was covered in a tangle of paddle plants, and a few paces above the head of the gulch, a three-meter swath had been smashed through the strange foliage.
Something large had pushed through the tangle and clambered over the outcropping, but Fred didn’t have a lot of time to contemplate what kind of giant fauna might be crawling around Netherop’s mountains. He climbed around the windward side of the plants, where he found two sets of circular hoofprints running parallel to each other, about two meters apart and leading into the broken swath. All the prints had a split down the center, like the hoof of a goat, but they were too uniform in size and shape to have been made by more than one animal. Or, really, any kind of animal. Nature just didn’t make feet that perfectly round.
But there was no time to puzzle over that now. He entered the ruined swath and traversed back toward the gulch, trying to position himself directly above it. As he moved, he saw that the paddles had been broken off at the stem. The ground was littered with those scaly grubs, all squashed flat and ripped free of their umbilicals. In the dust, he noticed dozens of tracks that looked an awful lot like the footprints of a human child—as unlikely as that seemed. But a lot of animals made tracks that could look somewhat human—bears, for example.
He just didn’t think there were any bears on Netherop.
Fred came to the spot he had been trying to reach, directly above the gulch, and saw that a wide cornice of dust extended over the top of the gulch. Had he attempted to jump across, it would probably have collapsed under his weight and dropped him into the chute, and he would have wasted the next few minutes trying to stop his slide and climb back to where he was now.
Fred grabbed a grenade and opened a general channel. “All clear on the Forgotten Highway?”
“Forgotten Highway?” Petrov asked.
“You’re standing on it,” Fred said. “I keep telling you—”
“All clear,” Petrov said. “Do it already.”
“This could take a few tries,” Fred said. “Stay away from the culvert until I give the word.”
“If we can,” Petrov said. “Just do it.”
“Yes, ma’am.” Fred thumbed the arming slider. “Fire in the hole!”
He tossed the grenade down onto the cornice, then watched it sink through the dust and vanish. A second later, it dropped out the bottom side and started to roll down the gulch . . . then detonated with a sharp bang and an orange flash.
A section of cornice disintegrated into a powdery cloud and plumed ten meters skyward, and a downslope segment broke free and dropped into the gulch. After that, all Fred could see was a billowing fog of dust, but the muffled rumble rolling up the chute suggested that at least something was avalanching down toward the culvert.
He grabbed the M41 off his back mounts and fired the first rocket through the dust, aiming for a point about two hundred meters down the gulch and toward the windward side. The detonation was louder and deeper than the grenade, but there was so much dust in the air now that the fireball was barely an orange glow.
Still, that muffled rumbling grew louder, and he knew the avalanche was growing. He fired the second rocket at a point he hoped was four hundred meters down the gulch, and this time, he did not even see the flare.
“Good job,” John said over TEAMCOM. “There’s a wall of dust about five hundred meters high over the gulch. Is that all of it?”
“Your guess is as good as mine.” Fred detached the used tubes from the M41 and reached for a reload. “I can’t see anything.”
“Then I suggest you start firing blind,” Kelly said. “I have figures leaving the Night Watch. Quite a few figures, actually.”
“I think the avalanche has attracted their attention,” Linda said. “They are spreading out . . . and stopping.”
“Maybe trying to figure out what they’re seeing,” Fred said. “Same as you are.”
“Maybe,” John said. “And pretty soon, someone’s going to hop in a Banshee to come check on us.”
He did not need to spell out what would follow. Even if the Covenant didn’t send a flight of Banshees to strafe them, Petrov could not afford to take chances. As soon as the first alien craft left the Night Watch crash site, she would detonate the Fury.
“I’ve got this.” Fred locked the reload tubes in place. He would have a better view of the cornices from the leeward side of the gulch, so he began to clamber across the shale outcropping, following the same path the mysterious creature—or creatures—had taken. “I’ll keep putting rockets into the cornice as I come down the mountain. Let me know when Commander Crazy decides to detonate.”
“Affirmative,” John said. “And, Fred, take it easy with that nickname. If the commander hears you using it—”
“I know,” Fred said. “Sorry. The truth hurts—usually the one telling it.”
As he crested the outcropping, he noticed a ghostly, spiderlike silhouette standing two hundred meters distant. Swaddled in the brown fog, it was an almost illusory figure that he might not have believed was real, had he not spotted a trail of parallel, split-hoofed tracks leading across the slope straight toward it. He magnified the image, but between the dust and the oily film clouding his faceplate, it did not help much.
All he could tell was that it was probably half again the size of a Warthog LRV, and it had five pairs of cursorial legs spaced evenly around a bulbous body with a flattened dorsal area. The legs on the uphill side were folded upward almost in two, so that its feet were planted on the slope at almost the same level as its belly. On the downhill side, the legs extended straight out from its flank and dropped to the ground at a ninety-degree angle, so that the body was supported more or less evenly. There appeared to be a pair of round spheres on the top of the body, which might have been forward-facing ears, but could have been very large external eyes—or very small heads.
“What the hell . . . ?”
“If that question’s for me,” John said, “I have no idea. How are those cornices looking?”
Seeming to sense it was being watched, the spider-thing scurried forward with astonishing speed, then dropped out of sight behind a fold in the terrain. Whatever it was, Fred hoped it would have the sense to hunker down and hold on tight—at least until after the Night Watch was incinerated. He turned and began to bound down the slope alongside the gulch.
“Not sure yet,” he said. “Working on it.”
He dropped out of the clouds and found himself traveling alongside the dust curtain billowing out of the gulch. There was no hope of seeing through it to the other side, especially as the chute widened again. But as he descended, the growl of the avalanche began to fade and the curtain seemed to grow less dense and high. After five hundred meters, he stopped and blind-fired a rocket into the far side of the gulch.
The dust curtain billowed even higher and thicker than before, and the sound of the avalanche rose to a rumble again. Fred raced another two hundred meters down the mountainside and fired again, though the dust was already so thick and the noise so loud he couldn’t tell whether he was having any effect.
He changed barrels again and continued down the mountainside. By the next time he fired, the sound of the avalanche had receded and the dust curtain had thinned so much that he was catching glimpses of a rocky face on the opposite side of the gulch. When the detonation didn’t launch any more dust into the air or heighten the sound of the avalanche, he bounded down the slope another few hundred meters and tried again.
The dust curtain continued to thin, and the sound of the avalanche faded entirely. He was less than a kilometer from the Forgotten Highway, and at the bottom of the gulch, he even thought he could see a flattened diamond of blue light where the culvert opened out onto the mirage basin.
He unlocked the M41’s empty tubes and switched to the general comm channel. “I think the gulch is clear,” he said. “Look for the culvert at the bottom.”
“Well done, Spartan,” Petrov said. “Now, take cover. You have twenty seconds.”
Fred looked toward the culvert. Before he had quite realized what he was trying to figure out, his onboard computer activated his rangefinder, and the distance to the culvert appeared on his HUD.
709 METERS.
Even Spartans weren’t that fast. “Crap.”
“Quickly, Fred,” Kelly said over TEAMCOM. “Commander Crazy is serious. We’re out of time.”
“Why? What’s happening?”
Fred knew the answer before he finished asking the question. The Covenant had to be launching something from the crash site. He tossed the empty missile tubes aside and turned to see what they were putting up—and instead found his eye drawn to a distant pair of figures sprawled atop the next outcropping, perhaps five hundred meters away, their legs and arms splayed across the slope, the tiny dots of their heads protruding just above the crest as they studied the activity at the crash site.
He magnified the image and could see a little more—enough to tell that they resembled human children, with small frames, gaunt builds, and unruly hair. They wore rough clothing that might have been woven from raw plant fibers, and they had some sort of black-soled sandals strapped to their feet. Behind them, at the bottom of the outcropping, stood one of the strange spider-creatures Fred had glimpsed earlier—maybe even the same one.
Fred switched to the general comm channel. “Wait, there are—”
“Can’t wait,” Petrov said. “Those Banshees are lifting off.”
Fred looked toward the Night Watch and saw the violet splinters of three impulse drives snaking through the heat shimmer above the tiny prowler floating on the blue mirage. Petrov was right—she couldn’t wait, but those kids (if that’s what they really were) on the next outcropping didn’t know what was coming or how to protect themselves from it. Fred cupped his hands around his voicemitter and began to yell. Even if they could speak the language, there was little chance of making himself understood at such a distance. But if he could attract their attention, maybe he could wave them down—
