Oblivion, page 14
John ejected his empty magazine and reached for another, then heard the sonic crack of two sniper rounds passing just above his head. Something dark spurted out the top of the Banshee’s dome; then it rolled toward the mountainside and plowed into the deepest part of the dust bank.
The crash raised a gray fan of dust twenty meters high before there came the muted crumpling of metal, followed by a muffled boom so powerful John felt it in the soles of his boots. The air went hazy and dark with dust, and a moment later, something metallic clanged off John’s shoulder pauldron.
“Heads up!”
He looked up, searching the swirling murk above for the swelling shadow of something he might need to dodge.
But none of the debris from the Banshee was all that large or dangerous. Anything heavy enough to damage his Mjolnir was too heavy to reach him, and anything light didn’t carry enough momentum. He spent a couple of seconds listening to the clangs fade to pings, then finally reached down and grabbed the object that had struck his shoulder pauldron and planted itself at his feet. It looked like some sort of strut, but not of a design he had ever seen before. He tucked it into his armpit and tried to check on First Platoon and the prowler crew. The dust haze was so thick that anyone more than a couple of meters away looked like a ghost, and anything more than ten meters away was simply not visible.
When the chance presented itself, Blue Team was going to need to do some serious maintenance on both their armor and their weapons.
“Status,” John said over TEAMCOM.
All three status LEDs flashed green inside his helmet; then Fred stepped to John’s side and took the strut from his armpit.
“Where did you find this?”
“It fell on me,” John said.
The strut was about a meter long, with a dull gray finish, a busted ball joint at one end, and a round metal pad at the other. The pad was about the size of John’s palm, with a hinged split down the center that allowed the two halves to flex outward or inward.
“Why?”
“I can’t believe your luck!” Fred was starting to sound crazy again. “Do you know what this is?”
“A Banshee landing strut?”
Fred made a horizontal slicing motion with his free hand to indicate that John was dead wrong. “Proof,” he said. “It’s a spider leg!”
“Oh no, please,” Kelly said. “Not that again.”
“You’ll see.” Fred tried to attach it to the magnetic mount on the back of his Mjolnir and failed—apparently the strut had no ferrous metal—then simply clutched it tight and started toward the Banshee crash. “There are nine more, just like this one.”
John caught him by the arm. “You’re forgetting something.”
He tipped his helmet up the highway, where, fifty meters away, Commander Petrov was standing above the cliffside end of the culvert, her hands on her hips and her chin resting on her chest as she stared down at the smoke plumes rising from the basin floor. Behind her, the rest of the ship’s complement sat waiting in the dust, most of the prowler crew looking at the ground between their feet, the marines watching her back with vacant gazes.
“Oh yeah.” Fred tucked the spider leg under the strap of the load-carrying harness he used to haul extra equipment. “The heat casualties.”
“You mean our backup force,” Kelly said.
Fred glanced out at the shimmering mirage basin. “On this hell-world, I don’t think there’s a difference.”
“Just try to be positive.” John started forward, angling toward Petrov. “And not a word about this spider machine. Half the unit is probably dazed with heatstroke, and I don’t want you confusing them any more than they already are.”
“Acknowledged,” Fred said. “But what are you going to do when they see one?”
“Don’t worry. They won’t,” John said.
As they drew near Commander Petrov, he noticed that Linda was already moving from one overheated marine to another, making sure they were drinking and encouraging them to use their weapons and shirts to create makeshift shade-shelters. John signaled Fred and Kelly to help her, then stepped to Petrov’s side and activated his voicemitter.
“I don’t see any new casualties,” he said. Petrov continued to stare at the smoke plumes for a moment, then finally turned to look at him. Her face was drier and more flushed than before, and her furrowed brow suggested she had a bad headache. “Ma’am, when was the last time you had a drink?”
“Are you trying to change the subject, Master Chief?”
“I wasn’t aware there was one.”
“Casualties,” Petrov reminded him. She turned back to the smoke columns rising out of the mirage basin. “How far is it to the target?”
“The Lucky Break?” John asked. When she nodded, he checked the waypoint that appeared on his HUD. “Fifty-one kilometers, as the crow flies.”
Petrov snorted. “You think a crow could survive in this place?”
“I wouldn’t know, ma’am,” John said. “I’ve never seen one.”
Petrov turned back to him. “No, I suppose you haven’t.” Her tone was gentle. “Trust me, no crow could survive here . . . and neither can we.”
John began to wonder if he should reconsider keeping Fred quiet about his talk of phantom children and their spider machine. It was beginning to seem like Petrov was confused enough to believe him, and thinking that there were a bunch of kids wandering around might give her a more optimistic attitude about their chances of survival.
“We’ll make it,” John said. “We have plenty of water and a reclamation tool.”
“Which you can leave with us,” Petrov said. “I believe you have your own reclamation systems, correct?”
“Ma’am?”
Petrov pursed her lips. “I believe your Mjolnir is self-contained,” she said. “If I understand your file correctly, you can survive indefinitely in almost any environment.”
“That’s correct.” John began to have a bad feeling about where Petrov was headed with this conversation. “But if you think we’re going to leave your crew and First Platoon behind—”
“Don’t be daft, Master Chief. Of course you’re going to leave us behind. It’s the only way you have any chance of completing the mission.”
“No offense, ma’am,” John said, “but we’re on the ground now. So that’s not your decision—and even if it were, I’m not sure you’re thinking clearly.”
“More clearly than you, apparently.” She looked up the highway. “How fast can four Spartans travel fifty kilometers on foot?”
“It depends on the terrain—”
“Stop dodging,” Petrov said. “Your file says you can average twenty kilometers an hour over long distances. That means you can reach the Lucky Break in two and a half hours if the terrain is good, double that if it isn’t.”
“I wouldn’t count on the terrain being good,” John said.
“If it’s not good for you, it will be terrible for us,” Petrov said. “And marines march at an average of five kilometers an hour in good conditions. What will their rate be in this heat? Dragging water tanks, casualties, and probably half my crew? Two kilometers an hour? One?”
John looked away. Given the necessity of going slowly and stopping frequently to keep cool, they would be doing well to average one per hour.
“Blue Team can reach the Lucky Break in a few hours,” Petrov said. “It will take the rest of us a couple of days—if we can make it the whole way—and nothing you can do here will change any of that. Even Spartans can’t carry thirty people on their backs.”
John swung his faceplate back toward Petrov. She was starting to make sense . . . damn it.
“There must be something we can do to increase your odds.”
“Complete your mission,” Petrov said. “Capture the damn frigate and get back to us as fast as you can, with whatever you can. That has to be better than hanging around to watch us die.”
“Okay, then,” John said. “I see your point. I may not like it—”
“You think I do?” Petrov asked. “You should find the Wheatley at the original LZ, keeping an eye on the Lucky Break from five kilometers out. Enlist the security team, if you think it will increase your odds.”
“I’ll consider it, ma’am,” John said. “Will they accept my—”
“They’ll do anything you ask of them,” Petrov said. “And if they won’t, make them.”
“I understand.”
“Do you? Make sure of it.” Petrov put a hand on his back and pushed him toward the rest of the company, where Blue Team was still busy handing out canteens and constructing shade-shelters. “Take that ship, Master Chief—and do it in the next ten hours. You can’t have any longer than that.”
CHAPTER 10
* * *
* * *
1041 hours, June 7, 2526 (military calendar)
Serpentine Canyon, Forgotten Highway
Mountains of Despair, Planet Netherop, Ephyra System
Blue Team had no choice. The Forgotten Highway had more bends in it than a Klein bottle, but it led generally in the right direction, and loping along its smooth surface was faster than scrambling through hundreds of deep ravines. Still, John’s HUD showed they had actually covered forty-seven kilometers on the ground, yet advanced only twenty-three kilometers toward the Lucky Break. That was a bad ratio. They had been traveling two hours already, and it meant they had at least three more hours of hard running ahead.
Assuming the ratio didn’t swing any further against them.
The highway climbed away from the mirage basin and entered a narrow gorge. To one side of the road, the canyon plunged hundreds of meters to a shimmering blue ribbon that was probably just a mirage. To the other side, a craggy face of banded gneiss rose a similar distance before crowning beneath a dingy canopy of clouds.
Kelly was on-point three hundred meters ahead of John, her small image rippling in the heat. As she led the team deeper into the gorge, the endless dust-drifts gave way to overflow mounds spilling out of tributary ravines. The overflow mounds grew ever smaller, until the road was covered by only wind-packed dust, and even that soon thinned into nothingness and exposed a bed of triangular paving blocks—the final proof, had they needed any, that the Forgotten Highway was an apt name.
The blocks were the color of bleached bone, cupped with wear and spalled by heat and age.
Blue Team ran deeper into the gorge. On most other planets, a canyon would be shady and cool. Here, the temperature climbed steadily. Kelly soon blurred into invisibility. John began to doubt First Platoon and the prowler crew would make it through this without any protection. The dark walls were a natural energy sink, collecting and holding heat like bricks in a kiln. When darkness fell, they would radiate it back into the canyon, and John doubted the road would grow noticeably cooler until late into the night.
Whenever that might come.
He looked up between the canyon rims, searching the crooked belt of brown sky for the white patch of Netherop’s sun. It had barely moved all morning. For all John knew, daylight on Netherop could last twenty hours.
A message from his onboard computer appeared on the HUD: SOLAR TRACKING INDICATES DAYLIGHT AT THIS LATITUDE LASTS 23 HOURS, 5 MINUTES.
John felt his breath grow labored and realized he was clenching his jaw. Their circadian rhythms were going to be massively disrupted. Was everything on Netherop incredibly hostile to human life?
“Who does this?”
Fred was four hundred meters behind John, bringing up the rear of the formation, so his voice came over TEAMCOM.
“You must be specific,” Linda said. “Who does what?”
“Who builds a highway halfway up a cliff face?” Fred said. “Either it should run along the bottom of the canyon, or it should go up on the rim. Why cut it into the side of a cliff—especially in hard stone like this?”
“You keep expecting aliens to think like humans,” John said.
“What makes you think it was built by aliens?”
“That’s rather obvious, isn’t it?” Kelly replied. “No human would build a road halfway up the cliff.”
Fred groaned, and they continued to run. The canyon bends grew sharper and more frequent, the tributary ravines narrower and steeper. The temperature continued to climb, and visibility decreased even more. John had the team reduce its spacing to two hundred meters so they could maintain visual contact, then a hundred and fifty.
After fifteen more minutes, Kelly’s status LED flashed red twice, the signal to stop while she checked something out. Everyone flashed green to acknowledge. John protected his back by moving close to the cliff face, then dropped to a knee and scanned the winding belt of sky for incoming Banshees. A month ago, a twisting gorge would have been the last place he expected to be strafed. But the Covenant did not face the same technical limitations as the UNSC, as had been evident on Mesra.
“You may not believe this,” Kelly said, “but I think someone dropped range markers on the road.”
“When it comes to the Covenant, I’ll believe anything,” John said. Despite the gorge’s narrow confines, it was hardly an ideal place for an ambush. The sheer walls left no place for attackers to hide except up on the rim, where their firing angles would be both awkward and at long range. And with all the curves in the road, their targets would be within a few steps of hard cover. “What are you looking at?”
“Rock spatters,” Kelly said. “Scattered along the road ahead.”
“You find it surprising that rocks fall from cliffs?” Linda asked.
“I do when they’re a different color of rock,” Kelly replied. “And a different kind. The cliffs are brown, granular, and very hard. The rock I’m looking at is black and dusty, and there are a lot of chunks with shell-shaped fracture marks. I think it might be coal.”
John moved as far away from the cliff face as he could without stepping off the highway, then craned his neck back. The light refraction wasn’t as pronounced when he looked skyward, because the air temperature directly overhead was not much different from where he was standing, and he had a decent view of the top of the canyon.
From what he could tell, Kelly had stopped at the beginning of a sharp curve, where the canyon turned to the right and continued for a couple of hundred meters before bending back in the opposite direction. If it went true to form, it would return an equal distance, completing one of the oxbow meanders that were forcing Blue Team to travel two or three kilometers along the road for every kilometer it advanced toward the target.
John magnified the image. There was some shimmer near the rim itself, where the rock was holding heat from Netherop’s sun, but he could see well enough to tell that the rim had a clean edge. There were no ragged borders or knobby bulges to suggest that the canyon’s gneiss was overlaid by a coal seam—or any other kind of stone.
Which meant those black chunks were inexplicable.
The last thing John wanted to do was interrupt their march to investigate a bunch of rocks lying on a roadbed that probably hadn’t been used in millennia. But if the rocks hadn’t come from the cliff, that made their presence a mystery—and in hostile territory, what couldn’t be explained couldn’t be ignored.
“We’d better check it out,” John said. “Linda, come forward and cover the canyon rim above those rocks. If it’s an ambush, you might see their heads pop up when they realize it didn’t work.”
Linda’s LED flashed green.
“Fred—”
“Already moving,” Fred replied. “I’ll go three ravines back.”
“Affirmative,” John said. “Kelly and I will come up the second.”
Fred’s and Kelly’s LEDs flashed green.
Everyone knew what to do. When sneaking up on an ambush, it was never smart to take the first obvious approach. A skilled foe would have sentries watching for a flank attack, so it was best to advance from an unexpected direction.
John and Linda passed each other without exchanging so much as a helmet nod. If the enemy was lying in wait, and if that enemy could see them, the less time given for them to adjust, the better.
John ran a kilometer to the second ravine back and began to climb. The gneiss was good stone, solid and unbroken, but the ravine itself was steep and very narrow, rising to the canyon rim at more than a sixty percent grade. He pushed his hands and boots against opposite sides and scrambled up it chimney-style, using counterpressure to avoid the tedious process of searching out tiny finger- and toeholds.
By the time he reached the rim, he was breathing heavily, and the Mjolnir’s environmental control system was working hard to keep him cool. John curled his fingers over the top and braced both boots against the opposite wall, then carefully raised his helmet to take a look. What he found was heat shimmer so dense he saw only green vase shapes, presumably foliage, dancing atop black undulating stone.
“Blue Two, status?”
“Advancing toward your ravine,” Fred said. “Nothing’s shot me yet.”
John looked over his shoulder and saw a blocky, slate-blue figure thirty meters away, pushing through the presumed foliage, the visual distortion at ground level so severe that nothing substantial could be perceived.
The figure seemed to be hunched down to about two-thirds of Fred’s normal height, which put his helmet at the same level as the top of the vase shapes. Presumably, that was high enough to clear the worst of the refraction. John crawled out of the ravine, then pulled the BR55 off his back and slowly rose to a high crouch. The heat shimmer diminished enough for him to see that the vase shapes were indeed some sort of plant.
Maybe.
The triangular leaves had no stems. Instead, they grew directly out of the ground in tight, concentric rings that were so perfectly formed it made John wonder if they were crystalline growths rather than plants. But the center of each leaf was puffy, and the edges had little hooked barbs that did not seem very mineral-like.
A FRIEND marker appeared on John’s motion tracker as Fred came up behind him. John looked down into the ravine and spotted Kelly a hundred meters below, climbing fast. He saw no good reason for the Covenant to launch an ambush from up here on the plateau, but neither did he see a source for the dark rock-splatters she had reported. They still had to spend the time and investigate.
