Outcasts, page 15
“Who do I use the Hand against?” ‘Kvarosee asked. “The only vessels in orbit are Sangheili.”
“The only vessels you can see,” ‘Ra’ashai noted. “The human insertion force did not drop on N’ba out of slipspace. There is a stealth ship up there.”
“Probably so,” ‘Kvarosee said. “But I cannot attack what I cannot find.”
“Then attack what you can find,” ‘Teodoree said. “The Sangheili flotilla remains intact, does it not?”
“Attack our own flotilla?” ‘Ra’ashai asked. “We are not that desperate. The humans have numbers, but we have our Sanctum and its defenses.”
“It is a mistake to assume it is our own flotilla,” ‘Teodoree said. “The hierarchs abandoned the Worldmaster and marooned us here deliberately. Are we to believe they have suddenly changed hearts and forgiven his disobedience… after more than a thousand cycles?”
“It was not disobedience,” ‘Kvarosee said. “It was the will of the Ancients, calling us to watch over their Sanctum.”
“So you have claimed many times, but that is not the vindication you believe it to be,” ‘Ra’ashai said. Members of the Silent Shadow were hardly known for their piety, and ‘Ra’ashai made no secret that he considered the Sanctum to be just another Forerunner facility… a bit older and more mysterious than most, but hardly worth dying over. “Before attacking any Sangheili vessel, we must find out why they are here.”
“So they will take you aboard when they leave?” ‘Kvarosee said. “Your devotion has always been lacking.”
‘Ra’ashai pushed his parted mandibles toward ‘Kvarosee. “I have more devotion than most. Just not to you.”
“Your only devotion is to escaping N’ba,” Tam said, allowing his disdain to rise into his voice. It was a risk, but if he did not defend ‘Kvarosee’s authority, no one would. “And your self-involvement is blinding you to our true peril.”
Rather than bristling, ‘Ra’ashai surprised Tam by asking, “And what would that peril be?”
“More than eight hundred cycles have passed since the last humans tried to land on N’ba,” Tam said. “Now we have humans and Sangheili inserting within a unit of each other?”
“It is no coincidence,” ‘Teodoree said. “Either they are doing battle, or our Sangheili brothers are traitors who have allied with the Covenant’s enemies.”
“And we have seen no sign that they are doing battle.” Tam looked to ‘Kvarosee. “Unless you have seen otherwise in your visions?”
“The gods have revealed nothing.” The Worldmaster’s “visions” were visible to everyone, manifesting as holographic images similar to the one floating in the passage ahead. But ‘Kvarosee spent most of his time alone in the heart of the Sanctum, where the visions always initially appeared. “There is no battle in orbit, but I have seen no human vessels. They may be hiding out of fear.”
“Very possible,” ‘Teodoree said. “Humans are cowards.”
“And yet,” ‘Ra’ashai said, “you are the one who proposes we destroy a Sangheili vessel rather than attack a band of human cowards. From behind.”
“I am only thinking of the Sanctum’s security,” ‘Teodoree said. “But why attack anything? Perhaps the Worldmaster can release the Wave of Wrath without unleashing the Divine Hand?”
‘Kvarosee dropped his mandibles briefly to the left, confirming what Tam had already guessed. The Divine Hand was not completely under the Worldmaster’s control. He could wield it against the enemies of the gods, but when they were not present to serve as his focus, he apparently could not summon it at all.
Tam did not dare let the rest of the Defenders discover that. Were it not for ‘Kvarosee’s connection to the gods, ‘Ra’ashai would have led a mutiny long ago and fed them both to the humans.
“The Wave of Wrath is but a by-product of the Divine Hand,” Tam said, thinking fast. “It cannot be summoned on its own.”
“Then attack something else,” ‘Teodoree said. “With such a large insertion force, surely the humans have plenty of surveillance and communications satellites in orbit.”
Tam had not thought of that possibility. “You would trouble the gods over a mere satellite?”
“I would trouble the gods to help us protect their Sanctum,” ‘Teodoree replied. “The humans on the Overmound outnumber us three to one, and it has been a thousand cycles since any of us fought a well-fed, armored enemy. If we fail, the Sanctum is lost.”
“Then we cannot fail,” ‘Kvarosee said. “Because even if we insult the gods by using their hand to swat at flegs, we dare not open the Rift of Eternity while there are humans on the Overmound. Or have you forgotten the Lurkers?”
‘Teodoree recoiled, and even ‘Ra’ashai dropped his chins. One time, three human castaways had leapt inside when the Rift opened. Instead of perishing, the trio began to float around inside the walls of the Sanctum, stalking its inhabitants like ghosts, always watching and ever present. Eventually, the surveillance grew so unbearable that four Defenders fled into the desert and were never seen again. It took two years for the last apparition to vanish, and by then the remaining warriors were so sleep-deprived and apprehensive that Tam and ‘Kvarosee spent most of their time keeping them from attacking one another.
“No one could forget the Lurkers,” Tam said, seizing the chance to turn the debate away from ‘Kvarosee’s control of the Divine Hand. “Better to take our chances and attack by surprise.”
“Not yet.” ‘Ra’ashai’s gaze was locked on the vision. “Better to gather intelligence first.”
“They are humans treading on the Sanctum,” ‘Kvarosee said. “What more do we need to know?”
“Where the other two went.” Ra’ashai pointed at the line of human soldiers. “The two without armor. Where did they go?”
* * *
Vale slapped the back of her shovel down and heard a hollow thump. She did it again, heard the same empty sound. A bit louder and more resonant than the usual dust-muffled whap.
“Found something!”
She was at the downslope end of the line, where the summit of the mound became the shoulder and fell away toward the crater floor. The searchers were spaced three meters apart, with Golly to her left, and Legs beyond him. Then it was Slim and his squad, with Grim Bear in the middle and Marcus and his squad on the far end.
Golly brought down his entrenching tool and produced the same hollow thump as had Vale. “Me too.”
“Same here,” Legs said. “That’s a big shaft.”
“Maybe not.” Slim dropped to his knees and cocked his helmet to one side, then slapped the ground with the spoon of his entrenching tool. Three times. “What if it’s a tunnel?”
Vale glanced down the side of the mound and saw no bulges or fans to suggest a rock dump at the end of a haulage tunnel. But if Rosa Fuertes was right about the upside-down layers of the tel, and Iyuska about its pre-Forerunner provenance, the site was over a hundred thousand years old. And that was plenty of time for erosion to smooth out the terrain.
She looked up the slope toward Slim. “What makes you think it might be a tunnel?”
“Distance, mostly. You and I are almost ten meters apart, and I’m pretty sure there’s a cavity under me, too. There’s no way that kind of span gets hidden by wind-packed dust. A plug that big would collapse under its own weight.”
“Probably so.”
Vale started backward, slapping her shovel down as she retreated. When the ground seemed solid again, she changed direction, following her soundings along what appeared to be the edge of a tunnel. It wasn’t that she doubted Slim’s theory—she just wanted to confirm it. Digging their way into a three-meter-high tunnel would advance the mission, but collapsing the plug over a haulage shaft hundreds of meters deep might well end it.
Vale had barely ascended three paces before she seemed to come to a sharp corner that turned under the probe line. At first, she assumed that the tunnel had changed direction, but then she looked up the slope and saw that Slim and Legs were still in line above her.
“I think we have an intersection here.” Vale slapped the shovel down a couple of times and heard hollow thuds for another couple of paces, then the ground began to sound solid again. “Yeah. Definitely an intersection.”
She moved across the mound horizontally, still following the hollow sound of the tunnel. It ran up the slope at an angle, and the thuds didn’t seem to grow any more muffled as she climbed higher. She stopped and used her tracks to plot a line.
It led to their landing zone, where Fuertes and Iyuska were sitting on the equipment crates, waiting for Tango Team to complete its reconnaissance. Vale began to run.
“Mama!” She waited until Grim Bear was looking in her direction, then pointed toward Fuertes and Iyuska. “Fall back to the LZ! Now!”
Grim Bear looked puzzled, but affirmed the orders to her staff sergeants and quickly waved soldiers toward the landing zone. Vale grabbed her M20 submachine gun off its magmount and closed the distance in five breaths, arriving just as Fuertes and Iyuska rose off the crates… and vanished, screeching, in an eruption of dust.
Vale entered the billowing gray plume, instantly lost visuals, then stepped into a pit and dropped three meters onto the top of an equipment crate… which collapsed under the weight of her GEN2 Mjolnir armor and left her standing in a pile of broken tripods and crushed laser measuring and mapping tools.
“Keely?!” Vale called. “Rosa?!”
“Here.” Iyuska’s voice came from beneath a jumble of crates ahead of Vale. “What just happened?”
“Don’t know. Is Rosa—” A familiar sound caught Vale’s attention—the snap-snap-snap of energy swords activating. Behind her. Along with the sound of pounding feet. To Iyuska, she yelled, “Stay put!”
The tactical readouts on her helmet’s VISR system refused to come up clear—no doubt obscured by the dense cloud of dust in the tunnel. But she was pretty sure Rosa Fuertes would not be charging her right now with an activated energy sword.
Vale launched a rear stomp kick behind her, hit hard, and sent something large and solid tumbling away with a grunt of pain. Her shield crackled twice as energy blades struck at her knee and ankle. She raised her leg, then snapped off a heel kick that caught a second attacker in the head and sent whoever it was thumping into the tunnel wall on the left. She reversed into a roundhouse, caught another head, and sent another body crashing into a wall.
Only then did Vale spin around, to find three large gray forms lying behind the diffuse glow of three bright blades. It took a couple of heartbeats to confirm they were male Sangheili warriors, as they were dressed in opalescent skinsuits rather than typical combat armor and helmets.
“I am not your enemy,” Vale said in Sangheili. “Hold your attack and—”
All three attackers roared in anger and gathered themselves up to charge, their energy swords rising to strike. Vale hit the one on the right with a short burst of submachine gun fire, dropping him back to the floor, then stepped into a thrust kick, smashing the middle one’s sword arm against his chest and sending him flying down the tunnel… knocking down a fresh trio of warriors just emerging from the dust behind him.
That wasn’t good.
By then, the warrior to Vale’s left was on his feet again, swinging his energy sword at her head. With her kicking leg still outstretched, she dropped onto the other haunch and swung the M20 across her body, firing one-handed into his abdomen.
The burst folded him over like a jackknife, and his energy sword sliced through the air a few centimeters above her helmet. She used her free hand to catch his wrist and pull him off-balance, depositing him in a heap in front of her. Orange circles glowed where her rounds had struck his torso, and she could see similar spots shining in the skinsuit of the first warrior she had targeted.
Both warriors were returning to their feet, their oblong heads swinging in her direction. The third warrior—the one she hadn’t shot—was also rising, along with the three behind him. A seventh figure seemed to be standing in the tunnel beyond, a gray ghost barely visible through the still-swirling dust.
“The war is over!” Vale called, still speaking Sangheili. “Nobody needs to die here.”
“Wrong, lying demon,” the ghostly figure in back said… in raspy, sibilant English. “You must die. The gods demand it.”
The gray blur of a rising arm appeared alongside his torso as he brought a weapon up. Vale opened fire with her M20 and saw him stumble back, a cluster of orange dots blossoming across his chest. When her magazine fell empty, the warriors she had attacked earlier leapt up. She stepped back and pulled her plasma pistol—a Sangheili Zo’klada-pattern manufactured by the Iruiru Armory on Sanghelios—off the mount on her hip—
—then felt the heart-stopping thump of a C-12 charge breaching the tunnel ceiling. The air went from murky to impenetrable, with a fat column of ambient light filtering down through dust thick enough to grab. An M90 boomed, and she saw a downward muzzle flash as a Tango Team ODST—probably Golly, given the shotgun—fired on a sword wielder.
Vale advanced through the dust, firing plasma bolts toward the glow of the other swords. Normally, she would have been careful to alert her teammate to her approach. But her comm indicator continued to flash red, and there was little possibility of making a voicemitter-modulated shout heard over the thunder of the shotgun fire.
The energy swords deactivated, but the miasma of dust made it impossible to tell whether the warriors holding them were dead… or had simply realized their weapons were only making them targets.
An instant later, the shotgun fire ceased, and Vale found herself standing in swirling dust, about half a meter from a murky wall of ODST armor that could only be Golly. Unable to see below her own knees, she began to sweep her feet back and forth, searching for her Sangheili attackers. When she felt nothing but spongy floor, she positioned herself back-to-back with Golly and looked down the tunnel into… more dust.
Speaking through her voicemitter, Vale asked, “You alone?”
“Negative,” Golly replied. “Legs is with—”
A burst of submachine gun fire sounded a short distance down the tunnel, just beyond the breach hole in the ceiling. Vale spun toward the sound, pushing Golly toward the right wall and going left herself. All she could see through the dust was a faint aura of muzzle flashes and plasma flares arcing around a dark oval that had to be Legs’s silhouette. Vale began to fire toward the source of the plasma flares, but it was impossible to tell whether she was hitting anything.
Then the dark oval dropped, not falling sideways as though Legs had been hit, but sinking straight into the floor. Her submachine gun continued to fire, the sound growing more muffled with each shot. Vale and Golly continued forward, firing on the run and—judging by the orange circles that flared in the miasma ahead—occasionally hitting a Sangheili.
A retreating Sangheili, because plasma bolts were no longer coming up the tunnel. Vale stopped firing long enough to put the plasma pistol away and reload the M20—then heard Golly cry out from across the passage:
“What thhheeee…”
His voice was sinking fast, and Vale looked over to see his murky form dropping straight into the floor, arms upraised and flailing. She dropped her M20 and stepped into the middle of the tunnel, at the same time stooping down and thrusting out her hand. Even with her augmented reflexes, she was almost too slow. By the time she caught hold of Golly’s wrist, all she could see of him was the hand above. Everything else—his head, shoulders, and even the other arm—was hidden under a churning pool of dust. She lifted him out and, not even taking the time to fully stand, began to retreat up the tunnel toward the crates.
“What the… is that?” she gasped.
Golly ignored her and started to pull back toward the… sinkhole, Vale decided.
“Corporal!” Vale jerked him toward her. “Use your head.”
“But Legs—”
“Legs is MIA.” Vale turned toward the crates, where she had left Iyuska hiding. “And joining her won’t change that.”
Vale started up the tunnel, dragging Golly along behind her. Whatever had just happened, she really didn’t like it. First, a band of Sangheili… hermits? monks? castaways?… had managed to drive a fifty-meter tunnel to Tango Team’s landing zone in a few minutes. Then, they had covered their retreat by creating a sinkhole—instantaneously.
It defied logic.
But whatever had happened, Vale needed to get her companions out of the tunnel, then figure out just what was going on. And she needed to do that fast, while she still had a team to work with.
They reached the pile of equipment crates. Iyuska was going through the one Vale had landed on, sighing and cursing as she pulled out broken tools and pieces of instruments.
Vale motioned Golly to climb out through the hole in the ceiling, then took a smashed transit level from Iyuska’s hands and tossed it aside.
“We’ll sort through the equipment later. Right now, we need to move.” Vale stepped around to the back side of the crate pile and peered into the empty space where Iyuska had been hiding. “Where’s Rosa?”
“You didn’t get her back?” Iyuska asked.
Vale’s stomach sank. Her mission was going bad, fast. She stood upright and looked over the crate pile. “What do you mean, get her back?”
“From the Sangheili. They came after the two of us. I managed to hide, but I’m assuming that’s what they were after. Us.”
CHAPTER 11
Barely visible in the billowing dust, a trio of ten-legged running machines raced along beside the one in which Thel ‘Vadam stood. Time and again, the spiderlike legs of his machine clacked against those of an adjacent vehicle and sent an alarming shudder through the passenger compartment, causing him to clench his mandibles and instinctively drop his center of gravity.
