Halo E-Book

Troy Denning

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2020

Seitenzahl: 654

Beschreibung

A Master Chief story and original full-length novel set in the Halo universe—based on the New York Times bestselling video game series with the latest entry, Halo Infinite, out in 2020!October 2559. It has been a year since the renegade artificial intelligence Cortana issued a galaxy-wide ultimatum, subjecting many worlds to martial law under the indomitable grip of her Forerunner weapons. Outside her view, the members of Blue Team—John-117, the Master Chief; Fred-104; Kelly-087; and Linda-058—are assigned from the UNSC Infinity to make a covert insertion onto the ravaged planet Reach. Their former home and training ground—and the site of humanity's most cataclysmic military defeat near the end of the Covenant War—Reach still hides myriad secrets after all these years. Blue Team's mission is to penetrate the rubble-filled depths of CASTLE Base and recover top-secret assets locked away in Dr. Catherine Halsey's abandoned laboratory—assets that may prove to be humanity's last hope against Cortana.But Reach has been invaded by a powerful and ruthless alien faction, who have their own reasons for being there. Establishing themselves as a vicious occupying force on the devastated planet, this enemy will soon transform Blue Team's simple retrieval operation into a full-blown crisis. And with the fate of the galaxy hanging in the balance, mission failure is not an option...

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Don’t Miss These other Thrilling Stories in the Worlds of Halo

Title Page

Leave us a review

Copyright

Dedication

Historian’s Note

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Epilogue

Acknowledgments

About the Author

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TROY DENNING

BASED ON THE BESTSELLING XBOX® VIDEO GAMES

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Halo: Shadows of Reach

Print edition ISBN: 9781789096330

E-book edition ISBN: 9781789096347

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First Titan edition: October 2020

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2020 by Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Microsoft, Halo, the Halo logo, Xbox, and the Xbox logo are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Elliot Courant

HISTORIAN’S NOTE

This story takes place in October 2559, a year after the events of Halo 5: Guardians, as the AI Cortana retreats into the Domain, then resurrects a host of Forerunner Guardians and uses them to impose martial law on interstellar civilizations across the Orion Arm of the Milky Way Galaxy.

CHAPTER ONE

0217 hours, October 7, 2559 (military calendar)

UNSC Owl Insertion CraftSpecial Delivery

Insertion Run, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

The situation monitor on the forward bulkhead remained in blackout mode, waiting for the Owl’s hull temperature to drop far enough to deploy the nose cameras. It didn’t matter. John-117 had inserted onto dozens of glassed worlds during his thirty-four-year combat career, and he knew what to expect: a blanket of silver-limned clouds hanging over vast sweeps of heat-fused ground. Mats of lichen and algae starting to take hold in scattered pockets of dust and mud. Black-bottomed ponds licking at mirror-smooth shores, spider-veined river systems draining into half-empty seas . . . and not much else.

The Covenant was gone now, save for a few holdout factions still clinging to their hatred of humanity or a lost hope of transcendence. But during the war, the aliens had rained monsoons of hot plasma down on hundreds of worlds, burning soil and melting bedrock, boiling oceans and filling the air with superheated vapor. Any creature that had escaped instant incineration had suffocated on superheated smoke, or seared away its feet fleeing over molten ground, or emerged from hiding to eventually starve while wandering barren expanses of ash-impregnated lechatelierite.

Nothing survived a Covenant plasma bombardment. John knew that.

But this was Reach, the closest thing to a home he and his fellow Spartan-IIs could remember, and he wanted to see for himself how it was faring these days.

He needed to.

Operation: WOLFE was supposed to be a simple mission, just a two-kilometer descent into the ruins of CASTLE Base to recover the assets Dr. Catherine Halsey needed to save galactic civilization, again, from a rogue AI.

Cortana.

Two years ago, Cortana had been John’s AI, residing in his Mjolnir armor, connected to his mind through a port in the back of his skull. And she—

Damn. It was happening again.

John could hardly think of Cortana’s name without finding himself in a battle against his own thoughts, replaying the entire incident in his mind and wondering what he might have done differently. It wasn’t a bad neural lace or hypnotic suggestion or anything like that—he was just . . .

He checked his heads-up display for the GO TIME.

ETA twenty-seven minutes. Enough of a window to get himself sorted and focused. John had known before their last battle together that Cortana was descending into the final stages of “rampancy”—a sort of inevitable AI schizophrenia—as her mind literally outgrew its neural matrix after seven years of existence. But with the fate of humanity hanging in the balance, he had allowed Cortana to infiltrate the control systems of a primordial enemy vessel, sacrificing herself so he could destroy a devastating weapon threatening Earth. And it had worked.

Until Cortana returned from the dead.

Things had really gone off the rails then, and John had made some decisions he regretted. Worse, he had dragged the rest of Blue Team into the mess along with him, going AWOL to uncover the mystery of Cortana’s rebirth and rescue her . . . from what? Herself?

Transformed by residing for a year in an ancient quantum information repository known as the Domain, Cortana had returned more intellectually capable than ever, with a host of long-hidden, massive “Guardians” at her disposal. She had wasted no time issuing an ultimatum to every world in the Orion arm of the galaxy: accept her rule and live in peace, or defy her and suffer the brutal consequences.

John’s second-in-command, Fred-104, called it peace-through-menace, but that was an understatement. The Guardians were so powerful they could neutralize entire worlds and knock fleets out of orbit, killing thousands—or even hundreds of thousands— when huge vessels crashed down on the towns and cities below. And Cortana had also corrupted an army of human AIs into aligning with and spying for her. Now interstellar civilization was sinking into a nightmarish surveillance state, with the situation worsening each day.

And John could not help feeling responsible. Had he ordered Cortana to stand down when her deterioration began to accelerate, she would never have been drawn into the Domain . . . but he would never have destroyed that Forerunner weapon. . . .

It was all just going in circles.

There had been no good choices, in any event—John knew that. He had done the best he could under such terrible circumstances . . . right up until he disobeyed orders and went AWOL, and had to be doggedly hunted down by his superiors and fellow Spartans. Someday there was going to be a reckoning for that decision. Just not now.

Now he had a job to do.

John checked the ETA. Twenty-five minutes. Still plenty of time. But during the previous day’s pre-drop threat sweep, the Special Delivery’s mothership—an Eclipse-class prowler named Bucephalus— had picked up some surface chatter suggesting there was a low-intensity conflict under way in the Arany Basin. It hadn’t been much, just a few transmissions as one group of humans warned another about an enemy patrol, followed a few minutes later by a trio of heat flares that could have been anything from plasma strikes to missile detonations. There had probably been more to the battle, of course, but the Bucephalus’s instruments weren’t sensitive enough to pick up small-and medium-arms fire from orbit. Just the artillery.

John and the other Spartan-IIs had grown to maturity on Reach, so he’d always paid special attention to any mention of it in the intelligence reports routed past him over the years. He knew that not much had happened on the planet since the Covenant plasma bombardment. A handful of salvagers—both human and alien—had started to visit Reach after the glass cooled, and two years ago, a small colony of rehab pioneers had set up somewhere on the continent of Eposz.

The Arany Basin was located on Eposz, so it seemed likely that the conflict involved the rehab pioneers somehow. But even that was not a certainty. The intelligence reports had grown extremely rare after Cortana issued her ultimatum, and the few John had seen did not refer to Reach. The fight could be between anybody—two salvage companies, the rehab pioneers and a salvage company, different rehab factions, or a hundred other possibilities.

All John knew for sure was that the conflict location was good news, because Blue Team had no intention of entering the Arany Basin. Sure, he would have liked to check on the pioneers and see how they were doing. Reach was the only home he could remember, and he would have liked some reassurance that it was in good hands.

But that wasn’t the mission.

“Two minutes.”

John let his gaze drop to the woman who had spoken, a steady-eyed crew chief in the jump seat beneath the situation monitor. Dressed in the black insertion suit of a marine special operations flight crew, Stella Mukai had a round face, Newsakan features, and a warm, no-nonsense manner that seemed equal parts den mother and drill sergeant. On her sleeve, she wore the flat black rocker and triple chevrons of a chief petty officer—a rank just two steps below John’s own rank of master chief petty officer.

The ETA in John’s heads-up display still read twenty-five minutes, so he asked, “Two minutes until what, Chief Mukai?”

Mukai pointed above her head, and John realized she had caught him staring at the blank situation monitor.

“Until the nose cameras deploy,” she said. “But you won’t see much at this time of night. With the cloud cover over Eposz, the surface glass is going to be about as reflective as a dust nebula.”

“What a shame,” Fred-104 said over his voicemitter. He was seated directly across the green-lit troop bay from John, secured in place by an oversize titanium-alloy crash harness designed especially for Spartans. “A state-of-the-art insertion craft like this, and nobody thinks to install an infrared enhancement package?”

Mukai’s brow shot up at the remark— every Owl had an infrared enhancement package—and she cast an admonishing glare in Fred’s direction. The Special Delivery was her baby, and nobody told a crew chief how to run her boat—not even a Spartan-II wearing four hundred kilos of GEN3 Mjolnir power armor.

Fred pretended not to notice Mukai’s reaction, tipping his helmet back so that the faceplate was angled up toward the monitor. It wasn’t a bad strategy, giving the crew chief a chance to cool off without backing down. Fred could be smart like that, patient but unyielding. It was one of the qualities that made him such an effective soldier—even if he still seemed a bit irritated by the UNSC’s response to some of Blue Team’s actions during the Cortana event.

Linda-058 sat next to Fred, her own faceplate directed slightly toward the deck. Her hands were resting on her thighs, palms up, and she seemed to be almost floating in her seat, her body upright and motionless as the Owl bounced and shuddered toward the surface of Reach. She was only about half present, John knew. Her attention was focused inward on a quiet mind, her external perceptions tickling over her like a moth’s feet. She liked to say that meditation was her best combat asset, the secret to making an impossible shot with the sky falling on top of her—or to lying motionless for days, waiting for the target to show itself. John didn’t know about that. He tended to fall asleep when he tried to still his thoughts, and he didn’t do motionless. But there was no arguing with the results. Linda was the best sniper in the United Nations Space Command.

The fourth member of Blue Team, Kelly-087, sat on John’s side of the troop bay, in the seat to his left. Her hands were grasping her shoulder restraints, and her dome-faced helmet was moving in time to the music he knew was blasting inside her headgear. Kelly had developed a sudden fondness for twentieth-century “rock” bands a year ago, after the Cortana event. John suspected the driving beats and rebellious lyrics were Kelly’s own version of meditation, a way to smother the extraneous thoughts and doubts that filled a soldier’s mind before an action began.

John’s stomach grew heavy as the Special Delivery decreased its angle of attack and began to decelerate. The nose cameras deployed and went active, and the situation monitor switched from blackout mode to a dark-as-night external view.

The ETA on John’s HUD dropped to twenty-three minutes. Mukai was still glaring at Fred, who was still pretending not to notice. Clearly he was in need of tactical support.

“Chief Mukai, it would be helpful to get a look at what’s happening down there,” John said. “I’d appreciate consideration of Spartan-104’s suggestion to use infrared enhancement.”

“That was a suggestion?” The crew chief continued to stare at Fred. “Funny. All I heard was a smartass lieutenant telling me how to run my bird.”

Fred finally dropped his gaze to Mukai. “Sorry, Chief. I’ll be clearer the next time I make such a request.”

Mukai nodded. “I’d appreciate that . . . sir.”

Special operations teams were tight-knit units where rank took a back seat to functionality and cohesion, so by acknowledging Fred’s commission, Mukai was tacitly accepting his truce offer. John felt proud of himself. If the Spartans ever ran out of enemies, maybe he could transfer to the Diplomatic Corps.

Negotiate peace treaties or something.

Mukai spoke into her headset, and the situation monitor blossomed with color. A blotchy blue field filled the screen, slowly drifting downward as the Special Delivery descended over the polar snowfields toward the green circle of Big Crater Bay. Ringing the southern edge of the bay was a wide indigo crescent where a mud beach separated the water from the endless orange sweep of the Eposz glasslands.

The glasslands still showed orange because lechatelierite cooled from the top down, its surface solidifying into a vitreous blanket that kept heat from radiating into the air. The ground beneath could stay molten for a year, and remain hot to the touch for a decade. And the beach existed because much of the liquid that had been vaporized during the Covenant’s plasma bombardment had not yet returned to the oceans. Most of the planet’s water continued to hang in the atmosphere in vast banks of fog and clouds, or to lie trapped on the glass in giant lakes and ash bogs.

A crimson dot flared into existence on the monitor, expanding rapidly against the indigo ring that surrounded Big Crater Bay. The hot spot was located on the northern boundary of the beach, about where the Babd Catha Ice Shelf had once ended. Reach still had plenty of geothermal activity, so the heat blossom could have been a geyser or volcano erupting just as the Special Delivery passed overhead.

Yeah, sure.

Kelly stopped rocking her helmet and turned her bulbous faceplate toward the monitor. “They are seeing this in the cockpit,” she said. “Right?”

Mukai craned her neck around to look up at the display.

“Count on it.” The dot swelled into a button-sized blur, then divided into five points and continued to expand. Mukai’s eyes widened, and she looked back to Kelly. “Trust me. They have buzzers.”

Rather than distract the pilots by asking for a report, John synced his HUD to the Special Delivery’s combat information system and saw the open-bottomed triangles of five airborne bandits. The configuration—a staggered polygon—had been favored by reconnaissance flights since the dawn of orbital combat. A MS31 designator code floated beneath each of the five symbols.

“They’re Seraphs,” John said. “All Morsam-pattern.”

“And that’s a good thing?” Fred asked.

One of the Covenant’s most durable space fighters, Seraphs could be found in the fleets of Covenant splinter groups ranging from Kig-Yar pirate bands to the Banished to the Servants of the Abiding Truth. They were a bit graceless and ungainly in atmospheric flight, but fast, energy-shielded, and heavily armed.

“Well,” Mukai said, “at least they’re not Phaetons.”

Fred looked toward her. “You’re a real ray of sunshine.”

Phaeton exoatmospheric fighters were Forerunner craft designed a thousand centuries before—and still technologically far beyond anything in the UNSC fleet. Produced from self-assembling blocks of smartmatter, they weren’t all that sturdy. But they were well-armed, with long-range mass cannons and self-guiding pulse missiles. They could even teleport short distances to evade enemy fire. But the most alarming thing? They were usually attached to one of Cortana’s Guardian Custodes. So, when Phaetons were in the area, fighting wasn’t an option. The only viable tactic was to retreat and hope for a safe escape.

The heat blossoms continued to expand on the situation monitor. The Spartans all hated this part of the mission—being helpless passengers at the mercy of someone else’s skill. But there was an art to flying Owls, and Major Van Houte was twice the pilot any of them were, with a long history of successful insertions under conditions far worse than these.

But there were still five Seraphs coming—and they were obviously aware of the Special Delivery’s presence.

“Relax, Spartans,” Mukai said. “Those Seraphs might know we’re here, but they don’t know where we are. There’s a difference.”

“Thanks,” Fred said. “Now I feel better.”

“As cool as a comet,” Kelly added. “I can’t even remember the last time an insertion went off as planned.”

John could. It had been nine years ago, at the height of the Covenant War, when they landed on the ice moon Umagena to capture the insurrectionist traitor Hector Nyeto. The target hadn’t been there, but the insertion had gone off without a hitch. And the fact that he could still remember it . . . well, John certainly couldn’t recall all of the insertions that had gone wrong since then.

He went back to waiting for the sound of cannon strikes.

The Special Delivery had left orbit over Reach’s northern pole, where the frigid temperatures just about guaranteed that there would be no inhabitants on the ground to notice the flame trail and hear the unavoidable sonic boom as the Owl dropped through the upper levels of the planet’s atmosphere. The insertion plan called for the craft to slow from hypersonic to supersonic velocity as it traveled south across the remnants of the Babd Catha Ice Shelf. As it crossed Big Crater Bay, it would slow from supersonic to subsonic, which would make it far more difficult to detect and locate. Unfortunately, the Seraphs had been lurking on the north side of the bay and had no doubt spotted the Owl while it was still above the ice shelf, traveling at hypersonic speed and generating a lot of noise and flame.

But the bay was coming up fast. John could already see it in the situation monitor, and the Seraphs would still have to climb fifteen kilometers before they reached interception altitude. By the time they did that, the Owl would be across the bay and traveling at subsonic velocity, and by then it would be a ghost in the dark.

Or so he hoped. The Owl was made to sneak, not fight. It carried six Argent V missiles internally and a retractable 370mm autocannon under the chin, and nothing else. It might be able to chase an infantry platoon out of a drop zone, but against shielded fighter-interceptors like Seraphs, its only defense was to avoid and evade.

The Seraph symbols on John’s HUD began to arc out in a starburst pattern, trying to array themselves in a broad circle so they could triangulate on the Special Delivery’s flame trail. It was a foolish maneuver. By the time they fixed a vector, the Owl would be much too far ahead to catch . . .

Unless the Seraphs weren’t trying to make the interception.

John studied the top of the situation monitor, looking for the thermal blooms of approaching craft. The blue blotches of the polar snowfields had been completely replaced by the green circle of Big Crater Bay and, along the top edge, the orange sweep of the Eposz glasslands. But there were no more heat blossoms—at least, not that the Special Delivery’s nose cameras could resolve.

The crisp voice of the Owl’s copilot, First Lieutenant Maks Chapov, sounded over the internal comm net. “Master Chief, how would you feel about losing the digging equipment?”

John glanced toward the rear of the troop cabin, where the team’s downsized excavation equipment sat secured to the deck. Positioned side by side and facing aft for speedy unloading, the two machines—a four-boom drilling jumbo and a two-kiloliter load-haul-dump wagon with a heavily loaded cargo shelf on the back—were barely four meters long and two meters wide. But they were powered by Toroidal Magnetic Confinement Device compact fusion reactors and equipped with heavy-duty hydrostatic transmissions, so they were as heavy as full-size armored personnel carriers. If it came down to dodging Seraph fire, the Special Delivery was going to have all the agility of a resupply pod.

“Why would I need to?” John replied.

“Major Van Houte doesn’t like the Seraph deployment,” Chapov said.

A hotshot flier who had transferred into the crew after a Phaeton mass cannon took out the Special Delivery’s last copilot, Maks Chapov had unusual skill and quick reflexes that were the perfect complement to Eznik Van Houte’s vast experience and bottomless bag of tricks. At least, that was how the captain of the UNSC Infinity, Thomas Lasky, had explained the pairing to John— though it seemed more likely that Lasky was just trying to leaven a young pilot’s aggression with the wisdom of an old veteran.

“They’re not trying to intercept us,” Chapov continued. “The major thinks they could be a tracking flight.”

“I think he could be right,” John said. “What’s that have to do with my excavation equipment?”

“If the tracking flight is vectoring in a wing of interceptors, I’ll need a light boat to get us out of here in one piece.”

“Any indication that’s what the enemy is doing?” John asked. “Or who they are?”

“There’s some long-range comm chatter,” Chapov said. “In Jiralhanae.”

“That’s not good,” Fred said.

Only two of the major Covenant splinter groups were dominated by Jiralhanae, a huge pseudo-ursine species that had supplied the Covenant with many of its most ferocious warriors. The first was an army of religious zealots known as the Keepers of the One Freedom. The second was a horde of mercenary raiders called simply the Banished. Both were bad news, and both employed Jiralhanae pack-attack tactics that made their fliers among the most feared enemies of UNSC fighter squadrons.

“Yeah, not good,” Chapov said. “And it gets worse. The tracking flight launched from the coordinates of SWORD Base.”

Fred groaned, Kelly let her chin drop, and even Linda broke her meditation long enough to look toward the situation monitor. The Keepers and the Banished were both obsessive salvagers of Forerunner artifacts, and years earlier a Forerunner vessel had been discovered buried under the ice near SWORD Base. The UNSC had attempted to destroy both the vessel and the surrounding installation when Reach fell, but the Covenant plasma bombardment had prevented anyone from actually confirming a successful demolition. So it was possible that enough of the vessel remained to explain the presence of ex-Covenant salvagers.

It just didn’t mesh with why the Jiralhanae had launched a tracking flight instead of an interception mission.

John continued to watch both the situation monitor and the combat information system synced to his HUD. Neither display showed a fighter cadre vectoring across Big Crater Bay at intercept velocity, but that didn’t mean they weren’t coming. Orbital combat control systems were not an option for stealth insertions, because a communications stream would reveal the insertion craft’s presence—and sometimes its exact location. So the Special Delivery was limited to its own instruments, which could only detect threats approaching from below the horizon.

John couldn’t recall the formula for determining the distance-to-horizon, and he didn’t need to. The question had barely occurred to him before his Mjolnir’s onboard computer, linked directly to his mind via a neural lace implanted at the base of his skull, calculated the answer and displayed the information on his HUD. Cortana used to do that—answer his question before he could ask it.

DETECTION LIMIT 489 KILOMETERS

AT ALTITUDE 15,305 METERS

MINIMUM TIME TO INTERCEPTION

2:24 MINUTES/SECONDS

ASSUMING CRAFT FLYING DIRECTLY

TOWARD EACH OTHER AT MACH 5

Mach 5 was about as fast as an interceptor could fly and have any reasonable hope of reacting to a target’s evasive maneuvers, so there was no need to second-guess the parameters the onboard computer had chosen. Once an enemy craft appeared on the horizon, the Special Delivery would have two and a half minutes to react, and probably a lot longer than that, since chances were small that the two craft would be flying directly at each other. It wasn’t a lot of time, but it was still almost twice as long as the Spartans would need to unfix and dump the excavation machines.

Which made Chapov’s question a bit premature.

“Lieutenant Chapov,” John said. “What aren’t you telling me?”

“I don’t understand, Master Chief.”

“You were at the mission briefing,” John said. “You do recall that the assets we’re trying to retrieve are hidden in Dr. Halsey’s lab at the bottom of CASTLE Base?”

“I remember.”

“And you also remember that what’s above CASTLE Base right now is essentially a big rubble pit?”

A lieutenant was superior in rank to a master chief, so strictly speaking, John was being a bit insubordinate by interrogating Chapov this way. But respect was an earned commodity in any military unit, and that was especially true in special operations, where junior officers were expected to show senior enlisted personnel the deference they deserved. And after three decades on the front lines, leading Spartans against humanity’s most dangerous enemies, John had earned the right to speak to a young hotshot copilot any way he felt necessary.

Besides, CASTLE Base was located two kilometers underneath what was once Menachite Mountain, which had been reduced to a ten-kilometer-wide detritus field during the Covenant attack on Reach. So the success of the mission depended on making retrieval as simple as possible—and on the vault where the assets were stored still being intact, of course. But Dr. Halsey had promised John that the vault was strong enough to withstand the collapse of CASTLE Base, and she was rarely wrong.

Especially when she was risking the lives of her Spartans.

After a short pause, Chapov said, “I do, Master Chief.”

“Then why are you telling me to dump my excavation equipment?” John asked. “Do you expect Blue Team to dig out the entrance to CASTLE Base by hand?”

“I haven’t told you to dump the excavation machines.” Chapov’s tone was resolute and unintimidated. “Not yet.”

“Yet ?” John said. He was aware of his mythical status in the UNSC, and he liked that Chapov was willing to stand up to him anyway. But that didn’t mean he was going to let the kid off easy. “Lieutenant, do you understand the stakes here? Dr. Halsey needs what’s in her lab to stop Cortana. Aborting this mission is not an option.”

“Which is why I’m asking you to think about the excavation equipment,” Chapov said. “If we get shot down, Blue Team won’t be digging out anything.”

John checked the combat information system in his HUD again. There weren’t any interceptors in view, and the tracking flight had fallen so far behind that it was barely on the display. But the Special Delivery had descended to ten thousand meters, which meant the distance-to-horizon was only 361 kilometers. An attacking Seraph could be close enough to open fire in a little less than two minutes.

Still plenty of time.

“Lieutenant Chapov, what aren’t you telling me?” John asked again. “And this time, don’t dodge the question.”

“There’s nothing to tell,” Chapov said. “We don’t like the way this feels. That’s all.”

“Glad to hear I’m not alone in that,” Kelly said. “If there’s a tracking flight, there are bound to be interceptors.”

“Exactly,” Chapov said. “We can’t see them yet, but with that chatter we heard earlier . . .”

“You’re worried about an interceptor flight coming up from Arany Basin,” John said. Located in the plains east of the Highland Mountains where Menachite Mountain and CASTLE Base were located, Arany Basin was a vast lowland adjacent to their planned flight path. “Because it isn’t that far off our course.”

“It’s a concern,” Van Houte said, joining in. Over the Owl’s internal comm net, his voice sounded raspy and almost brittle. “But we should be fine.”

“Should be? Or will be?” John didn’t know whether it would even be possible to dig out the entrance to CASTLE Base by hand, but Chapov was right about one thing—they would have no chance of success if they didn’t make it to the landing site.

“There are no guarantees, Master Chief,” Van Houte said. “You know that.”

“All too well,” John said. “But when someone asks me to think about an equipment dump, I’d like to know why.”

“My fault,” Van Houte said. “Lieutenant Chapov isn’t accustomed to a pilot who thinks out loud.”

“And?”

“And I said we could be in trouble if a flight of interceptors launches from the basin.”

John looked at the situation monitor again. Only a thin crescent of water remained, its green glow slowly dropping out of view as the Special Delivery approached the south side of Big Crater Bay. The insertion plan called for the Owl to slow to subsonic speed before it crossed the shoreline and started over land, but the combat information system indicated it was still traveling at almost Mach 5. Clearly Van Houte was modifying the insertion plan to stay ahead of the tracking flight.

But at that kind of velocity, the Owl would be generating so much friction heat and sonic energy that any Seraphs coming from the Arany Basin wouldn’t need to be vectored in. They would just be able to follow their own thermal detectors.

“We’ll need sixty seconds to unfix the equipment,” John said over the internal comm net. “And we can’t dump it at this velocity.”

“Have some faith, Master Chief,” Van Houte said. “I still have a trick or two left.”

John wasn’t sure he believed the major. But beneath the situation monitor, Chief Mukai was sitting in her jump seat with her head cocked, studying him with a bored expression that suggested she could not believe the legendary John-117 was worried about a few stray Seraphs. It was an act, of course, but he took her point. Eznik Van Houte had been flying insertion craft as long as John had been fighting the Covenant, and he would let them know when the time came to worry.

“Sorry, Major. Just apprising you.”

“No need to apologize,” Van Houte said. “I’d be nervous too if some crackerjack copilot started asking what equipment I could dump.”

“Sorry, sir.” Chapov sounded resentful, not apologetic. “I must have mistaken your muttering for a directive.”

“No worries, Lieutenant. You’ll learn soon . . .” Van Houte let the sentence trail off, and when he spoke again, it was in an indistinct mumble. “Well . . . didn’t expect . . .”

John felt his weight pushing against the crash harness as the Special Delivery changed course. On the situation monitor, the last green sliver of water slid off the bottom edge as Big Crater Bay passed completely out of view behind them, and the indigo crescent of its muddy southern beach began to creep down the right side of the display. The Owl was veering southeast, toward the Arany Basin. The combat information system showed it dropping through six thousand meters, but still traveling at Mach 5.

Van Houte wasn’t modifying the insertion plan—he was trashing it. John watched his HUD for some indication of the problem, but saw nothing. Of course, the Owl had descended to fifty-five hundred meters, which put its detection limit at . . .

He found himself waiting for his Mjolnir’s onboard computer to provide the answer. It was connected to his mind through the same neural lace that Cortana had used, but it was not nearly as efficient. That was only to be expected. After Cortana had corrupted so many smart AIs, the UNSC now avoided using them, substituting less capable “dumb” AIs whenever possible. And someone aboard the Infinity —probably Captain Lasky himself—didn’t want the Spartans taking even that much of a chance. Although their GEN3 operating systems were partitioned to prevent an AI—even a smart one—from interfering with the Mjolnir’s functionality, on this mission they carried only upgraded versions of the same onboard computers that had supported their Mark IV prototypes thirty years earlier.

A half second later, the answer appeared on John’s HUD.

He still expected to hear her voice as a part of it. No matter how efficient his computer was, it didn’t fill the void left by Cortana’s absence. That hadn’t changed, and John doubted it ever would.

DETECTION LIMIT 288 KILOMETERS

AT ALTITUDE 5,462 METERS

MINIMUM TIME TO INTERCEPTION

1:24 MINUTES/SECONDS

ASSUMING CRAFT FLYING DIRECTLY

TOWARD EACH OTHER AT MACH 5

Depending on where the trouble was coming from, Blue Team would have only about a minute and a half to dump the excavation machines. But that didn’t much matter, because at Mach 5, the Owl would be ripped apart as soon as Chief Mukai dropped the rear loading hatch.

“Arm decoys,” Van Houte said.

“At this speed?” Chapov’s voice broke an octave high. “We’ll disintegrate the second we open—”

“When I need your opinion, Lieutenant, I’ll ask for it.” Van Houte delivered the rebuke so calmly that John wasn’t quite sure it was intended that way. “Arm the decoys, please. I’ll tell you when to open the doors.”

“Aye,” Chapov muttered. “Arming decoys.”

The indigo beach vanished from the situation monitor, yielding to the mottled orange sweep of the warmer lechatelierite. John saw no indication of an approaching threat, but his HUD showed their altitude continuing to drop rapidly. If Van Houte didn’t pull up soon, there was going to be a very large crater in the Eposz glasslands.

Knowing better than to distract the pilots midmaneuver, John looked to Mukai—and found her riding easy in her jump seat, smirking at Fred with her hands resting in her lap. Whatever Van Houte was doing, it wasn’t the first time.

Mukai noticed John watching her and smiled. She tugged at the straps of her crash harness, making sure the quick-release buckles were securely fastened, then waved a finger at all four Spartans.

“Make sure your harnesses are locked down,” she said. “It’s going to get rough.”

“Could we know why?” Kelly asked.

“Because it’s better than being shot down,” Mukai said. “Okay?”

“Seems reasonable,” Fred said. He bumped Linda’s shoulder. “You catch that?”

Linda remained steady as a mountain. “A quiet mind is an alert mind.”

“So that’s a yes,” Fred said. He looked across the troop bay toward John. “Any hints from the cockpit?”

To guard against overloading the avionics systems, only the team leader had the capability of syncing into the cockpit feeds. John checked his HUD and found the feed as uninformative as before—though he did note that the Owl’s detection limit had dropped to 260 kilometers.

“No idea.”

“Sorry to keep you in the dark for so long,” Van Houte said over the internal comm net. “We had maneuvers to plan.”

“If you’re still planning,” John said, “we can wait.”

“We’re used to waiting,” Fred added. “We’re infantry.”

“No need,” Van Houte said. “I can fill you in while Lieutenant Chapov disables the missile ignitions.”

“What?!” Chapov screeched the question.

“Disable the ignition systems on all six missiles,” Van Houte said. “Must I give you every order twice?”

“Of course not, sir. Disabling ignition systems on all six Argents.”

“Thank you, Lieutenant,” Van Houte said. “Now, Master Chief?”

“Yes, sir?”

“You may have noticed that I’ve abandoned our insertion plan.”

“I had, Major,” John said. “I assume you have a good reason.”

“I’m afraid so. As we were crossing Big Crater Bay, I noticed some beyond-the-horizon launch flares.”

“Ah,” John said. “Given the tracking flight we picked up, weren’t we expecting that?”

“Not from the direction of New Miskolc, we weren’t,” Van Houte said. “They’d have been in visual range just about the time we reached our objective at Menachite Mountain.”

“That would’ve complicated things,” Fred remarked.

“Not that badly,” Van Houte said. “But there was a second set of launch flares.”

“Let me guess,” John said. “From Mohács?”

“Oddly not,” Van Houte said. “It was closer to the Szarvas Regeneration and Salvage Facility.”

“They’re trying to box us in, then?” Kelly asked, completely unfazed. “How are their chances?”

“That depends on how many launches I didn’t see,” Van Houte said. “So far, we have flights launching from the ruins of two UNSC sites—SWORD Base and the Szarvas salvage yards—and an urban center where I’m fairly sure there would have been some UNSC administrative facilities.”

John understood Van Houte’s concern. Reach had once been a vital support world to the UNSC, a supplier of vast amounts of war materiel and home to more bases than John could name. Given the low-intensity conflict in the Arany Basin, it was beginning to sound like there was an entire horde of raiders foraging the planet’s old UNSC installations.

That was hardly surprising, given the vast amounts of military hardware that had been abandoned during the Reach bombardment. But it did make John rethink the enemy’s likely identity. The Banished and the Keepers of the One Freedom loved to forage Forerunner sites, but neither group had much interest in UNSC technology—certainly not enough to launch a continental-scale salvage operation. Both organizations were predominately alien, and human equipment just wasn’t that valuable to them.

“What about the Highland Mountains?” John asked. The greatest concentration of bases was in that location, including the Reach Military Complex where the Spartans had been billeted during their training as children. “Especially around—”

“I would have mentioned CASTLE Base,” Van Houte said. “But that doesn’t mean anything. If I happened to be looking the other way, or they launched while we were still on the far side of the bay, or there was a ridge of mountains in just the right place—”

“Understood,” John said. “We could have a dozen flights coming straight at us and not know it.”

“Probably not a dozen,” Van Houte said. “But more than a few.”

John glanced across at Fred. He wasn’t about to abort, not when Dr. Halsey was counting on them to retrieve what she needed to end Cortana’s despotic reign. But if the alternative was getting shot down . . .

“Getting complicated fast.” Fred shrugged. “What else is new?”

“It won’t be complicated for long,” Van Houte said. “We’ll be fine once we disappear.”

John didn’t see the Special Delivery going sensor-invisible anytime soon. At their speed, even the Owl’s fused-carbon phenolic laminate skin could not shed heat fast enough to “disappear.” The craft would light up like a torch on even the most primitive thermal-imaging system.

The sound of alert buzzers came over the internal comm net.

“Finally.” The buzzers fell silent, and Van Houte’s voice dropped to a mutter. “They . . . long enough.”

John resisted the temptation to ask who had taken long enough and checked the combat information system on his HUD. He found a flight of Seraphs approaching from the direction of the Szarvas Regeneration and Salvage Facility. The display listed their range as 508 kilometers, well beyond the Owl’s detection limit— which he found puzzling, until he noticed the Seraphs’ altitude and realized they were still climbing in an effort to maximize their own detection ranges.

So the enemy didn’t have an orbital combat control system either. The Seraphs would be using their onboard sensor systems to hunt down the Special Delivery —which John might have found comforting, had the Owl not been dropping below 4,500 meters altitude at Mach 5, trailing a sonic wave that had to sound like an artillery barrage to anyone approaching from the right vector.

“You were beginning to worry me,” Van Houte whispered. “Now, where are the rest of you?”

“Sir?” Chapov asked. “Are you talking to me?”

“Are you piloting a Seraph, Lieutenant?”

“Of course not.”

“Then I’m not talking to you,” Van Houte said. “How are my missiles coming?”

“Disabling the ignition system on the sixth Argent now.”

“Good.” Van Houte’s voice lowered to a whisper again. “We’re going to be dropping them any—”

The alert buzzers sounded, and two more Seraph flights appeared on the combat information display on John’s HUD. The first was the tracking flight that had originally spotted them, now approaching from the direction of SWORD Base at Mach 10. The second was an entire squadron of ten additional Seraphs, approaching from New Miskolc at Mach 9. Both flights were diving down from altitudes of slightly less than 10,000 meters, being vectored in by the high-flying interceptors from Szarvas. They would need to decelerate soon or risk overshooting the Special Delivery.

“Lieutenant,” Van Houte said, “is that last missile ready yet?”

“N-negative.” Chapov sounded irritated. “I mistyped the override code.”

“Imagine that.” Van Houte chuckled. “Relax, son. We’re in no big hurry.”

It didn’t look that way to John. Now that the enemy had the Special Delivery in sensor range, all three flights were diving to attack altitude, and over the Owl’s internal comm net, he could hear proximity alarms sounding off in the cockpit.

He wondered how long it would be before the shooting started, and the answer appeared on his HUD.

ESTIMATED TIME TO INITIAL ENGAGEMENT:

83 SECONDS

It was almost the same as the minimum time to interception the computer had displayed the last time John checked. But with the combat information system providing vectors and locations for the enemy craft, the computer now had the data to refine its estimates. John just wished he knew why Van Houte sounded so damn calm with interception flights arriving from three directions.

The proximity alarms sounded again, and more Seraph designators appeared in John’s HUD, coming from the direction of Fenyot Basin. That kind of hurt—Fenyot Basin had been a favorite training site for the Spartans, and John didn’t like to think of a bunch of Jiralhanae raiders bashing around the hoodoo maze where he and his comrades used to play monthlong games of sniper elimination and stealth tag.

The alarms suddenly fell silent, and Van Houte said, “Prepare for vanishing maneuver.”

“Vanishing maneuver?” Linda had finally removed her hands from her thighs and was looking forward, toward the cockpit. “I have never heard of such a thing.”

“My own invention,” Van Houte said. “Insert like a fireball, vanish like a ghost. Chief Mukai will tell you what to do.”

“Man the firing ports?” Fred asked.

Van Houte broke out laughing. “Good one, Spartan.”

“Who’s joking?”

“You are,” Mukai said. She reached up to the collar of her black insertion suit and thumbed up the cooling system. “If we open the firing ports at this speed, those interceptors won’t need to shoot us down.”

As she spoke, the Special Delivery suddenly nosed up and slid into a wingover, then dropped back into its dive . . . facing backward. The Owl’s rear hatch, which had only a thin layer of ablative heat shielding, began to take the brunt of the air friction, and the interior of the troop bay shot up fifty degrees. The skinsuit inside John’s Mjolnir activated its cooling circuits, and he began to understand Van Houte’s plan.

Every planet in the galaxy was bombarded by a constant rain of meteors, sometimes large enough to become bolides and explode into a brilliant burst of light and fragments. If Van Houte could time his “vanishing maneuver” just right, he might be able to fool the Seraphs into believing they had been tracking such a fireball, then use the Owl’s stealth capabilities to slip away in a rain of decoys and unignited missiles as it dropped to subsonic speed.

“Prepare for deceleration.” Mukai pressed a valve on her lapel, and her pants ballooned as her suit began to squeeze her legs and hips to keep the blood from pooling in her lower extremities. “High-g protocol.”

John tightened his belly and legs, then watched in astonishment as the situation monitor overheated and sparked into blackness. Below it, Mukai’s face grew pink and sweaty, then quickly grew dry and red as her sweat evaporated. He looked aft, over the back ends of the excavation machines, and saw the Owl’s loading hatch paling from steel blue to ash gray. A circle in the middle started to glow white and expand.

“Major, you’re about to melt through—”

“Tell me something I don’t know, Master—”

The transmission ended in a blast of static; then John was thrown against the side of his harness as the Special Delivery fired its main engines and began to decelerate. John’s Mjolnir initiated automatic g-force protocols, using its hydrostatic gel layer to keep his blood in his torso and head.

The excavation machines strained against their mooring chains, the tremendous g-forces lifting them toward the rear hatch. The hoisting winches and haulage buckets stacked on the cargo platform on the back of the load-haul-dump wagon began to strain against the high-tensile net holding them in place. John checked the combat information display on his HUD and saw that the Owl was pulling twenty-one g’s in deceleration. A loud pop sounded from the forward bulkhead.

“Whoa!” Mukai’s outburst was answered by a metallic ping and a long sonorous peal, and she cried, “Cheap . . . Imberian . . . crap!”

She fell silent, and John found the soles of her boots bobbing up and down in front of him. She was still strapped into her crash harness, but three of the jump seat’s mounting brackets had failed, splitting along the fastener slots and pulling off the bulkhead bolts. Her arms were draped over the sides of the chair, limp and swinging in the green light, and it seemed apparent she had blacked out after her exclamation.

John’s HUD showed twenty-three g’s, and the Special Delivery’s engines were still firing. He and the other Spartans could handle another fifteen g’s before they had to worry about blacking out, but it was a wonder the pilots were still conscious.

The last mounting bracket on Mukai’s jump seat pulled away from the bulkhead, a long split opening between the fastener slots. In another breath, she was going to pull free and fly toward the back of the troop bay.

John extended an arm to catch her, as did Fred and Kelly, but when the flange finally failed, it was Linda who plucked Mukai out of the air and clamped her tight to her Mjolnir’s breastplate. Even with powered armor, Linda’s arms shook with the effort of keeping the chief from flying free.

Van Houte’s voice sounded over the Owl’s comm channel. “Launch . . . decoys.”

John checked the combat information display and saw that the Special Delivery had decelerated to Mach 2.5. Protocol dictated that decoy doors remained closed at anything above Mach 2, but he assumed Van Houte knew the Owl’s actual tolerances far better than he did.

At least he hoped so.

“Lieu . . . tenant?” Van Houte’s voice was strained, as it should have been. The combat information display showed the deceleration force hovering at twenty-five g’s. “Oh . . . hell. Launching. . . .”

The Special Delivery shook violently, and its nose began to slue back and forth as air pushed into the decoy bays and Van Houte fought to retain control. Two sharp clangs sounded aft. John looked back to see the rear section of the drilling jumbo lifting off the deck, a pair of broken D rings dangling from its mooring chains.

Midmaneuver or not, he had to warn the pilot.

“Major—”

“Dropping . . . missiles.”

The Special Delivery pitched and wobbled as a thousands-of-kilometers-per-hour wind entered the open missile bays from the wrong direction. The drilling jumbo slammed down on its rear tires, then began to buck wildly as the deck rose and fell beneath it.

“Cut thrust!” John shouted. “Cut—”

Van Houte killed the drives, but the Special Delivery’s nose had already come up again. The deck rose beneath the jumbo. The heavy machine slid aft and crashed into the loading hatch. The entire Owl shuddered, and the port safety bolts snapped free and ricocheted off Linda’s armor. A wedge of darkness appeared along the far edge of the loading hatch; then a shrill whistle filled the troop bay, and a two-thousand-kilometers-per-hour wind tried to rip the Spartans out of their crash harnesses.

Linda still gripped Mukai, clutching the chief to her breast like a baby.

Sirens and alarms blared inside John’s helmet, and the combat information system flashed so many warnings in his HUD that his faceplate looked like a lightning storm inside.

“What’s happening back there?!” Van Houte demanded. The craft banked to starboard, pushing the jumbo into the loading hatch even harder. “It feels like I’m flying a Warthog . . . with a flat tire!”

“Loose cargo.” John hit the emergency release on his crash harness. “Cease banking.”

“Not an option.” The Owl’s nose began to rise. “We need to come around and shed speed now.”

There was nothing but a hydraulic cylinder securing the port side of the loading hatch, and it was no match for the weight of the drilling jumbo. The cylinder began to extend, and the wedge of darkness continued to expand, and the hatch itself started to deform.

“Affirmative.” John pushed the crash harness up and out of the way. “Attempting to secure the cargo, but the loading hatch is already taking damage.”

“No choice,” Van Houte said. “We disappear now, or we have a squadron of Seraphs designating us as their destination.”

John stepped toward the runaway jumbo and found the rest of Blue Team following his lead. After three decades fighting side by side, it often seemed his fellow Spartans knew what he wanted before he opened his mouth to transmit it. He reached for a tie-down hook and found Kelly already holding the chain attached to it. On the other side of the vehicle, Fred had the tie-down hook, while Linda was securing a half-conscious Mukai in the crash harness Fred had just abandoned.

The Owl’s nose came up steeply, and even the sound-dampening traction soles on the bottoms of their sabatons were not enough to keep the heavy jumbo from dragging them aft. John’s HUD was now showing the Special Delivery’s speed in kilometers per hour instead of Machs, which meant the craft had dropped below the speed of sound on Reach. It was probably already flying in stealth mode.

John reset his feet and pulled hard against the heavy jumbo. Next to him, Kelly dropped to her rear and braced a foot against the cargo platform on the back of the load-haul-dump machine. She was spun sideways as the jumbo continued to push into the hatch, and the hatch continued to deform.

“Cease . . . climbing,” John said.

“Not an option,” Van Houte said. “We’ve got hills. Big hills.”

The safety bolts on the starboard side of the hatchway popped free and clattered off the LHD; then the wind slipped behind the hatch panel and tore it completely open, forcing the Owl’s tail down. The nose pitched upward almost vertically, and the jumbo shot toward the gaping hatch, its locked tires skidding down the slip-resistant deck as though gliding on ice.

“Let it go!” John released the drilling jumbo, then grabbed for the collar of Kelly’s armor and dived for the starboard side of the troop bay. “Secure yourselves!”

He hooked his arm through a crash harness and felt the Mjolnir’s force-multiplying circuits react, securing him and Kelly in place as the jumbo shot out through the hatch—then reached the end of its front tie-downs.

The back end of the machine rocked upward and hit the upper threshold of the hatchway, and that was the only thing that kept it from snapping the front chains and plummeting out of the Owl and into the night. John checked the motion tracker in his HUD and found Fred and Linda secure on the other side of the troop bay, with Mukai still tucked safely into Fred’s crash harness.

But the drilling jumbo was far from secure. It was now hanging halfway out the open hatch, still attached to the deck by its forward tie-down chains, rocking back and forth on its frame as the unrelenting wind tried to tear it free. Beneath it, the damaged hatch panel was catching the air, keeping the Owl pitched upward like a rocket plane climbing for orbit—except that it wasn’t climbing. The engines remained quiet, and any attempt to power them up would fill the troop bay with hot efflux.

John noted the altitude in his HUD. The Owl was at two thousand meters and dropping—which was pretty amazing, considering there were mountains to either side rising to twenty-five hundred meters. The only good news was that he didn’t see any Seraphs following them in—though that was probably only because the mountains were hiding their sensor signatures.

“Put us down,” John said. “No engines.”

“No engines, no problem,” said Chapov. The copilot had seemingly recovered from his blackout and was now flying the Owl. “But you have about ten seconds to get back into your crash harnesses.”

“And I wouldn’t be late,” Van Houte added. “Lieutenant Chapov may be a hotshot, but even he can’t work miracles.”

Kelly was drawing herself back into her seat. John did the same, then looked across the troop bay to see Fred and Linda already pulling their harnesses down. An Owl’s troop bay was designed to carry up to ten Spartans along each side, so there were plenty of empty spots, even with Mukai still in Fred’s original seat.

John’s harness locked into place with three seconds to spare.

“We’re ready.”

“Good,” Chapov said.

A deafening clang sounded from the Owl’s tail; then John saw the loading ramp fly up and launch the drilling jumbo forward. In the next instant, his seat bucked so hard he rose into his crash harness and felt the shoulder bars bend. The jumbo hit the end of its last mooring chains and decelerated rapidly as they broke, skidding forward across the nonslip deck and shattering the situation monitor hanging on the forward bulkhead—then tipping toward John’s side of the bay.

He thought the Special Delivery had gone into a side roll until he realized he was still sitting upright, that he was being thrown against the wall behind him, and he brought both hands up to prevent the jumbo from smashing him and Kelly. Somehow Chapov had landed the crippled Owl on its belly, and now it was plowing through the glass, level, fishtailing, and quickly decelerating.

“Brace yourselves!” Chapov warned.

John thought there must be a cliff or ravine coming. Instead, he heard a series of quarter-second hisses as Chapov used the attitude thrusters to bring the Owl under control, and then a single long whoooosh as the nose dropped and the craft finally slammed to a full stop.

For a moment no one spoke. John’s view across the bay was blocked by the drilling jumbo. He carefully pushed it back onto all four wheels, and heard Mukai give a small, startled cry as it crashed back to the deck. Thankfully, she was still alive and conscious again.

Then Chapov’s voice sounded over the intercom, relaxed, cocky, and unhurried.

“Ladies and gentlemen, on behalf of the pilot and crew of the Special Delivery, welcome to Reach. The time is 0241 military standard. I suggest you collect your weapons and equipment and exit the craft as quickly as possible. We have company on the way.”

CHAPTER TWO

0241 hours, October 7, 2559 (military calendar)

UNSC Owl Insertion CraftSpecial Delivery

Vadász Dombok, Continent Eposz, Planet Reach

It was so dark outside the Owl’s hatchway that even the fused-mode night-vision system in John’s Mjolnir helmet couldn’t gather enough light to provide an unmediated image. The terrain appeared inside his faceplate as a digitally rendered outline in green, with the illusion of volume provided by areas of shading and highlighting. The result was something like an impressionist painting, an interplay of light and shadow that suggested the Special Delivery had ended its flight on a long, broad terrace clinging to the side of a moderately steep ridge. Directly behind the Owl, framed by its loading hatch, lay a narrow, snaking furrow of scintillation that could only be its crash path. To the left hung a curving darkness that promised a bottomless abyss—but which might deliver nothing more than a shallow ravine.

Knowing there was still a fair amount of thermal radiation rising from the planet’s glassed ground, John had his onboard computer adjust the NVS input toward near-infrared. The image immediately grew crisper and more colorful, with the ground now represented by subtly fluctuating bands of orange and pink, the air in calm blue, and the clouds overhead a boiling mass of yellow and green. The crooked furrow of the Owl’s crash path resolved as a hot crimson trough filled with jagged shards of broken lechatelierite, stretching for a kilometer and a half behind them.

John leaned a little farther out of the hatchway and performed a quick scan of the sky, checking for inbound Seraphs and still wondering whether they belonged to the Banished or the Keepers— or maybe even to some new horde of Jiralhanae scavengers that he had not heard of. That was the trouble with this Pax Cortana. She was clamping down on interstellar civilization with an iron fist, and the harder she squeezed, the more insurgents she was going to have shooting out between her fingers.

When John saw no crimson halos blossoming above, he extended an arm behind him, pointing toward the weapons locker where his motion detector told him that the other Spartans were already gathering their weapons and equipment.