Chapter Text
1135 HOURS, JULY 3,
2545 (MILITARY CALENDAR) / 51 PEGASI-B SYSTEM,
TARGET AREA APACHE, PLANET PEGASI DELTA
The orbital pod broke through low orbit and arced down for the target area. The static-filled display screens dominated SPARTAN B-159’s blurred vision, as the compressing force from the controlled deceleration burn clamped across his circulatory system like he was being squeezed by a giant hand. The temperature from the atmospheric reentry heated the cocoon of titanium, lead foil and stealth ablative coating to a veritable boil, cooking him inside his Semi-Powered Infiltration armour.
Josiah acknowledged the impact of the pod smashing into the ground, sending a huge throb of pain through his muscles and nervous system, as the last of the air was expelled from his lungs and he nearly bit his tongue off. His vision pulsed black with spots and he tasted blood.
“Training,” his instructor, Lieutenant Commander Kurt Ambrose, had said. “Your training must become a part of your instinct. Drill until it becomes part of your bones.” Josiah reacted without thinking, six years of disciplinary instruction honing him into a weapon. He exploded out of the orbital pod like a greyhound after a hare, legs pumping hard as he blinked away the splotches in his vision.
The display on his faceplate winked to life, a layered translucent overlay of ghostly green topology. One hundred kilometres overhead, the baseball-sized Stealth Tactical Aerial Reconnaissance Satellite, or STARS, had come online. A single pulsing dot appeared that represented his position. Josiah was five kilometres south of the primary target. He scanned the horizon and saw the Covenant factory city in the distance, rising from the rocky surface like a castle of rust with giant smokestacks and blue plasma coils pulsing deep inside.
Pegasi Delta was a natural satellite orbiting 51 Pegasi-B, the faint yellow sun hung over the burnished horizon like an enormous sparkler, rippling with ionising energy and punishing heat. Being planet-side made Josiah imagine he and the other 300 SPARTANS of Beta company had executed a combat drop into hell's half acre. Red rocks; an orange, dust-filled sky; blemishes from a dozen impact skids and craters around him; beyond the factory lay the lavender shoreline of a toxic sea; and thirty metres ahead, another drop pod careened into the ground amongst a group of slate megaliths.
The orbital drop pod’s angle slanted upon striking the outcropping in a shower of sparks and a flash of sheared ablative stealth coating, then dove into the grit in a shriek of stressed titanium. Josiah unslung his MA5K; a cut-down and compact carbine chambered in 7.62x51mm. The FMJ-AP rounds were powerful enough to punch through the nanocomposite armour in use by Covenant soldiers, with sustained bursts needed to overwhelm the personal energy shields the formidable Elites utilised.
Brilliant electric-blue plasma raced overhead and exploded along the sandbank behind him, the extreme heat washed across the ground and turned the iron-oxide sand into a vitrified, glass-like wave which cooled from white to black. The near-miss crested around the dropzone, washing over him, and then boiling and peeling the outer layers of his Semi-Powered Infiltration armour like a bad sunburn. Although he wore a full suit (Colloquially known as “SPI” armour by Section Three technophiles), its hardened plates and photoreactive panels could only take a few glancing shots before failing. His skin erupted in blisters and Josiah had to steady his breathing and dissect the sensation, compartmentalise it, and banish it from his conscious thoughts.
“Pain is good. Remember,” his instructor, Senior Chief Mendez would tell them , “it lets you know you're alive. Pain is just weakness leaving the body. You need to control that weakness so that it doesn't control you.”
The pod ahead had settled on its back, the blast shield exploded up into the air amidst a geyser of steam-assisted energy. The occupant climbed out and promptly dropped behind the pod, following a torrent of sizzling plasma shards that hit the pod and melted clean through the titanium housing.
A dot pinged on the prone, camouflaged commando, then additional dots appeared on his Heads Up Display… a dozen, two dozen and then hundreds. The rest of Beta Company was online. Two hundred ninety-one of them. Nine hadn't made it, either dead on reentry or killed on impact or by Covenant forces before they could disembark from the pods. Josiah wanted to know who hadn't made it, but he had a sinking feeling many more would join them before the day was over, so he compartmentalised his emotions and banished them to a dark recess in his mind.
Josiah noted with relief the eight X’s of the sub prowler Black Cat exfiltration craft appear and then fade on his display. That was the only way off this rock after Operation TORPEDO was accomplished.
Text scrolled on his display: “TEAM ECHO PROCEED ON VECTOR ZERO FIVE ZERO. PROVIDE REINFORCEMENT TO TEAM LIMA.” No reply was necessary. Orders were broadcast from STARS overhead and any break of radio silence would reveal their position.
Three dots on his display winked, and tiny numbers came into view. B-041 was Benjamin. B-331 was Sophia. And B-292, that was Ethan. His friends. Fireteam Echo.
Withering plasma fire rippled over Sophia's position, lying prone in front of Josiah. She rolled toward him, then bounded up and the pair converged underneath a rocky outcropping, pausing for the others to join them.
To stay on task and not get distracted by his racing heartbeat, Josiah reviewed Operation TORPEDO one more time. PegasI Delta was home to a Covenant refinery. The sea on this tiny world was unusually rich in deuterium and tritium, which they used in their plasma reactors. The factory processed the hydrogen isotopes and refilled their ships, making this Covenant operation on the edge of UNSC territory a priority target, as it permitted the enemy easy access to human space.
There had been previous operations to neutralise the target. UNSC CENTCOM had sent nukes launched from Slipspace, but plutonium emitted an aura of Cherenkov radiation upon reentering normal space, making all the Stealth coatings and lead linings useless, with the Covenant easily detecting and destroying them. There were similarly too many Covenant ships near the moon to send a slow, distantly launched nuke in normal space. Nor was a regular invasion or even the elite Helljumper ODSTs worth the attempt. The UNSC had one chance to take the facility out before the enemy would muster their defences.
So they were sent. The three hundred Spartans of Beta Company had launched several hours ago into Slipspace from the UNSC Carrier All Under Heaven. They had suffered the ride in long-range stealth orbital drop pods, enduring debilitating nausea from the unshielded transition into normal space, before being parboiled on the fiery ride to the surface of Pegasi Delta.
Josiah heard the rapid pelt of boots on gravel, whirling to level his MA5K. His eyes could discern two phantom-esq figures from the heat waves and backdrop of plasma fire before they halted beside him and Sophia. Ethan and Benjamin looked identical to all the other Spartans of Beta Company, the prismatically shifting camo pattern of the SPI armour was one part legionnaire mail, one part tactical body armour, and one part chameleon. However, Josiah had spent the last six years living and training with Beta Company at Camp Currahee, and could easily tell one Spartan from the next. Ethan was thin and lanky, with a loping stride, while Benjamin had a broad stature and kept his elbows close in to his torso. Sophia, meanwhile, was notoriously tall for a Spartan. And possessed a slight tremble in her hands following their chemical augmentations.
Josiah made a two-fingers-over-faceplate gesture, the age-old silenced Spartan welcome. They gave him the slightest of nods. He made a series of short, sharp hand gestures, ordering them to advance beyond the pod in a direct formation. Maintaining stealth and speed, watch for enemy contact.
Josiah and Sophia whipped around the flank, while the others exited opposite of them, then dipped across a patch of sand crisscrossed with scars and crater marks, finally pausing by a row of short boulders alongside the upturned drop pod. A half-dozen Jackals, the Covenant's avian-like scouts, moved behind the melted casket. Their wrist-mounted shield units glowed in hues of lime and aquamarine, beak-like faces and reptilian eyes twitched in precautionary hesitation. Josiah unhooked a fragmentation grenade from his belt, armed and threw it overhand. The grenade sailed straight like a fast ball, skipping across the rust-coloured sediment and exploding centre of the probing Jackals.
They recoiled and toppled in a chorus of pained screeches, their shields crackled and popped as they deactivated. Ethan and Benjamin wrapped around the edge parallel to them in a haze of warped air and unloaded a torrent of bullets from their carbines. The Jackals writhed and twitched as the rounds punctured their Nanolaminate armour and lightweight avian bodies. Smears of green blood soaked into the rust-coloured sand, turning it a slimy brown.
An explosion of thunder rippled over the skyline and echoed across the groupings of rocks and boulders, as fire flashed and lingered in the terracotta-coloured clouds. A wing of Teardrop-shaped Seraph fighters aligned their approach vector and strafed the area fifty metres ahead. Josiah sensed the incoming threat, grabbed Sophia by the belt buckle and they dove behind the cover of a cluster of tall rocks. A rolling firestorm of plasma flashed towards their position face-down in the gravel, advanced, and blasted over them. The waves of three-thousand-degree flames would have melted clean through their SPI armour like butter if not for the protection of the rocks. The radiation coalesced across the sand, causing it to vitrify into a glass-like layer, and the skin on his back and neck prickled with blisters. The plasma passed… thinned… evaporated. The air and scalded rocks cooled.
Covenant air support was already in play and that made the situation a hundred times worse. With a blink, Josiah switched his Heads Up Display from TACMAP to TEAMBIO. All members of Team Echo showed skyrocketing pulses and blood pressures, but they were all green and still alive. Good.
Along with Sophia, he got up and sprinted. Stealth wasn't on the table now, nor an operational priority. Getting to the factory where they couldn't be strafed was their new objective.
Behind him, Ethan, Sophia and Benjamin fell in line, covering the difficult terrain at nearly fifty kilometres an hour. Red ovals appeared on Josiah's TACMAP: Covenant Seraphs returning on an attack vector. More than the last wave… six… ten… twelve.
Josiah looked around and saw his comrades, hundreds of Spartans running across the battered terrain. The dust from their charge filled the air and mingled with the smog from the incoming plasma blasts. Across from his team, three Spartans were lagging behind, turning to brace, armed with M19-B SAM missile launchers. They fired. Guided missiles streaked across the sky, leaving vapour trails in their wake. The first bounced off an incoming Seraphs shield and detonated, flashing the craft in sparks, not damaging it, but buffeting it nonetheless into its wingman. Both craft lost fifty metres of altitude and then recovered - but their forward-swept edges clipped the ground, fracturing their weakened shields and they spun, pirouetting like giant figure skaters into balls of flame and smoking metal.
The remaining two missiles struck their targets, overloaded shields crackled with energy, leaving the craft covered in soot, but otherwise intact. Josiah could see the following Seraphs wave off their attack. A small victory.
Josiah and fireteam Echo looped to the eastern flank, they slowed to a jog and watched as six remaining Seraphs dived from the clouds and released their plasma charges, then pulled up and vanished into the haze. Each dropped charge of plasma was a brilliant pinprick that elongated into a lance of boiling star-fueled sapphire. When they struck the ground they exploded and fanned outwards, propelled at three hundred kilometres an hour by momentum and thermal expansion.
A wall of flame blossomed to Josiah's right, it made the camo panels of his SPI armour shiver blue and white. But he didn't move, remaining transfixed on the other half-dozen fires that enveloped waves of Spartans. The plasma slowed, cooled and dissipated on the wind in a grey haze. Leaving crackling glassed sand and bits of scorched bone in its wake. On his TACMAP, dozens of dots winked off.
Sophia ran past Josiah, brushing him as she did so, the feeling snapped him back to the here and now, and he ran. He didn't have time for fear, or revenge, all that mattered was the mission. He instead shifted his attention to his TACMAP and the information that scrolled across his faceplate, the refinery was close, only five hundred metres separated them.
In the middle of the city-sized factory, the blue haze was too harsh to look at directly, casting shadows across the myriad of smokestacks and web of pipes. The structure was a kilometre square with towers rising 300 metres, perfect for snipers. Josiah forced himself to run faster, but still not able to catch Sophia, who was one of their fastest Spartans.
She must have had the same preliminary suspicions, because she began to weave and jive, changing her approach every ten metres. Josiah understood and mimicked this, seeing the dots of Ethan and Benjamin do the same. An energy shard blasted the sand near his ankle and he found himself dancing across the ground amidst a fusillade of high-angle trajectories. His concerns about snipers were well-founded.
The Spartans dodged, kept running and Josiah squinted ahead at the perimeter of the factory. His faceplate automatically responded and zoomed to five times magnification. There was another threat: shifting luminescent edges of force fields, Jackal shields. And in the shadows at the periphery, the self-righteous eyes of a pair of Covenant Elites in crimson armour. Enemy non-coms.
Josiah skidded to a stop and exchanged his MA5K for the M319 Individual Grenade Launcher clipped to his back. The 40mm grenades had two behaviours; the first launched a grenade that exploded on impact. The second firing mode, performed by holding the trigger down once fired, primed an alternate fuse on the grenade that would not detonate until the user had released the trigger.
Josiah fired once, aiming high, reloaded and fired a second shot on a lower trajectory, he held the trigger. The first grenade hit the wall behind the two crimson Elites. They snarled as the explosion flashed and showered them in shrapnel, their shields flared white but held. He watched carefully as the second grenade bounced off the ground, catapulted between the rows of Jackals and their phalanx, and then skidded under the Elites. Josiah released the trigger and the 40mm grenade detonated in a plume. The pair of Saurian aliens vanished in a cloud of dust and blue blood, scraps of red Nanolaminate and strips of flesh.
The Jackals arranged themselves in a wall at the edges of the factory, taking cover behind pipes and plasma tubes. There were hundreds of them. Thousands. And they all open fire. Josiah rolled to the ground, as did Sophia, Ethan and Benjamin. They spread into a slight divot as plasma bolts and crystal shards crisscrossed over Josiah's head, too many to dodge. The Covenant didn't have to be able to see them. All they had to do was fill every square centimetre of air with lethal projectiles.
Beta Company was pinned and easy pickings for the Seraphs, should they return for another pass. How had the Covenant mustard such a counter-response so quickly? If they had been detected earlier, their drop pods would have been vaporised en route. Unless they had had the extreme misfortune to get here just as a capital ship had been docked with the facility.
But on the blind side? Could the STARS overhead not see something that size? One of Lieutenant Commander Ambrose's first lessons echoed in his head, “Don't rely on technology. Machines are easy to break.”
Josiah's COM crackled: “M19 SAMs execute Bravo manoeuvre, targets painted. All other teams, be ready to move.”
Sophia's helmet turned to face Josiah, they understood: they needed cover and the only space available was dead ahead at the factory. From the field of Spartans, 6 trails of vapour shot towards the factory. The M19 SAMs detonated on contact with pipes and plasma conduits - exploding into clouds of black smoke and blue sparks. The enemy fire slowed and he sensed their opening.
Josiah exploded off the sand and ran for the left flank, he could hear his team members behind him. Every other spartan charged at the same time, hundreds of half-camouflaged armoured figures running and firing at the stunned Jackals, appearing as a wave of ghost warriors, half liquid, half shadow, part mirage, part nightmare. They screamed a battle cry, momentarily drowning out the sound of gunfire and explosions. Josiah yelled with them - for the fallen, for his friends, and for the blood of his enemies. The sound was deafening.
The Jackals broke ranks, turned to withdraw, and got shot in the back as their shields rotated with them. Many more held their ground, and hundreds of overlapping shields formed an invulnerable phalanx. On the right side, Josiah could see a few members of their attack company breach the factory interior, vanishing beneath the shadows cast by the electric-blue plasma core.
Fireteam Echo had nearly linked with Lima, he could see their FoF (Friend or Foe) tags on his Heads Up Display, in a small crater about a hundred metres from the Jackal wall. The buzzards blanketed the area with scores of plasma and crystalline shards, which made the approach excruciatingly difficult and they stalled about ten metres from Lima, Josiah took cover in an impact crater, lest his head get shot off. He fired another grenade and watched it sail into the enemy, bounce off their shields and explode harmlessly in front of them. The second shot was delayed, the arming trigger held tight, it skipped across the sand and erupted beneath the many scattering hooves of the Jackals, blowing a hole in their forward line five metres long.
Sophia posted beside him, MA5K locked and trained. She squirted small bursts of controlled fire, one by one, the Jackal shields winked off as their owners collapsed. It seemed to make little difference; for every one dead Jackal, three more would replace it.
There was a series of rapid thumps and blinding flashes of heat. Plasma grenades. Jackals and Elites rushed from their cover in the factory to meet the rest of Beta Company on the field, realising perhaps it would be suicide to face Spartans in close quarters.
Josiah pinged the enemy formation twice on his Heads Up Display, indicating a ‘bayonet charge.’ Sophia rose and he started running. Benjamin and Ethan ran alongside them, taking long strides in a wild dash for the enemy.
Thousands of Covenant clashed with two hundred Spartans in open combat. Tracer rounds, crystal shards, plasma bolts, and flaring Shields made the scene a blur of chaos. The SPARTAN-IIIs moved with speed and reflexes no Covenant could follow. They dodged, snapped necks and limbs, and with captured energy swords they cut through the enemy until the field ran with rivers of gore and blood. Spartan fireteams would sneak behind the clusters of enemy formations and attack from the rear, slaughtered everything, then fading away.
An Elite in polished red armour wheeled on Josiah as his MA5K clicked empty, the twin-blade of the energy sword crackled to life, the electric-blue weapon flashed, aiming for Josiah's head and he ducked. Time slowed to a crawl, he unholstered his M6D sidearm, aimed and fired at the Elite's digitigrade knees. The 12.7mm Semi-Armor-Piercing High-Explosive (SAP-HE) rounds easily broke the shield harness and bisected the knee joints. The cartilage blasted out, the bones shattered and blood poured.
The Elite roared and tipped back, collapsing under its own weight. Josiah was on top of it a second later, M6D jammed into the Elites' split jaws. He fired once and the alien's cranium exploded from the overpressure, as the SAP-HE round buried itself into the sand.
A shadow appeared overhead and the clouds greyed. Josiah's COM crackled to life, “Omega three, execute now! NOW!”
That made him stop and a chill ran down his spine. Omega three was the panic code, an order to turn tail and run for the hills, no matter the cost. Why? They were winning.
Then Josiah saw the clouds ripple and move. Only… they weren't clouds. Everything was clear to him now and why there were so many Covenant here. And why Seraph single ships, craft designed for space combat, were bombarding them. Seven Covenant cruisers sank from the clouds. Over a kilometre long, their bulbous oblong hulls cast shadows over the entire field. If these ships had been docked in formation, refuelling over the complex, the STARS might have mistaken them for part of the factory.
“Are we retreating?” Sophia asked over the TEAMCOM.
“No,” Benjamin said, “we're fighting.”
“No,” Ethan said, cutting the air with his hand, “the Omega order.”
“Negative,” Benjamin broke in again, “we're not running.”
“No,” Josiah agreed, “we're not. We need to buy the teams that made it inside some time. The order is… an error.” He jumped up and, along with half their number, turned to face the Covenant reinforcements. Josiah activated a company-wide comm-channel “Come on Spartans! Currahee!”
Seraph fighters deployed from the cruisers and swelled into purple shoals, hundreds strong. Darkly luminescent shafts of light appeared from the belly of each cruiser, transport beams, and from them marched hundreds of Elites onto the field. The Spartans spaced themselves equally and advanced to meet their enemy. Impossible odds, even for them. But they would buy time for the rest of the Company to find cover and destroy the factory.
His team was too far from the factory, thoughts raced through Josiah's prefrontal cortex, he wanted desperately for as many of them to survive as possible, but with each Elite battalion that was deployed, their chances of seeing home again dropped considerably.
Finding cover was a futile tactic, seven Covenant cruisers had enough firepower to fry two hundred Spartans. They could pin them down, send in ground reinforcements by the thousands or, if they wanted to, glass the entire moon from orbit.
“Orbit,” he said across the TEAMCON.
Sophia looked at him and her helmet tilted to one side, he had her curiosity. He pointed at the Covenant cruiser that settled 50 metres off the ground silently, the array of pulse lasers and plasma cannons across its dorsal line looking like birds perched atop a giant purple whale.
“We either board that ship or choke them at the drop zone,” Josiah said across the TEAMCOM, “that's the mission.” Three green acknowledgement lights winked across his Heads Up Display. His friends knew what he was asking.
Team Echo moved as one, running across the ragged ground, bounding over dead Covenant and fallen Spartans. They followed a Nanolaminate conduit that rose, half exposed in the iron-rich soil, there was a metal platform ahead with some metre-tall plasma coils. The Spartans had received extensive training in the use of enemy equipment, so as they ran, they collected plasma grenades, spare ammo from their comrades, and Jackal shield units, until they reached the small section of high ground, behind a berm near the cruiser's gravity lift.
The mass of aliens, already numbering in the hundreds, continued to flood down the luminescent shaft like a never-ending rain. Josiah blinked and viewed the TACMAP inside his display. He pinged a marker below his feet, marked it for a priority rendezvous, and watched as a few dozen Spartan IIIs, reactive panels blending into the environment, rallied towards them.
Josiah opened a channel to all nearby units, “M19 SAMs, execute Theta Manoeuvre.” He closed the COM and pinged the bottom of the gravity lift. As one, a fusillade of small-arms fire from MA5K carbines pelted the enemy formations, dropping them in huge numbers, as fragmentation and plasma grenades sailed into the mass and detonated in clouds of blood, plasma and dust. A pair of streams from rockets shot up near-vertical and then careened downwards to strike the rear of the landing zone. The Covenant, despite their staggering losses, continued to deploy into the drop zone, an unrelenting tide of them broke against the Spartan counterattack again and again.
The air was filled with lead, energy and crystalline shards as both sides exchanged fire. The Covenant layered plasma at them, boiling the rocks away gradually into molten globules of lava which steamed, trickled and then cooled. The captured Jackal shield units were helping to mitigate the damage but gave away the Spartan's locations. But stealth had gone out the window, this was a protracted firefight, plain and simple.
Josiah turned as he exhausted five magazines in a row, smoke belched from the housing around his MA5K, and he glanced back as Benjamin's life signs flatlined. He heard him drop and saw the photoreactive panels of his armour struggling to blend into the rocks, coated in blood and charred flecks of titanium. Benjamin lay face-down, crumpled uncomfortably, a large blackened hole seared through the back of his helmet.
Josiah didn't think about it. He couldn't. He didn't have the time. If he wasted a single second, he'd be dead next. He shuffled back, catching a look at Sophia as she reloaded and then promptly unloaded her MA5K at the enemy. He sought the plasma coils, a frame of Nanolaminate containing a pulsing vortex of superheated plasma gas, which were delicate and needed to be handled with care. He hoped that meant easy to break. Josiah picked one of them up, hefted it over his head and threw it. The core spiralled through the air and touched down in front of the enemy, who were delicately advancing over mountains of their own dead, the explosion blossomed brightly as it achieved a supercritical phase, and Josiah's display automatically polarised to compensate, even then he had to squint.
The shockwave struck him hard and he ducked again, the clearing of dust and debris revealed most of the Covenant on the front half of the dropzone had been atomised or flattened. The remainder moved back, slightly disorganised and disoriented, someone behind Josiah threw another coil in mimicry, the second explosion dwarfed the first and this time there was barely anything left standing.
The cruiser had gotten the message, it retracted the pull of its beam, tugging the survivors back up the lift to create a rising debris field of body parts and broken Covenant equipment.
“Go, go, go!” Josiah yelled through the TEAMCOM.
He charged over the berm, Sophia thundered behind him and he could see a wash of friendly blue dots race for the gravity field. He didn't have a plan beyond getting on board and killing everything in sight. He wasn't expecting to survive, not now, but they all knew what the mission was. Fight. Keep fighting until there was no fight left in them.
They reached the field and it flickered and disabled a moment before he could touch it. They were in the open now, the drop zone was deep and shaped like a cereal bowl, surrounded by 300 metres of empty space, with no cover in any direction.
The plasma conduits on the Covenant cruiser's lateral side flashed and blossomed to life. Flooding with superheated energy, the plasma ran red hot and then white. No one said anything, but they instinctually started running. It was hopeless, he realised. That firepower was meant for ship engagements… How could any of them survive?
Lances of fire rained down from the cruiser's weapon arrays and blasted his fellow Spartans. Scores of FoF dots winked off, he'd lost track of where he was. The sky had turned from a dull, hazy midday orange to a bright ivory, as crazy amounts of EM washed over him and static flooded his display. Ahead were a pair of shimmering Spartans, looking like angular, fractured snowmen as their photoreactive panels attempted to blend the brilliant light which only increased in luminosity.
A plasma burst rained down on them, the heat washed over Josiah in a rippling wave which sapped the energy out of him and sucked the moisture from his eyes, nose and mouth. The two Spartans had vanished in the steam of cooling, superheated air. Josiah tripped over the vitrified glass-like ground and spun onto his back. The wash of radiation blistered his skin, causing him excruciating agony.
A Spartan dropped down beside him, grabbed his arm and hauled him to his feet. They were a head taller than him. Sophia. He was glad to see she was still alive. Both of them were. If only for a few more seconds. He closed his eyes against the overwhelming brightness.
His arm jerked and he was almost pulled out of his boots into a dead run, “come on!” She shouted.
Josiah's eyes wrenched open and he could see the sagging mound of cooling rock from the plasma strike had uncovered something. There was a mix of molten alloy and sheared, plasma-scored pipe that led into a darkened cavity about four metres wide. Sophia had him by the hand and he couldn't stop himself being pulled into the welcoming darkness even if he wanted to. His stomach lurched and flipped and they plummeted. He heard echoes from the battle outside and could see everything well enough for a split second, a solid mirror of light was at the bottom, a reflection of the light across the surface of motionless water. Sophia still clasped his hand, they hit the water hard and it stunned him, the lining of his armour swelled and his helmet filled, weighing him down. He clawed for the surface, desperate to breach and could taste salt and copper.
He broke the surface, paddling as hard as he could to stay afloat and removed his helmet. Next to him, Sophia had her helmet off, too, gasping. He looked around, a small cave with a thin ring of slate shoreline and layers of stalactites ending just before the waterline.
“Look,” he nodded up at the top of the shaft.
Another plasma beam cut the top off the small hole they'd come in through and a mountain of rocks and dust fell into the water around them, splashing and steaming as the molten globules cooled. Somehow, again, they were still alive. But the brightness had dialled to eleven.
He couldn't see anything in much detail. A new sun had appeared above the lip of the bowl and beneath the prow of the Covenant cruiser. He could only guess that one of the forward fireteams had completed the mission as the factory’s supercritical core flared and light filled the world. The cruiser rippled, distorted and its Nanolaminate skin boiled away in the heat. It evaporated and bits blasted everywhere. The rocky prominence shattered into molten debris.
“Down!” Josiah cried.
He and Sophia pushed themselves underwater, diving to escape the overpressure and annihilating blast. His waterlogged armour might now save his life. Overhead, water flash vapourized. Droplets of liquid rock and metal hissed past him. Heat smothered him… and his consciousness slipped away like water running through his fingers.
Tom lay on the shore and gasped for air. They had nearly drowned after the explosion, but managed to shed their armour, and finally, exhausted, dragged themselves onto the short lip of shingle. Their legs dangled in the brackish water, and he shivered from the cold.
The shaft of light had dulled to grey smog, the sky overhead was cloudy and black, and soot trickled down and settled on the water's surface. They had no easy means to ascend to the top of the shaft and the EM pulse field had fried their suits, which now rested, submerged at the bottom of the cave, so they had no way of contacting any other survivors. If there even were any.
Sophia was sitting on the pool's edge and used the cold water to relieve the second-degree plasma burns on her hands and feet. “We're alive,” Josiah said again.
She nodded meekly. The shakes she seemed to always have weren't as bad right now, and somehow, that made him worry. They waited for an hour, resting, trying to get some sleep. They didn't hear anything on the surface, just a relentless breeze. After another hour or so, Josiah helped boost Sophia across one side of the rocky wall. She used her hands to clench into small gaps and squeezed her toes into hair-width ledges. Slowly, gradually, she was able to scramble to the surface. He waited a long while as she located one of the sub prowler Black Cats and returned with a length of rope. With some effort, he was topside again. He stood on the vitrified surface, all the hills and landscape features, the factory city, the cruisers, the ten thousand Covenant and every other Spartan were gone. All that remained was a glass crater four-kilometre wide in diameter. No bones, not even a panel from a suit of SPI. Their entire company had been obliterated, ghosts in the wind.
“Survivors?” Sophia muttered.
“There aren't any,” he said. She started to shiver.
Like Josiah, Sophia was only twelve years old. But at two metres and a hundred kilos, she was one of the largest Spartan IIIs. However, without her SPI and weapons, and her pale form covered only in modest body sheathing, she seemed as diminutive as a soggy cat. Josiah gently put his arm around her and the trembling seemed to calm.
“Survivors…” she whispered.
“There are none,” he said again. “We need to leave, the Black Cats capacitors will drain in two hours and we won't be able to jump to Slipspace.
Josiah helped Sophia into the Prowler and the engines thrummed to life, then dulled to barely a whisper. The craft rose and angled for the darkening sky.
