A red status light winked from Olivia. The team froze.
Five meters ahead, a fern bent and sprang back.
Ash rapidly blinked his green status light: the signal to open fire. This was the best target they'd had all morning.
Suppressed gunfire surrounded him. The fern exploded into a shower of confetti.
A single Spartan hidden by the fern turned, their SPI armor flashing silver from the staccato of stun rounds that peppered its surface. Their foot caught on a root and they tumbled.
Ash repeated the go-ahead signal, and his squad made sure the target stayed down with several bursts of well-placed rounds. The ballistic gel underlayer of their armor could take a heck of a pounding before breaking down.
After three seconds, he flashed red, and they ceased fire.
Olivia moved up and slapped a lime-green sticky flag on the still-writhing Spartan's back.
The target was now officially "dead."
Ash activated a NAV marker and alerted C and C for pickup of the "corpse."
The ground trembled, just for a moment, but all the Spartans in Team Saber froze, and then scanned the jungle, looking for the source of the disturbance.
Earthquake? Not likely. There was no tectonic activity on Onyx. That left only two possibilities: impact or detonation. Neither was especially welcome.
Ash motioned for Saber to move out. They slinked through the jungle and emerged on a plain. Here small limestone granite and quartz mesas, grottos, and fissures extended to the north— up to and beyond the high fence of Zone 67.
The Zone was where the "ghost" of Onyx was supposed to be. It'd been spotted once or twice according to other Spartan candidates: a single eye in the dark. They just made up that stuff to scare plebes. Ash had, however, heard of a Beta Company squad that had vanished near here and never been found.
He looked around warily and spotted a naturally eroded tunnel that extended through a hill. Ash pointed and Team Saber settled inside to assess the tactical situation.
Ash pulled off his helmet, and wiped the blood from his nose and hair. "Too close," he said.
"Still, we got one," Holly said, pulling off her own golden mirrored helmet, "and we didn't lose one of ours… although you sure gave it a good try." She scratched the fuzz on her head, which she had buzz-cut into a series of bear-claw scratch patterns. The length was a-okay by the regs, but some of the other teams teased her about it. Holly got a little wild about the teasing, and she had been demoted twice for fighting.
Dante removed his helmet and felt his scarred face for any damage. Satisfied, he retrieved two black flash-bang grenades from his pack. "Found these, just before yours went off. Caught the trip wires."
Ash nodded. He should have reprimanded Dante for sticking his hands near a set of primed grenades. Then again, Dante had near-magical abilities when it came to explosives. He always knew when they were about to go, and when they wouldn't. That or he was the luckiest person he'd ever seen.
Olivia kept her SPI helmet on. She slipped out of the cave, taking up a guard position outside. Ash wasn't worried. She was the best sneak in Gamma Company. They called her "O" for short because she was as whisper-quiet as her vowel namesake.
Ash turned to Mark. "Head check," he said, and patted his friend on the back of his helmet.
Mark pulled the helmet off, and Ash saw a nasty bruise on his cheek. Mark ran his hands over his shaved head and worried the edges of that bruise.
"I'm fine," Mark said. He smoothed the inner lining of his armor, making sure it was perfect, and then slipped the helmet back on.
They called Mark "The Mark," because he was their best marksman—good with a sniper rifle, but better with a rifle on full auto in all-out target-rich free-for-all. The more pressure on him, the cooler he got.
Ash spotted bands of rough onyx along the tunnel wall, black and white and streaked with flecks of gold. He ran a gloved finger over the patterns, intrigued by the geological oddity.
He then snapped out of it and focused on the here and now. He slipped his helmet back on.
"Audio check," Ash whispered over TEAMCOM.
Green status lights winked back. Good. No one was deaf.
A dull thump echoed off the distant mesa walls, and dust rained down from the cave ceiling.
Team Saber instinctively dropped to a crouch. Ash pulled his sidearm.
"Big one," Dante muttered. "Artillery? One of the new four-forties?"
"I don't think the Lieutenant Commander would use artillery on us," Ash whispered.
"Not normally," Holly replied. "But this is the last test. Maybe he's pulling out all the stops to figure out who'll get top honors."
Top honors. Ash had pushed Team Saber to stay on top for the last three years: honing their specialties; learning every lesson Endless Summer threw at them; and thinking, moving, and acting together as a single razor-edged weapon. Only two other teams were even close in the rankings. Gladius and Katana. Top honors would mean bragging rights and respect. It would mean they were the best. That they'd won.
Over TEAMCOM, Ash said, "O, you get a direction on that blast?"
Olivia's status light winked red.
"Okay," Ash said, "we'll assume it's artillery for now. I can't believe the Lieutenant Commander would be using it… but Mendez is another story. You hear incoming, scatter, and take cover."
Four green LEDs lit on his heads-up display, acknowledging the order.
Ash had read somewhere that you never heard the artillery shell that killed you. He had no desire to personally test that battlefield legend.
"What's the plan for Katana and Gladius?" Mark asked.
"Katana's down one," Ash replied. "We'll focus on the weaker of the two. We'll find—"
Another thump and the ground shuddered.
"Closer," Olivia whispered over TEAMCOM. "Vector north."
Ash stepped out of the tunnel and took cover by a large boulder. The others followed and their SPI armor blended into the rocky terrain.
If this was another trap, then they were probably stepping out right into a sniper's line of fire. But Ash didn't think so. No one would use ordnance that big so close, not even Mendez.
An explosion like that wasn't something you could throw together from rocks and branches and a couple of flash-bang grenades, either… so that eliminated Teams Katana and Gladius.
So who was doing it?
Forty meters to the north v/as the triple fence surrounding Zone 67. Electrified razor wire, motion sensors, and lanes of minefields made an effective barrier. If pressed, Team Saber could have gotten around it—but they wouldn't. The LC's orders had been crystal clear: DO NOT CROSS. It would count as an instant disqualification for top honors.
What about the other teams? Just a quick hop over and lateral move to flank him? No.
None of them would risk a disqualification.
There was a dust storm about three kilometers into Zone 67, a wall of sand, swirling smoke… and fire.
A distant mesa exploded—vaporized into a mushroom of glittering quartz dust, a hail of boulders, and roiling flame.
Ash instinctively ducked, and his insides clenched.
He'd seen big explosions before. Nothing like that, though.
"Two kilometers," Dante said. "Felt that one in my bones."
They watched the stones rain from the sky.
"A few Archer missiles maybe…" Mark murmured.
Dots swirled about the edge of the expanding cloud of dust. If Ash didn't know better he'd have sworn they were vultures. But Onyx didn't have raptorlike avian species.
Ash zoomed magnification on his faceplate. At five-times he saw the dots had a three- fold symmetry.
He unslung his sniper rifle and sited through the scope.
They were drones of some sort. But not UNSC MAKOS. Not Covenant Banshees fliers, either. They were a few meters long.
Three dull steel booms that surrounded a centra! eye, glowing like molten iron. No obvious jets. No cockpit. There were a dozen of them.
"Has to be an experimental prototype," Dante said. Maybe Zone 67 is a testing range for new weapons."
"They wouldn't be 'testing' a megaton worth of destructive force while we were so close,"
Ash countered.
Or was this part of the final test? Some new threat that the three squads would have to band together to defeat? That would be Chief Mendez's style: change the rules in the middle of a test.
The drones moved away from the atomized mesa, drifted closer to Team Saber's location, stopping short just on the opposite side of the Zone 67 fence, where they circled another butte.
Ash spied motion atop that formation. Shutters from a a camouflaged bunker popped open, and heavy machine-gun fire strafed the drones.
The lead drone's three booms snapped forward to make a triangular flat plane. A glimmering film of gold popped into place and fifty-caliber rounds impacted and bounced off.
"Energy shields!" Dante said. "Has to be Covenant."