The enemy fire slowed.
That was their opening.
Tom rolled to his feet, and sprinted for the thickest smoke. Team Foxtrot followed.
Every other Spartan on the field charged as well, hundreds of half-camouflaged armored figures, running and firing at the dazed Jackals, appearing as a wave of ghost warriors, half liquid, half shadow, part mirage, part nightmare.
They screamed a battle cry, momentarily drowning the sound of gunfire and explosion.
Tom yelled with them—for the fallen, for his friends, and for the blood of his enemies.
The sound was deafening.
Jackals broke ranks, turned to flee, and got shot in the back as their shields turned with them.
But hundreds more held their ground, overlapping shields to form an invulnerable phalanx.
Tom led Team Foxtrot into the smoke-filled shadows of the factory. He found a pipe the size of a redwood dripping condensed water and green coolant and took cover behind it. In the mist he saw Lucy, Adam, and Min take positions behind cover, too. He gave them rapid- fire orders with hand signals: Move in and kill.
He spun around, his MA5K rifle leveled—and found himself face-to-face with a Covenant Elite, its jaw mandibles split in mimicry of an impossibly large human grin. The monster held an energy sword in one hand, and a plasma pistol in the other.
It shot and swung.
Tom sidestepped the deadly arcs of energy, set his foot between the Elite's too-wide stance—pushed and fired at the same time.
The Elite sprawled onto the ground, and Tom tracked his body, spraying rounds into the slit of its helmet. He didn't miss.
Team Foxtrot closed on him, leaving six dead Jackals behind, their bodies snapped like rag dolls.
Behind on the field came rapid thumps and 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, realizing perhaps it would be suicide to face Spartans in close quarters.
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 blue blood.
Tom hesitated, torn between moving deeper into the factory complex and executing the mission and running back to help his comrades. You didn't leave your friends behind.
The sky darkened, clouds overhead turning steel gray.
Tom's COM crackled to life: "Omega three. Execute now! NOW!"
That stopped him cold. Omega three was the panic code, an order to break and run no matter what the cost.
Why? They were winning.
Tom then saw the clouds move. Only… they weren't clouds.
Everything was clear to him now. Why there were so many Covenant here. And why Seraph single ships, craft designed for space combat, were bombing them.
Seven Covenant cruisers sank from the clouds. Over a kilometer long, their bulbous oblong hulls cast shadows over the entire field. If these ships had been parked in formation, refueling over the complex, the STARS might have mistaken such large structures as part of the factory.
"We have to help them," Lucy whispered over the TEAMCOM.
"No," Min said, making a short cut motion with his hand. "The Omega order."
"We're not running," Adam broke in.
"No," Tom agreed. "We're not. The order is… in error." Despite the environmental controls in his SPI armor, he felt chilled.
Seraph fighters dropped from the cruisers, dozens of them, and gathered into swarms.
Darkly luminescent shafts of light appeared from the belly of each cruiser, transport beams, and from them marched hundreds of Elites onto the field.
"But we can't help them either," Tom whispered to his team.
Half of Beta Company turned to face the new threat. Impossible odds, even for Spartans, but they would buy time for the rest of them to find cover.
Finding cover was a futile tactic, though. Seven Covenant cruisers had enough firepower to neutralize even 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.
That left only one option.
"The core," Tom told them. "It's still our mission, and our only effective weapon."
There was a heartbeat pause, and then three green acknowledgment lights winked on his display. His friends knew what he was asking.
Team Foxtrot moved as one, running into the factory at top speed, dodging pipes and supply pods.
A squad of six Elites was ahead, hunkered behind a tangle of ducts.
Tom tossed a handful of concussive grenades to disorient them, but his team kept running. Any delay—even to engage an enemy who could take shots at their backs—might rob them of their one chance.
The surviving Elites recovered and fired.
Adam fell, one hand clutched at the crystal shards that penetrated his armor and punctured his lower spine.
"Go!" Adam cried, waving them off. "I'll hold them."
Tom didn't break stride. Adam knew what had to be done: keep fighting until there was no fight left in him.
The core was a hundred meters ahead. It was impossible to miss, so bright Tom's faceplate automatically polarized to maximum tint, and it was still hard to look at. The core was the size of a ten-story building, pulsing like a huge heart, fed by glowing conduits and steaming coolant pipes, and encrusted with crystalline electronics. It was a marvel of alien engineering, and complex—which hopefully also meant easy to break.
"Main coolant ducts there and there," Tom shouted over TEAMCOM and pointed. "I'll jam the dump valve." He moved to the base of the core.
Lucy's and Min's acknowledgment lights winked.
Tom helmet's display fuzzed with static, then popped and went black. The reactor plasma and its intensely fluctuating electromagnetic field was wreaking havoc with their electronics.
He found the dump valve, a mechanism the size of a Pelican dropship, just below the main chamber. He unspooled the thermite-carbon cord and ran it around the valve twice. He then primed and activated the charge. A line of lightning brilliance flared and sizzled through Covenant alloy, fusing the valve into a solid lump.
Tom glanced at Lucy. She set an explosive charge on one of the two main coolant lines that fed the reactor, and then set the timer on the detonator.
Min was setting his timer, too—then vanished in a flash of smoke and thunder. The core flared brighter than the sun. Coolant fumes screamed from twisted pipe and alarms blared.
"No!" Lucy screamed.
She ran past Tom toward the billowing cloud of toxic coolant. He caught her wrist, jerking her to a stop.
"He's gone," Tom said. "EM field must have triggered his charge."
She wrestled out of Tom's grasp.
"We have to get out of here," he told her.
She hesitated, taking one step toward Min.
The support structure groaned and started to melt and sag from the superheating core.
She turned back to Tom, nodded, and they ran out of the chamber—deeper into the factory complex, through a jungle of struts and hissing ducts, and splashing through lakes of leaked, boiling coolant.
The charge Lucy had set went off and silenced the reactor's alarms.
Even with their backs to the reactor, running at a full-out flat sprint, the glare from the core doubled as it reached near supercritical phase. It was too much to endure, even through a polarized faceplate, and Tom squinted his eyes nearly shut.
They turned a corner, slid down the railing of angled stairs and onto a catwalk that protruded over a ledge. Five hundred meters below, an ocean churned against rocky cliffs.
They had made it through the factory, out the back side, where massive tubes sucked in the ocean water for processing.
Lucy looked back at the factory and then to Tom. She offered her hand.
He took it.
They jumped.
In free fall, Tom struggled, pumping his legs. Lucy released his hand, and straightened her body. He did the same and then pointed his feet down a split second before he hit the water.
The impact stunned him, then he tasted salt, and choked on water that filled his helmet.
He clawed for the surface. The lining of his SPI armor swelled, taking on water, weighing him down.
He broke the surface, paddling as hard as he could with his legs to stay afloat. He clawed at his helmet release and pulled it off.
Next to him, Lucy had her helmet off as well, gasping.
"Look." He nodded to the cliff tops.
From this angle Tom saw the Covenant cruisers over the field. Lances of laser fire rained down from the ships' lateral weapon arrays and blasted his fellow Spartans. Firepower meant for capital ship combat… how could anyone survive that?
A new sun appeared. The supercritical core flared and light filled the world. The cruisers rippled, distorted, their alloy skins boiling away in the heat. They disintegrated, bits blasted outward.
The rocky prominence shattered into molten debris.
"Down!" Tom cried.
He and Lucy pushed themselves underwater, diving to escape the overpressure and incinerating blast. His waterlogged armor might now save his life.
Overhead, water flash vaporized. Droplets of liquid rock and metal hissed past him. Heat smothered him… and a giant hand grasped and squeezed until all Tom saw was blackness.
Tom lay on the ground panting. They had nearly drowned after the blast, but managed to shed their armor, and finally, exhausted, swam back to the shore, and dragged themselves around the edge of the battlefield and into the hills.
He and Lucy had made it to extraction point six where he had seen one of the stealth exfiltration ships.
No Covenant reinforcements came. They had all been killed when the reactor blew.
Operation TORPEDO was a success… but it had cost the lives of everyone else in the Beta Company contingent.
All that remained of the factory, the Covenant cruisers, and ground forces of Beta Company was a glass crater four kilometers in diameter. No bones, not even a camo panel from a suit of SPI armor. Gone. Whispers in the wind.
Lucy pulled herself up against the hull of the Black Cat sub-prowler craft, her body trembling. She started to stagger back down the hill.
"Where are you going?"
"Survivors," she whispered and took one uncertain step forward. "Foxtrot. We have to look."
No one had survived. They had checked all the COM frequencies, searched the shoreline, fields, and hills on their long silent hike back. No one else was alive.
Lucy was tiny. Like Tom, she was only twelve years old, but at one point six meters and seventy kilos, Lucy was one of the smallest SPARTAN-IIIs. Without her SPI armor and weapons, and her pale form covered only in modest body sheathing, she looked even smaller.
Tom stood and gently put his arm around her. She trembled violently.
"You're going into shock."
He found a first-aid kit and injected her with the standard postmission antishock medical cocktail.
"Survivors…" she whispered.
"There are none," he said. "We have to get out of here. The Black Cat's capacitors will drain in four hours and we won't be able to jump to Slipspace."
She turned to him, eyes wide and brimming with tears. "How are you sure we're alive?"
Tom was alive. He was certain. But as he cast one final glance at the crackling fields of Pegasi Delta, he knew part of him had died today with Beta Company.
He helped Lucy into the Black Cat prowler and closed the hatch.
The subprowler's engines thrummed to life, then dulled to a whisper. The craft lifted and angled up into the darkening skies.
Lucy's words asking if they were alive would be her last. "Posttraumatic vocal disarticulation," the experts would eventually declare. And although recertified for duty, she would remain silent—either unable, or unwilling, to speak the rest of her life.
In the years to come, Tom would reflect on Lucy's last question every day. "How are you sure we're alive?" Something had died for every Spartan that day.
SECTION I
LIEUTENANT AMBROSE
CHAPTER ONE
1647 HOURS, MAY 1, 2531 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \ 111 TAURI SYSTEM, CAMP NEW HOPE, PLANET VICTORIA John, SPARTAN-117, despite being encased in a half ton of angular MJOLNIR armor, moved like a shadow through the twilight forest underbrush.
The guard on the perimeter of Base New Hope drew on a cigarette, took a final puff, and tossed the butt.
John lunged, a whisper rustle, and he wrapped his arm around the man's neck, wrenching it up with a pop.
The guard's cigarette hit the ground.
Nearby crickets resumed their night song.
John pinged his status to the rest of Blue Team. Four green LED lights winked on his display, indicating the rest of the extended perimeter guards had been neutralized.
The next objective was a delivery gate, the weakest part of the rebel base's defense system. The guardhouse had two men outside, two on the rooftop, and several inside. Past this, however, the base had impressive security even by Spartan standards: motion and seismic sensors, a triple layering of guards, trained dogs, and overhead MAKO-class drones.
John blinked his status light green: the signal to proceed with the next phase.
The setting sun just touched the edge of the horizon when the guards on the roof of the bunker twitched and crumpled. It happened so fast, John wasn't sure which Linda had targeted first. A heartbeat later the two on the ground were dead as well.
John and Kurt ran for the gatehouse.
Kelly sprinted ahead, covering the three hundred meters from the forest in half the time, and leapt to the roof in a single bound. She opened the roof's vent and dropped flash-bang grenades.
Kurt posted outside the door, and swept the aft side for any targets. John waited on the other side of the steel and bulletproof-glass security door, one hand on its handle, one foot braced against the wall.
Inside three muffled thumps sounded.
John pulled, wrenching the door and frame from the steel reinforcing in the wall.
Kurt entered, his M7 submachine gun burping three-round bursts.
John was in a moment later, and assessed the threats in the blink of an eye. There were three guards already down. Behind them, banks of security monitors showed a hundred views of the base.