Halo: Evolutions - Essential Tales of the Halo Universe Page 13

  She ran over and hugged me, a strong clench, and then she shoved me back. “I can’t frigging believe you’re alive!”

  I was just as stunned. “What are you doing here?”

  “Holed up, same as you. The castle was my call. Some CEO had it made using actual quarried rock from outside the city. Covenant low-level energy weapons don’t vaporize the rock; they just melt it a bit more, making it even stronger. We’re waiting for some Pelicans to get us the hell out now that they took the museum off your grubby hands.”

  She had a jagged scar across her cheek, and a nasty burn on the back of her neck from a near miss. But I caught a glimpse of her bars: She’d risen up to colonel.

  We compared notes and found that we’d been in a couple of the same theaters together, separated only by thirty or so miles.

  “I can get you aboard my detail, if you want,” she said. “And I promise I won’t flake out on you again.”

  “Crap, Felicia, that was a long, long time ago. A lot’s happened since then.”

  “I know. You actually saved my life, you know.”

  “How’s that?”

  “I would have gone back. I would have been sitting on Harvest in my lame-ass Colonial uniform when those goddamn aliens dropped the hammer the second time around.”

  I didn’t say anything to that. I didn’t want to think about Harvest.

  “There were some survivors from the first attack,” Felicia said. “Did you ever look to see . . .”

  “My father wasn’t on the rolls, no.”

  Felicia nodded. “Mine, either.” Then she leaned in. “Look, I’ll get you a transfer to the Chares, the cruiser I’m aboard. And once up there, there’s someone you need to meet.”

  I was intrigued. I hadn’t felt this energized in years, so busy with keeping my head down and focusing on one task at a time. And now here was Felicia, with her energy and friendship.

  You know, to tell you the truth, I was scared. Did I dare reach out to her again?

  Or would she be dead soon enough, ripping another part of me away with her?

  Because how much of that can a person ever truly handle?

  I wasn’t sure.

  “If we get back to orbit,” Felicia said, “I have a surprise for you.”

  An explosion shattered molten rock up in the air, which drizzled back down and reformed. Eventually this castle was going to look like a version of itself that had been placed inside an oven, and half metal.

  “If we get back up!” she said, slapping my shoulder. “Get more ammo and get up on the walls. Pelicans should be down here soon.”

  Off in the distance a sharklike Covenant Cruiser began to descend from the clouds. From its belly, fierce energy descended upon the land, glassing it into oblivion.

  So we hightailed it out of there.

  I’d stopped expecting to live, right before I saw her again. After that, I suddenly felt real again. A human being again, with a past, and a life.

  ABOARD THE Chares the wounded and battered Marines and ODSTs tended their injuries as we retreated into slipspace. I couldn’t put a figure to the numbers who would have died down there on that planet, but given the cities I saw in the distance, I’d imagine millions.

  Despite the glum atmosphere, Felicia hunted me down with an air of excitement.

  “Come on,” she said. She led me down through several bays until we came to a smaller bay crammed with Pelicans.

  We rounded a corner, and sitting on a chair with a small cooler was Eric.

  Freaking Eric was alive.

  He stood up and grabbed my hand. “Gage . . .”

  “When?” I could barely find the words. “How?”

  Felicia looked over at us. “Bastard woke up after five years in a coma and joined the Navy. Became a right flyboy.” She grabbed a beer and studied it. “Rank has its privileges, and Eric has his ways.”

  It was almost too much.

  I wanted to know everything that had happened. Twenty-two years, more or less.

  Twenty-two years, and we were strangers to each other.

  And yet we fell right back into the same friendships, like chatting in the back of the empty Pelican, our voices echoing in the chamber of the launch bay.

  Felicia was a colonel, Eric flying his way in and out of hell. And I was not much more than a grunt that had been more of a zombie for the last couple decades than anything else.

  I may have lost the Outer Colonies, but I suddenly had my friends again.

  WHEN THEY told me about the plan, I remember that we were crowded in the back of Eric’s Pelican getting drunk after a particularly messy ground operation. As Eric summed it up: people had died, Covenant had been killed, and we’d once again had to fall back.

  “But at least it’s happening less frequently,” I said. “With the Cole Protocol they’re only finding our worlds when they stumble over them.”

  Maybe this would give humanity time to build more ships, time to ramp up for a big fight. Time, I thought, to create more super-soldier Spartans.

  “Spartans,” Eric spat. “They’re not even human. Freaks are what they are.”

  It was not an uncommon ODST outlook: a suspicion of the faceless, armored men who’d started to show up on the battlefield.

  I didn’t argue with him.

  “Besides,” Felicia said, “it took them a long time to enact the Protocol. Almost like they wanted the Outer Colonies out of the picture.”

  “That’s . . .” Ludicrous, I started to say. But I halted, remembering my own rage when it was first announced. “. . . hard to believe. But it still looks bad. And the result is . . . what it is.”

  “We put in our years, and we’ve been used up. We’re getting tired. And there’s nowhere to go home to,” Felicia said.

  “And because we’re Colonial Military transfers, our pensions are still technically CMA, not UNSC. Since the CMA doesn’t exist anymore, the pension funds were raided to build destroyers. No one is sure if the politicians will be able to find anything when we all start coming out of the system. If we live that long.”

  I felt the weariness in their voices. It was there in mine, too. Deep into my bones. I’d used up almost two-thirds of my life fighting.

  And all I’d seen were losses.

  Despite ONI propaganda films, and shore leave, and binges, I still felt that emptiness.

  I realized Felicia and Eric were staring at me. Studying me. Feeling me out.

  “We’re going on some sort of snatch-and-run operation,” Felicia said. “I just got word from the brass. We’ve found something the Covenant is squatting on.”

  “What is it?”

  “Some sort of artifact in the ground. Who the hell cares? What in the past is going to save us now? What’s important is that this is going to be our last mission,” Felicia said. “We’ve given our service. We’ve fought hard. The only thing stopping the Covenant is our being able to keep the location of Earth secret. The UNSC’s just using us up on the ground like throwaway pawns.”

  “All that matters to the UNSC is Reach and Earth anyway,” Eric said. He sounded so bitter. I’d gotten the sense that the explosion had changed him even more, despite his role in the UNSC; it was something he’d taken out of necessity, not human patriotism.

  Felicia continued. “The artifact the aliens have dug up this time is near a small city, which I’ve done some research on.

  “There’s a major bank in the center, with vaults. They’ve got gold and platinum ingots buried down there, and the Covenant invasion happened quickly enough that it’s all sitting down there. Right now.”

  I looked back and forth. “What, you want to steal it?”

  “Steal it?” Eric spat the words. “It doesn’t exist anymore, Gage. It’s about to be glassed. The UNSC wants us to snatch the alien artifact or destroy it. No one gives a crap about the gold.”

  “We could retire,” Felicia said. “Go back to Earth, and lay back comfortably. Something the UNSC could never offer us.”

/>   I took a deep breath and looked down at the scuffed floor of the Pelican.

  Eric chimed in. “We’re still going to attack the Covenant and bring back the artifact. We’ll be following orders. But we’ll be coming down with one extra Pelican. We blow the vaults, load the gold into ammunition chests, load the Pelican, and come back to the ship.”

  “And then what?” I asked.

  “Then . . . anything you want,” Felicia said leaning closer, more aware of the scar on her face and the intensity in her eyes than ever. “I know a transport headed back to Earth. I figure, I might as well see the mother planet before I die. Where you guys go, that’s up to you, but I was hoping we could all go together. One last hurrah.”

  One last hurrah.

  “We’ve put in our years, Gage. How much longer before it’s some random Jackal sniper that takes us down? We’ve been putting our damn lives on the line since we were just kids. Kids. It’s time to grow up. When was the last time you talked to a civilian?”

  Too long, I thought. Too long. “How many more are involved?”

  “With you, we can do this,” Eric said. “Felicia can assemble them all into a team for the snatch-and-run; brass trusts her word. They’re all old CMA vets. We’ve been planning this for a long time.”

  “We’ve been eyeing stuff like this on every op. Almost pulled the trigger on the mission we met you on,” Felicia said. “But there was too much going on and the bank was too far away from the action.”

  “But now that we found you, it’s like it was meant to be,” Eric said, looking into my eyes. “This is the one. It’s perfect.”

  Under the haze of alcohol, the team back together again, I felt like I’d refound my family.

  It was us against everyone.

  I was scared, but I didn’t want to let them down. I’d fought beside them. Hell, I’d been created beside them. We were a team. And I wasn’t going to let them down. No matter what misgivings I had about this crazy scheme.

  We had nothing left to lose.

  War had stripped us of many things; made us hard, unflinching, dangerous. But it had forced us into a close bond at the beginning, and reinforced it when we’d found each other again after all these years.

  I didn’t want to lose them again.

  WE DIDN’T come in by SOEIVs for this mission, but by Pelicans. They came out of orbit far from Covenant detection and then flew for hours until we reached the edge of our new combat zone.

  The small city was in the center of a horseshoe-shaped range of small mountains. Its center plaza sat on top of where four mountain streams joined up to become the head of a strong river that trickled out the valley.

  Our Pelicans came in low through a valley, just barely missing a rock ravine on either side as they flew up, over, and then back down, just feet over the ground. Risky, but again, the Covenant were none the wiser.

  So far.

  A hundred ODSTs fanned out through the city, clumping up temporarily to double-check weapons and strategy.

  I stood in the middle of the plaza road and watched it all with Felicia and Eric.

  Downriver the Covenant had thrown together a dam and dug in with a bustle of activity. Organic ships zoomed around overhead, and thousands of Grunts operated a constant hum of machinery that dissolved the ground.

  We could hear the operations in the distance of the evacuated, eerily quiet city.

  “Do you know what the city’s called?” I asked.

  “Mount Haven,” Felicia said.

  Two heavy machine guns had been mounted up on top of strategically located buildings in the city’s center. Manned by two ODSTs, Amey and Charleston, both were picked out by Felicia, and there in case the Covenant decided to come sniffing. They also had rocket launchers at their feet for an extra punch if needed.

  The other two members of that team, Orrin and Dale, stood with rocket launchers down the street.

  Sita stood with Felicia, holding a BR55 battle rifle slung under her arm, and Teller, a pale, gray-haired colonel, lounged by a doorway with a pair of SMGs.

  The eight of us were the base team, along with Eric in the Pelican with the Gatling gun in the nose making the ninth. This was base camp.

  The other Pelicans were scattered around the edges of the city, ostensibly to reduce the chance of their getting hit by Covenant fire if things got hot; but it was really just an order by Felicia to keep them out of view of the city center.

  Teams of ODSTs moved off downriver, and within ten minutes the city fell quiet.

  Just the buildings around the river plaza and us, left behind to keep Mount Haven “secure.”

  There was an empty Jim Dandy’s restaurant nearby. City Hall stood quiet with its facade of marble in the shadows.

  The stately, two-story bank stood there, waiting for us.

  “Okay, let’s go!” Felicia shouted.

  Orrin and Dale set their launchers up against the side of the bank and rigged explosives on the bank’s thick front doors.

  They blew off with a surprisingly muted thump. Precise shaped charges. The duo was good at this. They would be old CMA professionals that Felicia dug up.

  “We have twenty minutes before the Pelicans will be getting ready to come back for the pickup,” Felicia said as she led us into the bank. “So everybody move, move, move.”

  Sita, Teller, Orrin, and Dale all ran with her. The next obstacle was getting a door down; Dale quickly wired it up.

  Another explosion later and we were through.

  “Think we can risk the elevator?” I asked.

  “Backup power is running still,” Dale said. “It’s a small pebble-bed nuclear reactor deep underneath the city. It’ll keep.”

  There were three more thick doors to blast. But there was no one to worry about the alarms we continually set off. So it all went fast.

  The final explosion revealed a long tunnel with flickering lights, thick bars lining the rooms running along each side, with one final vault just beyond.

  “Jackpot,” whispered Teller. He licked his lips.

  On my right I could see the glimmer of gold bars, stacked as high as my chest.

  Each sub room was filled with precious metals. All here for the taking.

  ______

  WE MOVED quickly, using a motorized pallet dolly that just fit in the elevator. The first two sub rooms were cleaned out, and with each trip we deposited the gold bars into empty ammunition chests in the back of Eric’s Pelican.

  It filled up quickly, and there was a lightness in the air as we cracked jokes and imagined what we’d do with our share.

  The Pelican almost literally groaned with gold, and we had to move a Shiva warhead out to start adding a layer of chests full of gold to the walkway.

  “Any more and she won’t fly,” Eric warned.

  “There’s just one more room. We’ll get a few more chests in here, then we’re done,” Felicia said.

  Back under the bank we detonated the door to the last vault. The lights flickered from the pulse as we opened the door, coughing and hacking from the dust that had been kicked up. Shadows filled the room, shifting and moving as the lights struggled to come on.

  Then the lights quit flickering and steadied, and we realized that the shadows were still moving. They were human-shaped shadows.

  A hand reached out from behind the bars and grabbed at me. “Are you here to save us?” asked a tiny voice, and I looked down into the large, wide blue eyes of a little boy.

  “THANK GOD you came,” said an older man, a schoolteacher who’d been chosen to stay with the children while the adults armed up and marched downriver to fight the Covenant.

  That had been days ago.

  The entire group was camped out in the last gold storage room, spreading out what supplies they had on towels on top of more wealth than any of them could have ever have previously imagined touching.

  “We’ve seen what they’ve done to other worlds,” Julian, the schoolteacher, said. “We got as deep underground as w
e could . . . hoping maybe we could avoid the worst of it. The others had already left the city for the nearest spaceport. There weren’t many children left by the time the Covenant actually landed.”

  They were not nearly deep enough. But I didn’t say anything.

  “Just hold on a second, sir, we need to confer a moment.”

  Felicia had frozen in the center of the hallway, but moved when I approached. “What the hell do we do?” I hissed. “We can’t just leave them here.”

  “I don’t know,” she whispered back. “But how many are there? What can we do?”

  “We have a spare Pelican . . .”

  She cut me off. “Let me think. In the meantime, get those last three chests of gold up to Eric.”

  “And how are we going to explain that?” I asked, a bit louder than I intended.

  Felicia walked over to the open door that led to the room the children and their caretaker were in. There were thirty of them, I figured, from a quick head count. “Julian, that was your name, right? I’m Colonel Felicia Sanderson. I’m an orbital-drop shock trooper. We’re here under orders to retrieve the gold bullion, as part of the necessity to fund the war effort against the Covenant. You’ll have to understand, these orders are our first priority. In the meantime, if there is anything you need, food, water, we’ll provide that to you as we try to think about how to safely get you out of here.”

  “Thank you, thank you so much,” the teacher said.

  Dale and Orrin had finished loading the dolly.

  I pulled Felicia back farther away. “We need to call in extra Pelicans.”

  “Don’t tell me what we need to do. We’re going to load this last bit up, then we’re going to see what we can get back to the ship before all hell breaks loose with the damn Covenant just downriver. We’ll give these guys food and water, at least. But we’re not dragging them outside until I’ve had time to think.”

  “Think about what?” Sita asked, joining us. “You’re not seriously thinking about taking them out?”

  I was horrified. “How can we not? These are children!”

  “They’re dead,” Sita said. “They were dead the moment they chose to hole up down here. It is only a matter of when, and how. The fact that we stumbled across them doesn’t change the fact that we can’t evacuate everyone off an entire planet. It doesn’t work like that.”