1310 Hours, February 15, 2526 (Military Calendar)\
Epsilon Indi System, Operational Area Serration
Harvest

"K6, this is K6! I have eyes on multiple Covenant soldiers! Buzzards! They're pursuing us through the swamp!"

"K6, this is K2," replied Corporal Howell, the trooper in command of India-Two now that Sergeant Sanchez was dead. "I copy that. I have eyes on at least three of them."

"Three," K6 replied. Gunfire could be heard in his background. "How many of the ugly bastards are there?"

"K2 to K6, watch your radio discipline. Everyone else, assume that the entire security team is in pursuit. Lay low, avoid contact, make your way to the rendezvous point."

On his tacpad, David watched as five green acknowledgement lights winked on. Six survivors, out of eleven who walked into the swamp. And he had a sinking feeling that it would only go down from there. They were all scattered, and the swamp echoed with the cracks of gunfire and the whine of energy weapons. Avoiding contact was easier said than done.

He saw movement. A hundred meters to his left, on the far side of a shallow river, something was moving through the bushes. In one quick, smooth motion, David fell to his knees and pressed himself into the grey mud of the riverbank, where a thick layer of ash had flowed down the Ratotoskr river and collected at the bend.

Across the river, an alien pushed out of the bushes and clambered atop a fallen log. It was one of the avian-looking things that the Marines had taken to calling "Buzzards" and "Jackals". It was aptly named. Though this was the first time David had seen one in the flesh, he could tell that they were descended from a long and successful line of carrion scavengers.

The alien scrambled out to the end of the log and stood there with its rifle held at the low ready position. It moved like a bird, and it turned its head in sharp, jerking motions. Its yellow eyes swept the river, and seemed to fix on David.

He flicked the safety on his M7S submachine gun, but did not raise it. It was covered in the same adaptive camouflage fabric that made up his infiltration suit, but the Marines who had fought the Covenant swore that Jackals had perfect eyesight and an even better sense of smell. After the disaster at Facility A1-30, David was inclined to believe it. His best chance was to lie low, make no movement, and hope it missed him.

The Jackal continued to stare at him. Its beak opened, and David heard the cackling hiss-huff of its breath, as if it was trying to catch his scent. All of David's instincts screamed at him to take the shot or run, but he held still.

With a hiss and two hooting cries, the Jackal dismounted the log and splashed into the river.

Two more of the ugly buzzards strode out of the bushes and followed the first, but none of them seemed to be on the alert. Maybe alien body language was different, but the Jackals looked casual. Relaxed.

One of them scooped a hand into the river and withdrew a silvery fish, which it tossed into the air and caught between its teeth. This provoked brays of what could be laughter from the other two.

David let himself relax a little as the Jackals made landfall thirty meters upstream without glancing in his direction again.

Maybe his camouflage worked after all.

1342 Hours, two kilometers northwest of rendezvous point

David moved through the swamp as swiftly and silently as the undergrowth would allow. He left as little sign of his passage as he could, and he made a beeline for the rendezvous point. And all the while, his mind was burning. How had the Covenant ambushed his team? What gave India-Two away?

He stepped into a clearing and suddenly realized that he wasn't alone. He took cover behind a mossy tree and brought the M7S to his shoulder, searching the clearing for signs of trouble.

After a long moment, he said "Caldwell, is that you?"

A shape detached itself from the trees and approached. It was Private Caldwell, momentarily locking his adaptive camouflage to stand out from the bush. "Are there Covenant following you?"

"Nah. I gave the patrols the slip. You?"

"Man, you're the first anybody I've seen since we split up, Human or alien. Come on, let's get going."

David fell into line behind the other trooper. "What happened back there?"

"Covenant saw us coming," Caldwell replied. "Simple as that."

"But how? Were we spotted by that flight of dropships?"

"If we were, how would the sentries know when we got there? We must have tripped a perimeter alarm when we set up the sensors."

"It can't have been millimeter-wave radar, because our comms would have detected it," David said. "It can't be LIDAR, because nobody in their right mind would rely on LIDAR in this environment."

"Nah. Must have been a tripline or a pressure plate."

"Wasn't any of those."

"Smell," Caldwell said. "Just like those ARGUS drones. They must have lain down sensor stations on the perimeter that can detect Humans."

Anecdotally, David had heard of Innies using olfaction sensors to hunt down infiltration teams. And his own experience with ARGUS drones… He'd give himself even odds of detecting a Human scent in this environment, if he got the drone close enough.

But Private Koria had died when a needle as thick as his finger and twice as long plowed through his head. The sharpshooter must have been standing on one of the towers at the center of the refinery. Could a sensor that worked by smell, by detecting biochemical traces in the air, be sharp enough to spot for a 500-meter shot?

David suddenly realized what the Navy boys and girls up in orbit must feel like. Not only was he up against an enemy with superior technology, he didn't know just how outclassed he was.

David and Caldwell made good time to the rendezvous point, a semicircular ridge around a marsh that had once been an oxbow lake. They moved swiftly but carefully, moving with the terrain and checking all about them for signs of the Covenant.

K7 and K10, on the other hand, were not so careful.

K10, Private Ash Bennette, came charging up the hill and collapsed near the top, panting heavily. Her balaclava was rolled up to expose her mouth and nose, and David didn't blame her. The infiltration suits could trap heat something fierce, and the only reason he wasn't overheating was that he'd just waded through a river. Bennette must be swimming in her own sweat.

"K10, stay put, we're coming to you. K7, what is your location?"

Bennette's acknowledgement light winked on, but David got no other response. As Caldwell reached Bennette and checked her vitals, he tried again. "K5 to K7, where are you?"

"Turn off the damn radio!" snarled K7, Corporal Dietrich Sonderland as he stepped out of the bushes. It was like searching for and finally spotting a plane high in a clear blue sky. David knew which direction Sonderland was coming from, but he didn't spot the trooper until he was looking right at him, at which point a hazy man-shaped silhouette appeared from the foliage.

"Dietrich, glad you made it," David said. "Did you lose them?"

"Hell no," Corporal Sonderland replied. "Buzzards got our scent. Literally. They'll be here any minute now."

"Shit," David breathed.

"We'll lay a mousetrap," Sonderland said as he shucked his knapsack and withdrew two claymore mines. "Lure them into a killzone just like we did with the Applied Solutions mercs on Eridanus II. In the meantime, turn off your radio and keep it off."

"What?"

"Yeah," Sonderland said. "That's how they've been tracking us this whole time."

"Hold on," Caldwell said, tapping the side of his helmet. "These things hop frequencies and transmit in bursts. Trangulating them is like catching fog in a net."

"The Covenant are doing it anyway," Sonderland replied. "I saw it when we were setting up the Crows. Thirty seconds after we turned on the transceiver, the Covenant were hosing down our position. Howell and Robbs couldn't stay off the radio, and the Jackals came at them from all directions."

"The Jackals can see right through our camouflage," Bennette said between gulps of air. "They were looking right at us."

"How?" Sonderland demanded. He waved his hand over a tree trunk, and his adaptive camouflage made the motion all but invisible. "How do they see through this?"

"I saw them. The Jackals were clustered in the tower, and they were looking right at us. One of the sentries was pointing in our direction."

"And you didn't say anything?" Caldwell demanded. Bennette just shook her head.

"Fine," Sonderland said. He tossed one claymore mine to Bennette and the other to David. "Maybe they do have X-ray vision, in which case we're fucked. Assume radio silence anyway. Caldwell and I will go over the hill and lure the bastards into the killzone, then slip away. You and Bennette place the mines and wait for my signal."

"What signal?" David asked.

Sonderland made a show of loading a flare cartridge into his HE pistol. Without another word, he and Caldwell disappeared over the ridge.

The ridge was an arc perhaps seventy meters wide. With the claymores placed at either end, their shrapnel would be focused inward, forming a deadly crossfire. Outside of the zone of overlap, the shrapnel would be more diffuse, but no less deadly for it.

David placed his mine and retreated to a notch in the ridge where he could watch for Sonderlands flare. He checked his equipment and checked his tacpad as well. Two yellow lights gazed back at him. Two claymore mines; armed, synced to his device, and waiting for the signal to detonate.

There was a sound to his right. Bennette lay down a few meters from David, her submachine gun at the ready. But her eyes weren't on the marsh.

"You believe me, right?" she said. "The Jackals spotted us with their bare eyes."

Ashley," David said. "The Jackals caught up to me, down by the river. I had to hide in plain sight. They looked right at me and they walked on by."

"They looked right at you?"

"They looked every which way, including my direction. And they didn't see me."

"Then how are they doing this?" she snarled. When David had no response, she crawled away and watched the far treeline for signs of the enemy.

David, for his part, stared at his glove. Or rather, he stared at the fabric that made up his glove. The key to the infiltration suit's adaptive camouflage was a weave of lenticular beads filled with 'pixels' of electrophoretic ink, which mixed red, yellow, and blue pigments to reproduce every shade of color that the Human eye could see, as well as shades of grey. The beads were made of a tempered smartglass that could adapt its reflectivity in response to a control signal. And, of course, the fabric had a thermal underlayer that kept the outer layer at ambient temperature.

He thought back to Koria. Shot through the head from five hundred meters away. That only made sense if there was some flaw in the suit that the Jackals could see.

But even if they could see light that Humans can't, in the near-infrared or ultraviolet range, the infiltration suits had that covered. How-

A gunshot brought David's mind to the here and now. He looked up in time to see Sonderland or Caldwell darting through the bushes down in the marsh. Whoever it was, they'd locked their adaptive camouflage into a static tiger-stripe pattern. Perhaps to draw attention without being too obvious.

More gunfire echoed through the marsh, and plasma bolts flashed in return. The Jackals had arrived in force. Half a dozen of them took cover beyond glowing energy shields, but others darted through the bushes. David didn't see how many. His job was to watch for a flare, not to take a census.

The battle in the marsh rose to a fever pitch. The air was thick with the crack of gunfire and plasma burns and the shrieks of wounded Jackals. A lance of Jackals suddenly broke cover and raced for the far end of the ridge, to get elevation over the two troopers. One of them stumbled and fell, and the rest sheltered behind their shields. They were still well within the overlap zone.

David thought he heard a Human scream in pain, and then he realized that some of the gunshots were coming from his left. Bennette was sniping away with her suppressed submachine gun.

The Jackal lance suddenly opened fire. Plasma bolts and pink needles streaked toward the ridge, converged, and David saw a flicker of blue and pink on the slope of the ridge before the exotic weaponry tore into a trooper wearing adaptive camouflage. There was no scream of pain. The soldier fell to his knees, arms outstretched to his sides as graphical glitches played across his body. Tongues of flame rose from his back as more plasma poured into him.

It was Private Caldwell. David could see that now. He hadn't seen him flee up the ridge, but somehow the Jackals had.

He caught a flicker of pink light in the corner of his eye, and he heard Bennette scream in pain. Instinctively, he ducked and rolled, and that was what saved his life.

Plasma tore into the ridgeline all around him. Plasma bolts passed less than a meter above his head. Mud rained down on him, burning his nose with the acrid smell of scorched earth. Tree limbs exploded into ash.

And beyond that, David saw a red flare twirling into the overcast sky.

He had his tacpad flipped open before he realized that Sonderland must have fired the flare from within the killzone. After only a moment's hesitation, he mashed the detonate button three times.

Two thunderclaps split the marsh, followed by a prolonged thundercrack as shredded branches split from trees and fell to the ground. After that, there were only the cries of the dying.

David crawled over to Bennette's position. A crystal needle had shattered against a rock, spraying her face with shrapnel. She was bleeding from the nose, the forehead, and maybe her eye. David peeled off her balaclava and started administering first aid.

Caldwell was burned beyond recognition. His helmet, his hip computer, and his tacpad were all completely destroyed. David only had to retrieve the dog tags and say goodbye to a good friend.

They found Sonderland under a log that had been shot through and was oozing smoke and steam from a dozen scorch marks. The log had protected Dietrich from the claymores, for all the good that did him. He'd taken three plasma bolts to the torso. It was a wonder he'd lived long enough to crawl to cover and shoot off a flare.

David collected the dog tags from Sonderland as well as his mission record, and then he wiped the trooper's electronics. It didn't take long, but by the time he was finished, the cries of Jackals could be heard. Moving through the swamp, searching. And another one, close at hand, calling out to them.
Wordlessly, he motioned to Bennette, and they fled from the marsh.

1506 Hours, 10 kilometers southwest of rendezvous point

One foot after the other. After today, it felt like a marathon.

They'd risked a radio call back to Charlie base, arranging for an evac at coordinates four miles distant. David crunched the numbers in his head and came up short.

The two of them could make it that far, easy, but their pace was lagging. The Jackals were guaranteed to catch up with them. And if it came down to another firefight, David put Bennette's odds of survival at zero percent. Her good eye was buried beneath a bandage, and only a stiff shot of stimulants had kept her from going into shock.
And she was missing her balaclava, but maybe it didn't matter. The Jackals had an uncanny gift for finding them anyway, with or without the camouflage.

There was only one solution. Well, there were several, but only one that squared with David's sense of right and wrong.

"Ash, stop for a moment."

She stopped, looking all around her as if expecting Buzzards to fall from the trees. She nearly jumped with fright when David dropped a handful of tags into a pouch in her chest rig, followed by Sonderland's mission record. The pouch and the chest rig was cut from the same adaptive camouflage cloth as the rest of their infiltration suits.

"What are you doing?" she asked.

"I need you to get back to base. Tell everyone how this mission went tango uniform. I'm going to stay behind and find out what makes these buzzards tick."

"You can't. They'll slaughter you."

"They'll get us both if I don't stay behind. Get going! If I don't radio by the time you dust off, I didn't make it."

"But-"

"Go! Get to the LZ!"

David spun on his heel and charged back the way they'd come.

It was no longer about escape or ambush. He was the hunter now, and he'd kill the alien bastards until he got answers. He checked his submachine gun, pulling the adaptive camouflage shroud off to examine the magazine. In a way, it reminded him of the leather holsters his dad preferred for his hunting rifles.

A memory came to him, unbidden. It was a good memory, the first time his dad had taken him hunting. David had been seven years old, riding in the family truck with his dad in the wee hours of the morning. Between them was a large lunchbox and a seven millimeter hunting rifle.

Sleepy as he was, David had been filled with wonder and excitement as the truck wound its way through the Esposz highlands. The first fingers of dawn were creeping into the eastern skies when Papa Bordowicz parked the truck and announced "We are here!"

But before David could hop out, his dad pulled a bright orange vest from under the seat and told him to put it on.

"Why?"

"So that other hunters will see you and won't shoot you," his father replied.

"But dad! The deer will see me too."

"That's the trick," his father said. "They can't. Deer are color-blind."

The idea that animals couldn't see orange or blue or purple astounded young David. He donned the vest and hopped out of the truck feeling like the badass apex predator of all of Reach. But hour after hour of trudging through the wilderness without spotting a single deer tempered his enthusiasm.

'If only,' he'd thought. 'Someone could go out and put these vests on all the deer. They'd never notice. Wouldn't that be a trick?'

Back in the present, David stared in horror at his gloves, and at the way the colors mixed and flowed through the adaptive camouflage fabric.

With a heartfelt Hungarian swear he'd learned from his father, he shucked off the gloves and tore at his infiltration suit.

A/N: Well, I didn't mean for this to take a month and a half to write. Hope to get the next chapter cranked out this weekend. Thanks go out to Dovahkiin and 07 Contrite Witness for proofreading this chapter, and for F1onagher for making the Project Daybreak snippet thread on Spacebattles and getting the ball rolling on this fic.