1430, December 7th, 2542.
Chi Rho Surface. Supervolcano
John-117 clambered out of his drop pod and quickly surveyed his surroundings.
His pod had landed inside what looked to be a warehouse. All around him there were massive containers, twice the size of any human cargo containers, and reaching far up into the sky. The Covenant were stacking cargo containers nearly half a kilometer high, all the while moving them back and forth using massive mechanical claws that came down from the ceiling. There was a constant flurry of movement, the shouting of guttural alien tongues, and the sound of heavy machinery transporting the products of Covenant industry. Alongside the containers, there were massive plates of solid purple which were undoubtedly Covenant nanocomposite armor. Thousands of plates a meter across, and wider than a Scarab were being stacked and moved with the ease a child might move around toys.
For a moment, it provided John an almost terrifying insight into the sheer level of Covenant industry. He was on a planet the Covenant had owned for seven years, and they were already producing enough material to outproduce any human planet short of Reach or Earth.
The rest of Blue Team slowly creeped into view, moving silently across the ground floor, staying in the shadows beneath the moving platforms overhead. So far they hadn't been spotted. Or if they had, the response hadn't reached Blue Team yet. The rest of Blue Team were absolutely silent, not even daring to flash their status lights or transmit a close ranged broadcast.
Linda was the first to appear, like everyone else on the mission, she was loaded for bear, carrying several explosive charges, and enough grenades to blast her way out of almost any situation. In her hands was a Stanchion Rifle. The somewhat outdated weapon had been updated with Eezonic recoil dampeners, and improved targeting systems. The Magaze was gone, replaced with a somewhat bulkier micro-fabricator, with a slot for adding additional feedstock to the weapon.
Kelly made a quick hand signal. "Objective: Where?" Kelly was carrying what the Citadel called a Graal Spike Thrower. How she had gotten an illegal heavy shotgun that fired massive exploding spikes, John hadn't deigned to ask. Alongside the Spike thrower, Kelly also carried a Salarian Venom Shotgun. The latter of which, when folded up, fit quite snugly on her lower back.
Fred was the last to appear. On his back, he carried the Warp bomb that would be used to either destroy the primary reactor, or destroy whatever regulating mechanism contained the shield volcano the Covenant had tapped into. Just like John, his primary weapon was a modified MA5B merged with a Phaeston rifle's internals, and overclocked for Spartan physiology.
John held up a hand, showing Kelly the palm, then clenching twice. He brought up an orbital image of where they had arrived. They were roughly two kilometers from what had been identified as the control mechanism for the supervolcano the Covenant had managed to tap into. Their task was to destroy it, then evacuate before the shield volcano erupted, and covered half the planet with ash.
John made a chopping motion in the direction of their objective, then tapped three times on his palm, the order and position of each tap indicating where Blue-Two through Four would be relative to John. The other Spartans signed acknowledgement, and they advanced.
The Spartans were in their element here. While the enemy was distracted by an orbital assault, and Citadel Special Forces raided other locations in the Covenant Assembly Yard, the Spartans could slip past them with contemptible ease.
He carefully climbed a gantry towards a walkway that was out of the line of sight of the few Covenant workers and overseers Blue Team had spotted in the warehouse. They crossed it silently, then headed into the factory complex as a whole. Dirty purple gave way to dim grey panels and flickering lights as they entered a maintenance pathway. The only sounds were the soft taps of their footsteps as they accelerated their pace.
A squad of Jackals rushed past them, neglecting to look into the darkened alcove Blue-Team was moving through. The Spartans passed behind them without even the scrape of their power-armored feet giving away their position. John kept an eye on his sattelite map as he moved, making quick hand signals as he stayed in the lead, motioning for members of Blue Team to rush forward and cover the advance. There was the sound of gunfire in the distance, combined with the whoosh of biotic blasts and the war cries of Elites. He constructed a mental map of his surroundings using the sounds of combat, as reference points. If each Citadel force was attracting the closest Covenant forces, he would be able to move easiest by staying between the fights.
They approached a large doorway which was marked by Covenant warning runes, his armor translated as "Sanctified Admission Only." A quick bit of deductive reasoning based upon the Covenant's fundamentalist nature, made John confident that this meant the room was most likely the Covenant equivalent of a control station, or an area of the facility only open to authorized personnel.
John made a quick chopping motion with his hand, pointed at the door, then made a series of subtle twists and movements of his head. Objective: Breach. Blue-Two. Go.
Fred moved up, knelt down before the doorway, then lit both his omni-tooled hands. The first he placed upon the doorway, using the advanced instruments to take measurements of the kind of lock he was dealing with, the other fabricated a mixture of drills and small plasma torches he took to the mechanism.
John tapped his left wrist where a man might put a watch. Fred heard the noise, and made three subtle nods, each with a minute difference in angle and duration, followed by a subtle twitch of his right shoulder. Around three minutes. One if I trip the alarm. Your call. Silent.
John stood behind Fred, scanning the hallway for any Covenant patrols that might be heading their way. None appeared, which only made John paranoid. Either it was another case of the Covenant letting their fundamentalism get the best of them, or the door wasn't actually that important. Or it was a trap. John admitted. But Blue Team had fought its way out of traps before, oftentimes intentionally setting one off to draw in the enemy.
There was a soft hiss, and the door slid open. On the other side was a long hallway nearly a hundred meters long. He glanced at the orbital map again, seeing that this had to be the elevated walkway that led from the warehouse, towards the central structure at the heart of the Assembly city. John was about to give a command, only for an alarm to start shrieking, and warning lights began flashing.
Fred made some angry grumbles and reached for his rifle. He scanned the hallway ahead of him. "Clear. Must have been an automatic alarm when the door opened."
"We got incoming." Linda said, as she fired her sniper rifle at a corner, braining an Elite that ran around the corner. She fired again, sending another Elite sprawling and tripping up its comrades.
John switched his assault rifle to explosive rounds, and opened fire on the pileup. Fred saw what he was doing, and immediately joined, firing armor piercing rounds instead. The Elite advance halted completely as their front ranks were churned up by the firepower of the Spartans. John slowly backpedaled through the doorway. "Blue Two, Blue Three. Close the door." He commanded tersely as he continued to lay down suppressive fire on the Covenant.
Fred and Kelly got up, and each grabbed one part of the sliding doors, and with great exertion, pulled them back out of the walls they'd slid into, and closed them again. John spotted a brief lull in the fighting, then switched his aim to where the door mechanisms were. He fired a burst of armor piercing rounds at the machinery, making sure the door couldn't slide open again. "Blue-Four, Rig the tube for demolition. I want it to fall with the Covenant inside." He commanded.
Linda immediately began placing charges equidistant around the hallway, placing them near to where the walkway connected to the warehouse. He brought up her omni-tool and pressed a quick series of commands. The charges all made a clicking noise, followed by the sounds of suction.
Kelly fired her Spike Thrower through the small crack in the door, throwing an Elite back towards the wall behind him and impaling him upon it. She emptied her magazine, then primed a grenade and pushed it through the crack.
"Go!" John said, and broke into a sprint, heading down the walkway. As they moved, they came upon another door just like the last one. But this time they weren't trying to sneak around. Kelly instead approached the door, lit both her Omni-Blades, and began cutting into the door with furious but focused precision. John turned around and got to one knee, taking aim down the walkway towards a blocked door that was starting to glow.
"Ap. Sustained Full Auto." John commanded as he opened fire through the now melting doorway. His and Fred's armor piercing rounds punched through the now-compromised doorway. They both continued to fire for a solid half a minute, keeping up a withering suppressive fire. A quick glance at his HUD confirmed that they weren't even a quarter of the way through their ammo blocks. He kept a careful eye on the heat gauge, lowering his rate of fire just enough that the weapon wouldn't overheat.
There was a hissing behind him, and he slowly stood up, backpedalling as he continued firing. He stopped firing, then held up a hand to signal the rest to do so as well.
The Covenant charged through the broken doorway, energy sword lit and plasma rifles firing ahead of them. John waited until enough had gotten through the doorway, and then detonated the charges. The Covenant screamed in surprise as the end of the walkway detached and swung towards the building opposite it. There was a loud metallic slam as the walkway slammed into the building, with the Elites tumbling down the length, before flying out the other end and towards the ground far below them.
Blue team turned around and continued towards their target. After exitting the walkway, John could immediately feel the incredible heat of the new was so warm, that without his Mjolnir, he'd most likely not survive for very long. This was without a doubt the place the Covenant processed the Magma for their warships. It was an oppressive feeling, that reminded John he was entering what could easily be a nexus of Covenant heavy industry. A monument to the power of their enemy.
The Covenant they encountered uniformly broke ranks and ran upon seeing them. They were all wearing barely any armor, and quite a few of the Grunts and Jackals didn't look very physically fit. The prospect of killing what could essentially be Covenant power plant operators gave John an awkward twist in his stomach, but he didn't hesitate when opening fire. Blue team moved with brutal precision, gunning down anyone and anything that moved.
An encrypted radio broadcast went out across the channels reserved for Coalition Special Forces. "Anti-Orbital defenses compromised by Asari and SPECTER operatives. "
If they were transmitting, then it meant that any hope for stealth of subterfuge had been lost already. That might make an exfiltration more difficult. John advanced nevertheless. The only thing that mattered was destroying the entire Covenant city and everything in it. Extraction was a secondary objective.
They entered a large room that almost hummed with power. It was at a crossroad between multiple different hallways, each of them marked with a different color, and with wildly differing symbols on the signs that marked them. As John scrossed, he noticed that the ground almost hummed with rhythmic pumps. He glanced around, noticing the other Spartans had felt it as well.
Kelly knelt down and put a hand on the floor, feeling the vibrations through her armor. John didn't even need to think. He instinctively took up a defensive position around Kelly. Whatever she was doing, it had to be important. Kelly glanced up. "I think we're approaching what must be a pump. The pulses we're feeling have to be the releases of magma from the caldera of the supervolcano, before whatever mechanism the Covenant uses to control the outflow kicks in."
"That sounds unstable." John asked. "Seems not even the Covenant can fully contain this much tectonic force." The thought reassured John. The Covenant were not infallible. "We should block the Magma. The pressure should build up until the Volcano erupts and destroys all of this."
"You won't get any argument from me." Kelly said, getting up and readying her shotgun.
John moved in the direction of the pumping rhythm.
Linda screamed in pain as a spear erupted from her chest.
A tall slender figure in form-fitting purple with an arm surrounded by a blue shield of solid light was standing behind the Spartan, violently ripping its energy spear out of Linda's back. She fell forward, her back smoking and limbs twitching.
John immediately switched his aim to the attacker and opened fire. Hitting him in the side with a burst of high explosive rounds. Golden shields lit around the attacker, and held against the onslaught. It moved its shield as it moved, keeping it perfectly centered upon John's gunfire.
John barely had enough time to shift his aim, before the figure darted forward too fast for the eye to follow and thrust for his chest. With one hand, he slapped the spear aside with the butt of his rifle, then pulled out his combat knife from his belt, flipped it into a reverse grip with one fluid motion and thrust for the attacker's chest. The attacker raised its shield, and John's knife bounced off harmlessly. The shield was slammed into John's face, and he recoiled, head slammed backward by the force of the blow. A fiery hot feeling spread across his chest as the attacker slashed the side of its shield across John's chest, cutting a deep and bloody gash through his Mjolnir armor, then stabbing for John's chest with the spear. He managed to avoid a thrust to the heart, but the spear punched into his shoulder
John lunged forward and slammed his forehead into the attacker's skull. There was a satisfying crunch, and the attacker went limp and collapsed onto the floor, twitching as its energy spear shut off automatically. He pulled out the Carnifex Samara had gifted him, and took aim at the fallen attacker, shooting it through the head.
A bolt of plasma hit the minute hole in his Mjolnir armor, and John screamed in agony as the plasma burned through his torso. He stumbled back, covering the hole with his left arm, laying down suppressive fire with the Carnifex in the direction the plasma had come from. He went down, leaning against a wall as he fired. His bio-tracker was going wild. The plasma damage had almost touched his heart.
John glared at the direction it had come from, noting one attacker running across the ceiling, while another on the wall, firing red plasma rifles. John opened fire. The golden shields of the attacker on the ceilling flared the first four shots, but then as the attacker went for cover, John switched to his Omni-tooled other hand and fired an incineration blast at it. The attacker was set on fire, stumbled and rolled across the ground, then fell into a heap. The wall-runner aimed at John, when a massive spike erupted from Kelly's shotgun and ripped its arm clean off.
Fred was on the back foot, avoiding a pair of knives from another of the attackers. Fred had ignited both his omni-tools, forming them into small bucklers with which he swatted aside the attacker's quick blows. Suddenly it's shield extended and wrapped around Fred's right arm. The attacker put a foot behind Fred's right leg, and pulled. Nearly throwing the Spartan onto his back. The attacker drew a short wicked energy dagger with its right hand, and began stabbing into Fred's chest with wild abandon. Fred twisted and spasmed at the brutal onslaught, then turned his left gauntlet into an omni-fist, and struck the attacker in the chest, punching clean through. The attacker was unperturbed however, flipped the blade into an icepick grip, and punched for Fred's head. The blade cut through Fred's helmet and out the top, cutting through his eyes in a single stroke. Fred stumbled backwards, clutching his face.
Kelly opened fire upon the remaining. The attacker sidestepped the shot, then returned fire upon Kelly before she could fire a second volley. The red bolts of plasma impacted her barriers, broke through them, then splattered superheated plasma across her chest. A bolt hit Kelly's shotgun, melting it in her hand. John concentrated fire upon this attacker, his rounds lighting up golden energy shielding, before popping them with a satisfying blast of static.
The attacker shifted his aim, and shot John in the wrist, blowing off his hand. He howled in pain. This distraction let Kelly get close, and she put her pistol against the chest of the attacker and opened fire at close range. The rounds punched through its armor, but the attacker punched Kelly in the throat with the side of his shield. Kelly dropped the attacker in shock, then brought both her hands together on its head, crushing it between her open palsm. She backed off, clutching her profusely bleeding throat, before collapsing.
John's wounds hurt too much for him to cry out. But a dark cold grip seized his heart as Kelly fell. He glanced over at Fred scrambling around blindly, and Linda lying on the ground, her legs twitching. It was like a living nightmare.
John opened the emergency channel. "Code: Xerxes. Spartan Equivalents engaged. Blue team down." He gripped the Carnifex tightly and took aim down the hallway the attackers had come from.
