"You went off-mission."
"We had sanction."
"From an uncertified, now blacklisted operative; whereabouts currently unknown. You went off-mission, disregarded the withdrawal order and, in doing so, effectively severed chain of command: endangering your team's lives and the lives of those around them."
"Spartan deployments supersede standard chain of command. We had a viable target of opportunity, as per Combat Directive EC-343-0-"
"Condition Zero? Spare us, Spartan. We're familiar with the term."
"Black Stone was in the city. Our A.I. had a lead on his location. It was a judgement call. We made that call. I can live with my decision."
"Well good for you. Now tell that to the ones who didn't."
- excerpt from Calamity at New Cadiz: classified excerpts from the Post-War Tribunals (published 2753)
Rebecca and Eric stared in silence at the map display showing Chimera's position.
Chidinma had hauled Rashid out in a retreating Armadillo convoy beetling south toward the edges of the ruined city. Rashid's condition had stabilised, though his vitals lurked dangerously close to the red zone. The bleeding had been staunched however, and an entire medical team had been tasked with monitoring his condition. With the right medical facilities he would live, but his role in the mission was at an end.
Of more immediate concern were the two blips denoting Damien and Luke. They stood alone in the ruins of the Dakhar Market, increasingly isolated from the withdrawing UNSC advance. Even further north was the identifier for Chimera Two. Viktorya had blitzed a trail of carnage north into the deepest heart of Insurrectionist territory. The helmet cam footage had been difficult to track, and what little Rebecca could make out was best not remembered. Still, for all her fighting talent, the Spartan had placed herself in a perilous position. Her marker was all but lost in the clustered heap of red contacts that pulsed angrily in the heart of New Cadiz.
The two remaining Spartans mission would be twofold. Primary objective was Attack Pattern Hydra. Regrouping with Chimera Two was an added bonus, but looked increasingly unlikely. Eric spared a glance over to where General Stape stood ensconced in orchestrating the wider UNSC withdrawal. Time was limited.
Eric reached forward and keyed the com.
"Spartans," Eric began, "I'm uploading mission details to your neural lace now. Private channel, eyes only. Standby."
Chimera One and Five scavenged the dead.
They moved quickly. Time was short. A pall of gun smoke still draped the air of the fire-gutted trade house. Spools of light speared in from where rocket fire and burring AP rounds had chewed through the brickwork. Deft hands moved quickly. Magazines were stripped from discarded rifles; spare grenades and ammo belts were smoothly unclipped and hooked onto combat webbing. The UNSC dead had withdrawn by the Rangers, together with any UNSC armament left strewn about the ravaged market. Deprived of friendly munitions, Chimera picked over the corpses of their enemies instead; procuring all manner of diverse fire-arms.
Auto-rifles, light support pieces with clinking ammo belts and perforated exhaust ports; snub-nosed revolvers and pump action scatter guns. Their new armament was as eclectic as the insurgents that faced them. From MA5 knock-offs with extended barrels to crude Koslovic assault rifles dressed in sanded wood and battered chrome. No two weapons were alike. Soon both Spartans were festooned in all manner of webbing; bandoliers and ammo straps. Both looked as though they'd been ripped from the cover art of the most gratuitous Section Three action vid.
Chimera didn't care. The Spartans had a mission to perform. If that mission just so happened to be wading waist deep into heart of the Insurrectionist army with naught but their bare hands and a can-do attitude, then so be it.
They ignored the tinny warble coming from the wider command channel. Withdrawal coordination, mostly, with the occasional call and return of firefights as opportunistic insurgents sought to push the advantage, only to be brutally chastised by the superior UNSC airpower, or the thundering burr of vehicle mounted weapon systems. That part of the battle was none of their concern. Kaizen, monitoring inbound traffic from the wider ChatterNet, eventually snipped it off entirely. They were on their own now.
"All set?" Damien asked.
Luke flashed a thumbs up, coinciding with a green acknowledgement light for emphasis.
"Prepped, Chief. Just say the word."
Damien pressed a hand to the side of his helmet.
"Chimera Actual, this is Chimera One. Acknowledge Attack Pattern Hydra, Fireteam Chimera are prepped and ready to execute."
Eric's voice came out tinny in Damien's ear.
"Understood, Chimera One. Target details will be uploaded to your system HUD, standby for briefing steam. From now on, this operation is strictly under the purview of the Office of Naval Intelligence."
There was a pause, then Eric's voice crackled again over the channel:
"Kaizen, note for the mission log. Condition Zero is in effect."
Condition Zero. The full combat directive was long enough to require a legal manual all of its own. It spoke of extraordinary circumstances; where the conventional UNSC rulebook simply no longer applied. Sierra 117 had set the precedent; from detonating Slipspace drives to commandeering UNSC personnel and equipment; the most celebrated of the Spartans had written the textbook on defying the odds, and that very same textbook sometimes meant that the traditional rulebook got torn in half.
Fittingly, Condition Zero was colloquially known as the Spartan Rule. Ironically, it often meant obeying no rules at all.
Data began hot-piping its way into the box inset in the corner of Damien's HUD.
Biological data, known associates, dental records. Everything ONI knew about the target scrolled past at a speed that only an augmented eye could track. The atrocities too. A UNSC informant, burning alive in a cage, pleading for mercy as Al'Hajar and his most fervent followers looked on unblinking, utterly impassive. A bomb-blast in New Phoenix, wiping out a café and the sixty people within. Children screaming in the streets, eardrums burst, limbs missing; their parents facedown and unmoving. Smoke washed pictures, blaring sirens. A tragedy a second.
Damien barely blinked as he took it in. He didn't need convincing. He had a fellow Spartan a half klick north and smothered in hostile contact. He was going in anyway.
"Target's name is Mohammed Al'Hajar, Codename Black Stone. He's believed to be coordinating Separatist forces in this theatre, though the degree and organisation of enemy force deployments is unusually advanced. This operation was big, even for him."
"Do we suspect external interference?" Damien asked.
"Unconfirmed at this time, Chimera One, but stay sharp - we still don't have a formal I.D. on the insurgents Rashid noticed earlier."
"Understood, Sir. We'll keep our eyes peeled."
"Happy hunting, Chimera. Pattern Hydra, execute."
The two Spartans set off, Damien on point this time. They picked their way through the remains of the ruined trade house into the streets beyond.
Here, the avenues widened and the buildings grew taller; offering a degree of metropolitan sophistication only seen in the larger cities across the planet. Advertising boards and major administrative functions swamped the faces of the larger administrative blocks, whose burnt out windows stared vacantly at them; skeletal in their neglect. High end boutiques, their display windows long since smashed in and torched to ashes, flanked them as they made their way deeper into the city. It was as though the innate savagery of New Cadiz had rejected its own attempt at sophistication, as a body rejects an organ.
An empty MagRail link - the Central Line - hung overhead, the prongs of its support arches jutting down like the ribcage of some vast fossil. The Spartans panned their weapons upward, cautiously scanning for snipers lurking in the shadows above. VISR scans swept negative. It was as though the Insurgents had not expected the UNSC to get this far.
The level of infrastructure on display complimented an Orbital Tether of Orbital Two's scale. The shadows of its support columns cast vast pools of shadow over the city; offering a welcome respite from the stifling heat. To the north of Central lay the manufactory districts, where the bulk of New Cadiz's shipping sector dominated the landscape. It was here where the Royal Commandos and several supporting elements, combined Mantis units and supporting Marine units alike, contested the field. It was a markedly different conflict to the street fighting that characterised the Battle for New Cadiz: all trench work and long range marksmanship. Their heroism is recorded in other tales.
On the very edge of Chimera's radar suites, red contacts began to cluster. Eric's voice followed them every step of the way.
"Objectives are twofold. One, eliminate Black Stone and any known associates. Two, capture any intel regarding OPFOR support cells. Logistical frameworks, weapon suppliers, off-world contacts. If somebody helped Al'Hajar stage this coup, then we want to know who, and why."
"Acknowledged, Chimera Actual." Damien replied quietly, watching the radar system glow angrier by the passing second, "We'll get it done. Chimera Team out."
Viktorya had not been subtle in delivering her retribution. It would be easy to find her.
All they had to do was follow the bodies.
Here, laying scattered in the middle of an intersection between a fire gutted office block and a boarded up grav-rail station was a score of heaped Innies. Small arms fire, solid grouping to the upper torso. The human in Damien took in the horror with practiced stoicism.
The Spartan in him approved of the ammo conservation and marksmanship.
They stepped passed an upturned technical; a civilian model Warthog. It had ploughed into a streetlamp, flipped on the kerb and upended itself halfway through the front of what had once been a convenience store. Both driver and passenger were dead; though whether it was from the impact of the crash or the bullet holes that had raked the windshield was difficult to tell. The rear mounted anti-material rifle had been torn free from its moorings, and had evidently been turned on the rest of the bodies further up the street. Not that there was much left of them.
Chimera moved on, sweeping the eerily abandoned street.
At one point they passed a broken public access terminal. An insurgent had been pinned to it - not by a knife, as was so often her custom, but rather an entire MA5B Assault Rifle had simply been driven through his torso; plunged into the touch-screen console behind. The man's leg still twitched a jig in rhythmic shock as sparks hissed and spat.
"That's extreme." Luke muttered, "Even for her."
Damien grimaced and waved Luke forward.
Viktorya's HUD marker lay beyond, in the direction of once mighty office building that dominated an open plaza before them.
The Admin Tower. A low lying city, the building had once been an impressive structure by New Cadiz standards; its lobby all back-painted glass and polished granite. The central support plinth for Orbital Two rose up immediately behind the Admin Tower, dwarfing it considerably. A centrepiece for the city around it, the building served as the primary operations centre for the entire city. Accordingly, a ten storey atrium had formed the architectural centrepiece, though the glass had long since shattered, leaving only the bare skeletal anatomy of the steel framework behind. The ground floor was entirely bare of people, save for the occasional broken corpse.
Gunfire rattled and echoed within; tinny and hollow, high above and snatch-stolen by the passing wind. From within there came an explosion, and a shelf of dust filtered down from the eighth floor.
Damien and Luke crunched their way into the lobby. The insurgents paid Damien and Luke no heed, so focused were they on the threat above. Even from here at ground floor level, they could the frenzied fighting taking place overhead. The stairways of the upper floors were choked with insurgents; each of them stacking on one another and firing up into the summit of the building at an unseen target. Damien didn't even need to check his HUD to tell who they were trying - and failing - to kill.
There was a screech and a man - arms flailing, legs pumping - impacted the floor of the lobby. There was an audible crack as the granite split; cutting his screams abruptly short. As if in response, another explosion shuddered throughout the building.
The insurgents had evidently run out of patience, and were resorting to indirect ordnance to try and dislodge Viktorya from her position at the tower's summit. Quite how the Spartan had managed to fight her way to that position was beyond Damien, though the shell casings that carpeted the floor led toward one of the side access stairs to the left of the lobby indicated the approach she had taken.
Viktorya, for her part, was weathering the storm, though the odds were a few hundred to one. Contact markers indicated in excess of four hundred and thirty six active targets within the immediate confines of the building.
Damien opened a channel.
"Keeping busy, Two?"
An angry double-wink acknowledgement light flared at him: the universal Spartan code for "busy".
"Thought as much. Sit tight. We're on our way."
Either side of the lobby fed into an emergency access riser; functional concrete steps with an unassuming, steel banister: wide enough to fit two people walking side by side comfortably. Or a single Spartan. These two cores were the functional aspects of the building; far removed from the glossy excess of the lobby they serviced. Perhaps more crucially, the access risers were fundamentally more sheltered than the central dog-leg stair that worked its way up the exposed central lobby; hemmed in as they were on all sides by reinforced polycrete.
"Five, cut right and take Core B. I have Core A."
"Solid Copy, Lead. See you at the top."
Damien stepped over the broken door for Core A. The indentations in the centre of the buckled metal matched the approximate shape of Viktorya's boot. Saves me the trouble, Damien thought, as he took to the stairs, three at a time.
He was fully three storeys up before he encountered resistance. Fifteen insurgents, all huddled together. All peering upward to where more explosions reverberated down the superstructure. Heedless.
Their mistake.
Damien opened up with a sidearm he had procured in the Dakhar market; a chrome-edged Wildcat revolver. He loosed a grenade for good measure. Six rounds, .45 calibre at close range. The revolver sounded like an artillery piece in the close confines of the stairwell. The targets were so closely clumped together that he scarcely had to aim. The grenade he'd tossed as he'd drawn detonated with a dull crump; a cloudburst of smoke and slicing shrapnel. Damien advanced into the maelstrom, tossing the spent pistol and drawing his next weapon; a Koslovic auto-rifle. It barked angrily on semi-auto, as his VISR picked out targets in the dim half-light. Innies were smashed from their feet left and right.
And so it went. Step by step. Inch by murderous inch. There was no time to reload, no time to pause or take stock. Damien simply dumped his weapons as they clacked dry; tossed them, and drew anew. The Spartan advanced on muscle memory alone; all but blinded himself but for the ministrations of his VISR's targeting suite. Every action was preceded by a grenade. Bodies collapsed past him, tumbling by; some on fire, others blinded and disorientated by the fury of the assault. One insurgent recovered well enough to lunge at Damien with a machete. The Spartan simply shouldered the man into the safety rail, pitching him over the side. The Innie bounced from railing to railing; breaking nearly every bone in his body before meeting the ground below with a sickening splat.
Eventually word spread of the assault coming from below. Hemmed in on both sides, the Innies rallied. A blistering hail of shots chopped down the stairwell above. Grenades; homemade and profressional grenade, began bouncing down the stairs. Damien flinched back as his shields sparked fitfully. The walls became studded with barbed shrapnel.
The noise of the incoming fire suddenly grew heavier than standard small arms fire. Somebody had the foresight to turn a support piece in Damien's direction. Fist sized chunks tore themselves from the polycrete floor of the landing before him. .50 calibre; enough to make even a Spartan pause.
Damien held position and opened his com.
"Five, what's your status?"
"Sixth floor." Luke's voice was strained with concentration, "Resistance heavy."
"Copy that. You're making better progress than I am. Pinned on the fifth: someone's got a .50 cal, and they're determined to take a chunk out of me."
"You hit, Chief?"
"Negative, Five. Shields holding. They don't have an angle, but don't seem to be running out of ammo any time soon."
"Solid copy, Lead." There was a pause. "I think I can be of assistance. Standby."
It was at that point that the entire floor above erupted in a descending curtain of flame. Chunks of tumbling masonry spilled down. Body parts too. The entire stairwell choked with dust. Damien was thrown down the steps, his back smashed into the wall, driving the breath from him. His shield system hooted in alarm as it struggled to cope.
"'Standby?!' What the hell was that Luke?!"
Maniacal laughter crackled over the com.
"Got my hands on an RPG. You clear?"
Damien peered up into the churning smoke. Any semblance of organised resistance was gone. So too was the bastard with the .50 cal.
"I'd be reticent to say I owe you for that one, Five. No more rocket fire in confined spaces, please."
"You're no fun, Lead."
Damien advanced; his armour scorched as black as the walls of tortured polycrete around him. He gingerly stepped over the broken muzzle of the machine gun that had, moments earlier, been trying so doggedly to kill him. Its operator was nowhere to be found. The Innie had simply been vaporised in the explosion. Daylight washed in from where Luke's ill-advised rocket clearance had breached the outer skin of the building. A narrow shaft of light beamed through; the air whistling through and clearing the smoke; a brief oasis of fresh air that was entirely wasted on the armour encased Spartan.
The staircase had been severed. Smouldering rubble glowed where smooth steps had once been.
Damien could have easily made the jump, but if there were any insurgents still alive overhead, they would be expecting him to come from that direction. Not wishing to jump headfirst into an ambush, Damien instead braced himself against the door accessing the sixth floor atrium, and readied his next weapon: a compact sub-machine gun. One of his last: the stairs below him were littered with discarded guns, spent magazines and smouldering shell casings.
On a three count he hit the atrium at a sprint, weapon raised. The walkway ahead overlooked the atrium. It was littered with casualties from already. The half dozen men who remained standing didn't remain standing for much longer. Damien advanced in a half crouch; feathering the trigger in tight, controlled bursts. The first three men jerked and spasmed as hard rounds twisted them about. The fourth's face came apart as Damien caught him with a tight grouping.
Then the magazine clacked empty.
Not losing a second, Damien simply hurtled the spent machine gun with a degree of accuracy borne from desperation. It clocked the next insurgent square in the forehead, caving the man's skull inward. Without slowing, Damien flicked a combat knife from a wrist-sheath. It embedded itself in the throat of the last insurgent, who collapsed face-first to the deck, croaking; his hands grasping the knife's handle in reflexive horror.
Damien stood alone on the sixth floor walkway, surveying the devastation. The sudden silence was deafening compared to the mayhem of the carnage.
Above, a few shots echoed in Core B. Luke emerged on the floor above, flashing a thumbs up. Viktorya appeared on the balcony of the ninth floor, nodding at them gratefully.
"Clear up here Chief."
They regrouped on the tenth.
Viktorya was intact, though the paintwork of her digital armour had been all but shredded away; revealing the chrome underlayer of the Mjolnir armour beneath.
"Good to have you back, Two." Damien smiled, de-polarising his VISR to emphasise the expression. "Now please don't ever go rogue on me again. Are we clear?"
"Sir, I -"
"Save it, Two. There'll be time later. Right now we have work to do. You get a fix on Black Stone's location?"
Viktorya nodded.
"Kaizen's signal trail goes cold in this building. But there's nothing up here but munitions stores and medical supplies." Viktorya reached behind her back and produced a small grey lump of clay, festooned with wires, "I found this too."
Viktorya held up a line of C-5 moulded explosive, all strung together. Linking them was a single remote transmitter.
" More UNSC surplus?" Damien asked,
Viktorya shook her head.
"Negative, Lead. It's remote wired. I disconnected the trigger-switch at source, but the encoding is sophisticated."
"Let me take a look." Luke took the explosives in hand, examining it. Of the three Spartans, he had spent the most time running demolitions training. His VISR scanned the computer chip as he turned the device over in his hands. Eventually he let out a low whistle.
"She's not wrong. UNSC encoding. Sophisticated is right."
"How sophisticated?"
"Remote activated carrier signal. Encrypted. Advanced enough to tell me that this isn't the only C-5 we'll find in this area. This whole area's gotta be rigged."
Damien put a hand to the side of his helmet.
"Chimera Actual, you getting this?"
"Chimera Lead, this is Kaizen. Sierra 239 is indisposed at the moment, but I am receiving."
"We've encountered high grade demolitions works in the primary administrative tower in Central. Advise all units that we believe further parts of the city may be rigged. Repeat: high grade demolitions, linked to a remote trigger activation."
"The Innies were throwing down RPG fire like it was going out of style." Luke interjected, "I'm not even sure they knew this stuff was here. Stuff this potent? We're lucky the entire building didn't go up."
"No thanks to your efforts." Viktorya scowled. Luke splayed his hands defensively in mock surrender.
Damien ignored them. Kaizen was talking.
"Understood, Sierra 451. Repositioning orbital satellites. Remote linking to your suit's neural lace now."
Damien felt a peculiar sensation as Kaizen remotely transferred the majority of her processing capacity directly into his armour. Liquid ice flooded his brain.
Kaizen was a newer breed of smart A.I.; one designed for system infiltration on a global scale; intended for wetwork and sabotage. A combat A.I.; built for maximum flexibility.
Where previous Smart A.I.'s had relied on a single, high-functioning processing core. Kaizen had been purpose built by ONI to be a more pervasive, elusive force. While she too had her central systems confined to a single processing core, Kaizen had the added ability of splitting and focusing her operating functions to remote locations wirelessly, without the need for tactile contact from a transmitting carrier. Not unless her full abilities were required.
Even in a city as war torn as New Cadiz, Kaizen had the full benefit of the existing ChatterNet infrastructure, not to mention the availability of countless UNSC satellites and drone sweeps overhead. She had been with Chimera every step of the way on their push into New Cadiz, jumping from system to system in the wider network. Now, to have all her manifold functions transferring directly into Damien's neural lace all at once, jolted him. The effect was immediately unsettling.
"Stand by." Kaizen said, her voice too loud in his ears. "Please make direct contact with the device."
Luke wordlessly handed the inanimate explosive to Damien, who placed his palm against the transmitter.
There was a buzzing purr in his hands as Damien's suit scanned the device. Invisible to his eyes, a frenzied battle of firewalls and pass codes took place in a manner of heartbeats.
"I'm in." Kaizen said at last. "Tracing carrier source now."
Damien's radar pulsed as Kaizen stretched her awareness outward; as if sensing the terrain for herself.
"You're in the right location, but the signal is coming from beneath you."
The Spartans looked at one another. Then they all looked at the elevators that ran along the spine of the building. Kaizen's face appeared in a small box at the corner of Damien's HUD. Again her voice seemed to emanate from between his ears. He did his level best not to let if phase him.
It was normally Rashid's job to act as her physical avatar in the field.
"Pulling a schematic from municipal records now." A pause, "Unusual. The plans show a two storey sub-basement. Parking primarily, with some ancillary storage for physical records and server banks."
"I can't help but get the feeling there's a 'however' coming here, Kai." Damien grimaced.
"… however orbital scans from the Carpathia detect an additional five levels beneath the sub-basement."
Damien wasted little time. He was already restocking his webbing with fresh ammunition.
"Looks like we're going underground, Chimera."
Far beneath the city, Pershing turned away from the data monitor and calmly looked at the man they knew as Conrad Hekeder, and nodded.
"She's in the system."
"Orbital scans?"
"They just swept us. Deep surface scan, from the Carpathia herself. They know we're here."
Conrad Hedeker sat back in the command chair. It was the perfect replica of a UNSC captain's chair, right down to the moulding. But then, the entire room as a perfect replica of a UNSC facility. Why should his chair be anything different? This was, after all, a game for the patient.
Beside his chair stood an A.I. holo-plinth. It sat inert for now, though Conrad knew that wouldn't be the case for long.
McBride and Petrovic entered the room.
"Al'Hajar's looking for an update." McBride growled. "Got his entire honour guard watching the elevators. Wants to know why we've ordered the rest of our surface forces to stay clear."
"Tell him to relax. The surface isn't what's important now. Not if he wants to make it out of here alive."
"What should I tell him?"
"Exactly whatever it is he wants to hear." Hedeker replied, disinterested.
McBride and Petrovic exchanged a look. McBride looked at Hedeker, tried again.
"We have Spartans inbound. Three of them. They went through the entire Admin defence line like it was wet tissue paper. You're not concerned?"
"Concerned? Why should I be?"
Hedeker then offered one of his rare, lipless smiles. He spread his hands wide.
"After all, we're right on schedule."