Chapter Two - Scattered
He sat up, shaking his bruised head, and reached for his helmet. The visor was cracked, and so he tossed it aside. It was no use to him now. Instead, he sat and breathed deeply, composing himself. The street ended in a T-junction straight ahead. He looked up at the digital road signs glowing overhead. The T-junction was at the south end of the street. He looked over his shoulder, running a gloved hand through his short brown hair. The north end was blocked by an enormous blast door, the lights red – locked. The buildings either side seemed barricaded, so south seemed his only operable direction. There were no other HEVs, meaning that the squad was scattered by the jumping Carrier. He had to find them; though the rally point was like…nowhere. He suspected, now, that their target had never been the carrier – the controls had been firmly locked out, meaning he must have had a specific trajectory that was not going to land him on the ship. This stank of ONI. He shook his head against the pain. It didn't work. He climbed unsteadily from his wrecked HEV, and turned to retrieve his weapons. His pistol and SMG were fine. He holstered the pistol and racked the bolt on the M7S, then retrieved his webbing, shrugging it on. Fully loaded with his ammunition and frag grenades, he was as ready as he was going to be to move out.
He turned to face the south road, and began to walk, cautiously, rifle ready. He peered to the left and right as he reached the bottom of the street, the distant monotone of the city AI bleating about some traffic violation reaching his ears. Then, the high-pitched whine of anti-gravity engines. He rushed across the T-junction and into a doorway just as a bulbous Covenant dropship, a Phantom, nosed into view over the buildings, gleaming purple-blue like the hull of the Carrier, its miniature grav-lifts ringed with lights that cast eerie light into the quiet streets. It hung overhead for a moment, and for a second Larue thought it would pass, but then, the tone of it's engines deepening, it began to descend lazily into the street to an LZ somewhere off to the right hand-side of the junction, out of Larue's sight. Those things could carry an entire platoon of Covenant soldiers. His course had been decided for him.
He made his way left along the cross-street, the barking sound of Brutes yelling orders echoing down the otherwise empty street.
He turned a corner into a wide plaza, a walkway connecting the apartment blocks either side about two floors up their height. The plaza itself was sunken several metres below the rest of the area, the buildings raised up on concrete. Benches lined the plaza intermittently on either side. In the centre was a large rectangular trough in which grew several different species of plants and small trees. Some of it had sunk and broken into a crater where some explosive had hit, and soil spilt down like a landslide into it. One of the apartment buildings had a hole in it, encompassing three floors, the debris heaped against the side of the building, and cascading into the south-east corner of the plaza through the torn and twisted handrail. This area too was sparsely littered with the dead. Here it was mostly citizens. Larue heard a shout, and dropped to one knee behind the handrail, SMG up. He scanned the plaza below him, and the buildings, then saw the source. Relief flooded through him as he saw a figure in the breach in the right-hand apartment block. He was nondescript from this distance, but he could tell it was a UNSC Marine. He drew a pair of compact binoculars from his webbing and sighted on the individual. He was waving, and then when he saw he had Larue's attention, he began to make hand gestures, pointing to the street that led from the opposite end of the plaza. Larue read the motions with a cold feeling in the pit of his stomach. The Marine was youthful, freshfaced, though he was streaked with dirt and blood. He had evidently been through a lot. Twenty plus Covie infantry, Larue read from the gestures, led by brutes, backed by Hunters. He couldn't misread the last gesture. It brought a half smile. Get your ass in here, quick!
He rushed around the outskirts of the sunken plaza and began to climb the unsteady rubble to where the Marine awaited, now crouched, his MA5C rifle clutched tight in his hands. The voices of the approaching Covies could now be heard, rattling around the wide-open space.
"Hey, you an ODST? Follow me, the Sergeant's this way." He whispered, and without waiting for an answer, he hurried off along the creaking corridor, into the shadows and darkness. Larue followed suit, his footing unsteady on the already-sloping floor.
They reached a turn-off, half-way along which was a flight of stairs. Larue heard a sound he recognised, a kind of yelp, and he gripped the Marine's shoulder hard. The man nearly fell backwards, but Larue held him up.
"Listen." He whispered. His first word since insertion, he thought. His Throat was dry and cracked and the words were croaky and weird. He pointed at the staircase. The noise came again, followed by high-pitched conversation that both men could understand with their translation equipment.
"I don't like it in here…" the first voice squeaked. Grunts were climbing the stairs.
"Shut up and move, the humans are up here!" squeaked a second Grunt. A squat shadow, a metre and a half tall, with a pyramidal shape affixed to its back, reached the top of the stairs and stepped nervously out. By now, Larue was in cover on the left side of the corridor, the unnamed Marine on the right, both in the doorways of dark, silent apartments. The Marine looked at him, Larue could just about see his outline in the dim light. He raised a finger to his lips in response. Not yet.
The Grunt with its bulky atmosphere processor, trudged out of the way to allow a second and third to appear behind him. One raised an arm and gestured back down the stairs to more foes, out of sight.
"Now!" Larue yelled, causing the lead Grunts to jump in alarm – one screamed something indistinct. Laure's suppressed SMG coughed an almost flashless burst of fire down the corridor, the rounds ripping into the closest enemy, fountaining phosphorescent blue ichors onto the floor and walls. The Marine joined him, firing accurately down the corridor. At this range, they couldn't miss. The three Grunts were reduced to sparking, bleeding heaps of leaky meat in seconds. A plasma pistol was pushed around the corner, bright green bolts of white-hot plasma spitting towards them, and as the two UNSC troopers returned to cover, another pair of Grunts hurried into the corridor, taking cover, one behind an overturned chair, hunched low, and the other behind a trough of plants that stood against the right-hand side of the corridor several metres down. Green plasma spat furiously into the corridor, but the little aliens' bulk worked against them in the narrow corridor, meaning only a couple could face them at a time, and in this situation, the two humans had the beating of them. Another went down, its methane mask pierced and jetting it down into the dark emptiness of the corridor beyond, courtesy of the nameless Marine, who let out a whoop of triumph. The Grunt's position behind the overturned chair freed up for the next Grunt attacker. Larue's rifle coughed another short staccato that ripped into the Grunt behind the plant trough and shattered the ceramic trough itself, showering the floor with dust and compacted soil. The Grunt slumped to the ground in a pool of gore.
Larue, aware suddenly that the enemy were not running short on Grunts despite the five or six that had died already, let go of the SMG's pistol grip and took a fragmentation grenade from the left shoulder of his combat webbing. He pulled the pin with his teeth and tossed it the short distance to where the Grunts were emerging. It detonated with a reverberating thud that made the floor shudder and creak. The fallen bodies were torn up further, and charred by the blast, and the shrapnel whipped through the air all over. There was something screaming now, some wounded something further down the stairs, possibly on the next landing down.
Before Larue could tell the other soldier to move up, more green plasma fire whickered past from the other direction, startling them both back into their respective doorways. The other end of the corridor was lit by a gentle blue glow, which Larue saw emanated from the energy shields of two Covenant Jackals, birdlike and thin, standing with their heads cocked, hunched behind the protective barriers, their plasma pistols discharging around the edges where there were niches especially for them.
"Back! Past the stairwell, go!" Larue called, and in the strobing light of the plasma fire he saw the soldier, who appeared to be a couple of years younger than Larue, nod. He stepped out of cover in a lull in the fire, burning off half a magazine in the direction of the Jackals, moving quickly backwards. Larue stepped out to cover him, and the Marine began to run into the darkness. Several seconds later, he heard the man's rifle start up again, and Larue began to move back, crouching low, As he passed the staircase, he saw the source of the screaming. Lying on the landing where the stairs doubled back was a Grunt, screaming and wounded, as he moved, he mercy killed it, a round to the head. The stairs were dripping with alien gore. He computed events in his mind – evidently, the approaching column of Covies outside had known that there was a detachment of human troops in here, and had been sent to flank them. The Grunts had been sent up to infiltrate, and be a diversion, but when they had met resistance coming the other way, they had sent the Jackals and probably more besides, to flank said resistance, which they had successfully done. Now he and the as-yet nameless Marine had to redouble their efforts to reach his Sergeant and warn him they were being encircled.
He reached the Marine where the corridor turned diagonally right. The Jackals were far behind now, and he could hear the clicking, hissing sounds of their chatter as they began to advance. He crouched next to the man as he continued to fire back the way they came.
"What the hell is your name, Marine?" he asked. The man looked at him and grinned.
"Private First Class Dean Tanner, D Company. Yours?" he looked back to the encroaching Jackals.
"Private First Class Max Larue, B Company, ODSTs. Good to meet you."
"You too."
The two men chuckled at the moment of levity after their almost-deaths, and then the two of them began to run down the corridor. They ran past open apartments, their dead occupants strewn on the floor. They passed wrecked apartments, containing the bodies of Marines and Police and Covenant. They passed through a representation of what awaited them throughout the remains of New Mombasa. Horror. They reached the doorway at the bottom as the Jackals rounded the corner, now with barking, yelping Grunts moving behind them, two by two. At the very back was the bulky, ape-like form of a Brute, a plasma rifle in his hand, blazing red death down the corridor towards them. Tanner hit a switch by the door and a heavy fire door slid shut over the opening and locked. It wouldn't hold for long – but it would buy them time. Pretty soon they would either make their way up or down, and around the locked door, or they would bust through this one, or both.
The two men looked at each other, a moment of silent understanding. Then they began to rush, Larue following Tanner to his superior.