Chapter Six – Crash Course
Location Unknown – Somewhere North-West of Larue's Position
Gunnery Sergeant Caleb Keele wiped dust from the visor of his helmet with his gloved left hand, his M7S SMG up and tight into his shoulder with the other, its suppressed muzzle aimed at the corner ahead. He was crouched against the cool, smooth concrete of a nondescript building at a fork in the road, and he didn't want to take any chances. He had seen something down the left-hand fork, and gone to ground. It had been indistinct, but if a soldier on active duty learned one thing above all, it was that you can never be too cautious behind enemy lines. For this reason he paid no heed to the rumbling, distant explosion that reached his ears.
There it was. Finally. He had been crouched there for ten minutes waiting for confirmation. It was slender, humanoid, but strangely as of yet he had come across no Covenant Elites. He waited, his breath freezing in his throat. His patience was repaid. A second figure, similar in stature to the first. This one whispered something, and the two stopped by a parked police cruiser, its occupants dead behind the shattered windshield, splashed with their blood. The voice was unmistakeably human – Australian in fact. Marines.
He let out his breath in a whoosh, and stood. He waved a hand and called.
"UNSC!" the two Marines turned to look at him, jerking their weapons half-up, both MA5C variant Assault Rifles. They realised what they were looking at.
"An ODST? Christ you scared the hell out of us, man." One, the Australian one answered. The other spoke quickly after, his accent from the Western European Protectorate, possibly somewhere in France.
"Damn it, man. Where have you guys been? We're getting pasted down here." There was reproach in his voice. Keele shrugged it off.
"There's a lot of that going around." The Marine scowled.
"Gunnery Sergeant Caleb Keele," he introduced himself, continuing, "Where are you boys from?" He walked over to meet the two soldiers. They looked at each other, and then back at him. The Australian Marine was the one that spoke. Up close Keele could see there were bags of weariness beneath his eyes, and no additional magazines in his webbing. A short-range patrol. They had obviously been fighting for a long time. A heavy shadow of blonde stubble covered his chin. The European Marine was slighter, but more athletic, and he held his rifle tightly as though nervous to the point of snapping.
"2nd Battalion, 77th Marine Regiment. Corporal Bill Ferris. This here is Pvt. Moreaux." They saluted casually, much of their formality beaten out of them by recent events. Keele couldn't say he blamed them.
"Where's the rest of your unit?" Keele asked, already dreading the answer.
"No idea, sir. We know where some are – but the Battalion is scattered all to hell. There are another sixteen of us, dug in back that way," he punctuated this remark by waving an arm back the way they had come, pointing down the left-hand fork. It was a market district, the road lined with glass-fronted stores, one or two-storey buildings, many of their front windows shattered. There were abandoned stalls either side of the road, on the broad pavements. There were fewer cars along that fork of the road, most drivers knew to avoid the market district on a market day, so packed would it be with the mega-city's inhabitants – and that was exactly what the day had been when the attack hit. There were, however, a great deal of charred bodies. He could almost smell the death from here. The hot sting of the choking smoke was burning in his nostrils, the stench of decay underlying it. "We've got an uplink with the fleet, but they're too busy to talk to us lowlife infantry." The last words he spat with great venom. Keele understood; it was hard not to resent the flyboys at times, but Marines often forgot the amount of ship-bound personnel that had been killed in this war in the line of duty.
"Where exactly?" he pushed, and this time Moreaux answered.
"Dug in at a crossroads a little way down. They've been monitoring Covie chatter upstairs, and that's all the flyboys gave us. They reckon some of the Covies remaining armour is coming that way, going downtown towards a concentration of 3rd Battalion boys who are already under heavy pressure. This might be the beating of them." His tone was that of a condemned man. Keele wouldn't have that in any of his own men, and he wouldn't have it here.
"You say there are eighteen of you in total?" he asked, and received dual nods in return. "Plenty of Spankers?" he asked, referring to the double-barrelled rocket-launchers issued to Marine Infantry of all descriptions and vocations. More nodding. "Sounds like you could use an extra man. Who's in command down there?"
"Lieutenant Palmer." They answered in unison. There was a moment of silence.
"Let's go see Lieutenant Palmer then, Marines. Lead the way."
***
Larue and the battered band of survivors, Kagiso supporting Tanner, whose shoulder was now filled with biofoam straggling but for Hammond, bringing up the rear with his shotgun slung over his shoulder, and Tanner's MA5C in his hands. Yu and Larue were up front. Larue looked at Yu and could barely see the light-brown colour of his skin – his face was a mask of grime and fear, and his brown, tapering eyes were empty. The fabled thousand-yard stare. He supposed they must all look the same. They moved quickly, Larue thought west, along a broad main road. Either side the buildings towered above, what had once been graceful structures, office buildings and such, their windows shattered and their walls torn and tattered, metal spokes protruding from twisted concrete. They tried not to look at dead, instead focussing on weaving through the heaped debris and craters and silent vehicles, civilian and military. Buried in the front of a building on the left was a dropship that spat flames and showers of sparks. The smell of burning meat poured from within on the smoke that guttered and billowed from the wreckage, the debris and rubble tumbling over the crushed and battered wings and engines. The hold was dented and scarred and it was here where the smoke prevailed, the tail sticking up from the upside-down carcass of the dropship.
"Where are we going?" called Hammond from the back. Kagiso looked up as though she too had wanted to ask. Tanner remained silent and deathly pale.
Larue answered without stopping, his eyes never stopping searching the road ahead. "No idea. Away from the Covenant." He called. Hammond made a sound halfway between a gasp and a sigh.
"Apparently, your plan ain't going well. Contact!"
Larue spun and levelled his SMG. Two purple-blue craft, hovering a couple of feet above the blasted ground were speeding towards them, neck and neck. Ghosts, bulbous and compact. They spread out to come at the little unit from both sides.
"Get cover!" Larue called, and saw Kagiso react fastest. A deep crater was next to her, a civilian vehicle tilting into it. He threw Tanner in, and dove in after him, rolling to the pit of the crater. Hammond dropped to one knee behind a long, low-roofed, narrow civvie car, sporty and sleek, on his left. Somebody, Larue thought drily, would be really glad he had insurance. Yu rushed to take cover next to him. Larue took position the opposite side, behind the burned-out wreck of a convertible, its roof down, a small, sad, blackened corpse in the back seat. Larue tried and failed to ignore the implications of the discovery.
He peered around the front of the vehicle, past a shattered headlight.
The Ghosts closed, and bright blue bolts of heavy-duty plasma fire lanced from their twin guns, raking their vehicles, turning the metal of their opposite doors into molten slag, shaking the vehicles and hammering them back several inches. Larue looked to his right, anticipating the flanking move. The Ghost hooked around his cover pavement-side and tried to turn sharply. He raked the blur with SMG fire, rounds sparking along the sides and front, doing little to the light armour plating. The pilot was a Brute, he now realised, as some of the bullets cracked against its shield. To his left, Yu and Hammond reacted in a similar fashion to the left-hand threat. It raced past and was hammered by rounds, then spun around to come back. Plasma fire burned over head as the two threw themselves flat.
The boom of a shotgun interrupted the arms exchange. Kagiso had joined Larue's efforts, an unexpected threat to the right-hand Ghost, which attempted to train its guns on her as she emerged from the crater. She showed not a drop of fear, determinedly firing and then pumping the shotgun, round after round slamming into the Ghost's fuselage and the Brute's shield.
Something she hit was sensitive. Something sparked in the engines and strange, blue-tinged smoke choked from it. Larue leapt up and emptied his clip into the Brute. Its shields held, but it ditched its complaining ride, which slammed into the ground and skittered away into the wall, where it came reluctantly to rest. The Brute rolled to safety, concrete chips from his vehicle's impact spattering off his shimmering shield.
Larue dropped the mag as the Brute came to its feet. It was one of what the UNSC had termed 'Brute Ultras', a huge beast wearing far more armour than its smaller (as far as the word applied to Brutes) counterparts. It drew its weapon, a plasma rifle, its chrome surface gleaming. It whipped the weapon up and hailed fire in Kagiso's direction. She threw herself backwards, and the fire split the air where her head had been just a moment before. Larue gave up his attempt to reload. He had to act fast. He reached for a grenade, finding only the spike grenade he had had since the apartment block battle. He twisted it and primed it, and hurled it underarm. It embedded itself in the surface of the shining plasma rifle, where it hung for a moment. The Brute looked at the weapon and dropped it, but too late. It detonated, blasting him backwards and riddling him with two-inch spikes. It wailed piteously and gutturally, and pitched backwards, horribly wounded and leaking blood.
Larue turned his attention to the remaining Ghost, who was making life hell for Yu and Hammond, who were desperately keeping moving in opposite directions to make themselves less of a target. With Larue and Kagiso, newly recovered, they closed it down. It hit its turbo booster to escape, and jetted through a gap in the group. It rushed across the street, a short boost to give it room to manoeuvre – and it suddenly found itself encumbered as it drifted to a halt and began to turn around. For Tanner, the crazy son of a bitch, had lunged for the vehicle's rear, and grabbed a hold of the Brute up close and personal, with his one good arm. The Brute reached up with one arm to shrug and shove him free, but its own back was too broad, and it was like trying to scratch a problematic itch. The Ghost began to drift to the left, guns silent.
"Kill the son of a bitch!" He yelled frantically. "Kill it!"
Larue jammed a magazine into the receiver, finally, and racked the bolt. The four others lined up, and raised their weapons to their shoulders. Tanner disengaged himself, rolling back into the crater. The Brute looked somewhat relieved.
And then the four unleashed a respectable hail of small arms fire into him from close range, tearing him to bloody shreds. The Ghost dropped directly down, and Larue's breath caught in his throat.
Tanner!
"And he's okay!" came an exultant voice from within the deep crater, out of sight. Larue and the three police officers breathed a collective sigh of relief. Kagiso and Yu went into the pit and Hammond disappeared from view, while Larue stood stock still for a moment, catching his breath.
"What should we do with this one?" came Hammond's gravelly tones. He had a little of the African accent to go with his heritage, but not much, Larue noticed. Perhaps he grew up somewhere else. Larue looked over. The wounded Brute was still moaning and wailing in pain and rage. Its head and upper body were propped up against the rear door, passenger side, of the car tilting into the crater. Larue walked up to it. It snarled and spat, defiant until the end, as was to be expected from its kind. Larue jammed the muzzle of his SMG into its gaping mouth and fired once, blowing out the back of its head.
Yu emerged from the crater with Tanner, having taken over from Kagiso. He held his M7 non-suppressed variant SMG one-handed – the recoil would be a bitch.
Tanner was grinning. Laure grinned back, despite the severity of their situation.
"You know what, I'm no expert," Larue said to him, the ghost of humour in his voice, "this being my first day as a Shock Trooper, but doing something that balls-to-the-wall insane gives me the impression you would make a hell of an ODST yourself." Tanner looked inquisitive.
"So what did you do that gave someone that impression, Max?" he asked.
"I crashed into a Wraith tank in a 'Hog full of explosives to stop it shelling my unit." Larue answered.
"Jesus, Larue, where?" Hammond asked, his face disbelieving.
Larue turned away. "Abyssus III. Lets go, before their infantry catches up."
The others wordlessly followed.