Chapter 60 – Sanguis et Ignis
May 23rd, 2526 - (09:00 Hours - Military Calendar)
Epsilon Indi System, Harvest
Edda, planetary capital of Utgard
(26 Years Ago)
:********:
Don jumped.
He landed hard on his stomach, feeling something large and hot whiz overhead and slam into the pod with a sizzling crackle.
He saw a pair of legs standing in front of him, raised his rifle and squeezed, bracing against the kickback of the stock. He was a quarter of the way through the magazine before he even confirmed that what he was shooting wasn't human.
The legs were too stumpy, the arms too broad.
The creature, the Gasser, was dancing to the tune of his assault rifle as bullets tore into its chest, ripping through the metal of its armor in splashes of blue gore. A shrill scream rung out from behind its gas mask.
By the time he released the trigger, the alien had already keeled over onto its back, leaking azure blood from the many holes in its torso.
Another flash.
A spray of dust coughed into his face, spattering off his visor. It couldn't stop him from noticing the steaming hole in the ground beside him.
A pair of heavy footsteps sounded behind him and before he could react, a large hand hooked under his arm and hoisted him up. He rose to his feet, stumbling into a run.
"MOVE!" Gad shouted.
Don barely heard him over the rattling din of rifle fire and the whining scream of hostile ordnance.
He straightened up enough to see, only to be intermittently blinded by a blazing fireworks show of crisscrossing tracers and green plasma bolts. The screen of fire was so thick that it was impossible to either dodge or duck below it, so he ran through it instead. He stuck close to Gad, using the larger man as cover. Experience had taught him that if there was anyone in Foxtrot who was able to take a beating and brush it off, it was him.
He held back an inner panic at noticing that they were surrounded on all sides by towering shapes that his brain struggled to recognize as buildings, buildings that seemed primed to collapse. Jagged holes pocked their walls, having gouged out entire floors and spilt their innards onto the ground. A pair of imposing, domino-like skyscrapers loomed ahead of them like the watchtowers of an ancient gate, linked together by the shattered corridor of a glass skyway. One structure was leaning forward, the other backward, both of them having been hollowed out up to their highest levels so that only their frames remained, shattered windows leading to nothing but blasted rebars and open air.
Weaving away from a particularly vicious spat of plasma fire, Don caught on to the way the ground crunched beneath his boots with each step. He figured out where they were at a glance.
The platoon had landed in the middle of a massive expressway. Resemblant of a series of interstate highways put together, it was comprised of four distinct roadways or over 16 lanes of asphalt, except it was near impossible to tell that it had once been asphalt. Much of the surface was scorched to a blackened cinder that cracked and crumbled with every step. The medians separating the roadways had been leveled into long stumps. Downpours of rubble from the surrounding buildings had crashed across the area, creating mounds of crushed cement and jutting metal. A scattering of blackened, abandoned husks of sedans, trucks and public transportation seemed to have half melted into the lanes like boats sunken in shallow water.
Over several dozen SOEIVs dotted the expressway and even the adjoining streets, sitting in small impact craters left by the hard landing. Their occupants were out on their feet, using them for cover, repositioning behind dead cars or throwing themselves into the rubble. They traded fire with an almost equal number of Covenant troops that had come out of the woodworks, similarly using vehicles and debris as a defense against the bullets that kicked up dust around them. They were mostly the squat Type 2s, Gassers, armed with energy weapons that spat green plasma with a semi-automatic fury, though it wasn't so easy to tell. The aliens with their itchy trigger fingers laid down heavy-handed bursts that were almost as fast as the high-pitched gibberish shrieking from their respirators.
They were a good deal taller than he thought they would be, perhaps just a head shorter than the average person. That didn't stop them from being absolutely ferocious.
It struck him then that he had just killed his first alien. It was something he didn't really have time to think about.
He was turning to see where Gad was leading him at the exact moment that a Gasser leapt out from behind a burnt SUV up ahead. Don saw the sphere of vaporous blue light in its hand which was already reeling back for a throw. He tried to raise his rifle, but the alien was faster, pitching it at them like a baseball.
He felt Gad's hand slam into his shoulder and push him out of the way. He fell onto his side but had enough sense to roll and keep rolling. He heard the object land nearby when his back bumped into a wheel. With nowhere left to go, he saw the blue ball brighten, a sharpening whine stabbing at his ears. He pulled his knees to his face and wrapped his arms around his head, turtling up a mere second before the explosion. The blast knocked him hard against the car wreck, leaving his ears ringing from the percussion.
Move.
The order came to him unbidden. So did the Sarge's words of wisdom: 'You're either on your toes or in your grave.'
He unwrapped himself. Quickly reshouldering the MA5B, he whipped his reticle onto his attempted killer as it tried to do the same. Bullets tore into its side, stopping it in its tracks. Don took a long pull of the trigger to add his own fire to the mix, pocking its armor in spouts of blood. The Gasser seized up and toppled back.
Don slid his boots back beneath himself and pushed off into a run, sprinting over the small crater left by the enemy grenade. Gad met up with him on the other side, his MA37 still trained on the creature.
"You good!?" Don shouted.
"No time!" Gad pushed forward.
Don jumped over the corpse to follow as he finally got an idea of where they were going.
On the northern end of the expressway was a large bus that lay on its side. There was a Nav point on its underside where several ODSTs were already gathered. He didn't need to see their faces to know it was Foxtrot. The way they carried themselves was enough to let him know that so far, the Sarge, Foss, Izzy and Ray had made it.
He spotted Chris running in from far to their right. His armor was oozing tendrils of steam like the fresh specter of a dead man.
A trio of plasma bolts slashed at Don's feet. Flinching, he anchored a foot into the ground to let his momentum swing him around into a crouch. He sighted a Gasser tracking him from behind an overturned truck. A succinct three-round burst from Ray's BR caught it in the arm and sent it reeling back to safety.
"Fox-9, come on!" Izzy yelled.
Don went back to running, not getting far before his boot struck a chunk of cement that knocked him off his feet.
A flash zipped overhead.
He tucked his head and led with his shoulder, arching his back so that he rolled into a seamless run.
Something had taken another shot at him.
He shoved that piece of information to the back of his mind, turning all his attention instead to making it to the bus which he accomplished with a final leap, slamming back first into the undercarriage. He'd slotted himself between Izzy and Chris as the last of the team to arrive.
"Is that everyone!?" The Sarge asked.
"That's everyone!" Gad replied.
"Alright, here's the situation! We've got an elevated sniper's nest at a checkpoint on the other side of this bus and two heavy weapons emplacements on the flanks, about 10-meters down! We need to multitask! Fox-8, you and me are going to take these Buzzards! Everyone else, get some frags on those emplacements!"
Checkpoint.
So much had been going on in the last few seconds that Don had hardly gotten a chance to fully grasp what had happened. They had landed either in the middle of or in front of an armed checkpoint. Their pods had probably smashed into an outgoing patrol. That at least explained how there was an enemy already in his face the moment he popped the hatch.
Emplacements.
The word itself made him cognizant of the hail of continuous plasma fire that was spraying out across the landing zone. There were at least two distinct sources, both of which were firing from somewhere on the other side of the bus.
In a heartbeat he picked up on the fact that the bus itself was sitting on the mouth of an exit leading out from the expressway. The wreck hadn't quite sealed it off but it was still taking up most of the route. The exit had to be much narrower than the insertion area. That by extension would make it a much more desirous kill zone.
Having spent the last second thinking about everything else, he refocused on his last order.
The Sarge was edging towards the rightward end of the bus and Ray towards the left. The rest of the squad split up to tag behind either one. Don slipped a grenade from his belt and pressed into the undercarriage behind Gad and Foss, waiting for Ray.
"Fox-8!?" The Sarge called.
"In position!"
"Fox, make the toss!"
Don primed his grenade with the others, took a step back and threw it over the bus, aiming high so that it bounced off the wall of the neighboring skyscraper and into the exit. More grenades followed in close order.
A series of explosions went off with a thunderous resonance. The sounds echoed up between the tall ruins alongside the hissing belch of secondary detonations and alien shrieks.
"Now!" The Sarge swiveled out in tandem with Ray.
The two opened up on something above, one with several semi-automatic shots, the other with a pair of three round bursts.
A gurgling squawk rang out, swiftly seconded by another.
"Snipers are down!" Ray said.
"Left-side turret is out!" The Sarge added. "Right-side is still in operation!"
Don heard a hollow THUMP from behind. He turned right as a rocket soared from the landing zone and wisped past the bus, briefly blanketing the Sarge in exhaust before another blast resonated from the exit, joined by a new round of cooking secondaries.
"It's down!" Teague comm'd.
Don looked again to the landing zone and found the action there simmering down. Multiple Gassers lay in pools of blood across the expressway, lying prostrate behind piles of rubble or beside civilian vehicles that ultimately hadn't done them much good. There was still fighting near the center where he assumed Sergeant Major Eversman and Squad Ferret were mopping up the last holdouts.
Squad Frost for its part was arriving in force from the eastern edge of the zone. Captain Teague was dashing at the front, slowing to give a congratulatory slap on the back to Frost-7 as the squad's rocketeer hefted the smoking barrels of his launcher.
"Fox, push up along the left!" The captain ordered. "Ferret, secure our six and hook back around, see if you can't catch up!"
"Copy!" Eversman replied, a bitter note making itself known in his voice while a spiel of alien gibberish was cut short by a crunch of bone.
"Copy!" The Sarge echoed. "Fox, move up! Let's go!"
Ray went in first. The rest of the squad turned around the bus and piled in after him in a hastily forming stack, weapons raised and twitching from point to point. They found themselves advancing over a curb and down the beginning of a sidewalk. Frost did the same on the opposite side of the road, allowing both squads to scan through the street in between.
The first thing to steal Don's attention was the sniper's nest. At least that's what he thought it was. What else could it be?
The circular platform of purple metal was shaped an awful lot like a three-pointed crown. It hovered a good five or six meters above a smaller base of similar design, the latter possessing three rampways that led to a central unit. He eyed the column of luminous energy at its center that chimneyed up into a hole in the upper platform. Some kind of anti-gravity technology perhaps. Whatever it was, it hadn't stopped gravity and one too many bullets to the brain from carrying one of its occupants to the ground. It was a Buzzard, one with a chunk of its skull missing along with a ruined eye socket. It was splayed out over a quickly forming pool of bright purple blood, a scene further complimented by the pained twist of its jaws.
He couldn't help noticing that while much slimmer than a Gasser, it was taller, taller even than the average human.
Its partner was draped over the railing of the elevated platform, a single large middle finger just barely holding onto its strange weapon. It was obviously a rifle, much larger than anything the Gassers had used but with an unusual appearance, as if some extraterrestrial weaponsmith had once seen a human guitar and decided to make a gun out of an instrument.
A few steps further down they came across a trio of three-faced defense barriers with a leaf-like design. They were chipped and charred, the cause making itself evident in the handful of blast marks that marred the ground out in front of them. Set in between each of them were a pair of tripods whose charges lay broken and sparking beside their supports. He wouldn't have been sure if they were guns at all were it not for everything else he'd seen this far into the mission. It was about the same size as an M41 but slightly bulkier, its overall componential profile reminding him of a closed animal claw or a dismembered roach. The splattered and disemboweled remains of several Gassers sat behind them where a combination of grenades and rockets had sealed their fate.
The two squads moved forward down the exit.
Looking ahead, Don saw where the street ended 60-meters away, opening out onto a roadway that ran on a perpendicular course. Beyond that road was their objective.
The Harvest Parliament Building was in sight. Their route would take them right to its southern wing.
He eyed the structure itself. Compared to every other building around it, it was relatively intact, casting it as a sole outlier within an urban clearing formed by a wood line of ruination. Its plastered walls remained whole including most of its five-storied height, not that whatever saving grace had been granted to its infrastructure had extended to its windows.
The crumpled remains of a low ironwork fence stood the full way around the perimeter, its entire length bent and battered with entire sections missing. Behind the fence, what had probably once been a stretch of verdant gardens, lush hedges and well-manicured lawns had been reduced to little more than ashened tree stumps, disordered stone pathways and decimated terraces. A variety of leaning statues of burnt marble as well as the broken artistry of decorative fountains were laced throughout the devastation, hinting at the beauty that once was.
As if surviving a planetary apocalypse wrought by the release of incomprehensible energies wasn't enough of a punishment, the building had been split in half. The culprit had similarly split the road that 1st Platoon was travelling on at a diagonal, cutting through the skyscraper to their right. It was an iron cable, one that shone an almost bright golden in the morning rays. But it wasn't just any cable. It was easily thick enough to match the girth of a starship's docking bridge. Its spindling form wormed through the ruined skyscraper, cutting along a rut pounded into the very asphalt of the street before slipping well into the parliament's southern yard. There, it connected to something that Don had to increase his visor's magnification to recognize. The moment he did, he realized what the cable actually was, causing his stomach to churn with a sickening constriction.
It was a freighter.
A human freighter.
Its boxy, segmented design suggested as much, as did the handful of thrusters built behind its stern. He took note of two key details right away, the first being that it had been torn into two shattered halves that sat beside one another, the other being that it was upside down as evidenced by the smashed remains of a bridge peeking out from beneath the crumpled mass of the stern. The surrounding impact crater showed no signs of the typical crash landing, no long scars in the ground or expansive debris fields. No, what he saw wasn't an attempt to land. The craft had simply crashed. The way the cable was running beneath its frame showed him that the metal line belonged to one of the Tiara's orbital tethers around Utgard. It also let him know that the ship had been riding that very same tether when it snapped. The truth that both the wreckage and the cable were still coupled together spoke to a grizzly story, a desperate escape to the upper atmosphere, a snapped lifeline and a long fall.
The craft hadn't even gotten a chance to fly. It had plummeted, likely tumbling hundreds of meters per second while taking scores of screaming civilians, men, women and children down with it.
He'd heard that the Harvest survivors were found in freighters that looked just like this one. He knew there was no chance that all of them had escaped, but he didn't think he would have his suspicions confirmed like this.
Compared to the rest of the area, the signs of the enemy's presence around the building were relatively pristine.
The pavement in front of the fence was covered in a line of the same ornate barriers that they had encountered at the checkpoint. Closer to the ends of the defensive lineup were another pair of emplacements that were visibly different from the ones they had neutralized, wielding dual-barrels housed within disc-shaped chassis that hovered over circular baseplates. They had taken positions at either corner of the parliament's southside sidewalk, unlike the matching duo of two new sniper's nests that stood watch closer to the center. The four hardpoints as well as the barriers themselves were manned by a slew of Gassers and Buzzards. However, their attention was mostly elsewhere, focused on the activity to the east side of the building where dozens more Covenant troops and emplacements were stationed. In similar fashion, the attention of the defenses there as well as their outgoing fire were concentrated on the ODSTs emerging from the surrounding buildings.
The troopers of 2nd and 3rd Platoon had reached their pre-planned positions a few seconds ahead of the 1st. They were moving in along the handful of streets leading to the target. They fired from behind cars and incidental roadblocks of debris, laying down cover for those rushing forward before charging on ahead as their squadmates returned the favor. Their push centered around a stories tall pile of rubble and exposed rebar that rivaled the height of the parliament itself, serving as the gravestone of a collapsed building. They wheeled around it while utilizing the excess of cast-off furnishings, jagged walls and jutting pipes to shield themselves from the storm of incoming plasma.
Their arrival guaranteed the platoon an advantage, a foe too interested in what was going on with their neighbors to notice the fresh trouble beelining towards them.
The double CRACK of sniper fire brought an end to that as the two Buzzards on one of the towers folded in on themselves, each with a new third eye.
Don had to admit that Ferret-4's aim was spot on. Though not as good as Ray's, at such close range he was virtually a high-caliber gunslinger.
The move sparked a general reaction from the rest of the defenders, shocked squeals and harsh squawks heralding a reorientation of plasma weapons towards the platoon. But the 1st was already laying into them, filling the decreasing space between either side with tracer fire that cut into several Gassers who had the grave misfortune of being caught out in the open. As their kin fell dead around them, the others retreated behind the nearest defense barriers while throwing up a stochastic wave of green bolts in reply. The two emplacements also swiveled around and began letting loose with twin columns of plasma fire.
It was a race, one that both Foxtrot and Frost won by a hair, dispersing into the clog of old traffic at the end of the junction.
Don kept his head down while crouching along the side of a sturdy-looking flatbed. Every so often the superheated volleys from the emplacements slashed across the air overhead. They were trying to pin them in place with suppression fire, not that it was working. Peeking past the truck's wheels, he kept track of the others who continued to dash from cover to cover at a cautious stoop. He threw himself onto his hands and knees and scurried under the flatbed before bracing his back against what used to be a decent-looking coupe. Ray was already there by himself, trying to find an angle on the last pair of Buzzards manning the rightmost tower. He couldn't move however thanks to the overwhelming rush of returns coming from the defense barriers.
He caught sight of Don and waved him over. "Hey, 9, I need a window!"
"Hold on!" Don went back onto his stomach and peered below the undercarriage. Past a few more vehicles, two Gassers were taking turns using the small gaps in one of their barriers to take a crack at Ray. Don waited for the first to finish so that as its partner rose up to fire, its head lined up with his reticle. A five-round burst caught it in the face. It dropped out of view in a spray of brain matter, causing its neighbor to hesitate.
"Go!"
At Don's word, Ray pivoted out, lining up his BR in the same motion. The Buzzard up above was focused elsewhere, only for its reptilian eyes to roll into the back of its skull as a three-round burst scalped it. Ray stepped back just in time to avoid a series of vengeful returns from its comrade that left several steaming holes in the hood of the coupe.
There was another high-powered CRACK that earned a gargling shriek from the last Buzzard.
"You're clear, Fox-8!" Ferret-4 comm'd.
"Thanks bud!" Ray replied, running out past the hood.
Don followed him, briefly glimpsing Squad Ferret as they arrived on the scene, bringing up the platoon's rear. He shadowed Ray down a small aisle of cars, firing past him the entire time in order to keep the closest Gasser from taking a shot at him. It worked, giving Ray the seconds he needed to close the distance and round the barrier, firing off a pair of point-blank bursts, one to the gut, another to the face. The creature's scream died in its throat as its lifeblood splattered over his BDU. Still running after him, Don thumbed the release on his rifle to drop out his spent magazine while he pulled a fresh one from a pouch. He rammed it home and yanked the charging handle just as he bounded onto the sidewalk behind Ray. But Ray kept going, running past the growing collection of dead Gassers behind the barriers. Don took off in his wake. It only took a second for him to figure out that he was gunning it towards the leftmost emplacement.
Ray was so persistent that he went out of his way to run at another Gasser trying to fire off at the platoon. It saw him in time to make a panicked turn, fast enough to aim its weapon but too slow to realize he'd already ducked. Ray cannoned into it with his shoulder, bowling it over. It landed on its back with a gasping wheeze only to find its assailant already gone and a new one bearing down on it.
Don saw it reaching for its gun and stomped its arm into the ground before lining up his rifle, but the creature's freehand grabbed the barrel, causing him to drill a wild grouping into the ground beside it. It pulled at his rifle, releasing a garbled straining noise. Don struggled to wrestle back control of the MA5. The thing was stronger than it looked, keeping him at bay while its large hand strained after its own gun, so Don let it, pulling up his boot to kick it square across the jaw. Its mask flew out of its mouth, giving him an up-close view of the ugliest face he'd ever seen.
Izzy was right. Shriveled up and pruned, it really did look like some godforsaken ONI scientist had decided to blend human DNA with a turtle's.
He saw the fear in its eyes, a thing that rather than inspiring mercy, merely reinforced its uncanny resemblance to a person. A thought briefly crossed his mind as he reshouldered his MA5B and pulled the trigger: 'If God made man in his image then who the hell made you?'
He spent another quarter of his magazine simply trying to erase what was clearly one of God's mistakes, stopping only after he'd left a pulped forehead and a mouth with more bullet holes than teeth.
He got back to running, immediately finding Ray firing his BR with one hand while chucking a grenade with the other. The burst buzzed through the skull of the Gasser behind the controls, knocking it off the gun and silencing its barrage even as the grenade bounced into two reinforcing Buzzards. The pair were both jogging over from the iron fence, both hefting shields of bright energy that reminded Don of those wielded by the ancient Greeks. Whether made of metal or plasma, they did little good against the frag that skipped behind them. A flash of fragmentation ripped into their backs with the power to launch one of them into the air. It twirled about like a broken doll, crashing down onto the roof of a car even as the second was kicked away, its spine smashing into the fence. To its credit, the lone survivor promptly lifted its gun arm where a ball of roiling energies was quickly beginning to form.
An ODST Don recognized as Frost-2 leapt onto the pavement and finished it off with a short retort from his MA37. The Buzzard's head fell limp but not before letting off the overloaded bolt. Ray jumped aside, letting the wad of energy strike the ground where he'd been standing with a searing impact. Don took one look at the bright glow where it had landed and pieced together that it definitely wasn't something he wanted to get hit with.
Additional gunfire drew his eye back down to the rightward end of the pavement where a bloodied Gasser fell out from behind the last emplacement. It threw a hand in front of itself to try to crawl away. The Sarge walked after it. He put a boot on its gas tank to pin it in place before putting a round into the back of its head.
The rest of Foxtrot and Frost filtered through the congestion and emerged onto the pavement while Ferret continued to guard the rear.
"Platoon, let's go!" Teague said, vaulting over the ironwork fence.
The platoon pushed forward. Advancing over the fence or through gaps in the bars, they entered what were once the parliamentary gardens, trading scorched asphalt and wrecked cars for decapitated trees and patches of burnt grass.
Don stuck close to Ray, trailing behind him in case his reckless streak decided to have another go. He could be like that sometimes, suddenly getting ahead of himself and hammering into whatever was in front of him, a typical byproduct of trying to keep a Helljumper's natural bloodlust contained behind a sniper's scope.
In the brief quiet, he snuck a few glances at the wider situation. To the right, the defenses along the parliament's longer, eastern wing were gradually collapsing. The network of over a dozen sniper's nests and disc-shaped emplacements across the outer pavement were falling. Enemy snipers were being methodically picked off by counter-sniper fire. One by one, turret gunners were being shot out of their seats or blown to pieces by incoming rockets. Both 2nd and 3rd Platoons were now closing in on the eastern fence. Their advance was quickly noticed by the enemy positions that dotted the main driveway leading up to the front of the building. More and more of them were opening fire in an attempt to stop them.
Don looked left and was greeted with an even wider sense of the battle.
To the west, past the fence, the ground dipped into a meters-deep channel of what seemed to be an abnormally large dell. The drought-like ground was cracked and parched, its course carving a path from the city's northern quarter and continuing well out of sight into the south. The Mimir River had been reduced to little more than a dry ravine, an artificial promenade between one part of Utgard and the other.
The street they had just left rose into a causeway that would have arched over the river and into the Utgard Mall on the other side, that is if it hadn't already been blown apart. As for the mall itself, it was nothing more than an open graveyard of leafless tree trunks dispersed across a dust bowl. There he could see a dazzling lightshow of human ballistics mixed with corresponding flashes of greens and blues, a spectacle occasionally punctuated by bright explosions. Scattered across various pockets throughout the area were a series of intense firefights, the closest of which he could watch for himself. Not far from the river, a platoon-sized element of ODSTs were engaging a matching force of Covenant on the other side of a clearing, in the middle of which lay the smoking remains of several enemy emplacements.
Delta was getting the job done.
He glanced up to the larger city. The capital's former beauty was still somewhat apparent. Despite its plentiful assortment of eviscerated structures, sinking buildings and large stretches of leveled suburbs, there were enough places sufficiently intact to get an idea of what Utgard used to look like. Skyscrapers with ornate, knife or hook-like dimensions stood tall, paired with apartment complexes bearing architecturally pleasing curvatures and overlooks.
Above it all, the Air Force were fighting for what was left.
Scores of the same teardrop aircraft that had harassed the battalion on the way down were now on the receiving end of multiple dogfights. Longswords gave chase, dogging them through the city's skyline in close-knit engagements. They weaved around buildings like predatory birds, zipping in and out of sight, getting so close that their ASGM missiles lunged after their quarry as their rotary cannon fire inflamed the shields of the opposing fighters.
He eyed one such dogfight that was rapidly getting closer as a Longsword chased an alien craft southward down the length of the Mimir River. The latter's energy shielding continued to flare as its pursuer's autocannon tore away at its endurance until it finally succumbed, popping like an electric bubble. The opening paved the way for a trio of trailing missiles to strike its fuselage. Two detonated over its top as a third snuck beneath it to strike at its underbelly, punching through its stomach and disappearing inside. A moment later the detonation flowered out of its belly in a fiery eviction of metal guts. The fighter dipped into an increasingly steep dive that ended in a bellowing impact into the ground. It slid down across the riverbed, kicking up a rising tide of dust in its wake until its momentum finally petered out beside the parliament. Its corpse sparked and burned as its killer soared over it in a roar of fusion drives, whipping the platoon and everything around them with a rolling wall of air. Behind the outgoing Longsword, its latest kill erupted in a final secondary explosion, throwing up a geyser of flame that fanned out like the tail of a peacock. The flames cast everything in the immediate area in a shroud of shifting shadows as its brightness briefly overpowered that of Epsilon Indi.
So far, the Covenant appeared to be on the back foot of the fight.
Don hoped it stayed that way.
The platoon was sweeping through a part of the outer yard that was sectioned off by the bare-bones branches of dead hedges. They moved through spots where the branches were broken down in order to continue following a stone pathway that led straight to the building. Except there was something in their way:
The freighter.
It had crashed directly across the path.
Passing from the hedges, they reached a more open area of the gardens where plots of decorative flowers and spruces were once in abundance. It was the last stretch before the freighter. The wreck was much larger up close, just one-story away from obscuring the parliament building from view. Having been torn in half, its bow and stern lay separated from one another by only a few meters. That hadn't stopped its crash from spreading an extensive debris field of dislocated seats, bundles of shorn wiring and slabs of hull plating that had embedded themselves into the ground like a hail of arrows.
They forged on regardless, or at least they did until the captain raised his fist. "Hold up."
The platoon slowed to a trot and then to an instinctual scramble for whatever cover was available. A fair share of training and experience elicited the reaction. They were relatively exposed, something they hastily sought to correct by scampering behind tree stumps, mangled water fountains, maimed statues and car-sized pieces of hull plating. Don reached one of the larger fountains and slid behind the protection of its main basin. Izzy came after him and crouched along to the other side of the basin for a better line of fire. The two of them watched Ray go a little further before stopping behind a jagged shard of wreckage large enough and thick enough to serve as a defense.
When they were hunkered down, all eyes turned to the captain who stood still at the center of the advance, having found a commanding position behind the ashen skeleton of an enclosed gazebo. He crouched down behind what was left of its iron-made wall. Though his helmet was polarized, Don could tell that he was staring hard at the freighter.
Eversman called to him over the platoon freq. "Got something, 1-Actual?"
The captain didn't answer.
Don felt a twinge of anxiety stab at his stomach. It wasn't like the captain to get spooked at nothing. Whatever he'd picked up on, it had him watching the ship with an unwavering focus.
A roar went up from the other side of the vessel.
It was deep and baritone, yet somehow oddly human sounding, not quite a beast but not quite a man.
Several more roars followed it, sounding off with a level of intensity that left no mistake as to its purpose: a battle cry.
Don tensed.
Suddenly there was movement around the ship as humanoid figures charged out from hiding spots across the wreckage.
Time slowed for him.
In the half-second that he had to understand what he was seeing; he understood little.
They weren't Gassers.
They weren't Buzzards.
They weren't even Maulers.
They were something else, something far more dangerous, something new, things that the Office of Naval Intelligence had made no mention of in their threat catalogue.
The newcomers were by far the most human-like species Don had seen thus far from the Covenant, which wasn't saying much since they were easily a meter taller than the average person, and with thrice the mass to boot. They had much broader shoulders and backwards facing, digitigrade legs that seemed to move without issue, covering the kind of ground in one stride that a human could cover in three or four. They sported an ornate blue armor reminiscent of the compartmentalized plate of medieval knights, albeit far more maneuverable. Though he couldn't make out their faces too well thanks to all the movement, he swore he saw something like pincers on their mouths, or perhaps that was their mouths. Either way he didn't have much longer to absorb these observations before the latest addition to mankind's list of enemies raised three-fingered hands wielding an even newer kind of weapon.
Time sped back up and his world came alive with gunfire.
The bow and stern of the freighter lit up with tracers that concentrated overwhelmingly on six spots, focusing on the six newcomers who had moved into positions of their own, using the larger pieces of the wreckage to protect themselves against the onslaught. Not all of them reached cover untouched. Don saw one of them take several shots about the body, enough to kill a Buzzard or Gasser, except none of it actually made contact. Instead, they ricocheted off a crackling envelope of energy shielding that closely resembled those he had seen on their fighters and ships.
They had personal energy shields.
As if the notion wasn't horrifying enough that something so big and so fast had even more protection, the aliens responded in kind.
Most of them were armed with guns that looked closer to crab claws with fins at the very ends, yet another oddity from the enemy's arsenal. They worked all the same, unleashing torrents of rapid-fire plasma that ripped through the air faster than the smaller weapons implored by the Gassers.
Don ducked as a spray of bolts hissed overhead.
The whining drone of the discharges buzzed in his ears while he waited for whichever one was targeting him to lose interest. When it did, he shifted back onto his knees and leveled his rifle over the basin. The limited effective range of the MA5B made him search for the closest target, doing so only thanks to Izzy who was already firing at it. He traced her fire to one of the stern's rearward thrusters. Hunkered behind it, the most isolated of the creatures was using the same type of long-ranged arms utilized by the Buzzards to lash out at the rear of the platoon.
"Ferret-7 is hit!" Ferret-3 shouted on the freq. "Man down! Man down!"
Don didn't have the time nor wherewithal to process that piece of information beyond a full-auto barrage aimed at the perpetrator. His shots were inches away from turning into strays. He resisted the vibration of the stock against his shoulder, keeping his fire trained on the enemy's general vicinity while he added his efforts to Izzy's. Though much of it stabbed into the thruster, a few sparked off the thing's shields with an increasing consistency. In a matter of seconds, its personal energy barrier grew so bright that it was forced to slip back behind its cover.
Don felt the dry click of his rifle. His hand fumbled over his BDU for another magazine while he kept the threat in his sights. He needed to make sure that one stayed pinned less it pick off the rest of their rearguard.
Off to his right, Frost-3 who'd positioned himself behind a tree trunk was trying to do the same with another of the creatures. He was suddenly sent reeling as a plasma burst gut-punched him with enough force to twist him off his feet, knocking his rifle out of his hands. He barely got a sound out before he crashed onto his stomach, only managing to drag his hand beneath himself to claw at the steaming wound in his chest before he stopped moving altogether.
"Frost-3 is down!" Someone shouted. "Medic!"
"Give me some cover!" Foss said as he ran out from the shelter of a neighboring piece of wreckage, braving the gauntlet of dead trees and flying plasma on his way to the trooper.
He'd barely gotten halfway there before another ODST further away took a bolt to the face that snapped his head back. He went rigid as steam hissed from his shattered visor, trailing his descent as his legs gave out. He fell flat on his back and rolled limply down the small pile of debris that had been his refuge.
Don wasn't sure who it was, but it hurt him all the same by virtue of knowing everyone in the platoon. He didn't even get to process that for very long as his eyes were drawn skyward by a ball of azure light that one of the creatures had tossed into the air. He recognized it for what it was yet struggled to comprehend just how high it had been thrown. It began arcing back down like a mortar, descending towards its target.
By some stroke of luck, Foss had noticed it as well. After reaching Frost-3, he squatted down, grabbed the ODST by the arm and threw him over his back in a fireman's carry. He took off running even before he was fully upright, ducking beneath the hail of plasma as the alien grenade landed behind him. He picked up more speed and jumped behind a nearby tree just as the brightening sphere went off in a whining blast.
Don spotted the creature that had made the toss sheltering behind a wire-draped chunk of the stern's innards. He got control over his fumbling hands and grabbed his next magazine, barely stuffing it into the MA5B before he started firing again. He watched its shielding spark in an electrified flare, then suddenly burst as a sniper round punched through its forehead. A spatter of blood caked the surrounding debris as the corpse twirled to the ground.
Don gave a quiet thanks to Ferret-4, reveling in the momentary payback.
It didn't last.
Like before, another round of roaring voices resounded across the yard.
Far to the right, one of the newcomers emerged from one of the upside-down landing struts atop the freighter's bow. It rushed down the ship's belly and leapt into the air. Mid-jump, a flash of energy came from its hand. It landed at a crouch and took off at a dead run, but the object in its hand didn't dissipate like a bolt would. Instead, it remained constant, sticking out from its grasp in the shape of a two-pronged blade.
A sword.
Don was caught off guard at seeing the thing sacrifice its own commanding position to run straight into a melee.
It made for the closest ODST, forging onward through the bullet storm that picked away at its shielding. Frost-5 was behind the leaning statue of a colonial farmer carrying a bundle of hay over his shoulders. He stopped firing to throw himself aside as the sword sliced clean through the statue's legs. Even as the limbs exploded in a gasp of vaporized marble, the creature recovered from its swing and lunged again. Frost-5 rolled to his feet still firing. He took a few steps back then flew apart as the blade scythed through his waist, casting his severed torso away from his legs in a splash of gore.
His body hadn't landed before the creature moved on, sprinting full force towards another broken down fountain where Gad and Chris were crouched. The former had already raised his launcher and fired off a single rocket. The fireball raced towards the alien who seemed ready to meet it head on before suddenly leaping out of the way, letting it race past while it resumed its charge with a growl of rage.
Both Gad and Chris pulled away from the fountain. The two of them made a run for it, though it was obvious to those trying to cover them that their pursuer would close the distance in a matter of seconds. Then Gad swiveled back around into a crouch. Bringing up his launcher, he fired again. His aim was lower so that as the rocket raced forward, the creature tried to jump out of the way, only for the fireball to land near its feet. The blast blew its shields away and threw it clear off the ground. It nevertheless managed to land on its back and barreled up into another headlong run. But its progress was stunted by another hail of fire that now plunged freely into armor and flesh. Blood spewed from newly made wounds, and in short order the alien sprawled forward.
Don stopped shooting once he was sure it was dead. Turning to his front, he saw a new and altogether unwelcome sight. Another of the aliens emerged, jumping down from the portside wing of the overturned stern. The second it hit the ground it began to charge. Ferret-2 had gotten the furthest ahead of his squad and had a pair of dead trees to thank for it. The approaching assailant doused his position with a seemingly endless barrage of plasma that kept him pinned. Ray and Izzy quickly redirected their own fire in an attempt to slow it down. Don did the same, but none of them could stop it from pushing through the gap in the trees and coming face to barrel with Ferret-2. Though the latter fired first, he couldn't stop a plasma burst from blowing his head off his shoulders. It spiraled away in a spray of blood as its owner slumped to his knees, falling to the ground with a thud.
But the alien had already moved on.
Don could tell where it was headed next because he could see past his own muzzle flash, allowing him to lock eyes with his friend's killer.
The thing left no room for doubt as to its intentions as it charged straight for him.
He heard a click beside him.
"Reloading!" Izzy shouted.
With a sudden surge of nerves, Don switched to short bursts, trying to pace himself so that he wouldn't run dry at the same time. Ray hadn't stopped. His typical three-round tirades pushed its shields enough that it took notice. Dashing past his position, it somehow managed to let loose while moving at what was essentially a sidelong run. Ray got clear just in time by sidestepping behind another of the statues, letting the bolts chip and boil away at a peaceful farmer with a rake.
Don seized the opening by rising up to dump the rest of his ammo into its center of mass. He watched his ammo-counter drain to zero at the exact moment that its shields popped, the force of its collapse punching the creature back a step. Flinching, it raised its arms in a wrathful bellow, during which Don threw out his spent magazine and slammed the next one home.
Izzy started firing again and so did Ray. Don couldn't.
The creature rushed forward with such speed that he didn't have time to aim. Panic sunk in and he started backpedaling with a will, laying into its stomach for a second time. The alien shrugged off the blows coming from all directions as it bounded around the basin and closed the distance with four quick strides. By the fifth, Don had turned his gun into a shield and the alien had turned its foot into a ram.
The kick cannoned his rifle into his chest with all the force of a charging bull, exploding the air from his lungs and bowling him off his feet. He somersaulted face first into the ground, rolled and kept on rolling. Though thoroughly dazed, he still had the wherewithal to tuck in his limbs and barrel away as plasma bolts zipped into the dirt after him. He eventually hit something hard, grabbed it and pulled himself behind it as fast as he could.
His eyes winced open at the pain in his chest. It was the closest thing he could think of to how it would feel being kicked by a horse. He tried to take a breath and failed to suck in any air. There was another surge of panic. He willed himself to calm down, waited a few more seconds for the pain to subside then tried again. His first breath came as a wheeze, his second as a gasp. By the fourth, he was somewhat back to normal. He steadily took in more and more controlled breaths to regain his focus.
He found himself sitting behind one of the tree stumps. Looking around, he spotted where his rifle had landed not too far away.
A fresh round of pain throbbed in his chest. He pushed the sensation aside and pulled out his M6. Slowly, he peeked his head around the trunk.
His assailant lay splayed out on its stomach several meters back the way he'd come. The blood pooling around it assured him that it was out of action.
"Fox-9, you still alive back there!?" Izzy asked.
Don saw her taking shots at another of the aliens with her carbine. She peered over her shoulder at him. The best he could manage was a thumbs up. She nodded and went back to what she was doing.
Looking to his rifle, he took another breath and crawled out speedily towards it. A lance of plasma struck the dirt nearby and spattered him in dust. He nevertheless grabbed what he came for and scampered back behind the tree. He grimaced as he inspected it. The MA5B was bent in on itself. The ammo-counter was offline as well as every other display on the electronics housing. Its crooked barrel assured him that the weapon was done. He flicked the release and pulled the magazine. Seeing that it at least was in good condition, he stuffed it back into a pouch and cast the rifle aside.
He peeked out again at his old attacker and sighted its own weapon half buried beneath its torso.
He pushed himself to a standing position. After a quick countdown, he rushed back into the open. He ran towards the alien and threw himself behind it. Using its larger mass for cover, he grabbed at the claw-like device with one hand while keeping his pistol pressed to its elongated helmet with the other, just in case. The device, something he guessed to be a kind of plasma rifle, was locked in its grip. Its former wielder's added weight didn't help matters either.
Being where he was, he was granted a better view of what these things looked like up close, not that he'd asked for it. The pincers he'd seen on their faces weren't actually pincers but mandibles. All four of them were currently wide open in a death gasp that exposed the plentiful assortment of teeth lining its jaws. It was reptilian in nature but far less avian than the Buzzards, much closer to a lizard or an alligator. Its dark gray skin appeared leathery and snakelike, an association that its long neck didn't help to allay. But it was most obvious in the eyes with their slit pupils that stared back at him with an unsettling intensity. He was almost tempted to put another bullet in its brain. The numerous bloody holes pocking the armor on its back made him think twice, however. He turned on his side, planted his boot in the base of its neck and pushed up. The thing really was as heavy as it looked. Even so, he pushed harder and soon was able to lift its chest a few centimeters off the ground, just enough to pull its weapon away. He let the body drop while he sized up its tool of the trade.
Up close, even their weapons looked different. Proving so large that he had to hold it with both hands, he figured it had to be at least over ten pounds. It didn't seem to be one weapon either but rather two curving, elongated components bridged together by a kind of handle in the middle and a vacillating tendril of electrical energy at the front. While the two main components looked a lot like collectible replicas of extraterrestrial blimps, he couldn't say much for the markings or other features on their surfaces. Apparently neither could his HUD which offered no icons or corresponding ammunition counts on his display. It couldn't so much as recognize what he was holding as a weapon. In truth, he wasn't so sure about it either. He couldn't even tell where the trigger was, if there was a trigger.
That didn't matter.
It was his now.
He lifted it behind his back and let his harness magnetize it to his BDU with a satisfying clunk. Still, he didn't feel right leaving its previous owner without some measure of compensation, especially after what it had done to Ferret-2. He pulled out his pistol and fired two shots into its head before getting up and running back towards the fountain.
The firefight was winding down. He could see that at least one more of the newcomers had been gunned down near the bow of the freighter. The last two were making their last stand from the concentrated debris field between the two halves of the ship.
"Took you long enough!" Izzy said as he slid beside her. "How's your-"
She did a double take upon spotting his contraband.
Don could sense the questions on her mind, but she didn't get the chance to voice any of them.
The two of them had noticed it at the same time. He doubted the rest of the platoon had missed it either.
Despite the fighting still taking place, it was easy to feel the slight reverberations in the ground. They were rhythmic, repetitive and getting louder.
Footfalls.
Heavy footfalls.
Don felt a chill in his gut at the idea that the Covenant might have some form of bipedal tank. Something that sounded that heavy could only be a tank, but what came marching through the gap in the wreckage was not. Neither of them were.
The two arriving figures were vaguely humanoid, yet it was obvious at a glance that they were not even remotely part of the same species that had just held up the platoon.
They were also something else, something ONI had utterly missed, though he still struggled to wrap his head around how they could miss something that big.
For one, they had a full extra meter of height on their predecessors and three times the bulk. Whereas the latter were simply wearing armor, these new arrivals appeared to be the armor. Their bulky frames were hunched over with what looked like a handful of metal quills jutting out from their backs. Instead of hands, they wielded a concave shield on one hand. The other ended in an enlarged, three-clawed stump with several strange vials spaced along the forearm that glowed a menacing green. They moved with the mechanical precision of automatons as well as the fluidity of living, thinking beings, the latter of which wasn't so easy to tell since there was no obvious face on either creature. In the place of a head was an angular helmet mounted above a flayed neck of pink, writhing muscles, or was that the face?
The platoon's return fire died down amid the confusion.
That confusion gave way to a dread that burned in Don's throat as the pounding steps of the two behemoths came to an end. They stopped right in front of the survivors from the failed ambush, stepped closer to one another and raised their shields with an unnerving synchronicity.
The captain's voice rang through the comms. "Fire and maneuver! Get some suppression fire on those shields, keep them pinned! Fox-3, Ferret-6, Frost-7, shift to the flanks! Smoke'em out with the M19s! Get moving!"
In response, the outgoing fire from the platoon picked up both in quantity and intensity. A blazing assault of tracers slammed into the shields of the alien juggernauts, ricocheting off their metal surfaces or burrowing into them. Though heavily outnumbered, the creatures held their ground. That was to the platoon's benefit, Don thought. Out the corners of his eye he saw Gad dashing up along the leftward edge of the yard while Ferret-6 and Frost-7 moved up on the right. All three were carrying rocket launchers on their shoulders but ran as if they were weightless.
The situation was getting desperate, and desperation demanded speed.
Don tried to buy them time where he could by scoping in with his pistol. He took shots at the smaller aliens behind the juggernauts. He managed to catch one of them in the leg. Though it bounced off its energy shielding, he kept at it in the hopes of making the enemy think twice about abandoning their quarry and charging after the rocketeers.
But then the giants responded, reminding everyone that they had two arms, not one.
The 'stumps' at the ends of their right arms came to life, the vials on their upper limbs brightening drastically with a hum of rising energies, and Don realized far too late that they weren't arms at all.
At once, a bestial-mechanical roar split the air as large spouts of emerald plasma spewed from their cannons and hurtled towards the platoon. There was no time to run, only to duck as the salvos struck the line. On impact both a tree and a statue were shattered to pieces. Though no one was directly behind them, the resulting airburst buffeted those nearby. Don also realized that the salvos weren't actually salvos when the juggernauts shifted their cannons, causing the streams of plasma to spread to the rest of the line like long-range flamethrowers. Dried bark and burnt marble exploded into flames, forcing those hiding on the other side to run for more cover. In moments, the giants had etched twin-walls of green fire across the entire front of the platoon.
The heat was intense. Don could feel it through his armor. He could barely see his targets now that the inferno had thrown everything beyond it into a morass of wavering images.
Gad and the others kept moving, racing against the clock to get into position.
Try as they did, they failed to reach their destinations before the behemoths unleashed another heavy flow of plasma, one directed at them. Gad dove behind a chunk of hull plating. Ferret-6 and Frost-7 did the same. The move spared them from the pillars of fire that surged over their shelters in widening arcs, quickly torching everything else around them. At the end of the second fusillade, the giants were encompassed by a self-made conflagration.
"Platoon, we're pulling back!" The captain barked. "Rockets, pull out! Everyone else, give them some cover then withdraw to the street! I repeat, withdraw streetside! Frost-8, contact the Swords! Call a strike on our position! Rockets, get moving, let's go!"
Don reloaded his pistol and worked the slide, feeling some measure of shame at his own sense of relief. As an ODST he was never one to run from a fight, but if they didn't run from this then there wouldn't be a fight.
He spent the next magazine firing in the aliens' general direction. All the while, he watched the platoon's rocketeers beat a hasty retreat from the flanks. There was no pretense made at trying to find cover in the rubble. The three troopers kept running until they were safely back within the platoon's ranks.
Then the giants fired again.
Thankfully the 1st was already on the move. They went in two waves with half of them staying behind to throw back suppression fire in order to screen the other half's retreat. The third barrage struck further out than the last. However, it hit nothing aside from dirt and debris.
Don ran with Ray and Izzy. He jumped over the corpse of his last close call and picked up speed in a bid to avoid the next. After a good 10-meters, he slipped to the rear of one of the statues and squeezed off the rest of his current magazine at the enemy. Once Ray and Izzy had gone past, he moved for his next withdrawal but flinched at a massive bolt of energy that cannonballed into the ground just several meters ahead of him. He ran through the raining dust and jumped over the small crater that it left behind. Pumping his legs, he looked over his shoulder just as one of the behemoths let off another large bolt of plasma that sailed after the rest of the platoon. It landed worryingly close to the Sarge, nearly knocking him off balance. He miraculously recovered mid-stride and kept up his pace through the gale of steaming rocks.
Their cannons had different firing modes.
The revelation was easily among the most troubling that Don had received today. He pushed harder, ran faster, accepting that at any second he could have his legs blown out from under him.
The ground trembled once again.
He glanced back and witnessed firsthand as the armored titans gave chase, charging after the platoon. The two survivors came on their heels, using their allies as mobile shields. It was the perfect defense and the perfect offense.
The sight caused a general rout.
Abandoning withdrawal tactics altogether, Foxtrot, Frost and Ferret broke into a scrambling dash through the parliamentary gardens, heading for the small maze of dead hedges that lay before the fence.
Don heard the distinct THWUMP of an M319 grenade launcher.
Trying his best to cover more ground, his eyes shifted to the remains of the gazebo.
His heart sank.
Captain Teague hadn't gone anywhere.
Not only that, but he was inside the gazebo, using the walls to absorb the smaller return fire from the reptilian duo. Simultaneously, he waited for his 40-millimeter grenade to begin its descent. The whistling ordnance bounced between the advancing juggernauts and rose high enough to deliver a powerful airburst to their backs. The explosion flared the shields of the two ambushers as orange blood spewed from the cracks in the armor of the two titans. The pair came to a grinding halt, ending their charge. The quills on their backs rattled in furious harmony with a series of growls that sent another chill down Don's spine, sounding as if they came from far more than just two organisms.
The behemoths turned to the gazebo. Giving the captain their full attention, they raised their shields and closed with one another. Still, the captain fired off another grenade in an attempt to buy more time for the platoon. This time the projectile bounced off one of their shields, detonating harmlessly against a tree stump.
Teague turned to leave, but the giants raised their cannons in unison and opened fire.
He was nearly out when the massive bolts of energy pounded the gazebo, the first ripping away its walls, the second shattering its roof, engulfing the entire structure in a green blast that sent pieces of metal hissing across the gardens.
Don couldn't bring himself to say a word even as the silhouettes of broken beams rained down within the smoking aftermath. No matter how hard he looked, he saw nothing else. His running slowed, then picked back up again. He heard himself screaming into the comm, yet he wasn't sure who was using his mouth.
"Cap is down! Cap is down!"
The moment the word reached the rest of the platoon, more of the others began to slow or stop altogether, all eyes shifting to the patch of smog where the gazebo once stood. It became painfully clear that none of them had realized the captain had stayed behind. The shock was lost on no one. However, the approaching footfalls of the behemoths immediately reminded them why he had done it, as did the gradually loudening thrum of fusion drives.
"Move!" Eversman shouted. "Don't stop 'till you hit the street! Move it!"
The rigor of the sergeant major's voice got them going again, pulling silent visors away from the smoking gazebo and back towards the street. The platoon covered the last stretch of dead trees between them and the hedges. They bolted through the gaps or made their own by shouldering their way through the wall of sticks, breaking them aside to clear a path for those coming behind.
Getting past the hedges, they proceeded to do the same to the fence, either hopping over it or trampling through its brittle sections. They poured back across the pavement and dispersed throughout the lanes of car wrecks, throwing themselves behind rusted frames and melted tires.
Don found the same flatbed from before and braced against the girth of one of the front wheels. Foss turned the corner with the limp body of Frost-3 still draped over his shoulders. Don waved him over and helped him rest the wounded trooper against the tire. To his surprise, Frost-3 let out an agonized groan, tilting his head ever so slightly.
He was alive.
However long that would remain so was impossible to predict. Nevertheless, after their luck over the last few minutes, Don was just happy to see him breathing.
"Can he make it!?" He asked.
Foss only offered a frustrated shrug as he rummaged through his rucksack and pulled out his biofoam injector.
Not far from them, the sergeant major hustled behind a car. Another trooper, the platoon's radioman, threw himself behind the same vehicle. He was frantically manipulating one of the switches on the boxy radio equipment fastened to his back.
The pounding footfalls were getting closer.
Eversman grabbed the communications specialist by the shoulder. "Frost-8, I need a sitrep! Where's that payload!?
"Flyboys are saying they're 30 seconds out! Coming in hot from our nine o'clock!"
Don took a look for himself.
In the skies to the west, a quartet of Longswords were soaring in beneath the chaos of the greater air battle. They were flying in pairs, one above and slightly abreast of the other. Gradually, the duos were splitting off from one another, one group curving north as another angled south.
Eversman stared at them. "We didn't call in two-"
"That other one's not for us!" Frost-8 explained.
"...What's the callsign!?"
"Payday-2-4, sir!"
"Patch me through!"
Frost-8 paused a moment then gave him a nod.
Eversman looked back to the incoming pair of aircraft that were now heading directly towards their location. "Payday-2-4, this is Ferret-1, Bravo Company, 1st Platoon! I need you to do me a favor!"
"It's your run, Ferret-1." The pilot replied. "Call it how you see it."
"I'm changing your fire mission! We've got two heavy-duty hostiles bearing down on our position! I need you to clear everything south of the parliament building between the freighter and Market Drive! Don't hold back! Hit'em with the ASGM-10s as well as the 110-millimeter!"
"That's danger close, Ferret-1. I can't make any guarantees."
"Don't need any! Throw the kitchen sink at them if you need to!"
"Roger that, delivering in 10 seconds."
Eversman called to everyone else. "Brace yourselves troopers!"
Don grabbed onto the side steps beneath the door of the flatbed. He set himself on his knees and observed, counting off the seconds in his head.
Nine...eight...seven...
From the west, Payday-2-4 and his wingman dipped into a shallow dive towards the parliament building.
Six...five...four...
He noticed the lumbering shapes of the behemoths stomping towards the hedges, ready to stampede through them.
Three...two...one...
The titans' progress came to a jarring halt thanks to the blitz of rotary cannon fire that stenciled a smoking path across vast stretches of the garden before stabbing through their armor, blowing out chunks of orange flesh and flecks of metal.
The lead Longsword launched an ASGM-10 missile and banked off to the south as its partner did the same. The two of them flew up and away above the platoon, leaving their twin payloads to continue their downward flight. Their passage left behind long exhaust trails that continued on and on until they terminated in two expanding domes of hellish fury. The explosions bloomed across the gardens, flowering out with petals of yellow-orange flames, large pieces of objects-turned-shrapnel weaving skyward on trails of smoke like numerous sprouting branches. The resulting shockwave whipped across the street. Don held onto the steps, resisting the push of the pressure wave until it subsided.
Though the haze slowly began being lifted by the natural resumption of the easterly winds, Don could still see a similar pair of explosions thundering across the northern side of the building, pluming upwards like the blackened canopies of rotten trees.
To him, it was woefully apparent that 1st Platoon hadn't been the only ones struggling to make any headway. His friends in 4th Platoon had also called in air support and had done so at roughly the same time.
The air was now full of all manner of particulates that showered the street below. A steady downpour of metallic fragments and pieces of wood bounced off helmets and shoulder pads, covering them bit by bit in a light layer of debris.
Eversman didn't wait for the dust to settle. They couldn't afford to. Ambush or not, there wasn't a second to lose.
The platoon, in the absence of the captain, followed his lead. They cautiously trotted through the frozen traffic and closed back in on the pavement. Beyond the fence, or what few sticks of iron remained in the ground to call a fence, was a wall of smoke and roiled earth. Don switched on his helmet's VISR mode, knowing everyone else was canny enough to have already done the same. The threat identification software on his HUD began highlighting the yellow shapes of dozens of tree stumps that had survived the explosion. There was, however, a sizable gap between them, two in fact. There were figures as well, though measuring by their distinctly human visages and the VISR's neutral highlights, they were just the remaining statues.
There was no sign of any red contacts.
Eversman waved them forward.
There was virtually no need to navigate the same routes they had used to get through the fence and the hedges since the two were almost completely gone. The platoon fanned out into a wide arc, a search pattern, weapons shifting from place to place while they combed through the damage with a careful stride forward.
Don saw some of the same stumps that he had run past now leaning away from the blast sites with their roots torn almost entirely from the dirt. Scanning the ground, he laid eyes on the head of a woman's statue passing by on his left, peering up at him from the mist with a pleasant, welcoming smile.
There was still no sign of their attackers, that is until the Sarge stopped at the edge of one of the suspected craters. "Found one!"
Don was nearby. He was one of several others that dared to step closer to his position. He didn't need to get too close, however, to see what he had found.
The blast crater was about two meters deep at its center and 20 meters wide overall. Within it, opposite to where the Sarge stood, was the upper torso of one of the juggernauts. Its legs were missing as was the arm with the cannon. Its shield arm was still partially draped over the rim, as if it had survived its fatal wounds for a very short while before finally succumbing. Not far from where it lay was the single solitary leg of one of the original ambushers, a leg and nothing more.
"Found the other one!" Ferret-4 declared. Ray was by his side when they stopped at a large mass that lay on the isthmus of unbroken ground between the two craters.
The Sarge started going around. Don and those who dared to trailed after him to the side of the first found corpse. They approached with guns raised and surrounded it. The Sarge took a step closer and kicked what was left of its helmet. There was no reaction, neither a groan nor a sigh.
So the bastards could be killed, Don thought. All it took was two 500-pound bombs and a whole lot of running.
Then without warning, the Sarge bent down and reached into the giant's 'face'.
"Fox-1?" Gad called.
The reply he received was a squelching pop as the Sarge pulled back and stood up again. In his hand was a piece of rope. At least Don thought it was a rope until he took note of its fleshy texture. That as well as the wads of viscous goo beginning to drip from it.
It was a worm, though it was so big that anyone who'd never heard of the Covenant could have mistaken it for a snake with some kind of rare genetic mutation, that mutation being that it lacked eyes and a mouth. It was all flesh, and it hung lifelessly in his hands like an intestinal parasite, or perhaps it was a piece of the actual intestines. But if so, why would it have come from the face?
"There's plenty more of them in there from what I can see." The Sarge said. "Seems like the whole thing is made of these-...whatever they are..."
"You sure you want to be touching that, sir?" Don asked.
The Sarge didn't answer. Don eventually picked up on the fact that he was squeezing the worm, so tight in fact that more of the goo that seemed to be its lifeblood began to ooze from between his fingers. At length he flung it away into the crater like a piece of garbage and moved on, prompting the others to follow suit.
Continuing alongside the platoon, Don saw that those furthest ahead had already reached a particularly large pile of debris, one that was still simmering. It was the gazebo. What remained of its ruined pillars and ceiling lay in a collapsed heap. Eversman had already clambered into the wreckage with Izzy and Frost-8. The three of them were quietly looking down at something that Don couldn't see.
The Sarge walked up to the steps of the gazebo. He looked to the sergeant major who, when he registered his presence, simply shook his head.
After a long pause, the Sarge nodded.
It was at that point Don knew for a fact that Eversman would be leading them through the rest of the operation. He began doing just that by walking on out of the debris and resuming his place at the fore of the advance.
The platoon moved on, no longer looking for their casualties. If they did their jobs right, there would be plenty of time to find them later.
The ghostly image of the freighter slowly resolved from the haze. The platoon carried on, passing the unseen bodies of the fallen on their way to the ship. They moved through the wreckage in a cautious trident formation with one element going between the bow and the stern as the remaining two went around them.
From there, the smoke was lifting, and the way was clearer.
The face of the parliament building's south wing was finally in front of them. The long cable of the Tiara's tether had cut through a part of it, creating a slanting chasm that exposed the innards of several floors. Eversman guided them into a determined sprint that covered the last of the ground between them and the steps, at the top of which was a large patio that led to a doorway. There was no actual door. Whether it had been blown away by the fighting done during the first battle of Harvest, destroyed by the orbital bombardment or simply ripped aside by the planet's new inhabitants, it no longer mattered. The platoon filtered up the steps, crossed the patio and stacked themselves into two neat lines on either side of the doorway. There was a corridor beyond, lightless and ominous in equal measure.
Don was one of the closest to the threshold. He was waiting for the order to push inside when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and saw Chris offering him an MA5B.
He briefly eyed it then took it with a nod of thanks. "Where'd you find this?"
"Ferret-2."
The image of the ODST's head flying from off his shoulders flashed through his mind. Don examined the weapon and took exception to the red blood covering parts of the housing. It couldn't be helped. On any other occasion, he would have refused it or put it aside out of respect. But now was neither the time nor place.
Listening to the sounds of fighting emanating from the northern and eastern sides of the building, Eversman raised two fingers and pointed to the doorway.
Ray and Frost-4 were on point and pivoted inside first. At their backs, the rest of the platoon poured in, VISRs on and guns ready.
Sanguis et Ignis - Blood and Fire