Had he pressured a young and inexperienced lieutenant to flank a superior enemy? Had he sent in air support with orders to saturate-bomb the area?

Fred didn't trust the Admiral's judgment, but he couldn't ig- nore a direct order from him, either.

He ran his team roster up onto his heads-up display: twenty-two Spartans, six wounded so badly they could barely walk, and four battle-fatigued Marines who'd been through hell once already. They had to repel a massive Covenant force. They had to extract Admiral Whitcomb, too. And as usual, their survival was at best a tertiary consideration.

He had weapons to defend the installation: grenades, chain-guns, and missiles— Fred paused. Perhaps this was the wrong way to look at the tactical situation. He was thinking about defending the installation when he should have been thinking about what Spartans were best at— offense.

He keyed the SQUADCOM. "Everyone catch that last transmission?"

Acknowledgment lights winked on.

"Good. Here's the plan: We split into four teams.

"Team Delta—" He highlighted the wounded Spartans and the four Marines on the roster. "—fall back to this location." He uploaded a tactical map of the area and set a NAV marker in a ravine sixteen kilometers north. "Take two Warthogs, but leave them and stealth it if you encounter any resistance. Your mission is to secure the area. This will be the squad's fallback position.

Keep the back door open for us."

They immediately acknowledged. The Spartans knew that ravine like the backs of their hands. It wasn't marked on any map, but it was where they'd trained for months with Dr. Halsey.

Beneath the mountain were caverns that the Office of Naval In- telligence had converted into a top-secret facility. It was fortified and hardened against radiation, and could probably withstand anything up to and including a direct nuclear strike. A perfect hole to hide in if everything went sour.

"Team Gamma." Fred selected Red-Twenty-one, Red-Twenty-two, and Red-Twenty-three from the roster. "You'll extract the Admiral and his staff and bring them back to the generators. We'll need the extra crew."

"Affirmative," Red-Twenty-one replied.

Technically Fred was following Whitcomb's order to extract him from his current position. What the Admiral didn't realize, though, was that he would have probably been safer staying put.

"Team Beta—" Fred selected Red-Twenty through Red-Four.

"—you're on generator defense."

"Understood, Chief."

"Team Alpha—" He selected Kelly, Joshua, and himself.

"Awaiting orders, sir," Joshua said.

"We're going to that valley to kill anything there that isn't human."

Fred and Kelly faced the three Banshee fliers that had been dragged into the makeshift compound. Fred peered inside the cockpit of the nearest craft and tabbed the activation knob. The Banshee rose a meter off the ground, its antigrav pod glowed a faint electric blue, and it started to drift forward. He snapped it off, and the Banshee settled to the ground. He quickly tested the other two, and they also rose off the ground.

"Good. All working."

Kelly crossed her arms. "We're going for a ride?"

A Warthog pulled up and skidded to a halt in front of them, Joshua at the wheel. The rear held half a dozen Jackhammer mis- siles and a trio of launchers. A crate sat in the passenger's seat, one loaded with the dark, emerald-green duct tape that every sol- dier in the UNSC ubiquitously referred to as "EB Green."

"Mission accomplished, sir," Joshua said as he climbed from the Warthog.

Fred grabbed a launcher, a pair of rockets, and a roll of tape from the 'Hog. "We'll be needing these when we hit the Cove- nant on the other side of the ridge," he explained. "Each of you secure a launcher and some ammo in a Banshee."

Joshua and Kelly stopped what they were doing and turned to face him.

"Permission to speak, sir," Kelly asked.

"Granted."

"I'm all for a good fight, Fred, but those odds are a little lopsided even for us. . . like ten thousand to one."

"We can handle a hundred to one," Joshua chimed in, "maybe even five hundred to one with a little planning and support, but against these odds, a frontal assault seems—"

"It's not going to be a frontal assault," Fred said. He wedged the launcher into the cramped Banshee cockpit. "Tape."

Kelly ripped off a length of tape and handed it over.

Fred smoothed the adhesive strip and secured the launcher in place. "We'll play this one as quiet as we can," he said.

She considered Fred's plan for a moment and then asked, "So, assuming we fool them into letting us into their lines ... then what?"

"As much as I'd like to, we can't use the tac-nukes," Joshua mused, "not in the far valley. The intervening ridge isn't high enough to block the EMP. It'll burn out the orbital defense generator."

"There's another way to use them," Fred told them. "We're going to board the cruiser—right up its gravity lift—and detonate the nuke inside. The ship's shields will dampen the electromagnetic pulse."

"It'll also turn that ship into the biggest fragmentation grenade in history," Kelly remarked.

"And if anything goes wrong," Joshua said, "we end up in the middle often thousand pissed-off bad guys."

"We're Spartans," Fred said. "What could possibly go wrong?"

CHAPTER FOUR

0711 hours, August 30,2552 (Military Calendar)\Epsilon

Eridani system, Longhorn Valley, planet Reach.

The alarm hooted, and Zawaz sprang to his feet with a startled yelp. The squat alien, a Grunt clad in burnished orange armor, fumbled and dropped his motion scanner. He keened in fear and retrieved the device with a trembling claw. If the scanner had been damaged, the Elites would use his body as reactor shielding. If his masters learned he'd been asleep at his post, they might do far worse than kill him. They might give him to the Jackals.

Zawaz shuddered.

Fortunately, the scanner still worked, and the diminutive alien sighed with relief. Three contacts rapidly approached the moun- tain that separated Zawaz's cadre from the distant human forces.

He reached for the warning klaxon but relaxed as his detector identified the contacts—Banshee fliers.

He peered over the dirt edge of his protective hole to confirm this. He spotted three of the bulbous aircraft on approach. Zawaz snorted. It was odd that the flight wasn't listed on his patrol schedule. He considered alerting his superiors, then thought bet- ter of it. What if they were Elites on some secret mission?

No, it was best not to question such things. Be ignored. Live another day. That was his creed.

He nestled back into his hole, reset the motion detector to long range, and prayed it wouldn't go off again. He curled into a tight ball and promptly fell into a deep sleep.

Fred led their flying-wedge formation. The purple and red air- ships arced up and over the treetops of the ridge, gaining as much altitude as the Banshee could manage—about three hun- dred meters. As he cleared the top, what he saw made him ease off the throttle.

The valley was ten kilometers across and sloped before him, thick with Douglas firs that thinned and gave way to trampled fields and the Big Horn River beyond. Camped in the fields were thousands upon thousands of Covenant troops. Their mass covered the entire valley, and thin, smoke-choked sunlight glinted off a sea of red, yellow, and blue armor. They moved in tight columns and swarmed along the river's edge—so many that it looked like someone had kicked over the largest anthill in existence.

And they were building. Hundreds of flimsy white dome-shaped tents were being erected, atmosphere pits for the methane-breathing Grunts. Farther back were the odd polyhedral huts of the Elite units, guarded by a long line of dozens of beetlelike Wraith tanks. Guard towers punctuated the valley; they spiraled up from mobile treaded bases, ten meters tall and topped with plasma turrets.

The rules had indeed changed. In more than a hundred battles Fred had never seen the Covenant set up encampments of such magnitude. All they did was kill.

Floating behind all this activity, almost brushing against the far hills, the Covenant cruiser sat thirty meters off the ground. It looked like a great bloated fish with stubby stabilizing fins. Its gravity lift was in operation, a tube of scintillating energy that moved matter to and from the ground. Stacks of purple crates gently floated down from the craft. In the afternoon light he could see its weapons bristling along its length, casting spider-like shadows across its hull.

Their Banshees leveled out, and Fred dropped back to tighten his formation with Kelly and Joshua.

He glanced again at the enemy ship and the guard towers. One good hit from those weapons could take them out.

Fred saw other Banshee patrols circling the valley. He frowned.

If they passed them, the enemy pilots would almost certainly de- mand to know their business... and there was no way of knowing what the established patrol routes were. That meant he'd have to take an alternate flight path: straight down the middle, and straight over the Covenant horde.

They'd only need one run to do this. They'd probably only get one run.

He activated a COM frequency. "Go."

Kelly hit the acceleration and glided toward the cruiser. Fred fell in behind her. He armed the fuel rod gun built into the Banshee.

They were six kilometers from the cruiser when Kelly achieved the maximum speed of her flier. Grunts and Jackals in the fields below craned their necks as the Spartans flashed over them.

They had to go faster. Fred felt every Covenant eye watching them. He dived, trading his altitude for acceleration, and Joshua and Kelly did the same.

Communication symbols flashed across his Banshee's wind- shield display. The UNSC software built into their armor worked only with some of the spoken Covenant languages—not their written words. Odd, curling characters scrolled across the Ban- shee's displays.

Fred hit one of the response symbols.

There was a pause, the display cleared, and dozens more sym- bols flashed, twice as fast.

Fred clicked the display off.

Three kilometers to go, and his heart beat so hard he heard it thunder in his ears.

Kelly pulled slightly ahead of them. She was now thirty me- ters off the ground, gaining as much speed as she could, driving straight for the cruiser's gravity lift.

The nearest guard tower tracked her; its plasma cannon flared and fired.

Kelly's flier climbed and banked to evade the energy fire. The bolt of superheated ionized gas brushed against her starboard fuselage. Energy spray melted the Banshee's front faring, and her ship slowed.

A dozen plasma turrets turned to track them.

Fred banked and opened fire. Energy bursts from the Ban- shee's primary weapon strafed the guard tower. Joshua did the same, and a river of fire streaked toward the towers.

Fred hit the firing stud for the Banshee's heavy weapon, and a sphere of energy arced into the base of the tower. It began a grad- ual tilt, then collapsed.

Kelly hadn't fired. Fred glanced her way and saw that she now stood in a low crouch atop her racing Banshee. She had one foot under the duct tape that had secured the nuke and now held the bomb in her hand, cocking it back to throw.

A shard of jagged crystal, a round from a Covenant needier, pinged off Fred's port shield. He snapped a look below.

Covenant Grunts and Jackals boiled in agitation—a hundred badly aimed shots arced up after him; glistening clouds of crys- talline needles and firefly plasma bolts swarmed through the air and chipped away at his Banshee's fuselage.

Fred jinked his Banshee left and right, and dodged plasma bolts from the three guard towers tracking him. He lined up for a second strafing run, and the Banshee's lighter energy weapons sent Grunts scattering.

A hundred meters to go.

Kelly leaned back, coiled her body, and readied to throw the nuclear device as if it were a shotput.

The Covenant cruiser came to life, and its weapons tracked the Banshees. A dozen fingers of plasma ripped the air; white-blue arcs of fire reached for them.

One bolt connected with Joshua's ship. The Banshee's impro- vised shields overloaded and vanished. The canards of the flier melted and bent. The alien airship lurched into a spin as its con- trol surfaces warped, and Joshua fell behind Fred and Kelly just as they entered the gravity lift of the craft.

Fred keyed his COM to raise Joshua but got only static. Time seemed to slow inside the beam of purple light that ferried goods and troops to and from the belly of the ship. The strange glow surrounded them and made his skin tingle as if it were asleep.

Their Banshees rose toward an opening in the underside of the carrier. They weren't riding into the ship, though; they were trav- eling too fast and would cross the beam before they were three quarters of the way to the top.

Fred snapped around. He didn't see Joshua anywhere. Plasma beams hit the well and were deflected as if it were a giant glass lens.

Kelly hurled the nuke straight up into the gullet of the cruiser.

Fred wrenched the Banshee's controls and arced the craft under the edge of the ship; Kelly was right behind him. The light vanished, and they emerged on the far side of the Covenant vessel.

Behind them, distorted through the gravity lift, Fred saw Covenant troops firing their weapons into the sky. He heard ten thousand voices screaming for blood.

Fred pinged Joshua on the COM, but his acknowledgment light remained dark.

He wanted to slow and turn back for him, but Kelly dived, ac- celerating toward the ground, and she entered the forest that car- peted the mountainside. Fred followed her. They were scant meters above the ground; they dodged trees and blasted through tangles of foliage. A handful of stray shots flashed overhead.

They flew at top speed and didn't look back.

They emerged from the tree line and over the powdered snow of the mountaintop. They arced over a granite ridge, came about, and throttled back. The Banshees drifted slowly to the ground.

The sky turned white. Fred's faceplate polarized to its darkest setting. Thunder rolled though his body. Fire and molten metal blossomed over the ridge, boiled skyward, and rained back into the valley. The granite top of the intervening mountain shattered into dust and the snow on their side melted in muddy rivulets.