Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [49]
Steamy clouds parted like a drawn curtain; a fireball one hundred meters across roared over Fred and Kelly's position. Fred traced the line of flames back through the sky and spotted the faint outlines of dozens of Covenant warships in low orbit.
Fred's Banshee skimmed over the treetops, down the mountainside. He pushed the craft to its maximum speed. Kelly followed, and they swooped into a valley and up onto the zigzagging ridge-line where Joshua had first spotted the Covenant invasion force.
He put aside thoughts of his fallen comrade. He had to focus on keeping his remaining team members alive.
Fred called up the mapping system on his heads-up display. A blue NAV marker, nestled in the crux of topological lines, identified their fallback position: ONI Section Three's secure-andsecret research facility buried under Menachite Mountain. Two decades ago it had been a titanium mine, and then the abandoned tunnels were used as storage until Section Three had taken over the mountain for their own purposes.
"We'll need to find a safe route through—"
A hail of purple-white crystalline shards hissed through the air, arcing up from the forest beneath them. Each shard looked like the projectile fired by a Covenant needier—but far larger. The shard that slashed past Fred's cockpit was the size of his forearm.
Kelly dodged one projectile, which exploded in midair. Needlelike fragments bounced from the Banshee's fuselage.
One tiny secondary fragment impaled Fred's Banshee and detonated. The port canard of his flier deformed from the explosion, and the craft wobbled.
"Down!" he shouted, but Kelly was already a dozen meters below him and plummeting to a distant dry riverbed. He followed, trailing smoke.
Fred confirmed his position and guided his wounded Banshee onto a course that followed the flash-dried riverbed below. The path wound through the forest, and sinewed close to Menachite Mountain. With luck, they could ditch the Banshees and make a short run to the ONI facility.
Overhead, tangerine borealis pulsed from the north. Sheets of silver crackled across the sky, and the black clouds boiled, lit by the raging fires beneath them. They piled into thunderheads and spat lightning.
The massive warships that had been overhead moments ago accelerated back into the upper atmosphere. Their engines screamed and left blistering wakes across the swollen sky.
For a split second panic seized Fred's throat. Then his training kicked in and his mind turned cold and metallic, and filtered through every fact he had on Covenant plasma bombardments. He had to think or die.
So he thought.
Something didn't fit. Covenant plasma bombardment had always proceeded in an orderly crisscrossing pattern across a planet until every square centimeter of the surface was glass and cinder. The ships above hadn't finished their work here.
He risked a glance to the left and right. One hundred thousand hectares of forest—the same forest that Fred and his fellow Spartans had trained in since childhood—was being devoured by walls of flame. Coils of heat and thick black smoke spiraled into the sky.
A wave passed over Fred and Kelly—he couldn't see it, but he felt it: A thousand ants had gotten into his armor and bitten him. Static fuzzed his display, and then vanished with apop. His shields dropped to zero and then slowly started to recharge. The grav pods on their fliers flickered and sputtered.
"EMP," Kelly shouted over the COM. "Or some plasma effect."
"Hard landing," Fred ordered.
Kelly made an unhappy sound over the COM and snapped it off.
They plummeted out of the sky, gliding with what little aerodynamics and power remained in their Banshees. Fred nosed his craft over the steaming rocks of the dry riverbed. He picked a path between boulders and jagged granite fangs, pointed toward a ribbon of gravel.
There was just one problem: A pair of these rocks were slightly darker than the others . .. and they moved.
The creatures were huge and heavily armored and moved with slow, deliberate precision. Each held a massive metal plate like a shield.