Halo_ Ghosts of Onyx - Eric S. Nylund [6]
They had made it through the factory, out the back side, where massive tubes sucked in
the ocean water for processing.
Lucy looked back at the factory and then to Tom. She offered her hand.
He took it.
They jumped.
In free fall, Tom struggled, pumping his legs. Lucy released his hand, and straightened her body. He did the same and then pointed his feet down a split second before he hit the water.
The impact stunned him, then he tasted salt, and choked on water that filled his helmet. He clawed for the surface. The lining of his SPI armor swelled, taking on water, weighing him down.
He broke the surface, paddling as hard as he could with his legs to stay afloat. He clawed at his helmet release and pulled it off.
Next to him, Lucy had her helmet off as well, gasping.
"Look." He nodded to the cliff tops.
From this angle Tom saw the Covenant cruisers over the field. Lances of laser fire rained down from the ships' lateral weapon arrays and blasted his fellow Spartans. Firepower meant for capital ship combat… how could anyone survive that?
A new sun appeared. The supercritical core flared and light filled the world. The cruisers rippled, distorted, their alloy skins boiling away in the heat. They disintegrated, bits blasted outward.
The rocky prominence shattered into molten debris.
"Down!" Tom cried.
He and Lucy pushed themselves underwater, diving to escape the overpressure and
incinerating blast. His waterlogged armor might now save his life.
Overhead, water flash vaporized. Droplets of liquid rock and metal hissed past him. Heat smothered him… and a giant hand grasped and squeezed until all Tom saw was blackness.
Tom lay on the ground panting. They had nearly drowned after the blast, but managed to shed their armor, and finally, exhausted, swam back to the shore, and dragged themselves around the edge of the battlefield and into the hills.
He and Lucy had made it to extraction point six where he had seen one of the stealth exfiltration ships.
No Covenant reinforcements came. They had all been killed when the reactor blew. Operation TORPEDO was a success… but it had cost the lives of everyone else in the Beta Company contingent.
All that remained of the factory, the Covenant cruisers, and ground forces of Beta Company was a glass crater four kilometers in diameter. No bones, not even a camo panel from a suit of SPI armor. Gone. Whispers in the wind.
Lucy pulled herself up against the hull of the Black Cat sub-prowler craft, her body trembling. She started to stagger back down the hill.
"Where are you going?"
"Survivors," she whispered and took one uncertain step forward. "Foxtrot. We have to look."
No one had survived. They had checked all the COM frequencies, searched the shoreline, fields, and hills on their long silent hike back. No one else was alive.
Lucy was tiny. Like Tom, she was only twelve years old, but at one point six meters and seventy kilos, Lucy was one of the
smallest SPARTAN-IIIs. Without her SPI armor and weapons, and her pale form covered only in modest body sheathing, she looked even smaller.
Tom stood and gently put his arm around her. She trembled violently.
"You're going into shock."
He found a first-aid kit and injected her with the standard postmission antishock medical cocktail.
"Survivors…" she whispered.
"There are none," he said. "We have to get out of here. The Black Cat's capacitors will drain in four hours and we won't be able to jump to Slipspace."
She turned to him, eyes wide and brimming with tears. "How are you sure we're alive?"
Tom was alive. He was certain. But as he cast one final glance at the crackling fields of Pegasi Delta, he knew part of him had died today with Beta Company.
He helped Lucy into the Black Cat prowler and closed the hatch.
The subprowler's engines thrummed to life, then dulled to a whisper. The craft lifted and angled up into the darkening skies.
Lucy's words asking if they were alive would be her last. "Posttraumatic vocal disarticulation,"