Beta Company’s Victory at Pegasi Delta

1135 HOURS, JULY 3, 2545 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \
51 PEGASI-B SYSTEM, TARGET AREA APACHE, PLANET PEGASI DELTA

The orbital pod impacted, and metal wrenched and sparked. Inside his cocoon of titanium, lead foil, and stealth ablative coating, SPARTAN-B292 watched black stars explode across his vision, he tasted blood in his mouth, and the last air compressed from his lungs.

Tom’s training kicked in: he pulled the pod’s twisted frame apart and blinked in the bright blue sunlight.

Something was wrong. 85 Pegasi-914A was supposed to be a faint yellow sun. This was electric blue—boiling plasma blue.

He jumped, rolling to one side as the blast washed over him. The outer layers of his Semi-Powered Infiltration armor boiled and peeled like a bad sunburn.

“Training,” his instructor, Lieutenant Commander Ambrose, had said. “Your training must become part of your instinct. Drill until it becomes part of your bones.” Tom reacted without thought; a lifetime of training took over.

He raised his MA5K assault rifle and fired along the trajectory of the plasma bolt, making sure to sweep low.

His eyes cleared, and as he automatically reloaded his weapon, he finally saw the surface of Pegasi Delta. It could have been hell: red rocks; orange dust-filled sky; the scars of a dozen impact skids and craters around him; and thirty meters ahead, dark purple splashes of Jackal blood soaking into the sand.

Tom pulled out his sidearm and warily moved to the fallen aliens. There were five with extensive wounds to their lower legs. He shot them each once in their odd angular vulturelike heads, then he knelt, relieved them of their plasma grenades, and stripped off their forearm force shields.

Although Tom wore a full suit of Semi-Powered Infiltration armor (colloquially called “SPI” armor by Section Three technophiles), its hardened plates and photo-reactive panels could only take a few glancing shots before failing. The armor’s camouflaging textures sputtered and stabilized, however; and once again blended into the rocky terrain.

Every SPARTAN-III had received extensive training in using the enemy’s equipment, so Tom would improvise. He strapped one of the Jackal shields to his forearm. It was excellent protection, as long as you remembered to crouch behind it and cover your legs, a tactic larger UNSC soldiers would have trouble accomplishing.

The display on his faceplate flickered to life, a transparent layer of ghostly green topology. One hundred kilometers overhead, the baseball-sized Stealth Tactical Aerial Reconnaissance Satellite, or STARS, had come online.

A single blinking dot appeared that represented his position. Tom was five kilometers south of the primary target.

He scanned the horizon and saw the Covenant factory city in the distance, looming from the rocky surface like a castle of rust with giant smokestacks and blue plasma coils pulsing deep inside. Beyond the factory lay the lavender shoreline of a toxic sea.

Additional dots appeared on his heads-up screen . . . a dozen, two dozen, and then hundreds. The rest of Beta Company was online. Two hundred ninety-one of them. Nine hadn’t made it, either dead on reentry or killed from the impact or by Covenant forces before they could get out of the pods.

After the mission, he’d check the roster to see who they’d lost. For now, he stuffed his feelings into a dark corner of his mind.

Tom sighed with relief as he saw the eight Xs representing the subprowler Black Cat exfiltration craft appear and then fade on his display. That was their only way off this rock after Operation TORPEDO was accomplished.

Text scrolled on his display: “TEAM FOXTROT PROCEED ON VECTOR ZERO EIGHT SIX. PROVIDE FLANKING SUPPORT TO TEAM INDIA.”

No reply was necessary. Orders were broadcast from STARS overhead, and any break of radio silence would reveal their position.

Three of the dots on the display winked, and tiny numbers faded into view. B091 was Lucy. B174 was Min. And B004, that was Adam. His friends. Fireteam Foxtrot.

Tom loped forward, found an outcropping of rock, and took cover under it, waiting for them to catch up.

To stay on task, and not get distracted by his racing heartbeat, he reviewed Operation TORPEDO one more time. Pegasi Delta was home to a Covenant refinery. The sea on this tiny world was unusually rich in deuterium and tritium, which they used in their plasma reactors. The factory processed the stuff, and refueled their ships, making this Covenant operation on the edge of UNSC territory a prime target. It allowed the enemy easy access to human space.

There had been previous operations to neutralize the target. UNSC CENTCOM had sent nukes, launched from Slipspace, but plutonium emitted an aura of Cherenkov radiation upon reentering normal space, making all the stealth coatings and lead linings useless. The Covenant had easily detected and destroyed them.

There were similarly too many Covenant ships near the moon to send a slow, distantly launched nuke in normal space. Nor was a regular invasion or even the elite Helljumper ODSTs worth the attempt. The UNSC had one chance to take the factory out before the enemy would muster their defenses.

So they were sent.

The three hundred Spartans of Beta Company had been launched seven hours ago into Slipspace from the UNSC carrier All Under Heaven. They had endured the ride in long-range stealth orbital drop pods, suffered debilitating nausea transitioning unshielded into normal space, and then got parboiled on the fiery ride to the surface of Pegasi Delta.

From the warm welcome given by those five Jackals, Tom knew they’d been detected, but the Covenant might not yet know the size of the breach in their security. He’d have to move quick, take advantage of whatever element of surprise remained, blow the factory, and if possible, the secondary targets of ammunition depots and methane reserves.

They could still do this. They had to do it. Destroying that factory would triple the length of the Covenant supply lines to UNSC space. This is exactly what Tom had trained for since he was six years old—years of drills and war games and schooling. But that might not be enough.

He heard the crunch of gravel under a boot. He spun, rifle raised, and saw Lucy.

Every SPARTAN-III looked the same in their Semi-Powered Infiltration armor. The angular shifting camo pattern of the SPI armor was one part legionnaire mail, one part tactical body armor, and one part chameleon. Tom, however, recognized Lucy’s short, careful gait.

He made the two-fingers-over-faceplate gesture, the age-old silenced Spartan welcome. She gave him the slightest of nods.

Tom handed her a Jackal shield unit and two plasma grenades.

Adam arrived next, and Min ten seconds after that.

When all their appropriated shields were in place, Tom gave Team Foxtrot a series of quick, sharp hand gestures, ordering them to move ahead in a loose arc formation. Stealthy, but fast.

As he stood, thunder rumbled, fire flashed in the sky, and a shadow covered them—and vanished. Two teardrop-shaped Covenant Seraph fighters roared over their hiding spot.

A line of plasma erupted a hundred meters behind them—an inferno that billowed and blossomed straight toward his team.

Tom leapt to one side, activating his Jackal shield, holding it between him and the three-thousand-degree flames that would melt though his SPI armor like butter. The force field flared white from the radiation; his skin on his palms prickled with blisters.

The plasma passed . . . thinned . . . evaporated. The air cooled.

Covenant air support was already in play. That made the situation a hundred times worse.

With a blink, Tom switched his heads-up display from TACMAP to TEAMBIO. All members of Team Foxtrot showed skyrocketing pulses and blood pressures. But they were all still green. All alive. Good.

He sprinted. Stealth was no longer an operational priority. Getting to the factory where they couldn’t be strafed was all that mattered.

Behind him, Lucy, Adam, and Min fell in line, covering the rough ground in long powerful strides at nearly thirty kilometers an hour.

Red ovals appeared on Tom’s TACMAP: Covenant Seraphs on another attack run. More than before . . . three . . . six . . . ten.

Tom glanced to either side and saw his comrades, hundreds of Spartans running across the broken ground. The dust from their charge filled the air and mingled with the smoke from the last plasma blasts.

Three Spartans lagged behind, turned, and braced, holding M19-B SAM missile launchers. They fired. Missiles streaked into the atmosphere, leaving snaking trails of vapor.

The first bounced off an incoming Seraph’s shield; the missile exploded, not damaging the craft, but buffeting it nonetheless into its wingman. Both craft tumbled, lost fifty meters of altitude, and then recovered—but their leading edges scraped the ground, dissipating their weakened shields, and they spun end over end erupting into fiery pinwheels.

The two other missiles struck their targets, overloaded shields, leaving their target Seraphs covered in soot, but otherwise intact. Tom could see the Seraphs wave off their attack runs.

A small victory.

Tom slowed to a trot and watched as the remaining six Seraphs dipped and released their plasma charges, then pulled up, rolled, and vanished in the haze.

Each charge of dropped plasma was a brilliant pinpoint that elongated into a lance of boiling sun-fueled sapphire. When they hit the ground, they exploded and fanned forward, propelled at three hundred kilometers an hour by momentum and thermal expansion.

A wall of flame appeared on Tom’s left, and it made the camo panels of his SPI armor shiver blue and white. But he didn’t move. He remained transfixed on the other five fires enveloping scores of Spartans.

The plasma slowed, still boiling, and then the clouds cooled and thinned to a dull gray haze, leaving crackling glassed earth and bits of charred bone in its wake.

On his TACMAP, dozen of dots winked off.

Lucy sprinted past Tom. The sight of her snapped him back to action, and he ran.

There’d be time for fear later. And for revenge. When they blew this factory there’d be plenty of time for bloody revenge.

Tom shifted his focus off his TACMAP on his helmet’s faceplate and farther ahead to the primary target, now only five hundred meters distant.

From the center of the city-sized factory the blue glow was too intense to stare directly at, casting hard shadows in the web of pipes and the forest of smokestacks. The structure was a kilometer square with towers rising three hundred meters, perfect for snipers.

Tom forced himself to run faster, ahead of Lucy, Adam, and Min, darting from side to side. They understood and mimicked his evasive tactic.

Plasma bolts exploded near his foot. He weaved back and forth through a hailstorm of high-angle trajectories. His suspicions about snipers had been correct.

He dodged, kept running, and squinted ahead at the edge of the factory. His faceplate automatically responded and zoomed to five-times magnification.

There was another threat: shifting luminescent edges of force fields, Jackal shields. And in the shadows, the arrogant eyes of a Covenant Elite in purple armor, staring straight back at him.

Tom skidded to a halt, grabbed the sniper rifle slung on his back, and sighted through the scope. He stilled his labored breathing. A plasma bolt sizzled near his shoulder, crackling the skin of his SPI armor, singeing his flesh, but he ignored the pain, irritated only that the shot had thrown him momentarily off target. He waited for the split second between the beats of his heart, and then squeezed the trigger.

The bullet’s momentum spun the Elite around. The articulation of its neck armor exploded off the creature. Tom shot once more, and caught it in the back. A splash of bright blue blood spattered the pipes.

Jackals emerged from the shadows at the periphery of the factory, crawling out behind pipes and plasma tubes.

There were hundreds of them. Thousands.

And they all opened fire

Tom rolled to the ground, flattening himself into a slight depression. Adam, Min, and Lucy dropped, as well, their assault rifles out in front of them, ready to fire.

Plasma bolts and crystal shards crisscrossed over Tom’s head—too many to dodge. The enemy didn’t have to be able to see them. All they had to do was fill every square centimeter of air with lethal projectiles. His team was pinned, easy picking for those Seraphs on their next pass.

How had the Covenant mustered such a counterresponse so quickly?

If they had been detected earlier, their drop pods would have been vaporized en route. Unless they had had the extreme bad luck to get here when a capital ship had been docked at the factory. On the blind side? Could the STARS overhead have missed something that large?

One of Lieutenant Commander Ambrose’s first lessons echoed in Tom’s head: “Don’t rely on technology. Machines are easy to break.”

Tom’s COM crackled: “M19 SAMs execute Bravo maneuver, targets painted. All other teams ready to move.”

Tom understood: they needed cover. And the only cover was dead ahead in the factory.

From the field six smears of vapor lanced forward to the factory. The M19 SAMs detonated on contact with pipes and plasmas conduits—exploding into clouds of black smoke and blue sparks.

The enemy fire slowed.

That was their opening.

Tom rolled to his feet, and sprinted for the thickest smoke. Team Foxtrot followed.

Every other Spartan on the field charged as well, hundreds of half-camouflaged armored figures, running and firing at the dazed Jackals, appearing as a wave of ghost warriors, half liquid, half shadow, part mirage, part nightmare.

They screamed a battle cry, momentarily drowning the sound of gunfire and explosion.

Tom yelled with them—for the fallen, for his friends, and for the blood of his enemies. The sound was deafening.

Jackals broke ranks, turned to flee, and got shot in the back as their shields turned with them.

But hundreds more held their ground, overlapping shields to form an invulnerable phalanx.

Tom led Team Foxtrot into the smoke-filled shadows of the factory. He found a pipe the size of a redwood dripping condensed water and green coolant and took cover behind it. In the mist he saw Lucy, Adam, and Min take positions behind cover, too. He gave them rapid-fire orders with hand signals: Move in and kill.

He spun around, his MA5K rifle leveled—and found himself face-to-face with a Covenant Elite, its jaw mandibles split in mimicry of an impossibly large human grin. The monster held an energy sword in one hand, and a plasma pistol in the other.

It shot and swung.

Tom sidestepped the deadly arcs of energy, set his foot between the Elite’s too-wide stance—pushed and fired at the same time.

The Elite sprawled onto the ground, and Tom tracked his body, spraying rounds into the slit of its helmet. He didn’t miss.

Team Foxtrot closed on him, leaving six dead Jackals behind, their bodies snapped like rag dolls.

Behind on the field came rapid thumps and flashes of heat. Plasma grenades.

Jackals and Elites rushed from their cover in the factory to meet the rest of Beta Company on the field, realizing perhaps it would be suicide to face Spartans in close quarters.

Thousands of Covenant clashed with two hundred Spartans in open combat. Tracer rounds, crystal shards, plasma bolts, and flaring shields made the scene a blur of chaos.

The SPARTAN-IIIs moved with speed and reflexes no Covenant could follow. They dodged, snapped necks and limbs, and with captured energy swords they cut through the enemy until the field ran with rivers of gore and blue blood.

Tom hesitated, torn between moving deeper into the factory complex and executing the mission and running back to help his comrades. You didn’t leave your friends behind.

The sky darkened, clouds overhead turning steel gray.

Tom’s COM crackled to life: “Omega three. Execute now! NOW!”

That stopped him cold. Omega three was the panic code, an order to break and run no matter what the cost.

Why? They were winning.

Tom then saw the clouds move. Only . . . they weren’t clouds.

Everything was clear to him now. Why there were so many Covenant here. And why Seraph single ships, craft designed for space combat, were bombing them.

Seven Covenant cruisers sank from the clouds. Over a kilometer long, their bulbous oblong hulls cast shadows over the entire field. If these ships had been parked in formation, refueling over the complex, the STARS might have mistaken such large structures as part of the factory.

“We have to help them,” Lucy whispered over the TEAMCOM.

“No,” Min said, making a short cut motion with his hand. “The Omega order.”

“We’re not running,” Adam broke in.

“No,” Tom agreed. “We’re not. The order is . . . in error.” Despite the environmental controls in his SPI armor, he felt chilled.

Seraph fighters dropped from the cruisers, dozens of them, and gathered into swarms. Darkly luminescent shafts of light appeared from the belly of each cruiser, transport beams, and from them marched hundreds of Elites onto the field.

“But we can’t help them either,” Tom whispered to his team.

Half of Beta Company turned to face the new threat. Impossible odds, even for Spartans, but they would buy time for the rest of them to find cover.

Finding cover was a futile tactic, though. Seven Covenant cruisers had enough firepower to neutralize even two hundred Spartans. They could pin them down, send in ground reinforcements by the thousands, or if they wanted to, glass the entire moon from orbit.

That left only one option.

“The core,” Tom told them. “It’s still our mission, and our only effective weapon.”

There was a heartbeat pause, and then three green acknowledgment lights winked on his display. His friends knew what he was asking.

Team Foxtrot moved as one, running into the factory at top speed, dodging pipes and supply pods.

A squad of six Elites was ahead, hunkered behind a tangle of ducts.

Tom tossed a handful of concussive grenades to disorient them, but his team kept running. Any delay—even to engage an enemy who could take shots at their backs—might rob them of their one chance.

The surviving Elites recovered and fired.

Adam fell, one hand clutched at the crystal shards that penetrated his armor and punctured his lower spine.

“Go!” Adam cried, waving them off. “I’ll hold them.”

Tom didn’t break stride. Adam knew what had to be done: keep fighting until there was no fight left in him.

The core was a hundred meters ahead. It was impossible to miss, so bright Tom’s faceplate automatically polarized to maximum tint, and it was still hard to look at. The core was the size of a ten-story building, pulsing like a huge heart, fed by glowing conduits and steaming coolant pipes, and encrusted with crystalline electronics. It was a marvel of alien engineering, and complex—which hopefully also meant easy to break.

“Main coolant ducts there and there,” Tom shouted over TEAMCOM and pointed. “I’ll jam the dump valve.” He moved to the base of the core.

Lucy’s and Min’s acknowledgment lights winked.

Tom helmet’s display fuzzed with static, then popped and went black. The reactor plasma and its intensely fluctuating electromagnetic field was wreaking havoc with their electronics.

He found the dump valve, a mechanism the size of a Pelican dropship, just below the main chamber. He unspooled the thermite-carbon cord and ran it around the valve twice. He then primed and activated the charge. A line of lightning brilliance flared and sizzled through Covenant alloy, fusing the valve into a solid lump.

Tom glanced at Lucy. She set an explosive charge on one of the two main coolant lines that fed the reactor, and then set the timer on the detonator.

Min was setting his timer, too—then vanished in a flash of smoke and thunder. The core flared brighter than the sun. Coolant fumes screamed from twisted pipe and alarms blared.

“No!” Lucy screamed.

She ran past Tom toward the billowing cloud of toxic coolant. He caught her wrist, jerking her to a stop.

“He’s gone,” Tom said. “EM field must have triggered his charge.”

She wrestled out of Tom’s grasp.

“We have to get out of here,” he told her.

She hesitated, taking one step toward Min.

The support structure groaned and started to melt and sag from the superheating core.

She turned back to Tom, nodded, and they ran out of the chamber—deeper into the factory complex, through a jungle of struts and hissing ducts, and splashing through lakes of leaked, boiling coolant.

The charge Lucy had set went off and silenced the reactor’s alarms.

Even with their backs to the reactor, running at a full-out flat sprint, the glare from the core doubled as it reached near supercritical phase. It was too much to endure, even through a polarized faceplate, and Tom squinted his eyes nearly shut.

They turned a corner, slid down the railing of angled stairs and onto a catwalk that protruded over a ledge. Five hundred meters below, an ocean churned against rocky cliffs.

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 subprowler 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,” the experts would eventually declare. And although recertified for duty, she would remain silent—either unable, or unwilling, to speak the rest of her life.

In the years to come, Tom would reflect on Lucy’s last question every day. “How are you sure we’re alive?” Something had died for every Spartan that day.

Copyright © 2006 by the Microsoft Corporation