Shadow of Intent (HALO) Page 6

  Suddenly a miniature star erupted in the holo-tank as Spear of Light’s engines engaged, full thrust. The Half-Jaw watched three of his shots go wide, a fourth boil a deep scar across the cruiser’s back, and the rest evaporate in the particle furnace of the cruiser’s exhaust. Venting atmosphere and shuddering terribly as it decelerated at a rate far exceeding its structural limits, Spear of Light came alongside Shadow of Intent close enough to scrape the outer limits of the carrier’s portside shields—but these shields were gone now, their energy siphoned off for the Half-Jaw’s hasty volley.

  Both ships were flying side by side at point-blank range. For the moment, however, neither could harm the other. The Half-Jaw couldn’t order another plasma shot without suffering splash damage to his own ship. And even Shadow of Intent’s less powerful point-laser batteries would need time to recharge.

  “They’ll be running for their escape pods . . .” the Blademaster said. But his boisterous voice betrayed his age, and he stammered a little, trying to rationalize everything that had just occured. “The Prelate has no choice! If . . . if he stays where he is, we take him apart with lasers. If he moves, we use the cannons. Surely he knows he’s doomed?!”

  But “escape pods” was all the Half-Jaw heard. For in that moment, Rtas felt his enemy’s trap snap shut, and he finally understood: The Prelate never intended to destroy Shadow of Intent. He planned to steal it.

  “All hands!” Rtas shouted into a ship-wide channel. “Arm for battle! Close quarters!” Then, locking eyes with the Blademaster: “This Prelate will not take our ship!”

  The escape pod blasted out of its mooring socket, and Tem’Bhetek slammed backward into his harness. A reactive gel layer inside his armor protected him from the punishing acceleration as the pod sped across the narrow gap of space between the two capital ships. The pod’s viewport blast shields were down, and it was running dark. But through the low-light optics in his visor, the Prelate could see the sharp outlines of five Jiralhanae crammed into harnesses around him, each one fully enclosed in deep blue, vacuum-rated armor that glimmered with reflections of the pod’s flashing status lights.

  Behind the Prelate’s pod, nine more were launching, each with five Jiralhanae inside. These fifty warriors—the entirety of Spear of Light’s remaining crew—knew they had just punched a one-way ticket, that there was no turning back. But whatever nervousness the Brutes might have felt when they were near the miniature Halo was absent now. Hurtling toward an enemy, weapons in hand, these ruthless creatures were in their element. Tem felt a surge of confidence. We are going to make it inside that carrier and tear the Sangheili apart!

  It had been an audacious plan. A single light cruiser against an assault carrier. Outmatched in arms and armor, the Prelate had known one thing for certain: Spear of Light would never survive the fight. But the genius of his strategy was accepting the inevitable destruction of his ship and turning it to his advantage.

  The Prelate had visited Duraan’s system once before, on one of the many training missions that had kept him far from home. Back then he and his inexperienced Jiralhanae crew had been surprised at just how rapidly Duraan’s red dwarf star had degraded their cruiser’s shields. But the Prelate had filed away this miscalculation, as he did with all his missteps, as a tool for self-improvement. Years later, when he had wracked his brain for the best place to spring a trap, his memories of the red dwarf’s powerful storms, as well as Duraan’s small, poorly armed settlements, quickly sorted this planet to the top of the list.

  Like most plans, this one had variables the Prelate couldn’t control, the biggest of which was the Half-Jaw himself. The red dwarf could only do so much to degrade Shadow of Intent’s defenses. For the Prelate’s gambit to work, he needed the Half-Jaw to throw everything he had at Spear of Light—to so desperately want to kill the Prelate here and now before he could do any more harm that he would be willing to expend Shadow of Intent’s many advantages in a single devastating blow.

  The Half-Jaw had swung hard, but the Prelate was still standing. And now the odds were no longer in the Sangheili shipmaster’s favor. In a close-up fight, the Prelate knew his Jiralhanae could match any Sangheili. And as for the Half-Jaw? Tem’Bhetek fingered the hardlight shield projector and plasma rifle attached to his anti-grav belt. I will deal with him myself.

  Five seconds out of the socket, and Shadow of Intent’s point lasers still hadn’t fired on his pod. This was good, because the pods had no significant shielding; even a single laser salvo would mean the end of the Prelate and his Jiralhanae. The pods’ primary advantage—the one thing that made them superior to standard boarding craft in this situation—was their straight-line acceleration. They were designed to get away from a dying ship very quickly. And a burst of speed was all the Prelate needed to reach Shadow of Intent.

  Now more than halfway across the gap, the Prelate knew the laser batteries must be down, crippled by the stellar storm. Which left one last problem to overcome: the pods had no rams—reinforced docking gantries built into the noses of Covenant boarding craft that they used to lamprey onto a target vessel’s hull and cut their way inside.

  Instead, the pods could enter only through a door that was already open. And fortunately for the Prelate, Shadow of Intent had one that was very hard to miss: the entrance to its portside hangar. An energy field barred the hangar, keeping the carrier’s artificial atmosphere in and all unauthorized vessels out. On a feed from his pod’s forward-facing camera that the Prelate had slaved to his visor, he could see the field’s telltale violet glow. But the hangar door was flickering, clearly weakened by the storm, and the Prelate knew their velocity would carry the pods safely through.

  Fifteen seconds after the Prelate’s pod had burst from its socket, its smart circuits cut the main engine thrust and fired its maneuvering rockets, applying as much braking force as possible. A moment later, his pod was across the hangar threshold, still moving fast, but angled toward the deck. The pod landed hard on its belly, rocked onto its rounded nose, and screeched forward at an angle, shedding ablative tiles, stabilizing fins, and other exterior parts until it ground to a halt halfway across the hangar. As the Prelate wrestled out of his harness, he could hear the other pods hit and rasp across the deck, occasionally colliding with a bone-jarring crunch.

  But when the Prelate blew the seals on his pod’s airlock and moved outside, more wobbly on his legs than he would have liked, he was relieved to see that all ten pods had made it safely inside the hangar. Their hatches exploded open, and the Jiralhanae emerged, some a little shaken, but all with weapons ready.

  The bay stretched out before the Prelate, half a kilometer to the carrier’s starboard side, where there was another large energy-field door. To his right were passages to the carrier’s reactors and engines. To his left were vehicle repair bays and armories that led to Shadow of Intent’s ship-to-ground gravity lift. Beyond the lift were passages that spanned a graceful arc connecting the ship’s teardrop stern section to its hooked prow. In the dead center of the prow, protected by hundreds of meters of hull plating and honeycombed superstructure, was the carrier’s command deck. This was Tem’Bhetek’s objective, and if he could survive the sprint from here to there, this carrier would be his.

  Bright green plasma bolts skipped across the hangar floor. The Prelate spun back behind his pod as the barrage spattered up and over the ship and then hit a Jiralhanae out in the open on the other side. The Jiralhanae’s chest plate buckled, his organs boiled and burst, and he fell backward with a mournful howl. As the Brute hit the floor, the Prelate closed his eyes and drew a deep breath . . . and his body did what it was designed to do.

  Of all the Forerunner technologies the San’Shyuum had tried to unlock, genetic engineering had proved the most difficult. This was largely due to the fact that the Forerunners had refined their bio-enhancing tools and procedures for their own physiologies, not for other sentient creatures. Coupled with San’Shyu
um taboos against doing anything that might further jeopardize their already limited ability to reproduce, research into this particular brand of Forerunner magic was completely ignored by all of their ministries save one: the Ministry of Preparation.

  The Prelate slipped his left hand into his hardlight gauntlet and pulled it away from his belt. He activated the gauntlet with a forearm snap, and as its bright blue, crescent-shaped shield appeared at his wrist, the Prelate felt the world slow around him. The roars of the Jiralhanae and sharp reports of their weapons stretched and faded into the background. By the time the Prelate was around the front of his pod, shield up and sprinting forward, his enhanced nervous system and musculature were already fully engaged, and he now acted almost without thinking.

  The plasma fire had come from the aft side of the hangar. Six Sangheili had emerged at the top of a ramp leading to Shadow of Intent’s reactors. All of these warriors were lightly armored and carried only plasma pistols, and had likely been tasked with engineering duties rather than ship security. The Prelate went right for these unlucky first responders, half running, half gliding across the hangar, dodging their wild shots with quick lateral pulses from his anti-grav belt and swatting away accurate ones with his hardlight shield. In mere moments, the Prelate was across the hangar and up the ramp, a few paces from his foes.

  He swung his shield in a low arc at one Sangheili, severing both its legs at the back-bent junctions of its calves and elongated ankles. There was barely any resistance as the shield’s photonic edge slid through armor, flesh, and bone. Spinning through the cut, the Prelate caught two more Sangheili with his primary weapon, a variant of the Covenant plasma rifle preferred by the Jiralhanae. Colored red instead of blue, the snub-nosed weapon was nicknamed “blood-hand,” and true to its name, it fired twice as fast as the standard model and required a firm grip to keep it from bucking off target. The Prelate expended half his rifle’s charge, hitting the two Sangheili in their lightly armored abdomens. As they crumpled to the deck, the Prelate squared his stance and brought his elbow up into the neck of a fourth charging warrior. The Prelate wheeled to follow this Sangheili as it fell, and then pulsed his rifle into its astonished face.

  By then, a squad of four Jiralhanae had made it halfway from the pods to the ramp, and they dispatched the last two Sangheili with their own rapid-firing plasma rifles.

  Tem’Bhetek forced himself to take two deep breaths. Enhanced hormones were surging through his system, but he didn’t want to peak too early. He and the other Prelates had trained long and hard in the Sacred Promissory. Deep in its halls within the rocky foundation of High Charity’s dome, they had learned the dangers of pushing their altered bodies too far: sudden debilitating exhaustion, seizures, and, in rare cases, death.

  In short bursts, the Minster of Preparation had told the Prelates, you can defeat any foe. Even, the Minister had hoped, the humans’ demonic Spartan soldiers.

  But that had been a different time and a different war. As far as Tem’Bhetek knew, he was now the last of his kind. All the other Prelates had died at High Charity.

  And if you aren’t careful, you’re going to join them!

  Uncannily quick, the Prelate raised his hardlight shield and deflected three shots from a Covenant carbine rifle. The bright green hypersonic slugs ricocheted with glassy pings, sparking radioactive fuel. A glance to his right, and the Prelate identified the shooter: an Unggoy standing on the other side of the bay, at the top of a bow side ramp. Two squads of Sangheili rangers were spilling down the ramp past the Unggoy. Mixed in among the silver-suited warriors was a Sangheili armored red, carrying an energy lance. Even at this distance, the Prelate knew this Sangheili was female—and familiar . . . but he had no time to collect his thoughts before his body was sprinting forward, preparing to meet these new threats.

  “Squads four and five, join squad two! Take the reactors!” the Prelate ordered as plasma fire sizzled past him from behind. Without looking, he knew more Sangheili were emerging from the engineering bays, but he guessed they were small in number and that the remaining Jiralhanae could handle them. “The rest of you, to me!”

  The Jiralhanae he’d tasked against the oncoming rangers were already charging in that direction, some of them bent forward in a feral hunch, pawing the deck with their armored claws. But when these Brutes were within leaping distance of their foes, the rangers activated the maneuvering jets embedded in their armored shoulders and heels. The carrier’s artificial gravity was still operational, and while the jets’ chemical propellants performed far better in zero-gee, they helped the rangers match the impact force of the heavier Jiralhanae. After a terrible crash of armor and a quick skirmish in which five Jiralhanae and three rangers fell—one with a cut across the neck from the Prelate’s shield—the two sides retreated into a stalemate, trading shots from the cover of loose, opposing rows of crated Phantom parts.

  Although the Jiralhanae still outnumbered the Elite rangers almost two to one, the Prelate knew he couldn’t afford to get bogged down. His plan relied on surprise and speed, and he now had precious little of both. He had no firm idea how many Sangheili were aboard Shadow of Intent, nor how many were still between him and the command deck. But more were certain to spill into the hangar soon. “Squads one and two: disengage and head for the command deck!” the Prelate shouted. “All other squads: covering fire! Keep those rangers pinned!”

  Instantly, the Jiralhanae unleashed a volley of fragmentation grenades from their heavy, belt-fed launchers. As the grenades’ orange-and-blue explosions filled the enemy’s position with shrapnel, the Prelate sprinted toward the same ramp the rangers had used to enter the bay. But as he accelerated, the Prelate saw from the corner of his eye that the Unggoy and the red-armored Sangheili female were breaking cover to try to cut him off. As much as it galled him to avoid a fight, the Prelate would not stop to engage them. His primary objective was the command deck—and the only enemy that really mattered was the Half-Jaw.

  A clang of armor behind the Prelate told him his rear guard had tangled with his two pursuers. As the Prelate topped the ramp and sped into the passage beyond, he checked the motion tracker in his visor and noted seven Jiralhanae charging close behind him. These were all the troops he’d have to help him take the command deck, and as the Prelate felt a dizziness creeping up the back of his skull—his enhanced nervous system’s first warning of excessive exertion—he throttled his speed and let the Jiralhanae catch up.

  Tem’Bhetek didn’t need a map to the command deck. In his mind’s eye, he saw Shadow of Intent’s passages spread out before him. He knew the carrier so well that he often found sleep by making phantom sprints through its warrens of anodized, deep purple corridors. If he was fortunate, these waking dreams would carry with him into slumber, replacing his usual nightmarish journey through High Charity.

  But quite often, the two dreams would bleed together.

  Tem would see Yalar walking Shadow of Intent’s twisting trapezoidal halls, her thin yellow gown billowing behind her, only to disappear around the bend of a passage or whisk up a gravity lift before he could reach her. Sometimes Yalar would be waiting for him on the command deck, sitting in the Half-Jaw’s empty chair, staring at him with sad eyes, cradling their crying child. . . .

  The Prelate shook his head, forcing himself to breathe. He was nearing Shadow of Intent’s gravity lift, which was halfway to the command deck. Muscles aching with spent fury, the Prelate knew he had just a few more bursts of hyper-lethal speed before his body completely seized. With his Jiralhanae panting behind him, the Prelate raced through a four-way intersection into a high-ceilinged muster bay, slowed as he passed through one of the bay’s sally ports, and then came to a full stop on the wide platform that ringed the gravity lift beyond.

  Shadow of Intent had been the bane of other ships, human and Covenant alike. But it was also a prodigious troop carrier that had played a key role in the invasions of many human
worlds, and the lift at the center of this large, arched chamber was the fastest way to deploy its armored infantry. Hovering low above the surface of a planet, Shadow of Intent could send hundreds of troops per minute down the lift—or pull them back up, depending on the direction of the anti-grav field, which was produced by a machine of Forerunner design suspended from the roof. When active, this chandelier of crystalline tines projected its field down a circular shaft through the carrier’s hull, more than a hundred meters wide and at least that many deep. At the bottom of the shaft was a ponderous armored platform that was always the first item down the lift. Once the platform was placed firmly on the ground, it served as the receiving end of the anti-grav field and a temporary firebase for the descending troops.

  All of this was familiar to the Prelate from his study of the ship, and while the Jiralhanae that came up behind him were momentarily dazzled by the prismatic light of the gravity lift’s Forerunner machinery, the Prelate’s eyes immediately focused on the two Sangheili moving fast toward his position. He knew them by their armor: the Half-Jaw and his Blademaster, running opposite ways around the lift’s yawning shaft.

  Tem had always imagined he’d kill the Half-Jaw on the command deck. It seemed a fitting stage for the fight that would determine who controlled the mighty ship.

  No matter. I will gut him here and watch his blood spill down the lift.

  The Prelate willed his body again to its full potential. . . .

  But before he could unleash it, he felt three sharp slaps between his shoulders and he staggered forward onto a knee. The Prelate’s shields had kept the carbine’s radioactive slugs from penetrating his armor, and the chemicals in his bloodstream had dulled the pain. But craning his long neck around to zero in on the shooter, the Prelate was shocked to see that the Unggoy, as well as the red-armored Sangheili female and four rangers, had already caught up to his Jiralhanae rear guard—and was shooting past them. Tem cursed his decision to slow his pace as he turned to meet his pursuers.