Halo: Ghosts of Onyx (29 page)

1950 HOURS, NOVEMBER 3, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \ ZETA DORADUS SYSTEM, PLANET ONYX \ NEAR RESTRICTED REGION ZONE 67

Kurt stood behind Kelly and Will in the Covenant dropship's cockpit. Kelly sat in the pilot's seat while Will manned the gunner's station and watched the scanners. The other Spartans, Mendez, and Dr. Halsey were aft, readying equipment, waiting, and watching.

Kelly shifted back and forth—the pilot's seat was angled wrong for human physiology, and she leaned awkwardly over the control surface.

She took the ship in low and fast over the jungle. The controls were an odd assemblage of holographic geometries that danced before her hands.

Kurt tried to learn as much as he could in case he had to fly the alien ship. It was difficult, however, to watch her and not the viewscreens.

The sun was a hand's breadth from the edge of the horizon, and the Covenant ship passed through long shadows and dim red light.

As the jungle thinned, Kelly dropped and swerved between acacia trees, skimming two meters over the grassland.

Without looking up from her controls, Kelly said, "Piece of cake, LC. Relax."

She smoothed her hand over an acceleration stripe and the ship leapt forward—zipping off the savanna and over the broken canyon lands.

Kelly maneuvered aggressively—jinking up and down, performing quarter rolls to veer around mesas, dropping into ravines and pulling up at the last instant to avoid a crash headlong into a wall.

"Great," Kurt whispered to Kelly. He forced himself to release the edge of her seat.

Dead ahead the slope of a mountain angled gently up over two thousand meters.

"Nothing airborne on sensors," Will announced. "Clear sailing ahead."

"Status on the warheads?" Kurt asked over the COM.

Ash clicked on the channel. "All FENRIS warhead detonators now secure and slaved to

our secure COM signal, sir. As ordered, two warheads cut down, armed, and ready for transport. Working on the rest."

"Hang on!" Kelly cried.

The nose of the ship jerked up. A rock the size of a Warthog tumbled down the mountain slope—clipping the undercarriage of the ship.

The dropship spun, but Kelly expertly rolled, righted, and got them back on course.

"Close," she muttered.

"Rescan for surface motion," Kurt ordered Will.

Will swept the camera angle port and starboard.

Kurt saw they weren't on a single mountain; it was a range-all equivalent elevation, extending in a gentle arc as far as he could see.

"Motion detected," Will said. "Just appeared, sir. Ahead. Got a target lock."

A silhouette resolved on the viewscreen, outlined by the glare of the setting sun.

Kelly came hard to port.

As their relative angle changed, Kurt saw motion: earth and rocks shot up and then cascaded down the slope.

Will slid his hand over his controls and polarized the monitor, cutting the glare. The motion came from a collection of thirty interlaced Sentinels, their booms and center spheres assembled into an oblong shape, and through its center traveled a continuous stream of stone.

To Kurt it looked like a mechanical worm regurgitating over the mountainside
. Dr. Halsey clambered into the cockpit. "No energy spikes detected," Will said. "They're not ready to fire." Kurt swallowed. "Steady on this heading," he told Kelly. He watched the giant machine recede behind them. It
had
to have seen them. Thirty sets

of eyes wouldn't have missed something as large as a Covenant dropship. Why hadn't it attacked?

Dr. Halsey tapped a control and one of the viewscreens jumped back to the combined Sentinels. She studied this a moment, and then declared, "Tinkertoys."

"I don't understand the reference," Kurt said.

"An ancient child's toy," she said, "sticks and flat round connectors. These may be the Forerunners' counterpart. They reconfigure to accomplish various tasks, having all the required basic components: antigravity units, force-field generators, energy projector weaponry It is the equivalent, I suspect, of the simple machines that comprise our technology: the wheel, the ramp, lever, pulley, and screw."

Her casual analysis of a technology centuries more advanced than theirs irritated Kurt.

"I'd say in this configuration," Dr. Halsey continued, "it is not designed for combat, and will not attack… unless, of course, they were provoked. Their programming, while sophisticated, appears dedicated; that is, each Sentinel combination special-izes lor a single

task. And right now, that task is moving dirt."

"Doesn't mean there aren't more combat pairs around," Kelly said. "Orders, sir?"

Kurt detected the slightest edge of nervousness in Kelly's voice. He felt it, too, in the pit

of his gut. If those thirty Sentinels back there had wanted to, they could have blasted this ship into shrapnel.

There were only two options; go forward or retreat.

Kurt felt like his luck had run dry, but he also felt like they were close to finding something.

He longed for the days of simple missions when there were only two things to worry about: maneuvering and where your team's lines of fire were.

Yet, when you broke it down to its components, forgot the consequences of success or failure, wasn't this mission the same as any other?

Move and fire. Find a target to capture or neutralize. Minimize casualties while inflicting maximum damage on your enemy. Get in quick. Get out quicker.

"New course," he told Kelly "Come ninety degrees to starboard. Take us up that mountainside."

"Aye, sir."

The tuning fork-shaped dropship banked and raced up the slope. The earth vanished under them as they crested the summit.

Beyond was a crater a hundred kilometers in diameter.

There were
thousands
of the earthmovers on the inner slope— all spewing rocks over the edge. The Sentinels had created a giant anthill. How much, Kurt wondered, had ONI cleared in the decades they had been here? And how much of this was the Sentinels' doing?

At lower elevations there was nothing to see. The sun was too low, and shadows pooled. Kurt boosted image enhancement on his heads-up display and faint lines resolved… but nothing made sense.

"Take us in closer," he whispered.

Kelly angled the ship down the interior slope, reducing their speed to one-quarter.

The clouds overhead lit with oranges and reds as the setting sunlight reflected off their undersides… and the crater interior glowed a faint amber.

Kurt blinked, dazzled by what he saw. Mirror-image clouds drifted upon angled surfaces and burned crimson and gold.

As his eyes adjusted, he saw swirls and bands of other muted colors underlying the reflected images: green stripes and black and silver waves that appeared to be a tempest ocean frozen in place.

He blinked once, twice, and then finally unraveled the optical illusion of patterns, colors, and shadow.

There were pillars and arches, elevated aqueducts; columned temples with crowns of three-dimensional Forerunner symbols; a forest of sculpted geometries of spheres, cubes, and tori; roads that curved up and twisted into Mobius surfaces—it was a vast alien city.

Kurt shook his head clear, and then recognized the material that constructed the city. He had seen it before in tumbled stripped river rocks and the slabs quarried from nearby Gregor Canyon. A rock so plentiful this world had been named for it. Only the stuff in the crater had been polished to optical flatness, mirroring the sky with superimposed rainbow bands.

"Onyx," he whispered.

"Chalcedonic quartz with trace elementals enhancing their spectral variation," Dr. Halsey remarked.

Scalloped columns rose from the crater floor to the mountainous summit, an elevation Kurt could only assume had been ground level before ONI began their excavation.

As they maneuvered closer to one pillar, Kelly banked the ship around its curve and Kurt saw reflected images of a thousand different sunsets—all with varying cloud geometries, some with flocks of migrating birds, or dinosaurs, another had smears of blue spacecraft, and one burned with a supernova that illuminated the twilight… all images captured here. From the past? The future? Both?

And only then did the scale of the structure register. It was three kilometers in diameter, larger than a UNSC carrier.

Kurt's mind rebelled at the scale of this technology, the effort it had to have taken to construct such a thing.

He glanced at Dr. Halsey. While she intently studied the viewscreen, she did not appear the slightest bit impressed.

"You knew this would be here?" he asked her.

"I suspected," she said. "Frankly, after reviewing the reports of the Halo structures, I am somewhat disappointed."

"Bigger than the ruins under Reach," Kelly said.

"We did not discover the full extent of those ruins," Dr. Halsey replied, "and likely never will." She squinted at the monitor. "There," she said, pointing at a distant gleaming dome. "Can you move closer to that structure?" She turned to Kurt. "With your permission, Lieutenant Commander."

"New heading zero two five," Kurt said. "Pick your best path."

"New course, aye," Kelly replied.

As they descended deeper, the dropship sped past a staircase that ascended to

nowhere—each step a hectare of unbroken polished stone.

The cloud-reflected light dimmed and the smooth surfaces melted into shadow. Dr. Halsey's dome turned red-gold and faded to a silhouette.

Will turned the passive radar on the thing and an outline overlaid the structure. Kurt discerned that the top of the dome faceted into seven flat surfaces, each with a tall arch

leading to the interior.

"Those large enough to fly through?" Kurt asked.

Will consulted his sensor screen. "Huge," he replied.

"Move us in," Kurt told Kelly

"Aye aye." She pulled the nose of the ship up.

As the last traces of light vanished, Kurt saw lights in the crater—red dots that swarmed

over every surface. Sentinels.

Will's hands flashed over the sensor panel. "New energy

signatures detected. Extremely low frequencies." He looked up. "Over a hundred

thousand distinct emitters, sir."

"What configuration?" Dr. Halsey asked. "Clusters, single units, or pairs?"

Will studied the panel. "Ninety-five percent clusters, a few hundred single patterns… and

a few hundred dual signatures."

"Combat pairs," Kurt whispered. "Kelly, match their speed." He keyed TEAMCOM, and said, "Make ready for a hot drop. Battle-ready conditions."

Green status lights flashed back, confirming his order.

They decelerated over the darkening city, creeping toward the dome. Kurt's instinct told him this was the right thing to do. The logical, conscious portion of his mind, however, urged him to leave. He'd trust his "gut" on this one—get them inside and under cover, before every Sentinel in the place fired on them.

"Nice and easy," he said.

Kelly's hand hovered over the throttle stripe. "You think these things are smart enough to use our own tricks against us? Lure us inside and then close the trap?"

"It's a possibility," he admitted. "But I don't think they went to all the trouble to unearth

this place just to blast it to bits." He shrugged. "Just a hunch."

Kelly and Will glanced at each other.

"Understood," Kelly said. "Approaching structure. Three hundred meters."

"Back us in," Kurt said.

Their ship slowed, spun around, and eased toward one of the dome archways. Five

Covenant dropships could have fit through the opening with room to spare.

Inside, the blue glow of their engines illuminated the walls. The interior surfaces were angled and carved with star charts and the Forerunner hieroglyphics.

Below, seven flat surfaces, each the size of carrier landing decks, were evenly spaced.

Kelly set them down one.

Kurt exited the dropship. Will followed him, and together they helped Dr. Halsey off.

The other Spartans took defensive positions around the ship.

Kurt's motion sensor showed everyone on deck, but there was nothing beyond the

landing pad save darkness. Every noise was swallowed by the vast emptiness of the interior, and he felt as if he were drowning in shadows and silence.

He initiated a single-beam COM network, and opened external audio so Dr. Halsey could hear them, too.

"We do this fast," he told his team. "Olivia, Will, scout the perimeter of this landing pad. I want a report in ninety seconds on all routes and motion sensor hits."

Olivia and Will nodded and melted into the dark.

"Linda, Fred, Mark, Holly, get grappling rounds, scale the dome, and take up lookout positions in the arches. Set up single-beam relays and zip lines. Anything moves this way, sound the alarm."

Their status lights flashed green. Linda disappeared into the ship and returned with harpoonlike shafts and rope bags. She passed them out to the three other Spartans. They slid the rounds into their sniper rifles, aimed, and shot them through the archways overhead.

Braided monoline uncoiled, pulled by the grapple. They tested the lines, and then rapidly ascended the ropes.

"Dante, Mendez, stay with the ship. Get our gear ready and loaded into balanced packs."

Dante's status light remained unlit for a full second in protest, and then it winked green. Mendez nodded and they boarded the ship.

"Kelly, Ash, Tom, Lucy—you're with me and Dr. Halsey. Ash, grab those cut-down nukes."

Ash moved into the dropship's cargo area and retuned hefting a backpack.

"Tom, Lucy," Kurt said, "keep Dr. Halsey covered."

His senior NCOs stepped to either side of the Doctor.

"Got a staircase, sir," Will reported. "Goes through the floor and around the landing pad's support pedestal. No motion detected."

"Roger," Kurt said. "Olivia, link up with Will. Scout it out. We'll follow."

He oriented on Will's IFF tag and set a single-beam relay antenna on the edge of the platform so he could keep in contact topside.