Halo: The Cole Protocol (15 page)

CHAPTER

TWENTY-FIVE

HABITAT EL CUIDAD, INNER RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

Ignatio Delgado pulled at the handcuffs attached to the long chain until he was at the very end, and got a drink of water from a sink.

It was a long drink. He used his body as a shield as he picked at a cotter pin holding one of the taps in place. He palmed it and stood up.

He was being held inside a dingy factory. The dust seemed to cling to everything. Even the light beams from the windows seemed to ride in on floating clouds of dust.

Bonifacio’s five pet heavies sat at a table with a deck of cards that fizzled and popped and lit up their little corner of the warehouse.

The card game paused as he watched. The men gathered the cards up quickly, all five rushing to get things cleared off.

One of the men stood up and trotted over as Delgado finished drinking water out of his hands.

“What’s going on?” Delgado asked.

The men had ignored him. Bonifacio had yet to return. He’d had no food, but he could drink out of the sink and use a bucket they’d left for him.

“Your time is up,” one of them grunted. “The
Kestrel’s
back.”

That meant Bonifacio had no reason left to leave him alive when he got back from wherever he was.

The question was, since he was handcuffed here under Council’s orders, how was Bonifacio going to properly get rid of him?

“The thing is,” another heavy added. “She’s got company.”

Delgado looked around. “Company?”

“A UNSC stealthed frigate. Some new design. It’s poking around the edges of the Rubble.”

“How do you know?” asked Delgado.

“Same way we know anything about them. We have someone aboard. They’ve been using a tight-beam laser to cast out messages to us, like where the ship is, what it’s up to. They’re getting ready to help us take care of the problem.

“Once we know that’s solved and the
Kestrel
is safely at Mr. Bonifacio’s private dock, then we take you back to the Council.” The man grinned.

Delgado did not believe what he said for a second. Delgado imagined they’d be on their way to take him back, and hand him over, but somehow there’d be a terrible tube car accident. Or airlock accident. That’s how people like Bonifacio worked.

Four of the men were called away, leaving one heavy to sit by himself and forlornly guard Delgado.

The lone guard only lasted about three minutes before he unfolded a small screen and started watching something on it. The sounds of tinny gunfire and screams from the movie echoed in the empty factory walls.

Delgado retrieved the cotter pin he’d been hiding. He started using it to fiddle with the lock on the cuffs. The guard stared intently at the screen.

CHAPTER

TWENTY-SIX

OUTER RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

There was an art to deciphering patterns, Keyes thought, looking at all the contacts the ship’s radar was showing him on a screen. And despite all the training he gave in his life he felt it wasn’t something you could analyze. Seeing patterns came to those with intuition. You looked for the gaps and cracks that opened up.

The
Midsummer Night
had slipped deep into the Insurrectionist structure. He couldn’t help but be amazed by it all.

All these asteroids, all these connections. What a tremendous achievement.

“Say what you will about them, this is a pretty slick operation,” Lt. Dante Kirtley muttered from comms. He was bent over, looking for stray chatter. “They’ve routed most of their communications through physical lines, there’s almost no wireless leakage. Makes all of this pretty quiet out here, Commander.”

Commander Zheng checked the information they were all sending him. “The Jackal ship, Lieutenant. Don’t forget about the ship. These Insurrectionists are probably working with the Covenant—that’s how they’ve managed to achieve all this. I’m not inclined to be as charitable.”

The radar contacts Keyes was following shifted with the ship, as if orbiting it, but from a very long distance.

Keyes puffed the thrusters, gently moving them along a random line. The bulk of the cloud of freighters, personal ships, drones and other small contacts all shifted slightly.

A slight sense of claustrophobia washed over Keyes, but it was quickly quenched.

“Commander, you better take a look at this,” Keyes said, putting the contacts up on a forward screen. “They’re adjusting their position based on our adjustments. I think we’re not as stealthy as we think we are.” Out of the corner of his eye Keyes saw Badia Campbell swallow a pair of pills with a pained look on her face. She looked stressed.

Zheng double checked the time-lapsed information, then nodded. “I think you’re right, Lieutenant.”

Campbell at ops disagreed. “We can damp our engines down further, alter our course and coast through. Lighting up full to jump out of here will just blow our cover. We won’t be able to get back in this deep ever again.”

Keyes disagreed, but didn’t say anything. The bridge crew had been tight. He wasn’t going to risk second-guessing anyone just yet, even if Campbell was being jittery. The decision was Zheng’s anyway.

Zheng mulled it over for a second, then tapped the pad. “I don’t like it. Keyes, light us up and let’s blow clear. We’ll observe from a distance. We can drop some drones and double-check the stealth there; maybe something is going wrong. It’s still a new ship.”

Keyes had a rough line plotted out already. He double-checked it, and checked the engines. Ready to come on fully hot.

They’d rip right through that school of slow Insurrectionist freighters to safety, Keyes thought, tapping the navigation console and getting ready.

But then something in the heart of
Midsummer Night
exploded and the air in the cockpit rose in pressure, making Keyes’ ears pop.

“Ops!” Zheng shouted, turning to his side. “Report!”

Keyes fired the ship’s main engines, looking to throw them clear while Zheng and Campbell figured out what had happened.

But the engines wouldn’t fire.

Keyes turned to Campbell, about to ask for a report. But Campbell leapt clear of her station and pulled out her sidearm. “Campbell, what the hell?”

He hesitated for a second, not sure what was happening. So did everyone else.

Badia Campbell pulled the trigger. She shot Zheng twice in the side and stomach as he started to get out of his chair. The loud crack of the gunfire stunned everyone into moving.

Keyes jumped forward at her without thinking, as did Kirtley and Li.

Campbell turned and shot Li low, getting the weapons officer in the leg. As Campbell raised her gun, she shot Kirtley in the shoulder, spinning him around. Keyes smacked into her before she could pull the trigger again.

They rolled over the decking, Campbell twisting to get free and kneeing Keyes in the groin as he wrestled to grab her gun.

He finally pinned her against the bottom of her console, using all his strength to hold her down. “Why?” Keyes asked.

“You heard Zheng back on Charybdis,” she said. “He said he would destroy them. I couldn’t let that man in among the Rubble. He’s too dangerous. You know what he
did with
his own ship, lost his whole crew, just for the smallest chance to get his revenge. I can’t let him do that to us.”

She was amped up on something, preternatural strength exhausting an already recovering Keyes. Sweat beaded her entire face, and her pupils were dilated. “We will win, Lieutenant Keyes,” she hissed at him. “One day, we will be free.”

Her vicelike grip on the gun twisted, and Keyes fought her. But the adrenaline and drugs in her system left her crazed. She twisted the gun up between them until the point of the barrel jammed up against her chin.

“Badia, please…” Keyes hissed, his arms shaking from the effort of trying to pull the barrel away from her chin.

She pulled the trigger. The sound, this close to Keyes’ face, was more than deafening, it washed through his skull and left it ringing. A red mist hung in the air underneath the console. Her jaw slackened, and her eyes glazed.

Keyes rocked back, holding her limp hand and the gun. He closed his eyes, unwilling to look at the mess of blood and brains spattered across the deck.

“Medic!” he screamed, trying to process what had just happened. But as he looked around, he realized the whole bridge crew had been shot by Campbell as she’d leapt forward. Campbell didn’t need help. But they did. He turned around to see Zheng crawling up into the commander’s chair, holding his stomach with one bloody hand, spitting even more blood clear of his mouth.

Li had hobbled back to her weapons console, and Kirtley had cracked open a first-aid kit and rushed back to Zheng’s side.

“Engineering!” Zheng croaked. “Update. What happened?” Kirtley sprayed biofoam on Zheng’s wounds. That would sterilize the wound, and the hardened foam would act as a firm bandage, seeping into the wound and holding everything together. It would do until the medics got to the bridge for something more thorough.

There was a haze of swearing in the background, along with the clanking of crew running from place to place, as engineering crackled back in reply. “We’ve been sabotaged. Lieutenant Campbell, or someone working with her, put explosives on the goddamned fusion core coolant system. It’s a mess, sir.”

“Can we fix it?” was all Keyes wanted to know.

“Sir, she knew her business. The fusion core is going critical. We can stop it from blowing us up to hell, but we’re not going to get the engines back very quickly here.”

Engineering got into spacesuits and opened the back of the ship. They started flushing everything out to the depths of space;

the lack of air began extinguishing most of the fires and let them get to work on the damaged cooling system. But this was also venting heat and radiation into space.

They were no longer stealthy in any sense of the word.

They were as good as dead in the water. Keyes reoriented the
Midsummer Night,
realizing that they had only thrusters to work with.

“We have thrusters,” Keyes reported, a bit relieved. He scanned his console for the largest asteroid. If he could get them to it and use it as a shield of some sort, he could buy them some time to fix the engines.

“And weapons,” Li grunted.

Commander Zheng groaned as he shifted. “Comms, set condition red. Battlestations.” Kirtley moved back to his console and tapped away, one-handed. More blood had begun to stain his uniform.

Emergency lighting flickered on and the sirens yelped.

“Missile crews stand by. Get the MAC ready,” Zheng ordered. He glanced over at Keyes. “Where are you headed, Lieutenant?”

Keyes explained his strategy quickly as they continued thrusting their way back into the rebel structure that Campbell had called the Rubble. He finished with, “We can just go right through the structure, buying time for us to get the engines fixed.”

“Belay that,” Commander Zheng snapped. “Steer away from the structure, get us out into the open.”

“Sir, with all due respect, we can’t outrun them. Lying about in the open like this… we’re too vulnerable,” Keyes said.

“Don’t repeat the obvious to me, Lieutenant,” Commander Zheng said. “I’ve already had one of my core bridge crew shoot me. Now another is heading the ship deep into enemy territory. Please forgive my inability to trust your judgment right now. I don’t want to hand the enemy my ship on a damned platter. Take us out and away. Now.”

“Yes, sir,” Keyes said. He didn’t like it. Not a bit. But he saw Zheng’s position. And he had his orders.

The
Midsummer Night
ponderously turned about, into a net of freighters and small ships moving in toward it around the very edges of the Rubble.

Keyes flipped through the scans until he found the biggest Insurrectionist ship, and then wound the
Midsummer Night
through the weave of docking tubes and asteroids out toward it.

Keyes wanted to move them close to one of the Insurrectionists’ big ships. He wanted to get the rest of the smaller ships attacking the
Midsummer Night
to stop for fear they might fire on their own ship by accident.

A slim chance. But Keyes would take it.

“Incoming!” Keyes shouted, as the world lit up.

“Counter-measures deployed,” Li reported. The twinkling chaff Li had enveloped the ship in confused a handful of the missiles. The others penetrated the screen. The ship shuddered as they struck the hull.

A second wave of missiles streaked in, and Keyes had the ship thrusting as close to one of the smaller asteroids as he could, almost grazing it. Missiles struck the asteroid, throwing up dirt and dust.

“Good thinking,” Li said.

Keyes looked over to Zheng, who had narrowed his eyes. “We’re not stopping, Keyes. Full thrusters, get us clear.”

The moment they cleared the asteroid the next wave of missiles struck. The ship shuddered and shook; damage reports started streaming in.

They were taking a hell of a beating.

And still Commander Zheng, now doubled over and clutching his stomach, had them limping their way out into the open.

This was suicide, Keyes thought. He wanted to speak up, say something. But he didn’t. An order was an order, damn it, and Zheng was a good commander.

A fast-moving blip ripped across the screen before Keyes could even call out.

The explosion slammed Keyes’ face into his console. When he sat up, blood dripped all over the screen.

“That was a mass-driver slug,” Keyes said, wiping the blood away with the edge of his palm. “Pretty much like a MAC; though in this case, they use it for mining operations.”

“It hit near engineering,” Zheng said.

“They fire it again, we’re dead,” Li said. “We’re barely taking the hammering from their missiles.”

Zheng closed his eyes, fighting some inner pain. “They’re working with the Covenant. I have no choice but to enact the Cole Protocol. Keyes, destroy the navigation data, databases, logs, and anything related to them. You have the bridge. I need to get down to engineering.”

Zheng painfully left his chair and shuffled out of the cockpit.

Keyes accessed the Cole Protocol instructions. He found the virus needed to scavenge through the ship’s systems as a second line of defense. This was it, he thought. Once he started this, they were stuck here, no matter what happened next. He’d probably never see Miranda again. Never see another Earthrise over Luna.

Another missile strike shook him out of those thoughts. They were dying here. He had a duty. Getting rid of the data might well protect Earth and the colonies.

Keyes triggered the program, swallowing his nervousness as he began shutting down the nav station.

Lieutenant Li was coordinating fire response, trying to keep the Insurrectionist forces busy and at arm’s length. But judging by the more and more frequent explosions on the hull, it was a losing battle.

Kirtley caught Keyes’ eye. “They’re hailing us. They want to talk to the commander.”

“He’s on his way to Engineering.”

Kirtley shook his head. “Engineering hasn’t seen him yet.”

Keyes frowned. “Where the hell is he?”

Li swore, and Kirtley looked frustrated. Keyes checked the progress on his virus. It was done. This ship would never get back to the Inner Colonies or Earth.

“They’re saying they have more mass-driver shots aimed at us if we don’t kill the thrusters,” Kirtley said.