A Well-Oiled Machine

“Well…” Kodiak stretched for some benediction to commence with. The recon was reviewed, his MJOLNIR’s lockup tested, and their vehicle as close to functioning as they’d get. In the end, all he came up with was, “Here we go.”

“Thanks, team lead. Real inspiring.” Dyne quipped. He was crouching on the Scorpion’s rear right tread pontoon, a few feet behind where Kodiak stood on the tank’s deck. Kodiak would’ve turned to glare at him—hunched over a melted exhaust grate in the cannon mount’s side, diesel fumes belching into his MJOLNIR-armored face—but he had to keep the 90-millimeter barrel propped over his shoulder.

Morgan, posted somewhere above in the high-rises shadowing the claustrophobic urban canyons they rolled down, reported over COM. “Coming up on the turn. Covenant checkpoint will be in view the moment you clear it. Contact in five… four…”

Kodiak fingers stretched around the cannon, trying to clear the squelch of sweat between them. This was his bad idea, terrible enough to make him smile as much as any he and Dyne dreamed up had. But those had all been harmless pranks back in training. In live combat? His team believed in him enough to back it, but if this didn’t work, half of them were likely to be killed. But as the tank rolled out beyond the corner storefront, carrying them into full view of the Covenant, the chance to go back and think of something else evaporated.

One of their sleek, purple lookout platforms hung two stories above the burned-out wrecks of civilian minicars, suspended by gravity lifts on the street below. Kodiak spied a squat Unggoy on the tower who looked up, shook itself in disbelief, and scrambled toward the mounted plasma cannon it was supposed to tend.

Kodiak himself scrambled over the Scorpion’s deck, pulling the cannon with him. The turret’s traversal hydraulics were dead, blasted by the hole in the mounting’s side from a plasma mortar as Team Machete had found it, abandoned in the street—but the firing mechanisms were still intact.

With augmented strength and MJOLNIR circuits, the young Spartan hefted the cannon into position until it jutted up like a dug-in spear at the lookout platform, then locked his armor, freezing it in place like instacrete to brace himself.

“Now, Amber!” he shouted.

Buried in the operator’s seat below, Amber squeezed both triggers on her controls, and the telescoping barrel slammed back as an explosion drove a 90mm shell through. Kodiak flinched as the blast made his ears ring and the shaking barrel threatened to numb his fingers—but the lookout platform detonated, going up in a cloud of smoke and purple flame as the shell pierced it and exploded.

“Yahoo!” Amber yelled as burning debris rained over the alarmed cries of Unggoy and shrieks of Kig-Yar. Their auspicious first blow brought Kodiak a grin, too, but only momentum would keep things in their favor, and it left no time to celebrate.

“Dyne, reload!”

“On it!” Dyne replied, already reaching into the melted grate to get at the exposed breech. The autoloader at the back of the turret had been punched out by the gun’s recoil, but plasma had slagged the mechanisms driving the rest of the operation. MJOLNIR gloves insulating his fingers, Dyne pried the smoking, empty shell free before ramming home a new one from a box sitting beside him, then scurried to the turret’s rear to throw all his weight into pushing the assembly back in again. When it rammed home with a clunk, he sprang clear and called, “Up!”

On the Scorpion’s deck, Kodiak had already unlocked himself and pulled the cannon twenty degrees, his eye on some of the quickest responders as the Scorpion advanced. “Fire!”

A dormant Ghost on the left sidewalk was ripped apart by a tungsten-carbide slug, taking its neighbor with it in the pursuant explosion—along with the Sangheili riders running to them.

Scanning for their next target as the checkpoint became an anthill, Kodiak’s count of the seconds until Dyne finished reloading was lost when acid-green plasma bolts splashed across his energy shield from the right. Despite his locked armor, he made a prime target standing atop the tank like a superhuman hood ornament. No sooner had his shield alarm started beeping, however, than sharp cracks rang out from above, and the offending Kig-Yar fell dead in the street. Morgan and Tara were picking off the infantry brave enough to rush them, as planned.

“Uh-oh,” Dyne moaned as a less-than-planned development hovered out of a parking garage beside the checkpoint. “Where’d they get that?!”

A Wraith, the Scorpion’s Covenant nemesis, turned sluggishly toward them on the cushion of its gravity drive. The top of its bulbous, blue laminate armor cracked open, revealing the glowing petals of a charging plasma mortar. Blue streams of fire from anti-personnel cannons in its sloping prow tracked across the asphalt, racing toward Kodiak.

“Dyyyne!” he called in desperate warning.

To his relief, the reply was, “Up!”

“Fire!”

Another deafening kick, and a fireball rolled over the Wraith’s prow. The blue streams immediately stopped—but the Wraith floated out of the smoke and flaming gasses with no more than dented plating. Then, with an almost gentle wail, its mortar conjured a meter-wide ball of blue-white plasma and lobbed it in a low, sharp arc directly toward the Scorpion.

The blinding-hot mortar swelled, dominating Kodiak’s vision. His armor, even locked, wouldn’t save him from this, and with it locked he didn’t have time to get out of the way—but it did stop him from tumbling off the deck when the Scorpion lurched to a halt.

Amber’s maneuver saved his life. Striking the ground in front of the tank, the magnetic fields containing the plasma broke open, bursting into a short-lived conflagration that flickering out as the Scorpion’s glacis plate deflected it.

With the cannon on his shoulder still pointed, Kodiak had the presence of mind to yell, “Reload!”

“No time!” Dyne shouted back. “What do we do?”

“This!” Amber roared, and suddenly the tank was moving again. Crawling over the dying embers of the mortar, they bore down on the Wraith with all their meager speed and considerable mass.

With a crash, riveted steel rammed laminate armor. The Wraith’s sophisticated propulsion let it float over the worst terrains, but offered none of the traction of a Scorpion’s segmented treads. Its prow locked with the human tank’s glacis, and the Wraith sailed back until it was pinned, listing, against the concrete of the parking garage behind with a bone-jarring crunch. Its mortar fired once more, but the angle only sent its shot sailing harmlessly into the street.

Kodiak wasted no time. His armor lock released, he sprang from their tank to the Wraith and dug his glove into the rent armor, prying free the hatch over the cockpit. Seated amid fiber-optic displays winking like stars in dark control panels, the Sangheili Tankmaster threw one four-fingered hand up to protect its head and went for a plasma pistol with the other.

Kodiak didn’t give him the chance. Slipping a knife from its sheath as his arm drew back from discarding the hatch, he drove its point into the Elite’s sternum where the alien warrior’s armor didn’t cover, impaling one of its two hearts. It was over in a moment, the tankmaster’s last breath dripping purple blood from between its four mandibles.

Shaking out the blade, he turned to see Dyne helping Amber climb from the Scorpion’s operating seat. The tank’s growling diesel engine had finally gone quiet, apparently dead after the impact had shaken its last, tenuous lifeline. None of the checkpoint’s remaining infantry had appeared to counterattack; Morgan and Tara’s shooting must have made short work of them. Machete’s charge was a complete success, routing the Covenant entirely.

Settling for contentment with their performance as he came down from the adrenaline high of combat, Kodiak depressed the COM control on his helmet’s side. “Erin? Checkpoint is clear. Tell the convoy to come through.”