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The officer glanced back over her shoulder and spied a Covenant dropship. The ungainly looking craft swept in from the east, and was about to deploy additional forces. Its plasma cannon opened fire and stitched a line of black dots in the dirt, out toward the edge of the drop-off.
A sniper disappeared from the waist down, and still had enough air to scream as his forward motion slowed, and his torso landed on a pile of his own intestines.
McKay skidded to a halt, yelled, “Snipers! About face,fire !” and hoped that the brief parade ground–style orders would be sufficient to communicate what she wanted.
Each Covenant dropship had side slots, small cubicle-like spaces where their troops rode during transit, and from which they were released when the aircraft arrived over the landing zone. Had the pilot been more experienced he would have positioned the aircraft so that it was nose-on to the enemy and fired his cannon while the troops bailed out—but he wasn’t, or he’d simply made a mistake, as he presented the ship’s starboard side to the humans and opened the doors.
More than half the ODST snipers had switched back to their S2s and had shouldered their weapons up as the drop doors opened. They opened fire before the Covenant troops could leap to the ground. One of their rounds hit a plasma grenade and caused it to explode. A control line must have been severed, because the dropship lurched to port, pitched forward, and nosed into the ground. Twin waves of soil were gouged out of the plateau as the aircraft slid forward, hit a boulder, and exploded into flame.
Secondary explosions cooked off and the twin hulls disintegrated. The sound of the blast bounced off theAutumn ’s hull and rolled across the surrounding plain.
The Marines waited a moment to see if any of the aliens would try to crawl, walk, or run away, but none of them did.
McKay heard the muffledthump ,thump,thumpof automatic weapons fire coming from within the ship behind her, knew the job was only half done, and waved to the half dozen Marines. “What are you waiting for? Let’s go!”
The Helljumpers looked at one another, grinned, and followed McKay into the ship. The El-tee mightlook like a wild-eyed maniac, but she knew her stuff, and that was good enough for them.
The soil was still damp from the rain, so when the sun hit the top of the mesa a heavy mist started to form, as if a battalion of spirits had been released from bondage.
Keyes, exhausted by his captivity, not to mention the harrowing escape from theTruth and Reconciliation , had literally collapsed in the bed the Helljumpers had prepared for him and slept hard for the next three hours.
Now, awakened by both a nightmare and the internal clock that was still attuned to the arbitrarily set ship time, the Naval officer was up and prowling about.
The view from the rampart was nothing less than spectacular, looking out over a flat plain to the gently rolling hills beyond. A bank of ivory-white clouds scudded above the hills. The vista wasso beautiful,so pristine, that it was difficult to believe that Halo was a weapon.