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The alarm hooted, and Zawaz sprang to his feet with a startled yelp. The squat alien, a Grunt clad in burnished orange armor, fumbled and dropped his motion scanner. He keened in fear and retrieved the device with a trembling claw. If the scanner had been damaged, the Elites would use his body as reactor shielding. If his masters learned he'd been asleep at his post, they might do far worse than kill him. They might give him to the Jackals.
Zawaz shuddered.
Fortunately, the scanner still worked, and the diminutive alien sighed with relief. Three contacts rapidly approached the moun?tain that separated Zawaz's cadre from the distant human forces. He reached for the warning klaxon but relaxed as his detector identified the contacts—Banshee fliers.
He peered over the dirt edge of his protective hole to confirm this. He spotted three of the bulbous aircraft on approach. Zawaz snorted. It was odd that the flight wasn't listed on his patrol schedule. He considered alerting his superiors, then thought bet?ter of it. What if they were Elites on some secret mission?
No, it was best not to question such things. Be ignored. Live another day. That was his creed.
He nestled back into his hole, reset the motion detector to long range, and prayed it wouldn't go off again. He curled into a tight ball and promptly fell into a deep sleep.
Fred led their flying-wedge formation. The purple and red air?ships arced up and over the treetops of the ridge, gaining as
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much altitude as the Banshee could manage—about three hun?dred meters. As he cleared the top, what he saw made him ease off the throttle.
The valley was ten kilometers across and sloped before him, thick with Douglas firs that thinned and gave way to trampled fields and the Big Horn River beyond. Camped in the fields were thousands upon thousands of Covenant troops. Their mass covered the entire valley, and thin, smoke-choked sunlight glinted off a sea of red, yellow, and blue armor. They moved in tight columns and swarmed along the river's edge—so many that it looked like someone had kicked over the largest anthill in existence.
And they were building. Hundreds of flimsy white dome-shaped tents were being erected, atmosphere pits for the methane-breathing Grunts. Farther back were the odd polyhedral huts of the Elite units, guarded by a long line of dozens of beetlelike Wraith tanks. Guard towers punctuated the valley; they spiraled up from mobile treaded bases, ten meters tall and topped with plasma turrets.
The rules had indeed changed. In more than a hundred battles Fred had never seen the Covenant set up encampments of such magnitude. All they did was kill.
Floating behind all this activity, almost brushing against the far hills, the Covenant cruiser sat thirty meters off the ground. It looked like a great bloated fish with stubby stabilizing fins. Its gravity lift was in operation, a tube of scintillating energy that moved matter to and from the ground. Stacks of purple crates gently floated down from the craft. In the afternoon light he could see its weapons bristling along its length, casting spider-like shadows across its hull.