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He heard the crunch of gravel under a boot. He spun, rifle raised, and saw Lucy.
Every SPARTAN-III looked the same in their Semi-Powered Infiltration armor. The angular shifting camo pattern of the SPI armor was one part legionnaire mail, one part tactical body armor, and one part chameleon. Tom, however, recognized Lucy's short, careful gait.
He made the two-fingers-over-faceplate gesture, the age-old silenced Spartan welcome. She gave him the slightest of nods.
Tom handed her a Jackal shield unit and two plasma grenades.
Adam arrived next, and Min ten seconds after that.
When all their appropriated shields were in place, Tom gave Team Foxtrot a series of quick, sharp hand gestures, ordering them to move ahead in a loose arc formation. Stealthy, but fast.
As he stood, thunder rumbled, fire flashed in the sky, and a
shadow covered them—and vanished. Two teardrop-shaped Covenant Seraph fighters roared over their hiding spot.
A line of plasma erupted a hundred meters behind them—an inferno that billowed and blossomed straight toward his team.
Tom leapt to one side, activating his Jackal shield, holding it between him and the three-thousand-degree flames that would melt though his SPI armor like butter. The force field flared white from the radiation; his skin on his palms prickled with blisters.
The plasma passed… thinned… evaporated. The air cooled.
Covenant air support was already in play. That made the situation a hundred times worse.
With a blink, Tom switched his heads-up display from TACMAP to TEAMBIO. All members of Team Foxtrot showed skyrocketing pulses and blood pressures. But they were all still green. All alive. Good.
He sprinted. Stealth was no longer an operational priority. Getting to the factory where they couldn't be strafed was all that mattered.
Behind him, Lucy, Adam, and Min fell in line, covering the rough ground in long powerful strides at nearly thirty kilometers an hour.
Red ovals appeared on Tom's TACMAP: Covenant Seraphs on another attack run. More than before… three… six… ten.
Tom glanced to either side and saw his comrades, hundreds of Spartans running across the broken ground. The dust from their charge filled the air and mingled with the smoke from the last plasma blasts.
Three Spartans lagged behind, turned, and braced, holding M19-B SAM missile launchers. They fired. Missiles streaked into the atmosphere, leaving snaking trails of vapor.
The first bounced off an incoming Seraph's shield; the missile exploded, not damaging the craft, but buffeting it nonetheless
into its wingman. Both craft tumbled, lost fifty meters of altitude, and then recovered—but their leading edges scraped the ground, dissipating their weakened shields, and they spun end over end erupting into fiery pinwheels.
The two other missiles struck their targets, overloaded shields, leaving their target Seraphs covered in soot, but otherwise intact. Tom could see the Seraphs wave off their attack runs.
A small victory.