第9页
The impact stunned him, then he tasted salt, and choked on water that filled his helmet. He clawed for the surface. The lining of his SPI armor swelled, taking on water, weighing him down.
He broke the surface, paddling as hard as he could with his legs to stay afloat. He clawed at his helmet release and pulled it off.
Next to him, Lucy had her helmet off as well, gasping.
"Look." He nodded to the cliff tops.
From this angle Tom saw the Covenant cruisers over the field. Lances of laser fire rained down from the ships' lateral weapon arrays and blasted his fellow Spartans. Firepower meant for capital ship combat… how could anyone survive that?
A new sun appeared. The supercritical core flared and light filled the world. The cruisers rippled, distorted, their alloy skins boiling away in the heat. They disintegrated, bits blasted outward.
The rocky prominence shattered into molten debris.
"Down!" Tom cried.
He and Lucy pushed themselves underwater, diving to escape the overpressure and incinerating blast. His waterlogged armor might now save his life.
Overhead, water flash vaporized. Droplets of liquid rock and metal hissed past him. Heat smothered him… and a giant hand grasped and squeezed until all Tom saw was blackness.
Tom lay on the ground panting. They had nearly drowned after the blast, but managed to shed their armor, and finally, exhausted, swam back to the shore, and dragged themselves around the edge of the battlefield and into the hills.
He and Lucy had made it to extraction point six where he had seen one of the stealth exfiltration ships.
No Covenant reinforcements came. They had all been killed when the reactor blew. Operation TORPEDO was a success… but it had cost the lives of everyone else in the Beta Company contingent.
All that remained of the factory, the Covenant cruisers, and ground forces of Beta Company was a glass crater four kilometers in diameter. No bones, not even a camo panel from a suit of SPI armor. Gone. Whispers in the wind.
Lucy pulled herself up against the hull of the Black Cat sub-prowler craft, her body trembling. She started to stagger back down the hill.
"Where are you going?"
"Survivors," she whispered and took one uncertain step forward. "Foxtrot. We have to look."
No one had survived. They had checked all the COM frequencies, searched the shoreline, fields, and hills on their long silent hike back. No one else was alive.
Lucy was tiny. Like Tom, she was only twelve years old, but at one point six meters and seventy kilos, Lucy was one of the
smallest SPARTAN-IIIs. Without her SPI armor and weapons, and her pale form covered only in modest body sheathing, she looked even smaller.
Tom stood and gently put his arm around her. She trembled violently.
"You're going into shock."
He found a first-aid kit and injected her with the standard postmission antishock medical cocktail.
"Survivors…" she whispered.
"There are none," he said. "We have to get out of here. The Black Cat's capacitors will drain in four hours and we won't be able to jump to Slipspace."