Halo: The Rubicon Protocol by Kelly Gay

Author:Kelly Gay [Gay, Kelly]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Tags: , &#160
Publisher: Titan Books
Published: 2022-08-09T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 22

Zeta Halo

March 4, 2560

Day 83

Spartan Tomas Horvath had lain unconscious for several days on the edge of the mud flats after Gorian ripped the near-fatal metal shard from his side. After he woke, he stayed another week or so, his biomonitors inducing a semicomatose state, slowing down his brain function, metabolism, core temperature, and circulatory system while the medical systems within his armor engaged in the regeneration of his torn insides.

Once he was able to stand, he’d been on the move—albeit slowly at first—sticking to the shadows and feeling real hunger for the first time in a long while, and surly because of it. Those emergency high-caloric nutrient supplements fed directly into his system during his healing process had been the barest minimum to keep him alive. It was enough to get him across the kilometers of mud flats and to a more familiar landscape, but it sure as hell wasn’t filling.

In the weeks that followed, his strength returned and he became adept at hunting the area’s population of striped gophers and land birds for food, and finding abundant water sources in the lowlands. Thanks to the Banished, no doubt, some of the larger fauna on Zeta Halo had been eradicated from this part of the ring, effectively hunted to the point of extinction. This was the Banished’s modus operandi: indiscriminately ravage a location’s resources until it was bare and then move on. For the time being, he’d have to make do with smaller game.

He’d definitely landed off-target of where he had originally intended, but he still counted it as a success—that he’d made it across open space at all was a miracle. Now the challenge, once again, was finding his way back to a UNSC presence.

And at every opportunity, he took out the Banished, becoming somewhat detached after a while, a lone wolf hunting the enemy, picking his targets, stalking them, taking them down one by one and then disappearing. He was smoke and shadow; they never saw him coming and he never left anyone alive to see him leaving.

All the while he stayed on the move and, with Fi’s help, sought the location he’d discovered in the Phantom’s flight recorder. He often referred to the data he’d stolen from the crashed vessel, trying to get a lock on position, using the landscape, building his own map, looking for the ruins from which the Banished had extracted the stone artifacts.

It was the only known location he had to go on, and he was certain it’d bring him back into the Banished’s—and, he hoped, the UNSC’s—main playing field.

After so much time searching, he’d finally found it on the edge of a flooded plain populated with a series of tall, connected mesas. It was a site of intense destruction, the once dry plain evidently having been splintered by the initial ring fracture, causing the ground to drop dramatically in places, leaving the mesas behind and allowing water from a higher-elevation lake to drain into the depressions.

The weather over the plain was tumultuous.

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