“Soon,” Linda said. “What timer delay do you want?”
“Two seconds longer than you need to get clear,” John said. “This is going to be close.”
“Give us thirty seconds,” Fred said. “We’ll leave via escape pod.”
John approved. Because Seoba had only a trace atmosphere, the shockwave of a Fury one-megaton thermonuclear device would barely be noticeable from a half kilometer away, and both Spartan Mjolnir and ODST space-assault armor was already shielded from EMP. So they would need to worry only about the heat blast, which could be avoided by simply hiding behind something . . . the farther away, the better, of course.
...
John ignored him. “All personnel, take cover!” he said. “Fury-class tactical nuke detonation thirty seconds! Repeat, tactical nuke thirty seconds!”
...
John was already up and bounding down the run-out drift with Joshua and Anton when Crowther’s voice came over the command channel.
“What the hell was that?”
“Fred and Linda with Starry Night survivors,” John reported. “Be advised, self-destruct detonation in twenty-five seconds.”
...
John didn’t know quite what to make of the exchange with the two commanders, but he’d figure that out later—assuming he cleared the half-kilometer safety range before the Fury detonated.
...
Then John and his companions reached the bottom of the run-out drift, dropped into the blanket of sublimation fog, and started across the quarry floor at a sprint. He didn’t want to distract the squad by asking for a count-off, but his motion tracker showed five Spartans fleeing in the same direction. Counting the two with him and the two that had ridden the escape pod away with Fred, that was all but one of the squad right there. With luck, he wouldn’t lose any.
The gray silhouette of a wrecked Covenant hoverbike emerged from the fog ahead, and a moment later his onboard computer displayed a yellow five-second countdown on the HUD. Four, three . . . John and his companions leaped over the vehicle and crouched down behind it.
The count on his HUD reached one. His helmet speakers crackled with static, and the quarry grew as bright as a muzzle flash. The vehicle rocked ever so slightly, and the fog cleared, carried away on the shadow of a shockwave that Seoba’s trace atmosphere could support.
John rose, then looked back toward a billowing wall of steam where the run-out drift had been a moment before. He was happy to see the blocky shapes of several Spartans—first three, then four, then all five that he had seen on his HUD earlier—emerging from the cloud, stumbling and weaving, but still on their feet. Their Mjolnir was shielded from the EMP released by nuclear weapons, and the lack of atmosphere had protected them from any shockwave effects. But if they had been close enough to the detonation, their armor could have taken some heat damage—and if the shielding had been breached, the Spartans themselves might even have suffered some radiation poisoning.
Source: Halo: Silent Storm
