Nine days to bring a ridge with us. That is what the Frontier said afterwards, that we brought a ridge, and they meant it as a complaint. It is the kindest thing anyone has written about the Covenant.
The ridge was there already. What we brought was two Titans, two Bulwarks, a relay, an Engineer and a mortar's worth of rounds up eleven hundred metres of blue ice that a Strider would have crossed in a quarter of an hour and could not have carried a rifle up. I am the Bulwark called Ballast because I am what keeps a plan from tipping over. Counterweight is the other. We do not glide much. We are certified to, and there is a Covenant Strider somewhere, painted grey, whose operator gets teased, but a Bulwark's Drive is tuned to move a person who is also carrying a siege weapon, and the foundry did not tune it for joy.
From the crest the salvage camp is a shelf of ice with a tunnel in it and a line of sensor posts along the lip like teeth. Below the shelf the crevasse field, a kilometre of it, is the reason the Frontier never looked up. A Bulwark cannot cross that. A Bulwark on a Titan's tow can go around it, slowly, for nine days, while the Frontier watches the field.
The chain is six links and I am the fourth. Blind: the raiding pair kills the western post from across the field at a range the Vector Cannon is not rated for, and the Frontier sends its Engineer to fix it, which is the gap. Insert: Tamper, in grey, crosses the field on Glide while the Engineer is busy and sets the mark at the tunnel mouth. A Frontier scout sees him and reports one of ours, wrong paint. Keep: our Engineer holds the relay on the crest under a Shield Pack while their drone sweep finds it and hammers it, and the Shield holds for exactly the time the solution needs, which is what a Shield is for.
Then the mark comes through the relay and onto my readout, and Counterweight's, and for twelve seconds it is the only thing either of us can see.
Solution laid. The Frontier jams the beacon on the thirteenth second. They are good, the Frontier; they are just late, because they were watching the field.
Fire is eleven rounds. It is not a manoeuvre. It is arithmetic done in advance and paid for in weight, and the rounds go where the arithmetic says, onto the tunnel mouth and the sensor line, and the camp's information ends. Exploit is the Hammers and Rivet going down the blind side of the ridge into what is left, and Rivet walks the tunnel and comes out with the first Core, and then the second.
On the way down a Titan finds a crevasse the survey had not, and its driver does not come out. That is the ledger: one Titan, one operator, four Break Cores. It is a good ledger. The Covenant keeps them carefully, which is why the other blocs owe us so much.