Program the rest to detach and track any enemy ship on our approach."

Haverson nodded and settled into the ops station next to Polaski.

Two crates and a duffel pushed through the open access tunnel to the Pelican. Locklear emerged from the opening and sealed the hatch. "That's it, Chief," he said. "An HE Pistol, two extra MA5Bs, one M90 Close Assault Shotgun, and a crate or so of frag grenades. About a dozen clips for the rifles—only a few shells for the shotgun, though."

The Chief took four grenades and a half dozen clips for his as- sault rifle. He ejected his weapon's nearly spent magazine and slapped a full one into place with a satisfying clack.

The Sergeant grabbed ammo, an MA5B, and three grenades.

"Orbital exit burn in ten seconds," Polaski said.

"Dog the rest of that," the Chief told Locklear. "And brace yourself."

Locklear secured the collection of weapons and ordnance in a duffel bag, looped it around his neck, and then found a hand- hold. Sergeant Johnson leaned against the cryopods. The Master Chief grabbed the bulkhead.

"Releasing Pelican," Polaski said. There was a thump from beneath the hull. "Pelican away."

"Pelican autopilot programmed," Cortana said.

"Moray mines attached and armed," Haverson added.

Polaski said, "Exit burn in three... two... one. Burn!"

The Longsword's engine roared to life, the hull creaked with stress, and everyone leaned against the acceleration.

The Pelican pulled ahead, rounded the horizon of the moon first, and arced back into the debris field. As the Longsword fol- lowed, the light struck the surface of the moon just right and the Chief saw meteors rain upon the planetoid, leaving craters and tiny puffs of dust as they impacted.

Polaski snapped the display port camera centered on the Covenant cruisers. "They were waiting for us," she cried. "Evasive maneuvers." The Pelican rolled to starboard. "Accelerating to the flagsh—"

The flagship was close. Too close. It must have anticipated their orbital trajectory. But it hadn't counted on them turning straight toward it. If they hadn't, the flagship would have been in a perfect perpendicular firing position.

"Pelican now two hundred kilometers in the lead," Polaski said.

The bulky craft drew fire from the cruisers. Smoke trailed from its hull, and bits of the empty ship were vaporized.

"Mines away," Haverson announced. "Plugging coordinates and trajectories into NAV, Polaski. Don't run them over."

"Roger," she said. "Hang on—we're going in."

"I hate this crap," Locklear muttered. "Ships shooting each other, fire so thick you could walk on it to the LZ, and me sittin' here not able to do a damn thing but hang on and wonder when I'm going to get blown up."

The Chief said nothing, but he agreed. Despite the ODST's foul disposition, he shared his uneasiness with space combat.

"Amen," Sergeant Johnson added. "Now shut up and let the lady drive." He removed a mission record unit from his pocket and inserted a chip. The screen blanked; a rhythmic cacophony blasted from its single tiny speaker.

The Chief recognized the sound as "flip" music—a descen- dant of some centuries-old noise called "metal." The Sarge had peculiar tastes, to say the least.

"Just shoot me now, Sarge," Locklear protested, "and get it over with. Don't torture me with that crap first."

"Suck it up, Marine. This is a classic."

"So's a mercy killing."

Polaski continued to evade, and the Longsword rolled and jinked port and starboard. She sent the ship into a double barrel roll'to dodge a plasma torpedo fired from the flagship.

"Show-off," Cortana muttered in the Chief's helmet speaker.

"Connecting to the Covenant battlenet," Cortana announced over the ship COM. "Accessing their weapons systems. Stand by."

Ahead, the Pelican intercepted a second torpedo and burst into flames, vaporized, and smeared across the night as a cloud of sparkling ionized metal.

The flagship appeared on the forward viewscreen—no larger than a dinner plate.

"No more time to play around," Polaski muttered. She hit the afterburners and rocketed toward the flagship.

The sudden acceleration sent the Chief and Sergeant Johnson bouncing to the aft of the Longsword. Locklear still hung on to the frame, now nearly horizontal.

"There is now insufficient distance to decelerate and make a soft landing inside the flagship launch bay," Cortana warned.

"Really?" Polaski replied, irritated. "No wonder they call you 'smart' AIs." She tugged her cap lower over her eyes. "I'll do the flying. You concentrate on getting those weapons offline."

"They're launching fighters," Haverson warned. On the viewscreen the Covenant flagship now filled half the display, and six Seraph fighters emerged from the belly of the massive ship. "I've still got active signals from twenty of the Moray mines.

Their momentum is carrying them within range. Tracking . ..

locked on . . . maneuvering." Tiny puffs of fire overlapped the teardrop-shaped Seraph fighters as they exploded. Haverson laughed. "Bull's-eye!"

"Forward weapons systems and shields are disabled,"

Cor-tana said.

"The doors are open," Polaski murmured. "We're invited in.

It'd be damn impolite to say no."

The flagship filled the display.

"Collision imminent," Cortana warned.

Sergeant Johnson got to his feet. The Chief knew better and stayed where he was on the deck. He grabbed on to the Ser- geant's leg.

Polaski cut the engines and hit the maneuvering thrusters. The Longsword spun 180 degrees. With the ship now pointed back- ward, she pushed the throttle to maximum, and the engines thun- dered in full overload. The hull strained against the sudden reverse deceleration.

The Chief hung on to the floor with one hand; with the other he held on to the Sergeant and kept him from flying across the ship.

Polaski changed the viewscreen to a spilt view—fore and aft.

She maneuvered with the ship's thrusters, adjusting their ap- proach to the launch bay opening. Onscreen the small opening grew larger alarmingly fast. "Hang on—hang on!"

The engines whined and the ship slowed... but it wasn't going to be enough.

They entered the launch bay at three hundred meters per sec- ond. Flames from the Longsword's engines washed over Grunt technicians as they vainly attempted to scramble out of the way.

Their methane-filled atmosphere tanks popped like firecrackers.

Polaski cut the power. The ship slammed into the wall.

The Master Chief, Sergeant Johnson, and Locklear crashed into the pilot's and ops seats in a heap.

Grunts approached the ship with plasma pistols drawn, the weapons glowing green as the aliens overcharged them. Cove- nant Engineers struggled to put out fires and repair burst conduits.

"Shield reenergizing in place over the launch bay," Cortana announced. "External atmosphere stabilizing. Please feel free to get up and move around the cabin."

Locklear scrambled to his feet. "Yeah!" he whooped. The young Helljumper yanked his MA5B's charging lever and racked a round into the chamber. "Let's rock!"

"Good work, people," the Chief said, standing. He readied his own assault rifle. "But that was just the easy part."

CHAPTER SEVEN

1750 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Covenant flagship, uncharted system, Halo debris field.

Plasma bolts impacted on the Longsword's hull and splashed across the windshield. The packets of glowing energy sizzled across the cockpit and etched cloudy, molten trails into the glass.

A legion of Grunts hunkered behind docked Seraph fighters and fuel pods. Some darted in and out of cover and fired ghostly green blobs of plasma at the Longsword.

"I got 'em," Polaski said and flipped a switch.

The Longsword's landing gear deployed and raised the craft a meter off the floor. "Guns clear," Polaski announced. " 'Bye, boys."

She brought up a targeting reticle and swept it around the bay.

A hail of 120mm rounds tore through the Grunts' cover. Fuel pods and unshielded fighters detonated and sent metal frag- ments and alien soldiers hurtling to the deck. The air exploded into roiling flame, which billowed toward the ceiling and then subsided. Pools of burning fuel and the charred bodies of Grunts and Covenant Engineers littered the launch bay.

"Fire suppression system activating," Cortana said.

Jets of gray mist blew down from above. The fires intensified for a moment, then guttered and went out.

"Is there atmosphere in the bay?" the Chief asked.

"Scanning," Cortana replied. "Traces of ash, some contami-nation from the melted ship hulls, and a lot of smoke, but the air in the bay is breathable, Chief."

"Good." He turned to the others. "We're going in. I'll lead.

Locklear, you're up with me. Sergeant, you've got the rear."

"You'll need to take me, too," Cortana said. "I've pulled a schematic of this ship to navigate, but the engineering controls have been manually locked down. I'll need direct access to this ship's command data systems."

The Chief hesitated. His armor allowed an AI like Cortana to tag along stored in a special crystal layer. On Halo, Cortana had been an invaluable tactical asset.

Still, she also used part of his armor's neural interface for pro- cessing purposes, literally harnessing parts of the Chief's brain.

And after coming out of Halo's computer system, she'd been act- ing. . . twitchy.

He put his discomfort aside. If Cortana turned into a liability, he'd pull the plug.

"Stand by," he said. He punched a key on the computer terminal and dumped Cortana to a data chip. A moment later the ter- minal pulsed green.

He removed the chip and slotted it in the back of his helmet.

There was a moment of vertigo, and then the familiar mercury-and-ice sensation flooded his skull as Cortana interfaced.

"Still plenty of room in here, I see," she said.

He ignored her customary quip and nodded at Johnson and Locklear. "Let's go."

Sergeant Johnson hit the door release, and the side hatch slid open. Locklear shouldered his rifle and poured fire through the opening. A pair of Grunts who had crouched near the Longsword to protect themselves from the fire flew backward onto the deck.

Phosphorescent blood pooled beneath their prone forms.

The Chief dived through the open hatch and rolled to his feet; his motion tracker picked up three targets to his side. He whirled about and saw a trio of Covenant Engineers. He removed his fin- ger from the weapon's trigger. Engineers were no threat.

The odd, meter-high creatures hovered above the deck, using bladders of some lighter-than-air gas produced by their bodies.

Their tentacles and feelers probed a tangle of fuel lines, quickly repairing the pipes and pumps.

"Funny that there's no welcoming committee yet," Cortana whispered. "I looked over this ship's personnel roster: three thousand Covenant, mostly Engineers. There's a light company of Grunts, and only a hundred Elites."

"Only a hundred?" the Chief muttered.

He waved his team forward toward a heavy door at the back of the launch bay. The air was full of smoke and fire-suppressing mist, which reduced visibility to a dozen meters.

The rattle of assault rifle fire echoed through the bay. The Chief spun to his right and brought his own rifle to bear.

Locklear stood over the twitching corpses of the Engineers.

He fired another burst into the fallen aliens.

"Don't waste your ammunition, Corporal," the Sergeant said.

"They may be ugly, but they're harmless."

"They're harmless now, Sarge," Locklear replied. He wiped a spatter of alien blood from his cheek and smirked.

The Chief tended to agree with Locklear's threat analysis of the Covenant: When in doubt, kill. Still, he found the young Ma- rine's actions unnecessary... and a little sloppy.

The architecture of the Covenant fighter bay was similar to the interior of the other Covenant ship the Chief had recently been inside, the Truth and Reconciliation. Low indirect lights illuminated the dark purple walls. The alien metal appeared to be sten- ciled with odd, faintly luminescent geometric patterns that overlapped each other. The ceiling was vaulted and unneces- sarily high, maybe ten meters. In contrast to a human ship, it was a waste of space.

The Chief spotted a large door at the back of the bay.

The door was a distorted hexagonal shape and large enough that the entire team could enter at the same time—not that he'd ever be foolish enough to take up such a formation in hostile ter- ritory. The door had four sections that, when keyed to open, would silently slide away from the center.

"That will take us to the main corridor," Cortana said. "And from there, to the bridge."

The Chief waved Locklear to the right side of the door, Sergeant Johnson to the left.

"Lieutenant Haverson," he called out, "you're our rear guard.

Polaski, hit the door controls. Hand signals from now on."

Haverson tossed an ironic salute to the Chief but tightened his grip on his weapon and scanned the bay.

Polaski moved forward and crouched by the panel in the mid- dle of the door. She turned her cap around and leaned closer, then looked back to the Chief and gave him a thumbs-up.

He raised his rifle and nodded, giving her the go-ahead to breach the door.

She reached for the controls. Before she touched them, though, the door slid apart.

Standing on the opposite side were five Elites: Two stood shielded by either edge of the door; a third stood centered in the corridor, plasma rifle leveled at the Chief; behind it, the fourth Elite covered the rear of their formation; and one last Elite crouched in front of the door control panel—nose to nose with Polaski.

The Chief fired two bursts directly over Polaski's head. His first shots struck the Elite in the middle of the corridor. His sec- ond burst hit the Elite standing rear guard. The alien warriors hadn't activated their shields, and 7.62mm rounds punctured their armor. The pair of Elites dropped to the deck.