Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [36]
She checked on the Chief. His signal was still on board, and his biomonitor indicated that he was still alive.
"Chief, are you there yet? I'm down to one last option."
There was a static-filled pause over the COM, and then the Master Chief whispered, "Almost." "Be careful. Your armor is breached. You can no longer function in a compromised atmosphere."
His acknowledgment light winked on.
Cortana pushed the Covenant reactors to overload and plotted a course around Threshold. She had to slip into the outer reaches of its atmosphere. The heat, ionization, and planet's magnetic field might protect them from the plasma.
The flagship rolled and dived into the thin tendrils of clouds. Bands of white ammonia and amber ammonium hydrosulfide clouds snaked in sinuous ribbons. A red-purple spot of phosphorus compounds cycloned and lightning arced, illuminating an intervening layer of pale blue ice crystals.
But their ship no longer had shields. The friction heated the hull to three hundred degrees Celsius as she brushed against the upper reaches of Threshold.
On her aft cameras Cortana saw the trailing Covenant ships open fire. Their shots followed her like a pack of predator birds.
"Come and get me," she muttered.
She adjusted the attack angle of the flagship so it nosed up, which produced a slight amount of lift. She concentrated the building heat toward the ship's tail. A turbulent wake of superheated air corkscrewed behind them.
"Cortana?" Polaski said. "We're approaching the viable edge of an exit orbit. You're getting too close to the planet."
"I am aware of our trajectory, Warrant Officer," she said and snapped off the COM. The last thing she needed was a flying lesson.
The leading edge of the plasma overtook them. It roiled in their wake, churned explosively with the atmosphere. The flagship pitched and dropped in the unstable air, but the plasma diffused and caused them no further damage. Behind the flagship was an unfurling trail hundreds of kilometers long, a wide flaming gash upon Threshold.
Cortana experienced a moment of triumph—then squelched it.
There was a new problem: The concussion from that blast had altered their flight path. The heat and overpressure wave had thinned the atmosphere ... just enough to cause the flagship to drop seven hundred meters. Wisps of ice crystals washed over the prow.
They were too deep now. They didn't have enough power to break orbit. They would spiral into the atmosphere, and would ultimately be crushed by the titanic gravitational forces of Threshold.
The Chief spun in midair and planted his feet on the "ground." The gravity had been disabled in this elevator shaft. That had made traversing the many intervening decks easy . . . as long as he'd been willing to jump and trust that the power in this part of the ship wouldn't be restored.
The Engineer clutching his shoulder tapped the tiny control panel on the wall. The doors at the bottom of the shaft sighed and slowly slid apart.
Funny how the creature didn't care what or who John was. Didn't it know their races were enemies? It was clearly intelligent and could communicate. Maybe it didn't care about enemies or allies. Maybe all it wanted to do was its job.
There was a corridor ahead, five meters wide, with a vaulted ceiling. Past a final arch, the passage opened up into the cavernous reactor room. The ambient lights in the hallway and room were off. Along the far wall of the room, however, the ten-meterhigh reactor coils pulsed with blue-white lightning and threw hard shadows onto the walls.
The Master Chief adjusted his low-light filters to screen out the glow from the reactor. He made out the silhouettes of crates and other machinery. He also saw one of those shadows on the wall move ... with the distinct slouching waddle of a Covenant Grunt. Then the motion was gone.
An ambush. Of course.
He paused, listened, and heard the panting of at least half a dozen Grunts, and then the high-pitched