Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [54]
The hallway dead-ended in a vault door.
"The retinal and palm scanners are broken," Will explained. "There's voice access, which we've tried, but there's no response. This door must be a meter thick, so without cutting tools or a hundred kilos of explosive we're stuck on this side."
"You spoke to the people on the other side?" Kelly asked. "The channel is open," Will said. "But there's been no reply. Everyone on the other side probably bugged out." "Or maybe you're just not saying anything they want to hear," Kelly said. She whistled a six-note singsong tune.
Will nodded. "I didn't think of that."
The tune had been the Spartan's secret code from when they were young and training on Reach. It was their all-clearit's-safe-to-come-out signal. No one but the Spartans and a few very select outsiders knew of it. . . a few outsiders who might be still here.
Kelly keyed the mic and whistled the tune. She released the key and waited.
Two minutes ticked off Fred's mission clock. Too much time sitting here, doing nothing, while the Covenant over their heads were undoubtedly figuring out a way to dig them out and tear them to pieces.
"It was a good idea," he told Kelly. "We'll recon the shaft. Maybe it's not completely collapsed. Will you—"
A mechanism thunked and then hummed within the titanic door. There was a hiss as the seams parted, and the meter-thick door swung inward on perfectly balanced, silent hinges.
Bright light flooded the passage. A silhouetted figure stood on the threshold. As Fred's display compensated and enhanced the image, he saw it was human, slight of figure, female. She wore a gray pleated skirt and a white lab coat with a data pad stuffed into the breast pocket. He caught the glimmer of her eyeglasses, black-rimmed with faint bifocal lines. Her gray hair was coiled into a tight bun.
But it was her face that caught and held his focus—he recognized the tight smooth skin that wrinkled only in the comers of her mouth and her gray-blue eyes. She was the intellect behind the SPARTAN-II program, and the one who'd invented their MJOLNIR armor.
She was Dr. Catherine Halsey.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
0810 hours, August 30,2552 (Military Calendar)\EpsilonEridani system, ONI underground facility, planet Reach.
Dr. Halsey studied the five Spartans in the hallway and pushed her antique glasses farther up the ridge of her nose. Despite everything their presence here meant—Reach invaded, their mission to find the Covenant leadership compromised, everything she had worked for now in jeopardy—she was still pleased to see them. She steeled herself, though; an emotional outburst wouldn't be understood, or appreciated, by her Spartans.
"Come in," she said briskly. "And hurry. From the sounds of things upstairs we haven't much time."
The Spartans stood there a moment—undoubtedly communicating with one another through a mixture of externally silent COM channels and minute body language. She noticed the tick of a finger, the slight nod of a head. They then moved together, picked up their equipment, and walked through the threshold of the vault.
Dr. Halsey greeted them as they passed her. "It's good to see you, Fred."
"Ma'am," Fred replied. "Good to see you, too."
She noted that Kelly's movements were off, a little sluggish.
She was hurt, as were the rest of them, now that she saw them up close. "Kelly." "Doctor Halsey." She reached out and gave her hand a slight squeeze of greeting.
"Isaac."
"Doctor."
"Vinh."
ERIC NYLUND
She nodded.
"William."
Will grunted. He had never liked his formal name.
She knew this annoyed them all—how she was always able to tell who they were despite the MJOLNIR armor. She had grown up with them, knew their every gesture and their individual walks. She could have never called them by their number designations: SPARTAN-104, -087, -039, -029, and -043, respectively.
Dr. Halsey tapped a control pad. The vault door eased silently shut, its seams vanished, and, with a sharp, metallic click, it locked.
"We have access to Aqua, Scarlet, and Lavender Levels," she told them. "Follow me to the