Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [63]
The last Elite had vanished. No return fire. No sensor contact.
The Spartans held position for a moment longer, then regrouped. With hand signals, each member of the team reported no contact.
Fred spied tracks in the white dust scattered on the floor. The Elite had bugged out, and it was most likely gathering reinforcements.
That wasn't what Covenant Elites usually did. Their pride demanded that they fight, and die fighting, if need be. They would hurl themselves headlong into battle, no matter the odds, and die by the hundreds if necessary. They never ran away. Nothing about this engagement had been "usual."
Fred glanced at Will and Dr. Halsey. Will gave him a thumbs-up, indicating that the doctor hadn't been wounded in the exchange.
After the exchange of gunfire, there was no need for secrecy. "One of them got away," Fred told them. "We need to move, too... and forget quiet."
The Spartans ran down the corridor. They heard and felt another explosion directly over their heads.
Kelly skidded to a halt in front of the locked elevator doors. She gripped one of the panels; Fred and Vinh gripped the seam of the other side, and the Spartans pried them apart as if the five-centimeter steel alloy were no tougher than the rind of an orange.
Kelly grabbed the elevator cables and slid down. Vinh followed, then Fred plummeted more than five hundred meters into
the darkness. The three of them ripped open the doors at the bottom of the shaft. Will slid down next with Dr. Halsey holding on to his neck. Isaac followed.
"There should be an air vent," Dr. Halsey whispered. "There."
Kelly ripped off the vent cover and peered down.
"It leads to the old mine tunnels," Dr. Halsey told them, "and more, I hope." "Go," Fred ordered. Kelly dived in, headfirst. They waited ten seconds, and her ac
knowledgment light winked on.
Fred entered next, sliding through the vent duct. It twisted and turned and finally dumped him into a long tunnel of roughly hewn granite. The ceiling was ten meters high and—judging from the three-meter-wide tire tracks in the dust—big enough for heavy equipment to have rolled through.
Will slid out of the duct with Dr. Halsey riding on his chest. Vinh and Isaac came after them.
"There's more to this place," Dr. Halsey told them, standing up and brushing the dust from her lab coat. "This is only the beginning. We have to—"
A thunderous detonation cut her off. The mountain exploded, and ONI's base collapsed over their heads.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
0002 hours, September 7,2552 (Military Calendar) \ ONIunderground facility, planet Reach.
Fred followed the trail of odd symbols along the left-hand stone wall until they twisted into a spiral mosaic and vanished into ever-smaller curls. The symbols were part of the rock, composed of glittering mica inclusions in the granite matrix. There were a series of squares, triangles, bars, and dots, similar to Covenant calligraphy he had seen—but at the same time it was simpler, cleaner, and when Fred focused on them, the characters seemed to blur around their edges and fade from his stare.
He blinked, and the symbols were there again.
Following these symbols like a trail of bread crumbs had been his primary mission for the last five days. Dr. Halsey and the Spartans had explored the extensive caverns, hoping to find two things: a way out, and what Dr. Halsey called "the most important discovery of the millennium." She had, however, refused to speculate on what exactly this discovery would be. "I'm a scientist," she'd told them, "not a soothsayer."
Fred would have settled for finding an airhole to the surface— but he recognized that the symbols were important, too. They were important because the Covenant thought they were important. And that made whatever Dr. Halsey was searching for worth finding, if only to keep the enemy from getting it.
The Covenant hadn't stopped digging overhead, although the pace and methods they used had changed. There had been no further explosions. There was only the constant and gentle scraping sound of equipment as they slowly but steadily