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Now! Get us out of here!"

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CHAPTER

FORTY-ONE

nOO HOURS, NOVEMBER 4, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \ UNDETERMINED LOCATION WITHIN FORERUNNER CONSTRUCT KNOWN AS SHIELD WORLD

The Spartans and Dr. Halsey gathered about the graves of William and Dante.

It was a fine spot: sunlight dappled the river that flowed past this grove of oak trees. A path of banded onyx curved through the area. They had pried up some of the slabs, scratched in William's and Dante's names, and erected two more to serve as markers for Holly and the Lieutenant Commander.

Senior Chief Petty Officer Mendez read from a small black

leather book: "We have come to a place far from home / Time long passed since we have seen the sun rise / A place where peace can fimally come / A place where we can rest and laugh and sing and love once more."

He hung his head and closed the volume, A Soldier's Tale: Rainforest Wars, the military classic written in 2164.

There was a moment of silence.

"Burial detail dismissed," Fred told them.

Ash set a spent brass casing on each marker, a token of respect for his fellow Spartans. He didn't know what else to do.

It had been a full day and a half since the Lieutenant Commander had ordered them into the rift, and a day and a half since it had sealed, stranding them all here.

The shock of losing him and the others hadn't worn off. They all felt numb and hollow. Spartans usually did not have the luxury of grief; contemplation of the dead was almost always truncated by another mission, a battle, and their focus redirected to the larger strategic picture of saving humanity.

… Not this time.

The Slipspace rift had been stable when Dr. Halsey and Chief Mendez had first passed through, dropping them three meters onto a grassy hill. The cryo pods and Team Saber had followed shortly thereafter. They watched as the opening then started to collapse.

When Fred, Linda, and Kelly emerged, they immediately tried to return. Tom and Lucy had tumbled through the opening, and by then the rift was too small. They could only watch as it compressed back to a single wavering dot and vanished.

Most of them had thought the Slipspace passage would move them to an interior room within the artificial construct known as Onyx.

No one, not even Dr. Halsey, had been prepared for this.

Overhead blazed a golden sun. The sky, if it could be called that, was robin's-egg blue at the horizon but quickly deepened

to indigo and black the higher one looked, then warmed again as it neared the sun. There were no stars.

The surface stretched out in all directions—meadows, rivers, lakes, forests, winding paths all perfectly flat. All flat, that is, until Linda sighted through her Oracle scope. She then discovered every horizon sloped upward until these curving surfaces vanished in the extreme distance.

Linda said it felt like being at the bottom of a large bowl.

Dr. Halsey had assured them they most definitely were not in a "bowl."

"A sphere," she said, repeating this for the third time to Chief Mendez, "is where we are."

The Chief sat in the grass. "One more time," he said, "explain it to me, please, Doctor. Slowly."

Dr. Halsey sighed, straightened her skirt, and then sat next to him. "Very well, Chief" She unfolded her laptop, and numbers, charts, and spectroscopic analysis flashed on-screen.

The Spartans gathered as well to listen. In truth, while they understood the scientific principles that led Dr. Halsey to her conclusions, they still didn't quite believe them.

"We start with this so-called sun." She pointed straight up and then gestured to the data on her screen. "Spectra and energy output are consistent with a G2-type dwarf, one of slightly smaller dimensions than Sol.

"Next, you will note the curvature of this world, concave, as seen through Linda's sniper scope." She tabbed to a new screen and it sketched the star and a curve that arced to complete a full circle.

"Extrapolating, I calculate a diameter of one hundred fifty million kilometers—two astronomical