Halo_ Ghosts of Onyx - Eric S. Nylund [5]
Seraph fighters dropped from the cruisers, dozens of them, and gathered into swarms. Darkly luminescent shafts of light appeared from the belly of each cruiser, transport beams,
and from them marched hundreds of Elites onto the field.
"But we can't help them either," Tom whispered to his team.
Half of Beta Company turned to face the new threat. Impossible odds, even for Spartans,
but they would buy time for the rest of them to find cover.
Finding cover was a futile tactic, though. Seven Covenant cruisers had enough firepower to neutralize even two hundred
Spartans. They could pin them down, send in ground reinforcements by the thousands,
or if they wanted to, glass the entire moon from orbit.
That left only one option.
"The core," Tom told them. "It's still our mission, and our only effective weapon."
There was a heartbeat pause, and then three green acknowledgment lights winked on
his display. His friends knew what he was asking.
Team Foxtrot moved as one, running into the factory at top speed, dodging pipes and supply pods.
A squad of six Elites was ahead, hunkered behind a tangle of ducts.
Tom tossed a handful of concussive grenades to disorient them, but his team kept running. Any delay—even to engage an enemy who could take shots at their backs—might rob them of their one chance.
The surviving Elites recovered and fired.
Adam fell, one hand clutched at the crystal shards that penetrated his armor and
punctured his lower spine.
"Go!" Adam cried, waving them off. "I'll hold them."
Tom didn't break stride. Adam knew what had to be done: keep fighting until there was
no fight left in him.
The core was a hundred meters ahead. It was impossible to miss, so bright Tom's faceplate automatically polarized to maximum tint, and it was still hard to look at. The core was the size of a ten-story building, pulsing like a huge heart, fed by glowing conduits and steaming coolant pipes, and encrusted with crystalline electronics. It was a marvel of alien engineering, and complex—which hopefully also meant easy to break.
"Main coolant ducts there and there," Tom shouted over TEAMCOM and pointed. "I'll jam
the dump valve." He moved to the base of the core.
Lucy's and Min's acknowledgment lights winked.
Tom helmet's display fuzzed with static, then popped and went black. The reactor plasma and its intensely fluctuating electromagnetic field was wreaking havoc with their electronics.
He found the dump valve, a mechanism the size of a Pelican dropship, just below the main chamber. He unspooled the thermite-carbon cord and ran it around the valve twice. He then primed and activated the charge. A line of lightning brilliance flared and sizzled through Covenant alloy, fusing the valve into a solid lump.
Tom glanced at Lucy. She set an explosive charge on one of the two main coolant lines that fed the reactor, and then set the timer on the detonator.
Min was setting his timer, too—then vanished in a flash of smoke and thunder. The core flared brighter than the sun. Coolant fumes screamed from twisted pipe and alarms blared.
"No!" Lucy screamed.
She ran past Tom toward the billowing cloud of toxic coolant. He caught her wrist, jerking her to a stop.
"He's gone," Tom said. "EM field must have triggered his charge."
She wrestled out of Tom's grasp.
"We have to get out of here," he told her.
She hesitated, taking one step toward Min.
The support structure groaned and started to melt and sag from the superheating core.
She turned back to Tom, nodded, and they ran out of the chamber—deeper into the factory complex, through a jungle of struts and hissing ducts, and splashing through lakes of leaked, boiling coolant.
The charge Lucy had set went off and silenced the reactor's alarms.
Even with their backs to the reactor, running at a full-out flat
sprint, the glare from the core doubled as it reached near supercritical phase. It was too
much to endure, even through a polarized faceplate, and Tom squinted his eyes nearly shut.
They turned a corner, slid down the railing of angled stairs and onto a catwalk that