Halo_ Ghosts of Onyx - Eric S. Nylund [95]
"New course," he told Kelly "Come ninety degrees to starboard. Take us up that mountainside."
"Aye, sir."
The tuning fork-shaped dropship banked and raced up the slope. The earth vanished under them as they crested the summit.
Beyond was a crater a hundred kilometers in diameter.
There were thousands of the earthmovers on the inner slope— all spewing rocks over the edge. The Sentinels had created a giant anthill. How much, Kurt wondered, had ONI cleared in the decades they had been here? And how much of this was the Sentinels' doing?
At lower elevations there was nothing to see. The sun was too low, and shadows pooled. Kurt boosted image enhancement on his heads-up display and faint lines resolved… but nothing made sense.
"Take us in closer," he whispered.
Kelly angled the ship down the interior slope, reducing their speed to one-quarter.
The clouds overhead lit with oranges and reds as the setting sunlight reflected off their undersides… and the crater interior glowed a faint amber.
Kurt blinked, dazzled by what he saw. Mirror-image clouds drifted upon angled surfaces and burned crimson and gold.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw swirls and bands of other muted colors underlying the reflected images: green stripes and black and silver waves that appeared to be a tempest ocean frozen in place.
He blinked once, twice, and then finally unraveled the optical illusion of patterns, colors, and shadow.
There were pillars and arches, elevated aqueducts; columned temples with crowns of three-dimensional Forerunner symbols; a forest of sculpted geometries of spheres, cubes, and tori; roads that curved up and twisted into Mobius surfaces—it was a vast alien city.
Kurt shook his head clear, and then recognized the material that constructed the city. He had seen it before in tumbled stripped river rocks and the slabs quarried from nearby Gregor Canyon. A rock so plentiful this world had been named for it. Only the stuff in the crater had been polished to optical flatness, mirroring the sky with superimposed rainbow bands.
"Onyx," he whispered.
"Chalcedonic quartz with trace elementals enhancing their spectral variation," Dr. Halsey remarked.
Scalloped columns rose from the crater floor to the mountainous summit, an elevation Kurt could only assume had been ground level before ONI began their excavation.
As they maneuvered closer to one pillar, Kelly banked the ship around its curve and Kurt saw reflected images of a thousand different sunsets—all with varying cloud geometries, some with flocks of migrating birds, or dinosaurs, another had smears of blue spacecraft, and one burned with a supernova that illuminated the twilight… all images captured here. From the past? The future? Both?
And only then did the scale of the structure register. It was three kilometers in diameter, larger than a UNSC carrier.
Kurt's mind rebelled at the scale of this technology, the effort it had to have taken to construct such a thing.
He glanced at Dr. Halsey. While she intently studied the viewscreen, she did not appear the slightest bit impressed.
"You knew this would be here?" he asked her.
"I suspected," she said. "Frankly, after reviewing the reports of the Halo structures, I am somewhat disappointed."
"Bigger than the ruins under Reach," Kelly said.
"We did not discover the full extent of those ruins," Dr. Halsey replied, "and likely never will." She squinted at the monitor. "There," she said, pointing at a distant gleaming dome. "Can you move closer to that structure?" She turned to Kurt. "With your permission, Lieutenant Commander."
"New heading zero two five," Kurt said. "Pick your best path."
"New course, aye," Kelly replied.
As they descended deeper, the dropship sped past a staircase that ascended to
nowhere—each step a hectare of unbroken polished stone.
The cloud-reflected light dimmed and the smooth surfaces melted into shadow. Dr. Halsey's dome turned red-gold and faded to a silhouette.
Will turned the passive radar on the thing and an outline overlaid the structure.