Halo_ The Fall of Reach - Eric Nylund [126]
He checked the radar—thirty kilometers to the docking ring. He ignited the engines to slow them down. He had to or they would crash into the station. Twenty kilometers. Rumbling shook the dropship. They slowed—but it wasn’t going to be enough.
Ten kilometers. “Hang on,” he told Linda and James. The sudden impact whiplashed the Master Chief back and forth in his seat. The straps holding him
snapped.
He blinked . . . saw only blackness. His vision cleared and he noted that his shield bar was dead. It slowly began to fill again. Every display and monitor in the cockpit had shattered. The Master Chief shook off the disorientation and pulled himself aft. The interior of the dropship was a mess. Everything tied down had come loose. Ammunition boxes had
broken open in the crash landing and loose carriages filled the air. Coolant leaked, spraying blobs of black fluid. In zero gravity, everything looked like the inside of a shaken snowglobe. James and Linda floated off the deck of the Pelican. They slowly moved. “Any injuries?” the Master Chief asked.
“No,” Linda replied. “I think so,” James said. “I mean, no. I’m good, sir. Was that a landing or did those Covenant ships take a shot at us?”
“If they had, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. Get whatever gear you can and get out, double time,”
the Master Chief said. The Master Chief grabbed an assault rifle and a Jackhammer launcher. He found a satchel. Inside was a kilogram of C-12, detonators, and a Lotus antitank mine. Those would come in handy. He salvaged five intact clips of ammunition but couldn’t locate his thruster pack. He’d have to do without one.
“No more time,” he said. “We’re sitting ducks here. Out the side hatch now.”
Linda went first. She paused, and—once she was satisfied the Covenant weren’t lying in ambush— motioned them forward. The Master Chief and James exited, clung to the side of the Pelican in zero gravity, and took flanking
positions at the fore and aft ends of the dropship. Space dock Gamma was a three-kilometer-diameter ring. Dull gray metal arced in either direction. On
the surface were communications dishes and a few conduits—no real cover. The docking bay doors were sealed tight. The station wasn’t spinning. The dockmaster AI must have shut the place up tight when it detected the unsecured NAV database.
The Master Chief frowned when he spotted the tail end of their Pelican—crumpled and embedded into the station’s hull. Its engines were ruined. The dropship jutted out at an angle; its prow and the charges of C-12 that were supposed to have blasted them into a Covenant ship—now pointed into the air.
The Master Chief started to drift off the station. He clipped himself to the hull of the dropship. “Blue-Two,” he said, “police those explosives.” He gestured to the prow. The motion sent him gyrating. “Yes, sir.” James puffed his thruster pack once and drifted up to the nose of the Pelican. The Spartans had trained to fight in zero gravity. It wasn’t easy. The slightest motion sent you spinning
out of control. A flash overhead reflected off the hull. The Master Chief looked up. The Covenant ships were alive now
—lances of blue laser fire flashed and motes of red light collected on their lateral lines. Their engines glowed and they moved close to the station. A streak crossed the Master Chief’s field of vision in the blink of an eye. The center Covenant frigate
shields strobed silver; the ship shattered into a cloud of glistening fragments. The orbital guns had turned and fired on the new threat. This was a suicide maneuver. How did the Covenant think they could withstand that kind of firepower? “Blue-One,” the Master Chief said. “Scan those ships with your scope.” Linda floated closer to the Master Chief. She pointed her sniper rifle up and sighted the ships. “We’ve
got inbound targets,” she said, and fired. The Master Chief hit his magnification. A dozen pods burst from the two remaining Covenant ships. Trails of exhaust pointed right at the Spartans’ position. There were tiny specks accompanying