Halo_ The Fall of Reach - Eric Nylund [136]
Three dozen Covenant craft moved toward Gamma station and the now inert orbital defense platforms.
They bombarded the installations—the mightiest weapons in the UNSC arsenal—with plasma. The guns
melted, and boiled away. The Master Chief clenched his hands into fists. The Captain was correct: there was nothing to do now except complete the mission they had set out to do.
Captain Keyes barked, “Ensign Lovell, give me our best acceleration. I want to enter Slipstream space as soon as possible.”
Cortana said, “Excuse me, Captain. Six covenant frigates are inbound on an intercept course.” “Continue evasive maneuvers, Cortana. Prepare the Slipspace generators and get me an appropriate randomized exit vector.”
“Aye, sir.” Navigation symbols flashed along the length of her holographic body. The Master Chief continued to watch as the Covenant ships closed in on them. Was he the only Spartan left? Better to die than live without his teammates. But he still had a mission:
victory against the Covenant—and vengeance for his fallen comrades. “Generating randomized exit vector per the Cole Protocol,” Cortana said. The Master Chief glanced at her translucent body. She looked vaguely like a younger Dr. Halsey. Tiny
dots, ones, and zeros slid over her torso, arms, and legs. Her thoughts were literally worn on her sleeve; the symbols also appeared on Ensign Lovell’s NAV station.
He cocked his head as the symbols and numbers scrolled across the NAV console. The representations of Slipspace vectors and velocity curves twisted across the screen—tantalizingly familiar. He’d seen them somewhere before—but he could not make the connection.
“Something on your mind, Master Chief?” Cortana asked. “Those symbols . . . I thought I had seen them somewhere before. It’s nothing.” Cortana got a far off look in her eyes. The marks cycling on her hologram shifted and rearranged. The Master Chief saw the Covenant fleet gathered around planet Reach. They swarmed and circled like
sharks. The first of their plasma bombardments launched toward the surface. Clouds in the fire’s path boiled away.
“Jump to Slipspace, Ensign Lovell,” the Captain said. “Get us the hell out of here.”
John remembered Chief Mendez’s words—that they had to live and fight another day. He was alive . . . and there was still plenty of fight left in him. And he would win this war—no matter what it took.
SECTION VI
HALO
EPILOGUE
0647 Hours, August 30, 2552 (Military Calendar) / UNSCPillar of Autumn , Epsilon Eridani System’s edge
Cortana fired thePillar of Autumn ’s autocannons—targeting a dozen Seraph fighters harassing them as they were accelerated out of the system. Seven Covenant frigates were now locked into the pursuit. She dodged a volley of pulse laser fire, using the ventral emergency thrusters.
She pushed the damaged secondary reactor to critical levels. They had to build up more speed before activating the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight generators or the jump to Slipstream space would fail.
She rechecked her calculations. Under the Cole Protocol, they would be jumping away from Earth . . . but it would not be a totally random heading.
The Master Chief had been right when he said that he recognized the shorthand navigation symbols on the NAV display.
Cortana accessed the Spartans’ mission logs. She sifted through the data, and filed it into a secondary long-term storage buffer. When she reviewed the database of his mission reports, Cortana learned that Spartan 117had seen something similar on the Covenant vessel he had boarded in 2525. And again—the symbols almost looked like those on the rock he had extracted from Covenant forces on Sigma Octanus
IV. ONI reports on the symbols found in the anomalous rock had defied cryptoanalysis.
Keyes’ order to plot a navigation route sparked a connection between this data; she accessed the alien symbols, and rather than compare them with alphabets or hieroglyphics, compared them to star