Halo_ The Fall of Reach - Eric Nylund [58]
another five minutes.” “Yes, sir.” Commander Keyes fumbled with his pipe. He didn’t bother to light the thing, just chewed on the end.
Then he put it away. The nervous habit wasn’t setting the right example for his bridge officers. He didn’t
have the luxury of showing his apprehension. The truth was, he was terrified. Four Covenant ships would be an even match forseven destroyers. The best he could hope for was to get their attention and outrun them—hopefully distract them until the fleet got here.
Of course . . . those Covenant ships could outrun theIroquois as well.
“Lieutenant Jaggers,” he said, “initiate the Cole Protocol. Purge our navigation databases, and then generate an appropriate randomized exit vector from the Sigma Octanus System.” “Yes, sir.” He fumbled with his controls. He hung his head, steadied his hands, and slowly typed in the
commands. “Lieutenant Hall: make preparations to override reactor safeties.” His junior officers all paused for a second. “Aye, sir,” Lieutenant Hall whispered. “We’re receiving a transmission from the system’s edge,” Lieutenant Dominique announced.
“FrigatesAlliance andGettysburg are on an inbound vector at maximum speed. ETA . . . one hour.” “Good,” Commander Keyes said. That hour might as well be a month. This battle would be over in minutes.
He could not fight the enemy—he was severely outgunned. He couldn’t outrun them, either. There had
to be another option. Hadn’t he always told his students that when you were out of options, then you were using the wrong tactics? You had to bend the rules. Shift perspective—anything to find a way out of a hopeless situation.
The black space near Sigma Octanus IV boiled and frothed with motes of green light. “Ships entering normal space,” Lieutenant Jaggers announced, panic tingeing his voice. Commander Keyes got to his feet. He had been wrong. There weren’t four Covenant frigates. A pair of enemy frigates emerged from
Slipspace . . . escorting a destroyer and a carrier. His blood ran cold. He had seen battles in which a Covenant destroyer had made Swiss cheese of UNSC
ships. Its plasma torpedoes could boil through theIroquois ’ two meters of titanium-A battleplate in seconds. Their weapons were light-years ahead of the UNSC’s. “Their weapons,” Commander Keyes muttered under his breath. Yes . . . hedid have a third option. “Continue at emergency speed,” he ordered, “and come about to heading zero three two.” Lieutenant Jaggers swiveled in his seat. “That will put us on collision course with their destroyer, sir.” “I know,” Commander Keyes replied. “In fact, I’m counting on doing just that.”
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
0320 Hours, July 17, 2552 (Military Calendar) / UNSCIroquois en route to Sigma Octanus IV
Commander Keyes stood with his hands behind his back and tried to look calm. Not an easy thing to do when his ship was on a collision course with a Covenant battlegroup. Inside, adrenaline raced through his blood and his pulse pounded.
He had to at leastappear in control for his crew. He was asking a lot from them . . . probablyeverything , in fact.
His junior officers watched their status monitors; they occasionally glanced nervously at him, but their gazes always drifted back to the center view screen.
The Covenant ships looked like toys in the distance. It was dangerous to think of them as harmless, however. One slip, one underestimation of their tremendous firepower, and theIroquois would be destroyed.
The alien carrier had three bulbous sections; its swollen center had thirteen launch bays. Commander Keyes had seen hundreds of fighters stream out of them before—fast, accurate, and deadly craft. Normally his ship’s AI would handle point defense . . . only this time, there was no AI installed on theIroquois .
The alien destroyer was a third again as massive as theIroquois . She bristled with pulse laser turrets, insectlike antennae, and chitinous pods. The carrier