Halo Lighting System First Strike Games User Manual

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FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

BALLANTINE BOOKS • NEW YORK

Other books based on Xbox games:

HALO: THE FLOOD by William C. Dietz

HALO: THE FALL OF REACH by Eric Nylund

BRUTE FORCE: BETRAYALS by Dean Wesley Smith

CRIMSON SKIES by Eric Nylund, Michael B. Lee, Nancy

Berman, and Eric S. Trautmann

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Halo: First Strike is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.

A Del Rey® Book Published by The Random House Publishing Group

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Bungie, Halo, Xbox, the Xbox logo and the Microsoft Game Studio logo are either registered trademarks or trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Used under license. © 2003 Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved.

Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

www.delreydigital.com

ISBN 0-345-46781-7

Manufactured in the United States of America

First Edition: December 2003

OPM 10 9 8 7 6

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

First and foremost, I would like to thank the personnel at Central Command: Syne Mitchell and the newest officer on our team, Kai Nylund.

The Intel Officers at Microsoft's Franchise Development Group: Doug Zartman, Nancy Figatner, and Edward Ventura, and most notably Eric S. Trautmann (Special Ops field agent).

The people in Section Two, a.k.a. Microsoft's User Experience Group: Jo Tyo, Matt Whiting, Dana Fos, and Jason Groce.

Logistics officers at Ballantine/Del Rey: Keith Clayton, Nancy Delia, Betsy Mitchell, and Steve Saffel.

And the Bungie troopers who are slugging it out on virtual battlefields across the universe to bring you the best game ever: Jason Jones, Peter Parsons, and, of course, Joe Staten, Jaime Griesemer, and Lorraine McLees.

SECTION

REACH

CHAPTER ONE

0622 hours, August 30,2552 (Military Calendar)\ UNSC Vessel Pillar of Autumn, Epsilon Eridani system near Reach Station Gamma.

SPARTAN-104, Frederic, twirled a combat knife, his fingers nimble despite the bulky MJOLNIR combat armor that encased his body. The blade traced a complicated series of graceful arcs in the air. The few remaining Naval personnel on the deck turned pale and averted their eyes—a Spartan wielding a knife was generally accompanied by the presence of several dead bodies.

He was nervous, and this was more than the normal pre-mission

jitters. The team's original objective—the capture of a Covenant ship—had been scrubbed in the face of a new enemy offensive. The Covenant were en route to Reach, the last of the United Nations Space Command's major military strongholds.

Fred couldn't help but wonder what use ground troops would

be in a ship-to-ship engagement. The knife spun.

Around him, his squadmates loaded weapons, stacked gear, and prepped for combat, their efforts redoubled since the ship's Captain had personally come down to the mustering area to brief the team leader, SPARTAN-117—but Fred was already squared away. Only Kelly had finished stowing gear before him.

He balanced the point of the knife on his armored finger. It hung there for several seconds, perfectly still.

A subtle shift in the Pillar of Autumn's gravity caused the

knife to tip. Fred plucked it from the air and sheathed it in a single deft move. A cold feeling filled his stomach as he realized what the gravity fluctuation meant: The ship had just changed course—another complication.

ERIC NYLUND

Master Chief SPARTAN-117—John—marched to the nearest COM panel as Captain Keyes's face filled the screen.

Fred sensed a slight movement to his right—a subtle hand signal from Kelly. He opened a private COM freq to his teammate.

"Looks like we're in for more surprises," she said. "Roger that," he replied, "though I think I've had enough sur-

prises for one op."

Kelly chuckled.

Fred focused his attention on John's exchange with Keyes. Each Spartan—selected from an early age and trained to the pinnacle of military science—had undergone multiple augmentation procedures: biochemical, genetic, and cybernetic. As a result, a Spartan could hear a pin drop in a sandstorm, and every Spartan in the room was interested in what the Captain had to

say. If you 're goin g to drop in to hell, CPO Mendez, the Spartans' first teacher, had once said, you may as well drop with good in tel.

Captain Keyes frowned on the ship's viewscreen, a nonregula-tion pipe in his hand. Though his voice was calm, the Captain's grip on the pipe was white-knuckle tight as he outlined the situation. A single space vessel docked in Reach's orbital facilities had failed to delete its navigational database. If the NAV data fell into Covenant hands, the enemy would have a map to Earth.

"Master Chief," the Captain said, "I believe the Covenant will use a pinpoint Slipspace jump to a position just off the space dock. They may try to get their troops on the station before the Super MAC guns can take out their ships. This will be a difficult mission, Chief. I'm... open to suggestions."

"We can take care of it," the Master Chief replied.

Captain Keyes's eyes widened and he leaned forward in his command chair. "How exactly, Master Chief?"

"With all due respect, sir, Spartans are trained to handle diffi-

cult missions. I'll split my squad. Three will board the space dock and make sure that NAV data does not fall into the Covenant's hands. The remainder of the Spartans will go groundside and repel the invasion forces."

Fred gritted his teeth. Given his choice, he'd rather fight the

Covenant on the ground. Like his fellow Spartans, he loathed off-planet duty. The op to board the space dock would be fraught

with danger at every turn—unknown enemy deployment, no gravity, useless intel, no dirt beneath his feet.

There was no question, though: The space op was the toughest

duty, so Fred intended to volunteer for it.

Captain Keyes considered John's suggestion. "No, Master

Chief. It's too risky—we've got to make sure the Covenant don't get that NAV data. We'll use a nuclear mine, set it close to the docking ring, and detonate it."

"Sir, the EMP will burn out the superconductive coils of the

orbital guns. And if you use the Pillar of Autumn's conventional

weapons, the NAV database may still survive. If the Covenant search the wreckage—they may obtain the data."

"True," Keyes said and tapped his pipe thoughtfully to his

chin. "Very well, Master Chief. We'll go with your suggestion. I'll plot a course over the docking station. Ready your Spartans and prep two dropships. We'll launch you—" He consulted with Cortana."—in five minutes."

"Aye, Captain. We'll be ready."

"Good luck," Captain Keyes said, and the viewscreen went black.

Fred snapped to attention as the Master Chief turned to face

the Spartans. Fred began to step forward—

—but Kelly beat him to it. "Master Chief," she said, "permission to lead the space op."

She had always been faster, damn her.

"Denied," the Master Chief said. "I'll be leading that one.

"Linda and James," he continued. "You're with me. Fred,

you're Red Team leader. You'll have tactical command of the ground operation."

"Sir!" Fred shouted and started to voice a protest—then

squelched it. Now wasn't the time to question orders. . . as much as he wanted to. "Yes, sir!"

"Now make ready," the Master Chief said. "We don't have

much time left."

The Spartans stood a moment. Kelly called out, "Attention!"

The soldiers snapped to and gave the Master Chief a crisp salute, which was promptly returned.

Fred switched to Red Team's all-hands freq and barked, "Let's

move, Spartans! I want gear stowed in ninety seconds, and final

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

prep in five minutes. Joshua: Liaise with Cortana and get me current intel on the drop area—I don't care if it's just weather satellite imagery, but I want pictures, and I want them ninety seconds ago."

Red Team jumped into action. The pre-mission jitters were gone, replaced with a cold calm.

There was a job to do, and Fred was eager to get to work.

Flight Officer Mitchell flinched as a stray energy burst streaked into the landing bay and vaporized a meter-wide section of bulkhead. Red-hot, molten metal splattered the Pelican dropship's viewport.

Screw this, he thought, and hit the Pelican's thrusters. The

gunmetal-green transport balanced for a moment on a column of

blue-white fire, then hurtled out of the Pillar of Aut umn's launch

bay and into space. Five seconds later all hell broke loose.

Incoming energy bursts from the lead Covenant vessels cut across their vector and slammed into a COMSat. The communications satellite broke apart, disintegrating into glittering shards.

"Better hang on," Mitchell announced to his passengers in the

dropship's troop bay. "Company's coming."

A swarm of Seraphs—the Covenant's scarablike attack fighters—fell into tight formation and arced through space on an intercept course for the dropship.

The Pelican's engines flared and the bulky ship plummeted toward the surface of Reach. The alien fighters accelerated and plasma bursts flickered from their gunports.

An energy bolt slashed past on the port side, narrowly missing the Pelican's cockpit.

Mitchell's voice crackled across the COM system: "Bravo-One to Knife Two-Six: I could use a little help here."

He rolled the Pelican to port to avoid a massive, twisted hunk of wreckage from a patrol cutter that had strayed too close to the oncoming assault wave. Beneath the blackened plasma scorches, he could just make out the UNSC insigne. Mitchell scowled. This was getting worse by the second. "Bravo-One to Knife Two-Six, where the hell are you?" he yelled.

A quartet of wedge-shaped, angular fighters slotted into covering position on Mitchell's scopes—Longswords, heavy fighters.

"Knife Two-Six to Bravo-One," a terse, female voice crackled across the COM channel. "Keep your pants on. Business is good today."

Too good. No sooner had the fighters taken escort position

over his dropship than the approaching Covenant fighters opened up with a barrage of plasma fire.

Three of the Pelican's four Longsword escorts peeled off and

powered toward the Covenant ships. Against the black of space, cannons flashed and missiles etched ghostly trails; Covenant energy weapons cut through the night and explosions dotted the sky.

The Pelican and its sole escort, however, accelerated straight

toward the planet. It shot past whirling wreckage; it rolled and maneuvered as missiles and plasma bolts crisscrossed their path.

Mitchell flinched as Reach's orbital defense guns fired in a

hot, actinic flash. A white ball of molten metal screamed directly over the Pelican and its escort as they rocketed beneath the defense platform's ring-shaped superstructure.

Mitchell sent the Pelican into the planet's atmosphere. Vaporous flames flickered across the ship's stunted nose, and the Pelican jounced from side to side.

"Bravo-One, adjust attack angle," the Longsword pilot advised. "You're coming in too hot."

"Negative," Mitchell said. "We're getting to the surface fast— or we're not getting there at all. Enemy contacts on my scopes at four by three o'clock."

A dozen more Covenant Seraphs fired their engines and angled toward the two descending ships.

"Affirmative: four by three. I've got 'em, Bravo-One," the

Longsword pilot announced. "Give 'em hell down there."

The Longsword flipped into a tight roll and rocketed for the

Covenant formation. There was no chance that the pilot could take out a dozen Seraphs—and Knife Two-Six had to know that. Mitchell only hoped that the precious seconds Two-Six bought them would be enough.

The Pelican opened its intake vents and ignited afterburners,

plummeting toward the ground at thirteen hundred meters per second. The faint aura of flames around the craft roared from red to blinding orange.

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ERIC NYLUND

The Pelican's aft section had been stripped of the padded crash seats that usually lined the section's port and starboard sides. The life-support generators on the firewall between passenger and pilot's compartment had also been discarded to make room. Under other circumstances, such modifications would have left the Pelican's troop bay unusually cavernous. Every square centimeter of space, however, was occupied.

Twenty-seven Spartans braced themselves and clung to the frame of the ship; they crouched in their MJOLNIR armor to absorb the shock of their rapid descent. Their armor was half a ton of black alloy, faintly luminous green ceramic plates, and winking energy shield emitters. Polarized visors and full helmets made them look part Greek hero and part tank—more machine than human. At their feet equipment bags and ammunition boxes were lashed in place. Everything rattled as the ship jostled through the increasingly dense air.

Fred hit the COM and barked: "Brace yourselves!" The ship lurched, and he struggled to keep his footing.

SPARTAN-087, Kelly, moved nearer and opened a frequency. "Chief, we'll get that COM malfunction squared away after we hit planetside," she said.

Fred winced when he realized that he'd just broadcast on

FLEETCOM 7: He'd spammed every ship in range. Damn it.

He opened a private channel to Kelly. "Thanks," he said. Her

reply was a subtle nod.

He knew better than to make such a simple mistake—and as

his second in command, Kelly was rattled by his mistake with

the COM, too. He needed her rock-solid. He needed all of Red

Team frosty and wired tight.

Which meant that he needed to make sure he held it together.

No more mistakes.

He checked the squad's biomonitors. They showed all green on his heads-up display, with pulse rates only marginally accelerated. The dropship's pilot was a different story. Mitchell's heart fired like an assault rifle.

Any problems with Red Team weren't physical; the biomonitors confirmed that much. Spartans were used to tough missions; UNSC High Command never sent them on any "easy" jobs.

Their job this time was to get groundside and protect the generators that powered the orbiting Magnetic Accelerator Cannon platforms. The fleet was getting ripped to shreds in space. The massive MAC guns were the only thing keeping the Covenant from overrunning their lines and taking Reach.

Fred knew that if anything had Kelly and the other Spartans rattled, it was leaving behind the Master Chief and his hand-picked Blue Team.

Fred would have infinitely preferred to be with Blue Team. He

knew every Spartan here felt like they were taking the easy way out. If the ship-jockeys managed to hold off the Covenant assault wave, Red Team's mission was a milk run, albeit a necessary one.

Kelly's hand bumped into Fred's shoulder, and he recognized

it as a consoling gesture. Kelly's razor-edged agility was multiplied fivefold by the reactive circuits in her MJOLNIR armor. She wouldn't have "accidentally" touched him unless she meant it, and the gesture spoke volumes.

Before he could say anything to her, the Pelican angled and

gravity settled the Spartans' stomachs.

"Rough ride ahead," the pilot warned.

The Spartans bent their knees as the Pelican rolled into a tight turn. A crate broke its retaining straps, bounced, and stuck to the wall.

The COM channel blasted static and resolved into the voice of the Longsword's pilot: "Bravo Two-Six, engaging enemy fighters. Am taking heavy incoming fire—" The channel was abruptly swallowed in static.

An explosion buffeted the Pelican, and bits of metal pinged off its thick hull.

Patches of armor heated and bubbled away. Energy blasts flashed through the boiling metal, filling the interior with fumes for a split second before the ship's pressurized atmosphere blew the haze out the gash in its side.

Sunlight streamed though the lacerated Titanium-A armor. The dropship lurched to port, and Fred glimpsed five Covenant Seraph fighters driving after them and wobbling in the turbulent air.

"Gotta shake 'em," the pilot screamed. "Hang on!"

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

The Pelican pitched forward, and her engines blasted in full overload. The dropship's stabilizers tore away, and the craft rolled out of control.

The Spartans grabbed on to cross beams as their gear was flung about inside the ship.

"It's going to be a helluva hot drop, Spartans," their pilot hissed over the COM. "Autopilot's programmed to angle. Reverse thrusters. Gees are takin' me out. I'll—"

A flash of light outlined the cockpit hatch, and the tiny shock-proof glass window shattered into the passenger compartment.

The pilot's biomonitor flatlined.

The rate of their dizzying roll increased, and bits of metal and instruments tore free and danced around the compartment.

SPARTAN-029, Joshua, was closest to the cockpit hatch. He

pulled himself up and looked in. "Plasma blast," he said. He paused for a heartbeat, then added: "I'll reroute control to the terminal here." With his right hand, he furiously tapped commands onto the keyboard mounted on the wall. The fingers of his left hand dug into the metal bulkhead.

Kelly crawled along the starboard frame, held there by the spinning motion of the out-of-control Pelican. She headed aft of the passenger compartment and punched a keypad, priming the explosive bolts on the drop hatch.

"Fire in the hole!" she yelled. The Spartans braced.

The hatch exploded and whipped away from the plummeting craft. Fire streamed along the outer hull. Within seconds the compartment became a blast furnace. With the grace of a high-wire performer, Kelly leaned out of the rolling ship, her armor's energy shields flaring in the heat.

The Covenant Seraph fighters fired their lasers, but the energy weapons scattered in the superheated wake of the dropping Pelican. One alien ship tumbled out of control, too deep in the atmosphere to easily maneuver. The others veered and arced up back into space.

"Too hot for them," Kelly said. "We're on our own."

"Joshua," Fred called out. "Report."

"The autopilot's gone, and cockpit controls are offline," Joshua answered. "I can counter our spin with thrusters." He tapped in

a command; the port engine shuddered, and the ship's rolling slowed and ceased.

"Can we land?" Fred asked.

Joshua didn't hesitate to give the bad news. "Negative. The computer has no solution for our inbound vector." He tapped rapidly on the keyboard. "I'll buy as much time as I can."

Fred ran over their limited options. They had no parasails, no rocket-propelled drop capsules. That left them one simple choice: They could ride this Pelican straight into hell. .. or they could get off.

"Get ready for a fast drop," Fred shouted. "Grab your gear.

Pump your suits' hydrostatic gel to maximum pressure. Suck it up, Spartans—we're landing hard."

"Hard landing" was an understatement. The Spartans—and

their MJOLNIR armor—were tough. The armor's energy shields, hydrostatic gel, and reactive circuits, along with the Spartans' augmented skeletal structure, might be enough to withstand a high-speed crash landing... but not a supersonic impact.

It was a dangerous gamble. If Joshua couldn't slow the Peli-

can's descent—they'd be paste.

"Twelve thousand meters to go," Kelly shouted, still leaning

over the edge of the aft door.

Fred told the Spartans: "Ready and aft. Jump on my mark."

The Spartans grabbed their gear and moved toward the open

hatch.

The Pelican's engines screamed and pulsed as Joshua angled

the thruster cams to reverse positions. The deceleration pulled at the Spartan team, and everyone grabbed, or made, a handhold.

Joshua brought what was left of the craft's control flaps to bear, and the Pelican's nose snapped up. A sonic boom rippled through the ship as its velocity dropped below Mach 1. The frame shuddered and rivets popped.

"Eight kilometers and this brick is still dropping fast," Kelly called out.

"Joshua, get aft," Fred ordered.

"Affirmative," Joshua said.

The Pelican groaned and the frame pinged from the stress— and then creaked as the craft shuddered and flexed. Fred set his

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

armored glove on the wall and tried to will the craft to hold together a little longer.

It didn't work. The port engine exploded, and the Pelican tum-

bled out of control.

Kelly and the Spartans near the aft drop hatch dropped out. No more time.

"Jump," Fred shouted. "Spartans: Go, go, go!"

The rest of the Spartans crawled aft, fighting the gee forces of

the tumbling Pelican. Fred grabbed Joshua—and they jumped.

CHAPTER TWO

0631 hours, August 30,2552 (Military Calendar)\Epsilon Eridani system, unknown aerial posi tion, planet Re ach.

Fred saw the sky and earth flashing in rapid succession before his faceplate. Decades of training took over. This was just like a parasail drop ... except this time there was no chute. He forced his arms and legs open; the spread-eagle position controlled his tumble and slowed his velocity.

Time seemed to simultaneously crawl and race—something Kelly had once dubbed "SPARTAN Time." Enhanced senses and augmented physiology meant that in periods of stress Spartans thought and reacted faster than a normal human. Fred's mind raced as he absorbed the tactical situation.

He activated his motion sensors, boosting the range to maximum. His team appeared as blips on his heads-up display. With a sigh of relief he saw that all twenty-six of them were present and pulling into a wedge formation.

"Covenant ground forces could be tracking the Pelican," Fred told them over the COM. "Expect AA fire."

The Spartans immediately broke formation and scattered

across the sky.

Fred risked a sidelong glance and spotted the Pelican. It tumbled, sending shards of armor plating in glittering, ugly arcs, before it impacted into the side of a jagged snowcapped mountain.

The surface of Reach stretched out before them, two thousand meters below. Fred saw a carpet of green forest, ghostly mountains in the distance, and pillars of smoke rising from the west. He spied a sinuous ribbon of water that he recognized: Big Horn River.

The Spartans had trained on Reach for most of their early

ERIC NYLUND

lives. This was the same forest where CPO Mendez had left them when they were children. With only pieces of a map and no food, water, or weapons, they had captured a guarded Pelican and returned to HQ. That was the mission where John, now the Master Chief, had earned command of the group, the mission that had forged them into a team.

Fred pushed the memory aside. This was no homecoming.

UNSC Military Reservation 01478-B training facility would

be due west. And the generators? He called up the terrain map and overlaid it on his display. Joshua had done his work well: Cortana had delivered decent satellite imagery as well as a topographic survey map. It wasn't as good as a spy-sat flyby, but it was better than Fred had expected on such short notice.

He dropped a NAV marker on the position of the generator complex and uploaded the data on the TACCOM to his team.

He took a deep breath and said: "That's our target. Move

toward it but keep your incoming angle flat. Aim for the treetops. Let them slow you down. If you can't, aim for water... and tuck in your arms and legs before impact."

Twenty-six blue acknowledgment lights winked, confirming

his order.

"Overpressurize your hydrostatics just before you hit."

That would risk nitrogen embolisms for his Spartans, but they

were coming in at terminal velocity, which for a fully loaded Spartan was—he quickly calculated—130 meters per second. They had to overpressurize the cushioning gel or their organs would be crushed against the impervious MJOLNIR armor when they hit.

The acknowledgment lights winked again ... although Fred

sensed a slight hesitation.

Five hundred meters to go.

He took one last look at his Spartans. They were scattered

across the horizon like bits of confetti.

He brought up his knees and changed his center of mass, try-

ing to flatten his angle as he approached the treetops. It worked, but not as well or as quickly as he had hoped.

One hundred meters to go. His shield flickered as he brushed

the tops of the tallest of the trees.

He took a deep breath, exhaled as deeply as he could, grabbed

his knees, and tucked into a ball. He overrode the hydrostatic system and overpressurized the gel surrounding his body. A thousand tiny knives stabbed him—pain unlike any he'd experienced since the SPARTAN-II program had surgically altered him.

The MJOLNIR armor's shields flared as he broke through branches—then drained in one sudden burst as he impacted dead-center on a thick tree trunk. He smashed through it like an armored missile.

He tumbled, and his body absorbed a series of rapid-fire impacts. It felt like taking a full clip of assault rifle fire at point-blank range. Seconds later Fred slammed to a bone-crunching halt.

His suit malfunctioned. He could no longer see or hear anything. He stayed in that limbo state and struggled to stay conscious and alert. Moments later, his display was filled with stars.

He realized then that the suit wasn't malfunctioning... he was.

"Chief!" Kelly's voice echoed in his head as if from the end of

a long tunnel. "Fred, get up," she whispered. "We've got to move."

His vision cleared, and he slowly rolled onto his hands and

knees. Something hurt inside, like his stomach had been torn out, diced into little pieces, and then stitched back together all wrong. He took a ragged breath. That hurt, too.

The pain was good—it helped keep him alert.

"Status," he coughed. His mouth tasted like copper.

Kelly knelt next to him and on a private COM channel said, "Almost everyone has minor damage: a few blown shield generators, sensor systems, a dozen broken bones and contusions. Nothing we can't compensate for. Six Spartans have more serious injuries. They can fight from a fixed position, but they have limited mobility." She took a deep breath and then added, "Four KIA."

Fred struggled to his feet. He was dizzy but remained upright. He had to stay on his feet no matter what. He had to for the team, to show them they still had a functioning leader.

It could have been much worse—but four dead was bad enough. No Spartan operation had ever seen so many killed in one mission, and this op had barely begun. Fred wasn't superstitious, but he couldn't help but feel that the Spartans' luck was running out.

"You did what you had to," Kelly said as if she were reading his mind. "Most of us wouldn't have made it if you hadn't been thinking on your feet."

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ERIC NYLUND

Fred snorted in disgust. Kelly thought he'd been thinking on his feet—but all he'd done was land on his ass. He didn't want to talk about it—not now. "Any other good news?" he said.

"Plenty," she replied. "Our gear—munitions boxes, bags of extra weapons—they're scattered across what's passing for our LZ. Only a few of us have assault rifles, maybe five in total."

Fred instinctively reached for his MA5B and discovered that the anchoring clips on his armor had been sheared away in the impact. No grenades on his belt, either. His drop bag was gone, too.

He shrugged. "We'll improvise," he said.

Kelly picked up a rock and hefted it.

Fred resisted the urge to lower his head and catch his breath. There was nothing he wanted to do more right now than sit down and just rest and think. There had to be a way to get his Spartans out of here in one piece. It was like a training exercise—all he needed to do was figure out how best to accomplish their mission with no more foul-ups.

There was no time, though. They'd been sent to protect those

generators, and the Covenant sure as hell weren't sitting around waiting for them to make the first move. The columns of smoke that marked where Reach HighCom once stood testified to that.

"Assemble the team," Fred told her. "Formation Beta. We're heading toward the generators on foot. Pack out our wounded and dead. Send those with weapons ahead as scouts. Maybe our luck will change."

Kelly barked over the SQUADCOM: "Move, Spartans. For-

mation Beta to the NAV point."

Fred initiated a diagnostic on his armor. The hydrostatic subsystem had blown a seal, and pressure was at minimal functional levels. He could move, but he'd have to replace that seal before he'd be able to sprint or dodge plasma fire.

He fell in behind Kelly and saw his Spartans on the periphery of his tactical friend-or-foe monitor. He couldn't actually see any of them because they were spread out and darted from tree to tree to avoid any Covenant surprises. They all moved silently through the forest: light and shadow and an occasional muted flash of luminous green armor, then gone again.

"Red-One this is Red-Twelve. Single enemy contact ... neutralized."

"One here, too," Red-Fifteen reported. "Neutralized." There had to be more. Fred knew the Covenant never traveled

in small numbers.

Worse, if the Covenant were deploying troops in any significant numbers, that meant the holding action in orbit had turned ugly . . . so it was only a matter of time before this mission went from bad to worse.

He was so intent on listening to his team's field checks, he al-

most ran into a pair of Jackals. He instinctively melted into the shadow of a tree and froze.

The Jackals hadn't seen him. The birdlike aliens sniffed at the

air, however, and then moved forward more cautiously, closing on Fred's concealed position. They waved plasma pistols before them and clicked on their energy shields. The small, oblong protective fields rippled and solidified with a muted hum.

Fred keyed his COM channel to Red-Two, twice. Her blue ac-

knowledgment light immediately winked in response to his call for backup.

The Jackals suddenly turned to their right and sniffed rapidly.

A fist-sized rock whizzed in from the aliens' left. It slammed

into the lead Jackal's occipital crest with a wet crack. The creature squawked and dropped to the ground in a pool of purple-black blood.

Fred darted ahead and in three quick steps closed with the re-

maining Jackal. He sidestepped around the plane of the energy shield and grabbed the creature's wrist. The Jackal squawked in fear and surprise.

He yanked the Jackal's gun arm, hard, and then twisted. The

Jackal struggled as its own weapon was forced into the mottled, rough skin of its neck.

Fred squeezed, and he could feel the alien's bones shatter. The plasma pistol discharged in a bright, emerald flash. The Jackal flopped over on its back, minus its head.

Fred picked up the fallen weapons as Kelly emerged from the trees. He tossed her one of the plasma pistols, and she plucked it out of the air.

"Thanks. I'd still prefer my rifle to this alien piece of junk,"

she groused.

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ERIC NYLUND

Fred nodded, and clipped the other captured weapon to his

harness. "Beats the hell out of throwing rocks," he replied.

"Affirmative, Chief," she said with a nod. "But just barely."

"Red-One," Joshua's voice called over the SQUADCOM.

"I'm a half-klick ahead of you. You need to see this."

"Roger," Fred told him. "Red Team, hold here and wait for my

signal."

Acknowledgment lights winked on.

In a half crouch, Fred made his way toward Joshua. There was light ahead: The shade thinned and vanished because the forest was gone. The trees had been leveled, every one blasted to splinters or burned to charred nubs.

There were bodies, too; thousands of Covenant Grunts, hundreds of Jackals and Elites littered the open field. There were also humans—all dead. Fred could see several fallen Marines still smoldering from plasma fire. There were overturned Scorpion tanks, Warthogs with burning tires, and a Banshee flier. The flier had snagged one canard on a loop of barbed wire, and it propelled itself, riderless, in an endless orbit.

The generator complex on the far side of this battlefield was intact, however. Reinforced concrete bunkers bristling with machine guns surrounded a low building. The generators were deep beneath there. So far it looked as if the Covenant had not managed to take them, though not for lack of trying.

"Contacts ahead," Joshua whispered.

Four blips appeared on his motion sensor. Friend-or-foe tags identified them as UNSC Marines, Company Charlie. Serial numbers flashed next to the men as his HUD picked them out on a topo map of the area.

Joshua handed Fred his sniper rifle, and he sighted the contacts through the scope. They were Marines, sure enough. They picked through the bodies that littered the area, looking for survivors and policing weapons and ammo.

Fred frowned; something about the way the Marine squad moved didn't feel right. They lacked unit cohesion, with their line ragged and exposed. They weren't using any of the available cover. To Fred's experienced eye, the Marines didn't even seem to be heading in a specific direction. One of them just ambled in circles.

Fred sent a narrow-beam transmission on UNSC global frequency. "Marine patrol, this is Spartan Red Team. We are approaching your position from your six o'clock. Acknowledge."

The Marines turned about and squinted in Fred's direction, and brought their assault rifles to bear. There was static on the channel, and then a hoarse, listless voice replied: "Spartans? If you are what you say you are ... we could sure use a hand."

"Sorry we missed the battle, Marine."

" 'Missed'?" The Marine gave a short, bitter laugh. "Hell,

Chief, this was just round one."

Fred returned the sniper rifle to Joshua, pointed toward his eyes and then to the Marines in the field. Joshua nodded, shouldered the rifle, and sighted them. His finger hovered near the

weapon's trigger—not quite on it. It never hurt to be careful.

Fred got up and walked to the cluster of Marines. He picked his way past a tangle of Grunt bodies and the twisted metal and charred tires that had once been a Warthog.

The men looked as if they had been to hell and back. They all sported burns, abrasions, and the kilometer-long stare indicative of near shock. They gaped at Fred, mouths open; it was a reaction that he had often seen when soldiers first glimpsed a Spartan: two meters tall, half a ton of armor, splashed with alien blood. It was a mix of awe and suspicion and fear.

He hated it. He just wanted to fight and win this war, like the rest of the soldiers in the UNSC. The Corporal seemed to snap out of his near fugue. He removed his helmet, scratched at his cropped red hair, and looked behind him. "Chief, you'd better head back to base with us before they hit us again."

Fred nodded. "How many in your company, Corporal?"

The man glanced at his three companions and shook his head. "Say again, Chief?"

These men were likely on the verge of battle shock, so Fred controlled his impatience and replied in as gentle a voice as he could muster: "Your FOF tags say you're with Charlie Company, Corporal. How many are you? How many wounded?"

"There's no wounded, Chief," the Corporal replied. "There's no 'company' either. We're all that's left."

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

CHAPTER THRE E

0649 hours, August 30,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Epsilon Eridani system, Orbital Defense Generator Facility A-331, planet Reach.

Fred looked over the battlefield from the top of the southern bunker, his temporary command post. The structure had been hastily erected, and some of the fast-drying instacrete hadn't fully hardened.

The bunker was not the best defensive position, but it gave him a clear view of the area as his team worked to strengthen the perimeter of the generator complex. Spartans strung razor wire, buried Antilon mine packs, and swept the area on patrols. A six-man fireteam searched the battleground for weapons and ammunition.

Satisfied that the situation was as stable as possible, he sat and began to remove portions of his armor. Under normal circumstances a team of techs would assist in such work, but over time the Spartans had all learned how to make rudimentary field repairs. He located a broken pressure seal and quickly replaced it with an undamaged one he'd recovered from SPARTAN-059's armor.

Fred scowled. He hated the necessity of stripping gear from Malcolm's suit. But it would dishonor his fallen comrade not to use his gift of the spare part.

He banished thoughts of the drop and finished installing the seal. Self-recrimination was a luxury he could ill afford, and the Red Team Spartans didn't have a monopoly on hard times.

Charlie Company's surviving Marines had held off the Cove-

nant assault with batteries of chainguns, Warthogs, and a pair of

Scorpion tanks for almost an hour. Grunts had charged across the minefield and cleared a path for the Jackals and Elites.

Lieutenant Buckman, the Marines' CO, had been ordered to send the bulk of his men into the forest in an attempt to flank the enemy. He had called in air support, too.

He got it.

Reach HighCom must have realized the generators were in

danger of being overrun, so someone panicked and sent in bombers to hit the forest in a half-klick radius. That wiped out the Covenant assault wave. It also killed the Lieutenant and his men.

What a waste.

Fred replaced the last of his armor components and powered

up. His status lights pulsed a cool blue. Satisfied, he stood and activated the COM.

"Red-Twelve, give me a sit-rep."

Will's voice crackled over the channel. "Perimeter estab-

lished, Chief. No enemy contacts."

"Good," Fred replied. "Mission status?"

"Ten chainguns recovered and now provide blanketing fields of fire around the generator complex," Will said. "We've got three Banshee fliers working. We've also recovered thirty of those arm-mounted Jackal shield generators, plus a few hundred assault rifles, plasma pistols, and grenades."

"Ammo? We need it."

"Affirmative, sir," Will said. "Enough to last for an hour of

continuous fire." There was a short pause, then he added: "HQ must have sent reinforcements at some point, because we've recovered a crate marked HIGHCOM ARMORY OMEGA."

"What's in it?" "Six Anaconda surface-to-air missiles." Will's voice barely

concealed his glee. "And a pair of Fury tac-nukes."

Fred gave a low whistle. The Fury tac-nuke was the closest

thing the UNSC had in its arsenal to a nuclear grenade. It was the size and shape of an overinflated football. It delivered slightly less than a megaton yield, and was extremely clean. Unfortunately, it was also completely useless to them in this situation.

"Secure that ordnance ASAP. We can't use them. The EMP

would fry the generators."

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

"Roger that," Will said with a disappointed sigh. "Red-Three?" Fred asked. "Report."

There was a moment's hesitation. Joshua whispered: "Not good here, Red-One. I'm posted on the ridge between our valley and the next. The Covenant has a massive LZ set up. There's an enemy ship on station and I estimate battalion-strength enemy troops on the ground. Grunts, Jackals, equipment, and support armor are deploying. Looks like they're getting ready for round two, sir."

Fred felt the pit of his stomach grow cold. "Give me an uplink."

"Roger."

A tiny picture appeared in Fred's heads-up display, and he saw what Joshua had sighted through his sniperscope: A Covenant cruiser hovered thirty meters off the ground. The ship bristled with energy weapons and plasma artillery. His Spartans couldn't get within weapons range of that thing without being roasted.

A gravity lift connected the ship to the surface of Reach, and troops poured out—thousands of them: legions of Grunts, three full squadrons of Elites piloting Banshees, plus at least a dozen Wraith tanks.

It didn't make much sense, though. Why didn't the cruiser get closer and open fire? Or did the Covenant think there might be another air strike? The Covenant never hesitated during an assault ... but the fact that he was still alive meant that the enemy's rules of engagement had somehow changed.

Fred wasn't sure why the Covenant were being so cautious, but he'd take the break. It would give him time to figure out how to stop them. If the Spartans were mobile, they might be able to engage a force that size with hit-and-run tactics. Holding a fixed position was another story altogether.

"Updates every ten minutes," he told Joshua. His voice was

suddenly tight and dry.

"Roger that." "Red-Two? Any progress on that SATCOM uplink?"

"Negative, sir," Kelly muttered, tension thickening her voice. She had been tasked with patching Charlie Company's bullet-ridden communications pack. "There are battle reports jamming the entire spectrum, but from what I can make out the fight upstairs isn't going well. They need this generator up—no matter what it's going to cost us."

"Understood," Fred said. "Keep me—"

"Wait. Incoming transmission to Charlie Company from

Reach HighCom."

HighCom? Fred thought headquarters on Reach had been

overrun. "Verification codes?"

"They check out," Kelly replied. "Patch it through."

"Charlie Company? Jake? What the hell is the holdup t here?

Why haven 'tyou gotten my men out yet?"

"This is Senior Petty Officer SPARTAN-104, Red Team leader," Fred replied, "now in charge of Charlie Company. Identify yourself."

"Put Lieutenant Chapman on, Spartan," an irritated voice

snapped.

"That's not possible, sir," Fred told him, instinctively realizing that he spoke to an officer and adding the honorific. "Except for four wounded Marines, Charlie Company is gone."

There was a long static-filled pause. "Spartan, listen to me

very carefully. This is Vice Admiral Danfor th Whitco mb, Deputy Chief of Naval Operations. Do you know who lam, son?"

"Yes, sir," Fred said, wincing as the Admiral identified himself. If the Covenant were eavesdropping on this transmission, the senior officer had just made himself a giant target.

"My staff and I are pinned d own in a g ully so ut heast o f where HighCom used to be," Whitcomb continued. "Get your team over here and extract us, on the double."

"Negative, sir, I cannot do that. I have direct orders to protect

the generator complex powering the orbital guns."

"I'm countermanding those orders," the Admiral barked. "As of two hours ago, I have tactical command of the defense of Reach. Now, I don't care if you 're a Spartan or Jesus Christ walking down the damned Big Horn River—/ am giving you a

direct order. Acknowledge, Spartan."

If Admiral Whitcomb was now in charge of the defense, then a lot of the senior brass had been put out of commission when HQ got hit.

Fred saw a tiny amber light flashing on his heads-up display. His biomonitor indicated an elevation in his blood pressure and heart rate. He noticed his hands shook, almost imperceptibly.

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

He controlled the shaking and keyed the COM. "Acknowl-

edged, sir. Is air support available?"

"Negative. Covenant craft took out our fighter and bomber

cover in the first wave."

"Very well, sir. We'll get you out."

"Step on it, Chief." The COM snapped off.

Fred wondered if Admiral Whitcomb was responsible for the hundreds of dead Marines who'd been trying to guard the generators. No doubt he was an excellent ship driver. . . but Fleet officers running ground ops? No wonder the situation was FUBAR.

Had he pressured a young and inexperienced lieutenant to flank a superior enemy? Had he sent in air support with orders to saturate-bomb the area?

Fred didn't trust the Admiral's judgment, but he couldn't ignore a direct order from him, either.

He ran his team roster up onto his heads-up display: twenty-two Spartans, six wounded so badly they could barely walk, and four battle-fatigued Marines who'd been through hell once already. They had to repel a massive Covenant force. They had to extract Admiral Whitcomb, too. And as usual, their survival was at best a tertiary consideration.

He had weapons to defend the installation: grenades, chain-guns, and missiles—

Fred paused. Perhaps this was the wrong way to look at the

tactical situation. He was thinking about defending the installa-

tion when he should have been thinking about what Spartans

were best at—offense.

He keyed the SQUADCOM. "Everyone catch that last transmission?"

Acknowledgment lights winked on. "Good. Here's the plan: We split into four teams.

"Team Delta—" He highlighted the wounded Spartans and the four Marines on the roster. "—fall back to this location." He uploaded a tactical map of the area and set a NAV marker in a ravine sixteen kilometers north. "Take two Warthogs, but leave them and stealth it if you encounter any resistance. Your mission is to secure the area. This will be the squad's fallback position. Keep the back door open for us."

They immediately acknowledged. The Spartans knew that

ravine like the backs of their hands. It wasn't marked on any map, but it was where they'd trained for months with Dr. Halsey. Beneath the mountain were caverns that the Office of Naval Intelligence had converted into a top-secret facility. It was fortified and hardened against radiation, and could probably withstand anything up to and including a direct nuclear strike. A perfect hole to hide in if everything went sour.

"Team Gamma." Fred selected Red-Twenty-one, Red-Twenty-two, and Red-Twenty-three from the roster. "You'll extract the Admiral and his staff and bring them back to the generators. We'll need the extra crew."

"Affirmative," Red-Twenty-one replied.

Technically Fred was following Whitcomb's order to extract him from his current position. What the Admiral didn't realize, though, was that he would have probably been safer staying put.

"Team Beta—" Fred selected Red-Twenty through Red-Four.

"—you're on generator defense."

"Understood, Chief."

"Team Alpha—" He selected Kelly, Joshua, and himself.

"Awaiting orders, sir," Joshua said.

"We're going to that valley to kill anything there that isn't

human."

Fred and Kelly faced the three Banshee fliers that had been

dragged into the makeshift compound. Fred peered inside the cockpit of the nearest craft and tabbed the activation knob. The Banshee rose a meter off the ground, its antigrav pod glowed a faint electric blue, and it started to drift forward. He snapped it off, and the Banshee settled to the ground. He quickly tested the other two, and they also rose off the ground.

"Good. All working."

Kelly crossed her arms. "We're going for a ride?"

A Warthog pulled up and skidded to a halt in front of them,

Joshua at the wheel. The rear held half a dozen Jackhammer missiles and a trio of launchers. A crate sat in the passenger's seat, one loaded with the dark, emerald-green duct tape that every soldier in the UNSC ubiquitously referred to as "EB Green."

"Mission accomplished, sir," Joshua said as he climbed from the Warthog.

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

Fred grabbed a launcher, a pair of rockets, and a roll of tape from the 'Hog. "We'll be needing these when we hit the Covenant on the other side of the ridge," he explained. "Each of you secure a launcher and some ammo in a Banshee."

Joshua and Kelly stopped what they were doing and turned to face him.

"Permission to speak, sir," Kelly asked.

"Granted."

"I'm all for a good fight, Fred, but those odds are a little lop-

sided even for us. . . like ten thousand to one."

"We can handle a hundred to one," Joshua chimed in, "maybe

even five hundred to one with a little planning and support, but against these odds, a frontal assault seems—"

"It's not going to be a frontal assault," Fred said. He wedged

the launcher into the cramped Banshee cockpit. "Tape."

Kelly ripped off a length of tape and handed it over.

Fred smoothed the adhesive strip and secured the launcher in

place. "We'll play this one as quiet as we can," he said.

She considered Fred's plan for a moment and then asked, "So,

assuming we fool them into letting us into their lines ... then

what?"

"As much as I'd like to, we can't use the tac-nukes," Joshua

mused, "not in the far valley. The intervening ridge isn't high enough to block the EMP. It'll burn out the orbital defense generator."

"There's another way to use them," Fred told them. "We're go-

ing to board the cruiser—right up its gravity lift—and detonate

the nuke inside. The ship's shields will dampen the electromag-

netic pulse."

"It'll also turn that ship into the biggest fragmentation grenade

in history," Kelly remarked.

"And if anything goes wrong," Joshua said, "we end up in the

middle often thousand pissed-off bad guys."

"We're Spartans," Fred said. "What could possibly go wrong?"

CHAPTER FOUR

0711 hours, August 30,2552 (Military Calendar)\Epsilon Eridani system, Longhorn Valley, plan et Reach .

The alarm hooted, and Zawaz sprang to his feet with a startled yelp. The squat alien, a Grunt clad in burnished orange armor, fumbled and dropped his motion scanner. He keened in fear and retrieved the device with a trembling claw. If the scanner had been damaged, the Elites would use his body as reactor shielding. If

his masters learned he'd been asleep at his post, they might do far

worse than kill him. They might give him to the Jackals.

Zawaz shuddered.

Fortunately, the scanner still worked, and the diminutive alien sighed with relief. Three contacts rapidly approached the mountain that separated Zawaz's cadre from the distant human forces. He reached for the warning klaxon but relaxed as his detector identified the contacts—Banshee fliers.

He peered over the dirt edge of his protective hole to confirm this. He spotted three of the bulbous aircraft on approach. Zawaz snorted. It was odd that the flight wasn't listed on his patrol schedule. He considered alerting his superiors, then thought better of it. What if they were Elites on some secret mission?

No, it was best not to question such things. Be ignored. Live another day. That was his creed.

He nestled back into his hole, reset the motion detector to long range, and prayed it wouldn't go off again. He curled into a tight ball and promptly fell into a deep sleep.

Fred led their flying-wedge formation. The purple and red air-

ships arced up and over the treetops of the ridge, gaining as

ERIC NYLUND

much altitude as the Banshee could manage—about three hundred meters. As he cleared the top, what he saw made him ease off the throttle.

The valley was ten kilometers across and sloped before him, thick with Douglas firs that thinned and gave way to trampled fields and the Big Horn River beyond. Camped in the fields were thousands upon thousands of Covenant troops. Their mass covered the entire valley, and thin, smoke-choked sunlight glinted off a sea of red, yellow, and blue armor. They moved in tight columns and swarmed along the river's edge—so many that it looked like someone had kicked over the largest anthill in existence.

And they were building. Hundreds of flimsy white dome-shaped

tents were being erected, atmosphere pits for the methane-breathing Grunts. Farther back were the odd polyhedral huts of the Elite units, guarded by a long line of dozens of beetlelike Wraith tanks. Guard towers punctuated the valley; they spiraled up from mobile treaded bases, ten meters tall and topped with plasma turrets.

The rules had indeed changed. In more than a hundred battles Fred had never seen the Covenant set up encampments of such magnitude. All they did was kill.

Floating behind all this activity, almost brushing against the far hills, the Covenant cruiser sat thirty meters off the ground. It looked like a great bloated fish with stubby stabilizing fins. Its gravity lift was in operation, a tube of scintillating energy that moved matter to and from the ground. Stacks of purple crates gently floated down from the craft. In the afternoon light he could see its weapons bristling along its length, casting spider-like shadows across its hull.

Their Banshees leveled out, and Fred dropped back to tighten his formation with Kelly and Joshua.

He glanced again at the enemy ship and the guard towers. One good hit from those weapons could take them out.

Fred saw other Banshee patrols circling the valley. He frowned. If they passed them, the enemy pilots would almost certainly demand to know their business... and there was no way of knowing what the established patrol routes were. That meant he'd have to

take an alternate flight path: straight down the middle, and straight over the Covenant horde.

They'd only need one run to do this. They'd probably only get

one run.

He activated a COM frequency. "Go."

Kelly hit the acceleration and glided toward the cruiser. Fred fell in behind her. He armed the fuel rod gun built into the Banshee.

They were six kilometers from the cruiser when Kelly achieved the maximum speed of her flier. Grunts and Jackals in the fields below craned their necks as the Spartans flashed over them.

They had to go faster. Fred felt every Covenant eye watching them. He dived, trading his altitude for acceleration, and Joshua and Kelly did the same.

Communication symbols flashed across his Banshee's windshield display. The UNSC software built into their armor worked only with some of the spoken Covenant languages—not their written words. Odd, curling characters scrolled across the Banshee's displays.

Fred hit one of the response symbols. There was a pause, the display cleared, and dozens more sym-

bols flashed, twice as fast.

Fred clicked the display off. Three kilometers to go, and his heart beat so hard he heard it

thunder in his ears.

Kelly pulled slightly ahead of them. She was now thirty meters off the ground, gaining as much speed as she could, driving straight for the cruiser's gravity lift.

The nearest guard tower tracked her; its plasma cannon flared and fired.

Kelly's flier climbed and banked to evade the energy fire. The bolt of superheated ionized gas brushed against her starboard fuselage. Energy spray melted the Banshee's front faring, and her ship slowed.

A dozen plasma turrets turned to track them.

Fred banked and opened fire. Energy bursts from the Banshee's primary weapon strafed the guard tower. Joshua did the same, and a river of fire streaked toward the towers.

Fred hit the firing stud for the Banshee's heavy weapon, and a

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

sphere of energy arced into the base of the tower. It began a gradual tilt, then collapsed.

Kelly hadn't fired. Fred glanced her way and saw that she now stood in a low crouch atop her racing Banshee. She had one foot under the duct tape that had secured the nuke and now held the bomb in her hand, cocking it back to throw.

A shard of jagged crystal, a round from a Covenant needier,

pinged off Fred's port shield. He snapped a look below.

Covenant Grunts and Jackals boiled in agitation—a hundred badly aimed shots arced up after him; glistening clouds of crystalline needles and firefly plasma bolts swarmed through the air and chipped away at his Banshee's fuselage.

Fred jinked his Banshee left and right, and dodged plasma bolts from the three guard towers tracking him. He lined up for a second strafing run, and the Banshee's lighter energy weapons sent Grunts scattering.

A hundred meters to go.

Kelly leaned back, coiled her body, and readied to throw the nuclear device as if it were a shotput.

The Covenant cruiser came to life, and its weapons tracked the Banshees. A dozen fingers of plasma ripped the air; white-blue arcs of fire reached for them.

One bolt connected with Joshua's ship. The Banshee's improvised shields overloaded and vanished. The canards of the flier melted and bent. The alien airship lurched into a spin as its control surfaces warped, and Joshua fell behind Fred and Kelly just as they entered the gravity lift of the craft.

Fred keyed his COM to raise Joshua but got only static. Time seemed to slow inside the beam of purple light that ferried goods and troops to and from the belly of the ship. The strange glow surrounded them and made his skin tingle as if it were asleep.

Their Banshees rose toward an opening in the underside of the carrier. They weren't riding into the ship, though; they were traveling too fast and would cross the beam before they were three quarters of the way to the top.

Fred snapped around. He didn't see Joshua anywhere. Plasma beams hit the well and were deflected as if it were a giant glass lens.

Kelly hurled the nuke straight up into the gullet of the cruiser.

Fred wrenched the Banshee's controls and arced the craft under the edge of the ship; Kelly was right behind him. The light vanished, and they emerged on the far side of the Covenant vessel.

Behind them, distorted through the gravity lift, Fred saw Covenant troops firing their weapons into the sky. He heard ten thousand voices screaming for blood.

Fred pinged Joshua on the COM, but his acknowledgment light remained dark.

He wanted to slow and turn back for him, but Kelly dived, accelerating toward the ground, and she entered the forest that carpeted the mountainside. Fred followed her. They were scant meters above the ground; they dodged trees and blasted through tangles of foliage. A handful of stray shots flashed overhead. They flew at top speed and didn't look back.

They emerged from the tree line and over the powdered snow of the mountaintop. They arced over a granite ridge, came about, and throttled back. The Banshees drifted slowly to the ground.

The sky turned white. Fred's faceplate polarized to its darkest setting. Thunder rolled though his body. Fire and molten metal blossomed over the ridge, boiled skyward, and rained back into the valley. The granite top of the intervening mountain shattered into dust and the snow on their side melted in muddy rivulets.

Fred's visor slowly depolarized.

Kelly leaned across her Banshee. Blood oozed from her armor's left shoulder joint. She fumbled for her helmet seal, caught it, and peeled it off her head. "Did we get 'em?" she panted. Blood foamed from the corner of her mouth.

"I think so," Fred told her.

She looked around. "Joshua?"

Fred shook his head. "He got hit on the way in."

It had been easy for him to fly into the face of certain death

moments ago. Saying those words was a hundred times harder.

Kelly slumped and dropped her head back against her Banshee.

"Stay here, I'm going up to take a look." Fred powered up his Banshee and rose parallel with the ridgeline. He nudged the craft up a little farther and got his first look into the valley.

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

It was a sea of flame. Hundreds of fires dotted the cracked, glassy ground. Where the Big Horn River had snaked along, there was now only a long steaming furrow. There was no trace of the cruiser or the Covenant troops that had filled the valley moments ago. All that remained was a field of smoldering, twisted bone and metal. At the edge of this carnage stood blackened sticks—the remnants of the forest—all leaning away from the center of the explosion.

Ten thousand Covenant deaths. It wasn't worth losing Joshua or any of the other Spartans, but it was something. Perhaps they had bought enough time for the orbital MAC guns to tip the battle overhead in the Fleet's favor. Maybe their sacrifices would save Reach. That would be worth it.

He looked up into the sky. The steam made it difficult to see anything, but there was motion overhead: Faint shadows glided over the clouds.

Kelly's Banshee appeared alongside his, and their canards bumped.

The shadows overhead sharpened; three Covenant cruisers broke through the clouds and drifted toward the generator complex. Their plasma artillery flickered and glowed with energy.

Fred snapped open his COM channel and boosted the signal strength to its maximum. "Delta Team: Fall back. Fall back now!"

Static hissed over the channel, and several voices overlapped. He heard one of his Spartans—he couldn't tell who—break through the static.

"Reactor complex seven has been compromised. We're falling back. Might be able to save number three." There was a pause as the speaker shouted orders to someone else: "Set off those charges now!"

Fred switched to FLEETCOM and broadcast: "Be advised,

Pillar of Autumn, groundside reactors are being taken. Orbital

guns at risk. Nothing we can do. Too many. We'll have to use the nukes. Be advised, orbital MAC guns will most likely be neu-

tralized. Pillar of Autumn, do you read? Acknowledge."

More voices crowded the channel, and Fred thought he heard

Admiral Whitcomb's voice, but whatever orders he issued were

incomprehensible. Then there was only static, and then the COM went dead.

The cruisers fired salvos of plasma that burned the sky. Distant explosions thumped, and Fred strained to see if there was any return fire—any sign that his Spartans were fighting or retreating. Their only hope was movement; the enemy firepower would shred a fixed position.

"Fall back," he hissed. "Now, damn it."

Kelly tapped him on the shoulder and pointed up.

The clouds parted like a curtain drawn as a fireball a hundred meters across roared over their position. He saw the faint outlines of dozens of Covenant battleships in low orbit.

"Plasma bombardment," Fred whispered.

He'd seen this before. They all had. When the Covenant conquered a human world they fired their main plasma batteries at the planet—fired until its oceans boiled and nothing was left but a globe of broken glass.

"That's it," Kelly murmured. "We've lost. Reach is going to fall."

Fred watched as the plasma impacted upon the horizon and the sky turned white, then faded to black as millions of tons of ash and debris blotted out the sun.

"Maybe," Fred said. He gunned his Banshee. "Maybe not. Come on, we're not done yet."

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

SECTION I

THRESHOLD

CHAPTER FIVE

1637 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard Longsword fighter, uncharted system, Halo debris field. Three weeks later.

The Master Chief settled into the pilot's seat of the Longsword attack craft. He didn't fit. The contoured seat had been engineered to mate with a standard-issue Navy flight suit, not the bulky MJOLNIR armor.

He scratched his scalp and breathed deeply. The air tasted odd—

it lacked the metallic quality of his suit's air scrubbers. This was the first quiet moment he'd had to sit, think, and remember. First there was the satisfaction after the successful space op at Reach, which went sour after Linda was killed and the Covenant glassed the

planet... and Red Team. Then the time spent in a Pillar of Autumn

cryotube, the flight from Reach, and the discovery of Halo.

And the Flood.

He stared out from the front viewport and fought down his

revulsion at the memory of the Flood outbreak. Whoever had constructed Halo had used it to contain the sentient, virulent xenoform that had nearly claimed them all. The rapidly healing wound in his neck, inflicted by a Flood Infection Form during the final battle on Halo's surface, still throbbed.

He wanted to forget it all. . . especially the Flood. Everything inside him ached.

The system's moon, Basis, was a silver-gray disk against the

darkness of space, and beyond it was the muted purple of the gas giant Threshold. Between them lay a glistening expanse of debris—metal, stone, ice, and everything else that had once been Halo.

ERIC NYLUND

"Scan it again," the Master Chief told Cortana. "Already completed," her disembodied voice replied. "There's

nothing out there. I told you: just dust and echoes."

The Master Chief's hand curled into a fist, and for a moment he felt the urge to slam it into something. He relaxed, surprised at his frayed temper. He'd been exhausted in the past—and without a doubt the fight on Halo had been the most harrowing of his career—but he'd never been prone to such outbursts.

The struggle against the Flood must have gotten to him, more

than he'd realized.

With effort he banished the Flood from his mind. Either

there'd be time to deal with it later. . . or there wouldn't. Worrying about it now served no useful purpose.

"Scan the field again," he repeated.

Cortana's tiny holographic figure appeared on the projection

pad mounted between the pilot's and system-ops seats. She crossed her arms over her chest, visibly irritated with the Master Chief's request.

"If you don't find something out there we can use," he told

her, "we're dead. This ship has no Slipspace drive, and no cryo. There's no way to get back and report. Power, fuel, air, food, water—we only have enough for a few hours.

"So," he concluded as patiently as he could manage. "Scan.

Again."

Cortana sighed explosively, and her hologram dissolved. The

scanner panel activated, however, and mathematical symbols crowded the screen.

A moment later the scanner panel dimmed and Cortana said,

"There's still nothing, Chief. All I'm picking up is a strong echo from the moon ... but there are no transponder signals, and no distress calls."

"You're not doing an active scan?"

Her tiny hologram appeared again, and this time static flashed

across her figure. "There are trillions of objects out there. If you want I can start to scan and identify each individual piece. If we sit here and do nothing else, that would take eighteen days."

"What if someone's out there but they turned off their trans-

ponder? What if they don't want to be found?"

"That's highly un—" Cortana froze for a split second. The static

around her vanished, and she stared off into space. "Interesting."

"What?" Cortana looked distracted, then seemed to snap out of it.

"New data. That signal echo's getting stronger."

"Meaning?" "Meaning," she replied, "it's not an echo."

The scanner panel hummed back to life as Cortana activated the Longsword's long-range detection gear. "Uh-oh," she said, a moment later.

The Chief peered at the scan panel as Cortana identified the contact. The distinctive, bulbous silhouette of a Covenant cruiser edged into view as it moved around the moon's far side.

"Power down," he snapped. "Kill everything except passive

scanners and minimal power to keep you online."

The Longsword darkened; Cortana's hologram flickered and

faded as she killed power flow to the holosystem.

The cruiser moved into the debris field, prowling like a hungry shark. Another cruiser appeared, then another, and then three more.

"Status?" he whispered, his hands hovering over the weapons controls. "Have they spotted us?"

"They're using the same scanning frequencies as our system," Cortana said in his helmet speaker. "How strange. No mention of this phenomenon in any of the UNSC or ONI files on the Covenant. Why do you suppose they'd use the same frequencies?"

"Never mind that," the Chief said. "They're here and looking for something. Like I said before, if there are survivors out there, they'd be powered down."

"I can listen to their echoes," Cortana said, her voice flat and oddly procedural. Operating at lower power levels seemed to limit her more colorful behavior. "Process active: analyzing Covenant signals. Piggybacking their scans. Diverting more runtime to the task. I'm building a multiplex filtering algorithm. Customizing the current shape-signature recognition software."

Another ship rounded the horizon of Basis. It was larger than any Covenant ship the Master Chief had seen. It had the sleek three-bulbed shape of one of their destroyers, but it must have been three kilometers long. Seven plasma turrets were mounted

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on universal joints—enough firepower to gut any ship in the UNSC fleet.

"Picking up encrypted transmissions from new contact," Cor-tana whispered. "Descrambling... lots of chatter... orders being given to the cruisers. It appears to be directing the Covenant fleet operations in the system."

"A flagship," the Chief murmured. "Interesting."

"Scan still in progress, Chief. Stand by."

John got out of the sysops seat. He had no intention of just "standing by" with seven Covenant warships in the system.

He drifted to the aft compartment of the Longsword fighter. He'd assess what equipment was on board. He might get lucky and find a few of those Shiva nuclear-tipped missiles.

As he had seen when he first boarded the ship, the cryotube

had been removed. He wasn't sure why, but maybe, like every-

thing else on the Pillar of Autumn, the ship had been stripped

down and upgraded for their original high-risk mission.

Where the cryo unit was supposed to be there was a new control panel. The Chief examined it and discovered it was a Moray space-mine laying system. He didn't power it on. The Moray system could dispense up to three dozen free-floating mines. The mines had tiny chemical-fuel drives that allowed them to keep a fixed position or move to track specific targets. These would come in handy.

He moved to the weapons locker and forced it open—it was

empty.

The Chief checked his own assault rifle: fully functional, but

only thirteen rounds remained in the magazine.

"Got something," Cortana said.

He returned to the sysops seat. "Show me."

On the smallest viewscreen, a silhouette appeared: a small,

bullet-shaped cone with maneuvering thrusters on one end.

"It could be a cryotube," Cortana said. "Thruster and power packs can be affixed on their aft sections for emergencies... if a ship has to be abandoned, for example."

"And most of the crew on the Pillar of Autumn never had a

chance to be revived from cryo," the Chief said. "They could have been jettisoned before the ship went down. Move us toward them. Docking thrusters only."

"Course plotted," Cortana said. "Thrusters engaged." There was a slight acceleration. "ETA twenty minutes, Chief. But given the Covenant cruis-

ers' current search pattern, I estimate they will encounter the

pod infive minutes."

"We need to move faster," the Chief told her, "but without firing

the engines. The drive emissions will show up like a flare on their sensors."

"Hang on," Cortana said. "I'll get us there." The Chief donned his helmet and locked its atmosphere seals.

Status lights pulsed green. "Ready," he said.

The aft hatch of the Longsword breached and slammed open.

There was an explosive sound as the atmosphere vented. The Longsword jumped forward; the Chief's head slammed into the back of his helmet.

"Adjusting course," Cortana said calmly. "ETA two minutes."

"How are we going to stop?" he asked.

She sighed. "Do I have to think of everything?" The aft hatch

resealed, and John heard the faint hiss as the internal compartments pressurized.

One of the sleek Covenant cruisers slowed and turned

toward them.

"Picking up increased scanning signal activity and strength,"

Cortana reported.

The Chief's hand hovered over the weapons system console.

It would take several seconds for the weapons to power up. The 110mm rotary cannons could fire immediately, but the missiles would have to wait for their target-lock software to initialize. By then the cruiser, which outgunned them a hundred to one, would turn the Longsword into molten slag.

"Attempting to jam their scanners," Cortana said. "That may

buy us some time."

The Covenant cruiser turned away, slowed, and turned back

to face the comparatively tiny Longsword. It took no further action . . . as if it were waiting for them to get closer.

So far so good. The Chief clenched and unclenched his

gauntleted hand. We 're not dead yet.

He glanced at the scan display. The contact resolved into a

clearer image: definitely a UNSC cryopod. It tumbled, and he

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saw that what he thought was a single pod was in fact three of them, affixed side by side.

Three possible survivors out of the Pillar of Autumn's total

complement of hundreds. He wished there were more. He wished Captain Keyes were here. In the Chief's opinion Keyes had been the most brilliant spatial tactician he had ever encountered ... but even the Captain would have thought twice about approaching seven Covenant warships in a single Longsword.

He risked feeding more ship's power to Cortana's systems. If they were going to make it through this, he needed her as effective as possible.

"New contact," Cortana said, interrupting his thoughts. "I think it is, anyway. Whatever it is, it's stuck onto a chunk of rock, half a kilometer in diameter. Damn, it just rotated out of my view."

On the display Cortana replayed a partial silhouette of an oddly angled shape on the surface of the rock. She highlighted its contours, rotated the polygon, and overlaid this onto a schematic of a Pelican dropship.

"Match with a tolerance of fifty-eight percent," she said. "They might have parked there to avoid detection, as you suggested."

The Chief thought he detected a hint of irritation in her voice, as if she resented him for thinking of something she had not.

"Or," Cortana continued, "more likely, the craft merely crashed there."

"I don't think so." He pointed at the display. "The position of that wing indicates it's nose-out—ready for takeoff. If it had crash-landed, it would be faced the other way."

Another Covenant cruiser moved toward this new ship.

"Coming about, Chief," Cortana told him. "Brace yourself, and then get ready to retrieve the pods."

The Chief unsnapped his harness and drifted aft. He grabbed a tether and clipped one end to his suit, the other to the bulkhead of the Longsword.

He felt the maneuvering thrusters fire, and the ship rotated

180 degrees.

"Decompression in three seconds," Cortana said.

The Chief opened the empty weapons locker and climbed partially inside. He braced himself.

Cortana dropped the aft hatch, and the inside of the ship exploded out; the Chief slammed into the door of the locker, denting the centimeter-thick Titanium-A.

He climbed out and Cortana overlaid a blue arrow-shaped NAV point on his heads-up display, indicating the location of the drifting cryopods.

The Chief jumped out of the Longsword.

He floated through space. He was only thirty meters from the pods, but if he'd guessed wrong about his trajectory and missed the target, he wouldn't get a second chance. By the time he reeled himself back to the Longsword and tried again, those Covenant ships were certain to kill them all.

He stretched his arms and hands toward the cylinders. Twenty meters to go.

His approach was off. He shifted his left knee closer to his chest and started a slow tumble.

Ten meters.

His upper body rotated "down" relative to the pods. If he spun

just right as he passed the cryotubes, it would give him enough extra reach to make contact. He hoped.

He rotated back... almost standing "up" now.

Three meters.

He stretched his arms until the elbow joints creaked and

popped; he stretched his hands, willed his fingers to elongate.

His fingertips brushed against the smooth surface of the leading cryopod. It slid off and over and touched the second pod. He flexed and failed to grab hold. He scratched the surface of the third and final pod—his middle finger hooked on the frame.

His body swung inward, curled, and landed on the pod. He quickly looped his tether through the frame, secured himself to it, and pulled their combined mass back to the Longsword.

"Hurry, Chief," Cortana said over the COM. "We've got trouble."

The Chief saw exactly what the trouble was: The engines of two Covenant cruisers flared electric blue as they accelerated toward the Longsword. The plasma and laser weapons along their hulls warmed from red to orange as they readied to fire.

He pulled as fast as he could, making minor adjustments with

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the muscles in his braced legs so his motions didn't send them into a tumble in the zero gravity.

The Longsword was a sitting duck for those Covenant cruisers. Cortana couldn't fire the engines until he got on board. Even if he and the pods survived the thruster wash, any evasive maneuver Cortana made would snap him and his cargo like the end of a whip.

The Covenant ships were within firing range, lined up perfectly to destroy the Longsword.

Three missiles streaked though space, impacting on the starboard side of the lead Covenant ship. The explosion splashed harmlessly across its shield, which shimmered silver as it dissipated the energy.

The Chief turned his head and saw the Pelican blast off from the asteroid where it had been hiding. It rocketed on a perpendicular course toward the two Covenant ships.

The cruisers came about, apparently more interested in hunting live prey than the motionless Longsword.

The Chief gave one final yank on the tether. He and the pods flew through the aft hatch and crashed into the deck of the Longsword.

Cortana immediately sealed the hatch and fired the engines.

The Chief climbed into the system-ops seat just as they accelerated and turned toward the cruisers. He activated the weapons systems.

The two Covenant cruisers powered their engines and pursued the Pelican, but it had entered a dense region of the debris field, dodged a chunk of metal and rock, dived over an iceball, and charged through clouds of shattered alien metal. The Covenant fired: Energy blasts impacted on the debris and missed the Pelican.

"Whoever's piloting that Pelican knows their stuff," Cor-

tana said.

"We owe them a favor." John fired the Longsword's guns, and tiny silver dots punctuated the trailing Covenant cruiser's shields. "Let's settle that debt."

"You realize," Cortana said, "that we really can't damage

those Covenant ships."

The cruiser slowed and turned toward them. "We'll see about that. Get me a firing solution for the missiles.

I want them to target their plasma turrets just before they fire. They have to drop a section of their shields for a fraction of a second."

"Working," Cortana replied. "Without precise data, however, I'll have to base my calculations on several assumptions." A string of mathematics appeared on the weapons ops panel. "Give me fire control."

John punched the auto override on the firing systems. "It's yours," he said.

The Covenant cruiser's plasma turrets turned to track them as the ship came to bear. They warmed, and Cortana fired all the Longsword's ASGM-10 missiles.

White vapor trails snaked toward the target.

"Let's move!" the Chief said.

The Longsword accelerated into the debris field, following the Pelican's path. The aft camera displayed the missiles racing to their target. Antimissile laser fire stabbed though space, and three of the missiles exploded into red fireballs. The Covenant's plasma turret glowed white hot—about to fire—when the last missile impacted. The explosion smeared across the hull.

At first the Chief thought it had hit the shield, but then he saw

that the explosion was inside the shimmering envelope of en-

ergy. The plasma turrets fired; their energy was immediately absorbed into the cloud of dust and vapor around the ship. Dull red plasma ballooned inside the cruiser's shield, obscuring its sensors. The ship listed to port, momentarily blind.

"That should keep them busy for a while," Cortana said.

The Longsword arced under a half-kilometer-wide metal plate—just as a plasma bolt impacted and boiled the surface, sending the plate sputtering and spinning through space.

"Or not," Cortana muttered. "Better let me drive."

The autopilot engaged, and the controls jerked out of the Chief's hand. The Longsword's afterburners kicked in, and it accelerated toward a field of tumbling rocks. Cortana rolled and pitched, keeping the hull mere meters from the jagged surfaces.

The Chief hung on to the seat with one hand and pulled his harness tight with the other. He moved the scanner display to the center viewscreen and saw the two nearest Covenant cruisers vectored toward his and the Pelican's position. The two UNSC

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ships might evade and dodge through the debris field for a few minutes, but soon their fuel would be exhausted, and the Covenant would move in for the kill.

And where could they really run to, anyway? Neither ship had Shaw-Fujikawa Translight Engines, so they were stuck in this system and the Covenant knew it. They could afford to take their time and play with their prey before they pounced.

The Chief performed a sweep scan of the system looking for

something—anything to give him a tactical advantage. No, think-

ing of tactics was going to get him killed. There was no tactical

advantage he could gain that would give him a victory in this

mismatch. He had to change the rules—change his strategy.

He scanned the massive Covenant flagship—that was the key.

That's how he'd be able to turn the tables on the enemy.

He keyed the COM system and hailed the Pelican. "This is

Master Chief SPARTAN-One-One-Seven. Recognition code Tango Alpha Three Four Zero. Copy."

"Copy," a woman's voice answered. "Warrant Officer Polaski

here." Other voices argued in the background. "Damn good to hear you, Chief."

"Polaski, proceed at maximum burn to this position." He dropped a NAV point on the display directly on the Covenant flagship. He included an exit vector indicating a rough course.

There was silence over the COM.

"Copy, Polaski?"

"I copy. Plotting course now, Chief." The voices arguing in the background became loud and more strained. "I hope you know what you're doing. Polaski out." The channel snapped off.

"Get us there, Cortana," he said, tapping the NAV point. "As fast as you can make this thing fly."

The Longsword rolled right and pitched toward the moon, Basis. The chief's safety harness groaned as gee forces increased.

"You do know what you're doing?" Cortana asked. "I mean,

we're headed straight toward the largest and most dangerous Covenant ship in this system. I assume this is part of some daring and brutally simplistic plan you've cooked up?"

"Yes," the Chief replied.

"Oh, good. Hang on," Cortana said. The Longsword rolled to port and dived under a rock. An explosion detonated aft of

the ship. "Looks like your 'plan' has gotten their attention. I'm reading all six Covenant cruisers moving to overtake us at flank speed."

"And the Pelican?" "Still there," Cortana reported. "Taking heavy fire. But on tra-

jectory to the NAV point. .. moving slower than us, of course."

"Adjust our speed so we arrive at the same time. When you're

in range for a secure system link, let me know."

The Longsword decelerated; it shuddered to starboard and

then to port, and laser fire flashed along either side.

"You never told me," Cortana said in a voice that was equal parts

irritation and calm indifference, "precisely what your plan is."

"Something Captain Keyes would approve of." The Chief summoned the navigation console on the main display. "If we survive long enough, I want a course from here"—he tapped the NAV point over the flagship—"into the gravity well of Basis to slingshot us around."

"Done," Cortana replied. "I still— Hey, they've stopped firing."

The Chief tapped the aft camera. The six cruisers continued their pursuit, but the tips of their weapons cooled as they powered down. "I was counting on this. We're on the same line of fire as their flagship. They won't shoot."

"Pelican now twelve hundred kilometers and closing. Within range for system link."

The Chief hailed the Pelican. "Polaski, release your controls. We're taking over."

"Chief?"

"Establish encrypted system link. Acknowledge."

A long pause, then, "Roger."

Cortana's hologram appeared on the tiny protection pad. She appeared to listen intently for a moment, and then declared, "Got them."

"Synchronize our courses, Cortana. Put us right on top of the Pelican."

"Maneuvering to intercept the Pelican. Five hundred kilometers to flagship."

"Prepare to alter our course, Cortana, as we pass the flagship. Also get ready to direct all scanners at the flagship if we pass."

'"If?" Cortana asked.

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The flagship's turrets turned to bear on the Longsword and

Pelican. They glowed like angry eyes in the dark.

"Three hundred kilometers."

Light sparkled along the length of the Covenant craft as it prepared to fire; dull red plasma gathered; three torpedoes extruded and raced toward them.

"Evasiv—" the Chief said.

Cortana banked hard port, starboard, and then hit the after-

burners and pulled up. Streaks of hell&e brushed close to the hulls of the Longsword and Pelican—then were gone behind them.

The Chief had hoped for this: Their extreme oblique approach angle combined with their speed made them hard to hit, even for the notoriously accurate Covenant plasma weapons.

"Ten kilometers," Cortana announced. "Scanning in burst

mode."

They flashed over the three-kilometer-long ship in the blink of

an eye. The Chief saw gun turrets straining to track their approach. The alien craft had sleek lines, relatively flat top to bottom, but it curved from stem to stern into three distinct bulb sections. Along its hull ran glowing blue conduits of superheated plasma; surrounding the ship was a faint shimmer of silver energy shields.

He eased back into his seat. The Chief hadn't realized that

he'd been holding his breath, and he exhaled. "Good," he said. "Very good."

"Burning into a high slingshot orbit," Cortana announced.

The Longsword's engines rumbled. The acceleration played

hell with the Chief's inner ear. He wasn't certain for a moment which way was up.

"Bring us closer to the Pelican," he said. "Right on top. Give

me a hard dock on its top access hatch."

Cortana set her hands on her hips and frowned. "Readjusting burn parameters. But you know a linked-ship configuration during an orbital burn is not stable."

"We won't be linked long," he said and slipped out of his harness. He drifted aft, pulled himself down to the floor and opened the Longsword's access hatch. Green lights on the intervening pressure door winked on in succession. He removed the safeties and popped the seal.

A hand reached up from the other side. John pulled the person

through.

The shock only lasted a moment. John's reflexes kicked in— he grabbed a handful of the man's uniform, kicked the hatch shut, and propelled both of them against the hull. With a lightning-quick motion, he drew the newcomer's pistol and aimed it squarely at the man's forehead.

"You were dead," the Chief said. "I saw you die. On Jenkins's

mission record. The Flood got you."

The black man smiled a set of perfect white teeth. "The Flood? Hell, Chief, it'll take more than that pack of walking alien horror-show freaks to take out Sergeant A. J. Johnson."

HALO: FIRST STR IK E

CHAPTER SIX

1710 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard Longsword fighter, uncharted system, Halo debris field.

The Master Chief held on to the ship's frame with one hand so he wouldn't float away in zero gee. With the other hand he pressed the pistol deeper into Johnson's forehead.

The Sergeant's smile faded, but there was not a trace of fear in his dark eyes. He snorted a laugh. "I get it: You think I'm infected. Well, I'm not. This"—he patted his chest—"is one hundred percent grade-A Marine... and nothin' else."

The Chief eased his stance but didn't lower the gun. "Explain

how that's possible."

"They got us all right, those little mushroom-shaped infec-

tious bastards," Johnson said. "They ambushed me, Jenkins, and Keyes." He paused at the Captain's name, then shook his head and went on. "They swarmed all over us. Jenkins and Keyes were taken... but I guess I didn't taste too good."

"The Flood doesn't 'taste' anything," Cortana interjected. "The

Infection Forms rewrite a victim's cellular structure and convert him into a Combat Form, then later a Carrier Form—an incubator for more Infection Forms. Based on what we've seen, they certainly don't just decide to pass up a victim."

The Sergeant shrugged. He fished into his pocket, found the

remaining stub of a chewed cigar, and stuck it in the corner of his

mouth. "Well, I've seen different. They 'passed me up' like I was

undercooked spinach at a turkey dinner."

"Cortana," the Chief asked. "Is it possible?"

"It's possible? she carefully replied. "But it's also highly un-

likely." She paused for two heartbeats, and then added, "According to the readings from the Sergeant's biomonitors, his story checks out. I can't be one hundred percent positive until he's been cleared in a medical suite, but preliminary findings indicate that he is clean of any Flood parasitic infection. He's obviously not a mindless, half-naked alien killing machine."

"All right." The Chief clicked the pistol's safety to "on" then flipped the pistol around and handed it back to the Sergeant, grip first. "But I'm having you checked inside and out the first chance we get. We can't risk letting the Flood infection spread."

"I hear you, Master Chief. Looking forward to those Navy

nurses. Now—" The Sergeant pushed off the hull and drifted toward the hatch. "—let's get the rest of the crew on board." He hesitated by the cryotubes. "I see you already picked up a few stragglers."

"They'll have to wait," the Chief said. "It'll take half an hour to thaw them out without risking hypothermic shock. We don't have that much time left before we reengage the Covenant."

"Reengage," the Sergeant said, savoring the word. He smiled. "Good. For a second I thought we were running away from a perfectly good fight." The Sergeant opened the hatch to the Pelican.

The barrel of an MA5B assault rifle extended through the opening. The Sergeant reached down and pulled it up.

A Marine Corporal drifted though the hatch. The name stitched on his uniform read LOCKLEAR. He was tanned, shaved bald, and had a wild look in his clear blue eyes. He retrieved his gun from the Sergeant and swept the interior with the point of his weapon. "Clear!" he shouted back down into the Pelican.

"At ease, Corporal," the Master Chief said.

The Corporal's eyes finally locked onto the Chief. He shook his head in disbelief. "A Spartan," he muttered. "Figures. Outta the friggin' frying pan—"

The Master Chief spotted the Marine's shoulder patch: the gold comet insigne of the Orbital Drop Shock Troops. The ODST, more colorfully known as "Helljumpers," were notorious for their tenacity in a fight.

Locklear must have been one of Major Silva's boys, which explained the young Marine's general hostility. Silva was ODST to

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the bone, and during the action on Halo had been decidedly negative about the SPARTAN-IIs in general... and the Chief in particular.

Another man gripped the edge of the hatch and pulled himself up. He had a plasma pistol strapped to his side and wore a crisp black uniform. His red hair was neatly slicked back, and his eyes took in the Chief without obvious surprise. He wore the black enameled bars of a First Lieutenant.

"Sir!" The Chief snapped off a crisp salute.

"Adjusting burn and angle," Cortana announced. The Long-sword and Pelican tilted relative to the moon, Basis, on the viewscreen. "That should give you a little more than one gee on the deck."

The lieutenant settled to the floor and lazily returned the salute. "I'm Haverson," he said. He looked John over with interest. "You are the Master Chief, SPARTAN-117."

"Yes, sir." The Chief was surprised. Most people, even experienced officers, had difficulty distinguishing one Spartan from another. How had this young officer so quickly identified him?

The Chief saw the round insigne on the man's shoulder—the black and silver eagle wings over a trio of stars. Inscribed above the eagle wings were the Latin words SEMPER VIGILANS—Ever Vigilant.

Haverson was with the Office of Naval Intelligence.

"Good," Haverson said. He glanced quickly at Locklear and Johnson. "With you, Chief, we might have a chance." He reached into the hatch and pulled another person onto the Longsword.

This last person was a woman, and she wore the flight-suit of a

pilot. Her dirty blond hair was tucked into a cap. She saluted the Chief. "Petty Warrant Officer Polaski, requesting permission to come aboard, Master Chief."

"Granted," he said and returned her salute.

Stenciled onto her coveralls was a flaming fist over a red bull's-eye, the insignia of the Twenty-third Naval Air Squadron. Although the Chief had never met Polaski, she was from the same chalk as Captain Carol Rawley, callsign "Foehammer." If Polaski was anything like Foehammer, she would be a skilled and fearless pilot.

"So what's the story?" Locklear demanded. "We got some-

thing to shoot here?"

"At ease, Marine," the Sergeant growled. "Use that stuffing between your ears for something besides keeping your helmet on. Notice we're not floating? Feel those gee forces? This ship is in a slingshot orbit. We're coming around the moon for another crack at the Covenant."

"That's correct," the Chief said.

"Our first priority should be to escape," Haverson said and his

thin brows knitted in frustration, "not to blindly engage the Covenant. We have valuable intelligence on the enemy, and on Halo. Our first priority should be to reach UNSC-controlled space."

"That was my intention, sir," the Chief replied. "But neither this

Longsword nor your Pelican is equipped with Shaw-Fujikawa engines. Without a jump to Slipspace, it would take years to return."

Haverson sighed. "That does limit our options, doesn't it?"

He turned his back to the Chief and paced, deep in thought.

The Master Chief respected the chain of command, wnich meant that he had to obey Lieutenant Haverson. But, officer or not, the Spartan had never liked it when people turned their backs to him. And he certainly didn't like the way Haverson assumed he was in charge.

The Chief had already gotten his orders, and he intended to

follow them—whether or not Haverson approved.

"Pardon me, sir," the Chief said. "I must point out that while you are the ranking officer, I am on a classified mission of the highest priority. My orders come directly from High Command."

"Meaning?"

"Meaning," John continued, "I have tactical command of this

crew, these ships. . . and you. Sir."

Haverson turned, his expression dark. The Lieutenant's mouth opened as if he were going to say something. He closed his mouth and looked the Chief over. A faint smile flickered over his thin lips. "Of course. I am well aware of your mission, Chief. I'll do anything I can to assist."

He knew about the Spartan's original mission to capture a

Covenant Prophet? What was an ONI officer doing here anyway?

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ERIC NYLUND

"So what's the plan?" Locklear asked. "Slingshot orbit—then

what? We just going to talk all day, Chief?"

"No," the Chief replied.

He glanced at Polaski and the Sergeant. He could count on her, and though he was suspicious of exactly how Sergeant Johnson had avoided falling to the Flood, he was willing to give the man the benefit of the doubt. Haverson? He wouldn't trust him, but the man knew what was at stake, and he wouldn't interfere. Probably. Locklear was another story, though.

The ODST was coiled and ready to pounce . . . or come apart like an antipersonnel mine. Some men broke under pressure and wouldn't fight. Some snapped and disregarded their own and their team's safety for blind revenge. Add that to the Hell-jumper's fierce pride and one had a volatile mix. The Chief had to establish his authority over the man.

"Get onto the Pelican," the Chief told him. "We only have a few minutes while we're on the far side of this moon. Grab anything we can use: extra weapons, ammunition, grenades. Keep linked up to my COM so you can hear the briefing."

Locklear stood there, glared into the Chief's faceplate, and

tensed.

Sergeant Johnson opened his mouth, but the Chief made a subtle cutting gesture with his hand. The Sergeant kept whatever he had to say to himself.

The Master Chief took a step closer to Locklear. "Was my or-

der unclear, Corporal?"

Locklear swallowed. The blue fire in his eyes dulled and he looked away. "No." His body slumped and he shouldered his rifle, accepting, for now, the Master Chief's authority. "I'm on it, Master Chief." He went to the hatch and dropped into the Pelican.

To say this team was mismatched for a high-risk insertion op was an understatement.

"So how do we get a Shaw-Fujikawa drive?" Polaski asked.

"We don't," John replied. "But we go after the next best thing." He moved to the ops consol and tapped the display. The scan of the Covenant flagship appeared on the viewscreen. "This is our objective."

Haverson frowned. "Chief, if we approach that ship we'll be blown out of the sky before we can even think about engaging them."

"Normally, yes," the Chief replied. "But we're going to rig the Pelican as a fireship—we load it with Moray mines and send it out ahead of us. We'll have to remote-pilot the Pelican, but it can be accelerated past the point where a crew would black out. It'll draw enemy fire, drop a few mines, and let us slip by."

Polaski's expression hardened into a frown.

"There a problem, Warrant Officer?"

"No, Master Chief. I just hate to lose a good ship. That bird

got us off Halo in one piece."

He understood. Pilots got attached to their ships. They gave

them names and human personalities. The Chief, however, never fell into that trap; he had long ago learned that any equipment was expendable. Except, maybe, Cortana.

"So we get close to the flagship," Haverson said and crossed

his arms over his chest. "Are we going nose to nose with a ship with a thousand times our firepower? Or are you planning another flyby?"

"Neither." The Chief pointed to the flagship's fighter launch bay. "That's our LZ."

Polaski squinted at the comparatively tiny opening in the belly

of the flagship. "That's a hell of a window to hit coming in this fast, but"—she bit her lower lip, calculating—"technically possible in a Longsword."

"They'll launch Seraph fighters to engage the Pelican and the Longsword," the Chief said, "and to do that, they'll have to drop that section of their shields. We get in, neutralize the crew, and we have a ship with Slipspace capability."

"Rock 'n' roll!" Locklear yelled over the COM. "Penetrate

and annihilate!"

Sergeant Johnson chewed on his cigar as he considered the plan.

"No one has ever captured a Covenant ship," Haverson whispered. "The few times we've had one of them beaten and in a position to surrender, they've self-destructed."

"There's no choice," the Chief said. He looked over Polaski,

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

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Johnson, and finally Haverson. "Unless anyone has a better plan?"

They were silent. "Anything to add, Cortana?" he asked.

"Our exit orbit burn leaves us low on fuel and traveling at high velocity on an intercept course with the flagship. There are overlapping fields of enemy fire on our approach vector. We have to decelerate and dodge simultaneously. That will be tricky."

"Polaski will be on that." The Chief turned to her.

"Pilot a Longsword?" Polaski slowly nodded, and there was a gleam in her green eyes that hadn't been there a second ago. "It's been a while, but yes, Master Chief. I am one hundred and ten percent on it." She moved to the pilot's seat and strapped herself in.

"With all due respect to Miss Polaski's skill," Cortana said, "allow me to point out that I process information a million times faster and—"

"I need you to link with the flagship's intraship battlenet," the Chief cut in. "When we're close you'll need to shut down its weapons. Jam its communications."

"Sending an unescorted lady ahead to do your dirty work?" Cortana sighed. "I suppose I'm the only one who can."

"Lieutenant Haverson," the Chief said, "I'll need you to program the Moray mines to release and attach onto the Pelican before we exit this orbit. Set half for detonation on impact. Program the rest to detach and track any enemy ship on our approach."

Haverson nodded and settled into the ops station next to Polaski.

Two crates and a duffel pushed through the open access tunnel to the Pelican. Locklear emerged from the opening and sealed the hatch. "That's it, Chief," he said. "An HE Pistol, two extra MA5Bs, one M90 Close Assault Shotgun, and a crate or so of frag grenades. About a dozen clips for the rifles—only a few shells for the shotgun, though."

The Chief took four grenades and a half dozen clips for his assault rifle. He ejected his weapon's nearly spent magazine and

slapped a full one into place with a satisfying clack.

The Sergeant grabbed ammo, an MA5B, and three grenades.

"Orbital exit burn in ten seconds," Polaski said. "Dog the rest of that," the Chief told Locklear. "And brace

yourself."

Locklear secured the collection of weapons and ordnance in a duffel bag, looped it around his neck, and then found a handhold. Sergeant Johnson leaned against the cryopods. The Master Chief grabbed the bulkhead.

"Releasing Pelican," Polaski said. There was a thump from

beneath the hull. "Pelican away."

"Pelican autopilot programmed," Cortana said. "Moray mines attached and armed," Haverson added.

Polaski said, "Exit burn in three... two... one. Burn!"

The Longsword's engine roared to life, the hull creaked with

stress, and everyone leaned against the acceleration.

The Pelican pulled ahead, rounded the horizon of the moon first, and arced back into the debris field. As the Longsword followed, the light struck the surface of the moon just right and the Chief saw meteors rain upon the planetoid, leaving craters and tiny puffs of dust as they impacted.

Polaski snapped the display port camera centered on the Covenant cruisers. "They were waiting for us," she cried. "Evasive maneuvers." The Pelican rolled to starboard. "Accelerating to the flagsh—"

The flagship was close. Too close. It must have anticipated their orbital trajectory. But it hadn't counted on them turning straight toward it. If they hadn't, the flagship would have been in a perfect perpendicular firing position.

"Pelican now two hundred kilometers in the lead," Polaski

said.

The bulky craft drew fire from the cruisers. Smoke trailed

from its hull, and bits of the empty ship were vaporized.

"Mines away," Haverson announced. "Plugging coordinates

and trajectories into NAV, Polaski. Don't run them over."

"Roger," she said. "Hang on—we're going in."

"I hate this crap," Locklear muttered. "Ships shooting each other, fire so thick you could walk on it to the LZ, and me sittin' here not able to do a damn thing but hang on and wonder when I'm going to get blown up."

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

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The Chief said nothing, but he agreed. Despite the ODST's

foul disposition, he shared his uneasiness with space combat.

"Amen," Sergeant Johnson added. "Now shut up and let the lady drive." He removed a mission record unit from his pocket and inserted a chip. The screen blanked; a rhythmic cacophony blasted from its single tiny speaker.

The Chief recognized the sound as "flip" music—a descendant of some centuries-old noise called "metal." The Sarge had peculiar tastes, to say the least.

"Just shoot me now, Sarge," Locklear protested, "and get it

over with. Don't torture me with that crap first."

"Suck it up, Marine. This is a classic."

"So's a mercy killing."

Polaski continued to evade, and the Longsword rolled and jinked port and starboard. She sent the ship into a double barrel roll'to dodge a plasma torpedo fired from the flagship.

"Show-off," Cortana muttered in the Chief's helmet speaker.

"Connecting to the Covenant battlenet," Cortana announced

over the ship COM. "Accessing their weapons systems. Stand by."

Ahead, the Pelican intercepted a second torpedo and burst

into flames, vaporized, and smeared across the night as a cloud of sparkling ionized metal.

The flagship appeared on the forward viewscreen—no larger

than a dinner plate.

"No more time to play around," Polaski muttered. She hit the

afterburners and rocketed toward the flagship.

The sudden acceleration sent the Chief and Sergeant Johnson

bouncing to the aft of the Longsword. Locklear still hung on to the frame, now nearly horizontal.

"There is now insufficient distance to decelerate and make a

soft landing inside the flagship launch bay," Cortana warned.

"Really?" Polaski replied, irritated. "No wonder they call you

'smart' AIs." She tugged her cap lower over her eyes. "I'll do the flying. You concentrate on getting those weapons offline."

"They're launching fighters," Haverson warned. On the

viewscreen the Covenant flagship now filled half the display, and six Seraph fighters emerged from the belly of the massive ship. "I've still got active signals from twenty of the Moray mines.

Their momentum is carrying them within range. Tracking . .. locked on . . . maneuvering." Tiny puffs of fire overlapped the teardrop-shaped Seraph fighters as they exploded. Haverson laughed. "Bull's-eye!"

"Forward weapons systems and shields are disabled,"

Cor-tana said.

"The doors are open," Polaski murmured. "We're invited in.

It'd be damn impolite to say no."

The flagship filled the display. "Collision imminent," Cortana warned.

Sergeant Johnson got to his feet. The Chief knew better and stayed where he was on the deck. He grabbed on to the Sergeant's leg.

Polaski cut the engines and hit the maneuvering thrusters. The Longsword spun 180 degrees. With the ship now pointed backward, she pushed the throttle to maximum, and the engines thundered in full overload. The hull strained against the sudden reverse deceleration.

The Chief hung on to the floor with one hand; with the other

he held on to the Sergeant and kept him from flying across the ship.

Polaski changed the viewscreen to a spilt view—fore and aft. She maneuvered with the ship's thrusters, adjusting their approach to the launch bay opening. Onscreen the small opening grew larger alarmingly fast. "Hang on—hang on!"

The engines whined and the ship slowed... but it wasn't going

to be enough.

They entered the launch bay at three hundred meters per second. Flames from the Longsword's engines washed over Grunt technicians as they vainly attempted to scramble out of the way. Their methane-filled atmosphere tanks popped like firecrackers.

Polaski cut the power. The ship slammed into the wall. The Master Chief, Sergeant Johnson, and Locklear crashed

into the pilot's and ops seats in a heap.

Grunts approached the ship with plasma pistols drawn, the weapons glowing green as the aliens overcharged them. Covenant Engineers struggled to put out fires and repair burst conduits.

"Shield reenergizing in place over the launch bay," Cortana

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

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announced. "External atmosphere stabilizing. Please feel free to get up and move around the cabin."

Locklear scrambled to his feet. "Yeah!" he whooped. The young Helljumper yanked his MA5B's charging lever and racked a round into the chamber. "Let's rock!"

"Good work, people," the Chief said, standing. He readied his own assault rifle. "But that was just the easy part."

CHAPTER SEVEN

1750 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard

unidentified Covenant flagship, uncharted system, Halo debris

field.

Plasma bolts impacted on the Longsword's hull and splashed across the windshield. The packets of glowing energy sizzled across the cockpit and etched cloudy, molten trails into the glass.

A legion of Grunts hunkered behind docked Seraph fighters and fuel pods. Some darted in and out of cover and fired ghostly green blobs of plasma at the Longsword.

"I got 'em," Polaski said and flipped a switch.

The Longsword's landing gear deployed and raised the craft a meter off the floor. "Guns clear," Polaski announced. " 'Bye, boys."

She brought up a targeting reticle and swept it around the bay. A hail of 120mm rounds tore through the Grunts' cover. Fuel pods and unshielded fighters detonated and sent metal fragments and alien soldiers hurtling to the deck. The air exploded into roiling flame, which billowed toward the ceiling and then subsided. Pools of burning fuel and the charred bodies of Grunts and Covenant Engineers littered the launch bay.

"Fire suppression system activating," Cortana said.

Jets of gray mist blew down from above. The fires intensified

for a moment, then guttered and went out.

"Is there atmosphere in the bay?" the Chief asked.

"Scanning," Cortana replied. "Traces of ash, some contamination from the melted ship hulls, and a lot of smoke, but the air in the bay is breathable, Chief."

ERIC NYLUND

"Good." He turned to the others. "We're going in. I'll lead.

Locklear, you're up with me. Sergeant, you've got the rear."

"You'll need to take me, too," Cortana said. "I've pulled a schematic of this ship to navigate, but the engineering controls have been manually locked down. I'll need direct access to this ship's command data systems."

The Chief hesitated. His armor allowed an AI like Cortana to

tag along stored in a special crystal layer. On Halo, Cortana had been an invaluable tactical asset.

Still, she also used part of his armor's neural interface for pro-

cessing purposes, literally harnessing parts of the Chief's brain. And after coming out of Halo's computer system, she'd been acting. . . twitchy.

He put his discomfort aside. If Cortana turned into a liability,

he'd pull the plug.

"Stand by," he said. He punched a key on the computer termi-

nal and dumped Cortana to a data chip. A moment later the terminal pulsed green.

He removed the chip and slotted it in the back of his helmet.

There was a moment of vertigo, and then the familiar mercury-and-ice sensation flooded his skull as Cortana interfaced.

"Still plenty of room in here, I see," she said.

He ignored her customary quip and nodded at Johnson and

Locklear. "Let's go."

Sergeant Johnson hit the door release, and the side hatch slid

open. Locklear shouldered his rifle and poured fire through the opening. A pair of Grunts who had crouched near the Longsword to protect themselves from the fire flew backward onto the deck. Phosphorescent blood pooled beneath their prone forms.

The Chief dived through the open hatch and rolled to his feet;

his motion tracker picked up three targets to his side. He whirled about and saw a trio of Covenant Engineers. He removed his finger from the weapon's trigger. Engineers were no threat.

The odd, meter-high creatures hovered above the deck, using bladders of some lighter-than-air gas produced by their bodies. Their tentacles and feelers probed a tangle of fuel lines, quickly repairing the pipes and pumps.

"Funny that there's no welcoming committee yet," Cortana

whispered. "I looked over this ship's personnel roster: three

thousand Covenant, mostly Engineers. There's a light company of Grunts, and only a hundred Elites."

"Only a hundred?" the Chief muttered.

He waved his team forward toward a heavy door at the back of the launch bay. The air was full of smoke and fire-suppressing mist, which reduced visibility to a dozen meters.

The rattle of assault rifle fire echoed through the bay. The

Chief spun to his right and brought his own rifle to bear.

Locklear stood over the twitching corpses of the Engineers.

He fired another burst into the fallen aliens.

"Don't waste your ammunition, Corporal," the Sergeant said.

"They may be ugly, but they're harmless."

"They're harmless now, Sarge," Locklear replied. He wiped a

spatter of alien blood from his cheek and smirked.

The Chief tended to agree with Locklear's threat analysis of the Covenant: When in doubt, kill. Still, he found the young Marine's actions unnecessary... and a little sloppy.

The architecture of the Covenant fighter bay was similar to the interior of the other Covenant ship the Chief had recently been

inside, the Truth and Reconciliation. Low indirect lights illumi-

nated the dark purple walls. The alien metal appeared to be stenciled with odd, faintly luminescent geometric patterns that overlapped each other. The ceiling was vaulted and unnecessarily high, maybe ten meters. In contrast to a human ship, it was a waste of space.

The Chief spotted a large door at the back of the bay.

The door was a distorted hexagonal shape and large enough that the entire team could enter at the same time—not that he'd ever be foolish enough to take up such a formation in hostile territory. The door had four sections that, when keyed to open, would silently slide away from the center.

"That will take us to the main corridor," Cortana said. "And

from there, to the bridge."

The Chief waved Locklear to the right side of the door,

Sergeant Johnson to the left.

"Lieutenant Haverson," he called out, "you're our rear guard. Polaski, hit the door controls. Hand signals from now on."

Haverson tossed an ironic salute to the Chief but tightened his grip on his weapon and scanned the bay.

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

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Polaski moved forward and crouched by the panel in the mid-

dle of the door. She turned her cap around and leaned closer, then looked back to the Chief and gave him a thumbs-up.

He raised his rifle and nodded, giving her the go-ahead to

breach the door.

She reached for the controls. Before she touched them, though,

the door slid apart.

Standing on the opposite side were five Elites: Two stood

shielded by either edge of the door; a third stood centered in the corridor, plasma rifle leveled at the Chief; behind it, the fourth Elite covered the rear of their formation; and one last Elite crouched in front of the door control panel—nose to nose with Polaski.

The Chief fired two bursts directly over Polaski's head. His first shots struck the Elite in the middle of the corridor. His second burst hit the Elite standing rear guard. The alien warriors hadn't activated their shields, and 7.62mm rounds punctured their armor. The pair of Elites dropped to the deck.

Their comrades on either side of the door howled and attacked. The whine of plasma rifle fire echoed through the bay as blue-white energy bolts crashed into the Chief's own shields.

His shield dropped away, and the insistent drone of a warning indicator pulsed in his helmet. His vision clouded from the flare of energy weapon discharges, and he struggled to draw a bead on the Elite in front of Polaski. It was no good—he had no clear shot.

The Elite drew a plasma pistol. Polaski drew her own sidearm.

She was faster—or luckier. Her pistol cleared its holster; she snapped it up and fired. The pistol boomed as a shot took the Elite right in the center of its elongated helmet.

The Elite's own shot went wide and seared into the deck be-

hind Polaski.

Polaski emptied her clip into the alien's face. A pair of rounds rocked the alien back. Its shields faded, and the remaining rounds tore through armor and bone.

It fell on its back, twitched twice, and died.

Johnson and Locklear unleashed a hellish crossfire into the

corridor and made short work of the remaining Elites as Polaski hugged the deckplates.

"Now that's what I'm talkin' about," Johnson crowed. "An

honest-to-God turkey shoot."

Ten meters down the passage a dozen more Elites rounded a

corner.

"Uh-oh," Locklear muttered.

"Sergeant," the Chief barked. "Door control!" John moved to Polaski's position in two quick strides, grabbed her by her collar, and dragged her out of the line of fire. Plasma bolts singed the air where she'd been.

He dropped her, primed a grenade, and tossed it toward the

rushing Elites.

The Sergeant fired his assault rife at the door controls; they exploded in a shower of sparks, and the doors slammed shut.

A dull thump echoed behind the thick metal, then an eerie si-

lence descended on the bay. Polaski struggled to her feet and fed a fresh clip into her pistol. Her hands shook.

"Cortana," the Chief said. "We need an alternate route to the

bridge."

A blue arrow flashed on his heads-up display. The Chief

turned and spotted a hatch to his right. He pointed to the hatch and signaled his team to move, then ran to the hatch and touched the control panel.

The small door slid open to reveal a narrow corridor beyond, snaking into the darkness.

He didn't like it. The corridor was too dark and too narrow—a

perfect place for an ambush. He briefly considered heading back to the primary bay door, but abandoned that idea. Smoke and sparks poured from the door seams as the Covenant forces on the other side tried to burn their way through.

The Chief clicked on his low-light vision filters, and the dark-

ness washed away into a grainy flood of fluorescent green. No contacts.

He paused to let his shields recharge, then dropped into a low

crouch. He brought his rifle to bear and crept into die corridor.

The interior of the passage narrowed, and its smooth purple surface darkened. The Chief had to turn sideways to pass through.

"This looks like a service corridor for their Engineers," Cor-

tana said. "Their Elite warriors will have a tough time following us."

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

The Chief grunted an acknowledgment as he eased his way through. There was a scraping sound and a flash of sparks as his energy shield brushed the wall. It was too tight a fit. He powered down the shields, which left him just enough room to squeeze through.

Locklear followed behind him, then Polaski, the Sergeant, and finally Haverson.

The Chief pointed at Haverson, then at the door. The Lieutenant frowned, then nodded. Haverson closed the hatch and ripped out the circuitry for the control mechanism.

There had been dozens of Engineers in the launch bay—

and there were enough on the ship to merit their own access tunnel.

The Chief hadn't seen anything like this on the Truth and Reconciliation.

In fact, he hadn't seen a single Engineer on that ship. What made this ship different? It was armed like a ship of war... yet had the support staff of a refit vessel.

"Stop here," Cortana said.

The Chief halted and killed his external speakers so he could speak freely. "Problem?"

"No. A lucky break, maybe. Look to your left and down twenty centimeters."

The Chief squinted and noticed that a portion of the wall extruded into a circular opening no larger than the tip of his thumb. "That's a data port. . . or what passes for one with the Covenant Engineers. I'm picking up handshake signals in shortwave and infrared from it. Remove me and slot me in."

"Are you sure?"

"I can't do much good in there with you. Once I'm directly in

contact with the ship's battlenet, however, I can infiltrate and take over their systems. You'll still need to get to the bridge and manually give me access to their engineering systems. In the meantime, I may be able to control secondary systems and buy you some time."

"If you're sure."

"When have I not been sure?" she snapped.

The Chief could sense her impatience through the neural interface.

He removed Cortana's data chip from the socket in his helmet.

The Chief felt her leave his mind, felt the heat rush back into his head, pulsing with the rhythm of his heart... and once again, he was alone in the armor.

He slotted Cortana's chip into the Covenant data port. Locklear's face rippled with disgust, and he whispered, "You

couldn't pay me to stick any part of myself in that thing."

The Chief made a slashing gesture across his throat, and the

Marine fell silent.

"I'm in," Cortana said. "How is it?" the Chief said. There was a half-second pause. "It's ... different," Cortana

replied. "Proceed thirty meters down this passage and turn left."

The Chief motioned the team forward.

"It's very different," Cortana murmured.

Cortana was built for software intrusion. She had been programmed with every dirty trick and code-breaking algorithm the Office of Naval Intelligence, Section Three had ever created, and a few more tricks she'd developed on her own. She was the ultimate thief and electronic spy. She slipped into the Covenant system.

It was easy the first time she had entered their network as the Longsword had approached the flagship. She had set their weapons systems into a diagnostic mode. The Covenant had determined the problem and quickly reset the system, but it had given Polaski the precious seconds her sluggish human reflexes had needed to get inside the launch bay.

"How is it?" the Chief asked.

Now the element of surprise was gone, and the system's counterintrusion systems were running on high alert. Something else prowled the systems now. Delicate pings bounced off the edges of Cortana's presence; they probed, and withdrew.

It felt as if there were someone else running through their system. A Covenant AI? There had never been any reports of alien AIs. The possibility intrigued her.

"It's.. . different," she finally answered.

She scanned the ship's schematics, deck by deck, then flashed through the vessel's three thousand surveillance systems. She picked out the quickest route to the bridge from their current

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

position and stored it in a stolen tertiary system buffer. She multitasked a portion of herself and continued to analyze the ship's structure and subsystems.

"Proceed thirty meters down this passage and turn left."

Cortana hijacked the external ship cameras and detected the six Covenant cruisers. They had stalled their pursuit of the Longsword and now hovered a hundred kilometers off the flagship's starboard side. The strange U-shaped Covenant dropships launched from the cruisers and swarmed toward the flagship. That was trouble.

Within the flagship she spotted a dozen hunt-and-kill Elite teams sweeping the corridors. She scrambled the ship's tracking systems, generated electronic ghosts of the Chief and his team along a path directed toward the nose of the ship, where UNSC command-and-control centers were typically located. Maybe she could fool the Elites into a wild goose chase.

She uploaded the coordinates of those enemies into the Chief's HUD.

A tickle of feedback teased through the data stream.

Cortana locked onto the source of that feedback, listened, discerned a nonrandom pattern to the signal, then cut off contact. She had no time to play hide and seek with whatever else was in this system.

Cortana had to finally admit to herself that she didn't have the

power to contend with a possible enemy artificial construct. She had absorbed a tremendous volume of data from Halo's systems: eons' worth of records on Halo's engineering and maintenance, the xenobiology of the Flood, and every scrap of information on the mysterious "Forerunners" the Covenant revered so much. The information would take her a week of nonstop processing to examine, collate, codify. . . let alone understand.

Even compressed, all the data filled her and cut into optical subsystems that she usually reserved for her processing. She had a nagging suspicion that the file compression had been too hasty—and that the Halo data might be corrupted.

In effect, the vast amount of information she had copied bloated her, made her slower and less effective.

She hadn't mentioned this to the Chief. She could barely ad-

mit it to herself. Cortana was extremely proud of her intellect.

But to operate as if nothing were different would be even more foolish.

She sent a blocking countersignal along the connection where

this "other" was trying to contact her.

The portion of her consciousness examining the ship's structure discovered that the bridge had another access point. Stupid. She should have seen it immediately, but this other entrance had been filed under the schematics as an emergency system. It was a tiny corridor that connected to a set of escape pods. That route shared a vent with an engineering passage.

"Chief, there's another way to the bridge." "Affirmative. Wait one." There was a burst of gunfire on the

COM, then silence. "Go ahead, Cortana."

"Uploading the route now," she said. "I do not believe you can fit through this new passage in your armor. I suggest you split your team and proceed along both routes to maximize your chances of egress onto the bridge."

"Understood," the Chief said. "Polaski and Haverson with me. Johnson and Locklear, you take the escape pod route."

She continued to track both teams and the relative positions of the Covenant parties. She replicated additional ghost signals to confuse the enemy.

Cortana picked up increasing communications bandwidth between the flagship and the cruisers. Reports of the invaders—a call for help—a warning to be relayed to the home world. There were references to the "holy one," and those messages had what she considered amusing attempts at encryption to keep them secret. Curious, she had to investigate what the Covenant thought important enough to hide.

As she decrypted those messages and others cross-referenced and filed in their COM archives, she detected an energy spike on the flagship's lateral sensors. One cruiser off to starboard moved farther away; it turned, its engines glowed, the black around it rippled electric blue. The Covenant ship sped forward, tore the night, and vanished into Slipspace.

Cortana noted their departure vector for future reference. . . a possible clue at the location of their home world.

It was puzzling that the Covenant would call for help. Their

warriors were intensely proud; they almost never ran from a

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fight. They didn't ask for help... not for themselves. Then again, this ship, although armed for war, didn't appear to be staffed for combat. It carried only a few hundred Elites and an army of Engineers.

As Cortana pondered this, she continued to generate a counter-signal to match to the probe sent by the other presence in the system. She hoped to cloak her activity as long as possible. The other's signal morphed into a series of Bessel functions, and she compensated to match.

She automated this process, commandeering a portion of the Covenant's own NAV computer to do so, and then she herded the electronic ghosts of the Chief and the others to confuse the pursuing Elite forces.

At the same time, she continued her study of the Covenant ship and its systems—it was a unique opportunity. The information on their advanced Slipspace drive, their weapons—it could leapfrog human technology decades forward.

"Cortana?" The Chief's voice broke her concentration. There were sounds of plasma bolts and automatic weapons fire. "We've got Elites in active camouflage in the passage. We need a way around this intersection."

She had not considered the Elites' light-bending technology. She was doing too much, spreading herself too thin. She halted her ongoing study of the Covenant technology and found the Chief a way around the intersection.

She rebooted her human communications and protocol routines and said, "Access panel to your right, Chief. Down three meters, straight ahead five meters, turn to your left and then up again."

She heard an explosion. "Got it," the Chief said.

Cortana had to focus on protecting the Chief. She halted her other searches and scrutinized the ship's schematics. There had to be something she could use. A weapon. A way to stop then-enemies—there: the backup terminus for their atmospheric preprocessors. Unlike the other systems, this one was classified as low priority and had minimal security layers.

She generated several hundred thousand Covenant codes in a microsecond and cracked the system. She diverted the air vents along the corridors the Chief and his team occupied to the pri-

mary air systems. She then tasked the processor pumps to service the rest of the ship and activated them—in reverse.

Warnings flashed throughout the Covenant system as the pressure suddenly dropped in 87 percent of the ship's passages. She squelched them.

The other presence in the system tried to shut the pumps off. She blocked that signal and assigned a new code to the security systems: "WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU."

She heard the other AI scream, an echo of an echo that reverberated through her processors. She knew trie sound—familiar like a human voice, but terribly distorted.

She scanned through the ship's cameras and saw Grunts squeal and fall over, methane leaking from their breathers as the pressure dropped. Engineers turned blue, slowed, and died, floating in place with tentacles twitching, still searching for something to fix. The Elite hunt-and-destroy parties halted in the corridors and clutched their throats, mandibles snapping at air that was no longer there; they toppled and suffocated.

An impulse flickered through her ethics subroutine and generated an interrupt command, designed to make her stop and rethink her decisions. But Cortana knew it was either kill or be killed. She rerouted all signals from her ethics routine and shut it down. She couldn't afford to be slowed down by such secondary considerations.

"Chief," she whispered over the COM. "Be advised that the passages I'm uploading into your NAV system no longer contain atmosphere. Proceeding into those regions will be lethal to the rest of your team."

There was a three-second pause, and then the Chief replied, "Understood."

Cortana's decryption of the Covenant communiques referencing the "holy one" finally cycled to a halt. The language in them was unusually ornate—even more so than the florid prose of the higher-ranking Elites. It was impossible to develop a literal translation, but she gleaned that some dignitary was due at the Halo construct. Soon.

This visitor was so important that these warships were only the advance scouting party. More ships were on their way. Hundreds of them.

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"Chief," Cortana said. "We may have a prob—" "Hold transmission, Cortana," the Chief interrupted. "We're

outside the command center. Can you tell how many are inside?"

"Negative. They have disabled the bridge sensors," she replied.

"You heard Cortana," the Chief said, addressing his companions. "Expect anything. Sergeant, you and Locklear: Get in position."

"Roger that," Sergeant Johnson whispered. "In position and ready to kick Covenant ass."

"We're about to blow the door on this end, Cortana. Stand by."

Cortana picked up energy surges on the flagship's lateral sensors. The Covenant cruisers turned; their plasma weapons warmed and readied to fire.

"Chief," Cortana said. "Hurry!"

"Plasma grenades on my mark," the Chief said on the COM. "Mark! Toss them and take cover."

The Chief tossed two plasma grenades. They burned magnesium-brilliant and adhered to the heavy alloy of the bulkhead doors that encased the bridge—one of the alien weapons' more useful properties. He moved around the corner of the passage and shielded Haverson and Polaski.

Five seconds elapsed, and a flash filled the hallway. The Chief moved back to the doors. They shone mirror-bright where the grenade had detonated but were otherwise unharmed.

A hundred grenades wouldn't have blasted through these doors—but when Covenant plasma grenades detonated, they disrupted electronics and shielding. The Chief dug his gauntleted fingers into the door crack—hoping that the disruption had knocked out the motors and shielding keeping these doors closed.

He braced himself and tried to pull the doors apart at the seams. They slid a few centimeters, then ground to a halt. The Chief adjusted his footing and strained at them again, but the doors remained frozen in place.

The Chief's motion sensors pulsed a warning—there was

movement directly on the other side of the door.

He shoved the muzzle of his assault rifle into the narrow opening and squeezed the trigger. Spent shell casings clattered to the floor.

A howl echoed from the other side, and a curl of gray smoke

drifted through the crack.

The Chief slung his rifle, grabbed the doors, flexed, pulled—

and this time the heavy metal moved.

A flash of plasma fire washed over his shields, blinding him. He ignored it, closed his eyes, and continued to force his way through the door. Another plasma shot struck him in the chest.

The doors were half a meter apart—good enough.

He rolled to the side and gave his shields a moment to regenerate.

Nothing. The suit's alarms pulsed insistently. He squinted through the glowing spots that swam in his vision and scanned the damage report—the MJOLNIR's internal temperature was over sixty degrees Celsius, and the Chief heard the whine of microcompressors in his armor, trying to compensate.

"Marines!" he yelled. "Suppressing fire!"

"Hell yes, Master Chief," Locklear replied. Locklear dropped to one knee and fired through the opening; Johnson stood and fired over the younger Marine's head.

The Chief rebooted his shielding control software.

Nothing. His shield system was dead.

The shooting stopped. "I'm out," Locklear said.

"And I'm in," the Chief said.

• He rushed into the room and stepped over the dead Elite on the floor before him. Its torso had been ripped open—shot as it tried to hold the doors closed.

The Chief scanned the room. It was circular, twenty meters across, with a raised platform in the center that was ten meters across and ringed with holographic control surfaces. The central platform floated over a pit in the floor. Within the pit were exploded optical conduits and a trio of Covenant Engineers, cowering in fear.

"Don't shoot the Engineers," Cortana warned. "We need them."

"Understood," the Chief replied. "Acknowledge that order,

Locklear."

There was a pause over COM and then Locklear said,

"Roger."

Along the circular walls, floor-to-ceiling displays showed the flagship's status as a variety of charts and graphs, peppered with

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the odd calligraphy of the Covenant. They also showed the space surrounding them, and the five remaining Covenant cruisers closing in.

The Chief caught a motion in his peripheral vision: An Elite in

jet-black armor materialized from the wall display, its light-bending camouflage dissolving. It strode toward the Chief, roaring a challenge.

The Chief's rifle snapped up, and he squeezed the trigger. Three rounds spat from the muzzle, then the bolt locked open. The ammo counter read oo—empty.

The shots flared on the Elite's shielding; a lucky round penetrated and deformed its shoulder. Purple-black blood spattered on the deck, but it shrugged off the wound and kept coming.

Haverson charged into the room and leveled his pistol. "Hold

it!" he yelled, and thumbed off the weapon's safety.

The Elite drew a plasma pistol and fired at the Lieutenant—

but never took its eyes off the Chief.

Haverson cursed and scrambled out of the room as the plasma

charge slashed at him.

The Chief altered his grip on the rifle and crouched in a low fighting stance. Even with the shield malfunction, he was confident he could take a single Elite.

The Elite removed its helmet and dropped it. The plasma pistol

clattered to the deck a moment later. It leaned forward, and its mandibles parted in what the Chief guessed had to be a smile. It moved closer, and a blue-white blade of energy flashed to life in its hands.

The Elite raised the energy blade and charged.

CHAPTER EIGHT

1802 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Covenant flagship, uncharted system, Halo debris field.

The Master Chief ducked as the hissing energy blade slashed at him. He dived toward the Elite and slammed the butt of his rifle into the alien's midsection.

The Elite doubled over, and the Chief brought the rifle butt down to smash the alien's skull—

But the Elite rolled back. There was a blur of motion as the energy blade lashed out and neatly bisected the assault rifle. The two halves of the wrecked MA5B clattered to the deck.

The blade of crackling white-hot energy narrowly missed the Chief. The MJOLNIR's internal temperature skyrocketed.

He couldn't risk dancing at this range, so the Master Chief did the last thing the creature expected: He stepped closer and grabbed its wrists.

The bands of muscle on the Elite's arms were iron hard, and it struggled to free itself from the Chief's grasp. The Chief wrenched the alien's sword arm and forced the blade away—but this took most of his strength, and he had to weaken his grasp on the Elite's other hand.

The energy blade blurred perilously close to the Chief's head. It missed by a fraction of a centimeter and sent a wash of static across his heads-up display.

The blade was a flattened triangle of white-hot plasma, contained in an electromagnetic envelope that emanated from its hilt. The Chief had seen such weapons slice battle-armored

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ODSTs in half and gouge gaping wounds in Titanium-A armor plating.

Worse, this Elite was tough, cunning, well trained—and it hadn't spent days fighting nonstop on Halo. The Chief felt every wound, pulled muscle, and strained tendon in his body.

Haverson and Polaski moved onto the bridge, their pistols

drawn, but neither of them had a clear line of fire.

"Move, Chief!" Haverson shouted. "Damn it, we've got no shot!" Easier said than done. If he let go, the Elite would cut him in

two.

The Master Chief grunted, struggling to turn the Elite.

The alien fought back for a moment, then—instead of resisting—lurched back, right into the path of the Chief's advancing teammates.

The Elite flicked the angle of its blade flat so the arc of energy

whipped toward Haverson and Polaski.

Haverson screamed and fell to the ground as the energy blade sliced through his pistol and across his chest. Polaski cursed and fired a single shot, but it glanced off the Elite's shield.

The alien glanced at the source of the fire and growled in its

guttural, warbling tongue.

"Get the Lieutenant out of here," the Master Chief barked. He raised his knee to his chest and lashed out with a straight kick. His boot connected with the Elite's breastplate. The alien's energy shield flared, then faded, and its breastplate cracked like porcelain beneath the force of the blow.

The alien staggered back, dragging the Master Chief with it. It coughed up purple-black blood that smeared John's visor, obscuring his vision. Its foot struck something on the ground—the alien's fallen helmet—and it lost its footing.

Together they crashed to the ground.

The Master Chief kept his grip on the Elite's sword arm. The alien's other hand, however, wrenched free and grabbed the fallen plasma pistol. The weapon's muzzle charged with sickly green energy.

The Chief rolled to his right as the pistol discharged. A globe of plasma arced across the compartment and splashed over the displays behind him.

The instruments flickered, then flashed and sparked as the en-

ergy bolt melted their systems. Before the displays went dark, however, the Master Chief saw one of the Covenant cruisers open fire. A lance of plasma rushed through space toward the flagship.

The Chief and the Elite struggled, rising to their feet. The Chief

batted the plasma pistol aside, and it clattered across the control center.

The Elite's mouth opened, and it snapped at the Chief. It was angry or panicking now... and he felt it getting stronger.

His grasp on the alien loosened.

There was motion behind the Elite; Sergeant Johnson and

Locklear still struggled to get their hatch open more than a crack.

"Sergeant—prepare to fire."

"Ready, Master Chief." the Sergeant cried from the other side

of the hatch.

The Chief tightened his grip on the Elite's sword arm, shoved his forearm into the alien's throat and drove it backward, across the bridge. He slammed the creature into the partially opened hatch.

The energy blade cut into the Master Chief's armor, boiling

through the alloy that protected his upper arm.

"Sergeant, now! Firer

Gunfire exploded from the hatch, oddly muffled because the rounds impacted directly into the Elite's back. The alien snarled and contorted, but it held on to the Master Chief. The alien warrior sawed the blade deeper, cutting through the tough crystalline layers of the MJOLNIR armor. Hydrostatic gel oozed from the wound... mixed with the Chief's blood.

"Keep. Shooting."

A bullet hole appeared through the Elite's broken chestplate—

bits of shattered armor and torn flesh spattered over the Chief.

The Master Chief slammed the Elite into the bulkhead, and a control panel behind the alien sparked. The door to the escape corridor hissed open, and the creature reeled back.

The alien was off balance, and the Chief finally had leverage. He bulled the Elite backward and hammered its arm into the wall. The alien metal rang like a gong, and the Elite dropped its energy sword. The blade guttered and went dark as its fail-safes permanently disabled the weapon.

The Chief forced the alien back, step by step. The deck was

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slippery with blood. Finally he twisted the Elite to the right and launched a powerful open-handed strike into the alien's wounded chest.

The Elite howled in pain and flew back, through the open

hatch of an escape pod.

"Get off this ship," the Chief said. He hit a control stud and the

hatch slammed shut. There was a sharp, metallic bang as the

locking clamps released. The pod screamed away from the hull.

The Chief exhaled. Sweat dripped in his eyes, momentarily

blurring his vision.

"Good work, Sergeant, Locklear," he panted. His shoulder

burned. He tried to move it, but it was stiff and wouldn't respond.

The ship lurched.

"Plasma impact on the starboard foredeck!" Cortana called out. "Shields down to sixty-seven percent." She paused and then added, "Amazing radiative properties. Chief, you need to disable the navigation override so I can maneuver."

Haverson and Polaski strode toward the Chief. Haverson clutched his chest and grimaced in pain from the sword wound. Polaski set her hand on the Master Chief's shoulder. "That's bad," she whispered. "Let me get a first-aid kit from the Pelican, and—"

The Chief shrugged off her touch. "Later." He saw her con-

cerned expression melt into one of... what? Fear? Confusion?

"Cortana, show me what to do," the Chief said and made his way to the raised platform in the center of the bridge. "Polaski, you and Haverson get that other hatch open."

"Aye aye," Polaski muttered, her voice tight. She and Haverson went to the hatch and got to work.

The Master Chief glanced at the control surfaces. As his hand

hovered over them, the flat controls rose and became a three-dimensional web of the distinctive Covenant calligraphy. "Where?" he asked.

"Move your hand to the right half a meter," Cortana said. "Up

twenty centimeters. That control. No, to the left." She sighed.

"That one. Tap it three times."

Faint lights traced the surface as the Chief touched it; they flared red and orange and finally cooled to brilliant blue.

"It worked," Cortana said. "NAV controls coming online. I

can finally move this crate. Hang on."

The ship spun to port. On the displays that still functioned,

four more Covenant cruisers tracked them—and fired.

The flagship accelerated, but the plasma torpedoes arced and followed them. "No good," Cortana said. "I can't overcome our inertia in this tub. They're going to hit us . . . unless I can get us into Slipspace."

A rhythmic warble pulsed from one of the displays. It

flashed red.

"Oh no," Cortana said.

The leading plasma torpedo impacted. Dull red fire smeared across the viewscreens.

"Oh no, what?" Haverson demanded.

"This ship's Slipspace generator is inert," Cortana replied.

"The disabled NAV controls were a trick. It must have been the Covenant AI; it lured me here while the drive was physically decoupled from the reactor. I can maneuver all I want, give orders to the Slipspace generator—but without the system powered up were not going anywhere."

"There's a Covenant AI?" Haverson muttered, and raised an

eyebrow.

"Upload the coordinates to power coupling," the Master Chief

said. "I'll take care of it."

Two more plasma torpedoes impacted and splashed across the

shield. "Energy shields collapsing," Cortana said. "Brace!"

The last shot collided with the flagship. The hull heated, and plasma boiled layers of armor plating away. The ship rolled as plumes of superheated metal vapor outgassed.

"Another hit like that will breach the hull," Cortana said. "Moving this tub at flank speed."

"The power coupling coordinates, Cortana," the Master Chief insisted.

A route appeared on his heads-up display. The engineering rooms were twenty decks below the bridge.

"Those won't do you any good," Cortana told him. "There are bound to be Elite hunt-and-kill teams waiting for you. And even if you managed to remove them, there is no way to repair the power coupling in time. We don't have the tools or the expertise."

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The Master Chief looked around the bridge. There had to be a

way. There was always a way—

He leaned over the edge of the central platform and grabbed one of the Covenant Engineers that cowered below. He dragged it up by its float-sack. The creature squirmed and squealed.

"Maybe we don't have the expertise," he said and shook the Engineer. "But this thing does. Can you communicate with it? Tell it what we need?"

There was a pause. Then Cortana replied, "There is an extensive communications suite in the Covenant lexic—"

"Just tell it I'm taking it to fix something." "All right, Chief," Cortana said.

A stream of high-pitched chirps emanated from the bridge speakers, and the Engineer's six eyes dilated. It stopped squirming and grabbed hold of the Master Chief with its tentacles.

"It says 'good' and 'hurry,' " Cortana told him.

"Everyone else stay here," the Chief said.

"If you insist," Haverson muttered, his face pale. Blood trickled from the wound in his chest.

The Master Chief looked at Johnson and Locklear. "Don't let

the Covenant retake the bridge."

"Not a problem, Chief," Sergeant Johnson said. He stopped to

kick the dead Elite once in the teeth, then slapped a fresh clip into his MA5B. He yanked the weapon's charge handle, fed a round into the chamber, and stood at arms. "Those Covenant sissies are going to have to tango with me before they set one foot in this room."

On the display two of the Covenant cruisers fired again.

The Chief watched as the plasma raced toward them, fire that spread across the black of space. "Cortana, buy me some time," he said.

"I'll do what I can, Chief," Cortana told him. "But you'd better

move fast. I'm running out of options."

Cortana was annoyed. She had let the Covenant AI—for that's what this other presence in the system undoubtedly had to be— trick her. She had gone straight for the simple lockdown of the NAV systems. She never performed a thorough systems check

of the ship, assuming that there had only been one point of sabotage. It was a mistake she would never have made if she'd been operating at full capacity.

She checked every system of the flagship. She then locked

them out with her own security measures.

Cortana turned off her feelings of anger and guilt and concentrated on keeping the ship in one piece, and the Master Chief alive. No... she reconsidered and kept her emotions active. The "intuition" provided by this aspect of her intelligence template was too valuable to deactivate in a battle.

She maneuvered the flagship toward the gas giant, Threshold. The incoming plasma might be disrupted by the planet's magnetic field—if she dared get close enough.

Cortana diverted power from the foreshield to the aft portions, distorting the protective bubble around the flagship. She turned all seven plasma turrets aft and fired a pair of plasma torpedoes at the incoming salvo.

The plasma turrets warmed and belched superheated flame— but it dispersed into a dull red cloud only a few meters from the point of fire, thinned, and then dissolved.

She saw a subsystem linked to the weapons control: an ac-

companying magnetic field multiplier. That was how the Cove-

nant shaped and guided their charges of plasma. It acted as a sophisticated focusing lens. Something wasn't right, however— something had already been in this directory and had erased the software.

Cortana swore that when she caught this guerrilla Covenant AI, she'd erase it line by line.

Without understanding how the guiding magnetic fields worked, the plasma turrets were no more useful than a fireworks display.

The enemy Covenant plasma charges, however, were tight and burned like miniature suns; they overtook the flagship and splashed over its reinforced aft shields. They boiled against the silver energy until the shields dulled and winked out.

The plasma etched a portion of the aft hull away like hot water dissolving salt. Cortana sensed the dull thumps of atmospheric decompressions.

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She checked on the Chief. His signal was still on board, and

his biomonitor indicated that he was still alive.

"Chief, are you there yet? I'm down to one last option." There was a static-filled pause over the COM, and then the

Master Chief whispered, "Almost."

"Be careful. Your armor is breached. You can no longer func-

tion in a compromised atmosphere."

His acknowledgment light winked on.

Cortana pushed the Covenant reactors to overload and plotted a course around Threshold. She had to slip into the outer reaches of its atmosphere. The heat, ionization, and planet's magnetic field might protect them from the plasma.

The flagship rolled and dived into the thin tendrils of clouds. Bands of white ammonia and amber ammonium hydrosulfide clouds snaked in sinuous ribbons. A red-purple spot of phosphorus compounds cycloned and lightning arced, illuminating an intervening layer of pale blue ice crystals.

But their ship no longer had shields. The friction heated the hull to three hundred degrees Celsius as she brushed against the upper reaches of Threshold.

On her aft cameras Cortana saw the trailing Covenant ships

open fire. Their shots followed her like a pack of predator birds.

"Come and get me," she muttered.

She adjusted the attack angle of the flagship so it nosed up, which produced a slight amount of lift. She concentrated the building heat toward the ship's tail. A turbulent wake of superheated air corkscrewed behind them.

"Cortana?" Polaski said. "We're approaching the viable edge

of an exit orbit. You're getting too close to the planet."

"I am aware of our trajectory, Warrant Officer," she said and snapped off the COM. The last thing she needed was a flying lesson.

The leading edge of the plasma overtook them. It roiled in their wake, churned explosively with the atmosphere. The flagship pitched and dropped in the unstable air, but the plasma diffused and caused them no further damage. Behind the flagship was an unfurling trail hundreds of kilometers long, a wide flaming gash upon Threshold.

Cortana experienced a moment of triumph—then squelched it.

There was a new problem: The concussion from that blast had altered their flight path. The heat and overpressure wave had thinned the atmosphere ... just enough to cause the flagship to drop seven hundred meters. Wisps of ice crystals washed over the prow.

They were too deep now. They didn't have enough power to break orbit. They would spiral into the atmosphere, and would ultimately be crushed by the titanic gravitational forces of Threshold.

The Chief spun in midair and planted his feet on the "ground." The gravity had been disabled in this elevator shaft. That had made traversing the many intervening decks easy ... as long as he'd been willing to jump and trust that the power in this part of the ship wouldn't be restored.

The Engineer clutching his shoulder tapped the tiny control panel on the wall. The doors at the bottom of the shaft sighed and slowly slid apart.

Funny how the creature didn't care what or who John was. Didn't it know their races were enemies? It was clearly intelligent and could communicate. Maybe it didn't care about enemies or allies. Maybe all it wanted to do was its job.

There was a corridor ahead, five meters wide, with a vaulted ceiling. Past a final arch, the passage opened up into the cavernous reactor room. The ambient lights in the hallway and room were off. Along the far wall of the room, however, the ten-meter-high reactor coils pulsed with blue-white lightning and threw hard shadows onto the walls.

The Master Chief adjusted his low-light filters to screen out the glow from the reactor. He made out the silhouettes of crates and other machinery. He also saw one of those shadows on the wall move ... with the distinct slouching waddle of a Covenant Grunt. Then the motion was gone.

An ambush. Of course.

He paused, listened, and heard the panting of at least half a

dozen Grunts, and then the high-pitched uneasy squeaks the creatures emitted when they were excited.

This came as a relief to the Master Chief. If there was an Elite

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here, it would have maintained better discipline and silenced the Grunts.

Still, the Master Chief hesitated. His shields were gone, his armor breached. He had been fighting almost nonstop for what felt like years. He was forced to admit that he was at the limits of his endurance.

A good soldier always assessed the tactical situation—and right now, his situation was serious. A single lucky plasma shot could inflict third-degree burns along his arm and shoulder and incapacitate him, which would give the Grunts an opportunity to finish him off.

The Chief flexed his wounded shoulder, and pain lanced across his chest. He banished his discomfort and concentrated on how to win this fight.

It was ironic that after facing the best warriors in the Covenant, and after defeating the Flood, he could be killed by a handful of Grunts.

"Chief," Cortana said over the COM. "Are you there yet? I'm down to one last option."

The Master Chief replied in a whisper, "Almost."

"Be careful. Your armor is breached. You can no longer function in a compromised atmosphere."

He flashed an acknowledgment to Cortana and concentrated on the problem at hand. Using grenades was not an option; a plasma grenade or a frag near those reactor coils could breach the containment vessel.

That left stealth—and outwitting the Grunts.

Maybe he'd use his grenades after all. The Master Chief set a plasma grenade in the center of the elevator shaft. He took his remaining two frag grenades and set them aside as well. He felt along the elevator shaft walls and found what he needed—a length of hair-fine optical cord. He pulled out a three-meter length.

The Engineer gave a huff of irritation at this destruction.

The Master Chief threaded the line though the rings of his frag grenades and tied each end at anchor points ten centimeters off the floor. He wedged the grenades into the slot of the open door.

The trap was set; all he needed now was bait. He set a plasma grenade on the far wall of the shaft and trig-

gered it.

He pushed into the corridor, fast. Four seconds to go. The gravity, still active in this portion of the ship, pulled him to the deck. He melted into the shadows and sprinted along the wall two meters farther in, and halted along the inside of the first support brace. Three seconds.

One Grunt emitted a startled cry and a plasma shot sizzled

down the center of the hallway.

Two seconds.

The Master Chief pried the Engineer off his shoulder and pressed the creature firmly into the join where the brace meet the wall.

One second.

The Engineer squirmed for a moment, then stilled, perhaps sensing what was about to happen.

The plasma grenade detonated. A flash of intense light flooded the hallway and the room beyond.

The rest of the Grunts cried out; plasma bolts and a hail of crystalline needles filled the passage, impacting inside the elevator shaft.

The Grunts ceased fire. A lone Grunt cautiously stepped out from behind a crate and crept forward. It gave a barking, nervous laugh and then, encountering no resistance, waddled down the passage toward the elevator.

Four more Grunts followed, and they passed the Master Chief, oblivious that he hid behind the wall brace less than a half-meter from them.

They approached the elevator, sniffed, and entered.

There was the gentle ping as the frag grenade rings pulled free

of the trip wire.

The Master Chief covered the Engineer.

One of the Grunts squealed, high and panicky. They all turned and ran.

Twin blasts of thunder enveloped the elevator shaft. Bits of meat and metal spattered along the corridor.

A needier skidded to a halt a meter away. It was cracked, its

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energy coil dim. The Master Chief grabbed it—ducked as another plasma bolt singed over his head. He withdrew to the cover of the bracing support. He tried to activate the weapon. No luck. It was dead.

The Engineer snaked a tentacle around the weapon and tugged it away from John's grasp. It cracked the case and peeled the housing open. The tip of one of its tentacles split into a hundred needle-fine cilia and swept over the inner workings. A moment later it reassembled the weapon and handed it, grip first, to the Master Chief.

The needier hummed with energy, and the glassine quills the weapon fired glowed a cool purple.

"Thanks," he whispered.

The Engineer chirped.

The Master Chief edged around the brace. He waited, needier held tightly in his hand, and became completely still. He had all the time in the world, he told himself. No need to rush. Let the enemy come to you. All the time—

A Grunt poked its nose over a crate, trying to spot its enemy; it took a blind shot down the corridor and missed.

The Master Chief remained where he was, raised the needier, and fired. A flurry of crystal shards propelled down the passage and impaled the Grunt. It toppled backward, and the shards detonated.

The Master Chief waited and listened. There was nothing except the gentle thrumming of the reactor.

He moved down the corridor, weapon held before him as he cleared the room. He was careful to watch for the faint rippling of air that would alert him to the presence of camouflaged Elites. Nothing.

The Engineer floated behind him, and then accelerated toward the disengaged power coupling. It hissed and chittered as it rapidly manipulated a small square block of optical crystal, unscrambling the internal circuit pathways.

"Cortana," he said. "I've gotten to the coupling. The Engineer appears to know what it's doing. You should have power for the Slipspace generator in a moment."

"It's too late," Cortana told him.

CHAPTER NINE

1827 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Covenant flagship, uncharted system, Halo debris field.

The flagship plunged through Threshold's churning atmosphere. Cortana could not hold the ship's attitude. It wobbled and blasted a fiery scar through the clouds, slowly rolling to port on its central axis.

Without shields, the flagship's hull continued to heat to seven-

teen hundred degrees Celsius. The nose glowed a dark red, which spread into an amber smear along the midsection and became a white-hot plume at the ship's tail. Conduits and feathery antenna arrays melted, separated, and left a trail of molten metal in an explosive wake. Shocks rippled along the frame as the overpressure shed off the bow in waves. The friction from the planet's dense atmosphere would shred the ship in a matter of seconds.

"Cortana," the Master Chief said. "I've gotten to the coupling. The Engineer appears to know what it's doing. You should have power for the Slipspace generator in a moment."

"It's too late," Cortana told him. "We are now too low to escape Threshold's gravitational pull. Even at full power we can't break our degrading orbit. And we can't tunnel into Slip-space, either."

The incoming Covenant fire had forced them deeper into the atmosphere. She had pushed their trajectory to the edge of what had been safe—it was that, or be engulfed in plasma. But she had saved them from one death ... only to delay that fate by a scant minute.

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She recomputed the numbers, thrust and velocity and gravitational attractions. Even if she overloaded the reactors to critical-meltdown levels, they were still stuck in an ever-descending spiral. The numbers didn't lie.

The Master Chief's Engineer must have repaired the power coupling, because the Slipspace generator was functional again— for all the good it did them.

To enter Slipspace a ship had to be well away from strong gravitational fields. Gravity distorted the superfine pattern of quantum filaments through which Cortana had to compute a path. Covenant Slipspace technology was demonstrably superior, but she doubted that the enemy had ever attempted a Slipspace entry this close to a planet.

Cortana toyed with the idea of trying anyway—pulse the Slip-space generators and maybe she'd get a lucky quadrillion-to-one shot and locate the correct vector through the tangle of gravity-warped filaments. She rejected the possibility; at their current velocity, any attempt to maneuver the ship would send it into a chaotic tumble from which they'd never recover.

"Try something," the Chief said to her with amazing calm. "Try anything."

Cortana sighed. "Roger, Chief."

She booted the Covenant Slipspace generators; the software

streamed through her consciousness.

The UNSC Shaw-Fujikawa Slipspace generators ripped a hole in normal space by brute force. But the Covenant technology used a different approach. Sensors came online, and Cortana could actually "see" the interlacing webs of quantum filaments surround the flagship.

"Amazing," she whispered.

The Covenant could pick a path through the subatomic dimensions; a gentle push from their generators enlarged the fields just enough to allow their ships to pass seamlessly into the alternate space with minimal energy. Their resolution of the reality of space-time was infinitely more powerful than human technology. It was as if she had been blind before, had never seen the universe around her. It was beautiful.

This explained how the Covenant could make jumps with

such accuracy. They could literally plot a course with an error no

larger than an atom's diameter.

"Status, Cortana?" the Master Chief asked. "Stand by," she said, annoyed at the distraction.

At this resolution Cortana could discern every ripple in space caused by Threshold's gravity, the other planets in this solar system, the sun, and even the warping of space caused by the mass of this ship. Could she compensate for those distortions?

Pressure sensors detected hull breaches on seventeen outer decks. Cortana ignored them. She shut down all peripheral systems and concentrated on the task at hand. It was their only way

out of this mess: They'd get out by going through.

She concentrated on interpolating the fluctuating space. She generated mathematical algorithms to anticipate and smooth the gravitational distortions.

Energy surged from the reactors into the Slipspace generator matrices. A path parted directly before them—a pinhole that became a gyrating wormhole, fluxing and spinning.

Threshold's atmosphere throbbed and jumped through the hole—sucked into the vacuum of the alternate dimension.

Cortana dedicated all her runtime to monitoring the space around the ship, and risked making microscopic course corrections to maneuver them into the fluctuating path. Sparks danced along the length of the hull as the nose of the flagship departed normal space.

She eased the rest of the ship through, surrounded by whirling

storms and jagged spears of lightning.

She pinged her sensors: The hull temperature dropped rapidly and she registered a series of explosive decompressions on the breached decks.

Cortana emerged from her cocoon of concentration and immediately sensed the electronic presence of the other near her, monitoring her Slipspace calculations. It was practically on top ofher.

"Heresy!" it hissed and then withdrew... and vanished.

Cortana pulsed a systems check along every circuit in the ship, hoping to track the Covenant AI. No luck.

"Sneaky little bastard," she broadcast throughout the system. "Come back here."

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

Had it seen what she had done? Had it understood what she'd

just accomplished? And if so, why declare it a "heresy"?

True, manipulating eighty-eight stochastic variables in eleven-dimensional space-time was not child's play... but it was possible that the other AI would be able to follow her calculations.

Perhaps not. The Covenant were imitative, not innovative;

at least, that's what all the ONI intelligence gathered on the collection of alien races had reported. She had thought this was exaggeration, propaganda to bolster human morale.

Now she wasn't so certain. Because if the Covenant had truly

understood the extent of their own magnificent technology, they could have not only jumped into Slipspaceyrow a planet's

atmosphere—but jumped into a planet's atmosphere, too.

They could have simply bypassed Reach's orbital defenses.

The Covenant AI had called this heresy? Ludicrous.

Maybe the humans could eventually outthink the Covenant,

given enough access to the enemy's technologies. Cortana realized the humans actually had a chance to win this war. All they needed was time.

"Cortana? Status please," the Master Chief said.

"Stand by," Cortana reported.

The Chief felt decompressive explosions reverberate through

the deck, thunder that suddenly silenced itself as the atmosphere vented.

He waited for an explosion to tear through the engine room, or

for plasma to envelop him. He scanned the engine room for any signs of Grunts or Elites, and then exhaled, and stared into the face of death for the countless time.

He had always been a hairsbreadth from death. John wasn't a fatalist, merely a realist. He didn't welcome the end; he knew, though, that he had done his best, fought and won so many times for his team, the Navy, and the human race . . . it made moments like this tolerable. They were, ironically, the most peaceful times in his life.

"Cortana, status please," he asked again.

There was a pause over the COM, then Cortana spoke. "We're safe. In Slipspace. Heading unknown." She sighed, and her voice sounded tinged with weariness. "We're long gone

from Halo, Threshold, and that Covenant fleet. If this tin can holds together a bit longer, I want to put some distance between us and them."

The Chief replied, "Good work, Cortana. Very good." He moved

toward the elevator. "Now we have a hard decision to make."

He paused and turned back toward the Covenant Engineer. The creature moved away from the repaired power coupling and drifted to a scarred, half-melted panel that had been hit with stray plasma fire. It huffed, removed the cover, and delved into the tangle of optical cables.

The Chief left it alone. It wasn't a threat to him or his team. In

fact, it and the others like it might be key to repairing this ship, and their continued survival.

He continued to the elevator shaft, stepping over the bodies of

the Grunts in the hallway. He nudged them with his foot to make certain they were dead, and then retrieved two plasma pistols and one of the needle launchers.

He entered the elevator shaft, pushed off the deck, and floated upward in the null gravity. The Chief kept his eyes and ears sharp for any hint of a threat as he moved through the corridors to the bridge. Everything was quiet and still.

At the open bridge door, he paused and watched as Warrant Officer Polaski supervised a Covenant Engineer while it removed the blasted door control panels. The Engineer turned a melted piece of polarizing crystal before its six eyes, and then picked up an unblemished crystalline panel off the floor and inserted it into the wall.

Polaski wiped her hands on her greasy coveralls and waved him in.

Thin, blue smoke still filled the bridge, but the Chief noted that most of the display panels were once again active. Nearby, Sergeant Johnson tended Haverson's wounds and Locklear stood guard. The young Marine's eyes never left the Engineer, and his finger hovered close to, though not quite on, his MA5B's trigger.

The Engineer floated back, spun on its long axis, and looked

first at Polaski, then the Chief.

A burst of static issued from the bridge speakers, and the Covenant Engineer looked to them and then to Polaski. It tapped the control, and the massive bridge doors slid shut.

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

The Engineer passed a tentacle over the controls. They flashed

blue, then dimmed.

"It locks now," Polaski told them. "Ugly here knows his stuff."

Three ultrasonic whistles filled the air. The Covenant Engineer who had just repaired the bridge door snapped to attention, and its eyes peered intently forward. It chirped a response and then floated toward the Master Chief, trying to maneuver behind him.

"What's it doing?" the Master Chief asked, turning to face the creature.

The Engineer huffed in annoyance and tried again to move around him.

The Master Chief didn't let it. While John had seen no hostility from the creatures, they were still part of the Covenant. Having one at his back grated against every instinct.

"I've told it to repair your armor's shields," Cortana said. "Let it."

The Master Chief allowed the small alien to pass. He felt the access panel removed from the shield generator housing on his back. Normally it took a team of three technicians to remove the safety catches and get to the radioactive power source. The Chief shifted uneasily. He didn't like this one bit, but Cortana had always known what she was doing.

Locklear watched this and ran a hand over his shaved head. He stood on the raised center platform and turned to the other Covenant Engineer as it repaired the burned-out displays on the port side of the room. He held his MA5B loosely, but it was still aimed in the alien's general direction. "I don't care what Cortana says," he told the Chief, "I don't trust them."

The Engineer near Locklear floated to the bridge's holographic

controls and passed a tentacle over a series of raised dots.

The screens snapped on and showed three Covenant cruisers

closing fast.

Adrenaline spiked through the Master Chief's blood. "Cor-

tana, quick—take evasive action."

"Relax, Chief," Locklear said. He waved his hand over a holographic control; the images on screen froze. "It's just a replay." He turned and examined the suspended plasma bolts just as they

impacted on the flagship's shields. "Man," he whispered. "I wish our boats had weapons like those."

"We might soon have exactly that, Marine," Lieutenant Haver-son said. He winced and stood, then moved to a screen that showed the storms in the upper atmosphere of Threshold. "Play this one, Corporal."

Locklear tapped one of the controls.

A line of sparkling blue lights appeared on screen, and the nose of the flagship edged into view. The blue line ripped a hole in space, and the ship jumped forward. The clouds of Threshold vanished; there was only blackness on the screen.

Haverson slicked back the strands of his red hair that had fallen into his face. "Cortana," he asked, "has anyone, human or Covenant, ever performed a Slipspace jump from within an atmosphere?"

"No, Lieutenant. Normally such strong gravitational fields would distort and collapse the Shaw-Fujikawa event horizon. With the Covenant's Slipspace matrices, however, I had greatly increased resolution. I was able to compensate."

"Amazing," he whispered.

"Goddamned lucky," Polaski muttered. She tugged on the rim of her cap.

"It worked," the Master Chief told them. "For now, that's all that matters." He faced his team, trying to ignore the motions of the Covenant Engineer attached to his back. "We have to plan our next move."

"I'm sorry to disagree, Chief," Lieutenant Haverson said.

"The mere fact that Cortana's maneuver worked is the only thing

that matters now."

The Chief squared himself to the Lieutenant and said nothing.

Haverson held up his hands. "I acknowledge that you have tactical command, Chief. I know your authority has the backing of the brass and ONI Section Three. You'll get no argument from me on that point, but I put it to you that your original mission has just been superseded by the discovery of the technology on this ship. We should scrub your mission and head straight back to Earth."

"What's this other mission?" Locklear asked, his voice

suspicious.

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

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Haverson shrugged. "I see no reason to keep this information

classified at this point. Tell him, Chief."

The Master Chief didn't like how Haverson "acceded" to his tactical command yet readily ordered him to reveal highly classified material.

"Cortana," the Chief said. "Is the bridge secure from eavesdroppers?"

"A moment," Cortana said. Red lights pulsed around the room's perimeter. "It is now. Go ahead, Chief."

"My team and I—" the Master Chief started.

He hesitated—the thought of his fellow Spartans stopped him cold. For all he knew they were all dead. He pushed that to the back of his mind, however, and continued.

"Our mission was to capture a Covenant ship, infiltrate

Covenant-controlled space, and capture one of their leaders. Command hoped they could use this to force the Covenant into a cease-fire and negotiations."

No one said a word.

Finally, Locklear snorted and rolled his eyes. "Typical Navy

suicide mission."

"No," the Master Chief replied. "It was a long shot, but we had

a chance. We have a better chance now that we have this ship."

"Excuse me, Master Chief," Polaski said. She removed her

cap and wrung it in her hands. "You're not suggesting that you're going to continue that half-assed op, are you? We barely sur-

vived four days of hell. It was a miracle we got away from Reach,

survived the Covenant on Halo... not to mention the Flood."

"I have a duty to complete my mission," the Master Chief told her. "I'll do it with or without your help. There's more at stake than our individual discomfort—even our lives."

"We're not Spartans," Haverson said. "We're not trained for your kind of mission."

That was certainly true. They weren't Spartans. John's team would never give up. But as he scanned their weary faces, he had to acknowledge that they weren't ready for this mission.

The Sergeant stepped forward and said, "You still want to go, I

got your back, Chief."

John nodded, but he saw the exhaustion even in the Sergeant's

dark eyes. There were limits to what any soldier, even a hard-

core Marine like Johnson, could endure. And as much as he didn't want to admit it, his original orders, given only a week ago, felt as if they'd been issued a lifetime in the past. Even John felt the temptation to stop and regroup before continuing.

"What's on this ship," Haverson said, "can save the human race. And wasn't that the goal of your mission? Let's return to Earth and let the Admiralty decide. No one would question your decision to clarify your orders given the circumstances—" He paused, then added, "and the loss of your entire team."

Haverson's expression was carefully neutral, but the Chief still bristled at the further mention of his team—and at the attempt to manipulate him. He remembered his order sending Fred, Kelly, and the others to the surface of Reach, thinking that he, Linda, and James were going on the "hard" mission.

"Listen to the El-Tee," Locklear said. "We deliver a little something for the R-and-D eggheads and maybe buy some shore leave. I vote for that plan." He saluted Haverson. "Hell yeah!"

"This isn't a democracy," the Master Chief said, his voice both calm and dangerous.

Locklear twitched but didn't back down. "Yeah, maybe it isn't," he said, "but last time I checked, I take my orders from the Corps—

not from some swabbie. Sir."

The Sergeant scowled at the ODST and moved to his side. "You better get it together, Marine," he barked, "or the Chief'11 reach down and pull you inside out by your cornhole. And that'll

be a sweet, sweet mercy ... compared to what I'm gonna do to

you."

Locklear contemplated the Sergeant's words and the Master Chief's silence. He looked to Polaski and then to Haverson.

Polaski stared at the Marine with wide eyes, then turned away. Haverson gave him a slight shake of his head.

Locklear sighed, eased his stance, and dropped his gaze. "Man, I really, really hate this shit."

"I hate to interrupt," Cortana said, "but I find myself agreeing

with the Lieutenant."

The Chief clicked on a private COM channel. "Explain, Cortana. I thought our mission was what you were built for. Why are you backing out now?"

"I'm not 'backing out,' " she shot back. "Our orders were

HALO: FIRST STRIKE

ERIC NYLUND

given when the UNSC had a fleet, and when Reach was still an intact military presence. All that has changed."

The Master Chief couldn't disagree with what she was saying ... but there was something else in her voice. And for the first time, John thought that Cortana might be hiding something from him.

"We have intact ship-scale plasma weapons and new reactor technologies," Cortana continued. "Imagine if every ship could maneuver with pinpoint precision in Slipspace." She paused. "The UNSC could be just as effective in space as you are in

ground engagements. We could actually win this war."

The Master Chief frowned. He didn't like the Lieutenant's or Cortana's arguments—because they made sense. Aborting his mission was unthinkable. He had always finished what he started, and he'd always won.

As a professional soldier, John was ready to give up anything for victory—his personal comfort, his friends, his own life if that's what it took—but he'd never considered that he'd have to sacrifice his dignity and pride as well for the greater good.

He sighed and nodded. "Very well, Lieutenant Haverson. We'll do it your way. I hereby relinquish my tactical command."

"Good," Haverson said. "Thank you." He faced the others and continued, "Sergeant? You, Polaski, and Locklear get back down to the Pelican and grab whatever gear wasn't smashed to bits. Look for a field medkit, too, and then get back up here, double time."

"Yes, sir," Sergeant Johnson said. "We're on it." He and Polaski headed for the door, tapped the control, and let the panels slide apart.

Polaski shot a stare at the Master Chief over her shoulder; then, shaking her head, she followed the Sergeant.

"Shit," Locklear said, checking his rifle as he loped after them. "Wait up! Man, I'm never going to get another hour's sleep."

"Sleep when you're dead, Marine," the Sergeant said.

The bridge doors sealed.

Haverson said, "Plot a course back to Earth, Cortana, and then—"

"I'm sorry, Lieutenant Haverson," Cortana said. "I can't do that. A direct course to Earth would be in violation of the Cole

Protocol. Furthermore, we are not allowed an indirect route, either. Subsection Seven of the Cole Protocol states that no Covenant craft may be taken to human-controlled space without an exhaustive search for tracking systems that could lead the enemy to our bases."

"Subsection Seven?" Haverson said. "I haven't heard of it."

"Very few have, sir," Cortana answered. "It was little more than a technicality. Before this, no one had actually ever captured a Covenant vessel."

"An exhaustive search of this vessel would be difficult under the circumstances," Haverson said and cupped his hand over his chin, thinking. "It must be more than three kilometers long."

"I have a suggestion, sir," the Chief said. "An intermediate destination: Reach."

"Reach?" Haverson quickly hid the shock on his face with a smile. "Chief, there's nothing in the Reach system except a Covenant armada."

"No, sir," the Master Chief replied. "There are ... other possibilities."

Haverson raised an eyebrow. "Go ahead, Chief. I'm intrigued."

"The first possibility," John said, "is that the Covenant have glassed the planet and moved on. In which case there might be a derelict, but serviceable, UNSC craft that we could repair and take to Earth. We'd leave the Covenant flagship in low orbit and return with the proper scientific staff and equipment to effect a salvage operation."

Haverson nodded. "A long shot. Although the Euphrates did

have a Prowler attached to her. They were supposed to launch a reconnaissance mission, before they got the signal to drop everything and help defend Reach. So maybe it's not such a long shot, after all. And the other possibility?"

"The Covenant are still there," the Master Chief said. "The likelihood that they would attack one of their own capital ships is low. In either event, there is no violation of the Cole Protocol because the Covenant already know the location of Reach."

"True," Haverson said. He paced to the center of the bridge. "Very well, Chief. Cortana, set course for Reach. We'll enter at the edge of the system and assess the situation. If it's too hot, we jump and find another route home."

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ERIC NYLUND

"Acknowledged, Lieutenant," Cortana replied. "Be advised that this ship traverses Slipspace much faster than our UNSC counterparts. ETA to Reach in thirteen hours."

The Master Chief sighed and relaxed a little. There was another reason for choosing Reach, one he didn't reveal to the Lieutenant. He knew the odds of anyone surviving on the surface were remote. Astronomical, in fact ... because once the Covenant decided to glass a planet, they did so with amazing thoroughness. But he had to see it. It was the only way he could accept that his teammates were dead.

A wash of static covered the Chief, first along his spine and

then wrapping about his torso. There was an audible pop, and

sparks crackled along the length of his MJOLNIR armor.

The Engineer released its grasp on him and cluttered with excitement.

Diagnostic routines scrolled upon the Chief's heads-up display. In the upper right corner the shield recharge bar flickered red and slowly filled.

"They work," the Master Chief said. John was relieved to have his shields back. He wouldn't forget what it was like to fight without them, though. It had been a wake-up call: not to become dependent upon technology. It was also a reminder that most battles were won or lost in his head, before he engaged any enemy.

"Impressive little creatures," Haverson remarked. He scrutinized the Covenant Engineer as it floated toward the wall of displays and began tinkering with one. "I wonder how the Covenant caste system—"

"Sir!" Sergeant Johnson's voice blasted over the COM, breaking with static. "You've got to get down to the Pelican ASAP. You and the Chief."

"Are you under fire?" the Chief asked.

"Negative," he replied. "It's one of the cryotubes you recovered."

"What about it, Sergeant?" Haverson snapped.

"Chief, there's a Spartan in it."

CHAPTER TEN

1852 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Captured Covenant flagship, in Slipspace, location unknown.

After the Chief had left to investigate the cryopod, Haverson made certain that the bridge doors locked. He turned and walked over to the Covenant Engineer who'd repaired the Master Chief's armor.

"Fascinating creatures," he murmured. He drew his sidearm and pointed it at the back of its head.

Two of the Engineer's six eyes locked onto the muzzle of the weapon. A tentacle reached for it, split into fine probing threads, and touched the blue-gray metal.

Cortana asked, "What are you—"

Haverson shot the Engineer. The round tore through its head and spattered gore across the display the alien had been repairing.

"Haverson!" Cortana cried.

The other Engineer turned and squealed—then a blinking light on the broken display captured its attention and it returned to its work, oblivious.

Haverson knelt by the dead Engineer and holstered his gun. "I had no other choice," he whispered. He touched the creature's odd, slick skin. Its color faded from a faint pink to a cold gray.

He dragged it to the escape hatch, opened it, and placed the body in the corridor. He paused, and went back to fold its tentacles over its body. "I'm sorry. You didn't deserve it."

"Why was that necessary?" Cortana demanded.

Haverson stood, wiped his hands on his slacks, and sealed the escape hatch access. "I'm surprised you even have to ask, Cortana." He heard the anger in his voice. He checked his rising ire.

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