TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALY\Estimated 0640 hours, September 23,2552 (MilitaryCalendar)\Epsilon Eridani system, tunnel complex below surface of Reach.
John tensed as he watched the thousands of Covenant crowd.ing on the galleriessurround him and his team. He didn't dare move; his team was on the wrong end of toomuch firepower. They couldn't win this fight.
On the third gallery off the floor of the great room, at the four o'clock position, a Hunterpair roared with anger. They raised their fuel rod cannons and then leveled theirweapons—and fired.
Kelly moved before anyone; she was a blur of motion and stepped in front of Dr. Halsey.John and Fred moved to either side of Kelly, while Anton grabbed the Admiral and threwthe older man behind them.
The blinding white-hot plasma charges struck the Spartans' shields and splashed over their chests.
John's shield drained completely. The overpressure forced him to take a step backward,and the skin on his forearms blistered.
Then the heat was gone, and he blinked away the black dots that swarmed in his vision. Kelly lay at his feet. Her armor smol.dered and hydrostatic gel boiled from theemergency release vent along her left side.
A thousand more shots rang out from the gallery, and John in.stinctively crouched tocover his fallen comrade. He braced for the inevitable burning energy impact.
Plasma bolts and crystalline needles crisscrossed the galleriesERIC NYLUND201overhead, a spiderweb of energy and projectiles. Every shot was directed at the pair ofHunters who had fired upon John and his team.
The Hunter pair raised their shields in unison and ducked be.hind them—the quarter-meter-thick slabs of metal could repel almost any single weapon's fire ... but not thismerciless bar.rage. These mightiest Covenant soldiers burned, their armor and shieldsignited as well, and John caught their outlines for only a split second before they were vaporized.
The section of gallery where they had stood blasted into dust and smoke, and the debrisrained onto the floor ... along with dozens of Grunts and Jackals who had been unfortunate enough to be standing too near the pair.
Three heartbeats pounded in John's chest. Neither the humans nor the Covenant hosts inthe great room moved.
"What the hell is this?" Sergeant Johnson muttered. "Shouldn't we be dead by now?"John linked to Kelly's biomonitors; she was in shock, and her suit's heat pumps were strained to the failure point. He had to get her to safety.
From the uppermost gallery a Covenant Elite in golden armor raised its energy swordhigh into the air and shouted. Translation software in John's helmet whispered half asecond later: "Take them—but the next one to fire at the holy light will be skinned alive!
Go!"Dr. Halsey pressed the arm of her glasses tighter against the back of her ear, listening asthe built-in translator whispered. "The crystal," she murmured. "They're after thecrystal."Teams of Elites dropped slithering, plasticine ropes, which glowed a ghostly blue. Theyrappelled to the floor. A hundred Grunts squealed with excitement and danced from onefoot to the other. Jackals followed their Elite leaders on the ropes.
"Polaski!" Admiral Whitcomb shouted into his COM. "Get down here ASAP! We needimmediate extraction!""Roger that," Polaski replied in her cool never-flinch Navy flier voice.
Fred, Grace, and Anton turned and fired three-round bursts straight up as a team of Elitestried to descend on their position. The Elites fell, spattering purple blood across the tiledfloor.
202HALO: FIRST STRIKEDr. Halsey stuffed the alien crystal into her lab coat pocket and knelt next to Kelly. Shechecked her vitals on the data pad and shook her head. She looked at John, her expressiongrim. "She's alive ... barely. She needs help.""Let's not be rude," Admiral Whitcomb barked. "Welcome our guests, Master Chief!""Perimeter fire," the Master Chief ordered. "Keep it tight. Dispersion pattern Delta. Go!"The Spartans simultaneously step ed into a semicircle, as.sault rifles pointed outward.In unison they thumbed their weappp.ons' safeties and opened fire. Right behind themLocklear, Johnson, Haverson, and the Admiral took up position inside the circle. Theyprimed and threw grenades.
John paused and turned his attention to Kelly. He hauled her limp body off the floor anddraped her over his shoulder.
The Covenant forces hit the ground and edged closer, but they didn't return fire. Dozensof Elites dropped as armor-piercing rounds peppered their armor and frag grenadesdetonated with thunderous force. The Jackals who followed their masters on the ropeslanded in the middle of the carnage, maneuvered in front of the Elites, and overlappedenergy shields. It was typical Elite bravado—they had to be the first into the battle ... evenif that meant they'd die for that honor.
The Chief had no problem satisfying their honor. He slapped a fresh clip into his rifle andcontinued firing.
Jackals and Elites cautiously advanced on the firing Spartans. A second line of Jackalsangled their personal energy shields over their heads to prevent any grenades from being tossed into their midst.
Polaski's dropship descended from the hole in the ceiling, spun about, and eased to a stopa meter above the cracked blue-tiled floor. Both side hatches of the craft hissed open.
John handed Kelly to Fred as he leapt on board; he helped Dr. Halsey and the Admiralinside next. Locklear and the other Spartans jumped into the second hatch. SergeantJohnson and the Master Chief were last to board—just as their feet touched the ramp andthey grabbed on to the rungs, Polaski accelerated off the deck.
The Master Chief watched the Covenant as the dropshipERIC NYLUND 203climbed. There were thousands of them—on the floor, clinging to the walls, overflowingthe galleries. They looked like a swarm of angry ants.
The hatch sealed and the Master Chief moved forward, toward the cockpit. As he passedthrough the compartment, he saw Kelly. She was slumped over; thin trails of smokecurled from the holes in her armor.
He helped Dr. Halsey strap Kelly down. Halsey's eyes locked onto the wounded Spartan'serratic vitals as they squiggled across her data pad. She set the elongated crystal next toKelly... but it didn't lie flat. It defied gravity, floating—one sharp, slender end pointed atthe surface.
"How very odd," Halsey whispered.
John had to agree; it was unusual. Almost as odd as being un.der the guns of a thousandangry Covenant soldiers—yet none of them had fired a shot.
"Take care of her," he told Dr. Halsey, then he stood and made his way to the cockpit.
Polaski hunched over the controls. She pushed the Covenant dropship into a hyperbolicascent and entered the hole in the ceiling of the great room. The Master Chief grabbedhold of the walls and braced himself.
The dropship, however, slowed and pitched forward so it was once again horizontal.
"Problem," Polaski announced and rapidly tapped the controls. "Big problem."The purple light of the grav beam in the hole darkened; it seemed to fade from view... butit also began to hurt to look at.
"They're pushing us back," Admiral Whitcomb said. "Li, crawl topside and launch a couple"Yes, sir," Li replied—eager to return to the fight. He nodded at John, grabbed aof Jackhammers up this pipeht.
t"Jackhammer rocket launcher, and moved to the hatch.
The Admiral frowned and shook his head. "No way a rocket will make it up a kilometer ofthis tunnel. Gotta try anyway."The dropship stopped rising, bobbed in place a moment, and slowly sank back down through the tunnel.
Li opened the side hatch. The intense purple light from the grav beam flooded the interior of the ship.
204HALO: FIRST STRIKEDr. Halsey inhaled sharply, and the Master Chief turned to see what had startled her.
For a moment he thought the crystal she had brought with her had shattered. But ithadn't broken, not exactly. The top half of the slender shard had split along its facets and opened like a flower blossom. The sapphire petals undulated, and as the ultraviolet lightof the grav beam fell upon them, the crystal opened wider. The facets twirled and spun ina complex geo.metric dance. The crystal seemed to reshape itself, and it pulsed a coolgreen.
The light inside the ship cleared—all traces of the purple tint seemed to recede like a tide.
The dropship lurched upward.
"What the hell—" Polaski, caught unawares, grasped the yoke and pulled back. Theirdropship hummed with power and shot up through the tunnel.
"Gravity," Dr. Halsey whispered and stared into the opened facets of the crystal. "Thisthing warped space when we first ap.proached. It apparently has an effect on artificialgravity fields as well. I can't wait to get this into a lab."The dropship emerged from the hole, and sunlight flooded the interior.
Once out of the grav beam, the slender stone folded back upon itself, closing petal-likefragments, melding back into a single smooth shard. Dr. Halsey plucked up the stone and slipped it back into her lab coat pocket; she returned her attention to Kelly's biosigns.
The air over Menachite Mountain was thick with circling flocks of Banshee fliers andSeraph fighters. The three-hundred-meter-long light cruiser had company, too. Six more Covenant cruisers faced their tiny dropship, plasma turrets tracking them.
A series of icons flashed on Polaski's console. "They've got weapons lock," she said, thecalm in her voice cracking slightly around the edges.
"They won't fire," Admiral Whitcomb declared. There was steel resolution in his words—as if this weren't a guess on his part, but rather an order that the Covenant had better follow. He set his hands on his hips and watched the ships, seeming to stare the cruisers down. "They want whatever the doctor and her teamERIC NYLUND205discovered ... and they want it bad enough to let us shoot at them and not so much as spitin our direction.""Sir," the Master Chief said. "We're to rendezvous with Cor-tana and the captured flagshipat oh-seven-fifteen hours. That gives us only twenty minutes, sir."Admiral Whitcomb consulted his watch and then glanced at the Covenant ships gatheringaround them and edging closer. "Polaski, get us out of here. Plot a course to your rendezvous point—and make this crate fly as fast as you can!""Aye aye, sir." Polaski angled the ship into the upper atmo.sphere of Reach; the skydarkened from turquoise to slate gray to midnight blue and then inky black, filled withstars.
As their dropship left the cruisers behind, it moved painfully slow compared to the agileSeraph fighters. They formed up around her, four to the port and four on the starboard oftheir craft. A pair of the teardrop-shaped singleships pulled ahead of her, slowed... and blocked their path.
"They're boxing us in," Polaski said and decelerated their ship.
"Warrant Officer," the Admiral said and set a hand gently on her shoulder. "Ram them.Full speed."Polaski swallowed. "Aye, sir." One of her hands cinched her crash harness tight. The other hand passed over the velocity stripe on the control panel, and shoved it to full power.
The dropship jumped—straight toward the Seraph fighters in their path. The two fighters tumbled aside with a scant three me.ters to spare, and the dropship raced past them.
Locklear peered out of the port display and whistled. "Does anyone else," he whispered,"think it's a little crowded up here?"The Master Chief looked over Locklear's shoulder. There had been a dozen smallwarships when they had descended only a few hours ago... now there were three timesthat number in or.bit around Reach.d Reach.
There were light cruisers that looked like luminous manta rays; there were four carriers with their bulbous sections, and the space near them was aglow with swarms of Seraphsinglecraft; there were a handful of destroyers, sleek and fast, bristling with plasma turrets.
There was also wreckage: Pieces of Covenant ships tumbled in orbit, raw ragged chunks of the alloy plating, tangles of plasma206HALO: FIRST STRIKEconduits still aglow from the heat they carried, and clouds of metal that had been vaporized and had cooled into mists of glit.tering dust.
"Cortana's been busy in our absence," Lieutenant Haverson remarked. He noddedapprovingly at the carnage.
The Master Chief detected flickers of light and dark from the launch bays of a Covenantcarrier. He activated his visor's mag.nification and saw a legion of Elites in thruster packs, and a score of the tentacled engineering drones leaving the bay.
"Singleships, drones, and Elite boarding parties on intercept vectors," Polaski announced."Inbound—" She paused and double-checked her scans. "Jesus. They're inbound from alldirections.""Get us to the rendezvous coordinates," Admiral Whitcomb ordered. "And don't spare thehorses.""Sir," Polaski replied, her voice icy cold, "these are the ren.dezvous coordinates."The Master Chief searched for their captured ship on any display—and saw only theenemy.
Cortana and Ascendant Justice reappeared in space; it was a tight fit.
This particular jump required precision to the centimeter and, although she loathedadmitting it, a large measure of luck.
She had often wondered what would happen if a ship transi-tioned to normal space too close to a planet or other mass—in this case, another ship.
Ascendant Justice winked into existence within the debris field in high orbit around Reach. There was, however, no ultravi-olent explosion as the atoms of the flagshipoverlapped with the matter of the scrapped ships the Covenant had herded together inspace.
Either Slipspace jumps prevented such occurrences from happening, shunting theincoming ship to the side like water that flows around a river rock ... or she had borrowedsome of the Master Chief's probability-bending good fortune.
Hundreds of wrecked ships, human and Covenant alike, tum.bled lifelessly about her,their net trajectories suggesting that As.cendant Justice had just nudged them aside. Ifshe'd had moreERIC NYLUND 207time, she would've designed a set of experiments with drone ships to test out herdisplacement-luck hypothesis.
But time was something neither she nor the Master Chief had in abundance.
Minutes remained until their rendezvous—and Cortana would need every millisecond toaccomplish what she had to do if any of them were going to leave the Epsilon Eridanisystem alive.
Cortana searched the field of derelicts for a likely candidate. There were only a handful ofCovenant ships; if the UNSC had managed to take out one of the alien ships in the battlefor Reach, they apparently had been forced to obliterate it. No suit.able candidatesremained for her plan.
She turned her attention to the vast number of wrecked UNSC ships. The Covenant didn'thave to completel destroy a human ship to remove its tactical presence from the battle—a single en.ergyyy projection beam could tear through enough decks and kill enoughcrew to disable the craft.
She wondered how many fallen humans drifted in the local space alongside her,thousands of brave men and women who had died fighting.
Her sensors flicked over the silhouettes of the UNSC light ships. There were corvetteswith bisected hulls leaking radio.active coolant from their nuclear start-up reactors.Although they were more suitable for her purpose, the damage to them was too great. Shedidn't find one with a single intact fusion reactor.
She tagged the location of the carriers and heavy cruisers and excluded them from hersearch. They were simply too large. She was willing to sacrifice maneuverability andspeed... but not so much that it would take her an hour to make the burn out of orbit.
That left destroyers and frigates. She found and tagged four.teen in the debris field.Destroyers were essentially frigates that carried a meter and a half of Titanium-A armorinstead of the sixty centimeters of their lighter counterparts.
There were two candidates: Both the destroyer Tharsis and the frigate Gettysburg hadintact fusion reactors. While the Gettysburg had been killed by an energy projector beamthat had gutted it stem to stern—obliterating the bridge and life support— its powerplant and even the Magnetic Accelerator Cannon on its208HALO: FIRST STRIKEundercarriage were apparently functional. Even better: The ship's topside hardpointswere intact.
Cortana let a flicker of power pulse through Ascendant Jus.tice's engines, and she slowlydrifted toward the Gettysburg.
She paused to listen to the Covenant traffic insystem. There was eight times the chatterthere had been before, with many ref.erences to the "Infidels" on the planet and the"holy light" that was now in jeopardy. Good. That meant the Master Chief was doing whathe did best: causing mayhem among the enemy. And more importantly, the presence ofAscendant Justice floating among the hundreds of dead ships had not been detected.
When she was within a kilometer of the Gettysburg, she cut her engines. With delicatepuffs from the thrusters she edged closer and rolled Ascendant Justice until its top sidewas parallel with the top side of the Gettysburg.
She pinged the Gettysburg's telemetry s stem and received a faint handshake reply.Cortana gave the override code—quicklyyy accepted—and entered the Gettysburg's NAVcomputer.
There was no other computer intelligence on board. The cap.tain of the Gettysburg hadflatlined the NAV system and the AI as per the Cole Protocol. Cortana extended herpresence through the empty systems. The Gettysburg was a wreck; all thrusters offline. Itwouldn't be moving on its own power ever again, but its heart still beat. The ship's fusionreactor operated at 67 per.cent capacity. Perfect.
Ascendant Justice gently touched down on the Gettysburg— probably the first time in thehistory of the universe that human and Covenant ships had made contact with nonlethalintentions.
All modern UNSC ships had been designed with hardpoints on their dorsal and ventralsides in the event that they were too crippled to move under their own power. In theory,another UNSC ship could dock, lock systems, and carry the wounded ship away.
The Covenant flagship had a similar series of hardpoints on its top side where ships toolarge to fit in its launch bay could dock.
The two systems, however, were incompatible.
Cortana fixed that. She activated the seven service drones on the Gettysburg, andinstructed the Covenant EngineersERIC NYLUND209within the outer hull of Ascendant Justice to secure the docking points mating the two ships and adapt their power uplinks.
The reason for this salvage operation, her pinpoint jump into the debris field, and thehybrid docking... it was all for power.
Ascendant Justice's cover had been blown; the Covenant knew that their flagship was human-controlled. That made their original plan of rendezvousing in orbit around Reachimpossi.ble. She could have jumped to that location and picked up the Chief, but then they would be stranded there while the Slipspace capacitors slowly recharged—and inthe meantime they would be boxed in and obliterated by the Covenant armada.
So she had to change tactics; she'd jump into the thick of a hostile and wary Covenantforce, grab the Chief, and just as quickly jump out of the system. For that she'd needpower to in.stantly recharge the Slipspace capacitors—the kind of power only two ships could produce.
The power uplinks connected. Gigawatts flowed from the Gettysburg's reactor into Ascendant Justice's energy grid.
"Perfect," she purred.
It was 0712 hours. She had less than three minutes to prepare for the next phase of her plan.
Cortana checked and rechecked the calculations for what had to be the shortest Slipspace jump ever: from the floating junk.yard to the rendezvous coordinates, a mere three thousand kilo.meters. She scanned that region of space—and discovered it was no longer a blind spot in the Covenant defenses. There were three times as many ships insystem as when she'd left.
Cortana spotted the Chief's hijacked dropship ascending from the lower atmosphere ofReach, with a pack of Seraph fighters surrounding the craft.
She intercepted a series of repeated orders from the Cove.nant's fleet commander: Do not fire or you will be targeted and destroyed. The Infidels have captured the holy light.
This was both good and bad. Good because the Master Chief and his team with this "holylight" avoided being blasted into vapor. Bad because every Covenant ship in the systemwas clos.ing in on their dropship—ultimately they'd box it in, grapple with the tiny craft,and take it with overwhelming force.
This also made Cortana's jump target increasingly crowded.
210HALO: FIRST STRIKEShe made certain her plasma turrets were fully charged; she rechecked her shapingmagnetic coils; she ran a systems check on Ascendant Justice's thrusters in casesomething happened with her exit jump and she had to maneuver.
The time was 0714.10 Military Standard.
Cortana then did the one thing she was not good at: wait. Fifty seconds for a mind thatcould perform a trillion calculations per second was an eternity.
At T minus thirty seconds Cortana dumped power into the Slipspace capacitors.
Pinpricks of light dotted the black space around her.
At T minus twenty she updated her calculations, taking into account the slightgravitational variances that so many Covenant warships created in local space.
The vacuum around her pulled a art, and she picked a path through the "here" of normalspace into the "not-here" of Slipspppace.
At T minus ten she wrote a quick program to target the distant ships near her exitcoordinates—and keep them targeted when she reappeared.
Ascendant Justice moved slightly forward into the rip in space; light enveloped the craft.
She vanished from the field of floating debris and——reappeared in an eyeblink. The full face of Reach filling her lateral starboard displays.
The port displays were crowded with inbound Covenant ships.
The odd piggybacked Covenant—human craft appearing in the middle of their trap musthave confused the enemy ... no one fired.
The dropship was three kilometers off Cortana's starboard beam, its trajectory more orless aligned with Ascendant Jus.tice's launch bay.
She opened the UNSC E-band and said, "Chief, your ride is here.""Acknowledged," the Master Chief replied. There was no qua.ver in his rock-solid voice.
He had been headed into certain death a moment ago, but he sounded like this was whathe expected to occur. Like this was normal operational procedurehis was normal operational procedure.
The dropship veered toward the open bay, and CortanaERIC NYLUND 211dropped shields for a split second—just long enough for the tiny craft to enter—thenreestablished the protective field.
Cortana routed power from the Gettysburg into Ascendant Justice's Slipspace capacitors,and they began soaking up the charge.
Three dozen Covenant cruisers surrounded her, their plasma turrets glowing a hellish redas they prepared to fire.
Apparently the order not to fire did not extend to Ascendant Justice.
Cortana needed five seconds to attain a full charge, five sec.onds before she could makegood her escape... but five seconds might be long enough for her to become the center of asmall Covenant-made sun.
She took the initiative and fired at the closest four cruisers.
Laser-fine plasma lanced from her turrets, burned though the Covenant shields, and splitopen their hulls. When the super.heated gas came in contact with the atmosphere insidethe ships, plastic, flesh, and metal caught fire and roiled throughout their interiors.
Two of the targeted cruisers immediately detonated as the plasma beams found thereactors. Billowing clouds of vaporized metal mushroomed across the night and obscuredher from the advancing ships.
Pinpricks of light appeared around Ascendant Justice.
ERROR.
Cortana rechecked the figures and quickly found the source of the problem: The fail-safesubroutine that tracked local gravita.tional conditions returned an anomaly.
The gravity from Reach no longer warped space ... which was impossible.
No time for speculation. She had to leave or fight.
She moved Ascendant Justice into the twisting spatial field——and vanished.
Instead of the nonvisible nondimensions of Slipspace, how.ever, a blue-tinged fieldappeared on Cortana's monitors. It wasn't space—not the crowded space near Reach, orthe star-filled s ace of the Epsilon Eridani system. But it was a space, where there shouldhave been no spppace at all.
212HALO: FIRST STRIKEShe probed the region with her sensors, but her range was lim.ited to a thousandkilometers as if she were in an obscuring fog.
There—a contact. And another. And then a dozen more.
Fourteen Covenant cruisers resolved from the blue mist.
"Cortana," the Master Chief said. "What's our status?""Same as ever," Cortana replied. "We're in trouble."The Covenant warships fired.
"Damn," Cortana muttered.
She initiated her last option: She fired back, hoping to take some of them to hell with her.