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Because of this slipperiness in the interdimensional space, UNSC ships traveling between star systemsmight arrive half a billion kilometers off course.
The curious properties of Slipspace also made this assignment a joke.
Ensign Lovell was supposed to watch for pirates or black-market runners trying to sneak by . . . andmost importantly, for the Covenant. This station had never logged so much as a Covenant probesilhouette—and that was the reason he had specifically requested this dead-end assignment. It was safe.
What he did see with regularity were trash dumps from UNSC vessels, clouds of primordial atomichydrogen, even the occasional comet that had somehow plowed into the Slipstream.
Lovell yawned, kicked his feet up onto the control console, and closed his eyes. He nearly fell out of hischair when the COM board contact alert pinged.
“Oh no,” he whispered, fear and shame at his own cowardice forming a cold lump in his belly.Don’t letit be the Covenant. Don’t let it . . . not here.
He quickly activated the controls and traced the contact signal back to the source—Alpha probe.
The probe had detected an incoming mass, a slight arc to its trajectory pulled by the gravity of SigmaOctanus. It was large. A cloud of dust, perhaps? If it was, it would soon distort and scatter.
Ensign Lovell sat up straighter in his chair.
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Beta probe cycled back. The mass was still there and as solid as before. It was the largest reading EnsignLovell had ever seen: twenty thousand tons. That couldn’t be a Covenant ship—they didn’t get that big.And the silhouette was a bumpy spherical shape; it didn’t match any of the Covenant ships in thedatabase. It had to be a rogue asteroid.
He tapped his stylus on the desk. What if it wasn’t an asteroid? He’d have to purge the database andenable the self-destruct mechanism for the outpost. But what could the Covenant want way out here?
Gamma probe reappeared. The mass readings were unchanged. Spectroscopic analysis was inconclusive,which was normal for probe reading at this distance. The mass was two hours out at its present velocity.Its projected trajectory was hyperbolic—a quick swing near the star, and then it would pass invisibly outof the system and be forever gone.
He noted that its trajectory bought it close to Sigma Octanus IV . . . which, if the rock were in real space,would be cause for alarm. In Slipspace, however, it could pass “through” the planet, and no one wouldnotice.
Ensign Lovell relaxed and sent the retrieval drones after the three probes. By the time they got theprobes back, though, the mass would be long gone.
He stared at the last image on screen. Was it worth sending an immediate report to Sigma OctanusCOM? They’d make him send his probes out without a proper recovery, and the probes would likely getlost after that. A supply ship would have to be sent out here to replace them. The station would have tobe inspected and recertified—and he’d receive a thorough lecture on what did and did not constitute avalid emergency.