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The black space near Sigma Octanus IV boiled and frothed with motes of green light.
“Ships entering normal space,” Lieutenant Jaggers announced, panic tingeing his voice.
Commander Keyes got to his feet.
He had been wrong. There weren’t four Covenant frigates. A pair of enemy frigates emerged fromSlipspace . . . escorting a destroyer and a carrier.
His blood ran cold. He had seen battles in which a Covenant destroyer had made Swiss cheese of UNSCships. Its plasma torpedoes could boil through theIroquois ’ two meters of titanium-A battleplate inseconds. Their weapons were light-years ahead of the UNSC’s.
“Their weapons,” Commander Keyes muttered under his breath. Yes . . . hedid have a third option.
“Continue at emergency speed,” he ordered, “and come about to heading zero three two.”
Lieutenant Jaggers swiveled in his seat. “That will put us on collision course with their destroyer, sir.”
“I know,” Commander Keyes replied. “In fact, I’m counting on doing just that.”
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CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
0320 Hours, July 17, 2552 (Military Calendar) /UNSCIroquois en route to Sigma Octanus IV
Commander Keyes stood with his hands behind his back and tried to look calm. Not an easy thing to dowhen his ship was on a collision course with a Covenant battlegroup. Inside, adrenaline raced throughhis blood and his pulse pounded.
He had to at leastappear in control for his crew. He was asking a lot from them . . . probablyeverything ,in fact.
His junior officers watched their status monitors; they occasionally glanced nervously at him, but theirgazes always drifted back to the center view screen.
The Covenant ships looked like toys in the distance. It was dangerous to think of them as harmless,however. One slip, one underestimation of their tremendous firepower, and theIroquois would bedestroyed.
The alien carrier had three bulbous sections; its swollen center had thirteen launch bays. CommanderKeyes had seen hundreds of fighters stream out of them before—fast, accurate, and deadly craft.Normally his ship’s AI would handle point defense . . . only this time, there was no AI installed ontheIroquois .
The alien destroyer was a third again as massive as theIroquois . She bristled with pulse laser turrets,insectlike antennae, and chitinous pods. The carrier and destroyer moved together . . . but nottowardIroquois . They slowly drifted in-system toward Sigma Octanus IV.
Were they going to ignore him? Glass the planet without even bothering to swat him out of the way first?
The Covenant frigates, however, lagged behind. They turned in unison and their sides faced theIroquois—preparing for a broadside. Motes of red light appeared and swarmed toward the frigate’s lateral lines,building into a solid stripe of hellish illumination.
“Detecting high levels of beta particle radiation,” Lieutenant Dominique said. “They’re getting ready tofire their plasma weapons, Commander.”
“Course correction, sir?” Lieutenant Jaggers asked. His fingers tapped in a new heading bound out-