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Blue Team fanned out and continued on their way. When they heard Banshees overhead, they hunkereddown in the mud, and the fliers passed.
Ten more kilometers of rough terrain and then the jungle stopped and fields of rice paddies stretched outbefore them all the way to Cote d’Azur.
Crossing these would be more difficult than the jungle. They donned camouflage cloaks that maskedtheir thermal signatures and crawled through the muck on their stomachs.
The Master Chief saw three larger ships hovering over the city. If they were troop transports, they couldcarry thousands of Covenant soldiers. If they were warships, any direct ground assault against the citywould be futile. Either way it was bad news.
He made sure his vid and audio mission recorders got a good clear image of the vessels.
When they emerged from the mud, they were near the beach on the edge of the city. The Master Chiefchecked his map readings and made his way to the sewage outlet.
The two-meter diameter pipe was sealed with a steel grate. He and Fred easily bent the bars aside andentered.
They sloshed through hip-deep muck. The Master Chief didn’t like the cramped quarters. Their mobilitywas restricted by the narrow pipes; worse, they were bunched up and therefore easier to kill withgrenades or massed fire. Motion sensors picked up hundreds of targets. The constant downpour fromstorm drains above made the sensors useless.
He followed his electronic map through the maze of pipes. Light filtered in from above—beams ofillumination connected to the manhole-cover vent holes. Every so often something moved and blockedthat light.
The Spartans moved quickly and quietly through the sludge and halted when they reached their finalwaypoint—directly under the center of Cote d’Azur’s “downtown.”
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With a tiny jerk of his head, the Master Chief informed Blue Team to spread out and keep their eyespeeled. He snaked a fiber-optic probe up through the drain grate at street level and plugged it into hishelmet.
The yellow light from the sodium vapor lamps washed everything topside in an eerie glow. There wereGrunts positioned on the street corners, and the shadow of a Banshee flier circling overhead.
The electric cars parked on the street had been overturned, and the waste receptacles had been knockedover or set on fire. Every street-level window was broken. The Master Chief saw no human civilians,alive or otherwise.
Blue Team moved up and over a block. The Master Chief checked topside again.
There was more activity here: a pack of black-armored Grunts meandered down the streets. Two vulture-headed Jackals sat on the corner, squabbling over a hunk of meat.
Something else caught his attention, though. There were other aliens on the sidewalk—or rather,abovethe sidewalk. They were roughly man-size creatures—unlike any he had ever encountered. The creatureswere vaguely sluglike, with pale, purple-pink skin. Unlike other Covenant forces, they were not bipeds.Instead they had several tentacular appendages sprouting from their thick trunks.