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John cocked his head quizzically. “It was our mission, Corporal,” he said.
The Corporal stared at him and then at the other Spartans. “Yes, sir.”
When Green Team Leader reported that the perimeter was clear, the last of the Spartans boarded thePelican.
James had regained consciousness. Someone had removed his helmet and propped his head on a foldedsurvival blanket. His eyes watered from the pain, but he managed to salute the Master Chief with his lefthand. John gestured at Kelly; she administered a dose of painkiller, and James lapsed intounconsciousness.
The Pelican lifted into the air. In the distance, the suns were warming the horizon, and Cote d’Azur wasoutlined against the dawn.
The dropship suddenly accelerated at full speed straight up, and then angled away to the south.
“Sir,”the pilot said over the COM channel. “We’re getting multiple incoming radar contacts . . . abouttwo hundred Banshees inbound.”
“We’ll take care of it, Lieutenant,” John replied. “Prepare for EMP and shock wave.”
The Master Chief activated his remote radio transceiver.
He quickly keyed in the final fail-safe code, then sent the coded burst transmission on its way.
A third sun appeared on the horizon. It blotted out the light of the system’s stars, then cooled—fromamber to red—and darkened the sky with black clouds of dust.
“Mission accomplished,” he said.
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CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
0500 Hours, July 18, 2552 (Military Calendar) /UNSCIroquois , military staging area in orbit around Sigma Octanus IV
Captain Keyes leaned against the brass railing on the bridge of theIroquois and surveyed the devastation.The space near Sigma Octanus IV was littered with debris: the dead hulks of Covenant and UNSC shipsspun lazily in the vacuum, surrounded by clouds of wreckage: jagged pieces of decimated armor plate,shattered single-ship fuselages, and heat-blackened metal fragments created a million radar targets. Thedebris field would clutter this system and make for a navigational hazard for the next decade.
They had recovered nearly all the bodies from space.
Captain Keyes’ gaze caught the remnants of theCradle as the blasted space dock spun past. Thekilometer-wide plate was now safely locked in a high orbit around the planet. She was slowly being tornapart from her own rotation; girders and metal plates warped and bent as the gravitational stresses on theship increased.
The Covenant plasma weapons had burned through ten decks of super-hard metal and armor like somany layers of tissue paper. Thirty volunteers on the repair station had died piloting the unwieldy craft.
Admiral Stanforth had gotten his “win” . . . but at a tremendous cost.
Keyes brought up the casualty figures and damage estimates on his data pad. He scowled as the datascrolled across his screen.
The UNSC had lost more than twenty ships, and those that survived had all suffered heavy damage;most would require months of time-consuming repair at a shipyard. Nearly one thousand people werekilled in the battle, and hundreds more were wounded, many critically. Add to that the sixteen hundredMarine casualties on the surface—and the three hundred thousand civilians murdered in Cote d’Azur atthe hands of the Covenant.