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The Covenant answered by launching a salvo of plasma torpedoes at the orbital guns—so much fire inspace that it looked like a solar flare.
Deadly arcs of flame and metal raced through space and crossed paths.
The engines of the three refit stations flared to life and the platelike ships moved toward the path of theflaming vapor.
A plasma bolt caught the edge of the leading station—fire splashed over its flat surface. More bolts hit,and the station melted, sagged, and boiled. The metal glowed red, then white-hot, tinged with blue.
The other two stations maneuvered into position and shielded the orbital guns from the fiery assault.Plasma torpedoes collided with them and sprayed plumes of molten metal into space. After a dozen hits,clouds of ionizing metal enveloped the place where the three stations had been.
They had been vaporized.
The last of the Covenant plasma hit the haze—scattered, absorbed, and made the cloud glow a hellishorange.
Meanwhile, the fleet’s opening salvo and the Super MAC rounds hit the Covenant fleet.
The smaller ship-based MAC rounds bounced off the Covenant shields—it took three or more to wearthem down.
The Super MAC rounds, however, were another story. The first Super MAC shell hit a Covenantdestroyer. The ship’s shield flashed and vanished—the remaining impact momentum transferred to theship—the hull rippled and shattered into a million fragments.
Four nuclear mines detonated in the center of the Covenant fleet. Dozens of ships with downed shieldsflared white and dissolved.
The other ships however, shrugged off the damage; their shields burned brilliant silver, then cooled.
The surviving Covenant vessels advanced in-system—a third of their number were left behind . . .burning radioactive hulks or utterly destroyed by the Super MAC rounds.
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Plasma charges collected on the lateral lines of the Covenant ships. They fired. Fingers of deadly energyreached across space . . . toward the UNSC fleet.
One Covenant ship sat in the center of the pack, a gigantic vessel, larger than three UNSC cruisers.White-blue beams flashed from its prow—a split second later five UNSC vessels detonated.
“Cortana . . . what the hell was that?” Keyes asked. “Lovell, push those engine superchargers as hot asyou can make them.”
“Running at three hundred ten percent, sir,” Lovell reported. “ETA fourteen minutes.”
“Replaying and digitally enhancing video record,” Cortana said.
She split the screen and zoomed in on the huge Covenant ship, replaying the video as the large shipfired. The Covenant energy beams looked like pulse lasers . . . but tinged silver white, the samescintillation effect that they’d seen when their shields were hit.
Cortana switched back to view the doomed UNSC destroyerMinotaur . The lance of energy was needle-thin. It struck the vessel on A deck, aft, near the reactor. Cortana pulled the view back and slowed therecord frame by frame—the beam punctured through the entire ship, emanating below H deck by theengines.