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Space around the Covenant ship boiled and pulled apart—and two more alien ships appeared.
They, too, ignored the dropship. Was it too small to bother with? The Master Chief didn’t care. His luck,it seemed, was holding.
He checked the radar—thirty kilometers to the docking ring. He ignited the engines to slow them down.He had to or they would crash into the station.
Twenty kilometers.
Rumbling shook the dropship. They slowed—but it wasn’t going to be enough.
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Ten kilometers.
“Hang on,” he told Linda and James.
The sudden impact whiplashed the Master Chief back and forth in his seat. The straps holding himsnapped.
He blinked . . . saw only blackness. His vision cleared and he noted that his shield bar was dead. Itslowly began to fill again. Every display and monitor in the cockpit had shattered.
The Master Chief shook off the disorientation and pulled himself aft.
The interior of the dropship was a mess. Everything tied down had come loose. Ammunition boxes hadbroken open in the crash landing and loose carriages filled the air. Coolant leaked, spraying blobs ofblack fluid. In zero gravity, everything looked like the inside of a shaken snowglobe.
James and Linda floated off the deck of the Pelican. They slowly moved.
“Any injuries?” the Master Chief asked.
“No,” Linda replied.
“I think so,” James said. “I mean, no. I’m good, sir. Was that a landing or did those Covenant ships takea shot at us?”
“If they had, we wouldn’t be here to talk about it. Get whatever gear you can and get out, double time,”the Master Chief said.
The Master Chief grabbed an assault rifle and a Jackhammer launcher. He found a satchel. Inside was akilogram of C-12, detonators, and a Lotus antitank mine. Those would come in handy. He salvaged fiveintact clips of ammunition but couldn’t locate his thruster pack. He’d have to do without one.
“No more time,” he said. “We’re sitting ducks here. Out the side hatch now.”
Linda went first. She paused, and—once she was satisfied the Covenant weren’t lying in ambush—motioned them forward.
The Master Chief and James exited, clung to the side of the Pelican in zero gravity, and took flankingpositions at the fore and aft ends of the dropship.
Space dock Gamma was a three-kilometer-diameter ring. Dull gray metal arced in either direction. On
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the surface were communications dishes and a few conduits—no real cover. The docking bay doorswere sealed tight. The station wasn’t spinning. The dockmaster AI must have shut the place up tightwhen it detected the unsecured NAV database.
The Master Chief frowned when he spotted the tail end of their Pelican—crumpled and embedded intothe station’s hull. Its engines were ruined. The dropship jutted out at an angle; its prow and the chargesof C-12 that were supposed to have blasted them into a Covenant ship—now pointed into the air.
The Master Chief started to drift off the station. He clipped himself to the hull of the dropship.