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She propped her rifle on the edge of the open pod and aimed.
Jackals crawled over the Pelican—one of the Elite warriors appeared as well, maneuvering in a harness,flying over the ship. The Elite gestured imperiously, directing the Jackals to search the ship.
“Fire,” the Master Chief said.
Linda fired once. The grenades detonated; the chain reaction set off the twenty kilograms of C-12.
A subsonic fist slammed into the Master Chief and threw him to the far side of the landing pod. Eventwenty meters away, the sides of the craft warped and the top edges sheared away.
He looked over the edge.
There was a crater where the Pelican had been. If anything had survived that blast, it was now in orbit.
“We have a way in,” the Master Chief remarked.
Linda nodded.
In the distance, where the station curved out of view, more Covenant pods landed—and the MasterChief saw the silhouettes of hundreds of Jackals and Elite fighters crawling and jetting their way closer.
“Let’s go, Blue-One.”
They pulled themselves toward the hole. The detonation had blown through five decks, leaving a tunnelof ragged-edged metal and sputtering gas hoses.
The Master Chief called up the station’s blueprints on his display. “That one,” he said, and pointed twodecks down. “B level. That’s where bay nine and theCircumference should be, three hundred meters toport.”
They climbed into the interior and into B deck’s corridor. The station’s emergency lights were on, fillingthe passage with dull red illumination.
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The Master Chief paused and signaled her to halt. He pulled out the Lotus antitank mine from his satcheland set it on the deck. He set the sensitivity to maximum and triggered its proximity detectors. Anythingthat tried to follow them would get a surprise.
The Master Chief and Linda gripped the handrails along the corridor and pulled themselves up thecurved hall.
Flashes of automatic-weapons fire flashed in the low light, just ahead of their position.
“Blue-One,” the Master Chief said, “Ahead, ten meters—there’s a pressure door open.”
They quickly took positions on either side of the door. He sent his optical probe around the corner.
The docking bay had a dozen ship berths on two levels. The Master Chief spotted a few batteredPelicans; a station service bot; and in berth eleven, a sleek private craft held in place by massive serviceclamps. Where the ship’s name should have been painted on the prow there was only a simple circle.That had to be the target.
Two berths aft, four Marines in vac suits were pinned down by plasma and needler fire. The MasterChief turned his optical probe and saw what was pinning them down: thirty Jackals were in the forwardportion of the bay, slowly advancing, under cover of their energy shields.
The Marines tossed frag grenades. The Jackals scrambled for cover and turned their shields.
Three silent explosions flashed in the vacuum. Not one of the Jackals fell.