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Sam winced at the tone in his superior’s voice. He’d known Thom Shephard since the Academy and had never heard the man sound so grim.
“Look,” Shephard said, “I need someone I can depend on. Like it or not, that’s you, pal. You’ve cross-checked on cryo systems.”
Sam sighed. “Months ago . . . but yes.”
“I’m sending a feed to your terminal, Sam,” Shephard continued. “It’ll answer some of your questions anyway. Dump it to a portable ’pad, grab your gear and get down here.”
“Roger,” Sam said. He stood, shrugged into his uniform tunic, and stepped over to his terminal. He activated the computer and waited for the upload from Shephard.
As he waited, his eyes locked on a small two-dee photograph taped to the edge of the screen. Sam brushed his fingers against the photo. The pretty young woman frozen in the picture smiled back at him.
The terminal chimed as the feed from Shephard appeared in Sam’s message queue. “Receiving the feed, Chief,” he called out to the intercom pickup.
He opened the file. A frown creased his tired features as a new message scrolled across his screen.
>FILE ENCRYPTED/EYES ONLY/MARCUS, SAMUEL N./SN:18827318209-M.
>DECRYPTION KEY: [PERSONALIZED: “ELLEN’S ANNIVERSARY”]
He glanced back at the picture of his wife. He hadn’t seen Ellen in almost three years—since his last shore leave on Earth, in fact. He didn’t know anyone on active duty who’d been able to see their loved ones for years. The war simply didn’t allow for it.
Sam’s frown deepened. UNSC personnel generally avoided talking about the people back home. The war had been going badly for so long that morale was rock-bottom. Thinking about the home front only made things worse. The fact that Thom had personalized the security encoding was unusual enough; reminding Sam of his wife in the process was completely out of character for Chief Shephard. Someone was being security-conscious to the point of paranoia.
He punched in a series of numbers—the date of his wedding—and enabled the decryption suite. In seconds, the screen filled with schematics and tech readouts. His practiced eye scanned the file—and adrenaline suddenly spiked through his fatigue like a bolt of lightning.
“Christ,” he said, his voice suddenly hoarse. “Thom, is this what . . . who Ithink it is?”
“Damn right. Get down to Cryo Two on the double, Sam. We’ve got an important package to thaw out—and we drop back into real space soon.”
“On my way,” he said. He killed the intercom connection, his exhaustion forgotten.
Sam quickly dumped the tech file to his portable compad and deleted the original from his computer. He strode toward the door to his cabin, then stopped. He snatched Ellen’s picture from the workstation—almost as an afterthought—and shoved it into his pocket.
He sprinted for the lift. If the Captain wanted the inhabitant of Cryo Two revived, it meant that Keyes believed that the situation was about to go from bad to worse . . . or it already had.
Unlike vessels designed by humans—in which the command area was almost always located toward the ship’s bow—Covenant ships were constructed in a more logical fashion, which meant that their control rooms were buried deep within heavily armored hulls, making them impervious to anything less than a mortal blow.