第6页
“It was just a matter of time, Lieutenant.” He sighed. “We can’t hide here forever.”
ThePillar seemed to glide out of the shadow cast by the gas giant, and into bright sunlight.
Keyes’ eyes widened with surprise as the ship cleared the gas giant. He had expected to see a Covenant cruiser, Seraph fighters, or some other military threat.
He hadn’t expected to see the massive object floating in a Lagrange point between Threshold and its moon, Basis.
The construct was enormous—a ring-shaped object that shimmered and glowed with reflected starlight, like a jewel lit from within.
The outer surface was metallic and seemed to be engraved with deep geometric patterns. “Cortana,” Captain Keyes said. “Whatis that?”
A foot-high hologram faded into view above a small holopad near the captain’s station. Cortana—the ship’s powerful artificial intelligence—frowned as she activated the ship’s long-range detection gear. Long lines of digits scrolled across the sensor displays and rippled the length of Cortana’s “body” as well.
“The ring is ten thousand kilometers in diameter,” Cortana announced, “and twenty-two point three kilometers thick. Spectroscopic analysis is inconclusive, but patterns do not match any known Covenant materials, sir.”
Keyes nodded. The preliminary finding was interesting,very interesting, since Covenant ships had already been present when theAutumn dropped out of Slipspace and right into their laps. When he first saw the ring, Keyes had a sinking feeling that the construct was a large Covenant installation—one far beyond the scope of human engineering. The thought that the construct might also be beyondCovenant engineering held some small comfort.
It also made him nervous.
Under intense pressure from enemy warships in the Epsilon Eridani system—the location of the UNSC’s last major naval base, Reach—Cortana had been forced to launch the ship toward a random set of coordinates, a standard procedure to lead the Covenant forces away from Earth.
Now it appeared that the men and women aboard thePillar of Autumn had succeeded in leaving their original pursuers behind, only to encounter even more Covenant forceshere . . . wherever “here” was.
Cortana aimed a long-range camera array at the ring and a close-up snapped into focus. Keyes let out a long, slow whistle. The construct’s inner surface was a mosaic of greens, blues, and browns—trackless desert, jungles, glaciers, and oceans. Streaks of white clouds cast deep shadows on the terrain below. The ring rotated and brought a new feature into view: a tremendous hurricane forming over a large body of water.
Equations again scrolled across the AI’s semitransparent body as she continued to evaluate the incoming data. “Captain,” Cortana said, “the object is clearly artificial. There’s a gravity field that controls the ring’s spin and keeps the atmosphere inside. I can’t say with one hundred percent certainty, but it appears that the ring has an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere, and Earth-normal gravity.”