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CHAPTER ELEVEN
D+73:34:16 (SPARTAN-117 Mission Clock) /
On board theTruth and Reconciliation .
He wasn’t here, wasn’t there, wasn’tanywhere insofar as the Chief could tell from within the strange never-never land of Halo’s teleportation net. He couldn’t see or hear anything, save a sense of dizzying velocity. The Spartan felt his body stitched back together, one molecule at a time. He saw snatches of what looked like the interior of a Covenant ship as bands of golden light strobed up and disappeared over his head.
Something was wrong and he was just starting to figure out what it was—the inside of the ship seemed to be upside down—when he flipped head over heels and crashed to the deck.
He’d materialized with his feet planted firmly on the corridor’s ceiling.
“Oh!” Cortana exclaimed. “I see, the coordinate data needs to be—”
The Chief came to his feet, slapped the general area where his implants were, and shook his head. The AI sounded contrite. “Right. Sorry.”
“Never mind that,” the Spartan said. “Give me a sit-rep.”
She patched back into the Covenant computing systems, a much easier task now that they were aboard one of the enemy’s warships.
“The Covenant network is absolute chaos,” she replied. “From what I’ve been able to piece together, the leadership ordered all ships to abandon Halo when they found the Flood, but they were too late. The Flood overwhelmed this cruiser and captured it.”
“I assume,” he said, “that’sbad .”
“The Covenant think so. They’re terrified that the Flood will repair the ship and use it to escape from Halo. They sent a strike team to neutralize the Flood and prepare the ship for immediate departure.”
The Chief peered down the corridor. The bulkheads were violet. Or was that lavender? Strange patterns marbled the material, like the oily sheen of a beetle’s carapace. Whatever it was, he didn’t care for it, especially on a military vessel, but who knew? Maybe the Covenant thought olive drab was for wimps.
He started forward, but quickly came up short as a voice that verged on a groan came in over his implants.“Chief . . . Don’t be a fool . . . Leave me.”
It was Keyes’ voice.
Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK. He clung to the tether of his CNI carrier wave, and “heard” familiar voices. An iron-hard, rasping male voice. A tart, warm female voice.
He knew them.
Was this another memory?
He was struggling to dredge up new pieces of his past to delay the numbing advance of the alien presence in his mind. It was harder to maintain a grasp on who he was, as the various pieces of his life—the things that made him who he was—were stripped away, one at a time.
Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK.
The voices. They were talking about him. The Master Chief, the AI Cortana.
He felt a sense of mounting panic. They shouldn’tbe here.
The other grew stronger, and pressed forward, eager to learn more about these creatures that were so important to the struggling prisoner who clung so stubbornly to identity.