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He hit the accelerator, but the rest was more a matter of luck rather than skill. The Master Chief pushed the ’Hog up a ramp, felt the bottom drop out of his stomach as the LRV flew through the air, dropped two or three levels, hit hard, slewed sideways, and came to a stop.
The Chief wrestled with the wheel, brought the front end around, and glanced at the timer. It read: 01:10:20. He stamped on the accelerator. The Warthog shot ahead, raced through a narrow tunnel, then slowed as he spotted the array of horizontally striped barrels that blocked the road ahead. Not only that—but the entire area was swarming with Covenant and Flood. The Master Chief jumped out, hit the ground running, and gunned an Elite who had the misfortune to get in the way.
The fighter was straight ahead, ramp down, waiting for him to come aboard. Plasma bolts stuttered past his head, explosions hurled debris in every direction, and then he was there, boots pounding on metal as he entered the ship.
The ramp came up just as a mob of Flood arrived, the Longsword shook in sympathy as another explosion rocked thePillar of Autumn , and the Spartan staggered as he made his way forward. Precious seconds were consumed as he dropped into the pilot’s seat, brought the engines on-line, and took the controls.
“Here we go.”
The Chief made use of the ship’s belly jets to push the Longsword up off the deck. He turned the fighter counterclockwise, and hit the throttles. Gee forces pushed him back into his seat as the spacecraft exploded out of its bay and blasted up through the atmosphere.
Yayap, who had made it to the edge of the foothills by then, heard a series of dull thuds and turned in time to see a line of red-orange flowers bloom along the length of theAutumn ’s much abused hull.
As the cruiser’s fusion drives went critical, a compact sun blossomed on the surface of Halo. Its thermonuclear sphere carved a five-kilometer crater into the superdense ring material and sent powerful pressure waves rippling throughout the structure. Both up- and down-spin of the explosion, the fireball flattened and sterilized the surface terrain. Within moments, the yellow-white core had consumed all of the available fuel, collapsed upon itself, and winked out.
Still spinning, but unable to withstand the forces exerted on this new weak point, the ring structure slowly tore itself apart. Huge chunks of debris tumbled end over end out into space, as a five-hundred-kilometer-long section of the ring world’s hull sliced through an even longer curve of brilliantly engineered metal, earth, and water, and produced a cascade of eerily silent explosions.
There was an insistent beeping sound as the wordsENGINE TEMP CRITICAL flashed on the control panel, and Cortana said, “Shut them down. We’ll need them later.”
The Master Chief reached up to flick some switches, got up out of his seat, and arrived in front of the viewport in time to see the last intact piece of Halo’s hull sheared in half by the dreadful slow-motion ballet of flying metal.