第21页
The clouds parted like a curtain drawn as a fireball a hundred meters across roared over their position. He saw the faint out?lines of dozens of Covenant battleships in low orbit.
"Plasma bombardment," Fred whispered.
He'd seen this before. They all had. When the Covenant con?quered a human world they fired their main plasma batteries at the planet—fired until its oceans boiled and nothing was left but a globe of broken glass.
"That's it," Kelly murmured. "We've lost. Reach is going to fall."
Fred watched as the plasma impacted upon the horizon and the sky turned white, then faded to black as millions of tons of ash and debris blotted out the sun.
"Maybe," Fred said. He gunned his Banshee. "Maybe not. Come on, we're not done yet."
SECTION I
THRESHOLD
CHAPTER FIVE
1637 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard Longsword fighter, uncharted system, Halo debris field. Three weeks later.
The Master Chief settled into the pilot's seat of the Longsword attack craft. He didn't fit. The contoured seat had been engi?neered to mate with a standard-issue Navy flight suit, not the bulky MJOLNIR armor.
He scratched his scalp and breathed deeply. The air tasted odd— it lacked the metallic quality of his suit's air scrubbers. This was the first quiet moment he'd had to sit, think, and remember. First there was the satisfaction after the successful space op at Reach, which went sour after Linda was killed and the Covenant glassed the planet... and Red Team. Then the time spent in a Pillar of Autumn cryotube, the flight from Reach, and the discovery of Halo.
And the Flood.
He stared out from the front viewport and fought down his revulsion at the memory of the Flood outbreak. Whoever had constructed Halo had used it to contain the sentient, virulent xenoform that had nearly claimed them all. The rapidly healing wound in his neck, inflicted by a Flood Infection Form during the final battle on Halo's surface, still throbbed.
He wanted to forget it all... especially the Flood. Everything inside him ached.
The system's moon, Basis, was a silver-gray disk against the darkness of space, and beyond it was the muted purple of the gas giant Threshold. Between them lay a glistening expanse of debris—metal, stone, ice, and everything else that had once been Halo.
ERIC NYLUND 35
"Scan it again," the Master Chief told Cortana.
"Already completed," her disembodied voice replied. "There's nothing out there. I told you: just dust and echoes."
The Master Chief's hand curled into a fist, and for a moment he felt the urge to slam it into something. He relaxed, surprised at his frayed temper. He'd been exhausted in the past—and without a doubt the fight on Halo had been the most harrowing of his career—but he'd never been prone to such outbursts.
The struggle against the Flood must have gotten to him, more than he'd realized.
With effort he banished the Flood from his mind. Either there'd be time to deal with it later... or there wouldn't. Worry?ing about it now served no useful purpose.