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Fred felt a hot pain in the tip of his finger. He drew his bare hand away and a tiny track of blood smeared the rock.
The glittering symbols on the wall took on a greasy cast, and the reflection from his helmet lights thickened and almost seemed to be absorbed by the minerals.
He flicked off his helmet lights. The symbols in the rock emit?ted a faint illumination of their own: a soft reddish glow like heated metal. The light intensified and spread across the spiral on the wall, starting from where his blood had fallen; those sym?bols warmed to a pleasant orange, then yellow-gold.
A new symbol in the center of the spiral appeared that hadn't been there a second ago ... or perhaps it had been, but had lain just beneath the surface. It heated and became increasingly visi?ble, a single triangle that glowed white.
Fred was inexorably drawn to this central figure. He reached for it; there was no heat. He slowly stretched and touched the symbol with his exposed fingertip.
Warm white light raced along the spiral of symbols, then traced a path down the hallway and into the distance. The entire cavern seemed sudden alive with radiance and shadow. Even with the step-down luminosity filters in his helmet, Fred had to blink and squint.
The wall before him rumbled and seams appeared at the cen?tral figure, dozen of lines that curved in a radial pattern—and then pulled away to reveal a corridor behind.
142 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
Fred realized that he was holding his breath. He exhaled.
This new corridor was twenty meters high—large enough for a titan to stride down its length. It vanished into the distance, a straight line that gently sloped deeper into the earth. The floor was paved with asymmetric blue tiles patterned to look like waves lapping upon a shore. Four-meter-tall symbols of gold were centered and inlaid into the mirror-smooth walls. These gi?ant triangles, squares, bars, and circles began to emit the same soft light... and Fred felt his foot shuffle forward.
He stopped, shook his head, and looked away. He checked his radiation counter; it pulsed, and then fell back to a normal back?ground count.
He keyed the COM. "Doctor Halsey, I think I've found what you've been looking for. Sending video feed now. Copy?"
There was a long pause. The COM was open, but Dr. Halsey wasn't responding.
"Doctor Halsey, copy?"
"Yes," she finally said over the COM. "Don't move, Fred. And don't touch anything. Excellent work. Kelly, Isaac, Vinh, Will— meet me at Fred's location."
Fred wanted to stare at the gold symbols and the light they cast, but something warned him that this would be dangerous. He had long ago learned to listen to that inner voice when on pa?trol or in the heat of battle. It had saved him from dozens of am?bushes. He kept his eyes on the dirt floor of the tunnel. There was something too fascinating and nearly familiar about those sym?bols. They reminded him of the Greek mythology that Deja, the Spartans' first teacher, had taught—legends of hauntingly beau?tiful creatures who lured the unwary to certain death. Sirens.