第103页
John laughed.
"What's so funny?" the man growled.
"You idiots are bunched up."
A hail of darts hissed through the air from all sides. The men from the Pelican convulsed; one fired his rifle, but the shot went wide and high. They fell over, paralyzed.
John dropped to a crouch, grabbed a pistol from the man who'd punched him, and crawled on his stomach to the Pelican. He crept around the open hatch and swept the interior. Empty.
He scrambled into the cockpit and pulsed the Pelican's radar. He got a contact bearing of 110, fourteen kilometers out, but it moved on a parallel course to their position. John left the Pelican and ran across the field.
Red and Blue Teams were still hidden... and they would stay hidden forever, until he gave the all-clear.
Their all-clear signal wasn't something that could be wrung from John—not even torture or CPO Mendez's best coercion techniques would wrest it from him. He would rather have died than betray his teammates.
John whistled the singsong six-note melody and called: "Oly Oly Oxen Free!"
Red Team emerged first and marched across the meadow. Kelly paused to kick one of the men in the head; she took his ri?fle, too.
Linda and Fred dropped down from a tree branch and ran across the field. "Oly Oly Oxen Free," Linda repeated, grinning from ear to ear. "All out in the free. We're all free."
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALYX Estimated 0510 hours, September 23,2552 (Military Calendar)\Aboard captured Covenant flagship, Epsilon Eridani system.
Cortana only partially listened to the debate between the Master Chief and the others. The discussion was moot. She had projected the outcome as 100 percent certain that John would convince them all to go, or—failing that—that he would con?vince the Lieutenant to let him go alone to the surface to investi?gate the signal ... a signal that in her opinion was so easily copied and so blatantly unencrypted it defied explanation how the Chief had conjectured that his team of Spartans had sent it.
Instead of partaking in the slow and inefficient conversation, she analyzed the Covenant pattern of movement in the Epsilon Eridani system and discerned three important things.
First, the Covenant warships had extremely regular elliptical orbits about Reach. There were a total of thirteen heavy cruisers and three carriers moving three hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet. Two exceptions to this patrol pattern were a pair of light cruisers hovering over Menachite Mountain— trapped at the bottom of the gravity well and therefore not an im?mediate threat to her ship.
Second, there was a blind spot in their patrol patterns that would make a perfect rendezvous location to extract the Chief and the others from their soon-to-be-executed surface mission. She plotted ingress and egress courses, and started the precise calculations she would need if she was to initiate a Slipspace jump so close to Reach.
Arid third, and most interesting to Cortana, 217 smaller Cove-