第117页

　　"What  is  it,  Sergeant?"  The  Admiral's  voice  died  in  his  throat.
　　The  Master  Chief's  motion  tracker  flickered  on  his  heads-up  display,  but  there  was  no  solid  contact...  nor  did  he  see  any?thing  across  the  entire  three-kilometer-wide  cavern.  Had  it  picked  up  a  camouflaged  Elite?  No,  the  dust  in  the  air  would  have  certainly  given  it  away.
　　"No  one  move,"  the  Admiral  whispered.
　　John  saw  them,  then.  He  saw  them  all.
　　He  had  missed  them  before  because  he  had  thought  it  was  the  haze  in  the  air  rippling,  the  dust,  maybe  the  distance  causing  a  miragelike  image.  He  hadn't  thought  it  possible  for  so  many  Covenant  to  be  so  still.
　　On  each  level  of  the  twelve  tiered  galleries  that  circumscribed  the  gigantic  room  stood  Covenant  soldiers.  They  crowded  the  balconies  with  Grunts,  Jackals  whose  energy  shields  popped  on,  snarling  Elites,  and  several  pairs  of  Hunters  with  fuel  rod  can?nons  glowing  green.
　　The  whine  of  thousands  of  plasma  weapons  charging  filled  the  air  like  a  swarm  of  locusts.
　　No  one  moved.  No  one  breathed  except  Locklear,  who  ex?haled  a  long  and  heartfelt  expletive.
　　John  tried  to  count  them  all.  There  had  to  be  thousands—on  every  level.  A  battalion  at  least,  maybe  more.  They  wouldn't  even  have  to  aim.  All  they  had  to  do  was  shoot  and  fill  the  space  with  needle  shards  and  boiling  energy.
　　190 HALO:  FIRST  STRIKE
　　They'd  be  vaporized  before  they  could  get  halfway  to  the  tun?nel  at  their  backs.
　　A  Hunter  pair  roared  with  rage;  they  leveled  their  fuel  rod  cannons  at  John  and  his  team  and,  with  steady  aim,  discharged  their  weapons.
　　A  split  second  later  the  rest  of  the  alien  horde  opened  fire.
　　CHAPTER  TWENTY-ONE
　　TIME:DATE  RECORD  ANOMALYX  Estimated  0640  Hours,  September  23,2552  (Military  Calendar)\Aboard  captured  Covenant  flagship  Ascendant  Justice,  periphery  of  Epsilon  Eridani  system.
　　Ascendant  Justice  emerged  from  the  non-Euclidian,  non-Einsteinian  realms  that  humans  had  erroneously  called  "Slip-space."  There  was  neither  "space"  nor  anything  to  "slip"  across  in  the  alternate  dimensions.
　　The  ship  displaced  a  cloud  of  ice  crystals  that  had  for  millen?nia  been  melted  and  refrozen  into  delicate  weblike  geometries.  Ascendant  Justice's  running  lights  diffused  through  these  parti?cles  and  made  a  glimmering  halo  of  hard-edged  reflections.  It  reminded  Cortana  of  the  snowglobe  that  Dr.  Halsey  had  kept  on  her  desk:  the  Matterhorn  and  a  little  Swiss  climber  scaling  its  three-centimeter  height—all  swirling  in  the  center  of  a  micro?scopic  blizzard.
　　The  frozen  Oort  cloud  around  her  was  significantly  larger,  but  it  was  still  a  charming  effect  and  a  welcome  sight  from  the  abyss  ofSlipspace.
　　Cortana  had  fled  the  Epsilon  Eridani  system,  but  only  to  its  edge—a  short  jump  of  a  few  billion  kilometers  from  Reach  and  the  Master  Chief.
　　The  odds  that  the  Covenant  would  find  her  were  long—  astronomical,  in  fact,  even  if  they  had  ships  on  patrol.  The  Oort  cloud's  volume  was  too  large  to  search  in  a  hundred  years.  Still,  she  powered  down  virtually  every  system  on  the  ship  except  the  fiision  generators—and  her  own  power  systems,  of  course.