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The purple light of the grav beam in the hole darkened; it seemed to fade from view... but it also began to hurt to look at.
"They're pushing us back," Admiral Whitcomb said. "Li, crawl topside and launch a couple of Jackhammers up this pipe."
"Yes, sir," Li replied—eager to return to the fight. He nodded at John, grabbed a Jackhammer rocket launcher, and moved to the hatch.
The Admiral frowned and shook his head. "No way a rocket will make it up a kilometer of this tunnel. Gotta try anyway."
The dropship stopped rising, bobbed in place a moment, and slowly sank back down through the tunnel.
Li opened the side hatch. The intense purple light from the grav beam flooded the interior of the ship.
204 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
Dr. Halsey inhaled sharply, and the Master Chief turned to see what had startled her.
For a moment he thought the crystal she had brought with her had shattered. But it hadn't broken, not exactly. The top half of the slender shard had split along its facets and opened like a flower blossom. The sapphire petals undulated, and as the ultraviolet light of the grav beam fell upon them, the crystal opened wider. The facets twirled and spun in a complex geo?metric dance. The crystal seemed to reshape itself, and it pulsed a cool green.
The light inside the ship cleared—all traces of the purple tint seemed to recede like a tide.
The dropship lurched upward.
"What the hell—" Polaski, caught unawares, grasped the yoke and pulled back. Their dropship hummed with power and shot up through the tunnel.
"Gravity," Dr. Halsey whispered and stared into the opened facets of the crystal. "This thing warped space when we first ap?proached. It apparently has an effect on artificial gravity fields as well. I can't wait to get this into a lab."
The dropship emerged from the hole, and sunlight flooded the interior.
Once out of the grav beam, the slender stone folded back upon itself, closing petal-like fragments, melding back into a single smooth shard. Dr. Halsey plucked up the stone and slipped it back into her lab coat pocket; she returned her attention to Kelly's biosigns.
The air over Menachite Mountain was thick with circling flocks of Banshee fliers and Seraph fighters. The three-hundred-meter-long light cruiser had company, too. Six more Covenant cruisers faced their tiny dropship, plasma turrets tracking them.
A series of icons flashed on Polaski's console. "They've got weapons lock," she said, the calm in her voice cracking slightly around the edges.
"They won't fire," Admiral Whitcomb declared. There was steel resolution in his words—as if this weren't a guess on his part, but rather an order that the Covenant had better follow. He set his hands on his hips and watched the ships, seeming to stare the cruisers down. "They want whatever the doctor and her team
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discovered ... and they want it bad enough to let us shoot at them and not so much as spit in our direction."
"Sir," the Master Chief said. "We're to rendezvous with Cor-tana and the captured flagship at oh-seven-fifteen hours. That gives us only twenty minutes, sir."