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Admiral Whitcomb consulted his watch and then glanced at the Covenant ships gathering around them and edging closer. "Polaski, get us out of here. Plot a course to your rendezvous point—and make this crate fly as fast as you can!"
"Aye aye, sir." Polaski angled the ship into the upper atmo?sphere of Reach; the sky darkened from turquoise to slate gray to midnight blue and then inky black, filled with stars.
As their dropship left the cruisers behind, it moved painfully slow compared to the agile Seraph fighters. They formed up around her, four to the port and four on the starboard of their craft. A pair of the teardrop-shaped singleships pulled ahead of her, slowed... and blocked their path.
"They're boxing us in," Polaski said and decelerated their ship.
"Warrant Officer," the Admiral said and set a hand gently on her shoulder. "Ram them. Full speed."
Polaski swallowed. "Aye, sir." One of her hands cinched her crash harness tight. The other hand passed over the velocity stripe on the control panel, and shoved it to full power.
The dropship jumped—straight toward the Seraph fighters in their path. The two fighters tumbled aside with a scant three me?ters to spare, and the dropship raced past them.
Locklear peered out of the port display and whistled. "Does anyone else," he whispered, "think it's a little crowded up here?"
The Master Chief looked over Locklear's shoulder. There had been a dozen small warships when they had descended only a few hours ago... now there were three times that number in or?bit around Reach.
There were light cruisers that looked like luminous manta rays; there were four carriers with their bulbous sections, and the space near them was aglow with swarms of Seraph singlecraft; there were a handful of destroyers, sleek and fast, bristling with plasma turrets.
There was also wreckage: Pieces of Covenant ships tumbled in orbit, raw ragged chunks of the alloy plating, tangles of plasma
206 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
conduits still aglow from the heat they carried, and clouds of metal that had been vaporized and had cooled into mists of glit?tering dust.
"Cortana's been busy in our absence," Lieutenant Haverson remarked. He nodded approvingly at the carnage.
The Master Chief detected flickers of light and dark from the launch bays of a Covenant carrier. He activated his visor's mag?nification and saw a legion of Elites in thruster packs, and a score of the tentacled engineering drones leaving the bay.
"Singleships, drones, and Elite boarding parties on intercept vectors," Polaski announced. "Inbound—" She paused and double-checked her scans. "Jesus. They're inbound from all directions."
"Get us to the rendezvous coordinates," Admiral Whitcomb ordered. "And don't spare the horses."
"Sir," Polaski replied, her voice icy cold, "these are the ren?dezvous coordinates."
The Master Chief searched for their captured ship on any display—and saw only the enemy.
Cortana and Ascendant Justice reappeared in space; it was a tight fit.