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He stood and said nothing.
"Very well. I suppose you know your limitations better than anyone else." She turned the display back around. "I wanted to
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speak about your report on the alien construct—Halo. I've pieced together a bit of the story based on Admiral Whitcomb's recounting of your adventures, Cortana's debriefing, and the mis?sion logs of Locklear, Johnson... and the curious partial mission log of one PFC Wallace Jenkins."
The Master Chief shifted uneasily.
"There are inconsistencies that I must resolve before we get back to Earth." She pushed her glasses higher onto the bridge of her nose. "One of them is Sergeant Johnson." She tapped in commands on her keyboard. "Please step closer, John. I want you to see this with me."
The Master Chief moved alongside her chair. His massive weight thudded through the thick deck plating. Two meters tall and half a ton of metal and somehow Dr. Halsey couldn't help thinking of him occasionally as the same little boy she had stolen from his parents in Elysium City.
No. John had changed. She hadn't. She was the one who still carried the three-decade-old festering guilt.
She took a deep breath and refocused her attention on the video records before her. On screen played mission logs that showed Covenant and Marines in firefights, the odd Forerunner architec?ture in the interior of the Halo construct, and the terrifying omni-parasitic life-form known as the Flood.
She replayed the mission record of Private Jenkins and the first Flood attack.
John stiffened as Captain Keyes appeared on screen and as the Flood consumed the Captain and his squad. Sergeant Johnson was there, too, fighting and cursing ... until the hordes of tiny, podlike Infection Forms swarmed over him.
"The Sergeant survived," she said. "The only human to have direct exposure to the Flood meta-organism and walk away."
"I know," the Master Chief whispered. "I'm not sure how he survived. How could anyone live through that?"
"That's the simple part," Dr. Halsey told him without looking up from her displays. She tapped a key, and the Sergeant's medi?cal records flashed on screen. "See, here?" She touched a file dated three years before. "He was diagnosed with Boren's Syndrome."
"I haven't heard of it," the Chief said.
"I'm not surprised. It's caused by exposure to high-yield
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plasma. Like the burst released by a Covenant plasma grenade. We don't see many cases—people usually die from the direct ef?fects of those weapons long before these secondary symptoms manifest.
"Apparently, the Sergeant captured a crate of plasma grenades from the Covenant during the Siege of Paris IV He used them all—received a commendation for bravery ... and a twelve-hundred-rad cumulative dose of radiation as an unanticipated bonus."
John was silent for several minutes. Dr. Halsey wasn't sure if he was reading the computer files, contemplating her words, or trying to confirm all this on a private COM channel with Cor-tana. His impenetrable armor made discussions with normal so?cial conventions nearly impossible. It irritated her, yet without that armor with its constant hydrostatic pressure and automated biofoam injectors, John would have literally fallen apart by now.