第175页
Admiral Whitcomb and Sergeant Johnson entered the room. The Spartans snapped to rigid attention. "Officer on deck!" the Master Chief shouted, and they all saluted.
"At ease," Admiral Whitcomb said. "Please sit down."
The Master Chief stepped forward. "With respect, these chairs will not support the weight of our gear, Admiral."
"Of course," the Admiral said. "Well, make yourselves as comfortable as you can. This is an informal meeting." He snorted.
ERIC NYLUND
287
"I just wanted to see who was left on board and alive." He looked past the open doors to the Officers' Club. "Lieutenant Haverson will join us shortly. He's investigating the site of Corporal Lock-lear's... accident."
A holographic projector pad upon the bar flickered to life, and Cortana's slender body appeared. Chunks of broken crystal on the pad refracted the light and distorted her image so she ap?peared half melted and cast prismed arcs of light onto the walls.
Sergeant Johnson stepped over to the bar and swept the pad clean.
"Thank you, Sergeant," Cortana said, looking over her re-sorted figure.
"My pleasure," he replied with a grin.
Cortana faced the Admiral. "Sir," she said, "you'll be happy to hear that I'm detecting no signals, residual radiation, or any transient contacts ... which is precisely what you would expect from a normal Slipspace journey."
Admiral Whitcomb nodded, sighed, and eased into one of the leather-backed chairs at the table's head. "Well, that's one small blessing."
"And here's evidence that Doctor Halsey's crystal was indeed destroyed," Lieutenant Haverson said as he entered the room. He paused to seal the door behind him.
Haverson sat next to the Admiral and set a small plastic bag flat on the table. "I found Locklear exactly where Cortana said he would be: B-Deck, the medical storage room. Overloaded electronics at the site are consistent with a high-energy radiation burst... as are the burns on the Corporal's body."
He grimaced and added, "If it means anything, his death was quick. And these"—he tapped the plastic bag on the table—"are crystalline fragments that I found at the site. At first glance they appear to be a match to the shard found on Reach." He shook his head. "But what I found isn't sufficient mass to account for the entire crystal. So unless it was atomized and left no trace, a fact inconsistent with the presence of these larger pieces, then the rest of that crystal has to be somewhere else."
Cortana tapped her foot, and one of her eyebrows arched. "If the radiation burst detected before our jump correlates with the destruction of Doctor Halsey's crystal," she said, "then there is
288 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
an alternative explanation. The timing between that explosion and the radiation flare was only forty-seven milliseconds. Since the crystal had unusual space- and time-bending properties, the missing fragments may have been 'squeezed' out of the ship and into Slipspace."
Haverson asked incredulously, "You mean pieces of the great?est scientific discovery in human history are"—he nodded past the walls of the Gettysburg—"lost in Slipspace?"