第185页
A rubbery tentacle reached in along the seam of the drop-ship's hatch.
John raised his hand and signaled Linda to stand down. He recognized the alien limb—the splitting cilia feelers and globu?lar sensory organs could belong only to a Covenant Engineer.
The Engineer pushed open the hatch and entered the ship, floating past John and Linda as if they weren't there. It chittered and squawked as it ran its tentacles over the foreign armor plates and spatters of lead. Two more Engineers bolted through the open hatch and joined the first.
As long as they left the single-minded aliens to their work, they wouldn't raise an alarm. But what else was out there?
John eased against the frame of the hatch and slid the fiber?optic probe outside. There was a line of dropships, Seraph fight?ers, and other singleships that stretched away into the shadows. Swarms of Engineers, thousands of the creatures, hovered and drifted throughout the area. They moved parts, disassembled and reassembled sections of ship hulls, and plumbed plasma coils. There was no trace of a welcome party of Elites waiting for Blue Team.
John turned the optic probe up and saw a latticework deck overhead with tools, welders, and spotlights hanging like jungle vines. It was as good a place as any to get their bearings.
John turned and pointed at Linda and Will, then out the hatch and up. They nodded and moved out.
304 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
Five seconds later acknowledgment lights from Blue Four and Three winked on. It was safe for the rest of them.
John grabbed the upper lip of the hatchway and flipped up onto the top of the dropship. He grabbed a dangling cord and pulled himself onto the latticework deck where Fred and Linda perched, watching and making sure the bay was clear.
Grace and Fred disembarked and scrambled silently up into the darkness, joining them.
John pointed two fingers at his eyes and then made a flat fan motion across the space of the bay. The Spartans moved to care?fully scan the area.
From his shadowy overview John saw that this place was a repair-and-refit facility, with slots for hundreds of singleships. The room curved out of view three hundred meters in either di?rection. It must run the circumference of the station's hub.
Apart from the thousands of busy Engineers, John spotted only two Grunts wearing white methane-breather masks. It was not a color designation he had seen before. They pushed carts containing barrels of sloshing fluids. They would be easy to avoid.
One side of the bay had a series of sealed doors that he pre?sumed led to air locks. The opposite wall of the bay had a meter-thick window through which poured an intense blue light.
Every thirty meters along that transparent wall was a recessed alcove. Overflowing from the nearest alcove were purple poly?hedral cargo barrels, old charred plasma coils, and plates of the silver-blue Covenant alloy. But what piqued John's interest was what was next to this pile of junk: a holographic terminal.