第20页
"Yes, ma'am."
"And for God's sake," she said, narrowing her eyes to slits, "Catherine Halsey must never know. Her bleeding-heart sympathies for the Spartans have won her too many admirers at CENTCOM. If that woman wasn't so vital to the war we would have had her retired decades ago."
Ackerson nodded.
The three Naval officers thumbed their tablet readers and the files erased. They rose, and without another word, left the cage.
They had never been here.
None of this had ever been discussed.
Alone now, Ackerson reviewed his files and made plans. The first matter of business was already in the works: on-screen appeared the career record of SPARTAN-051.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
← ^ → CHAPTER
THREE
0940 HOURS, NOVEMBER 7, 2531 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \ GROOMBRIDGE 34 SYSTEM, NEAR CONSTRUCTION PLATFORM 966A (DECOMMISSIONED)
SPARTAN-051, Kurt, jumped into utter emptiness. It was a hundred-kilometer drop to the moon under his feet. He mentally made the adjustment to the free-floating world of space, and noted that technically there was no "under" or "above" in space—just vectors, masses, and velocities.
He switched on his reverse-angle camera and saw Kelly and Fred jump from the lock of the prowler after him. He knew not to turn his head to look. The motion would make him gyrate out of control. Besides, in the vacuum-enhanced variant of MJOLNIR armor, his mobility was a fraction of normal.
A green status light winked on, confirming they were all on the same vector.
They'd coast for several kilometers before they activated long-range thruster packs. Although slow, there were two good reasons to be cautious.
First, when their prowler. Circumference, had reentered normal space, the NAV Officer had picked up an echo, a partial ship silhouette, prowler class. He had dismissed this as an echo
from their reentry to normal space that had bounced off the moon. The NAV Officer had assured them there was nothing to worry about. Still, the anomaly bugged Kurt. In case there was another ship, Kurt wanted to be well away before igniting packs. No need to needlessly give away the stealth ship's position.
Second, they had detected an inert COM satellite on the dark side of the moon—something you'd expect if the system was being monitored for a sneak attack. No signal had emitted from the thing. The Circumference had jammed, and then fried it with a burst from a pulse laser.
Kurt just made the assumption this simple recon mission would be hot. That way, he'd be happy to be disappointed.
He activated the single-beam laser TEAMCOM system, and said, "ETA to day-night demarcation in five minutes. System check thrusters."
Kurt ran his own diagnostic. They couldn't take any chances with the packs. Designed for long-range deep-space operations, it was one of the riskiest pieces of equipment they'd been trained on. Even with triple redundancy in NAV system and stabilizers, one accident and there was enough compressed tri-amino hydrazine in the double fuel tanks to propel you so far and so fast off course, rescue would be an astronomically remote possibility.