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The last time he had worn it was when he had greeted the Alpha Company recruits. Since then he had meticulously cared for it, and learned everything there was about its maintenance. Its fusion pods had been refitted when Kurt had been assigned to recon Station Delphi, so it had sufficient power for fifteen years of continuous operation.
MJOLNIR armor was superior in every way to the SPI suit. Wearing it Kurt would be able to protect his SPARTAN-IIIs better, destroy these drones more efficiently, but after decades of
drilling into the Spartans the importance of working together, of being a family, the MJOLNIR armor would symbolically isolate him from them.
And that was the last thing he wanted.
He pulled a locker out from under the suit's stand and opened it. Within was a matte gray set of Semi-Powered Infiltration armor. He removed his boots and pulled on the PR leggings.
Lucy pointed to the MJOLNIR armor, and then at Kurt.
"No," he said. "That's not what I am anymore. I'm one of you."
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← ^ → SECTION IV
DR. CATHERINE HALSEY
CHAPTER
SIXTEEN
DATE STAMP [[ERROR]] ANOMALY \ ESTIMATED RANGE SEPTEMBER 15-DECEMBER 20, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \ ABOARD DECOMMISSIONED UNSC CHIROPTERA-CLASS VESSEL (ILLEGAL REGISTRY) BEATRICE, IN SLIPSPACE, LOCATION UNKNOWN
Dr. Halsey straightened her gray wool sliirt, smoothed her tattered lab coat, and then donned lead gloves and apron to protect her from the beta and alpha particles being emitted from the acceleration matrix. Around her lay the disassembled panels and radiation shields of the ship's Shaw-Fujikawa translight engines.
She delicately guided the spork she had confiscated from the Beatrice's galley through the tangle of electronics. She slipped the utensil's edge into the slot of the tiny screw on the supercooled superconducting magnet. She rechecked the calculations in her head. Two millimeters, three turns, should do it.
Dr. Halsey twisted and loosened the screw. The rainbow glow gushing from the matrix intensified, and she blinked tears from her eyes. Sparks danced off the metal plates and arced between titanium supports.
She glanced through the propped-open door to the bridge. The engineering display showed a 32 percent jump in coil power. Good enough.
She replaced the Shaw-Fujikawa core access panels and slumped to the floor.
Sixty years ago when Shaw-Fujikawa drives had first been
installed in spacecraft like this one, technicians had had to perform manual adjustments all the time. The magnetics that aligned the acceleration coils drifted out of phase when they transitioned into Slipstream space, where the laws of physics only occasionally worked as expected. No computer controls were used; electronics always malfunctioned close to the core.
Of course, many of those technicians had died or had mysteriously vanished.
Dr. Halsey had considered dropping out of Slipspace and powering down the Chiroptera-class vessel to make the adjustment. It would have been safer, but that first activation of the Shaw-Fujikawa engine had almost resulted in a coil overload. She didn't know if the little ship had another jump left in her.