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Miranda Keyes was the ballsiest officer in the fleet to go after that Covenant ship on her own. Was she nuts? Or trying to live up to the legendary reputation of her father?
Lash would never know what that felt like. His dad had been a welder on the Cradle … at least before the Cradle had been destroyed at Sigma Octanus earlier this year. Dad had always wanted to be a hero. He'd gotten his wish.
The Dusk—with the two frigates Redoubtable and Paris, and the corvette Coral Sea—had approximated the entrance vector of the Covenant ship, hoping to find out where they were headed, that or assist In Amber Clad in blowing her to hell.
They had been caught in the wake of the Covenant craft and accelerated to many times the maximum velocity of any UNSC ship in Slipspace. A lucky break. They'd have never caught it otherwise.
Technically "acceleration" and "velocity" were the wrong terms. They didn't map to the eleven nondimensions of Slipspace, but Commander Lash had never gotten the knack of thinking so abstractly. He left that to his NAV Officer.
What this wake effect meant in concrete terms was Covenant ships traveled geometrically faster from point to point than their ships. One more strategic advantage the aliens possessed.
Commander Lash surveyed his bridge crew. His first. Lieutenant Commander Julian Waters, sat next to him, scanning engine output semantics, his forehead furrowed with worry lines. At NAV sat Lieutenant Bethany Durruno running diagnostics, nodding off. She had ice in her veins, and sadly that calm-under-disaster fortitude was wasted in Slipspace. At the sensor station was Lieutenant Joe Yang; his youngest officer had seen more battle in the last four years than most saw in a lifetime, and he had suffered for it. Back in Engineering was Lieutenant Commander Xaing Cho, doing his job and the job of three other technicians.
They had all pulled double shifts, and the waiting was started to wear at them all.
The Dusk had been caught between rotations when the Covenant hit Earth. The ship normally had a crew of ninety They had to make do with a complement of forty-three.
And they were alone now, too.
The Redoubtable, the Paris, and the Coral Sea, with their larger engines, had moved ahead in the Slipstream wake. They'd passed out of limited COM range an hour ago.
"Sensor hits correlated, sir," Yang said.
A graph appeared on Commander Lash's display, plotting frequency and temporal distributions of their ion trail. It was a power-law decay.
That was the last ion they could expect. The trail was as cold as liquid helium. That meant either the Dusk had lost In Amber Clad … or it had dropped out of Slipspace.
"Stand by for transition," Lash said.
His officers snapped to, readying the Dusk to drop into the normal interstellar vacuum—or into the middle of a star or planet, for all they knew. There had been no time to plot a course.
Commander Lash took a deep breath. "Jettison the HORNET mines," he told Lieutenant Commander Waters.