第95页
Over INTERSHIPCOM Voro linked to the Xida Lekgolo pair. "Report."
Paruto spoke: "No breaches detected. All ship personal accounted for. No taint exists."
Voro exhaled. There might yet be hope they could survive.
"Detecting the Twilight Compunction, sir," Y'gar said, "and two other Jiralhanae frigates on an intercept course. Their lateral lines are hot."
The crisis was not yet over but already they returned to the old hatreds. Voro scrutinized the fleet and saw others turning and firing on ships they had only moments ago fought side by side with.
"Make ready to transition to Slipspace," Voro ordered.
"With respect, sir," Y'gar whispered. "We are leaving the battle?"
"To stay here and fight until we are all dead is madness. Everything had changed. We will heed the summons of Imperial Admiral Xytan 'jar Wattinree. We must warn them what has happened… the jiralhanae, the Flood."
"Slipspace matrix energized," Zasses said. He shook his head, confused. "Anomalies detected in dimension YED-4, sir… cause undetermined."
"Can we safely transition?" Voro asked.
"Unknown, sir."
Slipstream space dimensions didn't exhibit "anomalies." Was this something caused by the holy ring? There was no time to investigate. They'd have to risk it.
"Set course and execute transition," Voro told him. "Salia system, outpost world Joyous Exultation."
The UNSC prowler Dusk hovered in the shadow zone of the fourth planet's moon.
It was so quiet on the bridge Commander Lash heard his own breathing and heartbeat. Every screen showed the battle raging among the Covenant forces.
Music from the last act of Der Ring des Nihelungen played in his mind—Gotterdammerung, Ragnarok, Armageddon… the end of the entire goddammed universe.
"Confirm all recorders on high-def capture mode," Lash said.
Durruno double-checked her station. "Confirmed, sir," she whispered.
"Sir," Lieutenant Yang said, "as ordered, capacitors charged, and all secure to enter Slipspace on vector tango."
Lash and Lieutenant Commander Waters stared at the viewscreens, watching the Covenant fleet destroy itself.
"Whatever the hell is happening out there," Waters remarked, "at least they haven't spotted us."
"Sir," Yang asked, "what do you think is happening?"
"There's only one thing it could be," Lash answered. "A Covenant civil war."
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← ^ → SECTION V
BLUE TEAM
CHAPTER
TWENTY-THREE
1550 HOURS, NOVEMBER 3, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR] \ SOL SYSTEM, PLANET EARTH \ CARIBBEAN OCEAN, NEAR CUBAN COAST
Blue Team—SPARTANS-104, -058, and -043—sat on the blood tray of the Pelican as it roared over the ocean, skimming a few meters over the water. The aft hatch was lowered, jammed open because a plasma shot had melted the hydraulics. Fred watched the jets chum the water behind them, happy to be above the water instead of under it.
In the last two weeks Blue Team had been deployed on numerous zero-gee ops to repel the Covenant ships in orbit over the Earth. They had then been dispatched to Mount Erebus in the Antartic where they neutralized a Covenant excavation with a HAVOK tactical nuke. They had then redeployed off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula for a swim. Covenant forces had been searching the seafloor for something. What precisely—a holy relic, a geological sample—no one knew, and it didn't matter. What mat-lered was when they got what they wanted, the Covenant then his-lorically glassed the planet to remove any human "infestation."