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Fred strode to a set of pressure doors and the nearby control panel.
Three Spartans couldn't take a Covenant ship; not under normal circumstances, but Blue Team had three advantages.
First they had the element of surprise. What Covenant captain would dream three humans might board and capture their ship?
Next, Blue Team had been on an enemy warship before; they knew the basic layout.
And last, and most important, the Covenant were slow to change. While their technology was centuries ahead of the most advanced the USNC could muster, it had become more dogma than science. They didn't innovate; they imitated.
Certainly they knew about the capture of the Ascendant Justice by John. If that had happened to a UNSC ship, there would have been new security protocols enacted on every ship in the fleet to prevent it from ever happening again.
Fred was betting their lives that the Covenant didn't think like that.
He retrieved the ONI datapad, newly updated with Covenant translation software, and set it upon the control panel. Purple lights flickered on the panel near the pad as the pad's network-infiltration programs booted… and it slipped into the Covenant ship's system.
He was in. Just like having Cortana around… without the chatter.
Fred searched intership messages and found an alert: the team unloading the nukes was overdo to report. A Brute team had been sent to see what was wrong.
Will and Linda took cover inside the dropship's cockpit. Fred wished he could join them. They powered up the ship. It lifted, turned, and backed into the far corner to protect the nukes from the next phase of his plan.
Fred returned to the datapad. He had little time before the entire ship was alerted to the invading army of three.
He scrolled through ship systems and found the icon he needed: an arrow encircling twin dots. Pressurized molecular oxygen. John had shown them that one. Fred overrode the ship's self-seal bulkheads—jammed them open. Every pressure door he secured—ajar. The ONI hackware churned as it stripped away security protocols. He primed the ship's life pods and froze their air-lock hydraulics.
He flashed his red, amber, and green status lights to give Will and Linda a countdown.
As the green winked off, Fred gripped a handle on the wall and clutched the datapad.
As the amber light dimmed he slaved the controls for the
energy shield on the shuttle bay, the emergency life-pod releases, and the air-lock overrides.
On red… he punched the master release.
A drum roll of thumps pounded the destroyer's hull.
The shuttle bay's energy shield vanished.
A hurricane pulled at Fred, blew out cargo pods, bodies, tools, small repair ships, and the bodies of Jackals and Grunts.
He clung to the handle; one side of the metal bar bent and pulled free, but then the tremendous gale subsided. All the air had evacuated into space.
Fred rechecked his atmospheric reserves. They had been in combat and on the COE for a long time where no one was taking tiny breaths. His MJOLNIR suit had seven minutes of air left.