第104页
He went back to the datapad and checked: all corridors and rooms read zero pressure. Unless there were Covenant forces in pressure suits, this ship was a ghost ship now.
Will and Linda joined him.
Fred routed power and the doors slid apart.
Blue Team entered the hallway and quickly made their way toward the bridge. Six dead Brutes lay on the floor. For all their ferocity, even they had to breathe.
Fred halted at another set of pressure doors and accessed the control panels. Linda knelt by his side, sniper rifle butted to her shoulder, aimed at the center of the doors. Will stood on the opposite side, a grenade in each hand, ready to throw.
Fred touched his helmet to the bulkhead, and listened, boosting his aural sensors. Nothing.
He then keyed the doors open.
The oval bridge was empty save for a single Covenant Hunter who miraculously clung to the railing of the command console. Inside the monster's eight-centimeter-thick armor, its body, composed of a colony of eel creatures, had oozed out and freeze dried onto the deck.
The three Spartans checked the life-pod hatches for any sign
of the enemy. Fred saw the open space beyond, stars… and the other Covenant destroyer turning toward them.
He moved onto the command platform and set the datapad in the interface location. Fred had to hurry; he had to move slow, too. Rushing now might cause errors that could cost them more time. It took all he had to focus on language matrices, numbers, and icons.
Will watched from a life-pod hatch, and whispered over TEAMCOM, "Destroyer on intercept vector."
Fred accessed the datapad's memory and got the Slipspace jump solution provided by a NAV Officer on Cairo Station. He hoped the Covenant ship would accept the human mathematics or they'd be stuck here.
Linda joined Will by the open hatch, peering through her Oracle sniper scope. "Ten thousand kilometers and closing fast," she said.
"Arm FENRIS warheads," Fred told her.
"Roger," she said.
This was where the luck part of their plan would be stretched to its thinnest. Had the Covenant shuttled the now-active warheads onto their ships? Would they notice the detonators had been primed?
"Confirmation signal lock," Linda said.
"Okay, come on," Fred whispered to the datapad.
The command surfaces lit and holographic geometries drifted over its surface. A tiny version of the console appeared on his datapad with English translations.
Fred grabbed the spherical Slipspace command and rotated it. Its ready status winked ultramarine. He input the jump coordinates.
The sphere then froze, and a white vector stretched toward tiny stars that appeared over the command surface. A blinking gold starburst appeared to initiate the Slipspace transition.
"Two-second countdown," he told Linda, "on my mark."
Will pulled the hydraulics from the open hatch, grasped the door, and rolled it back into place.
The bridge's main holographic viewer flickered on and showed the closing destroyer. Warning indicators pointed to the ships' heating lateral plasma lines.