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The raging flames made repairs impossible. Fred couldn't find the controls to quench the broken line without shutting down the main plasma coil and dropping them out of Slipspace—so he let it bum.
Purple alloy melted and oozed through the aft quarters, consuming life support and several sensor nodes.
Bloodied Spirit would last only a few more minutes, but it was, he hoped, all they'd need.
Will smoothed his hands over the NAV console. "Shifting to normal space in three seconds," he said, "two, one—now."
Stars winked on in the central viewer. Fred moved perspective alongside Bloodied Spirit, revealing smoldering holes in her
side, bare conduits spewing plasma, and in places gapping cavities two decks deep.
A planet rotated into view.
Will's jump had been uncannily accurate. They were only a hundred thousand kilometers from the world known as Onyx, a jewel of blue and white against the black.
"Looks habitable," Fred remarked.
"Reading water vapor, oxygen, and nitrogen," Linda said.
"Other ships?" Fred asked. "Scan the region."
Linda bent over the Covenant sensors. "No plasma signatures. No silhouettes on radar," she said. "They didn't follow us."
"Yet," Will added.
"I'll take the lucky break," Fred told him, "and figure out why we got it later."
Fred couldn't relax, though. Leading Blue Team and the responsibility to "captain" this ship was his alone. He had been trained in rudimentary astrogation and ship-to-ship tactics, but it wasn't enough; it was like trying to perform brain surgery with only a basic aid kit. The sooner he got groundside where he could fight on his own terms, the better off they'd all be.
He wasn't sure what the Covenant were doing fighting amongst themselves and stealing human nukes… but whatever it was, he hoped it kept them busy The Covenant captain who had seen them wasn't going to let a human-crewed Covenant ship slip off his radar for too long.
"Groundside signals," Linda said. Lines wavered in a window floating off her console. "UNSC E-Band."
"Put it on audio," Fred said.
There was a hiss, a pop, and it went dead. The hiss repeated and then again fell silent.
"That's a looped signal," Linda said. "Hang on, slowing it down by a factor of three hundred."
A series of beeps resolved from the noise.
"Slow it down more," Will told her.
Three longer beeps pinged, then three shorter ones, and three longer. After a moment, this repeated.
"Not 'SOS,'" Linda declared. "It's 'OSO.'"
"Signal source?" Fred asked.
Linda retuned to the console. "Multiple point sources," she said. "Cycling at random. Someone doesn't want to get triangulated."
"If SOS is a distress call," Will said, "then what's OSO supposed to be? A warning? Why would Dr. Halsey send a distress call and then warn us away?"
"The message repeats every twelve seconds," Linda said. "Twenty-seven OSO units, a pause of two seconds, and then another one hundred eighteen units."
"Twenty-seven by one one eight?" Fred considered. "Latitude and longitude?"