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"Watch," Will said, and took a step inside.
Holographic Forerunner glyphs—dots, dashes, lines, and polygons—sprang from the stone floor and twisted around him.
"With your permission, Lieutenant Commander?" Dr. Halsey asked. "It's not dangerous, I assure you. I have seen similar control surfaces in the Halo mission logs."
Kurt didn't like a civilian leading, but Dr. Halsey was the expert here… as much of an expert as he had at any rate.
"Very well. Doctor," he said. "But carefully."
Dr. Halsey made her way forward. "Stand perfectly still," she told him, and entered the room.
She tapped a tiny crystalline blue square; it blinked in response.
"Still dammed difficult to read," she muttered. "There is a simple two-dimensional translation, but I now see there are higher-dimensional interpretations." She reached for her laptop.
"There's no time for details," Kurt told her.
She frowned and put away her laptop. "All meaning is in the details. Lieutenant Commander." She compressed her lips, concentrating on the symbols, and then she straightened. "This way."
She started to stride across the room, and the floor lit a brilliant blue before her, running directly into a blank wall.
Kurt set a hand on her arm, gently checking her motion. He then waved for Lucy and Tom to join him and the three Spartans slowly walked ahead.
Dr. Halsey pointed to a small slightly brighter blue dot on the wall.
Tom and Lucy took up firing positions on either side of him. Kurt reached for the dot, ready for trouble.
The wall slid apart and in the darkness beyond, a bridge of light flickered on, arcing into the distance.
Kurt told Olivia, "Stay here and relay signals topside."
She nodded.
Kurt paused at the wall, testing his weight on the semitrans-parent bridge. It held. He didn't like it, though. If the power cut out, this thing could vanish.
He moved twelve paces, with Tom and Lucy right behind him… although the distance covered by their steps didn't seem to match the much greater distance he perceived he was traveling along the curve of the bridge. He looked down: fathomless shadows. He kept his eyes straight ahead.
When they got to the end of the bridge, a door of dazzling light appeared, and the shadows slid apart.
Kurt, Tom, and Lucy passed through, not registering so much as a blip of enemy contact on their motion sensors. He found himself in a half-sphere chamber twenty meters across. In the center was a console over which metallic-hued Forerunner hieroglyphs swarmed.
Kurt turned and motioned for Dr. Halsey to come along.
She strode quickly across the bridge. Kelly, Will, and Ash hurried behind her, keen for any motion.
They entered the room, and Dr. Halsey studied the hologram.
"For lack of a better term," she said, "this is an information center." She ran her hands over the symbols on the console. "We should be able to find, ah"—she tapped a tiny flexing triangular icon—"a map."
Light exploded around Kurt. Holographic geometry flashed and zoomed to a distant perspective—and a sphere of symbols, topology lines, and shapes swelled over the console, until it touched the apex of the room.