第159页
"Let her fly," Lash ordered.
"Releasing," Cho whispered. He grasped the manual override claw, and with supreme concentration, he dropped the warhead.
The bay door irised open and the black egg-shaped HORNET mine dropped from its carrier and, centimeter by centimeter, drifted into space.
"That was the last, sir." Cho wiped the beads of sweat that had collected on his wrinkled forehead.
Cho was technically past the mandatory retirement age in the UNSC prowler corps. This was a fact that had been carefully ignored by Captain Iglesias. The UNSC was running out of qualified recruits, and Cho would have been impossible to replace.
Lash gave him an approving nod, which was as much praise as the old engineer was ever comfortable with.
"Thank you, sir."
Lash entered the tube to the bridge and pushed off, propelling himself in the null gee, somersaulting and then using his legs to brake. He took a moment to compose himself before he opened the hatch. In the last fifteen minutes the Dusk had seeded the space on the dark side of the moon of Onyx with fourteen nuclear mines—thirty-megaton yield with vacuum-enhanced loads.
Delicate work to stay stealthed and get them all deployed on Admiral Patterson's timetable, but they'd done it.
All it had cost was the fraying of Lash's already shot nerves. He smoothed his uniform, brushed his thinning hair, took a deep breath, and then spun open the hatch.
"Report," he said to Lieutenant Commander Waters.
Waters looked up with bloodshot eyes from his display. "The Admiral has been informed mission accomplished, sir. He's moving the fleet to new coordinates, a high orbit on the bright side of the moon."
Lash examined the system NAV map. Patterson was going to use the entire planetoid as cover. He'd need it. The enemy forces still outnumbered them sixteen ships to their four. By any sane measure it would be suicide to attack that Covenant battle group.
The line, however, between sane and not was becoming increasingly blurred in this system.
Lash settled in the captain's chair. "Lieutenant Yang? Status?"
"As dark as midnight under a rock, sir."
Lash nodded, pleased at Yang's hyperbole. A little humor was a good sign. "Lieutenant Durruno, move us to lunar Lagrange-Four, one-quarter full. Tell Lieutenant Commander Cho to trickle-charge our Slipspace capacitors."
"Aye, sir." She tapped in the commands, cursed, and then backspaced and retyped them correctly.
Durruno needed sleep. They all did. But he'd keep her in play a little longer. There was no one to replace her, and this would be over, one way or the other, very soon.
"Covenant fleet on-screen," Lash ordered Waters. "Rescan and give me a full spectral analysis."
"All sensors on target," Waters replied.
Rainbows played over the central viewscreen, building composite images from radiation far-infrared to soft gamma, and fourteen Covenant ships resolved, clustered together in a spherical formation three hundred thousand kilometers distant.