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Dr. Halsey met him. "I'm sorry," she whispered. "Holly and Will—"
She stopped midsyllable and Kurt saw her glasses reflected the jiggling lines of his TEAMBIO signals. He had had no idea she could intercept their encrypted COM channel.
"You're wounded," she stated, and seemed to stare into his body. "Internal bleeding… your liver… massive laceration…" Her gaze came back into focus, and her voice dropped to a whisper. "You're going to bleed out, Kurt, if I don't operate. The only thing holding you together inside is biofoam."
Kurt was lucky that Hunter shield hadn't cut him in half. "I understand." He rechecked his mission timer: 6:32. "I'll hold myself together for a few more minutes. Then you can do whatever you want to me."
He looked past Dr. Halsey to the central rift. The rings here were flattening fastest. The ledges were only an eighth of a meter high and visibly contracting.
Within the rift he caught flashes of golden sunlight. There were other colors: green, blue, and brown, but the distortion was so great, Kurt couldn't focus on what shapes lay beyond.
"Once it closes, this Slipspace field will remain intact?"
"I have no reason to believe otherwise," she replied.
"Impenetrable…" Kurt whispered.
"To any force in our normal three dimensions, yes."
The Sentinels, the Halo rings, this so-called "shield world," and the clockwork design that the Forerunners had set in motion millennia ago was about to end… and it made sense to Kurt.
At least it made sense in terms of him now having a winning option.
He unpolarized his faceplate and looked at her. "I think I understand what you were trying to tell me before, Doctor. The Forerunners built this construct to protect these 'Reclaimers' from the Halo detonations. Like a bomb shelter. But they never got inside. You were going to use it for the Spartans."
" 'Behind the sharpened edge of the shield,'" Dr. Halsey quoted. "Safe… perhaps from everything."
He locked stares with her and nodded.
"I'm sending Team Saber, Mendez, and you ahead."
She blinked. "I thought you said we stay together."
For the last two decades Kurt had struggled to keep his Spartans alive. But what if Dr. Halsey had been correct and all their battles meant nothing? What if no matter how valiant the fight they could not win this war? Did it make sense to die, or was it better to live to fight another day?… Even if that "day" was very far away.
He turned back to the Spartans. "Tom, Lucy, Team Saber," he said over the COM, "set Dante and Will on the pods. Saber will go ahead and scout the core."
Tom and Lucy nodded, and with help from Olivia and Mark, they gathered the fallen Spartans.
Ash jumped into the center and approached. "Sir," he said, "we're not leaving the fight."
"This isn't about a fight," Kurt told him. "You have a mission to accomplish, son. Carry out my orders."
"Understood, sir."
Ash motioned for Olivia and Mark to join him near the rift.
"Go," Ash told them.
Olivia and Mark looked at Kurt and then together jumped into the brilliance.