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… Not this time.
The Slipspace rift had been stable when Dr. Halsey and Chief Mendez had first passed through, dropping them three meters onto a grassy hill. The cryo pods and Team Saber had followed shortly thereafter. They watched as the opening then started to collapse.
When Fred, Linda, and Kelly emerged, they immediately tried to return. Tom and Lucy had tumbled through the opening, and by then the rift was too small. They could only watch as it compressed back to a single wavering dot and vanished.
Most of them had thought the Slipspace passage would move them to an interior room within the artificial construct known as Onyx.
No one, not even Dr. Halsey, had been prepared for this.
Overhead blazed a golden sun. The sky, if it could be called that, was robin's-egg blue at the horizon but quickly deepened
to indigo and black the higher one looked, then warmed again as it neared the sun. There were no stars.
The surface stretched out in all directions—meadows, rivers, lakes, forests, winding paths all perfectly flat. All flat, that is, until Linda sighted through her Oracle scope. She then discovered every horizon sloped upward until these curving surfaces vanished in the extreme distance.
Linda said it felt like being at the bottom of a large bowl.
Dr. Halsey had assured them they most definitely were not in a "bowl."
"A sphere," she said, repeating this for the third time to Chief Mendez, "is where we are."
The Chief sat in the grass. "One more time," he said, "explain it to me, please, Doctor. Slowly."
Dr. Halsey sighed, straightened her skirt, and then sat next to him. "Very well, Chief" She unfolded her laptop, and numbers, charts, and spectroscopic analysis flashed on-screen.
The Spartans gathered as well to listen. In truth, while they understood the scientific principles that led Dr. Halsey to her conclusions, they still didn't quite believe them.
"We start with this so-called sun." She pointed straight up and then gestured to the data on her screen. "Spectra and energy output are consistent with a G2-type dwarf, one of slightly smaller dimensions than Sol.
"Next, you will note the curvature of this world, concave, as seen through Linda's sniper scope." She tabbed to a new screen and it sketched the star and a curve that arced to complete a full circle.
"Extrapolating, I calculate a diameter of one hundred fifty million kilometers—two astronomical units, or a radius equivalent to the distance of the Earth orbiting its sun.
"Conclusion?" She paused for dramatic effect. "We are inside a Micro Dyson sphere."
Ash pulled off his helmet and vigorously scratched his head
with both hands. "That can't be right," he protested. "We stepped through the rift and showed up here instantaneously. Even in Slipstream space it would have taken some time to travel to another star"
"Entirely true," Dr. Halsey said, "but we have not left Onyx."
"This is the part I don't get," Kelly muttered.
"The Forerunners' grasp of Slipspace technology was far more advanced than ours or the Covenant's," Dr. Halsey explained. "I believe this sphere resides in the center of the planet, encapsulated and protected by a Slipspace bubble of compressed dimensionality."