"Back us off. Will," he ordered.
"Something's happening," Linda said.
The image in the viewer zoomed in on a cluster of the spacecraft. Seven of them moved into a line.
The view pulled back and revealed other identical formations. Seven of these lines stacked into an elongated triangle, and the spheres within the forty-nine-craft pattern glowed red-hot.
"Hard to port!" Fred cried. "Emergency power to shields."
The deck tilted.
"Answering hard to port," Will cried.
A blast of golden light overwhelmed the image in the viewer.
The frame of Bloodied Spirit resounded like it had been struck with a hammer. The artificial gravity failed and Fred gripped the railing.
"Starboard side hit," Will said. "Shields destroyed."
Fred moved his hand over his console and Bloodied Spirit appeared on the viewer. A gaping crater of blue hull armor smoldered white-hot. Crystalline electronics crackled, and severed plasma lines spewed fire. As the ship turned, Fred saw the hole was five decks across and had punched clean through to the port side.
"Main plasma pressure nil," Will reported. "Cycling to fuel cells. Slipspace capacitors holding charge. We have enough power to jump."
Linda looked to Will and then to Fred and nodded.
Fred watched as more alien drones crystallized into triangular lattices. Individually they were no match for even a Covenant single ship. Combined they packed enough punch to atomize Bloodied Spirit.
"We're not leaving," Fred muttered. "We're moving closer. Will, get me a jump solution on coordinates to twenty-seven degrees north latitude, one hundred eighteen east longitude, elevation fifteen thousand meters."
"On it," Will said, and he stared at the Covenant math as it steamed over his console.
"Linda, go evasive!" Fred ordered.
Her hand melted into the holographic controls and Bloodied Spirit pitched forward, accelerating, which made the hull ping with stress.
The tiny alien ships easily tracked their motion, surrounding them.
Covenant ships could perform pinpoint-acurate Slipspace jumps. But could the weakened hull of Bloodied Spirit survive an instantaneous change of pressure from zero to over one kilogram per square centimeter? And that was just accounting for the atmosphere. Their velocity in air would exert tremendous forces on the ship's leading edges.
"Course plotted," Will announced. "Only a second-order approximation, but the jump system is accepting the numbers. I'll have higher-order terms in a minute."
"Belay that," Fred ordered. "Linda, give me all power to the engines. Slave Will's jump coordinates through the NAV system and give us a thirty-second countdown."
"Done," she said.
"Let's move, Blue Team," Fred told them. "We're abandoning ship."
It was a perfect day on the jungle-swathed peninsula. The sky was crystal cobalt dappled with cotton-ball altocumulus clouds. Insect buzz and bird caw abruptly ceased and a hundred redwing macaws took flight as the world exploded over their heads.
A fifteen-kilometer-long smear of condensed water vapor marred the air, and from it a fireball colored every cloud red— Bloodied Spirit shot forth like a bullet.
Sonic booms rippled off the destroyer's prow. Hexagonal armor plates fluttered and shed, revealing a skeletal frame. Static discharges arced from ship to clouds and back.
Inside Bloodied Spirit fires raged stem to stern and every deck glowed hot, trailing flames and an oily black smoke.
The ship rolled and the nose began to shudder until the entire length of the vessel wobbled.
The once-deadly Covenant ship was no more than a ballistic mass, a meteor, with only one possible trajectory: a parabola that intersected the planet's surface.
A dozen drones punched through the clouds and left swirling vortices, and then a hundred more drones appeared, giving chase.
As the destroyer dropped to a hundred meters, the heat ignited the jungle canopy, leaving a blistering path in its wake. Debris from the disintegrating vessel rained into the trees, crushing them to splinters.
The drones closed and fired.
As Bloodied Spirit turned and its shuttle bay presented groundwork, what appeared to be another chunk of the ship fell, spinning until it plummeted below the canopy—and then the dropship's engines flared, and it righted.
The tiny ship's momentum smashed it through three banyan trees before it touched ground and scraped to a full stop.
Three figures eased from the tuning fork-shaped vessel, and quickly melted into the surrounding jungle.
Fred watched pieces of Bloodied Spirit fall to the earth. The ground under him shook from the impacts.
Drones accelerated after the lost destroyer, so many that they blackened the sky.
A flash cut through the jungle, casting long hard shadows. A wave of pressure shot rock, splinters, and smoldering vegetation hurling over his head, igniting leaf and wood and flattening brush and trees.
Bloodied Spirit had landed.
A kilometer to the north a wall of plasma-fueled fire shot skyward and the clouds overhead parted.
Fred flicked his green status to his teammates.
Linda's status light burned green, but Will's remained dark a moment, and then winked amber.
There was a flutter on Fred's motion detector, two o'clock, and then nothing. Another malfunction?
Linda's light shifted to amber as well.
No. Real trouble.
Fred sited down his assault rifle and covered the area. Linda would soon be in position to snipe. Will would draw whatever was there out into the open.
Had those drones discovered them so quickly? Or had the Covenant managed to track them here after all?
On his heads-up display, the secure single-beam COM system activated. His helmet speaker hissed with static, and then a voice as familiar as his own spoke.
Kelly whispered: "Olly olly oxen free."
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
SEVENTH CYCLE, 49 UNITS (COVENANT BATTLE CALENDAR) / ABOARD FLEET CARRIER SUBLIME TRANSCENDENCE, IN ORBIT ABOVE JOYOUS EXULTATION, SYSTEM SALIA
The Unggoy Kwassass knew his place aboard the Covenant su-percarrier Sublime Transcendence. He was to be trod upon under the boots of its glorious Sangheili officers. He was to clean, scrub, wait in the shadows for orders, and never speak unless spoken to.
Among his other duties Kwassass was also responsible for the maintenance of storage subdeck K. The mining gear that had exacted the human fortress world Reach had been stored on subdeck K. Diggers, earthen conveyors, portable microenergy projectors, plasma fuel cells all sat in orderly rows.
He had been ordered to repair and refit everything, a gargantuan task that would take six months and the entire K-deck tribe. It was a crushing responsibility… but also a tremendous opportunity.
Kwassass waddled along the dim corridors of subdeck K, admiring its cavernlike expanses and the warmth of the place. Even after seven years of service to the Covenant he could not help marveling at their copious wealth of heat. After freezing every day of his childhood, watching his family one by one succumb to the blue death, heat was something he never took for granted.
He spotted a group of laborers playing a game with rocks, jumping them over one another on a grid scratched upon the floor. They laughed and gambled for tiny tanks of compressed organics and audio crystals.
Kwassass joined them, lost a few cartridges of formaldehyde, won a file of old BBC, and then wished them well and moved along on his morning patrol. Today it would be best to keep up appearances.
He meandered toward Storage Sector Three, making sure no one noticed.
Kwassass had overheard one Sangheili speak of pods of benzene that required disposal in that sector. Lovely lung gold! He sighed, reliving the pleasure of his last inhale of the sacred aromatic.
He slowed his place, though; Storage Sector Three was a shadowy realm where only Huragok5 ventured, as it was full of active plasma conducts.
The tentacled podlike Huragok never spoke to his kind. Sometimes they fixed things for them… but just as often they took things apart and left them that way. He had learned it was best to avoid them, as the Sangheili valued their services.
Kwassass ventured into the dim section of the ship.
Only the glow from the occasional plasma coil provided an eerie blue light, and the shadows were full of the floating Huragok that whispered to one another in ultrasonic chitters.
Tonight they seemed to move with a greater purpose, floating in pods of three farther into the storage sector.
5 Huragok: the Forerunner name for the Engineer race He followed one of these pods and emerged in a round chamber, lit by an overhead heat exchanger that dripped fluorescing green coolant. A machine towered in the chamber. It was five times his squat height, and it would take thirty Unggoy to circumscribe its curved surface.
Dozens of Huragok clustered about the thing, their tentacles gently probing its surface in reverence.
The device was bare silver metal, which was a rare thing in Covenant alloys. Kwassass was drawn to the shiny material. He wanted to touch it, take it with him.
There were alien pictograms on the side and he ran his hand over them. Although his tribe had been trained to listen and transcribe alien transmissions as part of their duties, they were forbidden to read.
There were four pictograms. The first was three connected lines. The second was a hollow dot. The third was an angle of two lines. The last icon was the same angle inverted with a line horizontal midway between them.
…N…O…V…A.
Many of the Huragok clustered on the far side, and Kwassass gently pushed through them to see what was so interesting.
A black box lay on the deck.
The Huragok had obliviously removed a panel from the cylinder: a tangle of wires and cabling stretched from a cavity in the cylinder to this box.
Inside the box were flashing red, blue, and green lights and many buttons.
He knelt and touched a button.
A sound came from the box: a curious series of slurps, pops, and deep rumbles that made Kwassass giggle. A rare alien transition. Treasure indeed. He could perhaps trade this for a rare ASTHEWORLDTURNS he had heard was on M deck.
The noise stopped, so he touched the button, and the noise repeated to his delight.
He strained to decipher the sounds. Like all human transmission he understood many of the words, but very little of what it actually meant. This voice had a twangy accent.
He listened again, straining to understand… "… I am Vice Admiral Danforth Whitcomb, temporarily in command of the UNSC military base Reach. To the Covenant uglies that might be listening, you have a few seconds to pray to your dammed heathen gods. …"
"We have been betrayed by those we trusted most," thundered the Imperial Admiral and Regent Command of the Combined Fleet of Righteous Purpose, Xytan 'Jar Wattinree. He shook both fists as he spoke. "We have been betrayed by our Prophets."
The Sangheili stood over three and half meters tall and wore silver armor covered with the gold Forerunner glyphs of Sacred Mystery. In the center of the oration chamber aboard the super-carrier Sublime Transcendence, Xytan's image was holographi-cally magnified so he towered thirty meters before them, and image replications made his face present in four directions simultaneously to the crowd.
Xytan appeared no less than a god.
Ship Master Voro stood at attention and watched the legendary commander. He had never been defeated in battle. He had never failed at any task, no matter what the challenge.
He was never wrong.
The Imperial Admiral's only flaw was that he had been so revered, some said even more so than any Prophet. For the sin he had been exiled to the fringe worlds of the vast Covenant Empire.
This had happened before; the former Supreme Commander of the Fleet of Particular Justice had never returned from the "glorious mission" the Prophets sent him on.
Xytan had summoned all the factions of the Sangheili to |oyous Exultation. He was, in Voro's opinion, their best chance for survival.
Voro was one of thirty representative Ship Masters who had been called from the two hundred vessels in orbit to hear these words.
"I, like all of you, believed in our leaders and their holy Covenant," Xytan continued, his voice resonating off the silver stadium dome overhead. "How could we have been so willing to believe a Covenant of lies!"
Xytan paused and looked out among them. The thirty Ship Masters and their guards seemed to be swallowed by the empty space in the chamber, designed for a capacity crowd of three thousand.
No one dared speak.
"They have called for the destruction of all Sangheili. They have aligned themselves with the barbaric Jiralhanae," Xytan said. He hung his head and his four jaws opened slack for a moment, and then he looked up, a new determination burning in his eyes. "The Great Schism is upon us. The unbreakable Covenant Writ of Union has been split asunder. This is the end of the Ninth, and final, Age."
A grumble echoed within the oration chamber. These words were the grossest sacrilege.
Today, however, they could be the truth.
Xytan held up a hand and the dissent quelled.
"You must now decide to surrender to fate—or resist and strive to persist. Myself, I choose to fight." He outstretched both hands to his audience. "I call upon you all to join me.
Let the old ways fade and battle by my side. Together we can forge a new, better union—a new Covenant among the stars."
The Sangheili Ship Masters roared their approval.
It was an inspired oration, but the Prophets had used words to trick them all before, too.
Ship Master Tano had let words, and their more dangerous by-product, beliefs, cloud his reason.
Words alone would not help them. Voro crossed his arms over his chest.
Amazingly, Xytan saw this gesture and turned to face him, locking gazes.
"You disagree. Ship Master?"
A tomblike silence smothered the stadium. Voro felt all eyes upon him.
"Speak, then, hero of the battle for the Second Ring of the Gods, and de facto commander of the Second Fleet of Homogeneous Clarity." Xytan waved him forward and offered him the center pulpit, an unprecedented and generous step for one so high.
It stunned Voro to hear such honorifics attached to his name. Xytan knew what had happened? Who he was? Of course, his intelligence network was legion. And what better way to silence questions than with compliments?
