1751 Hours, September 13, 2552 (Revised Date, Military

Calendar) Aboard Covenant Battle Station

Unyielding Hierophant.

John struggled and tried to pry the hands from his throat. The tendons in the Brute’s forearms were solid bands of steel—and the creature was so determined to rip John’s head off that a full clip from a rifle into its chest hadn’t even slowed it down.

Behind him, John felt another explosion thunder though the stone floor, followed by the staccato rattle of rifle fire.

Blue Team was busy with another threat. He was on his own.

John blinked. The darkness dimming the edge of his vision wouldn’t clear.

John watched his shield bar flicker and sluggishly recharge. If it built up enough repulsive force, he might have a chance to wriggle out of the Brute’s grasp. If he tried too quickly, though, the Brute wouldn’t lose its grip and could pound his shield flat again.

The Brute bellowed, and globules of spittle spattered onto the Chief’s visor. It leaned closer, screwing its massive hands tighter around his throat.

John’s vision narrowed. His windpipe swelled, and he gagged.

Shields were at one quarter charge. It’d have to be enough.

John had been in similar death-grip holds before—endless hours of training on the wrestling mats with his teammates and martial arts specialists provided by Chief Mendez. There were ways to escape a larger, stronger opponent. And there were always countermoves to those escapes. And countermoves to those counters. It was like a game of chess, except the pieces were arms and legs, torque and your center of mass… and most importantly your mind.

He pulled his knees to his chest, and tucked his torso toward his pelvis at the same time. He twisted ninety degrees and shot out both legs and arms, and uncoiled his body. The maneuver was called “shrimping.”

John’s head slipped from the Brute’s grasp.

He used the monster’s split second of disorientation to scramble onto its back. John brought his elbow down on the base of the Brute’s neck. He swept out its elbow, wrenched the joint around, and pushed it as far as it would go—far past the point where any human’s or Elite’s would have snapped. John scissored his legs wide and pushed against the floor, leveraging his body to keep the Brute pinned.

It growled and pushed itself and John up with its one free arm.

“No. You. Don’t.”

John still clutched a frag grenade in his left hand. He flicked the arming pin—reached around and under, and thrust it into the Brute’s belt—then withdrew, sweeping out its one arm holding them up.

The Brute dropped onto the floor and screamed with rage.

The grenade detonated. It lifted them both a meter, and they landed again… this time accompanied by a wet, pulpy smack as the Brute’s dead hulk slammed into the ground.

The Master Chief rolled off and sprang to his feet and looked for Blue Team.

The large pillars blocked his view, but he saw on his motion tracker that Fred was behind a pillar down and to John’s left, and Will behind the pillar to the right. There was no tag indicating Grace’s location. There were, however, blurry motion contacts beyond the wide arched entrance to the temple.

And there was one other thing—neither Will nor Fred checked John’s status over the COM. That silence meant trouble.

John fumbled for his fiber-optic probe, but it had been lost in the scuffle with the Brute. He eased around the basalt pillar.

Grace lay face-first on the floor, five meters from the temple entrance. A puddle of hydrostatic gel and blood spread across the floor.

John clicked the COM once, a status query.

The instant he did this, two Brutes wheeled from their cover on either side of the entrance archway. They held weapons with large-caliber muzzles and padded stocks, fixed with razor-edged blades. One of the Brutes saw John, aimed, and fired.

John darted back behind the basalt pillar; he saw the flash and thunder of a grenade launched from the weapon—heard two more rounds fired immediately after that.

The first grenade impacted on the opposite side of the pillar and exploded. The overpressure rattled his teeth.

The Chief turned and dived, hoping to get behind the next stone column before—

—the second and third grenades impacted and detonated on the pillar he had stood behind a split second before. The solid stone crumbled into fist-sized chunks.

He skidded and scrambled for cover as the upper part of that column collapsed, raining stones that shattered the floor… and would have crushed him.

So much for engaging these Brutes in a direct assault. John wasn’t up for another round of wrestling, either. Not with the clock ticking. Not with every Covenant on this station about to tear them to pieces. Complicating all this was the enemy’s apparent ability to locate them when they used the COM.

That only left one tactical option: run.

He wasn’t going to leave Grace behind, though. Not until he knew for certain she was dead.

He removed his backpack and took out one of his two Lotus antitank mines. The disk was a quarter meter across with spikes set along the rim to stabilize it when buried. He set the detonation selector to countdown mode, seven seconds. He then slid around the edge of the column.

He threw the mine with a flick of his wrist. It spun in a wide arc across the temple hall and embedded into the wall just over the entrance archway.

Two seconds until it blew.

John clicked on his COM and said: “Fire in the hole!”

The Brutes again wheeled around from their cover and leveled their deadly grenade launchers.

The Lotus mine detonated—it was a flash and an instant of fire. The temple opening and Brutes vanished, replaced by a cloud of dust and a cascade of stones that fell from the ceiling.

One gray arm remained exposed under the rubble, still flexing.

John moved up. The entrance was sealed. They were safe for a few seconds.

He knelt next to Grace. Her biosigns had flatlined. He tried to roll her upright—but there was no need. The detonations he had heard while wrestling the first Brute had been three of their high-velocity grenades… which had blown Grace’s midsection apart.

Fred and Will emerged from their cover. John looked at them and shook his head.

John opened the tiny access panel on Grace’s armor power pack and entered the fail-safe code. They still had a mission to finish, which meant they couldn’t carry her out; it would slow them down too much. They wouldn’t be leaving her for the Covenant either, though. Her armor’s tiny fusion reactor would overload and burn everything within a ten-meter radius—Grace’s funeral pyre.

“Let’s move,” John said. “Cortana, which way?”

“Proceed into the temple thirty meters. Turn right. There will be a sealed doorway, an access hatch for Engineers. I will open it and lock it behind you. Hurry. I’m encountering increased resistance from the station’s AIs. While I have their security COM channels blocked, word of intruders is speeding via private COMs.”

There was a curious echo to her voice. Maybe it was feedback from the Covenant triangulating on their signals. Or maybe there was some other effect at work. What had she warned him about? Unforeseen complications using a copy of a copy of Cortana?

“Roger that,” he said and waved Fred and Will forward. He took one last look at Grace, then marched quickly and silently ahead.

There were no more motion contacts in the temple. The Chief, however, saw Grunts and Jackals, Elites and Hunters in murals painted on the walls. In the shadows and stained-glass filtered light, those pictures seemed to move. They genuflected to something farther ahead. The Chief wished he had more time to take a full video record.

Blue Team moved thirty meters and turned to face a section of the wall. It parted. The passage could have fit two Engineers side by side, but John had to crouch and turn sideways to pass. Will and Fred followed; Cortana sealed the door behind them.

They continued until the narrow passage turned ninety degrees and dropped straight down. Will attached a rope and they rappelled down a hundred meters, landing on a platform.

John overlooked a cavern hewn from rough stone that arched up ninety meters and vanished into the shadows in the distance. Five hundred twelve fusion reactors that looked like flatted spiral seashells filled the space, stacked in rows and columns eight deep. Each was the size of a Pelican dropship and thrummed with power, casting off waves of wavering heat.

The open areas between the reactors were a tangle of plasma conduits and alive with swarms of thousands of buoyant Engineers as they tended the machinery. Faint wispy borealis comprised of escaped plasma swirled, whipped into a luminous froth by the intense magnetic vortices within the chamber.

It was a tremendous feat of engineering. It was as if the station’s builders had hewn this from a seed asteroid and built the rest of the installation around it.

Will pointed across the room to three Jackals who walked along a catwalk. Blue Team held position and didn’t move.

“There,” Cortana announced. “Across the platform is a terminal on the reactor subsystem.”

John held up a hand to Will and Fred, waited for the Jackal guards to pass, and then sprinted across the platform. He removed Cortana’s chip and inserted it into the terminal.

After three seconds, she reported: “I’m in. Very few Covenant counterintrusion measures in this system. I can accomplish the overload.

“I’ve found an exit route for Blue Team and uploaded it into your NAV systems,” she continued. “It should be stealthy enough for you to return to the repair bay undetected. Once there, give me the order and I can begin. It will take ten minutes for the overload to build. There’s no stopping once I start this, Chief, so be sure.”

“This station and the Covenant fleet might jump to Earth in the next ten minutes,” John said. He looked to Fred and Will, and they nodded as if they could read his mind.

“Proceed with the overload now, Cortana.”

The light from the reactors shifted; blue plasma tinged white and spread like a poison through the interconnecting conduits.

“Overload commencing,” the copy of Cortana announced. “I suggest Blue Team move at top speed to the exit.”

A NAV triangle indicated a ladder that ran to the catwalk overhead. John held up two fingers at Will and Fred and then nodded to the patrolling Jackals. Fred and Will knelt, braced, and waited for him to go ahead.

John climbed the ladder. As he neared the top, three shots rang out behind him. The sound was nearly drowned out by the intensifying reverberations from the reactors. He cleared the top of the ladder and saw three dead Jackals on the catwalk. He swept both directions with his rifle and then waved Will and Fred forward.

His countdown timer read 9:47. The heat and light from the reactors grew stronger, and John’s shields flared slightly.

Blue Team jogged down the catwalk to an elevator. They got inside, the doors closed, and the car immediately ascended.

When the doors opened again, artificial blue sunlight filled the car—as did the shadows cast by two Elites waiting for the elevator. Blue Team opened fire and cut down the Elites, leaving a spray of blood across the ground.

The Chief edged around the frame of the elevator door and saw a tangle of pipes and fountains and one of the curious spiral waterways that fell up from its center. This was a heat exchange plant for the reactors below. Already the water in the canals steamed and boiled.

He saw that Covenant Elite and Hunter pairs had converged at the entrance to the temple a hundred meters to his right. Over the temple dozens of Banshee fliers circled the carnage.

A gang of Grunts managed to clear an opening to the temple. There was a flash of light and fire that roiled out in a long plume, burning them as well as their Elite overseers.

“Good-bye, Grace,” John whispered.

The detonation of her power pack would buy them more time while the Covenant forces tried to figure out what just happened—perhaps they’d think Blue Team was still inside the temple. Grace had also taken out a dozen Grunts and four Elites with her last action. That would have pleased her.

John turned toward the far end of the great room and spotted a band of translucent material on the far wall. It led to the repair bays and airlocks beyond. That was their exit.

He glanced at his mission timer: 8:42. They’d have to get there fast.

His gaze locked onto the Banshees in the air. He searched for Linda, posted somewhere in the odd geometry of this station. She could be anywhere along several kilometers of cityscape.

John clicked on his COM. “Linda, do not reply. The Covenant are triangulating on our signals. I’m hoping they do and send a few of those Banshees to reconnoiter. When they get close to the heat-exchange plant, take them out—we’ll need their vehicles.”

There was no answer. Did that mean Linda understood and was in a position to help? Or was she dead?

As John hoped, three Banshees peeled off the search formation, circling the temple and turning toward them.

John waved Fred and Will out of the elevator and into the forest of steaming pipes. They scattered, took cover, and aimed at the incoming Banshees.

The Banshees spread out, slowed… but then banked, returning to the temple.

John clicked his COM three times.

The Elite pilots immediately wheeled about and accelerated toward their position. One Banshee flier nosed into a classic strafing dive. Its plasma cannons warmed and crackled with energy, indicating an imminent discharge.

There was a spray of blood in the flier, then the pilot fell forward and pushed the accelerator to full. The Banshee careened through the air at maximum velocity—crashing into a water-recovery tower, and wobbled to the ground.

“Linda,” John muttered and tried to spot her. Judging from the blood spray, she’d managed to send a round through the tiny exposed area of the cockpit, and inflicted a lethal ricochet. He looked for her position; most likely the shot had come from behind and above. There were numerous catwalks running across the length of the massive room. She had to be on one of them.

The two remaining Banshees accelerated toward Blue Team. Their plasma cannons flickered, and they leveled into a flat trajectory.

John, Fred, and Will raised their rifles.

There was a muted crack of a sniper rifle, and another Banshee drifted to the ground, its pilot felled by Linda’s uncanny skill.

The last remaining pilot veered starboard, not knowing what had just taken out its two wingmates… only that it had to get out of the area if it was going to live. In the tightest arc of its curve, the craft slowed. John couldn’t tell precisely where the shot came from, but a third sniper round ricocheted through the craft’s cockpit. The Banshee spun in circles before it thumped to a halt, nose-down in the street.

Three impossible shots, three kills. Even for Linda, this was superb shooting—the finest shots John had ever seen. He looked around the station, over the buildings, spires, catwalks, transit tubes—it was impossible to spot her.

John waved Fred and Will toward two of the downed Banshees and sprinted toward the one still spinning riderless in the street, its canards scraping and sparking along the stones.

He climbed aboard, pushed the throttle forward, and pointed to the far wall. He held his hand flat and lowered it, indicating that Fred and Will should skim low to the ground.

John veered off in a wide arc. Maybe he could divert the attention away from them.

He rose slightly higher and buzzed the tops of gilt domes and statues of Elite heroes with raised swords. Grunts and Jackals scattered as he approached, and John fired at them. He shifted to the side as he splashed though water falling from one side of the station to the other.

Four Banshee fliers fell in behind him. John weaved back and forth. A pair of plasma bolts sizzled over his head.

He risked a look over his shoulder and saw two of the Banshees drop away. A moment later they crashed into the surface.

Linda still had his back covered.

He dropped to the ground and skimmed along a street, skidded, and turned into an alley. Banshee shadows passed overhead. He pushed the throttle to full and made a direct run toward the back wall.

Will and Fred had grounded their fliers and crouched next to the meter-thick window separating this inner section from the repair bays. John settled his Banshee next to theirs, turned his backpack around, reached in, and tossed Fred his last Lotus antitank mine.

“Get that on the window and set for a remote trigger.” He then risked an open COM channel to the copy of Cortana in the station’s system. “Cortana, can you open the airlocks in the repair bay?”

A flurry of voices filled the COM, all speaking at the same time, shouting to be heard over one another… all Cortana’s voices. One finally broke through. “Chief, I’ve spun off a copy dedicated exclusively to communicating with you. Go ahead.”

“How many copies are there of you?”

“Unknown. Hundreds. The Covenant AI overwhelmed me. Had to. This is difficult. Many errors in my systems. Filtering over all subchannels of information.

“To answer your initial question: yes. I can override safety lockouts and open the airlocks. My systems are fragmenting. I cannot exist in a coherent state much longer.”

John looked out across the kilometers of curving cityscape. Wraith tanks rolled into the streets; legions of Grunts, Jackals, and Elites raced from building to building and shot at targets that weren’t there. Banshees and Ghosts buzzed through the air like clouds of flies.

John’s mission countdown timer read 7:45.

“Linda’s back there,” he told Fred and Will. Fred started to say something, but John cut him off. “If I’m not back in three minutes, blow that window and exit.”

Fred hesitated but then nodded.

“I can’t leave her,” John said and gunned his Banshee’s throttle. “Not if she’s still alive.”

Dr. Halsey’s last words to him resonated in John’s mind: I should have been trying to save every single human life—no matter what it cost.

He’d get to Linda. He’d get her out alive—or die trying.