0502 hours, March 5, 2526 (military calendar)

Unknown Covenant Frigate

High Equatorial Orbit, Planet Netherop, Ephyra System

With a quick check of his HUD, John confirmed that the atmosphere in the carnage-strewn hangar was breathable—which was a good thing, since he had just fourteen minutes of rebreather capacity left. The Mjolnir’s onboard computer anticipated his next request by shutting down his rebreather, and warm, acrid air began to flood into his helmet.

He activated his suit’s external speaker, going to voice comm. “External air, everyone.” Their own rebreathers would recharge as new air ran through the Mjolnir’s filtering system. “Gold Team, execute the equipment dump. Include a couple of those four-jawed pilots. I don’t know if the xenos have dissected any yet.”

He was talking about the xeno-scientists of Section Three’s new Beta-3 Division, a fast-growing ONI unit dedicated to analyzing and replicating Covenant technology.

Joshua-029’s status light flashed green in acknowledgment; then he and the rest of Gold Team began to retrieve different types of weapons and tools. Once they had packed the Banshee cockpits full, they would close the canopies and push the spacecraft out of the hangar for recovery by the support prowlers. It would tie up Gold Team for a while, but John had insisted on it as a hedge against mission failure. That way, even if the assault squad could not capture the ship, the UNSC would still get something worth analyzing.

John took Blue and Green Teams to an oversize iris hatch at the back of the hangar. The bulkhead around it was cratered with strikes from M99 rounds that had passed completely through their targets. But none of the projectiles had penetrated the ship’s thick armor and actually breached the hull.

John was still looking for a control pad or mechanical release when the hatch leaves suddenly retracted—and revealed a pair of Jackals coming from the opposite direction, descending a gray-blue passageway that curled down the vessel’s hooked tail. They were clucking and squawking at each without paying much attention to where they were going. John stepped through the hatch and put a round through the head of the one on the right. Fred followed and took the one on the left.

Both Jackals flew backward and landed on the deck, and the hatch closed behind the two Spartans. Guessing that it responded to proximity, as had the hatches aboard the Covenant ship Blue Team had boarded at Chi Ceti IV, John sent Fred to secure the passageway ahead, then tossed one of the bodies back toward the hangar.

The hatch opened, and the rest of Blue and Green Teams stepped through.

“Green Team, secure all compartments and intersections as we move forward,” John ordered.

John hurried after Fred, who had already vanished around the curve of the passageway and was almost beyond the range of the motion tracker on John’s HUD.

As they advanced, John was surprised by the simple sensation of walking. Although the passageway curled steeply upward as it followed the curve of the mothership’s hooked tail, it always felt like “down” was beneath his feet. Clearly, the aliens’ control of artificial gravity was a lot more refined than humanity’s.

Big surprise.

After fifty meters, they reached the top of the vessel’s hooked tail. Instead of flipping pedestrians upside-down, the passageway ran through a ninety-degree twist, shifting the deck to what seemed like it should be a bulkhead. Then it ran through another twist, so that now it had the same orientation as the hangar deck below.

The assault squad was still in the mothership’s tail, but as they hurried forward, more iris hatches began to appear in the adjacent bulkheads. The first hatch opened automatically as they approached, and Kurt stepped inside. He fired a few rounds, then stepped back into the passageway. “Supply locker.”

Blue Team continued up the passageway on its own. Green Team followed, their sound-suppressed rifles coughing softly as they cleared compartments. After fifty meters, the iris hatches were replaced by tall, swinging hatches that did not respond to proximity. And there were a lot of those entrances, spaced every few meters.

“This is dangerous,” Kelly said. She looked back down the passageway toward Green Team, which was lagging about thirty meters behind as they paused to clear each compartment. With that much gap, someone could step out of an uncleared compartment between the two teams and wreak havoc by forcing them to fire toward each other. “You want me to blow the ones that don’t open?”

She had a fifty-meter coil of breaching cord in one of her cargo pouches, and it would take only three seconds to place it and blast open each hatch. But John counted twenty hatches, and that meant delaying their advance by a full minute.

John paused for a second, thinking about where they were in the ship and how that might be related to the change in hatch style. But mostly he found himself trying to decide whether it was more dangerous to risk splitting up, or to give the enemy an extra minute to trap them in the tail of the vessel. Either way, if something went wrong, he would get someone killed.

“John?” Fred urged. “We’re seventy seconds into the mission—”

“Keep going,” John said. If they were still in the tail of the vessel, that meant they had to be in the narrowest part. “Nothing’s coming out of those hatches.”

Blue Team continued to advance, but Kelly asked, “You sure about this?”

“Sure enough,” John said. He wasn’t, not when he was risking the lives of his Spartans, but he had to make a call. “We’re above the Banshee racks. Those hatches are sealed because they serve airlocks.”

Kelly didn’t reply for a moment, then said, “You’re smarter than you look.”

“That’s a relief,” Fred said. “But let’s watch our six anyway.”

“On it,” Linda said. “I’m smarter than John looks too.”

“Thanks, team.” John was not offended by the banter. In fact, he was glad to hear his team joking and easing the tension. “When we get back, you’re all volunteering to swab the hold.”

The declaration was greeted with snorts, and they continued up the passageway toward an oversize iris hatch that John figured opened into the main body of the ship. Until now, the mission had depended on speed and stealth, but once they crossed that threshold, success—and survival—would depend on shock and firepower. A dozen paces from the hatch, John called a halt so Fred could shoulder his rocket launcher and everyone else could open their grenade satchels—then his helmet speakers popped as someone went active on the prowler squadron’s comm net.

“Contacts! Two adrift—make that three—with no power.” The voice was excited, male, and speaking English with an unfamiliar Outer Colonies accent. “It has to be the assault squad, dumping—”

“Close transmission!” a second voice interrupted. “You’re not internal. This is SQUADCOM!”

“SQUADCOM?” the first voice said. “Oh, sh—”

The voice cut off in midsentence, no doubt because he had realized his mistake and closed the channel.

“What the hell?” Kelly demanded. “Are they trying to blow—”

“We’ll figure it out later.” It was hard to imagine a Prowler Corps crewman deliberately undermining the mission, but mistaking the squadron comm net for an internal channel was not an easy error to make. “Keep moving.”

John waved Kelly toward the hatch.

Kelly stepped forward. The hatch remained closed.

“Not good,” Fred said. An alien voice began to bark orders from a bulkhead speaker. “Might even call it a mess.”

“But just a little mess,” John said. “We can still do this.”

Fred tipped his helmet toward John. “Did I say we couldn’t?”

“No.” It had not been Fred he was trying to convince, John realized. Irritated by his doubts, he turned to Kelly and said, “Blow it.”

Kelly was already pulling the breaching cord from its cargo pouch. “I’ll give it a little extra, in case there’s a reception committee on the other side.”

“Affirmative,” John said. “Fred, be ready. Both tubes.”

Fred’s status light flashed green. “Is there any other way?”

The M41 SPNKR had a disposable double-tube loading system, so two rockets could be fired in quick succession—a feature that often proved useful against enemies lying in ambush.

At least, that’s how it went in mock battles against human enemies.

John pushed his doubts aside and activated TEAMCOM. “Comm silence lifted,” he said. “The aliens know we’re here.”

“No shit,” replied Daisy-023. Gold Team’s infiltration specialist, Daisy was probably the most intractable of the Spartans. “If we get out of this, I’m gonna find the dumbass who gave us away and rip his—”

“After the mission,” John said.

“Seriously?” Daisy asked. “You’re okay with that?”

“All I care about is the mission,” John said. “Let’s do that first.”

John was reacting to this setback as he had been trained, swiftly and forcefully. But in the back of his mind, he was asking himself how many of his friends would die because of the sensor operator’s mistake, and he could not help wondering whether he should abort while he still could.

Kelly said, “Stand clear.”

Fred dropped to a knee five meters from the hatch, while John backed up against the side of the passageway alongside Kelly and Linda. After a quick glance to confirm everyone was in position, Kelly detonated the breaching cord. The hatch vanished behind a curtain of smoke and blast flash, and a dull clang echoed through John’s helmet as the pressure wave slammed it against the bulkhead.

An orange streak filled the passage as a Special Warfare M21 antipersonnel rocket shot past. Half a second later, a loud boom shook the deck beneath John’s feet. A plume of black smoke billowed back through the hatchway, bolts from enemy plasma weapons already flying out of it.

At least he could stop wondering when the mission was going to take a bad turn.

John reached for a grenade, and Fred rose to his feet and fired his second rocket into the smoke at a slight downward angle. The deck shuddered with another explosion, and the spray of plasma bolts dwindled to a stream.

John thumbed the primer slide on his grenade and pitched it down the stream of bolts. A smaller bang followed, and the plasma fire ended. He stepped through the open hatch and found himself in the ship’s main passageway, a broad, smoky corridor lined with burned and mangled bodies. All of the casualties appeared to be species he had already seen. Most were Jackals, but a few were the same as the Banshee pilots—tall, powerfully built saurians with compact heads and jaws with four mandibles. Unlike the pilots, however, these wore thick, contoured armor and sleek, oblong helmets with a long, sharply-pointed neck guard. And three of the aliens were the same vaguely man-sized creatures they had encountered in the hangar. They resembled insects with undersize wings, four limbs, and five lanky body segments.

Most of the aliens were unarmored, with no weapons larger than a sidearm, so John guessed they had been an improvised force of officers and support crew. Some were still writhing, and others lay with a plasma pistol in hand or nearby, so he put two rounds into the heads of all of them. The last thing he needed was a handful of wounded survivors attacking from the rear.

John glanced at his HUD. The rest of Blue Team was in position immediately behind him, and Green Team was about halfway through the tail. He started up the passageway at a sprint. Blue Team’s objective was to capture the bridge, which the xeno-engineering analysts aboard the Starry Night had assured them would be located high in the mothership’s bow. John suspected the analysts were just making an educated guess, but that was okay—he would have figured the same thing.

Green Team stepped through the blown hatch behind them, then immediately split down intersecting passageways, searching for a route below. Their assignment was to secure the engineering deck, and the location of the thrust nozzles almost guaranteed it would be in the belly of the vessel.

Gold Team would provide tactical support, coming in from the hangar to eliminate pockets of resistance and launch rear-attacks on enemy units that attempted to ambush either Blue or Green Team. Given past engagements with the Covenant, prisoners seemed unlikely, but should any aliens choose to surrender, Gold Team would also be charged with securing them.

Blue Team met little resistance as it advanced, eliminating perhaps fifty aliens who attempted to flee down intersections or take shelter in nearby compartments. By the time they had traveled three hundred meters, the ship appeared deserted—a sure sign that the enemy was organized and aware of their location.

The main passageway ended fifty meters ahead, at a double-width, horizontal-oval hatch with a seam across the center. As they approached, John saw that the deck to either side was shiny with wear—probably from feet moving back and forth as a pair of sentries repeatedly entered and left attention.

John signaled Kelly to blow the hatch, then sent Fred and Linda back down the passageway to take covering positions. The Covenant was most likely to attack as the Spartans advanced into the hatchway, but it would also be sound tactics to hit them from behind before they blew it. As Kelly placed the breaching cord, John activated TEAMCOM.

“Blue Team preparing to storm possible bridge approach.” The aliens would probably capture the transmission, but their chances of breaking TEAMCOM’s double-encryption protocols were nil. “Green Team sitrep?”

“On third deck and still laying below,” Kurt reported. “Meeting moderate but steady resistance from Jackals and those flying roach guys.”

“Designate flying roach guys as Drones,” John said. “How long before you take the engineering deck?”

“No idea,” Kurt replied. “We haven’t found it yet.”

“Keep looking,” John said. “And keep me posted.”

“Affirmative.”

“Gold Team?”

Before Joshua could respond, the hatch split across its centerline and retracted to reveal a large gray shaft. A trio of white fiery spheres came flying out at an angle, and John realized the enemy had chosen a counterattack tactic so crazy he hadn’t anticipated it: head-on assault.

“Grenades—go go go!”

Shoving Kelly ahead of him, he hurled himself through the hatchway . . . and found himself in a metal-walled shaft about four meters in diameter. They began to drop, not falling, but being drawn gently downward by an invisible force that had to be some kind of grav tech. Unexpected, but not necessarily a disaster.

The hatch clanged shut behind the two of them, and a trio of muffled booms sounded out in the passageway.

Sparks began to flash along the grav tube walls. A projectile deflected off John’s shoulder armor, and he checked his motion tracker. Five hostiles were clinging to the wall twenty meters behind him—which meant above him, since he was descending the grav tube face-first. He rolled onto his back, then felt more impacts as two more projectiles burrowed into his titanium breastplate.

Still wasn’t a disaster, but getting closer.

A line of the saurian aliens was hanging above the closed hatch, each clinging to a built-in utility ladder with one hand and firing some sort of Covenant carbine with the other. Sooner or later, one of them was bound to hit a soft spot in his armor, just as they had Sam’s. John raised his MA5K and emptied the magazine, running a line of fire straight up their column.

His rounds deflected off some kind of personal energy barrier, ricocheting around the grav tube and coming back at the aliens’ flanks and deflecting again. The energy shields seemed to flicker out after multiple hits, but these guys were clearly elite warriors who knew how to maintain fire. When a lucky ricochet finally caught one of them in the throat, the four survivors stepped away from the ladder and began to descend after John and Kelly. Still standing upright, they arranged themselves into a circle and began to fire down through the center of their formation.

Kelly opened up, squeezing off targeted three-round bursts. She caught one of the aliens under the mandibles and filled his helmet with gore. John ejected his ammo clip and reached for another, enemy rounds still impacting his armor, mostly glancing off, but some burying themselves deep in the titanium shell.

A little deeper, and it would be a disaster.

Above the enemy, the blast of a breaching charge launched the hatch itself into the grav tube. Fred and Linda stuck their helmets through the opening and poured targeted fire from above. The head of one alien erupted into a purple spray. The surviving pair adjusted to the situation instantly, one raising his weapon to meet Fred and Linda’s attack, the other continuing to lay fire on John and Kelly.

A heartbeat later, John’s stomach flipped, and the invisible force drawing them down the grav tube reversed direction and began to carry everyone—aliens included—back up toward the blown hatch. As the aliens rose past it, they stopped firing and pulled dark orbs from their belt pouches.

John and Kelly both yelled “Grenade!” over TEAMCOM. John slapped the new magazine into his MA5K and opened fire, but the orbs had begun to glow with white flame, and the two aliens were already throwing.

Fred and Linda spun away, and the grenades flew through the opening into the main passageway. In the next instant, the two Spartans reappeared, leaping into the grav tube feet-first. They immediately raised their weapons and began spraying rounds at the enemy above them.

The grenades detonated, a searing white brilliance pouring through the hatch and filling the shaft, and John lost sight of the pair. His own ascent slowed briefly as a concussion wave hammered him from above; then he and Kelly were rising past the open hatch.

The passageway beyond was lined with dead enemies, clustered in four groups, all armored and armed with Covenant carbines. They were facing all directions, a sign they had died surprised and confused. Beyond them, Gold Team was advancing down the passageway, Joshua and Daisy leading the way with M301 grenade launchers slung under their MA5C assault rifles. The other two members were hanging back, ready to eliminate any more of the Covenant who made the mistake of thinking they could sneak up on a Spartan.

Then John was past the hatch, still ascending the grav tube next to Kelly. The clatter of small-arms fire above fell silent, and he looked up to find Fred changing his magazine while Linda continued to aim her BR55 upward. The grav tube beyond was too littered with hatch doors and dead aliens to see what awaited Blue Team at the top of the shaft, but amazingly enough, it still appeared possible to capture this ship.

John went back to TEAMCOM. “Gold Team, sitrep.”

“Main deck under control,” Joshua reported. “Eliminated maybe two hundred targets. No casualties.”

“How’s your ammo holding up?”

“About half down,” Joshua said. “But Naomi has figured out those hinge-head rifles. We’ll be okay.”

Naomi was Naomi-010, one of the Spartans’ more resourceful soldiers and a near-genius with any sort of equipment. By the age of ten, she had been a master armorer who was refining and modifying every infantry weapon the Spartans used, and currently she was the only one on the squad who seemed to completely understand the theory behind the Mjolnir’s reactive circuits.

But John had never heard of such a weapon designation. “Hinge-head?”

“The big ones with the four jaws,” Joshua said. “The ones that know how to fight.”

The tall saurians, in other words.

“Now designated Elites,” John said. “Take Gold Team and lay below. Disrupt any counterattack preparations—especially those led by Elites.”

“Affirmative.”

Gold Team moved out of motion-tracker range and vanished from John’s HUD. The clang of colliding metal drew his attention overhead, where a jumble of twisted hatch-sections and dead Elites were pinned against the top of the grav tube. To their left—on the side opposite the utility ladder—hung a single-width hatch, a vertical oval with a split down the center. A second utility ladder descended beneath it, each rung slightly offset so that it angled around the shaft wall to join the first.

“Shouldn’t that hatch be open by now?” Kelly asked. “If it’s activated by proximity, all those dead Elites—”

“It’s overridden!” John reached over and caught hold of a ladder rung. “Grab—”

The gravity field reversed polarity and jerked John downward, and the order came to an abrupt end. His arm straightened, and his elbow hyperextended and erupted in pain. He held on anyway, his Mjolnir armor’s force-multiplying circuits droning as he fought the grav tube’s pull. Fred and Linda dropped past and shot down the shaft, their outstretched gauntlets clanging off the ladder rungs as they tried to grab hold. Kelly was somewhere below them, already beyond motion-tracker range.

A new contact appeared on his HUD. John looked up and saw the hatch door splitting open, an armored hand reaching into the seam from either side. Both held dark orbs. Grenades.

More grenades.

John opened fire, raising his MA5K one-handed and running a burst up the widening seam. The first rounds were deflected by energy shields, but he managed to hit both grenades as they ignited in white flame and were released. He managed to send one tumbling back toward the enemy. The second fell to the deck, then rolled into the grav tube and was sucked down the shaft.

“Incoming!” John warned over TEAMCOM. “Gren—”

The detonations filled the tube with white heat, one blast boiling up the shaft from below and the other spraying through the half-open hatch above. John’s HUD flashed to static, and the first blast wave ripped one side of the ladder from the wall. The second wave nearly impaled him on its broken rungs.

John’s grasp remained secure, even when the rung in his hand snapped on one side and bent downward. He jammed his boots onto the ladder, slapped his MA5K onto its magnetic mount, and began to climb the offset rungs—the few that remained—ascending toward the mangled wreckage of the hatch.

“Blue Team, report!”

“Gel-locked, but uninjured,” Fred responded. “Lying in the bottom of the grav tube. Should be operational once the pressure bleeds off.”

“Same as Fred,” Linda said. “Condition good.”

“Under them both.” Kelly’s voice was thin with anguish. “Also gel-locked, but I have torso pain and blood in my underarmor. Must be a compound rib fracture.”

John felt his gut clench. Compound rib fractures were dangerous, even for Spartans. With the jagged end of a bone moving around inside the chest cavity, something as simple as a deep breath could puncture a lung or lacerate the heart.

“Copy,” John said. “Fred, get her out of the grav tube. I don’t want her getting slammed around any more.”

“I can take care of myself,” Kelly said. “I don’t need a babysitter.”

“And I don’t need an argument. Clear?”

“Affirmative. But you’re being . . . overprotective.”

By overprotective, John knew Kelly meant jerk. But if it kept his Spartans alive, John was okay with being an overprotective jerk. He was under the hatch now, and could hear the chattering of alien voices coming through the gap between its twisted halves. He poked his head up above the deck and glimpsed a relatively small oval compartment beyond, with a high dome overhead and a two-tiered bank of instrument consoles arranged in a semicircle around a central commander’s throne.

The consoles were manned by busy Elites, most uniformed in white tabards striped by blue diagonals. But at least three armored Elites were pointing alien carbines at the hatch, and when they saw John peering through the gap, they opened fire.

Already ducking out of sight, John grabbed a pair of fragmentation grenades from his satchel and thumbed the arming sliders.

“Hold fast, Blue Leader,” Linda said over TEAMCOM. “I am unlocked and climbing. I’m with you in sixty seconds.”

Sixty seconds was forever in a firefight, but with the hatch jammed open, John could probably hold his position that long. What he couldn’t do was prevent the enemy from tossing more grenades into the grav tube—and that meant Linda’s chances of getting blown up were about the same as her chances of reaching him alive.

“Negative.” John brought his arm up and tossed his grenades through the half-open hatch. “Vacate and support Green Team. I’ve got this.”

“Alone?” Linda asked. “That’s insane. You need support.”

The ladder shuddered with the double-thump of the grenades detonating on the bridge, and a cone of flame and shrapnel shot from the half-open hatch and flashed across the tube above John’s head. He was already drawing two more grenades from his belt satchel.

“The grav tube is a kill zone.” John thumbed the arming sliders and tossed the grenades through the hatch, this time trying for a higher arc that would carry them toward the front of the bridge. “Vacate. That’s an order.”

Another pair of detonations shook the ladder. John poked his head up again and found the bridge littered with Elites, some broken and dead, some still writhing in pain, all torn and bloody. Here and there, a slender saurian head showed above an instrument panel, its beady eyes fixed on the hatch.

In the center of the compartment sat the commander’s throne, its back panel warped and blackened from a grenade detonation. On the right side, a jagged limb hung above an armrest filled with glowing toggles and glide switches. On the left side, a leathery forearm in singed cloth lay stretched along the armrest, a pair of long alien fingers scratching at a boxy yellow cover about half the size of a human palm.

It looked like a safety cover.

John reached into the opening, grabbed a hatch panel, then hauled himself onto the top rung of the utility ladder.

The fingers on the commander’s throne found what they were scratching for, and the yellow safety cover retracted into the armrest. A holographic keypad appeared in its place, and the fingers began to fly over glowing symbols.

John drew his M6D sidearm and put a round through the Elite’s upper arm. The fingers touched another pair of symbols, and the keyboard vanished. A yellow blister—likely some kind of control button—rose out of the armrest.

John put a second shot through the elbow, but the hand was already descending toward the blister. The round blew the Elite’s forearm half off and sprayed purple blood across half a dozen instrument consoles, but the alien retained adequate shoulder control to draw its arm back toward the chair. Its hand landed atop the yellow bubble, the heel of its palm coming down hard enough to punch it back down into the armrest.

The ship did not self-destruct.

Instead, the commander’s hand remained atop the blister, and an ambient green light rippled through the bridge. A trio of hidden panels retracted into the outer bulkheads, revealing open iris hatches on the three forward sides of the bridge. Elite survivors began to rise from behind their instrument consoles and spring toward the hatches, obviously less afraid of John than of what their commander had just initiated.

Bad mistake. The last thing ONI wanted was survivors providing firsthand accounts of the Spartan boarding action. John opened fire with his M6D, blowing holes through Elite chests with .50-caliber nickel-plated rounds, and activated TEAMCOM.

“Green Team, sitrep?”

“Assaulting the engineering deck now,” Kurt-051 reported. “We’re going to take it, but it’s too easy. Something’s wrong.”

“Like all hands abandoning ship?” John asked.

“Not the Drones,” Kurt said. “They’re staying to fight. But everyone else—”

“Break off and get out now.” John’s M6D locked open as it ran out of ammunition. “Gold and Blue Teams, you too.”

“What happened?” Linda asked. “I can be on the bridge in thirty seconds. Maybe less. We can still take the ship.”

John holstered his sidearm and thought about it, pulling the MA5K off its magnetic mount. There were no aliens left to throw grenades down the grav tube, so it wasn’t a kill zone any longer. But if he was right about that blister on the commander’s armrest, he’d still be putting her at risk—for no reason. The bridge was already John’s. All he had to do was walk in, secure the wounded, and make certain the commander’s hand did not leave the blister.

John muscled the hatch panels apart and, shoving the MA5K through ahead of him, quickly checked the adjacent corners for ambushers. Seeing only pieces of dismembered Elites, he stepped onto the bridge and finally replied.

“Negative, Linda.” John switched to SQUADCOM so that Halima Ascot and the rest of the prowler squadron would hear his report. “The alien commander has his hand on what looks like a dead man’s switch. I think he’s trying to give his crew a chance to abandon ship before he self-destructs.”

“That’s supported by what we’re seeing from our position,” Ascot replied. “There are escape capsules dropping everywhere.”

“I think I can secure the switch,” John said. “But I want the rest of the assault squad off the ship, just in case.”

“Affirmative,” Ascot said. “The squadron is already moving to sync orbits.”

“We heard.” John did not elaborate on the trouble the sensor operator’s mistake had caused his Spartans. That would come later, during the debrief—and, if he had anything to say about it, right before the court-martial. “Team leaders, let me know when you’re clear.”

“Green Team clearing now,” Kurt reported. Once clear of the ship, the Spartans would drop into a preassigned orbit and await pickup by a prowler. “Rebreathers recharged to seventy percent, beacons on.”

“Gold Team right behind him,” Joshua said. “Rebreathers recharged to seventy-five percent, beacons on.”

“Blue Two and Three commandeering enemy escape capsule,” Fred reported. He was Two, Kelly was Three. “Three’s pressure seal is compromised. We’ll try to repair, but check for friendly beacons before you open fire on any escape capsules.”

“Affirmative,” Ascot said. “And good luck.”

Only Linda had not reported. As he waited for her, John began to shoot wounded aliens—when he made his move to secure the commander’s dead man’s switch, the last thing he wanted was a still-capable Elite ambushing him.

By the time John had finished and reloaded both of his weapons, he still had not heard from Linda. It wasn’t like her to disobey an order, but he glanced back down the grav tube just to be sure.

Empty.

“Linda? What’s the holdup?”

“Drones,” Linda said. “An entire nest, herding me like a damn sheep. They do not want me to leave.”

John cursed himself—she would probably have been better off joining him on the bridge after all.

“What’s your situation?” he asked. “I don’t think I can wait much longer—I don’t know whether this commander is dead or alive, but his hand could come off that dead man’s switch any second.”

“Go,” Linda said. “I’m almost in the hangar. They can’t stop me then.”

“Affirmative.”

John gathered himself to leap across the bridge—then thought, Drones. They could fly.

He stepped through the hatch and spun right, bringing his MA5K up, and, sure enough, saw a Drone trying to track him with a plasma pistol. He brought it down with a quick burst, then spotted another on his motion tracker, dropping down behind him.

He threw himself to the floor, rolled toward the commander’s throne, and came around firing. The Drone dropped to the deck in two pieces, and John rolled again, bringing a knee under and springing up, already stretching for the armrest.

The throne spun away from him, whirling around in a three-quarter circle, the bloody hand still resting atop the yellow blister. John found himself looking over his shoulder into the pain-clouded eyes of the Elite commander. The alien’s head was cocked as though it could not quite understand what it was seeing—or could not quite bring itself to believe it. Its mandibles opened in a four-pointed star that might have been scorn . . . or laughter . . . then it twisted its shoulders and dragged its hand free of the armrest.

John did not wait to see the yellow blister rise. He dived for the nearest hatch and felt the ship rumble as he bounced off the edge and landed inside a spherical escape pod lined by crash couches and safety harnesses. He spun to his knees and lurched back toward the entrance, hands slapping at everything that could possibly be a control panel—and hoping Linda was clear of the hangar.

The hatch closed, and in the next instant, he began to ricochet around the interior, his Mjolnir armor going into gel-lock as the Covenant ship outside flew apart in a cloud of flame and metal and his escape pod tumbled away.