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Meanwhile, a pair of Jackals opened fire at Will; he dodged the shots, but was forced back

A plasnored it and focused on the pair targeting Will He flicked his MA5B assault rifle to full auto and shot Linda combined her fire and they dropped the Jackals

The last four Jackals charged Fred and Linda--plas

Linda made a fist and pumped it once

Fred nodded and he faded back behind the hull, leaving a priround

He reloaded, waited two heartbeats, and then twin blasts shuddered through the hull

Fredto rise off the deck

He looked for another target

None but the Spartans stood The cavernous shuttle bay of the Covenant destroyer was eled and bloodied corpses of Jackals and Grunts

Fred pointed at Linda and then to the nukes on the ship They had to get those things defused She nodded and moved toward the FENRIS warheads

Fred strode to a set of pressure doors and the nearby control panel

Three Spartans couldn't take a Covenant ship; not under nores

First they had the element of surprise What Covenant captain would dreaht board and capture their ship?

Next, Blue Team had been on an enemy warship before; they knew the basic layout

And last, and e While their technology was centuries ahead of the ma than science They didn't innovate; they imitated

Certainly they knew about the capture of the Ascendant Justice by John If that had happened to a UNSC ship, there would have been new security protocols enacted on every ship in the fleet to prevent it fro their lives that the Covenant didn't think like that

He retrieved the ONI datapad, newly updated with Covenant translation software, and set it upon the control panel Purple lights flickered on the panel near the pad as the pad's network-infiltration programs booted… and it slipped into the Covenant ship's syste Cortana around… without the chatter

Fred searched intershipthe nukes was overdo to report A Brute tea

Will and Linda took cover inside the dropship's cockpit Fred wished he could join them

They powered up the ship It lifted, turned, and backed into the far corner to protect the nukes from the next phase of his plan

Fred returned to the datapad He had little ti arh ship syste twin dots Pressurized en John had shown them that one Fred overrode the ship's self-seal bulkheads--jammed them open Every pressure door he secured--ajar The ONI hackware churned as it stripped away security protocols He primed the ship's life pods and froze their air-lock hydraulics

He flashed his red, aive Will and Linda a countdown

As the green winked off, Fred gripped a handle on the wall and clutched the datapad

As the ay shield on the shuttle bay, the eency life-pod releases, and the air-lock overrides

On red… he punched the master release

A drum roll of thuy shield vanished

A hurricane pulled at Fred, blew out cargo pods, bodies, tools, small repair ships, and the bodies of Jackals and Grunts

He clung to the handle; one side of the ale subsided All the air had evacuated into space

Fred rechecked his atmospheric reserves They had been in co tiny breaths His MJOLNIR suit had seven minutes of air left

He went back to the datapad and checked: all corridors and rooms read zero pressure

Unless there were Covenant forces in pressure suits, this ship was a ghost ship now

Will and Linda joined him

Fred routed power and the doors slid apart

Blue Team entered the hallway and quickly e Six dead Brutes lay on the floor For all their ferocity, even they had to breathe

Fred halted at another set of pressure doors and accessed the control panels Linda knelt by his side, sniper rifle butted to her shoulder, aimed at the center of the doors Will stood on the opposite side, a grenade in each hand, ready to throw

Fred touched his hel his aural sensors

Nothing

He then keyed the doors open

The oval bridge was e to the railing of the coht-centimeter-thick armor, its body, composed of a colony of eel creatures, had oozed out and freeze dried onto the deck

The three Spartans checked the life-pod hatches for any sign of the enemy Fred saw the open space beyond, stars… and the other Covenant destroyer turning toward them

He moved onto the command platform and set the datapad in the interface location Fred had to hurry; he had to ht cause errors that could cost thee matrices, numbers, and icons

Will watched from a life-pod hatch, and whispered over TEAMCOM, "Destroyer on intercept vector"

Fred accessed the datapad's ot the Slipspace jump solution provided by a NAV Officer on Cairo Station He hoped the Covenant ship would accept the human mathematics or they'd be stuck here

Linda joined Will by the open hatch, peering through her Oracle sniper scope "Ten thousand kilo fast," she said

"Arer," she said

This here the luck part of their plan would be stretched to its thinnest Had the Covenant shuttled the now-active warheads onto their ships? Would they notice the detonators had been prinal lock," Linda said

"Okay, come on," Fred whispered to the datapad

The coeometries drifted over its surface A tiny version of the console appeared on his datapad with English translations

Fred grabbed the spherical Slipspace command and rotated it Its ready status winked ultramarine He input the jump coordinates