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but even the Captain would have thought twice about approach- ing seven Covenant warships in a single Longsword
He risked feedingto h this, he needed her as effec- tive as possible
"New contact," Cortana said, interrupting his thoughts "I think it is, anyway Whatever it is, it's stuck onto a chunk of rock, half a kilometer in diameter Damn, it just rotated out of my view"
On the display Cortana replayed a partial silhouette of an oddly angled shape on the surface of the rock She highlighted its contours, rotated the polygon, and overlaid this onto a sche- matic of a Pelican dropship
"Match with a tolerance of fifty-eight percent," she said "They ested"
The Chief thought he detected a hint of irritation in her voice, as if she resented hi she had not
"Or," Cortana continued, "more likely, the craft merely crashed there"
"I don't think so" He pointed at the display "The position of that wing indicates it's nose-out--ready for takeoff If it had crash-landed, it would be faced the other way"
Another Covenant cruiser moved toward this new ship
"Co about, Chief," Cortana told hiet ready to retrieve the pods"
The Chief unsnapped his harness and drifted aft He grabbed a tether and clipped one end to his suit, the other to the bulkhead of the Longsword
He felt the rees
"Decompression in three seconds," Cortana said
The Chief opened the empty weapons locker and climbed partially inside He braced himself
Cortana dropped the aft hatch, and the inside of the ship ex- ploded out; the Chief sla the centimeter-thick Titanium-A
He climbed out and Cortana overlaid a blue arrow-shaped NAV point on his heads-up display, indicating the location of the drifting cryopods
The Chief juh space He was only thirtyabout his trajectory and et a second chance By the tiain, those Covenant ships were certain to kill them all
He stretched his aro
His approach was off He shifted his left knee closer to his chest and started a slow tumble
Ten meters
His upper body rotated "down" relative to the pods If he spun just right as he passed the cryotubes, it would give hih extra reach to"up" now
Three meters
He stretched his arms until the elbow joints creaked and popped; he stretched his hands, willed his fingers to elongate
His fingertips brushed against the s cryopod It slid off and over and touched the second pod
He flexed and failed to grab hold He scratched the surface of the third and final pod--hisinward, curled, and landed on the pod He quickly looped his tether through the frame, secured hisword
"Hurry, Chief," Cortana said over the COM "We've got trouble"
The Chief saw exactly what the trouble was: The engines of two Covenant cruisers flared electric blue as they accelerated toward the Longsword The plas their hulls ware as they readied to fire
He pulled as fast as he could, s so his ravity
The Longsas a sitting duck for those Covenant cruisers
Cortana couldn't fire the engines until he got on board Even if he and the pods survived the thruster wash, any evasive o like the end of a whip
The Covenant ships ithin firing range, lined up per- fectly to destroy the Longsword
Threeon the star- board side of the lead Covenant ship The explosion splashed harmlessly across its shield, which shiy
The Chief turned his head and saw the Pelican blast off fro It rocketed on a perpen- dicular course toward the two Covenant ships
The cruisers ca live prey than the ave one final yank on the tether He and the pods flew through the aft hatch and crashed into the deck of the Longsword
Cortana iines
The Chief climbed into the system-ops seat just as they accel- erated and turned toward the cruisers He activated the weapons systeines and pursued the Pelican, but it had entered a dense region of the debris field, dodged a chunk of h clouds of shattered alien y blasts impacted on the debris andthat Pelican knows their stuff," Cor- tana said
"We owe theuns, and tiny silver dots punctuated the trailing Covenant cruiser's shields
"Let's settle that debt"
"You realize," Cortana said, "that we really can't dae those Covenant ships"
The cruiser slowed and turned toward the solution for the et their plasma turrets just before they fire
They have to drop a section of their shields for a fraction of a second"
"Working," Cortana replied "Without precise data, however, I'll have to baseof mathematics appeared on the weapons ops panel "Give me fire control"
John punched the auto override on the firing systems "It's yours," he said
The Covenant cruiser's plasma turrets turned to track them as the ship casword's ASGM-10 et