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"I know," John whispered back He pulled the flag from his shirt and handed it to Sam "Thanks"

John crawled away from their position When he was thirty meters from his team, he stood and approached the Pelican-- which was almost certainly a trap

He halted halfway across the ure appeared on the exit ramp of the Pelican and waved hiative, sir!" John shouted

The figure turned and hed "Okay, so we do it the hard way"

Four ed out of the back of the Pelican They quickly spread out in a semicircle and moved toward John, their assault rifles ai up," one of the soldiers said disbelievingly

"Should we just shoot hi them hissed "Payback first" He stepped up to John and punched him in the stomach

John doubled over frootta find that da

Where is it, kid?" He shook John "And where's the rest of your pack?"

John laughed

"What's so funny?" the rowled

"You idiots are bunched up"

A hail of darts hissed through the air from all sides The men from the Pelican convulsed; one fired his rifle, but the shot ide and high They fell over, paralyzed

John dropped to a crouch, grabbed a pistol from the man who'd punched him, and crawled on his stomach to the Pelican

He crept around the open hatch and swept the interior Empty

He scraot a contact bearing of 110, fourteen kilometers out, but it moved on a parallel course to their position John left the Pelican and ran across the field

Red and Blue Teams were still hidden and they would stay hidden forever, until he gave the all-clear

Their all-clear signal wasn't so from John--not even torture or CPO Mendez's best coercion techniques would wrest it from him He would rather have died than betray his tea six-note ed first and marched across the meadow

Kelly paused to kick one of the men in the head; she took his rifle, too

Linda and Fred dropped down from a tree branch and ran across the field "Oly Oly Oxen Free," Linda repeated, grinning from ear to ear "All out in the free We're all free"

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALYX Estimated 0510 hours, Septeship, Epsilon Eridani system

Cortana only partially listened to the debate between the Master Chief and the others The discussion was moot She had projected the outcome as 100 percent certain that John would convince the that--that he would con- vince the Lieutenant to let hinala signal that in her opinion was so easily copied and so blatantly unencrypted it defied explanation how the Chief had conjectured that his tea in the slow and inefficient conversation, she analyzed the Covenant pattern of movement in the Epsilon Eridani systes

First, the Covenant warships had extreular elliptical orbits about Reach There were a total of thirteen heavy cruisers and three carriersthree hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet Two exceptions to this patrol pattern were a pair of light cruisers hovering over Menachite Mountain-- trapped at the bottoravity well and therefore not an im- mediate threat to her ship

Second, there was a blind spot in their patrol patterns that would make a perfect rendezvous location to extract the Chief and the others froress and egress courses, and started the precise calculations she would need if she was to initiate a Slipspace ju to Cortana, 217 sion of space in a high stationary orbit over Reach's northern pole Within that re- gion drifted the wrecked hulls of both Covenant and UNSC ships destroyed in the battle for Reach Floating there were some of the UNSC's finest ships: the Basra, the Hannibal, and the pride of the fleet, the supercarrier Trafalgar No hunals emanated fronetic fields

She watched as the smaller Covenant ships cut into the dead hulks and jetted aith chunks of Titanium-A armor They moved like a trail of ants to a location in space over the lower latitudes, a point over Menachite Mountain, where the Covenant used thewas already a square plate a kilometer to a side Clearly, the Covenant had more in mind for Reach than destruction

"Cortana," the Master Chief said "We'll need to rendezvous at a--"

"Coordinates already optimized," she replied and projected the Covenant blind spot on the bridge displays "Eneion Further opti- mization reveals that all ships will be farthest froest we meet there at that time"

Cortana felt a pulse of satisfaction at their perplexed looks over her see the creith her intellect

"Very good," the Lieutenant replied, still exa her calculations on the display

"Optimal course plotted and uploaded into the Covenant drop-ship to the signal source," she told them Then, on a private COM channel to the Chief, she added, "Good luck, Chief Be careful"

"I always am," he replied

Cortana didn't bother to reply to that ridiculous statement

The Master Chief took so iven up calculating his odds of survival

The Chief and his teah the flagship,sure the path to the launch bay was clear There were still Covenant on board She couldn't pin them down, but there were transient contacts, vent shaft panels had been opened and closed, and several Engineers had gone

She tracked their Covenant dropship as it cleared the launch bay, entered the upper atmosphere, and drifted toward the sur- face Polaski was a fine pilot but she was only huical bravado and eical course of action Cortana wished that she were going down there--both to protect her hues and be- cause there were et answered

Why were the Covenant so interested in Menachite Mountain?

Was anything left of ONI's CASTLE base? Cortana terhts There was too much to do up here

Several tasks divided her attention She kept the Slipspace generators hot in case she needed to ju the calculations that shaped the plasht She isolated the name of their captured ship-- Ascendant Justice-- from one of the 122 simultaneous communiques from every Covenant ship insysteious allusions that laced the coe-translation subroutine She diverted additional pro- cessing power to the task of tracking thefor lifepods, cryotubes, anything that ht hold a hue and disappeared sohland Forest on the surface--which activated a new task

Cortana began constructing a high-resolution ion where the Chief's inated, as well as Menachite Mountain