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"What the hell--" Polaski, caught unawares, grasped the yoke and pulled back Their dropship huh the tunnel
"Gravity," Dr Halsey whispered and stared into the opened facets of the crystal "This thing warped space e first approached It apparently has an effect on artificial gravity fields as well I can't wait to get this into a lab"
The dropship eht flooded the interior
Once out of the grav bea petal-like fragle smooth shard Dr Halsey plucked up the stone and slipped it back into her lab coat pocket; she returned her attention to Kelly's biosigns
The air over Menachite Mountain was thick with circling flocks of Banshee fliers and Seraph fighters The three-hundred-ht cruiser had company, too Six more Covenant cruisers faced their tiny dropship, plas them
A series of icons flashed on Polaski's console "They've got weapons lock," she said, the cales
"They won't fire," Admiral Whitcomb declared There was steel resolution in his words--as if this weren't a guess on his part, but rather an order that the Covenant had better follow He set his hands on his hips and watched the ships, see to stare the cruisers down "They hatever the doctor and her teah to let us shoot at them and not so much as spit in our direction"
"Sir," the Master Chief said "We're to rendezvous with Cor-tana and the captured flagship at oh-seven-fifteen hours
That gives us only twenty minutes, sir"
Adlanced at the Covenant ships gathering around theet us out of here Plot a course to your rendezvous point--and make this crate fly as fast as you can!"
"Aye aye, sir" Polaski angled the ship into the upper atray to ht blue and then inky black, filled with stars
As their dropship left the cruisers behind, it hters They formed up around her, four to the port and four on the starboard of their craft A pair of the teardrop-shaped singleships pulled ahead of her, slowed and blocked their path
"They're boxing us in," Polaski said and decelerated their ship
"Warrant Officer," the Adently on her shoulder "Ram them Full speed"
Polaski sed "Aye, sir" One of her hands cinched her crash harness tight The other hand passed over the velocity stripe on the control panel, and shoved it to full power
The dropship juhters in their path The two fighters tumbled aside with a scant three me- ters to spare, and the dropship raced past them
Locklear peered out of the port display and whistled "Does anyone else," he whispered, "think it's a little crowded up here?"
The Master Chief looked over Locklear's shoulder There had been a dozen so now there were three tiht cruisers that looked like luminous manta rays; there were four carriers with their bulbous sections, and the space near thelecraft; there were a handful of destroyers, sleek and fast, bristling with plase: Pieces of Covenant ships tules of plaslow from the heat they carried, and clouds of lit- tering dust
"Cortana's been busy in our absence," Lieutenant Haverson ree
The Master Chief detected flickers of light and dark from the launch bays of a Covenant carrier He activated his visor's ion of Elites in thruster packs, and a score of the tentacled engineering drones leaving the bay
"Singleships, drones, and Elite boarding parties on intercept vectors," Polaski announced "Inbound--" She paused and double-checked her scans "Jesus They're inbound from all directions"
"Get us to the rendezvous coordinates," Admiral Whitcomb ordered "And don't spare the horses"
"Sir," Polaski replied, her voice icy cold, "these are the rendezvous coordinates"
The Master Chief searched for their captured ship on any display--and saw only the enemy
Cortana and Ascendant Justice reappeared in space; it was a tight fit
This particular juh she loathed ade measure of luck
She had often wondered ould happen if a ship transi-tioned to normal space too close to a planet or other mass--in this case, another ship
Ascendant Justice winked into existence within the debris field in high orbit around Reach There was, however, no ultravi-olent explosion as the atoship overlapped with the ether in space
Either Slipspace ju the inco ship to the side like water that flows around a river rockor she had borrowed soood fortune
Hundreds of wrecked ships, human and Covenant alike, tuesting that Ascendant Justice had just nudged thened a set of experiments with drone ships to test out her displace neither she nor the Master Chief had in abundance
Minutes remained until their rendezvous--and Cortana would need every millisecond to acco to leave the Epsilon Eridani system alive
Cortana searched the field of derelicts for a likely candidate
There were only a handful of Covenant ships; if the UNSC had ed to take out one of the alien ships in the battle for Reach, they apparently had been forced to obliterate it No suit- able candidates remained for her plan
She turned her attention to the vast number of wrecked UNSC ships The Covenant didn't have to completely destroy a human ship to rey projection beah crew to disable the craft
She wondered how side her, thousands of brave