Halo: Ghosts of Onyx (20 page)

Dr. Halsey rapidly typed on her laptop. "Link to the COM probe," she told Endless Summer, "and amend our message with this. Calculate a frequency shift to match Cortana's signal, and resend our message from the probe
inside
Slipspace."

"Linked with probe." Endless Summer stared into space. "Stand by."

If this worked, Cortana's signal would act as a transluminal carrier wave. If the Slipstream space monitoring station on Earth had its ears open, their message would get to FLEETCOM in minutes instead of weeks. Possibly in time to do some good.

"Done," Endless Summer announced, "but verification impossible. Slipstream matrix has collapsed."

Dr. Halsey sighed, hoping the amended message had gotten through, and hoping she had done the right thing.

So much depended on her lies.

She glanced at the additional message she had typed.

"HOOD, YOU'LL HAVE YOUR HANDS FULL. REVISE REQUEST: SEND ELITE STRIKE TEAM TO RECOVER TECHNOLOGICAL ASSETS FROM ONYX. SEND SPARTANS."

CHAPTER

TWENTY-TWO

1440 HOURS, NOVEMBER 3, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDARS \ SLIPSTREAM SPACEUNKNOWN VECTOR\ ABOARD UNSC PROWLER
DUSK

Commander Richard Lash hovered over Lieutenant Yang's shoulder, watching the screen for a blip—waiting for a single titanium ion to be sniffed by the sensor array on the
Dusk's
nose.

Lieutenant Yang shifted in his chair. "Sir, it's been fifteen minutes. I'm going to purge the collectors and recalibrate."

"Wait," Lash said.

"Yes, sir." Yang smoothed over his eyebrow, a nervous habit.

Five minutes ticked off on the clock as Yang and Commander Lash waited.

"Accurate timekeeping" was an oxymoron in Slipstream space. Still, Lash held on to some illusion that he was in control and not flying blind, chasing a trail so faint it might qualify as nonexistent after a Covenant capital ship and the UNSC destroyer
In Amber Clad.

A
single spark lit the screen.

"Got one," Lieutenant Yang cried. "Mass spectrometer pegs it as titanium-50. Consistent with UNSC battle plate. One of ours, sir."

"Very good." Commander Lash clapped his hand on Yang's shoulder. "Keep watching." He pushed off and drifted back to the captain's chair.

Lash felt uneasy sitting here; it really belonged to Captain [glesias, but he was in rehab back on Earth. Radiation treatment for six months. This war would probably be over by then.

He sat and clicked the harness on. For better or worse he was in charge now.

Probably for the worse, because this mission was a cross between a wild-goose chase and pure suicide.

His prowler,
Dusk,
had been close enough to act when
In Amber Clad
had entered the Covenant capital ship Slipspace rift as it left New Mombassa. They were one of four UNSC ships with charged Slipspace capacitors, and nimble enough to make the transition before the overpressure wave generated by an in-atmosphere transition crushed them.

Miranda Keyes was the ballsiest officer in the fleet to go after that Covenant ship on her own. Was she nuts? Or trying to live up to the legendary reputation of her father?

Lash would never know what
that
felt like. His dad had been a welder on the
Cradle
… at least before the
Cradle
had been destroyed at Sigma Octanus earlier this year. Dad had always wanted to be a hero. He'd gotten his wish.

The
Dusk
—with the two frigates
Redoubtable
and
Paris, and
the corvette
Coral Sea
— had approximated the entrance vector of the Covenant ship, hoping to find out where they were headed, that or assist
In Amber Clad
in blowing her to hell.

They had been caught in the wake of the Covenant craft and accelerated to many times the maximum velocity of any UNSC ship in Slipspace. A lucky break. They'd have never caught it otherwise.

Technically "acceleration" and "velocity" were the wrong terms. They didn't map to the eleven nondimensions of Slipspace, but Commander Lash had never gotten the knack of thinking so abstractly. He left that to his NAV Officer.

What this wake effect meant in concrete terms was Covenant ships traveled geometrically faster from point to point than their ships. One more strategic advantage the aliens possessed.

Commander Lash surveyed his bridge crew. His first. Lieutenant Commander Julian Waters, sat next to him, scanning engine output semantics, his forehead furrowed with worry lines. At NAV sat Lieutenant Bethany Durruno running diagnostics, nodding off. She had ice in her veins, and sadly that calm-under-disaster fortitude was wasted in Slipspace. At the sensor station was Lieutenant Joe Yang; his youngest officer had seen more battle in the last four years than most saw in a lifetime, and he had suffered for it. Back in Engineering was Lieutenant Commander Xaing Cho, doing his job and the job of three other technicians.

They had all pulled double shifts, and the waiting was started to wear at them all.

The
Dusk
had been caught between rotations when the Covenant hit Earth. The ship normally had a crew of ninety They had to make do with a complement of forty-three.

And they were alone now, too.

The
Redoubtable,
the
Paris,
and the
Coral Sea,
with their larger engines, had moved ahead in the Slipstream wake. They'd passed out of limited COM range an hour ago.

"Sensor hits correlated, sir," Yang said.

A graph appeared on Commander Lash's display, plotting frequency and temporal distributions of their ion trail. It was a power-law decay.

That was the last ion they could expect. The trail was as cold as liquid helium. That meant either the
Dusk
had lost
In Amber Clad
… or it had dropped out of Slipspace.

"Stand by for transition," Lash said.

His officers snapped to, readying the
Dusk
to drop into the normal interstellar vacuum— or into the middle of a star or planet, for all they knew. There had been no time to plot a course.

Commander Lash took a deep breath. "Jettison the HORNET mines," he told Lieutenant Commander Waters.

"Sir?" he asked.

"Do it. Pull denotation codes and send then down."

Waters sighed explosively and nodded his head. "Yes, sir. Understood."

His junior bridge officers exchanged a look, but they all knew they had to lose the nukes. They were going to remain stealthed, no matter what the cost, and fissile materials exiting Slipspace lit up with Cherenkov radiation—a signal flare to any Covenant ship within light-minutes.

"Mines away," Waters whispered.

"All external power off-line," Lash ordered. "Ablative baffles locked. Recheck engine dampers, and full power to counter sensor array."

The crew scrambled to make the
Dusk
virtually invisible.

Green LEDs lit on Commander Lash's status board. "Transition," he said.

"Stand by," Lieutenant Durruno said from her NAV station.

"Coordinating with Lieutenant Commander Cho in the core room. In four, three, two— now."

Stars snapped on the forward viewscreen. A sun blazed to the left.

"New course zero three zero by zero three zero," Commander Lash said. "One-quarter full."

"Aye, sir," Durruno said, "answering new heading."

It was a good idea to alter trajectory on a transition exit in case some telltale sign of their appearance manifested. Over the seven years he'd been on a prowler. Lash had learned that this class of ship was one of the slowest, most underpowered, and most poorly armed vessels in the UNSC fleet. Invisibility was their only defense.

Lieutenant Yang's display lit with carrier wave patterns. "Signals," Yang cried. "Not our guys. Too many—at least a hundred of them!"

Durruno at NAV craned her head for a better look, and then snapped back to her station. "Signal origin near the fourth planet," she said. "Magnifying and enhancing starboard camera view."

The central screen panned to starboard and the image magnified a thousandfold.

There were a hundred or more Covenant ships, a Covenant superbase or orbital city… and dwarfing all this was a ring-world construct as large as a moon.

For a split second. Lash couldn't think. He was all animal, fight or flight… with an

overwhelming portion of his mind focused on the
flight
portion of that imperative.

He snapped out of it.

"Yang," he whispered.

Yang stared, mouth agape at the overwhelming Covenant forces.

"Yang!"

"Sir, yes." Yang shook his head clear. "I'm here, sir."

"Good. Triple-check all countersensor packages. Make absolutely sure we are locked

down tight. Very tight." "On it, sir."

"Durruno," Commander Lash said, "move us dead slow into that asteroid field, at two point four AU."

"Aye, sir." Her hands shook, but she plotted the new course.

"There's no trace of
In Amber Clad,"
Lieutenant Commander Waters said, staring into his display. "Or the
Redoutable, Paris,
or
Coral Sea."

"Detecting multiple energy spikes," Yang said, his voice now oddly steady. "They may have spotted us, sir."

"Make ready to go to full power," Commander Lash said.

The bridge officers tensed.

"Sir," Waters said. "I see weapons discharging in the region… directed plasma fire, energy projectors. None targeting us."

Lash magnified the viewscreen until the images of Covenant ships blurred. Flashes of fire and lances of lightning crisscrossed the dark.

Lash whispered, "Who the hell are they shooting at?"

Major Voro 'Mantakree drew his needier pistol and fired at the back of Ship Master Tano's head.

The crystalline spines thucked into the Ship Master's skull and exploded—spraying blood, brains, and bits of skull over the command console.

The magnitude of his treachery was unprecedented. What Sangheili
¹
Major would dare disobey a Ship Master who had led seven glorious campaigns against their enemies? Who would murder his superior officer on the bridge of the one of the fleet's most renowned cruisers?

But how could Voro let this continue?

¹
Sangheili: the Elite name for their race

Tano 'Inanraree had lost his mind, literally and figuratively. And while religious fervor was laudable under most conditions, it was not if it killed the entire crew of the
Incorruptible…
and destroyed their race.

Voro stepped over the body of his friend and former commanding officer and bolstered his weapon.

The U-shaped bridge seemed somehow smaller now, the blue-white light a little harsher than it had a moment ago, and the holographic consoles appeared covered in icons he couldn't understand. Voro blinked his nictating membranes and looked with cleared eyes at the bridge officers.

Sangheili from the respected Dn'end Legion—Uruo Losonaee at Operations and Zasses Jeqkogoee at Navigation—stared with maws agape, shocked into inaction. Y'gar Pewtrunoee at the Communications/Sensors station nodded with understanding.

But the bonded Lekgolo
²
pair responsible for security on the
Incorruptible
tensed; their armored bulks took two thudding steps toward Major Voro. Their spines fanned in anger. One of their duties was to protect the Ship Master, and failing that, they were to enact revenge on his assassin.

In truth, the bonded pair, Paruto Xida Konna and Waruna Xida Yotno, were a mystery to Voro. He had seen them tear enemies in half with their "hands" while in the midst of a mindless blood rage, and afterward pause to recite war poetry. How could any truly understand the Lekgolo? Inside their thick armor swarmed orange worms—a colony gestalt as alien as anything Voro had ever encountered.

More pragmatically, they were indestructible—at least to Voro with his one pistol. Lekgolo armor could withstand multiple plasma bolts before even warming.

Voro stood tall and unapoiogetic.

The Lekgolo stared at him. Their forms shuddered and the eel

²
Lekgolo: the Elite name for the Hunter race

colonies pulsed in harmonic unison to produce a subsonic rumble, words that were more felt than actually heard. "A mercy kill," they said together. "You have done the Ship Master an honor."

Voro resumed breathing. They were his now to command and to send into battle. As was the Reverence-class cruiser
Incorruptible.

"Does anyone else have words about this?" Voro asked his bridge officers.

They looked to one another.

Y'gar, the eldest bridge officer, stepped forward. His sole vanity was his left eye, which had been blinded in combat. He had refused to have the cataract repaired.