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

A plasma bolt singed the hull near Fred, but he ignored 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—plasma pistols firing.

Linda made a fist and pumped it once.

Fred nodded and he faded back behind the hull, leaving a primed grenade on the ground.

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

Fred moved up and shot the wounded Jackals struggling to rise off the deck.

He looked for another target.

None but the Spartans stood. The cavernous shuttle bay of the Covenant destroyer was empty save mangled 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 normal circumstances, but Blue Team had three advantages.

First they had the element of surprise. What Covenant captain would dream three humans might board and capture their ship?

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

And last, and most important, the Covenant were slow to change. While their technology was centuries ahead of the most advanced the USNC could muster, it had become more dogma 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 from ever happening again.

Fred was betting 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 system.

He was in. Just like having Cortana around… without the chatter.

Fred searched intership messages and found an alert: the team unloading the nukes was overdo to report. A Brute team had been sent to see what was wrong.

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 time before the entire ship was alerted to the invading army of three.

He scrolled through ship systems and found the icon he needed: an arrow encircling twin dots. Pressurized molecular oxygen. 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, amber, and green status lights to give Will and Linda a countdown.

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

As the amber light dimmed he slaved the controls for the energy shield on the shuttle bay, the emergency life-pod releases, and the air-lock overrides.

On red… he punched the master release.

A drum roll of thumps pounded the destroyer's hull.

The shuttle bay's energy 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 metal bar bent and pulled free, but then the tremendous gale subsided. All the air had evacuated into space.

Fred rechecked his atmospheric reserves. They had been in combat and on the COE for a long time where no one was taking 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 made their way toward the bridge. 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 helmet to the bulkhead, and listened, boosting his aural sensors.

Nothing.

He then keyed the doors open.

The oval bridge was empty save for a single Covenant Hunter who miraculously clung to the railing of the command console. Inside the monster's eight-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 move slow, too. Rushing now might cause errors that could cost them more time. It took all he had to focus on language matrices, numbers, and icons.

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

Fred accessed the datapad's memory and got 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 kilometers and closing fast," she said.

"Arm FENRIS warheads," Fred told her.

"Roger," she said.

This was where 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 primed?

"Confirmation signal lock," Linda said.

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

The command surfaces lit and holographic geometries 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.

The sphere then froze, and a white vector stretched toward tiny stars that appeared over the command surface. A blinking gold starburst appeared to initiate the Slipspace transition.

"Two-second countdown," he told Linda, "on my mark."

Will pulled the hydraulics from the open hatch, grasped the door, and rolled it back into place.

The bridge's main holographic viewer flickered on and showed the closing destroyer.

Warning indicators pointed to the ships' heating lateral plasma lines.

"Two-second timer confirmed," Linda said. "Commands accepted and confirmed. All six FENRIS nukes show armed status."

"Mark!" Fred tapped the jump button.

Nothing happened… Black space turned white.

Lord Hood watched from the command deck of Cairo Station, ignoring the warbling emergency signals.

The Covenant destroyer had maneuvered to optimal plasma range. He hoped the shields of the Spartan-captured ship staved off at least one salvo, and gave Blue Team the time they needed.

Spartan-104's plan had been inspired, yet in Lord Hood's seasoned opinion, suicidal. Dr.

Catherine Halsey had once told him in confidence that Spartans considered it their duty to prove the impossible possible.

The Covenant ship's plasma lines reddened, bolts formed, and launched. At the same time, the enemy destroyer flashed inside their energy shields; its hull glowed and vaporized as the stolen nuclear devices onboard detonated. A circle of white light appeared an instant before Cairo Station's polarization shields cut the viewscreens. Thermal and radiologicals showed smears of amber and red mushrooming outward in a wavering torus.

Station Wayward Rest had been obliterated as well. The length of the Tallo Negro del Maiz crumpled and fell to the Earth.

There was no sign of the Spartan-held ship. There was no way to know if they had succeeded and jumped into Slipstream space or not.

Lord Hood chose to believe they had done the impossible anti whispered, "Godspeed, Blue Team."

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

1440 HOURS, NOVEMBER 3, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \ ABOARD THE CAPTURED COVENANT DESTROYER BLOODIED SPIRIT, IN SLIPSTREAM SPACE

Fred sat on the bridge deck of Bloodied Spirit, breathing air tinged with the scent of Hunter blood. It smeiled like burnt plastic to him.

He polished a tiny quantum mirror and set it back into its sensor housing. This he slipped into the pauldron of his MJOLNIR armor and clicked the cover. The mirror had been encrusted with sea salt, causing his motion sensor to fail… and almost costing him his life back on Havana.

Linda passed a canteen to Fred and sloshed its contents to get his attention. He accepted it, opened his faceplate, and enjoyed a taste of nonrecycled water.

Were the three of them on this ship the last Spartans? Fred wondered if John was dead.

Or Kelly. There was no mention of Kelly in Dr. Halsey's communique. And what had ever happened to Gray Team on a mission far outside the confines of UNSC space, now missing for over a year? He would never voice these worries. It might sap Blue Team's morale. But for the first time, real doubt eroded Fred's confidence. Doubt that John, Kelly, and the others were alive.

Linda touched his arm with a finger and dispersed these thoughts. She then patted the bullet-shaped nuclear warhead on the floor next to him. "Remember? The rebel base?"

They'd brought one of the FENRIS warheads up here in case they needed a final option. Fred didn't think they would need it… but it was best to cover all contingencies.

"What insurgent base?" Will asked, rolling over and waking up.

"It was twenty years ago," Fred explained. "Rebels in the Tauri System claimed they had nukes to trade. Blue Team was sent in to recover the warheads, but it turned out to be a trap." He shook his head. "Would have worked too, if it hadn't been for Kurt."

Linda took the canteen and hoisted it. "To absent friends," she whispered and sipped.

She passed the canteen to Will, who drank deeply.

A red octahedral flashed over the Covenant command console. It projected amber beams onto the surface and the holographic geometries shifted.

The Spartans dropped their faceplates.

Fred moved to the console, overrode the controls, but they reverted, seeming to have a mind of their own.

Were there Covenant still alive on this ship, attempting to regain control?

Translations scrolled across his datapad: "BLOODIED SPIRIT AUTOMATED…SYSTEM ACTIVATED…TO BATTLE SOUNDED…HEED THE CALL TO WAR…WARNING…SLIPSPACE ANOMALY…DIMENSION YED-4 DETECTED…CAUSE: SINGULARITY AFTERMATH."

"Trouble," he told Linda and Will.

Linda bounded to the weapons station and her hands moved over the surface. "Making plasma lines hot," she said. "I think. Laser capacitors charging."

Will stood at the NAV station. "We're approximately sixteen light-years from Onyx," he said. "No stellar systems or other significant bodies in the region. The Slipspace matrix is decon-voluting."

Fred tapped a hexagon—the Slipstream space matrix reinitialization command. It blinked once and faded.

"We're entering normal space," he said. "Stand ready."

Stars winked on in the bridge's holographic viewer along with four Covenant ships.

Three smaller ships gave chase to one larger. The small ones were two-thirds the tonnage of Bloodied Spirit. The larger ship was twice their size. The vessels' sleek outlines made Fred think of sharks hunting a whale.

Lances of plasma flashed from the three and shimmered as they impacted on the larger ship's shields.

"I think we dropped out of Slipspace because of some anomaly," Fred said. "Or… in response to a distress signal. I'm not sure which."

"From what ship?" Linda asked. "Which one do we target first?"

The central holographic viewer faded and a Brute materialized standing before them with blue-gray skin, a gorilla head, and red feral eyes. He spoke in a series of grunts and hisses.

A translation popped on Fred's datapad: "Brothers, the schism is here. We are free at last to crush the lesser races. We will no longer be led by—"

The Brute looked about the bridge, blinked, and then glared at Fred. It hissed and vanished.

On the translation pad a single word had appeared: "Demons."

One of the smaller ships turned toward them. Ultramarine spheres flashed over Linda's weapon console.

"It's targeting us," she said.

"That answers that," Fred muttered. "Target the smaller ships. Will, get me a best-guess Slipspace transition vector to Onyx."

Fred had no intention of engaging in ship-to-ship combat. He was no captain. He'd be out of his depth if this were a UNSC ship with controls he could understand, and astrogation, tactics, and weapon systems he was familiar with. On Bloodied Spirit, he couldn't begin to fathom how to fight. Running was the only realistic option.

"Working on a solution," Will said. He glanced back and forth between the printed crib sheet of translated symbols and the Covenant mathematics that flashed before him.

"Time on target calculated," Linda announced. "Ready to fire plasma."

"Just buy us time," Fred told her. "We're not moving to engage."

"Covenant frigate now in weapons range," Linda said. "Plasma lines heating. They've fired!"

On the central viewer twin crimson lances streaked from the ship and arced toward them.

Circles snapped on the tips of these lines, which then twisted into three-dimensional spheres.

The holographic perspective pulled back and showed the frigate, the plasma, and their ship in their relative positions. The translucent spheres centered on the plasma shots and overlapped Bloodied Spirit.