Linda was still locked in place, tracking the overwatch Sentinel. Tom and Lucy knelt on either side, missiles ready.
Kurt squinted along the angle of their aim. Hanging in the air, over two kilometers away, was a single dot, their target.
They had to get it or the Sentinel would report their position and send for reinforcements… which wouldn't fall for this trick again.
"Target off-center, starboard boom," Linda whispered to Lucy and Tom. "Forward point,"
They adjusted their aims. "Locked on target," Tom replied.
"Fire," Linda said softly.
Twin plumes of exhaust washed over them as the missiles screamed into the air.
The overwatch Sentinel turned toward the incoming projectiles and its energy shield shimmered golden.
Linda's rifle muzzle flashed. Without seeming to move a molecule she fired until the magazine was empty.
The missiles impacted—smoke and flames ballooned about the Sentinel.
A heartbeat later, the winds blew the discharge cloud aside… the Sentinel jerked, and plummeted.
Linda got to her feet.
The Sentinel scattered as it fell, center sphere and three booms spinning out of control until they impacted.
"Go," he told them. "Make sure it's dowm."
Kurt didn't waste another second on the Sentinel; he turned back to the ravine and ran— toward Kelly.
He scanned Kelly's bio signs: erratic heartbeat, falling blood pressure, low body temperature. She was in borderline shock.
Kurt skidded to a halt in the ravine as Ash and Holly propped her up.
"I'm sorry, sir," Ash said. "The Sentinels were three meters from the exit. If I had waited any longer it would have cleared the trap. It would have shot her. I couldn't take that chance."
Kelly shook her head—not to disagree, rather to clear her senses. Her bio signs perked.
"He's right," she whispered and coughed. "The kid did good." She gave Ash the thumbs-up signal.
Ash bowed his head.
Kurt breathed a sigh of relief that Kelly had survived. He'd risked her life to gain a slim advantage over the enemy—he now had to use it wisely.
"What's next?" Fred asked.
Kurt told them, "Now we have an opportunity. If that over-watch Sentinel didn't get a fix on our position we'll have some room to maneuver and take the initiative."
"Maneuver where?" Holly asked.
"Zone 67," Kurt said. "It's the center of everything. If there's any technology to be recovered other than broken Sentinel parts, it's going to be there."
"Patrols get denser the farther north we've gone, sir," Dante noted.
"It'll be dusk soon," Kurt said, "enough time to circle back to Blue Team's dropship. The sun will be setting and we'll fly it in low, get some camouflage from the long shadows. The rocks in these canyons have been baking all day and we'll have thermal cover, too."
Kurt surveyed his team. "Unless there's a better idea?"
His gaze fell on Dr. Halsey as she and Chief Mendez made their way down the valley slope. She stared at him as if she could see through his mirrored faceplate.
"Okay, stay sharp. Olivia, Will, Linda, scout ahead. No COM chatter. Let's get this done."
Dr. Halsey watched Kurt give detailed instructions to the Spartans.
She didn't care what his orders were so much as how he was saying it, and the effect it had on them. He spoke with confidence, but there was also warmth and pride in his voice.
She'd never heard any Spartan so demonstrative. Certainly Kelly would crack the rare joke, but that was just a layer of emotional armor.
Kurt was different.
The Spartans, young and old, responded to him. There was the usual Spartan stoicism and no questions asked, but there were also nods, slight tilts of their heads—the involuntary indication of rapt attention. Kurt was their leader now.
That fact might serve her well in the upcoming crisis.
Of course he was hiding something about his SPARTAN-IIIs. If the mute psychologically damaged Lucy was any indication of what this secret was, Dr. Halsey could only guess at its horrors.
But as the end neared, she would have no choice but to trust Kurt. She would have to trust them all to forgive the lies she had told about the treasure trove of Forerunner technologies.
CHAPTER THIRTY
1950 HOURS, NOVEMBER 3, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \ ZETA DORADUS SYSTEM, PLANET ONYX \ NEAR RESTRICTED REGION ZONE 67
Kurt stood behind Kelly and Will in the Covenant dropship's cockpit. Kelly sat in the pilot's seat while Will manned the gunner's station and watched the scanners. The other Spartans, Mendez, and Dr. Halsey were aft, readying equipment, waiting, and watching.
Kelly shifted back and forth—the pilot's seat was angled wrong for human physiology, and she leaned awkwardly over the control surface.
She took the ship in low and fast over the jungle. The controls were an odd assemblage of holographic geometries that danced before her hands.
Kurt tried to learn as much as he could in case he had to fly the alien ship. It was difficult, however, to watch her and not the viewscreens.
The sun was a hand's breadth from the edge of the horizon, and the Covenant ship passed through long shadows and dim red light.
As the jungle thinned, Kelly dropped and swerved between acacia trees, skimming two meters over the grassland.
Without looking up from her controls, Kelly said, "Piece of cake, LC. Relax."
She smoothed her hand over an acceleration stripe and the ship leapt forward—zipping off the savanna and over the broken canyon lands.
Kelly maneuvered aggressively—jinking up and down, performing quarter rolls to veer around mesas, dropping into ravines and pulling up at the last instant to avoid a crash headlong into a wall.
"Great," Kurt whispered to Kelly. He forced himself to release the edge of her seat.
Dead ahead the slope of a mountain angled gently up over two thousand meters.
"Nothing airborne on sensors," Will announced. "Clear sailing ahead."
"Status on the warheads?" Kurt asked over the COM.
Ash clicked on the channel. "All FENRIS warhead detonators now secure and slaved to our secure COM signal, sir. As ordered, two warheads cut down, armed, and ready for transport. Working on the rest."
"Hang on!" Kelly cried.
The nose of the ship jerked up. A rock the size of a Warthog tumbled down the mountain slope—clipping the undercarriage of the ship.
The dropship spun, but Kelly expertly rolled, righted, and got them back on course.
"Close," she muttered.
"Rescan for surface motion," Kurt ordered Will.
Will swept the camera angle port and starboard.
Kurt saw they weren't on a single mountain; it was a range-all equivalent elevation, extending in a gentle arc as far as he could see.
"Motion detected," Will said. "Just appeared, sir. Ahead. Got a target lock."
A silhouette resolved on the viewscreen, outlined by the glare of the setting sun.
Kelly came hard to port.
As their relative angle changed, Kurt saw motion: earth and rocks shot up and then cascaded down the slope.
Will slid his hand over his controls and polarized the monitor, cutting the glare. The motion came from a collection of thirty interlaced Sentinels, their booms and center spheres assembled into an oblong shape, and through its center traveled a continuous stream of stone.
To Kurt it looked like a mechanical worm regurgitating over the mountainside.
Dr. Halsey clambered into the cockpit.
"No energy spikes detected," Will said. "They're not ready to fire."
Kurt swallowed. "Steady on this heading," he told Kelly.
He watched the giant machine recede behind them. It had to have seen them. Thirty sets of eyes wouldn't have missed something as large as a Covenant dropship. Why hadn't it attacked?
Dr. Halsey tapped a control and one of the viewscreens jumped back to the combined Sentinels. She studied this a moment, and then declared, "Tinkertoys."
"I don't understand the reference," Kurt said.
"An ancient child's toy," she said, "sticks and flat round connectors. These may be the Forerunners' counterpart. They reconfigure to accomplish various tasks, having all the required basic components: antigravity units, force-field generators, energy projector weaponry It is the equivalent, I suspect, of the simple machines that comprise our technology: the wheel, the ramp, lever, pulley, and screw."
Her casual analysis of a technology centuries more advanced than theirs irritated Kurt.
"I'd say in this configuration," Dr. Halsey continued, "it is not designed for combat, and will not attack… unless, of course, they were provoked. Their programming, while sophisticated, appears dedicated; that is, each Sentinel combination special-izes lor a single task. And right now, that task is moving dirt."
"Doesn't mean there aren't more combat pairs around," Kelly said. "Orders, sir?"
Kurt detected the slightest edge of nervousness in Kelly's voice. He felt it, too, in the pit of his gut. If those thirty Sentinels back there had wanted to, they could have blasted this ship into shrapnel.
There were only two options; go forward or retreat.
Kurt felt like his luck had run dry, but he also felt like they were close to finding something.
He longed for the days of simple missions when there were only two things to worry about: maneuvering and where your team's lines of fire were.
Yet, when you broke it down to its components, forgot the consequences of success or failure, wasn't this mission the same as any other?
Move and fire. Find a target to capture or neutralize. Minimize casualties while inflicting maximum damage on your enemy. Get in quick. Get out quicker.
"New course," he told Kelly "Come ninety degrees to starboard. Take us up that mountainside."
"Aye, sir."
The tuning fork-shaped dropship banked and raced up the slope. The earth vanished under them as they crested the summit.
Beyond was a crater a hundred kilometers in diameter.
There were thousands of the earthmovers on the inner slope— all spewing rocks over the edge. The Sentinels had created a giant anthill. How much, Kurt wondered, had ONI cleared in the decades they had been here? And how much of this was the Sentinels' doing?
At lower elevations there was nothing to see. The sun was too low, and shadows pooled.
Kurt boosted image enhancement on his heads-up display and faint lines resolved… but nothing made sense.
"Take us in closer," he whispered.
Kelly angled the ship down the interior slope, reducing their speed to one-quarter.
The clouds overhead lit with oranges and reds as the setting sunlight reflected off their undersides… and the crater interior glowed a faint amber.
Kurt blinked, dazzled by what he saw. Mirror-image clouds drifted upon angled surfaces and burned crimson and gold.
As his eyes adjusted, he saw swirls and bands of other muted colors underlying the reflected images: green stripes and black and silver waves that appeared to be a tempest ocean frozen in place.
He blinked once, twice, and then finally unraveled the optical illusion of patterns, colors, and shadow.
There were pillars and arches, elevated aqueducts; columned temples with crowns of three-dimensional Forerunner symbols; a forest of sculpted geometries of spheres, cubes, and tori; roads that curved up and twisted into Mobius surfaces—it was a vast alien city.
Kurt shook his head clear, and then recognized the material that constructed the city. He had seen it before in tumbled stripped river rocks and the slabs quarried from nearby Gregor Canyon. A rock so plentiful this world had been named for it. Only the stuff in the crater had been polished to optical flatness, mirroring the sky with superimposed rainbow bands.
"Onyx," he whispered.
"Chalcedonic quartz with trace elementals enhancing their spectral variation," Dr. Halsey remarked.
Scalloped columns rose from the crater floor to the mountainous summit, an elevation Kurt could only assume had been ground level before ONI began their excavation.
As they maneuvered closer to one pillar, Kelly banked the ship around its curve and Kurt saw reflected images of a thousand different sunsets—all with varying cloud geometries, some with flocks of migrating birds, or dinosaurs, another had smears of blue spacecraft, and one burned with a supernova that illuminated the twilight… all images captured here.
From the past? The future? Both?
And only then did the scale of the structure register. It was three kilometers in diameter, larger than a UNSC carrier.
Kurt's mind rebelled at the scale of this technology, the effort it had to have taken to construct such a thing.
He glanced at Dr. Halsey. While she intently studied the viewscreen, she did not appear the slightest bit impressed.
"You knew this would be here?" he asked her.
"I suspected," she said. "Frankly, after reviewing the reports of the Halo structures, I am somewhat disappointed."
"Bigger than the ruins under Reach," Kelly said.
"We did not discover the full extent of those ruins," Dr. Halsey replied, "and likely never will." She squinted at the monitor. "There," she said, pointing at a distant gleaming dome.
"Can you move closer to that structure?" She turned to Kurt. "With your permission, Lieutenant Commander."
"New heading zero two five," Kurt said. "Pick your best path."
"New course, aye," Kelly replied.
As they descended deeper, the dropship sped past a staircase that ascended to nowhere—each step a hectare of unbroken polished stone.
The cloud-reflected light dimmed and the smooth surfaces melted into shadow. Dr.
Halsey's dome turned red-gold and faded to a silhouette.
Will turned the passive radar on the thing and an outline overlaid the structure. Kurt discerned that the top of the dome faceted into seven flat surfaces, each with a tall arch leading to the interior.
"Those large enough to fly through?" Kurt asked.
Will consulted his sensor screen. "Huge," he replied.
"Move us in," Kurt told Kelly "Aye aye." She pulled the nose of the ship up.