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140
HALO: FIRST STRIKE
drew closer. Fred had set his audio filters to screen out the noise
so he could concentrate.
Five days. It hadn't seemed that long. They worked, they
rested, they slept, and they waited. Dr. Halsey had taught them
word games like twenty questions and simple cipher, at which
they all became extremely proficient—so much so that she
quickly stopped playing. Dr. Halsey was not a graceful loser.
The time had melted away. Maybe it was the darkness, the
lack of any temporal reference like the sun, moon, and stars, but
the hours had lost their meaning.
He paused to stretch his Achilles tendon, recently stitched and
fused by Dr. Halsey. Aside from some stiffness, it was almost
back to normal. He had almost torn the tendon off, running on
the injury.
Dr. Halsey had patched them all up; she had even flash cloned
Kelly a new partial lung, which she successfully grafted. In her
tiny field medical kit, the doctor had a handheld MRI, a sterile
field generator, even a shoe-box-sized clone tank for organ
duplication.
She had also installed the new MJOLNIR parts in their exist-
ing armor. These upgrades were in field-testing and not certified,
she had explained, but she gauged their need sufficient to justify
the risk of using the new equipment.
Kelly received an improvement to her neural induction cir-
cuits, giving her twitch response time a speed boost. Vinh had a
new linear accelerator added to her shield system, effectively
doubling its strength. Isaac had a new image-enhancing com-
puter installed. Will received a better tracking system on his
heads-up display, which improved his accuracy at distances up
to a thousand meters.
Fred flexed his bare right hand. Dr. Halsey was installing his
upgrade now—new sensors that would boost the sensitivity of
his motion tracker. Without the single gauntlet, Fred felt vul-
nerable. The Master Chief would have told him not to rely on his
armor or weapons—rely instead on his head. It would protect
him better.
He wondered how Blue Team—John, Linda, and James—had
fared. And what of the rest of his own team? Had anyone at the
generator complex survived?