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204
HALO: FIRST STRIKE
Dr. Halsey inhaled sharply, and the Master Chief turned to see
what had startled her.
For a moment he thought the crystal she had brought with
her had shattered. But it hadn't broken, not exactly. The top half
of the slender shard had split along its facets and opened like a
flower blossom. The sapphire petals undulated, and as the
ultraviolet light of the grav beam fell upon them, the crystal
opened wider. The facets twirled and spun in a complex geo-
metric dance. The crystal seemed to reshape itself, and it pulsed a
cool green.
The light inside the ship cleared—all traces of the purple tint
seemed to recede like a tide.
The dropship lurched upward.
"What the hell—" Polaski, caught unawares, grasped the
yoke and pulled back. Their dropship hummed with power and
shot up through the tunnel.
"Gravity," Dr. Halsey whispered and stared into the opened
facets of the crystal. "This thing warped space when we first ap-
proached. It apparently has an effect on artificial gravity fields as
well. I can't wait to get this into a lab."
The dropship emerged from the hole, and sunlight flooded the
interior.
Once out of the grav beam, the slender stone folded back upon
itself, closing petal-like fragments, melding back into a single
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-meter-long light cruiser had company, too. Six
more Covenant cruisers faced their tiny dropship, plasma turrets
tracking them.
A series of icons flashed on Polaski's console. "They've got
weapons lock," she said, the calm in her voice cracking slightly
around the edges.
"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, seeming to stare
the cruisers down. "They want whatever the doctor and her team