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316
HALO: FIRST STRIKE
by side, but John had to crouch and turn sideways to pass. Will
and Fred followed; Cortana sealed the door behind them.
They continued until the narrow passage turned ninety de-
grees and dropped straight down. Will attached a rope and they
rappelled down a hundred meters, landing on a platform.
John overlooked a cavern hewn from rough stone that arched
up ninety meters and vanished into the shadows in the distance.
Five hundred twelve fusion reactors that looked like flatted spiral
seashells filled the space, stacked in rows and columns eight
deep. Each was the size of a Pelican dropship and thrummed
with power, casting off waves of wavering heat.
The open areas between the reactors were a tangle of plasma
conduits and alive with swarms of thousands of buoyant Engi-
neers as they tended the machinery. Faint wispy borealis com-
prised of escaped plasma swirled, whipped into a luminous froth by
the intense magnetic vortices within the chamber.
It was a tremendous feat of engineering. It was as if the sta-
tion's builders had hewn this from a seed asteroid and built the
rest of the installation around it.
Will pointed across the room to three Jackals who walked
along a catwalk. Blue Team held position and didn't move.
"There," Cortana announced. "Across the platform is a termi-
nal on the reactor subsystem."
John held up a hand to Will and Fred, waited for the Jackal
guards to pass, and then sprinted across the platform. He re-
moved Cortana's chip and inserted it into the terminal.
After three seconds, she reported: "I'm in. Very few Covenant
counterintrusion measures in this system. I can accomplish the
overload.
"I've found an exit route for Blue Team and uploaded it into
your NAV systems," she continued. "It should be stealthy enough
for you to return to the repair bay undetected. Once there, give
me the order and I can begin. It will take ten minutes for the
overload to build. There's no stopping once I start this, Chief, so
be sure."
"This station and the Covenant fleet might jump to Earth in
the next ten minutes," John said. He looked to Fred and Will, and
they nodded as if they could read his mind.
"Proceed with the overload now, Cortana."