Filter
Top Products
324
HALO: FIRST STRIKE
every twenty meters along the bay walls, the air lock doors were
opening. Beyond, stars shone upon velvet black.
Fred and Will's Banshees appeared off John's starboard ca-
nard. John pointed and together they dived, accelerating toward a
bull's-eye pattern of cracks on the translucent portion of the
wall.
That web of fissures spread: fingers that stretched and split
along the length of the window... slowed and stopped.
John fired the Banshee's plasma cannons. Fred opened fire as
well, and four blobs of plasma splashed across the glassy surface
fifty meters away.
The window flexed, crackled, tiny flakes popped off... but
the translucent material remained stubbornly intact.
John was thirty meters from the surface—he'd have to veer off
now, or impact upon it. He gritted his teeth and braced himself.
Ten meters.
The window's smooth surface flashed into a jigsaw mosaic.
The squealing of glass over glass filled the air. It shattered.
The entire length crumbled and instantly blasted into the
vacuum of space—swept out by the pressurized atmosphere fill-
ing the interior of the station.
John tried to maneuver the Banshee. He bounced into the
repair bay, rolled the craft over and upright—fell off, tumbled
though the air lock . . . and drifted away into the darkness of
space.
He flailed his limbs in the zero gravity, and the tether on his
belt snapped taut. He recoiled back toward the Banshee. Linda
held on with one hand and held out the other to him. He climbed
back aboard and tapped the thrusters to stabilize their pitch
and yaw.
Behind them the station vented gas as well as the bodies of
Covenant Engineers, Grunts, Jackals, and Elites. Clouds of metal
junk bled from the ruptures. Tendrils of steam flash froze into
glittering ice crystals.
The Covenant fleet moved as well—some cruisers closed
with the station, others moved farther away. There were five hun-
dred alien warships without leadership from their
command-and-control center, and they reminded John of motes
of dust in a sunbeam—silently floating in every direction.