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ERIC NYLUND
79
She checked on the Chief. His signal was still on board, and
his biomonitor indicated that he was still alive.
"Chief, are you there yet? I'm down to one last option."
There was a static-filled pause over the COM, and then the
Master Chief whispered, "Almost."
"Be careful. Your armor is breached. You can no longer func-
tion in a compromised atmosphere."
His acknowledgment light winked on.
Cortana pushed the Covenant reactors to overload and plotted
a course around Threshold. She had to slip into the outer reaches
of its atmosphere. The heat, ionization, and planet's magnetic
field might protect them from the plasma.
The flagship rolled and dived into the thin tendrils of clouds.
Bands of white ammonia and amber ammonium hydrosulfide
clouds snaked in sinuous ribbons. A red-purple spot of phospho-
rus compounds cycloned and lightning arced, illuminating an in-
tervening layer of pale blue ice crystals.
But their ship no longer had shields. The friction heated the
hull to three hundred degrees Celsius as she brushed against the
upper reaches of Threshold.
On her aft cameras Cortana saw the trailing Covenant ships
open fire. Their shots followed her like a pack of predator birds.
"Come and get me," she muttered.
She adjusted the attack angle of the flagship so it nosed up,
which produced a slight amount of lift. She concentrated the
building heat toward the ship's tail. A turbulent wake of super-
heated air corkscrewed behind them.
"Cortana?" Polaski said. "We're approaching the viable edge
of an exit orbit. You're getting too close to the planet."
"I am aware of our trajectory, Warrant Officer," she said and
snapped off the COM. The last thing she needed was a flying
lesson.
The leading edge of the plasma overtook them. It roiled in
their wake, churned explosively with the atmosphere. The flag-
ship pitched and dropped in the unstable air, but the plasma dif-
fused and caused them no further damage. Behind the flagship
was an unfurling trail hundreds of kilometers long, a wide flam-
ing gash upon Threshold.