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CHAPTER NINE
1827 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard
unidentified Covenant flagship, uncharted system, Halo debris
field.
The flagship plunged through Threshold's churning atmo-
sphere. Cortana could not hold the ship's attitude. It wobbled
and blasted a fiery scar through the clouds, slowly rolling to port
on its central axis.
Without shields, the flagship's hull continued to heat to seven-
teen hundred degrees Celsius. The nose glowed a dark red,
which spread into an amber smear along the midsection and be-
came a white-hot plume at the ship's tail. Conduits and feathery
antenna arrays melted, separated, and left a trail of molten metal
in an explosive wake. Shocks rippled along the frame as the
overpressure shed off the bow in waves. The friction from the
planet's dense atmosphere would shred the ship in a matter of
seconds.
"Cortana," the Master Chief said. "I've gotten to the coupling.
The Engineer appears to know what it's doing. You should have
power for the Slipspace generator in a moment."
"It's too late," Cortana told him. "We are now too low to
escape Threshold's gravitational pull. Even at full power we
can't break our degrading orbit. And we can't tunnel into
Slip-space, either."
The incoming Covenant fire had forced them deeper into the
atmosphere. She had pushed their trajectory to the edge of what
had been safe—it was that, or be engulfed in plasma. But she
had saved them from one death ... only to delay that fate by a
scant minute.