Fred didn't understand any of the symbols, yet something seemed familiar about them. Some of the controls were similar to the Banshee, but nothing was an exact match. He relaxed as best he could given the situation, and his hands drifted over the controls. He tapped a symbol that could have been Aztec iconog- raphy, a tangle of spaghetti, or a crisscross of bird tracks.

His tank coughed and rumbled and rose a meter off the ground.

Fred frowned. He'd been damned lucky to get it right the first time. That was more than luck—-just as it was more than luck that he knew that the controls under his left hand moved the tank, the ones under his right aligned the mortar on target, and the one in the center armed and fired the main battery. But Fred wasn't going to examine how he knew this. He'd just use this cu- rious development to his advantage.

"Ready here," he told Kelly. "Let's take out the motor pool."

"Affirmative," she said, trying to conceal the faint trace of anticipation in her voice.

In unison the Spartans turned and fired at the far corner of the formation of tanks. Two blue-white blobs of liquid sun spat from the Wraiths and detonated. There was a dazzling light, an expan- sion of superheated white fire—and then there was glass-smooth ground and the smoldering skeletons of seven Wraith tanks.

More luck. If the tanks had been active, with hatches secured, they might have survived the first volley.

Kelly's tank surged ahead and bulldozed aside the surviving tanks near them.

Fred turned, accelerated to full power, and smashed through a line of retreating Grunts, a series of small, satisfying thuds reverberating through the cockpit.

The two Wraith tanks shattered through a line of trees, splin- tering their trunks. Beyond lay the main Covenant camp. A thou- sand Grunts and Jackals ran toward them, weapons and personal shields ready, but none of them fired.

They charged past the two tanks.

"They think we're on their side," Fred said. "They're going to see what attacked them. Let's not show them otherwise until we have to."

Kelly's acknowledgment light winked on, and she pushed a path through the onrushing Grunts—who quickly parted before her.

Half a kilometer ahead was a stand of hexagonal gold and silver structures: the shielded tents of the Elites. There were half a dozen stationary plasma turrets, "Shades," guarding them, and beyond them lay the mountain under which were ONI Section Three's secret research caverns. The Covenant were there as well.

Without thinking, Fred tapped a control; the display magni- fied. A hundred Covenant Engineers maneuvered heavy equip- ment: laser drills and conveyor belts and giant insectlike machines that looked as if they could dig through the entire mountain.

"They found the caverns," Fred told Kelly. "Looks like they're going to dig them out."

But again ... why? Why not just blast them from orbit? The Covenant had never taken prisoners—except the occasional strag- gler to execute for sport. They didn't go to this much trouble.

Unless it wasn't Delta Team they were after.

Fred keyed his COM. "Delta, if you're listening, we're com- ing in from south-southeast in a pair of captured Wraith tanks.

You'll know which ones from the fireworks. Keep your heads down and don't shoot us."

He keyed over to Kelly's personal COM. "Blaze a trail, Red-Two! Kill everything and get to that entrance ASAP!"

"I'm on it," she whispered, her voice thick with concentration.

A blue acknowledgment light flickered on . . . but it wasn't Kelly's. It was tagged as SPARTAN-039, Isaac. That was part of Will's team.

So they were holed up at the fallback position. Relief flooded into him to know his team was here and still alive.

But he couldn't hope—not yet. He had three hundred meters to cross, every millimeter of which was covered with a solid wall of Covenant Grunts, Jackals, and Elites—a path straight through hell.

Kelly rotated her tank about and fired at the remaining Wraiths and the cluster of Grunts trying to put out the fires near those she'd already destroyed. For a split second the ground was the surface of a sun; it flared, faded, and then was nothing but ash.

Fred fired his mortar—as fast as the tank's power supply would cycle. He lobbed three silver-white projectiles at the con- centration of Elites and plasma turrets. They had shields that protected them for a microsecond before they overloaded and collapsed. They flared like the "strike-anywhere" matches the ODSTs used to light their contraband cigarettes.

Kelly shot arcing projectiles into the hundreds of Grunts and Jackals running in every direction. Bodies charred midstride and turned to vapor. It was as if a dozen lightning bolts had struck in the center of the camp.

Grunts ran and ducked and shot at one another. The few Jackals tried to marshal the diminutive soldiers, but the Grunts, enraged or terrified, fired on them as well.

Fred caught motion in the corner of his eye—a shadow buzzed over his tank, and a blast rocked it from side to side.

That had to be Banshees. It made sense that they'd already have Elites in the air, on patrol. He cursed himself for not spotting them before. It was only a matter of time now. Without infantry support, sooner or later the Covenant ground and air forces would regroup and destroy them.

"Move!" he shouted over the COM. "Break off contact and get to the caves!"

Kelly gunned her tank and pushed through the wreckage.

Fred let her get ahead and paused to target the excavation equipment. He fired once.

Three rapid impacts thudded on top of his tank—exploded and shook his teeth. He fired three more times at the excavation equipment and gunned the Wraith tank. It shuddered and lurched forward.

He gritted his teeth and smiled. On the display, the smoke cleared enough for him to see that the laser drill, conveyor belts, and the insectlike diggers had been reduced to piles of half-melted junk.

The displays lost focus. No—Fred saw it wasn't the picture; smoke poured into the cockpit.

"Banshees circling over you," Kelly yelled over the COM.

"Get out!"

Fred popped the hatch and crawled out.

Overhead, a dozen Banshee fliers turned to strafe his crip- pled tank.

Fred jumped, rolled to his feet, and ran. A NAV marker ap- peared on his heads-up display, over a gash in the side of the mountain where the cavern entrance used to be.

A red-hot sledgehammer hit him squarely in the back: a plasma pistol on overload. He reeled forward but didn't lose his balance—and kept running. There was no time to stop. He glanced at his shield bar; it was completely drained, but it slowly began to recharge. He dodged and weaved back and forth. He couldn't take many more hits like that.

"Hurry," Kelly said.

He crossed the remaining hundred meters in seconds and jumped into a crater where there had once been a gatehouse and the secure entrance to ONI's underground base.

Kelly stood, braced just over the lip of the crater, holding a Warthog's chaingun. She aimed over Fred's head and sprayed the enemy with thunderous suppression fire. SPARTAN-043, Will, stood next to her. Fred was thrilled to see them alive—and even more thrilled to see Will holding a Jackhammer rocket launcher.

"Get below," Kelly said, and motioned with her head to the center of the crater. "We'll cover you." She continued to fire until she had depleted the chaingun's belt of ammunition.

Will took aim and squeezed the trigger. A rocket knifed through the air, and a contrail of white smoke connected with the cockpit of an oncoming Banshee. The alien flier disintegrated in a ball of fire.

Fred turned and saw a shaft that plunged deep into the ground.

A steel cable had been rigged to one side, and it angled into the depths.

He grabbed the line, jumped, and zipped into the darkness. He felt a sharp vibration through the line—once, then twice—as the other Spartans followed him.

After three hundred meters of free fall, he glimpsed a faint il- lumination at the bottom of the shaft, the feeble sickly yellow glow from chemical light sticks. Fred tightened his grip on the cable, and his descent slowed. A meter from the bottom of the shaft, he let go and landed in a crouch. He moved out of the way. The other Spartans landed next to him.

"This way," Will said and moved ahead, through a set of elevator doors that had been forced open.

Fred noticed that Will moved with a severe limp, and remem- bered the Spartans he had sent here were injured. It was ironic that he had sent them out of the thick of battle, to end up in the middle of another dire situation.

Then again, they weren't dead .. . which was more than he could hope for Beta Team.

They stepped into a corridor with brushed stainless-steel walls that mirrored and smeared the faint light from the chem lights.

Overhead there was a tremendous explosion. Rocks and dirt showered into the shaft, and dust blossomed through the corridor.

"Lotus antitank mines," Will said. "A little something to slow our uninvited guests down."

Two other Spartans, Isaac and Vinh, sat along either side of the hallway, behind rock barricades. They gave slight nods to Fred and kept their eyes and weapons on the end of the corridor.

"Where's the rest of the team? And the Marines from Charlie Company?" Fred asked.

"They didn't make it," Will replied, his voice flat. "We were separated on the way here." He shook his head. "No contact since then."

Fred was quiet a moment. He listed those three as MIA on his team roster as well as the other Spartans on Will's team. The list of Spartans he could account for had grown extremely short.

Fred felt his stomach twist. "Any word from Beta Team?"

"Negative. No contact, sir."

Fred clenched his teeth and marked Beta Team as MIA as well.

"Gamma Team?" Will asked.

"They're out there," Fred replied. "I heard them on the COM, but I couldn't make out much. I warned them away from this position."

"Good," Will whispered.

The hallway dead-ended in a vault door.

"The retinal and palm scanners are broken," Will explained.

"There's voice access, which we've tried, but there's no re- sponse. This door must be a meter thick, so without cutting tools or a hundred kilos of explosive we're stuck on this side."

"You spoke to the people on the other side?" Kelly asked.

"The channel is open," Will said. "But there's been no reply.

Everyone on the other side probably bugged out."

"Or maybe you're just not saying anything they want to hear,"

Kelly said. She whistled a six-note singsong tune.

Will nodded. "I didn't think of that."

The tune had been the Spartan's secret code from when they were young and training on Reach. It was their all-clear-it's-safe-to-come-out signal. No one but the Spartans and a few very select outsiders knew of it. . . a few outsiders who might be still here.

Kelly keyed the mic and whistled the tune. She released the key and waited.

Two minutes ticked off Fred's mission clock. Too much time sitting here, doing nothing, while the Covenant over their heads were undoubtedly figuring out a way to dig them out and tear them to pieces.

"It was a good idea," he told Kelly. "We'll recon the shaft.

Maybe it's not completely collapsed. Will you—"

A mechanism thunked and then hummed within the titanic door. There was a hiss as the seams parted, and the meter-thick door swung inward on perfectly balanced, silent hinges.

Bright light flooded the passage. A silhouetted figure stood on the threshold. As Fred's display compensated and enhanced the image, he saw it was human, slight of figure, female. She wore a gray pleated skirt and a white lab coat with a data pad stuffed into the breast pocket. He caught the glimmer of her eyeglasses, black-rimmed with faint bifocal lines. Her gray hair was coiled into a tight bun.

But it was her face that caught and held his focus—he recog- nized the tight smooth skin that wrinkled only in the comers of her mouth and her gray-blue eyes. She was the intellect behind the SPARTAN-II program, and the one who'd invented their MJOLNIR armor.

She was Dr. Catherine Halsey.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

0810 hours, August 30,2552 (Military Calendar)\Epsilon Eridani system, ONI underground facility, planet Reach.

Dr. Halsey studied the five Spartans in the hallway and pushed her antique glasses farther up the ridge of her nose. Despite everything their presence here meant—Reach invaded, their mis- sion to find the Covenant leadership compromised, everything she had worked for now in jeopardy—she was still pleased to see them. She steeled herself, though; an emotional outburst wouldn't be understood, or appreciated, by her Spartans.

"Come in," she said briskly. "And hurry. From the sounds of things upstairs we haven't much time."

The Spartans stood there a moment—undoubtedly communi- cating with one another through a mixture of externally silent COM channels and minute body language. She noticed the tick of a finger, the slight nod of a head. They then moved together, picked up their equipment, and walked through the threshold of the vault.

Dr. Halsey greeted them as they passed her. "It's good to see you, Fred."

"Ma'am," Fred replied. "Good to see you, too."

She noted that Kelly's movements were off, a little sluggish.

She was hurt, as were the rest of them, now that she saw them up close. "Kelly."

"Doctor Halsey." She reached out and gave her hand a slight squeeze of greeting.

"Isaac."

"Doctor."

"Vinh."

She nodded.

"William."

Will grunted. He had never liked his formal name.

She knew this annoyed them all—how she was always able to tell who they were despite the MJOLNIR armor. She had grown up with them, knew their every gesture and their indi- vidual walks. She could have never called them by their number designations: SPARTAN-104, -087, -039, -029, and -043, respectively.

Dr. Halsey tapped a control pad. The vault door eased silently shut, its seams vanished, and, with a sharp, metallic click, it locked.

"We have access to Aqua, Scarlet, and Lavender Levels," she told them. "Follow me to the medical wing." She proceeded down a concrete hallway with a high arched ceiling, recessed lights, and security cameras. "I know the Covenant entered the Epsilon Eridani system at approximately oh-five-hundred hours. ONI Section Three staff evacuated this facility at oh-five-thirty hours. I assume you're not here to let me know it's safe to come out?"