Along the side of the carrier, motes of light collected as they rebuilt the charges of their plasma weapons.

Archer missiles were pinpoints of exhaust in the distance; the carrier’s pulse lasers fired and melted a third of the incoming missiles.

The Pillar of Autumn rolled to starboard and dove.

Captain Keyes floated in free fall for a heartbeat, then landed awkwardly on the deck. The crenellated surface of an asteroid appeared on their port camera—meters away—then vanished.

Captain Keyes was grateful that he never had time to initialize the Pillar of Autumn’s AI. Cortana performed superbly.

The trio of blazing MAC rounds struck the carrier. The shield flashed once, twice. The third round got through—gutting the ship from stem to stern.

The carrier spun sideways. Her shields stuttered once, trying to reestablish a protective screen. A hundred Archer missiles struck, cratered the hull, blossomed into fire and sparks and smoldering metal.

The alien carrier listed and crashed into the asteroid the Pillar of Autumn had just narrowly avoided. It stuck there, hull broken and cracked. Columns of fire blossomed from the shattered vessel.

Captain Keyes sighed. A victory.

The Spartans, however, would not be taking that ship into Covenant space. It wasn’t going anywhere.

“Cortana, mark the location of the destroyed ship and the asteroid. We may have a chance to salvage her later.”

“Yes, Captain.”

“Ensign Lovell,” Captain Keyes said, “turn us around and give me best speed to rally point Zulu.”

Lovell tapped the thrusters and rotated the Pillar of Autumn to relative space normal with Reach. The rumble of the engines shook the decks as the ship accelerated in-system.

“ETA twenty minutes at best speed, sir.”

The battle for Reach could be over by the time he got there. Captain Keyes wished he could move through Slipspace for short, precision jumps like the Covenant. That carrier had materialized a kilometer behind the Pillar of Autumn. If he had that kind of accuracy, he could be at the rally point now—and be of some use. Any attempt to jump in-system, however, would be foolish at best. At worst, it would be a fatal move. Jump targets varied by hundreds of thousands of kilometers. Theoretically, they could reenter normal space inside Reach’s sun.

“Cortana, give me maximum magnification on the fore cameras.”

“Aye sir,” she said.

The view on the forward screen zoomed in—jumped and refocused on planet Reach.

Twenty thousand kilometers from the planet, a cluster of a hundred UNSC ships collected at rally point Zulu: destroyers, frigates, three cruisers, two carriers—and three refit and repair stations hovering over them... waiting to be used as sacrificial shields.

“Fifty-two additional UNSC warships inbound to rally point Zulu,” Cortana reported.

“Shift focus to section four by four on-screen, Cortana. Show me those Covenant forces.”

The scene blinked and transferred to the approaching Covenant fleet. There were so many ships Captain Keyes couldn’t estimate their numbers.

“How many?” he asked.

“I count three hundred fourteen Covenant ships, Captain,” Cortana replied.

Captain Keyes couldn’t tear his gaze away from the ships. The UNSC only won battles with the Covenant when they outnumbered the enemy forces three to one... not the other way around.

They had one advantage: the MAC orbital guns around Reach—the UNSC’s most powerful nonnuclear weapon. Some called them “Super” MAC guns or the “big stick.”

Their linear accelerator coils were larger than a UNSC cruiser. They propelled a three-thousand-ton projectile at tremendous speed, and could reload within five seconds. They drew power directly from the fusion reactor complex planetside.

“Pull back the camera angle, Cortana. Let me see the entire battle area.”

The Covenant ships accelerated toward Reach. The fleet at rally point Zulu fired their MAC guns and missiles. The orbital Super MAC guns opened fire as well—twenty streaks of white hot metal burned across the night.

The Covenant answered by launching a salvo of plasma torpedoes at the orbital guns—so much fire in space that it looked like a solar flare.

Deadly arcs of flame and metal raced through space and crossed paths.

The engines of the three refit stations flared to life and the platelike ships moved toward the path of the flaming vapor.

A plasma bolt caught the edge of the leading station—fire splashed over its flat surface. More bolts hit, and the station melted, sagged, and boiled. The metal glowed red, then white-hot, tinged with blue.

The other two stations maneuvered into position and shielded the orbital guns from the fiery assault. Plasma torpedoes collided with them and sprayed plumes of molten metal into space. After a dozen hits, clouds of ionizing metal enveloped the place where the three stations had been.

They had been vaporized.

The last of the Covenant plasma hit the haze—scattered, absorbed, and made the cloud glow a hellish orange.

Meanwhile, the fleet’s opening salvo and the Super MAC rounds hit the Covenant fleet.

The smaller ship-based MAC rounds bounced off the Covenant shields—it took three or more to wear them down.

The Super MAC rounds, however, were another story. The first Super MAC shell hit a Covenant destroyer. The ship’s shield flashed and vanished—the remaining impact momentum transferred to the ship—the hull rippled and shattered into a million fragments.

Four nuclear mines detonated in the center of the Covenant fleet. Dozens of ships with downed shields flared white and dissolved.

The other ships however, shrugged off the damage; their shields burned brilliant silver, then cooled.

The surviving Covenant vessels advanced in-system—a third of their number were left behind... burning radioactive hulks or utterly destroyed by the Super MAC rounds.

Plasma charges collected on the lateral lines of the Covenant ships. They fired. Fingers of deadly energy reached across space... toward the UNSC fleet.

One Covenant ship sat in the center of the pack, a gigantic vessel, larger than three UNSC cruisers. White-blue beams flashed from its prow—a split second later five UNSC vessels detonated.

“Cortana... what the hell was that?” Keyes asked. “Lovell, push those engine superchargers as hot as you can make them.”

“Running at three hundred ten percent, sir,” Lovell reported. “ETA fourteen minutes.”

“Replaying and digitally enhancing video record,” Cortana said.

She split the screen and zoomed in on the huge Covenant ship, replaying the video as the large ship fired. The Covenant energy beams looked like pulse lasers... but tinged silver white, the same scintillation effect that they’d seen when their shields were hit.

Cortana switched back to view the doomed UNSC destroyer Minotaur. The lance of energy was needle-thin. It struck the vessel on A deck, aft, near the reactor. Cortana pulled the view back and slowed the record frame by frame—the beam punctured through the entire ship, emanating below H deck by the engines.

“It drilled through every deck and both sets of battleplate,” Captain Keyes murmured.

The beam moved through the Minotaur, slicing a ten-meter-wide swath.

“Projected beam path cut through the Minotaur’s reactors,” Cortana said.

“A new weapon,” Captain Keyes said. “Faster than their plasma. Deadlier, too.”

The large Covenant ship veered off course and accelerated away from the battle. Perhaps it didn’t want to risk getting too close to their orbital MAC guns. Whatever the reason, Keyes was grateful to see it withdraw.

The UNSC forces slowly scattered. Some launched missiles to intercept the plasma torpedoes, but the high-energy explosives did nothing to the stop the superheated bolts. Fifty UNSC ships went up like flares, burning, exploding, falling toward the planet.