“Lieutenant Hall?” the Captain asked.

“Scanning,” she said. After a moment she looked back and shook her head.

“I see,” the Master Chief replied. There could be worse deaths... but not for one of his Spartans. Floating helpless. Slowly suffocating and freezing—losing to an enemy that could not be fought.

“Sir,” the Master Chief said, “when will the Pillar of Autumn rendezvous with my planetside team?”

Captain Keyes turned from the Master Chief and stared out into space. “We won’t be picking them up,” he said quietly. “They were overrun by Covenant forces. They never made orbit. We’ve lost contact with them.”

The Master Chief took a step closer. “Then I would like permission to take a dropship and retrieve them, sir.”

“Request denied, Master Chief. We still have a mission to perform. And we cannot remain in this system much longer. Lieutenant Dominique, aft camera on the main screen.”

Covenant vessels swarmed though the Reach System in five-ship crescent formations. The remaining UNSC ships fled before them... those that could still move. Those ships too damaged to outrun the Covenant were blasted with plasma and laser fire.

The Covenant had won this battle. They were mopping up before they glassed the planet; the Master Chief had seen this happen in a dozen campaigns. This time was different, however.

This time the Covenant was glassing a planet... with his people still on it.

He tried to think of a way to stop them... to save his teammates. He couldn’t.

The Captain turned and strode to the Master Chief, stood by his side. “Dr. Halsey’s mission,” he said, “is more important than ever now. It may be the only chance left for Earth. We have to focus on that goal.”

Three dozen Covenant craft moved toward Gamma station and the now inert orbital defense platforms. They bombarded the installations—the mightiest weapons in the UNSC arsenal—with plasma. The guns melted, and boiled away.

The Master Chief clenched his hands into fists. The Captain was correct: there was nothing to do now except complete the mission they had set out to do.

Captain Keyes barked, “Ensign Lovell, give me our best acceleration. I want to enter Slipstream space as soon as possible.”

Cortana said, “Excuse me, Captain. Six covenant frigates are inbound on an intercept course.”

“Continue evasive maneuvers, Cortana. Prepare the Slipspace generators and get me an appropriate randomized exit vector.”

“Aye, sir.” Navigation symbols flashed along the length of her holographic body.

The Master Chief continued to watch as the Covenant ships closed in on them.

Was he the only Spartan left? Better to die than live without his teammates. But he still had a mission: victory against the Covenant—and vengeance for his fallen comrades.

“Generating randomized exit vector per the Cole Protocol,” Cortana said.

The Master Chief glanced at her translucent body. She looked vaguely like a younger Dr. Halsey. Tiny dots, ones, and zeros slid over her torso, arms, and legs. Her thoughts were literally worn on her sleeve; the symbols also appeared on Ensign Lovell’s NAV station.

He cocked his head as the symbols and numbers scrolled across the NAV console.

The representations of Slipspace vectors and velocity curves twisted across the screen—tantalizingly familiar. He’d seen them somewhere before—but he could not make the connection.

“Something on your mind, Master Chief?” Cortana asked.

“Those symbols... I thought I had seen them somewhere before. It’s nothing.”

Cortana got a far off look in her eyes. The marks cycling on her hologram shifted and rearranged.

The Master Chief saw the Covenant fleet gathered around planet Reach. They swarmed and circled like sharks. The first of their plasma bombardments launched toward the surface. Clouds in the fire’s path boiled away.

“Jump to Slipspace, Ensign Lovell,” the Captain said. “Get us the hell out of here.”

John remembered Chief Mendez’s words—that they had to live and fight another day. He was alive... and there was still plenty of fight left in him. And he would win this war—no matter what it took.

SECTION VI

HALO

EPILOGUE

0647 Hours, August 30, 2552 (Military Calendar)

UNSC Pillar of Autumn, Epsilon Eridani System’s edge

Cortana fired the Pillar of Autumn’s autocannons—targeting a dozen Seraph fighters harassing them as they were accelerated out of the system. Seven Covenant frigates were now locked into the pursuit. She dodged a volley of pulse laser fire, using the ventral emergency thrusters.

She pushed the damaged secondary reactor to critical levels. They had to build up more speed before activating the Shaw-Fujikawa Translight generators or the jump to Slipstream space would fail.

She rechecked her calculations. Under the Cole Protocol, they would be jumping away from Earth... but it would not be a totally random heading.

The Master Chief had been right when he said that he recognized the shorthand navigation symbols on the NAV display.

Cortana accessed the Spartans’ mission logs. She sifted through the data, and filed it into a secondary long-term storage buffer. When she reviewed the database of his mission reports, Cortana learned that Spartan 117 had seen something similar on the Covenant vessel he had boarded in 2525. And again—the symbols almost looked like those on the rock he had extracted from Covenant forces on Sigma Octanus IV. ONI reports on the symbols found in the anomalous rock had defied cryptoanalysis.

Keyes’ order to plot a navigation route sparked a connection between this data; she accessed the alien symbols, and rather than compare them with alphabets or hieroglyphics, compared them to star formations.

There were some startling similarities—along with a number of differences. Cortana reanalyzed the symbols and accounted for thousands of years of stellar drift.

A tenth of a second later she had a close match on her charts—86.2 percent.

Interesting. Perhaps the markings in the rock recovered on Sigma Octanus IV were navigation symbols, albeit highly unusual and stylized ones—mathematical symbols as artistic and elegant as Chinese calligraphy.

What was there that the Covenant wanted so badly that they had launched a full offensive against Sigma Octanus IV? Whatever it was... Cortana was interested, too.

She compared the new NAV coordinates with her directives and was pleased with what she saw; the new course complied with the Cole Protocol. Good.

The Covenant frigates fired their plasma again. Seven bolts of fire streaked toward the Pillar of Autumn.

She dumped the coordinates to the NAV controls and stored the logic path that led to her deduction in her high-security buffer.

“Approaching saturation velocity,” she told Captain Keyes. “Powering Shaw-Fujikawa Translight generators. New course available.”

The Covenant frigates aligned with their outbound vector. They were going to try to follow the Pillar of Autumn through Slipspace. Damn.

The Shaw-Fujikawa Translight generators tore a hole in normal space. Light boiled around the Pillar of Autumn and she vanished.

Cortana had plenty of time to think on the journey. Most of the crew were frozen in cryo for the trip. Some of the engineers had elected to try to repair the main reactor. A futile gesture... but she lent them a few cycles to try to rebuild the convection inductor.

Had Dr. Halsey been on Reach when it fell to the Covenant? Cortana felt a pang of regret for her creator. Maybe she had gotten away. The probability was low... but the doctor was a survivor.