Halo: Ghosts of Onyx by Eric S. Nylund

Author:Eric S. Nylund
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, Military science fiction
ISBN: 9780765354709
Publisher: Macmillan
Published: 2007-04-03T06:00:00+00:00

SECTION V

BLUE TEAM

CHAPTER

TWENTY-THREE 1550 HOURS, NOVEMBER 3, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR] \ SOL SYSTEM, PLANET EARTH \ CARIBBEAN OCEAN, NEAR CUBAN COAST

Blue Team—SPARTANS-104, -058, and -043—sat on the blood tray of the Pelican as it roared over the ocean, skimming a few meters over the water. The aft hatch was lowered, jammed open because a plasma shot had melted the hydraulics. Fred watched the jets chum the water behind them, happy to be above the water instead of under it.

In the last two weeks Blue Team had been deployed on numerous zero-gee ops to repel the Covenant ships in orbit over the Earth. They had then been dispatched to Mount Erebus in the Antartic where they neutralized a Covenant excavation with a HAVOK tactical nuke. They had then redeployed off the coast of the Yucatan Peninsula for a swim. Covenant forces had been searching the seafloor for something. What precisely—a holy relic, a geological sample—no one knew, and it didn't matter. What mat-lered was when they got what they wanted, the Covenant then his-lorically glassed the planet to remove any human "infestation."

Blue Team had stopped both operations.

Fred looked over the ocean and wondered how long they could keep the Covenant at bay in space. His gaze dropped to the corrugated floor of the Pelican. It had lived up to its nickname "blood tray"… stained with splashes of congealed dark red. Good soldiers had died today.

On his heads-up display the TACMAP showed the edge of

Cuba ahead. Fred exhaled and cleared his mind. They were close to their third target: the Centennial Orbital Elevator.

There had been scattered reports that the Covenant had invaded the facility… before all contact with COE Control had been lost.

Fred stood and stretched. Linda and Will rose as well, sensing their brief downtime was over.

Linda opened one of the crates they had obtained from Base Segundo Terra near Mexico City. Within was a new SRS99C sniper rifle. She dissembled it, cleaned each part, applied graphite lubricant, and reassembled the gun with mechanical precision. She then examined the Oracle N-variant scope that had accompanied the rifle, and made microadjustments with a fine set of screwdrivers.

William tore into the box of ammunition and loaded magazines, sorting them by frag and AP types.

Fred opened an "egg carrier" box and divided up fragmentation and concussion grenades into three satchels.

He found an ONI datapad and turned it on. It had new Covenant-English translation matrices and the latest ONI intrusion and counterintrusion software. Updates courtesy of Cor-tana. He tossed it into his bag.

In the cockpit. Sergeant Laura "Smokes" Tanner flew, while her Crew Chief, Corporal Jim Higgins, fiddled with the COM, trying to filter though the reports of the action in space and on the ground. Tanner popped a black bubble and continued to chew the contraband tobacco gum so popular with NCO fliers.

"So then," Tanner said to Higgins, "In Amber Clad goes after the damned Covenant battleship as it did an in-atmosphere Slipspace jump! Flattened New Mombassa. I don't know what those split-chinned freaks were after, but they sure didn't stick around after they found it—that's all I heard.

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