Hesitant to jump through the flames unless it was absolutely necessary, he took a right turn instead. The sounds of combat grew louder as the hatch opened onto a large room where a full array of Flood forms were battling a clutch of Sentinels. He paused, shouldered his weapon, and fired. Sentinels crashed, carrier forms exploded, and everyone fired at one another in a mad melee of crisscrossing energy beams, 7.62mm projectiles, and exploding needles.

Once the robots had been put out of action, and most of the Flood had been neutralized, the Chief was able to cross the middle of the room, climb a ladder, and gain the catwalk above. From that vantage point he could look across into the Maintenance Control Room, where a couple of Sentinels were hard at work trying to zap a group of Flood, none of whom were willing to be toasted without putting up a fight. The combatants were too busy to worry about stray humans, however, and the noncom took advantage of that to work his way down the walkway and into the Control Room.

And that, as he soon learned, was a big mistake.

It wasn’t too bad at first, or didn’t seem to be, as he destroyed both of the Sentinels, and went to work on the Flood. But every time he put one form down, it seemed as if two more arrived to take its place, soon forcing him onto the defensive.

He retreated into the antechamber adjacent to the Control Room. The human had little choice but to place his back against a locked hatch. The larger forms came in twos and threes – while the infection forms came in swarms. Some of the assaults seemed to be random, but many appeared to be coordinated as one, or two, or three combat forms would hurl themselves forward, die under the assault weapon’s thundering fire, and fall just as the Spartan ran out of ammo, and more carrier forms waddled into the fray.

He slung his AR, drew the shotgun – briefly hoping there would be a lull during which to reload – and opened fire on the bloated monstrosities before the force exerted by their exploding bodies could do him harm.

Then, with newly spawned infection forms flying in every direction it was clean-up time followed by a desperate effort to reload both weapons before the next wave of creatures attempted to roll over him.

He dropped into a pattern of fire and movement. He made his way through the ship, closer to the engineering spaces, pausing only to pour fire into knots of targets of opportunity. Then, he quickly disengaged, reloaded, and ran farther into the ship.

The noise generated by his own weapons hammered at the Master Chief’s ears, the thick gagging odor of Flood blood clogged his throat, and his mind eventually grew numb from all the killing.

After dispatching a Covenant combat team, he crouched behind a support strut and fed rounds into the shotgun. Without warning, a combat form leaped on his back and smashed a large wrench into his helmet. His shield dropped away from the force of the blow, which allowed an infection form to land on his visor.

Even as he staggered under the impact, and pawed at the form’s slick body, a penetrator punched its way through his neck seal, located his bare skin, and sliced it open.

The Spartan gave a cry of pain, felt the tentacle slide down toward his spine, and knew it was over.

Though unable to pick up a weapon and kill the infection form directly, Cortana had other resources, and rushed to use them. Careful not to drain too much power, the AI diverted some energy away from the MJOLNIR armor, and made use of it to create an electrical discharge. The infection form started to vibrate as the electricity coursed through it. The Chief jerked as the Flood form’s penetrator delivered a shock to his nervous system, and the pod popped, misting the Spartan’s visor with green blood spray.

The Chief could see well enough to fight, however, and did so, killing the wrench-wielding combat form with a burst of bullets.

“Sorry about that,” Cortana said, as the Spartan cleared the area around him, “but I couldn’t think of anything else to do.”

“You did fine,” he replied, pausing to reload. “That was close.”

Another two or three minutes passed before the Flood gave up and he could take the moment necessary to remove his helmet, jerk the penetrator out from under his skin, and slap a self-adhering antiseptic battle dressing over the wound. It hurt like hell: The Spartan winced as he lowered the helmet back over his head, and sealed his suit.

Then, pausing only to kill a couple of stray infection forms, and still looking for a way to gain entry to the cryo chamber, the Chief made his way through a number of passageways, into a maze of maintenance tunnels, and out into a corridor where he spotted a red arrow on the deck along with the word ENGINEERING.

Finally, a break.

No longer concerned with finding a way into cryo, the noncom passed through a hatch and entered the first passageway he’d seen that was well lit, free of bloodstains, and not littered with corpses. A series of turns brought him to a hatch.

“Engine Room located,” Cortana announced. “We’re here.”

The Spartan heard humming, and knew that 343 Guilty Spark was somewhere in the vicinity. He had already started to back through the hatch when Cortana said, “Alert! The Monitor has disabled all command access. We can’t restart the countdown. The only remaining option will be to detonate the ship’s fusion reactors. That should do enough damage to destroy Halo.

“Don’t worry... I have access to all of the reactor schematics and procedures. I’ll walk you through it. First we need to pull back the exhaust coupling. That will expose a shaft that leads to the primary fusion drive core.”

“Oh, good,” the Spartan replied. “I was afraid it might be complicated.”

The Chief reopened the hatch, stepped out into the Engine Room, and an infection form flew straight at his faceplate.

The attack on the Truth and Reconciliation came with mind-numbing speed as a wing of fifteen Banshees came screaming out of the sun, attacked the nearly identical number of Covenant aircraft assigned to fly cover over the cruiser, and knocked half of them out of the sky during the first sixty seconds of combat.

Then, even as individual dogfights continued, Lieutenant “Cookie” Peterson and his fellow Pelican pilots delivered Silva, Wellsley, and forty-five heavily armed Marines into the enemy cruiser’s shuttle bay, where the first leathernecks off the ramps smothered the Covenant security team in a hail of bullets, secured all the hatches, and sent a team of fifteen Helljumpers racing for the ship’s Control Room.

Conscious of the fact that occupying the Control Room wouldn’t mean much unless they owned engineering as well, the humans launched a nearly simultaneous ground attack. Thanks to the previous effort, in which the Master Chief and a group of Marines had entered the ship looking for Captain Keyes, McKay had the benefit of everything learned during that mission, including a detailed description of the gravity lift, video of the interior corridors, and operational data which Cortana had siphoned out of the ship’s systems.

Not too surprisingly, security around the gravity lift had been tripled since the previous incursion, which meant that even though McKay and her force of Helljumpers had been able to creep within meters of the hill on which the gravity field was focused, they still had six Hunters, twelve Elites, and a mixed bag of Grunts and Jackals to cope with before they could board the vessel above.

Having anticipated that problem, McKay had equipped her fifteen-person team with eight rocket launchers, all of which were aimed squarely at the Hunters.

The Covenant-flown Banshees had just come under attack, and the spined monsters were staring up into a nearly cloudless sky, when McKay gave the word: “Now!”