Fred glanced at Will and Dr. Halsey. Will gave him a thumbs-up, indicating that the doctor hadn't been wounded in the exchange.
After the exchange of gunfire, there was no need for secrecy. "One of them got away," Fred told them. "We need to move, too... and forget quiet."
The Spartans ran down the corridor. They heard and felt an?other explosion directly over their heads.
Kelly skidded to a halt in front of the locked elevator doors. She gripped one of the panels; Fred and Vinh gripped the seam of the other side, and the Spartans pried them apart as if the five-centimeter steel alloy were no tougher than the rind of an orange.
Kelly grabbed the elevator cables and slid down. Vinh fol?lowed, then Fred plummeted more than five hundred meters into
138 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
the darkness. The three of them ripped open the doors at the bot?tom of the shaft.
Will slid down next with Dr. Halsey holding on to his neck. Isaac followed.
"There should be an air vent," Dr. Halsey whispered. "There."
Kelly ripped off the vent cover and peered down.
"It leads to the old mine tunnels," Dr. Halsey told them, "and more, I hope."
"Go," Fred ordered.
Kelly dived in, headfirst. They waited ten seconds, and her ac?knowledgment light winked on.
Fred entered next, sliding through the vent duct. It twisted and turned and finally dumped him into a long tunnel of roughly hewn granite. The ceiling was ten meters high and—judging from the three-meter-wide tire tracks in the dust—big enough for heavy equipment to have rolled through.
Will slid out of the duct with Dr. Halsey riding on his chest. Vinh and Isaac came after them.
"There's more to this place," Dr. Halsey told them, standing up and brushing the dust from her lab coat. "This is only the be?ginning. We have to—"
A thunderous detonation cut her off. The mountain exploded, and ONI's base collapsed over their heads.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
0002 hours, September 7,2552 (Military Calendar) \ ONI underground facility, planet Reach.
Fred followed the trail of odd symbols along the left-hand stone wall until they twisted into a spiral mosaic and vanished into ever-smaller curls. The symbols were part of the rock, com?posed of glittering mica inclusions in the granite matrix. There were a series of squares, triangles, bars, and dots, similar to Covenant calligraphy he had seen—but at the same time it was simpler, cleaner, and when Fred focused on them, the characters seemed to blur around their edges and fade from his stare.
He blinked, and the symbols were there again.
Following these symbols like a trail of bread crumbs had been his primary mission for the last five days. Dr. Halsey and the Spartans had explored the extensive caverns, hoping to find two things: a way out, and what Dr. Halsey called "the most impor?tant discovery of the millennium." She had, however, refused to speculate on what exactly this discovery would be. "I'm a scien?tist," she'd told them, "not a soothsayer."
Fred would have settled for finding an airhole to the surface— but he recognized that the symbols were important, too. They were important because the Covenant thought they were impor?tant. And that made whatever Dr. Halsey was searching for worth finding, if only to keep the enemy from getting it.