Fall of Reach

The UNSC wasn’t taking any chances. And after everything he had seen, he didn’t blame them.

His scanning windows appeared on the view screen, full of spectroscopic tracers and radar—and lots of noise.

Archimedesstation cycled three probes into and out of Slipstream space. Each probe sent out radar pings and analyzed the spectrum from radio to X rays, then reentered normal space and broadcast the data back to the station.

The problem with Slipstream space was that the laws of physics never worked the way they were supposed to. Exact positions, times, velocities, even masses were impossible to measure with any real accuracy. Ships never knew exactly where they were, or exactly where there were going.

Every time the probes returned from their two-second journey, they could appear exactly where they had left . . . or three million kilometers distant. Sometimes they never returned at all. Drones had to be sent after the probes before the process could be repeated.

Because of this slipperiness in the interdimensional space, UNSC ships traveling between star systems might arrive half a billion kilometers off course.

The curious properties of Slipspace also made this assignment a joke.

Ensign Lovell was supposed to watch for pirates or black-market runners trying to sneak by . . . and most importantly, for the Covenant. This station had never logged so much as a Covenant probe silhouette—and that was the reason he had specifically requested this dead-end assignment. It was safe.

What he did see with regularity were trash dumps from UNSC vessels, clouds of primordial atomic hydrogen, even the occasional comet that had somehow plowed into the Slipstream.

Lovell yawned, kicked his feet up onto the control console, and closed his eyes. He nearly fell out of his chair when the COM board contact alert pinged.

“Oh no,” he whispered, fear and shame at his own cowardice forming a cold lump in his belly.Don’t let it be the Covenant. Don’t let it . . . not here.

He quickly activated the controls and traced the contact signal back to the source—Alpha probe.

The probe had detected an incoming mass, a slight arc to its trajectory pulled by the gravity of Sigma Octanus. It was large. A cloud of dust, perhaps? If it was, it would soon distort and scatter.

Ensign Lovell sat up straighter in his chair.