Halo Lighting System First Strike Games User Manual

Page 123

Advertising
background image

ERIC NYLUND

119

"It was a good idea," he told Kelly. "We'll recon the shaft.

Maybe it's not completely collapsed. Will you—"

A mechanism thunked and then hummed within the titanic

door. There was a hiss as the seams parted, and the meter-thick

door swung inward on perfectly balanced, silent hinges.

Bright light flooded the passage. A silhouetted figure stood on

the threshold. As Fred's display compensated and enhanced the

image, he saw it was human, slight of figure, female. She wore a

gray pleated skirt and a white lab coat with a data pad stuffed

into the breast pocket. He caught the glimmer of her eyeglasses,

black-rimmed with faint bifocal lines. Her gray hair was coiled

into a tight bun.

But it was her face that caught and held his focus—he recog-

nized the tight smooth skin that wrinkled only in the comers of

her mouth and her gray-blue eyes. She was the intellect behind

the SPARTAN-II program, and the one who'd invented their

MJOLNIR armor.

She was Dr. Catherine Halsey.

Advertising