The Mona Lisa

Searching a derelict prison ship adrift near a shattered Halo ring, Sergeant Zhao Heng Lopez and his Marine squad expect to find survivors or, at worst, Covenant stragglers to put down under the Cole Protocol. Instead they find a Flood infestation seeded by an ONI black project that used prisoners, human and alien, as test subjects, and a ship where the only way out is a single escape pod nobody can agree on sharing. A routine salvage mission becomes a claustrophobic fight for the last seat off a dying vessel.