TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALYX Estimated 0510 hours, September 23,2552 (Military Calendar)\Aboard captured Covenant flagship, Epsilon Eridani system.
Cortana only partially listened to the debate between the Master Chief and the others.The discussion was moot. She had projected the outcome as 100 percent certain that Johnwould convince them all to go, or—failing that—that he would con.vince the Lieutenant to let him go alone to the surface to investi.gate the signal ... a signal that in her opinion was so easily copied and so blatantly unencrypted it defied explanation how the Chief hadconjectured that his team of Spartans had sent it.
Instead of partaking in the slow and inefficient conversation, she analyzed the Covenant pattern of movement in the Epsilon Eridani system and discerned three important things.
First, the Covenant warships had extremely regular elliptical orbits about Reach. There were a total of thirteen heavy cruisers and three carriers moving three hundredkilometers above the surface of the planet. Two exceptions to this patrol pattern were a pair of light cruisers hovering over Menachite Mountain— trapped at the bottom of thegravity well and therefore not an im.mediate threat to her ship.
Second, there was a blind spot in their patrol patterns that would make a perfectrendezvous location to extract the Chief and the others from their soon-to-be-executedsurface mission. She plotted ingress and egress courses, and started the precise calculations she would need if she was to initiate a Slipspace jump so close to Reach.
Arid third, and most interesting to Cortana, 217 smaller Cove168HALO: FIRST STRIKEnant craft pushed debris into a concentrated region of space in a high stationary orbitover Reach's northern pole. Within that re.gion drifted the wrecked hulls of bothCovenant and UNSC ships destroyed in the battle for Reach. Floating there were some ofthe UNSC's finest ships: the Basra, the Hannibal, and the pride of the fleet, thesupercarrier Trafalgar. No human signals ema.nated from the ships; nor did Cortana sense any active electro.magnetic fields.
She watched as the smaller Covenant ships cut into the dead hulks and jetted away withchunks of Titanium-A armor. They moved like a trail of ants to a location in space over the lower latitudes, a point over Menachite Mountain, where the Covenant used the metalto construct a platform. The thing was already a square plate a kilometer to a side.Clearly, the Covenant had more in mind for Reach than destruction.
"Cortana," the Master Chief said. "We'll need to rendezvous at a—""Coordinates already optimized," she replied and projected the Covenant blind spot on the bridge displays. "Enemy patrols miss this nine-thousand-cubic-kilometer region.
Further opti.mization reveals that all ships will be farthest from this point at oh-sevenfifteenhours. I suggest we meet there at that time."Cortana felt a pulse of satisfaction at their perplexed looks over her seemingly instantanalysis. She enjoyed dazzling the crew with her intellect.
"Very good," the Lieutenant replied, still examining her cal.culations on the display.
"Optimal course plotted and uploaded into the Covenant drop-ship to the signal source," she told them. Then, on a private COM channel to the Chief, she added, "Good luck, Chief.Be careful.""I always am," he replied.
Cortana didn't bother to reply to that ridiculous statement. The Master Chief took somany chances and had defied death so many times, she had given up calculating his oddsof survival.
The Chief and his team left the bridge. Cortana swept her sen.sors through the flagship,making sure the path to the launch bay was clear. There were still Covenant on board. Shecouldn't pinERIC NYLUND 169them down, but there were transient contacts, vent shaft panels had been opened andclosed, and several Engineers had gone missing.
She tracked their Covenant dropship as it cleared the launch bay, entered the upperatmosphere, and drifted toward the sur.face. Polaski was a fine pilot... but she was onlyhuman and prone to illogical bravado and emotional outbursts that overrode the mostlogical course of action. Cortana wished that she were going down there—both to protecther human charges and be.cause there were many questions she'd like to get answered.Why were the Covenant so interested in Menachite Mountain? Was anything left of ONI'sCASTLE base? Cortana terminated those thoughts. There was too much to do up here.
Several tasks divided her attention. She kept the Slipspace generators hot in case sheneeded to jump out of the system in a hurry. She continued refining the calculations thatshaped the plasma emitters' magnetic fields, in case she needed to fight. She isolated thename of their captured ship—Ascendant Justice— from one of the 122 simultaneouscommuniques from every Covenant ship insystem. She correlated the numerous religiousallusions that laced the communications and continued to build a language-translationsubroutine. She diverted additional pro.cessing ower to the task of tracking the millionsof floating ob.jects around her, searching for lifepppods, cryotubes, anything that mighthold a human survivor.
The Covenant dropship left sensor range and disappeared some.where in what was oncethe Highland Forest on the surface—which activated a new task.
Cortana began constructing a high-resolution map of the surface—especially the regionwhere the Chief's mysterious signal originated, as well as Menachite Mountain.
A quick diagnostic revealed that these tasks were taking much longer than normal. Shehad to free up some of her overtaxed memory. Cortana began to recom ress the data shehad retrieved from the Halo construct, and she briefly considered dumppping all the datainto storage on the Covenant system. She rejected that potential course of action. She hadto protect that data at all costs.
Cortana felt her mind perceptibly slow. She was spread too170HALO: FIRST STRIKEthin. Multitasking too many jobs. This was dangerous. She couldn't react fast enough if—"Infidel!"The Covenant word blasted through her communications rou.tines and left her stunnedfor three cycles—just enough time for her to lose control over the ship-to-ship COMsoftware suite.
The Covenant AI transmitted a narrow-beam communica.tions burst to the nearestcruiser.
For a Covenant communique, it was terse: a report that the flagship was "tainted by theunclean presence of Infidels" and a plea that every ship insystem "converge and cleansethe filth" from the captured vessel. Also compressed and futilely en.crypted on thecarrier wave was a record of Cortana's mathe.matical manipulation of Slipspace thatallowed her to jump so close to the gas giant, Threshold.
Cortana squelched the channel—but it was too late. It was al.ready gone, and shecouldn't pull photons back from space.
She shunted all COM memory pathways on themselves. "Gotcha!" she hissed.
"Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel—""That's quite enough of that," she said. "You and I need to come to an understanding." Shereduced the memory pathways, peeling the Covenant AI apart code layer by code layer."This is my system now."While an operational Covenant AI would have been a prize for ONI Section Three—thisparticular Covenant AI was too dangerous. She could not allow its existence to continue.
"Do what you will-wil-willwii" "ll,it screamed, /go to finally to . my heaven rewardpamdisefinal-finalfinalinfinityinfinityinfini-ATNONCOPYSTATE." gCortana's curiosity over this odd proclamation would have to wait—forever. She tore theAI apart, erasing, recording the Covenant code structure even as she destroyed it. Thiswas analo-S gous to a dissection, and it she did it quickly, efficiently, and withoutremorse—until she found the AI's core code.
She halted. =She almost recognized this code. The patterns were madden.ingly familiar. No time toponder why, though. She recorded itERIC NYLUND 171and then wiped the original. The Covenant AI was gone, its bits safely hacked apart andstored for future research. Provided, of course, Cortana had a future.
She tracked thirteen Covenant warships. They came about and bore down on her position. Her COM channels overloaded with fanatical threats and promises of her andthe captured flag.ship burning.
There was no useful data there, so she filtered them out.
The Covenant warships' weapons warmed to a dull red.
Cortana remained calm. After considerable study of the Cove.nant plasma weapons system, she now understood why they glowed before discharge. The stored plasma was always hot and ready to fire, but the Covenant used an inefficient method to col.lect anddirect the chaotic plasma into a controllable trajectory. They selected the charged plasma atoms with the proper trajec.tory necessary to hit a target and shunted them into a magnetic bubble. The bubble was then discharged; subsequent pulse charges herded theplasma on target.
For an advanced race, the Covenant's weapons relied on crude brute force calculations and were terribly slow and wasteful.
She booted the new system she had devised to control the plasma. It used EM pulses a priori to align the stochastic mo.tions of the plasma atoms, herding their trajectories andeleven degrees of electronic freedom into a laser-fine columnatedbeam within a microsecond.
This was, of course, an entirely theoretical operation.
She test-fired the three forward plasma turrets—red lines slashed across the black spaceand intercepted the three lead Covenant cruisers; their shields glowed orange, flickered,and failed. Cortana's plasma cut into the smooth alien hulls. Metal boiled away, and thetrio of beams punched clear through the ships.
Cortana moved the plasma beams like a scalpel—up and then down—and cut the vesselsin half.
"Adequate," she remarked. The plasma reserves of the first three turrets, however, were exhausted, and it would be several minutes before they'd recycle.
If only there were a better electromagnetic system on this flagship, she could have devised a more effective guidance algo172HALO: FIRST STRIKErithm. Alas, the Covenant's grasp of Maxwell's equations was ironically inferior to human technology.
Cortana realized it was fortuitous she had shut down the enemy AI before it leaked her new plasma guidance system. The thought of every ship in the Covenant fleet refittedwith im.proved weaponry was too terrible to calculate.
She also realized that staying to fight was not the wisest course. She considered taking on the rest of the Covenant forces; with her improvements to the weapons systems, shemight win, too. But it wasn't worth the risk of the Covenant capturing her refinements totheir technology.
Cortana fired Ascendant Justice's aft plasma turrets, and laser-like beams flickered across space. A squadron of Seraph fighters disintegrated as they launched from the closestcarrier. Explosions bubbled and mushroomed inside the carrier's launch bay.
She didn't stay to watch the fireworks.
Cortana dived at flank speed straight toward the center of Reach. The surface of theplanet raced toward her. She wondered where the Chief was now, and if he was safe.
"I should have never told you to be careful," she whispered. "You're incapable of that. Ishould have wished you victory. That's what you're good at, John. Winning."She initiated the Slipspace generator; space distorted, teased apart, and light envelopedthe flagship.