Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [35]
"Those won't do you any good," Cortana told him. "There are bound to be Elite hunt-and-kill teams waiting for you. And even if you managed to remove them, there is no way to repair the power coupling in time. We don't have the tools or the expertise."
The Master Chief looked around the bridge. There had to be a way. There was always a way—
He leaned over the edge of the central platform and grabbed one of the Covenant Engineers that cowered below. He dragged it up by its float-sack. The creature squirmed and squealed.
"Maybe we don't have the expertise," he said and shook the Engineer. "But this thing does. Can you communicate with it? Tell it what we need?"
There was a pause. Then Cortana replied, "There is an extensive communications suite in the Covenant lexic—"
"Just tell it I'm taking it to fix something."
"All right, Chief," Cortana said.
A stream of high-pitched chirps emanated from the bridge speakers, and the Engineer's six eyes dilated. It stopped squirming and grabbed hold of the Master Chief with its tentacles.
"It says 'good' and 'hurry,' " Cortana told him.
"Everyone else stay here," the Chief said.
"If you insist," Haverson muttered, his face pale. Blood trickled from the wound in his chest. The Master Chief looked at Johnson and Locklear. "Don't let the Covenant retake the bridge."
"Not a problem, Chief," Sergeant Johnson said. He stopped to kick the dead Elite once in the teeth, then slapped a fresh clip into his MA5B. He yanked the weapon's charge handle, fed a round into the chamber, and stood at arms. "Those Covenant sissies are going to have to tango with me before they set one foot in this room."
On the display two of the Covenant cruisers fired again.
The Chief watched as the plasma raced toward them, fire that spread across the black of space. "Cortana, buy me some time," he said.
"I'll do what I can, Chief," Cortana told him. "But you'd better move fast. I'm running out of options."
Cortana was annoyed. She had let the Covenant AI—for that's what this other presence in the system undoubtedly had to be— trick her. She had gone straight for the simple lockdown of the NAV systems. She never performed a thorough systems check of the ship, assuming that there had only been one point of sabotage. It was a mistake she would never have made if she'd been operating at full capacity.
She checked every system of the flagship. She then locked them out with her own security measures.
Cortana turned off her feelings of anger and guilt and concentrated on keeping the ship in one piece, and the Master Chief alive. No. . . she reconsidered and kept her emotions active. The "intuition" provided by this aspect of her intelligence template was too valuable to deactivate in a battle.
She maneuvered the flagship toward the gas giant, Threshold. The incoming plasma might be disrupted by the planet's magnetic field—if she dared get close enough.
Cortana diverted power from the foreshield to the aft portions, distorting the protective bubble around the flagship. She turned all seven plasma turrets aft and fired a pair of plasma torpedoes at the incoming salvo.
The plasma turrets warmed and belched superheated flame— but it dispersed into a dull red cloud only a few meters from the point of fire, thinned, and then dissolved.
She saw a subsystem linked to the weapons control: an accompanying magnetic field multiplier. That was how the Covenant shaped and guided their charges of plasma. It acted as a sophisticated focusing lens. Something wasn't right, however— something had already been in this directory and had erased the software.
Cortana swore that when she caught this guerrilla Covenant AI, she'd erase it line by line.
Without understanding how the guiding magnetic fields worked, the plasma turrets were no more useful than a fireworks display.
The enemy Covenant plasma charges, however, were tight and burned like miniature suns; they overtook the flagship and splashed over its reinforced aft shields. They boiled against the silver energy until the shields dulled and winked out.
The plasma etched