Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [39]
"Try something," the Chief said to her with amazing calm. "Try anything."
Cortana sighed. "Roger, Chief."
She booted the Covenant Slipspace generators; the software streamed through her consciousness.
The UNSC Shaw-Fujikawa Slipspace generators ripped a hole in normal space by brute force. But the Covenant technology used a different approach. Sensors came online, and Cortana could actually "see" the interlacing webs of quantum filaments surround the flagship.
"Amazing," she whispered.
The Covenant could pick a path through the subatomic dimensions; a gentle push from their generators enlarged the fields just enough to allow their ships to pass seamlessly into the alternate space with minimal energy. Their resolution of the reality of space-time was infinitely more powerful than human technology. It was as if she had been blind before, had never seen the universe around her. It was beautiful.
This explained how the Covenant could make jumps with such accuracy. They could literally plot a course with an error no larger than an atom's diameter.
"Status, Cortana?" the Master Chief asked.
"Stand by," she said, annoyed at the distraction.
At this resolution Cortana could discern every ripple in space caused by Threshold's gravity, the other planets in this solar system, the sun, and even the warping of space caused by the mass of this ship. Could she compensate for those distortions?
Pressure sensors detected hull breaches on seventeen outer decks. Cortana ignored them. She shut down all peripheral systems and concentrated on the task at hand. It was their only way out of this mess: They'd get out by going through.
She concentrated on interpolating the fluctuating space. She generated mathematical algorithms to anticipate and smooth the gravitational distortions.
Energy surged from the reactors into the Slipspace generator matrices. A path parted directly before them—a pinhole that became a gyrating wormhole, fluxing and spinning.
Threshold's atmosphere throbbed and jumped through the hole—sucked into the vacuum of the alternate dimension.
Cortana dedicated all her runtime to monitoring the space around the ship, and risked making microscopic course corrections to maneuver them into the fluctuating path. Sparks danced along the length of the hull as the nose of the flagship departed normal space.
She eased the rest of the ship through, surrounded by whirling storms and jagged spears of lightning.
She pinged her sensors: The hull temperature dropped rapidly and she registered a series of explosive decompressions on the breached decks.
Cortana emerged from her cocoon of concentration and immediately sensed the electronic presence of the other near her, monitoring her Slipspace calculations. It was practically on top ofher.
"Heresy!" it hissed and then withdrew... and vanished. Cortana pulsed a systems check along every circuit in the ship, hoping to track the Covenant AI. No luck. "Sneaky little bastard," she broadcast throughout the system. "Come back here."
Had it seen what she had done? Had it understood what she'd just accomplished? And if so, why declare it a "heresy"?
True, manipulating eighty-eight stochastic variables in eleven-dimensional space-time was not child's play... but it was possible that the other AI would be able to follow her calculations.
Perhaps not. The Covenant were imitative, not innovative; at least, that's what all the ONI intelligence gathered on the collection of alien races had reported. She had thought this was exaggeration, propaganda to bolster human morale.
Now she wasn't so certain. Because if the Covenant had truly understood the extent of their own magnificent technology, they could have not only jumped into Slipspaceyrow a planet's atmosphere—but jumped into a planet's atmosphere, too.
They could have simply bypassed Reach's orbital defenses.
The Covenant AI had called this heresy? Ludicrous.
Maybe the humans could eventually outthink the Covenant, given enough access to the