Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [77]
"Very good," the Lieutenant replied, still examining her calculations 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 so many chances and had defied death so many times, she had given up calculating his odds of survival.
The Chief and his team left the bridge. Cortana swept her sensors through the flagship, making sure the path to the launch bay was clear. There were still Covenant on board. She couldn't pin them down, but there were transient contacts, vent shaft panels had been opened and closed, and several Engineers had gone missing.
She tracked their Covenant dropship as it cleared the launch bay, entered the upper atmosphere, and drifted toward the surface. Polaski was a fine pilot... but she was only human and prone to illogical bravado and emotional outbursts that overrode the most logical course of action. Cortana wished that she were going down there—both to protect her human charges and because there were many questions she'd like to get answered. Why were the Covenant so interested in Menachite Mountain? Was anything left of ONI's CASTLE 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 she needed to jump out of the system in a hurry. She continued refining the calculations that shaped the plasma emitters' magnetic fields, in case she needed to fight. She isolated the name of their captured ship—Ascendant Justice— from one of the 122 simultaneous communiques from every Covenant ship insystem. She correlated the numerous religious allusions that laced the communications and continued to build a language-translation subroutine. She diverted additional processing power to the task of tracking the millions of floating objects around her, searching for lifepods, cryotubes, anything that might hold a human survivor.
The Covenant dropship left sensor range and disappeared somewhere in what was once the Highland Forest on the surface—which activated a new task.
Cortana began constructing a high-resolution map of the surface—especially the region where the Chief's mysterious signal originated, as well as Menachite Mountain.
A quick diagnostic revealed that these tasks were taking much longer than normal. She had to free up some of her overtaxed memory. Cortana began to recompress the data she had retrieved from the Halo construct, and she briefly considered dumping all the data into storage on the Covenant system. She rejected that potential course of action. She had to protect that data at all costs.
Cortana felt her mind perceptibly slow. She was spread too thin. Multitasking too many jobs. This was dangerous. She couldn't react fast enough if—
"Infidel!"
The Covenant word blasted through her communications routines and left her stunned for three cycles—just enough time for her to lose control over the ship-to-ship COM software suite.
The Covenant AI transmitted a narrow-beam communications burst to the nearest cruiser.
For a Covenant communique, it was terse: a report that the flagship was "tainted by the unclean presence of Infidels" and a plea that every ship insystem "converge and cleanse the filth" from the captured vessel. Also compressed and futilely encrypted on the carrier wave was a record of Cortana's mathematical manipulation of Slipspace that allowed her to jump so close to the gas giant, Threshold.
Cortana squelched the channel—but it was too late. It was already gone, and she couldn'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." She reduced the