Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [87]
Ascendant Justice emerged from the non-Euclidian, non-Einsteinian realms that humans had erroneously called "Slip-space." There was neither "space" nor anything to "slip" across in the alternate dimensions.
The ship displaced a cloud of ice crystals that had for millennia been melted and refrozen into delicate weblike geometries. Ascendant Justice's running lights diffused through these particles and made a glimmering halo of hard-edged reflections. It reminded Cortana of the snowglobe that Dr. Halsey had kept on her desk: the Matterhorn and a little Swiss climber scaling its three-centimeter height—all swirling in the center of a microscopic blizzard.
The frozen Oort cloud around her was significantly larger, but it was still a charming effect and a welcome sight from the abyss ofSlipspace.
Cortana had fled the Epsilon Eridani system, but only to its edge—a short jump of a few billion kilometers from Reach and the Master Chief.
The odds that the Covenant would find her were long— astronomical, in fact, even if they had ships on patrol. The Oort cloud's volume was too large to search in a hundred years. Still, she powered down virtually every system on the ship except the fiision generators—and her own power systems, of course.
The ship drifted in the icy dark.
She redlined the reactors, however, to recharge the Slipspace capacitors and regenerate the plasma she had expended in her brief fight with the Covenant cruisers.
If she was part of a larger fleet, her desperate tactics might be valuable—flashing all her plasma away and the near-gravity Slipspace jump—but as one ship against a dozen, her effective combat lifetime using those tactics could be measured in microseconds.
And now the Covenant knew that Ascendant Justice was not one of theirs. She hoped the Master Chief would elude them— find his Spartans and somehow meet her at the rendezvous coordinates—all without getting blown up by enemy ground forces and the Covenant fleet.
She paused and reset her emotion subroutines—the AI equivalent of a deep sigh. Cortana had to remain focused and think of something useful to do while she waited.
The problem was that she'd been thinking at peak capacity for the last five days. And now she was thinking with a large portion of her mind occupied by the data absorbed from the Halo construct.
She again toyed with the idea of dumping that data into Ascendant Justice's onboard memory. Now that the other AI had been erased, it should be safe. Yet one piece of technological data had already been leaked to the enemy ... and that could have extreme repercussions in the war effort. If the Halo data got into Covenant hands—the war would be over.
She decided she would make do with her available memory-processing bandwidth.
Cortana listened and looked to the center of the Epsilon Eridani system with Ascendant Justice's passive sensors. Faint Covenant communiques whispered past her—eight hours old, because that's how long it took the signal to travel from Reach to here.
Interesting. The present insystem chatter was undoubtedly focused on the intruders. Eight hours ago, however, it had been business as usual... whatever business that was.
She eavesdropped on the data streams, translating, and tried to make sense of it all. Among the more coherent samples of their excited religious
babble were: uncovering the fragment of divinity, and illuminating shard of the gods to exist the perfect moment that vanishes in the blink of an eye but lasts forever, and collecting the stars left by the giants.
A literal translation was not a problem. It was the meaning behind the words that eluded her. Without the proper cultural references, this was all gibberish.
It had to mean something to someone, however. Perhaps she could use part of the dissected Covenant AI to help. It had spoken to her, so it was partially fluent with human idioms. She might be able to reverse-engineer its translation software.
Cortana isolated the AI code and began the retrieval-andunpacking