Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [88]
While she waited, she examined the Covenant reactors. They used a pinched magnetic field to heat the tritium plasma. It was surprisingly primitive. Without better hardware, though, there was little she could do to improve their effectiveness.
Power. She needed more if she was going to head back insystem to rendezvous with the Master Chief. The Covenant weren't going to sit by and wait for them to hook up, bid a fond adieu, and then escape.
Logically, there was only one way to do this: She was going to have to fight and kill them all.
She could conserve her ship's power and fire the plasma weapons as they were designed. That, however, would only delay the inevitable. A dozen ships against one—even Captain Keyes wouldn't have survived such a lopsided tactical situation.
She deliberated how to solve this problem, spun off a multitasking routine that listed her resources, and filtered them in a creativity-probability matrix, hoping to find an inspired match.
The unpacking of the alien AI's routines finished. The code appeared to her as a vast cross section of geological strata: gray granite variables and blood red sandstone visual processors and oily dark function films. But there were dozens of code layers she didn't even recognize.
The translation algorithms, however, were in the top layers of this structure, glistening like a vein of gold-laced quartz. She tapped into the software; it had infinite loops and dead-end code lines—things that had to be errors.
Yet there were also slender crystalline translation vectors that she would never have thought of on her own. She copied those and slaved them to her dynamic lexicon.
The distant Covenant transmissions poured though her mind, now somewhat more coherent: Inner temple layers penetrated; Infidels present, and Cleansing operation ongoing; Victory is assured, and The Great One's purity will burn the infidels; The holy light cannot be tainted.
She picked up on the urgent undertone to these transmissions, as if the notorious Covenant confidence were not entirely genuine.
Since these messages made reference to an infestation to be cleansed, and since these transmissions occurred many hours before the Ascendant Justice had entered the Epsilon Eridani system, the Master Chief had been correct in his conclusions: There were human survivors on Reach. Likely Spartans.
His correct analysis of the situation based on the six-note signal irritated Cortana. It annoyed her more that she had not concluded this as well. It made her realize how dangerously close to the edge of her intellectual capacity she operated.
One of her alert routines triggered. An access hatch on the route from the bridge to the reactor room—one that she had specifically directed Sergeant Johnson not to weld shut—just opened.
"The trap is loaded," she whispered.
Cortana scanned the region with the ship's internal sensors. There was nothing ... unless that "nothing" was actually a group of camouflaged Elites—perhaps the "Guardian of the Luminous Key" mentioned in the Covenant's greeting communique.
She tripped the emergency hull breach shut on four bulkhead doors—two on each side of this opened hatch.
"Trap is sprung," she remarked.
Cortana vented the atmosphere in this sealed section.
She hoped that they had left the vent system open behind them—dooming any others left behind to a similar asphyxiation.
Her sensors picked up a plasma grenade detonation on the inner port set of doors she had sealed and locked. The discharge scrambled those circuits and disabled the locks. She noted that the doors were being slowly opened... but not enough to reach the second set of sealed doors ahead.
The opening of those doors halted.
"Gotcha," she whispered.
She'd keep that section of Ascendant Justice sealed until Sergeant Johnson could confirm the kills. She wouldn't let her guard down, either. There had to be additional alien saboteurs aboard her ship. And if she