Halo_ First Strike - Eric S. Nylund [96]
The vacuum around her pulled apart, and she picked a path through the "here" of normal space into the "not-here" of Slipspace.
At T minus ten she wrote a quick program to target the distant ships near her exit coordinates—and keep them targeted when she reappeared.
Ascendant Justice moved slightly forward into the rip in space; light enveloped the craft.
She vanished from the field of floating debris and—
—reappeared in an eyeblink. The full face of Reach filling her lateral starboard displays. The port displays were crowded with inbound Covenant ships.
The odd piggybacked Covenant—human craft appearing in the middle of their trap must have confused the enemy ... no one fired.
The dropship was three kilometers off Cortana's starboard beam, its trajectory more or less aligned with Ascendant Justice's launch bay.
She opened the UNSC E-band and said, "Chief, your ride is here."
"Acknowledged," the Master Chief replied. There was no quaver in his rock-solid voice. He had been headed into certain death a moment ago, but he sounded like this was what he expected to occur. Like this was normal operational procedure.
The dropship veered toward the open bay, and Cortana dropped shields for a split second—just long enough for the tiny craft to enter—then reestablished the protective field.
Cortana routed power from the Gettysburg into Ascendant Justice's Slipspace capacitors, and they began soaking up the charge.
Three dozen Covenant cruisers surrounded her, their plasma turrets glowing a hellish red as they prepared to fire. Apparently the order not to fire did not extend to Ascendant Justice.
Cortana needed five seconds to attain a full charge, five seconds before she could make good her escape... but five seconds might be long enough for her to become the center of a small Covenant-made sun.
She took the initiative and fired at the closest four cruisers.
Laser-fine plasma lanced from her turrets, burned though the Covenant shields, and split open their hulls. When the superheated gas came in contact with the atmosphere inside the ships, plastic, flesh, and metal caught fire and roiled throughout their interiors.
Two of the targeted cruisers immediately detonated as the plasma beams found the reactors. Billowing clouds of vaporized metal mushroomed across the night and obscured her from the advancing ships.
Pinpricks of light appeared around Ascendant Justice.
ERROR.
Cortana rechecked the figures and quickly found the source of the problem: The fail-safe subroutine that tracked local gravitational conditions returned an anomaly.
The gravity from Reach no longer warped space ... which was impossible.
No time for speculation. She had to leave or fight.
She moved Ascendant Justice into the twisting spatial field—
—and vanished.
Instead of the nonvisible nondimensions of Slipspace, however, a blue-tinged field appeared on Cortana's monitors. It wasn't space—not the crowded space near Reach, or the star-filled space of the Epsilon Eridani system. But it was a space, where there should have been no space at all.
212 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
She probed the region with her sensors, but her range was lim
ited to a thousand kilometers as if she were in an obscuring fog. There—a contact. And another. And then a dozen more. Fourteen Covenant cruisers resolved from the blue mist. "Cortana," the Master Chief said. "What's our status?" "Same as ever," Cortana replied. "We're in trouble." The Covenant warships fired. "Damn," Cortana muttered. She initiated her last option: She fired back, hoping to take
some of them to hell with her.
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
TIME:DATE RECORD [[ERROR]]ANOMALY\Date unknown\ Aboard captured Covenant flagship Ascendant Justice, in Slipspace. Now.
"Cortana?" the Master Chief asked. "What's our status?"
The Chief and the rest of his team scrambled out of the Covenant dropship. Fred carried a semiconscious Kelly out and laid her on the deck of the launch bay.
"Same as ever," Cortana replied. "We're in trouble."
Video feed from the ship's external