Halo_ The Fall of Reach - Eric Nylund [111]
She considered how well the Master Chief had performed this morning on the obstacle course. He was more than Cortana could have hoped for. The Master Chief was much more than Dr. Halsey or the press releases had indicated.
He was intelligent . . . not fearless, but as close to it as any human she had encountered. His reaction time under stress was one-sixth the standard human norm. More than that, however, Cortana had sensed that he had a certain—she searched her lexicon for the proper word—nobility. He placed his mission and his duty and honor above his personal safety.
She reexamined his Career Service Vitae. He had fought in 207 ground engagements against the Covenant, and been awarded every major service medal except the Prisoner of War Medallion.
There were holes in his CSV, though. The standard black-out sections courtesy of ONI, of course . . . but most curious, all data before he entered active duty had been expunged.
Cortana wasn’t about to let a mere erasure stop her. She traced where the order to erase that data had originated. Section Three. Dr. Halsey’s group. Curious.
She followed the order pathway—crashed into layers of counter code. The code started a trace on her signal.
She blocked it—and it restarted a trace of the origin of her block.
This was a very well-crafted piece of counterintrusion software, far superior to the normal ONI slugcode. If nothing else, Cortana liked a challenge. She withdrew from the database and looked for an unguarded way into ONI Section Three files.
Cortana listened to the hum of coded traffic along the surface of ONI’s secure network. There was an unusual amount of packets today: queries and encrypted messages from ONI operatives. She peered into them and unraveled their secrets as they passed her. There were orders for ship movements and operatives outbound from Reach. This must be the new directive to send scouts into the periphery systems and find the Covenant. She saw several ships docked in Reach’s space docks—ONI stealth jobs made to look like private yachts. They had cute, innocuous names: theApplebee ,Circumference , and theLark .
She spotted something she could use: Dr. Halsey had just entered her laboratory. She was at checkpoint three. The doctor waited as her voice and retina patterns were being scanned.
Cortana intercepted and killed the signal. The verification system reset.
“Please rescan retina, Dr. Halsey,” the system requested, “and repeat today’s code phrase in a normal voice.”
Before Dr. Halsey could do this, Cortana sent her own files of Dr. Halsey’s retina and voice scans. She had long ago copied them and occasionally they came in handy.
Section Three verification opened for Cortana. She had only a second before the doctor spoke and overrode the previous entry access.
Cortana, however, was a lightning strike in the system. She entered, searched, and found what she wanted. Every piece of data on SPARTAN 117 was copied to her personal directory within seventy milliseconds.
She withdrew from the ONI database, routing all traces of her queries back to her Ackerson “ghost.”
She closed all connections and returned to thePillar of Autumn . One quick check of the reactor—yes, operating within normal parameters—and she sent a complete report to Lieutenant Hall on the bridge.
Cortana examined the Master Chief’scomplete CSV. She scanned backward through time: his performance data on the obstacle course, and the debriefing he had given at ONI headquarters.
She paused and pondered the signal the Covenant had sent from Sigma Octanus IV. Intrigued, she tried to translate the sequence. The symbols looked tantalizingly familiar. Every algorithm and variation of the standard translation software she attempted, however, failed. Puzzled,