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  “Admiral Whitcomb,” she said, “a pleasure to see you again. My thanks for the rescue. It was far timelier than you could imagine.” She turned to the Master Chief. “Or is it you I have to thank for this daring operation, John?”

  The Master Chief found he had no words to answer. He also bristled at her casual use of his given name…but he could forgive her that. She had always used his name—never his rank or serial number.

  He noticed the fist-sized crystal clutched in her hand. It had a thousand facets and emitted a brilliant blue light the color of sapphires and sunlight on water.

  “Thank anyone you want, Catherine,” Admiral Whitcomb said. “Throw us all a party if that’ll make you happy…once we’re out of here.” He clicked open his COM. “Polaski, get down—”

  Sergeant Johnson set his hand on the Admiral’s arm and nodded toward the far wall.

  “What is it, Sergeant?” The Admiral’s voice died in his throat.

  The Master Chief’s motion tracker flickered on his heads-up display, but there was no solid contact…nor did he see anything across the entire three-kilometer-wide cavern. Had it picked up a camouflaged Elite? No, the dust in the air would have certainly given it away.

  “No one move,” the Admiral whispered.

  John saw them, then. He saw them all.

  He had missed them before because he had thought it was the haze in the air rippling, the dust, maybe the distance causing a miragelike image. He hadn’t thought it possible for so many Covenant to be so still.

  On each level of the twelve tiered galleries that circumscribed the gigantic room stood Covenant soldiers. The balconies were crowded with Grunts, Jackals whose energy shields popped on, snarling Elites, and several pairs of Hunters with fuel rod cannons glowing green.

  The whine of thousands of plasma weapons charging filled the air like a swarm of locusts.

  No one moved. No one breathed except Locklear, who exhaled a long and heartfelt expletive.

  John tried to count them all. There had to be thousands—on every level. A battalion at least, maybe more. They wouldn’t even have to aim. All they had to do was shoot and fill the space with needle shards and boiling energy.

  They’d be vaporized before they could get halfway to the tunnel at their backs.

  A Hunter pair roared with rage; they leveled their fuel rod cannons at John and his team and, with steady aim, discharged their weapons.

  A split second later the rest of the alien horde opened fire.

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Time: Date Record Anomaly Estimated 0640 Hours,

  September 23, 2552 (Military Calendar) Aboard Captured

  Covenant Flagship Ascendant Justice,

  Periphery of Epsilon Eridani System.

  Ascendant Justice emerged from the non-Euclidian, non-Einsteinian realms that humans had erroneously called “Slipspace.” 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 of Slipspace.

  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 fusion 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 communiqués whispered past her—eight hours old, because that’s how long it took the signal to travel from Reach to here.

  Interesting. The present in-system 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-and-unpacking process. This would take time; she’d compressed the code, and the reconstitution process would require a good deal of her reduced processing power.

  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 in-system 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 bloodred sandstone visual processors and oily dark function films. But there were do
zens 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 communiqué.

  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 found them, she’d deal with them in the same efficient fashion.

  This minor distraction resolved, Cortana returned her attention to the Covenant AI’s code. Small portions of the alien software looked like her. The odds of such a parallel evolution in computer science seemed improbable. It was almost as if it were her code…only copied many times, each time with subtle errors introduced by the replication process.

  Could the Covenant have captured a human-made AI, copied it, and then used the result in their ships? If so—why had there been the need to replicate the code so many times? And with so many errors?

  This theory didn’t track, however. Smart AIs like her had an operational life span of approximately seven years. After that the processing memory became too interconnected and developed fatal endless feedback loops. In essence, smart AIs became too smart and suffered an exponential attenuation of function; they literally thought themselves to death.

  So if the Covenant were using human-created AIs, all the copies would be dead within seven years—there was no reason to recopy the copies. It wouldn’t extend their life span, because all the memory-processor interconnections had to be copied as well.

  Cortana paused to consider how much of her life span had been compromised by absorbing and analyzing the data from Halo. Her experiences within the Forerunner computer system had certainly pushed her intellect far past its designed limits. Had she burned away half her “life” doing so? More? She stored that thought for later consideration. If she didn’t find a way to get the Master Chief and get back to Earth, her operational life span would be even shorter.

  She was, however, curious about one thing: She ran a trace on the origin of the copied pathways of the alien AI, and found its replication routine. This copying code was extremely convoluted; in fact, it took up more than two thirds of the Covenant AI’s processor-memory space. It was dark with functions that ran deep to the core. It spread dendritic fingers through the system, like a cancer that had metastasized throughout the AI’s entire body.

  She did not understand any of it.

  But she didn’t have to understand the code to use it.

  Was it worth the risk of using? Perhaps. If she could mitigate the risk, she’d copy a portion of herself onto an isolated system in Ascendant Justice. She could always erase this subsystem if anything went wrong.

  The potential rewards of this operation were great. She might be able to restore herself to full operational capacity—even carrying the Halo data.

  Cortana double- and triple-checked the system she would overwrite: the Covenant software that managed the life support on the lower decks. Since the lower decks were now evacuated and cold, life support was moot. She carefully severed the connections from that subsystem to the rest of the ship.

  She also rechecked her thinking. This copying software was likely responsible for the Covenant AI’s fractured thinking. Her thinking, however, was being squeezed to nothing. There had to be a balance between these two deleterious states.

  Cortana initialized the Covenant file-duplication software. It moved, and the entire thing pulsed and reached for her; she immediately shut down all contact with her translation suite.

  The dark functions touched her code, wrapped around them, pushed against the barriers she had erected.

  It happened too fast, but she didn’t stop the process. It was far too interesting to stop.

  She distantly felt that portion of her mind blur and replicate, assembled line by line into its new location within Ascendant Justice. It felt strange. Not that it was strange she could think in more than one place about more than one thing at the same time—she was used to multiprocessing.

  This was different strange—as if she had a glimpse into something wonderful…and infinite.

  The replication ceased, and the copying code was once again inert and safely stored with the dissected Covenant AI’s directory.

  Cortana ran her entire system; nothing else had been altered.

  She checked the new copied system. It was intact, and, apart from a few slight errors in the software—which she immediately mended—it appeared functional.

  She initiated the new system and slaved it with her original system, running them in parallel—one tapping the ONI’s English–Covenant lexicon, the other tapping the alien AI’s Covenant–English lexicon.

  If the alien copying software could duplicate her translation routine, could it duplicate more of her?

  No. She squelched that thought. The risk of copying any more “hers” was too great. There were too many unknowns. And this was, after all, the enemy’s code. There could be booby traps, waiting to be tripped within the complex algorithms.

  Besides, copying herself would do nothing to prevent her mental degradation. Those interconnection errors were already present…and they always would be, despite the number of copies generated.

  She remembered the strange fractured speech patterns of the Covenant AI and wondered how many times it had been copied.

  Her thoughts were interrupted as the Covenant transmissions became clear. It was suddenly as if she had a new set of eyes and ears to hear them: Excavation proceeding; new sublayer discovered at six-hundred-meter depth and Patrol unable to find the Infidels; returning to base and Minor ar
tifacts discovered; rejoice!

  And there was one thing she had missed in her previous analysis of the Covenant communiqués, a second signal on the carrier wave: They used the same symbols she had used to find the Halo construct—the symbols that the Master Chief had discovered on the alien artifact on Côte d’Azur.

  She hadn’t seen the simple dots, bars, squares, and triangles before because the Covenant, naturally, had embellished the clean symbols with their highly decorated calligraphied scripts, and further with their overwrought religious allusions.

  Cortana, with her new subsystem and her new translation lexicon, could, as Dr. Halsey might say, “cut through the crap.”

  These subcommuniqués were orders. They originated from new ships entering the Epsilon Eridani system and were, in turn, accepted and acknowledged by those outbound.

  It was an automated mail system that could carry messages from the center of the Covenant Empire to the outer reaches of the galaxy. The Covenant were either too arrogant, or too ignorant, to properly encrypt these orders.

  Still, Cortana realized that the UNSC had not, until just now, discovered their deceptively simple system…so who was more ignorant?

  There were deployment orders for hundreds of ships: carriers, destroyers, tenders—a massive fleet. They were to meet at select locations, join up, refuel, gather resources, and then orient for the next Slipspace jump.

  Cortana knew how to translate these simple symbols into stellar coordinates.

  There—a jump to the Lambda Serpentis system to gather tritium gas for their reactors. And there—another jump to the Hawking system to meet with three dozen carriers and effect a transfer of Seraph fighters. And there—

  Cortana halted all her processes. She directed her full intellect to check and recheck her translation matrix a hundred times.

  There was no error.

  The terminating coordinates for the Covenant’s impending operation was Sol.

  The Covenant were headed to Earth.

  Section IV

  Gambit