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  Even compressed, all the data filled her and cut into optical subsystems that she usually reserved for her processing. She had a nagging suspicion that the file compression had been too hasty—and that the Halo data might be corrupted.

  In effect, the vast amount of information she had copied bloated her, made her slower and less effective.

  She hadn’t mentioned this to the Chief. She could barely admit it to herself. Cortana was extremely proud of her intellect. But to operate as if nothing were different would be even more foolish.

  She sent a blocking countersignal along the connection where this “other” was trying to contact her.

  The portion of her consciousness examining the ship’s structure discovered that the bridge had another access point. Stupid. She should have seen it immediately, but this other entrance had been filed under the schematics as an emergency system. It was a tiny corridor that connected to a set of escape pods. That route shared a vent with an engineering passage.

  “Chief, there’s another way to the bridge.”

  “Affirmative. Wait one.” There was a burst of gunfire on the COM, then silence. “Go ahead, Cortana.”

  “Uploading the route now,” she said. “I do not believe you can fit through this new passage in your armor. I suggest you split your team and proceed along both routes to maximize your chances of egress onto the bridge.”

  “Understood,” the Chief said. “Polaski and Haverson with me. Johnson and Locklear, you take the escape pod route.”

  She continued to track both teams and the relative positions of the Covenant parties. She replicated additional ghost signals to confuse the enemy.

  Cortana picked up increasing communications bandwidth between the flagship and the cruisers. Reports of the invaders—a call for help—a warning to be relayed to the home world. There were references to the “holy one,” and those messages had what she considered amusing attempts at encryption to keep them secret. Curious, she had to investigate what the Covenant thought important enough to hide.

  As she decrypted those messages and others cross-referenced and filed in their COM archives, she detected an energy spike on the flagship’s lateral sensors. One cruiser off to starboard moved farther away; it turned, its engines glowed, the black around it rippled electric blue. The Covenant ship sped forward, tore the night, and vanished into Slipspace.

  Cortana noted their departure vector for future reference…a possible clue at the location of their home world.

  It was puzzling that the Covenant would call for help. Their warriors were intensely proud; they almost never ran from a fight. They didn’t ask for help…not for themselves. Then again, this ship, although armed for war, didn’t appear to be staffed for combat. It carried only a few hundred Elites and an army of Engineers.

  As Cortana pondered this, she continued to generate a countersignal to match to the probe sent by the other presence in the system. She hoped to cloak her activity as long as possible. The other’s signal morphed into a series of Bessel functions, and she compensated to match.

  She automated this process, commandeering a portion of the Covenant’s own NAV computer to do so, and then she herded the electronic ghosts of the Chief and the others to confuse the pursuing Elite forces.

  At the same time, she continued her study of the Covenant ship and its systems—it was a unique opportunity. The information on their advanced Slipspace drive, their weapons—it could leapfrog human technology decades forward.

  “Cortana?” The Chief’s voice broke her concentration. There were sounds of plasma bolts and automatic weapons fire. “We’ve got Elites in active camouflage in the passage. We need a way around this intersection.”

  She had not considered the Elites’ light-bending technology. She was doing too much, spreading herself too thin. She halted her ongoing study of the Covenant technology and found the Chief a way around the intersection.

  She rebooted her human communications and protocol routines and said, “Access panel to your right, Chief. Down three meters, straight ahead five meters, turn to your left and then up again.”

  She heard an explosion. “Got it,” the Chief said.

  Cortana had to focus on protecting the Chief. She halted her other searches and scrutinized the ship’s schematics. There had to be something she could use. A weapon. A way to stop their enemies—there: the backup terminus for their atmospheric preprocessors. Unlike the other systems, this one was classified as low priority and had minimal security layers.

  She generated several hundred thousand Covenant codes in a microsecond and cracked the system. She diverted the air vents along the corridors the Chief and his team occupied to the primary air systems. She then tasked the processor pumps to service the rest of the ship and activated them—in reverse.

  Warnings flashed throughout the Covenant system as the pressure suddenly dropped in 87 percent of the ship’s passages. She squelched them.

  The other presence in the system tried to shut the pumps off. She blocked that signal and assigned a new code to the security systems: “WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU.”

  She heard the other AI scream, an echo of an echo that reverberated through her processors. She knew the sound—familiar like a human voice, but terribly distorted.

  She scanned through the ship’s cameras and saw Grunts squeal and fall over, methane leaking from their breathers as the pressure dropped. Engineers turned blue, slowed, and died, floating in place with tentacles twitching, still searching for something to fix. The Elite hunt-and-destroy parties halted in the corridors and clutched their throats, mandibles snapping at air that was no longer there; they toppled and suffocated.

  An impulse flickered through her ethics subroutine and generated an interrupt command, designed to make her stop and rethink her decisions. But Cortana knew it was either kill or be killed. She rerouted all signals from her ethics routine and shut it down. She couldn’t afford to be slowed down by such secondary considerations.

  “Chief,” she whispered over the COM. “Be advised that the passages I’m uploading into your NAV system no longer contain atmosphere. Proceeding into those regions will be lethal to the rest of your team.”

  There was a three-second pause, and then the Chief replied, “Understood.”

  Cortana’s decryption of the Covenant communiqués referencing the “holy one” finally cycled to a halt. The language in them was unusually ornate—even more so than the florid prose of the higher-ranking Elites. It was impossible to develop a literal translation, but she gleaned that some dignitary was due at the Halo construct. Soon.

  This visitor was so important that these warships were only the advance scouting party. More ships were on their way. Hundreds of them.

  “Chief,” Cortana said. “We may have a prob—”

  “Hold transmission, Cortana,” the Chief interrupted. “We’re outside the command center. Can you tell how many are inside?”

  “Negative. They have disabled the bridge sensors,” she replied.

  “You heard Cortana,” the Chief said, addressing his companions. “Expect anything. Sergeant, you and Locklear: Get in position.”

  “Roger that,” Sergeant Johnson whispered. “In position and ready to kick Covenant ass.”

  “We’re about to blow the door on this end, Cortana. Stand by.”

  Cortana picked up energy surges on the flagship’s lateral sensors. The Covenant cruisers turned; their plasma weapons warmed and readied to fire.

  “Chief,” Cortana said. “Hurry!”

  “Plasma grenades on my mark,” the Chief said on the COM. “Mark! Toss them and take cover.”

  The Chief tossed two plasma grenades. They burned magnesium-brilliant and adhered to the heavy alloy of the bulkhead doors that encased the bridge—one of the alien weapon’s more useful properties. He moved around the corner of the passage and shielded Haverson and Polaski.

  Five seconds elapsed, and a flash filled the hallway. The Chief moved back to the doors. They shone mirror
-bright where the grenade had detonated but were otherwise unharmed.

  A hundred grenades wouldn’t have blasted through these doors—but when Covenant plasma grenades detonated, they disrupted electronics and shielding. The Chief dug his gauntleted fingers into the door crack—hoping that the disruption had knocked out the motors and shielding keeping these doors closed.

  He braced himself and tried to pull the doors apart at the seams. They slid a few centimeters, then ground to a halt. The Chief adjusted his footing and strained at them again, but the doors remained frozen in place.

  The Chief’s motion sensors pulsed a warning—there was movement directly on the other side of the door.

  He shoved the muzzle of his assault rifle into the narrow opening and squeezed the trigger. Spent shell casings clattered to the floor.

  A howl echoed from the other side, and a curl of gray smoke drifted through the crack.

  The Chief slung his rifle, grabbed the doors, flexed, pulled—and this time the heavy metal moved.

  A flash of plasma fire washed over his shields, blinding him. He ignored it, closed his eyes, and continued to force his way through the door. Another plasma shot struck him in the chest.

  The doors were half a meter apart—good enough.

  He rolled to the side and gave his shields a moment to regenerate.

  Nothing. The suit’s alarms pulsed insistently. He squinted through the glowing spots that swam in his vision and scanned the damage report—the MJOLNIR’s internal temperature was over sixty degrees Celsius, and the Chief heard the whine of microcompressors in his armor, trying to compensate.

  “Marines!” he yelled. “Suppressing fire!”

  “Hell yes, Master Chief,” Locklear replied. Locklear dropped to one knee and fired through the opening; Johnson stood and fired over the younger Marine’s head.

  The Chief rebooted his shielding control software.

  Nothing. His shield system was dead.

  The shooting stopped. “I’m out,” Locklear said.

  “And I’m in,” the Chief said.

  He rushed into the room and stepped over the dead Elite on the floor before him. Its torso had been ripped open—shot as it tried to hold the doors closed.

  The Chief scanned the room. It was circular, twenty meters across, with a raised platform in the center that was ten meters across and ringed with holographic control surfaces. The central platform floated over a pit in the floor. Within the pit were exploded optical conduits and a trio of Covenant Engineers, cowering in fear.

  “Don’t shoot the Engineers,” Cortana warned. “We need them.”

  “Understood,” the Chief replied. “Acknowledge that order, Locklear.”

  There was a pause over the COM and then Locklear said, “Roger.”

  Along the circular walls, floor-to-ceiling displays showed the flagship’s status as a variety of charts and graphs, peppered with the odd calligraphy of the Covenant. They also showed the space surrounding them, and the five remaining Covenant cruisers closing in.

  The Chief caught a motion in his peripheral vision: An Elite in jet-black armor materialized from the wall display, its light-bending camouflage dissolving. It strode toward the Chief, roaring a challenge.

  The Chief’s rifle snapped up, and he squeezed the trigger. Three rounds spat from the muzzle, then the bolt locked open. The ammo counter read 00—empty.

  The shots flared on the Elite’s shielding; a lucky round penetrated and deformed its shoulder. Purple-black blood spattered on the deck, but it shrugged off the wound and kept coming.

  Haverson charged into the room and leveled his pistol. “Hold it!” he yelled, and thumbed off the weapon’s safety.

  The Elite drew a plasma pistol and fired at the Lieutenant—but never took its eyes off the Chief.

  Haverson cursed and scrambled out of the room as the plasma charge slashed at him.

  The Chief altered his grip on the rifle and crouched in a low fighting stance. Even with the shield malfunction, he was confident he could take a single Elite.

  The Elite removed its helmet and dropped it. The plasma pistol clattered to the deck a moment later. It leaned forward, and its mandibles parted in what the Chief guessed had to be a smile. It moved closer, and a blue-white blade of energy flashed to life in its hands.

  The Elite raised the energy blade and charged.

  Chapter Eight

  1802 Hours, September 22, 2552 (Military Calendar)

  Aboard Unidentified Covenant Flagship,

  Soell System, Halo Debris Field.

  The Master Chief ducked as the hissing energy blade slashed at him. He dived toward the Elite and slammed the butt of his rifle into the alien’s midsection.

  The Elite doubled over, and the Chief brought the rifle butt down to smash the alien’s skull—

  But the Elite rolled back. There was a blur of motion as the energy blade lashed out and neatly bisected the assault rifle. The two halves of the wrecked MA5B clattered to the deck.

  The blade of crackling white-hot energy narrowly missed the Chief. The MJOLNIR’s internal temperature skyrocketed.

  He couldn’t risk dancing at this range, so the Master Chief did the last thing the creature expected: He stepped closer and grabbed its wrists.

  The bands of muscle on the Elite’s arms were iron hard, and it struggled to free itself from the Chief’s grasp. The Chief wrenched the alien’s sword arm and forced the blade away—but this took most of his strength, and he had to weaken his grasp on the Elite’s other hand.

  The energy blade blurred perilously close to the Chief’s head. It missed by a fraction of a centimeter and sent a wash of static across his heads-up display.

  The blade was a flattened triangle of white-hot plasma, contained in an electromagnetic envelope that emanated from its hilt. The Chief had seen such weapons slice battle-armored ODSTs in half and gouge gaping wounds in Titanium-A armor plating.

  Worse, this Elite was tough, cunning, well trained—and it hadn’t spent days fighting nonstop on Halo. The Chief felt every wound, pulled muscle, and strained tendon in his body.

  Haverson and Polaski moved onto the bridge, their pistols drawn, but neither of them had a clear line of fire.

  “Move, Chief!” Haverson shouted. “Damn it, we’ve got no shot!”

  Easier said than done. If he let go, the Elite would cut him in two.

  The Master Chief grunted, struggling to turn the Elite.

  The alien fought back for a moment, then—instead of resisting—lurched back, right into the path of the Chief’s advancing teammates.

  The Elite flicked the angle of its blade flat so the arc of energy whipped toward Haverson and Polaski.

  Haverson screamed and fell to the ground as the energy blade sliced through his pistol and across his chest. Polaski cursed and fired a single shot, but it glanced off the Elite’s shield.

  The alien glanced at the source of the fire and growled in its guttural, warbling tongue.

  “Get the Lieutenant out of here,” the Master Chief barked. He raised his knee to his chest and lashed out with a straight kick. His boot connected with the Elite’s breastplate. The alien’s energy shield flared, then faded, and its breastplate cracked like porcelain beneath the force of the blow.

  The alien staggered back, dragging the Master Chief with it. It coughed up purple-black blood that smeared John’s visor, obscuring his vision. Its foot struck something on the ground—the alien’s dropped helmet—and it lost its footing.

  Together they crashed to the ground.

  The Master Chief kept his grip on the Elite’s sword arm. The alien’s other hand, however, wrenched free and grabbed the fallen plasma pistol. The weapon’s muzzle charged with sickly green energy.

  The Chief rolled to his right as the pistol discharged. A globe of plasma arced across the compartment and splashed over the displays behind him.

  The instruments flickered, then flashed and sparked as the energy bolt melted their systems. Before the d
isplays went dark, however, the Master Chief saw one of the Covenant cruisers open fire. A lance of plasma rushed through space toward the flagship.

  The Chief and the Elite struggled, rising to their feet. The Chief batted the plasma pistol aside, and it clattered across the control center.

  The Elite’s mouth opened, and it snapped at the Chief. It was angry or panicking now…and he felt it getting stronger.

  His grasp on the alien loosened.

  There was motion behind the Elite; Sergeant Johnson and Locklear still struggled to get their hatch open more than a crack.

  “Sergeant—prepare to fire.”

  “Ready, Master Chief!” the Sergeant cried from the other side of the hatch.

  The Chief tightened his grip on the Elite’s sword arm, shoved his forearm into the alien’s throat and drove it backward, across the bridge. He slammed the creature into the partially opened hatch.

  The energy blade cut into the Master Chief’s armor, boiling through the alloy that protected his upper arm.

  “Sergeant, now! Fire!”

  Gunfire exploded from the hatch, oddly muffled because the rounds impacted directly into the Elite’s back. The alien snarled and contorted, but it held on to the Master Chief. The alien warrior sawed the blade deeper, cutting through the tough crystalline layers of the MJOLNIR armor. Hydrostatic gel oozed from the wound…mixed with the Chief’s blood.

  “Keep. Shooting.”

  A bullet hole appeared through the Elite’s broken chestplate—bits of shattered armor and torn flesh spattered over the Chief.

  The Master Chief slammed the Elite into the bulkhead, and a control panel behind the alien sparked. The door to the escape corridor hissed open, and the creature reeled back.

  The alien was off balance, and the Chief finally had leverage. He bulled the Elite backward and hammered its arm into the wall. The alien metal rang like a gong, and the Elite dropped its energy sword. The blade guttered and went dark as its fail-safes permanently disabled the weapon.