TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALYX Estimated 0510 hours, September 23,2552 (Military Calendar)Aboard captured Covenant flagship, Epsilon Eridani system.

Cortana only partially listened to the debate between the Master Chief and the others.The discussion was moot. She had projected the outcome as 100 percent certain that Johnwould convince them all to go, or—failing  that—that he would con.vince the Lieutenant to let him go alone to the surface to investi.gate the signal ... a signal that in her opinion was so easily copied and so blatantly unencrypted it defied explanation how the Chief  hadconjectured that his team of Spartans had sent it.

Instead of partaking in the slow and inefficient conversation, she analyzed the Covenant pattern of movement in the Epsilon Eridani system and discerned three important things.

First, the Covenant warships had extremely regular elliptical orbits about Reach. There were a total of thirteen heavy cruisers and three carriers moving three hundredkilometers above the surface of the planet. Two  exceptions to this patrol pattern were a pair of light cruisers hovering over Menachite Mountain— trapped at the bottom of thegravity well and therefore not an im.mediate threat to her ship.

Second, there was a blind spot in their patrol patterns that would make a perfectrendezvous location to extract the Chief and the others from their soon-to-be-executedsurface mission. She plotted ingress and egress  courses, and started the precise calculations she would need if she was to initiate a Slipspace jump so close to Reach.

Arid third, and most interesting to Cortana, 217 smaller Cove168HALO: FIRST STRIKEnant craft pushed debris into a concentrated region of space in a high stationary orbitover Reach's northern pole. Within that re.gion drifted the wrecked hulls of bothCovenant and UNSC ships destroyed in the battle for  Reach. Floating there were some ofthe UNSC's finest ships: the Basra, the Hannibal, and the pride of the fleet, thesupercarrier Trafalgar. No human signals ema.nated from the ships; nor did Cortana sense any active  electro.magnetic fields.

She watched as the smaller Covenant ships cut into the dead hulks and jetted away withchunks of Titanium-A armor. They moved like a trail of ants to a location in space over the lower latitudes, a point over Menachite  Mountain, where the Covenant used the metalto construct a platform. The thing was already a square plate a kilometer to a side.Clearly, the Covenant had more in mind for Reach than destruction.

"Cortana," the Master Chief said. "We'll need to rendezvous at a—""Coordinates already optimized," she replied and projected the Covenant blind spot on the bridge displays. "Enemy patrols miss this nine-thousand-cubic-kilometer region.

Further opti.mization reveals that all ships will be farthest from this point at oh-sevenfifteenhours. I suggest we meet there at that time."Cortana felt a pulse of satisfaction at their perplexed looks over her seemingly instantanalysis. She enjoyed dazzling the crew with her intellect.

"Very good," the Lieutenant replied, still examining her cal.culations on the display.

"Optimal course plotted and uploaded into the Covenant drop-ship to the signal source," she told them. Then, on a private COM channel to the Chief, she added, "Good luck, Chief.Be careful.""I always am," he replied.

Cortana didn't bother to reply to that ridiculous statement. The Master Chief took somany chances and had defied death so many times, she had given up calculating his oddsof survival.

The Chief and his team left the bridge. Cortana swept her sen.sors through the flagship,making sure the path to the launch bay was clear. There were still Covenant on board. Shecouldn't pinERIC NYLUND 169them down, but there were transient contacts, vent shaft panels had been opened andclosed, and several Engineers had gone missing.

She tracked their Covenant dropship as it cleared the launch bay, entered the upperatmosphere, and drifted toward the sur.face. Polaski was a fine pilot... but she was onlyhuman and prone to illogical bravado and  emotional outbursts that overrode the mostlogical course of action. Cortana wished that she were going down there—both to protecther human charges and be.cause there were many questions she'd like to get  answered.Why were the Covenant so interested in Menachite Mountain? Was anything left of ONI'sCASTLE base? Cortana terminated those thoughts. There was too much to do up here.

Several tasks divided her attention. She kept the Slipspace generators hot in case sheneeded to jump out of the system in a hurry. She continued refining the calculations thatshaped the plasma emitters' magnetic fields,  in case she needed to fight. She isolated thename of their captured ship—Ascendant Justice— from one of the 122 simultaneouscommuniques from every Covenant ship insystem. She correlated the numerous  religiousallusions that laced the communications and continued to build a language-translationsubroutine. She diverted additional pro.cessing ower to the task of tracking the millionsof floating ob.jects around her,  searching for lifepppods, cryotubes, anything that mighthold a human survivor.

The Covenant dropship left sensor range and disappeared some.where in what was oncethe Highland Forest on the surface—which activated a new task.

Cortana began constructing a high-resolution map of the surface—especially the regionwhere the Chief's mysterious signal originated, as well as Menachite Mountain.

A quick diagnostic revealed that these tasks were taking much longer than normal. Shehad to free up some of her overtaxed memory. Cortana began to recom ress the data shehad retrieved from the Halo construct,  and she briefly considered dumppping all the datainto storage on the Covenant system. She rejected that potential course of action. Sh............