TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALYX 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 "Slip-space." There was neither "space" nor anything to "slip" across in the alternate dimensions.

The ship displaced a cloud of ice crystals that had for millen.nia been melted andrefrozen into delicate weblike geometries. Ascendant Justice's running lights diffusedthrough these parti.cles and made a glimmering halo of  hard-edged reflections. Itreminded 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 ofa micro.scopic  blizzard.

The frozen Oort cloud around her was significantly larger, but it was still a charmingeffect and a welcome sight from the abyss ofSlipspace.

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 fiision generators— and her own power systems, of course.

The ship drifted in the icy dark.

192HALO: FIRST STRIKEShe redlined the reactors, however, to recharge the Slipspace capacitors and regeneratethe 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 theMaster Chief would elude them— find his Spartans and somehow meet her at therendezvous coordinates—all without getting blown up by enemy ground forces and theCovenant fleet.

She paused and reset her emotion subroutines—the AI equiva.lent 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 por.tion of her mind occupied by the data absorbed from the Halo construct.

She again toyed with the idea of dumping that data into Ascen.dant Justice's onboardmemory. Now that the other AI had been erased, it should be safe. Yet one piece oftechnological data had already been leaked to the  enemy ... and that could have ex.treme repercussions in the war effort. If the Halo data got into Covenant hands—the war wouldbe 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 communiques whispered past her—eight hours old, because that's how long it took the  signal to travel from Reach to here.

Interesting. The present insystem chatter was undoubtedly fo.cused 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 religiousERIC NYLUND193babble were: uncovering the fragment of divinity, and illuminat.ing shard of the gods toexist the perfect moment that vanishes in the blink of an eye but lasts forever, andcollecting the stars left by the giants.

A literal translation was not a problem. It was the meaning be.hind the words thateluded her. Without the proper cultural refer.ences, this was all gibberish.

It had to mean something to someone, however. Perhaps she could use part of thedissected Covenant AI to help. It had spo.ken to her, so it was partially fluent with humanidioms. She might be able to reverse-engineer its translation software.

Cortana isolated the AI code and began the retrieval-and-unpacking process. This wouldtake time; she'd compressed the code, and the reconstitution process would require agood deal of her reduced processing power.

While she waited, she examined the Covenant reactors. They used a pinched magneticfield to heat the tritium plasma. It was sur risingly primitive. Without better hardware,though, there was little she could do to imppprove their effectiveness.

Power. She needed more if she was going to head back insystem to rendezvous with theMaster Chief. The Covenant weren't go.ing to sit by and wait for them to hook up, bid afond adieu, and then escape.

Logically, there was only one way to do this: She was going to have to fight and kill themall.

She could conserve her ship's power and fire the plasma wea ons as they were designed.That, however, would only de.lay the inevitable. A dozen shippps against one—evenCaptain Keyes wouldn't have survived such a lopsided tactical situation.

She deliberated how to solve this problem, spun off a multi.tasking routine that listedher resources, and filtered them in a creativity-probability matrix, hoping to find aninspired match.

The unpacking of the alien AI's routines finished. The code appeared to her as a vast crosssection of geological strata: gray granite variables and blood red sandstone visualprocessors and oily dark function films. But  there were dozens of code layers she didn'teven recognize.

The translation algorithms, however, were in the top layers of this structure, glisteninglike a vein of gold-laced quartz. She194HALO: FIRST STRIKEtapped into the software; it had infinite loops and dead-end code lines—things that hadto be errors.

Yet there were also slender crystalline translation vectors that she would never havethought of on her own. She copied those and slaved them to her dynamic lexicon.

The distant Covenant transmissions poured though her mind, now somewhat morecoherent: Inner temple layers penetrated; Infidels present, and Cleansing operationongoing; Victory is as.sured, and The Great One's  purity will burn the infidels; The holyShe picked up on the urgent undertone to these transmissions, as if the notorious light cannot be tainted.

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 sig.nal irritated Cortana. Itannoyed her more that she had not con.cluded 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 thereactor 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 theLu.minous Key" mentioned in the  Covenant's greeting communique.

She tripped the emergency hull breach shut on four bulkhead doors—two on each side ofthis 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 leftbehind to a similar asphyxiation.

Her sensors picked up a plasma grenade detonation on the in.ner port set of doors shehad seale............