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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
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 John would
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 had conjectured 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 hundred kilometers 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 the gravity 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 perfect rendezvous location to extract the Chief
and the others from their soon-to-be-executed surface 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 Cove-