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ERIC NYLUND
169
them down, but there were transient contacts, vent shaft panels
had been opened and closed, and several Engineers had gone
missing.
She tracked their Covenant dropship as it cleared the launch
bay, entered the upper atmosphere, and drifted toward the sur-
face. Polaski was a fine pilot... but she was only human and
prone to illogical bravado and emotional outbursts that overrode
the most logical course of action. Cortana wished that she were
going down there—both to protect her 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's CASTLE 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 she needed to jump out of the system in a
hurry. She continued refining the calculations that shaped the
plasma emitters' magnetic fields, in case she needed to fight. She
isolated the name of their captured ship—Ascendant Justice—
from one of the 122 simultaneous communiques from every
Covenant ship insystem. She correlated the numerous religious
allusions that laced the communications and continued to build a
language-translation subroutine. She diverted additional pro-
cessing power to the task of tracking the millions of floating ob-
jects around her, searching for lifepods, cryotubes, anything that
might hold a human survivor.
The Covenant dropship left sensor range and disappeared some-
where in what was once the Highland Forest on the surface—which
activated a new task.
Cortana began constructing a high-resolution map of the
surface—especially the region where the Chief's mysterious
signal originated, as well as Menachite Mountain.
A quick diagnostic revealed that these tasks were taking much
longer than normal. She had to free up some of her overtaxed
memory. Cortana began to recompress the data she had retrieved
from the Halo construct, and she briefly considered dumping all
the data into storage on the Covenant system. She rejected that
potential course of action. She had to protect that data at all
costs.
Cortana felt her mind perceptibly slow. She was spread too