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CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
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 millennia
been melted and refrozen into delicate weblike geometries.
Ascendant Justice's running lights diffused through these parti-
cles and made a glimmering halo of hard-edged reflections. It
reminded 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 of a micro-
scopic blizzard.
The frozen Oort cloud around her was significantly larger, but
it was still a charming effect 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.