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192
HALO: FIRST STRIKE
She redlined the reactors, however, to recharge the Slipspace
capacitors and regenerate the 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 the Master Chief would elude them—
find his Spartans and somehow meet her at the rendezvous
coordinates—all without getting blown up by enemy ground forces
and the Covenant 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 onboard memory. Now that the other AI had been
erased, it should be safe. Yet one piece of technological 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 would be 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 religious