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206
HALO: FIRST STRIKE
conduits still aglow from the heat they carried, and clouds of
metal that had been vaporized and had cooled into mists of glit-
tering dust.
"Cortana's been busy in our absence," Lieutenant Haverson
remarked. He nodded approvingly at the carnage.
The Master Chief detected flickers of light and dark from the
launch bays of a Covenant carrier. He activated his visor's mag-
nification and saw a legion of Elites in thruster packs, and a
score of the tentacled engineering drones leaving the bay.
"Singleships, drones, and Elite boarding parties on intercept
vectors," Polaski announced. "Inbound—" She paused and
double-checked her scans. "Jesus. They're inbound from all
directions."
"Get us to the rendezvous coordinates," Admiral Whitcomb
ordered. "And don't spare the horses."
"Sir," Polaski replied, her voice icy cold, "these are the ren-
dezvous coordinates."
The Master Chief searched for their captured ship on any
display—and saw only the enemy.
Cortana and Ascendant Justice reappeared in space; it was a
tight fit.
This particular jump required precision to the centimeter and,
although she loathed admitting it, a large measure of luck.
She had often wondered what would happen if a ship
transi-tioned to normal space too close to a planet or other
mass—in this case, another ship.
Ascendant Justice winked into existence within the debris
field in high orbit around Reach. There was, however, no
ultravi-olent explosion as the atoms of the flagship overlapped
with the matter of the scrapped ships the Covenant had herded
together in space.
Either Slipspace jumps prevented such occurrences from
happening, shunting the incoming ship to the side like water that
flows around a river rock ... or she had borrowed some of the
Master Chief's probability-bending good fortune.
Hundreds of wrecked ships, human and Covenant alike, tum-
bled lifelessly about her, their net trajectories suggesting that As-
cendant Justice had just nudged them aside. If she'd had more