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ERIC NYLUND
207
time, she would've designed a set of experiments with drone
ships to test out her displacement-luck hypothesis.
But time was something neither she nor the Master Chief had
in abundance.
Minutes remained until their rendezvous—and Cortana would
need every millisecond to accomplish what she had to do if any
of them were going to leave the Epsilon Eridani system alive.
Cortana searched the field of derelicts for a likely candidate.
There were only a handful of Covenant ships; if the UNSC had
managed to take out one of the alien ships in the battle for
Reach, they apparently had been forced to obliterate it. No suit-
able candidates remained for her plan.
She turned her attention to the vast number of wrecked UNSC
ships. The Covenant didn't have to completely destroy a human
ship to remove its tactical presence from the battle—a single en-
ergy projection beam could tear through enough decks and kill
enough crew to disable the craft.
She wondered how many fallen humans drifted in the local
space alongside her, thousands of brave men and women who
had died fighting.
Her sensors flicked over the silhouettes of the UNSC light
ships. There were corvettes with bisected hulls leaking radio-
active coolant from their nuclear start-up reactors. Although they
were more suitable for her purpose, the damage to them was too
great. She didn't find one with a single intact fusion reactor.
She tagged the location of the carriers and heavy cruisers and
excluded them from her search. They were simply too large. She
was willing to sacrifice maneuverability and speed... but not so
much that it would take her an hour to make the burn out of orbit.
That left destroyers and frigates. She found and tagged four-
teen in the debris field. Destroyers were essentially frigates that
carried a meter and a half of Titanium-A armor instead of the
sixty centimeters of their lighter counterparts.
There were two candidates: Both the destroyer Tharsis and
the frigate Gettysburg had intact fusion reactors. While the
Gettysburg had been killed by an energy projector beam that had
gutted it stem to stern—obliterating the bridge and life support—
its power plant and even the Magnetic Accelerator Cannon on its