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210
HALO: FIRST STRIKE
She made certain her plasma turrets were fully charged; she
rechecked her shaping magnetic coils; she ran a systems check
on Ascendant Justice's thrusters in case something happened
with her exit jump and she had to maneuver.
The time was 0714.10 Military Standard.
Cortana then did the one thing she was not good at: wait. Fifty
seconds for a mind that could perform a trillion calculations per
second was an eternity.
At T minus thirty seconds Cortana dumped power into the
Slipspace capacitors.
Pinpricks of light dotted the black space around her.
At T minus twenty she updated her calculations, taking into
account the slight gravitational variances that so many Covenant
warships created in local space.
The vacuum around her pulled apart, and she picked a path
through the "here" of normal space into the "not-here" of
Slipspace.
At T minus ten she wrote a quick program to target the distant
ships near her exit coordinates—and keep them targeted when
she reappeared.
Ascendant Justice moved slightly forward into the rip in
space; light enveloped the craft.
She vanished from the field of floating debris and—
—reappeared in an eyeblink. The full face of Reach filling her
lateral starboard displays. The port displays were crowded with
inbound Covenant ships.
The odd piggybacked Covenant—human craft appearing in the
middle of their trap must have confused the enemy ... no one
fired.
The dropship was three kilometers off Cortana's starboard
beam, its trajectory more or less aligned with Ascendant Jus-
tice's launch bay.
She opened the UNSC E-band and said, "Chief, your ride is
here."
"Acknowledged," the Master Chief replied. There was no qua-
ver in his rock-solid voice. He had been headed into certain death
a moment ago, but he sounded like this was what he expected to
occur. Like this was normal operational procedure.
The dropship veered toward the open bay, and Cortana