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ERIC NYLUND
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dropped shields for a split second—just long enough for the tiny
craft to enter—then reestablished the protective field.
Cortana routed power from the Gettysburg into Ascendant
Justice's Slipspace capacitors, and they began soaking up the
charge.
Three dozen Covenant cruisers surrounded her, their plasma
turrets glowing a hellish red as they prepared to fire.
Apparently the order not to fire did not extend to Ascendant
Justice.
Cortana needed five seconds to attain a full charge, five sec-
onds before she could make good her escape... but five seconds
might be long enough for her to become the center of a small
Covenant-made sun.
She took the initiative and fired at the closest four cruisers.
Laser-fine plasma lanced from her turrets, burned though
the Covenant shields, and split open their hulls. When the super-
heated gas came in contact with the atmosphere inside the
ships, plastic, flesh, and metal caught fire and roiled throughout
their interiors.
Two of the targeted cruisers immediately detonated as the
plasma beams found the reactors. Billowing clouds of vaporized
metal mushroomed across the night and obscured her from the
advancing ships.
Pinpricks of light appeared around Ascendant Justice.
ERROR.
Cortana rechecked the figures and quickly found the source of
the problem: The fail-safe subroutine that tracked local gravita-
tional conditions returned an anomaly.
The gravity from Reach no longer warped space ... which
was impossible.
No time for speculation. She had to leave or fight.
She moved Ascendant Justice into the twisting spatial field—
—and vanished.
Instead of the nonvisible nondimensions of Slipspace, how-
ever, a blue-tinged field appeared on Cortana's monitors. It wasn't
space—not the crowded space near Reach, or the star-filled
space of the Epsilon Eridani system. But it was a space, where
there should have been no space at all.