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64
HALO: FIRST STRIKE
The Chief felt her leave his mind, felt the heat rush back into his
head, pulsing with the rhythm of his heart... and once again, he
was alone in the armor.
He slotted Cortana's chip into the Covenant data port.
Locklear's face rippled with disgust, and he whispered, "You
couldn't pay me to stick any part of myself in that thing."
The Chief made a slashing gesture across his throat, and the
Marine fell silent.
"I'm in," Cortana said.
"How is it?" the Chief said.
There was a half-second pause. "It's ... different," Cortana
replied. "Proceed thirty meters down this passage and turn left."
The Chief motioned the team forward.
"It's very different," Cortana murmured.
Cortana was built for software intrusion. She had been pro-
grammed with every dirty trick and code-breaking algorithm the
Office of Naval Intelligence, Section Three had ever created, and
a few more tricks she'd developed on her own. She was the
ultimate thief and electronic spy. She slipped into the Covenant
system.
It was easy the first time she had entered their network as the
Longsword had approached the flagship. She had set their weap-
ons systems into a diagnostic mode. The Covenant had deter-
mined the problem and quickly reset the system, but it had given
Polaski the precious seconds her sluggish human reflexes had
needed to get inside the launch bay.
"How is it?" the Chief asked.
Now the element of surprise was gone, and the system's
counterintrusion systems were running on high alert. Something
else prowled the systems now. Delicate pings bounced off the
edges of Cortana's presence; they probed, and withdrew.
It felt as if there were someone else running through their sys-
tem. A Covenant AI? There had never been any reports of alien
AIs. The possibility intrigued her.
"It's.. . different," she finally answered.
She scanned the ship's schematics, deck by deck, then flashed
through the vessel's three thousand surveillance systems. She
picked out the quickest route to the bridge from their current