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ERIC NYLUND
65
position and stored it in a stolen tertiary system buffer. She
multitasked a portion of herself and continued to analyze the
ship's structure and subsystems.
"Proceed thirty meters down this passage and turn left."
Cortana hijacked the external ship cameras and detected
the six Covenant cruisers. They had stalled their pursuit of the
Longsword and now hovered a hundred kilometers off the flag-
ship's starboard side. The strange U-shaped Covenant dropships
launched from the cruisers and swarmed toward the flagship.
That was trouble.
Within the flagship she spotted a dozen hunt-and-kill Elite
teams sweeping the corridors. She scrambled the ship's tracking
systems, generated electronic ghosts of the Chief and his team
along a path directed toward the nose of the ship, where UNSC
command-and-control centers were typically located. Maybe she
could fool the Elites into a wild goose chase.
She uploaded the coordinates of those enemies into the
Chief's HUD.
A tickle of feedback teased through the data stream.
Cortana locked onto the source of that feedback, listened, dis-
cerned a nonrandom pattern to the signal, then cut off contact.
She had no time to play hide and seek with whatever else was in
this system.
Cortana had to finally admit to herself that she didn't have the
power to contend with a possible enemy artificial construct. She
had absorbed a tremendous volume of data from Halo's systems:
eons' worth of records on Halo's engineering and maintenance,
the xenobiology of the Flood, and every scrap of information
on the mysterious "Forerunners" the Covenant revered so much.
The information would take her a week of nonstop processing to
examine, collate, codify.. . let alone understand.
Even compressed, all the data filled her and cut into optical
subsystems that she usually reserved for her processing. She had
a nagging suspicion that the file compression had been too
hasty—and that the Halo data might be corrupted.
In effect, the vast amount of information she had copied
bloated her, made her slower and less effective.
She hadn't mentioned this to the Chief. She could barely ad-
mit it to herself. Cortana was extremely proud of her intellect.