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HALO: FIRST STRIKE
mary air systems. She then tasked the processor pumps to ser-
vice the rest of the ship and activated them—in reverse.
Warnings flashed throughout the Covenant system as the
pressure suddenly dropped in 87 percent of the ship's passages.
She squelched them.
The other presence in the system tried to shut the pumps off.
She blocked that signal and assigned a new code to the security
systems: "WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU."
She heard the other AI scream, an echo of an echo that rever-
berated through her processors. She knew trie sound—familiar
like a human voice, but terribly distorted.
She scanned through the ship's cameras and saw Grunts squeal
and fall over, methane leaking from their breathers as the pres-
sure dropped. Engineers turned blue, slowed, and died, floating in
place with tentacles twitching, still searching for something to
fix. The Elite hunt-and-destroy parties halted in the corridors
and clutched their throats, mandibles snapping at air that was no
longer there; they toppled and suffocated.
An impulse flickered through her ethics subroutine and gen-
erated an interrupt command, designed to make her stop and re-
think her decisions. But Cortana knew it was either kill or be
killed. She rerouted all signals from her ethics routine and shut it
down. She couldn't afford to be slowed down by such secondary
considerations.
"Chief," she whispered over the COM. "Be advised that the
passages I'm uploading into your NAV system no longer contain
atmosphere. Proceeding into those regions will be lethal to the
rest of your team."
There was a three-second pause, and then the Chief replied,
"Understood."
Cortana's decryption of the Covenant communiques referenc-
ing the "holy one" finally cycled to a halt. The language in them
was unusually ornate—even more so than the florid prose of
the higher-ranking Elites. It was impossible to develop a literal
translation, but she gleaned that some dignitary was due at the
Halo construct. Soon.
This visitor was so important that these warships were only
the advance scouting party. More ships were on their way. Hun-
dreds of them.