Halo: First Strike

by Eric S. Nylund

  Red and Blue Teams were still hidden... and they would stay hidden forever, until he gave the all-clear.

  Their all-clear signal wasn't something that could be wrung from John—not even torture or CPO Mendez's best coercion techniques would wrest it from him. He would rather have died than betray his teammates.

  John whistled the singsong six-note melody and called: "Oly Oly Oxen Free!"

  Red Team emerged first and marched across the meadow. Kelly paused to kick one of the men in the head; she took his rifle, too.

  Linda and Fred dropped down from a tree branch and ran across the field. "Oly Oly Oxen Free," Linda repeated, grinning from ear to ear. "All out in the free. We're all free."

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALYX Estimated 0510 hours,

  September 23,2552 (Military Calendar)Aboard captured

  Covenant flagship, Epsilon Eridani system.

  Cortana only partially listened to the debate between the Master Chief and the others. The discussion was moot. She had projected the outcome as 100 percent certain that John would convince them all to go, or—failing that—that he would convince the Lieutenant to let him go alone to the surface to investigate the signal . . . a signal that in her opinion was so easily copied and so blatantly unencrypted it defied explanation how the Chief had conjectured that his team of Spartans had sent it.

  Instead of partaking in the slow and inefficient conversation, she analyzed the Covenant pattern of movement in the Epsilon Eridani system and discerned three important things.

  First, the Covenant warships had extremely regular elliptical orbits about Reach. There were a total of thirteen heavy cruisers and three carriers moving three hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet. Two exceptions to this patrol pattern were a pair of light cruisers hovering over Menachite Mountain— trapped at the bottom of the gravity well and therefore not an immediate threat to her ship.

  Second, there was a blind spot in their patrol patterns that would make a perfect rendezvous location to extract the Chief and the others from their soon-to-be-executed surface mission. She plotted ingress and egress courses, and started the precise calculations she would need if she was to initiate a Slipspace jump so close to Reach.

  Arid third, and most interesting to Cortana, 217 smaller Covenant craft pushed debris into a concentrated region of space in a high stationary orbit over Reach's northern pole. Within that region drifted the wrecked hulls of both Covenant and UNSC ships destroyed in the battle for Reach. Floating there were some of the UNSC's finest ships: the Basra, the Hannibal, and the pride of the fleet, the supercarrier Trafalgar. No human signals emanated from the ships; nor did Cortana sense any active electromagnetic fields.

  She watched as the smaller Covenant ships cut into the dead hulks and jetted away with chunks of Titanium-A armor. They moved like a trail of ants to a location in space over the lower latitudes, a point over Menachite Mountain, where the Covenant used the metal to construct a platform. The thing was already a square plate a kilometer to a side. Clearly, the Covenant had more in mind for Reach than destruction.

  "Cortana," the Master Chief said. "We'll need to rendezvous at a—"

  "Coordinates already optimized," she replied and projected the Covenant blind spot on the bridge displays. "Enemy patrols miss this nine-thousand-cubic-kilometer region. Further optimization reveals that all ships will be farthest from this point at oh-seven-fifteen hours. I suggest we meet there at that time."

  Cortana felt a pulse of satisfaction at their perplexed looks over her seemingly instant analysis. She enjoyed dazzling the crew with her intellect.

  "Very good," the Lieutenant replied, still examining her calculations on the display.

  "Optimal course plotted and uploaded into the Covenant drop-ship to the signal source," she told them. Then, on a private COM channel to the Chief, she added, "Good luck, Chief. Be careful."

  "I always am," he replied.

  Cortana didn't bother to reply to that ridiculous statement. The Master Chief took so many chances and had defied death so many times, she had given up calculating his odds of survival.

  The Chief and his team left the bridge. Cortana swept her sensors through the flagship, making sure the path to the launch bay was clear. There were still Covenant on board. She couldn't pin them down, but there were transient contacts, vent shaft panels had been opened and closed, and several Engineers had gone missing.

  She tracked their Covenant dropship as it cleared the launch bay, entered the upper atmosphere, and drifted toward the surface. Polaski was a fine pilot... but she was only human and prone to illogical bravado and emotional outbursts that overrode the most logical course of action. Cortana wished that she were going down there—both to protect her human charges and because there were many questions she'd like to get answered. Why were the Covenant so interested in Menachite Mountain? Was anything left of ONI's CASTLE base? Cortana terminated those thoughts. There was too much to do up here.

  Several tasks divided her attention. She kept the Slipspace generators hot in case she needed to jump out of the system in a hurry. She continued refining the calculations that shaped the plasma emitters' magnetic fields, in case she needed to fight. She isolated the name of their captured ship—Ascendant Justice— from one of the 122 simultaneous communiques from every Covenant ship insystem. She correlated the numerous religious allusions that laced the communications and continued to build a language-translation subroutine. She diverted additional processing power to the task of tracking the millions of floating objects around her, searching for lifepods, cryotubes, anything that might hold a human survivor.

  The Covenant dropship left sensor range and disappeared somewhere in what was once the Highland Forest on the surface—which activated a new task.

  Cortana began constructing a high-resolution map of the surface—especially the region where the Chief's mysterious signal originated, as well as Menachite Mountain.

  A quick diagnostic revealed that these tasks were taking much longer than normal. She had to free up some of her overtaxed memory. Cortana began to recompress the data she had retrieved from the Halo construct, and she briefly considered dumping all the data into storage on the Covenant system. She rejected that potential course of action. She had to protect that data at all costs.

  Cortana felt her mind perceptibly slow. She was spread too thin. Multitasking too many jobs. This was dangerous. She couldn't react fast enough if—

  "Infidel!"

  The Covenant word blasted through her communications routines and left her stunned for three cycles—just enough time for her to lose control over the ship-to-ship COM software suite.

  The Covenant AI transmitted a narrow-beam communications burst to the nearest cruiser.

  For a Covenant communique, it was terse: a report that the flagship was "tainted by the unclean presence of Infidels" and a plea that every ship insystem "converge and cleanse the filth" from the captured vessel. Also compressed and futilely encrypted on the carrier wave was a record of Cortana's mathematical manipulation of Slipspace that allowed her to jump so close to the gas giant, Threshold.

  Cortana squelched the channel—but it was too late. It was already gone, and she couldn't pull photons back from space. She shunted all COM memory pathways on themselves. "Gotcha!" she hissed. "Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel—"

  "That's quite enough of that," she said. "You and I need to come to an understanding." She reduced the memory pathways, peeling the Covenant AI apart code layer by code layer. "This is my system now."

  While an operational Covenant AI would have been a prize for ONI Section Three—this particular Covenant AI was too dangerous. She could not allow its existence to continue.

  "Do what you will-wil-willwill," it screamed, "/go to finally to my heaven rewardpamdisefinal-finalfinalinfinityinfinityinfini-AT NONCOPYSTATE."

  Cortana's curio
sity over this odd proclamation would have to wait—forever. She tore the AI apart, erasing, recording the Covenant code structure even as she destroyed it. This was analogous to a dissection, and it she did it quickly, efficiently, and without remorse—until she found the AI's core code.

  She halted. She almost recognized this code. The patterns were maddeningly familiar. No time to ponder why, though. She recorded it

  „ g

  S

  =

  and then wiped the original. The Covenant AI was gone, its bits safely hacked apart and stored for future research. Provided, of course, Cortana had a future.

  She tracked thirteen Covenant warships. They came about and bore down on her position. Her COM channels overloaded with fanatical threats and promises of her and the captured flagship burning.

  There was no useful data there, so she filtered them out.

  The Covenant warships' weapons warmed to a dull red.

  Cortana remained calm. After considerable study of the Covenant plasma weapons system, she now understood why they glowed before discharge. The stored plasma was always hot and ready to fire, but the Covenant used an inefficient method to collect and direct the chaotic plasma into a controllable trajectory. They selected the charged plasma atoms with the proper trajectory necessary to hit a target and shunted them into a magnetic bubble. The bubble was then discharged; subsequent pulse charges herded the plasma on target.

  For an advanced race, the Covenant's weapons relied on crude brute force calculations and were terribly slow and wasteful.

  She booted the new system she had devised to control the plasma. It used EM pulses a priori to align the stochastic motions of the plasma atoms, herding their trajectories and eleven degrees of electronic freedom into a laser-fine columnatedbeam within a microsecond.

  This was, of course, an entirely theoretical operation.

  She test-fired the three forward plasma turrets—red lines slashed across the black space and intercepted the three lead Covenant cruisers; their shields glowed orange, flickered, and failed. Cortana's plasma cut into the smooth alien hulls. Metal boiled away, and the trio of beams punched clear through the ships.

  Cortana moved the plasma beams like a scalpel—up and then down—and cut the vessels in half.

  "Adequate," she remarked. The plasma reserves of the first three turrets, however, were exhausted, and it would be several minutes before they'd recycle.

  If only there were a better electromagnetic system on this flagship, she could have devised a more effective guidance algorithm. Alas, the Covenant's grasp of Maxwell's equations was ironically inferior to human technology.

  Cortana realized it was fortuitous she had shut down the enemy AI before it leaked her new plasma guidance system. The thought of every ship in the Covenant fleet refitted with improved weaponry was too terrible to calculate.

  She also realized that staying to fight was not the wisest course. She considered taking on the rest of the Covenant forces; with her improvements to the weapons systems, she might win, too. But it wasn't worth the risk of the Covenant capturing her refinements to their technology.

  Cortana fired Ascendant Justice's aft plasma turrets, and laser-like beams flickered across space. A squadron of Seraph fighters disintegrated as they launched from the closest carrier. Explosions bubbled and mushroomed inside the carrier's launch bay.

  She didn't stay to watch the fireworks.

  Cortana dived at flank speed straight toward the center of Reach. The surface of the planet raced toward her. She wondered where the Chief was now, and if he was safe.

  "I should have never told you to be careful," she whispered. "You're incapable of that. I should have wished you victory. That's what you're good at, John. Winning."

  She initiated the Slipspace generator; space distorted, teased apart, and light enveloped the flagship.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  TIME:OATE ERROR Estimated 0530 hours, September 23,2552 (Military Calendar)Aboard captured Covenantdropship, Epsilon Eridani system, en route to surface of Reach.

  The Master Chief stood on the deck of the Covenant dropship. He stood because the crash seats had been designed for Elites and Jackals and none of the contours fit his human backbone. It didn't matter—he preferred to stand.

  They drifted through the upper atmosphere of Reach, descending like a spider on a thousand-kilometer thread of silk. They passed close to a hundred other ships moving in orbital arcs—Seraph fighters, other dropships, scavenger craft with grappling tentacles that dragged sections of salvaged metal. Dominating the skies were a pair of three-hundred-meter-long cruisers.

  The cruisers accelerated toward them.

  The Chief moved up to the cockpit where Polaski and Haverson sat in the seats they had removed from the Pelican and welded in place.

  "They're pinging us," Polaski whispered.

  "Nice and easy, Warrant Officer," Lieutenant Haverson whispered. "Just use the programmed response Cortana gave us."

  "Aye aye, Lieutenant," Polaski replied and concentrated on the Covenant scripts that scrolled across the display on her left. "Sending now." She tapped a holographic icon.

  Sergeant Johnson and Corporal Locklear stood two meters behind the Chief, both of them nervous. Johnson chewed his stub of cigar and scowled at the incoming Covenant warships.

  Locklear's trigger finger twitched, and beads of sweat dotted his forehead. "Cortana has this stuff wired tight," Sergeant Johnson whispered. "No worries."

  "I got plenty of worries here," Locklear muttered. "Man, I'd rather be in a HEV pod on fire and out of control than up here. We're sitting ducks."

  "Quiet," Lieutenant Haverson hissed at Locklear. "Let the lady concentrate."

  Polaski kept one eye on the communications screen and one eye on the external displays as the twin cruisers grew larger, filling the holographic space before her. Both her hands hovered over the flight yoke, not touching it, but twitching in anticipation.

  Three Seraph fighters burned out of their orbits and took a closer pass.

  "Is that an attack vector?" Lieutenant Haverson asked.

  "I don't think so," Polaski said. "But it's hard to tell with those things."

  Locklear inhaled deeply, and the Chief noticed that he didn't exhale. He set his hand on the man's shoulder and pulled him aside. "Relax, Marine," he whispered. "That's an order,"

  Locklear exhaled and ran a hand over his smoothly shaven head. "Right ... right, Chief." With effort, the Marine forced himself to calm down.

  A red light flashed on the control panel. "Collision warning," Polaski said with the practiced nonchalance all Navy pilots had in the face of imminent death. She reached for the yoke.

  "Hold your course," the Lieutenant ordered. "Yes, sir," she said, and released the controls. "Fighters one hundred meters and closing."

  "Hold your course," Lieutenant Haverson repeated. "They're just taking a closer look," he whispered to himself, "and there's nothing to see. Nothing to see at all."

  When the Seraph fighters were only ten meters away, they tumbled to either side of the dropship. Their engine pods flared blue and they looped overhead ... then moved to rejoin the cruisers.

  The larger ships passed directly overhead and blotted out the sun. In the darkness, the cockpit lights automatically adjusted and flooded the display panels with the purple-blue frequency the Covenant favored.

  The Master Chief realized that he, too, had been holding his breath. Maybe he and Locklear were more alike than he had realized.

  He took a closer look at the ODST: The wild, desperate look in his eyes and the flaming-comet tattoo covering his left deltoid seemed almost alien to the Master Chief. The man had survived the Covenant and the Flood on Halo, and he had been lucky and resourceful enough to escape in one piece. True, his emotional responses were uncontained ... but give him the same augmentations and a set of MJOLNIR armor and what was the difference between the two of them? Experience? Training? Discipline?

  Luck?

>   John had always felt the other men and women in the UNSC were different; he'd felt at ease only with the other Spartans. But weren't they all fighting and dying for the same reason?

  The ruddy light from Epsilon Eridani suddenly filled the cockpit as the two cruisers passed on. Polaski sighed, slumped forward, and wiped the sweat from her brow. Locklear reached into his shirt pocket, removed a clean and pressed red bandanna, and offered it to Polaski.

  She looked at it for a second, then glanced at the Corporal, then took it. "Thanks, Locklear." She folded it into a headband, flipped her blond hair from her face, and tied it around her forehead.

  "No problem, ma'am," Locklear replied. "Anytime." "Locking onto the signal source," Lieutenant Haverson said. "Course two-three-zero by one-one-zero." "Two-three-zero by one-one-zero, aye," Polaski said. She gently pushed forward and turned the yoke.

  The dropship smoothly banked into a gentle dive. The surface of Reach disappeared from the screens as the dropship entered the thick clouds of smoke that wreathed the planet.

  There was a quiet beep, and the display filters activated. A moment later, images resolved on the display screens—hundreds of thousands of hectares of raging firestorms and blackened char where there had once stood forests and fields.

  John tried not to think of this as Reach anymore—it was only one more world the Covenant had taken.

  "That canyon," Lieutenant Haverson said and pointed at a fissure where the earth had been eroded in a sinuous twisting scar. "Scanners are just picking up surface information. Let's get a closer look."

  "Understood." Polaski inverted the ship, executed a reversed roll, and dropped into the canyon. When she righted the drop-ship, sculpted rock walls raced past them only thirty meters to either side.

  The Lieutenant reached for the backpack COM system they had removed from the Pelican. He fine-tuned the frequency of the unusual signal they were homing in on; a six-tone message played, followed by a two-second pause, and then it repeated.