Halo: First Strike

by Eric S. Nylund

  Either Slipspace jumps prevented such occurrences from happening, shunting the incoming ship to the side like water that flows around a river rock ... or she had borrowed some of the Master Chief's probability-bending good fortune.

  Hundreds of wrecked ships, human and Covenant alike, tumbled lifelessly about her, their net trajectories suggesting that Ascendant Justice had just nudged them aside. If she'd had more

  time, she would've designed a set of experiments with drone ships to test out her displacement-luck hypothesis. But time was something neither she nor the Master Chief had in abundance.

  Minutes remained until their rendezvous—and Cortana would need every millisecond to accomplish what she had to do if any of them were going to leave the Epsilon Eridani system alive.

  Cortana searched the field of derelicts for a likely candidate. There were only a handful of Covenant ships; if the UNSC had managed to take out one of the alien ships in the battle for Reach, they apparently had been forced to obliterate it. No suitable candidates remained for her plan.

  She turned her attention to the vast number of wrecked UNSC ships. The Covenant didn't have to completely destroy a human ship to remove its tactical presence from the battle—a single energy projection beam could tear through enough decks and kill enough crew to disable the craft.

  She wondered how many fallen humans drifted in the local space alongside her, thousands of brave men and women who had died fighting.

  Her sensors flicked over the silhouettes of the UNSC light ships. There were corvettes with bisected hulls leaking radioactive coolant from their nuclear start-up reactors. Although they were more suitable for her purpose, the damage to them was too great. She didn't find one with a single intact fusion reactor.

  She tagged the location of the carriers and heavy cruisers and excluded them from her search. They were simply too large. She was willing to sacrifice maneuverability and speed... but not so much that it would take her an hour to make the burn out of orbit.

  That left destroyers and frigates. She found and tagged fourteen in the debris field. Destroyers were essentially frigates that carried a meter and a half of Titanium-A armor instead of the sixty centimeters of their lighter counterparts.

  There were two candidates: Both the destroyer Tharsis and the frigate Gettysburg had intact fusion reactors. While the Gettysburg had been killed by an energy projector beam that had gutted it stem to stern—obliterating the bridge and life support— its power plant and even the Magnetic Accelerator Cannon on its

  undercarriage were apparently functional. Even better: The ship's topside hardpoints were intact. Cortana let a flicker of power pulse through Ascendant Justice's engines, and she slowly drifted toward the Gettysburg.

  She paused to listen to the Covenant traffic insystem. There was eight times the chatter there had been before, with many references to the "Infidels" on the planet and the "holy light" that was now in jeopardy. Good. That meant the Master Chief was doing what he did best: causing mayhem among the enemy. And more importantly, the presence of Ascendant Justice floating among the hundreds of dead ships had not been detected.

  When she was within a kilometer of the Gettysburg, she cut her engines. With delicate puffs from the thrusters she edged closer and rolled Ascendant Justice until its top side was parallel with the top side of the Gettysburg.

  She pinged the Gettysburg's telemetry system and received a faint handshake reply. Cortana gave the override code—quickly accepted—and entered the Gettysburg's NAV computer.

  There was no other computer intelligence on board. The captain of the Gettysburg had flatlined the NAV system and the AI as per the Cole Protocol. Cortana extended her presence through the empty systems. The Gettysburg was a wreck; all thrusters offline. It wouldn't be moving on its own power ever again, but its heart still beat. The ship's fusion reactor operated at 67 percent capacity. Perfect.

  Ascendant Justice gently touched down on the Gettysburg— probably the first time in the history of the universe that human and Covenant ships had made contact with nonlethal intentions.

  All modern UNSC ships had been designed with hardpoints on their dorsal and ventral sides in the event that they were too crippled to move under their own power. In theory, another UNSC ship could dock, lock systems, and carry the wounded ship away.

  The Covenant flagship had a similar series of hardpoints on its top side where ships too large to fit in its launch bay could dock.

  The two systems, however, were incompatible.

  Cortana fixed that. She activated the seven service drones on the Gettysburg, and instructed the Covenant Engineers

  within the outer hull of Ascendant Justice to secure the docking points mating the two ships and adapt their power uplinks. The reason for this salvage operation, her pinpoint jump into the debris field, and the hybrid docking. . . it was all for power.

  Ascendant Justice's cover had been blown; the Covenant knew that their flagship was human-controlled. That made their original plan of rendezvousing in orbit around Reach impossible. She could have jumped to that location and picked up the Chief, but then they would be stranded there while the Slipspace capacitors slowly recharged—and in the meantime they would be boxed in and obliterated by the Covenant armada.

  So she had to change tactics; she'd jump into the thick of a hostile and wary Covenant force, grab the Chief, and just as quickly jump out of the system. For that she'd need power to instantly recharge the Slipspace capacitors—the kind of power only two ships could produce.

  The power uplinks connected. Gigawatts flowed from the Gettysburg's reactor into Ascendant Justice's energy grid.

  "Perfect," she purred.

  It was 0712 hours. She had less than three minutes to prepare for the next phase of her plan.

  Cortana checked and rechecked the calculations for what had to be the shortest Slipspace jump ever: from the floating junk-yard to the rendezvous coordinates, a mere three thousand kilometers. She scanned that region of space—and discovered it was no longer a blind spot in the Covenant defenses. There were three times as many ships insystem as when she'd left.

  Cortana spotted the Chief's hijacked dropship ascending from the lower atmosphere of Reach, with a pack of Seraph fighters surrounding the craft.

  She intercepted a series of repeated orders from the Covenant's fleet commander: Do not fire or you will be targeted and destroyed. The Infidels have captured the holy light.

  This was both good and bad. Good because the Master Chief and his team with this "holy light" avoided being blasted into vapor. Bad because every Covenant ship in the system was closing in on their dropship—ultimately they'd box it in, grapple with the tiny craft, and take it with overwhelming force.

  This also made Cortana's jump target increasingly crowded.

  She made certain her plasma turrets were fully charged; she rechecked her shaping magnetic coils; she ran a systems check on Ascendant Justice's thrusters in case something happened with her exit jump and she had to maneuver.

  The time was 0714.10 Military Standard.

  Cortana then did the one thing she was not good at: wait. Fifty seconds for a mind that could perform a trillion calculations per second was an eternity.

  At T minus thirty seconds Cortana dumped power into the Slipspace capacitors.

  Pinpricks of light dotted the black space around her.

  At T minus twenty she updated her calculations, taking into account the slight gravitational variances that so many Covenant warships created in local space.

  The vacuum around her pulled apart, and she picked a path through the "here" of normal space into the "not-here" of Slipspace.

  At T minus ten she wrote a quick program to target the distant ships near her exit coordinates—and keep them targeted when she reappeared.

  Ascendant Justice moved slightly forward into the rip in space; light enveloped the craft.

  She vanished from the field of floating debris and—

  —reappeared in an eyebli
nk. The full face of Reach filling her lateral starboard displays. The port displays were crowded with inbound Covenant ships.

  The odd piggybacked Covenant—human craft appearing in the middle of their trap must have confused the enemy ... no one fired.

  The dropship was three kilometers off Cortana's starboard beam, its trajectory more or less aligned with Ascendant Justice's launch bay.

  She opened the UNSC E-band and said, "Chief, your ride is here."

  "Acknowledged," the Master Chief replied. There was no quaver in his rock-solid voice. He had been headed into certain death a moment ago, but he sounded like this was what he expected to occur. Like this was normal operational procedure.

  The dropship veered toward the open bay, and Cortana 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 seconds 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 superheated 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 gravitational 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, however, 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.

  212 HALO: FIRST STRIKE

  She probed the region with her sensors, but her range was lim

  ited to a thousand kilometers as if she were in an obscuring fog. There—a contact. And another. And then a dozen more. Fourteen Covenant cruisers resolved from the blue mist. "Cortana," the Master Chief said. "What's our status?" "Same as ever," Cortana replied. "We're in trouble." The Covenant warships fired. "Damn," Cortana muttered. She initiated her last option: She fired back, hoping to take

  some of them to hell with her.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  TIME:DATE RECORD [[ERROR]]ANOMALYDate unknown Aboard captured Covenant flagship Ascendant Justice, in Slipspace. Now.

  "Cortana?" the Master Chief asked. "What's our status?"

  The Chief and the rest of his team scrambled out of the Covenant dropship. Fred carried a semiconscious Kelly out and laid her on the deck of the launch bay.

  "Same as ever," Cortana replied. "We're in trouble."

  Video feed from the ship's external cameras appeared on the Master Chief's heads-up display. Covenant cruisers surrounded them, their plasma turrets aglow; they reminded the Chief of pictures he had seen of fish that lived at the bottom of Earth's oceans—swarms of phosphorescing lights and razor-sharp teeth.

  He marched toward the edge of the launch bay and stood a centimeter from where the ship's energy shield abutted the opening to the space beyond. He looked directly into the vast blue fields and the giant warships far too close for his liking.

  "We jumped to Slipspace, didn't we?" Lieutenant Haverson asked uncertainly.

  "Yes," Dr. Halsey replied. "And no."

  She withdrew the crystal from her lab coat pocket and frowned as she discovered that it was no longer a slender shard. The facets had rearranged like the pieces of a jigsaw puzzle... but in a configuration that differed from the one the artifact displayed in the Covenant grav beam. This time it was a starburst of edges and refracted light.

  "We jumped," she said, examining her reflection in the artifact's mirrored planes. "But not to the Slipspace we know." The Master Chief's radiation counter clicked and a shrill alarm screamed through his helmet. "Secure that, Anton," he said and nodded toward the glowing stone. "Get it into the reactor compartment of the Pelican."

  Anton relieved the crystal from Dr. Halsey, who only reluctantly released it from her grasp. He sprinted toward the wrecked Pelican.

  "There was a radiation surge, Doctor," the Chief explained. "And that thing is the source." The Chief noticed that the intensity of the radiation did not drop off as Anton moved it into the Pelican.

  "Whatever it is," Dr. Halsey said as she scrutinized the blue field outside their ship, "it warps space. When we first approached it in the great room, space curled around the crystal. And again in the grav beam, it dispersed that field potential."

  "And now?" Admiral Whitcomb asked. "This tiling is affecting our passage through Slipspace?" "Apparently so," Dr. Halsey said, and stepped next to John to get a better look outside.

  The Admiral joined her and watched as the Covenant ships' turrets heated. "Can they even fire those things in Slipspace? If they can, we're sitting ducks."

  The Master Chief could make out more ships in the distance. The Covenant vessels flickered, faded, disappeared, and then reappeared in the fog. The nearest enemy Covenant ships fired. Amorphous balls of superheated gas belched from their turrets and accelerated toward them, tingeing the blue space purple.

  The Master Chief saw Locklear as he helped Polaski out of the Covenant dropship. He kept her hand in his, and they watched together as the plasma sped toward them.

  The balls of plasma streaked on—then curled and spiraled off their trajectories. Several simply winked out of existence, only to reappear somewhere else. The enemy shots raced up, down, sideways—any direction but toward Ascendant Justice.

  "What the hell is this?" Sergeant Johnson said and he stepped next to the Master Chief to watch the display. "I didn't think their ships could fire in Slipspace. Ours sure as hell can't."

  Dr. Halsey removed her glasses, and her eyes widened. "Normally, they can't. If they can fire, then logically, we're not in Slipspace. And wherever we are," she murmured, "the rules have changed."

  The Admiral frowned. "Cortana," he shouted. "Whatever you do, do not return—"

  Too late. Cortana returned fire.

  Columns of fire streaked from Ascendant Justice—streamers that twisted and helixed, then vanished and reappeared.

  The bubble of tangled blue space containing Ascendant Justice and the Covenant warships now contained at least forty bolts of superheated plasma circling in random directions and accelerated to incalculable velocities.

  Three spheres of roiling fire appeared in front of the nearest Covenant cruiser and splashed across its bow. The first boiled away its shimmering silver shield; the second and third melted the armor and alloy skin beneath. Atmosphere vented and spun the massive ship like a child's pinwheel.

  "Hot damn," Sergeant Johnson crowed. "All we have to do is wait for those trigger-happy bastards to take themselves out. Look, they're firing again."

  The Covenant weapons heated and squeezed out a second salvo of plasma. The guided bolts of fire veered off course, swarmed, disappeared, reappeared, and spun out of control though the localized Slipspace bubble.

/>   "No, Sergeant," Dr. Halsey said, her voice turning cold. "We're all in the same mess." "Cortana," the Master Chief said, "drop the launch bay blast door. Now!"

  The three-meter-thick door overhead shuddered and slid down.

  A streamer of plasma on a parallel trajectory flashed through the dark not half a kilometer from the Master Chief's face—so close that the external temperature rose twenty degrees even through the ship's shields.

  Red fire illuminated Ascendant Justice's starboard shield as plasma splashed across them; the film separating the launch bay from the external vacuum rippled like a thousand broken mirrors. Static crackled across the Master Chief's armor, and his shields resonated in sympathy.

  As the blast door lowered, the Chief saw another fireball spill across their port side. Energy sprayed across the bow in a blood red borealis. Ascendant Justice's shields flickered and faded... but they held. Barely.

  The launch bay door touched the deck and sealed with a subsonic thud.

  "Blast door locked and secured," Cortana announced.

  "Let's get this boat under way," Admiral Whitcomb barked. "While we still have a boat." He looked around and frowned. "Chief, lead the way to the bridge." "Yes, sir." He marched to the passage that led deeper into the alien ship. His Spartans and the rest of the crew followed.

  Admiral Whitcomb turned to Dr. Halsey. "Catherine, explain in layman's terms just what the hell is going on here. If we can see those cruisers and they can see us, why aren't our shots connecting?"

  Ascendant Justice rolled to port, and explosions chained overhead. The artificial gravity fluttered, and the deck tilted. The crew stumbled, and Dr. Halsey fell to the deck.

  "Turrets one and seven destroyed," Cortana announced.

  Whitcomb helped Dr. Halsey up off her knees. She glanced nervously up and down the passage. "I'd guess the alien artifact we've brought with us into Slipspace has expanded the region. Physicists believe Slipstream space is a highly compressed version of normal space, layered over and under itself, like a ball of yarn. Now, imagine that our ball of yarn"—she interlaced her ringers—"is looped and knotted. These threads are not solid, however; plasma, light, and matter jump from one thread to another given the slightest quantum fluctuation."