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She watched with thePillar of Autumn ’s camera as Captain Keyes approached the ship in a shuttle pod.Lieutenant Hikowa left to greet him in the docking bay.
From C deck, Captain Keyes spoke over the intercom: “Cortana? Can we have power to move the ship?I’d like to get under way.”
She calculated the remaining reactor burn-in time and made an adjustment to run it hotter. “The engines’final shakedown is in theta cycle,” Cortana replied. “Operating well within normal parameters. Divertingthirty percent power to engines; aye, sir.”
“And the other systems’ status?” Captain Keyes asked.
“Weapons-system check initiated. Navigational nodes functioning. Continuing systemwide shakedownand triple checks, Captain.”
“Very good,” he said. “Apprise me if there are any anomalies.”
“Aye, Captain,” she replied.
The COM channel snapped off.
She continued her checks on thePillar of Autumn as ordered. There were, however, more importantthings to consider; namely, a little reconnaissance into ONI databases . . . and a little revenge.
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She dedicated the balance of her run time toward probing the SATCOM system around REACH forentry points. There. A ping in the satellite network coordination signal. She broadcast a resonant carrierwave at that signal and piggybacked into the system.
First things first. She had two loose ends to take care of.
While she and the Master Chief had been on the obstacle course, she had commandeered SATCOMobservation beacon 419 and rotated it to view them from orbit.
She reentered the back door she had left open in the system, and rewrote the satellite’s guidance thrustersubroutine. If the system was analyzed later, it would be determined that this error had altered it to arandom orientation rather than a planned position.
She withdrew, but left her back door intact. This trick might come in handy again.
The other loose end that required her attentions was Colonel Ackerson—the man who had tried to eraseher and the Master Chief.
Cortana reread Dr. Halsey’s recommended test specifications for the MJOLNIR system on the obstaclecourse. She had suggested live rounds, yes. But never a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, chain-guns, Lotus mines . . . and certainly not an air strike.
That was the Colonel’s doing. He was an equation that needed to be balanced. What Dr. Halsey mighthave called “payback.”
She linked to the UNSC personnel and planning database on Reach. The ONI AI there, Beowulf, knewher . . . and knew not to let her in. Beowulf was thorough, methodical, and paranoid; in her own way,Cortana couldn’t help but like him. But compared with her code-cracking skills, he might as well havebeen an accounting program.
Cortana sent a rapid series of queries into the network node that processed housing transfer requests. Anormally quiet node—she overloaded it with a billion different pings per minute.
The network attempted to recover and reconfigure, causing all nodes to lag, including node seventeen—personnel records. She stepped in and inserted a spike wedge, a subroutine that looked like a normalincoming signal, but bounced any handshake protocol.