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"Scan the field again," he repeated.
Cortana's tiny holographic figure appeared on the projection pad mounted between the pilot's and system-ops seats. She crossed her arms over her chest, visibly irritated with the Master Chief's request.
"If you don't find something out there we can use," he told her, "we're dead. This ship has no Slipspace drive, and no cryo. There's no way to get back and report. Power, fuel, air, food, water—we only have enough for a few hours.
"So," he concluded as patiently as he could manage. "Scan. Again."
Cortana sighed explosively, and her hologram dissolved. The scanner panel activated, however, and mathematical symbols crowded the screen.
A moment later the scanner panel dimmed and Cortana said, "There's still nothing, Chief. All I'm picking up is a strong echo from the moon ... but there are no transponder signals, and no distress calls."
"You're not doing an active scan?"
Her tiny hologram appeared again, and this time static flashed across her figure. "There are trillions of objects out there. If you want I can start to scan and identify each individual piece. If we sit here and do nothing else, that would take eighteen days."
"What if someone's out there but they turned off their trans?ponder? What if they don't want to be found?"
36 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
"That's highly un—" Cortana froze for a split second. The static around her vanished, and she stared off into space. "Interesting."
"What?"
Cortana looked distracted, then seemed to snap out of it. "New data. That signal echo's getting stronger."
"Meaning?"
"Meaning," she replied, "it's not an echo."
The scanner panel hummed back to life as Cortana activated the Longsword's long-range detection gear. "Uh-oh," she said, a moment later.
The Chief peered at the scan panel as Cortana identified the contact. The distinctive, bulbous silhouette of a Covenant cruiser edged into view as it moved around the moon's far side.
"Power down," he snapped. "Kill everything except passive scanners and minimal power to keep you online."
The Longsword darkened; Cortana's hologram flickered and faded as she killed power flow to the holosystem.
The cruiser moved into the debris field, prowling like a hungry shark. Another cruiser appeared, then another, and then three more.
"Status?" he whispered, his hands hovering over the weapons controls. "Have they spotted us?"
"They're using the same scanning frequencies as our system," Cortana said in his helmet speaker. "How strange. No mention of this phenomenon in any of the UNSC or ONI files on the Cove?nant. Why do you suppose they'd use the same frequencies?"
"Never mind that," the Chief said. "They're here and looking for something. Like I said before, if there are survivors out there, they'd be powered down."
"I can listen to their echoes," Cortana said, her voice flat and oddly procedural. Operating at lower power levels seemed to limit her more colorful behavior. "Process active: analyzing Covenant signals. Piggybacking their scans. Diverting more runtime to the task. I'm building a multiplex filtering algorithm. Customizing the current shape-signature recognition software."