第40页
"It's very different," Cortana murmured.
Cortana was built for software intrusion. She had been pro?grammed with every dirty trick and code-breaking algorithm the Office of Naval Intelligence, Section Three had ever created, and a few more tricks she'd developed on her own. She was the ultimate thief and electronic spy. She slipped into the Covenant system.
It was easy the first time she had entered their network as the Longsword had approached the flagship. She had set their weap?ons systems into a diagnostic mode. The Covenant had deter?mined the problem and quickly reset the system, but it had given Polaski the precious seconds her sluggish human reflexes had needed to get inside the launch bay.
"How is it?" the Chief asked.
Now the element of surprise was gone, and the system's counterintrusion systems were running on high alert. Something else prowled the systems now. Delicate pings bounced off the edges of Cortana's presence; they probed, and withdrew.
It felt as if there were someone else running through their sys?tem. A Covenant AI? There had never been any reports of alien AIs. The possibility intrigued her.
"It's.. . different," she finally answered.
She scanned the ship's schematics, deck by deck, then flashed through the vessel's three thousand surveillance systems. She picked out the quickest route to the bridge from their current
ERIC NYLUND 65
position and stored it in a stolen tertiary system buffer. She multitasked a portion of herself and continued to analyze the ship's structure and subsystems.
"Proceed thirty meters down this passage and turn left."
Cortana hijacked the external ship cameras and detected the six Covenant cruisers. They had stalled their pursuit of the Longsword and now hovered a hundred kilometers off the flag?ship's starboard side. The strange U-shaped Covenant dropships launched from the cruisers and swarmed toward the flagship. That was trouble.
Within the flagship she spotted a dozen hunt-and-kill Elite teams sweeping the corridors. She scrambled the ship's tracking systems, generated electronic ghosts of the Chief and his team along a path directed toward the nose of the ship, where UNSC command-and-control centers were typically located. Maybe she could fool the Elites into a wild goose chase.
She uploaded the coordinates of those enemies into the Chief's HUD.
A tickle of feedback teased through the data stream.
Cortana locked onto the source of that feedback, listened, dis?cerned a nonrandom pattern to the signal, then cut off contact. She had no time to play hide and seek with whatever else was in this system.
Cortana had to finally admit to herself that she didn't have the power to contend with a possible enemy artificial construct. She had absorbed a tremendous volume of data from Halo's systems: eons' worth of records on Halo's engineering and maintenance, the xenobiology of the Flood, and every scrap of information on the mysterious "Forerunners" the Covenant revered so much. The information would take her a week of nonstop processing to examine, collate, codify... let alone understand.