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Even compressed, all the data filled her and cut into optical subsystems that she usually reserved for her processing. She had a nagging suspicion that the file compression had been too hasty—and that the Halo data might be corrupted.
In effect, the vast amount of information she had copied bloated her, made her slower and less effective.
She hadn't mentioned this to the Chief. She could barely ad?mit it to herself. Cortana was extremely proud of her intellect.
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But to operate as if nothing were different would be even more foolish.
She sent a blocking countersignal along the connection where this "other" was trying to contact her.
The portion of her consciousness examining the ship's struc?ture discovered that the bridge had another access point. Stupid. She should have seen it immediately, but this other entrance had been filed under the schematics as an emergency system. It was a tiny corridor that connected to a set of escape pods. That route shared a vent with an engineering passage.
"Chief, there's another way to the bridge."
"Affirmative. Wait one." There was a burst of gunfire on the COM, then silence. "Go ahead, Cortana."
"Uploading the route now," she said. "I do not believe you can fit through this new passage in your armor. I suggest you split your team and proceed along both routes to maximize your chances of egress onto the bridge."
"Understood," the Chief said. "Polaski and Haverson with me. Johnson and Locklear, you take the escape pod route."
She continued to track both teams and the relative positions of the Covenant parties. She replicated additional ghost signals to confuse the enemy.
Cortana picked up increasing communications bandwidth be?tween the flagship and the cruisers. Reports of the invaders—a call for help—a warning to be relayed to the home world. There were references to the "holy one," and those messages had what she considered amusing attempts at encryption to keep them se?cret. Curious, she had to investigate what the Covenant thought important enough to hide.
As she decrypted those messages and others cross-referenced and filed in their COM archives, she detected an energy spike on the flagship's lateral sensors. One cruiser off to starboard moved farther away; it turned, its engines glowed, the black around it rippled electric blue. The Covenant ship sped forward, tore the night, and vanished into Slipspace.
Cortana noted their departure vector for future reference... a possible clue at the location of their home world.
It was puzzling that the Covenant would call for help. Their warriors were intensely proud; they almost never ran from a
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fight. They didn't ask for help... not for themselves. Then again, this ship, although armed for war, didn't appear to be staffed for combat. It carried only a few hundred Elites and an army of Engineers.
As Cortana pondered this, she continued to generate a counter-signal to match to the probe sent by the other presence in the system. She hoped to cloak her activity as long as possible. The other's signal morphed into a series of Bessel functions, and she compensated to match.