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She automated this process, commandeering a portion of the Covenant's own NAV computer to do so, and then she herded the electronic ghosts of the Chief and the others to confuse the pursuing Elite forces.
At the same time, she continued her study of the Covenant ship and its systems—it was a unique opportunity. The informa?tion on their advanced Slipspace drive, their weapons—it could leapfrog human technology decades forward.
"Cortana?" The Chief's voice broke her concentration. There were sounds of plasma bolts and automatic weapons fire. "We've got Elites in active camouflage in the passage. We need a way around this intersection."
She had not considered the Elites' light-bending technology. She was doing too much, spreading herself too thin. She halted her ongoing study of the Covenant technology and found the Chief a way around the intersection.
She rebooted her human communications and protocol rou?tines and said, "Access panel to your right, Chief. Down three meters, straight ahead five meters, turn to your left and then up again."
She heard an explosion. "Got it," the Chief said.
Cortana had to focus on protecting the Chief. She halted her other searches and scrutinized the ship's schematics. There had to be something she could use. A weapon. A way to stop then-enemies—there: the backup terminus for their atmospheric pre?processors. Unlike the other systems, this one was classified as low priority and had minimal security layers.
She generated several hundred thousand Covenant codes in a microsecond and cracked the system. She diverted the air vents along the corridors the Chief and his team occupied to the pri-
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mary air systems. She then tasked the processor pumps to ser?vice the rest of the ship and activated them—in reverse.
Warnings flashed throughout the Covenant system as the pressure suddenly dropped in 87 percent of the ship's passages. She squelched them.
The other presence in the system tried to shut the pumps off. She blocked that signal and assigned a new code to the security systems: "WE REGRET TO INFORM YOU."
She heard the other AI scream, an echo of an echo that rever?berated through her processors. She knew trie sound—familiar like a human voice, but terribly distorted.
She scanned through the ship's cameras and saw Grunts squeal and fall over, methane leaking from their breathers as the pres?sure dropped. Engineers turned blue, slowed, and died, floating in place with tentacles twitching, still searching for something to fix. The Elite hunt-and-destroy parties halted in the corridors and clutched their throats, mandibles snapping at air that was no longer there; they toppled and suffocated.
An impulse flickered through her ethics subroutine and gen?erated an interrupt command, designed to make her stop and re?think her decisions. But Cortana knew it was either kill or be killed. She rerouted all signals from her ethics routine and shut it down. She couldn't afford to be slowed down by such secondary considerations.