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168 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
nant craft pushed debris into a concentrated region of space in a high stationary orbit over Reach's northern pole. Within that re?gion drifted the wrecked hulls of both Covenant and UNSC ships destroyed in the battle for Reach. Floating there were some of the UNSC's finest ships: the Basra, the Hannibal, and the pride of the fleet, the supercarrier Trafalgar. No human signals ema?nated from the ships; nor did Cortana sense any active electro?magnetic fields.
She watched as the smaller Covenant ships cut into the dead hulks and jetted away with chunks of Titanium-A armor. They moved like a trail of ants to a location in space over the lower latitudes, a point over Menachite Mountain, where the Covenant used the metal to construct a platform. The thing was already a square plate a kilometer to a side. Clearly, the Covenant had more in mind for Reach than destruction.
"Cortana," the Master Chief said. "We'll need to rendezvous at a—"
"Coordinates already optimized," she replied and projected the Covenant blind spot on the bridge displays. "Enemy patrols miss this nine-thousand-cubic-kilometer region. Further opti?mization reveals that all ships will be farthest from this point at oh-seven-fifteen hours. I suggest we meet there at that time."
Cortana felt a pulse of satisfaction at their perplexed looks over her seemingly instant analysis. She enjoyed dazzling the crew with her intellect.
"Very good," the Lieutenant replied, still examining her cal?culations on the display.
"Optimal course plotted and uploaded into the Covenant drop-ship to the signal source," she told them. Then, on a private COM channel to the Chief, she added, "Good luck, Chief. Be careful."
"I always am," he replied.
Cortana didn't bother to reply to that ridiculous statement. The Master Chief took so many chances and had defied death so many times, she had given up calculating his odds of survival.
The Chief and his team left the bridge. Cortana swept her sen?sors through the flagship, making sure the path to the launch bay was clear. There were still Covenant on board. She couldn't pin
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them down, but there were transient contacts, vent shaft panels had been opened and closed, and several Engineers had gone missing.
She tracked their Covenant dropship as it cleared the launch bay, entered the upper atmosphere, and drifted toward the sur?face. Polaski was a fine pilot... but she was only human and prone to illogical bravado and emotional outbursts that overrode the most logical course of action. Cortana wished that she were going down there—both to protect her human charges and be?cause there were many questions she'd like to get answered. Why were the Covenant so interested in Menachite Mountain? Was anything left of ONI's CASTLE base? Cortana terminated those thoughts. There was too much to do up here.
Several tasks divided her attention. She kept the Slipspace generators hot in case she needed to jump out of the system in a hurry. She continued refining the calculations that shaped the plasma emitters' magnetic fields, in case she needed to fight. She isolated the name of their captured ship—Ascendant Justice— from one of the 122 simultaneous communiques from every Covenant ship insystem. She correlated the numerous religious allusions that laced the communications and continued to build a language-translation subroutine. She diverted additional pro?cessing power to the task of tracking the millions of floating ob?jects around her, searching for lifepods, cryotubes, anything that might hold a human survivor.