第118页

　　The  ship  drifted  in  the  icy  dark.
　　192 HALO:  FIRST  STRIKE
　　She  redlined  the  reactors,  however,  to  recharge  the  Slipspace  capacitors  and  regenerate  the  plasma  she  had  expended  in  her  brief  fight  with  the  Covenant  cruisers.
　　If  she  was  part  of  a  larger  fleet,  her  desperate  tactics  might  be  valuable—flashing  all  her  plasma  away  and  the  near-gravity  Slipspace  jump—but  as  one  ship  against  a  dozen,  her  effective  combat  lifetime  using  those  tactics  could  be  measured  in  microseconds.
　　And  now  the  Covenant  knew  that  Ascendant  Justice  was  not  one  of  theirs.  She  hoped  the  Master  Chief  would  elude  them—  find  his  Spartans  and  somehow  meet  her  at  the  rendezvous  coordinates—all  without  getting  blown  up  by  enemy  ground  forces  and  the  Covenant  fleet.
　　She  paused  and  reset  her  emotion  subroutines—the  AI  equiva?lent  of  a  deep  sigh.  Cortana  had  to  remain  focused  and  think  of  something  useful  to  do  while  she  waited.
　　The  problem  was  that  she'd  been  thinking  at  peak  capacity  for  the  last  five  days.  And  now  she  was  thinking  with  a  large  por?tion  of  her  mind  occupied  by  the  data  absorbed  from  the  Halo  construct.
　　She  again  toyed  with  the  idea  of  dumping  that  data  into  Ascen?dant  Justice's  onboard  memory.  Now  that  the  other  AI  had  been  erased,  it  should  be  safe.  Yet  one  piece  of  technological  data  had  already  been  leaked  to  the  enemy  ...  and  that  could  have  ex?treme  repercussions  in  the  war  effort.  If  the  Halo  data  got  into  Covenant  hands—the  war  would  be  over.
　　She  decided  she  would  make  do  with  her  available  memory-processing  bandwidth.
　　Cortana  listened  and  looked  to  the  center  of  the  Epsilon  Eridani  system  with  Ascendant  Justice's  passive  sensors.  Faint  Covenant  communiques  whispered  past  her—eight  hours  old,  because  that's  how  long  it  took  the  signal  to  travel  from  Reach  to  here.
　　Interesting.  The  present  insystem  chatter  was  undoubtedly  fo?cused  on  the  intruders.  Eight  hours  ago,  however,  it  had  been  business  as  usual...  whatever  business  that  was.
　　She  eavesdropped  on  the  data  streams,  translating,  and  tried  to  make  sense  of  it  all.
　　Among  the  more  coherent  samples  of  their  excited  religious
　　ERIC  NYLUND
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　　babble  were:  uncovering  the  fragment  of  divinity,  and  illuminat?ing  shard  of  the  gods  to  exist  the  perfect  moment  that  vanishes  in  the  blink  of  an  eye  but  lasts  forever,  and  collecting  the  stars  left  by  the  giants.
　　A  literal  translation  was  not  a  problem.  It  was  the  meaning  be?hind  the  words  that  eluded  her.  Without  the  proper  cultural  refer?ences,  this  was  all  gibberish.
　　It  had  to  mean  something  to  someone,  however.  Perhaps  she  could  use  part  of  the  dissected  Covenant  AI  to  help.  It  had  spo?ken  to  her,  so  it  was  partially  fluent  with  human  idioms.  She  might  be  able  to  reverse-engineer  its  translation  software.
　　Cortana  isolated  the  AI  code  and  began  the  retrieval-and-unpacking  process.  This  would  take  time;  she'd  compressed  the  code,  and  the  reconstitution  process  would  require  a  good  deal  of  her  reduced  processing  power.
　　While  she  waited,  she  examined  the  Covenant  reactors.  They  used  a  pinched  magnetic  field  to  heat  the  tritium  plasma.  It  was  surprisingly  primitive.  Without  better  hardware,  though,  there  was  little  she  could  do  to  improve  their  effectiveness.