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208 HALO: FIRST STRIKE
undercarriage were apparently functional. Even better: The ship's topside hardpoints were intact.
Cortana let a flicker of power pulse through Ascendant Jus?tice's engines, and she slowly drifted toward the Gettysburg.
She paused to listen to the Covenant traffic insystem. There was eight times the chatter there had been before, with many ref?erences to the "Infidels" on the planet and the "holy light" that was now in jeopardy. Good. That meant the Master Chief was doing what he did best: causing mayhem among the enemy. And more importantly, the presence of Ascendant Justice floating among the hundreds of dead ships had not been detected.
When she was within a kilometer of the Gettysburg, she cut her engines. With delicate puffs from the thrusters she edged closer and rolled Ascendant Justice until its top side was parallel with the top side of the Gettysburg.
She pinged the Gettysburg's telemetry system and received a faint handshake reply. Cortana gave the override code—quickly accepted—and entered the Gettysburg's NAV computer.
There was no other computer intelligence on board. The cap?tain of the Gettysburg had flatlined the NAV system and the AI as per the Cole Protocol. Cortana extended her presence through the empty systems. The Gettysburg was a wreck; all thrusters offline. It wouldn't be moving on its own power ever again, but its heart still beat. The ship's fusion reactor operated at 67 per?cent capacity. Perfect.
Ascendant Justice gently touched down on the Gettysburg— probably the first time in the history of the universe that human and Covenant ships had made contact with nonlethal intentions.
All modern UNSC ships had been designed with hardpoints on their dorsal and ventral sides in the event that they were too crippled to move under their own power. In theory, another UNSC ship could dock, lock systems, and carry the wounded ship away.
The Covenant flagship had a similar series of hardpoints on its top side where ships too large to fit in its launch bay could dock.
The two systems, however, were incompatible.
Cortana fixed that. She activated the seven service drones on the Gettysburg, and instructed the Covenant Engineers
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within the outer hull of Ascendant Justice to secure the docking points mating the two ships and adapt their power uplinks.
The reason for this salvage operation, her pinpoint jump into the debris field, and the hybrid docking... it was all for power.
Ascendant Justice's cover had been blown; the Covenant knew that their flagship was human-controlled. That made their original plan of rendezvousing in orbit around Reach impossi?ble. She could have jumped to that location and picked up the Chief, but then they would be stranded there while the Slipspace capacitors slowly recharged—and in the meantime they would be boxed in and obliterated by the Covenant armada.
So she had to change tactics; she'd jump into the thick of a hostile and wary Covenant force, grab the Chief, and just as quickly jump out of the system. For that she'd need power to in?stantly recharge the Slipspace capacitors—the kind of power only two ships could produce.