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Dr Halsey straightened her gray wool sliirt, sloves and apron to protect her fro emitted from the acceleration matrix Around her lay the disassembled panels and radiation shields of the ship's Shaw-Fujikawa translight engines
She delicately guided the spork she had confiscated frole of electronics She slipped the utensil's edge into the slot of the tiny screw on the supercooled superconducting net She rechecked the calculations in her head Two millimeters, three turns, should do it
Dr Halsey twisted and loosened the screw The rainbo gushing from the matrix intensified, and she blinked tears from her eyes Sparks danced off the lanced through the propped-open door to the bridge The engineering display showed a 32 percent juh
She replaced the Shaw-Fujikawa core access panels and sluo when Shaw-Fujikawa drives had first been installed in spacecraft like this one, technicians had had to perforned the acceleration coils drifted out of phase when they transitioned into Slipstream space, where the laws of physics only occasionally worked as expected No computer controls were used; electronics always malfunctioned close to the core
Of course, many of those technicians had died or hadout of Slipspace and powering down the Chiroptera- class vessel to make the adjustment It would have been safer, but that first activation of the Shaw-Fujikawa engine had almost resulted in a coil overload She didn't know if the little ship had another jump left in her
She toweled the perspiration off her face and then checked her file She'd live, at least, for the next few moments
She pushed off the bulkhead and free-floated onto the bridge
The Beatrice's coned, by its former owner, rebel Governor Jacob Jiles, for comfort rather than efficiency Every surface save the displays was curved and padded with creae and temperature controls--even a ridiculous feature: a cup holder
Dr Halsey checked on Kelly She had strapped Kelly into the firstaway A line ran into an input port on the interior elbow joint of her MJOLNIR arenerate the burns that covered 72 percent of her body… and enough nar-colytive sedatives to keep her unconscious until she was needed
"I'm sorry, you would have never come on your own," she said "Spartans are attracted to suicide missions like moths to flames But this is much more important than any military solution"
Dr Halsey pushed away and drifted to the Beatrice's computer control Her laptop was attached to the multiinterface port, and the infiltration protocols had al the ship's pried a sandwich of memory crystal and processor boosters into her laptop
These components she had appropriated froutted AI core
She then withdrew a pea-shaped chip froerly set the chip into her laptop's auxiliary reader port A tiny spark lit and lifted off her coraphic projector
"Good afternoon, Jerrod"
"Good afternoon, Dr Halsey," the spark replied in a for to "
"There have been a few temporal anomalies since we last spoke," she said
"Indeed? I look forward to the explanation, ma'am"
"So do I," she murmured
After an alien artifact and combat in warped Slipstream space had distorted space-time
Dr Halsey wasn't so sure precisely what tied in Quantum paradoxes that once seem a quaint mental exercise were now a part of her reality
"How may I be of service?" Jerrod asked
Dr Halsey sht of Jerrod as a toy, it was a fully functionala budding smart AI would last in a constrained processor-memory matrix The theoreticians at Sydney's Synthetic Intellect Institute calculated its life span to be a matter of days Jerrod, however, had fooled the experts at the "Double SI" It had rapidly grown but then stabilized within its pea-sized cell of memory-processor crystal
Jerrod would never be a tenth as brilliant as a real "smart" AI like Cortana, nor even as smart as a traditional "dumb" AI of unlimited proportions But he had a spark of creativity and spunk, and despite the stuffy butler persona he had adopted, she liked him
Jerrod had one other feature uniquely suited for Dr Halsey's purposes: portability Other AIs required an institute, a starship, or at the very least a full set of MJOLNIR arnostics on the Beatrice's systems, please," Dr Halsey said "Then correlate the data slice downloaded from Cortana's memory core and prepare for analysis Execute a database search on stellar coordinates input into the NAV systein"
"Stand by, …"
"And a little Debussy, please," she said "Les Sons et les par-fuht shrank to a pinpoint of brilliance as he pushed his processing abilities
After five seconds, e's speakers
"Done," Jerrod replied, sounding almost out of breath
"Display Cortana's ti"
Dr Halsey had appropriated Cortana's truncatedShe had accessed and erased a portion of the AI's eant Johnson At the tiical to download a thuh
Cortana's voice narrated a slideshow of ies Dr Halsey saw John and the crew of the Pillar of Autu artifact, and then witnessed the horrific Flood as it infested human and alien bodies She closed her eyes as the assimilated Captain Keyes was destroyed
"Rest easy, old friend," she whispered
"Limit references to Forerunner entries alone," she told Jerrod
Dr Halsey listened to Cortana and the Forerunner artificial intelligence, Guilty Spark, spar… until they revealed the true purpose of the Halo construct: the exteralaxy "No wonder the Covenant are so interested in these artifacts," she said
"Ma'a, Jerrod"
She now also understood Colonel Ackerson's interest
Dr Halsey had taken the liberty of rifling Colonel Ackerson's top-secret files on Reach before the Covenant destroyed the facility In a file labeled "King Under the Mountain" there were pieced-together data froma Octanus System, and discovered coordinates that had pointed to the alien ruins on Reach under Castle Base
Was this an ary?
The last bread cru trail was an encrypted folder in Ackerson's secret files, the one labeled "S-III"
In it were extensive medical records on her SPARTAN-IIs As if Ackerson were studying the alphanu that represented old celestial coordinates
She typed in the string
"Display all data on stellar objects at these coordinates"
"This coordinate system is antiquated, Doctor," Jerrod said "Not used since extrasolar manned space exploration" He paused "It falls outside UNSC-controlled space"