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It was dead
The Engineer snaked a tentacle around the weapon and tugged it away fro open The tip of one of its tentacles split into a hun- dred needle-fine cilia and swept over the inner workings A rip first, to the Master Chief
The needier hulowed a cool purple
"Thanks," he whispered
The Engineer chirped
The Master Chief edged around the brace He waited, needier held tightly in his hand, and became completely still He had all the time in the world, he told himself No need to rush Let the enemy come to you All the ti to spot its enemy; it took a blind shot down the corridor and missed
The Master Chief remained where he was, raised the needier, and fired A flurry of crystal shards propelled down the passage and impaled the Grunt It toppled backward, and the shards detonated
The Master Chief waited and listened There was nothing ex- cept the gentle thru of the reactor
He moved down the corridor, weapon held before him as he cleared the roo of air that would alert hiineer floated behind hi It hissed and chittered as it rapidly manipulated a s the internal circuit pathways
"Cortana," he said "I've gotten to the coupling The Engineer appears to knohat it's doing You should have power for the Slipspace generator in a moment"
"It's too late," Cortana told him
CHAPTER NINE
1827 hours, September 22,2552 (Military Calendar) \ Aboard unidentified Covenant flagship, uncharted systeh Threshold's churning atmo- sphere Cortana could not hold the ship's attitude It wobbled and blasted a fiery scar through the clouds, slowly rolling to port on its central axis
Without shields, the flagship's hull continued to heat to seven- teen hundred degrees Celsius The nose glowed a dark red, which spread into an a the midsection and be- came a white-hot plume at the ship's tail Conduits and feathery antenna arrays melted, separated, and left a trail ofthe frame as the overpressure shed off the boaves The friction from the planet's dense atmosphere would shred the ship in a otten to the coupling
The Engineer appears to knohat it's doing You should have power for the Slipspace generator in a moment"
"It's too late," Cortana told hiravitational pull Even at full poe can't break our degrading orbit And we can't tunnel into Slip-space, either"
The inco Covenant fire had forced them deeper into the ate of what had been safe--it was that, or be engulfed in plasma But she had saved them from one deathonly to delay that fate by a scant minute
She recoravita- tional attractions Even if she overloaded the reactors to critical- spiral The nuineer enerator was functional again-- for all the good it did the gravitational fields Gravity distorted the superfine pattern of quantuh which Cortana had to coy was demonstrably superior, but she doubted that the enemy had ever attempted a Slipspace entry this close to a planet
Cortana toyed with the idea of trying anyway--pulse the Slip-space generators and et a lucky quadrillion-to-one shot and locate the correct vector through the tangle of gravity-warped filaments She rejected the possibility; at their current velocity, any attempt to maneuver the ship would send it into a chaotic tu," the Chief said to her with aer, Chief"
She booted the Covenant Slipspace generators; the software streah her consciousness
The UNSC Shaw-Fujikawa Slipspace generators ripped a hole in nory used a different approach Sensors ca webs of quantu," she whispered
The Covenant could pick a path through the subatoed the fields just enough to allow their ships to pass seay Their resolution of the reality of space-tiy It was as if she had been blind before, had never seen the universe around her It was beautiful
This explained how the Covenant could make jumps with such accuracy They could literally plot a course with an error no larger than an atom's diameter
"Status, Cortana?" the Master Chief asked
"Stand by," she said, annoyed at the distraction
At this resolution Cortana could discern every ripple in space caused by Threshold's gravity, the other planets in this solar sys- te of space caused by the mass of this ship Could she compensate for those distortions?
Pressure sensors detected hull breaches on seventeen outer decks Cortana ignored them She shut down all peripheral sys- tems and concentrated on the task at hand It was their only way out of this h
She concentrated on interpolating the fluctuating space She generated ravitational distortions
Energy surged froenerator matrices A path parted directly before the and spinning
Threshold's ath the hole--sucked into the vacuum of the alternate di the space around the ship, and riskedmicroscopic course correc- tions tothe length of the hull as the nose of the flagship departed norh, surrounded by whirling stored her sensors: The hull teistered a series of explosive decoed from her cocoon of concentration and im- mediately sensed the electronic presence of the other near her,her Slipspace calculations It was practically on top ofher
"Heresy!" it hissed and then withdrew and vanished
Cortana pulsed a syste to track the Covenant AI No luck
"Sneaky little bastard," she broadcast throughout the system
"Come back here"
Had it seen what she had done? Had it understood what she'd just accomplished? And if so, why declare it a "heresy"?
True, ht stochastic variables in eleven-dimensional space-time was not child's play but it was possible that the other AI would be able to follow her calculations