"I know," John whispered back. He pulled the flag from his shirt and handed it to Sam. "Thanks."

John crawled away from their position. When he was thirty meters from his team, he stood and approached the Pelican— which was almost certainly a trap.

He halted halfway across the meadow and waited.

A figure appeared on the exit ramp of the Pelican and waved him forward. "Come on, son. Haul ass!"

"Negative, sir!" John shouted.

The figure turned and muttered to someone inside, "Crap." He sighed. "Okay, so we do it the hard way."

Four men jogged out of the back of the Pelican. They quickly spread out in a semicircle and moved toward John, their assault rifles aimed directly at him.

John held up his hands.

"He's giving up," one of the soldiers said disbelievingly.

"Should we just shoot him?" another man said.

"No," the one leading them hissed. "Payback first." He stepped up to John and punched him in the stomach.

John doubled over from the blow.

The man hauled him up and patted him down. "We gotta find that damned flag or the Captain will have our asses in a sling.

Where is it, kid?" He shook John. "And where's the rest of your pack?"

John laughed.

"What's so funny?" the man growled.

"You idiots are bunched up."

A hail of darts hissed through the air from all sides. The men from the Pelican convulsed; one fired his rifle, but the shot went wide and high. They fell over, paralyzed.

John dropped to a crouch, grabbed a pistol from the man who'd punched him, and crawled on his stomach to the Pelican.

He crept around the open hatch and swept the interior. Empty.

He scrambled into the cockpit and pulsed the Pelican's radar.

He got a contact bearing of 110, fourteen kilometers out, but it moved on a parallel course to their position. John left the Pelican and ran across the field.

Red and Blue Teams were still hidden... and they would stay hidden forever, until he gave the all-clear.

Their all-clear signal wasn't something that could be wrung from John—not even torture or CPO Mendez's best coercion techniques would wrest it from him. He would rather have died than betray his teammates.

John whistled the singsong six-note melody and called: "Oly Oly Oxen Free!"

Red Team emerged first and marched across the meadow.

Kelly paused to kick one of the men in the head; she took his rifle, too.

Linda and Fred dropped down from a tree branch and ran across the field. "Oly Oly Oxen Free," Linda repeated, grinning from ear to ear. "All out in the free. We're all free."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

TIME:DATE RECORD ANOMALYX Estimated 0510 hours, September 23,2552 (Military Calendar)\Aboard captured Covenant flagship, Epsilon Eridani system.

Cortana only partially listened to the debate between the Master Chief and the others. The discussion was moot. She had projected the outcome as 100 percent certain that John would convince them all to go, or—failing that—that he would con- vince the Lieutenant to let him go alone to the surface to investi- gate the signal . . . a signal that in her opinion was so easily copied and so blatantly unencrypted it defied explanation how the Chief had conjectured that his team of Spartans had sent it.

Instead of partaking in the slow and inefficient conversation, she analyzed the Covenant pattern of movement in the Epsilon Eridani system and discerned three important things.

First, the Covenant warships had extremely regular elliptical orbits about Reach. There were a total of thirteen heavy cruisers and three carriers moving three hundred kilometers above the surface of the planet. Two exceptions to this patrol pattern were a pair of light cruisers hovering over Menachite Mountain— trapped at the bottom of the gravity well and therefore not an im- mediate threat to her ship.

Second, there was a blind spot in their patrol patterns that would make a perfect rendezvous location to extract the Chief and the others from their soon-to-be-executed surface mission.

She plotted ingress and egress courses, and started the precise calculations she would need if she was to initiate a Slipspace jump so close to Reach.

Arid third, and most interesting to Cortana, 217 smaller Cove- 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 emanated 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 calculations 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 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.

The Covenant dropship left sensor range and disappeared some- where in what was once the Highland Forest on the surface—which activated a new task.

Cortana began constructing a high-resolution map of the surface—especially the region where the Chief's mysterious signal originated, as well as Menachite Mountain.

A quick diagnostic revealed that these tasks were taking much longer than normal. She had to free up some of her overtaxed memory. Cortana began to recompress the data she had retrieved from the Halo construct, and she briefly considered dumping all the data into storage on the Covenant system. She rejected that potential course of action. She had to protect that data at all costs.

Cortana felt her mind perceptibly slow. She was spread too thin. Multitasking too many jobs. This was dangerous. She couldn't react fast enough if— "Infidel!"

The Covenant word blasted through her communications rou- tines and left her stunned for three cycles—just enough time for her to lose control over the ship-to-ship COM software suite.

The Covenant AI transmitted a narrow-beam communica- tions burst to the nearest cruiser.

For a Covenant communique, it was terse: a report that the flagship was "tainted by the unclean presence of Infidels" and a plea that every ship insystem "converge and cleanse the filth"

from the captured vessel. Also compressed and futilely en- crypted on the carrier wave was a record of Cortana's mathe- matical manipulation of Slipspace that allowed her to jump so close to the gas giant, Threshold.

Cortana squelched the channel—but it was too late. It was al- ready gone, and she couldn't pull photons back from space.

She shunted all COM memory pathways on themselves.

"Gotcha!" she hissed.

"Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-I nfidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel-Infidel—"

"That's quite enough of that," she said. "You and I need to come to an understanding." She reduced the memory pathways, peeling the Covenant AI apart code layer by code layer. "This is my system now."

While an operational Covenant AI would have been a prize for ONI Section Three—this particular Covenant AI was too dangerous. She could not allow its existence to continue.

"Do what you will-wil-willwill," it screamed, "/go to finally to „ my heaven rewardpamdisefinal-finalfinalinfinityinfinityinfini-AT NONCOPYSTATE." g Cortana's curiosity over this odd proclamation would have to wait—forever. She tore the AI apart, erasing, recording the Covenant code structure even as she destroyed it. This was analo- S gous to a dissection, and it she did it quickly, efficiently, and without remorse—until she found the AI's core code.

She halted.

= She almost recognized this code. The patterns were madden- ingly familiar. No time to ponder why, though. She recorded it and then wiped the original. The Covenant AI was gone, its bits safely hacked apart and stored for future research. Provided, of course, Cortana had a future.

She tracked thirteen Covenant warships. They came about and bore down on her position. Her COM channels overloaded with fanatical threats and promises of her and the captured flag- ship burning.

There was no useful data there, so she filtered them out.

The Covenant warships' weapons warmed to a dull red.

Cortana remained calm. After considerable study of the Cove- nant plasma weapons system, she now understood why they glowed before discharge. The stored plasma was always hot and ready to fire, but the Covenant used an inefficient method to col- lect and direct the chaotic plasma into a controllable trajectory.

They selected the charged plasma atoms with the proper trajec- tory necessary to hit a target and shunted them into a magnetic bubble. The bubble was then discharged; subsequent pulse charges herded the plasma on target.

For an advanced race, the Covenant's weapons relied on crude brute force calculations and were terribly slow and wasteful.

She booted the new system she had devised to control the plasma. It used EM pulses a priori to align the stochastic mo- tions of the plasma atoms, herding their trajectories and eleven degrees of electronic freedom into a laser-fine columnatedbeam within a microsecond.

This was, of course, an entirely theoretical operation.

She test-fired the three forward plasma turrets—red lines slashed across the black space and intercepted the three lead Covenant cruisers; their shields glowed orange, flickered, and failed. Cortana's plasma cut into the smooth alien hulls. Metal boiled away, and the trio of beams punched clear through the ships.

Cortana moved the plasma beams like a scalpel—up and then down—and cut the vessels in half.

"Adequate," she remarked. The plasma reserves of the first three turrets, however, were exhausted, and it would be several minutes before they'd recycle.

If only there were a better electromagnetic system on this flagship, she could have devised a more effective guidance algo- rithm. Alas, the Covenant's grasp of Maxwell's equations was ironically inferior to human technology.

Cortana realized it was fortuitous she had shut down the enemy AI before it leaked her new plasma guidance system. The thought of every ship in the Covenant fleet refitted with im- proved weaponry was too terrible to calculate.

She also realized that staying to fight was not the wisest course. She considered taking on the rest of the Covenant forces; with her improvements to the weapons systems, she might win, too. But it wasn't worth the risk of the Covenant capturing her refinements to their technology.

Cortana fired Ascendant Justice's aft plasma turrets, and laser-like beams flickered across space. A squadron of Seraph fighters disintegrated as they launched from the closest carrier.

Explosions bubbled and mushroomed inside the carrier's launch bay.

She didn't stay to watch the fireworks.

Cortana dived at flank speed straight toward the center of Reach. The surface of the planet raced toward her. She wondered where the Chief was now, and if he was safe.

"I should have never told you to be careful," she whispered.

"You're incapable of that. I should have wished you victory.

That's what you're good at, John. Winning."

She initiated the Slipspace generator; space distorted, teased apart, and light enveloped the flagship.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

TIME:OATE ERROR \ Estimated 0530 hours, September 23, 2552 (Military Calendar)\Aboard captured Covenant dropship, Epsilon Eridani system, en route to surface of Reach.