by Eric Nylund
The Master Chief ducked, primed a grenade, and hurled it at the closest of the remaining automated weapons. The grenade sailed through the air—then detonated just above the autogun.
“Chain-gun destroyed,” Cortana reported.
Two more grenades and the automated guns were out of commission. He noted that his shields had dropped by a quarter. He watched the status bar refill. He hadn’t even known he had taken hits. That was sloppy.
“You seem to have the situation under control,” Cortana said, “I’m going to spend a few cycles and check something out.”
“Permission granted,” he said.
“I didn’t ask, Master Chief,” she replied.
The cool liquid presence in his mind withdrew. The Master Chief felt empty somehow.
He ran through the razor fields, snapping through steel wire as if it were rotten string.
Cortana’s coolness once again flooded his thoughts.
“I just accessed SATCOM,” she said. “I’m using one of their satellites so I can get a better look at what’s happening down here. There’s a SkyHawk jump jet from Fairchild Field inbound.”
He stopped. The automatic cannons were one thing—could the armor withstand against air power like that? The SkyHawk had a quartet of 50mm cannons that made the chain-guns look like peashooters. They also had Scorpion missiles—designed to take out tanks.
Answer: he couldn’t do a thing against it.
The Master Chief ran. He had to find cover. He sprinted to the next section of the course: the Pillars of Loki.
It was a forest of ten-meter-tall poles spaced at random intervals. Typically, the poles had booby traps strung on, under, and between them—stun grades, sharpened sticks... anything the instructors could dream up. The idea was to teach recruits to move slowly and keep their eyes open.
The Master Chief had no time to search for the traps.
He climbed up the first pole and balanced on top. He leaped to the next pole, teetered, regained his balance—then jumped to the next. His reflexes had to be perfect; he was landing a half ton of man and armor on a wooden pole ten centimeters in diameter.
“Motion tracking is picking up an incoming target at extreme range,” Cortana warned. “Velocity profile matches the SkyHawk, Chief.”
He turned—almost lost his balance and had to shift back and forth to keep from falling. There was a dot on the horizon, and the faint rumble of thunder.
In the blink of an eye, the dot had wings and the Master Chief’s thermal sensors picked up a plume of jetwash. In seconds, the SkyHawk closed—then opened fire with its 50mm cannons.
He jumped.
The wooden poles splintered into pulp. They were mowed down like so many blades of grass.
The Master Chief rolled, ducked, and flattened himself on the earth. He caught a smattering of rounds and his shield bar drooped to half. Those rounds would have penetrated his old suit instantly.
Cortana said, “I calculate we have eleven seconds before the SkyHawk can execute a maximum gee turn and make another pass.”
The Master Chief got up and ran through the shattered remains of the poles. Napalm and sonic grenades popped around him, but he moved so fast he left the worst of the damage in his wake.
“They won’t use their cannons next time,” he said. “They didn’t take us out—they’ll try the missiles.”
“Perhaps,” Cortana suggested, “we should leave the course. Find better cover.”
“No,” he said. “We’re going to win... by their rules.”
The last leg of the course was a sprint across an open field. In the distance, the Master Chief saw the bell on a tripod.
He glanced over his shoulder.
The SkyHawk was back and starting its run straight toward him.
Even with his augmented speed, even with the MJOLNIR armor—he’d never make it to the bell in time. He’d never make it alive.
He turned to face the incoming jet.
“I’ll need your help, Cortana,” he said.
“Anything,” she whispered. The Master Chief heard nervousness in the AI’s voice.
“Calculate the inbound velocity of a Scorpion missile. Factor in my reaction time and the jet’s inbound speed and distance at launch, and tell me the instant I need to move to sidestep and deflect it with my left arm.”
Cortana paused a heartbeat. “Calculation done. You did say ‘deflect’?”
“Scorpion missiles have motion-tracking sensors and proximity detonators. I can’t outrun it. And it won’t miss. That leaves us very few options.”
The SkyHawk dove.
“Get ready,” Cortana said. “I hope you know what you’re doing.”
“Me, too.”
Smoke appeared from the jet’s left wingtip and fire and exhaust erupted as a missile streaked toward him.
The Master Chief saw the missile’s track back and forth, zeroing in on his coordinates. A shrill tone in his helmet warbled—the missile had a guidance lock on him. He chinned a control and the sound died out. The missile was fast. Faster than he was ten times over.
“Now!” Cortana said.
They moved together. He shifted his muscles and the MJOLNIR—augmented by his link to Cortana—moved faster than he’d ever moved before. His leg tensed and pushed him aside; his left arm came up and crossed his chest.
The head of the missile was the only thing he saw. The air grew still and thickened.
He continued to move his hand, palm open in a slapping motion—as fast as he could will his flesh to accelerate.
The tip of the Scorpion missile passed a centimeter from his head.
He reached out—fingertips brushed the metal casing—
—and slapped it aside.
The SkyHawk jet screamed over his head.
The Scorpion missile detonated.
Pressure slammed though his body. The Master Chief flew six meters, spinning end over end, and landed flat on his back.
He blinked, and saw nothing but blackness. Was he dead? Had he lost?
The shield status bar in his heads-up display pulsed weakly. It was completely drained—then it blinked red and slowly started to refill. Blood was spattered across the inside of his helmet and he tasted copper.
He stood, his muscles screaming in protest.
“Run!” Cortana said. “Before they come back for a look.”
The Master Chief got up and ran. As he passed the spot where he had stood to face down the missile, he saw a two-meter-deep crater.
He could feel his Achilles tendon tear, but he didn’t slow. He crossed the half-kilometer stretch in seventeen seconds flat and skidded to halt.
The Master Chief grabbed the bell’s cord and rang it three times. The pure tone was the most glorious sound he had ever heard.
Over the COM channel Dr. Halsey’s voice broke: “Test concluded. Call off your men, Colonel Ackerson! We’ve won. Well done, Master Chief. Magnificent! Stay there; I’m sending out a recovery team.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he replied, panting.
The Master Chief scanned the sky for the SkyHawk—nothing. It had gone. He knelt and let blood drip from his nose and mouth. He looked down at the bell—and laughed.
He knew that stainless-steel dented shape. It was the same one he had rung that first day of boot. The day Chief Mendez had taught him about teamwork.
“Thank you, Cortana,” he finally said. “I couldn’t have done it without you.”
“You’re welcome, Master Chief,” she replied. Then, her voice full of mischief, she added: “And no, you couldn’t have done it without me.”
Today he had learned about a new kind of teamwork with Cortana. Dr. Halsey had given him a great gift. She had given him a weapon with which to destroy the Covenant.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
0400 Hours, August 30, 2552 (Military Calendar)
UNSC Pillar of Autumn, in orbit around Epsilon Eridani System, Reach Military Complex
Cortana never rested. Although based a
pproximately on a human mind, AIs had no need to sleep or dream. Dr. Halsey had thought she could keep Cortana occupied by checking the systems of the Pillar of Autumn while she attended to her other secret projects.
Her assumption was incorrect.
While Cortana was intrigued with the unique design and workings of the ship—its preparation barely occupied a fraction of her processing power.
She watched with the Pillar of Autumn’s camera as Captain Keyes approached the ship in a shuttle pod. Lieutenant Hikowa left to greet him in the docking bay.
From C deck, Captain Keyes spoke over the intercom: “Cortana? Can we have power to move the ship? I’d like to get under way.”
She calculated the remaining reactor burn-in time and made an adjustment to run it hotter. “The engines’ final shakedown is in theta cycle,” Cortana replied. “Operating well within normal parameters. Diverting thirty percent power to engines; aye, sir.”
“And the other systems’ status?” Captain Keyes asked.
“Weapons-system check initiated. Navigational nodes functioning. Continuing systemwide shakedown and triple checks, Captain.”
“Very good,” he said. “Apprise me if there are any anomalies.”
“Aye, Captain,” she replied.
The COM channel snapped off.
She continued her checks on the Pillar of Autumn as ordered. There were, however, more important things to consider; namely, a little reconnaissance into ONI databases... and a little revenge.
She dedicated the balance of her run time toward probing the SATCOM system around REACH for entry points. There. A ping in the satellite network coordination signal. She broadcast a resonant carrier wave at that signal and piggybacked into the system.
First things first. She had two loose ends to take care of.
While she and the Master Chief had been on the obstacle course, she had commandeered SATCOM observation beacon 419 and rotated it to view them from orbit.
She reentered the back door she had left open in the system, and rewrote the satellite’s guidance thruster subroutine. If the system was analyzed later, it would be determined that this error had altered it to a random orientation rather than a planned position.
She withdrew, but left her back door intact. This trick might come in handy again.
The other loose end that required her attentions was Colonel Ackerson—the man who had tried to erase her and the Master Chief.
Cortana reread Dr. Halsey’s recommended test specifications for the MJOLNIR system on the obstacle course. She had suggested live rounds, yes. But never a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, chain-guns, Lotus mines... and certainly not an air strike.
That was the Colonel’s doing. He was an equation that needed to be balanced. What Dr. Halsey might have called “payback.”
She linked to the UNSC personnel and planning database on Reach. The ONI AI there, Beowulf, knew her... and knew not to let her in. Beowulf was thorough, methodical, and paranoid; in her own way, Cortana couldn’t help but like him. But compared with her code-cracking skills, he might as well have been an accounting program.
Cortana sent a rapid series of queries into the network node that processed housing transfer requests. A normally quiet node—she overloaded it with a billion different pings per minute.
The network attempted to recover and reconfigure, causing all nodes to lag, including node seventeen—personnel records. She stepped in and inserted a spike wedge, a subroutine that looked like a normal incoming signal, but bounced any handshake protocol.
She slipped in.
The Colonel’s CSV was impressive. He had survived three battles with the Covenant. Early in the war, he received a promotion and volunteered for a dozen black ops. For the last few years, however, his efforts had focused on political maneuvers rather than battlefield tactics. He had filed several requests for increased funding for his Special Warfare projects.
No wonder he wanted the Master Chief gone. The Spartan IIs and MJOLNIR were his direct competition. Worse, they were succeeding where he failed.
At best, Ackerson’s actions were treason. But Cortana wasn’t about to reveal all this to the ONI oversight committee. Despite the Colonel’s methods, the UNSC still needed him—and his SpecWar specialists—in the war.
Justice, however, would still be meted out.
From the ONI database, she masqueraded as a routine credit check and entered the Colonel’s bank account—to which she wired a substantial amount to a brothel on Gilgamesh. She made sure the bank queries sent to confirm the transaction were copied to his home immediately. Colonel Ackerson was a married man... and his wife should be there to receive them.
She cut into his personal E-mail and sent a carefully crafted message—requesting reassignment to a forward area—to personnel. Finally, she inserted a “ghost” record, an electronic footprint that identified the source of the alterations: Ackerson’s personal-computer pad.
By the time Ackerson was done untangling all of that, he’d be reassigned to field duty... and get back to fighting the Covenant where he belonged.
With all loose ends neatly tied up, Cortana rechecked the Pillar of Autumn’s reactor; the shakedown was proceeding nicely. She tweaked the magnetic-field strength, and part of her watched the output from the engines for fluctuations. She inspected all weapons systems three times, and then went back to her own personal research.
She considered how well the Master Chief had performed this morning on the obstacle course. He was more than Cortana could have hoped for. The Master Chief was much more than Dr. Halsey or the press releases had indicated.
He was intelligent... not fearless, but as close to it as any human she had encountered. His reaction time under stress was one-sixth the standard human norm. More than that, however, Cortana had sensed that he had a certain—she searched her lexicon for the proper word—nobility. He placed his mission and his duty and honor above his personal safety.
She reexamined his Career Service Vitae. He had fought in 207 ground engagements against the Covenant, and been awarded every major service medal except the Prisoner of War Medallion.
There were holes in his CSV, though. The standard black-out sections courtesy of ONI, of course... but most curious, all data before he entered active duty had been expunged.
Cortana wasn’t about to let a mere erasure stop her. She traced where the order to erase that data had originated. Section Three. Dr. Halsey’s group. Curious.
She followed the order pathway—crashed into layers of counter code. The code started a trace on her signal.
She blocked it—and it restarted a trace of the origin of her block.
This was a very well-crafted piece of counterintrusion software, far superior to the normal ONI slugcode. If nothing else, Cortana liked a challenge. She withdrew from the database and looked for an unguarded way into ONI Section Three files.
Cortana listened to the hum of coded traffic along the surface of ONI’s secure network. There was an unusual amount of packets today: queries and encrypted messages from ONI operatives. She peered into them and unraveled their secrets as they passed her. There were orders for ship movements and operatives outbound from Reach. This must be the new directive to send scouts into the periphery systems and find the Covenant. She saw several ships docked in Reach’s space docks—ONI stealth jobs made to look like private yachts. They had cute, innocuous names: the Applebee, Circumference, and the Lark.
She spotted something she could use: Dr. Halsey had just entered her laboratory. She was at checkpoint three. The doctor waited as her voice and retina patterns were being scanned.
Cortana intercepted and killed the signal. The verification system reset.
“Please rescan retina, Dr. Halsey,” the system requested, “and repeat today’s code phrase in a normal voice.”
Before Dr. Halsey could do this, Cortana sent her own files of Dr. Halsey’s retina and voice scans. She had long ago copied them and occasionally they came in handy.
Cortana, however, was a lightning strike in the system. She entered, searched, and found what she wanted. Every piece of data on SPARTAN 117 was copied to her personal directory within seventy milliseconds.
She withdrew from the ONI database, routing all traces of her queries back to her Ackerson “ghost.”
She closed all connections and returned to the Pillar of Autumn. One quick check of the reactor—yes, operating within normal parameters—and she sent a complete report to Lieutenant Hall on the bridge.
Cortana examined the Master Chief’s complete CSV. She scanned backward through time: his performance data on the obstacle course, and the debriefing he had given at ONI headquarters.
She paused and pondered the signal the Covenant had sent from Sigma Octanus IV. Intrigued, she tried to translate the sequence. The symbols looked tantalizingly familiar. Every algorithm and variation of the standard translation software she attempted, however, failed. Puzzled, she set it aside to examine later.
She continued, absorbing the data from the Master Chief’s files. She learned of the augmentations he and the other Spartans were made to endure; the brutal indoctrination and training they had received; and how he had been abducted at the age of six, and a flash clone used to replace him in an ONI black op.
All of it had been authorized by Dr. Halsey.
Cortana paused for a full three processor cycles churning this new data through her ethics subroutines... not comprehending. How could Dr. Halsey, who was so concerned for her Spartans, have done this to them?
Of course—because it was necessary. There was no other way to preserve the UNSC against rebellion and Covenant forces.
Was Dr. Halsey a monster? Or just doing what had to be done to protect humanity? Perhaps a little of both.
Cortana erased her stolen files. No matter. Whatever the Master Chief had been through in the past... it was done. He was in Cortana’s care now. She would do everything in her power—short of compromising their mission—to make sure nothing ever happened to him again.