It was dead.
The Engineer snaked a tentacle around the weapon and tugged it away from John's grasp. It cracked the case and peeled the housing open. The tip of one of its tentacles split into a hun- dred needle-fine cilia and swept over the inner workings. A mo- ment later it reassembled the weapon and handed it, grip first, to the Master Chief.
The needier hummed with energy, and the glassine quills the weapon fired glowed 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 time— A Grunt poked its nose over a crate, trying 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 thrumming of the reactor.
He moved down the corridor, weapon held before him as he cleared the room. He was careful to watch for the faint rippling of air that would alert him to the presence of camouflaged Elites.
Nothing.
The Engineer floated behind him, and then accelerated toward the disengaged power coupling. It hissed and chittered as it rapidly manipulated a small square block of optical crystal, un- scrambling the internal circuit pathways.
"Cortana," he said. "I've gotten to the coupling. The Engineer appears to know what 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 system, Halo debris field.
The flagship plunged through 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 amber smear along 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 of molten metal in an explosive wake. Shocks rippled along the frame as the overpressure shed off the bow in waves. The friction from the planet's dense atmosphere would shred the ship in a matter of seconds.
"Cortana," the Master Chief said. "I've gotten to the coupling.
The Engineer appears to know what it's doing. You should have power for the Slipspace generator in a moment."
"It's too late," Cortana told him. "We are now too low to escape Threshold's gravitational pull. Even at full power we can't break our degrading orbit. And we can't tunnel into Slip-space, either."
The incoming Covenant fire had forced them deeper into the atmosphere. She had pushed their trajectory to the edge of what had been safe—it was that, or be engulfed in plasma. But she had saved them from one death ... only to delay that fate by a scant minute.
She recomputed the numbers, thrust and velocity and gravita- tional attractions. Even if she overloaded the reactors to critical-meltdown levels, they were still stuck in an ever-descending spiral. The numbers didn't lie.
The Master Chief's Engineer must have repaired the power coupling, because the Slipspace generator was functional again— for all the good it did them.
To enter Slipspace a ship had to be well away from strong gravitational fields. Gravity distorted the superfine pattern of quantum filaments through which Cortana had to compute a path. Covenant Slipspace technology 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 maybe she'd get 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 tumble from which they'd never recover.
"Try something," the Chief said to her with amazing calm.
"Try anything."
Cortana sighed. "Roger, Chief."
She booted the Covenant Slipspace generators; the software streamed through her consciousness.
The UNSC Shaw-Fujikawa Slipspace generators ripped a hole in normal space by brute force. But the Covenant tech- nology used a different approach. Sensors came online, and Cor- tana could actually "see" the interlacing webs of quantum filaments surround the flagship.
"Amazing," she whispered.
The Covenant could pick a path through the subatomic di- mensions; a gentle push from their generators enlarged the fields just enough to allow their ships to pass seamlessly into the alter- nate space with minimal energy. Their resolution of the reality of space-time was infinitely more powerful than human tech- nology. 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- tem, the sun, and even the warping 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 mess: They'd get out by going through.
She concentrated on interpolating the fluctuating space. She generated mathematical algorithms to anticipate and smooth the gravitational distortions.
Energy surged from the reactors into the Slipspace generator matrices. A path parted directly before them—a pinhole that be- came a gyrating wormhole, fluxing and spinning.
Threshold's atmosphere throbbed and jumped through the hole—sucked into the vacuum of the alternate dimension.
Cortana dedicated all her runtime to monitoring the space around the ship, and risked making microscopic course correc- tions to maneuver them into the fluctuating path. Sparks danced along the length of the hull as the nose of the flagship departed normal space.
She eased the rest of the ship through, surrounded by whirling storms and jagged spears of lightning.
She pinged her sensors: The hull temperature dropped rapidly and she registered a series of explosive decompressions on the breached decks.
Cortana emerged from her cocoon of concentration and im- mediately sensed the electronic presence of the other near her, monitoring her Slipspace calculations. It was practically on top ofher.
"Heresy!" it hissed and then withdrew... and vanished.