Cyberpunk: Spartan Walker

No one moved, no one breathed except Locklear, who let out a long breath and uttered the most heart-wrenching curses.

Rebecca wanted to count them. There must be thousands of them - at every level. But there may be more. They don't even need to aim, they just shoot, filling the space with needle bullets and boiling energy.

It was too late for them to get into the tunnel behind them, as they would turn into steam halfway through. A pair of hunters roared, raising their nuclear cannons to aim steadily at them, and then pulled the triggers.

In an instant, the plasma light shone and gunshots roared. Rebecca rushed to Lieutenant General Whitcomb aside, and the alien soldiers fired thousands of guns.

****

Time: Date record error\\estimated to be 0640 hours on September 23, 2552, military calendar

On the edge of the Epsilon Eridani galaxy, aboard the captured Covenant force flagship Mount Justice.

The Supreme Justice appeared in an area that neither Euclid nor Einstein had calculated, and humans mistakenly called it slip space. Its size is constantly changing, and there is no space or disconnection at all.

The spacecraft was surrounded by a large pile of ice crystals. The ice crystals, which were thousands of years old, melted and then froze back into a delicate network-like geometric pattern.

The Justice's navigation lights scattered on these grains, forming shimmering, sharply defined haloes, which reminded Cortana of the snowball Dr. Halsey placed on the table: Three Centimeter-high K2, with a miniature Chinese climber climbing on it - they were kept spinning by the intense miniature snowstorm.

The frozen Oort cloud around her is much larger than Dr. Halsey's snowball, but it's still fascinating, as if the unfathomable Slipspace had arranged it to welcome her.

The Supreme Justice escaped from the Epsilon system, but did not go very far - it just made a short jump to the edge of the galaxy billions of kilometers away from Reach and the action force.

The chances of the Covenant finding them were slim - not likely at all, even if they had patrol ships. Because the Oort cloud is so large, it would be impossible to search every corner even if it took a hundred years. And Colonel Keyes had shut down nearly every system on the ship, except for the thermonuclear generator—except, of course, her own power system.

The ship traveled through the icy darkness.

However, in order to recharge the slipstream generator and regenerate the plasma - which was depleted after a brief engagement with the Covenant cruiser - she turned the reactor back on.

If she were aboard a larger warship, an all-or-nothing tactic might be useful - fire all the plasma energy out and then head into slipspace regardless of gravity - but since she has to deal with ten enemy forces per ship, With two spaceships, her effective combat time may only be a few microseconds.

The Covenant forces now know that the Supreme Justice is not one of their own. She hoped that the Master Chief could escape their clutches - find his Spartans and manage to meet her at the agreed coordinates - that everyone would be safe and safe, escaping the indiscriminate bombardment of enemy ground troops and battleships. .

She paused to adjust her emotional subroutine, unable to indulge in deep sighs all the time. While waiting, she had to concentrate on thinking about something useful.

But the thing was, she'd been thinking as hard as she could for the past five days. Most of her spinning brain was now occupied by data absorbed from the aura.

She hesitated to dump that data into the Justice's onboard storage. Now that the other AI has been eliminated, there should be no danger. However, a set of technical data has been leaked to the enemy... which may have extremely serious consequences for mankind's war efforts. If Halo's data fell into the hands of Covenant forces - there would be no beginning to the war.

She decided to make do with the memory processing bandwidth available to her.

Cortana listened carefully and looked through Justice's passive sensors to see what was happening at the center of the galaxy. The faint murmur of a Covenant communiqué reached her ears—it had been sent out eight hours ago, as it took that long for electromagnetic waves to reach here from Reach.

interesting. The focus of discussion within the galaxy now is undoubtedly the invader. However, the situation had not changed eight hours ago - for whatever reason.

She eavesdropped on the data stream and deciphered it, trying to make sense of it all.

Among their fanatical and confusing religious rhetoric, some of the slightly coherent meanings are: looking for the fragments of God; the fragments of the gods that exist in this perfect moment shine brightly, disappear in the blink of an eye but never die; collect the fragments left by the giants Star.

The literal translation was no problem, but it was the meaning behind the words that confused her. Without relevant cultural knowledge for reference, this is all nonsense. The Covenanters certainly understood the implications, though. Maybe she could use some of the capabilities of the Covenant AI she subdued to help understand. It had spoken to her, indicating that it was familiar with parts of human language. She might be able to reverse-compile its translation software.

Cortana isolated the AI's code and began running the retrieval and decompression programs. This will take a while. She had compressed the code earlier, but running the decompression program took a lot of her limited processing power.

While waiting, she inspected the Covenant's reactor. They use a pinch magnetic field to heat the tritium plasma in a surprisingly primitive way. However, due to lack of better hardware, she had no way to improve their efficiency.

power. If she wanted to turn around and return to the system to rendezvous with the operational troops, she would need more power. The Covenant troops would not just sit back and let them run away with a good-natured Goodbye when they caught up with them.

As you can imagine, there is only one way out: she must fight and destroy them all.

She could preserve the power of the ship and fire the plasma weapons as designed by the Covenant. However, it would be difficult to reverse the inevitable defeat. Twelve spaceships against one - in such an unbalanced combat situation, even Captain Keyes may have a hard time winning.

She mulled over how to solve the problem, spun a multitasker to enumerate all her resources, and then filtered them through a creation-possibility matrix, hoping to find an enlightening match.

The alien artificial intelligence program is decompressed. The codes looked to her like a vast cross-section of geological strata, with dozens of coded layers she didn't even recognize. But the translation algorithm sits at the top of this structure, dazzling like a quartz vein edged with gold. She plugged into the software, which had countless loops and lines of terminal code—the stuff was corrupted.