Cyberpunk: Spartan Walker

The question lodged in the core of her logic for a nanosecond - now was not the time to think about it. She turned her attention back to the current rescue operation. The reason why she carried out this rescue operation, made a precise jump into the wreckage area, and docked two different spaceships was to obtain power.

The Justice's false identity has been exposed, and Covenant forces know that their flagship is controlled by humans. All this makes it impossible for them to meet in the orbit of Reach as originally planned.

She could have warped to the rendezvous point and brought the Master Chief back, but because the warp fault generator couldn't recharge fast enough, they would be trapped there - and in the meantime, the Covenant fleet would surround them and destroy them.

So she had to change her tactics. The Covenant forces are fierce and alert, and she has to jump into the place where their power is most concentrated, receive the action troops, and then quickly jump out of the galaxy. To do this, she needed enough power to instantly recharge the slipstream generator—power that only two ships could provide.

The power transmission lines are properly connected, and billions of watts of current are continuously input from the Gettysburg's reactor into the energy system of the Justice.

That's great, she purred with satisfaction, watching as the bridge crew cheered loudly for this unprecedented feat.

It's 0712 hours. She had less than three minutes to implement her next step.

Cortana checked over and over again the calculations she had made for the shortest slipspace jump - just three thousand kilometers from where the wreckage was dropped to the rendezvous coordinate. She scanned the area of ​​space—no longer a blind spot for Covenant defenses. There were three times more ships in the system than when she last left.

Cortana saw the troop carrier controlled by the Master Chief ascending from the lower atmosphere of Reach. A black Pelican troop carrier shuttled around the Phantom troop carrier. Four Seraph fighter jets were caught off guard and destroyed by its cannons. , and more fighter jets rushed towards them from the atmosphere of Reach.

She intercepted the Covenant fleet commander repeating a series of orders: Do not fire, otherwise you will be targeted and destroyed. The Holy Light is in the hands of heretics.

It's a bittersweet experience. Fortunately, the Master Chief and his team had the Light and were able to avoid enemy bombing; unfortunately, every Covenant ship in the system was closing in on their troop transport - eventually destroying it. Surrounded and captured it with an absolute advantage, while the Pelican had to face the fate of being destroyed.

This also makes Cortana's warp destinations increasingly crowded.

She made sure the Justice's plasma turrets were fully charged, checked the magnetic coils again, and checked the Justice's thruster systems in case something happened and she had to adjust them when she jumped out of the system.

It is 0714.10 hours military standard time.

Then Cortana did the thing she was least good at: waiting. To a mind capable of performing trillions of operations per second, fifty seconds is an eternity.

Countdown to thirty seconds. Captain Keyes gave the order to jump, and Cortana switched power to the jump fault generator.

A large number of pinpricks of light appeared in the dark space around her.

Countdown to twenty seconds. You can hear a needle drop on the bridge, and the atmosphere is as cold as ice. She updated the calculation results to take into account the slight gravity field changes caused by the many Covenant warships in that area of ​​space.

The vacuum around the ship tore open, and she took a path from regular space into slip space. Countdown to ten seconds. She quickly wrote a program to aim the weapon at the spacecraft near the coordinate point where she jumped out.

The Supreme Justice slid forward gently into the rift in space. The ship was enveloped in light and then disappeared from the floating debris.

——Reappeared in the blink of an eye. The monitor on the starboard side was filled with the entire view of Reach, while the monitor on the port side was filled with Covenant warships that had just flown into the system.

The Covenant and Terran ships were oddly connected back to back, appearing in a trap set by the enemy, which must have confused them as to why they didn't have their warships to fire.

The two troop transports were three kilometers away from Cortana's starboard side, and their flight path was almost in a straight line with the berthing bay of the Justice-Gettysburg.

She turned on the UNSC's E-band and said, Operation Force, your flagship is here.

Copy that. The sergeant major and colonel replied almost simultaneously. Their voices were rock solid, without a hint of tremor. They were still running for their lives just now, but they sounded like they had everything under control.

The Pelican troop carrier burned out the remaining iron felt missiles and quickly flew under the Phantom troop carrier. Then the two changed directions and flew towards the holed berth.

Cortana removed the shields—for just a split second, just long enough for the little one to gain access to the flagship—and turned them back on.

Case looked away from the monitor, the sweat on his face melting into beads on his chin. Cortana, let's go.

Warping in progress, sir.

Cortana channels the Gettysburg's power into the Justice's slipstream generators, and they begin to recharge.

Three Covenant cruisers surrounded her, their plasma turrets glowing a terrifying red as they prepared to fire.

It was clear that the order not to fire did not extend to the Justice.

Cortana needed five seconds to replenish her energy before she could escape, but five seconds was too long, long enough for the Covenant to destroy her flagship, causing it to explode into two small suns.

She temporarily bypassed Captain Keyes's command and seized the opportunity to open fire on the four nearest cruisers.

Plasma beams rocketed from her turrets, burning the shields of Covenant ships and splitting their hulls. When the ultra-high temperature gas mixed with the air inside those battleships, the plastic, flesh and metal immediately burst into flames, burning from the outside to the inside.

The two hit cruisers exploded immediately when the plasma beam hit their reactors. The vaporized metal formed billowing clouds like mushrooms and rose into space, blurring the view of the approaching spacecraft.

Spots of light as thin as pinpricks appeared around the Justice-Gettysburg.

An unexpected error occurred.

This error should not occur.

Cortana checked the data again and quickly discovered the problem: a fail-safe subroutine that tracked local gravity conditions had detected an anomaly.

It's impossible for Reach's gravity to no longer bend space.

No time to dwell on it. She could either leave or fight.

She drove the Wushang Justice into the twisted space field

--Disappeared.

However, this is not a jump space where nothing can be seen and there are no dimensions. A light blue space appeared on Cortana's monitor. It was not space—not the crowded space near Reach, nor the starry sky of the Epsilon system. But it is indeed a space, and this space should not exist at all.