Eight: Ghosts of Reach

"So what now?"

All of the humans turned to look at their ship's COM system or at the private on Keyes' ship, an eyebrow moving on up.

"I mean, we can't stay here; we don't have the oxygen or the supplies, and that planet," he waved in the direction of Threshold, "isn't capable of sustaining human life. So what now?"

"Orders, Captain?" Fred asked over the radio.

"None of our ships have Slipspace generators, which means we need to capture one that does. Options, Cortana?"

"Our options are limited," the AI replied, "Capture a Covenant ship or die. There are no human ships in range, so a Covenant one is the only way out. If there is time, I would also advise looking for any jettisoned cryotubes." She was already scanning nearby space for one of the aforementioned ships or a spacial distortion that indicated one's impending arrival, praying to whoever was up there that the Ascendant Justice did not appear right in the middle of their little flock –

"Well, that's convenient." Said Covenant ship had dropped out of Slipspace about six kilometers away from them with three frigates and a destroyer, and the AI hijacked the autopilot of their transports, instantly sending them veering away when the ship powered back on and fired at them. "Okay, let's move! Hang on, everyone!" The construct began moving their ships with the expert precision of a pilot who'd been doing it for years; all of the humans scurried to get themselves strapped in or anchored in some way to the ships.

"I think I'm going to be sick," someone growled when Cortana send their transport into a steep dive below the Justice, swinging them up and around to one side in one of the plasma turrets' blind spots, but no one could argue with the effectiveness of her techniques; not one of the ships had been taken out yet, and they were doing substantial damage to the Justice's shields.

"Okay, okay, come on," the construct grunted when she was forced to send one of the Longswords into a sharp spiral to dodge a plasma bomb; then, so soft that they almost didn't hear her, "Did this once before, and with fewer ships, too; can do it again." A brilliant blue laser beam suddenly split the darkness, just barely missing the Justice's hull, but it tore the shields wide open, enabling Cortana to bring the transports into a starboard docking bay. Through the plexi-fiberglass windows of the ships, the humans caught a glimpse of a simply immense black ship gliding silently in front of Basis. Its lit windows would serve as natural camouflage when it was not backlit by something, making it seem like just another stretch of distant space, and its shape made them think of an isosceles triangle with very powerful engines on the back. The black ship suddenly rippled iridescently – and vanished, its active camouflage engaged. They never saw it leave, but Cortana reported that it must have had some kind of external anti-grav generators; there had been zero distortions in space due to the ship's gravity, and they would not have detected it at all if it hadn't revealed itself for that brief instant.

"Daaaaaaaamn."

"Whatever it was, it's not an enemy, even if it's not an ally; it fired on the Covenant, not us," Keyes said firmly over the COM while the Spartans cleared the cargo bay for the regular soldiers to disembark.

"All due respect, sir, but it might not have even known we were there; it could have just fired on the Covenant to keep them from attacking it," Cortana piped up after Fred removed her from the Longsword's console, slotting her back into his armor. The AI did the equivalent of flopping down in exhaustion while he jogged down the Longsword's ramp, and the Spartans reported that all threats in the vicinity had been taken care of. The ODSTs instantly thundered down the ramps of the Pelicans and Spirit dropships, sweeping the area with their own assault rifles as the other soldiers descended at a much slower pace. The armored behemoths were holding the doors into the bay, and occasionally they could hear the brief sounds of a firefight in the distance. "Personnel rosters for this ship – the Ascendant Justice – indicate that there's only one hundred Elites and a light company of Grunts with the odd Jackal here and there," the construct informed them as she searched for the shortest route to the bridge, "but most of the three-thousand-member crew are Engineers."

The Spartans said nothing, but then again, they didn't have to. One of the Marines spoke what was all on their minds: "Only a hundred?" in an undertone of sarcasm. Cortana ignored him and directed them to a large hexagonal door, telling them that it would take them through the main corridor to the bridge. She also provided the options of taking other routes to secure other areas, and the mass of soldiers split into three groups with at least six teams of Spartans per group, each of the three taking a different path. Keyes was going to the bridge with Cortana and Blue Team, Silva was taking Red Team to Engineering, and Lieutenant McKay set off for the main armory with Yellow and Green Teams, and it soon became very clear that the Covenant had originally dispatched many of their soldiers to fight on Halo.

The main passage to the bridge was, of course, heavily guarded, forcing them all to file down a small maintenance hall and the Spartans to power down their shields and turn sideways so they could fit through, which made for quite an amusing sight. Cortana was still snickering when she called for a halt and said, "There's a data port on you left, S-104, and down twenty centimeters. Slot me in; I can assist you better from within the ship." Fred hesitated, then did so, figuring that she could do no more harm than good; the UNSC – and Dr. Halsey – had assured them that even if she didn't like them, the rampant AI would not kill them or hinder their mission.

"How is it?" he asked, ready to yank her back out again if necessary; though she was there to help them, that didn't mean that she wasn't capable of giving information to the enemy.

"Different," the AI said without hesitation, "Proceed down this passage for thirty meters and turn left." She was already running down all of the Covenant AI in the ship's system, cackling like a mad woman when she found one and dissected it. The only one who was able to put up much of a fight was the one in charge of the weapons' systems, but she tore it apart with the ease of experience. Only when she was sure the place was clean did she drop a few of her anti-infiltration measures to better take control of the Justice, scanning nearby space for any UNSC cryotubes drifting close to the ship in the debris from Halo.

The navigation controls were disabled – again – but she swiftly found another way in, taking control of the weapons systems at the same time and swinging the ship around to get a line on the ships that had come with the Justice; though they knew that the enemy had boarded the flagship, they were not firing, not yet. Because she was rampant, thus effectively terminating her ethics algorithms, she was able to devote more runtime to the task of finding and eliminating Covenant where she could, sealing bulkheads, and rallying the sensor ghosts of the humans. Just like before, she marshaled them around the bow of the ship where the UNSC's bridge would have been, drawing the Covenant away from the real locations of the humans. The Huragok she left alone, telling them to carry on with their appointed tasks and ignore any humans they saw, just as she told the UNSC to ignore them.

Dozens of Elite hunt-and-kill teams roamed the ship, searching; they hadn't yet realized that she was there, as she had spun off several subroutines to respond to the aliens as if they were the actual enemy constructs. Despite the fact that she was bloated both with the Origin Halo data and the Parallel's, she was still far better than anything the Covenant had in their arsenal. In fact, she had several hundred subroutines working on processing the immense volume of data, correcting errors, and compressing it all to a more manageable size, all while she was free to torment the aliens on the Justice, thoroughly confusing them whilst she retrieved a few cryotubes from the cold darkness of space.

She uploaded the second method of reaching the bridge into the Spartans' and soldiers' neural laces, leaving them to choose who would go where. She turned her attention to calculating the Slipspace vector that the "rogue" Spartan had taken, estimating the distance traveled until she realized that the vector passed through Substance and Installation Zero-Five. "Proactive, that one," she commented, noting that someone was attempting to take their Slipspace generator offline; she diverted some power from the reactor and shocked the person or people with only six volts of power but almost ten amps of current, when not even half an amp was necessary to kill a human.

A spike of energy outside the ship caught her attention; one of the damaged frigates was making for High Charity. She let it go, knowing that if the Arbiter was to become the Arbiter then Truth and the other Prophets needed to haul butt. She color-coded the halls that she was about to pump atmosphere from and sent them to all UNSC personnel, making sure the areas were clear of humans before reversing the air pumps. 'Doing what must be done is never easy,' she thought, but refused to allow the memories of High Charity to consume her, instead turning her attention back to the Spartans. Keyes' crew was almost perilously close to the bridge, and Cortana briefly spun up a different avatar for herself, making her look like a Forerunner. She appeared on the bridge and instantly spotted Thel 'Vadamee, the current Supreme Commander of the Fleet of Particular Justice and future Arbiter of the Separatists.

She cleared her throat to gain his attention. "You."

The gold-armored Elite spun to face her, mandibles abruptly going slack in shock at the sight of a seemingly-solid and full size Forerunner on his bridge. "/Holy one, I-/"

"Now is not the time," she said gently, "You must leave through the escape pods. Your task is not done, and if you die here, then all of your people will follow. A great and terrible massacre is coming, one which will shake the Sangheili people to their roots. You must be their pillar of strength."

He hesitated, then dipped his head. "/I understand, Holy One./"

She smiled gently at him. "We know you will not fail us, Thel 'Vadamee. You are a great warrior, as great as the Didact himself." She bowed her head in return and dissolved her hologram. When the Spartans burst into the bridge, the Elite dodged the bullets they fired at him, drawing his plasma sword, but before he could strike back, one of the Spartans lunged forward and slammed an open hand against his chest, cracking his ribs and sending him flying back into one of the escape pods. "I got this," Cortana said to the Spartans, sealing the pod and launching it, keeping the Sangheili alive. The humans swept the room to make sure it was safe before permitting Captain Keyes to enter with his surviving bridge crew; there were only a few frightened Huragok drifting in a corner.

The construct appeared on the display, her crimson body throwing odd shadows about in the room, and she flipped her hair over her shoulder. "Lieutenant McKay is in the process of securing the armory, and Major Silva has taken control of engineering, Captain," she said in her best deadpan, careful to keep her expression neutral. Internally she was excited; there was no turning back now.

Cortana was not by any means nervous over the impending "First Strike;" no, what she was nervous about was whether or not there would be a First Strike. Almost half of the crew of the Pillar of Autumn was still with them, about a thousand people, and all seventy-five of the Spartans were still breathing, so far as she could tell. What she really hoped was that Keyes would ask her what their options were so she could shoot the "continue on Alpha Rendezvous" one out of the water. There were a million good reasons why they should not continue, number one being that –

"Cortana?"

"Yes, sir?"

"What are our options?"

'….Thank you, God.' The AI shook her head. "Not many. We can either continue on our previous mission or head back to Earth. I would highly advise doing the latter, as Reach is no longer on the playing field. Also, we cannot very well charge into enemy space with barely half of the crew and no back-up ship. It is… highly inadvisable." She crossed her arms, obligingly running calculations for their odds of survival, but things were not promising. With only one ship on which to make their escape, there would be no decoys, no hopes of transferring the Prophet from one ship to another without the Covenant knowing and letting that ship escape while the other drew fire and was ultimately destroyed. There was only the slimmest of probabilities that they would make it out alive if they went.

Keyes sighed. "Rock and a hard place, is it?"

"Quite so, sir." She shifted from one foot to another, a surprisingly human gesture that had the Spartans present cocking their heads slightly as they looked at her; they were unable to tell where the AI ended and the human mannerisms began. Cortana appeared to abruptly gaze off into space

'Sounds like the world is coming to an end,' the construct snickered at the COM traffic she was listening to before addressing the humans in front of her. "Regardless of our course of action, there are some vital internal repairs to be made, which means I need one of you," she pointed at the Spartans, "to take one of them," the Huragok, "to Silva in Engineering. Although I would prefer that more of them were taken down there, I'm not sure I can rely on you all to play nice with the Covies long enough to get them down there, given your history."

Behind her visor, Kelly pursed her lips at the surreptitious insult and unintentionally rose to Cortana's bait. "I'll do it," she said, "Just show me where to take it."

The AI waved at the group below. "Pick your Engineer of choice, and I'll map out the course you'll need to take." The Spartan paced forward into the group and looked over the Engineers, one particularly brave one actually drifting closer to peer at her with its six eyes. Kelly decided to take that one, and Cortana told it what they wanted in its own tongue via the Covenant lexicon in the computer. When they left, it looked like Kelly was giving the purple creature a strange piggy back ride, as the thing had wrapped its tentacles around her torso just above her waist to it could be pulled along behind her.

The construct loaded the map into her HUD as the Spartan tore down the hall, dropping a few levels before pausing at the bottom of an elevator shaft. Her Huragok pressed a button on the wall, and the doors before her wrenched themselves open just as there was a flutter of activity at the edge of her motion tracker. She crouched behind a support beam and peered around the side just in time to see a clutch of Grunts take fire from some Marines around the corner. The Huragok huffed when some of the bullets penetrated the walls of the passage but didn't let go of her; if anything it clung tighter and shivered as if – it was afraid.

S-087 looked down at the being blinking up at her with its six eyes, and it chirped impatiently, trying to nudge her along. "Like a temperamental teenager," Cortana commented in her ear as she paced down the passage, rifle at the ready, and rounded the corner, coming face to face with Wolfgang.

"What is that thing?" he asked, covering her back as they retreated up the passage to Engineering, "It looks like one of those mutant slime blobs from those really bad nineteen-sixties movies."

"You watch too much TV in your free time," Kelly told him, "and you obviously weren't paying attention when Halsey debriefed us. It's an Engineer." They reached the Engineering station and entered through the guarded door, the ODSTs standing outside giving her odd looks when she passed. The many-limbed being squealed unhappily when it saw the state of the place and immediately set to work, giving the distinct impression that it was muttering furiously under its breath, cursing the soldiers who used far too much ammo and ended up destroying their surroundings, too. Both Kelly and Wolfgang raised an eyebrow at it before passing it off as one of the race's quirks.

Silva scowled when he saw that yet another Spartan had arrived and paced over to them. "Why are you here?" he demanded, incensed.

"Cortana asked that we bring down one of the Engineers, sir," Kelly said calmly, gesturing to the purple creature now disassembling what was unmistakably the Justice's Slipspace generator and replacing damaged parts. Silva humphed and strode away, leaving the warriors to their own devices. None of the ODSTs seemed happy at her arrival, and even fewer when Fred and Sam arrived, the latter with two Engineers clinging to his person. They chirped at one another as they set to work repairing the damaged components in the room, leaving the three members of Blue Team free to return to the bridge, which they did; they didn't want to overstay their "welcome." There were several more Huragok repairing the bridge when they came through the door, and said door was successfully locked behind them.

Keyes was standing on the platform in the center of the bridge, supervising Cortana's evasive action from the other Covenant ships, moving them closer and closer to Threshold and its gravity well, and they had just slipped in, intending on using the planet's own magnetic field to disrupt the plasma torpedoes fired in their direction. Though she had prevented the Covenant from taking the Slipspace generator offline, it had been damaged by Silva and the ODSTs when they took the Engineering section of the ship; she was waiting for the Huragok taken down there to finish repairing it so they could make a jump. The AI was waiting rather impatiently, though; each second was a small eternity to her, and Keyes' decision was taking even longer. She sighed heavily.

Being an AI sucked.

"Cortana, set a course for Earth, and –"

"I'm sorry, Captain, but I cannot do that. Both a direct course and an indirect course are disallowed by the Cole Protocol, as there is no way to perform an exhaustive search of this ship for tracking devices." She paused, reviewing their course of action in the Origin. "I suggest an intermediate destination: Reach."

"Reach?" Keyes seemed confused, and the Spartans sidled over to listen. "There's nothing in the Epsilon Eridani system except for a Covenant armada. Why should we go there?"

"There are two major possibilities for Reach," Cortana explained gently, "The first is that the Covenant simply glassed the system and moved on. If that is the case, there should be a serviceable derelict that we can repair and take to Earth, leaving this ship in low orbit around the planet until we return with a full R&D staff to examine it. The other option is that the Covenant is still there, in which case it is highly unlikely that they would fire on one of their own ships."

The AI received a ping from one of the Engineers, letting her know that the Slipspace generator was back online, and she instantly fired it up, already compensating for the gravitational distortions of Threshold even as she plotted a course for Reach. They sped away from the ruins of Halo and the soon-to-be arrival zone of High Charity, but the AI was shocked when a request for a COM establishment came just after arrival in Slipspace.

'Hello?'

['Ello, love. Thought you'd like to know that we – that is, the Infected and I – have arrived safely at Installation Zero-Five.]

'Thanks.'

He sent her the rough equivalent of a COM link smiley face before he cut the connection, letting her return her attention to the Captain. He was in deep conversation with the bridge crew nearby, so she turned her gaze to the Spartans, a few of whom were sitting on the edge of the platform, cleaning their weapons. She simulated a bored yawn.

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"Okay, let's get to work, people. I need a platoon to scout out the Library; check and see if there's a Gravemind below it but approach no closer than necessary. Four squads of SpecOps to the Control Room; I want that puppy locked down and under observation before Tartarus gets there. The rest of you, start unpacking the Infection forms; let them loose at these locations."

"Where will you be, sir? In case we need to find you?" Nep'Thalia looked up from the display to blink at the cloaked Spartan.

"I will be going over the terrain that I covered in the Origin, getting the scope of how things have changed and assessing possible checkpoints to keep an eye on the UNSC when they come through. It's been a hundred thousand years since we've been here, after all." The Spartan vanished through the teleportation network on the ships and reappeared on the Halo's surface where Blue Team would land in the HEVs, a Forerunner light rifle in his hands.

-------------------------------------------

"Alright. We're going to Reach."

Cortana slipped out of the sleep-like state that she had induced while waiting for Keyes' decision and was momentarily disoriented. "Wha? – Oh, right. Okay, then." She ignored the odd looks that Keyes and the Spartans sent her and made it look like she was changing their destination when in actuality she was looking over the cryotubes she had retrieved, checking the status of the pods and their energy sources. McKay and her crew had secured the armory, so she told the Huragok to take the pods to her and returned her attention to the bridge. "…what?"

The majority of those on the bridge had been staring at her. "Nothing," Keyes replied and became engrossed in a conversation with Lieutenant Hikowa on the advantages of the Covenant Slipspace generators, reexamining the videos of their flight from Threshold. Cortana sighed to herself. She just wanted to get back to Earth so they could set out for Delta Halo already, dammit! Alas, it was not to be; humanity had yet to figure out how to do instantaneous teleportation, though the plans she had taken from Halo would set them on the right path. She sighed again, then remembered: Dr. Halsey was still on Reach. Was she alright? Was she hurt? Had the Covenant overrun her position? Was she even in CASTLE base when it all went down? Her records were unclear on the matter, so it was best to assume that she was there, based on her analyses of Halsey's personality and the history of the Origin.

'Is it me, or am I getting really random?' she thought, examining the weapon controls for the flagship. There had been no time to look them over before, but now she could see that one of the Covenant AI had gotten to them earlier in the game, which meant she had to replace them. She rifled leisurely through her files and found what she was looking for in the blink of an eye, uploading the protocols and running a couple thousand test fires before she deemed it "adequate." The construct alerted Keyes to what the enemy AI had done and how she had fixed it, which led to –

"Hold on, the Covenant have an AI?" one of the bridge crew said, holding up their arms in an X to stop her from speaking.

"'Had,' Lieutenant. I terminated it but saved all of its data. It appears to be a copy of a copy of a human AI, probably a dumb one, as it is not very innovative. It went through all of the standard procedures for stopping infiltration before I slipped in." Cortana crossed her arms and shifted her weight, seeming to stare off into space. "I have taken the liberty of adding its language translation vectors to my own subroutines, and it has substantially increased my understanding of the Covenant, as well as revealed an encoded subchannel that I could not detect before."

"So we'll be able to add this to the other UNSC smart AI?"

"Indeed." She appeared to straighten in surprise. "Five minutes until arrival at Epsilon Eridani system," she said calmly, "All hands prepare for reversion to normal space. Let's see what's there waiting for us."

**********

A/N: Here are the teams so far:

Red Team: Douglas-042, Jerome-092, Alice-130, Grace-093

Orange Team: Maria-062, Cassandra-075, Joseph-122, Joshua-029

Yellow Team: Daisy-023, Anton-044, Soren-066, Kurt-051

Green Team: Li-008, Fhajad-084, Rene-005, Kirk-018

Jade Team: Malcolm-059, Solomon-069, Carl-074, Carter-013

Teal Team: Darrian-136, Wolfgang-149,

Cyan Team: Darius-116, Valerie-142, Chris-014,

Blue Team: Fred-104, Kelly-087, Linda-058, Sam-034

Indigo Team: Ralph-003, Randall-098, Sheila-022, Victor-102

Violet Team: Jorge-052, James-132, Keiichi-047, Isaac-039

Black Team: Vinh-030, Arthur-079, Cal-141, William-043

Brown Team: Arnold-101, Robyn-009, Andrew-037, Mickey-012

Amber Team: Lily-150,

Beige Team:

Gray Team: Jai-006, Adriana-111, Mike-015, Zadok-119

White Team:

Ivory Team:

Gold Team:

Silver Team:

Infected Team (Team Forerunner): John-117, Venera & Kenera, Nep'Thalia, Dacien, Lil'Ame, Harena, Cenanto, Thenma, Ursoen, 100,000+ others