Halo Lighting System Games manual 171

ERIC NYLUND 171

and then wiped the original. The Covenant AI was gone, its bits safely hacked apart and stored for future research. Provided, of course, Cortana had a future.

She tracked thirteen Covenant warships. They came about and bore down on her position. Her COM channels overloaded with fanatical threats and promises of her and the captured flag- ship burning.

There was no useful data there, so she filtered them out. The Covenant warships' weapons warmed to a dull red. Cortana remained calm. After considerable study of the Cove-

nant plasma weapons system, she now understood why they glowed before discharge. The stored plasma was always hot and ready to fire, but the Covenant used an inefficient method to col- lect and direct the chaotic plasma into a controllable trajectory. They selected the charged plasma atoms with the proper trajec- tory necessary to hit a target and shunted them into a magnetic bubble. The bubble was then discharged; subsequent pulse charges herded the plasma on target.

For an advanced race, the Covenant's weapons relied on crude brute force calculations and were terribly slow and wasteful.

She booted the new system she had devised to control the plasma. It used EM pulses a priori to align the stochastic mo- tions of the plasma atoms, herding their trajectories and eleven degrees of electronic freedom into a laser-fine columnatedbeam within a microsecond.

This was, of course, an entirely theoretical operation.

She test-fired the three forward plasma turrets—red lines slashed across the black space and intercepted the three lead Covenant cruisers; their shields glowed orange, flickered, and failed. Cortana's plasma cut into the smooth alien hulls. Metal boiled away, and the trio of beams punched clear through the ships.

Cortana moved the plasma beams like a scalpel—up and then down—and cut the vessels in half.

"Adequate," she remarked. The plasma reserves of the first three turrets, however, were exhausted, and it would be several minutes before they'd recycle.

If only there were a better electromagnetic system on this flagship, she could have devised a more effective guidance algo-