Halo Lighting System Games manual 211

ERIC NYLUND 211

dropped shields for a split second—just long enough for the tiny craft to enter—then reestablished the protective field.

Cortana routed power from the Gettysburg into Ascendant Justice's Slipspace capacitors, and they began soaking up the charge.

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

Apparently the order not to fire did not extend to Ascendant Justice.

Cortana needed five seconds to attain a full charge, five sec- onds before she could make good her escape... but five seconds might be long enough for her to become the center of a small Covenant-made sun.

She took the initiative and fired at the closest four cruisers. Laser-fine plasma lanced from her turrets, burned though

the Covenant shields, and split open their hulls. When the super- heated gas came in contact with the atmosphere inside the ships, plastic, flesh, and metal caught fire and roiled throughout their interiors.

Two of the targeted cruisers immediately detonated as the plasma beams found the reactors. Billowing clouds of vaporized metal mushroomed across the night and obscured her from the advancing ships.

Pinpricks of light appeared around Ascendant Justice.

ERROR.

Cortana rechecked the figures and quickly found the source of the problem: The fail-safe subroutine that tracked local gravita- tional conditions returned an anomaly.

The gravity from Reach no longer warped space ... which was impossible.

No time for speculation. She had to leave or fight.

She moved Ascendant Justice into the twisting spatial field— —and vanished.

Instead of the nonvisible nondimensions of Slipspace, how- ever, a blue-tinged field appeared on Cortana's monitors. It wasn't space—not the crowded space near Reach, or the star-filled space of the Epsilon Eridani system. But it was a space, where there should have been no space at all.