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Cortana immediately accessed the Covenant battlenet as soon as she was inserted. The Covenant relied a great deal on this easily infiltrated network. If not for this network, the Covenant formations would be chaos and they could never execute the brilliant tactics they rely on to win a battle. Every ship was connected to it. A perfect place to plant a virus. From here, Cortana controlled every system on the ship. She immediately opened all the airlocks on board, flushing out a lot of the Covenant onboard. She knew as soon as a patrol found the bridge sealed, they would alert the crew. And they might be able to cut the power to the bridge from the reactor. After she flushed the reactor room, she proceeded with the rest of the ship. The two waited for the last jackals and elites to loosen their grips on the ship and watched them drift in space, every fluid in the body expanded from the lack of pressure. Some foolish jackals didn't exhale on the way out and their lungs exploded. Master Chief couldn't help but smile at the gruesome death of his sworn enemies. Cortana would have to act fast; the nearby cruisers may become suspicious as to why the ship's crew was sucking vacuum. Cortana had learned a lot in the past few months. Continuous battle with the Covenant and she's learned her way around their ship systems and battlenets. She even knew the commands to control minor parts of the Covenant ships. Since all Covenant ships were wired into their battlenet, some parts could be controlled if you had the right command codes, luckily, Cortana recently cracked these codes, and planned to put them to good use. She could easily infiltrate a Covenant battlenet, but she needed a way to disable it. The Covenant weren't as defensive when it came to network security as humans are. They are overly confident in their superiority to the infidels in every way. She had counted on this. She had been working for months on a way to disable or shut down their battlenet. But the enormous net was too big too be overloaded, and even if she could, she could only disable it for one ship, the others would still be able to communicate with each other. She had to buy the UNSC time, and she found the perfect way to do it. Because this tactic had never been explored before, the Covenant would never expect it. It was genius, and it took months for her to figure it out. Once received by a Covenant ship, it would send commands to all the plasma weapons onboard, telling them to charge, only they could never stop charging. One of two things could happen. The charging weapons could overload the ship's reactor causing it, in some cases, to go nuclear, and create a huge explosion that would vaporize anything within a hundred kilometers of the epicenter, but this only happened to the largest of ships with the most powerful reactors. The other event would make the weapons overcharge to the point where it fried itself, melting the weapon system itself. She uploaded the virus to the net, then contacted Admiral Stanforth. "Tell your men to get ready to blast the hell out of the Covenant," She said, "You'll see all the ships' weapons charging, but do not fire until their weapons overload, understood?" Stanforth got on the COM, "Cortana, where the hell are you? We're receiving this from a Covenant cruiser, do you mind explaining?" "Just do it Admiral, no time to explain." But before the virus had time to spread to every ship, the entire Covenant fleet began accelerating preparing to jump to slipspace. Three-fourths of the fleet had already jumped before the virus caught up to the Covenant ships that were to close to gravity wells to make slipstream. They were accelerating as the virus caught up to them. Covenant ships cannot jump to slipspace without the full power of their reactors devoted to the engines. They needed all the power they could get for the pinpoint jumps. When the weapons started charging, they were trapped in the system, unable to escape. The largest ship, a carrier, began to charge. After a minute of charging, the pent up power of the unreleased plasma energy overheated the reactor. The UNSC fleet watched in awe as Sol system was the mother of a second sun, and another, and another. The three largest carriers went out in a spectacular show of nuclear fury. The Covenant ships within 75 kilometers of the blasts fluttered as their reactors tried to sustain the shields and charging plasma at the same time. Within 50 kilometers of the blast, every ship's system failed instantly, and they too erupted into flame and suffered the same fate as so many UNSC ships had before, they were turned to molten metal. The rest of the ships within the 100 km radius struggled to abstain from the same fate their brethren had suffered. The explosions accelerated the overcharging process, the reactors couldn't handle keeping the shields up and charging the weapons at the same time. The frigates and smaller cruisers simply lost their weapons, and were still functional to some degree. Ships that still had power tried their best to escape the flames and shrapnel thrown off by the exploding Covenant ships. By this time the UNSC fleet had once again regrouped outside the Covenant formations. And concentrated their weapons on any ship that still was moving. They quickly dispatched any would-be escapees. Within minutes the humans had won, albeit not how anyone had expected, not even Cortana. Only one Covenant ship remained intact, the one from which this chaos or salvation had begun. The fleet had suffered a great deal, but was still two-hundred ships strong. Cheers of joy erupted from every human in-system. News of the failed Covenant attack was quickly sent and spread planetside. Everyone was cheering, except two. The Chief knew what happened was pure luck. He knew something worse had happened for the entire Covenant fleet to try to leave system so suddenly. Cortana accessed the navigation controls and moved the ship near lunar base, making sure the ship had friendly tags so the rest of the fleet wouldn't melt them as soon as they saw them. She scheduled the ship for a docking at lunar base as soon as possible. They would need this carrier for their mission. Whatever the reason the Covenant had for running, Cortana was sure something big had happened in their space. She decided this would be the perfect time to finally fulfil their original mission. As soon as both ships entered dock on lunar base, the carrier would be filled with the best marines and spec ops the UNSC had to offer, at least, second to the crew of the Justification. The Chief, along with Cortana, was on the carrier, analyzing the star maps and accessing any information the ship's mainframe might have to help them. Within days, their mission was ready to go, and the two ships, the Justification and the newly recommissioned Covenant carrier, the Vindication. The ships accelerated to the edge of system. They finally knew where the Covenant homeworld was. And instead of capturing a prophet, the top brass went for a last ditch effort and decided to invade the planet with the entire fleet. The two ships were going ahead for scouting and making sure it was plausible for a victory in the battle. The Vindication would arrive in system first because of its superior speed, to evaluate the Covenant fleet status. The Vindication received the go ahead by Stanforth, and the two ships began to accelerate. The Chief prepared to go into the newly installed cryo chambers. The Covenant didn't use them like the humans had to. And even though the ships were faster, it would still be 3 months to the crew until the arrived in the Covenant system. The Chief at least had some decent comrades this time. The three remaining Spartans, the ones lucky enough to be fighting the Covenant elsewhere when the attack on Reach occurred, had reunited with Master Chief and were on Earth when the attack began, they had gotten lucky twice. Because they weren't in a zone planetside that got glassed, but their luck may not keep them alive during this mission. It wasn't much of a main attack force to be attacking the core world of these ruthless zealots, but it was something, and that's all they needed. Master Chief, along with the other Spartans, would remain in their Mk. VIs while in cryo in case they had to be quick-thawed for combat. "Here we go again." Master Chief said before chamber put him to sleep for 3 months. The Vindication jumped first, then the Justification, it would 102 days before they would arrive, plenty of time for Cortana to figure out just what the hell was going on. She would be shocked upon arrival, for they never could've guessed what had happened... |
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