“I should have sent his wife back to her keep rather than enter a combat zone,” ‘Telcam said. “Her sons would have a mother now. I should have known better. So the elder boy, Dural, wishes to fight and avenge his mother, and I’ve agreed to take him into my service. An apprentice, I think you would call it. A cadet. Have I chosen the right word?”
“Sounds about right.” It was a guilty moment. Phillips had been as responsible as anyone in ONI for the fate of Jul ‘Mdama, the fierce Sangheili nationalist who wanted his people to reclaim their former glories. “I know I shouldn’t ask if that’s actually Jul’s son, but it’s not as if I’m going to break the taboo and tell him.”
‘Telcam just tilted his head. Sangheili males were never allowed to know who their fathers were. It was a secret kept by the females to give all youngsters an equal start in life. Naomi assumed they managed bloodlines to prevent inbreeding.
“Is he bitter?” Phillips asked.
“As only a grieving son can be.” ‘Telcam lowered his head and took a couple of steps toward his transport. The meeting was over. “Or a grieving parent. They’re the surest enemies, those we deprive of their loved ones.”
‘Telcam couldn’t have known that he’d described both Naomi’s father and Dural ‘Mdama, just two in a list of angry, vengeful victims that ONI left in its wake. Phillips said nothing. Naomi waited for the Brutes to remove the last crate before she went back to sit in the Warthog’s driver’s seat. Phillips took a few moments to say good-bye to ‘Telcam before he headed back to the vehicle and ‘Telcam’s party went on its way.
“Sometimes I think he’s psychic,” Phillips said. “Or maybe he just states the crushingly obvious.”
“What, how we make enemies?”
“Something like that.”
“He never mentioned that he’s hired the Kig-Yar.”
“He’s still the enemy. Why would he tell us everything?”
“I thought you liked them.”
“There’s respect and there’s being on their side. I never said I was the latter.”
She’d never heard Phillips openly call them the enemy before, however implicit it was the work he now did. His whole career was built on the Sangheili. He was probably Earth’s foremost expert on them, and he’d been genuinely upset by the deaths of the females and their children in Nes’alun. But he lived and worked with people who had every reason to hate them. It seemed to have tempered his enthusiasm for his area of expertise.
“Tell me something,” he said. “Would you want to know exactly who glassed Sansar? Would you want to know if it was him?”
Naomi made every effort not to wonder. It didn’t matter. Whatever she knew and felt had to be kept in check so that it didn’t get in the way of the job. Not knowing things like that was the best way to handle it.
“No, I wouldn’t,” she said. “Because then I’d have to ask the Huragok if they’d maintained ventral beams, and then I’d have to ask which ships. Pretty soon the whole thing comes unraveled.”
That was what had happened to her father. She couldn’t argue with the logic or sense of justice. Unraveled. Yes, there were unfortunate doors that opened and couldn’t be closed again. It was best not to open them in the first place.
FORMER COVENANT BATTLECRUISER PIOUS INQUISITOR, APPROACHING SHAPS’ STAR
The deck shivered. Staffan felt like he was in an elevator that had suddenly accelerated. His first reaction was to check his watch—less than two hours’ transit time—and his next was to look to Edvin for his best guess as to where Inquisitor had dropped out of slipspace.
“So where are we?”
Edvin studied his datapad. “Well, pick one of two star systems. Cordoba or Shaps. They’re both in range.”
Fel huddled in an alcove on the control room deck with a dozen of his crew plus his two lieutenants, Dhak and Eith, and there seemed to be a debate going on. Staffan had picked up a few words in various Kig-Yar dialects over the years. He made sure nobody knew how much he actually understood, though. Ignorance might not have been bliss, but the appearance of being a stupid flat-face was a great negotiating advantage.
He strained to eavesdrop, expecting this to be something about how they were going to disguise Inquisitor’s lack of capacity or some other defect, but a few words leaped out at him. Home. Pay. Late. Enough trouble. Fel’s crew just wanted to close the deal, get paid, and lie low.
That was useful to know. Fel had to be under pressure from all sides. He was stuck with stolen property that he needed to off-load before his crew got too restless and before an angry Sangheili tracked him down. He’d be flexible on price. Kig-Yar thought they’d written the book on piracy and sharp practice, but Staffan had been taught his trade by a genuine, fully-qualified, twenty-four-carat gangster. Fel had surrendered control of the transaction the minute he decided to stroll off with a warship with very few potential buyers he could sell it to.
“Where are we, Fel?” Staffan asked. “Cordoba or Shaps?”
He hoped Edvin was right about the system. He usually was. Intelligence ran in the family. Fel’s huddle broke up and the shipmaster stalked across the deck, doing a good impression of someone who was in control of his crew.
“Shaps’ Star,” Fel said. “Very good. Shaps Three is a wasteland. Just ancient ruins, and nobody’s going to notice the energy spike out here.”
“So what’s your plan?”
“We’ll be in position shortly. We’ll make this fast, just to be prudent.” The Kig-Yar trotted over to the far end of the command console. “I’ve launched a remote to sit on the surface and send back images. Then we can see how effective the beam is. Actually, beams. There are two.”
“You haven’t tested it, then.”
Fel looked over his shoulder at Staffan as if he was mad. He could turn his head a disturbingly long way, almost like an owl. “Of course not. Vaporizing the surface of a planet is inclined to attract attention.”
“I meant on Sanghelios.”
“Glassing would have been extra. We were paid to transport.”
Staffan sometimes wondered if Fel was joking or simply playing up to the Kig-Yar stereotype. But he looked at the mad little yellow eyes with their slit pupils, and decided that the bastard meant every word.
Good. Makes life easier.
Staffan could communicate with Edvin like a card cheat. A glance here, a breath there, and his son knew where he was heading with a deal, and Staffan knew what Edvin thought as well. They watched Fel tapping in coordinates. Then the bridge doors parted and the Huragok floated in. He was moving pretty fast, as if he had urgent news. Staffan was distracted for a moment, fascinated by the engineering feat of making a fairly heavy creature like that buoyant and mobile simply with gas sacs.
“What do you want?” Fel asked irritably, not even looking up from the controls. “We’re about to deploy the beam.”
Sometimes Sinks hovered right next to him. How did Fel understand it? The Huragok appeared to understand him, but its responses were all flurries of tentacles, a kind of sign language. If the Huragok came with the ship, then Staffan was going to need a better interface than that.
“What do you mean, no?” Fel said suddenly.
Sinks backed off a little, but his tentacles were going crazy like a bookmaker at a racetrack.
“It’s got to be done,” Fel said. “Go away.”
The Huragok appeared to be getting increasingly distressed. Staffan couldn’t tell what the bioluminescence meant, but when the Huragok put one tentacle on Fel’s arm, it was hard not to see the gesture as an attempt to stop the ventral beams from being fired.
“What’s up with him?” Edvin asked.
Fel put out a bony arm to steer the Huragok away. “Artifacts. He says we can’t destroy the artifacts down there.”
“Are they important?”
“Just Forerunner ruins. The false gods. If they were useful—like portals—we would have made use of them by now. Some of those still function, you know. It�
��s simply that you have no guarantee where the wormhole terminates, because they haven’t been maintained for thousands of years.”
Fel stepped back from the console as if he’d given up on the idea, then turned toward the doors. Sinks followed him. The door parted, the two of them disappeared down the passage, and Staffan waited. The Kig-Yar on the bridge glanced over their shoulders as if this was a regular delay in their day. It was only when Fel came back some time later without the Huragok that Staffan wondered if Fel had shot the creature.
No. They’re too valuable. He’s still trying to sell him to me.
“I locked him in the brig,” Fel said. “But he might reconfigure the locks.”
“I thought they were supposed to be obedient,” Edvin said. He shot Staffan a glance. “How do you control them?”
“They have one purpose in life,” Fel said. “To be engineers. To build, maintain, and repair. That’s how the Forerunners made them, to ensure that they’d always be happy and willing workers. Sometimes they can be very insistent about looking after inanimate objects, but despite their strength, they’re not aggressive. Just annoying.”
Fel walked back to the console and started switching between cam feeds. Staffan could now see multiple holographic views of Shaps 3 and the keel of the ship, including the surface of the planet from ground level, showing a cluster of extraordinary buildings in the distance.
“Are those the Forerunner ruins?” he asked.
Fel adjusted the controls. “Yes.”
“They’re astonishing.” Staffan had never seen anything like it. “How long ago did they abandon them?”
“Millennia.” Fel was unmoved. He was used to seeing this, but Staffan definitely wasn’t. “Don’t worry. I doubt they’ll return to file a complaint.”
It was no time to worry about cultural vandalism. Staffan still felt uneasy about it, though, like nuking the pyramids at Giza. He put it out of his mind. Buildings weren’t people, no matter how fascinating and awe-inspiring they might be. Lives came first.
Another camera gave him an aerial view of the planet with a magnification that looked like an altitude of ten thousand meters. When the beam fired, he’d see exactly what it did from every angle.
And this is what they did to Sansar.
He had to put some emotional distance between that and what he was seeing now. He’d left Sansar behind long before the place was glassed. But it was hard not to remember the house, the neighbors, and the forests, and calmly accept that they’d all been vaporized without mercy or warning. He looked at Fel.
But Fel didn’t press that button. And Fel didn’t take my daughter.
When it was impossible to tell whose hands were clean in this world, getting through the day was a matter of deciding who you hated least. Staffan concentrated on the cam feed projections and took a couple of steps toward Edvin. His son was watching Fel too.
“Did they say prayers?” Edvin asked.
Fel’s head flicked from side to side as he stared down at the controls. The ruff of black feathers made him look even more raven-like. “What?”
“Did the bastards say prayers before they pressed the button? You know. To sanctify the act or some voodoo bullshit like that.”
“I have no idea.” Fel seemed to take the comment as a shared dislike of the Sangheili, not the thinly veiled insult to an entire Covenant that included him. “I was never present for such a thing. Is everyone ready?”
“Do it,” Staffan said.
He was already thinking which city he might target in due course, and how he’d feel when he was in Fel’s position. It made him feel slightly sick. He wondered if the Sangheili who gave the order to fire had any misgivings, but then reminded himself that the entire Covenant war was about maximum collateral damage. It was genocide.
And if I use this as a bargaining chip, then I have to be prepared to do the same.
It didn’t matter. Whatever question he asked would be heard more loudly with a battlecruiser to back him up, even if he left it berthed in some shipyard.
“It’s fully powered.” Eith leaned closer to a control panel and scrutinized it with a beady red eye. He didn’t seem to bother with formal commands and responses. He gave Staffan the impression that he thought all that military discipline was nonsense. “You may activate it, Shipmaster.”
“Watch,” Fel said. The Kig-Yar spread his claws and pressed his palm on a large disc-shaped control. “Make sure you watch, Sentzke.”
A faint, tickling vibration climbed through the soles of Staffan’s boots. He didn’t dare take his eyes off the screens, but the back of his tongue started to itch, an irritation that made him want to scratch deep inside his ears. In the hull cam view, a pinpoint of white-hot light fringed with violet expanded into a swirling ball of energy in seconds.
The projection dimmed slightly. The deck shivered and the sensation in Staffan’s ears became so intense that he jammed his fingers into them to try to relieve it. Then all he could see for a painful second was blinding, blue-white light.
When he blinked again, he was looking down a long, narrow beam of fire apparently connected to the surface of Shaps 3, and a heartbeat later a white-hot ball spread like a bursting dam and turned red-hot in seconds. The beam vanished. The red area roiled like the surface of the sun, broken up by an undulating black mesh.
Molten rock. Smoke. Oh God.
A strange wailing, keening sound, desperately animal, suddenly filled the bridge. Staffan’s gut lurched: the hair rose on his nape. It sounded like souls in torment, and for a moment he let himself be swallowed by something stupid and irrational.
It’s not the dead. Look for the explanation. You’re a rational man, for God’s sake.
But Staffan still thought the unthinkable. He hoped whoever had snatched Naomi had taken her off-planet. He couldn’t bear to think of her dying like that.
Fel made an angry rasping noise. “Dhak, go and shut that thing up.” He turned to Staffan. “The Huragok’s managed to access the ship’s broadcast system. That’s him, whining. He’s upset about useless Forerunner ruins.”
Dhak went trotting off to sort out Sometimes Sinks. Knowing what the noise was didn’t make Staffan feel any more comfortable, but he composed himself to look at the ground view of the strike. Edvin asked for it to be replayed a few times. Each seemed freshly shocking, especially the ground-level view. One moment the horizon was low hills and cliffs with a cluster of ancient, gigantic, thoroughly alien ruins, and the next it was just pure white light, followed seconds later by what looked like an instant red ocean that lit the sky like a sunset behind dense black clouds. There was nothing left but heat and smoke. Even the geological features seemed to have vanished. The terrain was now almost completely flat.
“At least you wouldn’t feel anything,” Edvin said. “Not unless you were a few kilometers outside the area. Then you’d know a lot more about it.”
Staffan was speechless. He was also stunned that the beam had erased the entire Forerunner site. He thought he could still pick out a few stumps of the foundations, but that was all. His scalp prickled.
Get a grip. This is a war. Not a conservation project.
He’d have to calculate the blast radius of the strikes. He didn’t even know if he could vary the output. But the Huragok would, and presumably it wouldn’t care about what happened to Earth any more than it had cared about the colonies.
“So this is the Huragok’s ship, then,” Staffan said, trying to look unimpressed. “I mean that he’s the resident engineer.”
“No, we salvaged him from a wreck we found drifting. He was stranded.” Fel looked toward the doors as Sinks drifted in, still making sad little oooo-oooh sounds. The shipmaster strode up to him, feathers raised. “It’s just crumbling stone, you idiot. Shut up. Do you hear me? It’s nothing important.”
Edvin moved closer to Staffan and gave him a discreet nudge to indicate he’d ask some questions to shake Fel down. “If these Huragok are so brilliant, how come he
was stuck in a wreck?” he asked. “Why didn’t he repair it, or rebuild the hull, or whatever?”
Fel shrugged. “I don’t know. Maybe he was damaged by whatever destroyed the ship. Maybe all his comrades were killed so there was nobody left to maintain him. But he’s still useful.”
Sometimes Sinks floated toward Staffan. It was hard to see the creature as a machine. He peered into Staffan’s face, which might have been an appeal for moral support or an accusation. It was impossible to tell. Then he made a flurry of signs with his tentacles, none of which meant anything to Staffan, but if the speed and the increased bioluminescence were anything to go by, it was a long and impassioned monologue. None of the Kig-Yar took any notice.
“You really need to get this thing a translator, Fel,” Staffan said. “He might be telling us something important, like the power’s about to overload or something.”
Fel glanced at the Huragok. “He isn’t. He’s just complaining and telling us we’re doing bad things to the ruins.” The Kig-Yar shrugged. “They don’t normally express opinions. Maybe his last ship dumped him to get some peace.”
Edvin checked that the power levels had returned to ready status. There was no point buying a battlecruiser that had fired its only shot.
“I want to try it,” Staffan said.
He half-expected Fel to make some excuse to avoid it, but the shipmaster seemed relaxed. “Go ahead.”
Fel indicated the controls. They were surprisingly simple for such an apocalyptic weapon—a power readout, a simple palm-sized button, and a nav display like others he’d seen in Covenant ships. He wasn’t entirely sure how to change the aim. Sometimes Sinks hovered at his side, making odd noises. Staffan could only see him as a distressed child, desperate to stop the grown-ups from doing something upsetting.
“Okay, you tell me where to aim, then,” Staffan said. He looked into the Huragok’s face, trying to connect with him. “I know. It upsets you. We don’t have to hit the ruins.”
Sinks moved to tap the controls. The views on the various displays changed. He seemed to have shifted the ship by about fifty kilometers.
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