Envoy

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “There are Unggoy in the breach!” Melody shouted.

  The promise of an easy foe proved to be too much of a draw. The two guards ran up the gently curved corridor toward the destruction.

  Melody waited a moment, then, once they were out of sight, shot the door lock with the plasma pistol.

  Nothing.

  “Damn it.”

  Melted metal from the control pad she’d shot dripped slowly toward the floor.

  “The human lies! There are no Unggoy here!” shouted one of the guards from the distance.

  Melody dropped her second plasma grenade up against the crack in the doors. No time to get clear. She fired up the Kig-Yar point defense shield and huddled behind it.

  The blast from the grenade knocked her clear back against the other wall. Quickly recovering, Melody turned the shield off and scrabbled toward the small hole she’d created with the grenade.

  Glowing hot edges seared her back and sides as she wriggled into the dark cavern of a room just as the two furious guards reached the door.

  Melody held the deactivated Kig-Yar gauntlet against the hole and turned it on. The edges spat solid energy against the floor and forced the shield up into the soft, heated metal, where they fused together, effectively blocking the only way into the room. The frustrated guards kicked and pulled at it, but the energy shield remained firmly wedged in place.

  In the dim light of the hangar, she could just make out the three hulking cryo-chambers stacked against the wall by the door.

  She hit the light panel. The rest of the room revealed itself to be an entire storage bay crammed with spare parts. Half-stripped Spirit dropships with disturbingly rib-like skeletons gleamed in the harsh light, their engines ripped out. Cut-up Banshees and Vampire fighters were held down by metallic straps. Rows and rows of rounded buckets with Sangheili script denoted dirty salvage for every imaginable kind of ex-Covenant craft.

  She’d known the Sangheili fleets were ghosts of their former selves and that Rojka had limped his own fleet to Carrow on chewing gum and spit. This confirmed it. The proud fleetmaster had never shown her this particular area when touring her around his vessel.

  Melody turned back to the cryo-chambers.

  With the lights on, she could now see that each of them indeed contained a Spartan.

  They looked like statues in there, she thought. Statues roughly two meters tall and wearing half a ton of armor. Just waiting. They didn’t know it, but the Spartan trio had been sealed up for almost six years while drifting deep in former Covenant space.

  Adriana-111, the muscle behind the three. A deadly sniper and a chaotic influence on the group. She was not one for protocol, and she had little patience for leadership. But she had proven herself against tremendous odds repeatedly, according to the files Melody had read.

  Michael-120. The technical expert who could fly, shoot, or hack pretty much anything after watching it being used. Known for jury-rigging deadly weapons out of spare parts. And breaking through any security thrown his way. He was also their pilot.

  And Jai-006, their leader. ONI records indicated that without Jai, the team would simply not hold. It was his will that drove them forward. Kept them focused. An indomitable fighter, even among other Spartans.

  This was Gray Team.

  Now they stood in front of her, frozen in place.

  Melody tapped out codes on the chamber readouts and started cycling them awake. She was doing this faster than was safe, but they didn’t have much time.

  She took a closer look at their armor now that she had a spare moment. This was the first time she’d seen Spartans up this close. It was one thing to see vid or images and quite another to stare up at the massive bulk right in front of your fingertips. Living history, she thought, with no small amount of awe. But she frowned as she leaned forward.

  This team was battered to hell. Deep furrows left by plasma fire scarred almost every element of the Mjolnir armor. Large, irregular dents in their chest plates caught the shadows. Jai-006’s slightly crooked helmet had a visor at the top that had curled downward from some incredible impact.

  Melody couldn’t see anything behind the silvered faceplate. Just her own tired face looked back at her, curiously warped by the curve.

  “Come on,” she whispered, checking the readouts.

  “Envoy!” shouted a familiar, guttural voice from the other side of the doors. Rojka, projecting the kind of anger that was universal.

  Melody glanced at the readouts one last time. She took a deep breath and walked over to the doors. “Yes, Fleetmaster Rojka?”

  “You wake the dead.”

  “They offer you a chance to fight back against your cousin.”

  “No, they do not! The Demon Three must pay for their sins!” Rojka replied. “What you are doing is unacceptable. But . . . I shall grant you one opportunity. Know that you will join in their fate if you do not turn this shield off so we can enter.”

  “I’m sorry, Rojka,” Melody said. “I can’t do that.”

  “I was indeed foolish to let you aboard my ship. Tell me, was it ever your true intent to negotiate peace between my people and the humans, or was this all just an opportunity to liberate the Demon Three?”

  “I wanted peace,” she said.

  Yes, her primary job was to restore peace between humans and the Sangheili, but ONI had recruited her discreetly to pass on any recon about Gray Team’s condition while she was aboard the Sangheili ship and, if possible, negotiate a release. As part of their normal function, the UNSC had also trained Melody and her staff to use Covenant technology and weapons.

  Even more enigmatic, during her ONI sessions Melody had received extra training from one Commander Ivrin Yarick on how to rapidly cycle a cryo-chamber without irreparably damaging its contents. Just in case, he’d noted.

  Just in case what? she’d asked. It’s not like I can smuggle three Spartans out of a ship full of Sangheili. That can’t be my real mission . . . can it?

  Yarick had looked at her, his expression inscrutable. It’s just in case, he repeated. We told you what’s down on that planet. We’re covering every conceivable eventuality.

  Maybe the Spartans will smuggle you out of the ship, he said with a grim seriousness.

  Now the bottom chunk of the door leading into the hangar blew apart. The Kig-Yar shield flew forward and smacked Melody’s legs. She pitched face-forward to the floor, slamming her cheek. Her vision blurred as she lay there and tried to get her thinking straight again.

  “Grant me entrance!” Rojka shouted from what now seemed like a long distance away, his entrance blocked by the partially sealed door. There were other angry words. Focusing on Sangheili language with her head spinning this fast took too much effort.

  An energy sword burst through the door. It sizzled and spat, cutting down slowly as the Sangheili on the other side strained to shove the shaped plasma through solid metal. Melody could see thick, alien feet through the hole in the bottom.

  Hands shaking, blood dripping off her chin down onto her arms, Melody took out her third plasma grenade, armed it, and heaved it ever so gently through the missing chunk of door.

  “Wort wort wort!” the Sangheili shouted, feet thudding as they leapt for safety. She knew what that meant, but her brain was too fuzzy to translate after exerting the energy it took to steady herself and throw the grenade.

  The plasma grenade’s explosion sucked the breath out of Melody, yanking the air out through the hole. She dropped to her knees and fired the acquired plasma pistol three times through the opening.

  She couldn’t focus on the door. It waved and wobbled in front of her.

  She glanced down to see the floor covered in blood around her feet. Too much blood. A strangely shaped piece of metal on the side of her stomach stuck out of her uniform. Melody tried to reach for it, puzzled. She didn’t remember getting hurt, but it was clearly a jagged sliver of the door that had speared her.

  Right now, rather than continue to stand an
d fight back the Sangheili, it felt a lot more important to sit down and shove her back up against the nearby cryo-chamber. She’d already lost too much blood.

  Melody strained against the pain, propped the plasma pistol on her knee, and kept it aimed at the doors.

  Whenever she saw so much as a shadow, she fired.

  But the shadows didn’t just appear near the doors. They spun around her, lifting the room up and whipping it around her in looping, wobbly circles until she closed her eyes.

  “Rojka! It’s about more than just the Spartans . . .” She tried to shout, but her voice faded away as if she stood at the far end of a tunnel. “It’s . . . something bigger.”

  The tunnel door slammed shut. The sounds faded. Everything fell away from her.

  Melody tightened her finger on the trigger. The last thing she felt was the recoil of the plasma pistol firing, firing, firing.

  The Jiralhanae chieftain Hekabe jumped from one of the arms of a siegework gunship and landed on the ground with a satisfied grunt. The gunship itself, a machine sometimes called a “grave-maker,” was a rugged, nest-shaped gun platform, crudely fused together and plated over with heavy armor shielding, struggled to get back into the air. Its weight seemed to momentarily overpower the sputtering blast and roar of its cluster of downward-facing engines, before it climbed back up into the sky. Hekabe felt satisfaction watching the tanklike craft providing Jiralhanae on the ground with substantial firepower from its array of heavy-grade spike autocannons, now that it had deployed him and his warriors to the surface.

  A blast of hot air hit Hekabe’s face from a building on fire nearby. He watched with interest as the oddly rectangular metal and glass structure succumbed and collapsed to the street in an explosion of debris. A rolling cloud of noxious dust struck him and his eyes narrowed. Above it all, his extensively armored cruiser, the Foebane, hung in the air, an immeasurable shadow blocking out the city’s sky. More grave-makers bristling with vicious firepower fell rapidly from its belly, delivering packs and hordes of Jiralhanae. Several of the ships skittered off between the human buildings, dipping and weaving, opening fire at anything that moved below.

  Hekabe breathed in the stench of burned rubble as he shifted his massive gravity hammer—Oath of Fury—from his hands and slung it over his shoulder. War hammers traditionally passed through a long line of elders through the customs of his people. But this one he had pried from the hands of an enemy in combat, then used it to finish him off.

  “Look at our might!” Hekabe shouted into the hot wind. The chieftain wore a large, rugged combat harness from the Jiralhanae’s time within the Covenant: black-crimson armor masked with ornate linework. He raised Oath of Fury over his helmet. A single crest dominated the helmet, with two flanking plates that swung backward to either side, and a fearsome horn that jutted from above his snout—a design that paid homage to Doisac’s native degaeorth, a giant predatory beast that stalked the planet’s dense forests. “Their structures are weak! They are weak!”

  Hekabe’s captains surrounded him. Their own armor also came from the old era of Covenant service, though most had made dramatic modifications, cobbling together features from the Jiralhanae heritage and trophies recovered from conquered foes—even the remains of the foes themselves.

  “I think I could bring their buildings down with a single strike of my hammer,” Hekabe gloated.

  “They do build puny things, Chieftain!” Vikus shouted over another wave of gunships kicking up dirt as they released rows and rows of Jiralhanae warriors onto the outskirts of the human city. “We did not have to worry about them interfering with our efforts.”

  Hekabe bared his teeth at Vikus. “And who was worried?”

  Vikus, who shaved his face raw and kept his head mane in a pair of tall strips along the top, looked directly down at the ground. “There were some,” he growled. “But they were wrong to doubt you, Chieftain.”

  “The infestation of the weak does not affect our plans,” Hekabe said. “It offers us a chance to harden our warriors to battle.”

  “Yes, Chieftain. You are correct. The humans have fled from here. They do not disturb us.” From the corner of his eye, Hekabe watched Vikus take several steps back. The Jiralhanae captain clenched his jaw, as if fighting to say something else but keeping it in check. Vikus, it seemed, had been one of those concerned about the large number of humans at the site but wisely now said nothing.

  Good. Hekabe wouldn’t be forced to kill him then. This was just another in a long series of doubts expressed by the Jiralhanae horde-captain in the past several months. Clearly Vikus wanted the chieftainship—Hekabe could see it on his face whenever he looked at him. But Vikus evidently favored life more than an uncertain chance at power. There were many Jiralhanae of the clan who had assumed Vikus would be the one to have killed the former chieftain Remarus—Hekabe’s great-uncle—and taken his title. But to the surprise of many, it had been Hekabe who seized the opportunity and slit the old warrior’s throat.

  There hadn’t been any other option at the time. Hekabe could have either moved against Remarus from the shadows to save them all from the peril he had placed them in, or waited only to see everything lost. The master packs, or skeins, feuding on Doisac had consumed so much of their world that the only way some packs could even get supplies was to raid the Sangheili frontier, stealing from the race that previously had oppressed their people within the Covenant. The global Jiralhanae civil war went far back in time: the two enormous skeins of Jiralhanae had battled each other on Doisac before the Covenant ever came along. They had destroyed each other—their civilization, their lands, and their people—with nuclear weapons, setting all Jiralhanae back hundreds of years.

  Some thought it had made them feeble, but Hekabe thought it had tempered his people. Made them stronger in the long run.

  The Rh’tol skein now gloried in the piracy against the former Covenant. It let them show their true strength to the very face of the Sangheili species that had so poorly treated them. The Vheiloth skein saw such looting and destruction as an unfortunate necessity. But Hekabe believed it all to be simple weakness.

  It was time for Jiralhanae to stop scavenging for scraps.

  Many chieftains disagreed with him. To take these ships to help a Sangheili faction in a minor civil war was—for their part—utter madness. The Sangheili had lorded over the Jiralhanae in the Covenant for decades. They openly despised the Jiralhanae and had torn apart the Covenant in open war the very moment the Jiralhanae became favored by the Prophets. The Great Schism, as most Jiralhanae knew, had shown the truth of the Elite–Brute relationship—the Sangheili were arrogant and cruel slavers. For Hekabe to offer assistance to an Elite showed incredible vulnerability and poor character, as far as his opposition was concerned.

  Hekabe had to kill many doubters in order to get his pack to this world that Sangheili and humans squabbled over.

  He knew there were still skeptics, like Vikus, lurking among his warriors. And so it wasn’t angry Jiralhanae back on Doisac that Hekabe had feared, and that he had been forced to silence or outmaneuver. Those who had questioned Hekabe’s plans and desired to see him dead had been easy to spot. It was the quiet ones—who would betray and kill him in the dark as Hekabe himself had done to Remarus—who troubled him. Though he would never speak of this.

  Destiny was now within his grasp. “Are the Sangheili ships still fighting above us?”

  “Yes,” Vikus said.

  Jiralhanae autocannon platforms flew patterns over the city’s skyline, black smoke chugging from their engines as they unloaded a barrage of white-hot metal into enemy fortifications. Knifelike Prowler and Marauder groundcraft roared around the human streets, heavily armored warriors hanging off their plating. The cruelly shaped Jiralhanae vehicles looked as though they had been cobbled together from raw pieces of steel, optimized for bone-crushing speed and unforgiving firepower. “Excellent. The longer the Sangheili remain distracted, the better.”

  “Th
ey are trying to board their kaidon’s ship.”

  Their honor, Hekabe thought, prevented them from just destroying it from a distance. Well, it was good for him. The Sangheili would battle each other for some useless reason or another for many hours yet before they understood why Hekabe had really landed planetside.

  That was all the time he needed.

  Hekabe projected a map into the air from a holotank sitting on the ground. “Destroy any buildings in this zone,” he ordered, initating a perimeter-like designation in the hologram. With the vast section of the human city spread before them, a precise area was carved out for Hekabe’s operation. This was not going to be indiscriminate destruction: he had a plan. “Then we will bring the Unggoy down from the Foebane.”

  He glanced at the desert in the distance. When he was finished here, the Sangheili would rue the day they had ever heard his name.

  As would the humans.

  CHAPTER 4

  * * *

  * * *

  Jai-006 dimly heard the sound of repeating plasma pistol fire. He raised an armored hand and pushed against the glass of the cryo-chamber. His skin under the Mjolnir armor blazed with frozen itch. He wanted to dig his fingernails in under the surface and just rip it all off to get it to stop.

  There was a woman—likely the source of the pistol fire—slumped over onto the floor. The walls in this place under the emergency lighting looked smooth, organic, with flowing bulkheads swooping down from the tall ceilings. In the distance to his side was a large cavernous hangar bay, filled with rows of Covenant vehicles and machinery. Jai kicked the protective glass to shatter it. He yanked free of hoses plugged into his armor and stepped out of the chamber.

  A wave of extreme sickness dizzied him. He forced himself to stand still for a second and let it pass.

  “Where are we?” Adriana-111 asked inside his helmet. “Can you let me out?”

  Jai crouched next to the fallen woman. She wore a gray uniform he didn’t recognize. Blood splattered the collar and torso. A lot of it came from the wound in her right side, where there was a jagged piece of metal sticking out from under the fabric. Her nose and busted lips dripped more blood down off her chin. “We’re inside a Covenant ship.”