One of Grace’s aides had mounted a paper map of the city on the wall—this is how they had done this sort of thing hundreds of years ago. Paper on a wall in an underground facility. It seemed incredibly inefficient and impractical to Ellis, but it was all they had right now. Someone had used a marker to shade areas showing the Jiralhanae-controlled sections of Suraka, isolated on the border of the city and the vast Uldt desert. “The rough headcount is about three hundred Jiralhanae on the ground, judging by the dropship intervals and spotter counts,” the aide said. “They’re demolishing the buildings and using heavy equipment—large, heavily weaponized excavation platforms, like the ones we saw during the war. Now that they’ve secured the area and airspace, they’re using a legion of Unggoy to push the rubble toward the city. It may be some kind of barricade. We’re not sure. We don’t have any eyes in the sky at the moment, but some reports indicate they’re leveling all the buildings in that zone of the city as well.”
General Grace added, “They stopped our incursions, reacting very negatively whenever units passed the financial district and approached the residential areas. They did not pursue during retreat but kept to the occupied areas marked off on the map. For Jiralhanae, they were very organized about it. Usually you can lure them out with a three-person team—decoy squads designed to break up pack numbers. Two for firepower, and someone posing as bait. They never took it. Step past the demarcation point, though, and they attack en masse and with extreme prejudice.”
Two hints in one statement about Jiralhanae brutality, Ellis realized. “How . . . many people did we lose testing their defenses?”
“Twenty percent casualties on units sent in before withdrawal,” Grace said, grimacing. “We’re still sorting out the casualty lists, lots of possible MIAs, others deserters. Some of them are pretty shaken up after seeing these aliens face-to-face, and seeing what they’re capable of. They certainly earn the name Brutes.”
Ellis knew that General Grace had been offered a career track in the UNSC and could have continued a life back on Mars, in the UEG’s population dispersal effort. Grace had no love for the UNSC, but many found a way to bury that in exchange for stability. Most people here in Suraka had considered building new lives back in Earth’s solar system after becoming refugees, living on the Martian reserve for the first few years after the war. Any citizen here could have continued down that safe, comfortable path.
But they’d come to Carrow. Many with children. So far from the UNSC, out here in the Joint Occupied Zone where so many glassed worlds existed. They’d wanted a place of their own. Freedom from the wars of the past, from the UNSC’s overextended control. Some believed the UNSC would eventually use the Covenant as an excuse to gain full military control of the colonies—all of them, including Carrow. Conspiracy theory crap, but Ellis had heard it often enough when campaigning for governor.
Ellis constantly reminded voters of the fact that she’d grown up on Carrow and was eighteen when she’d fled Suraka with her entire family before the Covenant fleet could arrive. She’d been forty when she returned here. Jeff had been born on the UEG’s reserve, a network strewn across the southern dunes of Terra Cimmeria on Mars. Her husband, another refugee, had hailed from Arcadia. She’d met him in the camps.
Her delayed engineering degrees, something she’d fought to get even as the war crept closer and closer to Earth, had been a defiant victory. Her return to Carrow, yet another.
“How many casualties will we take if we try a full assault?” Ellis sat down in one of the conference chairs. “We have four thousand in the militia and three or four thousand volunteers, right?”
Grace nodded, hesitant. “We don’t have any orbital support with our ships hiding out past the moon. If we tried anything of that nature, the overwhelming probability is that we’d be destroyed by the Jiralhanae or Sangheili ships in orbit. It would be suicide.”
“And if the enemy didn’t have the high ground?” Assuming some miracle, or that everyone aboard the Surakan ships laid their lives down to give everyone on the ground a chance.
“Hundreds of Jiralhanae against our militia, and them armed to the teeth with fully weaponized ground and aircraft?” Grace shook her head. “I can’t condone any manner of frontal assault at this time, even assuming the remote possibility the other ships could provide some support. The risk is simply too high.”
Ellis sank further back into her chair. She’d browbeaten and shepherded so many toward her platform of reinvestment and ambassadorship. She’d worked hard to get negotiations between the Sangheili here on Carrow with the UEG as a mediator. All things the prior governor, Kait Adelie, had chosen to delay in order to first make sure the militia was built, the bunkers were dug, and Suraka was fully prepared for the worst. The Sangheili only had tens of thousands in the keeps of Rak, banding those together into something like what humans would call a city. Humanity outnumbered them by a million in Suraka. But the Sangheili were vicious fighters.
Ellis had viewed a potential war as tremendously wasteful. Yes, the Sangheili had landed six years ago and started building in the Uldt, thinking Carrow abandoned, only months before humans returned to reestablish Suraka. And yes, they were very territorial. But the UNSC hadn’t protested the Sangheili colony, and in fact, some suggested that Carrow was offered to the Arbiter’s people by the UNSC to assuage their Sangheili allies in light of some unspeakable crime. What was more likely was that the UEG hadn’t even had eyes on the planet at all since the Covenant attack years earlier, but once they found it, it would have only strained the tense postwar relations to demand that the Arbiter and his leadership uproot tens of thousands of determined warriors. So they didn’t.
And the first few years had been so quiet, Ellis thought. You could even pretend that there weren’t aliens living on the other side of the Uldt. Imagine that, somehow, a sandy, impassable border protected them. Sure, people here grumbled. But it was reiterated by their advocates over and over that the Sangheili weren’t like the rest of the Covenant. Their naval fleets had actually turned on humanity’s enemies and fought side by side with people.
Then, as time went on, more and more “incidents” had happened at the edge of the desert.
Conflicts between human settlers and Sangheili. Maybe war was inevitable. If that was to come, she had thought then, let it be after humanity had grown in numbers and in manufacturing ability. Infrastructure. Resource allocation. Trade. Everything that came along with a burgeoning human economy.
She’d had the figures, damn it. Three more years, and the Sangheili here on Carrow would have been utterly unable to face them in any kind of context.
Maybe that was why they had attacked now.
“Governor?”
Now people were throwing their lives away in “probing defenses” so that they could ascertain the strength of this sudden Jiralhanae occupation? And Ellis herself had been the one who said they needed to probe those defenses, hadn’t she?
Ellis flipped through the notes her aide had taken of orders she’d given, looking for written confirmation that she had actually suggested they do this. A few days earlier, she was working through plans to solve runoff issues at the base of Arduu Ridge; now she was sending soldiers into a meat grinder to test enemy defenses. What could ever prepare one to be a wartime leader? she wondered. Nothing—it was a constant roller coaster ride of emotions, guilt, and fear.
“Governor, are you okay?” Grace asked, concerned.
There. There it was, on paper. She’d clearly ordered this disaster. It had just been words, though. Things that she’d known would be expected of her. Probe their defenses, she’d ordered. Figure out what’s going on up there.
But now the blood was on her hands.
This was all too messy. Ellis couldn’t see a way around it—people would die, no matter what choices she made. And if she choked, people would still die. There were only less-bad decisions here.
Ellis looked up at the general and her aide, who were both staring at her. “I . . . I jus
t want them off our world,” she whispered. Not just the Jiralhanae—she meant all of them. “I want them to go away.”
No matter which way Ellis pushed the pieces around, they would not click into place. Not this time. Her entire life, she’d been able to visualize a project and make it all line up. Now there was just unstructured chaos and those haunting less-bad choices in her head.
The general glanced at the aide and back to Ellis. “We’re trying to come up with solutions, Governor. Really, we’re trying.”
“Then we have to try harder, General. We have to push harder. We owe it to the people who took this journey with us to Carrow and who gave everything of themselves.”
General Grace rubbed her temples, letting her guard down for a second to show how tired she also was. “I know, Governor. Believe me, I’m feeling the weight of it all as well.”
From the Unwavering Discipline’s command bridge, Rojka ‘Kasaan watched his enemies scatter before him as his heavy cruiser accelerated, shields suddenly back up. Thars’s boarding craft and dropships sloughed off the hull, then spun and darted about fruitlessly as the fleetmaster shouted commands to ignore them.
Daga had followed his orders to get the shields online. Loyal Sangheili had bled the decks slick, defending repair parties throughout the ship. Lives had been spent. Even now, his crew kept fighting hundreds of intruders throughout its many corridors as the cruiser moved.
And, Rojka swore to himself, it would be for a worthy cause.
“Is this a final attack on Thars?” Daga asked. He had not questioned any of Rojka’s demands. No one had. The energy Rojka had returned to the command bridge with had galvanized all his officers. Something was afoot—the crew knew their fleetmaster and their kaidon. Possibilities seemed to brim as they murmured to each other of Rojka’s gambit: perhaps ramming the vessel into the traitor, or even going back to Sanghelios itself to return here with a greater fleet.
“No,” Rojka said to his second in command. “Thars is now beside the point. He does not matter.”
Three enemy frigates turned and raked Unwavering Discipline’s sides. Shields sputtered out once again. Rojka gave commands to spin the ship, spreading the damage out. Occasional bursts of plasma fire ripped through the hull. But Rojka was quicker. The belly he turned to his enemy’s spear was always the fat, never the muscle. Let them pierce his decks, but leave his engines intact.
“Fire back!” Rojka shouted. “Do not stand and gape at me, or I will strike you down myself to preserve your own honor!”
“If we are not attacking Thars, then what are we doing?” Daga asked. Fear colored his voice. “Are we running from him?”
Rojka gave Daga a hard look. “Running? I am Rojka ‘Kasaan. I will not be tainted by cowardice. I want vengeance.”
Rojka paused and looked out at the bridge crew. Only his most trusted officers knew about the Demon Three. He was sure many of his crew had been curious about why he had posted armed guards at that particular hangar bay. The quarantine held, however, and the existence of living human Spartans had remained a secret for most on Discipline.
“I would talk to all my crew,” Rojka said, tapping at controls to initiate a shipwide message.
The ship shivered, struck again, as Rojka nodded and began speaking. “Some time ago, many of you wondered why I took this ship back to the ruins of Glyke—the world most of you had considered home. For six years now, since its destruction, I have left many probes in the system—watching, waiting, reporting everything. They found a signal: a human signal. On the borders of the debris field, a single human escape craft was found, and aboard, three stasis chambers. Inside them, we found the Demon Three, a team of what the humans call ‘Spartans.’ They were held captive in secret on Discipline for a time, as I pondered how to exact their punishment.”
One of the lower-ranking officers on the bridge gasped, eyes widening.
Rojka continued. “We do not run from Thars. We chase the Demon Three now, as they have escaped this ship during battle, and with the human envoy’s help. Thars’s attack and the envoy have stopped us from bringing the Demon Three to proper justice for what they did to Glyke, and I will not let them slip from our grasp again. Will any of you?”
Now they all understood. Their eyes collectively gleamed.
Rojka looked at a single pip on one of his holoprojectors. “We are tracking them. We will catch them. We will kill them. Only then will we again turn our attention to Thars. This is why I ask you to fight the boarders. This is why you must hold the engine rooms and shield generators.”
The command bridge erupted in delighted roars of assent. Daga looked overcome for a moment. “I am with you, Fleetmaster and Kaidon. I pledge myself to this. I am sorry I doubted you. The demons will pay for the horrors they unleashed.”
More hits. Damage reports rolled in across projectors faster than Rojka could even understand them. “Is the slipstream drive available?” he shouted over the barrage of plasma tearing his ship asunder.
“One jump only. And we may end up in slipspace forever if we do it!” Daga answered. “We need just a moment to regain power.”
“Thars hails you, Fleetmaster!” the communications officer shouted.
“Show him to me.” Rojka looked up as his foe shimmered into being as a hologram in front of him. “Cousin Thars!”
The easy, informal greeting should have gotten a sneer from Thars, but his enemy was too gleeful. “You run! I am told your slipstream drive is being readied. I always knew you were a coward, Rojka. You are choosing to flee to Sanghelios. Back to where you are no longer considered a kaidon. Anyone of consequence you seek shelter from there will strip your ship from you in shame, brand you a failure, and give you menial work for the rest of your days.”
Rojka shook his head. “Thars, you and I fight over our visions for this world. You have come for my throat because you think I am weak. I understand this, grievous error though it is. But Thars, you bear scars by my hand, for you have seen me fight. Even now, you waited until you had more vessels and more warriors pledged to your cause than I before you would even dare attack me. You may gloat now, but look deep inside yourself. You know what I am. You know what I am capable of.”
Thars appeared to quickly sober. Confusion played across his face. “Then what is it that you are trying to do?”
“I hunt the Demon Three,” Rojka said, and enjoyed Thars’s stunned look. “I had them imprisoned in human stasis chambers until your ill-advised attack released them.”
“I had heard rumors,” Thars breathed. He twisted his head slightly. “And you let them live?”
“I did.”
Thars remained silent, thoughtful for a moment. Rojka glanced at the engineering readouts as Unwavering Discipline struggled to prepare for its single, risk-filled slipspace jump.
“Rojka, did you wish to use the Demon Three for trade?”
“I did.”
Thars waved a hand. “Unexpectedly clever of you. But you waited too long. So. I will allow you to die with honor if you tell me where they are.”
“They will be like a thistle in a forest, cousin. Only I know where that thistle is.”
“You lie.”
“I have a tracker on their escape ship,” Rojka said. “Kill me, and you lose it, and any hope of finding them. The last thing you want on Rakoi are three demons skittering about on its surface, no matter what happens to me.”
“I have as much right to hunt them as you,” Thars hissed. “They slew all that I knew as well.”
“You have made enough of a mess. It is time for me to do the right thing.” Rojka pointed at Daga. They didn’t need to delay anymore: further conversation was unnecesary. “Slipspace, by my order!”
Thars disappeared as Unwavering Discipline punched through the void, quickly launching through slipspace before emerging hundreds of miles away, trailing debris from the hundreds of jagged holes throughout the vessel.
Rojka looked at the tracker’s signal. It looked like the Spa
rtans were heading for the human city, Suraka.
“Down,” Rojka ordered. “Down toward the Spartans.”
“Our hull is damaged beyond repair,” Daga said. “We might not make it through the atmosphere. Our shields have fallen again, and we cannot reenter without them.”
“Sir, Thars and his fleet are adjusting their orbit,” an officer reported.
“They come for us,” Daga said.
“To the surface, I said!” Rojka shouted. He found a certain calm in choosing his next command: “And inform the repair crews they have until we enter the upper atmosphere to get the shields back up, or we will all burn.”
Hekabe sat on the remains of a concrete wall and looked at the growing pile of detritus the slave Unggoy were pushing up between the horrible-looking, burned-out human buildings on their perimeter. Some of the Unggoy utilized mechanized Goblins, peculiarly designed heavy-lift suits, which Hekabe allowed in limited numbers to expedite the process. They had bitten a large, circular chunk out of the entire city now, reduced the buildings in the circle to rubble, and created a great crater out of the debris.
Time was precious. He couldn’t glass the entire city—he simply didn’t have enough cruisers or opportunity to reduce everything around his underground target layer by layer. He needed to be precise. Fast. Accurate.
But they could start glassing this particular area. And in mere hours, unveil what he had come here for.
One of Hekabe’s trusted captains, Terrillus, approached. “The Sangheili appear to have stopped fighting each other,” he announced.
“Rojka has fallen already then?” Hekabe asked, surprised.
“No. His flagship is coming down out of orbit for the planet’s surface. Thars chases him.”
Hekabe stood up, alarmed. “Thars would not approach until he has killed his rival. This is unusual.”
“Do you think he suspects something?”
“I would speak with him. Now!”
Terrillus loped off toward the low-hovering troop carrier that Hekabe had been using as a temporary command center, with the chieftain striding close behind. Orders were shouted, the carrier’s Jiralhanae attendants ran around looking for a holotank, and moments later the three-dimensional image of Thars stood in front of them all.
Envoy Page 8