He knew he didn’t have much time before the pain of the tendrils reaching down to interface with his own neural tissue would burn through him. He steeled himself for the excrutiating sensory trauma.
“An entire generation has passed since the Covenant first set fire to our world,” Hekabe reminded them all. “And they laid waste to us until we accepted them as masters, accepted their ways, and welcomed their oppression. We survived on the scraps they threw us. We ate the Sangheili’s pervasive scorn, we lived underneath their boots for decades. Now, after all our sacrifices, our kin starve and we stand at the edge of thralldom. But we have tasted power before . . .”
The device, this ancient Forerunner machine, kept reaching deep into his brain. Explosions of light dazzled Hekabe, his ears roared from the surging rush of blood. A vast and powerful storm swept forward to grab his mind.
It’s just a machine, he reassured himself. Ancient and powerful. But technology and power to be wielded, like anything else.
“Do you remember?” Hekabe shouted, trying to hear himself over the din inside his own mind. The howling wind of ancient software was trying to rip at his thoughts. “Do you remember that brief moment when everything had been made right after we thrust the Sangheili out, when we stood near the apex of it all? It is time to stop fading away! It is time that we grasp for that same power once more so that we are never weak again! We will feed our children once more. We will gorge ourselves on fresh meat. We will cease begging for scraps. It is time for the Jiralhanae to rise!”
Hekabe knew that his voice had risen to a scream, but he could not even hear his own words. He realized then that he had not so much taken possession of the machine, as the machine had taken possession of him.
A blinding light that only he could see finished tormenting him in one last, frightening burst so that Hekabe could watch in silence against the inner storm as the great wall that barred entry to the citadel suddenly slid below the ground, finally revealing its inner contents to him. Racks and racks of stasis fields, the blue lights each like the lit tip of a candle from the distance.
Hundreds of thousands of points of light glowed. Inside each field, a shadow held firm by the stasis field’s embrace.
Deep in Gila Station, surrounded by an edgy Gray Team who seemed to be ready for combat to break out at any moment, Melody half turned back toward Commander van Eekhout as he held up a hand.
“You’ll want to think very carefully about what you are actually cleared to talk about,” he said.
“I understand,” Melody said. “I’ll own this.” It’d be her career thrown on the fire, and maybe her life—it was ONI, after all. They could just hunker down here and wait. Do nothing. She’d retrieved the Spartans. She’d done her best to stop this war. Now she was going to follow through with the rest of the plan. Even if it meant deploying a broken Gray Team.
The last thing she was going to do was to keep critical intel from them.
She would just lay her cards on the table.
“In fact,” van Eekhout said softly, “my orders were to convey the intel directly to them on the off chance that this opportunity were to materialize. I have rank and command privileges in this facility. No one does anything here without my clearance. They go when I say they go, and they stay when I say they stay.”
Adriana said, “Go ahead and pull rank. But you can’t force us to stay here. I wouldn’t guarantee your safety if you try.”
“You might be surprised,” van Eekhout said, an assured coolness in his voice.
“I’ve already poked around at your defenses,” Mike said. “She’s not wrong.”
Melody stepped into the middle of the group. “Let’s not get into threats. We’re all on the same side: Gray Team can’t be kept in the dark, van Eekhout. We’re the ones on the ground. We need to make the decisions here.”
“Sure,” Adriana remarked. “We said that when ONI gave us orders deep in Sangheili territory, after we went dark behind enemy lines.”
“You sure you want to talk about that right now?” Jai asked.
“Well, we all seem to be on the cusp of putting everything out in the open,” Adriana snapped. “This is as good a place as any to talk about it. We’ve been avoiding it long enough.”
“We made a choice, together,” Jai said.
“Was it the right choice?” Adriana asked. “You’ve heard the things the envoy’s been saying. The war ended in December of ’fifty-two. It was done, over with. So what did we do back there on Glyke, when we followed our original orders? You know damn well why those Sangheili want us dead.”
Jai shifted to face Adriana and Mike. Melody remained utterly silent.
“That far into enemy territory,” Jai said, his voice wearied by this burden, “with what we were asked to do . . . we all had to agree. We’d lost communications, so we fell back to protocol—all we had were the orders. We didn’t know the war was over.”
“We did what we did. It’s done and we can’t change it,” Mike said. “It was what we had to do. It’s what we’ve always done. Now is as good a time as any to explain it to these two. They’ll need to know, since those Elites will still be out there tracking us. They won’t give up. The envoy’s and agent’s lives are just as much in the line of fire.”
Jai turned to Melody. “It was called Operation: SUNSPEAR. You won’t find any records of it—it was activated just after Reach fell. I don’t know if you remember how desperate ONI was in ’fifty-two, how desperate it still feels, at least to me, even though you’ve told us the war has been over for six years. That humanity actually won . . .” He shook his head and stopped.
“The Covenant was right on our doorstep,” Melody prompted him, leading him. “We all thought our species would be extinct. And there were certainly some desperate measures by ONI. So what was SUNSPEAR?”
“Retaliation,” Jai said solemnly. “Specifically against the Sangheili naval commanders who led the fleets that destroyed our worlds. There were those within ONI who . . . wanted the Elites to know they were not invulnerable on their homeworlds either. We needed to extract a price from them for what they had done.”
He’d gone quiet again.
“I get it. It’s not an unknown strategy in total war,” Melody said. “You’re talking about a long strike: we couldn’t invade back, but we could demonstrate that we could reach them.”
“Early on during the war, we targeted prominent commanders and religious leaders,” Jai said. “We made sure their backup strategic minds were under the constant threat of assassination. Then, as things got worse and more human colonies fell, we were asked to do more.”
Van Eekhout looked rather concerned right now about where this conversation was headed; whether he knew or not what kind of confession was about to come from Jai couldn’t be immeditately determined. “Spartan, you don’t have authorization to—”
“No,” Adriana continued. “We do. What happened next was that an emergency order came through. Condition Endgame, it was called. It meant the Covenant had appeared in the Sol system, that the Cole Protocol had finally failed to protect us after all these years. We couldn’t reach Sanghelios itself—it was too well protected. But ONI made a breakthrough with intel in 2552. They learned the locations of a number of enemy strongholds, so we were immediately deployed to the Sangheili world of Glyke.
“We brought a NOVA bomb with us.”
Now Melody took a step back. Glyke, she realized. For Rojka ‘Kasaan, it was all about Glyke.
She had to suppress any emotion, any judgment, as she continued to listen. All her Diplomatic Corps training was kicking in. Glyke had been utterly destroyed in the wake of the war, only days after the UEG established a tentative peace treaty with the Arbiter. Billions of Sangheili, civilian and military, gone in a blink of an eye. Some had blamed the Jiralhanae, others had more elaborate theories of clan disputes on the planet itself—but now it appeared to have been ONI.
And Gray Team was responsible for carrying it out.
<
br /> “We voted,” Jai said. “We took the intel we had and we made a decision. We followed protocol. With Earth backed into a corner, we were confident humanity was about to be destroyed. So. What would you do if you knew everything you’d spent your life fighting for was about to be erased?”
This was it. This was the darkness that had settled over Gray Team and dogged them since Melody had met them, threatening to rip them apart.
Again, Melody would have to draw on her Diplomatic Corps training. She needed to help them come back from the edge of whatever precipice they now found themselves on.
Melody bit her lip. “You had to follow orders. You retaliated for Earth. You hoped the slaughter would stop our extinction.”
“And now you know why your Sangheili friend was willing to risk everything and come hunt for us,” Jai said.
“Those same Sangheili glassed entire human worlds!” Melody said. “Killed billions themselves! It was war, Jai. And we were all in a war for survival. Humanity was on the brink of extinction.”
“Our deep-space comms equipment was damaged,” Mike said. “We never got the orders to cease or withdraw. We didn’t know the war was over, never mind that there was peace. So we followed through with SUNSPEAR and lit the nuke.”
“We got out before the destruction,” Adriana said. “We watched from orbit in our escape shuttle. An entire planet ripped apart. Every living thing on it killed in a moment. Zero probability for survival, no matter what kind of lifeform. By the end, it was just empty debris where a planet once had been. And that’s when I actually started wondering—where does this armor stop and flesh begin?”
A rather introspective statement from a Spartan-II, Melody thought. They were struggling to process what had happened out there.
“The prowler we had originally deployed from was damaged during the blast. All we had left was a lifeboat. After a few days waiting for pickup, we went into cryosleep,” Jai said.
Those long hours, sitting in the dark. Wondering if they’d done the right thing. Waiting for rescue. Wondering if there was anything left that even could rescue them. Wondering if everything they knew was lost.
“You’re concerned about your functional viability as a team,” Melody said softly. “I take it that it wasn’t a confident unanimous decision when you finally decided to activate the NOVA. Now you’re being thrown into another war and you’re not sure which end is up. I understand your reluctance.”
Melody was willing to bet her pension that if they took those helmets off right now, Gray Team would be looking right through her. The “thousand-yard stare” they’d called it in the first machine-gun wars on Earth. When soldiers fought from trenches and shivered in the mud while artillery rained down on them.
Van Eekhout shook his head. “This is a scenario modifier. What was supposed to happen in the unlikely event that you managed to retrieve these Spartans was that they were to be immediately redeployed to secure—”
“What lies beneath Suraka,” Melody supplied.
“Yes.” Van Eekhout nodded, mouth quirking slightly. He seemed to view that as too much information. “If what they’re saying is true, then we need to get clearance from my superiors to redeploy them. Otherwise we risk intensifying the situation on Carrow exponentially—and even having it spill over into our ongoing peace negotiations with the Sangheili. I didn’t know they were directly responsible for Glyke, but this is certainly a new factor and it requires new mission parameters. The Sangheili here on Carrow are mostly Glyke refugees. We throw the Spartans into the mix—who they would likely consider war criminals—and we’re adding fuel to a raging fire. We need to keep them here for now and wait for new orders. Gray Team can’t be redeployed without my superiors’ clearance, or we could be risking everything the UEG and Carrow were trying to accomplish here.”
“Maybe,” Melody said. “But we’re in a desperate situation now ourselves. With the Jiralhanae’s strike and the rogue Sangheili making a play for the planet, there are over a million human lives in Suraka that need any help we can give them. And that’s not even considering the overall Suraka situation. If ONI’s models are correct, and the Jiralhanae have gotten to what’s under the city, our greatest risk isn’t human-Sangheili peace relations. It’s whether we’ll all survive what they get their hands on.”
“I’m going to reiterate that this is classified information. We need to have Command reassess the situation given these new factors before we provide any more information. Gray Team does not have the clearance—” van Eekhout started to say.
“With Suraka’s slipspace relay down, there’s nothing to piggyback off of, and that means days. We don’t have days,” Melody said. “And it’s classified information that everyone is shortly going to find out about the hard way if the Jiralhanae get access to what’s down there. Anyone trapped on this planet deserves to know what’s coming, including these Spartans.”
Melody turned to Jai, serious, and leaned forward. “Have you ever heard of the Sharquoi?”
CHAPTER 13
* * *
* * *
By the light of the lava flow around them, Hekabe stepped forward to the nearest stasis field in the first row of seemingly hundreds. The Forerunner machine had sunk more pieces of itself down into his skull, leaving only small shards still glinting from random spots on his head. Inside, more connections were being formed, reaching deeper into Hekabe’s consciousness. The immense presence that came with the neural link and the mysterious nano-machinery that now burrowed into Hekabe’s skull began to press in on him.
So many of them are lurking inside those stasis fields, Hekabe thought. All of them waiting to be unleashed.
Hekabe stepped closer, just an arm’s length away from the shifting energy patterns formed by—incredibly—the sustained breach of slipspace being perpetuated right in front of him. The bristles on his shaved arms twitched.
The figure behind the curtain of energy stood twice as tall as Hekabe on thick, trunk-like legs. The chieftain caught a glimpse of a gray, leathery skin over heavily bunched, corded muscle. Hekabe looked up at its fists, bigger than his head, shifting in and out of view under the wash of blue light. My hand looks like a young whelp’s next to these, he marveled.
And from just above the hands, two massive bone spikes jutted out, larger than Hekabe’s thighs. This creature could impale a Jiralhanae on them and simply pick it up to look at it with idle curiosity, like a mere toy. The rest of the creature was shrouded in the swirl of energies.
Hekabe knew what would come next: the chieftain swallowed as he merely willed the field to release its contents. The neural interface inside his mind twitched, the ancient machine now embedded deep inside his brain responding as it decoded Hekabe’s command.
The slipspace energy snapped like a foam bubble hitting seashore, with both time and space releasing its prisoner so that Hekabe could now gaze upon it unencumbered.
What looked like a single, cyclopean eye dominating the creature’s forehead was actually a lump of light-gray bony tissue, Hekabe now saw. It thrummed as it pinged the room around it with sound. Below the heavy head, the squat, powerful shoulders shifted as the arms stretched underneath a strange armored collar of Forerunner design. Hekabe stared at the beast’s jagged razorlike teeth that jutted awkwardly out over its jaw as its neck craned forward, taking in the room through sonic mechanism.
This was a creature designed for destruction, strength, and power. To see in the dark or in the light. To lay waste to any threat despite the environment it was faced with.
Hekabe tightly gripped Oath of Fury with both hands. It was to reassure himself. An instinctive response. Though what could his weapon do against something like this?
Anexus would not follow his chief any farther. He had stopped a few paces behind Hekabe, gaping at the stored beasts in their stasis fields. The rest of the nervous packs all remained at the threshold of the citadel’s gate, staring up in fear and awe.
“What is it?” Anexus asked
, terror seeping from him and fouling the air. “Chieftain . . . ?”
“Sharquoi,” Hekabe whispered. He stepped forward and left Anexus behind. His eyes blurred with sweat and blood as he walked up within the creature’s reach.
ONI Commander Greg van Eekhout looked like he’d swallowed something very distasteful. “Azikiwe, I’m going to ask one last time: are you sure you want to do this?”
“Yes,” Melody said firmly. Her mouth was dry. There was an electricity in the air. Was van Eekhout going to try and somehow lock down Gila Station to keep them all here? The Spartans would rip the place apart if he tried something stupid; she was sure of that. “And you’re going to help me because you know just how high the stakes are. We don’t have days for ONI to assess the situation. We need to move now.”
Van Eekhout nodded, resigned. “All right. Come with me.”
“Thank you,” Melody said.
He didn’t reply but led her and the Spartans to a ready room and turned on a holographic projector. “During the early days of JOZ integration, the UNSC debriefed a lot of Sangheili seeking political asylum or just trying to find a place to call home in the middle of their own civil war. One of our higher-target interviews was with a shipmaster who spent a great deal of time on the Covenant’s holy city of High Charity. His statements validated a long-standing suspicion based on rumors: within High Charity, there was a reserve weapon the Prophets had planned for the final attack on humanity. Something so powerful that the releasing of it would spell the absolute end of whatever world they had targeted. And even though they didn’t have many of them—according to his records, at least—once they located a target high in population and of sufficient morale value, like Earth, they would unleash it.”
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