Those who remained with Hekabe would be well rewarded for their loyalty. Though clearly some of them had unwittingly been caught with their packs, Hekabe could see they still stood here because they regarded their leader with some measure of respect.
“Our enemies gather overhead,” Hekabe said, using his own voice. So small, so weak. “We have sacrificed much to be to where we stand right now. But I promise you, it will be the beginning of a new age for our people—for the Jiralhanae. An age where we are finally restored to our proper might!”
The packs cheered, but it was halfhearted. They were uncertain of the Sharquoi or of the humans who had rocked the surface of the planet above.
Hekabe stepped forward toward his packs, beginning to cross the bridge. The massive Sharquoi lumbered forward around him as they responded to Hekabe’s will.
He raised his voice with a shout of triumph. The masses of Sharquoi responded with their own deafening roar and began marching past the packs over the bridge, their movement drowning out the sound of burbling lava. The nervous Jiralhanae stared as the army of giants rumbled past them, headed up the spiraling ramps carved into the sides of the shaft that led to the surface.
Jai hit the Warthog’s accelerator and swerved past a boulder in the dry riverbed. A blast of plasma struck the rock, shards of white fire raining and rattling into the vehicle. There’d been some human ships deorbiting in the distance, explosions in the clouds over Suraka. He hoped they were getting there in time, but it didn’t look good from here.
“Adriana!” Jai yanked the wheel, zigging and zagging them around and up the side of the banks, the wheels kicking up dust before ducking the Warthog back down into the riverbed.
“Just a second.”
A Banshee flipped around in the air and resumed its strafing run.
“Whichever Sangheili they’re working for sure knows where we are now,” Jai muttered.
“We’re ten minutes out from Suraka,” Mike told him. Something boomed up ahead, the shock waves felt in the Warthog. In the distance, a blanket of dirt and dust washed across the desert like an enormous wave.
“Earthquake?” Jai asked, as the plasma fire raked across the ground in front of them and he cut the wheel to avoid it.
“Nah. Something rang the bell,” Mike replied.
Adriana ignored them and walked a stream of bullets along just in front of the Banshee, letting the pilot slam into them. The Banshee took a dozen in its side before it wobbled and dipped toward the ground, striking an outcropping with a spectacular explosion.
“We’re out of ammo,” Adriana said, pushing back from the Vulcan and retrieving her plasma rifle from the magnetic latch on her thigh.
Almost there, Jai thought, just as the streambed abruptly ended. The Warthog roared as they jumped out onto hard dirt and scrub. The distant skyline of the city rippled on the horizon, an oasis of greenery and steel rising up from the stark barren wasteland surrounding it.
“Somebody took out that cruiser,” Mike said, impressed.
The remains of the Jiralhanae vessel burned off on the horizon. It had plowed into the desert on the other side of a small range of rocky hills that had blocked them from seeing its demise earlier.
“What do you think took it out?” Mike asked, as two more Banshees vectored in from their side, flying low against the ground. These new craft were different—they were a hybrid of familiar Covenant alloys and strange Brute iron, covered with extra cannons, and boasting a menacing rose of spikes welded to their fronts.
Out in the open, there was nowhere for Jai to hide. On the first run, the Banshees strafed a line of fire down the dirt and into the side of the Warthog. The vehicle bounced up onto its side, riding up on two wheels for a second as Jai fought to control it. Metal hissed, blackened from the strikes.
“These aren’t Elites,” Adriana said. “Must be Brutes.”
The Warthog started shimmying badly as they slammed back down onto four wheels.
“I thought they were still in the city,” Jai said.
“There’s been a lot of activity over there—maybe they got pushed out?” Mike said. “Or maybe they’re sentries, just making sure no one gets into the city.”
Another strafing run. Jai veered hard to the left and accelerated straight at the Banshees, trying to shake them off. He pulled up the battle rifle the ONI agent had given him, preparing to give it to Mike, and jammed a boot against the wheel. To his back, he could hear Adriana’s plasma rifle open up.
The Banshees kept closing in, pressing their attack. And then the one on their right started to smoke near its canard, losing altitude. “Focus on the left one,” Jai said.
From out of nowhere, a rocket flew languidly along and struck the left Banshee before Adriana could redirect her fire. Pieces of it spiraled apart and then fell out of the air just as they passed underneath. Jai let the Warthog slow to a stop as the other smoking Banshee slammed down into the ground and detonated.
Mike looked back to where the rocket fire had originated. “Humans. Look. They’re coming in weapons up,” he observed.
A squad wearing green and brown camouflage and slightly modified marksman rifles ran full tilt toward the Spartans from a rocky outcropping they had apparently been stationed at. “Lower your weapons!” the woman in the lead shouted. “Now!”
“Let’s stand down and be friendly,” Jai said.
“It’s going to slow things down,” Adriana said, hopping down from the Warthog’s rear bed.
Jai raised his hands and started walking forward. “I know. But these are local fighters, not UNSC. I want our first encounter to be on solid terms if we’re going to be working side by side with them.”
“Nice and slow!” the squad leader yelled. Jai didn’t recognize the uniforms or the insignia, not even among the colonial ones he had known from six years ago. The Suraka military had certainly broken with the UNSC in look—scrappy, functional, with only a hint of structure. A rip-away name patch on the squad leader’s left chest said “Carson.”
The squad leader’s eyes widened. “Holy shit, you’re Spartans,” she said.
“We’re here to help,” Jai said. “We’d like to speak with whoever is in charge.”
The squad leader smiled. “You’re too late to help.” She jutted her chin back in the direction of the city. “We’ve already taken care of it. Shot them right out of the sky. We’re in the process of cleaning up any Brutes in the outskirts. But it’ll be an added bonus to have Spartans as well, so we’ll take you in.”
They’re too sure of themselves, Jai thought. This was not the reaction of an army that had faced something like what the envoy and ONI agent had described back at Gila Station. It was clear that they had no clue about the danger that still lay beneath their city.
CHAPTER 17
* * *
* * *
Rojka ‘Kasaan had gathered Melody—he now gave the human envoy the respect of using her name—and his closest remaining personnel in the bay of the Phantom dropship, which had become somewhat cramped with the newcomers. The three fighters who’d stayed behind at the facility reported that, as Daga predicted, Thars had left the human facility before it exploded. They’d been unable to lure him in the wrong direction, so Rojka ordered them to head back for Rak. Thars was tracking Rojka, and now he needed to make decisions about where to go, and what to do, next.
Daga sat across from Melody and his remaining fighters, warily watching the human. The fleetmaster’s most trusted commander had never liked the envoy, now apparently even less so. She pushed a hand to her shoulder to slow the bleeding there, Rojka noticed. Engimatically, she did not appear the least bit embarrassed about the dishonor of spilling her own blood on the Phantom’s deck.
He decided to ignore it.
“You tell me that these creatures from Sangheili legend truly exist,” Rojka said. “I traveled to High Charity many times before its demise, yet I never saw nor heard anything of this before. I find it hard to believe.”
/> “It would not be the first time the San’Shyuum lied or kept secrets from your people,” Melody said.
“That is true.” Rojka scratched his mandibles and sighed.
Sharquoi. Rojka wasn’t sure what to believe. Giant creatures that could rend one asunder with their bare hands, deployed and controlled in the thousands through some kind of neural network that the Jiralhanae had evidently discovered. The human claimed other Sangheili knew of these creatures, but there were never enough to be a significant concern . . . until now.
Could she be lying to me?
Yet the Jiralhanae had risked everything to get to the human city. The humans already had a hidden facility here on the planet. The pieces of the story fit well together.
“Even if everything you have just told me is true, I have only a handful of warriors at my command. I have no ships. I have nothing to offer. I have lost so much. You want me to sacrifice the one thing I have left: vengeance against the Demon Three.”
“I have lost even more,” Melody said firmly. Something in her voice caught Rojka’s attention. He realized he knew so little about the envoy. The human had worked tirelessly to understand so much about him, but Rojka had never bothered to reciprocate. “I lost everything when the Covenant attacked Earth. I joined the refugees fleeing New Mombasa. I left and tried to rebuild everything in a refugee camp on Oban. There were too many of us displaced by the war, so we lived in plastic-lined shacks, huddled around makeshift fires at night, far displaced from civilization. My government was still reeling from thirty years of nonstop war—so many people without homes—and they didn’t know what to do with us.
“There was so much suffering, so much death. Every night, I listened to one of my neighbor’s children cough, until one day she stopped. I was so glad when I saw her at the mass burial fields later that day because I knew she wasn’t in pain anymore. There wasn’t enough medicine. Not enough food. You have lost so much, Rojka . . . that means you must know how I feel.”
Rojka looked away from her. “I never participated in the attack on Earth. I was rebuilding ships, maintaining the fleets.” And, he realized, she was trying to manipulate him. Words were her own weapons, he could see.
And she was a good warrior. A good envoy.
“I don’t blame you, specifically,” she replied. “But for years, every night, I would wake up in a cold sweat, listening for the sound of Covenant ships torching the ground and waiting for plasma fire to sweep me away. When my own demons appear in my nightmares, they look like Sangheili firing into crowds of civilians while we tried to run for safety. My demons look just like you, Rojka.”
Rojka snarled under his breath, the words striking him as solidly as the jab of a spear. “Then why do you make such an effort for peace between our kind, if you think of my kind like this?”
“I’m here to build something new, something different, Rojka,” she said. “I want a future. I want to look ahead, not behind. And I know you want to build something too. You came here to build a city; you risked much to come here and build something new as well.”
“Like you, I had little choice. I was a refugee as well,” Rojka said. He turned her attacks back on her. “When I learned that my family, that much of my bloodline, had been destroyed on Glyke, I took command of the fleet I was tasked to repair. I led what survivors I could here even as both your kind and mine ignored the treachery at Glyke.”
He felt dishonor at first simply complying with the Arbiter’s request to bury his rage and forget the life he had on Glyke for the sake of peace between their species. But then Rojka had seen a chance to found a new lineage on a new world—and, with him as Rak’s kaidon, he might be able to finally make this dream a reality.
The envoy thought about that. “Then we are all in the same position, on this world. We are all survivors of war trying to start something new. And the Jiralhanae threaten both Suraka and Rak. If the Jiralhanae are able to use the Sharquoi to whatever ends they seek, we will lose everything. Everything on Rakoi. All the fighting between us will have been meaningless.”
It was Rojka’s turn to ponder. “It’s not just this planet we might lose. No, the chieftain, Hekabe, will surely raise his sights higher than this dust world if he has the strength of the Forerunners behind him. He could attack both of our homeworlds if he is able to get his prize off the planet.”
“That’s my thinking as well. So we have to stop this from happening, however we can. No matter what demons either of us must face.”
Rojka handed Melody a plasma pistol, amused at how large it looked in her hands. The last time she’d had one like that, she’d been shooting at him from behind the door. He suppressed his sudden anger at that past betrayal, then found some small measure of gallows humor in the strangeness of the battlefield. “Very well, Envoy. Let us fight this new threat together.”
But I will watch you carefully, he thought. He had once believed that he could anticipate what she would do next, only to find her releasing the Demon Three and turning against him. This was a temporary alliance of convenience. Nothing more.
The envoy could use all the grand words and clever arguments at her disposal, but Rojka understood where she would ultimately put her true allegiance now more than ever.
He was, after all, one of the demons that haunted her nightmares.
Ellis pressed on toward the massive crater, picking her way across the rubble with a small team of milita surrounding her. They had their rifles slung, but still remained alert and wary. Ellis clambered up until she crested chunks of cement lining the outskirts and looked down into the district-sized basin the Jiralhanae had burned out of Carrow’s surface. Several militia squads had already taken position at what was apparently the Forerunner structure’s entrance, hundreds of meters away, at the far bottom. Warthogs and heavier machinery drove cautiously down the slope. Some of the Surakan ships had dropped all the way down to the surface, hovering near the crater’s edge with their large hangar doors open in order to provide those working the area with easy access to supplies.
Behind her, in a medical tent, she could see the bodies lined up in silent rows, like mummies. She’d stopped by the rows on her way up, dozens of them. This was the price, she had told herself. This was why victory wasn’t some cartoonish celebration and cheering. Each human life meant a loss of potential. Whatever they could have been, created, or invented, was forever lost. The lives they would have influenced would remain forever untouched. Their families would feel the sudden emptiness that she now experienced.
Ellis swallowed. Jeff had died out here at the hands of the Jiralhanae. That thought had come and gone over the long hours, each time returning with more grief. She wasn’t here among the rows of dead, thanks to people on the ground at the excavation who had fought, like her son. Jeff had given his life, and now she wanted to see the reason why.
There was a Jiralhanae body lying under debris nearby. Ellis stared at it. There were lots of the aliens still slumped and scattered all over the city. The Surakans hadn’t bodybagged any of them. So what to do? Bury them? Or heap them into piles and just burn them?
Were their packs going to mourn their dead as well, on some distant world, like Ellis mourned her own son? Had some of these Jiralhanae been full of potential as well, just like Jeff?
This thinking wouldn’t do anything useful, she decided, so she abandoned it.
Her hands shook now. She could barely hold them still as she applied another stimulant patch. How many more of these things could she endure? Could too many kill you? She needed to take stock on how many patches she’d used and at what intervals. It was strange; usually she’d be so precise about balancing something like this. But that care had been lost in the madness.
But as the new patch sharpened her senses again, she reminded herself that others had paid a far greater price. What were some shakes compared to that?
Pope scrambled up next to her. “Governor, General Grace wants to talk to you.”
The general and he
r staff were down at the bottom of the rubble. Ellis followed Pope over the lip of the basin and back down to the street, where things began to look more normal.
“Is the structure cleared yet?” Ellis asked.
The general’s staff parted to let her through to Grace. “We’re almost ready to begin. But I thought you’d like to know that a patrol heading out to secure the cruiser crash site picked up three Spartans heading into the city. They claim they want to help.”
“Spartans?” Ellis frowned. “Have the UNSC arrived? Did something change?”
“There are no ships in orbit. That we know about, at least.” General Grace cocked her head.
“Tell the squad to bring the Spartans in for questioning. Once they’re detained, we can inform them that the UNSC has no jurisdiction here. We have the situation under control and we don’t need their help against the Jiralhanae. But I do want them questioned. I want to know what they’re doing here and where the hell they came from.”
General Grace bit her lip. “Governor, you want me to detain Spartans?”
“Yes.”
“That could be . . . difficult if they decide they don’t want to cooperate.”
Ellis looked around. “If they decide that, then we’ll know whether they’re really here to help or cause trouble. Make it happen.”
General Grace nodded. Ellis kept walking along the street with Pope following a few paces behind. “Travis?”
“Yes, Governor?”
“We’re going to have to start figuring out where people are going to sleep since so many homes were destroyed. People who had holed up until this was done will be coming out of the cracks. We’ll need to deploy resources to help them, escort them to Sector 31 if there’s space. We can’t have people living in the streets.”
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