“You know, they may not need our help after all,” Melody mused, spirits lifting slightly at the sight of the burning Jiralhanae vessel.
The Sangheili pilot snorted dismissively and pointed toward the far side of the city. A Surakan ship wobbled above the skyline, smoke trailing from one of its engines. It appeared to be struggling to rise above the city.
“There is trouble yet,” he said.
As they watched, the ship’s hull burst gouts of flame and then exploded.
Amid the falling debris was a tiny, gray form, which struck a building in a shower of glass.
Sharquoi, Melody knew.
“They do need our help. The attack you warned us of has already begun,” Rojka said somberly. He turned around to his Sangheili. “Prepare to disembark. We move on the ground from here.”
The pilot dropped the Phantom low to the ground, spinning it about. Daga pointed a fist and the rear ramp dropped open, unloading the Sangheili in two columns.
Rojka glanced back at Melody. “There are two camouflaged human scouts up ahead who have set a trap for us. I suggest you walk forward alone, Envoy, and gain us safe passage without interruption from any . . . miscommunication.”
Melody followed the Sangheili out the back of the Phantom and onto the hot, dry sand. “We may be too late,” she told Rojka, as she looked at the vast crater to her distant right and saw plumes of smoke rising from it.
“In that case, perhaps we will still receive that honorable death we were both cheated of.”
Sergeant Carson and her squad had hustled Gray Team across Suraka’s sandy boundaries to a new bunker on the city’s fringe. More armed militia waited for them by the sandbagged entrance to escort Jai and his team inside.
Jai looked around the control and operations room deep inside the centimeters of concrete and at the dozen or so nervous-looking civilians silhouetted by the glow of displays.
“This is taking far too long. We’re running out of time,” Adriana noted with distaste.
Jai looked at the pale faces and muttered conferences happening all around them. “They’re taking us very, very seriously now. Something’s changed.”
A tall woman covered in gray dust and soot waited in the bunker room. She pointed at the Spartans. Another man with civilian clothes and an armored vest stood just behind her. Everyone in the room stepped out of their way as she crossed the room.
They both reek of “in charge,” Jai thought.
“Tell me everything you know,” the woman snapped in Gray Team’s direction.
“I’m sorry, ma’am, who am I talking to?” Jai asked, unwilling to give her control of the conversation at the start.
“I’m Governor Ellis Gass. This is my vice-governor, Lamar Edwards. The citizens of Suraka are trapped here, unable to get off this planet, while we face some new threat that I believe you know something about. So tell us what you know.”
Jai saw the vice-governor’s face twitch as she said that: something was off. But he was forced to pay attention to the governor, who had now moved right up to his visor.
“What the hell did the Jiralhanae release?” Governor Gass demanded. “And don’t give me any ONI ‘official secrets’ bullshit. You’re here for a reason. What is it? We don’t have time for red tape. We’re far past that point. This is my city we’re talking about! Our people are dying! My people are dying!”
The pain in the governor’s last words was obvious. Everyone in the control room stared at the confrontation, work forgotten. The strain of battle weighed heavy on Ellis, Jai thought. He understood the pain in the governor’s eyes.
“We came to help,” Jai told her softly.
Governor Gass shook her head. “To help? Is that it? Spartans can do a lot of things, maybe even take on one of those monsters out there. But that’s not what we need right now. We need intel, we need to know how to stop them. So you need to tell us everything you know. Then we’ll all form a plan together.”
“They’re called the Sharquoi—” Jai started to say.
The vice-governor had stepped back in the meantime to listen to something being whispered to him. Now he interrupted: “Madam Governor,” he said formally. “There are Sangheili at the city’s edge asking to lend assistance, along with the Unified Earth Government envoy, Melody Azikiwe.”
The governor frowned. “Oh, the one who was supposed to broker that new era of peace between us and the Sangheili?” Bitterness laced her words.
She raised a finger as the vice-governor looked about to say something. Jai took the halted moment to jump in. “You’ll want the envoy,” he said. “She knows more about the Sharquoi than anyone else.”
Governor Gass turned. “She knew about this?” The venom in her voice all but dripped.
If there’d been time for sympathy, Jai would have offered it. Instead he said, “It’s complicated. And we can argue about it later. We don’t have time to fix what happened in the past. Like you said, people are dying. We need to face what is about to happen.”
“He’s right, ma’am,” the vice-governor said to her. “We need all the information we can get. Now is not the time for us to assess the failures they made in the past.”
The governor took a deep breath. She seemed to take the vice-governor seriously, though it did not appear easy for her. Something had passed between them with just a look.
“Fine. Okay then,” Governor Gass said, her voice dripping with sarcasm. “Let’s all find out what secrets the Office of Naval Intelligence has been hiding from us here on our own world. Sure, bring the envoy and her friends right on in! In the meantime, Spartan, tell me what you know and how you can help us.”
“Ma’am, I am not an expert: we just learned about them a few hours ago ourselves,” Jai told her. “But my team has a plan we’ve been working on since we were briefed about the threat.”
Governor Gass leaned forward, her eyes glittering with glassy fatigue in the emergency lighting. “Go on,” she said.
“It’s simple,” Adriana said. “Get us close enough so that I can take out the Jiralhanae leader. Those creatures on their own aren’t much more than feral animals. They’re augmented by their numbers and cohesion.”
“But they’re being controlled through a Forerunner device that the Jiralhanae chieftain possesses,” Mike added.
“Kill the Brute, you kill the threat,” Adriana said softly but firmly.
The governor thought about it for a moment. “Well, you’ll certainly get no argument from me about the directness of this. And I’ve seen the chieftain. With my own eyes.”
She swallowed. Jai noticed a small tremor in her hands.
“Give me some time to set it up with my generals,” Governor Ellis finally said. “I think we can get you close.”
“Your vice-governor mentioned there were Sangheili with the envoy?” Jai asked.
“Yes. Is that going to be a problem?”
Jai opened his mouth to respond, then realized the words weren’t coming. Finally he said, “If the envoy says they can help, I believe we can trust her.”
The governor turned to face Adriana. “Spartan?”
“Ma’am?”
“Don’t miss.”
“I won’t.”
Hekabe stood in the late afternoon sun of the desert world, enjoying the heat on his face.
He also moved through the cool shadows of a stairwell, hunting a terrified human warrior.
He perched on the edge of one of the pitiful human buildings, looking out over the crater and back at himself—the Jiralhanae chieftain standing on a boulder. From the distance, he could barely make out the metallic contours of the Forerunner device sticking out from his skull in random, jarring directions, shining in the sun.
Hekabe was everywhere.
He forced his way awkwardly into the bellies of a handful of human ships, the Sharquoi he controlled leading Jiralhanae from his war packs as they boarded the alien vessels. The humans had surprised him with these ships. He had thought them defeated
in orbit, but they had actually just run away—behavior typical of their kind.
The Jiralhanae followed behind the vicious giants as they destroyed the human defenders on each craft, allowing them to storm their way onto the command bridges and take control. So now he had mobility.
Hekabe laughed at the irony, and the laugh came from thousands of alien throats.
Anexus walked up toward him. “My Chieftain.” He stank of utter obedience and total subservience. It smells sweet on the air, Hekabe thought.
“Come.”
Hekabe started walking. Multiple Sharquoi fell into step beside him, like protective walls towering on all sides. He felt invincible.
“It is an honor guard the likes of which even the Prophets never had the courage to summon,” Anexus proclaimed, glancing around nervously.
Hekabe ignored Anexus. Something odd had occurred to distract him. A Sharquoi with a broken leg, head half dashed in from a human explosion, roared in pain as it pulled itself down the road away from the crater. There was sullen determination in its movements as it tried to crawl the span of a city block toward Hekabe’s original form.
“That one is not a part of me,” Hekabe told Anexus. “Interesting. I cannot see into its mind. The implants in its skull must have been damaged.”
A long smear of purple blood trailed the road behind the wounded Sharquoi.
Hekabe made a circle around the persistent damaged remnant with the five Sharquoi that he now kept around him as his personal guard. The dying creature looked around, what remained of its forehead thrumming as it attempted to echolocate and build a picture of its surroundings. This is a Sharquoi, as they were before the Forerunners. It bleated something that Hekabe vaguely understood. It just wants to run. To be free of pain. To be free.
That would not do.
Hekabe tightened the fist of the Sharquoi around the fallen one and unleashed them with his thought. They moved deliberately toward their injured brother and started to kick it as it held its clawed fists up, begging for mercy. Anexus watched as they stomped the creature until the head tore free and rolled across the ground.
The decapitated body of the Sharquoi stopped quivering.
Hekabe focused his attention on five ships as they took off. They wobbled for a moment as they rose, likely controlled by Jiralhanae barely able to adapt to human controls. After a moment, they corrected their ascent and flew out north over the desert. They would trace search patterns across the wasteland until they found the Sangheili ships that had managed to survive the fight in orbit. Then they would disgorge Sharquoi and kill them all.
Anexus watched them depart. “We should send word to our fellow Jiralhanae clans. We could even call the Banished to us. Atriox would send us cruisers to transport these Sharquoi back to our homeworld. We will be safe forever. Just as we planned. The Jiralhanae will no longer suffer when all see our new weapon.”
“No.” Hekabe looked out from Sharquoi senses spread throughout the city, seeing humans moving to aim missiles down at the crater from the top of a building. He burst out at them, shouldering through the stairwell that he barely fit in, smashing walls apart to break free, and they screamed and scattered before his Sharquoi frame. He impaled them on his claws and threw each of them down to the street, bellowing from the rooftop in victory. “We will truly make certain we are safe from our enemies forever, but we will do it on our own. We do not need the other Jiralhanae, and we do not need the Banished. All that we need is already here.”
The wind in his mind had hinted at its power before, but it became more and more clear to Hekabe as the Jiralhanae-controlled human ships—filled with Sharquoi in their hangar bays—moved farther away from the city. The Forerunner device that had embedded itself into his skull had more reach than he had even imagined. It could operate on far more than just a world. It could reach light-years across into other distant places. The only constraint was the strength of his own mind.
“Chieftain, we will need a carrier large enough to transport the Sharquoi,” Anexus insisted.
“We will not cower and beg for assistance!” Hekabe shouted at him. “We will not hole up on our own worlds and wait to take abuse! Instead, we shall seize what we have here and go to our enemies. We will strike them down on their own worlds. We will reduce them to nothing but ghosts and shadows!”
“And how will we go to them?” Anexus asked, frustration rolling off him. “We have only a handful of weak human ships.”
Hekabe pointed west. “There are Sangheili on the ground repairing their cruisers even as we speak, thinking that they will take us by surprise. They are sorely mistaken. The Sangheili cruisers will be ours soon enough. Our strength will prevail!”
“But what if they’re not repaired in time? What if—”
Anexus screamed as two of the Sharquoi nearby unceremoniously grabbed each of his arms and pulled. The limbs tore free like petals from a flower, his flesh ripping and joints popping free as the Sharquoi casually flung the torn appendages aside. Anexus dropped to his knees in front of Hekabe.
“Mercy!” he frothed, blood pouring from his destroyed shoulders.
“There is no more mercy,” Hekabe said as the Sharquoi standing directly behind Anexus picked him up. “If the Sangheili vessels fail me, then there will be human ships that arrive here soon. I will take what is due to me, one way or another.”
The Sharquoi simply crumpled Anexus in its giant fists, like balling up a piece of trash. Hekabe could feel ribs shatter and poke at his palms.
Everything here would be his. Everything. And once he sat on the ruins of all this planet had to offer, other worlds would feel his wrath.
Safety and respect were no longer his goal. Dominion was what he now sought. There would be a true Jiralhanae empire to rival even the Covenant. An empire ruled by him. And Hekabe solemnly promised himself it would be unlike anything the stars had ever seen.
CHAPTER 19
* * *
* * *
A Pelican flanked by two smaller Sparrowhawk gunships cut through the air just above Suraka’s skyline, banking hard as they approached the fighting. Surakan militia had fallen back almost eight blocks from the crater. The gray tide of Sharquoi was implacable, plowing into the city’s defenders and leaving only a trail of carnage behind.
“It’s a damn massacre,” Sergeant Carson said, looking out over the pilot’s shoulder.
Jai agreed. But in order for them to have a chance at stopping this, they needed the Sharquoi and their Jiralhanae leader—the chieftain by the name of Hekabe—preoccupied. So rather than retreat, the militia kept on fighting.
“Where to?” Jai asked Adriana as the Pelican looped around again, avoiding stray fire that came from the battle raging above the desert.
“We won’t be able to stay up in the middle of this for much longer!” the pilot shouted.
Suraka had thrown almost every flying vehicle they could get into the air in order to harass and distract the vessels that the Sharquoi had taken. Melody believed that Hekabe’s strategy, now that his cruiser had been destroyed, would be to secure vessels in order to carry the Sharquoi off-world.
Transmissions from the bridges of these ships confirmed that Jiralhanae now had control and were moving the stolen vessels deeper into the desert, for reasons yet to be made clear.
Surakan aircraft had assaulted them en masse: Pelican gunships, Sparrowhawks, and even some effectively armed Nightingales had initiated the strike. But the aircraft over the crater, completely outmatched in firepower, were being shot down by the Surakans’ own point defense weapons on the Brute-controlled ships. The distraction wasn’t going to last too long.
The Surakans were paying a high price to get this team into position.
Jai glanced out of the Pelican’s rear bay to the left to see a Phantom keeping pace with them and in perfect formation, lazily swooping and twisting to match the human pilot’s evasive maneuvers, providing protection for this effort.
How strange it feels to
be flying into combat with an old enemy beside us, Jai thought.
Rojka ‘Kasaan had not said a word when he’d joined them in the staging area with the envoy by his side. Although everyone present seemed at ease with a Sangheili holding conversation in the same room as them, Jai found it rather challenging. It must have been tough for the rest of Gray Team too. Most of the people here had grown accustomed to human–Sangheili relations since the war had ended six years ago, despite all that was happening on Carrow. But for Gray Team, the war had ended only hours earlier. It was difficult to keep instincts trained for years in check, instincts that told him to kill and protect at the sight of the enemy.
Rojka, for his part, did not seem to mind, though he was virtually impossible to read, especially in a neutral posture—something Jai had rarely ever seen from an Elite. The Sangheili had just stood mostly silent as the envoy explained they were here to help take out Hekabe.
But there was still the matter of Glyke. Which pretty much guaranteed that no matter what he looked like, this Sangheili was anything but neutral.
“The technology used to control the Sharquoi is tied to a single individual—we all know that much,” Melody had told the Surakan generals, boosting their plan. “So we target the chieftain, Hekabe. That’s the best chance we have to slow or stop this mess.”
The Sangheili with Rojka had been visibly uncomfortable. Jai and the rest of Gray Team remained on the other side of the governor and envoy, giving the Sangheili their space. They’d pooled their arsenals to start this last-ditch attack, a unified strategy that had to work if there was any chance to stop Hekabe. The Spartans would take a Pelican, and the Sangheili would take a Phantom.
War, Jai thought, makes for strange, shifting allegiances.
“There,” Adriana now said, pointing to the top of a building. “Our line of sight is good there.”
“That’s right on the line,” the pilot warned. “We don’t know how long we can hold them back before they overrun us.”
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