In the distance, gunfire popped inside one of the tunnels.
No time. Ellis turned her back on Lamar as he left. “Rhodes. The focusing elements from the M68, how are they coming along?”
Rhodes raised his head from another mess of circuitry toward the far edge of the large table where a wild Frankenstein of a machine was being created between the Havok’s core and an oversized, dismounted gauss cannon. It was intimidating to see it up this close, lying on its side. “We’re there, Governor.”
She wanted the maximum amount of energy coming out in a focused beam, one that they could bring into the Forerunner facility and control. They weren’t using the nuke for its destructive power: they needed it to power the gauss cannon’s disruptive EMP energy right at Hekabe, to sever his connection with the Sharquoi and neutralize any tech buried in the chieftain’s skull.
Since they were using a repurposed M68 gauss cannon—normally mounted to Warthogs or other mobile vehicles—they had some options on what exactly they could attach the gun to.
And if the electromagnetic pulse didn’t work, well, there was always the nuclear option.
Quite literally, in this case, she thought.
For Ellis, that sort of final act and sacrifice would be her penance for being wrong. Penance for all those lives lost at her hands. Penance for those who had been forced to leave all they had called home.
And the final revenge against the bastard that took her son’s life.
Melody walked out of the Pelican into the hot desert. The Spartans fanned out in front of her, and Rojka grunted as he stepped forward from under the shade of the Pelican’s wings. They were fifty klicks from Suraka, at the coordinates where Thars had agreed to meet them. It was an empty and bare swath of land, well removed from Thars’s own ships.
Melody shielded her eyes against the sun. Above, a Spirit dropship made a slow circle around them.
“He’s thinking about it,” Mike said.
The Sangheili ship finished a second pass, then began to sink toward the sand.
“It’s landing,” Melody said.
The Spirit dropship came to a stop just above the sand, heat rippling up around it. Twenty Sangheili climbed out of its arms and spread out in a long semicircle in front of it, with Thars at the center.
Melody raised her hand to her shoulder. The burned flesh where Thars had shoved the edge of his energy sword into her skin still scraped against her dirty uniform.
Her hands shook as she pushed her hair back and tied it with a handkerchief. She was scared to stand here. To walk knowingly into what had to be some horrible trap. How do the Spartans do this so calmly?
“It’s okay,” Jai reassured her, glancing back at the Pelican parked to their backs. “We’ll protect you.”
“This is so far from okay I’m not even sure how to describe it. You still won’t tell me your plan.”
“We’re all going to go say hello to Rojka’s cousin,” Jai said. “And we’re going to watch for an opportunity.”
Melody didn’t believe that. “You must have something else planned, right?”
“Plan is an ambitious word,” Adriana said, approaching from behind her with Mike. “Just be ready for anything.”
“You should really tell me what you’re going to do.”
Melody so wanted to be able to see past those faceplates. They didn’t truly trust her, and that made her nervous. She had continued to wonder about their own goals on the flight out. Were they planning to trade her: was she actually the prisoner? No, that couldn’t be it. Thars wanted Rojka, and he wanted the Spartans even more. He likely couldn’t care less about a random UEG envoy. As they had said, she was just here to sweeten the pot.
But why keep her completely in the dark?
They had to be concerned that she would hint that something was about to happen. Maybe they needed her in the dark in order to sell a legitimate conversation and hide whatever they had really planned? She was going to have to believe that.
They were all teetering on the edge of unknowns and doubts and suspicions. She would have to be the one to trust them.
Melody felt like she would throw up if they didn’t need to keep walking forward. But she needed to monitor the situation second by second. She was looking for an opportunity to pivot anything that happened in a different direction. Better that than wait for what felt like an inexorable bloodletting of some kind lurking ahead.
There’s still time, she told herself.
Rojka threw the hilt of his plasma sword to the ground as a show of peace and walked out in front of the group.
“Here we go.” Jai dropped his rifle in suit. Mike followed along.
Adriana carefully set her sniper rifle down on the sand. Next to it, a pistol. Then another pistol. She added the submachine gun slung over her back. A dagger from an ankle. Then she stood back up. The Spartans moved forward.
The further they got from the Pelican, the more Melody’s mouth dried up—not what an envoy needed just before a conversation with the enemy. She glanced from side to side, watching as Thars’s Sangheili cohort moved to surround them.
“I rescued you, only to lead you to your deaths,” Melody whispered as she caught up to Jai, voice shaking.
“Don’t take all the credit. We were running toward death long before you ever showed up,” Jai replied. “And you can’t lead us anywhere we don’t willingly follow.”
Twenty plasma rifles and carbines were aimed in Melody’s direction. If Thars gave the order, all this would end very quickly.
Adriana slipped to Melody’s side as Jai walked confidently forward.
“Take a deep breath,” Adriana said. “This is the real edge of the knife.”
Thars stepped out from the protection of his Sangheili. “On your knees! Move no further!”
His energy sword flared to life at his side. Melody and Gray Team came to a halt behind Rojka, who faced his adversary.
“Thars.” Rojka slowly sank down into the sand with the look and posture of resignation. Melody did the same. And the Spartans followed as well.
Thars walked around Rojka, and from Spartan to Spartan, eyes narrowed with suspicion as he examined the armor. His sword, a white blaze of plasma, still remained casually at his side. He stopped in front of Melody.
Melody stared back up at Thars. “Kill me and you will be at war with the full might of the UNSC.”
“I do not see the UNSC here.” Thars looked around with a kind of theatrical exaggeration. “Do you?”
“You know they’re coming.”
“Oh Envoy, everyone who could tell the UNSC anything about this meeting will be long dead when they arrive.”
“Thars. There are bigger issues at stake. The Sharquoi are headed—”
He struck her face with the back of his massive hand, the blow knocking her down onto the sand. “You will live a little longer, Envoy. At least long enough to see the Demon Three dead before you. At my hands. Their blood will soak the sand, an unfitting cost for the atrocities at Glyke, but it will have to do. My people will call me the Killer of Demons. Rojka too will see my sword the moment before he dies. Payment for his bloodline’s preservation in Rak. And then—”
The familiar sound of another energy sword activating interrupted Thars’s speech.
The sword’s blue light burst out from the chest of one of the Sangheili in the semicircle. The warrior looked down, stunned, and then he was lifted into the air by something invisible as he squirmed against the weapon and screamed.
Another scream cut through the shocked silence of Thars’s Sangheili. A Sangheili on the other end of the semicircle fell to the ground, killed by a blur of motion wielding an energy sword.
Melody instinctively crouched closer to the sand.
“Here we go,” Adriana said to her, calmly. “That was the plan.”
Jai ran full speed at the nearest Sangheili the moment Rojka’s three camouflaged warriors attacked. The surprised fighter fired at him twice. That was all. The p
lasma fire crackled across Jai’s armor and his shielding hissed. Then he slammed into the Elite. They rolled in an explosion of dirt and sand down the ridge behind him. The Sangheili fought hard, scrabbling to get his rifle up for an opportunity to hit Jai point-blank.
But the rifle flew away when Jai cracked it with his elbow, using the rush of gravity and his own inertia to his advantage.
The Sangheili was resourceful though. His energy sword fired up in his other hand as they slowed to a stop. He launched up and forward with it, shoving it into Jai’s chest armor, dragging the blade up toward Jai’s neck. Jai pulled himself closer to grab the hilt of the energy sword. They both strained to overpower each other and control the direction of the blue energy spitting in the air between them.
Then Jai slowed his breathing. He looked past the flickers of readouts blinking warnings on the inside of his helmet and time slowed down. He concentrated on his enemy’s own strength as he shoved the sword upward between them as hard as he could.
The Sangheili gurgled and spat as Jai slowly pushed the sword up through his jaw and deep into his skull.
Two more Sangheili tackled Jai when he stood back up and pulled the crackling sword free. Jai threw the first over his head and sliced the arm off the next one. The Sangheili screamed and rolled in the sand as Jai stabbed him in the chest and picked up his rifle.
He barely had time to lift the rifle and blindly shoot another attacker nearly a meter away. The last two Sangheili should have shot him from a distance, Jai thought, but their preoccupation with honor was their undoing. He might not get that advantage with the rest of them.
All around him Sangheili screamed, fought, and died. Adriana and Mike attacked in concert, blitzing the enemy and using the Sangheili’s own weapons against them. Rank-and-file Elites were incredibly strong natural warriors and their combat harnesses made them resilient, but against Spartans it was never a fair fight. Especially when the trio of Spartans was augmented by three camouflaged Sangheili—Rojka’s invisible wild card, the only survivors that remained from his cruiser. To the Elite’s surprise, his three warriors had not returned to Rak, but instead traveled toward the besieged Suraka, intending to fight alongside their kaidon to the bitter end.
They’d kept that part of the plan secret from the envoy, to prevent her from inadvertently betraying something in her body language to Thars.
“The dropship!” Jai shouted.
Some of Thars’s Sangheili were folding far quicker than the Spartans had expected. They covered each other as they fell back to the giant tuning fork of a Spirit dropship, whose long bays began to re-open from one end to the other.
Jai ran for the dropship as well.
Two Sangheili faded out of active camouflage and hurried alongside him. Rojka’s surviving fighters.
Rojka himself was now in a fierce duel with Thars, their energy swords slamming together with an unfettered, raw hatred Jai had rarely seen.
“Where is the third one?” Jai shouted midsprint. Some ten Sangheili had piled back into the two bays of the dropship. Three on ten, and the Spirit itself—not the best odds. The dropship’s ventral cannon ignited as it rose from the ground and plasma fire swung in Jai’s direction. He dove with the two Sangheili behind the safety of a rock. The craggy outcropping shook from the impact of heavy plasma.
The heavy droning sound of the ship’s engines kicked up several octaves.
“They’re taking off! We need that Spirit!” Jai pulled back from glancing around the edge of the rock and shoved his back against the rock in frustration.
A Banshee whipped past them, flying just a few meters above the ground. Jai rolled away from the rock to see Rojka’s third fighter bank the vehicle slightly to draw the dropship’s fire and then rise up through the barrage of plasma fire.
The Banshee fired back, scorching the closing bay of the Spirit with a trail of white flame and throwing two Sangheili clear. Their limp bodies struck the sand in two quick thuds. The dropship’s ventral weapon caught up and danced across the Banshee’s right canard, blowing it free. Rojka’s third soldier lost control and the fighter careened toward the ground but not before it collided into the back of the Spirit. The resulting explosion rocked the entire dropship. Secondary detonations ripped through the inside.
Thars’s loyalists were now leaping from the vessel for the desert floor as the dropship listed, slid, and then finally crashed. Impaled in the sand, the ship’s insides glowed blinding white and then exploded, sending debris and sand in every direction.
Jai stood at the ready and scanned the area for survivors. There were none—all of them had been consumed by the blast. Adriana and Mike had killed those who hadn’t been able to retreat. Rojka and Thars, who now stood alone on the sand, warily circled each other with energy swords out.
Jai watched the debris burn, cursing under his breath. They’d needed this dropship, intact.
Melody Azikiwe staggered to her feet from where she’d taken cover on the ground, her face now grimed with dirt. “What the hell just happened?” she asked as she walked past him.
“We failed,” Jai said, looking her up and down.
Adriana kneeled in the sand over a dead Sangheili, retrieving a plasma grenade from its side. Mike walked toward Jai, armor featuring a new burn mark on his right thigh.
“We needed that Spirit to get to Thars’s ships,” Jai said.
“Don’t kill him!” Melody shouted to Rojka in Sangheili.
Jai turned. Rojka, his harness battered and covered in Sangheili blood, had smacked Thars’s energy sword away. Rojka’s entire posture crackled with fury. Weaponless, Thars sunk to his knees in front of him and looked down into the sand.
“Do not give me orders, human!” Rojka roared, raising his energy sword high in the air to slice through Thars’s neck.
Rojka roared, his rage boiling over. Thars. The one who had riven the Sangheili here on Rakoi. He had destroyed everything Rojka had worked so hard to build.
Then the words of the envoy finally sank in.
He slowly lowered his energy sword.
“Contact them,” Rojka said, breathing heavily. “Tell them to destroy any slipspace devices still working.”
They had fought a brief but savage duel as the attack unfolded around them, paying little attention to anything but each other. It had been a contest of sheer strength and cold bloodlust, until Thars made a fatal error and lost his energy sword with one fateful blow from Rojka. Now Thars, fully spent, waited on his knees.
He had lost his war: this was the end for him. But Rojka needed something else. Not blood satisfaction but something more important. As strange as it felt to think in this way, thanks to the envoy.
“You still think a Jiralhanae worm will attack my fleet?” Thars asked through his bloodied mandibles.
“Do you think I risk my life, do you think I delay my vengeance, for no reason?” Rojka moved the sword closer. “I have seen the Sharquoi with my own eyes. Yes, they are real, not some myth as the elders of old spoke of. I have fought one myself. I have even heard Hekabe’s voice from a Sharquoi itself. He controls them. He is our true enemy, cousin.”
Thars snorted blood. “I do not care if the Forerunners themselves walk this world again. I will not tell my fleet to destroy their engines, nor will I give you control of anything I have wrested away. I expected a trap. My commanders warned me that you could not be trusted. But I thought I had enough fire power and fighters to survive it. I was wrong. But this is how I will die with my honor nonetheless: You will not have my ships.”
Rojka grabbed Thars by the head and twisted him around to face Suraka in the distance. The clouds of smoke above the city flickered with explosions. In the quiet they could all hear the distant gunfire and artillery. “Look, cousin. The human city falls. It is being eaten from underneath by a wretched hive of monsters which Hekabe controls. Rak will soon be overrun as well. So will other worlds, if Hekabe gains the use of your fleet.”
“No,” Thars said. �
�My fleet will burn the human ships out of the sky. We are not ignorant, Rojka. We have been watching. Preparing. After my people destroy the human ships that currently approach, they will come for me. And then they will come for you. If you wish to see your bloodline survive, you need to consider—”
Rojka shoved the tip of the sword into Thars’s shoulder and watched him scream as flesh sizzled. “You have no honor.”
Melody moved between them. “Shipmaster, you risk our homeworlds,” she hissed down at Thars in Sangheili. “All of them.”
“I am already on my homeworld right now,” Thars said with venom in his tone. Rojka pushed her aside with his free hand.
“Rojka,” Melody begged him, “we can’t let this happen. They’ve got minutes before the Jiralhanae arrive with the Sharquoi.”
Thars leaned back, satisfaction dripping from him. “The only thing you can do now is let me open communications with my fleet. Let me show you how great our power is as we destroy this thing that makes you cower. Then they will attack here in great numbers once they’re done with this annoying alien threat. But at least you will die knowing that your world is safe.”
“I will kill you before your people arrive,” Rojka promised.
“We need to warn them what they’re up against,” Melody said to Rojka. “We need to let Thars open communications.”
Rojka snarled. This would just hand Thars what he wanted. A second chance at them all. But then the image of Sangheilos burning dripped in the back of his mind. No, he could not risk such a thing.
Thars graciously spread his arms, then winced. The cauterized wound along his shoulder oozed Sangheili blood. “Give me the information to fight these new creatures, and I will be generous in the manner of your death.”
Rojka shoved Thars toward the Spartans. “Open communications. Help his commanders, if they’ll listen. And if they survive to come for us, we will deal with them then.”
Thars staggered forward, glee seemingly on his face, as the Spartans trained their weapons on him. He pointed toward a hologrip lying in the sand, a handheld comm projector used by the Covenant before the end of the war.
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