The Cole Protocol

by Tobias S. Buckell

  “My honor, Shipmaster” Saal replied quickly.

  Thel watched the shamed Sangheili slink off the bridge, disgusted that someone so incompetent could end up on his bridge.

  “Human contacts,” Saal reported. “But they do not appear to be warships. And they are not moving to engage.”

  “Tell Pellius to hold his fire and follow our lead.” Thel stood up and walked toward the screens, a long shipmaster’s cloak pulling off the chair with him. His ancestors had worn thick, doarmir-fur cloaks like this at sea to stay warm and dry on long voyages.

  Thel had made his by hand during a long recuperation in the Vadam Keep after a training accident the family had tried to hide. Thel remembered the shame of seeing his own blood spilled on the sand of the training ring in the courtyard, due to his own mistake. He recalled the faintness and the tall snowcapped mountains that rose above Vadam Keep as he pitched to his side.

  The family had a recently promoted shipmaster in their bloodline, and they had been loath to lose that particular honor. They’d secretly called for a doctor in the night and held Thel down by his limbs as he was operated on.

  Thel kept the cloak as a reminder to himself that he could make grave mistakes when he let his guard down.

  Mistakes like letting an inexperienced minor Sangheili aboard the bridge who panicked at the thought of being surrounded by human warships.

  “Make sure that coward gets his rations revoked,” Thel said to Veer, letting his mind dwell on that particular incident now that he knew the ship was not in danger. “Maybe with a hunger in his belly he will find the hunger in his soul that he needs to be a real warrior.”

  “A well thought-out solution, shipmaster,” Veer said, and leaned over to send out the command.

  “Saal, report.” Thel gathered the cloak around. Be sharp, he reminded himself. Keep your mind open, and think sideways instead of walking forward into a pit-trap.

  “I . . . I have to show you,” Saal said.

  A complex set of scans appeared on the screens. Thel narrowed his eyes, then opened his mandibles in shock. “These are all asteroids,” he said. “They are all connected.”

  There were hundreds of connected worldlets.

  “This is unlike anything I have ever seen the humans do,” Thel said out loud. “There was nothing like it when the human world here was destroyed.”

  “Perhaps they built it after that?” Zhar suggested. He looked intrigued by the scans. “You have to admit, that demonstrates some strong blood on their part, to remain here and build after the Prophets ordered them destroyed.”

  “Strong indeed,” Thel agreed.

  “But it does them little good ultimately,” Jora said. “Their blasphemy still cannot stand, and they must all still die.”

  “What bothers me,” Thel grumbled, “is that they have gone this long unnoticed.”

  “I think I know why,” Zhar said. He tapped his console, and before the bridge crew the long-distance image of a Kig-Yar freighter appeared.

  It was docked against one of the many asteroids in the superstructure.

  A human structure.

  “What new treachery is this?” Thel hissed. The Kig-Yar, pirates and scum, worked under contracts given out by the ministries. They were hardly loyal fighters; they had little nobility. But they usually remained in line due to the dual methods of Unggoy Deacons aboard their ships, as well as the contracts and payments the Prophets offered them.

  Thel could hardly believe what he saw.

  “Brace for impact!” Saal warned, just as the Retribution’s Thunder shivered, throwing Thel from his feet against a pillar.

  So the humans had found them and were attacking, Thel thought as he sprang for his shipmaster’s throne.

  The second impact stabbed through the heart of Thel’s ship, a violent, metal-boiling line of light that just missed the bridge. But this wasn’t human. Humans employed kinetic or explosive ordnance, not plasma.

  A Psalm Every Day was preparing a second volley. It was very obvious that the plasma salvo was from another Covenant vessel.

  Their own escort.

  “Traitors!” Thel seethed. “Evasive maneuvers!”

  “I have a firing solution,” Jora yelled, turning to Thel. “Permission to fire, Shipmaster?”

  “Fire at will! Saal tactical slipspace, now!”

  But getting past the shock of being fired upon by their own escort had cost them critical seconds. Even as Retribution’s Thunder fired back, another salvo of blue plasma ripped through the heart of Thel’s ship.

  He could feel some of the engines firing, but they had been too slow. Sangheili double hearts could take far more acceleration than Jiralhanae or Kig-Yar, but the incredible random high-speed evasive maneuvers Thel had braced himself for didn’t come.

  “Status,” Thel snapped.

  He did not like the returning reports. They were venting precious air into space. The number of casualties was rising. Long range communications were down. Life support was failing. The last volley had taken their core engines offline, and their ability to generate plasma had gone with it. While most of their sensors were still operational, they could go nowhere and do nothing.

  Pellius appeared in hologram before Thel. The Jiralhanae looked pleased with himself, his large teeth bared. “A mighty shipmaster Sangheili, helpless before me. I shall savor this moment for the rest of my life.”

  Thel stared at Pellius and wondered where the Kig-Yar shipmistress had gone. She was nowhere to be seen on the bridge. “It will be a short life.”

  “Not as short as yours. Good-bye, shipmaster.” Pellius faded away.

  “He has released boarding craft and Spirits!” Saal reported.

  “They will not have the Retributions’ Thunder,” Thel said, staring at the spot Pellius had faded from. “Alert the crew. Get in protective gear and draw the boarders in deep. Rig every section to explode. We will leave nothing to salvage!”

  “Shipmaster! A Psalm Every Day has engaged their slipspace drive!” Zhar said. “They’re leaving!”

  “Leaving?” Jora growled.

  “The Humans are not likely to go anywhere as are we. He will report whatever his feeble mind can concoct when he reaches High Charity.”

  “They get the glory for reporting this structure and the humans hiding here,” Zhar concluded with frustration.

  “Cursed cowards,” hissed Jora.

  “The Spirits are approaching to attack!”

  “Where are their boarding craft?”

  “They are hanging back.”

  In the distance, the outer hull shook and shivered as Spirits flew up and down the length of the ship, strafing it.

  Thel broke the arm off his chair in frustration. “Those who wish to escape the ship may do so now.”

  It was a rhetorical statement. But it did serve one purpose: to weed out any dishonorable Sangheili who might falter by your side.

  Thel pressed his mouth parts firm against each other as they waited in silence for a handful of dishonorable crew to desert. Maybe they were serfs who had risen far enough to work simple duties aboard the ship, or Sangheili who’d managed to hide their lack of real blood.

  He waited for that, and for the Kig-Yar to get bolder and try to board the ship.

  One of the screens showed Sangheili trying to escape aboard Spirits from inside Retribution’s Thunder’s hold, and the Kig-Yar-run ships fell on them en masse, overwhelming them. Plasma ripped out and filled the space around the ship, and it wasn’t long before the cowardly died in the vacuum at the hands of traitorous Kig-Yar.

  A fitting fate, Thel thought. “Fire the empty escape pods,” he ordered.

  They watched those get destroyed, and it strengthened their resolve to fight. To run was to die.

  Now the Kig-Yar felt that they could risk boarding, with what seemed like most of the crew of the ship gone.

  Thel waited. Waited until Kig-Yar swarmed the hull and trooped through the heart of his ship, and then gave the or
der.

  Explosions ripped through the interior, section by section. The smooth, bulbous lines of his ship flexed and twisted, and fire gushed out from in between the cracks, roiling up through the corridors.

  The air in the bridge heated up, and then rushed out. Thel found himself panting for air that no longer existed, and then a secondary explosion turned the cockpit inside out.

  Thel hurtled through the air and struck a bulkhead.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  HESIOD, 23 LIBRAE

  The Kestrel was a svelte smuggler of a ship, more engine than cargo bay. Even then, civilian engine technology didn’t hold a candle to what the Midsummer Night had at its heart.

  The Midsummer Night had been shadowing the Kestrel for almost a week. UNSC sensor buoys had been put on high alert on the edges of the system, and caught the Kestrel preparing for its jump into Slipspace. These were the same sensor buoys that had detected the inbound Covenant.

  Dmitri Zheng had thrown the Midsummer Night on a ripping course out to follow it. Badia Campbell at ops reported nervously that the ship’s reactor was struggling to keep up.

  But the ship had been shaken out. No more pipes blew, or components failed. She’d gotten up to speed, closing in on the Insurrectionist ship like a shark slipping up from the depths on its prey.

  On their way out, they’d all continued to watch broadcasts from sensor posts scattered throughout the system of the Covenant ships moving over Charybdis IX, glassing the surface.

  The mood onboard had remained somber and determined. The crew had been itching to fight, and now had to turn tail and run.

  No one liked it.

  But they had a mission, and they’d all had friends and family fall to the Covenant. Despite Zheng’s anger, many had gotten used to the dull pain of human loss. Casualties mounted; they had for years. It had become a part of life for many.

  Now they were deep behind Covenant lines, hopping through what had once been the Outer Colonies, sticking close behind the Kestrel as it seemed to randomly jump into Slipstream space.

  “We’re close,” Keyes announced. The last three jumps the Kestrel had taken made a line on the star charts that Keyes could use.

  Assuming that the jumps continued in their pattern, Keyes had run the charts. He posted the result to the bridge crew’s screens.

  Zheng took a look and frowned. “You think they’re headed to Madrigal? That planet was glassed by the Covenant.”

  “It could be where they make their drops,” Keyes suggested. He paused as his sensors showed the smuggler making another jump.

  He was right. The last several Slipspace jumps took them to the outer edge of the system, and then the Kestrel began curving its way in-system.

  The Midsummer Night followed, invisible and silent. They coasted with the Kestrel all the way into the depths of the system.

  “It isn’t Madrigal,” Keyes announced several shifts later, reviewing the navigation data left by a junior officer.

  “Then what is it?” Zheng asked. “Where are they headed?”

  Keyes had astronomy data up on his screen with possible paths of the Kestrel mapped out. “There’s a gas giant, farther out. It’s called Hesiod.”

  They followed the Kestrel as it fell into an orbit trailing far, far behind the gas giant, but slowly catching up to it.

  “There we go,” Keyes said, upping the magnification on the view ahead of them.

  “Asteroids?” Zheng said.

  “Trojan asteroids,” Keyes said. “Most gas giants have asteroids sitting just ahead and behind their orbit in stable L4 and L5 positions.”

  “Makes a good hideout,” Rai Li spoke up from weapons. “The rebels at Eridani used the asteroid belt there and it made it hard to hunt them down.”

  The Kestrel slowed as it slipped into the cloud of rock.

  There was something wrong, Keyes thought. Dirtsiders heard the term “asteroid field” and thought of a large collection of rocks floating near each other.

  The truth was that asteroids lay millions of miles from each other. A slow-moving ship could thread through them easily enough on their way through a system.

  But this collection of asteroids looked just like a layperson’s idea of an asteroid field. Hundreds of asteroids had been moved within a mile of each other.

  Keyes magnified the image even more, putting it up on a wall screen the whole bridge could look at. The hundreds of irregularly shaped rocks jumped into view.

  “Looks like some of them are built up,” Dante Kirtley said. “Plus, I’m starting to get a lot of direct-line comms chatter. They’re trying to keep it focused and quiet, but I’m hearing it. Looks like we got ourselves an Insurrectionist hiding hole. And behind Covenant lines, no less.”

  But something glinted between them. Keyes upped the magnification even further, and everyone on the bridge gasped.

  The glints were long, silver lines. As Keyes jumped the magnification up again, the gossamer lines resolved themselves into tubes.

  “They’re all connected,” Li said. “With docking tubes.”

  “If each of those asteroids is fully inhabited, this isn’t just an Insurrectionist hiding hole,” Zheng said. “It’s a floating metropolis . . . behind enemy lines.”

  They coasted in closer, staring at the spectacle of an asteroid field towed in closer, connected together, and hollowed out. Ships moved in between the rocks, and occasionally a burst of flame from a guidance rocket adjusted an asteroid, presumably so that it didn’t break one of the tubes.

  “Freeze that,” Li suddenly snapped. Keyes stopped the drift on the image. “Zoom.”

  He saw it too, now.

  “Is that a Jackal ship?” Kirtley asked.

  “That’s Jackal,” Li confirmed. She tapped her console and put a window up next to their live image of a Jackal ship taken from the combat camera of a Navy ship. Unlike the usual Covenantmade ships, the Jackal-made ships looked like last-minute scrap yard projects—girders, rockets, and capsules haphazardly joined together around a core unit. These ships were not made to even kiss an atmosphere, but remain in space.

  Zheng cracked his knuckles and stared at the screen. “Bring the crew up to ready, ops. Weapons, unlock missiles and arm a nuke. Comms, make sure you’re scanning and getting everything that’s going on.”

  Li, Kirtley, Keyes, and Campbell got to work.

  “Lieutenant Campbell, set up preparations to destroy our navigation charts, as per the Cole Protocol.”

  Campbell paused, considered something, and then spoke up. “Sir, does it make sense? The Kestrel obviously has charts, and I’d bet other ships in this . . . complex have charts as well. We’re not making it any harder for Covenant here to find charts, are we?”

  Zheng looked at the screen. “You’re right, Lieutenant. That thing out there, that’s just one giant Cole Protocol violation, isn’t it? But orders are orders. Ready the purge. Just in case.”

  “Yessir.”

  “Okay, Keyes, bring her in nice and easy. We just want to swing nearby, nice and quiet, and see what intel we can pick up to bring back with us. But if things get hairy, be ready to get us the hell out.”

  “Aye, sir,” Keyes responded. Then he spotted movement. “They have patrols, it looks like. Moving around the perimeter.”

  “Let’s see how stealthy this frigate really is, Keyes.” Zheng leaned forward in his chair.

  The Midsummer Night moved closer to the tangle of docking tubes, asteroids, ships, dust, and debris trailing the massive orb of Hesiod.

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-FOUR

  PINEAPPLE HABITAT, THE RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

  Thel ‘Vadamee and his bridge crew sat on the far end of a large cell. It was a crude thing: a hole dug out of the rocky interior wall of a hollowed out asteroid, with bars of metal over the front, some of which were hinged.

  Thel had seen medieval keeps with similarly built jails back on Sanghelios. In museums.

  He’d woken up wi
th a horrific headache pounding the side of his temple where he’d struck the bulkhead. Not an honorable battle wound, or a way to end a fight, Thel thought miserably as he looked out through the bars.

  The Kig-Yar had combed the remains of the ship, carrion sniffers that they were, and found the bridge crew alive. The rest of the crew had fought to the death, destroying the ship in the process.

  Thel sincerely wished they’d just left him for dead on his destroyed ship. But the Kig-Yar had some plan in mind for them, using the Sangheili as hostages.

  Jora crept his way over. “I am beyond shame, my shipmaster.”

  Thel had been told Jora rushed the Kig-Yar with no weapon, and they’d shot him several times in the leg. Now Jora was dragging the useless limb behind him on the cell floor.

  “I have snapped one of the legs off those useless cots made for humans.”

  He handed it to Thel, who tested the sharp end with a finger. Jora had worked hard to get the long piece of metal sharp.

  “Please,” Jora begged. “I have no honor left. I am crippled. I cannot face my keep.”

  If the Sangheili masters found out that they’d been captured by a lesser race like the Kig-Yar, or that they’d failed so horribly in a holy mission handed to them directly by a Hierarch, there would be dire consequences.

  Jora’s entire bloodline could be killed off. They’d hunt down his nephews and behead them. The genetic proclivities of failures, the planetary heads of Sangheilios thought, could not be allowed to continue on.

  But if Jora did the right thing, and killed himself before the Kig-Yar could get any use out of him, or further sully his name and by extension, his line . . . well, his keep might fall in stature, but at least the line could try to struggle back up from its loss of honor.

  “Please,” Jora whispered. “You have been like a cousin to me. Please do me one last favor. I have not the strength to do it myself.”

  “Come and kneel,” Thel said.

  The other zealots in the cell faced away. It was embarrassing to see that Jora could not even dispatch himself, but needed the hand of another.