So how do I find like-minded Sangheili? How do these old laws apply to the situation we find ourselves in now?
He was wondering whether to enlist his keep brothers in the plot when the ground beneath him shook a little. Then he heard three muffled whumps more like artillery fire than tree clearance. But the Forerunner spire had already been destroyed; what was Relon doing, pulverizing the rubble? There were quieter ways to do that. Annoyed at the thoughtlessness of his neighbor, Jul stormed outside and activated his comms to call Relon’s keep. The channel was dead. The old fool. He’d have to drive over to the keep and ask him to stop this nonsense.
Jul called Gusay to bring the Revenant. “Gusay, where are you?” Jul was in the outer courtyard now, wondering why he could hear the familiar sound of a Spirit dropship in the distance. “Gusay, I need to pay a visit to Relon.”
The comm channel was silent for a moment.
“My lord, Relon’s keep is on fire. It’s been attacked.”
For an insane moment, Jul’s first thought was that the gods had finally chosen to make an appearance. The destruction of the spire had enraged them. No. That’s superstition to keep you in your place. You know that now. He was about to reply when the sound of the Spirit’s drives grew a lot louder and the dropship suddenly roared over the keep, heading south. By the time Jul got outside, the Spirit had dwindled to a speck in the distance and a pall of smoke hung in the sky. Relon’s keep had probably been burning for some time, judging by the density and spread. The Revenant whined to a halt at the end of the path and Gusay beckoned him from the open cockpit, looking agitated.
Raia shouted after them from an open window. “What’s happening? Is it Jiralhanae? Humans? How did they get past our defenses?”
“It’s Sangheili, my lady,” Gusay called back. “It’s our own.”
Jul sprang into the passenger section. “What do you mean, our own?”
“The keep’s been hit by plasma cannon.”
“Impossible.”
“Why? Who would do that?”
“No idea, my lord.”
Jul tried to make sense of it as Gusay steered along the line of the highway between the keeps. Other keeps in the area had already responded to the explosions. The Revenant joined a small fleet of vessels and vehicles trying to get close to the burning buildings, and the kaidon’s transports seemed to be everywhere. Nobody could accuse Levu ‘Mdama of not coming to the aid of his client keeps.
Jul stared as Gusay brought the Revenant to a halt. The main keep was just a stump of rubble shrouded in smoke. He knew only too well what a plasma cannon strike looked like. He jumped down from the vehicle and went to walk through the gates, wondering why all the activity seemed to be in the courtyard and not the keep itself. The fire was cracking and hissing, but he could hear no roars of anger or panic. It was only when he turned a corner, gulping in a lungful of acrid smoke as the heat hit his face, that he understood why there was such silence.
He didn’t take in the group of warriors, wives, and children clustered in the yard. He saw only what they were staring at. A scaffold of sorts had been made from a joist that jutted from the wall, and from it hung two objects that Jul took a few moments to recognize.
It was Relon and his brother, Jalam, both very old warriors, and both dead. Beneath their dangling bodies—what was left of them—were pools and splashes of purple blood. They were so mutilated that it was hard even for a shipmaster like Jul, used to combat and the ugly scenes it left in its wake, to work out exactly what he was looking at, but he couldn’t drag his eyes from the horror even though he was desperate to look away. It took him some moments to realize Levu ‘Mdama was standing next to him, staring in silence too.
A handwritten board hung from cords around Relon’s neck made the situation very clear. The script was stylized and ancient, more like the scrolls of the priests from before the time of the war with the San’Shyuum. But Jul could read it easily enough.
We do not allow blasphemers to live
The gods demand a return to piety
Truth abides
“I thought they were all talk,” Levu said quietly. “It seems that they’ve woken up again. They were everywhere when I was a boy.”
“Who?” Jul couldn’t work out why nobody was ushering the family away from the terrible scene. “How did they manage to do this in a keep? What are they?”
“The Neru Pe ‘Odosima,” Levu said. It was an ancient name in a form of Sangheili that was no longer spoken. “Fanatics. Fools.”
Jul recalled the name. “The Servants of the Abiding Truth? But they were monks.”
“Well, we let them became warriors, and now they’re dangerous, savage fools. And they seem to have stockpiled arms.” The kaidon gestured to his aide to do something about the bodies. “Thun? Thun! Get those bodies down from there. Cover them. It’s not decent.”
Jul looked away from the slaughter and that brief lapse of attention let a stray thought cross his mind. He wished it hadn’t, because the sane, responsible elder in him said this was all utterly wrong, cowardly—dishonorable. These were just old warriors who’d served Sanghelios and the gods all their lives. But the thought wouldn’t go away.
And there was no better idea to take its place.
If these Neru Pe ‘Odosima would butcher venerable old men for blowing up a meaningless ruin, they would surely take on the Arbiter for turning all Sangheili from the gods.
Abiding Truth was an existing network that Jul could draw on. Its followers were clearly willing to break every moral convention on disputes. Jul just had to work out how to organize and discipline them, and then he could bypass the kaidon and anyone else to bring down the Arbiter—and unite Sanghelios against the real threat that would inevitably return.
He would have to do deals with monsters for the greater good. The rules of war had changed.
CHAPTER
FOUR
WHY DO WE BOTHER TO FORCE UNHAPPY COLONY WORLDS TO STAY IN THE UN FOLD? BECAUSE UNSC BUDGETS AND UNSC HEAVY LIFT ENABLED THOSE COLONIES TO EXIST. BECAUSE THE UNSC NEEDS AS MANY SUPPLY BASES IN DEEP SPACE AS IT CAN GET. AND BECAUSE THEY’RE HUMAN—THEY’RE US. IN A GALAXY OF HOSTILE ALIENS, YOU’RE EITHER FOR US, OR YOU’RE THE ENEMY.
(ADMIRAL MARGARET O. PARANGOSKY, CINCONI, TO CAPTAIN SERIN OSMAN)
FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX, FOUR HOURS INTO RECONNAISSANCE PATROL: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.
The passage ahead of Lucy wasn’t the tunnel it first appeared to be.
It could have changed shape in the second that she’d looked away, or maybe her helmet optics were on the fritz, but the opening was at least six meters high, a black, featureless maw that didn’t appear to have interior walls.
Why make a door that big?
She took a few steps inside, rifle raised, and flicked on the tactical lamp. Her visor flared for a moment. Nothing. The cavern swallowed the light and kicked her armor’s reactive coating into mottled black. She glanced down at her boots—now matte black, barely there—and realized she couldn’t see a floor underneath them. It triggered a brief, primal panic. For a moment she was falling. It took a conscious effort to look up and make herself believe that she was on solid ground. She struggled to trust what she could feel rather than what she could see.
“Lucy? Hang on.” It was Tom on the radio. “Lucy! Wait, will you?”
Two sets of boots thudded behind her. She hadn’t realized how far into the opening she’d gone. Her helmet’s head-up display showed that Chief Mendez and Tom were following her, the only two icons at close range. Tom’s bio readout showed his pulse was raised. She decided to risk taking her eyes off the passage and turned around.
“What have we got, Lucy?” Tom caught up with her and put his hand on her shoulder. “You okay?”
Why did he think she wouldn’t be? She waved him away. Something had come down this passage and she couldn’t turn back until she’d found and identified it, and—if necessary—neutralized it. She checked her display for EM or
thermal signatures ahead, but there was nothing. The ground was definitely flat and smooth like terrazzo. Now she’d started to trust her proprioception rather than her eyes, she picked up speed and started walking at a pace she thought of as cautious-normal.
“I’m going to fetch Halsey in here to evaluate this,” Mendez said. Lucy kept moving. “Hold it here, Lucy. We’ll secure a perimeter in case whatever it is decides to come back. You hear me, Petty Officer? Hold it here.”
Lucy halted. She couldn’t shake the feeling that if she didn’t hunt down whatever had fled, it would come back for them all. Get it before it gets us. She stood staring into the black void, wondering what kind of material could absorb light so completely.
The trouble with staring at a featureless surface was that it soon stopped being featureless. She could now see pinprick flashes of light and brightly colored moving shapes like mingling currents of dye. It was just her optic nerve trying to make sense of the absence of light, but she couldn’t stop her brain from pouncing on the phantoms and reshaping them. Suddenly it was a twisting path with a tantalizing hint of lights ahead, and movement, and people.
Then the colored lights became the afterimage of a white-hot explosion.
Lucy had been here before. Part of her knew it wasn’t happening, but it couldn’t stop the animal core of her reacting to it. She was in a maze of pipes, in a Covenant refinery, and she could even see the coolant leaking and bubbling on the floor ahead of her. Tom was to her right. They were the last two Spartans left alive from Beta Company and now they were going to die as well. She was twelve years old; scared, running on autopilot, trying to gulp in a breath that never reached her lungs because the pounding pulse in her throat was choking her.
Then hands grabbed her shoulders and spun her around.
She raised her fist with no idea why, no thought involved. Only the crack of a visor against her own faceplate stopped her. She could still see the coolant pipes in her peripheral vision, fading and drifting, and then they were gone.
“Come on, Luce, get a grip.” Tom still had hold of her shoulders. He knocked his helmet against hers a couple more times. “It’s okay.”
It felt like long minutes and Lucy was certain she’d moved a few meters. But it was seconds and she was still rooted to the same spot, just facing in the opposite direction. Her bio readouts must have spiked and scared the hell out of everyone.
“It’s okay. I get it too,” Tom stepped back as if he was satisfied she wasn’t going to lose it. “Just take it easy. Breathe. It’s not real. Any of it.”
There were times when Lucy wished she could answer him, but there were no words left inside her now. After seven silent years, she didn’t talk and she didn’t scribble notes. Her head was full of things that nobody else would understand or want to hear. At first she’d had nothing to say in the hours after she’d escaped from the sabotaged refinery with Tom, and then she’d had things she’d wanted to say that were too painful. The heavy silence settled like silt in her chest, a little more each day, and each time she tried to work up to talking it was harder to find words that conveyed the images in her head, and then even her inner voice faded away.
She couldn’t imagine speaking now. She didn’t know where to start. It was just as well that Tom could work out what was going on in her head.
“Hey, Lucy.” She was suddenly aware of Olivia striding toward her with Mark and Ash at her heels. They’d have seen her bio signs spiking, too. “Couldn’t you find the light switch?”
Ash tapped his knuckles against her armor and Olivia gave her a rough hug. When Lucy looked past her, Halsey was framed in the dim scatter of lights at the far end of the passage. For a moment she looked like she was standing in front of a decorated Christmas tree. It was a sharp little echo of buried memories, and then it was gone.
“Environmental controls,” Halsey called. Her voice didn’t echo. Lucy could hear her even with her helmet on. “Come here. Look.”
Lucy hung back as the others headed for the entrance and stood a meter inside the passage, just in case whatever it was she’d heard decided to return.
It’s got to get past me.
It won’t.
Halsey was running one hand over the illuminated Forerunner symbols on the walls. After a few moments of frowning at the lights as if they were being willfully stubborn, she held out the cylinder to Kelly.
“Here, hang on to this for me.” She took out her datapad and unfolded it like a piece of origami into a laptop format. That didn’t appear to satisfy her and she folded it up again into a datapad. Then she carried on running her hand along the symbols. “Okay, perhaps it’s not environmental. I’ve found a symbol for humidity. This might be controlling storage conditions, so one of these could activate lights or orientate us.”
“How do you know that?” Mendez asked, all suspicion.
Halsey flipped the screen and held it toward the wall. “I just do. Let’s see what my database makes of this.”
“And you wouldn’t dream of keeping anything else from us.”
“Chief, I won’t lecture you on the wisdom of stones and glass houses, so just accept that I don’t know how I know yet. I’m not hiding anything.”
Lucy expected a scientist like Halsey to be more disturbed about random hunches. She backed away into the passage and set her helmet to record, just in case she picked up something.
“Luce…”
Tom’s voice in her helmet was a quiet warning. She gave him an I’m-okay gesture, diver-style, and carried on. He could still see her bio readout so that would keep him happy until she came back. Normal pulse and respiration. See? I’m fine. I can handle this. I’m not crazy. Just low blood sugar. Fatigue. I ought to eat something.
“Luce, wait up. I’m coming. Damn it, you know better than that.”
She moved across to the wall and held her rifle one-handed, skimming her left hand across the surface to orient herself, and suddenly she felt much better. The ground beneath her boots was smooth and level. Even if she couldn’t see it she had a better idea of where she was.
I have to find where this leads. Something’s in here. Something’s waiting for us. If we found our way in—so might the Elites.
And Lucy had a lifetime of scores to settle. She didn’t think there was anything wrong with her judgment at all.
When she stopped and looked over her shoulder, the faint light from the entrance had gone. She turned back, almost giddy because there was nothing to orient her. But the squad’s bio signs were all visible on her HUD, so she hadn’t lost comms signals, and she wasn’t alone.
“One-Zero-Four to Bravo-Zero-Nine-One.” It was Fred on the radio now. “Lucy, where the hell are you?”
He should have known he wouldn’t get an answer, but if she could see his bio readout, he could see hers. He’d know she was fine. If the others wanted to faff around and look for the light switch, fine, but someone had to secure this passage. She was about to flash back a status signal when she collided with something that bounced her back a couple of steps.
Damn, she’d walked into a wall. That was what came of not concentrating on the task in hand.
“What is it, Lucy?”
Her heart rate must have blipped. She transmitted status-OK, then put her hand out ahead of her to feel her way around the obstruction. When her fingers touched it, it felt exactly like the side wall she’d been using for orientation, but then it yielded and her hand went through something soft. It was almost as if she’d put her hand into a closet and found a pile of towels.
Except … except her whole body passed through it. The wall brushed past her. It was the only way she could describe it.
As the wall engulfed her, the squad bio readouts in her HUD winked out. She tried to turn back. Too late: sudden pressure popped her ears, the ground dissolved under her, and she fell, pitching forward. Her helmet bounced away. It cracked loudly against something but she couldn’t see where it had rolled.
And then the lights came on
.
She couldn’t yell a warning. She couldn’t transmit a status report.
But she still had her rifle, and now she could see where to aim.
HANGAR DECK, UNSC PORT STANLEY: APPROXIMATELY TEN HOURS FROM NEW LLANELLI.
“History’s not my subject.” Vaz bent over a crate of Covenant rifles and wondered whether ONI had paid for them or looted them. The hangar deck was a warehouse of crates stacked either side of a small dropship that looked like a civilian patrol vessel, although its matte gray stealth coating said otherwise. “But I recall that things like this often end very badly.”
Naomi loomed over him. “So you do speak.”
That was rich coming from her. She hadn’t said more than a few words since the meeting with Parangosky. Vaz had already chalked that up to Spartans believing too much of their own PR, because everybody knew that they were winning the war single-handed. It was official. The UNSC media people had decided it was great for morale to tell the civvies all about the Spartans and what a superhuman job they were doing of saving Earth.
That didn’t go down well with ODSTs. Vaz suspected it didn’t go down well with all the other average, unglamorous grunts who were doing their fighting and dying behind the scenes, either.
“Yes, I talk,” Vaz said at last. “If I have something to say.”
He couldn’t read her expression at all. Even Mal hadn’t tried to flirt with her, and that was a first. Naomi was just odd. Vaz had expected Spartans to be like the heroic PR image presented to the media, fearless and godlike, gazing nobly into the distance with one boot on a pile of dead hinge-heads. They weren’t supposed to be awkward.
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