by Troy Denning
“Wendell said you were coming around.”
Shocked to hear that Wendell’s monitoring capabilities extended into her bedroom, Veta glanced around for an access point and found it in the media screen’s integrated conferencing camera. Normally, the camera would be controlled by only the room occupant, but a powerful military AI like Wendell would have no trouble seizing command of the device.
When Veta did not reply to his first comment, Nelson seemed to realize he had made her uncomfortable. He tried to recover by asking, “So . . . how are you feeling?”
Veta raised her hands and wiggled her fingers to indicate nothing was broken. “Lucky, I guess.”
Nelson smiled too broadly. “Yes, I can see how you might be feeling that way.”
He picked up the decanter and, providing himself a convenient excuse to look away, began to fill the glasses. Veta had a sinking feeling and went to join him.
“How bad is it?” she asked. “Didn’t the Gammas make it?”
“The Gammas are fine—at least as fine as Gammas can be.” Nelson handed her a glass. “They’re already mobile, even if the medics keep telling them they shouldn’t be.”
“I’m glad to hear it.”
Veta accepted the beverage, then sat in one of the chairs and took a thumb-size babo nut from the snack bowl. She hadn’t realized how hungry she was until she bit into it and tasted its peppery sweetness, and she immediately felt guilty for relishing the experience.
She took a sip of the bitters, then said, “Sorry about Fred.”
Nelson’s brow shot up. “Fred? Don’t you worry about Fred—not when you lost so many of your people.” His eyes widened with sudden worry, then he asked, “You did know, didn’t you?”
Veta let her face drop and took a long swallow of the drink, but it did nothing to dull the ache in her heart.
“I know,” she said at last. “I saw the Falcon go down. I was there when the Jiralhanae pulled the bodies out in pieces.”
Nelson took the glass from her hand and, despite the fact that it was still more than half-full, topped it off.
“Inspector Lopis . . . it’s not just the people in the Falcon you lost.” He set the glass on the table in front of her. “It’s everyone. You’re the only one left.”
“What?” Veta literally did not understand what he was saying; it sounded as though he was trying to tell her that Andera Rolan, Olinda Riost, and all the GMoP personnel who had been stationed in the Vitality Center were just as dead as Cirilo, Saria, and all the others who had made the trip to Crime Scene India with her. “Come on. Don’t be ridiculous. Dr. Rolan wasn’t aboard the Falcon. Neither was Olinda or Dario.”
“No, but they were in the employee dorm when a downed Pelican crashed into it.” Nelson stared at his glass for a moment, clearly at a loss for words, then finally looked up and said, “There was a sniper attack on the main building, too. I was nearly killed myself.”
It was this last awkward detail that finally jolted Veta out of her daze of incomprehension—and which convinced her to accept Nelson’s story at face value. The man was intelligent and ambitious, but he was a bit awkward socially, and his obvious discomfort spoke volumes. Had the commander been trying to hide something, his delivery would have been more deliberate and practiced—and he would not have made the mistake of trying to mitigate her loss by focusing on himself. Clearly, Nelson was just trying to break the news to her as gently as he knew how.
Veta took another babo nut from the bowl and absentmindedly bit into it. At the moment, she needed food a lot more than she needed oblivion—no matter how well intentioned the offer of a drink might be.
When Veta didn’t say anything, Nelson continued, “We recovered everyone’s bodies, of course, and quite a bit of the evidence—though I imagine it’s been badly contaminated. And we found a datapad stored in a file safe.”
Veta nodded numbly. The datapad probably belonged to the unit’s information coordinator, who was in charge of collecting and cataloging all knowledge concerning the investigation. It was standard GMoP protocol to store the datapad in a file safe whenever it was not in use.
Nelson turned to the sergeant and said, “Odell, could you bring it in?”
“Yes, sir.”
As Odell disappeared into the next room, Veta realized Nelson was carefully steering the conversation toward her investigation—away from everything else happening in the vicinity. And in her shock, she was letting him.
“Commander Nelson,” Veta said, “as much as I appreciate your concern for my situation, I’d like to know more about yours. Is the battle over? Are the Keepers of the One Freedom gone? What happened to the Forerunner artifacts that Fred and his squad recovered?”
“Yes, that battle is over and the Keepers are gone,” Nelson said. “The rest, I can’t discuss. I think you know why.”
Veta gave a resigned nod. “Classified.” Given that she had helped recover the artifacts, she would have grumbled about Nelson’s reply more—had she not noticed his slip. “But you said that battle. So, are you expecting another one?”
Nelson waved a weary hand. “We’ll come to that, Inspector,” he said. “But first, we need to talk about where your own investigation stands.”
Odell now returned and presented Veta with a soot-stained datapad. “Here you are, Inspector. We had to replace the energy cells, but it still functions.”
Veta accepted the datapad with a nod, then activated it and entered her override password. She selected REPORT INDEX on the opening menu, and almost immediately, two files caught her eye.
The first was a summary of evidence collected by the forensic spiders Cirilo had released at Crime Scene Charlie, with a subheader that read EXOTIC ALLOY. Veta opened the file and discovered there had been traces of an unidentified alloy on the toppled benches. The evidence had been collected only where the benches had been grasped as they were ripped off their mounting bolts. The implication was obvious. If Veta could find the source of the alloy, she would have the weapon used in the crimes. After that, finding the killer would be a lot easier.
The other file that caught her eye was an encrypted message from Arlo Casille titled: SCHEMATICS FOR LOPIS. Veta knew it probably contained the specs she had requested for the Spartans’ Mjolnir armor. Unable to reach Veta while she was underground, the minister had simply fallen back on procedure and sent the file to the team’s information coordinator.
Veta closed the menu without opening Casille’s message, then looked up at Nelson and asked, “Did you look at these reports?”
Nelson gave a small shake of his head. “We couldn’t guess the passcode.” Not seeming to recognize the impropriety of admitting that the UNSC had actually tried to violate GMoP security in the first place, he took another sip of bitters, then added, “Under the circumstances, it didn’t seem worth the time to crack it.”
Swallowing a sigh of relief, Veta turned off the datapad and set it on the table. “What circumstances are those?”
“Circumstances on the ground, of course,” Nelson said. “The Ministry of Protection isn’t allowing UNSC reinforcements through, and there are reports that Minister Casille is calling for a cabinet proclamation demanding President Aponte’s resignation. Our information suggests that Casille himself will take Aponte’s place.”
Veta gasped. “Arlo?” Her boss had always been a political schemer and a hard-line loyalist, but he had never struck her as subtle enough to win the presidency. “When did this happen?”
Before answering, Nelson turned to Odell. “Excuse me, Inspector. Anything new on that front, Sergeant?”
“Negative, sir,” Odell replied. “I will inform you the moment a dispatch arrives.”
If Nelson noticed the slight rebuke in the sergeant’s tone, he didn’t show it. Nelson merely nodded, as if his mind were somewhere else, then looked back at Veta.
“With the . . .” He seemed to reconsider what he had been about to say—no doubt something about the planet-wide comm jamming—then
continued: “In the current communication environment, it’s hard to track fast-moving events in Rinale. Our latest information indicates your Cabinet of Ministers is meeting today. Once Casille assumes office, we expect him to move quickly.”
“To do what, Commander?” Veta was struggling to absorb what she was hearing, and to understand how the circumstances on the ground—as Nelson called it—affected her investigation. “Round up the Keepers?”
This drew a cynical snort from Odell, and then the pieces finally fell into place for Veta.
The Gao woman in the cave—the one who had died after sticking a shotgun in Olivia’s face—had introduced herself as an old friend of Arlo . . . and she had wanted the same thing as the 717th and the Keepers: the ancilla.
Veta turned back to Nelson. “You think Arlo is going to attack the 717th?”
“That’s what we expect, yes.”
“That’s crazy,” Veta said. “It would start an all-out war—a war that could lead to another Insurrection.”
Nelson shook his head. “Nobody wants to risk another Insurrection,” he said. “And Minister Casille knows it.”
Again, Veta had pause to consider Nelson’s words—and she couldn’t quite believe what she was hearing. “You’re on your own? No way. A UNSC task force would never stand by and let anyone wipe out an entire research battalion.”
“Of course not,” Nelson agreed. “But there are complicating factors, and our extraction is far from—”
“Commander,” Odell interrupted. “Those plans are—”
“Classified, I know.” Nelson waved a dismissive hand. “But Inspector Lopis deserves some kind of explanation.”
“I get the picture,” Veta said. “You’re going to evacuate, hopefully before Arlo becomes president and tries to stop you. What about my investigation?”
Nelson looked confused. “That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you,” he said. “You don’t have an investigative team anymore, and your evidence has been corrupted. All you really have is what’s on that datapad. It’s over. Even if you wanted to continue, I don’t see how you could.”
“It would be hard, but not impossible,” Veta said. “I was making progress.”
“I know you were. You did everything you could.” Nelson spread his hands. “And, under the circumstances, it would be wrong to ask any more of you—especially after everything it’s cost you already.”
Veta closed her eyes for a moment. Had she been able to foresee how the investigation would become entangled with the military operation, she would never have brought her team along. And had she anticipated Arlo Casille’s brinksmanship—realized how far he would go to undermine the UNSC’s plan and seize power for himself—she might have declined the assignment altogether.
Might have, because no matter what else had been happening at the time, Gao citizens were being murdered. There had been a serial killer running free here—and that hadn’t changed.
A trio of sharp voices broke out in the next room, followed by a sharp cry and the sound of a brief scuffle. Nelson turned to Odell, who started toward the door, and Veta looked toward the SAS-10 she had seen lying in its holster on the dresser.
A pair of powerfully built teenagers stepped through the doorway. Both were unarmed and neatly dressed in fresh fatigues and clean boots. One was on crutches, and the other was using a twistlock to push an angry-looking sentry into the room ahead of him.
“Hi, Mom,” Olivia said. She smiled and hobbled across the room on her crutches. “We heard you were finally awake.”
Ash studied the fatigues Veta was wearing, then nodded.
“The uniform looks good on you, but you need a couple of bars.” He shoved the sentry facedown onto the bed and released the twistlock, then moved toward Veta without looking back. “We thought the brass might be getting ready to ship you out without letting us say good-bye.”
Veta rose, a little surprised by how excited she was to see these two. Now that they were cleaned up and no longer dressed in SPI armor, they looked a lot more like adolescent endurance athletes than they did soldiers. She started to open her arms—then realized Spartans were unlikely to be big huggers, and so she stuck her hands in her back pockets.
“It’s good to see you both,” Veta said. “I wasn’t sure how things turned out back at the crash site.”
“Yeah, you did bug out in a big hurry,” Ash teased.
Olivia elbowed him in the ribs. “Be nice,” she said. “She’s a good soldier.”
“I know.” Ash grinned, then said, “That was a pretty wild extraction.”
“And we wanted to say our thanks.” Olivia’s tone was serious. “Fred may be a lieutenant, but he’s pretty decent for an officer. We’d miss him if he wasn’t around.”
“Fred survived?” Veta was more than a little impressed through her shock. “And he’s okay?”
“He will be,” Ash said. “His armor’s in worse shape than he is.”
“He gave us a message for you,” Olivia said with a smirk. “He said next time, he rides on top.”
“Wait—Fred was conscious?” Veta said. “Why didn’t he do something?”
“Turns out his HUD wasn’t the only thing acting screwy,” Ash said. “His Mjolnir was still in lockdown, either from the Falcon crash or from being banged around by that Brute you kneecapped.”
“And because he was pumped full of biofoam and in too much pain to do much of anything,” Olivia added. “Fred’s not a Gamma, you know. Eventually, his pain stops making him any stronger.”
The offhanded remark broke Veta’s heart. The UNSC had deliberately inflicted a cruel mental handicap on Olivia and all the other Gammas—one that could easily rob them of their sanity under the wrong circumstances—and yet, Olivia chose to take pride in her affliction. It was either the wisest thing Veta had ever witnessed in a teenage girl or the most naïve. Maybe both.
Veta forced a smile and nodded. “Well, I guess not every Spartan can be a Gamma.” She glanced toward the door, where the sentry and Odell now stood together, glaring back at Olivia and Ash, then asked: “Speaking of Gammas, where’s Mark? I hope he came out of the battle okay, too.”
Olivia and Ash exchanged glances, and then Olivia said, “Yeah, well, Mark is being Mark.”
“He’s out on patrol with Kelly and the rest of Blue Team,” Ash said. “But he said to tell you he’ll be seeing you around.”
Veta cocked a brow. It probably wasn’t a threat, but there was just enough taunt in the message to remind her why she couldn’t close her investigation. If she gave up now, her colleagues would have died for nothing—and Ash and Olivia would never know whether they were fighting alongside a master soldier or a serial killer.
And the victims deserved justice. So did their families. Wasn’t that the reason Veta had become a homicide investigator in the first place?
Veta forced a smile, then said, “Thanks, Ash. Please be sure to tell Mark that I’ll catch him later.”
Olivia rolled her eyes. “It’s not him, Mom,” she said. “How many times do I need to tell you that?”
“Until I know it’s true,” Veta said gently. “But that shouldn’t be much longer. I’m close to identifying the prime suspect.”
“You are?” The question came from Nelson, still seated at the table behind her. “I thought we just agreed that you’ve taken the investigation as far as it can go.”
Veta turned around. “Not in the slightest, Commander,” she said. “I never agreed to anything. You were telling me about your problems with Minister Casille. And those problems don’t impact my investigation at all, and they certainly don’t end it.”
Nelson rose with a frown, then looked past Veta toward the door. “Sergeant Odell, escort these two Spartans back to their quarters. I’ll see that they have a chance to say their farewells before Inspector Lopis ships out.”
“Yes, sir,” Odell said. “Spartans?”
Veta looked over her shoulder and found Ash and Olivia turning to obey, but mov
ing slowly and scowling in resentment.
“The commander and I have a few details to work out,” Veta said. “But I won’t be leaving anytime soon. I’ll make sure to track you down.”
Olivia relaxed. “Okay,” she said. “We’re down on the third floor.”
She tapped Ash on the ankle with one of her crutches, and the two Gammas picked up their pace. Once they were gone, Nelson turned his attention to the doorway—and the embarrassed sentry who had been lingering there since failing to prevent Ash and Olivia from entering the room.
“Return to your post, Mikaelis,” Nelson said. “And if we’re interrupted again, it had better be over your dead body.”
Mikaelis paled, then saluted and quickly withdrew, pulling the door shut behind him. Nelson paused, apparently giving the sentry time to move out of earshot, then looked back to Veta.
“Mom?” he asked. “Ash and Olivia seem to have grown rather fond of you.”
Veta nodded. “Apparently,” she admitted. “Once I figured out how young they are, my protective side came out. I’m probably the first person who’s ever treated them like teenagers instead of soldiers.”
“But they are soldiers, Inspector,” Nelson said. “The elite of the elite, in fact.”
“It’s possible to be more than one thing at a time.”
Nelson considered this, then said, “I imagine it is.” He returned to his chair and motioned for Veta to do the same. “What’s this about Mark? He can’t be your suspect.”
Veta shrugged. “Maybe. I’m not sure yet.”
“That’s what we need to discuss.” Nelson reached for the decanter, then saw that Veta’s glass was still full and placed his hand awkwardly on the table. “If you don’t have the evidence to prove that whoever committed these crimes is one of our Spartans—”
“I didn’t say that,” Veta interrupted. “I said that I’m not sure yet.”