by Various
The Half-Jaw stared hard at the Prelate as he rose from the bench. “I’ve already set a course for the hidden sector. Before we arrive, you might want to reconsider who has told you the truth and who has not.”
The Prelate watched in mute fury as the Half-Jaw stepped to the cell’s energy field. The barrier shimmered a lighter shade of blue, and the Sangheili walked through it and out of sight.
“I hope your investigations went better than mine,” Rtas said to the Blademaster and the Unggoy, who were waiting in the guardroom outside the cell. Both still wore their battle armor. Vul ‘Soran was nervously fingering the twin hilts of his energy swords. Stolt was calmly holding his breath while he cleaned his mask. He toggled a valve with one of his thick thumbs, heard a satisfying hiss of methane, and then clipped the mask back into place.
“Well, the good news first, then,” the Blademaster said. “The Jiralhanae didn’t cause any damage to the reactors. Strange, I know. But none of those hairy curs is alive to tell us what they were thinking, so let’s just be thankful that we still have enough power for the slipspace drive.”
“And the bad news?” the Half-Jaw asked.
“All forward plasma cannons offline. Most lasers down too,” Stolt said. “This ship might look tough from far away. But it can’t fight.”
Rtas nodded his head, only half listening to his two lieutenants. His mind was churning over a new puzzle, courtesy of the Prelate: Why would the Minister of Preparation, one of the San’Shyuum’s most brilliant Forerunner technologists, send the last living Prelate to capture my ship? The Half-Jaw had no idea. But he had a strong suspicion that the answer he sought was waiting for him in the hidden sector.
Rtas fought the urge to rub the gash in his shoulder. The pain from the wound was intense, worse than he would ever let the Prelate or his own warriors know. And yet, once again, here he was, barely recovered from one battle and off to fight another. I don’t know if I have the strength for this. . . . And in this moment of weakness he went one step further: If the Minister wants this old, worthless ship so badly? Fine. He can have it!
This idea was, of course, ridiculous, self-indulgent, and a betrayal of the Sangheili warrior code. But instead of feeling a rush of embarrassment and regret, Rtas was oddly energized. The pain in his shoulder suddenly fell away as the Half-Jaw realized: he had been so busy staring at his enemies’ puzzles that he failed to notice that he held—had always held—the most important piece.
“I need volunteers,” the Half-Jaw said to Stolt. “Enough to manage a slipspace jump, but no more than we can fit into two Phantoms. Get the wounded and everyone else off of Shadow of Intent and down to Duraan’s surface.”
The Unggoy’s beady eyes crinkled with questions. But content in the knowledge that he’d just placed his own name at the top of the list of volunteers, Stolt grumbled his assent and trotted out of the guardroom, methane tank rattling on his back.
“The ballad of Kel ‘Darsam. . . . Haven’t heard that one sung in years.” The Blademaster glanced at the Prelate, brooding on the other side of the cell’s energy-field door. “Which do you think it was—spear in the front or in the back?”
“I don’t know,” Rtas said. “But we’re about to find out.”
Shadow of Intent slid forward, its hull reflecting the yellow, pink, and sapphire clouds of a nearby nebula that nearly filled the black horizon. As Rtas watched the colors shift across the carrier’s glossy hull, he was reminded of the sea predators that prowled the tidelands near his childhood home, a keep on the edge of one of Sanghelios’s warm equatorial oceans.
The carrier was headed for a dark world without a star—a rogue planet spun out from an unknown cataclysm long ago, which was now content to carve its own stubborn path across the galactic disk, ignoring the feeble tugs of distant suns.
Orbiting this planet was something that looked uncannily like a sea urchin, one of the clusters of needle-sharp spines that had bedeviled Rtas’s explorations of his keep’s shoreline at low tide.
Once, when Rtas was barely out of his first decade, stripped to nothing but his loincloth and scampering on rocks close to shore, looking for small fish to spear, the sea had pulled quickly back, exposing a previously unseen world of limestone ridges and valleys, shaped and sharpened by ages upon ages of crashing waves. In fact, the water had receded so fast that countless sea creatures Rtas had only ever seen bulging from the deep-water nets of the keep’s fishing fleet were now caught unaware, trapped and splashing in rocky puddles much too shallow for their bulk.
For a young Sangheili hunter with ambitions that had outgrown the minuscule prey close to shore, this was a golden opportunity. Rtas had eagerly threaded his way through the limestone, spearing glistening creatures until his woven shore-grass shoulder bag hung wet and heavy across his back. But even then, he did not return to shore. There were pools farther out filled with even rarer prizes: snap-tails and electric kesh that now lay gasping on the rocks. Rtas picked his way out to these magnificent specimens, shouldered his spear, and stroked their scaly flesh, imagining he was taming them with nothing but his touch. . . .
Then Rtas had seen the wave—a dark wall of water on the horizon that grew taller by the second. He looked back at the high walls of his keep and was terrified to see how far he’d come. Entranced by the bounty of the pools, he’d clambered almost a kilometer offshore, which would have been a quick sprint on even ground. But now his retreat was a razor-sharp maze, and by the time Rtas made it back across the rocky beach and limped through the water gate of his keep, his bare feet were swollen and burning with toxins from the urchins he’d been moving too fast to miss. His hands and knees bled from countless limestone cuts, and the sting of salt water in these wounds left him dizzy with pain.
Rtas hadn’t thought of that day in decades. But the memory came back now, crystal clear, as he watched Shadow of Intent draw within a thousand kilometers of the orbital. Then, without warning, the urchin-like structure blazed brighter than the nebula behind it. And in that moment, something hit the Half-Jaw with a force far greater than the tsunami that had long ago crashed against the walls of his keep.
The energy wave, or whatever it was, slammed into the Half-Jaw’s mind. One instant he had the complete memory of that day in the tide pools. The next moment he did not—and never would again. When the energy wave hit, the foremost thoughts in the Half-Jaw’s mind were scoured clean. And when the light from the orbital finally faded from his eyes, Rtas was surprised to find he was screaming.
He was not the only one.
The pilot sitting beside him in the Phantom’s cockpit was shouting a string of unintelligible words. At first Rtas thought he was talking in some alien tongue. But then he realized the pilot was speaking Sangheili and that, for a moment, the Half-Jaw had forgotten the language he had spoken all his life.
“C-calm down!” Rtas stuttered, reaching for the pilot’s shoulder. But the Half-Jaw’s arm was heavy, and it took tremendous concentration to move his hand, as if it some vital nerves had been severed and his brain was now threading a new path around the cut. “Can you . . . still control this ship?”
“Y-yes, Shipmaster,” the pilot said. He was a ranger, the very picture of menace in his silver armor and vacuum-rated, full-face helmet. But he sounded like a frightened child, and when the sharp chirp of an emergency transmission rang from the cockpit control panel, the pilot grabbed his helmet and began to wail, rocking back and forth in his seat.
“Report!” Rtas shouted, stabbing a holographic switch to accept the transmission. The message was coming from the other Phantom, a few kilometers to starboard, and he expected to hear the Blademaster, who was serving as that dropship’s copilot.
But after a brief pause, it was the Scion who announced: “Shipmaster, we have c-casualties! I don’t know what . . . or h-how . . .” She, too, was having trouble forming the right words. “Three r-rangers are unresponsive . . . and Vul ‘Soran as well.”
Rtas clenched his jaws. He h
ad known a slipspace jump into the hidden sector was a dangerous move. But he and his navigation officer had carefully studied Spear of Light’s database and chosen an entry point far outside the volume of that cruiser’s previous arrivals and departures. As soon as Shadow of Intent had emerged from slipspace, Rtas had launched the two Phantoms. For several minutes, while the dropships had maintained what they hoped was a safe distance, the Half-Jaw had watched the carrier drift toward the orbital on the visor of his own full-face helmet. There was no crew aboard Shadow of Intent. It was now a decoy, piloted by its computational matrix, which was slaved to Rtas’s Phantom in the event that he needed to give the carrier different commands.
At some point, Shadow of Intent had crossed an invisible line, and the orbital had fired. And in that respect, the Half-Jaw’s plan had worked perfectly. If he or his crew had been on Shadow of Intent when the wave hit, they would all be incapacitated—or worse. In war, Rtas knew, there was always a price to pay for bold maneuvers. He thought of the Blademaster and his injured rangers and grimaced at the cost.
But it was about to go even higher.
The Half-Jaw heard the muffled discharge of a plasma pistol in his Phantom’s troop bay. Warning glyphs blazed on the cockpit control panel, and he punched another switch, opening a comm channel to the bay.
“Status!” he shouted, but there was no response. Rtas shrugged out of his shoulder harness and stepped groggily to the rear of the cockpit. He heard another plasma burst and felt the Phantom’s engines groan. The cockpit’s control panel suddenly shut down, and all interior lights went dark except for the violet emergency backups. By the time Rtas had manually cycled through the troop bay door, he already knew what he would find.
Bringing the Prelate with them had been a calculated risk. While the Prelate had said no more about the Minister of Preparation following his initial interrogation—indeed, had said nothing else at all—it was clear to Rtas that the two San’Shyuum were partners in their scheme. If the Minister was truly here, the Half-Jaw had reasoned, he might be willing to negotiate for the Prelate’s release, which might save Shadow of Intent from another fight. Rtas had mitigated the risk by keeping the Prelate restrained and putting him under the watchful eye of the Unggoy and the best of his rangers. But that hadn’t been enough.
All of the Sangheili in the troop bay had been stunned by the energy wave and were either unconscious or struggling feebly in their harnesses. Stolt had wrestled free of his own shoulder harness, but was now facedown on the floor, his armor sparking from an overcharged plasma pistol shot. The Unggoy was trying to crawl toward the Prelate, who stood, wrists and ankles manacled together, at the center of the bay, near a smoking hole in the troop bay floor. The Prelate had stolen a plasma pistol from one of the unconscious Sangheili, and after blasting Stolt, he had pumped more plasma into a critical relay between the cockpit and the Phantom’s engines. As soon as he saw Rtas, the Prelate steadied his stance and held down the pistol’s trigger to build another overcharged bolt.
Rtas froze. He had his energy blade, but no ranged weapon. Yet instead of shooting the Half-Jaw, the black-armored San’Shyuum aimed the pistol at his own feet. A green bolt of superheated plasma splashed the Prelate’s boots, instantly depleting his armor’s energy shields—but also melting away his ankle manacles. A holographic meter near the pistol’s rear sight flashed red, indicating the weapon’s battery was depleted.
Seeing his opening, Rtas tore his energy blade from his belt and rushed across the troop bay. The Prelate tossed the pistol to the deck and for a moment seemed ready to meet the Half-Jaw’s charge. But as Rtas brought his blade down in a vicious vertical slash, the Prelate quickly raised his hands, splayed wide apart—and Rtas’s blade cut clean through the Prelate’s wrist manacles with an electric snap. The Prelate whirled aside to let his enemy pass, and as the Half-Jaw’s momentum carried him to the back wall of the bay, the Prelate stepped calmly into the circular energy field that formed an airlock in the troop bay floor, and then dropped out of sight.
Rtas shoved away from the wall with an angry roar.
“Tried . . . to stop him,” Stolt said, his voice weak in the Half-Jaw’s helmet.
“It’s all right,” Rtas said, swallowing his temper. He holstered his blade and pulled a carbine rifle from a nearby weapon rack. “I’m going after him.”
The Unggoy rose slowly to a knee. “I’m . . . c-coming with you.”
“No. See to your rangers. Reestablish a connection with Shadow of Intent.” Rtas stepped to the edge of the airlock. “If my transponder goes dark, tell the carrier to fire all remaining weapons . . . and destroy that orbital.”
With that, he plunged through the field.
As Rtas entered the cold emptiness of space, there was no sound inside his helmet except his own uneven breaths. He fired his thrusters and stabilized his orientation so that he was facing the orbital, which was just off Shadow of Intent’s prow; a stark blossom of dark spines against the brilliant nebula. A bright chemical burst betrayed the Prelate’s position as the San’Shyuum course-corrected and accelerated toward the orbital. Just as the Half-Jaw was about to do the same, his motion-tracker flashed, and Tul ‘Juran appeared beside him, holding her energy lance.
Unlike the rangers, the Half-Jaw and the Scion didn’t have thrusters integrated into their armor. But they had mounted ancillary units before the mission, and while Tul ‘Juran had had only a short time to train, she managed a smooth stop beside Rtas, quickly corrected an incipient spin, and then said over a local comm channel: “He killed my k-kaidon and my kin . . . his life is mine to take.”
“He killed many more than that . . . and he’s not our only concern.” The Half-Jaw pointed at the orbital. “We have to shut that down, before it fires again . . . or all the lives we’ve lost will be for nothing.”
He and the Scion stared at each other through their thick polymer visors, their faces covered with the luminous war paint of their reflected heads-up displays. The Scion nodded, and Rtas saw in her eyes that she understood.
This is bigger than me. This is bigger than the both of us.
Then, together, they fired their thrusters and rocketed after the Prelate.
“It’s a trick!” the Prelate shouted. “Prepare the ring to fire again!” He was hurtling past Shadow of Intent, and at present speed would reach the installation in less than a minute. Tem’Bhetek didn’t need to look behind to know the Half-Jaw would soon be upon him.
“What happened?!” The Minister of Preparation’s thin, precise voice crackled in the Prelate’s helmet. “I attempted to hail the carrier, but you did not respond!”
The Prelate knew the Minister had been expecting him to arrive in full control of Shadow of Intent. Tem didn’t have the energy now to explain how the Half-Jaw and his warriors had departed the carrier just outside the prototype Halo’s effective range—how he himself had been captured and then made his escape.
Tem’s mind had also been rattled by the activation of the ring. But he had the advantage of knowing what was coming—had used his mental enhancements to blank his thoughts and let the crippling wave wash over him—and in this way recovered a few seconds faster than his ranger guards. He had clubbed the nearest Sangheili with his manacles, taken his plasma pistol, and then shot the Unggoy, who had been the quickest to regain his wits. But the Prelate saved all of this explanation for later and instead simply said:
“Just have the ring ready by the time I reach the bunker!”
There was a long pause. Nothing but static. The Prelate had never been this direct with the Minister. He thought he might have pricked the older San’Shyuum’s pride, giving him an order like he was one of the Jiralhanae.
“I will fire when I see fit, Prelate,” the Minister said, his voice suddenly cold. “Whether you have returned to the bunker or not.” Then he cut the connection.
The Prelate felt a gnawing doubt take a giant bite out of his resolve. After the Half-Jaw had told him his own version of event
s at High Charity, Tem had gone over and over Boru’a’Neem’s description of events. The Sacred Promissory is lost! the Minister had said. Nothing lives inside the city now except the Flood! And in subsequent conversations, while Preparation had provided a few more details about the holy city’s fall, they were mostly about his failed defense of the Promissory . . . nothing about events inside the dome.
At the time, because the Prelate had already been convinced of the Half-Jaw’s guilt, he hadn’t pressed the Minister. But having stared the Half-Jaw in the eye and heard the genuine remorse he showed for the Prelate’s loss . . . things weren’t as black-and-white as they used to be. And the Prelate’s anger was only growing stronger in the gray.
Tem shot through a gap formed by four crossed spines, out of the nebula’s light and into the installation’s darkened interior. Unlike the energy fields on Covenant ships, the Forerunner structure had no visible separation between hard vacuum and atmosphere. More magic we never understood. . . .
But the Prelate didn’t dwell on this. He throttled the output of his anti-grav belt and glided through a long diamond-shaped bay large enough to accommodate three Phantoms side by side. Following the course of a narrower, upward-sloping hall at the end of the bay, he soon emerged into the bright white expanse of the test chamber. The Minister was waiting for him near the lift that led to the bunker. He was surrounded by Yanme’e—some stood awkwardly on the floor on their curved, clawed legs, and more used these limbs to cling to the chamber walls. There were at least two dozen of the Drones, all armed with plasma pistols and needle rifles.
The Prelate kept his voice relaxed as he eyed the Yanme’e’s weapons. “What are those for?” He cut power to his anti-grav belt, alighted on the floor, and removed his helmet.