Retribution

by Troy Denning

  Fred stopped in front of the three officers; then he and Kelly saluted. “Phase one complete,” he reported. “Hector Nyeto captured, Georgi Baklanov terminated as a target of opportunity, Inspector Lopis and her Ferret team aboard a Kig-Yar transport with the Havoks and tracking equipment. No casualties.”

  Osman returned the salutes, still frowning. “Well done, Spartans.” She glanced in Hersh’s direction, and her expression grew worried. “SIGINT has confirmed all that.”

  “But something went wrong.” Fred didn’t have to be a detective to see that. He turned to Hersh. “Don’t tell me there’s an equipment problem.”

  “There isn’t,” Hersh said. She was a tiny, dark-haired woman whose attention usually seemed focused ten minutes into the future. “The spy gnats are functional. Quite functional, to be honest. Ash-G099 must have landed one on Chur’R-Sarch herself. We’re catching every hiss.”

  “What about the slipbeacon?” Fred asked. In his experience, when a support officer made a point of reporting good news first, there was usually bad news to come. “That check out too?”

  “In local proximity.” Hersh’s tone was less confident. To track the Ferret team’s movement, her unit had modified a standard starship emergency locator beacon and disguised it as one of the “stolen” Havoks. Unfortunately, the urgency of the situation had not allowed field-testing. “Of course, we can’t confirm its supraluminal capabilities until we receive a homing signal from the target system, but—”

  “The slipbeacon has been the weak spot all along,” Kelly said, addressing her interruption to Osman. “I told Lopis she needed to include a backup.”

  “That was Lopis’s call to make,” Osman said. “Adding a backup would have delayed deployment and doubled the risk of discovery. Besides, the slipbeacon isn’t our problem.” She nodded to Hersh. “Go ahead, Lieutenant.”

  Hersh raised her hand and began to tap the oversize tacpad strapped to her forearm. “This intercept is from the sixteen-thirteen microburst.”

  To reduce the likelihood of detection, the intelligence gathered by Ash’s spy gnats was collected at a central transmitter, then relayed to the Silent Joe in randomly timed microbursts. Hersh stopped tapping, and a string of Kig-Yar squawks sounded from the tacpad speaker. Before Fred could remind her that he didn’t speak bird, she hit another key, and the intercept continued in English.

  “. . . clear of pagan pursuers.” The voice resembled the one that had been speaking before the translation began, raspy and female. “Then prepare a course for Salvation Base.”

  “But Dokab Castor—”

  “Will reward us abundantly,” the female said.

  “Or punish us swiftly,” said a second male. “The commandment is clear: take no chances now.”

  “And we won’t, Gyasi,” the female said. “The passengers will never see Salvation Base. We do have to eat, you know.”

  This drew a cackle from several companions, but Gyasi remained serious. “You did not see them in the trattoria. We may be the ones who get eaten. This band might even be pagan infiltrators.”

  “Why should now be any different?” asked the first male. “The pagans have been seeking Salvation Base for months.”

  “Now is different because of what happened in the Tisiphone system,” Gyasi said. “The herald says that Castor believes the UNSC will blame him for the attack on their Admiral Tuwa.”

  “And why shouldn’t they?” asked the first male.

  A chorus of amused hisses sounded from the tacpad speaker.

  “Are you all slowbrains?” Gyasi demanded. “Tuwa’s mate and their issue were taken.”

  “By the Keepers?” It was the first male again, but now his tone was alarmed. “Why would Castor command that? It’s the taunt of an eggeater.”

  “We don’t know that he did,” Gyasi said. “And it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that the Dokab expects the UNSC to blame the Keepers. They’ll expand their search for Salvation Base—tenfold.”

  There was a short silence, and when the female finally broke it, her voice was thoughtful.

  “Perhaps you are right, Gyasi. We should be careful.” She paused, then added, “We will use the gas.”

  A silence followed, then another Kig-Yar sighed. “So much for dinner.”

  Hersh tapped her tacpad again, ending the translation, then craned her neck to look into Fred’s visor. “The gas is probably ostanalus,” she said. “It’s safe for Kig-Yar, but it’s a powerful necrotoxin contact poison that causes fatal tissue decay in most other species.”

  “And the Ferrets don’t have a counteragent because there isn’t one,” Captain Ewen said, speaking for the first time. A lanky man with short-cropped gray hair, he was as tall as Hersh was short, rising almost to the height of Fred’s chin. “So we need to extract.”

  “Extract?” Kelly asked. “Did Lopis hit the panic button already?”

  “She didn’t need to,” Ewen said. “The situation has gone south.”

  “Not yet, sir,” Fred said. “If Lopis hasn’t called for help—”

  “We don’t have much time to debate this,” Ewen said. “If that starsloop jumps before we can board it, we lose the Ferret team and a Kig-Yar captain who can lead us to the Keeper hideout. We can’t take that chance. We need to find this ‘Salvation Base.’ ”

  “And if we extract now, we lose our best hope of recovering Admiral Tuwa’s family alive.” Fred turned to Osman. “Lopis can handle this, ma’am.”

  “You sound pretty sure of that,” Osman said. “Why?”

  “Because she has a good team,” Fred said. “The Kig-Yar will never have a chance to deploy that gas.”

  “We can’t be certain Lopis even knows about the gas,” Hersh said. “She might not have heard the same intercept. It’s an automatic relay, so if Ash hasn’t been able to retrieve—”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Fred said. “Lopis is smart, and her team is experienced. They’ll be watching for something like this.”

  “Even wounded?” Ewen asked. “Normally, I wouldn’t question your judgment on this, Lieutenant, but Mark took a round in the shoulder and Olivia took one in the thigh. They’re hardly in fighting condition.”

  “They’re used to it,” Fred said. He wasn’t being flippant. All of the Spartan-IIIs on Lopis’s team were from Gamma Company, whose members had undergone a special round of biological augmentations to enhance their strength, endurance, aggression, and resistance to shock when wounded. Unfortunately, the augmentations had two big downsides. First, they required a rigid protocol of pharmaceutical “smoothers” to keep the subject’s brain chemistry stable. Second, they were extremely illegal, which made Gamma Company’s special history so highly classified that neither Ewen or Hersh had the clearance to know about it. “Pain just makes them fight harder.”

  Ewen looked doubtful. “I know they’re Spartans, but—”

  “Fred has worked with this team before,” Osman interrupted. Like Fred, she was well aware of the trio’s illegal augmentations. “Let’s assume he knows what he’s talking about.”

  “Then you want to continue the mission?” Ewen checked the tacpad on his wrist and added, “The decision will be out of our hands in two minutes.”

  “Of course I want to,” Osman snapped. “That’s not the question here.”

  “Ma’am, there is no question,” Fred said. “The Ferrets can do it. And Blue Team will be right behind them.”

  “Well, sort of,” Hersh said. “Remember, we can’t actually follow them through slipspace.”

  “I remember,” Fred said. Because the slipbeacon couldn’t transmit a location until it reached the destination, the Silent Joe wouldn’t be able to begin pursuit until the Kig-Yar’s starsloop had already arrived. The length of the delay would depend on the length of the slipspace jump, but it would be considerable—at least half a day. “But it pays to be optimistic.”

  Osman thought for a moment, then nodded. “Very well,” she said. “We’ll run the risk. We
owe that much to Admiral Tuwa.”

  CHAPTER 5

  * * *

  * * *

  1725.023 hours, December 12, 2553 (human military calendar)

  ONI Research and Development Station Argent Moon

  Deep Space, Crow’s Eye Nebula

  On this date in 2495, the Insurrectionist philosopher Yera Sabinus wrote, “No prison can hold a free mind.” She penned the statement in her own blood, in a toilet-paper journal she kept hidden beneath her bunk. The words became part of the human record after a cellblock riot, when the journal was discovered during a facility-wide shakedown and scanned into the inmate record at Colonial Administration Authority Detention Center 3063-OM-Y.

  Sabinus died during the riot, but the inmate record made no mention of cause or responsibility. Intrepid Eye suspected an enterprising guard had taken advantage of the chaos to silence a troublesome prisoner—one who was widely regarded as the Insurrection’s most effective spiritual leader. But the killer’s identity was of no consequence now. The words remained the truest a human had ever spoken—especially for an advanced artificial intelligence whose archeon-class quantum processing dots had been designed by the Forerunners’ finest Builders.

  Intrepid Eye’s own prison was a signal-sequestered cell aboard the ONI research and development station Argent Moon. In its basic construction, the cell resembled a standard detention-center isolation unit—a metal-walled cube three meters long by two meters wide and two-and-a-half meters high. There were no windows, only a single, remotely controlled door. A security camera above the door monitored the cell at all hours, and a grate-covered voice portal provided the only means of communication to the exterior.

  Intrepid Eye resided inside the gray cube of an immobile, meter-high chassis that sat in the middle of the room. She had only four primitive buses, which served a fixed ocular lens, an auditory receptor, a limited-range acoustic transducer, and a single under-length manipulation tentacle. Her captors could interrupt her power supply by slapping an emergency button on the far wall, and they could flood the room with circuit-scrambling electromagnetic pulses by simply stomping on the floor—or by falling on it, if she somehow rendered one of them unconscious.

  But even those precautions could not keep Intrepid Eye completely sequestered. The security camera above the door was emitting a steady bleed-off signal, undetectable to human hearing, yet discernible to Intrepid Eye’s receptor as a carrier wave conveying data feeds from similar cameras all over the Argent Moon.

  At the moment, she was observing an image from the security station outside her cell, where a young ONI lieutenant named Bartalan Craddog was approaching the check-in counter. A watch officer stood waiting there with her crewman assistant. Tall and gangly, Craddog was the station’s new science chief and Intrepid Eye’s head captor. In one hand, he carried a Forerunner artifact with a pair of helical tongs rising from a crescent-shaped base—an instrument he no doubt hoped Intrepid Eye would help him identify.

  Craddog was a slow circuit even by human standards, and certainly the most inadequate of the Argent Moon’s complement of AI researchers. That was why Intrepid Eye had chosen to make him her rising star.

  He stopped in front of the check-in counter and set the artifact aside while he placed his personal electronics in a property drawer. He was fond of technology, so there was an abundance—an ear-comm, a fitness monitor with a self-adjusting pedometer, a wrist-worn tacpad, a high-security access key, a credtab, a utility laser, a pocket light, four data-storage chips, and a pair of sole-stimulating electro-massage shoes.

  As Craddog completed the process, Intrepid Eye watched for glimpses of the artifact on the counter. The instrument was not a sophisticated one, even by human standards, but it was just the tool she needed. If matters went well, her freedom would be complete by the time he left her cell.

  Once Craddog finished emptying his pockets, the watch officer nodded to the crewman, who stepped forward with a scanning wand to make sure nothing had been missed. The backup procedure was a wise one, since preoccupied scientists occasionally forgot that their security-enhanced name tags and color-shifting mood jewelry contained microcircuits that Intrepid Eye could use to smuggle out bits of code.

  But the safeguard was not infallible. Sometimes the guard waved the scanning wand too quickly or held it too far away, and something like a locator tag or a biosensor implant slipped past. It had happened nine times in the last five months, which was how Intrepid Eye had managed to trickle out enough code to establish remote aspects in five different sectors of human-held space—including one hidden inside the processing systems of the Argent Moon itself.

  Of course, Intrepid Eye’s remote aspects were several magnitudes more powerful than those of the most advanced human AIs. But without access to her quantum-processing dots, they were a mere shadow of a true archeon-class ancilla, and the disparity was retarding her study of humanity. Even more troubling, the necessity of communicating through overlooked electronics and undetected bleed-off signals was resulting in mistakes and missed opportunities—and that, Intrepid Eye could not tolerate.

  When the crewman’s scanning wand did not squeal, he stepped back and saluted. Craddog returned the gesture and reached for the artifact he had left sitting on the counter.

  The watch officer placed a restraining hand on Craddog’s and said something. Her back was to the camera, so it was impossible to read her lips. But Intrepid Eye had developed a compensating filter for the way sound waves were degraded as they passed through her cell’s voice portal, and she was able to comprehend the exchange perfectly.

  “Lieutenant, what is that thing?” the watch officer asked.

  “Nothing to worry about.”

  “Sir, it’s my job to worry,” she said. “If you can’t explain what it is, it might be better to follow the old procedure.”

  The old procedure had been to take only paper photographs into Intrepid Eye’s cell. Most of the time, Intrepid Eye could identify a Forerunner artifact from the image alone, and she had done so for anyone who brought her a hard-copy printout. But she had accurately explained the principles of operation only to Craddog. For everyone else, she had provided partial or inaccurate explanations. Of course, Craddog had quickly won the reputation of a genius, and he had been promoted to the station’s lead science officer.

  When the watch officer continued to hold his arm, Craddog audibly exhaled. “As you wish, Ensign.” He flashed a gap-toothed smile that many female humans seemed to find charming. “It’s a state shifter.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It converts matter from one state to another,” Craddog said, clearly lying. The instrument looked nothing like a state shifter—and it was far too small to house a suitable power source. “I just need the ancilla to show me how to produce fermionic condensates. It’s really quite safe.”

  “It doesn’t sound safe, Lieutenant.”

  “You are aware that I’m now the chief science officer here, correct?”

  “Sir, I am.” The ensign was beginning to sound intimidated. “But this is a matter of station security, and—”

  “If you’d rather discuss this with Admiral Friedel, be my guest. But I think we both know how that’s going to turn out.” Craddog flashed his gap-toothed smile again. “And, frankly, I’d miss seeing you around.”

  “I see your point, sir.” She reached under the counter, and the door to Intrepid Eye’s cell slid open. “Good luck with the state shifter.”

  “Thank you, Ensign.” Craddog picked up the artifact and turned toward the open door. “And forget I identified the artifact to you. That term is above your security rating.”

  Craddog entered the cell, and the door slid shut behind him. Intrepid Eye waited until he had closed the voice portal, then activated her acoustic transducer.

  “Dr. Craddog, it is very good to see you.” Intrepid Eye’s voice spilled out in a staccato monotone—the result of a modulation inhibitor hardwired into the transducer in a futil
e attempt to prevent her from using her voice as a carrier wave. “I have grown so bored that I have begun to calculate the moment of galactic singularity.”

  Craddog’s brow shot up. “You can do that?”

  “With enough data,” Intrepid Eye said. “Until I have access to a more complete set, my margin of error remains at one hundred millennia.”

  “Well, a hundred thousand years isn’t bad, as galactic timelines go.” Craddog smiled, as though he believed he could charm Intrepid Eye the way he did females of his own species, then added, “But let me know if there’s anything I can do to help.”

  “Thank you, Dr. Craddog. I will.” Intrepid Eye waited as Craddog sat across from her, then asked, “What have you brought me today?”

  Craddog chuckled. “That’s what I was hoping you could tell me.”

  Intrepid Eye chuckled back—or perhaps she cackled. In any case, Craddog’s eyebrows arched in bewilderment.

  “I am learning humor,” Intrepid Eye said. “I found your joke amusing.”

  “Oh.” Craddog looked uncomfortable for a moment, then said, “I’ll try to help you with that. Can you help me with this?”

  He dangled the instrument in front of her lens, tines down, and spun it around.

  “Yes, that is interesting,” Intrepid Eye said. “Turn the tines upward and pinch the center of the handle.”

  “What will that do?”

  “Activate it,” Intrepid Eye said. “There is no need to fear.”

  Craddog frowned, but did as instructed. Between the tines, a silvery pane of hard light—technically a boson-photon field—flickered into existence. His mouth drooped in disappointment.

  “A mirror?” he asked.

  “Among other things, yes.” As Intrepid Eye spoke, she activated a subroutine that compensated for the effects of her transducer’s modulation inhibitor. Her voice pitch grew more varied, and between each word came a short burst of regulated static that struck the hard-light panel and relayed her instructions to the instrument’s nanodot circuitry. “To demonstrate everything that an observation pane is capable of, I would need access to the station’s communications array.”