As she looked along the hul above to find a hatch, she picked up a sound. Her hearing was hypersensitive at the best of times. But the helmet’s audio amplified a noise exactly like someone sliding a pair of pants off the back of the chair, dragging a leather belt over wood. It was so slowly done, so careful, that al Lucy could think was ambush.
I can’t just wait for it to get me.
It’s coming from … Lucy leveled her rifle and swung around in the direction of the noise. Her eye caught movement and short-lived shadow, but whoever it was had taken cover between the vehicles. She started stalking it.
Okay … let’s see your legs.
The vessels or whatever were al different shapes and sizes, some ten or fifteen meters high, some much smal er. But the terrazzo floor was perfectly smooth and flat. Lucy darted under the nearest vehicle and lay cheek to the ground, looking for boots moving between the stands and struts. Over the sound of her own rapid breathing—pumping adrenaline, fiercely focused—she could stil hear the slithering leather, and what she thought was a gasp of effort.
Actual y, it sounded more like a fart. It was a weird, unfunny moment. She was trying to get the jump on someone who was more likely to blow her head off than shake her hand, and here she was listening to a damned fart. But she stil couldn’t see any legs. Elites just couldn’t move that quietly.
And a Brute would have smashed through everything in the garage to get at her.
But she saw a shadow moving slowly right to left about four vessels ahead of her. She crawled under the ships on elbows and knees, rifle cradled in the crook of her arms, keeping her eyes on that shadow. It paused for a moment.
Is there a gantry above me? Is that what I can see? Someone on a gantry?
Lucy couldn’t look up to check. She kept going. She didn’t think she was making much noise, but it was hard to be completely silent. She was trying to tiptoe on joints. It was slow going.
And then she was under the curved hul of another dark gray ship, one that gave her a glimpse of much more familiar undercarriage gear, and within two meters of the shadow.
Okay. Still no legs. You’re standing on something above me. Maybe some walkway between the vessels. So I’m coming up underneath you.
That’ll be a lovely surprise, won’t it?
Lucy left it to the last moment to flip over onto her back. It wasn’t easy with a backpack, but she did it, balancing herself on it and putting one boot against a strut. If she pushed off hard enough, she’d skid out like a skate and come up under the bastard, whoever it was. She clutched her rifle to her chest, right index finger on the trigger, left hand cupped around the muzzle, then tested her boot against the strut and braced her quads.
Deep breath. Three … two … She drove off from the strut and shot out into the gap between the vessels. Right above her, a dark shape blotted out the light. In the fraction of a second between seeing it and squeezing the trigger, her brain told her tentacles, Engineer, could be rigged to explode, do it.
She squeezed off a burst, straight up. Liquid splashed her visor. A terrible squealing noise like a bal oon venting air told her she’d hit it. She tried to rol clear, but it crashed down on her, tentacles flailing.
It didn’t blow up. And neither did she.
Oh God. I shot an Engineer. I shot a poor damn Engineer.
Lucy couldn’t move for a moment. Engineers—Huragok—were lightweights, less than sixty kilos, but it was stil hard to move with a dead weight like that on her chest. She squirmed out from under it. It was stil alive, making terrible wheezing, sucking noises now, looking like a beached squid with a face. The creatures had gas sacs that enabled them to float and that was what she’d hit. But the sacs were their lungs as wel . It was suffocating.
Lucy couldn’t even tel it she was sorry. She couldn’t explain that she’d seen too many Engineers with booby traps strapped to them by the Covenant, and that she was trained not to take chances.
She couldn’t explain that she overreacted to threats and sometimes got it wrong, either.
She tried to lift its head and comfort it. Its face reminded her of an armadil o, long and narrow. She took off her helmet and tried to look into its eyes, three on each side of its head, and make some sort of contact with it, but it was hard to work out where to focus. The poor thing was dying. It was like shooting an autistic child. Huragok were harmless, obsessed with repairing technology and tinkering with machinery. They didn’t fight or take sides; they were only dangerous when the Covenant strapped explosives to them.
That had always disgusted Lucy. She had a faint recol ection of a pet cat before the Covenant kil ed her family and glassed her colony.
Savages. Monsters.
But humans did that too. We did it with dogs and dolphins and all kinds of helpless creatures. We made them into bombs. And now I’ve killed an Engineer.
It might not have troubled most Spartans, but it troubled her. Al she could do was hold it. The sucking noises were getting weaker. There was nothing in her medical pack that could save it. She didn’t even know where to start.
And I’ve killed the only sentient being that could help us find a way out of this place. Or get me out of here.
The Engineer seemed to get heavier as she tried to prop up its head, then it stopped wheezing and its tentacles went limp.
God, I’m sorry. Did you realize I didn’t mean to do it?
Lucy sat back on her heels and wondered what the hel to do next. Now she knew there was no real threat, she had to work out how to contact the squad and let them know where she was and what she’d found. If she could locate the point where she’d entered the chamber, maybe she could tap a Morse message on the stone.
Amid al this incredible alien technology, the one thing she could rely on was a simple, seven-hundred-year-old system of on-off signals that almost everybody else had forgotten.
She stood and looked down at the Engineer for a few moments. She’d never kil ed anyone she hadn’t wanted and intended to. She was wondering what to do with the body when she heard that leather belt sound again.
Several leather belts, in fact. Shadows flickered in her peripheral vision.
Engineers were harmless—weren’t they?
HANGAR BAY, UNSC PORT STANLEY: FIFTEEN THOUSAND KILOMETERS OFF NEW LLANELLI, BRUNEL SYSTEM.
“Aren’t you going to help Naomi into her Mjolnir?” Mal said, stuffing a magazine of armor-piercing rounds into his belt. “You two were getting on so wel .”
Vaz looked over his shoulder with some difficulty as he eased himself into his new armor. It didn’t smel familiar. Maybe that was just as wel . He swung his arms to get a feel for the extra range of movement in his shoulders and wondered if it was worth the trade-off against shoulder plates.
“She’s too old and too scary,” he said. “And she needs a technician for that.”
“If you’re stil pining for Chrissie, I’l thump you. She didn’t stand by you, mate.”
“And you think that being crushed by a Spartan with bigger biceps than me is going to make me feel better.”
“No, but I almost made you smile, didn’t I?”
BB popped up in front of them. “Oh, you’re matchmaking. How adorable. Are we ready to move, gentlemen?”
“We?” Vaz asked. “I thought you were staying here with Naomi.”
“I’l split off some of my dumb processes.” BB projected a second box, a smal , battered, peeling thing. Vaz was starting to understand AI humor.
“I can’t afford to fal into enemy hands. And don’t get Phil ips kil ed. Too much paperwork.”
“I’m here, you know,” Phil ips said. He stuck his head out of the dropship’s door. “ONI said I’d get some weapons training.”
“They lied, Prof,” Mal said. “It’s what they do. Don’t worry, we’l show you how it’s done.”
Vaz secured his helmet, looking at BB through a filter of boot-up icons and status displays. He tapped Mal on the back. “Helmet check.” A few moments later, the view from Mal’s helmet cam, inset on one side of the HUD, blinked from idle to a head-on close-up of Vaz’s mirrored visor with Mal’s faceplate reflected in it.
“Wel , I’m fabulous,” Mal said, brushing off imaginary dust from his shoulder. “Let’s go wow the hinge-heads.”
Devereaux’s helmet cam feed flickered, then became a tilted view of the cockpit and Osman’s leg in regular infantry armor as she reached out to press a control. “Got you, Staff. Starting drives.”
The dropship was packed to the deckhead. Between the Warthog, a smal forklift, and the trailer ful of crates, there was barely enough room for Vaz to find a space to lean his backside against, let alone sit down. The airtight bulkhead sealed behind them and the ship maneuvered toward the ramp, then slipped through the parting doors into the black silence.
Osman’s voice crackled over the comms speaker. “BB, keep the intercepted channels patched through to Phil ips. Naomi, where are they now?”
“One Tarasque stil in low orbit, one’s landed approximately five kilometers from the RV point, and the boarding craft’s where you expect to be.”
“Okay. Devereaux, set us down behind that ridge.” Osman sounded as if she was looking at a chart on the nav display. She didn’t have a helmet on, so Vaz couldn’t see her viewpoint. “As soon as we’re done, we’re going to extract Spenser and transfer him.”
“You stil need someone to man the listening station on Reynes?” Phil ips asked.
“If you’re volunteering,” Osman said, “the answer’s no. You’re not trained for undercover work, let alone anything remote.”
“But you could catch up on lots of reading,” Mal said. “Never mind.”
Phil ips, wedged in a gap between two coolant housings, looked disappointed. At least he didn’t lack guts. Vaz leaned forward and tightened the strap on his body armor for him. The guy was stil getting the hang of unfamiliar kit.
“Don’t leave any gaps,” Vaz said. If the Elites turned an energy weapon on Phil ips, then a few pieces of upper body armor wouldn’t do him much good. But they had projectile weapons as wel , including looted MA5Bs. “You’d be amazed where rounds can penetrate.”
Phil ips gave him a thumbs-up, right hand pressed to his ear as he listened in on the hinge-head frequencies.
“Wonder what happened to Ariadne?” Mal asked.
“Can BB hear us?”
“Of course I can,” said the voice in Vaz’s audio. “Ariadne is stil undergoing emergency repairs. Monte Cassino’s been diverted to take off her nonessential crew. Sounds like they might have to abandon her.”
“And no help from Venezia.”
“No. They won’t be getting a Christmas card from the Admiral this year.”
Mal made one of his annoyed fffft sounds but didn’t offer a comment. They approached New Llanel i in silence, leaving Vaz with nothing to distract him from the fact that he was about to hand over weapons and ordnance to the enemy. No matter how he cut it, no matter how much sense it made, it stuck in his throat. It stuck in a hel of a lot deeper when he caught a glimpse of what he thought was a river in the hul cam repeater. It resolved into glittering patches of vitrified soil.
Shit, it’s all glasslands. How many colony worlds look just like this?
It wasn’t about the mil ions of humans who’d been slaughtered. The scale was so far beyond what he could feel that he didn’t get instinctively angry about it: he just knew it was terrible in a theoretical kind of way. No, what gripped his guts was the smal er-scale stuff, al the buddies he’d lost trying to save places like this, and that was al any one man could real y feel. Anyone who cried for some general mass of humanity they didn’t even know was crying for themselves, just wal owing in the idea of it. So how did the surviving colonies feel? Hood was kidding himself if he thought he could sign a peace deal and get anyone who was left out here to stick to it.
Yeah, I’d want revenge too. Can’t blame them for that.
Mal reached over and rapped sharply on his helmet, jerking him out of it. “Don’t,” he whispered.
“I wasn’t thinking about her.” Actual y, he hadn’t brooded about Chrissie for quite a while. He’d moved into the blank phase where he’d get angry about it if someone reminded him, but it didn’t keep him awake at night now. “Just wondering if we’re going to be back here in a year enforcing a cease-fire.”
They were al on an open channel. Osman couldn’t have missed that, but she didn’t pass any comment.
Devereaux landed north of an escarpment that sloped down to an ice rink of vitrified soil, and shut down the drives. “They must have heard us coming in,” she said. “But they can’t get a lock on us. Okay, everybody out.”
Mal scrambled up to the ridge clutching his sniper rifle and lay flat to scope through the landscape. The Elites wouldn’t pick him up on infrared or EM in the recon armor, but they might be able to spot him the old-fashioned way. Did it matter? Vaz thought it would have been better to rock up with as many people visible as possible, but Osman seemed to know what she was doing. If anything went wrong, then at least Mal was in the best overwatch position to pick off ‘Telcam.
“What have we got, Staff?” Osman asked over the radio. She was wearing just a black UNSCN flight suit and light armor, no helmet, possibly trying to look less confrontational to a jumpy hinge-head. To her credit, she rol ed up her sleeves and helped Devereaux hitch the trailer of crates to the Warthog. “See them yet?”
“One Elite in gold armor, plus sidekick and a couple of Brutes. Plasma rifles only. Nothing else on infrared. No idea how many more there might be in the dropship. But even I can slot them at this distance.”
“He’s kept his word, then,” Osman said, sounding surprised. “Phil ips, I’l drive. Corporal, you’re top cover.”