"I know the numbers," Ponder said. "Thirty-eight civilian casualties, three of your unit KIA. But I also know Staff Sergeant Johnson is not in the stockade, nor was he charged with any misconduct. And as far as I'm concerned that's all anyone needs to know."
Byrne tightened his fists, but left them at his sides.
"You're angry. I understand that. But this ends tonight." Ponder shifted his gaze to Avery.
"You got anything else, now's the time."
"Sir, no sir." Avery's voice was hoarse.
Ponder's eyes snapped to Byrne. "And you?"
Without a moment's pause, Byrne smashed a fist into the side of Avery's face. Avery dropped to a knee. "That should do it," Byrne grunted.
Avery spat a mouthful of blood onto the barrack's floor. He hadn't run, but Byrne had followed—gotten transferred away from TREBUCHET just like him. Avery knew something wasn't right. And that filled him with more anger than any sucker punch.
"Last chance, Johnson" Ponder said.
Avery rose, and slugged Byrne hard enough to snap his head past his shoulder.
One of Byrne's teeth skipped along the floor and came to rest near Healy. The Corpsman had made his way forward from his bunk, hefting one of his boots like a club—apparently to try and break up the fight on his own. "Jesus," the Corpsman whispered, starring down at the tooth.
"We're finished." Ponder lowered his pistol. "That's an order."
"Yes, sir," Avery and Byrne said together.
The Captain gave each Staff Sergeant a final, emphatic glance, then marched down the barrack's steps. The screen-door banged shut behind him, creaked back on its hinges and came to a rattling rest.
"I'm not rated for oral surgery," Healy said lamely in the silence that followed. He knelt and picked up Byrne's tooth.
"Doesn't matter. What's done is done." Byrne locked Avery's wary stare. He sucked at the bloody hole of his missing canine. "But this is so I don't forget."
With a slow rotation of his massive frame, Byrne followed Ponder into the night.
"I'm going to triage," Healy announced.
"Good," Avery replied, rubbing his jaw. The way he felt, the last thing he wanted was Healy keeping him awake with more conversation.
"To grab a med-kit. Then I'm coming right back."
Avery huffed as Healy walked past, "You sure you still want to bunk with me?"
The Corpsman paused in the doorway. For the first time, Avery recognized the soothing appeal of his near-perpetual grin.
"You're a piece of work, Johnson." Healy jerked his chin at Byrne's fading footfalls. "But that guy? He'd probably kill me in my sleep."
CHAPTER SIX
MINOR TRANSGRESSION, EPSILON INDI SYSTEM
Dadab slunk through the engine room, doing his best to stay low in spite of his methane tank.
In his fist he held a rock, a mottled gray and green chunk of digestive grit he'd taken from the Kig-Yar's dining compartment. Easy now, he thought, rising up behind a thick line of conduit bracketed to the floor, don't spook it.
Scrub grubs were anxious creatures. The hairs that covered their turgid bodies were always in motion, sensing for danger as they ate their way around machinery that could easily scald or freeze. But it wasn't until Dadab rose up that it felt a disturbance in the room's steamy air. The grub pulled itself from the floor with a loud pop and began undulating for the safety of an elevated overflow unit, its consumption orifice warbling in miserable panic.
Dadab threw his rock, and the grub disappeared in a mealy poof. The rock carried forward, rebounded off the iridescent casing of Minor Transgression's engine, and skipped to a stop in a puddle of viscous green coolant. Had the grub lived, it eventually would have sucked the puddle up.
Dadab snorted proudly inside his mask, and flexed one of his hands: < Two! > < Apologies, but I am perplexed. > Lighter Than Some reached a pearly tentacle into the puddle, retrieved the rock, and tossed it back to Dadab. < I only saw one grub. > The Deacon rolled his small, red eyes. The rules of the game weren't complicated. He simply lacked the vocabulary to explain them clearly. < Watch > he signed.
Dadab wiped the rock clean with a corner of his orange tunic. Then with the pointed tip of one of his fingers, he scratched a second hash mark into the stone—right beside one for the first grub that had wandered into the methane suite, breaking a long stretch of mind-numbing confinement.
It had been many sleep cycles since Minor Transgression exited its jump at the edge of the unexplored alien system. Chur'R-Yar had moved inward at a cautious pace toward the alien cargo vessel's point of departure. But until they arrived, the Deacon had very little to do; Zhar and the other Kig-Yar crewman certainly weren't interested in listening to any of his sermons.
He showed the rock to Lighter Than Some, and signed his simple math:<One, one, two! > The docile grubs were hardly a challenge—nothing like the mud wasps and shade crabs of Dadab's youth. But in the Unggoy game of hunting rock, you marked every kill, easy or not.
< Oh, I see …. > the Huragok replied. < The amusement is additive. > < More … fun … ? > Dadab struggled to mimic poses for words he hadn't yet learned.
Lighter Than Some formed slow, simple poses. < More, kill, more, fun. > Dadab didn't take offense when the creature dumbed down its discourse for clarity. He knew he spoke no better than a Huragok infant and was grateful for its patience.
< Yes > Dadab gestured, < more, kill, more, fun. > He pulled a second rock from a pocket in his tunic and presented it to Lighter Than Some. < Most, kill, win! > But the Huragok ignored him—floated back to the conduit and began to fix a stress fracture that was the cause of the coolant puddle.
Dadab knew the creature had a preternatural urge to repair things. It was almost impossible to distract it from its work, which was why Huragok were such valuable crew members. With a Huragok on board, nothing remained broken for long. Indeed, seconds later the leak was sealed —the tear in the metal conduit knitted together by the cilia that covered the tips of Lighter Than Some's tentacles.
< Hunt! > Dadab said, offering the rock a second time.
< I'd rather not. > < Why?> < Really, you go ahead. Try for three. > < Game, fun! > < No, your game is murder. > Dadab couldn't help an exasperated groan. A grub was a grub! There were hundreds of the things skulking around the Kig-Yar ship! On a long voyage like this one, it was essential to thin their numbers before they multiplied and worked their way into a critical system.
Then again, Dadab thought, maybe the Huragok felt a certain kinship with his prey? They were both voiceless servants—tireless slaves to the Kig-Yar vessel's needs. Dadab imagined Lighter Than Some's beady sensory nodes glimmering with condemnation.
Looking around the engine-room, Dadab spotted a spent energy core. He hefted the clear, bowed cube onto the overflow unit the grub was aiming for and worked it back and forth until it balanced nicely—until he was sure the Huragok would tip it, even with a glancing blow.
< Now, no, kill. > Dadab signed enthusiastically. < Just, fun! > Lighter Than Some deflated one of its gas-sacs with an obstinate toot.
< Try! > Dadab pleaded. < Just, once! > With obvious disdain, the Huragok curled its tentacle and tossed its rock. It was a perfunctory throw, but it hit the core dead center, knocking it to the floor.
< One! > Dadab grunted happily and was about to reset the target for another toss when the Shipmistress' voice crackled from a round metal signal unit clipped to his tank harness.
"Deacon, to the bridge. And do not bring the Huragok."
Chur'R-Yar sat at the edge of her command-chair, mesmerized by the contents of the bridge's holo-tank. The representation of the alien system was now much more detailed. Planets and asteroids—even an inbound comet—were all represented, details previously missing from Minor Transgression's database. The planet from which the alien ship began its journey shone in the very center of the tank. But it was the thousands of cyan glyphs dotting the planet's surface—all with the same, circular design—that transfixed her.
Suddenly, the glyphs and everything inside the tank flickered as it temporarily lost power.
"Careful!" the Shipmistress hissed, twisting toward Zhar. The male Kig-Yar stood near an alcove in the bridge's concave purple walls, a laser-cutter in one of his clawed hands.
"I want it disconnected, not destroyed!"
"Yes, Mistress." Zhar's spines flattened subserviently on his head. Then he gingerly reapplied his cutter to a twist of circuits connected to a device with three pyramidal parts suspended in the center of the alcove. The largest of the pyramids was arranged point down; the two smaller ones pointed up, supporting the largest on either side. All three shone with a silver glow that framed Zhar against the alcove.
This was the ship's Luminary, an arcane device required on all Covenant vessels. It had assigned thousands of glyphs or Luminations to the alien world, each one a possible Forerunner relic. Chur'R-Yar's tongue flicked against her teeth with barely contained excitement. If only Minor Transgression had a bigger hold….
The Shipmistress came from a long line of matriarchal ship captains. And while most of her bloodline had been decimated in defense of asteroid redoubts during the Covenant's aggressive conversion of her species into its faith, she still felt her ancestors' buccaneering spirit pulsing through her veins.
Kig-Yar had always been pirates. Long before the Covenant arrived, they sailed the tropical archipelagos of their watery home world, raiding competing clans for food and mates. As their populations grew, the distances and differences between clans decreased; a new cooperative spirit led to the creation of spacecraft that lifted them from their planet. But as some clans looked out on the dark and endless sea of space, they could not resist returning to their old marauding ways.
In the end, these pirates were the species' only effective resistance to the Covenant. But they could not hold out forever. To save themselves, the captains were forced to accept letters of marque: agreements that let them keep their ships so long as they sailed in the service of a Covenant Ministry.
Some Kig-Yar saw opportunity in this subservience. Chur'R-Yar saw eons of table scraps.
Endless patrols, looking for relics—unimaginably valuable treasures she would never be allowed to claim as her own. Yes, during her voyages she might stumble across some small amount of salvage: a derelict Covenant habitat or a damaged alien freighter. But these were comparatively meager alms, and Chur'R-Yar was no beggar.
At least not anymore, she thought. The Shipmistress knew she could remove a small number of relics without anyone noticing. But only if her ship's Luminary remained silent, and she waited to transmit its accounting until after she had taken her share.
Chur'R-Yar felt the callused plates on her neck and shoulders contract. This thick skin served as natural armor, keeping females of her species safe during the literal backbiting that accompanied most Kig-Yar mating sessions. The Shipmistress wasn't normally very broody.
But when she sold the relics on the Covenant black-market, she hoped to earn enough profit to take Minor Transgression out of service for an entire mating season. And that possibility was deeply arousing.
She relaxed in her chair and stared at Zhar—watched his sinewy muscles ripple beneath his scales—as he carefully severed the Luminary's connections to her ship's signal circuits. He wasn't her ideal mate. She would have preferred someone with higher standing amongst the clans, but she had always been partial to males with virile plumage. And Zhar had another advantage: he was close at hand. With all the blood rushing to her shoulders, Chur'R-Yar began to feel deliciously faint.
But then the bridge door cycled open, and Dadab trotted through. The Unggoy's tunic reeked of engine coolant and gassy Huragok, and the stink immediately killed her libido.
"Shipmistress?" Dadab preformed a curt bow then looked suspiciously at Zhar.
"What do you see?" Chur'R-Yar snapped, redirecting the Unggoy's gaze toward the holo- tank.
"A system. Single star. Five planets." Dadab took a step toward the tank. "One of the planets seems … to … have …" His voice squeaked off, and he drew a series of rapid breaths.
Chur'R-Yar clucked her tongue. "A Luminary does not lie."
Usually she quoted Holy Writs only to mock them, but this time Chur'R-Yar was serious.
Every Luminary was modeled after a device the Prophets had located aboard an ancient Forerunner warship—one that now stood at the center of the Covenant capitol, High Charity.
Luminaries were sacred objects and tampering with them was punishable by death—or worse.
Which was why the Shipmistress knew the Deacon was so distressed by Zhar's actions. As her chosen mate continued to flash his laser all around the Luminary, the Deacon shifted his weight from one of his conical, flat-bottomed feet to the other. Chur'R-Yar could hear the valves inside his mask clicking as he tried to get his breathing under control.
"I must report these Luminations at once," Dadab gasped.
"No," the Shipmistress snapped. "You will not."
Zhar severed a final circuit and the Luminary dimmed.
"Heresy!" Dadab wailed, before he could stay his tongue.
Zhar clattered his toothy jaws and stepped toward the Deacon, laser cutter blazing. But Chur'R-Yar stopped the over-protective male with a rattling hiss. Under different circumstances, she might have let him tear the Unggoy apart for his foolish insult. But for now, she needed him alive.
"Calm yourself," she said. "The Luminary is not damaged. It simply cannot speak."
"But the Ministry!" Dadab stammered. "It will demand an explanation—"
"And it shall have one. After I take my pick of plunder."
The Shipmistress uncurled a claw toward the holo-tank. There was a single glyph not located on the alien planet. To the untrained eye, it might have looked like some sort of display error—a misplaced piece of data. But Chur'R-Yar's pirate gaze recognized it for what it was: a relic aboard another of the alien freighters; one she hoped would be as easy to capture as the first.