The feed was a high-angle thermal picture of the restaurant's interior in which hot objects biased white and cold items black. The target individual was very pale, as were the food counter's other patrons. The lukewarm coffee in the man's mug appeared dark gray—which meant he was due for a refill or was about to settle his tab and stand up. But most important, Avery noticed he was surrounded by a red glow, an indication from the drone's ARGUS that he was covered with explosive residue. Avery guessed the man had recently been at the raided workshop; maybe he'd even helped fit the explosive tires on the hauler.
As Avery's Hornet rotated sideways to face the office building, he strained against the black nylon cords clipped to his shoulder plates and loosed an M99 Stanchion gauss-rifle from the aircraft's wing. The weapon, a two-meter long tube of linked magnetic coils, accelerated small projectiles at very high speed. While it was technically an anti-materiel weapon designed for eliminating bombs and other ordnance at a distance, it was also extremely effective against so- called "soft" human targets as well.
Avery lowered the Stanchion on its shock-absorbing armature and hugged it to his shoulder.
Immediately, the rifle's targeting system established a wireless link to his helmet's HUD, and a thin blue line angled across the the drone's feed. This was the M99's aiming vector—the path its five-point-four-millimeter tungsten rounds would travel. Avery angled the rifle down until the vector turned green: an indication that his first shot would pass directly through the target individual's chest. Almost as if the man could feel the invisible line enter through his left armpit and exit just below his right, he swiped his credit chip against the counter and swiveled around on his stool.
Avery thumbed a solid-state switch in the Stanchion's stock. The weapon chirped twice, indicating its battery was fully charged. He performed two calming breaths, and whispered: "Target acquired. Request permission to fire." In the few seconds it took Lt. Colonel Aboim to respond, the target sauntered to the Jim Dandy's wooden double-doors. Avery watched him hold the entrance open for a family of four. He imagined the man smiled—said something kind to the two parents as they hurried after their ravenous and rowdy boys.
"Permission granted," Aboim replied. "Fire at will."
Avery refocused and increased the pressure of his gloved finger on the Stanchion's trigger.
He waited for the man to stroll down a short flight of steps—until a hash mark on the aiming vector indicated his first shot would angle harmlessly into the parking lot. As the man reached into his baggy coveralls, perhaps for the hauler's key-fob, Avery fired.
The Stanchion's slug exited the barrel with a muffled crack and punched through two of the office building's steel-reinforced, polycrete floors with no adverse effect on its trajectory.
Traveling at fifteen thousand meters per second, the round whistled over the highway and hit the target at the apex of his sternum. The man flew to pieces as the round buried itself in a rooster tail of pulverized asphalt.
Instantly, both Hornets surged up and over the office building and raced across the highway; Avery's banked into a covering orbit while Byrne's plunged toward the restaurant.
The Irish Staff Sergeant leapt from his landing-skid while the aircraft was still a few meters above the ground and fast-walked his squad to the hauler. Bits of pink and white gore covered the vehicles' cab. Ragged pieces of brown coveralls clung to the side of its cargo trailer. One of the target individual's arms had wedged between two tires.
"We're secure," Byrne growled over the COM.
"Negative," Avery countered. Checking the drone's leaden feed, he noticed a persistent red glow near the dead man's stool. "There's a bomb inside the restaurant."
Byrne and his squad sprinted to the Jim Dandy's entrance and burst through its double doors. The diners twisted in their seats and gawked as the armored marines emerged from the vending machine-packed foyer. One of the waitresses held out a menu, an involuntary gesture that earned a rough shove from Byrne as he muscled past. The Staff Sergeant's ARGUS clattered like an enraged insect as he pulled something from under the food-counter: a purse, burgundy mesh with a golden chain.
At that moment, the door to the restaurant's bathrooms at the far end of the counter swung open. A middle-aged woman in black pants and a cropped corduroy coat stepped through, casually flicking water from her freshly washed hands. When she saw the armored hulks of bravo squad, she stopped midstride. Her heavily mascaraed eyes darted toward the purse—her purse.
"On your knees!" Byrne bellowed. "Hands on your head!"
But as the Staff Sergeant lowered the purse to the counter and brought his M7 to bear, the woman leapt toward a table where the family of four had just gotten settled. She hooked an arm around the neck of the youngest boy and wrenched him out of his chair. He couldn't have been any more than four years old. His little feet kicked as he began to choke.
Byrne cursed, loud enough for the officers in the TOC to hear. If he hadn't been burdened by armor, he would have dropped the woman before she moved. But now she had a hostage and command of the situation.
"Get back!" the woman shrieked, "Do you hear me?" With her free hand she pulled a detonator from her coat—the same size and shape as the one Avery had seen in the workshop.
She held the device in front of the boy's face. "Get back or I'll kill them all!"
For a moment, no one moved. Then, as if the woman's threat had pulled some invisible linchpin keeping all the diners locked to their seats, they sprung up and scrambled for the Jim Dandy's exits.
Avery watched the chaos unfold in his HUD. He saw the bright white shapes of more than thirty terrified civilians surge around the bravo squad, driving them back and confusing their aim.
"Johnson. Take the shot!" Byrne thundered over the COM.
As Avery's Hornet orbited the restaurant, the Stanchion's aiming-vector rotated around the woman, piercing the axis of her chest. But her heat signature was almost indistinguishable from the boy's.
Suddenly, Avery saw the ghostly image of the captured boy's father rise from his chair, hands raised to show the Innie woman he was unarmed. Avery couldn't hear the father's pleas (they were too soft for the bravo squad's helmet microphones) but his calmness only increased the woman's panic. She began backing toward the restroom, waving the detonator, her threats now so furious they were incomprehensible.
"Nail the bitch," Byrne shouted. "Or I will!"
"Firing," Avery said. But instead he watched the aiming-vector pivot, waiting for an angle that might spare the boy. "Firing," he repeated, hoping his words would stay Byrne's trigger- finger. But Avery didn't fire. Not immediately. And in his moment's pause the father jumped forward, grasping for the detonator.
Avery could only stare as the woman tumbled backward, father on top and the boy pressed between. He heard the rattle of Byrne's M7, then the muffled thump of the bomb in the purse followed by the earthshaking boom of the hauler's tires. The drone's feed bleached painfully bright, slamming Avery's eyes shut. Then a wall of shock and heat tossed him back hard against the Hornet's airframe. The last thing Avery remembered before he slacked inside his armor was the sound of thrusters fighting for altitude—a noise more like a scream than a moan.
PART I
CHAPTER ONE
UNSC SHIPPING LANE, NEAR EPSILON INDI SYSTEM, SEPTEMBER 3, 2524
Horn of Plenty's navigation computer was an inexpensive part. Certainly less expensive than the freighter's load: some twenty-five hundred metric tons of fresh fruit—melons mainly, racked like billiard balls in large, vacuum-sealed bins that divided its boxy cargo container into floor-to-ceiling rows. And the NAV computer was an order of magnitude less expensive than Horn of Plenty's most important component: the propulsion pod connected to the rear of the container by a powerful magnetic coupling.
The bulbous pod was a tenth of the container's size, and at first glance it looked a little tacked on—like a tugboat nosing one of Earth's old seafaring supertankers out to sea. But whereas a tanker could sail under its own power once out of port, Horn of Plenty couldn't have gone anywhere without the pod's Shaw-Fujikawa drive.
Unlike the rocket engines of humanity's first space vehicles, Shaw-Fujikawa drives didn't generate thrust. Instead, the devices created temporary rifts in the fabric of space-time—opened passages in and out of a multidimensional domain known as Slipstream Space, or Slipspace for short.
If one imagined the universe as a sheet of paper, Slipspace was the same sheet of paper crumpled into a tight ball. Its creased and overlapping dimensions were prone to unpredictable temporal eddies that often forced Shaw-Fujikawa drives to abort a slip—bring their vessels back into the safety of the normal universe thousands and sometimes millions of kilometers from their planned destination.
A short, intrasystem slip between two planets took less than an hour. A journey between star systems many light years apart took a few months. With sufficient fuel, a Shaw-Fujikawa- equipped ship could traverse the volume of space containing all of humanity's colonized systems in less than a year. Indeed, without Tobias Shaw's and Wallace Fujikawa's late-twenty- third-century invention, humanity would still be bottled up inside Earth's solar system. And for this reason, some modern historians had gone so far as to rank the Slipspace drive as humanity's most important invention, bar none.
Practically speaking, the enduring brilliance of Slipspace drives was their reliability. The drives' basic design had changed very little over the years, and they rarely malfunctioned so long as they were properly maintained.
Which was, of course, why Horn of Plenty had run into trouble.
Rather than slipping all the way from Harvest to the next nearest colony, Madrigal, Horn of Plenty exited halfway between the two planets' systems—tore back into normal space at coordinates that could have easily been occupied by an asteroid or any other nasty, incidental object. Before the ship's NAV computer really knew what had happened, the freighter was in an end-over-end tumble—its propulsion-pod jetting a plume of radioactive coolant.
The UNSC's Department of Commercial Shipping (DCS) would later classify Horn of Plenty's drive failure as a "Slip Termination, Preventable"—or an STP for short, though freighter captains (and there were still humans that did the job) had their own way of translating the acronym: "Screwing The Pooch," which was at least as accurate as the official classification.
Unlike a human captain whose brain might have seized with the terror of unexpected deceleration from faster-than-light speed, Horn of Plenty's NAV computer was perfectly composed as it fired a series of bursts from the propulsion pod's hydrazine maneuvering rockets —brought the crippled freighter to a stop before the torsion of its tumble sheared its propulsion pod from the cargo container.
Crisis averted, the NAV computer began a dispassionate damage assessment and soon discovered the breakdown's cause. The pair of compact reactors fueling the Shaw-Fujikawa drive had overflowed their shared waste containment system. The system had fault sensors, but these were long overdue for replacement and had failed when the reactors maxed power to initiate the slip. When the reactors overheated, the drive shut down, forcing Horn of Plenty's abrupt exit. It was a maintenance oversight, pure and simple, and the NAV computer logged it as such.
Had the NAV computer possessed a fraction of the emotional intelligence of the so-called "smart" artificial intelligences (AI) required on larger UNSC vessels, it might have taken a moment to consider how much worse the accident could have been—wasted a few cycles enjoying what its human makers called relief.
Instead, nestled in its small black housing in the propulsion pod's command cabin, the NAV computer simply oriented the Horn of Plenty's maser so it pointed back toward Harvest, cued a distress signal, and settled in for what it knew would be a very long wait.
While it would only take two weeks for the maser burst to reach Harvest, the NAV computer knew Horn of Plenty wouldn't rate an expedited recovery. The truth was, the only part of the freighter worth a salvage fee was its Slipspace drive, and in its damaged state there was no need to rush the drive's retrieval. Better to let the radioactive coolant plume disperse, even if that meant letting the cargo container's reactor-powered heating units fail, and its load of fruit freeze solid.
So the NAV computer was surprised when, only a few hours after Horn of Plenty's breakdown, a contact appeared on the freighter's radar. The NAV computer quickly redirected its maser dish and hailed its unexpected rescuer as it approached at a cautions pace.
<\\> DCS.REG#HOP-000987111 >> * DCS.REG#(???) * <\ MY DRIVE IS DAMAGED.
<\ CAN YOU PROVIDE ASSISTANCE? \> The NAV computer hesitated to log the contact as a ship when it failed to match any of the DCS profiles in its admittedly limited database. And even though it failed to get an initial response, it let its message repeat. After a few minutes of one-sided conversation, the contact slunk into range of the freighter's simple docking-assist camera.
The NAV computer didn't have the sophistication to make the comparison, but to a human's eyes the rescue vessel's profile would have looked like a fishhook fashioned from impractically thick wire. It had a series of segmented compartments behind its hooked prow and barbed antennae that flexed backward to a single, glowing engine in its stern. The vessel was the deepest blue-black—an absence of stars against the brilliant background stripe of the Milky Way.
As the contact drew within a few thousand meters of Horn of Plenty's port side, three crimson dots appeared in a divot in its prow. For a moment these lights seemed to gauge the freighter's disposition. Then the dots flared like widening holes in the wall of a raging furnace, and a chorus of alarms from various damaged and dying systems overwhelmed the NAV computer.
If the NAV computer had been smarter, it might have recognized the dots for the lasers they were—fired its maneuvering rockets and tried to evade the barrage. But it could do nothing as the now clearly hostile vessel slagged Horn of Plenty's propulsion pod, burning away its rockets and boiling the delicate inner workings of its Shaw-Fujikawa drive.