by Kelly Gay
And then her mind had been blown.
“My ship has arrived in the system,” she told Barton after he was finished with another lecture she hadn’t even listened to. “Command of the Taurokado is yours once again. Happy hunting.” She cut the feed and sat back, letting out a long breath, and catching movement out of the corner of her eye.
Lieutenant Commander Radeen was standing in the doorway.
She had no idea if he’d just arrived or had heard the entire exchange. He rarely showed any emotion one way or another, but she thought, for the briefest of moments, there was a glint of pride in his eyes.
“Commander?”
He stepped into the room. “The AR team’s full report should be coming in within the hour.”
“Good. When it does, patch it through immediately.”
He hesitated, seeming like he wanted to say more, but then decided against it. He dipped his head, smiled, and pulled the door closed behind him.
Annabelle sat there stunned. Wonders never ceased. That might be the first time in years she’d actually seen the man smile.
CHAPTER 22
* * *
UNSC Taurokado, Jupiter Station, Sol system, June 20, 2557
When it came to Rion Forge, failure seemed to follow Walter Hahn wherever he went. No matter that he’d secured Hugo Barton his debris field and his Forerunner AI. No matter that, because of his efforts, the Office of Naval Intelligence would continue to achieve great things, necessary things, for the good of the galaxy, whether the galaxy at large knew or approved of it or not.
All of that fell short and was forgotten the moment they entered Geranos-a’s atmosphere and caught sight of the Ace of Spades.
No one had been more shocked than Hahn himself.
How the hell the salvagers had found the site, he couldn’t begin to guess. But he knew it wasn’t by coincidence.
This was payback, plain and simple.
Now Barton, and no doubt the entire crew of the Taurokado, looked to him as the cause. Because he had made a critical mistake with Rion Forge: he’d taken too much from her. She’d gotten under his skin, he admitted that, and he’d gone too far. Instead of scaring her into submission, he’d created an enemy—and a reckless one at that.
Hahn hadn’t missed the look in Spartan Novak’s eyes when he’d taken her father’s mementos and files. He’d thought it stern and bold, but in hindsight it was harsh and perhaps unnecessary.
Too late to turn back the clock now.
Shortly after they’d arrived at Geranos-a, an ONI black ship appeared and proceeded to take over the site on the planet below. Hahn had no idea what, if anything, Rion and her crew might have retrieved from the surface, but they hadn’t gone there for shore leave. Now he was bound and determined to recover whatever they’d taken and correct his mistake.
Hahn was going for maximum damage control; he had to do something now.
With a little digging, and Turk’s help, he’d been able to locate the commanding officer who’d sent them to Geranos-a in the first place—a Captain Annabelle Richards.
He waited a full twenty-four hours at Jupiter Station for a reply before his aide alerted him with good news. “Sir, she’s on the line.”
Hahn sat straighter in his desk chair, tugged his black ONI-issue jacket down to smooth any creases, and then turned on his screen. The face staring back at him was not what he’d expected. Annabelle Richards was a rail-thin, petite woman with straight red hair parted in the middle, one side tucked behind her ear. Looking at her file wasn’t in his pay grade, but considering all the roadblocks he’d encountered just to gain contact information, she must be very important within ONI’s ranks.
“Agent Hahn,” she prompted, not bothering to hide her impatience.
“Yes, ma’am. As you may know, I’m the counter-contraband agent on the Taurokado—”
“Yes, I know,” she cut in. “I read your file. And I read Captain Karah’s report. None of which has been very helpful. You underestimated your salvagers, Agent Hahn—made an enemy of them when your directive was and is to make them work for us whether they realize it or not . . . or want to or not.” She gave him a tired, somewhat pained look. “Unless you know where they are with my wreckage, I don’t see the point—”
“So they did take something.” Her flat expression told him he’d overstepped. “Please,” he said hastily before she dropped the feed. “Captain, I don’t know where they are at this moment, but I believe I will know.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying that I can lure the Ace of Spades to a meeting.”
Her eyes went sharp and narrow. “They could be anywhere in the galaxy right now. What makes you think you can get a message to them?”
“Navigating the smuggling trade in the Outer Colonies is my specialty, ma’am. I know it pretty well. There are lines of communication, channels used by traders and salvagers. Everyone out there knows when goods come in, when private sales happen, when big things are discovered. The Ace of Spades might be in slipspace or hiding out on some planet with no commsat, but they won’t be doing that forever. And when they reemerge, they’ll check in. They’ll want to know the state of things—if we’re still after them, how safe they are. I propose we send out a message, one they’ll find appealing.”
“Which is?”
“That we’re willing to make a deal. I believe that’s why they went to Geranos-a.”
“To steal ONI property and then trade it back to us?” She shook her head in disbelief.
“I know it sounds preposterous and reckless, but please understand—these salvagers, they operate on a different level. They have no respect for the law or for the military. They consider themselves equals to us in every way.”
Captain Richards didn’t look convinced. That anyone would think to steal from ONI and then try to make a deal . . . even to Hahn, it did indeed sound ridiculous. But things were different in the Outer Colonies.
“If we offer a trade and can sweeten the deal, so to speak, they might not be able to resist.”
“Explain.”
“We—I—took possession of items confiscated from the crew via Article Eight Zero Nine Point Seven Five of the UNSC Salvage Directive, which included personal property, salvage, bank accounts, and, from the captain, intelligence regarding the UNSC Spirit of Fire.”
“All of this I already know.”
“Yes, of course. But their leader, Captain Rion Forge, is the daughter of one of the Spirit of Fire’s crew. She’s been looking for that ship for a very long time. And honestly, she’s had more success than we ever have. I’ll have her file sent over. But I believe because of her emotional ties, we can entice her with the return of her items, plus additional information regarding the ship.”
“You do realize there might not be any additional information about the ship.”
“She won’t know that.”
A sharp red eyebrow lifted slightly, and Richards regarded him for a long moment. “It’s not in my nature to appease thieves and criminals. But our choices now are limited, aren’t they.”
Hahn ignored the dig. “They’ll trade, Captain Richards. And when they do, we’ll seize the ship and recover whatever wreckage they took from Geranos-a.”
“All right, Agent Hahn. Send out your message. My AI, Ferguson, will contact you with my secure channel. And I’ll arrange for you and your staff to stay at Jupiter Station to await a reply. If there is one, I want to know immediately.”
“Yes, ma’am. Thank you.”
The screen went black, and Hahn relaxed into his chair to let out the breath he’d been holding.
Rion Forge would make a deal. He was sure of it.
Her motive was revenge, after all. As motives went, it was always a reliable one, which from experience he understood very well.
CHAPTER 23
* * *
Facility at Voi, Kenya, Africa, Earth
Closing her channel with Agent Hahn, Annabelle tapped her finger
s on the desktop. After receiving Bad Moon Rising’s initial report on the salvage site, she’d been livid and somewhat depressed, but Hahn’s proposal offered an intriguing solution. If they could lure Forge into a meeting, they might just succeed.
“Ferg?”
The facility AI appeared over the integrated holopad on her desk. He was lean and tall in form, and had chosen to attire himself in a sharp-looking business suit, white dress shirt, and plaid tie. “Yes, Director Richards?”
“I’d like all the intel we have on the UNSC Phoenix-class vessel Spirit of Fire. All the intel. If there’s anything off the record or lurking deep in the eyes-only files, I want to know about it.”
“Very good, Director.”
Leverage over Captain Forge might prove vital.
Feeling hopeful for the first time in days, Annabelle left her office to seek a bit of fresh air. She took the elevator to the surface, then climbed the metal rungs built into the side of the airfield’s power generator. On the roof of the one-story block building was an observation deck.
From this position she could see far across the flat savanna to the faint peak of Kilimanjaro in the west and the hazy cityscape of New Mombasa in the southeast, where the effort to rebuild was ongoing, and closer still the rim of the Artifact, otherwise known as the Excession, the Forerunner slipspace portal generator left on Earth eons ago by the Librarian. Once activated, the generator opened a portal leading outside the galaxy to one of the Forerunners’ greatest technological achievements—the Ark.
One hundred seventeen kilometers in diameter, the deep depression in the Earth caused by the Artifact had created a rim that could be seen a full kilometer away, sometimes more on a clear day. Annabelle had witnessed firsthand the portal come online, the pylons rising impossibly high into the air, the astonishing electrical storm generated overhead.
She’d gone into the portal and traveled to the Ark itself. . . .
Two years had gone by, but sometimes it felt like yesterday.
Pulling her mind away from darker memories, she let her gaze drift over the dry grasses. Somewhere out there, the Librarian and her companion, Catalog, had ensured the portal’s construction before dying here on Earth.
Of course, 343 Guilty Spark had suggested a different ending.
One of Annabelle’s directives was ascertaining if there was truth to Guilty Spark’s claim. Had the Librarian survived the firing of the Halo Array? CINCONI wanted a definitive answer.
Because finding that answer might lead them to a treasure far greater than the Librarian herself.
ONI’S Holy Grail.
Project: BOOKWORM wasn’t just about Guilty Spark or the Librarian. In the end, all roads led to the Domain. And how could they not?
The Bornstellar Relation had given them their first introduction to the Domain, a quantum repository containing all the knowledge and experience of the entire Forerunner civilization. But it hadn’t been created by them. It was far, far older—crafted by the elusive Precursors and said to contain a hundred billion years’ worth of wisdom and experience from “before there were stars” to the fall of the Forerunners.
Annabelle stepped to the railing as the hot, arid wind stirred the grasses and blew over her skin. With her fair complexion, she could never stay topside for very long during the day, but she did love it out here, especially now as the sun began to set, bathing the land in a dusty orange glow.
She often wondered how the landscape looked when the Librarian and Catalog were here, waiting for Halo’s pulse to reach them, accepting their fate, and knowing, if nothing else, that they would succeed not only in starving the Flood by eliminating its food source, but in reseeding the galaxy after it was safe to do so.
Without the Librarian’s efforts, humanity might not have continued. The Lifeshaper had set the stage. Prepared. Sacrificed. Perhaps thought she’d done everything she could. Annabelle could only imagine the horror the Librarian must have felt, finding out at the last minute that the most precious thing in the universe, the Domain, would also be destroyed in the firing of the Halo Array. The Forerunner hadn’t counted on that, hadn’t even known such a thing was possible.
But once she knew, all of ONI’s stat bot analysis pointed to action.
The bots had studied what they knew about the Librarian, had built personality profiles, and one thing was abundantly clear—she would have tried, until her dying breath, to save the Domain. She’d sent a message to her husband, Bornstellar, the Iso-Didact, hoping he might repair whatever damage was done to the Domain, but could she count on him getting the message or succeeding?
The question remained: Had she done something more?
Annabelle hadn’t been so sure, not until Dr. Iqbal and his team had discovered the remains of what was thought to be the Librarian’s Catalog seven meters down in the Ross-Ziegler Blip, a fossil-absent geological layer in the Earth that coincided with the timing of the Halo’s destructive force.
Thanks to another Catalog found by Hugo Barton’s team on Onyx, they had known immediately what they’d unearthed and hoped that they too would find a datacore containing a testimony similar to the Bornstellar Relation. But all they’d been able to recover was an unidentifiable, twisted, misshapen mass inside the Catalog’s carapace and an eroded datacore that yielded nothing of value.
They’d been so close to perhaps solving the mystery of the Librarian’s final moments. As dictated by its rate, a Catalog’s job was to observe and take testimony for the Forerunners’ juridical record. It would have recorded everything—every word, every moment, right up until the very end.
The mystery only deepened when nothing else was discovered in the excavation area, suggesting that the Catalog might have been alone when it died.
So where was the Librarian? Was she still out there, buried beneath the savanna, under a shifting land that had changed, flooded, moved again and again over time, perhaps taking her remains with it?
Or was Guilty Spark right?
His last words to the officers of the Rubicon were etched in Annabelle’s memory—she’d read them so many times:
“. . . You and I are brothers in many ways . . . not in the least that we faced the Didact before, and face him now, and perhaps ever after. This is combat eternal, enmity unslaked, unified by only one thing: our love for the elusive Lifeshaper. Without her, humans would have been extinguished many times over. Both I and the Didact love her to this day.
Some say she is dead, that she died on Earth. But that is demonstrably untrue . . .
. . . after a hundred thousand years of exploration and study, I know where to find her.”
Analysis suggested that the Lifeshaper to whom Guilty Spark referred in his final thoughts was indeed the Librarian, First-Light-Weaves-Living-Song. Guilty Spark and the Didact had no other unified love except for the Lifeshaper known as the Librarian. There was none who loved humanity more than she, and no other Lifeshaper who was thought to have died on Earth.
What Annabelle found particularly disturbing, however, was in mentioning his belief to the Rubicon crew, Guilty Spark wanted it known that she was alive.
The question was: why?
CHAPTER 24
* * *
Ace of Spades, slipspace to Etran Harborage, June 29, 2557
Rion stood at the tactical table, keeping a tight watch on the slipspace feed, curious about the armiger’s chosen destination and dreading the unknown.
The crew had assembled on the bridge, quietly sitting at their stations, waiting and monitoring systems. There was no way to tell where they were headed, because the destination wasn’t inherently known to the new star charts they’d had to buy back on Venezia.
When they’d scrubbed all their previous navigational logs and star charts, also gone were the many notations, more than a decade of discoveries and out-of-the-way locales that weren’t often found on standard maps. Her many backups were gone too, victims of ONI’s warehouse thefts. Rion’s chest ached at the loss. Light-years’ worth
of travel and navigational knowledge simply not there anymore.
Not that it mattered in this instance. The long-lost Forerunner world the armiger had in mind wouldn’t be on any of her charts, old or new.
Speaking of which . . . The metallic echo of footsteps beyond the bridge bristled along Rion’s spine. The sound grew with each step closer, until the armiger appeared in the doorway. All she could see for a moment, before it ducked its head to enter the bridge, were those strange eyes and the lines denoting cheekbones and mouth glowing blue in the dimness.
Once inside, it straightened to its nearly three-meter height, took four steps forward, and then stopped behind her captain’s chair.
Save for Niko, they’d done a good job of avoiding it up until now, and it’d seemed content to remain mostly in the cargo hold during their journey.
Rion withdrew her attention as a low ping told them they were exiting the slipspace portal. Unease had her gripping the ends of the tactical table as Ace dropped smoothly out of slipspace and into . . . chaos.
“What the—”
“Contact!” Ram shouted as a shrill alert blared through the bridge. He scrambled from one chair to another, taking up the weapons systems and immediately maneuvering Ace’s cannons to let loose on two Seraphs screaming past their bow. “They’re coming around!”
