The Thursday War

by Karen Traviss

  “So, you attack women and make a mess of my clean floor, you filth,” she snarled at the corpse. “Come on. We must barricade this doorway while we still can.”

  Phillips tried to take a look outside, but Elar batted him back with one hand. Youngsters and adult females swarmed back into the chamber dragging furniture, planks of wood, and sheets of composite that made odd wobbling noises, then began frantically boarding up the doorway. They clearly had a defensive drill and everyone seemed to know their part in it. Phillips wished he’d counted how many rounds he’d squeezed off. He stared at the pistol, lost.

  Oh God. Do I recharge this thing, or does it have power packs? How long does that take?

  He didn’t have a clue. For all he knew, he could have killed a dozen Sangheili and not even seen them fall. The red splotches still danced in front of him. He hoped it wasn’t permanent retina damage.

  “Professor,” BB said quietly. “Your heart rate is worrying me.”

  “Sssh. I’m fine.”

  “Professor—”

  “Do some translation. Record some stuff.”

  Phillips moved at a crouch to the back window and rested the pistol on the sill as best he could. It was more like a horseshoe in shape, no muzzle as such to poke through small holes. He squinted with one eye to try to see past the red lights. Someone walked up behind him.

  “Head down, Efanphilliss,” Elar whispered. “And wait. We will now contact someone to tell them you’re here.”

  “The Arbiter?” He was going to get out. Shame, really: he was starting to feel invincible. He wanted to get good at this. “Oh, thank you. Thank you.”

  “No.” She put a huge hand on his head and shoved him down below the line of the windowsill. “The Servants of the Abiding Truth. If the Arbiter values you enough to let you come here, then you may well be a valuable hostage for them.”

  His stomach lurched and fell. So … right back where I started. Terrific. But there was an equal chance that he’d end up with his head incinerated by a plasma round from a Sangheili who didn’t know him and just wanted a few hundred more hectares of prime arable.

  “Okay,” Phillips said. “I better not get killed, then.”

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  PEOPLE MAKE STUPID DECISIONS IN WARS. WRONG KIT, WRONG ASSETS, WRONG PLACES, EGOS TAKING PRECEDENCE OVER COMMON SENSE, POLITICS—THE MEN AND WOMEN AT THE SHARP END UP DYING WHEN THEY DON’T HAVE TO BECAUSE SOMEONE FARTHER AWAY FROM DANGER IS MORE CONCERNED ABOUT BUDGETS OR VOTES OR AMBITIONS. WELL, WE’VE CUT THE POLITICIANS OUT OF IT. WE’VE ONLY GOT OURSELVES TO BLAME NOW.

  (COMMANDER THOMAS LASKY, XO, UNSC INFINITY)

  VADAM, SANGHELIOS

  Vadam keep had stood for a thousand years, they said, but Raia wasn’t sure that it would survive much longer.

  She did as Forze told her and kept her head down behind the barricade of Ghosts, Revenants, and Spectres that marked the forward rebel position six kilometers from the keep walls. The keep itself was more rock than masonry, one wing set into the lower slopes of Mount Kolaar itself. A huge hole in the east wall now gaped like a mouth open in outrage that anyone would dare to attack it. The Arbiter was being brought down a stone, a brick, a branch at a time, not by overwhelming technology or the firepower of capital ships, but by the sheer number of small groups with a single bitter grudge. Raia wondered if any of them would have anything in common once the task was accomplished, but for the time being, they were united.

  For them it was bad enough that Thel ‘Vadam had turned his back on the gods, but he compounded the betrayal by appeasing the humans. He’d fought alongside them, defended them, shaken hands with them, and now he’d allowed them to trample on the spiritual heart of the world. He had to pay for that sacrilege.

  Raia no longer believed that ritual could please or offend real gods, or make any difference to imagined ones. She wanted her husband back, and then she wanted her nation restored, able to shape its own destiny for the first time in millennia. But it was hard to think beyond her family when she was cold, hungry, and in the middle of a battlefield.

  Forze leaned over her. “You should go home now and wait for Jul. Wherever he is, when the Arbiter falls, he’ll be found or freed. I can find someone else to take you back to Mdama.”

  “I have to stay,” she said. “I have to see this through.”

  She raised her head over the barricade and looked around. She’d expected a violent uprising to be continuous shooting and shelling, but it was confusingly disjointed. There were long, quiet lulls: warriors, veteran and young alike, stood in discussion, watching and waiting, some taking the opportunity to eat hurried snacks. From time to time, the hiss and crack of plasma fire would send everyone running for cover or returning fire, or a Banshee—sometimes one from the keep, sometimes one attacking it—would zip overhead and explosions would shake the soil beneath her feet. This was one of those moments. A purple metallic streak caught her eye and the sound hit her a heartbeat later. A pulsed stream of fire went up from a Revenant and caught its tail section. The Banshee belched flame and smoke before skimming the walls of the keep and disappearing behind the mountain. Then an explosion she couldn’t see sent smoke high into the air. Firing started up on both sides again.

  Forze pointed away from the front line. “As I said—go home.”

  Raia ignored him. Sooner or later the rebels would storm the keep, and she’d go with them. She’d kill anyone who got in her way, and she’d find the cells and locked rooms that such a keep would certainly have, and then she’d search for Jul in every one. If he wasn’t there and he still didn’t come home once the Arbiter was gone, she’d know he was dead.

  But she knew nothing of the kind, not yet.

  ‘Telcam walked along the barricade with the air of a kaidon surveying his territory. He stopped when he got to Forze and Raia.

  “I have a task for you, Forze,” he said. “I need a guest collected.”

  Forze thrust his head forward. “What kind of guest?”

  “Someone whose safety I need to ensure—a human who’s on Sanghelios with the Arbiter’s permission. He’s at Acroli with a loyal keep that’s been attacked. Go and get him. Bring him to me.”

  “Why would you need to keep any human safe?” Raia asked.

  “Because I have a promise that I need to honor to continue doing the will of the gods. He has considerable value.”

  Forze didn’t question the situation. Raia wanted to but thought better of it.

  “Very well, I’ll collect your hostage, but what about Raia?” Forze asked. “I can’t leave her here without protection.”

  “She can go with you.”

  Raia objected. “But I’ve come to find my husband.”

  “He could be anywhere, and there’s little you can do here.” ‘Telcam looked around impatiently. “It’s your choice. How long will it take you, Forze?”

  Forze spread his arms. “It’s a short flight—we can be back here before the next meal.”

  “There, my lady, you can go with your protector and still be back in time to watch the fall of the blasphemer,” ‘Telcam said. “And my conscience will be temporarily soothed. I would prefer not to have the shame of a female dying on my battlefield.”

  Raia realized she no longer had any leverage. She’d lost it the moment that ‘Telcam had taken his ship from her quarry, and now even the ship was gone. If she wanted to carry on her hunt for Jul, then it would require ‘Telcam’s blessing. Forze would bring her back. She could rely on him. So she would concede, a tactical withdrawal.

  “Come on, Raia,” Forze said, beckoning to her. “Field Master, where is this keep?”

  “Dunil will program the coordinates for you.” ‘Telcam walked away. “Take one of the Phantoms—the least equipped one, mind you, but I want the human alive and well. No foolish mistakes with the locals. His name is Philliss.”

  Raia followed Forze through the ranks of rebels and vessels that were assembling in ever greater numbers on the lo
wland facing Vadam keep.

  “Look at that,” he said. “It still worries me when we assemble too many assets in one place. But who’s left to take advantage of our vulnerability? Nobody.”

  It looked as if half the keeps in the northern hemisphere had sent a few warriors and a vessel of some kind. There were now so many packed in the coastal strip between the keep and the sea that Raia felt she’d walked several kilometers simply to pass through them and reach the Phantoms. Jul had said that keeps had commandeered ships and hardware when the Covenant collapsed, but this was the first time that she had fully understood how much had been spirited away. Much of it was battered and looked poorly maintained without the Huragok to take care of it, but it was almost as if the great righteous army had come together again.

  We can do this. We have far to go, but we can become a powerful nation again. We can relearn what it means to be great.

  For a moment, she wished she had brought her young sons to see this. The sight of all those vessels and warriors, however down-at-heel, however divided they were by petty domestic feuds, was as eloquent a lesson in nationhood as any long speech that Uncle Naxan could have given them.

  “This human must be very important,” she said.

  “Ah, politics.” Forze shook his head. “Just another worm. This must be the one Buran said they had taken to the temple. There must be a very special ransom for him.”

  The human didn’t matter at all. “Can you fly a Phantom?”

  “Of course I can. It’s only a dropship.”

  “But I can’t operate its weapons.” Raia could see it clearly now, a curved and polished blue hull like a squat insect. “Will we need them?”

  “It’s simply a plasma cannon,” Forze said. “Leave all that to me. As if we’ll need it against farmers.”

  He sounded very casual, but then he was used to cruisers and battles involving entire fleets. This was a minor diversion for him. Dunil met him at the ramp. The Phantom assigned to them wasn’t the one she’d been looking at, but its less glamorous twin—short on polish and the worse for wear.

  “Only the fore cannon works,” Dunil said. “The other two are awaiting repairs.”

  “Let’s hope the farmers have no large rocks, then,” Forze said. He ushered Raia to the cockpit. “Touch nothing. Even if it doesn’t work.”

  In the last day she had forced her way onto a warship, survived a crash landing under fire, and watched the beginning of the end for Thel ‘Vadam. Now she was sitting in the cockpit of a Phantom, preparing to collect an alien, an enemy that had fought the Covenant for an entire generation. It would be hard to look the creature in the eye and not want to kill it.

  “Have you ever met a human, Forze?” she asked as the dropship lifted off. The drives sounded irregular. She could describe it no other way. “Have you touched one? A live one, that is.”

  Forze rocked his head from side to side in a shrug. “Only from a great distance. They’re very small. When they take their helmets off, they have these strange, flat faces that look as if something has been cut off them.”

  “Horrible,” Raia said. “And this one speaks Sangheili. Do they all?”

  “No. It’s too difficult for their little animal brains. Some warriors had to learn their language simply to insult them properly.”

  So this Philliss creature was unusual. Raia was curious. It would be something to tell Jul about when she’d found him and brought him home, another way of showing him that she finally understood his world and would be more understanding in the future of what drove him.

  “Don’t get too comfortable,” Forze said. The sea churned beneath them as they crossed the coast at Vadam Harbor, completely deserted today. “We’ll be over Acroli before you know it.”

  UNSC TART-CART, SEARCHING THE ONTOM COAST, SANGHELIOS

  “Got him,” BB said. “Got him, got him, got him.”

  His blue box did a flip and a twirl in the middle of the cramped crew bay, catching Mal’s shoulder. It was weird, not only because it didn’t feel of anything, but because BB was too precisely controlled to misjudge a movement even with his hologram. All heads turned. Devereaux made a yeee-hah noise.

  “Where?” Mal couldn’t see anything on the recon display. The dropship was skimming low over the deserted shoreline, just in case Phillips had decided to wait it out in the least populated open ground. But even on the thermal screen, nothing showed up except some kind of four-legged eels basking at the water’s edge and slapping their tails. “Alive, yeah?”

  “He’s just shown up at a keep in Acroli and they’ve called ‘Telcam to pick him up.”

  “Better get there before the mad monk does, then.” Mal slapped the bulkhead. “Acroli, Dev, and don’t spare the horses. Where is it?”

  “Here’s the coordinates,” BB said. The dropship banked and swung out to sea. “Lian, you’ll probably want to fix your hair before we pick him up.”

  “What’s he doing in Acroli?” Devereaux asked, ignoring the jibe. “That’s eighty klicks away.”

  “Por-tal,” BB trilled. “Lucky that I’m phenomenal, or else we’d still be twiddling our thumbs waiting for Hood to send that list of sites. You just can’t get the staff these days.”

  “I don’t think the Arbiter’s taking calls at the moment.”

  Mal batted at BB’s hologram to get his attention. “Are you going to tell us what went on?”

  “Phyllis popped up in the middle of a field and some Grunts took him to a farmer’s keep. Hah. They really can’t say his name.”

  “And?”

  “The keep’s been under attack. But everything’s fine, because the ladies of the house have beaten them off.”

  “Oh, now we get the detail.” Mal trusted BB to give them the intel they needed when they needed it, but sometimes the AI liked to indulge in a bit of theater. At the moment, though, it was hard to tell if he was amusing himself or just trying not to worry about what he’d find when they hooked up with Phillips again. “So this is an opposed extraction, is it?”

  “Probably not. Depends what’s happening when we get there.”

  “We’ll be there in minutes, BB,” Devereaux said. “Is there a fight or not?”

  “At the moment, it sounds like not. Look, I’m just listening in on a very unreliable comms link. I’ll have to move a surveillance drone to actually see anything, and we’ll be in Acroli long before it’s in position.”

  “I hope you’ve got an exact location.”

  “Nes’alun keep. It’s not marked on charts.”

  “But it’s a small town.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay, we’ll worry about how we knock on doors when we get there. A keep’s got to be obvious, right?”

  Vaz made a noisy show of clipping down his armor plates and reloading his rifle. “Females.” He checked the optics. “Remind me, have I ever seen a female hinge-head? Do they look any different?”

  “Not a lot,” BB said. “You won’t want a date. It’s the jaws. Ghastly kissers.”

  “Then they’d better hand Phyllis over.” Vaz was immune to being cheered up. “I believe in equality. I’ll shoot anyone.”

  He got up and walked to the front of the compartment, grabbing the safety rails as he went. Naomi still had the shutters up. She hadn’t taken off her helmet and sat staring at the bulkhead, arms folded, which probably meant she was watching something on her HUD. Mal placed a mental bet that it was the latest ONI reports on Venezia. It was too easy to forget that once they’d retrieved Phillips, a queue of other messy problems was still waiting patiently for them.

  “So remind me what the strategy is,” Vaz said. “Are we playing nice with ‘Telcam or not? How do you think he’s going to react when we grab Phillips?”

  “Well, there’s the interesting thing,” BB said. “Osman told him to find Phillips or else no more arms, but they’re using words like hostage on the comms channels.”

  Naomi lifted off her helmet and tidied her hair with one hand. If Mal h
adn’t known better, he’d have thought she’d just woken up. “Even if he doesn’t think Phillips is a hostage, the others might. We’re not dealing with one tidy group here.”

  “I always assume the worst,” Mal said.

  “So do I.” Devereaux sounded as if she’d leaned out of her seat. “It’s you-can’t-see-me time.”

  A row of unfamiliar status lights flashed up on the bulkhead repeater. “Deflective camo, Dev? That’s nostalgic. I didn’t think we still had it.”

  “Just because it didn’t fool Covenant sensors doesn’t mean that Farmer Giles can spot us,” she said. “There’s still value in hiding behind a tree, you know.”

  Mal caught himself teetering on the edge of praying that nobody would wonder what that funny whining noise was overhead, as if any god would care about what happened to one ODST. Carbon nanotube cloaking was very old and largely useless now, but Kilo-Five wasn’t going up against a high-tech enemy. This was pitchfork country. It would do.

  “It doesn’t make us completely invisible,” he said. “Or silent.”

  “No, but it makes us pretty damn hard to spot at two hundred meters.” Devereaux made a few grunting sounds, as if she really was combing out tangled hair. BB didn’t comment. “Did you think he was dead?”

  “Phillips? No. I never gave him permission to die.”

  Naomi flipped her helmet over between her hands like a basketball. “I don’t believe anyone’s dead until I see a body.”

  It wasn’t like her to join in unless she was asked a specific question. Mal’s first thought was that she meant her father, but then he remembered that she’d been really cut up to hear that the Master Chief was officially MIA with a strong unofficial dash of KIA. Maybe she meant him. It was hard to tell with so many dead and so few bodies brought home.

  “We’ll be over Acroli in six minutes.” Devereaux still seemed more worried about Phillips than she’d admit. “Ideas on how to identify Nes’alun, BB?”

  “Well, a farmhouse with a lot of damage, probably.”