New Blood

by Matt Forbeck

  But I’ll be damned if that Engineer didn’t crawl inside a nearby garbage truck and get it up and running again. Veronica jumped in the driver’s seat and took off for the shipyards, daring me to keep up.

  I’ll say this for her: She never failed to impress me with her bravery and her willingness to do whatever it took to get the mission done. Much as her dedication to the job frustrated me at times, I loved that about her, too.

  As I told the Rookie then, If you ever fall for a woman, make sure she’s got balls.

  Ah, hell, you know what I mean.

  Words to live by.

  The Rookie and I scared up an abandoned Warthog and chased after Veronica and Vergil’s truck. We caught up with them fast and escorted them out of the city. But the Covenant hadn’t exactly forgotten about the highways—maybe because they were worried about an assault coming into the city. Either way, the garbage truck made a poor excuse for a tank, and escorting the thing out of town made for a crappy Sunday drive.

  First chance we got, we swapped the Warthog for a Scorpion and put the tank through its paces. I don’t know if you’ve ever operated one of those babies, but it beats the hell out of just about any other mode of transportation on a battlefield. The Covenant threw all sorts of things at us: turret emplacements, Banshees, Phantoms. Besides which, we saw another Scarab march by.

  Even with all that top-grade UNSC armor around us, getting down that road couldn’t have been a narrower thing. We knew we didn’t have much time, but I had no idea how fast the clock was ticking. Just when I thought we might have finally made it, a Covenant assault carrier joined the fun and started glassing the city in front of us. This included the highway we were driving on.

  Honestly, for a few dark moments, I thought it would wind up like Reach all over again. They’d destroy New Mombasa and then go from there to polish off the entire planet.

  I got Mickey on the comm and told him he needed to get that stolen Phantom of ours into the air. “You’re coming to us!”

  I wouldn’t have asked Mickey, Dutch, and Romeo to fly through that crowded sky if we hadn’t had Vergil with us. Veronica had mentioned the alien might have the key to winning the entire war stuck somewhere in his circuitry, though, and that seemed like something worth risking all our lives for.

  Before they could reach us, though, another Scarab crawled onto the highway and blasted the garbage truck off its wheels. My heart stopped in my chest and didn’t start pumping again until I was sure Vergil wasn’t going to die then and there and shatter the whole thing apart from the inside—Veronica along with it.

  Vergil weathered the storm fine, though, and the Rookie and I got the alien and Veronica out of the truck and hustled them into a nearby building, the public-facing end of the Uplift Nature Reserve. From there, we hung tight, near an open courtyard where our stolen Phantom would have enough room to pick us up.

  The Covenant must have been running out of live targets at that point because it seemed like every last one of them that wasn’t busy turning the rest of the city into glowing slag was gunning for us. Multiple Phantoms brought wave after wave of angry, well-armed Covenant warriors straight to that courtyard, while artillery fire descended in glowing purple bolts all around us.

  The Rookie and I took the battle to the Covenant while Veronica mother-henned Vergil. I shot so many of the invaders that afterward my arms didn’t stop vibrating for an hour.

  We barely held out until Mickey showed up in our stolen ride. As they hovered over the courtyard, Dutch and Romeo let loose with the plasma cannons on either side of the ship and gunned down every last remaining Covenant soldier in range.

  We didn’t waste any time hustling onto that Phantom. Vergil gave us a bit of trouble when he panicked at the sight of another Covenant assault cruiser slipping toward us through the Kenyan sky. Gasbags like him don’t have much traction, though, and a few good shoves later, we had him up inside our stolen Phantom with the rest of us.

  I gotta hand it to Romeo. He was half dead, propping himself up on the mount of the plasma cannon he was firing, but he never gave up. Without him, we might not have made it.

  Hell, I could say that about every member of Alpha-Nine, all the way down to the Rookie. I’d even toss Veronica and Vergil into that mix.

  Once we got the Huragok calmed down, he took the Phantom’s controls. In no time, he had the ship all turboed up and ready to roll, and we were gone.

  As far as I know, we were the last humans to make it out of New Mombasa alive. Taking a look out of the Phantom’s bay door as we hightailed it out of there, I caught a glimpse of what the Covenant was after. As I found out later, below New Mombasa and spreading out west into Kenya—hidden far below the planet’s surface for who knows how long—sat a mighty big machine. Definitely not human in origin. What the machine was and who left it there only made sense much later, but I’m getting ahead of myself again.

  Despite the insanity of the moment, or maybe because of it, I had the nerve to ask Veronica about us—her and me—as we left New Mombasa behind.

  “Win this war,” she said, “then ask me that again.”

  It was a fair answer, and let me tell you, that’s what I call motivation.

  NINE

  * * *

  Alpha-Nine had a lot of time to bond together as a team after New Mombasa. Since we’d built up some kind of connection with Vergil, ONI kept us off the front lines for a few weeks. They’d decided that Alpha-Nine could do the most good for the war effort by helping get information out of our pet Engineer instead. Veronica had quarantined us in an orbital ONI station with Vergil, along with a few other alien captives the spooks were trying to keep under wraps and pump for as much information as they could get.

  That gave Romeo a chance to heal up, which suited him fine. The rest of us were itching to get back into action, but I have to admit that spending most of my waking moments with Veronica did a lot to improve my mood.

  Establishing communications with Vergil was a bit of a trick. Seems the Huragok talk with some kind of sign language so subtle and complicated that most humans can’t even recognize it. Still, they seem to be able to understand English well enough, so we can speak to them. It just makes for lopsided conversations and terribly useless interrogations early on.

  Of course, they’re not called Engineers by accident. Once Vergil had a few spare moments, he figured out a way to talk with us fast. He scrounged up a tablet and programmed it so that he could make words appear on it with but a touch of a cilia-covered tentacle. Later he even rigged up a speaker and a speech-to-text program to give himself a voice. Apparently, other Huragok elsewhere used a similar setup to do the same—or so I’m told.

  Despite that, he didn’t like to use it. He’d been a Covenant slave from the moment he came into the world, and even though he’d been brave enough to revolt against them, the thought of them still out there terrified him. Getting him to open up about the Covenant’s plans took a lot of time—and a bit of help.

  He was happy enough to chat about things other than the Covenant, and we passed a lot of time that way. I discovered that the Huragok name their young by the way they find their balance after they’re born or created or hatched or printed or whatever. Vergil’s real name was Quick to Adjust, which I suppose said a lot about him as an adult, too. But that moniker was enough of a mouthful that we simply stuck with calling him Vergil instead.

  Turns out the original Vergil—at least in this case—was a subroutine in the Superintendent program that ran New Mombasa’s infrastructure. You know, things like traffic lights, train schedules, water releases, toll booths, and so on. It wasn’t one of those fancy AIs with a full-on personality like the ones you sometimes see running warships for the UNSC, but a much simpler variety—in other words, just a complex program that did a complex job.

  The guy in charge of that AI—Dr. Daniel Endesha—was a widower too busy helping
run New Mombasa to watch over his daughter, Sadie, so he programmed Vergil to do it for him. No matter where she was in the city, or what she was doing, Vergil kept an eye on Sadie, and if anything went wrong, he alerted Dr. Endesha at once. I’m no father, but I can see the appeal of a system like that.

  When Quick to Adjust downloaded what was left of the Superintendent after the Covenant invasion, he wound up with Vergil inside him, too, and their personalities kind of merged. Well, maybe more their purposes.

  Maybe that’s one reason Quick to Adjust was more willing to work with the UNSC than most other Engineers. He just so happened to download the right information to make him just a little more human.

  Despite everything, we didn’t make a whole lot of headway with getting Covenant secrets out of Vergil at first. We were able to copy data from the Superintendent off him—with his help, of course—but we knew he had more to offer. He was too scared to give it up, though, until we got a visit from one of the Master Chief’s old friends.

  Working with Vergil took a lot of patience, but the clock was ticking faster every day. The Covenant had found something under New Mombasa, and the UNSC needed to know what it was and what it could do.

  It was an enigma that might help us win the war. For one thing, the fact that it was buried on Earth seemed to be the only thing holding the Covenant back from glassing the entire planet. If we could at least stop the Covenant from making off with it, we could keep Earth—and all of humanity’s hopes for it—alive.

  And if we could figure it out and take control of it ourselves? Well, some people thought that might turn the entire tide.

  Try as we might, we couldn’t pry it out of Vergil for anything though. No amount of cajoling, pleading, and even begging would get him to open up about it.

  Charming Romeo even threatened to puncture the gasbag while I conveniently had Veronica out of the way for a while. That didn’t do a bit of good. It just made Vergil clam up tighter than ever when Romeo walked his way.

  We did manage to wheedle a few things out of him. Just enough to make sure High Command kept him on the station. We learned, for instance, that he could tap into the Covenant battlenet—or at least parts of it that he knew how to hack into. He somehow managed it remotely—from on our secret ONI space station—in a way we didn’t quite understand.

  When I say “we,” I include the ONI scientists in the group, who were studying Vergil on the sly. They analyzed everything about him from his odor to the kinds of radio waves he emitted. Honestly, no one in Alpha-Nine had the slightest shot at figuring any of that out. We’re the blunt end of the UNSC stick.

  It wasn’t until Admiral Hood—the very head of the UNSC Navy himself—sent Sergeant Major Avery Johnson to the space station for a friendly chat with the Huragok that we got him to open up. Johnson turned out to know more about the Engineers than everyone else on the station put together. A lot more.

  “The Brutes,” he said as he sat down on a crate that put him at the same level as all six of Vergil’s blinking eyes. “The bastards who put bombs on your buddies and killed millions of my people, they’re digging a mighty big hole.”

  Even after a month of the Covenant poking around in that hole, no one in the UNSC knew exactly what they were after, or what that ancient machine they’d found could actually do. But every one of us in that room—Johnson included—suspected Vergil did.

  Later, I found out that Johnson was pretty certain the Ark— or at least something that led to it—had been buried underneath New Mombasa. He wanted Vergil to confirm that for him and, if possible, tell him what the hell that meant the UNSC was getting into.

  “You’re gonna tell me exactly what they’re looking for. And then, you’re gonna help me stop them.” I tell you, I wouldn’t want to have played poker against Johnson, ever. The man was born to be a drill sergeant.

  Once Vergil finally opened up, ONI didn’t need Alpha-Nine around much anymore, and they set us loose so we could get back to the war.

  That cut my little working vacation with Veronica short, but by that time, we’d come to an understanding. Much as we cared for each other, two working soldiers couldn’t commit to anything in the middle of a war.

  Such plans are for peacetime. Or so we told ourselves.

  Doing the smart thing didn’t mean it didn’t hurt though.

  “Hey,” I said, “Gretchen and Dutch got hitched.”

  “Gretchen was sidelined by an injury,” she said. “And Dutch is stuck here with Alpha-Nine rather than back home with her. Is that how you want us to be?”

  “I could retire,” I said, looking for some kind of solution that would make us both happy. “Maybe we both could.”

  She didn’t buy it for a second. She gazed into my eyes with a look that said I know you too well. “Not while there’s still a job we need to do,” she said.

  One of the things I love about Veronica is how she’s always right. But I wouldn’t be honest if I didn’t confess I sometimes hate it, too.

  I heard later that the information Vergil provided gave us the edge we needed to save humanity. That’s a whole ’nother story, and to be honest, I hear the Master Chief did most of the heavy lifting. If you want to know the gory details, you’ll have to ask someone else and show them you have the proper clearance.

  Anyhow, it turns out the Forerunners hadn’t buried the Ark beneath the city, but it was something nearly as good: a transdimensional portal that led right to it. Seems like it had been there since we weren’t much more than cave people digging around in the dirt, and we’d had no idea the entire time.

  I’m not sure I want to think a whole lot about what that says about the origins of humanity. Or about how good we are at knowing what’s under our feet.

  Either way, we’re still here, and the Covenant’s been shattered.

  I guess it doesn’t matter if you win ugly, just so long as you win.

  TEN

  * * *

  After New Mombasa, I kind of lost track of Vergil. Part of that was the fact he was one of ONI’s best-kept secrets. The other was that he was a manufactured alien who’d been part of the Covenant, which meant we didn’t have a whole lot in common. Other than the trauma bond we shared from surviving the fall of a major Earth city together, that is.

  Plus, there was still a war on, and I had other things to worry about. Like keeping me and my team alive long enough to kill as many Covenant soldiers as we could manage.

  Every now and then, Veronica would update me on Vergil’s status. In an unofficial way.

  He was, as you might imagine, one of the secret heroes of the Covenant War. Not only could he tap into the Covenant battlenet for us, but he was great at figuring out all sorts of Forerunner artifacts that the UNSC ran across. Basic things that might stump our human scientists for months—like how to turn a device on—he already knew about. Having him gave us a fantastic edge.

  I already told you that he could fix just about anything, too. Not that he got much of a chance to take on challenges like that over what little time there was left in the war. He was too valuable an asset to risk on a battlefield.

  And after the war ended, about a month-and-a-half following the events in New Mombasa, ONI kept Vergil under wraps. Even with the Covenant broken, he had plenty of work to do for us. It wasn’t like the Brutes and the Elites just walked away and settled back into peaceful lives, treaties or no. They’d been a part of the Covenant for countless generations. They didn’t have any frame of reference for living for anything but war.

  I understand ONI mostly kept Vergil busy continuing to puzzle out Forerunner artifacts. Now that we could poke around more of the galaxy without fear of our worlds being glassed, we were turning up a lot more of these things.

  So when—about three years later, I’ll say?—Veronica disclosed that Vergil had been kidnapped on the planet Talitsa, along with Sadie Endesha, I didn’t even g
ive it a second thought. I jumped right at the job. That put her back on her heels, which I’ll admit, I enjoyed plenty. She was a hard woman to surprise.

  This was now in 2555, long after Romeo, Mickey, and me had become Spartans.

  Yeah, I know. At this point you’re probably wondering whatever happened to “my answer is no”? Just bear with me—I’m getting to that. There’s a method to my madness.

  Where was I? Oh, right. Veronica.

  She and I had become a lot closer since the official end of the Covenant War, but despite that, we both remained dedicated to our jobs.

  “No arguments?” she’d said. “No comebacks?”

  I shook my head with an emphatic no. “If Vergil’s in trouble, then Alpha-Nine is on it. Well, what’s left of us, anyhow.”

  “You almost sound like you’re maturing.”

  “I just figure you have your reasons for sending us after him, and I trust that you’re right.”

  “Wait, you are maturing.”

  “I like to think of it more as surrendering to your wisdom.”

  She grabbed me by the chin then and looked me straight in the eyes. “Are you feeling all right?”

  I shrugged. “It’s been a long time since I’ve seen Vergil. It’ll be a good chance to catch up. After we rescue him, of course.” That actually wasn’t a lie. In the weeks we’d spent in orbit with the Huragok, I’d grown to know him better than any other non-human I’d ever known, including my family dog.

  She gave me a disbelieving frown. “Sometimes I think those Spartan treatments messed with more than just your body.”

  I favored her with a wry smile. “I’m sure you’d know more about that than me.” I hesitated for a moment. “You think he’ll still recognize me? Or any of us?”