Jai nodded slowly, the world around him pulling back into a focus he hadn’t realized he’d lost. “We’re Spartans, sir. We can’t be anything but Spartans. We’re not stepping away. That’s not Gray Team.”
He had spoken on their behalf. He tensed, expecting an objection. But neither Adriana nor Mike said anything. They gave him quick nods, their visors tipping forward ever so slightly.
Gray Team is back, Jai thought.
“The war we were fighting appears to be over,” Jai continued. “We’ve obviously got some catching up to do. But even we can see that whatever is left of the Covenant is still causing trouble. The UNSC can barely control whole worlds like Carrow this far out from Earth. You’re not done with us, sir. I think we all know that. So, what’s the other choice?”
Commander Yarick smiled. “You’re right—ONI would prefer to keep Gray Team intact and active. The Forerunners left a lot of secrets littered around the galaxy; many of them have been popping up on human colonies. Artifacts and technology are scattered throughout the Joint Occupied Zone, which obviously makes our peace extremely tenuous. Humanity is vulnerable, Spartans—especially way out here. We need a specialized strike force that we can send out into the dark, where the UNSC doesn’t have formal coverage, that can keep us safe.”
“And you think we are that team.”
“Part of it.” Yarick held out his hands. “See, if you agree to come back on in this capacity, we can offer you a formal pardon that the Arbiter—the Sangheili leader Thel ‘Vadam—has put together along with others under him. Then you would join a team.”
“We are a team,” Mike said. “We don’t work with others, sir.”
“Right,” Adriana said. “We go out. Alone. That’s how we’ve always done this.”
Yarick smiled. “I’m actually talking about an interspecies team, trained to work together to face whatever out there that is threatening us.”
“We’ve never worked with others,” Adriana said, tapping the table. “Not even other Spartans.”
But that isn’t true, Jai thought. They’d worked with Rojka. They’d fought alongside Melody. “We’ll need some time to think about that,” Jai said.
“If you want back in, this is how it goes.”
“Can you believe this?” Adriana said privately via Jai’s helmet. Then, disgusted, “ONI.”
“If we do this, I want a UNSC prowler at our disposal,” Mike said to Yarick.
“What?” Yarick asked, twisting to face Mike directly. “That’s—”
“I’m not doing this unless we have a stealth corvette, something fast and with slipspace capability,” Mike said. “We’re not hitching rides anymore. Or taking six-year naps. We get our own ship. A prowler.”
Yarick looked around at the Spartans. “If you’re amenable to what I’m proposing, I’ll see what I can do,” he said.
“I have requests as well,” Adriana said. “If the Sangheili are our allies now, I have a whole other list of weaponry I want to stock up on. It’s an extensive list.”
Jai smiled. It would take a long time for that weight they’d been carrying to fully slide away. But they’d turned a corner. They were broken, they were bruised . . . but they were still Gray Team.
Melody walked through the hallways of Welcome to the Snipehunt. Soon they’d be under way. Back to Earth. Back to suits and cocktail mixers with diplomats. Paperwork and the hum of offices.
She’d go back having saved a world though. There was a future to be built on Carrow. Soon there would be ships with even more diplomats on their way out here as the UEG created official channels. Formally, they would claim that a portion of Carrow that contained Suraka was an Outer Colony. A piece of this world would fall under the jurisdiction of the UEG. They would bankroll repairs and handle any fallout as a result of the Sangheili and Jiralhanae attack.
Sangheilos would likely do the same for Rak, which meant that somewhere out in the Uldt desert, between Suraka and Rak, would be an actual land border between the UEG and the Sangheili.
In practice, Melody knew the UEG didn’t have the ability to force Suraka back in right now. So at least for the next few years, a form of realpolitik would have to be exercised here. Likely the same for the Sangheili. Carrow would be treated like it was independent although on paper everything would change. Melody would be an unofficial ambassador. Not just between Suraka and the UEG, but between the UEG and the Sangheili.
Now where would that put her on the climb up the organizational chart? That sort of fieldwork would go far in her working her way up the ranks. It would unlock assignments she hadn’t even dreamed of.
In the past, she would have been quite elated by that.
But instead she was here walking the corridors of the Snipehunt. When was the last time she’d slept? Or thought about her staff. She would have to write the letters to their families.
How am I supposed to feel after a battle?
In the last couple of days, whenever she lay down and tried to close her eyes, sleep fled from her, like she was trying to hold on to water.
They’d given her sleeping patches. She knew she’d be poked and prodded a whole lot more when she arrived back on Earth. It had taken years of therapy for her to come to terms with growing up as a civilian in a war. How many years would it take for her to come to terms with what had just happened?
Did that mean that, just like back then, she wouldn’t stop feeling dazed? That she’d never feel relief? That she had another long journey ahead of her?
The thought frightened her. She’d been keeping busy the past few days since coming back up out of the Forerunner structure. Trying to keep all that buried.
Melody stopped in front of a cabin door. She knocked gently on it, ignoring the comms system. “Hello,” she said when it opened.
Adriana-111 stood on the threshold, wearing shorts and a halter top. No helmet. No armor. Her pale face stood out in the dark. Too much time under the armor. Too much time under an alien sun. Adriana ran a hand through buzz-cut hair.
“Can’t sleep?” Adriana asked.
“No.”
“The patches work.”
“They yank me down into the dark. I don’t like the feeling.”
“Come on in.” Adriana stepped back from the door. “Even in the dark, those things in your mind, they never really let go of you. The drugs just make them invisible.”
Melody came inside and the door closed behind her. “No one else on this ship would understand what we’ve been through.” She needed to stop running these things through her head. They’d been focused just on surviving for so long. Now the world was opening back up for her.
“Some of them have been in war,” Adriana said.
“But nothing like the one we just saw.”
“It’s always the same,” Adriana said.
Melody sat on a chair in the corner of the small cabin. “Do you know what Gray Team’s going to choose?” she asked. She’d been told they’d be offered some sort of out, or more work with ONI.
Adriana was making tea over a small kitchenette. It was a strangely tranquil act, made bizarre by her tall frame and muscle. Here was a Spartan, out of armor, doing something so . . . normal.
She handed a steaming cup of water to Melody, then a cherry-colored container with a selection of teas in it. “You know already,” Adriana said. “You just called us Gray Team. Your answer is there.”
Later on, the tea still hot in her stomach, Melody lay looking at the ceiling of her own cabin. No matter how hard she tried, she still couldn’t fall asleep.
Twenty minutes to slipstream transit.
Commander Yarick returned to the briefing room and shut the door. Someone moved in the dark at one of the desks at the back. Yarick quickly turned the lights on.
“Admiral Osman,” he said, startled. “I didn’t realize you were on board.”
Where the hell had she come from? His heart pounded despite his forced casual tone. He desperately wanted to sit down in case his le
gs gave out. The Commander-in-Chief of the Office of Naval Intelligence sat right in front of him when she was supposed to be light-years away on Earth.
“I came in via prowler to take a look at Carrow, Commander. I wanted to see it firsthand. I’m actually on my way somewhere else: there’s another storm brewing.” She didn’t get up. Just watched him with slightly narrowed eyes for a moment, then: “Gray Team encountered this Forerunner weapon, the Sharquoi. We almost lost a planet here because of those things, Commander. We could have ended up with them on Earth thanks to one disgruntled Jiralhanae chieftain.”
“Gray Team acted quickly. We were lucky to have Spartans on the ground,” Yarick said.
“Lucky, were we?” Admiral Osman raised an eyebrow. “Someone told the Sangheili where to find their lifeboat. Yes, that was very fortunate. Someone trained the envoy how to free them. Some would call that more than just simple luck.”
Yarick gaped at her for a moment. “Of course, Admiral.”
“Why don’t you tell me about your meeting with them.” She looked down at a notification from a viewscreen built into the desk and swiped at it.
“We issued the proposal, the one you approved. They said they have demands. Admiral, if they don’t bite, we both know they’re not the only team that did black ops against Covenant targets during the war. I could offer an alternate choice for the specialized group we’re trying to build. One that would likely . . . integrate better. And be more affordable.”
The admiral looked at Yarick as if he were an idiot. “They’re Spartans, Commander. They will be taking the pardon and joining the team, even if they are negotiating a little with us. And yes, they’ll never fully integrate into this new team; I agree with your report. But that’s precisely why I want them to be out there. They don’t trust others outside their circle, and that means they’re exactly the kind of soldiers I want on this team, right next to our allies. Especially in the event that our allies ever decide not to be friendly anymore. We’ll have eyes and ears right there. And weapons, should the situation require it.”
“Admiral, they want a prowler,” Yarick protested.
Yarick had never seen the admiral smile before. “Okay. So give them one. And new armor while they’re at it.”
“Admiral,” Yarick nodded curtly. One prowler for Gray Team it was, then. Apparently if Gray Team wanted a fast, armored and stealth capable UNSC starship they were going to get it. He’d have to go looking through his notes for Adriana’s very long list of Covenant weapons.
“Lastly,” the admiral continued. “What about the Sharquoi? Did the Havok really take everything out, or have your scans from orbit been able to pick up anything left over?”
“We have our Surakan contacts in place with all governmental science agencies down on the ground. Their scans and ours from orbit don’t indicate anything made it. But we will need to continue keeping an eye out for any that might have escaped into the desert. Otherwise, yes, I’d say we’re clean.”
Admiral Osman nodded. “Good.”
Yarick let out a deep breath. “Admiral, what about Azikiwe?”
“Azikiwe doesn’t know it yet, but she will be spending a lot more time with the Sangheili. She’ll be one of our formal envoys to the Swords of Sanghelios as we create this new team.”
Now that’s interesting, Yarick thought. “Should I know about this other threat? The ‘storm’ you mentioned?”
“No, we’ve got others handling it. Your job is simple, Commander. Gray Team needs to be sharp and ready as soon as possible.”
Admiral Osman stood up. “Things are about to get more interesting, and I’m going to need every last Spartan out there in the dark to protect us.”
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
* * *
* * *
Big thanks to my family, who put up with me during the year I worked on this book. Cal, Thalia, thanks for your patience. Double thanks to my wife, Emily, who sent me away twice to stay with friends or hole up in a hotel so I could really focus on the book.
Thanks also to Charlie Finlay and Rae Carson for letting me bunker down with them under a deadline so I could change my surroundings to somewhere warm while I wrote.
Thanks to my agent, Barry Goldblatt, for making sure everything went smoothly.
Thanks to Ed Schlesinger and the team at Gallery Books for bringing another fun Halo story to audiences.
And super big thanks to Jeremy Patenaude and Tiffany O’Brien, as well as everyone else at 343 Industries who wanted to see more of Gray Team. Jeremy was responsible for a lot of great ideas and was available at any moment to help answer questions I had.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR
* * *
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Called “violent, poetic and compulsively readable” by Maclean’s, science fiction author Tobias S. Buckell is a New York Times bestselling writer born in the Caribbean. He grew up in Grenada and spent time in the British and U.S. Virgin Islands, and these places influence much of his work.
His Xenowealth series begins with Crystal Rain. Along with other stand-alone novels and his more than fifty stories, Tobias has been translated into eighteen different languages. He has been nominated for such awards as the Hugo, Nebula, Prometheus, and John W. Campbell Award for Best New Science Fiction Author. His latest original novel is Hurricane Fever, a follow-up to the successful Arctic Rising, which NPR says will “give you the shivers.”
He currently lives in Bluffton, Ohio, with his wife, twin daughters, and a pair of dogs. He can be found online at www.TobiasBuckell.com.
FOR MORE ON THIS AUTHOR: Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Tobias-S-Buckell
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