The Cole Protocol

by Tobias S. Buckell

  The last assassin backpedaled, looking for room to defend himself, realizing that this was not a simple job anymore.

  There was a lot of space in the master room. The assassin stepped back over the large stone slabs of the room’s floor, his eyes darting from door to door, wondering whether he could make a run for it. Or at least, how he might use the space to his advantage.

  Thel remained in front of the window, watching the assassin. To be honest he had expected more than this. The Vadam elders had voted him kaidon based on his abilities as a leader, fighter, and zealot. The keeps worked on a system of meritocracy—only the most capable would be voted as kaidon upon the death of the previous one.

  But for those who felt that their vote had been ill advised, or who had second thoughts, it was both a cherished right and a tradition to send in assassins to test the true merit of that ruler’s martial abilities.

  It was another layer of meritocracy. A kaidon who could not defend himself from assassins was not a true ruler.

  This was classic Sangheili thinking.

  The assassin tested the first door, and found it locked. The four-inch-thick kafel wood would not break easily, and the assassin had to have known that with just a glance. The second door was just as locked and solid.

  Now he turned and looked at Thel, realizing that he was as good as dead, and ran straight for the window where Thel stood. A last stand.

  Thel pulled a plasma pistol out of his holster and shot the assassin straight through the head. The assassin tumbled to the floor right in front of Thel’s feet.

  Now which elder, Thel wondered as he turned around to look out over the solid rocky walls of the ancient Vadam keep, was brave enough to order this?

  The massive moons of Sanghelios, hanging over the peaks of the mountain, offered no answers for Thel.

  He turned and stepped over the corpses, and unlocked the door with the key hung by brass links around his neck. Several of his personal guard stood outside, weapons drawn.

  “Gather the elders,” Thel ordered them. “In the stone hall.”

  “It is not even morning yet,” one of them protested.

  Thel rounded on him. “Who is kaidon?”

  The guard snaked his long head downwards. “I swear on the blood of my ancestors I shall not question you again.”

  Thel looked his guards over. Lean and tall, their muted brown skin was almost all hidden by sturdy armor. Covenant armor. Their long-necked heads were sheathed in chain mail, and their large eyes gleamed in the flickering light of the hall.

  They were all well built, powerful, overly trained since birth, specimens of Sangheili warriors.

  All poised to do Thel’s bidding.

  They split off to go rouse the elders, as Thel walked through the stone corridors and tight spaces.

  This was a tense but glorious day that Thel had worked toward his whole life. The lineage of Vadam, in the long history of his kind, was relatively young—founded by a distant ancestor during the first exploratory age, when Sangheili ships plied the dangerous oceans, risking terrific tides due to the multiple suns and moons the planet danced with.

  From the sides of Kolaar Mountain the Vadam keep looked out toward Vadam harbor, thirty miles away. They’d huddled against invaders throughout the ages here, and it was also from this well-defended location that they’d lashed back.

  The Prophets themselves had even tried but had been unable to properly destroy Vadam, among many others. They’d been too buried into the crags and cliffs of their mountains.

  Great Sangheili had built Vadam’s power up through the generations. Thel wanted to add his own name to the Vadam Saga, etched into the living rock of the walls under the mountain.

  “They are waiting for you,” a guard said outside the stone room, as Thel walked down the steps that took him ever farther down into the depths of the mountain’s bedrock.

  In the distance, the thunder of the river shook the stone under Thel’s feet. An underground water source, and power source, that no enemy had ever managed to get to.

  Thel entered the stone hall, and looked up at the curved timbers rising a hundred feet over his head. Then he looked down at the long table in the center of the room. The elders, most of them with their cloaks wrapped around them against the morning cold, stared at him with large, unblinking eyes.

  “My blood,” Thel said, as he walked to the head of the table. “You voted me for kaidon, and yet it seems one of you did not believe in his vote, and did not believe in me, for three assassins broke into the High Room just minutes ago.”

  With that said, Thel shrugged his own cloak off, and stood naked before them. “Kaidon . . .” one of them whispered, shocked.

  “As you can all see with your own eyes, they failed to even scratch my body.” Thel glared at them all as one of his personal guard rushed to his side to pull the cloak back on. “I killed two of them, but left the last one alive so we could discuss the matter of who sent him.”

  A lie, but it was a telling lie, as Thel saw one of the elders stiffen, then let out a long breath.

  Koida, Thel remembered his name. Koida ’Vadam. Thel felt the faint kick of disappointment.

  Any of these elders could have sired Thel. It was not the Sangheili way to let a child know its father, as Sangheili took sires based on their fighting prowess. Sangheili only truly could know who their mothers’ brothers were, and so were raised by their uncles to learn the fighting arts.

  Many of these elders had once been great warriors. And several of Thel’s uncles sat before him.

  Koida, thankfully, was not one.

  “I am Thel ‘Vadamee.” Thel stressed the “ee” that signified his military service. “If you voted me for kaidon, surely you knew I could defend myself?”

  Koida leaned forward, his wrinkled hands on the table before him to steady himself. “You have spent your last years fighting the lesser races of the Covenant, not Sangheili. I feared you had weakened, and would not make a strong kaidon of the keep.”

  Thel shook his head. “The only ones who grow soft, it seems, are elders who cluster in their small rooms, plotting against their kaidon. Had you been strong, you would have waited in my room to attack me yourself.”

  The elders murmured agreement, and Thel walked around the table, grabbed Koida’s cloak, and pulled him up from his chair. He pushed him toward the nearest massive wall, where the Vadam Saga stopped.

  “There are the words of our lineage, Koida,” Thel said. “Where is your name on that wall?”

  Koida shook his head sadly, his wrinkled faded brown skin bunching as he did so. “It is not on the wall.”

  “We Sangheili are only as good as our deeds. We are born and live in the common rooms, beginning life equal to each other in the eyes of the keep, and rise according to our ability. You should have voted against me and stood your ground, or killed me yourself. Your cowardice is not a trait I want spread through the lineage of Vadam.”

  Koida’s eyes widened fully. “I will fall on my sword, kaidon, but please do not revoke the blood of my line.”

  “I did not quench it,” Thel said. “You did.”

  Koida leapt forward, suddenly finding courage, and Thel pulled his energy sword out. The blue plasma leapt out, and Thel swung the blade through Koida’s neck.

  The elder’s head rolled across the floor, and purple blood gushed out, splattering the Saga’s chiseled words. It was the closest the elder would get to having any part of himself on the wall.

  Thel turned to his guards. “The Koida line shall leave. They are no longer Vadam. They have until sunrise to do so. Any of Koida’s line still here after that will meet the same fate as he did. I grant them mercy, because Koida at least found his spirit right before death. Had he taken a knee and begged, they would all be dead.”

  “It is our honor,” the guards said, and left to spread the order.

  Thel turned back to the elders. “I have been looking over the state of Vadam.” The harbor brought in profits, t
he buildings reached from the valley under the keep out across the land, and Vadam’s serfs were happy and working hard, hoping to rise and distinguish themselves and gain a position in the keep. “I am happy with your guidance. The lineage is strong.”

  “Vadam is strong,” an elder agreed, perhaps hoping to gain favor and notice.

  “But I am no figurehead,” Thel continued, ignoring the interruption for the moment. “I will take a close interest in all our investments and activities. Those who work for only their own gain, and not that of Vadam, risk my wrath. Am I understood?”

  They all did. “Yes, kaidon.”

  “Good.” Thel flicked the energy sword off, and slid the handle into the depths of his cloak. “You were right to elect me kaidon. I have news for you. I have been given a promotion, and command of a ship that is part of a fleet created by a High Prophet himself. We have discovered a new human world.”

  “We pity the poor creatures who are about to be destroyed by your mighty hand,” one elder said.

  “What is the name of this world?” Another asked.

  “The humans call it Charybdis IX. I leave you all now in stewardship of Vadam.” Thel eyed the elders. “I hope it is in the most capable hands.”

  They all rushed to reassure the new kaidon that, indeed, it was.

  CHAPTER

  TEN

  UNSC FRIGATE MIDSUMMER NIGHT,

  OUTER FRINGES, ECTANUS 45 SYSTEM

  Keyes walked into the chart room of the Midsummer Night. The whole bridge crew sat around the tabletop chart, nodding as he entered. His fellow junior officers were all here: Lieutenant Badia Campbell ran ops, Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Rai Li on weapons, and Lieutenant Dante Kirtley ran communications.

  “Heard you got hit pretty hard, Keyes.” Badia Campbell looked up from her notes. The jovial note in her voice sounded slightly forced.

  A piece of deck plate had slammed into Keyes while he floated toward the ship, but he had waved on the medics that had been sent to pick him up—he thought the others needed it more. The explosion had killed some twenty Helljumpers. And although the container with the wounded had been badly damaged, it had been recovered, and many survived. Other Helljumpers had been concussed, or suffered internal bleeding and injuries from their proximity to the shockwave.

  But more people had made it out than Keyes initially had even hoped for. And many were treating him with a newfound respect, something above and beyond just his rank and his reputation of being well learned.

  And that added respect included the bridge crew all around the chart table looking up at him. Keyes hadn’t had much time in the first forty-eight hours to get to know them. They’d all been running around, checking on repairs and trying to figure out why things weren’t working.

  But on the bridge all three of his fellow officers had been crisp, together, and on top of things . . . though Campbell sounded tired and a bit short-tempered with the people reporting to her.

  Keyes would’ve been too. Ops was taking the brunt of the work to get things running smoothly.

  “Minor head wound,” Keyes said.

  Rai Li smiled. “I personally think your skull’s too thick for debris to get through.”

  They all laughed, breaking the ice. This was the first time they’d all sat in a room together. They’d been busy with their duties, and then reporting to Zheng, who had been very hands-off so far with the crew, trusting only his officers.

  That hadn’t sat well, a lot of nervous crew wondered why Zheng had been given a ship after sacrificing his last one in a suicidal dash. They whispered that he’d been caught sitting in the captain’s chair, staring out at space, crying silently to himself. Everyone tiptoed around the man.

  The shakedown problems didn’t leave a lot of time to size each other up. But the Finnegan’s Wake incident had now run them through a critical event, and everyone aboard had stopped bickering over petty things. The ship seemed to have pulled together. After the somberness of the past twenty-four hours, it was nice to smile.

  “Should have seen Kirtley’s face when Zheng hailed you and you answered. He was knee-deep in his console, upside down, no less, trying to figure out if something had gone wrong with our equipment,” Campbell said.

  “Well, we’ve had so little luck on equipment so far.” Kirtley shook his head. “I know we need to refit and build these ships as fast as possible to face the Covenant, but we need to be a little bit more careful about build quality . . .”

  The door opened and Commander Zheng walked in, Major Akio Watanabe close behind. They all stood to attention, but Zheng waved his hand. The exuberant mood the officers had shared died. Even they were beginning to be affected by Zheng’s reputation. They only interacted with him formally, as they were now. It made him hard to gauge. And Keyes’s efforts to talk to the commander had been rebuffed with the hasty excuse of being too busy.

  “As you were,” Zheng said.

  They sat back down. Except Watanabe, who held onto a small box and continued to stand behind Zheng. If Zheng was standoffish, Keyes thought, then Watanabe here was almost as mysterious, staying in his room alone for most of the trip so far.

  “Good to have you back, Lieutenant Keyes,” Zheng said. “We dodged quite a bullet, there. The ship owes you.”

  “Thank you, sir,” Keyes ducked his head, somewhat embarrassed at the attention. This was wildly outgoing for Zheng. “What about the captured Innie? Has he talked?”

  Everyone turned to Watanabe.

  “Well, he has admitted to being an Insurrectionist, yes.” Watanabe looked down, as if in thought. “I haven’t gotten much else out of him.”

  Kirtley murmured, “I’d hate to be that guy right now.”

  Watanabe snapped his head up and stared at the two of them. “Mr. Dante Kirtley . . . do you think I brought aboard a portable torture chamber?”

  Kirtley didn’t answer.

  “I know we’re the boogeymen,” Watanabe continued. “But don’t be ridiculous. You torture a man, he’ll tell you anything to make it stop. Anything you think you want. He might even, if you’re pushing hard enough, believe whatever that is with all the will that he has left.”

  Akio Watanabe unbuttoned the top of his sleeves. He pulled them back to reveal scars running from his wrists all the way up to his elbows. A fast unclip of his odd, high-necked collar revealed horrible scarring around his throat. “If I tortured them, I’d be no better than them.”

  He sat down and rebuttoned his uniform slowly.

  “I’m sorry,” Kirtley started to say, but Watanabe cut him off.

  “If I’m overloyal to the Prowler Corps, and by extension, the UNSC, it is because they rescued me from hell itself. Now, let’s not ever talk about this again.”

  “Of course, sir,” Keyes said, eager to get everyone past it. “So no information out of him.”

  “Sadly, not much. The Insurrectionists use cell tactics, and the man we captured doesn’t know too much other than the details of this mission. I’m using a mild sedative to relax him, and a lie detector he doesn’t know about. So I’m just chatting with him. With the detector and random conversation for calibration, we may yet learn something, but don’t get too hopeful.”

  Rai Li shook her head. “Doesn’t make sense, what they did.”

  “Really?” Watanabe cocked his head. “We’ve just ordered that there be no more non-Navy travel. They can’t resupply each other, they have no communications ability. They’re isolated. We’ve incidentally dealt the Insurrectionists all across the colonies a killing blow, as a complete sidenote to the war against the Covenant.”

  “We should have done this years ago, then,” Kirtley said.

  “What kind of martial civilization would we be where civilians weren’t allowed to travel unless by the military, where all communications between worlds were controlled by us?” Watanabe asked.

  “We’d be a functional one, without uprisings. Orderly.” It seemed obvious to Kirtley. Keyes had to admit he agreed somewhat.<
br />
  “Ah.” Watanabe shrugged. “Maybe. At first. But don’t forget, these Insurrectionists knew what frequency to jam. They have sympathizers in the UNSC, they could be anywhere. It isn’t as simple as killing this or cutting that. People facing an invasion, no matter what we’d like to believe, behave in a variety of different ways. Some ready for battle, some try to bargain, others look to what advantages they can gain in the short term, and old wounds still run deep.”

  “In the meantime,” Commander Zheng said, “we need to focus on the next leg of our mission.”

  Watanabe held out the box. “And now it is time to unseal our orders. Commander Zheng, your thumbprint please?”

  Zheng pressed his thumb against the screen. Then Watanabe did the same.

  The pad lit up, and Watanabe handed it over to Zheng, who read it.

  “Would you like to brief them, Captain?”

  Zheng looked up with a frown. “You know the particulars?”

  “I’m the one who suggested this operation.” Watanabe steepled his fingers together. “It’s a situation I’ve been following for a while now. We haven’t had the resources, until I became aware of this ship.”

  “Then go ahead, Mr. Watanabe. It’s your show.”

  “During my . . . recovery,” Watanabe started, “I was on loan from the Prowler Corps to the data gathering and analysis section of a certain ONI branch that I’m not at liberty to name. It was there I started coming across reports of Covenant weaponry turning up in civilian hands throughout the colonies.”

  “But that isn’t unusual.” Campbell leaned forward. “Marines who’ve tangled with Covenant forces bring them back. They can hock them on the black market.”

  Watanabe unfolded his hands and leaned back in his chair. “That’s true. But according to regulations you’re supposed to turn them in to ONI, and not everyone is so . . . rules bound. With the Cole Protocol being rolled out, you’ll note that bringing a Covenant weapon back to any UNSC installation or Inner Colony location is an act of treason under one of the attached sub-articles. They might not be weapons, but drones, or bombs, or have beacons in them that will let the Covenant map our locations.”