The Cole Protocol

by Tobias S. Buckell

  With stealth, and the single MAC gun aboard the Night, a series of hit-and-runs could perhaps harass the Covenant into chasing them, and lure them into a situation where the three Destroyers would only face one or two Covenant ships.

  Hansen shook her head. “If the Covenant are coming for Charybdis, your one frigate will make no difference. Keyes, it’s vital you follow up on the Kestrel, find out what the Covenant are really up to. It’s what your ship was designed for. We can’t waste it on a last stand.”

  “But—”

  “It wouldn’t be a wise use of resources.” Hansen bit her lip. “And the UNSC, every day, has fewer and fewer resources to spare, Keyes. We’ve been fighting the Covenant now for almost a decade. As of now, we’ve pretty much lost all the Outer Colonies. You need to find out what is going on. You need to go after the Kestrel. Before the Covenant get all the way in-system and trap you.”

  It didn’t sit well with Keyes, abandoning people to a doomed defense. He stood next to the ONI agent in silence as the Pelican broke free of the atmosphere.

  “After you drop me off at the orbital depot, tell Zheng to get clear. I’ll transmit the orders. You’ll find that I outrank you both.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Keyes said.

  Hansen sighed. “And when you find your real victory, Lieutenant, make sure you smoke one of those Sweet Williams for me.”

  “We’re coming in!” Carson announced from the cockpit. “And fast. Captain Zheng wants us back on board ASAP.”

  Through the cockpit windows the long spars of a Navy orbital depot slowly rotated. Carson twitched the Pelican until it slammed against one of the spokes.

  As the back opened, Keyes stood straight and saluted. The ODSTs inside followed his example, not sure what was going on.

  Hansen saluted back, and then left the Pelican.

  “Okay,” Carson shouted. “Hang on!”

  CHAPTER

  EIGHTEEN

  UNSC DESTROYER DO YOU FEEL LUCKY?, CHARYBDIS IX

  Thel ‘Vadamee burst through a corridor at a full run and aimed a plasma rifle down its length. Nothing.

  There had to be more humans aboard this destroyer than the pitiful few who’d tried to hold off the boarding party. The angular ship with its sharp corners and boxy layout reeked of a larger contingent of humans.

  The Sangheili did not reholster his gun. A drawn weapon demanded blood, and one didn’t draw a weapon in Sangheili culture unless you intended to use it, even if it was a just a gun. So now it would remain out in his hand.

  Thel crossed another bulkhead and turned to his right. There it was, that scent again: a pungent smell. The humans. They must have retreated to a core area, deep inside the ship.

  Throughout this system his fellow Sangheili hunted down human ships to destroy them, and the flagships of the fleet would now be raining the full strength of their energy weapons down on the surface of the planet. It was sterilization. A mandate for destruction handed down by the leaders of the Covenant, the three High Prophets.

  But Thel and his handpicked team were off on a side mission.

  To his right a team of zealots padded along with him, keeping a full 360 degree path of fire at the ready in case of an ambush. Their long, leathery necks craned around, their eaglelike eyes scanning the awkward nooks and crannies of the human ship for the enemy.

  “Cowards,” Jora ‘Konaree hissed. Jora was one whose blood always ran hot, always ready for the fight and eager to rush a position. He sounded disappointed and frustrated to not have a direct fight to engage in. “They flee in front of us like panicked forest creatures before the flame.”

  An apt metaphor, thought Thel, considering that Covenant ships rained fire down on the human worlds. “Be cautious,” Thel warned. “They are small creatures, but they are not unaware of their disadvantages.”

  The humans would ambush them, soon enough, in some sort of last stand. He’d heard a few rumors from other Sangheili who’d boarded human ships looking for information that they would fight hard, almost honorably.

  Or, at least, Thel hoped so. Hunting them down like vermin would be . . . demeaning to everyone involved.

  From past dissections of human ships of this class, they knew the control center would be close to the front of the ship. A daring and brash position that Thel appreciated.

  They broke through the doors by tossing a sticky grenade at the seam. The grenade thudded into the gap and stuck in place. It glowed a sickly blue, then exploded. “Forward,” Jora shouted.

  The other three zealots—Zhar, Saal, and Veer—followed Jora and Thel through the ruined remains of the doors. Zhar, careful but constant and steady; Veer, a bored expression on his face but eyes darting everywhere, looking for details and oddities for his war poems; and Saal, like Jora, looking for anything to kill.

  They were Thel’s own small force, a band of fighters that had seen many enemies fall at their feet.

  Jora rushed through the room. “They abandoned their own command center,” he growled. Then he leaned over the alien computer consoles and tapped at them. The only response was sparking and fizzing: the consoles had been shot up before the humans abandoned them. “Useless!”

  He unsheathed his energy sword and fired it up in frustration. The two crackling, curved blue flames of energy rose up on either side of the hand holding the bar. Jora plunged it into the heart of the machine, sparks flying and metal oozing out around where the sword pierced it.

  The screens above flickered and faded.

  Jora pulled the sword out and cut the whole console in half, the energy sword cleaving it cleanly down the middle. “Savages with starships and toy weapons, Shipmaster,” he hissed at Thel, who watched the display of anger without any emotion.

  The barking chatter of human gunfire ripped through the cockpit, and Jora’s armor flared. “Blood,” the zealot swore, as he ducked for cover.

  Zhar calmly turned and lobbed grenades down the corridor.

  “So they finally attack.” Jora’s mandibles split open as he roared a challenge down the corridor.

  Thel, though, already ran down the corridor at the attack. The humans had cornered them here. A smart move. Thel leapt through the smoke and chaos of the explosion, his armor dinged, nicked, and its energy shield flaring due to human bullets. He shot the first human he saw as he landed back on the deck.

  The second human, flush against the wall, spun to bring his rifle to bear. Thel was too close to shoot him: he snapped the butt of the energy rifle into the short alien’s face and watched it slump to the floor.

  Weak, very weak. The human’s insubstantial armor of olive clothing did little to protect it.

  Jora barreled through, sword high, and cut the third marine in half, but not before the man got off several shots, near point blank. Jora stumbled, and clutched at his armor.

  Thel threw grenades around the corner, angry. Jora might act a little crazed, but he was a hard fighter. Thel did not want to lose him. Thel waited for the explosion to dissipate, then rounded the corner, firing at anything that moved.

  Within seconds Thel and his boarding crew stood in the odd crimson pools of human blood. Twenty men lay dead in the corridor, their bodies twisted, contorted, missing parts, or just plain destroyed.

  “There is nothing here for us,” Thel relayed back to the Retribution’s Thunder. “We are returning.”

  A shame, thought Thel. The humans had thwarted their mission to find data about their homeworld by destroying their computer systems before he’d even boarded.

  Twenty Unggoy filled the large, open space of the hangar bay. The Unggoy, like the humans, were short, bred too fast, and were individually weak. The Unggoy, however, wore triangular methane tanks and breathing masks over their flattened, squashed faces. Thel found them useless for intense fighting, but in large enough numbers they were very effective so he’d left them to guard the boarding craft.

  The Unggoy were a part of the Covenant, and thus were to be used in the war against the apostat
e humans. But that didn’t mean Thel had to go out of his way to include them in the heart of his missions.

  As they jumped up into the long, pipelike snout of a boarding craft, Jora groaned. Thel and the others pretended not to hear.

  “Back on board,” Thel ordered the Covenant forces in the hangar.

  The Unggoy grumbled about being moved about randomly, and about being forced to wear their heavy tanks and their itchy masks, but did as they were told. They streamed back up into the mouth of the boarding craft, stepping past their fallen brothers who had died as the humans tried to defend the ship.

  The boarding craft yanked away from the gash it had made in the side of the destroyer, shields flaring as it did so. Thel watched as the bulky, blocky destroyer fell away from them.

  Streaks of carbon ran along the side where they had fired at the human ship. Most of the damage clustered near the ship’s engines.

  “It is strange,” Jora grunted. Everywhere the hiss and occasional wispy stink of methane filled the air in the boarding craft due to the lines of Unggoy staring straight ahead, trying not to be noticed by any of the five Sangheili.

  “What is?” Thel asked as the destroyer dwindled into the size of an eyeball. He nodded at Saal, who murmured into a mouthpiece.

  “The Prophets have demanded we destroy their ships, burn their worlds, and allow no heretic to live.” Jora held his side, and Thel noticed a trickle of purple blood seep through his fingers. “Now we search for information and sneak aboard their ships?”

  “The Path is strict, Jora—it brooks no deviation, no remorse. We are zealots. We serve the Way. These are our orders. We do not question them.” Thel saw the tiny destroyer suddenly light up as a long sliver of a plasma beam ripped into it. It exploded, chunks flying off in all directions, superstructure glowing hot and failing.

  “You do not wonder why our orders changed, Shipmaster?” Jora asked.

  Zhar, from nearby, looked up. “The Prophets, in their infinite wisdom, want to shorten this war. Maybe the Hierarchs did not realize these vermin were spread out in so many different places, like some weed. Now they urge us to seek the source.”

  “You think we have failed to find their home world?” Thel asked.

  “We keep finding more and more developed worlds to destroy,” said Zhar. “Like the one we just visited. What was it the human Saal tortured called it?”

  “Charybdis . . .” Thel said. “The aliens called it Charybdis.” His split mandibles struggled with the word. It was an afront for lesser species to name an entire world. That was a right reserved for the powerful.

  Saal ran to them, his eyes wide with astonishment. “Shipmaster! Encrypted signal from Infinite Sacrifice!”

  Thel walked with him to a communications niche. A holographic image turned, startling the Sangheili zealot. Speak of the Prophets! Here one was. One of the Hierarchs themselves.

  The image was of a tired, ochre-skinned, and hunchbacked creature slouched over a floating antigravity chair, its head bowed with the weight of an enormous gold crown its long neck could barely support. “Thel ‘Vadamee,” it hissed. “You are to report to me aboard the ship Infinite Sacrifice. I have studied your intrusion attempts aboard the human ships. I have a new mission for you.”

  The Hierarch leaned forward, and the image flickered away.

  Thel turned to Saal. “That was the Prophet of Regret. He has been following the fleet, observing the destruction of this latest human world. He has a new mission.”

  “What is it?” Jora looked a bit awed by the thought a Hierarch had noticed them.

  “I do not know, but whatever it is, I am sure it will bring us honor,” Thel said. He looked at Jora’s purpled hand. The zealot would need medical attention soon, probably from one of the Huragok. That Covenant species was obsessed with fixing anything. Yet even letting a Huragok work on you was a grave dishonor. It was the same as letting a doctor put his filthy claws on you. Thel sighed. Blood was your essence, your nobility. To spill it meant to lose honor, and Jora had lost honor with his eagerness and carelessness. Now he would have to let a doctor—a Sangheili warrior so low as to make his living slicing and causing other Sangheili to bleed without honor—tend to his wounds. That was a deep shame.

  Jora would be eager to prove himself again after this slip.

  Thel looked back at the glowing remains of the human destroyer. It would be an honor to help find the world the pink, fleshy humans came from.

  And to reduce it to nothingness.

  CHAPTER

  NINETEEN

  COVENANT CRUISER INFINITE SACRIFICE, CHARYBDIS IX

  The Prophet of Regret hunched forward, head bowed with the weight of his crown. The wrinkled wattle of his throat shook as he looked around the room at the many holographic screens that flickered in the control room buried deep in the heart of the Infinite Sacrifice. An honor guard of Sangheili surrounded the Hierarch, ready to kill anything that moved to attack the hierarch.

  Thel was surprised to see the Hierarch himself here, but Regret had always seemed to spend as much time as possible around Sangheili warriors.

  Regret admired the Sangheili martial prowess, rumors said. While most of the San’Shyuum floated about the holy city of High Charity and focused on their lives, Regret traveled with Sangheili battle fleets to see them in action.

  It was rumored that the Hierarch carried a sidearm of his own underneath the silk robes draped over his lap, and had killed acolytes who dared ask too many questions on the spot.

  One of the Minister’s honor guard, a distant cousin with obligations to Thel’s bloodline, had told Thel that the Prophet of Regret had come to his throne through machinations.

  That may have been true. Thel had his doubts—everyone was prone to gossip. And so what if it were true? The Sangheili were sent forth into battle by the mixed Council of Masters, a group of Sangheili and San’Shyuum masters who dictated war needs. But most of the fighting was done by Sangheili as the San’Shyuum remained on High Charity, the mobile world and heart of the Covenant. That was the nature of the Covenant itself—the Sanghieli defended the Prophets, defended the holy objects. Meanwhile the Prophets deciphered the holy relics, doling out the technology they found and adapting them for Covenant use. Their eventual hope was to unlock what the races would need to do to join the Great Journey. Much like the mysterious race of the Forerunners had done all those thousands of years ago when they disappeared from this area of the galaxy, leaving only their artifacts behind. It didn’t matter to Thel how the Prophet of Regret came to be one of the three hierarchs, because Regret was here, monitoring the fleet and talking to him.

  Regret nudged the floating chair he sat in closer to a grand conference table that swooped up from the floor. He threw a plasma rifle onto the table in front of Thel. “Pick that up,” he ordered.

  Thel froze. If he picked up the rifle, he would have an unhol-stered weapon out in the presence of a Prophet. The honor guard would be obliged to kill him.

  Was this some way of punishing him for failing to find data leading to the human homeworld aboard the destroyer? Thel met the honor guard’s captain with large, brown eyes. The Sangheili shook his head in a snaking motion. It was okay.

  Thel picked up the plasma rifle. “What would you like me to do?”

  “Look closely at it,” Regret said, sounding suddenly annoyed. “What do you see?”

  For a moment, Thel saw nothing. It was just a normal plasma rifle. Then he spotted the small readout on the side. It scribed an alien symbol at him. Human script.

  “You see it, do you not?” the Hierarch said, looking intensely at him.

  “What is this?” Thel dropped the rifle back on the table, feeling unclean. It was forbidden to alter the technologies that the Prophets handed down. They were the holiest of gifts.

  “It is blasphemy. Heretical human creatures touching and altering the holy gifts of Forerunner artifacts like our energy weapons . . . or anything else,” hissed the Hierarch. It navigate
d the floating chair around the table and pointed a hand and jointed finger right at Thel. “And I want you to find who is responsible for it. Find them out and destroy them. They have been found in Kig-Yar black markets on High Charity. Supposedly they come from a system the humans call 23 Librae, by way of Kig-Yar-run ships. One of my loyal deacons aboard a ship of theirs died transmitting this data to me. Ungrateful pirates.”

  The Hierarch’s voice had risen to a scream, even as Thel listened. He remembered 23 Librae, he had fought there, on a world the heretical creatures called “Madrigal.”

  Thel dropped to a knee and fist in a bow before the Hierarch. “Your will be done, Hierarch.”

  Regret cleared his throat noisily; large fishy eyes gleaming as he stared at Thel. “Of course you will, my Sangheili warrior. Of course you will. That is why I asked you here. You will leave while we continue destroying Charybdis IX and go to 23 Librae to hunt down this heresy.”

  He pivoted his chair, and said over his back, “You will take your own ship, but you will also have additional forces at your disposal. I have tasked Jiralhanae to accompany you aboard the Kig-Yar raider A Psalm Every Day. They will help you with whatever you may encounter. And keep the Kig-Yar Shipmistress well in line. I’ve come to distrust their greedy natures more and more of late.”

  Jiralhanae? Thel blinked his large eyes, but dared not question the Prophet. The Jiralhanae were barbarians who considered themselves the equals of Sangheili.

  The Jiralhanae had once attained space flight and high levels of technology. But by the time the Covenant came across them, they’d bombed themselves back into a state of barbarism.