“The kaidon walked for many days, eating vermin and scraps, becoming lower than low, until he came into the vast deserts that lie in the interior of all our lands. And out there, after wandering for many years, built his strength, his hardness, and made allies from other wanderers. They were the least of the least, yes, but with a will to fight, and a will to live no matter the odds.
“With this new tribe, my ancestor returned to Vadam keep and scaled the walls. He killed his enemies all, throwing their bodies to the river. It is said that it ran purple with blood for a week. And when the kaidon was done killing his enemies, he opened the jails and killed the Vadam who had been cowardly enough to remain alive in them. That was my kaidon. That is Vadam. Our blood was forged in the desert, confirmed in the keep that day, and purified through Kaidon Ther’s experiences. So it is carved on the Vadam saga wall.”
Thel looked over at Zhar, who asked, “Shipmaster, do you have a point to retelling a stanza of your family’s saga?”
Thel sat down in the shipmaster’s chair at the center of the cockpit. “I can hardly turn my back on my lineage, can I, Zhar? I will not return to High Charity with a lost ship, knowing we were locked up by Kig-Yar, and little knowledge of what is happening here. I would be no better than the jailed Sangheili that Ther executed for being useless.”
“It was a suggestion. An option,” Zhar said.
“But it is not an option, as we are Sangheili.” Thel now turned back to Deacon Pipit. “So you understand, Unggoy? We are here to stay. I ask you, again, what is on Metisette?”
“Dreams,” Pipit sighed.
“Do not play word games,” Thel growled. “Be plain.”
“When commanders need fighters, Unggoy are ordered to breed and expand. Then we die in great numbers. Unggoy, you all say: do this, do that. Some dream of free,” Pipit explained. “And though we hate Kig-Yar, this one named Reth, high commander, says to those Unggoy that they can come to Metisette. Come, build a home. Help change this moon so it becomes a place you can live where the methane is free in all the air. Breed free.”
Zhar started to laugh. “And you believed this . . . Reth?”
Pipit looked up, beady red eyes squinting in anger. “Kig-Yar always betray, yes, but the opportunity . . .” The alien shrugged.
Thel looked down at the fatalistic little alien. “So Metisette has methane in the air that you can breathe.”
“A place for Unggoy,” Pipit said. “A safe place, where we can live without interference, without controls on our population that are imposed from on high. Where we can walk around without these chafing harnesses and breathing tanks.”
“An Unggoy paradise,” Thel muttered. “Where you can breed until you overrun the entire place.” The Unggoy were well-known to reproduce like mad. During peacetime the Prophets monitored their population closely; the Unggoy had never cared for that. And even though they hated the Kig-Yar, it made sense that the Unggoy had jumped at the chance in this strange sequence of events to gain a world of their own.
Thel scratched his lower mandibles.
Saal called Thel over the intercom. “They have our infiltrator harness here,” he said. “In their storage bay. The Kig-Yar stole it from our ship!”
Thel stopped scratching as he thought about the news. “We have a change of plans. Take the armor down to the Kig-Yar shuttle. Get the shuttle warmed up as well. We are going down.”
“Into that murk?” Zhar protested from nearby.
“Yes. Zhar, the Prophets unleash the Unggoy to breed whenever there is a war; they stop mixing antibreeding hormones into the methane supplies. Now we have a renegade Kig-Yar breeding Unggoy. I think this ‘Reth’ is creating an army on the surface of Metisette for himself.”
“So we are going to see for ourselves?” Zhar snorted.
“I want to talk to Reth,” Thel said simply.
“Why?”
“If he is in charge of Metisette, he knows what is going on with the humans and the Kig-Yar working together. And he knows about the betrayal of the Jiralhanae. Reth knows things we need to know.”
“And he is surrounded by hundreds of Unggoy,” Zhar noted.
The deacon cleared his throat. Thel turned to him, and Pipit said, “Not hundreds.”
Thel waited a moment. “Thousands?”
Pipit still bobbed his head. “Tens of . . .” but already the alien had shaken its head again.
“Hundreds?”
Now Pipit nodded eagerly as Zhar swore.
Reth had quite an army at his disposal. This would make getting to him a lot more difficult.
But Thel smiled. “We have our infiltrator harness back.” That gave them an edge. They were not just Sangheili, but well armed, well armored, and also invisible Sangheili.
Like his ancestor Ther, the ancient kaidon, Thel would come back against great odds, swarming into the middle of his enemy before they even knew what had happened.
“Get us ready, Zhar,” Thel ordered. “We are going down there. Pipit, Veer will take over while we are gone; you will help him. Give us the coordinates to Reth. And if you deceive us, Veer will be here to make sure you suffer immediately for it.”
Pipit nodded and, in a voice that seemed to crack, gave Zhar the necessary coordinates.
“Thank you, Deacon.” Thel looked around. “You will also need to have an Unggoy pilot meet us at the shuttle, Deacon. Talk to the Unggoy down there on Metisette, tell them you had an accident aboard, and need to be resupplied with methane for Unggoy to breathe.”
With that done, Thel stalked off the bridge with Zhar close behind.
“Three of us against hundreds of thousands of Unggoy,” Zhar said.
“The little ones will cower with fear and run from us in floods,” Thel proclaimed as they thudded down the corridors.
Zhar laughed. “You are confident.”
“I am Sangheili,” Thel said. “This is what we are.”
They crammed into the tiny shuttle. Spec ops armor lay on the benches where Unggoy would have lined up and sat. Now there was only one Unggoy, a terrified pilot who remained strapped in and staring at the Sangheili in terror.
Thel felt the warmth that came to him when he had a direct plan. “Take us down, Saal.”
Once they’d broken through the worst of the deceleration in the upper atmosphere of Metisette, Thel unstrapped himself and walked back to don his spec ops armor, and helped Zhar with his. The shuttle shook and rattled its way through the thick atmosphere, but they remained balanced on their feet easily enough.
Once suited up, Zhar flicked the armor on, and faded away into invisibility.
“It works,” Thel said. Then tested his own.
Zhar and Saal switched places. As Saal struggled into his armor alone and Zhar flew the shuttle in, Thel walked up to the edge of the cockpit to look down.
Nothing but thick orange clouds and haze—at least until they broke out under the clouds to fly over a jagged, ice-cold landscape whipped by constant storms.
Zhar banked them slowly through the orange murk toward a massive crater. As they flew across it the sides reached up like distant mountains, and Thel could see a massive lake at its center.
In the distance stood what looked like a keep, straddling a giant river of liquid that tumbled over the edge of the crater down to its floor. The keep was ramshackle, made out of parts of old, ruined ships that had been rudely deorbited and landed near the lip of the immense waterfall.
But it stood high with additions that had been built in between the spaceships’ hulls, with tubes and domes that hung like carbuncles pocking the rock faces and rising above the river. Thel saw that it could house hundreds of thousands.
Elevators ran down along the sides of the thousand feet of waterfall to structures around the giant lake.
Metisette wasn’t a world one could breath in. Its mostly nitrogen atmosphere would leave Sangheili, or Kig-Yar, or most races with nothing to breathe.
The liquid on the very cold Metisette was met
hane. Thel watched as a stream of it fell off the lip of the crater. Methane mist hung strong in the air all throughout the natural valleys and low areas of the crater, thanks to the falls.
“Giant reactors heat the land all around the crater,” the pilot spoke up, pride suddenly more powerful than its fear of the Sangheili. “It makes more of the mists.”
Zhar skimmed the lake and approached the falls. The shuttle hit the mists, and then rose up near the falls, pressing Thel against the seat.
“We pop over the edge and land, Zhar,” Thel shouted. “Make sure your armor is tight, Saal. It will give us air until we are inside the structure. If Reth is breathing and Kig-Yar are in there, then we will be okay.
“If there is only methane, we go in as far as we can before coming back. Zhar stays with the shuttle, hiding, as this Unggoy has the other Unggoy load up our shuttle with tanks of methane.”
Thel watched the remains of a large Kig-Yar merchant ship appear over the lip, and Zhar arced over it into a large landing area marked out in plasma-melted rock.
As soon as the shuttle touched rock, the three Sangheili activated their camouflage and flickered and vanished. Zhar sat across from the Unggoy who was supposedly piloting the shuttle, and Thel and Saal jumped out the back of the shuttle.
The Unggoy pilot had not lied—the land here was bitterly cold to Thel, but it was tolerable. Like an arctic waste. Not nearly as cold as the rest of the moon.
Silent ghosts moving through the orange murk that hung in the air, they maneuvered across the field, keeping well clear of the Unggoy who waddled out across the landing pad toward the shuttle, barking and shouting in their language.
Thel kept an easy lope going, covering the ground so fast that any Unggoy who noticed a wavering in the air would surely shake their heads and dismiss it as a trick of the light.
They slipped in through a series of giant airlocks, where Unggoy still had to wear their harnesses and tanks.
Thel looked around. “This is Kig-Yar territory,” he whispered to Saal. It made sense that the lesser aliens were here in a repurposed old ship, mounted near the lip of the falls. It made for a commanding view, because although the Unggoy felt like this was their world, Thel would imagine that the Kig-Yar saw it differently.
Saal found a lone Unggoy, and an empty room in the back of what had once been the large hangar bays of the Kig-Yar ship.
It didn’t take long to get the Unggoy to give up the location of Reth.
“The cockpit room, at the very top.”
Saal snapped the Unggoy’s neck and they took the emergency maintenance tubes up through the ship. Thel panted heavily and his mandibles were wide open, his tongue flicking the air, by the time they arrived at the top.
Four Kig-Yar guarded the cockpit’s doors, but two of them were looking out the windows down to the launch pad, bored, their plasma rifles slung over their backs.
They never had a chance to turn and see what attacked them. The two Sangheili were in their midst in a split second, firing point-blank into their faces with their own plasma rifles.
The other two Kig-Yar had a second to squall loudly before they met the same fate, and Thel blew the cockpit doors apart with a grenade.
Inside the carpeted, lavishly furnished room sat a single Kig-Yar, his large eyes staring at the shimmering flaws in the air before him. Thel shut his invisibility off.
“Sangheili,” the Kig-Yar hissed. “Damn you, what have you done? Do you know who you cross?”
“You are Reth?” Thel asked.
“Yes,” the Kig-Yar said.
“You let Unggoy breed without control. You pretend to be a voice of the Prophets here. You are a heretic.” Thel raised his plasma rifle and struck Reth in the head with it.
“Pick him up,” Thel ordered Saal. “Let us return to the shuttle.”
A loud warble echoed across the corridors. Thel looked around. “That sounded like an alarm.”
Saal walked over to the front of the cockpit, Reth slung casually over a shoulder. “It is. We should call Zhar, have him fly up here. We can get outside onto the top and get him to pick us up there.”
Thel stepped forward to stand next to Saal and looked down. Saal murmured into the air, talking to Zhar.
“Zhar needs just a minute. Too many Unggoy inside the shuttle.”
Hundreds of feet below in a courtyard formed from the superstructures of three or four mothballed spaceships, thousands of Unggoy streamed out. The crowds ran to surround the building they were in.
“They cannot enter,” Saal said. “Almost all of them have no harnesses or air. The methane mists out there let them breathe. Where are their harnesses?”
Thel looked at the unconscious Kig-Yar on Saal’s shoulder.
“The Kig-Yar either have not made them many, or are keeping them under lock and key.”
“But why?” Saal asked.
“Because they cannot leave Metisette, or even attack this Kig-Yar structure in the center of their own keep, if they have no tanks.”
“Doesn’t help us right now,” Saal said, looking at the quadrangle fill with Unggoy. “Enough Unggoy seem to have harnesses to cause us trouble.”
Thel turned and looked back down the corridor, hearing the sound of Unggoy screeches. “It tells us who’s really in charge of all this.”
“The Kig-Yar.”
Thel looked back at Reth’s limp form. “Yes. That one in particular. Wake him up. We may have to put a gun to his head. What is Zhar’s progress?”
Saal cocked his head, listening to an update from down below. “Zhar is closing the ramp and warming the shuttle up.”
“The timing will be tight,” Thel said. He walked over to the doors with his plasma rifle up and ready. “Be ready to blow the windows out when he gets airborne.”
“My honor,” Saal grunted. He set Reth down and slapped the Kig-Yar’s face. “Wake up,” the Sangheili zealot growled.
CHAPTER
THIRTY
ASUNCION HABITAT, INNER RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE
Keyes watched his people being herded toward gates. They huddled together and stared down at their feet as they moved forward. Men in gray uniforms, rifles slung at the ready, moved about the edges, pushing the crew back into line toward the five checkpoints the rails led everyone toward.
The Midsummer Night had been docked with an asteroid. From the cargo bay they’d all been herded out at gunpoint, down a long corridor in the endcap of the habitat, and walked out into the interior.
But the tall rails, all enclosed in chicken wire with razor wire wrapped around that, effectively prevented them from walking out into the habitat until they’d passed through five stations. Humorless-looking officials stood by small podiums in the stations with computer pads.
“Stay single file,” a guard shouted.
The lines formed up, people jammed against each other, wondering what came next. They were face-to-face with the enemy: Insurrectionists.
Captured.
A woman in a black uniform with yellow trim walked up to a dais mounted over the gates. She brushed back a long lock of black hair, then folded her arms at the small of her back in a sort of parade rest.
When she spoke her voice was amplified so that the entire crowd could hear her. “Welcome to the habitat Asuncion,” the woman said.
Keyes leaned back and looked up at the far side of the asteroid’s interior, far on the other side from where he stood. Patches of gardens and trees could be seen. It was odd, seeing something almost pastoral in a megastructure like this.
“And welcome to the Rubble,” the woman continued. “My name is Maria Esquival. I am here to help orient you to your new situation.”
Keyes was surrounded by his remaining bridge crew. Lt. Dante Kirtley had folded his arms and was watching the woman, but Junior Grade Rai Li checked out the crowded crew, looking worried.
Behind Keyes loitered a handful of ODSTs, with Faison standing in their midst. He raised an eyebrow at Keyes.
Mar
ia Esquival continued her speech. “After the destruction of Madrigal, as we escaped into the asteroids and rocks here, we had some very tough decisions to make about who we would become: refugees struggling to exist, fighting over scraps? Or a civilization?
“We chose civilization. We worked hard to build the Rubble. We worked hard because we knew we had something to build. A world like nothing the UNSC has ever known, with its strict hierarchies and militaristic command.”
Keyes looked over at Dante, who rolled his eyes. “More Insurrectionist bullshit,” the comms specialist muttered.
“Free of the trappings of being a colony, we reinvented ourselves from the ground up. The Rubble is a technocracy. All of its municipal functions, all its laws, are voted on by our members. Some of us are Insurrectionist, some of us are refugees from Madrigal. Others are miners who were here from the beginning. Some are smugglers who made it here from the Inner Colonies. All are welcome.
“We mean that. All are welcome to have the right to vote. This includes you, crew of the Midsummer Night.”
Esquival paused to let that sink in. In the crowd, Kirtley leaned back toward Keyes. “They all vote on everything. Like even security? That’d be insane.”
“Because we believe in freedom, the Rubble invites you to join our democracy. You have a choice in what happens next to you. You can choose to turn your back on the imperialist nature of the UNSC. Many of you may have come from Outer Colonies. Colonies that fell to the alien Covenant while the UNSC took their time to enact methods of dealing with the aliens. Colonies that you know were not as well protected as they could have been, because the UNSC’s loyalties are to Earth first, the Inner Colonies next, and the Outer Colonies last. Here in the Rubble, you are equal among all.”
Rai Li sniffed. “How many crew you think are going to buy that crap?”
Keyes looked out over the crowd of heads. How many crew were survivors of border colonies, or had family in the Outer Colonies?
He thought of his sister for a second, a twinge of pain at the thought of her dying without UNSC protection, out there alone in the Outer Colonies.
The Cole Protocol Page 17
