Or maybe, Keyes suddenly thought, maybe they’d survived. Just like the Rubble had.
The idea captured him for a second, and then Keyes shook himself. No, he had to remember what the Covenant was really about. The Rubble was some strange anomaly . . .
“Too many.” Keyes rubbed his jaw, thoughtfully. “And can you blame them? We have no options. We’re stuck out here. Behind the lines. They might as well start trying to find allies, figure out what the new game is. We’re refugees, now.”
His eyes burned. He hadn’t slept since they’d been boarded, running from place to place to make sure things went smoothly.
Now it was over.
Everything was over.
He’d read about POWs in past wars, unlucky bastards who’d been the first shot out of the air and stuck in a camp for the length of a war.
If he lived, he’d be one of those footnotes.
Maria Esquival cleared her throat. “But, as you are UNSC, and have a checkered background, there are some concessions that have to be made when integrating you into the population of the Rubble.
“You will have to swallow a motion tracker, in the form of a pill. This will let the Rubble’s AI monitor and track your location. You will have to report for counseling and you will be assigned a case officer who will review the integration process. However these things are a small price to pay for your freedom.”
Keyes wished he had his pipe to fiddle with. He had to leave it aboard the ship, along with any other personal effects or objects as they were moved to Asuncion.
“Those of you who wish to become citizens, have only to ask when you reach Processing. You will be split off to a separate location. Those of you still loyal to the UNSC, who refuse the pill, we will, of course, be forced to jail you.”
With that, Esquival turned around and left her perch. The large lines staggered forward.
“A lot of them are asking for citizenship,” Faison said from behind Keyes.
“Can’t blame them,” Keyes said. “One can understand what’s going through their minds.”
“You’re not going to do anything about it?” Faison asked.
“We’re trapped. We have nothing. What do you want me to do? They’re doing the rational thing.”
Faison grabbed Keyes by the shoulder. “Either we’re soldiers or we’re not. Defeat or not, we should never forget that, Keyes. Give them a speech. Say something to counteract all that, because whatever this is you’re doing right now, this isn’t leadership. Where’s the man who had us all jump out of that freighter?”
Say something.
Keyes cleared his throat, then jumped up onto the railing. He wobbled for a second. “Crew of the Midsummer Night,” he shouted.
The snaking line paused. And Keyes suddenly felt like a blank sheet of paper. Nothing came to him.
Faison punched his shin, and Keyes sucked his breath in. “Crew of the Midsummer Night, we have had a hard blow, I know. Some of you, after hearing all this, will have a hard choice to make.
“Just know this. No matter who we are, or why we give our service, we all joined to fight a common enemy. The people here, although they fled the destruction of their own world, think that the Covenant can be allies. The same creatures that destroyed their world. I think this is an illusion. So I hope that you will, if the time ever comes, stand by my side again if the need calls for it. With no hard feelings. I will not be joining their citizenry. I remain ready to fight the Covenant and protect humanity, as I swore to do when I joined the fight. As did you all.”
Keyes got back down.
There was only silence. Rai Li finally shook her head. “That was an awkward speech.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Faison said. “What mattered was that he gave it.” And Keyes knew he was right; he was stumbling toward being the leader they all wanted . . . and needed.
Keyes grabbed Faison by the shoulder. “By the way, why are so many ODSTs at the front of the line? They look like they’re going to be citizens.”
Faison nodded and looked Keyes in the eye. “Well, of course.
You know the Helljumpers: first in and all that.” He gave the last word in emphasis.
Then he winked.
Keyes got it. He could still trust Helljumpers to be Helljumpers. Faison was just making sure he got men out into the general populace in case they needed them out there.
“You’ve got company,” Lt. Kirtley said.
Maria Esquival and several black-clad men pushed through the crowd of crew toward Keyes.
“Lieutenant Jacob Keyes, I gather?” Esquival said.
“Yes ma’am,” Keyes replied.
“No more speeches.”
Keyes laughed. “I thought we were all equals here.”
Esquival tilted her head. “You just announced you gave up the right to citizenry, right?”
“Yes . . .”
One of the black-uniformed men punched Keyes in the stomach. Faison stepped forward, but Keyes waved him back as he coughed.
“Then I’m pleased to report I’m under no obligation to treat you as a citizen, Lieutenant Keyes.” Esquival smiled. “The problem is, you have a position of power over your men. Such speeches, while admirable, are given from that position of power. Many possible citizens might feel compelled to go to jail who wouldn’t otherwise.”
“It’ll all end,” Keyes said. “When the Covenant gets bored of whatever game it’s playing here.”
Esquival sighed. “You’re so sure of yourself. The war with the Covenant is something the UNSC somehow started back on Harvest, we’re sure of it. This is not our war, we just got caught up in it. It’s your war. While you all fight to the last man with your brotherhood of arms, we’ve built something here. I don’t know if the UNSC has noticed, but the Covenant is comprised of a number of varying races. Many of these were allowed into the Covenant. We here in the Rubble are looking for ways humanity can join their ranks. As a junior race, perhaps. But we’re adept, Lieutenant Keyes, we’ll work our way up.”
Keyes shook his head. “You conspire with the enemy.”
Esquival sighed. “Take him and his bridge crew to the jails. Get them out of here.”
They zip-tied his hands, and then led him off. Several junior officers started applauding, but it died out nervously after a few seconds.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-ONE
SOMEWHERE NEAR HABITAT CARIBO
INNER RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE
Jai eyeballed the Insurrectionist smuggler in the distance. They’d been tagging along far behind it until it had docked.
Now he flew in the weightless vacuum toward it.
He struck the surface, absorbing the impact with his knees. Even as he rebounded, he threw a magnetic grapple at the hull to stay attached.
Adriana hit the hull next to him. She grabbed his leg with one hand to stop him from bouncing back off. She had a large plastic case tucked underneath the other arm.
Jai looked at her helmet. “What does Mike have for us today?”
“Electromagnetic pulse bomb. Mostly harmless—except to anything electronic aboard the Kestrel. It’ll wipe it all clean,” Adriana said. She opened the case and pulled out a large, discshaped device that looked like a landmine. “He’s been saving this one.”
With a thud the EMP attached itself to the hull. Adriana leaned over it and tapped out a code. “It talking to you, Mike?”
“We’re live,” Mike reported. “Now get well clear of that thing. The EMP pulse is strong enough to fry a whole ship. Usually our armor can recover from those bursts pretty quickly, but it will still knock out your MJOLNIR briefly if you’re too close. I want to wait until we’re all back aboard and well clear before—”
Jai spotted movement. “We have company. They’re coming from the airlock.”
Two black space suits, hardened-looking affairs, coasted quickly at them. A burst of flame from their backs jetted them down the hull even faster.
“Hostile or curious?” Mike asked.<
br />
Muzzle flash answered that; the two suits had machine guns in either hand.
Adriana bent down and leapt at them, pulling out her battle rifle and firing. Her rounds sparked and pinged off well-hardened material and the two suits curled up in a ball.
“They were expecting us,” Jai said.
“We’ve been here a while, it’s obvious something’s happening,” Mike replied. “Not too surprising they’ve rustled up a response of some sort. I’m jockeying Petya in closer.”
“No,” Adriana said. “Get ready to hit the EMP; we don’t want to give these goons a chance with it. They’ve probably raised the alarm. We also don’t want to give them time to get the data off the ship somehow.”
She grunted as she smacked into one of the suits.
Jai leapt at the second one while paying out the rope on his grapple with one hand. He didn’t bother shooting at the man until they collided. He ripped the rocket pack off the back of the combat space suit and threw it away, did the same with the man’s two guns, then yanked himself back toward the smuggler with the line.
The black suit hung still, unable to move anywhere.
Adriana had smashed in the faceplate of their other opponent. The man’s dying breath hung in the air between the two, a crystalline and fading cloud.
She threw the suit away, the motion pushing her toward the hull.
“Four more of them,” she said. The glare of their packs marked them, flying right at them from the asteroid.
“Let’s get out of here.”
With all the strength available to them from the combination of their physique and the MJOLNIR powered armor, they crouched and leapt for the Petya, over a mile away.
Halfway across, Mike triggered the EMP bomb with a dramatic electric fireshow that crackled across the Kestrel’s hull.
It also left their chasers immobile, their electronics burnt out by the invisible wave of electrical energy the bomb had released.
Jai’s heads-up display flickered slightly. “Cutting it close, Mike?”
“A little,” came the response.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-TWO
THE REDOUBT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE
The first trio of Unggoy to turn the corridor walked right into Thel’s line of fire. Short bursts of plasma struck them in the center of their torsos.
Footsteps pattered behind Thel. He turned around and saw Reth trying to run away from Saal. Saal grabbed the Kig-Yar leader and dragged him back toward the windows and out of the direct line of fire.
“Do you two realize what you are doing?” the Kig-Yar asked.
Saal cocked his head. “We are kidnapping you.”
Reth did not find it as amusing as Saal seemed to. “There are hundreds of thousands of Unggoy out there, all who are at my command.”
“They are out there,” Saal said. “But you and I know they cannot all get in here.” And Saal chuckled.
“So you plan on doing what then?” Reth hissed. “You are meddling in extraordinarily important affairs.”
Thel ducked behind the doorframe as more Unggoy spilled out into the far side of the corridor. One stumbled when he saw Thel duck back around with his plasma rifle. “Sangheili! Defend the Redoubt!” it screamed, and the back of its methane tank exploded from another accurate shot. Flaming debris struck other Unggoy, who lost their cohesive charge down the corridor and scattered, trying to pat the flames away before they got burned.
“That should hold them for a bit,” Thel muttered. But then to his surprise, the Unggoy turned back toward him again.
These were some very determined Unggoy.
“They have something to fight for,” Reth shouted. “Sangheili, you don’t understand what’s going on. You must free me. I can save your lives. I swear it.”
Thel watched the Unggoy charge. There was little love between the Kig-Yar and Sangheili—Reth’s kind resented the position Sangheili held in the Covenant. And the Sangheili regarded the Kig-Yar as little more than scavengers.
Thel suspected Reth was lying and would happily have them killed the moment they set their weapons down.
But Reth pressed on nonetheless. “You are the Sangheili from Retribution’s Thunder, am I right?”
Why was Zhar taking so long? Thel shot another handful of Unggoy.
“Yes.”
More came up the elevators and stairs and ran forward.
“It was a mistake. We should not have betrayed you to those Jiralhanae,” Reth said in as soothing a voice as a Kig-Yar could. “But we needed you to not interfere! Not after all the work we’ve done so far.”
Thel shook his head. “What is done is done. You have made your choices. Now we are making ours.” Way too many Unggoy were rushing up to the top floor, flooding over dead bodies in the hall. Thel knew they were going to continue until he ran out of the charge in his plasma rifle.
“You go against the Hierarchs!” Reth shouted.
Saal backhanded the Kig-Yar. “We are on a direct mission for the Hierarchs. Do not dare blaspheme like that. As if you speak for the Hierarchs . . .” he muttered.
Thel saw out of the corner of his eye that the Kig-Yar looked stunned. “Which Hierarch?”
“The Prophet of Regret himself,” Saal proclaimed proudly.
Reth shook his head. “Wrong Prophet,” he muttered, the feathered spines on his head wavering in confusion.
Wrong Prophet? Saal and Thel looked at each other, and then Saal shouted, “Zhar is up!”
Sure enough a column of disturbed air rippled just outside the windows.
“Blow the windows out!” Thel ordered. He shut the doors and locked them against the Unggoy.
Saal used a sticky grenade on the thick windows. The blue light pulsed, and then Thel grabbed Reth to shield him as the explosion shook the room.
Glass shards flew out, and the thunder of engines filled the room, bringing the acrid clouds of methane mist with it.
Thel hoisted Reth onto his back. “You scream, struggle, or move about, you will regret it dearly. Now take a deep breath while there’s still some air!”
He followed Saal out onto the lip of the window, looking at the slope of the repurposed ship stretching out before him. They didn’t want to go that way. Slide off the edge, they’d have a very long fall.
Thel pulled himself and the weight of the Kig-Yar up, using his hands and legs to crawl up onto the slope of metal above the windows. Saal scrambled up ahead, unencumbered, to the top of the ship, where the shuttle hovered, waiting for them.
They needed one last tactic to gain them some time. Thel pulled out a pair of grenades and let them roll down toward the slope of the hull. As they dropped by his feet he kicked them in through the window.
He scrambled up after Saal as fast he could, the grenades’ explosions blowing red flame and debris out of the windows underneath him as he ran.
The Unggoy pilot stood in the back of the shuttle, eyes wide in stunned surprise as he watched them run toward him. Zhar gently touched the top of the old Kig-Yar wreck with the shuttle and Saal and Thel leapt aboard. The tips of other grounded ships poked out of the thick, ruddy mists all around them like towers.
“Take it up!” Saal shouted forward, and they accelerated away, the structure dwindling at the top of the falls, the crater lake falling into the distance.
CHAPTER
THIRTY-THREE
HABITAT EL CUIDAD, INNER RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE
Despite being left alone, Ignatio Delgado had still not managed to free himself.
The thing was, trying to use a sliver of metal to pick the lock of a pair of handcuffs was a challenging proposition. And Delgado couldn’t even get the sliver to reach the keyhole.
With a loud sigh the one guard in the warehouse stood up and folded up whatever he’d been watching and pocketed it. “Alright, Delgado, things are settling down. Time to get you moved out.”
Delgado nodded, filled with a sense of foreboding. This was it, then.
The guard no
ticed the look on his face. “Come on, Delgado. It’s not like that.”
“Really?” Delgado looked the heavily muscled man up and down. “How is it, then?”
The man shrugged. “All Bonifacio and the Security Council know is that the data keeps getting found out. Better to keep you on close watch.”
Delgado shook his head. “Then why are you doing this? Why the hired muscle, the empty warehouse?”
“It keeps you under his eye. He doesn’t trust you, Delgado. You’re a wild card, man.” Delgado was unshackled from the chain, then handcuffed to the man’s right wrist.
With a shove, Delgado was pushed forward.
“What’s your name?” Delgado asked.
“Owen.”
“Your real name?”
“What do you think?” “Owen” asked, looking down at Delgado as he herded him outside to a waiting tube car.
“Where are we going?” Delgado asked.
Owen smiled. “One of Bonifacio’s working ships.”
Delgado frowned. “Working ships? He have a lot of broken ones?”
“Look.” Owen leaned in close, almost whispering. “Relax a little, Delgado. Bonifacio’s going to be in a foul mood because his smuggler ship, it just got fried.”
“What?”
Owen was laughing. “The best-laid plans . . . Someone really doesn’t like Bonifacio. They fried his ship. It’s structurally intact, but nothing inside it works; the data got wiped out.”
Delgado swallowed. The Spartans had struck again. “So now Bonifacio needs me.”
“Pretty much.”
The tube car stopped after making its way between a handful of coupled asteroids. Owen opened the door, and Delgado quickly followed him to avoid being yanked along.
Peter Bonifacio stood near an airlock, along with a handful of Security Council members. Including Diego Esquival.
Owen unlocked the handcuffs, and Delgado massaged his wrists. “What’s this all about?”
“Where’s the navigation data, Mr. Delgado?” one of the suited Security Council members asked.
The Cole Protocol Page 18
