by Troy Denning
“Thanks,” Veta said. She knew better than to take anything Wendell said at face value—he was, after all, ONI property—but if he was trying to misdirect the investigation, that would be a clue in itself. “I’m sure that will prove useful.”
“I’m always happy to be of assistance, Inspector,” Wendell said. “And now, perhaps you should return to your hiding place. Olivia is certain to be growing suspicious, and you’re putting both of you at risk by wandering.”
Veta did not turn around. “This log,” she said, “you put it together while you were down here?”
There was short pause—no doubt while Wendell analyzed the reason for her question—and Veta knew whatever the AI’s reasons for making the report, it had nothing to do with serving justice.
After a moment, Wendell said, “I’ve had the data all along, I’m afraid. But I didn’t see any reason to analyze it until you began to grow suspicious of Mark-G313.”
“I see.”
Veta stopped at the edge of a shallow pool and shined her handlamp into the rippling water. On the bottom glistened hundreds of calcite spheres, all more or less round and the color of alabaster. She was tempted to grab a handful to take back to the surface, but the Montero Park Authority had long ago outlawed the unlicensed collection of cave artifacts, so she contented herself with looking instead.
Continuing to study the cave pearls, Veta asked, “And why are you telling me this, Wendell?”
“Isn’t it obvious?” Wendell replied. “You’re searching for the killer, and there is a very high probability that Mark-G313 is the killer.”
Veta shook her head. “Not what I’m asking,” she said. “That’s what I get, if your theory turns out to be right.”
She stepped away from the pool . . . then heard a stone clatter in the darkness to her right. She turned her lamp toward the sound and saw nothing but a distant shelf of greenish flowstone. Determined to continue the interrogation while Wendell was willing to talk, she told herself the noise was probably just Olivia limping along, trying to keep an eye on her. She began to walk away from the clatter.
“I want to know how you benefit by pointing me at a member of Blue Team,” Veta said, continuing to whisper into her helmet mic. “Protecting Gao civilians isn’t exactly a mission priority for the UNSC.”
Again, there was a perceptible hesitation as Wendell formulated a reply. “It is not in anyone’s interest to have a murderer causing trouble right now,” he finally replied. “And since Frederic-104 is clearly unwilling to do what is necessary, you are the best option for resolving the situation.”
The explanation was credible, but Veta wasn’t sure it had the ring of truth. With an AI, honesty was hard to judge because there were no physical cues to observe. She paused, trying to find another angle to work . . . and she heard a slurping scrape somewhere behind her, the sound of a boot sole sliding down wet stone.
It ended in a thud too loud to have been made by a Spartan—and it was followed by a throaty grunt. Veta reached for her sidearm and spun around, bringing her lamp up just in time to glimpse an apelike figure in armor springing at her. She snapped her SAS-10 from its holster, but her attacker was already in midair, swinging a blocky pistol with a double-bladed bayonet toward her head, and it seemed clear that even if she managed to kill it, it was going to return the favor.
Veta raised the barrel of her SAS-10 . . . and found herself flying sideways as a second armored body slammed into her. A male voice yelled, “Down!” and then she was buried beneath a lightly armored human—one of the Spartan-IIIs.
Her attacker crashed down somewhere beyond her feet, and Veta heard stones clattering as he attempted to try again.
“Off!” Veta yelled.
The Spartan was already leaping to his feet. Veta sat up and fired into the darkness. The roar of the SAS-10 was deafening, but her target was so close she could see him in the light of the pistol’s muzzle flashes—a living mountain first slowing, then jerking, staggering, and finally tumbling over backward as Veta hammered his chest with armor-piercing rounds.
She finally stopped firing when she realized her target was no longer being illuminated by muzzle flashes. She ejected the SAS-10’s half-empty ammo clip and loaded a full one, then retrieved her handlamp and began to sweep the beam through the darkness. She saw only muddy ground and damp stone and the murkiness of a vast chamber. For a moment, she thought that her unexpected savior had already vanished.
Then she heard the wet thwack of a blade plunging into flesh. She swung the lamp toward the sound and found Mark kneeling over the corpse of her attacker, which she now recognized as a massive Jiralhanae warrior.
Mark was spattered helmet to boot in blood, and his combat knife was buried to the hilt in the Jiralhanae’s neck. There was a wild tension in his posture that suggested the Spartan might spring up and race away any instant. Instead, he withdrew his knife from the Jiralhanae’s throat and pointed the still-dripping blade toward Veta’s weapon.
“You can put that away now,” he said. “This guy was the last of them.”
Veta lowered the pistol, but she didn’t return it to its holster. “You’re sure?”
“Yeah, Mom. I’m sure.”
“You said them?” Veta asked. “So there was more than one Brute down here?”
“Afraid so,” Mark replied. “But, like I said, they’re all dead now.”
It did not escape Veta’s notice that Mark had avoided telling her exactly how many Jiralhanae he had killed. “What are they doing on Gao?”
“Hard to say,” Mark said. “I didn’t get a chance to ask them.”
He wiped his knife clean on the Jiralhanae’s furry beard and returned the weapon to its sheath, then stepped over to Veta and offered a hand to pull her up.
“And thanks for being so quick with that popgun of yours,” he said. “You might have saved my life.”
Veta allowed him to pull her up. “Just returning the favor,” she said. “You saved mine first.”
“Yeah, I did.” Mark swiped two fingers across his faceplate, a gesture Veta had learned to recognize as a Spartan smile, then added, “So that makes us even now.”
CHAPTER 14
* * *
* * *
0720 hours, July 5, 2553 (military calendar)
Cabinet Chamber, People’s Palace, City of Rinale
Founder’s District, Planet Gao, Cordoba System
With its ornate ceiling, darkly paneled walls, and massive rectangular table, the Gao Cabinet Chamber had always struck Arlo Casille as almost worthy of housing the People’s Collection of Presidential Holographs. In a projection niche at the far end of the room, a life-size image of founding director Ramonda Avelos stood waist-deep in cycads, her raven tresses blowing in the wind and her pioneer’s pressure suit peeled open at the collar. In the center of the adjacent wall, the great unifier Constantine “Grandfather” Moya leaned on a garden hoe, his straw hat pushed back and a wry smile on his cracked lips. Near the entrance to the presidential office, the armor-clad image of General Hector Nyeto stood on a fiery hangar deck, chomping on a cigar and smirking at the demolished remains of a Colonial Military Authority AV-14 Hornet.
All together, fourteen such portraits hung on the walls of the Cabinet Chamber. These were the men and women who had steered Gao through its tumultuous first century of settlement, who had spent their lives carving a prosperous, fiercely independent civilization from the darkness of an alien jungle. Through their courage and hard work, they had bestowed on their posterity a world-nation whose citizens lived as free of oppression as they did hunger—and Arlo Casille considered it his sacred duty to ensure that Tejo Aponte did not surrender through his cowardice what Gao’s forefathers had worked so hard to secure.
So, when the president’s door swung open twenty minutes after the emergency consultation had been scheduled to begin, Arlo was disappointed to see how quickly his fellow ministers rose to receive President Aponte. A slender, goateed man who carried himself
with the self-conscious erectness of a well-coached politician, Aponte went straight to his place at the head of the cabinet table. He took the tall chair and propped a datapad where he would be able to consult it at a glance. Not bothering to apologize for his tardiness—or even to explain it—he motioned the ministers back into their seats, then punched a control button on the arm of his chair.
A holographic projection cube appeared in the air above the table. Aponte tapped the screen of his datapad, and the image inside the cube became a top-down view of a half-demolished village. In the entrance plaza sat the smoking wreck of a UNSC Pelican, while most of the surrounding buildings had been reduced to rubble. The streets in the rest of the village appeared deserted, but a steady stream of tracer fire and plasma beams could be seen lacing many of the narrow lanes. Save for the fact that it was holographic, the scene was much the same as the video clips that BuzzSat had been running on its newsfeed for the last eighteen hours.
Always something of a showman, Aponte allowed the ministers to study the devastation for a few moments, then finally said, “As you all know by now, a band of alien insurrectionists has launched a vicious and unprovoked assault on the village of Wendosa.”
“I don’t know that,” Arlo said. By overlooking political protocol and speaking without the president’s invitation, he was deliberately setting an antagonistic tone, trying to put Aponte off balance. “I don’t know that they’re alien or insurrectionists. How do we know anything about them?”
Aponte scowled. “The findings are sound, Minister,” he said. “In addition to our own reconnaissance flights, the UNSC has shared its intelligence regarding the situation. One of its companies is under attack by a mixed force of several hundred Jiralhanae, Kig-Yar, and humans.”
“I see.” A battle in the middle of a Gao village was the last thing Arlo had expected when he smuggled Castor and the Keepers of the One Freedom onto the planet, but now that it had happened, Arlo was determined to use the calamity to bring down Aponte. He had to—anything less, and the truth about his own involvement was likely to come out. “And we’re just taking the UNSC’s word for all this? Or have they also shared some actual evidence to support their claims?”
“The evidence is right there in the holo,” said Gaspar Baez, Gao’s horse-faced, gray-haired Minister of War. “Those plasma beams and firebombs are a damn clear indication that the armament is ex-Covenant.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” Arlo objected. “The entire sector is flooded with Covenant War surplus. The Ministry of Protection has been confiscating two or three loads a week—and humans can use plasma rifles, too.”
“Are you really suggesting that the UNSC’s research battalion is attacking itself?” Aponte asked. “That’s a stretch even for you, Minister Casille.”
“And what about the reports of field mortars and shoulder-launched missiles?” added Trella Rangel. A shrewd, sloe-eyed blonde in her forties, she served as the Minister of Finance. “They’re being used against the UNSC, and the newsmongers claim they were manufactured by Sevine Arms.”
Baez gave a vigorous nod. “Certainly true. The Covenant didn’t have much use for that kind of foot-portable artillery.” He shot Arlo an accusatory glance, then added, “I wonder how our missiles and mortars came to be in the possession of these insurrectionists.”
“What are you implying, Minister?” Arlo demanded. “Because I assure you, every piece of foot-portable artillery in GMoP’s possession is in our evidence lockers—where we secured it after recovering it from the thieves who raided your armory.”
“It’s the artillery that didn’t make it into the evidence lockers that concerns me,” Baez said. “Your agents logged a quarter of what we lost.”
Arlo spread his hands. “And your missing weapons are probably being used at Wendosa—but that is hardly the fault of my agents. Had you notified us about the theft promptly, we might have caught the thieves before they started selling their take.” He paused, then leaned across the table toward Baez. “Unless . . . are you suggesting there’s been more than one armory raid?”
Baez’s face flushed, and he rose and leaned toward Arlo. “What I’m suggesting—”
“Is irrelevant,” Aponte interrupted. He scowled at Baez until the old warhorse settled back into his chair, then did the same with Arlo. When both men were quiet, the president clasped his hands and rested his forearms on the table, visibly trying to calm himself. “No matter where the weapons came from, Gao must put a stop to this battle now. That’s why I called this emergency consultation, and why I’m going to insist that we stick to the business at hand. Every minute we waste costs another Gao life.”
Aponte’s proclamation was greeted by an uncomfortable silence, which Arlo was content to let hang. When the UNSC had originally demanded permission to land a research team in the Montero Region, it had been Aponte who had insisted that a limited, peaceful occupation was better for Gao than an all-out war. It was at that moment Arlo had realized Aponte was a coward, and had started to develop a plan to replace the president with someone worthy of the position—namely himself. Now, with Arlo’s Jiralhanae patsy turning a Gao village into a battlefield, the president was preparing to go to war on the UNSC’s behalf. It was an action that would put the cabinet in an untenable position with the public, and one that could easily bring down Aponte’s government—especially if Arlo gave it a nudge.
Trella Rangel, the shrewd finance minister, broke the silence. “These insurrectionists—what makes you think they’re attacking us rather than the UNSC?”
“They’re attacking the village of Wendosa,” Aponte said. “They’ve also fired on the Montero Vitality Center. Both are on Gao.”
“And both are occupied by the UNSC,” Arlo said. “In fact, I’d argue that the insurrectionists are simply trying to liberate Gao.”
“Come on,” Baez said. “You can’t actually believe that.”
“I don’t know what to believe, Minister.” Arlo glanced around the table and saw nothing but doubt in the eyes of his fellow ministers, no hint of determination or even approval. “And neither does anyone in this chamber, because we don’t have facts. All we know is that a battle has erupted between the UNSC and some protestors opposed to their presence. We don’t know who started it—or even who those protestors are.”
“I saw a spokeswoman on the BuzzSat newsfeed just before I left my office,” Rangel said. “She claims the protestors are from the Committee to Preserve Gao Independence, and that the UNSC attacked them without provocation.”
“Whoever she is, she can’t be trusted,” Baez said. “Protestors don’t carry beam rifles and field mortars.”
“Radical protestors might,” Arlo said. In fact, he knew they did, because he was the one who had supplied the Committee to Preserve Gao Independence with weapons—shortly after creating it. He turned back to Rangel. “What kind of accent did this spokeswoman have? I’ve heard there may be some Venezian involvement.”
“She was Gao,” Rangel said. “And she claimed that the mess at the Vitality Center was self-defense. According to her, a UNSC Falcon opened fire on the crowd first. The Committee to Preserve Gao Independence had no choice but to return fire.”
“Again, what are these so-called protestors doing with shoulder-fired missiles?” Aponte demanded. “And what about Commander Nelson’s aide? That sniper bullet was meant for Nelson himself!”
“Probably so,” Arlo admitted. “But that doesn’t mean these protestors aren’t legal citizens of Gao. In fact, I’d say it’s likely they are. Who else would care enough about the occupation to start a fight with the UNSC?”
A triumphant gleam came to Aponte’s eyes. “Then you do agree that it was these . . . these ‘radical protestors’ who started the fight?”
Arlo sighed heavily, then gave a falsely reluctant nod. “It could have been,” he said. “With all that weaponry, they certainly came prepared for trouble. Only a fool would deny the possibility that they started it.”
“A support mission?” Rangel echoed. “For the UNSC?”
“Exactly,” Aponte replied. “The . . . radicals have blown the road between Wendosa and the Montero Vitality Center, and with only one Falcon left, the battalion can’t relieve the village. I spoke to Commander Nelson at the Vitality Center this morning. He’s convinced that without help, Wendosa will fall by evening.”
“And that’s our problem . . . why?” This question came not from Arlo, but from the Minister of the Environment, a scraggly-bearded engineer named Saul Quarres. “I can’t see risking Gao lives to save UNSC soldiers, especially when they shouldn’t be here at all.”
“I’m not happy about it, either,” Aponte said. “But there are more than a thousand Gaos trapped in Wendosa, and the best way to save them is to work with the UNSC to bring the situation under control. If we don’t, they’ll do it on their own, as soon as their task force enters orbit—and no one wants that.”
“I see,” Arlo said. “So you want us to do the UNSC’s dirty work.”
“I’m trying to stop an all-out war—one we clearly can’t win.”
“By assaulting Gao citizens so the UNSC doesn’t have to?” Rangel shook her head and looked around the table, then rested her gaze on Gaspar Baez. “I can’t believe I’m hearing this. I can’t believe you would go along with such a thing.”
“The president is right,” Baez said. “We can’t win a war against the UNSC. We can’t even win against their task force.”
“And so we show them our bellies? We kill our own people instead?” Arlo shook his head in disgust, then pointed toward the portrait of the cigar-chomping Hector Nyeto. “If General Nyeto had been afraid to fight when he faced the same odds, Gao wouldn’t be a free world today.”
