Last Light

by Troy Denning

  As one, the eight members of Blue Team rose from the devastation and bounded toward the Well of Echoes. Veta stood and scrambled across the log tangle after them. All she could see ahead was the edge of a cliff—but with eight Spartans leading the way and a tactical nuke about to detonate, she was willing to take a chance.

  Fred and Mark were only a couple of meters from the rim when the Owl rose out of the Well of Echoes and began to ease toward them. Resembling a slightly smaller, lightly armored version of a Pelican, the most obvious differences were the Owl’s cloud-gray finish and its downward-curved wings. As it drew near the cliff, the craft spun around to present its tail, then lowered a boarding ramp and hovered on its pivoting thrust nacelles.

  Fred turned to watch his team board, but Mark disappeared into the craft at a full sprint. Olivia, Ash, and the rest of the Spartans did likewise. A few seconds later, Veta raced up the ramp and found herself staring into the dark interior of a UNSC war vessel.

  Fred came up behind her, probably the last of his team to board, by some military tradition, and nudged her across the threshold onto the deck.

  “Welcome aboard, Inspector Lopis,” he said. “You’re one of the good guys now.”

  CHAPTER 28

  * * *

  * * *

  1458 hours, July 6, 2553 (military calendar)

  United Nations Space Command “Owl” Insertion Craft Silent Claw

  Well of Echoes, Planet Gao, Cordoba System

  The Owl lurched into motion and entered a steep spiral climb, its sound-dampened engines emitting little more than a groan. As the deck tipped back toward the open boarding ramp, Veta reached for the nearest wall, blindly searching for a handhold while her eyes adjusted to the dim interior light. A set of slender fingers took her wrist and guided her hand to a strap suspended from the ceiling.

  “I keep saying we need lights in here during daytime extractions,” said a throaty, half-familiar voice. “But you know the UNSC and protocol. You need three stars on your collar to change anything.”

  Veta slipped her hand through the strap, then turned toward the voice and began to discern a face. It belonged to a tall, olive-skinned woman with close-cropped hair and a slender, high-cheeked face.

  “Ms. Classified, I presume,” she said. “We meet at last.”

  Classified chuckled. “That’s Rear Admiral Classified,” she said. “But for now, you can call me Osman—Serin Osman.”

  “Forty-two seconds,” Mark said over TEAMCOM.

  At the same time, a female pilot’s voice sounded from a ceiling speaker. “Inbound Wyverns, folks. Let’s get it done and get gone.”

  “Mark!” Fred barked from Veta’s left.

  “Sir.”

  Mark emerged from the shadows along the cabin wall, his photoreactive armor struggling to adjust as he passed from darkness into the light spilling over the still-open boarding ramp. In his hands, he continued to hold the Havok.

  Before Veta could ask why in the world he still had it, Admiral Osman said, “Hold up, son.”

  Mark’s helmet snapped around. “Ma’am?”

  “You boarded early,” Osman said. “We have a few seconds.”

  Mark looked toward the ramp, where Fred stood silhouetted against a verdant, jungle-filled pit half a kilometer below. When Fred nodded, Mark reluctantly faced Osman again.

  “Thirty-eight seconds,” Mark warned.

  Osman cleared her throat, and Veta turned to find the rear admiral holding Intrepid Eye’s data crystal.

  “It’d be a tragedy to waste what this can do for humankind,” Osman said. She offered the crystal to Veta. “But a deal is a deal. There’s an adhesive strip on the Havok. If you want your justice, just attach this to the bottom.”

  Veta cocked a brow, trying to imagine a scenario where ONI would surrender a Forerunner ancilla—and there wasn’t one. If Osman was offering a data crystal to her, it was only because the admiral wanted her to believe that Intrepid Eye was inside.

  And because she thought Veta was naïve enough to fall for the switch.

  Veta pushed Osman’s hand back without even bothering to examine the offering. “I don’t know who you think you’re fooling,” she said. “But that is not Intrepid Eye.”

  A sly grin spread across Osman’s face. She made a fist over the data crystal and nodded to Mark. “Very well, Spartan. Carry on.”

  Mark’s shoulders visibly relaxed. Without taking the time to step closer to the ramp, he pitched the Havok out through the opening. Its nose dropped, and then Veta saw a trio of helical fins deploy. The device began a spinning dive down into the Well of Echoes.

  The tiny, delta-winged shapes of a dozen Wyverns floated into view, so distant and far below that they seemed to be merely drifting across the Well of Echoes.

  “Bomb away!” Fred announced.

  The Owl’s boarding ramp thumped shut, sealing Veta and the others inside a steel cocoon. Fred and Mark immediately sprang for opposite sides of the cramped passenger cabin. Osman took Veta by the elbow and pulled her into a seat next to Fred. An automatic crash harness descended out of the wall above her shoulders and cinched her tight against the back cushion.

  The Owl began a steep climb, accelerating so hard that had Veta not been secured by the crash harness, she would have been thrown to the rear of the craft.

  By now her eyes had adjusted, and she could see that there wasn’t much to the interior of the cabin—just a weapons locker at the forward bulkhead and ten inward-facing seats along each wall, with enough room between them for a couple of single-man vehicles. The Gammas were seated directly opposite Veta. They remained fully armored—as did all the Spartans except Fred.

  Mark’s faceplate seemed fixed on Rear Admiral Osman. “Twenty-six seconds,” he said. “It should have been thirty.”

  Osman frowned, then tipped her head in Veta’s direction and asked, “Am I the one who wasted four seconds thinking?”

  Veta had no chance to retort. The pilot’s voice came over the intercom again. “Brace yourselves!”

  Already secured in the tight crash harnesses, there wasn’t much of that to be done. Veta merely pressed her helmet into the back of her seat and clenched her jaw to make sure she wouldn’t bite her tongue, and the Owl bucked so hard she feared the wings had been blown off. It seemed to slide and tumble for a few seconds, then the pilot brought it under control.

  “Detonation confirmed,” she reported. “Well done, Spartans.”

  An air of relief filled the cabin, with the Spartans seeming to ease into their crash harnesses as they flashed hand signals to each other. But there was no jubilation or triumphant outcry, not even a fist pump or sudden wave of laughter, and Veta liked that about them. They did not celebrate death. They understood that the men and women who had just been incinerated above the Well of Echoes were merely soldiers, the same as them . . . that the people who had to do the killing and dying in a war were seldom the ones who started it.

  The Owl continued to shudder and shake for a few more minutes, then finally slipped free of the Gao atmosphere and settled into smooth flight. Veta found herself feeling queasy and drifting up against her harness, and she realized that, for first time in her life, she was experiencing weightlessness. She looked across the cabin at the Gammas—none of them even half her age—and saw by their slack postures and the distracted tilt of their helmets that it was a familiar sensation for them, one that they had probably experienced a hundred times in their young lives.

  But, still, none of the Spartans were opening their armor or even removing their helmets, and their harnesses remained firmly in place.

  Veta turned to Fred and asked, “How long do we need to stay buttoned up and locked in our seats?”

  “Until we leave the conflict zone.”

  “That’s not really an answer, Fred.”

  Fred spread his hands. “I’m not the pilot,” he said. “I have no idea how large the zone is right now.”

  “It’ll be about three hours,”
Osman said, “assuming the Gao Space Navy doesn’t give us too much trouble.”

  “They’re moving against the task force?” Fred asked. “Even Casille isn’t that crazy.”

  “That remains to be seen,” Osman said. “But Casille certainly did everything he could to make life difficult for the 717th. From what my own crews are reporting, the battalion lost half its strength evacuating under fire. And now that we’ve detonated a nuclear device . . . well, I doubt even Inspector Lopis knows what President Casille might do.”

  1508 hours, July 6, 2553 (military calendar)

  Republic of Gao “Basilisk” Forward Command-and-Control

  Craft Independence

  Holding at an altitude of five hundred meters, the Basilisk tipped its wing and circled the blackened crater that had once been the Well of Echoes. Ringed by a curtain of smoke rising from the flickering flame walls of a huge jungle fire, the Well was now a kilometer-deep shaft of fused limestone. In the bottom of the pit, Arlo Casille could just make out a pool of molten stone still glowing white with thermonuclear heat.

  The pool could not be any hotter than the anger burning in Arlo’s own soul. Was there no outrage beyond the UNSC? Could there be any atrocity too terrible for them to commit? Arlo would not have believed it possible for the barbarity of any Spartan to surprise him, but this final profanity had caught him completely off guard. The last thing he had imagined was that they would use a nuclear device to make good their escape.

  “Nobody could have expected that, you know,” said a raspy voice. “I certainly didn’t see it coming.”

  Arlo was so deep in concentration that he didn’t recognize the voice until he looked up and saw Gaspar Baez seated in the chair facing him. Like Arlo himself, the horse-faced Minister of War was dressed in a crisply pressed set of black Gao Space Navy fatigues, and he was leaning forward to peer out of the craft’s window at the destruction below.

  “What do you mean, exactly?” Arlo asked, immediately suspicious. Baez was an Aponte loyalist, after all. The only reason he still remained the Minister of War was a lack of time: Arlo had not wanted to delay the attack on the 717th long enough to put a new command structure in place. “I hope you’re not implying it’s my fault that the UNSC detonated a nuclear device on Gao.”

  “Of course not. It’s not your fault at all. Nobody would have expected that to be how the Spartans sprang their trap.” Baez steepled his fingers in front of his chin, then smiled. “And that’s exactly what I intend to say in my public interviews, once I’m a civilian again.”

  “I see,” Arlo said. “I hope you don’t intend to imply that I fell for a Spartan trap in the first place.”

  “Well, I do have to be honest,” Baez replied. “You are the one who ordered the Wyvern squadron to give chase—and, really, don’t you think that was a bit extreme? I’m sure you were hurt personally by Inspector Lopis’s betrayal, but diverting half of the assault force to go after her practically guaranteed the 717th would escape punishment—”

  “It wasn’t personal,” Arlo interrupted. “And you know that.”

  “Oh?” Baez raised his gray brows. “So you’re going public, then, with the hunt for the ancilla?”

  “Absolutely not,” Arlo said.

  Currently, the people of Gao were applauding him for chasing off the 717th, but that would change in a heartbeat if the citizenry learned that Arlo had caused the crisis by smuggling the Keepers of the One Freedom onto Gao in the first place. With any luck, Castor was lying dead in the jungle someplace or had actually been incinerated by the nuclear detonation, and the public would never know that the whole battle had been a tug-of-war over a Forerunner artifact—a tug-of-war that Arlo had lost.

  “We’re not going public with anything about the Forerunners,” Arlo continued, “or Inspector Lopis’s betrayal. As far as the public is concerned, Inspector Lopis died with the rest of her team, and I sent the UNSC packing because their Spartans were murdering tourists in the Montero Cave System.”

  Arlo pointed out the window at the huge crater below, then added, “And we need to find a way to keep that quiet, too.”

  “So, you don’t intend to use it to stir up sentiment against the UNSC?”

  Arlo shook his head. “Can’t do it. If I admit that the UNSC detonated a nuclear device on Gao, my own backers will push me into retaliating. And as much as I hate the UNSC, I’m not interested in being the president who roars at the giant and gets Gao smashed like a bug.”

  A knowing twinkle came to Baez’s eyes. “I’m very happy to hear that,” he said. “But those are going to be some very difficult secrets for you to keep. There must be at least five hundred Gao soldiers who know the truth.”

  “Which is why I’m going to need an experienced high commander to keep it quiet,” Arlo said. “Do you think you’ll be able to accomplish that, Minister Baez?”

  Baez dropped his chin and offered a thin smile. “It sounds like you’re asking me to stay on as part of your cabinet, President Casille.”

  “I think we understand each other.”

  “In that case, I’m sure these secrets will be safe.” Baez leaned back in his chair, then added, “If there’s one term my soldiers always respect, it’s most classified.”

  “I’m glad to hear it,” Arlo said. He pointed out the window at the crater below. “So tell me: how are you going to explain that?”

  Baez waved a dismissive hand. “What’s to explain? Your GMoP corvettes simply brought down a Prowler,” he said. “I’m afraid its reactor blew, so we’re going to have to keep a security cordon around the area . . . for as long as you’re the president and I’m the Minister of War.”

  “For years, then,” Arlo said, nodding his approval.

  “Oh, I’d say at the very least,” Baez agreed. He spread his hands and grinned. “Possibly even decades.”

  1518 hours, July 6, 2553 (military calendar)

  United Nations Space Command “Owl” Insertion Craft Silent Claw

  The pilot’s voice filled the Owl’s passenger cabin again. “We have a pair of Gao corvettes coming out from behind Cenobia,” she said. “We should be able to dodge them by ducking around the back side. It’s going to add a couple of hours to our trip, but stay buckled up back there in case we run into any surprises.”

  Veta’s dismay must have showed on her face, because Osman said, “Don’t tell me you have to pee.”

  “No, I’m okay.”

  Actually, Veta was already having trouble dealing with the harness confinement, and a monotonous five-hour flight was only going to make it worse. But she certainly wasn’t going to reveal that to Osman.

  “I just thought I might float around for a while,” Veta said. She felt a bead of sweat trickling down her brow, but did her best to seem nonchalant. “It’s my first time in space.”

  “I wish you could,” Osman said, speaking in a tone that suggested she was playing along. “Sorry, but you know how protocol is. We’ll just have to keep each other entertained with our sparkling wit.”

  Veta shot an uneasy glance over at Fred, who merely shrugged and looked away.

  “So, Inspector, I was wondering something,” Osman continued, either missing or ignoring Veta’s disquiet. “Now that you’re a pariah on your own world, what are you going to do with your life?”

  Veta looked back to Fred. “Is this lady for real?”

  “Yeah,” Fred said. “I’m afraid so.”

  “The reason I ask,” Osman said, “is that you passed my test with flying colors.”

  Veta let her voice go icy. “What test?”

  “With the data crystal. You read my play in four seconds flat, which is decent for an untrained amateur, and you didn’t let the Havok scare you.” Osman raised her brow. “You have potential, Inspector Lopis.”

  “I have experience,” Veta said. “I’ve been taking down hardened killers since I was twenty.”

  “Yes, I know all about that,” Osman said. “But I’m talking about the big leagu
es. Stuff where you can make a difference in the galaxy.”

  The more this woman talked, the less Veta liked her. But she did have Veta’s attention.

  “A difference how?”

  “I wish I could tell you.” She spread her hands. “But it’s—”

  “Classified?” Veta asked. “You can’t even tell me what you’re recruiting me for? Seriously?”

  The rear admiral tipped her head. “It’s need-to-know,” she said. “If you don’t sign up, you don’t need to know.”

  “Then I guess I don’t need to know.” Veta looked away. “I’m not the trusting kind—especially when I’ve seen the way you treat your own people.”

  Osman’s voice grew genuinely indignant. “There’s nothing wrong with the way I treat my people.”

  “No?” Veta asked. “Then why did I just help them haul a Havok across five kilometers of jungle when you could have dropped one out of the Owl?”

  “Placement is more precise with ground—”

  “You were waiting for us at the target,” Veta interrupted.

  “But we couldn’t be sure we’d make it until we actually got there,” Osman said. “The Spartans were in a better position to deliver, and since we had to extract them anyway—”

  “You’d have an insurance policy if they didn’t make it out,” Veta said. “With that Havok along, there was no way any Spartan would let the ancilla fall into Arlo Casille’s hands.”

  Across the cabin from them, Veta saw Ash and Olivia’s helmets turn toward each other. Mark just continued to stare in Osman’s direction. If Osman noticed their reaction, she betrayed no sign of it. She merely gave Veta a sly grin, then locked eyes with her.

  “Tell me I was wrong about that.”

  Veta couldn’t, of course. “I’m not so sure ONI is any better than Casille.”

  “You will be when you come aboard,” she said. “You may find this hard to believe, Inspector, but ONI just might be the best thing the galaxy has going for it right now.”

  “I hope not,” Veta said.

  She turned her gaze across the dark cabin toward the Gammas. When she thought of their ages . . . of what had been taken from them and done to them, of the Smoothers they had to inject to stay mentally balanced . . . when she thought of all that, she was more interested in shooting this woman than working for her.