by Troy Denning
The gesture was not lost on Nyeto, who craned his neck to watch the Ferret team race past. “Who are you?” he called. “Why did you—”
The question ended in a thump as Linda brought her assault rifle down, using the pressure point at the hinge of Nyeto’s jaw to knock him unconscious. She kicked the Comet away from his hand, then Veta lost sight of them as the Ferrets spilled into the street and sprinted for the intersection with Via Notoli.
They had taken about five steps when triple-round bursts began to crack from Linda’s assault rifle. Olivia cried out, and Veta looked over to see her staggering as she struggled to regain her stride. There was a fresh bullet hole in the thigh of her dark pants, and blood pouring down both sides of her leg.
First Mark takes a bullet, now Olivia. That was half of her squad wounded. Veta was beginning to think Blue Team was trying a little too hard to make the chase look real. She slipped a hand under Olivia’s arm and pulled her along for two steps. Once Olivia’s stride evened out, she twisted around, allowing Veta to guide her while she fired the big Comet over her shoulder. Ash and Mark were both doing the same, though parked scooter trucks and tri-wheel minivans seemed to be taking most of the damage.
They reached Via Notoli a few steps later. Veta led the way around the corner, away from the Trattoria Georgi. Traffic in the intersection had deteriorated into an impassible snarl of crashed and abandoned vehicles, but the walkway cleared ahead of them as alarmed pedestrians ducked into shops or hid between parked vehicles. Despite their wounds, Mark and Olivia had no trouble keeping up. If anything, their injuries only made them faster—a result of the biological augmentations they had received during their SPARTAN-III training.
Veta studied the warehouses ahead, looking for a red awning over a pair of green doors. This part of New Tyne had been built atop a swamp, and the red awning marked a building with a trapdoor that descended to a loading dock. To make their escape look credible, the Ferrets had left a shallow-draft airboat there. But they didn’t have much time to reach it. Blue Team could hold back only a few seconds without making it obvious that they were deliberately delaying pursuit.
The red awning came into view forty paces away, far enough from the action that confused pedestrians were still clustering in front of it. Veta glanced back and saw onlookers beginning to drift onto the walkway behind her. Beyond the gawkers, almost seeming to float above their heads in Venezia’s hazy air, two large Spartan helmets were emerging from the ruins of Trattoria Georgi. There was no sign of the Kig-Yar eavesdroppers, which Veta decided to take as a good sign. Given the circumstances, it would only make sense for a pair of Keeper spies to avoid showing themselves.
Veta continued to watch as the two Spartans—Fred and Kelly—started to pursue. She knew Linda would not be joining them. Instead, the third Spartan would be busy securing Ross Nyeto for transport to an ONI interrogation facility. At least that part of the operation had gone right.
“Do not slow down!” Veta’s ears had stopped ringing enough that she could hear her own voice, so she hoped the rest of her team could too. “If we need to clear a lane, fire warning—”
Olivia’s arm came up, catching Veta across the chest so forcefully the impact almost knocked her off her feet. She caught her balance and heard a vehicle clanging to a halt in front of her, then turned to find a tri-wheel minivan screeching to a full stop across the walkway.
The side door slid open. A tri-digit hand motioned them inside, and a scaly Kig-Yar face peered out. “If you want to live,” he said, “come with us.”
CHAPTER 2
* * *
* * *
1122 hours, December 8, 2553 (military calendar)
UNSC passenger schooner Donoma
Deep Space Transitional Zone, Tisiphone System
Operation: RETRIBUTION had been set into motion four days earlier, after Veta and her Ferret team were summoned to a deep-space rendezvous with the UNSC passenger schooner Donoma. They had entered the vessel through a temporary airlock and found themselves floating in a zero-G slaughterhouse.
The Donoma’s wardroom had been breached inward by a powerful detonation, and Veta could tell from the blood spatter that the blast had hurled three occupants into the far wall. Near the top of each pattern, an ovoid dent indicated where their heads had impacted, so it seemed likely that all three victims had been dead or unconscious when the cabin decompressed and sent their pressure-bloated corpses tumbling into the void. Fortunately for Veta—who still found it awkward to work in a pressure suit—the temporary airlock had sealed the breach and allowed the Donoma to be repressurized. So even if the vessel lacked gravity, at least it had a standard atmosphere.
Veta spun toward Rear Admiral Serin Osman, the officer who had summoned her to the scene. A slender woman with short-cropped hair and high cheekbones, the admiral wore a thruster harness over blue camouflage utilities. There was no unit patch or name tag, only a single black star on each collar tip. If you didn’t know she was ONI, you weren’t paying attention.
“Did they recover the bodies?” Veta asked.
“Not yet.” Osman was the current head of the Beta-5 Division of Section Three operations, which ran the SPARTAN programs and most of ONI’s other black ops and helped oversee an array of reverse-engineering programs that used alien technology to create new weapons and devices for the UNSC. She was among the most powerful of ONI’s division heads, and—according to rumor—being groomed to take over as the agency’s commander-in-chief when Margaret Parangosky finally retired. “We have a squadron of Storks running a search cone, but you know how it is—dead bodies are small, deep space is big. And the commanding investigator tells me the assault happened seven days ago. I don’t expect any recoveries.”
“Let’s hope they prove you wrong,” Veta said. She really wanted to see the bodies—more often than not, the bodies told the story. “How long has the IRI team been aboard?”
“Two days,” Osman said. Piracy had grown so common in the Outer Colonies that the UNSC had an entire Incident Response and Investigation branch dedicated to identifying and locating perpetrators. “But they haven’t removed anything from the scene. I wanted you to have a look first.”
“Because IRI investigators aren’t good enough?”
“Because there’s a lot at stake,” Osman said. “And I need answers fast.”
“I’m flattered, but—”
“Lopis, you were Gao’s best homicide investigator. Just give me something we can use to identify the killers. I’ll take care of the rest.”
Mark used a maneuvering thruster to move to Osman’s side. “Isn’t that what we’ve been training for, Admiral?” Like Ash and Olivia, he wore plain gray utilities, and his adolescent face showed no sign of the piercings and jewelry that would adorn it in the coming days. “To identify problems—and take care of them?”
“Mark, when Admiral Osman has a job for us, she’ll say so,” Veta said. Unlike her subordinates, she was in no hurry to interrupt their Ferret training and start working in the field. Deep-penetration black ops had a way of going sideways, and so far her young Spartan-IIIs were still far better soldiers than they were secret agents. “For now, let’s concentrate on giving the admiral what she’s asked for.”
Mark frowned but said, “Yes, ma’am. Just let me know what my assignment is.”
“How about you check the Donoma’s weapons inventory, both ship-to-ship and personal,” Veta said. The task was more than a way to keep Mark busy. As her team’s security specialist, he was the one most qualified to evaluate what combat tactics the crew might have employed in an attempt to fend off the boarders. “That should give us some idea of how the fight progressed—and how quickly.”
“Very well, ma’am.”
Mark turned to Osman and saluted. He nodded to Veta before departing, but skipped the salute. Although Veta was an ONI operative, that did not make her a military officer—which suited her just fine. As a Gao native, she still had a few anti-centralization fe
elings, and swearing an oath of loyalty to the UNSC might be more than she was ready for.
Veta drifted to the center of the wardroom and spun in a slow circle, assessing the scene. Judging by the swab smears on the walls and the evidence tags affixed to the floor, the IRI investigators had done a good job of collecting trace evidence. Eventually, those efforts might reveal something that pointed to the attackers’ identity. But scientific analysis took time, and if Osman had been willing to wait, she would not have jerked Veta’s team out of its final weeks of Ferret training to look at a crime scene.
“Anything, Lopis?” Osman asked.
“Yeah, a little.” Veta pointed at the jagged edges of the breach, which had been curled inward by the blast and were coated with dried blood. “There were a lot of people sucked out through that breach. More than died here in the wardroom.”
Veta turned away from the damaged hull and carefully used her thruster harness to cross the wardroom. It had been only five and a half months since she had experienced weightlessness for the first time, and while the sensation had grown familiar, she still preferred walking and lamented the absence of the Donoma’s artificial gravity field.
A moment later, she had successfully maneuvered herself into position next to the doorway. Rather than a hatch, the wardroom was serviced by an automatic door, which had jammed ten centimeters out of its storage pocket. She grabbed the leading edge and pulled herself down to examine a blood smear on the floor.
Struggling to hold herself steady while she worked, Veta noted that the smear seemed to be streaking toward the breach in the hull. She ran her fingers inside the door’s receiver slot and found a tuft of bristly brown hair stuck inside the sealing gasket. When she raised the hair to her nose, it smelled musky and acrid.
Veta passed the tuft to Osman, who was following at a polite distance. “You recognize that smell?”
“Jiralhanae,” Osman said. “That’s not a surprise.”
“Why not?”
“You’ll see,” Osman said. “So, what do you think?”
“I think a Jiralhanae corpse was jamming the door open.” Veta ran her fingers along the inside of the receiving slot again, this time about midway up its height, and came away with crusted blood. “When the boarding party withdrew and left in their vessel, the wardroom decompressed a second time. A lot of bodies from deeper in Donoma were drawn out past the Jiralhanae. Eventually, he was dislodged . . . and got sucked out of the breach himself.”
Osman nodded. “That makes sense,” she said. “The Banished don’t usually stick around to make a target airtight after they’re done.”
“The Banished?” Veta asked, not hiding her surprise. The Banished were a fast-growing, tech-savvy horde of marauders. Since the closing days of the war, they’d been causing trouble for humans and the Covenant empire by pillaging ships, installations, and even entire worlds in a relentless pursuit of cutting-edge weapons technology. “You think they did this?”
“So you don’t?” Osman asked. She was watching Veta closely, clearly trying to gauge her reaction. “Why not?”
“I don’t think anything yet,” Veta said. “I haven’t seen enough evidence—unless you’re holding something back?”
Osman shook her head. “At this stage, the Banished are just an assumption,” she said. “Forget I mentioned them. I need you to draw your own conclusions.”
“But hold on,” Olivia said. She hit her thrusters and drifted close. “You think it was the Banished. Did some lamebrain put equipment on the Donoma we should know about?”
Osman scowled. “What part of ‘forget I mentioned them’ wasn’t clear, Petty Officer?”
Olivia’s expression grew contrite. “Sorry, Admiral,” she said. “I didn’t realize the lamebrain was you.”
“It wasn’t,” Osman said. “Shouldn’t you be pissing off the ship’s AI or something?”
“Yes, ma’am. I’ll get right on that.”
Olivia saluted and maneuvered toward the doorway. As the Ferret team’s information specialist, she had been developed into an elite hacker who could plunder almost any processing system. Veta pushed out of the doorway to let her float past.
“Look for infiltration routines,” Veta said, now speaking to Olivia’s boots. “And anything that explains what the Donoma was doing way out here in the transitional zone.”
“Affirmative,” Olivia called back.
Once she had disappeared around the corner, Osman sighed and asked, “What are you thinking she’ll find, Lopis?”
“I’m not sure,” Veta said. “But whoever attacked the Donoma didn’t stumble on her by accident—not at the edge of the system. They knew she would be here.”
Ash now spoke up. “That doesn’t sound like the Banished. They’re not exactly subtle . . . are they?”
Osman’s thrusters hissed as she rotated to face him. At first, Veta thought Osman would reprimand him as harshly as she had Olivia. But Ash merely gave a look of calm expectation, and the irritation on Osman’s face faded to impatience.
“Ash, you know better than that,” Osman said. “You never underestimate an enemy.”
“I don’t think I am, ma’am,” Ash said. “I’m just saying . . . the Banished aren’t inside operators.”
The corners of Osman’s mouth started to drop, and Veta decided Ash needed backup.
“Taking the subject’s usual modus operandi into consideration isn’t underestimating him, Admiral,” she said. “If the Banished haven’t used espionage tactics in the past, we need a sound reason to think they’re using them now. Are you saying their tactics have evolved?”
Osman hesitated, then said: “We don’t have any intelligence to confirm that. But look at how brutal the attack was, how fast.”
“That characterizes the attack, but it’s not evidence,” Veta said.
“We don’t have time to cross every t and dot every i,” Osman replied, fuming. “We need to identify these bastards—and we need to do it now.”
Veta did not respond immediately. Outbursts were rare for the admiral, so the fact that she had lost control even a little suggested a personal element was involved—one that was making her desperate to push Veta toward the Banished being the culprit.
Once the ire had drained from Osman’s face, Veta asked, “Admiral, is there some reason you need these attackers to be the Banished?”
Osman looked as though she were biting back a sharp reply, then let out a long breath and spoke more calmly. “What I need is a quick answer,” she said. “I have a prowler watching a Banished flotilla in the Nereus system.”
“Ah—and you think they might be the Donoma’s attackers,” Veta surmised. Nereus was the next star Earthward, an uninhabited system of ice balls and dust-smothered rocks that would be a perfect spider hole for a pirate horde. “How long do we have?”
“Impossible to know. They’re holding in orbit at the tenth planet. The prowler captain thinks they might be waiting for a rendezvous, but we don’t have intelligence on that.”
“I don’t see the problem, Admiral,” Ash said. “Who cares whether they’re the ones who hit the Donoma? It’s still a Banished flotilla. Just tell Sector Command to send in a task force.”
“I can’t do that yet,” Osman said. “Not until I know whether it’s an attack mission or a rescue.”
“Rescue?” Ash fell silent for a moment, then said, “Oh.”
Veta asked, “Who needs rescuing?”
“Three passengers from the Donoma,” Osman said. “Civilians.”
Ash looked troubled. “And you spent two days waiting for us? Two days is an eternity when the target is mobile.”
“Nothing gets past you, does it?” Osman said. “But the prowler spotted the flotilla a few hours ago, and I only just received word. If your arrival hadn’t been imminent, I’d already have sent orders to launch a rescue mission.”
“Then there’s reason to believe the victims are still alive?” Veta asked. Not everyone abducted by alien marauders
became a hostage or a slave. Sometimes they became food. “Or is that more of a hope?”
“It’s more of a hope,” Osman said. “Obviously, we haven’t heard anything from the abductors, so we can’t confirm who we’re dealing with.”
Veta thought about this and realized it didn’t tell her much. It was hard to make anonymous contact with ONI, so it was possible that the abductors were just being cautious about their approach. Of course, it was also possible they had no intention of ever making contact.
“All right, Admiral,” she said. “We’ll try to provide confirmation.”
Osman bit her lip. “I wish it were that simple,” she said. “The best the IRI team will say is maybe it was the Banished, and this would be a tricky rescue operation. I’d like more than a ‘maybe’ before risking Blue Team.”
“You brought Blue Team?” Veta looked toward the interior of the Donoma. “This is getting more interesting by the minute, Admiral. These civilians must be important.”
“They are, but probably not in the way you think.” Osman sank into silence, then finally thrustered through the doorway. “Come with me. You’ll see.”
Before following, Veta turned to Ash and gestured back toward the jagged points surrounding the hull breach. “Find the IRI techs and see what they collected off those edges. Then borrow a magscope and have a look yourself.”
“Yes, ma’am,” Ash said. He was the unit’s surveillance specialist, and Veta had expanded his training with her own informal course on crime-scene investigation. “I’ll comm you when I’m done.”
Veta nodded and followed Osman into the Donoma’s starboard access corridor.
The magnalum walls were dimpled from bullet strikes for much the length of the passage, but blood spray stained only the ten meters between the wardroom door and the bridge access ramp. Judging by the location of the spatter patterns, seven defenders and ten attackers had suffered serious wounds before the boarding party reached the access ramp. Since three of the spray patterns were at the top of the walls and on the ceiling, it appeared that at least three Jiralhanae had been hit.
