by Troy Denning
“The Silent Joe won’t arrive for another five hours,” Veta said. “Which means we can’t expect Blue Team support until 2015—at the earliest.”
“So?” Mark asked.
“So that’s a long time to hold out against overwhelming odds,” Veta said. Assuming the Tuwas were actually on Taram, Veta had no doubts about recovering them—her Gammas were just that good. But getting everyone off the moon alive was another matter. “We’re going to need to delay, evade, or escape. Maybe all three—and that takes planning.”
“Don’t forget divert,” Mark added. “If we can make the Keepers think they’re already under attack, that will buy us some time.”
“What it’ll buy us is mission failure,” Olivia said. “We can’t spend five hours blowing things up. We’d never last that long—not in civvies.”
“Come on, Mark,” Ash said. “You know that.”
Mark sighed. “Yeah, I guess so,” he said. “It’s just that I miss the armor, you know?”
“Who doesn’t?” Olivia said. “But remember what Chief Mendez always said—”
“Armor’s no substitute for brains,” Mark finished. “Yeah, I remember.”
“Smart guy, that Mendez.” Veta thought for a moment, assessing their options, then said, “Okay, our first job is to locate the Tuwas—and it would be good to do that before the Keepers realize we’ve escaped.”
“Over there,” Mark said, pointing to the right. “But we’ll have to be careful. There’ll be guards.”
At first, Veta thought Mark was indicating the Turaco, but then she saw that he was pointing past the vessel’s nose, at the artificial grottoes in the cliff face. All of the openings were narrow and arciform, but they varied in height from around two meters to as much as four, and many were tilted on their axis in a pattern that seemed distinctly repetitive. She could see nothing but darkness beyond the openings—certainly no reason to believe that they would find either the Tuwas or guards inside any of them.
“Why there?” Veta asked.
“Because if the Tuwas are here, they’re probably being held in a detention center,” Mark said. “And prisoner transports berth near the detention center.”
Veta nodded. “Makes sense.” There was no need to ask what Mark meant by prisoner transport—the chieftain had made it pretty clear that he considered Veta and her team captives. “Good thinking.”
“Second that,” Olivia said. “You can be pretty smart when you’re not trying to start a firefight.”
“Firefights take brains too.”
“All the same, let’s keep a low profile until Blue Team arrives.” Veta took a moment to look around and make sure there were no threats developing on their perimeter, then said, “Five hours, guys. I need some ideas.”
The Ferrets rattled off a dozen good suggestions, and two minutes later they had a solid plan. Veta wasn’t sure it would work, but there was a chance—and the one thing she knew about her Gammas was that when they were given a chance, they put it to good use.
“Okay, reactivate TEAMCOM,” Veta said.
The reception dot in her ear popped live, and she heard a trio of click patterns confirming the rest of the team’s comm units went active as well. The Gammas removed the various rings, studs, and bolts still decorating their faces and passed them to Ash, along with Olivia’s knife and one of the comm headsets Veta had recovered from the Keeper corpses. She gave the second headset to Olivia and donned the last one herself. The earpiece covered the same ear containing her reception dot, so at times she would be listening to two comm nets at once. It wouldn’t be a problem. Like most good detectives, she had developed a knack for eavesdropping on several conversations at once.
Veta exchanged the M6 pistol she had recovered from Shag for the mauler that Mark had taken off the chieftain, then asked, “Everybody clear on their assignments?”
The three Gammas confirmed in unison.
“Then let’s do this,” she said. “And be careful. I don’t want anyone taking unnecessary—”
“Mom,” they said nearly in unison.
Ash opened a small cut on his forearm and set off alone toward the back of the spaceport, laying a false trail they hoped would lead any searchers in the wrong direction. With a headset clipped over his ear and a spiker resting casually over his shoulder, he looked like a human Keeper on an errand, and Veta did not think he was likely to attract any undue scrutiny from a distance.
Olivia returned to the control panel next to the Stolen Faith’s boarding ramp and began to enter a string of commands that would allow her to rewrite the ship’s security routines—and seal it tight. At least in theory. During her Ferret training, Olivia had been taught everything ONI knew about hacking Covenant computers—a necessary precaution, since the Ferrets’ role as undercover operatives would often make it dangerous to carry a team AI around. But this would be the first time she had tested her skills in the field, and there was no telling what kind of modifications a Kig-Yar crew might have made to a Sangheili starsloop.
Mark tucked his knife and pistol into his belt at the small of his back. He crossed his wrists as though they were still bound, then set off toward the cliff on a vector that would take them close to the Turaco.
Veta pointed the mauler at his back and followed a few steps behind, as though she were escorting him to the detention center. She had her doubts about whether they would be able to bluff their way past the entry guards, but it was worth a try.
As they passed behind the Turaco, the steady tick of a cooling hull grew audible, and Veta could feel heat radiating off the thrust nozzles.
“Recent arrival,” she noted. “The detention center intake could be crowded.”
“Which means the guards will be busy with someone else,” Mark said over his shoulder. “That’s always good.”
“But having to drop extra targets isn’t,” Veta said. “We need to do this quietly, remember?”
“No worries,” Mark said. “It’ll be quiet. A Turaco only carries eight people.”
As soon as they were past the Turaco, Mark began to angle toward an opening to their left. Veta saw nothing special to suggest it was the entrance to the detention center. It was about three meters high, and, like all of the grottoes ringing the spaceport, it had the shape of a narrow arch. There was no hint of light spilling into the interior, as though its mouth were covered by a dark curtain—or an opaque barrier field.
Veta was about to ask about the direction change when she noticed that Mark’s head was tipped slightly forward. She looked down and realized he was tracking the occupants of the Turaco, following a barely perceptible trail that seemed little more than a dark ripple a few centimeters beneath the spaceport’s green pavement. She glanced behind her and saw that their own footsteps were creating a similar effect, leaving pale ripples of shadow wherever they trod.
“Good eye, Mark,” she said. “Have you run across this kind of surface before?”
“Not this stuff exactly,” Mark said. “But hard light is pretty versatile. The Forerunners used it in a lot of different ways.”
“Forerunners?” Veta’s stomach sank—the last time she had set foot in a Forerunner ruin, she had become involved in three-way battle for possession of an ancient AI and ended up having to flee her homeworld. “Please don’t tell me this was a Forerunner base.”
“Maybe not a base,” Ash said over TEAMCOM. “But it was a Forerunner something. The Keepers don’t have hard light technology—and there’s no way they built their own vacuum energy extractor.”
“They have an extractor?” Veta did not know quantum theory well enough to understand the fundamental nature of vacuum energy—it had something to do with virtual particles blinking in and out of existence—but she did know that vacuum energy permeated the entire universe, and that the Forerunners had harnessed it to create a nearly infinite power source. “Are you sure?”
“Sure enough,” Mark said. “It takes a lot of artificial gravity to hold an atmosphere over
an area this size, and I don’t see any other power sources big enough for the job. Do you?”
“No.” Veta was not about to press the point. Mark and the rest of her Gammas had fought inside three Forerunner installations that she knew of, so they were certainly the experts on the team. “How much will this complicate our mission?”
Mark shrugged. “Not enough to stop us.”
They were only a dozen paces from the mouth of the grotto, so Veta fell silent and tried to convince herself that Mark’s nonchalance was warranted. After all, the Keepers still worshipped Forerunners as their deities, and the Forerunners had once inhabited the Shaps system. Finding Keepers operating from a Forerunner ruin on Taram was probably no more surprising than finding a band of human pirates operating from the ruins of one of Saturn’s lost moon colonies.
The air grew humid and began to smell of algae, and the sound of lapping water rose behind her. Veta glanced back to discover that the unmarked Turaco and the Stolen Faith now stood in a vast blue-green lake. Waves were breaking around the vessels’ struts and splashing up on their bellies, but the craft appeared steady and in no danger of sinking. Across the way, on the provisioning apron, the Keepers’ fleet of light attack vessels was barely visible, a distant flock of cockpit canopies and weapons turrets sitting just above the wave crests.
But the surface beneath Veta’s feet seemed as solid as ever. She dropped her gaze and found herself standing on water, perhaps half a meter above a pebbly lake bottom. Her boots began to darken with dampness, and her socks began to feel wet.
Mark was already stepping into the grotto, so there was no time to remark on the lake’s sudden appearance. But Veta’s ONI training had included a survey of human encounters with Forerunner technology, and she knew their extradimensional engineering capabilities could make reality seem all too fluid.
Mark vanished into the darkness as though he had passed through a curtain, and Veta felt her gut clench. The ONI course had described unfathomable perils—stasis pods that suspended occupants in time, slipspace bubbles that concealed whole worlds inside melon-size spheres—so she had good reason to be nervous.
“Entering now,” Veta said over TEAMCOM. “The portal is covered by some sort of blackout field, so we may lose contact.”
A pair of acknowledging tongue clicks sounded over her ear dot—but only two. She tightened her grip on the mauler and followed Mark through the blackout field into a large vestibule with walls of glassy yellow stone. Illuminated by a bright amber light with no clear source, the chamber had high, graceful lines and sharp angles that hinted of inconceivable wonders around every corner, and as she continued to look around, she began to experience a growing sense of calmness and belonging.
Mark stood to her left, one hand tucked behind his back to grasp the hilt of the combat knife tucked into his belt. Directly ahead, a utilitarian reception counter stood between two narrow staircases that spiraled down from opposite directions. Behind the counter, a set of metal weapons lockers stood in the mouth of a high, triangular corridor leading deeper into the grotto.
There were no guards in sight. In fact, there was no sign of anyone at all.
Mark signaled Veta to clear the staircase on the right, then drew his combat knife and began to creep up the one on the left. As usual, he moved with the swiftness and silence of a ghost. Veta ascended along the inner curve of her staircase, moving more slowly but just as quietly. It seemed strange for a Forerunner installation to utilize stairs rather than an antigravity lift, but there was an aura of tranquility about the place that made her suspect it had not been built for pragmatic purposes, that it had been some kind spiritual retreat. And with a five-meter ceiling and a rise of forty centimeters between each step, the staircase was certainly Forerunner scale.
Veta had ascended a dozen steps when Mark’s whisper sounded in her ear. “Clear to the next floor.”
Veta leaned around the curve of the wall and saw nothing but empty stairs ascending past an archway opening onto the next level. She sprang up the last few steps as quietly as she could, then dropped to her belly and peered down a long, curving corridor. The right side was lined by a row of shimmering energy barriers, each covering the entrance to what Veta assumed to be a detention cell. On the wall next to each barrier hung a power conduit and generator pod. She saw no sign of guards or the Turaco crew.
“Clear on this side too.” Veta began to crawl back down the stairs and felt dampness beneath her palm. She ran her hand over the step below and found more. “But someone came this way recently.”
“What do you have?”
Veta hesitated. “Did you see the lake?”
“Hard to miss,” Mark said. “My feet are wet.”
“So were somebody else’s,” Veta whispered. “Most likely the Turaco crew’s, unless the guards stepped out to meet them.”
“Any sign of the guards?”
“Unclear,” Veta said. “All I have is damp stone.”
“Understood.” Mark paused, then said, “This doesn’t make sense. There should always be a guard at the intake counter.”
“You’d think.” Veta returned to her feet and began to descend back down to the reception vestibule. The last thing she wanted to do was get trapped upstairs by a returning guard. “We’d better locate them before we go on.”
“Affirmative,” Mark said.
Veta listened for an acknowledging click from Ash or Olivia but heard none—which suggested the energy field across the entrance was blocking their TEAMCOM transmissions.
Just another joy of operating within a Forerunner installation.
As Veta descended into the vestibule, a liquid murmur sounded beyond the entrance, and she glanced outside to see that the lake had quieted considerably. The waves that had been lapping against the cliff face a few minutes earlier had calmed to mere ripples. The water beneath the unmarked Turaco was now so still it reflected the vessel’s belly, and as she gazed out on it, she began to feel her mind expanding out across it, stretching toward the infinite.
Veta drew her attention back to the lake, focused on her team.
Olivia and Ash were nowhere in sight. Ash had probably passed from view already, but Olivia should have been standing beneath the Turaco by now. The new plan called for her to hack its security systems and take control of the craft, then hold possession until the Tuwas were recovered and the rest of the team joined her. Once everyone was aboard, they would move to a secure location somewhere in the Pydoryn planetary system and remain hidden until the Silent Joe arrived with Blue Team.
But Mark was right—their plans kept damn well going sideways. Veta studied the struts beneath the Turaco and the Stolen Faith, looking in vain for movement or a hint of human silhouette, then finally had to accept that Olivia could not be seen.
Veta was about to slip outside and attempt comm contact when a gentle clang sounded behind the intake counter. She spun around to find Mark standing in front of an open weapons locker, his combat knife in one hand and a buckled door in the other.
“Too loud, I know,” he whispered. “But I’m telling you, we need more firepower.”
He sheathed his knife and reached into the locker with both hands, then removed a pair of BR85 battle rifles. Both weapons were equipped with sound dampeners and Sentinel sights.
“I’m starting to agree,” Veta said. She braced a hand on the intake counter and vaulted over, nearly slipping on a patch of damp stone. “I didn’t see ’Livi out there.”
Mark’s head snapped around. “Something happened to her?”
“That’s not what I said.” Veta unloaded the mauler and set it in the bottom of the weapons locker. “But she should be at the Turaco by now, and I didn’t see her.”
Mark handed her a battle rifle. “Doesn’t mean she’s not there.”
“Mark, she’s wearing black ralex, not SPI.” Veta loaded the BR85, then began to fill her pockets with spare magazines. “If she was out there, I’d have seen her.”
“And
we’re out of communication,” Mark said.
“It’s more than that,” Veta said. “Mark, does this place make you feel kind of . . . tranquil?”
“Affirmative,” he said. “And I don’t trust it. It could put us off our guard.”
“Right,” Veta said. “I’ll try to stay nervous.”
Mark closed the weapons locker. “Good idea,” he said. “But not about ’Livi. She might be out of communication, but you’ve got to trust her—you’ve got to trust all of us.”
“I do,” Veta said. It wasn’t her team she didn’t trust—it was her own lack of experience. “But that doesn’t mean I don’t worry.”
“Would it help, Mom, if I told you to stop?”
“Not in the slightest.” Veta dropped to her haunches, then turned her head sideways and looked along the floor. A trail of dampness ran down the corridor leading out of the intake area. “You notice this water?”
Mark’s eyes widened. He motioned Veta to follow, then advanced along the corridor wall and into a nearby chamber so vast it almost seemed they had passed outside.
Overhead, an emerald dome speckled with blue stars soared higher than they could see. Below, stone terraces descended in concentric rings toward a pit so deep and bottomless it seemed to swallow light itself.
“What the hell is this place?” Veta whispered.
“Weird,” Mark said. He dropped onto the next terrace and placed his face next to the stone. “And I don’t think this is water.”
Veta turned in the direction he was looking and, ten meters to the left, saw a line of dark droplets running over the terrace edge. She joined him and saw three fan-shaped blood-spray patterns on the next level down, then finally understood why there was nobody at the intake counter.
“The guards were executed,” Veta said. She hopped down onto the terrace with the spray patterns, then peered over the edge and saw three bodies—two humans and a Kig-Yar—lying on the level below. “And since the Turaco is still out there, the shooters must still be in here.”
Mark stepped to her side and studied the carnage for a moment, his expression equal parts dismay and bafflement. Perhaps he was feeling the same odd pang of loss that Veta was—a sense that she had somehow been hurt by the murder of the three Keepers, that her own soul had been diminished by their deaths. The Forerunner grotto was an eerie place, she decided, and not one where she cared to remain any longer than necessary. She turned from the bodies and tipped her head back toward the vestibule.
