by Troy Denning
“If you mean Blue Team,” Ash said, “I don’t see how we can wait. There’s a large Keeper force gathered at the Stolen Faith, and it looks like they’re waiting on orders.”
“No worries,” Olivia said. “I’ve got my eye on them.”
Ash hesitated, wondering how Olivia expected to hold the Turaco for five hours, then finally said, “Talk about pushing your luck.”
“It’ll be fine, Ash. Just make it fast this time.” Olivia paused, probably trying to bite back her irritation, then asked, “What took you so long, anyway?”
“Gee, I don’t know,” Ash retorted. “Maybe it was taking out thirteen Keepers.”
“That took you five hours?”
“No way,” Ash said. “More like fifteen minutes.”
“So what were you doing the rest of the time?”
Ash started to make a sharp reply—then recalled Olivia’s confidence in her ability to hold the Turaco until Blue Team arrived.
“ ’Livi,” he said, “tell me your chrono reading.”
“Twenty-thirty-five. Why?”
Ash checked his captured chronometer and began to understand the odd things he had observed from the grotto mouth—the Keeper vessels that seemed to disappear in a wink, the inability to see living beings moving about the lake, even the TEAMCOM blackout inside the grottos.
He rose and started to walk toward the area Mark and Lopis had used to enter the grotto complex. Every nerve inside him was screaming for him to run, but doing so was likely to attract the attention of the Keepers gathered around the Stolen Faith. If he walked, there was a chance that anyone who happened to be looking his way would assume he was one of the Keepers’ human faithful.
A chance.
“Ash?” Olivia asked. “Are you—”
“Still here.” Ash began to drift closer to the cliff face. “But that’s going to change when I’m back inside. There’s a time differential ringing the spaceport.”
“Time differential?” Olivia asked. “Like on Onyx?”
“I guess,” Ash said. “It might even be a continuum warp. With as much artificial gravity as it takes to hold an atmosphere over the entire installation, that’s a real possibility—especially since it’s Forerunner tech.”
Olivia began to sound worried. “Ash . . . maybe we should wait for Blue Team.”
“No good,” Ash said. “Time passes faster out here. Even if it only takes me five minutes to find Mark and Lopis, that could be hours for you.”
Olivia fell silent for a moment, then said, “Okay. I’ll hold position and inform Blue Team.”
“Affirmative,” Ash said. “But if things get hot—”
“I’ll be here, whenever you make it back.”
CHAPTER 12
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* * *
1514 hours, December 13, 2553 (military calendar)
Salvation Base
Moon Taram, Pydoryn Planetary System, Shaps System
The trail of dampness was beginning to evaporate, but that did not prevent Veta and Mark from realizing that the Turaco crew had preceded them up the detention center’s curving stairwell. There were plenty of other signs to alert them—pinpoint smears of drying blood, step edges rubbed clean by the scuff of a boot heel, chunks of mud not yet ground to dust.
The mud was a deep reddish-brown that did not match Taram’s yellow dust. Still an investigator at heart, Veta collected several chunks and sealed them inside a pocket. In the corners of the stairwell, she found boot prints suggesting a squad of four humans, probably one female and three good-size males. Splashes of sweat on the stair treads and handprints on the walls indicated they were moving fast and burdened so heavily they sometimes needed to brace themselves. The even spacing of their tracks suggested they were well organized and in good physical condition—traits that suggested military operatives.
Less clear was their identity. The elimination of the Keeper intake guards indicated the squad was on Taram to infiltrate the detention center, while the timing suggested it had come for the same reason the Ferrets had: to rescue Admiral Tuwa’s family.
It was the Turaco outside that Veta found most intriguing. The presence of a rare reconnaissance boat still in the testing phase suggested a link to the UNSC, which actually made sense. An angry UNSC commander could have sent a team without informing ONI, or ONI could have assigned a second team to the mission to increase the likelihood of success.
Mark’s hand came up in a fist, signaling a halt, then Veta began to hear a soft patter in the stairwell above them. The sound was so gentle it took her a moment to recognize it as human footfalls, coming fast and light.
Mark motioned down the stairs, and they retreated to the second level in silence. They hurried down the corridor, passing half a dozen cells sealed by shimmering energy barriers.
The barriers were transparent, and as they passed each cell, Veta glimpsed a single captive inside, sitting cross-legged on the floor or slumped against a wall, staring out over the vast blue-green expanse outside. There were two Sangheili and four humans, each with dirty bandages wrapped around a fingerless left hand. Despite their injuries, they all appeared to be in a state of serenity and contemplation, as though their attention was focused somewhere out beyond the lake. None displayed any reaction as Veta and Mark raced past—probably because the energy barriers sealing the cells were soundproof and transparent only from the exterior. That would certainly make sense in a detention center.
Once they were concealed by the curve of the corridor wall, the two Ferrets dropped to the floor, then crawled back up the passage until they could peek around the bend. They saw four humans—three men and a woman—descending the stairs.
At first glance, the humans appeared to be typical pirates turned Keepers, with long, unkempt hair, battered torso armor over shabby tunics, and bare arms entwined with “celestial highway” tattoos—a favorite symbol of human Keepers. But they were wearing top-of-the-line combat boots and moving with the quiet grace of special-ops soldiers, and their armament was UNSC-issue—silenced M7S submachine guns, silenced M6C/SOCOM pistols, and silenced BR85 battle rifles.
The “second team” theory was beginning to look more plausible—except that the Tuwas weren’t with them. In fact, Veta was beginning to suspect the squad’s mission had been to deliver something rather than recover it. Aside from their weapons, all they were carrying were a pair of half-empty rucksacks that didn’t look like they weighed more than a dozen kilos. And though they were careful to keep their weapons turned toward the corridor as they passed, they gave it only a precautionary glance and showed no interest in searching it for captives. Perhaps they had already checked the passage, but a crack squad that had failed in its mission would be more hesitant to leave.
Apparently, Mark had reached the same conclusion. Once the squad was past, he pointed toward the stairs, then tapped his brow to indicate he would lead the assault.
Veta was quick to shake her head. Attacking now would only delay their search for the Tuwas—and besides, it still remained possible that the squad was connected to the UNSC in a way she did not understand.
Mark scowled and made an O with his hand, then pointed in the general direction of the spaceport to indicate he was worried about Olivia. Veta understood his concern. Even outnumbered two-to-one, it would be relatively easy to eliminate the squad from behind. Olivia, on the other hand, would be outnumbered four-to-one and trapped inside the Turaco. If these guys were hostile, she would have a real fight on her hands.
Mark lifted his brows, urging Veta to make a decision before they lost their chance. She shook her head, then started down the corridor in the lead. The last thing she wanted was to leave any of her Ferrets in a bad position, but Mark had a tendency to be overprotective of his fellow Ferrets and a bit quick to kill—and that could endanger the entire team. Better to stick to the plan and trust Olivia to handle whatever was coming her way. She was, after all, a Spartan-III with enough combat experience to make sure she was in
a defensible position.
When they reached the stairwell, Mark cast one last glance after the fading footfalls, but heeded Veta’s decision and fell in at rear guard. Veta had no difficulty picking up the trail again and quickly followed it up to the third level of the detention center.
As on the level below, the cells were sealed by energy barriers with one-way transparency and occupied by single captives. But these prisoners were all human, with dark eyes and darker hair, and many were dressed in the light, loose-fitting garb favored by the people of Gao. Like the captives on the level below, they were missing all of the fingers on their left hands, but their torture had not stopped there. They appeared covered in burns and bruises, and several had swollen limbs that suggested broken bones or dislocated joints. Although their gazes were turned toward the lake, their expressions were accepting rather than serene, and they seemed to be watching the water rather than contemplating the great beyond.
Veta’s pulse began to pound. It only made sense for a lot of the prisoners to be Gao. Arlo Casille had used and ruthlessly betrayed the Keepers during his theft of the presidency, and the Keepers were taking their vengeance by preying heavily on Gao space-shipping. But Veta hadn’t expected this. Gao captives were clearly being tortured, as though their suffering would somehow punish Casille for his treachery.
“Looks like Castor carries a mean grudge,” Mark observed. “But we’ve got to let it go—at least for now. If we let those people out of their cells, we’ll never find—”
“I know what the mission is.” Veta started down the corridor again. “Let’s just move on, okay?”
They found the Tuwas five cells later—at least, Veta thought they were the Tuwas. The condition of the corpses made it hard to tell.
But there were definitely three of them, stiff with rigor mortis and dressed in blue overalls, lying close together on one side of the cell. The female was facing the lake, while the two males were facing the entrance. Their eyes were sunken and their cheeks hollow, and their complexion had gone the color of ash. Still, the hair was right—the female’s long and black, the older male’s brown and going gray at the temples, the youngest male’s cropped too short to tell. The jawlines matched the images Veta had seen, all fine but square, and their noses tended toward the long and straight. That was enough to convince Veta—maybe not with a hundred percent certainty, but close enough for the circumstances.
Veta glanced at the barrier’s control panel and found a pad with thirty-six oversize keys, all marked with blocky Jiralhanae hieroglyphs. Instead of trying to guess the access code, she traced a power conduit down the wall and pointed at the unit’s generator pod.
“We need to disable that.”
Mark was still staring at the three corpses. There were palm-size craters in their skulls where they had been struck by something like a hammer or a rifle butt, and the cloth on their limbs was striped by bloodless lacerations. Most gruesome of all, their torsos had been opened from collar to navel, and ropy nests of innards had been left to spill over their laps.
“Now, Mark,” Veta said. “I need to examine the scene.”
Her tone seemed to snap Mark back into focus. He stepped closer to the wall, then cocked his leg and sent the pod flying with a roundhouse kick. It remained connected to the power conduit by a crackling bolt of silver until it dropped to the floor and began to tumble, and then the energy barrier finally sizzled out of existence.
Veta signaled Mark to stand watch in the corridor, then entered the cell—and knew instantly that the scene had been staged. The walls were splashed with blood so fresh the droplets were still running, but the spatter patterns were all wrong. The kinds of horrible wounds the Tuwas had suffered would have left fan-shaped sprays everywhere. But the patterns Veta was seeing were narrow and straight, as though the blood had been flung onto the wall by a brush.
And the stink in the cell was just as wrong. There were no urine or bowel odors, which were to be expected at a fresh murder scene. Instead, the air was filled with a cloying smell of decay cut by an acrid tinge that suggested some kind preservative.
Veta knelt beside the husband—Kerbasi—and began a cursory examination of his corpse. His body was as rigid as a board. Where she could pull the overalls away and get a look at the skin underneath, the anterior side appeared pink with lividity. The chest had been opened with the straight, smooth stroke of a surgical incision. The sternum beneath had been split just as neatly, probably by a sonic costotome, and the heart, lungs, liver, kidneys—everything except the intestines—were missing.
Veta turned her attention to Kerbasi’s limbs. The lacerations there were jagged and variable, suggesting to her practiced eye that they had been inflicted by something like a combat knife. But the lacerations were not inflamed or bloody. Those injuries had definitely been inflicted after death.
The two craters in Kerbasi’s skull were a different story. In one, the bone had been depressed in a half-moon shape that she had seen often enough to recognize as the result of a striking rifle butt. But the other crater was more circular, with a hole in the center that was perfectly round and about half the diameter of Veta’s palm. She pushed her finger through and felt nothing. The brain had been removed.
Veta glanced over at the corpses of the son and daughter, Yuso and Catalin. They were in more or less the same condition, missing most of their internal organs and covered in postmortem injuries. It seemed likely that all three bodies had been mutilated to camouflage the theft of the organs—or at least to lay the blame on the Keepers—but that possibility raised more questions than it answered.
And Veta hated unanswered questions.
Veta cradled her battle rifle in the crook of her arm, then grabbed Kerbasi’s collar and dragged him toward the exit. She would have preferred to sling him over her shoulders in a fireman’s carry, but that was impossible with the corpse in full rigor mortis. And, anyway, she didn’t want to lose any physical evidence that would help her figure out where the Tuwas had really been killed.
She entered the corridor, where Mark was keeping watch back toward the stairs, and said, “You’re right. We should have taken out the delivery squad.”
“Delivery squad?” Mark’s gaze dropped to Kerbasi’s body, then drifted back toward the stairs. “They broke in just to kill the Tuwas inside a Keeper detention center?”
Veta shook her head. “Not exactly,” she said. “The Tuwas have been dead for a while, probably between twelve and thirty-six hours. The delivery squad just planted the bodies here.”
Mark scowled. “A frame job?”
“I’m guessing that’s part of it.”
“What’s the other part?”
“That’s what we need to find out.” Veta nodded him back into the cell. “You bring the other two bodies.”
Mark looked back toward the stairs. “Shouldn’t we be going after the delivery squad?”
“They’re not going anywhere without the Turaco,” Veta said. “And we’re going to need these bodies. They have a lot to tell us.”
CHAPTER 13
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* * *
2029 hours, December 13, 2553 (military calendar)
Mudoat Starsloop Stolen Faith, Salvation Base
Redoubt of the Faithful, Pydoryn Planetary System, Shaps System
On the deck at Castor’s feet lay an oblong Havok casing that contained a modified slipbeacon instead of a thermonuclear device. In his hands, he held a disc-shaped burst transmitter surrounded by a twenty-centimeter web antenna. Both had been found aboard the Stolen Faith in the last few minutes, and he was too smart to believe they had belonged to the Kig-Yar crew. The unthinkable had happened, and the infidels had slipped an ONI tracking device onto Salvation Base.
Castor’s anger was surpassed only by his remorse. Salvation Base had been given to him by the Oracle just four months before, when the image of a narrow Forerunner eye appeared above the communications holoplinth on the True Light’s flight deck. She had spoken in a vo
ice like water, thanking him for his efforts to save her during the battle of Gao and asking if he was still willing to serve her. Of course, Castor had not hesitated, promising to rescue her from the UNSC infidels as soon as he could gather the Faithful.
But that had not been what the Oracle wanted. Instead, she had told him where to find what she called the Contemplarium, then urged him to take it as his new base and begin a campaign of piracy to rebuild his forces. Sometimes she even gave him the routes of freighters carrying precious cargo or the itineries of yachts transporting wealthy tycoons. Due to her favor, Castor had ascended to first among the dokabs, and Salvation Base had become the largest and most important of all Keeper facilities.
And now, the carelessness of a Kig-Yar gunrunning crew had placed the Oracle’s gift in jeopardy. Had the fools not been dead already, Castor would have killed them himself—and taken his time to make certain they suffered for their mistake. Still, the fault was not theirs alone. Salvation Base was protected by many other layers of precaution, and if those protections had also failed, it was because someone on the ground had forsaken his duty. Castor turned toward the cargo ramp, where the base’s human approach-control officer was waiting with Castor’s second-in-command, a fellow Jiralhanae named Orsun.
Like Castor himself, Orsun was a seasoned warrior with many decades of battle showing in his grizzled features. But where Castor’s face was wedge-shaped and heavy-boned, with thick tusks and a long gray beard, Orsun’s was long and chiseled, with a heavily furrowed brow and slender tusks rising from a clean-shaven jawline. Castor motioned him forward, and Orsun escorted the approach control officer up the ramp and into the hold. As they crossed the grease-spotted deck, the man’s gaze drifted toward the line of Havoks resting in front of a wall alcove. The casings were open, and a pair of human technicians in white overalls and full face protection was kneeling over the last one in line, probing it with a long, thin wand.
