by Troy Denning
“I am,” Olivia replied. “The Turaco is under my control. . . . At least, I think it is.”
“Good,” Veta said. “Be ready to drop the boarding ramp and provide cover fire.”
“Affirmative.”
Mark and Ash were moving fast. They would probably reach the wounded Dark Moon operatives about the same time the Keepers reached the Turaco. After that, making it aboard would simply be a matter of combat skill against superior numbers—and while Veta was having a hard time seeing how her side was going to come out ahead, she had learned months ago never to bet against Spartans.
She set her battle rifle’s sight on the brow of a charging Jiralhanae—then gasped in surprise as the craggy face erupted in a red cone.
A second Jiralhanae suffered the same fate an instant later; then Keepers began dropping faster than Veta could count, landing on their bellies in thrashing heaps or simply collapsing beneath sprays of brain and bone. By the time she managed to redirect her fire and take out another Keeper, the charge had broken. Most of the Kig-Yar and humans were scattering in a panic, ducking their heads and fleeing sidelong as fast as they could run. The Jiralhanae reacted more wisely, diving for cover behind their wounded fellows and pouring blind fire back toward the burning Owl.
It took Veta a moment to find the remaining Keepers’ target—a trio of Spartans in full armor, charging out of the smoke and pouring small-arms fire into the Keeper rear. Fred-104 was leading the way in his blue-tinted CENTURION-prototype Mjolnir, his assault rifle tight to his shoulder and the muzzle drifting left to right as he picked off targets.
A dozen paces to Fred’s right, Kelly-087 was maintaining pace in her gray EVA Mjolnir, her bubble-visored helmet swinging back and forth as she fired 40mm grenades from the launcher mounted beneath the barrel of her assault rifle. Linda was breaking toward the Stolen Faith, armored in her brown ARGUS-prototype Mjolnir and carrying only an M6G pistol. Attached to the equipment mount on her thigh was a silver pod about the size of her goggle-eyed helmet. The pod was not part of her normal load-out, so it probably contained the tritium booster cylinders need to activate the Havoks—which Veta hoped were still aboard the starsloop. At least, no one had told her they had been moved.
“Sorry we’re late,” Fred said over TEAMCOM. “Mechanical difficulties.”
His helmet tipped slightly, as though he were saying something to his new AI, Damon, and the Owl’s self-destruct charge detonated with a gut-thumping boom. Chunks of hull and wing rose into the air, tumbling and trailing flame, and the handful of Keepers still on their feet threw themselves to the ground and covered their heads.
Linda reached the Stolen Faith and raced up the cargo ramp unopposed, then vanished into the hold.
Closer to the Turaco, Veta glimpsed three Jiralhanae in the blue-and-gold power armor of elite Keeper warriors. The trio were kneeling behind a pile of bodies, clustered around a mostly unarmored companion with a wedge-shaped face and a long gray beard. Despite his lack of formal Jiralhanae shock-plated armor, Graybeard seemed to be giving orders, peering over the body pile and gesturing in Fred’s direction.
Veta swung her battle rifle toward the cluster and opened fire. She was aiming for Graybeard, but her angle was poor, and her burst bounced off the shock plates of one of his bodyguards.
The bodyguard reacted instantly, spinning around in a flash of blue and gold, putting himself between Graybeard and the source of the attack, bringing his spiker to bear. Veta dived away, squeezing off a wild burst as she flew, and heard hot metal pinging off the hard light behind her.
The burst went wide, but it drew Blue Team’s attention to the cluster of Jiralhanae. Fred sprayed automatic fire and Kelly launched a grenade, and Veta rolled up to find her attacker lying facedown. He had a grenade crater in his back, and there was a pool of blood spreading across the hard light around him.
The remaining Jiralhanae were ducking under the Turaco and racing forward. Graybeard was sandwiched between his two remaining companions. A tall warrior with an older face was in the lead, and a young warrior with wild amber eyes was bringing up the rear. Wild Eyes was twisting around as he ran, pouring spikes behind him in an attempt to prevent Kelly from putting another grenade into their midst. Tall and Graybeard were firing on Mark and Ash, forcing them to evade and fall back. Whether it was intentional or not, they were making it impossible for the two Gammas to reach the wounded Dark Moon survivors whom Veta wanted captured.
Lacking the firepower to bring all three down quickly, Veta flipped her selector switch to full automatic and emptied her clip at Wild Eyes. She was hoping to get lucky and take Graybeard out with a ricochet, but the rounds crackled off Wild Eyes’ armor plating and bounced away harmlessly.
Still, Wild Eyes reacted in surprise, looking forward for a couple of steps, and that was all the chance Kelly needed. She took his armor’s resiliency the rest of the way down with a burst of her own, then sent a 40mm grenade flying into the Jiralhanae’s backplate.
The detonation hurled him forward into Graybeard, who lurched a half dozen steps forward before losing his balance and going down. Veta ejected her empty magazine and saw him pointing a spike rifle in her direction. She rolled away, glimpsed a pair of spikes flying past behind her, and reached for her thigh pocket.
To her left, Tall continued to charge forward, barely slowed by the small-arms fire bouncing off his shock plates. When he reached the wounded Dark Moon operatives, the man with the shredded leg—the only one who hadn’t been shot in both arms by Mark and Ash earlier—opened fire on him. Tall stomped on the man’s head, then surprised Veta by scooping up the two survivors and turning to flee combat.
Graybeard was close on his heels, having scrambled to his feet while Veta grabbed a fresh magazine. She pushed it into the battle rifle’s receiving slot, then rose to a knee and brought the muzzle up for a head shot. The Jiralhanae was looking at her as he ran, his narrow eyes burning and his lip drawn back in a tusk-baring snarl. He had a wedge-shaped face with heavy bones and thick tusks, and Veta was shocked to realize she recognized him.
She had shot him before—half a year ago, during the trouble on Gao, on a jungle-covered hillside outside the village of Wendosa. Veta hadn’t known he was the dokab Castor until some time later, when she saw his image during a classified ONI threat briefing.
So here was a chance to fix her mistake and take out the son of a bitch right now.
She held Castor’s gaze for an extra second, giving herself time to snug the rifle butt against her shoulder, and even when she saw his spike rifle coming up in her direction, she let her breath out and did not rush the shot.
Fred ducked under the Turaco and saw Veta Lopis kneeling in the open, twenty meters ahead, her weapon pointing toward a pair of fleeing Jiralhanae. He swung his assault rifle around and saw why she was holding her fire. The armored Brute in the lead was carrying two human prisoners and laying fire on Mark and Ash. The second Brute was unarmored, but only half a step behind the first, and he was staring back at Lopis, raising a spiker in her direction.
Unable to take a kill shot without risking a through-and-through that would hit the prisoners, Fred did the next best thing: he put a round through the Brute’s spiker hand. The weapon spun away in a spray of blood; then Lopis fired.
The Jiralhanae was already ducking away from Fred’s attack, and her round passed high. The Brute dodged in front of his power-armored companion, and Lopis’s next two shots were deflected by shock plates. Then the two Jiralhanae were surrounded by a couple of dozen fellow Keepers who were now rushing back to protect them, and the enemy fire began to build.
Kelly ducked under the Turaco and started to launch grenades in their direction. Then Olivia entered the fray, lowering the boarding ramp and opening fire with a S99 Sniper Rifle that she had probably found in an onboard weapons locker. The Keepers lost half their number in the space of a few breaths and reluctantly began to fall back once more.
Still, it was clear to Fred that the en
emy was far from defeated—and the shock of Blue Team’s initial assault had clearly worn off. He checked his TACMAP and saw that Keeper survivors were starting to regroup on both flanks, and that reinforcements were headed in from all around the landing site’s perimeter.
Fred activated TEAMCOM. “Olivia, can you fly that thing?”
“Affirmative,” she replied. “The Dark Moon AI seems to be disabled. Or maybe she’s just finally cooperating. But I have control—”
“That’s all we need. Fire up. Ferrets, get boarded. Kelly and I have the perimeter.” Fred signaled Kelly to cover the Turaco’s tail arc, then turned to take the nose arc. “Linda, how are you coming with those cylinder replacements?”
“Six Brightboys ready,” Linda reported, citing the nickname for the Havok nuclear devices. Clearly, she had encountered no opposition boarding the Stolen Faith—at least none that would slow down a Spartan-II—and now she was busy fitting the weapons with functional tritium booster cylinders. “Three to go.”
“Six is enough,” Fred said. “Set tamper triggers with a five-minute tango and get back here.”
Fred changed his ammunition magazine and continued to fire into the Keeper cluster that had emerged to meet the two Jiralhanae. In his experience, when a bunch of irregulars risked their lives to save one individual, that individual was usually their commander. Keeping him under fire would disrupt their efforts to regroup and counterattack.
“Fred, five minutes isn’t enough!” Lopis said over TEAMCOM. She remained on a knee, looking back toward the detention center entrance. “There are captives inside. A lot of them—probably hostages the Keepers are holding for ransom.”
“Hostages?” Fred glanced at Mark and Ash. They were already halfway to the Turaco, dragging a pair of corpses whose gray, sunken faces seemed to belong to Catalin and Yuso Tuwa. He assumed the body lying behind Lopis was Kerbasi’s. “What do they have to do with the Tuwas?”
“Probably nothing,” Veta admitted. “But when those Brightboys detonate . . .”
Lopis let her sentence trail off, and Fred groaned. His orders didn’t include any mention of rescuing stray hostages, and there was no provision for it—not with the Owl scattered across the spaceport in a hundred pieces.
After a second, Fred asked, “How many?”
“A dozen, at least.” Lopis rose and turned toward the detention center. “I’ll need ten minutes—”
“You’ll need an hour,” Ash interrupted. “Probably more. Don’t forget the temporal divergence.”
“What are you talking about?” Fred asked.
“Like at Onyx,” Ash explained. “Time moves slower inside the detention center than it does out here.” He and Mark were already dragging the Tuwa corpses up the Turaco’s boarding ramp. “Something to do with the base’s artificial gravity generator, or maybe the Forerunner vacuum energy extractor. Maybe—”
“Doesn’t matter,” Fred said.
He checked his TACMAP again and saw that the Keepers were massing on the provisioning apron, using the cover of their space fleet to organize an assault. From the look of things, the attack ratio would be about two hundred to one—and not even Spartans could hold for long against those kind of odds.
“We don’t have an hour.” Fred fixed his gaze on Lopis. He knew she would see only the reflective surface of his golden faceplate, but the effect should still be commanding. “Load up, Inspector.”
“What about the hostages?”
“Not part of the mission,” Fred said. “We can’t help them.”
Lopis glared into his faceplate, refusing to budge, trying to intimidate him. She was tough that way, afraid of nothing and—when she thought she was in the right—as stubborn as a drunken general. Fred respected that kind of edge, as long as it didn’t jeopardize the operation.
After a moment, Fred asked over TEAMCOM, “Linda, what’s taking so long with those Brightboys?”
Lopis shot him a dark look. “I thought we were the good guys, Fred,” she said. “You told me that on Gao.”
“We are the good guys,” Fred said. “It doesn’t mean we can save everyone.”
“On my way, Lieutenant,” Linda said. “Tango five. Covering fire appreciated.”
“Affirmative,” Kelly said. She rolled under the Turaco’s tail and shifted her firing arc toward the Stolen Faith. “Come ahead.”
Fred continued to watch Lopis for a heartbeat, then said, “You’re putting your team at risk, Inspector.” He changed to a fresh magazine and turned to cover as Linda raced down the Stolen Faith’s boarding ramp. “We need to go now, Lopis—that’s an order.”
CHAPTER 16
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* * *
2045.053 hours, December 13, 2553 (human military calendar)
ONI Research and Development Station Argent Moon
Deep Space, Crow’s Eye Nebula
The Argent Moon’s chief science officer and his two companions lay together in a bunk designed for one, so exhausted by their earlier exertions that they had fallen asleep in a tangle of bare limbs and rumpled sheets. Their uniforms lay in a heap on the floor, just touching a puddle of green liquid that had spilled from a toppled glass. A pair of intoxicant bottles sat empty atop a desk in the corner of the cramped cabin. The only rank insignia visible was an ensign’s bar on the collar of a laboratory work tunic, but it seemed unlikely that the other companion was enlisted. Even Bartalan Craddog was not foolish enough to violate Article 23, Section 12 of the UNSC Military Code of Conduct a mere day after his previous violations had been used to compromise him.
Intrepid Eye knew humans needed quality sleep to remain efficient, and she regretted the necessity of disturbing Craddog this early in his rest cycle. But now that she had secured access to the UNSC’s supraluminal communications network, she was monitoring all ONI traffic, and she had intercepted a disturbing report. Salvation Base on Rijaal Suluhu—the moon Taram to humans—had been obliterated by a cluster of thermonuclear explosions. Preliminary assessments indicated that the devastation of the Keeper facility was complete, but that was of little concern to Intrepid Eye.
Salvation Base had been built inside the Suluhu Contemplarium, a sequestered cloister that had been once been operated by the Forerunner Juridicals. The species’ sixty-seventh oldest institution at the time of their demise, the Contemplarium had received nonviolent miscreants, who would be sequestered inside a cell and encouraged to meditate on the joy of life’s interaction with the cosmos—a concept known to the Forerunners as “Living Time.” Because time passed more slowly inside the cells than in the galaxy at large, the residents had as long as they needed to bring their spirits into harmony, and when they returned to society, they were invariably welcomed as highly-valued members. Toward the end of the ecumene, it had even become fashionable for citizens of the highest character to request a term in the Contemplarium to rebalance themselves after a life-altering event, and its loss would be a tragedy barely two magnitudes less than the destruction of a Halo ring itself.
In fact, Intrepid Eye had intended to utilize it in her own work—which was why she had revealed it to Castor four months earlier. At the time, she had been unable to tell her ONI captors about the installation without also revealing her own autonomy, so she had created a special aspect to contact Castor. By encouraging him to use the Contemplarium as a pirate base, she had believed that the UNSC would eventually trace the Keeper operations and discover the facility on their own. After that, it would have been a simple matter to track any humans who visited the Contemplarium and identify those who achieved the spiritual elevation required to assume the Mantle of Responsibility.
But that would no longer be possible, due to the destruction wrought by Veta Lopis and her companions. They had been part of the team that hunted her down and captured her on Gao, and it had been Lopis who had seen through Intrepid Eye’s attempt to escape in a data crystal disguised as a UNSC AI. Now, they had arrived at the Suluhu Contemplarium earlier than expected and caught the Dark
Moon operations squad in the act of planting the Tuwa corpses in the Keeper detention center.
The destruction of a single operations squad was no great loss to Intrepid Eye, of course. The limited aspects that she had sneaked off the Argent Moon over the last six months had established a vast network of resources that was spread across most of the human-controlled galaxy. Through her aspects, Intrepid Eye controlled propaganda outlets, private security contractors, law practices, and even political consulting firms that operated on dozens of worlds, and she was already using them to shape humanity into a species worthy of the Mantle of Responsibility. So, the loss of four agents and a small military spacecraft was barely noticeable.
And yet, the incident was proving dangerous in other ways. Already the Ferret team had uncovered the squad’s connection to Dark Moon Enterprises. ONI would soon realize that the Keepers of the One Freedom had been framed for the murder of Admiral Tuwa and her family. Finding the true killers would become an obsession for the right hand of ONI Commander-in-Chief Margaret Parangosky, the unrelenting Director of the Beta-5 Division of Section Three Operations Serin Osman—and that meant the possibility of a catastrophic security breach for Intrepid Eye’s vast network of operations. Clearly, she had to move quickly, or ONI would trace the attack on the Tuwas straight back to her cell aboard the Argent Moon.
Intrepid Eye raised the cabin’s illumination level to its maximum brightness, then waited 2,012 system ticks before the trio finally began to moan and shield their eyes.
“Wha?” asked one of the companions. “That hurts.”
“No lights,” the other companion said. “You want lights, go home.”
Craddog pulled a pillow over his eyes and lapsed back into a torpor. He had placed his datapad someplace where the lens was obscured and the microphone muffled, so Intrepid Eye was observing the scene from Ensign Wallace’s datapad, which had been left on the arm of the cabin’s sole reading chair.
