“You real y are al bastards, aren’t you? You know how many people died on Llanel i? One mil ion, four hundred thousand. Don’t you get it? No, Earth was never hit, was it?”

“Oh, we lost a few bil ion on Earth,” Osman said. “I think we get it just fine.”

The door shut with a clunk and BB activated the locks. There was no more hammering.

Osman looked at Mal and shrugged. “He’s just an ungrateful dick, Staff, not a security risk. He can’t tel anyone anything.”

“And if he could?”

“Then I’d do the necessary. I wouldn’t expect you to do that.”

That wasn’t spel ed out. BB studied the look on Mal’s face as he watched Osman’s vanishing back. Mal had that deepening, distracted frown that said things were crossing his mind that made him uncomfortable. If Muir had seen arms being handed over to the Sangheili, then he would have had to be silenced, and kil ing other humans was something only the older troops could recal . Mal was too young to have known anything but an alien enemy, and kil ing hostile aliens was a clear-cut thing. Funny things, humans. They real y were hard-wired for anxiety about kil ing their own kind, whatever the history books showed.

“Square blue thing,” Mal whispered, leaning close to BB’s hologram. “Go on, get your own back. Show up in his cabin and rattle your chains.”

He turned and headed down the passage to the gal ey. BB took another look around the ship and decided he had more in common with his organic col eagues than he liked to admit. They were al making themselves busy whether they needed to be or not. Devereaux and Naomi had gone back to the hangar to tinker with the Spartan’s Mjolnir armor, working out the easiest way to get Naomi into it. Vaz was sorting laundry. And Mal was cleaning the gal ey. It was al the smal stuff that fil ed their down time and had to be done, covert mission or not. It made them al look rather harmless and domestic.

And, as Parangosky was fond of saying, the most successful missions were those that were unnoticed and of little remark, where nobody needed to fire a shot.

BB hoped the squad was savoring the enforced idleness. He couldn’t see it lasting long.

REYNES, FORMER MINING COLONY: UNSC TEMPORARY LISTENING STATION.

Reynes hadn’t been a pretty place to start with, but a visit from the Covenant hadn’t done much to improve the ambience.

Mining wasn’t scenic. The endlessly fascinating CAA Factbook flashed up the planet’s dismal history in Mal’s HUD.

Aluminum, tantalum, copper. There’d been about fifty thousand workers here when the mines were operating. Now there weren’t any, unless he counted Mike Spenser, but there were stil signs of where they’d been before the Covenant had launched its attack.

“Where is he?” Devereaux asked. She kept the dropship’s drive idling and got on the radio. “Kilo-Five to Agent Spenser—the meter’s running, sir. We’re at the extraction point and you’re not.”

It took a few moments for Spenser to respond. “Just shutting the shop. Wait one.”

“You need a hand?”

“I’m packing up the transmitter. Working to the last moment, that’s me. Not that the bastards pay me overtime.”

Mal stepped down from the dropship’s bay and decided the view was worth recording for posterity. He’d seen a lot of glassed planets in the last fourteen years, but this was the weirdest landscape he could remember. The intense heat that vitrified the soil was enough to vaporize everything combustible and melt metal into slag, leaving just the characteristic ice-rink pools of glassy material. But sometimes structures survived. There was probably a sensible explanation for that, like a low-orbit bombardment, but whatever it was it had left a landscape that looked like a freeze-frame of a flooded town.

A winding derrick, the head end of a conveyor, and something that might have been a radio mast jutted from the glass lake at odd angles, silhouetted against thin gray clouds. The structures looked submerged rather than incinerated. Mal started walking toward the lake. As he got closer he could see that the skeletons of the buildings were charred to a uniformly matte dark gray, like a coating of velvet. He grabbed a few images and eventual y stopped about ten meters from the edge. Al he could hear was the wind.

The il usion of water was overpowering. He looked down at his chest plate and dragged his gloved finger through a fine layer of slightly sticky dust. It was going to clog his filters if he didn’t flush them through as soon as he got back to the ship.

Vaz walked up behind him. “How come it’s stil standing?”

“Dunno.” Mal ventured out onto the glass and walked gingerly between the debris embedded in it. “Maybe al this blew in while the glass was cooling.”

It was pretty slippery, just like sheet ice. In some places it looked translucent with the hint of things trapped beneath. For the most part, though, it was a dense, opaque layer of mottled grays speckled with black patches that reminded Mal of carbon from a candle embedded in its melted wax.

He squatted to inspect a charcoal velvet girder jutting out of the vitreous layer at a steep angle.

Vaz fol owed and stood over him. “Weird.”

“Fancy being stuck here on your own for a couple of years. Can’t do much for your mental health.”

They waited, kicking around on the glassland and listening for movement. Vaz sighted up on the horizon for a few moments and then Mal heard crunching sounds like boots on gravel. A scruffy middle-aged man emerged from nowhere as if he’d crawled out of a hole. It had to be Spenser, and he looked exactly like he’d sounded.

He was in his fifties, face deeply lined with a good crop of gray stubble, one hand thrust deep in the pocket of a thick mountaineering jacket. He dropped a couple of rucksacks by his feet. Judging by the thud they made, that was his surveil ance equipment.

“We didn’t see where you came from,” Vaz said.

“Down there.” Spenser pointed. “The mine shafts are stil mostly intact.”

“Got that one right, then,” Mal said. “You ready to go now? Destroyed everything sensitive that you can’t carry?”

“I set fire to my underpants, if that’s what you mean.” Spenser looked around with that finality of a man fixing something in his memory for the very last time. “Can’t say I’m sorry to leave this behind. Where are you dropping me off?”

“We’re going to RV with Monte Cassino to cross deck you.” Mal could see some movement in the ruins. Vaz spotted it too and lifted his rifle slowly. “We picked up a survivor on New Llanel i, so you’l have company.”

Spenser frowned at Vaz and then glanced over his shoulder to see what he was looking at. “It’s just the Kig-Yar.”

“Are they your informers?” Vaz asked. “Because if they are, they’re on their own. We can’t take the whole zoo with us.”

“No, my boys are off camp. That bunch just drops in occasional y to scavenge for tantalum.”

The Kig-Yar started breaking cover and trotting out into open ground, spiky crests bobbing as they moved. Most people cal ed them Jackals, but the scrawny, scaly little bastards reminded Mal more of deeply unattractive herons. Maybe it was the long beaklike muzzle, or the long, bony limbs, but either way there was a reptilian birdness about them. They were clutching an assortment of weapons. One had a UNSC-issue sniper rifle.

You better not have looted that from one of our dead, dickhead.… The other three had Covenant needle rifles. The Kig-Yar with the sniper piece moved to the front and seemed to be leading his mates over for a chat. Mal decided it was time to go. Then his radio crackled. Devereaux hit the alert.

“Guys, I don’t want to worry you, but I’ve got a crowd of Jackals here too.”

“Wel , don’t sel them the dropship,” Mal said. “We’re on our way. Move out, Spenser.”

Spenser grabbed his bags and the three of them began walking back to the ship, trying to speed up as they went. It was a slight uphil gradient.

Mal just wanted to get out without a shooting match, but the Kig-Yar leader wasn’t having any of it.

“You take?” he rasped. “No—ours! Our mines! You leave it!”

Mal turned and took a few paces backward as he walked, doing his friendly act but with his finger on the trigger. “Yeah, al yours, mate. Help yourself. Fil your boots.”

Naomi cut in on the radio. That was al he needed, a Spartan for a backseat driver. “Staff, have we got a situation down there?”

“Smal dose of Jackals. We’re dealing with it.” The Kig-Yar leader kept coming. They were usual y pretty relaxed around humans as long as they were getting something out of it. They hadn’t exactly been Covenant zealots, the lowest of the low as far as the Elites were concerned, less obedient than a Grunt and lacking the in-your-face ferocity of Brutes. “Stand by. We’re banging out.”

They were only fifty meters from the ship. Now Mal could see what was worrying Devereaux. Five or six Kig-Yar were wandering around the dropship, looking it over like they were thinking about buying it. Mal almost expected them to start kicking the tires. The hatches were shut, but there was nothing Devereaux could do to drive them off short of opening the starboard bay door and using a rifle. The things were so close to the ship that they were too far inside the range of the close-in cannon.

And at some point, Devereaux was going have to open the hatch for Mal and the others. Knowing what pushy scavengers the Kig-Yar were, Mal decided the priority was to keep them out of the ship.

“They’re just Jackals,” Vaz said, striding ahead without breaking his pace. Mal was more worried about Spenser. He had both hands ful of kit.

“They’ve got bird bones. They break. I’l get them to move.”

“Vaz, we’re bloody wel surrounded. Take it easy.”

The Kig-Yar with the sniper rifle was right on Mal’s heels. If Mal gave him his MA5C and told them al to go away, he suspected they probably would. There was nothing secret about the rifle, either, especial y with the number being traded on the black market. But just as he slowed down to turn and talk his way out of a confrontation, Sniper Jackal made the mistake of reaching out and grabbing him by the shoulder with a clawed hand.

“Whoa there, mate.” Mal jerked away and held his rifle aside so that the Kig-Yar could see his finger on the trigger, fending him off with his free hand. “I said we were going, didn’t I? Now take your buddies and sod off. We don’t want any trouble.”

Sniper Jackal spat out a stream of what Mal assumed were obscenities. Mal, Vaz, and Spenser were now at a standstil with a ring of Kig-Yar between them and the dropship.

Life was normal y straightforward for an ODST. Mal encountered an enemy and blew its brains out, no ifs, ands, or chats about the weather. If he slotted any of these, though, the news would be around the sector in ten seconds flat, and he was pretty sure the last thing Osman wanted was for Port Stanley’s presence to become common knowledge.

“Come on, guys,” Spenser said, doing an arms-spread gesture at the Kig-Yar. “What’s your problem? You know me. We’ve done business.”

Vaz was now standing at the dropship’s hatch, or at least he would have been if there hadn’t been a couple of Kig-Yar in his way. Mal saw him look around, sizing up the odds before he grabbed one of them by the col ar and shoved the muzzle of his rifle under its chin. Sometimes they responded to a bit of alpha male aggression.

“You’re in my way,” Vaz said. “Move it.”

“You only got small ship,” said Sniper Jackal from behind Mal. They couldn’t detect the corvette in orbit, of course. “You got big mouth for human with no backup. We take it and drop you somewhere nice, yes?”

Things were now going pear-shaped at a rate of knots. “Don’t say I didn’t try to be reasonable,” Mal said. “Naomi? You getting this? Now would be a good time, sweetheart.”

He hoped she had a good fix on his signal. If she hadn’t, then BB certainly would. Mal shoved Spenser to the ground just as a searing bolt of white light sizzled through the thin cloud cover and blew a fountain of soil and rock high in the air about twenty meters to their left.

Debris rained on them, rattling off his armor. Some of the Kig-Yar threw themselves flat. Sniper Jackal tottered sideways, thrown off balance by the blast, and Mal put two shots through him. The next thing Mal heard was the whhfft-whhfft-whhfft of needle rifles discharging and something striking off his helmet. He opened fire in the direction of the sound. And Spenser wasn’t on the floor anymore. He was right next to Mal, squeezing off a few with his pistol.

Al Mal could hear now was automatic fire—his rifle and Vaz’s, he hoped—and then suddenly it al stopped dead in a ringing silence. His pulse hammered in his throat. When he looked around, Vaz was turning a dead Kig-Yar over with his boot and rummaging through the pouches on the thing’s belt.

Mal straightened up and got his breath back, then did a quick head count to check that none of the Jackals had escaped. Spenser dusted himself down and gave Mal a weary look of disapproval.

“Better hope one of these vultures isn’t related to any of my informers,” Spenser said irritably. “It took me years to build up that network.”

Yeah, tough. Join the club. Mal got on the radio. “Thanks, Naomi. Captain? I’m afraid we’ve left a bit of a mess.”

“Never mind.” Osman sounded surprisingly relaxed about it. “Have you got any Sangheili rifles down there? You might want to make a bit more of a mess so we can blame it on them as wel . Stir it up wherever you can, gentlemen.”

Mal liked a woman with a positive outlook on life. Vaz moved from body to body, col ecting weapons. He looked up at Mal and frowned, tapping his helmet.

“Dent,” he said. “Needle must have hit you.”