“What are you looking for?”

“You never know.” Vaz went back to rifling the Kig-Yar’s pouches. “These are bound to come in handy, if only for fitting someone up with false evidence.”

“Bring back a couple of bodies, too,” said Osman. “We might find a use for those.”

Kig-Yar stank to high heaven, and being dead didn’t make them any more fragrant. The smel worked its way through the entire dropship on the run back to Port Stanley. It was an aroma that Mal could only describe as mudflats at low tide after a passing tanker carrying acetic acid had shed its load on the beach.

“I want one of those little lavender air fresheners,” Devereaux muttered as she settled the dropship onto the docking ring. “You better get me one of those, Vaz.”

Mal wondered how long it would take him to live down one of the worst extractions in the Corps’ history, but Osman seemed perfectly satisfied.

She came down to the hangar while they were unloading.

“Where do you want me to put the Jackals, ma’am?” Mal asked.

“Stick them in the cryo store with the Jiralhanae,” she said, as casual y as tel ing him to put a liter of milk in the fridge. “Everybody stand by to jump. Next stop, Monte Cassino. I’m going to go and do some catching up with Spenser.”

Mal and Vaz bundled up the Kig-Yar corpses in body bags and heaved them onto a gurney. BB appeared and made tutting noises.

“I think he’s a bit old for her, don’t you?” BB said. “Do you want a hand with those?”

“Yeah, very funny.” Mal took the head end and Vaz steered from the rear. “Have we real y got dead Brutes in storage?”

“They’re next to the grape jel y,” BB said.

He was joking about the grape jel y, because there wasn’t any, but there real y were a couple of intact Jiralhanae corpses and assorted body parts in a cryo-sealed container. Mal stared. Vaz shrugged.

“You realize nobody back home is going to believe this,” he said.

“You realize we can never tel them anyway.”

Mal went back to the dropship and found Devereaux scrubbing the deck of the cargo area on her hands and knees with good old-fashioned water and disinfectant.

“If you’d known it was going to be this weird, would you have volunteered?” Devereaux asked.

“I don’t think we did,” Mal said.

When he flopped onto his bunk at the end of his watch, he was sure that he stil stank of vinegar. He shoved his fatigues in the laundry and scrubbed himself raw in the shower before final y gargling water up his nose in the hope that it would flush the remaining molecules out of his nose hairs. At one point he looked up from the basin and caught his reflection in the mirror, coughing and choking, and prayed that BB wasn’t going to materialize in the cabin and laugh at him. But he was on his own, genuinely on his own for maybe the first time in ages, and it felt oddly lonely.

The alarm woke him six hours later. Port Stanley had already dropped out of slipspace. He walked onto the bridge in time to hear Naomi talking to the comms officer in Monte Cassino.

“Stanley, we’re stil five hours behind you.” Monte Cassino’s officer of the watch sounded apologetic. That was slipspace for you, a lottery of reentry points. “How long before you reach Ariadne’s position? She’s venting reactor coolant now and she stil can’t land her crew.”

“You mean Venezia stil won’t help them,” Naomi said.

“Wel , they won’t let the ship land, and they’re not wil ing to board her to evacuate the crew. They say it’s too dangerous.”

“Okay, our AI estimates we can be there in two hours at sublight—we’ve actual y got a visual on her. We’l take the crew off and wait until you show up. Stanley out.”

“Is the boss okay with that?” Mal asked.

“Insists on it,” Naomi said.

Ariadne was a patrol ship, with a complement of thirty at most. Mal estimated that it would take half an hour to secure a docking ring and cross deck everyone. Al they had to do then was stand off at a safe distance from Ariadne, just in case, and hand out coffee—the ordinary stuff—until Monte Cassino rocked up. It wouldn’t compromise opsec at al .

“Where is she, then?” he asked, trying to pick out Ariadne in the star field.

Naomi stared for a while, then pointed. “Here. Take a look on the long-range monitor.”

Ariadne was just a speck of light even at maximum magnification. The marbled crescent of Venezia seemed Jupiter-sized by comparison.

“Not very efficient, the Covenant,” Mal said. “You’d have thought they would have glassed Venezia early on.”

Naomi just grunted. Mal was wondering if al the Spartans were that antisocial when the pinprick light that was Ariadne suddenly grew a lot brighter and then vanished.

He didn’t say anything for a moment, and neither did Naomi. Then they looked at each other.

“I hope that’s not the reactor,” he said, but knew it bloody wel was.

“BB.” Naomi tapped the console. “BB, what happened? What did we just see? Is it what I think it is?”

BB took a second or two to respond.

“I’m afraid I’ve lost her,” he said. “Ariadne’s gone.”

CHAPTER SEVEN

IT’S THE ONE THING WE CAN’T CRACK. ALL THE FORERUNNER TECHNOLOGY WE’VE BEEN ABLE TO EXPLOIT, ALL THE IMPROVEMENTS IN DRIVE PERFORMANCE AND WEAPONS CAPACITY WE CAN NOW INCORPORATE INT IO N FINITY, AND WE STILL CAN’T SEND A SHIP INTO SLIPSPACE AND CALCULATE EXACTLY WHERE AND WHEN SHE’S GOING TO EMERGE FROM IT. THAT ADVANCE ALONE WOULD HAVE SAVED A RIADNE’S CREW.

(REAR ADMIRAL SAEED SHAFIQ, UNSC PROCUREMENT)

FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, FORMERLY ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

“Wherever she is, she’s almost certainly safe,” Halsey said, slapping one palm against the wal. She stil held the gray cylinder in the other. “The Forerunners built this for safety. Let’s just think our way through this.”

Mendez seemed to be taking no notice of her. He turned to the right and vanished into the gloom. Fred and Linda were working their way across the wal at the end of the passage with tactical lamps from their rifles, searching for signs of an opening. The masonry seemed to swal ow any light that fel on it.

“They were also trying to keep something out, Doctor.” Mendez’s voice boomed out of the darkness. “And there was something moving around in there. That’s why she went in. Why don’t you take another look at the control panel? It’s got to be linked.”

Halsey knew when she was being told to shut up and get lost. It made her scalp prickle. She wasn’t used to being surplus to requirements. She couldn’t see Olivia or Tom, but Ash and Mark, who seemed to be giving her a wide berth, were back in the control lobby working their hands across the dazzling display of symbols. She got as far as the end of the passage and thought better of it.

Her natural tendency was to tel them to stop and leave it to someone who knew what they were doing, but she wasn’t so sure that she did.

Things just seemed familiar. That was inevitable, she supposed, if humans did share some common origin with the Forerunners. Many symbols were rooted in basic physiology, like the dominance of red as a warning. But she stil felt uneasy leaving this to gifted amateurs.

Are they gifted? Are they exceptional? How did Ackerson select them?

Halsey had assessed enough children in her time to be able to spot ability and character traits. Crisis or no crisis, her curiosity was consuming her. She wanted to know more about the Spartan-I Is.

She could stil hear Mendez cal ing for Lucy. The girl couldn’t respond even if she could hear him, of course. What was he thinking, letting someone in that condition serve on the front line? She turned around and went after him. He probably wasn’t in a teachable moment, but things had to be said.

Then there was Kurt’s misguided attempt to enhance the Spartan-IIIs’ neurobiology. No, she refused to believe that was Kurt’s idea, whatever he’d told her. Her Spartans were too intel igent to make that mistake. They’d have realized that deliberately creating a personality disorder that had to be kept in check with medication was asking for trouble. Spartans were likely to be cut off from supply lines in the field, forced to live off the land, and the last thing they needed was reliance on drugs that could run out. This had to be Ackerson’s amateur tinkering.

Halsey wandered up to Mendez as casual y as she could. “I should have realized that Lucy’s judgment was impaired,” she said careful y. “It’s neurobiological. How long since the Spartan-Threes had their meds? Too long, Chief. And we’re not likely to get resupplied anytime soon.”

Mendez emerged from the gloom and gave her a long, unblinking stare, lips pressed in a tight line. It was his don’t-push-me look. During the Spartan-II program, she’d rarely been the recipient of it. But Mendez had dropped off her radar more than twenty years ago, and he was a lot less deferential now than she recal ed.

Is that when he first betrayed me? I was pretty sure he’d been sucked into another classified project, but I never dreamed he’d team up with Ackerson.

“They’re experienced special forces,” Mendez growled. “Not malfunctioning AIs. What do you want me to do, power them down?”

That stung. Did he know? Did Ackerson himself even know that she’d eventual y shut down—kil ed—Ackerson’s interfering AI, Araqiel?

Probably not. She brazened it out.

“Chief, do you understand what I’m saying? Even Kurt acknowledged that the Threes’ judgment would be shaky.” Halsey abandoned her trust- me-I’m-a-doctor voice. “You know damn wel that he modified them genetical y to reduce frontal lobe activity. That needs regular medication to keep it in check, but we don’t have those antipsychotics, do we? I won’t bore you with the details, but you might want to look up RADI some time.

Reactive aggression. In a nutshel —your Spartans might be better at coping with injury and stress, but without their happy pil s they’re going to get dangerously violent.”

Mendez sucked in a breath. “Yeah, I do understand the big words, Doctor. But I trained them from the age of six, so I know them. They’re my men and women. They’re as rational and professional as anyone.”

“How can you say that? Is Lucy even functioning?” Halsey had to make him understand that kind of aphasia just wasn’t normal. “Nobody that traumatized should be serving frontline. How long has she been mute?”

“Coming up seven years.” Mendez shrugged, almost as if he was provoking her. “Maybe eight.”

“Eight damn years? Are you serious?” Halsey was appal ed. A soldier who can’t communicate? “She’s not just a liability to herself, Chief, she’s a liability to her whole team. Especial y with that frontal lobe modification.”

“Wel , Doctor, she didn’t have that. That’s how she is natural y. Any other dazzlingly wrong diagnoses you want to share with us?”

That stung. He’d made her look like an idiot. But a sudden muffled silence settled on her like a wet fog. There was enough light in the tunnel for her to see the body language around her, even if the Spartans’ helmets made their expressions unreadable. Olivia and Tom were looking at her, heads turned, unmoving. She’d expected the Spartan-IIIs to resent comments about Lucy, but Kel y looked a little troubled too. Halsey could tel from the way she swung her arms slightly.

“I admit it’s not ideal, ma’am,” Kel y said, “but we work around it. Lucy can signal just fine.”

The passage suddenly fil ed with light, harsh and bright enough to sting Halsey’s eyes for a moment. Ash and Mark cheered and came jogging back down the passage. As her eyes adjusted, Halsey could now see the layout of the corridor and the wal ahead of her.

“We might be latent psychos,” Mark said, “but we can stil operate a light switch.”

Halsey couldn’t tel from his tone if he was making a friendly joke or taking a pop at her. Seeing as the lights were indeed on, she let it pass and examined the wal one-handed. There appeared to be a rope-edged margin cut into the blocks, a rectangle five meters by three, with a vertical row of symbols set down the right-hand side. It said door to her, and it also said kept shut for a good reason.

“They’re back,” Ash said.

Halsey looked around. The other gray cylinders had returned, floating like ghostly bottles. One peeled off from the others and drifted over to Mendez, settling about thirty centimeters from his face. He stared at it. If it had the slightest understanding of human expressions, it would have fled.

Halsey let go of her cylinder and it floated up to head height, making no effort to escape.

“Ah,” she said.

She and Mendez were the only two not wearing helmets, and they were also the only two with cylinders peering into their faces.

“What’s different about you and me, Chief?” she asked. “Why are they interested in us and not the Spartans?”

Mendez took out his cigar and parked it in the corner of his mouth again. “Age? Unsocial habits? Guilt?”

“I’m being serious.”

“Wel , if I were them, I’d be making sure that nobody who got in here was contaminated with that Flood thing you were talking about,” he said.

“Because if they were, I’d have to destroy them. Maybe they’re sampling what we’re exhaling. Which they obviously can’t do with anyone in a helmet.”

That was actual y rather solid logic. She hadn’t thought in terms of Flood infiltration. She didn’t know enough about it, just references to the parasite in Cortana’s transmissions, but if that was what the Halo Array was designed to wipe out then the Forerunners had obviously decided the Flood was a catastrophic threat.