And then we’ll dispense with their assistance completely. Never again. No more reliance on aliens to keep our society functioning. We’ll learn to do things for ourselves.

Jul felt that he spent most of his days now walking up and down long passages, as if fate was giving him extra time to ask himself if he real y wanted to go ahead with this.

What if nobody arises to take the Arbiter’s place, and Sanghelios slides into chaos?

It was a risk that had to be taken. Jul was damned sure that the humans weren’t sitting in quiet reconsideration of their colonial policies. His boots echoed on the deck as he walked the last few meters to the bridge. ‘Telcam hadn’t said a word since they reached the sentry.

And this is where I move from brave talk to open revolt. This is where it becomes real. From this point on I have no retreat.

Buran surveyed his bridge, swinging his head sadly from side to side. The gloom was punctured by status lights from the few systems needed to keep Unflinching Resolve vacuum-tight and to suppress any fires or fluid leaks. From the forward viewscreen, Sanghelios looked to Jul as it always did on his return from a mission, a red beacon of warmth and welcome in the cold black void.

“For Sanghelios,” Buran murmured, and pressed the control to boot up the frigate’s AI.

The ship came to life section by section. Lighting, environmental controls, and diagnostics panels activated and went about their business without need of any attention from a crew. It took only six Sangheili to move a frigate and Unflinching Resolve didn’t have far to travel. Forze checked the navigation computer and entered a spurious flight plan. That would change as soon as they were free of the dock.

“I had the chance,” Jul said, more to himself than anyone else.

“To do what?” ‘Telcam asked.

“To kil the Arbiter. He came to speak at our assembly. I could have shot him where he stood, mere meters away.”

“And you’d have made a martyr of him. There’s a fine line between reckless and bold. Acting alone may be noble, but acting together with an agreed plan is effective. ” ‘Telcam was surprisingly pragmatic for a spiritual man. If he believed in the power of prayer, he hadn’t entirely given up on the need for a little extra support from laser cannon and sound tactics. “Heroes never die, and neither do their flawed ideals. So you must both kil and discredit them.”

Buran opened a channel to the dockmaster’s control room. “Unflinching Resolve requests release from dock for maintenance assessment.”

“You have clearance, Unflinching Resolve. ”

Buran glanced at ‘Telcam. “Secure for launch. Proceed to two hundred kilometers.”

Stealing a warship would have horrified the humans, Jul knew. They had rules and regulations and courts-martial. But they seemed to worry about the petty administrative things that no Sangheili would concern himself with. Shipmasters and other ranks were taking al manner of vessels and vehicles now. There was no central command to ask permission from or to track them, and the only thing a patriot would do with a commandeered vessel was use it to defend Sanghelios. There were no Prophets around to commandeer a vessel from. The fleet belonged to the people. And the people were taking it back.

There was nothing to worry about. Nothing at al .

Even so, there was no conversation on the bridge until they exited the safety zone. The Jiralhanae trotted in and stood by the doors, looking aimless and confused.

“Ship, proceed to these coordinates on my mark,” Buran said to the AI. It was a computer designed solely to pilot and control the ship, no more and no less, not the extravagantly sentient pet the humans seemed to prefer. “Suspend al automated status reports to the dockmaster.”

Buran would normal y have had a junior officer doing al this for him, but Forze stepped into the role without a word. He seemed to be feeling sorry for the shipmaster already. There real y was a sense of a final stand about him. Unflinching Resolve began picking up speed, preparing to pass behind Sanghelios to evade detection by the dock sensors before disappearing to lay up at Mdama.

Chaos had its virtues. A ship could go missing so easily these days.

The frigate passed the planet’s terminator and skimmed two hundred kilometers above continents shrouded in night. The Aanrar dockmaster would expect them to be out of contact anyway. Now was the moment that Unflinching Resolve had to vanish completely.

“Ship, maintain comms blackout and shut down transponders,” Buran said. “Begin landing sequence.”

Jul had thought that he’d reached his own point of no return. But he hadn’t, not yet. There would be an irrevocable moment to come, but right now al he was doing was slipping one step at a time toward it, and it could be reversed with no questions asked.

Raia … she knew not to ask them. She was also smart enough to work things out for herself. Unflinching Resolve descended through the atmosphere a thousand kilometers from Bekan keep and made the rest of the flight at eight thousand meters through night skies.

“There’s something to be said for being backward country yokels,” Forze said. “Try doing this in Vadam without anyone noticing.”

But many in Mdama would have noticed, of course. They just wouldn’t ask questions or interfere. With al those treacherous Jiralhanae and Kig- Yar around, many officers were busy making sure that assets didn’t end up in the hands of their assortment of new enemies. The excuse made itself. This wasn’t theft. It was patriotism.

Unflinching Resolve hovered above a quarry five kilometers from the keep and then descended into the artificial canyon to settle on her dampers.

Nobody spoke for a while. It was done. They’d seized a warship, and the coup had begun.

Buran reached out to shut down the active systems and the bridge faded into darkness again, lit only by the faint glow of status lights.

“I’l return in six days,” Buran said. “Now we lie low and plan a little more. Time to disembark, brothers.”

They sealed the hatches behind them and Buran looked back at the frigate. There was no way of camouflaging her. As Forze had said, it sometimes helped to live in the back of beyond.

“We must take good care of her,” Buran said sadly. “There are no Huragok left to fix her or replace her.”

“Yet, ” Jul said. “No new ships yet. The day wil come.”

The rebels dispersed to their respective transports. Jul walked back through the fields to his keep, to explain to Raia and his brothers where they should not venture.

He would also have to make plans for their safety if the overthrow failed. It was hard to think of anywhere on Sanghelios where his clan could hide if he did.

Jul, of course, would take whatever might come to him. It was the least anyone would expect of a shipmaster.

FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

Mendez had to give Halsey her due. Instead of making a fuss about the puncture in her leg, she just shut her mouth and gathered up the fragments of the cylinder.

It didn’t mean he was discovering a new respect for her and that the tension between them would eventual y turn to a lasting friendship. That kind of bul shit only happened in the movies. Mendez knew the bottom line was that they both had blood on their hands, and a lot of his wasn’t of the decent, rules-of-engagement, soldiering variety.

He had no idea why he didn’t feel inclined to keep his opinions to himself any longer. Maybe he was the one whose goddamn frontal lobes weren’t doing al the impulse suppression that they should. He watched Kel y, Fred, and Linda close ranks around Halsey and do the Spartan equivalent of fussing over her.

“Any il effects yet, ma’am?” Linda asked.

Halsey twisted from the waist and hitched up her hem discreetly to take another look. “Wel , I think I’l find out pretty soon whether it was injecting me with something or taking a sample. One thing’s certain—it won’t be doing it again.”

Fred picked over the fragments of cylinder in his palm. Mendez felt guilty about walking away from the search for Lucy, but he needed to know what that thing was because al the systems on this artificial planet had to be connected in some way. The Forerunners did seem to have a few godlike qualities, and one was purpose. They didn’t create things at random.

“I don’t recognize any of the components,” Fred said. “But there’s a piece of some spongy material here. It’s saturated with blood. I think your assessment that it’s taking samples is on the nail, Doctor.”

Halsey took a closer look at the pieces. “Now if I run a blood test, I’m looking to check how someone is, who someone is, or what someone is.

Perhaps it’s trying to work out if we’re carrying any infection. But if that’s the case, it would try to take samples from everybody. What’s different about me?”

Mendez didn’t say a word. He was trying to recal what the cylinders had been doing from the first time they’d shown up. They seemed to hang around faces. Now this one had taken a blood sample, if Halsey was correct. It had shown most interest in the people who weren’t wearing helmets, and then it seemed to want a second opinion on Halsey in particular.

“I think there’s a real y simple answer, Doctor,” Mendez said. “Me and Fred, we had something to eat. You’ve not eaten anything yet, though, have you?”

Halsey paused for a moment and then shut her eyes. “Glycogen metabolism. Damn it. It’s just a first-aid monitor.” She did that humorless little I- should-know-better smile. “My guess is that it can detect exhaled ketones. So it checked whether I had blood sugar problems. I’m not sure why the Forerunners would care about that, but scans make sense if you’re trying to keep out a pathogen.”

“Wel , terrific,” Mendez said, and strode back down the passage. “We can forget al about it until it bil s us. How are we doing, people?”

Tom and Olivia were stil working their way back and forth across the controls and the entrance lobby. He could hear the murmur of conversation from deep inside the passage as Mark and Ash examined the flagstone floor. Fred walked up behind him.

“Chief, we need to split up and carry on with the recon. Worst-case scenario is that it takes us weeks to work out where we are and find some structures that make more sense. I suggest we leave Dr. Halsey here with Kel y in case Lucy comes back the same way she went in, and the rest of us can move on.”

It was a perfectly sensible command decision. Mendez just nodded. But Fred cocked his head to one side.

“I wouldn’t dream of abandoning her, Chief.”

“Never thought you would, Lieutenant.”

Mendez never needed to see a Spartan’s face to work out what was going on in their heads. It was al about the body language—a split-second delay, the set of the shoulders, or a hundred other minute details that helped him gauge their reactions. Mendez watched Fred talking to the rest of the Spartan-I Is, but didn’t spot the slightest hesitation as they broke off from what they were doing to resume the patrol.

I trained ’em right. At least I can say that.

Mendez passed Halsey on the way out of the tower and nodded at Kel y. “If Lucy comes back, then you damn wel sit on her if you have to, but don’t let her wander off again.”

“Understood, Chief.” Kel y took off her helmet and adjusted her earpiece. “And just for the record, I’m placing my bets on it being some seriously weird transdimensional crap.”

“I bet that’s what Einstein said.”

Kel y managed a smile. “She strikes me as the unkil able sort.”

“Yeah. She’s a survivor.”

Mendez would always take facts over feelings, but he also had that time-honed instinct that told him when one of his people was in trouble. Lucy was stil around somewhere—he just knew it. But if there was such a thing as the worst Spartan to misplace, it was Lucy. The poor kid couldn’t yel for help. Yeah, Halsey had gotten it right again. Lucy real y shouldn’t have been serving on the front line. But what the hel was he supposed to do?

He couldn’t spare a single Spartan anyway, and the cruelest thing he could have done to Lucy was to separate her from the only family she had left.

He wasn’t prepared to ship her out to some psychiatric rehabilitation unit where she’d just be injected and analyzed and discussed by a bunch of strangers al pretty much like Halsey, treating her as a fascinating puzzle to be solved. She’d had enough of that garbage by now.

“Do you suppose John’s made it?” Kel y asked. It was right out of the blue. That meant it had been on her mind for some time and she couldn’t keep it battened down any longer. “And the others.”

“Of course he has,” Halsey said. She was setting up camp in the entrance lobby, unpacking the contents of her bag and laying out al her electronics. “He was always the luckiest of you al . And the most bloody-minded.”

Mendez supposed that was tact in a Halsey kind of way. She hadn’t said that John was the very best of the Spartan-IIs and that she’d known he was a natural leader from the first time she met him as a six-year-old. If she’d blurted that out, though, Kel y would have taken it without offense, because Halsey was now the nearest thing she’d ever have to a mom. Kids stil loved even the most abusive parent.

And you set their paths. Their expectations. Treat a kid as the chosen one, or as your biggest disappointment, and he’ll live up or down to that.

“Problem, Chief?” Halsey asked.

Mendez just took her sidearm from his belt, checked the safety and the clip, and handed it back to her. “You sure you can stil use this? If not, Kel y can bring you up to speed.”

“I can cope. I did the requalifier a couple of years ago.”

“Good.” He took out a couple of his ration bars as wel . The cylinder must have been worried about her starving, so he’d take that as a warning.