Frederic turned back up the passage with the other two female Spartans. Naomi looked at Vaz and did a slow headshake that was more confusion than disagreement. She’d obey orders, but that didn’t mean she wasn’t having a hard time with it.

“Come on,” he said. He decided to try another tack. “You’re a Spartan. You don’t need to hear her excuses. She doesn’t control you.”

“Okay, but can I ask a favor, Vasya?” She used the Russian short form. Nobody else did that. “Osman says I can see my records if I want to. She thinks I ought to see the whole thing, like there’s worse to come.”

“And do you want to?”

“I don’t know. I wish I did. I don’t have the courage to look.”

But she had the guts to take on a hinge-head with her bare hands, and any number of crazy things that could get even a Spartan kil ed. Vaz understood why it was too much for her, though. Once she read the detail, she could never forget it. Most of her childhood memories were too deeply buried to plague her consciously. But she was almost certainly speculating what her parents had been like, and how the events had devastated them, and she could have been imagining a lot worse than the reality. His automatic response was to do it, like he’d do the same for Mal. Looking out for your buddies didn’t just mean giving them covering fire.

“What do you want me to do?” Vaz asked. “Just say.”

“Would you read my files and decide whether I should know or not?”

Damn. How the hell will I know?

It was a massive responsibility. If he told her, it might be too painful, and if he didn’t, she’d know it was because the details were too awful and maybe imagine worse anyway. Even for a Spartan, there was such a thing as the final straw.

But an ODST didn’t let his buddies down.

“Okay,” he said. “You trust me to do that, do you?”

“Of course I do. Thanks, Vasya. I’l let the Captain know you’l need the file.”

She looked past him at the door to the compartment where Halsey was being held, and for a stupid moment he was tempted to let her in and face the consequences. But he could see Halsey making hand-wringing excuses for what she’d done, and then he’d be sorely tempted to punch the shit out of her, sixty years old or not.

The other Spartans—the ones they cal ed the Spartan-IIIs—were huddled in the senior rates’ mess with Devereaux, who was plying them with coffee and a mountain of snacks. So these were the expendable suicide troops, the colonial cannon fodder. Damn, they were teenagers: none of them could have been older than eighteen. If they’d been pumped ful of growth hormones and ceramics like Naomi, then it hadn’t worked. They were just regular-sized kids. One of the girls was so smal and fresh-faced that she didn’t look old enough to be out of school, let alone given firearms. She stared at Vaz like a malevolent ferret and didn’t say a word.

And we’re the good guys, are we?

“Everyone okay?” he asked, looking from face to face. They stared back at him. Edgy was an understatement. “We’re going to cross deck you to Glamorgan in an hour. She’s got a proper doctor.”

“We’re okay,” said one of the lads. His name tab said ASH. “Just peckish. Are we going to Earth?”

“Yes, you’re getting a debrief at HIGHCOM in Sydney. Bravo-Six. Are you old enough to drink? There’s stil some good bars in Sydney.”

Ash stared at Vaz as if he was senile. “I’m thirteen,” he said. “And we’ve never been to Earth.”

That brought Vaz up short. “Jesus. What about the rest of you?”

“I’m twenty,” Tom said. “So’s Lucy here.” He patted the mad ferret kid’s shoulder. “But the other guys are about Ash’s age, yes.”

It was just making Vaz angrier by the second. For a moment, he got a glimpse of why so many of the colonies hated Earth. He’d had enough of al this Spartan crap.

“We’l make sure the UNSC shows you some gratitude,” he said at last. “We’l talk to your CO about it.”

Vaz walked off. Devereaux came trotting down the passage after him.

“Wow,” she said. “You saw that little girlie? She decked Halsey. She’s the one who blacked her eye. They’re al psychos.”

“You’d be crazy as wel if they gave you a rifle when you were six.”

“Chief Mendez must have a magic touch to cope with al that.”

“Either that,” Vaz said, “or he’s a complete bastard.”

Devereaux held her hands up in her I’m-just-saying gesture and returned to mind the delinquent Spartans. Vaz went in search of Mal and found him in the gal ey with Mendez.

They were talking quietly in the corner, arms folded, with that seen-it-al -no-shit expression peculiar to senior NCOs. Two cans of beer sat on the counter. Mendez was in his late fifties or early sixties, a real thug of a guy with whipcord forearms and a broken nose. So this was the man who trained al the Spartans. What the hel was he doing while Halsey was doing the Frankenstein stuff on the kids? Vaz couldn’t work out why Mal was sharing a beer with him, but he nodded at him anyway. Maybe Mal needed to hear Mendez’s side of the story first.

“Everything quiet out there?” Mal asked.

Vaz shrugged. “The lieutenant wanted to talk to Halsey, but I told them she was off-limits. When’s Compton-Hall taking her off our hands?”

Mal checked his watch. “Six hours. Then we head back home.”

Mendez wasn’t saying much. He retrieved his beer and took a cigar stub out of his top pocket, staring at the frayed tip. “At least I get to replenish my supply of these.”

“So you and Dr. Halsey.” Vaz just couldn’t make smal talk with him. Something had to be said. “You’ve worked together a long time, yes?”

Mendez might have been born looking suspicious. He certainly looked suspicious now. “I worked with her a long time ago, if that’s what you mean.”

“Wel , we’ve spent the last few weeks working with a couple of Spartans. It’s hard to know what to say about a project like that.”

“Then it’s probably best to say nothing.”

Vaz bristled. Okay, so Mendez trained the Master Chief and was some kind of legend, but Vaz couldn’t let that intimidate him. He wanted to know how al this Spartan stuff could possibly fit alongside the Navy’s sense of decency. He’d always despised people who wouldn’t stand up and be counted. And here he was now, dithering like some gutless little clerk about whether to say something that might upset a man who’d stood by while Halsey played Dr. Mengele.

Okay, they can stick me on a charge for disrespect to a superior. But I’ve got to live with myself.

“One question, Chief,” Vaz said. “If you knew what was happening to those kids, why didn’t you do something? Any of you? I mean, how many people does it take to create dozens of flash clones and run a program that size? There must’ve been a whole army of technicians and doctors and military personnel working on it. Just tel me why. For Naomi if nothing else.”

Mendez took so long putting his cigar away and moving his can of beer across the counter that Vaz thought he was preparing to swing a punch.

Yeah, why don’t you try that, grandad? Go on. See what you get. But the punch didn’t come, and Vaz found himself disappointed.

“And you’d like to think that you would have handled things differently,” Mendez said.

Vaz stared into his face, searching for any loss of nerve. “There’s some things that you can’t do and stil cal yourself a man.”

He waited for an explosion or a punch. He didn’t dare look at Mal. What he’d said didn’t change a damn thing, and it wouldn’t stop it happening again with other people and other kids, but he’d said it. That was better than not saying it.

I don’t care if he’s the biggest damn hero in the UNSC and rescues blind kittens in his spare time. It’s still wrong and it’s always going to be wrong.

“Yeah, I think I reached that conclusion a few years ago,” Mendez said at last. He didn’t seem to be avoiding Vaz’s gaze so much as staring past him at something on the bulkhead that only he could see. “Next time I’l try to find my conscience before the event, not after it.”

He drained his beer in one pul , tossed the can in the trash, and left.

Mal turned to Vaz, arms stil folded. “Feel better now?”

“Actual y, yes.” Vaz didn’t plan to apologize. “I do. A sense of right and wrong is al we are.”

Mal rol ed his eyes. “If I knew the names of any Russian philosophers, I’d probably have a real y good line to shoot back at you, but I don’t, and I haven’t,” he said. “So come on, what do you think should happen to Mendez? Okay, Halsey—it was her project. But what are you going to do about people like Mendez and everyone else? How far down are you going to dril ?”

“As far as it takes. Because it’s ordinary people who let it happen.” Vaz busied himself refil ing the coffee machine. He didn’t want a fight with Mal, and he didn’t want to discover anything about the guy that he didn’t respect. Mal was his best friend. They’d been through a lot together. But it was a lot easier hel -jumping than wrestling with this kind of stuff. “The monsters don’t run the gulags and the death camps and the reeducation centers. Regular people do. If they al had the bal s to say no, the likes of Halsey, Zhou, or Stalin could never do it al on their own. Could they?”

“I’m not saying forgive and forget. But you know bloody wel that ninety-nine percent of humans do exactly what everyone else around them is doing, even if they know it’s evil or plain stupid, because that’s the way humans are. ”

Like keeping my mouth shut about this. “That’s not a defense.”

“No, but would you tel ONI to shove it in the middle of a war? Look at what we’re doing right now.”

“It wasn’t the middle of a war. This was before the Covenant showed up. It was about counterinsurgency, not genocide.”

“So being kil ed by the Covenant is worse than being kil ed by some colonial tosser? You hate it when civvies second-guess us with the luxury of hindsight.”

“This wasn’t some split-second decision under fire. It was deliberate, it went on for twenty-odd years, and it involved kids. How hard is it to work out that was wrong? Seriously, Mal, how hard?”

Sometimes Mal argued for the hel of it. Vaz wasn’t sure if he was arguing now or just trying to make sense of a bad situation, but this was suddenly personal, not a high school ethics debate. Whatever Halsey—and Mendez—had done, they’d done it to Naomi and Osman, too.

“This coffee’s taking forever,” Vaz said. “I’ve got stuff to do.”

He needed to go before he said something he’d regret. And he had a promise to keep to Naomi. He went to Osman’s day cabin and peered around the open door.

She was in there with the Chief, so she was either about to repaint the bulkheads with his innards or she didn’t feel too badly about his involvement. But that was her business—the individual Spartans were the only ones who had the right to forgive anyone.

“I said I’d take a look at a file for Naomi, ma’am,” Vaz said, avoiding eye contact with Mendez.

Osman nodded. “Probably best done in your cabin. BB can display it for you.”

He had to ask. “Have you read it, ma’am?”

“Yes.”

“Would you read your own now?”

She always looked him straight in the eye, but her gaze flickered for a moment. “No.”

That told him al he needed to know. He took the long route back to his cabin to avoid everyone and flopped down on his bunk. BB needed to be summoned. He made a point of not crossing the threshold, except for keeping his dumb processing eye on the environmental and safety controls. It was a thoughtful gesture.

“Come in, BB,” Vaz said. “Let’s get this over with.”

BB’s avatar popped up and the screen on the bulkhead switched from its portal to a file with more security warnings on the cover than he’d ever seen in his life.

“You’re doing a very kind thing, Vasily.”

Vaz tried to mimic Mal’s accent, embarrassed. “She’s me mate.”

“I know you wel enough by now to realize this is going to make you angry.”

“Most things do.”

“Cal me when you need me.”

“Hang on.” A thought crossed Vaz’s mind as the first page fil ed the screen. “You must have read al the files. Osman’s too.”

“Of course I have. I am the files.”

“But you don’t snoop in the cabins. I just wondered where you draw the line.”

“I’m required to know personnel details. But it also helps me understand the Captain better. And Admiral Parangosky.”

BB vanished, which in this case meant he real y had withdrawn from the room. Vaz forced himself to look at the file, guts knotted. Naomi’s family name was Sentzke, she came from a colony world he’d never even heard of—Sansar—and she was an only child. There were pages of reports signed by Halsey, detailing her exceptional genetic profile and so ful of jargon that he started skimming over the detail, but the next page that flashed up hit him right between the eyes.

It was a weekly psychological assessment form, detailing how this six-year-old kid was coping after being snatched by ONI agents on the way home from school; whether she was eating, how much she was crying, how often she asked for her mom, and how aggressive or withdrawn she was on any given day. It would have been bad enough reading that about a total stranger, but it was al too close to home now.