“Come on, we’ve got a briefing,” he said. “Have you unplugged? Osman’s rounding us up.”

“Yeah. Can you get a TV signal in the wardroom?”

“Hockey finals, live from Saint Petersburg.” Vaz actual y smiled, a proper smile with a show of teeth this time. “Two hours’ time.”

“Girls’ hockey?”

Vaz narrowed his eyes. He’d heard it al before. “Ice hockey.”

Slipspace comms were a little strategic miracle. It was going to be great to drop out of slip ful y briefed instead of being dumped into a crisis that had germinated, grown, and ripened during the time you were cut off. But nothing brought it home to Mal quite like the idea of Vaz being able to watch his beloved hockey live. It was the smal detail that taught him the most.

“They’l be using slipspace bubbles to preserve food one day,” Mal said. “That’s what happens to al technology. The descent into the mundane.”

“What?”

“Never mind. Come on, it’s your turn to give Adj and Leaks their sludge.”

“Leave it in the wardroom for them, on the nice tableware. They’re ONI now.” Vaz seemed to think Huragok had developed some kind of team spirit, but Mal suspected that their psychology was stil ambivalent, no matter how much lovingly prepared yeasty stuff he fed them. “Let’s go.

Briefing.”

Osman was pretty transparent for a spook; she’d thawed a lot since Mal had first met her. He stil had no doubt that she was worth fearing, because nothing less than absolute ruthless efficiency would have made her Parangosky’s chosen heir, but as far as the squad went she was a considerate commander who treated them with respect and fondness. She let them take over the wardroom—a lot of officers would have taken a very dim view of that—and she was prepared to get her hands dirty alongside them. Mal couldn’t ask for more. Unfortunately, the situation on Venezia was going to push that to the limit. He knew it. He watched her move from her seat at the wardroom table to sit next to Naomi, as loud a statement of here-comes-the-awkward-stuff as he’d ever seen.

“Okay, people, ONI closed-door rules,” Osman said. Phil ips and Devereaux shrank visibly. “I’l speak my mind and you’l speak yours. Venezia.

We pick up where we left off, and I admit there’s been some mission creep. We’re not interested now in who else is arming ‘Telcam so much as who’s turning into a problem for Earth. We’l continue to track the tagged weapons we gave ‘Telcam, but mainly to work out what the supply networks are now. The new focus of our interest is Pious Inquisitor.”

“Are we just observing, or wil we have an active role?” Naomi asked, like it was just another mission.

“Observing, initial y. But this isn’t a regular operation for us, so let’s work out our ground rules. Naomi’s father. We can make al the dutiful noises we want, but this isn’t just painful y personal, it’s without precedent. What do we do about him?”

“If this is about my feelings, ma’am, then you treat him like any other suspect,” Naomi said. “Victims take revenge and society feels sorry for them, but it’s stil il egal. They stil get prosecuted if they take the law into their own hands.”

“I meant before we get to that stage. Should he be told what happened to you? And do you want him to know? They’re different questions.”

“He’l be the first parent to find out, ma’am,” Vaz said. “Shouldn’t that be a consideration? Security, I mean.”

“I’l square that with Parangosky. She’l go public on it herself eventual y.” Osman looked at Naomi for a long time but didn’t seem any closer to getting an answer from her. She glanced away. “Mal?”

Mal could only put himself in Staffan Sentzke’s place and imagine his own reaction. “He’s got a right to know, ma’am. Whether it pisses him off even more or not.”

“So how do we let him know?”

Naomi folded her arms. “Maybe I’l tel him myself.”

“Wel , there’s a few stages we have to get through before you can do that.”

“So do we grab him and do the reunion thing here?” Mal asked. “Then what do we do with him? Jail him? Shoot him? Because if we just throw him back like some fish, then where does he go from there?”

“Earth’s security and the security of its colonies comes first,” Naomi said. She was stil trying to prove to them that she put duty first. She real y didn’t need to. “If what happened to my family is to have any meaning at al , that’s got to be paramount.”

It al depended on how Sentzke reacted to the news. But they had to find a way to tel him first, and Mal didn’t know if that would make him an even bigger threat. He spooled forward in his mind to an appal ing tragedy, the worst scenario: that some hardworking, ordinary bloke who’d never done anything wrong in his life had watched his family torn apart, had somehow survived the Covenant attacks, and then was final y reunited with his kid just before getting his brains blown out because he had a grudge against Earth. A justified grudge, as it turned out. Mal wondered how he’d feel about that when he was old and looking back on his service career, if he made it to old age and a peaceful death in his sleep. It wasn’t the kind of deathbed reminiscence he wanted to have.

Yeah, it’s all about how you meet your end, BB. It’s about making sure the last thought on your mind isn’t regret.

“So have we made a decision here?” Vaz asked. “Are we going to somehow let Sentzke know he’s got a daughter and that he was right al along?”

Osman looked at Naomi as if she was going to give her the casting vote, and Mal didn’t think that was right. She had the right to decide if she wanted to be revealed to her father or not. But it was also a terrible responsibility to give her for whatever Sentzke did when he found out.

I’d go ballistic. Completely and utterly frigging mental. Any father would.

“Naomi, I don’t know if it’s fair on you or not,” Osman said at last.

“I said I’d do it, ma’am.” Naomi had done nothing but brood on this since she’d found out. Mal damn wel knew it. “But maybe we make the decision when we have enough contact with him to assess the consequences—for everyone.”

It was a sensible Spartan kind of answer. Naomi pushed back from the table even though Osman hadn’t dismissed the meeting. She didn’t actual y get up and leave, but it had the effect of bringing things to a gradual halt.

“I want to deploy to the surface, ma’am.” Naomi said it as if Osman hadn’t worked that out yet. “If there’s one concession I want from you, it’s being al owed to do my job instead of watching this play out.”

“You’re two meters tal , at least, so you’re not going to go unnoticed,” Mal said. “And if you’re undercover, you can’t clonk around in a bloody Mjolnir suit.”

“Staff, there are plenty of real y tal women in the world, and I’m stil enhanced even without the armor.” Naomi looked right into him—not into his eyes but through them and right into him. “Let me do this. You think you know what a Spartan can do, but you don’t know what I can do.” She had that intense look just like her dad’s, those completely gray eyes without a trace of blue in them. “And I don’t know, either, but I do need to find out who Naomi Sentzke real y is.”

It wasn’t a perfect solution, but Mal knew there wasn’t going to be a better one. Osman looked at him as if he had a veto. He shrugged. They’d work out a way to pass off Naomi as just another regular miscreant who happened to end up on Venezia.

“Okay, I suppose we’d better thin out so Vaz can watch the hockey,” Osman said. “BB, use our spiffy new slipspace comms and ask the Admiral to route us every bit of current data on Venezia, up to the minute. Vaz and Naomi insert first, and then we send Mal in a few days later, with the rest of us on standby.”

Naomi disappeared. Mal didn’t care much for hockey anyway and gave her half an hour before he left the others to watch the game and went looking for her. She was down on Foxtrot, sitting cross-legged on the glass deck with her elbows braced on her knees. Without the armor, she was stil a very tal girl, but not conspicuously muscular. Maybe she’d get away with it on Venezia. Mal closed one eye to defocus slightly and tried to imagine seeing her for the first time without knowing what she was. He might have taken her for a basketbal player, or even a field athlete. She had a point. That lean, fine-boned face sort of fitted the image.

Mal walked out onto the transparent deck and sat down with her. It was easier when there was nothing to see below in space.

“Would he be happier not knowing?” she asked.

“What do you want to say to him? Are you going to tel him what was done to you?”

“It would upset him, wouldn’t it?”

“Yes. Of course it would.”

“But what if I hadn’t been taken? I’d probably be dead now, along with everyone else on Sansar. But I survived and I excel ed, and because of the Spartans, humanity survived too. Would he be proud of me?”

It was one way of looking at it. It didn’t make it any easier. “Are you happy with what you’ve become?”

“I don’t think I would have been happy being anything else,” she said. “Not if I was as … exceptional as Halsey told us we al were.”

Mal had to remember that the kids had been taken because they were rare, bril iant, genetical y gifted examples of humanity, even without al the crap that Halsey had bolted on later. Growing up to be a librarian or a truck driver in a backwater colony would have been pretty frustrating for a one-in-a-bil ion kid like Naomi.

“Yeah,” Mal said. “I think your dad would be proud. Earth or no Earth.”

ONIRF TREVELYAN “Okay, if they were so smart, how come they couldn’t make portals you could see?”

“Maybe they could see them. They were aliens.”

“Wel , Warren nearly crapped himself. He couldn’t find his way back out for half an hour.”

The explosive harness had many advantages, Jul decided. As Prone strapped it onto him for the day—a little looser so that it didn’t chafe his neck, as he’d requested—the stream of human babbling outside his cel resolved into comprehensible language. So the humans blundered into these gateways, too. It was a good question: why did the Forerunners do that?

“Why can’t we see the portals, Prone?” Jul asked.

< They’re for us. We can see them. > “That makes no sense.”

< There is no need. > Prone finished adjusting the harness and stepped back like a seamstress checking a garment. < This shield world has never been populated. The barriers are for maintenance access and can be sealed against contaminants. > “But you can change that. You can make them detectable.”

< Change is not required. They are detectable. You and the humans can feel them. > Huragok seemed completely obedient and passive, even timid, but Jul now had occasional glimpses of stubborn adherence to conventions that the Covenant hadn’t been ful y aware of. Huragok grew agitated when Forerunner technology was damaged; Jul, like everyone else, had thought that was an integral part of their programming, a simple way to reinforce their single-minded devotion to their tasks. But now that he spent so much time with the creatures, he was beginning to see a different side of them.

Obedience to the Covenant had been entirely incidental.

It wasn’t what they wanted to do, or even submitted to. They had tasks laid down by the Forerunners, and their cooperation had only been given so far simply because it didn’t substantial y interfere with those. The thought made Jul uneasy. There was a line the Huragok would eventual y draw.

He’d crossed it just once and been put firmly and painful y in his place.

Prone was standing his ground in that quiet, unfathomable way. The maintenance portals were Huragok business, not the province of Sangheili or humans.

Jul waited for the guard to open the cel door. “What’s your most important duty, Prone?”

< To preserve this shield world and its security for when the Forerunners need it. > Prone drifted through the open door ahead of him.

< Everything else is desirable but not essential. > The Huragok was very clear. Jul envied that clarity, and also that endless patience, however misguided it might be. Jul thought in days and weeks. Prone thought in mil ennia.

“The Forerunners aren’t coming back,” Jul said as they walked the familiar route out of the base. He bent down from time to time to examine interesting stones and pretty, silver-striped, spiral objects that appeared to be tiny mol usk shel s, now empty and dry, and put them in his pocket.

“You now know what happened in the world outside this sphere. We have found only the remains of their civilization.”

< They may yet wait somewhere or sometime else. > Prone speeded up. Perhaps he was getting frustrated with looking after Jul when he could have been tinkering with equipment. < They were not like you. They slept in thought.> It was more mystical nonsense. Jul doubted that such a precise machine as a Huragok would babble, though, so he decided that there simply weren’t words in the Sangheili language to express the actual meaning. He decided to keep Prone talking about the Didact, which would also keep Magnusson off-balance if she was eavesdropping.

< You’re going to the spire again, > Prone said. < Don’t you want to see other things? > “You know what I mean by a temple, yes?”

< Yes. You know I do. > “Wel , I spent a lot of time in Mdama’s temples as a child. My clan was devout, as we al once were. I stil find it comforting.”

< The spire isn’t a temple. And you think the Forerunners are dead. > “I no longer know what I think. I need to examine my life again, everything I took for granted and everything I abandoned. Is there an existence after this one? If the Forerunners could change time in this sphere, did they know how to live for eternity? Were the San’Shyuum right for once, that there’s a transformation awaiting us al ?”