Naomi just blinked a couple of times. “And Dr. Halsey?”

“She died on Reach,” Osman said flatly. “They’re stil recovering bodies.”

Mal felt for Naomi. Spartans had mates just like everybody else. He had no idea who Halsey was, but everyone knew about the Master Chief.

“Okay, Prof, this is where you earn your keep,” Osman said, changing mood. She gestured Phil ips to the communications console and Naomi moved in beside him. “You’re our ears.”

Phil ips seemed to be an old hand at this kind of thing. He took a molded earpiece from his top pocket and pressed it into his ear canal two- handed like a woman putting on a fiddly earring, then sat back in the seat, staring in defocus at the display in front of him while he listened for Elite comms frequencies.

Devereaux went over to the chart table. “Give me another look at New Llanel i, BB.”

Twenty centimeters above the surface of the table, an image of the colony world rotated as a sphere and then peeled itself like an orange, flipping out into a grid of colored lines to show the planet’s topography. Mal and Vaz had nothing better to do right then than to take a look and work out the least likely place to get ambushed.

“Is New Llanel i the colony itself or the whole planet?” Vaz asked.

Osman stood over Phil ips, watching something on the screen in front of him. “Was both. There were only three townships there anyway. BB, found any contacts out there?”

“I’ve got a live connection to Kilo-Three-Nine,” BB said. “No response, but he’s receiving. I’l loop it until he picks it up.”

“Where is he, ma’am?” Mal leaned on the chart table, bracing for an ONI need-to-know rap across the knuckles. “If you’re al owed to say.”

Osman didn’t turn a hair. “There’s a listening station on Reynes. He’s been camped out in the glasslands running a string of Jackal informers. He knows Sangheili dialects even better than Dr. Phil ips. But he’s not ONI, and he thinks this is al part of brokering peace with the hinge-heads so that Hood can waltz in and shake hands with the Arbiter.”

Phil ips took the news that he was the understudy pretty wel . He didn’t even flinch. “Hope I get to debrief him one day.”

“He’d talk your ears off. He’s not had much human conversation for some years.”

Mal was aware that agents had been working undercover for years in Covenant space, but it suddenly struck him as a lonely and miserable job.

He’d never given it much thought before. When he was plummeting through a planet’s atmosphere in a drop pod smal er than a car, trailing flame and heading for an uncertain landing behind enemy lines, he could only think of himself and his mates. Sometimes he didn’t even have the time to think at al . The pod would crash into the ground—upright if things went to plan, flat on its side if they didn’t—and the front hatch would burst open, coughing him out into a hail of fire. The job was clear-cut and immediate. Al he had to do was kil everything in front of him before it could kil him.

Even the slower tasks like training militias or doing long, patient recons had finite objectives most of the time. But to live in hiding on your own for years at a time, just listening and always in danger of being betrayed by informers … no, he real y didn’t fancy that at al . He preferred to hunt his enemy down, look him right in his dog-ugly face, and then slot the bastard.

“Captain, I’ve got Kilo-Three-Nine,” BB said. “Do you want him on the speaker?”

“Let’s hear him,” Osman said. “Hey, Spenser. How are you doing?”

“Good to hear you, Oz.” Spenser sounded like a grumpy uncle who smoked fifty a day. “You came al this way to check on me?”

“What have you got?”

“It’s going to rats out here. You want me to cut to the chase? I’l upload al the comms codes and detail to your AI, but the headline is headless chicken mode. Most of their C-Two’s gone. They were reliant on the Prophets for the big command picture. Plus there’s a real split in the ranks about the Arbiter al ying with us. One interesting development for you—a religious sect just kil ed a couple of keep elders for blasphemy.”

Osman’s voice didn’t change at al . “What did they do?”

“According to the chatter, these old hinge-heads wrecked a Forerunner relic and ended up disemboweled by the Abiding Truth. I sent Big Maggie a file on them a while ago. Anyway, the mad monks hit the keep with an air strike. They’re cannoned up.”

This was what the mission was al about: to get the hinge-heads to focus on kil ing each other. Mal searched for a hint of satisfaction on Osman’s face, but she just looked total y unmoved.

“You’re stil on Reynes, then,” she said.

“It’s kind of nice this time of year. I have a Grunt who comes in once a week to clean.”

“I’m going to pul you out, Spenser. We’l take over local surveil ance now. It’s getting too dangerous.”

“It’s been pretty damn dangerous for the last two years.”

“You said it yourself. It’s fal ing apart. Can you exfil to an RV point on your own?”

“I haven’t had orders to pul out.”

“You have now. We’l extract you after we’ve done a recon. Stay in touch with BB and keep your head down.”

“Okay, Oz. Hang on to your entrails. Three-Nine out.”

Mal found himself staring at the bulkhead, wondering what it was like to live alone on a dead colony world. Spenser obviously knew Osman wel enough to cal her by a nickname. It was hard to think of her as Oz. But it was even harder to think of Margaret Parangosky as Big Maggie.

“How long has he been there, ma’am?” Vaz asked.

“Two years, this time around.” Osman moved along the bank of monitors and readouts, eyes darting from screen to screen. Port Stanley’s bridge looked more like a TV studio crossed with a reactor control room than a warship. “I don’t want him restabilizing what we destabilize. BB, patch me in to ‘Telcam and let’s get this done.”

Nobody asked for confirmation that Hood was out of the loop on this, but Mal could work that out for himself. It was one of those gray areas that he hated. But Osman’s the boss now. What goes on above her is between Parangosky and Hood. He turned his head very casual y, just to get Vaz’s reaction without BB noticing, and Vaz held his gaze for an extra second that said it al .

Ours is not to reason why. Right, Vaz.

They waited. Only the faint sigh and hum of the ship’s systems broke the silence for a long five minutes, and then there was a burst of static.

“It’s the Bishop for you, Captain,” BB said. “I’ve taken the liberty of piggybacking on his comms just to check who else he’s talking to. I’l route that audio separately to Dr. Phil ips.” Phil ips jerked in his seat as if BB had plugged him straight into the main power supply. “Oops, volume problem there … sorry.”

Osman wandered over to the viewscreen and stared out as she tapped her earpiece, then turned back to the surveil ance screens. “‘Telcam, this is Captain Osman. Are you ready to take delivery of the consignment?”

“Your arrival is timely, Shipmaster.” Mal hadn’t expected the thing to speak such good English. “More of the faithful turn to us every day, and they need arming.”

“So we rendezvous on New Llanel i.” Osman gestured to Naomi and pointed to the radar screens. Mal could see several smal returns on one of them. “How soon can you get there?”

“By your time—five hours, maybe six. Where are you? I detect no ships.”

Osman gave Naomi a thumbs-up. “I’m hiding, ‘Telcam. Most of the Jiralhanae aren’t on your side and they aren’t on ours either. Very wel , same coordinates as last time. Six hours from now.”

The comms line went dead. Naomi stood in front of the radar screen with her arms folded.

“He’s got three ships,” she said. “What are they, BB?”

“One boarding craft and two old Tarasque fighters. He’s been rummaging through the scrapyards.”

Phil ips swiveled his seat to face Osman. “Anyone want a quick summary of the comms chatter? They don’t trust us and they can’t work out why they can’t locate us or the source of the signal. They just don’t have access to the technology they’ve been used to, and it’s thrown them.”

“That’s what I like to hear,” Osman said. “Blind, deaf, and needy.”

“And one of the pilots wants permission to attack us on the surface once we do the handover. Someone told him to shut up and remember that they need us to keep bringing the goods until the sect’s strong enough to seize the Arbiter’s fleet.”

“Yes, but remember we can’t touch them, either,” Osman said. “We need to find some wil ing Jiralhanae. Nothing like a few angry Brutes to keep things interesting for them.”

“So much for al that Elite warrior honor,” Devereaux said. “They’re just as bad as us.”

“Then we need to dirty up our game.” Osman looked like she was starting to enjoy herself. Mal couldn’t work out if that was good or bad. “I’d hate to see ONI lose the title of Most Devious Bastards in the Galaxy to a bunch of hinge-heads.”

“Go, Team Devious,” Phil ips muttered, one hand to his earpiece. “No moral depth left unplumbed.”

Mal had always tried to avoid contact with ONI. Any sane fighting man did. They were organized crime in uniform. A visit from them was everyone’s worst nightmare. And now he was happy to do their dodgy bidding, pumped up for a fight on their behalf, al in the space of a few days.

Am I a bad bloke?

He didn’t feel any better or worse than anyone else. But he looked around the bridge, and he didn’t see a weird Spartan, one of ONI’s most senior spooks, a creepy AI with way too much mouth, and a bloke with a Ph.D. in hinge-heads.

He just saw his CO and his mates. Not ODSTs, admittedly, but people whose backs he’d watch, just like Vaz and Devereaux.

And he’d expect them to watch his.

CHAPTER FIVE

IF YOU’RE GOING TO PRACTICE DIVIDE AND RULE TO MAINTAIN SOME SORT OF EQUILIBRIUM IN ONI, IT’S NOT ENOUGH JUST TO SET PEOPLE AGAINST ONE ANOTHER.

THE TRICK IS TO MAKE SURE THAT YOU GET SOME USEFUL WORK OUT OF THEM AS WELL. OTHERWISE JUST DISPOSE OF THEM AND SAVE YOURSELF SOME TIME.

(ADMIRAL MARGARET O. PARANGOSKY, CINCONI, TO CAPTAIN SERIN OSMAN)

FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

Where the hel was she now?

Lucy struggled to her feet by pressing her back to the wal and sliding up it, rifle leveled. The ferocious blue-white light that flooded the chamber left her a sitting duck. She had no cover and she couldn’t see a damn thing. It took her a second or two to work out that there was a column to her right, a five-meter dash that she decided was worth the risk. She ran for it.

The light dimmed to daylight levels as she dropped behind the column and got her bearings. To her left, she could see her helmet in the middle of a patch of pale gray tiles. She turned her head to the right as far as she could, stil flat against the column, wondering if she was going crazy. The wal seemed to extend a lot farther than she’d expected, as if the room was bigger than it appeared from the outside. But it was hard to tel . She’d stumbled in here in pitch blackness.

She sucked in a breath and held it for a moment, listening for movement. The place smel ed oddly like a hospital and had the muffled deadness of a room ful of heavy drapes. But that wasn’t what she could feel under her boots. She put her left hand on the ground to confirm it, and felt perfectly smooth, cool stone, a kind of terrazzo just like the entrance.

Either there’s a lot of bodies in here or it’s soundproofing. Let’s take a look.

Lucy detached the scope from her rifle and angled the lens to see the reflection of what was behind her. It didn’t help much. It was a segment of a curved surface, maybe white or pale gray, and it could have been anything from another Dyson sphere to a piece of Forerunner art.

Whatever it was, she couldn’t stay here.

She snapped the optics back on her rifle and decided to make a grab for her helmet before she worried about anything else. It wasn’t just protection. It was her comms and sensors, too, for whatever good they’d do in here. She eased herself into a squat, ready to dart out but not sure yet where she’d find cover on the other side.

Okay—three, two, go.

She sprang out and ran for the helmet. She found herself in a warehouse ful of machinery, none of it instantly recognizable, and scooped the helmet under one arm before sprinting ful tilt for the nearest cover, a bizarre statue that made her think of an ancient Babylonian frieze.

Winged bull. No, not a bull. A lion? A horse?

Whatever it was, she skidded under one of its pil ar-sized legs—not vertical, raked back at an angle—and flattened herself against it before putting her helmet on one-handed. The head-up display scrol ed through a menu of red status icons: no bio signs from the rest of the squad, no radio signals, and no global positioning. Wel , at least its optics worked. And it would save her from a headshot.

She looked up at the underbel y of the bul -lion-horse, much less animal in form now that she was up close to it. It was a dark gray, boat-shaped vessel with four landing struts and a headlike bow section. The organic curves didn’t look aerodynamic at al and she couldn’t see anything that resembled a human ship, but the openings at the stern had to be afterburners or something. She just knew it. She might simply have been jumping to the wrong conclusion, misled by familiar shapes, but it was a guess she felt confident about.

Maybe this is the Forerunners’ parking garage. Makes sense. All part of rebuilding their civilization if the worst happened, just like the Chief said.