She was going to have to get used to those gray areas.

“I’l worry about that later,” she said, walking onto the bridge. The ODSTs looked up at her as if she’d said walkies to a dog. “Prepare to slip.

Let’s see how Spenser’s getting on.”

“Does that mean we get to stretch our legs, ma’am?” Mal asked. “Vaz wants a souvenir of Venezia.”

“Why not?” That was what ODSTs were for: operating behind enemy lines. “Want to check out some covert insertion sites, Devereaux?”

“Yes ma’am. ”

Osman could have relied on burst transmissions via the Bacchante node to stay in touch with Spenser, but it was time to assess how easily she could infiltrate the colony and maybe do a few discreet checks to see if any more tagged weapons had found their way there.

And Spenser had asked. He wasn’t the asking kind.

Port Stanley dropped out of slipspace a couple of hours from Venezia and took up station at a hundred thousand kilometers. Venezia might have had good tracking systems for a backwater colony, but a stealth corvette was stil far beyond its detection capabilities. They wouldn’t know she was there until it was too late, or maybe never, depending on what Osman decided to do if the colony pissed her off again.

CINCONI. That’ll be me before too long. Damn, all this is my decision now, isn’t it? Welcome to ONI command.

“Kilo-Three-Nine, this is Port Stanley. ” BB established a link with Spenser while checking on Phil ips and projecting the stored feed from Ontom onto a bulkhead screen. “There, I feel better for getting al my bits back together again. Phil ips looks like he’s having fun.”

Osman, one ear on the radio, tried to make sense of the Phil ips-view of Sanghelios. She’d review the footage later, but she seemed to have lost a day of his activities in slipspace and he was now bouncing around a huge tower that gave him a thirty-kilometer view in al directions. Maybe he liked the spectacular scenery, but maybe he’d also absorbed al those tips on how to make the most of surveil ance and his occasional excited comments under his breath to BB were al part of the show. Osman decided not to distract him. She could see he’d never be satisfied with a quiet life in academia now.

Got him. Let’s hope it’s a long career.

“Port Stanley, this is Kilo-Three-Nine.” Spenser sounded chirpy for a change. “I’ve put the kettle on. Want some coordinates?”

VENEZIA: THIRTY KILOMETERS OUTSIDE NEW TYNE.

It was dress-down Friday as far as Mal was concerned. He held out his arms and stood in front of Devereaux in the crew bay of the dropship, waiting for an opinion.

“Do I look like an ODST on his day off?” he asked. “Because I’m not removing any more body armor.”

Vaz squeezed through the hatch and inspected him as wel . Devereaux cocked her head on one side.

“It’s not your color,” she said, tugging at the sleeve of the battered jacket. “But you’ve got the failed militia look down to a T. Half of them are wearing warry-looking stuff like that.”

With a day’s stubble, Vaz looked like a gangland enforcer. It was mainly his expression, but the scar helped a lot.

“You’l do.” He leaned forward and straightened the back of Mal’s col ar. “Can you see this, Naomi?”

Her voice drifted over the intercom. “I stil say you need me down there.”

“You’re a two-meter blonde, and then some,” Mal said. “It’l take more than a scruffy pair of pants to disguise that in town.”

Spartans were great assets, but they weren’t made for plainclothes work. But Mal had never worked undercover before either, and neither had Vaz, so there was a certain amount of anxiety about how out of place they’d look.

“They used to say that a good SAS man could speak twenty languages while disguised as a bottle of Guinness,” Vaz said. “And don’t ask me what Guinness was, Devereaux. I think it was beer.”

“I love your little history lessons.” She took a carbine out of the locker. There was now a handwritten sign on the bulkhead that said UNSC TART- CART. “They’re always so incomplete. Now if you’l excuse me, gents, I’m going to do my nails while you’re gone.”

She loaded the carbine and went back into the cockpit. Tart-Cart, as she’d named the dropship, was hidden in a deep gorge lined with pines, and even if nobody was going to strol by casual y this was stil Venezia. The risks were high. But Devereaux could look after herself.

Mal and Vaz sat in the shadow of the port wing, staring down the river toward New Tyne. Spenser had said he’d be approaching from that direction and would appreciate not being shot at.

“Remind me, is he supposed to know now that we’re arming hinge-heads or not?” Mal asked.

Vaz patted the canvas kitbag on his lap, ful of odd bits of kit that Spenser needed. “He has to, or we can’t get him to check for tagged weapons.”

“Hope we don’t run into our Kig-Yar fans.”

“It’s a big galaxy. And we al look the same to them.”

“Yeah.” The sound of a vehicle engine wafted in and out on the breeze. Mal pressed his earpiece. “Dev, can you see what that is?”

There was a few seconds’ pause. “Looks like Spenser’s pickup on the scan,” she said. “Wait one … yes, here he comes.”

Mal stil had his rifle ready just in case. It was easier dealing with the Covenant, because everything that wasn’t human had been out to kil him and probably stil was. In the colonies, though, the enemy looked, spoke, and thought just like he did. They even carried the same weapons.

A wispy plume of dust marked the pickup’s progress. Then its dul red roof broke the line of the bushes and it bounced over a few boulders to come to a halt in the cover of some trees. It was a very old civilian variant of the Warthog, heavily patched and modified. Spenser climbed down from the front seat and beckoned.

“Wel , don’t you two look the part,” Spenser said as they clambered in. He looked Vaz over. “And you, Ivan—no getting into fights with the local Kig-Yar, hear? We can’t afford to draw attention.”

“I’l be good,” Vaz murmured.

Mal checked out the vehicle pass taped to the windshield, surprised that Venezia had rules and regulations, but he supposed that even a bunch of terrorist scumbags had to keep a town running smoothly. The name said AMBERLEY, MIKE and the next line said SITE CONTRACTOR.

“I’m an electrician,” Spenser said. “Great cover. You should see my brand-new criminal record.”

“You’ve been tel ing fibs to these good people.”

“Not entirely.” Spenser aimed the Warthog at the road, trundling over rocks and logs to drop a meter onto the smooth black surface. It wasn’t a backwater road at al , but a proper highway. “I can do basic electrical stuff. Real repairs. The bit about my being anxious to avoid contact with the CAA et al. because I skipped town with some cash from the defense forces—that’s mainly embroidery.”

“They check your references?”

“Of course. This is organized crime, not anarchic crime. Although we’ve got some of them, too.”

Mal noted the use of we and put it down to the spookish requirement to fit in. New Tyne loomed ahead of them, looking like a smal er-scale, low- rise version of Sydney, only in a much better state of repair. Why had he expected it to look like a shanty out of the GlobeWar doomsday movies that Vaz insisted on watching over and over again? These tossers had a thriving business, they hadn’t had a visit from the Covenant, and they’d been here a very long time. No wonder they had a proper infrastructure.

They were a couple of kilometers out of town now. A vehicle passed them heading the other way with a Kig-Yar driving. He didn’t even glance at them.

“Very cosmopolitan,” Vaz said.

“You’ve had my last sitrep, yes?”

“No, we’re a little behind with the paperwork. We’ve been busy.”

“Ah, yes, you busted Halsey. We’re going to need an awful y big carpet to sweep her under.”

Mal’s natural reaction would have been to ask Spenser if he’d heard about Infinity and mutter about the injustice of Halsey just being whisked away instead of being shoved out the airlock. But then he remembered that he didn’t know what Spenser needed to know, what he needed not to know, and what he actual y knew. It al went beyond opsec into a world where Mal never knew which word or syl able would be the fatal one. It was starting to permeate everything he said.

But that’s the idea, right?

Vaz, who’d been slouching on the backseat with his hands deep in his pockets, came to life and leaned forward to prod Mal in the shoulder.

“Look at that,” he said. “A Scythe.”

New Tyne’s skyline didn’t just have a couple of modest skyscrapers and a fancy spire. To the west, perched on one of the slopes, it had a gun battery. No, it had four nestled among the trees: two were recognizably M-71s, but the other two were Covenant kit, one of them a T-38. That was what they’d used to take a pop at Monte Cassino.

“You real y haven’t read my sitrep thoroughly, have you?” Spenser said. “This place is like a bazaar. They’ve got every conceivable kind of hardware you can imagine, and more comes in every day. We’ve got a Kig-Yar enclave here, Brutes, Grunts, every damn thing, and even I haven’t worked out whose side each is on yet. It’s Dissident Central.”

“This is a joke, right?”

“I wish. You know when Earth-based terrorists used to al hang out together, and arm and train one another? Wel , here we go again. It won’t be long before some chancer shows up with a Sangheili capital ship and hires it out for glassing runs.”

Mal turned slowly in his seat and gave Vaz a look, but he had his head down, keeping an eye on a smal scanner. Mal had no idea where he could take this conversation and where it would shift from exchanging intel to talking out of turn. He’d go back and talk to Osman about that so that he had better ground rules next time out.

“You know what we’re here for, don’t you, Mike?” he asked.

“I know what I’m here for,” Spenser said, not taking his eyes off the road. They were in pretty busy traffic now, crossing a bridge with tol booths. It was so normal. “And that’s to head these bastards off at the pass. I realize you’ve got other bastards on your list.”

“Okay, so we both know what we’re talking about.”

“I think so. And if we manage to kil both bastards with one stone, that would be terrific.”

Mel just nodded. On the right, to one side of a grocery store—normal, normal, normal—there was a long road where the buildings gradual y thinned out and he could see a big, wire-fenced, forbidding place like a military instal ation.

Spenser took one hand off the steering wheel and gestured toward it, eyes not leaving the road ahead for a second. The traffic was at a standstil . “That’s where I work at the moment. The Home Guard, you could cal it. Handy, isn’t it?”

What a way to spend your life. Always being someone else, always among the enemy, never among your mates. Mal could see how spook personalities got bent out of shape. I’ll settle for being a tourist in this game.

Vaz grunted. Mal looked back at him again. His gaze was fixed on the tag scanner, a smal palm-sized handset that could have passed for any kind of personal comms. Vaz caught Mal looking and held it out so that he could see it.

A discreet green trace blipped rhythmical y on the screen. Vaz angled the device this way and that, doing a good impersonation of casual y checking his comms signal rather than what he was actual y doing—picking up microtransponders embedded in ONI-supplied Sangheili weapons.

“What setting have you got that on?” Mal murmured.

“Short range.” Vaz turned very slowly and ran his gaze over the vehicles around them as if he was just bored with the traffic jam. “My bet’s on the truck.”

“What is?” Spenser asked.

“Just checking.” Mal couldn’t believe that an old spook like Spenser would be troubled by gun running. “Is there some armaments clearing house here?”

“What, like Death Mart or something? Of course not. This place is porous in trade terms, shal we say, but they don’t exactly have an ordnance supermarket.”

“Oh wel . Maybe you can take us on a guided tour of the hot spots.”

“Oh, I see.”

“Yeah.”

“You just tracking stuff, or have you lost something important?”

So he knew. Mal breathed again. “Tracking now.”

“See, it’s always easier if we pool intel, but I understand.”

Mal decided that Vaz’s strategy was probably the wisest: silence. He sat back and just took in the rest of the ride. Spenser’s Hog pickup blended into the workday traffic and as it wound its way through town, the sight of assorted ex-Covenant species going about their business started to become as routine as a mixed neighborhood anywhere on Earth.

There was no guaranteeing that any of them had ever been loyal to the Covenant, of course, least of al the Kig-Yar. There were a lot of them here.

“Okay, this is Chateau Spenser,” Spenser said, turning left down a ramp and into what looked like a derelict industrial estate. “I’l bring you up to speed with what I’ve been monitoring since I got here. And stick the carbine under your jacket before you get out, wil you? Neighbors.”

He turned into the short concrete driveway of a single-story house that looked like every other one in the road. Mal glanced over his shoulder as he got out of the vehicle, but there were no lace curtains twitching. Inside, a long dimly lit passage led through to a back door with a single glass panel, with rooms to either side. Spenser led them into the kitchen.