"A short while?" Keyes didn't like the sound of that.

"He rammed a Covenant destroyer."

"Sometimes that's the only option you have ..."

"That was after he'd been ordered to retreat. The only reason he wasn't court-martialed was because he disabled it long enough for another ship to finish it off with a MAC. They fished him out of the debris."

Keyes mulled that over. He was going to be serving with this man. Maybe he shouldn't have jumped to saying "yes" so quickly.

"You know why he did it, sir?" Jeffries continued. "Rumor has it he's mad with grief. Covenant burned his home world, while he was out on a patrol, seven years ago. Never been the same since."

"Okay, that's enough," Keyes said. The conversation was sliding into innuendo; he didn't need to be poisoned against his future commanding officer.

There'd be plenty of time to get to know Zheng once aboard. And maybe this was why Keyes had been called back in, to add a bit of strategy and calm into Zheng's style. "Oh, and one more thing, Mr. Jeffries?"

"Sir?"

"When you fly me, a commanding officer, out of a military installation, you will follow the flight plan you were given. Failure to do so, including dropping out of radar range near tree level, means they have every right to swat you out of the sky like a bug. We are, after all, on a world near the front. You yourself indicated that to me." The steel in his voice surprised even him. "In the event that we were to be shot down for violating the flight plan, I would personally hunt you down from beyond the grave, soldier, and make your life a miserable thing to behold. Do you get me, soldier?"

Jeffries kept his gaze dead ahead through the windshield. "Yes sir."

"Lastly, you will don your full flight gear. Were this Pelican to be holed, while

I

might be gasping for air, I fully expect you to be able to fulfill your mission -- even if your mission is as meaningless as being my personal, full-time chauffeur. We clear, Jeffries?"

"Crystal, sir."

Keyes clipped himself into the copilot's chair and listened to the Pelican's engines warm up. He was bridge crew on a stealth ship, with a mystery mission from the ONI in three days.

It was good to be back.

"All right, Mr. Jeffries, take this bird up."

Keyes leaned back in his chair, enjoying the sensation of thrust. Three days to shake out the frigate and chase civilians to enforce the Cole Protocol seemed straightforward enough. A nice way to ease back into ship life.

Chapter THREE

OAKS CENTRAL HABITAT, THE RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

Ignatio Delgado walked slowly toward his copilot's funeral dressed in a full suit, a tie uncomfortably snug around his neck. The painful plasma burns on his torso still hurt but he felt compelled to attend. '

The parks existed on the inside of a hollowed-out asteroid; look up and you were looking down on the treetops of the other side of the park.

Maria Esquival intercepted him near a grove of tiny trees.

"Hey, Nacho." She grabbed his hand. Only Maria called him by that nickname, because only Maria knew him from back when he was a grubby little kid running around the surface of Madrigal. Back then she'd been a scrappy tomboy from just down the street with her hair pulled back in a functional pony-tail. "You really shouldn't be here."

"He was my best friend."

Maria squeezed his hand. "I know. But they still don't want you here. You have to respect his family's wishes."

In the distance, the Hollister family had their backs to him. All dressed in black, surrounding a small urn, they were adding his ashes to the ground near one of the trees that gave the habitat its name.

They blamed Delgado for Melko's death. The copilot had succumbed to his wounds before anyone had gotten to

Distancia.

An unnecessary death, his family thought. They could care less about protecting the data that led back to Earth. They'd fought for self-rule from among the depths of this system for generations. Let the aliens have Earth, let it burn. They didn't care.

"Come on," Maria said, guiding him away.

"Do you think he died in vain?" Delgado asked.

Maria kept moving him along. "It's not for me to say, Nacho. But I've known both of you long enough to know that you both stood by each other to do what you each thought was right. So pay them no attention. They're grieving."

Maria had been with Delgado when their parents had rushed them to the large fields outside Nueva Lima, bundling them aboard a fat cargo ship as

their crying parents told them they'd be on the next ship following them.

They'd been crammed into the hold with all the other scared children, trying to figure out what was happening. Delgado had been fourteen. Maria had been planning her quinceanera.

They'd held each other when the air outside turned white-hot, and the cargo ship shook and rattled. And when it had reached orbit, the shocked pilot's voice filled the hold, telling them that the entire surface of Madrigal had been "glassed."

All because of the war between the UNSC and the Covenant.

They strolled along, heading toward a man, who appeared to be waiting for them by one of the habitat's famous large oak trees. His dark eyes taking in the funeral in the distance. He wore casual overalls, and a cap.

Maria stopped. "My brother needs to talk to you, though he refuses to tell me about what."

"Don't take it so personally, Maria. It's council business."

Nine Security Council members were voted into position by the citizens of the Rubble. They handled the entire structure's defenses, along with the AI Juliana.

Diego and the Council had chosen Delgado and Melko on short notice to protect the navigation when the Nav data started disappearing. With their

years of piloting cargo throughout the

Rubble, they knew it all inside and out. The council felt secrecy was their best option. With their volunteer defense forces and open nature, trying to put the chip under iron-tight guard would raise attention and create a big target.

But after this latest mishap, Delgado was convinced someone on the Council was leaking the location.

"You slumming it, Diego?" This was not the usual, tightly tailored man that Delgado expected.

Diego grimaced. "Keeping a low profile, Ignatio." He kissed his sister on the cheek, and she left the copse of trees to walk alone across the manicured grass toward the funeral.

"What do you need?" Delgado finally asked, watching Maria.

"You seem convinced that someone on the Security Council is leaking information about the location of the navigation data. You've been sniffing around, kicking up attention, trying to figure it out." Diego started walking out from the park toward the large airlocks at the end of Oaks Central Habitat. "When we decided to use you to move the data, and keep it safe, we were figuring on your keeping a low profile. That was the whole damn point, Ignatio."

"Someone is leaking it," Delgado said. "Those Jackals knew exactly where it was. This was the second time they made a play to get at it, and they were damn close. If I hadn't decided to move the data earlier than the date I gave the Security Council, those Jackals would have had it. You know, whoever leaked that murdered Melko. And I want them to pay."

They passed by the giant rolling axle of the join between the docking tubes and the asteroid's slow-spinning hub.

"I understand what you're doing, Ignatio. But the only people who knew where the navigation data was are the Security Council members, To suggest that one of us leaked it is serious."

"I know that," Delgado said as they walked into a massive, clear tube. From here they could see other asteroids connected to Oak Park. The connected structures faded off into the distance like a giant's tinker toy set.

Artificial gravity faded away, and the two men grabbed the railings running along the tube as they hung in the air. In the center of the docking tube, pods zipped along with goods and passengers moving from rocky habitat to habitat. "A lot of people wouldn't mind handing over the chart data to the Kig-Yar. They're offering us power, money, and Covenant technology for it."

"And what about you, Diego?" Delgado asked. "You in favor of that?"

Diego slowed down and came to a stop in the busy tube. He looked off at the looming orb of the gas giant Hesiod in the distance. "I think that if we hand over the chart data, our usefulness to the Kig-Yar is over. That's why I've worked so hard to keep the data concealed. That's why I asked you to help me do it. Most of the Council agrees."

"Most?" Delgado seized on the word. Diego was being surprisingly moderate for an old Insurrectionist.

Diego handed him a cigar, letting it hang in the air thanks to the lack of artificial gravity. Delgado looked down. "A Sweet William? I didn't realize there were any left."

"A Council member gave me one of these. Hinted around that he could get me more, said he had a smuggling operation out of Charybdis IX with one of his ships. He says that the UNSC Navy has been getting ready to crack down on slipspace jumps by citizens. They want everything to be

militarized." Diego practically spat the last word. "This Council member has been shipping weapons of some sort he purchased from the Covenant for brother Insurrectionists back in the colonies, but he's worried that whatever is destroying the navigation data throughout the Rubble may get to him. He wants to give it to the Kig-Yar before something happens. He claims he's making his last smuggling trip now. Afterwards, he wants to give the Kig Yar his ship, and the navigation data aboard it. I'm getting this secondhand, but it looks like he's trying to bribe a majority Council vote for selling the navigation data."

"You're going to let that happen?"

"I had Juliana hunt for a likely candidate among recent ship activity." Diego smiled referring to the Rubble's AI. "She came up with one. The ship's name was

Kestrel.

It is the only known ship that could still be in the colonies and able to make it back. It hasn't returned to dock, as far as we can tell. All our other smuggling ships have been destroyed, or had their data erased. We're truly cut off from the rest of humanity."

"Your Council member could have been lying; he could have just found some boxes of Sweet Williams."

"Maybe," Diego said. "But Juliana thinks the

Kestrel is our ship."

"So what do you want me to do?" Delgado handed the cigar back by bumping it back through the air at Diego.

"Find out more about the Kestrel, Ignatio. See if they were really working for a Council member. Find out if they've snuck back into the Rubble. Because if you can connect them to our Council member, then I can move against him. There are better things to be trading for those weapons. Like ... medicine instead of damned cigars."

Diego crushed the cigar, and the pieces of tobacco flakes hung in the air between them. "And since I'm giving you this lead, please work hard to keep it quiet."

"I can do that." Delgado brushed the crushed cigar out of the air between them. "What's his name?"

Diego sighed. He looked very reluctant to be giving out a name of a fellow Security Council member. Maybe he was having second thoughts. He

turned and looked out of the tube. The entire collection of tubes and asteroids housed the remains of Madrigal's proud colony: its people.

It was called the Rubble because that's what it had once been. Detritus, rubble, rocks, and slag left over from the creation of the solar system, trailing the gas giant Hesiod.

"You've done a lot for me, Diego, I appreciate everything," Delgado said. Diego had taken in both Maria and Delgado when they arrived those years ago, after Madrigal was destroyed. Diego had joined the Insurrectionists years before Madrigal was glassed, and he'd been the only person waiting for them after they'd fled the planet. Delgado owed Diego a lot. But before everything changed, Diego planted bombs in passenger ships, spaceports, and on stations. He'd smuggled and pirated, and everything that implied. Delgado always felt a sense of awkwardness, accepting what his hard-working parents, had they lived, would have called blood money. There was a tension in his friendship with Diego. But then, maybe that wasn't fair. Since the fall of Madrigal, Diego had thrown himself at the idea of the Rubble. Delgado changed the tone of his words. "So please give me the name. I won't kill the man. I'll bring him to justice. We're not the rabble we used to be, we've changed since the Fall of Madrigal."

Back then, the Rubble had just been a massive Insurrectionist military base, quartered and scattered throughout the asteroids trailing the gas giant in a trojan orbit.

But in short time, using spaceships, raw materials, and anything they could lay their hands on that hadn't been destroyed by the Covenant, they'd built the Rubble that they were now looking out on. It was something to be proud of.

"I know." Diego turned back to him. "Doesn't make it easier. The man you're looking to link the

Kestrel to is Peter Bonifacio."

Delgado looked down the length of the tube. Bonifacio did a lot of smuggling back before the Covenant glassed Madrigal. Now he was reduced to

occasional sneaks back to the Inner Colonies, though even those trips had become too dangerous as he lost ship after ship to both UNSC and Covenant forces. Delgado had moved stuff from asteroid to asteroid for the man, who always paid late. How he'd managed to get on the ballot to be voted onto the Security Council Delgado had never understood.

"Consider it done," Delgado said. Halfway around the clear tube a series of streamlined transit cars sped up, moving passengers inside from one habitat to another on a maglev track.

"Good. Thank you. And Delgado? You'll need to be careful."

Delgado nodded. The two men shook hands, and then floated to go off their separate ways. Diego with sadness in his eyes. Delgado with fire and

vengeance.

Chapter FOUR

OUTER FRINGES, ECTANUS 45 SYSTEM

Keyes rode the copilot's seat as Jeffries expertly guided a Pelican full of orbital-drop shock troopers into the inky depths of space between the Midsummer Night and the tattered-looking civilian cargo hauler