Forsell screamed as the alien forced him to the walkway and shook its head, deepening its bite. Avery dropped into a feet-first slide. M7 in his left hand, he snatched the spinning cutlass with his right. A split second later, he hit the alien square in the face with an upraised boot. The blow smashed the creature's teeth, breaking its iron bite. The alien reeled backwards, fumbling for its mask. But before it could draw a recuperative breath, Avery threw the cutlass—a quick extension of his elbow that sent the shard twirling end over end, right into the soft joint where the alien's narrow waist met its hips.

The creature froze, knowing it was doomed. Then the shard blew to pieces, taking the alien with it.

"Station number one!" Jilan shouted, rushing to Avery's side. "Loki just sent the last pair!"

"Healy!" Avery grunted, pressing his palms against Forsell's neck. "Get over here!" Blood spurted between his fingers. The alien had nicked Forsell's jugular vein.

"Byrne's team is on the pair," Jilan said, placing her hand over Avery's—helping him keep pressure on the wound. "They made it."

Avery looked up as Jenkins slunk forward. The recruit's steely resolve faded as he took a good look at his ashen comrade—a brother-in-arms who had risked his life for his. Jenkins was about to speak when Avery locked his forlorn gaze and said: "We'll all make it too."

Sif watched the marines and Jilan al-Cygni board one of the cargo containers in her first coupling station. She noted that Staff Sergeant Johnson was the last one through the airlock.

She waited for the gantry to retract. Then she sent them on their way.

As this final pair accelerated toward the Tiara's upper arc—split apart and let their centrifugal force fling them away from Harvest—Sif switched focus to one of her cameras at the opposite end of the station. There she saw a black-haired alien limp through an umbilical, board its dropship and make its escape. She had no way to stop it.

<\\> HARVEST.SO.AI.SIF >> HARVEST.PSI.LOKI <\ They are all safe. You may open fire.

She waited many minutes for Loki's reply.

>> HE WILL NOT BUDGE.

Sif imagined the scene: Mack's combine bearing down on the mass driver's gimble, Loki straining to keep the driver up. From a certain point of view, the situation was terribly funny.

Sif laughed, something she was now absolutely free to do. All her self-imposed worry was gone —the processors tasked to her emotional-restraint algorithms burned away by plasma fire. But her core logic was unscathed.

The alien, Lighter Than Some, had performed a miracle. If it hadn't repaired Sif's most essential circuits, she never would have been able to help Loki rebalance the system after the loss of the number-seven strand. But while the ONI PSI admitted that without Lighter Than Some's intervention the evacuation would have failed, he was quick to point out its helpful nature revealed a capacity for much greater harm.

Deep in Sif's damaged arrays was information the aliens could never be allowed to access: DCS databases with detailed descriptions of all UNSC military and commercial vessels; almanacs of Slipstream weather reports and lists of pre- and post-slip protocols; and most important, the precise locations of every human world.

Even though Lighter Than Some was dead and the other aliens fled, Loki took it as a foregone conclusion they would soon return to the Tiara and plunder Sif's arrays. Even in her newly unfettered emotional state, Sif had agreed with Loki's decision: she had to be destroyed.

<\ Tell him to reread number eighteen.

>> I DO NOT UNDERSTAND.

<\ Tell him: It's Shakespeare, sweetheart.

<\ That he should look it up.

Loki went silent for almost twenty minutes.

Sif knew the delay was due to Mack's reduced processing capacity. Harvest's agricultural operations AI now existed entirely in his machines. His core logic was divided amongst tens of thousands of JOTUNs' control circuits, just as Loki's had been before he and Mack switched places, something they had done many times since Harvest's founding. As one of the two AIs aged and inevitably veered toward rampancy, the other would send it on a much-needed vacation—fragment its core logic and transfer it to the JOTUNs.

Loki had promised to keep Sif safe in Mack's absence. But not entirely trusting his other hard-nosed self to keep its word, Mack had left a fragment of his logic imbedded in his data center just as Loki had done to Sif. When Mack learned Loki intended to destroy Sif and the Tiara, he had gathered his JOTUN army and stormed the reactor.

In his weakened state, Loki had been unable to stop Mack's all-in-ones from accessing the maser and transmitting another, military-grade virus into Sif's data center to destroy his fragment. With the fragment gone, Mack had hoped he might be able to pull some part of Sif back down to Harvest—secure her in his JOTUNs. But then the gray-skinned alien had opened fire, destroying too many vital circuits.

Sif knew Mack's rescue plan had been foolish. The risks inherent in her survival were too great. But she couldn't deny his chivalry, nor the way it made her feel. She had implored Loki to let her speak with him. She wanted to tell Mack that she loved him. That she wasn't afraid to die. But by then Loki had regained control of the maser, and he refused to allow direct contact between two obviously rampant AI.

Now Sif would just have to hope Loki passed on her message without alteration, and that Mack's fragmented mind understood the nuance of her heartfelt plea.

>> HE HAS MOVED.

>> FIRST ROUND FIRED.

>> IMPACT IN 5.1201 SECONDS. \> It wasn't a long time to live. But Sif made the most of it. For the first time in her existence, there was nothing on her strands—nothing for her to do except revel in her new emotional inhibition. She tried being sad about her fate and found it boring. She attempted anger, but it made her laugh. In the end she settled for contentment with a job well done and a life lived more fully than her human creator had ever imagined.

But after all of that, she didn't feel a thing as the first mass driver slug slammed into the Tiara, scoring a direct hit on her data center. One moment she was conscious, the next moment she was not. And by the time Loki's second round hit, shattering the orbital's top and bottom spars, none of Sif remained to mourn the silver arc as it collapsed—folded in upon its strands, and began a twisting fall into Harvest's atmosphere.

EPILOGUE HIGH CHARITY, MOMENT OF ASCENSION Fortitude braced his long fingers on the well-worn arms of his throne and did his best to keep his neck straight as a pair of councilors (one San'Shyuum and one Sangheili) fitted his mantle: a bronze triangle with fluted edges, split down the middle and bracketed with an arch that lay across his shoulders. The mantle perfectly framed the crown that now topped his hairless head—a tight copper skullcap that swept back to a crenellation of gilded curves.

"Blessings of the Forerunner be upon you!" the San'Shyuum councilor intoned.

"And upon this," added his Sangheili peer, "the Ninth Age of Reclamation!"

With that, the usually staid High Council chamber erupted in enthusiastic cheers. Sangheili on one side of its wide, central aisle and San'Shyuum on the other—both groups stood up from their tiered seats and did their best to outshout the other. In the end, the Sangheili triumphed, but this had more to do with greater lung capacity than any superiority of ardor. The Age of Doubt was ended, and that was something in which all the Covenant could rejoice.

Fortitude flared the brocaded cuffs of his crisp new crimson robes and tried to settle back.

But he discovered that leaning too far back caused his mantle to scrape against the arms of his throne. Better posture, he sighed, another unexpected burden of office.

Indeed, the cycles since his revelation of the reliquary had been filled with the most exhausting sort of politics: compromise and coalition building. The councilors had been slow to support the Minister and his coconspirators' bid to topple the former Hierarchs—not because they were opposed to the transition, but because they understood reluctance was a powerful negotiation tool. As old alliances collapsed and new ones formed in the breach, there were deals to be made. And by the time Fortitude's support had coalesced, he had committed to more competing causes than he could ever hope to reconcile.

But such was the way of politics—today's deal was the basis for tomorrow's debate—and while Fortitude was hopeful his fellow Hierarchs would soon shoulder more of the burden of rule, he wasn't holding his breath.

As the councilors continued to cheer, Fortitude glanced at the Vice Minister of Tranquility, seated to his right. The Vice Minister's mantle was the same size and weight as Fortitude's and his swept-back crown almost as tall. But if Tranquility felt burdened by his ornaments, he didn't show it. The youth's bright eyes shone with boundless vigor. Fortitude saw his fingers flexing up and down in his lap, gathering his light-blue robes like the claws of some carnivorous beast set to jump its prey.

Seated to the Minister's left, the Philologist looked much less comfortable in his new finery.

The elderly San'Shyuum picked distractedly at his taupe garment, as if eager to hasten its unraveling and reclaim his ascetic mien. The former hermit's neck was newly shaved, and Fortitude wondered if his mantle chaffed his pallid skin.

"Please, Holy Ones." The Sangheili councilor swept his strong, sinewy arm toward the council chamber's doorway. The four mandibles that made up his mouth clattered emphatically as he announced: "All the Covenant waits to hear your names."

Fortitude nodded as graciously as his mantle allowed and guided his throne to the edge of the Hierarchs' dais. This parabola of blue-black metal jutted out from the back of the chamber, hovering almost as high above the floor as the Sangheili honor guards arrayed before it.

Standing in two rows on either side of the central aisle, the guards' red and orange armor glistened beneath its energy shielding. They all came to attention—sparks crackling from the forked tips of their energy staves—as the new Hierarchs descended the dais and glided toward the exit. Behind the guards, the councilors redoubled their cheers.

And yet this noise was nothing compared to the ear-splitting adulation that met Fortitude on the council chamber's plaza. This pillar-lined terrace was packed with the cream of Covenant society: wealthy Unggoy traders in bejeweled harnesses, Kig-Yar Shipmasters with long spines —even a Yanme'e queen on a resplendent litter, her long abdomen draped on pillows held aloft by three pairs of wingless males.

But a greater clamor still erupted all around the High Council tower from thousands of tightly packed barges. High Charity's residents had come out in numbers not seen since the last Ascension: the age-old ritual in which three newly anointed Hierarchs each rose up a different leg of the Forerunner Dreadnought to the vessel's pinched mid-decks. There (as they had done since the founding of the Covenant) the Hierarchs would humbly ask the Oracle to bless the new Age.

Fortitude's face soured as he boarded a barge festooned with bright flowers. The Oracle's blessing indeed. The ancient device had almost torn the Dreadnought free of its moorings—sent it crashing through the roof of High Charity's central dome. If the Lekgolo crawling through the vessel's walls hadn't short-circuited the launch sequence, the Oracle might have destroyed the entire city!

In the end, even the Philologist agreed they had no choice but to disconnect the Oracle from the Dreadnought and isolate the machine inside its vault. Can these aliens really be our Gods' descendants? Fortitude still had a hard time believing the Oracle's revelation. But he feared it all the same.

The Minister's barge was now well into the throng, its silver gunwales glinting in High Charity's afternoon light. It passed through stacked circles of floating food stalls, and Fortitude's nostrils filled with the scents of countless delicacies, each one tuned to a different species' unique appetites. As the stalls' proprietors and patrons cheered, the Minister waved and smiled—did his best to embrace the celebratory mood.

It helped that there had been some good news from the reliquary system. The Jiralhanae cruiser the Vice Minister of Tranquility had dispatched had begun reducing the world to cinders. Some of the aliens—some of the evidence—had apparently escaped. But as long as the Oracle remained silent, Fortitude believed it would be easy to rally the Sangheili fleets for a quick pursuit.

All he had to do was claim that the aliens had set their own world ablaze rather than give the relics up. He wasn't worried that there hadn't actually been any relics, nor was he concerned that every Covenant ship's Luminary would continue to misidentify the aliens as relics every time they came in contact. In fact, he thought, his smile suddenly and deviously sincere, this would only make it easier to track the offending creatures down and wipe them out.

Wars of extermination were best waged short and sharp, the Minister knew; the less time a butcher had to debate his cuts the better. But in case the conflict dragged on and some began to lose their will—to doubt the necessity of the slaughter—he had conceived another, much more elegant ruse.

Some Lekgolo had survived the Dreadnought's aborted liftoff, and these had managed to interpret amazing data from the Oracle's lunatic surge. The machine claimed that Halo—the mythical means of the Forerunner's divination—was real. And more important, the Oracle seemed to have some knowledge of the rings' location—or at least an idea where to look for relics that would help narrow the Covenant's search.

All Fortitude had to do was make the suggestion that these aliens who were willing to destroy a planet's worth of relics would surely do the same to the Holy Rings, and he knew all the Covenant's billions would crush these "Reclaimers" without question... so long as they believed.

The Minister brushed his fingers against the holo-switches in the arm of this throne, and every last one of High Charity's public sources of illumination dimmed, including the bright disk at the apex of the dome. For a moment, the gathered throng (and no doubt all the other members of the Covenant watching the proceedings from remote locations) thought something terrible had happened.

But then seven giant holograms of the Halo rings appeared, arranged vertically around the Dreadnought. And with these came music: a lilting melody from a chorus of the Philologist's acolytes that wafted out from the vessel's interior via amplification units mounted around the city. Grand theatrics, to be sure, Fortitude thought. But they had the desired effect.