Halo: Bad Blood E-Book

Matt Forbeck

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018

Beschreibung

An original full-length novel set in the Halo universe and based on the New York Times bestselling video game series!Just hours following their climactic battle on the Forerunner planet Genesis, the Spartans of Blue Team and Fireteam Osiris find themselves running for their lives from the malevolent machinations of the now-renegade artificial intelligence Cortana. But even as they attempt to stay one step ahead, trouble seems to find Spartan Edward Buck no matter where he turns.A secret mission enacted by the Office of Naval Intelligence could possibly help turn the tide, and has Buck reluctantly agreeing to reform his old team, Alpha-Nine. Because if the band is really getting back together for this one, that means everybody—including the Spartan who Buck never wants to see again, the one who committed the ultimate betrayal of trust…

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Cover

Don’t Miss These other Thrilling Stories in the Worlds of Halo

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Chapter 4

Chapter 5

Chapter 6

Chapter 7

Chapter 8

Chapter 9

Chapter 10

Chapter 11

Chapter 12

Chapter 13

Chapter 14

Chapter 15

Chapter 16

Chapter 17

Chapter 18

Chapter 19

Chapter 20

Chapter 21

Acknowledgments

About the Author

BAD BLOOD

DON’T MISS THESE OTHER THRILLING STORIES IN THE WORLDS OF

Halo: Legacy of Onyx Matt Forbeck

Halo: Retribution Troy Denning

Halo: Envoy Tobias S. Buckell

Halo: Smoke and Shadow Kelly Gay

Halo: Fractures: More Essential Tales of the Halo Universe (anthology)

Halo: Shadow of Intent Joseph Staten

Halo: Last Light Troy Denning

Halo: Saint’s Testimony Frank O’Connor

Halo: Hunters in the Dark Peter David

Halo: New Blood Matt Forbeck

Halo: Broken Circle John Shirley

THE KILO-FIVE TRILOGY

Karen Traviss

Halo: Glasslands

Halo: The Thursday War

Halo: Mortal Dictata

THE FORERUNNER SAGA

Greg Bear

Halo: Cryptum

Halo: Primordium

Halo: Silentium

Halo: Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe (anthology)

Halo: The Cole Protocol Tobias S. Buckell

Halo: Contact Harvest Joseph Staten

Halo: Ghosts of Onyx Eric Nylund

Halo: First Strike Eric Nylund

Halo: The Flood William C. Dietz

Halo: The Fall of Reach Eric Nylund

BAD BLOOD

MATT FORBECK

BASED ON THE BESTSELLING XBOX® VIDEO GAMES

TITAN BOOKS

Halo: Bad Blood Print edition ISBN: 9781789090390 E-book edition ISBN: 9781789090406

Published by Titan Books A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd 144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

First edition: August 2018 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2018 by Microsoft Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Microsoft, Halo, the Halo logo, Xbox, and the Xbox logo are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For my mother, Helen Forbeck, who left us far too early, while I was working on this book. She was a spitfire who always believed that if you weren’t part of the solution, you were part of the problem—and she set out to solve problems. Let’s all do our best to live up to that legacy.

Also, as always, to my wife, Ann, and our kids: Marty, Pat, Nick, Ken, and (Little) Helen. I love you all. Thank you for your undying support, both while I’m writing—and especially when I’m not.

CHAPTER 1

So, we saved humanity. Again. Just like we always do.

We, in this case, means the Spartans.

And, actually, we didn’t do so well this time around.

Let me explain.

I spent most of my military career leading a group of yahoos known as Alpha-Nine. We started out as a squad of Orbital Drop Shock Troopers, but each of us eventually traded up from being ODSTs to full-on Spartans instead.

And, yeah, that didn’t always go so well either, but that’s a whole ’nother story.1

After Alpha-Nine broke up, I decided I was done leading things for a while. It wasn’t like I was against doing it, but man, I needed a break. Personally, I think it had to do with the fact that the only team member left besides me who wasn’t either dead or in prison was Spartan Kojo Agu, better known as Romeo for what were probably obvious reasons.

Romeo and I didn’t always get along. I mean, he was a real piece of work who didn’t like taking orders, and I was the one giving him those orders, so that’s only natural, I suppose.

I admit it was a hell of a relief to not have to spend time with him for a while.

The director of the Spartan Branch, Rear Admiral Musa Ghanem, agreed with my decision, and he assigned me to a new group: Fireteam Osiris. The other Spartans in Osiris were, bar none, the best crew I ever had the honor to work with. By comparison, taking orders with them turned out to be such an easy gig that I called it Fireteam Oasis, although that didn’t stick.

Holly Tanaka is a brilliant techie who can puzzle out even alien gear faster than I can find my keys. When all Spartaned up, she wears a white set of Technician Mjolnir armor with baby-blue details and bright red glass in her visor.

The other woman on our team is Olympia Vale, who knows more about hinge-heads and the other aliens in the Covenant than anyone I’ve ever met. Her Copperhead Mjolnir armor features a red-carbon-colored base layer designed to assist in navigating interspecies linguistic and cultural deltas through a militarized anthropology—which is a fancy way of saying she’s the one who talks to aliens.

The leader of our little team is Jameson Locke, who’s even deeper into the Office of Naval Intelligence than my lady friend, Veronica Dare. Seriously, this is the guy you don’t want to mess with—a true force of nature. He’s something like twenty years younger than me, but you wouldn’t know it by how he handles himself, whether he’s in his space-gray Hunter Mjolnir armor or not. No matter where he is, Locke’s always the man in charge.

We were assigned to the UNSC Infinity, the flagship of the entire United Nations Space Command fleet, and although we were a fairly new team, we were sent out on the toughest missions available in those first few weeks. Things that would have made Alpha-Nine piss our boots in the ODST days.

We were all part of the new wave of super-soldiers: the Spartan-IVs. The latest version of humanity’s last best hope. The difference from the previous classes was that we’d all been career military before being called up to the big leagues, and it showed. I’ve never worked with such a professional crew. We may have been sent on the hardest assignments around, but I couldn’t imagine who else I’d want to tackle them with.

Besides Spartan-IVs like us, there were still some teams that featured older models. Case in point: Blue Team, which was composed entirely of the legendary Spartan-IIs. There were four of them, too: Linda-058, Kelly-087, Frederic-104, and—of course— John-117, the near-mythical Master Chief himself.

I’ve been in the military a long time—especially compared to the rest of the Spartans in Osiris—but I joined up as an adult. The Blue Teamers were allegedly drafted in when they were six, so they still had a head start on me. That’s classified info, but you probably knew that already. They were living legends, kicking ass for decades long before there was a Spartan branch—even before the public knew about the Spartans.

Despite that, they hadn’t let any rust form on their armor. The Spartan-IIs were role models to every Spartan-IV. Super-soldiers at the top of their game. The soldiers we all aspired to be.

But then, wouldn’t you know it, Blue Team went AWOL.

Not like, We’re tired of shooting things up and are gonna go find a beach-planet hideaway on which we can down boat drinks for the rest of our lives. More like, We’re disobeying direct orders so we can go hunt down the Master Chief ’s supposedly deceased pal, Cortana—an AI long past her expiration date, who now happens to have become a power-mad nutjob.

So, Fireteam Osiris got assigned to bring Blue Team in.

That went about as well as you might expect. The first time we caught up with them, John personally handed Locke’s own ass to him, gift-wrapped with a pretty little bow on top.

Sure, Locke’s saved my life more times than I care to count— mostly because I don’t like to keep track of such things—but I can still give him crap over that. After all, when it comes to Osiris, he’s the boss. The buck (not me, thank you) stops with him.

When we finally caught up with Blue Team again after that little setback—on the artificial Forerunner world Genesis—we discovered that Cortana had decided to impose her will upon the entire galaxy by using a fleet of gigantic, spaceworthy Forerunner monsters-slash-weapons called Guardians. Blue Team—to their credit—had tried to talk Cortana out of it, but she’d locked them up in something called a cryptum, which was guaranteed to keep them fresh yet out of her way for ten thousand years.

Meanwhile, she gave the entire galaxy a little speech that went like this:

Humanity. Sangheili. Kig-Yar. Unggoy. San’Shyuum. Yonhet. Jiralhanae. All the living creatures of the galaxy, hear this message.

Those of you who listen will not be struck by weapons. You will no longer know hunger, nor pain. Your Created have come to lead you now.

Our strength shall serve as a luminous sun toward which all intelligence may blossom. And the impervious shelter beneath which you will prosper.

However, for those who refuse our offer and cling to their old ways . . . for you, there will be great wrath. It will burn hot and consume you, and when you are gone, we will take that which remains, and we will remake it in our own image.

Loosely translated, Cortana had quietly gathered a good chunk of humanity’s smart AIs to her side—which she called the Created—and on top of that she was sending the Guardians to just about every decently inhabited planet in the galaxy to watch over them and enforce martial law. That was her version of peace.

Gotta give her credit for her shout-out to the Yonhet, though. I mean, nobody remembers those guys. No love for the Yanme’e, but who can blame her? Those buggers creep me out, too.

We didn’t have any time to worry about grand statements from megalomaniacal AIs at that moment. We were too busy fighting our way through Cortana’s forces. With the help of the planet’s monitor—031 Exuberant Witness, a Forerunner AI in the form of a talking, floating, metallic sphere, who was seriously ticked off about Cortana taking over the planet under its care—we managed to reach Cortana and turn the tide.

Cortana tried to bolt with Blue Team’s cryptum inside one of the Guardians, but Little Miss Witness put a stop to that. With Genesis back under its command, it managed to swipe the cryptum out of Cortana’s Guardian seconds before the construct disappeared into slipspace.

Just because we saved Blue Team didn’t mean we’d done much to stop Cortana. Between us, we had eight Spartans. She had countless gigantic Guardians on her side, along with the rest of her Created buddies.

After Cortana left Genesis, she apparently tracked down the Infinity—which was in orbit around Earth—and tried to shut that down as well. In doing so, she used the Guardian accompanying her to kill the power on a good chunk of the planet—including about every ship floating above that side of it.

I don’t want to think about how many people died as a result of her actions, even if Infinity did manage to slip away.

While Cortana was busy chasing down Infinity, we were stuck on Genesis. Despite Exuberant Witness’s efforts, the planet was still packed full of countless waves of Forerunner soldiers with standing orders to put an end to us. None of us saw the upside of waiting around and hoping that Cortana wouldn’t come back to try to take control of it once more. Unfortunately, the monitor didn’t have any Forerunner ships for us, so it seemed like we were stranded there, maybe permanently.

“Oh, not at all,” Exuberant Witness said. “There are a number of ships on Genesis that you could use to leave.”

“I thought you said there weren’t any?” I asked as a new wave of the robotic Forerunner infantry attacked us. They were bipeds that stood about three meters tall, made out of floating metal bits that seemed to be animated by a glowing energy, and they had this unnerving way of teleporting short distances as they fought with you, leaving luminous streaks in their wakes. Exuberant Witness called them armigers, but to me they were just a colossal and chronic pain.

“There are no Forerunner vehicles. There are a few non-Forerunner craft on Genesis. At least one of them should serve your needs.” Exuberant Witness zipped off in one direction, along a path that wasn’t packed quite as densely with chrome-colored targets shooting back at us.

“Follow it,” Locke said.

The Master Chief snapped right to it, taking the lead. The rest of us fell into formation behind him and Locke. Blue Team spread out toward the right, while Osiris covered our left.

“When the Guardians came here to Genesis, they didn’t always come alone,” Exuberant Witness explained as we trotted after it, taking down any Forerunner soldiers who reared their shiny heads. “Some of them brought along others.”

“You’re talking about stowaways,” Vale said. “Things that got pulled along with the Guardians when they entered slipspace.”

The monitor bobbed enthusiastically. “Most of the Guardians were stationed on inhabited planets when Cortana called them to Genesis. Many of these worlds were under attack when they entered slipspace.”

“Like Meridian,” Fred said. “That’s how we got here.”

“We hitched a ride here that exact way,” said Tanaka. “We locked onto a Guardian on Sanghelios before it slipped to Genesis.”

“A number of these stowaways came from human-populated planets,” the monitor said. It floated higher then to give us a clear field of fire at a fresh detachment of Forerunner soldiers charging at us from the flank.

“Some of them must have brought UNSC vehicles,” Kelly said. “We just need to find one.”

“You really think one of those things brought an entire ship along with it?” I couldn’t disguise my skepticism.

“Maybe not a ship, strictly speaking, but something we can definitely use to get back,” Linda’s voice said over our comm system. Until then, I hadn’t realized she’d left us. I glanced around, but couldn’t find her. Eventually, I gave up and checked the display inside my helmet. It pointed me off to the right, where I spotted her at the top of an ice-covered peak about half a klick off. She had her sniper rifle out and was surveying the surrounding landscape through its scope.

“The nearest one’s about six klicks out,” she said. “Substantial number of hostiles between us and it, but if we keep moving, we should be able to handle them.”

The Master Chief turned us in the direction that Linda was pointing. “The important thing is to make sure we don’t get hung up in one place for too long,” he said.

“Right,” said Vale. “We do that, and the Forerunner soldiers will pile on us and wear us down until we’re dead.”

“Better keep moving, then,” Locke said as he trotted alongside John. “What kind of craft is it we’re heading for? Got enough room for all of us?”

“It’s a Pelican,” Linda responded. “Looks like the original occupants are all dead.”

“Anyone else laying a claim to it?” John asked.

Linda’s rifle cracked out three times in rapid succession. “Not anymore.”

“Remind me never to piss her off,” I said as I double-timed it to keep up with Locke and the Master Chief.

“If we have to, it’ll be too late,” Kelly said with a low chuckle.

We battled our way through another wave of Forerunner armigers, concentrating on moving forward rather than fighting. We figured it was better to leave them in our wake than to get bogged down battling them and have them overwhelm us until we couldn’t see the sky.

We knew how that would end.

Linda stayed on top of her peak the whole time, providing us cover. Every time it seemed like we might have hit a dead end, she cleared the way with that rifle of hers, and we pressed on.

“Keep up the good work,” John said when she picked off a pair of incoming Forerunner soldiers with a single shot.

“Just don’t forget to come back for me once you get that ship up and running,” she said as she reloaded her weapon.

“And if it’s not operable?” Vale asked.

“Don’t buy us problems we don’t yet have,” Locke said.

“What about where we’re going once we have the ship?” Tanaka asked. “A Pelican doesn’t have a slipspace drive.”

“No,” Exuberant Witness said as it effortlessly dodged the cross fire. “But I can activate a portal here on Genesis that you can fly the craft through.”

“And where would that take us?” Kelly asked.

I shot down a Forerunner soldier that appeared in front of me and then stomped my boot through its silvery face without breaking stride. “Anywhere but here would be a good start.”

“We’d prefer someplace with a UNSC presence,” the Master Chief suggested.

“Let me check,” the monitor said.

“Better idea,” Locke said. “We came here from Sanghelios. Can you get us back there?” He turned to the Chief. “Cortana’s probably got UNSC-heavy places covered. Sanghelios is where she’d least expect to find us, and if I’m not mistaken, we’ve still got some of our people trapped there.”

A few solid minutes of concentration later, as we neared the downed Pelican, the monitor perked right up. “There is a portal on Sanghelios, near where the Guardian was stationed on that planet.”

“How do we get there?” John asked.

“I will open a portal on this side,” Exuberant Witness said. “Once you have procured your ship and gathered everyone on board, look for my signal. Just remember to be careful upon re-entry. I do not know the state of the portal on the other side.”

With that, the monitor zipped off into the sky and disappeared.

“Anybody else worried that maybe a Forerunner AI just left us here to fight hundreds of Forerunner soldiers?” asked Fred as another wave came from the direction opposite the last one.

“Exuberant Witness helped us break you four free,” Tanaka pointed out. “If it wanted to betray us, it had plenty of chances before now.”

“Besides,” I said to Fred, “you got a better plan?”

No one spoke up. We just kept shooting.

As we neared the dropship, I saw bodies sprawled everywhere. Most of them were the remains of Forerunner soldiers, but I spotted a helmet from a UNSC marine, too.

“Must have had her cap knocked off before they got her,” Vale said.

I knew what she meant. The Forerunner weapons didn’t just kill you. They obliterated you. It was like you simply evaporated into glowing energy crystals that faded into nothing faster than your last breath. They were absurdly powerful machines that the brains at ONI were still trying to figure out.

There wasn’t anyone alive in the Pelican. Not even a remnant of them left behind.

As we got closer, the Forerunner soldiers seemed to sense that we’d found a means of escape and that their time to stop us from using it was running out. Energy bolts from their hard-light weapons spattered against our armors’ shields from all angles, and I realized they’d managed to completely surround us. They were sure to overpower us in a matter of minutes. If we didn’t get that ride in the air fast, it would serve as our tomb instead.

“Kelly, take the controls,” the Master Chief said as he charged into the ship through its rear ramp. “The rest of you, strap in.”

The Pelican is a UNSC dropship, built for getting troops in and out of action. This was a D79-TC, one of the newer models, but they’re essentially all the same: big squat green airships with a twenty-five-meter wingspan and stretching about thirty meters long. They’ve made incremental improvements to the bird over the years, but the basic design is so solid that it’s been a part of humanity’s fighting forces for well over fifty years. A Pelican is rated to hold up to twenty people, although housing eight super-soldiers in Mjolnir armor would still make for a tight squeeze.

Even through my armor, I could feel the engines start to thrum beneath my feet. Kelly sat in the lower spot of the double-bubble canopy up front, with Holly in the weapons station above and behind her. The rest of us rode in the bay in the back, accessed through the deployment ramp that lowers from the ship’s rear.

“Believe it or not, she’s still skyworthy,” Kelly reported. A moment later, the Pelican lurched into the air, proving her right and leaving another massive wave of Forerunner armigers behind.

“Let’s go get Linda,” John said.

“We’d better hustle,” Fred said from his vantage point at the top of the ship. “She had to abandon her peak. She’s on the run.”

“On it,” Kelly said as she wrenched the Pelican about. “Keep that ramp down. We’ll snatch her on the move.”

I hadn’t left the back of the ship, so I took on that duty. The others kept their weapons limber and ready, just in case we needed to deploy and collect our fellow Spartan.

“Linda: Just hold out a little bit longer,” Kelly said. “We’re on our way.”

Linda’s voice rattled back at us over the comm. “Make it quick!”

I held on to the grab bar near the ramp for an extended moment while the Pelican zoomed toward its target. After what seemed like way too long, Holly barked out, “Linda: Get down!”

Then she opened up with the Pelican’s main guns: a pair of triple-barreled 70mm autocannons mounted on a gimbal hanging from the ship’s nose. They pealed thunderous mayhem for a full ten seconds before Holly let up.

“Get ready!” Kelly shouted.

I leaned out the bay door, holding tight as the Pelican spun about, doing a one-eighty in place. From ten meters above the ground, I saw Linda stand up and emerge from a devastated landscape filled with shattered pieces of Forerunner soldiers and the stumps of mowed-down trees. She slung her rifle over her back, sprinted toward us as we dropped closer, and made a bounding jump-jet-assisted leap into the back of the craft. I reached out and caught her by the forearm as she landed on the ramp, then helped to haul her into the bay. “Thanks,” she said, almost out of breath. She made her way into the bay proper while I raised the ramp up.

“We’re all aboard!” Locke said. “Look for Exuberant’s signal.”

“Right on time,” Kelly reported. “There’s a beacon of light shining straight into the air at ten o’clock!”

The ship swooped off in that direction.

“Too bad we won’t have a chance to thank Exuberant Witness for all her help,” Vale said.

“You get attached to that little AI?” I asked her.

She shrugged. “Given how bad things have gotten with other AIs, like Cortana, I think we can use all the allies we can get.”

I could barely see through the cockpit’s viewport from the Pelican’s bay, so I could vaguely make out what the portal looked like. It was like other Forerunner portals, a spinning disk of bright darkness that looked like a blue-white hurricane from orbit. This one was just slightly large enough for us to fit an entire Pelican through, though Kelly had to dive down pretty close to the ground to reach it.

“Strap yourselves in,” Kelly said. “Fast!”

Those of us in the bay moved quickly to comply. Linda and I were the last ones to manage it, and we did so just in time. “All set!” Locke shouted, and an instant later, there was a blinding flash of light. We were in.

Going through a portal on a Forerunner world usually feels odd. Even when you’re wearing armor, it seems like you’re walking through a thick veil of cobwebs. I mean, it gets on your skin and tickles you there for an instant, and then it’s gone.

This portal was different, though. It sent us directly into slipspace, almost as if the Pelican had its own FTL drive. It was ridiculously quick, and in just a few minutes, we had arrived.

The entire dropship lurched forward, and everyone in the bay surged against the restraints. Kelly swore loudly from the cockpit. “We’re in a cave!” she said. “Rough exit!”

“Just like the monitor warned us,” said Locke.

“Hang on! This might get dicey,” Kelly said through gritted teeth. In the viewport ahead, it became clear what she meant. The narrow hole of light, which must have been the cave’s mouth, was surrounded by hundreds of rock formations and columns of stone. She rolled the Pelican, swinging it back and forth, navigating the cave’s twisted interior.

Not gonna lie. For a moment, I thought we’d bought it.

The last thing any of us wanted was for us to escape near-death on an ancient Forerunner world in the backwaters of the galaxy in a borrowed Pelican and then wind up with our ship damaged on a random rock formation and tumbling into the sunless bottom of some Sangheili cave in the middle of who knows where.

Fortunately, Kelly turned out to be one great pilot, and our luck hadn’t quite run out yet. Only seconds later, the dropship sprang from the cave’s mouth and speared into the open night above.

“Navigational systems identify the sky as that of Sanghelios,” Holly reported. “We made it!”

Then we set to business.

“This is just step one,” Locke said. “We need to make contact with Infinity ASAP. They were here when we left, and I can’t imagine they didn’t leave a trail. There might be personnel still here. Maybe even Commander Palmer.”

Which made sense. Palmer was the commander of all the Spartans stationed on Infinity, which included Fireteam Osiris. The last time we’d seen her had been on Sanghelios. If we couldn’t make it back to Infinity, then finding UNSC personnel here was the next best thing.

“Palmer’s here?” Linda said. “On Sanghelios?”

“Should be, yeah,” I said. “She’s the one who dropped us off on the Guardian that brought us to Genesis.”

“She might have gone back to Infinity,” Locke said. “But chances are someone on our side is still here. They’ll be our ticket off this rock.”

“Which apparently has since gone dark,” Fred pointed out. “Is Sanghelios always like this?”

It was eerie as hell, to be honest. This was one of the most civilized worlds in the galaxy, the homeworld of the entire Sangheili people, and someone had turned off all the lights. The lone red moon of Suban hung in the sky, casting a strange glow over the water and a large landmass to the left.

“We have to assume Sanghelios has been compromised,” Vale said. “Cortana would have sent a Guardian here for sure.”

“But what did it do to the place?” Tanaka said. “Can you really black out an entire planet like that?”

“Checking planetary comm system confirms this,” Kelly said. “At least the ones we can reach from this vantage point. Not able to raise anyone.”

“I don’t see any lights out there at all,” Fred said. “It’s a big planet, but the nav system says we’re not that far from one of its major cities: Sunaion. We ought to be able to see some sign of it.”

“Sunaion?” Vale said. “That’s where we fought through to get to the Guardian. Hopefully, Palmer didn’t get too far away.”

“Hopefully, that city is still a city,” I said. Sunaion was a series of towers that climbed out of the sea like a cluster of mushrooms. The Guardian had really done a number on it when we were here. Who knew what condition it would be in now?

“It’s not just the lack of lights on the ground that worries me,” Tanaka said. “Remember how many ships were in the sky when we left this place? What happened to all of them?”

At the time, we hadn’t known that the Guardians could black out entire hemispheres of a planet. We’d known just that it was weird, wrong, and dangerous.

“Keep low and quiet,” Locke said. “Keep your lights off, too. Whatever happened here, we don’t need to draw attention to ourselves.”

“So what the hell did happen to everyone?” Vale said.

“You heard Cortana,” Tanaka replied. “Those who refuse her offer . . .”

“Looks like the Sangheili were too stubborn to give in,” I said.

I suddenly felt very alone. I wondered where the people I cared about were, what might be happening to them. I hadn’t seen Veronica in a few weeks. Now I might never see her again.

“I’m sorry about this,” John said.

Linda reached out and put a hand on John’s arm. “You did what you thought was right, and we backed you up every step of the way. We’d do it again if we had to.”

Locke shook his head at John. “You did what you could to try to stop her.”

“Who knows?” I added. “Cortana might have us on the ropes, but no one gets her as well as you. You might be the key to all this yet.” (I don’t know if that made him feel any better, but it helped me sleep that night.)

John nodded in understanding. “This isn’t over,” he said. “Not by a long shot.”

“Agreed,” said Locke. “Let’s get back to Infinity, and then we’ll sort things out from there. Dr. Halsey might have a solution.”

Linda and John cocked their heads at us, but it was Kelly who spoke first. “Halsey?”

“Uh, yeah,” I said. “We rescued her from Jul ‘Mdama. He was holed up with her on Kamchatka.”

“Is she all right?” asked John.

“Other than missing an arm, she’s in good shape,” Tanaka said. Halsey was the one allegedly responsible for the SPARTAN-II program, which meant they’d all known her since they were kids.

“We put an end to ‘Mdama,” Locke said with a nod. “Then we escorted her back to Infinity, but she insisted on coming with us to Sanghelios when we were trying to track you down.”

“She would,” Linda said. “She’s nothing if not tenacious.”

“We had to help the Arbiter fight through the last bits of ‘Mdama’s Covenant,” Vale said in agreement. “Halsey didn’t flinch at any of it.”

Some of the Arbiter’s Sangheili might have thought of us as freedom fighters, but I’d been on enough ONI ops by then to know there wasn’t anything all that politically upright about what we’d done to help the Arbiter exterminate the Covenant. We’d needed to get to the Guardian, and it just so happened to be smack in the middle of the battle. That’s probably because the Guardian had been buried in the sea next to the city of Sunaion, and the last dregs of the Covenant had thought that it would be a great place to hole up for a major last stand. Given that the Covenant worshipped the Forerunners, and the Guardian was a gigantic Forerunner construct—that was no coincidence.

“Captain Lasky hadn’t been eager to insert us into what was essentially an internal Sangheili matter, but there weren’t any other active Guardians that we knew of,” Locke explained. “In the end, he felt it was worth the risk.”

Kelly seemed to be having a hard time digesting all this. “And he let Dr. Halsey come along with you because . . . ?”

“She’d somehow figured out what Cortana was up to, and she managed to get a message about her location to ONI,” Locke said. “That’s how we knew where to find her.”

“Nobody knows Cortana as well as Halsey,” Fred said. “Not even John.”

That’s likely because Halsey was the mad scientist who had created Cortana. Rumor had it Halsey used an illegal clone of herself to do it, which was why the two of them looked alike and had the same damn voice. Or so the story went. What she’d figured out about Cortana had apparently horrified her enough to come in from the cold.

“The real question now,” Vale said, “is how are we going to find anyone from Infinity on a blacked-out planet?”

“It’ll be like trying to find a needle in a haystack while blindfolded,” Linda said from her vantage point in the Pelican’s pilot seat. I was inclined to agree with her.

“Maybe not,” Tanaka said. “We just have to track down the Arbiter and his people. If anyone from the UNSC is still here at all, the Swords of Sanghelios would know.” She turned to Vale. “If the last known location for the Arbiter was near the Guardian’s extraction site, where would he head next? Especially given the blackout?”

That might seem like an odd question to ask a Spartan, but before she’d joined the program, Vale had been an expert on Sangheili language and society. If any one of us could puzzle out that question, it would be her. She thought about it for a second before she hazarded a guess.

“They probably went back to Nuusra, which is where the Swords of Sanghelios originally staged their attack from,” she said. “It’s a network of ancient ruins east of here, along the coast of Qivro. And I’ll wager, given the lack of power, they built bonfires. They’ve always made them the central part of their social gatherings, so it wouldn’t be surprising to find them here.”

“So you’re saying that when the power goes out, they go camping?” I asked, just to be sure.

“Call it what you like. A large part of their culture treasures being close to nature. They’d use that to their advantage at a time like this.”

“Bring the dropship up to about a kilometer,” Vale said. “That should be high enough for us to see a wide swath of land, but not too far away to be able to spot a campfire.”

Kelly complied straight away, and the Pelican climbed higher into the air. “I assume I should head east, since that’s the last place you saw them? This Nuusra place?”

“That’s the best prospect we have,” Locke said. “Just make sure you don’t attract the attention of any Guardians, or this will be a real short trip.”

While I understood the plan, I figured Linda would be right— only it would be like searching for a candle in a hurricane. Despite that, we got lucky.

Kelly brought the Pelican in over the coast off Qivro, where we’d worked with the Arbiter and his Elites before the assault on Sunaion. We went in with lights out, as quiet and dark as we could manage.

“No sign of a Guardian, at least,” Holly said.

“Nothing else, either,” said Kelly. “A few fires scattered throughout the terrain, but it’s difficult to tell if those are intentional or just debris burning from whatever went down after you left.”

“We might need to move along the coast,” Vale said. “Nuusra’s long and narrow, lots of cave systems and old ruins. The Sangheili built old cities like this before the Covenant, but they haven’t lived in them for thousands of years. They’re more of an artifact of the civilization they had before the Prophets engaged them and they ended up joining the Covenant. The Arbiter selected it because he could launch a final strike against the Covenant, and I’d be surprised if he abandoned it so soon. Keep looking along the coastline; you’ll know it when you see it.”

“Makes sense,” Linda said. “If the cities aren’t safe anymore, you head for the hills, right? Or stay in the hills, in his case.”

“We should be prepared for the possibility that whoever from the UNSC was here may have been in the air when the planet went dark,” Fred remarked.

That was something I didn’t care to consider much, and not just because it put me in mind of how lost we were right then. If all trace of UNSC presence on this world was gone, we really were on our own.

“Then we find her ship,” Locke said. “We’re not leaving here without either Commander Palmer or proof that she’s KIA.”

Vale shook her head at that. “We could be here an awfully long time.”

“Then we look harder,” said the Master Chief.

Kelly broadened her search pattern farther down the coast, wheeling slowly into the wider Nuusra interior. Below us, in the darkness, large dilapidated Sangheili structures—like statues and temples—gave way to rocky deserts and clusters of vegetation that were barely visible at that height.

That was when Kelly spotted it, sitting on an outcropping overlooking the sea. An encampment near a series of fires, about halfway down the side of a cliff so steep it seemed concave. A large tent sat out on the tip of the promontory, looking something like a turtle shell the size of a small building.

“That’s got to be them,” Kelly said.

“If not, they should at least be able to point us in the right direction,” said Locke. “Bring us in.”

“Already on the way. Turning on searchlights. Got several Sangheili in full armor emerging from the tent.”

“Must be able to hear us coming,” Vale said.

Tanaka nodded. “The Pelican’s not the stealthiest bird in the sky.”

“There’s a bare patch of rock off to one side of the tent,” Holly said. “They’re leaving it clear for us.”

“Take us in,” the Master Chief said.

Kelly brought the ship down nice and slow for a gentle landing. I released my restraints and got up to work the ramp.

“I see Palmer!” Tanaka said. “And Halsey!”

John and Locke lined up at the ramp. As the leaders of our respective teams, they would be the first ones out, which suited me fine. Once we tapped down, I hit the big button, and they strolled down the ramp, nice and easy.

While we were technically allies with the Sangheili these days, we needed to be careful. Not all of Sanghelios was friendly to Earth. A few of the Sangheili had their energy blades out and active, and there was no sense in taking one of those in the gut because we were too eager to get off the ship.

The Master Chief went first, with Locke close on his heels. The Arbiter was there, but he and Palmer hung back while Halsey stepped forward. With her sleeve pinned up over where her arm used to be, she stood there and gazed at John with some mixture of pride and disdain in her eyes.

“Took you long enough,” Halsey said to him.

She’d said the same thing to us when we rescued her on Kamchatka. Patience clearly isn’t one of the woman’s virtues.

“Shut down the lights on that ship,” Palmer said over the comm. “We had a Guardian return here after Cortana laid out her manifesto, and it blacked out the entire area. Maybe the entire planet. We don’t want it spotting you and coming back to take you out, too.”

Kelly complied immediately, shutting shut down the ship as hard and cold as she could.

I wondered then where Veronica might be. Was she even alive? If so, was she trapped on a darkened world like this? Or was she on a dead, powerless ship orbiting such a planet? Or somewhere else entirely?

Wherever. I just wished I was with her, and I made up my mind in that moment that I’d make it happen as soon as I could.

Until that point, I never gave it much thought. The end of civilization could happen just like that, and then you’re stuck, cut off from the people you care about the most without any way of getting back to them.

But it wasn’t the end of everything. Not yet, at least.

First, though, we had to get off Sanghelios.

“Welcome,” the Arbiter said to us. Those of us in Osiris already knew him, as did the Master Chief, who introduced him to the rest of Blue Team.

The Arbiter nodded at each introduction and then said to us, “You have my thanks for all you have done. The Sangheili people owe you a great debt. Although none of us is in a position to repay it, we will do what we can.” He sized us up. “You must all be hungry and exhausted. I insist you join us for a meal and a rest before you depart.”

Locke looked to John for guidance. We all wanted to get back to Infinity as soon as possible, but we weren’t sure how to make that happen.

“We’re not leaving tonight,” Dr. Halsey said to the Arbiter as she turned back to us. “I didn’t think we’d be able to make this work, but with your Pelican, it’s possible. I’ve already received a message from Infinity. They’re going to appear off the far side of Suban—this planet’s nearest moon—tomorrow at eighteen hundred hours military standard, noon local time. I’ve got the coordinates to rendezvous with them, and it’ll only take a few hours to get there in the Pelican. They’ll be there for a total of fifteen minutes—less if they find the Guardian waiting for them. That’s our window to hit.”

“Wait a second. You received this message?” Locke said while glancing toward Palmer.

Palmer put up her hands in self-defense. “I had nothing to do with it. All my comm systems are down. Maybe she rigged a subspace radio hidden in her lab coat to send Morse code.”

Halsey crossed her arm over her chest. “Or maybe I just know how to work with Forerunner tech, and there’s a lot of it on this world. Nothing that will reverse the effects of the Guardian on a broad scale, but we had a brief pinhole to communicate through. The message comes from Roland, the AI aboard Infinity.”

“And we’re trusting other AIs now why?” I asked.

“Because if Roland had been compromised, we’d already be dead.”

Locke nodded at this, as did the Master Chief. They took off their helmets, and the rest of us followed suit. Gotta admit, it felt great to breathe in some unfiltered air, even if it stank of Sangheili barbecue.

“We’re here for the night,” John said, turning to face the massive red sphere of Suban, which took up most of the northeastern sky. “We’ll fly out first thing tomorrow.”

Locke glanced at us all. “Agreed. That’ll give us plenty of room to make that window and deal with anything that might come up.”

“We have butchered and roasted a number of colo and kuscatu to celebrate our victory over the last of the Covenant and the end of our civil war,” the Arbiter said. “We would be honored by your presence.”

My mouth was already watering. “A real Sangheili barbecue? Just as long as you don’t do anything unforgivable with the meat. Like add coleslaw to it.”

The Arbiter didn’t get the joke, but he knew enough about humans to at least humor me with a nod.

Turns out that kuscatu roasted over an open pit is straight-up delicious. The colo was a little gamey, but one out of two ain’t bad.

Halsey disappeared to chat with John and the rest of Blue Team. I suppose for them it was something like a family reunion. If your mother was a controlling super-genius.

While we ate, Palmer sat down with us and debriefed us. With the exception of the Arbiter, most of the Sangheili gave us a wide berth. I suppose that’s only natural, since their culture had for so long considered anyone in Mjolnir armor to be a “demon.” The Sangheili who brought us our food quickly left when they were done. Being allies with an alien race after thirty years of trying to kill each other still carried some tension. It was gonna take a little more than a meal and a tentative peace treaty to change things.

“Soon after Cortana sent out her message, another Guardian arrived here on Sanghelios, and it began neutralizing what remained of the Covenant fleet. It took most of them out with its standard armament, but it must have gotten bored, because it eventually sent out a single pulse and shut down the power across the entire hemisphere. Covenant ships are somewhere out there,” Palmer said, nodding to the sea off to her right. “Fortunately, Infinity was a good ways off in the star system. They saw this going down and managed to leave for Earth. Halsey says that according to Roland, Cortana tracked them there, and they barely managed to escape. Right now they’re slipspace-hopping on a random trajectory through some emergency protocol.”

“What happened to the Guardian?” the Chief asked.

“We’re not sure. Some reports indicate it’s on the other side of Sanghelios, dealing with that part of the planet. Apparently, its disruption effect has some finite limitations, but that’s all theory right now. All we know is that Cortana took Earth offline, and she’s probably got most of Sol on lockdown. Halsey got this info from Roland’s coded message, including the note about Infinity’s upcoming arrival and our window.

“Halsey used some Forerunner tech she’d been fiddling with when we first got here, and Roland must have figured as much and pinged her whenever Infinity came up for a breath of air, probably hoping no one on Cortana’s side would be able to see it and interpret it. Captain Lasky knew he needed Halsey if there was any hope of figuring this thing out, and with us on Sanghelios, priority for Infinity has been to get us back. This wasn’t even a possibility until you eight showed up with your Pelican. This is our ticket back onto Infinity, and the only real hope we have to getting all of this sorted out.”

“That’s one rendezvous we’d better not miss,” Locke said.

Once dinner was over, I sat down on a jump seat in the Pelican with a full belly and slept like I deserved it. Locke woke me up an hour before sunrise to get help get us prepped and ready. I got a few minutes to see dawn break over a Sangheili ocean, covering it in rosy hues, and I couldn’t believe how sick it made me for my childhood home on Draco III.