Halo: The Cole Protocol – extracts

Author: Tobias S. Buckell

Scenes featuring Sangheili point-of-view.

Chapter 9

VADAM KEEP, VERMO, SANGHELIOS

Early in the predawn light of the day after Thel ‘Vadamee’s ascension to kaidon of his keep, he woke to the faint scratching sound of three pairs of feet.

They were on the roof outside his window, moving quickly and getting ready to vault the lip of his windowsill into his room. Thel wasted no time getting up from the chair that he had sat in all night, waiting for this.

As the first assassin broke through the window, Thel pressed the button on the thick bar of metal in his hand that had been lying casually by his side. The energy sword flicked into being with a crack of ionized air from the handle as the twin half ovals of blue plasma appeared.

The first swipe of the angry-sounding sword dug deep into the assassin’s chest, spearing him on the tip of the concentrated plasma. To his credit, the assassin did not scream.

Thel barely had time to duck, though, as the next two assassins bearing energy swords of their own hit the floor in front of him. Their crackling energy weapons just barely missed Thel’s head. But their overeager swings doomed them. Even as their energy swords passed by him, Thel was coming back up to a full stand, slicing the sword arm of the nearest assassin clear off his body.

The last assassin backpedaled, looking for room to defend himself, realizing this was not a simple job anymore.

There was a lot of space in the master room. The assassin back over the large stone slabs of the room’s floor, his eyes darting from door to door, wondering whether he could make a run for it. Or at least, how he might use the space to his advantage.

Thel remained in front of the window, watching the assassin. To be honest he had expected more than this. The Vadam elders had voted him kaidon based on his abilities as a leader, fighter, and zealot. The keeps worked on a system of meritocracy – only the most capable would be voted as kaidon upon the death of the previous one.

But for those who felt that their vote had been ill-advised, or who had second thoughts, it was both a cherished right and a tradition to send in assassins to test the true merit of that ruler’s martial abilities.

It was another layer of meritocracy. A kaidon who could not defend himself from assassins was not a true ruler.

This was classic Sangheili thinking.

The assassin tested the first door, and found it locked. The four-inch-thick kafel wood would not break easily, and the assassin had to have known that with just a glance. The second door was just as locked and solid.

Now he turned and looked at Thel, realizing that he was as good as dead, and ran straight for the window where Thel stood. A last stand.

Thel pulled a plasma pistol out of his holster and shot the assassin straight through the head. The assassin tumbled to the floor right in front of Thel’s feet.

Now which elder, Thel wondered as he turned around to look out over the solid rocky walls of the ancient Vadam keep, was brave enough to order this?

The massive moons of Sanghelios, hanging over the peaks of the mountain, offered no answers for Thel.

He turned and stepped over the corpses, and unlocked the door with the key hung by brass links around his neck. Several of his personal guard stood outside, weapons drawn.

“Gather the elders,” Thel ordered them. “In the stone hall.”

“It is not even morning yet,” one of them protested.

Thel rounded on him. “Who is kaidon?”

The guard snaked his long head downwards. “I swear on the blood of my ancestors I shall not question you again.”

Thel looked his guards over. Lean and tall, their muted brown skin was almost all hidden by sturdy armor. Covenant armor. Their long-necked heads were sheathed in chain mail, and their large eyes gleamed in the flickering light of the hall.

They were all well built, powerful, overly trained since birth, specimens of Sangheili warriors.

All poised to do Thel’s bidding.

They split off to go rouse the elders, as Thel walked through the stone corridors and tight spaces.

This was a tense but glorious day that Thel had worked toward his whole life. The lineage of Vadam, in the long history of his kind, was relatively young – founded by a distant ancestor during the first exploratory age, when Sangheili ships plied the dangerous oceans, risking terrific tides due to the multiple suns and moons the planet danced with.

From the sides of Kolaar Mountain the Vadam keep looked out toward Vadam harbor, thirty miles away. They’d huddled against invaders throughout the ages here, and it was also from this well-defended location that they’d lashed back.

The Prophets themselves had even tried but had been unable to properly destroy Vadam, among many others. They’d been too buried into the crags and cliffs of their mountains.

Great Sangheili had built Vadam’s power up through the generations. Thel wanted to add his own name to the Vadam Saga, etched into the living rock of the walls under the mountain.

“They are waiting for you,” a guard said outside the stone room, as Thel walked down the steps that took him ever farther down into the depths of the mountain’s bedrock.

In the distance, the thunder of the river shook the stone under Thel’s feet. An underground water source, and power source, that no enemy had ever managed to get to.

Thel entered the stone hall, and looked up at the curved timbers rising a hundred feet over his head. Then he looked down at the long table in the center of the room. The elders, most of them with their cloaks wrapped around them against the morning cold, stared at him with large, unblinking eyes.

“My blood,” Thel said, as he walked to the head of the table. “You voted me for kaidon, and yet it seems one of you did not believe in his vote, and did not believe in me, for three assassins broke into the High Room just minutes ago.”

With that said, Thel shrugged his own cloak off, and stood naked before them. “Kaidon ….” one of them whispered, shocked.

“As you can all see with your own eyes, they failed to even scratch my body.” Thel glared at them all as one of his personal guard rushed to his side to pull the cloak back on. “I killed two of them, but left the last one alive so we could discuss the matter of who sent him.”

A lie, but it was a telling lie, as Thel saw one of the elders stiffen, then let out a long breath.

Koida, Thel remembered his name. Koida ‘Vadam. Thel felt the faint kick of disappointment.

Any of these elders could have sired Thel. It was not the Sangheili way to let a child know its father, as Sangheili took sires based on their fighting prowess. Sangheili only truly could know who their mothers’ brothers were, and so were raised by their uncles to learn the fighting arts.

Many of these elders had once been great warriors. And several of Thel’s uncles sat before him.

Koida, thankfully, was not one.

“I am Thel ‘Vadamee.” Thel stressed the “ee” that signified his military service. “If you voted me for kaidon, surely you knew I could defend myself?”

Koida leaned forward, his wrinkled hands on the table before him to steady himself. “You have spent your last years fighting the lesser races of the Covenant, not Sangheili. I feared you had weakened, and would not make a strong kaidon of the keep.”

Thel shook his head. “The only ones who grow soft, it seems, are elders who cluster in their small rooms, plotting against their kaidon. Had you been strong, you would have waited in my room to attack me yourself.”

The elders murmured agreement, and Thel walked around the table, grabbed Koida’s cloak, and pulled him up from his chair. He pushed him toward the nearest massive wall, where the Vadam Saga stopped.

“There are the words of our lineage, Koida,” Thel said. “Where is your name on that wall?”

Koida shook his head sadly, his wrinkled, faded brown skin bunching as he did so. “It is not on the wall.”

“We Sangheili are only as good as our deeds. We are born and live in the common rooms, beginning life equal to each other in the eyes of the keep, and rise according to our ability. You should have voted against me and stood your ground, or killed me yourself. Your cowardice is not a trait I want spread through the lineage of Vadam.”

Koida’s eyes widened fully. “I will fall on my sword, kaidon, but please do not revoke the blood of my line.”

“I did not quench it,” Thel said. “You did.”

Koida leapt forward, suddenly finding courage, and Thel pulled his energy sword out. The blue plasma leapt out, and Thel swung the blade through Koida’s neck.

The elder’s head rolled across the floor, and purple blood gushed out, splattering the Saga’s chiseled words. It was the closest the elder would get to having any part of himself on the wall.

Thel turned to his guards. “The Koida line shall leave. They are no longer Vadam. They have until sunrise to do so. Any of Koida’s line still here after that will meet the same fate as he did. I grant them mercy, because Koida at least found his spirit right before death. Had he taken a knee and begged, they would all be dead.”

“It is our honor,” the guards said, and left to spread the order.

Thel turned back to the elders. “I have been looking over the state of Vadam.” The harbor brought in profits, the buildings reached from the valley under the keep out across the land, and Vadam’s serfs were happy and working hard, hoping to rise and distinguish themselves and gain a position in the keep. “I am happy with your guidance. The lineage is strong.”

“Vadam is strong,” an elder agreed, perhaps hoping to gain favor and notice.

“But I am no figurehead,” Thel continued, ignoring the interruption for the moment. “I will take a close interest in all our investments and activities. Those who work for only their own gain, and not that of Vadam, risk my wrath. Am I understood?”

They all did. “Yes, kaidon.”

“Good.” Thel flicked the energy sword off, and slid the handle into the depths of his cloak. “You were right to elect me kaidon. I have news for you. I have been given a promotion, and command of a ship that is part of a fleet created by a High Prophet himself. We have discovered a new human world.”

“We pity the poor creatures who are about to be destroyed by your mighty hand,” one elder said.

“What is the name of this world?” another asked.

“The humans call it Charybdis IX. I leave you all now in stewardship of Vadam.” Thel eyed the elders. “I hope it is in the most capable hands.”

They all rushed to reassure the new kaidon that, indeed, it was.

Chapter 18

UNSO DESTROYER DO YOU FEEL LUCKY?, CHARYBDIS IX

Thel ‘Vadamee burst through a corridor at a full run and aimed a plasma rifle down its length. Nothing.

There had to be more humans aboard this destroyer than the pitiful few who’d tried to hold off the boarding party. The angular ship with its sharp corners and boxy layout reeked of a larger contingent of humans.

The Sangheili did not reholster his gun. A drawn weapon demanded blood, and one didn’t draw a weapon in Sangheili culture unless you intended to use it, even if it was a just a gun. So now it would remain out in his hand.

Thel crossed another bulkhead and turned to his right. There it was, that scent again: a pungent smell. The humans. They must have retreated to a core area, deep inside the ship.

Throughout this system his fellow Sangheili hunted down human ships to destroy them, and the flagships of the fleet would now be raining the full strength of their energy weapons down on the surface of the planet. It was sterilization. A mandate for destruction handed down by the leaders of the Covenant, the three High Prophets.

But Thel and his handpicked team were off on a side mission.

To his right a team of zealots padded along with him, keeping a full 360-degree path of fire at the ready in case of an am bush. Their long, leathery necks craned around, their eaglelike eyes scanning the awkward nooks and crannies of the human ship for the enemy.

“Cowards,” Jora ‘Konaree hissed. Jora was one whose blood always ran hot, always ready for the fight and eager to rush a position. He sounded disappointed and frustrated to not have a direct fight to engage in. “They flee in front of us like panicked forest creatures before the flame.”

An apt metaphor, thought Thel, considering that Covenant ships rained fire down on the human worlds. “Be cautious,” Thel warned. “They are small creatures, but they are not unaware of their disadvantages.”

The humans would ambush them, soon enough, in some sort of last stand. He’d heard a few rumors from other Sangheili who’d boarded human ships looking for information that they would fight hard, almost honorably.

Or, at least, Thel hoped so. Hunting them down like vermin would be … demeaning to everyone involved.

From past dissections of human ships of this class, they knew the control center would be close to the front of the ship. A daring and brash position that Thel appreciated.

They broke through the doors by tossing a sticky grenade at the seam. The grenade thudded into the gap and stuck in place. It glowed a sickly blue, then exploded. “Forward,” Jora shouted.

The other three zealots – Zhar, Saal, and Veer – followed Jora and Thel through the ruined remains of the doors. Zhar, careful but constant and steady; Veer, a bored expression on his face but eyes darting everywhere, looking for details and oddities for his war poems; and Saal, like Jora, looking for anything to kill.

They were Thel’s own small force, a band of fighters that had seen many enemies fall at their feet.

Jora rushed through the room. “They abandoned their own command center,” he growled. Then he leaned over the alien computer consoles and tapped at them. The only response was sparking and fizzing: the consoles had been shot up before the humans abandoned them. “Useless!”

He unsheathed his energy sword and fired it up in frustration. The two crackling, curved blue flames of energy rose up on either side of the hand holding the bar. Jora plunged it into the heart of the machine, sparks flying and metal oozing out around where the sword pierced it.

The screens above flickered and faded.

Jora pulled the sword out and cut the whole console in half, the energy sword cleaving it cleanly down the middle. “Savages with starships and toy weapons, Shipmaster,” he hissed at Thel, who watched the display of anger without any emotion.

The barking chatter of human gunfire ripped through the cockpit, and Jora’s armor flared. “Blood,” the zealot swore, as he ducked for cover.

Zhar calmly turned and lobbed grenades down the corridor. “So they finally attack.” Jora’s mandibles split open as he roared a challenge down the corridor.

Thel, though, already ran down the corridor at the attack. The humans had cornered them here. A smart move. Thel leapt through the smoke and chaos of the explosion, his armor dinged, nicked, and its energy shield flaring due to human bullets. He shot the first human he saw as he landed back on the deck.

The second human, flush against the wall, spun to bring his rifle to bear. Thel was too close to shoot him: he snapped the butt of the energy rifle into the short alien’s face and watched it slump to the floor.

Weak, very weak. The human’s insubstantial armor of olive clothing did little to protect it.

Jora barreled through, sword high, and cut the third marine in half, but not before the man got off several shots, near point-blank. Jora stumbled, and clutched at his armor.

Thel threw grenades around the corner, angry. Jora might act a little crazed, but he was a hard fighter. Thel did not want to lose him. Thel waited for the explosion to dissipate, then rounded the corner, firing at anything that moved.

Within seconds Thel and his boarding crew stood in the odd crimson pools of human blood. Twenty men lay dead in the corridor, their bodies twisted, contorted, missing parts, or just plain destroyed.

“There is nothing here for us,” Thel relayed back to the Retribution’s Thunder. “We are returning.”

A shame, thought Thel. The humans had thwarted their mission to find data about their homeworld by destroying their computer systems before he’d even boarded.

Twenty Unggoy filled the large, open space of the hangar bay. The Unggoy, like the humans, were short, bred too fast, and were individually weak. The Unggoy, however, wore triangular methane tanks and breathing masks over their flattened, squashed faces. Thel found them useless for intense fighting, but in large enough numbers they were very effective, so he’d left them to guard the boarding craft.

The Unggoy were a part of the Covenant, and thus were to be used in the war against the apostate humans. But that didn’t mean Thel had to go out of his way to include them in the heart of his missions.

As they jumped up into the long, pipelike snout of a boarding craft, Jora groaned. Thel and the others pretended not to hear.

“Back on board,” Thel ordered the Covenant forces in the hangar.

The Unggoy grumbled about being moved about randomly, and about being forced to wear their heavy tanks and their itchy masks, but did as they were told. They streamed back up into the mouth of the boarding craft, stepping past their fallen brothers who had died as the humans tried to defend the ship.

The boarding craft yanked away from the gash it had made in the side of the destroyer, shields flaring as it did so. Thel watched as the bulky, blocky destroyer fell away from them.

Streaks of carbon ran along the side where they had fired at the human ship. Most of the damage clustered near the ship’s engines.

“It is strange,” Jora grunted. Everywhere the hiss and occasional wispy stink of methane filled the air in the boarding craft due to the lines of Unggoy staring straight ahead, trying not to be noticed by any of the five Sangheili.

“What is?” Thel asked as the destroyer dwindled into the size of an eyeball. He nodded at Saal, who murmured into a mouthpiece.

“The Prophets have demanded we destroy their ships, burn their worlds, and allow no heretic to live.” Jora held his side, and Thel noticed a trickle of purple blood seep through his fingers. “Now we search for information and sneak aboard their ships?”

“The Path is strict, Jora – it brooks no deviation, no remorse. We are zealots. We serve the Way. These are our orders. We do not question them.” Thel saw the tiny destroyer suddenly light up as a long sliver of a plasma beam ripped into it. It exploded, chunks flying off in all directions, superstructure glowing hot and failing.

“You do not wonder why our orders changed, Shipmaster?” Jora asked.

Zhar, from nearby, looked up. “The Prophets, in their infinite wisdom, want to shorten this war. Maybe the Hierarchs did not realize these vermin were spread out in so many different places, like some weed. Now they urge us to seek the source.”

“You think we have failed to find their home world?” Thel asked.

‘We keep finding more and more developed worlds to destroy,” said Zhar. “Like the one we just visited. What was it the human Saal tortured called it?”

“Charybdis ….” Thel said. “The aliens called it Charybdis.” His split mandibles struggled with the word. It was an affront for lesser species to name an entire world. That was a right reserved for the powerful.

Saal ran to them, his eyes wide with astonishment. “Ship master! Encrypted signal from Infinite Sacrifice!”

Thel walked with him to a communications niche. A holographic image turned, startling the Sangheili zealot. Speak of the prophets! Here one was. One of the Hierarchs themselves.

The image was of a tired, ochre-skinned, and hunchbacked creature slouched over a floating antigravity chair, its head bowed with the weight of an enormous gold crown its long neck could barely support. “Thel ‘Vadamee,” it hissed. “You are to report to me aboard the ship Infinite Sacrifice. I have studied your intrusion attempts aboard the human ships. I have a new mission for you.”

The Hierarch leaned forward, and the image flickered away.

Thel turned to Saal. “That was the Prophet of Regret. He has been following the fleet, observing the destruction of this latest human world. He has a new mission.”

“What is it?” Jora looked a bit awed by the thought a Hierarch had noticed them.

“I do not know, but whatever it is, I am sure it will bring us honor,” Thel said. He looked at Jora’s purpled hand. The zealot would need medical attention soon, probably from one of the Huragok. That Covenant species was obsessed with fixing any thing. Yet even letting a Huragok work on you was a grave dishonor. It was the same as letting a doctor put his filthy claws on you. Thel sighed. Blood was your essence, your nobility. To spill it meant to lose honor, and Jora had lost honor with his eagerness and carelessness. Now he would have to let a doctor – a Sangheili warrior so low as to make his living slicing and causing other Sangheili to bleed without honor – tend to his wounds. That was a deep shame.

Jora would be eager to prove himself again after this slip.

Thel looked back at the glowing remains of the human destroyer. It would be an honor to help find the world the pink, fleshy humans came from.

And to reduce it to nothingness.

Chapter 19

COVENANT CRUISER INFINITE SACRIFICE, CHARYBDIS IX

The Prophet of Regret hunched forward, head bowed with the weight of his crown. The wrinkled wattle of his throat shook as he looked around the room at the many holographic screens that flickered in the control room buried deep in the heart of the Infinite Sacrifice. An honor guard of Sangheili surrounded the Hierarch, ready to kill anything that moved to attack the Hierarch.

Thel was surprised to see the Hierarch himself here, but Regret had always seemed to spend as much time as possible around Sangheili warriors.

Regret admired the Sangheili martial prowess, rumors said. While most of the San’Shyuum floated about the holy city of High Charity and focused on their lives, Regret traveled with Sangheili battle fleets to see them in action.

It was rumored that the Hierarch carried a sidearm of his own underneath the silk robes draped over his lap, and had killed acolytes who dared ask too many questions on the spot.

One of the Minister’s honor guard, a distant cousin with obligations to Thel’s bloodline, had told Thel that the Prophet of Regret had come to his throne through machinations.

That may have been true. Thel had his doubts – everyone was prone to gossip. And so what if it were true? The Sangheili were sent forth into battle by the mixed Council of Masters, a group of Sangheili and San’Shyuum masters who dictated war needs. But most of the fighting was done by Sangheili as the San’Shyuum remained on High Charity, the mobile world and heart of the Covenant. That was the nature of the Covenant itself – the Sangheili defended the Prophets, defended the holy objects. Meanwhile the Prophets deciphered the holy relics, doling out the technology they found and adapting them for Covenant use. Their eventual hope was to unlock what the races would need to do to join the Great Journey. Much like the mysterious race of the Forerunners had done all those thousands of years ago when they disappeared from this area of the galaxy, leaving only their artifacts behind. It didn’t matter to Thel how the Prophet of Regret came to be one of the three hierarchs, because Regret was here, monitoring the fleet and talking to him.

Regret nudged the floating chair he sat in closer to a grand conference table that swooped up from the floor. He threw a plasma rifle onto the table in front of Thel. “Pick that up,” he ordered.

Thel froze. If he picked up the rifle, he would have an unholstered weapon out in the presence of a Prophet. The honor guard would be obliged to kill him.

Was this some way of punishing him for failing to find data leading to the human homeworld aboard the destroyer? Thel met the honor guard’s captain with large, brown eyes. The Sangheili shook his head in a snaking motion. It was okay.

Thel picked up the plasma rifle. “What would you like me to do?”

“Look closely at it,” Regret said, sounding suddenly annoyed. “What do you see?”

For a moment, Thel saw nothing. It was just a normal plasma rifle, men he spotted the small readout on the side. It scribed an alien symbol at him. Human script.

“You see it, do you not?” the Hierarch said, looking intensely at him.

“What is this?” Thel dropped the rifle back on the table, feeling unclean. It was forbidden to alter the technologies that the Prophets handed down. They were the holiest of gifts.

“It is blasphemy. Heretical human creatures touching and altering the holy gifts of Forerunner artifacts like our energy weapons … or anything else,” hissed the Hierarch. It navigated the floating chair around the table and pointed a hand and jointed finger right at Thel. “And I want you to find who is responsible for it. Find them out and destroy them. They have been found in Kig-Yar black markets on High Charity. Supposedly they come from a system the humans call 23 Librae, by way of Kig-Yar-run ships. One of my loyal deacons aboard a ship of theirs died transmitting this data to me. Ungrateful pirates.”

The Hierarch’s voice had risen to a scream, even as Thel listened. He remembered 23 Librae, he had fought there, on a world the heretical creatures called “Madrigal.”

Thel dropped to a knee and fist in a bow before the Hierarch. “Your will be done, Hierarch.”

Regret cleared his throat noisily; large fishy eyes gleaming as he stared at Thel. “Of course you will, my Sangheili warrior. Of course you will. That is why I asked you here. You will leave while we continue destroying Charybdis IX and go to 23 Librae to hunt down this heresy.”

He pivoted his chair, and said over his back, “You will take your own ship, but you will also have additional forces at your disposal. I have tasked Jiralhanae to accompany you aboard the Kig-Yar raider A Psalm Every Day. They will help you with whatever you may encounter. And keep the Kig-Yar Shipmistress well in line. I’ve come to distrust their greedy natures more and more of late.”

Jiralhanae? Thel blinked his large eyes, but dared not question the Prophet. The Jiralhanae were barbarians who considered themselves the equals of Sangheili.

The Jiralhanae had once attained space flight and high levels of technology. But by the time the Covenant came across them, they’d bombed themselves back into a state of barbarism.

Why the Prophets regarded them so highly was beyond Thel.

They had no culture. No refinement in their fighting. No thought about their bloodlines, copulating at will with no foresight or plans.

They were not noble.

But Thel bowed his head. “I thank you for your gift of troops and ships,” he said out loud. And he thought secretly to him self: I do not have to use them on this mission, they can simply come along and watch true warriors do their duty.

He had just recently become a shipmaster, something he’d longed to attain ever since he’d stood on the stone walls of his keep and looked up at the stars and wondered what amazing things might be waiting for him up there. Now, with another ship and more troops under his command, the dream of be coming a fleetmaster seemed within reach.

With a promotion like this, Thel would need to send a message home to the keep elders. He would have more wives brought to the keep. It was time for Thel to create more alliances on the homeworld. It was time to expand the rooms, and father more children to pack the common rooms. The line of Vadam would be continued in strength.

The keep’s poet would add a line to the family saga, celebrating Thel’s furthering in rank. Thel would be the most renowned Vadam yet.

The Prophet of Regret waved his hand. “Come with me, Shipmaster.”

Thel loped behind the antigravity throne that Regret drove across the room to a massive wall-sized projection of the planet they’d come to orbit.

“They left only three ships to protect it,” Regret mused. “You know why we fight these creatures?”

“They committed a grievous sin,” Thel said. “They destroyed Forerunner artifacts.”

He shivered as he said that.

The Forerunners had left traces of the time they spent in the galaxy scattered across worlds and in space. These mighty demigods of the galaxy had been the forefathers of all the Covenant knew, and they’d just … disappeared.

But they’d left clues as to where they’d gone. A Holy Journey, to another plane of existence, using the technology of the Halos.

So the Prophets taught, and the Covenant existed for finding the Halos, and following the Forerunners on their holy path.

But these humans, they’d found Forerunner artifacts, and instead of venerating them like all other species, they had destroyed them.

Thel vibrated with religious rage. For that, the humans would pay.

“It is important their heresy and desecration be punished,” Regret said. “So anything that distracts us from this holy duty, that itself, is unholy And must be stopped. Like these blasphemous weapons.”

“I understand, Hierarch,” Thel said. “I will stop at nothing.”

Regret sighed. It spoke into its chair to the fleet commanders throughout. “Destroy this planet, and all on its surface.”

On the screen, plasma roiled and grew on the sides of the Covenant cruisers as the ships prepared to rain fire down upon the world the humans called Charybdis IX.

Chapter 21

COVENANT CRUISER INFINITE SACRIFICE, CHARYBDIS IX

The Prophet of Regret watched the surface of Charybdis IX melt from the firepower of his ships with grim satisfaction and heavily-lidded eyes.

He shouldn’t have chosen to smoke in his private quarters before coming out, but before attacks like this Regret always found a good smoke calmed his nerves.

Energy rolled over the square buildings that the humans loved to cluster near one another on the ground. That made it all that much easier for the Covenant to destroy them.

Regret grew bored of watching the destruction of the planet, and turned the screen off.

“You are dismissed. Go. Weed out the Heretics. Leave no stone unturned!”

The Sangheili zealot blinked, and then bowed in that sinuously graceful Sangheili way. “Your will be done, Hierarch,” he said, and then left to pursue his mission.

Regret sat in the control room, listening to the buzz of the ship’s bridge crew.

The matter of the Kig-Yar smuggling weapons rankled the Prophet. Only the San’Shyuum, the leaders of the Covenant and its pinnacle species, could alter holy technology.

To let other races control technology was a dangerous path. The Covenant’s cohesion was grounded in their shared need for Forerunner technology. It was their unified religion, their political structure, and the hub of all commerce. To pull out one major tenet of the Covenant meant risking the entire thing crumbling. And Regret had not worked the last ten years of his life to watch the Covenant die. He’d helped it face one of its biggest threats, with hardly anyone any the wiser, right before his ascension to Hierarch.

Together, Prophets Regret, Truth, and Mercy had been aboard the massive Forerunner dreadnought that sat in the heart of High Charity, powering the entire moving world with just a fraction of its engines’ power.

The dreadnought had come to life as the Oracle at its heart had muttered blasphemous, world-changing accusations at the Prophets. All triggered by the Oracle encountering information about the humans. This machine had accused the Prophets of mistranslating Forerunner documents, and misunderstanding the Great Journey.

It claimed the very tenets of their religion were false.

And then the Oracle had attempted to launch the dreadnought.

They had disconnected it just in time.

In that moment, Regret felt, they had saved the entire Covenant. Without the Halos to search for, the Path to walk, and the worship of the Forerunners who left their mark all over the galaxy, the Covenant would fall apart.

And the Hierarchs would not let that happen.

So they turned that conflict into the annihilation and genocide of the humans. There was no room for negotiation or settlement. Humanity would be the first species they had encountered that they hadn’t tried to absorb into the Covenant, as it was the source of the Oracle’s confusion. Destroy them, and the Covenant would be able to continue its holy search to follow the Forerunners safely.

Nothing could detract from that. Not even these counterfeit weapons.

Regret didn’t care that they’d been modified. The San’Shyuum happily pilfered Forerunner technology and modified it as they saw fit. What Regret cared about was that the weapons had been modified for humans, and that they’d been tampered with without the Prophet’s approval.

And Regret wouldn’t stand for that – not from the Oracle, or from whoever was making those weapons.

Regret turned the screen back on and looked down on the burning of Charybdis IX and watched.

This was for the good of the Covenant, he told himself.

Regret had only made one major mistake, he told himself. When the humans were first discovered Regret had assumed the world they’d been found on was their homeworld.

But after destroying it, they’d found out that the humans had scattered across many worlds.

It made destroying them all a lot more difficult, tiring, and time-consuming than Regret had anticipated.

Chapter 22

MADRIGAL 23 LIBRAE

The humans called it 23 Librae. For the Covenant it was no more than a series of coordinates, another star in a long series of stars that Kig-Yar ships scouted out under their Ministry of Tranquility contracts. The Covenant hoped to find Forerunner artifacts in these various systems.

It was in one of these many human places that the Kig-Yar had found signs of a massive wealth of Forerunner artifacts, the Prophets said. They also said that instead of studying them and learning of the glorious truths contained in them about the journey all species could prepare themselves for, the stupid creatures had destroyed them.

Cosmic vandalism, mused Thel, as the two ships skipped out of Slipspace next to the one planet 23 Librae had in its habitable zone: the orbit not too close to the sun where it would boil its atmosphere off, or so far away that it would freeze.

“Start scanning the planet,” Thel ordered his bridge crew. “Engage all sensors. Make the sweep through. Last thing we need is for the Kig-Yar to lay claim, or the Jiralhanae to best the Sangheili in a task personally assigned them by a Hierarch!”

Madrigal.

Retribution’s Thunder fell into orbit around the planet that had once been inhabited by the humans. Just off to their starboard side the Kig-Yar ship that the Hierarch had assigned to them, A Psalm Every Day , accompanied them.

Thel’s lower mandibles twitched. The Kig-Yar Shipmistress had come in too close. They could have collided thanks to her aggressive piloting.

But neither the Kig-Yar nor the Jiralhanae aboard would listen to Thel.

They hadn’t so far. He’d asked them to keep their distance, but they acted as if he were going to cheat them of any discovery, or any chance to get into battle.

Thel felt he would have been better off alone than saddled with A Psalm Every Day dogging his every move.

Then again, maybe that was the Hierarch’s way of keeping an eye on him. Thel had a general feeling, from what he knew of politics on High Charity, that the Prophet of Regret was very crafty.

Yes, this one probably didn’t just outright trust Thel, but wanted some verification. A Psalm Every Day was here to monitor him.

Fair enough.

“Nothing there,” Jora grumbled from his station as initial results from the systematic scans began to scroll through the holographic display. “It is as we left it, Shipmaster. There are no signs of activity. Our quarry could not have come from here.”

The entire surface of the human planet had been destroyed. Melted with plasma.

Zhar grunted. “Their structures have deep roots. Is it possible they survived deep underground?”

Thel shook his head. “I participated there.” Thel considered it briefly. “I personally saw to the destruction of their warrens in the capitol. I doubt it will become useful again in this Age. You may tell the Jiralhanae they may check the capitol for spoils … with my leave. Meanwhile, send a probe to finish the sweep, then let us move on.”

“To where?” Jora asked. He threw the words out almost like a challenge.

Thel eyed Jora. “This is a system. There is more than one place to hide. These are Kig-Yar we are dealing with, remember.”

Zhar frowned. “Asteroids?”

Thel smiled. Zhar, ever the analytical. Hardheaded, but a hard thinker. He knew that the Kig-Yar, after leaving their homeworld had chosen to settle out among the asteroids of their home system. It was what had made them so hard for the prophets to ferret out while battling them when the Kig-Yar had initially resisted joining the Covenant. “Yes. We will seed the asteroid belt with sensor buoys. We will leave no stone unturned.”

Zhar nodded. “It will be done.”

Thel leaned over. “Veer, would you do me the ….” his voice dripped with sarcasm, “ … honor of contacting A Psalm Every Day ?”

Veer nodded, and the three-dimensional image of Pellius appeared in front of Thel. The Jiralhanae stood eye-to-eye with Thel. Behind the giant, furred chieftain sat the Kig-Yar Shipnistress Chur ‘R-Mut, her lanky arms draped over her chair’s arms. He grinned his needle-sharp grin and the quills on his head twitched.

Pellius curled his lip slightly. “What do you want? We’re preparing to land and search the destroyed capital city.”

“You will not find anything there,” Thel said, and explained what he’d already told his bridge crew.

The Jiralhanae chieftan looked disappointed. For a second. “You still search, though?”

“Yes.”

“Good.” And then the image faded away.

“Jiralhanae,” spat Saal from his weapons console. “Uncivil and untrustworthy.”

“So they are,” Thel agreed. “The Prophets in their inscrutable wisdom have assigned them to us. They are here to stay. Zhar, move us out.”

Without seeding the system with navigation buoys the ship’s own long-range scanners weren’t good enough to root out a hiding enemy. Unless something was moving around.

To catch sneaking ships, they’d need to lay some traps. Thel settled into his chair, getting ready for the Slipspace hop they’d have to make to the asteroid belt, when Veer straightened in his chair.

“Shipmaster,” Veer hissed. “Our long-range instruments are detecting multiple signals. They are not even trying to hide!”

Thel hid his excitement before them. “Where?”

“The gas giant.”

Not where he’d been expecting. But nonetheless, they had something!

“Take us there,” Thel ordered.

Retribution’s Thunder poked a hole through space and time as the ship made the sudden leap from Madrigal to a trailing orbit just behind 23 Librae’s sole gas giant.

This was a great location Thel thought. Gas giants tended to have small rocky clusters both in front of their orbit and behind them – it was a natural place to hove his ship to and spy on whatever was going on near the gas giant.

Retribution’s Thunder’s screens lit up with contact symbols. Alarms wailed as the crew scrambled for damage control and fire stations, and Thel realized he hadn’t been the only one with that particular idea.

“Situation?” Thel barked.

“They are everywhere!” a Sangheili shouted from the deck. “We are surrounded.”

Thel whipped around at the outburst to look at the unnamed and slightly unnerved Sangheili. “Get off my bridge!”

Thel turned to Saal. “Take his console. What do we face – numbers and weapons strength?”

“My honor, Shipmaster,” Saal replied quickly.

Thel watched the shamed Sangheili slink off the bridge, disgusted that someone so incompetent could end up on his bridge.

“Human contacts,” Saal reported. “But they do not appear to be warships. And they are not moving to engage.”

“Tell Pellius to hold his fire and follow our lead.” Thel stood up and walked toward the screens, a long shipmaster’s cloak pulling off the chair with him. His ancestors had worn thick, doarmir-fur cloaks like this at sea to stay warm and dry on long voyages.

Thel had made his by hand during a long recuperation in the Vadam Keep after a training accident the family had tried to hide. Thel remembered the shame of seeing his own blood spilled on the sand of the training ring in the courtyard, due to his own mistake. He recalled the faintness and the tall snow-capped mountains that rose above Vadam Keep as he pitched to his side.

The family had a recently-promoted shipmaster in their bloodline, and they had been loath to lose that particular honor. They’d secretly called for a doctor in the night and held Thel down by his limbs as he was operated on.

Thel kept the cloak as a reminder to himself that he could make grave mistakes when he let his guard down.

Mistakes like letting an inexperienced minor Sangheili aboard the bridge who panicked at the thought of being surrounded by human warships.

“Make sure that coward gets his rations revoked,” Thel said to Veer, letting his mind dwell on that particular incident now that he knew the ship was not in danger. “Maybe with a hunger in his belly he will find the hunger in his soul that he needs to be a real warrior.”

“A well thought-out solution, Shipmaster,” Veer said, and leaned over to send out the command.

“Saal, report.” Thel gathered the cloak around. Be sharp, he reminded himself. Keep your mind open, and think sideways instead of walking forward into a pit-trap.

“I ... I have to show you,” Saal said.

A complex set of scans appeared on the screens. Thel narrowed his eyes, then opened his mandibles in shock. “These are all asteroids,” he said. “They are all connected.”

There were hundreds of connected worldlets.

“This is unlike anything I have ever seen the humans do,” Thel said out loud. “There was nothing like it when the human world here was destroyed.”

“Perhaps they built it after that?” Zhar suggested. He looked intrigued by the scans. “You have to admit, that demonstrates some strong blood on their part, to remain here and build after the Prophets ordered them destroyed.”

“Strong indeed,” Thel agreed.

“But it does them little good ultimately,” Jora said. “Their blasphemy still cannot stand, and they must all still die.”

“What bothers me,” Thel grumbled, “is that they have gone this long unnoticed.”

“I think I know why,” Zhar said. He tapped his console, and before the bridge crew the long-distance image of a Kig-Yar freighter appeared.

It was docked against one of the many asteroids in the super structure.

A human structure.

“What new treachery is this?” Thel hissed. The Kig-Yar, pirates and scum, worked under contracts given out by the ministries. They were hardly loyal fighters; they had little nobility. But they usually remained in line due to the dual methods of Unggoy Deacons aboard their ships, as well as the contracts and payments the Prophets offered them.

Thel could hardly believe what he saw.

“Brace for impact!” Saal warned, just as the Retribution’s Thunder shivered, throwing Thel from his feet against a pillar.

So the humans had found them and were attacking, Thel thought as he sprang for his shipmaster’s throne.

The second impact stabbed through the heart of Thel’s ship, a violent, metal-boiling line of light that just missed the bridge. But this wasn’t human. Humans employed kinetic or explosive ordnance, not plasma.

A Psalm Every Day was preparing a second volley. It was very obvious that the plasma salvo was from another Covenant vessel.

Their own escort.

“Traitors!” Thel seethed. “Evasive maneuvers!”

“I have a firing solution,” Jora yelled, turning to Thel. “Permission to fire, Shipmaster?”

“Fire at will! Saal, tactical Slipspace, now!”

But getting past the shock of being fired upon by their own escort had cost them critical seconds. Even as Retribution’s Thunder fired back, another salvo of blue plasma ripped through the heart of Thel’s ship.

He could feel some of the engines firing, but they had been too slow. Sangheili double hearts could take far more acceleration than Jiralhanae or Kig-Yar, but the incredible random high-speed evasive maneuvers Thel had braced himself for didn’t come.

“Status,” Thel snapped.

He did not like the returning reports. They were venting precious air into space. The number of casualties was rising. Long-range communications were down. Life support was failing. The last volley had taken their core engines offline, and their ability to generate plasma had gone with it. While most of their sensors were still operational, they could go nowhere and do nothing.

Pellius appeared in hologram before Thel. The Jiralhanae looked pleased with himself, his large teeth bared. “A mighty shipmaster Sangheili, helpless before me. I shall savor this moment for the rest of my life.”

Thel stared at Pellius and wondered where the Kig-Yar Shipmistress had gone. She was nowhere to be seen on the bridge. “It will be a short life.”

“Not as short as yours. Good-bye, Shipmaster.” Pellius faded away.

“He has released boarding craft and Spirits!” Saal reported.

“They will not have the Retributions’ Thunder,” Thel said, staring at the spot Pellius had faded from. “Alert the crew. Get in protective gear and draw the boarders in deep. Rig every section to explode. We will leave nothing to salvage!”

“Shipmaster! A Psalm Every Day has engaged their slipspace drive!” Zhar said. “They’re leaving!”

“Leaving?” Jora growled.

“The humans are not likely to go anywhere as are we. He will report whatever his feeble mind can concoct when he reaches High Charity.”

“They get the glory for reporting this structure and the humans hiding here,” Zhar concluded with frustration.

“Cursed cowards,” hissed Jora.

“The Spirits are approaching to attack!”

“Where are their boarding craft?”

“They are hanging back.”

In the distance, the outer hull shook and shivered as Spirits flew up and down the length of the ship, strafing it.

Thel broke the arm off his chair in frustration. “Those who wish to escape the ship may do so now.”

It was a rhetorical statement. But it did serve one purpose: to weed out any dishonorable Sangheili who might falter by your side.

Thel pressed his mouth parts firm against each other as they waited in silence for a handful of dishonorable crew to desert. Maybe they were serfs who had risen far enough to work simple duties aboard the ship, or Sangheili who’d managed to hide their lack of real blood.

He waited for that, and for the Kig-Yar to get bolder and try to board the ship.

One of the screens showed Sangheili trying to escape aboard Spirits from inside Retribution’s Thunder’s hold, and the Kig-Yar-run ships fell on them en masse, overwhelming them. Plasma ripped out and filled the space around the ship, and it wasn’t long before the cowardly died in the vacuum at the hands of traitorous Kig-Yar.

A fitting fate, Thel thought. “Fire the empty escape pods,” he ordered.

They watched those get destroyed, and it strengthened their resolve to fight. To run was to die.

Now the Kig-Yar felt that they could risk boarding, with what seemed like most of the crew of the ship gone.

Thel waited. Waited until Kig-Yar swarmed the hull and trooped through the heart of his ship, and then gave the order.

Explosions ripped through the interior, section by section. The smooth, bulbous lines of his ship flexed and twisted, and fire gushed out from in between the cracks, roiling up through the corridors.

The air in the bridge heated up, and then rushed out. Thel found himself panting for air that no longer existed, and then a secondary explosion turned the cockpit inside out.

Thel hurtled through the air and struck a bulkhead.

Chapter 24

PINEAPPLE HABITAT, THE RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

Thel ‘Vadamee and his bridge crew sat on the far end of a large cell. It was a crude thing: a hole dug out of the rocky interior wall of a hollowed out asteroid, with bars of metal over the front, some of which were hinged.

Thel had seen medieval keeps with similarly-built jails back on Sanghelios. In museums.

He’d woken up with a horrific headache pounding the side of his temple where he’d struck the bulkhead. Not an honorable battle wound, or a way to end a fight, Thel thought miserably as he looked out through the bars.

The Kig-Yar had combed the remains of the ship, carrion-sniffers that they were, and found the bridge crew alive. The rest of the crew had fought to the death, destroying the ship in the process.

Thel sincerely wished they’d just left him for dead on his destroyed ship. But the Kig-Yar had some plan in mind for them, using the Sangheili as hostages.

Jora crept his way over. “I am beyond shame, my shipmaster.” Thel had been told Jora rushed the Kig-Yar with no weapon, and they’d shot him several times in the leg. Now Jora was dragging the useless limb behind him on the cell floor.

“I have snapped one of the legs off those useless cots made for humans.”

He handed it to Thel, who tested the sharp end with a finger. Jora had worked hard to get the long piece of metal sharp.

“Please,” Jora begged. “1 have no honor left. I am crippled. I cannot face my keep.”

If the Sangheili masters found out that they’d been captured by a lesser race like the Kig-Yar, or that they’d failed so horribly in a holy mission handed to them directly by a Hierarch, there would be dire consequences.

Jora’s entire bloodline could be killed off. They’d hunt down his nephews and behead them. The genetic proclivities of failures, the planetary heads of Sangheilios thought, could not be allowed to continue on.

But if Jora did the right thing, and killed himself before the Kig-Yar could get any use out of him, or further sully his name and by extension, his line … well, his keep might fail in stature, but at least the line could try to struggle back up from its loss of honor.

“Please,” Jora whispered. “You have been like a cousin to me. Please do me one last favor. I have not the strength to do it myself.”

“Come and kneel,” Thel said.

The other zealots in the cell faced away. It was embarrassing to see that Jora could not even dispatch himself, but needed the hand of another.

But Thel remembered how Jora had thrown himself against the Kig-Yar. That had to count for something, he thought, as he stepped behind Jora.

“May the Great Journey await you, may your enemies writhe in hell, and your line continue forward, and gain honor,” Thel said to his boldest fighter.

And then he slammed the spike into the back of Jora’s head. Jora slowly toppled forward with a sigh.

“May your scattered body go,” Veer murmured, turning back around, “beyond the limits of your mind ….”

“Beyond the limits of our worlds,” Saal said the next line of the death benediction.

“To the places our ancestors dream and sang of,” Zhar sang.

“And the Prophets speak of,” Thel finished. The survivors clasped forearms. “You all remain alive – why?”

“We want to study how to destroy the humans hiding here,” Saal said. “The Kig-Yar spoke of ransoming us to our keeps. But Thel, you are kaidon of your keep now. Would you pay for one of your own captured like this?”

Thel snorted. “I would sooner bleed on the ground than do it. You know this.”

“Exactly,” Zhar said. Thel could see his tactical mind working. This was good. Set Zhar on a problem and he was like a warrior – he’d tussle with it to his last breath.

Saal laughed. “The Kig-Yar are idiots who pay no attention to us. They should have know to kill us where we lay; no Sangheili in his right mind would pay a ransom. That is a Kig-Yar game.”

Zhar tuned to him. “And that is how we will destroy them. They are too far away to find this out so quickly. And our suspicions were right; we have heard Kig-Yar say as much. The Jiralhanae who betrayed us are returning with the Shipmistress to High Charity where they can claim this find for themselves.”

“And find favor with the Prophets,” Veer said. “But how is it that we’re in a human cell here?”

Thel understood what he was getting at. “The prophets will not like it.”

“Humans and Kig-Yar, working together,” Veer mused. “There were humans here talking to the Kig-Yar who dragged us in.”

“They called the one human Bonifacio,” Saal said. “You could smell his fear of us in the air.”

“All we need to do is get out of this cell,” Zhar said. Saal walked over to Jora’s body and pulled the spike free from his head. “I have yet to see anything spying on us. This all looks like it was recently welded together on short notice to contain us.”

Thel snorted in appreciation. “Roll Jora’s body onto a cot and cover it. Eventually they will want to know why he doesn’t move. Make sure the covers they gave us drape over where the metal leg used to be.”

They had a weapon now. And a plan. Of sorts.

Four Sangheili free would be a force to reckon with.

And Thel did not, one way or another, intend to be recaptured.

Now all they needed was an opportunity.

Chapter 27

LA PAZ HABITAT OUTER RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

Thel sat in front of the bars, his legs folded underneath him, watching the two guards. It was a modified warrior’s crouch, one that let a Sangheili rest with his legs beneath him, but in a manner that allowed one to leap up and forward in the blink of an eye. He’d spent long hours practicing with fellow students in the sandy training courtyards of the Vadam keep, learning the pose; now it came as second nature.

The short, shuffling Unggoy that guarded them carried a plasma rifle too large for its frame, and Thel caught the trace whiffs of methane that leaked from around the guard’s mouth piece. The Unggoy – an annoying lesser being – was careful to remain as close to the far wall and as far away from the bars as possible, rightly fearing the Sangheili’s long limbs.

But that didn’t stop the Unggoy from taunting them and puffing itself up. “Look, you mighty Sangheili. Look you not so mighty now, eh?”

Thel growled from somewhere deep in the back of his throat.

“You ignore the Unggoy, yes. Throw us to die at your feet. Don’t care when other races take advantage of poor Unggoy. No more. Wait until you are taken to Metisette, then see you our might.”

Thel looked over at Zhar. “Might?”

“Unggoy might is a contradiction in terms,” Zhar grumbled.

“So think you,” the Unggoy hissed. “Just you wait. Just you wait.”

“What’s this Metisette? That is the second time I have heard that word,” Zhar observed. “The Kig-Yar who locked us in here mentioned it.”

Thel took a deep breath. “It is the human name for a world around the great gas giant.” His calves burned somewhat, now. But he waited still.

Just under his feet, hidden by his crouch, was the long spear of metal. Using the edge of the bedframe, and their own strength, Thel and Saal had taken turns sharpening it further. They’d also cut rudimentary barbs into the spike by shaving out sections of the crude weapon.

Now it was a case of choosing the best moment. Thel didn’t want to waste their one attempt.

This cell, they had determined, was in one of the far edges of what Zhar had heard the humans call “the Rubble.” Though the Kig-Yar and humans were working together, this was mainly a human creation.

Before Thel’s thoughts meandered further, the walls shook and debris began breaking loose. The bars of metal holding them in started bowing and screeching as they were tortured into slightly different shapes.

Lights flickered, and Thel still remained absolutely still, like a helioskrill imitating a rock back on the home planet, just watching for a meal to unsuspectingly walk by.

As the cell plunged into darkness, Thel felt his weight lift off as the antigravity generators failed. He picked up the spear, the end of it tied off to several lengths of tightly braided sheet strips, and listened.

He could hear the Unggoy’s panicked breathing and the hiss of the methane tank as he struggled in the air.

The spear flew out from between the bars and made a wet, crunching sound as it struck the Unggoy. Thel gave the impromptu rope a quick yank, and the screaming Unggoy was pulled right into the bars.

Zhar and Saal waited there. Their long arms snapped the Unggoy’s neck and quieted it.

Saal retrieved the plasma rifle as Thel pulled the makeshift spear out of the Unggoy and shoved the body away. Bright blue blood hung in the space, expanding into large globules as the Unggoy slowly spun in the air.

“Get the lock,” Thel ordered.

After bracing himself against the far wall, Saal fired at the lock three times. Plasma blew the device away into a cloud of molten metal rivulets that flew across the room, sizzling against Unggoy skin and slapping into the wall.

The four Sangheili pushed the cell door open and floated out as the lights flickered back on.

They hit the floor, along with dried metal beads and the Unggoy’s limp body. Blood splattered the floor a split second later.

Zhar looked around the room, blinking as his eyes adapted to the overly-bright human lights. “They brought us in over there.” He jutted his mouthpieces in the direction of a corridor.

Thel moved with the spear, taking point.

The Kig-Yar still here would deeply regret jailing him, he thought, as he turned a corner and spotted one of them standing by an airlock door.

Thel sprinted the length of corridor, caring little for stealth.

The Kig-Yar spun, a protective shield flaring up by his forearm, but Thel struck so hard the Kig-Yar’s head smashed into the bulkhead behind him, and he drooped to the ground.

Saal peered in through the window briefly, then pulled back.

“More inside,” Saal grunted. “But they seem preoccupied.” Thel looked at the door controls, regretting his impulse to kill the Kig-Yar guard so quickly. The collection of buttons that the humans used to control things stumped him. But he managed to tap a large green button that cycled the door open.

The Kig-Yar all turned and found themselves facing Saal with the plasma rifle aimed right at their heads.

“Remember us?” Saal said, and pulled the trigger. Long Kig-Yar faces exploded as Saal calmly shot all four in the head over their screeches of fear and rage.

“And that,” Veer said, stepping over the bodies and closing the airlock door of the ship behind them, “is why you never imprison Sangheili; you execute them.”

The walls and seats were splattered with bright purple blood.

Thel looked around with satisfaction. “That is a good start,” he said, a pleased rumble in the back of his voice. “Throw the bodies out.”

Now it was time to find out what the Kig-Yar, humans, and Unggoy were up to.

And make them all pay.

Chapter 29

IN ORBIT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

Thel grumbled happily. They’d taken the Kig-Yar shuttle out farther away from the Rubble, slowly scanning the area until they’d found a larger Kig-Yar transport ship on its way to Metisette.

They boarded it, fast and quick, before the few Kig-Yar on board had even realized what had happened.

On board were several hundred Unggoy. The Kig-Yar had been in charge, but didn’t have the numbers to run their own ships. Now the Kig-Yar were dead.

But the Unggoy had run the ship for the Kig-Yar. That made them useful. They were willing to work for Thel and his crew, or so the cowering Unggoy Deacon said as Thel stood on the purple-stained bridge. “It would be the Prophets’ will,” the Deacon yelped.

“It would be,” Thel said from behind the Unggoy. “We are on a direct mission from a Hierarch.”

The Unggoy waddled about, shifting its mouthpiece, to face Thel. It looked up and spread its arms out. “I do not question. I serve. That is our fate,” it moaned.

Thel couldn’t care less for Unggoy self-pity. “Tell your crew this ship flies where we command, or we will slaughter every last one of you. Saal will go down to engineering and watch over you. Veer will roam the corridors.”

Veer growled, and the Unggoy backed up. “Sirs! We will do our ship duties! Doubt us not.”

Thel turned to Veer and Saal. “Be wary. The slightest notion the Unggoy are playing games, hold nothing back.”

Veer and Saal grunted affirmatively and walked out of the cockpit.

The deacon turned to go, but Thel held up a hand, and the Unggoy froze.

“What is down there, Unggoy?” Thel asked. He pointed at the image of the planet on a screen at the front of the cockpit.

It was Metisette. Its sickly, yellow-orange-colored atmosphere swirled; thick, cold storms lashed the icy surface.

The Unggoy stared at them, saying nothing.

Thel turned back to the screen and folded his arms. “Zhar, my closest advisor, didn’t want to come here. He wanted to turn this transport right around to attack the Kig-Yar ship docked by the humans, and take that right back to High Charity so we could warn the prophets about the Jiralhanae treason.”

“A noble choice,” the Unggoy said.

“It is not,” Thel said. “We were captured, and jailed. When we return, we will be lucky if we hold our titles, if not our very names.” The Unggoy trembled at Thel’s anger. “What is your name, Deacon?”

“Pipit,” the Unggoy replied.

Thel folded his arms. “Pipit, one of my ancestors, a kaidon of Vadam, lost a war to one of the keep’s bitter rivals. The new kaidon put my ancestor in the cellars, jails where the defeated were left in the most dishonorable manner imaginable. They were fed scraps, and visited by the invaders to be mocked and laughed at. The most honorable among the jailed killed them selves or each other.

“The kaidon escaped after weeks of starving. He had become so thin he could pull himself through the bars of his window looking out over the Vadam keep cliffs. He scaled the cliff, and swam down the river, all the way to the valley.

“The kaidon walked for many days, eating vermin and scraps, becoming lower than low, until he came into the vast deserts that lie in the interior of all our lands. And out there, after wandering for many years, built his strength, his hardness, and made allies from other wanderers. They were the least of the least, yes, but with a will to fight, and a will to live no matter the odds.

“With this new tribe, my ancestor returned to Vadam Keep and scaled the walls. He killed his enemies all, throwing their bodies to the river. It is said that it ran purple with blood for a week. And when the kaidon was done killing his enemies, he opened the jails and killed the Vadam who had been cowardly enough to remain alive in them. That was my kaidon. That is Vadam. Our blood was forged in the desert, confirmed in the keep that day, and purified through Kaidon Ther’s experiences. So it is carved on the Vadam saga wall.”

Thel looked over at Zhar, who asked, “Shipmaster, do you have a point to retelling a stanza of your family’s saga?”

Thel sat down in the shipmaster’s chair at the center of the cockpit. “I can hardly turn my back on my lineage, can I, Zhar? I will not return to High Charity with a lost ship, knowing we were locked up by Kig-Yar, and little knowledge of what is happening here. I would be no better than the jailed Sangheili that Ther executed for being useless.”

“It was a suggestion. An option,” Zhar said.

“But it is not an option, as we are Sangheili.” Thel now turned back to Deacon Pipit. “So you understand, Unggoy? We are here to stay. I ask you, again, what is on Metisette?”

“Dreams,” Pipit sighed.

“Do not play word games,” Thel growled. “Be plain.”

“When commanders need fighters, Unggoy are ordered to breed and expand. Then we die in great numbers. Unggoy, you all say: do this, do that. Some dream of free,” Pipit explained. “And though we hate Kig-Yar, this one named Reth, high commander, says to those Unggoy that they can come to Metisette. Come, build a home. Help change this moon so it becomes a place you can live where the methane is free in all the air. Breed free.”

Zhar started to laugh. “And you believed this … Reth?”

Pipit looked up, beady red eyes squinting in anger. “Kig-Yar always betray, yes, but the opportunity ….” The alien shrugged.

Thel looked down at the fatalistic little alien. “So Metisette has methane in the air that you can breathe.”

“A place for Unggoy,” Pipit said. “A safe place, where we can live without interference, without controls on our population that are imposed from on high. Where we can walk around without these chafing harnesses and breathing tanks.”

“An Unggoy paradise,” Thel muttered. “Where you can breed until you overrun the entire place.” The Unggoy were well-known to reproduce like mad. During peacetime the Prophets monitored their population closely; the Unggoy had never cared for that. And even though they hated the Kig-Yar, it made sense that the Unggoy had jumped at the chance in this strange sequence of events to gain a world of their own.

Thel scratched his lower mandibles.

Saal called Thel over the intercom. “They have our infiltrator harness here,” he said, “In their storage bay. The Kig-Yar stole it from our ship!”

Thel stopped scratching as he thought about the news. “We have a change of plans. Take the armor down to the Kig-Yar shuttle. Get the shuttle warmed up as well. We are going down.”

“Into that murk?” Zhar protested from nearby.

“Yes. Zhar, the Prophets unleash the Unggoy to breed when ever there is a war; they stop mixing anti-breeding hormones into the methane supplies. Now we have a renegade Kig-Yar breeding Unggoy. I think this ‘Reth’ is creating an army on the surface of Metisette for himself.”

“So we are going to see for ourselves?” Zhar snorted.

“I want to talk to Reth,” Thel said simply.

“Why?”

“If he is in charge of Metisette, he knows what is going on with the humans and the Kig-Yar working together. And he knows about the betrayal of the Jiralhanae. Reth knows things we need to know.”

“And he is surrounded by hundreds of Unggoy,” Zhar noted.

The deacon cleared his throat. Thel turned to him, and Pipit said, “Not hundreds.”

Thel waited a moment. “Thousands?”

Pipit still bobbed his head. “Tens of ….” but already the alien had shaken its head again.

“Hundreds?”

Now Pipit nodded eagerly as Zhar swore. Reth had quite an army at his disposal. This would make getting to him a lot more difficult.

But Thel smiled. “We have our infiltrator harness back.” That gave them an edge. They were not just Sangheili, but well-armed, well-armored, and also invisible Sangheili.

Like his ancestor Ther, the ancient kaidon, Thel would come back against great odds, swarming into the middle of his enemy before they even knew what had happened.

“Get us ready, Zhar,” Thel ordered. “We are going down there. Pipit, Veer will take over while we are gone; you will help him. Give us the coordinates to Reth. And if you deceive us, Veer will be here to make sure you suffer immediately for it.”

Pipit nodded and, in a voice that seemed to crack, gave Zhar the necessary coordinates.

“Thank you, Deacon.” Thel looked around. “You will also need to have an Unggoy pilot meet us at the shuttle, Deacon. Talk to the Unggoy down there on Metisette, tell them you had an accident aboard, and need to be resupplied with meth for Unggoy to breathe.”

With that done, Thel stalked off the bridge with Zhar close behind.

“Three of us against hundreds of thousands of Unggoy,” Zhar said.

“The little ones will cower with fear and run from us in floods,” Thel proclaimed as they thudded down the corridors.

Zhar laughed. “You are confident.”

“I am Sangheili,” Thel said. “This is what we are.”

They crammed into the tiny shuttle. Spec ops armor lay on the benches where Unggoy would have lined up and sat. Now there was only one Unggoy, a terrified pilot who remained strapped in and staring at the Sangheili in terror.

Thel felt the warmth that came to him when he had a direct plan. “Take us down, Saal.”

Once they’d broken through the worst of the deceleration in the upper atmosphere of Metisette, Thel unstrapped himself and walked back to don his spec ops armor, and helped Zhar with his. The shuttle shook and rattled its way through the thick atmosphere, but they remained balanced on their feet easily enough.

Once suited up, Zhar flicked the armor on, and faded away into invisibility.

“It works,” Thel said, then tested his own.

Zhar and Saal switched places. As Saal struggled into his armor alone and Zhar flew the shuttle in, Thel walked up to the edge of the cockpit to look down.

Nothing but thick orange clouds and haze – at least until they broke out under the clouds to fly over a jagged, ice-cold landscape whipped by constant storms.

Zhar banked them slowly through the orange murk toward a massive crater. As they flew across it the sides reached up like distant mountains, and Thel could see a massive lake at its center.

In the distance stood what looked like a keep, straddling a giant river of liquid that tumbled over the edge of the crater down to its floor. The keep was ramshackle, made out of parts of old, ruined ships that had been rudely deorbited and landed near the lip of the immense waterfall.

But it stood high with additions that had been built in between the spaceships’ hulls, with tubes and domes that hung like carbuncles pocking the rock faces and rising above the river. Thel saw that it could house hundreds of thousands.

Elevators ran down along the sides of the thousand feet of waterfall to structures around the giant lake.

Metisette wasn’t a world one could breath in. Its mostly-nitrogen atmosphere would leave Sangheili, or Kig-Yar, or most races with nothing to breathe.

The liquid on the very cold Metisette was methane. Thel watched as a stream of it fell off the lip of the crater. Methane mist hung strong in the air all throughout the natural valleys and low areas of the crater, thanks to the falls.

“Giant reactors heat the land all around the crater,” the pilot spoke up, pride suddenly more powerful than its fear of the Sangheili. “It makes more of the mists.”

Zhar skimmed the lake and approached the falls. The shuttle hit the mists, and then rose up near the falls, pressing Thel against the seat.

“We pop over the edge and land, Zhar,” Thel shouted. “Make sure your armor is tight, Saal. It will give us air until we are inside the structure. If Reth is breathing and Kig-Yar are in there, then we will be okay.

“If there is only methane, we go in as far as we can before coming back. Zhar stays with the shuttle, hiding, as this Unggoy has the other Unggoy load up our shuttle with tanks of methane,”

Thel watched the remains of a large Kig-Yar merchant ship appear over the lip, and Zhar arced over it into a large landing area marked out in plasma-melted rock.

As soon as the shuttle touched rock, the three Sangheili activated their camouflage and flickered and vanished. Zhar sat across from the Unggoy who was supposedly piloting the shuttle, and Thel and Saal jumped out the back of the shuttle.

The Unggoy pilot had not lied – the land here was bitterly cold to Thel, but it was tolerable. Like an arctic waste. Not nearly as cold as the rest of the moon.

Silent ghosts moving through the orange murk that hung in the air, they maneuvered across the field, keeping well clear of the Unggoy who waddled out across the landing pad toward the shuttle, barking and shouting in their language.

Thel kept an easy lope going, covering the ground so fast that any Unggoy who noticed a wavering in the air would surely shake their heads and dismiss it as a trick of the light:

They slipped in through a series of giant airlocks, where Unggoy still had to wear their harnesses and tanks.

Thel looked around. “This is Kig-Yar territory,” he whispered to Saal. It made sense that the lesser aliens were here in a repurposed old ship, mounted near the lip of the falls. It made for a commanding view, because although the Unggoy felt like this was their world, Thel would imagine that the Kig-Yar saw it differently.

Saal found a lone Unggoy, and an empty room in the back of what had once been the large hangar bays of the Kig-Yar ship.

It didn’t take long to get the Unggoy to give up the location of Reth.

“The cockpit room, at the very top.”

Saal snapped the Unggoy’s neck and they took the emergency maintenance tubes up through the ship. Thel panted heavily and his mandibles were wide open, his tongue flicking the air, by the time they arrived at the top.

Four Kig-Yar guarded the cockpit’s doors, but two of them were looking out the windows down to the launch pad, bored, their plasma rifles slung over their backs.

They never had a chance to turn and see what attacked them. The two Sangheili were in their midst in a split second, firing point-blank into their faces with their own plasma rifles.

The other two Kig-Yar had a second to squall loudly before they met the same fate, and Thel blew the cockpit doors apart with a grenade.

Inside the carpeted, lavishly-furnished room sat a single Kig-Yar, his large eyes staring at the shimmering flaws in the air before him Thel shut his invisibility off.

“Sangheili,” the Kig-Yar hissed. “Damn you, what have you done? Do you know who you cross?”

“You are Reth?” Thel asked.

“Yes,” the Kig-Yar said.

“You let Unggoy breed without control. You pretend to be a voice of the Prophets here. You are a heretic.” Thel raised his plasma rifle and struck Reth in the head with it.

“Pick him up,” Thel ordered Saal. “Let us return to the shuttle.” A loud warble echoed across the corridors. Thel looked around. “That sounded like an alarm.”

Saal walked over to the front of the cockpit, Reth slung casually over a shoulder. “It is. We should call Zhar, have him fly up here. We can get outside onto the top and get him to pick us up there.”

Thel stepped forward to stand next to Saal and looked down. Saal murmured into the air, talking to Zhar.

“Zhar needs just a minute. Too many Unggoy inside the shuttle.”

Hundreds of feet below in a courtyard formed from the superstructures of three or four mothballed spaceships, thousands of Unggoy streamed out. The crowds ran to surround the building they were in.

“They cannot enter,” Saal said. “Almost all of them have no harnesses or air. The methane mists out there let them breathe. Where are their harnesses?”

Thel looked at the unconscious Kig-Yar on Saal’s shoulder. “The Kig-Yar either have not made them many, or are keeping them under lock and key.”

“But why?” Saal asked.

“Because they cannot leave Metisette, or even attack this Kig-Yar structure in the center of their own keep, if they have no tanks.”

“Doesn’t help us right now,” Saal said, looking at the quadrangle fill with Unggoy. “Enough Unggoy seem to have harnesses to cause us trouble.”

Thel turned and looked back down the corridor, hearing the sound of Unggoy screeches. “It tells us who’s really in charge of all this.”

“The Kig-Yar.”

Thel looked back at Reth’s limp form. “Yes. That one in particular. Wake him up. We may have to put a gun to his head. What is Zhar’s progress?”

Saal cocked his head, listening to an update from down below. “Zhar is closing the ramp and warming the shuttle up.”

“The timing will be tight,” Thel said. He walked over to the doors with his plasma rifle up and ready. “Be ready to blow the windows out when he gets airborne.”

“My honor,” Saal grunted. He set Reth down and slapped the Kig-Yar’s face. “Wake up,” the Sangheili zealot growled.

Chapter 32

THE REDOUBT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

The first trio of Unggoy to turn the corridor walked right into Thel’s line of fire. Short bursts of plasma struck them in the center of their torsos.

Footsteps pattered behind Thel. He turned around and saw Reth trying to run away from Saal. Saal grabbed the Kig-Yar leader and dragged him back toward the windows and out of the direct line of fire.

“Do you two realize what you are doing?” the Kig-Yar asked.

Saal cocked his head. “We are kidnapping you.”

Reth did not find it as amusing as Saal seemed to. “There are hundreds of thousands of Unggoy out there, all who are at my command.”

“They are out there,” Saal said. “But you and I know they can not all get in here.” And Saal chuckled.

“So you plan on doing what then?” Reth hissed. “You are meddling in extraordinarily important affairs.”

Thel ducked behind the doorframe as more Unggoy spilled out into the far side of the corridor, One stumbled when he saw Thel duck back around with his plasma rifle. “Sangheili! Defend the Redoubt!” it screamed, and the back of its methane tank exploded from another accurate shot. Flaming debris struck other Unggoy who lost their cohesive charge down the corridor and scattered, trying to pat the flames away before they got burned.

“That should hold them for a bit,” Thel muttered. But then to his surprise, the Unggoy turned back toward him again.

These were some very determined Unggoy.

“They have something to fight for,” Reth shouted. “Sangheili, you don’t understand what’s going on. You must free me. I can save your lives. I swear it.”

Thel watched the Unggoy charge. There was little love between the Kig-Yar and Sangheili – Reth’s kind resented the position Sangheili held in the Covenant. And the Sangheili regarded the Kig-Yar as little more than scavengers.

Thel suspected Reth was lying and would happily have them killed the moment they set their weapons down.

But Reth pressed on nonetheless. “You are the Sangheili from Retribution’s Thunder, am I right?”

Why was Zhar taking so long? Thel shot another handful of Unggoy.

“Yes.”

More came up the elevators and stairs and ran forward.

“It was a mistake. We should not have betrayed you to those Jiralhanae,” Reth said in as soothing a voice as a Kig-Yar could. “But we needed you to not interfere! Not after all the work we’ve done so far.”

Thel shook his head. “What is done is done. You have made your choices. Now we are making ours.” Way too many Unggoy were rushing up to the top floor, flooding over dead bodies in the hall. Thel knew they were going to continue until he ran out of the charge in his plasma rifle.

“You go against the Hierarchs!” Reth shouted.

Saal backhanded the Kig-Yar. “We are on a direct mission for the Hierarchs. Do not dare blaspheme like that. As if you speak for the Hierarchs ….” he muttered.

Thel saw out of the corner of his eye that the Kig-Yar looked stunned. “Which Hierarch?”

“The Prophet of Regret himself,” Saal proclaimed proudly.

Reth shook his head. “Wrong Prophet,” he muttered, the feathered spines on his head wavering in confusion.

Wrong Prophet? Saal and Thel looked at each other, and then Saal shouted, “Zhar is up!”

Sure enough a column of disturbed air rippled just outside the windows.

“Blow the windows out!” Thel ordered. He shut the doors and locked them against the Unggoy.

Saal used a sticky grenade on the thick windows. The blue light pulsed, and then Thel grabbed Reth to shield him as the explosion shook the room.

Glass shards flew out, and the thunder of engines filled the room, bringing the acrid clouds of methane mist with it.

Thel hoisted Reth onto his back. “You scream, struggle, or move about, you will regret it dearly. Now take a deep breath while there’s still some air!”

He followed Saal out onto the lip of the window, looking at the slope of the repurposed ship stretching out before him. They didn’t want to go that way. Slide off the edge, they’d have a very long fall.

Thel pulled himself and the weight of the Kig-Yar up, using his hands and legs to crawl up onto the slope of metal above the windows. Saal scrambled up ahead, unencumbered, to the top of the ship, where the shuttle hovered, waiting for them.

They needed one last tactic to gain them some time. Thel pulled out a pair of grenades and let them roll down toward the slope of the hull. As they dropped by his feet he kicked them in through the window.

He scrambled up after Saal as fast he could, the grenades’ explosions blowing red flame and debris out of the windows underneath him as he ran.

The Unggoy pilot stood in the back of the shuttle, eyes wide in stunned surprise as he watched them run toward him. Zhar gently touched the top of the old Kig-Yar wreck with the shuttle and Saal and Thel leapt aboard. The tips of other grounded ships poked out of the thick, ruddy mists all around them like towers.

“Take it up!” Saal shouted forward, and they accelerated away, the structure dwindling at the top of the falls, the crater lake falling into the distance.

Chapter 34

METISETTE ORBIT, 23 LIBRAE

The Kig-Yar named Reth screamed, a primal roar of pain and horror that echoed throughout the corridors of the ship, all the way up to the cockpit, where Thel sat poring over Kig-Yar estimates of human strength in the Rubble.

Zhar stood up, but Thel held up a hand. “I ordered Saal not to do this. I will go.”

For a moment Zhar remained up, then he folded back down into his chair. “What –”

“That is my concern, Zhar.” Thel walked out of the cockpit, past the Unggoy clustered in the halls. They chattered nervously and cleared a path as Thel strode by.

Thel walked to Reth’s cell. The Kig-Yar had been strapped to the wall, his arms and legs splayed out in a large X by strong straps.

On the other side of the energy bars, Saal stood in front of the Kig-Yar. As he leaned forward, the horrendous screams began again. “Why are you really here in this system?” Saal bellowed. “What is it you seek to gain?”

Reth spit purple blood and screamed.

Thel shut off the containment system, and stepped into the alcove. “Has he said anything new to justify continuing this interrogation? Maybe something different?” Thel asked softly.

Saal spun around, turning off his energy sword. Purple blood stained the hilt in his hand and dripped from his fingers. “No, honor. He has not. He’s still sticking to his story. That a Hierarch commands him to have done all this.”

“Have you forgotten your orders, then?” Thel stared Saal straight in the eye, neck bared, as if daring Saal to try for it.

SaaI backed away from the implicit challenge of confidence, moving closer to a wall. Reth gurgled in the background.

“I wanted to break him of his heresies,” Saal said. “What he’s saying cannot be true.”

“It is a poor soldier who insists on seeing things not as they are, but as he wants them to be. One day reality hits, and his illusions fail him, and he dies stupidly. What honor is there in that?” Thel stepped closer to Saal, cornering him, dominating his space.

Saal straightened. “But if the Kig-Yar is right, then one Prophet ordered him to come here and do this, and another ordered us to come here and –”

“It is not up to us to pick apart what the Prophets may or may not have ordered, Saal. It is also not up to you to decide what orders of mine to follow.”

Thel patted his waist, where his own energy sword was clipped, and kept his eyes locked on Saal, who finally looked toward the ground.

“I have failed you, honor,” Saal said.

“You have.” Thel sighed.

“I have lost nobility. I will do what is right.” Saal’s energy sword flared into being.

“You will not take your life,” Thel said. “You will scar your forearms with the mark of disobedience.”

Saal closed his eyes and shivered. “Please ….”

“It is an order,” Thel stood up straight and high over Saal. “Now leave.”

Saal walked out of the cell with his head low from shame. Thel walked over to the slab of a bed and sat on it, facing Reth.

“Sangheili are insane,” Reth hissed. “What is the mark of disobedience?”

“He will use his energy sword to burn marks into the skin of his arms. Crossing lines all up and down, where all can see and know him for what he is. It is shameful. Death is preferred. But for now, I need all my fighters. He can kill himself later, and we will destroy the body so that his lineage will not suffer. If he performs well in battle.”

Reth shook his head. “Sangheili ….”

“We are strong, Kig-Yar. That is why we sit at the right hand of the Prophets.”

Reth laughed. “One day that shall pass.”

“Not as long as we remain strong.” Thel stood. “But Saal’s worries do trouble me. You still claim that it is the Prophet of Truth who sent you here?”

Again Reth laughed. “You should worry. I speak the truth. And it was Truth who sent me here. He doesn’t believe that the Prophet of Regret has come even close to the human homeworld.”

Thel leaned closer. “But this here is not the human homeworld.”

Reth blinked, focusing his memories. “When that Kig-Yar ship took back recordings of these humans begging to trade for their lives, Truth realized he had found a way to easily find the core of their infestation.”

“These heretical weapons,” Thel said.

“Humans have rebels among them. Something Truth wants to use. The weapons are traceable. We could map the entire human population if we got these rebels to smuggle back enough of them. Sadly, the humans have a new directive that has killed this opportunity.”

“They destroy data on their ships before they are captured, yes,” Thel said.

“But we still have a chance to get the location of their homeworld from them here. There are opportunists who will sell it to us. Once we have it, these habitats are ours to keep, the Prophet promised us. The Kig-Yar will hold a special place then, Truth has promised us.”

Thel shook his head. “The Sangheili will remain by the side of the Prophets.”

“You are too arrogant,” Reth spat. “The Jiralhanae betrayed you. We are given this special mission by the Prophet of Truth. Both seek to minimize your kind. You have dominated things far too long.”

“We are in the midst of a holy war with the humans,” Thel hissed. “That is not the time for such things.”

“But it is,” Reth said. “We will use our Unggoy army from Metisette to destroy the humans here once we have the data that leads us to their homeworld. And we will be favored in the Prophets’ eyes. Not you, Sangheili.”

“You are an obnoxious creature.” Thel broke the straps around the Kig-Yar and freed him.

“When we hand over the humans, we will be honored. The Prophets will look kindly on us in the final journey.”

Reth staggered over to the bunk and lay down. “We will be holier and more blessed than you, Sangheili. You will see. You will see.”

Thel walked away, back to the cockpit, where Zhar looked up. He’d overheard their whole exchange.

“Do you believe him?” Zhar asked.

“I think Reth believes what Reth is saying.” Thel sat down, suddenly tired.

“What games are we caught in the middle of?” Zhar asked.

“I do not know,” Thel said. He toyed with the image of the Kig-Yar ship on his screen. It was the closest thing the Kig-Yar had to a true fleet ship, similar to the designs of refitted Kig-Yar raiders that had fought the Covenant from asteroid belts before the Kig-Yar were granted a place within the Covenant.

He wondered if the Kig-Yar had managed to put a Slipspace drive on it.

It looked likely, though Thel wondered if the cobbled- together affair would make it through. It certainly didn’t look like it.

But it had weapons. Thel made a decision.

“We will take that Kig-Yar ship. We wilt use it to destroy all this heresy. If the Prophet of Truth shows up and tells me to stop, then I will do so. Tell the others to prepare, and tell these Unggoy to ready themselves to be useful.”

Until the Prophet of Truth himself showed up here, Thel had to follow the orders he was given. And since the Jiralhanae would be back with the High Prophet of Regret soon, Thel wanted his actions to show that he had done his duty.

Yes. The human habitats here would burn, just as their world Charybdis IX had burned.

Chapter 36

METISETTE ORBIT, 23 LIBRAE

Reth lay curled up on the uncomfortable slab, thinking about the warmth and closeness of a Kig-Yar nest, and how far away such things were from him at the moment.

He hurt everywhere, thanks to his treatment by the Sangheili. Oh, they’d pay for this. Reth followed the orders of a Prophet. Who were they to treat him so cruelly?

The Sangheili thought they were lords of it all, but they were just thugs, Reth thought. Little different from the Jiralhanae and their violent approaches to everything in the world.

Soon the Prophets would listen to all Kig-Yar, Reth thought. Reth was here, working to find the secret of the human homeworld. It would have been his already, if not for the Sangheili meddling.

“Unggoy!” Reth carefully got off the bench, his limbs protesting, his steps dizzy.

The Sangheili would have to go. Things were so close to being finished. Soon his human agent would have the location to Earth for him. Once Reth had that, then the army of Unggoy he’d gathered on Metisette would be ready to be unleashed on the Rubble. The asteroids would make wonderful Kig-Yar nesting grounds.

“Unggoy, where are you? You must attend me. Are you not believers in the mission the Prophet of Truth himself gave to me, and thus to you?” Reth collapsed to the ground in front of the energy bars that kept him jailed.

Once he had the Rubble, he thought through a haze, and the location to Earth, the humans’ Exodus Project would provide him the vehicle he needed to then bring the Unggoy to attack the human homeworld.

A daring plan.

A Kig-Yar plan.

A plan the Prophet of Truth had agreed to when Reth presented it after returning with the secret of the Rubble and the humans’ desire to trade: He’d kept it a secret from his own Shipmistress, a violation that would have gotten him castrated if found out, but it had paid off handsomely.

“Unggoy!”

Now they’d been discovered, the Jiralhanae were returning to broadcast the news about the discovery of the Rubble to a different Prophet.

The Kig-Yar couldn’t stop them. But they could move the plan up, so that they wouldn’t look like traitors, trading with the humans.

No, it was time to destroy the humans and their homeworld and show the Prophets that it was the Kig-Yar, not the Sangheili or Jiralhanae, who were the most cunning and loyal and holy subjects of the Covenant.

The shuffling steps of two furtive Unggoy soldiers got Reth to focus on the ground in front of his long face.

“Sangheili kills us if we release you,” one of the Unggoy protested.

“And you’ll risk your chance at joining in the Great Journey because you’re scared of these Sangheili,” Reth hissed. His ribs hurt.

The Unggoy shuffled their feet again, methane snorting out from their masks as they looked back and forth at each other.

“Will you risk the Sangheili destroying the Redoubt, and all you’ve built on Metisette?” Reth asked. “Will you see all the Unggoy on that planet punished, when they’ve been following the right Path?”

They glanced at each other again. “Our nipple brothers would be all killed?”

The Unggoy sucked food from a shared tube, a nipple, Reth remembered. “Yes, your nipple brothers would all die.”

That was enough to get them to free him. One of the Unggoy tapped at the controls for Reth’s cell.

Reth smiled as the energy bars disappeared. He rolled out of the cell before the Unggoy changed their minds. “Quick, you must help me escape.”

The two Unggoy grabbed him under his arms as he wobbled, prompting Reth to grunt in pain. Together, all three hobbled down the corridor until Reth had them stop near a service panel.

The Sangheili may have taken the ship by force, and cowed the Unggoy, but Reth still had some tricks of his own. He shut down the ship’s computer system with an override password.

While the Sangheili raced to reboot the system, he had the Unggoy drag him to an escape pod.

Minutes later the cylindrical pod shot out of the ship, veering back toward Metisette at top speed, as the Sangheili coasted with a dead ship.

It was time, Reth thought bitterly while rooting around the pod for a medical kit, to show the Sangheili that Kig-Yar could fight.

Chapter 38

THE REDOUBT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

Reth quickly strode through the hall of one of the Redoubt’s grounded ships. There were ten old decommissioned ships that had been landed around “the Plaza,” with the largest Kig-Yar ship towering over them all from the northeast corner. Docking tubes connected the ships like bridges high over the ground.

And if Reth chose, he could descend into the ground, where every day the Unggoy warrens spread deeper and farther into the warmed rock. The escape pod he had landed in still sat out on the landing pad of the Plaza, crackling and shimmering from the heat of reentry.

He’d lived in fear for several long minutes, convinced that the Sangheili would get the ship running in time to turn around for him, but they hadn’t. The Sangheili had gotten the ship booted up and kept moving along their trajectory headed for the Rubble.

Reth needed to order the Infinite Spoils away from dock along with all the other Kig-Yar ships, but he was reluctant to do so. Soon the Infinite Spoils would have human Slipspace drives, something the Hierarch hadn’t even granted Reth, but something that all Kig-Yar wanted: a Slipspace ship of their own. But first Reth needed to take the Rubble, and any human ships with the drives, for the Kig-Yar. The humans had been stockpiling the Slipspace drives they’d traded for to install in their own machine: the Exodus Project.

But when the Infinite Spoils got its drives it would mark something new, as long as the Kig-Yar could spirit it out of the Rubble before the Hierarchs heard of it.

Everything was about to change, Reth felt, as he took an elevator up into the tall, grounded ship that was the Kig-Yar refuge inside the Redoubt. There were many, many more guards around now than when the Sangheili had broached it.

He entered his room. The remains of the firefight had been cleaned up, the glass replaced so that he could, once again, look out over the Plaza, and the Redoubt as a whole.

The river of methane on the surface of Metisette rumbled underneath their creation. Its passage turned giant turbines, creating power for the entire complex. The Unggoy thrived here among the mists of methane reclaimed from the rivers and pools.

Shuttles were already descending from the reddened clouds to touch down on Metisette’s surface. Kig-Yar were forming up in the square below the balcony, as well as Unggoy Deacons. All per his command.

Several of his key advisors hustled up behind him. They looked shocked at the wounds all over his body, and his hunched position. Reth paid the stares no mind.

“We have planned for the invasion of the Rubble for a long time,” Reth said, doing his best to straighten up against the twinges of pain the Sangheili had left him.

“Is it time?” they asked.

Reth smiled. “Yes,” he said. “It is time. Send the orders. Gather the Unggoy out onto the Plaza. Give them their harnesses and masks. Prepare for the attack. We will take it all for our own, and once we have that data, we will continue to their homewor as well.”

The Kig-Yar in the room warbled happily. They had been waiting patiently as the humans developed asteroids that the Kig-Yar considered prime for Kig-Yar nests.

Now they would be rewarded.

“Go,” Reth snapped. “Tend to your functions!”

The Kig-Yar advisors scattered out of the room, bumping into a slew of Unggoy that waited outside.

They were not rocketing into the Rubble just yet. But for all intents and purposes, the invasion had begun.

Chapter 40

HIGH ORBIT HESOID, 23 LIBRAE

Thel idly scratched at a small piece of charred carbon that had been flaking off his armor while the Unggoy before him trembled, wondering about its fate.

He finally stopped. “So Reth escaped.”

“Lords ….” The Unggoy shook as it started to speak. “Reth is devious. And he has commanded all within this system. You can imagine, most Unggoy are eager to please our masters. It is easy to be confused at times like these, when lords turn against lords.”

Thel stood up from the pilot’s seat. Saal looked up from his console. The Sangheili winced as he moved, the crisscrossing scars of his shame scabbing and causing him pain. Which was the point.

Saal refused to look at Thel; he kept his eyes cast down at the floor. Another sign of his shame, a refusal to meet another Sangheili’s eyes.

The message had gotten across to Saal, Thel thought. It was a shame it had taken so long to control him.

Thel leaned closer to Saal. “It will only bring shame if you do not perish triumphantly in battle.”

Saal looked up, a glimmer of hope brimming in his large eyes. “I will redeem myself before you and my ancestors – by my blood I swear it,” he said.

“I know you will,” Thel replied. “That is why I ordered you to remain by my side for now.”

Ahead, on their screens, the Rubble grew larger as they got closer.

“I want you to lead the charge on that Kig-Yar ship,” Thel said. “The Infinite Spoils. It is powerful enough and large enough for what I have in mind.”

“I’ll destroy anything in our way,” Saal said.

“Good.”

Thel returned to the shaking Unggoy. “And you, will your soldiers do their job, by the Prophets? Or will they risk the chance of damnation by disobeying?”

“Sirs! They will fight. They have seen the error of their ways,” it said.

“Then you will follow close behind Saal,” Thel said. “Saal, get weapons for yourself and the Unggoy.”

“My honor,” Saal said, and left to go equip himself. Zhar, still in the cockpit, scratched a mandible. “You think the Unggoy will really fight hard to take the ship?”

“Do they ever really fight hard?” Thel wondered. “I just need them to cause confusion while we do what needs to be done. With that ship, we can destroy this ‘Rubble’ and get things moving back in the direction they’re supposed to be moving.”

Zhar nodded. “And Saal will fight like an unleashed army to regain honor.”

Thel grumbled happily. “Yes. Yes, he will.”

Chapter 45

UNNAMED KIG-VAR TRANSPORT, THE RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

Thel looked at the monitor, not quite believing what he saw: a human freighter, docked with the Infinite Spoils. And he was listening to the Kig-Yar battle channel, where they screamed about human attacks by their UNSC warriors.

Zhar looked over at him. “This Rubble grows stranger by the day, Shipmaster.”

Thel shook his long head. “As strange as this may be, it cannot surprise you. The humans are heretics – it was foolish of the Kig-Yar to think they could enter into an alliance with them.”

“Nonetheless, the airlock is occupied. What do we do now?” Zhar asked.

“Shoot the human ship,” Thel ordered. “It will either move, or we will have to burn our way in.”

Thel leaned back in his command chair, watching plasma leap out toward the human ship.

Chapter 48

INFINITE SPOILS, OFF HABITAT TIAGO, THE RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

Thel stepped aboard the Infinite Spoils with a snarl. The human ship had clogged up their attempt to board, and they’d had to shuttle over on boarding ships, burning their way aboard the docked human freighter.

It left him in a testy mood. And with Unggoy milling about bumping into each other, Thel’s mood had darkened further.

He leaned over to Zhar. “Have any of them figured out how to move this human ship away?”

“No,” Zhar replied, looking over the Unggoy standing around the cockpit, pushing buttons and chattering to each other.

Thel sighed. “Leave five Unggoy here to cut the ship loose with plasma torches once we get through the airlock.”

He stalked back to the airlock and made his way through after several Unggoy. They fanned out ahead of him into the corridors, their ungainly steps making far too much noise.

The Kig-Yar ship felt empty. No Kig-Yar had even tried to hold the airlock. Had the humans killed them all?

And if so, where were the humans?

Zhar followed him through. After the airlock closed, the sound of welding and cutting came through from the other side. A moment later a loud creaking sound filled the corridor, then silence.

“The human ship is cut loose. The Unggoy Deacon and Saal say they’re towing it free and casting it off,” Zhar said. “So far, no human ships have come to sniff around.”

“Good.” Thel looked around. “Unggoy toward the bridge. Zhar and I will secure the other airlock from the docks and eliminate any Kig-Yar there.”

The Unggoy dutifully headed up the corridor.

Zhar patted the plasma rifle in his hands. “Let’s go, then.”

Thel’s old friend took the lead, turning corners as Thel quickly followed behind, keeping him covered as they thudded down the inside of the ship through bulkhead after bulkhead.

Zhar turned a corner and flinched as human gunfire slapped into his armor. The old Sangheili fired downward, and the shots stopped.

The now-dead human, its back against the wall, had been already wounded. A large shot to its thigh had bled the creature’s strange red blood out onto the floor. Zhar had shot it once: clean through the head.

“It was sitting down,” Zhar said. “Startled me. I barely got a return shot in.”

“You are lucky it didn’t have a more powerful weapon.” Thel kicked away the handgun lying by its side.

“Indeed.” Zhar actually sounded somewhat shaken. He squatted in front of the dead human. “I wonder why they left one of their own behind like this? Was it a trap?”

“Who knows how they think?” Thel said. “Who cares? They are heretics. They do not deserve names or life.”

Zhar wouldn’t stop worrying at some idea deep in his head. “I don’t know, Thel. You’re a true zealot, I know, and I would never doubt the word of the Prophets, but we’ve fought the humans for years and they show some capacity for honor. Look, they left behind one of their own, who was bleeding and dishonored, to spring a trap and die with honor. Don’t you think that indicates something profoundly noble about them?”

Thel looked down at the dead alien and thought about it. “You think too much, Zhar.”

As he said that, Thel saw something move quickly out of the corner of his eyes. Zhar snapped out his plasma rifle and fired, just as the large, gray-armor-clad human fired back with a rifle of its own.

Thel pulled out his energy sword as the armored human smacked into him, carrying them both rolling down the corridor until they struck a bulkhead hard enough to make Thel’s vision blur and knock his sword loose.

“I cannot get a good aim,” Zhar shouted, as Thel struggled to get a grip on the powerful human’s rifle.

The loud human gun fired into the floor several times as they fought over it, and then Thel got the barrel in both his hands.

He stared at his reflection in the alien’s visor and roared as he bent the weapon, straining to make it useless. The gold visor stared implacably back at Thel. There were no sounds, though the alien was straining just as hard.

What creature did not choose to show its face that wasn’t a soulless and dead one? Thel roared again. “Demon! Heretic. Unholy alien!” He headbutted the gold visor, snapping the human’s neck back with each whiplike blow.

The human threw him back and yanked a primitive knife from the chest of its armor.

The two warriors stood, staring at each other for a split second. Thel suddenly realized that they would both die, fighting to the very end, equally matched.

Equally matched with a human. Thel spat purple blood from his mouth. This was a surprise.

The human looked over at the other dead marine, shook its head, and then took off down the corridor.

“We follow it,” Thel gasped, out of breath. He’d broken a rib with that impact.

“What was that?” Zhar asked, cautiously pointing his plasma rifle around the corner.

“I do not know,” Thel said. “It was strong, though.” He joined Zhar, turning around the corner.

“Looks like it was headed to the docks. Let’s go.” Zhar had a small limp, and it hurt for Thel to run, but neither of them would allow these to slow them. Both Sangheili ran all-out, grunting occasionally, to the airlock dock.

They got there just in time to see the gray-armored human disappear past the lip, running out into the large cavernous docking area where human tracers and Covenant plasma filled the air.

Kig-Yar corpses lay around the airlock.

Zhar took one side, Thel the other, forgetting about the strange new human for now “It looks like the Kig-Yar were protecting the ship,” Zhar said. “But were surprised by the attack from inside.”

“The humans are moving out onto the docks, back into their habitats,” Thel noted. “They have done us a favor. They cleared the ship.”

He shut the airlock door with a laugh and walked over to Zhar and clapped him on the shoulder. “Guard this door, old friend. I will head to the bridge and get us moving. We will pick up Saal, and then we will see what our options are.”

Zhar nodded.

“But you should also check to see what it was the humans were doing aboard when we get clear,” Zhar said. “We do not need any more surprises.”

Thel thought about the pain in his ribs, and what had felt. like a close brush with death, and nodded.

What had that human been?

Chapter 50

SANGHEILI-OCCUPIED SHIP INFINITE SPOILS, THE RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

Thel looked over the reports that Zhar had patiently gathered for him. The humans had dug around the Kig-Yar battle net, which had been poorly secured.

“These are details on where the Unggoy Redoubt is,” Zhar said. “Including force strength, ships, how they will shuttle the Unggoy to the Rubble for an attack, and plans for an invasion of one of their habitats called ‘Exodus.’ The humans have the whole Kig-Yar battle plan for themselves now”

“Well, they are clever creatures,” Thel said. He shut the display down. “You yourself admired that, if I remember correctly.”

“This is troubling, though,” Zhar said. “It means the Kig-Yar, Reth, may have been telling the truth.”

Thel sighed. “That they plan to trick the humans out of the location to their homeworld?”

“Yes. And that he was doing a holy duty for a Hierarch. You must admit the possibility, looking over those plans to attack the humans. These have been in place for years.”

Thel rubbed the bottom of a mandible thoughtfully. “It is a possibility, now. I agree.”

“Then we may have crossed the Hierarch,” Zhar said. “You of all should know how that chills my heart.”

“A Hierarch,” Thel said, cautiously.

“What do you mean?”

“What I mean is that we were given a set of orders that put us in conflict with orders given by another Prophet.”

Zhar shook his head. “These things border on heresy.”

“Then do not speak of them ever again,” Thel said. “But it does not change our situation.”

“But –”

“So we shall also send a message to Reth,” Thel said, trying to add a note of reassurance to his voice. “We will not approach or attack the Exodus asteroid that the Kig-Yar want. We will attack the other human parts of the Rubble, working to destroy the humans there.”

Zhar swallowed. “Will that be enough to convince the Prophet of Regret that we did what we were asked?”

Thel grumbled. “We will destroy the Rubble. We will grind it to pieces from this Kig-Yar ship. How will they doubt our zealotry, then, Zhar? We offer Reth our agreement to leave their habitat alone, and maybe we will come out ahead.”

“Maybe.” Zhar left the cockpit in a dark mood, and Thel sat down on the shipmaster’s chair with a sneer. This was not Covenant standard; it was designed for Kig-Yar. It was an insult and an expression of their rebellious impulses. And even worse, it was an uncomfortable fit for the Sangheili. Nonetheless, it would be a good spot from which to oversee the destruction of the Rubble.

The sooner this mess was wrapped up, the sooner Thel imagined a more normal life would resume. Betrayals and intrigues were not his strong suit.

Sangheili were almost always more … direct.

Thel punched the console in front of him in frustration, shattering the screen and denting the metal.

Chapter 52

SOMEWHERE NEAR CHARYBDIS IX

The Prophet of Regret stood in front of a giant screen that showed his fleet assembled in the far distance: tiny specks of light waiting to be flung through space wherever he wished.

He turned his chair about to regard the other body in the room: the Prophet of Truth.

Regret frowned as Truth rebuked him. “You are, as ever, too hasty.”

“How is this?” Regret whined. “I have sent my hunters out to find the source of what I thought was trouble. I have hunted the humans. I have acted.”

“You have not acted well. My plan was more elegant.”

Truth, Regret thought, always did like working his intrigues. He shouldn’t have been this surprised to find out Truth was behind the design of these smuggled weapons.

They were all just an attempt to furtively find the human homeworld, Truth had said, without further fleet engagements. Never mind that Regret knew they could smash the humans, one world after another. Truth worried about the secret of humans, and their first encounter with them. Particularly since the three Hierarchs had worked so hard to hide that secret.

“Does it matter now what we have done?” Truth said. “There is a mess, and it needs cleaning. The fleet needs to return to this world. If the Kig-Yar have the location of the human homeworld, we can use it and the Unggoy quartered there. If not, then we destroy all traces of this … experiment.”

“I agree,” Regret said, finding himself once again following Truth’s lead.

“The Jiralhanae who betrayed your Sangheili shipmaster, they will need to be destroyed. Their loyalty is commendable, but the knowledge of what they saw must die with them. We do not need any in High Charity speaking of this.”

Regret agreed. “You will travel to this world with us, and watch the fleet in action?”

The Prophet of Truth bobbed his head. “I want to see this all concluded, yes. I have had my effects brought onto your flag ship. We will have joint command. Together we will fix any problems. As we always have.”

Regret turned and looked at the screen, with its live images of the fleet. Truth had platitudes, words about being brothers, now that his experiment had failed. But they were only brothers with a shared secret while the humans lived.

If they ever got rid of the threat humans presented, then Truth would have no need of Regret. More than ever, Regret realized, if he ever had the chance to destroy the humans first and keep control of his position in the Covenant, he would have to move fast in the future. Faster than Truth’s intrigues.

Regret shook himself from his thoughts. “Then it is time for us to go there,” he said. And using the controls on his floating throne, he keyed in a channel to the ship’s bridge and gave the order for the fleet to make the jump.

Chapter 54

THE REDOUBT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

Reth lay in a soft collection of pillows in an approximation of a nest. His skin had been bandaged, cuts and bruises covered with medicines that stank, and he was giddy from pain medication. The damage the Sangheili had done to him still throbbed; but he was beginning to feel like the worst of the pain was over now that a Kig-Yar healer had spent time with him.

The soft sound of air fans lulled him near the edge of sleep when the door to his room opened.

“I was not to be disturbed during this sleep cycle,” Reth snapped, his eyes still closed.

“It is the humans.” A lesser Kig-Yar groveled by Reth’s feet. “They keep contacting us, requesting meetings.”

“About what?” Reth opened his eyes. The room was decorated with bits and pieces of art from around Covenant space randomly piled in corners and hanging off shelves in random chaos and clutter, All were pieces stolen or traded from all the species the Kig-Yar dealt with – a riot of shapes, colors, sizes, and function. It may have looked like random junk, but any Kig-Yar in the room would know it was Reth’s hoard. In the corner was a handmade Sangheili practice helmet, carved out of a hard wood and painted black. Reth’s most prized piece of the collection.

Sangheili didn’t part with their handmade gifts easily. Reth had to work hard to pilfer that particular item.

“They won’t say,” the Kig-Yar by his feet said.

Reth sat up, wincing as split skin on his shoulder recracked and started bleeding again. “Send word to all Kig-Yar in the Rubble to pull out. Have them stand ready to act as our front wave. The humans may be getting wind of our plan, somehow. Let’s not leave our brothers sitting within easy reach of the aliens.”

“Yes, lord. But … we have worked with these humans for so long. We have built good things with them. Are you sure we must destroy them?”

Reth sighed. “Any day now the Hierarchs will arrive. Do you wish to look like you were helping heretics? Our task is to fetch the location of Earth, and destroy them. Now we are to do this.”

Time was growing short, Reth felt, if the humans were getting antsy. He was going to have to launch Kig-Yar ships against the Rubble before the Unggoy were even on their shuttles for the invasion.

No matter, he thought. That would just soften up the Rubble once he took it.

Once he had the Exodus asteroid, Reth thought, all these baubles in his room would be meaningless compared to that fat prize.

Chapter 56

OUTER RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

Thel stalked across the bridge. “All the Kig-Yar ships are leaving the Rubble?”

Zhar exhaled through his mandibles in an audible sigh of happiness. “Yes. Now we won’t have to worry about firing on them. One less reason the Prophets may seek to damn us when they arrive.”

“Contact Reth,” Thel ordered, tamping down his annoyance with Zhar’s obsession about the wills of Prophets. They were Sangheili – noble warriors. This dithering didn’t bode well. “It is time we spoke since his escape.”

Zhar bowed his head and fiddled about. Thel ignored Zhar’s mutterings with distant Kig-Yar, moving his way up the chain of command, until Reth’s long face appeared on one of the screens.

Thel faced the image. The Kig-Yar still wore bandages over the wounds Saal had inflicted on him.

“Shipmaster,” Reth said, the words dripping with fury. “You have stolen Infinite Spoils, the pride of my fleet.”

Thel ducked his head. “I am not here for recrimination, Reth. You will do what you have been asked. I can only do the Same, for we are both soldiers of the Covenant. I have offered to stay away from your main target, but I am also going to start attacking the humans.”

“Do what you wish. Keep them occupied, Sangheili. The longer their eyes aren’t looking toward this moon, the better.”

The Kig-Yar’s image flicked off. Thel looked around at the nervous Unggoy, and the now-petulant Zhar. “That Kig-Yar will do his best to assassinate us with words to his Hierarch,” Zhar said. “Why talk to him like this, Shipmaster? It serves nothing but to remind him that we’re here.”

Thel ignored Zhar. “Prepare this ship’s weapons.” He walked over to a screen showing the image of their first target, a small asteroid on the edge of the Rubble with mining equipment on it.

The long-barreled mass drivers could sling ingots of metal across the Rubble to wherever they were needed. The larger machines could send these slugs across the entire system, from planet to planet.

They made effective anti-ship weapons in a pinch, Thel knew. He’d encountered a few repurposed mass drivers in the service of canny humans before.

“Destroy it,” he ordered, and watched as several balls of energy barreled their way across the empty space between them to plow into the asteroid, ripping it apart in fiery destruction.

Normally his heart leapt when dealing fire to his enemies. In this case, Thel felt as if he was merely going through the motions.

He had no idea what the Prophets would think of all this. But he had to do his duty.

And Sangheili knew all too much about duty and nobility.

It ran in the blood.

Chapter 64

THE REDOUBT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

Reth sat at a table as a healer checked him over. He’d been inside a command center when the massive explosion occurred, and since many of the Kig-Yar ships grounded to make the skeleton of the Redoubt were fighting ships, he was therefore well-shielded. He’d been safe.

But he’d gotten a high dose of radiation.

The healer left him with pills to take, and Reth stalked his way up to an enclosed balcony carved out of a large airlock. The Redoubt was a mess. It was a good thing they were moving out to take the Rubble, he thought. Rebuilding this would be expensive.

There were Unggoy leaders wanting to see him, shocked by the damage the humans had done and wondering what it meant for the timeline they had in mind for their continuing development of Metisette as a world for themselves.

Reth growled.

Humans.

When the Prophet set him on this task, Reth had done it to raise his profile, and that of the Kig-Yar. He’d also enjoyed the guilty pleasure of working with the humans. Their profit-minded goals and Kig-Yar-like love of trade and smuggling and piracy had meshed. He’d been slightly disappointed to have to destroy the humans throughout the Rubble as the endgame of this grand experiment.

Now though, he wondered if the Prophets weren’t right. The humans were unconscionable reprobates, too dangerous to let live. The Prophets’ call for their extermination was starting to make sense to him.

Reth looked forward to taking the Rubble. Even more so, to getting the Exodus and the location to their homeworld on it.

He’d happily burn it all for the Prophet, now.

Reth left the balcony and donned a long cloak, his air supply for the walk across the plaza, and a pair of plasma pistols. He walked out in the plaza where droves of terrified Unggoy stood.

They’d all been dosed with anti-radiation meds. Many had died in the blast, but Reth had had those bodies bulldozed away, and cleared the way of Unggoy waiting in the lower warrens to line up and get aboard the troop carriers. He had only lost a few thousand to the bomb, thankfully, as the communications and scanning station was miles upstream of the core Redoubt plaza.

It was time to repay the humans for their deeds, he thought, as he walked toward his shuttle and several of his senior Kig-Yar officers.

Unggoy were shaking and looking up into the sky. It was growing brighter.

Reth stopped and looked up. Giant fireballs were streaking down, growing larger and larger.

The humans had taken out the antiaircraft batteries and his ability to see … to see this coming. He ran for his shuttle, shoving frightened Unggoy aside.

“Go!” he screamed at his pilot in the cockpit. “Get off the ground!”

The shuttle fired its engines and started to rise, and Reth saw the first giant mound of rock slam into the Redoubt.

But where had they come from? he wondered, as the shock wave threw his shuttle aside and dashed it against the side of one of the large buildings.

The wreckage of the shuttle slid to the ground as debris and rock rained down on it.

A dazed Reth looked up through the cracked glass of the shuttle; he stared directly up at one large fireball that plummeted right at him.

It was irregularly shaped, he thought, with large docking collars sticking out of one side, melting away into slag as the heat deformed them.

A piece of the Rubble, he realized just before it struck, vaporizing everything in an immense release of hyperkinetic energy and destruction.

Chapter 65

METISETTE ORBIT, 23 LIBRAE

Thel looked at the glowing, cratered remains of the Redoubt from orbit. “Nothing remains of Reth’s fleet. There is no sign of Reth himself, either.”

A stillness descended on the bridge of the Infinite Spoils as both Zhar and Thel contemplated the destruction the humans had wrought on Metisette.

“And now what, Shipmaster?” Zhar asked. “We have destroyed prime targets in the Rubble; the rest has dashed itself against Metisette.”

Thel looked at the Unggoy working for them, and thought about Saal, brooding somewhere deep inside the ship.

“Some might say we have done our mission well, Zhar. Do you think the Prophets will believe it when they arrive?” Zhar looked at him, his mandibles flexing slightly as if tasting the air for clues as to what Thel might want as an answer. His once-proud mind had become erratic in the face of the idea that the Hierarchs may have had differing goals, and that they’d gotten caught in the middle of some machination between the Prophets of Regret and Truth.

Thel knew that Sangheili honor demanded they rise above it. He cleared his throat. “Reth’s invasion fleet is in disarray. The Hierarchs will not be happy if we stand here and let the last of the humans escape with the location to Earth and the only chance all these loyal Unggoy have to live.”

Thel looked at the Unggoy on the bridge as they paid close attention to him, without looking directly at him. So maybe Sangheili could play politics, Thel thought to himself, or at least set aside the desire for direct combat for a bit, despite the fact it coursed through their blood.

“What do you mean?” Zhar said.

“The want loyal subjects and true believers,” Thel said. “I cannot imagine what would happen to all these surviving Unggoy if they do not try to take that asteroid in which the humans are trying to evacuate the system.”

Unggoy eyes balefully watched Thel pace the bridge now. Zhar coughed. “Their lives would all be forfeit.”

Thel nodded. “They would indeed.” He turned to the Unggoy in the room. “Tell your surviving brothers to board the Exodus asteroid. We will provide cover for the action, but then stand clear. That human ship is too much of a match for this ungainly Kig-Yar boat.”

He walked over and shut off the screen showing the ruins of the Redoubt. “The Unggoy will take the asteroid, or die trying.”

If the Hierarchs were to let any of them live, there was no other option.

Zhar got up and walked over to Thel. “If the illustrious Hierarchs cannot agree on these things, what else do they disagree on, and what else might just be Prophet manipulation, Shipmaster?”

Thel grabbed Zhar’s arm, and Zhar growled. But Thel looked his fellow Sangheili in the eye and whispered, “Such thinking lines the path to heresy. Do not indulge in it.”

Zhar pulled free and left the bridge.

Chapter 69

INFINITE SACRIFICE, METISETTE ORBIT, 23 LIBRAE

Thel got to his knees and bowed to the pair of Hierarchs before him on the bridge of the Infinite Sacrifice. An honor guard of five Sangheili guards arrayed themselves around their floating chairs.

“Rise,” the Prophet of Truth said. “You ordered the Unggoy to storm the human vehicle after the Kig-Yar Reth’s death?”

“Yes, Hierarch,” Thel said. “It was a chance to get the location of their homeworld. But we know now the Unggoy and any Kig-Yar that were with them have failed.”

“How is that?” the Prophet of Regret asked.

“Their air would have run out by now.”

The heavy crowns of the Hierarchs bobbed as they considered that. “Indeed,” Truth said. “We are left only with Kig-Yar who imagined they were helping humans, at Reth’s orders. Potential traitors, all of them. And these Unggoy as well, breeding outside the law. Traveling without permits.”

Regret shook its head. “A mess.”

“A mess that revealed much,” Truth hissed.

For a moment, an uncomfortable silence hung in the air. Then Regret nodded at Truth. “We will destroy all the traitors.”

Thel felt his neck tighten. He’d failed to appreciate the situation, and now he would pay the ultimate price for his mistakes. The Hierarchs would have his head.

Vadam would suffer. His lineage would be suspect.

The floor beneath his feet felt as if it wavered, and then Thel stiffened. Zhar was moving forward.

The Sangheili warrior had drawn the bar of his energy sword, but not yet unleashed it.

“Zhar,” Thel hissed, horrified. Zhar seemed to be struggling with himself.

“So you will kill us too, Shipmaster?” Zhar cried out. “Like animals? After all we served. How can I suffer such a dishonor? My line’s dishonor?”

The honor guard drew their energy pikes, the ends shimmering with contained blue plasma.

Zhar took another hesitant step forward, and Thel pulled out his sword and turned it on. “Zhar?”

His old friend looked back at him. “I have already drawn,” he said. “I will not stand and let them dishonor me.”

“I have drawn as well,” Thel said sadly.

Zhar leapt forward, but Thel jumped as well, slamming into his side and spearing Zhar through the throat with his sword. It sizzled and spat Sangheili blood.

Thel threw Zhar against a wall, then decapitated him with a swift swipe.

He stared at the mess of blood and Zhar’s body, then turned back to the Hierarchs, setting his sword down on the ground away from him.

What else could he have done? Thel wondered. Zhar had forced him into it. To step toward the Hierarchs with a sword in hand was madness.

Regret looked shaken, but composed himself and piloted his chair out of the large bridge. “What madness Sangheili honor can be,” he muttered as he left. “They should be careful, lest they lose their way.”

But Truth looked at Thel with analytical eyes. “Tell me your name, noble warrior.”

“Thel ‘Vadamee,” Thel said.

Truth moved closer, the honor guard moving with him. “You live. Say nothing of what happened here.”

“Yes, Hierarch,” Thel said.

“Report to the shipmaster – he will find you lodging until we return to High Charity.” Truth also left the bridge.

Thel waited until they were well clear, then stood. He didn’t look at Zhar’s body as he walked to the large Sangheili shipmaster to get his instructions.

This mission was over, and Thel was grateful. He wanted a ship to command that was part of a fleet, not off on its own. But leading a mission, away from the Prophets where his decisions could or could not risk their wrath …

Thel ‘Vadamee never wanted to be in that position again.

Chapter 71

HIGH CHARITY

“We lost much,” the Prophet of Regret said.

Truth looked at his fellow Hierarch. “No. We purged Kig-Yar and Unggoy who might have caused trouble, due to their inclinations to work with humans. And thanks to the modified weapons, we have found two more worlds of theirs to attack.”

“Neither of which will be their homeworld,” Regret grumbled.

“It is progress,” Truth said.

From their throne room, high up in High Charity, they looked out over their subjects. Streams of other San’Shyuum wobbled around the city in the air in large rings, barges of Unggoy flew from point to point, and pilgrims from all throughout the Covenant worlds thronged the streets.

“We need to be more careful about the Sangheili,” Regret said. “Honor and nobility might one day get in the way of orders.”

Truth glided away from the city scene and into the heart of the chamber, where golden streams of light flashed through a gentle drug-smoke haze. “Maybe,” he said. “But some of them seem fiercely loyal, and very useful. I value loyalty.”

Regret grunted. “I value results.”

“Then it is good we work together,” Truth said. “For the good of the Covenant.”

Regret picked up one of the bowls and inhaled. “For the good of the Covenant, yes. In all we do.”

The two hierarchs had resolved the moment of bad blood that had grown between them. Their plans were back in synchronization.

For now, Regret thought. For now.

Chapter 72

VADAM KEEP, VERMO, SANGHELION

“The Fleet of Particular Justice?” Lak ‘Vadamee asked. The old Sangheili walked along the keep’s walls with Thel. Thel had a new shipmaster’s cloak that tugged and kicked at him in the cold mountain wind. “I have never heard of it.”

“It is a new reorganization of the fleets. Against the Sangheili Councilors’ desires. They have given me a cruiser to command within this fleet.”

“A strange new age, Kaidon.”

Thel looked out over Vadam valley, out toward the distant sea. “Stranger than I can dare speak. Even when I add my lines to the family saga.”

“But our nobility rises, does it not?” Lak asked.

“For now,” Thel replied. “But I have seen humans as strong and as fast as any of ours. And I have seen what happens to those who disappoint the Prophets.”

“We are Vadam,” Lak said. “We shall persevere.”

Thel started to say something, then paused. Lak had trained Thel when he’d been among the keep’s young. He’d bruised and kicked Thel, toughened him to be the warrior he was today. He’d taught him the histories, made him learn sagas, and taught him to reason. If he couldn’t trust Lak to be a close advisor, then Thel had no friends and was alone in this universe. “You must never repeat this, but I saw the Hierarchs argue with each other, and it cost the lives of many souls,” Thel finally said. “Is it heresy that I cannot shake the worry that gives me?”

“There is heresy, and then there is heresy,” Lak said softly.

Thel rested his hands on the stone in front of him. “What do you mean by that riddle, elder Lak?”

“Long ago our ancestors believed without a doubt that the Forerunner artifacts we found scattered on our world were objects of veneration. We could study and worship them, and imagine transcendence. But that was it. To destroy; even take them apart, was heresy.

“Then came the Prophets, who wanted the artifacts to study. They wanted to violate them and explore them. So we fought to prevent this heresy, and both Prophets and Sangheili almost perished in the fight. Now we let the Prophets do what they will and study these artifacts. Might made heresy change. But what is the true truth? Who knows?” Lak shrugged.

“That is close to heretical,” Thel said, looking over at his old master.

“I am an old Sangheili,” Lak said. “I have been hit on the head too many times, and am easily confused. What do I know of theology?”

Thel grumbled. “We shall persevere then, elder, heresies or not, and strive to follow the path. I might even rise above just shipmaster.”

“That is the attitude to take, Kaidon. Enjoy your moments of triumph now. The future will come soon enough; there is no reason to dwell too much on it. Then you will end up an old creature who has spent far too much time worrying.”

Thel followed Lak down the stairs into the warmth, where the elders of the Vadam waited to congratulate him on his success and promotion.

There was living to do, Thel thought happily. And the warmth of a productive and virile keep to enjoy.

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