Vaz had never seen Mal lost for words before. He actually blushed. "So ... bathroom breaks?" he asked, very quietly.

Naomi paused a beat. "I'm catheterized. Another reason why that machine has to be so precisely calibrated. This suit plugs into me in a lot of places."

"I think I'm going to cry," Mal said.

"Think of it as a weaponized life-support unit. It recycles the urine, too."

To his credit, Mal kept his nerve and winked at her. "Ah, that explains everything about the beer they serve in the mess."

He didn't get a smile, though. Naomi put her helmet on and it sealed with a faint thunk. Suddenly she wasn't the forbiddingly awkward Baba Yaga any longer, but-just like the PR people said-a perfectly designed, totally confident fighting machine. Vaz heard footsteps behind him that scuffed to a sudden halt.

"Oh wow..." It was Phillips. His voice trailed off and he walked right up to Naomi, grinning like a schoolboy as he craned his neck to look up at her. "You look amazing. Real killer robot stuff."

Vaz didn't know Naomi well enough yet to pick up any body language, and he couldn't see her expression, but she leaned forward so that her gold-mirrored visor was right in Phillips's face. For a moment the compartment was so quiet that Vaz could hear the faint sigh of the armor's servos as she moved.

"Be honest," she said. "Does my ass look big in this?"

Phillips burst out laughing. "You look like a goddess. Go on, do a twirl for us."

And she did. She rotated 360 degrees for him then strode out into the hangar. Only the thud of her boots gave any hint of the sheer weight of that kit.

So she had another side to her, then. Vaz hadn't seen that coming.

Phillips gazed after her with a look of pure delight until he realized Vaz was staring at him. "What?"

"You're having fun, aren't you?"

"You guys take this for granted." Phillips looked suddenly embarrassed. "We never see anything like that at the university."

Vaz shrugged. "Neither do we. We're the riffraff. We don't normally get to hang out with Spartans."

"Hey, you know that suit maintains and upgrades itself when she's in cryo? It's all nanotech." Devereaux herded them out of the compartment. She seemed to be getting on fine with Naomi, but it couldn't have been sisterly bonding. "It must cost more than a damn Longsword. No wonder we don't get issued with that kit."

Phillips shrugged. "Maybe that's why she spends all her time working on it."

"No, it isn't," Mal said. "It's because she doesn't think she fits in. How many Spartans did they create? She's almost like the last of her species."

"Functional Spartan-Twos? Under a hundred. Almost all MIA now." Osman suddenly appeared from behind a stack of crates. Vaz hadn't heard her coming-again. She seemed to be able to pop up out of nowhere, just like BB. "Spartan-Threes? Hundreds. But you probably didn't see many of them, either. Let's not sugarcoat it. They carry out the suicide missions."

Vaz couldn't work out if she was making some point about how terrific the Spartans were by comparison with ODSTs, or just answering a question in that in-your-face way that she had. It was the first time that Vaz had heard a mention of different Spartan classes, though. He decided to leave the follow-up to Phillips, who was now the official squad blunderer, the civvie who could blurt out awkward questions and get away with it like a small child.

But Osman seemed pretty willing to volunteer information about a program that had been top secret for years.

"So you were a Two, were you?" Phillips jumped right in. "Did you have armor like that?"

Osman clutched her datapad. "No. You need the mechanical augmentations to wear Mjolnir, or it'll just snap your spine."

"Such as?"

"Ceramic bone implants, mainly. Makes them pretty well unbreakable. I only had the genetic and biochemical enhancements, and after that my body started rejecting things." She cocked her head on one side to look at him, almost teasing. "I can't tell if you're fascinated or repelled, Evan."

Oh, it's Evan now, is it?

Phillips squirmed. "It's not the medical issues, Captain. It's doing it to fourteen-year-olds. I don't want to pry, but what made your parents consent?"

"They never knew," Osman said, still matter-of-fact. "We were all colonial kids, taken from our families. They thought that we'd died." She changed tack instantly as if nothing remotely unusual had been said. Vaz thought he'd misheard. "BB's picked up some interesting voice traffic. We've got a small Jiralhanae transport inbound to Sanghelios with a high-value passenger. A Huragok. An Engineer. That's worth bothering them to acquire, don't you think?"

Mal looked as if he hadn't heard anything shocking. Vaz decided he must have imagined it.

"I wondered where they all went," Mal said. "Definitely one for the tool box."

"My thoughts exactly. Best estimate is that there are six Jiralhanae embarked. They're transporting weapons for 'Telcam, so we're not helping our primary mission, but the Huragok's far too valuable to pass up. We'll intercept them in approximately eighty-two minutes, so let's meet in ten and plan that out. Better break out the dead Kig-Yar."

"Yes ma'am."

Mal checked his watch as she walked off. Nobody said anything for a painfully long moment.

Phillips finally let out a breath. "Did she say what I think she said?"

"Kidnapped as kids," Mal said, apparently not shocked at all. "Yeah, I think that's what she meant."

Phillips looked at Vaz and then turned to Devereaux, almost appealing for a verdict. "I expected some reaction from you. Did you know all that?"

"Of course we didn't." Vaz had reached the stage of not caring what BB overheard now. "Who the hell tells us? It's all classified. We're just marines. The only reason ONI admitted the Spartan program even existed was to boost public morale."

"I just want to know why she's telling us all this," Mal said. Maybe he wanted BB to relay that to the boss. "Whatever she wants from us, we'll do it. We just want clear orders."

Devereaux was still hefting her wrench, looking at its jaws with a glazed, distant expression. "What do people generally do when a war's ending and all kinds of dirt's going to come out? They clear their yardarm. Only following orders. That kind of thing."

"If she's right, then we used child soldiers," Phillips said. "We kidnapped them from their families before performing experiments on them. Christ ... and this is my government?"

"You think anyone would care as long as we won?"

"Actually, yes, they would." Phillips was doing his embarrassment gesture again, one arm folded across his chest and his free hand pinching his top lip, as if he was worried about disagreeing. "I think the public would give a pretty big damn about that."

"Don't bank on it," Mal said. He seemed underwhelmed by it, which wasn't like him at all. "Outrage fatigue set in years ago. The colonies are a long way from Sydney. And they weren't always on our side."

Phillips just stared at him for a few seconds, then shook his head and began walking away. "I'll go and be outraged on my own, then. I've got some monitoring to do."

Devereaux turned to Vaz and shrugged. "Well, at least we never claimed we were fighting this war for decency and freedom. Just survival."

"Which war?" Vaz asked. "The one where we were fighting other humans? Because that's when all this started."

"That was before my time," she said. "And yours."

There wasn't really much Vaz could say, not because BB would hear every word, but because he really didn't know where to start. The strong had done terrible things to the weak ever since the first caveman discovered he could crack his smaller neighbor's skull with a well-placed rock. Only the technology changed. Even so, the idea of little kids being abducted and carted off to boot camp made Vaz's scalp crawl.

He was glad that it did. It told him he was still normal, still able to feel something after eight years of numbing warfare.

"Win the war, and nobody says a word about that kind of stuff until you're dead," he said. "Lose the war, and you end up at Nuremberg."

"What's Nuremberg?" Devereaux asked.

Mal wandered off to move some crates. He balanced a table-sized lid across two of them and then got down on all fours to pick up something from underneath it. Vaz waited for him to crack his head and start cursing.

Kidnapping six-year-olds. ONI can't get any worse. Can it?

"Vaz?" Mal called. "Give us a hand, will you?"

Vaz squatted to stick his head under the lid. Mal was hunched underneath it, scribbling something on his palm with an orange marker pen.

"What is it?"

Mal put a finger to his lips and tilted his palm so that Vaz could read it. Ah, got it ... There was no shipboard tech-or anything in his neural implant-that could detect things scribbled on skin. If you wanted privacy and anonymity, you used old-fashioned ink. BB couldn't snoop down here. Not even the 360-degree safety cams, BB's eyes and ears, could get a look at what was going on through ten centimeters of composite. Vaz read the letters carefully.

PSYCH TEST.

Vaz mimed a what-the-hell frown. What?

NO IDEA TELLING US STUFF TO SEE HOW WE REACT.

Mal ran out of palm and tried writing with his left hand on his right. Val wrestled the marker pen from him.

LIP READ PLEASE.

Mal shook his head and grabbed the pen back. The only space he could use now was the back of his left hand. YOU SAW THE OLD MOVIE BB WILL SPACE US Mal laughed his head off. He had a point, though. There were very few ways of avoiding BB's attention. Vaz started laughing too. He didn't know which movie Mal meant, but here he was, hiding under an ammo crate in an invisible ship in enemy space while his own side used small kids for cannon fodder. It wasn't remotely funny. It wasn't that kind of laughter.

Devereaux stuck her head under the lid from the other side. "Good God, it must be funny to crack you up," she said. "Share, Vaz."

Mal just offered his hand for reading. If BB wasn't wondering why he could see three ODSTs' backsides sticking out from under a crate lid, then he wasn't much of an AI.

Devereaux shrugged and tapped her watch. She didn't seem bothered whether Osman was running some experiment on them or not.

"Huragoks come preloaded with a lot of Covenant technical intel." She might have been saying it for BB's benefit. "So ONI won't even have to interrogate it. Just let it play in a workshop."

"You make them sound like puppies."

"Well, they're harmless. We just don't seem to have ever captured any. It's really sad to think of the Covenant detonating them rather than let them fall into enemy hands. All that lost information."

Yeah. They're solid gold. Osman's right.

Vaz had only seen Engineers in diagram form at briefings, never in the flesh. He wondered how the creature would feel to be cut off from its own kind and everything it knew, left to the dubious mercies of ONI.

Sad. Wrong. Like us using kids.

No, the war hadn't numbed him at all.

UNSC PORT STANLEY, URS SYSTEM, 500,000 KILOMETERS FROM SANGHELIOS: ON INTERCEPT COURSE WITH FORMER COVENANT AUXILIARY VESSEL PIETY.

Phillips seemed to be warming to the intelligence business.

He paced around the deck, adjusting his earpiece with the air of a man who'd been spying on hostile aliens all his life. For all Mal knew, he could have been listening to Gregorian chant or stock prices, but he had a familiar glazed stare that said he was translating. He stopped in his tracks for a moment and then changed direction to home in on Mal.

"I don't want to worry you," he said, "but some Kig-Yar have put out a mev-ut on you and Vaz for shooting up their buddies on Reynes."

"That's bad, is it?"

"If they catch you, yes. It's a reward for bringing back body parts as proof of a kill."

"Any parts in particular? I use some of mine more than others."

"With UNSC, it's heads and cervical vertebrae. And they love ones with neural implants."

"Dearie me." Mal hauled one of the Kig-Yar corpses out of the cold store, holding its slack beak shut with one hand while Vaz grappled with its clawed feet. "We'll have to be more diplomatic next time, Corporal Beloi. Make a note of that."

Vaz let go of the Kig-Yar's legs and took off his glove to scratch his chin. His scar seemed to be bothering him again. "Hey, BB? Is there mail today? Haven't had any for two weeks."

BB didn't appear but his voice boomed over the ship's broadcast system. "Opsec," he said, which always explained every irksome event that did and didn't happen. "But the worthless trollop hasn't tried to contact you anyway. Listen to Mal's advice."

Vaz sighed. "So you're my mother now."

"I have the crew's welfare at heart. Anyway, do you want to look at the schematics for the target or not? Briefing on the bridge."

"Can't you project it here?" Mal sniffed his gloves. He'd never get that Kig-Yar smell out of them. "Come on, square blue thing. We'll make the place stink."

"Move it, Staff. Captain's waiting."

Just a few weeks into the mission, and even the AI was acting like they'd all been together since boot camp: Mal took that as a good sign. BB wasn't like a real person. He was one. Mal wondered how the software boffins had managed to make the top-grade AIs that good.

If he asked BB, he knew the AI would tell him, sparing no detail. It would have to wait until they'd abducted the Engineer.

They abandoned the Kig-Yar corpses and made their way up to the bridge. Phillips trailed after Vaz. "Call me Evan, will you? Professor. I only use that to psych out other academics."

"Okay. Not Killer Robot, then?"

"Oops. Yes. Did I offend Naomi?"

"No. That's probably a Spartan's idea of flirting."

"Oh."

"Yeah, she'll give you a big ceramic hug," Mal said, "and you'll never play the piano again."

When they reached the bridge, BB had already set up the hologram over the chart table. Osman was studying it with Devereaux and Naomi. There were also voices droning over the radio in the background, ones that Mal didn't recognize. But he realized he was listening to a conversation between ships, or a ship and a control room somewhere, and despite the accents and fluency it wasn't quite human somehow. Then an exchange clued him in.

"It's your problem, you cretinous lump of meat. Just don't try to tear it off."

"You wanted one. You got one."