"So who's that, BB?" Mal asked.

BB hovered over the ship's hologram. "Voice traffic between 'Telcam and the Brutes in this little gin palace here. He's telling them not to try to remove the Huragok's booby trap."

"But that's not his voice."

"Of course it's not," BB said. "I'm giving you a simultaneous interpretation from the chatter. Like dubbing a foreign movie-colloquial English, better voices. Quality of service, Staff. Quality."

Vaz seemed in a good mood today despite the lack of mail. "So why do we need the prof at all?"

"Opposable thumbs, Corporal. Someone's got to pour the gin and tonics, after all."

Phillips raised an eyebrow. "Ice, a slice, and some arsenic for you, then, BB?"

"Excellent, you've found your vocation." BB expanded the schematic of the small vessel above the chart table. "Pay attention, ladies and gentlemen. She's called Piety, and she's one of these-a Hudal-class auxiliary. A glorified tug. Close-in cannon, no slipspace capability, and no hardening, so an EMP pulse will shut her up before any of her brave but brutish tars can put out a mayday."

The schematic rebuilt itself layer by layer to expand detail of the interior bulkheads and compartments, but there were no guarantees that she was still configured that way. Piety was the same length overall as their own dropship, though, so it wasn't like storming a frigate. Mal's only worry was getting in and out without turning the Engineer into Huragok puree.

"So, once we've zapped her, we've got two options," Osman said. "Board her, or haul her in and crack her open in the hangar."

Mal looked at Naomi. She nodded. Devereaux nodded too and poked her forefinger down into the hologram.

"I don't know how robust Engineers are, but sucking hard vacuum isn't generally good for anybody," she said. "This here is the only place I can maintain a seal with the docking ring. If we breach her hull out there, then chances are we'll kill the Engineer as well. I'd rather take the risk of dragging the vessel back in here."

"How upset are you going to be if we lose the Engineer, ma'am?" Mal asked.

"I accept it's a risk," Osman said. "If we lose it, then we use it-blame it on the Jiralhanae that 'Telcam trusts. I'll think of something suitably devious. The question is whether we want a potential self-destruct on the hangar deck."

"Well, seeing as the best way to carry out an opposed boarding is simultaneous entry at multiple points, we're stuffed. We'll end up venting their atmosphere anyway. I'm not saying we can't take the ship, but there'll be a lot of ordnance flying around, we won't know where the Engineer is until we get in there, and it might not survive until we find it anyway."

Naomi leaned on the chart table with both hands. It creaked a little. Mal noted all the small detail. So everything on board has got to be built to take a few hundred kilos of armored Spartan. No wonder the budget's the way it is. She indicated a hatch near the bow.

"Mjolnir's good for over an hour in hard vacuum," she said. "What's your pressure suit rated at? Fifteen minutes? Ten? But I don't know if I can seal the hatch fast enough to avoid killing the Engineer. So I'll vote for bringing the ship inboard. It's still going to be an opposed boarding, but we have a little more time to do it sensibly."

"Just thinking aloud," Mal said. "What if they decide to blow the ship while they're in the hangar, or they get their drives going, or fire their weapons?"

"Or decide to kill the Engineer rather than let us take it," Vaz said. "Although that suicide harness is going to blow either way."

Whichever way they cut it, Mal decided, the Engineer still stood less than a fifty-fifty chance of survival. The only question was how much of a risk they wanted to take themselves. Port Stanley was designed specifically for ONI's kind of unorthodox warfare, but she wasn't heavily armored and she probably couldn't withstand a massive explosion in a hangar.

We could just blow up the ship, of course. At least that would deny them the asset.

But something deep in Mal's core refused to let him walk away from this even if he'd been given the choice. When he looked at the faces of everyone else around that chart table, he could see that they were just as reluctant to pass up the chance.

If we'd captured some Engineers early in the war, we would have known exactly what Covenant weapons could do and how to counter them. We could have used Engineers to develop better weapons ourselves. We could have stopped the war. We could have saved billions of lives. Lose this one? No bloody way.

But he had to ask. "How come we haven't got any Engineers already, ma'am? It's not like we haven't come across them before."

Osman looked him straight in the eye. "We have. Or at least we had. We captured and defused one a couple of years ago and got some very useful developments out of it. But we need more than one. They repair one another, remember. And they make more Engineers."

"Got to do it, then, ma'am." Mal didn't ask what had happened to the lone Engineer because he wasn't sure he wanted to hear any more upsetting stuff about ONI. "What if we seal the hangar's emergency bulkhead and do the business in the aft section with the doors open? We can repressurize fast when we need to. Devereaux, can you maneuver in that space?"

Devereaux nodded. "Bit tight, but probably."

"If anything goes wrong, then at least most of the blast gets directed out, not in."

"And you're still dead," Osman said. "It's your call. If you think I'm going to get you all killed, then you tell me, and we just destroy Piety and sacrifice the Engineer."

Mal was finding it hard to get used to voting on whether to attempt a mission. "But if we have a mishap, then the ship's still recoverable, along with BB."

"Okay, do it," Osman said. "Remember-once we hit it with an EMP, then we can't hear their radio, and Engineers can fix things in seconds. Unless the crew's locked it up, then it'll head for the generator compartment to restore power, and it won't think it's being rescued. It'll try to hide."

There didn't seem to be many places to hide in Piety, but there was still that explosive harness to worry about. Mal would usually have planned a boarding like this down to the smallest detail and done a dry run or two before committing anyone to it. They didn't have that luxury now. It was all on the fly, all guesswork and reaction.

Now he was starting to understand why ONI had assembled this particular team. He just had the feeling that he knew exactly how each of them would react and what they'd do in a given situation, planned or unplanned. Maybe the HR psychologists weren't as useless as he'd thought.

On the sensor displays, Piety was tanking along at a sedate pace, oblivious of the fact that Port Stanley was now almost up her tailpipe. And she still couldn't detect the corvette.

"Okay, BB," Osman said. "Show us the fly-through."

The hologram schematics snapped out and were replaced by an exterior of Piety, Port Stanley, and the dropship. The display animated to align Stanley on Piety's tail, then flipped her 180 degrees so that she was belly-up to her target. The dropship took up position below Stanley's upper hull and aft of the EMP cannon, the cannon fired, and the dropship shot forward and upward to maneuver onto Piety's back and lock grapples on her. The EMP cannon fired a few more times, Stanley pivoted 180 degrees about her midships in a relative nose-down movement until she was facing the other way, and the dropship slotted straight into the hangar bay.

"Tell me the dropship's hardened," Devereaux said.

"Of course it is." BB sounded indignant. "Like Naomi's armor. But it's a contingency measure. If one EM pulse keeps Piety disabled, all well and good. If the busy little Huragok keeps fixing it every few seconds, then I keep firing. In which case, Naomi is best placed to breach Piety while I do that. If you go in, you'll lose your HUD and environmental controls, so you'll be rebreathing air and sweating a lot. Which gives you far less time to operate."

Mal looked at Vaz. He shrugged. "No problem."

Phillips was very quiet, one hand to his ear. Mal could see waveforms of the various Brute voices on the display in front of him.

"That's six distinct voice profiles," he said. "Doesn't mean that there's only six on board, though. Best guess."

It didn't matter now. Mal knew there couldn't be a hundred, and one Brute could kill you as surely as six, twelve, or fifty. They'd be logjammed in that small ship anyway, so their bulk and their numbers would work against them.

"Okay, is everyone going to remember all that?" Mal asked. "No? Too bad. Stand to. See you when we get back, BB."

"Oh, I'm coming too." BB rotated and moved in Naomi's direction. "A fragment of me will remain here to pilot the ship, but I'll transfer to the Mjolnir. We've never done this for real before, by the way. Have we, Naomi?"

"Why now?"

"Why not? I know I'm not your dedicated AI, but I can do anything Cortana can."

Mal picked up a little rivalry there. He'd have to ask about Cortana later. BB's hologram suddenly vanished and Osman pulled a data chip out of the command console. If BB had any physical entity at all, then that chip was as near as damn it him, the raw being.

"Put your pants on, BB," Mal said. It was a sobering sight, all that power and knowledge-and their lives, like it or not-in a small wafer of silicon and crystal. "There's ladies present."

Naomi took the chip from Osman and stared at it for a moment. "There would be better occasions to try this for the first time."

"Oh, you've done dry runs with other AIs," BB said cheerfully. "Why not just plunge in? I can improve your response times, pipe data straight to your brain, do that crossword you can never quite crack..."

Naomi really didn't look happy about it. Quiet misery was her default expression, but Mal watched it twist into real dismay. But she was too much of a Spartan to give in to it. She slotted the chip into her helmet.

"As long as we're clear," she said, lifting the helmet onto her head, "that I call the shots."

BB didn't say a word. Maybe integrating into Naomi's systems had shut him up for once. Mal decided to keep a watchful eye on the relationship. Everyone was getting on fine: better than fine, in fact, a really close-knit and easy-going team. The last thing they needed was a Spartan saddled with an AI she didn't want.

But that wasn't a problem he could solve, given that they were the two most advanced and expensive pieces of defense technology the UNSC had ever produced.

They were stuck with each other.

BRIDGE, UNSC PORT STANLEY: TEN MINUTES LATER.

Phillips was still sitting quietly at the comms console and listening to the voice traffic, but Osman felt utterly alone in the ship as she looked out of the viewscreen at Piety.

The nearest that she could get to experiencing the HUD data that her team relied on was to have their helmet cam feeds overlaid on the viewscreen. It was a cheap and simple modification, just a matter of adding a projector that could display a few centimeters in front of the plate. But it made all the difference to her. She felt less helpless, a little more in touch with what was happening to them.

I should be out there doing it. I'm still fit and I ought to fight.

"BB, move Devereaux's POV to the left, please, and keep the others on the right." The individual screens showing the cam outputs moved across her field of vision. Against the black backdrop of space, they were vivid and sobering. "Thanks. Perfect."

"Imagine that all scrunched up in your visor instead of spread out across a viewscreen," Phillips said.

"Yes, there's a lot going on in those HUDs. Distracting." Movement in Devereaux's icon caught her eye. The dropship was moving into position. "And upside down."

Osman could see the inverted tail of Piety ahead. The Jiralhanae were still unaware that they had stalkers. They couldn't detect Port Stanley electronically and they couldn't physically see her. They had reasonable forward visibility, but none aft, so they wouldn't realize they were being attacked until they felt the dropship grapples slam against their hull. No, maybe not even then: it would be when they were dragged in a U-turn toward the hangar and saw Port Stanley's bow doors wide open like a maw.

"Devereaux," Osman said. "If Piety recovers her power and starts dragging you, then break off and get clear. We'll take her out from here. Understand?"

"Hoping it won't come to that, ma'am. This is like old-style submarine warfare. Minus the bit where one submarine misjudges things and collides with the other, of course. Not that bit at all."

Osman checked the right-hand side for the outputs from Naomi, Vaz, and Mal. The helmet cam views tilted back and forth between the black and navy blue marbling of space and the yellow chevron stripes marking the emergency bulkhead, now fully sealed at two-thirds of the length of the hangar deck. The three of them were talking quietly, working through the various permutations of ways to enter Piety.

"Stand by," Osman said. "In you go, Devereaux. We'll work around you."

"They're still chattering, Captain," Phillips said. "I'll let you know when I lose the signal."

Osman counted down to herself as if she was the one who would take the decision to fire the EM pulse. But that was the task of BB's fragment, with his vast processing power and an accuracy far beyond even the best human gunner.

For a disorienting moment, Osman saw the viewscreen she was standing at framed upside down in Devereaux's HUD as the dropship moved up past the corvette's bows. When she looked up, the dropship was passing above her, inverted. Port Stanley still had a clear line of sight with Piety. It was all a matter of timing.

"EMP firing ... now," BB said.

There was no sound, no light, and no impact, just Phillips's whisper.

"Lost the signal, Captain."

Only the indicator on the console told her that BB had fired. The dropship settled neatly on top of Piety's hull and the grapples extruded from the wing nacelles to latch on to it. Osman held her breath. There was nothing she could do now; no orders, no advice, nothing. She just had to watch.

Ten seconds ... eleven ...

The Engineer hadn't fixed things yet, then, or else the creature was confined somewhere. Osman could imagine what was happening inside Piety-total darkness, drives dead, shouts and curses, Brutes stumbling around trying to restore power and still with no idea yet of what had happened to them. Behind her, the comms speakers fizzed briefly as if the radio had come back to life but died again. The EMP indicator lit up and faded. The dropship's drives were at full thrust now, blue-hot rings in the blackness, and the crew of Piety would be feeling vibrations as the dropship began forcing her around in a loop.

Port Stanley's bow dipped as the corvette did a smooth, slow somersault. The dropship and Piety, locked together like mating insects, slid up and out of Osman's field of view.

"Hangar, stand by," she said.

It was all so silent, so smooth, and such a complete contrast to what she knew was going on inside the ship. The stars swept up past her as if she was falling and then she was facing out into a different star field, rock steady. To the right of the viewscreen, the HUD icons of the ODSTs and Naomi showed the two locked vessels heading into the hangar, filling their field of view.

The radio fizzed again and the EMP indicator flared.

"I don't think it's the Huragok." BB sounded oddly breathless. He's an AI. He can't be. But he was integrated with Naomi now, plugged into her nervous system, experiencing much of what she was feeling. "I zapped her again just to be on the safe side. In she comes...."

"Can openers ready, boys and girls," Mal said. "Our brave Brute boys are really pissed off."

Osman could see that. Two of the Jiralhanae crew were at Piety's forward viewscreen, harshly lit by the landing lights facing outward. Their lips were drawn back in a snarl over huge white fangs. The view shuddered for a moment. Piety had been forced down onto the deck, and the three HUD views went haywire. Mal's veered one way, Vaz's veered to the other, and Naomi's-Naomi's just seemed to jet into the air.

Osman had never heard an AI whoop before.

CHAPTER.

TEN.

MESSAGE PRIORITY: FLASH.

FROM: CO UNSC GLAMORGAN.

TO: CINCONI.

CYCLICALLY FLUCTUATING ANOMALY LOCATED 5,000 KM FROM ONYX COORDINATES. READINGS AT PEAK CONSISTENT WITH 1.37 SOLAR MASSES. SPHERICAL FORM, 23 CM (TWENTY THREE CENTIMETER) DIAMETER. SEE REPORT FOR FULL EMR/ GRAVITATIONAL ANALYSIS. POSSIBLY DIMENSIONAL PORTAL.

(Received at Bravo-6 February 2553.) HANGAR DECK, UNSC PORT STANLEY.

A human being was an extraordinary machine, but oh, how chaotic: how thrillingly disjointed.

BB spent a nanosecond reassuring himself that splitting the critical ship functions from his higher processing had been a sensible move. The input flooding him from Naomi's neural net was so new that he wanted time to savor it.

Being the heart and brain of a starship was a joy, but experiencing the adrenaline-distorted, frantic awareness of a human under stress was far, far more ... visceral.

And I have no viscera. How about that.

"Drive-offline," Naomi said. "Cannon down."