'Telcam jumped in, teeth bared. "Manus? Manus!"

Jul still expected to hear weapons discharging, but when he climbed into the ship behind 'Telcam, it was clear that Piety still had her cargo. There was no sign of the Jiralhanae.

They're dead. They ran out of air.

Then 'Telcam stumbled over something, knocking into crates, and cursed loudly. He was looking down at the deck. Jul squeezed through the gap after him and saw the bodies.

A Kig-Yar lay slumped against a bulkhead with a human rifle beside him. Jul stepped over the body and saw there were four dead Jiralhanae in the compartment as well, but his first glance told him they hadn't asphyxiated. There were projectile wounds to their faces. 'Telcam pushed through to the cockpit and roared with anger.

"All of them, dead," he snarled. "All of them. And where's the Huragok?"

Jul squeezed into the small cockpit. Two more dead Jiralhanae, one of them Manus, were draped over the seats. Above him, Jul could see the daylight through gaps around the hatch seal. Piety's console was on idle, the flickering lights indicating that her autopilot was still engaged, which explained how she managed to return and why her radio had been working but silent.

"They've taken the Huragok." 'Telcam was almost sitting with indignation. "They attacked the ship. Damned Kig-Yar vermin. They'll pay for this."

He gestured Jul back into the main section of the ship and went back to the dead Kig-Yar. Jul swallowed his revulsion and moved the body with his boot to look at the wounds.

"Projectiles," he said. "It's been shot several times."

"Human weapons." 'Telcam squatted and poked around in its clothing, then picked up the human rifle. "They like these things. They'll trade with anybody." He examined the interior of the compartment. "Look at the number of rounds expended. There was quite a firefight here. I imagine this idiot got himself caught in the cross fire and his comrades didn't bother to retrieve him."

Sangheili always called Kig-Yar cowardly, but it was just an unthinking insult and didn't reflect how aggressive the creatures could be. They were very effective in large numbers, which often made up for their slight build. Jul suspected that the San'Shyuum preferred them in individual roles, not just because they were excellent snipers and scouts, but because they knew what trouble the scavengers would be if deployed in battalions.

If they could hijack a shuttle and overpower six Jiralhanae, it was a worrying development. They were on the offensive.

"I forget their pirate heritage," Jul said. "Anarchy. That's what'll follow if we don't impose some order on the situation."

'Telcam didn't comment, shaking his head slowly as he searched the ship. He seemed more shocked now than angry. He looked behind every panel and in every space, however small, but there was no sign of the Huragok.

It was worth a lot of money on the black market, Jul knew. But it was even more valuable as an asset to bring Kig-Yar weapons and ship technology up to the level of the Sangheili.

That worried him much more.

"We are, as the humans might say, spoilt for choice," he said at last. "Who should we deal with first? Should we depose our heretical Arbiter, or teach these vermin some respect?" He picked up the Kig-Yar's rifle, a MA5B, a weapon Jul had seen scattered among the human corpses in the aftermath of many a battle. They were fiddly, cumbersome things, too crude for a Sangheili. "The Kig-Yar need to learn their place."

"Well, let's find out which nest was responsible for this." Jul went back to the cockpit and had to heave Manus's body off the navigation console. For a moment he wondered if Manus had a family and what they might be doing now. He'd never considered that they had their own lives before. Buran would have to tell his mate and children. "The flight recorder should answer some questions."

'Telcam tapped the console and the recorder flashed a stream of data on the screen, most of it simply coordinates and speeds. The attack wasn't instantly visible in the output, but the communications log was much easier to read from raw data. Jul read through the station idents: Piety had had radio contact with Kig-Yar from within a human-occupied sector, a colony world that had once been called Sqala.

No. That world is not theirs. They're interlopers. I won't dignify them by calling their infestations colonies.

It was now called Venezia. And it would pay for harboring criminals.

BLUE TEAM CAMP, FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

They said you could always judge a woman by the contents of her purse, and Halsey was content to be judged by hers.

Datapad ... pocket archive ... change of clothes ... self-amalgamating tape ... lip salve ... pocket saw ... solar power pack ... Mom's antique Patek Philippe ... medications ... folding knife ... coffee. To be opened in case of emergency, as they say.

She sorted through it all again, knowing that the item she valued most was gone. She'd lost her journal during the Covenant assault on Reach. It must have been ash by now.

Damn ... so much of her life was in there, not just the years spent on the Spartan program but the personal things too. She'd start another one, but she didn't have the right technology at the moment, and that meant paper-paper and pencil and ink. She needed to feel the faint drag of the lead or the way a nib glided on a cushion of liquid ink. Talking to a datapad or scribbling and tapping on it was no substitute when it came to outpouring rather than thinking.

Why was I so careless with it?

Halsey tried to apply the same intellectual rigor to analyzing herself as she did with others. A Freudian slip, much as I hate to admit it. Subconsciously, perhaps she wanted to lose it, or-more to the point-she wanted it to be found. That could only mean that she needed to explain herself to posterity, to put her plea in mitigation for all her sins.

If I really believed they were sins, though, would I do that? But if I acknowledge they're sins, then I've demonstrated morality, haven't I?

Stop it. Stop it, right now.

When she found herself spiraling into those circular arguments, she slammed on the brakes. Like an AI, she knew she would ultimately think herself into oblivion. The more onion layers of ethical debate she indulged in, and the more she peeled them back and looked underneath, the more she realized she would find nothing concrete of herself left at the core. She was just ideas: just thought. There was nothing she believed in except her own intellect. She wondered if she was more of an AI than Cortana, so very conscious of her virtual body and emotionally invested in her Spartan. At times Halsey felt the AI was more human than she could ever be.

So I have no soul. And why are the only concepts I have for this religious ones? Can't reason provide the answers?

She couldn't actually remember what she'd written in the journal, not in any detail. She wondered if she didn't want to.

She only recalled that when she wrote, she had an awareness at the back of her mind that one day those words and sketches would be seen by others, studied by historians, quoted and analyzed, because she was important. She was one of the greatest thinkers of her century. Everyone had told her so.

Right now, though, she was sixty years old, hungry, and half scared and half thrilled, trapped in a Dyson sphere through a debacle of her own making and trying to put a brave face on it. There were only three people here who thought she was a great thinker and a boon to humanity. The others didn't really know or care what the hell she was, except for the one who knew her only too well and had finally lost his ability to hide his contempt for her.

And if the Flood's now overrun the galaxy and the Halo Array's fired, then this is our seed corn to rebuild humanity. Two sterile and miserable old bastards, and at least one of the females of childbearing age is genetically predisposed to violence and aggression. Let's hope Kelly and Linda are still firing on all cylinders.

But that was a problem for the long term. The short-term one still had to be tackled. Halsey was now pretty sure she knew what the tower structures were, which was a start. So far it had taken her three days to capture images of the Forerunner symbols spread across the walls and map the symbols to the language algorithm in her datapad. She had no AI this time to help her.

But that's fine. I create AIs. I shouldn't need to rely on them. The human mind's still the best tool for the job.

The results were slow in coming, but they were fascinating. This sanctuary wasn't a single, self-sustaining ecosphere but a customizable range of environments. Halsey noted the symbols for temperature, humidity, ratios of gases in the atmosphere, and even gravity. Some other symbols didn't make sense on first examination because they appeared to be names rather than common elements of language, and names were notoriously hard to pin down in translation. But an intuitive leap told her the names were not those of individuals, but of species.

So which is which? What's the symbol for human? We had to be part of the plan. Look how closely this environment mirrors Earth. But why is that all we can see? Does the first species to find its way in dictate the setup?

That didn't make sense, but she was confident that it would in time. Halsey took another guess-another intellectual gamble-that the Forerunners had created a bunker not just for themselves but for other sentient species they wanted to protect from the devastating effects of the Halo Array. They'd have found a way of catering for different requirements. She found herself wondering whether the Forerunners had thought in terms of a diverse community of equals, or simply a zoo for their own amusement.

And if you were so powerful, so advanced, so able to play God-what happened to you all?

For a moment, she forgot the wider predicament and found she was actually enjoying herself. She knew that was wrong and that she should have been as worried as the others were about Lucy, who'd now been missing for days. She realized that she was equally untroubled about the food supply. She hoped that was because she'd made a rational calculation about their environment and the kind of plant and animal species it would support, but something at the back of her mind told her that it was an almost religious faith in salvation by genius-that she was so brilliant, and her Spartan-IIs were so resourceful, that they were bound to come up with a solution to the problem in the nick of time.

Child. Belief in magic. Belief in grown-ups' omnipotence. Get a grip, Halsey.

But it really was yet another lovely, balmy day and it was hard not to believe in providence. We could have found this sphere set up for methane-breathing extremophiles, couldn't we? It's working out somehow. The river was ice cold, so bathing was a bracing experience and her hands were numb by the time she finished washing her clothes each evening. But something perverse within her was actively enjoying the sheer adventure of it all. The temporary camp around the tower had settled into a daily routine, with half the Spartans rostered to gather wild food and the other half carrying out recons in the sprawling but still stubbornly empty city a few kilometers away.

Halsey stayed back at the camp with a sidearm and her research. It was a comfortable solution. She didn't have to indulge in conversation or try to maintain a civilized working relationship with Chief Mendez, which was looking less possible by the day. She sat cross-legged on the grass with her laptop balanced on one knee, savoring the current intellectual puzzle and now not at all bothered by the disgusting taste of the ration bars.

When she looked up she could see Kelly emerging from the woods with her hand resting against her shoulder as if she was carrying something draped across her back. Judging by the swagger in the Spartan's walk, Kelly was pleased with herself and grinning from ear to ear under that helmet.

She came to a stop in front of Halsey and swung the load off her back, holding it up like a prize. It was a rather sad bundle of destruction, a haul of dead animals that she'd managed to trap. Halsey could see three or four of the small green lizards, one of them temptingly plump, as well as an assortment of birds and two hare-sized mammals of a species she didn't recognize, covered in dense chocolate-brown fur.

"Whatever you do, ma'am, don't say it tastes like chicken."

"Well, all we need now is a few cloves of garlic and a bottle of decent red," Halsey said, smiling. "Although there is that herb growing on the riverbank that's got quite a tang to it."

Kelly looked around, not so relaxed now. Her shoulders braced. Halsey got the feeling that she'd been tasked with babysitting her and didn't want it to look that obvious.

"Still no change inside the tower, then?" She meant Lucy. "There's got to be some link between these towers and the city. Maybe Lucy's going to pop up inside the buildings somewhere."

"It's only a matter of time before I finish translating the symbols, and then we'll work out how to access the other parts of the building," Halsey said, trying to be reassuring. "I promise you that I haven't forgotten about her."

"I didn't say you had, ma'am."

No. I think it was me.

Kelly began gutting and skinning her catch, oblivious of Halsey's reaction. Then she stopped and put her hand to the side of her helmet. "Chief Mendez is on his way back. I think that man can smell dinner ten klicks away."

Well, I might as well make myself useful. It'll save an argument.

Jacob Keyes had once asked Halsey why she kept a pocket saw in her purse, and she remembered making some crack about putting uppity men in their place with it. But she was an Endymion girl and it was just a handy thing she might need one day. She'd had a comfortable, middle-class upbringing, but Endymion was still a frontier colony, and beyond the boundaries of her hometown the wilderness always loomed.

It was all glasslands now. She knew that. Reading the official signal as it passed through the ONI system didn't evoke sobbing and regret. Endymion was gone, her parents were gone-not that she'd seen much of them in the preceding years-and life had to go on.

I have no soul. I know that. But that lets me think the unthinkable and create the things that enable decent, feeling people to survive. That's the price-for all of us.

Halsey got up to collect firewood from the log pile that they'd started building next to the tower. It was a regular Girl Scout camp. She stood by the fire, pleased that she hadn't forgotten how to build one and keep it going, and smiled at the sight of thornbushes draped with the Spartan-IIIs' underwear drying in the sun.

The hunting team returned first. Fred, Linda, and Olivia ambled into the camp clutching more small dead animals, an assortment of greens, and those yellow tennis ball fruits. Olivia held something in her arms as carefully as if it was a newborn.

It was a fish. A huge, silver, meaty-looking fish. It was the first one Halsey had seen here. They definitely weren't going to starve, then.

"We decided to skip pizza," Olivia said. She cradled the fish, looking wistful. "We've gone organic."

The fish seemed to perk everyone up. They took off their helmets and settled down with Halsey to prepare the food, skewering chunks of vegetable and meat on twigs, making morale-boosting comments about everything being all right now but not mentioning Lucy. Mendez appeared from the trees a hundred meters away with Mark, Ash, and Tom trailing behind him.

"You know what we really need?" Fred said. "A nice big cooking pot. I think it's time we invented ceramics."

Mendez walked into the cooking circle, grunted an acknowledgment at nobody in particular, and seemed to be doing a head count. He didn't meet Halsey's eyes. "Anyone mind if I light up before dinner?"

"Ration yourself, Chief," Ash said. "Four puffs. Or you'll have to find some local stuff to dry and smoke."

"Uh-huh." Mendez lit his cigar stub from the taper of dry grass and inhaled deeply. "I may well do that, Ash. I may yet weaken."

He walked away and stood with his back to them, facing the river. Halsey wasn't counting, but he'd taken a lot more than four puffs by the time he turned around, and when he did his turmoil was etched into his face, possibly the first time that Halsey had ever felt the urge to go to him and ask if she could help.

But she knew she couldn't. It was about Lucy. Nobody was speculating openly about it now, but Halsey was certain that if she could access everyone's thoughts for most of their waking day, then the majority of them would be about that girl-where she was, what had happened to her, whether she was badly injured and unable to call for help, and what she'd been chasing when she went missing.

Whatever it was, it hadn't come back.

Halsey decided she couldn't just stay out of Mendez's way and say nothing indefinitely, because this exile might last for years. Assuming he doesn't shoot me first. She got to her feet and wandered over to him.

"I've nearly finished translating the symbols, Chief," she said, brandishing the achievement like an olive branch. "I'm betting that we'll be able to work it all out then."

Mendez looked down at the glowing tip of his cigar, then extinguished it carefully on the sole of his boot. "Hope so, Doctor."

"Like everyone says, Lucy's smart and tough. She'll hang in there, wherever there is." Halsey really was trying to make placatory conversation. Whatever Mendez had done in the intervening years, she wouldn't have been able to turn her Spartans into soldiers without him. "So how did you actually select the Threes?"

He looked up slowly. "Is this going to be about me betraying you and helping Ackerson hijack your project? Because if it is-"

"I was just asking," she said. "Because I want to know."

"Well, you know we didn't select them on the basis of perfect genomes," he said. Halsey had suspended the second tranche of the Spartan program because she'd run out of candidates with the ideal genetic profile. She knew he wasn't going to let her forget it. "They were all orphans. No qualification beyond the Covenant slaughtering their entire family. We asked them if they wanted to get their revenge, and we took the ones who said yes." He put his cigar back in his belt pouch, but he was staring right into her face. "We took volunteers. We enhanced them some, but we took whatever we could get, and they turned out fine."

"No filtering at all?" A six-year-old couldn't possibly understand combat enough to volunteer, but she didn't want to start a pissing contest with him over ethics, not in front of the Spartans. "Not even genetic screening?"

"You think it's all about genes, Doctor? The Spartans that I trained were made from random, raw, imperfect humanity. But by God, they were motivated. And that's what it's all about. A state of mind."

Halsey wanted to resist a debate, but if she'd just nodded and smiled it would have made him just as angry. "If that were true, then we wouldn't have needed the Spartan program. Exceptional genes create an advantage in any field."

"What was it you said to me once? Genome is the blueprint, environment and training is the engineer. Phenotype."

"Yes, but-"

"I realize you need justification, but your history isn't up to your science," Mendez growled. "The most successful special forces in history weren't genetic supermen. They were every damn size and shape, every age, and some of them weren't even especially fit, but they all had one thing that made them great commandos. They believed they could do anything, and then they went out and did it."

Mendez always knew where to strike to disable. It was part of his training. He could wound psychologically just as well as he could place a fist or a blade.

My research mattered. My research made a difference. Don't you give me that commando state of mind bullshit, don't you dare ...

"But you let Kurt tamper with their neurobiology, so what kind of state of mind is that?" Halsey defended herself. Why the hell should she take this? She'd dedicated her entire life to the defense of Earth and its colonies, surrendering any chance of the kind of normal family life that other women took for granted. "And that was made illegal years ago."

"So was goddamn kidnapping and using nonconsenting humans in medical experiments, Doctor, but I never noticed that stopping you."

Her attempt to reestablish diplomatic relations with Mendez had crashed and burned inside minutes. She was fuming. You could have chosen to put it aside, Chief, but you didn't. You found the first chance to take a pop at me. She was suddenly aware of the Spartans in her peripheral vision, frozen in position and watching warily. When she turned, what she saw troubled her. Her Spartans were standing in a knot, and Mendez's were sitting on the other side of the fire. She got the feeling that it was about more than just sticking with the people you'd known all your life.

Olivia called to them. "This fish is going to be ready soon," she said, ever the diplomat. "If you want to stake your claim, you better get over here."

If there had been cold beer and good humor, Halsey reflected, it would have been a pleasant barbecue. Everyone settled down and ate in silence for a while. Eventually Mendez licked his fingers and wiped them on one of the large leaves that did duty as plates.

"As long as she's got water, she can last a couple of weeks without food," he said. He didn't need to say the word Lucy. "So how far have you got, Doctor?"

"Well, the more I translate, the more I see an environment that can be tailored to the needs of any species." Halsey took refuge in a neutral topic. "What I've not worked out yet is how they would divide up the planet into different ecosystems for different species, but they're the Forerunners. If they can build a Dyson sphere like this and a Halo Array, then compartmentalizing atmospheres would probably be very simple housekeeping for them."

"So, whatever was moving around in the corridor before we lost Lucy," Mark said. "Is it possible that another species landed in here just like we did?"

Halsey liked to think of this as a tactical withdrawal into the only safe space between them and the Covenant rather than blundering in. But she knew there was always the chance that they were in over their heads. Even if-even when-she shook all the facts and information out of this place, there was no guarantee that they would ever find a way out. Perhaps the Forerunners had given up on colonizing the galaxy and had decided to sit tight on one safe, barricaded world for the rest of time.

"I'd be lying if I said no," Halsey said at last.

Normal conversation didn't resume. All the Spartans had heard every word that Halsey and Mendez had said, and now there was no use pretending that the pair of them weren't wrestling with battered, painful consciences.

"I still got a couple of panels to analyze," Halsey said, getting to her feet and finding that her knees were a lot less flexible than she remembered. Once she could have stood up from a cross-legged position in one fluid movement, but that time was long gone. "Better crack on with the task. I'll leave you to wash the dishes."