"Is that some kind of mini Sentinel?" Mendez asked. "Because if it is, we've already seen the big ones. And you know what happens when those bastards link up."

For a moment, Halsey was totally distracted by the matte gray device and completely forgot her moment of ignominy in the grass. It wasn't a defensive machine like the deadly Sentinels they'd encountered on the surface. It gave the impression that it was waiting for something, although it had dived on them like a fighter. Halsey edged closer despite Kelly waving her away, and looked at the underside. A cluster of lights-no, illuminated symbols she couldn't read-was visible, two blue and one a greenish white. The blue ones were blinking.

It could have been counting down to detonate, of course. The Forerunners would have gone to a lot of trouble to ensure no unwanted life-forms contaminated this sanctuary. Halsey still had no evidence that the sphere's apparent tolerance of human intrusion was anything more than luck.

"No telling what'll happen if I shoot it," Kelly said. "And size doesn't mean something isn't lethal. Right, O?"

Olivia suddenly appeared from nowhere. Halsey really never heard her coming. Maybe old age was creeping on.

"Shall we-well, catch it?" Olivia asked. "We're supposed to be acquiring technology here."

Kelly reached out, slow and cautious for once. She was a finger-length from the cylinder when it shot up in a perfect vertical and vanished before she could target it.

"Damn, I've finally been outrun," she said. "Oh, the shame of it."

Mendez watched from a distance, lips moving. He was talking to Fred's squad on the radio. Halsey's stomach growled, reminding her of the top priority.

"It'll be back," she said. "And I'd like to take it alive." She turned to Tom, who'd taken off his helmet and was scratching his scalp. He was just as luminously young as the other Spartan-IIIs, with dark hair and a bruise on his chin that was already turning yellow at the margins. "Is that from when Kurt knocked you out?"

"Yes." Tom stared at a point between his boots and blinked a few times. "I'd never have left him to hold off the Elites on his own."

"It's okay, I know you wouldn't." Halsey wasn't sure if she was trying harder because Mendez had snarled at her or if she really did feel a pang of regret. "Saving someone is a reflex. Nobody who's wired that way thinks about it. Do they?"

Tom just shrugged. "No point taking chances, ma'am. You're the only one here who can read a Forerunner menu, aren't you?"

"Thanks, Spartan," she said. Do I mean that? Yes, I think I do. "I'll try to find you a steak."

CHAPTER.

TWO.

HUMANITY CAN NOW BREATHE AGAIN.

THE COVENANT HAS FINALLY BEEN DRIVEN BACK. THE COST IN LIVES-OUR TROOPS AND OUR CITIZENS-HAS BEEN ENORMOUS.

BUT FREEDOM NEVER COMES CHEAPLY, AND NOW, WE REBUILD.

I PROMISE THIS TO EVERY MAN, WOMAN, AND CHILD ON EARTH AND IN ITS COLONIES. WHILE WE WILL CONTINUE TO STRIVE FOR A PEACEFUL COEXISTENCE WITH OTHER SPECIES, HUMANITY WILL NEVER AGAIN ALLOW ITSELF TO BE THE VICTIM OF AGGRESSION. THIS IS THE MOMENT WE START TO RECLAIM OUR RIGHTFUL PLACE IN THE UNIVERSE.

(INAUGURAL SPEECH OF DR. RUTH CHARET, NEW PRESIDENT OF THE UNIFIED EARTH GOVERNMENT: JANUARY 2553).

CORE 5, OFFICE OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE, BRAVO-6 FACILITY: JANUARY 26, 2553.

Don't mind me. BB settled down to watch and learn. I'm no trouble at all. I'll stay out of your way. I'm just observing.

And he was observing a man who seemed to think his time had come, the idiot. Didn't he realize the war was anything but over? David Agnoli, Minister for the Colonies, sat on the low oak bookcase with his back to Parangosky's office. He still didn't seem to have the measure of UNSC yet.

"Do you think the old bat's ever going to die, Captain?" Agnoli reached down between his legs to pull out a volume at random, but BB was pretty sure he was keeping an eye on the office door via the reflection in the glass panel opposite. "Or will she transmogrify into her true basilisk form, and vanish in a puff of sulfur? I'd pay good money to see that."

He started leafing through the book, a faded and ancient copy of The Admiralty Manual of Seamanship Vol. II. Captain Osman glanced at him with faint contempt.

"The Admiral speaks very highly of you, too, David," she said sourly. "I think the word was weasel. Well, it began with a W, anyway."

"Come on, you're the anointed one. You can get me in to see her, can't you?"

"If she'd known you were coming, I'm sure she would have made time for you. But she's got a lot of souls to digest." She gave him a look of faint disgust as he riffled through the yellowing pages. "Look, do you know how many centuries old that book is? Admiral Hood gave it to me. Don't get greasy fingerprints all over it."

Agnoli turned to look over his shoulder as Parangosky's door opened. Her flag lieutenant, Dorsey, hovered with his hands braced on the door frame as if he didn't dare cross the threshold.

"The Admiral will see you now, Captain." Dorsey made a polite show of noticing Agnoli. "Oh, hello, Minister. Will we be seeing you at Dr. Charet's reception later?"

"Possibly." Agnoli closed the ancient book with exaggerated care and stood up to put it back on the shelf. He nodded at Osman as Dorsey vanished. "I'll show myself out, then. Perhaps the lieutenant can make an appointment for me."

Osman watched him until he was out of sight-but not out of BB's-then reached out to pick up some files from her desk. BB decided it was time to introduce himself. He projected his three-dimensional holographic image into the doorway and waited for her to react.

How else was an AI supposed to shake hands?

Osman stopped in her tracks and stared at him. "And whose little pet are you?" She cocked her head a fraction as if she suddenly wasn't quite sure what he was. "You are fully sentient, aren't you?"

"I'm Black-Box," he said. "I thought I'd introduce myself before we see the Admiral."

Osman looked him over with no change in her expression whatsoever. BB's holographic avatar was a cube, a featureless box picked out in blue light, because he saw no point in masquerading as something other than what he was-pure intellect, his intricate thought processes a closed book to organic life. He couldn't bear the theatrics of manifesting as flesh and blood.

Faces are for wannabes. I'm not a surrogate human.

"You didn't answer my question, Black-Box," Osman said, waiting until he moved aside. "Whose AI are you?"

He followed her for a few meters as she walked down the corridor, as far as he could project himself using her desk terminal. "I report to the Admiral. And she calls me BB. You might like to as well."

Osman looked over her shoulder to say something, but he'd run out of range and had to switch to another terminal. It took him a fraction of a second to reroute himself through the fire alarm system and the mainframe to project from Parangosky's terminal and pop up again in front of Osman. She was in the process of turning around again to look for him. Judging by the way she flinched, he'd actually managed to startle her.

"Apologies, Captain," he said. "As I was saying, I work for Parangosky."

"Doing what, exactly?"

"Whatever she wants," BB said.

Look after Osman. Trust her. I've kept her under wraps for years, hidden her even from Halsey. She has a job to do. The Admiral thought the sun shone out of Osman's backside, and even a dolt like Agnoli could see that she'd take over when Parangosky decided to call it a day, even if he didn't know why.

And if it was good enough for Parangosky, then it was good enough for BB.

Ah ... Hogarth. An alert rippled through BB, detected by extensions of his program that he'd distributed throughout the communications and security systems in key government buildings. There he goes. He's on the prowl. Even if Captain Hogarth hadn't put a private appointment with the UEG in his diary, his comms handset made his movements trackable, and each secure door that he passed through betrayed his identity. He was moving around the president's suite of offices. So you're off to do some lobbying, are you? You really do fancy your chances as head of ONI. Shame that you've backed the wrong horse. What possible deal could the civilian government offer you?

In the time it took BB to run all his monitoring systems and check intelligence reports from fifty ships, Osman had only just begun her instant reply.

"I never knew she had an AI," Osman said, walking straight through BB's hologram into Parangosky's office. Humans didn't usually do that to AIs. They'd walk around them. He wasn't sure how to take it. "Well, nice to meet you, BB."

Parangosky gave him a wink as he moved in behind Osman. "I see you two are getting to know each other," she said, gesturing Osman to a seat. "That's good. Don't worry, Captain, you can trust BB with your life. Not a phrase I use lightly. Or figuratively."

"And am I going to need to, ma'am?" Osman asked.

"Very possibly." Parangosky leaned forward, slowly and painfully, to check the status panel on her desk. The office was secure, door seals shut and soundproofing activated. BB had his own defenses to keep unfriendly AIs out of the Admiral's systems, but the benign dumb ones needed dissuasion too. He exploited them to spy and expected other AIs to do the same. "Which is why I decided that you needed your own AI. And why this conversation is strictly between you, me, and him."

Osman looked BB over, chewing her lip. He couldn't tell if she was pleased with the appointment or not, but she certainly seemed a little uneasy. Everything he could observe told him so. He could infiltrate any electronic system and ride its vectors, seeing, hearing, and sensing far more than a limited human-even a Spartan-ever could. From the minute feedback adjustments in the environmental controls, he could detect how much CO Osman was exhaling. The security cameras enabled him to see her in any wavelength, including infrared. She looked rather flushed in that spectrum, which mirrored her increased respiration.

Anxious, Captain?

"Are we talking about Kilo-Five or something else?" Osman asked.

"Something else." Parangosky twisted a little in her seat as if she was trying to ease her arthritic hip. "I'll come on to the squad later. But this is about Catherine Halsey."

"You've found a body."

"Oh, she's still alive. I can feel it in my water. But, more to the point, Glamorgan's ELINT has picked up something much more concrete." Parangosky indicated the screen. "BB, do the honors, please."

BB pulled up the files he'd collected from the ONI corvette. The holographic display unfolded itself just over the desk between the two women, showing a chart of the system that once contained Onyx before the artificial planet had deconstructed itself. Slightly irregular concentric rings radiated out from the Onyx coordinates. One forlorn blue light was set within the red lines, a pinprick that marked a signal from a Spartan armor transponder, the only KIA that had been confirmed-Lieutenant Ambrose.

BB had left a fragment of himself in Glamorgan's system to alert him as soon as anything else was found. The corvette's nav AI didn't seem to mind the intrusion.

"Sifting for debris out there is a slow process." Parangosky reached into the display and enlarged the detail. "You know what it's like. Hard to spot anything smaller than a family car. It'll take the rest of the year to complete a visual search, but Glamorgan's picking up massive electromagnetic anomalies. Something's still there, but we can't see it. And unless every single sensor's malfunctioning, it's enormous, the size of a solar system. We knew there were areas underground that we couldn't access, but now we know that Onyx was wholly artificial, it's starting to support the theory that it was built as a citadel. A last-chance saloon."

Osman was staring at the chart with a slightly openmouthed expression that told BB she was forming a theory. "That's not any slipspace signature I'd recognize, but it looks a hell of a lot like it. Makes me wish I hadn't sent a wreath."

"You didn't. You may yet get the chance, though."

"Well, it was only a matter of time before she found enough pieces to put together. You can't keep that much information completely quiet for that long. But are you sure?"

"Oh, I never assume anything where Halsey's concerned, and she might well actually be dead, of course, planning or no planning. But there's a logical progression." Parangosky counted out on thin fingers, joints swollen despite her doctor's best efforts. "We have the Onyx battle reports from Dusk. We know she kidnapped Spartan-Zero-Eight-Seven. We know she persuaded Hood to deploy Spartans to Onyx. And we know damn well just how many Forerunner artifacts there were on that planet and what they might be. So she had her Spartans, and she had access to Forerunner technology. Now-your turn."

"So she jumped ship," Osman said. "She's used something the Forerunners left behind."

BB felt free to chip in with his own theories. "And after reading her journal, I think she's cleansing her conscience by hiding her Spartans."

"That's big of her. Hiding them from us?"

"Who knows?" BB said. "The woman rewrites her own reality as she goes along."

Parangosky sucked in a breath. "Osman, she's effectively abducted some very scarce special forces personnel as well as Chief Mendez. She can steal all the paper clips she likes, but she does not get to stroll off with billions of dollars' worth of UNSC resources in the middle of a battle. If she had a military rank, she'd have faced the death penalty for that. She still might."

BB noted Osman nod involuntarily. There was no love lost there, and it wasn't just because Osman had taken on her mentor's loathing of Halsey.

"When did you last have contact with her, Captain?" BB asked.

"You already know that," Osman said stiffly. "But if you don't, then you ought to. When she discarded me as breakage from her program. That's when."

"Just testing for potency of venom, Captain...."

"Savored cold and all that, BB. The best way."

Parangosky turned to BB and gave him her don't-be-a-naughty-boy look, a rueful half smile. He suspected that Parangosky had been the kind of little girl who kept pet scorpions and doted on them the way other children cooed over puppies.

"We don't do pointless vengeance in ONI, BB," Parangosky said gently. "We do vengeance with a pragmatic outcome in mind. Revenge might give you a warm feeling, but unless it delivers some lasting results you might as well have a nice cup of mocha instead."

"So you want me to take Kilo-Five to Onyx," Osman said, obviously in a hurry to move on from the personal stuff. "Or the gap where Onyx used to be. So who's going to handle the Sangheili mission?"

"That's still our top priority. We've got Elites to neutralize and the rest of the Halos to locate. Just stand by to divert to Glamorgan if and when we find something. Mendez and some of the Spartan-Threes could still be alive too, but don't forget you're going to have Spartan-Zero-One-Zero in your squad, and she thinks that Halsey walks on water. They all do. Hence my preference for this private briefing."

"If you can't trust a Spartan, then who can you trust?"

"I'm not saying they can't be trusted. I just don't want to put that loyalty to the test if we find Halsey, that's all. I'm not briefing the ODSTs about it, either. Just so that we don't have any slipups. We stick with our story. Halsey died a long way from Onyx, all suitably sacrificial and heroic. But that's for the UNSC's benefit, not hers."

"You could have made her vanish a long time ago, ma'am," Osman said. "There has to come a point where the irritant factor outweighs her usefulness."

"She's reached it now she's compromised our ability to fight." Parangosky turned her head slowly and glanced at the virtual window. The image it projected from above ground was a bright, sunny summer day. She looked almost wistful, as if she wanted to be outside for a change. Tomorrow's a bonus, BB. She said that quite a lot these days. "So I want to find her alive. It's keeping me going, believe me."

BB had access to every record in the ONI archives, and in the six months since his creation Parangosky had answered every question he'd put to her. Even so, it was hard for an AI to extract as much data from a human as he needed, even from an articulate and succinct one like Parangosky. Flesh and blood was so very, very slow. The question that most fascinated him had still to be fully answered.

What made you dislike Halsey so much, Admiral? ONI has plenty of unpalatable, unlikable, dangerous people in its ranks, but you tolerate them. What did she do?

She had answered, in a way. Halsey had lied to her, she said.

But ONI was all about lies. They were now about to tell some more.

"So, on to today's business." Parangosky shut down the holoimage. "BB, are they all here now?"

"Yes, ma'am." BB checked on the monitors in each separate waiting room, where the candidates sat isolated by specialty. "Staff Sergeant Malcolm Geffen, Corporal Vasily Beloi, Sergeant Lian Devereaux, Naomi-Zero-One-Zero, and Dr. Evan Phillips."

Osman didn't say a word for a moment. Sometimes Parangosky didn't tell her everything. But then Phillips had been a last-minute change of mind on Parangosky's part, and BB still wasn't convinced that the professor understood what he'd agreed to in a matter of seconds. Phillips craves knowledge, like an AI. Can't exist without it. Gorges on more and more every day. I think we'll get on just fine. Phillips had rushed to Bravo-6 so fast that he was still repacking his holdall in the waiting room.

"I didn't know he was coming," Osman said at last.

Parangosky looked almost apologetic. She always took care not to offend Osman, but BB knew there were things she didn't tell her for her own good. The time was approaching, though, when she would need to be told everything, and when the name Infinity would finally mean something to her.

"He's a gamble I took two hours ago," Parangosky said. "You might need his expertise, even with BB around. I'll worry later about how I get him to keep his mouth shut."

She eased herself up from the chair and reached for her cane. She needed it for the walk to the elevator down into the core of the HIGHCOM complex, but somehow she made it look like a weapon she had every intention of using.

"Time to put Kilo-Five together, then," she said. "BB, you're formally assigned to Captain Osman as of now. Lead on, Captain."

PRIVATE QUARTERS OF FORMER SHIPMASTER JUL 'MDAMA, BEKAN KEEP, MDAMA, SANGHELIOS: JANUARY 26, 2553 IN THE HUMAN CALENDAR.