"I took the liberty of recording all voice traffic from the moment I knew you had a prisoner, and I've sifted through it, but there's nothing to interest you so far," BB said, all tact and diplomacy. "I'm thoughtful like that, I am."

Phillips grunted something that sounded like thanks and headed for his cubbyhole in the hangar. Vaz looked at Osman and raised his eyebrows. He seemed a bit unsteady.

"He'll come around to the idea, ma'am," Vaz said. "He always disappears to think things over when he finds out something nasty about his government. But he always gets on with the job in the end."

Naomi was still waiting to be dismissed, holding the cattle prod tucked under her arm like a swagger stick.

"You all right, Spartan?" Osman asked.

"Fine, thanks, ma'am."

"Okay, I'm going to talk to the Admiral about getting this guy offloaded, and then we'll see what Hood's up to."

"Are we still on for that, ma'am?" Mal asked.

"It'd be handy to get clearance to tag along, if only to get Phillips on nodding terms with the Arbiter. Who else is Hood going to want with him? I expect the Admiral's suggesting it right now."

There was just a flicker of doubt on Mal's face. She could understand that. Everyone liked Hood, and it wasn't easy to stomach the idea of ONI unleashing dirty tricks on the man who'd brought Earth through the war in some kind of shape to rebuild, but then that depended on which of them thought their efforts had made the most difference. The Spartans were ONI's project and the Spartans had been the tipping point, one way or another. Parangosky felt she had prior claim. Osman wasn't sure. But she knew who her boss was.

She took another look through the plate of the brig door. The Sangheili was on his feet now, pacing around and occasionally landing a punch on the bulkheads.

"See, he's all better now." Mal peered over her shoulder. "Do their teeth grow back again, like sharks' do?"

"Stick your arm in and find out," Vaz suggested.

Osman decided she could leave the Sangheili in there until she'd arranged a handover. If the brig needed hosing down afterward, that was a price worth paying. She went back to her day cabin and sat down at the desk with her chin resting on her hands.

"BB, can you find out what Hood's planning?" she asked. She meant accessing his secure files and comms, not asking his secretary. She really hadn't wanted to do that to the man, not after how kind he'd been to her over the years. "I know Parangosky's going to tell me, but it would be nice to plan ahead."

"I thought you'd never ask," BB said, appearing in the in-tray. "Let me see what my naughty fragment's been up to while my back's been turned. Oh, and Hogarth. I hope you didn't mind my smacking his bottom. He keeps sending Harriet to snoop in your files so I stuck something in his and alerted Internal Audit."

"I believe the phrase is you fitted him up...."

"Nothing major. Just triggered the attack accountants from hell to check a truly massive overspend. They'll find it's a misplaced decimal point in due course."

"Remind me never to cross you."

"And Phillips will be here to see you in ... ten seconds."

"You're fabulous, d'you know that?"

"Yes. I do."

BB disappeared just as Phillips stuck his head inside the door.

"Good lead with Mdama, Captain," he said. "I have a name."

Osman leaned back in her chair. "That was quick."

"Jul 'Mdama." Phillips could even do the little cross between a glottal stop and a click before the clan name. "Shipmaster. Some traffic between 'Telcam, another shipmaster called Buran, and some guy called Forze who appears to be his best buddy. Jul took off from Bekan in a shuttle, and hasn't called in for ages."

"So he's known to 'Telcam."

Phillips nodded. "Apparently."

"That could get interesting. Naomi says he definitely wasn't on overwatch. He was doing some sneaky observation."

"Maybe he's an agent for the Arbiter. A plant. A sleeper. Or whatever the Spookish is for undercover these days."

Now there's a thought.

"Cover blown, then," Osman said. "Now let's work out the most divisive and strife-inducing way I can use that information."

MAINTENANCE AREA, FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552.

"Easy, Lucy. Back off."

Mendez had Lucy in a headlock and she was finally running out of adrenaline. She knew she'd kicked him, but she really didn't mean to, not the Chief, not the man who'd raised her and turned her into a soldier. "I said stand down, Spartan. Did you hear me? Stand down!"

She took a deep wheezing gasp, deafened by her own pulse. Her legs almost buckled and her face and neck felt like they were on fire. She realized that Mendez was now holding her up rather than holding her back.

And she was crying-sobbing like she hadn't sobbed for years. Mendez turned her around to face him and crushed her to him so tightly that she thought he'd break a rib.

"Good girl. Let it out. It's okay." She'd just punched out the ONI's chief scientist but Mendez didn't sound angry at all. "Let it all out. Damn. That was a long time coming."

Lucy had a small crowd around her now and suddenly felt completely humiliated. Tom ruffled her hair ferociously. "You're back, Lucy. You're back. Come on. Keep talking."

But she wasn't sure what to say next. It should have been an apology, but she wasn't sorry, not one damn bit, not for defending Prone. She couldn't see Halsey behind a cluster of Spartan-IIs, but she knew that she must have hit her a hell of a lot harder than she thought. Her hand was throbbing.

"She'll be okay," Kelly said, straightening up. It was hard to tell if she was looking at Lucy but her voice was flat calm. "Nothing that can't be fixed."

Mendez let Lucy go but still kept a tight grip on her shoulder. He'd never been a kindly-looking man but the granite expression softened just for a moment. "I ought to put you on a charge, Petty Officer. But I'm just too damn glad to hear you talking again." He looked over her head in Halsey's direction. "You're lucky she's a small one, Doctor. Are you okay?"

Halsey was on her feet now, supported by Kelly and Linda. Fred took his helmet off and looked at Lucy as if he was working out who the hell she was.

"I'll live," Halsey said. She dabbed at her nose with the back of her hand, trying to mop up a thin trickle of bright red blood. "You and I had better have a talk, Chief."

Halsey went outside with her Spartan escort like she was some kind of general. Lucy bristled. It must have shown because Mendez gave her his don't-even-think-about-it look.

"Now I'm going to get my ass kicked," he said. "Tom, look after her, will you? I'd better make sure Halsey gives the Engineers some space or we'll be here until hell calls time."

The adrenaline had ebbed away and Lucy was now at the embarrassed and shaky stage. She'd never lost control like that before. The doctors had warned her that anger was part of traumatic stress, but she was a Spartan, for goodness' sake. She should have had enough discipline to resist throwing a punch.

There was just something about Halsey haranguing the Engineers that snapped something inside her, and for a few seconds she didn't care whether she lived or died as long as she lashed out and stopped it.

Tom and Olivia kept ruffling her hair. "That'll make her think twice about treating us as cheap knockoffs," Olivia said, putting her arm around Lucy's shoulders. "How're you doing, Luce? Take it a step at a time, though. I bet that this time next week we won't be able to shut you up."

The Engineers were huddled in a corner, probably wondering what the hell they'd let into their sphere. They'd seen Lucy shoot one of their buddies, and now she was swinging punches at civilians. Prone floated away from the group and headed her way, clutching a page-sized piece of the same milky white glass used on the walls. He fluttered his cilia over it and held it in front of her.

YOU ARE PARTLY REPAIRED. WHO WILL FINISH REPAIRING YOU NOW?.

Lucy put her hand out to the screen, looking for the makeshift keyboard. Olivia caught her wrist.

"No, speak to the guy, Lucy."

She'd managed one word, but that didn't mean it had opened the floodgates. A connection in her brain was still fragile and rusted, the one that most people took for granted from the time they were small children-thinking what they were going to say before their vocal cords took over a fraction of a second later. It was an easy habit to lose. Just as she'd found herself struggling to frame written words, she was now back to square one trying to do the same with speech. She took her hand off the screen and touched Prone's tentacle.

"Prone," she said hoarsely.

I CANNOT RESTORE YOU. WHO WILL DO IT?.

Lucy gestured to the squad around her. "Them."

"Good going, Luce," Mark said, almost shaking her by the shoulders. "Keep it up."

Prone peered into her face for a few moments and then wrote on his pad again. YOU WANT TO GO HOME.

Lucy knew that if she asked in the right way, he'd send a message for her. He trusted her despite what she'd done, and he obviously didn't trust Halsey.

But was it the right thing to do? Engineers weren't stupid, and if Prone was worried about what was lurking outside the sphere, then he had good reason. On the other hand, maybe he'd just show them what he could see. It was only a small step. It didn't mean breaking radio silence and making themselves into potential targets.

But how do you breach a Dyson sphere in another dimension anyway? Can anyone get at us?

Lucy nodded at Prone. She didn't have a home to go back to, and even her base on Onyx was gone, but that was too complicated for her to explain to him right now. The important thing was that she focused again and continued with the mission, or everyone she'd lost would have died for nothing.

It was a massive effort. She looked into Prone's face and squeezed the unfamiliar words out of weak vocal cords.

"Show us."

"She means show us your data on the threat," Olivia said. "Maybe we know what it is."

Prone didn't respond. He seemed to be studying Lucy's face in return. Then he just wandered off and rejoined his friends.

"Sometimes I think those things react to humans, and sometimes I think they're just looking at a complicated circuit diagram," said Mark. "But maybe he's gone away to mull it over."

For the moment, there was nothing that they could do. Lucy wondered whether to stay out of Halsey's way, but she had to face the woman sooner or later, and they were still stuck here with no immediate hope of rescue. No, she had to stop thinking of it as a rescue. She had to see it as the retrieval of high-value technology. She walked outside into the sunlight, suddenly terrified that she didn't know what to say-literally say-next. If she didn't try to keep talking, she knew she would slide back into silence.

She looked around the camp at the underclothes and jerky drying side by side on the bushes and saw the Spartan-IIs standing in a huddle, talking. Mendez and Halsey were head to head a few meters away. Their body language said it all.

They were standing square on to each other, shoulders braced in confrontation. Lucy could hear the discussion building into a fight. They were oblivious. Maybe they didn't care that they now had an audience of Spartans.

Halsey had her arms folded tight across her chest, more a blocking gesture than a defensive one. "Do you take my point now, Chief? They're just not stable. They're a liability."

"So what do you want me to do, Doctor?" Mendez growled. "They were broken when we got them. It was their goddamn qualification to get into the program, for Chrissakes. Terrified, angry little kids who'd seen their parents killed and wanted to lash out."

"Well, yes, that's a classic profile, but-"

"You know what regular recruits are like when you draft them?" He started stabbing his finger in her direction to make his point. "A mixed bag. Some are downright psychopathic. Some are bone idle. Some are scared of their own shadows. All kinds." He took out his cigar and shoved it between his lips, still talking as it dangled there while he felt in his pockets for that ancient Swedish fire-starter he always carried. "But dumb guys like me make them into fighting men and women by giving them discipline and pride. That's the way the armed forces always ran before we started designing soldiers." He paused for breath as he struck furious sparks off the two metal strips onto a scrap of dry grass, then lit the Sweet William. "You know something?" He gestured with the cigar right under her nose, wafting her with smoke. "It's the way the rest of the UNSC still runs. What you call disorders and abnormalities, I call different personalities. You just want to medicate and tweak and modify people into one vanilla definition of perfect, lady, and it's not what humans are like."

"You finished, Chief?"

"Hell, no, Doctor, I only just got started. You were never much good at accepting imperfect people, were you? You dumped your own goddamn daughter on her dad when she got too imperfect. Poor Jacob Keyes. Nice guy. Good father. Great officer. So then you made your own perfect daughter with that AI of yours, Cortana, a tidy little copy of yourself who thinks you're the Virgin Mary. I don't need a goddamn Ph.D. in psychiatry to work out what's wrong with you."

Lucy couldn't move. She didn't really know Halsey and she didn't care what the woman thought of Spartan-IIIs. But she could hear Mendez losing his temper. His voice was getting more gravelly as his throat constricted. He almost wheezed when he puffed on that cigar. This was the man who'd looked after her and the other Spartan recruits from the day she'd landed on a strange planet with a bunch of six-year-old savages who'd almost forgotten what it meant to be human beings. He asked them who wanted a chance to kill the Covenant. Me. I wanted that. I wanted to kill them all. Mendez had faced the same risks alongside them. She knew whose side she'd be on in any fight.

"You bastard," Halsey said at last. It was more of a hiss. "How dare you pry into my private life."

"You're not the only one with a nosey AI, Doctor. But a lot of UNSC staff can access the DNA database-and the goddamn calendar. A lot of people know. They've just got too much respect for Miranda to gossip."

"You and Ackerson. A matching pair of treacherous assholes."

"At least he only took volunteers."

"Six-year-olds can't possibly volunteer. Spare me the competitive morality."

"They didn't have parents grieving for them, either."

"You've been saving this up, haven't you?"

"Not really. Work in a sewer long enough and you don't notice the smell until you go outside."

Lucy was transfixed. All the stuff about Halsey and her daughter and parents grieving-it was getting ugly, even if she didn't understand the context. She realized Tom and Fred were now standing next to her, helmets in hands.

"I better break this up," Fred said.

Tom shook his head. "No, sir, I think you better leave them to air their differences."

Halsey dropped her voice, but it was still crystal-clear. "You knew what the deal was, Chief. You could have walked away at any time."

"So I deserve what's coming to me. I should have asked for a transfer as soon as I found out what you'd done to their parents. And those goddamn clones. You know what? Just saying it out loud now makes me sick to my gut. It was all wrong. All completely wrong. Well, I hope someone charges me with the crimes, because this should never be hidden. This should never be covered up."

"But you did it once," Halsey said, hands on hips, "and then you did it again, without me. And you did it for the same reason that I did-because creating Spartans gave us the best chance of saving the human race."

"Steady with that airbrush, Doctor. You created the Spartans to counter colonial insurgents. That was a hell of a long time before the Covenant showed up."

"And they were just as big a threat. Remember Haven? I wanted to stop that ever happening again."

"You wanted to do it because you could. Curiosity. Goddamn vanity. You don't give a damn about human life, not even your own daughter's-only about being the smartest kid in the class."

"Don't you dare lecture me on Miranda. I asked Jacob to bring her up because I knew I was a bad mother."

"I never said you weren't self-aware."

"Look, I know I can't give anyone unconditional love. But I'm smarter than most abusive parents and I knew Jacob would do a better job than I ever could. I didn't want a doll to play with, Chief. I got pregnant, it wasn't convenient, and I wasn't prepared to take an unborn life."

"Don't you dump that pious handwringing bullshit on me." Mendez was now white with fury. He was gesturing so hard with the cigar that ash was flying everywhere. Lucy hovered on the edge of stepping in to break it up. "You had no damn respect for born life."

"Okay, that's enough." Fred strode forward, pushing between them until they backed apart. "This stops now. Both of you. Wind your necks in, and that's an order."