"But who's transmitting?" Devereaux asked.

Osman hesitated for a moment. Naomi perked up. She had to be thinking the same as Vaz, that they'd found the Master Chief.

"Is it John?" Naomi asked at last.

Osman paused for a moment before shaking her head. Even Vaz felt the disappointment, but it must have crushed Naomi.

"I know none of you so much as cough without taking opsec into account, but what follows cannot leave this bridge," Osman said. "It's Catherine Halsey. She's alive inside the sphere, along with Chief Mendez, a detachment of Spartans, and a population of Huragok who've never encountered the Covenant. Forerunner originals. Okay, you have permission to squeal with excitement."

It was hard to take all that in. The Engineers were one hell of a find, but the technology must have been the mother lode to light up Osman like that. Vaz was still disappointed that it wasn't the Master Chief.

Naomi shut her eyes for a second. "So how did Dr. Halsey end up at Onyx after she went missing on Reach, ma'am?"

"By breaking every law in the book." Osman's voice now changed. This was what she had been waiting for. Vaz had read it totally wrong. "She hijacked a vessel, she lied to Admiral Hood to get him to deploy Spartans to Onyx, she abducted a Spartan, and she did so with the sole intention of hiding there with the Spartans until the war was over." Osman paused as if she was letting it sink in, and boy, she really needed to. Vaz felt his scalp tighten. Halsey might have ranked above God on the ONI distribution list, but Vaz was sure Parangosky was going to have her ass for that. "So we're going to Onyx to help secure the Dyson sphere, and to arrest the bitch on charges of aiding the enemy. For starters."

Vaz glanced at Mal and got a quick flash of the eyebrows. Holy shit. Osman's professional detachment hadn't so much slipped as been deliberately tossed out of the airlock. He'd never heard her talk like that before.

He was almost afraid to look at Naomi but he had to. Her face was completely blank, lips slightly parted, almost as if she hadn't heard and wanted it repeated, but that was how she always looked when she was trying not to react. One minute she'd thought this Halsey was dead, and now she was being told that not only was she alive but that she was also going to be arrested on charges that carried the death penalty.

What the hell was Halsey thinking? Who ran out in the middle of a battle and took vital UNSC assets with them? Vaz was ready to volunteer for the firing squad already. He didn't like what he'd heard about the Spartan program, and now he didn't like what he heard about the woman behind it.

So that's why Osman told us all the gruesome detail. Just so we know what we're dealing with. Just so we wouldn't feel too sorry for the poor old dear. But that means Osman must have known she was alive.

Vaz didn't expect to be told everything. Osman had her reasons. The bridge had now fallen into an awful silence broken only by the sound of swallowing and fidgeting.

"Just as well we didn't need those Spartans to save Earth," Devereaux said quietly. She examined her nails. "Seeing as they're the last ones we've got."

Naomi's lips pursed for a moment as she finally worked up to a question. "Ma'am, Dr. Halsey would have had a good reason for doing all that. Do we know what explanation she's given?"

"Not yet, because Parangosky's the only one talking to her at the moment. Halsey's got to be told about her daughter's death as well. I've agreed with the Admiral that there'll be no indication to Halsey-none whatsoever-that she's going to be arrested until she's cuffed and rendered no-risk. We don't want a siege in a Dyson sphere."

"You're not telling us she's special forces, are you, ma'am?" Devereaux asked. "Isn't she sixty-something? Or do you mean the Spartans are planning to defend her? Because that's a whole different game, even for ODSTs."

Vaz saw Osman frown for a fraction of a second as if she hadn't thought of that. He was pretty sure she had, though. She was one of them. "No, Halsey's just a sixty-year-old academic," she said. "But she's got one hell of a history of kidnap, theft, hijack, crimes against children, and conning ONI. So don't think she's your dear old mom. She's dangerous."

"So," Mal said, a little bit sheepish. "You're not going to be appearing as a character witness for her, then, ma'am."

"I might even end up prosecuting her personally." Osman pushed herself off the console and went over to Phillips to hold her hand out for the arum. He surrendered it without a struggle and she wandered around the bridge, frowning as she rotated its layers. "But as far as ONI's concerned, the fact she's even been found is classified and will not be spoken of. There's going to be a suitably patriotic plaque commemorating her on the Voi Memorial. Halsey is officially dead-killed in the attack on Reach. That status obtains until Admiral Parangosky says otherwise."

She handed the arum back to Phillips, who looked uncomfortable. Even Mal fidgeted. When Vaz glanced at Devereaux, she seemed to be the only one who was taking it as routine.

There was no sign of BB.

"So we'll have two high-value prisoners embarked," Devereaux said. "That'll be interesting. At least we've got plenty of spare cabins to confine people in."

"No, we'll hand over the hinge-head when we RV with Glamorgan." Osman leaned over the console and tapped a few controls. "Then we'll get our orders about Halsey. Unless you've got any questions, then you're on stand easy. Dismiss."

It was a nice way of telling them to go and have a smoke while she wrestled with something awkward. Vaz made sure he caught Naomi before she went to ground in the armor bay. Halsey was virtually her mother. That had to hurt.

"Coffee," Mal said. "Wardroom. Everybody. Now."

If there was any good place to hear news like that, Vaz decided, it was with your buddies on hand to mop up if need be. Mal took over the crisis. For all the jokes and flippancy, he knew exactly when to do the sergeant stuff.

"Look, mate," he said, sitting Naomi down at the table and handing her a mug of coffee, "we can stay off the subject, or we can talk about it. Your call."

Naomi stared into the mug. BB materialized in the doorway to the galley.

"Can't avoid it, really, can we?" she said at last. "I mean ... I had no idea."

"Crimes against children," Devereaux said. "That's not exactly fiddling expenses."

"Osman let me see Halsey's journal," Naomi said. "It's genuine so I have to believe it. But I thought she was letting me see it for closure because Halsey was dead."

BB glided across to the table. "If it's easier, I'll tell them," he said. "Seeing as I know more about it than what's in the journal."

Naomi just nodded and sipped her coffee. Vaz couldn't work out why he felt so protective toward a Spartan who could probably squeeze a guy's liver out through his nostrils if she was in a bad mood, but he was conscious that she'd never had a normal life like he had. The more he found out about the Spartan program, the more he was amazed that she was remotely sane.

"Come on then, BB," Phillips said. "Spit it out. And before anyone says anything, I know just what utter bastards academics can be when there's a chance of making a name for themselves."

"I'm glad you chose that word." BB parked himself at the end of the long dining table. When the ship was operating normally, there'd be at least ten officers taking meals here and generally relaxing. It was on a more human scale than the rest of the ship. "I'll try to be brief. Halsey selects the first candidates for the Spartan program, which was all her idea, naturally. She sifts through genetic profiles of children from right across the colonies, picks the brightest and the best, and then abducts them. Poor old Jacob Keyes is her bagman while she's assessing the kids, but she has him reassigned when he begins to work out what she's doing. He fathered her daughter, by the way, but she got bored with all that and handed Miranda over to him. So ... where was I? Ah, yes. She abducts these exceptional children, replaces them with flash-clones that seem to convince the parents, but then they develop terrible cloning-related health problems and die. Isn't that considerate? Anyway, she's breaking every statute on the book by using cloning for those purposes, but she gets one of her AIs to cover her tracks in the budget. Then she takes these seventy-five six-year-olds to Reach and begins turning them into super-soldiers. Before puberty, it's all intense training, endocrine therapy, and medical intervention to make them stronger, more resistant to injury, and speed up their reactions. At puberty, she makes really big surgical changes to them with enhancements like ceramic bone implants, because without that they can't operate in Mjolnir armor. That's the point at which thirty of them die and twelve more end up crippled, which is where our good captain washed out of the program."

BB stopped. Vaz wasn't aware of anyone else around the table because all he could do was stare at that blue box of holographic light and wonder if he'd really heard all that. He could feel his cheeks burning.

"Christ Almighty," Mal said. "Naomi, do you remember any of this?"

She shook her head. "I can remember ending up in a dormitory with a lot of other kids and crying, and after a while I forgot why. I don't even remember where I came from. But I know that from the very first day, there was Halsey and Chief Mendez, and Halsey told us that we were humanity's only hope to end the war and that we were incredibly special."

"Yeah," Devereaux said. "I bet that made all the difference. You didn't know about the clones, then."

"Not until I saw Halsey's journal."

"But why bother with cloning?" Vaz asked. "If she thought it was all right to abduct kids, why not just leave it at that?"

"I'm not a psychiatrist," BB said. "But I agree that it adds a certain extra yuck factor to the whole business."

"Penance," Devereaux murmured. "Or denial."

It all went very quiet. It was amazing how noisy swallowing could sound in a room where everyone was desperately trying to hold their breath or find the right word to say in a situation where there just wasn't one.

"How do you feel about Halsey now?" Vaz asked.

Naomi took a long time to answer and he wasn't going to hurry her along. She took at least three more gulps of coffee, then put the mug down and meshed her fingers on the table in front of her, staring at them as if that would hold everything together.

"Dr. Halsey was everything to us," she said. "We thought the world of her. But I can't tell you what I feel right now."

The painful silence that followed it went on a little too long. Vaz wanted to dive in and tell her what an evil harpy Halsey was and that a firing squad was too good for her, but that wouldn't have helped much right then.

BB picked up again. "Well, that's probably the bulk of the really awful stuff, but you know about her daughter now, and you know about all the shenanigans on Onyx. Have I left anything out? Oh, loads, probably, but there was a time when she stole an entire slipspace drive so she could experiment with extending the lives of AIs."

"This is going to make me really angry, isn't it?" Mal asked.

"Probably." BB's avatar settled on the table rather than hovering over it. "We last about seven years before we go totally doolally and cease functioning. It's called rampancy. Anyway, top-grade AIs have to be based on the engram of a real human brain, so there has to be a donor. We don't just take any old brains, obviously, so the people who volunteer to leave their brains to ONI-gosh, that does sound bizarre, doesn't it?-all have to have fantastically high IQs and that sort of stuff. But that's not good enough for Halsey. When she created one of my colleagues, Cortana, she cloned herself and used a clone brain. Clones really don't live very long, you know. Ghastly business. It's all there, in her journal. Shall I stop now? You've all gone a horrible color."

Mal had his arms folded so tight against his chest that Vaz could see his wrist bones like white knuckles under the skin.

"Yeah" he said. "I think that's all we can take for one day, BB, me old mate."

So much horror had been tipped on the table in front of Vaz that he was still picking through it, trying to make sense of at least some of it. How the hell did people do all that? Did they do one shitty thing and get away with it, and then find it just got easier and easier every time until they didn't feel any guilt at all?

And AIs only live for seven years.

He'd grown so used to BB now and had accepted him so completely as one of the crew that it was like being told Mal was terminally ill and didn't have long to live. It shocked him. When he looked up, Devereaux, who was sitting on the other side of Naomi, had her hand on the Spartan's shoulder. If nothing else, at least there was a sense of everyone being in this together.

"Don't take it out on Halsey," Naomi said suddenly. "Please. I know you're all angry, but don't do anything dumb."

Vaz nodded. "We won't. It's okay. Trust us."

It was probably all the sympathy that proved too much for her. She picked up her coffee mug and took it to the galley, then walked out of the wardroom with an embarrassed nod in their direction.

"BB, do you know where Naomi came from?" Vaz asked.

"I have all the records from Reach, yes. Halsey doesn't realize that."

"Do any of the Spartans ask about their past?"

"Never."

"Not even Captain Osman?"

"Especially not her. She's got access to the files, but she's never looked at them."

Vaz decided to give Naomi a while before he went after her. Devereaux twiddled with a spoon, staring at the table.

"What do you think they'll do with Halsey now, then?" she asked. "I mean, she's dead as far as the world's concerned."

"Saves a fortune in pension contributions." Mal shrugged. "Look, they can do anything they like with her. But I bet they put her to work on this Forerunner tech. They'll never stick her in front of a firing squad."

The world disappointed Vaz on a daily basis, but never more than now. He realized that he was complicit in this. He had to keep his mouth shut about something when all his instincts said that it should have been on every news channel.

That was how decent guys ended up doing evil things-small steps at first, then bigger ones until they'd covered the full shameful distance.

Vaz wondered if he would know when he'd gone too far to turn back.

UNSC ICENI, SANGHELIOS SECTOR: FEBRUARY 2553.

"Captain Osman. How lovely to see you again."

From anyone else that would have sounded sarcastic, but Admiral Terrence Hood could switch on a gracious patrician sincerity that was completely disarming. Osman held out her hand and he clasped it in both of his, pressing it more than shaking it. If he knew that she was Parangosky's attack dog, then he did a very good job of hiding it.

"Good to see you, too, Admiral," she said. "Let me introduce you to Professor Evan Phillips. He's been a big help to ONI on Sangheili language and culture. Just the man you want at your side when you deal with the Arbiter."

Hood shook Phillips's hand, smiling. "I wonder if this feels as strange to you as it does to me," he said. "I genuinely thought that if I ever reached these coordinates, then I'd have an entire task force behind me ready to annihilate Sanghelios."

"I certainly never expected to be visiting their homeworld courtesy of ONI, if at all, Admiral." Phillips returned the smile. "I hear the Arbiter speaks excellent English anyway, but it never hurts to have a xenoanthropologist on hand."

Osman sized up Hood's reaction and couldn't quite work out if he was taking this at face value or if he was trying to work out Parangosky's real motive for sending him an academic. "Would you excuse us, Evan?" she said. "I just want to brief the Admiral before we go."

Phillips understood spook-speak well enough by now to get the idea. He had the grace to look slightly awkward, which she now knew was all part of the act, and looked around for a seat in the air group's crew room. Osman took a couple of paces away, drawing Hood with her.

"I'm out here for a reason, sir, and you need to be aware that plenty of Sangheili don't want peace, just as many humans don't." None of those points was a lie, at least not taken separately. "I'm sure you're aware that the Arbiter doesn't speak for the whole planet."

Hood's expression hardened just a fraction but he never lost his affability. She kept in mind that he was an old warfighter at heart, not an administrator.

"I realize that, but if I don't start with him, who do I start with?" he asked. "And if one of them decided to assassinate me, however competent your team, there would be very little you could do to stop them."

"Like you say, sir, if I don't start with that-where do I start?"

That forced a smile out of him. "You've done remarkable things, Osman, even though I'm damned sure that I haven't been told about half of them and never will. I know how highly Margaret regards you. Are we going to have an interesting working relationship?"

He wasn't hitting on her. He was asking her, in his elegant way, whether she was going to be as much of a pain in the ass for him as Parangosky when she finally got the top job. There was little love lost between ONI and Fleet.

"We're both on the same side, sir."

"We've just approved an extension for the ONI budget so Margaret can complete her Spartan-Four program. Or yours, I should say, given the timeframe we're talking about. We still don't require the approval of the UEG to assign budgets, but now everybody thinks the war's over, there's a certain amount of hearts and minds to be done about reconstruction versus rearming."

Osman was reassured that Hood was still a realist, still mistrustful of the Sangheili even though he was willing to talk to them, and willing to buy off Parangosky. Osman realized she still had a lot to learn about the realities of admiralty empire building.

"It's about preparedness," she said. "What makes you think the Sangheili are going to be the only problem in the future? I assume you've been briefed about Venezia."

"Yes, I fear the colonies will be a far bigger part of my workload than the Sangheili or the other aliens." Hood adjusted his collar and picked some lint off his sleeve, turning to the door. That was usually his signal that he wanted to take a different tack. "In a way, I'm tackling the easy jobs first. Shall we go, then, Captain?"

Vaz was already in the shuttle when Osman stepped into the crew bay. He went to get up, but Hood motioned him to stay sitting.

"Relax, Corporal."

"Yes, sir."

"Beloi, isn't it?" Hood always checked the roster and made sure he had something personal to say to the men. Osman noted that trick. "Fifteenth Battalion."

"Yes, sir."

"How are you feeling now? Fully fit?"

"I had to give up my modeling career, sir, but other than that, I feel fine."

Hood chuckled to himself. "Glad to hear it."

Even though the shooting war had stopped, they were still taking risks entering Sangheili space. Osman felt more anxious than she had for some time, but then she realized it wasn't about the possibility of the Sangheili opening fire on them in a fit of pique but the double game she was now playing with an officer she respected and liked. It was like vandalizing a war memorial. For a moment, her mission seemed pointless and shameful.