The doors opened and cut short any more bragging about the Covenant dropship. That was the problem with most of the meeting rooms and offices in Bravo-6. They were soundproofed, and nobody could hear anyone coming until it was too late. The tallest, scariest woman Mal had ever seen stalked into the room.

Even without Mjolnir armor, it was obvious what she was. Mal had never seen a Spartan in the flesh before. She looked more unreal in her UNSCN uniform than she would have in armor, he decided. He cast an eye over her sleeve.

"Morning, Petty Officer." He outranked her but he still had to tilt his head back to look her in the eye. Christ, she had to be over two meters tall, easy. "Good to see the Navy's managed to drag itself out of its bunk before lunch."

Mal expected to get a bit of abusive but friendly banter back from her. That was the way of interservice diplomacy, the custom of centuries. But the Spartan just looked down at him, unmoved. He couldn't work out if she was very blond or completely gray.

"Naomi-Zero-One-Zero, Staff," she said. "I believe we're waiting for Admiral Parangosky."

"That's the idea." Mal couldn't read her at all. She's a bloody Valkyrie. She really is. "Yeah, we are."

Mal edged away to the tote boards and feigned intense interest in the list of unit acronyms scribbled beside actions on the incident timeline. Vaz and Devereaux sidled up to him. The three of them had already closed ranks without even thinking about it.

"Here we go," Mal murmured. "They're going to inject us full of crap and put bolts through our necks. Frankentroopers."

"Ah, that's just stories," Devereaux said. She didn't sound convinced, though. "But if it's not, I'm sure as hell not volunteering."

Naomi the Valkyrie interrupted. "Officer on deck."

Mal turned and snapped to attention, the reflex of fifteen years, slipping instantly behind the facade of the stony-faced, unreadable ODST. He decided his guess about a psych test was right.

So this was Parangosky.

Admirals never retired, technically speaking, but Mal was sure nobody really expected the old salts to front up and earn it for real once they were past seventy. Parangosky walked in slowly with a cane for support, somehow managing to be both frail and terrifying at the same time, the crazy old woman who scared all the kids in the neighborhood. But she obviously wasn't crazy. Mal met her eyes for a disturbing second and fully believed the rumors that she could erase anyone stupid enough to cross her.

"Stand easy," she said. "My apologies for the location, but Strength through Paranoia is my motto. Meet Captain Osman and Professor Phillips. They already know all about you. Take a seat."

Phillips was a bearded bloke in his thirties who had civvie hired help written all over him. Osman was tall, not Spartan tall, but conspicuous just the same. Parangosky settled down at the far corner of the tables and gestured to them to sit. The old girl handed six datapads to Osman, who passed them around. Mal didn't get a chance to look to Vaz for a reaction before his screen flashed into life and told him the captain was Serin Osman, ONI, and Phillips was a Sangheili expert from Wheatley University.

Debrief, then. About what? The bloody Spirit? What was so special about that?

"I'll get to the point," Parangosky said. "You're under no obligation to undertake this mission."

That sealed the deal for Mal. ODSTs didn't turn down tasking, any tasking. They'd automatically volunteered for everything and anything, now and forever, world-without-end-amen, on the day they'd turned up for the selection board. Being RTU'd-Returned to Unit, sent back to their original regiment or ship or squadron in whatever country because they didn't make the grade as a Helljumper-was the worst thing that could happen to them. Death was a minor embarrassment by comparison.

Parangosky fixed Vaz with a watery but intimidating gaze. "Corporal, when's the best time to kick a man?"

"When he's down, ma'am," Vaz said quietly. "And preferably in the nuts. Hard as you can."

Mal could have sworn that Parangosky smiled. It was more like a twitch of the lips, but he was pretty sure Vaz had hit the target.

"A man after my own heart," she said. "Very well, I'm asking you all to go and kick the Sangheili in their collective nuts in ways that might seem foreign to you. I want you to sow discontent and strife. They're already infighting and I want to keep that going until we're ready to finish the job. Anyone not keen on that? There's no shame in refusing. I've seen your service records and you've all more than earned the right to say no."

Yeah, Mal was pretty sure she knew every last thing about them, right down to how many sugars they took in their coffee. So she had to know the answer she'd get. It was still a decent gesture, though. Nobody said a word. Osman seemed to be keeping an eye on the Spartan, and the Spartan kept giving her a furtive glance as if something was bothering her. They were both roughly the same age, so maybe there was some weird alpha female power struggle going on. Mal made mental note to stay well clear.

"I'm up for it, ma'am," Devereaux said. "But how foreign is this going to get? Because we're fine with assassination and sabotage."

"I know. I'm talking about arming Sangheili dissidents. Misinformation. All deniable." Parangosky squinted at her datapad for a moment. "You're going to have to think on your feet. Intel's very patchy now and we're not sure exactly where the fault lines are forming between the various factions, so you'll be gathering information as you go. I wish I could prepare you more thoroughly."

Mal knew that ONI were a law unto themselves, and the one question he'd learned never to ask was why. It was always how and when. He certainly didn't plan to ask if every member of the UNSC security committee was on board with Parangosky's op.

Devereaux didn't seem to worry about all that. "We'll manage, ma'am. So no peace treaty, then?"

"Admiral Hood believes it's possible to reach a formal deal with the Arbiter," Parangosky said. "But he's going to be busy dealing with the colonies now that we need to bring our wayward sheep back into the fold."

Mal thought she'd avoided the question until the answer sank in. Oh God. She's even sidelining Hood now. Never mind. That's so far above my pay grade that I'd need a telescope to see it. Had he been given a lawful order? Well, he hadn't been given an unlawful one yet.

Phillips was still sitting there with the expression of a rabbit about to be hit by a truck that it just hadn't seen coming. He hadn't said a word yet. Vaz glanced at him.

"So what's the professor's status, ma'am?" Vaz asked. "We're looking after him, yes?"

"No, he'll be armed and he'll take his chances, just like you." Parangosky hovered on the edge of looking concerned. "You'll have to forget the chain of command and make your own decisions out there. Our comms are a shambles, we've got relays down, our people out there are struggling to get word to us, and the colonies-well, where they've gone silent, we don't know whether they're a smoking heap of charcoal or if they've just decided to sever links with us."

Mal wanted to ask why she'd picked them. He could understand the professor, the spook, and the Spartan, but there were still plenty of ODSTs around, and any of them could have done the job. It obviously wasn't a lottery or else Vaz wouldn't have been here too.

He'd find out sooner or later. It didn't make any difference anyway. He was going.

"We're shipping out in the morning," Osman said. "If you want to do any drinking tonight, do it within the complex. Your personal effects are being brought over from the barracks. We'll transfer to the ship at Midpoint-it's Port Stanley. She's got the latest Forerunner enhancements to her drives, so we can cover a lot of space fast. A corvette's a big vessel for six, but we'll have an AI to handle her."

Parangosky laid her pad down like a winning hand of cards. "Come on, BB. Don't be coy. Introduce yourself."

Mal had never worked with smart AIs. A ship would drop him and his mates, and if they were lucky it would show up again and extract them when the job was done, but he didn't get to play with any of the technology that ONI took for granted. He waited for the hologram to appear. When a blue cube materialized in the center of the tables, it was a bit of an anticlimax. He'd expected something a little more exotic. He'd heard all the hairy stories about the weird forms that AI avatars took.

"That'd be me," the blue cube said in a news anchor's tenor voice. "The taxi driver. Black-Box. Airport runs my specialty."

Mal leaned back in his seat and caught Vaz's eye for a second. He looked carefully blank, like he always did.

We don't do psyop. We've never worked with Spartans before. And we're definitely not trained for this spook stuff. But how hard can it be?

They were ODSTs. They could do anything. It was all about the right attitude-a commando's state of mind.

"Hi, BB," Mal said. "Take us to Hinge-head World, then."

CHAPTER.

THREE.

IT'S BEEN ANNOUNCED TODAY THAT ADMIRAL LORD HOOD, CHIEF OF NAVAL OPERATIONS, IS TO HEAD A DIPLOMATIC MISSION TO THE SURVIVING EARTH COLONIES TO DISCUSS RECONSTRUCTION. UEG SOURCES SAY THAT SOME COLONIES HAVE REBUFFED THE OFFER AND WON'T NEGOTIATE WITH THE ADMINISTRATION THEY FEEL ABANDONED THEM. IN OTHER NEWS, UEG PRESIDENT CHARET HAS UNVEILED HER NEW CABINET. AMONG THE CASUALTIES IS COLONIES MINISTER DAVID AGNOLI, WHO'S BEEN REPLACED BY AKEYO ODUYA.

(WAYPOINT NINE NEWS UPDATE, JANUARY 2553).

FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE, ONYX: FOUR HOURS INTO RECONNAISSANCE PATROL.

Mendez did the calculations in his head again as he waded through long grass that left burrs on his pants. Three thousand times three, divided by five hundred, equaled eighteen. They could eke out their emergency rations for eighteen days if they scraped by on a rock-bottom five hundred calories a day.

Eighteen days eating that crap. It's going to seem like a hell of a lot longer. How bad can lizard be? I ate a lot worse in escape-and-evasion training.

As far as he knew, Halsey didn't carry an escape belt, which meant she didn't have a survival pack that included three bars of the most foul-tasting but nutritionally dense substance known to man. Anyone who'd had to survive on special forces emergency bars found regular MREs to be a damn five-star restaurant experience by comparison. It was just as well the escape belt included an animal snare plus a hook and line. Mendez was up for cooking anything that moved.

But he and the Spartans would have to pool their supplies to feed Halsey if push came to shove. He wasn't sure if he resented that or not.

Okay, stay hydrated, and hope the Forerunners thought of everything.

The two structures looked more like old-fashioned cooling towers the closer he got to them. Their walls seemed to be either tiled or decorated with ashlars. It was hard to tell with Forerunner structures because they had a habit of shifting and changing moment to moment, but he could definitely see a grid of indented lines at regular intervals. The grass gave way to scattered trees. Mendez kept a wary eye above him, expecting more flying cylinders to buzz them.

Tom caught up with him as if he was going to ask a question but he didn't say anything. They walked side by side in silence for a while, picking their way through the trees, dividing their attention between scanning for possible threats in the branches and checking the ground beneath for anything edible. Mendez couldn't see Tom's expression. He knew him well enough by now to pick up on his mood, though.

"You okay, son?" Mendez asked.

"Yes, Chief."

"You know you did all you could."

"Yeah. It's just the first time someone's sacrificed their life for me. Deliberately, I mean."

Mendez knew that was hard and that it would only get harder until Tom made peace with himself about it. But it was way too soon. Kurt, William, Dante, and Holly weren't cold in their graves yet, and everyone-himself included-was still at that stage where the deaths hadn't become an integral part of the new reality. Mendez found himself thinking and acting as if nothing much had happened, and then suddenly remembering who he'd lost. He hadn't forgotten about it; it was just that grief was set aside out of habit because that was the only way to cope, and every so often it would come crashing back on him, triggered by a dumb thought like needing to tell Kurt something and then remembering that he was dead.

They didn't have a war to fight any longer. Terrible as it was, combat could be a blessing. It didn't give you time to think until much later. Now they all had plenty of quiet time on their hands to brood about the people they'd lost.

"We don't know he's dead," Tom said. "Only that he didn't make it into the sphere."

Mendez just looked at him. He didn't believe in humoring anyone. It didn't spare them the reality that would eventually hit them all the harder.

"Even a Spartan can't hold off a Covenant army," he said. And even Spartans lose one buddy too many and start to crack. He thought of Lucy. "No matter how much gung-ho BS we spin the public."

Tom did a quick reluctant nod that seemed almost apologetic, as if he was embarrassed to be caught clutching at straws. Mendez turned slowly and took a few paces backward to check behind, but he was more interested in keeping an eye on Halsey. You wouldn't stop at anything, would you, Doc? Kelly ambled along beside her, looking more like close protection. She didn't seem remotely troubled by the fact that Halsey had abducted her for this jaunt.

Not for the first time, either. Goddamn. The things we treat as normal. The things we accept. I used to be a regular guy, and now look at the crap I get up to.

Halsey glanced at him for a second, all suspicion. Yeah, so Ackerson took her research and Mendez had cooperated with him. So what? She'd already given up on the Spartan program because she didn't think her next tranche of candidates was good enough. What did she think this was, some private hobby, that all those lives lost and all that pain could just be flushed because it didn't meet her personal standards? If she'd called it a day because her conscience had kicked in, that would have been different. But it hadn't. And Ackerson, unlovable dick or not, at least made sure that lives spent on the program hadn't been wasted.

Wonder where he is now?

Listen to yourself, Mendez. Denial. You're still in goddamn denial. The UNSC used child soldiers. Under-tens. Tin-pot dictators who did that ended up charged with war crimes. What does that make you?

Mendez forced himself to concentrate on the crisis right in front of him. Being cooped up with Halsey and the fruits of their guilty labor was only going to get harder. He brought the patrol to a halt fifty meters from the towers to assess the entrance and the safest way to approach, looking up at the concave walls for anything that resembled doors. He couldn't see any, but that didn't necessarily mean there was no entrance.

He opened the radio attached to his collar. "Lieutenant? We've reached the foot of the tower. We don't see you."

"We took a detour, Chief." Fred sounded upbeat. "Got something to show you. We're heading for your position."

The trees and grass ended fifteen meters from the tower. A paved perimeter surrounded the whole structure, like a service road made of completely regular flagstones. Mendez walked a few meters along the wall, peering at the pale gold stone blocks in the hope of seeing a hairline split that would indicate an opening. He didn't plan to touch it until the other squad caught up with him, just in case he triggered an unknown mechanism that swallowed them up in another protective sphere. Halsey wandered along behind him. She didn't touch the wall either.

"If this place is a survival bunker, then there has to be more here than supplies and accommodation for sitting this out," Mendez said. "There'll be whatever the Forerunners needed to start rebuilding after it was safe to come out. Weapons. Comms. And transport. How did they get ships in here?"

Kelly took off her helmet to scratch her scalp. "Let's hope they were as smart about expiration dates as they were with dimensional physics."

"But how would they know when it was safe outside?" Olivia asked. "Okay, they'd have a good idea in theory of how long the Halos would take to wipe out the Flood, but if all that was left of their entire civilization was holed up here, they'd want to make absolutely sure."

"Now there's a good question." Halsey rummaged in her bag and took out a water bottle. Mendez wondered if she'd hidden another sidearm in there. He wasn't planning to give her weapon back to her until he was sure she wasn't going to pull another stunt like the hijack. "This might not have been their only bunker, of course. It's a big galaxy. But they'd still want to be able to check outside before they opened the door. Perhaps even communicate with other shield worlds."

"But who put the Katana and the other guys in the cryo pods?" Mendez asked. He wondered why he hadn't worried about that detail sooner. "Doesn't that bother anyone?"

"Perhaps we should be asking why they decided to get into them instead," Halsey said.

"Sounds like an assumption, Doctor."

Mendez knew she hated that. She took a pull from the bottle and put it back in her bag, ignoring the bait. He stared hard at the leather, looking for an outline of a weapon, but the bulges just looked like women's stuff and square-edged books or datapads.

"So let's see what we find, Chief," she said carefully.

Mendez checked his watch, wondering just how much out of sync with real time the Dyson sphere would be. Halsey gave the impression of being able to work out that kind of stuff on a napkin. He hoped she could. Could any of them really know if time was suspended in here, like it seemed to be in those cryo pods? What did that feel like?

The crunch of boots on gravel and then on paving heralded Fred's arrival with Lucy, Linda, Mark, and Ash. Fred had something in his hand. Mendez's reflex reaction was to wonder what the hell he was doing with tennis balls, but then he realized Fred was clutching three spherical yellow fruits one-handed. He held them out to Mendez.

"We ought to run tests on these first," Fred said. "I've logged the location. Anyone got an assay pack?"

Mendez sniffed one of the fruits cautiously, picking up a faint smell of cedar wood. Its texture was like sticky suede, almost quince-like, but it wasn't a quince. He hadn't had to do this bushcraft stuff for years.

"Over to you, Doctor." He handed the fruits to Halsey, who put them in her bag. "I've got some test strips for cyanogenic glycosides and alkaloids somewhere in my kit."

"I'll take a look at them later," Halsey said. "Let's find a way to get into this tower."

Fred motioned for everyone to move. "Okay, people, spread out and take a section of wall each. This tower first, then we'll try the other one. If anything opens, nobody steps in. Just call it. I don't want anyone stuck on the wrong side of a door we can't open."

The scale and lateral curve of the tower only sank in when Mendez began inching his way along his section of ashlars. He realized that he couldn't see Mark to one side of him or Linda to the other unless he took a few paces back from the wall. He ran his hands over the stone, not sure what he was feeling for but expecting some kind of mechanism to detect him and either open a hatch or at least display some controls. All the Forerunner technology he'd encountered so far did that kind of thing. But the wall remained steadfastly unresponsive.

"If you build a bomb shelter, you make it easy to find and get inside." Halsey walked past him. She wasn't searching the wall but pacing slowly along the paved perimeter with her eyes on the flagstones. "Imagine it. Things have gone badly wrong, the Flood is overrunning the galaxy, and all the Forerunners in the sector pile in here as fast as they can. No matter how advanced they were, they'd have needed to orientate themselves."

"Then why not put the signs near the front door?" Mendez asked. "What if they never finished this place? Because they're not around anymore, are they?"

Halsey said nothing but walked on, head down, the soles of her black loafers tapping on the flagstones. It was too easy to see the Forerunners as not simply advanced but godlike, just like the Covenant did. But Mendez knew all too well that brilliant technology didn't guarantee infallibility. Even humans hadn't always thought of their own gods as being perfect, honest, or even competent.

"Ah well..." He promised himself a few comforting drags on his cigar in two hours. The gold wall felt oddly warm and smooth under his fingers, like living skin. "Maybe we need to go back and check the portal area."

Click ... click ... click.

"Jackpot," Halsey called. "Look."

Mendez turned and jogged after her. All the Spartans converged on the same spot. Halsey was standing with her weight on one foot, the other held a little off the ground as if she'd been frozen in the middle of playing a kids' game of hopscotch. She'd looped the strap of her bag around both shoulders like a satchel, adding to the impression of a middle-aged schoolgirl.