Why make a door that big?

She took a few steps inside, rifle raised, and flicked on the tactical lamp. Her visor flared for a moment. Nothing. The cavern swallowed the light and kicked her armor's reactive coating into mottled black. She glanced down at her boots-now matte black, barely there-and realized she couldn't see a floor underneath them. It triggered a brief, primal panic. For a moment she was falling. It took a conscious effort to look up and make herself believe that she was on solid ground. She struggled to trust what she could feel rather than what she could see.

"Lucy? Hang on." It was Tom on the radio. "Lucy! Wait, will you?"

Two sets of boots thudded behind her. She hadn't realized how far into the opening she'd gone. Her helmet's head-up display showed that Chief Mendez and Tom were following her, the only two icons at close range. Tom's bio readout showed his pulse was raised. She decided to risk taking her eyes off the passage and turned around.

"What have we got, Lucy?" Tom caught up with her and put his hand on her shoulder. "You okay?"

Why did he think she wouldn't be? She waved him away. Something had come down this passage and she couldn't turn back until she'd found and identified it, and-if necessary-neutralized it. She checked her display for EM or thermal signatures ahead, but there was nothing. The ground was definitely flat and smooth like terrazzo. Now she'd started to trust her proprioception rather than her eyes, she picked up speed and started walking at a pace she thought of as cautious-normal.

"I'm going to fetch Halsey in here to evaluate this," Mendez said. Lucy kept moving. "Hold it here, Lucy. We'll secure a perimeter in case whatever it is decides to come back. You hear me, Petty Officer? Hold it here."

Lucy halted. She couldn't shake the feeling that if she didn't hunt down whatever had fled, it would come back for them all. Get it before it gets us. She stood staring into the black void, wondering what kind of material could absorb light so completely.

The trouble with staring at a featureless surface was that it soon stopped being featureless. She could now see pinprick flashes of light and brightly colored moving shapes like mingling currents of dye. It was just her optic nerve trying to make sense of the absence of light, but she couldn't stop her brain from pouncing on the phantoms and reshaping them. Suddenly it was a twisting path with a tantalizing hint of lights ahead, and movement, and people.

Then the colored lights became the afterimage of a white-hot explosion.

Lucy had been here before. Part of her knew it wasn't happening, but it couldn't stop the animal core of her reacting to it. She was in a maze of pipes, in a Covenant refinery, and she could even see the coolant leaking and bubbling on the floor ahead of her. Tom was to her right. They were the last two Spartans left alive from Beta Company and now they were going to die as well. She was twelve years old; scared, running on autopilot, trying to gulp in a breath that never reached her lungs because the pounding pulse in her throat was choking her.

Then hands grabbed her shoulders and spun her around.

She raised her fist with no idea why, no thought involved. Only the crack of a visor against her own faceplate stopped her. She could still see the coolant pipes in her peripheral vision, fading and drifting, and then they were gone.

"Come on, Luce, get a grip." Tom still had hold of her shoulders. He knocked his helmet against hers a couple more times. "It's okay."

It felt like long minutes and Lucy was certain she'd moved a few meters. But it was seconds and she was still rooted to the same spot, just facing in the opposite direction. Her bio readouts must have spiked and scared the hell out of everyone.

"It's okay. I get it too," Tom stepped back as if he was satisfied she wasn't going to lose it. "Just take it easy. Breathe. It's not real. Any of it."

There were times when Lucy wished she could answer him, but there were no words left inside her now. After seven silent years, she didn't talk and she didn't scribble notes. Her head was full of things that nobody else would understand or want to hear. At first she'd had nothing to say in the hours after she'd escaped from the sabotaged refinery with Tom, and then she'd had things she'd wanted to say that were too painful. The heavy silence settled like silt in her chest, a little more each day, and each time she tried to work up to talking it was harder to find words that conveyed the images in her head, and then even her inner voice faded away.

She couldn't imagine speaking now. She didn't know where to start. It was just as well that Tom could work out what was going on in her head.

"Hey, Lucy." She was suddenly aware of Olivia striding toward her with Mark and Ash at her heels. They'd have seen her bio signs spiking, too. "Couldn't you find the light switch?"

Ash tapped his knuckles against her armor and Olivia gave her a rough hug. When Lucy looked past her, Halsey was framed in the dim scatter of lights at the far end of the passage. For a moment she looked like she was standing in front of a decorated Christmas tree. It was a sharp little echo of buried memories, and then it was gone.

"Environmental controls," Halsey called. Her voice didn't echo. Lucy could hear her even with her helmet on. "Come here. Look."

Lucy hung back as the others headed for the entrance and stood a meter inside the passage, just in case whatever it was she'd heard decided to return.

It's got to get past me.

It won't.

Halsey was running one hand over the illuminated Forerunner symbols on the walls. After a few moments of frowning at the lights as if they were being willfully stubborn, she held out the cylinder to Kelly.

"Here, hang on to this for me." She took out her datapad and unfolded it like a piece of origami into a laptop format. That didn't appear to satisfy her and she folded it up again into a datapad. Then she carried on running her hand along the symbols. "Okay, perhaps it's not environmental. I've found a symbol for humidity. This might be controlling storage conditions, so one of these could activate lights or orientate us."

"How do you know that?" Mendez asked, all suspicion.

Halsey flipped the screen and held it toward the wall. "I just do. Let's see what my database makes of this."

"And you wouldn't dream of keeping anything else from us."

"Chief, I won't lecture you on the wisdom of stones and glass houses, so just accept that I don't know how I know yet. I'm not hiding anything."

Lucy expected a scientist like Halsey to be more disturbed about random hunches. She backed away into the passage and set her helmet to record, just in case she picked up something.

"Luce..."

Tom's voice in her helmet was a quiet warning. She gave him an I'm-okay gesture, diver-style, and carried on. He could still see her bio readout so that would keep him happy until she came back. Normal pulse and respiration. See? I'm fine. I can handle this. I'm not crazy. Just low blood sugar. Fatigue. I ought to eat something.

"Luce, wait up. I'm coming. Damn it, you know better than that."

She moved across to the wall and held her rifle one-handed, skimming her left hand across the surface to orient herself, and suddenly she felt much better. The ground beneath her boots was smooth and level. Even if she couldn't see it she had a better idea of where she was.

I have to find where this leads. Something's in here. Something's waiting for us. If we found our way in-so might the Elites.

And Lucy had a lifetime of scores to settle. She didn't think there was anything wrong with her judgment at all.

When she stopped and looked over her shoulder, the faint light from the entrance had gone. She turned back, almost giddy because there was nothing to orient her. But the squad's bio signs were all visible on her HUD, so she hadn't lost comms signals, and she wasn't alone.

"One-Zero-Four to Bravo-Zero-Nine-One." It was Fred on the radio now. "Lucy, where the hell are you?"

He should have known he wouldn't get an answer, but if she could see his bio readout, he could see hers. He'd know she was fine. If the others wanted to faff around and look for the light switch, fine, but someone had to secure this passage. She was about to flash back a status signal when she collided with something that bounced her back a couple of steps.

Damn, she'd walked into a wall. That was what came of not concentrating on the task in hand.

"What is it, Lucy?"

Her heart rate must have blipped. She transmitted status-OK, then put her hand out ahead of her to feel her way around the obstruction. When her fingers touched it, it felt exactly like the side wall she'd been using for orientation, but then it yielded and her hand went through something soft. It was almost as if she'd put her hand into a closet and found a pile of towels.

Except ... except her whole body passed through it. The wall brushed past her. It was the only way she could describe it.

As the wall engulfed her, the squad bio readouts in her HUD winked out. She tried to turn back. Too late: sudden pressure popped her ears, the ground dissolved under her, and she fell, pitching forward. Her helmet bounced away. It cracked loudly against something but she couldn't see where it had rolled.

And then the lights came on.

She couldn't yell a warning. She couldn't transmit a status report.

But she still had her rifle, and now she could see where to aim.

HANGAR DECK, UNSC PORT STANLEY: APPROXIMATELY TEN HOURS FROM NEW LLANELLI.

"History's not my subject." Vaz bent over a crate of Covenant rifles and wondered whether ONI had paid for them or looted them. The hangar deck was a warehouse of crates stacked either side of a small dropship that looked like a civilian patrol vessel, although its matte gray stealth coating said otherwise. "But I recall that things like this often end very badly."

Naomi loomed over him. "So you do speak."

That was rich coming from her. She hadn't said more than a few words since the meeting with Parangosky. Vaz had already chalked that up to Spartans believing too much of their own PR, because everybody knew that they were winning the war single-handed. It was official. The UNSC media people had decided it was great for morale to tell the civvies all about the Spartans and what a superhuman job they were doing of saving Earth.

That didn't go down well with ODSTs. Vaz suspected it didn't go down well with all the other average, unglamorous grunts who were doing their fighting and dying behind the scenes, either.

"Yes, I talk," Vaz said at last. "If I have something to say."

He couldn't read her expression at all. Even Mal hadn't tried to flirt with her, and that was a first. Naomi was just odd. Vaz had expected Spartans to be like the heroic PR image presented to the media, fearless and godlike, gazing nobly into the distance with one boot on a pile of dead hinge-heads. They weren't supposed to be awkward.

Her looks didn't set him at ease, either. It wasn't so much the sharp features as her pale, translucent skin and platinum hair. They reminded him of nightmarish folk tales his grandmother told him as a kid, where female demons who looked like ice princesses dined on the giblets of unwary children. There wasn't much happily-ever-after in Russian fairy tales.

Come on, I'm ODST. I'm a big boy now. This is insane. Stop it.

Naomi tucked a strand of hair behind her ear. "You have to know how much gas to pour on a fire," she said, not even looking at him.

It sounded a bit zen. But they were up to their elbows in a crate of identity-tagged Sangheili rifles, so he decided they were back on the topic of the wisdom of arming hinge-heads.

"How come they're short of arms?" he asked. "I don't recall that being a problem when they were blowing our heads off."

"The Covenant civil war. The Great Schism. It cost them a lot of ships and equipment. And once they drove out the Prophets, they lost their supply chain. And their command and control." Naomi was suddenly transformed into something like a regular woman. This was obviously her pet subject. Her pack-ice eyes lit up. "So most of the rank and file don't have access to serious hardware now, and they're too disorganized to use it effectively anyway."

"So are they still fighting the Brutes?"

"Some. As far as we know." She seemed to be working up a sweat, puffing a bit as she heaved crates around. Without that power-assisted Mjolnir armor she had to rely on raw muscle, just like him, but he still didn't think he'd beat her at arm wrestling. She was genetically enhanced and it showed. "That'll spread them thinner than the butter on a Navy sandwich."

As soon as she said that, as soon as she even brushed close to griping, Vaz felt her change from the terrifying Baba Yaga into one of his own. Everyone in uniform griped about everything all the time. It was one of those fundamental things that bonded ships and armies. When the griping stopped, officers worried. Vaz relaxed a little.

"That's one feud we won't need to stir up." All the weapons were invisibly tagged to make them trackable, the transponder material worked into the metal itself. Vaz examined one of the energy swords to see if he could detect it on a casual inspection. "Will the hinge-heads fall for the tracking?"

"They've lost their Prophets and Engineers so they're not so technically hot now. But even if they spot it, I doubt they'll care. They'll think they can pick us off later."

Naomi suddenly jerked her head up, frowning. Vaz strained to listen and caught the sound of two Elites chattering on the radio. It had to be a recording of voice traffic intercepted before they entered slipspace, but it still had the power to make his flesh crawl. He wasn't going to shake it that easily. Nobody who'd fought those things at close quarters ever would.

He followed the sound, squeezing between the stowed drop pods, and ended up outside a small fire-control compartment aft of the dropship. The hatch was open. When he stuck his head inside, he found Phillips with his boots up on the console, fingers meshed behind his head, and eyes shut. His datapad sat in his lap. Its screen was flickering with rapidly scrolling lines of text.

Vaz waited for him to notice someone was there. It took a full minute. Phillips just opened his eyes and didn't even look startled.

"Dialect variation," he said. "Good stuff, this ONI eavesdropping kit."

Vaz had never actually heard Elites just talking before. He'd only heard them roaring what he assumed were terms of abuse as they came at him, or gurgling out their last curses or pleas as he finished them off the hard way. It was strange to imagine them having a chat. "You understand all that?"

Phillips tapped his jaw with his index fingers. "I understand it, and I can read it, but I don't have enough jaws to speak it like a native. There's a whole tonal layer I can't reproduce."

He cocked his head at the sound. There were two distinct voices, then a third cut in. The rumbling tones didn't mean a thing to Vaz but he was suddenly aware of a lot of clicks and gulps within the words.

He still didn't know what to make of Phillips.

They'd met less than two days ago and now they had to trust each other with their lives. Phillips was about Mal's age, with reddish brown scrubby hair and a matching beard. He looked a little fitter than the average civvie in a set of unbadged UNSC fatigues. Vaz suspected he'd probably wanted a bit of adventure in his life but hadn't had the balls to enlist. He wondered how Phillips was going to shape up when an Elite took a potshot at him.

"Do you like them?" Vaz asked.

"I've had direct contact with them. They're fascinating."

Vaz had had pretty direct contact with them too, and fascinating wasn't the word that sprang to mind. "But you don't mind shafting them like this. Because that's what we're doing."

"Come on, it's not as if I'm falsifying research." Phillips made that sound like the worst possible thing a man could do. "I'd rather stay alive than die academically pure. Look, I know the Sangheili. They despise us. There's no forgive and forget, not after nearly thirty years of killing each other. The only reason they split from the Covenant and allied with us was because the Prophets were trying to exterminate them. Hardly the basis for a lasting marriage, is it?"

"We're not good at forgetting either," Vaz said. "Glad to know you haven't grown fond of them."

The conversation ended abruptly when BB appeared and hovered in the gap next to Vaz. ONI might have taken AIs for granted, but Vaz didn't, and judging by the way he jumped, neither did Phillips.

"Come along, gentlemen," BB said. "Chop-chop. Places to go, mayhem to cause." He rotated and headed for the ladder, not that he even needed to. "Final briefing at eighteen hundred. Captain on deck."

Phillips swung his feet off the console and stood up as BB vanished through the bulkhead. Port Stanley was so crammed with systems and holoprojectors that an AI could cover almost every centimeter of the ship. Vaz decided BB was just jerking a few chains for his own amusement.

"This is why I didn't do theology," Phillips whispered, as if he thought BB wouldn't hear him. "He isn't actually in any one place, is he? Omnipresent. That really messes with my mind."

It was a frank admission for a smart guy. "He's spread throughout the whole ship," Vaz said. "He's in every system. Right now, he is the ship."

"That occurred to me when I was taking a leak. It's not a happy thought."

Phillips didn't seem used to the indignities of communal living like service personnel. Vaz stifled a smile. "Don't you have AIs at the university?"

"Not like that. They're either dumb or they're terminal-restricted. And they're not that human."

"I think that's why UNSC ones have avatars, so we don't get too paranoid. I don't think the AIs actually need them."

"But he's not where his avatar is. That's what I'm struggling with."

"No." Vaz had learned the art of not fretting about unsettling things that he couldn't control. He just worked on the basis that BB, like the Corps, saw every move and heard every cough and spit he made. "Assume the worst. It makes life simpler."

He could hear Osman's boots on the gantry. As he picked his way between the crates around the dropship, Devereaux looked busy in the cockpit, head down and shoulders moving as if she was running her hands across the instrument panel. When he stepped up into the crew bay it was instantly clear that it wasn't a regular security vessel. The ONI engineers had gutted it. Now every centimeter of bulkhead was lined with surveillance equipment and screens.

Mal was stacking small crates. "Luxury, eh?" he said. "Can't remember the last time I landed on a planet without smashing into the ground."

Devereaux's voice came over the bulkhead speaker. "Can't recall the last time I did, either."

"Okay, that's it. I'm changing my airline."

Both of them roared with laughter. Devereaux squeezed through the hatch into the crew bay and gave Vaz a friendly thump in the chest with her fist. "You know we haven't got a plan, don't you?"

"We never do." Vaz checked over his shoulder to see where Phillips was. He'd vanished. "They just drop us into the sewer and we work out how to clear it."

"Have you been charming our Spartan?"

"Just talking."

"Keep at it, Vaz," Mal said, winking. "Older birds are more grateful. Did she say why she keeps giving Osman the hairy eyeball?"