"No. I didn't ask."

"Trust me, there's definitely something going on there."

Vaz put his finger to his lips. They really weren't used to having fully sentient AIs around. Then it occurred to him that he was standing in a snake's wedding of cables and surveillance feeds accessible to BB, so even a shut-it gesture wasn't private.

Devereaux gave Vaz a very discreet wink. She nudged Mal with her elbow to get him moving kit again. "Come on, Mal. Put your back into it." She stuck her head out of the crew bay. "Phillips? You too. Come and shift this."

Vaz didn't have to wait long for proof that BB saw all and heard all. Osman appeared at the bay door with Phillips at her heels. He looked as if she'd smacked him for being a bad boy.

"How's it going?" she asked.

Mal straightened up. "Fine, ma'am. What's the plan?"

"I do have one."

Mal didn't even blink. "Ah. Permission to feel reassured."

"Granted. The Sangheili effectively have no top-level command and control left so the best we can do is hand them the weapons and see where the fault lines form." She didn't seem irritated, whatever BB had relayed to her. If anything, she seemed a little apologetic. "We're at the mercy of very patchy short-range comms, so there'll be a lot of surveillance to carry out."

"We can do patient too, ma'am," Mal said. Naomi appeared in the door and stood with one boot on the step, half-turned toward them. "We don't just jump out of orbit and shoot bad guys."

"Don't worry, Staff, you'll see some action." Osman paused a beat as if she was working up to something, then glanced at Naomi. "And you might as well know this now," she said, carefully matter-of-fact. "I was in the Spartan-Two program until I was fourteen. Naomi and I knew one another. But I'm not a Spartan now. Everybody okay with that? We're going to be living in each other's pockets for quite some time, so I don't want there to be any more secrets than are operationally necessary."

That was an unnatural thing for an ONI officer to say. Secrets were meat and drink to them. But it wasn't half as unnatural as the word fourteen. Osman just stood there as if she was inviting comments. Vaz assumed it was calculated, because ONI officers were never lost for words and patted down every syllable for incriminating evidence before it was allowed to leave their mouths.

Mal filled the gap. "You said fourteen, ma'am. Eighteen's the minimum age for enlistment."

"Correct. We started the program aged six." Osman gave Naomi a slow look and turned back to Vaz. "They couldn't complete the full augmentations until we were fourteen."

Mal went quiet, probably doing the same calculations and gap-filling that Vaz was right then. But Phillips just dived in, unafraid of the braid as only a civvie could be.

"This was a military academy, I assume," he said.

"Not exactly." Osman seemed to be on a gutspill. Vaz couldn't imagine any ONI officer doing that without a calculated reason. "Boot camp. Live rounds."

She looked as if she was going to say more but stopped dead. Vaz caught Naomi looking at Osman. Her thin-lipped expression said one thing: traitor. Vaz didn't know why the captain had decided to share it with them, and he definitely didn't know why it had pissed off Naomi so much, but Spartans obviously disapproved of talking outside the tent. Naomi just stood there, grim and silent.

Osman scratched the nape of her neck as if her neural interface was bothering her, then glanced at her watch. "Well, that's obviously broken more ice than I expected. Okay, BB, prepare to drop out in two hours and carry out a full comms sweep of the sector."

She jumped down from the crew bay and walked away. Naomi peeled off in the opposite direction. Nobody spoke until the click of Osman's boots changed to a metallic clang as she climbed the ladder to the upper gantry.

"Wonder why they didn't share that little gem with us," Mal said. "And why she did."

Phillips looked from face to face as if the ODSTs knew more than he did. He really didn't understand the military yet. "Was she serious? That means they started the Spartan program before the Covenant war."

"Correct," said a disembodied voice. BB took a couple of seconds to appear, and Vaz noted that nobody flinched this time. "It's a long and complex story. A rather messy one."

"Thanks for not engaging our interest, BB," Devereaux said, sliding back through the cockpit hatch. "We're not remotely curious. Really."

Mal wasn't amused at all, though. Vaz saw his jaw muscles working. "BB, are you going to trot off to her with every bloody thing we say?"

"You were concerned about the obvious tension," BB said calmly. "I thought it was worth getting the captain to address it, seeing as we're living en famille, so to speak."

There was no answer to that. BB turned to Vaz. For a cube that wasn't really there and didn't actually need to turn to look at anything, his ability to convey which way he was looking fascinated Vaz. He seemed to have a faint dappling of light on one face of his cube.

"And you're right, Vasily," BB said. "An avatar is for the benefit of humans. Not for the AI. Well, in my case, anyway. Some of my kind have issues about identity."

The question escaped before Vaz even thought about it. "So why not look human?"

"That," BB said, drifting away through the door, "would just be too needy."

BRUNEL SYSTEM: TWO HOURS LATER.

Mal savored the novelty of being on the bridge when Port Stanley dropped out of slipspace.

It was better than the movies. He'd never take a moment for granted. At this stage of a mission, he was usually already sealed into his drop pod in the launch bay of a frigate, blinded by the instrument panel and too preoccupied with final checks to think about the physics. Now he was sitting in front of a full-height viewscreen-the real deal, not some projection from an exterior cam-and about to watch creation return to existence.

BB sat on the chart table like a ghostly box of donuts. "Five ... four..."

Osman just grunted. Mal watched her press back into her seat's headrest as if she was steeling herself not to throw up. Beyond the viewscreen was absolute, unbroken nothing. Mal let the slight giddiness of reentry roll over him.

"Three ... two ... and we're back."

And then there was light.

Stars, rank upon rank of stars, red and yellow and blue-white, were somehow not there one second and there the next. Even the black of space was a different black. He fought down an urge to grin like a kid. After more than five centuries of space exploration, there was still only a relative handful of people who got the chance to do this on a regular basis. He turned to look at Vaz and Devereaux; no reaction. How could they be that jaded? Naomi and Phillips weren't in his eyeline.

"So how did we do, BB?" Osman got to her feet and moved to the chart table. She couldn't predict exactly where and when the ship would drop back into realspace, even with the combined processing power of BB and the corvette's own dumb navigation AI. "How far off target?"

"Oh ye of little faith," said BB. "Current position is approximately one hundred and forty-nine million kilometers from Brunel, so we're about five hours from New Llanelli, and well within our time window. That's not too shabby. Making OPSNORMAL and starting comms scan now." It couldn't have taken him more than a second. The speed those things worked at was frightening. "Messages waiting-sitrep for you from the Admiral, Captain. She's also passing on personal messages from Ten-ODST Five-Five Flight and Fifteen-ODST Lima Company. Awww. Bless."

Cocky little bugger. But as soon as the thought formed, Mal realized that he'd accepted BB as an oppo, a brother in arms-body or no body. And good old Parangosky. How about that? Any admiral who understood that ODSTs worried about their mates disappearing was okay in his book.

"Any update on John, BB?" Naomi asked quietly.

BB paused for a second, which must have been a long time for an AI. "We haven't given up, but it's not looking hopeful." He sounded genuinely sorry. "The Master Chief's gone."

Naomi just blinked a couple of times. "And Dr. Halsey?"

"She died on Reach," Osman said flatly. "They're still recovering bodies."

Mal felt for Naomi. Spartans had mates just like everybody else. He had no idea who Halsey was, but everyone knew about the Master Chief.

"Okay, Prof, this is where you earn your keep," Osman said, changing mood. She gestured Phillips to the communications console and Naomi moved in beside him. "You're our ears."

Phillips seemed to be an old hand at this kind of thing. He took a molded earpiece from his top pocket and pressed it into his ear canal two-handed like a woman putting on a fiddly earring, then sat back in the seat, staring in defocus at the display in front of him while he listened for Elite comms frequencies.

Devereaux went over to the chart table. "Give me another look at New Llanelli, BB."

Twenty centimeters above the surface of the table, an image of the colony world rotated as a sphere and then peeled itself like an orange, flipping out into a grid of colored lines to show the planet's topography. Mal and Vaz had nothing better to do right then than to take a look and work out the least likely place to get ambushed.

"Is New Llanelli the colony itself or the whole planet?" Vaz asked.

Osman stood over Phillips, watching something on the screen in front of him. "Was both. There were only three townships there anyway. BB, found any contacts out there?"

"I've got a live connection to Kilo-Three-Nine," BB said. "No response, but he's receiving. I'll loop it until he picks it up."

"Where is he, ma'am?" Mal leaned on the chart table, bracing for an ONI need-to-know rap across the knuckles. "If you're allowed to say."

Osman didn't turn a hair. "There's a listening station on Reynes. He's been camped out in the glasslands running a string of Jackal informers. He knows Sangheili dialects even better than Dr. Phillips. But he's not ONI, and he thinks this is all part of brokering peace with the hinge-heads so that Hood can waltz in and shake hands with the Arbiter."

Phillips took the news that he was the understudy pretty well. He didn't even flinch. "Hope I get to debrief him one day."

"He'd talk your ears off. He's not had much human conversation for some years."

Mal was aware that agents had been working undercover for years in Covenant space, but it suddenly struck him as a lonely and miserable job. He'd never given it much thought before. When he was plummeting through a planet's atmosphere in a drop pod smaller than a car, trailing flame and heading for an uncertain landing behind enemy lines, he could only think of himself and his mates. Sometimes he didn't even have the time to think at all. The pod would crash into the ground-upright if things went to plan, flat on its side if they didn't-and the front hatch would burst open, coughing him out into a hail of fire. The job was clear-cut and immediate. All he had to do was kill everything in front of him before it could kill him. Even the slower tasks like training militias or doing long, patient recons had finite objectives most of the time. But to live in hiding on your own for years at a time, just listening and always in danger of being betrayed by informers ... no, he really didn't fancy that at all. He preferred to hunt his enemy down, look him right in his dog-ugly face, and then slot the bastard.

"Captain, I've got Kilo-Three-Nine," BB said. "Do you want him on the speaker?"

"Let's hear him," Osman said. "Hey, Spenser. How are you doing?"

"Good to hear you, Oz." Spenser sounded like a grumpy uncle who smoked fifty a day. "You came all this way to check on me?"

"What have you got?"

"It's going to rats out here. You want me to cut to the chase? I'll upload all the comms codes and detail to your AI, but the headline is headless chicken mode. Most of their C-Two's gone. They were reliant on the Prophets for the big command picture. Plus there's a real split in the ranks about the Arbiter allying with us. One interesting development for you-a religious sect just killed a couple of keep elders for blasphemy."

Osman's voice didn't change at all. "What did they do?"

"According to the chatter, these old hinge-heads wrecked a Forerunner relic and ended up disemboweled by the Abiding Truth. I sent Big Maggie a file on them a while ago. Anyway, the mad monks hit the keep with an air strike. They're cannoned up."

This was what the mission was all about: to get the hinge-heads to focus on killing each other. Mal searched for a hint of satisfaction on Osman's face, but she just looked totally unmoved.

"You're still on Reynes, then," she said.

"It's kind of nice this time of year. I have a Grunt who comes in once a week to clean."

"I'm going to pull you out, Spenser. We'll take over local surveillance now. It's getting too dangerous."

"It's been pretty damn dangerous for the last two years."

"You said it yourself. It's falling apart. Can you exfil to an RV point on your own?"

"I haven't had orders to pull out."

"You have now. We'll extract you after we've done a recon. Stay in touch with BB and keep your head down."

"Okay, Oz. Hang on to your entrails. Three-Nine out."

Mal found himself staring at the bulkhead, wondering what it was like to live alone on a dead colony world. Spenser obviously knew Osman well enough to call her by a nickname. It was hard to think of her as Oz. But it was even harder to think of Margaret Parangosky as Big Maggie.

"How long has he been there, ma'am?" Vaz asked.

"Two years, this time around." Osman moved along the bank of monitors and readouts, eyes darting from screen to screen. Port Stanley's bridge looked more like a TV studio crossed with a reactor control room than a warship. "I don't want him restabilizing what we destabilize. BB, patch me in to 'Telcam and let's get this done."

Nobody asked for confirmation that Hood was out of the loop on this, but Mal could work that out for himself. It was one of those gray areas that he hated. But Osman's the boss now. What goes on above her is between Parangosky and Hood. He turned his head very casually, just to get Vaz's reaction without BB noticing, and Vaz held his gaze for an extra second that said it all.

Ours is not to reason why. Right, Vaz.

They waited. Only the faint sigh and hum of the ship's systems broke the silence for a long five minutes, and then there was a burst of static.

"It's the Bishop for you, Captain," BB said. "I've taken the liberty of piggybacking on his comms just to check who else he's talking to. I'll route that audio separately to Dr. Phillips." Phillips jerked in his seat as if BB had plugged him straight into the main power supply. "Oops, volume problem there ... sorry."

Osman wandered over to the viewscreen and stared out as she tapped her earpiece, then turned back to the surveillance screens. "'Telcam, this is Captain Osman. Are you ready to take delivery of the consignment?"

"Your arrival is timely, Shipmaster." Mal hadn't expected the thing to speak such good English. "More of the faithful turn to us every day, and they need arming."

"So we rendezvous on New Llanelli." Osman gestured to Naomi and pointed to the radar screens. Mal could see several small returns on one of them. "How soon can you get there?"

"By your time-five hours, maybe six. Where are you? I detect no ships."

Osman gave Naomi a thumbs-up. "I'm hiding, 'Telcam. Most of the Jiralhanae aren't on your side and they aren't on ours either. Very well, same coordinates as last time. Six hours from now."

The comms line went dead. Naomi stood in front of the radar screen with her arms folded.

"He's got three ships," she said. "What are they, BB?"

"One boarding craft and two old Tarasque fighters. He's been rummaging through the scrapyards."

Phillips swiveled his seat to face Osman. "Anyone want a quick summary of the comms chatter? They don't trust us and they can't work out why they can't locate us or the source of the signal. They just don't have access to the technology they've been used to, and it's thrown them."

"That's what I like to hear," Osman said. "Blind, deaf, and needy."

"And one of the pilots wants permission to attack us on the surface once we do the handover. Someone told him to shut up and remember that they need us to keep bringing the goods until the sect's strong enough to seize the Arbiter's fleet."

"Yes, but remember we can't touch them, either," Osman said. "We need to find some willing Jiralhanae. Nothing like a few angry Brutes to keep things interesting for them."

"So much for all that Elite warrior honor," Devereaux said. "They're just as bad as us."

"Then we need to dirty up our game." Osman looked like she was starting to enjoy herself. Mal couldn't work out if that was good or bad. "I'd hate to see ONI lose the title of Most Devious Bastards in the Galaxy to a bunch of hinge-heads."

"Go, Team Devious," Phillips muttered, one hand to his earpiece. "No moral depth left unplumbed."

Mal had always tried to avoid contact with ONI. Any sane fighting man did. They were organized crime in uniform. A visit from them was everyone's worst nightmare. And now he was happy to do their dodgy bidding, pumped up for a fight on their behalf, all in the space of a few days.

Am I a bad bloke?

He didn't feel any better or worse than anyone else. But he looked around the bridge, and he didn't see a weird Spartan, one of ONI's most senior spooks, a creepy AI with way too much mouth, and a bloke with a Ph.D. in hinge-heads.