She didn’t need to point that out. Al unknown territory was presumed to be potential y hostile.
Mendez came to a halt and fumbled one-handed in his pockets. “Why?”
“Why what?” Tom asked.
“Why did the Forerunners put trees and animals here? Just to make the place nicer while they sat out the holocaust, or is it some kind of zoo?”
Mendez tapped his radio and Halsey suddenly heard the crackle and hiss from the receiving end. “Lieutenant? Mendez here. We’re seeing some wildlife now. Lizards. Anything your end?”
Fred’s patrol was now on a paral el path a kilometer away. “Not yet, Chief. But we’ve got blossom on some of the trees, so I’m guessing there’l be pol inators around.”
“Insects, birds … smal mammals.”
Halsey couldn’t bear assumptions. “Or they’re self-pol inating.”
“Some of the plants look like Earth species, but so far we haven’t … seen anything confirmed as edible.” Fred sounded as if he was climbing something, pausing for breath. “Keep looking.”
They were spread out in patrol formation with Mendez on point and Kel y walking tail. Halsey was suddenly conscious of being the misfit rather than the boss here, the theoretician who’d created a generation of Spartans but had never actual y served, and al the smal soldierly things that the Spartans seemed to do automatical y—constantly scanning the branches of the trees, turning to take a few paces backward and check behind every so often—leapt out at her. She simply didn’t move that way, and not just because she was lugging a bag that seemed to get heavier by the minute and burdened with a skirt. It just wasn’t part of her unconscious fabric as it was with them.
It unsettled her. Nobody expected her to behave like a Spartan, even if she’d trained a generation of them. She wasn’t sure why that troubled her.
“Bird?” Tom said to nobody in particular, pointing. He sighted up. “I can’t tel , even with the scope.”
Halsey fol owed his gesture to see a few tiny black dots making lazy passes high above them. Something about the movement wasn’t birdlike. It reminded her of a bat’s flight, but much slower.
“If it is, it doesn’t fly like any avian species I know,” Kel y said. “We’re going to have one hel of a nature table.”
They were moving through knee-high grass now, rol ing downs dotted with stands of trees, some of which were made up of the terrestrial oaks that seemed to be everywhere. Others had bloated gray trunks and tiny, deep red, frondlike crowns that Halsey didn’t recognize at al . It stil didn’t answer the Chief’s question as to whether this was ornamental or part of a conservation project.
So how many did they expect to shelter here? The whole Forerunner population? Or just the great and the good? And for how long?
The quiet was as unfamiliar as the vegetation, layer upon layer of smal , wild sounds that merged into the white noise of a countryside that sounded utterly alien. Humans had their own template of normal ambient noise, Halsey decided, and it remained unnoticed until they didn’t hear it.
She noticed the absence of hers now; no familiar birdsong, no distant rumble of traffic, no aircraft overhead. It kept her on edge. Every sound seemed suddenly magnified. The Spartans’ armor clicked as their weapons shifted slightly with each pace. Mendez reached behind him and took something out of his belt pouch, making the material rasp against his webbing.
Then something touched Halsey’s shoulder. She yelped and spun around.
“Sorry, ma’am.” It was Olivia, one of the Spartan-I Is. She held out something between her thumb and forefinger. “This was crawling up your back.
Might be harmless, but I’m erring on the side of caution here.”
Halsey’s heart was hammering. She hadn’t even realized the girl was behind her. “For God’s sake, don’t creep up on me like that.”
She felt like a fool as soon as she said it. Olivia didn’t react. But when Halsey looked around, embarrassed, she caught Mendez giving her a long, unblinking stare. She could see what he was holding now—his one weakness, a Sweet Wil iam cigar, or at least the last few centimeters of one. He rol ed it between thumb and forefinger for a few slow moments like a rosary before stowing it in his belt pouch again.
“Let’s you and me walk awhile, Doctor,” he said, ambling back down the line toward Olivia. “Up you go, O. Take point.”
“O” must have been Olivia’s nickname. Halsey found herself the outsider again, not the matriarch. The girl lifted off her helmet one-handed to take a closer look at the creature that was squirming between her fingers, a beetlelike thing about ten centimeters long with bright orange stripes and a long tapering spike of a tail. Olivia couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. She had poreless coffee-brown skin and delicate features that made Halsey think her origins were in the Horn of Africa.
“Just a tail. Not a sting.” Olivia let the insect go and replaced her helmet. “But you never know.”
Halsey glanced around. Kel y had now fal en back a distance and Tom had moved wel to the right. Halsey realized the Spartans had instantly given her and Mendez some fight space, apparently without a single gesture or word passing between them. That was a testament to good shared situational awareness.
“Is there anything you want to say to me, Doctor?” Mendez said quietly. He took out his cigar butt again and parked it in the side of his mouth without lighting it. “Because we’ve been awful y civil so far.”
You knew. You damn well knew. “Is that your last one?” Halsey asked.
“I’ve got three left. I’m rationing myself for the good of the mission.”
“Spoken like a smoker.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t light up anywhere near you.”
“Always the gentleman.”
Mendez was a hard man to read but it was safe to assume that the less emotion he showed, which wasn’t much at the best of times, the more he was keeping his reaction battened down. He just gave her that dead-eyed look. It was probably the last thing that a lot of Covenant troops ever saw.
“Okay, ma’am, if you won’t open the batting, I wil . You are, I know, ticked off that there’s a whole batch of Spartans you didn’t bless or know about.” Mendez took the cigar out of his mouth and pocketed it again. “Now, while I’m happy to discuss al that, I’m asking you to do one thing. Treat the Spartan-Threes the way you treat the others. If you’ve got a problem with the program, Doctor, direct it at me. Not them. They’re Navy. They’ve earned respect.”
It stung in the way that polite rebukes always did, with a little extra smack in the mouth for disrespecting men and women in uniform. Am I really that rude? Yes, I suppose I am. Halsey bit back the indignation that had been fermenting since she’d first seen complete strangers on Reach daring to wear the Spartans’ Mjolnir armor.
It had al fal en into place. Parangosky putting Onyx off-limits, Mendez dropping out of sight al those years ago, Ackerson raiding her data around the same time … al she’d needed was the video logs and the information from Cortana to add the Halo Array and the Flood into the equation, and then she had a fairly reliable set of signposts. Parangosky must have had a good idea of what might be on Onyx even if she didn’t know the ful nature of the threat and couldn’t access any of it.
It was why Halsey had picked Onyx. It was about more than realizing there were Spartans there, Spartans she had to save. It was a gamble on the Forerunners’ meticulous survival precautions.
I’m lucky. But we make our own luck.
“I don’t have a problem with them, Chief, or I wouldn’t have come here to save them, would I?” she said. Maybe that sounded too messianic. She watched his eyes harden a little more. “But it’s not easy finding that someone you’ve worked with for years kept something of this magnitude from you.”
“It’s cal ed need-to-know, ma’am, and I don’t decide who needs to. I just fol ow lawful orders.” He gave her that look again, heavy-lidded, as if he was shaping up to spit on her. “But you knew more about Onyx than you’re tel ing me.”
“Just putting two and two together. Fol owing the crumbs.”
“And I’m sure you’re too professional to withhold any information from us that we need to stay alive.”
Ouch. “My only aim is to save the Spartans. I think you can count on that.”
Mendez looked away in silence and kept walking. Halsey realized she was matching his pace, struggling to keep up with him. I really wish I’d worn pants. And I wish I was fitter. We’re the same age, for goodness’ sake. She was fol owing his lead, one of those little psychological tel s. He was the dominant individual now because this was his natural environment—the concrete, the physical y dangerous—and not hers. She didn’t like that at al .
“Who told you not to mention the Spartan-Three program to me?” she asked. There was a chance it would never matter, but she had to know.
Colonel Ackerson had hacked her confidential data, but that didn’t mean that his was the only score she’d have to settle. “Ackerson? Parangosky?
Or both?”
“I was only told who I could tel . But I wouldn’t have told you anyway.” No, this wasn’t quite the Chief she was used to, the one who looked away and kept his counsel: rounding on Olivia had definitely provoked him. “You’d have spent al your time arguing that we didn’t have good enough candidates and trying to get it shelved. And I’d have told you that attitude trumps genetics every time.”
“I know that. I—”
Halsey didn’t have a personal radio, but everyone else did. Mendez turned away from her instantly and responded to a cal she couldn’t hear.
“Go ahead, sir.” It had to be Fred. “Where?”
Where. The word made Halsey spin around, left then right. It was pure instinct. But when she caught sight of Kel y, the Spartan was looking up.
“Damn, he’s right,” she said, and aimed.
Halsey could see now. There was a black dot in the picture-perfect blue sky, getting bigger by the second. Something was swooping down on them.
Tom was nearest to her. “Ma’am, down! ”
It was a fluke. If anyone had the lightning reflexes and sheer speed to reach her, it was Kel y. But Tom cannoned into Halsey and pinned her down just as a charcoal gray cylinder the size of a wine bottle whisked by so close that she felt the rush of air on her face. For a moment she couldn’t see where it had gone. She was looking up at the lower edge of Tom’s visor, wondering for a moment why she could stil breathe.
That SPI armor was light, cheap stuff. Thank God. Three hundred kilos of Mjolnir armor would have kil ed her. But Tom was kneeling over her on al fours, shielding her from whatever had decided to target them. He’d just pushed her down.
“It’s okay. It’s okay. ” That was Kel y. Halsey heard her rifle click. “I’ve got it. It’s not doing anything.”
Tom got to his feet and helped Halsey up. Kel y had her rifle trained on the cylinder, frozen at a silent hover two meters off the ground.
“Is that some kind of mini Sentinel?” Mendez asked. “Because if it is, we’ve already seen the big ones. And you know what happens when those bastards link up.”
For a moment, Halsey was total y distracted by the matte gray device and completely forgot her moment of ignominy in the grass. It wasn’t a defensive machine like the deadly Sentinels they’d encountered on the surface. It gave the impression that it was waiting for something, although it had dived on them like a fighter. Halsey edged closer despite Kel y waving her away, and looked at the underside. A cluster of lights—no, il uminated symbols she couldn’t read—was visible, two blue and one a greenish white. The blue ones were blinking.
It could have been counting down to detonate, of course. The Forerunners would have gone to a lot of trouble to ensure no unwanted life-forms contaminated this sanctuary. Halsey stil had no evidence that the sphere’s apparent tolerance of human intrusion was anything more than luck.
“No tel ing what’l happen if I shoot it,” Kel y said. “And size doesn’t mean something isn’t lethal. Right, O?”
Olivia suddenly appeared from nowhere. Halsey real y never heard her coming. Maybe old age was creeping on.
“Shal we—wel , catch it?” Olivia asked. “We’re supposed to be acquiring technology here.”
Kel y reached out, slow and cautious for once. She was a finger-length from the cylinder when it shot up in a perfect vertical and vanished before she could target it.
“Damn, I’ve final y been outrun,” she said. “Oh, the shame of it.”
Mendez watched from a distance, lips moving. He was talking to Fred’s squad on the radio. Halsey’s stomach growled, reminding her of the top priority.
“It’l be back,” she said. “And I’d like to take it alive.” She turned to Tom, who’d taken off his helmet and was scratching his scalp. He was just as luminously young as the other Spartan-IIIs, with dark hair and a bruise on his chin that was already turning yel ow at the margins. “Is that from when Kurt knocked you out?”
“Yes.” Tom stared at a point between his boots and blinked a few times. “I’d never have left him to hold off the Elites on his own.”
“It’s okay, I know you wouldn’t.” Halsey wasn’t sure if she was trying harder because Mendez had snarled at her or if she real y did feel a pang of regret. “Saving someone is a reflex. Nobody who’s wired that way thinks about it. Do they?”
Tom just shrugged. “No point taking chances, ma’am. You’re the only one here who can read a Forerunner menu, aren’t you?”
