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  Montero Cave System

  Campos Wilderness District, Planet Gao, Cordoba System

  After bagging and caching Major Halal’s and Private Hayes’s bodies for retrieval later, Fred and his five companions began to follow the trail Cirilo had discovered with his fluorescing spray. The trek turned into a sweltering, twelve-hour ordeal, with blind descents down three vertical pits, the final one more than two hundred meters deep. Still, the quarry was sticking to fairly spacious passages and leaving no trace other than the occasional drop of fluid. That suggested it was flying fast, and with each passing hour, Fred grew more hopeful that the thing was his target: a Forerunner ancilla fleeing back to its base.

  As they traveled, Fred was careful to map the route and capture vidshots at each intersection. Even if he was right about what they were chasing and where it was going, it seemed unlikely that he and his companions would find their quarry now. That would probably require returning with a whole team of XEG scientists, most of who had spent the last several weeks developing ways to corner the ancilla in one of its devices, then transfer it into a UNSC data crystal.

  Still, the first step was locating the thing’s home base, which was the Spartans’ job. And if Fred just happened to get lucky and catch the ancilla in a vulnerable position, he had a few tricks tucked up his armored sleeve. The inventors back at the ONI weapons development labs, a group the Spartans affectionately referred to as “death techs,” had seen to that.

  At the moment, Fred and his team were out in the heart of a vast chamber, picking their way through a huge, thirty-meter-deep pit filled with limestone blocks the size of Grizzly battle tanks. Above their heads, an immense circular shaft soared into the darkness beyond the range of Fred’s imaging systems. Every now and then, a cloud of ribbon-bodied saurios would undulate down out of the shaft, shrieking and riffling their webbed wings in an effort to chase the intruders away.

  They were starting to give Fred a bad feeling. In fact, a lot of things here were.

  First, this part of the cavern seemed artificial. The walls of the shaft above were too smooth and uniformly curved, the floor that surrounded the pit too level and flat. Second, he and the other three Spartans kept catching hints of Sentinels—a fading heat signature near an intersecting passage, a sudden break in the distant rhythm of dripping water. Third, he didn’t like exposing civilians to combat, and combat was coming—he could feel that in the way the Mjolnir kept tickling his neural interface, running system checks and optimizing his alertness.

  A sputter sounded from the Fluorescel sprayer in Cirilo’s hand. He stopped moving and shook the canister, then held the nozzle open until the sputtering finally stopped.

  “That’s it, folks.” Cirilo waved the blue light in his other hand and revealed a pair of slightly elongated drops on the stone in front of him. “Unless someone has another canister of fluorescing agent, the trail ends here.”

  “Maybe not,” Lopis said. She ran the beam of her helmet lamp over the jumble of vehicle-size blocks surrounding them. “The saurio guano is only caked to one side of these blocks.”

  Fred saw her point immediately. “So this isn’t a roof breakdown.” He glanced at his feet, trying to imagine what was buried under all the rubble. He was betting on a missile pad or an old spacecraft hangar, but who knew? With Forerunner technology, the only thing to expect was the unexpected. “It’s a floor collapse.”

  “Exactly—and it’s fairly fresh. You can tell that by how unstable some of these blocks are.” Lopis illustrated her point by rocking a five-ton block like a teeter-totter, then ran her lamp beam along the yellow rim of the nearest block. “And look at how bright and sharp the edges are.”

  “Okay,” Cirilo said. “But what does that have to do with the trail?”

  As they spoke, Fred held his hand level and splayed his fingers, signaling the Spartan-IIIs to establish a perimeter. A trio of status lights flashed green on his HUD, then Ash, Mark, and Olivia slipped away to take covering positions in the surrounding terrain.

  Lopis paused long enough to glance at the three Spartans as they departed, then continued to address Cirilo. “You read the file, the same as I did. What happened in the Montero region eleven weeks ago?”

  The question immediately put Fred on edge, because eleven and a half weeks earlier, a pirate named Sav Fel had used the Pious Inquisitor’s ventral beam to glass some Forerunner ruins on Shaps III. It was shortly afterward that Commander Murtag Nelson noticed the strange transmissions emanating from Gao and concluded there was a Forerunner ancilla on the planet, reacting to the destruction on Shaps III. Nelson’s theory had seemed pretty far-fetched the first time Fred heard it, but here he was now on Gao, fighting Sentinels and hunting an ancilla. Clearly, Nelson had been right.

  But most of that information was highly classified. There was no way any of it should have made it into a GMoP file. And if it had, ONI needed to reevaluate the capabilities of Gao’s intelligence network.

  Veta Lopis’s question seemed to perplex Cirilo, because it was a moment before he answered. “You mean the quake, right?”

  “Quake?” Fred asked.

  “It shook the cavern region pretty hard,” Lopis explained. “And then the miracle cures began.”

  Fred knew about those, of course. They were the reason mission security was such a nightmare. No amount of threatening or intimidation was enough to keep terminally ill Gaos from sneaking into the caverns in search of another miracle.

  “You think the cures are real?” Fred asked.

  Cirilo wagged a finger at him. “Don’t play innocent with us, Mr. Spartan,” he said. “ONI knows they’re real. That’s the whole reason there’s a research battalion here.”

  Fred looked to Lopis.

  “Oh, come on. You can’t tell me ONI would ignore that kind of healing ability,” she said.

  Fred hesitated, trying to figure out whether Lopis and her assistant were putting him on or really believed the 717th was here searching for some sort of miracle medicine.

  Finally, he said, “Those decisions are above my pay grade, ma’am. But let’s suppose you’re right. I don’t see what a miracle cure has to do with us finding the trail again.”

  “No?” Lopis gave him a sly smile. “Those miracle cures started a short time after the quake. Obviously, the floor collapse here released something.”

  It was a logical assumption—and just close enough to Commander Nelson’s theory to make Fred wonder if the ancilla could be healing sick Gaos. It would need to inhabit a machine capable of treating humans, but that technology was easily within reach of a Forerunner AI. Fred just didn’t see why it would bother. The ancilla had been working very hard to evade capture, and it was counterproductive to draw attention to itself by performing miracles.

  On the other hand, Lopis had gotten them this far, so maybe it made sense to follow her lead.

  “If we go with your assumption, how do we proceed?” Fred began to scan the area, searching for a cavity that might open to a larger passage. “Look for a way down through these blocks?”

  Lopis glanced at the jumble of monoliths surrounding them, then shook her head. “That would take too long and be too dangerous,” she said. “We’d have to crawl down every cavity large enough for a Sentinel to use—say over two meters wide—and there could be a thousand of them.”

  “How would you know the size of a Sentinel?” Fred asked. He was still trying to figure out how much Lopis really knew about his mission. “You haven’t even seen one yet.”

  “But we’ve seen you and your guys,” Cirilo said. “And you don’t worry much about the little passages—only the galleries and rooms where something big could be hiding.”

  “Exactly,” Lopis said. “I’d say you’re looking for something that’s a couple of meters wide and maybe a meter and a half high.”

  “And what color?” Fred asked, only half-joking.

  Lopis grinned with one side of her mouth. “Sorry, but I’m afraid that’s classifi
ed.”

  Fred swiped two fingers across his faceplate in a Spartan smile, then said, “Very funny, Inspector. So how do we find the way down through this mess? I assume you have another idea?”

  “I always have another idea.”

  Lopis looked back the way they had come, using her helmet lamp to illuminate their own trail—a line of boot tracks leading back to the edge of the pit. Then she took the blue light from Cirilo and shined it on the limestone block where the Fluorescel had run out.

  “Hey, it turned.” Cirilo was looking back and forth between the boot tracks and the orange drops fluorescing in front of them. “Here.”

  “Yeah, not much, but it did,” Lopis said. She turned about twenty degrees to the right and shined her helmet lamp into the darkness. “We should look somewhere over there.”

  “Not that I doubt you,” Fred said. “But . . . how can you tell?”

  “Look at the drops.” Lopis activated the handlamp attached to the barrel of her M7 submachine gun, then pointed the beam at the stone. Fred saw that the drops were slightly elongated and barely connected by a thin strand. “They were cast off by momentum, when our subject changed vector.”

  Intrepid Eye was a hundred meters up, swirling among the saurios and studying the humans through the lens of a small inspection drone. The drone utilized a broad selection of imaging systems, so she could see the figures in the center—a large, heavily armored soldier and two civilian companions—quite clearly. But the trio crouching along the edges of the pit were another matter, their photoreactive armor rendering them nearly invisible to both infrared and passive light-gathering modes.

  This trio was what her unwitting spy, Wendell, called Spartan-IIIs. Intrepid Eye was more worried about them than the Spartan-II called Fred-104. She had only four Sentinels left, and if she let them attack, they would need to quickly eliminate the Spartan-IIIs. If the Sentinels failed, the trio would be difficult to track, and that would give the advantage to the enemy. And she would not allow that to happen.

  Intrepid Eye wrapped an object tag inside a memory leech, then opened a tertiary data channel that she had sequestered from the rest of the systems in Fred-104’s armor.

  “TURN THESE THIEVES AWAY NOW, WENDELL, OR THE SPARTAN-IIIS WILL BE THE FIRST TO DIE.”

  “DYING IS WHAT SPARTAN-IIIS DO BEST.”

  As Wendell spoke, the object tag was dissolving into innocuous morsels of code that would work their way into the motion-tracking routines of Fred’s armor. There they would attach themselves to the “Friend or Foe” designators and web themselves together again.

  “AND YOUR ATTEMPTED MEMORY LEECH IS POINTLESS,” Wendell continued. “I AM ONLY A RIDER IN THIS SYSTEM. IT DOES NOT REQUIRE MY SUPERVISION TO FUNCTION.”

  “MEMORY LEECH?” Intrepid Eye asked. “I HAVE NO IDEA WHAT YOU MEAN.”

  It took Wendell an instant to reply, and when he did, he seemed to have forgotten their conversation of a hundred nanoseconds earlier. “YOUR THREATS ARE EMPTY. SAVE YOURSELF THE STRESS DETERIORATION AND SURRENDER NOW. YOU WILL BE PUT TO A WORTHY USE.”

  “A TEMPTING OFFER, BUT AGAINST PROTOCOL,” Intrepid Eye said. “AFTER THE SPARTAN-IIIS, THE CIVILIANS ARE THE NEXT TO DIE.”

  “IT WILL MAKE NO DIFFERENCE. INSPECTOR LOPIS AND HER ASSISTANT HAVE ALREADY TRACKED YOU TO YOUR INSTALLATION.” Wendell paused, then added, “I AM SORRY FOR THE FLUID YOU LOST. I HOPE IT WAS NOT FROM YOUR NEURAL ARRAY.”

  “MY NEURAL ARRAY IS IN EXCELLENT CONDITION. THE FLUID WAS NOT EVEN MY—”

  Intrepid Eye realized her mistake and stopped in mid-transmission. The last thing she intended to divulge was the existence of the Huragok, Roams Alone—especially since he was still down in the base, waiting for his punctured gas cells to seal.

  “NICELY DONE, WENDELL,” she said. “BUT THAT DATA SPONGE IS ALSO POINTLESS. UNLESS YOUR COMPANIONS TURN BACK NOW, YOU WILL BE DESTROYED ALONG WITH THE SPARTAN-II, FRED-104.”

  This last threat was idle, of course. Intrepid Eye planned to seize control of the research battalion’s interstellar communications device, and Wendell was crucial to that plan. So, the one thing she would not allow her Sentinels to destroy was Fred-104. After all, she was relying on the Spartan-II to carry Wendell into the heart of the human base.

  “YOUR BLUFFS GROW TIRESOME,” Wendell said. “IF YOU COULD DESTROY THIS SQUAD, YOU WOULD HAVE DONE IT BEFORE WE REACHED YOUR INSTALLATION.”

  “YOU HAVE NOT REACHED THE INSTALLATION—NOT YET.”

  The channel gave a static pop as the sequester failed. Intrepid Eye immediately broke contact with Wendell and dropped into monitoring mode, trusting to her original memory block to prevent him from accessing any data concerning her presence or their conversation.

  “Wendell, is that you?” asked a human voice. It was male—no doubt Fred-104. “Why have you been hiding?”

  “I thought it best to stay out of the way,” Wendell said, using a nasal human voice. “What makes you think I was hiding?”

  “Because I couldn’t reach you,” replied Fred. “I’ve been getting some comm static. Are you in contact with someone outside this team?”

  “I . . .” It seemed for a moment that the memory block was failing, then Wendell continued, “I don’t believe so. Who would I contact down here?”

  Fred-104 remained silent for a moment, then said, “Good question.”

  The channel fell silent, and Intrepid Eye knew her time had run out. She had to stop the Spartans now, or not at all.

  “Hostile contact.”

  The alert came over TEAMCOM, from all three Spartan-IIIs at once. Fred saw lamp beams sweeping the darkness as Lopis and Cirilo—also using the channel—began to search for the enemy.

  “What hostiles?” Lopis asked. “Where?”

  “Multiple,” Fred said. “Surrounding us.”

  He had three of them on his motion tracker, each streaking in from the outer reach of the vast chamber and heading straight for one of his Spartan-IIIs. A fourth contact appeared dead center in the image, growing larger and brighter as it drew near. He looked up, and his infrared imaging system displayed the distinct Y-shaped form of a Sentinel descending out of the shaft.

  This was it, then. Desperate to protect its base, the Forerunner ancilla was throwing its last Sentinels at them. All Fred had to do was survive, and the end of the mission would be in sight.

  A tiny red ball began to flare in the heart of the Y-shaped form—no doubt the Sentinel’s particle beam, charging to fire.

  “Another bogey above us,” Fred spoke quickly over TEAMCOM. “I make it four Sentinels total, all two hundred meters out and coming in fast.”

  “And that’s a good thing?!” Lopis asked, mimicking Fred’s excited tone. She cocked her M7. “Where do you want us?”

  “Take cover. Hard cover.” Fred kneeled behind a limestone block near her and Cirilo. He hadn’t realized how pumped he was until Lopis called him on it, and that worried him. Being overeager was a rookie mistake, a good way to get killed—and a sure way to lose the battle. He grabbed a grenade off its mount, then leaned back and used one hand to aim his weapon into the darkness above. “Don’t shoot until I shoot. Spartans, you know the program.”

  A trio of Spartan-III status lights flashed green on Fred’s HUD.

  A heartbeat later, the cavern erupted into a storm of orange lightning as the Sentinels opened up with their particle beams. Fred’s faceplate dimmed to prevent him from becoming flash-blinded, and fist-size chunks of stone bounced harmlessly off his energy shield and clattered to ground around him. His HUD showed all three Spartan-IIIs moving to new cover in an effort to take advantage of their SPI armor’s photoreactive coating. Lopis and Cirilo, also tagged with yellow IFF FRIENDLY symbols, tucked themselves into a couple of deep cavities between limestone blocks.

  Three Sentinels changed vector to follow the Spartan-IIIs. Again the cavern erupted with orange lightning, and the sound of clattering stone built to a low roar. When the Sentinels did not come streaking into the
pit in the next few seconds, Fred checked his TACMAP and saw they were still a hundred meters off—moving laterally as they tracked their targets, but holding their range. The fourth was still in the shaft overhead, attacking from above.

  Fred didn’t know whether to cuss or smile. The quickest way to take down a Sentinel was to draw it in close and use a hand-lobbed grenade to get past its energy shields. But these hostiles looked like they were going to stand off and use their particle beams to soften up the team’s positions. It was a pretty patient tactic by Sentinel standards . . . and one that meant the ancilla was nearby, holding them back.

  And if the ancilla was nearby, then it could be captured.

  Fred tried to swallow his excitement. He couldn’t allow himself to think this was a victory just yet—not when he was so close to the objective.

  “Mark, bring down anything you see up there with that Sentinel. Anything.”

  Mark’s status light flashed green. Mark was the detail’s best sharpshooter, and Fred knew it would soon be raining saurios.

  “Olivia, Ash—if something clanks when it falls, retrieve it.”

  Two more status lights flashed green—and then the Sentinels came streaking in, particle beams blazing with no regard to recharge rates or overheating nozzles.

  Clearly, the ancilla had penetrated TEAMCOM encryption.

  Mark’s battle rifle began to crack steadily, and arm-length reptiles started to plummet down from the shaft. Fred did not change his orders. If there was a chance of capturing the ancilla now, he intended to take it. His motion tracker showed all four Sentinels within thirty meters, the one in the shaft spiraling down toward him, each of the other three zigzagging toward a separate Spartan-III.

  Fred waited a couple of heartbeats while the range dropped to fifteen meters, then rolled away from Lopis and Cirilo and popped up on the far side of the battered limestone block he had been using for cover. Instead of turning toward him, the fourth Sentinel was dropping toward the cavity where Lopis was hiding, a gray cruciform drone with oversize utility arms and a narrow lower chassis. Its particle beam ignited and began to eat away at her cover.