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  “Of course.” Veta was careful to keep a neutral face, so the girl would not think her reaction was due to the severity of her injuries. “I’ll do whatever I can.”

  Veta ran her lamp beam over Olivia’s swollen thighs and knew immediately that the squad would have to break off pursuit and retreat to the surface. Both of the girl’s femurs had been broken, probably in a couple of places. She would need surgery to save her legs—and maybe even her life.

  Veta turned to Fred. “How did this happen?”

  “A rock slab dropped on her,” Fred said. “I thought you saw that.”

  “I did,” Veta said, frowning. “Then I saw her take out a Sentinel with her bare hands. There’s no way she did that on those legs.”

  “Don’t underestimate us,” Ash said. “You’d be surprised at what—”

  Fred silenced Ash with a slashing gesture, then said, “You’d be surprised what adrenaline can do.”

  Veta didn’t believe that explanation for a moment, but now was hardly the time to press the issue. She stared into Fred’s faceplate long enough to let him know she wasn’t fooled, then turned to Olivia.

  “We’re going to check you out. It might hurt.”

  Olivia nodded. “No worries,” she said. “I have . . . I have it under control.”

  “Have what under control?” Veta asked.

  “Her combat response,” Fred said, answering for Olivia. “When the fight-or-flight reflex kicks in, Spartans are conditioned to fight. That’s what you saw with Olivia.”

  “If you say so,” Veta said.

  Vowing to find out later what Fred was trying to hide, Veta touched her fingers to Olivia’s throat. The girl’s skin was cool and clammy, but her pulse was strong, and she didn’t seem confused. She might be in shock, but her superb physical condition seemed to be helping her counter its effects.

  Fred watched only a moment before turning toward Mark and speaking over TEAMCOM. “Mark, you’re in charge here. If I’m not back in two hours, evacuate on your own.”

  “Not back?” Veta asked. “Where do you think you’re going?”

  Her demanding tone drew a surprised gasp from Olivia and a raised brow from Ash. Fred simply stared at her with his blank faceplate for a moment, then surprised everyone by answering her question.

  “Down the pit to take a look below us,” he said. “Maybe I’ll find Cirilo.”

  “Don’t try to play me, Fred. You’re not good enough.” Veta opened the medkit that Fred had left and began to rummage through it contents, looking for air splints and something that resembled an emergency saline drip. “And that pit can’t be stable. We don’t need you buried under a thousand tons of rock with whatever’s left of Cirilo.”

  “My call, not yours,” Fred said. “I need to recon the area. If I happen to find Cirilo’s remains, I’ll bring them back.”

  “Recon can wait, and so can Cirilo’s remains,” Veta said. Had Cirilo been able to talk, she knew he would have urged her to care for the wounded first. “These kids are tough, but they’re not invincible. Olivia needs a hospital, and Ash could use a real doctor, too. We need to start back to the surface together—and we need to do it now.”

  Fred remained silent for a moment, then shook his helmet. “The mission takes precedence. They can hold on until I get back.” He turned back toward the pit. “And they’re not kids. They’re Spartans.”

  “Spartans, maybe. But they’re still kids.” Veta turned to Olivia. “How old are you anyway? Fifteen?”

  “Fifteen?” A look of surprise flashed across Olivia’s face. “I’m, uh . . . that’s classified, ma’am.”

  “Classified?” Veta could think of half a dozen reasons that the UNSC might want to classify the age of the Spartan-IIIs, but only one would explain their youthful appearance. “Oh good Lord—you’re not even fifteen, are you? How old were you when they conscripted you? Ten?”

  “Nobody had to conscript us,” Ash said. “We volunteered.”

  “That’s beside the point. You’re barely old enough to go on a date.” Veta looked toward Fred. “What kind of animal sends kids this age into combat?”

  “The kind that would do anything to stop the Covenant from destroying us,” Fred answered. “And Ash volunteered when he was six, Inspector Lopis. So did the others, after the Covenant killed their families. Any other questions?”

  Veta could think of only one. “How do you people live with yourselves?”

  “One day at a time, the same as any soldier.” Fred took the battle rifle off its mount and turned away. “I’ll see you in two hours.”

  “Only if you catch up,” Veta said to his back. “We’ll be starting out as soon as Olivia is stable enough for us to move her. I’m taking these children into protective custody.”

  This brought a surprised snort over TEAMCOM, and Mark said, “Right. That’s going to happen.”

  “Don’t harm her, Mark.” Fred spoke without turning around. “But keep her here with you.”

  “Affirmative.”

  Ash looked over at Veta, then grinned and spread his hands in a gesture of helplessness. “Sorry, Mom. Looks like we’ll be staying put.”

  The human was beyond reassembly. Roams Alone could see that through a narrow interstitial tunnel that descended three tentacle lengths into the rockslide, where the upper torso of the dark-haired male lay trapped between two limestone blocks. The man’s eyes were bulging from their sockets, and the ground around him was covered in blood. But it was the smell of charred flesh that convinced Roams Alone there was nothing to be gained by further examination. He had seen before what a Sentinel beam did to a human, and even when the critical organs were not disintegrated outright, they were usually charred beyond repair.

  Roams Alone doused the phosphorescent light at the end of his illumination tentacle, then backed away from the passage to consider his disappointment. He had spent most of his long existence tending to the handful of troglobite species that had established colonies inside the depths of the Jat-Krula Support Base—species such as chirping spiders and no-shell snails and ghost scorpions—and he had believed his creation purpose to be the nurturing of any blind, albino creature that happened to find its way into his hidden world.

  Then the distress call had come. The base ancilla had awakened from her long stasis and opened the silo doors to launch a reconnaissance probe, and ten thousand centuries of compressed guano dust had come crashing down into the hangar and changed everything. After the ground had finally stopped shaking, Roams Alone had found a passage through the rubble into the service caverns above, and there he had discovered frilled salamanders and flat-bodied saurios and glowfish . . . and humans.

  Humans were intriguing and wonderful—adaptable, resilient, and complex—but also unpredictable and violent. He had acquired that knowledge fifty thousand respirations ago, when he was attacked by one. He couldn’t allow that to happen again. His cousin Huragok, the Engineers, had all perished during the disaster triggered by the hangar collapse, and without an extra set of tentacles, it had been all he could do to just seal his ruptured gas cells and replenish his lost metabolic fluid.

  So when the crash-crunch of human boots began to sound from above, Roams Alone dropped into the cavity between three limestone blocks, then carefully extended his head-stalk just far enough to see a rare mechanical form descending the rubble pile. It held its weapon at the ready and pivoted its blocky head from side to side, sweeping a beam of artificial light across the rocks around it.

  Roams Alone had only seen a human mechanical form twice before, and he had yet to determine whether the things were fully machine, or simply biological entities wrapped inside machine shells. But he knew better than to follow one. He had once watched a pair of mechanical forms destroy three Sentinels, and during the battle, it had grown clear that their quick reflexes and deadly weapons were not their only assets. They had 360-degree imaging systems that extended far into the electromagnetic spectrum.

  Roams Alone remained i
n his hole, watching as the mechanical form descended to the hangar floor and began to circle the area. It seemed to be taking its time, shining its light into every sagging corner of the immense chamber, pausing to examine each piece of twisted wreckage.

  Roams Alone doubted it would find anything useful. During the initial roof collapse, guano dust had seeped into the base’s vacuum energy extractor and corrupted its calibrations. A cyclone of quantum fury had ripped through the entire facility, warping space and time and dimensionally displacing anything it touched. Much of what remained had been hit by a wave of subatomic agitation that softened metal and disintegrated polymers. And that had triggered a secondary collapse that brought millions of tons of limestone blocks crashing down into the hangar. The only reason Roams Alone had survived was that he happened to be half a kilometer away at the time, tending to his colony of hyaline crayfish in the drainage conduits beneath the base.

  The mechanical form finally made its way to the far end of the hangar. It knelt next to an irregular hole in the floor, peering down into a crater where the vacuum energy extractor had once existed. Roams Alone knew the mechanical form would be mesmerized by what it saw there, so he left his hiding place and began to float up along the rubble pile. Intrepid Eye would not approve—she had instructed the Huragok to remain in hiding until the humans departed—but Roams Alone could not resist. He had heard the battle between the humans and the Sentinels a few hundred respirations earlier, so he knew there would be more humans to examine in the silo.

  Perhaps some would even be alive.

  CHAPTER 10

  * * *

  * * *

  0105 hours, July 4, 2553 (military calendar)

  Probable Launching Silo, 1,500 Meters belowground,

  Montero Cave System

  Campos Wilderness District, Planet Gao, Cordoba System

  Veta could not imagine what kept Olivia from wailing in agony. The girl lay beneath her therm blanket conscious and alert, with a field drip in her arm and a pair of bulky air splints wrapped around her thighs. Her eyes were bright with pain and her mouth locked in a fierce grimace. Still, she refused anything but a gentle painkiller, fearing that stronger meds would knock her unconscious and make her an even greater burden on the team.

  “We’re wasting time,” Veta said, speaking to all three of the young Spartans. “We need to be moving.”

  “No can do, Mom,” Mark replied, speaking from the nearby darkness. “Those aren’t the orders.”

  “Stop calling me that.” Veta wasn’t quite sure why the entire trio had started to call her by the nickname, but she didn’t like it. She already felt certain sympathy for the young Spartans because of how their childhoods had been sacrificed to make them what they were, and she didn’t want to develop any emotional connections that might affect her judgment. “I’m not your mother.”

  “Then stop acting like it,” Mark replied. “The lieutenant knows what he’s doing.”

  “I have no doubt. But moving Olivia is going to be a slow process. It could take a day and a half to carry her out of here.” Veta looked over and caught Ash’s eye, then held his gaze. “The lieutenant won’t have any trouble catching up, and starting out now could make a difference.”

  Veta didn’t need to say between what. She saw Ash’s eyes soften, and he turned to look in Mark’s direction. When Mark did not respond immediately, Veta knew she was starting to win the pair over.

  Then Olivia said, “The lieutenant can order us to our death at any time, and we’ll go. What makes you think we’ll ignore his orders just because of my legs?”

  “Common sense. I’m betting you have some.”

  Veta was about to press her case when a chime sounded from the interior of Ash’s helmet, which was still sitting on the cavern floor, providing the light by which they were watching over Olivia. Immediately, Ash pulled a small hypo from a pouch on his equipment belt, then opened a concealed tab in his skinsuit and pressed the hypo tip against the flesh of his inner thigh. Veta heard the hiss of an automatic injection, then Ash sealed the tab and secured the empty hypo in another belt pouch.

  A similar hiss sounded from Mark’s position, and then Olivia pointed toward Ash’s waist.

  “Ash, I lost my gear belt,” she said. “Can you—”

  Ash was already reaching for his own belt. “Sure, ’Livi.” He opened the pouch again and removed another hypo. “You want me to do it?”

  “Hold on.” Veta reached across Olivia’s prone figure and grabbed his wrist. “What is that?”

  “Classified,” Mark said from his spot in the darkness.

  “Then Ash isn’t giving it to her,” Veta said. “In Olivia’s condition, a combat stimulant could send her into—”

  “It’s not a stimulant,” Ash said. “And she needs to take it . . . now.”

  Veta shook her head. “Not until I know what it is.”

  Ash glared at her and continued to hold the hypo, and for a moment Veta thought he would simply push her away and make the injection. But when she refused to back down, Ash let his breath out and glanced into the darkness.

  “You’re in charge, Mark.”

  A soft rustle sounded over TEAMCOM as Mark sighed inside his helmet. “Yeah.” He was silent for a moment, then he spoke to Veta. “You know we’re not ordinary, right? I mean, physically?”

  “That’s hard to miss,” Veta replied. “And Spartan augmentations aren’t quite the secret that the Office of Naval Intelligence thinks they are.”

  “Good,” Mark said. “Then you’ll understand. We need the shots to stay, uh, stable.”

  “Stable how?” Veta asked.

  It seemed pretty obvious that ONI was giving these kids massive amounts of steroids and hormones, but their doses would not be interchangeable. They would be tailored to the individual, and there was no way that a steroid cocktail designed for Ash would work for Olivia.

  Then Veta remembered what the Spartans could do and whom they worked for, and she realized she was missing the point. ONI had made these kids into attack dogs—and an attack dog you didn’t control was as dangerous to you as the enemy.

  “So that’s why you won’t leave without Fred,” she said. “ONI has you on a leash.”

  Ash looked confused. “A leash?”

  “Addiction.” Veta nodded at the hypo in Ash’s hand. “What is that? Xenothook? Kastal?”

  Ash scowled. “Do we look like zoneouts?” he demanded. “It’s not a drug—not like that, anyway.”

  “It’s medicine,” Mark said. “It helps us . . . control ourselves.”

  Veta rolled her eyes. “It helps someone control you.”

  “No, that’s called discipline,” Ash said. “It’s been drilled into us since we were six.” He wiggled the wrist that Veta still held, waving the hypo back and forth. “This just keeps us even—straight in our heads.”

  Veta released Ash’s wrist. “I see.” It sounded like they were talking about some kind of antipsychotic drug, and—recalling the way Olivia had attacked the Sentinel after her injury—Veta was starting to see how denying it to the girl might be a bad idea. “And if you don’t get your injections, you . . . what? Start hearing voices? Go berserk?”

  “Something like that.” Ash pressed the hypo to Olivia’s hip and completed the injection. “Except we don’t always hear voices.”

  “Or see flying dinosaurs,” Mark added. “That only happens sometimes.”

  “But we can usually . . . read thoughts,” Olivia said. “I kind of like that, especially when there are civilians around, thinking about sex and stuff.”

  “Very funny,” Veta said. Under different circumstances, she might have enjoyed the teasing and the way these three played off each other. But the injections had her thinking about her suspect pool again, wondering what else Fred hadn’t told her. “And these injections are something every Spartan needs?”

  Ash’s eyes immediately grew wary, and he hesitated.

  “Come on,” Veta said. “I already
know most of it.”

  When Ash spoke, his voice had grown more reserved. “No, ma’am, only Gamma,” he said. “Only us.”

  “Gamma?”

  “From Gamma Company,” Olivia explained. “On Blue Team, that’s just Ash, Mark, and me.”

  “So it’s just us you need to worry about,” Mark said. “Lucy and Tom don’t have the same augmentations, so they never go crazy like we do.”

  “What about Fred, Linda, and Kelly?” Veta asked, her tone all business. She had not intended to turn the exchange into an interrogation, but now that it had, she was going to control it. “You should know that, with their Mjolnir armor, the Spartan-IIs are still my primary suspects.”

  “You don’t think one of us could tear the arm off some civilian?” Mark sounded even more resentful than before. “After you saw what Olivia just did?”

  Veta turned toward Mark’s voice. “I’ve seen enough down here to know what you’re capable of, Mark.”

  She left it at that, and they fell into an uncomfortable silence. It was natural enough for a suspect, especially a young one, to be bitter. But the condescension in Mark’s tone was raising alarm bells in Veta’s mind. Most serial killers believed themselves to be more cunning than the investigators hunting them, and Mark was either daring Veta to accuse him or trying to draw attention away from someone else. Either way, he clearly believed he could manipulate her, and the simple fact that he was trying suggested there was something to hide.

  Veta spent the next few minutes pondering the situation, reviewing her suspect list and comparing it to the scant evidence at her disposal. When she had last been on the surface, her team had still been working to learn more about the victims and establish a timeline for the first nine killings. So—to her frustration—all she really knew about those murders was that they had been committed by someone strong enough to dismember a body.

  At the time, she had excluded Mark and the rest of the Spartan-IIIs because their SPI armor didn’t multiply their strength the same way Mjolnir armor did. But after seeing Olivia take down that Sentinel bare-handed and with two broken legs—and now learning of Gamma Company’s destabilizing augmentations—she was reconsidering her decision. In fact, she was placing the trio from Gamma Company at the top of her suspect list—especially Mark.