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  Veta was just turning her thoughts to the peculiarities of Crime Scene India—its location and the lack of tracks near the body—when she saw Ash grab his battle rifle. Olivia was already sitting up and reaching for the M7 Veta had left on floor. Fearing the worst, Veta put a knee on the M7 and reached for her sidearm.

  “Stand down,” Mark said. “It’s just a Huragok.”

  Veta had no idea what that was, but at the moment, she was more worried about her companions than anything else in the cave. Even when Ash immediately relaxed, she kept her knee on the barrel of the M7 and drew her SAS-10.

  Olivia stared at Veta’s knee for a moment, then gave a weak smirk. “You worry too much, Mom.” She lay back down. “We’re not the monsters you think.”

  “Just being careful,” Veta said, picking up the M7. “And I don’t think you guys are the monsters.”

  She holstered her sidearm and turned to look in the same direction Ash was. At first, she saw only darkness. Then Ash reached over and gently pushed the barrel of the M7 toward the ground. What looked vaguely like a leathery green jellyfish floated into view and hovered at the edge of the light.

  “Don’t worry,” Ash said. “These things aren’t dangerous.”

  Veta kept the barrel of her submachine gun pointed at the floor, but she was not about to put it down. “How do you know?”

  “We’ve run into them before,” Mark said. He backed into the light, his battle rifle secured to the mount on his armor, and turned his faceplate toward Veta. “The Huragok aren’t monsters, either.”

  “The Covenant used them as engineering slaves,” Ash explained. “But the Huragok don’t take sides. They just like fixing stuff.”

  “So the Covenant is here?” Veta gasped.

  Ash and Mark glanced at each other, then Mark said, “No. The Covenant proper doesn’t really exist anymore. And not all Huragok belonged to the Covenant. This one probably came up from . . . below.”

  “Go ahead and say it,” Veta said. “It’s pretty obvious you’ve been looking for a Forerunner base.”

  “Then there’s no need to say it.” Mark pointed at her M7. “Put your weapon down. You’re making the Huragok nervous.”

  “And that matters because . . .?”

  “Because we have standing orders to capture every Huragok we encounter,” Ash explained. “And it won’t come with us peacefully if you keep making it nervous.”

  Knowing better than to argue the niceties of sovereign ownership of planetary resources, Veta merely shrugged and placed her weapon on the cavern floor. The Huragok immediately floated forward, revealing a lumpy, almost dome-like body with a handful of tentacles and a small, elongated head on a short neck stalk.

  As it passed Veta, it swung its head in her direction and regarded her briefly, then drifted over to Olivia and began to hover above her. Veta started to step over to push it away, but Ash waved her off.

  Olivia raised her head and studied the Huragok for a moment, then said, “Sorry, fella. No machinery here. I’m pure girl, flesh and blood.”

  The Huragok dropped to within twenty centimeters of her and allowed its tentacles to trail over her damaged legs. At once, the pain drained from Olivia’s face, and the swelling began to subside.

  Olivia’s eyes widened in surprise, and she turned to Mark. “Do . . . they work on people?”

  “Not that I’ve heard of.” Mark spread his hands in a gesture of confusion. “But I’ve never heard of one that was green and didn’t glow, either. Maybe this is a different model.”

  As Mark spoke, the tips of the Huragok’s tentacles seemed to melt through Olivia’s flesh, and Veta began to see little wormlike ridges writhing beneath the girl’s skin.

  “Olivia?” Veta felt her hand hanging above her sidearm, and she had to fight every instinct in her body to keep from drawing the weapon. “How are you—”

  “I’m okay,” Olivia interrupted. “I think . . . I think it’s repairing me.”

  0305 hours, July 4, 2553 (military calendar)

  Forerunner Support Installation, 1600 Meters belowground,

  Montero Cave System

  Fred stood on the brink of creation, watching universes wink into being, then swell into silvery eggs of brilliance and implode into nothing. He saw galaxies spin up from emptiness and send their arms whirling off across the void, saw their cores collapse into holes that were deeper and darker and hotter than any hell that man had ever imagined. He saw the birth of all things and the end of everything, saw the wave of eternity roll across a universe of universes and swallow them all in the blink of an eye.

  And still Fred stood there, on the brink of annihilation, staring down into a hole so deep it had punched through existence itself. He could not recall how long he had been there, what had come before and what was to come next. He simply was, a man who had inadvertently stepped to the edge of time and space and found himself bound by a mystery too vast and bright and endless for him to comprehend, too filled with paradox and potential for any human mind to grasp.

  “Lieutenant?” The voice came to Fred deep inside his mind, and for a time he wondered if it belonged to the universal creator in which he had never believed, if he had somehow passed from the world of the living into the realm of the once-living and not even noticed. “Lieutenant, do you read me?”

  “Who’s asking?”

  Fred cocked his head, in the process turning his faceplate away from the bottomless hole and all its cosmogenic mystery, and he found himself suddenly back in time and space, the beam of his helmet lamp illuminating a distant circle of hangar wall. He checked his HUD and saw that only ten minutes had passed since he had left Olivia with Lopis and the rest of the detail. Mark-G313’s status light was illuminated, indicating that he was the one on the other end of the transmission.

  “Didn’t I tell you to give me two hours?”

  “Yes, sir, you did,” Mark answered. “And it’s been two and a quarter.”

  Fred checked his chronometer again. Still ten minutes. “You’re sure?”

  “Lieutenant, are you all right?”

  “I’m fine.” Fred checked his motion tracker and found Mark about a hundred meters behind him, using line-of-sight transmission from the top of the block pile. “I’ll tell you when I’m not.”

  “Very well, sir,” Mark replied. “But you’ve still been gone two hours and, well, sixteen minutes now. I thought I should attempt contact before evacuating.”

  “Good thought.” Fred checked his chronometer again and saw that it now indicated that he had been gone eleven minutes—a discrepancy of two hours and five minutes. He didn’t like that. Not at all. “How are Olivia and Ash doing?”

  “Very well,” Mark reported. “In fact, Ash is a hundred percent, and Olivia is stable enough to—”

  “You can give me the details in a minute,” Fred interrupted.

  Right now, he needed to figure out what had happened during those two lost hours, and that meant starting with an overview of the situation. He backed away from the hole, being careful not to glance into it again, and turned away. Whatever was down there, he would have to let the scientists figure it out.

  “Any sign of the ancilla?”

  “Negative,” Mark said. “But there’s something else. You’ll want to see it.”

  “I hope you don’t expect me to play guessing games,” Fred said. “Spill it, soldier.”

  “We’ve found some kind of Huragok,” Mark said. “Actually, it found us.”

  “A Huragok?” Fred started across the hangar floor toward Mark. “Not exactly what we came for, but I’ll take it.”

  They had just discovered a Forerunner base, so Fred wasn’t surprised to hear about the Huragok. Considering the devastation in the hangar, however, he was surprised to learn that the thing was up in the silo with his team, instead of down here trying to fix things. It just wasn’t in a Huragok’s nature to ignore something in need of repair.

  Unless, of course, the ancilla had another trick up it
s sleeve.

  Fred began to move double quick at that thought. “Tell me more about this Huragok.”

  “That’s what I was trying to explain,” Mark said. “It’s not an Engineer. I think it might be some kind of medic.”

  “A medic Huragok?” Fred had never heard of such a thing. “What makes you say that?”

  “It’s green, a bit smaller, has some extra tentacles, and doesn’t have much bioluminescence,” Mark said. “But mostly . . . it’s because it fixed up Ash and Olivia.”

  “Fixed up how?”

  “I don’t know,” Mark said. “It just slipped a few tentacles through their skin and did it. Ash said he feels as good as ever, but when Olivia tried to stand up, the Huragok pushed her back down and sat on her. We’re assuming she still needs some time to mend.”

  “Probably a good assumption.” Fred began to relax a little. Had the Huragok been outfitted with an explosive vest, as some in the field had been, it would have certainly detonated by this point. Besides, that had been a Covenant tactic, and whatever this place was, it had nothing to do with the Covenant. “Where’s the Huragok now?”

  “Ash tied a utility cord around its neck stalk,” Mark reported. “But the thing has been leading him around. I think it’s trying to teach Ash to heel.”

  Fred ignored the humor and stopped at the base of the block pile, running his gaze around the hangar, using all imaging systems to make another record of what he saw. Unfortunately, he didn’t think any of it would be much help in locating the ancilla. All that remained of the hangar equipment was a shadowy mural of silhouettes that had been burned into the walls and floor when the Forerunner base was destroyed.

  It stood to reason that other sections of the base were in better shape, since the Huragok, a bunch of Sentinels, and presumably the ancilla had all survived the mysterious conflagration. But, after losing two hours—quite literally losing them—Fred was starting to doubt the wisdom of continuing the exploration all by himself. He would not capture the ancilla by vanishing into the depths of the base forever, and he had enough experience to know that such things could happen when you began to poke around Forerunner installations alone.

  “Mark, what’s the situation up there?” he asked. “Can Ash keep an eye on things while you and I reconnoiter the rest of the base?”

  Mark hesitated a moment, then answered, “It might be better if Ash and the others started out on their own.”

  “I thought you said everyone was in good condition.”

  “I did,” Mark replied. “But Olivia’s gear belt was lost in the rockslide.”

  “And?”

  “And her Smoothers were in it,” Mark explained. Smoothers was the Gamma trio’s nickname for the cocktail of antipsychotic meds that kept their altered brain chemistry in check. “We’re down to just five doses.”

  “Each or total?” Fred asked.

  “Sorry, Lieutenant,” Mark said. “That’s total. I can keep one and stay, but I may come apart on you on the way out.”

  That would keep Ash and Olivia in meds for a day, and it would be another half day before they began to unravel. In theory, that would be about four hours longer than they needed to reach the surface again. But if Lopis was not up to hauling Olivia, or if the Huragok slowed them down, or if the ancilla caused more trouble, then the special inspector would be trapped alone with a pair of unbalanced Spartan-IIIs. And the result would not be pretty.

  In fact, the result would probably start a war.

  “Tell Ash to make ready.” Fred shut down his recording systems and started to climb. “We’ve done what we can here for now. It’s time to go get Commander Nelson and show him what we’ve found.”

  CHAPTER 11

  * * *

  * * *

  0306 hours, July 4, 2553 (military calendar)

  Uncharted Cave Entrance, 1,200 meters from Wendosa Village,

  Montero Jungle

  Campos Wilderness District, Planet Gao, Cordoba System

  The cave entrance lay thirty meters below, a slender crescent of darkness barely visible through the moonlit fronds of the rugged Montero Jungle. Even from atop the narrow ridge, it reeked of guano and mildew and the sour mud of an alien world, and Castor could not imagine squeezing his large body into such a narrow, foul-smelling pit. But secrecy was all. If he failed to take the infidels by surprise, he would not destroy them. And if he failed to destroy them, he would never save the Oracle from their desecration.

  Castor turned to his guide, a skinny Gao human in black coveralls, and asked quietly, “The opening—it is wider than it looks?”

  “Not so much.” An olive-skinned woman who carried a short-barreled shotgun slung across her back, Petora Zoyas had a small, leathery face with a broad mouth and bright blue eyes. “But it’s a meter across in most places. Unless your warriors have deeper chests than that, they’ll fit.”

  Though Castor found the assurance hard to believe, he was inclined to trust Zoyas’s judgment. A local cave guide and a former insurrectionist, she had already proven herself a capable operator. When a Gao customs corvette “forced” Castor’s One Light to land at the Campos Impound Hangar for a phony inspection, she had been waiting inside to brief him on the situation in the Montero region. She had suggested that instead of launching their own search for the Oracle, it might be more effective to sneak into the cave system and find the UNSC trail. After that, it would be a simple matter to track down the enemy and recover the Oracle through an ambush.

  Once Castor had agreed to the approach, Zoyas had proposed entering the caverns near the village of Wendosa. The location was thirty kilometers from the enemy headquarters at the Montero Vitality Center. But the UNSC had posted an entire combat company in the village, presumably to guard a cave entrance that had been seeing a lot of Spartan traffic recently. Zoyas had not needed to point out the obvious conclusion—the UNSC was protecting Wendosa because the caverns beneath it led to the Oracle.

  Castor had seen the wisdom of Zoyas’s advice at once. They had loaded his attack force onto a small fleet of freight transports she had waiting, then departed on a staggered schedule, each vehicle taking a different route to avoid drawing attention. Now, just a day and a half after meeting Arlo Casille aboard the Esmeralda, Castor was deep in the Montero jungle, less than two kilometers from Wendosa village.

  With the enemy so close, Castor could not help worrying. The smallest mistake would alert the marines to his presence, and his holy mission would fail even before the rest of his transports had arrived.

  Castor glanced back along the ridge. The fifty warriors who had arrived on the first transport were still approaching along its crooked crest, carefully picking their way through a thick, pathless jungle. Despite their best efforts, the thirty Jiralhanae at the head of the column were thudding and huffing, and Castor could only hope their muted rumble would be masked by the breeze rustling through the jungle canopy.

  Behind the Jiralhanae, there would be ten long-beaked Kig-Yar skirmishers and ten human infiltrators—none of whom Castor could see and none of whom he trusted. Both groups had sworn devotion to the Keepers of the One Freedom, but the humans were slow to tithe, and the Kig-Yar’s corvine temperament often ran more toward looting infidel vessels than spreading the Truth of the Great Journey.

  “Your Jiralhanae aren’t exactly stealthy, are they?” Reza Linberk remarked. She was standing next to Castor on the side opposite Zoyas. “It might be smart to have the Kig-Yar scout ahead, in case there are any UNSC sentries this far out.”

  “There aren’t,” Zoyas said.

  “You can’t know that,” Reza Linberk said, leaning past Castor. She had insisted on joining the operation as an observer for Peter Moritz, and since Venezia provided the Keepers with both weapons and a safe haven, it had been necessary to agree. “The UNSC maintains a five-kilometer foot-patrol radius.”

  “True, but it also monitors motion sensors out to ten kilometers.” Zoyas glanced at the rugged tacpad strapped to her wrist,
then added, “An hour ago, the Committee to Preserve Gao Independence began to protest the UNSC occupation by triggering and disabling hundreds of those devices—which means the Wendosa foot patrols will be busy responding to an endless series of false alarms.”

  Linberk scowled. “Then the entire company is already on alert,” she said. “They’ll be expecting an attack.”

  “Exactly.” Zoyas smiled. “And what will they do next? They’ll tighten their cordon and pull their sentries back to five hundred meters . . . and we will enter the cave system unnoticed.”

  Castor watched for Linberk’s reaction. He knew from dealing with her on Venezia that she was cunning for a human. If there was a weakness in Zoyas’s plan he had not thought of, Linberk would see it.

  When her expression remained thoughtful, Castor asked, “It is a good plan, yes?”

  “Maybe.” Linberk continued to study Zoyas. “That would depend on whether we’ve tripped any motion sensors ourselves.”

  “We haven’t,” Zoyas said. “This entrance is seldom used and known only to a few. That’s why there is no footpath to it.”

  “Still, you can’t be sure—”

  “I can,” Zoyas said. “The Committee tested the route yesterday, and we’ve kept it under watch since then.”

  Linberk raised an eyebrow almost imperceptibly, then cast a pointed glance toward the dark crescent below.

  “So, it appears our sole concern is the entrance,” she said. “You’ve said it’s a meter across in ‘most places.’ But when you’re inside a cave, only small places matter. If you get stuck at a choke point, it makes no difference what lies beyond.”

  “You’ve spent some time in caves,” Zoyas said. “But you’re not a guide. You don’t know this cave.”

  “I don’t need to know this cave to know about choke points,” Linberk replied. “It’s common sense.”