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  “And that she was working with the Keepers,” Olivia said.

  “That’s an assumption,” Veta said. “And irrelevant. I am not working with the Keepers. In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve been trying to kill me—same as you.”

  “Hazards of being a Keeper agent,” Olivia retorted.

  “I’m not a Keeper agent.” Growing exasperated, Veta took a deep breath. “I’m just a GMoP inspector, trying to find out who’s been murdering our citizens.”

  Olivia’s eyes narrowed, and Veta finally realized the girl’s hostility might have less to do with the infiltrator than with the questions Veta had been asking about Mark.

  Veta took another breath, then continued in a cool voice, “Olivia, if that makes me someone your friends need to be protected from, then you’d better do some thinking about who those friends are.”

  Olivia curled her lip in anger, but before she could reply, Mark said, “Let it go, ’Livi.” He grabbed a battle rifle off the bench and handed it to Veta. “We need every gun we can get.”

  “And if she is an agent?” Olivia asked.

  “Then she won’t live very long,” Fred said. “We’ll figure out how the Keepers knew about the ancilla later.” Still holding his own weapon in one hand and the Forerunner worm-thing in the other, he raised an elbow toward Veta’s borrowed helmet. “But the last thing Inspector Lopis can do is switch sides while she’s wearing a UNSC combat helmet—and if she takes it off, you can shoot her. Clear?”

  Olivia let her breath out in a huff, but nodded. “Affirmative.” She unbuckled Veta’s gun belt and passed it over, then shot Veta a cold grin. “That works for me.”

  Veta answered the girl’s smile with one of her own. “Me, too.” She secured her chinstrap. “This helmet isn’t going anywhere.”

  Fred glowered at them. “I wasn’t asking your opinion, ladies.” He held the scowl for a moment, then directed his attention to the group as a whole. “Now listen up. Ash and Mark will take point with their active camouflage. . . .”

  Fred went on to outline a simple plan to take the Keepers by surprise and inflict enough casualties to turn the battle against them. Mark and Ash sorted through the weapons on the bench and each grabbed a needle-nose beam rifle. Olivia slung the M7 across her back and took the remaining battle rifle, while Fred picked up something that vaguely resembled a giant pistol with a pair of sharp-tipped machetes hanging beneath the barrel. Not recognizing any of the strange devices that remained, Veta decided to make do with her SAS-10 and the battle rifle Mark had given her.

  With the Huragok sticking close and keeping a careful watch on the worm-thing still draped over Fred’s arm, the squad started toward the surface. As they ascended the long staircase, they salvaged equipment satchels from the corpses and stuffed them full of grenades and spare ammunition. By the time they reached the top, Veta was sweating and breathing hard, though she could tell by the butterflies in her stomach that her reaction was mostly nerves. She had certainly been in gunfights with desperate suspects before, but never in this kind of a pitched battle.

  The staircase rose to a semicircular entrance platform that sat just inside the cave mouth. A trio of freshly killed Jiralhanae snipers had been dragged over to benches on the far edge and laid out facedown, a single gaping bullet hole in the back of each thick neck. From all the look of it, all three had died before any of them had realized they were in trouble.

  Fred signaled Veta and Olivia to wait at the back of the platform while Mark and Ash crept into the jagged oval of the cave mouth. They were nearly invisible as they slipped along the walls, the photoreactive coating of their armor almost perfectly mimicking the murky gray limestone.

  Even from the back of the platform, Veta could see that their position was golden for Fred’s attack plan. Located in a rocky outcropping about five meters higher than the village itself, the cave mouth opened out into a small cobblestone circle with a decorative fountain in the center. The tiny courtyard was littered with bodies—many of them civilian—and on the far side, the turnstiles and admission booths at the bottom of the steps had been leveled by explosives.

  Beyond the circle lay Wendosa’s central boulevard, a long, corpse-strewn avenue flanked on both sides by burned-out buildings with smoke and particle beams still pouring from their empty windows. Three hundred meters distant stood the battle-scarred compound of a large resort hotel, its darkened windows twinkling with muzzle flashes. The sign HOTEL WENDOSA hung over its grand gateway, which was blocked by the smoking remnants of a Warthog utility vehicle. Save for the small-arms fire, the village looked less like a war zone than it did a ghost town, and Veta was hard-pressed to see how five people were going to sway the outcome of a fight that already appeared lost.

  Not so with the Spartans. Fred studied the situation for thirty seconds, then handed the worm-thing to Olivia. He wrenched a trio of stone benches from the platform perimeter—snapping the steel anchoring bolts as though they were twigs—and set them out just inside the cave mouth, where they would remain cloaked in shadow. He waved Olivia and Veta forward, motioning them each behind a bench, then took the worm-thing back and glanced over at Veta.

  “You know what to do?”

  “Shoot the big guys,” Veta said.

  “Close enough,” Fred said. He lay prone on the cave floor, trapping the worm-thing beneath his abdomen, then peered around the end of the middle bench. “Ash and Mark will open up first. With any luck, it will take the Keepers a while to realize what’s happening.”

  “So don’t fire until the lieutenant does,” Ash clarified. He was kneeling at the edge of the cave mouth, almost invisible in his SPI armor. “And concentrate on the closest targets. Leave the long-range stuff to Mark and me.”

  “Will do,” Veta said. “But how do I confirm my targets? All I can see right now are beam streaks and muzzle flashes.”

  Olivia snickered. “Confirming won’t be a problem,” she said, assuming a prone firing position similar to Fred’s. “If they’re shooting at us or the Hotel Wendosa . . . that’s confirmed.”

  “Fair enough.” Veta was starting to see how some of her ingrained police practices might prove a liability in a free-fire zone. She dropped to her belly and angled herself to look around the end of her bench. “Just one more question.”

  “Make it fast,” Olivia snapped. “Marines are dying out there.”

  Veta glanced back at the Huragok. It was hovering behind Fred, staring out through the cave mouth with its long head-stalk canted to one side.

  “What about our friend there?”

  Olivia glanced back and tried to drive it off by hissing and tossing bits of rubble in its direction. The Huragok seemed mesmerized by the view of the village and merely drew its head-stalk back close to its body. She soon gave up and turned back toward the village.

  “It’s not exactly brave,” she said. “It’ll probably take cover as soon as the shooting starts.”

  But it didn’t. As Mark and Ash fired their first salvo of particle beams, the Huragok dropped down behind Fred and fixed its gaze on the worm-thing. Veta tried to wave it back down the stairs, but if it understood what she wanted, it had no interest in obeying.

  “Forget about the Huragok,” Fred called. “Worrying about it now will only get you both killed.”

  Veta looked forward again and watched in amazement as Mark and Ash used their beam rifles to silence a dozen Keepers in half as many seconds. It was like magic. The weapons would send an indigo beam flashing into a distant window or wall, and an instant later a Keeper position would fall silent. A couple of times, a weapon tumbled out into the street below, and once the slender torso of a Kig-Yar flopped out over a sill.

  Then an eerie lull started to descend over the battle as the Keepers began to react to the death raining down on them from the cave mouth.

  “Okay, we’ve got their attention,” Fred said. “Flush ’em out.”

  Ash and Mark tossed the beam weapons aside and snatched the battle rif
les off the weapon mounts on their armor, and a deafening clatter echoed off the cave walls as the Spartans let loose. Jets of alien blood flew from windows and doorways far and near, and every couple of heartbeats, a Keeper warrior would tumble out into the street.

  Veta followed the Spartans’ lead, firing three-round bursts into any window where she noticed the hulking figure of a Jiralhanae or recalled a beam flash. Three times she was rewarded by a blood spray through her scope, and three times she was surprised by the joy she felt racing through her chest.

  Veta tried to tell herself it was just relief, the thrill of knowing she had taken out an enemy before it eliminated her. But it was not something she had ever felt previously. Every time she had killed in the past, it had been up close and personal, either self-defense or justice delivered, and the experience had always left her feeling drained and hollow and a little bit lonely.

  But this . . . this exhilaration . . . it frightened her.

  After what seemed like forever but could only have been a couple of seconds, the muzzle flashes in the nearby windows grew suddenly rounder and brighter, and stone chips began to flake off the bench she was hiding behind. Exhilaration exploded into terror, her pulse pounding so hard in her ears that she could not distinguish it from gunfire.

  Veta shifted her aim toward the nearest muzzle flash, her eye pressed to the scope, then pulled the trigger and felt the barrel rising with the recoil of the three-round burst and saw the strobing shape of a huge brutish face disintegrating beneath her rounds.

  Veta shifted to another window and spotted the long snout and pebbly face of a Kig-Yar peering over the jaws of a sparking plasma rifle. She pulled the trigger and . . . nothing. Empty magazine.

  Already.

  Veta ejected the magazine and reached for her ammo satchel as her cover began to disintegrate. She pulled a fresh clip out of the satchel, but before she could reload, Fred pulled her rifle out of her hands and tossed it aside.

  Veta saw his lips moving. It was impossible to hear him over the battle din, but he was saying something like take this and tossing the worm-thing over her arm. Yanking her to her feet as he rose, he pushed her behind him and started through the cave mouth.

  It was all Veta could do to hold on to her ammo satchel and keep pace as they raced outside and bounded down a short flight of broad white stairs. The worm-thing was surprisingly light and elastic, hanging over her forearm like a warm towel and making her skin prickle every time its tentacles twitched.

  Three steps later, they were sprinting across the plaza, beams and bullets ricocheting off Fred’s energy shields from three directions. Ash and Mark were somewhere on the far side of the fountain, hurling grenades and pouring suppression fire in all directions. As the shock waves from the small explosions hit them, Olivia was pressed close to Veta’s back, firing her battle rifle with one hand and the M7 with the other.

  And the damned Huragok was floating right along with them, two of its tentacles wrapped beneath Veta’s armpits and reaching up to clutch the collar of her combat vest. Surprised to discover it clinging to her, she glanced back and found its head-stalk extended over her shoulder, twisted around so it could keep three eyes on the worm-thing.

  Apparently, Veta had been promoted to pet caddy.

  By the time the squad reached the stone balustrade at the plaza perimeter, Olivia was out of ammo and tiny forks of overload static were dancing across Fred’s energy shield. The nearest shelter—a burned-out restaurant with a gaping square of emptiness where its glass façade used to be—was still ten paces away, and Veta began to fear that Fred’s plan to relieve Charlie Company had been a little overambitious. Maybe more than a little.

  Then half the storefronts along the main avenue erupted with detonations, and curtains of thick black smoke began billowing into the street. Veta glimpsed movement above and spotted two figures in blocky Mjolnir armor crouching on rooftops opposite each other. Both were holding grenade launchers and pouring incendiary rounds into nearby structures. The other pair of Spartan-IIIs—Tom and Lucy, Veta recalled—were more difficult to spot in their SPI armor. But the twin streams of heavy machine-gun fire ripping furrows through second-story walls left no doubt they were near.

  Clearly, the Spartans were just getting started.

  With the rest of Blue Team providing cover, Veta and the others had no trouble reaching the destroyed restaurant.

  Ash and Mark entered first and cleared the room, killing a pair of waiting Kig-Yar. Moving upstairs, they sent a terrified human Keeper leaping out of a second-story window into the street below. He landed wrong in front of the building, snapping his ankle, but Olivia leaned around a doorjamb long enough to end his agony with a three-round burst to the head.

  Fred pointed Veta to a secure corner near the back of the demolished dining room. “You stand by over there with our tentacled friends while I establish comms,” he said. “And you might want to draw that peashooter of yours. We have the Keepers disrupted for now, but there are a lot of Brutes out there. Getting knocked on their heels is just going to make them mad.”

  “Copy that,” Veta said. “But please see what you can find out about my people, will you?”

  Veta had already left Cirilo lying at the bottom of the cave, and she was shaken to realize that he might not be the only friend she had lost.

  Fred nodded. “Sure thing.”

  Veta retreated to the corner and slung her ammo satchel onto a glass-strewn table—then felt a paralyzing shock in the arm holding the worm-thing. Thinking she had been hit by a sniper, Veta dropped to the floor and whirled around.

  There was no sign of blood or injury—only the Huragok’s tentacle now holding the scramble grenade and the worm-thing free-floating off her arm. She lunged for it, but it quickly rippled out of her reach and headed for the kitchen.

  “Fred—a little help!” Veta started toward the kitchen. “Your damn flatworm just gave me the slip!”

  CHAPTER 17

  * * *

  * * *

  0808 hours, July 5, 2553 (military calendar)

  Hector Nyeto Conference Room, Montero Vitality Center,

  Montero Cavern Surface

  Campos Wilderness District, Planet Gao, Cordoba System

  Despite the gravity of the battle for Wendosa, Commander Murtag Nelson was finding it difficult to focus on Major Wingate’s tactical briefing—and not just because of the man’s droning voice. Murtag’s gaze kept drifting across the holographic situation map to the Well of Echoes—the mysterious, vine-draped pit that almost certainly dropped into the heart of the Forerunner base. He was too smart to dwell on past failures, but he did wish he had recognized its nature a week ago, when he still had enough personnel to mount a mission into its depths.

  “Commander Nelson?” Tereem Wingate’s tone was not quite a rebuke, but it was impatient. As commander of the 717th’s combat arm, the major was unaccustomed to having the attention of his audience wander. “We were talking about the situation in Wendosa? We have people dying there right now.”

  “My apologies, Major.” Murtag was careful to avoid snapping; Wingate was the one soldier in the 717th he could not afford to peeve. “I was just thinking about our next move.”

  Wingate scowled. “Our next move, Commander?” A stocky, square-faced man with graying, close-cropped hair, his expression reminded Murtag of a drill sergeant on babysitting duty—which was probably exactly how he felt about being assigned to Murtag’s battalion. “What next move?”

  “I know where to find the Forerunner base,” Murtag said. “How many men can you spare for an escort mission?”

  Wingate’s eyes bulged so far Murtag feared they might pop loose. “Now, sir? With everything that’s going on?”

  “It would be better to do it before we’re booted off the planet, don’t you agree?” Murtag was careful to keep a reasonable tone. “So what can you give me? Two platoons, Major? Three?”

  Wingate’s weathered face grew an even deeper shade of red. “
I can’t give you any, Commander—not with the 717th’s top combat company getting shredded in Wendosa and the other two on the way to relieve it!”

  “What about Sierra Company?”

  “Our security force?” Wingate was aghast. “With snipers in the jungle and a mob of radicals waiting to storm the grounds? With all due respect, Commander, have you lost your mind? We’re already down our two Pelicans and one of the Falcons. If we let them take out the last Falcon, we won’t have any airlift capacity at all!”

  “My point exactly,” Murtag replied. “We’re here to recover a Forerunner ancilla. I know where to find it, and we’re running out of time. I’d be crazy not to go after it.”

  Wingate’s face remained crimson, but his eyes grew a little less wild. “We . . . just don’t have the personnel, Commander.” He turned back to the situation map. “Perhaps something will occur to us as we go over the current tactical situation. Shall we proceed?”

  Murtag clenched his teeth. While he was technically Wingate’s superior, the only combat personnel he had direct authority over were the Spartans—and they weren’t available. If he hoped to reach the Forerunner base anytime soon, he would need to persuade Wingate first.

  “Very well, Major,” he said. “If we must.”

  “Thank you, Commander.”

  Wingate aimed a laser pointer toward the center of the map, where a holograph of Wendosa sat atop the broad crest of a long, jungle-clad ridge. Taken by a reconnaissance drone shortly after dawn, the image captured not only the previous day’s destruction, but also a hail of tracer fire and plasma beams flying between a hotel complex and dozens of nearby buildings.

  A kilometer from the hotel, the wreckage of a UNSC Pelican lay in the village’s small entrance plaza, its cockpit a blasted-out hollow and its hull ripped open by self-destruct charges. It was hard to tell what had initially crippled the craft, but the ground around it was pocked with craters, and the buildings on the plaza perimeter had been reduced to rubble.