“The top line says access, or pathway, or connection,” he said. “The row beneath that—I’m uncertain. But the lines below that al contain the word for circle. Loop. Ring.”

“Halos. Please tel me it’s Halos.” Everyone thought there were more out there, on standby to be activated and wipe out al life, but finding and decommissioning them was another matter. “With locations.”

“It could wel be, but I can’t see any coordinates. Just ordinal numbers. And something that might be relative bearings.”

“So … one through seven, yes?”

“Correct.”

“Why the symbols? Why are there two sets of symbols?”

“Location, perhaps, and the assumption of the person who created this was that others knew what that symbol was shorthand for. Or status.”

“You mean status status, or black, red, amber status? Like the security alert escalation?”

“I mean on or off, locked or unlocked, up or down—”

And then it hit Phil ips right between the eyes. Status. One of the Halo rings had been destroyed.

He counted again, comparing the shapes. No, there are six like this, one like that. Did I remember right?

But these symbols must have been here for thousands of years. They were carved into the stone. How could they mean what he thought they did?

How could they be indicators of functioning and nonfunctioning Halos when one of them had only been deactivated in the last year?

“Sorry, I was getting too excited,” Phil ips said. “I real y thought this might be a status panel, but it’s just stone.”

He reached out to touch the symbols, the ones he now thought of as on-off switches. The layer that he could feel and but not see yielded and he found his fingertips against the intricately detailed shape. He could feel it.

“I wouldn’t touch that if I were you, Professor,” BB said.

Phil ips stepped back. “Yeah, if that was a big red button, I might have wiped out half of the galactic core.”

“Wel , you’ve activated something. Look.”

Phil ips felt his stomach knot. He looked, but he couldn’t see a damn thing except the cartouche. “What?”

“Look at the symbols at the top. They’ve changed.”

“They haven’t. It’s just stone.” Phil ips looked up at the ceiling and scanned 360 degrees in case he was missing something that BB had detected. “Nothing’s changed.”

“It has. I can compare every microframe I’ve recorded.” BB was persistent but polite. “I don’t know what the words meant before, but they’ve changed, and now they say to find someone or seek something beyond, or higher, or better. I’m sorry that this is rather vague. Halsey left copious notes and some of them are a little too fulsome and extrapolative.”

It sounded like a religious text, some self-improving stuff. But this was stone, moving stone, stone that changed while he was standing right in front of it. No, that was impossible. But the Forerunners—if they could bend time and build artificial planets, a bit of conjuring with stone was probably easy-peasy for them.

What had he triggered? What did he have to strive for or aspire to? He was thinking in puzzle terms and juggling the language when an idea struck him, one that came straight out of the initial question he’d put to BB.

Black, red, amber status? Like the security alert escalation?

He was an academic learning to be military intel igence the hard way, and the way he thought was changing from anthropologist to marine. The cartouche wasn’t tel ing him to do something spiritual y uplifting. It was tel ing him he had to find someone senior to him.

Maybe it was like any weapon of mass destruction on Earth. They usual y needed more than one person to validate the launch and activate it, just to be on the safe side. Maybe the garrison here hadn’t been trusted to fire Halos on their own. How he’d been able to get the stone to react—and why the Sangheili hadn’t already tried this—wasn’t half as important right then as working out what the hel he’d done.

“Oh, bugger it, BB,” he said. “I think I might have just primed a Halo.”

UNSC TART-CART, PREPARING TO ENTER SANGHEILI SPACE “So how many fragments have you split off now, BB?” Mal asked. “You’re not going to have a dissociative episode, are you?”

“Three,” BB said. Vaz thought he sounded irritable. “And no. And stop making Naomi nervous. She hates me being in her neural implant at the best of times.”

Naomi interrupted on the radio. She sounded as if she was heading their way at a brisk pace. “You know the rules, BB. Do the translating, but don’t mess with my nervous system unless I’m in trouble.”

“I behaved impeccably last time.”

“Tourist.”

“Oh, it’s al bitch, bitch, bitch. You love me real y.”

Vaz looked at Mal and said nothing. Mal just raised his eyebrows. The ODSTs put on their helmets as Naomi thudded into the crew bay like a truck being dropped on the deck, transformed by her Mjolnir armor into an icon of lethal inscrutability. Behind that gold mirrored visor she was probably a long way from inscrutable, but that was one of the comforts of ful -face helmets. Nobody could real y tel if you were scared, worried, or just checking your pay-slip.

She settled down in one of the reinforced seats and folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t worry, Vasya, I’m okay,” she said, reading him like a book. Vaz wasn’t sure if she was talking about her father or the fact that she now had a piece of BB on the loose in her brain, ready to enhance her reactions. “Worry about Phil ips.”

“I already did that.”

She didn’t take the conversational bait and Vaz found himself wondering if he could pul the trigger on Staffan Sentzke. Staffan needed to know he’d been right, and that his kid had survived. He had to be told how she’d spent her life and what she did now, because he’d paid a hel of a price for it. But Vaz didn’t know if that would give him closure. It might just make him worse.

I’d go crazy. I know I would. No wonder the colonies hated us. If all this ever goes public, the ones that are still left are going to hate us even more.

Osman stuck her head into the crew bay. “Just fol ow the Elite escort and don’t let the bastards provoke you, okay? Vaz, Devereaux—you’ve been there before. Relax. And remember to launch those comms drones, because that’s our only chance to monitor voice traffic down there.”

“We’re very relaxed, ma’am,” Mal said. “But I hope you declined the civic reception and parade.”

“I’l keep trying ‘Telcam. Remember what I said about cultural sensitivity and don’t go crashing around the temple.”

Just seeing UNSC troops on their patch would offend most Elites. Vaz recal ed the reaction to the Arbiter showing up in Kenya for the dedication of the Voi memorial, not exactly a forgive-and-forget moment. Nobody lobbed bricks at him, but the expressions on their faces said they’d have real y liked to, given half a chance.

The hatch closed with a hiss and Devereaux started the launch sequence.

Head down, find Phillips, bang out. As Mal would say.

“Head down, find Phil ips, bang out,” Mal said.

“I knew you’d say that.”

“Wel , I always try not to surprise you, Vaz.” Mal jogged him with his elbow. “You think Osman’s going to be al right on her own? It’s a big ship.”

“I’m stil there,” BB said. “Actual y, I can deploy Stanley without carbon-based help, thank you.”

“But who’d keep you entertained?”

“True. And who’d clean the heads?”

Vaz ignored the relentless cheeriness. He found himself ignoring the head-up display on his visor and thinking things that he hadn’t realized had ever been in his head. The first was his father, who was a hazy memory anyway. Then it was Huragok. He tried to reconcile the idea of Adj, harmless and friendly as a puppy, and the Covenant doing glassing runs in the colonies. Ah, that was the subconscious connection: glassing. His father had gone to do construction work on a new colony, leaving four-year-old Vaz with Grandmother Beloi, but he never came home. Glassing.

And maybe it wasn’t Adj’s handiwork—how long did Huragok live, anyway?—but somewhere down the line, teams of Engineers just like him maintained and upgraded those plasma weapons.

Guilt. Vaz had always agonized over the boundaries of guilt and responsibility. Cute or not, Huragok were machines designed to do the job, just like BB. Vaz spent a few more minutes trying to work out if hard-wired reactions got humans and hinge-heads off the hook, too, but decided that anything that was aware of its actions was capable of making choices about them.

I think too much.

I should have shot Halsey. Shoved her out of an airlock.

Do we really want to solve our problems, or just go through the motions? Spenser’s worried about Venezia getting hold of Covenant ships.

How about us?

“If we real y want to stop the Elites,” he said to nobody in particular, “why don’t we concentrate on acquiring a hinge-head ship and just glass Sanghelios? Finish them once and for al .”

The silence around him made him wonder why he’d said it. He real y was thinking aloud.

“Rules of engagement,” Naomi said. “Peace treaties.”

“Is there a law against it? A proper law, not UNSC regulations.”

“Genocide. Kil ing civilians.”

“Okay, but where did al the capital ships go? Who’s got those plasma weapons now?”

The silence descended again. BB was unusual y quiet. Vaz didn’t think he’d said anything shocking. Hinge-heads were perfectly okay with their own ethnic cleansing, and he couldn’t recal any war where one side had been shamed into behaving nicely because the other side was more civilized.

“I believe there’s an ongoing plan to find and decommission those vessels,” BB said at last. “One of Infinity’s planned tasks.”

But save one for us, though. Vaz was damn sure that Parangosky was thinking that way as wel . Even if everybody else had been too worried about losing the war to think ahead, Parangosky would have had a plan for every outcome. It was early days yet, just months into the ceasefire.

Mal leaned close to him like he was about to whisper, even though everyone could hear perfectly wel on the helmet comms.

“See, this is nature’s way of protecting us from brain strain,” he said. “Just when you start to overheat about the stupid politics that got you here, some bastard shoots at you, and then your brain’s ful y occupied with shooting back, saving your own arse, and saving your mate’s. Simple.”

Devereaux cut in on the circuit. “I’m al for glassing, Vaz. I don’t want to be the most ethical corpse in the morgue.”

Tart-Cart’s deck vibrated gently under Vaz’s boots. He shifted his focus back to his helmet display to watch the icons moving around as the dropship closed on the rendezvous coordinates where the Arbiter’s escort was already waiting, a smal red dot that normal y meant be my guest, blow it up. Most Sangheili ships stil showed up as hostiles on the system. Judging by the fact that they hadn’t given Devereaux a map of the landing pad and left her to it, the suspicion was mutual.

“Hey, folks, it’s him, ” Devereaux said. “He’s speaking English. Switching to voice.”

“Human vessel, this is your escort. Respond. ”

“I hear you, Sanghelios. Give me your instructions.”

“Proceed to the coordinates I am transmitting now. Do not deviate.”

“Understood. We’re just going to look for our comrade and stay out of your way.”

“I meant do not deviate because we are under attack from traitors.”

“We’l be careful. Thank you.”

So the rebel ion was escalating. Wel , the more the Arbiter had on his plate, the more leeway that gave the squad. Vaz shut his eyes and tried to picture the pilot, but got a flashback of Jul ‘Mdama a fraction before the hinge-head knocked him across Stanley’s holding cel and nearly broke his neck.

Devereaux switched the comms back to cockpit-only. Vaz watched the pinpoint blue light wink out in his HUD. Bastards, all of them. One of his chrono displays was counting down, minutes and seconds: in twenty minutes, they’d be entering the atmosphere.

“Do you mind if I wander around your sensors, Devereaux?” BB asked. “I’ve sent a monitoring package over the comms. But I like to ask.”

“You’re a gentleman. Knock yourself out.”

Naomi didn’t move a muscle. Vaz wondered what it felt like to have BB plugged in to your brain and also doing that stuff, al this piggybacking and splitting and infiltration. Whatever it was, the Spartan wasn’t reacting.

“Oh, very sloppy…,” BB murmured. “You can tel they left the technical work to the hired help.”

“What is it, BB?” Vaz asked.

“I’l show you. Brace brace brace. Hah.”

“Come on, don’t—” But that was as far as Vaz got. An explosion fil ed his HUD, white-hot, dying instantly into orange flame and black smoke. He flinched. If he hadn’t been strapped in, he’d have lifted clear off the seat. Then the lack of sound registered on him and the smoke began to clear from the image projected inside his visor. He was looking down on a Sangheili city from what would have been a traffic cam on Earth, and there were pal s of smoke rising in the distance. The image then swung around and focused somewhere else. So, not a static surveil ance device, then.

“What the hel ’s that? Ontom?”

“Whoa,” Mal said. “Don’t bugger about with the HUD feeds, BB. Now I’ve got to change my chuddies.”

“Live from glorious downtown Vadam,” BB said. The image shrank to a tiny icon and minimized to the right-hand margin of Vaz’s display. He tried to fol ow it. “I think that’s a feed from an artil ery position. Sorry about loosening the old sphincters, Staff. Exciting, isn’t it?”