Vaz had never actual y heard Elites just talking before. He’d only heard them roaring what he assumed were terms of abuse as they came at him, or gurgling out their last curses or pleas as he finished them off the hard way. It was strange to imagine them having a chat. “You understand al that?”

Phil ips tapped his jaw with his index fingers. “I understand it, and I can read it, but I don’t have enough jaws to speak it like a native. There’s a whole tonal layer I can’t reproduce.”

He cocked his head at the sound. There were two distinct voices, then a third cut in. The rumbling tones didn’t mean a thing to Vaz but he was suddenly aware of a lot of clicks and gulps within the words.

He stil didn’t know what to make of Phil ips.

They’d met less than two days ago and now they had to trust each other with their lives. Phil ips was about Mal’s age, with reddish brown scrubby hair and a matching beard. He looked a little fitter than the average civvie in a set of unbadged UNSC fatigues. Vaz suspected he’d probably wanted a bit of adventure in his life but hadn’t had the bal s to enlist. He wondered how Phil ips was going to shape up when an Elite took a potshot at him.

“Do you like them?” Vaz asked.

“I’ve had direct contact with them. They’re fascinating.”

Vaz had had pretty direct contact with them too, and fascinating wasn’t the word that sprang to mind. “But you don’t mind shafting them like this.

Because that’s what we’re doing.”

“Come on, it’s not as if I’m falsifying research.” Phil ips made that sound like the worst possible thing a man could do. “I’d rather stay alive than die academical y pure. Look, I know the Sangheili. They despise us. There’s no forgive and forget, not after nearly thirty years of kil ing each other.

The only reason they split from the Covenant and al ied with us was because the Prophets were trying to exterminate them. Hardly the basis for a lasting marriage, is it?”

“We’re not good at forgetting either,” Vaz said. “Glad to know you haven’t grown fond of them.”

The conversation ended abruptly when BB appeared and hovered in the gap next to Vaz. ONI might have taken AIs for granted, but Vaz didn’t, and judging by the way he jumped, neither did Phil ips.

“Come along, gentlemen,” BB said. “Chop-chop. Places to go, mayhem to cause.” He rotated and headed for the ladder, not that he even needed to. “Final briefing at eighteen hundred. Captain on deck.”

Phil ips swung his feet off the console and stood up as BB vanished through the bulkhead. Port Stanley was so crammed with systems and holoprojectors that an AI could cover almost every centimeter of the ship. Vaz decided BB was just jerking a few chains for his own amusement.

“This is why I didn’t do theology,” Phil ips whispered, as if he thought BB wouldn’t hear him. “He isn’t actual y in any one place, is he?

Omnipresent. That real y messes with my mind.”

It was a frank admission for a smart guy. “He’s spread throughout the whole ship,” Vaz said. “He’s in every system. Right now, he is the ship.”

“That occurred to me when I was taking a leak. It’s not a happy thought.”

Phil ips didn’t seem used to the indignities of communal living like service personnel. Vaz stifled a smile. “Don’t you have AIs at the university?”

“Not like that. They’re either dumb or they’re terminal-restricted. And they’re not that human. ”

“I think that’s why UNSC ones have avatars, so we don’t get too paranoid. I don’t think the AIs actual y need them.”

“But he’s not where his avatar is. That’s what I’m struggling with.”

“No.” Vaz had learned the art of not fretting about unsettling things that he couldn’t control. He just worked on the basis that BB, like the Corps, saw every move and heard every cough and spit he made. “Assume the worst. It makes life simpler.”

He could hear Osman’s boots on the gantry. As he picked his way between the crates around the dropship, Devereaux looked busy in the cockpit, head down and shoulders moving as if she was running her hands across the instrument panel. When he stepped up into the crew bay it was instantly clear that it wasn’t a regular security vessel. The ONI engineers had gutted it. Now every centimeter of bulkhead was lined with surveil ance equipment and screens.

Mal was stacking smal crates. “Luxury, eh?” he said. “Can’t remember the last time I landed on a planet without smashing into the ground.”

Devereaux’s voice came over the bulkhead speaker. “Can’t recal the last time I did, either.”

“Okay, that’s it. I’m changing my airline.”

Both of them roared with laughter. Devereaux squeezed through the hatch into the crew bay and gave Vaz a friendly thump in the chest with her fist. “You know we haven’t got a plan, don’t you?”

“We never do.” Vaz checked over his shoulder to see where Phil ips was. He’d vanished. “They just drop us into the sewer and we work out how to clear it.”

“Have you been charming our Spartan?”

“Just talking.”

“Keep at it, Vaz,” Mal said, winking. “Older birds are more grateful. Did she say why she keeps giving Osman the hairy eyebal ?”

“No. I didn’t ask.”

“Trust me, there’s definitely something going on there.”

Vaz put his finger to his lips. They real y weren’t used to having ful y sentient AIs around. Then it occurred to him that he was standing in a snake’s wedding of cables and surveil ance feeds accessible to BB, so even a shut-it gesture wasn’t private.

Devereaux gave Vaz a very discreet wink. She nudged Mal with her elbow to get him moving kit again. “Come on, Mal. Put your back into it.”

She stuck her head out of the crew bay. “Phil ips? You too. Come and shift this.”

Vaz didn’t have to wait long for proof that BB saw al and heard al . Osman appeared at the bay door with Phil ips at her heels. He looked as if she’d smacked him for being a bad boy.

“How’s it going?” she asked.

Mal straightened up. “Fine, ma’am. What’s the plan?”

“I do have one.”

Mal didn’t even blink. “Ah. Permission to feel reassured.”

“Granted. The Sangheili effectively have no top-level command and control left so the best we can do is hand them the weapons and see where the fault lines form.” She didn’t seem irritated, whatever BB had relayed to her. If anything, she seemed a little apologetic. “We’re at the mercy of very patchy short-range comms, so there’l be a lot of surveil ance to carry out.”

“We can do patient too, ma’am,” Mal said. Naomi appeared in the door and stood with one boot on the step, half-turned toward them. “We don’t just jump out of orbit and shoot bad guys.”

“Don’t worry, Staff, you’l see some action.” Osman paused a beat as if she was working up to something, then glanced at Naomi. “And you might as wel know this now,” she said, careful y matter-of-fact. “I was in the Spartan-Two program until I was fourteen. Naomi and I knew one another. But I’m not a Spartan now. Everybody okay with that? We’re going to be living in each other’s pockets for quite some time, so I don’t want there to be any more secrets than are operational y necessary.”

That was an unnatural thing for an ONI officer to say. Secrets were meat and drink to them. But it wasn’t half as unnatural as the word fourteen.

Osman just stood there as if she was inviting comments. Vaz assumed it was calculated, because ONI officers were never lost for words and patted down every syl able for incriminating evidence before it was al owed to leave their mouths.

Mal fil ed the gap. “You said fourteen, ma’am. Eighteen’s the minimum age for enlistment.”

“Correct. We started the program aged six.” Osman gave Naomi a slow look and turned back to Vaz. “They couldn’t complete the ful augmentations until we were fourteen.”

Mal went quiet, probably doing the same calculations and gap-fil ing that Vaz was right then. But Phil ips just dived in, unafraid of the braid as only a civvie could be.

“This was a military academy, I assume,” he said.

“Not exactly.” Osman seemed to be on a gutspil . Vaz couldn’t imagine any ONI officer doing that without a calculated reason. “Boot camp. Live rounds.”

She looked as if she was going to say more but stopped dead. Vaz caught Naomi looking at Osman. Her thin-lipped expression said one thing: traitor. Vaz didn’t know why the captain had decided to share it with them, and he definitely didn’t know why it had pissed off Naomi so much, but Spartans obviously disapproved of talking outside the tent. Naomi just stood there, grim and silent.

Osman scratched the nape of her neck as if her neural interface was bothering her, then glanced at her watch. “Wel , that’s obviously broken more ice than I expected. Okay, BB, prepare to drop out in two hours and carry out a ful comms sweep of the sector.”

She jumped down from the crew bay and walked away. Naomi peeled off in the opposite direction. Nobody spoke until the click of Osman’s boots changed to a metal ic clang as she climbed the ladder to the upper gantry.

“Wonder why they didn’t share that little gem with us,” Mal said. “And why she did. ”

Phil ips looked from face to face as if the ODSTs knew more than he did. He real y didn’t understand the military yet. “Was she serious? That means they started the Spartan program before the Covenant war.”

“Correct,” said a disembodied voice. BB took a couple of seconds to appear, and Vaz noted that nobody flinched this time. “It’s a long and complex story. A rather messy one.”

“Thanks for not engaging our interest, BB,” Devereaux said, sliding back through the cockpit hatch. “We’re not remotely curious. Real y.”

Mal wasn’t amused at al , though. Vaz saw his jaw muscles working. “BB, are you going to trot off to her with every bloody thing we say?”

“You were concerned about the obvious tension,” BB said calmly. “I thought it was worth getting the captain to address it, seeing as we’re living en famille, so to speak.”

There was no answer to that. BB turned to Vaz. For a cube that wasn’t real y there and didn’t actual y need to turn to look at anything, his ability to convey which way he was looking fascinated Vaz. He seemed to have a faint dappling of light on one face of his cube.

“And you’re right, Vasily,” BB said. “An avatar is for the benefit of humans. Not for the AI. Wel , in my case, anyway. Some of my kind have issues about identity.”

The question escaped before Vaz even thought about it. “So why not look human?”

“That,” BB said, drifting away through the door, “would just be too needy. ”

BRUNEL SYSTEM: TWO HOURS LATER.

Mal savored the novelty of being on the bridge when Port Stanley dropped out of slipspace.

It was better than the movies. He’d never take a moment for granted. At this stage of a mission, he was usual y already sealed into his drop pod in the launch bay of a frigate, blinded by the instrument panel and too preoccupied with final checks to think about the physics. Now he was sitting in front of a ful -height viewscreen—the real deal, not some projection from an exterior cam—and about to watch creation return to existence.

BB sat on the chart table like a ghostly box of donuts. “Five … four…”

Osman just grunted. Mal watched her press back into her seat’s headrest as if she was steeling herself not to throw up. Beyond the viewscreen was absolute, unbroken nothing. Mal let the slight giddiness of reentry rol over him.

“Three … two … and we’re back. ”

And then there was light.

Stars, rank upon rank of stars, red and yel ow and blue-white, were somehow not there one second and there the next. Even the black of space was a different black. He fought down an urge to grin like a kid. After more than five centuries of space exploration, there was stil only a relative handful of people who got the chance to do this on a regular basis. He turned to look at Vaz and Devereaux; no reaction. How could they be that jaded? Naomi and Phil ips weren’t in his eyeline.

“So how did we do, BB?” Osman got to her feet and moved to the chart table. She couldn’t predict exactly where and when the ship would drop back into realspace, even with the combined processing power of BB and the corvette’s own dumb navigation AI. “How far off target?”

“Oh ye of little faith,” said BB. “Current position is approximately one hundred and forty-nine mil ion kilometers from Brunel, so we’re about five hours from New Llanel i, and wel within our time window. That’s not too shabby. Making OPSNORMAL and starting comms scan now.” It couldn’t have taken him more than a second. The speed those things worked at was frightening. “Messages waiting—sitrep for you from the Admiral, Captain. She’s also passing on personal messages from Ten-ODST Five-Five Flight and Fifteen-ODST Lima Company. Awww. Bless.”

Cocky little bugger. But as soon as the thought formed, Mal realized that he’d accepted BB as an oppo, a brother in arms—body or no body.

And good old Parangosky. How about that? Any admiral who understood that ODSTs worried about their mates disappearing was okay in his book.

“Any update on John, BB?” Naomi asked quietly.

BB paused for a second, which must have been a long time for an AI. “We haven’t given up, but it’s not looking hopeful.” He sounded genuinely sorry. “The Master Chief’s gone.”