“I know none of you so much as cough without taking opsec into account, but what fol ows cannot leave this bridge,” Osman said. “It’s Catherine Halsey. She’s alive inside the sphere, along with Chief Mendez, a detachment of Spartans, and a population of Huragok who’ve never encountered the Covenant. Forerunner originals. Okay, you have permission to squeal with excitement.”

It was hard to take al that in. The Engineers were one hel of a find, but the technology must have been the mother lode to light up Osman like that. Vaz was stil disappointed that it wasn’t the Master Chief.

Naomi shut her eyes for a second. “So how did Dr. Halsey end up at Onyx after she went missing on Reach, ma’am?”

“By breaking every law in the book.” Osman’s voice now changed. This was what she had been waiting for. Vaz had read it total y wrong. “She hijacked a vessel, she lied to Admiral Hood to get him to deploy Spartans to Onyx, she abducted a Spartan, and she did so with the sole intention of hiding there with the Spartans until the war was over.” Osman paused as if she was letting it sink in, and boy, she real y needed to. Vaz felt his scalp tighten. Halsey might have ranked above God on the ONI distribution list, but Vaz was sure Parangosky was going to have her ass for that.

“So we’re going to Onyx to help secure the Dyson sphere, and to arrest the bitch on charges of aiding the enemy. For starters.”

Vaz glanced at Mal and got a quick flash of the eyebrows. Holy shit. Osman’s professional detachment hadn’t so much slipped as been deliberately tossed out of the airlock. He’d never heard her talk like that before.

He was almost afraid to look at Naomi but he had to. Her face was completely blank, lips slightly parted, almost as if she hadn’t heard and wanted it repeated, but that was how she always looked when she was trying not to react. One minute she’d thought this Halsey was dead, and now she was being told that not only was she alive but that she was also going to be arrested on charges that carried the death penalty.

What the hel was Halsey thinking? Who ran out in the middle of a battle and took vital UNSC assets with them? Vaz was ready to volunteer for the firing squad already. He didn’t like what he’d heard about the Spartan program, and now he didn’t like what he heard about the woman behind it.

So that’s why Osman told us all the gruesome detail. Just so we know what we’re dealing with. Just so we wouldn’t feel too sorry for the poor old dear. But that means Osman must have known she was alive.

Vaz didn’t expect to be told everything. Osman had her reasons. The bridge had now fal en into an awful silence broken only by the sound of swal owing and fidgeting.

“Just as wel we didn’t need those Spartans to save Earth,” Devereaux said quietly. She examined her nails. “Seeing as they’re the last ones we’ve got.”

Naomi’s lips pursed for a moment as she final y worked up to a question. “Ma’am, Dr. Halsey would have had a good reason for doing al that.

Do we know what explanation she’s given?”

“Not yet, because Parangosky’s the only one talking to her at the moment. Halsey’s got to be told about her daughter’s death as wel . I’ve agreed with the Admiral that there’l be no indication to Halsey— none whatsoever—that she’s going to be arrested until she’s cuffed and rendered no-risk.

We don’t want a siege in a Dyson sphere.”

“You’re not tel ing us she’s special forces, are you, ma’am?” Devereaux asked. “Isn’t she sixty-something? Or do you mean the Spartans are planning to defend her? Because that’s a whole different game, even for ODSTs.”

Vaz saw Osman frown for a fraction of a second as if she hadn’t thought of that. He was pretty sure she had, though. She was one of them. “No, Halsey’s just a sixty-year-old academic,” she said. “But she’s got one hel of a history of kidnap, theft, hijack, crimes against children, and conning ONI. So don’t think she’s your dear old mom. She’s dangerous.”

“So,” Mal said, a little bit sheepish. “You’re not going to be appearing as a character witness for her, then, ma’am.”

“I might even end up prosecuting her personal y.” Osman pushed herself off the console and went over to Phil ips to hold her hand out for the arum. He surrendered it without a struggle and she wandered around the bridge, frowning as she rotated its layers. “But as far as ONI’s concerned, the fact she’s even been found is classified and wil not be spoken of. There’s going to be a suitably patriotic plaque commemorating her on the Voi Memorial. Halsey is official y dead—kil ed in the attack on Reach. That status obtains until Admiral Parangosky says otherwise.”

She handed the arum back to Phil ips, who looked uncomfortable. Even Mal fidgeted. When Vaz glanced at Devereaux, she seemed to be the only one who was taking it as routine.

There was no sign of BB.

“So we’l have two high-value prisoners embarked,” Devereaux said. “That’l be interesting. At least we’ve got plenty of spare cabins to confine people in.”

“No, we’l hand over the hinge-head when we RV with Glamorgan. ” Osman leaned over the console and tapped a few controls. “Then we’l get our orders about Halsey. Unless you’ve got any questions, then you’re on stand easy. Dismiss.”

It was a nice way of tel ing them to go and have a smoke while she wrestled with something awkward. Vaz made sure he caught Naomi before she went to ground in the armor bay. Halsey was virtual y her mother. That had to hurt.

“Coffee,” Mal said. “Wardroom. Everybody. Now. ”

If there was any good place to hear news like that, Vaz decided, it was with your buddies on hand to mop up if need be. Mal took over the crisis.

For al the jokes and flippancy, he knew exactly when to do the sergeant stuff.

“Look, mate,” he said, sitting Naomi down at the table and handing her a mug of coffee, “we can stay off the subject, or we can talk about it. Your cal .”

Naomi stared into the mug. BB materialized in the doorway to the gal ey.

“Can’t avoid it, real y, can we?” she said at last. “I mean … I had no idea.”

“Crimes against children,” Devereaux said. “That’s not exactly fiddling expenses.”

“Osman let me see Halsey’s journal,” Naomi said. “It’s genuine so I have to believe it. But I thought she was letting me see it for closure because Halsey was dead.”

BB glided across to the table. “If it’s easier, I’l tel them,” he said. “Seeing as I know more about it than what’s in the journal.”

Naomi just nodded and sipped her coffee. Vaz couldn’t work out why he felt so protective toward a Spartan who could probably squeeze a guy’s liver out through his nostrils if she was in a bad mood, but he was conscious that she’d never had a normal life like he had. The more he found out about the Spartan program, the more he was amazed that she was remotely sane.

“Come on then, BB,” Phil ips said. “Spit it out. And before anyone says anything, I know just what utter bastards academics can be when there’s a chance of making a name for themselves.”

“I’m glad you chose that word.” BB parked himself at the end of the long dining table. When the ship was operating normal y, there’d be at least ten officers taking meals here and general y relaxing. It was on a more human scale than the rest of the ship. “I’l try to be brief. Halsey selects the first candidates for the Spartan program, which was al her idea, natural y. She sifts through genetic profiles of children from right across the colonies, picks the brightest and the best, and then abducts them. Poor old Jacob Keyes is her bagman while she’s assessing the kids, but she has him reassigned when he begins to work out what she’s doing. He fathered her daughter, by the way, but she got bored with al that and handed Miranda over to him. So … where was I? Ah, yes. She abducts these exceptional children, replaces them with flash-clones that seem to convince the parents, but then they develop terrible cloning-related health problems and die. Isn’t that considerate? Anyway, she’s breaking every statute on the book by using cloning for those purposes, but she gets one of her AIs to cover her tracks in the budget. Then she takes these seventy-five six- year-olds to Reach and begins turning them into super-soldiers. Before puberty, it’s al intense training, endocrine therapy, and medical intervention to make them stronger, more resistant to injury, and speed up their reactions. At puberty, she makes real y big surgical changes to them with enhancements like ceramic bone implants, because without that they can’t operate in Mjolnir armor. That’s the point at which thirty of them die and twelve more end up crippled, which is where our good captain washed out of the program.”

BB stopped. Vaz wasn’t aware of anyone else around the table because al he could do was stare at that blue box of holographic light and wonder if he’d real y heard al that. He could feel his cheeks burning.

“Christ Almighty,” Mal said. “Naomi, do you remember any of this?”

She shook her head. “I can remember ending up in a dormitory with a lot of other kids and crying, and after a while I forgot why. I don’t even remember where I came from. But I know that from the very first day, there was Halsey and Chief Mendez, and Halsey told us that we were humanity’s only hope to end the war and that we were incredibly special.”

“Yeah,” Devereaux said. “I bet that made al the difference. You didn’t know about the clones, then.”

“Not until I saw Halsey’s journal.”

“But why bother with cloning?” Vaz asked. “If she thought it was al right to abduct kids, why not just leave it at that?”

“I’m not a psychiatrist,” BB said. “But I agree that it adds a certain extra yuck factor to the whole business.”

“Penance,” Devereaux murmured. “Or denial.”

It al went very quiet. It was amazing how noisy swal owing could sound in a room where everyone was desperately trying to hold their breath or find the right word to say in a situation where there just wasn’t one.

“How do you feel about Halsey now?” Vaz asked.

Naomi took a long time to answer and he wasn’t going to hurry her along. She took at least three more gulps of coffee, then put the mug down and meshed her fingers on the table in front of her, staring at them as if that would hold everything together.

“Dr. Halsey was everything to us,” she said. “We thought the world of her. But I can’t tel you what I feel right now.”

The painful silence that fol owed it went on a little too long. Vaz wanted to dive in and tel her what an evil harpy Halsey was and that a firing squad was too good for her, but that wouldn’t have helped much right then.

BB picked up again. “Wel , that’s probably the bulk of the real y awful stuff, but you know about her daughter now, and you know about al the shenanigans on Onyx. Have I left anything out? Oh, loads, probably, but there was a time when she stole an entire slipspace drive so she could experiment with extending the lives of AIs.”

“This is going to make me real y angry, isn’t it?” Mal asked.

“Probably.” BB’s avatar settled on the table rather than hovering over it. “We last about seven years before we go total y doolal y and cease functioning. It’s cal ed rampancy. Anyway, top-grade AIs have to be based on the engram of a real human brain, so there has to be a donor. We don’t just take any old brains, obviously, so the people who volunteer to leave their brains to ONI—gosh, that does sound bizarre, doesn’t it?—al have to have fantastical y high IQs and that sort of stuff. But that’s not good enough for Halsey. When she created one of my col eagues, Cortana, she cloned herself and used a clone brain. Clones real y don’t live very long, you know. Ghastly business. It’s al there, in her journal. Shal I stop now? You’ve al gone a horrible color.”

Mal had his arms folded so tight against his chest that Vaz could see his wrist bones like white knuckles under the skin.

“Yeah” he said. “I think that’s al we can take for one day, BB, me old mate.”

So much horror had been tipped on the table in front of Vaz that he was stil picking through it, trying to make sense of at least some of it. How the hel did people do al that? Did they do one shitty thing and get away with it, and then find it just got easier and easier every time until they didn’t feel any guilt at al ?

And AIs only live for seven years.

He’d grown so used to BB now and had accepted him so completely as one of the crew that it was like being told Mal was terminal y il and didn’t have long to live. It shocked him. When he looked up, Devereaux, who was sitting on the other side of Naomi, had her hand on the Spartan’s shoulder. If nothing else, at least there was a sense of everyone being in this together.

“Don’t take it out on Halsey,” Naomi said suddenly. “Please. I know you’re al angry, but don’t do anything dumb.”

Vaz nodded. “We won’t. It’s okay. Trust us.”

It was probably al the sympathy that proved too much for her. She picked up her coffee mug and took it to the gal ey, then walked out of the wardroom with an embarrassed nod in their direction.

“BB, do you know where Naomi came from?” Vaz asked.

“I have al the records from Reach, yes. Halsey doesn’t realize that.”

“Do any of the Spartans ask about their past?”

“Never.”

“Not even Captain Osman?”

“Especial y not her. She’s got access to the files, but she’s never looked at them.”

Vaz decided to give Naomi a while before he went after her. Devereaux twiddled with a spoon, staring at the table.