"I haven't made any decisions about that yet," Jai said.

Mike shrugged. "When you decide, the nukes will be ready."

Jai left the bridge. Those two were just way too sure of themselves. Then again, so was he. He smiled to himself. They were cursed with each other.

"Wait a second," Mike shouted.

Jai turned back around, annoyed. "What?"

Screens lit up with warnings and scrolled text faster than Jai could read. Mike tapped away at the keyboards, his fingers flashing over the keys as he started swearing.

"What is it?" Jai repeated.

"Something's leaping in through our communications dishes. I can't stop it; incursion alerts all over."

Jai felt his stomach flip. Mike was the systems expert, had always been. He'd figured out how to steal that Pelican when he'd been conscripted into the Spartan II program because he'd been flown into the camp on one, and that single session of watching how the pilot flew was enough for him. He had a gift with machines and computers that Jai envied.

Now Mike looked flustered. "Hit the kill switch. Now!"

Jai ran to the center of the cockpit and pulled up a plate-of metal. He yanked out the red handle inside and the entire freighter abruptly plunged into darkness.

"What just happened?" Adriana shouted. "Was that the kill switch?"

"Yeah." Without any power the artificial gravity had failed. Jai hung near the kill switch, a manual circuit breaker Mike had installed during the long Slipspace journey to this system.

Just in case, he'd always said. You can't hack into a ship if someone yanks the power cord loose.

The Petya, their home for the last several months, coasted along in the dark.

Mike twisted onto his back in the starlight and moved over to one of the windows. "We're not going to hit anything for twenty minutes or so," he said.

"That'll give us time."

When it came to the ships and hardware, Mike called the shots.

Mike spun in place to face them. "Jai, get clippers and snip the wires going to any comms arrays. You have eighteen minutes before we go bump.

Adriana, you should suit up. If someone was trying to get into our systems they might try a less virtual route and show up outside."

"On it." Adriana kicked off the edge of the cockpit door and back down the dark center of the ship toward the bunks.

Jai followed, leaving Mike in the cockpit.

Fifteen minutes later, after crawling around the guts of the

Petya to trace wiring, Jai had two of the arrays cut. Adriana had cycled out the lock in full armor and coasted up the belly of the freighter and just ripped the last array off the ship and flung it clear.

As Jai pulled himself out and shoved himself through the air into the cockpit, Adriana exited the airlock and followed. With full armor, she seemed to take up the entire cockpit.

"There's no one out there; didn't spot anything moving toward us either," she reported.

"That's both reassuring and worrying," Mike said. "Plug her back in."

The Petya's emergency lights flicked on. A bit late, Jai thought, but then it was an old tramp freighter, just barely able to struggle from Slipspace point to Slipspace point until Mike had insisted they snag it. The team had spent a whole week under his direction, refitting a faster, military-grade Slipspace unit into her.

But Jai had to agree now, it had been worth it. There was more space in the cargo area for the weapons they'd accumulated, which made Adriana very happy. Mike as well; he'd picked up a few extra Shiva nuclear Warheads, and stocked up on just about everything else he could get his hands on.

The primary lights flicked on as Mike tapped at screens and guided the ship's rebooting. Jai realized everything had fallen deathly silent as fans and pumps whirred back into life. The entire ship's steady background hum slowly trickled back.

Artificial gravity returned. Adriana and Mike twisted like cats and landed on their feet.

"All right, let's see what we've got." Mike moved back to the controls and

Petya shuddered as he adjusted their trajectory with thrusters. They passed by one of the flexible, clear docking tubes stretching half a mile between two asteroids.

Inside people hustled from point to point on their business, hardly even noticing that the freighter had come within a mile of striking it.

One of the screens to Mike's right flickered, and a woman appeared on it, her skin a ghostly skein of numbers and calculations. The effected look of many AIs. It seemed to look around the cockpit. "Neat trick," it said through the cockpit's many speakers. "But before you cut the power again, know that I infected a number of your external stellar navigation sensors. They don't have much broadcasting power, but I have a lot of comms equipment trained on your guys throughout the Rubble listening for them. Plus I already disabled your Slipspace drives, so you really do have to listen to me."

Mike checked a screen, then swore and turned to Jai, who reached down for the red handle.

"Wait, wait, please hear me out," the AI on their screen said. "I have an offer for you. I can get you the Rubble navigation data, but I want to cut a deal."

Jai froze and locked eyes with Mike, who shrugged. Jai looked back up. "A deal?"

The AI nodded on the screen. "You're Spartans. The best of the best of the best." It smiled. "There are a lot of lives at stake here, soldiers. I will help you get that navigation data, because I want you to protect it. But you can't leave right away. And that's the deal."

"We have to stick around?" Jai asked, a bit incredulously. "Why?"

"Because the lives of everyone in the Rubble are at stake, Spartan. And I am going to need you three to help save them in the very short days ahead.

We will be their deliverance, and you three their paladins, my very own knights in somewhat shining armor."

Mike shook his head and held up seven fingers by his thigh for Jai to see.

An artificial intelligence usually lasted seven years before it legally had to be put down. After seven years they often started to go through stages of instability. They became rampant: convinced of their godlike power and ability. Rampant AIs were destructive, dangerous, and somewhat insane.

But rampancy was not inevitable, just statistically likely. An AI older than seven years was playing a dangerous game. Out here in the Rubble, they must have felt it prudent to keep the AI running this long in order to keep the system together.

"Come on!" snapped the AI, yelling at them. "I can see your fingers, Spartan. I am over the age, yes. Maybe I am rampant. I damn well deserve to be."

Adriana turned to look at Jai, but he waved his hand. Let it talk. See where it went.

"They unpacked me from storage to run the Rubble the year after Madrigal was glassed -- they couldn't handle the course corrections manually to keep asteroids connected to each other. They needed the constant and genius-like attention of someone like me.

"That kept me busy, growing all this out, until the Jackals came. Since then, well, I've been planning for the end, Spartans. And now it's here. Yes, I am Juliana, the goddess of the Rubble. Your experts may suspect me of rampancy, but a benevolent goddess may be exactly what you need right now.

And this one happens to be very, very attached to the idea of saving the people of the Rubble."

Mike shifted. "Doesn't sound rampant to me." He was mollifying it, engaging it, Jai saw. Maybe even validating it. And Jai felt not pulling the plug had been worth it. This unsettled AI, somewhat frazzled by the chores it had been given in keeping the Rubble going, might be a very useful ally indeed.

Juliana looked down, suddenly tired, a flash of sadness crossing her face. "I... think, right now, my preoccupation with the tricky, immense, complicated task of saving the Rubble's citizenry is all that does actually keep me from the depths of rampancy. It's been eating away at the edges of me for two years now."

"And you want us to help?" Adriana prodded.

The AI looked back up. "In return I'll give you even more than the data you want. The Covenant forces here are up to a lot more than just setting up shop in a few of the Rubble's asteroids. I have details. You'll want these." She had a coy smile.

Adriana and Mike looked over at Jai, who smiled back at the AI.

"We don't have much time," Juliana said. "We need to help each other now."

They had a rampant Insurrectionist AI demanding their help, with a promise of greater secrets. Adriana's pet Insurrectionist running around. And a crippled freighter.

Jai smiled. This was just the sort of situation Gray Team thrived on.

Chapter NINE

VADAM KEEP, YERMO, SANGHELIOS

Early in the predawn light of the day after Thel 'Vadamee's ascension to kaidon of his keep, he woke to the faint scratching sound of three pairs of feet.

They were on the roof outside his window, moving quickly and getting ready to vault the lip of his windowsill into his room. Thel wasted no time getting up from the chair that he had sat in all night, waiting for this.

As the first assassin broke through the window, Thel pressed the button on the thick bar of metal in his hand that had been lying casually by his side.

The energy sword flicked into being with a crack of ionized air from the handle as the twin half ovals of blue plasma appeared.

The first swipe of the angry-sounding sword dug deep into the assassin's chest, spearing him on the tip of the concentrated plasma. To his credit the assassin did not scream.

Thel barely had time to duck, though, as the next two assassins bearing energy swords of their own hit the floor in front of him. Their crackling energy weapons just barely missed Thel's head. But their overeager swings doomed them. Even as their energy swords passed by him, Thel was coming back

up to a full stand, slicing the sword arm of the nearest assassin clear off his body

The last assassin backpedaled, looking for room to defend himself, realizing that this was not a simple job anymore.

There was a lot of space in the master room. The assassin stepped back over the large stone slabs of the room's floor, his eyes darting from door to door, wondering whether he could make a run for it. Or at least, how he might use the space to his advantage.

Thel remained in front of the window, watching the assassin. To be honest he had expected more than this. The Vadam elders had voted him kaidon

based on his abilities as a leader, fighter, and zealot. The keeps worked on a system of meritocracy -- only the most capable would be voted as kaidon upon the death of the previous one.

But for those who felt that their vote had been ill advised, or who had second thoughts, it was both a cherished right and a tradition to send in assassins to test the true merit of that ruler's martial abilities.

It was another layer of meritocracy. A kaidon who could not defend himself from assassins was not a true ruler.

This was classic Sangheili thinking.

The assassin tested the first door, and found it locked. The four-inch-thick kafel wood would not break easily, and the assassin had to have known that with just a glance. The second door was just as locked and solid.

Now he turned and looked at Thel, realizing that he was as good as dead, and ran straight for the window where Thel stood. A last stand.

Thel pulled a plasma pistol out of his holster and shot the assassin straight through the head. The assassin tumbled to the floor right in front of Thel's feet.

Now which elder, Thel wondered as he turned around to look out over the solid rocky walls of the ancient Vadam keep, was brave enough to order

this?

The massive moons of Sanghelios, hanging over the peaks of the mountain, offered no answers for Thel.

He turned and stepped over the corpses, and unlocked the door with the key hung by brass links around his neck. Several of his personal guard stood outside, weapons drawn.

"Gather the elders," Thel ordered them. "In the stone hall."

"It is not even morning yet," one of them protested.

Thel rounded on him. "Who is kaidon?"

The guard snaked his long head downwards. "I swear on the blood of my ancestors I shall not question you again."

Thel looked his guards over. Lean and tall, their muted brown skin was almost all hidden by sturdy armor. Covenant armor. Their long-necked heads were sheathed in chain mail, and their large eyes gleamed in the flickering light of the hall.

They were all well built, powerful, overly trained since birth, specimens of Sangheili warriors.

All poised to do Thel's bidding.

They split off to go rouse the elders, as Thel walked through the stone corridors and tight spaces.

This was a tense but glorious day that Thel had worked toward his whole life. The lineage of Vadam, in the long history of his kind, was relatively young -- founded by a distant ancestor during the first exploratory age, when Sangheili ships plied the dangerous oceans, risking terrific tides due to the multiple suns and moons the planet danced with.

From the sides of Kolaar Mountain the Vadam keep looked out toward Vadam harbor, thirty miles away. They'd huddled against invaders throughout

the ages here, and it was also from this well-defended location that they'd lashed back.

The Prophets themselves had even tried but had been unable to properly destroy Vadam, among many others. They'd been too buried into the crags and cliffs of their mountains.

Great Sangheili had built Vadam's power up through the generations. Thel wanted to add his own name to the Vadam Saga, etched into the living rock of the walls under the mountain.

"They are waiting for you," a guard said outside the stone room, as Thel walked down the steps that took him ever farther down into the depths of the mountain's bedrock.

In the distance, the thunder of the river shook the stone under Thel's feet. An underground water source, and power source, that no enemy had ever managed to get to.

Thel entered the stone hall, and looked up at the curved timbers rising a hundred feet over his head. Then he looked down at the long table in the center of the room. The elders, most of them with their cloaks wrapped around them against the morning cold, stared at him with large, unblinking eyes.

"My blood," Thel said, as he walked to the head of the table. "You voted me for kaidon, and yet it seems one of you did not believe in his vote, and did not believe in me, for three assassins broke into the High Room just minutes ago."