“Phil ips is okay, ma’am. We’re just negotiating access to the temple to get him out.”
“Do you need me to talk to ‘Telcam again?”
“Doesn’t look like it. I’l report in when we’ve actual y got him.”
“Watch your backs when you exfil. We’re only monitoring the northern hemisphere, but there’s a fair bit of fighting going on.”
“We’l be out of here in an hour or two. Kilo-Five out.”
BB was stil negotiating. Mal was getting fed up with the delay. He took another look through the gates and counted about thirty hinge-heads gathering fifty meters outside, so they’d obviously decided it was safe to come out and start the clear-up. Vaz stood back from the door and scanned the roofline.
“Come on, BB, what’s his problem?” Mal asked. “Is this a setup or something?”
“He says we’re not supposed to enter the temple, being unbelieving scum and al that. I’m trying to convince him that we won’t touch anything and we’l be gone before he knows it.”
“Tel him I’l make sure ‘Telcam knows how uncooperative he’s being.” Mal took a couple of slow steps forward to make it clear that they weren’t going away anytime soon. “Tel him I’l get Osman to cal his boss right now.”
Vaz shifted his attention to the gate and wandered away from the door. Mal was about to push his luck and just step past Olar when Vaz cal ed out to him.
“Mal, you need to take a look at this.”
“What?”
“Hinge-heads,” Vaz said. “They’re gathering outside the gate and they don’t look very happy.”
Naomi looked over her shoulder and BB carried on talking to Olar. She gestured at Mal, tapping her visor and pointing. Look at that. So Mal looked.
“Oh shit,” he said. Vaz was right. There were a lot more Sangheili outside now, right outside, and they were snarling and gesturing toward the temple. The gates were three-quarters open. Mal didn’t have to be a linguist to pick up the mood. “Is it us? BB, can you listen to this as wel ? What’s pissing them off? Is it because we didn’t wipe our boots or something?”
BB didn’t miss a beat. Mal could hear him stil arguing with Olar, but he managed to carry on a simultaneous conversation with the squad.
“They’re arguing whether to come in and drag us out,” BB said. “It’s some theological debate about whether it’s permitted to kil an unbeliever on holy ground, or whether they have to haul us outside to do it. You get a more intel ectual y rigorous class of violence here.”
“Great. So we’re pinned down.”
“I think we should bar the gates, just to be on the safe side.”
“There’d better be a back door out of this place.”
Naomi broke off and ran for the gates, ramming one with her shoulder to slam it shut just as the grumbling outside turned into shouting and the Elites surged forward. They didn’t open fire. That was al that saved Mal and Vaz as they struggled to slam the other door shut. Naomi slid the security bars into place and Mal held his breath for a few moments.
“Are they going to kick those doors down?” Vaz asked.
“They’re stil dithering about whether they’l be violating a Forerunner site,” BB said. He shot out a stream of Sangheili at Olar and got an arms- spread gesture back. “Come on, get inside. I’ve told him to let us in and lock the door in case the faithful out there turn ugly. Okay, even uglier.”
Mal brushed past Olar. The hinge-head was a head tal er and he could have snapped Mal’s neck in a heartbeat, but he seemed too overwhelmed by events to bar the way. He’d been left to mind the store and was probably now wondering how he was going to explain al this to his boss. They clattered down the passage into a vaulted chamber ful of crates, tables, and equipment.
“Where are the rest of them?” Vaz asked. “Is this it?”
There was only one other Sangheili in there, a smal er male sitting at a communications desk. He looked up at Mal and didn’t seem surprised.
Whatever he was listening to had a firmer grip on his attention. BB, stil using Naomi’s helmet speaker, started talking to Olar again. Olar gestured to a doorway and threw up his hands.
“He says Phil ips went that way,” BB said. “And that we mustn’t touch anything.”
“Okay, first things first.” Mal went ahead, fol owing a line of overhead lights, and cal ed Devereaux while he stil had a signal. This was Forerunner territory and he couldn’t take anything for granted. “Dev, we’re inside the temple. He’s in here somewhere.”
“Is everything okay?”
“Yeah,” Mal said. “We’ve got a tough crowd tonight. Take a look at BB’s plot of the area and check if you can land inside the compound.”
UNSC PORT STANLEY, SANGHEILI SPACE Osman had never been a people person, but today she felt the need for company.
Stanley was a very empty ship now and she’d grown used to having Kilo-Five around in al too short a time. She sat in front of the viewscreen to try to feel some connection with her team down there on that rust-red planet, a world that she could see but that couldn’t even detect her vessel. That feeling kept creeping back. If she looked away, if she didn’t keep an eye on that planet, then she was abandoning her crew. It was il ogical but none the less insistent for that.
“Wel , at least Phil ips is okay, BB,” she said. “Are you there? Oh, what am I saying … of course you are.”
She looked around for the AI’s avatar. Maybe if he’d remained a disembodied voice then she would have started to think of him as he truly was, as a distributed entity inhabiting not only every part of the ship but capable of extending himself across light-years on a carrier wave. Now he was pul ing off that bril iant trick of being in several places at once in multiple forms but stil functioning as a single mind.
The cube of blue light popped up from the console. “You don’t enjoy sitting and waiting, do you, Captain?”
“That obvious, is it?”
“You’l be doing this a lot as CINCONI. You’l deploy your people and then al you can do is let them get on with it.”
It was a sobering thought. Osman was forty-one, and she already knew that she’d be promoted to rear admiral in a few weeks. She wouldn’t have to wait for the list to be announced like al the other hopefuls. Parangosky had told her what was to come, and what was not, and the only thing she didn’t know yet was the date on which she’d succeed the admiral as head of ONI.
She preferred not to know. She wanted to think that it was stil years away, and not just because she wasn’t sure if she was ready for the top job, or because she didn’t want to see Parangosky leave. Now that she’d had a taste of being in the field with a team, she found that she liked it, and she wanted a little more of it before she retreated to Bravo-6 and that big, big office to see out her career.