“Probably not. Depends what’s happening when we get there.”
“We’l be there in minutes, BB,” Devereaux said. “Is there a fight or not?”
“At the moment, it sounds like not. Look, I’m just listening in on a very unreliable comms link. I’l have to move a surveil ance drone to actual y see anything, and we’l be in Acroli long before it’s in position.”
“I hope you’ve got an exact location.”
“Nes’alun keep. It’s not marked on charts.”
“But it’s a smal town.”
“Yes.”
“Okay, we’l worry about how we knock on doors when we get there. A keep’s got to be obvious, right?”
Vaz made a noisy show of clipping down his armor plates and reloading his rifle. “Females.” He checked the optics. “Remind me, have I ever seen a female hinge-head? Do they look any different?”
“Not a lot,” BB said. “You won’t want a date. It’s the jaws. Ghastly kissers.”
“Then they’d better hand Phyllis over.” Vaz was immune to being cheered up. “I believe in equality. I’l shoot anyone.”
He got up and walked to the front of the compartment, grabbing the safety rails as he went. Naomi stil had the shutters up. She hadn’t taken off her helmet and sat staring at the bulkhead, arms folded, which probably meant she was watching something on her HUD. Mal placed a mental bet that it was the latest ONI reports on Venezia. It was too easy to forget that once they’d retrieved Phil ips, a queue of other messy problems was stil waiting patiently for them.
“So remind me what the strategy is,” Vaz said. “Are we playing nice with ‘Telcam or not? How do you think he’s going to react when we grab Phil ips?”
“Wel , there’s the interesting thing,” BB said. “Osman told him to find Phil ips or else no more arms, but they’re using words like hostage on the comms channels.”
Naomi lifted off her helmet and tidied her hair with one hand. If Mal hadn’t known better, he’d have thought she’d just woken up. “Even if he doesn’t think Phil ips is a hostage, the others might. We’re not dealing with one tidy group here.”
“I always assume the worst,” Mal said.
“So do I.” Devereaux sounded as if she’d leaned out of her seat. “It’s you-can’t-see-me time.”
A row of unfamiliar status lights flashed up on the bulkhead repeater. “Deflective camo, Dev? That’s nostalgic. I didn’t think we stil had it.”
“Just because it didn’t fool Covenant sensors doesn’t mean that Farmer Giles can spot us,” she said. “There’s stil value in hiding behind a tree, you know.”
Mal caught himself teetering on the edge of praying that nobody would wonder what that funny whining noise was overhead, as if any god would care about what happened to one ODST. Carbon nanotube cloaking was very old and largely useless now, but Kilo-Five wasn’t going up against a high-tech enemy. This was pitchfork country. It would do.
“It doesn’t make us completely invisible,” he said. “Or silent.”
“No, but it makes us pretty damn hard to spot at two hundred meters.” Devereaux made a few grunting sounds, as if she real y was combing out tangled hair. BB didn’t comment. “Did you think he was dead?”
“Phil ips? No. I never gave him permission to die.”
Naomi flipped her helmet over between her hands like a basketbal . “I don’t believe anyone’s dead until I see a body.”
It wasn’t like her to join in unless she was asked a specific question. Mal’s first thought was that she meant her father, but then he remembered that she’d been real y cut up to hear that the Master Chief was official y MIA with a strong unofficial dash of KIA. Maybe she meant him. It was hard to tel with so many dead and so few bodies brought home.
“We’l be over Acroli in six minutes.” Devereaux stil seemed more worried about Phil ips than she’d admit. “Ideas on how to identify Nes’alun, BB?”
“Wel , a farmhouse with a lot of damage, probably.”
“You’re a natural-born navigator.”
Six minutes was a lot longer than it sounded. Mal sealed his helmet and checked the video feeds. One was the exterior cam mounted under Tart- Cart’s nose, showing a lot of greenery that threw long shadows in the late afternoon and a little stone-built town beyond. It looked like half a dozen smal , wal ed keeps and a few big barns. But as the town rushed up on them, Mal saw some serious damage—big holes in some of the wal s, missing sections of roof, and the charred remains of a fighter or something gouged into the ground. It wasn’t exactly pitchfork fighting, then.
“Wel , it’s all damage, BB,” Mal said. “Next idea?”
Tart-Cart slowed and looped around the settlement at three hundred meters. There were some Sangheili trying to salvage their property, and a couple of them looked up as the dropship passed overhead, but they went back to clearing the rubble. They’d heard it but they couldn’t quite see it.
They probably thought the noise was coming from another direction.
“‘ Telcam’s got to have coordinates to find the place,” BB said. “If I could get hold of him. Acroli is largely Arbiter supporters.”
“Location. Any clue at al would do.”
“Wait one.”
“See, BB, when we were baby ODSTs in training, the sarge impressed on us the importance of observation and planning when retrieving hostages.”
BB went a little acid. “You can go back and ask Sarge, then, Staff.”
A rough stone building that looked like a kid’s idea of a fort stood a couple of klicks away from the settlement.
“Okay, what’s that over there?”
“Another keep.”
“And what’s that muzzle flash?” Mal knew perfectly wel what it was. He’d seen enough plasma fire to last him a lifetime. “I bet that’s Nes’alun.”
A s Tart-Cart slowed to sweep wide around the fields, Mal could see that it wasn’t so much a firefight as a sporadic exchange of shots. About twenty hinge-heads crouched in the cover of low wal s and shabby outbuildings, focused on the main structure, but they seemed to be playing a waiting game rather than launching an assault. A couple of shots spat out from a narrow window. The hinge-heads laying siege ducked, then fired back. Then it went quiet again.
This had to be the farmhouse. The dropship changed course again and now Mal could see the state of the main doors. The opening was blocked with al kinds of wood, and black smoke streaks radiated from the stone door frame like sooty petals. It looked like they’d tried to storm the place and failed.
“So the women are defending the keep because the blokes are away fighting, I suppose,” Mal said. “Which means they could be back anytime, so the ones down there can’t wait forever.”
“What do you want to do?” Devereaux asked. “Set down and observe for a while?”