“I hope that sounds more bloody urgent in Sangheili.” Mal elbowed Vaz and looked back from the door. Elar and her kil -crazed sisters were at every available window slit, hosing whatever was out there while the unlucky Elites who’d managed to breach the building were a messy heap on the floor. Some of the smal er kids clustered around to look, as if there wasn’t a pitched battle going on. “They’ve got to be running out of men soon.”
Devereaux cut in on the circuit. “Mal, I’m going to push them back the hard way. They’re right at the door, so watch for shrapnel.”
Meters from the door, stone and soil fountained into the air in a stream of explosions like firecrackers detonating. Vaz saw the hinge-heads outside dive for cover. Some made it; some didn’t. Behind him, the snarling and fighting continued but the firing had stopped dead. Naomi thudded down beside him.
“Now,” she said. “Move now. There’s about twenty left outside. We can take them.”
Boom. Something detonated above their heads. BB said something, but Vaz didn’t catch it. Then he saw a Banshee streak east again, skimming the tree line, and Dev started swearing blue murder.
“Bastard hit my tail,” she said. “I’m losing coolant. Hey, asshole, you want to make yourself useful? Go get the goddamn Banshee.”
Vaz heard a painful y high-pitched shriek of an engine as it pul ed away. “Dev, can you drop an Anvil out front?”
“If you want to risk bringing down the keep.”
“Just clear a space.”
BB cut in. “Everybody cover, ” he said.
An Anvil missile was the last thing Vaz wanted to see detonate on his front doorstep. Phillips. No armor. The thought overrode everything else and he flung himself on the professor just as the blast hit his visor like a blizzard. The debris seemed to rain for ages. He tried to get up and found himself springing to his feet with easy, unexpected energy.
But it was Naomi. She held him up by his webbing. “Get going,” she said, and scooped Phil ips up under one arm like a naughty toddler who was now in serious trouble. He wasn’t dead or bleeding, anyway. He was stil moving. “Dev, we’re coming out.”
Mal was up and running. Vaz stumbled after him. He couldn’t see where the Banshee or the Phantom had gone, but he could see Tart-Cart waiting on the other side of a crater twice the size of a swimming pool, and Naomi sprinting toward it with Phil ips. Then a huge hand clamped down on Vaz’s shoulder and spun him around. Elar, the mouthiest of the hinge-head girls, loomed in his face.
“You destroy our land and then you run away.” She pointed behind her but he couldn’t see anything. He could hear more Elites shouting as they ran, though, male. “My children and my sisters can’t defend themselves against an entire keep.”
It wasn’t Vaz’s problem. He shook her off. “Not my war,” he said. “I’ve got one of my own. Sorry.”
She could have ripped his head from his shoulders. He knew that for sure now. But she didn’t, and he ran for the dropship. Mal pul ed him into the crew bay and Devereaux took off so fast that he fel across the seats. The last thing he saw below was an al -too-familiar sea of armored heads thrust forward from massive shoulders as another wave of hinge-heads made their way to the keep.
“I’ve got to fix this leak,” Devereaux said. “BB, let me know when you see a quiet spot where I can set down. Otherwise we’re not going to make it out of orbit.”
Phil ips was almost forgotten for the moment. He sat on the bench seat, stil clutching his plasma pistol and looking up at Naomi like he was expecting her to put him over her knee and slap his ass. She took the pistol off him.
“Thanks,” he said sheepishly. “My radio went down and BB’s fragment is total y screwed, but you should see some of the stuff I’ve found. Halo data.” He looked past Naomi at the hatch, stil open to the air. “They’re going to be slaughtered down there. Can’t we do anything?”
“We’re not here to do peacekeeping. We came to save your arse.” Mal lifted off his helmet and tried to peer out of the hatch. “Where’s that bloody Phantom now?”
“Fol owing us,” said Devereaux.
UNSC INFINITY, SOMEWHERE IN SLIPSPACE Andrew Del Rio sat at the comms console with an expression of confidence welded seamlessly to his face, but it didn’t fool Parangosky one bit. He clenched his jaw for a moment, then opened the ship’s broadcast system.
“Safeguard in force,” he said. It was the signal to al hands that the exercise was suspended and that they were deploying for real. This was no longer a dril . “Safeguard, safeguard, safeguard.”
He had to be terrified. He had a temporary AI, a skeleton crew, two admirals breathing down his neck, and a new, largely untested ship running on alien technology that didn’t have a manual.
And when Infinity dropped out of slip—if things went to plan—she’d be right in the middle of a civil war, tasked to defend a former enemy.
Now that’s what I call the pucker factor.
“Bracing, isn’t it?” Parangosky walked up behind his seat more slowly than she actual y needed to and leaned close enough to his ear for him to feel her breath. “I haven’t been on deck for a shooting war in decades.”
Del Rio was staring into the unbroken blackness ahead. She watched his Adam’s apple slide just a fraction as he swal owed discreetly. When she was thirty and good-looking, it was a tactic that could be misunderstood, but now that she was beyond old and her glitteringly black history of vengeance was known throughout the fleet, it could only be interpreted as menace. Del Rio got the message loud and clear.
“I’m glad that you trust my abilities enough to take this risk,” he said.
She inhaled silently: sandalwood soap, coffee, and mint. “I wouldn’t miss this for the world, Andrew.”
She straightened up and took a seat to his right just as Hood arrived on the bridge. Lasky was standing at the navigation console with Glassman and Nguyen as they watched the readouts, hands together and forefingers resting on his top lip. He looked like a smal boy praying for a bike for Christmas. This was the test. This would prove whether the Forerunner drive enhancement and slipspace plotting would drop them exactly where and when they’d planned to be. Parangosky almost al owed herself a little shiver of excitement. One of the Huragok came onto the bridge and drifted along the rows of instruments like a highly decorative ghost.
“Fifty seconds, sir,” Lasky said. “Engineering stand by … forty … thirty…”
Aine took over the count. Lasky didn’t seem to be expecting that. She was probably making the point that she stil had a job to do, civil war or not.
“Twenty-nine…”
“Sorry, Aine.”
“Twenty … ten … five, four, three, two … and we’re back.”
Parangosky didn’t feel the slightest hint of giddiness as the ship dropped back into realspace. One moment Infinity was in one dimension and the next she was in another, as smooth and instant as a blink. The black void fil ed up with stars and skeins of glowing gas.