Phil ips shrugged. “Maybe that’s why she spends al her time working on it.”
“No, it isn’t,” Mal said. “It’s because she doesn’t think she fits in. How many Spartans did they create? She’s almost like the last of her species.”
“Functional Spartan-Twos? Under a hundred. Almost al MIA now.” Osman suddenly appeared from behind a stack of crates. Vaz hadn’t heard her coming—again. She seemed to be able to pop up out of nowhere, just like BB. “Spartan-Threes? Hundreds. But you probably didn’t see many of them, either. Let’s not sugarcoat it. They carry out the suicide missions.”
Vaz couldn’t work out if she was making some point about how terrific the Spartans were by comparison with ODSTs, or just answering a question in that in-your-face way that she had. It was the first time that Vaz had heard a mention of different Spartan classes, though. He decided to leave the fol ow-up to Phil ips, who was now the official squad blunderer, the civvie who could blurt out awkward questions and get away with it like a smal child.
But Osman seemed pretty wil ing to volunteer information about a program that had been top secret for years.
“So you were a Two, were you?” Phil ips jumped right in. “Did you have armor like that?”
Osman clutched her datapad. “No. You need the mechanical augmentations to wear Mjolnir, or it’l just snap your spine.”
“Such as?”
“Ceramic bone implants, mainly. Makes them pretty wel unbreakable. I only had the genetic and biochemical enhancements, and after that my body started rejecting things.” She cocked her head on one side to look at him, almost teasing. “I can’t tel if you’re fascinated or repel ed, Evan.”
Oh, it’s Evan now, is it?
Phil ips squirmed. “It’s not the medical issues, Captain. It’s doing it to fourteen-year-olds. I don’t want to pry, but what made your parents consent?”
“They never knew,” Osman said, stil matter-of-fact. “We were al colonial kids, taken from our families. They thought that we’d died.” She changed tack instantly as if nothing remotely unusual had been said. Vaz thought he’d misheard. “BB’s picked up some interesting voice traffic.
We’ve got a smal Jiralhanae transport inbound to Sanghelios with a high-value passenger. A Huragok. An Engineer. That’s worth bothering them to acquire, don’t you think?”
Mal looked as if he hadn’t heard anything shocking. Vaz decided he must have imagined it.
“I wondered where they al went,” Mal said. “Definitely one for the tool box.”
“My thoughts exactly. Best estimate is that there are six Jiralhanae embarked. They’re transporting weapons for ‘Telcam, so we’re not helping our primary mission, but the Huragok’s far too valuable to pass up. We’l intercept them in approximately eighty-two minutes, so let’s meet in ten and plan that out. Better break out the dead Kig-Yar.”
“Yes ma’am. ”
Mal checked his watch as she walked off. Nobody said anything for a painful y long moment.
Phil ips final y let out a breath. “Did she say what I think she said?”
“Kidnapped as kids,” Mal said, apparently not shocked at al . “Yeah, I think that’s what she meant.”
Phil ips looked at Vaz and then turned to Devereaux, almost appealing for a verdict. “I expected some reaction from you. Did you know al that?”
“Of course we didn’t.” Vaz had reached the stage of not caring what BB overheard now. “Who the hel tel s us? It’s al classified. We’re just marines. The only reason ONI admitted the Spartan program even existed was to boost public morale.”
“I just want to know why she’s tel ing us al this,” Mal said. Maybe he wanted BB to relay that to the boss. “Whatever she wants from us, we’l do it.
We just want clear orders.”
Devereaux was stil hefting her wrench, looking at its jaws with a glazed, distant expression. “What do people general y do when a war’s ending and al kinds of dirt’s going to come out? They clear their yardarm. Only fol owing orders. That kind of thing.”
“If she’s right, then we used child soldiers,” Phil ips said. “We kidnapped them from their families before performing experiments on them.
Christ … and this is my government?”
“You think anyone would care as long as we won?”
“Actual y, yes, they would.” Phil ips was doing his embarrassment gesture again, one arm folded across his chest and his free hand pinching his top lip, as if he was worried about disagreeing. “I think the public would give a pretty big damn about that.”
“Don’t bank on it,” Mal said. He seemed underwhelmed by it, which wasn’t like him at al . “Outrage fatigue set in years ago. The colonies are a long way from Sydney. And they weren’t always on our side.”
Phil ips just stared at him for a few seconds, then shook his head and began walking away. “I’l go and be outraged on my own, then. I’ve got some monitoring to do.”
Devereaux turned to Vaz and shrugged. “Wel , at least we never claimed we were fighting this war for decency and freedom. Just survival.”
“Which war?” Vaz asked. “The one where we were fighting other humans? Because that’s when al this started.”
“That was before my time,” she said. “And yours.”
There wasn’t real y much Vaz could say, not because BB would hear every word, but because he real y didn’t know where to start. The strong had done terrible things to the weak ever since the first caveman discovered he could crack his smal er neighbor’s skul with a wel -placed rock.
Only the technology changed. Even so, the idea of little kids being abducted and carted off to boot camp made Vaz’s scalp crawl.
He was glad that it did. It told him he was stil normal, stil able to feel something after eight years of numbing warfare.
“Win the war, and nobody says a word about that kind of stuff until you’re dead,” he said. “Lose the war, and you end up at Nuremberg.”
“What’s Nuremberg?” Devereaux asked.
Mal wandered off to move some crates. He balanced a table-sized lid across two of them and then got down on al fours to pick up something from underneath it. Vaz waited for him to crack his head and start cursing.
Kidnapping six-year-olds. ONI can’t get any worse. Can it?
“Vaz?” Mal cal ed. “Give us a hand, wil you?”
Vaz squatted to stick his head under the lid. Mal was hunched underneath it, scribbling something on his palm with an orange marker pen.
“What is it?”
Mal put a finger to his lips and tilted his palm so that Vaz could read it. Ah, got it … There was no shipboard tech—or anything in his neural implant—that could detect things scribbled on skin. If you wanted privacy and anonymity, you used old-fashioned ink. BB couldn’t snoop down here.