“Where’s Forze?” She couldn’t get her breath. “Where is he?”
“I can’t see him. Everyone’s scattered. Quick, find cover. They’re coming for us.”
“Who is?”
“The Arbiter’s troops.”
All Thel ‘Vadam’s forces had to do was head for the crashed ship, now a burning beacon on the edge of the city. There was no hiding from them: if she tried to pass as a local in Vadam, her accent and light skin would mark her out as coming from a foreign keep. The entire crew was in the same position. They would have to fight their way home. She found herself stumbling through thorn bushes and then into trees, and only when she ran out of breath and her legs wouldn’t carry her any farther did she stop, dropping to the ground. Dunil stopped with her.
“You have to keep going.”
“Go. Leave me here.”
“I can’t.”
Raia could think of nothing now but survival. Just when she thought her lungs would burst and she could never stand up again, a cold and intense clarity swept over her and stripped away every thought that wasn’t devoted to the immediate moment. She reached into her holster and took the plasma pistol, checking the charge.
“I have several hundred shots in this, don’t I?” She held it so that Dunil could see it. “Tell me. How many?”
“That model? Four hundred.”
“More than enough.”
“For what?”
“To kill any fool who tries to kill me.” Finding Jul was a secondary issue now and she was shocked to find she felt no guilt for thinking that way. She was no use to Jul dead. “I have nothing to lose. What do we do now, regroup or press on?”
Dunil looked down at her as if she was mad. “Do you want the command view, or the real one? I could tell you that we press on and die gloriously, or I could tell you that the intelligent thing to do is to escape and come back another day with greater forces.”
“Then we will do the intelligent thing,” Raia said. She looked around, buoyed up on new clarity, and spotted some of Unflinching Resolve’s crew moving through the trees at a crouch, pistols in hands. “I have never traveled far from my keep. How do we get home now?”
“Ah, that’s the question,” Dunil said.
Forze came crashing through the undergrowth, smoke-smeared and angry. “Raia, come with me. We must get down the shore. Naxan’s going to send Gusay to collect you.”
“Is that it? What about everyone else?”
“Let us worry about that. You shouldn’t be here. This is no place for an elder’s wife.”
“Don’t start that argument again.”
She could still hear the sporadic crack and hiss of cannon somewhere in the distance. Then another sound began to drown it out, a ship’s drives, and she assumed it was Gusay showing up to take her home. It was only when the sound multiplied that she realized there was a squadron of vessels somewhere overhead, and her assumption changed: this was the Arbiter’s fleet, coming to hunt them down and finish them off. She wasn’t the only one. She saw all the males look up and aim their weapons, pointless though it was to try to take on warships with pistols.
But she raised hers, too.
Then ‘Telcam came stalking into the clearing just ahead of her. He held out his arms as if he was summoning his crew for an address.
“Do you hear that?” he called. “Do you hear it? Do you know what that is?”
He was taking a huge risk. Whoever was flying overhead would be able to see him. But he looked more than unconcerned. He looked triumphant.
“What is it, brother?” one of the monks asked.
“Listen to your communications,” ‘Telcam said. “Open the channel. The gods have come to our aid.”
Raia’s heart sank. The monk had lost his mind. She waited for a searing energy bolt to vaporize him where he stood, but she turned and caught the expression on Dunil’s face and Forze’s. All the troops were listening to something.
She had no communications equipment. She wouldn’t even have known which channel to switch to.
“I’d call that a timely miracle,” Forze said. His jaws parted and snapped together again with satisfaction. “And an apt one.”
“What?” Raia stood in his way, demanding an answer. “What is it?”
Forze removed his communicator and held it out to her. “Listen to the sound of salvation,” he said.
The mood had changed in seconds. The surviving crew were all standing in the open now, either listening to their communicators or roaring in approval as they looked up into the sky. She put Forze’s device to her ear. Someone was talking to ‘Telcam.
“We’re not alone,” the voice said. “Word is spreading, from city to city. The keeps are rallying. We might not be the most pious warriors, but ‘Vadam has gone too far this time. Allowing human troops to land on Sanghelios, allowing them to defile a temple—that’s more than enough to unite the keeps against him.”
‘Telcam had his miracle, then. Raia hoped it would last long enough to bring Jul home, wherever he was. She gazed at her pistol, now feeling more comforting in her hand than unfamiliar, and decided she wasn’t going home to Mdama just yet.
Gusay would have a wasted journey. Forze could call him now and tell him to stay at home.
TEMPLE OF ABIDING TRUTH, ONTOM
Fifty meters into the tunnel, comms with Port Stanley began to break up. By one hundred meters, Vaz had lost the link completely.
“Can you still hear us, Dev?” Sooner or later, they’d lose Tart-Cart, too. BB hadn’t been able to scan inside the temple from orbit, so there was a fair chance that something about the Forerunner structure was interfering with signals. “Everything okay out there?”
“No,” Devereaux said. “Do you want to see? I’ve moved so I can monitor the lynch mob outside.”
Tart-Cart’s forward exterior cam fed Vaz a view of the plaza from ground level, just a few hundred Elites gathering and making angry gestures, but even in that big open space it still looked like a lot of hinge-heads. They hadn’t plucked up the courage to storm the temple and piss off the gods yet. Judging by the body language of the ones closest to the cam, though, they were giving it some serious consideration.
The image relayed to everyone’s HUD. Mal whistled to himself.
“Hinge-heads to the southwest,” he said, putting on an exaggerated accent that Vaz didn’t recognize. “Thousands of ’em, sir.”
Devereaux huffed. She seemed to get the joke. “Yeah, funny, Staff, but I’ve got to move the ship. I’ll take a big loop around and avoid going over their heads, because that really won’t help matters. I’m going to set down at the back of the temple.”
“Is there enough space?”
“I’ll make space.”
“Try not to damage anything, Dev.”
“You just make sure you exit via the back door, okay?”
“Got it. You’re breaking up now, so we’re going to lose comms.”
“Tart-Cart out.”
Vaz replayed the footage as he walked. He wondered how long piety would stop the Elites storming the place. If they were anything like humans in crowds, the whole thing would boil over in a second and they’d be in here, bent on revenge. Narrow passages, nowhere to run—would they open fire, or would they be too worried about damaging sacred structures? Did it matter? They could rip Vaz apart with their bare hands and just mop up the mess later.
And Phillips might not have been the only person down here. Maybe they were all walking straight into an ambush.
“Phillips?” Vaz yelled at the top of his voice but there wasn’t even the hint of an echo. “Come on, Phillips, where the hell are you?”
“He’s come this way, because I can smell him,” BB said. “And his fingerprints are on some of the surfaces.”
“What do you mean, smell him?”
“Human sebum. Very persistent, full of heavy alcohols and hydrocarbons. No witty rejoinders, please, Mal.”
Mal had his finger inside the trigg
er guard, so he was as worried as Vaz about what might be around the next corner—or behind them. “Is Phillips all you can smell? No Elites?”
“Just Phillips. At least in recent weeks.”
”Are you using my nose?” Naomi asked. She sounded absolutely serious to Vaz. “How did you pick that up?”
“Your NBCD filters.”
“Oh. Okay.”
Mal stopped a few meters ahead of them. “So you’re sure we haven’t been down this one before, BB?”
“Positive. But Phillips has. Keep going.”
“How far have we come?”
“Over three kilometers.”
“Well, it’s got to end somewhere.”
“No,” Vaz said. “This place could be in some part of slipspace for all we know.”
He looked back to check on Naomi. He didn’t trust Forerunner technology after what had happened on Onyx, so he walked back around the curve of the tunnel to look for her. He found her standing in front of a carved panel, tilting her head one way then the other as if she was trying out different filters. There was no telling what went on with her armor these days. It had some nanite system that upgraded it when it was idling, so her hardware was as much a voyage of discovery as the Forerunner ruins. It still looked like Mark V Mjolnir from the outside, but it definitely wasn’t. Maybe she liked the retro style and wanted to keep it, like a shabby but much-loved pair of jeans. He wasn’t going to ask right now.
“No wonder Phillips has gone on safari,” BB said. He still sounded as if he was doing a ventriloquist’s act with Naomi as the dummy. Vaz wondered how long she’d put up with that. “Have you seen these engravings? I’m recording them, just in case.”
“I hate it when you say that.”
“These are control panels, like the ones Halsey found in the Dyson sphere, except this isn’t an emergency shelter. It’s more like a command center. A garrison building.”
Naomi stepped back from the panel and walked away. “Hey, I haven’t finished,” BB said. “I need to use your visual feed.”
“You can process information in a split second, and you can monitor through anyone’s helmet.”
“Oh, sorry I spoke—”
Vaz interrupted in to break it up. “So why aren’t you fluent in Forerunner by now, BB? Halsey can’t be smarter than you are.”
“If you think that cereal-packet psychology is going to distract me from the inevitably unpleasant discovery that my fragment is utterly buggered, Vaz, it won’t.”
Yes, BB was definitely strung out. “Okay, so tell me what it says.”
“What does the word link mean in English? Anything from a comms channel to a shuttle service. Be a dear, Naomi, and touch the surface, will you? I need to analyze that shield that’s covering it.”
Naomi put her gloved palm cautiously on the surface. “What is it?”
“A job for a Huragok,” BB admitted.
Nothing blew up, lit up, or made a noise. After a couple of seconds, Naomi turned, pointed forward in the direction that Mal had gone, and walked off. Vaz prodded the surface of the panel to check and decided it felt more like the bristles of an invisible silicone brush.
Mal was opening up a gap ahead of them, calling out like he was looking for a wayward cat. “Phillips … Phil-lips … come on, time to go home. Lots of angry hinge-heads outside.”
“Left,” BB said. “He went left. Right’s a dead end, anyway. Look, Mal, let Naomi take point, will you? I need her sensors out front.”
Mal stopped and turned slowly around, cradling his rifle. “Right away, sir. Any other orders?”
“You know I mean well.”
“Yeah.”
Naomi strode past Mal, leaving Vaz on tail. Vaz was now starting to worry whether he’d actually hear anyone coming up behind him. The passages swallowed sound. He was waiting for the outraged faithful to jump him from behind: it was beginning to feel like a jungle patrol minus the trees. He turned around every few meters and walked backward for a few paces.
“Ick,” BB said. “You don’t need sensors to detect that.”
Vaz faced forward and inhaled. He couldn’t pick up anything through his filters, so he lifted his helmet and sniffed again. It was a very familiar odor. “Smells like the heads.”
“Oh dear, the Prof’s let the side down,” Mal said. “Peeing in a temple. I’ll be writing to The Times about this. You still on the trail, BB?”
“Yes. He went down there—ahhhh. Look at that.” It was another panel of carvings. “That’s like the one in the Dyson sphere. The storehouse-garage-sarcophagus symbol. And lots of negative symbols. I might have to send this back to the Admiral and ask for a Huragok to take a look at it.”
“What makes you think they’d know?”
“Why leave a janitor with instructions he can’t read?”
“But why wouldn’t they volunteer that information?” Naomi asked. “Were they ordered not to, or is it a case of just having to ask them for every damn thing?”
Vaz caught a quick burst of static on his radio, as if someone was trying to contact them but unable to get a stable signal. It had to be Devereaux. Mal turned around. He’d heard it, too.
“I’m going to assume that was Dev,” he said. “And that something’s wrong. Because it usually is.”
“Skip the survey, BB.” Naomi started jogging. “Just follow Phillips.” She speeded up, sounding like a trip-hammer even with the sound-deadening acoustics of the passages. “Phillips! Come on, Phillips, answer me.”
All Vaz could do was run after her. Mal broke into a sprint. Vaz found himself trying to calculate how long it would take a hinge-head to cover three klicks, based on the length of stride, and the worrying answer was that it would be a lot sooner than he thought. He was pretty certain now that at the end of the trail of Phillips’s unique cocktail of odors, he’d trip over a body.
“You realize that wherever we are, we’re going to come up a bloody long way from the dropship even if we find a way out,” Mal panted.
“So we retrace our steps.”
“Hey, what happened to the lighting?”
“It’s still—oh. Yeah.” Vaz noticed there were no more visible light fittings hanging from the ceiling, but somehow there was still light. “How do they do that?”
“I think we’re entering Weirdville now.”
Vaz couldn’t see Naomi. The passage curved around to the left and then there was a sharp corner, but BB’s voice came over the radio before Mal got there.
“I’ve lost the trail,” BB said. “It’s just stopped dead.”
Mal let out a long breath and kept going. Vaz was right on his heels, still checking over his shoulder for enraged hinge-heads. When they caught up with Naomi, she was standing at a T-junction in the passage. Vaz felt that buzz in his earpiece again, like radio interference or a failing loop-suppressor, and stopped to look in both directions.
“No scent?” Vaz asked. “It doesn’t necessarily mean he hasn’t been here, does it? Where else could he go?”
Naomi prodded the stonework. “This isn’t like Onyx. This is solid. He’s gone one way or the other.”
“Okay.” Mal pointed left. “Naomi, you take that passage and we’ll take this one. Keep broadcasting and turn back if you lose the signal. I don’t want to misplace anyone else.”
Vaz was now starting to imagine cuffing Phillips around the ear when he found him rather than slapping him on the back with relief. Once they found him, they still had to exfil. Vaz hoped that whatever Phillips had found was worth all this crap.
“Door,” Naomi said. “I’ve found a door. I’m waiting here until you come to me.”
“You heard the lady.” Mal did a U-turn and gestured at Vaz to go back. “I’m going to kick his arse into the middle of next week.”
“I hope you realize how many panels I’ve not been able to find and record,” BB said irritably.
“That’s all right. Adj can fill in the gaps.”
It was a door all right, lik
e a smaller version of the one at the front of the temple, with an actual locking mechanism rather than a button. Naomi stood beside it, running her finger around the frame while she checked the TACPAD on her wrist.
“It’s just a door,” she said. “Better open it.”
“Live dangerously.” Mal raised his rifle and aimed into the doorway. Vaz stood to the other side. “One, two…”
Naomi turned the circular handle and it swung outward. For a second, all Vaz could see was a patch of light and absolute black shadow until his visor adjusted. He could hear crowd noises but they sounded distant, and—more important—there was the familiar and comforting whine of a dropship’s idling drive. But there was no sign of Phillips.
“Now I’m getting really pissed off with him,” Vaz said. “Didn’t he realize we were coming?”
“Evidently not.” Naomi went ahead and stalked up the short passage. “Permission to grab him and cart him off, Staff?”
“By the nuts if you want to,” Mal said. “Dev, can you hear me?”
“Got you, Staff. Meter’s running. Where are you?”
“Where are you?”
“Right behind the temple. I’ve got two meters’ clearance on both wings.”
BB was still griping. “I can’t pick up any odor. Opening the door might have diffused it, but I doubt it.”
Naomi reached the end of the passage and stepped outside. Then she held her hand up to stop. “I think we’ve come in a circle,” she said. “I can see the wall in the plaza. And no Phillips.”
“Oh, for Chrissakes—Dev, has he come out near you?”
“No Phillips here, Staff.”
“We’re going to have to search the grounds.” Vaz didn’t feel very comradely right then. “Quietly. Are those hinge-heads inside the walls yet?”
They stood outside for a few moments, looking and listening, just in case Phillips decided to pop up from a hiding place and they could run for it. But it was a few seconds too long. Vaz edged beyond the building and held his breath. He was looking at maybe a hundred Elites as they clustered around the front door, right inside the compound. Someone was arguing with them. It wasn’t Phillips. It looked like Olar, the hinge-head they’d met going in.