After evading another barrage from the Kig-Yar in the hold, he scampered through an umbilical back onto Minor Transgression. He hurried into the ship's methane suite (the only room constantly filled with the gas), and eagerly undid the chest-buckles of his harness. As he backed into a triangular depression in one of the square room's walls, a hidden compressor sputtered and began to refill his tank.

Dadab slipped out of his harness and swung his oversized forearms across his chest. His jaw ached from his mask's tight seal, and he tore it off and flung it away. But before the mask hit the floor, it was intercepted by a lighting-fast pearlescent swipe.

Floating in the center of the suite was a Huragok, a creature with a stooped head and elongated snout held aloft by a collection of translucent pink sacs filled with a variety of gasses. Four anterior limbs sprouted from its spine—tentacles, to be exact, one of which held Dadab's mask. The Huragok brought the mask close to a row of dark, round sensory nodes along its snout and gave it a thorough inspection. Then it flexed two of its tentacles in a quick, inquisitive gesture.

Dadab contorted the digits of one of his hardened hands so they matched the default arrangement of the Huragok's limbs: four fingertips, facing straight out from the Deacon's chest. <No, damage, I, tired, wear. > His fingers splayed and contracted, bent and overlapped as they formed each word's unique pose.

The Huragok released a disappointed bleat from a sphincterlike valve in one of its sacs. The emission propelled it past Dadab to the tank receptacle where it hung the mask on a hook that protruded from the wall.

< Did you find the device? > the Huragok asked, turning back to Dadab. The Deacon held up the box, and the Huragok's tentacles trembled with excitement: < May I touch what I can see? > < Touch, yes, smell, no. > Dadab replied.

But the Huragok either didn't mind the box's residual Kig-Yar stench, or it simply failed to get Dadab's joke. It wrapped a tentacle around the alien plunder and eagerly lifted it to its snout.

Dadab flopped onto a cushioned pallet near the suite's free-standing food-dispenser. He uncoiled a nipple connected to a spool of flexible tubing, put it in his mouth and began to suck.

Soon, an unappetizing but nutritious sludge surged down the tube and into his gullet.

He watched the Huragok pore over the alien box, its sacs swelling and deflating in an expression of what? Impatience? It had taken the Deacon most of the voyage to grasp the creature's sign language. He could only guess at the emotional subtleties of its bladder-speak.

Indeed, it had taken him many cycles just to learn the Huragok's name: Lighter Than Some.

Dadab knew the basics of Huragok reproduction, or rather Huragok creation. The creatures manufactured their offspring out of readily available organic materials with the same deft activity of their tentacles' cilia, which Lighter Than Some was using to bore a neat hole in the alien box. It was a truly fantastic process, but what Dadab found most unusual was that the most difficult step for Huragok parents was to make their creations perfectly buoyant—to fill them with the exact right mix of gases. As a result, new Huragok would initially float or sink, and their parents would name them accordingly: Far Too Heavy; Easy To Adjust; Lighter Than Some.

Clamping the nipple in his teeth, Dadab inhaled through his nose, swelling his lungs to capacity. The methane in the suite was no less stale than what he carried on his back, but it felt good to breathe unencumbered. As he watched Lighter Than Some insert his tentacle into the box and cautiously probe its interior, Dadab was once again reminded of how much he appreciated the creature's company.

There had been multiple Huragok on the training voyages he'd taken during his education at the Ministry seminary. But they had kept to themselves, and had been singularly focused on keeping their ships in good working order. Which is why Dadab had been more than a little surprised when Lighter Than Some had first flexed its limbs in his direction—repeated a single pose over and over until the Unggoy realized it was attempting a simple: < Hello! > Suddenly, Lighter Than Some jerked its tentacle from the box—drew back as if shocked.

The Huragok's sacs swelled, and it began flailing its limbs in spastic discourse. Dadab struggled to keep up.

< Intelligence! … Coordinates …!… Undoubtedly the aliens … Even more than our own!

> < Stop! > Dadab interrupted, spitting out the food-nipple and jumping to his feet. < Repeat!

> With visible effort the Huragok forced its tentacles to curl more slowly. Dadab watched with darting eyes. Eventually, he grasped Lighter Than Some's meaning.

< You, certain? > < Yes! The Shipmistress must be told! > Minor Transgression was not a large ship. And in the same amount of time it took Dadab to refit his tank, doing his best not to wrinkle his tunic, he and the Huragok were out of the suite and down Minor Transgression's single central passage to the bridge.

"Either remove your mask," the Shipmistress said after Dadab breathlessly delivered Lighter Than Some's assessment, "or learn to speak more clearly." Chur'R-Yar was perched on an elevated command chair. Her light yellow skin made her the brightest thing on the small, shadowy bridge.

Dadab swallowed twice to clear some residual sludge from his throat and began again. "The device is a collection of circuits similar to the processing pathways running throughout our ship."

"My ship," Chur'R-Yar interjected.

Dadab winced. "Yes, of course." Not for the first time, he wished the Shipmistress shared Zhar's spiny plumage; the appendages changed color depending on the male of the species' mood. Right now the Deacon was desperate to gauge the level of Chur'R-Yar's impatience. But like all female Kig-Yar the back of the Shipmistress' head was covered with dark brown calluses—thick skin like a patchwork of bruises that made her narrow shoulders seem even more hunched than they really were.

Dadab decided to play it safe and cut to the chase. "The box is some sort of navigational device. And although it is damaged …" The Deacon gestured furtively at the Huragok, who bobbed to a wall-mounted control panel. "It still remembers its point of origin."

Lighter Than Some drummed the tips of its tentacles against the panel's luminous switches.

Soon, a three-dimensional holographic representation of the volume of space around Minor Transgression coalesced in a holo-tank before Chur'R-Yar's chair. The tank was merely the space between two dark glass lenses: one built into a platinum pedestal, the other imbedded in the bridge's ceiling. Like most surfaces on the Kig-Yar ship, the ceiling was covered with a purple metal sheeting that, catching the hologram's light, displayed a darker hexagonal pattern —an underlying Beryllium grid.

"We were here," Dadab began as a red triangle representing the Kig-Yar ship appeared in the projection. "When we registered the alien vessel's radiation leak." As he continued, the projection (controlled by Lighter Than Some) shifted and zoomed, presenting additional icons as required. "This is where we made contact. And this is where Ligh—where your Huragok believes the vessel initiated its journey."

The Shipmistress angled one of her globose, ruby-red eyes at the highlighted system. It was outside the missionary allotment the Ministry had charged her with patrolling—beyond the boundary of Covenant space, though Chur'R-Yar knew it was heresy to suggest such a limit.

The Prophets believed the Forerunners once had dominion over the entire galaxy, so every system was hallowed ground—a potential repository of important relics.

"And its destination?" Chur'R-Yar asked, her long tongue rattling against the top of her beak-like mouth.

Again the Deacon signed to the Huragok. The creature bleated from its sacs and flicked two of its limbs. "I'm afraid that data has been lost," Dadab replied.

The Shipmistress curled her claws around the arms of her chair. She hated that the Unggoy had learned the Huragok's language—that the Deacon now served as intermediary between her and a member of her crew. Not for the first time, she considered losing the Deacon out an airlock. But staring at the unexplored system, she realized the pious little gas-sucker had suddenly become a great deal more useful.

"Have I ever told you how much I appreciate your good counsel?" the Ship-mistress asked, relaxing into her chair. "What do you suggest we tell the Ministry?"

Dadab's harness began to chafe around his neck. He fought back the urge to scratch.

"As in all matters, I will follow the Shipmistress' recommendation." Dadab chose his words very carefully. It wasn't often Chur'R-Yar asked him a question; and she had never asked for his opinion. "I am here to serve, and in so doing honor the will of the Prophets."

"Perhaps we should wait to make our report until we have had a chance to survey the alien system?" Chur'R-Yar mused. "Give the Holy Ones as much information as we can?"

"I am sure the Ministry would … appreciate the Ship-mistress' desire to bear more complete witness to this important discovery." Dadab hadn't said "approve," but if the female Kig-Yar wanted to take her ship out of the allotment, Dadab couldn't stop her. She was, after all, Shipmistress.

But the Deacon had another, more personal reason for his compliance. If they did find something of value in the unexplored system, he knew this would only help speed his promotion. And to accomplish that, Dadab was willing to bend a few rules. After all, he thought, communication delays happen all the time.

"An excellent recommendation." Chur'R-Yar's tongue flicked between her jagged teeth. "I will set a new course." Then, with a cursory flip of her head, "May we follow in Their Footsteps."

"And so better mind The Path." The Deacon answered, completing the benediction.

The saying honored the Forerunner's divination—the moment they activated their seven mysterious Halo rings and disappeared from the galaxy, leaving none of their kind behind.

Indeed, this belief that one could become a God by following in the Forerunners' footsteps was the crux of the Covenant religion. One day, the Prophets had long promised their faithful hordes, we shall find the Holy Rings! Discover the very means of the Forerunners' transcendence!

Dadab, and billions of his fellow Covenant, believed this absolutely.

The Deacon backed away from the Shipmistress' command-chair, signaling Lighter Than Some to follow. He pivoted as smartly as his methane tank allowed then trotted through the bridge's automatic sliding door.

"Zealot," the Shipmistress hissed as the two angled halves of the door slid shut. She tapped a holographic switch in the arm of her chair that controlled the ship's signal gear. "Return at once. Bring only what you can carry."

"But Shipmistress," Zhar's voice crackled from her chair, "all this food would—"

"Return to your stations!" Chur'R-Yar screeched, her patience exhausted on the Deacon.

"Leave it all behind!" The Shipmistress gave the switch an angry smack. Then, with a rasp of her tongue only she could hear: "Soon we will find much, much more."

CHAPTER FOUR

UNSC COLONY WORLD HARVEST, EPSILON

INDI SYSTEM, DECEMBER 21, 2524

During its slip from Earth, the computer in the cryo-bay of the UNSC fast-attack corvette Two for Flinching led Avery through a long, cyclical slumber. Per his request, the circuits let Avery enjoy stretches of anabolic rest, bringing him through dream-filled REM as quickly and as infrequently as possible. All of this was accomplished by careful adjustments to the near- freezing atmosphere of Avery's cryo-pod and the judicious application of intravenous pharmaceuticals—drugs that both controlled the frequency and duration of cryo-subjects' sleep cycles and influenced the content of their dreams.

But no matter what brand of meds Avery got before being iced, he always dreamed about the exact same thing: the worst of his missions against the Insurrectionists—a series of scorched snapshots culminating in whatever operation he'd just completed.

Even though the bloody specifics of these missions were things Avery would have preferred to experience only once, the true horror of his dreams was their suggestion that he had done much more harm than good. His aunt's voice echoed inside his head….

Make me proud, do what's right.

The cryo-computer observed a surge of activity in Avery's brain—an effort to yank himself out of REM—and upped his dosage. Two for Flinching had just emerged from Slipspace and was vectoring toward its destination. It was time for the computer to initiate Avery's thaw, and it was standard operating procedure to keep subjects dreaming throughout the sequence.

The meds took hold, and Avery sunk deep. And his mind'seye picture show continued to roll….

A hauler jack-knifed in a roadside ditch, smoke belching from its burning engine. An initial round of cheers from the other marines in a checkpoint tower, thinking Avery had just nailed an Innie bomber. Then the realization that their ARGUS units had malfunctioned—that the hauler's dead civilian driver had done nothing but pick up the wrong load.

Avery had only been a few months out of boot camp. And already the war had soured.

If you listened to the carefully packaged UNSC propaganda, Innies were all the same sort of bad apple: after two centuries of common cause, isolated groups of ungrateful colonists began to agitate for greater autonomy—for the freedom to act in their individual worlds' best interests, not those of the empire at large.

In the beginning, there were sizeable numbers of people who felt sympathy for the Innie cause. The rebels were understandably sick of being told how to run their lives—what jobs to take, how many children to make—by CA bureaucrats; the often heavy-handed proxies of an Earth-based government with an increasingly poor understanding of the colonies' unique challenges. But that sympathy quickly evaporated when (after years of frustrating negotiations that went nowhere) the more radical Innie factions abandoned politics for violence. At first they hit military targets and known CA sympathizers. But as the UNSC began its counterinsurgency operations, more and more innocent people were caught in the crossfire.