With that said, Thel shrugged his own cloak off, and stood naked before them. "Kaidon..." one of them whispered, shocked.

"As you can all see with your own eyes, they failed to even scratch my body." Thel glared at them all as one of his personal guard rushed to his side to pull the cloak back on. "I killed two of them, but left the last one alive so we could discuss the matter of who sent him."

A lie, but it was a telling lie, as Thel saw one of the elders stiffen, then let out a long breath.

Koida, Thel remembered his name. Koida 'Vadam. Thel felt the faint kick of disappointment.

Any of these elders could have sired Thel. It was not the Sangheili way to let a child know its father, as Sangheili took sires based on their fighting prowess. Sangheili only truly could know who their mothers' brothers were, and so were raised by their uncles to learn the fighting arts.

Many of these elders had once been great warriors. And several of Thel's uncles sat before him.

Koida, thankfully, was not one.

"I am Thel 'Vadamee." Thel stressed the "ee" that signified his military service. "If you voted me for kaidon, surely you knew I could defend myself?"

Koida leaned forward, his wrinkled hands on the table before him to steady himself. "You have spent your last years fighting the lesser races of the Covenant, not Sangheili. I feared you had weakened, and would not make a strong kaidon of the keep."

Thel shook his head. "The only ones who grow soft, it seems, are elders who cluster in their small rooms, plotting against their kaidon. Had you been strong, you would have waited in my room to attack me yourself."

The elders murmured agreement, and Thel walked around the table, grabbed Koida's cloak, and pulled him up from his chair. He pushed him toward

the nearest massive wall, where the Vadam Saga stopped.

"There are the words of our lineage, Koida," Thel said. "Where is your name on that wall?"

Koida shook his head sadly, his wrinkled, faded brown skin bunching as he did so. "It is not on the wall."

"We Sangheili are only as good as our deeds. We are born and live in the common rooms, beginning life equal to each other in the eyes of the keep, and rise according to our ability. You should have voted against me and stood your ground, or killed me yourself. Your cowardice is not a trait I want spread through the lineage of Vadam."

Koida's eyes widened fully. "I will fall on my sword, kaidon, but please do not revoke the blood of my line."

"I did not quench it," Thel said. "You did."

Koida leapt forward, suddenly finding courage, and Thel pulled his energy sword out. The blue plasma leapt out, and Thel swung the blade through Koida's neck.

The elder's head rolled across the floor, and purple blood gushed out, splattering the Saga's chiseled words. It was the closest the elder would get to having any part of himself on the wall.

Thel turned to his guards. "The Koida line shall leave. They are no longer Vadam. They have until sunrise to do so. Any of Koida's line still here after that will meet the same fate as he did. I grant them mercy, because Koida at least found his spirit right before death. Had he taken a knee and begged, they would all be dead."

"It is our honor," the guards said, and left to spread the order.

Thel turned back to the elders. "I have been looking over the state of Vadam." The harbor brought in profits, the buildings reached from the valley under the keep out across the land, and Vadam's serfs were happy and working hard, hoping to rise and distinguish themselves and gain a position in the keep. "I am happy with your guidance. The lineage is strong."

"Vadam is strong," an elder agreed, perhaps hoping to gain favor and notice.

"But I am no figurehead," Thel continued, ignoring the interruption for the moment. "I will take a close interest in all our investments and activities.

Those who work for only their own gain, and not that of Vadam, risk my wrath. Am I understood?"

They all did. "Yes, kaidon."

"Good." Thel flicked the energy sword off, and slid the handle into the depths of his cloak. "You were right to elect me kaidon. I have news for you. I have been given a promotion, and command of a ship that is part of a fleet created by a High Prophet himself. We have discovered a new human

world."

"We pity the poor creatures who are about to be destroyed by your mighty hand," one elder said.

"What is the name of this world?" Another asked.

"The humans call it Charybdis IX. I leave you all now in stewardship of Vadam." Thel eyed the elders. "I hope it is in the most capable hands."

They all rushed to reassure the new kaidon that, indeed, it was.

Chapter TEN

UNSC FRIGATE

MIDSUMMER NIGHT,

OUTER FRINGES, ECTANUS 45 SYSTEM

Keyes walked into the chart room of the

Midsummer Night.

The whole bridge crew sat around the tabletop chart, nodding as he entered. His fellow junior officers were all here: Lieutenant Badia Campbell ran ops, Lieutenant, Junior Grade, Rai Li on weapons, and Lieutenant Dante Kirtley ran communications.

"Heard you got hit pretty hard, Keyes." Badia Campbell looked up from her notes. The jovial note in her voice sounded slightly forced.

A piece of deck plate had slammed into Keyes while he floated toward the ship, but he had waved on the medics that had been sent to pick him up --

he thought the others needed it more. The explosion had killed some twenty Helljumpers. And although the container with the wounded had been badly damaged, it had been recovered, and many survived. Other Helljumpers had been concussed, or suffered internal bleeding and injuries from their

proximity to the Shockwave.

But more people had made it out than Keyes initially had even hoped for. And many were treating him with a newfound respect, something above and beyond just his rank and his reputation of being well learned.

And that added respect included the bridge crew all around the chart table looking up at him. Keyes hadn't had much time in the first forty-eight hours to get to know them. They'd all been running around, checking on repairs and trying to figure out why things weren't working.

But on the bridge all three of his fellow officers had been crisp, together, and on top of things ... though Campbell sounded tired and a bit short-tempered with the people reporting to her.

Keyes would've been too. Ops was taking the brunt of the work to get things running smoothly. "Minor head wound," Keyes said.

Rai Li smiled. "I personally think your skull's too thick for debris to get through."

They all laughed, breaking the ice. This was the first time they'd all sat in a room together. They'd been busy with their duties, and then reporting to Zheng, who had been very hands-off so far with the crew, trusting only his officers.

That hadn't sat well, a lot of nervous crew wondered why Zheng had been given a ship after sacrificing his last one in a suicidal dash. They whispered that he'd been caught sitting in the captain's chair, staring out at space, crying silently to himself. Everyone tiptoed around the man.

The shakedown problems didn't leave a lot of time to size each other up. But the

Finnegan's Wake incident had now run them through a critical event, and everyone aboard had stopped bickering over petty things. The ship seemed to have pulled together. After the somberness of the past twenty-four hours, it was nice to smile.

"Should have seen Kirtley's face when Zheng hailed you and you answered. He was knee-deep in his console, upside down, no less, trying to figure out if something had gone wrong with our equipment," Campbell said.

"Well, we've had so little luck on equipment so far." Kirtley shook his head. "I know we need to refit and build these ships as fast as possible to face the Covenant, but we need to be a little bit more careful about build quality ..."

The door opened and Commander Zheng walked in, Major Akio Watanabe close behind. They all stood to attention, but Zheng waved his hand. The

exuberant mood the officers had shared died. Even they were beginning to be affected by Zheng's reputation. They only interacted with him formally, as they were now. It made him hard to gauge. And Keyes's efforts to talk to the commander had been rebuffed with the hasty excuse of being too busy.

"As you were," Zheng said.

They sat back down. Except Watanabe, who held onto a small box and continued to stand behind Zheng. If Zheng was standoffish, Keyes thought, then Watanabe here was almost as mysterious, staying in his room alone for most of the trip so far.

"Good to have you back, Lieutenant Keyes," Zheng said. "We dodged quite a bullet, there. The ship owes you."

"Thank you, sir," Keyes ducked his head, somewhat embarrassed at the attention. This was wildly outgoing for Zheng. "What about the captured Innie?

Has he talked?"

Everyone turned to Watanabe.

"Well, he has admitted to being an Insurrectionist, yes." Watanabe looked down, as if in thought. "I haven't gotten much else out of him."

Kirtley murmured, "I'd hate to be that guy right now."

Watanabe snapped his head up and stared at the two of them. "Mr. Dante Kirtley ... do you think I brought aboard a portable torture chamber?"

Kirtley didn't answer.

"I know we're the boogeymen," Watanabe continued. "But don't be ridiculous. You torture a man, he'll tell you anything to make it stop. Anything you think you want. He might even, if you're pushing hard enough, believe whatever that is with all the will that he has left."

Akio Watanabe unbuttoned the top of his sleeves. He pulled them back to reveal scars running from his wrists all the way up to his elbows. A fast unclip of his odd, high-necked collar revealed horrible scarring around his throat. "If I tortured them, I'd be no better than them."

He sat down and rebuttoned his uniform slowly.

"I'm sorry," Kirtley started to say, but Watanabe cut him off.

"If I'm overloyal to the Prowler Corps, and by extension, the UNSC, it is because they rescued me from hell itself. Now, let's not ever talk about this again."

"Of course, sir," Keyes said, eager to get everyone past it. "So no information out of him."

"Sadly, not much. The Insurrectionists use cell tactics, and the man we captured doesn't know too much other than the details of this mission. I'm using a mild sedative to relax him, and a lie detector he doesn't know about. So I'm just chatting with him. With the detector and random conversation for calibration, we may yet learn something, but don't get too hopeful."

Rai Li shook her head. "Doesn't make sense, what they did."

"Really?" Watanabe cocked his head. "We've just ordered that there be no more non-Navy travel. They can't resupply each other, they have no communications ability. They're isolated. We've incidentally dealt the Insurrectionists all across the colonies a killing blow, as a complete sidenote to the war against the Covenant."

"We should have done this years ago, then," Kirtley said.

"What kind of martial civilization would we be where civilians weren't allowed to travel unless by the military, where all communications between worlds were controlled by us?" Watanabe asked.

"We'd be a functional one, without uprisings. Orderly." It seemed obvious to Kirtley. Keyes had to admit he agreed somewhat.

"Ah." Watanabe shrugged. "Maybe. At first. But don't forget, these Insurrectionists knew what frequency to jam. They have sympathizers in the UNSC, they could be anywhere. It isn't as simple as killing this or cutting that. People facing an invasion, no matter what we'd like to believe, behave in a variety of different ways. Some ready for battle, some try to bargain, others look to what advantages they can gain in the short term, and old wounds still run deep."

"In the meantime," Commander Zheng said, "we need to focus on the next leg of our mission."

Watanabe held out the box. "And now it is time to unseal our orders. Commander Zheng, your thumbprint please?"

Zheng pressed his thumb against the screen. Then Watanabe did the same.

The pad lit up, and Watanabe handed it over to Zheng, who read it.

"Would you like to brief them, Captain?"

Zheng looked up with a frown. "You know the particulars?"

"I'm the one who suggested this operation." Watanabe steepled his fingers together. "It's a situation I've been following for a while now. We haven't had the resources, until I became aware of this ship."

"Then go ahead, Mr. Watanabe. It's your show."

"During my ... recovery," Watanabe started, "I was on loan from the Prowler Corps to the data gathering and analysis section of a certain ONI branch that I'm not at liberty to name. It was there I started coming across reports of Covenant weaponry turning up in civilian hands throughout the colonies."

"But that isn't unusual." Campbell leaned forward. "Marines who've tangled with Covenant forces bring them back. They can hock them on the black market."

Watanabe unfolded his hands and leaned back in his chair. "That's true. But according to regulations you're supposed to turn them in to ONI, and not everyone is so ... rules bound. With the Cole Protocol being rolled out, you'll note that bringing a Covenant weapon back to any UNSC installation or Inner Colony location is an act of treason under one of the attached sub-articles. They might not be weapons, but drones, or bombs, or have beacons in them that will let the Covenant map our locations."

"That'll have a chilling effect on the pawn shops near military bases," Li said.

A strained smile quirked on Watanabe's lips. "One imagines. However, I'm not talking about the usual levels of black market collectibles. Until the Cole Protocol was put in place, we saw a dramatic increase in Covenant weaponry flooding the market. My fellow analysts and I came to believe that somewhere out there, Insurrectionists or other parties may actually be trading with the Covenant. Or, alternatively, they are being co-opted by the Covenant somehow, instead of merely being destroyed."