"So you know," Jai said, "the moment you hand over the data, the Covenant will deal with the Rubble the same way they did Madrigal."

Delgado had no reply. He stood with his arms crossed, staring at Jai. "Maybe. It's our problem, not yours. The UNSC isn't running things here."

"All right," Jai said. "But we'll be watching you."

The freighter thudded into dock under Mike's control. The air inside shifted, and Delgado's ears popped. Adriana led Delgado down to the airlock, where the door had already opened.

Delgado hesitantly walked through. He bit his lip. They wouldn't shoot him in the back, would they? They had honor, and a code, didn't they?

Adriana leaned against the rim of the airlock. "Good-bye, Mr. Delgado. Try to stay out of trouble."

He turned and looked back at her, the tall, dangerous Spartan without her armor. The freighter's airlock door lurched, and started to slowly close, rust scraping off the surface as it did.

"And don't forget, there were no Spartans here." She said it seriously, without a sense of humor.

After the freighter left, Delgado looked out one of the airlock portholes at the distant Jackal ship.

The Spartans were right. The moment the Jackals got their hands on the navigation data they'd probably sell it to their brothers in the Covenant. He was going to have to figure out how to secure the navigation data. There were way too many people after it. If the Rubble was going to survive against the Covenant, it needed to be safe.

Chapter EIGHT

FREIGHTER

PETYA,

OUTER RUBBLE, 23 LIBRAE

Jai watched the last sliver of light fade away as the airlock shut. They were back alone in the freighter

Petya.

He folded his arms as Adriana walked back up at him.

"We should have kept him," Jai said as she passed.

Adriana paused and looked him eye to eye. "We've had this discussion. If you'd like to order me to go get him,

Petty

Officer Jai, I will follow your commands."

He stared back at the intense blue eyes. "Would you?"

She sighed and left him leaning against the wall. The freighter shuddered as Mike disengaged the airlock and coasted away from the asteroid.

Gray Team,

Jai thought to himself with a small amount of frustration.

He'd ask what he'd done to deserve being put with the other two, but he already knew. It had started when he was six. He'd been snatched away from a life he only dimly remembered and taken to a military training facility on the planet Reach, along with seventy-five other children.

Jai remembered being herded into an amphitheater after waking up from the chill of coldsleep by a tough, gristly looking Naval drill instructor in fatigues. Every child had had an instructor standing next to them.

And then, up front on a raised dais, a woman with dark hair and gray-blue eyes cleared her throat. Beside her stood a man with medals that they would all come to respect and fear: C.P.O. Mendez. But it was clear this woman was in charge. All the big Navy men in the room responded to the crack of her orders with a nervous jump.

The woman had looked at the crowd of nervous children and told them "As per Naval Code 45812, you are hereby conscripted into the UNSC Special Project, code-named SPARTAN II."

Conscripted.

Jai hadn't liked the sound of the word. It felt wrong. And when he'd heard it, he stood up and tried to leave. The heavily muscled drill instructor next to him had grabbed him by the shoulders and shoved him down.

Shocked, Jai continued listening as the woman said, "You have been called upon to serve. You will be trained ... and you will become the best we can make of you. You will be the protectors of Earth and all her colonies."

He'd been six, damnit.

His life in Bhuj in an orphanage hadn't been much better than the hellish boot camp that followed the next morning, all orchestrated by C.P.O. Mendez, but Jai had roamed the streets on his own time back on Bhuj. He'd scrapped with other urchins, stolen food, and found all the best boltholes in the city to hide and watch other people from.

It had been his life, and even as a wiry six-year-old, Jai had decided conscription didn't figure into his plans.

After the first night of boot camp Jai met Adriana, who'd been out that night sneaking around.

"Are you leaving?" she'd asked in awkward English.

"Yes," Jai said. "I need something to pick a lock with."

Adriana had handed him a sliver of metal from under her tongue, a paperclip stolen from somewhere on the base.

Jai had picked a lock and they'd snuck out from the barracks, using the shadows until they'd broken for the gates.

He got halfway up the fence before the guards turned the electricity on, and Jai had dropped to the ground with Adriana, both writhing in the dust and screaming.

"Good evening," Mendez had said, walking up to look down at him. "I don't recall giving you two permission to leave base."

Neither of them said anything; they just stared at the forest off in the distance.

So the next week Jai used a blanket to help them climb, and the guards caught them on the other side. And after that, it was sprinting across the barren space around the camp. They were hunted down in the forest, but he and Adriana split up and eluded their pursuers for days. They came after him on the roads past the forest, hunting them down in large teams by Warthog and Pelican.

But no matter how much Mendez punished him with extraordinary runs, push-ups, latrine cleaning duty, no matter how hard he tried to break him, Jai and Adriana always planned the next attempt.

The men who had to catch the young Jai paid the price too. The tougher he trained under Mendez, the harder he fought when captured. Guards got

shattered kneecaps, lost eyes, fingers, and toes. They'd started tranquilizing him from a Pelican at the end, waiting until he burst from the forest and shooting him down from the safety of the sky.

Until one day, five months in, the woman asked for him. Catherine Halsey. Always watching them from a distance, always scribbling her notes down.

Jai had sat in front of her desk, C.P.O. Mendez by his side.

"What do you want?" Halsey asked, suddenly looking up from her desk.

"You called me here," Jai had said defiantly.

Halsey chuckled. "I did. Do you want to leave, Jai?"

"Yes!"

The woman who'd had him snatched away from everything studied Jai like he was a strange bug under a rock. "You understand what you were told, when you first arrived?"

"You stole me. You want me to fight for you. Fight for Earth. It isn't even my home planet," Jai said. "I don't want to be here."

Halsey nodded, and suddenly looked tired. As if she didn't want to do what came next. But then her spine snapped straight. "Okay, Jai. You see this?"

She'd picked up a small dart. "Some of you don't have what it takes. Some have folded. Some just aren't ready to be protectors of the colonies. And that's okay. This dart will induce selective neural paralysis. The next time you break out of the forest, the guards in the Pelicans will shoot you in the head with one of these, and you'll wake up in a city. You won't remember any of this."

A crawling sensation in the back of Jai's mind told him that this was a lie. A memory eraser? It didn't sound quite right, nor did Halsey's eyes look right. There was a deeper pool of weariness and sadness there. Jai had no doubt the dart would erase something.

Halsey must have noticed Jai shift. She amended her words. "You may also lose more than that. There are no guarantees. The process is messy, and it's worse with a child because they have so few memories to lose."

Jai swallowed and stared at the dart.

"Of course," Halsey said, steel in her voice. "You could just continue your training, and your duty."

"Why?" Jai asked.

"You're an orphan, right, Jai? State Dorm Five-Five, bed number sixty-eight? And you want to go back to that?" Jai nodded.

Halsey sighed. "You think they remember you there? We called; no one had even noticed I transferred you. No one there cared enough to even check your bed until I called, and you've been gone for months, Jai."

Jai stared back at her. It shouldn't have hurt to hear that. He kept to himself, why was he surprised they hadn't noticed?

"No vendors remember you; your hiding places in the city have been taken over by rats. No one has even noticed you were gone. You had no family, no friends, nothing. You left no imprint on the world when you were taken, Jai. You're fighting so hard to leave, when there's nothing for you to go back to."

Jai shook his head and bit his lip.

"But here, Jai," Halsey continued, driving her words home, "you have people who notice when you try to leave. Mendez who trains you. And even though you don't have family, I find it interesting that you keep seeking out Adriana to make your escape with. Would you miss her if you left? Would you be happy if we just erased your mind with a single shot, and erased your name from our computers, and Adriana just... forgot all about you?"

Jai stared at her, his mouth dry. He didn't say anything, but inside he felt like he'd been destroyed. She'd picked him apart, like he was some simple puzzle. Mendez could break their bodies, but Halsey could break their minds.

"I'm giving you a final offer, Jai," Halsey said. "The guards are around the forest tonight -- if you escape we'll delete you from our records and it will be like you were never here. But if you are in your bed tomorrow morning, I offer you a family, Jai, and a place to make your mark and be remembered.

We have special things in mind for you and the others. Very special things. I swear to you."

Jai stared at her. And he had believed her.

Adriana had also returned to the barracks that night looking shaken.

But they broke out again, of course. They made it out past the fence using a tunnel they'd dug together a week before. There were caches of food and simple weapons in the forest, buried under trees.

But they'd both stopped well clear of the edge of the forest. "What'd she tell you?" Jai asked.

Adriana had tears streaming down her cheeks. "I can't tell you."

"But you're not going to go, are you?"

"No. I like this too much to go," she'd said, with that odd Adriana smile that Jai was now always comfortable seeing. "Me either."

They'd both sat on a log and watched the Pelicans crisscross the sky outside the forest, and then turned back for the barracks.

Mendez didn't comment on Jai's dusty boots the next morning, just threw a ten-mile run at him with a small grin.

When Jai had returned, Mendez introduced him to another quiet kid with even browner skin than Jai's and tight curly hair who stood outside the

barracks running in place next to Adriana, both of them holding heavy wooden logs over their heads.

"At ease! Jai, Adriana, and Mike," Mendez said. "You are now a team. You will eat together, run together, drill together. Fight together."

"Sir!"

When Mendez left, Adriana and Jai had turned to Mike. "What did you do?"

Mike smiled. "I stole a Pelican," he said, innocently. "Then blew it up when they got me."

And all those years ago, all three of them had shaken hands. Gray Team trained to be isolated, slipped into distant fields for missions where there was little, if any, oversight. And after the physical augmentation, and as they became lethal killers, the ONI branch began to use the three loners for long-duration missions way out of reach from command.

They were ghosts that could wreak terrific damage.

Which was why this latest mission made sense. Supplement

ONI Prowler Corps efforts to destroy all information that was left behind enemy lines.

But the same attributes that made Gray Team an incredible asset made it hard for Jai to be its commanding officer. Gray Team was... different. Adriana and Mike accepted Jai's leadership, but they'd been trained to think for themselves and act on their own.

So Jai had been frustrated to find out that Adriana let the Insurrectionist Delgado live after the Jackals made a play for the last known navigation data in this bizarre asteroid creation of theirs. She should have focused only on the data.

But she hadn't.

And now, they had once again let him go.

But as Adriana pointed out, had they destroyed that last bit of data and left the Rubble, then they wouldn't have known about another ship coming back from Charybdis IX. So their delay had helped. They might have left the Rubble without fully finishing their mission.

But Jai still felt they should have kept Delgado aboard. He was, after all, working with Insurrectionists. And Jai had killed his fair share of Innie terrorists.

Now Adriana felt they had a duty to help make sure the people living here were safe. Covenant-collaborating Insurrectionists, no less.

Jai walked up to the cockpit of the old freighter. Mike sat at the controls as the Jackal ship slowly drifted past their field of vision.

"One Shiva nuke," Mike muttered.

"You think Adriana's right? That these Covenant will turn on them?"

"They always do," Mike said. "The Covenant always attack. Always destroy it all. Why would they stop now?"

"I don't know," Jai said as Mike boosted them out away for the fringes of the Rubble, where they could lurk. "We've never seen anything like this before. Jackals trading and working with humans to build asteroid habitats?"

But then, that was what Gray Team was for. They couldn't call back for orders, they were the UNSC in absentia. The three of them had to figure out what this all meant, and what to do next.

"One Shiva?" Jai turned and looked at Mike.

Mike ran a hand over his shaved head. "Put it in the right place, yes."

"Put it where?"

"Inside."

Jai looked at him and then laughed. "That would do the trick, Mike. That would do it."

And he imagined that if Adriana and Mike were right, and they usually were, they would end up having to do it.

"How many Shivas do we have left in the holds?" Jai asked.

"Enough," Mike said.

"Enough to what?"

"Cause a lot of trouble here in the Rubble," Mike said. "When the time comes."