“We are, Field Master.”

“Are we set on our path? Does anyone wish to step back from the war to come?”

‘Telcam was a monk who stil believed in the Forerunners as gods, even if the San’Shyuum had been discredited as false prophets. But he also had a pragmatic political streak. Phil ips had started to think of him as medieval Pope material, a Borgia of a creature, both ruthless commander and devout bishop. The Sangheili was playing a bit of both now. He looked from face to face as if he was searching out the waverers before devouring them. Nobody twitched.

“Are we ready to launch our assault?”

“Close, Field Master. Very close.”

‘Telcam hit the table again. Dust jumped. So did Phil ips.

“Then that is close enough. Ignore the Brutes. Kil any that get in the way, but focus on the main objective.” He turned his head slowly from side to side to take in the whole room, suddenly seeming more like a swaying cobra. “The assault on Vadam must begin now. ”

UNSC INTELLIGENCE SAFE HOUSE, NEW TYNE, VENEZIA: MARCH 2553 Me and my big mouth.

As soon as Vaz Beloi said the name Naomi, he knew he’d regret it. But he couldn’t stop himself. He just wasn’t expecting to scrol through mug shots of Venezia’s resident undesirables and see her father’s face looking out from the rogues’ gal ery.

Staffan Sentzke. Terror suspect. Colonial insurgent. Ready to take a pop at Earth any chance he gets.

Sentzke was the one conspiracy theorist in a mil ion who was actual y right. His long-lost daughter real y was alive and the child the police had brought back to him was an impostor, just like he’d claimed. He didn’t know she was a Spartan, though. And Naomi didn’t know he hadn’t been kil ed when Sansar was glassed by the Covenant. Vaz sat staring at the datapad, wondering where the hel he’d start explaining this escalating disaster to her—or anybody else, for that matter. He’d thought ONI had final y done the decent thing by letting the Spartans know about the families they’d been snatched from as kids and brainwashed to forget, but now it didn’t look decent at al . It looked agonizingly messy. There’d be no happy endings and no healing reunions, not for any of them.

Maybe she’s better off never knowing where she came from.

But it was too late for that. Naomi knew, and now he and the two men peering over his shoulder knew a lot more. Vaz craned his neck to look up at Mal Geffen for a reaction. Mal wasn’t just his friend. He was his sergeant, too, and—Vaz had to admit it—a lot calmer when it came to these kinds of situations. He didn’t get angry. Vaz did.

Mal just let out a long breath, hands stil braced on the back of the sofa as he leaned over Vaz. The basement was a scruffy jumble of old furniture and high-tech comms equipment, with the dead, musty, muffled silence of a soundproofed room. It swal owed every breath and creak.

“Wel , bugger me,” Mal said quietly. “Smal world, eh?”

Mike Spenser, the veteran intel igence agent who’d been posted here, frowned in that hang-on-a-minute kind of way that said he’d put two and two together and had come up with an embarrassing answer. Vaz was never sure how much Spenser had been told about anything. He was military intel igence, but he wasn’t ONI, and ONI was a law unto itself even in the intel igence world. As far as Vaz knew, Spenser hadn’t even been briefed about Kilo-Five’s mission to destabilize the Sangheili state. Just because they were al on the same side didn’t mean they could share information.

I shouldn’t have said Naomi . Jesus, what was I thinking?

“You don’t mean Naomi Naomi, do you?” Spenser asked at last. If anything, he sounded bored, and that had to be an act. “Spartan Naomi? The Valkyrie?”

Spenser wasn’t the kind of guy to forget a name, and he certainly wouldn’t have forgotten Naomi. She was at least two meters tal , so pale that Vaz stil wasn’t sure if she was platinum blond or silver-gray. She could take down an Elite or a Brute with her bare hands, and Vaz had seen her do both without breaking a sweat. She was what a human could become if you took the smartest and strongest, and pumped them up with gene therapy, ceramic bone implants, and the most intensive military training the UNSC could offer.

Provided you did al that while they were stil little kids, of course. That was the heart of the problem as far as Vaz was concerned. It was a recipe for retribution. And he knew that day had come.

“Yes. Naomi Naomi. Spartan-Zero-One-Zero.” Vaz stood up and handed the datapad to Mal. There was a certain wisdom to stopping digging when you were in a hole, but that would only make Spenser more curious now. “That’s her real name. Naomi Sentzke. I’ve seen her file.”

Spenser nodded, stil pretty relaxed. “Yeah, I wondered when al that crap would come out.” He didn’t elaborate on what he meant by crap and Vaz didn’t know how to ask without revealing anything. The dirty details of the Spartan program had certainly come as a shock to the marines. “I can see the resemblance now. That boiled look. You think he knows? It would explain his attitude to Earth.”

“He worked out some of it.” Mal narrowed his eyes a fraction. “You know how they recruited for the Spartan program?”

“I didn’t need to know. But I do know some operatives declined to take part in the recruitment. I’m being heavy on the euphemism there.”

“What happened to them?”

“What do you think? This is ONI we’re talking about, not an animal shelter. ONI real y does put healthy dogs down.”

Vaz tried not to dwel on that. Mal missed a beat, but only one.

“So you know they took kids,” he said.

“I do now.”

“Oh.” Mal blinked a couple of times, final y caught out. “We never learn, do we?”

“Ah, come on. You’re ODST. Honest marines. Just stick to low-orbit jumps and shooting things. You’l sleep better.” Spenser sloshed the dregs of his coffee around his mug, then took the datapad back from Mal. “The question is whether Sentzke knows. Or whether she does.”

“She knows who her real family is,” Vaz said. Do we tell her? Do we not tell her? Do we tell her before we tell Captain Osman? What the hell’s right? “But this wil be news to her.”

Spenser shook his head, slowly and rueful y. “We’re going to miss the Covenant. Nice simple stuff. One jaw, good. Four jaws, bad.”

“Are you going to cal this in, Mike?” Mal asked.

“No, because you’re going to do it. Aren’t you?”

Vaz wasn’t sure how to take that. There was another awkward silence. He could feel the vibration of traffic from the main road. Beyond these wal s, old enemies were picking up where they’d left off before the Covenant had arrived and interrupted the long-running war between humans.

Venezia had always been a haven for criminals and assorted outlaws. Now it was open house for any species with an axe to grind with its government, but that suddenly seemed a much more theoretical problem than facing Naomi.

Naomi had to be told, one way or another, and Vaz would do it. She’d make a big show of being completely above al the personal loyalty stuff, maybe even want to arrest her dad to prove she put her duty first, just like the way she’d reacted to Halsey. That didn’t mean it wouldn’t hurt her.

Spenser was right: kil ing hinge-heads had been a blissful y simple kind of war. It had never left Vaz feeling dirty.

“Devereaux here, guys,” said a voice in his earpiece. “I need you both back here pronto. Osman’s banging out.”

Mal’s head jerked around. “What’s the problem?”

“We’ve got an incident on Sanghelios. We’ve lost contact with Phil ips.”

“Christ, that’s al we need. Is this going to be an extraction?”

“Possibly. Now means now, Mal. Move it.”

Spenser watched the exchange with mild interest, unable to hear the other side of the conversation. “Is that Oz?”

“Devereaux,” Mal said. “Change of plan. We need to get back to the ship.”

“Wel , I’d better drop you off, then, hadn’t I? Spenser Cabs. We never close.” Spenser began switching off the various screens and monitors in the shuttered basement. He didn’t ask for details. “When are you coming back?”

“I’l tel you when they tel us.”

“Never mind. I’l keep the scumbags warm while you’re gone.”

Spenser had a hel of a lot of security devices to activate before he final y locked the front door behind him. There was no such thing in New Tyne as neighbors who minded their own business. Vaz slid into the backseat of the pickup and tried to look normal for Venezia, which actual y seemed easier than fitting in on Earth. Everybody here looked what Mal cal ed dodgy, so Vaz felt that the scar across his jaw came in handy. Nobody would work out that he got it trying to tackle a hinge-head. It looked like the outcome of a bar brawl with a knife. He hoped it would deter the curious.

“Do me a favor, Mike.” Mal slid into the passenger seat with his carbine half-hidden under his jacket, finger inside the trigger guard. “Hang fire on Sentzke until we get back.”

“Wouldn’t dream of shooting him without your permission.”

“Seriously. This is going to be awkward.”

“I’l bet.”

Spenser started the engine and headed for the highway. The ancient Warthog eased into the traffic, weaving slowly around trucks until it pul ed up at the stoplight in the city center.

Vaz risked looking at the vehicle idling in the next lane. The driver was a Kig-Yar. The assortment of species living side by side on Venezia was the only sign that this wasn’t a regular colony, not that Vaz had ever seen one of those. By the time he got to a colony world, it was usual y smoking ruins or a glassy sheet of vitrified soil. The war with the Covenant had started long before he’d enlisted, and he was an Earth boy.

“Ugly bastards,” Mal muttered. The Kig-Yar turned its malevolent heron gaze toward him like it had heard him, but it was just checking the traffic.

“You know how long it took me to get the smel off my hands the last time I picked up a dead one?”

“You know how long it took me to build up a working relationship with the ones you shot?”

“Sorry about that.”

“They’ve stil got a mev-ut out on you two for that. You know what that is, I hope.”

“Yeah, Phil ips did explain. A cash bonus for bringing back our skul s and cervical vertebrae. We’re col ector’s items.”

Mal must have been more worried about Phil ips than Vaz thought. Silence meant he was thinking about a bad situation: swaggering humor meant he was trying not to think about it. Phil ips was a clever guy with plenty of guts, but he wasn’t trained for these kinds of situations, and Vaz could only imagine what a hinge-head could beat out of him given enough time and a big stick.

But they don’t trust us anyway. You can’t suddenly start trusting an enemy after you’ve been at war for that long. No, it’s not about exposing ONI. It’s what they’ll do to Phillips.

Phil ips had a fragment of BB with him, at least, and BB could always think his way out of a tight spot. But the fragment had orders to activate a lethal injection if Phil ips found himself with no other way out. Vaz had lost a lot of comrades over the years and had always suspected that one day his last bul et might be best saved for himself, but the thought of having to put a buddy out of his misery was more than he could cope with right then.

Maybe BB would find it easier.

“You okay, Vaz?” Spenser asked. “You don’t look too happy.”

“This is Russian elation,” Vaz said. “You should see me when I’m miserable.”

Spenser made a noise in his throat that might have been a laugh. There was a trick to driving a ’hog in a don’t-mind-me kind of way and he seemed to have it. Vaz noted that the old pickup variant had exactly the same degree of denting and neglect that most of the other vehicles here did, no more and no less, so that it simply merged into the cityscape. Spenser was driving briskly, not breakneck fast but not hanging about either, and clearly watching everything around him without looking as if he was staring at anything at al . He simply moved his gaze, casual y scanning from side to side and occasional y checking in the mirrors, making it look perfectly normal. Vaz noted the technique. He decided he might need it one day. Spenser had probably been a spook for thirty years, and a guy didn’t get to survive covert operations behind enemy lines for that long without exceptional skil s.

Am I ever going to get used to this kind of war?

Spenser had known a time when the only enemy was other humans. Vaz hadn’t. Neither had Mal. Vaz wondered how hard it would be to fire on his own species.

The buildings thinned out from offices and stores to houses, and then melted into open land. Less than thirty minutes after receiving the recal they were grinding through scrubland on a dirt road, heading for the RV with Devereaux. The ONI dropship—not just any old Pelican, but a stealth variant—was laid up in a wooded gorge, out of sight of passing ships or vehicles. Stealth didn’t mean invisible to the naked eye. Mal fiddled with his radio and Vaz caught a microburst of signal in his earpiece. Not that Devereaux needed a signal to start the engines: Vaz could already hear the faint whine of drives even before Spenser came to a halt.

Spenser stopped under the cover of trees. He had to live here, after al . “I’l wait until you’re clear,” he said. “Just in case.”

Mal slapped him on the shoulder and jumped down from the passenger seat without a word. Vaz hadn’t even secured the dropship’s door before Devereaux started to lift. She skimmed along the top of the gorge, putting as much distance between herself and New Tyne as possible before she had to hit the throttle and make the final fast climb out of the atmosphere. Vaz watched tops of trees streak past the cockpit windshield, worryingly close.