"Are we secure?" Jilan hadn't moved. Her eyes and her pistol were still locked on Thune.
Avery slid the M7's charging handle back a hair. There was a round in the chamber. If the constable had fired, he could have killed Jilan. As the man tried to rise, Avery gave him a swift kick in the gut. "Yes, ma'am."
Thune's eyes narrowed.
"Who do you think you are, al-Cygni?" "The highest-ranking military officer on this planet," she replied, then repeated her previous declaration. "In accordance with section two, paragraph—"
"You can quote any legal bullshit you want. I'm not going to step down."
"Governor, are you sure?" Mack asked.
"Are you deaf?" Thune slammed his fists onto his desk with enough force to break a weaker man's knuckles. His voice was full of venom. "Want me to say it again?"
Jilan straightened her arm. "No."
Her pistol cracked three times and Thune staggered back, spraying red from the open collar of his shirt. In a flash, Avery was past the Lt. Commander and across Thune's desk, sliding feet- first over the polished oak. Byrne dashed around the desk to meet him, and together they covered the Governor as he slumped to the floor.
"Healy!" Avery shouted into his throat-mic. "Get up here!"
"That won't be necessary," Jilan said.
Avery was about to remind the Lt. Commander that she'd just mortally wounded a colonial governor when his nostrils filled with a sweet, familiar scent.
"Clever," Byrne snorted. He reached for Thune's reddened shirt, and rubbed the sticky residue of TTR rounds between his fingers. "Out like a light."
"And he's going to stay that way." Jilan safed her pistol and slid it back into her holster.
"All the way to FLEETCOM HQ."
Suddenly, Ponder began to sway. "Actually, ma'am? I think getting the doc might not be a bad idea …" Then he fell to the floor, his good arm clutched against his left side.
Avery sprinted back around the desk. By the time he reached Ponder, Jilan had already dropped to her knees and ripped open the Captain's shirt. The biofoam cast covering his chest was soaked with bloody blotches. And unlike Thune, this was the real thing.
"Healy! Double-time!" Avery growled. Then, whipping his head around to face Jilan: "Ma'am, things are going sideways, and I don't like it. I want to know what you're planning, and I want to know now. Because I'm pretty sure—whatever it is—you're counting on me and Byrne to get it done."
Jilan took a deep breath. "Alright." She stared at Avery, her deep green eyes narrowed halfway between respect and reservation. "Go ahead, Loki. Tell them."
For a second, Avery wondered who Jilan was talking to. Then he heard Mack clear his throat.
"Yes." The AI smiled as Avery turned to face the holo-projector. He looked a little embarrassed. "Yes, I guess I should start with that."
Bapap jumped on one foot, then the other. He checked the fill-level on his methane tank.
He scratched an itch in the scaly pit of one of his arms. Finally—though the Deacon had asked him repeatedly to be quiet—Bapap cocked his head at the Huragok and asked. "What you think it do now?"
Dadab really wished he knew. And this lack of understanding had made him even more exasperated than Bapap's constant pestering. Lighter Than Some was completely still, his buoyancy perfectly neutral as he floated before the towers that made up the alien intelligence.
"Just keep your eyes on the walkway," Dadab said. "It shouldn't be much longer."
Bapap grumbled inside his mask and thrust his head back through the pried-open gap in the control room's doors. The Deacon kept up his pacing behind the Huragok in the room's shallow pit, stepping over the panels it had removed from the towers to access the alien circuits.
< To begin a conversation. > the Huragok had signed.
Again Dadab wondered if he had made the right decision in bringing the Huragok to the orbital (who knew what sort of conversation it was having?). But he had been desperate to get Lighter Than Some out of the hangar before it learned of his deception—before it discovered Dadab had ensured its plows would be turned into weapons by the Yanme'e.
Dadab felt terrible about betraying his friend's trust, but he hadn't had much choice. When the broken Spirit had come apart, revealing not one but four of the Huragok's creations, the Deacon had almost soiled his tunic. He didn't even want to think what Maccabeus would do if he learned the Huragok's real motivation for constructing the plows. The Chieftain had just suffered a grievous injury at the aliens' hands; he would have no patience for peace offerings, let alone the Deacon, who had failed to stop their construction.
Dadab stopped pacing and flashed his fingers before the Huragok's sensory nodes. < Is everything all right? > But Lighter Than Some remained still.
All four of its tentacles were thrust deep into the center-most tower. Leaning closer, Dadab could see the limbs were in motion—twitching ever so slightly at the tips as their cilia made contact with multicolored knots of wires. Dadab traced some of the wires to one of the tower's many black boxes and saw that two small lights in the box's casing were blinking green and amber in response to the Huragok's deft probes.
Suddenly, the energy core Lighter Than Some had rigged to power the towers began to flicker. They had already used up three cores, and Dadab wasn't eager to take any more from the nearby encampments. The other Unggoy were starting to get curious about the Deacon's activities, especially after he returned to the orbital with the Huragok in tow. The last thing Dadab needed was a proliferation of witnesses to his latest sinful effort at intelligence association.
"Deacon!" Bapap whispered. "Flim and two others!"
Dadab waved his gnarled hands, hastening Bapap onto the walkway. "Go! Delay them!"
As Bapap pushed through door, Dadab tugged at one of Lighter Than Some's lower tentacles. The Huragok loosed a surprised bleat from one of its sacs and jerked free of the tower.
< Put panels back! > Dadab flashed.
The Huragok's response came slowly, as if it was having difficulty transitioning back to a normal conversational mode.
< Do you know what they have done? > < What? Who? > < The Chieftain and his pack. > Dadab could hear Flim's gruff voice on the walkway, the clang of methane tanks as he knocked Bapap aside. < Explain later! > he picked up a panel and thrust it toward the Huragok.
Lighter Than Some wrapped the thin metal plate in its tentacles as Dadab trotted to the door.
"I gave no permission to leave your post!" he said, stepping onto the walkway, directly in Flim's path.
"You walk and explore," Flim replied with glum suspicion. "Why can't I do same?"
"Because I am Deacon! My explorations have Ministerial endorsement!"
Flim cocked his head, making it clear he had no idea what this meant and wouldn't much care even if he did. "You find food?"
"No."
"Relic?"
"Certainly not!"
"Then what?"
"Nothing," Dadab said, feigning great exasperation. "And wasting time talking with you won't help my work go any fas—" The Deacon doubled over as Flim shoved past, not-so- accidentally thrusting one of his barnacle-pitted forearms into Dadab's shrunken stomach.
"Then we no talk." Flim waddled into the control room.
Dadab reached up weakly and tried to stop Flim's companions: a bow-legged Unggoy named Guff and another called Tukduk, who was missing one of his eyes. But these two toadies slipped past as well, and all the Deacon could do was hunch after them, taking shallow breaths to refill his lungs.
Flim looked at the towers and snorted inside his mask. "I see nothing."
Dadab raised his head. To his great surprise, he saw that all the panels were back in place.
Lighter Than Some floated innocently in the shallow pit, as if it had spent the time since its arrival doing nothing but.
"And soon that's all you'll see," Dadab said as the energy core flickered again. "Fetch me another core and I'll let you help me with my work."
But Flim was shrewder than he looked. "You come with me to get core."
Dadab sighed. "Very well."
As he ushered Flim and the others back to the walkway, he signed subtly to Lighter Than Some: < Keep panels on! > He wanted to hear the Huragok's explanation—what it had learned about the Jiralhanae—but any lengthy conversation would have to wait until they were alone.
Lighter Than Some waited for the Unggoy's footfalls to fade. The energy core began to blink rapidly, threatening to cut out. The Huragok vented one of its sacs and sunk low. It also did not want to betray its friend's trust, but it had no choice.
Quickly, it removed the central tower's highest panel, and flicked one of its tentacles against the panel's bare metal inner surface. Then it turned to face one of the image-recording devices it had discovered in the corners of the room.
< Safe, come, out. > Lighter Than Some's signs were slow and deliberate—as they had been when it first taught the Deacon the intricacies of its speech.
A moment later, a little representation of an alien in a wide-brimmed hat appeared on the room's holo-projector.
Lighter Than Some held out the protective panel. It waited a few moments then signed: < Now, you, show. > The representation nodded its head and disappeared. The Covenant glyph representing "Oracle" appeared in its place. Lighter Than Some released a contented bleat. < When, show, others? > The alien appeared again. It raised its right hand and flexed four of its fingers: < Morning.
> < Good! > The Huragok's sacs swelled and it rose a little higher. < Soon, come, peace! > The energy core was fading now, and the little alien with it.
Lighter Than Some angled its snout toward the towers. The associated intelligence inside was amazingly efficient; it had only taken half a cycle to learn how to speak. The Huragok's sacs quivered with excitement. There were so many questions it wanted to ask! But it knew it only had time for one before the energy core was sapped.
< Want, me, fix? > Lighter Than Some gestured toward the towers.
< No. > Loki's fragment quickly verified its sabotage of Sif. < Nothing, worth, save. > Then the energy core sputtered out, and the data center plunged into darkness.
CHAPTER TWENTY
HARVEST, FEBRUARY 23, 2525
Overnight, the mall had cleared. At dawn there were no refugees, no constables; all had moved in the night to the elevator sheds. As Captain Ponder strode eastward across the park, he saw half-drained drink cartons, unzipped luggage, and ransacked clothes; here and there were diapers, foul-smelling rags, and crumpled holo-stills. The once beautiful mall had become a trash heap—a dirty and disorganized monument to Harvest's abandonment.
After placing a beacon at the center of the mall to mark a landing zone for the aliens, his Staff Sergeants had wanted to remain at the LZ to set up sniper hides and cover Ponder during the handoff. But the Captain had refused. Healy had insisted he at least drive Ponder from the Parliament across the mall. But the Captain had just ordered the Corpsman to wrap him in a new cast, give him some meds, and set him on his feet. This wasn't stoic pride; Ponder was just eager for one last march.
Some marines hated marching, but Ponder loved it—even his first, grueling road hikes in basic training. Since his demotion, he'd sometimes joked how lucky he was to have his arm blown off. If the Innie grenade had taken one of his legs (his punch line went), he probably would have learned to walk on his hands. Not the best joke ever told, but even now it made him chuckle.
That made him wince and suck air through his teeth. Despite his new cast, one of his shattered ribs had shifted against his already ruptured spleen. There was nothing Healy could do for such a serious injury, and there wasn't enough time for an operation at Utgard's hospital, not that Ponder would have agreed to it. Some missions were best handled by dying men, the Captain knew. And giving the aliens their Oracle was one of them.
The knoll at the center of the mall was topped by a fountain and a bandstand, and surrounded by a ring of old, gray-barked oaks. As Ponder hunched past the trees, their heavy branches rose as if they were stretching up in anticipation of Epsilon Indi's ascent. But Ponder also felt his abused organs rise inside his chest, and he realized the real cause of the oaks' elation even before he cleared their canopy and could once again see the sky.
The alien warship was dropping toward Utgard, and its anti-gravity generators were cushioning its descent with an invisible, buoyant field.
Under different circumstances, the Captain might have felt fear as the massive vessel came to rest perpendicular across the mall, no more than a few hundred meters above Utgard's highest towers. But the anti-grav field did a better job of managing his pain than any of the meds Healy had given him. As the warship came to a groaning stop, Ponder inhaled deeply. For a few glorious moments he breathed without effort, without feeling the steady throb of blood from his spleen.
But the relief dissipated as quickly as it came. As the alien ship stabilized and dialed its field generators back, the Captain was forced to trudge up the hill to the bandstand bearing the full weight of his trauma.
It didn't help that he also carried the brass-bottomed holo-projector from the Governor's office. Ponder still only had one arm, and couldn't shift the object's weight. To make matters worse, Lt. Commander al-Cygni had fitted a round, titanium-cased network relay to the bottom of the projector. She'd wanted to use a lighter model, but Loki—Harvest's long-dormant PSI— had insisted that a more robust relay was required.
Ponder had been too weak in the Governor's office to concentrate fully on Loki's explanation of the plan. But he understood that the aliens were looking for a powerful, networked intelligence. Something they called an Oracle. And thanks to an apparent traitor in their ranks, Loki had learned he could fake the Oracle's electronic signature by filling the relay with an excess of data traffic.
Staff Sergeants Johnson and Byrne had a hard time trusting intel from a hostile source, especially after what the aliens had done to Gladsheim. And in fact, when al-Cygni had revealed her and Loki's complete plan, the marines had initially exhibited some of Governor's Thune's outrage. If they were going to try and sneak all of Harvest's remaining citizens past the alien warship, why the hell would they want to lure it closer to Utgard?
