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"You real y are al bastards, aren’t you? You kno many people died on Llanel i? One et it? No, Earth was never hit, was it?"
"Oh, we lost a few bil ion on Earth," Oset it just fine"
The door shut with a clunk and BB activated the locks There was no ed "He’s just an ungrateful dick, Staff, not a security risk He can’t tel anyone anything"
"And if he could?"
"Then I’d do the necessary I wouldn’t expect you to do that"
That wasn’t spel ed out BB studied the look on Mal’s face as he watched Os, distracted frown that said things were crossing hishanded over to the Sangheili, then he would have had to be silenced, and kil ing other hu only the older troops could recalMal was too young to have known anything but an alien ene Funny things, hu their own kind, whatever the history books showed
"Square blue thing," Mal whispered, leaning close to BB’s holograet your own back Show up in his cabin and rattle your chains"
He turned and headed down the passage to the gal ey BB took another look around the ship and decided he had ues than he liked to ad themselves busy whether they needed to be or not Devereaux and Naoar to tinker with the Spartan’s Mjolnir aret Nao the gal ey It was al the smal stuff that fil ed their down time and had to be done, covert mission or not It made them al look rather harosky was fond of saying, the most successful missions were those that were unnoticed and of little remark, where nobody needed to fire a shot
BB hoped the squad was savoring the enforced idleness He couldn’t see it lasting long
REYNES, FORMER MINING COLONY: UNSC TEMPORARY LISTENING STATION
Reynes hadn’t been a pretty place to start with, but a visit from the Covenant hadn’t donewasn’t scenic The endlessly fascinating CAA Factbook flashed up the planet’s dismal history in Mal’s HUD
Aluminum, tantalum, copper There’d been about fifty thousand workers here when theNow there weren’t any, unless he counted Mike Spenser, but there were stil signs of where they’d been before the Covenant had launched its attack
"Where is he?" Devereaux asked She kept the dropship’s drive idling and got on the radio "Kilo-Five to Agent Spenser--the , sir We’re at the extraction point and you’re not"
It took a fewthe shop Wait one"
"You need a hand?"
"I’ to the last moment, that’s me Not that the bastards pay me overtime"
Mal stepped down fro for posterity He’d seen a lot of glassed planets in the last fourteen years, but this was the weirdest landscape he could reh to vaporize everything co just the characteristic ice-rink pools of glassy material But sometimes structures survived There was probably a sensible explanation for that, like a low-orbit bombardment, but whatever it was it had left a landscape that looked like a freeze-fra derrick, the head end of a conveyor, and solass lake at odd angles, silhouetted against thin gray clouds The structures looked sub toward the lake As he got closer he could see that the skeletons of the buildings were charred to a uniforrabbed a few ie Al he could hear was the wind
The il usion of water was overpowering He looked down at his chest plate and dragged his gloved finger through a fine layer of slightly sticky dust It was going to clog his filters if he didn’t flush theot back to the ship
Vaz walked up behind hi?"
"Dunno" Mal ventured out onto the glass and walked gingerly between the debris elass was cooling"
It was pretty slippery, just like sheet ice In sos trapped beneath For the rays speckled with black patches that reminded Mal of carbon from a candle embedded in its melted wax
He squatted to inspect a charcoal velvet girder jutting out of the vitreous layer at a steep angle
Vaz fol owed and stood over hi stuck here on your own for a couple of years Can’t doaround on the glassland and listening for hted up on the horizon for a few ravel A scruffy ed from nowhere as if he’d crawled out of a hole It had to be Spenser, and he looked exactly like he’d sounded
He was in his fifties, face deeply lined with a good crop of gray stubble, one hand thrust deep in the pocket of a thickjacket He dropped a couple of rucksacks by his feet Judging by the thud they made, that was his surveil ance equipment
"We didn’t see where you came from," Vaz said
"Down there" Spenser pointed "The mine shafts are stil ht, then," Mal said "You ready to go now? Destroyed everything sensitive that you can’t carry?"
"I set fire to my underpants, if that’s what you mean" Spenser looked around with that finality of ain his memory for the very last time "Can’t say I’to RV with Monte Cassino to cross deck you" Mal could see some movement in the ruins Vaz spotted it too and lifted his rifle slowly "We picked up a survivor on New Llanel i, so you’l have colanced over his shoulder to see what he was looking at "It’s just the Kig-Yar"