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"What are you looking for?"
"You never know" Vaz went back to rifling the Kig-Yar’s pouches "These are bound to co so back a couple of bodies, too," said Os-Yar stank to high heaven, and being dead didn’t h the entire dropship on the run back to Port Stanley It was an aroma that Mal could only describe asacetic acid had shed its load on the beach
"I want one of those little lavender air fresheners," Devereaux"You better getit would take him to live down one of the worst extractions in the Corps’ history, but Osman seear while they were unloading
"Where do you want me to put the Jackals, ma’am?" Mal asked
"Stick them in the cryo store with the Jiralhanae," she said, as casual y as tel ing hie "Everybody stand by to juo and do so up with Spenser"
Mal and Vaz bundled up the Kig-Yar corpses in body bags and heaved the noises
"I think he’s a bit old for her, don’t you?" BB said "Do you want a hand with those?"
"Yeah, very funny" Mal took the head end and Vaz steered froe?"
"They’re next to the grape jel y," BB said
He was joking about the grape jel y, because there wasn’t any, but there real y were a couple of intact Jiralhanae corpses and assorted body parts in a cryo-sealed container Mal stared Vaz shrugged
"You realize nobody back ho to believe this," he said
"You realize we can never tel them anyway"
Mal went back to the dropship and found Devereaux scrubbing the deck of the cargo area on her hands and knees with good old-fashioned water and disinfectant
"If you’d known it was going to be this weird, would you have volunteered?" Devereaux asked
"I don’t think we did," Mal said
When he flopped onto his bunk at the end of his watch, he was sure that he stil stank of vinegar He shoved his fatigues in the laundry and scrubbed hi water up his nose in the hope that it would flush the re molecules out of his nose hairs At one point he looked up fro and choking, and prayed that BB wasn’t going to h at hienuinely on his own for es, and it felt oddly lonely
The alarm woke him six hours later Port Stanley had already dropped out of slipspace He walked onto the bridge in ti to the comms officer in Monte Cassino
"Stanley, we’re stil five hours behind you" Monte Cassino’s officer of the watch sounded apologetic That was slipspace for you, a lottery of reentry points "How long before you reach Ariadne’s position? She’s venting reactor coolant now and she stil can’t land her crew"
"You mean Venezia stil won’t help them," Naomi said
"Wel , they won’t let the ship land, and they’re not wil ing to board her to evacuate the crew They say it’s too dangerous"
"Okay, our AI estiht--we’ve actual y got a visual on her We’l take the crew off and wait until you show up Stanley out"
"Is the boss okay with that?" Mal asked
"Insists on it," Naomi said
Ariadne was a patrol ship, with a complement of thirty at most Mal esti and cross deck everyone Al they had to do then was stand off at a safe distance from Ariadne, just in case, and hand out coffee--the ordinary stuff--until Monte Cassino rocked up It wouldn’t compromise opsec at al
"Where is she, then?" he asked, trying to pick out Ariadne in the star field
Naomi stared for a while, then pointed "Here Take a look on the long-range ht even at nification The marbled crescent of Venezia seemed Jupiter-sized by comparison
"Not very efficient, the Covenant," Mal said "You’d have thought they would have glassed Venezia early on"
Nao if al the Spartans were that antisocial when the pinprick light that was Ariadne suddenly grew a lot brighter and then vanished
He didn’t say anything for a moment, and neither did Naomi Then they looked at each other
"I hope that’s not the reactor," he said, but knew it bloody as
"BB" Naomi tapped the console "BB, what happened? What did we just see? Is it what I think it is?"
BB took a second or two to respond
"I’one"
CHAPTER SEVEN