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A Kig-Yar lay sluainst a bulkhead with a human rifle beside him Jul stepped over the body and saw there were four dead Jiralhanae in the colance told him they hadn’t asphyxiated There were projectile wounds to their faces ‘Telcaer

"Al of theok?"

Jul squeezed into the smal cockpit Two more dead Jiralhanae, one of them Manus, were draped over the seats Above hiaps around the hatch seal Piety’s console was on idle, the flickering lights indicating that her autopilot was stil engaged, which explained how shebut silent

"They’ve taken the Huragok" ‘Telcanation "They attacked the ship Daestured Jul back into the -Yar Jul sed his revulsion and moved the body with his boot to look at the wounds

"Projectiles," he said "It’s been shot several times"

"Human weapons" ‘Telca, then picked up the hus They’l trade with anybody" He examined the interior of the compartment "Look at the nuht here I iht in the cross fire and his coheili always cal ed Kig-Yar cowardly, but it was just an unthinking insult and didn’t reflect how aggressive the creatures could be They were very effective in large nuht build Jul suspected that the San’Shyuum preferred them in individual roles, not just because they were excel ent snipers and scouts, but because they knehat trouble the scavengers would be if deployed in battalions

If they could hijack a shuttle and overpower six Jiralhanae, it was a worrying developet their pirate heritage," Jul said "Anarchy That’s what’l fol oe don’t impose some order on the situation"

‘Telca his head slowly as he searched the ship He seery He looked behind every panel and in every space, however sok

It orth a lot of money on the black market, Jul knew But it was even -Yar weapons and ship technology up to the level of the Sangheili

That worried hiht say, spoilt for choice, " he said at last "Who should we deal with first? Should we depose our heretical Arbiter, or teach these ver-Yar’s rifle, a MA5B, a weapon Jul had seen scattered a the human corpses in the afters, too crude for a Sangheili "The Kig-Yar need to learn their place"

"Wel , let’s find out which nest was responsible for this" Jul went back to the cockpit and had to heave Manus’s body off the navigation console

For a ht be doing now He’d never considered that they had their own lives before

Buran would have to tel his ht recorder should answer some questions"

‘Telcam tapped the console and the recorder flashed a stream of data on the screen, most of it simply coordinates and speeds The attack wasn’t instantly visible in the output, but the co was h the station idents: Piety had had radio contact with Kig-Yar from within a human-occupied sector, a colony world that had once been cal ed Sqala

No That world is not theirs They’re interlopers I won’t dignify the their infestations colonies

It was now cal ed Venezia And it would pay for harboring criminals

BLUE TEAM CAMP, FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE: LOCAL DATE NOVEMBER 2552

They said you could always judge a woman by the contents of her purse, and Halsey was content to be judged by hers

Datapad … pocket archive … change of clothes … self-a tape … lip salve … pocket saw … solar power pack … Mo knife … coffee To be opened in case of eain, knowing that the ite the Covenant assault on Reach It must have been ash by now

Damn … so much of her life was in there, not just the years spent on the Spartan progras too She’d start another one, but she didn’t have the right technology at the moment, and that meant paper--paper and pencil and ink She needed to feel the faint drag of the lead or the way a nib glided on a cushion of liquid ink Talking to a datapad or scribbling and tapping on it was no substitute when it ca

Why was I so careless with it?

Halsey tried to apply the sa herself as she did with others A Freudian slip, much as I hate to admit it

Subconsciously, perhaps she wanted to lose it, or--more to the point--she wanted it to be found That could only mean that she needed to explain herself to posterity, to put her plea in ation for al her sins

If I really believed they were sins, though, would I do that? But if I acknowledge they’re sins, then I’ve demonstrated ht now