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She didn’t need to point that out Al unknown territory was presumed to be potential y hostile
Mendez came to a halt and fumbled one-handed in his pockets "Why?"
"Why what?" Tom asked
"Why did the Forerunners put trees and animals here? Just to make the place nicer while they sat out the holocaust, or is it some kind of zoo?"
Mendez tapped his radio and Halsey suddenly heard the crackle and hiss fro so your end?"
Fred’s patrol was now on a paral el path a kiloot blosso there’l be pol inators around"
"Insects, birds … smal mammals"
Halsey couldn’t bear assu"
"Some of the plants look like Earth species, but so far we haven’t … seen anything confir, pausing for breath "Keep looking"
They were spread out in patrol for tail Halsey was suddenly conscious of being the misfit rather than the boss here, the theoretician who’d created a generation of Spartans but had never actual y served, and al the ss that the Spartans see the branches of the trees, turning to take a few paces backward and check behind every so often--leapt out at her She siing a bag that seeet heavier by the minute and burdened with a skirt It just wasn’t part of her unconscious fabric as it ith them
It unsettled her Nobody expected her to behave like a Spartan, even if she’d trained a generation of them She wasn’t sure why that troubled her
"Bird?" Tohted up "I can’t tel , even with the scope"
Halsey fol owed his gesture to see a few tiny black dotsabout the ht, but much slower
"If it is, it doesn’t fly like any avian species I know," Kel y said "We’re going to have one hel of a nature table"
They weredowns dotted with stands of trees, some of which were made up of the terrestrial oaks that seeray trunks and tiny, deep red, frondlike crowns that Halsey didn’t recognize at alIt stil didn’t answer the Chief’s question as to whether this was ornamental or part of a conservation project
So how many did they expect to shelter here? The whole Forerunner population? Or just the great and the good? And for how long?
The quiet was as unfaetation, layer upon layer of sed into the white noise of a countryside that sounded utterly alien Humans had their own template of normal ambient noise, Halsey decided, and it remained unnoticed until they didn’t hear it
She noticed the absence of hers now; no fa, no distant rue Every sound seenified The Spartans’ arhtly with each pace Mendez reached behind hi thetouched Halsey’s shoulder She yelped and spun around
"Sorry, ma’am" It was Olivia, one of the Spartan-I Is She held out so up your back
Might be har on the side of caution here"
Halsey’s heart was hairl was behind her "For God’s sake, don’t creep up on me like that"
She felt like a fool as soon as she said it Olivia didn’t react But when Halsey looked around, e stare She could see what he was holding now--his one weakness, a Sweet Wil iaar, or at least the last few centier for a fe ain
"Let’s you andback down the line toward Olivia "Up you go, O Take point"
"O" must have been Olivia’s nicknaain, not the irl lifted off her helmet one-handed to take a closer look at the creature that was squir about ten centi spike of a tail Olivia couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen She had poreless coffee-brown skin and delicate features that ins were in the Horn of Africa
"Just a tail Not a sting" Olivia let the insect go and replaced her hellanced around Kel y had now fal en back a distance and Toht Halsey realized the Spartans had instantly given her and Mendez soesture or word passing between theood shared situational awareness
"Is there anything you want to say to ar butt again and parked it in the side of hisit "Because we’ve been awful y civil so far"
You knew You daot three left I’ood of the mission"
"Spoken like a sht up anywhere near you"
"Always the gentleman"
Mendez was a hard man to read but it was safe to assume that the less emotion he shohich wasn’this reaction battened down He just gave her that dead-eyed look It was probably the last thing that a lot of Covenant troops ever saw
"Okay, , I wilYou are, I know, ticked off that there’s a whole batch of Spartans you didn’t bless or know about" Mendez took the cigar out of his ain "Nohile I’ Treat the Spartan-Threes the way you treat the others If you’ve got a probleram, Doctor, direct it at me Not the in the way that polite rebukes always did, with a little extra s men and women in uniform Am I really that rude? Yes, I suppose I a since she’d first seen co to wear the Spartans’ Mjolnir ar Onyx off-lio, Ackerson raiding her data around the sas and the information from Cortana to add the Halo Array and the Flood into the equation, and then she had a fairly reliable set of signposts Parangosky ht be on Onyx even if she didn’t know the ful nature of the threat and couldn’t access any of it