"They only track high-velocity objects," he said over the COM.

The drone hesitated and its booms moved in and out almost as if it were… what? Attenuating his signal? Trying to hear him?

Ash yelled over his COM, "STOP!"

The three booms locked in place and the drone drifted back a half meter.

It had heard him.

"What do you want?" Ash said.

The drone crept closer.

His own voice blasted though his helmet's speaker: "Fhejelet 'Pnught Juber."

Ash shook his head clear "I don't understand." He held up his hands spread wide and shrugged—the universal I-don't-know gesture.

"Fhejelet non sequitur, now?"

"I got part of that," Ash said. "Non sequitur—that's Latin, right?"

Ash wasn't sure what this thing was, or what it was trying to say, but it definitely wasn't Covenant. The Covenant had language translators, and they didn't sound like this. The Covenant generally used them only to pronounce florid curses just before they vaporized planets.

This close, Ash could see the inert curve of the drone's booms, and could feel the heat from its eye. Tiny golden hieroglyphics shimmered around the sphere, floating a centimeter off its surface. Ash squinted, but couldn't make out the characters.

"Security protocols enabled," the drone spoke over the COM.

"I understood that," Ash replied.

"Ring offensive system activated," it said. "Shield in countdown mode. Exchange proper counterresponse. Reclaimer."

"I don't want to hurt you," Ash tried.

He had no idea what this thing wanted.

"Non sequitur," it said. "Reclassification of targets as non-Reclaimers. Aboriginal subspecies. Collect for further analysis— else neutralize as possible infection vector."

Ash understood with perfect clarity "neutralize."

The drone advanced, spreading its booms apart like an open maw.

He was out of ideas.

A rock hit the drone, a granite chunk a half meter across. It glanced off the drone's ventral boom.

The impact made the drone dip, but it recovered, and its booms shifted, geometry rearranged so it now stared up at the edge of the channel.

Team Saber stood there, looking down—all of them hefting large rocks.

Two stones collided into the drone's spars, and one shattered directly on its eye. It dipped to the ground with a crash, and the spherical eye heated to blazing white-hot. The dirt around it fused to glass and bubbled.

A boulder barely fitting within the channel bounced off the walls—and flattened the drone. The eye, crushed to an oblate shape, crackled and cooled to dull red and then black.

The thing's three metal spars radiated out from under the rock like a flattened spider.

Ash exhaled, let his adrenaline subside, and he climbed out of the chasm.

Mark and Dante helped him up.

They'd saved each other a hundred times before, but those were always drills. Even under live-fire conditions, it had never been like this. For real. Ash wanted to tell them that they were like brothers and sisters to him.

All he could manage without his voice breaking was: "Thanks, guys."

Holly replied, "Well, thanks for being bait."

"Good call using rocks," Olivia whispered.

Ash nodded. "We've got to get under cover," he said, "back to the jungle."

"No, back to camp," Mark said. "Grab some real ammunition." Dante added, "Explosives, too."

Ash saw motion in his peripheral vision. Three more drones flew over the mesas, moving back and forth… searching.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

0745 HOURS, OCTOBER 31, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \ ZETA DORADUS SYSTEM, PLANET ONYX, NEAR CAMP CURRAHEE

Kurt eased the Warthog to a stop half a kilometer outside Camp Currahee. A large shadow crossed the tree line ahead, and a flock of red-tailed parrots took flight.

He jumped out and motioned Mendez to the brush at the side of the road. They hunkered down, and watched as an unmanned drone glided over their Warthog and paused.

The machine wasn't a UNSC design. It might have been Covenant, but they never varied from their big-ugly oblate blue-gray ascetic. The thing was floating whisper silent, and that meant antigravity technology… which likely made it nonhuman.

He remembered Endless Summer's flash transmission with a chill. Possible non- Covenant vectors.

The geometry of the drone shifted: the sphere in the center floated forward along the length of its lateral spars.

Kurt's first instinct was to grab his assault rife and fire. He had a superior flanking position. He reached for his weapon, and then recalled they had no weapons save Chief Mendez's sidearm and knife.

He decided hiding was, for now, the soundest strategy.

The drone circled the Warthog, and then satisfied, it continued down the dirt track.

Kurt waited until the drone disappeared into the jungle and then he motioned for Mendez to follow him through the trees to the edge of Camp Currahee.

Three hundred meters of jungle had been cleared around the horseshoe-shaped camp.

From the edge of the clear zone, Kurt saw several of the alien fliers circling the buildings and parade grounds.

"Zigzag patterns," Mendez whispered. "They're looking for something. Or someone."

There was an explosion from the center of camp. Not like the energy blast they had witnessed on the road. This was the dull crack of a fragmentation grenade.

The drones over the camp slowed and turned, and all moved in the same direction—the NCO quarters.

"That's our chance," Kurt said. "Go. Run."

With the drones distracted, they sprinted across the clear zone, slipped past the gate guardhouse, and ran to the Spartans' dormitories. They crawled under the raised building.

Shadows slipped over the adjacent gravel roads and paths as the drones silently glided overhead.

Kurt held up a hand to Mendez, and saw the older man cover his mouth to muffle his panting. As much as he admired the Chief, that sprint had taken something out of him.

They watched until there was a break in the shadows, and they ran for the next building, the NCO quarters.

Kurt spotted the source of the drones' distraction: a heap of wreckage, three bent booms, and a charred sphere lying smoldering in the NCO's inspection yard.

Someone had taken one of the alien fliers out.

Across the yard and under the infirmary appeared the red glare of a laser sight—trained on Kurt. He started to twist to one side. When a targeting sight was on you, you moved. But this was no threat. It was a signal.

He pointed and then Mendez saw it, too. The laser flashed once more and then it winked off.

Mendez started to move; Kurt checked the airspace, and then pulled the Chief flat against the wall as another drone floated overhead.

It passed. They ran to the infirmary and dove under.

Waiting for them in the shadows were perfectly camouflaged smudges of mottled gray: Tom and Lucy in their SPI armor.

Mendez said in a low voice, "You two are the best dammed things I've almost seen all week."

Kurt felt the same way, but he didn't have the luxury to say so. He was in command, and that required a certain distance, no matter how much he cared for these two.

Lucy nodded and took up position along the edge of the building, on guard.

"Report," Kurt said.

"We count twenty-two drones within the camp perimeter," Tom said.

"Any other camp personnel here?" Kurt asked.

"No, sir," Tom replied. "All missing… or dead." He took a deep breath. "We've neutralized two drones with grenades. They have shields and deflect assault and sniper rounds. Slower projectiles are not deflected. We've learned that from a weak transmission from Team Saber."

"Saber is here?" Mendez asked.

"Negative, Chief," Tom said. "We never hooked up with Saber, Katana, or Gladius after Zone 67 went active. There were no additional transmissions after the one."

Kurt watched Mendez's reaction. The man looked rock solid, and there was no trace of the worry he had seen earlier. He knew he could count on him, Tom, and Lucy no matter what.

"We may be on our own for a long time," Kurt told them.

"We have to make the most of our position at Camp Currahee. Tom, get to the armory, collect grenades, det cord, whatever else looks good. Forget the ammunition, though, they're all stun rounds. Don't overload."

Tom nodded. "Yes, sir."

"Chief," Kurt said, "get to the command center. Fire up the generators to boost power and get on the auxiliary COM. It might be strong enough to punch through this radio interference. Send a general distress. Bounce it between the antenna arrays. It might confuse these things long enough to get through. Try and raise any survivors from the Agincourt."

They both knew the odds of escape pods being out of the range of that blast. Still, they had to try.

"Leave a note," Kurt continued, "in case the other Spartans come here. Tell them to gather supplies and meet us at El Morro Point."

"Aye aye," Mendez replied.

Kurt checked his watch, a self-winding antique mechanical. "Mark time as 1045. Lucy and I will pick up ammunition and then arrange for a distraction in one hour. Then make for the jungle, and we'll meet up at El Morro Point."

"Yes, sir," Tom and Mendez said.

They then crawled to opposite sides of the infirmary, waited for the drone shadows to vanish, and then they rolled out.

"Lucy?"

She belly-crawled over to him.

"Follow." He moved to the building's edge. Lucy in her SPI armor became his shadow.

Kurt pointed to the small whitewashed house across the quad: the Camp Commandant's residence where Kurt had lived for the last twenty years.

They waited three long minutes for the overhead shadows of patrolling drones to vanish.

He and Lucy entered the house and closed the door.

Kurt had never locked it, but now, some part of his mind made him reflexively turn the tiny bolt on the door.

The house was small, three rooms comprised of an outer office, a toilet area, and bunk.

There were framed pictures on his office wall, a Greek urn with ancient wrestlers in an alcove, and neat stacks of paperwork on his desk—the recent deployment orders for Gamma Company.

He wished whatever was happening had started last week— when there had been three hundred Spartans on Onyx. The tactical situation would be much different.

Lucy lowered the bamboo blinds, and then hesitated by the pictures on the wall.

Kurt joined her. For the last five years the SPARTAN-II program had been publicly promoted by Section Two to boost morale. There were shots of Spartans in their MJOLNIR armor helping wounded marines onto a Pelican, Spartans surrounded by fallen Covenant Elites, Spartans standing tall. Heroes all. The SPARTAN-IIIs had studied their legendary predecessors, their battles, and their tactics—learning from the best.

He glanced at Lucy, her expression inscrutable within her mirrored helmet, and then he looked back to the pictures. There wasn't a single photo of a SPARTAN-III on the wall, however, and not one public mention of their sacrifices. And there never would be, either.

Kurt wished it was different, and that he'd taken the small steps to improve his Spartans sooner. The emphasis on their team training, the SPI-armor system upgrades, the new mutations—it hardly seemed enough.

"This way," he told her, and turned to the steel door set near the bathroom. He palmed the biometric and let the facial and retinal scanners play over his face. The door silently opened and they entered.

Fluorescent lights flickered on, revealing a room lined with ammunition lockers, rifle racks, crates labeled SPNKr, and dozens of grenade bandoliers. Titanium girders crisscrossed the walls and ceiling, reinforcing the room so it could withstand a direct bomb blast.

He opened one floor-to-ceiling weapon cabinet and showed Lucy the arsenal of Covenant rifles, pistols, and grenades within.

"Start packing," he told her. "Take all the live ammunition. Fill up six duffels. Take the SPNKrs, all the grenades, too."

She held out both hands, palms up, and made a down-up-down motion. The sign for "heavy."

"We'll have to make a few trips."

Kurt moved to the comer and stood before the two-and-a-half-meter-square stainless- steel safe. He dialed the combination and the door clicked and opened with a hiss as the pressurized nitrogen atmosphere vented.

Kurt pulled open the safe's heavy door. A green glow suffused the room.

Lucy froze with a SPNKr launcher in one hand, plasma pistol in the other. She moved trancelike to his side and stared at the contents of the safe and let out a tiny strangled sound of surprise.

Inside was a suit of MJOLNIR armor. The muscular plates glistened ghostly green over the jet-black ballistic underlayer. It looked formidable even standing there empty.

The last time he had worn it was when he had greeted the Alpha Company recruits.

Since then he had meticulously cared for it, and learned everything there was about its maintenance. Its fusion pods had been refitted when Kurt had been assigned to recon Station Delphi, so it had sufficient power for fifteen years of continuous operation.

MJOLNIR armor was superior in every way to the SPI suit. Wearing it Kurt would be able to protect his SPARTAN-IIIs better, destroy these drones more efficiently, but after decades of drilling into the Spartans the importance of working together, of being a family, the MJOLNIR armor would symbolically isolate him from them.

And that was the last thing he wanted.

He pulled a locker out from under the suit's stand and opened it. Within was a matte gray set of Semi-Powered Infiltration armor. He removed his boots and pulled on the PR leggings.

Lucy pointed to the MJOLNIR armor, and then at Kurt.

"No," he said. "That's not what I am anymore. I'm one of you."

SECTION IV

DR. CATHERINE HALSEY

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

DATE STAMP [[ERROR]] ANOMALY \ ESTIMATED RANGE SEPTEMBER 15-DECEMBER

20, 2552 (MILITARY CALENDAR) \ ABOARD DECOMMISSIONED UNSC CHIROPTERA-

CLASS VESSEL (ILLEGAL REGISTRY) BEATRICE, IN SLIPSPACE, LOCATION UNKNOWN