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  This is for all the Halo fans who’ve loved Gray Team as much as I have. Thank you for giving me the chance to tell another one of their stories.

  CHAPTER 1

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  Carrow, Joint Occupation Zone, September 1, 2558

  Melody Azikiwe watched a Sangheili heavy destroyer die a slow, fiery death above the planet Carrow’s upper atmosphere. Even from kilometers away, she could see the iridescent purple hull shimmer as the destroyer’s thinner, almost waspish waist broke apart. The rear finlike structures spun off in a series of explosions, though the bulbous prow remained intact and still moved forward.

  She was grateful to be standing inside a protected bay on the Unwavering Discipline, a former Covenant capital ship and sturdy heavy cruiser, in these final hours of what had become a bloody Sangheili civil war over Carrow’s skies.

  Melody watched plasma fire whip through the space between the vessels to carve up the remaining part of the other ship. Lights guttered out and what was left of the destroyer slowly fell through the upper atmosphere, blazing white-hot as the speed of reentry turned it into a stretched-out cloud of glowing debris.

  From where she stood in the bay with her three Diplomatic Corps staff members, Melody could see the rest of the naval battle in the dark by the lines of plasma bolts dancing across empty space as Sangheili ships exchanged constant fire. A sudden blast of energy lanced out directly toward her and she flinched. The massive, vaulted hangar shuddered. The shield opening shivered as it dissipated the energy.

  Adam Hsein, one of the three secretaries who made up Melody’s staff for this diplomatic mission, glanced over at the hangar’s open mouth. They all wore functional gray uniforms. Diplomatic Corps utilitarian clothing—not quite military, but clearly not civilian. Though Jens Forsburg had a yellow scarf around his neck, Jens never being one for regulations.

  “How long do you think the Discipline’s shields can hold?” Adam asked nervously.

  “This ship is really getting the crap beat out of it,” Victoria Weaver agreed.

  Another shuddering impact knocked them off their feet.

  Melody staggered back up as Adam grabbed her arm. “You okay?” he asked.

  Melody nodded. Victoria and Jens huddled protectively around her.

  “Unwavering Discipline is a heavy cruiser,” Melody reminded them, not for the first time since the fighting between the Sangheili had broken out in Carrow’s orbit. It was an old vessel with an equally archaic, zealously Sangheili name. But that only meant it had survived many an encounter. “The shielding is strong. It’ll take more than a few hits to knock it out. The fleetmaster knows what he’s doing.”

  Victoria looked dubious. “I think he’s losing.”

  Jens looked absolutely terrified that she’d said that out loud.

  “We’re not the experts on Sangheili fleet engagements,” Melody remarked, glaring at Adam. He’d started this whole train of thought among the staff.

  Adam shrugged in response but then nodded that he understood. They didn’t need to be thinking about shield strength or who was winning the battle right this second. The two of them had always worked well together, half their communication being the nonverbal subtleties needed in the Diplomatic Corps.

  “We should keep moving,” Adam said, and pushed at their shoulders.

  They walked past a row of teardrop-shaped Seraph fighters and three Spirit dropships. Despite the nature of the job, Melody was uncomfortable around the dropships in the gloom of a hangar. She was used to seeing them above the mountains, swooping down and bringing death. They looked like massive, flying tuning forks, the long forward-pointing arms vomiting Covenant soldiers out on the ground when they landed.

  Six years ago they were the enemy. Now she could speak their language.

  Things changed so fast. But it was still sometimes hard to shake the bad memories away. Even as an envoy. Even if the Spirits were empty and just being used for spare parts.

  “Here we go.” Melody stopped in front of the ship’s Ren, a small and boxy specialized utility shuttle capable of quick, short-range travel thanks to its four impulse drives. “Victoria, get down to the coordinates I gave you. That’s the safest possible area from all this mess. Don’t head for Suraka.”

  They’d just seen hours earlier what Fleetmaster Rojka ‘Kasaan’s enemies had done to the city of Suraka from orbit. A vicious, preplanned attack that had neutered human defenses in a matter of hours. Any ships with slipspace drives destroyed, on the ground or in orbit. An action destroying any chance of the peace that Melody had come to negotiate. And it had been followed by the Sangheili all turning on each other. It was a raw, ungloved Sangheili fight for the future of this world, with Melody caught in the middle.

  Victoria looked across the hangar, back out through the Sangheili shields toward the battle. “You’ve got to be kidding me. I’ve only ever flown through a combat situation in a simulator, back on Earth. And that was only as part of standard training.”

  “And this kind of situation is what that training was for,” Melody said. She squeezed Victoria’s shoulder in reassurance. “You can do this. I have no doubt.”

  Melody tapped the control pad and the shuttle’s door dropped open. Adam and Jens slipped past and inside to strap in. Victoria stayed put and grabbed Melody’s hand. Her own hand was pale against Melody’s skin, even in the strange Sangheili light. “You can’t stay here.”

  “I have to,” Melody replied.

  “We’ll be stranding you. Why are you staying? You can’t stop any of this. You need to come with us. Your mission is over.”

  Melody projected calm and confidence for her staff. “Just get everyone down safely to Carrow. I can’t talk about what’s going on any further.”

  Victoria glanced around and lowered her voice. “You realize you’re sending us to the middle of the desert. There’s nothing there.”

  “You’ll be all right. Trust me,” Melody said.

  “Does all this have something to do with the Office of Naval Intelligence?” Victoria had always been very curious about Melody’s ad hoc ONI training sessions just before taking this mission. Not that Melody could have disclosed anything about that particular situation even if she wanted to.

  “It’s a safe place,” Melody said. “Now, I’m ordering you: go!” There wasn’t much time left.

  At this point, Melody wasn’t sure how long Unwavering Discipline’s shields would really hold. Her staff knew it; she knew it. Melody Azikiwe wasn’t a naval officer, but it seemed to her that Unwavering Discipline was now outgunned. At first, Fleetmaster Rojka ‘Kasaan’s fleet had been evenly matched against the other attacking Sangheili ships. But a Jiralhanae fleet had inexplicably since joined in, and the tide had clearly turned.

  Melody had already seen two of Rojka’s light destroyers obliterated while shielding the Unwavering Discipline. The fleetmaster had pulled in frigates to replace them. But that was all he had now—each of his heavy destroyers was burning in Carrow’s upper atmosphere, ambushed by the Jiralhanae and unable to fall back to help him. Her staff’s judgment had been correct: this was clearly the end of the battle.

  Melody pushed Victoria in and closed the shuttle door. “Go!” She banged on it and backed away.

  It sat th
ere for another long minute.

  Finally, the engines kicked on. The shuttle shot awkwardly across the hangar floor, wobbling in the air. Once outside the hangar, it seemed to pause for a second, until the engines lit up to fling it away from the ship just as another plasma assault struck the shields. Melody staggered back at the impact and smacked her ribs against a stack of stripped-down Sangheili engine parts, slicing an area of her palm on a jagged metal edge.

  She hissed in pain. Then she grabbed her side and jogged her way back through the hangar. The direct hits to Unwavering Discipline increased as she moved. Apparently she’d gotten her staff off the ship just in time.

  Melody pulled a strip of cloth out of her hair. It had grown out of regulation length and right up into frizzy chaos while on board the Sangheili ship. She hadn’t had time to cut it herself, and there weren’t exactly any Sangheili hairdressers on board. She wound the strip around her hand and then kept it clenched in a fist to hide the cut. This had less to do with protecting her injury and more to do with the fact that the Sangheili believed spilled blood to be shameful.

  The fleetmaster stood waiting for her in a nearby corridor. Rojka ‘Kasaan was surrounded by two of his trusted commanders and five guards who waited just behind them. Rojka himself towered over Melody, all two and a half meters of gray, saurian alien. He had a full weapons harness on, which was ominous—it meant he expected to be fighting hand-to-hand at any moment. Rojka’s upper and lower mandible armor shifted as he spoke to her.

  “Your staff has finished dishonoring themselves?” he asked in Sangheili as he began to walk. Melody had to hurry after him and his retinue as their long backward-joined legs strode rapidly down the corridors of his ship. “I see that the shuttle flees for the surface of Rakoi.”

  Rakoi. That was what the Sangheili who had taken residence on Carrow called the planet, ignoring the already existing human name. Rojka had explained to Melody that the Sangheili chose the different naming convention to honor the devastated human city of Suraka, somehow. And the Sangheili had built their own city, across the Uldt desert from the remains of Suraka, and called it Rak. All in memory of the human place they had once destroyed, never realizing that humans who had originally fled would actually ever try to come back to Carrow.

  “This battle is not my staff’s to fight,” Melody replied, slightly out of breath as she struggled to keep up. It was hard to switch her mind to the alien language. She’d only been speaking it for a few years after being accepted into an accelerated immersion language program in the Diplomatic Corps. Though the last two months speaking Sangheili with warriors on this ship had really accelerated her abilities.

  “Yet you stay aboard with us,” Rojka observed.

  “Yes. How does the Unwavering Discipline fare, Fleetmaster?”

  The Sangheili’s head, almost snakelike, twisted to look down at her. Looking down: that comes so easily to them, Melody thought. She wondered if it was their height that had given them their natural haughtiness toward other species.

  “I have eliminated many of the enemy’s destroyers and frigates,” Rojka told her.

  “But you’re still outnumbered,” Melody said. “And taking direct fire. That can’t be a good sign, Fleetmaster.”

  Rojka slowed his loping walk. “You are correct,” he said, thoughtfully. “Soon, Thars will send his best warriors for me when he disables this vessel. We have stopped maneuvering and are preparing to be boarded. My understanding, Envoy, is that you do not have extensive training in combat. Would you like to be honorably executed by my hand so that you are not captured alive?”

  Melody instinctively pulled back. Then she stopped herself and remembered her cross-species training. “I thank you for your offer, Fleetmaster.” Because it was a genuine and sincere offer from a Sangheili. “But I will not choose death by your hand.”

  “You understand that because you have made cause with me, Thars will not grant you a quick death. Or an honorable one. He cares little for humans.”

  “I stayed for another reason,” Melody said, quickly shifting to get out in front of Rojka and half jogging backward. She lowered her voice so that only Rojka could hear what came next. “I want to wake the Spartans.”

  Rojka stopped in his tracks and roared, armored mandibles flying fully open in rage. Melody backed off, despite having steeled herself for just this reaction. “No! Their fate is sealed—sealed by actions they took long ago! Consider this their judgment. You tried your best, Envoy, but they were dead. Dead to begin with.”

  She had to make a martial argument. Something that a skilled fleetmaster would understand. “They can fight your enemies, they are an asset—” Melody started to say.

  The Sangheili stepped forward and lowered his face down to hers, his wide, unblinking alien eyes staring deep into her own. “The only good thing about dying here is knowing that they will perish along with me.”

  He walked past. His soldiers moved with him, pushing Melody aside as they hissed at her.

  Rojka craned his head around. “I have posted guards on what you seek,” he said, “in case you have other thoughts about this matter.”

  Melody gritted her teeth. Damn it.

  Rojka ‘Kasaan stalked his way into Unwavering Discipline’s command bridge. Here, in the raised central platform of the cavernous room buried deep inside the heavy cruiser, he could see the situation at a glance by looking at any of the many holographic projections feeding him information about the battle and his ship’s status.

  Daga ‘Rathum, one his most trusted field commanders, looked over at him. “We have lost Retribution’s Promise,” he announced.

  That was Rojka’s last escort. Their throat was now exposed to Thars ‘Sarov. Rojka had fought like a trapped animal and managed to eliminate two of the enemy’s heavy destroyers, along with four light destroyers and a frigate. But Thars was still coming for Rojka with four damaged frigates and his own heavy cruiser.

  Rojka could have annihilated those too, were it not for the other fleet.

  The Jiralhanae. Rojka cursed them. Two of their heavy cruisers and two heavy destroyers also advanced, patched together and pushed with engines underpowered due to the sheer amount of extra armoring the Jiralhanae added to the vessels. What a strange way to do battle: to purposely put your ships into the middle of fire and not even try to evade it. To just sit there and merely take the damage while firing back.

  Rojka and Thars had both come to this world to create a new one together. To start over after the war took everything. Now it was clear that, while Thars might share an uncle with him, the only blood Thars now cared about was Rojka’s: spilled on the ground of combat. And sadly, he was about to get that.

  But why had Thars allied with the contemptible Jiralhanae? Why would they even be here after the result of the Great Schism they had set into motion years earlier? The Covenant had failed, obliterated under the weight of many lies; as a result, the Sangheili did not make common cause with Jiralhanae anymore, at least not as equals. No, this was strange. Thars was apparently so consumed with a desire for power and a hatred of the humans that he preferred to turn to the Jiralhanae and buy their loyalty rather than to Rojka, one of his own bloodline.

  What did we call the Jiralhanae? Brutes. Rojka always thought it low and insulting. Yet he also found a certain fondness for the accuracy of the term. They were, indeed, Brutes.

  Rojka had fiercely damaged his enemies, to be sure, but the inevitable was clear: he had lost this fight.

  A part of Rojka looked forward to defining how the battle poems of his descendants would remember this moment. How he would die against great odds. He’d vanquished more ships than he’d lost. And when he was boarded, he would kill many traitorous Sangheili before he fell.

  But another part of Rojka mourned the sheer waste.

  “A weak kaidon should be attacked,” he said to Daga, “but face-to-face, or with assassins. This fight between evenly matched fleets will only weaken Thars when he attempts to take Rako
i for his own. He will not even be able to fight the humans on this world as he wishes, despite the blow he struck them before embarking on this coup.”

  “Rakoi will not be able to stand as an independent colony,” Daga said. “Everything we risked, everything we fought for, Thars now throws away.”

  “Such a fool I have never met. We were barely keeping our ships repaired and in good order,” Rojka said. “Now we have lost most of them in this pointless battle among ourselves.” Keeping a proper fleet maintained since the Great Schism and the breaking of the Covenant was difficult. Since the San’Shyuum Prophets and Jiralhanae betrayed the Sangheili, forsaking the Covenant’s thousands of years of seeming invincible unity, they had all been making do by stripping parts off older vessels to keep any working ships running. Being a part of the Covenant had once meant access to great shipyards, great wealth, and even greater power. Now it was only a memory.

  “He does not make us strong. He weakens us,” Daga agreed.

  Rojka missed the order and certainty of days past, longing for the knowledge of exactly what was to be done. He yearned for Sanghelios, his species’ cradle world, though he knew he would never see it again. And of course, it was best not to think about Glyke, Rojka’s own homeworld.

  But to consider all he had lost right now would be to make himself weak before he needed to be his strongest.

  He should never have let humans on his ship to begin with. Ever since he had first heard of the species, things had been falling apart.

  Pesky, pesky things, these humans.

  Rojka checked the holographic images on the projectors. A wave of enemy dropships flung themselves out into the space between the fighting vessels. Unwavering Discipline had lost most of its ability to fire back. But Rojka wasn’t about to give the order to run. “If I am to die, so be it—whether it is in opposing rebellion by Thars, a sneak attack by the Jiralhanae he makes cause with, or anything else. I have fought well. I will die well.”