Envoy Read online

  “History will never hear that Rojka ‘Kasaan surrendered.”

  “Then I will make sure you die ignobly.”

  “You will fail.” Rojka cut the communications link. He looked around his control bridge. “Prepare for boarding.”

  Governor Ellis Gass held on to the side of the door as the scarred old Warthog hopped a curb and plunged down into a parking bay under the Wulandari Building, where the Surakan Stock Exchange had its offices. The Exchange had been shut down for the last month. Since then, no one had rung the old brass ship’s bell that had flown through slipspace all the way from Luna to be mounted in the pit’s ceremonial balcony.

  She wondered if anyone had removed the bell to store it away for safety.

  “Stay down, Governor!” her driver shouted.

  Behind them, a Jiralhanae Prowler burned on the street, riddled with holes from the extraordinarily loud and heavy machine gun mounted just centimeters over Ellis’s head. The sled-like Prowler had been rushing to block them when the militia volunteer manning the Warthog’s main gun opened fire. And then her driver had just rammed the alien vehicle before Ellis realized what was happening. Thankfully, the Prowler had sustained enough damage from the Warthog’s mounted weapon that a broadside collision was enough to finish it off.

  She brushed dust and dirt from her suit as the Warthog rattled down one more level of the parking bay. It stopped in front of a large, gray concrete wall. The words EXECUTIVE PARKING had been sprayed on the wall in red stenciled letters.

  On the street outside, the sound of something flying between the buildings shook the floor.

  Distant explosions thudded. From the direction of the residential districts, Ellis realized.

  “Authorization?” the driver loudly asked. He was now talking to Militia Volunteer Command-and-Control on one of the Warthog’s comm units. He’d asked Ellis something already. She’d been distracted. Still in shock.

  Ellis struggled to remember the code, to tell the driver, but couldn’t. She clambered out of the Warthog and then unceremoniously threw up all over the ground. She hung on to one of the tire’s deep treads, her fingers digging into the mud and grit there as she heaved.

  The gunner, barely eighteen, was lying strangely against the side of the bed-mounted weapon. He hadn’t said anything since the driver had hurtled them into the dark safety here. Ellis looked into the boy’s glassy eyes. Dead. There was a charred black hole in his chest that she could see straight through.

  “Oh, no,” Ellis whispered, raising her hand.

  The driver was done talking to Command-and-Control and scrambled to the back of the Warthog. “Dizzy!” He was an older man with graying hair, calm and pragmatic in the middle of what felt like a mad dash to get here. But now he wiped his eyes as he grabbed the gunner in a hug around the shoulders. “You Brute bastards . . .”

  A loud engine roar echoed through the bay’s caverns, bouncing off the walls and startling Ellis.

  The driver pulled Dizzy’s body down, set it on the ground, and then took his place at the heavy mounted gun, spinning it quickly around to face the incoming vehicle.

  It was another Warthog roaring up to them. The driver relaxed.

  Lamar Edwards, her vice-governor, dropped out of the arriving vehicle. “Ellis, are you okay?” he asked.

  She staggered forward and grabbed his shoulder, utterly relieved to see him. “Lamar, I . . . I can’t remember the codes to get us down,” Ellis said, her voice cracking.

  “It’s okay,” he muttered, but not unkindly. Then he said to the driver, “Call in that the governor and vice-governor are coming down. Authorization whiskey-papa-tango-five-nine-eight-six-four.”

  “Yes, sir,” the driver said, climbing back into the front of the Warthog.

  Ellis and Lamar stood in silence for a second. The dead gunner was called Dizzy, but she had no idea who the driver was. Yet they’d both saved her life. Her bodyguards had rushed her out and handed her over to the militia volunteers during the initial bombing. No time for names or introductions.

  Yesterday she’d been planning to attend a potentially historic summit between the Sangheili leadership, her administration, and the Unified Earth Government’s own envoy. Now she was in the middle of a war.

  Lamar looked over at the body. “I don’t know my driver’s name,” Ellis said in a low voice.

  “The SMV didn’t have time to get name patches on some of the new uniforms,” he replied.

  SMV—Surakan Militia Volunteers. She hadn’t focused much on the SMV, considering she’d inherited it when she took office. With the Covenant a thing of the past and the UNSC fighting off in the distance, it shouldn’t have been needed. As far as Ellis had been concerned, the war was over.

  The parking garage floor jolted and began to descend into the ground. Lamar didn’t stumble but easily moved with the disruption. As he would. The EXECUTIVE PARKING stencils rose slowly as they moved down into the earth. Slabs of concrete, stained with tire marks and fluid leaks, swung closed into place over her head with a clang. Lights flickered on around them as they rumbled down the massive elevator shaft.

  “This is a mess, Lamar,” Ellis said. She looked down at the scars on the brown, weathered backs of his hands, then back up at his green eyes and the military-short haircut he preferred. Lamar had been an ODST in the UNSC Marine Corps—what they had referred to as a Helljumper. He never talked about what he’d done back in the war, but he’d agreed to run with her for office. She’d needed to prove to the Carrow refugees that her administration had the expertise to keep them all safe. She’d resented that necessity at the time. But now she’d never been happier to see the man. “I mean, I was working on high-volume pump design improvements and infrastructure logistics when I ran for office. Now I’m making decisions that leave people dead.”

  Lamar gave her a look. She’d known this wouldn’t be easy when they left the relative comforts of the UEG refugee reserve created for them on Mars and returned to rebuild Suraka. “We all took the risk to come back here,” he said.

  “Too big a risk. We should never have trusted the Sangheili. We should’ve known our peoples couldn’t coexist, that they’d want this whole world for themselves.” History would judge her poorly. All that money going toward keeping a security fleet in orbit; Ellis had thought reducing it would help pay for the civil engineering projects Suraka desperately needed. Five years ago, they’d returned to Carrow and started rebuilding. But Ellis had always felt they could address the neighboring Sangheili settlement after Suraka had been fully restored from the damage it had suffered during the war. After all, they were separated by the vast, lifeless Uldt desert: why would the Sangheili ever cross it?

  “A lot of people believed in you. They still do.” Almost a million, all refugees from early Carrow and other colonies still uninhabitable due to the Covenant’s thirty years of unhindered destruction, had come to Suraka in various stages over the last five years. So many hopes and dreams were embedded in this small, ruined city. Suraka had been suddenly evacuated when the Covenant continued their rampage through the Outer Colonies in 2531. It had lain fallow for twenty-two years, ignored by all. And now it was unbelievably the center of a new conflict, five years into rebuilding.

  Ellis wiped her cheek with a shaking palm. “People trusting me may have made the gravest mistake, Lamar.”

  “You have to dream of a future. Or all the hard decisions we’ll need to make next, they won’t be for anything. And it has to be for something.”

  Lamar should have been governor, Ellis thought. She would have been better off remaining a civil engineer or project manager.

  “No one could have stopped the Sangheili from attacking the city,” Lamar said.

  “We could have worked harder to stop people from settling outside of Suraka. Those smaller settlements out in the Uldt. They spooked the Sangheili.” A large brown line passed by. They were now ten stories down, Ellis estimated. Halfway there. She thought the pistons sounded a bit under-
oiled. “I could have built those people better oases. They wouldn’t listen. All they had to do was wait.”

  “It’s hard to tell people who have lost everything to keep living in temporary housing,” Lamar said. “Hard to tell them that the independence we promised them would take time.”

  “I should have been firmer.” Ellis wrapped her arms around herself. A couple hundred thousand Sangheili versus a million humans, and growing. The Sangheili in their sprawled-out keeps and holdings. Feudal, fortified, and strategic.

  “You didn’t provoke the Sangheili into this,” Lamar said. “You can’t own that.”

  Ellis had woken up today to the sound of explosions. The ground thudding. Arms grabbing her, hustling her into a Pelican to get her clear of the new governor’s house on the edge of Suraka. An SMV commander gave her a hurried briefing as the Pelican barreled inward toward the city. Human ships with slipspace ability in orbit and on the ground had been obliterated by Sangheili destroyers. She’d been planning to fly out tomorrow to meet the UEG envoy and the kaidon—Rojka ‘Kasaan, leader of the Sangheili here on Carrow—on one of those ships.

  Utterly stunned, Ellis learned that communications back to Earth had been targeted and taken out in seconds, before anyone in Suraka had even realized what was happening. The ferocity of the Sangheili attack was overwhelming. In a matter of seconds, Carrow was completely cut off, isolated, and vulnerable.

  Then, according to some very confusing reports, the Sangheili seemed to have turned on each other just as viciously as they had struck Suraka. The SMV had ordered any surviving ships to flee and hide, as those on the ground scrambled to secure the city against further attack.

  Ellis had hoped for a lull here as the Sangheili fought among themselves. Instead, out of nowhere, the Jiralhanae had dropped from orbit to land in Suraka, wreaking havoc on a scale she had only read about in fiction. They plowed through everything that crossed their path, and left few survivors.

  Right here in her city.

  And then there was the matter of her son.

  “Lamar . . . Jeff’s in the militia. I haven’t heard from him. I’ve been asking everyone since I was picked up. No one has anything to tell me.”

  “I’ll ask around when we get inside,” Lamar said softly. Then added, “I didn’t know he joined.”

  “I didn’t want to advertise it. He always thought it would come to this. He didn’t think making concessions to aliens that were never supposed to even be here—who drove us off Carrow to begin with—was right, or tenable for that matter. I didn’t want my opponents using him against me. I let him sign up under his father’s name.”

  Her husband, Senj, had died three years ago. Jeff shared his father’s opinion of all things alien. Neither of them had easily forgotten their time as refugees, so he’d joined the militia. Senj would have been proud.

  Spending so much time on the rebuilding efforts, Ellis had barely seen Jeff in the last year. She tried hard to remember the last thing she’d said to him, but it wouldn’t come back to her right now. That should have bothered her more than it did at the moment, but she felt unmoored, numb, and fuzzy.

  The elevator ground to a slow halt in front of large hangar doors. Ellis might not have been a soldier, but she was an engineer. She’d been a part of building these backups during the previous administration, in the first four years since returning to Suraka. They’d drilled down deep into the rock below the city and hollowed out impregnable spaces to shield the citizenry and militia—on the remote chance that anything like this would ever happen. Many of these underground facilities were interconnected with heavily fortified armories at strategic intervals.

  Ellis had protested the investment of resources and time but had served the previous governor well, getting everything done in record time and under budget so that they could move to bigger and (so she had thought) better projects for Suraka’s second age. It was because of these defenses that she’d run against her predecessor on a platform of reorientation: expanding Suraka to take in even more people than it could currently hold.

  She might be out of her element at the moment, but she was still home under her own city. I’m the one who built this underworld, she thought. That gave her strength and let her summon a measure of focus now that imminent danger had been removed.

  And from here, she would rebuild Suraka again.

  “It’s time to start fighting back,” Ellis said. “We’ve lost a lot of people with the first wave of Brutes. But it’s going to be tough for anything to reach us down here. We’ll need to regroup.”

  “No other choice,” Lamar said.

  The fortified doors at the bottom of the shaft opened, revealing the large storage facilities and bays filled with militia activity.

  “Carrow is our world,” Ellis said. “We won’t let them take it from us.”

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  * * *

  Unwavering Discipline’s shields flickered under the latest barrage of plasma and then dissipated as its systems finally gave out. Rojka sat in his command chair, following the chain of breakdowns throughout the ship on his diagnostic sensors. Some instinctive part of him wanted to shout at the crew to start working on repairs. But that was a foolish act, dragging out just a little more time before the inevitable.

  “Dropships and boarding craft are almost here,” Daga reported to Rojka.

  Soon dozens, possibly hundreds, of Sangheili would come boiling through holes punched in the hull. Thars might even have the Unggoy aboard his ship, which he would use in a suicidal first wave to soften up Rojka’s fighters.

  That was the real reason Rojka didn’t want any of his crew trying to fix the shields or keep Unwavering Discipline’s engines running for maneuvers. The moment those craft surrounded the hull, Rojka would note their locations and move his crew to create killing avenues and choke points for the incoming boarders.

  Thars was going to pay a tremendous price for this vessel.

  “This fight will be remembered for generations,” Daga announced.

  Certainly Thars would never forget it. Rojka let a wave of satisfaction pass over him. “If Thars dares set foot anywhere on this ship, he will die.”

  To perish facing one’s enemy was all that a true Sangheili could ask for.

  Daga turned away from a projection console. “The weapons master needs a moment of your attention, Fleetmaster.”

  “What is it?” Rojka asked. The timing was distracting. He broke away from staring at the boarding craft falling toward the hull.

  “He says the human envoy demanded ordnance.” Daga sounded surprised and somewhat impressed. So was Rojka. He pulled at his own weapons harness and mulled that over for a moment.

  “The envoy is merely a negotiator. Can a human like that even use our weapons?” Rojka asked. “Are they trained?”

  Daga cocked his head. “When I fought on the world they called Reach, the civilians usually fled before us without fighting, or perished well before I arrived. I had assumed not.”

  Rojka checked the lines of boarding craft on the hull’s visual sensors again. Their large, armor-cracking maws loomed larger. Not long now. He checked his thigh for his energy sword. It was there. Ready to soak in the blood of his enemies.

  “Human or Sangheili, it should be any creature’s right to die in face-to-face combat,” Rojka said. “Let her keep what she has taken. The envoy will perhaps enjoy a good death by our side. Where does she make her stand?”

  Daga conferred with the ship’s limited battlenet array. “The envoy is now deep in the storage holds. I have a designation . . .”

  Rojka was thunderstruck. He stood up and shouted, “She makes no stand and plans no fight!”

  Daga recoiled at the sudden outburst. “Fleetmaster?”

  “She makes a fool of me!” Rojka hissed. “Disregards my direct orders!”

  The understanding then dawned on Daga. He looked around and lowered his voice. “She is trying to release the Demon Three? But the
y are guarded by warriors you trust.”

  “Which is why she has armed herself.” Rojka stalked toward an exit.

  “We are abandoning the command bridge?” Daga said, alarmed. “What of Thars?”

  “After what the Demon Three have done, would you die well knowing that they might at last manage to escape?”

  Daga still wasn’t convinced. “There are the guards.”

  “The envoy has deceived us. I should never have taken her aboard.”

  “We were not strong enough to defy the human government,” Daga said. “We had to negotiate. We had to make certain the allies of Thel ‘Vadam did not view our presence here as a threat.”

  Daga was right, of course. But Thars had nonetheless used the presence of the human envoy on Unwavering Discipline to claim that Rojka was nothing but an Earth puppet. Even among Rojka’s crew, there were many Sangheili who had little love for the humans.

  Now the envoy was attempting to release the Spartans. It was, for Rojka, the killing cut to his patience with having her aboard his ship. “I doubt the envoy ever came aboard to build peace alone. I think she also came here precisely to free the Demon Three. This was always her mission. Send one of your best warriors with me. We need to find and stop her.”

  Two of Rojka’s senior warriors guarded the doors to a hangar deep on the lower decks of the Unwavering Discipline, plasma rifles tight up next to the armored harnesses. Either one of them could rip Melody apart faster than she could sneeze.

  They looked up as she hurried toward them. “Quick!” Melody shouted. “A boarding team has breached the hull behind me!”

  The plasma grenade she’d just stuck on the wall further up the corridor should go off any second—

  The explosion—in the compressed air pressure of the ship—roared in her ears with an intensity she had not expected. The guards hesitated for a second, and Melody wondered if she had found the only two Sangheili on the ship not interested in proving their worth as fighters.