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  For my father, Ken Forbeck, who fought like hell to stay alive the entire time I wrote this, and now has enough new parts in him that he might qualify as a Spartan himself.

  Also, as always, for my wife, Ann, and our kids: Marty, Pat, Nick, Ken, and Helen. Their love of games and stories and just sheer fun inspires me every day.

  ARCHIVIST’S NOTE

  * * *

  After the incident on Talitsa in 2555, each surviving Spartan was thoroughly debriefed in light of the salient issues raised concerning conflicting emotions and loyalties among the subjects of the SPARTAN-IV program. Edward Buck’s unusual candor proved illuminating at this crucial juncture in the institution’s history, in the years after the end of the Human-Covenant Conflict (also referred to as the Covenant War) and in the early development of the Spartan branch. His story is presented here in its entirety for placement in the historical record.

  ONE

  * * *

  REPORT OF SPARTAN EDWARD BUCK

  OFFICE OF NAVAL INTELLIGENCE EYES ONLY

  I never wanted to be a Spartan. They didn’t even exist when I was growing up on Draco III, unless you count the citizens of the Greek city of Sparta back on Earth, I suppose, but that’s one hell of a stretch.

  The super-soldiers from the SPARTAN-II program, like the Master Chief? Back when I was a marine, they always struck me as glory-hungry bullet-catchers. And I wasn’t just your average grunt slinging slugs for the United Nations Space Command. For the better part of my career, I was one of the top soldiers in the human part of the galaxy, the ones the regular marines look up to.

  I was an ODST.

  That’s an Orbital Drop Shock Trooper. We’re the ones who get packed into our high-tech coffins and then shot out of perfectly good spacecraft. From there, we zip through skies burning with enough ordnance to turn a regular ship to slag, then slam down behind enemy lines and start clearing the LZ for the next wave of marines lining up behind us.

  We had a damn hard job, and we did it better than anyone.

  The old-school Spartans? The best thing they did for the rest of us on the field of battle was draw enemy fire.

  That’s no small benefit, mind you, and I got nothing against the Master Chief himself. I’ve met him. Fought alongside him. He’s a good Joe. You know, for a genetically engineered superhuman who was kidnapped at six years old to be shaped into a killing machine.

  He never morphed into a monster and tried to bite my head off. Not once.

  That’s a far sight better than I can say about those Covenant bastards we put down together. And don’t even get me started on the Flood. (So far, I’ve managed to avoid coming into contact with those nasty critters though. Not coincidentally, the docs tell me that’s the best way to prevent any kind of infection.)

  But times change. Spartans change. Hell, even I changed.

  The Covenant War ended. We won. With the help of the Arbiter and his rebellious Elite pals, we kicked the rest of their bifurcated asses off Earth, and then we cleared out every human system we could find.

  Go, humanity! Am I right?

  I loved that. The moment we knew we’d won? That was a sensation I’ll never forget. Against all odds—and countless thousands of Covenant troops—humanity had survived.

  One thing overwhelmed me even more than that feeling of triumph: a sense of relief.

  But that stunning instant of accomplishment faded faster than a perfect sunset on shore leave. We might have shattered the Covenant as a group, but some of the most hostile surviving bugs picked up the pieces and did their level best to glue the damn thing back together into an even uglier version of its old self.

  Now, I didn’t mind that so much, but without the threat of the original, properly organized Covenant looming over our heads, some of the human rebel forces who had joined the UNSC in our fight against the aliens didn’t cool their barrels for more than a couple days before they spun their sights on the rest of humanity again. Never mind that without the UNSC’s efforts, they’d have been mosquitoes on the Covenant’s windshield. They weren’t the kind to get choked up over such favors.

  So while the war might have been over, the battles went on, just over different issues.

  I kinda miss the old days. At least then, you knew who to shoot and who might be drawing a bead on you. But as Commander Musa likes to say, you don’t always get to fight your favorite foes.

  He also likes to say that, as Spartans, we no longer have formal ranks like they do in the rest of the military, which we’re supposed to take as meaning we’re all equals within the Spartan branch of the UNSC. Course, some of us are far more equal than others, and he’s the main point of evidence for that. So I don’t take his words as gospel.

  Don’t think I’m knocking inequalities, as long as they’re justified. I used to like being a gunnery sergeant in charge of my own squad.

  Anyhow, that’s how me and what was left of my ODST fireteam—code-named Alpha-Nine—found ourselves on Talitsa in August of 2555, almost three years after the end of the war, hunting for a Covenant Engineer named Vergil and his human handler, Sadie Endesha. Note that I said his and not its—we’ve come a long way with the Covenant.

  We’d been sent to that damn dustball by Veronica—excuse me, Office of Naval Intelligence Captain Dare—who thought we might have some kind of rapport with the alien. I suppose I saw her point. After all, Alpha-Nine had been the team that’d hauled his floating carcass out of New Mombasa, back on Earth in October of 2552, at the worst point of the Covenant War. If he had the capacity to recognize us, maybe he’d still be grateful for our help, assuming ONI hadn’t abused him too much in the interim.

  I wasn’t about to put any money down on Vergil knowing me from any other leatherneck. Me, I couldn’t tell him apart from another Huragok without a visual assist from my armor’s heads-up display, even though he was the only one I’d spent any real time with.

  At least he didn’t insist I call him Quick to Adjust, which, to be fair, was his real designation. Vergil was just the name of a program inside the AI that had run New Mombasa’s infrastructure, which got damaged when the Covenant invaded the city. While Quick to Adjust was trying to fix it, he assimilated Vergil into his own programming, and the name somehow came along with it. That’s how we first came to know him, and it kinda stuck.

  Mostly because “Vergil” rolls off the tongue better, I think.

  “You have a better chance with him than anyone else,” Veronica had said to me. “Plus, you’re one of the best soldiers I know.”

  “Just one of the best?”

  “I know a lot of soldiers these days.” She gave me a kiss on the cheek and that little wry smile she has when she knows the argument’s already won. “And there are a lot more Spartans out there now.”

  I suppose that’s fair if you count the Spartan-IVs, the new ones like me. We’re not exactly like those artificial gods from the earlier generations. More like demigods. And I’ll be damned if that usually isn’t good enough.

  “And who’s the handler?” I asked Veronica. “Her name sounds familiar.”

  “You have some history with her, although you’ve never met her.”

  “How’s that?”

  “Sadie is the daughter of Dr. Daniel Endesha, the man who programmed the
Superintendent AI that ran New Mombasa. As a single father, he couldn’t watch over his daughter as much as he wished, so he coded the Superintendent to be her caretaker instead. He called the program that did that Vergil.”

  “Ah.” Now it started to make sense.

  “That’s why I gave the Huragok that name. It’s also why ONI decided to pair Sadie up with him later.”

  “Because the program that was set to watch over her is now a part of him.” I scratched my head. “Does that mean the Huragok looks after her like a father?”

  Veronica shrugged. “It means he has an attachment to her we haven’t seen him form with any other humans. In fact, that’s how the United Rebel Front got their hands on him. They kidnapped Sadie, and he went along, quiet and willing.”

  “What the hell were they doing on Talitsa in the first place?”

  I started rolling my eyes before she could finish saying, “That’s classified.” She then held up a finger to cut me off. “But I can tell you that the UNSC has been using the ongoing conflict against the Front there as a proving grounds for the MJOLNIR armor project.”

  “And Vergil might have been giving them a hand. Tentacle. Whatever.”

  “I didn’t say that, but does it matter?”

  Not really. It was a shitty job either way, but then that’s why they called us in.

  Romeo started whining about it as soon as we were on the ground on Talitsa. Our ONI ride had dropped the three of us off in a rocky valley several klicks away from our target, which meant we had to hoof it the rest of the way, and he didn’t care for the effort one bit.

  “It’s bullshit, Gunny.” Romeo still used that nickname for me when we were out of earshot of the other Spartans, as did Mickey. Force of habit, I suppose. “What’s the deal with making us walk?”

  “Afraid you’ll get a blister on your dainty little feet?” Mickey said as he scanned our six with his designated marksman rifle. He didn’t care for the idea of a hike any more than Romeo did, but he wasn’t about to pass up an easy chance to razz his old pal some.

  Romeo kept his eyes fixed on the mountain rising against the horizon before us. “Back in the day, they’d stuff us in our coffins and boom us right down on the bugs’ heads. Now they’re afraid we can’t manage a proper insertion?”

  “We come cracking down through the sky like that, and the rebels holding Vergil will pop him—her, it, whatever—like a meaty balloon.” I started to leg it toward the rust-colored mountains, following the suggested route on my HUD, which wound about more than I liked. The others fell in behind me like birds in formation. “Since our mission is to save him from the rebels, we’d prefer to avoid that. We don’t have a lot of Engineers on our side to spare—which is why we can’t let the Front have even just one.”

  “But it’s okay if they kill the girl?” said Mickey.

  “Sadie’s not a girl. She’s only three years younger than you,” I said. “And we’re going to do everything we can to save her. But Vergil’s our top-value target.”

  “And she can go hang?”

  I resisted the urge to punch Mickey in the throat. “You think they would have hauled us out here to save just her?” I said. “We might have a lot more Spartans in the field these days, but we can’t be everywhere. We can’t save everyone.”

  Mickey grunted at me. “So she’s just lucky she happened to get kidnapped along with a valuable alien.”

  Romeo shook his head. “I liked it better when we were shooting at the bugs instead of rescuing them.”

  “That’s not the point,” I said. Much as we’d been through, Romeo knew he grated on my nerves sometimes, and I’d started to think he liked it. “We got our orders, we got our fancy implants and armor, and so we get the job done.”

  “Aye-freaking-aye,” Romeo said in as positive a tone as he could muster.

  With that settled, or so I thought, we double-timed it up the sunny side of the mountain. None of us said another word. We’d worked together for too long to bother with small talk in the field.

  That sort of thing had killed more soldiers than I care to think about. You started talking about your home life, such as it was, and you took your mind off the task at hand. The next thing you knew, enemy fire you never saw coming blew straight through your head.

  We hadn’t survived this many operations by letting ourselves get distracted. Besides which, we didn’t always have that much to say to each other those days.

  By the time we reached the ridge, the massive sun had fallen low, painting the sky in reds as dark as blood. The light amplifiers in my helmet automatically compensated for the encroaching dusk.

  I gave the signal, and we crouched low. A little while later, we fell to our hands and knees and crawled the last several meters until we could peer down over the ridge, hoping no one spotted our helmets silhouetted against the darkening sunset.

  A military base lay below us, nestled between two raised arms of the mountains and surrounded by low rock formations, along with a five o’clock shadow of scrub brush. It had been thrown together with prefabricated buildings that still bore UNSC logos. Anywhere near civilization and the rebels would have taken the time to remove such markings to help hide their crimes, but out here in the wilds of this backwater colony, they hadn’t bothered. They might even have worn the evidence of their thefts as a badge of honor.

  Lights glowed throughout the complex, and people strolled between the buildings like they were relaxing at a resort rather than holing up with a stolen alien genius. A pair of banged-up transports squatted in a makeshift airfield that sprawled in the center of the buildings, and I spotted a last-gen fighter stuffed in a dusty hangar just beyond that.

  It hadn’t been loaded up with any ordnance, as far as I could see. Maybe they didn’t have any. It might have been nothing more than a glorified high-speed taxi to them. Despite all that, they’d nabbed an Engineer right from under ONI’s nose, which meant they had to be far more effective than their base’s appearance implied.

  Vergil could have done a lot to help get the place into shape, but from the looks of it, they hadn’t dared let him that far off his leash yet. That reluctance wouldn’t last forever though.

  “What an ugly mess,” Romeo said over our private comm channel. “What kind of idiots would put up with living in a hellhole out in the sticks like this?”

  “Idiots with a purpose,” I said. “Rebels with a cause.”

  “They’re not doing it for the ladies, Romes,” said Mickey.

  “That’s Spartan Agu to you,” Romeo said with a chuckle. “That’s what all the girls call me.”

  “Cut the chatter.” I’d focused on two people striding between a couple of the buildings, cutting across the airfield to save time. “This is an op, not a playground.”

  “Yes, sir, Spartan Buck, sir,” Mickey said.

  God, I wanted to smack him across the back of his helmet, but Romeo took care of that for me. Quietly, of course.

  I scoped in on the pair. They looked like civilians out for an evening stroll—a man and a woman holding hands and chatting on their way to dinner. Watching them gave me a pang for Veronica, for a simpler life together that we’d probably never know. We could play at it in short bursts between missions, but we had our jobs.

  And to be honest, our jobs had us.

  My onboard operational database didn’t match them with any of the Front leaders catalogued by ONI, but that didn’t mean anything. The Front wasn’t a combined force so much as an ideology, a creed to which overmilitarized colonists who didn’t think they owed anything to the Unified Earth Government subscribed. While they didn’t pose as much of a direct threat as whatever remained of the Covenant, their decentralization made them that much harder to kill.

  We’d had the same trouble with the Covenant, of course. It’s a lot easier to strike at the heart of a beast than to stomp out every bug in a
hive.

  I scoped down tighter on the couple. Maybe I let their apparent happiness out here in the ass-end of the galaxy distract me. They didn’t look like they needed beaches or bars or shore leave or much of anything else they didn’t have a hope of finding around here. They had each other, and I’ll be damned if that didn’t seem like plenty.

  When the couple reached the center of the airfield, they veered toward the open hangar, and I saw a familiar blue glow move out to greet them. I brought the scope up just a bit and spotted an Engineer floating toward them. They waved to him, and I almost would have thought they were old friends but for the squad of armed guards that trailed in the alien’s wake.

  My HUD positively identified the Huragok as Vergil, and I allowed myself a smile. “Yup. That’s the gasbag we’re looking for,” I said to the others.

  I made to stand up but felt something hard jab me in the back of my helmet. “Hold it right there, Gunny,” Romeo said over the comm channel. “Don’t make one damn move. Please.”

  “What the hell?” I braced my arms to shove myself to my feet, and I got another knock in the back of the head for my efforts.

  “Better listen to him, Buck,” Mickey said. “Don’t move a muscle.” He sounded as grim as a medic telling a soldier that the only good thing about him bleeding out on the battlefield was that his cancer wouldn’t get him first.

  “Okay,” I said. “This is an awful bad time for a joke.”

  A full platoon of heavily armed rebels emerged from the rock formations just below us. They’d been lying there, waiting for us the entire time and blending into the environment with their rust-colored armor. They fanned out quickly, keeping their weapons trained on us. My HUD now marked each and every one of them as a semicircle of red blips on my foe-finder.

  “Gunny?” Romeo said. “I don’t think anyone’s laughing.”