D+73:34:16 (SPARTAN-117 Mission Clock) /On board theTruth and Reconciliation .

He wasn’t here, wasn’t there, wasn’tanywhere insofar as the Chief couldtell from within the strange never-never land of Halo’s teleportation net.

He couldn’t see or hear anything, save a sense of dizzying velocity. TheSpartan felt his body stitched back together, one molecule at a time. He sawsnatches of what looked like the interior of a Covenant ship as bands ofgolden light strobed up and disappeared over his head.

Something was wrong and he was just starting to figure out what it was—theinside of the ship seemed to be upside down—when he flipped head over heelsand crashed to the deck.

He’d materialized with his feet planted firmly on the corridor’s ceiling.

“Oh!” Cortana exclaimed. “I see, the coordinate data needs to be—”

The Chief came to his feet, slapped the general area where his implantswere, and shook his head. The AI sounded contrite. “Right. Sorry.”

“Never mind that,” the Spartan said. “Give me a sit-rep.”

She patched back into the Covenant computing systems, a much easier task nowthat they were aboard one of the enemy’s warships.

“The Covenant network is absolute chaos,” she replied. “From what I’vebeen able to piece together, the leadership ordered all ships to abandonHalo when they found the Flood, but they were too late. The Floodoverwhelmed this cruiser and captured it.”

“I assume,” he said, “that’sbad .”

“The Covenant think so. They’re terrified that the Flood will repair theship and use it to escape from Halo. They sent a strike team to neutralizethe Flood and prepare the ship for immediate departure.”

The Chief peered down the corridor. The bulkheads were violet. Or was thatlavender? Strange patterns marbled the material, like the oily sheen of abeetle’s carapace. Whatever it was, he didn’t care for it, especially on amilitary vessel, but who knew? Maybe the Covenant thought olive drab was forwimps.

He started forward, but quickly came up short as a voice that verged on agroan came in over his implants.“Chief . . . Don’t be a fool . . . Leaveme.”

It was Keyes’ voice.

Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK. He clung to the tetherof his CNI carrier wave, and “heard” familiar voices. An iron-hard,rasping male voice. A tart, warm female voice.

He knew them.

Was this another memory?

He was struggling to dredge up new pieces of his past to delay the numbingadvance of the alien presence in his mind. It was harder to maintain a graspon who he was, as the various pieces of his life—the things that made himwho he was—were stripped away, one at a time.

Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK.

The voices. They were talking about him. The Master Chief, the AI Cortana.

He felt a sense of mounting panic. They shouldn’tbe here.

The other grew stronger, and pressed forward, eager to learn more aboutthese creatures that were so important to the struggling prisoner who clungso stubbornly to identity.

Keyes, Jacob. Captain. Service number 01928-19912-JK.

Chief, Cortana, you shouldn’t have come. Don’t be a fool. Leave me. Getout of here. Run.

The presence descended, and he could feel its anticipation of victory. Itwouldn’t be long now.

“Captain?” Cortana inquired desperately. “Captain!I’ve lost him.”

Neither one of them said anything further. The pain in Keyes’ voice hadbeen clear. All they could do was drive deeper into the ship and hope tofind him.

The Chief passed through a hatch, noticed that the right bulkhead wassplattered with Covenant blood, and figured a battle had been fought there.

That meant he could expect to run into the Flood at any moment. As hecontinued down the passageway his throat felt unusually dry, his heart beata little bit faster, and his stomach muscles were tight.

His suspicions were soon confirmed as he heard the sounds of battle, took aright, and saw that a firefight was underway at the far end of the corridor.

He let the combatants go at it for a bit before moving in to cut thesurvivors down.

From there he took a left, followed by a right, and came to a hatch. Itopened to reveal a black hole with jagged edges. Farther back, beyond thedrop-off,another firefight was underway.

“Analyzing data,” Cortana said. “This hole was caused by some sort ofexplosion . . . All I detect down there are pools of coolant. We shouldcontinue our search somewhere else.”

The AI’s advice made sense, so the Spartan turned to retrace his steps.

Then, as he took the first left, all hell broke loose. Cortana said,“Warning! Threat level increasing!” and then, as if to prove her point, amob of Flood came straight at him.

He fired, retreated, and fired again. Carrier forms exploded in a welter ofshattered flesh, severed tentacles, and green slime. Combat forms rushedforward as if eager to die, danced under the impact of the 7.62mm rounds,and flew apart. Infection forms skittered across the decks, leaped into theair, and shattered into flaps of flying flesh.

But there were too many, far too many for one person to handle, and even asthe Chief heard Cortana say something about the black hole he accidentallybacked into it, fell about twenty meters, and plunged feetfirst into a pondof green liquid. Not in the ship, but somewhere under it, on the surfacebelow. The coolant wasso cold that he could feel it through his armor. Itwas thick, too—which made it more difficult to move.

The Master Chief felt his boots hit bottom, knew the weight of his armorwould hold him in place, and marched up onto what had become a beach ofsorts. The cavern was dark, lit mostly by the luminescent glow produced bythe coolant itself, although streaks of plasma fire slashed back and forthup ahead, punctuated by the steadythud, thud, thud of an automatic weapon.

“Let’s get out of here,” Cortana said, “and find another way back aboardthe ship.”

He moved up toward the edge of the conflict and let the combatants hammereach other for a bit before lobbing a grenade into the mix, waiting for thebody parts to fall, and strafing what was left.

Then, having moved forward, he was forced to fight his way through a seriesof narrow, body-strewn passageways as what seemed like an inexhaustiblesupply of Flood forms came at him from every possible direction.

Eventually, having made his way through grottoes of coolant, and past pilesof corpses, Cortana said, “We should headthis way—toward the ship’sgravity lift,” and the Spartan saw a nav pointer appear on his HUD. Hefollowed the red arrow around a bend to a ledge above a coolant-filledbasin. Even as he watched, a dozen carrier forms marched up out of the greenlagoon to attack a group of hard-pressed Covenant soldiers.

The Spartan knew there was no way in hell that he’d be able to force hisway throughthat mess, turned, and made his way back down the trail. A sniperrifle, just one of hundreds of weapons scattered around the area, was halfobscured by a headless combat form. The petty officer removed the rifle,checked to ensure that it was loaded, and returned to the overlook. Then,careful to make each shot count, he opened fire.

The Elites, Jackals, and Grunts went down fairly easily. But the Floodforms, especially the carriers, were practically impossible to kill withthis particular weapon. With few exceptions the heavy round seemed to passright through the lumpy-looking bastards without causing any harmwhatsoever.

When all of the 14.5mm ammo was gone, the Chief went back for the shotgun,jumped into the green liquid, and waded up onto the shoreline. He heard anobscene sucking noise, saw an infection form trying to enter an Elite’schest cavity, and blew both of them away.

After that there was more clean-up to do as some combat forms took a run atthe human and a flock of infection forms tried to roll him under. Repeateddoses of shotgun fire turned out to be just what the doctor ordered—thearea was soon littered with severed tentacles and scraps of wet flesh.

A pitch-black passageway led him back to another pool where he arrived justin time to see the Flood overrun a Shade and the Elite who was seated at thecontrols. The Spartan began firing, already backpedaling, when the Floodspotted him and hopped, waddled, and jumped forward. He fired, reloaded, andfired again. Always retreating, always on the defensive, always hoping for arespite.

This wasn’t his kind of fight. Spartans were designed as offensive weapons,but ever since they’d landed on the ring, he’d been on the run. He had tofind a way to take the offensive, and soon.

There was no break in the endless wall of Flood attackers. He fired untilhis weapons were empty, pried energy weapons out of dead fingers, and firedthose until they were dry.

Finally, more by virtue of stubbornness than anything else, and havingreacquired human weapons from dead combat forms, the Master Chief foundhimself standing all alone, rifle raised, with no one to shoot at. He felt apowerful sense of elation—he wasalive .

It was a moment he couldn’t take time to enjoy.

Eager to reboard the cruiser and find Captain Keyes, he made his way backalong the path he had been forced to surrender to the Flood, passed theShade, rounded a bend, and saw a couple dozen infection forms materializeout of the darkness ahead. A plasma grenade strobed the night, pulverizedtheir bodies, and produced a satisfyingboom! It was still echoing off thecanyon walls as the human eased his way through a narrow passage and emergedat one end of a hotly contested pool. About fifty meters away the Covenantand Flood surged back and forth, traded fire with each other, and appearedto be on the verge of hand-to-tentacle combat. Two well-thrown grenades cutthe number of hostiles in half. The MA5B took care of the rest.

“There’s the gravity lift!” Cortana said. “It’s still operational.

That’s our way back in.”

It sounded simple, but as the Master Chief looked up at the hill on whichthe lift was sited, well-aimed plasma fire lashed down to scorch the rock athis right elbow. It glowed as the human was forced to pull back, wait for alull, and dash forward again. Looking ahead, he spotted the point where agroup of hard-pressed Covenant were trying to bar a group of Flood frommaking their way up a path toward the top of the hill and the foot of thegravity lift. It was a last stand, and the Covenant knew it. They foughtharder than he’d ever seen the aliens fight. He felt a moment of kinshipwith the Covenant soldiers.

He stood and threw two grenades into the middle of the melee, waited for thetwin explosions and went in shooting. An Elite sent plasma stuttering intothe night sky as he fell over backward, a combat form swung a Jackal’s armlike a club, and a pair of infection forms rode a Grunt down into the poolof coolant. It was a madness, a scene straight from hell, and the human hadlittle choice but to kill everything that moved.

As the last bodies crumpled to the ground, the Spartan was free to followthe steadily rising path upward, turn to the right, and enter the lift’sfootprint. He felt static electricity crackle around his armor, and heardplasma shriek through the air as a distant Covenant took exception to hisplans. Then the Chief was gone, pulled upward, into the belly of the beast.

Keyes? Keyes, Jacob. Yes, that was it. Wasn’t it?

He couldn’t remember—there was nothing left now but navigation protocols,defense plans. And a duty to keep them safe.

A droning buzz filled his mind. He vaguely remembered hearing it before, butdidn’t know what it was.

It pressed in, hungry.

Metal rang under her boots as McKay jumped down off the last platform ontothe huge metal grating. It shivered in response. The trip down from the mesahad taken more than fifteen minutes. First, she had taken the still-functional lift down to the point where she and her troops had forced theirway into the butte, back when the Covenant still occupied it, thentransferred to the circular staircase, which, like the rifling on the insideof a gun barrel, wound its way down to the bottom of the shaft and thebarrier under her feet.

“Good to see you, ma’am,” a Private said, as he materialized at herelbow. “Sergeant Lister would like to speak with you.”

McKay nodded, said “Thanks,” and made her way over to the far side of thegrating where the so-called Entry Team were gathered into a tight littlegroup next to an assemblage of equipment that had been lowered from above. Aportable work light glowed at the very center of the assemblage and threwhuge shadows up onto the walls around them. Bodies parted as McKayapproached, and Lister, who was down on his hands and knees, jumped to hisfeet. “Ten-hut!”

Everyone came to attention. McKay noticed the way that the long hours andconstant stress had pared what little bit of extra flesh there was off thenoncom’s face, leaving it gaunt and haggard. “As you were. How does itlook? Any contact?”

“No, ma’am,” Lister responded, “not yet. But take a look atthis .”

A Navy tech directed a handheld spotlight down through the grating and theofficer knelt to get a better look. The stairs, which had ended on the farside of the platform, appeared to pick up again just below the grating andcircled into the darkness below.

“Look at the metal,” Lister prompted, “and look at what’s piled up onthe stairs below.”

McKay looked, saw that the thick metal crosspieces had been twisted out ofshape, and saw a large pile of weapons below. No human ordnance as far asshe could tell, just Covenant, which was to say plasma weapons. With nocutting torches to call upon, not yet anyway, it looked as though the Floodhad depleted at least a hundred energy pistols and rifles in a futileattempt to cut their way through the grating. Given some more time, sayanother day or two, they might have succeeded.

“You’ve got to give the bastards credit,” McKay said grimly. “They nevergive up. Well, neither do we. Let’s cut this sucker open, go down, and lockthe back door.”

Lister said, “Ma’am, yes ma’am,” but there were none of the usual gung-ho responses from the others who stood around him. It was dark down there—and nightmares lay in wait.

Once inside thePillar of Autumn , ’Zamamee and Yayap found conditions to beboth better and worse than they had expected. Consistent with the Grunt’spredictions, the officer in charge—an overworked Elite named ’Ontomee—hadbeen extremely glad to see them, and wasted little time placing ’Zamamee incharge of twenty Jackals, with Yayap as senior NCO.

That, plus the fact that the security detachment had a reasonable amount ofsupplies, including methane, meant that basic physical needs had been met.

That was the good news.

The bad news was that ’Zamamee, now known as Huki ’Umamee, lived inconstant fear that an Elite who knew either him or the recently deceasedcommando he had decided to impersonate would come along and reveal histrueidentity, or that the Prophets would somehow pluck the information out ofthin air, as they were rumored to be able to do. These fears caused theofficer to lay low, stay out of sight, and delegate most of his leadershipresponsibilities to Yayap.

This would have been annoying but acceptable where a contingent of Gruntswas concerned, but was made a great deal more difficult by the fact that theJackals saw themselves as being superior to the “gas suckers,” and wereanything but pleased when they found themselves reporting to Yayap.

Then, as if to add to the Grunt’s woes, the Flood had located thePillar ofAutumn , and while they were unable to infiltrate the vessel via any of themaintenance ways that ran back and forth just below the ring world’ssurface, they had become adept at entering the vessel through rents in itsseverely damaged hull, the air locks where lifeboats had once been docked,and on one memorable occasion via one of the Covenant’s own patrols, whichhad been ambushed, turned into combat forms, and sent back into the ship.

The ruse had been detected, but only after some of the “contaminated”

soldiers were inside the vessel. A few of them were still at large,somewhere within the human vessel.

As the Grunt and his group of surly Jackals stood guard in theAutumn ’sshuttle bay, a dropship loaded with supplies circled over the downed ship,asked for and received the necessary clearances, and swooped in for alanding.

Yayap eyed his recalcitrant troops, saw that three of them had drifted awayfrom their preassigned positions, and used his radio to herd them back.

“Jak, Bok, and Yeg, we have a shuttle coming in. Focus on the dropship—notthe area outside.”

The Jackals were too smart to say anything over the radio, but the Gruntknew they were grumbling among themselves as they returned to their variousstations and the ship settled onto the blast-scarred deck.

“Watch the personnel slots,” Yayap cautioned his troops, referring to thesmall compartments that lined the outside surfaces of the shuttle’s twinhulls. “They could be packed with Flood.”

In spite of the resentment he felt, Bok touched a switch and opened all ofthe slots for inspection, a new security procedure instituted three daysbefore. The compartments were empty. The Jackals sniggered, and there wasnothing Yayap could do but suffer through the indignity of it.

With that formality out of the way, a crew of Grunts moved in to unloadsupplies from the cargo compartments that lined theinside surface of thedropship’s hulls, and towed the heavily loaded antigrav pallets out ontothe deck. Then, with the unloading process complete, the shuttle rose on itsgrav field, turned toward the hatch, and passed out into bright sunlight.

The cargo crew checked the label on each cargo container to see where it wassupposed to go, gabbled at one another, and were about to tow the palletsaway when Yayap intervened.

“Stop! I want you to open those cargo mods one at a time. Make sure theycontain what they’re supposed to.”

If the previous order had been unpopular, this one met with out-and-outrebellion, as Bok decided to take Yayap on. “You’re no Elite! We’re underorders to deliver this stuffnow . If we’re late, they’ll take our heads.”

He paused and clicked his beak meaningfully. “And our kin will takeyours ,gas-sucker.”

The Jackals, all of whom were enjoying the interchange to the maximum,looked at each other and grinned.

’Zamamee should have been there, should have been giving the orders, andYayap cursed the officer from the bottom of his heart. “No,” he repliedstubbornly. “Nothing leaves here until it has been checked. That’s the newprocess. The Elites were the ones who came up with it, not me. So open themup and we’ll get you and your crew out of here.”

The o............