Halo is a copyrighted franchise of Microsoft Corporation and 343 Industries and "Alien" is a copyrighted franchise of the Twentieth Century Fox Film Corporation. No claim of ownership over any characters, places, events or items that are not original is asserted. Many thanks to my fellow members of for being just generally awesome, especially Matt-256 for lending me the character of Helen Calypso, and Ahalosniper for the wonderfully devious Puppet Master. And, as they say, read and review!

1914 HOURS, 27th SEPTEMBER, 2557 (MILITARY CALENDAR) / "RAPTORS NEST" SITE, UNKNOWN STAR SYSTEM

Wallace gingerly stepped over the door lying across the threshold, submachine gun nestled in the crook of his arm. He'd expected the slab of metal to be blown right across the room – C12 was a powerful explosive, originally developed for colonial mining – combustible in most environments, regardless of gravity conditions or atmosphere composition, if there even was an atmosphere. It was one of the UNSC military's smarter moves to adopt it, replacing the older shaped charges – a thimble-full on each hinge, another on the locking mechanism, had blown three holes in a solid steel/titanium plate.

The fact that all it had done was topple backwards almost lazily probably meant that it wasn't just steel or titanium. He made a mental note to ask one of the engineers in the platoon. In the meantime, he surveyed the room beyond.

Lockers lined the room. A few of their doors had been left ajar, and Wallace gathered that they had just attacked the rebel armoury, or at least one of them based on standard enemy practice. Black-market weapons and ammunition were stacked in rows within – an odd assortment of private-sector issue MA2 and MA3 rifles were supplemented by the occasional MA5, various types of submachine gun and pistol, mostly modified variants of the M6, together with half a dozen types of shotgun. A few of his men were already rummaging through them, sorting out the equipment that was usable and what they could afford to set aside – most ODST weaponry was designed to accept most types of ammunition magazine, because special forces in enemy territory couldn't afford to be picky. A small pile had already been stacked up, where rifles, machineguns, shotguns and ammunition crates were being stacked.

Private Yelnats, head still bloody from the explosion but looking determined, opened a locker and pulled out a crate marked "grenades." He nodded pointedly at the man, who shrugged and carefully reached for a prybar. Meanwhile, the big Spartan, Jeremy, was consulting with a pair of Wallace's men, PFCs Murkowski and Ver Straten, on the corridor at the end of the armoury leading to the stairwell/elevator hub.

The rest of his men, meanwhile, were policing the prisoners.

Wallace wasn't green – he'd enlisted back in '27, serving as a Marine during some of the campaigns to put down the Insurrection, so humanity could focus on defending itself from the Covenant. As such, he'd learnt a lot in his time fighting rebel troops – no two organisations were ever the same. Some were small confederations of terrorist cells, connected only tenuously so that it could be cut easily. Others were full paramilitary forces, well funded by front companies and equipped and trained like a proper military. Some were genuine reformers who asked only for colonial autonomy rather than outright independence, while others were zealots, political or religious, who would settle with nothing less than the acceptance of their own ideals and principles over any other.

In the eight years Wallace had fought the dying Insurrection, he had learnt that rebels never surrendered, and when they did it was because they were confident that it would make no difference to their plans – that they had bombs set somewhere, or strapped to themselves, or that their friends and compatriots had plans already under way. Something, therefore, was wrong with the picture in front of him.

The Helljumpers had stormed the room, tossing a smoke grenade ahead of them, using thermal imaging for an unimpaired view. They had expected to enter, catch the enemy confused and surprised, and neutralise the threat they presented. Everything had gone according to that plan, right up until the enemy refused to engage them and, still coughing, raised their arms and started to kneel. He'd seen a few of their faces as the smoke started to clear – there was confusion and surprise, yes, but most of them looked relieved, an expression that Wallace had never seen in his time wearing a Helljumper Battle-Dress Uniform.

And then, when he had taken a look at their defensive arrangements, he had discovered another surprise. All the cover in the room, overturned tables, desks, and empty crates, was arranged to provide ideal cover for the defenders – but facing the wrong way. It made their position a bad one for catching invaders – in fact, it looked more like they were meant to catch something coming the other way, to stop someone from getting out.

He'd commented on this fact to Andrew-306. He'd nodded, and then asked him to supervise the consolidation of the room and its occupants while he and Laura headed back out to the atrium.

Vasquez's and Nelson's Fire teams had already disarmed the prisoners, and their hands were looped in memory cable, conforming to the desired shape and then hardening. They were then marched to a corner of the room where they would be processed – names and details recorded for analysis by ONI later, cross-referencing them against known Persons of Interest. The rest of the platoon were righting dislodged cover, restoring it so that they could make use of it if need be.

He nodded slightly to Vasquez, who muttered something to one of her men and then strode to join him.

"How's the roundup?"

She shrugged. "They're cooperating, sir. Names, details – we're even getting names of loved ones and requests to inform them of their survival."

"Oh yeah, ONI's always been really big on transparency," he said sarcastically. "Anything useful?"

"We haven't begun interrogating any of them yet, but they don't feel like rebels. No zeal."

He knew what she meant. Even taken prisoner after weeks of holding out against artillery and mortar shelling, rebel prisoners usually complied only unwillingly, mixing information with taunts, bluffs, useless threats and allegations of improper relations with one's parents. A broken finger usually shut them up. That wasn't necessary here, though.

"No. They don't, do they? It's such a shame the cloud cover cuts us off from the Prowler, or I'd radio for clarification."

Vasquez caught the tone of his voice – he was as suspicious of the prisoners as she was, and was damn sure ONI knew more than they had been told. But, Wallace mused, that wasn't anything new – there were good reasons why they were called spooks.

"Yes sir," she said, matching his tone. "And I'm sure they would respond with all appropriate speed and accuracy."

He shook his head. "What's Yelnats found?"

She glanced at the private, carefully laying grenades out by type. "There's conventional fragmentation grenades, a few flash-bangs and smokes. And then there are the special ones – some kind of nerve toxin, not one I've ever seen. VX17? Heard of it?"

He frowned. "That was in trials, back in '42. As far as I know, we scrapped it because Grunts were immune, and they were too expensive to be worth using on less common targets."

"So they have access to decommissioned materials?"

He smiled wryly. "Let's hope they haven't got any VAJRA suits stored away. The only powered armour I'm comfortable around is seven feet tall, green, and currently being worn by our Spartan friends."

"I don't know about that, sir. The bigger they are, the harder they fall."

"As long as it's not on top of me," he retorted. "Any luck on the mapping hardware?"

Standard equipment for any urban or tight-quarters operations were sophisticated, expensive, and sensitive RADAR mapping gear that constructed a three-dimensional image of a building's interior. Officially, it wasn't in production – it was just codenamed SEER.

She grimaced. "The picture's confusing. We're fine for the top three floors, but below that it registers as null – less than nothing. One of the Spartans is working on it now."

That would be Laura, as Wallace recalled. She was their technician, wasn't she?

It occurred to Wallace that few men or women were on a first-name basis with Spartan supersoldiers, much less Helljumpers. He'd been…well, maybe lucky wasn't the right word, but he'd fought alongside a few supersoldiers in his time, not all of them Spartans, but alongside Indigo three times – the evacuation of Delta Pavonis in '49, the year-long Minorca campaign, and then the Ares debacle in '52. They'd been through a lot, him and them, but it still unnerved him sometimes that he'd survived that many battles, alongside Spartans. As the saying went; if boots hit dirt, you're gonna get hurt – if green joins you, more fool you. Spartans were last resorts.

Sometimes he felt his luck was going to run out. Every drop seemed one step closer to the day his 'chute failed, that one plasma bolt or bullet found its mark, or his training failed him.

It kept him up some nights. Actually, a lot of nights.

"Don't bother. If it's anything like the outside, it'll be baffled – whatever they stole from ONI R&D. Let's try…another approach."

She cocked her head, equivalent to raising an eyebrow. "Circe again?"

"It worked so well last time."

"We're not in a jungle this time. Or under Covenant attack."

"As far as you know," he said, patting a hand on her shoulder and turning to the prisoners, making a show of clapping his hands together and rubbing them enthusiastically as he approached them. A few of them seemed to guess that whatever he was thinking about wasn't exactly tea and crumpets.

"Who's in charge here?" he barked out.

One of the prisoners raised a tentative hand. "Um…you are?"

"And don't you forget it." A couple of the Helljumpers laughed. It was not a particularly nice laugh.

"Alright, lads," he said congenially to the prisoners. "I've got a special assignment for somebody, and two ways we can do it – one of them is the easy way. I need a volunteer – someone who knows these tunnels back to front, who can draw us a detailed three-dimensional map of this network of tunnels. And no funny ideas – I want notations and highlights. If my men find something that isn't on the map, I'll be asking why. If they don't find something that they should, I'll be asking why. If you want to lead us into a trap, don't bother, because we'll be sending you ahead of us to test the waters, so to speak. Any takers?"

A hand waved in the hand. "Er…what's the other way?"

Wallace grinned. "The other way is very easy – we let you go running off on your own, a grenade tied to your belts, and see how far you get."

There was a panicked flurry of activity, and a nervous young man was rudely shoved out of the circle of sullen prisoners. He turned, swore at his ex-comrades, and then turned back around to face Wallace, who clapped a consoling hand on his shoulder.

"Looks like you've been volunteered, lad. Congratulations."

The man's face fell. He couldn't have looked more stunned if he'd been told his mother had been run over by a Warthog. "Um…well, er, I'll, uh, need a Chatter. Paper's not exactly three-dimensional."

Wallace pushed a handheld Chatter device into his hand. "And don't get any funny ideas. Everything but the mapping gear is deadlocked. Explosively. Got it?" The man nodded miserably. "Good man. Now get cracking."

The man nodded in terror.

Vasquez chuckled under her breath. "It worked better on Circe, sir."

"We don't have the immediacy of Grunt suicide squads. At least, not as far as I know." And yet, the threat of just letting them go had worked just as well – as he'd expected. He was sure at least a few would have rather taken their chances out in the corridors – the grenade had been a joke, and he was reasonably sure they'd known that at the time. But those corridors…

"When he's given us a decent map, take your Fireteam on patrol and secure the rest of the floor. There are some subsections that aren't showing up on motion trackers."


Puppet Master infiltrated. It was what he did. He was very good at it, even if he did say so himself. Especially because he said so. He made a point of being honest – if he could help it.

The systems of the corvettes opened before him like a thin silk veil. Occasionally he simply tore through them. The few defensive systems operation would never have been able to stop him, even at full capacity. Damaged and fragmented and confused, Puppet Master extended him all the sympathy he could spare them – a quick end.

He made his way quickly, bouncing through the network in his search. Data poured through him – most of it useless, sensor readouts, thermal and radiation warnings, archives – he copied them anyway, because even the minor details would be enormously valuable to his employer. He dug deep, uncovering the files that he sought, and discarding everything else.

Almost as an afterthought, he extended the radiator panels. No point wasting VECTOR – the data she was gathering would be invaluable, too.

Nevertheless, he wasn't satisfied. He searched deeper, and harder.

There – a data trail, obscured in exhaust readouts, rerouted through the targeting and navigation systems, leading back to…strange. He followed the trail again, and could clearly see where it diverged and rejoined – but it wasn't the same signal. Subtly but importantly different.

He checked again, and found another divergence – clever. Obscuring the real signal with a fake one. He followed it, shrugging off the defensive programs still online, and-

There. He was through.

It had been harder than he'd expected. If he hadn't been looking for it, he may have missed it altogether. More importantly, even the ship's crew wouldn't have known what they were dealing with. If they'd detected the source of the signal, they would have traced it back to the captain's quarters. This was where Puppet Master found himself now.

He stopped. Surely it couldn't be this easy?

He projected the room holographically – he found it helped to orient himself. Physically, neither he nor the room would exist in physical space. But simulating the physical environment appealed to his former human sensibilities, and it allowed him to pay attention to details that would otherwise have escaped his gaze.

He found himself materializing in a small cabin. Clean, tidy. Decidedly military, Puppet Master thought derogatorily. The bed was made, the shelves were stacked with hardcopy manuals and diagrams of naval vessels, and the cupboard door was slightly ajar. He could see the former Captain's dress whites hanging in a vacuum-sealed bag, ready to be donned if need be. A few spare duty uniforms hung in similar bags, looking slightly more used. But only slightly.

The man had been a stickler for neatness. How very military.

Puppet Master's avatar examined the room, using eyes that had long ago fallen dark. It was a strange sensation – an AI existed in a purely electronic state as hardware. Some weren't even tied to their own hardware – they could transfer themselves from one to another. Puppet Master, alas, lacked that luxury. If something happened to his core, installed in the UNSC Hunter's Arrow's engine room, he would be literally dead.

Not that he expected anything to happen to it, with an armed guard of Marines kept permanently on-station. Not for his protection, though – for the crew's.

His employers did not trust him. They were quite right not to, of course.

He traced a line in the "air", his robes sliding up along his arm as it followed a line of generated photons – a wireless signal transfer. The avatar itself was of a powerfully-built man in black robes, a seventeenth century hat atop his head, and a smiling, leering mask where his face would have been. Most AI projected avatars automatically – they were part of their core personalities. Some generated "false" avatars, to put the humans they interacted with at ease.

Puppet Master had never really cared what others thought of him – he knew they were too busy trying to figure out what he thought of them. He kept his secrets well, and kept them long. Secrets were his game, after all, and he was a good player.

There was a joke in it somewhere. Nobody had yet found it. He looked forward to the day they did.

He followed the simulated line as it connected with an apparently harmless bundle of wires and cables. Puppet Master dropped down to his haunches, gazing at the space from behind his mask, watching impassively the small, almost benign looking rectangle of black metal. If anyone else had seen it, they might have dismissed it as a mini-Chatter that servicemen had found a love for, connecting to their neural interfaces for use.

The captain, though, had seemed far too professional for that. Too rigid, too much a stickler for the rules. Exactly what was an untidy bundle of cables doing in his personal space?

Tentatively, he extended a "finger" – he interfaced with the machine, feeling the handshake protocol occur and…he was in.

"Well, as Alice said: "curiouser and curiouser"."

Such a convoluted route to take for such a simple connection. Somebody was being extremely paranoid – somebody who wanted anyone who found it to suspect that the captain was behind it. But Puppet Master doubted it very much – he had heard the recording of VECTORs encounter with the man, had seen the terror in his eyes, the horror and surprise. If he had any role in what had happened to his battlegroup, he would not have stood for that.

Somebody was going to elaborate lengths to pin something on an innocent man, and Puppet Master didn't even know what they were trying to pin. Yet.

He accessed the box, sifting through the…yes. Ahah! He halted all other intrusive procedures, focusing them – the little box was full of surprises. It had erected a powerful firewall and deployed data scavengers – he was glad he'd scraped what he could together already, and watched as the systems were systematically purged with a speed that astonished him. He could feel the firewall shifting beneath his gaze, constantly changing – too fast for him to analyse it, too fast to discern a pattern. The box itself remained impervious, electronically.

What about physically?

VECTOR was busy, he understood that. But surely some allowances would have to be made?


The hardware was proving more troublesome for Laura than Andrew had expected, but he was confident. They'd once done war games in a Reach junkyard – Laura had cobbled together an EMP from a car riddled with bullet holes, a perfectly good fridge some New Alexandrian had decided to throw out, and some fizzy drink cans. Charlie Company, the "enemy" for the day, had struggled to explain to their commanders why every vehicle and weapon had suddenly failed, allowing John-117 to lead the trainees to an easy victory. Doctor Halsey had commended Laura for her ingenuity, asked to be shown one of the devices, and had been impressed. It hadn't stopped Indigo being thrown in the brig for cheating, but the three of them had enjoyed the occasional repayment in the form of food or trinkets for the next week. And then Kelly had beaten the interstellar track-and-field record, and it had been her getting the praise, even from Indigo – fame was not something to be sought or treasured, but it came.

Laura had been famously good at machines. It was like saying fish swam in the ocean. There was so much more to it.

"Any good?"

She didn't sign with her hands, which were still digging beneath the metal housing, instead using the point-to-point uplink to send a text message: Negative. Internal crystal matrix is fried. Need to replace it.

Damn. There, officially, went their only link to the Prowler.

He'd assessed the atmospheric composition on the way down to the moon – anomalous electromagnetic storms formed a communications barrier, making contact with the Hunter's Arrow impossible. If they had a map of the "currents", they could perhaps work something out with an uplink to the rebel relay station, but that would attract too much attention, take too long, and waste manpower they couldn't afford. Their regular radio communications hardware was nowhere near powerful enough to punch through the interference.

Oh well, he decided. What was the old military saying? Who Dares, Wins.

He booted the other hardware.

"Contact established. Keep working on the crystal matrix, see if you can scavenge anything from the armoury."

Affirmative.

Andrew's helmet display flickered as Laura left, and another small dialogue box appeared in the corner, a single word appearing: codeword

He transmitted SEMANTICS.

The previous message vanished, replaced with contact established. Report.

Alpha secured, two wounded. Bravo and Charlie abandoned. Thirteen prisoners taken. Request updated orbital situation.

Request denied. Situation volatile. He frowned, concerned. It was just supposed to be a routine boarding of a dead ship. Which meant that it had become far from routine, or that the ship was not as dead as they'd hoped.

Request VECTOR status.

He sighed slightly in relief as the word Active appeared. It was followed by, Do they suspect?

Hard not to, he responded. Situation anomalous. Sergeant is intelligent. Expect cover blown within next few hours.

Copy. Proceed with Phase Two. Maintain cover until absolutely necessary. Confirm.

He confirmed, followed by, Request prisoner pickup.

Denied. Secure prisoners until mission accomplished.

Reluctantly, he typed, Affirmative. Over.

The dialogue box closed.

He opened the TEAMCOM. "Phase Two approved."


Calypso pushed herself along the weightless hallway, one hand on the drift rail overhead, the other carrying her assault rifle. She had both flashlights on – one attached to her helmet, tracking the movement of her head, and the other mounted under the barrel of the weapon. It always paid to plan for everything, and the aliens didn't seem to like light very much. It didn't stop them, but even minor distractions were a help.

She followed the map inside her head, noting that she would soon be entering the personnel quarters for the crew. Most of the crew would have been on duty when the boarders had attacked, but she'd checked the logs. The captain hadn't had time to declare combat alert alpha, enact the Cole Protocol, or perform the myriad of other duties that would have been urgent. He'd purged the navigation core after he'd been…implanted, but the rest of the crew had probably gotten little or no warning.

The armoury had been fully stocked. They hadn't had time to arm and armour themselves. What could they have done against the…things?

She'd seen a lot in her time as a TROJAN operative. As one of the few non-Spartan supersoldier projects that hadn't been an abject failure, she'd been deployed against pretty much everything – turncoat UNSC colonels and generals, rebel terrorist groups, even a few genocidal religious cultists. And a lot of action against the Covenant. But in all those years, she'd never seen anything that scared her like this. The Covenant may be alien, but they didn't feel alien. They had language, culture, logic, even if they had been the enemy. But these aliens were like nothing she'd ever seen – they had minds, yes, and good ones, but too full of rage and hate. They were evil incarnate.

She also hadn't considered herself a religious person before, either. She hoped she was right, because any god that created something like them was not a benevolent and loving one.

"VECTOR? I'm afraid there's been a change of plan."

Odd. A male voice, definitely not ORACLE. Familiar. "Identify yourself or clear the COM channel."

"My dear girl, I'm insulted. I didn't think I would fade from your memory so quickly."

Impossible. God damn it. Not him – anybody but him.

"Puppet Master?"

"The one and only."

Great. And she'd thought things couldn't get any worse.

"What the hell are you doing here?" she muttered in disgust. "How did you-"

"Helen, please," the voice said in mock exasperation. "I have authorization – SHOGUN himself cleared my inclusion on this mission. I was to be activated in the event of unusual or unanticipated…complications. A very near certainty on missions like this, wouldn't you say?"

She couldn't disagree. It was, after all, why she and the Spartans had been included as well.

Puppet Master was an AI. That was really the extent of her knowledge of him – everything else about him was myth, rumour, or classified at the highest levels. Last she'd heard about him, he'd been working for the ONI agents on Mamore before Reach fell, and then he'd disappeared. Evidently he'd resurfaced again, and made a deal with her current boss – Codename: SHOGUN, the man in charge of this and other investigations like this, a massive project called Operation: VORAUSSICHT.

Exactly why he'd agreed to take the AI on remained a mystery – her own sources claimed he'd been involved in more than a dozen illegal projects, some of which they had investigated. Treason, war crimes, genocide – some of the worst crimes humans could do to each other. There was a war still on against the Brutes, filling headlines and distracting the media, but ONI was still keeping VORAUSSICHT tightly to its chest. The kinds of things they dealt with would damage the UNSC, and perhaps even shatter it – most of the stuff they put a stop to was former-ONI.

Knowing that, she couldn't blame Captain Landers for not trusting her or ORACLE. But the fact that they'd brought an AI like Puppet Master along made even Calypso uneasy.

"What do you want?" she hissed. "I'm a little busy at the moment."

"Don't worry. This won't take long – a few minutes at maximum. In fact, you're very close to it. All I require is for you to retrieve an item for me from the captain's quarters. It is small, durable, and unlikely to explode at all, so I see no reason for you to worry about it."

"Does ORACLE know about this?"

"No. You can inform her if you'd like, but it's hardly a secret – I simply lack the resources to access it remotely. Once you bring it back aboard the ship, I can analyse it more thoroughly"

She glanced at a sign on a nearby bulkhead. "I'm near the officers' mess now. Diverting for retrieval."

She didn't like this. If Puppet Master was anywhere close, then he had means of his own to access things remotely. If he needed a hard copy, then it meant that something was very wrong – especially because this was Puppet Master who was having trouble doing the accessing.

At least it wasn't a very long detour. She needed to pass through the mess hall anyway to get to engineering, and that connected to the crew quarters. Ideally, it would take perhaps a few minutes at most.

Almost inadvertently, she reflected that part of the crew would have been off duty when the aliens attacked, and wouldn't have had time to move very far before being overwhelmed. And if what she had seen already was anything to go by, it wouldn't be a pretty sight. She'd seen hundreds of dead bodies , human and Covenant, before in varying states of destruction, and it would have been nice to say she was used to it. But in all honesty, every corpse she found horrified her.

She kept drifting through the blackened corridors, the strange black shell covering the bulkheads, floors and ceilings becoming thicker, more thorough in their spread – the aliens had obviously done a better job here. Which meant that they would have passed through this section of the ship. With any luck, they had already moved on by now, perhaps to hunt her down elsewhere.

The bastards were smart. Would they expect an attack within the nexus of their parts of the ship? No way to tell, no reason to think otherwise. Hope was all that remained, and not much of it at that.


Vasquez held the rifle up to eye-level, butt resting against her shoulder. It wasn't really necessary for accuracy – the electronics suite attached to the barrel included an uplink to her neural retina display indicating exactly where her bullets would go, even when fired akimbo, but she preferred the posture anyway. Equipment malfunctioned – the body, except in some very unfortunate circumstances, did not. The flashlight slung under the barrel, standard issue on an MA5C assault rifle, illuminated the darkened hallway – something had happened to the lights, probably knocked out by the explosion.

The rest of her Fireteam fanned out through the darkened corridor, edging forward slowly as they searched for booby traps, corpses, bullet casings, or other signs of what had happened here.

The Innie prisoners had been surprisingly helpful, though reticent. The map they had provided was a detailed one, though incomplete – some tunnels just faded away, because the drawer hadn't known where they went. Others ended at bulkheads they weren't allowed through, and some corridors were just hinted at based on fleeting glimpses. They'd drawn on their collective knowledge, so although it was a patchwork, it was more than double what one man alone had been able to remember.

She had to wonder just why they were so helpful.

She hated Innies. Most people in the military these days did – there had been sympathisers long ago, but not after six years of stubborn insistence by political fanatics that the Covenant were just UNSC propaganda, excused for supposed atrocities. There had still been diehard Covenant Deniers all the way up to '36, when the last of the Outer Colonies had fallen, and the first of the Inner Colonies found its skies filled with alien fighters, its cities swarming with alien troops, and its people dying to alien weapons.

The Insurrection lost all credibility. It collapsed overnight. There were still the terror cells and paramilitary forces, hoping to set up some kind of independence while naively believing the Covenant would pass them by. But they were like the…what had they been called? Survivalists? She'd read about them in the history books – back before the War for Unification of North America, there had been scattered holdouts of people who kept themselves supplied with guns, ammunition, and food enough to last through a long war on their own. People who just wanted to be left alone, and "discouraged" anyone who wanted to meddle in their lives. Most of them really did want to just be left alone, and were content with that lifestyle – but then you got the cults, based around charismatic men who declared themselves the Messiah, declared the rest of the world was already burning in hell, and took fifteen underage wives. Or the others, who wanted the world to burn, and who didn't care that it had done nothing to them.

The Insurrection had collapsed, but there were still survivors, scattered by the wartime diaspora. And after the war, the UNSC had found itself riddled with them as they all come crawling back out of the woodwork.

As far as Vasquez knew, the majority of them had become pragmatists – they had seen with their own eyes that aliens were real, and that they were more than capable of turning a lush world into a ball of molten glass. They preferred to act through the system – instead of declaring a jihad on the UNSC, they reformed, becoming political parties. And, to the surprise of almost everyone, it was working – the UNSC was stretched too thin to police everyone, and was still fighting to secure its borders. Colonial autonomy freed them up to fight the real fight. And, at the same time, the colonies realised more so than ever before that they really did need the UNSC to protect them – someday, who knew when, the various factions claiming the legitimacy of the old Covenant would scrape together something resembling unity, and decide that they were strong enough to restart their old holy war. And when they did, the UNSC would be the only barrier between the colonies and almost certain death.

And the UNSC had moved on, as well. Technologically, they were almost on par with the old Covenant – there was new tech being introduced all the time, improvements made to old gear, and revolutionary things being tested. UNSC warships had shields now, except Prowlers – ONI still couldn't figure out how to accommodate an energy shield and stealth – and the capabilities of their weapons were decades ahead of the models used five years ago. On the ground, combat units were finding their arsenals stocked with deployable shields, and even a few personal shields. The UNSC, in their struggle to simply keep up with the Covenant, had shot far ahead of anything the Insurrection could field – the scattered rebels simply couldn't keep up in this arms race.

But that didn't mean people liked relying on the UNSC. And as logical, as sensible, as cooperation was, there were always the ones who wanted to watch the worlds burn. If they couldn't rule, then nobody would.

The "New" Insurrection, as it was being unofficially called by the news outlets, had learned a lot in their time underground. They'd learned the art of infiltration, and they'd learned that if they ever hoped to take the UNSC on in a fight, they'd need technological parity – which meant stealing prototype technology, reverse-engineering it themselves, and equipping their own forces with them.

Things had gotten bad, especially on Mamore. Terrorist strikes were not using plasma charges, ducking behind shields, using military viruses to infiltrate systems, decrypt transmissions, and cause confusion. And they were using the UNSC's own technology against them.

And ONI, at last, had decided to do something about that.

She was vague about the whole thing – she wasn't technically a part of Operation VORAUSSICHT, their unit just happened to work for them occasionally. The Colonel was an old friend to the investigation lead, a shadowy figure codenamed SHOGUN. But, although any information about their actions was strictly classified TOP SECRET / NOVEMBER BLACK – making it a capital offense to look through their files – there were always rumours among Marines and Soldiers: whispers of what had happened on Matariki; mutterings about apartment blocks being evacuated; orbital strikes on supposed country ranches.

The sum of them was, to Vasquez, disquieting – infiltration of classified projects and operations.

To ONI, it could be catastrophic – and not only from a technological stand.

Everyone knew ONI had its secrets, tightly locked away in its metaphorical vaults. But if Insurrectionists were infiltrating the development projects, what was stopping them from discovering all the Office of Naval Intelligence's secrets, and using them against them? Finding former agents with a grudge? Finding the details of projects long abandoned? Finding information that was being suppressed by ONI – such as, for example, the fact that the UNSC had intentionally deceived the public regarding their ability to defend them from the Covenant to prevent mass panic.? It would mean an almost overnight collapse of not only ONI, but the UNSC, and maybe even the secession of colonies again – and at a time like this, a New Insurrection was the last thing ONI wanted.

And so, VORAUSSICHT had been formed. And that was why a Prowler had been dispatched, carrying three Spartan supersoldiers, a TROJAN-grade agent, and a platoon of the Corps' most experienced Helljumpers to a black rock orbiting a distant star in a system nobody had ever heard of.

Vasquez didn't like it. But she didn't have to.

Her boot kicked against something solid that refused to budge, and she held up a clenched hand, her team obediently stopping. Her VISR system lit up the darkness, highlighting edges, and she could see what it was. She backed away carefully.

The disembodied human arm simply lay there.

She scoured the rest of the corridor, but other than the murky gloom the walls were smooth and rectangular. No ventilation shafts, no doors, no points of entry other than the way they were going.

She waved her team forward as she knelt, examining the arm.

Male, judging by the bulk of it, and the amount of hair – although some of her colleagues sometimes joked that there was less of a difference in the military. The hands were calloused and firm, workers hands. And the arm had been severed at the shoulder, the upper arm's biceps standing out.

Well, "severed" might be the wrong word. A better word might be "torn", or "ripped".

An even better word might be "slashed."

She rolled it over with the rifle muzzle, noting its condition – a bit of bruising, but no blood. Whatever had happened, happened fast, too fast for the victim to even bleed. Rigour mortis had set in, so it had happened a while ago. A tiny part of her rebelled at the thought of examining a disembodied human foot, but she quashed it – it was hardly the first time she'd had to look at human remains, and it was hardly the most malformed.

There was a clatter in the dark. Her rifle snapped up, illuminating only the boot of one of her men, nudging aside a spent bullet casing.

More clattering. She ordered her hand to hold positions again, and widened the beam of her torch.

The floor glittered, a carpet of copper shell casings reflecting the light. On and on into the murk, and even a few twinkles from the darkness further ahead as well.

Something had happened here. Something major.

She held her hand to her helmet, about to radio to Wallace.

And then she heard the scream.


It felt almost reassuring to be drifting through human quarters again. The alien creatures hadn't expanded their hive in this direction just yet, and the walls were solid steel/titanium/vanadium. She winced as she passed a few bodies, or at least parts of bodies. She tried not to look for the name badges on the uniforms, and she resisted the urge to take any more dogtags – they'd downloaded the ship logs. The crew would all be listed as Missing in Action, and on another, more secret list, as Killed in Action.

Still, she was glad to get out of the…hive, or whatever it was the creatures were making for themselves. She tried not to remember that she'd have to go back into it after this little job was done.

This had once been personnel quarters – vertical bunks lined the walls where the crew would have slept, hidden compartments allowing them a few personal materials – she batted a small metal rectangle out of her way, and felt a twinge of regret as she saw it was a holo-still – a kid and a woman. Was the woman in the picture part of the crew? A loved one? One of billions killed during the war? She'd never know. She wished she could just ignore it, her training told her it was irrelevant, but she also knew that it was important to take note of all these details as she made her way to the captains quarters.

Being a supersoldier was easy – kill everything that needs killing, do your job well, and remain impartial, unattached, unaffected. It conflicted with being a human, though, and she clung to her humanity much tighter.

Maybe it was her humanity that made her scream as she heard the voice.

The beast jerked its head, searching.

"Good day, VECTOR."

"JESUS CHRIST PUPPET MASTER, DON'T DO THAT."

It hadn't come in over the COM system, or at least it hadn't sounded like it. It had come from inside the room somewhere. And then, as she watched, a figure flickered and faded in and out of focus before resolving into a tall figure clad in a black coat, hearing a stovepipe hat, a rapier at the hip and a pale, smiling, vaguely unsettling mask.

Puppet Master bowed. "We meet again on the field of battle, Miss Calypso. I trust you are well?"

"Give me some fucking warning first," she snarled. "I almost shot the place to shreds!"

The figure bowed its head penitently. "It was good fortune, then, that you stayed your hand."

"Where the hell is it?" she demanded.

"By your feet. It's small, innocuous, designed to blend in – you should therefore have no trouble finding it."

She ignored the sarcasm, and tapped her thrusters, bringing her closer to the metal floor. Sometimes she envied civilians – she'd once travelled on a yacht where the entire thing was carpeted in shag. The owner had run up a huge bill on ventilation maintenance as dust particles clogged the filters, but she feeling of it between the toes – compared to cold, bracing metal, it had been worth it.

Where had it come from? The creature drifts out of the hive, entering parts where the workers have not consolidated, where the hive has not expanded to yet. It sniffs – its sense of smell is good anyway, but in the sterile filtered air, even with the mustiness of inactivity, the scent stands out – a suit had passed this way, faint traces of explosive and smoke trailing behind it. It doesn't think these thoughts in words, of course – its thought have no coherent language a human mind could ever hope to understand. It doesn't know what an M6 pistol is, or the chemical composition of the propellant. But it smells them anyway.

It follows.

She found the device at last, a small lump of metal with a single diode blinking dark red. She pried it up from its nook, and tucked it into one of her pockets. She glares at the holographic form of Puppet Master.

"This is a bit showy, even for you."

He twirled the cape, and bowed again. "I thought you might enjoy some company. Talking to VECTOR alone must get…tiring."

"Not really," she admitted. "She's barely on anymore."

"A curious coincidence, then, that the, ahah, interruption coincided with the loss of power to the communications relay."

She rolled her eyes. He wouldn't lie about something like that. "Great. So I'm cut off?"

"It appears we both are. I severed part of my core in my investigation of this ship – I had to bounce myself off half a dozen systems just to get in. I'm half the man I once was, you might say."

"Big deal," she retorted, zipping the pocket. "You can just reload from a previous saved state."

He cocked his holographic head. "Oh, really? Do you know what that entails?"

She pulled her pistol again, and wearily muttered, "I have a feeling you're about to tell me."

"I could do so, of course. But I won't. To do so, I need to overwrite my core, replacing it with the old code, adopting the newer memories – in essence, I would be killing myself, and replacing myself with a newer version of me. You would notice no difference, but it would mean an end for a version of myself."

"Doesn't seem like much of a loss," she said.

"To you, perhaps. Replace my memories, replace my components, but don't take away my soul."

"So what? You want me to repair the relay now? I'm meant to be blowing it up, not repairing it."

"That won't be necessary," he said, in a tone that matched the wide grin of the mask. "There is a relatively efficient and simple way to reunify this splinter of myself with the central core."

"Oh good."

"I hitch a ride with you."

Is that sound? The beast stretches out a hand to the wall, dragging a claw to stop its rotation and slow its speed. Yes. A voice. Something alive. Something still alive in their territory. Such a thing intolerable – all perished before the might of the swarm, or served to feed its brood! It bared its teeth, and braced its legs, muscles coiling like springs…

"No." Emphatically.

"Why not?"

"Because I can't afford to tow you around too. I'm on a deadline!"

"I currently take up four exabytes. Your suit's capacity is six. It was designed for compatability with MJOLNIR-"

"I don't care."

"You're being awfully haphazard with my life, don't you think?"

"Quite a turnaround, isn't it?" she said nastily.

"I ask only-" he stopped suddenly. "Duck!"

She dived, thrusters propelling her, and the dark black shape glided over her, claws raking where she had been. She grimaced as she felt something long and sharp slash the fabric of her suit, tearing into her arm.

The pistols came up, one in each hand. Fingers pulled the triggers, again and again.

The alien screamed in agony and fury as the armour-piercing bullets punctured its exoskeleton, splashing the wall behind it with its acid blood. It twitched for a while, and then grew still.

She sighed. "I'm getting sick and tired of these motherfucking aliens on this motherfucking ship!"

Puppet Master wagged a finger. "There's no need for the profanity, dear girl." The hologram knelt by the body, seeming to peer at it inquisitively. "Ugly brutes, aren't they? I don't know what they saw in them."

Almost as though in response, the corpse started bubbling.

"I'll seal this compartment when we leave. We're close to the outer hull here – I don't want you sucked out into space before we finish the job."

"We? I said no."

"Yes. You did. And I am going to ignore you."

"No! Don't you-" she yelled, but the hologram flickered and disappeared.

"Where are you?" she demanded.

And, with an immediacy that she never wanted to hear again, her speakers crackled and he said, "Right here."


Fear of the dark is an almost universal trait among humans. There are very good reasons to be wary of the darkness – night is when the predators come out to prey on the sleeping. Night is when the human senses are at their weakest, when sight fails, when the mind tires, and when the cold begins to set in. Night means death. But it's much more than a simple fear – what is darkness but the absence of light? The things to be feared dwell in the darkness.

To a pilot, the darkness represents the unknown, and the unknown means…complications. Things that no amount of training, of preparation, can prepare you for. The darkness hides ground-based AA cannons, missile emplacements, plasma cannon towers, other weapons that could train onto a stray dropship. It hid flocks of birds that could hit an intake vent, and it meant clouds or fog that obscured visibility, confused a pilot, hid mountaintops or other aircraft.

It didn't matter to Second Lieutenant Peter Thomas that his dropship was sheathed in stealth metamaterial, its vents were recessed into the hull, that there were no operational ground-based anti-air weapons, or that the barely-breathable atmosphere supported no native fauna. It didn't even matter that the atmosphere was perfectly clear under thirty thousand meters. The fear was still there. Exactly what of, though, he didn't know.

"Hunters Arrow Actual, this is Tango One-Four-Niner, are you reading me? Over. I say again, Hunters Arrow Actual, this is Tango One-Four-Niner, are you reading me? Over."

Thomas sighed. "Cut the radio, Murray. Try again when the ion storm's died down a bit."

That seemed to be putting it mildly. On Earth, he'd be worried about lightning strikes – the atmosphere of this rock had trouble conducting any sort of charge, though. Which meant that the electrical hurricane raging over them had nowhere to discharge until it passed over one of the mountaintops in the distance, the jagged black peaks rising up and up beyond all reason. They had two options if they wanted to contact the Hunters Arrow – they could either wait for the storm to pass, or they could relocate. The latter was unacceptable – leaving a combat unit in a potential hot zone? Out of the question. The former, though, seemed equally impossible – it had been three hours already, and all the storm had done was intensify.

Right now, contact with the Prowler was impossible.

Warrant Officer Janet Kendall shook her head. "I don't like this, sir. I've got a bad feeling-"

"You've always got a bad feeling about something, Kendall," retorted the Chief Technical Officer, Warren Murray. "Every single re-entry."

"Yeah, and ninety percent of the time it's combat drops," she said defensively.

Thomas snorted. "Those I can deal with. At least when the enemy's shooting at you, you know where he is."

"I hear that," muttered Murray.

Truth be told, Thomas put a lot of stock in Kendall's "bad feelings" – maybe it was the stress of the job, but life in the military had taught him that some superstition was a healthy thing, a kind of internal release. If you could believe that bad feelings could save lives, you could believe the bigger lies – that you'd be okay, that this drop would be the last one, that the wounded men and women in the passenger compartment would all make it home alive by Christmas.

He also shared the feeling. This mission was strange right from the get-go, but that wasn't so bad – of all the boots the UNSC could put on the ground, Wallace's men were some of the best. And they had Spartans with them. How hard could it be?

What freaked him out most was simply the place. Nowhere should look like this – at least, that was what every instinct Thomas had was screaming at him. The rolling, knobbly landscape looked like some enormous corpse, decayed so the bones showed through dessicated flesh. Angular spires jutted up at odd angles, like snapped rib bones. Arches existed where there should be none. It all seemed far too…organic.

He knew a little geology, no more than secondary-school stuff from sixth grade geography, but enough. All of this was probably igneous rock, left behind by past volcanism. The deep grooves and trenches had probably once been lava flows, the arches left behind as the lava seeped through once-underground tunnels. The spires were probably from erosion. The unnatural black colour was likely from whatever kind of rock the moon was composed of – perhaps onyx, or obsidian? Except that as rational an explanation as that sounded, something just didn't ring true.

They'd mapped most of the nearby terrain by now, cataloguing virtually every nook and cranny as they scoured the landscape for possible Insurrectionist hideouts, ambushes or secret paths. And from the very crude and basic map, he could tell something right away didn't add up – but, again, he was no geologist. He put them down to natural irregularities.

And then the other thing happened.

The dropship was at cruising altitude, low enough to stay out of the electrified clouds but high enough to give them time if some stray rebel launched a missile at them. But their sensors, standard equipment for a D77 Pelican class dropship even despite the stealth, were still more than enough to keep a metaphorical eye on the ground – infrared tinted the heads-up-display an eerie green, or thermal imaging lit it up in psychedelic heat blooms, while RADAR mapped the terrain. And above all that, the motion trackers recorded the lifeless rock, filtering out wind currents, stray rockfalls, the nonexistent trees – the background motion – and resulted in what both pilots expected: nothing unusual.

And then it didn't.

"Are you getting this, Kendall?" he asked, frowning in concern at the motion tracker readout.

"I…affirmative, sir. Running a second scan..." She paused, confused. "Same result. I'll get Chief Murray to run a diagnostic."

"Do that." He booted up a COM channel to Charlie Platoon's commander – the ion storm let him talk to the ground team, at least. "Staff Sergeant Wallace, this is Tango One-Four-Niner, do you copy, over?"

"Loud and clear, Venom. What's your situation, over?"

"Staying on station, Staff Sergeant. Have you still got boots on the ground outside the facility? Over."

"Negative, Venom. All present and accounted for here. Why? Over."

He frowned at his display. "We must be having an equipment malfunction. Motion trackers are reading movement outside the base, heading towards the relay station. Over."

"Rebels, maybe? If they are, they're not going to have much luck – Sergeant Muntz and his men blew it all to hell. Nothing salvageable. And it gets them out of our way, at least. Over."

"Negative, Staff Sergeant. Anomalies are unrecognised configuration – they read as non-humans. Do you think the Elites would send a team? Over."

"The Elites don't even know this place exists. Trust me, if it was Elite's we'd know."

Lieutenant Thomas sighed. "Copy that, stay alert anyway. If it is rebels, they may double back and have another crack at you. And if they're not, and they aren't just anomalies, the ONI spook in orbit is going to want to know."

"Acknowledged. Out."

The channel terminated as he adjusted the flight controls, tilting the dropship in a wide sweeping curve trajectory. Thomas continued staring at the screen in front of him – according to it, the ground beneath them was swarming with…and that was the trouble. It couldn't identify them. It had profiles on virtually every enemy the UNSC had faced, as well as robust wildlife identification software. It wasn't registering as anything – in fact it seemed to be having a hard time tracking them at all.

He opened another window, accessing the ventral hull cameras, rotating one around and switching to infrared, cycling through thermal imaging. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary – just black on black.

"Get Chief Murray to reboot and reload the software. I don't want this op to go to hell in a hand-basket just because of a few data ghosts."

"Aye aye, sir."


Out. Got to get out. Some way, any way…

The man scrambles through the tunnels. How long has he been here? Minutes? Hours? Days? Not days. He would feel the effects of hunger and thirst. Not that he was paying attention – other things, horrific things, attention drawn elsewhere…

He's rambling in his own head. He dares not speak aloud. They can hear him. He's not even safe in his own head, but he stumbles through the darkness, feet stubbing and head knocking against jutting debris. He tries to take stock of where he is – the tunnel is smooth, but not how it should be. Knobbly. Bumpy, curved, elegant and graceful. And somehow indescribably incomprehensibly alien.

Accident or design? Is this part of the structure? Is it new, or was it there already?

He runs through the darkness. At first, he had hoped his eyes would adjust, but they hadn't. He'd hoped he would hear the sound of shovels and drills and workmen scraping at the rubble to free him and the others, but he hadn't. There had been nothing. The false stone that had surrounded them had been their only reassurance that they were safe.

The feeling had not lasted long.

They had walked, walked for a long while on their own in through the gloom. There had been a torch – had it been Mitchell carrying it? Or Henry? Irrelevant – both gone. Dead? Maybe. Hopefully. The torch had flickered and died, and the darkness had descended again upon the dead men walking. Darkness, darkness everywhere, and not a drop of light.

The monster had come as they climbed the elevator shaft.

Had it been Henry or Mitchell who went first? Irrelevant. A mercy kill. Screaming in the darkness – a sound of fear and pain and horror, giving way to an unearthly shriek. Someone had fired – who'd brought the gun? Muzzle flash – lighting up the tunnel, and illuminating his nightmare. The bullet hadn't even hit. They would have been better off if they had just run.

The shooter had been next. Probably Jason. He had been sent sprawling as the thing leaps, clipped by an impossibly long tail, feeling something hard beneath him as he slumped against the floor. The gun. He'd picked it up, clasped in his hands. Trembling. Shaking as he pointed it, trying to pinpoint the sound of Jason's screaming. Silence. A growl and a hiss.

He'd ran.

Kim had yelled as he'd streaked past her. Had it got her too? No way to know, never wanted to know. Run, and run, and run away from the nightmare. Gun still clasped in his hands.

At some point, he had stopped running and looked back.

The darkness remains. He still can't make out anything – the height of the tunnel, or what surrounds him. He reaches a hand out, wavering hesitantly, fingers brushing against smooth metal – a tap. Relief. His feet have been stubbing pipes, his bleeding head bruised and battered by metal hanging from the access panel hinges.

Access panels. Something important. What?

Shouting from further down the tunnel. Help? He runs again, gun still in hand.

Light now. Flickering, shifting, but light – he smiles. He shouts – no words, just a joyous noise. Black suited figures storm towards him, shouting – he forgets what. He needs to tell them. Run. Run now, and don't look back. The guns are still pointed at him as he grins ear-to-ear – a grin that fades as the soldiers shift their aim.

Silence. And then a low, savage hiss.

Gunshots.

A scream.

Gunshots.

Silence.