"Good." Avery held out the case. "Because you're my sniper. And he's your spotter."

Jenkins took the case, but it took him a few seconds more to realize that it held a rifle—that Avery had just given him an unofficial—but very important—promotion. "Yes, Staff Sergeant!"

Jenkins shouted, much louder than before.

"We're accelerating your training," Captain Ponder said, joining Avery near the sandpit.

"We've just learned Harvest is expecting a very important Colonial Authority delegation. The Governor has requested that this militia provide security—in case of Insurrectionist attack."

This was a boldfaced lie, but Avery and Ponder had agreed that while they couldn't tell the recruits the truth, they needed to give them a reason to train hard—an enemy that would keep them motivated.

And yet the mere mention of the Insurrection caused some of the recruits to start with fright. Others glanced nervously at one another while the rest frowned and shook their heads: We didn't sign up for this.

Avery nodded. "You volunteered for different reasons. But I can teach you to become soldiers—protectors of your planet."

He'd meant what he said to the Lt. Commander: until help arrived from FLEETCOM, these recruits were the only protection Harvest had. But what he hadn't admitted until now—even to himself—was that he didn't know if he could lead them. Not without their respect and trust.

And he didn't have a lot of time to earn either one.

"I am your drill instructor, but I am also a UNSC Fleet Marine," Avery continued. "I have committed myself to a life of service and sacrifice. I have set for myself the highest standards of personal conduct and professional skill. If you let me, I will teach you to do the same."

It wasn't lost on Avery that everything he committed to his recruits he also committed to himself. In waging the UNSC's dirty war against the Insurrection, he had compromised his standards—done immoral things. He'd sacrificed too much of his humanity for his service.

Now he was determined to earn it back.

Avery took off his duty-cap and tossed it to Healy. Then he stepped down into the pit.

"But first," he said, lifting Stisen's helmet and shaking it free of sand. "Someone's got to keep Forsell's head from getting any fatter." As the recruits of 1st platoon broke into astonished smiles, Avery added, "Might as well be me."

CHAPTER ELEVEN

HARVEST, JANUARY 20, 2525

Sif knew she had been alone too long. Alone with her suspicions, without another intelligence to help her separate what she knew from what she only supposed to be. Something had happened—was happening—right under her nose. But Sif only knew the results of recent unsettling events, not their reasons, and that was a terribly distressing thing for an eminently logical being.

Start with what you know, Sif reminded herself as she spun up her arrays, and once again fed the relevant bits of memory into her most reliable processor-cluster.

The facts: Jilan al-Cygni and two of the marines, Johnson and Byrne, had come up to the Tiara four days ago; al-Cygni had asked Sif to provide her with a vessel for "official DCS business"; Sif had complied without question, and the three humans had transited to the freighter Bulk Discount via al-Cygni's sloop, Walk of Shame; an hour later, both ships had broken orbit.

But this was where things started to become less clear.

Reviewing imagery from the Tiara's external cameras, Sif could tell that Walk of Shame had remained docked with Bulk Discount—kept its delta-wing hull hugged tight against the bottom of the freighter's cargo container as it initiated a slip to Madrigal. This sort of piggybacking wasn't unusual; smaller ships often took rides on Shaw-Fujikawa–equipped vessels the same way cargo-containers linked to propulsion pods to form Slipspace-capable freighters.

The thing was al-Cygni's ship had a Shaw-Fujikawa drive; it didn't need the freighter's help to get to Madrigal. But that was never Bulk Discount's destination. A few minutes after initiating its jump, the freighter had exited Slipspace and begun broadcasting an S.O.S.

Sif accessed the storage-array that held the record of the COM: <\\> DCS.REG#BDX-008814530 >> HARVEST.LOCAL.ALL <\ ALERT! CREW MEDICAL EMERGENCY!

<\ CAPTAIN (OKAMA.CHARLES.LIC#OCX-65129981) IS UNRESPONSIVE!

<\ REQUEST IMMEDIATE MEDICAL ASSISTANCE!

[MESSAGE REPEATS] \ > It was true that humans sometimes had adverse reactions to Slipspace travel. The multidimensional domain was volatile, its temporal eddies in a constant state of flux. Humans that came in contact with one of these disturbances could be hit by something as minor as nausea or as bad as a stroke. In rare cases, people—but not always their ships—had been known to simply disappear.

So freighters and other vessels relied on "weather reports" from other craft just leaving Slipspace to decide whether it was safe to enter at similar coordinates. At any one time, there were enough ships in transit (and when there weren't, the DCS supplemented its reporting with probes) to make the system very reliable. But it was still a predictive process, and sometimes ships encountered conditions so unexpectedly dangerous that they had to abort—leave the Slipstream immediately after they entered.

These emergency exits could be very dangerous for human crews, and the control-circuits of a Shaw-Fujikawa drive were supposed to give fair warning before an abort. But this wasn't always possible. Better for a crew to return to normal space quickly and suffer fixable, physical injuries than forever disappear inside the Slipstream.

But Bulk Discount had no crew. No "Captain Charles Okama." If Sif's suspicions were correct, the only people on board were Staff Sergeants Johnson and Byrne, but she forced her processors not to leap too far along the chain of evidence. Stay focused, her core-logic insisted.

Stick to the facts.

Polling the radar scans of freighters near Bulk Discount's exit coordinates, Sif confirmed that al-Cygni's ship had disengaged from the freighter after the exit, then dropped off radar—an indication that her sloop was equipped with some sort of stealth package. Sif knew this hardware was rare on UNSC warships, let alone the personal shuttles of midlevel DCS bureaucrats.

Far more confusing, however, was what the nearby freighters' scans showed subsequently appearing near Bulk Discount: a faint contact that took multiple triangulations to confirm; a vessel with no "Indication of Friend or Foe" (IFF) transponder and whose ARGUS profile confirmed a hull material that wasn't used in any UNSC construction—a material that was, Sif suspected, not of human origin.

Be reasonable! Her emotional restraint algorithms attacked her core. An alien ship?

But what other explanation was there? Sif's encyclopedic arrays knew the profile of every human vessel, and the contact didn't match any of them. Besides (Sif's core shot back at her code) the contact had attacked Bulk Discount with energy weapons, and then exploded in a flash of methane and other exotic biologicals! All of this suggested a ship, not just of alien design, but occupancy as well.

Sif wished she had just asked Jilan al-Cygni to tell her the truth. Not only about the alien vessel but about her identity as well. Clearly, al-Cygni wasn't DCS. She was military—ONI most likely, given Walk of Shame's stealthy design. But when the woman returned to the Tiara, she had been more tight-lipped than ever before. Based on the Staff Sergeant's injuries, Sif knew the mission had not gone well.

At the time, Sif had let her emotional restraints keep her need-to-know in check. But now the crystalline nano-assemblage at the heart of her core was burning with an almost uncontrollable need for answers. For the first time in her existence, she felt overly constrained —experienced a rampant twinge. And it made her very afraid.

At that moment, a new message appeared in her COM buffer.

<\\> HARVEST.AO.AI.MACK >> HARVEST.SO.AI.SIF <\ Morning, beautiful.

<\ Got myself in a bind. Could use some help.

<\ Mind coming down? \> Sif was surprised. It was the first text COM Mack had sent her in a very long time. He was flirting but not speaking—making an unusual effort to be polite. But it was Mack's final question that really threw her logic for a loop. In the history of their relationship, Mack had never asked Sif to visit him in his own data center.

Had she been in a more stable state, Sif would never have compressed a fragment of her core and pulsed it down the Tiara's maser. But her algorithms' restraint had backfired. If they wanted her to be reasonable, she would oblige—get another rational being to confirm or dismiss her conclusions. A few seconds later, Sif's fragment hit the antennae atop Utgard's reactor complex and slipped into Mack's COM buffer.

<\ Well. That was quick.

<\ Make yourself comfortable. Be with you in a jiffy. \> Mack's buffer was cluttered with other data (requests for help from farmers with broken JOTUNs and the like), evidence that Sif's spontaneity had surprised him as well. But Mack's hospitality was as good as promised, and soon Sif's fragment was settled in the flash-memory of one of the processor clusters inside his data center. The fragment found that Mack had opened a circuit to the center's holo-projector, and Sif's avatar blazed forth—a whorl of photons that brightened the otherwise pitch-black room.

What are you doing?! Her algorithms shrieked.

What I thought I needed to do, her core shot back.

To mollify her code, she pinged her fragment and showed that it was still perfectly in-sync with her core. She was in control, and if anything went wrong, she would simply discard the fragment.

"Take your time," Sif said, her voice echoing from speakers in the projector's base. The cluster that held her fragment had access to the center's thermostat. Sif knew the room was cold, so she'd draped a crimson poncho over her avatar's bare shoulders, complementing her orange and yellow gown. Sif's golden hair was done up in a hasty twist, but she'd left a few strands swept across her brow in an effort to hide the worry lines her algorithms insisted she display.

Like everything else about her avatar, its eyes and ears were strictly for show. But as fluorescent strip-lights flickered on above the projector, Sif availed herself of the center's cameras and microphones, and used them to properly animate her avatar's face as she inspected her surroundings.

She had imagined Mack's data center would be a mess, given the sweat and grime he rendered on his own avatar. But much to her surprise, the data center was perfectly organized.

His exposed circuits were neatly tied together, and his arrays stacked neatly in their racks.

Maybe it helped that the center was so small, Sif thought, more a closet than a room. Or maybe his maintenance staff was more thorough? But focusing the center's cameras, Sif saw a layer of dust on the wires and racks and she knew that no one, not even a tech crew, had been in Mack's data center for a very, very long time.

Pulling the cameras back, Sif saw that the ceiling was braced with titanium beams, and the floor was covered with rubberized panels. She got a strange sensation, a feeling that she had seen this sort of room before….

<\ Got a few more things to clear off my plate.

<\ Mind getting started without me? \> Mack opened a circuit to a processor cluster closer to his core-logic. As Sif's fragment shot forward, she caught brief glimpses of other active clusters—registered their tasks. While she was aware of Mack's various responsibilities, it was another thing entirely to see him go about his work from such an intimate point of view. The agricultural operations AI was at work all over Harvest. And Sif quickly gained newfound respect for how busy his job could be.

The vast majority of Mack's clusters were constantly pinging his hundreds of thousands of JOTUNs, giving orders and checking for faults. In a set of three co-processing clusters, he was busy surveying all the cargo containers in the maglev system, verifying the alignment of their propulsive paddles. At the same time, he was conducting stress tests on the maglev rail-lines themselves, checking to see how much excess capacity they could handle and at what speeds.

Sif knew keeping tabs on the JOTUNs was an all-day, everyday task. But she was a little puzzled by the infrastructure assessment. The CA only required annual checks of major systems, and she knew Mack had turned in a report a few months back (because she'd had to pester him to get it done). Then her fragment saw some things that made absolutely no sense at all.

One of Mack's clusters was supervising a crew of JOTUNs as they buried Harvest's mass driver. Some of Mack's combines had cut the wheat fields around the device, and a group of plows were now doing their best to push dirt onto the driver's line of large, circular magnets— make them look like natural undulations in the close-cropped terrain.

For a moment, Sif wondered if this unusual internment was the "bind" Mack needed her help with. But then her fragment reached the cluster nearest his core.

Here the processors were dedicated to control-circuits in the Tiara's seven elevator anchors —simple computers whose job was to transfer manifests (records of what each cargo container carried and how much it weighed) from Mack's arrays to Sif's. Before the containers could transfer from his rail lines to her strands, Sif had to verify the manifests. Only when she was certain the elevators could balance the loads would she give Mack permission to send the containers on their way.

These interactions happened thousands of times a day, and even though this gave Mack ample opportunity for flirtation, he had never done anything to make her regret this most fundamental of their connections. His manifests were always clear and concise, his weight assessments accurate to the kilogram. And while DCS regulations obliged Sif to double-check Mack's work, in this one respect she had grown to trust him implicitly.

Sif told her fragment to ping the anchors' control-circuits. But when the data came back, she didn't see anything obviously out of order. "Want to give me a hint?" her avatar asked. "The computers seem—"

<\ Oh, the computers are working fine… Mack's voice crackled from the data center's rarely-used PA. "What I'm wondering is: what would happen if we turned them off?"