Port Stanley’s bow dipped as the corvette did a smooth, slow somersault. The dropship and Piety, locked together like mating insects, slid up and out of Osman’s field of view.

“Hangar, stand by,” she said.

It was al so silent, so smooth, and such a complete contrast to what she knew was going on inside the ship. The stars swept up past her as if she was fal ing and then she was facing out into a different star field, rock steady. To the right of the viewscreen, the HUD icons of the ODSTs and Naomi showed the two locked vessels heading into the hangar, fil ing their field of view.

The radio fizzed again and the EMP indicator flared.

“I don’t think it’s the Huragok.” BB sounded oddly breathless. He’s an AI. He can’t be. But he was integrated with Naomi now, plugged into her nervous system, experiencing much of what she was feeling. “I zapped her again just to be on the safe side. In she comes.…”

“Can openers ready, boys and girls,” Mal said. “Our brave Brute boys are real y pissed off.”

Osman could see that. Two of the Jiralhanae crew were at Piety’s forward viewscreen, harshly lit by the landing lights facing outward. Their lips were drawn back in a snarl over huge white fangs. The view shuddered for a moment. Piety had been forced down onto the deck, and the three HUD views went haywire. Mal’s veered one way, Vaz’s veered to the other, and Naomi’s—Naomi’s just seemed to jet into the air.

Osman had never heard an AI whoop before.

CHAPTER TEN

MESSAGE PRIORITY: FLASH FROM: CO UNSC GLAMORGAN TO: CINCONI CYCLICALLY FLUCTUATING ANOMALY LOCATED 5,000 KM FROM ONYX COORDINATES. READINGS AT PEAK CONSISTENT WITH 1.37 SOLAR MASSES. SPHERICAL FORM, 23 CM (TWENTY THREE CENTIMETER) DIAMETER. SEE REPORT FOR FULL EMR/ GRAVITATIONAL ANALYSIS.

POSSIBLY DIMENSIONAL PORTAL.

(Received at Bravo-6 February 2553.)

HANGAR DECK, UNSC PORT STANLEY A human being was an extraordinary machine, but oh, how chaotic: how thrilingly disjointed.

BB spent a nanosecond reassuring himself that splitting the critical ship functions from his higher processing had been a sensible move. The input flooding him from Naomi’s neural net was so new that he wanted time to savor it.

Being the heart and brain of a starship was a joy, but experiencing the adrenaline-distorted, frantic awareness of a human under stress was far, far more … visceral.

And I have no viscera. How about that.

“Drive—offline,” Naomi said. “Cannon down.”

“Okay, she’s dead in the water,” Mal cal ed. “Blowing hatches in ten seconds. Stand by to close the airlock.”

The dropship lifted off Piety and peeled away. Mal and Vaz were already at the hatches on either side of the ship, placing shaped charges on them as Naomi took a short run at the bow. Her boot hit the vessel’s nose and propel ed her five meters up onto the sloping forward hatch right above the bridge. BB, used to predicting with certainty what his physical anchor would do—be it ship, circuit, or data drive—was left in the wake of real events for the first time in his existence.

He had no idea what Naomi would do or feel in the next fraction of a second, or the second after that, even though he detected the impulses in her brain before the muscles engaged.

She landed knees first on the hatch. The exposed deck was stil pul ing at one G, and BB felt the hatch cover deform slightly with the impact of four hundred kilos. Naomi sprang back immediately, boots planted either side of the hatch frame, and reached down to rip out the emergency release plate. BB could calculate precisely how much force it took to do that. But it didn’t give him half as much information as feeling the contraction in Naomi’s latissimus muscles and the pressure on her palms as she gripped and pul ed. A glittering mist of fine ice crystals sprayed out from the edges of the hatch like escaping steam. The ship was venting atmosphere.

“Hul breached— seal the hangar!”

BB felt Piety shudder. The charges had detonated on her side hatches. Naomi pul ed the nose hatch clear and dropped through the opening feet first, rifle clutched tight to her chest as the hangar doors shut.

She’s ripped open a shuttle craft. She’s torn metal apart like cardboard. Her heart rate’s near 180 and I can feel it in her throat—my throat— and it’s like nothing else I’ve experienced. She’s lost her depth perception. But I won’t step in yet.… Somewhere else in the ship automatic fire hammered in short bursts, but in Naomi’s ears it faded into the background. She landed in the cockpit between two Jiralhanae apparently mired in slow motion. She didn’t even raise her rifle. There wasn’t enough space, and that was a stroke of luck: the Brutes couldn’t make ful use of their massive weight. She brought her fist straight up under the first Brute’s chin and snapped his head back so hard that BB felt the smal shock wave of his breaking spine travel back up her arm. The blow didn’t kil the Brute outright, but he went down.

The other swung at her, bel owing. He was a head tal er but Naomi got her hand around his trachea and dug her fingers in hard while she brought the stock of her rifle down hard on the top of his skul . It took her a good seven or eight pounding blows to stun him before she could lean back and fire into his face at point-blank range. BB, attuned to what she perceived, saw her depth perception fade back in along with clear, ful - volume sound.

Adrenaline. Even in a Spartan, its effect is—messy. But carry on, dear. You’re doing okay without any help from me.

“Cockpit clear. Two hostiles down.”

“Four contacts back here,” Mal said. “One down. No Engineer yet. Oh—”

Mal was drowned out by weapons fire and raw, animal bel owing.

“Mal?” Naomi pushed through the cockpit hatch and into the cargo compartment, charging through a gap between stacked crates. “Mal!”

She almost fel over Vaz. One Brute lay twitching on the deck and another had Vaz pinned down one-handed. But the marine wasn’t giving up without a fight. He had a tight grip on his knife, now buried up to the hilt in the roaring, snarling Brute’s neck. BB, whose every process was tied to his system clock, felt two separate time frames happening—his own, real and objective, and Naomi’s, suddenly very much slower and more densely packed with only the data she needed to fight and win.

So that’s what adrenaline does to her time perception. Extraordinary.

Naomi grabbed the Brute by the col ar and jerked it off Vaz in one movement, freeing his arm so he could aim his carbine. He shoved the muzzle in the Brute’s mouth and pul ed the trigger. Another layer of noise vanished. Naomi reacted to the bursts of fire that were stil coming from the aft section.

“One down.” Vaz scrambled to his feet. “Mal, talk to me.”

“Two not down—the bastards.”

Naomi shoved past Vaz and fol owed the noise. BB felt her heart rate fal to 140 as her adrenaline steadied, and she moved forward with her rifle trained—much more deliberate, thinking more consciously. The next thing she saw spiked her heart rate for a couple of seconds and she’d already opened fire on it before her frontal lobes identified it as a Brute.

“Four down,” she said. “Two left.”

More fire rattled behind the bulkhead of the next compartment. BB stood by to give her some neural assistance but she stil showed no sign of needing it. She punched her way through the flimsy hatch and stepped into a hail of needle projectiles that skidded off her armor. BB’s sole sources of imaging right then were Naomi’s helmet cam and her optic nerve. He looked into the wide-open, fanged mouth of a Brute and turned—against his wil —to watch Mal finish off the last one standing with a ful clip emptied into its chest. The creature stil took a surprisingly long time to stop moving.

No amount of biological studies, data, recon footage, or any other kind of third-hand input could have prepared BB for this. His choices were either to see what Naomi saw or disconnect from her optic nerve, a very limited but intense set of options compared to the freedom of infiltrating every circuit, system, and carrier wave in his electronic existence. This was her experience of the world, however much he could use his processing power to enhance her nerve signals. He swal owed the microscopic detail and understood.

“Al clear,” she cal ed.

The world suddenly changed color, shifting from near-monochrome to the ful spectrum. Someone had opened Piety’s loading bay and the bright lights of the hangar flooded in. Naomi didn’t need the ODST’s night-vision visors to see in very low light, one of those little details that BB knew but had to experience to truly appreciate. The ODSTs took off their helmets and both scratched their scalps like a pair of bookends.

They’re okay. Good. We need that Huragok more than they realize, but they’d be a high price to pay for getting it.

BB stil didn’t want to be human. Poor old Cortana. How cruel, Halsey. But he liked some humans, he found even the ones he disliked fascinating, and he marveled at the ability of al of them to do so much with such limited hardware.

“Clear. Six down.” Mal got his breath back. “Now where’s the flying jel yfish?”

“Racist,” BB said.

“I’m looking at you, Naomi, but al I can hear is Square Blue Thing. Are you possessed? Any projectile vomiting?”

Naomi stifled a laugh. BB could feel the last of her adrenaline metabolizing as she wound down from the fight. The uncharacteristic laughter was al part of it.

“I’m bearing up,” she said. “Everyone okay?”

“Where’s Devereaux?” Vaz asked.

Osman came on the radio. “Docked on the top hatch, waiting for a parking space. Good work, people. But have we got a live Engineer?”

“Looking, ma’am.” Mal started opening lockers and tapping on panels. “It’s hiding. It’s not daft.”

“Might have been hit by a stray round.”

“Thanks, Vaz. Big morale booster.”

It wasn’t a big ship. Naomi had only gone a few meters back toward the cockpit when Vaz cal ed out.

“Aww, look,” he said. He squatted in front of an opening and held out his hand. “It’s terrified. Hey, come on out. It’s okay. You’re safe now.”

Naomi went aft again and squatted to look into the ventilation duct. The Huragok was huddled inside. Then it shot out of the opening in a flurry of tentacles, aiming for the nearest opening.

“Whoa—”

“Grab it!”

Vaz tackled it rugby-style at the cargo door and crashed down onto the hangar deck. It started squealing like a bal oon losing air. Mal pitched in and subdued it with a headlock, no easy feat given the Huragok anatomy. He got to his feet with his arm stil tight around its neck.

It was wearing the explosive harness that the San’Shyuum fitted to stop Engineers fal ing into enemy hands. Mal took a long, slow breath.

“Okay, who’s good at EOD?” he asked quietly. “And I do mean really good.”

Osman came clattering down the ladder from the gantry but Naomi gestured at her to stay back.

“I’l do it.” Naomi took out a few tools from her belt and assessed the locking mechanisms. “What do you reckon, BB?”

“I just happen to have an ONI schematic … there. How’s that look?”

Her focus adjusted to the diagram in her HUD. “Great. Keep stil , Mal.”

“Tel that to jel y boy here.”

Naomi fed the release codes into each port on the harness in the right order—with just the tiniest blip of adrenaline—and the harness slid onto the deck with a thud. Osman didn’t wait to be given the al -clear and jogged across to take a look.

“Textbook,” she said. “Absolutely textbook. What do we do with it now, BB?”

However many bel s and whistles the Huragok could add to a ship, BB wanted to play it safe for now. “We need to confine it where it can’t access me or any other critical systems. You know what they’re like. It’l start tinkering and next thing you know … wel , we don’t know. Proceed with caution.”

“So what are we going to do to keep it occupied?” Mal asked. “Give it a coloring book?”

“Let me talk to it. But if it gets into me, then it assimilates al my knowledge. That’s classified ONI intel igence. It’l siphon it up and share it with the next computer or Engineer it meets. Even if it only shares that data with UNSC systems, you’l have an interesting time explaining that to Admiral Parangosky.”

“Bloody good point, BB.” Mal stil had hold of the Engineer by its neck. “Can it pick locks? I mean, can we secure it in a compartment, or is it going to rebuild the security systems?”

“Give it something noncritical to play with,” Naomi said. “Upgrade the basic ODST armor or something. You’re not going to need it now everyone’s got their ONI rig.”

The Engineer gave up trying to squirm out of Mal’s headlock and wrapped its tentacles around his shoulders like a scared child.

“Yeah, okay,” Mal said. “Steady on, son. Don’t throttle me. Come on, BB, talk to it.”

BB decided he’d col ated enough data on Huragok sign language to attempt a conversation. He projected a set of holographic tentacles and began signing. The Engineer’s head whipped around and it let out a long, soft tril that BB hoped was an oooooh of amazement.

< Not going to hurt, > BB signed.

The Engineer seemed total y riveted by the unexpected conversation. < Where are the others? What will not hurt? > BB made a rapid recalculation of his syntax. He was used to total mastery of every subject he encountered, but his pidgin Huragok obviously wasn’t perfect. He tried again.

< We will not hurt you. What others? > < My brothers. We need to repair one another. > < Where did you come from? > < I waited in a damaged ship until the Jiralhanae came. It was a lot of work for one. > BB had hoped the Huragok would have a team of little friends waiting somewhere for him, but it didn’t look like it. < We do not know any others.