As she looked along the hul above to find a hatch, she picked up a sound. Her hearing was hypersensitive at the best of times. But the helmet’s audio amplified a noise exactly like someone sliding a pair of pants off the back of the chair, dragging a leather belt over wood. It was so slowly done, so careful, that al Lucy could think was ambush.
I can’t just wait for it to get me.
It’s coming from … Lucy leveled her rifle and swung around in the direction of the noise. Her eye caught movement and short-lived shadow, but whoever it was had taken cover between the vehicles. She started stalking it.
Okay … let’s see your legs.
The vessels or whatever were al different shapes and sizes, some ten or fifteen meters high, some much smal er. But the terrazzo floor was perfectly smooth and flat. Lucy darted under the nearest vehicle and lay cheek to the ground, looking for boots moving between the stands and struts. Over the sound of her own rapid breathing—pumping adrenaline, fiercely focused—she could stil hear the slithering leather, and what she thought was a gasp of effort.
Actual y, it sounded more like a fart. It was a weird, unfunny moment. She was trying to get the jump on someone who was more likely to blow her head off than shake her hand, and here she was listening to a damned fart. But she stil couldn’t see any legs. Elites just couldn’t move that quietly.
And a Brute would have smashed through everything in the garage to get at her.
But she saw a shadow moving slowly right to left about four vessels ahead of her. She crawled under the ships on elbows and knees, rifle cradled in the crook of her arms, keeping her eyes on that shadow. It paused for a moment.
Is there a gantry above me? Is that what I can see? Someone on a gantry?
Lucy couldn’t look up to check. She kept going. She didn’t think she was making much noise, but it was hard to be completely silent. She was trying to tiptoe on joints. It was slow going.
And then she was under the curved hul of another dark gray ship, one that gave her a glimpse of much more familiar undercarriage gear, and within two meters of the shadow.
Okay. Still no legs. You’re standing on something above me. Maybe some walkway between the vessels. So I’m coming up underneath you.
That’ll be a lovely surprise, won’t it?
Lucy left it to the last moment to flip over onto her back. It wasn’t easy with a backpack, but she did it, balancing herself on it and putting one boot against a strut. If she pushed off hard enough, she’d skid out like a skate and come up under the bastard, whoever it was. She clutched her rifle to her chest, right index finger on the trigger, left hand cupped around the muzzle, then tested her boot against the strut and braced her quads.
Deep breath. Three … two … She drove off from the strut and shot out into the gap between the vessels. Right above her, a dark shape blotted out the light. In the fraction of a second between seeing it and squeezing the trigger, her brain told her tentacles, Engineer, could be rigged to explode, do it.
She squeezed off a burst, straight up. Liquid splashed her visor. A terrible squealing noise like a bal oon venting air told her she’d hit it. She tried to rol clear, but it crashed down on her, tentacles flailing.
It didn’t blow up. And neither did she.
Oh God. I shot an Engineer. I shot a poor damn Engineer.
Lucy couldn’t move for a moment. Engineers—Huragok—were lightweights, less than sixty kilos, but it was stil hard to move with a dead weight like that on her chest. She squirmed out from under it. It was stil alive, making terrible wheezing, sucking noises now, looking like a beached squid with a face. The creatures had gas sacs that enabled them to float and that was what she’d hit. But the sacs were their lungs as wel . It was suffocating.
Lucy couldn’t even tel it she was sorry. She couldn’t explain that she’d seen too many Engineers with booby traps strapped to them by the Covenant, and that she was trained not to take chances.
She couldn’t explain that she overreacted to threats and sometimes got it wrong, either.
She tried to lift its head and comfort it. Its face reminded her of an armadil o, long and narrow. She took off her helmet and tried to look into its eyes, three on each side of its head, and make some sort of contact with it, but it was hard to work out where to focus. The poor thing was dying. It was like shooting an autistic child. Huragok were harmless, obsessed with repairing technology and tinkering with machinery. They didn’t fight or take sides; they were only dangerous when the Covenant strapped explosives to them.
That had always disgusted Lucy. She had a faint recol ection of a pet cat before the Covenant kil ed her family and glassed her colony.
Savages. Monsters.
But humans did that too. We did it with dogs and dolphins and all kinds of helpless creatures. We made them into bombs. And now I’ve killed an Engineer.
It might not have troubled most Spartans, but it troubled her. Al she could do was hold it. The sucking noises were getting weaker. There was nothing in her medical pack that could save it. She didn’t even know where to start.
And I’ve killed the only sentient being that could help us find a way out of this place. Or get me out of here.
The Engineer seemed to get heavier as she tried to prop up its head, then it stopped wheezing and its tentacles went limp.
God, I’m sorry. Did you realize I didn’t mean to do it?
Lucy sat back on her heels and wondered what the hel to do next. Now she knew there was no real threat, she had to work out how to contact the squad and let them know where she was and what she’d found. If she could locate the point where she’d entered the chamber, maybe she could tap a Morse message on the stone.
Amid al this incredible alien technology, the one thing she could rely on was a simple, seven-hundred-year-old system of on-off signals that almost everybody else had forgotten.
She stood and looked down at the Engineer for a few moments. She’d never kil ed anyone she hadn’t wanted and intended to. She was wondering what to do with the body when she heard that leather belt sound again.
Several leather belts, in fact. Shadows flickered in her peripheral vision.
Engineers were harmless—weren’t they?
HANGAR BAY, UNSC PORT STANLEY: FIFTEEN THOUSAND KILOMETERS OFF NEW LLANELLI, BRUNEL SYSTEM.
“Aren’t you going to help Naomi into her Mjolnir?” Mal said, stuffing a magazine of armor-piercing rounds into his belt. “You two were getting on so wel .”
Vaz looked over his shoulder with some difficulty as he eased himself into his new armor. It didn’t smel familiar. Maybe that was just as wel . He swung his arms to get a feel for the extra range of movement in his shoulders and wondered if it was worth the trade-off against shoulder plates.