0840 hours, March 7, 2526 (military calendar)

UNSC Valiant-class Cruiser Everest

Deep Space Transitional Zone, Dynizi System

The elevator made its first stop, and the doors opened to reveal a double-width passageway with a spotless deck and a recently painted overhead. The bulkheads were lined with life-size holographs of great naval commanders, dating all the way back to Themistocles and Lysander. Across from the elevator stood a pair of sentries uniformed in service dress blues and armed with MA5B bullpup assault rifles.

Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson stepped to the back of the car, making room for new riders, and assumed proper posture in case they happened to be officers. Which seemed likely, since the Navy did not post armed guards to secure access to crew decks. Even more telling was the sweet air beginning to drift in from the passageway. No ventilation chief wanted a bridge officer yelling at him about moldy ducts and musty scrubbers.

But no one boarded. The sentries glanced toward Avery, but did not otherwise acknowledge his presence. The doors remained open, giving him time to study the holograph directly across from the elevator. Situated between the two sentries, it depicted a pointy-bearded Korean warrior in a conical helmet and knee-length hauberk. He didn’t recognize the Korean’s image from memory, but the information at the bottom read Admiral Yi Sun-sin, who defeated a Japanese fleet of 133 ships with just 13 ships at the Myeongnyang Strait in 1597.

Avery hoped the UNSC had a few admirals like Yi Sun-sin. The odds facing humanity right now were a lot worse than ten to one.

After a moment, he realized the elevator had not stopped to admit new riders. He glanced over at the control panel and saw that he had arrived at Level Nineteen, the destination selected for him when he was ushered into the car. He hadn’t noticed at the time, but Levels Thirteen through Twenty could only be accessed via biometric thumb-scanner. Levels One through Twelve could be reached by simple touchpad. There was another thumb-scanner at the Hangar Deck level, then the touchpads began again, increasing in number from First Deck through Thirty Deck.

Avery had been aboard enough large vessels to know this was standard ship layout. The Hangar Deck was always considered Zero Deck. Everything above the hangar was a “level,” rising from one to as high as necessary. Everything below the Hangar Deck was “belowdecks,” starting at First Deck and descending through Second Deck, Third Deck, etc. What he did not know was why he had been sent to a command level of what seemed to be one of the largest vessels in the UNSC Navy.

Just three minutes earlier, Avery had stumbled out of a transfer shuttle and descended the boarding ramp onto a hangar deck the size of a small city. Still groggy and shivering after a three-week slipspace jump, he had been far from his usual handsome self—his black mustache had gone from close-trimmed to unkempt and spiky, while his brown skin had been dry and itchy—and waiting for him at the base of the ramp had been a burly lieutenant with a Hangar Boss insignia above her pocket.

“Staff Sergeant, you look like something I just scraped off my boot heel.” She was tall and broad-shouldered, with black lip-gloss and blond hair pulled into a bun. “Have you been drinking?”

“I wish, ma’am.” Avery came to attention. “It’s just cryofog. They pulled me out of a sleep tube about five minutes ago.”

The lieutenant wrinkled her nose. “That explains the smell.” She crooked a finger and turned away. “This way, marine.”

Avery had followed her across three hundred meters of deck to an elevator bank. She’d reached inside an open car and thumbed the control panel, then pointed him inside.

“Welcome aboard, Sergeant Johnson.”

Avery had still been so foggy-headed that he had not thought to ask where he was going—or even what ship he was aboard. His original orders had called for him to join the 11th Marine Force Reconnaissance/ODST Battalion at Neos Atlantis, then ship out to fight aliens in the Outer Colonies. But instead of awakening in orbit above the planet’s familiar green ice ball, he had emerged from cryosleep to find himself aboard the UNSC transport schooner Santori, in the middle of a major battle fleet so far out in deep space he couldn’t even tell which star was the local.

His first assumption was that the 11th Recon had left Neos Atlantis early, and his transport had been diverted to join them in transit. Now he was beginning to wonder. When a marine staff sergeant boarded a ship to join a combat unit, he wasn’t usually received on a command level.

Finally, the sentry on the left asked, “Something wrong, Sergeant Johnson?”

“Possibly.” Avery was a little surprised to be addressed by name, since he had not seen her gaze drop to the name tag on the breast of his combat utilities. “Where am I?”

“The Flag Deck.” An attractive petty officer second class, she had pale skin, hazel eyes, and short red hair barely showing beneath her white-and-blue bucket cap. “You think we put on these dress blues just for you?”

“Never crossed my mind.” It was beginning to sound like Avery was in the right place after all. He stepped out of the elevator, then asked, “The Flag Deck of what vessel?”

The sentry narrowed her eyes and glanced toward Avery’s name tag, apparently confirming that he was who she thought he was, then said, “You’re aboard the UNSC Super-heavy Cruiser Everest, flagship of Vice Admiral Preston J. Cole, commander Battle Group X-Ray.”

Damn. Preston Cole had been a decent battle commander twenty years ago, before the Office of Naval Intelligence identified his second wife as an insurrectionist spy and forced him to retire. Over the next several years, the gossip vids had mentioned a couple of short marriages and bitter divorces, and Avery seemed to recall something about a long hospital stay for a double organ transplant. If FLEETCOM was reactivating guys like him and giving them command of frontline battle groups, the UNSC was in worse trouble than Avery thought.

He grunted, then asked, “And I’m here because . . . ?”

“I have no idea.” The sentry looked him over from head to foot, then arched a brow. “Only thing I can figure is there’s more to you than meets the eye.”

“On occasion.” Avery wasn’t sure whether she was flirting or putting him down, but he was a noncommissioned officer and so was she, so he didn’t see anything wrong with finding out. He grinned and added, “I could tell you about it over coffee.”

She almost smiled back. “You’d have to shower first.”

“I can do that.”

The second sentry, a smooth-faced petty officer third class with puffy cheeks and pale hair, cleared his throat.

“Sergeant Johnson, the admirals aren’t known for their patience.” He extended a hand down the passageway. “It might be wise to arrange your date with Petty Officer Anagnos on your way out.”

Avery gave Anagnos an apologetic shrug, then glanced down the passageway past the holographs of a dozen ancient naval commanders. At the end, he saw a set of double doors. On the left-hand door was a large brass plaque that read CHESTER W. NIMITZ. On the right-hand door was a plaque that read SECURE CONFERENCE SUITE.

“Son, did you say admirals, as in plural?”

“That’s right, Sergeant.”

Avery groaned. “I was afraid of that.”

Wondering what he’d done wrong this time, he picked up his duffel bag and started toward the doors. Along the way, he passed holographs of Marcus Agrippa, Oliver Hazard Perry, and Isoroku Yamamoto. Between the three of them, they had saved Rome at Actium, won control of Lake Erie during the War of 1812, and crippled the United States Pacific Fleet at Pearl Harbor. With any luck, their ghosts would be among the admirals waiting in the Nimitz suite, because the way the war with the Covenant was going so far, Preston J. Cole would need all the help he could get.

As Avery approached, the doors parted and slid aside. Beyond the threshold stood a young ensign in dress blues, his jaw set and his hands clasped behind his back. Avery stepped through the doorway into a rectangular compartment with a waiting area on one side and a galley on the other, then dropped his duffel bag next to his leg, came to attention, and saluted.

“Staff Sergeant Avery Johnson reporting as . . .” He hesitated, realizing that he hadn’t actually been ordered to report, then said, “As directed.”

The ensign returned his salute smartly, then reached for Avery’s duffel. “Let me stow that for you, Sergeant. You won’t be bunking here.”

“Thank you, sir.” Avery allowed the ensign to take the bag, then said, “My personal weapons are in the duffel, unloaded or sheathed.”

“You’re a squared-away marine. May I offer you anything from the galley? Coffee or a sandwich?”

Avery shook his head, then added, “Nothing, thank you. Unless you have some odor neutralizer handy. I’m coming straight from the cryotube.”

The ensign—his nameplate read A. TISCHLER—gave a wry smile. “I’d never have guessed.” He dropped the duffel behind a counter, then took a bottle of Rejuverol from the beverage cooler. “No worries. They knew what they were getting when they told Lieutenant Ruta to send you straight up.”

“What’s their hurry?” Avery asked. “Nobody’s bothered to tell me what I’m doing here.”

“I wish I knew, Sergeant.” Tischler pushed the bottle of Rejuverol into Avery’s hand, then stepped over to an interior door and pressed a thumb to a biometric scanner. “No need for introductions. They already know who you are.”

The door slid aside. Avery stepped through, then came to attention and brought his hand up in a salute. He found himself in a large compartment with a holographic star map at one end and a conference table at the other. On the far side of the table sat two gray-haired officers with the triple stars of vice admirals on their collar tips. One was a haggard-faced man in his midfifties, dressed in a white service uniform with no jacket and the name P. J. COLE above his breast pocket. The other was a hollow-cheeked man in blue camouflage utilities with no unit patch, name tag, or service badges—a not-so-subtle hint that he was from ONI and therefore not to be screwed with.

Across from them sat a slender woman in a white lab coat. She had her back to Avery, so all he could tell about her was that she had collar-length chestnut hair and was completely unintimidated by vice admirals. She was wagging a finger in their direction, pumping her arm up and down and lecturing the pair like schoolboys.

“. . . can’t defeat an enemy it doesn’t understand, Admiral,” she said. “We must try again.”

“To what effect?” the ONI admiral demanded. “You said yourself it might be a year before the Materials Group understands the alien technology.”

“Wars rarely end in a year.”

“This one might be an exception, Dr. Halsey.” As Cole spoke, he flipped Avery a return salute, then pointed him toward the empty chair at the head of the conference table. “The UNSC has two choices at the moment, one rotten and the other lousy. Either we engage the enemy right now and start losing fleets in battles we have no chance of winning, or we mass at strong points and let the enemy glass everything else.”

Glassing was a relatively new term to Avery, but one that had already grown much too familiar. It referred to the results of an alien plasma bombardment, which struck a planet’s surface with so much heat that the silica in common dirt fused into glass. It seemed to be the Covenant’s favorite method of reducing human worlds to uninhabitable wastelands.

“I should think the answer is obvious,” Halsey said. “We mass at the strong points. It will take the Covenant at least two years to locate all of our undefended worlds, and by then the Materials Group will have reverse-engineered—”

“Catherine, FLEETCOM can’t do that,” said the ONI admiral. He was referring to Fleet Command, which oversaw the deployment and combat operations of the entire UNSC Space Navy. “We’d be leaving hundreds of worlds defenseless. We’d be condemning billions of colonists to death by plasma incineration.”

“And if you commit prematurely, you will lose every fleet you send—and leave hundreds of worlds defenseless anyway.” The woman paused and watched Avery ease himself into the chair Cole had indicated, then looked back to the ONI admiral. “I think you need to make FLEETCOM understand that, Admiral Stanforth. There is nothing you can do to save those people—not until I can give you the tools you need to fight.”

In his chair at the head of the table, Avery sat ramrod straight and wondered what the hell he was doing there. He’d never heard of the Materials Group, or Dr. Catherine Halsey, or ONI Vice Admiral Stanforth—which, in the tradition of clandestine services everywhere, probably meant he didn’t want to. Even more confusing, both admirals were talking to Halsey as though she had equal say in their decisions.

Which didn’t make any sense. Now that Avery was sitting adjacent to her, he could see that Halsey wasn’t even military. Beneath the lab coat she was wearing a form-fitting jumpsuit that had more in common with a laboratory clean suit than a uniform, and in her piercing blue eyes there was a stubbornness that would have been disciplined out of her the first week of boot camp.

After a moment, Cole leaned forward and braced his forearms on the table. “Point taken, Dr. Halsey,” he said. “But if FLEETCOM decided to pursue your plan—”

Avery snorted at the absurdity—he was so shocked it just came out—then swallowed hard as three heads swiveled in his direction.

“Pardon me.” He opened the Rejuverol he had been given by Ensign Tischler. “Something just went down the wrong pipe.”

Stanforth smirked. Cole merely frowned and looked back across the table, leaving Avery to wonder if the reactivated admiral’s instincts could really be so rusty that he would consider Halsey’s plan. The minute the UNSC began to abandon planets and mass at strong-point worlds, the Outer Colonies would go into full rebellion, and the UNSC would have two wars on its hands. Not to mention billions of dead civilians. No commander could accept that kind of casualty figure.

But Cole seemed determined to entertain the idea. “If we could persuade FLEETCOM to pursue your plan, Dr. Halsey, how can we be sure the aliens will go after undefended targets first? Why not destroy our strong points, then locate and eliminate the defenseless worlds at their leisure?”

“That’s hardly an efficient invasion strategy,” Halsey said. “The most effective way to advance is shock penetration—bypass strong points to secure easy victories and seize enemy territory, then bring up heavier units to reduce the strong points in a more measured fashion. That’s been optimum infiltration strategy since Oskar von Hutier used it in Operation Michael in 1918.”

“But have the aliens studied Operation Michael?” Cole asked. “More importantly, could they know a better way?”

Stanforth nodded. “Technology dictates strategy,” he said. “And since we don’t understand their technology—”

“We can’t anticipate their strategy. I see that.” Halsey was quiet for a minute, then said, “And it’s all the more reason to attempt another ship capture.”

Ship capture. Avery had a sinking feeling he’d just heard the real reason he was here. Earlier that year, he’d actually boarded a Covenant vessel near the planet Harvest, then ended up fighting a protracted surface battle against a company of alien warriors. There were probably only a handful of marines in the UNSC who could say the same thing, and that made Avery a pretty good choice to lead a suicidal boarding action.

But Stanforth vehemently shook his head. “Another capture attempt is too risky,” he said. “It keeps the assault squad aboard too long. We’re lucky we didn’t lose our Spartans at Netherop.”

“It wasn’t luck, Admiral,” Halsey said. “It was training and capability—and the mission was not a total failure. I’ve already ascertained a great deal from the captured Banshees. We’re still learning how to operate them, but I can tell you that, despite the lack of instrumentality and the enigmatic architecture, the drives and even the weaponry don’t seem as effective—”

“Yes, that’s great,” Cole interrupted. “But is it going to help us this year?”

Halsey hesitated, then said, “It’s a mistake to focus on the short term, Admiral.”

“The short term is all we have.” Cole sank back in his seat, and his tone grew firm. “Dr. Halsey, I’ll get you an alien ship if the chance presents itself, but capture can’t be our prime objective. We lost thirteen vessels taking Harvest back—against one Covenant defender. If we don’t blunt the Covenant advance, the Outer Colonies will be so many glass marbles by this time next year.”

“I’m afraid I agree, Catherine,” Stanforth said. “It’s the only way to buy the time your group needs to give us a fighting chance.”

Halsey sighed, then reluctantly nodded. “I’ll support the operation however I can, naturally.” She turned to Cole. “I look forward to hearing your plan.”

“So do I.” Cole’s gaze slid toward Avery. “As soon as we develop one.”

Avery’s stomach clenched. He hadn’t even heard that the UNSC had counterattacked at Harvest—much less what it had cost them. “You’re asking me for input, sir?”

“You see anyone else in this compartment who looks like he’s been trading fire with aliens on a regular basis?”

Avery glanced around the table for form’s sake, then said, “No, sir.”

“Then now’s the time to speak up, Sergeant,” Stanforth said. “I didn’t forge those transfer orders so you could sit on your hands. Tell us what you think.”

Avery hesitated a moment, trying to decide whether turning to a noncom for advice made the two admirals smart or desperate. In either case, he had to answer—and not only because he was being ordered to. Unless he spoke up, he would never be able to complain about a commander’s stupid battle plan again.

“All right, sir. What strikes me first is that while the enemy’s technology is very superior to ours, their soldiers aren’t.”

“Elaborate on that,” Cole said.

“I assume you’ve all read the incident reports from the initial contact at Harvest?”

Stanforth nodded.

“Then think about what happened there,” Avery said. “Sergeant Byrne and I killed five Jackal raiders, then fought our way aboard their ship. The only reason we didn’t take it is because their captain self-destructed it to avoid capture. Later, we fought off a company of Brutes and Grunts at the Harvest Botanical Gardens with a platoon of half-trained militia. And over the next few weeks, we managed to evacuate the planet right under their noses. So, the Covenant may have better equipment, but from what I’ve seen, they’re inferior soldiers.”

“Interesting,” Stanforth said. “And your impressions of the different species?”

“The Brutes are ferocious,” Avery said, “but not as clever as they think they are.”

“I’m sorry . . . Brutes?” Cole asked.

“The big ape-looking ones,” Avery said. “They seem to like hand-to-hand combat, where their strength is an advantage. The Jackals are cunning, but not very brave. The Buggers—”

“Buggers?” Stanforth asked.

“I believe he means what John is calling the Drones.” Halsey turned to Avery. “Those flying insectoids?”

“Sounds right,” Avery said. “Whatever we call them, they’re unrelenting, but easy to misdirect. And the Grunts . . . well, the Grunts are mostly dangerous because they get in your way.”

“What about the tall saurians?” Cole asked. “Those are the ones that worry me.”

“I don’t believe Sergeant Johnson fought any of them on Harvest,” Stanforth said. He turned to Avery. “They’re some kind of leader class, larger and stronger than the Jackals. They might be comparable to our Orbital Drop Shock Troopers—smart, tough, and disciplined.”

“In other words, the ones we kill first,” Avery said.

Stanforth smiled, then looked to Cole. “I like him.”

“He’s confident,” Cole replied. “That’s good.”

Avery was there for more than a debrief, he realized. He was being tested for an assignment he might not want. “With all due respect,” he said. “If there’s something I should know—”

“And observant too,” Halsey interrupted. “You could do worse.”

“Worse than what?” Avery asked. “What exactly are we talking about here?”

“Relax,” Stanforth said. “We don’t really know yet ourselves.”

“But they want a veteran on the team who’s actually fought the Covenant,” Halsey said. “And there aren’t many of you available. The Covenant is very thorough that way.”

“What team?” Avery demanded.

“At ease, Sergeant.” This time, Stanforth’s words were an order. “So far, it’s just a planning team.”

Avery relaxed . . . a little. “But I don’t know naval tactics, sir,” he said. “I’m an infantry marine.”

“You were also an ORION project volunteer,” Halsey said. “Which makes you an ideal addition for this assignment.”

“ORION project?” Avery repeated. That had been a top-secret Naval Special Warfare program to create biologically augmented super-soldiers to fight the Insurrection. As a participant, Avery had acquired his Orbital Drop rating and developed top-notch sniper and close-combat skills. But the program had been shut down almost twenty years earlier, when its results failed to justify the cost. “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

As one, Stanforth rolled his eyes, Cole looked annoyed, and Halsey pursed her lips.

“Okay . . . maybe I’ve heard of it,” Avery said. Even that was more than he was supposed to admit under the ORION project’s ultra-classified protocols. But he was beginning to think that of all the people sitting at the table, he was the one who knew the least about the ORION project. “What’s the assignment?”

“You keep asking that,” Stanforth said. “And I’m telling you, we still don’t know. Really.”

“Sorry, sir,” Avery said. “I’m a little confused.”

“I’ll try to clear that up,” Cole said. “The Covenant ships are protected by energy shielding that nothing short of a nuke or a Mass Accelerator Cannon can penetrate in one shot. Since their vessels are faster and more maneuverable than ours, that’s a problem.”

“Because you never get more than one shot,” Avery surmised.

“Sometimes not even one,” Cole said. “To make matters worse, their plasma beams cut through our Titanium-A armor like it’s paper.”

“And their pulse lasers are damn near as bad,” Stanforth said. “So we’re trying to find a way to fight that doesn’t involve fleet-to-fleet engagements.”

“Given your special operations background, Sergeant,” Halsey said, “and your creativity in improvising during the Harvest evacuation, I thought you might be an asset.”

Avery nodded. “I can definitely bring some asymmetric whoop-ass to your game,” he said. “Mines, decoys, logistics sabotage, provision poisoning, false signals . . . just give me a couple of prowlers and fifty good ODSTs.”

“All good ideas,” Cole said. “And we’re already implementing most of them.”

“We want to add you to something that’s a bit more hard-hitting,” Stanforth said. “Something with the potential to rock the enemy back on their heels.”

Avery didn’t like it when officers said potential. That meant they were gambling big. And when officers gambled big, jarheads died.

“Okay, I’m listening.”

“As you’ve noted yourself, the aliens themselves aren’t as good as their technology,” Stanforth said. “We have a special unit that’s taken advantage of that to board a couple of enemy vessels.”

“The capture attempt you were discussing when I arrived,” Avery said. “The failed capture attempt.”

“The vessel was still destroyed,” Stanforth said. “As was a frigate-size ship the first time the team tried this.”

“It’s our single most effective tactic, from all that we’ve seen,” Cole added. “We’d like to try it on something bigger.”

“How big?”

“As big as we can find,” Stanforth said.

“Don’t worry.” Cole flashed a grin. “You’ll have nukes.”

Avery was not amused. So far, Cole struck him as an admiral who had probably been a pretty good commander in his day, but hardly someone special enough to drag out of retirement.

“Nukes are fun,” Avery finally said. “But I haven’t volunteered for anything yet.”

“You will,” Stanforth said. “You always do.”

“After twenty years,” Avery said, “maybe it’s time I learned my lesson. Sir.”

“Not yet.” Stanforth leaned in and locked gazes with Avery. “You don’t want to miss this one, Johnson. You’ll be part of a team that’s going to save the human race . . . and I’m not exaggerating.”

Avery grunted and wished he had a cigar right now. He always thought better when he was chewing on a Sweet William.

After a moment, Avery said, “Something as big as you’re thinking will be protected by a fleet. We can’t just rush in and drop a boarding party.”

“That’s why we want your experience on this operation,” Cole said.

“And your creativity,” Halsey added. “I imagine you’ll need to develop new infiltration tactics for each mission.”

“Each mission?” Avery echoed. “You intend to do this more than once?”

“Certainly,” Halsey said. “You don’t expect to stop the Covenant by destroying one ship, do you?”

“I suppose not.” Without being aware of it, Avery pulled a Sweet William from his breast pocket and jammed it, unlit, between his teeth. “What’s our force?”

“The primary force will be an ODST space assault battalion,” Cole said. “The 21st.”

Avery smiled. “Colonel Crowther’s Black Daggers,” he said. “That’s a good unit.”

“The best,” Stanforth said. “But you’ll be attached to a special squad of twelve Spartans.”

“Spartans?” Avery chomped his cigar. He had heard Stanforth use the term earlier, but he’d assumed that a Spartan was a designation for a new kind of special operations soldier. Now it was beginning to sound more like a unit. Or maybe some sort of advanced infiltration craft. “What, exactly, is a Spartan?”

“Show him, Catherine.” Stanforth glanced toward Avery. “Your security clearance just rose three levels, Sergeant.”

Avery nodded, and Halsey withdrew a portable holopad from the pocket of her lab coat. She placed it on the table in front of Avery, then touched the activation tab.

The meter-tall hologram of a heavily armored form appeared above the pad. With a blocky helmet, mirrored faceplate, and bulky outer shell, the figure looked more like a robot than a man. Had there been integrated cannons to add firepower and a few extra limbs to facilitate movement, Avery would have assumed he was looking at a prototype war android. But the Spartan had only two legs, two arms, and a single helmet with a forward-looking faceplate, so there had to be a human inside.

“Impressive,” Avery said. There were no other figures in the hologram to provide scale, but judging by the size of the MA5K assault carbine affixed to the magnetic mount on the back of the armor, the Spartan had to be well over two meters tall. “But it’s going to take more than twelve soldiers in fancy armor to do the job you’re talking about.”

“The Mjolnir power armor is the least of their assets, Sergeant Johnson.” Halsey’s voice was proud. “The SPARTAN-II program succeeded where the ORION project failed. They are what you were meant to be.”

“This old failure has been getting the job done for two decades.” Avery didn’t appreciate being called a dud, but at least he was beginning to understand why the admirals treated Halsey with such deference. “But go ahead and brief me anyway.”

“No need to take offense, Sergeant Johnson. The ORION project failed you.” Halsey left the hologram of the Spartan standing in the middle of the table. “Each Spartan was selected at a young age for intelligence, physical prowess, aggressiveness, and emotional resilience. They were, almost literally, born to be soldiers. After conscription, they trained for eight years to become the most elite warriors humanity has ever seen.”

“So why am I only hearing about them now?”

“Ideally, they wouldn’t have been fully deployed for another two years,” Halsey said. “But when the Covenant appeared, we had to accelerate the program.”

“So you were going to train them for a decade?” Avery asked. “Talk about overkill.”

“Not for what we intended,” Halsey said. “The extra time would have given me an opportunity to fine-tune their biological augmentations and develop some custom enhancements. But no matter. My Spartans are still stronger, faster, more resilient, and more capable than any soldier you have ever seen.”

“I don’t doubt it,” Avery said, remembering the long course of biochemical enhancement injections he had endured during the ORION project. It had been an agonizing experience filled with confused, hormone-induced rages—and, given the apparent size of the Spartan in the hologram, he could only marvel at the anguish the man must have endured during his own augmentation process. “But if these Spartans of yours are so great, why do you need me?”

“First, you have some understanding of what they’ve been through,” Halsey said. “Second, you have something they don’t—twenty years of combat experience.”

“Exactly,” Stanforth said. “These kids are top-notch soldiers, but they’re still fifteen.”

“Fifteen?” Avery said. “Doesn’t that make them child—”

“They are not children,” Stanforth interrupted. “Get that notion out of your head, Sergeant. Do I make myself clear?”

Avery swallowed. “Yes, sir.” He had done enough work for ONI to understand that the admiral was telling him not to ask questions that the Office of Naval Intelligence didn’t want answered. “I only meant to inquire about their, um, level of training.”

“Second to none,” Halsey said. “They entered boot camp at age six and earned every combat rating by age eight—”

“You might say they attended an elite military academy,” Stanforth said. “Not so different from Corbulo Academy or Luna OCS.”

Halsey grimaced and looked away. “Yes. You might say a lot of things,” she complained. “That doesn’t make the Martian Elementary Education Complex the equal of the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics.”

“My apologies, Catherine.” Stanforth looked more amused than regretful. He turned back to Avery. “The important thing is that, on paper, the Spartans are every bit the soldier you are. They just need someone who understands the intangibles that can’t be taught on a training mission—someone who has a few tricks up his sleeve.”

“In other words, a sergeant,” Avery said.

“Exactly,” Stanforth said. “Just not a sergeant who gives orders.”

Avery scowled. “Are you looking for a sergeant or a nanny?”

“More of a big brother,” Stanforth said. “They already have a squad leader they trust, and you’d never replace him.”

“He understands their capabilities in a way you never will,” Halsey added. “They’ve been training together so long their communication seems almost telepathic at times.”

Avery gnawed on his cigar and wondered if he dared say no. The last thing he wanted was to play babysitter for a squad of new boots. But he wasn’t aware of any admiral who appreciated being told no—and ONI admirals did not play nice. If he turned down this assignment, he had a feeling his next one would be guarding snowballs on Venus.

Finally, Avery sighed. “If I’m that important to the operation, how can I refuse?”

“Exactly.” Stanforth flashed a tight-lipped smile. “You can’t.”