The Onyx Chronicles/Spare

“I’m thinking the cameras in the emergents. There,” Dyne, trainee G217, said, “and there.”
The scrawny boy of nine pointed out a pair of tall pines sticking up from the rainforest canopy. He was looking through a set of infrared binoculars, liberated from Camp Currahee’s latest supply transport. A quick switch of their cargo manifest with one doctored beforehand—conveniently omitting the binoculars, cameras, and other pilfered materiel—and no one would miss the spares.
His partner-in-crime, the huskier Kodiak-G114, crawled over to lie parallel with him and take the binoculars. They lay flat atop the Tree House, an observation post in a hundred-meter-tall banyan tree. Their instructors used it to monitor the adjacent training fields, used for the mock skirmishes they pitted trainees against each other in. Even in the pitch-dark night this far from Camp Currahee, their perch gave them line-of-sight for kilometers over the planet’s forested maze of valleys and ridgelines.
Tonight, however, their specific interest was Grid B12—one of the north-most training zones and tomorrow’s site for their scrimmage match against Team Xiphos. Xiphos was a decent team, likely to beat Kodiak’s bottom-ranked Machete. So the boys elected to bank on their team’s specialty: they’d cheat.
“We’d have to secure them tight for wind,” Kodiak murmured. The tallest trees sported fresh breaks where a storm the previous week had ripped boughs away. Kodiak shuddered, remembering that storm—he’d been out in it, along with half of Gamma Company.
“Won’t the DIs pick them up?” he asked. “Even if we camouflage ‘em, they’ve learned to run an electronics sweep before matches. Ever since we nailed Shoto with the stolen auto-turrets. No way to hide their signature up there.”
“Not if we rig them to timers that turn on just after the match starts,” said Dyne. Kodiak didn’t need thermal binoculars to see his teeth flash in a devious grin.
“You’re a mad genius.”
Kodiak started sizing up the trees for handholds while Dyne readied the climbing slings. Each boy stayed flat to provide a minimal target profile—even this far into the wilderness, alone, at night, and their outlines masked by black training fatigues. No sense giving coincidence a chance to undo your operation. The boys were learning to take their training to heart.
Some of it, anyway. Fair play was a hard lesson to stick when their team was on the bottom rungs. The aliens they trained to fight wouldn’t give up their advantages in strength and technology, after all, so why get used to letting the better man win?
“Hang on,” Kodiak said when Dyne was nearly finished, “we’re not alone out here.”
Dyne immediately stopped fiddling with the harnesses. Blind without the binoculars, he froze to keep anything from picking up his movement. “What do you mean?”
“Someone’s out in Grid B12 already.” Kodiak squinted into the binoculars. “Moving pretty fast. Guess they aren’t worried about being spotted.”
“What do they look like?”
Kodiak rolled his eyes. “Like someone red.”
“Wha—? Oh.” his friend realized. He untensed, knowing the other party likely couldn’t see them. “What about size? Kid or grown-up?”
“Trainee, definitely.”
Dyne’s brows pinched as he pondered the possibilities. “Think Xiphos had the same idea we did?”
“Mmm… Josh is no stickler for the rules, but he’s never risked trouble breaking them like this.”
“Maybe he’s trying to beat us at our own game? Taste of our medicine kinda thing?”
“If Amy’d let him. She’s been trying to suck up to Lieutenant Ambrose since team exercises started.” Kodiak’s finger found a dial to adjust the pickup range. “She’s keeping to the low ground, moving along the valley.”
“She? You can’t tell who it is, but you can tell it’s a she?”
“It’s the way they move. Probably she, I think… oh.” He stopped the dial. “They’re not alone, either. There’s a grown-up after them.”
“Must be one of the DIs,” Dyne smiled. “No wonder it was so easy to sneak out tonight. Someone else is giving them problems for a change.”
“Guess so…” Kodiak murmured, unconvinced. Then he suddenly tensed up. “Holy shit!”
“What?”
“They’re shooting at her!”
“What!?” Dyne repeated himself. His smile was gone. “, right?”
“Not with these thermal readings,” Kodiak’s voice came out short of breath, chilled by what he saw. “I think they’re using live rounds.”
Dyne’s brain scrambled to make sense of it. He didn’t doubt his friend, but the idea any of their instructors would try to outright kill one of them… then again, there were always the rumors about Team X-Ray. And the failed Alphas and Betas the SPARTAN-III program kept on as DIs held some vicious grudges.
Half-stunned, he did what he always did when lost for a course of action. He turned to Kodiak and asked, “What do we do?”
Kodiak gnawed his lip for a moment. Then he unclipped the zipline slider he’d stowed on his belt and started getting up. “Dyne—get the Warthog.”
----
Three years of daily five-klick runs should have better prepared Hari-G055 to run for her life.
Sure, she’d learned to run scared three years ago. Prodded awake with shock batons, drill instructors snapping and shouting to stampede scared kids down Camp Currahee’s trails. But three years had made it routine, kept her safe if she kept pace. Now the terror was fresh. The pace was an endless sprint through the pitch-dark forest, and no guarantee it would even keep her alive.
She hadn’t dared stop. Not since the golden beams danced around her—lighting her way as they stabbed through the spaces she'd been, searing her skin and filling her nose with ozone. Not when the impossible loops of polyhedral tunnels spilled her back out onto the surface. Not when the uncannily level acacia plains gave way to familiar pine valleys, or the dappled beam of a Pelican spotlight shone on her through the canopy.
And definitely not when the armed men in black suits ordered her to freeze.
She’d done right on the last count. They’d barely waited for her to slow before lighting up her path with gunfire. Only diving into the huddle of the cedar trunks saved her from the shredding dealt to the nearby ferns.
Hari pelted through the undergrowth, swatting aside the branches she couldn’t duck. Her footing was uncertain. Crisscrossed roots forced up the earth like gnarled reefs beneath the tide of night. She fell a dozen times, only to scramble back up and push on again. She had no concern to spare on possible sprains.
Wet dirt and pine needles itched where they stuck to her skin, and her tendons ached like rubber stretched too far. A vague unconscious warned if she kept running, exhaustion would kill her eventually. But her conscious mind told her gunshot wounds would kill her faster, and the primal drive for self-preservation left her no choice at all.
She kept low in the valleys, where trees grew the thickest and offered the most solid cover. The Pelican hadn’t reappeared, which Hari took for a good sign, whatever the reason. But it seemed each time she outpaced one pursuer, another was ahead of her, like a futile game of tic-tac-toe. All she could do was draw out the game for one more ravine.
Another branch was thrust aside, leaving more sap and scratches on her raw arms. The spring of it shifted her center of balance, and Hari swung her opposite leg out to correct. Halfway through the step, it bounced off something solid at the shin.
Her other foot left the ground in step, and Hari tumbled horizontal through darkness. At once, the motor function part of her brain knew she was in trouble, without the panic of consciously processing it. The calm of her discovery had yet to pass when her head collided with the tree trunk.
She didn’t feel the impact of her body roll to the ground, though she knew it must have happened. The angry throb of her head overpowered any other sensation. The collision popped her ears and left them ringing. She’d have worried the pressure change meant her skull was broken, but all she could do was lay frozen, as if hiding from the pain could stop it.
Her pursuer was completely forgotten. If he found her, she was dead. But that ‘if’ outweighed the ‘definitely’ registered by the overwhelming pain.
Hari remembered how to breathe, and gulped down air. Oxygen kept her pain receptors firing, to her regret, but she couldn’t starve them any longer. A sense of up and down returned, and she rolled so the cool of air was above her and the cold earth below. When she opened her eyes, she couldn’t be sure if the stars were in a sky above or just in her head.
A light fell across her then, eyelashes catching its glare at the edge of her dark-filled vision. They’d found her, she knew.
Powerless to flee, Hari’s fight-or-flight instinct demanded a response. She tilted her aching head up to try and see. Seeing the threat, assessing it, was the first step to a defense she couldn’t hope to mount. Her hearing began to return, but only picked up a bizarre, increasing roar.
The dark figure stood haloed by golden light between the trees. The beam of a flashlight at the silhouette’s waist looked like a hole punched through it. A deep voice grumbled something, beyond her shot brain’s ability to understand. Then the flashlight beam straightened out from her perspective, rising to the figure’s shoulder level. Taking aim…
She’d tried her hardest. The droning growl grew, filling her ears. Hari wondered if her misfiring brain made it up, or if everyone heard it as death came for them. The light surrounding the figure grew brighter and brighter, took on the shape of a cone, then shrank, narrowing…
The bumper behind the headlight beams plowed through her pursuer's space, tossing a mangled body into the air. The body soared twenty meters sideways, clipped a tree, spun to the ground, and lay in a twisted heap.
Hari tried to make sense of it. Above her, instead of a person, there now loomed an oversized jeep, its headlights conjuring tree trunks from the night within their beams. The roar of its engine died with a diesel gurgle, and a new shadow emerged from its top.
“Holy shit!” piped the shadow. “Did we just kill that guy?”
“Don’t care,” replied another, not quite as high. “Hey! Are you alright?”
Dazed physically and mentally, Hari lay back and let the cool, wet ground ease her aching limbs.
----
It took a few minutes for the pain to let Hari's jaw unclench enough to talk. The scrawny boy handed her a vitamin water—one of the good ones, she noticed, the flavor Currahee's mess hall was always mysteriously out of—which helped, and she took long sips between his anxious questions.
Hari did her best to retell what had happened in short gasps—she was afraid if her mouth was open too long, the vitamin water would come back up. She recalled crossing into the Zone, the doorway in the cliff face. Burning beams tracking her in the tunnels below, and her flight back into the woods. Dyne nodded along like he understood as well as she did—which was not at all—while his husky teammate poked at the mangled body of her pursuer with a stick. By the end of the story, Dyne was pacing with all the nervous energy Hari was too dazed to stand and walk off herself.
“This is bad,” he kept saying. “This is really, really bad. I mean, I know we're never supposed to go into Zone 67, but killing us for it? They could've started with a warning, three strikes or something…”
Hari tilted the plastic bottle back again, but it came up empty. She almost let the container slip from her fingers, but Mendez's lessons about covering tracks and leaving no trace came back to her. She felt they'd be more important for her now than ever, and crinkled the plastic near-flat to fit neatly in her sleeve, muffled under the fleece.
Without the drink to focus on, Hari's attention drifted to the wind whipping through branches in the dark overhead. She thought of the Pelican and its spotlight, and how certainly it would circle back when her pursuer didn't check in. When she tried to stand, though, Dyne's hand on her shoulder was enough to keep her pinned to her soggy seat. When she tried to shrug it off, a wave of dizziness nearly pitched her on her side.
“Take it easy.” he said. “Pretty sure you've got a concussion.”
Hari shook her head, both to clear it and to refuse. “I can't stay here. They're still looking for me. I need to… hide, run. Something.”
“Right,” Dyne tucked his head down to think. “Well, we've got caches and boltholes set up all over the place. You could hide out here for weeks, maybe months.”
Shaking her head had made Hari's pulse pound in her ears, so she consciously stopped herself from repeating it. “Months aren't enough. If the instructors want me dead, they aren't going to stop looking. It's not like I can live in the woods, eating stolen candy bars and wiping myself with leaves for the rest of my life.”
“Good news there. You won't have to.” Kodiak said, walking over to them.
Confusion deepened Hari's frown. “Why's that?”
Kodiak pointed back at the corpse with his stick. “Because it's not the instructors looking for you. He was one of Zone 67's guards. They work for a different section of ONI than Ambrose and the DIs.”
“Then that's it!” Dyne brightened. “We go back to Camp Currahee and talk to Lieutenant Ambrose! He can protect you. The Spartan program's too important for a bunch of guards to mess with.”
“No, no, no!” This time Hari didn't care about the pounding in her ears, and shook her head hard for emphasis. “He still works for ONI, don't you see? Someone is in charge of everything on Onyx, including Ambrose and Zone 67. Whoever it is, they could make Ambrose hand me over for going into the Zone!”
Her yelling turned Dyne red and stone-faced. Instead of shouting back, though, he just broke eye contact and stared at the forest floor, thinking.
A long minute of silence passed, each hoping the others would come up with something. With every second, Hari was sure the Zone 67 guards were closing in on them. The dread made thinking of anything else even harder.
It was Kody who finally spoke. “Did… any of them get a good look at your face?”
Hari concentrated. “I was running the whole time, so… I don't think so.”
“They get your trainee number off your suit?”
She gingerly tilted her head to look at the ripped seams on her upper arm. She'd ripped the number tag off when the breakout started the week before so the bold white text didn't give her away. “Nope.”
Kody flashed a smile. “Then they have no idea who you are. Best place to hide is with the only other hundred-fifty crowd of nine-year-old girls on the planet.”
“Hidden in plain sight.” Hari caught on. And just maybe in a comfortably spartan cot, too. “That makes sense… y'know, you aren't as dumb as Gladius says.”
“Ouch,” Kodiak feigned a clutch of his wounded heart. “This from the team who needed stickers to tell which end of the rocket launcher is front. Think you can stay awake long enough to get back to camp?”
Hari nodded. It didn't hurt her brain so much this time. “I'll be fine. But what about the camp guards?”
“Please,” Dyne shared his teammate's conspiratorial grin. “We've known the blind spots in their patrols since we were seven. We'll get you back to the barracks so quick, not even Santa Claus could tell you'd been awake.”
----
The pair were true to their word. After a short drive in the Warthog—which Hari noticed the boys had found the time to paint with flame decals across the hood and fenders—they left the jeep in a ravine just off the road leading to Camp Currahee’s main gate. A slow crawl through the forest brush followed—the whole time beneath heat-masking ghillie suits the boys had stashed in the same ravine.
Their plan for tackling the wall was less complex than Hari thought. They hadn’t found a dark, forgotten, secret corner, or a convenient over-arching tree, or tunneled under with plastic spoons from the mess hall. With the suits on, they just ran for a spot not far from the main gate as soon as the automated spotlight moved on. Where dark corners were expected trouble spots, no one paid attention to the front of the complex for being so obvious.
Spartan training had made the trainees athletic enough to clear the wall with Kody boosting the others, then reaching down for him to catch their hands and be hauled up. A well-timed drop to the other side and dart across to the motor pool garage’s shadow left them safely in the network of alleys and blind spots between the camp’s prefab buildings.
They tucked the ghillies for next time in a makeshift rack under the porch of Mendez’s NCO residence—so close under the Senior Chief’s nose Hari giggled at the thought of leaves in his mustache. The mess hall they scaled and jumped from roof to roof for a few blocks before dropping back down. The rest was an easy series of timed sprints from building to building—except one unavoidable gap monitored by camera, which the three had to cross by waiting for a six-wheeled Hedgehog to trundle by and run in its shadow.
At last, they reached the trainee barracks block and pressed themselves to the concrete wall leeward of the nearest light pole. After catching their breath, Dyne opened up a med kit picked up from a stash on one of the roofs and helped dress Hari’s cuts and scrapes.
“Can’t let ‘em pick you out by all the nicks after we got you this far,” he said.
A few stinging alcohol wipes and skin-tone bandages later, and Hari looked no worse than after an average day on the scrimmage field. Kody, meanwhile, went to work on the window. Hari expected some skillful manipulation of the lock with bent paper clips, but all it took was using the prong of his standard-issue trainee belt buckle like a pry bar to pop the handle out of place. With another hand up, they were in.
Hari was again glad they entered from the shaded side of the barracks—their side of the long, open-plan dormitory was dark enough to hide her shape slinking to the floor. Dyne and Kodiak slid down behind her, each stepping lightly to blunt the tap of their boots on the hard tile floor.
Two rows of stark metal cots, one along each wall, stretched a hundred meters in either direction to the dorm’s narrow ends. On each one lay the fuzzy lump of an eight- or nine-year-old Spartan candidate beneath a coarse, itchy blanket, deeply asleep after the day’s calisthenics and assault course runs.
Hari skirted the harsh, regular squares of lamp-light coming in from the far side windows. She scarcely dared making the noise it took to breathe despite the snoring of their classmates—if Dyne and Kody could manage to stay up, there had to be others ready to spring awake at the lightest trip of the hair-trigger instincts their DIs trained them for.
“Which one’s yours?” Dyne hissed, just above a whisper.
She rounded on him and thrust an arm into the Spartan hand signal for quiet, hoping the emphasis clearly translated to shut up. Dyne threw up his hands in grudging—but silent—surrender.
None of the cadets around them leapt up to run and tattle to the DIs. Hari’s tensed lungs relaxed enough to let out her held breath, and she started down the aisle between rows to find her section. It wasn’t far; all she had to do now was look for the empty bunk…
There were none. Hari did a double-take, counting the windows from the nearer end of the dormitory. She was in the right place. But someone was in her bunk.
Hari scowled. Her bunk was identical to all the hundreds of others in the trainee barracks. Mattress too thin to keep the slats from digging into her back, stained with sweat from the prior Companies trained at Currahee—no matter how many times they were washed—and made over with a rough, itchy blanket too cold in winter and too hot in summer. But this one was hers, dammit. After all she’d been through that night, it was the one bare comfort she demanded.
She marched up to the bunk with -055 on its foot chest and reached for the hem of the blanket, ready to throw it and the bunk-thief onto the floor together. In reaching, however, she caught sight of the thief’s calm, sleeping face.
Hari sprang back like a cat at a door slam, falling hard on her elbows and backside. Much as it smarted, all she could think to do was kick at the tile by her feet, hoping to push herself even a foot or two further from the nasty shock lying in her bed.
The squeak of her boot soles brought the boys over quick. She heard Kodiak gasp when he spotted it. Rooted in place, he turned to look at her and back, face slack with disbelief.
In her bunk lay a girl, nine years old, with Hari’s face. 
Even with the blanket covering her body, the face alone told her, instinctively, at a glance. Hari and… whoever this was were identical. Even the bruise on her forehead she’d gained in Zone 67’s tunnels, just beneath her hairline, was in exactly the same place—if slightly smaller.
Dyne pushed around his bigger friend’s side to see and came to a dead stop.
“Wha—!” he almost shouted before Kodiak clapped a hand over his mouth.
Dyne bucked once, but wasn’t strong enough to get free. Kodiak released him only once he’d stood calm and still for a few seconds. Then the huskier trainee looked to Hari, raised his hand, and made three silent signals: Retreat. Outside. Regroup.
Half a minute later, all three had crept back through the window they’d entered by, and crouched together in the alley between barracks.
“What the heck is going on?” Kody asked, breathless. He wasn’t taking his eyes off her, a twinge of uncertainty tugging the muscles in a face otherwise blank with shock.
“I don’t know,” Hari answered honestly. She knew who she was, remembered an unbroken chain of memories from this moment to back before her conscription. But that face in her bed… suddenly even she wasn’t totally certain.
Kody rubbed his hairless chin. “Could she… could that have been a flash clone?”
“No way,” Hari shook her head and pointed to her forehead. “It had bruises in the same spots I do. And flash clones take time to grow. It’s only been a week since we left camp.”
“Well, two.” Kody contradicted. Hari was about to correct him when Dyne paced between them.
“Holy bleep, what if they’ve got duplicates for all of us ready and waiting?” He held his head as if trying to hold his brain in. “Maybe that’s why they were trying to kill Hari; they didn’t want one spare to let us all know!”
Hari was about to tell him not to be stupid, and how wasteful that would be. But the exact duplicate of herself sleeping just a dozen meters away stopped her short. “If they do… they’re not going to like us finding out.”
Dyne’s nervous pacing stopped, and the fingers on Kody’s chin clenched unconsciously.
“I think,” Kody said after a moment’s silence, “maybe Hari had the right idea before. We need to leave Onyx.”
“Can we do that?” she asked, “Even if we can get one, I don’t know how to fly a spaceship. And you two definitely don’t pay enough attention in class to know, either.”
Kody actually cracked a smile, and glanced at his teammate. “Well, guess this one has to be original. She knows that much about us.”
Dyne nodded sagely. “Yeah, got us there.”
Hari realized her nerves must’ve been wound as tight as a Warthog’s suspension springs, because the dumb smiles on their faces made her laugh. She was stranded on a top-secret planet without a way off, hiding in the dark from government black-ops goons, and couldn’t help laughing. Mercifully, the sight of her doppelganger had left her short of breath, and couldn’t laugh loud enough to be heard beyond the alley.
Once the last of her giggles had died down, Kody erased the despair that’d brought on her laughter with a few words. “Luckily, we don’t have to fly it ourselves.”
“What? You mean you actually have a spaceship?”
“Not us,” said Dyne. “But it’s only a couple hours past midnight. That means the shuttle from the supply ship that came in yesterday hasn’t taken off yet.”
“We can stow away,” Hari realized, the promise of escape re-lighting a fire in the pit of her stomach. “How long do we have?”
“Not much,” said Dyne, “but we don’t need much. Pick up a couple of the bags we’ve hid around, and we should have enough rations to last us a slipspace trip.”
Kody pulled a folded paper from his sock, and flattened it out to reveal a crude map of Camp Currahee. “I’ll show you where. We each grab a bag, head for Landing Pad Bravo, and stow away in the empty crates they’re taking back. We’ll be on the supply ship and into slipspace by the time anyone knows we’re gone.”
----
Everything had changed so fast. Flattening herself to crawl under a solar panel on the roof of Currahee's firing range, Hari finally had a moment to think about it.
This morning, her main concern had been dodging search parties of DIs and fellow trainees, but only as a game. She knew they’d find her and her friends eventually, and then they’d come back to Currahee to continue training, like every day for the last three years. Hari was supposed to drill and learn and hone her skills until she could graduate to be a real Spartan, like Tom and Lucy from Beta Company before them.
Now, she was ducking into alleys and holding her breath in the dark for survival. She wouldn’t spend the next few years of her life on Onyx, in the same classrooms and shooting ranges and wilderness scrimmage zones. She had no idea where she’d spend the next few years—she didn’t know where she’d be tomorrow, if she even lived that long.
As much as she’d complained about homework and PT runs, Hari suddenly realized, there was a great deal of comfort in the certainty one day in Currahee would be mostly like the next. Certainty she suddenly didn't have.
She found the black rucksack Kody had described to her, wedged in one of the meter-wide solar panel’s supports, and pulled it down. A quick tug on its zipper confirmed the contents: half a crate’s worth of ONI-issue complete nutrition bars, each a log of organic matter containing exactly as much protein, fiber, vitamins, and calories as a body needed—without a drop of artificial flavoring to set it apart from what it would be like going out. Much as Hari dreaded them, the bars would keep the three of them fed for a month without risking someone taking notice of pilfered galley supplies.
Zipping it back up, Hari backed out from under the panel, dragging the pack behind her, then slung it over her shoulder, clambered down a rain gutter to the ground, and set off at a jog. The caches Kody had picked from his map were all close to the base’s supply pad, and within thirty seconds Hari could see it.
Concrete pillars lifted a rectangular, steel-plate pad a story off the ground on either side of a cargo elevator tower, like a giant, brutalist sculpture of a butterfly. Spotlights illuminated each pad, bouncing a blue-white gleam into the night sky. Cold and ugly as the structure was, the automated D82 Darter resting on the east pad—its dorsal cargo doors open and casting their own light like a gateway to heaven—filled Hari’s chest with the warm promise of escape, like a sailor thrown a lifeline in a stormy sea.
The halo of azure above Camp Currahee was suddenly polluted by the red flash of alarm beacons from every post on the perimeter wall. Somewhere, a siren blared, and prey instincts froze Hari’s heart all over again. Was she spotted? Were the boys? Or had they only noticed them missing?
Training kicked in again, making her listen for the tone and length of the alarm. She’d memorized all the alarms, and this one meant… an intruder on-site?
Whatever it meant, Hari wasn’t sticking around to find out. She forgot about quiet, and ran for the cargo tower.
Her feet pelting the gravel, she almost didn’t hear the gruff call as she neared the tower base.
“Hey!”
She didn’t see who it was—she didn’t care. Hari’s run became a sprint, the rucksack walloping her back like a flagellant’s whip as her lungs clenched like fists on the air they held. In a second, she was around the corner of the elevator tower and bounding up the steel staircase bolted to its side. The skeletal frame rang with every footfall, her little legs clearing four steps at a time.
Hari reached the top, breathless, and felt the shock in her knees as she halted to spin. All she had left were the thirty meters across the tower and far pad. She charged back into a sprint, her air-starved muscles be damned. Then the elevator platform, mounted on the cargo tower's side, came up level with the top. Standing on it was a man in sealed black armor, a battle rifle leveled at her.
“Freeze!”
Despair crashed down on Hari like a wave driving her underwater. She stopped in the ONI goon’s gunsights, and all the exhaustion of the night hit her like a sledgehammer. The Darter sat twenty meters away, its freight deck lowered flat on the pad, and nothing but open ground and the battle rifle’s sure aim between her and it. Her mouth opened to seize a breath, and a miserable sob escaped her.
The black ops trooper hunched over his rifle, helmet tilting to sight along its top rail.
Hari knew it was over. She didn’t have the strength or will to throw herself out of the way, for what little good it would do at this range. Then a short, wiry shadow dropped from the cargo crane’s arm.
The shape wrapped itself around the trooper’s head like a wet towel. The trooper yelped in surprise, and the battle rifle’s triple-gunshot went off.
Three rounds buzzed through the air, close enough for the wind they displaced to brush Hari's bangs over her ear—but an outstretched foot had kicked the weapon off-target. Clinging to the trooper’s neck and shoulders, hammering at his head like a crazed circus monkey, Dyne shouted, “Hari, run!”
She did exactly that.
So focused on the cargo ship’s illuminated deck in the dark, all Hari could process were sounds. Her breathing and the slap of her boots on the steel deck were overtaken by the whine of the Darter’s engines starting to spin up. The battle rifle clattered to the ground as the trooper struggled with Dyne, only for Kodiak to cannon from nowhere into his stomach and legs, taking all three to the ground. Distant shouts of other voices, and the ring of many boots on the metal stairs… and then Hari's bootsteps changed pitch. She was on the deck.
Half-stumbling, Hari used momentum to slide into the cover a crate, then rolled over and scrambled to peer back around its side. With her eyes already adjusting to the Darter’s lights, her augmented eyes struggled to make sense of shapes on the landing pad. The gunman’s strength was telling, even against the boys’ ferocity, but half a dozen more bodies were flooding up from the stairway, rushing all three with fists and kicks and shock batons.
Much as she wanted to help, Hari's boots felt like tungsten weights laced to her exhausted legs, with the rest of the armory in the backpack pinning her down. How could she help? Before she could think of anything, hydraulics at each corner of the square cargo deck started to whir. The sinking in her stomach told Hari the deck was retracting back up into the Darter. If she went back now, she’d never make it off Onyx.
The gap between the deck and the Darter’s hull narrowed, covering the figures wrestling on the pad. Hari stayed crouching behind the crate. She lost sight of the pad itself, and she stayed. The gap closed, shutting out the night and everything she was leaving behind, and Hari stayed.
Inertia pulled her guts against the inside of her skin as the Darter lifted off. Hari stood and took a half-step toward the thin seam between deck plates, wishing desperately she could squeeze through their airtight seal. Too late. The dropship was already rocketing into Onyx’s upper atmosphere, and taking her with it.
Alone in the flying metal cage, Hari fell to the deck and pounded a fist against it until her arm throbbed in pain. If it hurt enough, she hoped, it would wash out the shame of escaping alone. That her pain would be enough to atone.
It wasn't, of course.
----
“I have here the technical specifications for the new boundary,” said the liaison from Zone 67, producing a tiny flash drive. The man neither gave nor wore any name, but had a Major’s gold oak leaf and ONI’s black-and-white pyramid stitched prominently on his uniform.
Kurt had met plenty of career spooks since Colonel Ackerson recruited him to lead the SPARTAN-III program. Each one knew the power of information, and how much appearance mattered to it. The rank insignia, above Kurt’s own commission as Lieutenant Ambrose, was a display of authority. The absent name—which would’ve meant nothing to Kurt anyway—was enough to intimate they could hide things from him.
The SPARTAN-III program wasn’t the only Section 3 project operating on Onyx, an entire habitable world redacted out of UNSC records for ONI’s clandestine purposes. Each project allotted a space on the planet had their own reasons to remain classified. And between the cutthroat—often literally—competition for ONI funding and abundant chances to abuse their power behind confidentiality, each one was loathe to share anything with each other.
It made dealing with Camp Currahee’s northern neighbor, the “planetary survey team”—researching, testing, whatever in Zone 67—a pain in Kurt’s side when their respective projects interfered with one another. Today, however, Kurt had two cards up his sleeve.
The first was Kurt’s experience in dealing with career spooks by now. The liaison’s presentation told Kurt they saw him as a potential threat, looking to siphon away their resources. The SPARTAN-III program’s inception had already pulled nearly half of their smart AI’s processing power away from them at Colonel Ackerson's whim. So Kurt intended to be accommodating, easing them down to show he wasn’t there to cause a problem—without looking weak enough to try poaching from in return.
The second thing in his favor, fortunately, was the trio of special forces operators Mendez’s drill sergeants had caught, lying beaten and bound in Camp Currahee’s brig.
Kurt leaned forward with exaggerated interest in the maps and three-dimensional blueprints springing into the holotank over his desk. “Motion sensors. You’ve electrified the razor wire this time… Asteroidea mines? Sure you’re not being too thorough, Major?”
The officer’s smile was polite, and shallow as a playing card. “Well, you know the old poem, Lieutenant. Good fences make good neighbors.”
Kurt twitched his cheek muscles to keep from rolling his eyes. The Major had vaulted over the point of Robert Frost’s Mending Wall being how good fences did not make good neighbors, but critiquing his landing wouldn’t get Kurt anywhere. Instead, he shut off the holotank and reclined in his office chair.
“I trust it’s sufficient. What I’m more concerned with is how we’re going to address three of your people crossing into Beta-5 Division's jurisdiction.”
The Major adopted an even, business-innocent expression. “My personnel were reacting to a perceived intrusion into our own restricted area. They crossed into Currahee’s A-O without a superior’s instruction or permission, but the recapture of intruders to prevent leaks of classified information falls within the scope of their duties.”
Kurt nodded. “An assessment I’d be happy to believe, if the Zone 67 team were inclined to provide evidence of such an intrusion taking place—or what the duties of its men entail.”
By directly addressing the lack of cooperation, Kurt had called. The Major’s chin dipped as he mentally switched gears, ready to escalate to direct refusal, but Kurt cut him off by picking back up.
“Regardless, it’s not something you’ll have to worry about happening again. My charges have been expressly forbidden from crossing the boundary with Zone 67, and have no reason to disobey that order. The intrusion, we have found, was due to a mistake in navigation while seeking shelter during the last hurricane that came in. We’ll be more careful to maintain operational distance during such harsh weather in the future.”
Kurt was careful not to use the word recruit when referring to the children under his command in the officer’s presence.
The Major’s raised brow betrayed pleasant surprise at Kurt’s brushing aside of the point. “That would be a sensible precaution. Neither of us want a repeat of the Team X-ray incident.”
“I’m glad we agree,” Kurt made a conscious effort not to tighten his throat up to growl. The disappearance of four young Beta Company recruits in Zone 67 still hurt, years later. He sat up again and adopted his best helplessly resigned tone. “If the measures satisfy us both, I see little point in reporting this incident through Colonel Ackerson’s chain of command. It would just amount to paperwork keeping us from more important duties anyway.”
The Major appeared unperturbed by the mention of Kurt’s superior—but then, he was consciously keeping a blank face. “Something we could all do without.” No doubt the man was thinking any reports filed through proper channels would then need to be chased down ahead of delivery and suppressed. “There is, however, one other matter to resolve.”
“That being?”
“The release of my personnel… ?”
“Ah,” Kurt shook his head, as if chiding himself for forgetting about them completely. “Of course. They’ve already had their injuries treated and are ready for release. You can take them back on your way directly.”
Kurt pressed a control on the side of his desk. The office door slid open, and at its growl, Chief Petty Officer Mendez turned around smartly.
“Chief,” Kurt lifted his head to look past as the Major stood up. “Take the major by the brig on the way to the motor pool. He’ll be chauffeuring our guests home.”
“I’ll tell them to bring his Warthog around, sir.” Mendez nodded, then swept an arm to usher the Major into the corridor outside.
“Oh,” Kurt added when the Major was a step from the door, “we’ll be sure to arrange for the return of their weapons and field equipment when we find it. Much of it was neglected when the trespassers were apprehended. Should turn up soon.”
The Major’s open hand snapped closed at the mention of his elite operatives being disarmed, humiliated—a tell clear as a dropped jaw by ONI standards. Then he marched on, Chief Mendez smirking behind him.
As soon as the door shut, the holotank on Kurt’s desk sprang to life again, unprompted. Digital snowflakes swirled thick enough to blind, then disappeared in the span of a second. Left behind was the ghostly blue figure of an old man with a staff and long cloak, shaking his head at the closed door.
“It may be a cramped drive home for Major Starheim,” Deep Winter, Onyx’s planetary survey AI, remarked. “His Warthog only has seats for two. And he’s too vain to drive himself! Think he’ll be on the lap, or have someone on his?”
Filing away the name Winter so casually gave for later, Kurt rested his clasped hands on the edge of the desk. “What do you have for me?”
Winter manipulated the holo-projectors to turn and face Kurt, sorrow tugging at the facsimile of a mouth beneath his long beard. “Little good news, I’m afraid. By the time I was informed, the Agincourt had already retrieved its last Darter and transitioned into slipspace, taking the escapee with it.”
Kurt allowed himself a frown. He kept a tight lock on his already stoic Spartan countenance in front of rival ONI bureaucrats, but Deep Winter was different. Since replacing the previous Zone 67 AI pulling double-duty as Camp Currahee’s administrative intelligence, Winter had repeatedly made a priority of his human safety protocols. The Spartan candidates were more than just a distraction to him—and that put him on Kurt’s team, in his thinking. “No way to contact a vessel in the slip. Are you sure there’s nothing we can do to head it off at its destination?”
Winter shook its avatar’s head. “Nothing available to us. There are no vessels present on Onyx which could reach Orbital Station Ryder before Agincourt’s arrival. And as the UNSC has yet to develop FTL communication, there is no way to send word ahead. By the time we can alert anyone, the escapee will likely use her training to flee the ship and disappear.”
Kurt furrowed his brow. Something about Winter’s answer gave him one of those funny feelings, an instinct he’d learned to count on when he was a SPARTAN-II. He hadn’t directly said no, just nothing available to them. But he also counted on Winter, and trusted he was doing all he could for the missing Gamma recruit enough to let it go. “Doesn’t mean we shouldn’t still try. Get a prowler or any other ship you can requisition, and I’ll assign a detail to it under Lieutenant Coney. If we’re lucky, she might stay on the Agincourt or Ryder Station long enough for us to catch up.”
Winter nodded, no doubt already sending the necessary requests. “Do you have a plan in place for her if she is recovered?”
A deep breath was needed before Kurt could answer. “I’m not sure yet. I’ve already sent one Hari to the Headhunter site, near enough to Onyx’s other pole. That keeps the two we have from ever meeting, but a third? I can’t exactly just give her a haircut and a new tag. The candidates will catch on.”
“Speaking of those who’ve caught on,” Winter’s voice lowered, “what do you intend to do with your brig’s other occupants? G114 and G217?”
Kurt shrugged dismissively. “A simple twenty-four hour amnestic should be enough, and Professor Shultz can tell them it was the usual medical emergency. Dyne and Kody are problem kids, but not lost causes. Ackerson knows the program’s below its number projections. I won’t give up on any of them, even if we have doubles. How is this happening, Winter?”
The lines on the old man’s face seemed to deepen, as if to present a more pitiable facade. Kurt tried not to let the AI’s theatrics annoy him, but sometimes knowing how calculated every expression of its human interface was felt like the supercomputer was condescending to him. “Even if I was sure myself, there are things I’m simply not at liberty to share with you, Lieutenant. Zone 67’s projects are beyond restricted, which is why I suggested such robust boundary measures to Major Starheim.”
“Speaking of,” Kurt interrupted, having heard similar answers from Winter before, “I trust you’ll have a close handle on those?”
“Of course. I can deactivate the Asteroidea mines remotely if a candidate ever strays too close, and I can head off any readings the motion sensors pick up.”
“Good. You pick up anything coming from the Zone 67 side, you route those signals to me, personally.” Kurt hit a control to pull up the boundary maps again. “I’ll have DIs standing by at regular points near the Zone. If this happens again—we’ll be ready.”