Halo: The Cole Protocol (17 page)

CHAPTER

TWENTY-NINE

IN ORBIT, METISETTE, 23 LIBRAE

Thel grumbled happily. They’d taken the Kig-Yar shuttle out farther away from the Rubble, slowly scanning the area until they’d found a larger Kig-Yar transport ship on its way to Metisette.

They boarded it, fast and quick, before the few Kig-Yar on board had even realized what had happened.

On board were several hundred Unggoy. The Kig-Yar had been in charge, but didn’t have the numbers to run their own ships. Now the Kig-Yar were dead.

But the Unggoy had run the ship for the Kig-Yar. That made them useful. They were willing to work for Thel and his crew, or so the cowering Unggoy Deacon said as Thel stood on the purple-stained bridge. “It would be the Prophets’ will,” the Deacon yelped.

“It would be,” Thel said from behind the Unggoy. “We are on a direct mission from a Hierarch.”

The Unggoy waddled about, shifting its mouthpiece, to face Thel. It looked up and spread its arms out. “I do not question. I serve. That is our fate,” it moaned.

Thel couldn’t care less for Unggoy self-pity. “Tell your crew this ship flies where we command, or we will slaughter every last one of you. Saal will go down to engineering and watch over you. Veer will roam the corridors.”

Veer growled, and the Unggoy backed up. “Sirs! We will do our ship duties! Doubt us not.”

Thel turned to Veer and Saal. “Be wary. The slightest notion the Unggoy are playing games, hold nothing back.”

Veer and Saal grunted affirmatively and walked out of the cockpit.

The deacon turned to go, but Thel held up a hand, and the Unggoy froze.

“What is down there, Unggoy?” Thel asked. He pointed at the image of the planet on a screen at the front of the cockpit.

It was Metisette. Its sickly, yellow-orange-colored atmosphere swirled; thick, cold storms lashed the icy surface.

The Unggoy stared at them, saying nothing.

Thel turned back to the screen and folded his arms. “Zhar, my closest advisor, didn’t want to come here. He wanted to turn this transport right around to attack the Kig-Yar ship docked by the humans, and take that right back to
High Charity
so we could warn the prophets about the Jiralhanae treason.”

“A noble choice,” the Unggoy said.

“It is not,” Thel said. “We were captured, and jailed. When we return, we will be lucky if we hold our titles, if not our very
names.”
The Unggoy trembled at Thel’s anger. “What is your name, Deacon?”

“Pipit,” the Unggoy replied.

Thel folded his arms. “Pipit, one of my ancestors, a kaidon of Vadam, lost a war to one of the keep’s bitter rivals. The new kaidon put my ancestor in the cellars, jails where the defeated were left in the most dishonorable manner imaginable. They were fed scraps, and visited by the invaders to be mocked and laughed at. The most honorable among the jailed killed themselves or each other.

“The kaidon escaped after weeks of starving. He had become so thin he could pull himself through the bars of his window looking out over the Vadam keep cliffs. He scaled the cliff, and swam down the river, all the way to the valley.

“The kaidon walked for many days, eating vermin and scraps, becoming lower than low, until he came into the vast deserts that lie in the interior of all our lands. And out there, after wandering for many years, built his strength, his hardness, and made allies from other wanderers. They were the least of the least, yes, but with a will to fight, and a will to live no matter the odds.

“With this new tribe, my ancestor returned to Vadam keep and scaled the walls. He killed his enemies all, throwing their bodies to the river. It is said that it ran purple with blood for a week. And when the kaidon was done killing his enemies, he opened the jails and killed the Vadam who had been cowardly enough to remain alive in them. That was my kaidon. That is
Vadam.
Our blood was forged in the desert, confirmed in the keep that day, and purified through Kaidon Ther’s experiences. So it is carved on the Vadam saga wall.”

Thel looked over at Zhar, who asked, “Shipmaster, do you have a point to retelling a stanza of your family’s saga?”

Thel sat down in the shipmaster’s chair at the center of the cockpit. “I can hardly turn my back on my lineage, can I, Zhar? I will not return to
High Charity
with a lost ship, knowing we were locked up by Kig-Yar, and little knowledge of what is happening here. I would be no better than the jailed Sangheili that Ther executed for being useless.”

“It was a suggestion. An option,” Zhar said.

“But it is not an option, as we are Sangheili.” Thel now turned back to Deacon Pipit. “So you understand, Unggoy? We are here to stay. I ask you, again, what is on Metisette?”

“Dreams,” Pipit sighed.

“Do not play word games,” Thel growled. “Be plain.”

“When commanders need fighters, Unggoy are ordered to breed and expand. Then we die in great numbers. Unggoy, you all say: do this, do that. Some dream of free,” Pipit explained. “And though we hate Kig-Yar, this one named Reth, high commander, says to those Unggoy that they can come to Metisette. Come, build a home. Help change this moon so it becomes a place you can live where the methane is free in all the air. Breed free.”

Zhar started to laugh. “And you believed this… Reth?”

Pipit looked up, beady red eyes squinting in anger. “Kig-Yar always betray, yes, but the opportunity…” The alien shrugged.

Thel looked down at the fatalistic little alien. “So Metisette has methane in the air that you can breathe.”

“A place for Unggoy,” Pipit said. “A safe place, where we can live without interference, without controls on our population that are imposed from on high. Where we can walk around without these chafing harnesses and breathing tanks.”

“An Unggoy paradise,” Thel muttered. “Where you can breed until you overrun the entire place.” The Unggoy were well-known to reproduce like mad. During peacetime the Prophets monitored their population closely; the Unggoy had never cared for that. And even though they hated the Kig-Yar, it made sense that the Unggoy had jumped at the chance in this strange sequence of events to gain a world of their own.

Thel scratched his lower mandibles.

Saal called Thel over the intercom. “They have our infiltrator harness here,” he said. “In their storage bay. The Kig-Yar stole it from our ship!”

Thel stopped scratching as he thought about the news. “We have a change of plans. Take the armor down to the Kig-Yar shuttle. Get the shuttle warmed up as well. We are going down.”

“Into that murk?” Zhar protested from nearby.

“Yes. Zhar, the Prophets unleash the Unggoy to breed whenever there is a war; they stop mixing antibreeding hormones into the methane supplies. Now we have a renegade Kig-Yar breeding Unggoy. I think this ‘Reth’ is creating an army on the surface of Metisette for himself.”

“So we are going to see for ourselves?” Zhar snorted.

“I want to talk to Reth,” Thel said simply.

“Why?”

“If he is in charge of Metisette, he knows what is going on with the humans and the Kig-Yar working together. And he knows about the betrayal of the Tiralhanae. Reth knows things we need to know.”

“And he is surrounded by hundreds of Unggoy,” Zhar noted.

The deacon cleared his throat. Thel turned to him, and Pipit said, “Not hundreds.”

Thel waited a moment. “Thousands?”

Pipit still bobbed his head. “Tens of…” but already the alien had shaken its head again.

“Hundreds?”

Now Pipit nodded eagerly as Zhar swore.

Reth had quite an army at his disposal. This would make getting to him a lot more difficult.

But Thel smiled. “We have our infiltrator harness back.” That gave them an edge. They were not just Sangheili, but well armed, well armored, and also invisible Sangheili.

Like his ancestor Ther, the ancient kaidon, Thel would come back against great odds, swarming into the middle of his enemy before they even knew what had happened.

“Get us ready, Zhar,” Thel ordered. “We are going down there. Pipit, Veer will take over while we are gone; you will help him. Give us the coordinates to Reth. And if you deceive us, Veer will be here to make sure you suffer immediately for it.”

Pipit nodded and, in a voice that seemed to crack, gave Zhar the necessary coordinates.

“Thank you, Deacon.” Thel looked around. “You will also need to have an Unggoy pilot meet us at the shuttle, Deacon. Talk to the Unggoy down there on Metisette, tell them you had an accident aboard, and need to be resupplied with methane for Unggoy to breathe.”

With that done, Thel stalked off the bridge with Zhar close behind.

“Three of us against hundreds of thousands of Unggoy,” Zhar said.

“The little ones will cower with fear and run from us in floods,” Thel proclaimed as they thudded down the corridors.

Zhar laughed. “You are confident.”

“I am Sangheili,” Thel said. “This is what we are.”

They crammed into the tiny shuttle. Spec ops armor lay on the benches where Unggoy would have lined up and sat. Now there was only one Unggoy, a terrified pilot who remained strapped in and staring at the Sangheili in terror.

Thel felt the warmth that came to him when he had a direct plan. “Take us down, Saal.”

Once they’d broken through the worst of the deceleration in the upper atmosphere of Metisette, Thel unstrapped himself and walked back to don his spec ops armor, and helped Zhar with his. The shuttle shook and rattled its way through the thick atmosphere, but they remained balanced on their feet easily enough.

Once suited up, Zhar flicked the armor on, and faded away into invisibility.

“It works,” Thel said. Then tested his own.

Zhar and Saal switched places. As Saal struggled into his armor alone and Zhar flew the shuttle in, Thel walked up to the edge of the cockpit to look down.

Nothing but thick orange clouds and haze—at least until they broke out under the clouds to fly over a jagged, ice-cold landscape whipped by constant storms.

Zhar banked them slowly through the orange murk toward a massive crater. As they flew across it the sides reached up like distant mountains, and Thel could see a massive lake at its center.

In the distance stood what looked like a keep, straddling a giant river of liquid that tumbled over the edge of the crater down to its floor. The keep was ramshackle, made out of parts of old, ruined ships that had been rudely deorbited and landed near the lip of the immense waterfall.

But it stood high with additions that had been built in between the spaceships’ hulls, with tubes and domes that hung like carbuncles pocking the rock faces and rising above the river. Thel saw that it could house hundreds of thousands.

Elevators ran down along the sides of the thousand feet of waterfall to structures around the giant lake.

Metisette wasn’t a world one could breath in. Its mostly nitrogen atmosphere would leave Sangheili, or Kig-Yar, or most races with nothing to breathe.

The liquid on the very cold Metisette was methane. Thel watched as a stream of it fell off the lip of the crater. Methane mist hung strong in the air all throughout the natural valleys and low areas of the crater, thanks to the falls.

“Giant reactors heat the land all around the crater,” the pilot spoke up, pride suddenly more powerful than its fear of the Sangheili. “It makes more of the mists.”

Zhar skimmed the lake and approached the falls. The shuttle hit the mists, and then rose up near the falls, pressing Thel against the seat.

“We pop over the edge and land, Zhar,” Thel shouted. “Make sure your armor is tight, Saal. It will give us air until we are inside the structure. If Reth is breathing and Kig-Yar are in there, then we will be okay.

“If there is only methane, we go in as far as we can before coming back. Zhar stays with the shuttle, hiding, as this Unggoy has the other Unggoy load up our shuttle with tanks of methane.”

Thel watched the remains of a large Kig-Yar merchant ship appear over the lip, and Zhar arced over it into a large landing area marked out in plasma-melted rock.

As soon as the shuttle touched rock, the three Sangheili activated their camouflage and flickered and vanished. Zhar sat across from the Unggoy who was supposedly piloting the shuttle, and Thel and Saal jumped out the back of the shuttle.

The Unggoy pilot had not lied—the land here was bitterly cold to Thel, but it was tolerable. Like an arctic waste. Not nearly as cold as the rest of the moon.

Silent ghosts moving through the orange murk that hung in the air, they maneuvered across the field, keeping well clear of the Unggoy who waddled out across the landing pad toward the shuttle, barking and shouting in their language.