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Benti yelled, too loud: “Cranker! Two contacts incoming! I hit at least one of them! Cranker, do you copy?”

“Ready and waiting.”

Then Benti again: “What was that? Did you hear that?”

“Benti! Were the Covenant armed?” Lopez stepped over Rakesh’s vomit to look around the shower wall at the door.

“No,” Benti said. “But did you hear—”

Lopez cut her off. “Eyes open. Keep watch at the door.”

Benti nodded, mercifully shut up.

“Sir.” Cranker again. “Still ready. Still waiting.”

“Hold your position, Cranker,” Lopez ordered. “You might have some Covie heat coming your way, but they don’t appear to be armed, just like the rest. We’ve got some clean-up here, but we’ll be back soon. Over and out.”

Lopez crouched down beside what was left of Rabbit.

This really didn’t scan. On any level. It left her a little numb.

She’d been in the war since the beginning. She’d seen far too many friends and comrades and jerks and assholes and people, too many of her people, killed; burned up by plasma, run through with swords, crushed by brutes. Too many. And that meant she knew the Covenant by their actions, if nothing else. No single death signaled victory for them. No one Marine stilled gave them pause. Celebration didn’t enter into the equation—they just moved on. They did not leave themselves vulnerable, they did not desecrate the dead, they did not pound Marines into jelly. They did not do this.

“Sarge?” MacCraw loomed over her. “What’re you doing?”

“Give me some light.” Do something useful for a change.

Rabbit had no eyes left to close.

The bolognese of innards was cooling fast, but was still hot beneath Lopez’s fingertips as she felt about tenderly, picking aside fragments of spine, seeking Rabbit’s dog tags. This act didn’t disturb her, hadn’t done so for years. To be repulsed on the battlefield was to be selfish, put your own distaste over the needs of the dead.

Ah. A glint in the flashlight’s beam, and she’d found the dog tags, one of them folded over and flattened. She reached for them, paused, finding something else near her fingertips, half-revealed, half-hidden by the torchlight. MacCraw really couldn’t hold a light steady worth a damn.

The universe was a big place and Lopez didn’t know it by half, and never would, but what she saw sure as hell didn’t come from Rabbit, and didn’t look like any Covenant she knew. She stared at it for an instant.

The object was long and thin, and oddly segmented. It looked like a very large spider’s leg, but without the stiffness. She only associated it with something living when she saw it ended in a branch of small tentacle-like fingers. The shoulder had been reduced to a pulp of pale sickly goo, veined through with strains of green and purple. Sick, diseased, reeking of the stench Lopez had noticed when they’d first entered the Mona Lisa’s hangar.

She reached for it out of some perverse impulse, then paused. The shadow of her hand hid it from the others. John Doe saying, “I won’t come back.”

“Sarge?” MacCraw was getting restless.

Pondered. Decided. Probably nothing. They didn’t need to see it.

Apologetically, she nudged a loop of intestine over the thing, then a scrap of uniform over what was left of Rabbit’s face. Mama Lopez took care of her own. Freed the dog tags. Rakesh looked like he was going to be sick again. She got up, cupped his hand with hers, and dropped the bloody tags in his palm.

Did the spider’s leg come from Rabbit or from the Covenant? Distracted herself from that thought with the situation at hand: Covenant, headed toward Cranker’s position.

“Cranker,” she said. “Talk to me.”

A puzzled tone from Cranker. “The Covenant never got here. We’re still waiting, but they never got here. Did you guys go after them? Because—oh wait. I think that might be—oh crap oh crap oh crap . . .”

A garbled curse. A sound like a muffled rifle discharge, almost an afterthought. A wet sound. Too wet. Then, nothing.

Lopez wondered how much of this Burgundy was hearing.

Did they still have an escape route?

>Burgundy 1349