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No lighting, no emergency lighting. Their flashlights bit out pieces of the room, little snippets of chaotic destruction. Glass smashed to hell and back, crunchy on the hard floor. The walls dented, with a sickly green fuzz growing in patches. Benches and cupboards overturned. Blood drying and tacky on the walls and ceiling. She’d become jaded. It didn’t really register as any different from the decor in the rest of the ship. The Mona Lisa had been turned into a vast garbage pit, a nightmare for insurance adjusters.

But: the smell hit like a fist, a shudder and cringe running through them on that first inhale. Where did that smell come from? Lopez had never experienced it before the Mona Lisa. Ever. It combined the bitterness of the inside of a walnut shell with, as far as Lopez could tell, something from way up inside a dog’s ass.

“Geez, Sarge,” MacCraw groaned, as if she were somehow responsible.

“Buck up, Private,” Lopez said. “The rest of us have had to smell your cologne all day.”

He had no answer to that.

As they fanned out, Lopez barking out the usual refrain—secure the doors, don’t let your guard down—she realized this must’ve been ground zero. Whatever Smith had done, whatever he’d really done, it had happened here. The remains of scientific equipment, so broken, so mixed together, resembled the mixed bag of wares available at some infernal flea market. Nothing she could put a name or purpose to.

Outbreak, but not a Covenant outbreak.

But the room was empty, just the aftermath and their trembling shadows, big and bold against the walls. Whatever had been here had moved on.

“The way to the bridge looks clear,” Mahmoud said, coming back to them.

Could it be that easy? No, it couldn’t. But still she told Mahmoud, good work. Sent Percy and Singh to check the other exits. MacCraw stared at a thick growth of green pus on the wall.

“What were you doing here?” Kept her voice low, as if the ghosts of whatever had trashed the lab might hear her otherwise. Left boot prints in the congealed blood as she shifted her stance.

Smith slumped on a data bank, running his hand over it almost sadly, the smashed casing and shattered circuits.

“I told you, research and development,” Smith said, with a touch of scorn. “Like ONI’s always done. You should be thanking me. We came up with some interesting data that will help us maximize the damage inflicted by our weapons on the Covenant. They’ve developed a natural resistance to the radiation put out by their plasma weapons—a forced evolution, from the look of it. With further research, we’ll be able to use it against them, and to help us treat plasma burns, too.”

Mahmoud listened to this answer with what seemed to Lopez like derision. They all knew how long it took for any “development” to reach the people on the ground. “Yeah. Right. What about your ‘Flood’?”

The glimmer of pride Smith had displayed, listing his accomplishments, vanished. “We could have solved one of the greatest threats to the human species since the Covenant.”

Mahmoud, disbelieving. “ ‘Since the Covenant’? Why didn’t you just focus on them, sir? They’re kicking our asses all over the galaxy.”

Smith smiled, or tried to, swollen face barely moving. “The Flood is pure of intent. Relentless. Almost primordial. And it is a virus, spreads as fast as one. I had to study it. We had to study it. So we used Covenant.”

“You didn’t have to do anything,” Mahmoud said. “If the Covenant knew we were taking prisoners, can you imagine—”

Lopez noticed the death stare Smith gave Mahmoud.

Smith still wasn’t telling the truth, but he wasn’t lying either. Misdirection, misinformation, she didn’t trust any of it. She stepped up to the smashed viewing pane of a small cell. Human skin and flesh caught on the jagged glass.

“Keep talking,” she said, as she shone her flashlight inside. Stared at a leg in the small cell. Forgotten, like it was a dog’s chew toy. Human. A slipper had ended up against the opposite wall. Around the ankle and shin the now familiar orange fabric, half an ID