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“Every time you deploy Marines, you could be sending them to their deaths,” Rebecca said, talking to him as if he was a child. To add insult to injury, Foucault suspected she was processing some other scene, her attention elsewhere. “It is only recon.”

“Our original orders were ‘only recon’ as well,” he said in mild reproach, and steepled his fingers.

Rebecca looked at Foucault then, with her full attention, and her face seemed to soften. A cheap trick he’d seen her pull on others, changing the lighting on her avatar to something less harsh. “We’re at war, Commander. Reach has fallen. Our backs are against the wall. Extreme measures are necessary to ensure our survival.”

Foucault forced himself to show no reaction and didn’t immediately reply. That was quite the overreaction, and it cemented his suspicions that there certainly was more she wasn’t telling him, which meant she had orders of her own.

He watched the screen, which showed a real-time view of the space outside the Prowler. A single piece of debris tumbled slowly past. It wasn’t a rock, it was a piece of manufactured structure, hard crisp lines and dead cables showing. There was a marvelous logic to its gymnastics, a grace that seemed almost choreographed, even though now it was merely scattered garbage.

How to get Rebecca to share her knowledge?

“Survival,” he repeated.

Was that really the only thing they were fighting for now?

>Lopez 1304 hours

As the Pelican headed toward their destination, Lopez found herself marveling at the view, struck by an odd moment of poetic, profound insight, even though she didn’t understand it all. Perhaps even because she didn’t understand.

Dominating right now was Threshold’s ponderous “bloat-belly”; her term, shared with Benti in the mess hall. The vast gas giant so filled the windows it brought the illusion of blue sky to the cockpit up front instead of the empty black of space. Frequent storms raged and died in great cloud-swirls across that surface. From that far away, it looked like a slow, sleepy blossoming. Didn’t feel that way on the surface, Lopez knew. The winds blew hundreds of kilometers an hour.

Closer in: the wreckage of the Halo. The massive ring cut through the view like a question mark that’d been fractured to pieces. Thousands of kilometers wide. Great fires still raging, large enough to devour whole continents. Chunks of the superstructure bigger than cities tumbling ponderously in the void. Glowing and flaring as they tore shrieking down through Threshold’s atmosphere. Despite the jiggered failures in the structure, the sheer immensity of it made the curve smooth. Constantly tripped her sense of perspective.

Covenant hadn’t built it. It was entirely alien, in design and purpose, and she took some strange assurance from that. Here was proof that there was more out there in the big bad universe than just the goddamn Covenant. She had no idea if whoever built this was friend or foe, but the simple idea that there was another gave her a strange sense of security. We’re not alone. Again.

A pinprick next to Threshold, the Mona Lisa drifted like a dead thing alongside one of the larger pieces of debris from the Halo ring, on the far side from Basis and distant from the Red Horse’s current position. Lopez thought the ship looked lonely, desolate, on the screen as they approached. Abandoned, even. Pits like severe acne showed where the escape pods had already been launched into space.

She asked for an update from the pilot, Burgundy, who’d been called up despite being off the clock. Already getting reacclimated to the up-close sweat smell from the Marines in the seats all around her, only MacCraw dumb enough to be wearing cologne in the confines of a spacecraft, like he was on a date.

Rebecca had chosen the squad, pilot included. “The maximum we can spare,” she’d explained. Seventeen personnel in total, including Benti and also Singh’s small engineering team, who had received basic training but were technically not combat-ready.