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  CONTENTS

  * * *

  * * *

  Lessons Learned Matt Forbeck

  What Remains Morgan Lockhart

  Breaking Strain James Swallow

  Promises to Keep Christie Golden

  Shadow of Intent Joseph Staten

  The Ballad of Hamish Beamish Frank O’Connor

  Defender of the Storm John Jackson Miller

  A Necessary Truth Troy Denning

  Into the Fire Kelly Gay

  Saint’s Testimony Frank O’Connor

  Rossbach’s World Brian Reed

  Oasis Tobias Buckell

  Anarosa Kevin Grace

  Acknowledgments

  About the Authors

  LESSONS LEARNED

  * * *

  * * *

  MATT FORBECK

  This story begins on March 29, 2554, more than one year after the end of the Covenant War (Halo 3)—a thirty-year struggle for humanity’s survival waged across its embattled colonies—and the subsequent activation of the SPARTAN-IV program, which would eventually undergird the United Nations Space Command’s fledgling Spartan branch (Halo: Initiation).

  Tom wasn’t anywhere near the rec room when the explosion went off, but he felt the blast thrum through the superstructure of the space station just as the artificial gravity failed. He looked up from his desk in the drill instructors’ office, where he’d just been going over the performance of the new class of Spartan-IVs, and spotted Lucy already heading for the door. She effortlessly yanked herself across her desk and vaulted forward, flying through the open air.

  “Guess you heard it too,” Tom said.

  Spartan Lucy-B091 flashed a thumbs-up sign at him without looking back. Then the sirens kicked in, blaring throughout the station and flashing red lights along the ceilings. She threw open the door and raced down the hallway beyond.

  Tom-B292 followed her as best he could. They’d gone through countless hours in zero-G, both in training and in combat, but they’d usually been wearing Mjolnir armor while doing so. Being without it at the moment made him feel naked.

  They weren’t even halfway down the corridor when Tom felt the telltale pop in his ears that signified massive explosive decompression from somewhere in the station. The air began to haul Tom and Lucy forward, hard. She managed to snag a grip on a door handle as she went past it, but Tom couldn’t find purchase.

  Lucy swung her free arm out, and Tom instinctively grabbed it. With any regular person, he’d worry that the weight of his enhanced frame would haul their arm out of its socket, but Lucy had been equally augmented. They’d already saved each other’s lives more times than he cared to count.

  She still screamed with the effort.

  Tom found a foothold on a nearby doorway, which relieved much of the strain. An instant later, the door at the end of the hallway slammed shut, sealing it off from whatever catastrophe had suddenly decompressed the station.

  Lucy released Tom, and they started down the corridor again. When they reached the door, they couldn’t get it to budge. All they could see through the porthole was an intersection that had been sealed off on all four sides.

  “Doors won’t release until we repressurize,” Tom said. “What the hell happened?”

  Lucy pointed back toward their office area. The door there still stood open. Maybe it had failed. Maybe the AI that helped run the station had decided it didn’t have to cut off access throughout the entire ship; just seal away the affected area. Either way, even if they couldn’t go forward, they could go back.

  Lucy kicked off hard, and Tom scrambled to catch up with her once more. “What’s the hurry?” he asked.

  She was staring out the viewport, as if hunting for something. “Figuring it out,” she said.

  Lucy had lost her voice for seven years at one point—a souvenir of being one of the only two survivors (along with Tom) of Operation: TORPEDO, a battle with the Covenant that had all but wiped out the entire Beta Company of Spartan-IIIs. They’d lost 298 of their brothers and sisters to that horrible meat grinder that day. She’d recovered, but only because Lucy had wanted to scream at Dr. Catherine Halsey—the founder of the SPARTAN-II program—while trying to tear her head off.

  Over those years, Lucy and Tom had developed their own kind of sign language based on the signals Spartans used to communicate during a comms blackout on the battlefield. Even though she’d regained her voice, he still often fell back on that old habit, but Tom loved the fact that he didn’t have to guess at her intent any longer. Not during something dangerous like this.

  He kicked over to his desk and hit the comm there. “Control!” he said. “What the hell just happened?”

  In the time it took for someone to respond, Tom’s mind blazed through the worst options. Had an insurgent ship from a nearby colony world discovered this top-secret training ground and decided to attack? Had a vessel under the control of some resurgent fragment of the long-shattered Covenant stumbled upon them while sweeping through this remote system?

  “Had a rupture in the rec room,” Captain Chu’s voice said, still steely despite the man’s rising panic. “Bad one. Commander Musa was questioning someone about the homicide—”

  “Homicide? What—”

  “Tom!”

  He spun about to see Lucy stabbing her finger at something outside the station. Still floating in the zero-G, he kicked closer to get a better look at it.

  Two men struggled with each other out there, exposed to raw space but too intent on murder to worry about it. One of them was a blond-haired Spartan recruit Tom remembered hollering at just a few days ago. Schein, he thought.

  The other was Spartan Jun-A266. Like Tom and Lucy, Jun had been part of the SPARTAN-III’s Beta Company, but he’d been pulled out by Command for another mission prior to Operation: TORPEDO.

  Neither was wearing a protective suit.

  Jun broke free from Schein’s desperate grip and planted both feet on the recruit’s chest. Then he kicked off as hard as he could, sending Schein somersaulting deeper into the vacuum. The recoil shoved Jun back toward the station.

  “Shit.” Tom could barely believe what he’d just seen.

  Either way, Schein was dead for sure. Jun was one of the toughest people Tom had ever met, much less worked with. Still, even he would be dead in a matter of moments.

  Lucy grabbed Tom’s hand and pushed back toward the corridor. At the junction with the first doorway, she turned to the right and smacked her hand against a door set into the wall. It slid aside, exposing an airlock.

  “This is insane,” he said to Lucy as they entered. “It can’t possibly work.”

  She shrugged as she popped open a panel and reached for the emergency tether. “Not even going to try?”

  Tom groaned as he took the free end of the tether from her and began to tie it around his waist. He didn’t answer—she already knew what he would say.

  Tom peered through the porthole in the outer door as Lucy shut the interior one. He spotted Jun still tumbling toward them, moving like he was caught in slow motion. Without any friction
in space, the Spartan would reach the station soon, but from the angle he was moving, it looked to Tom like he might sail straight past it.

  Tom looped his arm through a handle near the door, hooking his elbow around it. “Blow it,” he said. Then he expelled all the air in his lungs and braced himself as best he could.

  Lucy smacked a button somewhere behind him, and the air blasted out of the lock. His ears painfully popped, and Tom felt like he was being dragged into a deep, dark ocean determined to freeze-dry him in a flash. His lungs collapsed, and he fought against the urge to try to breathe.

  Tom had performed exercises like this before—just like every Spartan had—but always under controlled circumstances. He’d only had to expose himself to raw vacuum for up to ten seconds at a time, and even then he’d hated every instant of it. With his augmented body, Tom could survive in space like this for up to a minute.

  Now that the air had evacuated from the lock, he had to move fast. This was going to hurt, he knew, but failure meant that Jun would have it infinitely worse.

  Tom pulled himself to the open doorway, then crawled out of the hatch and braced his legs against the edges of it. He tried to calculate Jun’s vector of approach, correcting for Jun’s current speed. Realizing he was running out of time, Tom made his best guess and launched himself into open space, the tether spilling out behind him.

  As Tom sailed through the station’s shadow and emerged into the light from the distant sun, he knew he’d made a critical mistake. Jun hadn’t been moving as fast as he’d thought.

  Without anything to grab onto, Tom immediately overshot Jun’s path. He flailed his arms as he went, hoping to find some purchase on the lost Spartan, but Tom never made contact.

  Had he any breath in his lungs, Tom would have cursed everything he could: Jun, Schein, whatever had blown them into space, but most of all his own miscalculation. He had guessed wrong, and now the best he could hope for was that the error would only cost one life.

  Tom came to the end of the tether long before anticipated and felt it bite hard into his middle. Still mentally cursing, he grabbed the now-taut line behind him and turned himself around to look back along it.

  There he saw Lucy framed in the airlock’s hatch. She was the one who had stopped him short, anchoring the tether on something inside the airlock. Now she was hauling on it hard, both reeling him in and trying to change the angle of his return as she did.

  Tom looked off to his left and saw Jun coming his way. He couldn’t tell if the man had spotted him yet, but from the way Jun kept flailing about, he seemed to still be conscious.

  He couldn’t have much more time left, Tom knew. Even a Spartan’s jumped-up circulatory system had to give out at some point. Despite ONI’s propaganda to the contrary, Spartans could die, and Tom had witnessed this happen more often than just about anyone else.

  Tom saw he wouldn’t reach Jun in time, and he started hauling himself back down the tether too, hoping to speed Lucy’s efforts. It still wouldn’t be enough.

  But the bald-headed Spartan managed to get his arm tangled in the line. At that point, the man must have finally blacked out, as he stopped struggling entirely.

  Tom yanked himself down the tether even faster, hand over hand, praying that he wouldn’t dislodge Jun from his precarious position. When he reached the Spartan, Tom looped his arms around Jun’s waist and held tight.

  No more movement from Jun.

  With his hands full, Tom couldn’t pull himself toward the station, but Lucy kept at it. All Tom had to do was hold on to Jun and hope she managed to bring them home before either one of them passed out too.

  Tom’s vision had already started to tunnel down, and the blackness around the edges drew tighter with every second. He wished he’d had time to grab an air tank or, better yet, slip into his armor, but that sort of delay would have doomed Jun for sure.

  He just hoped their rash decision hadn’t doomed them all. He wanted to shout at her to hurry, but he’d already deflated his lungs—and the sound couldn’t have traveled through empty space anyhow. He could see her face clearly now, though, as she gave it her all.

  Just as Tom’s vision had narrowed so far that it felt like he was staring down twinned rifle scopes, he bumped into the side of the station. It almost jarred Jun loose from his grip, but Tom managed to hold on. He shoved the man through the hatch before him, and Lucy guided his unconscious body inside.

  Then Tom’s vision went black.

  Tom woke up in the station’s sickbay, aching all over. He had tubes snaking into his arm and an oxygen mask over his face. He’d never felt so dried out and sunburnt in his entire life, as if he’d been sprawled unconscious on a tropical beach for a week.

  He tried to speak, but all that came out was a rasping croak. A comforting hand pressed onto his arm, and he turned his head to see Commander Musa sitting there in his wheelchair, giving him a proud smile.

  “You’re lucky to be alive,” the commander said.

  Tom arched his eyebrows in a question, and the commander nodded. “You managed to save Jun. That was one hell of a trick you pulled out there, Spartan.”

  Tom licked his dry lips and tried again. He felt like someone had poured sand down his throat. “Lucy?”

  “She’s fine too. Recovering in the next bay over. You two made the best out of the worst day the SPARTAN-IV program has had in a long time.”

  Tom closed his eyes and sighed. “What happened?”

  “You’ll get a full debriefing soon enough, once you’re recovered. By that time, we’ll know more about it too. The investigation is still ongoing.”

  Tom opened his eyes and gave the commander a shrug that said, “And so . . . ?”

  Musa frowned. “There was a murder in the training grounds earlier today. Someone killed one of our trainees—a young man named Hideo Wakahisa, from Newsaka—and tore out his translocator.”

  Tom winced at the news. That little device was implanted up under the jaw. Tearing it out would involve removing most of a Spartan’s throat.

  “Our investigation took us through a short list of suspects that led us to a new Spartan trainee named Rudolf Schein. While Spartan Jun, Captain O’Day, and I were questioning Schein, he realized we had cornered him, and he attacked. That explosion?”

  Tom nodded.

  “That was a grenade Schein activated. It injured several people and killed Captain O’Day.”

  Tom groaned. He’d not known O’Day for long, but he’d respected her skills as a drill instructor. To think that one of her own trainees had betrayed her boggled the mind.

  “The same explosion weakened the windows in the rec room, which gave way during the subsequent struggle between Schein and Spartan Jun. An exo team has already recovered Schein’s body. If not for the actions of you and Spartan Lucy, they would have been hunting for Jun’s body as well.”

  Tom shook his head in disgust at Schein’s betrayal. How could a Spartan turn on another Spartan? It didn’t seem possible.

  Commander Musa put a hand on Tom’s shoulder. “It’s been a hard day for all of us. Rest well, Spartan. You earned it.”

  “I get it,” Lucy said.

  They were back in their offices after a few days of healing, ready to return to work. Commander Musa had suspended training for the rest of the week, but the cycle was about to start up again in the morning.

  “What do you mean?” Tom said, confused. “What’s there to get? Schein was a traitor. That’s all there is to it.”

  Lucy gave him a helpless shrug. “The Spartans changed.”

  Tom stared at her, still confused. “Are you saying the Spartans are responsible for what he did?”

  He and Lucy had always had a special rapport, right from the moment they’d met during their training as part of the SPARTAN-III Beta Company. They’d both been six years old at the time. Orphans whose home planets had been glassed by the Covenant.

  That had been enough for them to bond with each other—and everyone else in Be
ta Company. Their shared hatred of the Covenant had created the anvil on which they were forged into Spartans. That special relationship ramped up even further when the rest of Beta Company was wiped out during Operation: TORPEDO. From that day on, Tom and Lucy had been inseparable. They were always assigned to the same duties, whether it was training the SPARTAN-III Gamma Company recruits on Onyx or, more recently, joining Blue Team to recover an ancient AI on the hostile colony of Gao. After that, they’d left their work with Blue Team for their current posts: training the new Spartan-IVs.

  But now, for the first time in a long time, Tom wasn’t sure what Lucy meant.

  She shook her head at him. “We don’t just fight Covies anymore.”

  With that, Tom recognized what Lucy was going on about. The war was over, but that didn’t mean the threats to humankind all went away. “Yeah, sure, some of them are theoretically our pals now, but the bulk of the Covenant fractured into a hundred smaller threats, each with their own bones to pick—and weapons to pick them with.”

  Lucy frowned at that. “But now we fight humans too.”

  Tom dismissed that concern with a wave of his hand. “The Spartans were originally created to fight the Insurrectionists. Once the war was over, those ungrateful traitors didn’t even wait five minutes before they started attacking the UNSC again.”

  Lucy pointed at herself. “I didn’t sign on to shoot people.”

  Tom leaned forward in his chair. “That’s not why I joined either. But I also don’t want to see everything we worked so hard to preserve get torn to pieces. Besides, there’s no such thing as an old-Spartans’ home, is there?”

  “Not yet,” Commander Musa said as he rolled into the room in his wheelchair. Jun came in right behind him and snapped a quick salute at Tom and Lucy. They responded by leaping to their feet and returning the gesture.

  “At ease,” Musa said before continuing his statement. “We may not have an old-Spartans’ home yet, but that’s because even the oldest Spartans aren’t quite of retirement age. I may have washed out of that original class, but I’m only in my forties myself. Not quite ready to dodder off and have someone wipe up my drool for me.”