Halo: Last Light by Troy Denning;

Author:Troy Denning;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Published: 2015-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Veta Lopis was still trying to puzzle through the events back at Crime Scene India—Mark’s spooky behavior, the sudden Jiralhanae attack and where the hell it had come from, Wendell’s warning that she was endangering herself—when the Huragok withdrew its tentacles from Olivia’s swollen thighs and turned to flutter its appendages at what looked like a giant flatworm.

The worm-thing was floating a few meters away from the muddy nook where Veta and Olivia had taken cover, silhouetted in the faint glow of the pathway lighting. It seemed to be rippling its own tentacles at the Huragok. The exchange was rapid and the gestures sharp, but the worm-thing didn’t look especially dangerous, and there was no indication it intended to harm anyone. But with the sporadic gunfire still echoing back from Ash’s end of the gallery, Veta’s nerves were frayed, and she found herself reaching for her sidearm without really thinking about it. The fact that Olivia had cocked her M7 and was casually holding the SMG alongside her thigh did little to convince Veta she was being overly cautious.

“What are they doing?” Veta whispered.

“Who knows?” Olivia’s voice was filled with pain. “Probably arguing about which of us to eat first—and just so you know, if that floating mop thing starts toward us, don’t think you can leave me here alone. I’ll shoot you in the back.”

Veta chuckled. “Thanks for the warning. If it comes to that, I’ll remember to take you out first.”

“Always a good policy,” Olivia said. “Shoot first.”

Even so, both she and Veta held their fire.

After no more than a dozen seconds, the Huragok and the giant flatworm abruptly stopped fluttering tentacles at each other. The worm-thing began to retreat, floating back toward the concrete pathway, while the Huragok returned to work on Olivia’s swollen thighs.

In the dim green glow seeping down from Inverted Forest, Veta could see the girl wince. Watery-looking blood and the cloudy white pus of an infection began to ooze out around the Huragok’s tentacles. Olivia merely took a deep breath and exhaled, willing the pain to flow out of her.

Veta could not help admiring the girl’s courage, and the more time she spent with the young Spartan, the more she hated what the UNSC had done to her and the rest of Gamma Company. Molding a bunch of young orphans into an army of Spartan-IIIs was not only immoral, but probably a criminal act under child-soldier protocols older than the Unified Earth Government itself. And using chemical agents to alter their brains? That was more than criminal. It was pure evil.

And that was even truer for Mark than for Ash and Olivia. Whether he was just a half-mad soldier taking down legitimate enemies or the cold-blooded murderer of at least ten innocent tourists, he was a victim in all this, too. The UNSC had turned him into a killing machine. And if the UNSC had lost control of its own weapon, then who was to blame?

Not that it mattered. It wouldn’t be the UNSC that Veta put down.

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