Broken Circle Read Online Free Page B

thoughts short. Blasphemy. Prophet of Inner Conviction, indeed—what irony. Find your own Inner Conviction!
    GuJo’n meanwhile signified satisfaction with the data on troop movements, using a gesture the Sangheili probably could not read, and added, “Very good—but what of this tale of sedition that’s come to us? I speak of the one called Ussa ‘Xellus. He and his followers have been cited in accounts from your own spies.”
    â€œUssa ‘Xellus? That crawling fur grub cannot be called a true Sangheili!” retorted Viyo ‘Griot.
    â€œYet he is a highly effective military strategist,” Mken remarked. “One who should not be underestimated. I have seen it myself, long ago, on the Planet of Blue and Red.”
    â€œOnce he served Sanghelios, it is true,” Viyo admitted. “But no more. He rejects the Writ of Union—he claims it is shameful to join our strength with your own! Even to negotiate peace with the San’Shyuum is tantamount to surrender. When his sedition was first accounted, we entreated him and his people, as he was once a warrior like us. But he refused to listen to reason, and brought war to Sanghelios. Our own keeps responded with . . . less subtle means, subjecting the entire state of ‘Xellus to incredible firepower. We intended to cut off the root of treason at the source, but apparently many of his people survived. We suspect he now hides like a coward somewhere in the barrens near the south pole of Sanghelios. A little-known region called Nwari. We have not heard from our spies for some days—it may be that they have been compromised. But we have our assassins looking for Ussa ‘Xellus now. When they do find him, be assured, they will choose their moment . . . and they will kill him. His followers are drugged into madness by his word. It seems likely that with him gone, their cult will dissolve.”
    â€œ Will it dissolve?” Mken wondered aloud. “Have you never heard of martyrdom?”
    A Sangheili Mining Colony on the Planet Creck
    The Age of Reconciliation
    The mission was a failure.
    Ussa ‘Xellus and his mate, Sooln, had traveled to the Creck colony, to recruit new followers into the resistance. Creck, named after ‘Crecka, the Sangheili who’d discovered it a generation earlier, was in the Baelion system—the seventy-sixth of designated worlds explored by Sangheili. It was now a Covenant miningcolony, operated, largely underground, by Sangheili. A few translucent meteorite-scarred colony domes rose above the rugged, methane-choked surface of the planet. They were the tips of the colony’s iceberg. On the other side of the mountains that brooded over the domes was a great sea of half-frozen hydrogen cyanide; there were said to be simple lifeforms, like great swimming worms, surfacing from time to time in that opaque ocean of toxin.
    But the Sangheili were here for the minerals and metals—the minerals to power their ships and the metals to sheath the hulls of those vessels. They delved deep into Creck, following mammoth crystalline veins down, with other shafts running to magma used to provide the base energy of their colony.
    Ussa and Sooln were riding a lift up a shaft from one of those scorching power plants. They’d spent some time there, traveling in the guise of engineers pretending to check for heat-fatigued walls, and talking as discreetly as possible to those who toiled over the generators. A defector from Creck had told Ussa there was discontent here. Who wouldn’t feel ill used, working in the geological energy plant? The structure couldn’t be climate controlled efficiently—and the heat was unbearable.
    But his primary contact, Muskem, had perished the day before Ussa arrived. Muskem had inexplicably fallen into a throbbing pit of magma, where he was instantly incinerated. Ussa had a strong intuition, after speaking with a supervising officer,