Broken Circle by John Shirley Read Free Book Online

loosed explosive charges on the plaza. Projectiles strafed, one of them tearing N’oraq in half.
    Then pillars of fire rose; dark blue blood gouted up in fountains. Sangheili shrieked as they were tossed, broken, through the air, and others ran helter-skelter, looking for surface-to-air weapons.
    Five sweeps the enemy made over the keep, and only one of the nine attack flyers went down, shot by Ussa ‘Xellus himself with a fire-wand launcher.
    The keep burned . . . and hundreds died. The flyers simply departed without further incident. But everyone had seen the Sacred Rings sign of the Covenant on the wings.
    Tersa spent a long day helping to cope with the dead and dying.
    And from that day forward, Tersa vowed he would do nothing for the Covenant. Nor would he give them quarter.
    Then the war widened, became a civil war on Sanghelios that in some places was of magnitude enough to damage Forerunner relics, sacred machinery kept underground. Ussa took his followers to Nwari, where they might seek cover. And it was there that the ships waited. Ussa had used most of the fortune of the ‘Xellus clan to pay for those vessels, to have them brought to the sleeping volcano.
    Now, as he worked in the cavern, Tersa sighed. He had taken an irrevocable course that day. Follow a clan’s hero to battle , his mother had said, and you have a chance to fight honorably and return. Follow a rebel and you will be overwhelmed, shot down without a chance to return fire . . . or executed .
    Would he see his mother again? Was she safe from the Covenant? He did not know, and he ached to realize he might never find out.
    He mustn’t think of that. Especially not with Ernicka glowering down at him. “You, youngling—go back and help organize the weapons. I’ll bring you the news soon enough.”
    â€œYes, Commander.”
    Tersa hurried off, slightly annoyed to be called a youngling, and wondering if Ussa had recruited the soldiers they needed for the revolt . . . or if he had some other plan entirely.
    With Ussa, one never knew what was coming until it had already been decided.

    The hills of Nwari were desolate, forbidding. But many of the caverns hidden beneath them were warm, bubbling with volcanically heated springs. Warmth, Ussa knew, was not enough.
    He stood on a natural balcony of stone, overlooking the Sangheili clans as they milled below, his followers doing tasks he had given out mostly just to keep them busy. There was a pervasive restlessness among them, and many times the clansfolk glanced up at him, as if wondering if he’d brought them here only to meet some ghastly end.
    The Sangheili had evolved in tropical wetlands, and their instincts rebelled against extended stays in these dark, natural amphitheaters. The coldly reverberant spaces, the clamminess whenever one strayed from the bubbling pools, the shadowy reaches of the place that seemed resistant to their lamps—perhaps resistant because of the thick mist from the sulfurous springs—all this made any normal Sangheili look about the encampment with distaste and mistrust. But Ussa had led his people here, remembering that in ancient times the clans had often taken shelter in deep places under the mountains of Sanghelios.
    Having retreated here, Ussa had ordered the subterranean approach from the north closed with plasma beams—meltingthe rock to seal it off as quietly as possible. The caverns were vast and labyrinthine, but Ussa knew that the Covenant authorities might well have guessed his general whereabouts; if they chanced upon the southern entrance within the dead volcano, all would be lost.
    Ernicka the Scar-Maker approached Ussa, grimly gnashing his teeth—which indicated that the news was not good.
    â€œGreat Leader,” Ernicka rumbled, “the listeners have detected new perturbations. The searchers are probing the sealed passages. They seem to know where we are.”
    â€œIt is soon