Broken Circle by John Shirley Page B

taste within his mandibles, when he thought of the fallen dead. Could they but speak, would they denounce the Sangheili as living without nobility?
    Now there was a crueler irony: Vil lived on a great chunk of what had once been Janjur Qom. It was the homeworld of the San’Shyuum, the homeworld of those who had wiped out so many Sangheili. The great mass of stone and soil, about two mountains worth, taken up by the Dreadnought when it arose from Janjur Qom, had been removed from the keyship and formed into an asteroid; it was to be the foundation of the true pedestal of High Charity. And already there were warrens dug into it, sealed off subterranean fortresslike structures, airtight and almost self-sufficient, where lived Sangheili serving as guards, protectors of the San’Shyuum.
    There were six trained Sangheili warriors, and their commander Trok ‘Tanghil, filing into the corvette on the launch deck. Just before he stepped into the air lock Vil’s gaze took in the sweeping, curved lines of the iridescent stealth corvette; it was in two linked tiers, its middle swollen like a Sangheili slitherer just after the creature had swallowed a hopping slug alive—as if something large was not yet digested in its belly. Like with all Covenant ships, loosely based on an obscure selection of Forerunner designs, there was something organic about the lines of the ship; it emulated the rippling forms found in nature.
    Just inside, floating blithely from left to right, on some engineering mission, was a Huragok, a being that defied the contrast between machine and biological organism. The thing—they could not be called a species, not having evolved—had been artificiallycreated, it was said, by the Forerunners themselves, who built them up with nanocellular intricacy to be repair and enhance mechanisms, to act as maintenance engineers for the devices known now as sacred relics. A Huragok’s snaking head could seem slightly reminiscent of the San’Shyuum, to Vil anyway, but the Engineer organisms had three eyelike sensory nodes on either side of their heads. A large cluster of translucent pink and purple gas sacs—some for elevation, some for propulsion, some for chemical supply—humped over the creature’s head; two probing, feathery anterior tentacles whipped forward. Each tentacle tip articulated into cilia, microscopically fine at the ends, for working within electroenergetic interfaces and other gear; from its underskirt below rippled four other work tentacles. The docile creatures seemed to desire nothing but food and work—and they’d made no resistance when tamed by the San’Shyuum.
    The Huragok seemed to be coming along on the expedition—and Vil had worked with the creature before, more than once. He recognized it by the particular mottling of its air sacs. This Huragok was known as Floats Near Ceiling. It communicated with configurations of its tentacles and could read some hand signs and certain holographic insignia. The Huragok being part of the crew was good, as Floats Near Ceiling was efficient and Vil always found its presence to be curiously comforting. Perhaps they were soothing because the Huragok had no agenda but effecting repair, maintenance, following directions, and the like—the creatures were almost eerily trustworthy.
    After stepping from the air lock into the ship, Vil saw the San’Shyuum leader known as Inner Conviction, the Prophet seated broodingly in his antigrav chair at the foot of the ramp leading up to the bridge of the corvette; an armed Steward behindhim watched the Sangheili narrowly. R’Noh, the Minister of Anticipatory Security, wasn’t coming on the voyage, but there were several other San’Shyuum on the stealth corvette: the captain, called Vervum, the communications officer, S’Prog, and a gunner named Mleer. But the vessel was outfitted for clandestine activities, not significant space battles, and it