Halo Waypoint today released the Prologue from the upcoming book Mortal Dictata.

   In Halo: Mortal Dictata, the Covenant War is over but hatred, guilt, and devotion endure beyond the grave. The Office of Naval Intelligence faces old grievances rising again to threaten Earth. The angry, bitter colonies, still with scores to settle from the insurrection put on hold for thirty years, now want justice — and so does a man whose life was torn apart by ONI when his daughter was abducted for the SPARTAN-II program. Black ops squad Kilo-Five find their loyalties tested beyond breaking point when the father of their Spartan comrade, still searching for the truth about her disappearance, prepares to glass Earth’s cities to get an answer. How far will Kilo-Five go to stop him? And will he be able to live with the truth when he finds it? The painful answer lies with a man long dead, and a conscience that still survives in the most unlikely, undiscovered place.  

You can read it below:

HALO: MORTAL DICTATA
PROLOGUE
NEW TYNE, VENEZIA: MARCH 2553

My name is Staffan Sentzke, and I never planned to be a terrorist.

It’s not the kind of life you aspire to. It was simply what I had to do. Terrorism is Earth’s word for it, a moral judgment, as if your warfare’s somehow noble and mine’s cowardly. But it’s a unit of measurement; nothing more, nothing less. When your enemy is an empire and you’re just a few guys, a handful of little people, then the biggest punch you can land is called terrorism. That’s all you’ve got.

Like I said, it’s a measure of magnitude, not morality. And I’m really particular about measurements. I used to work in a machine shop in Alstad before Sansar was glassed by the Covenant, and I still like to make things to keep my skills fresh. Here: what do you think of this? It’s a scale replica of an eighteenth-century Gustavian dining chair- I’m making a doll’s house for Kerstin. Edvin says I’m spoiling her, but what else is a granddad for?

I’d give anything to be able to spoil Naomi again.

There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about her. She’d be nearly forty- two now, well past the age for doll’s houses, but still my little girl.

Anyway, I need to finish this chair before dinner. I use a set of dental drills for the small detail. The upholstery’s the hardest thing, getting the right fabric so that the stripes are to scale. If I can’t make something myself, then I can acquire what I need because I know people who can get me pretty well anything- a scrap of satin brocade, a birch plank, even tiny brass pins.

Or a Sangheili warship. I can get one of those, too.
I think I’ve got one now, but I have to see Sav Fel again to iron out some details. Earth thinks it’s back in business now the Covenant’s collapsed. It won’t be long before it tries to stick its nose into our business again. We need to be ready. And what better time to prepare than when the black market’s awash with weapons and ships? When empires fall, there’s always a fire sale.

For the moment, though, I’m making doll’s house furniture, not arming Venezia. The workshop door opens behind me. This is the only place I’d ever sit with my back to the door, but then I know everyone who comes and goes in my own home.

“She’s going to love that,” Edvin says, peering over my shoulder. “Is it a set?”

“I’ve still got to make the matching table.”

“Nice work, Dad. I wish I had your patience.”

Oh, yes. Patience. I’ve got it in spades. When you have to wait for answers, for revenge, for justice, you can learn to wait as long as it takes.

I was forty when Edvin was born, and Hedda came along two years later. This is my second family and my second homeworld. I had a wife and a daughter on Sansar, but it wasn’t the Covenant that took them from me- it was my own kind. Humans. Maybe it was the colonial government, or maybe it was Earth’s, but it was human nonetheless.

And that’s how I ended up as a terrorist. That’s your word for it, remember. Not mine. I bet there are UNSC personnel out there right now doing exactly what I’m doing. I’ll use any means necessary, so I can’t object if my enemy does the same thing. Rules of engagement are just cynical games for politicians to play. It’s a war. People get killed. There’s no way you can make that look reasonable.

“So did you visit your sister today?” I ask Edvin. I know what’s coming next. “What’s she made me this time?”

“She sent you some surströmming. She says it’ll do you good.”

“God Almighty, you’ve not brought it in here, have you?”

“No. Take it easy. I’ve set up a cordon around it.”

“Good. Otherwise I’ll have to have the place fumigated.”

“Mom said you’d say that. Just pretend it was yummy, will you? For Hedda.”

“You can have it. Just take it outside the city limits before you open it.”

I’m not much of a Swede at heart. I don’t even like pickled herring, let alone the fermented variety, and anyway, we don’t have herring on Venezia- just some oily eel- type thing that’s even worse when it’s been turned into surströmming. Hedda, on the other hand, clings to her diluted heritage more fiercely every year, even though she’s never seen Earth, let alone Sweden. Cultures can get pretty warped in diaspora. They become weird fossilized parodies of themselves that seem to distill their worst features, but I’m afraid Hedda’s like me. She focuses, and then she can’t see anything else to either side. Edvin takes after Laura. He lets things wash over him.

But they both know they had a half-sister who was abducted, and that when she came back she was… different. And then she got sick and died. They know I think the government took her and replaced her with a double.

You think I’m crazy? Everyone did. Even me, for a while. But then I started looking, and found a few other families out in the colonies who’d lost children the same way. The kid went missing, then came back a little later, a little different, and finally went down with multiple organ failure or some metabolic disease.

So either we’re all mad, or something awful was going on long before the Covenant showed up. A few dead kids aren’t even a drop in the ocean considering the billions who’ve died in successive wars. But they’re our kids. Thirty-five years doesn’t even begin to numb the pain. I still need to find out what happened to Naomi and why. Before I die, I want to know.

Damn, it’s getting late. I need to finish this and call Sav Fel. It sounds too good to be true, but if he’s got a warship to sell, he’s come to the right place. Imagine it; he just strolled off with a vessel that can glass entire planets. Would you trust a Kig-Yar crew to look after your battlecruiser? The Sangheili took their eye off the ball.

Never turn your back on someone you’ve screwed over. You might want to make a note of that.

I smooth the tiny legs of the chair with an emery board, then blow off sawdust as fi ne as flour. It’s going to look great when it’s finished.

Edvin laughs to himself. “If your buddies could see you now . . .”

“Yeah. They say Peter Moritz knits. Real hard case.”

“You want me to go check out that new shipment?”

“No, it’s okay. I’ll be finished soon. You’ve got a living to make.”

What, you think terrorists sit around scheming and playing with firearms all day? We’ve got factories to run, food to grow, families to raise. We’re pretty much like you. This is our home. We have a functioning society, and the Covenant never bothered us. We do okay. Leave us alone, and we’ll leave you alone.

I’ve got time to put a coat of primer on the chair before I leave. This is one of my many regrets: I never did get around to making a doll’s house for Naomi. She really wanted one. I planned to make one when I had more time. She was such a bright, happy kid, always out exploring, always with lots of friends around her, which makes it even harder to understand how nobody saw her being taken.

I want to believe she’s still alive. She might not know I survived, and that’s why she hasn’t come looking for me. Maybe she doesn’t even know who she really is. They say that happens to kidnapped kids.

But if she’s still out there somewhere, I hope she’s among friends.

There. Finished. It’s a lovely little chair. But now I’ve got to go talk to a buzzard about a warship.

This is a disturbing portrait of Naomi’s father. When you couple that with the current real world climate of war and terrorism, I see a potential for bad PR here. Trying to rationalize terrorism, even fictionally, seems like a topic best left alone. I guess we’ll see how this pans out with the wider population beyond we fans.

I’m posting the Chapter One excerpt next!
-Sal