Halo: Indelible Past/Chapter Twenty-One

Venter greeted the Reaper with a warm smile as the armored man marched into the control center. "Congratulations. You fucked up."

"Really?" The Reaper seemed unperturbed. "How so?"

"Try the bit where that city isn't a smoking crater right now," Peter piped in from across the room. Several of the soldiers nodded in cold agreement.

Venter stalked towards his ally, throwing up an even bigger smile to hide the fury coursing through his chest. "You told me you could get the job done," he said. "You said you didn't trust anyone else to handle it. I wanted to do it myself, or send Peter, show the kid how it's done. But no. You had to do it yourself."

The Reaper leaned against a console and shrugged. "I noticed it myself when we didn't see the blast after the timer ran out. That firefight didn't push the squid-heads further away than it was supposed to, I guess."

It was all Venter could do not to shoot the man right there. "In case you hadn't noticed, nukes aren't exactly a dime a dozen," he growled. "I had to pull a lot of strings to get the ones we brought with us, and now you've gone and wasted the first one we arm."

The helmeted killer scratched at his neck-seal. "So we didn't get to nuke an evacuated city. So what?"

It was infuriating. Venter clenched his fists, doing his best to keep them as far from the pistol on his hip as possible. "You take failure pretty well, don't you?"

"I've failed before, plenty of times," the Reaper replied, sounding bored. "Believe me, I lost worse than just a nuke."

''If I shoot him, I'll have a bunch of prisoners and nothing to do with them. Plus he's the only one here who can actually understand these freaks without a computer. So I can't shoot him, no matter how much of an insufferable prick he's being right now.''

Venter smiled again, though it felt more like baring his teeth.