“Agents died to find out more about this threat,” Melody said, catching that acid in Adriana’s voice. She turned to van Eekhout. “Show them the helmet footage from Operation POLECAT.”
	He turned around. “Yeah, why not. We’re already in too far.” The holograms disappeared to show a flat screen projecting a camera feed from an ODST’s helmet. “We have seen them in person before. Once. There’s a lot of pertinent footage, but all you need to see is this.”
	A blue stasis field faded away at the center of the ODST’s heads-up display. A glance left showed a column of ODSTs with weapons ready. Easily a hundred soldiers moving slowly forward toward the location where the stasis field had been. A Sharquoi standing on the dais in front of them shifted. It towered over them like a small building. Jai couldn’t help thinking of a cyclops, or troll, from ancient human mythology—a massive pillar of lethality.
	“Operation POLECAT used Sangheili contacts and one trusted Sangheili crew on an ex-Covenant destroyer to hunt down a remote world where the Prophets had allegedly kept their Sharquoi hive,” Melody said. “A handful of Sharquoi were found there. One was accidentally released while ONI personnel were trying to access the site’s terminal data.”
	The Sharquoi’s head twisted. The eyelike bump on its head thrummed, probing and searching the air around it. It seemed to notice the weapons aimed at it and bellowed. There may have been words in some strange alien tongue, but they were washed away by the immediate chattering of bullets as the ODSTs opened fire.
	The creature roared and leapt into the air, shattering any assumptions that it was slow and lumbering. The ODST’s camera feed struggled to follow it as it landed in the middle of the column of shock troopers. Melody paused the footage just as the Sharquoi lifted up an ODST by his leg and smashed him between two fists, armor disintegrating under the impact.
	“One Sharquoi alone killed fifty ODSTs during this operation. Later, the hive was nuked from orbit and then glassed by the Sangheili ship for good measure,” Melody said. “They’re not something anyone at ONI wanted to get out.”

Halo: Envoy Ch 13