The Thursday War

by Karen Traviss

  “Devereaux here, guys,” said a voice in his earpiece. “I need you both back here pronto. Osman’s banging out.”

  Mal’s head jerked around. “What’s the problem?”

  “We’ve got an incident on Sanghelios. We’ve lost contact with Phillips.”

  “Christ, that’s all we need. Is this going to be an extraction?”

  “Possibly. Now means now, Mal. Move it.”

  Spenser watched the exchange with mild interest, unable to hear the other side of the conversation. “Is that Oz?”

  “Devereaux,” Mal said. “Change of plan. We need to get back to the ship.”

  “Well, I’d better drop you off, then, hadn’t I? Spenser Cabs. We never close.” Spenser began switching off the various screens and monitors in the shuttered basement. He didn’t ask for details. “When are you coming back?”

  “I’ll tell you when they tell us.”

  “Never mind. I’ll keep the scumbags warm while you’re gone.”

  Spenser had a hell of a lot of security devices to activate before he finally locked the front door behind him. There was no such thing in New Tyne as neighbors who minded their own business. Vaz slid into the backseat of the pickup and tried to look normal for Venezia, which actually seemed easier than fitting in on Earth. Everybody here looked what Mal called dodgy, so Vaz felt that the scar across his jaw came in handy. Nobody would work out that he got it trying to tackle a hinge-head. It looked like the outcome of a bar brawl with a knife. He hoped it would deter the curious.

  “Do me a favor, Mike.” Mal slid into the passenger seat with his carbine half-hidden under his jacket, finger inside the trigger guard. “Hang fire on Sentzke until we get back.”

  “Wouldn’t dream of shooting him without your permission.”

  “Seriously. This is going to be awkward.”

  “I’ll bet.”

  Spenser started the engine and headed for the highway. The ancient Warthog eased into the traffic, weaving slowly around trucks until it pulled up at the stoplight in the city center.

  Vaz risked looking at the vehicle idling in the next lane. The driver was a Kig-Yar. The assortment of species living side by side on Venezia was the only sign that this wasn’t a regular colony, not that Vaz had ever seen one of those. By the time he got to a colony world, it was usually smoking ruins or a glassy sheet of vitrified soil. The war with the Covenant had started long before he’d enlisted, and he was an Earth boy.

  “Ugly bastards,” Mal muttered. The Kig-Yar turned its malevolent heron gaze toward him like it had heard him, but it was just checking the traffic. “You know how long it took me to get the smell off my hands the last time I picked up a dead one?”

  “You know how long it took me to build up a working relationship with the ones you shot?”

  “Sorry about that.”

  “They’ve still got a mev-ut out on you two for that. You know what that is, I hope.”

  “Yeah, Phillips did explain. A cash bonus for bringing back our skulls and cervical vertebrae. We’re collector’s items.”

  Mal must have been more worried about Phillips than Vaz thought. Silence meant he was thinking about a bad situation: swaggering humor meant he was trying not to think about it. Phillips was a clever guy with plenty of guts, but he wasn’t trained for these kinds of situations, and Vaz could only imagine what a hinge-head could beat out of him given enough time and a big stick.

  But they don’t trust us anyway. You can’t suddenly start trusting an enemy after you’ve been at war for that long. No, it’s not about exposing ONI. It’s what they’ll do to Phillips.

  Phillips had a fragment of BB with him, at least, and BB could always think his way out of a tight spot. But the fragment had orders to activate a lethal injection if Phillips found himself with no other way out. Vaz had lost a lot of comrades over the years and had always suspected that one day his last bullet might be best saved for himself, but the thought of having to put a buddy out of his misery was more than he could cope with right then. Maybe BB would find it easier.

  “You okay, Vaz?” Spenser asked. “You don’t look too happy.”

  “This is Russian elation,” Vaz said. “You should see me when I’m miserable.”

  Spenser made a noise in his throat that might have been a laugh. There was a trick to driving a ’hog in a don’t-mind-me kind of way and he seemed to have it. Vaz noted that the old pickup variant had exactly the same degree of denting and neglect that most of the other vehicles here did, no more and no less, so that it simply merged into the cityscape. Spenser was driving briskly, not breakneck fast but not hanging about either, and clearly watching everything around him without looking as if he was staring at anything at all. He simply moved his gaze, casually scanning from side to side and occasionally checking in the mirrors, making it look perfectly normal. Vaz noted the technique. He decided he might need it one day. Spenser had probably been a spook for thirty years, and a guy didn’t get to survive covert operations behind enemy lines for that long without exceptional skills.

  Am I ever going to get used to this kind of war?

  Spenser had known a time when the only enemy was other humans. Vaz hadn’t. Neither had Mal. Vaz wondered how hard it would be to fire on his own species.

  The buildings thinned out from offices and stores to houses, and then melted into open land. Less than thirty minutes after receiving the recall they were grinding through scrubland on a dirt road, heading for the RV with Devereaux. The ONI dropship—not just any old Pelican, but a stealth variant—was laid up in a wooded gorge, out of sight of passing ships or vehicles. Stealth didn’t mean invisible to the naked eye. Mal fiddled with his radio and Vaz caught a microburst of signal in his earpiece. Not that Devereaux needed a signal to start the engines: Vaz could already hear the faint whine of drives even before Spenser came to a halt.

  Spenser stopped under the cover of trees. He had to live here, after all. “I’ll wait until you’re clear,” he said. “Just in case.”

  Mal slapped him on the shoulder and jumped down from the passenger seat without a word. Vaz hadn’t even secured the dropship’s door before Devereaux started to lift. She skimmed along the top of the gorge, putting as much distance between herself and New Tyne as possible before she had to hit the throttle and make the final fast climb out of the atmosphere. Vaz watched tops of trees streak past the cockpit windshield, worryingly close.

  Mal stuck his head through the cockpit hatch, squeezing Vaz out of the way. “You got a sitrep, Dev? How bad is it?”

  “How bad do you want? Phillips ran into ‘Telcam, and ‘Telcam asked him what he knew about Jul ‘Mdama.”

  “Oh, Christ. So our cover’s blown.”

  “No idea. There was an explosion, and the last thing Osman heard over the radio was ‘Telcam telling Phillips that it wasn’t them, whatever that means.” Devereaux paused and the dropship suddenly shot up almost vertically, making Vaz grab for a handrail. He should have buckled in. “Then she lost the signal.”

  That was what came of playing a double game—a treble game, in fact, smiling at the Arbiter while arming the religious zealots who wanted to overthrow him, as well as kidnapping one of the rebels who happened to get in the way. Well, ONI had certainly succeeded in keeping Sanghelios off balance. That was what Parangosky wanted: to kick the hinge-heads while they were down, to kick them so hard that they could never get up and bother Earth again. Vaz didn’t have a problem with that. He was just finding it tangled.

  The patch of sky framed in the cockpit screen faded from blue to violet to black. They were clear of the planet now. Devereaux turned the shuttle over to the onboard AI with a tap on the console. She didn’t look back over her seat.

  “He’ll be okay, Dev,” Mal said.

  She sounded a little hoarse. “Yeah.”

  Her tone was resigned. Vaz realized he hadn’t picked up something that Mal already had. So Devereaux was fond of Phillips. It wasn’t until Vaz heard that slight crack in her vo
ice that he realized it was more than a comradely concern for his safety.

  “I mean it, Lian.” Mal’s voice dropped to firm, quiet reassurance, the first time Vaz had heard him call Devereaux by her actual name. There was a rock-solid fatherly certainty about him now. “He’ll make it. He can talk his way out of anything in three alien languages. Chin up, kid.”

  Devereaux just nodded. Somewhere in the glittering black void, the ONI corvette Port Stanley lurked with an impatient captain, a Spartan who was about to get more bad news after a very bad week, and an AI who’d lost part of himself along with Phillips. On the console, the navigation plot showed the ship as a delicate green mesh of light.

  “So how was your day?” Devereaux seemed to be making an effort to be her chirpy self again. “Track down any bad guys?”

  It was hard to answer. As Kilo-Five’s commanding officer, Osman should have been told first, but then Naomi had the moral right to know before anyone else. On the other hand, Devereaux was ODST, 10th battalion, one of their own, and Vaz didn’t like keeping fellow marines in the dark even for a few hours. He struggled with the news. Mal didn’t step in to help him out.

  “We did,” Vaz said at last. “And it’s complicated.”

  HANGAR DECK, UNSC PORT STANLEY: VENEZIA ORBIT

  Pain was a strange sensation when you didn’t have a body.

  BB was an entity of pure thought, beyond the reach of aches and injuries, but now he realized what a traumatic amputation felt like. He’d been integrated with his fragment while it was stored in Phillips’s radio cam. Then there’d been an explosion. The link had been cut. And it hurt.

  That was the only way he could describe it. It was the interruption of his thought processes, unpleasant, disorienting, and lingering. He felt something of him was missing and gone forever.

  But I’m used to splitting off fragments and closing contact with them. I’ve got a fragment wandering around Bravo-6 in Sydney, too, and I’m out of touch with that all the time. I could split off a dozen more, no problem. This feels different.

  He’d been inserted into Naomi’s neural implant just once, plugged into her nervous system in combat, so he knew what stress and adrenaline felt like to a human. Perhaps that was the cause of this. He was identifying too much with flesh and blood. His existence, his body, was input and data: suddenly pulling the plug was like having a chunk of him ripped away, leaving him in shock.

  And thought is all I am. It’s my blood. Data is my existence, like breathing. Without it, I’m dead.

  It was also worrying to imagine what might have shut down the radio. Just a blast? Surely not. ONI kit was far more robust than that. Radios even went on functioning when their owner stepped on a mine.

  Well, there’s only one way to find out …

  BB was spread around Port Stanley’s systems, performing billions of operations a second and monitoring events light-years beyond the ship. Each sensor was his eyes, ears, nose, and fingertips, but he could detect and interpret inputs far beyond a human’s senses. He knew more than any individual man ever would. Uncertainty was a new and disturbing experience for him.

  Curiosity is wonderful. Ignorance … isn’t.

  “Tart-Cart to Port Stanley—put the kettle on, BB. ETA four minutes.” That was Devereaux, forcing cheerfulness but betrayed by the slight rise in the pitch of her voice. BB knew the dropship’s position to ten centimeters and exactly when he’d need to seal the interior bulkheads and activate the hangar doors. He wasn’t the only one struggling, then. “Any news?”

  “No.” BB could hear a conversation going on behind Devereaux, just broken snatches while she was transmitting, and too quiet for human ears to pick up. “Contacting the Arbiter’s people requires some diplomacy.”

  “Oh,” Devereaux said.

  Mal and Vaz were arguing. BB could detect the changes in frequency that indicated clenched jaw muscles and more rapid breathing. BB caught half a phrase from Vaz, his Russian accent more pronounced, which meant he was angry: —mi, then I will. “Okay, then. Tart-Cart out.”

  BB was linked only to the dropship’s onboard nav now, talking machine to machine. While he monitored and adjusted its flight path, he speculated on what the rest of that overheard sentence was, and what had preceded it.

  Mi. Nao … mi. “Then I will” … usually preceded by “If you don’t.”

  So if Mal didn’t do something regarding Naomi, then Vaz would. Do what? Ask her something, tell her something, give her something? The last crisis before the Venezia mission was unsealing Naomi’s personnel file—ghastly stuff, details that would disturb any woman, even one who’d been trained and engineered to cope with traumas that would floor a regular human. It had to be something left over from that. Naomi had asked Vaz to read her file and break the bad news to her, so he was best placed to make the decision on what to tell her and when. Yes, that was what it was all about. BB decided to keep an eye on things and make sure everyone was okay—or as okay as they could be under the circumstances.

  It was probably an authority thing. Mal was a staff sergeant; Vaz was a corporal. Vaz also had an inflexible moral streak, the sort that got him into arguments in a political world full of very gray areas.

  I wonder if I’ll ever regret stopping him from shooting Halsey?

  The bulkhead warning lights flashed, the seals engaged, and the aft section of the hangar opened to the vacuum as the dropship maneuvered into position. Voice comms were still disabled. Ah, so they were still arguing. They knew BB heard and saw everything. That was why they’d once resorted to hiding under a cargo crate and communicating in silence. He thought they’d got over that by now and had started to trust him, so this had to be rather more serious.

  “Come along, chop chop,” BB said. “Osman’s waiting to slip. We don’t want poor Phillips to have to sit through the Arbiter’s home movies any longer than he has to, do we?”

  Tart-Cart powered down. The deck clamps snapped into place on her landing gear and the hangar repressurized as the doors sealed shut. The starboard side hatch opened. BB caught the tail end of the argument before the ODSTs jumped out.

  “It’s got to be her first,” Mal said.

  “And what if she finds out? This is about trust.”

  “And what if she goes mental about it? Did you consider that?”

  “Then let her go mental.”

  “This is what OPs are for.”

  Devereaux interrupted. “Hey, how about buttoning it?”

  The three ODSTs walked away from Tart-Cart with their jaws set. BB projected his blue-lit hologram right in front of them as they jogged up to the metal steps leading to the gantry. He manifested as a box, plain and unadorned, because that was how he thought of himself: not a surrogate human, but a black box, a complex and unknowable machine behind a featureless facade.

  “Everything all right?” he asked. Because it’s not all right with me. He wasn’t used to being cut out of the comms loops on missions, and now there were two blank spots in a memory that was built to know and retain everything. “You need a shave.”

  Mal glanced at Devereaux. “Yeah, Dev, ditch the mustache. Come on, BB. Out of the way.”

  “I’ve missed you, too.”

  Mal seemed anxious to change the subject. Vaz went silent, jaw twitching with unspoken objections. BB drifted ahead of them as they clattered along the passages to the bridge.

  “What happened to your fragment?” Mal asked.

  “I don’t know. I went down at the same time Phillips did.”

  “You don’t sound right, BB.”

  “It’s not a pleasant sensation.”

  Mal slowed down and looked at him as he might have looked at Vaz. Organics needed to make eye contact. There were times when BB had considered relenting and projecting some kind of basic face, eyes and a mouth at least, to make humans more comfortable. But that wasn’t who he was, and right now he felt a desperate urge to cling to his own sense of self. The squad had managed to cope with his box facade so fa
r.

  “Did it hurt?” Mal asked.

  That was perceptive of him. “Yes.”

  “You’re an honorary ODST, then. You’ve got a scar—you’re in. Vaz has got one, Dev’s got one, I’ve got one…”

  “Yeah, he was shot in his ass while he was talking through it,” Devereaux said. “Come on, we should be worrying about Phillips.”

  That was exactly what they all seemed to be doing in that mock-aggressive ODST sort of way. Osman was on the bridge with Naomi, leaning back in her seat with her fingers digging into the armrests in anticipation of the jump into slipspace. She hated it. Naomi sat at the nav console in her UNSC fatigues, a monument to stoic indifference. It didn’t fool anyone and BB suspected she knew that all too well.

  Osman glanced over her shoulder. “Okay, time to burn and turn. BB, spin us up. How did it go, Staff?”

  “We’ll brief you when you’ve got five minutes, ma’am,” Mal said, settling into his seat for the jump. Vaz shot him a slow I’ll-get-you-for-that look. “So what’s the plan?”

  “Well, by the time we reach Sanghelios, Phillips might have surfaced again. But let’s assume he hasn’t. It might not be easy to get down to the surface and find him, but I’d rather be there than here.”

  “We’re up for anything, ma’am.”

  “I know. I’ve asked the Admiral to enlist Hood’s help, too.” Osman shut her eyes for a moment. It was probably more about steeling her stomach for the jump than despairing about things going wrong. “We’re giving them enough time to realize he’s in trouble before we tell them we’ve noticed. Not that the Arbiter won’t assume we’ve got our ways and means to stay in touch with him.”

  BB was reaching the end of the countdown. He ran a last-minute comms scan to make sure there were no messages waiting before the jump put Stanley out of comms contact, and took a sitrep from his fragment in Bravo-6, UNSC’s Sydney headquarters. It was keeping an eye on the other ONI officers and AIs at HQ. Everyone knew by now that Osman was Parangosky’s choice to succeed her when she finally retired as CINCONI, but that didn’t stop rivals jockeying pointlessly for position while her back was turned. BB kept watch.