The Thursday War

by Karen Traviss

  A slim spire next to the river took a direct hit and crumbled in slow motion, collapsing a layer at a time into the water below. More smoke had appeared on the skyline, reaching up to the clouds as if someone had thrown down a coil of dirty rope from the heavens. The Arbiter was under attack.

  This was what Jul had wanted. Raia hoped that wherever he was, he would think it was worth the price.

  “Take us in closer, Buran, and target Vadam keep,” ‘Telcam said. “But nobody is to cause damage to Forerunner relics, even indirectly.”

  Buran and a few of the other males turned to look at the monk in badly disguised disbelief.

  “That might not be possible, brother,” Buran said. “And what if ‘Vadam’s forces shelter in them?”

  “Then we must find another way,” ‘Telcam said. “Because the gods are our reason for fighting.”

  CHAPTER

  FIVE

  YOU CAN WIN WARS ANY NUMBER OF WAYS. YOU CAN CARPET BOMB, OR SEND IN GROUND TROOPS, OR SHELL A CITY, OR DETONATE A NUKE. YOU CAN LAY SIEGE, CUT OFF WATER AND POWER, OR BLOCKADE THEIR PORTS. BUT THERE’S ONE UNIVERSAL ACHILLES’ HEEL THAT EVERY ORGANISM HAS. IF THEY CAN’T GROW FOOD, OR CAN’T EAT WHAT THEY’VE GOT, THEY DIE. IT BEATS A SHOOTING WAR.

  (DR. IRENA MAGNUSSON, ONI RESEARCH FACILITY TREVELYAN)

  TEMPLE OF THE ABIDING TRUTH, ONTOM

  “I’ll be gone for a few hours,” Phillips said to Olar. He’d stuffed what he could into a bundle made from a knotted tunic and half-draped his jacket over it in case the Sangheili started asking awkward questions. “I’ve helped myself to some rations. I won’t get lost.”

  Olar seemed more interested in what was happening outside. A couple of his comrades came running back shouting that more armed Brutes had landed and that there was a stand-off in the plaza.

  “Those tunnels run for many, many spans, right across the island,” he said, not paying attention. “It’s a labyrinth. Don’t expect me to come and rescue you. And don’t go down the walled-off tunnels. It’s dangerous.”

  Dangerous. Right. There was a firefight going on outside and the coup had started. Phillips thought an unstable tunnel was probably the least of his problems. “I’ll be careful,” he said. He headed into the network of passages again, confident that he knew the route to the farthest point he’d mapped and that he could find his way back here. “Don’t worry about me.”

  So the passages run for kilometers, do they? Well, there’s definitely got to be a back door or two, then.

  He ran his fingertips along the wall as he walked, feeling for the weird barrier that covered some of the cartouches. Perhaps they weren’t safety covers at all. Maybe this was a museum and always had been, and the barriers were there to stop sticky fingers from messing up the ancient exhibits. But that didn’t mean they were useless. There was information on them, and all information was valuable sooner or later.

  He kept walking and sniffed the air from time to time. There was no mustiness, no dampness, nothing at all to indicate that he was a long way underground and getting farther from the entrance with every step. Now he’d been walking for about thirty minutes, and he couldn’t hear a damn thing other than his own breathing. He would have kept on walking but BB stopped him.

  “This is an area we haven’t catalogued, Professor,” the not-quite-BB said. “I’ll start recording.”

  Phillips cast around. It was all starting to look the same to him, a monotonous perfection of cream and taupe stonework, punctuated by crisply carved symbols every few meters and the string of scruffy lights. He looked at his datapad again: left, left, right, straight ahead, left. He made sure he was recording everything by hand, not just relying on BB, if this husk of the AI could be relied upon at all. He found himself starting to treat BB like a senile relative.

  “Adj would probably be able to read all this,” Phillips said, just by way of conversation.

  “Who’s Adj?”

  Oh, damn. He’s erased data that could compromise us. Yeah, we didn’t want the Sangheili to know we hijacked their Engineer. “Never mind. Just someone I knew.”

  “Dr. Halsey has made some errors in her translations, I believe, but I’m correcting them.”

  “Can’t wait to see you tell her that.”

  “I’ll have difficulty doing that, Professor, because she died in the assault on Reach.”

  Phillips marveled at the programming that decided which parts of BB’s memory to wipe and which to keep. His selective amnesia was both impressive and confusing.

  “Yeah, so she did,” Phillips said. “You were saying something about errors.”

  “The elements of the symbols that she interpreted as nouns. Some of them are actually adjectives, and that changes the meaning somewhat.”

  “Show me.”

  “You’re a linguist, aren’t you, Professor?”

  There was no sarcasm. BB didn’t remember anything that was classified. Maybe that meant he didn’t know they’d been buddies. So? I’m chummy with a computer. What’s wrong with that? He really does have a personality. He’s real. When BB got himself back together again and did that reintegration thing, perhaps they’d have something to laugh about. Phillips hoped so.

  “I’m a xenoanthropologist specializing in languages,” he said. “I hold the Arkell Chair at Wheatley University, Sydney.”

  “Then you’ll understand this. This language is a blend of phonetics and ideographs. It also appears to have pointing to indicate vowels, like Semitic languages. The trick is working out which elements are phonetic and which are ideographic. I’m using the pointing to differentiate, although that might be wholly misleading.”

  This was Phillips’s bread and butter, his life’s work. However fond as he was of the old BB, however sorry he felt for him right now, he was damned if he’d be beaten at his specialty by a glorified personal organizer. He rested his arm on the wall and held the datapad’s light at an angle to throw a stronger shadow, scrutinizing the symbols. There was no sign of a barrier. That didn’t mean it wasn’t there.

  “So what do you think this one says?”

  BB didn’t respond for a few seconds. Given the processing speed of an AI, even one in this state, that was the equivalent of putting Phillips on hold and going away for the weekend.

  “If I went by Halsey’s lexicon, then this symbol here refers to shield world zero zero six. I think the symbol on the end is sarcophagus.”

  “Wow.” Phillips scanned the panel, running his forefinger down the surface. Yes, there was something preventing him from touching the stone itself. “Zero zero six is called Onyx. Well, there had to be more than one bomb shelter, right? Which symbol?”

  “Down … down … stop. That one.”

  Phillips studied it, searching for some resonance. He really had to get up to speed with this alphabet. He thought he could see a recurring element in each symbol below the one that BB had identified as Onyx.

  “Does that mean these are all shield worlds?”

  “I believe so. We know of many, and different kinds.”

  “So … what is this? A commemorative plaque? A map?”

  “I can’t translate the symbol at the start of each line.”

  “Okay, if that bit is shield or shield world, and that element is the number, is the thing here just decorative?”

  “The Onyx one repeats three lines down.”

  Now that was interesting: there were eight lines with three smaller symbols next to each—the shield element, a symbol unique to the line, and a third symbol. Five bore one design and two another, and Onyx appeared to be one of those two.

  “It might indicate a general location, because I can’t see any numerical coordinates,” BB said. “But we don’t know if the Forerunners thought in terms of star systems, quadrants, or even separate galaxies.”

  Phillips sketched the cartouche even though he didn’t need to with his datapad and BB recording. This was fascinating. He wanted to feel the language, to understand how the shapes were formed, to kn
ow how Forerunners had felt when they were writing. The sense of connection was exhilarating. He realized he was breathing faster and his back itched with sweat.

  “Okay, let’s see what else we can find.” He was in deep shit but it almost didn’t matter while he was having this extraordinary cultural adventure. “Onward and upward.”

  BB had no choice about moving on. Phillips walked and he was dragged along with him. The next section of wall turned a corner to the right and there were no more inscriptions for another five minutes. How far had they come now? Phillips started calculating his pace and working it out, but it just didn’t matter now. He was following a trail, excited as a kid.

  I could be dead tomorrow. And all I care about is this.

  “This is fun, BB,” he said. “Knowledge. You like finding things out, don’t you? That’s what drives you. Me too.”

  “May I ask you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “We know one another better than I recall, don’t we?”

  “Actually, yes.” Phillips dithered on the edge of explaining in case it triggered memories that BB wasn’t supposed to retrieve now. He felt along the wall like a blind man, willing his fingertips to hit that slightly raised edge that wasn’t there but felt like … fur. That was it: fur. “You’re a fragment of yourself, and back where we came from, we’re pretty good buddies. You’ll see.”

  “Ah.”

  “Ohhh…” Phillips touched that velvet-pile fur again, but he couldn’t see anything on the wall. “Here we go.”

  This time it seemed to go on for a good couple of meters and he thought he was walking into a dead end, but when he reached it, it was just another corner. Then something touched his face and he batted it away instinctively. His brain said cobwebs, spiders. But there was nothing he could see, nothing at all. That was the weirdest thing about this place: the passages were as clean as if they were swept daily. He couldn’t imagine the Sangheili doing that. He’d been here a couple of days and he’d never seen them doing any housework beyond keeping the main chamber and living areas clean and tidy.

  “I keep picking up interference,” BB said. “But it’s stopped now.”

  To Phillips, interference meant comms. For a second he thought the link with Port Stanley had started working again, and he pressed the radio. But there was nothing. He glanced behind him. The passage was lit, but he couldn’t see the jury-rigged lights. He checked his watch. They’d been gone an hour and a half.

  “You want to press on, BB?”

  “Yes, Professor.”

  “You know you’re not normally this deferential to me.”

  “I have to take your word for that. Tell me, do I have more functions than this?”

  “Functions?” It was upsetting, even pitiful. “Jesus H. Christ, BB, you’re probably the most intelligent entity in UNSC, you perform a zillion processes a second, and you can run entire warships single-handed. Yes, I’d say you have a lot more functions. Just relax and you’ll be your old self before too long.”

  “Thank you,” BB said. “That’s comforting. Something about the gaps in my mind is becoming very distressing.”

  Phillips knew he had to knock that on the head before it turned into the only thing that BB could think about. Rampancy. AIs can think themselves to death. Literally. Phillips needed him working, however limited, but his instinct said to take care of a buddy. “BB, you’re an intelligence agent. A spy. Whatever’s been turned off in your brain is just temporary, to protect both of us.”

  “Are you telling me the truth?”

  “Yes. Trust me.”

  “Why?”

  “Because I’m your friend.”

  BB didn’t respond. Phillips carried on walking and let him think it over a few million times. The floor felt different beneath the soles of his boots, almost carpeted, but it was still a continuous run of immaculately faced, precisely laid flagstones, and he moved on methodically looking from side to side for more cartouches.

  “Jackpot,” he said. There it was, the first panel he’d seen for ages. “I hope it’s a sign for the bathrooms. I need to pump ship, as Mal would say.”

  And the old BB would have said how very nautical, but this one didn’t even pass comment. Phillips compared this cartouche with his hand-drawn notes. It was much starker than the previous one—six symbols of one design, one of another, with a smaller nonrepeating symbol beside each and two separate lines that could have been headers. He was certain he’d seen these before, or at least part of them. He was still looking through his notes when BB spoke.

  “The top line says access, or pathway, or connection,” he said. “The row beneath that—I’m uncertain. But the lines below that all contain the word for circle. Loop. Ring.”

  “Halos. Please tell me it’s Halos.” Everyone thought there were more out there, on standby to be activated and wipe out all life, but finding and decommissioning them was another matter. “With locations.”

  “It could well be, but I can’t see any coordinates. Just ordinal numbers. And something that might be relative bearings.”

  “So … one through seven, yes?”

  “Correct.”

  “Why the symbols? Why are there two sets of symbols?”

  “Location, perhaps, and the assumption of the person who created this was that others knew what that symbol was shorthand for. Or status.”

  “You mean status status, or black, red, amber status? Like the security alert escalation?”

  “I mean on or off, locked or unlocked, up or down—”

  And then it hit Phillips right between the eyes. Status. One of the Halo rings had been destroyed.

  He counted again, comparing the shapes. No, there are six like this, one like that. Did I remember right?

  But these symbols must have been here for thousands of years. They were carved into the stone. How could they mean what he thought they did? How could they be indicators of functioning and nonfunctioning Halos when one of them had only been deactivated in the last year?

  “Sorry, I was getting too excited,” Phillips said. “I really thought this might be a status panel, but it’s just stone.”

  He reached out to touch the symbols, the ones he now thought of as on-off switches. The layer that he could feel and but not see yielded and he found his fingertips against the intricately detailed shape. He could feel it.

  “I wouldn’t touch that if I were you, Professor,” BB said.

  Phillips stepped back. “Yeah, if that was a big red button, I might have wiped out half of the galactic core.”

  “Well, you’ve activated something. Look.”

  Phillips felt his stomach knot. He looked, but he couldn’t see a damn thing except the cartouche. “What?”

  “Look at the symbols at the top. They’ve changed.”

  “They haven’t. It’s just stone.” Phillips looked up at the ceiling and scanned 360 degrees in case he was missing something that BB had detected. “Nothing’s changed.”

  “It has. I can compare every microframe I’ve recorded.” BB was persistent but polite. “I don’t know what the words meant before, but they’ve changed, and now they say to find someone or seek something beyond, or higher, or better. I’m sorry that this is rather vague. Halsey left copious notes and some of them are a little too fulsome and extrapolative.”

  It sounded like a religious text, some self-improving stuff. But this was stone, moving stone, stone that changed while he was standing right in front of it. No, that was impossible. But the Forerunners—if they could bend time and build artificial planets, a bit of conjuring with stone was probably easy-peasy for them.

  What had he triggered? What did he have to strive for or aspire to? He was thinking in puzzle terms and juggling the language when an idea struck him, one that came straight out of the initial question he’d put to BB.

  Black, red, amber status? Like the security alert escalation?

  He was an academic learning to be military intelligence the hard way, and
the way he thought was changing from anthropologist to marine. The cartouche wasn’t telling him to do something spiritually uplifting. It was telling him he had to find someone senior to him.

  Maybe it was like any weapon of mass destruction on Earth. They usually needed more than one person to validate the launch and activate it, just to be on the safe side. Maybe the garrison here hadn’t been trusted to fire Halos on their own. How he’d been able to get the stone to react—and why the Sangheili hadn’t already tried this—wasn’t half as important right then as working out what the hell he’d done.

  “Oh, bugger it, BB,” he said. “I think I might have just primed a Halo.”

  UNSC TART-CART, PREPARING TO ENTER SANGHEILI SPACE

  “So how many fragments have you split off now, BB?” Mal asked. “You’re not going to have a dissociative episode, are you?”

  “Three,” BB said. Vaz thought he sounded irritable. “And no. And stop making Naomi nervous. She hates me being in her neural implant at the best of times.”

  Naomi interrupted on the radio. She sounded as if she was heading their way at a brisk pace. “You know the rules, BB. Do the translating, but don’t mess with my nervous system unless I’m in trouble.”

  “I behaved impeccably last time.”

  “Tourist.”

  “Oh, it’s all bitch, bitch, bitch. You love me really.”

  Vaz looked at Mal and said nothing. Mal just raised his eyebrows. The ODSTs put on their helmets as Naomi thudded into the crew bay like a truck being dropped on the deck, transformed by her Mjolnir armor into an icon of lethal inscrutability. Behind that gold mirrored visor she was probably a long way from inscrutable, but that was one of the comforts of full-face helmets. Nobody could really tell if you were scared, worried, or just checking your pay-slip.

  She settled down in one of the reinforced seats and folded her arms across her chest. “Don’t worry, Vasya, I’m okay,” she said, reading him like a book. Vaz wasn’t sure if she was talking about her father or the fact that she now had a piece of BB on the loose in her brain, ready to enhance her reactions. “Worry about Phillips.”