The Thursday War

by Karen Traviss

  “I already did that.”

  She didn’t take the conversational bait and Vaz found himself wondering if he could pull the trigger on Staffan Sentzke. Staffan needed to know he’d been right, and that his kid had survived. He had to be told how she’d spent her life and what she did now, because he’d paid a hell of a price for it. But Vaz didn’t know if that would give him closure. It might just make him worse.

  I’d go crazy. I know I would. No wonder the colonies hated us. If all this ever goes public, the ones that are still left are going to hate us even more.

  Osman stuck her head into the crew bay. “Just follow the Elite escort and don’t let the bastards provoke you, okay? Vaz, Devereaux—you’ve been there before. Relax. And remember to launch those comms drones, because that’s our only chance to monitor voice traffic down there.”

  “We’re very relaxed, ma’am,” Mal said. “But I hope you declined the civic reception and parade.”

  “I’ll keep trying ‘Telcam. Remember what I said about cultural sensitivity and don’t go crashing around the temple.”

  Just seeing UNSC troops on their patch would offend most Elites. Vaz recalled the reaction to the Arbiter showing up in Kenya for the dedication of the Voi memorial, not exactly a forgive-and-forget moment. Nobody lobbed bricks at him, but the expressions on their faces said they’d have really liked to, given half a chance.

  The hatch closed with a hiss and Devereaux started the launch sequence.

  Head down, find Phillips, bang out. As Mal would say.

  “Head down, find Phillips, bang out,” Mal said.

  “I knew you’d say that.”

  “Well, I always try not to surprise you, Vaz.” Mal jogged him with his elbow. “You think Osman’s going to be all right on her own? It’s a big ship.”

  “I’m still there,” BB said. “Actually, I can deploy Stanley without carbon-based help, thank you.”

  “But who’d keep you entertained?”

  “True. And who’d clean the heads?”

  Vaz ignored the relentless cheeriness. He found himself ignoring the head-up display on his visor and thinking things that he hadn’t realized had ever been in his head. The first was his father, who was a hazy memory anyway. Then it was Huragok. He tried to reconcile the idea of Adj, harmless and friendly as a puppy, and the Covenant doing glassing runs in the colonies. Ah, that was the subconscious connection: glassing. His father had gone to do construction work on a new colony, leaving four-year-old Vaz with Grandmother Beloi, but he never came home. Glassing. And maybe it wasn’t Adj’s handiwork—how long did Huragok live, anyway?—but somewhere down the line, teams of Engineers just like him maintained and upgraded those plasma weapons.

  Guilt. Vaz had always agonized over the boundaries of guilt and responsibility. Cute or not, Huragok were machines designed to do the job, just like BB. Vaz spent a few more minutes trying to work out if hard-wired reactions got humans and hinge-heads off the hook, too, but decided that anything that was aware of its actions was capable of making choices about them.

  I think too much.

  I should have shot Halsey. Shoved her out of an airlock.

  Do we really want to solve our problems, or just go through the motions? Spenser’s worried about Venezia getting hold of Covenant ships. How about us?

  “If we really want to stop the Elites,” he said to nobody in particular, “why don’t we concentrate on acquiring a hinge-head ship and just glass Sanghelios? Finish them once and for all.”

  The silence around him made him wonder why he’d said it. He really was thinking aloud.

  “Rules of engagement,” Naomi said. “Peace treaties.”

  “Is there a law against it? A proper law, not UNSC regulations.”

  “Genocide. Killing civilians.”

  “Okay, but where did all the capital ships go? Who’s got those plasma weapons now?”

  The silence descended again. BB was unusually quiet. Vaz didn’t think he’d said anything shocking. Hinge-heads were perfectly okay with their own ethnic cleansing, and he couldn’t recall any war where one side had been shamed into behaving nicely because the other side was more civilized.

  “I believe there’s an ongoing plan to find and decommission those vessels,” BB said at last. “One of Infinity’s planned tasks.”

  But save one for us, though. Vaz was damn sure that Parangosky was thinking that way as well. Even if everybody else had been too worried about losing the war to think ahead, Parangosky would have had a plan for every outcome. It was early days yet, just months into the ceasefire.

  Mal leaned close to him like he was about to whisper, even though everyone could hear perfectly well on the helmet comms.

  “See, this is nature’s way of protecting us from brain strain,” he said. “Just when you start to overheat about the stupid politics that got you here, some bastard shoots at you, and then your brain’s fully occupied with shooting back, saving your own arse, and saving your mate’s. Simple.”

  Devereaux cut in on the circuit. “I’m all for glassing, Vaz. I don’t want to be the most ethical corpse in the morgue.”

  Tart-Cart’s deck vibrated gently under Vaz’s boots. He shifted his focus back to his helmet display to watch the icons moving around as the dropship closed on the rendezvous coordinates where the Arbiter’s escort was already waiting, a small red dot that normally meant be my guest, blow it up. Most Sangheili ships still showed up as hostiles on the system. Judging by the fact that they hadn’t given Devereaux a map of the landing pad and left her to it, the suspicion was mutual.

  “Hey, folks, it’s him,” Devereaux said. “He’s speaking English. Switching to voice.”

  “Human vessel, this is your escort. Respond.”

  “I hear you, Sanghelios. Give me your instructions.”

  “Proceed to the coordinates I am transmitting now. Do not deviate.”

  “Understood. We’re just going to look for our comrade and stay out of your way.”

  “I meant do not deviate because we are under attack from traitors.”

  “We’ll be careful. Thank you.”

  So the rebellion was escalating. Well, the more the Arbiter had on his plate, the more leeway that gave the squad. Vaz shut his eyes and tried to picture the pilot, but got a flashback of Jul ‘Mdama a fraction before the hinge-head knocked him across Stanley’s holding cell and nearly broke his neck.

  Devereaux switched the comms back to cockpit-only. Vaz watched the pinpoint blue light wink out in his HUD. Bastards, all of them. One of his chrono displays was counting down, minutes and seconds: in twenty minutes, they’d be entering the atmosphere.

  “Do you mind if I wander around your sensors, Devereaux?” BB asked. “I’ve sent a monitoring package over the comms. But I like to ask.”

  “You’re a gentleman. Knock yourself out.”

  Naomi didn’t move a muscle. Vaz wondered what it felt like to have BB plugged in to your brain and also doing that stuff, all this piggybacking and splitting and infiltration. Whatever it was, the Spartan wasn’t reacting.

  “Oh, very sloppy…,” BB murmured. “You can tell they left the technical work to the hired help.”

  “What is it, BB?” Vaz asked.

  “I’ll show you. Brace brace brace. Hah.”

  “Come on, don’t—” But that was as far as Vaz got. An explosion filled his HUD, white-hot, dying instantly into orange flame and black smoke. He flinched. If he hadn’t been strapped in, he’d have lifted clear off the seat. Then the lack of sound registered on him and the smoke began to clear from the image projected inside his visor. He was looking down on a Sangheili city from what would have been a traffic cam on Earth, and there were palls of smoke rising in the distance. The image then swung around and focused somewhere else. So, not a static surveillance device, then. “What the hell’s that? Ontom?”

  “Whoa,” Mal said. “Don’t bugger about with the HUD feeds, BB. Now I’ve got to change my chuddies.”

  “Li
ve from glorious downtown Vadam,” BB said. The image shrank to a tiny icon and minimized to the right-hand margin of Vaz’s display. He tried to follow it. “I think that’s a feed from an artillery position. Sorry about loosening the old sphincters, Staff. Exciting, isn’t it?”

  “Not if you’re the Arbiter.”

  “Okay, I’m going to try jumping to Ontom air traffic control as soon as you make contact, so I can find me. Then I can trace Phillips.”

  Vaz couldn’t see any of the viewscreens from where he was sitting even if he’d had his eyes open. Mentally, he was now back in his drop pod, a powered coffin of a machine that would dump him on a planet with the minimum of ceremony and spit him out at the feet of the enemy. The ODST life wasn’t for the claustrophobic. But this was how he prepped for landing and it was a hard habit to break. He could convince himself that he didn’t have a few inches of clearance in front of his face. He could tell himself that it was just his eyelids, and he had all the space in the world. His body was telling him to fight, coiling his spring more tightly.

  No. Calm. Nonconfrontational. Don’t stare them out. Hide the hate.

  The vibration changed to a faint shudder. Tart-Cart had entered the atmosphere. They would land in a civilized fashion, and everyone would leave the diplomacy to Mal, backed up by BB’s linguistic support. Vaz was dying to see how the hinge-heads reacted when Naomi stepped out and looked them in the eye, though.

  “We’re coming in very high,” Devereaux said. “He’s worried about ground fire.”

  “What, specifically at us, or general anti-Arbiter mayhem?” Mal asked.

  “I’ll assume both.”

  “Has he told you where you’re parking?”

  “No—wait, here we go. I’m turning for Ontom.”

  Vaz activated the chart display in his HUD before opening his eyes. Now he was looking through the delicate blue mesh of BB’s fly-through, following the contours as Tart-Cart nearly nose-dived down through clouds to pull up in a shallow but very short approach to the shoreline.

  “Never thought I’d be landing here with permission,” Naomi murmured.

  It took Devereaux several minutes to crack the airlock seals once the dropship settled on its dampers. It was only then that Vaz heard sporadic cracking sounds, all too familiar. It was a firefight.

  “Probably just a little local misunderstanding,” BB said. “The good news is that my chart’s spot on.”

  Naomi shouldered her way through the hatch first and Mal scrambled out behind her. Tart-Cart had landed in what looked to Vaz like a factory parking lot on a Sunday, a big expanse of nothing scattered with an odd assortment of Phantoms, Spirits, Revenants, and small, scruffy Spectres and Wraiths. The Arbiter’s pilot was walking toward them and the cracking noise continued, but he didn’t seem bothered by it. He looked much more interested in Naomi.

  She stopped almost nose to nose with him. She was nearly tall enough to do that. The chances of him ever seeing a Spartan before must have been zero, but it was clear he’d heard all about them.

  “You must make your own way now, demon,” he said. It was an oddly quaint thing to call her, and if he meant it as an insult he was going to have to try a lot harder than that. “The temple is through that archway.”

  “I can hear energy weapons,” Mal said. “You want to brief us on anything?”

  “Still some skirmishing,” the pilot said, matter-of-fact, and began walking back to his vessel. “Brutes. Feel free to shoot the traitors. We would have wiped them out sooner, but Ontom is sentimental about its precious buildings.”

  “Wait, are you leaving us here?”

  The pilot shrugged without turning around. “I must return to defend Vadam.”

  Mal watched him go, checked his MA5C, and called Devereaux on the radio. “Dev, did you hear that? You stand by and make bloody sure we can bang out fast.”

  The radio clicked. “I heard, Staff. Good luck.”

  “Call us if you get any trouble.”

  Vaz headed for the archway. Hinge-heads couldn’t make up their minds. One minute they didn’t want humans going anywhere on their own, and the next they didn’t seem remotely interested, not even with a Spartan present. He couldn’t tell whether the Arbiter trusted the squad, thought they were too puny to be trouble, or hadn’t actually been told about Naomi.

  The view through the archway was a big, open space that might have been a plaza or an Elite-sized boulevard. It was definitely a mess, though. Short bolts of light spat one way across the plaza and then the other. Mal knelt slowly on one knee in the opening and sighted up.

  “Well, if this is Florence,” he said, “someone’s trashed the Uffizi gallery.”

  Vaz stared across the big, open plaza. It was a bomb site. Rubble was scattered everywhere. Then something hit the stonework about fifty meters from him and a small cloud of dust plumed in the air. Energy bolts shot out again from a position opposite.

  This was what Vaz was used to. No smiling, no politics, no diplomacy. He hefted his rifle, much happier now. “They never said we’d have to fight our way in.”

  Mal looked around, shrugged, and pointed to the first wall that would give them cover.

  “Details, mate,” he said. Then he sprinted. “Just poxy details.”

  ONIRF TREVELYAN

  Dr. Magnusson kept her word, an unusual thing for a human.

  Jul let the guard unlock the hatch and slide the tray into the opening. He made a point of standing at the other side of the room or sitting on his bunk at mealtimes so that he didn’t appear to be waiting to be fed like some anxious animal. When the outer door of the hatch snapped shut, he counted to ten before wandering slowly across the cell and sliding the inner hatch open.

  On the ledge, two bowls on a metal tray smelled of home.

  Rather than distressing him with the memories it brought back, it simply made him more determined to escape. He took the tray and carried it over to the table. One bowl contained irukan grain and the other stewed meat, probably the one named mutton; unlike the anemic, stringy, white flesh they called chicken, it was closer in flavor to the meat he ate at home, he could digest it without problems, and—so Magnusson had said—it had more of the specific fats that Sangheili appeared to need. But when he scooped a spoonful into his mouth, his life was transformed.

  It was colo meat. It was farmed across Sanghelios. It was delicious.

  And it had to be a trick. Why else would the humans go to so much trouble to keep a prisoner happy?

  Jul hadn’t found a surveillance device in his cell yet, but there had to be one.

  “I am impressed,” he said aloud to whoever might be monitoring him. “The Kig-Yar really will trade anything, won’t they?” He cleared the bowl of meat before he even glanced at the grain. “And let me tell you that this certainly does not taste like chicken.”

  A good meal—a good portion of protein—always boosted his mental processes as well as his morale, and Jul found himself working out how to turn the metal tray into an implement or a weapon. Perhaps that was too obvious. They would know it was missing. What he had to do was escape from his cell, destroy the Huragok before they gave the humans too great a technical advantage, and then escape from this world. The last was least important even if it was what he wanted most.

  He picked up the bowl of irukan and wandered around the cell while he ate it, looking over every panel, every conduit, and every seal. They would be expecting him to try to batter his way out. Osman would have told them how he raged and punched the bulkheads in her ship, and how it took two of their troops and a Spartan to subdue him. Perhaps the best strategy was to gradually give in and find a subtler way to get at the Huragok.

  Where would they be, anyway? How many of them were there? He needed to know these things. He had to destroy all of them, because the creatures were artificial, just like this world, and they could build more of their own kind. But he didn’t know how much time he had. For all he knew it could already be too late.

 
; How can I ask about the Huragok without arousing Magnusson’s suspicion?

  The irukan was really very good. The humans had actually managed to cook it correctly without turning it into gruel. Each grain burst on his tongue just the way it was supposed to.

  They know they can’t beat me into submission. They’re trying to play on my isolation and convince me they mean me no harm. Why? What could I possibly give them?

  He stood at the window watching the activity outside. More prefabricated buildings had sprung up in the last day. This was humanity’s enduring pattern of behavior, to move into new territory that wasn’t theirs, to fill it to overflowing with their buildings, and to strip whatever they could from it.

  What would make them give him access to a Huragok?

  We used to have teams of them. We never took much notice of them. They simply worked, and so did everything they touched.

  Eventually there was a knock at the door. The daily ritual had begun.

  “May I come in, Jul?”

  “Please do, Dr. Magnusson.”

  She entered with her guard and took a few cautious steps inside, clutching her cattle prod, clearly still not convinced that he wouldn’t lash out at her. He stayed at the window, adopting the same casual stance that humans seemed to when they were relaxed. It seemed to work. She glanced at the empty bowls on the table as she passed.

  “And how was the meal?”

  “Excellent. I see you managed to acquire everything.”

  Magnusson smiled without baring her teeth. “Yes, the Kig-Yar can be obliging for the right price. Let me know if the grain upsets your stomach.”

  “I’ve never had ill effects from irukan.” Jul carried on with the polite, less confrontational approach. This ONI group believed they could break anyone and probably thought he was equally susceptible. So he would use that human arrogance against them. “What’s happening on Sanghelios?”

  “More fighting. The revolution has begun. Again.”

  “That’s what you wanted. You wanted the Arbiter overthrown.”

  Magnusson raised her shoulders and dropped them. Jul found that shrugging gesture confusing, because it could mean too many things. “We thought ‘Telcam was more likely to stay away from humanity. But now that’s irrelevant. Capability matters more than intent. I think I might have said that before.”