Evolutions: Essential Tales of the Halo Universe

by Various

  “The Mona Lisa.” And then: “You don’t know, do you? You don’t know.”

  Lopez smiled, which, Benti had told her before, on leave, was grim and not at all reassuring and the main reason men fled at the sight of her, but still she wouldn’t give it up. No way Mr. Doe wouldn’t see his own death there.

  “I don’t know because you’re not telling me. Tell me, and we’ll get you off to the infirmary, and you can sleep.”

  “I would tell you all kinds of things,” Mr. Doe said, stumbling over the words. “If I had anyone left in the world. This is where I’m supposed to say, tell my girl I love her, that sort of thing.” A terrible, pitiless laugh from Mr. Doe, then, that contracted his eyes, his chin. A laugh that convulsed him, brought blood fresh through the bandages. “I know I’m dying. I know I’m dying. But that’s okay.” A clarity in his eyes, despite the kindness of the drugs. “I’m clean. I’m here. I won’t come back. It’s okay. It’s all okay.”

  It surprised Benti when Lopez took his grime-covered, bloody hand. Somehow Benti thought Lopez would pay for that touch. Benti was used to touching people when they were vulnerable, understood what it meant. Lopez really wasn’t. He’d just been this thing that talked before. Now how did Lopez see him?

  “What do you mean, you won’t come back?” Lopez asked.

  Like a thunderbolt, a lightning strike called up unbidden: the shimmering image of the ship’s smart AI, Rebecca, appeared beside them, also kneeling. So sudden that Benti had to suppress a sound of surprise, almost lost her balance, and Lopez pulled away a bit.

  Rebecca was in her warrior avatar, looking like half-Athena, half-Ares, with a feathered Greek headdress and ancient armor. Rebecca looked so good that Benti almost clapped.

  Rebecca asked, imploring almost: “What do you mean you won’t come back? Come back from what? Come back from what?”

  Benti looked through Rebecca to where Lopez knelt, staring wide-eyed at them both. Then realized a moment later, with a fading spike of sadness, that Mr. Doe had gone silent, had become Mr. DOA. Now they’d never learn his name, and all they had was “Mona Lisa,” which might be a ship, a painting, or nothing at all.

  Rebecca made a sound close to exasperation, and winked out. This new AI wasn’t big on niceties like “Hello,” “Good-bye,” and “Incoming!” Not like Chauncey.

  Benti stared down at Mr. Doe. Really, such a waste. Those nice eyes, that strong chin.

  “Come on, all you big strong men,” Benti said. “Help me get him to forensics.” Which was in the infirmary, but Benti didn’t like saying that, since it seemed to mix the living and the dead a little too easily. She also didn’t like telling people she assisted with autopsies, which Mr. Doe definitely required to write the proper ending to his story.

  A slow, sad shuffle then as they took the man’s body out of the landing bay. Mr. Doe seemed both heavier and lighter than before. Clarence seemed to take most of the weight, and didn’t seem to mind.

  When Benti looked back, Lopez was giving a good, hard look to the space that had been occupied by Rebecca’s avatar, like the sarge had been trying not to see through her, but into her.

  >Lopez 0932 hours

  * * *

  By the time she met with Commander Tobias Foucault and Rebecca, Lopez knew this much: nothing that might identify the dead man, not his prison brand, fingerprints, retina scan, DNA, came up on any of the databases aboard the Red Horse. Not that surprising. No way to check against the live databases back home. “Hush-hush,” as MacCraw said.

  They met in one of those featureless rooms adjoining the bridge that smelled like disinfectant. Lopez had wanted Benti there, too, but she was more valuable sitting in on the postmortem.

  Gray walls and plastic chairs that rocked back too far if you tried to slouch. A live image of the empty pod, with MacCraw and some other Marines cleaning up the blood, played across one screen. A video of the Halo artifact prior to Spartan-117 detonating the Pillar of Autumn’s reactor and destroying it played across the other. A blue-green place. Like a delicate, inverse cross-section of Earth. Now: a black-and-brown snake with orange cracks raging across its pieces, with the vast bulk of the gas giant Threshold looming behind it, inexorably pulling the debris into its gravity well.

  Commander Foucault sat opposite her, as always immaculate. The smell of aftershave. Foucault looked haggard and thin and prematurely graying, not at all the robust man she remembered from before his promotion. When he’d been just another one of them. Something about that soured in her mouth. Now she had to call him “sir.” They all respected him, respected the extreme circumstances that such a field promotion called for, but still resented the division of rank.

  At the far end of the table, Rebecca manifested in her more usual avatar of a flabby, middle-aged Mediterranean woman in a flower dress. She looked vaguely Italian. Benti had always clucked when she saw Rebecca that way, wondered aloud in their berths why she chose that avatar. But Lopez knew: the same reason off-ship, on leave, she would wear something feminine.

  It made people comfortable around Rebecca, took the edge off of their fascination and slight fear of something so seemingly alive made out of motes of light, bits and bytes. But, then, Chauncey had never cared whether they were comfortable around him. His actions did the job instead. So why, exactly, did Rebecca want to be disarming?

  “Anything new to report, Sergeant Lopez?” Foucault asked. Despite the worn look to his face, the commander’s light-blue eyes had a powerful effect. A gaze with a kind of grip to it.

  “No, sir,” she said. Wondering when the shit was going to hit the fan. Because you didn’t waste the time of the two most important people on the Red Horse by sticking them in a room with a sergeant. It didn’t scan. She found herself counting rosary beads in her head, against her will. The image forever anchored to the smell of old wooden pews and her mother as a younger woman, kneeling in church.

  “What about you, Rebecca?” Foucault asked, with the air of someone who already knew the answer. Lopez thought she noted a hint of sarcasm there, too.

  A smile from Rebecca that was meant to reassure Lopez, but didn’t. Not one bit.

  “The pod was launched six hours ago from the Mona Lisa, a prison transport. I backtracked and calculated the Mona Lisa’s approximate location at the time of launch. The coordinates have been uploaded to the nav system.”

  “And it didn’t show up on our sensors, I’m guessing, because of the debris?”

  Rebecca frowned, as if something annoying had just occurred to her. “That’s correct.” She brought up a schematic on the screen of a freighter with several levels, a docking hangar near the front. Storage bays hung off of it, seeming to weigh it down. To Lopez, it looked ugly. Like, if it were a ship meant for water, it would list heavily. “This is a simulation of the same ship type. They’re converted freighters, for transporting prisoners and ore to and from the penal colonies, along with the resources from the mines. The bridge is situated in the top level. The prison cells are down below, close to the hangar. In between you have the usual: kitchen, mess, infirmary, berths, the majority given over to cargo. Most prison ships have minimal defenses and minimal firearms on board—a precaution against an uprising—and rely on an escort for protection. There’s no sign of an escort, though.”

  A thin smile from Foucault as he stared at Rebecca. “What would a prison transport be doing at the most significant alien discovery of the past twenty years?” he asked, cutting through all the irrelevant details in a way Lopez admired.

  Rebecca shrugged. “That, I can’t tell you.”

  Foucault said, “Because you don’t know, of course.” It wasn’t framed as either statement or question.

  “Perhaps they encountered Covenant and made a random slipspace jump to escape.”

  “Quite the coincidence, if they did. They show up here, we show up here.” It wasn’t directed at Lopez, but in a way it was. Probably the only hint she’d ever get.

  Not waiting for a resp
onse, he turned to Lopez: “What do you think?”

  “I’m not paid to think, sir.” Her default answer when she didn’t want to get involved.

  A smirking laugh. Maybe some residual regret in that look from Foucault. As if, in situations like these, he wished he wasn’t paid to think, either.

  When they’d first come out of slipspace and seen their destination, seen the alien structure, magnificent even in ruins, Lopez had forgotten herself. “What are we looking for, sir?” she’d asked. Foucault hadn’t looked away from the window, but she’d sensed him wince. On that poker face, a “wince” was just a lowered eyebrow. “Whatever there is to find, Sergeant,” he’d said finally. Slight pressure on sergeant.

  “Did either of you intuit anything useful out of what the man said before he died?” Foucault asked. “Anything that gives us more context?”

  “He just kept saying he was safe, sir,” Lopez said. Maybe death was a form of safety, but not one that appealed much to her.

  “Nothing that would be inconsistent with the delusions of a man suffering from dehydration and mortal wounds,” Rebecca said.

  Foucault did this steepling thing with his hands that was his only affectation. “I’m inclined to finish the postmortem, stow the body, and carry on with our mission.”

  What mission? In Lopez’s opinion, risking their asses for “whatever there is to find” seemed stupid. She knew from talking to some of the noncoms on the bridge that it was near impossible to pilot the Prowler through the debris field. Between Rebecca and the discreet automatic defense firing, they’d avoided any serious collisions. But that risked giving away their position to the Covenant even as the debris helped hide them. Still, if the whispers that came back to her were right, the bulk of the Covenant fleet had left the system in pursuit of a “higher value target”—which supposedly had surprised the commander. Not the kind of thing she could confirm with Foucault, and Lopez didn’t know how long ago the Covenant fleet had left. All she cared about: no Covies so far.

  Somebody was doing a lot of gambling here, and Lopez still had no idea for what potential gain.

  Rebecca turned to Lopez and said, “What the commander means is he wants you to take a squad in a Pelican and go investigate the Mona Lisa’s last known coordinates.”

  Foucault looked grim. “Is that what I meant? If you say it’s what I meant, I guess it must be what I meant.” The sarcastic tone had become more pronounced, but, again, tinged with an odd kind of regret.

  “Sir?” Confused. She’d never seen an AI contradict a commander in quite that way. “Sir, your orders?”

  Foucault stared at Rebecca, as if the force of his gaze might burn two holes in her avatar. Then he said in a clipped cadence, “AI Rebecca is, of course, correct. Take a squad in a Pelican and investigate. Rebecca will coordinate the details. Good luck, Sergeant. Dismissed.”

  Lopez saluted, rose in confusion, walked out the door. Thinking of John Doe’s warm hand. Puzzled. Wondering why neither Foucault nor Rebecca had even asked about the autopsy, or the nature of the man’s terrible wounds, or everything else that didn’t jive.

  Lopez had scars from wounds of her own, collected from long years of making the Covenant pay and keep on paying. Along with a long white reminder on her wrist of why you didn’t surprise a sleeping cat.

  Every time Lopez was about to go into combat, she was aware of those scars.

  They were throbbing now, telling her: Something bad is coming.

  >Foucault 1003 hours

  * * *

  Foucault sat there after Lopez had left, staring at Rebecca. He was, for all his former exploits, a cautious man who had used extreme tactics when it had seemed the only option for his continued survival. It had made him a hero and given him his command, but he didn’t feel like a hero. He’d just been trying to save himself. He wasn’t sure he had. Waking from nightmares, from memories, awash with sweat to find it was only one in the morning got old fast. So did losing to the Covenant.

  Rebecca wasn’t helping. He’d had a good relationship with Chauncey. He’d trusted Chauncey. Rebecca, well . . . Theoretically she worked for him, but a directive from ONI’s upper echelons had imposed her on him—along with a couple of rookies who acted so raw it made him suspicious—and that was more than sufficient reason for him to be wary.

  Foucault’d had a superior once with a prosthetic eye, except that no one knew. This man would call Foucault into his office and, without telling him why he had been summoned, close his good eye and fall asleep, still staring at Foucault. Inevitably, Foucault would lose the waiting contest and be the first to break the silence.

  Rebecca was a man with a glass eye. She could outwait him.

  So, finally, Foucault sighed, lifted his head, and stated, “You know more than you’ve told me.”

  Rebecca didn’t quite shake her head. “We have our orders, Commander.”

  Orders. Strange, simple orders, Foucault had thought upon first receiving them. Jump to coordinates classified higher than top secret, retrieve samples of an alien artifact for study, conduct basic recon, expect Covenant trouble. He’d stood on the bridge, staring at the pieces of the Halo, the wealth of such samples before him, and wondered why they’d deploy a Prowler on such a task.

  As soon as the pod had come in, Rebecca had shown him the “expanded” orders. Even expanded, they remained strange and simple. Assess the status of the Mona Lisa, and if compromised beyond retrieval, destroy. There had been no mention of why the ship was in the area or what it might be compromised by.

  The codes were current, the passwords secure. He didn’t question their validity. It was the only thing he didn’t question.

  “Do you know what is on that ship?” he asked, knowing he would get no answer, knowing he wouldn’t believe any answer she gave. “I don’t like being kept in the dark, especially when deploying my troops. We could be sending them to their deaths for all I know.”

  “Every time you deploy Marines, you could be sending them to their deaths,” Rebecca said, talking to him as if he was a child. To add insult to injury, Foucault suspected she was processing some other scene, her attention elsewhere. “It is only recon.”

  “Our original orders were ‘only recon’ as well,” he said in mild reproach, and steepled his fingers.

  Rebecca looked at Foucault then, with her full attention, and her face seemed to soften. A cheap trick he’d seen her pull on others, changing the lighting on her avatar to something less harsh. “We’re at war, Commander. Reach has fallen. Our backs are against the wall. Extreme measures are necessary to ensure our survival.”

  Foucault forced himself to show no reaction and didn’t immediately reply. That was quite the overreaction, and it cemented his suspicions that there certainly was more she wasn’t telling him, which meant she had orders of her own.

  He watched the screen, which showed a real-time view of the space outside the Prowler. A single piece of debris tumbled slowly past. It wasn’t a rock, it was a piece of manufactured structure, hard crisp lines and dead cables showing. There was a marvelous logic to its gymnastics, a grace that seemed almost choreographed, even though now it was merely scattered garbage.

  How to get Rebecca to share her knowledge?

  “Survival,” he repeated.

  Was that really the only thing they were fighting for now?

  >Lopez 1304 hours

  * * *

  As the Pelican headed toward their destination, Lopez found herself marveling at the view, struck by an odd moment of poetic, profound insight, even though she didn’t understand it all. Perhaps even because she didn’t understand.

  Dominating right now was Threshold’s ponderous “bloat-belly”; her term, shared with Benti in the mess hall. The vast gas giant so filled the windows it brought the illusion of blue sky to the cockpit up front instead of the empty black of space. Frequent storms raged and died in great cloud-swirls across that surface. From that far away, it looked like a slow, sleepy blossoming. Didn’t fee
l that way on the surface, Lopez knew. The winds blew hundreds of kilometers an hour.

  Closer in: the wreckage of the Halo. The massive ring cut through the view like a question mark that’d been fractured to pieces. Thousands of kilometers wide. Great fires still raging, large enough to devour whole continents. Chunks of the superstructure bigger than cities tumbling ponderously in the void. Glowing and flaring as they tore shrieking down through Threshold’s atmosphere. Despite the jiggered failures in the structure, the sheer immensity of it made the curve smooth. Constantly tripped her sense of perspective.

  Covenant hadn’t built it. It was entirely alien, in design and purpose, and she took some strange assurance from that. Here was proof that there was more out there in the big bad universe than just the goddamn Covenant. She had no idea if whoever built this was friend or foe, but the simple idea that there was another gave her a strange sense of security. We’re not alone. Again.

  A pinprick next to Threshold, the Mona Lisa drifted like a dead thing alongside one of the larger pieces of debris from the Halo ring, on the far side from Basis and distant from the Red Horse’s current position. Lopez thought the ship looked lonely, desolate, on the screen as they approached. Abandoned, even. Pits like severe acne showed where the escape pods had already been launched into space.

  She asked for an update from the pilot, Burgundy, who’d been called up despite being off the clock. Already getting reacclimated to the up-close sweat smell from the Marines in the seats all around her, only MacCraw dumb enough to be wearing cologne in the confines of a spacecraft, like he was on a date.

  Rebecca had chosen the squad, pilot included. “The maximum we can spare,” she’d explained. Seventeen personnel in total, including Benti and also Singh’s small engineering team, who had received basic training but were technically not combat-ready. Clarence sat next to Lopez like some kind of morose watchdog. He never looked happy, but Lopez thought she could read in his impassive features a distinct unhappiness now.