Halo®: Mortal Dictata

by Karen Traviss

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  For Alasdair, for many fascinating discussions on the emotions we have in common with other animals

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  343 Industries would like to thank Kendall Boyd, Ben Cammarano, Scott Dell’Osso, Stacy Hague-Hill, Matt McCloskey, Whitney Ross, Bonnie Ross-Ziegler, Dave Seeley, Rob Semsey, Matt Skelton, Eddie Smith, Phil Spencer, Karen Traviss, Carla Woo, and Jennifer Yi.

  None of this would have been possible without the amazing efforts of the Microsoft staffers, including: Christine Finch, Mike Gonzales, Kevin Grace, Tyler Jeffers, Carlos Naranjo, Tiffany O’Brien, Frank O’Connor, Jeremy Patenaude, Jay Prochaska, Brian Reed, Corrinne Robinson, Chris Schlerf, Kenneth Scott, and Kiki Wolfkill.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Epilogue

  Books in the New York Times Bestselling Halo Series

  About the Author

  Copyright

  PROLOGUE

  NEW TYNE, VENEZIA: MARCH 2553

  My name is Staffan Sentzke, and I never planned to be a terrorist.

  It’s not the kind of life you aspire to. It was simply what I had to do. Terrorism is Earth’s word for it, a moral judgment, as if your warfare’s somehow noble and mine’s cowardly. But it’s a unit of measurement; nothing more, nothing less. When your enemy is an empire and you’re just a few guys, a handful of little people, then the biggest punch you can land is called terrorism. That’s all you’ve got.

  Like I said, it’s a measure of magnitude, not morality. And I’m really particular about measurements. I used to work in a machine shop in Alstad before Sansar was glassed by the Covenant, and I still like to make things to keep my skills fresh. Here: what do you think of this? It’s a scale replica of an eighteenth-century Gustavian dining chair—I’m making a doll’s house for Kerstin. Edvin says I’m spoiling her, but what else is a granddad for?

  I’d give anything to be able to spoil Naomi again.

  There’s not a day goes by that I don’t think about her. She’d be nearly forty-two now, well past the age for doll’s houses, but still my little girl.

  Anyway, I need to finish this chair before dinner. I use a set of dental drills for the small detail. The upholstery’s the hardest thing, getting the right fabric so that the stripes are to scale. If I can’t make something myself, then I can acquire what I need because I know people who can get me pretty well anything—a scrap of satin brocade, a birch plank, even tiny brass pins.

  Or a Sangheili warship. I can get one of those, too.

  I think I’ve got one now, but I have to see Sav Fel again to iron out some details. Earth thinks it’s back in business now the Covenant’s collapsed. It won’t be long before it tries to stick its nose into our business again. We need to be ready. And what better time to prepare than when the black market’s awash with weapons and ships? When empires fall, there’s always a fire sale.

  For the moment, though, I’m making doll’s house furniture, not arming Venezia. The workshop door opens behind me. This is the only place I’d ever sit with my back to the door, but then I know everyone who comes and goes in my own home.

  “She’s going to love that,” Edvin says, peering over my shoulder. “Is it a set?”

  “I’ve still got to make the matching table.”

  “Nice work, Dad. I wish I had your patience.”

  Oh, yes. Patience. I’ve got it in spades. When you have to wait for answers, for revenge, for justice, you can learn to wait as long as it takes.

  I was forty when Edvin was born, and Hedda came along two years later. This is my second family and my second homeworld. I had a wife and a daughter on Sansar, but it wasn’t the Covenant that took them from me—it was my own kind. Humans. Maybe it was the colonial government, or maybe it was Earth’s, but it was human nonetheless.

  And that’s how I ended up as a terrorist. That’s your word for it, remember. Not mine. I bet there are UNSC personnel out there right now doing exactly what I’m doing. I’ll use any means necessary, so I can’t object if my enemy does the same thing. Rules of engagement are just cynical games for politicians to play. It’s a war. People get killed. There’s no way you can make that look reasonable.

  “So did you visit your sister today?” I ask Edvin. I know what’s coming next. “What’s she made me this time?”

  “She sent you some surströmming. She says it’ll do you good.”

  “God Almighty, you’ve not brought it in here, have you?”

  “No. Take it easy. I’ve set up a cordon around it.”

  “Good. Otherwise I’ll have to have the place fumigated.”

  “Mom said you’d say that. Just pretend it was yummy, will you? For Hedda.”

  “You can have it. Just take it outside the city limits before you open it.”

  I’m not much of a Swede at heart. I don’t even like pickled herring, let alone the fermented variety, and anyway, we don’t have herring on Venezia—just some oily eel-type thing that’s even worse when it’s been turned into surströmming. Hedda, on the other hand, clings to her diluted heritage more fiercely every year, even though she’s never seen Earth, let alone Sweden. Cultures can get pretty warped in diaspora. They become weird fossilized parodies of themselves that seem to distill their worst features, but I’m afraid Hedda’s like me. She focuses, and then she can’t see anything else to either side. Edvin takes after Laura. He lets things wash over him.

  But they both know they had a half sister who was abducted, and that when she came back she was … different. And then she got sick and died. They know I think the government took her and replaced her with a double.

  You think I’m crazy? Everyone did. Even me, for a while. But then I started looking, and found a few other families out in the colonies who’d lost children the same way. The kid went missing, then came back a little later, a little different, and finally went down with multiple organ failure or some metabolic disease.

  So either we’re all mad, or something awful was going on long before the Covenant showed up. A few dead kids aren’t even a drop in the ocean considering the billions who’ve died in successive wars. But they’re our kids. Thirty-five years doesn’t even begin to numb the pain. I still need to find out what happened to Naomi and why. Before I die, I want to know.

  Damn, it’s getting late. I need to finish this and call Sav Fel. It sounds too good to be true, but if he’s got a warship to sell, he’s come to the right place. Imagine it; he just strolled off with a vessel that can glass entire planets. Would you trust a Kig-Yar crew to look after your battlecruiser? The Sangheili took their eye off the ball.

  Never turn your back on someone you’ve screwed over. You might
want to make a note of that.

  I smooth the tiny legs of the chair with an emery board, then blow off sawdust as fine as flour. It’s going to look great when it’s finished.

  Edvin laughs to himself. “If your buddies could see you now…”

  “Yeah. They say Peter Moritz knits. Real hard case.”

  “You want me to go check out that new shipment?”

  “No, it’s okay. I’ll be finished soon. You’ve got a living to make.”

  What, you think terrorists sit around scheming and playing with firearms all day? We’ve got factories to run, food to grow, families to raise. We’re pretty much like you. This is our home. We have a functioning society, and the Covenant never bothered us. We do okay. Leave us alone, and we’ll leave you alone.

  I’ve got time to put a coat of primer on the chair before I leave. This is one of my many regrets: I never did get around to making a doll’s house for Naomi. She really wanted one. I planned to make one when I had more time. She was such a bright, happy kid, always out exploring, always with lots of friends around her, which makes it even harder to understand how nobody saw her being taken.

  I want to believe she’s still alive. She might not know I survived, and that’s why she hasn’t come looking for me. Maybe she doesn’t even know who she really is. They say that happens to kidnapped kids.

  But if she’s still out there somewhere, I hope she’s among friends.

  There. Finished. It’s a lovely little chair. But now I’ve got to go talk to a buzzard about a warship.

  CHAPTER

  ONE

  ONI SPEC OPS AI BLACK-BOX (BBX-8995-1)

  RECORDING 4/5/2553

  PARTITION SECURITY FAILSAFE ACTIVATED

  I don’t actually need to record any of this, but my memory isn’t what it was.

  Let me put that another way. I recognize its potential fallibility after that unpleasant business of reintegrating my damaged fragment. Not that I misremember, lie to myself, or acquire false memories like humans do. I might have missing segments and damaged clusters, but what I actually recall is real, and it doesn’t change or get overwritten. So, reminder to self: memory gaps hurt, a preview of death by rampancy. Second reminder to self: yes, I’m reminding myself to remind myself, because Mal says the best way to stop worrying about your inevitable demise is to dwell on it morbidly until you’re so bored that you forget it.

  Anyway, I’m securing this data so that it can’t be retrieved by hostiles if I find myself in the same pickle again. My name is Black-Box, generally called BB: I work for Captain Serin Osman of ONI, who would have been a Spartan-II now if the program hadn’t nearly killed her, and I serve with her personal black ops unit, Kilo-Five—Sangheili cultural expert Professor Evan Phillips; ODST Marines Staff Sergeant Mal Geffen; Corporal Vasily Beloi; and Sergeant Lian Devereaux; and a Spartan-II, Naomi-010. We also have two Huragok on board, Requires Adjustment, aka Adj, and Leaks Repaired, known as Leaks. We’ve been covertly supplying arms to the Sangheili rebels to keep a civil war with the Arbiter on a steady simmer, because all the time they’re busy killing each other, they’re not regrouping to kill humans. They’re a tad disorganized since the collapse of the Covenant—job jobbed, as Mal would say—and the rebels have misplaced a battlecruiser. Like everything else, it’ll end up in the wrong hands unless we go and retrieve it. Or blow it up. I’m easy.

  There’s also the added complication of Naomi’s father showing up on Venezia. I suppose it was inevitable that the ugly past of the SPARTAN program would come back to bite us one day. Vaz and Naomi are on Venezia now, undercover. This will not end well.

  But now I have to go bake a cake. I just need to enlist some organics. Meatbags have their uses. They have hands.

  And, I admit, some of them are my friends.

  RECORDING ENDS

  ALSTAD, SANSAR, OUTER COLONIES: SEPTEMBER 10, 2517

  “Honey, where’s Naomi?”

  Staffan Sentzke hung up his jacket and looked for his daughter’s satchel and coat on the hook halfway up the wall, set as high as a six-year-old could reach. If the bus hadn’t dropped her off yet, he still had time to sneak the box into his workshop. It was five days to her birthday. She was already keeping an eye on everything he did with the unblinking vigilance of a security guard.

  Lena wandered into the hall, wiping her hands on a dishcloth. “Music practice, remember,” she said. “She won’t be back until five.”

  “You think she’s a bit young for all these extra classes?”

  “If you think she’s old enough to go to school on her own…”

  “Okay. You win that round.”

  “So did you get it?”

  “Yeah.” Staffan put the box on the kitchen table, pleased with himself both for finding such a uniquely Naomi kind of gift and for the overtime he’d had to work to buy it. It was a mini planetarium the size of a table lamp. “I bet she can name all the stars. You can get different discs to show the northern and southern hemispheres. Even views from other planets.”

  Lena opened the box and lifted out the projector. “At least she won’t think it’s the doll’s house before she opens it.” She had to move the toaster to plug the lamp into the wall socket. “Too small.”

  “You think she’ll be disappointed?”

  Lena flicked the switch. Sansar’s night sky came to life in the kitchen as constellations began tracking slowly across the walls and ceiling. Naomi would love it. She could leave the projector running all night if she wanted to. It was a grown-up kind of night-light for a smart little girl who was sometimes still afraid of the dark.

  “No, she’ll forget all about the doll’s house as soon as she sees it,” Lena said. A slow smile spread across her face as her gaze flickered from star to star. “It’s pretty magical, isn’t it?”

  “You can change the colors.” Staffan turned a dial on the side. “Look. There’s even a rainbow setting. And you can zoom in on individual stars and planets. Look.” He pressed a key and a blue-green planetary disc sprang out of the heavens. “Just like landing on Reach.”

  “Okay, let’s wrap it and put it away before she gets home.”

  Staffan rummaged in the kitchen drawers for scissors and tape, and noticed that the collection of tiny, handmade furniture on the shelf had grown an extra chair. Ever since Naomi had spotted the doll’s house in an expensive toy store in New Stockholm—no Daddy-I-want, no wheedling, just that rapt look on her face when she saw it—she’d been collecting all kinds of scraps, and spent hours cutting and gluing them to make furniture. There was a table, a bed, and now a dining suite. Staffan picked up one of the fragile chairs and studied it with his own craftsman’s eye, marveling at how square the angles were and how neat the glued joints.

  Pride overwhelmed him for a moment. Naomi would be six in a few days. She shouldn’t have had that level of dexterity or precision. Average six-year-olds were struggling with joined-up writing while his daughter was measuring angles and working out scale.

  Every parent thought their child was uniquely perfect, but Staffan knew the difference between fond delusion and the realization that Naomi was a gifted child. A few months ago, an educational psychologist from the Colonial Administration Authority had visited the school to carry out batteries of tests on her class, and Naomi’s teacher had told Staffan and Lena what they already knew: Naomi was exceptional, in the top small fraction of a percent—one in millions, maybe one in a billion. He just hoped that a small colony world like Sansar would have enough to offer her when she grew up.

  It was funny that she was so taken with the doll’s house, though. She didn’t even like dolls. She wasn’t interested in being a princess, either. There was something about the detail of the house, the creation of a separate world, that seemed to absorb her.

  Staffan turned the miniature chair over in his fingers. The cushion fell off. He swore under his breath and took it out to his workshop. He’d stick it together again and hope she didn’t notice, but she never missed a th
ing.

  A dab of wood glue put the tiny cushion—the fingertip of a knitted glove—back in place. There: good as new. Then he wrapped the planetarium projector in the red-and-white striped paper that he’d sneaked into the house last week. He’d have to lock it away somewhere. Naomi had a lot of self-control for a small girl, but she was a very curious child, always busy searching for something to do or make.

  He parted the blinds with his finger to look across the yard. It was getting dark. She’d be home soon. He hid the parcel in his rifle locker and went back inside the house.

  “Where’s she gotten to?”

  Lena stirred a pot on the stove. “I just called the school. They were running late. She’s on the bus now, so I make that ten minutes.”

  Staffan wanted to wrap his daughter in cotton wool, but if he did then she’d grow up afraid of everything. She was smart enough to catch the right bus and not talk to strangers. She had a watch—a proper adult one, not some glittery pink toy—and the drivers kept an eye on the kids and old folks anyway. Lena didn’t approve. It was one battle that Staffan had won.

  He worried, all the same. Dads couldn’t help themselves.

  And then before I know it there’ll be parties, and dating, and all that to fret about.

  While he watched TV, he could hear Lena walking back and forth between the kitchen and the hall. Then the front door opened. He expected to hear Naomi’s voice. But the door closed after a few seconds, and Lena came into the living room, pulling on her coat.

  “I’m going to walk to the bus stop,” she said. “I don’t want her wandering around in the dark. Which wouldn’t have happened if you’d let me pick her up.”

  Staffan checked his watch. Damn, it had been nearly half an hour since Lena had called the school. There was probably a perfectly good explanation. “Honey, you know she likes to feel grown-up. She’s not an idiot.”

  “I know. But she’s five.”

  “Six.”