Halo®: Mortal Dictata

by Karen Traviss

  A few more males passed, clawed boots clattering along the passage, and turned to take a sly look at Chol.

  “Are you looking for work?” she demanded.

  The two males froze in their tracks. “We’re already contracted to a ship, Mistress.”

  “I’m recruiting,” she said. “It’s a short mission that requires frontline combat experience. Tell all your friends. I’ll be here tomorrow at the same time to take names.”

  They dipped their heads and trotted off. With any luck, she’d find a crew who hadn’t heard of her eccentricities and wouldn’t start squawking in the bars before Paragon set off.

  “So what now, Mistress?” Zim asked. “Other than finding a platoon in a matter of two days.”

  All Chol wanted was enough names to form a pattern, some clue to work out which clans might be involved so that she knew where to start looking. Sav Fel had a battlecruiser with a slipspace drive. That meant he could now be anywhere in the galaxy within a spherical search area that was getting potentially bigger with every passing second. Hunting someone confined to the ground by working out from the point of origin was relatively simple. Finding someone who could travel in any plane in three dimensions was near impossible. It had to be done by educated guesses and predictions.

  And by persuasion.

  “Just find me enough males to crew Paragon and take Inquisitor by force if need be. Unless Fel has picked up reinforcements for some reason, he has a crew of fewer than forty. In the meantime, let’s find out who might know Dhak and Eith, and perhaps find Fel’s clan.”

  Zim cocked his head in surprise. “Why warn them?”

  “I wasn’t planning to warn them,” she said. “I was planning to spy on them.” She handed back his data module and wondered if she could still find some of her old crew from the days when Paragon had been Joyous Discovery. “If they know where Fel is, they’ll call him as soon as they know we’re hunting him. If they don’t, then we may learn what he sees as a viable customer.”

  “Who would want a battlecruiser, other than the four-jaws?” Zim asked.

  “Brutes, perhaps.” Me, of course. But I won’t tell you that until we’re under way. “Unggoy—never. The minor races—where are they now? Gone home. Gone back to resume their lives.”

  “There’s always the humans. But what would the flat-faces want with a battlecruiser? I hear they have new ships now, astonishing ships. I hear one bombarded Sanghelios to support the Arbiter.”

  Chol shook her head, bemused. And humans thought Kig-Yar were amoral opportunists with no sense of loyalty? “What short memories they have.”

  “No, you’re right,” Zim said. “What use would humans have for a ventral beam now?”

  STAVROS’S BAR, NEW TYNE, VENEZIA

  “I used to dream about this,” Mal said. It was the first time he’d been in a bar in months, even if this wasn’t strictly social. “Getting paid to drink on UNSC time. Who’d have thought it?”

  Vaz wasn’t paying attention. He was watching the door, looking even more surly than usual. Mal tossed one of the rock-hard snack things across the table at him and it landed in his beer with a small splash. That finally snapped him out of his fog.

  “Nairn’s late.” Vaz fished around in the glass and dredged up the snack, which didn’t seem any softer for a soaking. “We do the business with him, then we go find Spenser. Yes?”

  It had been a few days since Naomi had returned to Port Stanley. Mal wasn’t entirely sure why they needed to go through the motions of gaining acceptance in the local militia, because they now knew exactly who they were looking for, but it would make access easier. Space was a bloody big place to hide a warship. Every clue counted. The dedicated remote had picked up Staffan Sentzke leaving his house; another remote had detected the signature of a slipspace jump in Venezia’s system, but even if they’d positively ID’d it as Staffan’s vessel, they couldn’t follow it. There were a lot of puzzle pieces to guess about and maybe reach entirely the wrong conclusion.

  In the meantime, it was relatively easy to play a marine on the run, and Mal made the most of it.

  “Yeah.” It was funny how a big galaxy had now shrunk to a relatively small circle of people. Maybe that was a measure of just how many had died. “Mike can keep an eye on his Kig-Yar mates. He’s definitely got a way with poultry. Maybe he was a chicken-farmer in a previous life.”

  “Nice try.”

  “What?”

  “You’re right. I’m worried about Naomi.”

  “I wasn’t prying.” Mal was careful what he discussed in bars. “You’re sure that was who she thought it was?”

  “I’m sure.”

  “It’s just getting weirder by the day.”

  “Well, we’re here, so we must think it’s true, mustn’t we?”

  Mal crunched his way through the packet of snacks. He still had no idea what they were. Considering Venezia was Desperado HQ, he felt safer here than he did in some bars on Earth. There was no hobby violence and nobody trying to make a name for themselves on the gangster circuit. If he got a thumping here, it would be serious, delivered by people who did it as part of a rough job, not because they were bored delinquents who couldn’t handle their drink. In its own awful way, it was comforting.

  Vaz shuffled on his chair, instantly alert. “Heads up. Here he is.”

  Nairn walked in, looking exactly as Mal expected him to, with razor-cut brown hair and a fair bit of meat on him. He recognized Vaz and headed for the table.

  “This is my buddy, Mal,” Vaz said, introducing them. “He’s been a naughty marine and he needs a fresh start.”

  Nairn shook Mal’s hand. “How naughty?”

  The lie tripped off Mal’s tongue easily. “A gentlemen’s disagreement over a lady.” But then it wasn’t so much a lie as ancient history. Mike Spenser’s crash course in amateur spook-fu for the relatively innocent had been worth its weight in gold: if you weren’t a trained liar, it helped to stick to lies you knew something about, nothing over-detailed, just salted with authenticity. “It’s okay. The bloke made a full recovery. It’s amazing what surgeons can do these days.”

  “So, skills?”

  “Point me at something and I can usually kill it.”

  “Ship handling?”

  “I’ve never crashed a dropship. Yet.”

  “But you’re familiar with big ships.”

  “Yeah. Corvettes. Frigates. I’ve had some experience with Covenant ships and hardware, too.”

  “Really?”

  “Yes.” And what I don’t know, BB can ride along and prompt me with, like he did for Phillips. “Vaz and I nicked a Spirit once. Didn’t we, mate?”

  “How are you with aliens?” Nairn looked him over cautiously. “We’re a little irregular here. We tend to get on with them. Or at least we don’t shoot them on sight.”

  “If they don’t bother me, I don’t bother them.” There was such a thing as seeming too trusting. Mal had to stay in character. “What are you looking for, exactly? And why?”

  “Two main areas,” Nairn said. “Defense of New Tyne, which is basically responding to attacks on the ground, or crewing ships if we need to do anything off-planet. Which could be anything from seeing off a nosey UNSC vessel to retrieving something or somebody.”

  “Can do,” Mal said. “What’s your background?”

  “Corporal, Reach militia.”

  Mal tilted his head slightly to indicate a lone Brute sitting in the corner of the bar. “So no hard feelings about some of our big hairy chums, then?”

  “I left years before the Covenant trashed Reach. But that’s not to say I’d behave myself if I ran into an Elite. I left a lot of friends behind.”

  Mal wondered whether to ask Nairn why he’d banged out of Reach, but decided that polite Venezian society might frown on delving into people’s dodgy pasts. For all he knew, Nairn might have had a lot of debts or an angry ex-wife. He’d find out soon enough. All that mattered was getting Nairn to let him join
the militia, where he and Vaz would be perfectly placed to volunteer to serve in a Covenant battlecruiser if one happened to show up.

  Maybe it really will be that simple. Get on board and let BB slip a fragment into their systems. Job done.

  Who was he kidding? Nothing ever went that smoothly. It just went fast. It wasn’t the same thing at all.

  Vaz got a round of drinks at the bar while Nairn continued sizing up Mal. “So what happened to his girlfriend?” Nairn asked. “The blonde with the legs?”

  Mal wasn’t sure if Vaz had mentioned Naomi’s name. That was another problem with lying. “I never ask too many questions where those two are concerned. She might be back. Who knows?”

  Nairn seemed to take it as simple unwillingness to gossip to a stranger. He nodded and looked around the bar like he was checking who was in tonight. After a second or two of feeling pleased with himself, Mal decided he didn’t like being able to lie that easily. It was too seductive. He’d have to make sure he left that persona behind when the job was done.

  “So how did you end up here?” Nairn asked.

  Get the aliases right. At some point, someone might follow them to Spenser’s place anyway. And keep the cover story as low-maintenance as possible. “Friend of a friend of a friend of Mike Amberley.”

  “Well, I’m glad we’re getting some UNSC know-how,” Nairn said. “The military expertise here is mostly ex-militia and aging insurgents. It’s a shame to have all this equipment and not make the most of it.”

  “So this place is built on the arms trade, then.”

  “Hell, no. Tantalum mining. What do you think we’re here for? We’re not building an evil empire. We just want to be left alone. Now that Earth’s finished with the Covenant, someone’s going to remember that we’ve got all this lovely metal and that folks also have grudges against us.”

  It was sobering to see Earth from a colonial perspective. Mal had long since given up thinking in terms of good guys and bad guys, at least among humans, but he had a vague childhood recollection of how the grown-ups hated all colonial bastards for setting off terrorist bombs on Earth. Now there was a whole generation that didn’t remember the daily threat and actually felt sorry for them.

  Never mind. There’ll be another batch of bastards along soon.

  Vaz came back with three bottles of beer and sat down in silence, looking like a wet weekend in Grimsby.

  “So who did you sell the tantalum to?” Mal asked.

  “Kig-Yar, mostly,” Nairn said. “Traded for arms and ships.”

  Vaz wiped the mouth of the bottle with his palm. “At least they couldn’t use them to kill us, then.”

  “So what’s the UNSC going to do now it hasn’t got a war to fight?”

  Mal shook his head. “No idea. So am I in, or do I have to learn how to do a proper job? I don’t know anything about tantalum or farming.”

  “I’m sure we can find you something to do,” Nairn said. “Report to the barracks tomorrow evening, eighteen-hundred.”

  Mal clinked his bottle against Nairn’s. “Done.”

  So they were home and dry. It was that simple. They didn’t have to pretend that they didn’t know one end of a rifle from another, and they didn’t have to pretend they didn’t know Spenser, either. They’d be the first to hear about planet-killing warships being added to the arsenal.

  Nairn was still studying him, though. Mal could see it on his face. “We don’t get that many UNSC guys out here,” Nairn said. “You might be useful in other ways, too. It’s always handy to have someone who can pass for an insider.”

  Mal’s blood braked to a halt in his veins. Oh shit. “Meaning?”

  “If we need to infiltrate the UNSC, you two could be really helpful.”

  Vaz was still gazing mournfully at his beer. “They’d probably shoot us on sight.”

  “I was thinking more in terms of intel. There’ll come a time when guys like you could be the edge we need. If you’ve got any disgruntled buddies, tell them to get in touch.”

  Mal breathed again and hoped Nairn forgot what a great idea that had seemed. They finished their beer, made small talk about fifty-year-old rifles still being as effective as ever, and left. Mal and Vaz ambled back along the road, in no real hurry now, heading out to the parking lot. There was a wonderful aroma of woodsmoke and grass on the air, a hopeful kind of smell as if summer was on its way, although there was no reason to assume Venezia had anything like Earth seasons. The setting sun was just low enough on the horizon to make the evening hazy and luminous.

  “Jesus H. Christ,” Mal said. “I wasn’t expecting that. All this double agent stuff does my head in.”

  “It must be our cheeky faces.”

  “You think he knows what we are?”

  “I can’t see how.”

  “Better do our homework on CCS-class battlecruisers, though.”

  “Is there any detailed intel on them?”

  “Not a lot beyond ‘heard a loud noise, looked up, got fried,’ I suspect.”

  “How about Adj and Leaks? If they share all their data, some Engineer must have worked on those ships, so Adj is bound to have that stored somewhere in his little jelly brain.”

  “You know how hard it is to get information out of them unless you ask the right question in exactly the right way. It’s like Freedom of Information requests.”

  “BB can come up with something.” BB always had an answer. It was hard to imagine running operations like this without him. “You know the way he worked with Phyllis on Sanghelios? He can do that again.”

  “He doesn’t need meatbags like us at all, does he?”

  “Well, he does if he wants to go for a walk.”

  “You think he misses that, Mal?”

  “How? He said AIs haven’t got their donor’s memories. Or their personality.”

  “I mean his matrix. It’s based on the architecture of a human brain, and brains expect to plug into limbs and organs. Remember he said that there’s an AI based on a brain from one of Halsey’s own clones.”

  “Yeah, it makes me wake up screaming some nights.”

  “He says the AI was really devoted to her Spartan.”

  “Oh, that’s just all wrong.” Mal held up both hands to make it all stop. He could cope with ONI as long as it was just about normal dirty tricks like assassinations and destabilizing allies. Once it got into needles, experiments, and brains in jars, he couldn’t stand it. “The poor sod gets a stalker plugged straight into his brain. Terrific.”

  “I meant that smart AIs are a lot more human than BB admits. They’re nothing like their donors, like he says, because I can’t imagine Halsey being devoted to anybody, but they still seem to hold on to something from their past.”

  “Christ, Vaz. You hang out with Phyllis too much.”

  “Mark my words. BB’s got emotions from a previous life. Emotional memory’s stored separately from factual recall. Even dementia sufferers can remember how they felt if—”

  “That’s it. Enough. I’m not going there.” For a second or two, Mal wondered if the spysat remotes that BB deployed could pick up voices as well as keep an eye on the ground. He hadn’t picked up ambient sound on Sanghelios, not even explosions, but Mal was still uneasy. “What’s started all this? Naomi?”

  Vaz kicked a stone ahead of him every few strides, hands in his pockets. “Of course it is.” The stone finally vanished down a drain and he walked on. The Warthog was in sight now, parked on its own in the middle of a big, empty lot. “You said her father had a right to know.”

  Shit, I did. “Yeah. I still think he has.”

  “Before or after he’s in custody?” Vaz had his grim disapproval face on. “What did you have in mind? Tell him before he ships out to glass Sydney, or after we’ve detained him? Or just before we shoot him, so he has some closure before he dies?”

  “You need to take it out on Halsey, mate. Not me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I know it’s a mess. It always is. An
d we’re the ones who have to mop up the shit.”

  “Nobody ever has an exit strategy. Do you think Halsey planned for this?”

  “Of course not. Scientists never see the big picture.”

  Mal wondered what she’d had in mind for Spartans who made it to old age. Maybe she never thought any of them would survive that long. They were expendable weapons, after all. He approached the Warthog with the required caution, checking for anything odd—fingermarks on the dusty bodywork, anything dangling underneath the chassis, small bits of debris or footprints around it—and ran his key-sized scanner over it to sniff for explosives. It came up clean. It was only when he started the engine and headed for the exit that he saw two Kig-Yar pull across the gate. They had a Warthog too, or at least something that had been a Hog before they’d welded a cargo box on to it. Everybody liked Warthogs—even Kig-Yar—because they could run on water, and even on piss if they had to.

  “They can’t possibly know who we are,” Vaz murmured, sliding his magnum out of his jacket. “Even if Nairn does.”

  There was still a contract out on both of them, in theory. But nobody could ID them. All the Kig-Yar knew about the firefight on Reynes was that some unknown humans had killed a bunch of their mates. It didn’t necessarily make them any safer, though.

  “If you don’t know which human did it,” Mal said, “maybe any human will do.”

  “Come on, any Kig-Yar could have jumped me in the bar a few days ago. Or shot any human in New Tyne.”

  “No, any human with a UNSC neural implant. That’s their proof of a kill, remember?”

  “Oh.”

  “Yeah.”

  Vaz nodded. “I’ll just smile, then.”

  “There’s always a first time for everything.”

  Mal could drive a Warthog with one hand. He had to. His right hand gripped his own sidearm, and the Kig-Yar vehicle didn’t look like it was planning to move. Did he ram them, or stop and chat?

  He stopped but kept the engine running. At least they could hear him without him needing to get out of the vehicle.

  “Evening, gents.” He could see Vaz out of the corner of his eye. He’d drop the driver the second he saw him reach for anything. Christ, another run-in with the Kig-Yar was the last thing they needed right now. “Did you want us for something? Because we’re heading home.”