Halo®: Mortal Dictata

by Karen Traviss

  Naomi strode across the hangar deck and followed Devereaux up to the gantry. They passed through a security door and then a blast barrier. “Can I listen in?”

  “Do you want to? Heart, liver … and … oh my god, peritoneal fat membranes.”

  “Cooked?”

  “Are you talking to yourself, Naomi?” Devereaux asked.

  “BB’s relaying Mal’s recipes. The ones with all the minced organs.”

  Devereaux laughed. “If you think a French-Chinese Canadian’s squeamish about any food, think again.” They were on the main admin deck of Core 3 now, getting looks from everyone. It was hard to tell what got the crew’s attention, a Spartan in full rig or pilot with both an ODST and ONI patch. “My father loved tripes à la mode de Caen. Mom liked it steamed with garlic sauce and spring onions. Have you ever tried it?”

  “Not even Spartans are willing to take on tripe.”

  BB did a wonderfully theatrical intake of horrified breath. “Oh dear. I’ve just accessed the culinary database. They make Mal’s favorite dish out of testicles, too. Oh, so many jokes, so little time.”

  “Fine. I’m going to have a cheese sandwich.” Naomi could actually feel BB’s sheer delight at whatever was going on in the bar. He’d probably hiked her dopamine without meaning to. “Soya cheese.”

  “There’s nothing I can’t eat,” Devereaux said.

  “Then you haven’t tried surströmming. You need Viking blood to—”

  Where the hell did that come from?

  Naomi almost stopped in her tracks. She could smell that awful, pungent, eye-watering, fermented herring. The memory was vivid, instant, and gone again. She shook herself and carried on walking, unsure whether to pursue the memory or let it sink without trace.

  “Your heart rate’s jumped,” BB said. “Adrenaline’s up, too. What’s wrong? Do you remember that from your childhood?”

  It didn’t happen often. She knew why, at least in neurological terms. Infantile amnesia caused by neurogenesis. The more you learned as a very young child, the more new neurons formed in the hippocampus, and the more long-term memory was displaced. Kids generally forgot most of the first four or five years of their lives. There was only so much storage space in the human memory. And Spartan kids had learned an awful lot right at the end of that period.

  And that’s without all the cognitive enhancement they gave us.

  “Probably,” she said, trying to pass it off as irrelevant. But it was hard to lie when BB was monitoring her brain chemistry and physical responses. “Decomposing herring must rank as a significant childhood trauma.”

  As soon as she said it, she felt something pop in her brain again. It was precisely that—a physical sensation like a small bubble bursting. There was a certain irony to forgetting that you’d forgotten. Her memories began to take on a more permanent form around the age of six, a few hazy nightmares of loneliness, fear, and pain followed by patchy recall far better than an ordinary human’s, but still frustratingly incomplete at times.

  “This is great training for having kids,” Devereaux said. “You’re talking to your imaginary friend again.”

  “Oops—spike,” BB muttered. “Would you like me to turn that adrenaline down?”

  Naomi couldn’t even identify the emotion that had suddenly made her scalp crawl. It had something to do with children. She wasn’t even going to try to guess. “I’ll be okay, BB. Let’s get on with it.”

  Devereaux went into the UNSC Fleet Mail office while Naomi waited outside, arms folded across her chest while she read the notices on the bulkhead. They were a window to a world she’d never seen. They exhorted personnel to WRAP IT RIGHT OR LOSE IT, because badly packed parcels sent to loved ones back home got damaged or lost, or to MAKE SURE IT’S DAC-FREE, listing dangerous air cargo and banned materials that families were prohibited from sending in gift packages, or that UNSC personnel couldn’t ship home, like trophy weapons or alien plants and animals. Naomi smiled to herself as she thought of Phillips and his plasma pistol, now displayed in Stanley’s wardroom behind the bar. The list of average transit and delivery times—Earth to colonies, Earth to deployed ships, base to base, ship to ship, and all permutations thereof—carried warnings about perishable and urgent items.

  All these people out there, worrying and caring and thinking about someone. All their friends and families. All the shared anxiety. What must it be like when they get home after a long deployment?

  Naomi had heard about homecomings over the years and seen calendars on cabin bulkheads counting down the days to the end of a tour of duty, called chuff charts for reasons she had yet to discover. It was a strange and exotic thing to a Spartan. She was lost in thought when BB said, “Stand by, Naomi—problem.”

  Problem jerked her back to the here and now.

  “What is it, BB? Come on.”

  He was silent for nearly thirty seconds. That was hours—even days—for an AI. She could feel the urgency flood her. She couldn’t tell if it was simply her response to what he said or if his connection to her brain had mirrored his emergency reaction in her neurochemistry.

  “Mal and Vaz have been compromised,” he said suddenly. “I’ve had to sever contact with them.”

  “How compromised?”

  “I’d make a guess that your father and his associates have taken them for interrogation. The last thing I saw was what looked like the beginning of an ambush, then Mal told me to exfil. I’ve alerted Spenser. He’s clearing his comms room and making a run for it.”

  My father. My comrades.

  And Tart-Cart was here. Who the hell was going to rescue them? Naomi strode into the office and found Devereaux. “Got to go,” she said. “Mal and Vaz are in trouble.”

  Devereaux grabbed the parcel off the counter. The clerk frowned at her and tapped his screen angrily. “Form eight-three-alpha,” he said. “You’ve got to complete it.”

  Devereaux tapped the patch on her arm. “ONI,” she said. “We decide what forms we fill in.”

  They sprinted back to the hangar. Anchor 10 wasn’t as busy as it had been at the height of the war, but it was still a slalom course of bodies to dodge and weave through.

  “BB, tell Adj to drop what he’s doing and prep Tart-Cart for a fast exit,” Devereaux said. “We’ll come back for the spare later.”

  BB paused. Naomi heard him rather than felt his response this time. He was using her helmet audio.

  “Adj says he’ll be finished in eight minutes and that you need two gunships if you’re going to extract from multiple locations.”

  Naomi gave up waiting for the elevator and crashed through the doors to the ladders. “So he’s tactical now, is he?”

  “He’s right.”

  “I’m sorry, Dev,” Naomi said. It was a reflex. She felt personally responsible. If Earth had fallen to the Covenant, it would have been her fault, nobody else’s, despite a UNSC force of several million personnel. Now her father had apparently seized two of her friends, and she wasn’t there to deal with it right away. “Sorry.”

  “Why?” They had just one deck to go. “We had to pick up the Pelican sooner or later, and now’s the time we need it.”

  “It’s my dad. It looks like my dad ambushed them.”

  “Jesus, Naomi, that’s not your fault.”

  If only I hadn’t … hadn’t …

  Hadn’t what?

  She’d done something thirty-five years ago, and if she hadn’t done it, then she wouldn’t have been abducted by Halsey’s snatch squad. But she couldn’t recall what it was. She only knew that it had been a stupid thing to do, and that something else had happened that had left her feeling terrible for a long time. Adj scooted out of her way as she ran across the hangar deck and scrambled into the Pelican’s cockpit.

  It had been some time since she’d flown anything, let alone a gunship. And the paint wasn’t even dry on this one. She put her faith in Huragok obsession and BB’s skills.

  “Your heart rate’s one-eighty,” BB said. �
��They’ll be fine. Phillips survived, didn’t he? And bless him, he’s very keen and gutsy, but he’s not an ODST.”

  “Liaise with the dockmaster, BB.” Naomi scanned the instruments, checking pressures and status readings. It all came back to her, possibly with extra help from BB. She felt that little pop again somewhere deep in her brain. “Dev? Ready?”

  “Follow me out,” Devereaux said. “Show her, BB.”

  “Course laid in.”

  Naomi took a breath and activated the maneuvering thrusters. The outer doors peeled back and the Pelican was free of Anchor 10, powering up to reach the minimum safe distance before jumping to slip.

  Eight thousand … nine thousand … ten thousand …

  “It’s just a glorified heavily armed bus, dear.” BB was putting a brave face on it, and it showed. No, she could feel it. It translated into a hollow in the pit of her stomach. It wasn’t like pre-mission nerves at all, but something much more profound and disturbing. “Piece of cake. Safe point acquired … spooled up … and hit it.”

  Naomi pressed the paired controls hard forward, listening to the rising whine jump off the scale as the stars vanished from the viewscreen. It could have been a simple switch or button, but it was harder to activate two slides by accident. Adj really did do miracles. Now it was her turn.

  Yes, she was personally responsible for Mal and Vaz. Without her, there would be no angry Staffan Sentzke. And without Staffan Sentzke, Venezia might not have had a battlecruiser. She was back on Reach again, digesting the reality of being all that stood between victory and annihilation, and wondering when someone was coming to save her.

  It was a lot for a six-year-old to swallow.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  I HAVE NOT HEARD FROM YOU IN SOME DAYS. WHERE ARE YOU? MORE TO THE POINT—WHERE IS MY SHIP? DO I HAVE TO COME AND HUNT YOU DOWN AS WELL?

  —SIGNAL FROM AVU MED ‘TELCAM TO KIG-YAR VESSEL, INTERCEPTED BY EVAN PHILLIPS

  STUTTGART ARMORY, NEW TYNE: THREE HOURS AFTER THE DISAPPEARANCE OF VASILY BELOI AND MALCOLM GEFFEN

  It was a lot easier being captured by the Covenant.

  Vaz waited for the door to slam shut, then spat the blood out of his mouth. He had no idea where he was, and—worse—he didn’t know what they’d done with Mal. He listened, eyes shut, but he couldn’t hear a thing.

  If this had been a Sangheili cell, his choices would have been simple and limited. The Sangheili wouldn’t have captured him to check his credentials and let him go; they wouldn’t have taken him hostage for a prisoner swap; and they wouldn’t have held him as a prisoner of war in accordance with international laws on the humane treatment of enemy combatants. If they took him—and they generally didn’t bother with prisoners—then he was already dead. The only question was how long it would take and how much it would hurt. As the outcome was a foregone conclusion, the sane thing was to do something that would get you killed immediately—fight back, fling yourself off a ledge, or make a suicidal run for it, knowing they’d cut you down in seconds. It was worth trying anything to get it over with.

  There was always the chance that your buddies would manage to rescue you. But the hinge-heads would only keep you alive to ask you questions, so if there was likely to be more than half an hour’s delay before you were extracted, death was probably the better option.

  Vaz’s best guess was that he was being held in a warehouse or weapons store. When they’d bundled him out of the truck with Mal, the vehicle was already in a hangar. But when they were frog-marched through the passages, Vaz spotted the kind of blast doors usually installed in munitions depots. There were the familiar smells of a military establishment—fuel, lube oil, soap, sweat—but he drew more clues from the fact that there were so many lockable doors and yet it didn’t look like a prison. The other buildings where security would be paramount had to be defense-related, like the barracks, a computer center, or somewhere full of stuff that needed controlling even in a town where illegal possession and use of firearms was probably an essential qualification to be let in.

  An armory. He was pretty sure that he was in an armory or munitions store.

  Right now all he knew for certain was that he was in a small, dimly lit room with no windows—not shuttered, just absent, so maybe a basement—and tied to a metal-framed chair in the center of a painted concrete floor. There was no grimy, fly-spattered lightbulb hanging from a single cable from the ceiling, just a single overhead strip, the kind they used in offices. On the surface, there was nothing remotely intimidating about it, like most of New Tyne.

  Where’s Mal?

  Nairn had taken Vaz’s jacket, magnum, and the contents of his pockets. They were probably going through his wallet and radio chip.

  What are they going to do to me next?

  He took slow, deep breaths and tried to recall everything he’d been taught about resisting interrogation. ODSTs worked behind enemy lines; interrogation training had been routine since the colonial wars. It hurt more than he ever thought possible, but he knew that the instructors didn’t want to do him permanent damage or kill him, and that they’d stop if things got out of hand. He didn’t have that reassurance now.

  Fear of what’s coming next. That’s what they rely on. So accept the fear and get on with it.

  But maybe this wasn’t real at all.

  It was hard to tell if Staffan’s circle knew they’d been infiltrated, or if this was part of the usual security clearance to test newcomers who might need to be trusted with serious assets like battlecruisers. Until Vaz could work that out, he didn’t know whether to try to escape or keep up his cover story. If he guessed wrong and made a run for it only to find they were just checking him out the hard way, putting him through a very real exercise for a war they felt was coming sooner or later, then he’d blown the whole mission.

  If ONI issued suicide pills, would I even know when to take the damn thing? When do you decide you’ve had enough if you think you can still talk your way out?

  And Mal. Where’s Mal?

  There was nothing Vaz could do at that moment other than wait and observe. He looked around the room as far as he could by craning his neck, then tried shuffling the chair around to check behind him. There was a stack of identical metal framed chairs standing against the wall, very old with faded canvas seats, and a filing cabinet. He couldn’t see any sign that this was used regularly as a holding cell. He inhaled to test the air again and picked up only the musty scent of a room that wasn’t used or aired. There was no smell of sweat or urine.

  Vaz could have constructed a hundred scenarios to explain everything he saw and didn’t see as a positive sign or a negative one. He had to stop this. He needed to concentrate on the physical here and now, to look for unlocked doors and guards who weren’t paying attention.

  Keep your mind occupied. Don’t do their job for them by imagining the worst.

  And Mal. He’s here somewhere. I’ve got to find him.

  Did Spenser get away?

  Vaz shut his eyes again to listen. He almost expected to hear muffled screaming. But there was just the occasional creak of footsteps on a floor somewhere above him and the thump of a door closing a long way away.

  BB knows where we were when they grabbed us. Can he track the radios? Osman’s going to come for us. It’s not like trying to find us on Earth or Reach.

  Vaz started to feel the need to pee. He tried to take his mind off it by counting seconds so that he had some idea of how long he’d been here, and then he heard footsteps coming down a flight of stairs. The door rattled, unlocked from the outside, and swung open. Staffan and Nairn walked in and stood looking at him.

  What did he say? What did someone wrongly accused say? What did he say when nobody had actually accused him of anything yet?

  “Hi, Vaz.” Staffan walked behind Vaz and the metal chairs clattered. He put one in front of him and sat down. “Believe me, I’m not fond of theatrics. But we do need to talk.”

  Nairn stood to one side of
Staffan. Then he took three steps up to Vaz and hit him in the face, without threat, warning, or explanation.

  The force of it blinded Vaz for a couple of seconds. Christ, it hurt. The chair rocked. He’d been hit in brawls before, and been hit a lot harder. But it was one thing to be pumped up on adrenaline and trading punches, and quite another to sit there and take a blow in the face.

  Well, that was one thing out of the way, then. This was going to be violent. Somehow it was marginally less frightening than waiting to be hit. He stopped himself thinking how it would escalate. And he simply stopped thinking of the man sitting in front of him as Naomi’s father. It just happened. This was simply the guy who might kill him, or worse.

  “I don’t imagine you scare easily,” Staffan said. “Whoever you are.”

  “Where’s Mal?” Vaz asked. “What’s all this shit about?”

  “I’ve just been chatting to him. He’s not dead yet, if that’s what you’re asking.”

  Staffan went quiet and just looked at him. They sat staring at each other for a very long time. Vaz counted at least thirty-five seconds. He knew he wasn’t doing this right, but he still didn’t know if this was a test.

  “Who are you working for, kid?” Staffan asked. “No bullshit, please.”

  Don’t try to be clever. Don’t engage. Don’t … No, that was for a different kind of captor. Staffan obviously still had doubts. Vaz just went with his gut.

  “You think I’m from some gang? Some business rival?”

  “I don’t know for sure,” Staffan said. “But you’re not right. You and Mal. There’s something not quite right about you two. I’ve got a good instinct for that kind of thing.”