Halo®: Mortal Dictata

by Karen Traviss

  I don’t remember her. Yes. Yes, I do.

  “What did you want for your birthday?”

  A doll’s house. Oh. I remember that now. The toy store in town. It filled the window.

  “Now look at the file.”

  That’s Reach. I think it’s home. No, it’s not—the stars look different. I can’t see the same sky. But how can I see the sky when it’s underground? And I hate that taste. The medicine smells of raspberries, not real ones, artificial flavoring, but what’s underneath still tastes bitter—

  “BB, I’m tasting things. Actually tasting them.”

  “Okay. I know why that’s happening. Don’t worry. Just relax and keep talking.”

  Naomi had been conscious for brain surgery when her neural implant was inserted, listening to an unseen surgeon asking her questions and adjusting something while her body did things she had no control over, from slurring her speech to making her heart race. There was no pain; she just didn’t like being operated like a machine. Helplessness. Yes, that was it. It made her want to lash out.

  “Your heart rate’s up,” BB said. “Shall I stop for a moment?”

  “No. Just do it.”

  “I’m trying to avoid influencing you by asking questions. You know how susceptible human memory is.”

  “You’ve said that a dozen times. Is that your get-out clause?”

  “What, for practicing medicine without a license? Have I ever asked you to take your clothes off for an eye test? As I told the judge, that was all a terrible misunderstanding.”

  Poor old BB: the more he went into his standup routine, the more uneasy he was. “If what I recall is bad, you’ll be able to tell me it never happened anyway,” Naomi said. “Just a false memory caused by integrating suggestions and assorted garbage.”

  “First, do no harm.” BB seemed to be reminding himself. It didn’t sound like a joke. “I don’t want to make matters worse.”

  Naomi sat back on her bunk, spine pressed against the padded bulkhead. This wasn’t like hypnosis or meditation. She was fully conscious, letting her mind wander as best she could. The longer she looked at the photo of the day at the fair, the less certain she was about what she recalled.

  “Doughnuts,” she said.

  There was a funfair on the coast. Sometimes she’d catch a whiff of that cinnamon and frying oil smell even now, and she could not only taste doughnuts again but feel them too. Now she remembered the context. They were served up boiling hot in a greaseproof bag. She could feel them burning her palm and then her fingers as she fished one ring of heavy, luscious, sugar-gritted pastry from the bag and bit into it. Her teeth crunched through the heavy dredging of sugar and then sank into soft, compressible, rather bland dough that wasn’t all that sweet, an elusive flavor she chased but never caught, made more tantalizing by the residue of sugar it left on her lips and chin. Her mother leaned over her and wiped her mouth with something cool and wet, tutting. Naomi tried to recall her mother’s face but it was hard to differentiate between what she recalled and what was being filled in by the photo.

  I felt sticky. Sticky from the sugar. Sticky from the salt on the wind. My hair was all tangles.

  Her father looked happy in the photo, though. Who had taken it if they were all in it? A neighbor. A friend. A stranger. Naomi reached for her datapad and started looking through the documents that BB had assembled, her personnel folder and the assortment of ONI material. She hadn’t even read everything that was in her file yet. This was going to take some time, and she was acutely aware that Inquisitor had already been found—probably breached—and might well be beyond ONI’s reach by now.

  Her father seemed to think the Huragok could immobilize the vessel and even repel boarders. Either he knew a lot more about the creatures than she did, or a lot less. She tried to imagine Adj or Leaks defending Stanley. They wouldn’t. They’d accepted UNSC direction without murmur, just as they’d accepted the orders of the Covenant.

  And he renamed the ship Naomi. I don’t know how I feel about that.

  What are they going to do with him? Hand him over to an ONI debriefing in Sydney? Shoot him? Just throw him back into the water like an undersize fish when they’re done?

  Whether she wanted it to or not, it was shaping her reactions already. There were rules and regulations in the Navy. Then there was how you felt about them. She wondered if people thought Spartans were so brainwashed that they could simply decide not to think or feel like everyone else, that she could treat her father like any other insurgent sympathizer and not experience any fallout from it. But she’d told the rest of the team precisely that. She’d said it meant nothing to her, like arresting Catherine Halsey, but she’d been lying to herself. It might not have reduced her to a weeping wreck, but it definitely left a few scuffs.

  Damn.

  But Vasya gets angry and emotional about things, and he’s still a good marine. It doesn’t make you any less of what you are.

  She braced herself and opened the documents closest to the date that she’d been abducted: September 10, 2517. She’d almost forgotten BB was there behind her eyes and reading it too.

  “Is this the wash-up?” she asked. “The retrieval report?”

  “Yes,” he said. “Allow for the fact that any report’s going to be subjective. The mistakes tend to get downplayed and euphemized. The highlights get exaggerated.”

  “I have read UNSC bullshit before, BB. I may even have written some.”

  “About yourself?”

  He had a point. He always did.

  Headings like SUBJECT: SENTZKE, NAOMI, SUBJECT 010: DOB September 15 2511 never got things off to a good start. It had been filed by Retrieval Team Theta 2, RTθ2. She read it like a Spartan at first, just looking for the salient points, and noted how little space and how few words the destruction of her real life was worth. It wasn’t even a page. She was referred to throughout simply as Subject 010.

  Subject 010 had been observed over a period of seven months in Alstad, New Atlantic Province, Sansar. Data was gathered from routine school medical checks, and also via the bogus CAA Gifted and Special Needs Children Pilot Study created to gain extra access to identified candidates. We have no reason to believe that insufficient data was collected and that this led to the problems retrieving the subject.

  One of the staff at the Subject’s school did query the authority of Theta 2 personnel posing as educational psychologists, but seemed satisfied by the paperwork and the promise of special funding from the CAA if any children in the school were identified as gifted and requiring special measures.

  During psych evaluation by Dr. J., Subject 010 also underwent routine health checks such as vision, height, and weight, and the last of those was conducted within a reasonable period of the retrieval. The calculation of the sedative dose required to subdue the subject was correct based on that data, and the dose should have been sufficient even if the subject had gained up to five kilos in the intervening period. The risks of accidental overdose in children cannot be overstated; administering these drugs in a non-clinical environment means that it is prudent to give the lowest recommended dose per kilo. The subject could easily have died before RTθ2 was able to reach ONI medical support.

  Naomi looked up for a moment. This was mostly ass-covering. Someone was explaining why her kidnap went wrong and how it wasn’t their fault, no sirree, because they’d followed procedure and the dose should have been enough. It obviously hadn’t been, then.

  So I was sedated? I must have been. I would never have gone off with strangers. Christ, did they accidentally kill any of us before it even started?

  She read on.

  Subject 010 was lured into close physical contact so the sedative could be administered with minimum distress to her. She appeared to be fully sedated when placed in the support vehicle, but she regained consciousness while her clothing was being transferred to the clone replacement and became agitated and unexpectedly combative. As a result, she escaped from the vehicle and a sea
rch was carried out to recover her. She was found and recovered two hours later, when her behavior became sufficiently disruptive to risk compromising the mission. A decision was taken to give her further sedation. She was removed without further incident and no lasting physical damage was observed.

  “Wow,” she murmured.

  “You didn’t go down and you fought like hell,” BB said. “At least I think that’s what it means. I did cross-reference the personnel in Theta Two to see if they’d needed any medical treatment after the kidnap. Couldn’t find anything, but I do hope you did a Mal on them.”

  “Did a Mal?”

  “Mal bites when cornered. Ask him about his interrogation. Ask your father, actually.”

  “So…”

  “Remember it?”

  “Underwear,” she said suddenly. There: it popped up out of nowhere, out of context. “Oh, god. I woke up and someone was undressing me.”

  She was lying flat on something in a strange place that wasn’t her bedroom. She knew where she really was—sitting cross-legged on her bunk in Port Stanley—but she was also five going on six, with a weird taste in her mouth, head spinning, and someone was pulling her dress off her shoulders. There was a small pinpoint of light shining in her eyes from one side. The noises and movement told her she was in a car, and a woman was undressing her. She started struggling.

  “Damn, she’s coming around,” the woman said. “How much did you give her?” Naomi started kicking and screaming for Mom. She wasn’t sure exactly what people like that did to you, but she knew it was bad and wrong, so bad that the teachers warned the class about it regularly. “It’s okay, honey, it’s okay, take it easy. Nobody’s going to hurt you.”

  Liar. Liar, liar, liar.

  Naomi screamed as loud and as long as she could. That was what grown-ups had told her to do if a stranger grabbed her—to scream and make a fuss until someone noticed and came to help her. She was in a car. Who would hear her? Nobody. She had to get out. She had to get out now. The grown-ups in the car were arguing about something and a man was saying they couldn’t give her any more. The car swerved. Naomi could see the handle on the inside of the door. She’d never been so scared in her life, because Mom and Dad didn’t know where she was, and it was all her fault because she hadn’t gone straight home.

  The car slowed down. As soon as the woman leaned back, Naomi flew at her, clawing and screaming, and then she reached for the door latch. The door was suddenly gone. She was falling through a black void, hitting the ground so hard that it shook her teeth, rolling, dizzy, but she was up and running before she even knew where she was. She ran into the darkness. She tripped over a curb, stumbled through grass, and saw trees streak past her; she heard nothing but her own gasping breaths, uh-uh-uh, as she ran for her life. Her feet hurt. Her shoes were gone. She was wearing a long tunic of some kind and it flapped around her knees.

  They were behind her. She could hear their urgent whispers. Where was she? She couldn’t see any lights now, just the dark on darkness of trees against the speckled night sky. Her feet hurt and she wanted her mom.

  Where’s my watch?

  She’d lost her watch, the grown-up watch that Dad had given her. No, the woman had taken it, along with her clothes. If they were chasing her, Naomi had to keep quiet now. Running was noisy. She crept through spiky grass that was getting taller and taller around her, and then her feet slid into cold water and slippery mud. Don’t scream. Not this time. She held her breath and squatted in the water, hugging her knees in the cover of the tall grass. This was a big river. The stream near her house was small and bubbled over rocks, but this was slow and still, and her feet were in mud. So she was a long way from home.

  She felt like she’d held her breath forever, trying not to cry because they’d hear her. She’d never been this cold in her life; her legs were getting numb. Eventually, she had to move. She felt her way along the edge of the bank, looking for lights from houses, but there weren’t any. What had Dad told her? Rivers flow to the sea. If she put her hand in the water and felt which way it was going, she could walk along the bank and end up somewhere where there were people who’d help her.

  She’d been sure she was going to get home right up to the moment she heard a man’s voice saying “Check the thermal—see it?” Then someone grabbed her arms and hauled her kicking and screaming out of the water. The last thing she saw was that woman leaning over her, hair hanging down. She grabbed it and pulled as hard as she could, punching with her free hand until her arms went tingly and cold, and then she didn’t remember anything else.

  “Are you okay?” BB asked. “Your heart rate’s way up.”

  “I remembered,” Naomi said. She couldn’t go through all that detail again. It made her feel worse than she’d expected. “Waking up in the car and escaping. But they still found me.”

  How could she have gotten herself into that mess? She was just coming home from school. She didn’t recall the detail. It was dark, though. She would have been home in daylight if it was mid-September, so she must have stayed late for some class or other. She wanted to look at the night sky, so she got off the bus a stop early again to take a look from the field. There were so few streetlights around there that she could see everything like an astronomy textbook, stars beyond stars and the hazy ribbons of the galactic plane.

  Dad had told her to always come straight home. It was a grown-up privilege to be allowed to travel to and from school on her own, so she had to be responsible about it. A couple of people got off the bus at the same stop, but she was too intent on the night sky to look at them, and anyway, Mom had said not to talk to people she didn’t know or look at them in case … in case what? She thought she knew now, but she didn’t know then.

  Look behind you, and you look like a victim. Anyone who’s thinking of sneaking up on you is more likely to think you’re scared and take a chance.

  But that was her adult rationalization. She couldn’t have thought in those terms back then. She saw a light traveling along the top of a hedge, bright orange, so it couldn’t have been a firebug, because they were green and it wasn’t the right time of year. How far away was it? Maybe it was a shuttle taking off in the distance. She couldn’t tell. But it was going in a very straight horizontal line, which shuttles didn’t do, and it was just one light, not a cluster of different colors.

  Dad had told her never to wander off at night and to stay on the lit road where she could be seen, but she couldn’t explain that light, and she needed to. She had to find things out. She climbed over the wooden turnstile and headed into the field, picking her way over rutted furrows. The light might have been getting closer or moving away. She still couldn’t tell.

  Then she fell. She remembered putting out her hand to stop the fall and thinking that Mom would be mad if she came home with mud on her dress. It was only a shallow ditch, but at the time she thought she’d never stop falling. That was when she heard the thwop-thwop-thwop of someone running as fast as they could through soft soil, and someone grabbed her around the waist. She screamed.

  “For Chrissakes shut her up before the whole town hears her,” a man’s voice said.

  So now she knew. If she’d remembered what had happened, and not what she’d pieced together from what she knew of ONI, then she’d made the mistake of getting off the bus in a dark place and being too curious for her own good. But she hadn’t gone off with a stranger voluntarily. That was something. She hadn’t been irresponsible.

  “I remembered,” she said. “A lot of it, anyway. Maybe too much. It feels real, though.”

  “Want to tell me?” BB asked.

  “Later. They must have followed me for weeks to know I was getting off the bus early. They knew all about me, didn’t they?”

  “Governments try to,” BB said. “And always for their own good. Never yours.”

  BB waited while she scrolled through some recordings from her first three days in CASTLE, buried deep under the surface of Reach where no amount of scre
aming for Mom and Dad would ever be heard. The assessment team had recorded video footage of the kids working out where they were and even clinging to each other for comfort, seventy-five scared, baffled, and even angry children who didn’t quite get this idea of being chosen to save the world.

  Naomi couldn’t believe that she’d been like that. One clip showed her taking a swing at a guy in a lab coat, pummeling him with her fists and telling him that her dad was going to kill him if he didn’t take her home. So much for Halsey’s journal entries that suggested tearful but generally compliant children: the woman barely mentioned how much they fought back, and when she did, it was almost with amusement. But as Naomi worked through the clips, videos of her regular talks with Halsey and the other doctors, she watched herself get more withdrawn and cowed down day by day, asking to go home and begging for her mom and dad. In one session, she heard herself say that her daddy really loved her, so he’d come and save her.

  “Daddy’s not coming for you, Naomi,” Halsey was saying. It was a young Halsey, dark-haired, thirty or so. “He knows you’ve got an important job to do. He knows you’re too special to be anything other than a Spartan.”

  Lying bitch. You made me doubt my own father. You made me think he’d abandoned me. But you weren’t the only one, were you?

  Naomi’s anger was here and now. It wasn’t sorrow for her lost childhood. It was anger at the adults who’d betrayed them all by not doing the most basic thing a human adult was supposed to—to protect a child. Her father had tried his damnedest to do that and she’d never known until the last few weeks, more than thirty years too late.

  That was the worst bit. It hurt with a fresh pain that she hadn’t been expecting. She didn’t remember that at all until now. She realized her parents were never coming for her and that she was utterly alone. Her father wasn’t going to save her. She had a sudden, vivid pang of hurt, angry, desperate fear, and remembered how she thought her dad had let Halsey take her.