Halo®: Mortal Dictata

by Karen Traviss

  Vaz needed Adj right away.

  He went out into the passage. He didn’t even want BB to see this in case he was wrong. “BB? BB, can you get Adj for me, please? I need him to fix something.”

  “On his way,” BB said. “Are you all right?”

  “Yeah. I think so.”

  Vaz sat down on his bunk and examined the tiny chair and the black sphere while he waited. Adj showed up a few minutes later, sparkling with curiosity.

  “Adj, can you put the right plug on this, please?” Vaz showed him the end of the power cable. “I think it’s pretty old.”

  Adj let out a long ooooh noise, one of the few actual sounds that Huragok seemed to make naturally themselves. His cilia flickered over it.

  He finished it in less than a minute. Vaz patted him on the head, making him flinch, and stuffed the sphere, the chair, and the note into his bag to go in search of Naomi. She was in her cabin. If he hadn’t known what had happened, he wouldn’t have guessed from her expression that she’d had a very tough week. She looked okay. He hoped she was. It was now his job to make sure she stayed that way.

  “Did you have a good time?” she asked, jerking her head to invite him in.

  “I drank too much. You should have come.”

  “Next time.”

  “Can I show you something?”

  She frowned, then nodded. “Sure.”

  Vaz hoped he hadn’t read this all wrong, but he was certain he knew what the chair was and who had sent it. He fished it out of the bag and handed it to her. She turned it over in her hands, frowning again, then the frown relaxed and her lips parted.

  “Oh. Wow.”

  “It turned up in a parcel addressed to me. And this, too.”

  Vaz put the black sphere down on the desk and plugged it in. There’d been lettering on the base once, but time and use had worn it off. Only the switches were left. He pressed one and the cabin was suddenly transformed into another world.

  Naomi looked up at a deckhead speckled with constellations that circled slowly like a planetarium. She put one hand to her mouth. Vaz reached out to switch off the cabin light and lay down on the deck with his hands meshed behind his head to watch the show.

  “Come on,” he said. “Tell me what it is.”

  Naomi lay down next to him. They were suddenly in a field, star-gazing at a night sky. She didn’t say anything for a few minutes.

  “Sansar,” she said at last. Her voice sounded thick and hoarse. “It’s Sansar.”

  Vaz could guess what was coming, but he needed to know for sure. “Go on.”

  “My dad said he bought this for my sixth birthday. I was abducted before he could give it to me.” She swallowed. “It’s the star map from Sansar’s northern hemisphere. I loved looking at the stars when I was little.”

  It was probably why she found comfort sitting on the glass deck, staring out into the galaxy. It was probably why BB had asked Adj to make the deck transparent in the first place, too, although Vaz couldn’t remember seeing a reference to it in her file. He was glad the lights were off. There was nothing worse for a Helljumper’s image than to be caught crying.

  Naomi gazed up at the night sky from a dead world and a childhood cut short. She pointed to a constellation. “See that one? The Galleon. The nebula forms the sails.”

  Vaz waited for her to ask the inevitable question, but she didn’t. If she ever did, he wasn’t sure whether to answer or not. All the time he didn’t actually put it into words, he could stay in that narrow zone where he could live with himself both as an ODST and as a man. He didn’t have to say what he now knew, and if she didn’t hear those words, she was innocent of involvement in everything he’d done.

  Vaz had already gone too far—as a marine, anyway—when he sent the document to Staffan. He knew that he should have gone straight to Osman now and queried that post-contact casualty report on Pious Inquisitor.

  But he wouldn’t.

  And BB. What did you make yourself forget? No. Don’t ask.

  Naomi shuffled into a more comfortable position on the hard deck. The question seemed to be coming after all. “When was it sent, Vaz?”

  “Ask yourself if you need to know.”

  “Does that mean what I think it does?”

  He handed her the folded note. She could see better in the dark than an average human, but even she had to squint to read it in the faint light from the lamp.

  “If you don’t ask,” Vaz said, “I won’t have to tell.”

  Naomi seemed to be chewing it over. “The Spirit would have needed a slipspace drive to get clear, wouldn’t it?”

  Vaz had promised he’d take care of her. That was the deal with Staffan. All he needed to do to protect her right now was to deploy a defensive measure that ONI had taught him: plausible deniability.

  “Huragok,” he said carefully. “Busy little guys. You really can’t leave them alone for five minutes. Can you?”

  EPILOGUE

  RECEIVED: OFFICE OF CINCONI

  PRIORITY: URGENT

  CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET

  One has to be careful with suicide notes. Even these days, when I hope we all accept that our lives are our own to do with as we choose, some still see it as insanity, or cowardice, or an affront to some god, as if we’re no more than slaves of the divine with none of the free will those same believers claim God gives us. So this note will be explicit.

  I’m perfectly sane, and it’s my life that’s been cowardly, not my death. And if there is a god, then I’m prepared to stand before him and tell him what a careless, negligent, unloving father he is to let us behave as we do. He should have been more forthcoming with the thunderbolts and smiting.

  But why blame God? I don’t believe he exists, but even if he does, we should be capable of morality without him, and are. His purpose is mysterious because he hasn’t got one, and if he has, it isn’t benign. We face extinction by a genocidal alien culture that also believes it serves its gods. But we persist in the face of logic ourselves. The devil made us do it. We were only following orders. It was for the greater good. The ends justified the means. And so on, ad hypocritical nauseam, blaming everything but our own self-created evil.

  I have taken my own life because the SPARTAN-II program is a crime against humanity, and I should have had the moral courage to refuse to work on it. I did not. I complied. I’ve committed a crime against life and contributed to many deaths, so if nobody else can or will punish me for that, I must sentence myself and carry it out.

  I knew SPARTAN-II was morally indefensible. That probably makes me more loathsome even than Catherine Halsey. I understood how wrong it was, but she never appeared to recognize that in all the time I knew her. She made all the right noises, but that was all they were: noises. Her actions were all enthusiasm.

  Your conscience is what you do, not what you think or say you think. It’s also something you do when it has to be done, not as an afterthought when you’re forced to face up to your wrongdoing. Remorse is cheap and easy. It’s an insult.

  My awareness obliged me to act, but I did nothing: I cooperated, and my compliance enabled something monstrous. I didn’t slaughter millions, but there’s no sliding scale in atrocities, even if the robotic imagination of the law requires fixed thresholds. Each death, each act of suffering, is a complete and qualifying act of evil in itself.

  Humans instinctively norm. We behave like others around us, because compliance is our survival strategy. No matter how intelligent, sensible, or kind, 99 percent of human beings will carry out the most appalling acts if the rest of their tribe is doing the same. And most of our conscious acts are simply postscript rationalizations of our hard-wired unconscious decisions.

  And yet I knew what I was being asked to do was wrong, and I still did it. Being a normal human is no excuse for that.

  The Mortal Dictata Act defends many things, but mostly it enshrines the individuality and validity of
each human life. I hesitate to call it a human rights charter, because that term has been utterly devalued and its intent completely distorted over the centuries. The Mortal Dictata are a suite of laws that remind us of the basic moral duty that we owe our own species. They bar us from creating humans for the purposes of harvesting tissue, even if that human has an otherwise independent life; they bar us from enslaving others; and they bar us from cloning entire humans. The Mortal Dictata recognize a central principle that no human should be brought into existence or coopted primarily as a convenience for others. Each life is equal and valid.

  SPARTAN-II broke that law on every level. I helped it happen. And because of that, I can no longer justify my own existence.

  I have no right to ask anything of a fellow human being following my death, seeing as I failed to meet the minimum requirement of what it means to be human. But this is a personal request to Vice Admiral Margaret Parangosky, CINCONI, under whose command these acts took place. I would ask that my brain be retained for the AI donor program, specifically for an AI dedicated to the support and protection of Spartan-IIs. I have taken my life by a method that causes least damage to brain tissue. I know how to do that, of course. I am—was—a neurosurgeon and a psychologist.

  This isn’t an attempt to squeeze out a few more years of pitiful existence that I don’t deserve. I know the AI based on my brain won’t have my memories or personality, and that I shall be very dead. But I owe it to the children and families whose lives were ruined and stolen to put whatever I can back into making those Spartans’ daily existence safer and less miserable. If anything of me survives, then it might be what I wanted most in my final moments—the need to do some good for those children.

  If you can make this happen, Margaret, and I’m wrong about God or the Devil, I shall put in a word for you regardless at which gate I arrive. You were always more human than I ever managed to be.

  Your friend,

  Graham

  DR. G. J. ALBAN, MD, MCNS, MCPP

  SENIOR RESEARCHER, ONI SPECIAL PROJECTS

  MARCH 2523.

  ONI ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE DIVISION: PROJECT AI 4TH GEN

  CINCONI: APPROVED

  CODE AS/PRESERVE FOR: BLACK-BOX (BBX-8995-1)

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  Halo®: Mortal Dictata: Book Three of the Kilo-Five Trilogy by Karen Traviss

  ALSO BY KAREN TRAVISS

  GEARS OF WAR

  Aspho Fields

  Jacinto’s Remnant

  Anvil Gate

  Coalition’s End

  The Slab

  WESS’HAR WARS

  City of Pearl

  Crossing the Line

  The World Before

  Matriarch

  Ally

  Judge

  STAR WARS:

  REPUBLIC COMMANDO

  Hard Contact

  Triple Zero

  True Colors

  Order 66

  Imperial Commando: 501st

  STAR WARS

  Bloodlines

  Sacrifice

  Revelation

  The Clone Wars

  No Prisoners

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  No. 1 New York Times bestselling novelist, scriptwriter, and comics author Karen Traviss has received critical acclaim for her award-nominated Wess’har series, as well as regularly hitting the bestseller lists with her Halo, Gears of War, and Star Wars work. A former defense correspondent and TV and newspaper journalist, she lives in Wiltshire, England.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  HALO: MORTAL DICTATA

  Copyright © 2014 by Microsoft Corporation

  All rights reserved.

  Microsoft, Halo, the Halo logo, Xbox, and the Xbox logo are trademarks of the Microsoft group of companies.

  Cover art by Dave Seeley

  A Tor Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  e-ISBN 9781429997157

  First Edition: January 2014