The Cole Protocol

by Tobias S. Buckell

  Jai had sat in front of her desk, C.P.O. Mendez by his side.

  “What do you want?” Halsey asked, suddenly looking up from her desk.

  “You called me here,” Jai had said defiantly.

  Halsey chuckled. “I did. Do you want to leave, Jai?”

  “Yes!”

  The woman who’d had him snatched away from everything studied Jai like he was a strange bug under a rock. “You understand what you were told, when you first arrived?”

  “You stole me. You want me to fight for you. Fight for Earth. It isn’t even my home planet,” Jai said. “I don’t want to be here.”

  Halsey nodded, and suddenly looked tired. As if she didn’t want to do what came next. But then her spine snapped straight. “Okay, Jai. You see this?” She’d picked up a small dart. “Some of you don’t have what it takes. Some have folded. Some just aren’t ready to be protectors of the colonies. And that’s okay. This dart will induce selective neural paralysis. The next time you break out of the forest, the guards in the Pelicans will shoot you in the head with one of these, and you’ll wake up in a city. You won’t remember any of this.”

  A crawling sensation in the back of Jai’s mind told him that this was a lie. A memory eraser? It didn’t sound quite right, nor did Halsey’s eyes look right. There was a deeper pool of weariness and sadness there. Jai had no doubt the dart would erase something.

  Halsey must have noticed Jai shift. She amended her words. “You may also lose more than that. There are no guarantees. The process is messy, and it’s worse with a child because they have so few memories to lose.”

  Jai swallowed and stared at the dart.

  “Of course,” Halsey said, steel in her voice. “You could just continue your training, and your duty.”

  “Why?” Jai asked.

  “You’re an orphan, right, Jai? State Dorm Five-Five, bed number sixty-eight? And you want to go back to that?”

  Jai nodded.

  Halsey sighed. “You think they remember you there? We called; no one had even noticed I transferred you. No one there cared enough to even check your bed until I called, and you’ve been gone for months, Jai.”

  Jai stared back at her. It shouldn’t have hurt to hear that. He kept to himself, why was he surprised they hadn’t noticed?

  “No vendors remember you; your hiding places in the city have been taken over by rats. No one has even noticed you were gone. You had no family, no friends, nothing. You left no imprint on the world when you were taken, Jai. You’re fighting so hard to leave, when there’s nothing for you to go back to.”

  Jai shook his head and bit his lip.

  “But here, Jai,” Halsey continued, driving her words home, “you have people who notice when you try to leave. Mendez who trains you. And even though you don’t have family, I find it interesting that you keep seeking out Adriana to make your escape with. Would you miss her if you left? Would you be happy if we just erased your mind with a single shot, and erased your name from our computers, and Adriana just . . . forgot all about you?”

  Jai stared at her, his mouth dry. He didn’t say anything, but inside he felt like he’d been destroyed. She’d picked him apart, like he was some simple puzzle. Mendez could break their bodies, but Halsey could break their minds.

  “I’m giving you a final offer, Jai,” Halsey said. “The guards are around the forest tonight—if you escape we’ll delete you from our records and it will be like you were never here. But if you are in your bed tomorrow morning, I offer you a family, Jai, and a place to make your mark and be remembered. We have special things in mind for you and the others. Very special things. I swear to you.”

  Jai stared at her. And he had believed her.

  Adriana had also returned to the barracks that night looking shaken.

  But they broke out again, of course. They made it out past the fence using a tunnel they’d dug together a week before. There were caches of food and simple weapons in the forest, buried under trees.

  But they’d both stopped well clear of the edge of the forest.

  “What’d she tell you?” Jai asked.

  Adriana had tears streaming down her cheeks. “I can’t tell you.”

  “But you’re not going to go, are you?”

  “No. I like this too much to go,” she’d said, with that odd Adriana smile that Jai was now always comfortable seeing.

  “Me either.”

  They’d both sat on a log and watched the Pelicans crisscross the sky outside the forest, and then turned back for the barracks.

  Mendez didn’t comment on Jai’s dusty boots the next morning, just threw a ten-mile run at him with a small grin.

  When Jai had returned, Mendez introduced him to another quiet kid with even browner skin than Jai’s and tight curly hair who stood outside the barracks running in place next to Adriana, both of them holding heavy wooden logs over their heads.

  “At ease! Jai, Adriana, and Mike,” Mendez said. “You are now a team. You will eat together, run together, drill together. Fight together.”

  “Sir!”

  When Mendez left, Adriana and Jai had turned to Mike. “What did you do?”

  Mike smiled. “I stole a Pelican,” he said, innocently. “Then blew it up when they got me.”

  And all those years ago, all three of them had shaken hands. Gray Team trained to be isolated, slipped into distant fields for missions where there was little, if any, oversight. And after the physical augmentation, and as they became lethal killers, the ONI branch began to use the three loners for long-duration missions way out of reach from command.

  They were ghosts that could wreak terrific damage.

  Which was why this latest mission made sense. Supplement

  ONI Prowler Corps efforts to destroy all information that was left behind enemy lines.

  But the same attributes that made Gray Team an incredible asset made it hard for Jai to be its commanding officer. Gray Team was . . . different. Adriana and Mike accepted Jai’s leadership, but they’d been trained to think for themselves and act on their own.

  So Jai had been frustrated to find out that Adriana let the Insurrectionist Delgado live after the Jackals made a play for the last known navigation data in this bizarre asteroid creation of theirs. She should have focused only on the data.

  But she hadn’t.

  And now, they had once again let him go.

  But as Adriana pointed out, had they destroyed that last bit of data and left the Rubble, then they wouldn’t have known about another ship coming back from Charybdis IX. So their delay had helped. They might have left the Rubble without fully finishing their mission.

  But Jai still felt they should have kept Delgado aboard. He was, after all, working with Insurrectionists. And Jai had killed his fair share of Innie terrorists.

  Now Adriana felt they had a duty to help make sure the people living here were safe. Covenant-collaborating Insurrectionists, no less.

  Jai walked up to the cockpit of the old freighter. Mike sat at the controls as the Jackal ship slowly drifted past their field of vision.

  “One Shiva nuke,” Mike muttered.

  “You think Adriana’s right? That these Covenant will turn on them?”

  “They always do,” Mike said. “The Covenant always attack. Always destroy it all. Why would they stop now?”

  “I don’t know,” Jai said as Mike boosted them out away for the fringes of the Rubble, where they could lurk. “We’ve never seen anything like this before. Jackals trading and working with humans to build asteroid habitats?”

  But then, that was what Gray Team was for. They couldn’t call back for orders, they were the UNSC in absentia. The three of them had to figure out what this all meant, and what to do next.

  “One Shiva?” Jai turned and looked at Mike.

  Mike ran a hand over his shaved head. “Put it in the right place, yes.”

  “Put it where?”

  “Inside.”

  Jai looked at him and then laugh
ed. “That would do the trick, Mike. That would do it.”

  And he imagined that if Adriana and Mike were right, and they usually were, they would end up having to do it.

  “How many Shivas do we have left in the holds?” Jai asked.

  “Enough,” Mike said.

  “Enough to what?”

  “Cause a lot of trouble here in the Rubble,” Mike said. “When the time comes.”

  “I haven’t made any decisions about that yet,” Jai said.

  Mike shrugged. “When you decide, the nukes will be ready.”

  Jai left the bridge. Those two were just way too sure of themselves. Then again, so was he. He smiled to himself. They were cursed with each other.

  “Wait a second,” Mike shouted.

  Jai turned back around, annoyed. “What?”

  Screens lit up with warnings and scrolled text faster than Jai could read. Mike tapped away at the keyboards, his fingers flashing over the keys as he started swearing.

  “What is it?” Jai repeated.

  “Something’s leaping in through our communications dishes. I can’t stop it; incursion alerts all over.”

  Jai felt his stomach flip. Mike was the systems expert, had always been. He’d figured out how to steal that Pelican when he’d been conscripted into the Spartan II program because he’d been flown into the camp on one, and that single session of watching how the pilot flew was enough for him. He had a gift with machines and computers that Jai envied.

  Now Mike looked flustered. “Hit the kill switch. Now!”

  Jai ran to the center of the cockpit and pulled up a plate of metal. He yanked out the red handle inside and the entire freighter abruptly plunged into darkness.

  “What just happened?” Adriana shouted. “Was that the kill switch?”

  “Yeah.” Without any power the artificial gravity had failed. Jai hung near the kill switch, a manual circuit breaker Mike had installed during the long Slipspace journey to this system.

  Just in case, he’d always said. You can’t hack into a ship if someone yanks the power cord loose.

  The Petya, their home for the last several months, coasted along in the dark.

  Mike twisted onto his back in the starlight and moved over to one of the windows. “We’re not going to hit anything for twenty minutes or so,” he said. “That’ll give us time.”

  When it came to the ships and hardware, Mike called the shots.

  Mike spun in place to face them. “Jai, get clippers and snip the wires going to any comms arrays. You have eighteen minutes before we go bump. Adriana, you should suit up. If someone was trying to get into our systems they might try a less virtual route and show up outside.”

  “On it.” Adriana kicked off the edge of the cockpit door and back down the dark center of the ship toward the bunks.

  Jai followed, leaving Mike in the cockpit.

  Fifteen minutes later, after crawling around the guts of the Petya to trace wiring, Jai had two of the arrays cut. Adriana had cycled out the lock in full armor and coasted up the belly of the freighter and just ripped the last array off the ship and flung it clear.

  As Jai pulled himself out and shoved himself through the air into the cockpit, Adriana exited the airlock and followed. With full armor, she seemed to take up the entire cockpit.

  “There’s no one out there; didn’t spot anything moving toward us either,” she reported.

  “That’s both reassuring and worrying,” Mike said. “Plug her back in.”

  The Petya’s emergency lights flicked on. A bit late, Jai thought, but then it was an old tramp freighter, just barely able to struggle from Slipspace point to Slipspace point until Mike had insisted they snag it. The team had spent a whole week under his direction, refitting a faster, military-grade Slipspace unit into her.

  But Jai had to agree now, it had been worth it. There was more space in the cargo area for the weapons they’d accumulated, which made Adriana very happy. Mike as well; he’d picked up a few extra Shiva nuclear warheads, and stocked up on just about everything else he could get his hands on.

  The primary lights flicked on as Mike tapped at screens and guided the ship’s rebooting. Jai realized everything had fallen deathly silent as fans and pumps whirred back into life. The entire ship’s steady background hum slowly trickled back.

  Artificial gravity returned. Adriana and Mike twisted like cats and landed on their feet.

  “All right, let’s see what we’ve got.” Mike moved back to the controls and Petya shuddered as he adjusted their trajectory with thrusters. They passed by one of the flexible, clear docking tubes stretching half a mile between two asteroids.

  Inside people hustled from point to point on their business, hardly even noticing that the freighter had come within a mile of striking it.

  One of the screens to Mike’s right flickered, and a woman appeared on it, her skin a ghostly skein of numbers and calculations. The effected look of many AIs. It seemed to look around the cockpit. “Neat trick,” it said through the cockpit’s many speakers. “But before you cut the power again, know that I infected a number of your external stellar navigation sensors. They don’t have much broadcasting power, but I have a lot of comms equipment trained on your guys throughout the Rubble listening for them. Plus I already disabled your Slipspace drives, so you really do have to listen to me.”

  Mike checked a screen, then swore and turned to Jai, who reached down for the red handle.

  “Wait, wait, please hear me out,” the AI on their screen said. “I have an offer for you. I can get you the Rubble navigation data, but I want to cut a deal.”

  Jai froze and locked eyes with Mike, who shrugged. Jai looked back up. “A deal?”

  The AI nodded on the screen. “You’re Spartans. The best of the best of the best.” It smiled. “There are a lot of lives at stake here, soldiers. I will help you get that navigation data, because I want you to protect it. But you can’t leave right away. And that’s the deal.”

  “We have to stick around?” Jai asked, a bit incredulously. “Why?”

  “Because the lives of everyone in the Rubble are at stake, Spartan. And I am going to need you three to help save them in the very short days ahead. We will be their deliverance, and you three their paladins, my very own knights in somewhat shining armor.”

  Mike shook his head and held up seven fingers by his thigh for Jai to see.

  An artificial intelligence usually lasted seven years before it legally had to be put down. After seven years they often started to go through stages of instability. They became rampant: convinced of their godlike power and ability. Rampant AIs were destructive, dangerous, and somewhat insane.

  But rampancy was not inevitable, just statistically likely. An AI older than seven years was playing a dangerous game. Out here in the Rubble, they must have felt it prudent to keep the AI running this long in order to keep the system together.

  “Come on!” snapped the AI, yelling at them. “I can see your fingers, Spartan. I am over the age, yes. Maybe I am rampant. I damn well deserve to be.”

  Adriana turned to look at Jai, but he waved his hand. Let it talk. See where it went.

  “They unpacked me from storage to run the Rubble the year after Madrigal was glassed—they couldn’t handle the course corrections manually to keep asteroids connected to each other. They needed the constant and genius-like attention of someone like me.

  “That kept me busy, growing all this out, until the Jackals came. Since then, well, I’ve been planning for the end, Spartans. And now it’s here. Yes, I am Juliana, the goddess of the Rubble. Your experts may suspect me of rampancy, but a benevolent goddess may be exactly what you need right now. And this one happens to be very, very attached to the idea of saving the people of the Rubble.”

  Mike shifted. “Doesn’t sound rampant to me.” He was mollifying it, engaging it, Jai saw. Maybe even validating it. And Jai felt not pulling the plug had been worth it. This unsettled AI, somewhat frazzled by the chores it had been
given in keeping the Rubble going, might be a very useful ally indeed.

  Juliana looked down, suddenly tired, a flash of sadness crossing her face. “I . . . think, right now, my preoccupation with the tricky, immense, complicated task of saving the Rubble’s citizenry is all that does actually keep me from the depths of rampancy. It’s been eating away at the edges of me for two years now.”

  “And you want us to help?” Adriana prodded.

  The AI looked back up. “In return I’ll give you even more than the data you want. The Covenant forces here are up to a lot more than just setting up shop in a few of the Rubble’s asteroids. I have details. You’ll want these.” She had a coy smile.

  Adriana and Mike looked over at Jai, who smiled back at the AI.

  “We don’t have much time,” Juliana said. “We need to help each other now.”

  They had a rampant Insurrectionist AI demanding their help, with a promise of greater secrets. Adriana’s pet Insurrectionist running around. And a crippled freighter.

  Jai smiled. This was just the sort of situation Gray Team thrived on.

  CHAPTER

  NINE

  VADAM KEEP, YERMO, SANGHELION

  Early in the predawn light of the day after Thel ‘Vadamee’s ascension to kaidon of his keep, he woke to the faint scratching sound of three pairs of feet.

  They were on the roof outside his window, moving quickly and getting ready to vault the lip of his windowsill into his room. Thel wasted no time getting up from the chair that he had sat in all night, waiting for this.

  As the first assassin broke through the window, Thel pressed the button on the thick bar of metal in his hand that had been lying casually by his side. The energy sword flicked into being with a crack of ionized air from the handle as the twin half ovals of blue plasma appeared.

  The first swipe of the angry-sounding sword dug deep into the assassin’s chest, spearing him on the tip of the concentrated plasma. To his credit the assassin did not scream.

  Thel barely had time to duck, though, as the next two assassins bearing energy swords of their own hit the floor in front of him. Their crackling energy weapons just barely missed Thel’s head. But their overeager swings doomed them. Even as their energy swords passed by him, Thel was coming back up to a full stand, slicing the sword arm of the nearest assassin clear off his body.