It was a good question. They’d expected the bar to be open, not demolished, and they’d run out of time to find a bottle shop, as the locals called it. Mal shrugged, doing his I’m-just-a-lovable-rogue look that usually worked on women. The redhead gave him a sad smile and turned to her crew with her hand held out like she was asking for a tool. One of the men picked up a lunchbox from the seat of a dump truck and tossed her a plastic bottle. She handed it over to Mal with due reverence.
“Best we can do, Marine,” she said. “Go ahead, but don’t fall in and break your neck.”
After some of the jumps Vaz had done, that would have been an embarrassing way to go. Mal read the label and smiled.
“Fruit juice. He’d see the funny side of that. Thanks, sweetheart.”
The clearance crew moved back a little but they were still watching. Vaz squirmed. It felt like taking a leak in public. So what did they do now? All the vague plans to get hammered and reminisce about Emanuel had gone out the window, and Parangosky would be waiting.
Mal unscrewed the cap and handed it to Vaz. He took a swig—passion fruit or something, warm and fizzy—and handed it back. Mal took a pull and held up the bottle like a glass of vintage champagne.
“Emanuel Barakat,” he said. “Helljumper. Brother. One of the best. We miss you, Manny.”
Vaz forgot the audience of hard hats. All he could see was the water trickling from a broken main into the pool at the bottom of the crater. “Yeah, Manny. Rest in peace.”
Mal handed the bottle back to the redhead. “Thanks again. We’ll get out of your hair now.”
“No worries. I’m sorry about your mate.” She paused. “Is it all over, then? Is the war really over?”
“I don’t know.” Mal turned and started to walk away, Vaz following. “But it’s pretty quiet out there for the first time I can remember.”
They were a few paces down the road before the clapping started. It was the strangest thing. Vaz turned around, and there they were, a dozen men and women in high-viz tabards and rigger’s boots, just clapping and looking at them. And it wasn’t a general reaction to Mal’s comment on the war, either. The workers were applauding them.
Nobody said a word. Vaz couldn’t have managed one even if he’d known what to say. They’d reached the end of the road before Mal spoke.
“That was decent of them.”
Vaz wasn’t sure if he meant the fruit juice or the applause. But maybe the war was finally over. Everywhere they’d stopped off in the last few days, at every shop and transit point, the atmosphere was a strange blend of dread, bewilderment, and elation. Civvies were still getting used to the idea. He’d expected it to be like the newsreels from the end of the Great Patriotic War, with people dancing in the streets and climbing lampposts to hoist flags, but that war had only lasted six years, however bloody the battles. People in 1945—and 2090, 2103, and 2162—could recall what peace felt like and knew what they’d missed.
But now there were two generations that couldn’t remember a time when Earth wasn’t at war with the Covenant. Nobody had signed any surrender or cease-fire yet, though. Vaz wasn’t taking anything for granted.
Mal quickened his pace and Vaz matched it, deciding not to tell him he had a splash of mud drying on his pants leg. He’d sort it out later. They headed back to the nearest intact main road to hail a cab. Even in a city smashed to rubble, there was still a decent living to be made from ferrying UNSC personnel around, and one of the few places that remained untouched by the attack was the massive underground complex of Bravo-6. The driver who picked them up just glanced at them in the rearview mirror and said nothing for a while. When he caught Vaz’s eye, he looked away.
“Were you here when the Covenant attacked?” Vaz asked, trying to be sociable.
“Yeah.” The driver nodded. “Hid in the sewers. Didn’t even know where I was when I came out.” He licked his lips. “Is it all over, like the news keeps saying? I mean, you’d know better than anybody, wouldn’t you?”
“I don’t know,” Vaz said. “But the Covenant looks like it’s fallen apart. Maybe that’s the same thing.”
It wasn’t, and he knew it. It just meant the certainties of Us and Them would be replaced by a ragbag of trouble from unpredictable quarters, just as it always had on Earth. Aliens were a lot more like humans than anyone liked to admit.
But, like humans, they could all be dropped with the right ordnance, too. That wasn’t going to change. Vaz was glad there were still some things he could rely on.
“Come on,” Mal said as they showed their ID to the duty sergeant. “Practice your nice big smile for She Who Must Be Obeyed. Whatever she wants—it’s only pain.”
FORERUNNER DYSON SPHERE—LAST DEFINITIVE POSITION, ONYX: THREE HOURS INTO RECONNAISSANCE PATROL.
Catherine Halsey jerked her head around and stared into the bushes.
She realized she was the last person to react to the rustling in the leaves. Mendez, Tom, and Olivia already had their rifles trained on the same spot and Kelly had sighted up and was edging toward it. Something small and green shot up the trunk of the nearest tree to cling to the bark and stare at them.
“Not much meat on that, I’m afraid.” Kelly lowered her weapon. It was a lizard with a narrow, almost birdlike face and a frilled crest. For a moment it paused, crest raised and absolutely still, then zipped down the tree again to vanish back into the bushes. “Still, it confirms we have a food chain here.”
“Just as long as we’re at the top of it,” Olivia murmured.
Halsey wished she still had her sidearm. While she respected the Forerunners’ vastly superior technology, they hadn’t been around to mind the shop for a very long time, and there was no telling what might have evolved since they’d left this place ticking over. There were plants here that definitely weren’t from Earth. If the fauna here was drawn from all the worlds the Forerunners had visited, then anything was possible.
She didn’t need to point that out. All unknown territory was presumed to be potentially hostile.
Mendez came to a halt and fumbled one-handed in his pockets. “Why?”
“Why what?” Tom asked.
“Why did the Forerunners put trees and animals here? Just to make the place nicer while they sat out the holocaust, or is it some kind of zoo?” Mendez tapped his radio and Halsey suddenly heard the crackle and hiss from the receiving end. “Lieutenant? Mendez here. We’re seeing some wildlife now. Lizards. Anything your end?”
Fred’s patrol was now on a parallel path a kilometer away. “Not yet, Chief. But we’ve got blossom on some of the trees, so I’m guessing there’ll be pollinators around.”
“Insects, birds … small mammals.”
Halsey couldn’t bear assumptions. “Or they’re self-pollinating.”
“Some of the plants look like Earth species, but so far we haven’t … seen anything confirmed as edible.” Fred sounded as if he was climbing something, pausing for breath. “Keep looking.”
They were spread out in patrol formation with Mendez on point and Kelly walking tail. Halsey was suddenly conscious of being the misfit rather than the boss here, the theoretician who’d created a generation of Spartans but had never actually served, and all the small soldierly things that the Spartans seemed to do automatically—constantly scanning the branches of the trees, turning to take a few paces backward and check behind every so often—leapt out at her. She simply didn’t move that way, and not just because she was lugging a bag that seemed to get heavier by the minute and burdened with a skirt. It just wasn’t part of her unconscious fabric as it was with them.
It unsettled her. Nobody expected her to behave like a Spartan, even if she’d trained a generation of them. She wasn’t sure why that troubled her.
“Bird?” Tom said to nobody in particular, pointing. He sighted up. “I can’t tell, even with the scope.”
Halsey followed his gesture to see a few tiny black dots making lazy passes high above them. Something about the movement
wasn’t birdlike. It reminded her of a bat’s flight, but much slower.
“If it is, it doesn’t fly like any avian species I know,” Kelly said. “We’re going to have one hell of a nature table.”
They were moving through knee-high grass now, rolling downs dotted with stands of trees, some of which were made up of the terrestrial oaks that seemed to be everywhere. Others had bloated gray trunks and tiny, deep red, frondlike crowns that Halsey didn’t recognize at all. It still didn’t answer the Chief’s question as to whether this was ornamental or part of a conservation project.
So how many did they expect to shelter here? The whole Forerunner population? Or just the great and the good? And for how long?
The quiet was as unfamiliar as the vegetation, layer upon layer of small, wild sounds that merged into the white noise of a countryside that sounded utterly alien. Humans had their own template of normal ambient noise, Halsey decided, and it remained unnoticed until they didn’t hear it. She noticed the absence of hers now; no familiar birdsong, no distant rumble of traffic, no aircraft overhead. It kept her on edge. Every sound seemed suddenly magnified. The Spartans’ armor clicked as their weapons shifted slightly with each pace. Mendez reached behind him and took something out of his belt pouch, making the material rasp against his webbing.
Then something touched Halsey’s shoulder. She yelped and spun around.
“Sorry, ma’am.” It was Olivia, one of the Spartan-IIIs. She held out something between her thumb and forefinger. “This was crawling up your back. Might be harmless, but I’m erring on the side of caution here.”
Halsey’s heart was hammering. She hadn’t even realized the girl was behind her. “For God’s sake, don’t creep up on me like that.”
She felt like a fool as soon as she said it. Olivia didn’t react. But when Halsey looked around, embarrassed, she caught Mendez giving her a long, unblinking stare. She could see what he was holding now—his one weakness, a Sweet William cigar, or at least the last few centimeters of one. He rolled it between thumb and forefinger for a few slow moments like a rosary before stowing it in his belt pouch again.
“Let’s you and me walk awhile, Doctor,” he said, ambling back down the line toward Olivia. “Up you go, O. Take point.”
“O” must have been Olivia’s nickname. Halsey found herself the outsider again, not the matriarch. The girl lifted off her helmet one-handed to take a closer look at the creature that was squirming between her fingers, a beetlelike thing about ten centimeters long with bright orange stripes and a long tapering spike of a tail. Olivia couldn’t have been more than sixteen or seventeen. She had poreless coffee-brown skin and delicate features that made Halsey think her origins were in the Horn of Africa.
“Just a tail. Not a sting.” Olivia let the insect go and replaced her helmet. “But you never know.”
Halsey glanced around. Kelly had now fallen back a distance and Tom had moved well to the right. Halsey realized the Spartans had instantly given her and Mendez some fight space, apparently without a single gesture or word passing between them. That was a testament to good shared situational awareness.
“Is there anything you want to say to me, Doctor?” Mendez said quietly. He took out his cigar butt again and parked it in the side of his mouth without lighting it. “Because we’ve been awfully civil so far.”
You knew. You damn well knew. “Is that your last one?” Halsey asked.
“I’ve got three left. I’m rationing myself for the good of the mission.”
“Spoken like a smoker.”
“Don’t worry. I won’t light up anywhere near you.”
“Always the gentleman.”
Mendez was a hard man to read but it was safe to assume that the less emotion he showed, which wasn’t much at the best of times, the more he was keeping his reaction battened down. He just gave her that dead-eyed look. It was probably the last thing that a lot of Covenant troops ever saw.
“Okay, ma’am, if you won’t open the batting, I will. You are, I know, ticked off that there’s a whole batch of Spartans you didn’t bless or know about.” Mendez took the cigar out of his mouth and pocketed it again. “Now, while I’m happy to discuss all that, I’m asking you to do one thing. Treat the Spartan-Threes the way you treat the others. If you’ve got a problem with the program, Doctor, direct it at me. Not them. They’re Navy. They’ve earned respect.”
It stung in the way that polite rebukes always did, with a little extra smack in the mouth for disrespecting men and women in uniform. Am I really that rude? Yes, I suppose I am. Halsey bit back the indignation that had been fermenting since she’d first seen complete strangers on Reach daring to wear the Spartans’ Mjolnir armor.
It had all fallen into place. Parangosky putting Onyx off-limits, Mendez dropping out of sight all those years ago, Ackerson raiding her data around the same time … all she’d needed was the video logs and the information from Cortana to add the Halo Array and the Flood into the equation, and then she had a fairly reliable set of signposts. Parangosky must have had a good idea of what might be on Onyx even if she didn’t know the full nature of the threat and couldn’t access any of it.
It was why Halsey had picked Onyx. It was about more than realizing there were Spartans there, Spartans she had to save. It was a gamble on the Forerunners’ meticulous survival precautions.
I’m lucky. But we make our own luck.
“I don’t have a problem with them, Chief, or I wouldn’t have come here to save them, would I?” she said. Maybe that sounded too messianic. She watched his eyes harden a little more. “But it’s not easy finding that someone you’ve worked with for years kept something of this magnitude from you.”
“It’s called need-to-know, ma’am, and I don’t decide who needs to. I just follow lawful orders.” He gave her that look again, heavy-lidded, as if he was shaping up to spit on her. “But you knew more about Onyx than you’re telling me.”
“Just putting two and two together. Following the crumbs.”
“And I’m sure you’re too professional to withhold any information from us that we need to stay alive.”
Ouch. “My only aim is to save the Spartans. I think you can count on that.”
Mendez looked away in silence and kept walking. Halsey realized she was matching his pace, struggling to keep up with him. I really wish I’d worn pants. And I wish I was fitter. We’re the same age, for goodness’ sake. She was following his lead, one of those little psychological tells. He was the dominant individual now because this was his natural environment—the concrete, the physically dangerous—and not hers. She didn’t like that at all.
“Who told you not to mention the Spartan-Three program to me?” she asked. There was a chance it would never matter, but she had to know. Colonel Ackerson had hacked her confidential data, but that didn’t mean that his was the only score she’d have to settle. “Ackerson? Parangosky? Or both?”
“I was only told who I could tell. But I wouldn’t have told you anyway.” No, this wasn’t quite the Chief she was used to, the one who looked away and kept his counsel: rounding on Olivia had definitely provoked him. “You’d have spent all your time arguing that we didn’t have good enough candidates and trying to get it shelved. And I’d have told you that attitude trumps genetics every time.”
“I know that. I—”
Halsey didn’t have a personal radio, but everyone else did. Mendez turned away from her instantly and responded to a call she couldn’t hear.
“Go ahead, sir.” It had to be Fred. “Where?”
Where. The word made Halsey spin around, left then right. It was pure instinct. But when she caught sight of Kelly, the Spartan was looking up.
“Damn, he’s right,” she said, and aimed.
Halsey could see now. There was a black dot in the picture-perfect blue sky, getting bigger by the second. Something was swooping down on them.
Tom was nearest to her. “Ma’am, down!”
It was a fluke. If anyone had th
e lightning reflexes and sheer speed to reach her, it was Kelly. But Tom cannoned into Halsey and pinned her down just as a charcoal gray cylinder the size of a wine bottle whisked by so close that she felt the rush of air on her face. For a moment she couldn’t see where it had gone. She was looking up at the lower edge of Tom’s visor, wondering for a moment why she could still breathe.
That SPI armor was light, cheap stuff. Thank God. Three hundred kilos of Mjolnir armor would have killed her. But Tom was kneeling over her on all fours, shielding her from whatever had decided to target them. He’d just pushed her down.
“It’s okay. It’s okay.” That was Kelly. Halsey heard her rifle click. “I’ve got it. It’s not doing anything.”
Tom got to his feet and helped Halsey up. Kelly had her rifle trained on the cylinder, frozen at a silent hover two meters off the ground.
“Is that some kind of mini Sentinel?” Mendez asked. “Because if it is, we’ve already seen the big ones. And you know what happens when those bastards link up.”
For a moment, Halsey was totally distracted by the matte gray device and completely forgot her moment of ignominy in the grass. It wasn’t a defensive machine like the deadly Sentinels they’d encountered on the surface. It gave the impression that it was waiting for something, although it had dived on them like a fighter. Halsey edged closer despite Kelly waving her away, and looked at the underside. A cluster of lights—no, illuminated symbols she couldn’t read—was visible, two blue and one a greenish white. The blue ones were blinking.
It could have been counting down to detonate, of course. The Forerunners would have gone to a lot of trouble to ensure no unwanted life-forms contaminated this sanctuary. Halsey still had no evidence that the sphere’s apparent tolerance of human intrusion was anything more than luck.
“No telling what’ll happen if I shoot it,” Kelly said. “And size doesn’t mean something isn’t lethal. Right, O?”
Olivia suddenly appeared from nowhere. Halsey really never heard her coming. Maybe old age was creeping on.
Halo: Glasslands Page 3
