Halo: Glasslands

by Traviss, Karen

  “Cabins okay?” she asked.

  Mal thawed a little. His file said he was thirty-three but he looked younger, with a fuzz of dark hair and just a few lines around the eyes that suggested he actually spent a lot of time laughing. Vaz—ho managed to look both time-worn and twenty-something at the same time—had one of those lean, high-cheekboned Slavic faces and a spectacular scar the full width of his jaw. He didn’t seem the laughing kind at all.

  “Brammers, ma’am,” Mal said, deadpan. Osman assumed from his tone that it was high praise. “We never normally get a pit to ourselves. Vaz is delirious about it. Honest.”

  “I’ll take your word for it.” The only problem with drawing ODST recruits from all nations and all three services was that many of them were completely unintelligible even in English. It was part of their curious charm. “There’s a set of upgraded recon armor for each of you, too.”

  “Thank you, ma’am. Luxury.”

  “Okay. Secure for launch. BB, you have the ship.”

  Phillips never said a word as he buckled in. Osman caught his eye. If anything, he looked amused, as if she hadn’t fooled him at all about what ONI was actually up to.

  BB appeared settled on the console in front of her. “Thirty seconds … receiving final updates … you could have sedation, you know.”

  Osman couldn’t hide a thing from him. She knew she’d kissed good-bye to privacy before she was even old enough to understand what it was, but an AI could know more about someone than their own mother. Protective or not, it rattled her. BB had access to every cockpit recording and medical report, and he could probably pick up her pulse rate, too, the intrusive little bastard.

  She heard one of the ODSTs trying to stifle a yawn. Nothing fazed them. Port Stanley’s drives rose from a faint whine to what she could only describe as an intense nonsound that made her brain feel like it was being sucked down her Eustachian tubes.

  It was too late to stop. The drives were spooled up and committed to jump now. “I can deal with it,” she said.

  “Late databurst incoming … never mind, that’ll have to wait … five seconds.” BB executed a smart one-eighty-degree spin. “Place your bets on where and when we emerge, ladies and gentlemen … and jump.”

  Osman never looked at the external view. She couldn’t. Her gut plummeted and went on falling. Her brain told her she was tumbling head over heels down an unending tunnel, even though she could see her own fingers digging into the padded black armrests of her chair. Her eyes flickered uncontrollably as they tried to make sense of the misleading impulses from her brain. She was falling, completely out of control, and that was all there was to it. The sickening sensation behind her eyes crept down her neck and made her hunch her shoulders.

  Then she hit a brick wall. For a moment she was swaying horizontally on a storm-tossed deck, and then everything slowed to a stop. Throwing up wasn’t a very captainly thing to do. She gritted her teeth and waited for it to pass.

  She must have sat there longer than she realized. One of the ODSTs leaned over her.

  “You okay, ma’am?” Devereaux asked.

  Osman made an effort to stand up and look vaguely in command. “Jumps don’t agree with me.”

  “Like Nelson. Never did his reputation any harm, though.”

  “Nelson had a translight drive, did he? Well, that explains Trafalgar.”

  “No, ma’am, but he always puked his ring when he went to sea.…”

  Osman smiled despite herself. She was grateful not to see her breakfast in her lap. “Could be worse, then.”

  The view from the forward bulkhead projection was a dense, featureless void far blacker than normal space. But it wasn’t just Port Stanley that had slipped into a different dimension. Osman found herself in a new reality as well. This wasn’t ONI. Nobody here was calculating the best moment to make a play for her job or sending their AI to hack her systems. The people around her were just doing a job and watching their buddy’s back, not looking for the best place to insert a knife in it. Osman suddenly found herself disarmed by something that wasn’t exactly innocence—they were ODSTs, after all—but that pressed the same button in her.

  Uncomplicated. Straightforward. Transparent. Loyal. No threat. Well, not to me, anyway.

  “Okay, people, I make it forty-eight hours to Brunel, so familiarize yourselves with the ship,” Osman said. “BB, what was in that databurst?”

  The AI flashed an image onto the bulkhead display. It was a video transmission showing the pennant code ident of UNSC Ariadne. Osman wasn’t an engineer, but she could recognize an accelerator-shielding bulkhead when she saw one. Ariadne’s engineers were sending back images of a technical problem and asking for advice from Earth. There was no way of finding out what had happened until Port Stanley was back in normal space and comms were restored.

  “Where is she?” Osman asked.

  “She had to drop out of slip near Venezia,” BB said. “The CO made contact with the colony to ask to land nonessential personnel because of the safety risks, but they refused.”

  “Since when did a human colony get to say no to a UNSC request for assistance? Even Venezia?” Osman realized Ariadne was only a small patrol ship, but she was still armed. Osman would have landed shuttles and argued the toss later, cannoned up if need be. Venezia had gone quiet during the Covenant War, but everyone remembered what it had done during the colonial insurrection. “Who the hell’s driving that tub?”

  “Commander Pasquale.”

  The name didn’t ring a bell. She started to check her datapad for the UNSCN list, but decided to leave it for later. “As soon as we’re out of slip, check whether anyone else has responded or if they’re still in trouble.”

  “You’re not planning to divert, are you?”

  “I know my orders, BB. I just want to know what Venezia’s playing at.”

  Osman had mentally filed most of the hundreds of human colony worlds with one-word labels: glassed, silent, hiding, resentful, struggling, loyal, outlaw. Venezia had dropped off the plot more than ten years ago, when it was a known safe haven for terrorists. It could have been dusting off old grievances now that it thought the Covenant was gone.

  Vaz stared at the image of the backside of a hazmat-suited engineer squeezing into a small machinery space. He didn’t look amused.

  “Can’t help hoping the hinge-heads pay Venezia another visit,” he muttered. “But I suppose you can make that happen, can’t you, ma’am?”

  Vaz seemed to catch on fast. Good choice, that one. The Psych Eval deadbeats have their uses. Ethics were never simple in ONI, because planetary politics weren’t simple either, but Osman could see that lines would get much more blurred before too long.

  “Yes, I can,” she said.

  Parangosky’s words came back to her. Never settle a score until it’s tactically useful and you’re certain you can finish the job. Then make sure they know you did it. That’s how you keep them all in line. Osman had all her mentor’s words of wisdom filed mentally too, just like the disposition of colony worlds.

  She went back to her cabin and splashed her face with cold water to stop the throbbing in her temples. When she straightened up from the basin and scrutinized herself in the mirror, she still looked drained of blood. That wasn’t going to inspire confidence in anyone. She reached into the small cabinet behind the mirror to find a shot of analgesic, but her fingers brushed against something smooth and sharp-edged that crackled.

  It was a glistening, transparent bag of crystallized ginger, scrunched into a pouch and tied with a gold bow. A tiny handwritten tag dangled from it. Osman read it, chuckling to herself.

  You’ll find this works pretty well for nausea. MP.

  Yes, Parangosky had hidden facets. If you crossed her, she could make sure you ended up very, very dead. But if she liked you—if she trusted you, if she respected you, if she felt you deserved better than the hand you’d been dealt—then she’d be your guardian angel.

  It didn’t happen of
ten.

  Osman popped a cube of ginger in her mouth and savored the burn all the way down to the hangar bay.

  MDAMA, SANGHELIOS.

  Jul ‘Mdama realized that the old ways weren’t working any longer, but he had nothing to take their place.

  He stood at the kaidon’s door and waited for the old man to acknowledge him. Courtesy cost nothing, after all, and Levu had always been a sensible leader. Jul was ready to tear down society but he drew the line at personal disrespect.

  “You don’t look happy, Jul.” Levu, seated at his huge wooden table, beckoned him into his office. The table had been carved from a single piece of jet-wood, legs and top together, no joints or separate pieces at all, and a thousand years of constant use had polished it to a satin blackness. “What can I do for you?”

  “I have to know where you stand on the Arbiter,” Jul said.

  “On the truce with the humans?”

  “That’s our most immediate problem. Whatever my wife says.”

  “I haven’t opposed him, if that’s what you mean. But I don’t plan to sanction an assassination, either.”

  “Well, I have my answer, then. A mistaken answer, but an answer nonetheless.”

  Jul had no idea why he stood there a moment longer. He’d been given his answer and Levu wasn’t going to change his mind. Helplessness overwhelmed him for a moment, a frustration akin to seeing flames licking at a building and being unable to make its occupants heed his calls to run and save themselves. But it was his world that would burn if nobody listened. He was sure of that.

  “Do you think we can make peace with humans, Kaidon?”

  Levu put his hands flat on the table in front of him. It was a gesture of resignation. He’d always been a pragmatist. “I think they’re devious creatures that can be held in place with the right degree of mutual threat,” he said. “And I think that we’re in no shape to mount the kind of attack that could wipe them out cleanly. But that’s not to say I want to make peace with them. We do what we must.”

  The only items on Levu’s desk were his computer from the San’Shyuum system that had linked the Sangheili city-states to their Prophet masters, and an arum—part puzzle, part ornament, a wooden ball of nested concentric spheres carved from a single piece of wood much as the ancient desk had been. It sat on a carved base. Hidden in its core was a small gem crystal of some kind that could only be shaken free when the player worked out the complex alignment of spheres.

  The object seemed impossible to anyone except the craftsman who made it. Youngsters learned patience from it. Apart from providing diversion and strengthening character, it was said to represent what made the Sangheili strong; a perfectly engineered, orderly system that presented a smooth, impenetrable face to the outside world, and each had his appointed place in it. Jul suddenly saw it another way.

  He reached out for it and waited for Levu to give him a nod to pick it up.

  “Have you ever released a crystal?” Levu asked.

  “Once. Then never again.” Jul held the arum in his right hand, one thumb on the anchor piece, and pushed his nail into one of the holes to move one of the inner spheres. He put it back on its base. “But this is indeed what we are. Good day, Kaidon.”

  “Good day, Jul. Have patience.”

  Jul bowed his head politely and left. There was no point arguing with Levu because there was nothing to argue against. The kaidon made perfect sense, just as the Arbiter had also made perfect sense when he said the Sangheili had surrendered their selves and their ability to run their own affairs.

  And the arum summed up the problem. To reach the core, each sphere had to be operated in turn to activate the next. No sphere could act without the next one in a hierarchy that was impossible to reorder. It mirrored the Sangheili social structure and Jul wondered if that was the unspoken rule the arum actually taught children and reinforced in adults—that the keep system had to be obeyed and that flouting it was impossible. The family keeps all needed the approval of their township keep to act, and the township keeps answered to their city keep in its turn, spheres within spheres.

  Above that, though, there was nothing now that the San’Shyuum had been ousted. A world of eight billion needed more than a mass of uncoordinated fiefdoms to deal with the humans.

  And those Jiralhanae who’ve turned on us. We have many enemies now. As the humans say—the lid has come off.

  Jul found himself at the end of the colonnade that connected Levu’s keep to the marketplace without remembering the walk at all. It was a bad sign. And he still didn’t have a plan.

  Do I dispute Levu’s decision and exercise my right to assassinate him?

  His grievance wasn’t with Levu, and there was no point acting alone anyway.

  There’s Forze …

  But he needed more than a friend to back him up. He needed to find an army of like-minded patriots. Honor was all very well for settling clan disputes, but it was pitifully inadequate for fighting a war.

  He walked all the way back to Bekan. It took him hours, but he needed the time to think. As he walked along the highway, he saw serfs working in the fields, but still very few Unggoy. Perhaps it was for the best. Sanghelios should never have allowed itself to rely on alien races, either as masters or servants.

  He stopped on the aqueduct to gaze out over the valley. In the center of the Relon clan’s farmland, a fifty-span area of grass had been left untouched around the remnants of a Forerunner monument, an elegant but crumbling three-sided spire that had snapped off five meters above the soil. It was sacred ground, the handiwork of the gods, and not to be touched. As a child Jul had never dared say he thought it strange that gods should need to build ordinary things, and that many of those things would crumble in time just like any mortal’s work, but now he knew he’d been right.

  Even now that the Prophets had been exposed as liars, though, nobody had attempted to cross the boundary and plow up the grass.

  Does it matter? I think not.

  By the time Jul got back to his keep, it was long past the midafternoon mealtime. Children raced past him, hissing and squabbling. He grabbed one of the boys by his collar and yanked him to a halt.

  “Discipline, Kimal,” he said. He noted that his sons weren’t in the unruly mob. Good. “You’re not infants, any of you. I expect better.”

  “Sorry, my lord.”

  Kimal slunk away. The sober mood spread through the others in a heartbeat. Jul climbed the steps to his own keep and went looking for Raia. He found her in her private chamber, doing the accounts for all the Bekan clan keeps, a time-consuming job that fell to the wife of the elder. It never improved her mood.

  “Where have you been?” she demanded. “Forze called. He wants to talk to you. And you missed the meal. Is this what it’s going to be like now you’re back from the front? Wandering around wasting your time?”

  “I went to see Kaidon ‘Mdama. He’s going to support the Arbiter.” Jul waited for an acid comment but none came. “Did Forze say what he wanted?”

  “He said that old man Relon’s going to blow up the holy spire. Seeing as the gods are dead, he didn’t think they’d mind him plowing the land to grow tubers.”

  Jul found it odd to hear her talking so disrespectfully about the Forerunners. She’d always been the devout one in the marriage. Perhaps, like others, she was punishing the gods for letting liars and parasites deceive them and exploit them for so long.

  “Aren’t you offended by that?” he asked.

  Raia considered the question, eyes fixed on the accounts folio, all her jaws clenched.

  “It’ll ruin a pretty view,” she said at last.

  Jul decided to leave well alone and went to find some leftovers in the kitchens, braving the disapproving snaps and hisses of the older wives who were trying to clean up before the next meal. Raia was right. He was in danger of looking for something to fill his time, just like every other Sangheili warrior who suddenly had no war to fight.

  How do I wake my peopl
e? How do I galvanize them? The war isn’t over.

  He grabbed a couple of slices of roast meat on the way out, stopped to take an arum from one of the children in the courtyard, and went off to seek some clarity in the quiet at the top of the old watchtower. From the battlements, he could see right across the valley on a clear day. He lost himself in the arum for a while, utterly absorbed in trying every permutation of movement until a distant explosion jerked him out of the puzzle.

  He stood up just as a second rumbling boom carried on the afternoon air, leaning on the edge of the stonework to look north. Smoke was rising into the air farther up the valley. When it cleared, Jul realized that the sacred spire was gone.

  Relon had been as good as his word. Jul suspected it was another expression of the sense of betrayal, blaming the gods for three millennia of deceit. Gods, after all, should have been able to step in and bring the San’Shyuum to heel. They didn’t: so they were either neglectful gods not worth worshiping, or they didn’t exist at all. It was sobering to be alone in the universe.

  Raia didn’t pass comment on it at supper. Jul wondered whether to point it out to her but decided against it. He suspected there would be a rash of this destruction and then the novelty would wear off, and everyone would get on with their lives.

  After breakfast the next morning, he went to the armory to see what personal resources he had left. It was all small arms. He couldn’t seize a ship, not even if he added Forze’s armaments and brothers to the raiding party. He would need to assemble a small army to commandeer a frigate from a crew loyal to the Arbiter, and assassinations—perfectly legal challenges to authority, an orderly and honorable way to resolve disputes—required personal weapons. Anything beyond that was dishonorable. It was also designed to stop feuds escalating into civil war.